New Workforce - The Weblog of New Equities

Stephen Colbert punks Wikipedia

Comedian Stephen Colbert, who introduced the term "truthiness" into the collective vocabulary, pulls a stunt that demonstrates the perils of collaborative editing:

Stephen Colbert decided to take on Wikipedia tonight, and discuss his vision for a new "Wikiality," where the masses create the facts they want to believe in. And did they ever. At the conclusion of the amusing segment, Colbert instructs his audience to find the Wikipedia entry on elephants, and edit it to say that "the number of elephants has tripled in the last six months." Not surprisingly, plenty of people went to either make the edit, or to see if had been made.

Colbert's prank underscores the inherent risks in using collaborative environments for knowledge-sharing: accuracy can be easily subverted by authors intent on causing mischief. This is counterbalanced by the opportunity for multiple contributors to amplify a body of knowledge. It all comes down to the trustworhiness of the community providing that knowledge.

Update: According to Business 2.0, Wikipedia was quick to lock down the affected pages: "In this battle of truth vs. truthiness, truth ended up with the upper hand."

The 411 on Web 2.0

Washington Business Journal has an excellent introduction to Web 2.0 concepts and lingo: "Web two-point, oh?"

Web 2.0 is slowly making its way into the business world. But there is a challenge to widespread use: No one knows exactly what it is. There's no official Web 2.0 program to install. The features have to find their way into everyday use, which they are starting to do.

Implementation of Web 2.0 does not require dramatic action but rather a subtle shift in the way users connect to applications. The subtlety of the changeover can make it more difficult to get buy-in from colleagues and clients, but the upside is that many of the applications are free or cost very little. [snip]

Plenty of tech types claim that Web 2.0 is just the buzzword for all things newly Internet, something that gets used ubiquitously and without any real meaning.

John Dvorak, an editor at PC Magazine, decries Web 2.0 as a bunch of high-tech hooey: "Web 2.0 is the latest moniker in an endless effort to reignite the dot-com mania of the late 1990s," he wrote in a March 2006 column.

Dvorak says: If you can get past the buzzwords and conferences, the real essence of Web 2.0 is making the do-it-yourself nature of the Internet more efficient. It's about self-service.

If jargon such as "Ajax", "tagging",  "wikis" and "social bookmarking" seems a bit strange, this is a good primer. If you are already fully Web 2.0 buzzword-compliant, but are interested in going deeper, check out this widely-linked article by software maven Tim O'Reilly, "What is Web 2.0? Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software".

(Hat tip: Tiffany Bridge)

Managing information as a supply chain

Optimize has an interesting Q&A on looking at information flow from a supply chain perspective:

Q: What's the problem with the way companies deal with data today?

A: Companies think the way to attack the data management problem is to create a big warehouse. They presume that if they centralize the data, it'll be easier to access, but that creates obstacles as well. I think that by applying supply chain constructs to information management, we can get rid of the myth that a data warehouse will solve the problem.

Information management is a hot topic now, because of regulatory and compliance issues. Our clients are wrestling with how to take control of data. Now, it's not necessarily a new concept to apply supply chain concepts to data; there are articles that talk about applying lean manufacturing principles to information management. We're trying to figure out how the entire supply chain management perspective can be applied, initially in financial service opportunities.

Q: What are the benefits of thinking of information as a product?

A: If you look at financial services, a lot of their products are mortgages—loan applications come in and are sent off into the secondary market—and those are essentially products. That's a lot of contract data that comes through. Why can't you treat that as raw material, as a product in a manufacturing sense? The manufacturing process converts raw materials into products. Thinking along those lines could be applied to information management—start by looking at how fast your product comes through the front door and goes out the back, and if you want to increase the cycle to meet demand, you can apply these concepts to the market. It's just an implementation of information flow and cycle time.

Wikis aid project management

Qualcomm has found wikis to be useful for managing projects - and project managers:

The San Diego-based wireless communications company set up the MediaWiki open-source software in January 2005, essentially for free, Fjeldheim says. “We didn’t pay anything for the software,” he says. “I had an I.T. engineer and an intern set it up.”

But now, any of Qualcomm’s 9,300 employees--not just I.T.--can set up their own wiki Web page to communicate with other team members. And Fjeldheim says it’s taken off like a rocket: The wiki server now handles 400,000 hits per month, making it the most-used intranet tool at Qualcomm.

Most of the hundreds of wikis, which allow multiple users to post and edit text or documents, are being used by project management teams to keep everybody on the same page. They’re also being used for stuff that’s not strictly business, like pulling together intracompany softball teams. “It’s better than e-mail, because there’s a history there,” Fjeldheim says. “It’s organized in a way that lets people readily find out what’s going on with a project. It’s been a terrific forum.”

We're expecting to see many articles in this vein in the coming months as more companies start experimenting with wikis, blogs and other collaborative tools for sharing project knowledge. More background on wikis here.

Is multitasking bad or good for us?

Point and counterpoint.

Wikipedia on your iPod

It's not exactly The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but we're getting closer. How about Wikipedia to go, downloadable to your iPod?

Encyclopodia is a free software project that brings the Wikipedia, which is one of the largest encyclopedias on the world, on the Apple iPod MP3-Player. It has been successfully tested on a third-generation iPod and on an iPod mini, but it should also work on other iPod generations.

Don't panic!

Greasing the skids of the knowledge economy

On my desk: Gurus, Hired Guns and Warm Bodies, a 2004 study by Stephen R. Barley and Gideon Kunda that profiles "itinerant experts in a knowledege economy", that is, technology contractors. The book also goes into quite a bit of detail on the clients who hire contingent workers and the staffing organizations who often broker relationships. From the liner notes:

Viewing the knowledge economy in terms of organizations and markets is not enough, Barley and Kunda conclude. Rather, occupational communities and networks of skilled experts are what grease the skids of the high-tech, "matrix economy" where firms become way stations in the flow of expertise.

It promises to be an interesting read. Once I've had time to digest it, I'll post a review.

Wikis and knowledge sharing

Intelligent Enterprise has a nice introduction to wikis. What's a wiki? Read on:

A wiki is an online tool that allows users to update and publish content collaboratively. Anyone who has access can edit the content, using a very simple tool and an ordinary web browser. Wiki usage is known as ‘collaborative authoring’.

The first wiki was a complement to the Portland Pattern Repository, created on March 25, 1995 by Ward Cunningham, who based the name on the Hawaiian term “wiki wiki”, which means “quick.” And, the largest and most famous wiki is Wikipedia. This is a web-based encyclopedia based on free collaborative content. Founded in 2001, it already has more than 1.6 million articles. A more recent example of Wiki innovation is Wikicities, a collection of communities with websites that you can edit.

Within the corporate environment, wikis are proving to be valuable tools for:

• Project collaboration, information sharing and managing content
• Design collaboration
• Organizing a community around a written project
• Distributed intelligence gathering
• A knowledge base or collaborative extranet
• Fostering information flow within an organization
• Helping distributed teams work together seamlessly and productively
• Eliminating the one-webmaster syndrome of outdated intranet content 

The main features of Wikis are:

• A simple (and free) way to build and manage content
• Support hyperlinks and has simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly
• Accessibility from everywhere without any software installation (just a browser)
• Easy to track and constantly up-to-date

Organizations that have leveraged Wikis include Disney, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW), Yahoo, IBM, Lufthansa , New York Times Digital and Motorola. For example, Disney Corporation uses wikis, integrated into a collaborative toolset along with internal blogs and RSS feeds, as part of an information sharing strategy aimed at facilitating internal discussion, and documentation.

Most of us have probably looked something up on Wikipedia at one time or another. But is anyone using wikis professionally or in corporate life? If so, how useful have they been and what has been your experience to date?

Google rides its CRM Trojan Horse to Mt. Olympus

The launch of Google Analytics has made it an all-but-foregone conclusion that Google is getting serious about getting into CRM in a big way. From CRM News:

It's only a matter of time until Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) unleashes a free low-end hosted CRM suite. The heart of the business model for free CRM will be the potential for driving up advertising revenue while at the same time up-selling advanced CRM features. With Google Analytics launched and delivering a depth of features other free analytics packages can't touch, the progression of Google's product strategy is starting to take shape.

At New Equities, we've been using Google Analytics since its launch in mid-November and it would be vastly understating the matter to say that we are impressed that Google can provide such a robust service at no charge. So many people took Google up on its offer that it was forced to put on the brakes and declare a temporary moratorium on new users until it could get caught up, a development that must be giving other analytics vendors fits and starts.

Of course, one can only imagine all the data Google is aggregating as a result of its offering, and what it is planning to do with it. A Trojan Horse indeed, but one perfectly crafted for the Web, in which widespread use of a "free" application generates a treasure trove of data that is certainly of great use to any individual company, but grows to exponential value when viewed from the heights of Google's Olympian perspective.

UPDATE: Google CEO Eric Schmidt offers us "Ten Golden Rules" for getting the most out of knowledge workers. Among them are "Make coordination easy", "Eat your own dog food", and of course, the always-sensible guideline, "Don't be evil":

Much has been written about Google's slogan, but we really try to live by it, particularly in the ranks of management. As in every organization, people are passionate about their views. But nobody throws chairs at Google, unlike management practices used at some other well-known technology companies. We foster to create an atmosphere of tolerance and respect, not a company full of yes men.

Good advice. And it seems to be working out for them. (Hat tip: Inside Google)

Update: From the recent controversy over censoring content to gain access to the Chinese market, "Don't be evil" appears to have been replaced with a new motto: "Be semi-evil. Be quasi-evil. Be the margarine of evil. Be the Diet Coke of evil - just one calorie. Not evil enough". (Via Instapundit).

Job mobility and innovation

Virginia Postrel on how job-hopping in Silicon Valley contributes to innovation:

In her influential 1994 book "Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128" (Harvard University Press), AnnaLee Saxenian, an economic development scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, argued that Silicon Valley's innovative edge comes from two unusual characteristics.

First, talented employees move easily and often to new employers, far more so than people elsewhere. "The joke is that you can change jobs and not change parking lots," one of her interview subjects said.

Second, instead of vertically integrating, Silicon Valley computer makers rely on networks of suppliers. They also design open systems that can flexibly accommodate all sorts of new components.

"The system's decentralization encourages the pursuit of multiple technical opportunities through spontaneous regroupings of skill, technology and capital," she wrote.

This arrangement seems to be a positive overall for the industry, as employees gravitate to the companies with the best technology and cross-pollinate. The downside is that their knowledge goes with them.

When employees jump from company to company, they take their knowledge with them. "The innovation from one firm will tend to bleed over into other firms," Professor Rebitzer explained. For a given company, "it's hard to capture the returns on your innovation," he went on. "From an economics perspective, that should hamper innovation."

The best of both worlds (for hiring organizations) would be a system in which people can easily move to attractive new projects within the same company, so that their knowledge can be reapplied to new problems.