Is Web 2.0 Really New?
I recently sat through a very exciting and interesting presentation about how web 2.0 will flatten organizations and unleash knowledge and creativity locked up in employees stifled by rigid hierarchies… Oh wait a minute, wasn’t that the same talk I heard about knowledge management and collaboration in 1998?
In fact, I was thinking about this during the presentation by Billy Cripe who holds the title of Director of E 2.0 and ECM at Oracle. Billy is a terrific and dynamic presenter and his slides were visually interesting – not the usual death by bullets of many PowerPoint presentations.
I could not help but think during the talk that web 2.0 concepts are very reminiscent of concepts popularized in the early 90’s around collaboration and knowledge management. So, what is different? What is the same? Are there lessons that can be leveraged from prior experiences with these concepts?
Underlying Principles of Web 2.0: Knowledge, Collaboration and Networks
A number of years back, I taught a graduate course in knowledge management infrastructure. The class dealt with technologies to support collaboration, knowledge creation, content capture and application of organizational intellectual assets. Many of the tools and technologies that we discussed were very similar (if not the same) to the same ones we are using today as part of the Web 2.0 phenomenon. We did not have LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or blogs, but in effect much of the same functionality was provided by then current technologies: Instant messaging, collaborative workspaces, discussion forums, expertise directories, integrated search tools, early content management systems, portals, online learning systems, workflow applications, etc.
The goal of any of these tools alone or in combination was to facilitate two things:
- Connecting people with one another and
- Connecting people with content in the correct context.
The difference was that it sometimes took months of development and hundreds of thousands of dollars to do things we can do virtually for free with a few mouse clicks. By the time a project team gathered requirements and built out some tool, the business needs had changed significantly and tools could never keep up with the pace of business change.
Difference 1: Clock Speed
So the first difference between then and now is the velocity of information flow and the speed at which tools can be deployed or networks (of people and tools) can be reconfigured. Back in 1905, Kodak Corporation had a global business without the use of fax machines, email or even telephones. Communications were on a completely different time scale. Every generation of technology has increased the clocks peed of organizations and society and enabled vast new networks of knowledge and information to form. Applications and connectivity are vastly faster today then even a few years ago.
Difference 2: Degree of Connectedness
I recently found an old file folder with business cards. They looked very odd to me and it took a moment to realize that none of them had email addresses. It was shocking to think about a time so recently when people did not have email. Obviously moving collaboration from internal networks to the world at large unleashed collaboration on a scale no one imagined. When the first fax machines were in the market, there was not a lot of value. Once every one had them, it was a different story. Our connectivity is not just through messaging, but is no continuous and seamless. My air card has my laptop connected anywhere – even in moving taxis in relatively remote areas. My blackberry only disconnects on flights.
Difference 3: Expectations and Acculturation
It was also not very long ago that people would not shop on line. No one trusted web sites and people were not going to put credit card information online. It was difficult to find information on the internet. As web sites were adopted by trusted brands, web search improved and collaborative spaces became widely available, the general population became accustomed to doing more and more on the web. Mass adoption of technology changes perception of that technology. Personal and professional networks have changed our culture faster than any phenomenon in history and increased expectations around how quickly people. My generation grew up without ubiquitous computing. Current generations expect far more capabilities in work, school and personal life and have shifted to being active participants. That is simply the expectation – that technology, content and communication are a two way street.
Difference 4: Infrastructure
During the dot com boom, I was continually astounded by businesses getting millions of dollars to do things on the internet that we had done for years behind the firewall. But just as the railroad boom and bust of the early 19th century created capacity and infrastructure that later enabled new services and business models (like getting refrigerated agriculture products and mass manufactured goods to distant markets) so too did the internet boom and bust pave the way for new lower cost technologies and services to emerge.
Without all of that investment in the 90’s we would not have applications and programming languages as sophisticated as they are, we would not have many of the standards that were developed, organizations would not have built internal capabilities. Overbuilding infrastructure turns certain aspects into love value commodities and allows for newer higher value services and applications to be created.
Difference 5: Application Maturity
It’s easier to create applications that leverage networks and easier to integrate applications. New scripting languages and tools, web services, and interoperability standards have made it easier to repurpose content and create mash ups of diverse functionality from different environments.
Again, this is a result of the investment in infrastructure and funding of hundreds of companies that developed approaches to solving problems of application development a d deployment and turning what was always conceived as an “information browser” into a front end for interactive information access and complex application development. There are application development environments that would have been inconceivable a few years ago.
Underlying principles of Web 2.0: Self Organizing Behavior and Emergence
As a backdrop for this interesting confluence of events, there is a science that deals with large systems that contain many moving parts called “complexity”. Complex systems are part of many aspects of nature – from weather and ecosystems to markets and financial systems. Complex systems exhibit unpredictable behavior and are difficult to manage and control. Things can be complicated and predicable (a jumbo jet has lots of parts and systems but behavior is completely predictable within operational parameters), but a jumbo jet does not change when you get on aboard and use it (An organization is complex, it will change when you bring in a group of consultants. The jumbo jet does not react when you walk up with a tool box).
Complex systems react, adapt, grow, change and evolve. Complexity can emerge from simple rules and behaviors. For example, taxi cabs in NYC exhibit complexity from a simple rule – pick up fares and take them to where they want to go. If a convention comes to town, the taxi’s adapt and handle the surge. Bus routes are not adaptable and would be overwhelmed with the onslaught of people trying to move through the city. Yet it would be difficult to write a program that predicted taxi cab behavior but they perform well based on simple rules. Very sophisticated behavior arises from simple rules.
The internet is a complex system that began with some simple rules for creating pages, linking those pages together and requesting remote display of pages from other machines. (Of course all of the network and transport technologies had many layers of detail, but the superficial functionality and concepts were very easy to grasp.) From those simple rules, a vast information eco system supporting all aspects of society has grown and emerged.
Complex systems can create tremendous value out of seemingly nothing. Take two sources of disparate information, use simple rules for displaying one piece of information in the context of another and suddenly something that people find extremely useful is available. The iPhone’s GPS with restaurant reviews for example. Or Craig’s list apartments for rent with Google maps
But creativity can live on a smaller scale. Finding an article written by a colleague and creating a marketing plan or new offering from that is the same phenomenon. It’s the ability to recreate and recombine information to create something new. Organizations that do this on a large scale produce new products and services faster and adapt to changes in the economy more effectively.
When people talk about Web 2.0, they talk about flattening of hierarchies, decentralized decision making, unleashing creativity, leveraging collective wisdom, crowd sourcing, mashing up different applications and content sources, allowing users to generate content.
These are all an evolution of basic processes that people engage in whenever they get together and focus their attention on a problem or opportunity. Web 2,0 vastly expands the scale depth and speed at which this is happening because we have reached a saturation of connectivity to allow new and unexpected combinations to emerge on a daily basis.
So the bottom line is this stuff is very old and very new. It’s the same collaboration, creativity and knowledge creation that people have engaged in since the beginning of human communication. But connecting the planet on this scale is mind boggling in scope and possibility. The system will evolve – no one is running it and prioritizing, the system is doing so.
What is important to do is find ways to experiment with web 2.0 behind the firewall. The most important thing to keep in mind is not to throw away web 1.0 stuff or be too enamored with principles of ”self organization”.
Amazon’s recommendations are Web 2.0 in nature and an example of emergent knowledge but this is based on large numbers of user behaviors and complex purpose built algorithms. They don’t just happen. So don’t throw away the content management system just yet (though you can build this kind of function into content systems).
Google applies concepts of emergence with page rank algorithms since pages are voted on through the collective wisdom of sites that link to them (that is one out of over 200 signals for rank).
Organizations need to provide more boundaries and guidance around web 2.0 since there are not limitless opportunities for experimentation as there are on the web. So the first thing do to is agree on an area that could benefit from more collaboration or creativity. This may be a wiki to capture lessons learned on a new marketing program or new product development. It may be opening an area of a site to user feedback (moderated of course).
An organization could experiment with tagging applications though these need to be focused on content and an audience and do need some oversight to remove odd tags, misspellings, variations, etc.
Blogs are always a good way to offer “official” dialog from various parts of the organization . However these do need to be sanctioned and have some guidelines and review because they become official means of communications.
Prominent creative people or well known industry experts could twitter in order to build a following (though that is fairly labor intensive and may be best used as an experimental vehicle).
In each of these cases, governance and policies will need to be developed to manage implementations and make decisions. Some might argue that the beauty of Social Media and Web 2.0 is the lack of central control, but that mistake has been made in various contexts with similar user controlled tools (Lotus Notes for one and the new Lotus Notes, SharePoint). In those cases, lack of governance led to huge messes and silos of information. With no governance, web 2.0 projects will soon become unusable at best and counterproductive at worst.
Organizational Network Analysis
Social media is predicated on networks. One thing to do is to measure and understand your network and the work that is accomplished in informal as well as formal networks. Social and Organizational Network Analysis is a field that is applied to understanding hidden dynamics in all sorts of business circumstances. A newer discipline called Value Network Analysis measure intangible flows and transactions within the organization in order to discover new efficiencies and value through adapting and evolving so called “value chains”.
The Value of Structure
Organizations still need to maintain their focus on day to day processes and continue to build systems around structured information and content. Those will never go away and be supplanted by tag clouds and folksonomies. In fact, one premise around complex systems is that they require defined tags in order to function. (Quick example, for someone in one part of the organization to repurpose knowledge around new marketing strategies and apply to their area, they need to find documents labeled “market strategy”, etc. Defined vocabularies will always have a place in facilitating the recombining of knowledge assets.)
Web 2. 0 is an exciting progression of our world. There is no staying out of the game. Keep your eyes open to new possibilities but recognize that all of this builds on things you have already been doing. Experiment and evolve with new approaches and stay focused on bottom line benefits without getting to side tracked with a grand vision that is too far off. Web 2.0 is an evolution and will be providing new solutions that we can’t even conceive of today.
© 2009 Earley & Associates, Inc
Read an excerpt of this article in EContent Magazine.
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