Community 2.0 (Part 1: Bootcamp)

May 24, 2008 at 1:11 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Enterprise 2.0

I was pleased to be invited to talk about my book and “net work” at the recent Community 2.0 conference in Las Vegas. The conference was focused on building online communities, community platforms, and the business case for extending the conversations among employees, customers, and partners through mediated and facilitated online means. The conference attracted a community owners and developers from a broad range of industries and nonprofits and afforded a lot of interaction.

Much of the interaction at C2.0 and since has been on Twitter, which was the “star” of the conference. I think that many people who attended had not started tweeting before, but certainly the activity from all those at the conference who tagged tweets with “C20″ made believers out of many. See the C20

To maximize my own learning experience from the conference, I attended pre-conference workshops and the keynote sessions. This experience helped me to understand better how work will change as more and more of our work and interactions will be conducted in these online communities. Two experienced online community builders (who offer the bootcamp as a consulting service to individual companies), Kathleen Gilroy and Sylvia Marino conducted the workshop”Bootcamp: Building a 2.0 Community.”

Their definition of a what constitutes a “2.0 Community” succinctly suggests the boundaries and features:

• It provides a repository and interface
• For the collection and distribution
• Of structured and unstructured content

The key to building a 2.0 community is working within a framework that includes:

1. Defining the business goals
2. Defining the audience (for many communities, the audience are consumers or customers, for many others an internal base of employees)
3. Defining the reach (type of content, extent of distribution)
4. Defining the business commitment (including the roles that are necessary
5. Defining the business stakeholders

Given this foundation, it’s then possible to think about what social tools can best help achieve the goals. And we have so many now: blogs, Microblogs(Twitter), Comments, Forums, Wiki, Photo / Video Uploading (publishing), Embed code, Widgets, Onsite Social Networking (friends lists, connections), Tagging, Rating, RSS, Podcasts, Social graphs… Gilroy commented that Amazon.com, on a single page, provides 24 social components, from book reviewing, to those who bought similar books, to tagging, ratings, comments, and so on.

So with so many to choose from, how do you construct a strategy? Kathleen and Silvia described how to use a “playbook” in a way that it can help to continuously evolve in conjunction with the foundation. The playbook goes through an iterative inquiry:

• The Promise (why) – why the ability for people to engage will enhance or improve the business experience
• The Tools (how)– select the tool(s) designed to fit the job, one appropriate for large or small groups and appropriate for the mode of interaction you want to foster.
• Bargain (what) – understand the value that introducing or providing a specific social capability will be to the target audience and to the community owners/initiators as well as the transaction costs

The workshop attendees were broken into three groups, each of which had to come up with a “play” for a particular strategy area. I worked with the group looking at a social network play for an established professional community. The promise of such communities (particularly inside organizations) is access to expertise, both to answer immediate questions but also to have role models and best practices to follow. We agreed that the tools should provide simple social networking that include discussions. There are a number of platforms to choose from on the Internet; many of these let you start a community for free, and then charge you when you want advanced services (like customization). One of the bargains for participants to share best practices is in developing a reputation for expertise.

The foundations and playbook are are deceptively simple. The actual work, of course, is much more complex; the more complex the set of interactions, the more complex the bargain will be, for example. It’s also important to be continually following a pattern of “probe, sense, and respond” as the plays are developed and introduced. You need to be able to back off something that is not working, and to reinforce good behaviors.

Some of the slides from the bootcamp are available on SlideShare.

Ready for Web 2.0? Culture can kill!

May 23, 2008 at 7:55 pm · Filed under Culture, Enterprise 2.0

I have quite vivid memories of Sunday mornings as a child, being upset that there were few cartoons on Australian free-to-air television, and too many American Christian evangelists trying to convert the world by the power of the idiot box.

With all the hype about Web 2.0, it’s an easy task for evangelists to tell you that you need social computing tools in your organisation. Unfortunately, much of the talk seems to be more about dogma and less about actually educating people about what to do and what to watch out for.

One important factor that is often overlooked is corporate culture — and it can have a dramatic impact on whether your Enterprise 2.0 endeavours will be successful.

Just like our own personalities, there are lots of different facets to an organisation. And like personality you can also measure corporate culture. I’m not talking about the pop-psychology of modern management tests like Myres Briggs, I’m talking about Geert Hofstede’s work in the area of organisational psychology.

Power-Distance is one of the factors that Hofstede found that helps us understand why our organisations do the things they do. For organisations that are described as being high in Power-Distance, subordinates acknowledge and accept that power is a reflection of formal hierarchy. The higher a culture is in Power-Distance, the stronger an organisation’s hierarchy. Organisations low in Power-Distance usually have very flat or no hierarchies. Importantly, the scale does not reflect an objective difference in power distribution but rather the way people perceive power differences. These structures are also typically reinforced by Taylorist management practices.

The book The Emergence of the Relationship Economy looks at a wide range of factors in the adoption of social computing tools, including culture. In bringing together a number of studies, chapter nine [1] deals specifically with the issue of culture.

The book reports that cultures who have very high Power-Distance scores also have low adoption of social computing tools. What organisations are likely to be high Power-Distance cultures? Many government agencies, defence and security organisations, and manufacturing companies could be described in this way.

The suggestion is that even if you want to roll-out social computing tools within your organisation, or even outside the walls to engage your stakeholders and clients, it may not be successful if your organisation if its culture is high on Power-Distance. This sort of culture can kill your plans for implementing social computing because no one will want to adopt these practices.

What’s the solution? An organisation’s culture is like its personality — and that means its long lasting and slow to change. Fortunately, we can turn to other theories and practices from organisational and social psychology to help. We do know that influencing change relies on group dynamics and the ‘norming and forming’ processes. In essence, it’s the story of if your friend jumps off the bridge — would you do it as well? Theories of group dynamics actually suggest the answer is likely to be ‘yes’. Teams often have special tasks that isolate them enough from the broader organisational hierarchy that they have their own social structure and practices, making them the perfect place to start introducing change.

If you can slowly amass enough support, particularly in the low-hierarchy team environment (one that is therefore more likely to adopt social computing tools) you can begin to introduce social computing behaviours and interactions, using these tools, as a group norm, and as a group norm, the group will eventually adopt the behaviour and reinforce that ‘this is the way we do stuff’.

Evangelism is great for raising awareness of an important issue, but you need to know the factors that will help you get where you want to go. For those of your lucky enough to be in high Power-Distance cultures there’s lots of strategy to arm yourselves with, and lots to learn, but this will place control of the situation back to you, and understanding your organisation’s culture is one of the best places to start.

Good luck!

M

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[1] Hodgson, M. R. (2008) The Cultural Factors. The Emergence of the Relationship Economy. Scott Allen, Jay T. Deragon, Margaret G. Orem and Carter F. Smith, Eds.

Six Disciplines – Providing Integrated Consulting, Coaching, and Software for Small Businesses

May 23, 2008 at 4:25 pm · Filed under Reviews

Six Disciplines provides software to help small to mid-size businesses with their program execution and collaboration. However, it takes a somewhat unique approach in that it does not sell the software without the coaching and other services to increase the business impact of its use. I recently spoke with Gary Harpst, CEO and founder of Six Disciplines. His approach makes sense from my own experience. I find that when I provide guidance to a firm, if it is a one-time event, the success rate is much lower than if I am able to provide ongoing coaching for a while after the initial guidance. This has been the case over the past 25 years, and remains just as strong today.

Gary said he formed Six Disciplines in 2000 to help bring some of the best practices from large companies to help smaller firms and help them better leverage the web. He started an accounting software business, Solomon Software, 30 years ago that was eventually acquired by Microsoft after it merged with Great Plains. Six Disciplines is founded upon the lessons Gary and colleagues learned working with thousands of small- and mid-sized businesses through Solomon Software. He found that small companies need four key elements to be successful.

A business methodology and plan – this is where the Six Disciplines come in

A coach to provide an outside perspective on executing their methodology and plan

A software system to enable the plan and allow for collaboration

A community to share information and receive support

The firm needs to first have a vision of where they want to be in ten years. Then they need a goal statement for the next 2-3 years, and a one year plan that keeps rolling out a quarter at a time. Finally each individual needs a plan that supports the firm’s vision, goals, and plan. This sounds straightforward but I am sure than most small business do not operate that way.

To support this program, Six Disciplines offers a hosted solution that both the talent management issues but also the collaboration and content management requirements of a small business. Their platform acts to integrate a number of tools. The approach is to integrate with existing web-based tools rather than re-invent them and simply provide the connection points that align with their overall program. They can pull data from multiple sources and act as the glue.

Six Disciplines operates out of regional centers to provide more direct access to their coaches. They have an active blog, Be Excellent, to provide more of their story. Gary also recently a new book, Six Disciplines® Execution Revolution: Solving The One Problem That Makes Solving All Other Problems Easier, which is scheduled to be published in July 2008. In this book he details the elements of a complete strategy execution program, explains why it could only happen now with the current convergence of business issues and new technology.

My grandfather was a country doctor in Oklahoma before it was a state. When he bought one of the first cars in the county, the sales person came and lived on the arm for two weeks to teach him how to use the new technology. Even then it took him a while to make correct use of this tool and he almost went back to his horse and buggy for rounds. As small businesses move to make use of web technology, many for the first time, it makes sense that they need a coach. Six Disciplines offers more than just how to use the new technology, but the concept is the same. There is a significant mind set transformation in play.

The Design of Knowledge Work … The Industrial Era vs. The Networked Age

May 22, 2008 at 2:40 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Distributed Work, Enterprise 2.0, KM, Talent Management, Web 2.0

It’s not news that there is resistance and confusion about why and how to implement Enterprise 2.0 technology and capabilities in today’s organizations, notwithstanding the continuous flows of information and the growing prevalence of interconnected customers and knowledge workers.

There’s a lot of chatter about bottom-up versus top-down, the collective wisdom of the organizational crowd, and various related themes.  However, there is an ongoing dissonance or competition between the world of structured and defined organizational forms and activity and the growing world of hyperlinked flows in which knowledge and meaning are built layer by layer, exchange by exchange (all those hyperlinked interactions that increasingly make up what we call "knowledge work") as enabled by social computing.

There is a lot of resistance on the part of senior managers and executives to the less structured, less ordered world they see the Web offering their customers, the employees that work in the organizations they direct and manage, and everyone else out there who might have occasion to enter into contact with the organization for which they work.

Organizations of any size and scope in the year 2007 still by and large use the assumptions about efficiency, division of labour and accountability that were developed in the first half of the 20th century, when those assumptions began to be codified into management science … standardized methods for organizing and managing work and productivity.

At the heart of these methods are the ways work is designed and an organization develops its structure.  A primary tool in designing work and structure is job evaluation (and derivatives like accountability mapping and redundancy analysis).  I believe that these tools and their underlying assumptions are used to create the skeletal architecture of organizations … the pyramid we all know. 

The methodology of job evaluation is in my opinion  a very useful place to look at some of the likely reasons for the ongoing dissonance and resistance to change that I suggest we are seeing and will continue to experience.  I have written a number of times before about these issues, but have never really descended into the nitty-gritty granular elements.

I believe these need to be examined and re-conceived if the significant potential and power of social computing inside the firewall is ever to be realized on a broad scale.

Job evaluation is what creates pay grades, pay practices, thresholds for entry into bonus schemes, (sometimes) the criteria for distinguishing between management and non-management jobs, and so on.

Fundamentally, job evaluation (or work measurement in the professional jargon) relies very heavily on the assumption that knowledge is hierarchically structured and, as well, put to use.  It follows that she or he who has more of the knowledge, on paper, is she or he who deserves to be "higher up" in the organization.

There are four or five major, well-known methodologies for measuring work.  They all use very similar factors … sometimes described a bit differently semantically, with a couple more or less factors or sub-factors .. but they all essentially measure the same thing.

I will use the Hay Guide Chart Method’s factors, as I know them the best, but I have also worked with the Aiken Plan and the Towers Perrin and Watson Wyatt job evaluation methodologies in the past.

The Hay Method uses  the model that all work has three phases … input, throughput and output … and employs three core factors to measure that work:

1.  Know-How (knowledge and skills acquired through education and experience)

2.  Problem-Solving (the application of the said knowledge to problems encountered in the process of doing the work)

3. Accountability (the level and type of responsibility a given job has for coordinating, managing or otherwise having impact on an organization’s objectives.

There is a fourth factor called Working Conditions, but in many cases this is treated almost as a throwaway factor, especially when it comes to knowledge work, as it relates to fumes, chemicals, outdoor exposure, dangerous physical conditions, unusual exogenous stress, etc.

On the face of it these factors seem eminently reasonable, and the method (and the related ones cited above) have by and large served organizations well for designing one or another particular pyramid, ever since the early 1950’s.  These methods are put into practice along with other key assumptions from the era when organizations grew and prospered.  The assumptions as articulated are derived from the philosophy of Taylorism (aka scientific management) and the divisions of labour and packaging of tasks that have underpinned the search for efficiency and scale ever since the beginning of the 20th century.

But … and IMO this is an important BUT … these methods did not envision or foresee the Web, hyperlinks and the exchanges of information and bit-by-bit layering and assembly of knowledge and the peer-to-peer negotiation of results and responsibilities we are seeing emerge with greater frequency in this new networked world.

Just as important is these methods’ underlying assumption about the fundamental nature of knowledge. It assumes knowledge and its acquisition and use proceeds slowly and carefully and is based on the official taxonomy of knowledge … a vertical arrangement of information and skills that are derived from the official institutions of our society (Jane Jacobs has a fair bit to say about this in Chapter 3 titled Credentialing vs. Educating in her last book Dark Age Ahead, as do others like John Taylor Gatto and Alfie Kohn).

I’ve offered an example (the paraphrasing of the Hay Method’s semantic scales for measuring a job’s knowledge.  This vertical arrangement of Know-How (knowledge) is basically what supports and sustains vertical reporting relationships.  The other two factors (Problem-Solving and Accountability) derive from and reinforce the Know-How factor … for example, the rules of job evaluation are such that you cannot have a Problem-Solving or Accountability factor assessment that is of a higher order than the Know-How slotting.

The definitions of the Know-How ( knowledge and skills ) factor levels are paraphrased from the semantic definitions on the actual Guide Chart.

A – Unschooled and Unskilled

B – Some school, Some skill

C – Basic high school, routine work

D – Vocational school, community college, trades, senior administrative

E – University graduation, senior trades, managerial (reads the books)

F – University plus 10 years experience, grad school (puts the books to use)

G – Deep knowledge and expertise (writes the books)

H – God (has others write the books)

So .. let’s look at how information is shared and exchanged amongst networked individuals or groups.  I think it is (very) safe to say that problem-solving or accountability is assigned or accepted in that situation based on negotiation of "who knows what" or "how to get something done", and often a call (Skype, blog post, email) is put out to find and access some additional skill or knowledge that is required, and accountability is negotiated based on the constraints of the purposeful activity at hand.

The use of knowledge in a networked context is very often much more horizontal, sideways and based on accessibility and collaboration than is the use of knowledge in formally structured hierarchies.

The introduction of wikis and blogs for project work, for analysis and planning, for research and development and for other knowledge-intensive work is likely to introduce some reasonable levels of dissonance into the common and accepted organizational dynamics (or "organizational sociology") of formal, traditionally structured organizations. 

This is an area where David Weinberger’s phrase from the Cluetrain Manifesto … hyperlinks subvert hierarchy (or expose it, maybe better) … is likely to have real impact.  Performance objectives, job assignments, compensation arrangements and bonus schemes are generally almost always predicated on causality derived from the vertical arrangements of knowledge and its use in planned and structured initiatives.  As more and more knowledge work is carried out by people communicating and exchanging information using hyperlinks, in social networks where the places knowledge lives and that facilitate its routing to where it needed, at a point in time, the vertical arrangements for guiding the flows of knowledge are disrupted, if not subverted.

I have written before about the growing need for what I have called eOD.  As Enterprise 2.0 initiatives continue to proliferate, I cannot see how the latent dissonance I perceive and have tried to articulate in this blog post will be avoided.

I suspect that it is a strong awareness and felt sense about the perceived challenges to the power and status relationships that are the core of yet-to-change organizational structure that is behind many senior managers’ and executives’ struggles to understand or become enthusiastic about the possibilities of Enterprise 2.0.  There is no Guide Chart yet about problem-solving or accountability.

Never mind that there is much rhetoric about the need for leadership at all levels, or about the empowerment and democratization of workers in organization X or Y.  The performance management schemes, grade levels in the organizations and compensation practices have yet to recognize how work gets done in networked environments and increasingly, in a networked world.

And if any of you have any experience with performance management programs or in assigning someone in a job to a different grade level, or in making changes to levels of pay or bonus schemes, you know what a minefield any of those can be.

I’d love to hear what you have to say about this.

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, FastForward, JOHO, Hierarchy, Taylorism, eOD, job evaluation, performance management, knowledge management, compensation practices, bonus schemes, knowledge work, wirearchy

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MindServer Enterprise Search Runs Down the Length of the Long Tail

May 21, 2008 at 4:01 pm · Filed under Reviews

The key word approach has dominated search in the consumer web. Google is my default launch page for the web. However, within the enterprise this approach is not always sufficient. People do not always know what they are looking for and, even if they do, they do not often think in the same key words as those who put together the taxonomy or drafted the documents. There are also many more data types than the vast amounts of unstructured data found on the web. In addition, there are many more security concerns within the enterprise.

Recommind was started in 2000 to address this challenge. It sprang from academic work at MIT and UC Berkeley where researchers were developing algorithms for automatic categorization and conceptual search. Recommind developed their MindServer Enterprise Search tool from this work. It is designed to help you find the most relevant information without having to know the “correct” keywords. Last week, I spoke with Craig Carpenter, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development of Recommind about their work. MindServer provides an advanced search engine for those who need to dig deep and find the unexpected. It focuses on several market areas: highly regulated fields such as financial services, highly litigious companies, industries that do a lot of research such as pharma, and professional services such as legal and consulting.

MindServer Search utilizes its concept-based search capabilities to connect relevant information in the many forms of content within an enterprise such as document management, records management, portals, e-mail systems and many other applications and databases, whether structured or unstructured. It returns results in context for more accurate understanding, as well as increased usefulness of the information for the tasks at hand. It integrates with major document management systems such as Open Text and Interwoven. Results are ranked by relevance and search terms highlighted to reveal the useful part of a document. They can be automatically filtered by such categories as industry, author, location, date, topic, or other metadata. Mindserver can handle information security and the use of business rules. It understands user privileges, role-defined access parameters, and rule based application usage found in enterprise applications. It supports over 30 languages and over 370 document formats. Here is a sample search returns.

[photopress:Recommind_Screen_Shot_A.jpg,full,pp_image]

MindServer is not limited to documents and can also be used for expertise location. Unlike some expert location systems, it does not require people to fill out and maintain profiles. It automatically builds a profile based on the individual’s work product. The profile includes their contact information, bio, relevant documents, and other information depending on the industry. You can refine people searches by the same filters as documents and create industry specific filters. For example, law firms can add filters for bar admission, law school, practice areas, and other legal terms. Here is an example of results for People.

[photopress:Recommind_Screen_Shot__E.jpg,full,pp_image]

Here is an individual page profile for a person.

[photopress:Recommind_Screen_Shot_F.jpg,full,pp_image]

Recommind customers include the top 15 UK law firm, Addleshaw Goddard, Australian Government, Bertelsmann, BMW, DLA Piper, Eversheds, Field Fisher Waterhouse and Simmons & Simmons. Novartis, the Swiss-based pharma company, uses MindServer in their legal department of over 400 lawyers and staff spread around the world. Because of this global distribution, the legal department found it hard to share information across time zones and languages. They built a legal portal known as RADAR with MindServer as the system’s brains that delivered relevant documents, projects and expertise to users irrespective of geography, language or business unit.

Because of its conceptual based search, MindServer is especially good at finding the hard to find people and documents and the unanticipated. It works at the “long end of the tail” within the enterprise. They are now looking to expand the social side of the search results by allowing users to bookmark and rate what they find, moving further into enterprise 2.0.

Fearful of web 2.0? Take control!

May 20, 2008 at 8:13 pm · Filed under Web 2.0

At Web Directions Government 08, Jason Ryan, Communications Manager at State Services Commission New Zealand, suggested that rather than be afraid of loosing control that we should step up and take control of interaction in our social computing projects.

While, at first glance, this may seem rather contrary to the open, trusting, and free nature of interaction we’re used to with wikis and blogs, Jason was actually pointing to the need for those who are fearful of entering the domain of social computing to do the following:

1. Plan for how you will engage your stakeholders using social computing tools: Whether its your boss, the CEO or the head of your government agency, one day they’ll come up to you and ask how you’re going to deal with the fact that someone said something on YouTube or Wikipedia.I know that in Australia some government departments have been ‘changing history’ by making their own edits to Wikipedia to represent a more sanitised version of the truth at tax payers expense. What resulted was just a blanket ban of the sites so people could no longer access them from work. Obviously, this knee-jerk reaction is not a great solution.

   Social computing tools are becoming the primary way people interact and communicate online. Jason suggested that we need to start developing plans (even if just at a high-level) for how these channels will also become a part of your organisation’s communications strategies, rather than fighting covertly against them.

2. Create terms and conditions of use: Setting expectations is one of the most important aspects of official interaction, and doing so on your blog or wiki will help people understand what you will and won’t put up with on your site. E.g. bad language or extreme political and social views. After all, it is your site and you have your reputation to manage.
3. Remember that its not technology, it’s their environment: As little as 50 years ago, radio was a piece of social technology, bringing family and friends together at night to listen to radio plays and feel a part of a growing national and global community. Today, social computing tools are integrating themselves into the very fabric of people’s lives. For these individuals, it’s not just another piece of technology but it’s as much a part of their lives as radio was for our grandparents. In starting a dialogue with these people, choosing the right channel and the right message will mean the difference between reaching out and connecting with them and having your important message miss the mark, or worse, just ignored as irrelevant.

M

Unisfair Upgrades Its Virtual Events and Environments for Businesses

May 19, 2008 at 6:59 pm · Filed under Reviews

I have written about Unisfair before see, Virtual Environments for Business: Unisfair. It was my first post on this blog and covered how this company creates virtual events and environments for businesses. They provide another example of a company taking a consumer web concept and making significant changes so the outcome meets business needs. Now they have upgraded their virtual events with more useful features.

First there is professional networking. Event attendees can upload, modify and publish their professional profiles within a virtual environment. The Unisfair Professional Networking tool then searches the virtual environment and delivers recommendations on others who have similar business interests based on certain criteria.

They have also added e-commerce. Virtual event organizers can generate additional revenue by charging admission to the event, to specific locations or for specific content/presentations within the event, such as a keynote address.

Unisfair also offers multi-language events. Attendees can choose to experience a virtual environment in 15 different languages including English (US), Spanish (Latin and European), French (Canadian and European), German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish, Czech, Polish, Chinese and Korean.

Unisfair can also integrate with, and accommodate add-ins from, third-party solutions including sales force automation tools like Salesforce.com, webcasting and virtual hosts. Additionally, it delivers several new designs for virtual environments, virtual booths and even virtual booth staff. Unisfair has now powered more than 400 virtual business environments for clients like Cisco Systems, IBM, and Quest Software; and for media clients including Nielsen, CMP, Rogers Publishing and Penton Media. You can see their virtual worlds at their web site.