Around the Corner

The global financial crisis overshadowed today's sessions at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The World Economic Forum is an international non-profit organization that is committed to improving the state of the world by engaging leaders in partnerships to shape global, regional and industry agendas. It holds an annual meeting at this time each year and 2009 is its thirty-eighth year of international leadership. In addition to the global economic crisis, other topics for this year's meeting include energy, climate, governance, poverty and education.

Technology plays an especially relevant role at the World Economic Forum this year. In addition to the now-mainstream webcast and podcast information delivery channels, this year social media utilities allow us all to better engage, debate and attend. It may come as a surprise that we can be part of such a remote conference, but through Facebook, Twitter and Youtube we can do just that, at least virtually.

Citizen journalism is very active through Youtube and MySpace Citizen Reporter channels. The World Economic Forum sponsors an open group on Facebook with over 2,100 members. You'll also find chat sessions and a Youtube channel. And for the most current updates, follow the Davos tweets on Twitter.

The World Economic Forum continues throughout the next four days. I hope you will have the opportunity to engage, debate and attend. Enjoy !

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Did you know that Ward Cunningham created the first wiki in 1995 ? Why is it that it took more than ten years before the wiki became recognized as an icon for all things 2.0? What makes a technology useful today, that went unrecognized yesterday ?

As I've considered these questions, I've come to recognize both near term drivers and long term patterns of innovation. Today, our values drive technology adoption. We value participation over exclusion. And the availability of technologies like the wiki make everyone's participation possible at a reduced coordination cost. We demand a little less from a wiki than a traditional business application, in terms of rich function and features, but we value more the collaboration and participation that a wiki can provide.

Clay Shirky, in Institutions v. Collaboration, contrasts the effect of these near term drivers on patterns of innovation both within and outside institutions. Shirky explains why we value participation and how it shapes technology adoption today.

Over the longer term, there are recognizable patterns of innovation across industries and markets. Clayton Christensen, the Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, provides insights into these patterns. In the Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution to the Healthcare Crisis, Christensen observes two patterns. First, a sustaining innovation pattern occurs in the market place when a market leader engages in either incremental investment or breakthroughs. Christensen describes a second pattern which he calls disruptive innovation that occurs when a new entrant undercuts the market leaders at lower cost while satisfying their needs, but with typically lower performance.

Today, wikis and many other 2.0 technologies indicate patterns of disruptive innovation. In parts of the software community where wikis were first developed, simplicity and collaboration became more highly valued than formal planning. Over the past few years the venture capital community has invested heavily in 2.0 technologies. Where do you see these innovation patterns fitting into your Agency?

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The week before last I attended the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Most of my time was at a set of breakout sessions for government attendees, but I spent half a day on the convention center showroom floor. Despite news reports that attendance was down this year, the place was packed and energetic. I could not discern any noticeable downturn.

You probably read or heard about the show; it generates a great deal of news coverage. From my observations, here are a couple of trends that I noticed:

1. Mobility continues to be a huge trend. A number of vendors were showing improved devices and user interfaces. There were displays for internet service in vehicles, which sounds interesting but also potentially hazardous!

2. Video and video conferencing continue to improve. Several vendors were showing OLED televisions, which are only a few millimeters thick. Another big innovation was 3-D television, although these are not yet available commercially. I saw Sony's version, but there were probably a dozen other companies showing 3-D. You still have to wear the funny glasses, but it does make the viewing experience really realistic.The developments in video and mobility may eventually prove helpful in supporting federal telework and COOP (continuity of operations) programs.

3. Solid-state media is going into EVERYTHING, including camcorders. There's a great article in the latest Fast Company about the rapid market expansion of solid state memory (below). We have also heard from industry that solid state is moving into the data center. I believe hard drive technology may eventually be overtaken by solid state, which is much faster, quieter, longer-lasting and uses significantly less electricity and cooling.

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/131/have-a-solid-holiday.html

Two things I wanted to see but really did not were improvements in battery technology and high-definition radios. Maybe there were new innovations on display but I did not see or read about them

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There's no doubt that social media has captured just about everyone's imagination recently. Marketing channels are currently packed with the promise of higher productivity, shorter life-cycles, reduced coordination costs and peer-to-peer engagement. Whether all this ever happens, or not, have you ever wondered why social media caught on ? Or, are you asking yourself whether social media is just another fad like pet rocks and mood rings ? The good news is there's a science behind social media and that's why it works.

Social media is grounded in a new science called complexity. The science of complexity is an interdisciplinary study of the dynamics of the structure and behavior among the parts as well as the relationships between the parts and the whole that make up a system. The most notable research has been conducted in and around the Santa Fe Institute within the past twenty-five years. During this time, the science of complexity has produced a few surprising and important discoveries. First, we now know that between order and chaos is self organization. Social media and social networks are just one example of self organization. Bees and ants self organize, as do many chemical and biological systems. Second, we self organize as a network instead of a hierarchy. Networks are more efficient because they allow us to skip levels in the hierarchy. Of course the Internet is the most recognizable example of a network, but if we drew a picture of the links on the internet and all the friend links on Facebook, we'd find they take the same general shape.

There's much more to say about networks, self organization and complexity, but what does this mean to Federal agencies ? I think we'd all acknowledge the Federal government is a complex system, as are Federal agencies. Our planning and governance activities help us better organize and work together more productively. And social dynamics are a large part of how productively we work together. We saw how well President-elect Obama's campaign used social media to mobilize their constituents. Federal agencies can do that too. So in 2009 my team and I plan to take a closer look at the power of social media as a mechanism to encourage stakeholder engagement.

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