Blogs are enablers of an innovation culture

Phil Wolff wrote on RSS per Page: Toward Weblog Portability:

We need RSS files for every archival page. If you write archives by the day, week, month or year, one for each. If you write archives by category or topic, one for each. Where there's an html page, there should be an RSS file.

One other piece: A master list, perhaps in OPML, of the RSS files. This makes structure explicit so content can be discovered, imported, and flowed through new templates. The cost, negligible. Data portability is a huge deal in enterprise apps. The worlds of ERP, CRM, databases, email, and file service all met this threshold many years' ago. Weblog engineers should step up now.

It means that the big system integrators won't be put out of their job :-) by the new potent, emerging combinations of personal publishing, team-blogs, project-blogs and other types of business blogs. In fact, the ones that learn to master faster the intricacies of blog portability and inter-operability with other type of social software and legacy systems, they may turn that competence into a significant competitive advantage of high value, as our baby knowledge economny shifts gears towards more trust-based relations of production

In a germinal essay on social software--that we wish we wrote--Smarter, Simpler Social: An introduction to online social software methodology--Lee Bryant called our attention to the striking contrast of enterprise software and social software. His brilliant analysis deserves our full attention; that's why the extensive quote that follows.

PA Consulting found in July 2000 that 92% of companies were disappointed with expensive Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementations... The answer is not necessarily to continue building bigger and more centralised software systems, but to support smaller, simpler distributed networks of people, content and services that are more adaptable and responsive to changing needs and goals. Continuing to build bigger and more complicated systems is actually the opposite of what is needed to unlock the human potential such systems were designed to tap. Indeed, as we shall see, the concept of enterprise software itself is grounded in out-dated “process thinking” and does not sit well with our current understanding of organisations as living systems.

Whilst the first wave of online applications was characterised by large, centralised top-down implementations driven by a command-and-control mentality, the outlines of an alternative approach that is informed by new thinking about social networks and online behaviour is coming into focus. This approach is driven not by major IT vendors, but by rapid innovation occurring “in the wild”, where free or almost free online social applications are achieving usage levels and a depth of user engagement that enterprise software purchasers can only dream about. It is smarter, simpler and social.

Why knowledge sharing via social software is spreading rapidly whilst many of the KM initiatives targeting the same result as their main purpose, have failed?

The technology is only the enabler, not the driver. What drives the blog revolution is people's innate desire to learn and share, unhampered by old patterns of organizing work and learning, that we inherited from the industrial age. The companies that will understand that their capacity for innovation can be their strongest differentiator, AND decide to make it so, will discover that the source of that capacity is not simply their people, but the trust and social capital among them, what they're willing to do for one another as opposed to the sake of a faceless bureaucracy. Knowledge blogs, project blogs, team blogs, and many yet-to-discover applications of business blogging, when accompanied by modes of integration that don't kill the grassroots spirit, will support that discovery.

Future-responsive business leaders will be the first to recognize both the external and the internal blogospheres as new and rich source of opportunities for new value creation. The old guard will first dismiss it, then try to control it, and finally, loose it. Or they may join the "social software" movement too late, when everybody will have those tools, the corresponding modes of organizing collaboration, and it will be more difficult to turn them into a strategic advantage.