Learn to Adapt

This week I have been in Milan delivering train-the-trainer for our Web 2.0 University™ (W2U) partners at Reply. Reply has license to exclusively deliver the Web 2.0 Executive Bootcamp, Enterprise 2.0 Bootcamp, and Ajax Bootcamp in Italy and Germany. It has been an exciting week working with the dedicated and experienced folks at Reply to localize our learning content for their target audiences.

During the training we discussed how many of the Web 2.0 ideals and applications play out differently in Italy and Germany. From the legal restraints that make music sites like Pandora impossible to the generally more conservative attitude toward social applications, Reply is customizing the W2U content to deliver outstanding learning to their clients. They have become quite Web 2.0 savvy and I’m sure they will do a great job leading the 2.0 revolution in Europe. So, if you want to leverage the competitive advantage of Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 in Italy or Germany, visit the Reply W2U site.

Unlike most trips abroad, I took some extra time to enjoy Milan. Friday evening I had the great pleasure of being treated to dinner by Piero Rivizzigno, the CEO of the soon to be released, Glossom.com. (This social website will focus on design and fashion – link to come soon where you can learn all about it.) Piero took me into the city center for the best fresh mozzarella I have ever had as well as traditional Naples pizza that was fantastic. Piero mentioned that the owner of the Buffalo Ristorante (I think that was the name - confirmation to come) is hoping to open a restaurant in Georgetown in DC. That would be a wonderful development! Piero was a great host and our discussion of the future of social applications was illuminating. We discussed data portability and Piero was spot-on in his observation that website-owners who benefit from the content we provide need to do a better job of sharing their revenue (at least a small portion) with us.

Saturday I got to play tourist in full glory and traipsed all over Milan city center. I visited the Parco Palestro, the Castle of Milan, and the Milan Duomo and the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. Sadly, the battery on my camera bit the dust at the Duomo, but here are a few pictures:

The Palestro in the Parco Palestro…

The drawbridge at the southern “Little Bridge” entrance to the Castle of Milan:

Inside the Caste of Milan (or as it should be called – the castle of cats – they owned the moat):

Approaching the Duomo Church (both inside and out, it is simply magnificent):

My personal favorite: A beautiful fountain fighting the unbelievable moss that it swallowing it with the Duomo behind:

Now it is on to the butt-busting flight from Milan to Frankfurt to DC and back to my family (hopefully my son will look up long enough from Adventure Quest to notice I’m home ;o).

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These are my links for March 26th:

• The Top 100 Productivity and Lifehack Blogs - College Degree.com - A great reference list to seek out Websites to increase productivity and try to achieve work-life balance. Lifehack.org may have be the most well known, but I really like the work-life balance ideas from Zen Habits.
• ACM Queue - Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise: Social bookmarking tools are taking off on the Web. Do they have a place within the enterprise, too? - A comprehensive dip into the bookmarking end of the Enterprise 2.0 pool. Includes a deep field test of Dogear and concludes that there is “great potential”.
• Social Software`s Culture Clash - Another great case study that reinforces my “three legged stool” model for Enterprise 2.0 where culture change is the bigger challenge than the Web 2.0 technology. Their quote: “99 percent culture, 1 percent technology”
• Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk?: Scientific American - I’ve yet to dig into the article in depth, but just the idea of Scientific American publishing a lengthy article on using the Web for science research and collaboration it remarkable. The epitome of the hope that is “Learning 2.0″ - the Web enabling new

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These are my links for March 15th through March 17th:

• Digg, Wikipedia, and the Myth of Web 2.0 Democracy. - "At both Digg and Wikipedia, small groups of users have outsized authority." No one ever expected it to be truly democratic, but it does give pause as to who is deciding what learning we get - probably still better than the norm.
• Is User-Generated Content Out? | Newsweek Technology | Newsweek.com - "The individual user has been king on the Internet, but the pendulum seems to be swinging back toward edited information vetted by professionals." The trend continues. I still believe their is a huge "curator" role for editors to play.
• Where Every Ad Knows Your Name - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog - Loise Story of the New York Times asks an insightful question that reveals just how far we have come in "personalizing" the Web. It certainly raises privacy issues, but it also open the possibility of tailored content and delivery.

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Yesterday I had the great pleasure of presenting at a great day of learning on The Future of Enterprise Computing at University of Virginia. The seminar was put together by Professor Ryan Nelson, the director of the Center for the Management of Information Technology (CMIT) in UVA’s McIntire School of Commerce. Ryan pulled together a great panel of speakers:

• Andrew McAfee, Harvard Business School, the person who coined the term “Enterprise 2.0″
• Paul Daugherty, Accenture’s Chief Technology Architect
• Jeff Kelly (yours truly) representing Web 2.0 University(tm)
• Lewis Shepherd, CTO at Microsoft’s Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments

The audience consisted of about 70 graduate students in UVa’s MS MIT program and about 30 members of UVa’s Center for the Management of Information Technology. We were fortunate to be one of the first groups to present in the newly remodeled, state-of-the-art facilities in Rouss-Robertson Halls. I’ll give a brief recounting of each presentation, but I’m hoping that soon I will be able to edit this post to add links to videos of the presentations (3/17 update: it turns out the videos can’t be released - sorry about that).

Andrew McAfee led off with a great 60-minute summary of Enterprise 2.0 and it’s implication for enterprise technologists. I’ll briefly mention two points he made that I thought were intriguing. The first was his discussion of the underlying trends of E2.0 which included “lack of up-front structure” and “mechanisms to let structure emerge”. Those two trends align with the “freeform” and “emergence” concepts that Dion Hinchcliffe added in his FLATNESSES checklist - which is an extension of Andrew’s original SLATES checklist. We discussed it briefly over lunch, and the E2.0 trends that Andrew is encountering are congruent with what we have been seeing. The other interesting idea Andrew introduced centered around the value of weak ties in a social network. He mentioned Mark Granovetter’s The Strength of Weak Ties from 35 years ago and the Web as platform for social network is reproving how accurate Marks isights continue to be. He postulated - and I agree - that the people with whom we have weak social ties may be more valuable than the people with whom we have strong ties. That idea supports the research I have been doing about the importance of diverse and inclusive groups as the greatest driver of innovation.

Paul Daugherty was the second presenter and he provided very rich insight on the future of technology and what it means for the enterprise. Accenture has surpassed IBM as the world’s largest systems integrator, so Paul certainly has a keen perspective from which to predict future trends. His presentation was full of rich insight. While there was too much great content to review here, I will share his list of the eight power shift trends that will impact enterprise technology:

1. Cloud Computing & SaaS
2. Systems Integration - Regular & Light
3. Enterprise Intelligence at Scale
4. Continuous Access to People and Content
5. Social Computing
6. Explosion of User-Generated Content
7. Gradual Industrialization of Software Development
8. Green Computing

Jeff Kelly - I designed my talk to give the audience of technologists insight into the requests they might see coming from the business line. I based it on the platforms and strategies that resonate the most with the audiences we have at our Web 2.0 University ™ learning events. I provided a very brief summary of our two most popular learning events and then the topics that resonate the most with the business leaders who attend. You can see that list on slides 13 and 18 in the presentation deck linked here:

Lewis Shepherd gave a great capstone presentation that illustrated the practical application of the ideals and theories covered earlier in the day. His perspective was that of someone who came to DC from Silicon Valley after 9/11 to help devise ways for the US intelligence community to better gather, share and collaborate on various intelligence sources. So, much of his presentation focused on implementing Enterprise 2.0 platforms in a ultra-secure environment. His insights were excellent and provide great fodder for countering security-veiled resistance to E2.0. (It gives us the ability to say, “well I’m sure the information sharing your employees will do does require the most robust security available - let me tell you how the US intelligence community uses to wikis to share top-secret information…”). Lewis walked us through the evolution and success of Intellipedia as well as covering some other federal E2.0 projects. He also pointed out that my alma mater, EPA, is doing some great Web 2.0 work at epa.wik.is. I encourage you to read the EPA Web 2.0 Whitepaper - grand kudos to Brand Niemann and everyone else who is finally getting EPA to the level of public data exchange the Myles Morse and I (and many others) were hoping for 14 years ago when we worked on Enviro$en$e.

The day wrapped up with a panel moderated by Stefano Grazioli where Lewis, Paul, and I (Andrew had an early flight) fielded questions. The entire day was a great learning opportunity and I look forward to delving deeper into the wealth of information that was presented.

Thanks much to Brian Weston for posting pictures from the event!

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These are my links for March 10th:

• Steve Hargadon: Web 2.0 Is the Future of Education - This is the first time I stumbled upon Steve's blog. Now this is where we need to get more of our K-12 educators. I hope to have time to comb through the post in an upcoming post of my own soon…
• Thomas Davenport and Blogging - He is Wrong! : eLearning Technology - Karrer on Davenport on blogging. The jury will be out for quite some time, but interesting points taken on both sides…

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