Ross Mayfield on The Impact Of The Econolypse

Ross Mayfield, co-founder of SocialText, and I spoke today about the challenges that confront the enterprise today, and what we are trying to accomplish with the Open Enterprise 2009 study.
Ross Mayfield on Open Enterprise 2009 from stowe boyd on Vimeo.Ross suggests that providing a 'landscape' of the various technologies available would be very helpful, especially in a time of consolidation. He also came down pretty hard on a user-centered approach, which is the heart of what we are up to.Ross also confirms that the community is very interested in case studies, which we will be chasing down in the weeks and months to come.Finally, Ross offered this insight: that in the down economy companies may not have the wherewithal to rework business processes in the large, but instead they have to make small tweaks -- small refactorings -- on the fly. While large-scale change management may be unfolding, it will likely be realized, at the edge, by small kaizen-like process improvements. He asks what sorts of tools are best for this sort of business innovation?We will certainly sit down with Ross again, when we have churned up some more substantivee results from the study.