Bertrand Duperrin makes an interesting analogy in his post Will Adam Smith drive business in the future ? His take :

(…) Opposing a top-down and directive model an emerging relying on the existence of an “ invisible hand” that, in the same way as Adam’s Smith theory in economics, would make people personal actions and choices contribute to a collective purpose without the need of organizing anything.

I guess the difference between the enterprise and the market is that within the former, people (ideally) are working with the clear goal of collectively creating value and making the company richer. While in the latter the goal is to individually create value to make oneself richer.

Bertrand then sets a table comparing Enterprise 1.0 (strict), 2.0 (anarchy) and Rationalized 2.0 (ideal organisation).

My take : Bertrand’s Rationalized 2.0 is Enterprise 2.0 with a strong and clear leadership. The invisible hand in Adam Smith Enterprise is the leadership. Read more »

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After reading the excellent Andrew McAfee Enterprise 2.0 book, I was wondering if there was any point for Heavy Mental to publish yet another review. There already are plenty around with Venkatesh Rao’s on Enterprise 2.0 blog and Gil Yehuda’s probably being the most interesting ones.

It might be more valuable to offer a perspective focussing on the Adoption part of the book. By and large, the adoption topic has been the one sparking off most of the conversations and thinking on the Enterprise 2.0 topic. The idea is to confront McAfee work with a reference on the topic of adoption of innovation : Diffusion of Innovation : by Everett Rogers.

In all fairness, I haven’t read Diffusion of Innovation. I only know it through Scott Berkun presentation on innovation (already mentioned in a post on the subject). Scott quotes Everett Rogers work :

The diffusion of innovation is based more on sociology and psychology than on technology. Here are the things technologists hate : whenever they come with innovation, the main forces against the innovation adoption are sociological ones : ego, envy, fear, pride, politics, security etc …

These are the factors according to E. Rodgers to evaluate how likely your solution is bound to be adopted :

• Relative advantage : what value does it bring ?
• Compatibility : how much effort to transition to this innovation ?
• Complexity : how much learning is required to apply it ?
• Triability : How easy is it to try the innovation ?
• Observability : How visible are the results ?

Enterprise 2.0 represents innovative ways to communicate, collaborate and share knowledge among distributed teams in the organizations. So let’s see how Mc Afee writings answer these questions …

Read more »

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I have been reading a lot of Scott Berkun lately, including his brilliant Confessions of a Public Speaker (french review available). A must read for any speaker, professional or not, to make sure you transmit clearly your ideas .

However, sometimes you just don’t have a dedicated room, with people ready to offer you 30 minutes of attention. You don’t have the slideware, you don’t have the projector or your laptop.

No. What you have is just a 30 seconds time frame, where you bump into some executive or very important people in the company. And what you want is to take advantage of this opportunity to pitch people into some Enterprise 2.0 basics.

Scott addresses this point in one of his many excellent blog posts : how to pitch idea.

Now let’s see some elevator pitches to 5 key enterprise persona for 2.0 adoption …

Read more »

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…We haven’t exchanged a single word with each other. I’m trying a new thing and my inspiration for this is a picture I took from the latest Wired “Mystery” edition.

Apart from it being a smart picture, what I found more interesting is how the effect was achieved. Note the amount of people that Mr. sampotts is following, ca. 50. Having previously followed over 200 (now shrunk down to ca. 35), it was impossible for me to “listen” to a single word people were saying. My only two pieces of salvation were if you @vincentvw’d me (in which case an rss-feed would catch it) or if I added you to Friendfeed, where you can set up friendlists and place (imaginary) friends from Twitter inside.

Twitter is badly designed for this kind of collaborative effort, unless you minimise the amount of people you follow or find workarounds. Even so, those workarounds mean that you cheat 80% of your “friends” as you just push them into a corner where you listen to them less or not at all. E.g. on Friendfeed, I “follow” ca. 300 people, but really only read about 5. I’m sure 90% of Friendfeed users do the same.

My method, for now, is to restrict myself to people whose blog I read or with whom I chat (hopefully) on a regular basis. In the future, perhaps I’ll add a few people that I want to talk to, we’ll see. But the ultimate aim is to get the same effect that sampotts has, that I can ask a question and get answers from the hive mind.

If you remember, that was my vision of Twitter the first time I wrote about it on Tech IT Easy, nearly two years ago. I hope I can regain some of that innocent utopian vision.

For now, the best way to get me to follow you, is to say (smart) things to me, via Twitter, mail, this blog, or in real life!

Vincent

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On the web, 2007 was the year of the social web. Things like Facebook and Twitter have accelerated the way people can interact socially even at a distance. It’s a bit obvious to say that our possibilities to communicate will only get better next year. Internet is a communication network beneath it all.

Innovation isn’t about copying and yet no doubt we’ll see copies of aforementioned services in 2008. This of course depends on how the US economy and therefore VC funds will hold up. As we have seen before, changes are quick and some of the huge web properties might end up irrelevant next year. Will something like OpenSocial really matter? We’ll see.

Below all this Facebook SaaS Web as a cloud ideology, there’s an undercurrent that I find very interesting. As I wrote in October when Google bought Jaiku, XMPP/Jabber/Google Talk is a technology to watch for. Since the acquisition, we haven’t heard much about Google’s plans for Jaiku. As I also wrote, I think it was the technology they were after, not the service itself. Could a social notification system built on RSS feeds, mobile phones and XMPP somehow fit Google’s strategy?

Google has strongly positioned GTalk as the communications platform across its many services. GTalk has been integrated for a while in GMail and to some extent this is similar what you get in Yahoo Mail/Messenger and Microsoft Live Mail/Messenger. You might have read about Google’s recent poorly received integration of GTalk into Google Reader. You may have noticed that Google Docs now offer collaboration through Google Talk. There’s even GTalk integration in Orkut and my sources tell me more is on the way. Even YouTube has availability information of people watching the same video as you (This isn’t probably based on XMPP, but could be?).

Because of their closed nature, MSN/Live Messenger, AIM or Yahoo Messenger cannot leverage their networks outside their own properties. Google Talk users can interact (to some extent) with any XMPP user and other developers can create services for Google Talk users. This is important in a world that is not desktop-bound, but where services and applications are in the web cloud.

For some time XMPP had the problem that it was too ahead of its time and could not compete with the big players. Social web and Google has changed these. Now Live Messenger is playing catch-up with upcoming features like “Multiple points of presence support”, which is something essential to the XMPP-protocol. Microsoft could overthrow other players in the IM market through distributing Messenger with their operating system, like they did with Internet Explorer. The rules of the game have changed on the web and Google has realized they can be the next IM king by integrating their solution everywhere they can. They can introduce Google Talk to anyone with a Gmail account and without any download.

If it isn’t clear enough from above, what I predict to continue in 2008 is integration of IM or instant communication on the web. We won’t see one unified network to rule them all or anything like it. We’ll see advances to a future telecom operators and their ads would want to us believe is today. Yet they’re the ones stonewalling the development of internet on mobile phones. In reality, they are defending their networks against their Internet and web-based rivals. We won’t see iPhone or Android making a big impact on the mobile market, not yet.

What I hope is that devices like Apple’s iPhone & iPod Touch and platforms like Google’s Android will make SMS obsolete preferably through something open and web-friendly like XMPP and not something cooked-up by telecom operators. Microsoft is already offering Live Messenger on mobiles, but these are deals with telecom operators. My hope lies with Google and Nokia in this one. (See for example Nokia’s Gizmo client for S60. Coincidentally, Gizmo uses XMPP for IM.)

And yes, I’m predicting an instant communication nirvana even though my contact list is still mostly empty.

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