There were no real surprises in his preamble. Big, traditional companies struggling to get to grips with the internet, but they need to because 99% of people you want to access are there. And so are their competitors, and they have equal access. Traditional advantages like location mean nothing here.
"We've had [the internet] for 16 years, and only now are we getting a sense of how to win," said Hinchcliffe. "The rules are so different that there's a kind of congnitive dissinance about how much your business needs to change."
And this is where the controversy happened. He started talking about how to get Enterprise 2.0 ideas into your business. "The easiest way to do it is to do nothing at all," he said. The ideas are viral and come in through the network."
Now, I thought he said "but not the best", but other people missed it, or I hallucinated it because both Suw and Andy posted tweets that disagreed:
However, whatever the level of importance he put on the idea, his suggestion was that these tools are so compelling that clued-up users will push them into work environment with or without IT's help.
"They push the traditional business software out to the edge of the network, because they are so powerful," he said.
Key things to address:
- Peer production - already affected software
- Owning your classes of data - data becomes the competitive advantage
- New
distribution models - building a website and driving people there is
very 20th Century.
- You need to get you products wherever your customers
are
- Social systems - allow customers to be aware of each other and collaborate. You need this to get the first two points
Power has shifted from institutions to communities of individuals. The network enables this.
Customers are now part of the product - the most important part. This is part of the network effects - a platform is more valuable the more people who use it. Build a potent network effect, you win. Use open APIs to grow it.
But the biggest problem is changing our thinking - we need to unlearn our thinking about where the value is.
You need to reimagine your products and services for the 2.0 era, but there are significant hurdles to overcome:
-
How do you disrupt yourself?
- Not invented here.
- Fear of failure.
- Deeply ingrained 1.0 culture
- Low level of 2.0 understanding
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I have to say I thought this keynote, like most of them this year, was very weak and vague.
I agree with Suw and Andy on their objection to the 'do nothing' approach. If Dion can point to some long-term case studies where this has changed the game, I would be interested.
I tend to agree. As I mentioned to someone earlier, you can almost see the handbrake turns on the conference programme, where there was a sudden shift from ad-funded, consumer-facing startups to a focus on Enterprise 2.0.
But it all feels terribly woolly.
For me, Stowe Boyd, Saul Klein, Lee Bryant and the Two Gustavs made the conference worthwhile. The others were for the most part too vague