Ross Mayfield, riffing on a blog by JP Rangaswami on the value of information - or more precisely the corruption of the value of information - added some great perspective to the discussion of why information should not be so tightly controlled within enterprises. And Ross makes the suggestion that "Perhaps there is an opportunity for security systems to be more effective as a whole system when it focuses on what people do with information instead of controlling its flow".
This is a similar point to what I was attempting to make in my Content = Community post in that until people *do* something with information, it might as well not exist in terms of value. The more people add to information - whether by tagging it, sending it around, riffing off of it (as Ross did to JP's post) - the more valuable it becomes.
Earlier in my career I worked at a management consulting firm and we helped large companies with new product development processes. It was the mid-90s and the whole world seemed to be talking about supply chain management software, processes, and structures. Now that the management consultants and SAP have been working on those operational processes for a couple of decades, there is less and less efficiency to ring out of that business flow.
The experience of helping companies reduce time to market got me thinking about the real value of social media. I think its real value is in reducing the time between the spark of an idea and the point at which someone initiates execution on that idea (assuming it is a good idea). The problem is that 'process' can't really be applied to ideas and you can't apply a workflow to make them more inspirational - they either are appealing or not to their audience. What social media does is to capture conversation and then make in persistent and transparent. It also allows ideas to be exposed to others through trusted connections - which matters when it comes to exposure. No offense to J.Blow but I'm more likely to read Ross Mayfield's or JP Rangaswami's blogs. So in an unstructured way, it enables faster exposure to ideas and gives the viewer a way to contribute, riff, and pass the idea along - giving it more value and creating a higher likelihood that the idea will be acted upon. Doing that across an enterprise and its ecosystem creates huge potential.
Companies that see the potential of that openness will find that they can get more idea 'sparks', a lot more exposure to ideas, the contributions that makes the ideas more valuable, and ultimately the ability to execute on the well vetted ideas much more rapidly. They get the opportunity to arbitrage information and gain competitive advantage.
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