In my last post, I talked about biomimicry as the answer to most of our human problems. Some of those problems include information dissemination, joint knowledge creation and relationship management.  By looking at the insect world, we can and have solved many of these problems.

The insect world seems chaotic, but in reality it is a self-organizing, redundant, highly specialized, centrally managed system.  Colonies of ants and bees, for example, look like chaotic swarms, but in reality their queens give the orders, specialized workers carry out those orders and have backup systems, like chemical trails or poisons, which allow for problems, like invasion or weather, to be surmounted without damaging the overall system.  Individuals “know” each other through their scents or chemical signature and can share experiences and collaborate together once identified as “friends.  Is this beginning to sound familiar?  They may not have perfected smell-o-vision on the Internet yet, but once I “know” who you are, I can “friend” or “follow” you on any number of networking systems today.

Just like in the insect world, the systems we are creating are as diverse as the insects on this planet.  Their diversity stems from how the systems are being used and by whom.  For example, Facebook versus LinkedIn or Twitter versus Yammer where the difference is primarily between personal and business networks. Some of these networks are to ensure relationships are not lost and we can keep up with each other as we move from job to job or place to place.  I’ve found a number of people from school and past jobs through these networks that I never would have otherwise.  Others are focused on sharing information or on collaborating together to develop new knowledge.

I believe there are also classes of users who by using these systems differently are creating sub-systems within the larger network.  Take Twitter users for example.  There are many who use it as a global IM client.  Personally, I find this annoying when done all the time as that information is usually not relevant to more than one or two people.  I often “unfollow” very quickly if that’s all that’s coming across.  Others use it to ask questions or describe thoughts or describe live events as they unfold.  I liken this to the bee that has found a jackpot of pollen and wants every bee to know. My goal is to find jackpot bees from many different gardens so that my Twitterverse is diverse and highly valuable.

I have been finding that for many of the same reasons these technologies are so popular outside of business organizations, they are failing inside those same organizations.  It may be the self-organizing nature of the systems or the perceived lack of control over the information flowing through the system which worries businesses, regardless it is failing in most established businesses.

This year’s TED conference included a talk by Tim Berners-Lee where he spoke of information management being the next big issue to tackle as we tackled the WWW.  This is also true within businesses.  Too many assume all of their information is confidential and thus must be under lock and key, when in reality very little of it is.  It is my hypothesis that this fear of the truly unknown (ie information) is what is preventing a lot of social networking and collaboration from occurring  productively within businesses today.  How do we fix this?

“Greening IT” is becoming a mantra to many these days.  To some it is merely marketing, to others it is a way to reduce costs and reinvest those savings into more valuable IT pursuits.  Prior to the recent economic woes, there were even those who simply wanted to do right by the environment.  Although they have most likely switched their business cases to be more cost focused by now.

Of late, it has been top of mind for me…

Since early this year, I have been working on a large, multi-customer research project called Redefining Employee Computing.  We have been delving into how Web 2.0, cloud computing, social networking, Gen Ys entering the workforce, the economy, globalization and other converging forces are redefining the way in which IT enables its users.  Our scope is broad in that it includes desktops, mobile devices, security, data management, access, identity, collaboration, etc.  Our research is not focused on “green”, but because of the broadness of scope and the complexity of many of our members’ environments, our hypotheses and results are not only describing cost, flexibility and innovation benefits, but “green benefits” as well.  For example, the new EC models will include more telecommuting, less travel and fewer, big, energy inefficient facilities.

I recently commented on a great post by Esteban Herrera of NovaSphere Group on how IT outsourcing providers need to step up to this particular plate to ensure they are able to survive in the long term.  Additionally, those who do so quickly should be able to undercut the prices of their competitors who haven’t in the short term.

And just yesterday, I was reading Treehugger and came across its summarization of a recent Capgemini study, the Green IT Report 2008, which is “a study of the IT industry’s green credentials and an assessment of how industry leaders, EMC, HP, IBM, Google and Sun Microsystems are dealing with the topics of environmental responsibility, sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility.” The study suggests that some leading IT companies are serious about their green initiatives and are making measurable progress.  Given the few included and limited participation by some in the study, however, we still have a ways to go.

I’m hopeful that we’re beginning to move from insulting marketing ploys into the real world of making it happen.

Cloud computing has been steadily gaining momentum and validity in meeting enterprise needs and this latest global experiment from HP, Yahoo, Intel, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (US), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (DE) and Infocomm Development Authority (SG) should prove interesting to watch.

The ambitious six-site project is aimed at developing an Internet-based computer infrastructure stable enough to host companies’ most critical data-processing tasks. The project also holds an unusual promise for advances in fields as diverse as climate change modeling and molecular biology.

The project’s large scope will allow researchers to test and develop security, networking, and infrastructure components on a large scale simulating an open Internet environment. But to test this infrastructure, academic researchers will also run real-world, data-intensive projects that, in their own right, could yield advances in fields as varied as data mining, context-sensitive Web search, and communication in virtual-reality environments.

Tim O’Reilly is concerned that though we may move into the cloud for all the right reasons, we will still use the old architectures and lock everyone in as we did with ERPs and other proprietary applications.

…the success of the internet as a non-proprietary platform built largely on commodity open source software could lead to a new kind of proprietary lock-in in the cloud. What good are free and open source licenses, all based on the act of software distribution, when software is no longer distributed but merely performed on the global network stage? How can we preserve freedom to innovate when the competitive advantage of online players comes from massive databases created via user contribution, which literally get better the more people use them, raising seemingly insuperable barriers to new competition?

The “internet operating system” that I’m hoping to see evolve over the next few years will require developers to move away from thinking of their applications as endpoints, and more as re-usable components. For example, why does every application have to try to recreate its own social network? Shouldn’t social networking be a system service?

This isn’t just a “moral” appeal, but strategic advice. The first provider to build a reasonably open, re-usable system service in any particular area is going to get the biggest uptake. Right now, there’s a lot of focus on low level platform subsystems like storage and computation, but I continue to believe that many of the key subsystems in this evolving OS will be data subsystems, like identity, location, payment, product catalogs, music, etc.

How do we ensure openness and interoperability prevail at the end of the day?  Seemingly irrelevant for something referring to clouds, but no less important to cloud computing’s success, how too do we ensure the right locations for the physical manefestations of the cloud?

I’ve recently stumbled upon (no pun intended) a number of insightful best practices and tips centered around enterprise collaboration, community management and social networking in general as well as around specific technologies/sites.  What are yours?

• How Your LinkedIn Profile Is Connected To Your Company’s Success
  [Steve Patrizi]
• Twelve best practices for online customer communities
  [Dion Hinchcliffe]
• 2008 Tribalization of Business Study
  [Deloitte, Beeline Labs and Soc. for New Communications Research]
• Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise: McKinsey Global Survey Results
  [McKinsey & Co - see When Web 2.0 Works chapter - req'd reg]
• 13 Tips From My First Year Of Blogging
  [Dave Fleet]
• 42 Top Social Media Tips And Tools
  [Dave Fleet]
• Enterprise 2.0 Blueprint
  [Todd Stephens]
• Some Questions You Might Get Asked
  [Andrew McAfee]
• I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip
  [New York Times - Luis Suarez - req'd reg]
• When Group-Think Poses as Collaboration
  [Roy Youngman]
• Some Suggestions for a “CIO 2.0″
  [Vaughan Merlyn]
• The Trade-Off For Transparency
  [ThreeMinds - Marta Strickland]