Library clips

This is a topic I have come across a lot in my reading lately as it seems to be ever more relevant in times of an economic downturn…organisational issues such as capital costs and talent retention, and personal issues such as cost and happiness all become much more highlighted.

Actually, in addition to lifestyle, it also may be an emergency alternative in the event of biological scares like Swine Flu.

NOTE: Similar terms are: working from home, telecommuting, distributed work, mobility, digital nomads, remote teams, virtual teams…

We have some online tools now that make remote managing and working more effectively possible, and as some say this may be the Future of Work, and the world, as it has a collective benefit beyond organisations.

Reason’s for Telework

• Reducing carbon footprint and oil imports
• Reducing capital and operational costs
• Saving of personal cost and time for workers
• We now have some real-time solutions (Video conferencing, Desktop sharing, Instant Messaging) as well as more effective asynchronous communications (Blogs, Forums)
• Pushes our aim for a collaborative culture by default
• Pushes a work-in-progress culture (managers keeping tabs by reading a workers blog for raw updates, rather than having to wait for the final draft or a meeting)
• Pushes to form connections in online networks
• Happier  workers
• Talent retention
• Encourages more productive self-reliant workers

Blog post excerpts on this topic

Working from Anywhere:

"Not intended to supplant traditional workplaces, third places, just as the phrase suggests, are an alternative to the first place, the formal corporate office, and the second place, your home. Our research, in fact, shows that workers of the future will on average spend approximately 40 percent of their time in corporate facilities (either theirs, or their clients) 30 percent in a home office, and the remaining 30 percent in one or more third places. We believe the use of such third workplaces will become very common during the next several years, for the following reasons:

Organizations will continue to move away from fixed-cost structures to variable cost models in order to reduce capital requirements and risk, and to increase their agility or responsiveness to changing environments;
Most remote and mobile workers do not have adequate alternate meeting places, office services or technical support that are affordable and convenient;
Home-based independent workers also need and want better technical support and services ?"

I like this excerpt from the Wall Street Journal:

"Employers should adopt four-day workweeks and permit or expand telecommuting. A four-day workweek would eliminate 20% of commuting. Telecommuting could eliminate even more. Management Technology Associates studies show win-win-win benefits. Businesses reduce premises’ costs, overhead and labor with gains in productivity of 10%-40%. Workers enjoy significant fuel and time savings. Society reduces fuel use, traffic congestion and pollution."

I like this post on happier workers vs drones:

"Today, more than 12 million employees telecommute or “telework” more than 8 hours a week, up from about 6 million in 2000, according to Gartner Dataquest, a firm tracks this sort of stuff. The number will hit nearly 14 million by 2009.
It’s been increasing at a steady rate for several years.
Why?
Because it makes sense, it’s eminently economical, and it’s green.
Telecommuting is enabled by technology, of course. Electricity, a computer, the Internet, a cell phone or telephone are the basics.
The benefits to workers are terrific. Telecommuters largely are happier and more efficient than office drones. Their workday can span 24 hours. They can work and spend time with family.
Think about how many resources companies spend on building and maintaining offices - maintenance, insurance, utility costs, furnishings - the list can go on and on. With telecommuting, most companies could function equally well with a smaller bricks-and-mortar footprint."

The Future of Work & Home:

“more than 28m Americans now work from home at least one day per month and the number is expected to rise to 100m by 2010.”

Telecommuting - One of the Best Responses to this economy - Undress for Success THE best Guide for this:

"Kate Lister, principal researcher at TRN said, “Today only 7.7% of about 16 million Canadian workers telecommute, but 5.2 million more could. If eligible employees worked at home just half the time it would be the same as taking 1.6 million cars off the road for a year. In fact, 170,000 homes could be powered for a year with the energy saved in office electricity alone.”

This blog posts further describes two scenarios in the cost of work, one from the employee and the other the employer.

Digital nomads:

"Through its open work program, which more than half of Sun’s workforce takes part in, workers have no official desk and, instead, are given the choice to come to the office and find an open space or not come in at all. Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s chief executive, explains to the Economist that because of the program, Sun has been able to retain its employees longer and increase productivity."

More on Sun:

• The average worker only used 64 watts per hour at home, compared to 130 watts per hour in a Sun office.
• Commuting was responsible for 98% of each employee’s carbon footprint.
• Working from home two and a half days per week saves two and a half weeks of commuting time per year.
• The same amount of work at home saves 5400 kilowatt hours of energy per year.

Click here for Sun’s Open Work program.

Department of US Government Gets Why Teleworking Works:

"You might not believe the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) would be a hotbed of telecommuting, but it is. The federal agency, made up of 5,000 civilians and 1,600 to 1,700 military personnel, provides information systems support for the DoD."

Telecommuting Trends (review of the Economist’s Home Warriors article)

• Another study estimates that 33m Americans are employed in roles sutable for telecommuting; removing these commuters from daily travels could drive down oil imports by 25% and reduce carbon emissions dramatically…with the added benefit of increased productivity and perhaps even vacation time. 
• Employers are beginning to understand that increased agility, reduced costs and enhanced business continuity can flow from encouraging telecommuting, actually strengthening a business’ competitiveness and resilience whilst removing large capital and operational costs from the bottom line. 
• Studies of remote workers at American Express and BT show that they can be 30-40% more productive.
  A separate study concludes that remote workers can suffer from career stagnation and isolation, but ironically suggests that richer, ambient and persistent communication channels are the solution.

The State of Telecommuting

"The simplest bottom-line numbers: 17% of Federal employees telework on a regular basis, as do 14% of private-sector employees. There’s been a marked change in the reasons employees offer for being interested in telework as well. Compared to last year, the number of people who are motivated by lowered expenses - primarily commuting expenses - has jumped from 31% to 67%. (This data correlates well with an IBM study from earlier this year that found $4.50 per gallon gas would be the breaking point for many commuters)."

How come Distributed Work is Still the Next Big Thing?

A paper called, How come Distributed Work is Still the Next Big Thing?, lists six reasons and eight barriers for distributed work.

BUSINESS CASE

1. Reducing basic workforce costs
   • Cost reduction (Sun, IBM, Cisco have reduced real estate and facility costs by 50%)
   • Workers need less support as they learn to solve problems with technology (not sure about this one)
2. Increasing workforce productivity
   • Reduction in inefficient meetings
3. Attracting and retaining talent
   • Talent retention due to better family life and reduce personal costs eg. Travel
4. Increasing organisational agility
5. Reducing the business risk of disruption from terrorism or a natural disaster
6. Reducing traffic congestion, air pollution, and environmental impact more generally

"…one of the most unproductive things we do in the entire economy is move millions of bodies into central business districts every morning and then back home again every evening.

In the Industrial Era, given the technologies of the time, there was no choice. Factory workers had to be in the factory to work. Not only that, but all points on the assembly line had to operate in synch; the activities were tightly interconnected, and highly dependent on each other."

BARRIERS

It also hones in on some of the eight barriers to distributed work:

1. Inherent human inertia against externally imposed change
   

   "…people resist being changed, because it means loss of personal control and generates an unknown future where they fear being less successful than they are in the present"

   "Distributed Work places a huge premium on self-reliance and on being productive and work-focused even in the absence of the work-culture “messages” that every corporate facility sends nonstop."

2. Organisational inertia
   • used to stability, predictability, and efficiency
3. Management habits and Industrial-Age thinking
4. Fear on the part of middle managers
   • lack direct observation/interaction/control
   • disintermediation/irrelevance
5. Fear on the part of front-line workers
   • new skills to master
   • different social stimulation
   • do people recognise me
6. Uncertainty about communication and relationships in a distributed environment
   • meetings become special and not abused
7. The CEO "Edifice Complex" that leads to visible corporate facilities
   • bums on seats
8. Plain old complexity-Distributed Work is truly a Big Change

CONTEXT

How does the business case fit into your context/strategy/requirements

Where is it best applied? Perhaps workers with certain roles? Perhaps a couple of days a week? Perhaps workers that live far from the office? Perhaps it’s an only offered for special circumstances, or offered in temporary blocks?

How will the challenge effect operations..a change management process? They have an ROI Calculator.

Corporate Agility

Below is a slidedeck on the future of work, which is based on the Corporate Agility book.

More

Telecommuting and the Untethered Employee
Is Your Workplace Results Oriented or Time Oriented?
What makes web working more difficult?
6 Answers About Telecommuting
Why Your Boss Doesn’t Want You to Telework
Trends in Teleworking
Are Web Workers Truly Green?

twitlonger - if you need to write a tweet over 140 characters, then write it at twitlonger and it will be posted to your stream with a link to twitlonger to read the rest…also see tinypaste, Twitwall, and Twitblogs.

Tweetizen - create a Twitter group. You can filter tweets by keywords or hashtags, and you can limit the stream up to 10 sources (tweeps). Plus these groups are public. I made a quick group from some tweeps in my network who are book authors. This is similar to Filttr (which is not public), but there is no limit on sources. See more on Groups on Twitter.

TweetSum - organise your followers and following lists, also see Tweepler.

FriendFilter - similar to Topify, Twimailer, Nutshellmail in that when you get an email of a new tweep following you, it gives you a heap of information. Some of which I like is that is displays mutual friends (friends we both follow, and friends who follow both of you). It also acts as an address book where you can click on a friend and see their latest tweets and profile. It displays your DM’s and replies, a snapshot of your stream and friend stream, and you can post a tweet. [via b]

Twibes - join an open group…streams latest tweets of group, has RSS feed, you can reply, and keeps you updated on new members

BONUS
Socialcollider

I’m three days late for Blog Action Day 2008 - Poverty, but never too late. Actually I didn’t register and don’t have a blog post about “poverty”, but I thought I would take this opportunity to blog about a local cause that deserves plenty of attention.

My friend Shaun Chandran is a psychologist who works at a place called Parkerville Children and Youth Care, in his words “…working with children who have been through episodes of abuse and neglect and who display a range of trauma-related behaviours.”

Shaun has put his enterprising attitude to work and successfully got an amazing charity project off the ground, with the proceedings going to therapeutic care…here’s all about it on the website:

“WITH A LITTLE HOPE FROM MY FRIENDS is a charity project featuring songs from ‘The Beatles’ as performed by independent artists from the Western Australian music community. The project is a concept album; with songs specifically chosen to depict the journey of a child who has experienced trauma and abuse and is now in care.
The project is an initiative of Parkerville Children and Youth Care, a not for profit organisation in Western Australia that provides care and protection to the most vulnerable children and youth in the community. Parkerville Children and Youth Care has set its roots in Perth since 1903 and is currently in the preliminary stages of establishing Australia’s first Child Advocacy Centre.”

Click image to listen to the Playlist

“The entire proceeds from CD sales will go to providing various therapeutic interventions for our children. These include music and art therapy, dance, theatresport and therapeutic drumming. Recent research has shown how these interventions have a greater impact on creating sustainable change within the lives of these children by working on the lower areas of brain functioning where development has been heavily impacted by early trauma and abuse.”

Recently I posted about the community paradox, inspired by Andrew Gent, and today I am sharing some excerpts by another one of Andrew’s defining posts called the KM Core Sample.

In Andrew’s paradox post he posted on choosing whether your KM strategy is going to focus on the explicit or the tacit…I personally think you can do a bit of both.

Here’s the excerpt:

“This is perhaps the oldest of the paradoxes and the most intractable: whether to focus on explicit or tacit knowledge.
Explicit knowledge is information that is written down: project documents, white papers, lessons learned, best practices, etc. Tacit knowledge is all the information your constituents have garnered from experience but still have locked up in their heads.”

“A focus on explicit knowledge usually leads to an emphasis on search, taxonomy (categorizing the explicit knowledge), and sometimes selection (e.g. qualifying best practices). A focus on tacit knowledge often requires a concentration on establishing and encouraging communities (where tactic knowledge can be shared), story telling…”

Information Management

At work our Global KM lead has tackled the explicit part by going around the world and getting a feel for how our people find and look for information, and to also discover all the information providers such as the library catalogue, intranet, document management system (DMS), this system, that system, etc…

I guess you can call this a information audit or mapping, with the goal of identifying all the silos and somehow bringing them together to form some sort of cohesiveness, like a gateway page (something more navigable, with some more information scent), and perhaps some integration like federated search. We have also decided to take the published deliverables that live across all these silos and make a new silo for deliverables At least this way when you want to use a standard, procedure, best practice document, they are all in the published library.

So far, all this is Information Management, next we move onto the more tacit space.

Social Computing

Since most know-how lies in interactions like physical conversations, on the phone, IM and email we decided to use communities as a way to make all this findable, learnable, visible, transparent, etc…(this is still in development).
My current role is Communities Coordinator, and I say to a lot of people that our communities are like our DMS, but for conversations. If the DMS stores documents, the CoP not only stores conversations, but that’s where they happen (you don’t have to upload your conversations, as they are already there).
So the CoP is like our DMS but more, you can store documents, and you can have conversations…I won’t go deeper than that in this post. BTW- the main CoP tools are forums and blogs.

We are also trialing wikis within some CoPs, which people have used for: events, meeting agenda/minutes, lists and workaround pages, events, catalogue pages, glossary, how-to guides…

In the future we plan to look at social networking and revamping our Intranet, perhaps the Intranet will be our social network…there’s plenty of enterprise products to choose from these days. I feel that social networks (the new breed of expert locator), social bookmarking, presence (micro-blogging) networks and blogs outside of communities are an essential layer in our enterprise 2.0 stack.

The CoPs and wikis have been about creating conditions for people to share tacit knowledge, or more importantly giving them simple tools so they can get their work done in a more open and re-usable way than using email.

So far, all this is Social Computing…it’s a self organising network that requires someone to lightly constrain it so it doesn’t self organise in the wrong direction.

What we have a need for here is knowledge champions and facilitators to be embedded in teams to help facilitate a new way of working, and other ways to share knowledge and make decisions using complexity and narrative techniques. Shawn Callahan also takes this seriously alluding that we always complain about missing out on communications and finding information, but then when it comes to embedding dedicated collaboration coordinators, it’s not taken seriously. If you want personnel managed you have a HR team, so if you want human behaviour facilitated in “socially working together” then you need knowledge champions (for use of a better term).

Even though I’ve said that this is all about social computing, when you add the element of facilitating and lightly contraining we tread into the realm of Knowledge Management (I do have a problem with this term but we are stuck with KM for the time being).

But you don’t have to call this Knowledge Management, it could be a Learning Coordinator, Working Coordinator, etc…you tell me. Most of all this person has to be tech savvy in collaborating, participating and emergence, but they also need humanistic (social, counselling) characteristics to understand cognitive and social qualities of people. We used to have “Industrial psychologists”, well now we are heading into the same ground for the new connected age, but I’d rather call this “Knowledge facilitators” or “Knowledge counsellors” or “Knowledge coaches”. Or leave out the word Knowledge all together, and use Network or something else, we just need to pay attention to the people skills and they way they interact, as Anecdote say Corporate Anthropologist sums it all up. I think this may be an intimidating and foreign name that people may not specifically identify or relate to…see more.

Knowledge Management

We do not have a process or procedure for distilling the rich knowledge in communities and the other tacit spaces into best practices, lessons learned, etc that will be housed in our published library.
My idea if we do this is for each of these documents (or wikis) to have a references page that points back to the blogs posts and forum topics so people can read the raw interactions that have been summarized into these deliverables

It’s my hope we don’t concentrate too much on this supply-side KM, being a solutions company, we must have an innovative bent, and an addiction to looking at the past is dangerous. It has to be said that best practices are not recipes that will be applicable for any situation, using them this way could be detrimental, as nothing is the same and predictable…and spending time on these is time spent not creating new knowledge.

Plus we know human behaviour is to go to people to find information, so we wonder how often the published library will be used for this sort of thing compared to using an expert locator (social network) or diving into raw conversations in forums and blogs. I personally think the published library will be more used for forms, procedures, etc…the real context-free, or soulless documents.

Hopefully I can rub some sense-making and anticipatory awareness into the mix.

The best practice approach of summarizing what has come up in the communities is not too bad, but I disagree with the approach of a weekly mandate of “tell us what you know or learnt this week”…yuk, this is what communities are for and this know-how comes out as a byproduct, it’s embedded into routines. The “tell us what you know” approach is classic KM, and riffing on Snowden I call it “anticipating needs KM” or “maybe one day KM”, which usually starts off with a knowledge audit of what we know followed by a program of weekly/monthly sharing what you know into the knowledgebase (in the hope or anticipation that someone will one day need it), which is either mandated or rewarded. This is what gives KM a bad name as it’s resisted, unnatural, and gamed…it’s big brother society thinking.

COMPARISON

KM is something extra that happens with the content of what comes out of the social computing ecosystem, but it also stewards (facilitate/contrain) this ecosystem so it doesn’t go astray.

It seems we could have social computing without KM (to some extent, but there needs to be some governance and guidance), but KM without social computing is going back to the ineffective classic KM days.

Beforehand KM had to mandate to get it’s job done, now it mostly just happens on its own.

IM - managing and organising information (this is the same as explicit knowledge for some)

KM 1.0 - is the top-down way to mandate (command and control) “what you know” documents into a database, as a separate job duty, and then seeking this database when you have a need.

Social Computing - is bottom-up and distributed, using communities and networks (participation, connectedness and openness) where “what you know” surfaces by default, and what you want to know is always coming to you (rather than the other way around)…perpetually learning (build capabilities/situational awareness) and facilitates thinking.

KM 2.0 - is facilitating, harnessing and lightly constraining what happens in the self-organised social computing network, and secondly distilling these contributions and interactions (publishings and commentary) from the mess of the social computing ecosystem into formal documents (which can be seeked)

Sure we can use tags to find the raw information and relevancy/ratings and our social network to further filter our results, but distilling this into formally captured documents is just like writing a review, sometimes non-tech people just want it all in one document.

They don’t realise that by delving into the network they are going to come across a lot more relevant information than what they were looking for, just like the web, this links here, then links there, which links over there…related posts, posts with the same tag, people who tagged this…just like surfing the neural network of an enterprise mind. It’s no longer about finding information, it’s about information finding you…it’s about being hooked up, it’s not seek when you need to know, it’s an “always on” ecosystem.

The question is how valid is this distilling when we have networks, still I think if these distilled documents are based on the content in the network and can point back to the raw information, then it’s more acceptable. Everyone likes making “best of” lists reviewing each point or perhaps weaving it into a report or essay…it’s human nature that we want to stamp done on a process, or done on a topic, we feel safe to close the book, but we must realise that the book never closes, as we are always perpetually learning.

The core KM Sample

I don’t know what just happened but Andrew’s post sent me off on a tangent on the usual stuff but more on the big picture perspective, let’s close with this diagram and some excerpts from his post.

SOURCE: Andrew Gent

[The diagram] “…captures the various levels of “knowledge” and where they reside. The diagram also illustrates the rationalization and codification of knowledge as it rises through the layers.”

I’ve quoted this gem in another post:

“the process of codifying or standardizing knowledge into actionable procedures and practices actually changes the knowledge. It cleanses, sanitizes, and simplifies the knowledge — removing the stray tidbits, the ugly but necessary workarounds, the secret tricks of the trade… all of the untidy clutter that make up true expertise in a field — all of this is stripped off to achieve a linear, documentable, process.”

Layer 1 - Personal Knowledge

People Direct

“This is where true knowledge exists. In other words what people know. And the most accurate way of sharing that knowledge is talking to the people who possess it…”

Layer 2 - Tacit Knowledge

People Online

“The next layer up is where that personal communication is expanded to allow people to “talk” to others they do not know or cannot meet in person. Email distribution lists, forums, and other discussion technology reside in this layer. (Note that blogs are also in this layer.)”

Layer 3 - Best Practices

Capture

“…knowledge is instantiated in documents of some kind: sample documents, lesson learned, case studies, white papers. These all represent mechanisms used to selectively capture and sort knowledge in such a way that it can be reused by people who may never come in contact with the original author. The obvious limitation is that only a small portion of what any individual knows about their profession is captured in any of these documents. This is offset by trying to capture the most important or influential pieces of wisdom.”

Layer 3 - Institutionalised

Non-personal

“…captured knowledge and learnings are further refined into a defined set of templates, guidelines, and standard processes. In some sense, you might say that in this final layer the actual “knowledge” has been removed and is replaced by step-by-step procedures to ensure a consistent and reliable execution of desired behavior. To achieve this goal, a significant amount of sorting, sifting, and selection is required to winnow down all possible options or alternatives to a limited set of recommended or required processes and deliverables.”

I hope Andrew doesn’t mind me nearly re-posting his whole post, but I just want it for my record, I think it’s in my top 10 blog posts on KM.

Related
Seven ways enterprise 2.0 differs from web 2.0 (actually it’s 12 and counting)

A couple of months ago I was asked by the editor at “KM Review” to write an opinion piece for their organisational learning issue.

This could not have come at a better time as my blogging has come to a convergence point where the read/write web has enabled KM and Learning to become one in the same in some respect.

It also got me recognition at work even though I have been internal blogging about this stuff for ages, it goes to show the power of authoritativeness.

This article was a challenge as I had a 700 word limit, my only other experience is an interview, so actually writing a piece was a developing a new skill set for me, very different from blogging.

Blogging is easy as I choose the topics and I can blab on for as long as I want…having a word limit and a different audience changes all this.

Rather than my affordances of space and casualness to allow stream of consciousness, personal, and informal writings; the different audience, format and word limit, meant I had to pack a punch with each paragraph, and try to fill out my statements without the luxury of pointing to examples, experience, and explanations.

I found this very hard, and have since come to know that blogging is a very different beast than traditional publishing (the good thing about KM Review is they let me say what I want, so there is no inhouse bias or anything like that). Even though a blog can be used to publish professional articles, I think traditionally it’s more sharing, opinion and a learning soapbox, a way to express and develop…a conversation.

In a blog I’m expressing my thoughts and ideas as it happens in an informal fashion, whereas in an article I am codifying what I know.
NOTE: Basically I looked over all my blog posts and condensed them into the article.
I also looked in delicious for stuff that has come across my radar in the past that I bookmarked for a rainy day, and I also searched my Google Reader. Just this research process alone (come to me web) typifies exactly what this article is about, very zen…checkout Lee Bryant’s post for more on network productivity/social filtering/actionable collective intelligence, I’ve quoted it in my k-flow post.

From reading the article I’m not sure if all the information will holistically be understood by the reader, as there is not much room to explain in 700 words. But if you were then to read my blog posts, you would get to know my character, as a blog allows it to come through; you would get to know my style and wavelength, and you can leave comments to clarify points, contexts and examples with me. Also with each point I make I have the liberty to expand on contexts, and examples.

In the end there is going to be more of a chance that the information is transferred to the reader and internalised as knowledge, as the reader has more of a scope and familiarity (abstraction) with me to understand my message (signal).

These two formats complement each other, and I’ve spoken before about the power of blogs being used as “thinking out loud” and “work in progress” in writing a deliverable. Firstly this is a crowdsourcing technique to evolve the deliverable itself, and secondly when reading the deliverable a reader can refer to various blog posts for more peripheral information on the “workings out” of what took place.

Why is this important?

Deliverables and best practices are not always going to suit your situation, and when applied like a recipe can have a distasterous effect as they can leave out peripheral content, and your context is different. A best practice is not always going to be the best practice (pardon the pun) as there are so many different variables that can be different with your situation…see my post on on anticipatory awareness for more.

Alternate methods, like blogs, wikis and social networking really fit in with the promotion of knowledge sharing, and this is captured nicely by Ron Young’s article in the same issue of KM Review called “Reap the rewards from combining learning and KM”.

The virtuous KM circle is made up of: Trust, Communicate, Learn, Share

If you don’t have trust, then people are less likely to share or communicate, and less learning results.

Also there must be a personal benefit, like a learning feedback loop or reputation as a publisher, to motivate you to share (What’s in it for me?)

…you can become a subject matter expert when you make your know-how visible (and people can subscribe to your thoughts)

Again, once you have trust and simple tools, and a way to connect to people, we are more prone to share. We receive feedback and a reputation in this conversation network, in the end, as Dave Snowden says, we may form interdependencies with our trust circle which ultimately means our most effective way to get work done is by leveraging the social capital (ie. we come to rely on each other to share what we know to get things done). So by creating the conditions for “knowledge sharing”, we have enabled it to happen using a naturalistic approach.

Ron sums this up by saying:

“Capturing new learning and ideas as they occur…transforms an organization from an environment of episodic learning and innovation to one of continual learning and innovation.

Giving people an ecosystem where they can: improve, learn, self develop, and connect to like people, is a way to achieve the aims of KM. Not only can we re-use and apply knowledge to given situations but we become smarter and agile, so there is a mutual benefit at both the individual and organisational level

Related
Social learning and social computing
Flexible uses of web 2.0 tools