David Weinberger's Intranet Buzz:

WALKING THE WALK

By David Weinberger
Editor, Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization

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Harley-Davidson Motor wanted to get its corporate structure more in line with the values of its users

Remember Marlon Brando in The Wild One, back before he and his hog were in a statistically dead heat in terms of freestanding poundage? Can you imagine him engaging in a consultative, collaborative management environment? At Harley-Davidson Motor, they're apparently more interested in Brando's NY roommate during the Early Years: Wally Cox.

According to CIO (Feb. 15, Meredith Levinson), HDM wanted to get its corporate structure more in line with the values of its users. Bizarrely, rather than thinking that this means dissenters should be stomped, they decided to tear down the hierarchical structure in the IT shop. Now they have three CIOs, each overseeing one of three overlapping circles: manufacturing, sales and support. Although two of them report to the third, they do not consider the relationship hierarchical: the über-manager ties into the rest of the organization, but the three of them work independently and collaboratively as appropriate. Each division has its own steering committee made up of the managers who are going to have to implement what the committee decides on.

This is a result of a deliberate decision to move to a "distributed leadership" model that spreads responsibilities across groups. This requires them to respect differences, which they claim is the cornerstone of their success - just as with the Hells Angels who love differences because otherwise they wouldn't have anyone to beat up.

One startling finding: HDM has discovered that people tend to work collaboratively until they're promoted. Well, pop me a wheelie, who would ever have thunk it?

The National Institute of Health has invited all scientific journals to contribute to the PubMed site where anyone can search for biomedical information.

The National Institute of Health has invited all scientific journals to contribute to the PubMed site where anyone can search for biomedical information. This is, however, a bit like inviting all the local jewelry stores to contribute to the FreeGold site where anyone can pick up a coupla nuggets for free. In fact,, according to an article in The Industry Standard (Feb. 14, by William Speed Weed - I ain't making it up), Elsevier Science, one of the largest publishers of scientific journals, wants to team up with Science, Nature and nine other publishers to compete against PubMed.

NIH's point of view is that they spend $13B a year funding laboratory work that's then published for profit by the journals. Besides, the NIH site should stimulate interest in the research articles, the full text of which the journals can charge for at the PubMed site.

So far, not a lot of publishers have signed up with PubMed. The largest is the nonprofit Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And Biomed Central will start publishing papers there in May. BioMed is a new publishing house that accepts submissions direct from the scientists, gets 'em peer reviewed, and posts them electronically far faster than traditional publishers.

Open Source science! We want it now!

PubMed: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi/

BioMed: http://www.biomedcentral.com/

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The Author

David Weinberger writes JOHO and is one of the Ringleaders of cluetrain.com, a manifesto of web ethics. He also provides strategic marketing consulting to high-tech companies, writes for several magazines (including Wired) and is a commentator on NPR's "All Things Considered." He was, as VP of Strategic Marketing, one of the shapers of Open Text's intranet strategy. David sits on several conference boards and is a member of AIIM's Emerging Technology Advisory Group. Reach him at self@evident.com.