Social Computing White Paper Lehigh University

Migrating to Agility 2.
0: Social Computing Enables Organizational Growth and Innovation Roger Nagel, Steven Goldman, and Brian D. Davison Lehigh University, Bethlehem PA USA
This white paper reflects the thinking of over two hundred participants in various organizations. It was organized by twelve faculty from Lehigh University who both contributed their own ideas and directed the efforts of twenty five students during the last year. The effort was sponsored by grants from Air Products, The AKA Group, The National Adoption Center, and The Pennsylvania Infrastructure Technology Alliance (PITA). The Enterprise Systems Center at Lehigh University provided an organizational home, access to their research staff and logistical support. The research work was facilitated by Lehigh Professors Roger Nagel, Steven Goldman, and Brian Davison. Send comments and request for more information to agility@lehigh.edu
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Roger N. Nag Steven N Goldman, Brian D. Da R gel, N. avison, 2009 9 !

Except where noted othe erwise this wo is licensed under a Creative Commo Attributio Share Alike ork d ons on e License (US S/V3.0). See details at http d p://creativecom mmons.org/licenses/by-sa/ /3.0/ ! The Enterpr Systems Center and C rise Computer Sc cience and En ngineering de epartment at Lehigh Univ versity coordinate t Agility group research work and re this g h elated Industr interaction To find m ry ns. more informati or ion get involved please send inquiries to agility@lehig d, d gh.edu or visi our website at!http://agili it ity.cse.lehigh h.edu/
The Agility Group at Leh high Universi administer permissions beyond the scope of this license. ity rs
!
! Principal In nvestigator: Roger N. Nage el Co-principa Investigator Steven N. Goldman al rs: Brian D. Davison Air ( mo) Sponsors: A Products (Ken Anselm AKA Group (Allan Frank) A ( ) National Ado N option Center (Ken Mullner) Pennsylvania Infrastructur Technology Alliance (Robert Alpago & Chad Kus P re y sko) Research Associates: Li Qian and Nap poleon Devia a rs: udent of Lehigh University y Contributor Faculty/Stu Industry Pa articipants
versity Lehigh Univ Bethlehem, PA 18015 9 March 2009
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Migrati to Agility 2 Social Com ing 2.0: mputing Enable Organization Growth and Innovation es nal d
Foreword This white paper is a first step in an evolving multidisciplinary research project at Lehigh University, a project whose goal is identifying the value for business competitiveness of digital social networking. Business applications of social computing technologies are creating extraordinary opportunities for reducing the cost of innovation. These applications are also making it possible for companies to acquire the expanded capabilities associated with business growth without the costs incurred by traditional forms of growth: mergers, acquisitions, new facilities, additional personnel. As innovation continues to be a necessary condition for competitiveness, and as growth remains a compelling managerial strategy if not a condition of survival, the potential for reducing the costs of both in a period of economic recession cannot be ignored. Developments in information and communication technologies, together with the evolution of Internetbased social computing, are dramatically reducing human interaction costs: the cost of linking globally distributed people into coherent, highly interactive communities. The reduction in interaction costs is allowing companies using these communities to get much more value out of the knowledge and experience of their own personnel. It is also allowing them to use people they do not employ to create value for them by sharing knowledge and experience, either at little additional cost, or for a fee to be paid only after the value has been created. The ability to mobilize and effectively manage internal and external communities that enhance tacit interactionsinteractions among people who share knowledge, know-how, experience and expertisein order to gain competitive advantage requires new business models and new business strategies. It also requires the ability to manage without being constrained by internal or external organizational boundaries. In fact, the leadership challenges posed by social computing in the current global competitive environment reflect the evolution of the agility paradigm developed in the early and mid-1990s by an academic-industrygovernment collaboration at Lehigh Universitys Iacocca
Institute for Business Competitiveness. The agility paradigm highlighted the increasing marketplace value of intra- and inter-enterprise collaboration in order to focus human as well as physical resources on the continuing creation, and rapid marketplace introduction, of solutions: knowledge- and information-rich, customercentric integrations of goods and services. In particular, the agility paradigm promoted crossfunctional and inter-enterprise teaming, multi-enterprise collaboration, business networking, and virtual organizations, all of which were early forms of tacit interactionenhancing communities. The costs of mobilizing such communities has plummeted with the spread of consumer-oriented social computing, and companies are just beginning to realize that these same technologies can dramatically expand access to the kinds of knowledge and information that drive innovation and growth, and thus competitiveness. The white paper that follows identifies business opportunities latent in social computing applications and provides insights into the strategic thinking being used in companies that are already exploiting these opportunities. As with the initial agility paradigm, this white paper is the product of an academic-industry-government collaboration involving more than 200 individuals, that extended from the Winter of 2008 through the Winter of 2009. Twelve Lehigh faculty from all four of its collegesEngineering and Applied Science, Arts and Sciences, Business and Economics, and Education participated in the project, along with twenty-five graduate and undergraduate students. Pennsylvania state government participated through funding from its Pennsylvania Infrastructure Technology Alliance program. Several dozen companies participated, through funding, hosting pilot projects, attending workshops, providing presentation on social computing technologies and business initiatives, or making personnel available to share relevant knowledge and experience. In effect, the white paper outlines Agility 2.0, the evolution of the initial agility paradigm now driven by the further development of tacit interaction-amplifying social computing technologies. It introduces the notion of agile
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communities as platforms for building new business models and strategies that harness distributed knowledge and experience to creating new business value. The next steps beyond the white paper must identify the characteristics of agile communities, the parameters for forming and managing them effectively, the information technology infrastructure required to support agile communities, and the leadership challenges they pose. We have already begun this process, with a very similar academicindustry-government collaboration, with a view to a follow-on report in late 2009. But the pressing needs of industry and government today strongly suggest an expanded initiative, capable of generating usable results quickly. To that end, we propose creating an Institute for Leveraging Social Computing and Agility at Lehigh. The institute will be an integrated multi-disciplinary institute devoted to the development and deployment of agile community-enabling social computing tools, and of coordinated business strategies for exploiting them. Such an institute would facilitate, promote and provide a framework for research and education in the commercialization of social computing, and an open academic, industry, government, and public forum for discussing technical, behavioral, strategic and social issues raised by the exploitation of social computing technologies. The institute would include and integrate industrial partners with university researchers and students in ensuring the availability of realistic data,
scientific analysis, test beds, and prototype environments. We invite from all readers of this white paper to submit suggestions for organizing such an institute and expressions of interest in participating in it.
! For the Faculty, Student, and Industry teamRoger Nagel, Steven Goldman, & Brian Davison, Facilitators. !
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Migrating to Agility 2.0: Social Computing Enables Organizational Growth and Innovation
Table of Contents
1 The Opportunity ! Organizational Change Opportunity ! Agile Community Opportunity ! Value Creation Opportunity ! Agility 2.0 Opportunity The Business Infrastructure Impact of Social Computing ! Distributed Tacit Interaction Challenges ! Self-Forming Communities ! Community Facilitators ! Ecosystem Infrastructure ! Social Computing Analysis Increasing Organizational Agility Introducing Agile Communities ! Sustainable Competitive Advantage ! Ecosystem Advantages ! Tacit Advantages ! Facilitating an Agile Community Operational Agile Communities ! Tournament-Style Innovation Communities ! A Facilitated Innovation Community ! Internal Innovation Communities ! Mixed Internal-External Innovation Communities ! Interactive Communities in a Portfolio ! Communities as Platforms ! Customer-based Agile Community Business Models ! Table of Agile Community Lessons Learned What Leadership Needs To Know ! We are in an Agile Environment ! Leadership Challenges ! Evaluation Metrics Change ! Leadership is Critical ! Network Thinking ! Leadership Mandate Conclusions and Next Steps ! Why this is Important ! Establishing at Lehigh University an Institute for Leveraging Social Computing and Agility Sources of Material for the White Paper White Paper Facilitators, Sponsors and Participants
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1. The Opportunity
Migrating to Agility 2.0: Social Computing Enables Organizational Growth and Innovation Lehigh University, Bethlehem PA USA !
1. The Opportunity Business applications of social computing technologies have created an extraordinary opportunity for reducing the cost of growth and of innovation, an opportunity that is particularly valuable in a period of economic recession. Developments in information and communication technologies, together with the evolution of Internet-based Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 software, are dramatically reducing human interaction costs: the cost of linking globally distributed people into coherent, highly interactive agile communities. This reduction in interaction costs is allowing companies to get much more value out of their own personnel. It is also allowing companies to use people they do not employ to create value for them, either gratis, or for a fee to be paid only after the value is created. Organizational Change Opportunity The business drivers of organizational change today are similar to, but more intensive than, the drivers of change in the early 1990s. Then companies were able to respond by exploiting lower communication and transaction costs enabled by the introduction of new digital information technologies. Today, the response is keyed to exploiting reduced transaction costs enabled by the maturation of these same digital technologies. The stakes are higher now than they were fifteen years ago. The need for organizational change today is intensified by the spread of social computing technologies, the full globalization of commerce, and the financial ecosystem impacts of these changes. Social computing opens the way to accessing distributed knowledge and informationdistributed among personnel within an organization, distributed among organizations, and distributed globally among people not identifiable in advance as possessing them much more effectively than ever before, and in ways never possible before. Interaction costs, among physically and organizationally distributed people, are now much lower than they have ever been. This pushes organizational dis-integration a giant step further than lower communication and transaction costs pushed it in the past decade. Agile Community Opportunity Digital communities-based strategies are a necessary condition of competitiveness today because the increasingly intensive globalization of commerce puts a premium on knowledge, know-how and experience as applied to innovation, as well as to optimal execution of business processes. Not only is it increasingly difficult for one company, however large, to do it all, no one company in fact is doing it all! Agile communities connected by social computing technologies excel at solving problems that are loosely specified, and at creating novel solutions that had not been specified at all. They excel, in other words, at innovation. The justification for expending resources and effort on behalf of mobilizing agile communities is the promise that their agility will unleash positive emergent outcomes, unanticipated yet valuable outcomes whose benefits will far outweigh the resources and effort they cost. The engine of the positive emergent outcomes produced by agile communities is the tacit interactions that are fostered among all community members. To be agile, a community must be an interactive collaborative workspace in which everyone is a knowledge worker, not just individuals with formal credentials as such. That is, everyone participating in an agile community must feel stimulated to contribute to the communitys goal
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1. The Opportunity whatever relevant knowledge, know-how, experience, or expertise that they possess. It follows that a precondition of an effective community is setting clear goals. Note, however, that these goals need not be the same for the company, or companies, that mobilize a particular community and for the individuals comprising the community. For companies, the goal may be higher profit, new market position, or greater market share. For community members it may be career enhancement, a bonus, a prize, expressing personal or professional pride/reputation, or gratification from solving a difficult problem or from selflessly helping someone else solve a problem. The primary obligations of an organization mobilizing a community, then, are: identifying goals that are appropriate, identifying the kind of community most likely to achieve those goals effectively, populating the community in an appropriate way, and facilitating the communitys activities so as to accomplish the goals of the mobilizing organization and so as to motivate individual community members. Value Creation Opportunity Recognition of the opportunity presented by agile communities is driving business reorganization by early adopter companies pursuing the benefits to be derived from exploiting social computing. These benefits are unleashed by dis-aggregating the value creation process: moving from a vertical hierarchy to a networked and more horizontal value creation process. The dramatic reduction in interaction costs permits the utilization of global resources that are integrated via digital technologies into collaborating communities focused on value creation for the facilitating enterprise. This can provide an organization with almost instant access to unlimited sources of knowledge and information, know-how, experience and expertise, even when they are globally distributed. Access to knowledge and information is increasingly recognized as a core business resource, given the dramatic shift in the course of the 20th century from the transformation of materials as a platform for wealth creation to wealth creation by continuous innovation.
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Continuous innovation, in turn, is critically dependent on tacit interactions among people, that is, on interactions that provide access to implicit, as well as explicit, knowledge, information, experience and expertise possessed by possibly very large numbers of people, who may be widely distributed, organizationally, and even globally. Beyond the opportunity to dis-aggregate the value creation process by utilizing globally dispersed resources not necessarily owned or controlled by your enterprise, is the opportunity to increase organizational agility: to remove internal boundaries; to reduce the pyramid of control in management and decision making; and to tap the wisdom of the diverse population of individuals and communities in your organizational ecosystem. An agile organization is aware of its ecosystem, actively manages its ecosystem relationships, and builds ecosystem strategies as well as ecosystem defense mechanisms. Consider, for example, how the recent domino effect of economic disasters might have been reduced had we better understood the financial ecosystem and taken steps to manage it and control its ecosystem-based dependencies. The challenge posed by social computing technologies is to develop new business applications that can nurture wealth creation. Social computing is enabling these new opportunities, which are the cornerstone of an emerging second-generation agile business paradigm: Agility 2.0. Agility 2.0 Opportunity Organizations that are leading in the adoption of Agility 2.0 are rewriting how people relate to one another at work and at play, how they function within organizations and among organizations, and how organizational boundaries are defined. This change is already afoot and CEOs need to get in front of it before it blows past them and their organizations. Traditional organizational structures access only a small fraction of what their employees know and know how to do, and barely access the knowledge possessed by outsiders, even if they are customers or suppliers.
1. The Opportunity By using Agility 2.0 effectively, management can more fully realize the value of intellectual capital to the company. Doing so, however, requires an infrastructure that allows internal and external community interactions to flourish and that can identify new strategic outcomes made possible by these interactions.
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2. The Business Infras structure Imp pact of Socia Computing al g 2. T The Busines Infrastru ss ucture Impa act of Socia al Computing C So ocial computi is about enhancing th productivit ing he ty of in ndividual emp ployees and th effectiveness of interna he al and external team As we will show in what follows, ms. w socia computing is not about a single tool or technology al y. Socia computing is the nam we give to a suite o al g me of capab bilities that be ecome open to enterprises that choose t t to build the infras d structure nec cessary to deploy them m effec ctively. These infrastructur requiremen only begi e re nts in with the need fo providing computers to personne for g el, netw working them a connectin them to the Internet. No and ng e or are t infrastruc the cture requirem ments solely technologica al. As w be develo will oped in what follows, soc computin t cial ng requi ires extensive organizatio onal and lea adership infra astructure change in order to maximize its busines t ss benefits. Th first wave of social co he omputing intr roduced emai il, digita calendars, and first generation group al pware. Like a all techn nology- base enhancem ed ments to busi iness and th he enter rprise we use them at first to do the th e hings we hav ve alway done, but f ys faster, smarte and better w enhance er, with ed effici iency and sp peed. Thus co omputers, ne etworking, an nd the Internet pro ovided enhan nced commu unication an nd infor rmation acces Almost all enterprises now routinel ss. ly use t these first wa tools to produce a w ave wide variety o of busin benefits. ness All this corporate activity b l brought abou the second ut d wave of social com mputing, whic introduced the concept ch d ts of e enterprise po ortals, instan messagin nt ng, prototype e collab borative virtu workplace and person web sites ual es, nal s. While these may seem simpl innovation pioneering e le ns, g execu utives used th hese first and second wave capabilities d s, and the infrastru ucture neede to suppo them, to ed ort o revolu utionize busi iness and re einvent indus stries. Think k about how Amazon used inform t mation access to change the e way w buy books and how eB created a global virtua we s, Bay al marke et. Wh Amazon, eBay, and a host of othe did was to hat ers o innov vate by asking What can we do that was not done g, n e before? They wen beyond the faster, smar and bette nt e rter er focus of their com mpetitors to c create innova ative business strategies and new business m w models. Thei innovations ir were based on inf formation inte egration as do ocumented by y Nagel et al. (2004) [source 21] l ). Sur rprisingly, th third wave of social computing did he e d not o originate in t the corporate world. The third wave e e started with blogs and wikis, c consumer use ratings, and er d social bookmarkin These bec l ng. came a new w wave of socia al comp puting with the introduction of so ocial network k platfo orms like Fac cebook, MyS Space, Linked dIn, YouTube e and m many others. Because its roots lie outside the e e enterp prise and re equire greate initiative, the rate o er of corpo orate adoption of and innovation in social computing n g as en nhanced by t third wa has been slower than the ave n n adopt tion of the firs two waves. st .
Social C Computing Wa aves as Defin by Micros ned soft 1 Wa ave E-m mail Cale endar Gro schedulin oup ng Disc cussion Forum ms Dire ectories (Taxo onomy) Gro oupware
st
2nd Wave Virtual wor rkspaces Instant mes ssaging Enterprise portals Presence Web conferencing Enterprise Automation Personal w websites Composite Applications s Blogs s Wikis s
3rd Wave
Examples of 3rd Wave f
RSS feeds Socia networks al Tagging Socia bookmarkin al ng Perso profiles onal Mash hups
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Migrating to Agility 2 Social Com 2.0: mputing Enable Organization Growth and Innovation es nal d
2. The Business Infrastructure Impact of Social Computing Distributed Tacit Interaction Challenges All too often today, companies are using globally dispersed teams that are meeting, or even exceeding, managerial expectations in spite of sub-optimal communication effectiveness, poor coordination, and only minimal collaboration. This is a tacit interaction challenge, made more difficult by the lack of co-location. Imagine a team of people working on a project. Some of the team are doing research and posting results to a private (to the team) location of what they find. Others are notified of posts that fit their well-defined personal interest profiles as soon as a post is made. They can read posts and add comments, or see and respond to the comments of other team members in real time. This is very similar to the capability provided by a Facebook wall. Note that only a defined and closed set of friends (think team members) can see or comment Clearly, adding a Facebook wall will not provide the magic wand with which to meet the tacit interaction challenge. But the Facebook wall is just one of a collection of technological tools being developed for this purpose. Nor is the tacit interaction challenge purely a technology challenge. Imagine a global team that has a secure private virtual room in cyber space. Team members post their findings on the walls, add comments using cyber-post it notes and are able to respond to comments of others. They have the ability to suggest multiple alternative approaches, vote on ideas and explain why, and point out the need for further research, qualify sources of solutions, etc. The team meets regularly for synergy, brainstorming and to innovate faster. Sound impossible? Its not! IBM, Cisco and others use this type of virtual war room routinely. They do it on important strategic projects, in which the players are often globally dispersed. And sometimes they invite customers, and suppliers into cyberspace to join them. Social computing is now in its third wave and still evolving, as are the infrastructure requirements to support it. With the right technical and organizational infrastructure, social computing can be the basis for unlocking and integrating tacit knowledge that is embedded in sources scattered throughout the world. It can and is being used by pioneering and innovative corporate leaders to deal with the scenario described below and very effectively. Social computing can help an organization unlock and enhance the tacit interactions not only of its own global employees as described above, but more powerfully of non-employees, people who simply know things that would be valuable to you, and who can be motivated to work on your behalf. Proctor and Gamble in their Connect and Develop strategy set out to do exactly that, and they are succeeding. See Houston & Sakkab (2006).[source 12]
When an individual or team has a challenge and access to social computing they ask not how I/we can meet this challenge. Rather, they ask who in the world has knowledge, information, or a solution, partial or full, that would be of value in meeting this challenge. The social computing environment provides tools to share the challenge, search for resources, or qualify resources which self-select in response to the opportunity. It allows for facilitators to qualify, moderate, and enhance the process of finding, qualifying, and integrating resources from internal and external sources to create value-based solutions. Proctor & Gamble does this on an enterprise-wide basis in their Connect and Develop strategy employing over seventy trained facilitators in nine global locations. Google, another prime example, forms communities routinely to meet challenges as they occur, and uses detailed employee profiles as a part of the process.
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2. The Business Infrastructure Impact of Social Computing In thinking about social computing and business, do not view it simply as a connection and tacit interaction tool, for it can be much more than that. Do not view social computing as the means of helping one person or one team better solve their problem, although that is indeed one valuable business usage. Rather consider in addition the social computing ideas introduced in Wisdom of the Crowd [source 32] and We Are Smarter Than Me [source 17]. Social computing is a way of harnessing the diversity of knowledge and integrating it into higher order tacit knowledge-based problem solving. While Wikipedia is perhaps the most famous example of harnessing the wisdom of the crowd, there are numerous for profit business examples, including the ones discussed in Section 5. The key concept here is that organizational boundaries, whether internal or external, must not be obstacles to finding innovative opportunities and solutions. Social computing stimulates rethinking the value of drawing organizational boundaries and the potential benefits from using boundary-less resources that the organization doesnt own or control. Social computing tools cannot be used like cookbooks; there are no standard recipes to follow, and no formulas for instant success. Nevertheless, we find a growing population of leading edge business leaders using social computing tools to innovatively create value. Consider for example the values jam at IBM, the Connect & Develop strategy of P&G, or the Goldcorp Tournament. Self-Forming Communities In truth, we are immersed in a sea of multiple types of communities. Unlike tournament-inspired hub and spoke model communities, however, most long-familiar communities are made up of members who are motivated by selfless concern to help others who share the common interest that defines the community, whether they know each other or not, and whether or not they are compensated for their help. Such selfless help is a familiar feature of hobbyist communities. Members of the
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community of amateur radio operators or of classic car restorers, for example, routinely go to great lengths to share knowledge, experience, know-how and expertise with one another, gratis. Every special interest magazine, and there are thousands of them world wide, serves an interacting community. To understand a community is to grasp the motivation of its members to participate in the communitys activities and to share valuable experience with fellow members. Understanding how communities work represents an opportunity for a strategic change in the resources needed to generate wealth for an enterprise. It also creates a need for a culture change that will be difficult for organizations that have seen in sharing only a threat to their well-being. Furthermore, social computing facilitates the concept of self-forming groups of volunteers, individuals and organizations, who come forward to form a community in order to create value for you. They come forward in response to knowing about the opportunity that your needs represent. Building business strategies that enable value creation by people and organizations that volunteer to provide solutions is the essence of what P&G and others are doing successfully today. The concept of community and the business use of social computingenabled communities is the major focus of this paper. We realize that community is not a new corporate term, and emphasize that what we are suggesting is that social computing can enhance the effectiveness of many pre-existing communities; think for example of teams, task forces, communities of interest, practice etc. We are further suggesting that social computing can be used effectively in creating communities of people who are globally dispersed, and even who work for other companies, and are independent. Communities can and do take many forms, and choosing the right form is based on the goal you set for the community. An enterprise successfully using a social computing-enabled community strategy will have a portfolio of different kinds of communities, focused on
2. The Business Infrastructure Impact of Social Computing multiple different business opportunities, and will manage the portfolio as well as individual communities. Community Facilitators This brings up the criticality of community facilitators, and the need for both individuals and organizations that can and do facilitate communities by helping to populate, operate and focus their efforts. Facilitating is an organizational challenge. It requires an understanding and a mandate from strategic management, including clear goals and appropriate tools. Ecosystem Infrastructure All organizations operate in a community of other organizations on which they are dependent directly and/or indirectly. We call this infrastructure community the ecosystem of the organization. It is clear that all the suppliers and customers of a business are part of its ecosystem. In addition the organizations that provide indirect essential services to an enterprise also are part of its ecosystem: finance, communications, information technologies, food, power, etc. A host of other organizations are also part of the infrastructure ecosystem of an enterprise, for example, the radio stations in the ecosystem of songwriters, or the gas stations in the ecosystem of automobile companies. Until very recently most people assumed that the ecosystem simply existed, and that an organization could only to a limited degree shape or control it for its own benefit. We further assumed that the indirect members of an ecosystem could not dramatically impact the success of the core enterprise. The recent economic recession has shown that to be untrue. Identifying and knowing more about your ecosystem infrastructure and managing your dependencies, relationships, and strategies using ecosystem-based thinking can be a powerful strategic opportunity for changing the rules of competition in your industry, as Amazon and Google have done.
Google and Apple are perhaps the best examples today of organizations that think in terms of ecosystem infrastructure strategies, but Cisco, IBM and others are beginning to follow that path.
Social Computing Analysis As the three waves of social computing have evolved, technologists, sociologists, anthropologists and others have begun to build analysis and mapping tools. Social Network Analysis (SNA) has focused on discovering tacit communities by analyzing existing communication and interaction pathways. We now know, for example, because of exhaustive studies of the Enron email, that we can in fact discover many interesting infrastructure-based facts about leaders, communities, etc., from studying email and its contents. In recent books such as The Numerati[source 3] we now see evidence of what can be learned by analyzing the web surfing habits of people. If we add to this the capabilities of computer science research in the fields of data mining, pattern recognition, semantic web, search, etc., we can expect new and powerful tools for employing and deploying social computing enabled communities. Stephen Bakers book The Numerati provides a detailed account of an emerging brave new world of information technology run by gifted analysts using highly sophisticated data mining tools. These numerati, as he calls them, expose new business value hidden in information exchanges (e.g., email patterns), information and data available for collection, and information and data already collected for other purposes. According to Baker, the numerati are pioneers of the creative synthesis of information and data into new business opportunities. Thus social computing is not about socializing the enterprise. It is about a set of infrastructure opportunities that can, if dealt with properly, have a major strategic impact on the enterprise. Social computing can change
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2. The Business Infrastructure Impact of Social Computing the way your enterprise creates value and possibly can provide a means to minimize the impact of the current economic crisis.
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3. Increasing Organizational Agility ! 3. Increasing Organizational Agility In organizing to enable collaboration, work evolves from individuals working within managerial silos to people working collaboratively in cross-functional internal teams, in cross-enterprise teams, and in business networks. In the process, people create new value for their companies by reducing costs of some existing processes, but they often also stimulate new business strategies, new business models, and new markets for new kinds of high value goods and services. Legacybased organizational problems, however, can limit the effectiveness of digital collaboration technologies, and make the transition difficult for many established enterprises. Therefore, while social computing technologies allow us to tap significant existing potential value in our organizations, the way businesses are organized often does not allow it. Management must recognize that social computing can unlock significant potential for greater profitability, growth and innovation, and that this is achieved by enabling people to share professional knowledge, practical know-how, technical expertise, and accumulated experience in ways that create new value. Despite the evidence of much successful collaboration over the past decade, in many companies the potential for significant benefit has remained untapped because of traditional forms of business organization and management. Social computing technologies are in fact making community-based collaboration easier, cheaper, and more effective, thus more available to many more companies. New technologies are continuing to emerge, the pressure to globalize is intensifying, and the current recession is putting unbearable competitive pressures on enterprises. These factors make community-focused collaboration not only intrinsically desirable, but a necessity if a company is to remain competitive. People are the engine of value creation in communityfocused collaboration as enabled by social computing. This is possible because social computing is in fact not about socializing the enterprise; it is about enhancing the productivity of individual employees and the effectiveness of teams.
The distinctiveness of community focused collaboration compared to cross-functional teams and networks is that the members of these communities do not need to be known to one another, or to management, in advance of the communitys mobilization. See Goldman et al. (2009).[source 9] ! These communities can be self-organizing in response to management-set objectives, and they have a participation lifetime determined by those objectives. These communities can also be formed using the power of digital profiles as they can be far more effective than the human rolodex method commonly used to form communities. These communities can be facilitated in a variety of ways based on the type of community and its goal. The facilitation process enhances their productivity and effectiveness. These communities can integrate multiple points of view and utilize diversity to create enhanced solution/opportunities. Perhaps most importantly, several types of communities can be supported concurrently, only some of which utilize resources not owned or paid for until they create value. Finally, these communities often will reflect the need for a new form of organizational structure, requiring the endorsement and understanding of senior management. When used well they will extend the reach of both internal and external resources in creating value, lowering cost and increasing innovation if the organization is structured properly.
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3. Increasing Organizational Agility ! The third wave of social computing will continue to evolve. However because business applications of social computing are now beginning to become dominant, the next waves of this evolution can be expected to be influenced by the business needs and requirements of social computing.
The next wave of social computing may be called Enterprise 3.0 as we move to a more businessoriented focus. We expect to see one or both of the following: 1. Widespread use of very comprehensive and searchable profiles for all employees, and persons of interest to the enterprise. 2. Information security which is not based on inside and outside the organization, but much more agile and configurable to enable real sharing in appropriate community-focused collaboration. 4. Ecosystem mapping and management orientated software, so that organizations will be able to visualize, influence, impact and perhaps even manage the ecosystems in which they operate. 5. Major advances in facilitating software for community focused collaboration, much more agile than current capabilities built into the currently available systems. a. Interoperability of profiles, presence, status, feeds and notifications and security settings, for all the so called Web 2.0 tools currently customized individually to each social computing domain. b. Metaverse portability for avatars, and various virtual artifacts so that they can be used interchangeably in various virtual environments.
c. Mashups will be commonly available and usable so that people will not even think twice about piping the output of one tool to be the input of another. i. Significant enhancements so that networks of tools will be plug and play compatible and one can simply collect the tools that are useful and route the data without the need for computer scientists to program the results. ii. Ease of use equivalent to that of spreadsheet manipulation for the myriad social computing tools to be customized and configured for useful work in specific application domains. The technical details of these are beyond the scope of the current paper.
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4. Introducing Agile Communities 4. Introducing Agile Communities The objective of populating an agile community is the creation of new value for a company out of the focused, collective engagement of the communitys members on that objective, whether the members work for that company or not. Since the turn of the 21st century, new kinds of selforganizing online communitiesamong them, MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Flickr, YouTube, World of Warcraft, Second Life, and the blogospherehave spread with startling rapidity. These digitally enhanced communities prove to be a rich source of tacit interactions. As discussed above, the challenge is to develop business applications using digitally enhanced communities that can exploit tacit interactions and the other benefits possible to nurture wealth creation. There have always been communities, of course, and they have always been valuable in some way to their members. Social computing, however, is enabling the mobilization of new kinds of business value-creation communities, which we call agile communities. The use of such communities is the cornerstone of an emerging secondgeneration agile business paradigm: Agility 2.0. Agile communities aggregate and integrate tacit interactions on behalf of wealth creation for companies that mobilize these communities. An essential feature of agile communities is that though they can take many forms, all allow companies to exploit human and physical resources not owned by them and/or to utilize resources they do own far more effectively. Agile communities are boundaryless in traditional organizational terms, but they are bounded. Their boundaries are determined not by management, but by the goal for the sake of which each community is mobilized and supported. The goal, in turn, determines which type of community to mobilize, the resources it will need, and the form of its facilitation. Agile communities thus extend the concept of smart business networks, whose members are carefully selected for their competence in executing precisely specified means to achieve well-defined goals. See Goldman et al. (2009).[source 10] Agile communities also dramatically
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extend the outcomes of intra- and inter-enterprise collaboration.
Management can populate an agile community in many ways: 1. Sometimes they select the members from internal and or external sources. 2. Sometimes they approve self-selecting members. 3. Sometimes they use an open community. a. In a contest or tournament style. b. Or with a third party facilitator such as InnoCentive.
Sustainable Competitive Advantage Executives who grasp the significance of agile communities, and are prepared to act to make their effective utilization possible, can enhance the fortunes of their companies even in hard times, perhaps especially in hard times. They can also create sustainable competitive advantage without upfront investment in personnel, facilities, or mergers and acquisitions. Executives who do not see the lessons to be learned from the pioneers of business applications of social computing, or who are not willing to make the organizational changes required to implement them, can hope to ride out the recession, but are destined to play catch-up afterwards to competitors who have implemented them and gained in dealing with recession-based constraints, increasing the speed of innovation, harnessing resources they do not own or even control, and generically increasing their organizational agility. Unlike traditional communities, whether communities of interest or communities of practice, agile communities reflect the kinds of heightened interactivity made possible by social computing technologies. Agile communities, in turn, are enabling very new business models and strategies not available even to companies who adapted to 1990s-era agility.
4. Introducing Agile Communities to solve, and unaware that they possessed knowledge relevant to solving it. Agile communities facilitate tacit interactions between people who are physically distributed by digitally integrating them. Facilitating an Agile Community Facilitating an agile community can be a critical success factor. One key requirement for using agile communities is to make major advances in developing and nurturing the facilitating skills of people who are responsible for agile community success. Senior management needs to take the lead in orchestrating all of the above, but all generations and levels of employees need help in transitioning from a
Ecosystem Advantages Agile communities are also creating new markets and they are changing existing business ecosystems to serve them. Agile communities make ecosystem awareness and utilization important to any business. Agile communities are creating new webs of reciprocally inter-dependent companies keyed to social computing applications. One such ecosystem is the cluster of for-profit businesses centered on the free, open source Linux operating system. The Linux Foundation estimates the value of this ecosystem in 2007 at $25 billion and projects its increase to $40 billion by 2010. Tacit Advantages Exploiting agile communities requires connecting a concrete business problem with knowledge, experience, and expertise that are distributed among unrelated and potentially unidentified individuals. We call this enhancing tacit interaction. Prior to being connected together in an agile community, its members might be unaware of the problem the community was being asked There are a variety of ways to populate and control agile communities, and the method to use is determined by the goal or problem to be worked on by the community: 1. For some goals we form the community by selecting members, in others the members self select. 2. In some communities we control all the resources; in others resources are not controlled by us and we pay only for the value created. 3. In some communities facilitators are the key to success enabled by using internal or third party external facilitators, while in others, communities are self-facilitated with no formal facilitation role defined.
Some of the steps to successfully organize to use agile communities are listed below: 1. A cadre of people who facilitate agile community success is recognized as a critical organizational resource, and individual skill set. a. Facilitators will have strong people skills and understand the appropriate use of technological tools. b. They will be very close partners with a new and evolved IT organization. 2. Management puts in place programs, training and other tools to eliminate the so-called generation gap and work habit differences between the millennials and baby boomers in the workforce, dealing with the other generational workers in the middle as well. 3. Courses, workshops, and experienced-based learning tools are developed to create an environment where people are made comfortable in dealing with the lack of formal structure and uncertainty inherent in the broadbased use of a portfolio of agile communities.
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4. Introducing Agile Communities command and control environment to one of self-reliance and community thinking. This paper provides brief descriptions in the next section of how companies are using communities to create value. It also explores some of the questions that companies must address if they are to harvest the value latent in agile communities by adopting new business strategies, models and operations.
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5. Operational Agile Communities 5. Operational Agile Communities Social computing tools extend the range of communities that companies can mobilize to advance their interests. They also enhance the effectiveness of communities of all kinds, whether in the familiar form of teams and networks, or in the as yet less familiar form of self-organizing, open, agile communities. To stimulate the interest of the reader, and to provide a thought-provoking introduction to these examples, we also present in summary mode six strategic lessons and six operational suggestions for using agility and agile communities to create competitive advantage.
Agile communities are much better than teams and networks at creating the kinds of relationships that tap into, and focus onto concrete objectives, globally distributed knowledge, experience and expertise. Established early adopter firms, among them Cisco, Procter and Gamble, IBM, and a host of younger companies like eBay and Amazon, Google and InnoCentive, are proving the substantial benefits that flow from agile communities-based strategies, processes and products.
And as with Agility 1.0 (1991) [source 20], the benefits can be realized by the not-for-profit and government sectors as fully as they can by the for-profit sector. Agility 1.0 was extensively documented by Goldman, Nagel and Preiss in (1995).[source 9] In each of these cases, the advantage lies in identifying the right kind of community to form and then managing it to bring the widest possible range of relevant knowledge, experience and expertise to bear on well-defined goals and objectives. The social computing technology provides a new toolkit to management. Managements responsibility is to set appropriate goals, and to see that their organizations are adapted to effectively use the enabling technologies to accomplish those goals. In what follows, we describe seven different community types. For each type, we provide multiple real-world examples and lessons learned from the examples. A table of community types, a sample list of companies using them, and summaries of lessons learned appears at the end of this section.
Six strategic lessons for using agility 2.0 1. Agile Communities can shortcut the innovation process, generate better innovation outcomes, and reduce innovation costs. 2. You can leverage your competitive position within the ecosystems of which you are part and can create new value opportunities from those ecosystems. a. To do so you must actively manage your ecosystem relationships and dependencies. b. There are implicit (financial relationships, local economy, distribution logistics, etc.) and explicit (suppliers, customers, competitors, etc.) relationships which must be considered. 3. Leaderships role in adopting agility-based strategies and in fostering a communitiessupportive culture and bottom-up innovation is critical. 4. Integrate agile communities internally and externally in your daily operations. 5. Think communities, and develop a strategic portfolio of community initiatives. 6. Use profiles for all key people (yours and contractors, etc.), include objectives and key results in the profiles and use them for performance evaluation (as with Googles OKRs, for example).
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5. Operational Agile Communities What is the Goldcorp lesson? Promiscuous open communitiespromiscuous because anyone can join, without prior certification or credentialingwith appropriate motivation and supported by people with the relevant expertise, in this case Goldcorps own geologists, can shortcut the innovation process and at lower cost than traditional approaches to innovation. The community Goldcorp mobilized was built on a hub and spoke model: the members studied the data and responded to Goldcorp with their recommendations. There was little or no mutual interaction among the Challenge participants themselves. Their motivation for participation was surely the prize money, primarily, but not only the money. The lure of solving a difficult problem, openly posted, is a powerful one for many people. In 2003, Navteq, then an independent producer of digital map data but now owned by Nokia, announced the Navteq Challenge. This remains an annual event in which Navteq distributes millions of dollars in cash, licensing agreements, and equipment to participants who invent location-enabled applications based on digital map and dynamic positioning data for cell phones and other handheld wireless devices. Like Goldcorp, Navteq mobilized an open community, in the sense of a community whose members were not known to Navteq management in advance. Unlike Goldcorp, however, it was not a promiscuous community. Challenge candidates had to establish to Navteqs satisfaction that they were plausibly competent to come up with new applications in order to receive contest materials. In effect, Navteqs prize money precipitated a community of software innovators focused on creating applications that would add to Navteqs revenues. Some members of this community are established software developers, but participation is also, importantly, open to competent newcomers with clever ideas. Navteqs mobilization of an agile community also differs from Goldcorps in being renewed annually and in using the Navteq Challenge to leverage Navteqs position in an ecosystem of symbiotically related hardware and software companies offering products and services keyed to global positioning data. Navteq thus used an agile community of
Six operational lessons for using agility 2.0 1. Communities have a culture you must understand. 2. A self-motivated community may not need financial incentives. 3. Solutions can be vetted in ecosystem community, often at no cost to you. 4. Community types have distinctive membership, with objectives that can be narrow or broad, and each must be managed appropriately. 5. Well-defined objectives, facilitator & tools, as well the right culture increase agilitybased productivity. 6. Incentivize the social work flow behavior and empower bottom up innovation.
a. Tournament-Style Innovation Communities The Goldcorp, Navteq, and Netflix stories are wellknown illustrations of the power of open innovation via agile communities. The Goldcorp Challenge, with prize money totaling roughly half a million dollars, was announced in 2000 by Goldcorp CEO Rob McEwen. McEwen posted the companys hitherto proprietary geological data on the Web and invited all comers to study the data and identify where on Goldcorps land the company was likely to find new sources of gold. McEwen knew nothing about gold mining when he took over the moribund gold producer, but he was inspired by a lecture on the open source process behind Linux to open the site identification process to the public. His Challenge quickly generated recommendations to dig in 110 locations, 55 of which had not previously been identified by Goldcorps own geologists; 80% of these new locations yielded a total of 8 million ounces of gold. Goldcorp was transformed into a major gold mining company, with steadily increasing production from mines in North, Central and South America.
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5. Operational Agile Communities its own to enhance the value of the community of companies to which it belongs, on a win-win basis. The Goldcorp and Navteq Challenges posed loosely specified goals: find gold; create innovative GPS data applications. The Netflix Challenge, by contrast, specified a precise goal and a limited timeframe in which to achieve it. In October 2006, Netflix announced a $1 million prize for anyone who, by October 2011, could produce an algorithm for predicting the success of film recommendations to customers, based on each customers past and present choices, that was at least 10% more accurate than Netflixs in-house algorithm, called CineMatch. In the interim, Netflix has been awarding a $50,000 Progress Prize to any contestant who beats the previous years best by at least 1%. The 2007 Progress Prize winner, the KorBell team, was 8.43% better than CineMatch-based predictions. As of September 2008, over 39,000 contestants from 179 countries, organized into 3739 teams, had submitted over 30,000 valid programs and the top ten teams for 2008 were between 8.44 and 9.15% more accurate than CineMatch. What is the Netflix lesson? The Challenge community is promiscuous, but Netflix posed a very specific problem with very specific requirements for an acceptable solution: it had to be at least 10% more accurate in a company-generated test case than the Netflix algorithm, it had to be published in an open forum, and the publication had to include an explanation of how the algorithm worked. While opening the community to all comers, Netflix management wanted to be sure that the winning algorithm was not a fluke! Subjecting the algorithm to the scrutiny of the computing science community, as well as to the scrutiny of all of the losing teams, through publication is yet another way of mobilizing a community on behalf of a companys own interests. In this case, it is a self-motivated solution-checking community that needs no financial incentive to do the job required by Netflix! On a much smaller scale, Dell managed a local version of a Challenge community, keyed to its network of contract employees. When customer problems arose, a pre-identified subset of these employees were notified of the problem by email and then bid on solving it. b. A Facilitated Innovation Community InnoCentive was founded in 2001 as the worlds first open innovation community marketplace, spun off from an internal Eli Lilly exercise in community-style open innovation as documented in Chesbrough (2006).[source 4] Today, InnoCentive is a for-profit innovation broker, mediating between individual companies with problems to solve and a global community of some 160,000 potential problem solvers, a third of whom have advanced degrees in science or engineering. The community of problem solvers is promiscuous, but there is more interaction among problem solvers, who commonly selforganize into teams, than in the Goldcorp model. The major difference between InnoCentives use of community and the preceding instances is that the problems to be solved are not InnoCentives problems. InnoCentives business model is selling as a service its ability to mobilize communities of expertise on behalf of client companies, quickly, efficiently, and reliably. According to a study by the Harvard Business Review, almost 40% of problems posted by InnoCentive are solved to the satisfaction of its clients, with awards to solvers ranging from $5000 to $1 million. Part of InnoCentives additional value is its own community of full-time and consulting scientists and engineers who help client companies formulate problems before posting them, and filter submitted solutions to weed out the worthless or impractical ones. Pennsylvania-based PeopleForce uses a different model for creating value for clients by mobilizing on-demand communities focused on solving particular problems, performing tasks, or executing business processes. PeopleForce maintains a pool of hundreds of technical experts who, as appropriate, can be configured into a proprietary community, together with relevant personnel from the client company, and personnel from suppliers, partners, or customers. PeopleForce contracts directly with its clients to accomplish the clients goals and then employs its own WorkCenter workflow software to organize and manage the community that accomplishes those goals. The result is far more engaging for clients than outsourcing. Each community functions as an
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5. Operational Agile Communities extension of the clients own enterprise, but the client pays only for results, on a transaction-fee basis, not for the infrastructure required to achieve the results. c. Internal Innovation Communities Ace Hardware linked 300 dealers into a fairly simple network for a more efficient transfer of product experience and business information between and among the company and those dealers. As they did so, however, and at the instigation of Ace retail hardware store owners, the network evolved into a workplace community of over 5000 retail Ace Hardware stores. This expanded community allows retail store personnel to post problems they were having, exchange ideas and experiences, and bring the collective wisdom of thousands of people to bear on problems from the corporate level down to those of a local store. Aces community unleashed selfless-help resources from owners and employees across the community and led to increases in store sales that were much greater than the cost of the IT resources needed to support this community. Similarly, in 2006 Best Buy created a workplace community, called Blue Shirt Nation, for its employees, who spontaneously responded by using the resource to share experience, advice, successes and failures, boosting morale and store sales. Bell Canada initiated a study of how Social Network Analysis (SNA) could be used to create enhanced internal workplace communities. Using SNA, the company identified fourteen low- to mid-level managers who possessed what management determined was the ideal company mindset: they were committed, passionate, and competitive. These fourteen managers were then asked to identify the co-workers they trusted the most to work to the level they set for themselves. The result was an interactive, 2500-member community of best practices spread over 25 chapters at different Bell Canada sites. The activities of this community led to major increases in both employee and customer satisfaction ratings. With very little fanfare, Intel in 2005 enabled a company-wide community initiative developed by Josh Bancroft to capture personnel experience and expertise.
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Three years later, on a completely voluntary basis, the resulting Intelpedia had over 20,000 pages, was growing at the rate of 800 new pages a month, and registered 200,000 views per day, companywide. Advanced Micro, British Petroleum (BP), Cisco and IBM are among scores of companies that are using immersive 3-D virtual environments, like the one created by Second Life, as platforms for training, disseminating information to employees, running simulations, and for interactive virtual co-location of globally distributed members of agile teams. For example, new employees at any site in the world can attend training sessions in Second Life instead of meeting with HR people locally. Members of a new product design or development team, or a team created to solve a marketing, sales, or production problem, who may be physically located at sites thousands of miles apart, can meet in a secure virtual conference facility and interact as if they were together physically. In addition to such internal communities, a growing number of organizations are using virtual reality environments to create external communities that complement internal ones. Universities are creating presences on Second Life, primarily for purposes of recruiting, but some are also using these virtual facilities for teaching purposes. Other companies, among them Peugeot and Toyota, are using Second Life to engage customers in product design, development and evolution. Still others, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and The Gap, are using Second Life to create 3-D-like virtual stores in which customers, represented on screen as avatars, can engage in social shopping with friends. d. Mixed Internal-External Innovation Communities In 2000, Procter and Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley developed the Connect & Develop agile community strategy and committed the company to an open innovation model, supplementing P&Gs internal R&D capability with its staff of 7500. In 2006, the community of outsiders that it invited to propose new products, or solutions to production problems, was responsible for more than a third of all new P&G products and for some 80% of products that were commercial successes. See
5. Operational Agile Communities Chesbrough (2006).[source 4] P&Gs Web home page reveals how fully integrated this model is into its routine operations and corporate management has become an evangelist for open community approaches to innovation. In addition, P&G supports VocalPointa managed online community of 500,000 mothers who spread information by (digital) word of mouth on products in relevant P&G marketsas well as Tremor, a community of 250,000 teenagers who post their experiences with competitor products, P&G products, and teen trends in markets of interest to P&G. Learning to manage these communities has itself led to a new revenue stream for P&G, which now sells customer-based, word-of-mouth marketing services to other companies. What are the P&G lessons? First and foremost, the role of the CEO in driving downs into the organization the inescapability of a commitment to a community-based strategy. Lafley, like Rob McEwen, inherited a major inhouse R&D capability with an expectation that it would be invented here! Nevertheless, both Lafley and McEwen made opening the innovation process to a community of strangers stick. Second, that social computing-based strategies can be integrated even into the operations of an otherwise traditional bricks and mortar enterprise. Third, the open community approach to innovation was integrated into the existing Procter and Gamble R&D capability; it did not displace that capability. Easy to say, but this is a difficult corporate culture and mindset change to pull off, especially given the egos involved among R&D professionals. Fourth, that an open community whose members are unknown, self-selected, and change unpredictably can be a stable platform for sustained growth even for a very large corporation whose fate is tied to growth. Legos Mindstorms product family is an example of mobilizing a customer-based open community, this one focused on product development, applications and innovation. SAPs Ecosystem is yet another variation of this theme, helping customers find the distributed expertise they need to solve problems, grow, innovate, and form partnerships and networks. What generates growth for SAP customers generates growth for SAP in the process. The pre-pay cell phone company Virgin
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Mobile maintains a 2000-member community of highusage customers who report on new cell phone trends in exchange for bonus minutes, new cell phones, and prizes. SugarCRM is a leading customer relations management software package that was developed by its user community and offered free over the Internet, with millions of recorded downloads. Users use the software, announce bugs and post repairs, develop extensions, all for the good of the community. The paradigm of this was Linux, of course, which has steadily grown to become a major force in corporate computing and, for a free operating system, has spawned a profitable ecosystem of companies engaged in Linux development, implementation, and application. One Linux lesson is the importance, and commercial value, of technical support within a customer-centered ecosystem. Dell Corporations IdeaStorm, for example, is a customer community introduced by Dell to engage customers in the process of helping one another solve problems with their Dell computers and installed software, and helping Dell identify problems and opportunities for product development. At least one motive behind IdeaStorm was to take pressure off Dells beleaguered Help Desk and reduce technical support costs. The willingness of so many customers to join the IdeaStorm community and to contribute to it selflessly changed a negative to a (qualified) positive. It also gave Dell direct new information about how customers were using their products, how the products performed in customers hands, and what customers thought of them. Microsofts CodeBox [source 19], by contrast, is an internal social network, a platform for a self-organizing community of Microsoft employees exploring whether the community and collaborative concepts that underlie open source projects can be applied internally to Microsoft product engineering. Increased utilization of this community platform by Microsoft engineers is an early indication of the success of this initiative. e. Interactive Communities in a Portfolio Google, just 10 years old, has been a communityintensive company from the start, treating its employees as a pool of talent to be continually reconfigured to create
5. Operational Agile Communities new value. The company ideal is for that talent to be continually self-reconfiguring, and to that end personnel are allotted 20% of their time to pursue ideas of their own for fixing problems rather than living with them or, ideally, for new kinds of Google products and services. In fact, several high visibility Google products have emerged out of this free thinking time, among them, Gmail, Orkut, Google News, and AdSense. Anyone with a new idea can recruit others to work on that idea without approval from anyone. All the initiator of the idea has to do is persuade them to assign the time they spend on helping to develop it to their 20% time allowance! Ideas that other people find promising can thus be pushed to a considerable state of development before being proposed as an executable project. New ideas, at whatever stage of development, are routinely posted to Googles elaborate intranet, called MOMA, for open evaluation and ranking by all personnel. Well-developed ideas with a high community ranking typically get serious managerial attention. All Google personnel are required to maintain highly detailed, and self-critical, professional profiles, updated weekly on OKR (Objectives and Key Results) forms. In addition to the usual background education and preGoogle experience, these profiles must include all past and current work experience at Google, along with a selfanalysis of that individuals contributions to the projects they have worked on, a description of projects they would like to work on, and identification of near and middleterm goals. The profiles are open to the entire Google community. In principle, then, anyone can search the profiles to find people they dont personally know, but with the kinds of skills and work experience that match the requirements of a new project team. To assure that personnel maintain their profiles, OKRs are the sole basis for employee performance evaluation by management. This does justice to how critical profiles are to social networking-based business strategies. While many companies struggle to create such a community-centric database, Google achieves this end by making maintaining currency required for performance evaluation. f. Communities as Platforms
All but a small fraction of Googles revenues come from advertisements that are parasitic on its free-to-users services: search engine, Gmail, Google Earth, et cetera. What Google does is to create very large communities of users that then attract advertisers, so Googles business model and strategy, as well as its operations, are communities-intensive, and explicitly agile communitiesintensive. An interesting illustration of how Google mobilizes agile communities to generate revenues was Googles 2005 Audio Ads initiative, complemented by online newspaper and television ad initiatives. Googles existing software capabilities allowed it to create communities out of hundreds of U.S. radio stations, out of radio advertisers, and out of radio ad writers. Google then coupled these communities in ways that generate fees for Google even as each community benefits from the coupling. The radio stations always have unsold ad time slots, often at odd hours and close to broadcast time. Advertisers are always looking for low cost air time. Google manages real time auctions for unsold radio ad time slots, and these auctions typically generate higher prices than radio stations can get for these orphan slots on their own, so the radio stations benefit. Advertisers get a price break, so they benefit, but they then need ads in a hurry! This brings a third community into the picture: ad writers who, via a Google-mediated process, sell ads to advertisers that can be banked for use as appropriate, on short notice. This seemed promising enough that Google committed significant resources to Audio Ads, along with its newspaper and television analogues. Early in 2009, however, Google terminated its radio and newspaper ad communities because they had not demonstrated the anticipated growth and profitability; nor were they judged likely to do so in the prevailing depressed economic climate. Google retained the online television ad selling community, however, in spite of comparably lackluster performance, because of potential synergies with YouTube, now owned by Google. Both the launching of these three communities as attempts at leveraging Googles social computing competency, and the
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5. Operational Agile Communities termination of the radio and newspaper versions while retaining the television version (at least for the near term) hold valuable lessons for communities-based business strategies. Google, as well as Amazon (especially its Amazon Web Services division) and eBay, thrive on their ability to precipitate latent communities into actual ones in order to use them as platforms for revenue-generating services. Cisco and IBM, along with Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, and a rapidly growing number of established and start-up companies are pursuing business strategies and models based on selling agile community-exploitation tools to other companies. They are also integrating agile communities into their own operations. Like Navteq, but on a much larger scale, Ciscos strategy is to leverage its position in a global ecosystem of Internet users to create platforms for Ciscos own growth. Thus, Cisco is promoting its Connections Communities strategy as a proven means to reducing the costs of a companys business processes, improving their performance, and creating valuable new business capabilities. Ciscos market position in all this is as a critical enabler of mobilizing communities by making interoperability routine, from its packet switches to its communication services, and by providing Internet-based collaboration tools to build agile communities. To that end, Cisco bought WebEx to extend and integrate, its Voice over Internet Protocol phone and Internet video conferencing capabilities. The result is TelePresence, a dramatic and highly effective, comprehensive, and integrated videoconferencing package that Cisco uses internally and sells as a product. More recently, Cisco bought PostPath, an email software developer, and Jabber, a seller of commercial messaging solutions, primarily Instant Messaging software with corporategrade security and archiving capabilities. Ciscos goal is to provide an open, unified communications platform for community-supporting corporate and inter-corporate messaging services, a platform that will be compatible with existing choices of messaging software from Google, AIM, Microsoft, and Yahoo; hence the focus on interoperability. IBM is similarly committed to the gospel of communities-based collaboration and has likewise positioned itself as a provider of community mobilization infrastructure products and services. Closed systems, IBM argues, interfere with business agility. Silo-like, closed information systems need to give way to unified information solutions. This is made possible by IBMprovided tools for creating communities that allow their members to instantly, easily and securely share knowledge and expertise. Such IBM products as Lotus Connections, Domino, Sametime, UC2 (unified collaboration and communication), Quickr, FileNet Team Collaboration Manager, and PassItOn (for retaining the knowledge of retiring personnel) position IBM in this market. What IBM is doing here is selling infrastructure tools to encourage the creation of new, open-ended commercial ecosystems in which it will play a significant role. In the 1970s, the microcomputer operating system CP/M played such a role for a wide range of new products and services keyed to the first generation of personally owned computers (for example, the Altair). Shortly thereafter, the open architecture of the Apple II led to the emergence of an ecosystem comprising thounsands of companies selling their own hardware and software extensions of the Apple created box, and in the process selling lots of Apple IIs, long after that model was in principle superseded by the technologically more sophisticated first Mac model. By contrast, the closed architecture of that Mac prevented the formation of a Mac-centered ecosystem, which surely played some role in Apples market share collapsing relative to the IBM-and-clone PC and MSDOS combination. Cisco has also created an internal community platform within its Emerging Technologies Group, called the Idea Zone, or I-Zone. I-Zone is an open internal community: anyone can propose ideas for new products, processes, or markets, have them critiqued by others, and filtered for further development. This has been reinforced since 2007 by the Cisco I-Prize competition in which finalists get to develop full-fledged business models for funding by Cisco as new business ventures. Similarly, IBMs operations have assimilated open internal community-
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5. Operational Agile Communities based initiatives, including the IBM ValuesJam and an InnovationJam that resulted in ten candidates for new IBM-funded business ventures. g. Customer-based Agile Community Business Models Apples iPod is the poster child for mobilizing a community around a product that then serves as a platform for delivering a stream of revenue generating services. In 2008, these primarily remain songs downloaded from Apples iTunes store (over 4 billion of them to date), as video downloads have not taken off as rapidly as anticipated. Apples iPhone, initially closed to third party developers, has now been opened up by an Apple controlled and certified Application Store. The strategy is to tie the iPhones desirability to consumers to the creations of a community of applications developers, much as the Apple II owed its extraordinary longevity and profitability to thousands of third party hardware and software developers who created applications for it. Among a growing number of revenue generating web service products, Amazons Mechanical Turk is particularly illustrative of a community mobilizationbased business model. Mechanical Turk is a globally open marketplace in which Workers can perform tasks for Requesters, with Amazon receiving a percentage of the fee. The tasks involve work that cannot be done cost effectively now by computers and Requesters may require that Workers demonstrate competence before assigning the work to them. Mechanical Turk evolved into a commercial product for Amazon out of an internal need: eliminating duplicate Web pages on Amazons own sites. More visibly, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos decision to open the companys vast databases of customers and products to third party developers has made this information a platform for thousands of merchants, from whose profitable use of these databases Amazon derives substantial revenues. Angies List and Craigslist are highly profitable businesses based on online communities, in both cases inspired early on by the selfless help phenomenon: people freely offering to share their own experiences with strangers having problems. Craigslist, which attracts
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about a billion visits a month, is a digital job listing and classified merchandise listing service, with opportunities for interaction among participants that sustains a sense of community. The classified listings are free and supported by advertising, while the job listings are fee based. Angies List focuses on home repair service contractors and has expanded to include health care providers. Members, who pay a fee to join and now number some 600,000 nationally, routinely post comments on their experiences with contractors. In 2008, these postings ran to 20,000 per month and are the basis for rating contractors. As with Craigslist, Angies List provides the tools for members to share experience, advice, and recommendations; and people freely display the spirit that makes communities work. Threadless Ts is a commercial midget compared to the companies described above, but it is nevertheless a powerful illustration of another aspect of communitiesbased business models and strategies. Threadless Ts sells t-shirts with designs by people who visit its Web site. The designers use software provided by Threadless, can design anything they like, and of course are unpaid, though Threadless regularly announces contests with modest awards. All designs are posted on the Threadless Web site where viewers can rank them and order them. People who design a shirt often buy them for themselves or for a few friends and family members, but the popularity of the site means that some designs, typically those ranked high by viewers, sell thousands of copies. In a small margin, small scale, business niche, Threadless Ts has revenues of over $300 million, and it is representative of many more companies who are actively exploiting this same strategy and business model. Another illustration of a customer community-based business strategy is Brewtopia, an Australian company now selling custom branded bottles of beer, water, and wine. It began with a customer community-generated beer recipe that became a commercial success, largely through customer-driven activities, in the manner of Threadless Ts. The new beer was distributed to customer community members who rated the taste of sample batches as different combinations of ingredients and processing techniques were attempted by Brewtopia.
5. Operational Agile Communities Word of mouth made this customer-designed beer famous with no other advertising needed and customer participation in its creation surely played a significant role in its commercial success.
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5. Operational Agile Communities Agile Community Type a. Tournament-Style Innovation Communities Examples Goldcorp, Navteq, and Netflix Agile Community Lessons Learned a. Used promiscuous open communities, where members self select themselves. b. Used a self-motivated solution-checking ecosystem community that needed no financial incentive to do the job. c. Used third party agile facilitation and mobilization of an open community of experts. d. Used an open community with high interaction among problem solvers, who routinely self-organize into teams. e. Facilitated external sources into formation of networked community, such as including 300 dealers, 5000 stores into agile community for internal value creation as well as community based sharing and problem solving. f. Created a volunteer community of self help resources to share experience, advice, successes and failures, boosting morale and sales of users. g. Using Social Network Analysis (SNA) to create enhanced internal communities and share best practices. h. Formed and internally facilitated version of Wikipedia focused on the companies need to share the wisdom of crowds on company specific problems and opportunities. Specifically Intel created Intelpedia with 20,000 pages, and is growing 800 new pages a month, with over 200,000 views per day, which demonstrates the value it is providing. i. Using immersive 3-D virtual environments, internally and externally to avoid unnecessary travel, facilitate serendipitous interactions, and provide private and or public interaction space in cyberspace. j. Connect & Develop is an open Innovation strategy model used to generate 50% of new product ideas and implementations in a mixed internal-external community which has both structured and unstructured community members, such as over 70 facilitators define the opportunity, search internally and globally for potential solutions, which is a critical success factor of Connect & develop strategy k. VocalPoint - a managed online community of 500,000 mothers who digitally spread word of mouth on P&G products. l. Tremor, a community of 250,000 teenagers who share experiences with competitor products, for P&G. m. Used an open new product development community.
b. A Facilitated Innovation Community
InnoCentive Peopleforce
c. Internal Innovation Communities
Ace Hardware, Best Buy, Bell Canada, Intel, Advanced Micro, British Petroleum (BP), Cisco and IBM
d. Mixed Internal-External Innovation Communities
Procter and Gamble, Lego, SAP, Virgin Mobile, SugarCRM, Linux, Dell
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5. Operational Agile Communities Agile Community Type Examples Agile Community Lessons Learned n. User community developed CRM shared freely; IdeaStorm is just one example of this widespread idea. o. A community-intensive thinking is pervasive and the first way in which they attempt to solve problems and define new opportunities of this company well known for its success and innovation. p. Communities are continually self-reconfiguring and the culture of the company provides a community friendly organizational agility infrastructure. q. All people maintain detailed professional profiles, updated weekly with OKR (Objectives and Key Results). r. OKRs in profiles are the basis for all performance reviews, solving the problem that many face in how we can motivate our employees to keep skill inventories and profiles up-todate. s. Communities are created to interact with internal and external communities in the portfolio of communities that reflect this companies organizational agility operating style. t. When needed company precipitates latent communities into actual ones, to be used as platforms for revenue-generation. u. Company can be organized by creating a portfolio of communities. v. Keeping closed system can Interfere with business agility. w. Using personal and organizational connections in a communitys strategy. x. Integrate agile communities into operations. y. Idea Zone, an open internal community for idea sharing see (O above). z. Involving all employees worldwide in changing its values and a value based discussion that senior management found incredibly valuable by conducting jam. aa. Many companies are now recognizing the power of allowing users to innovatively develop social computing tools they value by facilitating the use of mashups and integrating them into for profit community tool sets. bb. Many tool companies build internal tools that they use and then use their experience and tools to develop and sell agile community-exploitation tools to other companies.
e. Interactive Communities In A Portfolio
Google, Cisco
f.
Communities as Platforms
Google, Amazon, eBay, Cisco and IBM, Microsoft, HP, Oracle
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5. Operational Agile Communities Agile Community Type g. Customer-based Agile Community Business Models Examples Apple, Amazon, PeopleForce, Angies List, Craigslist, Threadless Ts, Brewtopia Agile Community Lessons Learned cc. Many companies are now mobilizing an open community around a product that then serves as a platform for delivering a stream of revenue generating services. dd. Mobility and ease of use critical success factors in facilitated social agility. ee. Leading agility 2.0 companies now have a portfolio of communities with self selecting service providers, e.g. application developers and users on apple iPhone, iPod, computers etc. ff. A facilitated globally open community mobilization-based business model in which workers can perform tasks for requesters, like PeopleForce, Amazon, and others. gg. Utilize a profitable businesses model based on online selfless help volunteer communities, user members pay a fee for access. hh. Provide online access to product design tools for user community who self select and design products to be manufactured by the company. ii. Use an online community which votes on and helps choose products and their design. jj. Forming a community of users which will serve as an indirect advertising pool who spread word of mouth without an advertising budget.
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6. Leadership Needs To Know 6. What Leadership Needs To Know There is compelling evidence that acquiring the capabilities required for the routine, effective mobilization of agility 2.0 is critically dependent on an organizations executive leadership. Agility 2.0 is the 21st century version of Agility 1.0 as introduced by Goldman, Nagel, and Preiss (1995).[source 9] The CEO in particular must be perceived as a champion of agility and as committed to providing the resources needed to support agility. The CEO must be seen as reshaping strategic options in order to use agility to leapfrog competitors. Therefore, it is the CEO and the senior leadership team who must drive the agility commitment down through the organization by migrating to an agile organization, facilitating social agility by deploying appropriate tools and a supportive cultural environment, and developing a portfolio of agile communities. Leading by commitment to values, as in IBMs Values Jam, is a powerful agility leadership strategy. CEO Sam Palmisano recognized that the social agility approach can lead to bottom line-focused decentralized decision-making and that people are more likely to act on values if they have contributed to their identification and adoption. Agile leadership requires instilling an organization-wide proactive, future-oriented commitment to what the company can become. The senior leadership must be perceived by all to be setting new agility-reinforcing performance metrics, as actively assessing and monitoring community results, and as rewarding successful execution. We are in an Agile Environment Every enterprise/organization is already operating in a community-rich competitive environment, a minimally managed ecosystem of commercial, legal and social relationships. Using communities effectively is thus a next step beyond teaming, collaboration, alliances and
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focused networks towards managing a companys ecosystem more effectively. The key enabler of communities-based strategies is an agile information technology infrastructure. Leadership needs to know where their organization is now, where it could be relative to an agile community competency, how to get there from here, and what to beware of. Leadership Challenges Agile communities are rewriting how people relate to one another at work and at play, how they function within organizations and among organizations, and how organizational boundaries are defined. This change is already afoot and executives need to be proactive, not reactive, in adapting to it. Consider that so-called Millenials just entering the workforce expect to use social computing technologies. Not finding them integrated into the workplace will lead to gross underutilization of these personnel. At the same time, the pool of knowledge possessed by retiring Boomers, often indifferent or even hostile to social computing, is being lost. This knowledge can, however, remain coupled to enterprise objectives in effective ways by means of agile communities. It is up to a companys leadership, then, to implement processes for recruiting, retaining and developing people with the skills necessary to make communities work well for an organization. Another challenge to leadership from agile communities is learning that, while companies and organizations will continue to be identifiable in the new communities-intensive competitive environment, their operations will cross enterprise boundaries promiscuously. Leadership must become comfortable with open communities being the basis of innovations in how companies and organizations function as well as of innovations in what they produce and how they produce it. To the general public, at least, organizational identity in the agile community typically will mask the extent to which the goods, services, and solutions marketed by an organization as its own products, in fact are indebted to
6. Leadership Needs To Know outsiders: people and companies whose knowledge and operations are embodied in those products. In effect, the concept of a boundaryless organization is evolving from internal boundarylessness as championed by General Electric in the 1990s to external boundarylessness. Evaluation Metrics Change An analogous boundarylessness will become the norm for the professional identities of people within an agile communities-mobilizing organization, and this poses yet another challenge to leadership. People will need to be evaluated, recognized and valued, based on their actual contributions to internal and external communities, rather than on traditional job descriptions and assignments, type of degree and expertise, and place in an organizational chart. Success in mastering agile communities requires that senior management incentivize tacit interaction, cooperation, sharing and collaboration across the enterprise and outside the enterprise. Leadership is Critical It is impossible to overemphasize the role that the leadership of an organization must play if the organization is to be capable of using agility to create value for it. Only the leadership can make it routine for human resourcesfor people as carriers of knowledge, information and inter-personal skills of the sort that make organizational agility work wellto be shared within an organization opportunistically, regardless of reporting hierarchies or physical location, and for these resources to be configured and reconfigured as market opportunities and the mix of communities that a company is using change. Only the leadership can put into place personnel evaluation metrics that recognize the changing roles of personnel within the organization as well as their contributions to social agility. Only if the leadership makes it manifest how valuable agile communities are will personnel take the initiative to mobilize them. The First Commandment for the senior
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leadership is setting clearly articulated community goals. The second is the requirement for clear performance metrics and expectations. Implicit in the agility examples described in Section 5 is the availability of tools and infrastructure processes for identifying when a community approach to a task is called for, what kind of community is the right kind for that task, and for evaluating the performance of the community chosen. Especially when their use becomes routine, communities create a potential for abusefor example, in the form of vulnerability to loss of intellectual property that must be managed. Processes for accomplishing this need to be developed and implemented. Community exit strategies are just as important for leaders to articulate as community adoption strategies. Under Agility 2.0, the expectation of ecosystem agility performance is linked to new business strategies and models. Even traditional kinds of communitiesteams, partnerships, and networksneed to be adapted to the competitiveness requirements of the Agility 2.0 environment. Network Thinking The leadership of an enterprise must be aware that they are making decisions regarding an organization and its people that are in many communities and networks all of the time. This implies factoring network effects from the outset into the formulation and evaluation of new and existing business strategies and business objectives. The economy in which companies operate today is dominated by ecosystems of hierarchically nested communities of mutually interdependent, dynamically interacting enterprises. Every enterprise is situated simultaneously in multiple communities. In the past companies were largely insulated from the dynamic effects of ecosystem interactions by the speed limitations of the prevailing communication, transaction and interaction technologies. In todays digital information technology environment however, these protections no longer suffice, and senior management must strategize not only with their industry in mind, but that of the
6. Leadership Needs To Know complex set of ecosystem networks that govern their success or failure. personnel with tools and guidance for effective trust building: knowing who to trust, when to trust, how much to trust, and how to measure trust (for example, by ratings). Trust and loyalty are related concepts and therefore trust can be the basis of integrating loyalty to ones company with loyalty to the communities in which one participates. Typically, a community loyalty culture can implicitly or explicitly link members through an obligation not to let one another fail when that can be avoided by working together to help one another. The motivation for people selflessly helping other people commonly derives from commitment to the objectives of a community and a willingness to share knowledge in order to accomplish those objectives. Harnessing the power of selfless helping, whether internally or externally, requires recognizing that the primary loyalty of selfless helpers may not be to an organization or to fellow community members. The possibility of backfiring must also be taken into account, as developed in the cases of Jet Blue and Wal-Mart, among others. While hardware and software information technologies make agile communities viable and inevitable, there are no magic IT bullets that will make it happen: communities-based strategies are critically dependent on people and their characters, which open vulnerabilities and dangers as well as opportunities. Senior management should understand the different types of communities they can mobilize, what their distinctive capabilities are the match to the problem they are mobilized to solve and their distinctive support requirements. Value mapping [source 2] is a particularly useful analytic and visualization tool for identifying the right kind of community to adopt, what its goals ought to be, and how it should be constituted.
Ecosystem stakeholders and agile community members will have new kinds of needs that must be supported; those needs will be driven and defined by the functional requirements of creating value in dynamic, outcomes-driven relationships. Inherent in Agility 2.0 are strategies, as well as tools, for connecting people, changing boundaries, enhancing tacit interactions, integrating information, creating communities, and managing both portfolios of communities and the ecosystem in which communities must operate. Leadership Mandate What the leadership of a company committed to Agility 2.0 should know provides the rationale for what it will need to do if their organizations are to mobilize communities effectively on behalf of new strategies, operations and business models. Leadership must have and share a future-oriented vision. They must demonstrate by their behavior a proactive commitment to implementing that vision. Achieving the vision will require executives who support and facilitate broad-based participation in goal formulation and motivating people by using social agility tools and recognition systems. Senior management must therefore create and incentivize a culture that values connections, collaboration, sharing, and relationship building. New metrics, mindsets, leadership, decision-making, and structures will be needed to monitor and assess the performance of different kinds of agile communities. Evaluation metrics and rewards need to be synchronized to new business strategies, whether internal or external or both. Trust is critical to the productive functioning in an agile environment, so leaders must make trust a broadly distributed value in their organizations and provide
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7. Conclusions, and next steps ! 7. Conclusions and Next Steps Traditional organizational structures access only a small fraction of their employees knowledge and skills, and almost none of that possessed by outsiders, even that of customers and suppliers. At the same time, access to distributed knowledge, know-how and experience is more valuable in todays competitive environment than ever before. Although currently ad hoc and poorly understood, an emerging base of communication and collaboration technologies is enabling strategies that promise the development of an organizational agility that can reduce boundaries and enable access to openended knowledge and experience pools. We need to accelerate the understanding and deployment of organizational agility strategies by conducting research in the underlying technologies and by creating a cross-fertilizing interdisciplinary team which integrates computer science, behavioral science and business researchers. Why this is Important Social and technological changes, enabled by faster and cheaper computation and communication technologies make it possible to reduce the cost in both time and money of human interaction across the planet. While the cost of linking globally distributed people into coherent, highly interactive, boundaryless, agile communities has fallen, management structures and metrics in traditional organizations impede the development of agile communities. The mix of generations in the workforce means people react differentlysome thrive in agile organizations while others seek the comfort of a more traditional and rigid organization. Breaking these barriers is critical in todays business environment in which many corporations and virtually all supply chains are global. Even relatively localized organizations are dependent on an ecosystem-wide workforce distributed in both time and space. Those organizations (and those nations) that are sufficiently agile to exploit these opportunities will be the most likely to emerge from the current economic downturn as not only survivors but also as winners in the subsequent expansion. Establishing at Lehigh University an Institute for Leveraging Social Computing and Agility We believe that agile communities derive their power in part from information technology-enhanced relationships that amplify tacit interactions, and in part from innovative business models and strategies for leveraging those interactions. The result is that agility leads not only to efficiency but also to innovation. Before businesses can routinely deploy agility 2.0 capabilities, their managers must have at hand the technical and organizational frameworks that enable and support agility, and that assess results both by traditional means and through social computing tools themselves. To those ends, we envision creating at Lehigh a multidisciplinary yet integrated R&D initiative focused on the development and deployment of organizational agility tools, currently missing social computing technologies, and new business models and management strategies. Beyond this we seek to facilitate, promote and provide a framework for research, education and an open forum for discussing technical, behavioral and strategic issues. We shall integrate industrial, educational, and governmental partners with researchers and students to ensure the availability of realistic data, scientific analysis, test beds, and prototype environments. The envisioned institute would comprise an interdisciplinary team of university researchers from computer science, business, and human behavior disciplines with external industry and social partners to develop the scientific basis and supporting technologies for organizational agility. Such an initiative would build on the success of the multidisciplinary team of faculty, students and industry partners who collaborated in the production of this white paper identifying how social computing is enabling organizational growth and innovation.
If you would like to join our efforts as an individual contributor, organizational member, or supporter please contact us at agility@lehigh.edu
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Sources of Material for the White Paper Sources of Material for the White Paper 1. Ackoff R.L., Magidson.J., and Addison.H.J. (2006) Idealized Design: Creating an Organizations Future. Wharton School Publishing, Upper Saddle River, NJ. 2. Allee V., Value Network Analysis and value conversion of tangible and intangible assets, (2008), Journal of Intellectual Capital, 9(1): 5-24. 3. Baker S. (2008) The Numerati. Houghton Mifflin Company, New York. Chesbrough H. (2006) Open Business Models: How to thrive in the New Innovation Landscape. Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA. 4. Chesbrough H. (2006) Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology. Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA. 5. Friedman, T.L. (2006) The World is Flat. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York. 6. Fung V.K., Fung W.K., and Wind Y. (2008) Competing in A Flat World: Building Enterprises for A Borderless world. Wharton School Publishing, Upper Saddle River, NJ. 7. Gladwell M. (2002) The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Backbay, Boston. 8. Gloor P.A. (2006) Swarm Creativity. Oxford University Press, New York. 9. Goldman S.L., Nagel R.N., and Preiss K.P (1995) Agile Competitors and Virtual Organizations. Van Nostrand Reinhardt, New York. 10. Goldman, S.L., Nagel, R.N., Davison, B.D., Schmid P. (2009) Next Generation Agility: Smart Business Networks and Smart Communities, in Vervest P.H.M., Liere van D.W. and Zheng, L. The Network Experience, Springer, New York. 11. Howe J. (2008). Crowdsourcing. Crown Business, New York, NY. 12. Huston L., Sakkab N., (2006) Connect and Develop: Inside Proctor & Gambles New Model For Innovation in Harvard Business Review, March 2006. 13. Janneck C., Nagel R. N. Schmid P.D., Jarret D.R., Connolly M.L., Moll M.A. (2008) Smart Business Networks: Core Concepts and Characteristics, in Vervest P.H.M., van Hech E. and Preiss K. Smart Business Networking. Erasmus University, Rotterdam. 14. Kanter R.M., (2008), Transforming Giants, Harvard Business Review, Cambridge, MA. 15. Lencioni P.M. (2006) Silos, Politics and Turf Wars. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA. 16. Li C. and Bernoff J. (2008) Groundswell: Winning in a world Transformed by Social Technologies. Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA.. 17. Libert B. and Spector J. (2008) We Are Smarter Than Me. Wharton School Publishing, Upper Saddle River, NJ. 18. Livingston G. and Solis B. (2007) Now Is Gone - A Primer on New Media for Executives and Entrepreneurs. Bartleby Press, Savage, MD. 19. Microsoft, (2007) Open Source at MicrosoftCodeBox: Bringing the Open Source Approach InHouse!"#$%&'(')*"+'&,'&-*$'./"
http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/6/7/267E8 B26-B94B-4BF6-88E832B3B3AF6F09/CodeBox_vfinal.pdf"Last visited on
March 17, 2009. 20. Nagel, R., Dove, R. (1991): "21st Century Manufacturing Enterprise Strategy" (Volumes 1 & 2), November 1991. 21. Nagel R. N., Walters J.P., Gurevich G., and Schmid P.D. (2004) Smart Business Networks Enable Strategic Opportunities Not Found in Traditional Business Networking, in Vervest P.H.M., van Hech E., Preiss K. and Pau L.-F. (eds.) Smart Business Networks. Springer, New York. 22. Ogle R. (2007) Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity and The New Science of Ideas. Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA. 23. Page S.E. (2007) The Difference - How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. 24. Preiss K. P., Nagel R.N., and Goldman S.L. (1996) Cooperate to Compete. John Wiley, New York. 25. Raymond E.S. (1999) The Cathedral and the Bazaar. OReilly, Cambridge. 26. Scoble R., and Israel S. (2006) Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers. John Wiley, Hoboken, NJ.
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Sources of Material for the White Paper 27. Shirky C. (2008) Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. Penguin Press, NY. 28. Shuen A. (2008) Web2.0: A Strategy Guide. OReilly Media, Inc., Sebastopol, CA. 29. Shuman J., Twombly J., and Rottenberg D. (2001) Collaborative Communities: Partnering for Profit in The Networked Economy. Dearborn Trade, Dearborn, MI. 30. Slowinski G. (2005) Reinventing Corporate Growth. Alliance Management Group Inc., Gladstone, NJ. 31. Stross R. (2008) Planet Google-One Companys Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know. Free Press, San Francisco, CA. 32. Surowiecki J. (2004) The Wisdom of Crowds. Random House, New York. 33. Tapscott D. and Williams A.D. (2006) Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Penguin, New York. 34. Trompenaar F. and Hampden-Turner C. (1998) Riding the Waves of Culture. McGraw-Hill, New York. 35. Vervest P.H.M., Liere van D.W., Zheng, L. (2009) The Network Experience, Springer, New York.
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White Paper Sponsors, Facilitators & Participants White Paper Sponsors, Facilitators & Participants Faculty Facilitators for the White paper ! ! ! Roger N. Nagel, Computer Science & Engineering Steven L. Goldman, Philosophy Brian D. Davison, Computer Science & Engineering 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. Brian D. Davison, Computer Science & Engineering Steven L. Goldman, Philosophy Jeff Heflin, Computer Science & Engineering Xiaolei Huang , Computer Science & Engineering Henry F. Korth, Computer Science & Engineering Lin Lin, Management Roger N. Nagel, Computer Science & Engineering Greg Reihman, LTS Faculty Development Catherine M. Ridings, Management Robert E. Rosenwein , Sociology and Anthropology George P. White, Education and Human Services Emory Zimmers, Industrial & Systems Engineering
Sponsors The facilitators gratefully acknowledge the incredible support, guidance and advice of the four sponsoring organizations and their principle representatives in our effort. Without them and their leadership this paper would not have been possible. ! ! ! ! Ken Anselmo, Air Products Allan Frank, AKA Group Ken Mullner, National Adoption Center Robert Alpago & Chad Kusko, Pennsylvania Infrastructure Technology Alliance(PITA)
Contributing Students Students make a real differencethey are our inspiration; we learn from them and depend on them to do the real work. Their incredible efforts and enthusiasm for this project were the most important factors in our ability to create this white paper. We gratefully acknowledge them and their success. 1. Chang An, PhD student, Computer Science 2. Lauren Marie Berenato, BS Industrial & Systems Engineering 3. Siddhartha Bhattacharya, MBA 4. Greg Bosch, MS, Computer Science 5. Greg Bringhurst , BS in Mechanical Engineering (Virginia Tech) 6. Jared Cary, BS Psychology 7. Tara Ginsberg, BS Finance and Economics 8. Don Holloway, MBA Corporate Entrepreneurship 9. Liangjie Hong, PhD student, Computer Science 10. Saptarshi Kar, MS, Computer Science 11. Xavier Otero Keil, BS Computer Science and Business 12. Edward Lebow, BS Computer Science and Business 13. Liam Page, BS Computer Science 14. Kaustubh Pansare, MS Computer Science 15. Stephanie Rosamilia, BS in Business 16. Rebecca Rovner, BS Computer Science
We also gratefully acknowledge the Enterprise Systems Center (ESC) at Lehigh University under the inspired guidance of its director, Emmory Zimmers Jr. for providing leadership, an organizational home, logistical support, and access to their research staff. White paper Research Associates The facilitators gratefully acknowledge the critical role played by our two research associates; their expertise and dedication have been invaluable in creating this white paper ! ! Li Qian, Research Associate, Computer Science & Engineering, Lehigh University Napoleon Devia, President and CEO, PyCyL Inc.
Contributing Faculty The ideas in this white paper are the results of a set of twelve dedicated Lehigh faculty members mobilizing students, industry associates, and sharing their own ideas.
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White Paper Sponsors, Facilitators & Participants 17. Patrick Schmid, , PhD student, Computer Science 18. Matthew Serel, BS Computer Science and Business 19. Rebekah Simonds, PhD student in Education 20. Ryan Templin, BS IBE & Computer Engineering 21. Yu Tian, MS Computer Science 22. Hemant Tyagi, MS Electrical Engineering 23. Jessica Umlauf, MBA 24. Jian Wang, MS Computer Science 25. PingPing Xiu , PhD student, Computer Science 26. Xiang Zhou, PhD student, Computer Science 27. Andy Zimmers MS Education & Education leadership Other Participants The facilitators gratefully acknowledge the advice of the following people. Each of these people participated in a meeting, conversation, interview, phone call, or private discussion in which they provided feedback, advice and guidance to our team. Many of these people attended several meetings, discussions, etc., and recruited others to help as well. We consider them to be an extended agile community who crossed borders and boundaries to enhance our effort. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. Harita S. Achanta, Scitech Patent Art Services, Inc. Monty Alger, Air Products Verna Allee, ValueNetworks, LLC. Timothy Allen, Crompco/Peregrine Salon Bob Alpago, Pennsylvania Infrastructure Technology Alliance, Lehigh Univ. Ken Anselmo, Air Products Richard R.Antcliff, National Aeronautics and Space Administration Adaobi N. Arpino, IBM Jan Baan, CORDYS Don Bain Bill Barnes, Lattice Technology, Inc. Ayelet Baron, Cisco Dallas Beddingfield, Evolution Computing Susan J. Bird, Flying in Formation Inc. Lenore Blum, Carnegie Mellon University
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16. Anthony M.Boccanfuso, University-Industry Demonstration Partnership 17. Karen Bohanon, Cisco 18. Ross Born, JustBorn 19. Theo Bouts, Zurich Insurance Company 20. Scott Brinks, Agility 21. Jim Brown, Aberdeen Research 22. Alexandra Buczek, National Adoption Center 23. Richard Buday, Archimage 24. Geoffrey Butlin, TranscenData Europe Limited 25. John E Callies , IBM 26. Steve Cameron, Air Products 27. Karen Campbell, Air Products 28. Rusty Campion, F.L.Smidth 29. Kevin Casey, Collages 30. Lorraine Casler, Kraft Foods Global, Inc 31. Carolyn Castillo, Boeing 32. Jean Catan, TLA video 33. Marisa Chancellor, Cisco 34. Surendra K.Chawla, GoodYear 35. Bobby Chen, Air Products 36. Gang Chen, Beijing Changjiu Logistic Company 37. Michael Chupa 38. Martha Cichelli, Software Consulting Services, Inc. 39. Richard Cichelli, Software Consulting Services, Inc. 40. Chad M. Clancy, Modjeski and Masters, Inc. 41. Mike Coleman, Geometric Technologies, Inc. 42. Martha Collins, Air Products 43. Robert Coraor, Air Products 44. Ron Crane, Air Products 45. Amanda Cui 46. Jim Culberson, Matrix 47. Chris Dallas-Feeney, New Frontier Advisors, LLC 48. Yossi Dashi, Ben Gurion University of the Negev School of Management 49. Mills Davis, Project10X 50. Christian De Neef, Biznessence Europe 51. Robin Deily, LTS client services, Lehigh University 52. Mike Dever, YouChoose.net 53. Napoleon Devia, PyCyl 54. Joan DiMicco, IBM 55. John Dodd, Air Products 56. Al Dunn, The Network Foundation SBNi
White Paper Sponsors, Facilitators & Participants 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. Nancy Easterbrook, Air Products Nancy Eickman, Honeywell Mo Elbana, Seidel Enterprises Ken Elliott Thomas J. Eltringham, Air Products Christos Faloutsos, Carnegie Mellon University Gary Fedder, Carnegie Mellon University Alan Feiertag, Volvo Eden Fisher, Carnegie Mellon University Ludo Fourrage, Microsoft Craig Fox, AKA Don Fox Allan Frank, CIO office, City of Philadelphia Sara Gao, Universum Dan Garms, Garms Group Deirdre Gillin, Collages Craig Gomulka, Draper Triangle Ventures Dave Goodman, Softassist Vince Grassi, Air Products Sarah Grey, CETRA, Inc. H. Robert Gustafson, Enterprise Systems Center, Lehigh University Ken Hall, Gensler Grant Hartman, Chariot Solutions Ken Heft, Microsoft Douglas Heintzman, IBM Philip B.Henderson, Air Products David Herman, PeopleForce Gloria Hochman, National Adoption Center Tim Holt, Air Products Brad Holtz, Cyon Research Rick Ingram, License Tracker Inc. David Isbitski, Microsoft Patty Ivansheck, IBM Christine Jacobs, National Adoption Center Chris Jones, Small Business Development, Lehigh University Sharon Kalafut, Computer Science and Engineering, Lehigh University Kostas Kalogeropoulos , Meyer Jabara Hotels Sijin Karayil, National Instruments Neil Kleinman, College of Media and Comm / Univ. of the Arts
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Herb Klotz, Air Products Trissa Koda, Hershey Company David Krackhardt, Carnegie Mellon University Elizabeth N.Kraftician, Touchstone Research Laboratory, Ltd. 100. Chad Kusko, Pennsylvania Infrastructure Technology Alliance, Lehigh University 101. Adolfo Lagattolla, Scientec Italia srl 102. Chris Lamb, IBM 103. Phil LeDuc, Carnegie Mellon University 104. Shuh-Yuan Liou, Ford 105. Doug Litzenberg, BVI Precision Materials 106. C.H. Low, Orbius 107. Kelly Lyman, IBM 108. Mike MacDougall, Enterprise Systems Center, Lehigh University 109. Peter Marks, Design Insight 110. Michelle Marquard, Cisco 111. MaryAnn Mascia , IBM 112. David R Millen, IBM 113. Tiffany Miller, Collages 114. Suzanne O Minassian, IBM 115. David K. Moldoff, Academy One 116. Matt Mossholder, GSK 117. Khaled Moussa, Adobe Systems Incorporated 118. Ken Mullner, National Adoption Center 119. Jeffrey Myers, Information Technology, Lehigh University 120. Marilyn Nagel, Cisco 121. Rick Neulight, National Management Strategies, Inc., 122. Jason Niemi, Kraft Foods Global, Inc 123. Drs. Marcel van Oosterhout, RSM Erasmus University 124. Scott G. Opitz, Altosoft Corp 125. Joel Orr, Orr Associates, Inc. 126. Steve Pateuk, MFG.COM 127. Thomas P.Pennino, TPTECH, LLC 128. H. R. (Pent) Penton, Louisiana State University 129. Stephen Perelgut, IBM 130. Luis Perez, Merck 131. Tim Pettigrew, GSK 132. Bob Picciano, IBM
96. 97. 98. 99.
White Paper Sponsors, Facilitators & Participants 133. Robert Porter Lynch, Warren Company 134. Kenneth Preiss, Ben Gurion University 135. Richard Probst, SAP Labs, LLC 136. Stan Przybylinski, DASSAULT SYSTEMES 137. Lisa Purvis, Xerox 138. Peter Qian, CORDYS 139. Joy Quinn, Quintessential Solutions, LLC 140. Norm Racine, Collages 141. Eileen Rafferty, Collages 142. Robert Richards, Stottler Henke 143. Michael Riddle, Evolution Computing 144. Jack Ring 145. Dave Roberts, Air Products 146. Paul Rooijmans, Purple-Orange 147. Bill Rowland 148. Philip Russell, Weyerhaeuser 149. John Russo, ComputerAid 150. Irv Safra , Safra Associates 151. Maria Sarkar, DriveWorks Ltd 152. Paul Saylr, GSK 153. Lisa Schaller, Silberline 154. Jeffrey Schick, IBM 155. Gerrit Schipper, RDC 156. Bernie Schonbach, BVI Precision Materials 157. Dave Schreffler, SAPER VEDERE LLC 158. Randy Seidel, Seidel Enterprises 159. Brian K. Seitz, Intellectual Arbitrage Group 160. Reid R. Senescu, Stanford University 161. Fee Sepahi, CETRA, Inc. 162. Rhonda Serkey, HelpMeRhonda 163. Jeffrey Shuman, The Rhythm of Business, Inc. 164. Dan Siewiorek, Carnegie Mellon University 165. Elizabeth Simmons, Lehigh University 166. Baan Slavens, IBM 167. Carrington Smith, Air Products 168. Michael Spear, University of Rochester 169. Jiri Stejskal, CETRA, Inc. 170. Dave Stever, PPL Corp. 171. Linyan Sun, Xi'an Jiaotong University 172. Doug Sunday, Enterprise Systems Center, Lehigh University 173. Joel Sutherland, Center for Value Chain Research, Lehigh University
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174. Francis (Frank) Taney, Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney 175. Steven Thomas, Boeing 176. Jim Thompson, Bayer material Science 177. Heng Tian, Shenzhen ADA Auto System Co. Ltd 178. Rob Totterdale, TB Consulting 179. Zoran M.Trifkovic, Zurich Management Group 180. Bill Trosky, Carnegie Mellon University 181. Sascha Trck, Zurich Insurance Company 182. Jennifer Vatza, Moore College of Art and Design / Peregrine Salon 183. Robert Vero, Air Products 184. Peter Vervest, Rotterdam School of Management - Erasmus University 185. Heidi Votaw, IBM 186. Ed Web, Seidel Enterprises 187. Sara Weber, IBM 188. Jeff Weiser, CETRA, Inc. 189. Todd Welch, Charter Partners 190. Angela Wende, CETRA, Inc. 191. John Wesner, Carnegie Mellon University 192. Erik Whalen-Pedersen, Kraft foods, Global Research 193. George Witmer, Air Products 194. Yannick Wittner, DASSAULT SYSTEMES 195. Martin C.M.Wong, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University 196. Xiaobo Wu, Zhejiang University 197. Jianming Xu, Tang Investment Group (China) Co.,Ltd. 198. Michele Yohanna, IBM 199. Ming Yu, Tsinghua University 200. Stephen Zanias, Northrop Grumman 201. Shu Zhang, Harbin Institute of Technology 202. Sherri B. Zimmerman, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

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Migrating to Agility 2.

Roger N. Nag Steven N Goldman, Brian D. Da R gel, N. avison, 2009 9 !

versity Lehigh Univ Bethlehem, PA 18015 9 March 2009

Examples of 3rd Wave f

extend the outcomes of intra- and inter-enterprise collaboration.

b. A Facilitated Innovation Community

c. Internal Innovation Communities

d. Mixed Internal-External Innovation Communities

e. Interactive Communities In A Portfolio

Google, Amazon, eBay, Cisco and IBM, Microsoft, HP, Oracle

96. 97. 98. 99.

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