"Social networks have something of a trust deficit, which will either limit or make “more expensive” its ability to offer new services. The product teams at social networks have proven their ability to offer compelling services in exchange for personal information, but our research shows that people place a relatively low value on their social information.
For social networks to offer products in exchange for higher value information such as health records, physical location, or email/IM history, they will need to offer even more compelling products, services and outcomes to consumers."
Personally, I like the way John describes the shift from managing "a web page" to managing "a conversation" as we see systems of engagement emerge in the enterprise... but...
While the balance of the slide is specific to Enterprise IT and the companies that define the era include traditional enterprise players like IBM, Digital and Microsoft, it isn't clear to me that Google and Facebook have had the same level of ENTERPRISE impact (yet?).
If you dig a little at this line of thinking, you clearly see that each era was/is defined by a number of different sources of value and competitive advantage.
With a hat-tip to insights gained from the work of Geoffrey Moore, Umair Haque, John Hagel, Valdis Krebs and others, I like to describe the transition we're seeing in the enterprise applications industry this way:
Combining the two models, we have a hint at the opportunity for enterprise application vendors moving forward. Helping users manage conversations, relationships and transactions with and across the enterprise is a significant source of new value and growth.
A couple of questions to consider as the enterprise application industry evolves to a "network of information nodes":
1. Will Google or Facebook be "the best known" enterprise vendor as outlined by John in the Social and Cloud era?
The next wave of media disruptors are laser focused on being tailored, rather than retrofitted, for mobile devices. They start out sometimes just as apps, creating a strong beachhead in your pocket. Then they use these platforms to springboard into other ancillary media ventures. This means they're cut from a different cloth than older stalwarts that often need to retrofit themselves for mobile.
With Internet consumption on mobile devices set to surpass the same on PCs next year, according to Morgan Stanley, and US smart phone penetration to hit 50%, Nielsen says, mobile is no longer the tail on the media dog. For the next wave of media upstarts, it's the dog and the rest is the tail.
We're at the very beginning of a new era in media; one where mobile is the primary distribution platform. What's more, we have a perfect storm of technologies coming together that combine local, social, photo and mobile (what we call "LoSoPhoMo") and this is sure to spur even more media companies that are pure-plays at least at the start."
Steve is focused on the next wave of media. For me, the question is what does a disruptive mobile pure-play strategy look like for the enterprise when it takes advantage of the very same LoSoPhoMo - local, social, photo and mobile technologies Steve identifies as drivers for media disruption.
In many ways, the emergence and evolution of consumer focused Web 2.0 applications and strategy served as a proxy for key elements of Enterprise 2.0.
So, it is not too far of a stretch that the emergence of Mobile Pure-Plays and their evolution along a new transmedia arc may provide insight into the evolution of the mobile enterprise.
For example, one strategy could be starting as a Mobile Enterprise Pure-Play and evolving to a --->
- brain size related to complexity of social system
- Rings of Relationships grow by 3x the previous ring
- We have 5 true friends - as predicted by Aristotle
- Face-to-face critical to maintaining relationship...otherwise see decay
- Facebook social graph of 44M users have average of 120-130 friends
‘For the first time, it has been possible to provide a genuine evolutionary time depth to the study of brain evolution. It is interesting to see that even animals that have contact with humans, like cats, have much smaller brains than dogs and horses because of their lack of sociality.’ - Professor Dunbar
“We look at the near future, a universe next door in which media travels freely onto surfaces in everyday life. A world of media that speaks more often, and more quietly..."
“In contrast to a Minority Report future of aggressive messages competing for a conspicuously finite attention, these sketches show a landscape of ignorable surfaces capitalising on their context, timing and your history to quietly play and present in the corners of our lives.”
It is interesting to think about how ambient and incidental design could improve contextual communication applications that integrate location, social and personal data.
"In the age of the lean startup, we often forget about the importance of vision.
A big audacious vision is critical for attracting venture capital and for getting the early team to “take the leap.” It also stimulates the emotion/passion needed to fuel your team’s persistence to blast through inevitable hurdles.
Achieving your vision requires first getting traction. The most realistic way to get traction is to break down your vision to something very relevant now for the sweet spot of your target market.
This MVP (minimum viable product) is a bridge between concrete customer needs today and your big audacious vision."
GigaOm has an upcoming conference Net:Work that will explore the challenges and opportunities presented by a new culture of work and key tools and technologies for collaboration.
They put forward a report from Gartner that outlines 10 changes over the next 10 years that will impact how we work and collaborate in the future.
It is interesting to consider how Gartner's report compares to a similar report from The IFTF on key workplace skills for the future.
Gartner's view of how work changes includes:
1. “De-routinization” of work.
“Non-routine” activities that cannot be automated, such as innovation, leadership and sales, will dominate employment: By 2015, 40 percent or more of an organization’s work will be “non-routine,” up from 25 percent in 2010.
2. Work swarms.
Rather than traditional teams of people familiar with each other, ad-hoc groups or “work swarms,” with no previous experience of working with each other, will become a commonplace team structure. Gartner’s “work swarms” concept sounds similar to the Noded philosophy, which describes how groups of individuals, often but not necessarily geographically distant, come together to form temporary or recurring project teams.
3. Weak links.
Weak links are the cues people can pick up from people who know the people they have to work with. Exploiting our own networks will help us to develop the ties that are required for participating in wider “work swarm” opportunities.
4. Working with the collective.
Being able to influence the complex ecosystem of suppliers, partners, clients and customers will increasingly become a core competence.
5. Work sketch-ups.
Informality will define most “non-routine” work activities; the process models for these activities will be simple “sketch-ups,” created on the fly.
6. Spontaneous work.
Seeking new opportunities and creating projects around them is likely to be an opportunistic, rather than strategic, activity.
7. Simulation and experimentation.
The culture of Google’s “perpetual beta” is likely to spread to other industries, with rapid prototyping taking place in very public environments.
8. Pattern sensitivity.
Extrapolating from history and experience will become less reliable; the ability to detect and parse patterns and trends in society will provide better insights.
9. Hyperconnected.
With formal and informal work diffused across organizational boundaries, the support mechanisms for workers (healthcare, HR, IT) will need to evolve to support fuzzier, ad-hoc relationships between people and departments.
10. My place.
The boundaries between home and work life are already blurred. Balancing almost 24/7 availability against burning out will become a critical skill.
While Luke and Geoffrey focus on consumers, it is interesting to think about how this approach to design might influence product design for business users.
Clearly, "business displayers" exist within the enterprise. As the consumerization of IT continues to evolve, treating business users as "business displayers" may dramatically change the approach and design of business products.
Here's a video of Professor Miller's presentation:
People don’t buy products just to consume them. They buy them to display them.
Consumption (as in consumer) is a misleading term. While it’s true most animals spend all their time foraging for things to consume, display reaches much more deeply. Display is a highly natural instinct it pervades the animal world in mating, territory marking, and more.
What People Display
What do consumers want to display about themselves?
Central six mental traits: we are driven unconsciously to display these traits to anyone who will listen:
intelligence,
openness,
conscientiousness,
agreeableness,
stability,
extraversion.
The last five are “the big 5” personality traits.
All 6 of these traits are fundamental and ancient across all species; they are genetically heritable; stable across life & cultures; attractive to mates, friends, kin; and can be judged and measured accurately.
If you are unhappy with someone it is usually because they fall short on some of these traits. We have evolved thousands of words to describe these traits.
Intelligence: verbal, spatial, social, emotional. All of these are correlated.
Openness: novelty, fantasy, aesthetics, liberalism, globalism. Most product creators are more open then their audience. Any advertisement that feature openness will appeal to some and alienate others. Openness drives rapid acceleration of new brands.
Conscientiousness: discipline, planning, ambition, order. The ability to plan ahead.
Extraversion: last surviving trait from Myer Briggs. Shy vs. outgoing. Get positive feedback from act of talking. Plays out in consumer world through analytics, word of mouth, etc.
Everyone in business will overestimate openness, conscientiousness, etc. as they tend to over index on these traits.
"We all know that great companies are headed by great visionaries, right? And don’t some people just have a natural talent for seeing the world the way it might be, and convincing the people around them to believe in it as if it was real?
This talent is called the 'reality distortion field'. It’s an essential attribute of great startup founders. The only problem is that it’s also an attribute of crazy people, sociopaths, and serial killers. The challenge, for people who want to work with and for startups, is learning to tell the difference. Are you following a visionary to a brilliant new future? Or a crazy person off a cliff?
Based on the successful visionaries I have had the opportunity to work with up close, I'd like to offer two suggestions for the role of visionary:
1. Identify an acute pain point that others don’t see.
It’s important to specify the vision as much as possible in terms of the problem we’re trying to solve, rather than a specific solution. (Or, to use Clay Christensen's formulation, of the "job" customers are hiring us to do.) Even though the visionary surely has some concrete ideas which are to be tried, he or she should always be asking, “would I rather solve the problem, or have this specific feature?”
2. Hold the team to high standards.
Despite Steve Jobs' incredible talents, he doesn’t personally design and ship every Apple product. It’s much more likely that his main function is to hold everyone who works for him to the same high standard. Once they’ve agreed to try and solve a dramatic problem, it’s the visionary’s job to hold each provisional result up to the light of that vision, and help the team remember that although trade-offs and compromises are always necessary – the real payoff is in solving that acute pain. This can help avoid the trap of the false negative: even if the first few iterations don’t get it right, the vision inspires us to learn from our failures and keep trying."
Many technologists think that advantageous innovations will sell themselves, that the obvious benefits of a new idea will be widely realized by potential adopters, and that the innovation will therefore diffuse rapidly. Unfortunately, this is very seldom the case. Most innovations in fact diffuse at a surprisingly slow rate.
Rogers identifies five factors that define how quickly innovations spread...including:
1. Relative Advantage
What value does the new thing have compared to the old? This is perceived advantage, determined by the potential consumer of the innovation, not its makers. This makes it possible for a valueless innovation—from the creator’s perspective—to gain acceptance, while more valuable ones do not. Perceived advantage is built on factors that include economics, prestige, convenience, fashion, and satisfaction.
2. Compatibility
How much effort is required to transition from the current thing to the innovation? If this cost is greater than the relative advantage, most people won’t try the innovation. These costs include people’s value systems, finances, habits, or personal beliefs. Technological compatibility is only part of what makes an innovation spread: the innovation has to be compatible with habits, beliefs, values, and lifestyles.
3. Complexity
How much learning is required to apply the innovation? The smaller the perceived conceptual gap, the higher the rate of acceptance.
4. Trialability
How easy is it to try the innovation? Samples, giveaways, and demonstrations are centuries-old techniques for making it risk-free to try new ideas. The easier it is to try, the faster innovations diffuse.
5. Observability
How visible are the results of the innovation? The more visible the perceived advantage, the faster the rate of adoption, especially within social groups. Many technologies have limited observability, say, software device drivers, compared to physical products like mobile phones and trendy handbags, which are highly visible when socializing.
Assessing your innovation(s) against these 5 factors of adoption can help determine the likely success or failure of your new products.
