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

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

In the comments she says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Self serve creation is key!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just like matter warps gravity, design can warp culture.

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

A while ago I posted that size doesn’t matter when it comes to effective communities. You don’t need a lot of members to make a community of practice successful, you just need quality participation.

Whereas in a blog/micro blog social network you need lots of people in order to gain the network effect. That is, a network (individual centric) system like a blogosphere becomes more valuable as the number of players increases. The more bloggers there are, the more we have to read and learn, the more comments and linking result, and as a whole we have a richer distributed conversation. If there were only 5 bloggers in the world I would have not much to read, comment and link to…5 million diverse opinions are going to generate more material, discussion, points of view.

To re-iterate a community of practice does not necessarily become more valuable when the number of people increases…see fictional example:

“Our community was great, there were originally 10 of us that were of the same calibre, we had lots in common, we all trusted and relied on each other…now the community has 40 people, and it’s lost is attraction for me, there’s too much off topic content, and the conversations are too noisy and of lower quality, I really don’t know all these people…I liked the dynamic I had before with our original group, I was more prone to participate and felt much more comfortable among peers I trusted and had confidence in, we are thinking of branching off”

The thing about groups is that it’s a shared choice as it’s a shared space, whereas in a network it’s your own space, you just choose to ignore people, you only add friends to your contact list that you like or trust. Therefore you always keep the quality, at any time you can drop someone you lose interest in.

NOTE: Communities and networks are not substitutes, they both have unique purposes.

Why wikis have more adoption?

What sparked today’s post is a post from Sameer, 2009 is the year of Enterprise 2.0? Hold your horses….

In his post we see that Wikis are gaining more traction. I think this is because they are more:

• group based tools
• based around a task (an environment of certainty)
• help with process failure, and
• don’t require network effects like blogs and social networks
  …ie. wikis and forums don’t need lots of people to take off, all they require is a small group of people.

I recently left a comment on Stewart Mader’s blog about how my boss and I (and a couple of others) are using a wiki for everything lately…it’s so much easier and less messy pointing to a URL than emailing an attachment.
This is a social tool we are getting great value from, and all it took was a group of under five people.

Another reason wikis are taking off is that so many people at work want to make topic, workaround, best of, to-do pages. The nature of knowledge work is that we deal with uncertainty and unique situations, we can only document so many official processes/procedures; often we need to bend these processes and use our thinking and conversation to respond or get things done on the fly. This is why we are the people for the job as we use our minds to get things done, we are not programmed robots in a factory, work these days cannot be programmed by management, we need to respond and act to all the different situations that face us.
OK, so after that long speel, I guess I wanted to say that sometimes we may like to communally create our own informal procedures or workaround lists that contain the ways we responded to situations. Or a list that contains the best documents on a topic; these documents may be scattered in different repositories, and a wiki can bring them together in a topic page…and of course everyone wants to make a wikipedia, or use it as a simple CRM type tool.

What’s happening is that wikis are actually replacing a process, they are becoming a new way to do group work. Just the same forums, as Sameer mentions have been round a long time, and are useful for discussions that would normally be done in email…we can often use a forum to discuss a task.

Both these group tools are about the nitty gritty work tasks that we do in email, whereas blogs and networks may not be seen as task oriented, they are more about learning, sharing, opportunities…something nice to have…and of course require network effects…and the returns of effectiveness, efficiency, productivity may take longer to reveal…in this light they may be considered an R&D thing, not something for Joe Bloggs (pardon the pun).

In saying this, our community/team blogs are also taking off because they are in a group space, and the postings are about a task, status, progress, tips (we also see posts about sharing links, and theory). But, if we were to have blogs out of a context, that is, social network profile blogs, then I think adoption would take much longer, people would feel more like they have their own publishing house (feels more serious and onus to regularly post compared to a group space like a forum), and the postings would not necessarily be in the context of a task. People would be free to publish what they know from their own individual context. Managers may see this as not contributing their time to achieving a deliverable, the question would be asked, what returns are you getting from this that you can feedback into your job.

Social tools can be used multiple ways

This comes to a fundamental question. New social tools can be used to achieve tasks, but they can also be used to be more effective, connected, tuned in, so your tasks can be more optimal, of better quality, quickly executed, of reduced cost… So if you want your tasks to be more effective, rather if you want your workers to be more effective and deliver quality and innovation, then workers need time away from their tasks to devote to informal learning. Actually, it’s not even necessarily time away from tasks, rather we need time to tap into co-workers in researching, finding, conversing, and learning. Some of this may be seeking stuff from people, some of this may be general talking about what we know so we become smarter people.

Either way social tools are here to stay, we can use them for tasks, and if allowed time, we can use them to become more effective and tuned in, which in turn make us more efficient and deliver quality tasks.

If the company devotes the time, social tools can be used in two ways, if they don’t allow the time, they can still be used to achieve tasks (what you are already doing with email and attachments and rigid process systems)

Jordan Frank says in the comments of Sameer’s post, that when the tools are more process centric they don’t seem so standalone, they are more in the flow of doing work, eg. beta bloggers vs alpha bloggers, and Directed/Volunteered.

I mentioned in my post, Conversations that revolve around task objects, certain social tools will get more adoption and credibility (acceptance) when they contribute in the flow of getting work done (more process-centric). Then later on when they become indispensable, there will be more acceptance in dedicating time to using these tools to become a learning organisation, ie. connecting and sharing what we know, more above-the-flow. James Dellow is also on this meme of social features to existing tools, rather than just having a blog or wiki, we can have blog-like and wiki-like features on existing products.

Do we face a catch 22?

I say we need to first use these tools in group spaces like communities or teams of practice, as you don’t need network effects, and they are based around doing existing work…the returns and usefulness are seen quicker.

Once people see the benefit and find the group spaces indispensable (eg. this is already happening at my work), then management may see the value in people having their own individual spaces in a profile based network.
Further to this I think a microblog profile network (like Socialcast) may get more traction than a regular blog profile network, as more people ask questions and have conversation, than having a publishing bent…lot’s of bloggers are also on Twitter, but lots of people on Twitter do not blog.

Now this is all OK when you have existing groups that want to use an online social space to work in, but what about when you want to find people with like interests in order to build a group.

There are two things happening, one is existing groups can work better in their online social space, but we also want to capitalise on unknown scattered experts…who are our people? what are they good at? let’s self organise to find this out! We need to capitalise on what we don’t know, we need to seize opportunities from our pool of talent. In this case it seems we need a social network in order to find each other, and then come together in a group.

I guess this is why most new social platforms (like Clearspace) have the social network and the group component.

Collaboration vs Participation

Olivier Amprimo has a really good point here, in relation to what I’ve mentioned above, organisations see more immediate value in collaboration spaces rather than participation systems.

“Collaborative tools are made to have people work together on common tasks. It is about team work. They are principally organized around emails and documents, detailed profiling, structured workflows (document approval or task management).”

“Participative tools are made to have people socialize their ideas and activity. It is about Flow and Networked Individualism (as Lee says). They are principally organized around blogs, social networks, social bookmarks…”

He also relates this to adoption:

“The adoption of a collaborative tool focuses on deployment. It is mostly technical, the rest is the job of the boss who will enforce its use and agree training sessions.”

“The adoption of a participative tool focuses on great user interfaces, quality people and quality content in the early days in order to create exemplary behaviors and interactions that will influence new joiners. No matter Free Will, Humans are rational herds : they copy early-adopters behaviors and reproduce it or modify it only on the fringe. It is mostly sociological, no one can be bossy to make that work. That’s OD work.”

From this we can see that participative networks are more bottom-up and don’t revolve around a task or a thing, they are instead nodes that collide together. This is more about a learning organisation, it’s related to know-how and work, but not directly (a deliverable)…it could be seen as replacing some training with informal learning.

Olivier Amprimo has another post related to this topic. In it he brings up a point related more to communities of practice rather than team spaces. He mentions that learning communities require dedication and work on borrowed/allowed time (our communities of practice at work have sponsors, which means they agree that’s is OK for these people to spend time in the community).

“Most people see online communities as communities of practices, which are known to be hard to implement because they require engagement of of members and managers. Immediately people associate engagement as costly (time consumption from the financial angle) if not dangerous for the corporate reputation (B2C). Communities of practices also have the reputation of being not successful, because most of them have low activity.”

Olivier compares these group spaces to participation networks which may generate value without needing to build group engagement.

“…my stake is that we can take advantage of the “crowd” without demanding any engagement from any of its members.
This is what I call a socialized service. A socialized service is a service where the activity of an individual is made visible to others, so that it creates awareness among service users.
It relates to concepts such as “social translucence” and “ambient awareness”. The concept of “social translucence (of technology)” is almost ten years old now. It suggests that communication systems can be designed in such a way that they support social processes. Social translucence proposes that three factors support social processes in computer-mediated work environments. Those factors are: visibility, awareness and accountability. “Ambient awareness” is similar, it actually surfaced in a NY times paper later.”

Activities and numbers

Which brings me round to Betrand Duperrin’s post, like me he see’s that numbers are essential in networks, but not for collaboration. Which means some tools are taken up much easier over others. He also relates this to activities; those that are more certain, target oriented and focused tend not to need critical mass to achieve success.

I’d like to simply say this the other way around: those activities or systems that are set up to tease out weak signals, deal with uncertainty, surface opportunities, find and learn; don’t have a focused purpose, rather they are a framework to naturally manifest into something, based on the level (critical mass) and quality of participation.

We know the aim is all the things I mentioned directly above, but we don’t explicitly work towards that aim, rather we just participate and value emerges that achieves these aims. ie we have a framework to surface innovation, but we aren’t trying to specifically innovate, it will just happen by default…the system creates the conditions for participation, and from there everything else may eventuate…we don’t directly knowledge share, it’s just a by product of participating.

Bertrand says:

“In the beginning, my idea was that is was depending on the kind of tool. It’s easy to understand that a 5 people team is enough to demonstrate the value of a wiki and that a social network, on the other hand, needs a critical mass of users. With hindsight I’s rather say that it depends on activities.”

Personally, I think the numbers and the activity goes hand in hand. If you want to tap into enterprise-wide diverse ideas and opportunities (which is not a focused task to achieve, like collaborating on an end product), you simply need critical mass.

“…social networks, being more flexibility-oriented and aiming at mobilizing expertises inside adhoc groups, need to be used by a lot of people to make sure the relevant resources (people and information) will be there when they’ll be needed.”

“That’s why wikis is often mentioned as the example of a tool that was easily adopter : defined human and functional scopes, defined goal. A contrario, tools which have a larger spectrum, more protean uses, such as blogs or social networks, need a deeper work to be a part of people’s day to day job.”

And this brilliant way of putting it:

Again, some great insight:

I can’t help these excerpts, I’ve nearly re-published Bertrand’s post here:

Size is not critical when a clear need exists about what people have to deliver so that people immediately understand what benefits they will get from using such or such tools. Here, the goal, what has to be delivered, who has to participate are known from the beginning. Use is led by work organization“.

I really like that Bertrand has included this middle space below eg. a team using a wiki to list workarounds, and using a blog for tips and tricks

“Size may be critical when social software is to overcome dysfunctions in the way the work is organized. Here the goal is defined, but the people who have to participate and the functional spectrum can’t be anticipated, nor when the software will be used. Use is led by circumstances“.

“Size is critical when social software is expected to help people to deliver their full potential. Which, said in other words, mean to allow their to use all their skills to make things the company may have never thought about. It’s typically the case in “innovation” projects, where it’s impossible to know who wll have ideas, who’ll be interested in joining the discussion to improve things….and what the idea will be used for. Use is lead by the will to participate“.

Here’s an excerpt from a one page flyer I’m doing for Communities of Practice at our work:

“We like to think that people in our [firm] are more than their job title describes, we all have many talents, and we all have many needs to draw on each others talent. This is what we call ’social productivity.”

NOTE: I got the term “Social Productivity” from Sam Lawrence.

Basically, if I only had my team to rely on to get things done, I would not be as effective or be able to deliver things of optimum value. Why? Because my team doesn’t know everything. I need to be able to tap into people outside my team for advice and help. This is what we do everyday at work, we network with others to get our work done…without our informal network we would be at a loss.

Further to this, there are lots of people in other teams and offices that I don’t know who have great expertise; we need to explore and discover people, and tune our ambient awareness. We need some horizontal glasses to discover these people, and these glasses are social networks (and blogs). Mostly by the strength of weak ties and potential connections, in our ambient awareness.

And of course from this we are capitalising on opportunities, and there emerges an element of self organisation and autonomy. Basically we are making the most of what our collective organisation knows by tapping into it via a participation network structure. There’s lots more benefits like re-use (cost), innovation, opportunities, cooperation, communication, collaboration, awareness, adapt to change, knowledge transfer and retention, talent retention (feeling of belonging, heard, advancing career prospects), etc…

I read something related to this today by Paul Iske, head of KM for ABN Amro bank.

Here’s an excerpt:

“What proportion of your talent, ideas and experience are used in your job?
What percentage of your intellectual capital do you use?
The survey results came back with the response that 70 percent of staff felt that only 15 to 20 percent of their intellectual capital was being used. With 100,000 staff around the globe, this amounts to a significant amount of untapped potential for the organisation”

From this aspect talent and knowledge management is about opportunities and the way (method) to capitalise on them to benefit productivity, and effectiveness of workers, groups, and the organisation.

Is your Organization Talent Ready?

Margaret Schweer has an excellent post, Is your Organization Talent Ready?, referring to:

“…what are the most important competencies (skills, knowledge, experience, behaviors) for organizations today and tomorrow? That’s a very tricky question because creating capability is a continuous journey - there is no steady state for talent readiness, particularly given the current pace of change in technology, our workforce demographics, and in the global economy. “Forward looking” leaders are always in the hunt for talent with key capabilities in anticipation of the organization needs, especially in times of uncertainty. Newly developed, purchased, or even borrowed capabilities can become important inflection points for an organization . . . a way to seize unique opportunities ahead of competitors.”

This relates to a post of mine, Adapting to change with enterprise 2.0. In that post I link to and quote Jay Cross’s pithy explanation, here’s some of it again:

“The rear view mirror no longer reflects the future. Workers need to be able to assess new situations, learn in real time, and improvise solutions. That’s an entirely new learning agenda, for it means putting enough trust in workers to give them the wheel””

Margaret goes on to say:

“In our practice we are seeing the current economy accelerate profound changes in the fundamental structure and operating principles of organizations. These changes are challenging people to behave in different ways . . . requiring new capabilities.?”

Reading this; social computing, networks, and the whole social productivity movement is perhaps a response or a need to cope with our current fast-paced economy…effectiveness is the new efficiency (or the new ‘black’ as some would say).

Social computing is a coping mechanism and enterprise 2.0 is what one day may eventually result.

Some more brilliant gems from Margaret:

“Many of us are transitioning away from job to roles based on work for some portion of our organization. This is an important paradigm shift for leaders – ownership for talent is shared. Talent needs to be flexibly deployed against the areas of highest value for the organization.”

“The ability to structure work and talent in a flexible fashion increases the organization’s ability to rapidly and effectively respond to needs in times of crisis or opportunity.”

“…collaboration allows the organization to accomplish tasks or create new business offerings in ways that could not have anticipated or even attempted with traditional organizational structures.”

This rings a sympathetic vibration with the self organisation and autonomy that can result from a system where people are discovering, connecting, conversing, etc (a networked organisation). In this type of enterprise your profile page is like your living resume, you become your own person for hire, tasks/jobs you like will gravitate towards you, as you will be visible and known…just beware the numerati.

Simply said, we are too hidden in a hierarchy based organisation. As a result the organisation is not tapping into know-how. It just sounds silly that within your place you have ten experts for the job at hand, but you don’t even know of them, or of their talent (kick yourself).
By allowing workers to be visible and network online as we do offline, all these connections will percolate, and make visible everyone’s talent. This is not giving management some sort of x-ray vision, this happens in a distributed way, where everyone together as a result of their networking, will by default leave tracemarks of who know’s what? who’s connected to who?

Employee Engagement

Related to this topic is for employees to participate, and feel heard, for them to gravitate to work they like and enjoy, as the company equally wants something out of them…this mutual benefit brings more happiness, purpose, and increases career opportunities.

Even more so for GenY; if you aren’t on Facebook, you just don’t exist. Online they have their profile real estate where they connect and are known. When they join the workforce this ethos is missing. It’s like watching DVD’s all your life, and now you have to start watching VHS…it’s going backwards…did I just say organisational structures are backwards and colleague student structures know where it’s at

I like this excerpt from the slidedeck below:

“An engaged person brings creativity, passion and energy to the job; they proactively drive change, deliver business results and infect others with their enthusisasm. They are achieving their full potential.”

Being social at work

Matthew Hodgson as always as a post on the behavioural side of things.

A high performance team requires knowledge sharing rather than hoarding, as high group performance depends on each individual performing well. The next step is to have a high performance organisation, where this happens between teams.

From Matthew’s post:

“Taylorist management practices in particular only focus on those things that are measurable and directly associated with the task rather than understanding whether or not social interaction is of benefit to the task at hand. The result is seen in many modern managers who believe that their employees need to be busy and not wasting time (where wasting time equals socialising).”

“MIT research shows that 40% of creative teams productivity is directly explained by the amount of communication they have with others to discover, gather, and internalise information. In other MIT studies, research shows that employees with the most extensive digital networks are 7% more productive than their colleagues.”

“Since information does not diffuse randomly in organisations, but rather reflects the nature and structure of human relationships, providing the right tools that support human social relationships, communication and interaction, will provide a significant ROI to the enterprise.”

Jordan Frank also pitches in his thoughts…but more on an ROI roundup another day.

Something that also fits in here is Boyd’s Law (by Stowe Boyd):

“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…

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.”

The other day I commented on a post that kind of sums this up, in that part of our job performance needs to be measured on the “value” of our social interactions (network/collaborative), in this way it will be motivating people to network, and share. Performance measures or employee worthiness based on this criteria would promote organisational effectiveness and adaptability. Along with social work as top-down strategy or mantra that is as serious as safety and quality. The business needs to walk the walk, and middle managers and senior managers need to be on the same page, otherwise knowledge workers are confused about the mixed message of how they should balance efficiency and effectiveness, and the conflict that may arise when they try to practice effectiveness.

Ross Dawson points to a recent study on the positive productivity results of organisational online networks, in his post Largest ever organizational network analysis shows how social networks drive performance. I’ll think I’ll blog about this in a future post on the ROI of organisational online networks.

Amplified network effects

Let’s top this blog post off with an excerpt from an article by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, called Introducing the Collaboration Curve. It’s about the concept of network effects which I’ve mentioned before in my post, Communities don’t rely on network effects to be successful. What is I like about it is the concept of value increases when there are more players, but when those players are people there is an additional amplifying effect.

An example used is the World of Warcraft as a knowledge economy.

Do you think these guys have even heard of knowledge management?

They probably haven’t; what some of us call KM or sense-making is what these participants have embedded in their way of being.

If it’s effortless and a way of being, is there such thing as KM?

Does KM only exist until it finally becomes absorbed into the psyche, and then vanishes into the fabric?

I posed some of this thought in my posts, Has KM died, and resurrected as social computing?, and Knowledge and its facilitators.

Anyway, here’s the excerpt:

“There’s a classic story in economics primers illustrating the power of network effects. It tells how the first fax machine gave little value to its owner–after all, there was no one else with whom to send and receive faxes. As time went by, however, the value of that first machine increased as other people bought fax machines, and soon its owner could send faxes to the far corners of the earth, and receive them in return.

Fax machines, of course, don’t perform better as you add more of them to a network. But people and institutions do. And that’s where the concept of network effects gets more interesting–when we apply it to how people might perform better.”

[ADDED 28/04/09 : Susan Boyle: A Lesson in Talent Management - “Good managers help their employees succeed in whatever role they happen to be in. Great managers see the unique talents of each employee, and then create the role that’s a perfect vehicle for those talents. Great managers remove the obstacles that prevent their employees from unleashing their talent. And they make sure each employee has the right opportunities, the right stage, the right audience, to be fully appreciated.”]

[ADDED 29/04/09 : 5 Predictions for the Future of Collaboration - “At Cisco, we believe that the rigidly structured silos that were traditionally put in place in most enterprises will give way to more fluid, ad-hoc communities of experts. Increasingly, companies will rely on Collaboration Networks that bring together “clusters of experts” to get critical projects completed. These groups will form dynamically to achieve a shared outcome. This self-organizing cycle repeats itself on an ongoing basis, as the need arises. It’s both efficient and effective, in part because experts are drawn to projects and are thus motivated — rather than being “assigned” in a top-down fashion”]

[ADDED 06/05/09: Aggregative or emergent identity? Rethinking Communities - “In effect and individual was, within the team a collection of orientations that existing not in the individual in isolation, but in individuals as a result of their interaction with other members of the team, the history of that team and the context of their work. If one person left, you didn’t necessarily look at replacing that person, but you looked at the orientations, or balance of the team in consequence. If for example that individual was the only one with a primary completer-finisher orientation (one of the Belbin roles and the name speaks for itself), then it was likely that individuals with that as a secondary orientation would start to change their interactions with the team before you could achieve any replacement. In effect with were treating the team as a complex system, not as an aggregation of the qualities of the individuals.”

[ADDED 06/05/09: Video Conferencing Uptake Is Really About Changing Role of Organizations - “I believe we are nearing the time when entire organizations will make that same shift of perspective. Hierarchical command and control structures already have (mostly) given way to matrixed organizations. The next step in organizational evolution will be the formation of networks of individuals who work together to solve a specific business challenge, and then disband. The organization will support their endeavors by providing the assets and services listed above. Organizations will endure only as long as they can continue to form networks of knowledge workers and supply the assets and services those workers need.

How do I know this? I already work for such an organization!”]

[ADDED 19/11/09: On Twitter and in the Workplace, It’s Power to the Connectors - “Today, people with power and influence derive their power from their centrality within self-organizing networks that might or might not correspond to any plan on the part of designated leaders. Organization structure in vanguard companies involves multi-directional responsibilities, with an increasing emphasis on horizontal relationships rather than vertical reporting as the center of action that shapes daily tasks and one’s portfolio of projects, in order to focus on serving customers and society. Circles of influence replace chains of command, as in the councils and boards at Cisco which draw from many levels to drive new strategies. Distributed leadership — consisting of many ears to the ground in many places — is more effectives than centralized or concentrated leadership. Fewer people act as power-holders monopolizing information or decision-making, and more people serve as integrators using relationships and persuasion to get things done.”]

[ADDED 19/11/09: Is Twitter a Complex Adaptive System? - “It’s becoming clear that to constrict a person’s capabilities into rigid, set roles that limit creativity and innovation just doesn’t make sense. Diving talent into silos is an outdated paradigm. Rather, we should be encouraging the facilitation of diverse groups of people working together on common problems”]

[ADDED 19/11/09: The Future of Collaboration Begins with Visualizing Human Capital - “Social networks have the advantage of being able to connect globally distributed individuals, who can then operate with flexibility within a bottom-up, non-hierarchical framework. But, just having access to each other is not always enough to make things serendipitously happen.”]

In my last post I pointed out the difference in the dynamics between Teams and CoPs.

The main defining aspect is that teams exist to do tasks.

I’m finding lots of teams want to use social tools as a space to coordinate and communicate, and at the moment all we (my work) have to offer are our CoP tools. Our CoP spaces are more designed for learning and sharing, whereas team spaces need conversations to revolve around task objects. So although our CoP space offers the tools teams are asking for like blogs, forums, and wikis, these tools are not packaged in a design for the way teams do work.

NOTE: Teams may also be interested in using a CoP space for general learning, sharing and communicating, but parallel to this they need a space to do actual work (and vice versa CoPs may sometimes want to do tasks)

Nonetheless we don’t have social team tools, so the CoP tools will have to do; in a past post I suggested some social tools designed where each task object has a conversation stream. The task object itself can have comments, but also a forum or blog post may be tagged with the object ID, so when you look at the object, not only do you see it’s own comment stream, you also see blog and forum posts that refer to it (kind of like a trackback). I believe both Traction and Basecamp do something similar to what I just explained. Lotus Connections Activities is in a similar camp, only I gather you do not so much create a space up front, instead you create a thread as you work which becomes your space. An even more liteweight than this are 9cays, and ActionThis.

It’s great that we have enterprise social computing tools like Awareness, telligent, Tomoye, ThoughtFarmer, Clearspace, Cyn.in, GroupSwim, Alfresco, HiveLive, Knowledge Plaza, Socialtext, and the rest, but we also need some tools that explicitly revolve around tasks. We need Teams of Practice tools like Basecamp and Lotus Connections Activities.

To make myself clear I’m not talking about general knowledge sharing tools like the one’s listed directly above, I’m not talking about document collaboration, and I’m not talking about my personal task management list. I’m refering to an open space where a task has a URL, and a comment stream, and other objects like documents, forum and blog posts, IM’s and emails can be associated with the task. In essence when you look at the task URL, you will see all conversations about that task no matter the format.

As at the moment the conversations of the work we actually do are in email.

You have a task, you action it by:

• emailing back and forth with your boss, then you email a team member to help you out, then another…
  - all this work is distributed in a closed and distributed email system
• even the person driving the task finds it hard to keep track of all the emails (let’s not forget, this is not the only task you are doing)
• and it’s not only email, you also have to keep track of all the IM chats, files, etc…
• new people helping out on the task have a hard time knowing the history (as it’s in email silos), and you find you have to repeat yourself

One day someone else comes along to extend on this task:

• they wouldn’t have a clue where to find all the past history of that task, or that there even is a past history
• instead if you have a public task list with all the conversation around each task, then you have a corporate memory (in a linear format the makes sense)
• and the other thing is people can be aware while you are doing your task, and chime in
• also when you need help from someone half way through your task, you just point them to the space where they can catch up on the history of it

We do have task lists at work that show assigned person, status, etc…but that’s all it is, a list. It’s what you edit once in a while, once you have had lots of emails and meetings. You can generate reports from it, and it gives you a picture of progress.

The task list is great, but what is doesn’t show you is how you got to each status (all those conversations), and the latest conversation (on the pulse)…these are valuable for the task participants, general awareness for other parties, a corporate memory, and lessons for the future. It also means less meetings or asking progress, as people can find out for themselves.

At the moment I often find myself completing a task via email interactions, and then two weeks later remember to update the status for that task in the task list. The reason this happens is that the task list and doing the actual task are not integrated. We all know by email the task is finished, but someone visiting the task list wouldn’t know that (as I forgot to update it).

NOTE: I’m mostly referring to re-purposing email for transactions between task members (mostly by task object comment streams), but there will always be transactions where you have to meet, phone, IM, email with people not involved in the task, and at this stage it’s up to you to use the task space to update others about what eventuated via a blog post or a comment on the task object, etc…

This becomes the transparency of knowledgework. Knowledgeworkers are unique and know their job better than anyone else. Someone else filling their shoes don’t really know how to do the job, as there is no explicit process, it’s all about conversations. But hopefully we are coming to a place that the informalness of knowledgework can be documented as it happens, so we can get a picture of how knowledgework is actually performed, be more aware and cooperative…we are not about to video record everyone sitting at their desks, and then watch it.

It seems the lastest McKinsey Report, 6 ways to make web2.0 work, has a lot of people saying “What’s in the workflow is what gets used.”…check out all the tweets. Bill Ives has also posted on these social tools being integrated into processes, he compares it to process centric KM and library centric KM.
Of course this is all about balance, if all our social tools were strictly about tasks (processes) then we’d miss out on the, social productivity, self-organisation and emergence that comes from general networking. It’s equally important that knowledgeworkers can brand themselves beyond their job description, and for them to discover, connect and help/learn from each other. And not only that but perhaps these interactions may add to new strategies. For if it’s all about aligning to strategy, then how do we cross-pollinate and innovate.

NOTE: We innovate diffusely, rather than focused…we create the conditions, such as an open social network ecosystem, and through participation and interactions, innovation may slap us in the face.

The lastest McKinsey Report is well timed with this post as up until now enterprise social computing has been perhaps vague or seems like a great idea, but extra work to knowledgeworkers; so it’s time we design these tools to do in-the-flow work, ie. revolve them around tasks. I think this will be a great boost for adoption, getting people used to working collaboratively, openly and transparently, which will then hopefully drive more above-the-flow participation. Social task tools are perhaps a better introduction to enterprise social computing as you don’t strictly require the sharing type culture, as much as you do with general knowledge sharing tools, as you are actually re-purposing what you already do in email.

Here are some links: In-the-flow/Above-the-flow, Directed/Volunteered, Alpha/Beta

Here’s a list of other tools that I have collected, but not looked at (this list excludes tools I have listed above)

Socialcast
Workstreamer
Staction
Confluence
mindtouch
CentralDesktop
ActionBase
Clarizen
5pm
Daptiv
Lighthouse
ProjectPier
Collabtive
Viewpath
Wrike
LiquidPlanner
Copper
DreamFactory
@task
Project Spaces
Vignette Project Delivery (also collaboration)
ProjectSpaces
huddle
eloops
Teamspinner
wild apricot
devshop
activecollab (collab.ws)
BrainKeeper
Collanos
Egnyte
GoPlan
MyQuire
8apps
Burden Butcher
Task2Gather
WhoDoes2.0
Solodox
Planzone
Qtask
Projexx
Project.net
DeskAway
actionize
TaskAnyone
SmartSheet
Same-page
ActionItem

[ADDED 18/03/09: Kuka Systems - Traction]

[ADDED 3/04/09: blueKiwi]

[ADDED 17/04/09: Enterprise 2.0 and the importance of Silo Smashing!]

This is a follow-up to my Community Lessons post, and Community paradox post.

Top-Down community creation

We have not officially released communities at work, but we have over 50, as it’s spreading by word of mouth (plus all this stuff is in vogue now).
I’m still writing the help guides, so I feel for the current users, and sometimes they are lost…the design of our communities is not very web 2.0, so people need help.

People have to fill in a request form that asks them various questions highlighting the committment and facilitation required.
Once I review that form I meet with the proposed community leader and talk to them about communities, domain, people (community), practice (output), tools, methods, participation, facilitation, structure, types, community indicators, shared identity, how they are different to networks, sustainability, etc…

NOTE: Previously with organisational/team based communities I met with the whole team on a telecon, and it was a bit messy because everyone had their idea of structure, etc…so now I meet with the proposed leader and a couple of key members, and we go through everything, then they may or may not talk to their team before coming back to me to finalise.

Once this is finalised I create the community to the required specifications eg. maybe a community only want forums, or maybe they just want a blog and a place to store documents, etc…

Then I ask the leader to pilot the community with a few key members, this way when it’s opened to more people they can visit and read the content and discussions that have already taken place. The idea is to make it attractive and engaging on the first visit.
The other aspect to this is that the community leader and key members will be proficient users and will be empowered to tackle questions by new users.
For me this is part of adoption - a blank community is not inviting, it lacks a gravitational pull, and a leader who is not equipped to properly lead may leave members in the cold. Plus as global community coordinator I don’t want to be asked questions that the facilitators could be empowered to answer.

In the future I will be running a Facilitator’s community so I can keep community leaders in the loop of running and sustaining communities, and a place for them to learn off each other. I also give them examples of community specific help guides and examples of instructional design to help their users orient and learn to use the community…it’s crucial they have a good experience, by their needs being fulfilled. This also goes for people who visit. In regards to design it’s important to role play and pretend you are a member or a visitor and see how you fair in knowing how to orient yourself when visiting or participating in a community.

Something I’ll add here is that the person I talk to has to be the community leader, they have to be the passionate person. What happens with organisational/team based communities, as opposed to practice or share interest communities, is that a sponsor will set it up with me, and then they leave it to others to run…whereas I’d rather speak to those others from the start as well…I want a relationship with the person running the community. I want the nominated person to be passionate and committed, and not doing it because their boss said so…this is something I try to make known to their boss.

Another thing I learnt is that alot of communities have lots of members for no reason. With our communities visitors are free to subscribe to blogs and forums, leave blog comments, and ask a question.

Members can additonally write blog posts, interact in forums, and add documents. But it’s more than this, members need to be involved either offline/online, they need to be an integral part…whether they are behind the scenes organising meeting/events or they are a subject matter blogger or perhaps they don’t write forum topics but get involved in a lot of forum replies.
The real communities are those where each member is integral, this quote by Adam Fields sums it up:

“There’s really only one rule for community as far as I’m concerned, and it’s this - in order to call some gathering of people a “community”, it is a requirement that if you’re a member of the community, and one day you stop showing up, people will come looking for you to see where you went.”

If you are not going to participate at all, well you might as well not be a member, but still subscribe or visit to content you are interested in.
Anyway, when people request to join a community there is a message to this effect, helping them decide right off the bat if being a member is what they thought it would be.

So far this post has been about community creation, but what I really wanted to focus is on the disadvantages of top-down creation of communities, wiki, blogs, etc… That is, what are we, the company, and knowledge workers missing out on by not being able to have the freedom to create these objects (bottom-up creation)?

I have explained above, in the pre-creation consultation of a community I talk people through what’s involved. A lot of the time it’s not what they are after, they didn’t realise “communities are conversations”, and they were just after more of a document management (DM) type thing. I tell them that DM is a way to centralise and make available what’s on people’s hard drives into one easy place. The additional feature of our communities is that we can also have conversations using blogs and forums, that replace and make less messy what happens in emails, and much more…it’s about awareness, discovery and connecting with people, participating, conversations, evolving content, and learning.

The other aspect is that they don’t know what’s involved in sustaining and facilitating a community to be a sticky hot spot for people to visit daily, interact…ie a daily resource to learn more about your interest. In the end, the less participation, the less it’s a community. In one community at work there are very few forum topics and I’m basically the lone blogger, so it doesn’t feel like a community at all…we don’t meet-up or discuss things we want to learn. I get lots of comments, but then you don’t have to be a member to comment on a blog. I learn from these comments, but I might as well blog outside the community (but we don’t have this kind of framework yet, we only have blogs within communities, an intranet 2.0 network solution is further down the line)…I’ll stop here as this is not a post about participation.

I’ve mentioned that some people:

- think they want a community, but don’t, once they find out it’s not what they wanted
- don’t have time to commit
- don’t like the top-down process of having to set one up

Bottom-Up community creation

It’s this last point I’m interested in, if community creation was a bottom-up process what would be different?

For starters our communities are not that well designed or intuitive so they need to interact with me anyway, and creating a community requires a few steps.

My speculation is that we would have hundreds of abandoned communities, as people would realise it’s not what they want, they don’t know it’s about conversation, they don’t know how to facilitate, etc…

What this means is that our community directory would contain lots of empty communities, which would be an unfriendly experience as people would browse and discover lots of empty spaces, and perhaps think this community tool is not really serious, or wonder how to find the good stuff.

What I do like about this approach is since people are free to create communities, they will, and we would potentially get lots of great communities. Factors such as limited time, attention, and the fact that you can do it yourself and not need permissions, would surely result in the creation of lots more new communities, compared to a top-down method.

Simply, if there is a button called “create a new community”, people will press it, but if the button is “request a community” and outlines steps in involved, they are more inclined to wait another day, or never (and continue as an email gang)…that’s human nature. But then again if they are really passionate about enhancing their email gang with more appropriate tools, then they will make time for the formal process of starting a community.

By using our top-down creation approach we are probably forgoing the creation of lots of good potential communities, but at the same time we are not getting; duplicate communities, and lots of abandoned communities that make the product look like horseplay. All this flies in the face of Dave Snowden’s experience in IBM’s change to bottom-up community creation.

Another thing is that bottom-up creation may result in more communities that have lower membership, but where everyone is a major contributor (these are thriving communities as you usually trust a smaller circle of people, and you are all on the same wavelength and have time for each other). At the moment our community requests are never for 5 or 6 people, they are always for an indended crowd of 20, 50 or 100, I don’t know why. What I want to see are real small and tight communities, at the moment I still think these types are still using emails. Somehow I have to make clear that communities can be tiny and are able to reject membership. As I get into below, maybe a Facebook Group type of design is more inducive to this type of community.

I suppose there is also the other point in that we are being an authority in deciding whether the proposed community is a worthy topic for organisational performance, and so far it is every time. We also have more casual spaces like a bicycle users community, etc…but these are the minority, the idea is that the majority of communities are about building situational awareness and capabilities.
We are not averse to casual communities (just as long as they are not the majority, we are at work!), as it’s a way for people to discover, connect, converse and engage at work…people like where they work when they are socially engaged. Casual communities are like bumping into someone in the coffee room, you never know what may percolate, perhaps a conversation in the bicycle users community will lead to a work oriented task, or finding some information, or wanting to create a new community, or collaborating.
As long as we give people the tools to connect and converse we hope that everything else follows, and this will certainly be true with a future social networking tool. I think more communities will be created as people will meet in the network, and then hook up as a group as a community to pursue their shared interests.
Dawn Foster has an interesting idea of a lounge area in a community, where people can bond in a forum about things that don’t have to be work oriented or don’t have to pertain to the topic of the community. I think this is a great idea, and is something I may suggest in the future, this gives people a way to connect beyond the commonality of their job, and get to know each other a little deeper, or simply more holistically (I mean we do spend more time with these people than our families).

So when I think about it our communities are transparent and bottom-up in that people participate and interact their know-how, allowing for emergence, but they are not very enterprise 2.0 in the way of bottom-up creation. If people were free to create I bet we’d get lots more created than we’d get asked to create, so we are missing out on some emergence here.

Groups and Design

I have to think to myself if our communities were intuitive in design like Facebook groups, would we be more likely to let people create communities, as a Facebook group is very simple to create and use.

But then our communities are more robust than Facebook groups, you can do a lot more with the structure, permissions, and look and feel. Facebook groups are more disposable whereas our communities seem more professional. With our communities you wouldn’t go to the trouble to creating a “Nicole Kidman hate group” (well you wouldn’t do this in the enterprise anyway), as they take longer to set-up, and gather people…so I’m thinking here that there is a difference between a group and a community, or at least a group being a feature of a social network.

In the future when we look into an enterprise social network, I’m sure it will have a group feature just like Yammer, or any other enterprise Facebook type tool, and in this case people will be free to create groups on the fly. I’ve got a feeling these types of groups will be more about getting a task done, or smaller things, or more temporary things, rather than our official community tool.

I wait for the future to see how these groups will differ to our communities…for starters groups will be a feature of a social network, so already you have a pool of people one click away from being part of a group.

Actually I see these groups being use heavily for cross team collaboration, or team collaboration tasks. We don’t have a basecamp type tool (which is more task oriented than a community, but very similar), so some people use communities for tasks, but they are not quite designed that way even though they have almost the same tools. Our communities are too big or serious to set up to for a one month task, so people nominate an existing community and create a folder, adding a blog, forum, and documents, and then give non-members permissions to just that folder. The problem is first you have to choose a community to do a cross team task, wait for the Facilitator to create your blog and forum, and secondly the other team after a while may forget the link to that folder.

Our communities are just not designed for this, but I really feel this is where a groups feature in a social network will shine.

BTW - only a Community Leader can create a blog or forum…community members must send a request to the leader of a community. What do people think about this?

Wikis - Top or Bottom

We are also piloting wikis, and at the moment, as a control mechanism for the pilot you can only create a wiki in a community. I have had requests for wikis that don’t fit into any existing communities, but these will have to wait. Just like blogs and forums, a community member has to request a new wiki in their community. Any thoughts?

One of our staff (Jeff Brown) posted a great reply to one of my internal forum topics:

“A wiki is just another type of document, isn’t it? It has similar features to a document, in that it contains formatted text, images, can get updated, and is read by (possibly) multiple audiences. Do we restrict people from adding documents? (No)
I can see wanting to reach out to the people who just created a wiki, and providing them with material on how to use it, make it better, etc. I got an “urgent” call several weeks ago about how to set up a community, about 5 minutes in after I started explaining about the process, they said they had to go and never called back. I think they decided it was too much work (midcall). I’d hate to think we are putting too much red tape into the wiki creation process.

What could happen if everyone could create a wiki? Are we worried that someone will create a wiki that is then abandoned or not updated? That we will have a flood of wiki-hungry users with no support?”

This got me thinking, documents are linear and wikis are websites (hyperlinked pages), is there anything about the wiki format that makes it seem more official than a document.

Each community could create about 5 wikis, one for notes, one lists, one for drafting articles, etc…so whenever you need a wiki you just create a new page in an existing wiki and go for it. If people want a whole wiki for a task or topic they can request it from the Facilitator…but in a global community this could mean waiting for the next day, and that’s too late, as we only want to wait 5 minutes, and rightfully so.

Since they nature of wikis are more immediate and spontaneous eg. brainstorming, lists drafting…I think anyone needs to be able to create one.

But at the same time wikis can be official eg Help Guides, Glossary…and we don’t want duplication.

In the future when we allow wikis in and outside of communities eg. in our document management system, I don’t see why they can’t be created by anyone. It’s up to the owner of that folder or space to promote the official wikis from the scratchings and non-official wikis.

Thoughts

In relation to our communities, even if we had a bottom-up approach of people creating them, they would have to follow instruction as it’s not straight forward like user designed web 2.0 tools, and they may be put off straight away. Due to this non-intuitive design they will have a better experience if they can wait and allow me to create one, as they will be needing my help anyway. This way I will not be receiving constant support calls.

As I said earlier, if the design was right, it would be more probable for a bottom-up community creation scenario. We would get duplication, and abandoned communities which we would have to monitor. We’d also get more support calls as we’d get members asking the differences between blogs and forums and how to use them, as the community creator would not be empowered. Maybe communities could be promoted to the official directory based on participation and success statistics.

But I still like the idea of top-down creation as I get to share my skill in how to pilot, run and best set up (structure) a community.

So I’m really in two minds about this.

And of course it depends on your culture eg. if I was talking about a company like Google, I would assume their culture is web 2.0 savvy, and can probably survive on bottom-up creation. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they have facilitating and leadership skills.

When it comes to wikis, well I think users need to create this at will, bottom-up all the way…keep in mind I’m not saying this from experience.

I’d like to here from the likes of Gia Lyons, Chuck Hollis, Joitske Hulsebosch, Stewart Mader, Luis Suarez, Nancy White, Shawn Callahan, Steve Dale, Ed Mitchell, John Smith, Richard Dennison, Dawn Foster, Stan Garfield and any others on bottom-up community and wiki creation.

eg. Does Lotus Connections enable anyone to create a community, if so, what are the pros and cons of this bottom-up approach.

[ADDED 8/01/09: The participation issue from community ownership and structure]

[ADDED 9/01/09: A social media proficiency strategy]