Professor Andrew McAfee discusses Honeywell’s decision to implement internal knowledge discovery tools:
…it’s an effort by a classic large, mainstream, ‘old economy’ company to embrace Enterprise 2.0 technologies and approaches. Honeywell is about as far away from Avenue A | Razorfish as possible — the former is a huge old manufacturing conglomerate, the latter is a Network Era interactive agency. Yet both have now embraced tagging as a way to let their employees help each other find relevant content (a group-level goal) while simultaneously organizing their online environments (an individual-level goal).
Andrew’s information comes from inside Honeywell from Rich Hoeg. It”s not clear to me where Rich fits in the food chain but his bio says something about ‘knowledge management’ a term I know that sends tingles down Euan Semple‘s spine 
Nonetheless, Rich provides plenty of detail to get you thinking. The screeenshot above shows the results of a search conducted by their Google appliance.
What makes this interesting is that Honeywell is also one of the companies named by Oracle in its lawsuit against SAP. You might presume that Honeywell is making significant cost savings on its maintenance. This is something a number of my colleagues class as ‘innovation.’
So now we have two examples of innovation from a so-called mainstream company, steeped in ‘good old fashioned manufacturing.’ In his post, Andrew calls for further examples. If this very limited example provides any clue, then I think Andrew is looking in the wrong direction. Instead of concentrating on companies that are implementing a specific technology, how about looking for companies that are displaying a culture of innovation?
How about starting with the other companies named in the Oracle lawsuit?
From a professional perspective, I see the parallels among the firms with which I speak. To the go-getter TechCrunch set they might look pedestrian. But then once the penny drops, I’m finding it drops all the way. For a more visible example, you need only look at SAPs community efforts. A few years ago, it would have been unthinkable to imagine such a vibrant community coming out into the public domain with fresh ideas.
Dion Hinchcliffe provides further data points on the adoption of these new technologies. Again, his reporting mirrors what I am seeing in the UK and, to a lesser extent, in the wider European community. In commenting upon a recent McKinsey report, Dion says:
The numbers McKinsey provides from actual business leaders seems to indicate that broad, active interest in collective intelligence is rapidly forming in the offices of many company’s CIOs, CTOs, and other executives. McKinsey cites that fully 48% of the nearly 3,000 leading executives surveyed are actively investing in collective intelligence approaches.
The only thing that concerns me is that the pace of adoption seems to be far fast than was predicted. The usual hype cycle for adoption takes a path of 5-10 years. That does not appear to be the case this time around. I suspect there will be a lot of early failure or stalling with some of these initiatives. Not because the technology is difficult or that it is hard to get projects started. But because there needs to be a culture of change or a willingness before the benefits flow through. That’s a far harder nut to crack.
Technorati Tags: enterprise 2.0, innovation, knowledge as innovation, Oracle, Honeywell, SAP, SDN blogger
