Author Archive: Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao works at the Xerox Innovation Group, where he leads technology projects that aim to invent the future of documents and information work. Before he came to Xerox, he spent 2.5 years as a postdoc at Cornell, in Raff D’Andrea’s robotics research group. His work at Cornell was on Air Force comman-and-control models for future battlefields. Between 1997-2003, he was at the University of Michigan, working on his PhD, which was on aircraft and spacecraft formation dynamics, with Pierre Kabamba. His home discipline is systems and control theory, but he tends to draw from all the decision sciences, including OR and AI, for inspiration and ideas.
He also writes a blog on innovation, www.ribbonfarm.com.
Posts:
Okay, I am going to milk my 15 minutes of fame as an E 2.0 “influential” to pitch you some pure vaporware. When I am not starting flame wars around E 2.0 culture change, I manage a research team within the Xerox Innovation Group, that is building a technology called Xerox Trails. The technology allows you to blaze and follow “trails” through Web content. Right now, the consumer incarnation of the technology, a product called “Trailmeme,” is in limited invitation-only beta. Read on for an invite code. What I’d like from you E 2.0 evangelists and champions is help brainstorming and dreaming up the ideal enterprise version of this technology, which is on our roadmap for a year or so down the line. At a higher level, I am interested in discussing a more conceptual question: how do you make sense of the huge mess of documents on a typical Intranet, hosted on multiple internal sites and technologies? This is the problem of enterprise document integration (EDI).
The idea of Enterprise 2.0 is now a couple of years old, well into the trough of disillusionment as far as hype cycle position goes, and broad outlines are starting to become clear. So it is not surprising that two books have appeared in the last year that treat the subject broadly, systematically, and without the Kool-Aid that characterized books like Wikinomics, which appeared much earlier in the hype cycle. The first is one by the most usual of suspects, Andrew McAfee, titled, like his original article that coined the term, Enterprise 2.0 (the subtitle though, has changed appropriately, from “The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration” to “New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges.”) The second is “Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom” by Matt Fraser and Soumitra Dutta. The two books are ideal foils to each other. They tackle the left and right brains of the Enterprise 2.0 idea respectively. To a certain extent, they are also evil twins to each other. Which one is better for you?
Yesterday, I did something that suggested to me that we are at an important tipping point in the psychology of Web 2.0 adoption. Within an hour of hearing the news of Facebook acquiring Friendfeed, I signed up for the latter, using my Facebook login info. I’d known for a year that Friendfeed is a great dashboard service that integrates your social media presence, but I had not joined. Apparently I wasn’t alone. Friendfeed was at one point described by TechCrunch (I think) as ‘a great service nobody will ever use.’ So how do you interpret actions like mine?
Here’s a truth. Web 2.0 is interesting; Enterprise 2.0 is boring. When social technologies cross the firewall, they seem to lose the ambience of red-blooded, consequential and anarchic excitement that surrounds them in the public space (take for instance the excitement over Iran on Twitter). Equally, they usually fail to penetrate into the most adrenaline-charged, pulse-pounding core of the world of business. Why is this, and why is this dangerous? Why do we need flame wars and Twitter tsunamis (mutatis mutandis) to penetrate the firewall? I am going to be listening for this theme next week at E 2.0 (DM me @vgr or email me if you’d like to connect over a drink next week on this question or any of our other favorite topics like culture change, KM vs. SM etc.)
This is a piece about manufacturing productive dissent online, a subject about which, I am beginning to think, I know something. My first piece on this site, which I posted on September 28 last year, received 46 comments. A clear watershed divide emerged between those who hated my stance on “social media vs. knowledge management,” and those who loved it. It also got an unexpectedly large number of blog reactions, considering that I am at best a D-list blogger. Though I was slightly taken aback by the intensity of the reaction, (enough that I toned it down a bit, since I have far less energy for online debate than I did 10 years ago) that first piece set the tone for my blogging here. In the six months and some weeks since, I wrote 14 original, long op-ed type pieces here, which averaged around 9 comments apiece. That’s thrice the average on my own blog, where I tend to use a completely non-provocative voice. So I thought I’d do a quick overview and share my initial conclusions about the art of manufacturing productive dissent. These thoughts were triggered by the most extreme reaction I’ve gotten so far: some guy disagreed so much with the views I expressed when Stowe Boyd recently interviewed me, that he somehow dug up my phone number and left a slightly alarming message on my voicemail. He then spewed some venom at me on Twitter. Certainly, a time-to-take-stock event.
Apr 10th, 2009 | Venkatesh RaoBreaking the Second Moore’s Law: Clouds and the Two Enterprise Cultures
In the world of innovation and business strategy books, where vacuous roadmaps rule, falsifiable assertions and clear positions are rare. Geoffery Moore is an exceptionally clear signal in this bleak wasteland of noise . In his 2005 book Dealing with Darwin, he proposed a stimulating law, which I’ll call the Second Moore Law:
There are two basic business model architectures, complex systems and volume operations, and the two cannot and should not mix, or share best practices. Businesses with one architecture should not covet the benefits of the other.
The distinction is a nuanced one, but has almost biblical clarity (Moore actually uses the word “covet”). Think “high touch mega-deal business” vs. “mass production of widgets” for starters. Like every good dogma, it catalyzes a lot of creative thought when you attempt to think of ways to break it. My question to the Enterprise 2.0 crowd is this: does cloud technology provide a way to break the Second Moore Law? I think it does, but it will take some extraordinary business creativity to do so.
One theme persistently comes up whenever I talk social media, either inside my workplace or outside. This is “culture change.” When talking about catalyzing adoption of social media within the enterprise, at some point, someone will predictably say something like, “the most important thing is to get the culture to change.” Framing social media adoption in these terms is basically a show-stopper, because it means you’ve trotted out a reassuring phrase that allows you to view yourself as a visionary, others as obdurate idiots, and gives you something abstract to blame when (not if) your initiative fails. I don’t have an alternate framing, a phrase to replace “culture change” because there isn’t one. “Culture change” is merely a zeroth-order framing that screams “some hard, context-specific thinking needs to be done here.” When you hear the phrase, you are hearing lazy thinking. The key is to start thinking, not to substitute a different lazy-thinking phrase. Here is how you can unclog the mental plumbing.
Drip some ink on a piece of fabric and watch what happens. Depending on the type of fabric, the blot spreads at different speeds along the warp and woof. The pattern that appears reveals as much about the fabric as it does about the ink. What does this have to do with social media? Here is a picture of a chain email diffusing through the social fabric, created by Cornell researcher Jon Kleinberg (picture taken from a Cornell University news article).
As I write, a Presidential news conference is going on, a broadcast event that I, like many of you, would have treated as ‘unmissable’ 10 years ago. Yet, today, I am happy to keep twhirl in my peripheral vision, trusting that if anything truly important is said, tweets or emails will come my way. I have let a vast, trusted crowdsourced filter descend over my eyes. My changed behavior is just one symptom of the waning of broadcasting and the waxing of diffusecasting (I hereby claim credit for the term) as the central process in mass communications. Virality and word-of-mouth are just surface characteristics. Here is a deeper X-Ray view. Mass persuaders, read this if you value your future in your profession. Continue Reading »
So, I am in San Francisco for a few days, and met up with Steve Wylie and Paige Finkelman. That’s the “Us” in the title.
We had a great conversation, where we figured out world hunger and other such small issues, inspired by some great coffee from the Blue Bottle Cafe in the SoMA part of downtown.
- “No, we aren’t in the picture”
And we touched upon a few Enterprise 2.0 related questions that even our combined brilliance couldn’t seriously illuminate. Care to weigh in? Here they are:
I had a big insight today: the word “social” in the term “social media” represents the ultimate in misleading advertising, and is responsible for many failures and a lot of disenchantment, especially within the enterprise. The adjective attracts exactly the sort of people most likely to fail at doing anything valuable with the technology. The sort of extroverted, harmony-seeking, consensus-driven collectivists who think it is all about the group, cutting big-ego prima donnas down to size, and building Brave New Egalitarian Communities that enshrine social justice values. It also explains why thoroughly introverted, unsociable, egoistic and ornery individualists (I am one; among my nicknames in college was “hermit”) take to the medium like ducks to water. This conflation of social with sociable, collectivist and communitarian is extraordinarily tempting. Yes, the medium fosters communication and collaboration, but remember, wolf packs communicate and collaborate rather better than sheep. And they compete viciously for the carcass right after. The true nature of social media, the “message” of this medium, is one of radical, uncompromising individualism, within a brutally competitive, bubblegum-flavored Darwinian virtual environment. The “social” adjective is about something else entirely, not collectivist utopia. Allow me to elaborate. The implications are extraordinarily counter-intuitive, and if you don’t learn to appreciate them, you will be eaten by the wolves.
