Web 2.0
open source, open e-mail and environments. british telecom’s Cio, JP rangaswami, gives his thoughts on corporate culture and the free exchange of information.
your typical CIO, but he is certainly an outspoken one. The current CIO of global services at British Telecom and former CIO of Dresder Kleinwort (named CIO of the Year by Waters Magazine in 2003) is passionate about IT, open source and Web 2.0. He writes in his blog Confused of Calcutta: “ever since I read The Cluetrain Manifesto, I have believed in the ‘markets are conversations’ theme” and his credo is required reading for any executive contemplating Web 2.0 and the future of information sharing. He shares his thoughts.
On the Enterprise’s Suspicion of Web 2.0 A superior order problem that affects a lot of Web 2.0 is that if people don’t want to share, they won’t share. No system in the world is going to force them to when they have a cultural bias against it. Web 2.0 is first and foremost about culture in that sense. Those are core values, and if people don’t get those values then you are met with, “This looks trivial. This is not work. Have you looked at the security implications?” All the usual objections to a Web 2.0 model.
On InformationControlling Cultures Sharing information does not demean your having it. Personally, I want to see the pockets of power based on behind-closed-doors alliances destroyed. And I have no problem saying I think it’s part of the job of a firm CIO and their policies to make sure that you don’t create artificial pockets of power based on selfish motives that exploit information. The people who do that haven’t understood the value of teaching, learning, and sharing information or the wisdom of crowds.
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Why does open source work? Because given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. Now the bug that may be shallow may be an information bug. So if you put the facts out, then a fact that you got wrong is more likely to be corrected if there are 1,000 people seeing it rather than 100 people seeing it. There is a self-correcting capacity when you have a large group of people seeing things, which is very, very powerful in a firm. The training costs for new hires and induction plans or programs is that much lower if you have the concept of transparent information in place.
On Enterprise Web 2.0 There may be a lot of hype about Web 2.0, but its use in the enterprise is still in the early-adopter phase. I talked with Andy McCaffee at Harvard [Business School] about this because he did five case studies of what we did at Dresdner Kleinwort to adopt Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise. We asked who else is using these technologies aggressively, and we realized that there’s pockets of experimentation but widespread usage is rare. One of the reasons I joined BT is because the use of collaborative tools is already widespread, and therefore I’m not pushing water uphill or pushing against a closed door. When I negotiated my job, they said, 'Of course you can keep your blog going, just make it clear what’s your personal opinion and what’s your professional opinion.' Staff read my blog, and I freely discuss things that are challenging me at work. I don’t think people realize the blog is like a conversation at the dinner table or lunch table. And of course, you don’t break customer confidentiality; you don’t say things that are injurious to caste or creed or color.
On What Web Technologies Can do for Your Customer I believe the biggest transformations will be in such areas as collaboration, collective intelligence, and predictive market tools based on Web technologies. I want to create a seamless and unified customer experience, whether customers come to a portal, a call center, whether they are dealing with the head office, or whether they are dealing with an individual. We can make all those experiences the same. This is easier said than done because many times you go to a firm, and your Web experience is different than your kiosk experience is different than your service desk experience or your call center experience.
On the Inadequacy of E-Mail as a Collaboration Tool E-mail was the only collaboration tool in town for years, and it’s not fit for that purpose anymore. If you want to share reference material, for example, a wiki is a much better way of doing it. Then you don’t have people looking at different versions; there is only one version, it’s the latest. If you want audit trails, you can see the history; you can see when the last edits were made. A wiki is much better than e-mail because the former enables collaborative edit on a single article, people can see what others’ edits are, and it gives you the wisdom of crowds faster. You can use blogs for the preliminary conversation elements. Where the answer is not known somebody posts an opinion, people comment on it, and a conversation begins in order to reach a conclusion, which REAL CIO WORLD | j u n e 1 5 , 2 0 0 7
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