Library clips

Getting an internal Facebook (social network and group feature) is a standalone tool, it has nothing to do with the Intranet, does it?

Unless you can structure it yourself like Nathan Wallace did with a Confluence wiki…not sure if SocialText can achieve a similar thing, but I believe OpenText Social Media, Lotus Connections, Jive, Awareness, Traction, Telligent, Connectbeam, and more suites made of components rather than designed as an Intranet.

Getting an internal Facebook that is designed as an Intranet replacement is more like Intranet 2.0, and seems to be what ThoughtFarmer are doing.

I suppose the third category would be to alter your existing Intranet by mashing in these types of features.

The latest Neilsen report on the social intranet says a few interesting things on this point:

“It’s important to integrate social features with the main intranet to avoid burdening users with double work.”

“That said, several of our case studies successfully implemented a staged approach, initially separating social features from the main intranet because of their different design and feel. Eventually, these features should be integrated, ideally as part of a bigger project to redesign the entire portal.”

I guess the difference I’m making here is that these new social network/group tools are mainly about connecting and collaborating, whereas Intranets are usually about profile information on each unit, heavily used tools and links, and news from teams to the rest of the organisation.

In this sense it seems designed tools like Thoughfarmer are combing the best of both worlds:

Doing work/finding stuff

• individual connecting with the organisation
• individual sensemaking
• collaborate in groups

Company information, tools and news

• make a profile page for your team with links to lots of info and what you are about…and also news your team wants to share with the organisation
• find common tools and links (timesheets, repositories, etc…)
• a company homepage as the pivot point

This is taking us back to the true meaning of Intranet (via Matthew Hodgson), rather then the hijacked, vetted, static, one-to-many tool it became.

“Essentially, he observed that people were creating small websites inside their organisations to share knowledge and communicate information”

Matthew then explains it’s relationship with early KM efforts:

“…the idea that, much like print publishing, documents are worked on by individuals and then released to others once it is finished and officially approved. KM guru David Gurteen suggests that this “create and publish” behaviour is also likely to be the result of early knowledge management efforts to bring structure to information in the organisation and make it searchable and easily accessible to employees. Unfortunately, as Gurteen highlights, too often employees didn’t see any value in this for themselves and, as a result, such systems failed”

“The essence of this failure of early intranets to bring true communication value into an organisation and to its employees is perhaps bound with the lack of recognition and understanding of how knowledge is created and information is shared by people. It’s also the factor that underpins Web 2.0’s success where traditional intranets have tended to fail. That is, that information is shared through social networks, from person to person, and that there are a number of roles in that social exchange.”

Related

KM: Round 2.0
KM 2.0 is about “showing your workings out”
Is publish a dirty word in enterprise 2.0

The other day when I posted on social networks and ad-hoc groups, I mentioned these online tools need to mirror both our offline behaviour, and our online real-time behaviour.

I set the scenario that at work there may be a task or initiative which involves people from many departments.

What usually happens is everyone gets invited to a meeting: in a room, via a telecon, or something like webex (we now use MS Office Communicator).

After the meeting the coordinator will go back to their seat, document the minutes in MSword and send an email attachment.

Then various people use email to do their bit.

Then we reconvene in a new meeting to see where everyone is at.

This is hopeless; I say when we go back to our seats we can still assimilate the real-time room (meeting) environment in an asynchronous fashion.

This makes for better communication, coordination and awareness…and transparency by default.

After the meeting someone can create a group space and invite all members as quick as sending an email.

Here they will find the minutes in a wiki, each page has a comments stream.

Here they will find a question space (just like issues raised in the meeting)

Here they will find a blog to post updates about the part they are working on.

Well, look at that, we can do asynchronously, what we usually do when we are in the same room.

This online tool is a social network with ad-hoc groups, where you have your own “mypage” that lists all groups you are working in, even better if you can post to any of the groups from your page.

Integration

A good way for adopting new practices is in the design and integration with existing tools.

Just like Jon Mell describes less use of email by incorporating IM into email (placing it in the same spot where you create a new email)…what I would like to see at the end of an Office Communicator Live Meeting, is to be able to spin this real-time (synchronous) ad-hoc group into an asynchronous ad-hoc group using a social network and group tool. Somehow both tools would be integrated, making jumping from one to the other the obvious thing to do; rather than using email for asynchronous communication and coordination.

People often find email conversation frustrating so it’s decided we need another meeting…with the correct asynchronous tools you don’t need so many meetings as we can use blogs to communicate, forums to discuss and wikis to collaborate on a perpetual basis…I alluded to this use case for teams a while back.

BTW-Why is Outlook not an internal Facebook and MS Office Communicator an internal Twitter?

Like my last post, design is key to influencing new behaviours.

More from Jon Mell:

“…there is no reason why at the front end we cannot combine communication tools at the presentation layer so that people don’t have to think as much about how they are going to communicate and which tools they are going to use. There is a scale here in terms of how advanced people are in their adoption and usage of Enterprise 2.0. Once people are comfortable with the concept of Enterprise 2.0 then they will naturally and intuitively know which tools to use without thinking. At the initial adoption stage, however, putting guidance and pointers in the flow of existing tools can have a significant impact in terms of alleviating any fears of using a new system. Some users may always stay in this mode, where they need the system to do the thinking for them in terms of which tools to use, and others may move to a position where the thinking becomes more intuition.”

Paula Thorton is a blogging canon of late, which is good to see as her twitter trigger fingers are always on fire, but don’t provide enough space for her to share her extended original thinking, so I’m happy she’s blog drunk again.

Anyway, a post of hers called Adoption can’t be driven, really rang true to me, it’s about design, adoption and adaptation…the basic premise is that without user centred design, you can forget even trying to faciliate adoption.

In the comments she says:

“Rather than drive, push, pull — movement occurs by mutual attraction: draw (this is a fundamental principle of complexity sciences ala. self organization — per Stuart Kauffman, it’s “energy for free”). But that’s the ‘lesser’ goal. The FIRST goal is to simply GO to where they are. Meet them. While that can be taken literally, it’s more figurative. It’s about figuring out what activity they’re doing and embed function.”

NOTE: I’m currently drafting a post on adoption that goes much further into this, so stay tuned.

I could really relate to Paula’s post to the context of my current experience in using a 90’s non-user centred application for Communities of Practice (CoPs), as I find I’m driving adoption in a “pushing” sense in a big way in relation to the technology/design aspect. User manuals is not a good start, as CoP tools are very simplistic, they are not sophisticated at all…but that’s what you get when the design is not user centred.

Then to really press the point I came across this tweet:

GIA LYONS
RT @cflanagan: Poll: Do you allow employees 2 (self-service) create groups in your intn’l e2.0 deplmnt? http://twtpoll.com/elm0uu #twtpoll

JOHNT
@gialyons after meeting i can go back 2 desk + coordinate by email in 1 click, groups should b same

There is some context missing here that’s make it a little hard for this survey to be totally effective.

And that is, different applications have different ways of setting up groups…some old school apps involve some work in setting up a group…but on second thought this poll alludes to web 2.0 type tools, so I guess that means group features that you can set up in a couple of clicks.

NOTE: In this post I refer to CoPs and groups interchangeably, but as you know a CoP is a type of group.

In a previous post I have explained our CoPs are portal type websites that need to be designed, which means they take a while to set up, and they have lots of permissions functionality, you can add many blogs, forums, wikis, etc…they certainly don’t suit a quick set-up, and aren’t the easiest things to run.

This does not change our belief in emergent communities, but because of design sophistication and the design not being user-centric we have taken a bottom-up request, top-down creation, which is unfortunately a necessary obstacle to emergence.

This means I create the CoPs, and use my HTML skills to design the CoP as user friendly as possible to the needs of the requestors. I do this as they may not have skills or time to design their CoP…I want to limit the design adoption barrier as much as possible.

I really understand Paula’s point, because I believe we would have lots more adoption if the CoPs were designed intuitively, and we allowed self-serve creation.
People want to visit, orient themselves (ie. without thinking, understand what they can and can’t do), and be one-click away from an action.

Self serve creation is key!

The creation of the actual space is really important for emergence and empowerment, and this is what I like about new social computing tools like Lotus Connections, Jive, Open Text Social Media, etc… As a result this is a plus for adoption.

Think about it, a couple of us are interested in a topic or have a task to do…we create a group space in under a minute, and start participating.

The minute people need permissions, is a minute too long; they don’t bother and will use email. And if the design is not user-centric, they may eventually give up leaving a ghost town for email.

What self creation means is you are gonna get less of the prescribed scenario where the boss requests the creation of a CoP and appoints people to be members and lead; as people have the power to self-serve and naturally coalesce around a topic.

I bet that before the boss can even order a CoP, there would be people already creating their own…this is great, as the boss can concentrate on leadership.

Self-serve creation is where it’s at! as the very essence of it is not encouraging a culture of orders and outcome, but instead a culture of, “if it has value it will surface” (emergence and adapting)…plus the bonus of a transparent workplace (kind of like an emergence on top of the emergence)

User-centric design is where it’s at! as people just don’t have time to read a manual, or no longer read manuals anyway…or click around for an hour working it out, and even if they do, it doesn’t make using a non-intuitive tool less frustrating.

Don’t get me wrong, our current CoPs are great as conversational portal like websites, your HTML skills are your only barrier to creating a flashy site. Because of this design, they are prone to be used for more long-term uses.

In contrast, the enterprise version of anyone being able to set up a Facebook or LinkedIn type group in a few easy clicks is marvellous and simple to use…what people think in the organisation is actually making itself present as the frontline workers actually get to create the brains (groups) where this thinking (conversations) happens.
But your group may want more than a glorified forum and activity stream. They may want various forums on the same page, perhaps some permissions control, and a way to flash up the site. I guess the answer to this using 2.0 type groups is create as many groups as you like, and then use a wiki as your website to list them all, and perhaps also re-syndicate the content.

Since our current CoPs allow each CoP to house unlimited forums, blogs and wikis; this means topics may become buried in the CoP as it tries to cater too much. Seeing a CoP name in our directory is certainly not going to be able to describe all the content sources in the CoP. Plus you may have people that hang around a particular forum in the CoP and not the others, and they may want some more ownership and visibility by having their own space.
In contrast some of our existing CoPs would not suit new web 2.0 stream like group spaces (as they seem too simple), they would instead like to provide multiple blogs and forums in the one page, and to create free-form HTML content, this is especially true with some of our CoPs being used as support spaces, as they serve as a conversational portal/knowledge base.

I’ll just add a final comment on behavioural design…I’ve noticed that some of these new group sites don’t use terms like blogs, forums, and wikis, but instead call them messages, questions, documents. Even contextual names for blogs like project diaries, etc… I think using a familiar word like “messages, questions” lessens the unfamiliarity and even the stereotype you may have of the tool, and in all lessens the barrier to take part as it’s nothing too different.

Just like matter warps gravity, design can warp culture.

NOTE: My use of the word “warp” is not referring to the result of good or bad, but instead the intervening cause.

Matt Simpson has a kicker of a post in regards to a scenario that happens to me all the time…which you would expect from someone who deals with enterprise online communities on a daily basis.

The post title says it all, The Manager Who Thought He Could Create a Community.

“I had a meeting today with a manager who thought he could create a community. He was troubled that the community didn’t really work well. It really made him angry.”

“Now, you might ask yourself, how in the world can a man create a community? Aren’t communities made of people? Aren’t they voluntary? Don’t they form when people gather together and interact with one another voluntarily based on something they have in common and actually recognize themselves as members of a persistent group? Yes, of course.

So, I asked the man, how did he do it? He showed me.”

The Manager progressed to create an online space and filled it with member ID’s and appointed someone to facilitate it.

“His major frustration was that the assigned community manager hadn’t taken his role seriously.”

“…we talked a bit about the concept of communities… about voluntary membership and participation… about the self-selecting nature of the membership itself… about the need for leaders to self-select from within the membership and identify their own topics. This is a typical flow of discussion, which, when given enough time and insight, eventually changes a person’s entire outlook… from manager to gardener. Communities form and emerge naturally. They can be encouraged and facilitated; But they can’t be engineered and determined.“

And a magical summary if I’ve ever heard one:

“A man can no more create a community by filling out a form on a webpage than he can make a fruit tree by taping fruit to twigs and twigs to a stump.”

My post, Online communities : Bottom-up requests very much reflects this experience.

Here are some excerpts:

“IF THERE IS a Top-Down *request*, usually by a boss, we inform them that willing a community this way is not effective. Instead you have to workshop with your potential members and from this conversation an appropriate community/s will manifest.”

“Each CoP needs in this order:

1. a substantial enough topic to warrant it’s own space
2. someone who is passionate and has the time to lead it
3. a bunch of members who also have an interest in the topic and will contribute”

“If you have all of these then we will create a CoP as specific as you can (by that I mean a space where people have a shared identity about a topic)
- but I expect each person who wants to lead these CoPs to approach me”

“I noticed some communities in the directory that were created before I was the global lead for the company.
- there was a general community and then another 4 specific communities”

“I rang up the Facilitator of the general community and he told me that he got those 4 specific communities created in the hope to get some people to run them. But it just didn’t happen.”

I also reinforce this point in teams wanting to use CoP tools.

“It’s usually the team lead who wants the community
- so right off the bat we need to know if it’s what the workers want
- and we need to know how to best structure it so the workers naturally participate”

“An idea here for the lead is to put aside control, prescribed structure and convenience of one space, and let the workers suggest community structure/number of communities
- a bottom-up way to structure a top-down request”

“In this approach we get to see if the workers are excited or not (also a good way to surface champions), and they will come up with more natural and usable structures ie. communities designed in a way that will actually be used, as the people on “ground zero” actually designed it to flow with their way of working.”

“Another thing is that if the team lead has appointed a champion, or one has volunteered to facilitate, it’s a very hard job to have influence in a team dynamic.”

Read on for my elaboration on this point.

Something I recommend is to Crowdsource as a way to create a community, and also workshop needs and wants.

My post on spidergrams also lists some questions to address when wanting to create an online space for your community:

“1. Do you have a substantial enough topic that warrants it’s own community?
2. Do you have a community leader with passion and time?
3. Do you have passionate key members?
4. Do you have a shared identity on what you want out of the community? eg. topic, learning
5. Have you workshopped your design, topics, tools, etc…
6. Is it about learning and sharing?
7. Is it about coordinating tasks?
8. Is it about communicating to a general visitor audience? More a communication, and crowdsource tool, than a community?”

My post Social computing is messy and so it should be!, attacks the management approach of prescribed places to participate in.
Often management want all conversations on a topic to be in the one space, but this is unnatural, people will participate where they like to hang out, they don’t want to have to go where they are told to speak about that topic. In the end overlapping conversations happening in different areas is better than forcing and motivating it to happen in one area, and often ending up with no-participation at all.

I said something related to this in my post, More thoughts on community structure and creation:

“It’s not about the topic of the community, it’s about the people.”

Lastly, I mention to managers who want to use our CoP tools for their teams or just regular CoPs that, Communities don’t rely on network effects to be successful

Here are some excerpts from some of our help guides:

“Having an online community website doesn’t make a community, it just enhances the community you already have that you may be administering through email, telecons, face to face.”

If you know of others who are interested in the same topic, but you don’t yet communicate as a community, then workshop with these people to see if they all agree to create an online community space to beget the community.”

“An online space is not enough alone, a community needs members and conversations, otherwise it’s a website, rather than a community.
As a result, someone is required to run the community and encourage participation.”

Something that Matt has bought to my attention that I haven’t made clear is as well as communities (topic and members) naturally emerging, so will the leaders who facilitate the community (self-selecting approach).

[ADDED 18/08/09 Growing a Community is Like Making Risotto:

“A small community can only absorb a small number of new members at a time. Once it is bigger and there are more people that can welcome and absorb new members in a way that acclimates them, recruitment can ramp up. However, if you overwhelm an emergent community you are very likely to have the activity of the community stall out and it will be much harder to get it going again.”

Nancy White has a post called Communities, networks and what sits in between, which links to a video with herself and the effervescent Robin Good…I am intrigued by the sweet spot between networks and communities.

I’m not too sure about this middle, or whether it’s to the side…or what…

Is it aggregation?

eg. twitter hash tag channels?

These are not communities, yet people in the network understand to tag their tweets with a conference name so we have a bucket…we are acting like a group, but we are really are not a group at all.

Same goes with a topic news page based on sources that often post about this topic

eg. Nancy and I are part of the Communities and Networks Connection website…our posts are aggregated on the same page, yet we are not a group.

What about “social groupings”?

People that bought this book also bought.
People that also read this book.
People that also use this tag
Even self-organising directories you see on Twitter like wefollow
People in your city that are also vegetarian

Imagine if you could search match the Facebook info page, and do things like “show me people in my network who are also born in 1972″

I made a stupidly long post on this 18 months ago, see Networks, Communities and aggregation

Ad-hoc groups

A wall we are hitting at work is the need for ad-hoc group spaces to work on something rather than using email.

Lots of people belong to CoPs, but when it comes to working on a task with diverse people we get stuck…we could choose to nominate a CoP, but we’d rather an on-the-fly room. I explained this scenario in this post, Communities of Practice and discussions with non-Members

Some questions that come up when thinking about using an existing CoP is:

- whose CoP should we use to do this task
- not sure if people in my CoP will like me inviting temp members
- only people interested in the CoP topic should be members
- the CoP should not be used for unrelated stuff
- this task space would be buried too deep in the CoP , it really deserves it’s own URL so it’s more findable

The issue is that our CoPs are empowering as we can work in a communal space…when we have work to do with another bunch of people we naturally want to use a communal space to do this work, so we resort to our CoP tools as they are our only choice…but as explained a CoP, just like a team, is a shared space for a group of people based around a topic/function…these spaces are not too be abused to do unrelated stuff.

We use OpenText for our CoPs (and for Document Management for that matter), and for the past 3 months have been piloting their new Social Media product (in the realm of Jive, Lotus Connections, SocialText). Similar to the concept of Facebook and LinkedIn, it’s a social network with a groups feature. Our position is that our CoPs tool is more long term, stable, portal like, learning and sharing (looks like a website, with lots of permissions control and unlimited wikis, blogs and forums). Whereas the groups application is more simple/generic, it will be more for ad-hoc tasks/collaboration.

eg. I need to do task A - I need input from someone in marketing, IT, engineering, HR to help me on this task.
In less then 30 seconds I create a group space and invite these members. Here we can talk in a forum, upload documents, and use a wiki. Perhaps after a couple of months the task is finished.

The key is I need to instantly set up a space and communicate and coordinate a task. It’s there to see forever (corporate memory). Managers can actually now see how people do work (which was formerly happening in closed email). Plus the rest of the company can have an ambient awareness of what everyone is doing, leading to more cooperation, and adaptiveness.

This couples with the concept of disintermediation, where senior managers can connect to the raw fragments and workings out of a solution. And of course being able to recombine these fragments in other contexts.

I alluded to this in Twitter the other day:

“In KM 1.0 all we had was the expert song (best practice), in KM 2.0 “we” have all the separate layers to remix the song into new contexts “

Sameer Patel, riffed on it:

“@johnt so true. i was going to use the ingredients vs a complete dish analogy in my last post about ECM & E20″

This is what he referred to:

“When you layer in social computing concepts at the early stages of content creation, you have the ability to encourage such uses of raw ingredients (or social objects). These social objects, previously hidden in an access controlled CMS environment are now unlocked via social computing concepts and tools. The beauty is that they can now be work in progress for some, finished product for others that participate or discover it, or can be interpreted in totally different ways, never intended by the original participants.”

Not to mention the social network part where we can discover (serendipity/opportunities), and connect with a diversity of people…much more alive than the Global Address List (GAL) in Outlook. We can discover each other on social networks, and these relationships can lead to us collaborating on stuff…it just makes sense having social networks and a group module in the same application.

See Cheryl McKinnon’s post, Making Enterprise 2.0 Real. My Story of the “No E-Mail Beta Program”.

This is why I see enterprise products like OpenText Social Media cutting into the use of Outlook. In Outlook we have a GAL and do our group work, however messy and cumbersome it is, now with new tools we can replace the GAL function and the group work function.

Email is private by default, and if all we use is email, then our organisational activity is private by default…same goes with meetings…so at the moment organisational communication and coordination is a slave to inferior technology (non-conducive to the knowledge age).

We have our business units (functional), our teams (execute), our communities of practice (learn)…but what has been lacking online is mirroring the behaviour in how we work offline ie. ad-hoc groups from diverse parts of the organisation assembling in meetings to achieve an objective…and then this is where the mirror should appear, in that we go back to our seats and rather than use email use social networks and group spaces.

Looking at the bigger picture Larry Hawes (riffs off Sameer Patel) posts on how ad-hoc conversational work fits into the ECM picture:

“…social software be used for authoring, sharing, and collecting feedback on draft documents or content chunks before they are formally published and widely distributed. ECM systems may then be used to publish the final, vetted content and manage it throughout the content lifecycle.”

[ADDED 12/08/09: “There is something simply wonderful about a directory of people. And then enabling people to make the directory social. You quickly find not only the people, but who they are, who knows who, and who is paying attention to who. You can surface what people are working on. Groups that exist are made visible, and new groups form easily.” - Ross Mayfield]

Related
Activity-Centric Collaboration: Google Wave and Activities in Lotus Connections