November 2007 Archives

On December 5 I am giving a “View from the Top” online presentation to US and European members of the Association of Executive Search Consultants on Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships:The Key to Avoiding Commoditization.

There is no question that commoditization is one of the most powerful driving forces in the global economy. While this has been starkly obvious in product markets such as textiles and manufactured goods, commoditization is also fundamentally shaping professional service industries.

If clients believe that professional firms are replaceable, then they are commodities. Even if firms boast top talent and long-standing relationships, it is self-deception if you believe no-one else can do the work. The ‘black-box’ style of professonal services that relies purely on expertise is dated, and encourages clients to shop around. Ultimately the only thing that cannot be replicated and commoditized is a deep, collaborative, “knowledge-based” relationship. The field of competition for professional firms is increasingly the ability to build these high levels of engagement with their clients. This requires, among other capabilities, building effective networks to deliver value to their clients.

The slides for the AESC session are below (as usual, do not expect these to make complete sense without my accompanying presentation):

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For more detail you can download chapters from Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships: Chapter 1 on the big picture of professional services and knowledge-based relationships, and Chapter 6 on implementing key client programs.

In my 2002 book Living Networks I wrote about the gradual shift to open accepted standards. Earlier this year, in the context of the social network battles, I wrote Is the trend to openness accelerating? Social networks as an inflection point.

I think we can now safely say that the trend to open business is inexorable, and that in hindsight, we are quite likely to point to 2007 as the turning point.

The latest is the extraordinary news that Verizon Wireless will introduce an “Any Apps, Any Device” option for its customers in 2008, allowing them to use any phone runnning any application. There are sceptics, but because there is the real potential to attract new customers and thsu create competitive advantage, this massive step is likely to create followers, shifting the industry.

Let’s review just a few of the other steps towards open business in the last six months:
May:
Facebook opens its developer platform
September:
New York Times online goes open
October:
Google launches Open Social
Path 101 established a ‘naked start-up’
November:
Google launches Open Handset Alliance
Murdoch says he will open up access to Wall Street Journal Online
Verizon Wireless announces open access

An interesting article on Techcrunch says Digg refugees may be heading to Mixx. Mixx is one of literally hundreds of community-based collaborative filtering tools that is competing with Digg, yet it is getting significant traction.

It is particularly instructive to read what some of the “Digg refugees” are saying:

“I have already had quite a lot of success with getting my submissions voted on, this may be partly due to the fact that many of my digg friends have joined the site.” Dave Eaves

“Mixx has a much more positive audience than Digg. It always amazes me that even the most popular and highest quality articles can get so many negative and unnecessarily degrading comments on Digg. So far the users of Mixx have proven to be quite a bit more pleasant, something that I know will be welcomed by most users.” Vandelay Design

The context here is that while Digg gets millions of readers, the way stories get voted to the top is based on relatively small communities. As discussed in an article I wrote on the structure of social opinion, 30 people out of a million-odd are responsible for the original submission of 30% of the articles that hit the front page of Digg. The reason for their success is that their friends follow what each other Digg and vote on these stories, at which point the general mass of readers pick up on it. Someone who is prominent in the community is highly regarded, and can be an overt as well as a covert influencer. The community starts to become highly social, with personalities, exchanges, likes and dislikes.

Reuters has just reported that the European Union’s advisory body on data protection intends to scrutinize targeted online advertising and its implications for privacy in 2008. The Facebook Beacon debacle this week has brought to public attention the ramifications of targeted advertising for privacy, and the EU is already taking this to heart.

The EU’s machinations are among the most powerful forces shaping global business, and in particular the online world. To take just a couple of examples, Microsoft has come afoul of the EU on monopoly abuse, and Google’s mooted acquisition of Double Click is being delayed until April while the EU extends its probe. On a far broader canvas, extremely strict EU data protection laws shape how online business is conducted all over the planet.

There is no question that targeted advertising is one of the most fundamental forces shaping the entire media landscape. The greatest power of digital media (which is evolving to eventually cover almost all media, including many forms of TV, much outdoor advertising, and will also encompass newspapers come the advent of e-paper) is that it allows advertising messages to be targeted to the individual. This is not just about showing advertisements to those who will find them relevant, but also about customizing advertising content so that it is more likely to influence the individual viewer.

RossDawson.com is now launched! The website focuses on my individual work as a keynote speaker and strategy leader, which complements my organizational roles at Future Exploration Network and Advanced Human Technologies.

I have quite a few websites for the organizations that I'm in involved with, plus the occasional book and blog. Since my work focus is largely on my organizations, I didn't even look at getting a domain for my name for a good while. When I first looked at the domain rossdawson.com, the domain was registered though unused, by a Ross Dawson living in Scotland. I diarized to check when the domain was up for expiry, and was fortunate enough to be able to pick it up. Several years have passed since then, with my attention on other things, including establishing Future Exploration Network.

At this point I am keen to make space to write my next book, so over the next little while I will put a little less energy into growing the organizations, though we certainly have the resources to deliver significant projects as clients request them. I am quite happy for the next little phase to spend more time doing speaking engagements and working as a solo strategy leader with my clients. As such it makes sense to launch the RossDawson.com website now.

The website includes keynote speaking videos, speaking topics, client testimonials, event planner information, and new global speaking schedule and recent media features, which I'll incorporate into this blog soon. It also sports a new brochure: Ross Dawson: Keynote Speaker | Strategy Leader (1MB), which gives an overview of my work as a speaker and solo consultant.

I've simultaneously set up a very similar rossdawson.net site for speaking bureaux to use in promoting me. Although it's now very easy to search for and find anyone prominent these days, speaking bureaux still like to be sure that there are no direct contact details on anything they show clients about speakers they are proposing. As such the "bureau-friendly" rossdawson.net is the same as the rossdawson.com site, except with no contact details or external references to my blog or other sites.

Let me know any feedback or thoughts on the sites, as we'll refine them over time.

I've been a good friend and frequent collaborator with Business Development Institute since just after if was formed back in 2001. Since then it has become one of the best-established as well as one of the most innovative and interesting events and business development companies in the US. While their base is predominantly in New York city, they are rapidly expanding into other markets.

While I have been organizing the Future of Media Summit for the last couple of years, Business Development Institute have organized a series of related events in this space, including Web Video Leadership Forum, PR Leadership Forum, Communications 2.0 - Future of PR, New Frontiers in Online Advertising, and Blogging goes Mainstream (which I spoke at).

They are now pulling together all these themes into a major one-day event called Convergence 2007: The Future of Advertising, Communications, & Media, in New York on December 3. The event is highly focused on case studies, with senior executives speaking from organizations such as McDonalds, Toyota, Casio, and Audi, and themes for the day including web video, ROI, and industry careers. The entire event will be webcast for free. I think this is something which should become standard in the industry, making the cost of attendance less for the pure content, and more for the connections and immersion.

Future Exploration Network is an event partner, which is unusual for us, but it shows we think it's going to be a great event. Hope you can make it!

A few days ago Rupert Murdoch reaffirmed his previously stated intention to make the Wall Street Journal online free. At this point WSJ.com is the biggest-earning online subscription content site, so this in itself is a critical shift for the industry. He has been reported as seeking 10-15 million viewers for the site, compared to the current 3 million, which given the fantastic reader demographics, would make up for the lost subscription revenue.

To support Rupert's case, the September Nielsen Online figures for online newspapers are just out (see Editor and Publisher's figures for the top 30 US online newspapers for September). These are the first figures since the New York Times disbanded its Times Select subscription section, making the whole paper free. The net result is 2.9 million more viewers in the month, rising to 17.5 million. It's a tidy result. See the video interview of NYT's Vivian Schiller on beet.tv for the background.

As has been reported in The Economist and elsewhere, the Financial Times firmly plans to maintain a subscription section. However it has opened up to the point that it allows 30 free article views a month, hardly a lock-out policy.

Conference organizer IIR will be first off the block with a conference on Enterprise 2.0 in Australia, with their Enterprise 2.0 event on 3-5 December in Sydney. At Future Exploration Network we had originally planned to run our Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum that week, so we had to rethink when IIR set their conference dates to coincide with ours. What we ended up doing is that we rescheduled our event to 19 February, I agreed to do the opening keynote at the IIR conference, and we will be allowed to distribute information about our Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum at the IIR event.

My opening keynote at the IIR confernce will be on:
The Potential of Enterprise 2.0
* Applying Web 2.0 to the enterprise
* Understating the foundations of Enterprise 2.0
* Outstanding examples from Australia and internationally
* Understanding key implementation issues
* The Future of Enterprise 2.0

I’ll post more detailed notes and content from my keynote after the conference.

Aside from my keynote, there are a wealth of interesting presentations scheduled at the event, including from vendors such as Atlassian and Socialtext, case studies from companies including AGIMO, Telstra, Janssen-Cilag, Cochlear, Google, and NineMSN, and analysts such as Ovum and Ernst & Young. It will be a great kick-off for putting Enterprise 2.0 on the agenda for corporate Australia. The attendance fee is rather substantial compared to that for Future Exploration Network’s Executive Forum, though ours is a highly intense half-day event compared to the two days plus for the IIR event.

I did a video interview for IIR to help them promote the event, particularly in helping to explain to organizations why this is an important and relevant topic. The interview is below.

The availability of online services exchanges has been changing the nature of the online development business for a couple of years. Over two years ago in a blog post titled The rise of online services exchanges I described how sites such as elance.com, guru.com, rentacoder.com, and getafreelancer.com were globalizing services and tech development, and rapidly commoditizing fees to get work done.

Today Techcrunch has written about someone in Turkey who is asking on getafreelancer.com for a clone of Tangler.com, and is willing to pay $1500 for it. In an interesting coincidence, I caught up with Martin Wells, CEO of Tangler, at an event at Stanford University on Thursday evening, and we were talking about the online service exchanges, though more with a bent to getting work done.

Daniel on DRM finds other people looking for clones of Digg, eBay, Twitter and other leading online sites. I’m surprised that this is seen as noteworthy. None of this is new. Well over a year ago I saw over a dozen requests for Digg clones on Rentacoder. Has this resulted in the demise of Digg? Hardly. There are a few factors at play here.

The first is what the commentators today have focused on: the bidders are rather unlikely to create a worthwhile clone of these online sites for what they are getting paid. It shouldn’t be too hard to emulate a fairly simple site like Digg, though the rich functionality of Tangler is a bit more of a handful. Certainly you can’t expect robust, quality code at this kind of price.

Having spoken at several of the Network Roundtable conferences since they were initiated three years ago, it was fantastic to come back to speak again at this year’s event in Charlottesville, Virginia. The predominant impression is that of maturity. At the first conferences, most of the speakers addressed the potential applications and the early insights. At this event, it is clear that there is widespread use of organizational network analysis (ONA) in US and global organizations, and that much of it is both well established and creating substantial value.

Rob Cross, the driving force behind the Network Roundtable and the success of Organizational Network Analysis, has now firmly established the discipline as a mainstream discipline. In three years the Roundtable has grown to have 98 leading organizations as members.

Major ONA initiatives at organizations such as Microsoft, Lehman Brothers, Montgomery Watson Harza and the like over a number of years have created both a longitudinal history of how networks evolve in organizations, and highly valuable business outcomes.

Today I am speaking at KMWorld 2007 in Silicon Valley on Successful Enterprise 2.0 and Social Media. The speech is based on Future Exploration Network’s Web 2.0 Framework, and how the framework can be applied to setting and implementing successful strategies for Enterprise 2.0.

I’ve provided the slideshow below, mainly for people who attend my presentation. As a speaker, I don’t believe in duplicating all the content of the speech in a presentation – slides should be visual cues to accompany what I am speaking about. So if you weren’t at the speech, don’t expect the presentation to make complete sense on its own, though you can get the general gist of the ideas and content by flipping through.

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Alternatively download the slides as a pdf (2.9MB)

Here is a summary of the key points of the presentation:

Tomorrow I am presenting a keynote at the Network Roundtable conference at University of Virginia on Tapping Networks to Bring the Best of the Firm to Clients. This is the fruition of many years of work applying network analysis approaches to high-value client relationships. I will be talking about the big picture of what has been learned from a wide range of different studies of client relationship teams, and I will then hand over to Robert Burnside, Partner and Chief Learning Officer at Ketchum PR, who will discuss how Ketchum PR has been applying organizational network approaches to a number of situations, including enhancing the performance of one of their largest offices, leadership development initiatives, and their relationship with a large global client.

I usually don’t share my Powerpoint slides online, as they are primarily visual accompaniments to my speeches and don’t make much sense on their own, however in this case my presentation is far more text-based than normal and is probably is of some use to read, so I’ve put it here.

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The current presentation at the Network Roundtable conference is from Tamara Erickson, who has an article out in the latest issue of Harvard Business Review on Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams. Her organization, The Concours Institute, has recently completed an extensive study on collaboration in over 50 teams in 15 multi-nationals. She defines innovation as the combination of two previously unrelated ideas. Team complexity, including group dversity, size, and geographic dispersion, all led to lower levels of performance. In addition, the more educated the group, the less collaborative they tended to be. For complex teams, you have to invest specifically if you want them to perform well.

In the study Erickson identified eight factors that demonstrably improve team performance:

I’m at the Network Roundtable conference at the University of Virginia, where I’m doing a keynote tomorrow on Tapping Networks to Bring the Best of the Firm to Clients. I’ll do a few posts over the next couple of days on what’s happening at the conference. Since the Roundtable is a consortium with some fantastic corporate members, this is the premier venue for not just the latest research into applying network analysis, but also what specific value organizations are getting from network approaches.

This morning is breakout sessions, where I’m participating in the one run by Myra Gorman from Community Analytics on Leveraging External Networks. As a small group, we’re looking both at the scope of external network studies, and a few specific cases from workshop participants.

The nominal focus of the Network Roundtable is Organizational Network Analysis, so it largely examines what happens within organizations, at issues such as organizational structure, collaboration, leadership, talent development, innovation, and so on. In this session on External Networks we discussed how networks underlie almost all aspects of the business, government, and not-for-profit sectors. Some of the key networks we discussed are:

Dion Hinchcliffe has written a very good piece titled The State of Enterprise 2.0 giving an overview of where we are. He says:

Increasing evidence abounds that Enterprise 2.0 adoption has begun in earnest with a typical example being Wells Fargo taking the plunge, having rolled out Enterprise 2.0 platforms to 160,000 workers. It has become clear that we’re moving out of the early pioneer phase to a broader acceptance phase. From the production side, a brand new analysis indicates that the business social software market will be nearly $1 billion strong this year and over $3.3 billion by 2011. In these and other ways, such as the growing collection of success stories, Enterprise 2.0 has arrived.

Dion goes on to list seven lessons on what we’ve learned on Enterprise 2.0. I have to wholeheartedly agree with every point, particularly the last one. I’ll expand more on this soon.

Go to the post for full details on each of the lessons.

Future Exploration Network is running an Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum in Sydney on 19 February 2008. The event website is at www.futureexploration.net/e2ef.

The official description and current speakers are below. I also thought it was worth providing a bit of background to the event.

The genesis was at our Web 2.0 in Australia event, which was such a big success that it was clear we should do more on related topics. The event was at complete capacity, and we had to turn away all applications for two weeks before the event. Having been deeply involved in the enterprise space for many years, including working extensively on corporate knowledge management strategies in the 1990s, writing about corporate blogging in 2002 in my book Living Networks, organizing the Collaboration in Financial Services conference in New York in 2003, and applying network analysis to organizations globally for many years now, Enterprise 2.0 was an obvious topic to move on to. For well over five years now I have closely followed the application of Web 2.0 and social media tools inside organizations. This is now not only a mainstream business topic, it is also a phenomenon that over the next years will help transform how organizations work.

I will be interviewed on Sky Business tomorrow (Friday) evening on the use of Facebook and other social networks in organizations, and the emergence of Enterprise 2.0 as a driver of how companies function.

As soon as I find out what time the segment will be on I’ll post it here. I’ll also make a few notes on the interview. Good that these topics are getting finally more solid attention.

[Update:] Sky Business's Business Report will air my interview between 8.30 and 9pm on Nov 2