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.

About 18 months ago I posted on how the way I communicate and am aware of the lives of people I know is much different to my parents-in-law…to me it’s the new normal.

I’m not referring to explicit communication (sure this happens), but I’m referring more to just being aware without necessarily having to directly communicate or push a message to one or multiple people…directly communicating can often happen once you become "aware" of something.

In that post I mentioned that my inlaws swap long Christmas letters with their friends (once a year), so basically at the end of the year in one big gulp they become aware of what a family has been up to.

Sure they could be aware of many points shared in a friends Christmas letter if they had phone contact throughout the year, but you are not going to ring, SMS or email every person on your Christmas list each time something happens in your life…and ringing them to tell them about minor events like "I just landed in Hong Kong" seems ludicrous.

The difference here is that online platforms like my Facebook network operate on a different paradigm, we become ambiently aware of each other. Sure we can have directed conversations like phone calls, SMS and email, and in the Facebook context we can send direct messages, leave comments on updates and photos, but the big shift is that we talk about ourselves or something that has happened to us out loud, we broadcast this to a spot, and whoever subscribes to that spot, ie. our network, will see that in their stream. This is a shift in how we communicate, and an off-line version of doing this would make you seem a bit crazy, but in the online realm it works.

In fact, we are so ambiently aware of our friends lives via Facebook that when we meet up offline, we don’t have much to say to each other in the way of "how you been?"…this kind of becomes a non-question.

The other day I was on the phone to my mum and she told me my cousin landed in London. And I said I know. And she said, oh, have you talked to her. And I said no. She said well who told you. And I said she did. She was a bit confused. I then told her she broadcasted this on her Facebook profile, and people in her network like me get to pay attention to these updates, if we choose not to pay attention it just streams by. I said I can also choose to leave a comment on her update, or a gesture that I like it. If my mum were to ask, I wonder how long the plane trip took, I would say well the flight was split in two, earlier on she updated that she landed in Hong Kong. My mum was so amazed that I knew this stuff without having to be personally contacted. And from my cousins point of view, broadcasting it is much more doable than sending an SMS to a hundred people each time she wants to say something, and then one-to-one comments splintering the conversation.

In fact without these new online networks you wouldn’t have this type of awareness, it’s as simple as that…technology and it’s use affects and changes culture.

As you can imagine this happens all the time. My mum telling me on the phone about photos or a family friend having a baby. And I already know all this by being ambiently aware, unlike my mum I know this without having to have one-on-one contact (direct communication), or waiting to hear it from someone else.

I told her I even know what others say about my cousins update, even from people I don’t know…all without having to be in a tele-conference or email chain conversation. I told her when someone leaves a comment on an update it will appear in my stream that this happened. I told even when my cousin adds a new friend to her network I will also be updated about this, in this case my cousin doesn’t even need to broadcast this, she wouldn’t have any motivation to do this anyway, but instead the system automatically posts this update. Further to this I can leave comments on this update ie. we can have a chat around the fact my cousin has added a new friend.

I mentioned that whenever someone in my network uploads a new photo to the system they appear in my stream and float on by, but if I’m in one of the photos I am more explicitly notified of this.

Anyway, my point is why do I have close to total awareness of people in my personal life that requires low effort, but yet in the workplace I don’t have this ambient awareness!

In my personal life the “how you been?”, translates to what we hear in work meetings or weekly tele-cons eg “let’s go round the world, starting with Perth, John update us on what you have been up to in the past week”

In fact it may be more crucial to have micro-blogging/activity stream networks in the workplace as we share and work on the same/similar/related goals and tasks within our teams, across teams, workgroups, and enterprise wide…so the more we are aware, the more we can be on the same page, and have better coordination, cooperation and collaboration…surface opportunities (emergence), have the best people on the right tasks, and generally have the ability to be more responsive and adaptive.

This is impossible to do with email, phone, face-to-face…these all have their place, but now we can really do something new, or enhance what we do or what we have always wanted to do, that doesn’t require centralised coordination. Now our classic organisational problems of communication and awareness can for once realistically be addressed. Further to this it cascades into self-organising social productivity, much better than email which is our current self-organising tool.

I said once before we are moving from PC to SC ie. from Personal Computing to Social Computing.

And we are moving conversations from private by default to public by default.

Hopefully this comparison by story in describing this concept is useful in explaining online networking to people in the workplace as an alternative or a pre-cursor to: what it is, the benefits, how it works.

An email was sent to a bunch of leads the other day about the progress of our new document management server.

At the end of the email it said to pass this information on to our teams.

Need to Know - Scattered and Slow - Private by default

The way I see it each lead will send a version of this email to their teams, and then they will all have silo’d conversations.

Then certain leads will want clarification or have a question to ask, but will not include all the other leads on that email.

Then back to their teams again….

Back and forth, back and forth…the same topic being conversed in different groups…the scattered and slow approach.

On some occasions some of the leads will not pass on the message, or maybe the lead didn’t get one of the emails, and maybe the lead will slip passing on your feedback…and if they do you may not be attributed.

Then one day the change comes and people say why wasn’t I communicated about this…this initiative doesn’t even factor in how we work…if they consulted us the change could at least reflect to make the way we work easier and more productive. They don’t have a clue about ground zero. This is the enterprise gap!

Worker: Resist…ignore new process, use my backdoor workaround.

Manager: How come this change is being resisted…email the change management guy we need to "push" this.

Yuck, the word "push"…anyway this shows how a lack of visibility, co-creation, and bottlenecks that managers have the potential to be, lead to ineffectiveness…need a KM Flow Doctor!

Actually this takes me back to my corporate plot post.

Good to Know - Contained and Quick - Public by default

Here’s how I would have done it.

Believe it or not we actually have a Community of Practice (CoP) for this initiative.

I would have written a blog post instead of an email

• Our blogs have an email address, so we can publish a post by emailing the blog
• Since not all these people may subscribe to the blog I would have emailed these people the link to the blog post
• In the email I would mention to them to leave a comment on the blog if they had any queries
• I would also mention in the email for them to subscribe to the blog to get further comments (unfortunately our platform doesn’t have post level subscriptions like a "Watchlist")
• When you are subscribed you get emailed new posts and comments, and can use the email reply button to have comments conversations
• Basically you don’t even have to visit the blog itself to read and interact

Now each of these people can just pass on the link to the people in their teams.

Subscribers and browsers to the blog will also be informed.

And everyone can have ONE conversation in the ONE spot.

Inbox 2.0

Basically email becomes the vehicle for having the conversation, but yet no-one is personally sent an email; instead every email is sent to the blog object (social object), which people subscribe to ("pull" approach).

And at the end the blog object also stores the information.

Naturally we begin to think that the whole idea of the email client needs to be evolved…something like Tweetdeck, but more of an email client look, hello Lotus Notes, the "business inbox". Fuser and others have being doing this on the consumer web for years.

What results from using social tools

1. Transparency (communicating progress in the open…"public" by default)
2. Less distorted message (no interpretations, straight from the source, less gossip/rumors, access to raw facts allows you to re-mix and re-frame content)
3. Workers can offer feedback in discussions they normally would not be a part of (co-creation helps make the initiative more relevant to people who will actually use it…therefore less need for change management)
4. Diverse input (people not involved in either end of the change initiative may come across the conversation and add valuable input)
5. Workers feel engaged that they are included in discussions (happy workplace, build an influence by reputation)
6. Everyone is informed of the "know-why" (rather than just reading a report, they now know of, and can take part in the raw conversations…all the decisions that led to the final product)

This will help solve the fundamental issue that all organisations seem to face…the silo syndrome, communication and awareness breakdown, scattered and slow dialogue.

NOTE: Silos are natural and strong, and we need them. It’s just that each silo is not the enterprise, so to be effective we need to be aware and collaborate across silos…so we bridge silos, not smash them.

A support tool, a new literacy

Social computing (or KM) is not a strategy, it’s a support tool, a sense-making tool, a way of being…just like the phone, email, IM…

We can use these tools to improve sales, improve brand awareness, improve customer service, fix a problem, fix a process, etc…are these strategies/tactics, or simply using tools to achieve (support) your job tasks…difference to the past is that these tools (there use) can have a cultural impact in a deeper way…they challenge the dynamics of relationships, openness, power, routines, habits.

You could say we could use new social tools for everything, that’s why we see HR 2.0, Sales 2.0, Marketing 2.0, etc…that’s why existing products are starting to get features like blogs, social networks. So really it’s a way of being or a literacy, rather than a strategy. But yes, to get buy-in you may go the strategy route; but that’s just to get your foot in the door, and it’s also to help the blank faces when they are given tools that aren’t designed to do a specific thing…and what it takes to get adoption (the difference between transactional and interactional).

Obstacles

Visibility, connectedness (not just a horizontal slice of the org, but a network), and conversations are key.

What’s stopping this at the actioning or "doing" level (in relation to the anecdote I shared at the start of this post):

1. Design (have to visit the blog, rather than quickly shoot an email…but the blog does have it’s own email address, just need to remember to put it in your email contacts, and if you subscribe you can get new posts emailed and replying will publish a comment)

2. Habit and routine (this needs to be facilitated…rinse and repeat)

3. The message may want to be filtered for the masses (in this case the message was quite general)

4. Us and them syndrome (I have worked up my way in the hierarchy to be privy to these types of conversations…part of my status is to pass messages up and down the chain)

Going even more deeper the mass use of these tools could lead to a transformation that companies don’t see appropriate, not ready for, feel as a threat…the list goes on.

Subject Matter Networks

Another way of looking at the sense-making perspective is saying that we are moving from Subject Matter Experts to Subject Matter Networks. In the sense that it’s not about in-house gurus, it’s about people connecting in the network to do their work…much more normal, practical and resilient.

Mark Oehlert on this:

"…we needed to be thinking differently…if we just used social media to build more ways to get to SMEs, then we wouldn’t fix what was broken…our ability to access the expertise that we need, when we need it - either in order to answer a question, provide input into a course design or for some other purpose - we didn’t need better access to Subject-Matter Experts…we needed access to Subject-Matter Networks. (SMNs)

Eric Davidove shares the details:

"Some key conclusions from the research: Activities and interactions that occur in blogs, wikis and social networks naturally provide the cues that are missing from current expert locator systems. A search engine that mines internal blogs, for example, where workers post updates and field queries about their work, will help searchers judge for themselves who is an expert in a given field. Wiki sites, because they involve collaborative work, will suggest not only how much each contributor knows, but also how eager they are to share that knowledge and how well they work with others. Tags and keywords, which are posted by employees and serve as flags for search engines, can reveal qualities in an expert that are far from transparent in any database or directory. I like this study because it demonstrates the hidden value of blogs and wikis. This study also helps us further understand that the formal organizational chart and company designated experts are not necessarily the best “maps” for finding expertise or the most qualified experts in the company. Social media such as blogs and wikis will help us to identify the established and emerging experts and to go beyond the “usual suspects.”

And I like Simon Bostock’s touch:

"The reasons that other people approach those experts has as much to do with approachability, generosity and perspicacity as it does with expertise."

Rex Lee talks about removing barriers:

"Enterprise 1.0, would suggest that only specialized, trained individuals with the resources knew how to find pearls… Enterprise 2.0 suggests that we can simplify and remove some of the "specialization" barriers to enable more people to search for pearls

Tune processes of engagement

Just to quickly go off on a small tangent (which relates to my previous post on ad-hoc processes). Rex suggests that the tools are not enough, in that we need to tune processes and attitudes. He gave the example of sales people using a wiki rather than Marketing, as the Sales people were more agile on this type of information. But existing processes are not going to bring fruit to this good idea; why would sales people contribute when hoarding gets them ahead, when it means less time spent selling.

I asked similar questions in my post, I don’t want to share, that’s counter to meeting my objectives…and reward!! (hehehehe, just noticed I quoted Rex in that post)

Rex says:

"Without social engineering and modifying processes, models, policies and education, the initiative was doomed to fail before it even started. There seems to be a belief that by just letting all conversation flow in blogs, tweets, forums, wiki’s, etc…, that corporations will find great nuggets of insight, that people will connect and come up with great ideas, that agility and holistic understanding will be natural outcomes. Although this may be true, we don’t need to leave it at that. Proper social engineering in leveraging social technologies can enable organization to focus the potential of their employees & business partners to drive specific business value of higher quality and in shorter time frames. This requires and understanding the engagement factors (motivation, opportunity, capability) and taking initiative to design and facilitate within the environment."

Resulting in:

"Enterprise 2.1 would suggest that rather than "serendipitously" finding pearls, that we coordinate our efforts to actually create pearl farms."

Let’s finish off

Simon Bostock gets to the reality of it (just substitute KM for social computing/networks):

"At some point, when a skill becomes so important, it ceases to be somebody’s job but becomes a literacy. We no longer have scriveners (or many secretaries for that matter) because we’re all expected to write. At what point will we face up to the fact that Knowledge Management is no longer a respectable job (or PR or HR or marketing?) but a literacy?"

[ADDED 10/06/10 - Policy memo’s are not leadership

“Pentagon leadership today craft new strategies and implement them via policy memo. These memos can often be summarized as “All programs must now do X”. To the thousands of program managers out there who read them, they think: “SIGH….Great, add that to the pile”. Once that policy memo is emailed out, what’s the follow-up implementation? Staffs spend months and years interpreting meanings and sorting out implementation strategies while leadership often don’t hear of issues until a few programs fail.

If leadership maintained a blog, they could share their vision and thoughts as part of an ongoing dialogue with the community. The community early on can understand where leadership is going on an issue, long before a policy memo is staffed, approved, and distributed. Feedback can be provided to Pentagon leadership on issues that may arise and lessons learned“]

[ADDED 10/06/10 - How to Break the Tyranny of E-mail]

FeedVis - Still in private beta, with also an offer of the source code to run it on your server, FeedVis is a a tag cloud generator based on a bunch of feeds that you import via an OPML. The cloud is based on frequency and popularity. This should just be a feature of Google Reader, and probably is in Feedly (also see mini). I remember good old Feeds2.0 had a tag cluster. [via RWW]

embedit.in - embed doc and image files or URLs into your blog posts as flash boxes - doc, docx, xls, xlsx, ppt, pptx, pdf, wpd, odt, ods, odp, png, jpg, gif, tiff, bmp, eps, ai, txt, rtf, csv, html. Limit is 20 meg. If you already have a web page with links to lots of documents, use embedit.in sitewide to convert them in one go. See their tips. I’d rather not embed it in this post, but here’s a URL to an example of embedding a URL. [via nw]

Webinmail - if all you have is an email connection, yet you want to surf the web, then email this service with the URL you want in the subject field, and they will email you back the page…you can even email a search query. [via DI]

Innercircle.cc - create an email distribution list. Also see posterous group blog/email lists

Smub.it - ever read a webpage on your phone and want to bookmark it in delicious, share it on Twitter, Facebook or Friendfeed, email it, etc… I do all the time, but my phone doesn’t have bookmarklets (do phones have these). Anyway, what you can do now is prepend the URL you want to bookmark/share with “smub.it/”. It’s kind of like ShareThis, but done manually by altering the URL.

eg.
- if you came across this URL on your phone
http://www.labnol.org/internet/email/surf-the-web-via-email/5624/

- you go to the address bar, and prepend it with “smub.it/”
smub.it/http://www.labnol.org/internet/email/surf-the-web-via-email/5624/

- then it takes you to a page of icons for delicious, facebook, twitter, friendfeed, email, etc…click on one of these and your away.

Problem with my phone is I can’t choose an icon to click, darn….

Anyway, you can also manage your bookmarks at smub.it, and use a smub bookmarklet or toolbar

It’s also a URL shortener, where you can customise your URL’s
ie enter your ID and a keyword. For example the link in the example above could be
smub.it/johntropea/surfemail

[via BrightHub]