I want to alert people to two events, one on each coast of the US, that might well be of interest to readers of this blog,

The first is the inaugural San Francisco edition of the Enterprise 2.0 conference, which has to date taken place only in Boston. It’ll be held from November 2-5 at the Moscone North Convention Center. The Twitter feed for the conference is here. I’ll be speaking on Tuesday the 3rd about “What E2.0 Champions are Doing Right… and Wrong,” but that’s really not why you should go.

You should go if you’re at all interested in Enterprise 2.0 for your organization for one simple reason: you’ll learn a lot about how to do it from other companies who have been exploring the phenomenon. I always take away a huge amount from the examples and case studies presented (see, for example, this post summarizing what I got from the June event in Boston) and walk away with a much richer understanding of what’s going on, what’s working and what’s not, and the types of benefits reaped by adopters.

I also learn a lot from pundits and vendors at the conference, but for me the core value comes from listening and talking to companies at every stage of deploying emergent social software platforms. Conference organizer Steve Wylie and his colleagues do a great job of making the E2.0 conference valuable for all participants, and I hope to see you there.

You’ll also see wandering around like a kid in a candy store at the first annual Boston Book Festival, which will be held on October 24 in Copley Square (Twitter feed here). It’s astonishing that a city as bookish as Boston has not had its own literary festival, but thanks to the hard work of founding president Deborah Porter, executive director Emily D’Amour Pardo, and many others that’s about to change (hopefully permanently).

The Festival will feature Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk, humorist and PC personification John Hodgman, the launch party for the book Boston Noir, and other cool people and events too numerous to list.

The final schedule will be announced soon, but I wanted to call attention to the tech-y sections of the Festival, which look amazing. They include the New York Times’s David Pogue hosting “an e-reader variety show (with music!), which will showcase many of the new electronic readers on the market,” a discussion with Nicholas Negroponte and Iqbal Quadir on technology’s contributions to the fight against global poverty, and Brewster Kahle on making knowledge more widely available.

I suspect that I’m not the only Bostonian whose geek interests extend to both literature and technology, and I want to encourage all the like minds out there to come to the Festival. I’m a member of its technology advisory board, and can attest to how hard Deborah, Emily, and everyone else have worked to make it a bang-up event.

What are the other must-attend events of the fall?  Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

I’ve done some research on the US Intelligence Community’s impressive use of 2.0 tools, including internal blogs and the community-wide Intellipedia wiki. I’ve written about what I learned here and in my book Enterprise 2.0. I’ve also finished a sequence of case studies on them, which will be available for download soon at the Center for Digital Business.

I came away from my work on E2.0 at the IC and my interactions with the “Intellipedians” (including Sean Dennehy, Don Burke, Chris Rasmussen, Andrea Baker, and Amy Senger) fervently hoping that Community broadens and deepens its use of emergent social software platforms. 9/11 showed us with undeniable clarity both how important it is to be able to ‘connect the dots’ among available pieces of intelligence, and how ill-suited the Community’s 1.0 legacy technology infrastructure was for facilitating exactly that activity.

So I read the recently-published National Intelligence Strategy of the US with great interest. This document is a statement from the Directorate of National Intelligence (DNI) of the official vision, goals, and objectives of the IC, its Mission Objectives and Enterprise Objectives, and the principles that underlie them. I was eager to see how prominently information sharing and novel modes of collaboration feature in the NIS.

I didn’t have to dig too deep to get my answer. The vision statement on page 2 of NIS is:

“The United States Intelligence Community must constantly strive for and exhibit three characteristics essential to our effectiveness. The IC must be integrated: a team making the whole greater than the sum of its parts. We must also be agile: an enterprise with an adaptive, diverse, continually learning, and mission-driven intelligence workforce that embraces innovation and takes initiative. Moreover, the IC must exemplify America’s values: operating under the rule of law, consistent with Americans’ expectations for protection of privacy and civil liberties, respectful of human rights, and in a manner that retains the trust of the American people.” (emphasis in original)

Excellent – this sounds like an organization that will embrace Enterprise 2.0. And sure enough, the IC’s fourth enterprise objective is “Improve Information Integration and Sharing.” In a bit more detail, this objective is to

Radically improve the application of information technology—to include information management, integration and sharing practices, systems and architectures (both across the IC and with an expanded set of users and partners)—meeting the responsibility to provide information and intelligence, while at the same time protecting against the risk of compromise.

Again, I’m encouraged by this. It restates that the IC has officially shifted its policy from the ‘need to know’ to the ‘responsibility to share’ information. This strikes me as a necessary condition for real change. We’ll have to stay tuned to see if this shift plus the deployment of appropriate ESSPs are sufficient to cause such change.

The only slight grounds for concern I see as I go through the NIS is the impression that the DNI might be thinking that powerful computers running sexy algorithms are the way to respond to today’s threats. I read, for example, that:

The IC must narrow the gap between our capacity to “sense data” and our capabilities to “make sense of data” in handling an exponentially increasing volume and variety of data and information…

The Intelligence Community faces an explosive growth in type and volume of data, along with an exponential increase in the speed and power of processing capabilities.

Does that last sentence as imply that massive processing is the right or best way to “make sense of data,” or the primary way that the IC will attempt to do so? if so, that would be discouraging news.

I absolutely support using using acres of computers to sift through the flood of incoming data and highlight interesting patterns, but we shouldn’t relegate human pattern matching and recognition capabilities to the sidelines in our fight against those who would do us harm. Inside the IC, Enterprise 2.0 means (among other things) letting analysts highlight things that they’ve noticed, and also searching around to see if others have noticed anything similar. It means letting them ask questions or raise concerns to the community at large, then see who responds to them. It means letting them form, refine, and test their hypotheses over time, and so change what they think is important or noteworthy. These are all efforts to “make sense of data.”

People are extraordinarily good at all these things, and ESSPs are powerful tools for helping them do so. Pre-programmed computers, in sharp contrast, are really good at looking for exactly what they’ve been told to look for. The US IC clearly needs more of both capabilities, but my work convinced me that the latter has been historically been emphasized within the Community while the former was not well-supported by technology. It would be an unnecessary and counterproductive shame if this bias continued.

What do you think?  Are you encouraged by how the IC is talking about using technology? What concerns, if any, do you have?  Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

McKinsey recently published the results of its third annual survey on “How Companies are Benefiting from Web 2.0.” It’s well worth a read. Instead of trying to summarize it or hit all its main points, I just want to concentrate on a couple elements I found particularly interesting.

Internal uses are more popular and powerful than external ones. Adoption rates were highest for internal uses than either customer or partner one. Across all industries and geographies, the percentage of adopters reporting measurable benefits from internal uses was again higher than for either of the other two.

There’s no single ‘killer app.’ 65% reported that they were using 2.0 technologies internally, but no single technology was in use at more than 35% of respondents.  Wikis, blogs, and social networking tools were the most popular 2.0 tools, with 35%, 34%, and 32% internal usage rates, respectively.

Respondents report concrete and large benefits. Among internal users, for example, 68% of respondents reported ‘increased speed of access to knowledge,’ and the median estimated improvement was 30%. For ‘increasing employee satisfaction’ the corresponding figures were 35% and 20%, and for ‘increasing number of successful innovations for new products or services’ they were 25% and 20%. For customer-related purposes, 43% reported ‘increasing customer satisfaction,’ with a median estimated improvement of 20%. It’s important to stress that these are subjective and unverified estimates given in at least some cases by 2.0 enthusiasts. It’s also fair to point out that they’re pretty big numbers.

Usage is increasing, and so is investment.  Internal, customer, and partner adoption rates all increased in both 2008 and 2009. And 79% of respondents said that their future investments in 2.0 tech-based efforts would be comparable to or greater than their recent ones, and only 6% said that they were planning to decrease.

I find a lot to be encouraged about in this survey, and few if any warning signs. Do you agree?  What do you see in the data, and what conclusions do you take away from McKinsey’s work here? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

Always-opinionated blogger Dennis Howlett put up a post at ZDNet last week titled “Enterprise 2.0: What a Crock.” I don’t agree, but I do commend Howlett for making a couple important points and raising a question that really matters.

One of his important points, to my eyes, is that:

“Like it or not, large enterprises – the big name brands – have to work in structures and hierarchies that most E2.0 mavens ridicule but can’t come up with alternatives that make any sort of corporate sense.”

I’d use the word ’some’ instead of ‘most,’ but I applaud Howlett for pointing out that certain E2.0 enthusiasts adopt the language of revolutionaries. They rail against the old corporate order and proclaim that they’re working for its downfall. They portray hierarchy, standardization, and management as enemies of innovation, creativity, and value creation. And they maintain that E2.0 is an unstoppable force that will only gain power as Millennials enter the workforce and that resistance to it is, ultimately, futile.

All of which is both unhelpful and wrong. It’s unhelpful because such rhetoric has the effect of increasing resistance to E2.0 among people who really need to be on board. If you’re a manager within a stable hierarchy and you get wind of a movement that aims to eliminate management and hierarchy (and stability!), you’re almost certainly going to oppose it.

And it’s wrong because it’s, well, wrong. On two counts. First, management, hierarchy, routine, and bureaucracy have their faults, but none of them qualify as mala in se – things that are bad in and of themselves. Organizations should probably have less of each of them rather than more, but that doesn’t mean that they should have none.

Second, E2.0 is not an unstoppable force. All a company has to do is wipe ESSPs off its servers and block them at the firewall, and no Enterprise 2.0 will take place. And will that shortsightedness drive the company out of business in six months or a year? Almost certainly not.

I yield to few people in my belief in the power of emergent social software platforms, but they’re not the only game in town for achieving desirable business outcomes. I believe that over time companies that don’t use them will fall behind those that do, but how far behind, and over what time frame? Not that far, that fast.

Howlett’s other great point is that:

“[Organizations are] made up of a myriad of design, make and buy people who -quite frankly – don’t give a damn about the ‘emergent nature‘ of enterprise.  To most of those people, the talk is mostly noise they don’t need. They just want to get things done with whatever the best tech they can get their hands on at reasonable price.”

That’s so nicely put I’m not going to add anything except “hear, hear.” But I will revisit this quote later.

Howlett ends the post with his question-that-really-matters: “Can someone explain to me the problem Enterprise 2.0 is trying to solve?” I’ll give it a shot.

Here’s a set of business problems that are hopefully not too abstract or trivial, and ESSP-based solutions to them. They’re based on my research, casewriting, reading, and personal experience. This list is nowhere near exhaustive; it just contains the first few examples that came to mind.

Problem: How can we bring new hires up to speed as quickly as possible so that they become effective employees and stop bugging people with all their questions?

Use a wiki. Office supply company VistaPrint initiated a wiki in an attempt to capture what a new engineering hire needed to know. Because this knowledge base changed so quickly, the company felt that any paper-based solution would quickly become obsolete. Within 18 months the wiki grew to contain over 11,000 pages placed into 600 categories, all of them generated by employees themselves rather than a professional knowledge management staff. It became a dynamic and up-to-date repository of the company’s engineering knowledge.

Problem: How can we accurately forecast how many units we’re going to sell?

Use a prediction market. As Claire Cain Miller wrote in the New York Times Bits blog: “At a media company with a new product to ship, 1,200 employees predicted a ship date and sales figures that resulted in 61 percent less error than executives’ previous prediction, according to [prediction market vendor] Crowdcast. A pharmaceutical company asked a panel of scientists and doctors to predict regulatory decisions and new drug sales using Crowdcast, and they were more accurate than the company’s original prediction 86 percent of the time” The former example is especially impressive because the market demonstrated its ability to accurately foretell sales of a new video game, which are notoriously hard to anticipate. See these posts for more on prediction markets.

Problem: Who can solve this scientific problem that’s got us stumped?

Post it to Innocentive, an Eli Lilly spinoff and clearinghouse for scientific problems and problem solvers. Research groups within large organizations use Innocentive to post descriptions of problems they’ve not been able to solve. These problems are anonymized, assigned a solution value of between $2,000 and $105,000, then made available over the Web to the more than 80,000 independent scientists from over 150 countries who have an account with Innocentive. A 2007 study by Karim Lakhani, Lars Po Jeppesen, Peter Lohse, and Jill Panetta, found that almost 30% of 166 problems posted to Innocentive were solved.

Howlett asks “…can you imagine inserting a new process to pharma without FDA sanction? It would cause a hissy fit in Washington and rightly so. There is a reason why processes exist to validate what pharma wants to do. Can community oil those wheels?  Perhaps but I’ve not seen the proofs to suggest that is a long term win.” Innocentive has inserted a new process into pharmaceutical R&D, and I don’t think the clearinghouse has asked for or received FDA approval. Is it a proven long term win yet? No, but it has demonstrated some clear value.

Problem: How can we serve our customers better and more cheaply?

Set up an online community and let people help each other. As I wrote a while back, “an April 25 article by Steve Lohr in the New York Times that this is exactly what’s happening at Verizon. The article profiles Texan retiree Justin McMurry, who spends up to 20 hours per week at the community forums section of the company’s website, “supplying answers online to customer questions about technical matters like how to set up an Internet home network or how to program a new high-definition television.”

He’s not the only person exhibiting this strange new form of corporate altruism; Verizon’s director of e-commerce says that Mr. McMurry and his fellow volunteer ’super-users’ answer thousands of questions that would otherwise go unanswered (thus decreasing customer satisfaction) or take up an employee’s time (and thus cost Verizon). Discussions between customers and super-users also “provide customer ideas for improvements in hardware and software for the company’s fiber optic service, as well as a large, growing and searchable knowledge base online.”

Plenty of other companies, including SAP, Intuit and Dell, have had similar experiences. Howlett writes that “Business wants to find the most efficient ways of satisfying customers – and if you think that’s going to come from some new fangled community then think again.” Real world examples indicate that another round of rethinking might be in order.

Problem: Who can help me navigate through this huge company to find the document / information / resource / person / answer I’m looking for?

Set up discussion boards. Euan Semple wrote a great post about how he solved the above problem at the BBC:

“I can so well remember the frustration when managers would say “I can never find anything on the intranet”… I came to the conclusion that corporate intranet search was pretty much pointless. Not enough people created linky content so Google was out. Most stuff was static documents stored in “knowledge coffins” (hat tip to PWC for the terminology) that relied too heavily on structure, determined by someone else and without the benefit of context and lastly, with a few rare exceptions, once you found the document it was likely to be badly written, barely relevant and out of date!

… I came to believe that what people really wanted was to find someone who knew what they were talking about. Even if that “knew what they were talking about” meant knowing which document to read, why and where it was to be found. So what we did was start building online social spaces like forums, blogs and wikis in which highly contextual, subjective, complex patterns and information could start to surface about anything and everything in the business that was interesting and worth writing about.

The result was that when someone said on our forums “I need to find the official documentation on x because I am about to do y” they were usually rewarded, and very quickly, with multiple answers along the lines of “Well I found this document answered my questions because ….. ” pointing them at the documentation. Indeed increasingly the source they were directed to was a blog or a wiki containing up to date, contextualized information.

Having context in the question, context in the answer and the collective memory of your corporate meatspace, empowered by the mighty hyper-link, in between is hard to beat.”

Problem: How can we connect the dots among all the pieces of potentially relevant information about terrorist attacks and other intelligence issues?

Pursue Enterprise 2.0. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, which highlighted poor information sharing among America’s sixteen federal intelligence agencies, ESSPs were deployed across all of them, including the CIA, FBI, NSA, and DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency). An internal report concluded that these tools, which include blogs and the Intellipedia wiki, are “already impacting the work practices of analysts.  In addition, [they are] challenging deeply held norms about controlling the flow of information between individuals and across organizational boundaries.”

Comments I received from analysts across the intelligence community (IC) reinforced this viewpoint:

From a DIA analyst: “These tools have immensely improved my ability to interact with people that I would never have met otherwise… Enterprise 2.0 tools have helped considerably in exposing new information, new projects, and bringing new thought leaders . . . to the forefront. People that would never have been visible before now have a voice. . . .”

From an NSA analyst: “Before Intellipedia, contacting other agencies was done cautiously, and only through official channels. There was no casual contact, and little opportunity to develop professional acquaintances—outside of rare [temporary duty] opportunities, or large conferences on broad topics… After nearly two years of involvement with Intellipedia, however, this has changed. Using Intellipedia has become part of my work process, and I have made connections with a variety of analysts outside the IC. None of the changes in my practices would have been possible without the software tools… I don’t know everything. But I do know who I can go to when I need to find something out.

From an NSA engineer: “ . . . there’s now a place I can go for answers as opposed to data. In addition, using that data and all the links to people associated with that data, I can find people who are interested in helping me understand the subject matter. Since I’ve been involved in Web 2.0 activities, I have met many new people throughout the IC. They are a great resource for me as I continue my career. Their helpful attitude makes me want to help them (and others) in return.”

From a DIA scientist: “IC blogs allow me to connect to people that I would not otherwise know about. I can see what they are working on, and use it to make a real introduction.”

From a CIA analyst: “The first aspect that comes to mind when I contemplate how these tools have improved my ability to do my job is the ease of shar[ing] ideas and working collaboratively with intelligence professionals around the world . . . I am actively involved in an early stage project that would be impossible without these tools. The ability to link information and people together, as wikis and blogs do, makes possible an activity that I truly believe will transform our Community. The tools fundamentally altered the course of this project.”

A few paragraphs back, I cited with approval Howlett’s contention that workers care first and foremost about getting their jobs done. But I disagree when he writes: “[people] want to get things done with whatever the best tech they can get their hands on at reasonable price. That doesn’t mean some wiki, blog or whatnot.” The example of the US IC shows that in fact it can mean exactly some wiki, blog, or ESSP whatnot.

Problem: Is Andrew’s last name spelled McAfee or MacAfee?

Use Google to get it right, Dennis. It only takes a couple seconds.

If you know of other great E2.0-related problem and answer pairs, please tell us about them or point us to them via a comment to this post. I’d love to get a collection of examples that demonstrate to the open-minded that while Enterprise 2.0 contains a lot, it’s not a crock.