Library clips

Thought I’d share a few slides from a presentation I’m giving at work on Communities of Practice (CoP) from a knowledge management perspective.

My aim was to contrast traditional KM of conscripting best practices, with a new approach based on sensemaking pkm and networks…more appropriate tools, design for emergence and ambient awareness, and amplifying how we get things done offline…basically a more cognitive science approach over management science.

A great deal of my visual concept is based on the work of Dave Snowden, who looks at KM from a more anthropological, human behaviour perspective…a lot of his work deals with the notion of “context”, and I guess this is coupled with “intrinsic” motivation or engagement.

I also borrowed from a model by Shell on the concept of a Global Network (CoP), shown to me by Mark Bennett from Learning Collaboration.

Basically, from another perspective, I’m trying to do in 2 slides what T Systems did in 26 out of the 51 slides of their brilliant slidedeck, The revolution of knowledge part1

KM as blood bank

I also really like Mark Bennett’s symbolic way of thinking about it like a blood bank (taking and giving blood)

• Sense-making and asking questions (taking blood)
• Blogging/Sharing/Peer Assist and reflective KM like AAR, Lessons (giving blood)

Sense-making KM and CoPs - Just-in-time vs Just-in-case

The following slides are a contrast to supply-side KM, or just-in-case KM.

Also note this is KM from a Community of Practice perspective, as that’s what’s relevant to my day job. I guess one day I can alter them to include other KM activities and a more network perspective.

Sensekmaking KM and CoPs - Just-in-time vs Just-in-case

Different ways of engaging knowledge

Related to this sense-making concept of people and context in the just-in-time KM model is Nancy Dixon’s model on the different types of knowledge needs or interactions, in relation to: the level of cognitive diversity required, the degree of relationship (tie/trust) with others to source that information, facilitation/support, and the social computing tools that can create conditions for sense-making.

Embedded KM

Another related post is on Embedded KM by Andrew Gent.

I think knowledge sharing can be done as it happens (blogs, wikis, etc..) but also as a reflection (anecdote circles, AAR, etc..), and it’s the latter that Andrew is thinking about…how best to share lessons and good practices from one project to the next. Since the project is over, people don’t put great emphasis or care on reviewing it, as they are busy moving on to the next project, so Andrew talks about embedding this so it doesn’t seem a chore.

But he also makes a very relevant point to the heart of KM and motivation. When capturing information it has to become usable, and this takes effort on the contributor to make it findable, otherwise it’s up to the user to find the content and make it relevant to them. To make it usable and relevant takes too much effort for return, it has low intrinsic motivation for the contributors.

The challenge is a sweetspot where it’s usable enough, and contributing is simple enough…and what do you know, this works best as conversation, as we get sharing and context. And Andrew has an embedded way to trigger this reflective conversation as a part of an organisational process.

Andrew says:

“Rather than trying to make all project knowledge available to anyone, what if we simply try to expand the current knowledge base incrementally over time? Rather than collecting the review documents, why not include at least one reviewer from an unrelated project to each review? This could be an architect, implementer, or project manager as long as that person can provide an objective, outside view of the project progress.”

“…the outside reviewer helps to keep the project team “honest”. It is easy for internal reviews to become formulaic rubber stamp events if those involved are all working on the project.They do not have enough distance to see hidden pitfalls and will resist calling foul on people they have to work with on a daily basis.”

“…including outsiders gives at least one person a much more indepth and personal knowledge than could ever be gained by reading a set of historical documents with no one to explain them. Another value from a KM perspective is the opportunity the reviewer and the project team have to exchange knowledge, hints, and tips on the fly and in context of the discussion.”

“…the program then becomes essentially self-managing from a KM perspective. The project management teams are responsible for ensuring outside reviewers are included and with each review, little by little, knowledge is shared across the organization.”

Competitive vs Collaborative culture

The micro intentions or local behaviour involved in the the Just-in-time vs Just-in-case concept actually emerge a macro picture…and that’s a change in the internal dynamics of an organisation from a competitive to collaborative organisation…perhaps from teams to crews.

Why?

We create the conditions for engagement, transparency, agility, trust and awareness…where knowledge sharing becomes a magical by-product….not creating a knowledge sharing culture, rather creating conditions for one to emerge.

I know it’s about the people, not the tools, but it’s important to understand the design thinking involved…these new tools are designed for the people, where we can now achieve the original aims of KM. The use of these tools can be a catalyst for change. For more on this see my posts, Has KM died, and resurrected as social computing?, Knowledge and its facilitators.

You could say social computing is a bottom-up strategy (and is has total effect when enterprise-wide), but I think we can also have a top-down strategy, because no matter how enabled workers can be to express and converse in the open, they will be hesitant, feel unsafe, uncomfortable and not confident if this new type of enterprise interaction is not promoted or pushed from the top.

NOTE: social computing is not just bottom-up, managers can seed crowdsourcing/opinion/reviews

A while back I posted, Is knowledge sharing all about your pay cheque? (which was amplified by Stewart Mader).

In this post I contrasted a picture where people are influenced to share or hoard depending on how their performance is viewed from senior management.
If you are appraised on your personal output, then you will hoard and not collaborate as much as you have an incentive to own all the output, forgoing a more quality or optimum deliverable, than if you were to leverage the talent of the organisation.
On the other hand if you are appraised on a group output (how much you collaborate, your effectiveness in networking with the optimum people for your tasks) then this will instill a less competitive culture due to more knowledge sharing and collaboration. This is a cleverly designed strategy as the the workers themselves will be pushing quality from others as they all hold each other accountable…a culture of interdependency.

I really like how Stewart put it:

“People are used to thinking of their workday activities as indirectly affecting the bottom-line because the competition model essentially keeps the average employee in the dark about how things really work, or how healthy the organization is. The sharing model makes it much clearer, so the average employee can see the impact of her or his work.”

Betrand Duperrin also parallels these thoughts:

“They would be more efficient if they helped each other? But in order to get a good evaluation and the related rewards and bonuses they have, in the best case, to ignore each other, in the worse case to play the one against another.”

Learned behaviour

Beyond performance appraisals, what about a top-down message about the importance of connection and collaboration, just like the way organisations drill the message of quality and safety.

When I attended Mark Bennett’s masterclass on CoPs, he mentioned that safety is a learned behaviour (people are irrational and do unsafe things like drink driving, etc), and quality is a learned behaviour (people take shortcuts and ignore procedures and processes like emailing a document to a client for review, rather than sending through a formal transmittal via document control), and so to, collaboration can be a learned behaviour.

But I don’t think the result of this would be as effective in a fundamental way.

• If you are unsafe, you risk getting sued, bad accidents cause a bad reputation with clients, contractors and workers.
• If you are of low quality, you cut corners for short term gain, long term loss, and perhaps risk litigation.
• If you have low collaboration, you risk a less optimum job, low awareness and transparency and communication leads to low cooperation and cohesiveness, and you are less agile to adapt to change.

All three have bad consequences if ignored

• The first two is a risk in reputation, but also a benchmark risk, and more importantly the consequences are very meaty-litigation, death.
• The last one also is a risk in reputation (losing or not winning deals because of bad information flow does effect reputation/attractiveness), the industry benchmark is still a young thing in relation to collaboration, BUT unlike the others the consequences are not as meaty, no-one dies, we don’t get sued.

So I think because the consequences of not being collaborative don’t show explicitly like someone being hurt, and losing face (as this is seen as a quality process issue rather than collaboration/information flow), then we tend to be more reactive, or it takes a back seat in our attention. You still get work done not being collaborative (you do suffer later in frustration as you can’t find stuff or you aren’t aware of something you should be aware of), it’s just all these micro interactions, lead to a big picture of not being agile, and attractive to a client…if they can’t get their s*!t together, how are they gonna service us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doing work/finding stuff

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

Company information, tools and news

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related

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

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!”]

Our Communities of Practice at work are currently in the development stage. As we learn the software and develop guides we are also piloting lots of various communities to learn about structure, and human dynamics. There has been no effort to generate interest…it’s all word of mouth across our many global offices…I suppose all this stuff is in vogue at the moment.

When we are ready to officially release an email will go out to nearly 8,000 people, but before that time comes we want to be ready.
To tell you the truth I can’t wait till that time, as we can move on to the next phase of “community consulting”, that is, supporting and facilitating leaders of each community.
In fact I think we have piloted too many communities that we can support and guide, as we are too busy developing, so it’s important we jump on this soon before the water gets cold for some people.

Strategy

I think the deployment of our CoPs is a mix of a KM demand and supply strategy. At a macro level it’s about sharing knowledge in general, getting around hierarchies by allowing people to form cross-functional groups. I see *some* of the CoPs we already have as a breeding ground or testing area for the worthiness of future business units.
Actually CoPs are a perfect example of an enterprise 2.0 attitude of failure for free type experimenting. They can be used as a feasibility sandpit on whether the company should get into a new a area of business. This can be done by senior managers to get a pulse on the issue from the knowledgeworkers; or a CoP can be created by knowledgeworkers as a way to demonstrate the feasibility and worthiness of their proposal for a new area of business.
The CoP can attract relevant people together, and the exchange from all levels of people can help with the decision. This can be done from a crowdsourcing angle, a project team, or just a regular bottom-up CoP that may attract and generate interest.

Anyway, the KM Demand strategy is more at the micro-level. When we consult with a team who create a new CoP we help them with their needs analysis, and make sure they read some literature we provide about CoP concepts and facilitating.

NOTE: Supply-based KM (predictability KM) can also relate to capture, codify, and information into a structured database; over the demand-style KM (adaptable/sense-making KM) which is more about creation than shelving, where efforts are more involved in creating conditions for people to share amongst each other, and successful transfer of know-how.

This is the plan of the next phase:

Homepage

- an image of a public space (a commons) where you hover over icons and learn about communities and their features eg. people gathered around a table is a forum, a guy on a soap box is a blogger, etc…
- some icons have links to different places for information (as listed in the sections following below)
- we thought a homepage is important for people to visit to understand and orient themselves
- we will link to this homepage from the Intranet, and via the directory page (see below)
- it will also have a blog that is re-syndicated from the Information Desk Community (see below)

Flyer

- a one pager glossy PDF on communities, benefits and features
- the idea is an overview of the homepage in more of a takeway style, and selling the benefits
- I guess in between a product information sheet and a promotion flyer
- A link to this PDF will be on the homepage

Information Desk community

- A link to this is via the homepage and via the directory page (see below)
- A one stop shop with a communications blog, communal tips blog, and various forums.
- This is where we will also store our help guides (in PDF and a wiki soon), FAQ, and a issues and suggestions wiki
- I’m hoping people can help out each other…I’m going to experiment by not answering questions right away, in order to see if others will
- I also want to showcase some icons of featured bloggers and communities, I may even blog about some great blog posts and hot forum discussions

Facilitators Community

- A link to this is via the homepage and via the directory page (see below)
- This is a more advanced community to learn, guide and share experiences on facilitating and leading communities (the obvious members are people who facilitate/lead their own communities)
- A lot of this will be about cultivating, adoption, participation, gardening, sustaining, promotion, etc…
- I really hope to see members conversing, and helping out each other…I’m sure I’m gonna learn a lot as well
- We have various forums, a communications blog, and communal tips blogs, and people can create their own blogs

Directory

- A directory of all our communities (browse or search)
- Unfortunately we don’t have an aggregator of latest content from all communities (a kind of pulse of the organisation)

Presentations

- We have the Facilitators community for perpetual guidance, but I also plan to prepare a bunch of presentation as a kind of Facilitators boot camp.
- Facilitating isn’t just about helping people to use the tools, it’s also about interpersonal skills, re-purposing current email habits, and work routines
- Really it’s about change, but from the inside-out (rather than telling people the big picture of change, it’s about focusing on the self benefit of re-purposing current methods in different ways)
- Maybe I’ll also do some Lunch and Learn sessions with general users, kind of like an outreach version of content in our Information Desk

Pre-Consulting

- Besides supporting and monitoring global communities, I will also continue with the help of a support team to create communities
- Pre-creation process people fill out a request guide (here we ask questions like: who will your members be, what will your first 5 blogs posts be, what types of blogs and forums will you have, what topics will you talk about, is the community about shared learning, or to help a team coordinate and communicate, Who will be leading, and running the community…)
- During this creation process is consultation on the dynamics and food for thought for each individual community
- At this stage I also give the potential community leader a conceptual guide on what it really means to lead a community
- Once I create the community, I give the community leader a Facilitators Reference guide to the next steps to take, with excerpts from various help guides (my idea is to educate them as much as possible, and to make known that communities are not tools, they are about activity and interaction between people.)
- My quote is “Communities are conversations”

Post-Consulting

- This is what I’m looking forward to the most (the more anthropology/ethnography side of it)
- I will be monitoring each community and consulting
- As I mentioned earlier it’s important I follow-up on communities and guide them through their growth stage
- Things we may find here are the leader is not really being a role-model by participating, the community is too big where someone people want to splinter off into a new community, it needs more regular activity to keep it fresh, polls, competitions/theme weeks, are members being heard and do they have enough permissions to do things, champions may need to blog storm (hand holding) by sitting with members and help them create blog posts till they get the hang of it, etc…
- my recent discovery of spidergrams will be the tool of choice for community orientation, health checks and aspirations

Support

- I’m going to need to train IT and a few key support champions via some presentations
- They can also learn via the Information desk and Facilitator community

This started as a second job at work, but it’s getting so viral that soon I will be full-time (hopefully), as the workload is getting too much…which is a positive sign for CoPs as a demanded tool for social productivity.

At the moment we have me (half a person), and a techie (on demand), which is not going to be a viable support model. Part of successful release and adoption is “support”; at the moment it’s like I’m famous and don’t have time for everyone, people are not getting help quick enough, this leads to a bad experience which is not due to the product, but due to lack of support.
Any metrics we are gonna take later on has got to include that adoption may be lower than it ought to be, therefore overall participation may be lower than it has to be, due to low support.

Conclusion

My message to others out there is if you want to do this right or take it seriously, you need a dedicated team of at least a couple of people.
I will stress it’s not about IT offering the software and that’s it…communities will fail…whereas social networks may be a different matter (I’m not sure yet).

It must be a line of business, where a dedicated person supports the software, but equally important is someone to help facilitate communities get off the ground correctly and be successful. We need to take time to help people use the technology to augment the needs of their unique situation. A lot of this is about group dynamics, rather than technology.

Our project about deploying CoPs is not done once they are deployed, it’s not *just* about getting them operating in a risk free, secure and homogeneous way, and then walking away.
Instead, from a KM perspective our project is about helping people use technology to do work, helping them be socially productive, helping them connect to people with like interests, helping them surf their worklife complexities, augmenting their ability to do tasks, helping them be aware and learn…

People are unique, situations and contexts are unique, so our consultation is unique. We are not the factory line here, it’s not a one size fits all context. Communities are enabling and are more about effectiveness than efficiency.

Social search is resurfacing as a hot topic of late, due to how effective Twitter has become in helping you find information, and how it is close to how we source information in the offline world (via our network). Twitter is being differentiated by being called a “Help Engine“.

I think it’s getting us closer to the KM productivity (sense-making) aim that knowledge sharing and knowledge transfer has always aspired to, which is:

• finding the right information at the right time
• re-frame that information to be usable in your context and situation
• by connecting you to a social network of people you trust who will be willing to help out in a reciprocal relationship
  (which also helps out in the re-contextualising process as you share a common wavelength or level understanding with people in your network)
• learning organisation, information re-use, and corporate memory

From a particular perspective, the search experience is broken into three aspects:

• searching the web, searching within a website, and searching our network
• clarifying by reading and writing comments, and trackback/linkback blog posts
• asking a question within a website, within our network

Search for:

• facts/reference
• research a topic
• learning
• latest news about a topic
• looking for a particular thing
  - you may not know if it exists or not
  - you may have little information in hand to go by (exploratory search)
• ask a question
  - to find something
  - about stuff you have found to get more context

Socialness to findability list

Google’s PageRank is based on a referral model, so technically this is social search
- also comment/rank search results, also see Wikia
* based on whole web

Recommendations that are implicit based on your participation eg. Amazon recommendations
* based on content in a website

Google Blog Search (also Technorati, Backtype) is similar to PageRank
- but the point here is that the content is blogs which are a social ecosystem where you have distributed conversations (trackbacks/linkbacks), and leave comments
* based on whole web

Tag aggregators like Technorati Tags
- blog posts from the web filed by author generated tags
* based on whole web

Topic/blog aggregators
- a selection of curated sources
* based on another person’s selection

How-to sites like Instructables
* based on content in a website

Topic sites like Squidoo, and topic wikis
* based on another person’s selection
* based on content in a website

Review sites like Blippr
* based on your social network
* based on content in a website

Regular sites that have user reviews like TripAdvisor
* based on content in a website

Wikipedia is different to a regular topic site as the whole web can communally grow it
* based on the communal (people generated) web
* based on content in a website

Google Reader extends the concept of Google Blog Search in that I can create vertical people engines and subscribe to them.
- when I research a topic I search my Google Reader to see what the blogosphere has to say (often reading a blog post, links you to another, then another, and finally thanks to social linking you may just hop to the place you need…and lots of unexpected gems along the way…it’s about the journey as well
- if I need more I can leave a comment on a blog post
- you can now converse with your friends
* based on your selection
* based on your social network

Bookmarks like delicious (or even YouTube, etc) are a social search as you are searching in the human indexed web
- you can even add people to your network and search in the bookmarks of your social network
* based on content in a website
* based on your social network

Blog networks like Vox and LiveJournal
- contribute, network and search within the website, and also within your network
* based on content in a website
* based on your social network

Lifestreams like Friendfeed consolidate all the profiles you have on the web, and allow you to network with others
- this social search is more than just delicious (bookmarks) or Google Reader (blog feeds) alone, this is searching all these profiles in the one go (it searches a lot more information)
- you can even comment on these items and discuss with your network (rather than just discussing directly with the author)
- you can even create Friendfeed rooms (which as similarities to a forum)
* based on content in a website
* based on your social network

Facebook is similar to Friendfeed but all your profiles are inhouse
- a big difference here is that in order to add people to your network they have to add you back (so this is closer to the friends idea, and is a big factor in building trust, reciprocal help, and having a similar level of understanding which helps with knowledge transfer)
- an advantage over a community of practice is you have a connection to weak ties
* based on your social network

Lijit is similar to Friendfeed, with the addition of searching your friends friends
* based on content in a website
* based on your social network, and extended social network

The ChaCha search model routes you to the closest expert to guide you in your search
- this is not quite the social search we have in mind, it’s more like a reference librarian
* based on an authority/expert selection

Forums and Communities of Practice like Ning are conversational portals of information with people you often interact with and help out due to the reciprocal nature of a community
- there are strong ties here, so off-topic information will be hard to source from your community members
* based on your community
* based on content in a website

Micro-sharing sites like Twitter (Twitter Search)
- similar to blogging networks
- items in your stream are all at the same level it doesn’t distinguish between a blog-type post, comment type-post, conversation-type post, question-type post, answer-type post…see my post on Twitter compared to other tools like IM and blogs
- your stream will also include posts that your friends are having with others
- close to real-time information
- you don’t necessarily have to friend each other in order to follow a person’s content, but like Facebook it does have an element of social bonding, trust and willingness to help out one another
- probe, clarify, discuss to learn and re-frame, and also a better chance of transfer if you are familiar with each others ways…this is contrary to unhelpful scenarios
- not just searching but you are daily learning (also advantage of weak ties)
* based on content in a website
* based on your social network, and extended social network

Mahalo Answers is a Q&A site
- there is more trust here when someone in your network offers an answer…also more reciprocation
* based on content in a website
* based on your social network

Yedda is a Q&A site
- there is more trust here when someone in your network offers an answer…also more reciprocation
- the difference here is that the question is also emailed to registered users who are the most likely to offer an answer (based on some sort of data mining)
- and if I emailed to help someone out, do I really want to spend time doing this for someone I don’t know
- will I be burdened by my expertise
* based on content in a website
* based on data mining
* based on your social network

As you can see web 2.0 is the people generated web, and Google is no longer the first place we visit to search/find information. It’s now Google’s job to be aware of these sites, and lead people to them, as they are doing…you often now see Wikipedia and YouTube hits in Google results, and now Twitter hits.

Sure we can go to Google to get fast and ready results for quick facts
eg. today in a legal agreement I didn’t know what the term quite enjoyment meant.

But if I want to probe deeper I would perhaps have to search blogs and leave comments or search my Twitter network (people I trust and share) and get a more timely result, from hopefully my weak ties.

The blog post, 6 Reasons Why Twitter is the Future of Search - Google Beware has some things to say:

“Twitter search is the ultimate social media platform and will enable people to get the opinions of others and add context to relevant information”

“Searchers don’t just want facts. They want to learn more about the experiences of real people they can relate to.”

“For example, rather than doing a search in Google for “best restaurants in new york” and getting a bunch of review sites, you can do a search on Twitter to see which restaurants people are talking about in New York. If you don’t like the results, you can easily ask your network and get personalized answers in real time - which will then show up in future searches on the same topic.

Compare that to Google. They’ve been unsuccessful thus far in implementing social factors into the search results via Search Wiki. If you do a search in Google and can’t find what you’re looking for, what are you going to do? Probably ask around on Twitter.”

The post also mentions your Twitter network as a solution to filter failure, close to real-time, localised around geographic location, information is representative of the masses, social network and trust “if you had a question about life in the NBA, would you rather ask Shaquille O’Neal on Twitter or type a question in Google?”. I would say this is more likely effective if this person is in your network. People do have an altruistic nature in Twitter, but it’s human nature that we will help out others that we know will help us out in the future…a lot of this has got to do with the limited time we have in a day…see the shadow of the future concept.

Help Engine

Danny Sullivan calls Twitter a Help Engine, which is obvious by the title of this blog post, How We Search With The Twitter “Help Engine”. His post is not about the Twitter Search site, but how the Twitter site itself is used as a help engine, rather than in the past using something like Google as your first step. He also makes clear that using it as a help engine is a by product, as it’s primary purpose is a micro-blogging network.

I know myself I’m lazy and just ask my Twitter network a question, but maybe it’s not laziness, may it’s effectiveness. And again I can clarify my answer.

Here’s an example I asked the other day, I didn’t even think to go to Google, I unconsciously went to Twitter, and got an answer 10 minutes later.

johnt: is there a URL shortner like bit.ly that allows you do right-click on a link and shorten it?

about 18 hours ago

Thu Mar 26 03:54:24 +0000 2009

JayDugger: Several FF add-ons add that to context menus. I use Hyperwords.

about 17 hours ago

Thu Mar 26 04:06:03 +0000 2009

In Danny’s survey the top answers in order were:

1. Trust
2. Expert answers
3. Real-time response and news (hash tag conference tweets as it happens)
4. Variety of opinion (of those you trust compared to Google results)

See the whole list below:

“* Fast answers, faster than searching and reading answers
* Easier to use when I’m mobile for answers than searching
* Too lazy to search
* Trust my friends and followers more than search results
* Want answer from particular person
* To get expert answers
* Because I couldn’t find an answer on a search engine
* To get answers to “real time” issues (is Gmail working? is Time Warner Cable broadband broken again? Was that an earthquake?)
* Because I can follow up easily with further questions
* To get a variety of opinions rather than a specific “correct” answer
* For help finding something (article, news, web site) heard about but can’t remember or locate”

Danny related Twitter to our information foraging before search engines came along:

“General search engines simply don’t allow you to ask questions of friends en masse, something that was a top search habit until search engines came along. Twitter uniquely does allow this.”

He also mentions that the effectiveness of Twitter as a help engine depends on your followers, so this makes a big difference in effort compared to Google. A comment from Danny’s survey:

“As I have a small number of followers, I just don’t have the base yet to expect to get a response to any question I might tweet. On the other hand, I have often done searches at search.twitter.com to gain insight into what the hive mind might be thinking on a particular topic or to get an answer that is timely that I would not be able to find on a search engine otherwise.”

“I like using twitter to ask questions that involve personal opinion rather than straight facts. Often I can then follow-up with people as to why they say what they say, rather than the website author who may or may not be available for comment.”

To all this I would reprise what Danny said in that the Help engine aspect is a by product…Twitter is a tool where we can socially bond, perpetually learn, express ourselves, feel connected and recognised.

In another post by Danny Sullivan, The Rise Of Help Engines: Twitter & Aardvark, he examines a study where we are returning to people we know and trust for opinions and context on subjective matters we are looking into. Here’s an excerpt:

“…search engines can fail when it comes to subjective questions. What type of computer should you buy, a Mac or a Windows PC? A search engine can point you at resources such as computer reviews, but none of these resources will know the correct answer for your personal situation. That will be down to you.

Well, there is. That’s the new revolution that’s going on, a new type of search engine that effectively indexes the knowledge of those you know, so that you can query and get quick answers back from those people…”

Enterprise

This is highly relevant for the enterprise with tools like Socialtext signals, Socialcast, Yammer, etc…

Not sure why we need an ROI when all we are doing is using a tool that builds on the phone and email to help us do our work more effectively - learn, find people/information, conversations. We are all knowledge workers which means we are no longer of the methodology of “robots in a factory line process”, we are moreso thinkers and have social interactions based on informal practice to get our work done…before a decision is made there are lots of converstions.

There are so many reports on people wasting time in looking for information (making sense of the workplace), and now we have tools that use people as a filter to better find information and people; and all the bonus learning, conversations, re-framing, adapting that happens along the way…federated search is good, but it won’t do all that.

Why spend an hour looking for something, and to perhaps find that it doesn’t even exist. A tool like Yammer can stream a question to the whole organisation (public timeline), and someone’s network (if they follow you). It won’t annoy them with an email, if they pay attention to the stream they may offer an answer…hopefully someone in your network is looking. If not, it was no harm trying, and it didn’t cost any time or money to write a 140 character long question, and it didn’t interrupt or bother people, it’s up to them to look at the stream (which can be an accessible desktop app).

So now in addition to your search strategy you can also pop a question in Yammer “does anyone know if we have an official travel expense form…my federated searches are not finding it”
Hopefully within a couple of minutes you can stop searching as the Yammer help engine is using people to help you out.

Boyd’s law describes this new paradigm (it’s how we work offline anyway, but it’s new to the online experience)

Aardvark

The whole reason for this post was to comment on a paper by the Aardvark team on social search, and it seems I have felt I needed to establish the landscape before reviewing their paper.

So both Yedda and Mahalo Answers seem to have most of the elements of a help engine (trust/reciprocation/context and clarity/high understanding of each other)…only Yedda layers something on top by also sending your question to the most likely person in the service based on data mining (the trust/reciprocation/understanding aspect is not as strong here).

But they do lack the close to real-time and mobile feel of the Twitter stream, and the fact that I can do many things on Twitter, one of them being asking a question. In the end no matter how good a service is, if it doesn’t have enough users or if it’s not where your network hangs out, then it’s not gonna be much help…Twitter has the advantage here, as they have “the” audience.

From what I can gather Aardvark is similar to Yedda in the way that it finds the most suitable person for your question.

BUT, the big difference is when you ask a question it will be ported to a possible expert that is within your network, or your extended network (friends of friends), and it will also offer you a person who can connect with you at the moment in real-time (IM or the phone I suppose), otherwise in email or Twitter.

Danny Sullivan explains how it works:

• when you join you tag yourself with expert tags
• the person that invites you also tags you (reminds me of Lotus Connections Profiles or fringe)
- set how often you want to be interrupted to answer questions (interrupted is not a good word, but anyway…)
• send a question by IM (or email which is less used, and SMS and a toolbar are in the works…but IM is better as it’s chatty…even snail mail)
• await an answer or a conversation with a friend, or friend of a friend (it can base this on your facebook friends that are also registered at Aardvark…Twitter and LinkedIn coming soon)

Let’s review how Aarvark achieves our sense-making KM aims.

• connecting you at the right time with some who may have the right information
• since you are connecting to a person you are able to re-contextualise and get lots of peripheral information which helps you relate their experience to your situation at hand
• this is even more effective when this person is someone you trust as they will take out the time to helps you (shadow of the future), and there is more chance their signal will be transferred to you as you understand their way and wavelength

Where it fails:

• the organisation by default or indirectly is happy because you are not duplicating, you are re-using information, and you are learning off one another and becoming more capable and adaptable (due to being able to tap into the organisation as a network vs a siloed hierarchy)
  BUT, this is just on a demand basis, others are not getting a piggyback benefit by seeing your transactions in the open
• The transaction is not a corporate memory as it will be happening in IM, or email…unless the receiver blogs about it

  What’s powerful about transactions in an open space like Twitter is that lots of people see it, and you aren’t really interrupting them, they can choose to not help you, it’s just another item in the stream

  But at least an open stream allows people to learn daily, and build relationships, and allows others to eavesdrop and gift an answer from an unexpected person

  Put simply it will miss out on answers by others that system didn’t recognise

  Why not have your question auto-tweeted as well, just in case?

  Aha, VentureBeat alludes to a public view soon:

  “Despite being quite powerful, the service still has its faults (after all, it is in beta testing). You can’t search and view other users’ questions/answers on Aardvark –but this is something that should be available when the site is public.”

One clever thing it does, is that it may recognise your weak ties to help out with an answer, which is what sometimes happens on Facebook and Twitter, only Aardvark makes sure this is more than a potential by actually hooking you up.

It also gets around the need of having a massive follower count before it becomes useful, more from VentureBeat:

“Fred has more than 7,000 users on Twitter, I have barely 200 followers — but with Aardvark it not only evens the playing field, but opens the possibility of much, much more because of the network effect: The more users on Aardvark (there are currently more than 1,500 testing the beta), the more knowledge is available, and the faster the response.

Aardvark brings that power to the masses, and it leverages the collective intelligence (like Yahoo Answers) in real-time (like Twitter) without restricting you to just your followers.”

I like this bit:

“You’ll see more about the people you’re interacting with, you’ll see how you’re connected socially. The routing algorithm will start favoring friends-of-friends, which is a very cool experience.”

That’s so true, your social graph is organic, sometimes your friends introduce you to a friend, and you end up becoming closer friends

Insight from their paper, What is Social Search?

We simply go to people to find answers, rather than a database, the better networked we are, the more we can tap into the right people.

“Most people rely on the human knowledge of those around them on a regular basis: when wandering over to a coworker, emailing a friend, or calling a family member, people are getting information that is personalized, timely, and trusted.”

I really like this point; organisational know-how issues are not always about knowledge sharing per se, but more on understanding the current knowledge we have…this is the transfer part. Sometime we don’t even realise the stuff we know ourselves, until it’s triggered in conversation or seems to come out of us when faced in a new context. So there it is again, that word “conversation”, the more we can converse the more the signal can be understood, and this has even more chance when your dialogue partner is someone you know well.

My KM 2.0 model also suggests that as long as we have participation and conversation, everything else follows. So the aim is not to manage knowledge, but to create conditions for conversation for knowledge to flow.

“Social Search extends this process in two crucial ways:

This second point, above, is again related to the burden of expertise.

“Social Search is great for subjective questions, and questions where context is important to getting the information you want. Social Search complements Web Search, which is great for finding objective facts and public information.

Social Search is the right solution when what you want is a quick conversation with a real person who can interpret your question and understand what you are looking for. While Web Search can instantly provide you with millions of documents potentially related to your query, it cannot tell you which one is relevant to your personal needs in a specific context: just try searching for a hotel in London, or a
restaurant for a date, or great new music.”

“…the vast majority of people do enjoy sharing their opinions and helping acquaintances in the real world. Most people have deep knowledge about a surprising variety of subjects. Finally, individuals generally are flattered to be asked for help; they enjoy having the chance to express their ideas; and they find it gratifying to be thanked for their assistance.”

Nancy Dixon has a great post on this called Thankyou for sharing your knowledge.

“Social Search thus addresses the unmet needs of both consumers and producers in the information
marketplace:

“Social search is:

The Aardvark blog post, Social search is the new search, has more:

“Consider this: I have about 200 friends on Facebook, and they each have about 200 friends. Altogether I have over 10,000 friends and friends-of-friends in my extended network. These 10,000 people have a lot in common with me: many share my school and work affiliations and my cultural reference points. I’m interested in the choices they make and the experiences they have — they are usually more relevant to me than the opinions expressed by anonymous strangers on the web.

That’s why Social Search is especially great for subjective questions, and questions where context is important to getting the information I want. We’ve noticed that Aardvark users find Social Search to be complementary to Web Search, which is still great for objective information that can be found on a specific web page.”