My new favorite voice is Ross Mayfield’s (I haven’t even heard his comments from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference today).

He just knows what to say and how to say it…he’s the smooth-talker of Enterprise 2.0. It started with his panel comments at the April Web 2.0 Conference — the concise way he delivers so many critical thoughts. I’m still trying to make it through his hour of continous-stream-of-thought shared with his new neighbors at IDEO (talk about experience barriers…the darned player won’t rewind to catch something important).

Ross helped me focus a clear distinction: the difference between Enterprise 2.0 and KM is that the latter is not architected for emergence. KM technology is all about the structure…not about letting conversations happen. KM technologies reflect the minds of their makers, classic solutions engineering: they embody control.

Ross shares a related conversation that compares and contrasts the two environments. One quote illustrates an important ‘different’ to be embraced: ”Don’t train, advertise…” It’s a matter of effectively leveraging resources, reallocating ‘training’ resources to design thinking. From the Forrester panelist: “The marketing and communication departments, the lines of business are excited about these tools.  But IT has a lot of fear.”  

Prediction: You’re going to hear a lot more about leveraging Marketing for new technology adoption over IT – it is no coincidence that the marketing comments came from a Forrester analyst..they are hot on this trail. Why? Because Marketing is becoming more interested in the ‘experience’. Repeated several times in a Microsoft presentation yesterday: The Experience IS the Product.

Bill Ive’s recent piece shared a great example of a KM initiative that was approached ‘right’ – but their approach embraced the fundamentals of Experience Design practices. Typical KM technology adds elements of control that become barriers to the natural order of incidental and serendipidous. [But then, I could name a handful of Portal technologies that do the same...many worse than KM technologies...and the worst of them all are their collaboration components!]

Enterprise 2.0 is about the great discoveries that come from serendipidy…incidental connections to things thought to be unrelated or never considered. Enterprise 2.0 is about ‘design thinking’ — challenging the status quo.

My favorite Shopenhauer quote:

“Thus the task is
not so much to see
what no one yet has seen,
but to think
what nobody yet has thought
about that which
everybody sees”