Inside the Blogroll: Andrew McAfee

This is the first post in a new, occasional series, in which I profile one blog I read regularly. I have a long list of blogs in my RSS reader, and I'll talk about what's on the list and why I read it.

First up: Andrew McAfee: The Impact of IT on Businesses and their Leaders

Andrew McAfee is an associate professor at Harvard Business School, and he studies how IT investments have contributed to competitive advantage. Of particular interest is his focus on Enterprise 2.0 (a term he coined)--how social technologies akin to Facebook, Twitter, etc., could help enterprises, and what the barriers are for their adoption.

It's a great blog, with lengthy, detailed posts; lots of excellent comments; and a combination of techie-business focus that I like a lot.

Tags:
blogs, information technology, inside the blogroll

"What Was Privacy?" Indeed!

Compare these two quotes:

I have a date there with Samer Takriti, a Syrian-born mathematician. He heads up a team that's piecing together mathematical models of 50,000 of IBM's tech consultants. The idea is to pile up inventories of all of their skills and then to calculate, mathematically, how best to deploy them....

Takriti, a slim 40-year-old with wide, languid eyes, opens the door of his small office. He wears a rugby shirt tucked tightly into blue jeans. I tell him that being modeled doesn't sound like much fun. I picture an all-knowing boss anticipating my every move, perhaps sending me an e-mail with the simple message, "No!" before I even get up my nerve to ask for a raise. But Takriti focuses on the positive. Imagine that your boss finally recognizes your strengths, he says—maybe ones that are hidden even to you. Then he "puts you into situations where you will thrive."

Still, Takriti confesses that he's nervous.... With time, he and his team hope to build detailed models for each worker, each one complete with a person's quirks, daily commute, and allies, perhaps even enemies. These models might one day include whether the workers eat beef or pork, how seriously they take the Sabbath, whether a bee sting or a peanut sauce could lay them low.
(from "The Numerati," by Stephen Baker, excerpted in Business Week, 28 Aug 2008)

-and this-

Harriet Pearson is IBM’s chief privacy officer, a role she assumed in 2000, when Lou Gerstner was CEO. Gerstner was “convinced that as the Web emerged as a business platform, companies—particularly one such as IBM—had to lead on privacy,” Pearson says. “We were at an inflection point with respect to the pervasiveness of technology in business processes, and he correctly judged that IBM needed to use its leadership on that issue to support our initiatives on e-commerce.”... In 2005, under Chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano’s leadership, IBM adopted a forward-looking global policy that forswore the use of employees’ genetic profiles in making decisions about hiring or access to health insurance and other benefits. Pearson credits IBM’s own “DNA” in issues of employee privacy and nondiscrimination for the logic behind its policy on genetic profiling. “There’s a direct line that I can draw back to our history in the 1950s and 1960s that is consistent with who we are as a company,” she says. (In May 2008 George Bush signed into law the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. IBM’s early support facilitated its passage.) IBM’s manifold adventures in new technology—including systems for accelerating genomic research and pharmacological innovation—enable it to foresee developments that have implications for privacy. Pearson says it’s part of her job to scan company and industry horizons for potentially gnarly situations: “My business needs make me as likely, in one day, to be looking at genetics and RFID, and what they mean for privacy issues, as at data privacy and security issues associated with global business processes and the emergence of what’s being called ‘cloud computing.’” (from "What Was Privacy?" by Lew McCreary, Harvard Business Review, October 2008)

Both quotes concern IBM. And so, are you as confused as I am?

A company that characterizes itself as a privacy pioneer is mathematically modeling its consultants? This is what happens when cognitive bias embeds itself in a bureaucracy. IBM's people consider themselves privacy pioneers, yet at the same time they install procedures that to an outside observer are clear invasions of their employees' privacy.

Let me relate a little privacy story. A few years ago, I was involved in a dispute with my employer over an employment contract. While this dispute was ongoing, I still worked at the company. One day, I looked at my laptop, and thought of the servers and networks that carried my emails, web searches, etc., to the internet. The company could have been capturing all this information, scrutinizing it, and twisting it into evidence to support their case.

I felt a chill. What had I searched for? What emails had I sent? What personal information would they have access to? At that moment, I didn't have trust in the company's good will. Quite the opposite.

God forbid they would have had a "mathematical model" of me.

It's clear that people ascribe good motives to their own actions, while in others those same actions would seem questionable or downright wrong (see "I'm OK, You're Biased" by Dan Gilbert). The question is, who can blow the whistle at a large corporation? Who, at IBM, could say, "This is just wrong. We shouldn't be doing it," and be listened to?

UPDATE: Please read Harriet Pearson's comment below. She points to this blog post as an elaboration of IBM's views.

(Thanks to Cognitive Edge for the pointer to the Business Week excerpt.)

(Photo from bretwalda via stock.xchng)

Tags:
privacy, information technology, organizational behavior

There's a web2.0 hammer for lots of business nails

I was talking to a prospect today and they mentioned that their recent expansion had created an entire new level of people involved in their business. In other words, their staff now was communicating with end-clients through an array of agents and contractors, which had not been the case as much in the past. This raised the concern with them that they would not hear stories, both good and bad, from the front lines, and that they would struggle to communicate out to those end-clients.

After they finished speaking, I offhandedly said, "Have you thought of starting a social network where your clients, agents and contractors could all contribute?" Their kind of business has some strong unifying factors and a social network, to me, was a natural step to aid in the kind of communication they wanted.

They grabbed right onto the idea. It brought to mind Josh Bernoff's ("Groundswell") recent statement that few will make a business out of providing web2.0 tools to consumers, but many companies will thrive if they can create tools for use inside businesses.

And in today's business world, there are opportunities to use these tools to greatly improve information flow, collaboration and idea generation. Here are some thoughts:

wikis...for group collaboration
social networks...for communicating with customers/partners
blogs and RSS...for communicating and listening to the broader industry or world at large
social bookmarking...for sharing interesting ideas
microblogging...to create a feeling of a virtual workspace

There are countless other possible examples. Andrew McAfee has an interesting take, where he assigns tools based on the strength of people's ties. He also usefully points out that these tools work best when structures are allowed to emerge from the interaction of the participants, rather than being imposed by some authority.

(Picture by gerard79 via stock.xchng)

Related post:
Dell's web2.0 efforts pay off

Tags:
social media, information technology, web2.0, collaboration, communication,

Dell's web2.0 efforts pay off

Dell has taken a beating in the marketplace (both the commercial marketplace and the reputation marketplace) over the past few years. When founder Michael Dell took the reins again, you had to wonder whether his presence back in the CEO chair would really mean something, or would Dell slip into permanent stall mode like so many PC makers of the past (remember Gateway?).

So it's notable that Dell has distinguished itself among consumer electronics companies for embracing the capabilities of web 2.0 to engage with customers and influencers. According to the excellent new book "Groundswell," by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, Dell used a PR crisis created by a blogger to jump-start its participation in social media, by 2006 was monitoring blog posts on the company, proactively seeking out problems and responding to posts, if necessary reaching out to users with technical support.

That effort has expanded to include sensing problems by monitoring Twitter (as well as using Twitter to communicate with end-users and others).

Today's Wall Street Journal points out that Dell has mastered the art of energizing the "groundswell" to build publicity for its products:

Dell Inc. hit a viral-PR home run last week when photos of a not-yet-released computer -- a candy-red miniature laptop -- swept across the Internet, creating excitement in advance of the release.

The buzz wasn't an accident: It was the payoff from a year-long effort by Dell to engage more directly with bloggers and others who write about the company online....

Engaging with blogs isn't just a defensive move. It has also changed the way the company promotes its products. Chief Executive Michael Dell brought the buzz-generating candy-red computer to The Wall Street Journal's D: All Things Digital conference with the goal of showing it off to some of the bloggers in attendance.

A writer from Gizmodo, a popular gadget blog, saw the new computer and snapped a few pictures, which he posted on the Internet. The company then posted some official pictures on its own blog, and the story took on a life of its own. Dell's blog post says Gizmodo "caught" Michael Dell with the new computer.

I own a Dell computer, a beige minitower from the old days. It's a nice, boring computer. Dell's efforts in web 2.0, however, are the opposite of boring.


Related posts:
Is your marketing department confused about web 2.0? ("Groundswell")
Twitter and "Every Minute Accounted For"
Companies stall because they don't listen to customers

Tags:
social media, information technology, web2.0, marketing, blogging, communication, Wall Street Journal

What in hell is Service-Oriented Architecture?

A hint--it does not describe the new headquarters building for the International Red Cross. Rather, it is either the newest empty IT buzzword or the most important innovation in corporate computing since that Internet thing.

First, let's describe the problem. Companies still do most of their business functions in-house. To support those functions, they have over the years developed customized IT systems. Through growth and acquisition, these same companies have ended up with multiple instances of very similar processes supported by very different systems. This duplication is wasteful both in IT costs (maintaining redundant systems) and in operating costs (doing the same thing in different ways).

Employing an ERP system like SAP or Peoplesoft can address part of the problem--through brute force, a successful SAP implementation requires a company to adopt one way to process, say, employee expense reports. Yet that leaves lots of room for improvement. For the Fortune 1000, are there really 1000 uniquely valuable ways to process expense reports?

And that's where Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) comes in. SOA specifies IT systems as loosely coupled sets of services. Processing an employee expense report is one such service. Different front-ends, say web vs. mobile, are different services. A system architect then would combine these services into applications--plugging the web front end on for a desktop expense-report application, plugging the mobile front end on for a mobile app.

This was some of the thinking behind object-oriented programming since the 1970's, but services are much larger than objects, they are completely self-contained, and the "orchestration" required to assemble them does not require programming. What makes this possible is the internet and programming tools like Java, SOAP, XML, etc. A chunk of code receives a request for services over the net, processes it, and returns results to the calling process.

A company, were it to organize itself around a service-oriented architecture, could easily select systems to implement a standard expense reporting process, or outsource the process. If a better system or outsourcing partner emerged, the company could adopt it easily. And so on across all its processes. The promise would be a company that executes commodity processes very efficiently, and that is able to truly differentiate its most value-adding processes.

But it's a daunting change. The article "The Next Revolution in Productivity," by Ric Merrifield, Jack Calhoun and Dennis Stevens, in the June Harvard Business Review addresses this question. It also provides a detailed overview of SOA and the implications of this model for companies.

Which are: the potential of SOA is almost limitless, yet implementing it will be very difficult. It might be more expensive than those terribly costly SAP implementations you read about in the paper. In fact, startups who adopt this type of methodology from the outset may be creating a long-term competitive advantage against the dinosaurs.

Further reading on SOA:
An SOA overview from xml.com
IBM resources on SOA
The same from Microsoft
A nice one-page diagram

Tags:
what in hell is, information technology, architecture, business processes

Is your marketing department confused about web2.0? Read this

The one nearly universal feeling of companies dealing with the changes that web2.0 has made to marketing is utter bewilderment. I participated in a project to assess corporate blogs last year and I wouldn’t give any company I looked at better than a “C.” In fact, most of them would get incompletes: they had no blogs at all.

Never mind wikis, Facebook, Second Life, YouTube, Twitter, Digg, etc., etc.

So it’s very timely that Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research have written “Groundswell,” a book that illuminates what web2.0 means to everyday businesses. In straightforward language, and buttressed by primary research into how various groups participate in web2.0, Li and Bernoff define the most important web2.0 technologies, show how consumers use them, and lay out how companies can encourage and participate in the conversations about themselves and their products.

At the outset, Li and Bernoff define six overlapping types of web2.0 users & nonusers (creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, inactives) and show their representation in various segments. For example, Democrats have more web2.0 users across the board than Republicans. Japanese Fujitsu PC owners are far more likely to be collectors (e.g., content taggers or subscribers to RSS feeds) than NEC’s PC customers.

Through these examples, the authors crisply demonstrate that companies need to understand the web2.0 profiles of their customers, so as to understand, ultimately, how to engage them in productive conversation.

Case studies appear throughout the book, both success stories (Blendtec’s “Will It Blend” videos) and failures (the short-lived blog of Unica’s Chief Marketing Officer). To satisfy old-line executives (especially CFOs), they include pro forma business cases for several web2.0 projects—including laying out the upfront and ongoing costs of these initiatives.

Over and over, Li and Bernoff emphasize the need, when using these technologies, to listen, and not to shout. To be transparent, and to be authentic. Whether this is possible with traditional companies, in which desiring to control the message is deeply ingrained, remains to be seen.

---------------------------------

Examples of web2.0 user types defined in “Groundswell”:
Creators – blog writers, amateur YouTube videographers
Critics – blog commenters, Amazon product reviewers
Collectors – del.icio.us taggers
Joiners – myspace and Facebook users
Spectators – blog readers, forum readers

Related:
Groundswell blog
Corporate IT maximum-security is damaging innovation
How enterprise 2.0 adds value to the connections between workers

social networking, information technology, web2.0, marketing, blogging, virtual communities, reading list

Corporate IT maximum-security is damaging innovation

Exhibit A: A fellow I serve on a board with recently got a new job with a city government. I asked him for his updated contact information and he said, "I can't give out my work email address. They don't like anything that's not 100% city business done on their computers."

Exhibit B: another friend who works for a large telecom company tried to access my new site The Mistake Bank from work and found that corporate IT had blocked all social-networking sites.

Exhibit C (counter-example): Google's CIO, interviewed in today's Wall Street Journal, says the company's policy allows users to download their own software, supports multiple operating systems and uses public resources (like their own blogger.com) for work-related activities.

Andrew McAfee, for one, has often pointed the finger at internal IT shops for inhibiting the adoption of transformative Enterprise 2.0 technologies. Accurately so, in my opinion.

Why? Reasonable concerns regarding security risks and productivity impacts have spawned draconian, corporate-wide policies that essentially prevent employees from learning anything except that which is corporately-sanctioned.

A company worrying about people frittering away time on Facebook simply closes off access--and thereby prevents employees from keeping track of and developing valuable contacts that can help them deliver better results in their jobs.

Obsessing over use of work IT resources only for work--such as the concern about non-work-related emails my friend encountered--forgets that more and more work concerns things outside the company--learning about the issues facing customers and partners, researching competitors, understanding innovation. It also conveniently forgets that knowledge work frequently spills over the boundaries of the work day--thereby forcing some non-work activities into the hours of 8-5.

In sum, while this throttling of external IT resources for more and more companies may or may not make them more secure and productive--it certainly limits the horizons of employees, depriving them of oxygen needed for learning, innovative thinking, and being a whole person.

And is that a reasonable price to pay?

Related:
How enterprise 2.0 adds value to the connections between workers

(Photo: Alcatraz Island from amagill via Flickr Creative Commons)

social networking, information technology, web2.0, enterprise2.0, productivity, security, innovation

IT Risk - platform and architecture matter

Once, in my days running sales and marketing for a software company, the VP of Technology was growing agitated with my complaints about our product's hardware and database architecture. "OK," he said in exasperation, "if you don't like [proprietary platform], what platform do you want the product to run on?"

In imitation of a Qwest ad from that time, I said, "I want it to run on any operating system, on any database, from any provider." I then glanced at him to make sure he wasn't winding up to smack me in the head. "You asked."

What I was trying to get across is that fighting the platform battle with customers is a certain loser. If they are a Unix shop, and you are trying to sell them Linux, or OS400, it's a nearly impossible task. It's better, frankly, to cut your losses and find another prospect for which your product is a good architectural fit.

Why is that so? A new book helps sort it out. "IT Risk," by George Westerman of MIT's Sloan School and Richard Hunter of the Gartner Group, discusses how companies can and should manage risk within their information-technology infrastructures.

And one of Westerman and Hunter's key points is that a company's foundation architecture must be simple and standardized. Such an architecture can be more easily protected from disaster, can adapt more quickly to changes in the business, and can limit data access to authorized parties more easily than a hodgepodge of separate systems, platforms and applications.

Like it or not, when you are trying to sell a nonconforming software product into a company that has built a simple, standardized IT foundation, you are trying to force them to accept a hodgepodge. And they won't do it.

Product managers need to manage the lifecycle of their architectures as well as the lifecycle of their functionality. It can be painful and expensive, but not as expensive as a good product that loses its market due to an outdated architecture.

information technology, IT, books, risk, product management, reading list, books

Mistake Bank #12 - Don't forget about support!

What follows is a sample of a project I've been working on called the Mistake Bank. It combines narrative, learning from mistakes, video and web2.0 in an environment that companies can use to train new employees, create a corporate history, connect workers and mentors, and bring more humanity to the workplace. Email me at inquiry@caddellinsightgroup.com if you would like to know more about the Mistake Bank.



When John Caddell began his first job as a product manager, he inherited a new product that was being sold by a large partner. And once the first sale happened, he learned that having a support strategy is not optional.

mistakes, international, information technology, Mistake Bank, narrative, learning, marketing, distribution, software, web 2.0, product management, technical support

How enterprise 2.0 adds value to the connections between workers

Andrew McAfee, the Harvard Business School professor and formulator of the term Enterprise 2.0, shows us that there's more than one way to create a great blog. He doesn't post every day, or every week, even. It's been a month since his last post. But when he does post, it's the Web 2.0 equivalent of a scholarly paper. Detailed, well-reasoned, and complete.

Call his blog the anti-Twitter.

I write this because his new post is significant. Those of us who regularly work with Web 2.0 tools take it as a given that they can help businesses. Who could argue that more sharing and collaboration is harmful, we think? Unfortunately, this type of reasoning, or lack thereof, can't convince a skeptic to install Enterprise 2.0 tools in his data center and let them loose with the employee base--especially given the threat they pose to the information hegemony of senior management and the IT department.

Luckily, McAfee has been thinking about the "why" question. And in his latest post, he describes the value to businesses of Enterprise 2.0, by aligning its tools to the ties between workers--strong ties, weak ties, potential ties, and even no ties.

For example, wikis allow teammates (workers with strong ties) to collaborate on a deliverable. On the other end of the spectrum, prediction markets allow workers with no ties at all to contribute to answering a question or predicting a future result.

In sum, Enterprise 2.0 allows businesses to enhance value from the ties between workers. McAfee presents this conclusion in a very simple table.

So, we have our explanation. It's time to open up the data center. Who's with me?

social networking, information technology, web2.0, enterprise2.0, collaboration, Andrew McAfee

Free information -> lateral networks -> less authoritarianism

Anyone who owns a computer knows that storing and exchanging information has gotten much, much cheaper. I'm in the midst of a full backup, and I have 60 GB (60GB!) of stuff I don't want to lose. Take out the music, and there's still 10GB of spreadsheets, photos, documents, databases, etc., that I'm backing up over the Internet (over the Internet!).

What does that mean to business? To Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School, it means nothing less than a reordering of power and, eventually, a revolution in the management approach of companies. In his always-excellent blog, McAfee discusses MIT Professor Tom Malone's theory (from his book "The Future of Work") that cheap storage and fast networks create more lateral information flows within companies, and that upends hierarchies. Writes McAfee:

Until recently there was also a pretty simple rule of thumb within hierarchies: information flows followed decision rights. A decision right is exactly what it sounds like: the power to make a call, settle on a course of action, arbitrate a dispute, etc. A Gap store manager has decision rights over who to hire, but not where to open a new location; that decision right resides much higher up in the company.

Information flows have historically followed decision rights for two simple reasons: effective decision-making requires information (often a lot of it), and information has historically been expensive to gather and transmit. As a result, it made sense to be stingy when amassing and sending information, and to only send it where it would be put to best use -- as an aid to decision-making....

Malone’s theory, however, goes much farther than just outlining how information flows change. It also predicts how decision right allocations will change as a result. His thesis is a simple and powerful one: decision rights will also become more lateralized as information costs plummet, leading to greater power and autonomy at lower levels within a hierarchy -- in short, greater decentralization....

The strong form of this hypothesis is that companies will become less hierarchical and authoritarian, and more democratic and autonomous. Command-and-control approaches will become archaic. Pyramids will become pancakes. The fleetest, most innovative, and most competitive companies will be those that push decisions downward and empower the people closest to the action. The information gathering and filtering bureaucracies that most large companies have built up will become superfluous, and will be pruned. They’ll be replaced by networks of interdependent yet autonomous units that are given the decision rights necessary to pursue the company’s goals.

This will be good news to Traci Fenton of WorldBlu, who's been out in front of the workplace democracy movement, leading what seems like a lonely struggle. Traci, technology is on your side.

[I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that McAfee's post is not a wholesale endorsement of Malone's theory of increased workplace democracy and decentralization. If you read the whole thing, you'll see that he isn't quite sure about it, and in fact finds some evidence in favor of increased centralization due to these same technological factors. I hope Malone is right.]

management leadership information technology networks hierarchies

As Google buys Postini, corporate email surveillance grows

I shrugged my shoulders when I read the news the other day that Google was buying Postini, the corporate spam-filtering service provider. Oh, well, another acquisition. Google does about one of those a week, it seems. What's the big deal?

Then I read Stephen Baker's post on the subject in BusinessWeek Blogspotting, and I felt a weird vacuum in the pit of my stomach. Here's why: Postini's service searches all a company's emails looking for spam signals. It's trivial, especially given Google's expertise in real-time search, to expand that into looking for leaks of confidential information, customer or analyst communication that doesn't follow procedure, or... anything else. Writes Baker:

Once these data are searchable, it will become ever easier for managers to apply advanced analytics to corporate messaging. They'll be able mine these data for the latest trends of words and subjects that employees are writing about. Mapping the social networks inside and outside the company will be a cinch. And as automatic reading programs improve, companies will also be able to track the rising and falling sentiments of their work force.

Creepy, eh? Think about that the next time you send a dirty joke to your friends through your corporate email account. Or receive one, for that matter.

(Photo by hilaryaq via stock.xchng)

email acquisitions search information technology managed services surveillance

Web 2.0 - coming soon to your office desktop, or not?

A great post by corporate IT guru Andrew McAfee last week chastised FastForward conference attendees for their blind faith that Web 2.0 tools will gain widespread adoption in business. And it got me thinking about how companies and individuals use Web 2.0 tools differently. Here is one conclusion:

The great convenience and usefulness of Web 2.0 tools has spurred their rapid adoption by consumers (e.g., 50 million+ blogs, according to Technorati), while concerns over security and control of information have inhibited their adoption by corporations.

And that's much to the detriment of business. Collaboration is essential to any business. And with large businesses in particular, collaboration across distances and other boundaries (organizational, time, national, etc.) is mandatory. Yet IT departments don't know how to deal with some of the best tools--wikis, blogs, content tagging, social networks, etc.--that can benefit that collaboration.

Like individuals, businesses will have to give up some of their obsession with confidentiality and privacy in order to make use of these tools. The companies who figure out how to solve that equation first will have a great advantage. The rest will be wondering, five years from now, what happened.

knowledge management, information technology, web2.0