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.
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Feb 19th, 2009 | Venkatesh Rao
Recently, a colleague attended a cloud-computing workshop and mentioned a bit of trivia. One of the experts at the event didn’t like the word ‘cloud’ and insisted on using the term “Infrastructure as a Service.” What’s in a name? Everything or nothing, depending on your point-of-view. You could argue that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but you could also argue that the right name, with the right connotations, is what takes trends past a tipping point. So let me offer you impartial thumbnail ‘name analysis’ of the common candidates, and you decide which you like.
Today is short notes day, here are three interesting bits and pieces for you to ponder. First, there’s a quick look at the GTD Global Summit, an opportunity to drink the Kool-Aid of productivity, 2.0 style (I am a panelist and have 3 golden tickets — 50% off registrations — to offer, read on to find out how to get one). Second, a thumbnail review of what might be the first “2.0″ business parable, Where in the World is my Team? And finally, a pointer to a rather unique dashboard, since we’ve been on that topic, thanks to Irwin Lazar.
Since my ongoing series on a social media capability maturity model looks like it is going to be quite a trek, I thought I’d throw in some variety. Don Tapscott (@dtapscott, he of Wikinomics fame) has a nearly-new book out called Grown Up Digital (McGraw Hill, October 2008). It is sort of a sequel to one of his earlier books, Growing Up Digital, (June 1999). In a sense, the new book bookends a decade-long longitudinal study of Millenial digital natives (the term Millenial seems to be the most common, followed by Gen Y, and Tapscott’s own neologism, “Net Generation”). So what happened in the decade during which Tapscott’s own Millenial kids, Nikki and Alex (they feature prominently on the anecdote track), grew up, and why should you, Enterprise 2.0 enthusiast, care?
Let’s recap. In Part I we introduced the idea of a capability maturity model (CMM), and noted that creating a CMM for social media is difficult because the entity that is “acquiring” the capability, the twentieth-century firm, might not even represent the right way to organize your economic activities. Anything from a nonprofit to a self-organizing crowd with no legal status might be the right organizational form for your sector, not just “enterprise 2.0.” This is the sort of change Chris Anderson is talking about in Free: Why $0.00 is the future of business, and what Kevin Kelly is talking about in his recent essay “Better than owning.” This is not gentle evolutionary “keep-up” pressure. It is a mega-speciation event of new organization forms. So a CMM for social media must go well beyond telling you how and when to adopt social media and what “stage” you are at. It must also tell you what sort of species you ought to morph into. So, in Part II, let’s now zoom down to the extremely detailed level. I’ll show you how you can get a sense of where you are now. Get out your favorite spreadsheet program and your organization chart. Identify the functional organization of your enterprise (roughly, the major clusters of the lowest level of your org chart), and create a matrix with each function listed along both the rows and columns, like so (try to get adjacent functions on the org chart, which traditionally interact a lot, next to each other in the matrix; so sales ought to be next to marketing):
Figure 1: Basic matrix, functional
I promised in December that I would share a social media capability maturity model that I’ve been sketching out, so here goes. Capability maturity models (CMMs) are a standard part of our conceptual vocabulary when talking about organizational change, but applying the idea to social media presents some special problems which I need to discuss first. It is not a simple matter of drawing a little evolution curve and labeling some arbitrarily chosen levels of competence. In other words, if you are thinking in terms of a diagram like this (with indicators like “Level 1.2: some employees blog; Level 1.8: many employees blog, most people twitter”), STOP!
Two quotes immediately flashed across my mind as I started reading Listening to the Future by Dan Rasmus, a key soothsayer at Microsoft, and Rob Salkowitz, a free ranger in the Microsoft ecosystem who occasionally wanders further afield. The first is a Kant quote: we see not what is, but who we are. The second is due to Alan Kay, a big name in the hoary past of my employer, Xerox: the easiest way to predict the future is to invent it. Looking out and ahead at the future is as much a synthetic and introspective act as it is a predictive act, even if you don’t explicitly set out to introspect or synthesize. Microsoft’s visions of the future merit some belief simply because the vast energies of that 600 lb gorilla, channeled by those visions, might be sufficient to bring them about. Goliaths win more often than we suspect, because Goliath beating David doesn’t make the news. For you and me, this book is vastly more interesting for what it reveals about the strategic culture at Microsoft than for what it reveals about the future (which is interesting enough in its own right though). If Rasmus’ views are representative, and I believe they are, here’s the radar with which Microsoft is operating (this is a rough copy of a figure in the book):
Remember the last page of the Internet? That was a joke that worked on many levels. We all know how the Web 1.0 story really ended and where the real last page was. We discovered in the minimalist Google homepage that search, rather than content, was the real star of Web 1.0. That search could reconstruct advertising around clicks rather than impressions. The main Google homepage was the real last page of Web 1.0, as I’ll explain. By definition, it was also the first page of Web 2.0. The trajectory of Web 2.0 has now run through a similar course. While no worthy joke page has emerged, it is now clear what the real last page of Web 2.0 is. Take your best guess before you read further.
Happy New Year! I’ll do more rabble-rousing soon, but let’s start 2009 with some fun. So, my friends over at cloudworker.org thought up another bright idea for their January contest, which they call ‘the big tweet-off.’ The idea is to explore the changing nature of work by having people submit pictures of their workspaces, which will then be used in some creative mash-up art. So, take a picture, maybe with your cellphone, upload it through twitpic or some other means, and tweet the URL to @cloudworker. If you’ve been waiting for an excuse to start using twitter, this could be it. Contest ends Jan 31. Seems like they have some cool prizes up their sleeves.
I submitted a non-competing entry (since I was kinda involved in getting them started). At first I thought, how can a boring picture of a desk be creative and show off new ways of working? Here’s what I came up with: recursive photos taken by my tethered webcam (the USB cable you see is actually what the camera is connected to). I call this pair of pictures “My desk introspecting.” See if you can beat my creativity!
And a close-up. Doesn’t capture my whole physical workspace, but does capture my virtual workspace.
About 8 months ago, in April, I posted an article on my blog titled “A Map of the World 2.0 Canon” that tried to visualize how the emerging popular literature on the impact of 2.0 could be organized. The post went mildly viral. Here’s the visualization I came up with, and links to reviews to most of the books I included back then. Read the full piece if the logic of the diagram doesn’t leap out at you. Probably time to drop/add some books, so any suggestions? For those of you who’ve been lazy about keeping up, this might make for some good Cliff Notes level material to help you fake it.
The Reviews and One-Line Abstracts
I am linking to my reviews where I have them, and to Amazon where I don’t. For a book without a review (the starred ones), if you think you have a good one, send me a link.
Before you worry about 2.0 technology for your company, ask yourself: does the business you are in even make sense for the 2.0 world? Enterprise 2.0 as an abstraction will obviously happen; it is only a matter of time. Whether your industry actually survives to benefit is not so certain. On this site, we often discuss Enterprise 2.0 principles in the abstract, usually with a hypothetical widget manufacturing company as our implied mental model. We then ask how social media and 2.0 principles affect various functions like sales, PR or engineering. What happens when you go from widgets to specific product or service industries, like baby food, cars, finance, farming or fast food? Will YourEnterprise 2.0 make sense in 2009, the year of dual disruption from 2.0 on one end and a recession on the other?
