I was discussing with one of our execs the progress we’d been making on social media proficiency internally.

And he asked a great question that made me think:

“So, has anyone fundamentally changed their work processes because of the platform?”

And I realized this is the next frontier on what’s turning out to be a large-scale social engineering project.

Getting Business Value Out Of Our Social Software

As we make progress in this journey, I’ve got my eye out for different catagories of business value we’re seeing.  I suppose, at the same time, I should also be keeping my eye out for business value we’re NOT seeing yet.

And, as I’ve mentioned before, we’re seeing business value — in many forms — across the board:

People with specific interests are finding other people with similar interests
Rather than searching big content repositories, people are asking other people for help and answers
A pan-organizational “social fabric” has been created that wasn’t really there before
Folks who spend time on the platform are better educated — and more engaged — in EMC’ business

And more And, just to be clear, there’s no shortage of business benefits — I still stand behind the broad assertion that this has been one of the most ROI-positive IT projects I’ve seen in my career.

Interesting “value nugget” of the week: 

EMC runs a healthy program to bring a large number of interns and co-op students into the company.  They started introducing themselves to each other on the platform.

What started with “name, rank, serial number” blossomed into a wonderfully diverse set of conversations about careers, favorite hangouts, what it means to work at EMC, what is everybody doing, and so on.

I would argue that — whatever millions that EMC spends on this intern/coop program — we’ve now made it 10-20% more valuable, simply because we connected people to each other, and connected them all to the broader company. 

At zero incremental cost.

But we want more. Much more.
[More]

If the data are plotted as the cumulative adoption of the innovation, it looked like this:

Both of these types of curves have been seen again and again when the diffusion of innovation is examined. They seem to be derived from basic forces present in human social networks.

Ryan and Gross made several key contributions besides the identification of the S-shaped curve. One was the process by which the innovation diffused. The other was the type of farmer who used the innovation.

They found that there were five stages in the adoption of an innovation by an individual: awareness, interest, evaluation, trial, and adoption. And there were at least 4 different types of farmers, of which the early adopters were the most important.

Early adopters heard about the corn from traveling salesmen and tried small plots to see how well it worked. Later adopters relied on the personal experience of other farmers, usually the early adopters. When there were enough positive reactions from the early adopters, when there were more stories of personal experience, the adoption rate took off.

It was the human social network that was critical for the rate at which the innovation was adopted. The more social connections an early adopter had, the more cosmopolitan they were, the more likely it would be that others would adopt use of the innovation.

Everett Rogers was instrumental in codifying many of the principles of innovation diffusion. Here is his famous rendition of the distribution:

Only 16% of a population is usually made up of the early adopters, the ones that are critical for spreading the innovation to the early majority. The key to the adoption of any innovation is the rate at which early adopters can transmit the knowledge of the benefits to the early majority. In the case of the farmers, it would often take 4 or more years for this to be converted form awareness to adoption.

In many areas of our world today, this is much too slow. Technology is disruptive, meaning that the people who adopt this technology actually deal with the world in entirely different ways than those who do not. It is similar to a paradigm shift, in that those on either side of the shift have a hard time communicating with each other. It is almost as if they inhabit separate worlds.

This can cause some problems because the early adopters are required to communicate with the early majority if an innovation is to diffuse throughout an organization. If they can not, it creates a chasm, which has been described by Geoffrey Moore in his book.

The organization has to take strong action to recognize that this chasm is present and to span it, either with training or, more effectively, with people who have been specially designated as chasm spanners. In many cases using Web 2.0 technologies, they are called online community managers.

Disruptive innovations seem to arrive almost yearly. Without a directed and defined process to increase the rate of diffusion in an organization, if just standard channels of communication are used, innovation will diffuse at too slow a rate for many organizations to remain competitive.

Because there is usually not just one innovation disrupting an organization at a time. Life is not that clean. There can be multiple innovations coursing through different departments, moving early adopters even further away from the rest of the group and expanding the chasm. This only makes communication harder.

It can no longer be possible to simply let the early adopters go through their 5 stages of adoption and then tell others about it at the water cooler. Designated online community managers, with the training needed to enhance communication channels, will be critical in getting this information dispersed throughout an organization.

Technorati Tags: General, Web 2.0

by Randy Son Of Robert
8 Things We Hate About IT:
[Via HarvardBusiness.org]

You may think that hate is too strong of a word for feelings toward a corporate department. I don’t. Yesterday, I was interviewing an executive on his perceptions of IT and he couldn’t spit his frustration out fast enough. He said, “In the quest of getting things organized, they are introducing a bunch of bureaucracy and, in the process, they’re abdicating their responsibility for making sure the right things get done.” This is completely typical of management’s frustration - no, management’s hatred - of IT.

It’s hard to remember the time when criticizing IT was controversial. Now, it’s ceased to be even interesting. The now-classic HBR article “IT Doesn’t Matter” resonated so clearly because it underscored the pervasive belief that IT mediocrity is the norm. And how bad is an industry’s reputation when a major outsourcer, Keane, can get away with insulting its target market with the slogan, “We Do IT Right”?

It’s not personal – nobody hates the people in IT – it’s the system that’s broken. And here’s the rub: IT doesn’t like it either. One global Fortune 200 CIO describes leading IT as “a sucking vortex.”
[More]

Harvard Business is never shy about stoking controversy. Let’s take a look at some of these items.

• IT Limits Managers’ Authority
• They’re Missing Adult Supervision
• They’re Financial Extortionists
• Their Projects Never End
• The Help Desk is Helpless
• They Let Outsourcers Run Amok
• IT is Stocked with Out-of-Date Geeks
• IT Never Has Good News

The eight things almost all deal with an unwieldy section of a large company having to deal with rapidly changing circumstances. I believe that most of the eight things mentioned above derive from the two opposing aspects of IT in many companies.

So, many IT departments are driven by diametrically opposed needs. No wonder they do such a poor job of satisfying everyone. Stability necessitates limiting what the rest of the company can do. But innovation often needs large amounts of money to complete a project right now in order for the company to remain competitive.

I agree with F. Scott Fitzgerald. The people in IT usually possess first-rate intelligences but the requirements that are often put on them make it very hard to function effectively.

There will have to be changes in how IT is actually managed, how it is integrated into the corporation, in order for many of these problems to be attacked.

But maintaining these two opposing needs is the very definition of insanity.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Web 2.0

by longhorndave
Adobe Adds Features to Boost Collaboration:
[Via Enterprise 2.0 Blog]

Adobe has introduced two new products, Acobat 9 and Acrobat.com. The goal is to transform the way people collaborate—Adobe’s new Acrobat 9 PDF tool now uses Flash to let you embed video, audio, animation and all manner of files, which is very cool. Another new capability lets you leverage web conferencing from Adobe to mark up documents on the fly, in real time, without launching a full-blown conference. Both people can take turns walking through the document, there’s no need to pass the baton, making it very ad hoc. If you decide you need to, you can launch a full-blown web conference (via Acrobat Connect) with a single click.
[More]

Adobe is now making a wide variety of collaborative tools available online with the launch of Acrobat.com. Buzzword allows people to create collaborative documents. It looks like it has version history, access control and real-time controls. Nice.

These tools offer some pretty compelling ideas. I will be examining them to determine just how useful they really are. There is more information at the Adobe site.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

by aussiegall
What’s Your Internal Social Networking Strategy?:
[Via Enterprise 2.0 Blog]

Nemertes recently noted that eighty-three percent of organizations are now “virtual” meaning that members of workgroups reside in physically separate locations. The emergence of the virtual workplace has radically changed not only how we communicate and collaborate, but how we build social bonds among employees.
[More]

Informal interactions are very important in any social network. They provide secondary routes for information to bypass chokepoints, they permit radically different viewpoints to influence the creation of knowledge and they are just plain fun.

It will be important for any defined internal online social network to provide this outlet. Because, frankly, if it is not provided, people will either ignore the network or find ways, perhaps inappropriately, to create such an outlet.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Social media, Web 2.0

by b_d_solis
Appreciating A Seth Godin Post:
[Via chrisbrogan.com]

The other day, Seth Godin wrote about the new standard for meetings and conferences. I loved the article (but couldn’t comment that I did), and have been thinking about it ever since. I talked about it twice with two different people over the last few days, and part of the sentiment Seth put out there found its way into my jumping over a mountain post.

So, I’m presuming everyone reads Seth, but if not, check this out, or as Clarence would say, “marinate.”

Because Seth came by and commented reminded me to show that I am reading and paying attention to him. A side lesson to this: comment where you’re reading. It makes a difference.

Part of the way information flow is enhanced by Web 2.0 tools can be seen here. Someone comments on a post that was initiated by someone else’s thoughts. Each of us in the chain adds our own viewpoint, helping to not only transmit the information to a greater audience but also adding our own context.

He extends this to meetings of any sort. If we are going to take the time and expense to meet face-to-face rather than use social media to accomplish our goals, then we had better take advantage of the benefits those sorts of encounters provide than simply information transfer. Like using our hands to talk.

Seth says this:

If you’re a knowledge worker, your boss shouldn’t make you come to the (expensive) office every day unless there’s something there that makes it worth your trip. She needs to provide you with resources or interactions or energy you can’t find at home or at Starbucks. And if she does invite you in, don’t bother showing up if you’re just going to sit quietly.

What are some of the benefits of face-to-face encounters that can not be accomplished with Web 2.0 tools? I think engagement of real time thoughts and processes is one. Taking advantage of the simultaneous juxtaposition of time and place that can not happen online. Snacks and drinks are another.

Any other ideas?

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

by flikr
We Do Different Things:
[Via chrisbrogan.com]
The roles many blogs take, not surprisingly, are very different. They fulfill many of the same functions seen in face-to-face social networks: connector, innovator, aggregator, gossip, etc.

We do different things.

There’s nothing more flattering than being lumped in blog posts alongside Robert or Jason Calacanis or all the other folks who also write a blog on the web. But you have to realize that we do different things. (people are welcome to disagree with my characterizations of them).

Robert Scoble writes about really exciting new things, and he shows videos, and he connects humans, and he scours this space for new amazing things.

Louis Gray seems to own the aggregator/repurposing space, with things like FriendFeed, SocialThing, etc.

Seth Godin is a marketer’s marketer, and points out the human experience with products and services.

Jason Calacanis has a strong history in the web space, and also talks from a media maker’s perspective.

Jeremiah Owyang writes more analysis-based posts on social marketing as an industry.

I could go on for a while, but I guess the point is this: we all keep blogs. We all type about things. But we’re different and offer a different set of take-aways from our writing and thought processes.

That is what is so important about newsfeeds and RSS. Using the right software, they bring together all these diverse thought processes. It is almost like have a virtual conference room filled with some extremely interesting and creative people.

What is often begun as a personal approach towards communication can become, when aggregated, a very rich and very deep conversation, particularly when you add your own perspective on your own blog.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Social media, Web 2.0

by Felix Francis
Twitter’s growing pains:
[Via Buzzworthy]

It’s hardly news that Twitter is experiencing growing pains, but a couple of items have appeared in recent days that shed some new light on just how bad they’re getting.
[More]

As mentioned below, some of the problems Twitter is having while trying to scale are rooted in its basic communication paradigm. It is much more complex than a system based on the telephone company. It is almost as if every phone call was a 5 or 6 person conference call.

Difficult to do with the best experts. But it sounds like Twitter was somewhat surprised by the direction its technology took and was not prepared for the type of growth it sustained. It is still a very small company and one that may not have had onboard all the engineering help it needed.

Twitter is, fundamentally, a messaging system. Twitter was not architected as a messaging system, however. For expediency’s sake, Twitter was built with technologies and practices that are more appropriate to a content management system. Over the last year and a half we’ve tried to make our system behave like a messaging system as much as possible, but that’s introduced a great deal of complexity and unpredictability. When we’re in crisis mode, adding more instrumentation to help us navigate the web of interdependencies in our current architecture is often our primary recourse. This is, clearly, not optimal.

Twitter broke ground on a new manner of using Web 2.0 tools. Time will tell if it is able to maintain its initial success.There are some very difficult problems that have to be solved. But there will be somebody who solves the scaling problem because this tool is just too useful.

Google was not the first search engine., just the best one so far. Web 2.0 works by allowing rapid prototyping of new tools as one works towards perfection. Twitter was able to accomplish a lot with really very little. It has hit a barrier now. It will be interesting to see how this problem get solved. It is not too unlikely that a user who is really knowledgeable will propose a solution.

We have kept an eye on the public discussions about what our architecture should be. Our favorite post from the community is by someone who’s actually tried to build a service similar to Twitter. Many of the best practices in scalability are inapplicable to the peculiar problem space of social messaging. Many off-the-shelf technologies that seem like intuitive fits do not, on closer inspection, meet our needs. We appreciate the creativity that the technical community has offered up in thinking about our issues, but our issues won’t be resolved in an afternoon’s blogging.

We’d like people to know that we’re motivated by the community discussion around our architecture. We’re immersed in ideas about improving our system, and we have a clear direction forward that takes into account many of the bright suggestions that have emerged from the community.

To those taking the time to blog about our architecture, I encourage you to check out our jobs page. If you want to make Twitter better, there’s no more direct way than getting involved in our engineering efforts. We love kicking around ideas, but code speaks louder than words.

That would be the Web 2.0 way.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Social media, Web 2.0

by kevindooley
Am I Done with Facebook? Twitter FTW!:
[Via Phil Windley's Technometria]

I got a message from Facebook today saying that someone had friended me. I realized I didn’t care. Not that I didn’t care about the person who’d friended me–I didn’t care about Facebook. It’s been weeks since I was there and my life is pretty much the same.
I think the reason is Twitter. Twitter is much more social, much more interesting, and the plethora of clients (including any mobile phone with SMS) means that I don’t have to remember to go check the site to see what’s happening. Twitterific displays a solid stream of the 140 character thoughts of my friends.

Because of Twitter, today I know:
There were tornados in Denver and Laramie
Twitter posted an article about their architecture on their blog
There’s a blogger dinner tonight in Salt Lake City
@tylerwhitaker and @bradbaldwin aren’t going to carpool to the blogger dinner

I like that.

Twitter has scaling problems even though their user base is reportedly quite small. As Nik Cubrilovic points out, Twitter isn’t like Wordpress or Digg. Twitter is a group forming network (GFN). When a Metcalfeian network adds another user, the number of potential connections goes from N² to (N+1)². When a GFN adds one more user, the number of potential connections goes from 2^N to 2^(N+1). In case it’s been a while since you’d done that math–it’s a big difference.

There are three important ‘Laws’ dealing with networks, social or otherwise: Sarnoff’s, Metcalfe’s and Reed’s. Sarnoff’s Law states that the value of a network (David Sarnoff started NBC) is proportional to the number of nodes. Metcalfe’s Law states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes. Reed’s Law states that the value of a network increases exponentially with the number of nodes.

Metcalf’s assumes the nodes can communicate with each other, resulting in multiple connections. This is where network effects come into play. One phone is not useful. Two are a little better, but a network of 10 can be very useful. Metcalf first showed this using this figure:

The line corresponds to Sarnoff’s Law. Metcalf’s, which was derived from the first Ethernet networks, shows that the value for small numbers in a communication network is not great. But this increases rapidly with larger networks.

What this means is that in some social media settings, the number of groups can increase much faster than the number of connections. Here is a consequence of this:

To make this more real, consider TechCrunch’s twitter account. When TechCrunch, with almost 18000 followers, sends a message, that results in 18000 messages–one to each follower. This is like the phone system with infinite, always-on conference call capability. Sure, you can do things internally to collapse some messages, but you’re still dealing with exponential growth.

What is happening with Twitter, that is making it have problems scaling, is that the number of groups substantially increases the number of possible connections and messages it might have to maintain. With email, everyone on the list is sent a copy of the email, that sits on their computer and take up space. Twitter sends messages to phones, for example, possibly 18000 of them in this example.

That is a lot of wasted effort. Twitter may not be the best way to communicate with a large number of people in several different groups.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

by digitalART (artct45)
A search engine for open notebook science:
[Via Michael Nielsen]

There has been some great discussion in the comments on my post about “Open science”. One outcome is that Jean-Claude Bradley has created a search engine customized for open notebook science:

http://tinyurl.com/4multu

Fittingly, many people contributed to the discussion!

This demonstrates one of the nice abilities of Web 2.0 approaches. Google permits you to set up a custom search for a group of websites. This allows you to perform a directed search using specific terms against a designated group of websites.

A user-generated subset of Google web searches may be very useful for linking the content of several sites. This could be fun to play with. I’ll have to put one together for Science 2.0.

Technorati Tags: Science, Web 2.0

Avogadro: Open Source Molecular Building:
[Via MacResearch - Online Community and Resource for Mac OS X in Science]

Avogadro is a new, open source molecular editor for Mac, Windows, and Linux. It is an advanced molecular editor designed for cross-platform use in computational chemistry, molecular modeling, bioinformatics, materials science, and related areas. It offers flexible rendering and a powerful plugin architecture.

While still in beta, the recent 0.8 release brings general usability to viewing and editing molecules on your Mac. You can quickly export graphics to PNG, JPEG, or even POV-Ray rendering, or copy from the editor and paste a transparent PNG into programs like OmniGraffle. Avogadro supports reading from over 80 chemical file formats, courtesy of the Open Babel library.

read more

These sorts of tools will become more and more common - Open Source, mashable, easy to use. The last paragraph says a lot about the goals.

Future plans for the Mac version of Avogadro include integration of Spotlight and QuickLook, as well as built-in scripting in Python. Work is also underway to allow copy/paste from ChemDraw and other 2D chemical drawing applications. Additional builders (e.g., for biomolecules, nanotubes, and nanoparticles) and interfaces to other computational chemistry packages are due for future versions as well.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0