Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Twitter for Africa and Good Governance

Today I co-facilitated a session on Governance with Daniel Kaufmann, the Director, Governance and Anti-Corruption World Bank Institute.  In his post before the session, he distinguishes between e-government and m-government:

...But e-government, focused on government services, has under-emphasized broader aspects of governance, particularly those where citizens and institutions outside of government play a key role.  People have not been at the center of e-government, and e-government applications have often been static and immobile, relying on IT infrastructure which is out of reach for most locations and citizens in developing countries.

But the good news is that recently a dynamic IT-revolution has been afoot,  placing the citizen center stage.   It is m-governance, or ‘Governance-on-the-Go’ (GonGo), with the focus on (mobile) governance rather than only on government.  ’GonGo’ is enabling open, fluid and interactive ways for people to relate with each other and with institutions, including civil society and NGOs, the private sector, media, parliaments, and also public institutions.

Daniel frames the opportunity to put people in governance through mobility, and for good reason.  Africa has 20% mobile penetration and 80% of the population has access to the network through those with mobile devices.  This bridging function is common in the developing world and has its own design considerations (see Genevive Bell's research). 

Daniel went so far in the session to suggest there may be a Twitter for governance for the 3rd World (he also said there was really four worlds).  Picture open source identi.ca with a specialize mobile interface.  Not just as a tool for communication across citizen networks, or flash mobs, but for governments to communicate internally and with citizens.

I'll try recap the session in another post.

BrainstormTech: Making the world better?

I'm at Fortune BrainstormTech, an event that relates technology to the bigger problems it can solve.  Tomorrow I am moderating a lunch lab on the problem of Governance, with Daniel Kaufmann, Director, Governance and Anti-Corruption, World Bank Institute.

Managing Editor Andy Serwer introduced Brainstorm to attendees as "a respite from the problems you work on and talk about bigger problems we can solve" and recommending  "Try to be cool and immerse yourself in the stew of the people and what is about to happen."

"What makes it different is trying to understand technology in the context of how it is changing," said David Kirkpatrick.  "A lot of reporters and bloggers are here, so whatever that means to you, keep it in mind."

What's Tech got to do with it?

• Marc R. Benioff
                      Founder, Chairman, and CEO
                      salesforce.com, Inc.
• Michael S. Dell
                      Chairman and CEO
                      Dell Inc.
• Gary Hamel
                      Director, Management Lab.  (has a new book)
                      Visiting Professor, London Business School
• Christiane Salm

Is tech making the world better?

Dell: of course.  Majority of the new internet users today are from developing countries, total is doubling from 1B to 2B in two years, 500k new internet users a day.  Economic growth is driven by technology, but it is just the beginning.  Is it changing politics?  Sure, I'm not the world's expert on the topic.  Sure, but that's why I asked.  The whole idea of empowerment, the theme of this conference.  One clear change is that countries used to be isolated and competitive.  When you think about staying competitive individually, company or country, the dynamics are radically changed.  Raises serious questions, particularly for developed societies, where here in the US we have a disperportion of the population vs. wealth.  The pie will get a lot bigger and we have to adjust.

Hamel: Unarguably so.  We have to think about our purposes for technology, and if they are getting better.  The net is empowering people like never before in history.  For the first time we are emancipating human imagination and it will change everything. You find creative apatheid in some places and we will put a light to it.  My interest is in the social technology of management.  We are using 100 year technology in the enterprise.  The average company 100 years ago had 4 employees and  9/10 worked for themselves, but then in 25 years all that change, because of the invention of this kind of technology called management.  We are going to see a bigger impact when technology changes the way organizations are  structured and decisions are made.  Something more dramatic in the beginning of this century and it will make a lot of managers today very uncomfortable..

Dell: We put our big ears on.  Listened.  But the mechanisms you could use to listen went massively turbocharged with the net.  We will have 2B conversations with our customers this year.  Somethign fundamentally different managerially?  The nature of the tools changes how groups are formed and managed.  A central top down organization will not be the most responsive, engaged and creative.  We are creating new businesses all the time as teams see new opportunities and it is not as centrally planned as it once was.

Benioff:  Its not just Michael talking with his customers, but his customers talking with each other and then talking with him as a collective.  Something unprecedented.  With IdeaExchange, with our product managers, they have less to do and do a better job.  We have a lot less responsiblity and can look to the customers.  Not listening to the customer, but collaborating, iterating and sharing.  The innovations on Mystarbucksidea.com.  CEOs are not superman, you can't do it all, and this technology lets you listen to the customer.  The world is faster because of technology, not sure if it is better and dont want to get into the debate, keeping up with the acceleration, the internet as the great accelerator, will make our company better because we can listen.

Salm: I wonder if from a mangement perspective it becomes hard to manage the complexity.  We have more data and it may be hard to decide and keep sight within speed.  Managing companies with changes in organizational structures with network and heirarchies.  500 years ago Gutenberg was born in my town in Germany, allowed a new religion.  Disruptions across industries, media having real real challenges, I think it will change our society more than it will change our businesses.  Busnesses have to adapt, but societies do change and their change will have a bigger impact.

Is there is more willingness in Web 2.0 stuff to think in bigger terms?

Benioff: Clinton said a change in the world requires a change in conciousness.  Even in our own myopic world, Scott from Intuit called it the fall of Rome.  There is a big shift, with the internet.  (he said web 3.0 so I stopped typing)  We are going to get to a point where we see a radical step in terms of what this industry will deliver in the next 10 years.

Hamil in the late 18th cent

Hamil: structural reform needs to happen for the world to take advantage of this technology.  we used to be isolated, now you can bring capital and talent from anywhere in the world.  If you aren't part of that world you are still on the outside looking in.  Where terrorism emerged.  A lot more has to happen.  I am optimistic, but don't want ot be pollyannish about how technology will even out disparities without other changes.

Salm: Germans are known for things, like mp3, but the business was made somewhere else.  Competitive and entrepreneurial environment is not what we are good at, makes me sad, but our culture is not to take risk.  Germany as a market always works because it is the largest.  But I don't worry too much about it, we will be good enough to compete, and within Europe it is different. Scandinavia and UK pick up technology quickly.  My worries for Europe are not about inventiveness, but rather demographics.  Europe is growing substantially older than the US.  What does that mean for the other trends?

Hamel: Sometimes we over estimate cultural differences, what most limits innovation is how we are managed.  In the creative economy, it is working against us.  Towers Perin survey of 80k people across the world about about how emotional and intellectually engaged they are at work, no more than 20% engaged.  The scandal of management is that we habve feudal systems that are better at harnassing the customer's imagine than their employees.  Whereever you look at technology it is not friendly to heriarchy.

Vint Cerf: The internet has show it is possible to do these things, so we can't go back, but we need to make it work.  I agree with Mark about platforms for innovation, but innovation at scale is something that is new.

Benioff:  What's new is the internet as a platform at scale. What it indicates to me is that if we are moving from transaction to collaboration to innovation -- this country needs innovation today.

Hamel: If you polled the top guys in the F500 50 years ago about if they could create the internet, the couldn't.  It is imporant to have a competence to define you, but today it is more interesting to find your platfom advantage.

Esther Dyson: the word I heard missing was risk, a bigger difference than mangement when it comes to innovation.  Now startups need little money to take the risk.

Dell: An advancement of technology can accelerate a disruption that is already happening, in the job market for example.

Benioff: With an increased focus and emphasis on risk, we in the industry have a call for transparency, at the vendor or user level. Its like SarBox for the network.  Otherwise you lose trust.  Trust only comes from a level of transparency in the system.

The industry has reached a point where the society is so reliant on its products, that perhaps the industry needs to take its responsibility seriously?

Brian Dear: Cover story on Fortune about Tesla.  Where is the platform in the auto industry?  To let 100 Tesla's

Dell: The roads are already there.

Will this change the kind of leadership in businesses? More political philosophers?

Dell: This is the information age and what we need are people that are good at connecting.  You

Hamel: if you look on the web you find heirarchies, but they are natural, meritocritous.  Same thing will happen in organizations.  The single reason companies get in trouble is management's mental models depreciate faster than their power.  The architecht of the internal collaboration platfom will rise.

Brad Smith, CEO of Intuit, on How does an established company transform how it innovates? 

Now the most profound change management challenge, to where end users create the value themselves and see others to do so together.  It is challenging all of our beliefs: management, customer experience.  And as a new CEO where I walk in thinking we are a good baseball team and found myself on a football field.  How do we harness this and create value.  Like Dell said about putting on big ears.  We ask ourselves three questions:

1. Are we paying our employees to do work that our customers would volunteer to do and can do it better than us?  Turbotax Live Community, 40% of the customer questions answered by customers, with better answers and it cost us next to nothing
2. Are we sitting on a gold mine of data?  Who people want to talk turns out to be other small business owners. We have to figure out to connect those people and now we are 50% SaaS and if we can get people to liberate QuickBooks databases it benefits everyone.
3. Will our 25 years of success be an accelerant or an inhibiter?  The answer, we are discobvering is with our youth.  Generation Y is telling us what to do differently. 

Innovation is a moving target and it doesn't come with instructions. We are learning from you, used to be called plagarism, now we call it benchmarking.

iPhone Apps: What's Your Top Five?

I broke down and got a 3G iPhone.  Thumb reduction surgery pending.  On twitter, I asked people what their top five apps where, and here you go:

             

	mariosundar   @Ross here are my Top 10 Free iPhone App picks -            about 1 hour ago from web               in reply to Ross
	glemak   @Ross there's a room in friendfeed dedicated to this too ross - http://friendfeed.com/rooms...          about 1 hour ago from FriendFeed               in reply to Ross
	Cmoose   @Ross most useful: weatherbug. Most fun: phonesaber.          about 2 hours ago from twitterrific               in reply to Ross
	johnmac13   @Ross twitterific, Facebook, googletalk, aim          about 2 hours ago from twitterrific               in reply to Ross
	philwhln   @Ross My number one is definately the iTunes "Remote". But I'm only on the iPod touch here          about 2 hours ago from web               in reply to Ross
	gwachob   @Ross PhoneSaber, Jirobreak, Cube Runner and of course, Twitterific. 3 games + twitter. OH, YAH AND PANDORA TOO!          about 2 hours ago from twhirl               in reply to Ross
	Joseph_di_P   @Ross eReader, Instapaper; trying to decide between OmniFocus & Evernote; still looking ;-)          about 2 hours ago from Hahlo               in reply to Ross
	DougToombs   @Ross For non-games, it's Loopt, Yelp, UrbanSpoon (the "sleeper" best app), SmugShot, Shazam.          about 2 hours ago from twitterrific               in reply to Ross

The biggest missing app is something good and free from Flickr.  I was happy to find an alternative, Typepad:

Mobile. Blogging. Cats.

Alan Lepofsky Joins Socialtext

Alan Lepofsky just blogged that he has joined Socialtext as Director of Marketing.  I'm excited to work directly with him, as his passion and expertise in collaboration.  He most recently served as Senior Strategist for Lotus Software at IBM.  Ed Brill, who first introduced me to Alan, puts it better than titles:

Alan's contributions to the IBM Lotus business over the last ten years have been immeasurable.  Many know Alan as a visible member of the Lotus community -- a speaker during Lotusphere keynotes and breakouts, user groups and IBM conferences; constant contributor to the "Notes.net" and Business Partner discussion forums; Penumbra "Prism" award winner; and, of course, passionate blogger.  What is less well-known externally are his contributions to Lotus's business and technical strategy over the last ten+ years.  Alan has had direct influence on successful projects in our partner/channels organization, business strategy, and technical direction.  I can honestly say I've never worked with someone as passionate as Alan -- he is always willing to push for what is needed, even when that might be unpopular or politically challenging. As recently as last week, I saw him updating strategy documents, conducting brainstorming sessions, and pushing for more Notes technical integration.

I look forward to raising the bar in our marketing efforts with Alan, and also enhancing our partnership with Lotus Connections.

Who is on my team, anyway?

Larry Irons digs ups some old research to show that distributed collaboration isn't just about getting your team on the same page.  But figuring out who the team is in the first place.

Those advocating Enterprise 2.0, especially wikis, may consider the benefits described back in 2002 by Mortensen and Hinds obvious. However, I’d be surprised if managers in global organizations using cross-functional teams would agree that, on average, only 75% of the employees on any given distrbuted team agree about who is, and who is not, on their team. The implications for collaboration are significant. At the same time that wiki applications such as Socialtext People provide increased awareness of the boundaries of a team, they also increase the likelihood of finding people outside the team with expertise relevant to team challenges, resulting in more boundary spanning across teams. Overall, information sharing within teams and across teams increases.

Sounds like the making of a great Dilbert cartoon, outside the cubicles. 

But this distributed problem is widely distributed.  85% of knowledge workers engage in distributed collaboration.  That's a lot of nebulous teams.

Outbid by Google

Steve Lohr has an interesting post comparing networked competitive strategy.  Whereas Microsoft may have hard power from direct network effects, Google has soft power from indirect network effects.  Theory aside, something caught my eye:

Still, dominance alone is not an antitrust problem. The issue is the powerful company’s behavior, says Andrew I. Gavil, a professor at the Howard University School of Law. “You have to be big and bad, not just big,” he said.

The telltale signs of a company’s bad behavior include raising prices, hindering innovation and excluding competitors. There is no evidence that Google is engaged in suspect behavior, but it could be hard to spot. Its ad auction system, for example, is essentially a private marketplace run by Google, without much disclosure to advertisers or to Web publishers.

For the record, I think Google is good.  But I have a question.  What about when Google itself outbids you on Adwords?  Now this isn't the biggest thing in the grand scheme of things, but they seem to win every auction I compete in and effectively raise prices.

UPDATE: some good clarification in my Flickr comments:

Alex. C. says: Google's internal ads actually compete with other ads, so Google is not always #1: img369.imageshack.us/img369/9528/googleintern aladspj9.png

Check Matt Cutts' post from 2006: www.mattcutts.com/blog/im-on-debunking-duty/ which replied to a sensationalistic article about the same topic. There's also  a post on AdWords blog about this: adwords.blogspot.com/2006/12/google-advertisi ng-on-adword... . The second comment from an interesting Nicholas Carr post ( www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/12/when_the_a uctio.php#co... ) explains why it's not in Google's interest to play unfair.

Service and the Fifty Percent Rule

Next time you go into an Apple store, notice that 50% of the space is for retail sales and 50% for service and support.  I overheard this weekend that it is the most profitable arrangement in the history of retail. 

True or not, it is curiously obvious that complex products not only need after-market support, but giving it equal treatment increases profit through customer satisfaction and loyalty.  Plus all the cross sales when you have to walk through the retail space or wait a bit.

By contrast, you have to walk through a cramped support department to get to things at Fry's.  After some extreme frustration there I shifted my technolust procurement to Best Buy.  Their service department is clean, well lit and all, and they do have that Geek Squad specialization.  But recently I attempted to have my six month old PS3 serviced there, but apparently they will do absolutely nothing for in-warranty products unless you buy some kind of extra insurance at the time of purchase.  Absolutely nothing.  So I had to call Sony and go through a ship and repair process.

This is in contrast to when my wife's camera broke under warranty and Keeble & Schuchat sent it to Canon and called us when it came back to the store for pickup. Simple enough, and I bought a tripod while there.

What Best Buy is missing is the fact that they provide no after market value add with their retail -- in comparison to buying and servicing with an e-commerce vendor.  If I buy something in person I expect a person to be able to help me when things go wrong.  At least during the manufactures warranty, and I might pay to extend that period with the retailer.

But I think Apple gets something more than the value of customer experience.  According to the Consortium of Service Innovation, there is an iceberg effect for product knowledge.  90% of conversations about supporting products never touch the company.  Only 10% touch the call center.  And 1% of this service and product quality knowledge are assimilated. 

Sometimes this distribution is purposeful.  Support is viewed as a cost center.  Time to resolution (which we've decreased by as much as 30%) often trumps customer satisfaction or capturing knowledge.  Worst practices are often employed to incent contact center reps to avoid contact.

The problem is far worse with multi-vendor support.  Multi-vendor issues take 3-4 times longer to resolve.  So almost all vendors explicitly do not support these issues at all.  There is some promise in Vendor Relationship Management, or communities that address systemic needs through the demand side supplying itself, but only the beginning of promise.

So I wonder if Apple's vertical integration strategy is what makes this possible.  Is the 50% rule only a rule if you tackle the multi-vendor support problem?  Alignment or integration between Marketing and Support plays a role and some organizations put the same person in charge of Product Quality and Support.  But this opportunity space inherently requires rethinking not just organizational boundaries, but the firm itself.

For your business online, what porportion is dedicated to retail vs. support?  When not constricted by the boundaries of physical space, and can be empowered through community, where do you draw that line?  What crosses that line is a process not unlike osmosis, where energy is released with the right balance.

UPDATE: article in the Boston Globe on listening and participating to online conversations about service and support

Identi.ca Launches, an Open Source Twitter

Evan Prodromou, one of the better citizens of the wiki community and founder of WikiTravel, launched Identi.ca today.  Its a Twitter clone that is also distributed as Open Source licensed software.  I've been playing with it in semi-private beta.  From the FAQ:

The goal here is autonomy -- you deserve the right to manage your own on-line presence. If you don't like how Identi.ca works, you can take your data and the source code and set up your own server (or move your account to another one).

Its made Dave Winer's day and Jevon is Canadian. Marshall Kirkpatrick has a longer writeup and sees promise in federation:

Ultimately, this means federation.  I put a customized version of the foundation software (called Laconi.ca) on my server, you put one to your liking on yours, we both get friends on our local copy and any other versions around the web - and everyone can communicate with each other just like we were using the same service from the same provider. Whoever comes up with the best alternative to the garbled name Identi.ca wins!

That's something that many people have wanted to do for a long time. 

Can it work, work it scale? At least it's open source so the development community doesn't have to play armchair quarterback for a black box like they are with Twitter. Maybe these little puppies can get tied into Gnip, the social media switchboard service we wrote about yesterday.  Especially once Twitter integration happens, we expect to see Identi.ca become an important part of our work day here at RWW.

I wonder what role this could play if Twitter goes down and a community emerges to help scale this.  Or how open source contributions bend it in different directions.  Should be fun to watch.