Library clips

OK, here’s the solution upfront. You can read the rest of this post to know why this needs to happen.

SOLUTION

Requirements More than 140 characters (like Yammer and Socialtext Signals) Inline comments; also posts in their own right (like Yammer and Socialtext Signals)

Request Add a post to your Watchlist like an RSS Reader but subscribing at the post level Imagine rather than "favouriting/liking" a post, you are actually subscribing to it This way you can be notified of any new comments about a post Tag posts in your Watchlist a tagcloud/list would be accessible in the left hand pane of the microblogging app list preferred posts from your Watchlist in the left hand pane for one click access see it turn bold-which signifies new content-and displays a number-which signifies the number of new comments in that post Follow a Hashtag like saving Twitter search queries in your sidebar but more like an RSS Reader subscribing to a tag Click on it to view as a stream Reason for this feature is to catch new posts (and comments on those posts) on the same topic or task accessible from the left hand pane of the client and turns bold-which signifies new content-and displays a number-which signifies the number of new posts and comments in existing posts These requests are necessary to catch posts and comments that stream by that are important to you.

Microblogging in the enterprise is a different context from the consumer web; people are doing real work and need to be able to catch important posts in the stream. It’s not about just dipping into the stream and having a swim, it’s not just about following interests, it’s more about my boss, or people from a task I’m on, have posted a few things and I can’t afford to let them stream by unnoticed, I need the notification/subscription/follow mechanisms set up so I don’t miss anything essential.

This doesn’t happen in email, you don’t have difficulty sorting out the spam and the friendly email from the task type email…you don’t really miss seeing an email from your boss. This needs to be the same in enterprise microblogging; but it’s not as easy as email as the stream is much more a firehose than the email inbox.

Mary Abraham has talked about TMI (Too Much Information), and how do I differentiate the "good to know" stuff (it’s great to be aware of what’s happening in the organisation), from the "essential to know" (what’s the latest update I have to action today).

This brings up the need for enterprise microblogging to get a facelift by including a way to catch information that is essential to you…basically it needs a couple of simple features and functions.

READ ON

Not long ago I posted on how we do knowledge work via email because it’s easy, but we suffer later as it’s messy…and we miss out on these conversations living in a central place where others can be aware (and for possible diverse input), and later can be searched.

I explained the alternative in using a blog or forum. Which is OK, but it’s simply not in our flow to jump to a group space to communicate, especially when some of the people you want to communicate to are not subscribed to your blog.

At the moment if I need to have a conversation with a random group of people I use email (this is my ad-hoc tool)…I may even add an attachment if we need to do more than just converse. I’m not about to set up a group space for a conversation that may last a week or even a moment…it’s way too much effort.

Hence, no adoption of social computing tools for ad-hoc work. If we do get this design right, then not only will we get adoption for activity based work, but also for learning and sharing sites like online communities, online team spaces, etc..

It’s not just email; if I need to grab some relevant parties or have a discussion about a task we email or phone each other, and then get a room, or go to someone’s desk and have that chat. I want to be able to assemble this way using social tools, where there is not so much a group space, but a conversation space…kind of like a Twitter hashtag conversation, or a Yammer threaded post.

Group spaces (like CoPs) require facilitation to keep them active and you have to shift context to use them depending on the topic of your conversation, whereas network interactions are more transient, and only exist as long as they need to (just like email conversations).

Keith Swenson shares his pain:

"The solution is to make a shared “room” where all the toys can be shared equally within a group. That is the solution that many approaches have taken, and it is not difficult. But someone still has to set up the room in advance, in anticipation of the need to share, and most people will not take this step. It is just easier to send the documents as an attachment and force the work onto everyone else. In groups that I work with, even making the room available to people, they rarely get used."

What I’m alluding to here is the need not for a group space, but simply an ad-hoc conversation space…and networks, not groups is the answer.

In comes microblogging…

Here’s a fictional example…

@bob @sarah @jason @neil @brad @sally @jeff @denali @arielle @peter as you know the development of our new DMS has been on hold due to low resources. Well now there is an initiative happening that needs the use of a new DMS to store its documents, so they will sponsor it’s development…blah blah blah…please tell your people Posted by John Tropea Comments Bob - do you have a new roadmap? Sally - what’s the deadline? John - the deadline is August 31st, and a roadmap will be shared soon Neil - what is the initiative you are alluding to, and how far will they sponsor it’s development Jim - hey guys just came across this conversation as I follow John. We are running a global Quality initiative and need somewhere to keep our output, so we are sponsoring the new DMS John - apologies Jim, I forgot to @mention you in the original, come to think of it I forgot to add in our IT representative, hey @abby join in the conversation. Jody - Neil told me about this resurrection, congrats guys Abby - Hey guys, we ordered the new servers yesterday John - Thx Jody, yes we are indeed very happy about this Samantha - Hey guys, I’m from the DMS team, we are looking for some work for our intern, could they possibly get involved

So far so good, this is the type of thing you can do on Yammer as it has inline comments (and maybe Twitter soon via Twitoaster)

But the issue we have here is with notifications (which I will tackle further down in this post)

What new capabilities does microblogging bring to the table

Others can read this open conversation in the stream and be aware and get involved (diverse input…possible clashes with other tasks or what other teams are doing can be revealed as conversations are in the open to be found):

• whereas in email it’s just the recipients and people who have been forwarded the email
• microblogging makes for more chance of collaboration and awareness to better align and cooperate with other units

The recipients in the original post can re-post (retweet) the post including an @mention to other people so they are aware of it, or to get involved…or alternatively can leave a comment that includes @mention to others.

The recipients can re-post (retweet) the post to their group space (eg. as happens in Yammer group or Socialtext Signals) so their team can see the raw conversation, if they have not already seen it stream by anyway in the public stream

• what I like about this is that people down the hierarchy can see the raw conversation, not some filtered re-interpreted conversation. And of course if the post has failed to reach them via their manager, there is a chance they will still see it as it’s online in the stream for anyone to see

The conversation is in one location and not messy like email, no-one is left out of the loop, new comers can join and see the past conversation…it’s searchable

And of course it’s essential that posts have a comments thread, and more than 140 characters to post content.

But what’s missing here…

NOTIFICATIONS

If we follow the Facebook model… John is getting notifications that people are commenting on his post Bob, Sally, Neil, Jim, Jody, Abby and Samantha are also getting notifications as they have left a comment… BUT, they are only being notified of comments that have come after their comment. So they have to catch up reading on the earlier comments, unless they have already seen them stream by (remember comments are threaded, but are also a post in their own right) Sarah, Jason, Brad, Denali, Arielle, and Peter ARE NOT being notified of any comments Until microblogging can duplicate this uniqueness of email, it will not be as useful to do actual back and forth work

FILING/BOOKMARKING (FAVOURITE/LIKE)

When we have this typical conversation in email; people will individually file this conversation in a folder. This way they can find it later.

In microblogging we can favourite/like the post of this conversation so we can come back to it later, but we also need to be able to tag these favourites so there is more context to help us find them later.

And we need these tagged favourites browsable in a tagcloud/or a list on the left of our microblogging app, just like we have our email folders in the left-hand pane.

But we also need to be able to list some posts from within our favourites so we can see them right there in our left-hand pane.

Maybe they are not called favourite/like, perhaps Watchlist is better.

WATCHLIST

Ok, I think I just solved our notification issue… What’s required is a Watchlist feature. The recipients of the original post can click the Watchlist link on the footer of the post (it will also ask them to tag it ). This will put the post in a tag in their tagcloud, and also list it under the tagcloud so at a glance they can see the current important conversations they are following. When a new comment is added to a post that they have in their Watchlist it will become bold with the number of new comments. See what’s happening here, a Watchlist is catching something for you that you may miss streaming by. Kind of like an RSS reader, but at the post level. If the conversation becomes old, they can then remove it from their Watchlist and later find it in their tagcloud if they need it

MICROBLOGGING APP

An important aspect is that the microblogging app becomes the new email…so there is a battle here.

Similar to the screenshot I linked to in my previous post, perhaps microblogging can be integrated into the email client, and perhaps it’s no longer an email client, perhaps email is just a feature of Inbox 2.0.

The microblogging private message feature can perhaps replace email.

So why do we still need email?

We still need to email with people that don’t have access to the microblogging system. Our clients, vendors, friends, family, local shops, etc don’t have access. What I’m saying is different microblogging platforms don’t connect via a protocol like email does.

What about groups?

Earlier I mentioned microblogging groups, all this means is that you are not posting in the public stream, instead that post just appears in the group stream. And to catch these posts you just have a group tab to see them.

This is a great way to filter the firehose to see stuff that’s important to you…but often a task I’m in doesn’t really involve my whole team, instead it’s me and a handful of others from various teams, so the group stream doesn’t help here, instead we ad-hoc groups need a hashtag stream to filter the firehose (which I will tackle further down in this post)

Tag based forum

So what’s happening here? What is Twitter or Yammer? It’s conversations, but not confined to groups, instead it’s one massive group, but moreso a crowd as not everyone knows each other, just like you don’t know everyone in your workplace or suburb you live in.

So really it’s not a group, it’s a network.

Which kind of makes it like a giant forum, or a giant blog.

At work we have groups (CoPs) and each one has forums and blogs.

So to have conversations about a topic you need to visit the right forum/blog in the right group, and further to this you need to be a member, and you have to be a subscriber.

What if the appropriate topic doesn’t exist yet; I’m not about to create a forum and get people to subscribe…further to this they also have to become a member of the group space that they may not want to do.

For the sake of being open, this is way more difficult than email.

And if all we are having is one conversation I don’t want to subscribe to a forum and get further content that I don’t want to read.

And as mentioned earlier I want an ad-hoc conversation that doesn’t warrant the setting up of a space…you don’t have to do this in email.

Over 4 years ago I posted on Tag-based forum networks (I wonder if the idea for Twitter came from these sites)

It’s basically the idea of microblogging where a question about any topic can be asked, and the question is tagged, and further similar questions can be tagged the same so these questions can be collected into a browseable space.

Which brings us back to our fiactional example…

Collecting posts in the stream that are about the same task

The fictional example in this post is perfect for one off conversations, more appropriate than email and more designed to how we behave over having to go to a group space. This is not about groups, it’s about ad-hoc conversations.

Now what happens, is that the conversation stream on that post can get really long and cover lots of questions, which really should be their own posts.

What I mean is; what if this one-off ad-hoc conversation is part of a bigger task that requires many conversations on various items pertaining to the task. You’d hope that you could collect all these conversations into one browseable space.

To follow our example John needs to ask a question or give an update about the task. So again he has to @mention various people in a new post. This time he might @mention only a couple of people as the question or update is more contextual.

But what results is that unless all the recipients from the 1st question see this new post in the public stream they won’t be aware of progress…it’s not essential they see it otherwise John would have @mentioned them, but still the same they may want to be aware as they are part of the greater task. And for all John knows maybe it turns out it is essential for someone else to see it…that’s the beauty of these tools in that the it circumvents the sender having the power as they cannot always know who needs to know what.

Again people who see this post can tag it in their inbox and also add it to their watchlist so they can follow the conversation…keeping all the items about the task in a bucket.

The issue increases…

If people that are not @mentioned want to be in the loop about this task they have to catch these posts coming through the stream, there’s a good chance they are gonna miss them. What if you go on vacation for a few days. Are you gonna go through thousands of posts, add to your watchlist and tag them. How are you gonna differentiate the posts in the stream that are important to you.

So everyone will be doing the same thing, picking out these posts and personally tagging them to their collection.

See what’s happening here, we end up using microblogging just like email. Sure it’s open so you may catch these items race through the stream, but we need a way for the system to keep everyone in the loop on every conversation about the task, even if you it’s not your part of the task, it’s still good to be in the know of the greater picture. And further to this, in the future we want to look back at all the conversations about that particular task.

In come hashtags…

In our example the 2nd post could have a hashtag #DMS_dev, and then perhaps the 1st post could be re-edited to add this tag as well.

Then anyone can follow this hashtag, which is listed in your microblogging app sidebar

When there is a new post within this hashtag, the hashtag in your left-hand pane would go bold and display the number of new posts. The same would happen if there was a comment on an existing post. Just click the hastag to access the new content.

In this scenario what you could do is remove the 1st question off your Watchlist and remove it from your personal tag cloud. As now you are following the hashtag stream which is accessible via your hashtag list or cloud.

A hashtag stream would actually be similar in a way to a group stream, but it’s post-created rather than pre-created.

NOTE: When you think of it following a hashtag would be similar to saving a Twitter search query in your sidebar, but more like an RSS Reader subscribing to a tag

So there you have it…

• a way to follow ad-hoc conversations (using a Watchlist)
• a way to follow many conversations about the same task (following a Hashtag)

This design has the uniqueness and ease of email in ad-hoc conversations, but the benefits of the awareness and emergence of microblogging

I haven’t played much with Google Wave or Socialwok (I guess 9cays can be included), but these may be the closest tools to my thinking…it’s not about groups, it’s about the conversation, and similar conversations can be channeled into a unique tag that becomes a type of group space (or channel) on-the-fly.

Perhaps ActionBase is worth a mention:

"A task oriented email client will behave like a wiki document in the sense that once you send it out, any response, question or comment made by recipients or yourself, will all happen on the same email entry… all the relevant information under a single line item - THIS IS COLLABORATIVE EMAIL. In ActionBase we call this email - ActionMail. ActionMail is the next generation of work email which is task oriented rather than message oriented."

Output

Oh yeah, where is all the output, where is the documentation for the task kept.

This could be kept anywhere it doesn’t matter. But somehow the Hashtag page needs to be able to store links to where stuff is kept.

Pull

But there still is one big difference to email, this is mostly still a "pull" system where you add posts to your Watchlist, or follow Hashtags in order to be updated about new content.

Sure it starts off as "push" for some by way of @mentions, but then it becomes "pull" if you need or want to be further updated of new content without having to constantly @mention.

For others unrelated to the conversation it’s all "pull" for them as they were not @mentioned in the original post.

In saying this:

…if you publish the post or have left a comment then you will be pushed notifications by the system, but if you haven’t done one of these things and it’s pertinent that you are aware, then you better add it to your Watchlist, or follow the Hashtag.

Yeah, but no…

In the first part of the fictional example I mentioned that the lack of notifications means some people that were @mentioned in the original post won’t receive further comments unless they make a comment…hence my idea to pull it to yourself via a Watchlist.

Facebook have a private message feature where you can have a group conversation and all involved received comments by default (you don’t have to leave a comment to be notified of new ones). This is less messy than email but is still closed like email

End thoughts

I can only imagine so much, but without using such a system I won’t know if it’s too complicated. At the moment there are all these possible streams/filters:

• Public
• My network (people I follow)
• Various group streams
• @mention
• Hash tags I follow
• Watchlist (comments in a post I follow)
• Notifications (comments on my posts, and on posts I have commented on)

Thx to everyone for the retweets on my previous post about socialising processes, adhoc work, observable work and ACM.

If you are going to take something away let it be the concept of BRP (Barely Repeatable Processes) to enable adhoc, unpredictable work…and at the same time reclaiming observable work, and as always ambient awareness.

I’m sure the pioneers like Thingamy, Traction Software, Activities on Lotus Connections, ActionBase, Google Wave will be joined by many others.

And thanks to Paula Thornton, Jim McGee and Greg Lloyd for this wonderful exchange where we are riffing off each other, sometimes unknowingly, where various topics seem to blend into each other.

And let me give a shout out to Keith Swenson for his incredible blog on Adaptive Case Management (ACM)…empowering workers to deal with the unpredictable "practice" that is knowledge work.

Practice Execution

Like Paula Thornton tweeted:

"…heuristic structure rather than process. The means for work to flow"

Yes, and perhaps knowledge work is about practice execution, rather than pre-defined processes…but this is a tricky one as whether predictable or not, whether repeatable or not, it’s still a process, even if it only happens once in it’s life.

A long while ago I posted why KM failed in a nutshell, and it was about KM being a separate thing you need to do rather than embedded as a literacy. My post shared that magnificent gem by Ross Mayfield on what’s happening most of the time in this knowledge work era is that people are dealing with exceptions to processes and workarounds. And they do this using email and attachments which is messy, and not visible or amplifying.

Since then we have had social computing platforms as an alternative, and now we are starting to see this evolving where the tools are designed or allow the user to design them in the flow of the way we practice work.

Jim McGee warns of Enterprise 2.0 playing the game of enhancing processes as it’s much more than that. In my post I talked about that as just 1st gear to not only get adoption but because it’s also useful for knowledge work, but not to lose site that enterprise 2.0 is also about emergence, networks, connections, transparency, awareness, etc…

I not only talked about enhancing or socialising business processes, but also building your own processes using new tools. The thing is a "2.0" approach can be used almost anywhere, and existing processes need not be left out.

I won’t say too much as Jim had not read my post thoroughly at time of publishing his post.

OK now this brings me to an enlightening video clip with Patrice Livingstone and her passion for Traction Software as the poster child for the nemesis of email. H/T to Paula Thornton for the link.

Patrice talks very passionately about visibility and fragments, rather than closed and big buried documents.

And most importantly emerges the concept of "know-why".

It has come to the point that social computing is the way Patrice has been working for the last while, and she could not bare facing a new job where they use email and attachments. It seems a lack of social computing would be a show stopper for Patrice deciding on whether to take on a new job…and I second that! And so does Karen Lilla it seems: “@marciamarcia Our team at IBM can’t live without our social media tools. Anarchy would ensue if it was ever taken away! @geoffliving”

OK, I just read Paula’s latest post and what do you know she reviewed the same video, and we both describe Patrice’s diatribe as passionate…I have also borrowed some of Paula’s words for the title of this post.

Like I said before no matter what I talk about lately it seems to be intune with what my network is thinking…indeed feels like a collective intelligence.

What Patrice said on fragments and context

"I knew at an instinctive level that what we were doing — all the unstructured communication, all the relationship building and stuff that our team was doing — was much more valuable than the work we were doing in written reports and meetings and minutes, which is what consumed the body of our time."

She typifies the usual scenario of all the brainwork and conversations done in meetings and email and then distilled into massive document that get shelved into a filing cabinet.

Where has all that brainwork gone, there is no trace of it…the unstructured stuff (know-why) is missing as it happened in email.

This is reminiscent of Dave Snowden on fragmented vs summarised material in relation to context, recall, usability and attention scarcity:

"Everything is fragmented. We evolved to handle unstructured fragmented fine granularity information objects, not highly structured documents. People will spend hours on the internet, or in casual conversation without any incentive or pressure. However creating and using structured documents requires considerably more effort and time. Our brains evolved to handle fragmented patterns not information."

Access the link above for related issues on summarising content or codification, like:

"We only know what we know when we need to know it" "The way we know things is not the way we report we know things" "We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down"

For more on human behaviour, refer to this list of cognitive biases. eg. Retrospective Coherence, Narrative Fallacy, Fundamental Attribution Error

And Dave again:

"We urgently need to shift from working with chunked documents that seek to summarise material, to increasing direct access to fine granularity raw data in the form of anecdotes, sound files, pictures etc. etc. The process of chunking, or abstraction involves loss of content which may well contain weak signals or subtle clues and more importantly involves making the material specific to the context of its creation in time and socio-cultural context."

And yet again:

"The more you structure material, the more you summarize…the more you make material specific to a context or time, the less utility that material has as things change. For years now I have asked this question at conferences around the world: Faced with an intractable problem, do you go and draw down best practice from your company’s knowledge management system, or do you go and find eight or nine people you know and trust with relevant experience and listen to their stories? So why for the last decade and more have we focused on chunking up best practice? Increasingly unstructured material, blended in unexpected ways, provides a richer source of knowledge.

Arthur Shelley on a comment on a past blog says:

"In many ways, documents are dead (or at the least in a coma) until brought to life through a conversation"

I take it Arthur alludes to documents being a summarised outcome of the end result (know-what), meaning you then need to find the "know-why" to understand parts of the document. And social tools are a way to do this as they are raw fragments of the conversation…they basically record the conversation.

Alister Grigg (Fastman Consulting and Solutions) via an email conversation encapsulates this:

"…the logic, the argument, the thought process can only really be captured through that conversation. Capture and contextualise that conversation and you have the why. Link that to the output / deliverable and you have the why."

Alister goes on to say:

"Well written reports will include the arguments but as an output and not a record, and often influenced…"

This is quite a pithy statement. A document like a report has an agenda, whereas blog posts are raw fragments. There may be lots of peripheral information in blog posts that people may find to re-mix and use elsewhere.

This concept of raw fragments over summarised content also paralleIs with our cognitive processes in how we apply knowledge, see my past post:

“I need to be able to flex my skill in assembling my know-how in applied and unexpected situations. Eg we have people over for dinner in an hour and I need to cook dinner with what I have…improvise. You need to know the fundamentals, this way you can assemble fragments in new ways. In this respect we can see personal knowledge fragments as ingredients, and when I’m faced with a situation I bring those ingredients together and assemble them into an outcome. The knowledge is in recalling ingredients for the context and assembling them (knowing how they work together and as a whole). In another context some of those ingredients will assemble with others, and also the assembly may be approached differently. To me, this is know-how!"

Alister’s quote echos a passage from Nassim Taleb’s brilliant book "The Black Swan" on raw fragments and context:

“The journal was purportedly written without…knowing what was going to happen next, when the information available…was not corrupted by the subsequent outcomes.” “While we have a highly unstable memory, a diary provides indelible facts recorded more or less immediately; it thus allows the fixation of an unrevised perception and enables us to later study events in their own context. Again, it is the purported method of description of the event, not its execution, that was important.”

Matthew Hodgson also says something similar:

"If we look back to the rich oral history of many of our cultures, blogging is a reflection of the need to story-tell, carrying with it important information not only on the what – the facts like the reports we typically store in our recordkeeping systems – but also the meaning behind the why and how."

This is also a cultural move to a work-in-progress culture, where we are sharing workings out in the open, rather than just the finished product…the workings out are always there, but is it visible…and of course if it is visible it can be enriched, and re-mixed into new contexts.

Think of it as Steam and Ice:

“Steam - The thoughts, ideas and concepts that rattle around in our heads. Ice - Books and polished documents that we reference from time to time.”

Sorry about the tangent, but now we see how raw fragments over codified material is easier to digest and find, it is raw so it can be blended or re-mixed into another context…but most of all it’s the visibility and accessibility of all those myriad of decisions that help you understand how the "know-what" ie. the document you are reading, came to be.

Obviously both can co-exist, but as long as when when are reading a deliverable or report we can point back to the visible observable work, the tracemarks, the raw fragments, the conversations, whatever you want to call it, as this is where the "know-why" lives.

What Patrice said on "know-why"

Patrice mentions that we can’t reduce our brain work, you still have to work, but we can choose to re-purpose the tools we are currently using. She says with absolute clarity that an email is a blank page, an MS Word document is a blank page, a wiki is blank page, etc…which one are you going to choose when you do your work…a social and visible team space or email and attachments.

A social space has more value added down the road (tags, comments, links, visible, tracemarks…basically findable). Patrice shares a story of a task she was working on, and how a search in the Traction social platform revealed that her task had already been worked on or attempted before by another party:

"Along comes me, I’m here. I would not ever know about either Person A or B or that they had a conversation, but I can exhume a dialog that took place two years ago between these two individuals that lays out the problem and the solution. I can say…the following technology is now available. Problem solved."

Patrice also echoes something I posted about in getting up to speed with the help of accessing past conversations in online group spaces:

"…being placed in new situations, new organisations, and needed to get up to speed quickly - there was no luxury of time"

A quote in the Wikinomics book tells this same thing, in that the conversation once existed as it’s findable in a visible place (as opposed to closed email silos, which are a poor excuse for corporate memory). Now we can say, yeah this happened 2 years ago, not based on hear-say, but check out these links:

"When new problems and exceptions arise, people in organisations will swarm around that exception to try and resolve it […] this dencentralised approach to problem solving might be worked out in the lunchroom, while leaning over a colleague’s cubicle, over a pint after work, or increasingly through a long thread of emails The problem is that this causal approach to problem solving leaves no organisational memory of the event, with the risk that only people involved in creating the solution walk away with any new insights. Problems can persist like a bad cold, and solutions will be reinvented everytime the problem occurs. Social Software provides companies with a way to document and leverage those moments of innovation with relative ease, providing a living, breathing repository of easily accessible knowledge that grows along with the organisation. Companies can continually harness their local insights and adaptations to new problems by capturing and using those insights to drive organisational change and renewal."

The above quote is in relation to the context of "problems", but to me working visibly could be the norm in all group work, whether it’s a problem, task, coordinating something…anything.

And this echo’s Ross Mayfield’s quote about practice execution in that practice is used to fill the void, practice is used to fix things, but doing it in an invisible way using closed tools means we don’t leave any tracemarks behind, therefore no corporate memory.

And then Paula really brings home my notion of know-why and what the real corporate memory is:

"And yet, in most storage mechanism the work products themselves are stripped of the reality in which they were created. All the context as to why certain decisions were made at that time are all missing from the painfully-scrubbed collections of results and conclusions.The painful truth is, knowledge work products are not accurate representations of the work. The real work is on the cutting room floor and/or still in the minds of (or faded from) those that did the work and who may be gone. While there will always be ‘waste’ in any process, might the cuts from one project be relevant for another? Work products by themselves are often meaningless as they reflect what made it through the cuts. They lack the context of the work itself. When time and resources have past, how does one reconstruct the context for which the work product was created and you can no longer ask the workers questions about their work?"

And now let’s go back to Patrice in how she gives the details of Paula’s brilliant insight via a simple example of the invisible knowledge work that goes into a document review. It’s all too common that the person reading the document is missing the know-why in how to interpret the document. If all that know-why, all the workings-out that happened in creating/reviewing the document were visible, then it can easily be retrieved as the document can link to these raw fragments (conversations). These raw fragments, the knowledgework, can be consulted without having to track down the author (if they are still around), which we would then have to try and track down some emails, minutes, whiteboard, print-outs…

The key here is a document comment stream…which can inform the know-why or comments that hyperlink to other areas that have the know-why

Patrice’s know-why tragedy

"…100 page document get written, they’re beautiful, there’s a lot of work, lot of meetings, lot of brainpower, bright minds on difficult problems…and all this stuff…gets filed into Sharepoint [Document Managenent System]…nobody knows it’s in there…they don’t know how to find it, and if they could, they don’t know what they’re reading, why should they read it, there’s no context…because it’s been stripped now out of its environment…"

Patrice then talks about an order by the General (manager) to go back and re-work the document, and goes on vacation:

"…we work on pages 18 - 25…we do a lot of work - we cross out lines we explain why, we put in an appendix - and we put it back in Sharepoint…" "…unstructured conversation…our emails back and forth in generating that product which are now removed from the document itself…if we were blogging…it all would of been captured"

The lieutenant is asked to retrieve the document for the General, who wants to see the revised document…they are pointed to the new version of the file in the document management system:

"…change comparison…100 page document now an 87 page document [pages don’t match up anymore due to re-working it]…[the General and Lieutenant]… read this but…don’t know what they are doing. On page 20 there’s this whole paragraph about A and B and C…why did they do this…"

So they have to track down the authors of the document and get them back from the vacation:

"Now we are doing the work twice because we spent 3 weeks…doing this work and delivering it…all the value add is gone…yes we got a product, we still need a product…but this product is useless, because the knowledge work and the thinking, and the exchange, and the brainstorming, and the whiteboarding, and all that is gone…what good is it" "I will never use Sharepoint again because you’ve divorced me from my work" "Care and feeding of knowledge work requires relationships…people want high performance, but they forget about high touch…relationships are everything" "We did a lot of work…it got turned into some flat 80 page document that some General needed to have, and he got the document but he couldn’t understand the whys and wherefores" "He wouldn’t have…had the meeting to make the lieutenant retrieve the document, sit down with him and interpret the document [had he been able to access the visible unstructured conversations related to the document…whether in a blog or document comment stream, or whatever]

Sounds all too common. I bet you would hear hundreds of examples of this same story if you started asking around or eavesdropping in your workplace. I listen all the time at work and hear pains and pangs about communication and decisions being echoed around near where I sit.

Know-why is missing in action

Not long ago I was talking with Alister Grigg (who I linked to above) and he told me a story of a bridge built over a freeway. What the documentation didn’t tell them is why was it decided that the bridge was built to cover a 6 lane freeway when the freeway is only 4 lanes…where is this conversation that led to this decision?

Summary

Up until now the corporate memory has been in email silos, this is the know-how and know-why….the workings out, decisions, and conversations that led to deliverables. Just having end products (the know-what) is not good enough, we need to share the talent of the work that goes into this output…a move to a thinking-out-loud / work-in-progress culture.

Email silos are not discoverable and accessible, and people often will not share stuff in email that they would in blogs and forums. And now all the knowledge and decisions about documents can easily and intuitively be accessible via fragments whether they are micro-blogs, forums, blogs, wiki, document comment streams, etc…

Convergence of Themes

Emergence

Fragments

Visibility

Barely Repeatable Processes

Observable Work

Work-in-Progress

Thinking-out-Loud

Ambient Awareness

Stocks and Flows

Ad-hoc

Context

Craft

Next

In the next post I’ll explain my idea of conversational metadata. A way this "observable work" concept can be adopted (and take some email market share) as it’s designed into the process flow. This can happen various ways, but I’ll explain how it can happen against the backdrop of a Document Management System.

In the previous post I reviewed a video interview with the talented Jordan Frank from Traction Software, which was on social tools and ad-hoc processes. This video got me inquiring further into what others have said about this over the past couple of years. So I headed to my bookmark collection, and this post is what resulted.

But first I’ll repeat a few highlights from Jordan’s interview:

• Workflow systems are great until they fail…a need to have a collaboration safety net.
• Collaboration is not necessarily about making the things that are planned go right, it’s about dealing with the things that are unplanned that go wrong
• It’s hard to troubleshoot when what happened till now is not easily accessible or not recorded in a raw fashion
• You can’t anticipate a workflow for fixing a problem (with social tools like Teampage) you can model informal processes on the fly
• Make sure when business conditions change your business processes don’t get left behind

I also linked to one of Traction whitepaper’s that demonstrates the bottom-up enabling tools we now have to better cope with getting things done, and by default achieving the original aims of KM and being an agile organisation.

Emergence by default

Social computing is about many things: discovery, connection, conversation, emergence, crowdsourcing, transparency, engagement, innovation, collaboration, findability, diversity, sharing, learning, helping, sense-making…

Helping and sense-making have an immediate impact eg. stuck on an issue, asking a question, getting an answer and moving on…whilst this happened others got to learn for free.

In a way emergence happens anyway as a result of sense-making ie. emergence that surfaces from "In-the-flow" working, which is in contrast to "Above-the-flow" emergence (crowdsourcing, sharing your experience, etc). Either way we have emergence because people are visible and their interactions are documented, all made possible via bottom-up enabling tools.

Another immediate sense-making aspect is dealing with exceptions to processes. Email is our survival tool to not only improvise, but to plain and simply do work. Same goes with MS Word and Excel…then put them together as email and attachments.

James Dellow pins this down:

"Like cockroaches, spreadsheets have continued to thrive despite the growing (perceived) sophistication of modern enterprise information system. They record data, drive barely repeatable processes, they are spread around by email systems and people use them to address problems that other systems fail to solve."

Process vs Practice

I will refer later to "barely repeatable processes", but for now let’s looks at processes and how we need flexibility.

Jack Vinson quotes Mike Gotta on Process vs Practice:

"Process is "how work should be done." And Practice is "how work is actually done." When process fails (exceptions), people use practice to fix things. When process doesn’t exist, practice fills the void. While people don’t realize it when they engage in practice, they actually are tapping into community — an informal social network within or beyond the enterprise to discover expertise and get things done. The problem is that we haven’t had the tools to support good practice."

An interesting comment on Jacks post by Marnix:

"Process is the way work is being done, combining technology and practices. Culture is when this happens unconsciously; ’it is just the way we do things around here’"

Move from pre-defined structure to DIY

Bil Ives says the difference with new social tools is that the people (users) decide on the structure of the process:

"ERP provides infrastructure that often requires work processes to confound to the software structure. Enterprise 2.0 is often attempting to provide tools that will conform to your work practices. With ERP adoption is not the issue, except in the 9% of cases where parallel adoption is used, With ERP the issue is implementation, as people are generally required to use the system. The study stated than 83% of the ERP implementations studied were considered successful."

Bill also says:

"The irony of enterprise 2.0 is that you actually get more control because the free form nature of the tools allow the business people to decide on where structure occurs, not the people who make the software.”

Joe McKendrick gives BPM a new name:

"No matter how automated a workflow may get, there are always stages in which things need to stop for an exception, an approval or a quality check. The role of human interactions has always been a complicating factor in business processes. Introducing Enterprise 2.0 approaches may help shift the emphasis from business process re-engineering to business process re-energizing."

Jim McGee combines the concept of rigid processes and how it relates to emergence:

"In an accounting or ERP system, the system’s designers specify all aspects of workflow, database design, and information structure in advance. Users are expected to select from among pre-defined choices and enter only such data as the designers have provided for. In designing a system for emergence, the designers leave a number of these decisions open; waiting for users to fill in the blanks"

Paula Thornton comments on a past post of mine on this meme:

"Real knowledge work is about handling the exceptions. Everything else can be automated. Thinking about the frustrations you’ve had with anything you’ve tried to accomplish in getting work done (save your own shortcomings or those of others). A good majority of them are either due to over-automation (not allowing for exceptions) or underautomation (leaving you to manage mundane tasks). What IT methodology focuses on assessing for such balances? NONE!"

These are our tools to execute work. They are also the tools that come in especially handy when the process system we should be using is too rigid.

I know when I was doing document management support work the support database was merely used as managing the call, but the conversations happened in email. That is, email is our coping mechanism. I’ve posted on this before, and Larry Hawes has a post on the hybrid use of both process-centric and people-centric tools. The BPM type tool to locate issues, status, who’s on it, blended together with conversational tools where the troubleshooting actually happens. There is a place for both where they complement each other…the road ahead is integration 2.0.

This is when we say social computing isn’t really anything new, it’s just the next survival tool or coping mechanism which is more effective than email. Especially in circumstances where we need help, and ad-hoc collaboration to get through a process. We have phone, then email / IM and MS Office, now we have microblogging, blogs, forums…and wikis to stitch the process together.

Even a janitor is not absent from these non-routine and improvisational working conditions.

Unstructured and Barely Repeatable Processes

Sandy Kemsley notes that Gartner calls this unstructured processes:

“…work activities that are complex, nonroutine processes, predominantly executed by an individual or group highly dependent on the interpretation and judgment of the humans doing the work for their successful completion”and notes that most business processes are made up of both structured and unstructured processes. Unstructured processes are costing organizations a lot of money in lost productivity, lack of compliance and other factors, and you can’t afford to ignore them. Although most processes aimed to meet regulatory requirements are structured, unstructured processes provide a company’s unique identity and often its competitive differentiation, as well as supporting operational activities."

Sandy moves the conversation to Integration 2.0, where social tools are features of existing business process tools

"…the BPMS vendors are looking for ways to incorporate “barely repeatable processes” into their systems, allowing users to create their own ad hoc processes on the fly but still capturing the audit trail so that it’s not just happening over email or the phone in an unaudited fashion. The idea is not to pre-define all of these processes, but to provide tools that allow process participants to have a sufficiently unstructured environment to do what they need to do, and augment that process with their own call-out at that point."

I have posted before on Barely Repeatable Processes, and Exception Handling and am going to re-quote here from some of the pioneers in this movement.

Ross Dawson explains the need to complement an ERP - Easily Repeatable Process, with a BRP - Barely Repeatable Process (via Sigurd Rinde):

“Typically exceptions to the ERPs, anything that involves people in non-rigid flows through education, health, support, government, consulting or the daily unplanned issues that happens in every organisation. The activities that employees spend most of their time on every day. Processes that often starts with an e-mail or a call. A process volume, measured by time and resource spent at organisations, probably larger than for the Easily Repeatable Processes. These are mostly handled and organised - frameworked - by systems like paper based rules and policies, e-mail, meetings, calls and now in more modern organisations by wikis and other collaboration systems and methods. Known by extensive loss of information (e-mails residing on HDDs), little knowledge acquired and reused (typical research says 70% of problems solved before without being known) and most of all, untrustworthy processes (oops, forgot to send that mail). In other words not an iota (well almost) of business process thinking or methodology applied to this huge untapped area of business processes.”

Ross Mayfield on the same meme:

“The way organizations adapt, survive and be productive is through the social interaction that happens outside the lines that we draw by hierarchy, process and organizational structure. The first form of social software to really take off to facilitate these discussions was email. Most employees don’t spend their time executing business process. That’s a myth. They spend most of their time handling exceptions to business process. That’s what they’re doing in their [e-mail] inbox for four hours a day. Email has become the great exception handler.”

Bottom-up structuring of ad-hoc processes

Before I spoke of using social tools to sense-make (get help, get through a process), well the next step are apps created from the bottom-up (by the users), that have noticed how people use social tools in an ad-hoc way, and are offering a way to design or assemble this process into a more visible flow. Basically making your own process, which you can manipulate at any time to suit the situation.

A way to see it is a kind of semi-formal approach where you are agile enough to assemble an app to slightly structure ad-hoc work:

Dennis Howlet talks about Thingamy software:

"…‘barely repeatable processes’ - a good way to look at them - where you need a quickly built app that includes the process loops in order to solve the problem."

And Jacob Ukelson talks about ActionBase:

"One thing to be careful with is that you want to provide enough structure to the process to add value, but not so much as to strangle it. Given that most of these processes are executed today via documents and email, we built our tool as an extension to those standard office tools - allowing the same ad-hoc feel, but adding a layer of management, tracking and reporting. "For many of these processes an initial formal model is overkill (and at odds with the needs of most knowledge workers) - at most you want a guideline or best practice that gets modified as the work gets done. Then these emerging models can later be used to create a more formal model if needed (I’ve blogged on the topic of in-situ process discovery on our blog http://blog.actionbase.com/in-situ-process-discovery)."

When you think of Activities on IBM Lotus Connections they are practicing this in an organic way. Activities (and Google Wave), are a collaboration tool to work on a task, where everything is recorded, and lives on a URL. Common activities can be available as templates eg. if you have to organise an event, there’s no doubt many have done this before using "Activities", so why not start by re-using a template, and re-mix it to your context.

See a video called "The man who should have used Lotus Connections 5 - Innovate or Die"

Human Process Management

ActionBase call this Human Process Management (which is what people may refer to as BPM 2.0).

In the post, The ‘H’ Bomb in Business Process Management, they state how traditional BPM does not reflect the reality of work:

"Human work is: Dynamic Tacit Ad hoc Crossing boundaries and silos Saturated with peer to peer interaction If you want to manage a human workflow like fraud investigation or a product change request or any other, you need to accept the “chaos” and face the facts - structured, rigid process does not fit into this paradigm."

Following on, the post, What is a Human Process?, re-iterates what has already been reviewed in this post, ie. the co-existence of routine and tacit interactions:

"Human processes are business processes that generate a business outcome that is heavily dependent on interactions between people. These are also called “tacit interactions” by economists, which is an attempt to differentiate between routine transactions and interactions that rely heavily on judgment and context. These “tacit interactions” are the most prevalent kind of business processes in which knowledge workers take part. Most of the work of involved in executing these human processes is with the communication, coordination and management aspects of the process. Currently most human processes in business are executed using standard productivity tools (e.g. MS Office), email (e.g. Outlook) and meetings.

I have listed just a few of their characteristics involved in human processes:

"Unstructured - there is a standard framework for the process and how to achieve the intended result, but each case is handled separately and requires human understanding (for both decisions and flow) as part of the process. There isn’t enough standardization between instances of the process that allows for a formal, complete and rigorous description of the process end-to-end. Dynamic - the flow of the process changes on a case by case basis, based on available information and human decisions. A flow can also change while the process is being executed based on new information, or a changing environment."

Then they put it altogether as, What is Human Process Management (HPM)?

Mike Cohn takes this to the human behaviour, and change aspect, where enabling and empowerment from the bottom-up is key to adoption, as workers have a finger in the process pie that they will be using:

"None of the agile processes as described by their originators is perfect for your organization. Any may be a good starting point, but you will need to tailor the process to more precisely fit the unique circumstances of your organization, individuals, and industry. As Alistair Cockburn once told me, “Having a chance to change or personalize a process to fit themselves seems to be a critical success factor for a team to adopt a process. It’s the act of creation that seems to bind teams to ‘their own’ process.”"

Enterprise 2.0 - Complementing and Supplementing existing processes, and assembling new ones

Bertrand Duperrin has an excellent post on the three streams of enterprise 2.0 which puts an understanding out there that enterprise 2.0 is not about some isolated fairy-shary thing that happens on the edges of the organisation…he also posts about it here. Besides serendipity, and formal communications, it’s also about complementing and supplementing existing processes. He says:

"Becoming an enterprise 2.0 is not a goal for any enterprise and should not be. The only one is : improving the way things are done everyday, the way it produces. But what does “production” really mean ?"

1. Formal Production Capability (FPC):

"Being able to produce something defined, following a process in which everyone knows exactly what he has to do, when, and how."

2. Ad-hoc Production Capability (APC):

"Being able to overcome any breakdown or insufficiency […] goods and services have to be more and more customised. As a consequence, production is less and less standardized and the need for readjusting it according to clients who have more and more specific requests is not an accident anymore but a norm […] their unpredictability has to be admitted and a framework has to be defined in order, even if things are not under control in the strict sense of the word, they respect some essential rules. Paying no attention to that and focusing on the traditional FPC causes many dysfunctions and put employees in unbearable situations."

3. Serendipity production Capability (SPC):

"Being able to innovate and produce unexpected things […] has to be facilitated because it’s key in a disruptive economy"

He puts this into perspective using a comparison table, and concludes:

"…businesses have to develop these three points. Not one of them, all of them […] Companies should facilitate the switch between these three systems because it’s what people need to get things done […] There’s no unique satisfactory way of doing things. People have to know how to switch from one to another.

Bertrand has a related post on being adaptive and agile, which I will highlight in a future post.

Co-existence of processes and ad-hoc work

Many I have quoted admit that "process" is a good thing, but extreme standardisation, rules and rigidness can trap people, creating unproductiveness and inefficiencies which is counter to what you are trying to automate in the first place. The key is for some flexibility in the process to cater for change, contexts, and the unpredictable…and to also be able to assemble people and tools to create your own ad-hoc processes.

Ross Mayfield on the folly of process extremism:

"…processes can become calcified and accepted as the rule even when they do not work and make no sense."

I like how Ross sees a process more as a framework, that can be built upon or bendable (similar to Ross Dawson’s view of enterprise 2.0 approaches):

"A process is like a standard. It provides a common definition for others to build upon. This is generally a good thing […] At best, a process should serve as a reference model. Something that others can reference when completing a task. Something that can be leveraged for innovation, a boundary condition for experimentation at the margin."

Nicholas Carr shares his middle ground:

"…meticulously defined and managed processes continue to be a powerful source of competitive advantage for many companies. Look at Toyota, for instance. Its highly engineered manufacturing processes not only give it superior productivity but also provide a platform for constant learning and improvement. The formal structure, which is anything but democratic, spurs both efficiency and innovation - productive innovation - simultaneously"

Nicholas talks about how new tools complement processes:

"The simple group-forming and information-sharing software tools now being introduced and refined will often provide greater flexibility and effectiveness than more complex "knowledge management" systems. But even in these cases, processes aren’t going away; they’re just changing. There can’t be organization without process."

He concludes:

"Bad processes can destroy individual initiative, but well-designed processes, even very formal ones, can encourage individual initiative and, importantly, guide personal and group creativity toward commercially productive ends. I’m not sure you need to balance process and people so much as harmonize them"

Irving Wladawsky-Berger reminds us not all processes deal with unstable environments:

"…we need to standardize those processes where differentiation brings little or no incremental value, so as to avoid the huge inefficiencies involved in re-inventing the same process over and over again."

And also share’s his middle ground:

"An innovative business looks for the proper balance between process - covering those aspects of the business that can be designed, standardized, and increasingly automated - and people - who bring their creativity and adaptability to handle everything else. In a world that keeps getting more and more complicated and is changing faster and faster you need both - but even more, you need the innovation which, when all is said and done, is the truly human element."

Mark Masterson’s insightful take on it is:

“The problem is not business processes. The problem is trying to automate business processes."

Mark’s insight in detail:

"We are more efficient than before, but we’re disappointed nevertheless. Yes, our coordination costs are lower than they were with ad hoc and / or manual processes. But now we want more! We want to keep enjoying these improvements in efficiency and productivity, but we want the creativity and innovativeness back, which we are somehow certain that we’ve lost"

Phil Gilbert reminds us where we started:

“The traditional notion of a business process comes from the manufacturing world where you can standardise the inputs and outputs of a given process,” he explains.“With ‘white collar’ processes, the very reason you have human beings doing them is that you cannot standardise those inputs and outputs.”

Sigurd Rinde reminds us too:

"If work was like a water flow and the given framework was the pipe it flows through, then BPM would be the system whereby pipes were shifted from side to side and valves opened and shut to direct changes to the flows. Good enough if the flow is water. Not so good if the water molecules had a mind of their own and actually were able to make directional decisions underway. Funny thing, people can. And more; it’s wanted because people are smarter than machines and that’s why you hired them. Ever broken business rules or botched the main systems just so you actually can get your job done? But of course you have."

This takes us, as always, to being more effective and agile.

Mike Gotta quotes a HBS article:

"Many organizations struggle to balance the conflicting demands of efficiency and innovation. Organizations can become more efficient in the short run by replacing costly, unpredictable problem solving activity with consistent, streamlined routines. However, this efficiency often comes at the cost of long- run adaptability. The more organizational activity is dominated by stable routines, the less the organization learns, and the more rigid and inflexible it becomes. To escape this fate, the authors of this working paper theorize that highly disciplined organizations must actively engage in strategic and selective perturbation of established routines. A perturbation interrupts an established routine and creates an opportunity to innovate and learn."

Endnote

Often enterprise 2.0 is synonymous with "emergence" and "free-form" which mostly relates to what surfaces from people sharing and conversing about what they know. But "emergence" and "free-form" also relates to "processes"…how do I work around a process by being empowered with new bottom-up enabling tools. And what may emerge from using these free-form tools is things like a wiki page to list what to do in different contexts, troubleshooting tips that complement procedures, etc…see my post, Wikis for exceptions and process failures.

In the future I want to look more deeply into integration 2.0..social computing blended with designed process tools.

This post could keep going but I’ll stop here. Some related areas are; the addiction to Best Practices, stifling innovation, Management 2.0, Plans and Targets, and Complexity (uncertainty, unpredictable)…which I plan to post about.

Related

Socialize your business ? What does it mean ?

The Everything 2.0 discussion - the real issue

Process problems and one answer from thingamy

Process flexibility

People versus Process

On Process, Technology and Work Design

Process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity

A while ago I posted about using wikis to handle process failures, conversations around objects, and activity-centric collaboration; well these posts highly relate to informal processes and ad-hoc collaboration, which is something Jordan Frank know’s a lot about, and which the software firm he works for (Traction Software) can deliver in a way that really differentiates them from other players in the market like Jive SBS, Socialtext, Open Text Social Workplace, etc… I have left out the IBM Lotus Connections suite as the "Activities" module is in the same ball park as Traction.

Below is the video and some notes.

Jordan talks about processes and ad-hoc work using social tools:

• Workflow systems are great until they fail…a need to have a collaboration safety net.
• Collaboration is not necessarily about making the things that are planned go right, it’s about dealing with the things that are unplanned that go wrong.
• When something challenges the system, and the program team cannot deliver on time (things don’t go to plan…dealing with change and new context).
• We get into case where all of the work, and all of the value for our knowledge workers happens when things break…we change the plan, we discuss the issue, we adjust our priorities
• Besides social tools to help you workaround exceptions to business processes, I like how Jordan alludes to using social tools from the start, as new comers can have access to existing information to help sense-make when something goes wrong (rather then be sent a bunch of emails to make sense of). It’s hard to troubleshoot when what happened till now is not easily accessible or not recorded in a raw fashion…think Google Wave playback as a solution.
• You can’t anticipate a workflow for fixing a problem (with social tools like Teampage) you can model informal processes on the fly
• Jordan talks about a process for document approval, but the problem is by the time it’s developed the process is changed; further to this certain contexts present changes to how you action this process…by the time the process is designed it becomes unable to flex to these other ways to action the same process…and the designers aren’t able to keep up with the people.
• Jordan explains a simple DIY process that doesn’t need a designer and is totally adaptable to changes eg. Document review - tag document "toreview" and send to reviewers, they all leave comments. The person who approves it reads through the comments, and if is happy will tag it "done". This is just one example of a grassroots process using enabling tools that helps workers do their thing…a change from top-down centralised (planned/rigid) to bottom-up distributed (on-the-fly/flexible)
• Shifted from physical imposing of structure through databases and programming, to the more flexible managing by metadata (enforce rules by tribal power rather than constraints that you put into the rules in a program)
• More capable to flexing of today’s needs and changing with tomorrows needs…make sure when business conditions change your business processes don’t get left behind…why do business processes that were designed for two years ago, when we are trying to tackle objectives for today

Here’s a Traction whitepaper that demonstrates using social tools to actually do work.

In another interview on Bas Reus’s blog (which is one of my favourites), Jordan talks about riffing off existing structure and constraints:

"Key is to make use of existing organizational structures, and play with constraints. Keep them, make them or bypass them where necessary. Structures can always change…"

"Zone defense is a bit less structured than man-on-man. Zone defense requires constant adjustments and on-field co-ordination. So, there is a structure indicating an area a player defends at the start, but the structure may change as a play is executed and the players self-organize to adapt."

Here’s a link to a video overview of Traction Software, and a link to the rest of their video’s.

This post is a follow on from some loosely tied posts

• Is knowledge hoarding all about your pay cheque
• We are more than our job title describes, so let’s get social!…
• Sensemaking KM and CoPs (Just-in-time vs Just-in-case), engaging and embedded KM, and a competitive vs collaborative culture
• I don’t want to share, that’s counter to meeting my objectives…and reward!!
• Work group fatigue : level of effort vs funded, or transform the organisation!

This is not a post about the overall ROI on social computing effectiveness, but more on the supposed expense of workers spending time away from their immediate tasks, even if it’s about helping others for the greater benefit of the organisation.

It’s something we have to think about when we move from PC to SC (Personal Computing to Social Computing).

In these previous posts the theme is that for a collaborative, sharing, transparent, engaging and aware organisation we need more than bottom-up emergence. We also need a top-down shift and seriousness into this new way of working; with role-models, and a change to the performance appraisal model. Departments like HR, Talent and KM need to work together. This is a holisitic approach.

If what I know gets me more money, and if spending my time helping others doesn’t contribute to my performance, then why would I do it!

Well we do it to an extent with people we trust, "I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine"…this barter-type organisation is how real work gets done. But from a high-level we don’t try and leverage or harness the effectiveness of the barter-based organisation. Look no more than Verna Allee on intangibles as the real value of organisations.

My past posts have been about a change from a competitive workforce to a collaborative one, and also a more role-based network blended with hierarchy.

A current post by Hutch Carpenter shares a quote from an MIT Sloan working paper, about the knowledge hoarding attitude between competitive innovation communities:

"The likelihood of giving away innovation related information may be affected by the level of rivalry within the community. If an innovator believes that revealing innovation-related information will allow a rival to outperform him, the likelihood that the innovator will reveal this information will decrease unconditionally. This hypothesis is clearly confirmed in the communities studied here: assistance is given less often in more competitive settings."

NOTE: In the context of innovation, ideas, brainstorming; competition may be relevant as a starting block (personally I don’t think we should force a process, just let them co-exist) to avoid "group think", but then we move on to collaboration.

If we do have a networked and collaborative workforce, then how do we measure performance?

Olivier Amprimo has a pithy take:

"Work is about team work, not individual performance" "Over the last year HR has put a lot of attention on evaluating people on their individualistic performance while creating the notions of ‘competency’ and personal objectives. ‘A lot of attention’ often means too much attention ie to a point where participation to collective works was not evaluated. This creates inefficiencies as it favours individualistic strategies that can be adverse to organisational performance."

I mentioned that measuring performance of a group rather than an individual means that each group member ensures that each other are doing a good job, and you get this by collaborating.

But what about measuring non-group work or ad-hoc requests like helping other people out on tasks you are not involved in, etc…?

But what about measuring how well you sourced quality people and networked to get to help you on your task?

As Bertrand Duperrin ponders:

"…businesses don’t know how not to pass a local cost along to the the whole organization since everyone has to justify the way the allowed funds are used…businesses don’t understand free across its departments."

The "talk" is easy to say, "we need to be a more knowledge sharing organisation".

But when it comes to the "walk", the current design of business is counter to these intentions.

How do we cater for a networked organisation where you help, respond and spend time on other people’s tasks, without the cost centre you are working in not gettting ripped off ie. while they are paying you, you are spending time helping others out, and at the same time not spending time on your work.

Either we move to a freelance, role-based, self-managed organisation; or we somehow find a way to measure our time spent collaborating and networking…or a bit of both.

Managers need to understand what they lose, they gain in other ways. If one of their workers spends time helping others, in good turn others will help them when in need. In the long term, nothing is lost, in fact effectiveness is gained.

Again and again this takes me to Boyd’s law which I think defines the theme of a new enterprise, OK, enterprise 2.0:

“Connected people will naturally gravitate toward an ethic where they will trade personal productivity for connectedness: they will interrupt their own work to help a contact make progress. Ultimately, in a bottom-up fashion, this leads to the network as a whole making more progress than if each individual tries to optimize personal productivity. Perhaps more importantly, the willingness to assist others leads to closer social connections, and increases the likelihood of reciprocal behaviour, where an obsession with personal productivity does not. On a work basis, businesses today want it (or think they want it) both ways. They want their employees to be personally productive, making the classic logical error that if everyone is highly productive personally then the company will be. Nope.“

Measuring time and value of the group

Like others I proposed that we can measure groups rather than individuals, which works OK for group work, but not so much for social networking.

I’ll explain…

Applying a basic value on time well spent in a collaboration group, can be based on the output. And we are not even measuring; learning, helping others out, sense-making…so the value is much greater, but we know management like hard things to measure.

You could say: employees time spent in the collaboration group is worthwhile based on the group output (group ROI).
If there are 10 collaboration groups, and 10 people in each you can do an ROI on 100 people, by just looking at the output of 10 collaboration groups.

Some might say this is not fair as some individuals may not pull their weight, but rather than the manager pointing this out, the group itself will make this known to the person as it’s in their good interest.

I don’t think the same approach to group measurement can be used for Communities of Practice (CoP).

Why?

A collaboration group is more interdependent, and participation is often more equal, every player contributes to the final output, otherwise why would you be in the group.

Whereas in a Community of Practice participation is voluntary and we have a power law of participation 90-9-1. Which means the majority of the contributions are made by a very tiny percentage of the members.

In light of this it would be unfair to measure the group as a whole, as some people would be free riding on the kudos, whilst the fierce contributors feel they need to be more recognised…it’s only natural.

But yet it’s a hard one, because someone that contributed just a little may have made a big difference to the quality of the output. Or they didn’t score the goal, but having them in the group was essential in the conversations that led to great ideas.

Measure the effectiveness of using your network to get things done

If the firm has 1,000 or 10,000 people how are you going to do the ROI on each person for time spent doing work in a social networking way.

Whether collaboration groups, communities or networks, the new organisational design has to work out a way beyond incorporating group measurement, but as Bertrand said earlier a way for workers to transcend teams without the obstacle of local costs getting in the way.

As mentioned, value is just not about output, but the learning that happens along the way, and sense-making so we can make better decision and produce more optimal work.

It’s ultimately about how we build capabilities and skills from each other, by hanging out with each other…no training course can beat that! Plus we can measure value with anecdotes.

Gia Lyons post, Individual measurements in a social world – adoption obstacle?, has been the inspiration for this post.

This takes us back to earlier points made in this post…Gia says:

► Will how well I use my network to tap into talent to produce that report be recognised, compared to just using my team resources?

"…how do we measure a person’s prowess at making their individual contributions better because they knew who knew what, and had a relationship with them such that they could tap their expertise (there’s another blech phrase), whether directly or through their social contributions, at a moment’s notice?"

► Will sourcing my networks for help (collaboration), reduce the measure of assets I produce, if so I will produce something of less value on my own, at least I get all the credit and a bag of carrots?

In this comment Gia explains what prompted her post. She was contemplating whether to go the social route on a task or to keep it to herself, as she isn’t measured on how well she uses her network, she says:

“…there is a direct correlation between the number of assets I create in a quarter, and my quarterly bonus…”.

► I mentioned previously that you need time to spend using social tools to get to know people so you can use them properly

"To network, one must be social, must participate in online communities as well as offline, must spend time getting to know others and letting others know them. So really, we are asking people to spend precious time to do something for which they are not measured. Fix this, and you will have removed a major obstacle to the inside-the-firewall business adoption of social networking and productivity behavior."

Again we come to the space where bottom-up tools are not enough, workers need to be allowed time to become more effective and sense-make…and I’m not asking for Google 20% time.

Employee Performance Review based on ratings and reputation (peer review)

Rawn pondered this a while ago:

"During the Industrial Age, we achieved similar goals for manufacturing output. Now that we are in the Information Age, we are stumped, because rather than a physical unit output, it is more of a mental qualitative output, and that seems to us a very subjective element." "…there is at least one way to measure the quality of knowledge. It’s been done for centuries: the Peer Review process."

Andy McAfee posted about utilising ratings in social software as part of individual performance in six areas:

• Authoring
• Editing
• Interacting
• Tagging
• Pointers/Uploads
• Positive feedback

Andy’s subsequent post showcases a few comments that allude to this type of measurement as killing the quality of participation, and people gaming the system. I don’t quite think it’s the same as rewards, but it could have the same effect. Andy also has a follow up post.

Hutch Carpenter riffs off Andy’s post; social software like Spigit can monitor participation and generate ratings/reputation. He says:

"The feedback is in real-time, not annually. The views of colleagues throughout the organization can be captured, providing greater diversity in feedback. Ratings come from all levels of the organization, making them true 360 degree reviews. Obviously, great care must be exercised in introducing this concept. Early on, the social software ratings can be advisory in nature. As they prove themselves out, they can supplement the performance review process."

I agree that this only supplements, as there are other places that people participate that may go unrecognised eg. face-to-face, email, IM, on the phone…

Rex Lee also warns of such a rating systems being the only means of measuring the effectiveness of an E2.0 program, and the value of a contributor. He posts about the "false assumption" of measuring activity levels:

"Without any ratings, how would you know whether to trust the content? Rating a contributor based on activity levels is intended to provide participants with a gauge to the "quality" or "accuracy" of the content. This is a dangerous and false assumption. Just because someone may post a lot, or interact a lot, doesn’t mean that their content is necessarily of high quality. As an analogy, I spend a long time doing house repairs, not because I am good at but for the exact opposite reason!"

Rex alludes to a holistic approach in relation to motivation (which I’m going to have to post about separately):

"There is sometimes a desire to use ratings as a means to motivate employees to contribute. If you focus on "quantity" you are incenting the wrong behaviour, focus instead on "value"."

Rex also warns to not confuse quantity with value:

"A heavy focus on individual ratings will also diminish the real value of tapping into the long-tail." "The question isn’t about how much input you provide. Even if you provide only one single piece of contribution, what if that contribution turns out to be a major breakthrough?"

 Clay Shirky’s book, "Here Comes Everybody", describes this as the 80/20 optimisation:

“…because of transaction costs, organisations cannot afford to hire employees who only make one important contribution-they need to hire people who have good ideas day after day.” “the institutional response to this imbalance is to ignore the people with only one good contribution; the dictates of 80/20 optimisation forces a firm to maximise its output by ignoring casual participants. As a result, many good ideas are simply inaccessible in an institutional framework, because most of the time most institutions have to choose ‘steady performer’ over ‘brilliant but erratic’.” “It’s not that organisations wouldn’t like to take advantage of the idea of the occasional participant-it’s they can’t. Transaction costs make it too expensive”

Another social tool called Rypple replaces the traditional performance review with a peer-based review.

As usual Bertrand Duperrin has excellent perspective on what’s measured, and the difference between measuring a final result and the contributions that made the result possible.

Further to this is how measurement itself can be counter-productive, if you are measuring the wrong thing. Be careful what you measure, as this will effect performance.

He alludes to the game of basketball measuring the performance of the team rather than the individual:

"…at the end of the game, if you only focus on points you’d think that some players are useless because their specality is to help others score. Fortunately, statistics take “assists” (ie passes that help another player to score) into account for players and teams evaluations and they’re as important as points to measure player’s performance. It’s logical : the player who gives the ball makes his partners succeed and without him no point would have been score. More, a pass becomes an assist when and only when points are scored so it force people to make the right choices and not only pass the ball hoping others will do some positive things with. So basket ball knows how to evaluate the people who make other’s succeed. If this wasn’t measured I’m sure many players would focus on their own points without paying any attention the the team’s points. When such behaviors happen, you often have a team with two main players (according to the points they score) but that lost all of its games. How are people evaluated at work ? The answer will surely help you to understand why effective collaboration seldom happen."

 As for traditional performance review in general Peter Bregman sums it up :

"Traditional management systems encourage mediocrity in everything and excellence in nothing. Most performance review systems set an ideal picture of how we want everyone to act (standards, competencies, etc.) and then assesses how closely people match that ideal, nudging them to improve their weaknesses so they "meet or exceed expectations" in every area."

This is also typical of traditional KM and all outcomes based management. The new enterprise is more about emergence, diversity, facilitation, the unexpected…rather than an addiction to pre-define how people should perform.

Peter also posts about performance review in relation to the big picture of traditional management and the running of business and how it relates to culture change

"Performance reviews and training programs define the firm’s expectations. Financial reward systems reinforce them. Memos and communications highlight what’s important. And senior leadership actions — promotions for people who toe the line and a dead end career for those who don’t — emphasize the firm’s priorities."

Bill Bradford and Sue Traynor continue on this train of thought about out-dated performance review methods, and talk about it as a process, not an event. They also write about how this relates to competency:

"If an organization sees its appraisal process as the primary vehicle for performance management, it is in trouble. Performance management is a daily activity and supervisors and managers need to be highly trained in the coaching and counselling skills to deal with a wide range of issues on a daily basis.  Without the confidence that only comes with acquired skill and practice, they tend to swing between the extremes of avoidance and emotional reaction.  Acquiring the confidence to address poor performance and the emotional intelligence to know when to encourage, when to teach, when to reward, when to challenge and when to praise is fundamentally important."

An article in the Wall Street Journal says the performance review kills teamwork, but they don’t come from the angle I’ve been talking about lately in relation to knowledge hoarding. 

The Invisible hand

Not sure I agree with a post on the Social Glass blog from back in 2007, where Jeremy Thomas comes up with a model where participation in fueled by competition.

He likens workers in organisations to a free-market, whereas the whole notion for this post and others I’ve linked to is to change the free-market competitive organisation into a collaborative one…where the motivators are not exclusively about "self gain".

Charles Darwin says:

"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change"

Well what about "Survival of the Kindest" which is a feeling that I get from an online system like Twitter. I’m often reading tweets and then replying back with links to similar research, etc… There is no self-gain for me, but as it turns out I get rewarded as people do the same for me. If anything it allows conversation, and who knows where conversation is going to lead, and the unexpected benefits we get from this dance.

The Invisible hand is a game where everyone can pursue self interest which promotes the greater good for the market (cooperation without coercion). Basically consumers are free to buy and producers are free to sell what they want as well production methods. This results in a beneficial distribution and price for all, due to ‘greed’ ie efficient production increases profit, and competition leads to low prices.

Jeremy relates this to knowledge workers:

"A knowledge worker “…intends only his own gain”, he seeks recognition which can ultimately lead to promotion and increased salary. A knowledge worker “…intends only his own gain”, he seeks recognition which can ultimately lead to promotion and increased salary." "Enterprise 2.0 is not based on utopian ideals. It is instead based on the very principles that drive all free-market economies. Organisations that adopt enterprise 2.0 will do so for auto-preservation and corporate gain - to help their bottom line. Period."

This is what needs to change as it’s all a "game" of competition, rather than collaboration, and it’s totally the antitheseis to Boyd’s Law mentioned at the start of this post. To re-iterate the last bit "…making the classic logical error that if everyone is highly productive personally then the company will be. Nope."

Jeremy then moves to the point of this paper which sticks to the market concept called the, Enterprise Knowledge Market:

"…is an information discovery system designed to valuate and promote knowledge assets. It serves as the platform from which knowledge workers receive recognition for knowledge assets they produce in both "legacy" and Enterprise 2.0 environments. Within the EKM the enterprise collectively adjusts the calculated value index of a given knowledge asset. Over time the value index of an asset reflects its true value relative to other knowledge assets. This process acts as an efficient way to promote valuable over less valuable knowledge." "…the Enterprise Knowledge Market efficiently discovers and exposes enterprise information assets in an effort to recognize the knowledge workers who author them. The most valuable information assets are given the most visibility. Visibility leads to recognition, which knowledge workers compete for. Competition fuels participation, and participation increases the number of quality knowledge assets at the enterprise’s disposal. This raises the likelihood that innovative ideas will be discovered, and innovation helps the enterprise remain competitive."

I don’t mind the EKM concept too much in that the valuation is based on peer activity, but I do have a concern with knowledge referred to as a commodity, and the whole concept of popularity as the main driver. It’s a middle space concept I must say, as usually competition promotes knowledge hoarding, but in this case people are competing out in the open, which means knowledge sharing. Again this is only one aspect or way to measure quality and performance.

Employee productivity 

A more engaged and connected worker is more productive. Let’s revisit whether Boyd’s law is true…I think so!

Hutch Carpenter’s post the revenue impact of enterprise 2.0 cites a study, where he shares that:

“The author’s looked at the connections people had built on their own, and those who had the best, most diverse networks outperformed everyone else. What Enterprise 2.0 does is take these characteristics of the top performers and exposes them for everyone else in the organization.”

Then I came across Matthew Hodgson’s post about a study, called the ROI of being social at work, and a follow-up piece; the more connected you are, the more productive and effectively you can operate…the social interaction and group effort is an interdependency factor to achieving tasks and goals.

Ross Dawson also has a post reviewing a study where connections and patterns at work correlate with higher revenue production.

Jack Vinson’s post extends this discussion as he states that just because you can be more productive, it doesn’t mean the time saved will be spent productively. He says:

"Activity does not equate with utility."

But again the issue is no longer about believing the effectiveness or worthwhileness of collaboration and sharing, it’s about taking action and structuring an organisation to harness this fact. And not just by saying it, but re-designing the business so it enables or is conducive to this new way of working.

Middle Management

In an earlier post I mentioned management approval to use enterprise 2.0 tools, which I think goes against the whole ethos. I said, "Chuck mentions that some people were not sure if they could participate unless they had approval by their manager."

Time well spent learning, helping other, and making new contacts doesn’t have to have an immediate efficiency impact on your job, sure you can productively collaborate, ask questions for immediate benefit, but the unique part is that we can become more capable and skillful (effectiveness).
There is a stage where we have to develop our network, follow those people we are interested in, and also create our own brand by participating in blogs, etc…we also comment and answer questions, as we know this is a reciprocated relationship.

Perhaps the paradox is senior management want people to share know-how (be effective), but middle management need you to be efficient, because they are pressured from senior management about the bottom line. So in the end senior management may claim they believe in KM or enterprise 2.0 effectiveness, but they force middle management to go against this grain.

But middle management may not need any encouragement to not like social computing, as they may feel dis-intermediated…more on this in another post.

More

I’m also going to have to follow-up with a post on motivation/reward/engagement.

 

[ADDED 11/01/10 Jack Vinson - Individual measurement in team efforts

“Successful projects depend on the entire group working well together…individual measures work against group cohesiveness. I’ve written more lines. I’ve answered more phone calls. I’ve put out more fires. Therefore I must be better. Has the fact that an individual shines done anything for the success of the overall project? Has the entire group been given new skills or capabilities with which to meet the next challenge?“]

[ADDED 10/06/10 Society is more than an aggregation of individuals

“I’ve never really understood why anyone gets taken in by arguments along the lines of “get the individuals right and society will work itself out”. Ok it was the basic of classic liberalism and aspects of social contract theory but I did think by now most people realised that individuals co-evolve with each other, ideas, the cultural ideation patterns of their society etc. etc. The focus on individual competences and the assumption that they will aggregate is reductionist in nature, it fails to appreciate the complexity of social interaction.“]

[ADDED 10/06/10 It’s not all about you

“…successful DL [Distributed Leadership] companies do not leave collaboration to the predilections of individuals, but build it into structures, reward systems and HR practices. At Cisco, cross-functional councils and boards were created to quickly make strategic decisions and respond to new opportunities. In addition, a significant portion of senior managers’ compensation is based upon peer ratings of how well they collaborate“]