Davenport v. McAfee update

• Date: Monday, June 18
• Time: 10am
• Location: Westin Boston Waterfront. Boston, MA
• Price: FREE (conference admission is not free, but highly recommended!)

Thanks to the generosity of Conference Director Steve Wylie, and the planning organizers for the Enterprise 2.0 conference being held at the Westin, June 18 – 21, the Davenport/McAfee debate will be held “on campus” on one of the stages for the show event. Dan Farber has agreed to moderate the event. I’m particularly grateful to Dan for offering to do this on short notice. Dan helped us out with the inaugural Office 2.0 conference by interviewing Esther Dyson who opened the program, and he recently moderated an excellent panel of enterprise 2.0 CEO vendors at this year’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

I have seen a few more mentions of Davenport-related discussion on the web today, such as James Dellow who references a 1994 piece Davenport authored on how to “save IT’s soul.” Bill Ives picked up on that and added his comments today, as well.

From James Dellow:

I want to put a different spin on Davenport’s perspective. Firstly, he thinks that the next big thing will really be in the area of business analytics – however, I think he failing here to see what the impact Web 2.0 and other related technologies will have in this space. More on that another time maybe, but think about mashups and “Data as the Intel inside”.

From Bill Ives:

Thanks to James Dellow for pointing to Tom’s 1994 HBR article, Saving IT’s Soul: Human-Centered Information Management. Here Tom presents a manifesto for building information systems that focus on how people use information, rather than machines. He suggests that human centered information management should:

1. Focus on broad information types;
2. Emphasize information use and sharing;
3. Assume transience of solutions;
4. Assume multiple meanings of terms;
5. Continue until desired behavior is achieved enterprisewide;
6. Build point-specific structures;
7. Assume compliance is gained over time through influence; and
8. Let individuals design their own information environments.

While these are general points that many of us might agree with today, they were more innovative at the time, the early days of knowledge management. They remain relevant today since the non-technical side of enterprise 2.0 is more important than the technical side, just as it was for enterprise .05 (or any other number).

In true web 2.0 fashion, we’ve started an event on Facebook for the Enterprise 2.0 conference. Anyone with a Facebook account can join the event. We are planning to exchange information and meeting locations throughout the conference. I imagine Twitter will be buzzing at the conference as well.