Shaping Network Society

For 30 years competitive strategy (the five forces, portfolio analysis, learning, new market development, blue oceans) has determined how we think strategy. Competitive strategy was built on the 19th Century Prussian military understanding that business could be described through strategic interaction of rational players in environments that stay relatively stable over time (stasis in Heraclitian terms).

The world has changed. Today’s strategic environments are determined by complexity, post-human intelligence, networks, fuzzy boundaries, communicative rationality: flux, as Heraclitus would say. Web 2.0 is the shortcut for web-technologies (xml, self-publishing, collaboration platforms, social networking) that once intertwined transform economic production, society, and public governance. However, this change did not start in 2006. Over the last 30 years, we can observe a move from production (defining the value chain), to co-production (manging the supply chain), to peer production (enabling user-generated outputs). This means that strategy in business changes from competitive strategy to communicative strategy. This is big. The closest historical analogy, to this radical transformation of collective production is the emergence of print capitalism in the 16th and 17th Century.

What will post-competive strategy look like? What are the core strategic ideas of network society? What does strategy advice look like in such a world? Who will be the strategy gurus of tomorrow?

by Ines Mergel

I am a Twitter enthusiast and as one of those people who do spend a lot of time online, I noticed that Twitter is one of the information channels, that help me get access to information, that is otherwise not on my radar screen or I would not get access to.

Twitter – for me personally as a Government 2.0 researcher – therefore has the potential to bridge structural holes in the communication and information structure that I have built over the years. In addition, I noticed that it is expanding my attention network of a) topics I should pay attention to, and b) people and their public conversation streams that are interesting to know. In a new information paradigm of the US government to move from a need to know to a need to share strategy, I thought I would share a few interesting people whose information and conversation who might be interesting to listen in to.

Without trying to convince anyone of the power of public conversations happening on Twitter, I put together a list of people and organizations that might have helpful information for anyone interested in Web 2.0 in government:

@timoreilly: Tim O’Reilly is the found and CEO of O’Reilly Media, traditionally known for publishing IT-related books, isnow a supporter of Government 2.0 and hosts conferences on the topic. Definitely worth following -> I learned a LOT!

@mcaffee: Andrew McAffee, a former professor at Harvard Business School, has coined the term Enterprise 2.0. Andy addresses corporate but also general Web 2.0 problems and is asking questions using the hashtag #andyasks -> add the tag to the new search function, so that you can revisit the information purring in every few days.

If you like tweets from space live from the repair team of the Hubble telescope, space astronaut Mike Massimino is tweeting his observations directly from the space shuttle: @Astro_Mike. NASA itself was one of the first twitter users within the US federal government: @NASA:

As the swine flu (H1N1) developed and the threat level has increased to a pandemic disease, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in the US has adopted a comprehensive Web 2.0 approach to reach potential groups that are at risk at the virtual locations they might be frequenting the most. I posted a blog entry on this on my blog with an overview of tools used. On Twitter: @CDCemergency.

There are tons of government agencies present on Twitter and BearingPoint has put together a huge list that can be found here.

I have selected a few government agencies I am following and find helpful:

• Department of State: Official Blog of the U.S. Department of State @dipnote: http://twitter.com/dipnote

• White House @whitehouse: http://twitter.com/whitehouse

• US Army @USArmy: http://twitter.com/USArmy

• Tweet Congress: Aggregator of tweets from Members of Congress @tweetcongress

• USA.gov – the one-stop shopping portal of the US Government: @usagov

• Transportation Security Administration (TSA):  @tsablogteam

In addition, the tweets of government-related IT publications and organizations might be helpful to learn about ongoing initiatives and news:

• One Laptop Per Child: http://twitter.com/OLPC

• Govdigest [http://twitter.com/govdigest] and DotGov [http://twitter.com/dotgov] are compiling up to date information and are retweeting information from other accounts, spreading the word to their followers and multiplying the attention base.

• UN Secretary general @secgen [http://twitter.com/secgen] is using Twitter to as an online calendar, listing whom he is meeting with each day.

• GovWiki: http://twitter.com/govwiki

• Government Technology Magazine: http://twitter.com/govtechnews

As I am located in the US, this post and my list of favorite Web 2.0 people is very much US-centric. Please leave your suggestions for additional Twitter accounts in the comments!

Following me on Twitter: @inesmergel [http://twitter.com/inesmergel]

Mark Surman, the executive director of the Mozilla foundation gave a talk in Toronto last November titled “a city that thinks like the web.” His argument was that opennes and participation made the web better and can make cities better (just imagine how you can improve city services, if you have a million beta-testers). David Eaves points us to a motion that will be discussed at the Vancouver City Council on May 19th, about making Vancouver an open city:

[...]THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED THAT the City of Vancouver endorses the principles of:

• Open and Accessible Data – the City of Vancouver will freely share with citizens, businesses and other jurisdictions the greatest amount of data possible while respecting privacy and security concerns;
• Open Standards – the City of Vancouver will move as quickly as possible to adopt prevailing open standards for data, documents, maps, and other formats of media;
• Open Source Software – the City of Vancouver, when replacing existing software or considering new applications, will place open source software on an equal footing with commercial systems during procurement cycles; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED THAT in pursuit of open data the City of Vancouver will:

• Identify immediate opportunities to distribute more of its data;
• Index, publish and syndicate its data to the internet using prevailing open standards, interfaces and formats;
• Develop appropriate agreements to share its data with the Integrated Cadastral Information Society (ICIS) and encourage the ICIS to in turn share its data with the public at large
• Develop a plan to digitize and freely distribute suitable archival data to the public;
• Ensure that data supplied to the City by third parties (developers, contractors, consultants) are unlicensed, in a prevailing open standard format, and not copyrighted except if otherwise prevented by legal considerations;
• License any software applications developed by the City of Vancouver such that they may be used by other municipalities, businesses, and the public without restriction.

BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED THAT the City Manager be tasked with developing an action plan for implementation of the above.

It is interesting to see how in 2009, organizations of all types are asking radical questions about process and governance. What will our world look like in 2010? [thanks to Ines Mergel for twittering about the motion. Do RSS her blog]

in May 2009 many of “us” are getting social media and do believe that “web 2.0″ has the potential to be a game changer. However, the critique of the new way of organizing collective action is to be taken seriously. Some of the points policy makers from Austria, Colombia, Germany, Mexico, and the United States have voiced to me in the last weeks are:

- in my country/company, labor laws do not allow government officials to work at 10 pm at night and if the write an email from home, we have a serious problem.

- in my country/company, journalists do not get social media, so we had to buy them 100 copies of Clay Shirky’s Here comes everybody (2008) so that they would understand our politicians point.

- in my country/company, maneuvering the tension between privacy and transparency is so complicated, we would not be able to profit of increased transparency.

- in my country/company the politicians do not get what they could gain from increased transparency, collaboration, and participation.

What are the main objections you have heard in the last months? What are your counter-arguments? What will happen?