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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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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Here is a simple illustration I put together for a client that displays the six primary monetization methods on the Web. Is is a simplification and expansion on a post from Dion Hinchcliffe from awhile back. The only real “Web 2.0″ advances in monetization lurk in the “back door” that was opened up using APIs. Recently, Larry Dignan reiterated a common refrain that APIs are the future of Web monetization based on very rough numbers of how much Amazon makes from its numerous Web Services (additional interesting point here). While the numbers are not yet firm they are the only new monetization method that has arisen with Web 2.0. The illustration shows the monetization methods from the traditional “front door” of a Website as well the new opportunities opened up by APIs (all presented simply enough for even the busiest executive):

And here is a very brief summary of the six methods:

Advertising: The Web site owner sells spots on the website (“inventory”) to advertisers. There are numerous models for this type of monetization. Some are fixed price, some are per displays (“impressions”), other are based on the visitor clicking or taking some other action from the add link. Example: AOL sells premium ad banner locations for up to $500K per day.

Subscriptions: The Web site owner only makes some or all of the content or functionality available to customers who create an account and use a credit card (or other means) to subscribe to use the content or services. Rhapsody.com charges users $10/month to be able to listen to millions of songs from thousand of artists anytime, anywhere (online – additional charge to download a song).

Retail: The Web site sells products or services directly to the site visitor. This is a single transaction as opposed to an ongoing subscription. Example: iTunes makes it money be selling individual songs for download.

Donations: The Web site allows people who find the site’s content or services useful to donate money to keep the service functional. Example: RadioParadise.com is a user-supported online radio station that generates all its revenue from listener donations.

Fees: This is a B2B charge where the Web site makes some or all of its content or services available to other businesses for a fixed fee. Example: Amazon.com opened many of its online merchant functionality to other companies and generated an additional $250M in revenue in 2005.

Commissions: This is a B2B charge where the Web site makes some or all of its content or services available to other businesses and collects a percentage of the other business’ resulting revenue. Example: Google AdSense allows everyone to put Google text ads on their website and get a percentage of the money Google makes from the advertising.

And that is a wrap of the original document. But…

Coming Soon: Web 2.0 Show Me The Money (Part 2) - wherein I revisit the illustration and update it based on recent developments and the great monetization summary article from Professor Michael Rappa. (I will try to get part two up in the next 30 days!). In the meantime, please leave comments especially if you can point out everything I missed!

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In my role as Director of Education Solutions at Web 2.0 University™, I recently updated our outstanding (if I do say so myself) Enterprise 2.0 Bootcamp to include a model I used in earlier knowledge management learning products. I can’t claim the model as my own – it has been around for quite sometime – but I wanted to update it for E2.0. The three-legged stool model is designed to reinforce the importance of processes and culture in the success of E2.0 implementations. Because the technology is primarily “what’s new” in E2.0, it gets most of the attention. But processes and culture are just as important. All three must be balanced for the stool to work properly. So, let’s briefly review the Enterprise 2.0 Three-Legged Stool.

The first leg is technology and it has been the primary topic of E2.0 discussion. The innovative platforms and tools of Web 2.0 are being carried into the enterprise. Wikis, blogs, social networks, prediction markets, open APIs and mashups empowered people on the Web and now people want that same power at work (for more info, Dion Hinchcliffe has a great post how E2.0 technologies may fare in 2008). And while we focus much of our discussion on technology, you cannot just “build it and they will come.” You must have the other legs in place for the stool to stand.

The second leg is processes. Though usually emergent phenomena, E2.0 solutions needs to establish standard process and procedures in order to be successful. Employees must understand how each of the E2.0 tools works, how it interacts with other tools, and how they are expected to use it. E2.0 tools should be easy to use by definition, but employees will still need to be educated on “how” “why” and “what”. The “how” is an understanding of the tools’ function and features: “How do I use this to be more successful at work?” The “why” is about understanding the benefits to themselves and the larger organization: “Why is it worthwhile for me to use the tool?” The “what” is about understanding what the tool should be (and should not be) used for: “What would I use this tool to do?”

The third leg is culture. For E2.0 to succeed the organization must value collaboration and knowledge sharing. This is often the most challenging of the three legs. If your organization does not already have a culture that values collaboration and information sharing, it may be impossible for your E2.0 implementation to be successful. But cultures can be changed. Before we consier changing a culture, let’s be sure we agree on what a culture is. For our purposes, I will define culture as: “The behaviors and values characteristic of a particular group.” Within a culture, we have “mores” and “taboos” (and many other things we won’t go into). Again for our purposes, I will define mores as: “Accepted traditional customs and behaviors of a particular group” and taboos as: “Behaviors proscribed by a group as improper or unacceptable.”

So how do you create a collaborative culture? The group (especially leaders) must adopt the values and behaviors that foster collaboration and information sharing. Leaders must establish mores by modeling and rewarding collaboration. For instance, they should use the blogs and wikis themselves and they could make active collaboration an integral part of the organizations annual performance reviews. The entire organization can use taboos to encourage collaboration. Consider this chastising praise: “That was a great analysis paper you wrote, but why did you email a copy to everyone instead of just posing it on the wiki?” From a leader or a peer, that sort of feedback will help mold a culture of collaboration. Of course cultural change takes time. Take that into account when plan your E2.0 implementation and set expectations accordingly.

So there you have the three legged stool of Enterprise 2.0 (or any type of collaboration/knowledge sharing system). Successful E2.0 implementations assure that all three legs of the stool are strong and balanced. They also recognize that a change in any one of the legs may require changes in the other two to keep the stool balanced. To close with a blatant plug, I encourage you to join us at a delivery of the Enterprise 2.0 Bootcamp to learn more about the three legged stool and successful E2.0 implementations.

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So the blogosphere is agog with today’s big news that Microsoft has made a $44.6 billion bid to acquire Yahoo. I won’t pile on when so many others that have much more knowledge than I are busily chiming in. I will just say that I think this is just the first of many mergers and acquisitions we will see in 2008. There are too many duplicitous players out there and as the economy tightens, the strong will swallow the weak. Also, people are getting tired of having so many sites to keep track of (c’mon OpenID) that they will welcome a merger of some of their favorite social sites (can you say “MyFaceLinked”? - quick - go reserve the domain).

It did get me thinking about my old company AOL, however. Could they be on the radar for Microsoft to gobble up as well? Others have posited that Google might want to snap up AOL to strengthen their advertising sales force. That is certainly a possibility as well. But since I am way overdue to deliver some 2008 predictions, here is what I think will take place:

1. AOL is three different companies in one: the dial up subscription service, the Web services (publishing, media, IM, e-mail, MapQuest, TMZ.com, etc.), and the “Platform A” advertising business (anchored in Advertising.com).
2. Time Warner will not give up on Platform A. It recognizes the value of the online advertising business. It may decide to merge the “publishing” parts of the Web services with its Time Inc. publishing division. But the dial up business and the “services” part of Web services? I think they would be happy to find a buyer.
3. So, they sell the dial-up for scrap; merge their hot Web properties (MapQuest, TMZ.com, etc.) into a newly fortified Time publishing division; hold onto Platform A; and offer everything else (AOL portal, e-mail accounts, AIM, ICQ, etc.) to the highest bidder.
4. Who would want it? Microsoft? Google? Hard to say. But Google does have an inside advantage: they already own 5% 0f AOL. They purchased that for just over $1 billion in 2005.
5. When does all this happen? In July 2006 - because that is when Google can exercise an IPO on the 5% it owns.

So, that is my shot in the dark. I will repost in August to see how accurate I was. ;o)

Let me know what you think…

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