Grown Up Digital: The Next Generation in the Enterprise

Don Tapscott wrapped up the conference with some thoughts from his upcoming book: Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing the World. 

The Net Generation Comes of Age.
Don thinks the defining characteristic of the Net Generation is that they have grown up with the internet. This connectivity is part of their culture.  Nobody thinks of the refrigerator as technology. But to our grandparents (or great-grandparents) the refrigerator was technology. Similarly, the Net Generation does not think of the internet as technology. It is more like plumbing or an appliance.

The Net Generation and Technology. 
Mobility is a key. They do not use the phone to talk; they use it to text. There is the rise of social networks and hyper-connectivity. Unplugging is now a punishment.

Net Generation Norms.
"The war for talent is over and the talent won."

Technology and the Net-Generation Brain. 
There are critical periods of brain development between 0-3 and 8-18.  These are the ages when your brain gets formed and the synaptic connections develop.  The Net-Generation does lots more multi-tasking. (Don showed a picture of his son in his dorm room with three televisions on and all four boys with laptops open.)  This is a smart generation. College enrollments are trending up. But so is the high school drop-out rate.  Are schools failing?  Performance in school is bifurcated.  About 60% of the Net-Generation are creating content on the web.  Gamers process visual information more rapidly.  He also pointed out how online gaming recreates the business environment. (This reminds of a story in the Harvard Business Review: Leadership’s Online Labs by Byron Reeves, Thomas W. Malone, and Tony O’Driscoll.) 

Education and the Net-Generation.
There will be a new paradigm in learning.  Instead of one-way lectures it will be multi-way and collaborative. Even the course materials are starting to be developed in an open source method.  [Look at MIT Open Course Ware]

Net-Generation and Employment.
The Net-Generation is expecting to move from job to job. When Don graduated, he expected to have that job for life.  It is no longer about recruiting. It is about creating early channels of influence. They expect peer-to-peer influence. They expect more speed in the company. They do not want to wait for change.  They are equating work, collaboration, learning and fun.  Don't just retain; evolve the relationship.

Net Generation Consumers.
Honesty, consideration, accountability and openness are the key demands of N-Gen as a consumer.  They are more influenced by their friends and their social network, more so than general marketing.  The four P's of marketing (Product, Price, Placement and Promotion) are evolving to ABCDE: Anyplace marketplace, Brand, Consumer experiences, Discovery mechanism for price and Engagement.  

Net Generation and Government 2.0
Don believes Net-Generation is much more interested in government and are believers in the state. They will put a big demand on the delivery of government services. (Why does it take 6 weeks to get a passport?)  There is a lot more engagement in civic action. They do not believe in the current model of government.  There are new models of citizen engagement. Look at the Obama campaign. Look at Wikinomics for Obama.  Don is expecting a second wave of democracy characterized by strong representation ans a new culture of public deliberation built on active leadership.  He is not looking at the rule by the mob. He sees more engagement and participation. Leaders are in the position to decide and lead. But they need information and feedback. 

The Net generation is a bigger population than the Baby Boom. They think different and they are putting different demands on business and on government.  Don expects this generation to much more entrepreneurial.  They want to change the world and they want to be their own boss.

I am looking forward to Don's new book when it comes out in the Fall.

(In the interest of full disclosure I did get a copy of Wikinomics signed by Don.)

Legal Implications of Enterprise 2.0

The reason I attended this conference was because of an invitation from Paul Lippe of Legal OnRamp. Paul extended the invitation for me to provide audience input on this session. Paul wanted me to be a rapporteur.

Three Goals of the session:

• How lawyers can use these techniques
• How to address legal concerns about Enterprise 2.0
• Tips on getting platforms up cheaply and quickly

Paul focused on the benefits of a system focused around experts and their expertise.  (Like Legal OnRamp.)  He thinks it is much more in line with what a business would want for a social platform than Facebook.  It really is a knowledge platform not a social platform.  Knowledge is inherently social.

Paul turned to Michael Kelleher to lead a project in developing a set of information on the legal issues associated with enterprise 2.0.  They developed a Web 2.0 and The Law wiki inside Legal OnRamp.  Michael largely put forth that enterprise 2.0 does not introduce new issues. Many of the issues of enterprise 2.0 are the same issues and concerns raised when email first came into the enterprise. 

Ownership of IP
One of the benefits of enterprise 2.0 is in the gathering ideas from a broader scope.  Of course with ideas being thrown around more freely, you need to define the boundaries of ownership around the ideas. 

Privacy
Privacy is a big issue, largely because of the varying laws in different jurisdictions. The European requirement are stricter than the US requirements. Again, email and e-commerce are already dealing with these issues. 

Respondeat Superior
In what way does the company get implicated by the actions of an employee?  This is nothing new for enterprise 2.0. Companies already need to deal with what happens if an employee gets hurt at the company picnic or what the employee is sending out in email.

Employment Regulation
You need to be clear as to whether participating in these tools is part of their job description and whether they are getting paid for it.  Obviously, you cannot make employees blog and not pay them for their time blogging.

e-Discovery
The information in enterprise 2.0 platforms is potentially discoverable, just as any other records system is discoverable.  Email discovery can be very costly, largely because the native systems are so poor at searching for content. One advantage of the enterprise 2.0 tools is the increased findability.

Securities Regulation
Enterprise 2.0 tools, at their core, are communications tools.  Like any other communications tool you need to make sure you comply with securities regulations.

Enterprise 2.0 for Law Firms.
There are many features of enterprise 2.0 that fit very nicely with the work of law firms. But there are still some things to figure out with enterprise 2.0.  Can it work for paid, privileged work? Can it be self-organizing or do you need leaders? Is it sustainable? How do you deal with the formalisms of law?

Eating His Own Dogfood.
What better example for legal wiki than an article on wikis and enterprise 2.0?  Paul and the contributors assembled this information using a wiki in Legal OnRamp.

Growth Through Outside-In Innovation

Larry Huston, formerly of Procter & Gamble and now of 4inno, presented on Growth Through Outside-In Innovation.

Larry defines Outside-In Innovation as combining the internal and external ideas and assets on a level playing field to create top-line growth through innovation.

Larry showed us some of the open source development that lead to the iPhone, the opening of the iPhone for open source software to create new applications and some new open source financing for iPhone tools.

Some of Larry's lessons on Apple and the iPhone:

• Open innovation increases the speed to market.
• Going alone was a disaster (anyone remember the Rokr)
• Competitors are embracing this model
• Consumers are expecting open platforms
• world is moving to open source
• need a strategy to embrace open

The essence of innovation is bringing together what is possible with what is needed.

Larry gave some background on his story at Procter & Gamble through the Connect and Development program. One of the big questions is how you integrate this into the business. Procter & Gamble has technology entrepreneurs who sit with the product managers and CTOs to evaluate ideas, regardless of the source. The company's vision was to combine 1.8 million outside innovators with the 9,000 internal people. The CEO set a goal of 50% of the new products to developed from this program. This was a big cultural change. Larry spent a lot time while at P&G preaching this message.  He also found bringing success stories to his presentation to be a necessary tool.

For more on this see the article in Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge Archive: P&G's New Innovation Model by Larry Huston and Nabil Sakkab.

Certainly this was an interesting session (and Larry is a really sharp guy), but I am not sure how this fits into the practice of law. Lawyers do not create products. Of course there are innovations in the law: developing new approaches to structuring transactions, new causes of action, etc.  Most of the law is already in the public domain. Court filings are relatively easy to find.  The SEC's Edgar database is full of transaction documents. To me it seems the practice of law is already largely built on combing outside and inside experts and assets. I think there is room for tremendous growth for creating legal information in more public online spaces. Legal OnRamp obviously comes to mind as an online community that is trying to accumulate and organically grow legal knowledge.  But I am not sure how this directly leads to top-line growth like the P&G program.

Invigorating Online Communities

I was in the audience for this presentation at the nGenera Enterprise 2.0 Conference. The panel consisted of:

• Daniel Palestrant of Sermo.com
• Avi Muchnick of Worth1000.com and a.viary.com
• Neel Sundaresan of eBay Research Labs
• Ben Heywood of Patients Like Me
• Paul Lippe of Legal OnRamp

The panel started (appropriately enough) on how to start an online community.  There was a general consensus that you need to start around a topic or an idea. They want to share ideas and relationships with people who have similar thoughts. One panelists thought is was good to plant contributors in the communities to sustain the flow of information and conversation, especially in the early days.

Social communities can provide a lens of information. For example Facebook is way to keep track of loose ties, even though there is a lot of noise.  Important topics will get discussed by multiple people in multiple ways.  (My personal experience was that I initial ignored the Clay Shirky presentation on cognitive surplus at the Web 2.0 Conference. But enough of the people in my online communities kept highlighting the presentation to make me realize I needed to watch it.)

One panelist believes that online communities that grow rapidly are likely to have a rapid demise. All of the panelists thought of their sites as knowledge platform focused on sharing knowledge with the social aspect as a by-product. This is a sharp distinction from Facebook that is focused on social aspect with the sharing of knowledge being merely a by-product (and a very small by-product).  It takes a while to accumulate the content in a community to keep people coming back.  (I see that in any knowledge management project. The blank page is a deterrent to contribution.) As more knowledge accumulates in the system, the more useful the system becomes.

The general consensus was that general social sites are hard to keep sustained.  You need to associate the community with a business purpose and allow the sharing of substantive content.

Prediction Markets

I was in the audience for this presentation at the nGenera Enterprise 2.0 Conference. Going into this presentation I had very little background knowledge on prediction markets.  Hagai Fleiman and Jeff DeChambeau put on a great presentation with lots of audience participation.

The basic premise of prediction markets in an enterprise is that there exists lots of employee insight and knowledge.  Managers should look for ways to tap into that audience to help with business processes and decision-making. 

Prediction markets can be a way to engage employees ("your opinion matters") and engage customers ("your opinion matters").

One distinction is to build the prediction market as a futures trading and not merely as a poll.  By structuring it as futures trading, the market is more organic and responsive. It also allows people to make bigger bets if they feel more confident in their decision. 

The session spent some time on the experience of a retail store chain. They used a prediction market to figure out how many gift cards would be sold during the holiday season and another prediction market to figure out how those gift cards would be spent.  The spending market was used to help decide staffing during the post-holiday period. A representative of the retailer was in the audience. Of course the markets are not 100% accurate. But they are generally more accurate than the individual managers.

One issue was how to get people to participate in the predictions market.  One method is relying on the competitive nature of the enterprise. You can instill a sense of pride on those who accumulate the most "wealth" in the prediction market.  Many seemed to agree that you could not just ignore the information from the information market or people would not bother participating.  Employees want to feel engaged and feel that they have the ability to have some say in management of the enterprise.

The session moved onto the use of prediction markets at Google.  More detail on this can be found at the GoogleBlog post: The Flow of Information at the Googleplex.  It was very interesting to see the physical proximity within the Googleplex of the "winners" in the prediction markets. 

nGenera has some great research and information on the use prediction markets within the enterprise.

nGenera Enterprise 2.0 Conference

The folks at nGenera were nice enough to let me attend their member meeting on Enterprise 2.0 Unleashing the Enterprise as a guest. Thanks to Paul Lippe of Legal OnRamp for extending the invitation. This was a smart group of people. I was subject to a Non-Disclosure Agreement, so my notes are limited but look for the following blog posts on Monday:

• Prediction Markets
• Invigorating Online Communities
• Growth Through Outside-In Innovation
• Legal Implications of Enterprise 2.0.
• Grown Up Digital: The Next Generation in the Enterprise

I Freed Myself From Email's Grip

Unfortunately not me, but my pal Luis Suarez. There is a profile of Luis in the New York Times: I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip.  Luis describes how he started using platform communication tools like blogs and wikis instead of email. He managed to reduce his email traffic by 80% and still effectively communicate with his colleagues.

"Think about how to use social networking tools to eliminate spam and to avoid repeatedly answering the same question from many different people. These tools can also save you from an accumulation of online newsletters that never get read, and from those incessant project status reports that clutter many in-boxes."

How to Use Your Computer - Sharepoint Development Example

Mark Miller at EndUserSharePoint.com has been running with my idea of using separate pages in a Sharepoint area to host a collection of user support documentation: Pages and Sites in SharePoint 2007 (Case Study).

He has turned that into a screen cast using an alternative method of organizing the documents using content types: A Beginner’s Guide to Content Types. The screencast is a great way to show the methods used.

I find the use of content types to be very valuable when use multiple document libraries.

For a single document library like I set up for “Using Your Computer” I find the column and view sorting to work just fine without the content type. If I had the documentation spread across other sites or other libraries, then I would use content types. I find the power of content types to be their ability to reunite information spread across the site collection into one place. For a single document library, it seems to be excessive and adds unneeded complexity.

Defining Knowledge Management

I previously pointed out Ray Sim's collection of 43 Knowledge Management Definitions. If you look at the comments to his post and the pingbacks of others discussing his knowledge management definitions, you can see that he stirred up quite a discussion.

I figured I would add to the discussion by posting our current working definition of Knowledge Management at The Firm:

The purpose of the Knowledge Management Team is to promote and support within the firm:

• Collaboration, both within and among groups,
• Efficiency in producing high-quality work quickly, and
• Putting the firm's experience and expertise at your fingertips.

The Knowledge Management Team does this by:

1. Creating ways to capture and organize internal information about our work.
2. Creating ways to find internal experience, prior work product and administrative information.
3. Communicating the existence of these tools and practices to the firm.
4. Teaching the firm how to use these tools and practices.
5. Being the firm’s go-to experts in finding internal experience, prior work product and administrative information
6. Partnering with the IT Department to bring the view of experienced legal workers to technology selection, implementation and training.
7. Collaborating with the Practice Areas, which are the firm’s most important knowledge management platforms.
8. Collaborating with other firm support functions, especially Research & Library Services, Marketing, Training and Financial Reporting, to create efficiencies and profit from common interests.

One of current projects is to better define what fits within our umbrella to help in addressing what projects to take on and how to prioritize them. The first step was to work out what we thought knowledge management is at The Firm and what knowledge management should be at The Firm.

Legal OnRamp - An Opportunity Waiting to Happen

I spent a big chunk of the last two days at a conference in Cambridge on Enterprise 2.0. One of the other attendees was Paul Lippe of Legal OnRamp. Paul just had an article published on Legal Week.com about legal online communities: An Opportunity Waiting to Happen.

Paul puts forth ten reasons why an online community is suited for the law:

1. Law is a social profession
2. Legal content and expertise are developed and shared socially.
3. A social platform is the easiest way to go global.
4. A social platform can address clients’ demand for greater efficiency
5. A social platform can be used to manage privileged work.
6. A social platform gets lawyers closer to clients.
7. Social platforms will change the competitive dynamics of law.
8. Participating in the broader community is the best way to energize your own community.
9. An online community could prevent future shock.
10. Social platforms are not about technology, they are about people.

Paul and I were able to spend lots of time chatting about Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 affecting law firms and the practice of law.

My attendance at the conference was subject to a non-disclosure agreement so I have no posts to share my notes with you yet. (I have submitted them for approval from the conference host.)