The “Average” Knowledge Worker Today Faces Lots More Change

February 29, 2008 at 2:46 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Distributed Work, Enterprise 2.0, KM, Web 2.0

Much of what the average knowledge worker of today sees as "work"  is through the daily communion with the computer screen on her or his desk. They access the software with which they work and communicate with other employees through portals, on the company’s infrastructure of applications, or (increasingly) via the Web.

As we have learned more about how to integrate all growing software-based capability into our daily work lives, we have seen various forms of employee portals, partnership portals, project management portals and, more recently, comprehensive real-time enterprise computing applications take root and grow in many organizations. Organizations’ IT infrastructures, coupled with ongoing growth in the scope and use of smart software, will create a type of integrated nervous system, providing top management and workers with an improvement-and-learning focused feedback loop.

When software connects customers directly to business processes, and employees have "line-of-sight" responsibility for making a clear contribution or directly impacting business results – when most of an organization’s strategy and value proposition is directly coded into its CRM, ERM and B2B applications, will the types of supervision and management we learned in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s continue to be effective? There’s a very real issue here that is helping to create the emerging dynamics – the more that work activities are encoded and embedded into integrated systems, the more the human will and spirit needs to surface, assert itself.  This polarity is, I think, here to stay and is behind much of the ongoing discussion of conversation, collaboration and social computing.

The proliferation of information technology, business process re-engineering and wrenching changes to established business models created by the rapid development of the Internet are exerting significant pressure on long-standing business hierarchies. Top-down, command-and-control management structures and dynamics struggle to maintain effectiveness in the face of free-flowing streams of content-rich information, coming from all directions. The dynamics of how people relate – to work, to markets, to bosses and to each other – are changing. A new organizing principle posited on network dynamics - "wirearchy" - a dynamic flow of power and authority based on connections and conversations, may be emerging as a social dynamic for organized activities in  both business and society.

Wirearchy is an informal but pervasive emerging structure of governance, strategy, decision-making and control based on knowledge, trust, meaning and credibility. Things get done and results are achieved through the interplay of vision, values, connections and conversation. Wirearchy is generated by an open architecture of information, knowledge and focus, enabled by connected and converging technologies.  It suggests a fundamental change in the dynamics of human interaction in – and with – organizations of all sizes, shapes and purposes, and represents an evolution of hierarchy as an organizing principle and dynamic. Wirearchy will not render hierarchy obsolete, nor the need for direction and control; rather, it will render them more necessary. However, it will change the meaning of those terms and how they are used and experienced.

People won’t accept authority easily any more. While old-guard keepers-of-the- keys still cling to authority and power, the older models of how to lead and follow are unravelling. Organization charts are still useful, but only as they become more fluid. Certainly, they appear in a much wider range of shapes than before, and often convey new messages about power, status and control. "Organigraphs," or pictures of the ways organizations flow and operate, are clearly more pertinent, accurate and useful, according to strategy and organizational structure guru Henry Mintzberg.

How do today’s leaders and senior managers respond to these forces? Clues are evident in initiatives emerging in the fields of customer and employee relationship management, organizational development, human resources management and organizational change: The use of techniques such as scenario planning, dialogue, open space, 360 degree feedback, emotional intelligence, coaching and mentoring have all grown significantly over the past several years. Together, these soften the rigidity of outmoded structures, and help people respond and adapt.

Most organizations carry out ongoing initiatives to create, clarify and improve capabilities in each of these emerging areas. Indeed, a large percentage of the global consulting industry is focused on diagnosing, developing and implementing strategies for these goals. Wirearchy is significantly different in that it focuses on the structural and psychosocial dynamics generated by interconnectivity and access to knowledge. It begins not only with what’s happening at the top, but also what’s happening in the roots and branches of an organization. Where hierarchy created focus and meaning through the control of knowledge, wirearchy implies that the control and use of knowledge acknowledges and involves a much wider range of stakeholders..

Yesterday’s success factors involved secrecy and control, size, role clarity, functional specialization and power. Today’s emerging factors are openness, speed, flexibility, integration and innovation. The concept of wirearchy allows readers to develop a strategy for creating, implementing these factors in ways that respond with value to continuously changing conditions. Its core components are:

* a crystal clear vision and values
* a strategically designed and integrated technology infrastructure
* comprehensive, clear and completely open communications
* pertinent objectives and focused measurement
* characteristics of culture that create, support and enable responsiveness, adaptability and fluidity
* leadership that is clear, focused, open, authentic and shared

It will take time and experience in this new era to know what "success" and "effectiveness" mean and look like. In such an era,  where there is literal meaning in the phrase, "everything is connected to everything else," we will have to watch, learn and imagine how to lead and manage in ways that foster continuous developments in the effectiveness of individual workers, small working groups, the organizations with which they work and the societies in which we all live.

Clay Shirky is a well-know Internet / Web expert who has just published a new book titled "Here Comes Everybody".  While it does not focus exclusively on the workplace, it’s a decent bet that the concepts and dynamics Shirky addresses will have major impact on the future of work.  As the forces he describes continue to spread throughout society and grow in impact, this organizing principle – Wirearchy — is likely to impact the design of collaborative software and the architecture of workplaces, business, governments and societies in ways that we have never before encountered in human history.

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Nice Overview of Enterprise 2.0 Vendors from Jon Husband and Jim Bair

February 29, 2008 at 7:22 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Reviews

This will be one of the few times I cross post to the FASTforward Blog, another blog for which I’m a contributor, and the AppGap but the book above is very relevant to both audiences. On my way to Fast Forward 08 I took out my review copy of Making Knowledge Work - The Arrival of Web 2.0 by Jon Husband, a contributor to this blog, and Jim Bair. After the introduction, I went straight to Chapter 6 on Vendors since I have been writing about many of them on this blog and the Fast Forward blog. Jon and Jim provide a nice overview of the market, covering both the big guys like IBM and Microsoft, and the more pure play providers. I looked at the ones I interviewed and certainly agreed with their assessment and descriptions. I also discovered a number of others for the first time, as well as updates on firms I have known in the past.

There are certainly other worthy vendors that are not covered in the book and the authors acknowledge the many additional players in this market. However, their generalizations about how the large suppliers and the smaller firms will play in the enterprise 2.0 are accurate from my perspective. Their work also adds another validation to the market. Not shy, they write, “social computing promises to take over the world of work as participation, ease-of-use- and collaboration grow.” They note the advantage of the large players but acknowledge that some “new very small vendors (are) combining capabilities with industry giants.” The integration of Google Search Appliance with iQuest Discovery is one example they offer that I have written about before. There are many others. They also cover the entry of Google, itself, into the enterprise market with a useful summary of its moves.

Jon and Jim seem to come out on the side of the big vendors as the less risky way to get into enterprise 2.0 with a slight nod to IBM over Microsoft, unless of course if you are already a Microsoft shop. If you simply want to stay with your current enterprise provider as a safe move, there is certainly sound logic here. However, these large providers have had to integrate the new enterprise 2.0 functionality with their existing infrastructure and that can be limiting. The smaller new vendors do not have that burden. So there is a risk of missing out on some good stuff if you bypass them. Risk is in the mind of buyer.

I am looking forward to reading the rest of the book - It is clearly written and takes steps back along the way to look at the big picture and provide an historical perspective. I recommend it as a solid introduction to enterprise 2.0.

The Balance in Enterprise 2.0

February 27, 2008 at 5:49 pm · Filed under Change Management, Web 2.0

Via Patrick Lambe, a reference to a Matt Moore posting on implementing Enterprise 2.0. Matt uses the metaphor of how we help youngsters learn to ride bicycles by putting on training wheels that stabilize the bike. Eventually, the training wheels come off and there is an inevitable crash (or two or three) before that wonderful thing called balance emerges. Once we have learned to ride a bike, we never lose that particular sense of balance.

The “training wheels” for using Enterprise 2.0 technologies are also stabilizers: templates, governance models, moderators, and various artifacts that provide a sense of control that makes IT folks and executives a little more comfortable with allowing the social software revolution to slip into the enterprise. But these stabilizers must also at some point be removed if the true value of the integrated innovative enterprise is to be realized. But what, Matt asks, happens when the inevitable crash occurs? The organization has a choice, he says, between putting the wheels back on and keeping them there or letting the falls happen until the organization finds its balance.

This notion of balance in Enterprise 2.0 reminded me of the Davenport/McAfee debates in June 2007 and January 2008. In the first, the question centered on the need for corporate control of assets (Davenport) versus the benefits of opening the enterprise to emergence (McAfee). In the second debate, the argument shifted to the question of whether Web 2.0 was an evolution (Davenport) rather than a discontinuity (McAfee).  Davenport came a bit around last week to suggest that Enterprise 2.0 is the “new, new knowledge management.” (Thanks to David Gurteen’s newsletter for helping me catch up on the blogs I missed during vacation!)

The rapprochement is important, because it illustrates the many levels of learning to balance at work. We are learning to work with a new language, a set of distinctions that make us a bit wobbly in our thinking until we get them sorted out in our minds and speak more confidently. Emergence is one big distinction, as Davenport suggests: “Perhaps the most important difference is the emphasis on emergence of content structures in E2.0, rather than specifying them in advance.”

Another big distinction that we need to come to terms with is “boundaries.” Despite the urge on the part of some to let loose these new technologies within the enterprise, we need to have some governance, some rules about privacy and confidentiality, and perhaps even a bit of hierarchy with respect to editorial norms and appropriateness. This is the balance that companies undertaking E2.0 must learn. And they must let themselves wobble and, sometimes, crash. But the crashes must be source of learning, and not an excuse for withdrawal.

The New Knowledge Artisans

February 24, 2008 at 9:10 pm · Filed under Artisan Economy, Distributed Work

We recently released a new report in our Future of Small business forecast series called “The New Artisan Economy.” In the report we talk about the re-emergence of artisans as an economic force.

Next-gen knowledge artisans are amplified versions of their pre-industrial counterparts. Equipped with and augmented by technology, they rely on their human capital and skill to solve complex problems and develop new ideas, products and services. Highly productive, knowledge artisans are capable individually and in small groups of producing goods and services that used to take substantially larger teams and resources. In addition to redefining how work is done, knowledge artisans are creating new organizational structures and business models.

As our economy continues its shift towards ideas and innovation, the new knowledge artisans will be crucial to competitive success. Corporations will need to better understand knowledge artisans and how they work. They will also need to design work policies, organizational models and IT infrastructures that attract, retain and support knowledge artisans.

The new knowledge artisans share several important characteristics. First, they tend to have excellent end-user IT skills and expect to have access to the latest tools. Most knowledge artisans are power Internet users and comfortable with a wide range of IT and internet applications and software.

Knowledge artisans are highly collaborative. Because they often work in distributed, cross functional and cross organizational teams, they understand the importance of information sharing.

Knowledge artisans use a broad mix of collaboration tools to communicate with and share information across their teams.

Knowledge artisans tend to be analytical. The rise of the Internet has created vast new pools of data and information. Knowledge artisans understand the need to convert these complex data streams into useful and actionable information. Using analytical business tools and data visualization, knowledge artisans are shifting decision making from gut-instincts towards objective analysis.

Knowledge artisans are mobile and connected, but not “always on.” They tend to work from a variety of locations and are always connected. But being connected does not mean always-on. Instead knowledge artisans work when and where it best suits their needs. They schedule their own hours, choose their work location and even pick projects and teams that interest them. While knowledge artisans work very hard and put in long hours, they want to work “on their time” and “on their terms.”

Knowledge artisans are looking for values-based work. Knowledge artisans want to work in a manner that reflects their life values. The values knowledge artisans mention most are work/life balance, sustainable business practices, social responsibility and giving back to the broader community. We also hear knowledge artisans talking about “meaningful work”, “working independently”, and the pride of using their knowledge and skills to accomplish something.

The competition for skilled knowledge artisans will be intense. These highly valuable workers have many career options and job choices. Corporations that fail to develop business policies and IT infrastructures that support knowledge artisans will lose them – and come under increasing competitive pressure from firms that are able to attract, retain and support knowledge artisans.

A New Blog Dedicated to Young Professionals

February 24, 2008 at 8:41 pm · Filed under Communities, Notable + Quotable, Talent Management

[This is a cross-post from my Future of Work blog. I'm sure readers here will also be interested in the new blog "Newly Corporate."]

I’ve just found a new multi-author blog dedicated to Gen Y, Millennials, or whatever young professionals are calling themselves these days.

It’s called “Newly Corporate: Work, life and the pursuit of happiness for the young professional.”

One of its authors, Brendan Henak, wrote me recently and asked me to take a look. When I finally found a few moments on a Sunday afternoon (sadly, it’s just about the only time these days I can do stuff like that) I liked what I saw.

While the blog is really aimed at those young professionals, and offers them help and advice on coping with the corporate world, it’s also a useful place for any of us older farts to gain new insights into what makes those young-uns tick.

Actually, when I review the interesting and well-written posts there I find lots of good ideas that are applicable to any of us trying to survive the world of work these days. But, to the authors’ credit, it’s written in language and a style that is highly appropriate for their primary audience.

But no matter how old you are, I encourage you to go take a look. Bookmark it, or subscribe to the RSS feed. You won’t regret it.

Tags: GenY millennials futureofwork workplace

WorkLight Provides Enterprise 2.0 Security

February 22, 2008 at 10:07 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Reviews, Security

I wrote about WorkLight entering the enterprise Facebook market with their Workbook application on the Fast Forward blog. Last week I spoke with David Lavenda, their Vice President, Marketing and Product Strategy, about the range of products they offer. David said the company was founded by two executives from Amdocs (NYSE:DOX) and other hi-tech companies, who saw the well-documented trend of employees bringing consumer web products into work. This has caused concern with the IT folks and one of their main concerns is security. Many employees, especially the younger ones, are used to advanced features, transparency and networking enhancements found on the new web. In many cases, they are bringing these tools in whether or not IT sanctions them. WorkLight rightly saw a market here and started the company in 2006. The company’s flagship product, WorkLight for the Enterprise, is a secure and scalable server-based product that provides protected access to enterprise data and expertise through consumer web interfaces. They started with RSS feeds. Then moved to Ajax and gadgets, and now have their Facebook application.

Their tools allow for a secure connection between most any Web 2.0 front end, such as Facebook, to back end enterprise applications. The web tools include iGoogle Home pages, MS Live, Netvibes, Yahoo widgets, and others. They also offer gadgets for more tradtional enterprise web tools such as Sharepoint but their main focus is supporting secure connections with consumer web tools. This allows employees to get enterprise information anywhere with a consumer tool they are comfortable with. In addition, WorkLight partners with organizations, such as retail banks, to allow them to offer their customers the secure use of consumer web interfaces to their personal financial data. These customers can bypass the bank portal and just use RSS feeds and consumer web gadgets to get updates to their personal data. Needless to say the security concerns here are quite intense and the expectations are high, so this is a great demonstration of web security.

The most popular interface they support appears to be Facebook. They found that some of their customers tried to build their own social networking tool using Sharepoint or Lotus Connections and found this difficult and adoption was hard. The existing popularity and familiarity of Facebook made the adoption much easier once security was added through Workbook. The trend to sell to the business user within the enterprise who finds it hard to access information and online marketing people at banks for their customer tools.

One of their clients is a bank with over 60,000 employees working in locations across the world. The bank wanted to leverage employee expertise and encourage internal interactions, without compromising security and regulatory requirements. Through WorkBook, employees now connect with colleagues from other departments and locations, locate people with certain knowledge or common interest area, ask questions and get answers, create and join discussion groups, etc. The platform integrates with enterprise applications, e.g. to share and bookmark documents from the company’s document management system.

In another case, their client provides support and services to telecommunications operators around the world. These personnel must continuously report hours worked, in order to properly bill customers. Managers need to have an up-to-date view of the hours spent on specific projects and customers. They also need to be aware of missing and invalid time reporting. The WorkLight server, which resides in the company’s data center, is integrated with the ERP system. This makes the time reporting capabilities available to employees through the desktop and web-based gadgets that enable easy reporting of work hours. These Ajax-based mini-applications are resident on the employee’s desktop as part of Windows Vista, Apple Sidebar or Yahoo widgets. Alternatively, they are securely integrated into the employee’s personal home page in iGoogle, Microsoft Live or Netvibes. Employees can also define RSS feeds, such as: “My approved time reports”, “My employees’ missing reports” or “New reports for project X”. It is great to see examples like these two cases as they help to validate the promise of Enterprise 2.0, as well as provides additional implementation ideas.

WorkLight plans to continue to support the latest consumer web tools. They will let these tools makers such as Google provide the innovation and develop the audience. Then they offer the security to take the new tools safely behind the firewall.

SuccessFactors: Bringing Web 2.0 to Talent Management

February 20, 2008 at 4:46 pm · Filed under Reviews

SuccessFactors began in 2001 as one of the first on-demand Strategic HR software providers. They did this to allow companies of all sizes to quick start their performance & talent management support and bypass the some times lengthy implementation of enterprise products. It also took them out of the dump and run service mode as they, like other SaaS suppliers, depend on ongoing renewals for their revenue stream. The company now serves organizations from less than 10 to over 100,000 employees. They have 1,750 customers and over 3,000,000 on demand users. Some of these include Toyota, British Telecom, Fed Ex, AARP, Yahoo, NASDAQ, and Hilton.

Earlier this week I spoke with David Karel, Director of Product Marketing, to discuss their release of ULTRA, a significant overhaul of the SuccessFactors Performance and Talent Management Suite that incorporates a number of Web 2.0 features. I have had various forays into the HR space over the years so I am familiar with many of the issues but not an expert. David shared with me some interesting statistics about the need for better alignment of the enterprise workforce.

- 95% of employees don’t understand their company’s strategic goals (Norton & Kaplan)
- 50% of the average employee’s time is spend on non-productive work (Corporate Strategy Board Research; Measures that Matter)
- 86% of the workforce is disengaged (Towers Perrin)

These numbers are very believable to me as they are similar to what we found in the 80s when I was more involvement with learning and performance management. It is concerning that more progress has not been made. The numbers certainly point to the need for better implementations of tools like SuccessFactors. One of their major goals is to better align employee’s actions with companies’ objectives. I think that enterprise 2.0 features can help with this connection and am pleased to see a firm extending their product in this direction. As a SaaS supplier they are constantly upgrading their software but the recent ULTRA release was a major overhaul. David walked me through a demo of the new features. They included:

- the ability for employees to interact with each other through social media and networking-type communities

- employee profile features than encourage and facilitate user generated content such as an interactive seating chart, seamless integration with Facebook, and enhanced tagging capabilities

- the ability to obtain a 360-view of an employee from anywhere in the performance and talent management process. This is done through Quickcards that provide links to the employee’s essential information such as performance reviews, goal plans, development plans and career worksheets among others;

- integration between succession planning and recruiting to allow managers to create targeted new hire requisitions directly from their Succession Org Chart based on an understanding of the high performers on their teams;

– a more interactive Succession Org Chart with new features such as highlighting key positions and retirement eligibility flags to increase talent visibility so the organization and its managers can make better decisions about the strengths, weaknesses and gaps of the talent base - this comes with good security to protect confidential employee performance information from those who do not need to know

– recruiting management reports that plot the performance rating of employees against the recruiting cost of their hiring source to so managers know where they get their best talent and better information on their return on recruiting investment

They also provided increased visualization and other UI upgrades to better align with what employees are seeing on the consumer web. I really liked the search results for specific employees that come back as pictures, rather than names. Often, I will remember a face before a name. It is also more personal. As mentioned above, they also provide seating diagrams where you can drag and drop pictures and names of the occupants to get a physical location directory. Their open APIs also allow for Google and Yahoo Map integration and many other possibilities.

They also have a blog, the Performance and Talent Management Blog, written by Max Goldman, Group Product Marketing Manager. It does a nice job of covering their market, as well as their products

The addition of web 2.0 features helps enterprise software better keep up with the consumer web. David also showed me their old interface that looked like many enterprise software screens. The new one adds tags, tag clouds, social networking, increased visualization with drag and drop manipulations, and increased opportunities for employee input. Most importantly, it allows greater participation by employees in their own career management process. It is nice to see enterprise 2.0 continue spread through more enterprise software functions and tool sets.