Library clips

A little while ago I talked about not so much groupware, but a middle space, moreso activityware, where you create an object and invite people to add to it. I was looking for something where a conversation could revolve around a task object. You can do this on a wiki (with comments) or Google Docs (with comments), but the more robust tools I came across were Traction, Basecamp, and Activities on Lotus Connections.

The latter is a little different as it’s an on-the-fly tool to perform and coordinate tasks/conversations similar to email, but with less annoyance…sometimes called Activity-Centric Collaboration. From the screencast I find IBM’s Activities in tune with human behaviour. I have a task to do, I create a space, and interactions with people who help me, take place in a open task thread. But the beauty is they can add to the thread with a multitude of objects, they can answer a screenshot with an email, answer an email with a doc, answer a doc with an IM…it’s a thread made up of different objects.

Finally a task/conversation lives at a URL…but it’s not a blog, wiki, forum, online doc, but instead a task/conversation thread that can be made up of elements from different object types.

In email you have to reply with an email, you have to reply to an IM with an IM, you have to reply to a blog post with a comment, etc… Things are changing, now we can have a generic thread where the conversation elements can be made up of various formats.

This is important as we are not tied to one technology when contributing to the space. Currently if I’m in an email thread, but need immediacy for the next reply I will IM…and there you have it, I have just broken the conversation into scattered pieces. And the conversation doesn’t live at an open URL anyway.

I’m finding tools like IBM’s Activites and Google Wave as the new email/IM/attachments space…where conversations take place using a multitude of tools, are threaded in an open place, and don’t have to take place in an existing group space, but instead can be created on-the-fly when the activity arises. This is totally in tune with how we behave as it has very low barriers to start something, and to contribute, in fact it has the ease of email, but is less frustrating in coordinating…which means these spaces may just be the next killer app to solve our annoyance with current tools like email when trying to do tasks/collaborate.

As you can see, you don’t have to prior belong to a team or group, it’s on-the-fly creation of a collaboration space, which is increasingly important in the more role based networked organisation that we are moving towards. It’s more about interactions revolving around an activity, rather than general sharing or that activity having to take place in a best fit prescribed place eg. an existing CoP or team space (which is dire when the people you want to collaborate with aren’t on your team or CoP).
We need more process centric methods in enterprise social computing to make way for the acceptance of more opportunistic tools such as social networks. And for ease of use, we want to contribute via lots of tools eg. a bookmarklet, and as Jon Mell says (in reference to sending an IM via email), don’t make me think…and we want updates delivered any which way.

Basically what is happening is the technology, and what and how we want to achieve our aims, has become a tool designed for human behaviour. I have a task or start a conversation, I can do this from any app I’m in, others can reply from any app they are in, we are updated from the app of our choosing, the thread lives at a central open place…again “we don’t have to think, we just act”.

As Dave Snowden says:

“Technology is a tool and like all tools it should fit your hand when you pick it up, you shouldn’t have to bio-re-engineer your hand to fit the tool”

We find we need an activityware tool at work, as our online communities are not so much for specific tasks, you need to be a member of the community, and you can’t really create them at your disposable for a small task. What we do use is email, or a forum, or a wiki, but an activity space brings the thread together, accepts various object types in the thread, and membership is not based on requirements outside of the task.

Google Wave

I haven’t seen the Google Wave videos, but from reading blog posts and screenshots I get the idea, here are some posts.

Wave is the future of the Enterprise
Could Google Wave Redefine Email and Web Communication?
Google Wave: A Complete Guide
The Top 6 Game-Changing Features of Google Wave
Google Wave: Google Tries to Reinvent Email
Twave: Google Wave + Twitter
Sergey Brin: Google Wave Will Set A New Benchmark For Interactivity
Live With The Google Wave Creators
Exclusive: Video Interview With The Google Wave Founders
Google Wave: The Full Video From Google IO
Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web.

Lotus Connections Activities

NOTE: this is part of a blog post I drafted 2 years ago but never got round to posting.

The paper Activity management as a Web service is focused on integration of various clients and using various clients to action things, and having it all managed in the Wax collaborative activity web service. The beauty of it is that when starting an activity you can go look for content where ever it lies and bring it into the system, like an activity gateway or portal page…this again reminds me of widgets of information from elsewhere, and the widget is dynamically updated at the same time as the original. Read the rest about the task flow features.

The above paper is related to another article, Beyond predictable workflows: Enhancing productivity in artful business processes, which also explains the two ends of the specturum, using email for collaborative activities is clunky and not contextual, and using a centralised workflow system is to rigid and is not flexible to encompass the intricate flavours of all situations, there is calling to allow room for “artful processes” and a requirement is the “democratization of process”. Moving from here are more people focused, community or group based systems that have a more flexible bottom up approach (this also has the bonus of allowing innovation to sprout).

The most relevant paper would be, Activity Explorer: Activity-centric collaboration from research to product. The Activity-centric collaboration style:

It delves into the Activity Explorer client based on activity being a thread of objects.
An activity thread can start with any object (file, chat, screenshot, etc…), someone may be notified by their prefered alert mechanism (also a current area of study about attention delivery, alert, urgency, etc…), this person will reply to the thread with any object, automatically notifying the original person and so on.

The power is that you can collaborate in real-time or asynchronously within the activity, it becomes a shared thread that harnesses different object types, all without needing a meeting or entering a dedicated group share tool.

Their example, just shows how simple it can be to initiate and action an activity (task) in one simple thread with multiple people without even having to be f2f, and by using a combination of external tools integrated into the one simple display screen.

Here’s the brief on the scenario:

NOTE: to create a new object in the thread, you just right click on the previous object

1. Celine starts a new activity by dragging a file into Susan’s name
2. Celine adds a 2nd object (via a right-click on the 1st object); this 2nd object is a message note asking for Susan’s comments
3. Susan is alerted via her systems tray, clicking it takes her to the thread
4. Celine sees Susan is reading the message via an online presence indicator on that object
5. Celine clicks on the message object and initiates a 3rd object being a chat (popping up a box on Susan’s screen)
“Celine wants to clarify about an image detail in the file”
6. Celine creates a a 4th object being a shared snapshot (popping up a snapshot on Susan’s screen)
7. They annotate the image in real-time (like a whiteboard)
8. They invite their boss, Ming, into the chat (popping up a box on Ming’s screen)
- Ming has only got access to the chat object and the shared snapshot object
and so on…

As you can see this diverts or the lessens cognitive stress of deciding which tool to use to start and action a task. A discussion may start on chat, and then be moved to email, and then to some kind of groupware…and it’s not always easy to move information from system to system. Another benefit is information pertaining to the activity is already organised into one thread or view as a result of the process.

From the paper:

“…a single collaborative activity is often managed with multiple collaboration tools and technologies at different levels of formality. These can include e-mail, chat, wikis […] This diversity means that people must monitor and participate in multiple shared venues, spreading their attention and their effort across multiple media. Even if they succeed at this context management task, they still face the difficulty of having to determine the scale of any new collaborative activity in order to select the best medium.”

“The technical goal of activity-centric collaboration is to bridge these gaps of rigidity and tool boundaries by horizontally integrating different collaboration tools and technologies through the concept of a work activity.”

The Activity Explorer is further referred to in the paper, Business activity patterns: A new model for collaborative business applications.

Another great paper about creating more flexible processes is, Ethnographic study of collaborative knowledge work.

As you can see IBM are right into communication and collaboration processes based around people and tool flexibility and bringing all this together in one interface full of connected components, instead of a centralised top down system.

The Clipper Group has a review on the whole Lotus Connections Suite.

Last year, The Connections Blog posted about one of Luis Suarez’s email detox posts, which references my post on re-purposing email.

Related posts:

Activity-Based Computing
Activity-Based Computing
Lotus Connections Activities Demo Video
Activity-based Computing Moves Forward at Lotus Connections
Comprehensive Tour of Lotus Connections
Activities in Connections 2.0
When disaster strikes, create an Activity!
Using Activities to plan your Lotusphere Session

Complements social networks

What I like about all this, is that it complements social networks. I use the network to find profiles (beehive) and read up on people (their microblog, blog, bookmarks, CoPs, etc.), or maybe they are already a contact, then I invite them into my activity. I wonder what move Google will take towards networks, maybe Google Profiles, I do have my Gmail contacts, but I need to go to their space and see what their all about, at the moment this is ruled by Friendfeed, Facebook, LinkedIn.

I guess why I call this middlespace/ware is that you have groupware like Communities of Practice, then you have social networks, and I find ad-hoc activity spaces somewhere in the middle. So I guess this is related to my post, How relevant are communities of practice in a network age?.

As I mentioned earlier this middlespace or activity collaboration is paralleling with the move to a role based organisation where we are connected in social networks and assemble together for activities and disband.

Where does workstreamr come into all this.

NOTE: to clear something up with another way the term “activity” is being used of late. The Facebook newsfeed has been dubbed an “activity feed” as it feeds you the latest on what people you are following have published on their profiles and elsewhere, and what other actions they have been doing in the network, what their friends have been commenting on their profiles, as well as stuff done to you (notifications).

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why wikis have more adoption?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social tools can be used multiple ways

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

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

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

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

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

Do we face a catch 22?

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

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

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

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

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

Collaboration vs Participation

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

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

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

He also relates this to adoption:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Activities and numbers

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

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

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

Bertrand says:

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

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

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

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

And this brilliant way of putting it:

Again, some great insight:

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

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

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

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

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

The other day I posted about conversations around task objects, in reference to using web 2.0 tools to not just share in general, but to do down and dirty work. And in the past I’ve posted about using a combination of blogs, forums and wikis to coordinate a process.

What I’m now looking for is the middle ground; first we had rigid tools, and now we have totally unstructured tools. What I want to do is be able to connect some web 2.0 tools like lego to create a type of workflow that coordinates a process.

So far I have assembled blogs and wikis into a DIY workflow to coordinate a process, but they are not explicitly connected.

I’ve alluded to this before on a post I made about current tools having blog and wiki-like features, just like everything has an email this or print this button.

Something like Ning has been the first step where you can build your own social network, so I guess I’m looking for a similar tool to build a workflow eg. I may want to build something like Zapproved, or perhaps a support team process from logging a call to a solution.

I haven’t researched into this, but what has come across my radar is using a wiki as a DIY workflow…I guess some wikis nowadays go beyond simple HTML pages, you now get themed/template type pages.

James Robertson writes that most workflows aren’t totally effective as they don’t cater for the complexities for each context and situation.

But if we can make these workflows flexible and slightly change them to suit a context or a group of people, and to be able to adapt to freak things that happen in particular situations then this may be a middle ground.
- usually we adapt working around a process by using email

Some tools I have come across Workflow Perfect, and Thingamy.

These differ to Lotus Connections Activities and Basecamp which are more task management, rather than stitching together a process.

Perhaps my prescriptive approach is going backwards here, but I feel that being able to contextualise the workflow by actually changing the building blocks is very web 2.0. Not only can it be a read/write web, but it can also be a read/build web.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You have a task, you action it by:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[ADDED 3/04/09: blueKiwi]

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

Patrick Lambe has a great video presentation on information neighbourhoods.

He firstly presents a typical framework of the islands or assets of information in an organisation (eg. repository, applications, Intranet), which are glued together as a content management system, tags, taxonomy, search, etc..

He then displays a workers personal information cloud including more objects like share drives, email, phone, instant messaging, SMS, people, web, etc…

When he asked the audience how do they get things done, the main answers were: email, people, phone, web

This is a predictable answer, people go to people for help, we have conversations, we are each others filter or information scent. And of course the idea of social tools like social bookmarks, blogs, wikis and social networks is more in tune to the flow of human behaviour.

I posted not long ago about knowledge tools being embedded into our flow of work, rather than being servant and frustrated with rigid tools, or having to stop and visit islands to seek stuff, then have to dive back into our flow.
Now we can use new flexible and unstructured tools, and put our own complexity into them to suit our needs, kind of like sculpturers of flow.

Another aspect is drawing pieces from the islands of information (these filing cabinets) and creating our own interfaces, to use as a toolkit, perhaps for a project team. eg. a startpage, or shared startpage.

At the moment we can even assemble these social tools into a flow, but we wait for the day when the current rigid business process tools allow us to re-model them as movable pieces.

Patrick gives an example of a taxonomy as important for a Blacksmith when they go to the shop and look to replace one of their tools. They can use a faceted search, locating by type, size, brand, etc…

But when it comes to the Blacksmith organising their own workstation, they instead group the tools by place, that is, the tools live in the flow of where they are used.

Patrick refers to an article who call this assembly of information to meet a current task as a Taskonomy:

“…what the taskonomy does is bring the usability of the information being organised closer to the user. Taxonomists cannot remain in the back storeroom keeping the shelves tidy. They also need to venture into the storefront and see how customers need their information organised for use.”

This is what we need in organisations, we need startpages, we need integration into workflow (eg. edit this, blog it), we need re-mixing (assemblage or mashups of small pieces loosely joined), we need filtering (re-mixing feeds), we need connection and expression (blogs and networks), etc…

The taxonomy as the organised filing cabinet with many points of entry and search is great, but we need to pull pieces from it to build an on-the-fly toolkit, that is be able to arrange the information objects in the context of how we plan to “use” them.

The presentation later gets into the design and integration of information assets on a page offering, using pertinent and related information. That is drawing from the filing cabinets and presenting (or assembling) an interface for the need at hand.

An example is given of a BBC sports page of a current match score
- it also shows statistics, archive, replay, photo’s
- and related stories and actions like bookmark it, email it, rate it, print it, leave a comment

Read all about it at this post, Building Information Neighbourhoods, and the more philosophical post, How to Kill a Knowledge Environment with a Taxonomy