Education 2.0

There are five reasons why any senior executive needs to start thinking about Web Office now:

1. Web Office technology will make partnering and out-sourcing more efficient by creating a platform that can seamlessly support virtual ad-hoc teams. Thus, it will quickly reduce your costs.


2. If you have any competitors using Web Office technology, they are going to have a significant productivity lead over you. Web Office will be as big and important as email, and you wouldn’t imagine running a business today without email.


3. Your new hires are already using this technology. The MBA class of 2006 has lived and breathed the web since they were in high school. If you don’t provide company endorsed solutions, they will end up using tools that are available on the open Internet until you do.


4. Most importantly, Web Office will help you to increase the pace of innovation within your organization. As I explained in my last paper “Turning Knowledge Workers into Innovation Creators”, constant innovation is the only business strategy capable of producing a stream of above average profits. To achieve constant innovation, senior executives need to bring everyone into the effort. Web Office is the ideal tool to help achieve that goal.


5. Web Office is cheap. You will get a lot of bang for your buck.

None currently offer anything like a complete Web Office solution. But, they have all made a very interesting beginning. One of them could easily be the next Google. The company that wins this space will most likely lead with something that is not already available. An enterprise blog or enterprise Wiki provider is my best guess. The winner will quickly follow this with a widget / badging platform that will give non-technical users the power to quickly and easily create robust highly interactive web based applications.

My guess is this will be built on a Ruby on Rails platform, because Ruby on Rails is so powerful and because Ruby on Rails encourages such radically quick turn around. Currently, 37 Signals and Zoho seem to be furthest along with their Ruby on Rails based technology.

To come up with innovative ways of organizing the world’s information, Google relies upon its engineers. Google engineers are allowed to spend 20% of their time doing whatever they want. Eric Schmidt, the Google CEO has said that every new product in Google comes from the engineers and their 20% free time.

The engineers are so successful because they can use the internal Web Office solutions to quickly find out about interesting side projects to work on, or about the key problems that the company is trying to solve.

In most other firms, only the top executives are focused on trying to address the key strategic problems facing the company. At Google, every single engineer has been asked to contribute to the effort.

Dave Thomas, one of the original signatories to the Manifesto for Agile Software Development has some great advice:

Managers should not treat their employees as equals. Instead, treat them as suppliers. Don’t tell them how to do what you want. Instead, challenge them to provide you with better work products and innovative solutions.

Dave calls it management by intentions. This approach presents an amazing opportunity for a company to increase the pace of internal innovation and to get every member of the organization to focus on the company’s key strategic objectives.

How do you manage people in this type of environment?

Web Office is going to present a significant challenge for many managers. No longer will they gain power from control of information. Instead, power will go to managers who can cultivate an environment that encourages employees to make the most out of these new tools. Internal entrepreneurs should thrive in this kind of work place.

An example of enterprise blogging:

Image if everyone in your organization had a blog that described them, included their resume, a list of all their skills, and was automatically kept up to date with a list of all the projects they were working on. You could call these types of blogs “People Pages”. That is the beginning of an enterprise blogging solution.

Here’s what my team is building for our firm of 130,000 auditors and consultants.

Web 2.0 in the Workplace – What tools they are going to need?

When the MBA class of 2006 shows up for work, here’s what they’ll expect to find, because this is the list of tools they are already using:

With enterprise blogs and enterprise Wikis, when you write an article or a post, that information is captured in a structured format. That means it can be turned into many things. For example, most blogging systems, including MovableType and WordPress, will turn your blog posts into a feed.

A new phase in the web means a new phase on your intranet

The movement that is powering all these new technologies is loosely called Web 2.0. For the business world, Web 2.0 means three things.

Richard MacManus calls his blog “The Read/Write Web”. The name perfectly sums up the new philosophy about the web. People now believe that instead of just surfing the web, users should contribute as much content as they consume.

The average MBA graduates in 2006 are not just knowledge workers. They are capable of being highly networked internal entrepreneurs and innovation creators. Their ability to connect is not just about email, BlackBerries, text messages and voice-mails. They are intimately familiar with all those tools, but ultimately, expertise with those one-to-one connectivity tools is just the price of admission.

What makes these new graduates so effective is their ability to work efficiently with large virtual teams and their amazing ability to maximize the power of their personal networks.