Last week I attended the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Focused on innovation and collaboration inside the enterprise, it’s one of my favourite conferences and this is the second year I have attended (and in a departure, planning for 2009 has already begun, so if you want to go, you’d better register now, as spots are limited).

One of the most provocative sessions for me was Document 2.0, here’s the official blurb:

Documents flow through our organizations, are validated, reviewed, circulated, modified, transformed, printed, scanned… Just like the Web, the Office, or the Enterprise, the document has to evolve to support more effective business processes. Welcome to Document 2.0! Open, secure, personalized, traceable, structured, mobile — we’ll explore all these topics in this panel.

There were two really interesting threads that emerged during the course of the panel discussion, one was forward compatibility and the other was, not surprisingly, security.

Forward Compatibility
Who out there can still read their WordPerfect 1.0 documents, stored on floppy discs more than a decade ago? Unless you have the software and the hardware (a computer with the appropriate drive) you’re out of luck. There are millions of businesses and individuals in the same boat – they have data stored on tapes or discs that can no longer be easily read, meaning that data is as gone as if it had been deleted in a catastrophic systems crash.

The topic of centalized data repositories – essentially SaaS (software as a service) file servers, flushed out some passionate debate, largely focused around trust – a number of people in the audience seemed to be completely unwilling to entertain the idea that a third party service provider could actually be better at taking care of their data than they were. I’d like to strongly disagree.

If you stored your data remotely, rather than having to keep old equipment around to read old files, your service provider would ideally keep your data current and store it (or systematically update it) to be truly forwardly compatible (and searchable, and clean).

When it comes to security, think about it this way: you already store your money in the cloud. Your employer does not give you a bag of gold ingots on payday. They electronically transfer funds to a third party. Most of us are so comfortable with this that we don’t even think about it, but if the system suddenly stopped working or the third party stopped doing what they were supposed to do, mass chaos would ensue. The things that stop that from happening are mass and regulation.

So, a thousand little unregulated third-party data storage providers? No, I wouldn’t get on that boat either. Just enough big players to create an environment of competition and innovation, with appropriate government regulation that would establish forward compatibility and security? I’m all over that – and you should be, too.

I’ve been thinking about writing this post ever since reading a fascinating piece by James Surowiecki in the New Yorker a few months back. Titled, “The Open Secret of Success“, the article used the lens of Toyota on the edge of overtaking GM as the world’s largest automaker to explain a pivotal contributor to that success, the Japanese concept of kaizen. Surowiecki explored how kaizen has come to define innovation,

As an incremental process, in which the goal is not to make huge, sudden leaps but, rather, to make things better on a daily basis.

A short time after reading this piece I was preparing to speak at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, followed a few days later by a talk at Blogpotomac in Washington, DC. I’d also been giving a lot of thought to SMG and what we do. We’ve been around since 2006, and used to position ourselves as “one of the worlds first dedicated social media agencies”. After a time, that became less of a meaningful differentiator, and as a venerable member of our advisory board pointed out, yelling “FIRST!” is not exactly strong or insightful branding. For the last six months or so I’ve been thinking about exactly who we are and what we do, and posting about it as a way of crystallizing and making a commitment to some of these ideas.

Thinking about that New Yorker article and the stuff I was going to talk about at the conferences, who we are and what we do suddenly became clear: we transform companies. We don’t just deploy some fancy new social media tactics in support of a campaign and walk away when it’s done. When we form a new client partnership and start helping them take the steps they need to form meaningful relationships with a broad group of their stakeholders, we start the process of changing them from the inside; changing what they communicate and the ways they interact with their audience (whoever that might be – customers, partners, employees, the media, etc.).

As you can imagine, this takes time, and the challenge is that, particularly in North America, we are very much conditioned for what I call the “fireworks” mentality, often embodied in the phrase, “Let’s make a viral video!”. In other words, we want a hit, a big hit, and we want it now so we can show our bosses what a great job we did before moving on to the next thing.

The work that we do is the exact opposite of that. It is our objective to fundamentally transform the ways companies think about the behaviour that motivates the millions of people online all talking to one another, and the impact this can have on their business. Reaching out to these communities via tactical brilliance is definitely a component, but the last thing in the world we want to do is let the sky go dark afterwards. So we take the long view, focusing on incremental improvements. Things like including digital influencers in traditional events and maintaining those relationships, connecting with appropriate communities of interest in sustainable and meaningful ways, getting firms to pay attention to what people are saying about them online and learning how to respond and engage in a way that improves their bottom line.

Because, in the long run, based on the examples so clearly articulated by James Surowieki, what wins: fireworks or glacier?