Wikipedia wrestles with a growth and direction dilemma

Wikipedia has been an unqualified success of this decade. It is just not the product but the way they have created it. They spawned a new ideology, a new culture. In fact several enterprises have started to develop their content management and even the knowledge management practices around a wiki model.

However Wikipedia itself faces a deep dilemma about its growth and direction.

It started off as an encyclopedia from voluntary contributors and complete freedom to improve the content. Now, in its latest announcement it will impose an editorial review on articles. So, now the notion that everyone can change the entries is no longer true. In my view this is inevitable. A great ability to influence has to be accompanied by an equal amount of responsibility.

Currently they are doing a review about their culture and growth direction. I am particularly pleased that they are doing that because one of their commitments was to give a free encyclopedia to the world in possibly every language. They clearly seem to have lost sight of that.

The interesting thing is that Jimmy Wales — the man who created this movement and now an iconic figure is most critical about the direction itself.

Unlike corporations, Wikipedia is run by a Foundation which means that they have followers wedded to a particular cause. Changing the growth trajectory is not simply a matter of a CEO or the Board making a decision, but they would need to carry the thousands of volunteers with them — no easy task.

This would be an interesting organizational change to watch and learn from.

How to build a successful innovation team?

Recently I delivered a talk on business innovation. My main thesis was why that offers a competitive advantage and offers the best barrier to entry. There were interesting questions, but the question that flummoxed me was asked by a young MBA student and it went as follows: How to build a successful innovation team?

Not having worked in R&D or an innovation team, I had to admit my ignorance. I promised that I will think about it and revert. I asked several HR managers, consultants and even some innovation experts. I was not satisfied with most of the responses because they talked about examining past track records, achievements and so on. That doesn’t say much and I don’t necessarily agree with experience being a true predictor.. So here’s what I have come up with:

• Hire someone who doesn’t care much for stability, hierarchy, order and predictability. Every problem is unique and will need a different thinking approach.

• Find someone who appreciates and thrives on ambiguity. Ambiguity often has negative connotations, but to me to be able to appreciate the grey area and to live in the mental conflict zone is key to finding the breakthrough.

• A deep competency is good, but the person should be genuinely interested in other things. It is when you are looking at something else with genuine interest, a serendipity play converts the competency to a breakthrough.

• Have the ability to “abstractize” a practical problem and see a practical problem and hence an opportunity in an abstract thought. This calls for people who can have their feet on the ground and the head in the cloud and span the space between them.

• Finally and I think this is the most important: The last thing a team needs is finding another clone. Stop looking for something similar to what you already have. You need to fill gaps that are in your team and complement the competency and hence the more of the same doesn’t always make it successful.

(I am assuming that there exists some amount of passion, enthusiasm, respect for people and inter-personal communication strengths.)

It would be difficult to expect all this in an individual. However collectively the team should have these qualities. Whether they become successful or not is a different question. It depends on the mindset and a whole range of factors. But at least you know that we have a good capable team of cracking a problem.

Does anyone have a competency model to build innovation teams?

Mobile phones serve as catalysts for social media.

The mobile data services market is on an unprecedented roll. For the first time, wireless data revenue in the U.S. passed $10 billion in Q1 2009. Wireless data revenue in the U.S. itself maybe $42 billion by 2009 as per the respected analyst — Chetan Sharma who has provided details in his market update. The U.S. is now is the largest mobile data market, ahead of Japan and China. Verizon’s data revenues are close to $4 billion, just shy of NTT DoCoMo’s. The top four U.S. carriers figure among the top 10 global operators by way of mobile data service revenues.

I was curious to find out what could have led to the phenomenal surge. While there could be a few factors, in my view the single largest contributor has been the growth of social media. Let me explain:

As more and more people sign on to social networking platforms like Facebook, there is a compelling desire to share and be part of the communication. This naturally implies that more people are signing up for the mobile data plans which are far more profitable for operators. The key catalyst that contributes both to the social media and to the operator’s profit pool happens to be the ubiquitous mobile phone.

A simple, easy to use browser and a good camera on the phone is all that is needed. When the smart phone was invented, I bet no one saw this as a potential application. The iPhone showed what is possible and soon a variety of devices has made access to social media quite easy.

Now, mobile operators for a long time have tried to offer a variety of applications, but barring a few none took off. This only goes to show that managing a network and managing a application portfolio calls for different competencies. And suddenly when one was least expecting, there’s a big surge in mobile data services.

INQ Mobile — owned by Hutchinson Whampoa has launched a Facebook phone. In Hong Kong, where the INQ1 launched back in March, nearly 50 percent of its owners regularly use data services on a level that is four times higher than the typical 3G user base. Facebook usage is also 3-4 times higher than the average on other 3G devices on the 3 Hong Kong network, the company said. Soon we may have a Twitter phone as well.

So, we are back to where it all started: Carriers have become dumb pipes and the innovation is happening around the ends of the pipes — at the device level and at the application level.

So, like I normally say about innovation, the unintended effects of an innovation caused by seemingly disparate tributaries often causes a flood in an area that we least expected to happen.

Google and Apple are now confirmed rivals

If there was any doubt about the relationship between Google and Apple, the abrupt resignation of Eric Schmidt — Google CEO from the Apple Board should lay it to rest.

I wonder whether the FCC’s investigation of Apple yanking out Google Voice has something to do it. I wrote about their possible rivalry here, but before I could even conceive of possible actions, the resignation was announced. Coming to think of it, Google and Apple are bracing to compete with each other. Google’s Android which will soon be adopted by many device vendors will be in direct competition with Apple’s iPhone. And the Chrome OS will be competing with the Mac OSX.

But is this new? These moves have been going on for the past few years and while the conflict of interest wasn’t that sharp the yanking of Google Voice seems to have brought all that into the open.

I admire both companies. Both Steve and Eric are respected Valley veterans. They have been role models for me. Nonetheless I have to say they always had antithetical approaches to shaping the future of the consumer experience. Some day there was bound to be a conflict.

Apple believes in creating cool products, but being a walled garden. It has fans, not customers. Even though the iPhone is supposed to be open, every application must be approved by Apple. I had talked about the walled garden approach here and it seems to have worked very well for Apple.

Google has adherents. It believed in openness and its whole purpose (even for its Chrome OS) was to reduce the significance of devices in favor of applications that will reside in the cloud. And once the cloud becomes the organizing system, the devices — be it the phones or the laptops do not matter.

Google crowdsourced its innovation. Apple built an innovation value chain in-house. Both models were successful. Yet I think at the core there is a deep philosophical conflict which manifests as a fight between the open and proprietary approaches.  I wrote about it in the mobile phone industry here and hence am not surprised that a rivalry has come about.

The Google Voice episode is just the beginning. The FCC enquiry may reveal more.

And if the Google-Microsoft war and the Apple-Microsoft war, wasn’t interesting enough, we will see a third war — the Google-Apple war.

Understanding competition — the Bill Gates way

I thought that I had analyzed the levels and degrees of competition fairly comprehensively. In fact, I have used that as an organizing framework to understand competitive advantage.

Recently a friend of mine sent me an excerpts of an interview with Bill Gates when he was still the CEO of Microsoft which makes interesting reading.

Flying on the Delta Shuttle with Bill Gates 12 years ago, Richard Karlgaard– the Editor of Forbes asked Bill, “What Microsoft competitor worries you most?”

“Goldman Sachs.” Richard gave Gates a startled look. Was Microsoft about to try the investment banking business? “Software,” he said, “is an IQ business. Microsoft must win the IQ war, or we won’t have a future. I don’t worry about Lotus or IBM, because the smartest guys would rather come to work for Microsoft. Our competitors for IQ are investment banks such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.”

Getting the brightest bulbs to work at Microsoft has always been his obsession. It’s paid off. But what about now?

The best and the brightest want to work for companies like Google and Facebook. Microsoft seems to be losing the talent war. And does that explain why Microsoft has not made any ground shifting move in recent years yielding that terrain to Google and others?

Microsoft is caught in a classic dilemma of its own making. Its major revenue and profit streams continue to be Windows and Office which needs to be defended at all costs against young new attackers. Now will the smartest guys want to work for a organization where they would have to defend legacy or want to take a crack at changing the world?

The answer is obvious.

Unless you are a Singapore government scholar who has no choice but to work in the Singapore civil service because of the scholarship bond that you sign when you are 18 years old.

Social network for Government 2.0

Government 2.0 is clearly gaining momentum. I just stumbled on a social network platform to discuss government 2.0 initatives. GovLoop is the Premier Social Network for Government 2.0 connecting over 12,500 Federal, State, Local, Academics, and Good Contractors.

This is what I call tapping the wisdom of the crowd something that I have been strongly advocating. Some prefer to call it crowdsourcing.

Australia launches Gov 2.0. Will Singapore follow?

Another major country with pronounced democratic traditions and openness has set up a Government 2.0 task force. They rightly describe the opportunities that current technology provides, The current change in media behavior and habits is again seen as an opportunity not as a threat. The enthusiasm is clearly visible and the charter for the task force is clearly ambitious and could serve as an inspiration to other governments.

Many of the points made resonate strongly with me and I have written about it here and here. I only hope that Singapore also embraces this and does it soon.

I call it the inevitable path, because if people in government don’t wake up, the citizens will find some methods of forcing it to happen.

Singapore’s research and development needs a major rethink

Amongst the few Singapore civil servants I hold in great esteem for their clarity, sense of purpose, courage to stand up for what is right, one of them is Ngiam Tong Dow. He was the Perm Sec of the Ministry of Finance and the PMO . During the last few years, he has written some excellent pieces on the Singapore policy making process, governance, current quality of civil servants and other topics.

I have always found his writings thought provoking as he judiciously blends the philosophical with the pragmatic. There is always some clear takeaways from his writings. I wish I could chat with him and pick his erudite mind for some of the public policy dilemma that I have not been able to understand or reconcile with.

Mr. Ngiam in his usual characteristic style hints that Singapore’s R&D sector needs a rethink. He doesn’t dwell much on it neither does he make any specific suggestions.

But as I see a lot ails the R&D sector, especially in the IT area which I understand well. Here’s the record: Despite having a IT R&D sector for close to 20 years, and having spent hundreds of millions of dollars, the R&D sector has produced nothing to be even remotely proud of. There was the ITI, the ISS, JSAIC, CWC, just to name a few. They all had grandiose visions, programs, and ample funding. Then they were merged, combined, they took on new names and yet after 20 years, not a single technology, product, process, framework or anything worthwhile which the industry could use has come out of the labs. It was always a small “r” and a big “D”, and even there, the results have been dismal.

It may be ironical that the 2 best private sector firms that Singapore produced — Creative and Hyflux did their own R&D outside Singapore — the former in the U.S. and the latter in China as Mr. Ngiam points out. I met the CTO of Creative a few years back and he smiled indulgently when the talk about Singapore R&D sector came up.

Yet the Government focuses on R&D and each year their budgets have gone up. It is sad that the metrics of R&D performance is still predominantly input driven and no one is accountable for the outputs.

The only thing that I would like to ask Mr. Ngiam is how long will the Ministry of Finance continue to be satisfied with input metrics in the R&D category and when will it look for active output metrics. If companies like 3M, Microsoft, DuPont, P&G as well as some of the university labs are moving towards zero based budgeting, output driven metrics and clear directions for R&D effort, why is Singapore Inc not emulating them?

For those interested, Mr. Ngiam’s entire article is reproduced below. It makes very interesting reading.

June 6, 2009

FINANCE MINISTRY’S 50TH YEAR

Building more world-class S’pore firms

By Ngiam Tong Dow

THE year 1959 was a fateful one for Singapore. It was granted self-government by the British after 140 years of colonial rule. Other than foreign affairs and defence, the new Singapore Government led by Mr Lee Kuan Yew was free to pursue its own social and economic policies.

Mr Lee chose Dr Goh Keng Swee, the only economist in his team, to be our first finance minister. The Ministry of Finance (MOF) was housed in Fullerton Building. The General Post Office occupied the ground floor; MOF occupied the second to fifth floors.

As MOF alumni, we can be proud of belonging to the pioneering team, led by the inspiring Dr Goh, our minister, and by the late Mr Hon Sui Sen, our permanent secretary. We worked our guts out to pull the economy out of stagnation.

The Finance Ministry that Dr Goh established was not your traditional Treasury. Together with Mr Hon, he created the Economic Development Division to spearhead our economic development. The Economic Development Board (EDB) was set up as the operating arm of this division, tasked with finding jobs for the thousands of young students pouring out of our schools each year.

The EDB was given a grant of $100 million to get going. In return for the freedom to operate, its performance was continuously assessed. It was rated on outcomes more than outputs. The EDB chairman had to report annually the dollar value of the foreign direct investments committed to Singapore. He still does.

MOF’s fiscal policy has always been to stimulate growth through investment. As Permanent Secretary (Budget), I accorded higher priority to the development over the recurrent budget. The development budget invests for the future. In the early stages, the development budget was spent mainly on building infrastructure.

Over the last 50 years, we have seen Singapore’s budget priorities move from physical infrastructure to defence capability and now, education and training.

Though we are not totally free of ‘white elephant’ boo-boos, MOF’s track record in allocating scarce capital is good. Our current revenue was enough to pay for both operating as well as development expenditure. If the Government were a private corporation, we would have been able to finance all our capital expenditure without a cent of debt.

Was Singapore’s MOF more virtuous than our counterparts elsewhere? The fact of the matter is that we did what we did because we had no alternative. Without oil or other natural resources, budget surpluses and CPF savings were our only sources for accumulating reserves. Except in extremis, reserves are not intended to be spent on rainy days of the business cycle. The fundamental role of reserves is to serve as backing for our currency. A stable and convertible Singapore dollar is our lifeline to international trade on which our very survival depends.

In spite of the immense pressures exerted by the rest of Government on the MOF, I would be wary of dipping into our reserves to tide us over the troughs of business cycles. I remember the first global oil crisis of 1972. Mr Hon, by then Minister for Finance, refused to subsidise consumption. He thought it better for Singapore to swallow the medicine of inflation in one gulp. The cost of living index stabilised within 18 months.

MOF’s mission as guardian of the national budget will be more challenging in the future. For instance, before we can decide on how to allocate the research budget, we need to have some idea of the knowledge domains that Singapore has a more than even chance to compete in. Is it biotechnology, nano-engineering, solar energy or something else?

Spending on R&D in my view is too narrow a focus as a growth strategy. In any case, we do not have the breadth and depth of talent to compete successfully with the Americans, Europeans, Japanese, Russians, and in the near future, the Chinese and Indians.

We may be able to hire a few superstars to head our research institutions. But a Nobel laureate cannot work in isolation. He or she needs teams of young researchers to do the basic experiments. Young PhDs in China work for a fraction of the wages we pay our young dons at our two research universities. Ms Oliver Lum of Hyflux told me that the core membrane research work of her company was done at Hyflux laboratories in China.

Rather than pursuing high science whatever the cost, we may have to adopt a less lofty approach. We should ask ourselves: What are the knowledge domains we can excel in?

Singapore has a fair track record in building townships, industrial parks, container ports, submersible oil rigs, vocational and technical education and water treatment installations like Hyflux. As the example of Singapore Airlines shows, it is possible to build up a world-scale Singapore company on our own. SIA’s founding board had no foreign director or CEO.

The way forward for us is to have the guts to build another 25 world-scale ‘SIAs’ in the knowledge domains where we have a competitive advantage.

I learnt many lessons in economic policymaking from Dr Albert Winsemius, Singapore’s first Economic Adviser. The most valuable lesson he taught me was that you have to do the things that matter yourself.

After pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps in the pioneering years, we now outsource the CEO jobs to foreign talent. The irony is that when trouble looms, the foreign CEO just dusts off the seat of his pants and walks away with his sign-off bonus negotiated when he first signed on.

I refuse to believe that the Singaporean has so lost confidence in himself.

The pyramids of Egypt were built by the Pharoahs’ Hebrew slaves. The Egyptian Pharoenic race is now lost in antiquity. The Jewish Hebrew nation continues to thrive.

Quo Vadis Singapore? The above is an excerpt of a speech Mr Ngiam, a former senior civil servant, delivered yesterday to mark the 50th anniversary of the Ministry of Finance.

Will Singapore usher in Government 2.0?

President Obama will surely go down in history for a number of things. Amongst many things, he was the first one to use the power of social networking so effectively which led him to win the Presidential elections decisively. He appointed Vivek Kundra as CIO in his administration and Aneesh Chopra as a CTO. Surprisingly they are not marquee names as one would have expected, but people who have blazed a new trail defying conventional practices. Some prefer to call them the iconoclasts.

Vivek Kundra, the CIO for the Obama Administration launched a new website called Data.gov which for all its radical breakthroughs was announced quietly. I hope it gets the publicity it so rightfully deserves. The intent of the website is to release vast amounts of raw data so that tax payers can see what’s happening in the government and buraucracy.

The new site has 50 feeds and is intended to grow to about 240,000 feeds next month itself. It will be a one-stop shop for free access to data that will be generated across all federal government agencies.

This is a paradigm shift and in some sense unparalleled in the history of Government IT. First, it establishes beyond doubt the credentials of President Obama to be as transparent as possible. Second, ingenious entreprenuers can quickly develop Web applications more easily (with mash-ups becoming so common) using government data and take it to market. Finally, interested citizens can provide ideas to the government’s problems, now that they have access to better, reliable and immediate data. Finally, it also goes to show that the government is prepared to accept that it may not have all the answers to its problems and that crowdsourcing must be encouraged.

The Singapore government has been not just an early but a staunch user of IT. It has in the past, pioneered effective applications and can rightfully claim credit for the high level of IT penetration in Singapore. Yet, in recent years it seems to have lost both the momentum and direction. The Government IT directions are managed in a hybrid model with the Government CIO being part of the IDA. One look at the Government CIO mandate here shows it is inwardly focused, tactically driven and continues to o continues to operate from a traditional mindset.

At this stage of IT maturity merely notching up some incremental percentage points on the efficiency scale is not going to help either the Government or the citizens. It needs a more forward looking radical approach if it has to remain relevant and regain the respect that it once had. It needs a President Obama philosophy and a Kundra’s impetus for action.

If what is stopping this leap is imagination, it needs new blood; a set of iconoclasts. If however they believe that the government knows best and that there is no wisdom in the crowd, then sadly, only a serious failure will force a rethink. If the Government does not want to be more transparent, it is only inhibiting the natural empowerment and evolution of the citizens. If the government needs a role model, President Obama has accepted to be one.

Let’s not forget that one constant dimension of the various developments in the IT world is empowerment. This has happened not just within the firewall but as part of the extended enterprise. Choosing to ignore the philosophical underpinnings of empowerment is choosing to ignore the true potential of IT and in a way also choosing to ignore true progress.

I will have the opportunity to speak on Government 2.0 at a National IT conference very soon and this gives me a lot to conceptualize things better.

Managing change

Peter Drucker in a conversation with Peter Senge said, ‘Every organization will have to become a change leader. You can’t manage change. You can only be ahead of it. You can only make it.’

How true it is. Let us be ahead of ‘change.’