Full Circle Associates

Usual live blogging caveats apply – even though it takes me days to finally post this!

John Seely Brown - How do you tap the creativity of the Global Mind?
Emerging new organizational structures that allow us to take advantage of what is happening in Asia. Spend most of my time there

I want to start talking about some examples. Start with not a good example, Detroit. How does Detroit tend to work with their supply networks? They almost always choose the supplier based on the component price. ON top of that, they tell the supplier exactly what to do, precise spec. Classic systems engineering. Compare that with Toyota. They almost complete inverts. They never pick a supplier based on price, but on cost. How the hell do they do that?

They create a culture of collaboration. Tell us if you want to modify the designs we ask you to make. Fair amount of negotiation and collaboration in that space.

That is an interesting contradistinction. That is the beginning. Let’s dive into Asia

Detroit has a small number of suppliers. Toyota has 100. Li and Fung’s process networks – 20,000 suppliers. 100 year old apparel company, 2% margin. Look at data. Shocking things. Talking about their employees in China, they make 1 million stick through revenue per employee. Their ROE is 30-50%. Build supply networks all over the world. In 2002, they had suppliers in 37 countries. How do they do this?

They look carefully at who knows how to do something incredibly well. Then they build an interesting, loosely coupled relationship with those companies. Based on long-term relationship, not transactional. Loosely coupled. Toyota is tightly coupled. What is going on here, if Anne Taylor wants a dress, they sit down and negotiate with Li and Fong. He will say a certain kind of yarn will come available in Korea, can be woven in India. Taps the unique skills of that supply change to make a unique product. It is a learning, collaborative architecture with performance measures that allow one supplier in an ecology compare themselves to another ecology and pass things off between networks

Relational – when you get into Victor Fong’s network, he guarantees he will take 30% of your goods but never more than 70%. HE wants you to work with his competitors and learn from them. He can see if your skills are increasing or decreasing. You have a learning architecture, fundamentally collaborative, strung out over thousands of suppliers

Key constructs for process networks – a driver for a new form of open innovation. New types of architectures around loose coupling around nodes, relational and not transactional, time to build up shared meaning and trust, productive friction vs. destructive friction – how we tend to run our supplier networks.

Not just supply chains. Cisco has same structure with their customer networks.

How is this country going to compete is the fact that Thomas Friedman talks about the world being flat. In many ways he is right, but in another ways the world is becoming spikier with unique capabilities. Weave a tapestry a network of those capabilities into an innovation network. You cant to couple to, work with, collaborate with and innovate with those spikes.

How would our IT department support agile connections with 1000s of partners We have trouble loosely connecting to a couple. That game has also changed. In the last 2-3 years understanding fining ways to build loose coupling to string business processes together with new web services. Couple complex biz process across many partners

Deep collaboration goes way beyond coupling business processes. If you look at any kind of organization, it has a formal, authorized part, formal biz process and the emergent part, the social fabric where work gets done, new ideas and groups form. The power is the interaction between the authorized and the emergent. How to weave them together to create a whole new view of how the org works. Ironic that IT has been designed to support the authorized, not the emergent. It may be the emergent where all the ideas come from, the business processes structure the work.

What may be new types of tools to support the emergent, the co-social fabric within a firm and spread out over these vast networks. You can define process networks around formal biz process, but the real catch is how people collaborate with productive friction, creative tension. Current IT doesn’t do a good job supporting

Set of experiments, out of Fuji Xerox’ lab how they collaborate with Tokyo. How is it possible doing this tele/video conferencing, why can ‘t you use that to capture the information that is happening at the same time, go back and review and find ways to utilize the stuff that happened. How do you captures and structure corporate memory that is seamless and adds zero additional work .So suggestion emerge, without adding more work. Seamless information capture, proactive retrieval

Mantra – keep it simple so that nothing can go wrong. The way they did it was pathological. Makes no sense at all. Simply capture. Box sits between my laptop and the projector and capture the RGB stream and work on that stream. Always capture. How do you sit in the middle, capture this stream and how to automatically captures slides, text, audio video, then how do you segment the stream to identify a slide, what is interesting on that slide. Use powerful techniques behind the scenes. Unaware that this is captured and structured for you. Turns out to be easier than we thought. TO parse streams, OCR, can tell what a slide is. That is the system. To take that data collected over multiple years and work on the problem, looking at email, surfing the web, looks at the pages they are surfing. Then start ot abstract, document retrieval – a google looking desktop. If you are looking at these documents, the information from this meeting a year ago may be useful, you own the IP and you may want to build on that first.

This person looking at a new way to store photos. How to build a photo site. Found a year before there had been a talk in Palo Alto on stained glass, a whole new visual interface for representing photos. The system found that, segmented the video and audio streams, said here are the points you want to look at and if this is on the mark, touch the screen, play the related video. I’m never going to review the meeting, but if I can go to the hot spots, I will, and go deeper as needed. Just having this thing run in the background to capture and structure, you begin to have a system that could step forward and recommend things. And you have IP control for a distributed org.

That is one step. Now the whole notion of how close are we going to come to begin there ore better than being there. Moving visual collaboration to immersive collaboration. HP has one version, Polycom has another. Recognition that the single most important thing to make you feel like you are there, have the other person life size, with immediate, direct eye contact. The single most important thing to make a meeting seem natural. How do you solve the parallax problem. How do you figure out a new way, life size figures, new lenses and ways to composite images to appear as if you are looking directly at. Eye Contact Connect. Truly amazing. How do you do this when you have multiple sites around the world. Full life size presence, cameras that switch to the right person. Just beginning to see bandwidth and technologies to solve that problem. To connect the gaze. Powerful social phenomena.

Is it now possible to have a sense of better than being there? It is better in the sense that you have this direct contact, but because we can bring to fore the other technologies, automatic capture, index, parsed, structured and fed into instantaneous pro active retrieval systems. First step.

It does not handle the water cooler phenomenon.

How does this facilitate deeper collaborations across multiple complex partnerships. Enterprise 2.0 has to do with taking everything I said. Take the web 2.0 technologies, variants. How do you start to fold in web 2,.0 social software into and around service related architectures. Web 20 plus video. Composite structure to create something that begins to honor the emergent. The unplanned. The stuff the IT shop has not prepared for. A key property of what we have to think about for collaboration. Thinking about tools that enable new work practices to emerge. The dawn of the emergence of collaboration. How do you do these mashups – if we want something new, to do it ourselves, The practice we want.

Andrew McAfee “Technologists of enterprise 2.,0 are trying not to impose preconceive notions about the work should be categorized or structured. Instead they building tools that let these aspects emerge.”

What is Web 2.0? The next generation of social software beyond IM. I think some people still use email. What is the transformation?

Blogs – taking on new forms
Wikis
Power of social bookmarking, usually done in an open way. Could be done within a firm or workgroup so you can begin to see what others are thinking about, finding interesting, while minimizing overhead

Tagging. You want to talk about collaboration and see what will happen at 11:15. The sense of folksonomy is taking on a new force. There is no particular reason that you would use the same tags as me. If you get 20 people and look at their tag cloud, that tag becomes closed after 20. After that the chance of a new tag goes down. The collaborative mind starts to converge. Maybe we spend way to much work trying to get precise taxonomies, but instead look at group tag clouds.

The notion of mashups, how can I take this and this to get the work done I want to get done. One of the most impressive mashups was around Katrina. This happened a day after Katrina. FEMA was still trying to figure out something through the authorized. Someone threw up a site. SMS me and I will drop in the information into the map. Map, google earth, tags and became an interesting information resource, updated minute by minute. Emerged fast, unplanned. Key idea is how do you build systems that enable people to build small contributions. The more people make small contri utions, the better the system gets. This fundamental point of view is keep it small but enables more small contributions, the more valuable it becomes. Web 2.0 is a profoundly participatory media. What brings us together. Better ways to participate and collaborate

Three points of view

What are the participatory aps like – blogger, socialtext, flickr, Wikipedia

What are the structural properties – modularity, granularity, microformats

Architectural – the ability to have the document object model like Ajax, remix, plug in, RSS. Notion of loose coupling that starts to emerge.

Beyond there is another layer of things happening. This has to do with Second Life. Caught me by surprise, but the more I engaged and yes I have my own avatar, is this a new type of collaborative experience and participatory media. What does it mean to have your avatar sitting next to another avatar when you are in body in different parts of the world? Strange things start to happen. IN the gaming guides, when you do collaborative work with your avatars in Worlds of Warcraft (WoW), a new type of social dynamic starts to develop. Second life is a massive multiplayer participatory environment. Real economy and exchange market. I’m interested for a different reason. Cory Doctorow’s latest book launched in 2nd life. People coming from all over the world to hear him launch this book. Avatars know each other, channels between them. You can actually take those screens and remix to add a video simulcast. Real screen, avatars sitting around and watching. A dispersec family can watch a movie to together. Be surprised at what starts to happen.

Part of a group at USC for a kids game design competition around diplomacy and cultural exchange. Use the social dynamics of these spaces to have a form of cultural exchange. We had this game competition. In Hollywood we announced the winners of the games. At the same time we did this inside of second life. We had well over 100 people from around the world to be part of the simulcast into the virtual world. Don’t have to worry about rain or parking. In that second virtual auditorium on “Annenberg Island” – now have a corporate HQ where we hold meetings as well.

Examples like this do actually involve new levels of computing powers. We live at an unusual time, living under Moore’s law for 20 years. Claim it just went under a discontinuity. We are going to see a 100 fold leap in computing power. Sony’s playstation with 8 microprocessors on one chip. The catch is we have found ways to comoditize hardware and software, starting with Open Source and web services. Can put together thousands of machines in blades and clusters with almost unlimited computer power, flexibility of the software and architectures. Web 2.0 ideas running on Google and Amazon’s platforms to remix. New type of distributed innovation platform. Amazon had an interesting by Jeff Bezos. To do innovation at Amazon I don’t want anyone to do anything that takes more than 6 months, and a team that is no bigger than can be fed with two big pizza. If it takes more than a two-pizza size team, then something needs to be fixed in the infrastructure.

Finding a s[lit level thing, glob al, commodity based platform, then on that platform, Google has allowed us to do unlimited innovation and collaboration via mash ups. What we can do ourselves now to honor the emergent. Collaboration has to be based on honoring the emergent.