Nonetheless, I promised some time ago that I would keep you posted on the score with respect to Wiki Part Deux (Electric Boogaloo) . In short – so far, so good. Adoption, usage, and pervasiveness continue to steadily grow regardless of some rather daunting challenges like no SSO, no communication efforts, mandated account requests, and no integration with enterprise search. It’s all viral, all day and frankly it has been working surprisingly well. Like a virus. Errr…a friendly virus. A friendly virus that promotes transparency and recently added some hot new drag and drop capabilities. Yeah. That kind of virus.

As awareness increases, I have been fielding more and more questions on the difference between the wiki and (insert any big name document management platform here). The questions pertain to other internal systems or client systems. I (as well as a bunch of other much smarter people) have said some of this before, but thought it helpful to put it out there again.

Simply put, the wiki is not a new place to put content. It is a new way to create content. Think of the wiki as a replacement for Word or Email. Big name document management systems (in almost every organization I have seen) work like this: Open Word. Write something. Save it on your desktop. Upload it somewhere a few people can see it. Hopefully they find it. Hopefully they are the “right” people. Hopefully they download it. They make comments or changes. Hopefully they reupload. Hopefully you can reconcile the changes with everybody else’s. Rinse and repeat.

The wiki (in my organization) works like this -> Open the wiki. Write something. Save it. Everyone sees it. Some people comment or make changes. Actual (and rapid) collaboration ensues.

In my book the big difference between the two is a process improvement, not a location improvement. I don’t download. I don’t save attachments. I don’t worry about versions. I don’t send emails . I produce actual content.  My team and I are able to produce better content because we can work faster and with more brains at the table. Sure, there are great benefits in the knowledge management game, but at the end of the day it is about $ to me. Efficiency and leverage are the lifeblood of successful projects. Shifting how you think about producing the content, not where you think about putting the content will get you larger gains. It just so happens that the wiki is indeed a “place” of sorts at the end of the day, but the true value is in the process itself. This is why I see so many disappointed wiki users who do nothing but create pages and attach documents to them. There isn’t really a compelling improvement there. But when you change the process…now we’re cooking with gas.

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The strip mall loomed large in the chilled morning dew as I glanced back at 18 lanes worth of growing traffic idling through lights spaced a stone’s throw apart. Mega marts, chain restaurants, and expansive parking lots slumbered in preparation for the daily assault of inconsiderate consumers seeking considerable bargains and waistlines. The smell of yesterday’s funnel-cakes and tomorrow’s liquidation sale floated in the air, hell-bent on spoiling my otherwise unadulterated view of the Rockies.  I walk past a few rows of parked cars into a brightly lit storefront labeled “Fitness Rocks!” The substantial woman behind the desk smiles pleasantly at me while tending to a stack of fresh towels. I must have looked confused (hungover?) because she (much too cheerily) stepped toward me and (much too loudly) proclaimed,

“Welcome to Fitness Rocks! Where Fitness rocks! Are you interested in a membership? Or maybe a tour? Our MamboJitsu class is starting right this very minute! It’s like a cross between Dancing with the Stars and MMA. Hahahaha!! It rocks! Just like Fitness Rocks! YAAAAY!!”

Oh dear. Something was amiss. Many things were amiss. Most of which centered on this yapping Miss at my 12 o’clock. I pondered backing away slowly and distracting her by lobbing the nearby UltraZone PowerPack MilkBlast ProteinNuggets toward an idle StairMaster but after a few moments of frightened grunts, I mumbled something intelligible.

“I am staying at the Holiday Inn. They told me I could work out here.”

She unsuccessfully hid her disappointment and reached beneath the counter to retrieve some sort of form I was required to fill out. According to my newly befriended, awkwardly crestfallen attendant, this was mandated for adequate insurance coverage during my (hopefully?) brief stint at Fitness Rocks!  Huh. Weird. Never knew an insurance company to be concerned with my “Fav Workout Tunes” preference. But who am I to judge? Fine. I’ll bite. Mark one up in the Josh Grobin’s Greatest Hits column, Jessica. You and I both know the angels in his voice are the only thing sure to raise up our self esteem after failingly huffing and puffing through an advanced Ricky Martin Kwan Do class. (Also known as “Tae Chi Bangs.)

After satisfactorily registering my identity, I was allowed to enter the complex. I walked past rows and rows of awful dispositions forced by awful impositions. The machines appeared odd. The people on them appeared more so. It seemed to me that while there was sweat being produced, the actions producing it were foreign, contrived, and far, far removed from anything resembling a movement I might execute in the course of my daily life. I mean, how many times during a week do you find yourself on your back, pushing weight up in the air with your arms? (Other than your “workout” at the gym, that is…) It all just seemed so…I don’t know…slow. And antiquated. And easy. And more importantly…fruitless.

I pondered my reaction and sought to understand why. Why is it that this all seems so slow? While avoiding a leering turret of a man who had worked his biceps into a state that would deny him the freshness of feeling afforded by toilet paper, it dawned on me. It has been months since I patronized a “normal” gym. In line with furthering my CrossFit obsession and seeking a place where the WOD was not only condoned, but instructed, I had joined Primal Fitness this summer. As such, all of the traditionally normal things about normal gyms, seemed…well…abnormal.

For the 3 of you who have been reading this post (Hi Mom, Dad, Jay), patiently waiting for what this has to do with the transparent enterprise, gimmie a couple more paragraphs, and I promise we will get there.

When I walk into Primal in the morning, it is a completely different experience. There is no neon. There is no strip mall. There is no chipper receptionist. There are no remixes, no bodybars, no machines, and no dancers trying to be martial artists. Most importantly, there is no easy and there are no illusions. What greets me at Primal in the morning is an opportunity to work harder than I ever had before, exercising in a real, meaningful, and productive manner that has inevitably left me in better shape. There are no attempts to make things easy, fun, or even all that enjoyable. There is no complaining. It is competitive. It is hard. It is designed to be both. Frankly, it (exercise) should be. If you don’t like it, fair enough.  Head back to solo hours on the elliptical and keep complaining about the 3 flights of stairs you had to walk in a recent fire drill. Keep complaining about those tenacious 15, 30, 50 pounds you have been working on for years. Keep complaining about the back pain, the blood pressure, the weakness, and the expanding midsection. Keep complaining. And keep assuaging those complaints with fruitless trips to Fitness Rocks!

As I pondered, my mind drifted back to perhaps my second favorite topic – the transparent enterprise. Specifically, the now stark (to me) differences between those that have adopted the tools and processes of E2, and those who have not. It strikes me that there are huge similarities between my recent experience with a gym and my recent experience working outside of the wiki. For a brief period of time, there was no E2-enabled environment within which I or my colleagues could work. It has since been resolved but due to some mechanical issues there were a few dark days where I was reduced to working with (gasp!)…files. There was uploading. There was downloading. There was emailing and there was lack-of-version-controlling. All in all, it was like a step back in time.

I won’t mention the specific tool (read: way) I was working with/in, but seriously, it was the technological and cultural equivalent of Fitness Rocks!  There were hundreds of chipper people surrounding it, espousing how collaborative and transparent and effective it all was, begging me to sign up. There were people begrudgingly using it, albeit appearing in slow motion, fooling themselves into thinking they too were collaborative and transparent and effective. There were the muscle-bound super users who seemed to have pushed its operational capabilities to freakish levels of taxonomy and access control, all the while eliminating usability. There was a form I had to fill out in order to represent my identity. There was neon. There were sweat-free foreheads. There were complaints. There were expensive, long term contracts.  There was the illusion of utility. There was the illusion of return. There was the illusion of easy. There was…just an illusion.

Luckily, an E2-enabled environment resurfaced and I was able to return to my preferred method of working. I walk into that environment and am presented with an austere, yet overtly functional palette that responds accordingly to the amount of work I put in. There are no forms to fill out. There are no shiny advertisements. There are no huge costs. There is only work. There is true return. There is the opportunity to compete in a transparent, collaborative, and effective environment.

I look back on my brief interlude with both a 1.0 approach and Fitness Rocks! and shudder. Much like I am not satisfied with an hour on a treadmill, I too cannot sit idly by, waiting for the knowledge workday whistle to blow, all the while knowing there is a better way. I will not argue that change isn’t hard. However, after my time in the doldrums of traditional collaboration and fitness, I am ready to argue that hard is invariably better.

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I am one thing, however. I am a use case.

In the post linked above, Dennis Howlett gives the so called crock of E2 a lashing of epic proportion. I saw it go up and sort of delighted as the powers that be reacted to his assertion. I really chuckled out loud when one commenter referenced Karate Kid in her reply. Read it for yourself to form your own opinion, but best I can tell, the very debate itself, regardless of what side you are on, is the real crock.

While the critics and advocates go back and forth, wrangling for (what appears to me to be) pole position in the Blogpost Hit Count 500, there are those of us who have work to do. And, despite Mr. Howlett’s claims, we accomplish it using not only the tools of Enterprise 2.0, but via the ethos of a transparent enterprise.

I would consider the majority of the posts Jay and I have written to be evidence of our collective use case. We now work in a different way. Our organization, or at least the parts that need things from us, have changed the way they work as well. Sure, we may have speculated a bit on the evils E2 could cure, but all of them are based on real problems we faced on a day to day basis. The only criticism or advocacy we can provide for E2 is the sum of our experiences. Furthermore, if those experiences didn’t in some way improve our value to the organization, increase efficiency, drive additional revenue, whatever, we sure as hell wouldn’t continue to have them. After all, employment is my primary concern. Not the soapbox I am often accused of standing on.

Similar to the work I have to accomplish, the punditry will undoubtedly continue. While the debate rages on, there is in fact, actual change.  There are people like Jay and me everywhere, faced with “pressing business issues”, working via the tools and tenets of E2. Evangelism or criticism of the outcomes by the uninvolved is moot. Mr. Howlett asked, what problem is E2 trying to solve? For me….all of them.

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Man. Aint that the truth.

This quote is from a recent blog post by one of my favorite Enterprise 2.0 authors, Paula Thorton.  It literally jumped off of the screen, landed in my mint julep, and was ported directly into the underwhelming organ I refer to as my brain. I can count on one hand (finger?) the number of business applications I consider great experiences. As such, it has been stewing there for the past little bit and I have been trying to figure out why. Not necessarily why it has been stewing (that part is easy – I am simple), but why the statement is true.

I have also been stewing on a rallying cry I continue to hear while waging the undying E2 adoption battle. People seem to be transfixed on the idea that things (technologies) “must be easy to use” in order to opt for a change. I hear this in bunches and have sort of reduced it to ‘a technology must be relatively easier to use in order to induce change”.  For argument’s sake I mean change in the most binary of senses.  As in stop using SharePoint and start using Confluence. Forget all the other stuff like organizational transformation or culture shift or <insert change buzzword here>.

So when these two stews came together, I asked myself the following question:

• Does a great experience with a business application imply that it is easy to use? Moreover, should it be?

In attempting to answer this question I thought about experiences I consider “great”. What are the attributes of an experience, professional or otherwise, that inevitably make it great? After sifting through my collective experience of persistent mediocrity, it boiled down to a couple things. They usually entail some sort of hard work, possibly even pain, and a sense of accomplishment. For example, I hiked up Mount Washington with Brother Nash this past winter. In one day with temperatures well below freezing, we covered 8 miles, gained and lost a mile of altitude, and carried a sweet ice axe. Hard work? Yup. Sense of accomplishment? For sheezy. Great experience? Check. Another example is my obsession with CrossFit. Most weekdays, the fine folks at Primal Fitness DC are kind enough to hand back my ass after a seriously proper kicking up and down New York Avenue.  From Fights Gone Bad to dancing with the clown, there is definitely both pain and a sense of accomplishment. Mark another in the “great” column. Finally, the time I spent working in the Middle East was definitely a great experience. We accomplished many things and well…the reason why life might be a bit hard in Baghdad is pretty self-evident.

So how does this translate to business applications? The only app I really consider a great experience is our wiki. I have never really thought about it until now, but why is that? Why do I think it’s great? For the longest time, I thought it was because it was easy to use. But the more I think about it, while the tool itself may be easy, the experience is anything but. It is hard. It is sometimes painful. And frankly, it should be.

When we write professional content (like deliverables) in wiki form, we are forced to expand our minds beyond typical expectations. We must increase our understanding of context, look for the bigger picture, and understand where the content we are producing fits into it. What does this link to?  Where else are people writing about this? What are they saying? Am I wrong? Are they wrong? What should this link to?

I would posit that none of these questions existed so blatantly until I had a tool that exposed them to me. I worked away in my little silo of knowledge (more of a shed really) and never had to consider the bigger picture. Maybe there was some other eRoom with similar content, but I sure didn’t have access to it. Even if I could link my document to the other, what did that do? It didn’t help the search engine. It didn’t provide trackback for the other author. It would also usually break if either doc was moved or renamed. Now those were the easy days. So why bother?

Well…I didnt. And most people still don’t. Even though there is a clear option to  produce a great experience, people are still slogging through version control nightmares fueled by email attachments and track changes. Why? Because it is easier??? No. Ease of use is often a foil for thought laziness. Email attachments are easy. But they don’t precipitate a great experience. Why bother to expand your perspective when the siren of a paperclip icon (or a folder upload) calls so sweetly? Silo shmilo…I have Facebooking to get to!

My great experiences with business applications (or anything for that matter) always require some level of hard work. Authoring in the wiki provides for a great experience, but when the content is at its most powerful, it is in no way easier to produce. It forces me to think beyond what I usually think about. Isn’t that what organizations want out of their employees? Isn’t that what employees want from their jobs? Challenging assignments? Big thinking? I know it’s what I want.  And yes, it can be hard. But, just like the feeling you get from a correct choice in the Big Mac vs. spaghetti squash conundrum…it is great.

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This is key. While the drive to do IT differently, more cheaply and more transparently is clearly emanating from the folks now holding the reigns of the government, this notion easily be lost somewhere deep in the opaque depths of the IT procurement process. If there is one thing that some government technology contractors have come to appreciate, it’s that building a system that is expensive, difficult to retire, and complicated can often serve to lock in years of future revenue. As one presenter put it, some companies consider building bad enterprise software “a competitive advantage”. In some cases, this has become the only way they know how to operate. Think of the billions in contracting vehicles now rendered useless by a government who only wants to buy lightweight, open source software built on flexible data exchange standards – software that many of its legacy contracts aren’t able to provide.

Some will adapt. Some won’t. But, this opens a tremendous opportunity for smaller, more agile firms that have concepts like OSS, sound UX design, and web services built into their DNA. At Government 2.0, people like Peter Corbett of iStrategyLabs showed the feds that massive, data-intensive websites can be built quickly, and even crowd sourced to citizens who feel engaged by this approach. His Apps for Democracy project exemplifies this (in fact, Vivek Kundra sponsored this project when he was DC’s CIO). I’m confident that we’ll see the new administration work with IT vendors that can deliver projects that follow this model, big or small.

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While my interactions with Jeffrey were relatively limited from there on out, he was unwavering in his support and advocacy.  No matter how long it had been since a sale or a marketing event, he was gracious, appreciative, and genuinely interested in our continuing slog through the E2 adoption quagmire. In light of his tragic passing yesterday, we wanted to express our condolences and gratitude to his personal and professional family at home and Atlassian HQ.

Jeffrey, you will be sorely missed. We would not be where we are today without you and the dedicated people at Atlassian.

Thank you.

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Needless to say, I am stoked. After 3 months of a painful regression through file uploads, track changes, and hourly knowledge assassinations from email, I could not be happier to again, author content in Confluence. I mean really though…how do people do it? I haven’t been removed from that world for decades but Jesus Murphy…I almost missed my handball game with Gordon due to the total time suck of outdated and inefficient tools and methods.

So…I have been a thinkin’. Thinkin ’bout 2.0 and what not. Know how people say ‘If I had to do it all over again…”, and then ramble off a litany of mistakes from their latest project? (Or complete life in my case). Sometimes they even go so far as to turn these pricey little gems of consulting pontification into deliverables we call “Lessons Learned”. Strangely, for as introspective and growth-oriented as this process appears, I always get the sense no one actually “learns the lessons”. They are more just an embarrassing admission of failure recurrence when “learned” again on the next project.

So with that, I figured I would put down on paper (monitor?) a few lessons we learned from our multiple 2.0 implementations over the years. We are essentially starting over in the adoption marathon at our new company, and maybe, just maybe we won’t have to learn these lessons again.

• Lesson 1 – Completely disregard anything said by anyone referring to themselves as a social media expert, selling only a social media strategy, or claiming that it’s not about the technology. The real “experts” out there are the employees with their heads down, screaming like a banshee for a better way to work. They don’t need a strategy.  They need permission and a tool that will enable them to serve as a vanguard for the organizationally elite .  They will guide the rest of the herd, knowingly or not. And don’t call them early adopters. Call everyone else late.
• Lesson 2 – Realize you probably know way less about “how your organization works” than you think. “Culture” can be a tricky devil in the world of limited choice. Maybe your organization hoards information because they have never been given an option otherwise. Don’t presuppose any of the actions of the crowd. Go into projects with a focus on flexibility and agile adaptation to the movements of the masses. This is social software after all, and I know I am not nearly smart enough to accurately predict anything a society might do.
• Lesson 3 – Convince yourself you are never informed enough to always be right. You are only informed enough to sometimes be present. If you ask more questions than you answer, you reduce the risk of looking like a complete knucklehead and increase your chances of getting a second date. Wait…that’s not a lesson I learned at work…definitely learned that in Adams Morgan. Seems to sort of work both places though.
• Lesson 4 – Start a blog and make fun of yourself for being a 2.0 zealot. I mean…we are kind of nutty, right? And just like Dairy Queen, everyone loves a little substance dipped in crunchy self deprecation.

I can say with absolute certainty that I have committed the mistakes driving these “lessons” dozens of times. Hell, I might be committing one of them by writing this post.  As we move ahead with Wiki Part Deux, we’ll keep the scoreboard updated on how we are doing.  Put on your rally caps though, because if my writing is any indication of my ability, I am coming from down a ton and need all the help I can get.

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It can, and agencies are starting to show how. NASA’s Nebula enables project teams to develop and deploy software to meet their needs, and can take advantage of the scalability Cloud platforms can provide. The GSA’s planned “app store” would allow government users to quickly purchase applications and infrastructure, have them delivered through the Cloud, and pay via a credit card. Agencies that want to make their internal Cloud platforms successful should keep the notion of customer centricity in mind; to be successful they’ll need to keep their private Cloud simple, and accessible to end users. Looking at Cloud computing solely from the lens of an IT director or CFO won’t make Cloud computing anything more significant than the infrastructure technologies that preceded it. By bringing users a step closer to the technology that can help solve their problems, Cloud Computing can be as transformative in government as it has been in the private sector.

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I rarely disagree with these sorts of folks for two reasons. One – they are way smarter than I am. (Seriously. Not being sarcastic. I make it through the day by force of will and dumb luck. ) Two – they seemingly have way more time than I do to write retorts confirming the former. Disagreement sounds like a dicey proposition to me, but in the interest of perhaps proving my point, let’s run a few rounds.

My first issue is this paragraph from Venkatesh:

The exciting people — say the guy leading the consequential re-org, or managing the “bet the company” product launch, is probably far busier than everybody else. But I suspect there is another reason: to put it in terms of an American high school analogy, it is the same reason the “cool kids” avoid the “loser kids.”  Enterprise 2.0 is mostly populated by the equivalent of band geeks. The equivalent of football players and cheerleaders are possibly avoiding it. Just possibly, they might be thinking “nobody who is anybody goes there; nothing that matters happens there.”

Wow. Talk about a shot to my E2 gut. I was in fact a band geek in high school and I think Mr. Rao just stuffed me in a locker and stole my flute-playing girlfriend. On to something similar from @sradick:

Ultimately though, no matter how many pages your wiki has or how fantastic your internal blog is, the technology is going to reflect your organizational culture.  Not the culture you talk about on your website, but the real, honest culture of your organization.

Huh. So if I slap these two thoughts together, I am left with the fact that our Enterprise 2.0 implementations have been nothing more than a transparent magnification of the collective loserdom.

Gentlemen…Respectfully…I disagree.

First off, the claim that Enterprise 2.0 is inhabited by the equivalent of band geeks and high-school losers sounds like a text message you wish you could take back after a SharePoint bender. My dear friend, we are not losers. We are the organizationally elite. We are a minority because of the majority interest’s penchant for feeding tube IT and collaboration that is…well…easy. Keep thinking I sit alone at lunch because nothing that matters happens here. I am sorry, but in the rat race to be a better, faster, more informed knowledge worker (can I still say that?), the cool kid good looks, easy going nature, and belief that all problems can be fixed by relationship X or quid pro quo Y is a surefire sentence to a lifetime of inconsequentiality.

Secondly, the claim that technology is nothing more than a reflection of your internal culture is sleight of hand for change management consultants. Enterprise 2.0 technologies do not reflect a culture. They present a desired future state and an opportunity for that culture to change. It is not that I was always this collaborative or transparent. It is not that I have always wanted to blog (or whatever). In fact, I didn’t think anything of the sort was possible until I was exposed to the technology. Furthermore, I didn’t jump in immediately, thinking that this wiki thing was some sort of missing glass slipper I had been longing to wear. It was the opportunities that the technology presented that allowed my personal culture to change. The capabilities and power of the Enterprise 2.0 technologies are there out of the box. As the culture begins to change and understand their value, the culture itself becomes a representation of the capabilities manifested in the technology.

Frankly…both of these ideas have some merit. However, they are gross oversimplifications. Yeah sure…there are some geeks using the technologies. And yeah sure…the  guy who is a jerk in real life will probably be a jerk on the wiki. But in both of cases, having these events occur in the clear will go a long way toward said “loser culture” breaking down the crippling organizational and technological silos – put there by the football players and cheerleaders –  evidently as a representation of their “winner culture.”

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During our conversation I brought up the idea of bringing data exposition and mashup contests (is that what they are called?) to the developing world. Often times when Jay or I are overseas working within Ministry this or trade association that, the root of our challenges center on getting data from one place to another. Hopefully, that other place being somewhere near Usefultown. (Ever been to Usefultown? Not many people, but there is plenty of parking.)  As such we spend a whole bucketload of our moderately expensive hours trying to solve data-related issues. Either there isn’t any data, the data that exists is bad, or what is produced from the data is typically not citizen focused.

As I spoke about this to Peter, it struck me that we could score a development hat trick by instead of developing these apps ourselves, running a contest sponsored by the IT trade association. 1) The recipient government and citizens would end up with a useful application. 2) An entrepreneurial developer would receive startup funding, spurring private sector growth. 3) The US taxpayer development dollar would have a greater direct impact on the recipient country. I think this idea might be especially applicable for the two projects I have worked on in Jordan. (For those of you just tuning in, one is focused on private sector development and the other on capacity building within a government IT Department.) Within the IT capacity-building program we will implement an executive information system to aid in the development of policy, decision-making, and overall information awareness by aggregating various data sources. As usual, we are slogging our way through the traditional approach of driving requirements, unscrewing data sources, and visioneering (Ha!) what this thing might look like in the end. But, seems to me that if we focused on publishing as much data as possible and ran an Apps for Democracy style contest, we would have a much greater chance at ending up with something spicy. Like I would rather us focus on making the data available and harnessing the collective (and growing) crowd of IT talent, than beating our way through a traditional waterfall, black box implementation.

If I had a nickel for every time I spent months building a “projects database” or “management information system” that ended up serving the needs of 3 people tops, I could buy Montana. Or maybe just a Big Montana. Whatever. Too many nickels either way. It strikes me that the spirit of something like Apps for Democracy applied to international development makes a huge amount of sense. We should spend our nickels exposing government data (within reason) to its true owners, the citizens. Give them the tools to create useful applications and you will outrun any consultant-only driven model. Inspiring constituencies to participate in government and the resulting decisions will prove the centuries old adages of democracy by leveraging the years old approaches of all things 2.0. That, in my opinion is true development.

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