A few years ago, the web was a monologue forum. Website-owners created stuff, and everyone else looked at it. Then, a crazy thing happened: users were given create/upload/edit priveleges. Suddenly, we had a Read-Write Web, instead of a Read-only Web. And, it turned out that users really wanted to do more than consume and chat.
Lyzasoft believe the enterprise is due for the same opening-up, to involve all employees actively in creating and editing and remixing all types of information relevant for the enterprise. This is about more than Word documents and spreadsheets. It's about ALL the content of the enterprise: dashboards, charts, videos, images, reports, tables, manuals...everything. We are working to create the Read-Write Enterprise.
So, just to be clear: star ratings and instant messaging and groups are not the Read-Write Enterprise. The fundamental is...user generated content. In other words, most of the work to-date has been about allowing users to talk about pre-developed content; so, the conversation is emergent, but the data content itself is not.
When you define a priori the content around which the participants can converse, you kill creative thinking in at least 3 ways:
- You make issues forgettable. As the Madison Avenue folks have known for a long time, your brand is more memorable to a person when you involve her brain more. Spoon feeding does not work. Remember the Marlboro billboards? Why was the cowboy image imposed over the brand name? To get your brain to play with the ad like a puzzle. And, it worked. When we feed people static or pre-digested or bounded informational content, they forget it.
- You constrain the conversation to status-quo thinking. If you give young kids plastic farm animals, they will role play Farmer John -- not Gordon Gecko. If you want creative, emergent solutions you have to allow for creative, emergent content as input to the process.
- You dim the brightest bulbs. The best brains for creative problem solving are driven by curiosity. They NEED to try new things, look at things different ways. Play and experimentation and exploring actually energizes them, lights up their brains. If our collaborative environments do not allow these minds to play, they will not engage.
In the Read-Write Enterprise, users can create and manipulate the actual content -- videos, spreadsheets, charts, images, documents, presentations...anything. They work blend and extend and republish and link the company's information, so that it morphs and grows in sync with the flow of new challenges facing the business.
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