Tiddlers in Recipe public
This is a transcript of JP Rangaswami's talk given at Le Web 3.

Moderator: Moving along to our next speaker, probably best known for Confused of Calcutta, his blog, but you might also know him as the Managing Director of BT Design, please welcome to the stage, coming down from the stairway, JP Rangaswami.

Why Enterprise 2.0...Isn't



Opening comments

Hello. Good morning, everyone. I had the opportunity a few months ago to spend time with a guy called Alan Kay who was responsible, pretty much, for creating what we know today as windows in terms of an interface. Nearly 30 years ago, Alan said, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it".

30 years have passed and when I met him in San Diego I asked him what he felt about it and his response was, "JP, you know, spending time in large enterprises, I get the feeling that the best way to predict the future now is to prevent it". That's what large enterprises can do, but before I get onto that, it's trying to understand what people like Alan meant in order to give you the context of why I believe that Enterprise 2.0 is not really happening as yet.

You can imagine what happened in the late 1960s with Engelbart and Kay in terms of the mouse, the pointer, the click, the desktop as providing individuals with the right to consume structured information. It took us nearly 15 years after that with the advent of Excel, or VisiCalc more like, spreadsheets, small databases, word processors, storyboard tools to say that we then managed to give individuals and enterprises the right to produce structured information and it took a decade beyond that before we started having the concept of the browser and access to unstructured information so that the individual could now manipulate unstructured information.

However, that was not where the web was meant to be and one of the reasons people even us the word Web 2.0 is to describe an environment where the web became writable. The web was always meant to be writable, it was writable, so when I talk about Enterprise 2.0, I look at it in the context of empowering individuals. The empowerment of the individual is at the heart of what modern Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 is. The customer gets in control, the web becomes live, writable. These things are absolutely critical to understand what it is we mean when we say Enterprise 2.0.

Terror

What happens when you start talking about an individual being in control in an enterprise? Fundamentally, it is abject terror. People who like control are very, very uncomfortable with disaggregating control and giving it to individuals. This is not difficult or unusual. From the time we had priests, then through to doctors, through to lawyers and even IT departments, the concepts have been the same: speak in a foreign language, put smoke and mirrors between you and everybody else, make it very, very difficult for somebody else to understand what it is you are doing and then claim this is complex, you will not understand it.

That is what large enterprises do as well. We build immune system barriers in to obfuscate, complicate, make complex and corrupt things that happen inside the firm so that when youngsters walk into the firm they have to have all their ingenuity taken out of them. It is something along the lines of what an assembly line does, even in a school. You take individuality and then you reduce standard deviation by having processes that just say, "Any colour you like, as long as it's black". That's what enterprises do: reduce standard deviation rather than allow for individuality, so I wanted to just run very quickly through some of the reasons why people in enterprises are not adopting 2.0 techniques and what we can do about it.

Decaffeinating Ts

However, I want to give you some context and an apology to Loic and to the organisers of the LeWeb, because last year I was meant to be here and I pulled out on the last day. I pulled out for a strange reason: part of my body gave up and I had a major heart attack and when I had the heart attack it was slightly difficult to travel and I have had to make quite a lot of lifestyle changes since, at least one of which is that I do not drink caffeinated tea, which is why this section of the agenda is called 'Decaffeinating Tea' because I wanted to look at some particular Ts within an enterprise that need decaffeinating, so bear with me, humour me on this.

Trust

I do not know how many of you know the origin of the word 'bankrupt', but the merchants of Lombardy used to sit down on benches and talk to each other. If somebody within their group let them down, didn't keep their word, somebody would go and pick up the bench the guy sat on, break it in two and make it quite difficult for the person to sit down again. A breakdown of trust was what bankruptcy was about because the banco the person was sitting on was rupto.

Trust is at the heart of any sort of community activity and should be at the heart of any enterprise.

Instead, what do we do? Let me tell you. We build systems that say, "It is all right to have a conversation with another person and to copy their boss in". How to really build trust, a CC button; I am going to ask you to do something and I am going to copy your boss in. It should be called an "ass-cover" button, but somehow AC does not sound the same. They cannot tell me it is "carbon copy" because you can save sent mail anyway.

However, if CC was not bad enough, what else can you do? I am going to have a conversation with you and tell your boss without telling you. Wow. This is really going to build trust. A BCC button. Who thought that up? What value is there in trying to create collaboration, trust, commitment to each other when you had hidden conversations in public that way?

That is what large enterprise thinkers do when you are not careful and when you break down trust, you cannot legislate for ethics. You cannot possibly legislate for ethics. As far as I am concerned, Enron was Sarbox-compliant. It does not prove a thing. Ticked boxes do not a prison make.

The way we are going to have to work on it is to regenerate the trust we used to have and we have the tools to do it; yet sharing is not part of the concept of how an enterprise works.

Team

In order for trust to be meaningful, you do not have the concept of trust unless you also have the concept of people working together, people working as a team. However, if you look at the incentives within the enterprise, very rarely are the incentives anything other than hierarchically managed and controlled. The hierarchy then lends itself down to individual incentives, individual targets where "I'm all right, Jack, I will look after myself, you look after yourself", becomes the rule. We have spoken for many years about knowledge management and sharing, but most of the time, what you actually see in a large enterprise is inside the person's head, the person does not want to share.

However, human beings are communal beings. Man is a social animal, man is not an island. If that is the case, why does it happen that you take a normal human being, put him into an enterprise and he suddenly has to be clawing his way up an organisational ladder, scratching each other's eyes out, not sharing information? Why do these behaviours persist? They persist largely because the incentives are not aligned. You have incentive systems.

There was a guy called Chandler who in the late 1960s formulated a law that said that it is not true any more that strategy creates structure; it has now reached a stage where with large organisations, the structure can also create strategy. How you are organised has great impact on the things you can or cannot do and sadly for many institutions we are still organised not to share. We build silos, we build walls, we do not allow activity between the silos; lateral movement in a firm is prevented rather than augmented or even encouraged. That creates problems.

Time

Onto the next one. This is a strange T: time. I have nothing against Google, I think they are a fine company, but one of the reasons I get confused is when people tell me this is a great thing to separate 20% of a person's time and have them allocated to some activity or another, because it is not the 20% that worries me, it is the other 80%.

I think we are already should be living in a world where we concentrate on outputs not inputs. For my staff, if they get what they are meant to get done, what do I care what they do with their time because we do not live in a clock-punching world? I do not look at what time somebody comes in and what time somebody leaves. I do not even look as to whether the person comes into the office: many of my staff are completely disaggregated, they live at home or they come in to see me when they need to, but why celebrate the idea that 20% of the time you are actually allowed to do what you want?

I am worried about the other 80%, because I want my guys to do what they want in order to get value for the firm all 100% of the time and the modern generations think that way, they do not understand inputs and we need to be careful about it.

There is one other element about time that we need to understand in an enterprise which is that particularly when computing started entering the enterprise, what came in was batch thinking. Batch thinking became bad thinking. It was all right to tell you that truth was a snapshot that someone prepared according to some conventional representation yesterday. I am no accountant, but I am aware that when I look at most financial statements, the only truth I see is a cash position. Everything else is some form of conventional representation. It is symbols which you do not necessarily understand. It is words that reflect things other than what is said, because it is nothing more than convention. We need to understand that, but today's generation do not actually think of time the same way, they do not accept batch, everything has happened to them. We accuse them of instant gratification, but actually they do not have the same delays that we have had, that we allow, and this enters the enterprise.

Technology

I do not particularly like PowerPoint and I thought to myself, "How am I going to allow a multicultural audience to try and follow what I am saying when I am trying to say it at very high speed?" and I thought, "Okay, I will give in and I will use some form of presentation technology and use the same letter to make my points to make my points to help people to understand". However, I was grinding my teeth on my way back here after the Led Zep concert to say, "How will I use PowerPoint? I do not like doing it".

Yes, I was there and when I came here, I thought, "I know what!" I already had the technology. Some of the guys who came here, they built something called RippleRap, which is fundamentally a wiki on a stick to be able to work with in order to say I do not have to be online to work on a wiki, I can synchronise what I am writing when I reconnect later and in its simplest form, what you are seeing this presentation on is RippleRap. It is TiddlyWiki which is an open-source tool that we not only use, that we promote because we acquired the company that built it.

That is the way we try to think and that is very, very important for modern generations. The reason I bring up this technology is that those of you who follow my blog are already aware that things have changed to the point that in an enterprise, there appear to be only four types of applications that are needed:
This is what enterprises do, but to make all these things happen - search, syndication or subscription and fulfilment - you need conversation, and what Web 2.0 is really about within the enterprise is really in bringing together of blogs, of wikis, of instant messaging, of collaborative tools of today, rather than the point tools of the past, in order to engender learning across silos.

Doc Searls, a good friend of mine, is in the audience and he would like to speak later. The Cluetrain Manifesto, which he and three other guys wrote is a critical part of even my pantheon, but David Weinberger, who is not here today, is rumoured to have said, 'Hyperlinks subvert hierarchies' and that is at the heart of what can be done in anything to do with technology. The firm throws hierarchy at you, but the tools that we have can subvert those hierarchies and create a much richer experience within the enterprise.

Teenagers

Why are these things important? Why am I thinking so hard and so long about the youth of today? It is for a reason; Danny Rimer in the last session alluded partly to it. For most of my life, when you had new technology, you had to be 29 to 40, usually male and usually working in aerospace or defence or investment banking in order to get to play with toys. The technology adoption curve was about a successful professional working in an industry with a high and fat profit margin.

That has changed. Today, if I go home with two mobile phones bought duty free and give one to my wife and one to my son and say, "No instructions, I want to see which one of you can power it up, take a photograph and email it or MMS it", I know my son would beat my wife every time.

Danny was referring to the fact that the kids of today get involved in technology much earlier. That technology adoption curve has sharply inverted in the past decade where much of what is new now gets played with by Generation M or Generation Y, depending on what literature you read, a mobile, multi-tasking and multi-media generation. Their tools are different. They come trained for the workforce. You do not have to teach them how to use the tools within the enterprise, you have to learn how to take their tools and embed them in the enterprise, because they come trained. They are already fully aware. The experience of the consumer teenager at home is already better than the literate 40-year-old in the enterprise in terms of access to information. Things have changed, which brings me to my final point.

Today

If you look at today, today is a wonderful place to be. The technology is there, but the talent is there as well, because this generation represents something completely different. They are interested in the values, they are interested in what the firm stands for.

In my father's generation, a person probably had one job. Job mobility was low, you joined a company for life, the company looked after you and it was a worthwhile relationship.

In my generation, I am probably going to have seven jobs. Mobility has increased and the covenant relationship between the enterprise and the employee has changed. It has broken down in many respects.

In my son's generation, it is actually going to be that he has seven jobs as well, but with a difference: the seven jobs are at the same time, because the next level of disaggregation of employment is taking place in front of us.

Everything to do with our life is moving to becoming something that looks like a war for talent, because Moore's law has given us tremendous price performance, Metcalfe's law has given us the value of network effects, Gilder's law has given us virtually free bandwidth, but human longevity during that period has not scaled. Man used to live maybe 77 years, now he lives 79. As a result, simplicity and convenience become very, very important and in an enterprise particularly, we have to squeeze every bit of it, because as things get commoditised, you have to know where you are going to be able to make your money to survive. The historical lock-ins are either illegal or inappropriate. Customers stay with a firm because of the value the firm provides them with and not because they are unable to move.

Closing remarks

In ending, I just want to remind you guys what you hold in your hands, many of you, and how that relates to the enterprise of tomorrow. 100 years ago if you worked for a bank, you were only allowed to use the company pen, because you had ledgers, you had folios and you had to make sure you used the right quill pen to enter the details into the ledgers.

Now, imagine telling a new kid you are trying to hire, "By the way, when you work for us, you will only use the company pen". Actually, we are telling them that, because the laptop they carry is their device: they personalise it, they skin it, they put stickers and decos and labels on it, it is their device to carry and transport the whole pile of completely personal attributes.

In the same sort of not-quite-anti-Google statement, I have always lived in worlds where people said, "Ban direct dial telephones from desks because people will waste time. Ban the carrying of BlackBerrys, people will waste time. Ban Facebook, people will waste time".
What is this concept of wasting time unless you focus on inputs? We live in a world where enterprises have to focus on outputs, where the generation that is coming forward will want to treat devices like laptops as if they were their own, they have not just a demand, but they are used to a life where it is any device, any form of connection, anywhere, any time and they can multi-task. We should not think that this has not arrived. It is a very William Gibson time. The future is here, it is just unevenly distributed. That is where we are.

My own staff keep teaching me by how they use things. I needed a demonstration of TiddlyWiki. How did that demonstration reach me when I was in a different country? He just took a video of the demo, stuck it on YouTube and sent me a one-time tag, because you can hide in plain sight. You stick something onto YouTube and you have not tagged it, you cannot find it. If you give a one-time tag like ~X371PGQ9, who the hell is going to look for that tag? However, because I have that tag, I can walk into YouTube and pick up the demo they have sent me.

Similarly, when I wanted to understand what to do about OpenSocial and I spoke to one of my guys, he just built a quick slide, took a photograph of it and Flickred it to me. Again, the attachment was sent by email, actually within Facebook, and the photograph that was attached was in Flickr.

We have the technology today. It is called the web, but we have to learn how enterprises are going to break down the walls that put them into prisons and become porous and allow connectivity between the enterprise and the customer again.

That same connectivity is also between the enterprise and its partners, its supply chain and the individuals who will become tomorrow's ~CIOs, tomorrow's ~CEOs: these guys are people who do not think like me. I am on my way out of life, I am on my second half, I have turned 50. I am relaxed about things. The kids of today expect something different.

The tools of today allow us to do something different and all I have to leave you with is the knowledge that Enterprise 2.0 does not happen not because the technology is not there, not because the will of the youth is not there, but because of people like me. We stand in the way. It is time to get out of the way, which is what I am going to do now. Thank you very much for listening.

Participant: Thank you. Thank you so much. What you do not know, but I know, is that JP was scheduled to speak last year and had a heart attack and we are so happy you are in excellent shape.

JP Rangaswami: Delighted to be here.

Participant: Well, we are delighted, and JP, I was following Twitter a little bit as you were talking and if you do track LeWeb, you should see your comments, they all say, "Oh wow! An enterprise talk that does not suck!" That is great, you were fantastic. Thank you so much.

JP Rangaswami: And Phil, thanks for driving.

Participant: Thank you, JP.