Reality Check … The Workplace of the Future, Five Years Later

July 3, 2008 at 12:56 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Distributed Work, Enterprise 2.0, KM, Web 2.0

I initially wrote the piece below a little more than five years ago. 

At the time I had been running around trying to get people to look at the ways that information technology and the Internet would have major impact on the ways we work, and the on the structures and dynamics of the workplace of the (relatively) near future.  Most of the time it felt like being a butcher at a vegetarians’ convention … especially given that it wasn’t so long after the dot.com bust and 9/11/01.

I find it useful to look back, and check in:

The Workplace of the Future
posted Mon November 11, 2002 - 04:00 AM

Fundamental assumptions create beliefs, which shape what we do. A dominant set of beliefs creates what we call a ‘paradigm’. Many people have recognized that a paradigm shift is occurring as we move from the Industrial Age to the Information Age.

While many of the factors and trends are already apparent in the work world today, using them as fundamental assumptions about the emerging future can help to address their growing impact on peoples? work lives and the ways we adapt to their presence.

1. Interconnectedness - between people and between businesses - will continue to grow. Being ‘connected’ in a ubiquitous sense will become more familiar to more people. Access to the Web, and the applications on it, will become easier and easier to use.

It looks like a tsunami coming. Globally, three times as many people are forecasted to be on-line in the year 2003 relative to the number of people on-line at the end of the year 2000. Web applications will more and more often reflect the intersection of human and work activities, and will touch virtually every domain of activity.

So much of  this has happened that the forecast above seems banal today.

2. ‘Smartware’ (smart software) applied to work activities will become ubiquitous for virtually all types and aspects of work. The effects of smartware applied to work will continue to change the fundamental nature of knowledge work, and increase the polarization currently occurring in the work economy.

At one pole, the dematerialization of work (less manufacturing, more information and knowledge) will create ever-higher levels of creative, imaginative and specialized knowledge work. Highly-focused service work will be based on conversations, meetings and negotiations in which people leverage knowledge, money, power (by virtue of controlling something) or time.

At the other pole, legions of low-skilled service work, such as customer service, data entry, sales service and semi-skilled trades work will be supported by smart tools. This type of work will become essentially disposable in nature, in the sense that it will matter little who does the work.

Between these two poles, work will tend to migrate towards one or other of the poles, e.g., skilled trades or teaching school. A school teacher will be supported to significant extents through the use of smartware and smart tools, as will a technician or a machinist. However, the nature of the work will depend upon the context of the organization and the systems, tools and culture of that specific workplace.

It will become critically important to clarify the context with which to use smartware and smart tools. The tools will become important participants in this process, and using them will demand clarification of the context, or the tools themselves will help to clarify and revise the context(s).

This large shift seems to be underway.

3. The ‘line-of-sight’ between the customer, employees’ work and the company’s strategic objectives will be essential, and very complex in some types of work. An employee’s work will need to address the dynamic of mass customization (an individual’s specific skills and personality will need to mesh with highly-structured work processes and information systems).

The other type of work will be niche-based, very narrowly defined and serving a specific need, yet the service provider will offer you an extensive range of services, bundled to create packages of value (value bundling).

This shift is also underway.

4. Tomorrow’s knowledge-work employees will be smart, assertive and questioning of inappropriate or uniformed authority. This sharpens the game for senior managers/executives and makes the notion of coaching (or championing-and-channeling instead of command-and-control) very real.

Many have written often about the growing impact of tech-savvy Digital Natives as they begin to pile into the workplace.  The rapidly-growing use of wikis and blogs in organizations seems to reinforce this observation.

5. Jobs/roles will change continuously - the focus will be a blend of skills and the strategic areas an organization now (in the present) either chooses to pursue strategically or must pursue to stay in the game.

Jobs/roles will become fluid and unbundled (into price-sensitive sets of skills - the tools to do this are currently being built), and ‘described’ this way (except in the Public Sector). Personal learning contracts will become the job description of 2005. This dynamic will continue to grow in importance because younger workers have been told to prepare for this for at least ten years.

Restructuring and downsizing will become regular and accepted fluid dynamics of life in organizations. It is already a common feature of the corporate landscape, and it will become an accepted fact of life.

This has been happening, and has been reinforced by the large shift to online descriptions and applying for jobs using job boards.

6. Most of the necessary ’smartware’ to create all this already exists. New and better applications will appear continuously. The key limiting factor will be an organization’s willingness and/or courage to use them. This will depend on the awareness/openness of senior managers/executives regarding:

· Real willingness to invest in letting smart people use the tools and an interconnected social web of knowledge-building to their full potential.

· The ability of this group to share power, in a real and meaningful sense. The legacy of structural hierarchy, and the manifestations of power and control embedded in our understanding of how to lead and how to manage, have created a real rigidity with respect to the unlocking of potential implicit in the concept of Human Capital.

· The ability of the "top" group to change deeply-ingrained behaviour patterns (see above) and ‘champion and channel’ people to focus on the line-of-sight link between customers’ needs and an organization’s strategic objectives.

The rise in awareness of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, code words for the application of social software and web services to critical elements of knowledge work in many organization, is a clear indication that this forecast is accurate, so far.

All of the factors outlined above, and doubtless others which we don’t yet recognize or understand, will continue to re-shape the world of work and organizations in ways that we haven’t yet foreseen.

What is certain is that the attitudes about work that we have collectively held at near-DNA levels of our psychology, will not serve us well in the future. Flexibility, creativity, authenticity - and opposites such as continual stress, the need to have clear structure, and protective territoriality - will all be key forces in shaping the future of work.

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Supernova 2008 … Interview with Eric Bonabeau of Icosystem

June 17, 2008 at 4:50 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Distributed Work

(originally posted to the Supernova 2008 ConversationHub)

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I sat down earlier today with Eric Bonabeau, one of the presenters speaking at Tuesday’s opening Supernova session on the Theory and Practice of Networks.

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Eric Bonabeau is the founder and Chief Scientist of Boston-based Icosystem Corporation. Icosystem creates customized tools that replicate the detailed behavior of real systems—be they companies, processes, physical systems, or social networks—whose complexity pushes them beyond the reach of traditional analytical approaches.

Eric is one of the world’s leading experts in complex systems and distributed adaptive problem solving. He co-wrote the book Swarm Intelligence - From Natural to Artificial Systems, a scientific bestseller for eight years and provided the inspiration for another bestseller, Michael Crichton’s Prey. His articles in Harvard Business Review (Swarm Intelligence, May 2001; Predicting the Unpredictable, March 2002; Don’t Trust Your Gut, May 2003; The Perils of the Imitation Age, June 2004; You Heard It Here First, February 2005; What Is Luxury Without Variety?, February 2006; The Two Faces of New Product Development, November 2007, to appear) and MIT Sloan Management Review (Understanding and Managing Complexity Risk, Summer 2007) have all been exploring the limits of human decision making in a complex, decentralized and unpredictable world.

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Icosystem’s and Eric’s work focuses on understanding and analyzing network activity for clients in specific realms, primarily in order to be able to predict better (uptake of new products or services, distribution and dissemination of critical information, etc.) and, as he wryly noted, "preferably before rather than after the fact".

I asked Eric to help me "build" the interview because frankly when faced with the task of interviewing someone who has been breaking new ground in complex systems and adaptive problem-solving, I was afraid that I might not know enough, or how, to ask useful questions. Eric graciously agreed to help me out.

So, I started off by asking Eric to elaborate on something he said earlier this morning that I thought was central to his presentation:

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"When considering how networks behave and how we might use them, we should decouple structure and function."

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I was hoping that in elaborating, Eric would make it clear what he meant by focusing on the decoupling. He did, and here’s how he made it clear.

He began by noting that thus far roughly 95% of network science has been focused on the structure of the networks, and that much of the analysis about the implications of network activity has suffered from "leaps of amateurism". And while he suggested that we should decouple structure and function, he went on to say that people should not get bogged down in trying to understand the structure of networks. Different networks operate in different ways, depending upon purpose, size, components and other variables. Thus, when considering them, one must consider function and what kind of constraints are in operation or may be needed.

Initially, as we began to use the Web to interact and participate in networks, there was a significant emphasis on the ways use of the Web amplified our human activities. The amount(s) of communication and connectivity were just a quantitative increase. However, he feels that we are now beginning to see / experience a qualitative phase transition, wherein the shapes and forms of human expression are changing. He offered the oft-cited example that the purpose and dynamics of social networking platforms is different between generations and from culture to culture, which is leading to the likely redefinition of the concept and definitions of friendship.

Eric also suggested that if we look at the operation of networks connected by information technology over longer time frames, you can predict pretty well how the technology will evolve … what you can’t always predict well are the uses to which people will put the technology or the ways in which they use it. You can predict what will come out of the evolutionary path of technology, you just can’t predict well how people will use it …. so to paraphrase a point made by Lily Cheng in the discussion of the Publius Project later in the morning, the community of users will be the ones who provide the key design points about what a technology really should be used for, and why.

Decoupling the structure and function of networks will help to understand better, and perhaps predict better, what will happen in a given network. The better understanding has led to the emergence of the term "architecture of participation" for thinking further and deeper about the interactive environment the Web affords. Decoupling structure and function is likely to lead to better analysis, better understanding and ultimately purposeful and informed-by-design-constraints shaping of network dynamics rather than imposing or forcing defined behaviour derived from structurally-derived assumptions about how and why networks operate as they do. This is NOT to say that there should not be rules for individual and group behaviour but that, as in real life, the minimum necessary rules will emerge and be used based on understanding the purpose(s), components and functions of networks as decoupled from their structure.

Eric and I termed this shaping "social engineering", for lack of a better word … which lead us to a brief discussion of Brave New World, Revisited, an essay written by Aldous Huxley 20 years after he publishing of his iconic book Brave New World).

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Tags: Supernova 2008, Eric Bonabeau, Icosystem, complexity, network theory

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On Process, Technology and Work Design

June 9, 2008 at 2:01 am · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Distributed Work, Enterprise 2.0, Talent Management

Two + years on, I am still turning over in my mind this post on process (The End of Process) by Ross Mayfield, along with the attendant comments.

I have been involved in various aspects of work design in companies for a long time, and one could even say that I am heavily invested in some core beliefs, given that I quit a lucrative and semi-high-profile career fifteen years ago.  I believed then that information technology would drastically change the nature of work. The company I worked for - a global HR and organizational effectiveness consulting company - wasn’t, in my opinion, ready to acknowledge the extent of the transformation.

I still believe that, and I still believe many, if not most, companies have not really acknowledged the extent of the change that is possible, or that is now coming thick and fast.

This is a statement that, on its face, appears absurd … companies the world over have expended tens, scores, if not hundreds of millions of dollars on large integrated systems that have required the design of long, large and tightly designed work processes … followed by the pouring of *electronic concrete* over these work processes, in the form of the large integrated systems.

I think that processes are good and useful, leading to the standardization of work and the delivery of increased product and service quality in many instances.

I also think that standardization and the fitting of work process to the requirements of integrated information systems have also led to significant rigidities in the face of boisterous, interacting, demanding individual human beings … rendering all too many of us *prisoners* of some companies’ business processes, whether we are workers who struggle with an internal-to-the-company boa constrictor of exceptions and constraints, or customers who are left to fend with a system that won’t let their needs or desires be met in appropriate or sensible ways.

What companies have not done well is acknowledge or understand that the fundamental responsiveness to customer or employee feedback comes from what people have always done well … what they, arguably, are designed to do or what is in their nature to do .. which is:

- ask questions, and seek to understand

- decide together why and how to do something

In effect, these *social processes* have been suppressed or limited by the structures of most sizeable companies, with the attendant rules underpinning reporting relationships, spans of control, delegations of authority. This is, colloquially, why so many people like to complain about *hierarchy* … there are often better ways available, or conditions which no longer suit the bureaucracy which was yesterday’s process answer to yesterday’s conditions, but they are not permitted to enter into play.

These ruminations bring to mind the approach known as Participative Work Design, known mainly to Organizational Development theorists and consultants:

Participative Design was developed in 1971 by Fred and Merrelyn Emery. They developed the method as a faster and more acceptable alternative to the Socio-Technical Systems (STS) approach, where a multi-functional task force redesigns the organisation, usually taking a whole year to do so. A design created in such a way tends to be flawed, because it is based on an incomplete assessment of reality. Also, workers do not have ownership of the design, and this generates resistance to change. And, perhaps most significantly, the organisation’s underlying power structure remains intact.

Whereas STS is based on what the Emerys call the ‘bureaucratic design principle’, Participative Design reflects the ‘democratic design principle’. This says that (1) those who have to do the work are in the best position to design the way in which it is structured, (2) effectiveness is greatly improved when teams take responsibility for controlling their own work, and (3) the organisation increases its flexibility and responsiveness when people are capable of performing multiple functions and tasks.

The Emerys have also identified six basic conditions that need to be met if people’s work is to be productive and satisfying. There must be:

- Elbow room for decision making
- Opportunities for continuous on-the-job learning
- Sufficient variety
- Mutual support and respect
- Meaningfulness
- A desirable future, not a dead end

The examples of human interactive behaviour while doing *work* are characteristics of the give-and-take of purposeful interaction. Wikis (such as the solution offered by Ross’ company Socialtext) or purpose-designed blogs (for project management, or brainstorming, or collective competitive intelligence, or for wrestling with difficult problems through dissection, analysis and reconstruction of issues … is a social process.

The lightweight, inexpensive, user-friendly tools are now available to let people interact, with each other and with larger, integrated systems .. to integrate social process into more static and more clearly defined work processes.

The nature of work is changing too much, and the spread of easy-to-use inexpensive social software too rapid and far-reaching (and useful) not to attract the attention of hundreds of thousands of managers, professionals and anyone else interested in the nature of work in a world in which we are surrounded by software and information systems.

It has been said  that sociology always trumps technology.

What do you think ? Who else do you know that is contributing to wider and deeper understanding ?

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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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It Takes A Long Time For Change To Happen Quickly

May 3, 2008 at 2:26 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Distributed Work, Economic Development, Enterprise 2.0, KM, Web 2.0

Taylorism changed a lot about the nature of work in North American and western Europe pretty quickly, all things told … but it still took thirty or forty years to emerge into its relatively full-blown effects.  At its heyday, the manufacturing might and effectiveness of the United States that Taylorism helped create enabled it (along with important agricultural and resources capabilities and growing financial clout) to become the world power economically over several decades at most. 

In an important sense, it was useful to his theories that 1) they helped respond to the massive spread of the Industrial Era’s requirements for growth in the first half of the 20th century, and 2) World Wars I and II came along in the late 1910’s and in the late 1930’s to provide a massive need for manufacturing.

30+ years elapsed from the publication of Principles of Scientific Management in 1911 to the codification of those principles into work design methodologies in the 1940’s and early 1950’s.  He and his theories get a bad rap today, but it seems clear that they were highly useful to the process of creating wealth by improving manufacturing processes and capabilities.

It seems banal to say that those theories are less effective today, but I am not sure that’s the case.  There have been no comprehensive theories and principles come along (yet) to replace them, notwithstanding a plethora of management books published since the mid-1980’s promising enhance organizational effectiveness … more often than not by combining Taylorist principles with developmental workarounds and adaptations.

The recent emergence of the field called Enterprise 2.0, and clarion calls for management innovation that have followed (see Gary Hamel, Andrew McAfee, Tom Davenport, Don Tapscott, Dave Snowden and many, many others) promises much potential disruption.  It also portends significant struggle as the forces of buttoned-and-battened-down efficiency derived from a manufacturing-focused era vie with the forces arising from networked flows of information in an era where economic value is derived from the construction and application of knowledge to product and service design and delivery (manufacturing happens in China now).

Via Wikipedia:

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Taylor published his Principles of Scientific Management in 1911, which elucidated four core principles:

1. Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.

2. Scientifically select, train, and develop each employee rather than passively leaving them to train themselves.

3. Provide "Detailed instruction and supervision of each worker in the performance of that worker’s discrete task".

4. Divide work nearly equally between managers and workers, so that the managers apply scientific management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks

Management theory

Taylor thought that by analysing work, the "One Best Way" to do it would be found. He is most remembered for developing the time and motion study. He would break a job into its component parts and measure each to the hundredth of a minute.

[ Snip … ]

He was generally unsuccessful in getting his concepts applied and was dismissed from Bethlehem Steel. It was largely through the efforts of his disciples (most notably H.L. Gantt) that industry came to implement his ideas.

Managers and workers

Taylor had very precise ideas about how to introduce his system:

"It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone." (Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management, cited by Montgomery 1989:229, italics with Taylor)

Workers were supposed to be incapable of understanding what they were doing. According to Taylor this was true even for rather simple tasks.

"’I can say, without the slightest hesitation,’ Taylor told a congressional committee, ‘that the science of handling pig-iron is so great that the man who is … physically able to handle pig-iron and is sufficiently phlegmatic and stupid to choose this for his occupation is rarely able to comprehend

[The scope of] Taylor’s Influence - United States

• Carl Barth helped Taylor to develop speed-and-feed-calculating slide rules to a previously unknown level of usefulness. Similar aids are still used in machine shops today. Barth became an early consultant on scientific management and later taught at Harvard.
• H. L. Gantt developed the Gantt chart, a visual aid for scheduling tasks and displaying the flow of work.
• Harrington Emerson introduced scientific management to the railroad industry, and proposed the dichotomy of staff versus line employees, with the former advising the latter.
• Morris Cooke adapted scientific management to educational and municipal organizations.
• Hugo Münsterberg created industrial psychology.
• Lillian Gilbreth introduced psychology to management studies.
• Frank Gilbreth (husband of Lillian) discovered scientific management while working in the construction industry, eventually developing motion studies independently of Taylor. These logically complemented Taylor’s time studies, as time and motion are two sides of the efficiency improvement coin. The two fields eventually became time and motion study.
• Harvard University, one of the first American universities to offer a graduate degree in business management in 1908, based its first-year curriculum on Taylor’s scientific management.
• Harlow S. Person, as dean of Dartmouth’s Amos Tuck School of Administration and Finance, promoted the teaching of scientific management.
• James O. McKinsey, professor of accounting at the University of Chicago and founder of the consulting firm bearing his name, advocated budgets as a means of assuring accountability and of measuring performance.

I’ve long appreciated the aphorism that is the title of this post, and I think of it regularly when surfing and reading the latest insight from the many pundits and critics of the Web.  And today I am thinking about "the future of work".

It’s my assertion that the changes social computing will bring to knowledge work and knowledge-based workplaces may be even greater than the generally immature experiments that have taken hold today as early adopters play with tools that allow them to connect, create, converse, convulse, coopt, and carry on about all manner of things … including work issues, challenges and opportunities.

David Weinberger is a well-known expert on knowledge management and the hyperlinked web / organization.  He has from time to time written about how the digital infrastructure and the dynamics it fosters "cuts the slack out of interactions" (The Need For Leeway, October 2002) .  We need "slack" to reflect, to think, to imagine, to support the filling in and filling up of the connections we have made between people, information, task and problems.  And we need analysis and measurement, specialized skills, budgets, accountability and best practices to optimize work and eliminate what is clearly unnecessary, not useful and / or wasteful.

But efficiency is not and will not be the hallmark of human interaction, and human sociology in the modern workplace cannot forever take its architectural design principles for Taylorism.  As we watch Enterprise 2.0 emerge, I watch what seem to be regular waves of dots (widgets, applications, platforms, services and people in equal measure) joining together, using the Web, to meld efficiency and slack … the "both / and" so often cited as characteristic of this new environment.  A flow of questions, responses and pertinent information soldered together to provide a design, or a service, is not the same as carrying out efficient repeatable supervisable step-by-step tasks the result of which are combined with other sets of efficient repeatable supervisable step-by-step tasks to produce repeatable products or services (You can have any Model T you want, as long as it is black).

There’s an enormous amount of resistance, both intellectual and cultural, to acknowledging that maybe work cannot be designed and structured based on the principles that have been in place for more than three-quarters of a century now.  A lot of that has to do with what "management" still means to us (especially the incumbents of managerial roles).  It’s hard to give up power and control, especially when you are charged with making stuff happen and the budgets and performance management and compensation bonus schemes reinforce that charge. So, while it appears that the Internet, and thus the difficult-if-not-impossible-to-control flows of information, are here to stay, it also seems that about every 6 months or so there’s another wave of "this newfangled hyperlink stuff, personal publishing, connecting social-this-and-that is now officially over and it hasn’t yet changed the world".

Generally, I agree but with reservations.  Those reservations are that "we tend to overestimate the impacts in the short term because we overlook all the details of how things are done and the tenacious stickiness of peoples’ habits, and tend to underestimate the impacts in the longer term because we overlook or ignore the scope and depth of accumulated change" (not verbatim).

Today I found this snippet from Clay Shirky’s now-well-known Web 2.0 Expo keynote.

In my opinion he puts none too fine a point on the fact that the Internet seems to be with us to stay, and that it’s impacts will continue to accumulate.  Tomorrow’s workers won’t understand meetings, collaboration, supervision or accountability in the same way we do … all because of gin and that damned mouse.

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Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

… a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom.

[ Snip … ] 

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment.

Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?”

And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.

Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change.

Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

[ Snip … }

I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?

Well, the TV producer did not think this was going to be a big deal; she was not digging this line of thought. And her final question to me was essentially, "Isn’t this all just a fad?" You know, sort of the flagpole-sitting of the early early 21st century? It’s fun to go out and produce and share a little bit, but then people are going to eventually realize, "This isn’t as good as doing what I was doing before," and settle down.

And I made a spirited argument that no, this wasn’t the case, that this was in fact a big one-time shift, more analogous to the industrial revolution than to flagpole-sitting.

I was arguing that this isn’t the sort of thing society grows out of. It’s the sort of thing that society grows into.

But I’m not sure she believed me, in part because she didn’t want to believe me, but also in part because I didn’t have the right story yet. And now I do.

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Is This An Argument For or Against More Social Computing Inside the Firewall ?

April 28, 2008 at 3:04 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Distributed Work, Enterprise 2.0, Talent Management, Web 2.0

Discuss the issues outlined in the excerpt below.

I’m not going to comment on the general structural issues and dynamics, as they’re reasonably obvious.  Suffice it to say that using wikis and blogs can easily become another form of ongoing 360-degree review process, running continuously.

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The full Globe and Mail newspaper article is here.

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The boss isn’t listening

Managers might think the lines of communication are open, but an unwillingness to listen to tough issues leaves many underlings fearful of speaking frankly. Rebecca Dube reports

‘Hi there boss, I just wanted to let you know things are going great! Really great. In general. Yeah … um, though, there are a few issues. Like, the marketing plan? That you drew up? Is not working. At all."

"Hmmm … I’m pretty busy now. Can we talk later?"

"Um, sure. It’s just that the numbers are sliding really badly, and we’re running out of - "

"Sorry, gotta take this call."

Sound familiar? No one likes bad news. But new research shows that unwillingness to hear tough messages is the biggest blind spot for bosses.

"There is, in general, too much fear in organizations," says Patrick Barwise, emeritus professor of management and marketing at London Business School.

He and a colleague analyzed more than 4,000 U.S. managers’ 360-degree reviews - so called because they incorporate feedback from subordinates and co-workers as well as superiors.

"The gap between managers’ self-evaluations and colleagues’ assessments is widest when it comes to gauging receptiveness to hearing about difficult issues," Dr. Barwise and Sean Meehan, professor of marketing and change management at IMD business school in Switzerland, wrote in April’s issue of the Harvard Business Review.

The biggest disconnect showed up when rating managers’ abilities to "Encourage others to express their views, even contrary ones," and "Listen willingly to concern expressed by others."

In other words, bosses think their "open door policy" is working well, while their underlings feel like they’re talking to a brick wall.

[ Snip … ]

One culprit is lack of time. Listening to a problem and solving it takes longer than nodding along to "everything’s great" updates. Of course, that’s time well spent if it prevents disaster in the long run, but too many companies forget that perspective.

Some companies actively try to foster an environment of openness. Dr. Barwise points to the example of Toyota, where any employee - no matter how junior - is empowered to stop the assembly line if he or she sees a problem.

[ Snip … ]

Ironically, Dr. Barwise thinks that as the world economy increasingly struggles, creating more bad news for business, the tendency for managers to evade hard truths only grows.

"I think it’s getting worse," he says.

Employee - Speaking truth to power

How do you talk so your boss will listen? Some tips:

Pick the right boss. If you work for a Stalin-type, all your lovely communication skills will be for naught. Keep a low profile and work on your résumé instead.

Present factual evidence. Make your case with data, not opinions. It helps if you’re right, too.

Don’t be a gloomy Gus. Discuss flaws in the context of making the company stronger, and focus on the benefits of fixing them.

Don’t sit on it. If you spot a problem, raise it in conversation as soon as possible.

Boss - Can you handle the truth?

If you’re the boss, here are some tips on encouraging honest communication so you find out what you need to know from your employees:

Repetition, repetition, repetition. You can’t declare an "open-door policy" on the first day of work and expect it to sink in. If you want truthful feedback, ask for it regularly.

Don’t shoot the messenger. Sure, you know that, but putting it into practice is hard. If you freak out when you hear about a cost overrun, chances are you won’t hear about the next one.

The truth takes time. If you rush through meetings and give your employees the impression that you never have time for them, they’re less likely to come to you with important concerns.

If your company does 360-degree reviews, pay attention to them.

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Will Enterprise 2.0 Drive Management Innovation ?

April 26, 2008 at 12:48 am · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Distributed Work, Enterprise 2.0, KM, Talent Management, Web 2.0, Web Apps

I wrote this post about three months ago for my personal blog.  Today I was talking with a colleague about it, decided to re-read it, and have now gone through and edited it (in an attempt at greater clarity).  I hope it adds to this conversation on the future of work, and I’d also be delighted to learn what anyone may think of it … good, bad or indifferent.

Gary Hamel has called for fundamental management innovation in his recently-published book The Future of Management.  This call to exploration, experimentation and action is aligned with the emergence of the much-debated arena of Enterprise 2.0.

Here’s a key excerpt:

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This may not be a detailed design spec for a 21st-century management system, but I doubt it’s far off. Argue with me if you like, but I’m willing to bet that Management 2.0 is going to look a lot like Web 2.0.

Most of us grew up in a "post-industrial" society. We are now on the verge of a post-managerial society, perhaps even a post-organizational society.

Before you object, let me assure you that this doesn’t imply a future without managers. Just as the coming of the knowledge economy didn’t wipe out heavy industry, so the dawning of a post-managerial society won’t produce a world free of executives and administrators. Yet it does herald a future in which the work of managing will be performed less and less by "managers". To be sure, activities will still need to be coordinated, individual efforts aligned, objectives decided upon, knowledge disseminated, and resources allocated, but increasingly this work will be distributed out to the periphery.

While Management 2.0 won’t completely supplant Management 1.0, the two versions aren’t entirely compatible. There are going to be conflicts. Indeed, I think the most bruising contests in the new millenium won’t be fought along the lines that separate one competitor or business ecosystem from another, but will be fought along the lines that separate those who wish to preserve the privileges and power of the bureaucratic class from those who hope to build less structured and less tightly managed organizations. Richard Florida sees the same battle shaping up. In The Rise of the Creative Class, he puts it bluntly: "The biggest issue at stake in this emerging age is the ongoing tension between creativity and organization." This is, perhaps, the most critical and intractable management trade-off of all, and therefore, the one most worthy of inspired innovation.

It will take more than advances in technology to issue in the post-managerial age. As I noted earlier, management and organizational innovation often lags far behind technological innovation. Right now, your company has 21st-century Internet-enabled business processes, mid-20th-century management processes, all built atop 19th-century management principles.

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It’s getting clearer and clearer today that the capabilities and dynamics of consumer-based social software … those funny things called blogs, and wikis, and widgets stitched together into  web services though the use of APIs … are finding their ways into the workplace.  Why wouldn’t they ?  After all they are the means by which we are discovering how human activity (purposeful and otherwise) translates to the online environment.  People have always  been creating and building up "...  knowledge through exchanging information, talking and arguing and pointing out other ideas and sources of information and ways to do things."

The 2.0 label is said to denote a more interactive, less static environment.  Whether we like it or not, we are  passing from an era in which things were assumed to be controllable, able to be deconstructed and then assembled into a clear, linear, always replicable and (thus) static form, to an era characterized by a continuous  flow of information.  Because these flows feed the activities of organizations large and small, they necessarily demand to be interpreted and shaped into useful inputs and outputs — what we call knowledge work.

What today we call Enterprise 2.0 can also be seen as the emergent stage of the intersection of significant advances in information technology, management science applied to business process and the analysis and control of operational activities.  These forces and factors are converging in today’s workplaces, wherein a continuous flow of information is the rule rather than the exception.  Thus, as Hamel asserts,  it’s useful if not essential to cast a critical eye on the assumptions about static sets of tasks and knowledge arranged in specific (and relatively static) constellations on an organization chart.  See all major job evaluation methodologies for more detail

I believe that we need to revisit the fundamental principles of work design AND the basic rules used to configure hierarchical organizations in which the primary assumption is that knowledge is put to use in a vertical chain of decision-making.  I am not arguing that we need to replace hierarchy holus-bolus … rather, I am suggesting that the combined capabilities of information systems and social computing, and two decades of widespread experience with team and organizational development processes permits centralization (read hierarchy) where and when necessary, and networked configurations where and when necessary … both centralization and decentralization.

That both centralization and decentralization of information flows in the hands of knowledge workers can operate simultaneously and effectively is, I think, a significant state change, and should be used to inform the basic assumptions about the design of knowledge work.

As for the management innovation called for by Hamel … it is my belief that the organizational development principles that have been developed over the past 30 - 50 years represent a large and pretty coherent body of work that stretches from Participative Work Design through QWL, quality circles, socio-technical systems approaches, self-directed and self-managing teams, GE-style "workouts", inclusive and participative large-scale strategic change methods and dialogue-and-consensus building models and approaches to "management" (visioning, objective setting, responsibility assignment, resource allocation, implementation, measurement, etc.) like Future Search and Open Space. 

The various elements of these approaches and methodologies have been pushed or pulled into place over the last several decades as software and integrated information systems have brought constant flows of information to the process of designing, developing and delivering products and services.  This in turn has led to fragmentation of efforts ay productivity as well as potentially making it easier, faster and more effective to create flows that are integrated and focused.  The trick is to be able to do both and choose which is necessary why and when.

Also, now we more and more often live and work in networks as well as hierarchies.  The principles cited in the paragrapsh above have developed over the past several decades to soften, mitigate or work around the more rigid and less effective aspects of hierarchical work and organizational design. The daily and copious flows of information both internally and from customers and markets essentially dictate, now, that much knowledge work takes shape as projects or as time-limited initiative.  These require collaboration and the horizontal discovery and use of knowledge when and where it is needed or can best be put to use. 

The architectural challenge is to design and implement both work processes and the ways humans interact (with both the work and each other) intelligently whilst allowing for change(s) as needed.  That means understanding much better the structure and dynamics of networks and the new influence of greater transparency when addressing issues such as decisions about what is to be centralized or decentralized, who is to be involved and why (competencies, availability, fit with team, and so on), what is  individual or group activity, and how accountability, reporting and tracking activities supervised,

Many examples of these factors and influences have appeared on the shelves as the management, leadership and organizational behaviour sections of bookstores have expanded rapidly during the past two decades.  The experimentation with inclusive, participative and somewhat democratic developmental processes mirrors some of the core dynamics in the more consumer driven and public involvement in use of the Web. 

 As similar tools, services and dynamics begin to penetrate our workplaces, I expect we will seek methods, practices and philosophies that track closely in parallel with the process of  enquiry, exploration, sensemaking, negotiation and implementation set out by Dave Snowden’s Cognitive Edge approaches to intractable issues and organizational complexity.

I think there is an important coherence to much of what has been being developed over the past two decades or so.  To reiterate, as this OD framework has developed much of it was aimed, bit by bit, at mitigating the harsher effects of having to lead and manage hierarchically under old models while striving to discover and use what actually works.  Dave Pollard, a well-known knowledge management expert, calls these "workarounds", and  has often suggested that most traditional management methods are becoming less and less useful but are still in place as the proxies for status and power.  He and I both believe that generally  people want to do good and effective work and so keep at it,  constantly developing and using work-arounds.  This is OD at its most basic … discovering what works best when people need to cooperate and collaborate to get things done and meet objectives, and then working at "learning" it, integrating it into the way things are done around here.

OD principles "understand" and play nice with Web 2.0 participative and collaborative dynamics.

I think OD has suffered from being seen as "soft" and a "nice-to-have-time-to-do", especially in the chaotic and ambiguous environment of the first decade of the 21st century.  While it is a maxim in the OD field that "the soft stuff is the hard stuff", this can be and often is brushed aside or put down by the hard-nosed management hard-asses, the "I want to measure everything and tolerate no slack" crowd. 

Clearly we need both objectives, metrics and well-defined processes AND enough slack and support to help people learn, adapt and work around ineffective or obsolete policies, practices and processes.  I am increasingly of the opinion that there is a coherent and pertinent model available for working effectively in Enterprise 2.0.  However it is not seen today as the dominant "management" model. 

The dynamics generated by today’s networked knowledge workers using lightweight, easy-to-use social computing tools and web services welded together with existing integrated information systems are similar in reach, scope and pace to the the challenges explored by the field of organizational development … only with more regular frequency and greater intensity.

Taken together as a coherent management framework, perhaps the fundamental principles of organizational development and learning  represent the beginnings of the innovation in management Gary Hamel is suggesting we need.  Another of the great management thinkers, Stan Davis, suggested as much twenty years ago at the end of Chapter 3 in his 1987 book Future Perfect:

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"Electronic information systems enable parts of the whole organization to communicate directly with each other, where the hierarchy wouldn’t otherwise permit it. What the hierarchy proscribes, the network facilitates: each part in simultaneous contact with all other parts and with the company (see expanded definition above)as a whole. The organization can be centralized and decentralized simultaneously: the decentralizing mechanism in the structure, and the coordinating mechanism in the systems.

Networks will not replace or supplement hierarchies; rather the two will be encompassed within a broader conception that embraces both."

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Tags: hierarchy, Enterprise 2.0, wirearchy, organizational development, management innovation

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Systems Architecture, Applications and End-Users

April 23, 2008 at 7:32 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Distributed Work, Web 2.0, Web Apps

I am not a technologist.  There, that’s out, for anyone who may still be labouring under the misapprehension that I understand anything about information technology even remotely, other than conceptually what it does and how it gets done..  However, I do spend a lot of time thinking about the impacts of technology and its use on human sociology and anthropology in the work and business arenas..

That’s why when this Whit Andrews (Gartner’s lead analyst on search) quote on the FASTForward Enterprise 2.0 blog caught my eye, I immediately began thinking about what this means for knowledge workers and organizations still working on understanding what E2.0 means to them and for them.

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“End-users of information access technology do not recognize, respect and treat as reasonable the divisions that application architecture have forced on information access strategy.”

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It can be argued, and successfully (I think) that notwithstanding much work at integration there’s a lot of siloed and compartmentalized information systems in use out there … and you can even be forgiven for assuming or thinking that information technology designed to do what a given business process needs done is natural.  However, it remains problematic for many organizations today that accessing information is mightily influenced by the architecture of specialized applications, and those specialized applications have often been designed for siloed or functionally separated business processes and organizations

The "forcing of architecture on access strategy" has (both unconsciously and at times consciously, I think) come about due to 1) a general replication-of-reporting-relationships-on-the-org chart as the formal route or map for the information flows supported by the architecture, and 2) insufficient attention to the patterns of information flow actually used in the process of putting information and knowledge to work.

Silo-busting and improved cross-functional communications have long been two of the primary objectives of many organizations in their quests for greater effectiveness and efficiency, or their "search for excellence" as they work on going "from good to great".  And more often than not they still are.

However, with the advent of the "user revolution" that Web 2.0 continues to promise and enable, real and substantive change can be seen on the horizon.  I have said before, and continue to believe, that the use of social software with minimal policy restrictions beyond "don’t be stupid" would go a long way towards silo-busting and opening up cross-functional flows of information, support accelerated and deeper learning and increase the opportunities for innovation that bubble up from committed and engaged people working together on purpose.

End users in a Web 2.0 environment now have a wide choice of tools for sharing and shaping what they know and what they learn, and it’s highly probable that they (as a generality) do not want one or a few applications imposed by the organization "forcing their hand" so to speak.  They want to use the tools they find easy, or that work nicely with their cognitive, communications and collaboration styles, and they want to be able to change when something better comes along.  And increasingly they don’t "understand" why what they want to use won’t work with the systems in place.

 "End-users … do not recognize, respect and treat as reasonable" ….

Welcome to another episode of the "mass customization of work".

Remember all the systems training courses to which you used to send all sorts of workers ?  As JP Rangaswami has been known to state, "Tomorrow’s workers have been using online applications, platforms, widgets and services for a while now, and so they’ll be all trained up when they report to work".

 It’s the organizations for which they will work that have to be trained now

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Managing Your Flow …

April 6, 2008 at 10:46 am · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Distributed Work, Enterprise 2.0, KM, Web 2.0, Web Apps

… as the constant flow of information and interaction is likely to never cease (unless there is a major outage in Internet service at some point in time, though that has not yet happened).

And yet, it can be argued that the ways we work with the constant flows of information are still very new.  We are coming out of a good half-century of "work design" in which much information and knowledge was highly structured.  Indeed, organizational structures (the architecture of the ways in which knowledge is put to work) have been designed to ensure that the flows of information and knowledge went "up" to the top, to the small executive group who watch, think, strategize and direct.

We used to … and still do … speak of "reporting relationships", as in "who, or what job, do you (or does your job) report to ?".  As I think many people realize, over time that kind of structure tends to ensure that the kinds of information that "flow up" becomes edited (edit the bad news out, or frame it so that it is acceptable).

Given that we are arguably moving headlong into a new environment for working with information and knowledge in constant flows, I often find myself wondering what will be next .. and then next .. and then next .. in the endless stream of applications that help us manipulate, manage and sometimes mangle the process of writing and publishing to the Web.

The Web is now a major part of hundreds of millions of peoples’ lives. Personal publishing of some form or another, whether it’s using a wiki with your team or is called blogging or something else, won’t be going away any time soon.

As we use software and the Internet more and more for working with information and knowledge it is becoming clearer and clearer that  every individual has her or his own working style (have you ever watched over your friend’s, or your sister’s, or your dad’s shoulder whilst they are doing something on the computer, or on the web ? I’ll bet you’re just like me, and everyone else I have ever seen … you just instinctively want to reach out ands steer, because they aren’t doing it the way you do) …

On the Web, info flows in to your conscious awareness all the time .. continuously. Whether it’s via an RSS aggregator, or through some search activity, or just by browsing and link-hopping. You’re always watching, reading .. using your cognitive capabilities and style to *interact* with the flows of information passing in front of your eyes.

The quest has been underway for some time … and won’t stop …  to design, make and offer applications that give an individual maximum time for reading and thinking whilst (by definition)  one is at the center of this continuous flow of information. Ideally,  most operations - most anything you want to do, other than typing itself - down to one click, but it’s not likely that we’ll get every operation down to that level of simplicity. But many, if not most will be.

In the blogging / personal publishing environment, publishing all sorts of other digital content (podcasts, self-created mp3’s, photo slide shows, video clips) is quickly becoming as easy as publishing text, links and images are now. It will soon be the case for knowledge workers everywhere to employ formidably simple *information pivots* which will allow you, the personal publisher, read, think, write and express yourself as clearly and elegantly as possible … whilst still offering you significant flexibility, versatility and power to address the wide range of individual’s personal publishing habits.

This will require workers to become more effective at managing both theior cognitive capacity and the way(s) in which they put that to work in the ongoing, never-ending, flow of information. And this too is a never-ending quest.

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Desktop ? Who Needs a Desktop ?

March 26, 2008 at 6:53 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Distributed Work, Enterprise 2.0, KM, Web 2.0, Web Apps, Web Commuting

Ed Burnette of ZDNet asks a question that I suspect will commonly be asked (but from a slightly different perspective) in the workplace setting over the next five years or so. 

Installing and uninstalling and maintaining anything on the desktop (be it Windows or Mac or Linux) is hard, and more and more people won’t bother. Why? Because there’s a better alternative.

It fits with the moves towards cloud computing, social computing, and the accessibility of much what constitutes the raw materials for knowledge work via mobile devices and / or from several different geographic places at the same tiome.

Work, increasingly, doesn’t happen where your computer is … "work" happens (or can happen) in that fuzzy space somewhere between the back of your skull, the interactivity-supporting platforms you use, and the images and text that are on whatever screen is in front of your face whether interacting with information or another person (or both).

Ed casts the issue from a user perspective, and not necessarily from a workplace perspective, though it’s pretty easy to imagine and extrapolate.

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Microsoft, Apple and the death of the desktop

Installing and uninstalling and maintaining anything on the desktop (be it Windows or Mac or Linux) is hard, and more and more people won’t bother. Why? Because there’s a better alternative.

Another way of saying this is, the browser is the new desktop.

Case in point: My wife has been complaining lately that her “computer was slow”. She’s running Windows XP on a Dell machine, so first I checked out the usual suspects. Viruses? Nope. Spyware? None found. Crapware? Already gone, from the day after we got the machine. Startup programs?The browser is the new desktop. Removed a few but it didn’t help. I started the task manager, but saw nothing suspicious. No processes using CPU or disk I/O. But still, she said it was slow.

So I watched what she was doing. She brought up the browser to check web-based mail on gmail.com. She used google.com to search for something for our kid’s classwork. She went to cartoonnetwork.com and webkins.com to play games with the kids. And so forth. Notice a pattern here? Everything was in the browser. It was the *browser* that was slow, not the computer. In her mind, the browser was the computer.

The problem turned out to be too many plug-ins in the browser. She had a Upromise plug-in, a Google toolbar plug-in, a Real media plug-in, and a bunch of other plug-ins I didn’t even recognize. I turned it all off, restarted the browser, and poof, “the computer” was several times faster. Cue fanfare.

My point is that even with the technical limitations under the covers–things like browser incompatibilities, offline storage, JavaScript memory leaks, etc. (all those things that developers pull their hair out about)–the convenience of internet-delivered applications is just so compelling that all other issues are falling by the wayside. In the span of a few years, we’ve witnessed a major paradigm shift in the way computing is surfaced to users.

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I don’t expect the desktop at work will die any time really soon, although it will be interesting to watch the situation unfold.  There have been a number of technologies move through our North American and western European organizational lives pretty quickly, actually … electric typewriters, calculators, fax machines.

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.                                                                                                                R. Barsalo, SAT

I’ve always found the above graphic interesting.  Each of the small human figures represents a generation .. you’ll notice that at the start (in the top left-hand corner - the little generation icon is white.  That first figure represents humankind’s invention of language.  Them, things don’t change, generation after generation … oral transmission of language is how we distributed and used information beyond keeping it inside our senses and head.

Attention, change alert ! About 300 generations ago (notice the icons change to light grey 30% of the way along the fourth row from the bottom) humans invented writing and the use of symbols.  Then, again, things didn’t change much generation after generation (in terms of a physical-cognitive perspective of input, processing and output of information) until only 35 generations ago, when the Gutenberg printing press was invented and came into widespread use.

The bottom right-hand corner of the graphic shows 7 differently-coloured icons, each one representing a new source or channel for information reception, transmission and the processing we need to do whenever we use whatever medium it may be that we are using at a point in time.  All the new modes and media have occurred in the past 100 years or so.

The point of this graphic is that for a long long time our cognitive intake and processing capabilities (the way(s) our brain works with information) had plenty of time, over many generations, to adapt to changed modes of information flows.  It’s most interesting that as all these new methods have come (and to some extent gone or changed), the workplace and the formality with which information and knowledge have been treated have been increasing … until recently.  In keeping with the interconnectivity of the web and the accelerated (and accelerating still) flow of information coming from the interconnected environment, we are hearing much more about the organic nature of creating and using knowledge enabled by social computing tools and services.

 It will be interesting to see if it will take another generation or not before work is just one of another cognitive tasks we all perform whenever and wherever our attention is directed to a specific need or issue .. for information, for response, for decision-making, for action … and it mainly takes place in the constantly looping invisible "space" screens,  the seeing and hearing information,  and the processing in our brain into some form of output, an action.

However … first we shape our tools, then our tools shape us.  The beginning of the transition from desktops, and from both physical and cognitive habits in terms of how we interact with, shape, use and distribute information has been (for better and / or worse) shaped significantly by the other transitions of the past 100 years pointed out above. We still take in information, by and large, in structured forms and ways .. it’s only recently that people have been asking deeper questions about what (for example) is a document and what is not a document.  Please remember, for the vast majority of us we’ve only had hyperlinks to play with for maybe a decade.  The horizontal movements and use of information and knowledge, in self-generated  and self-supported feedback loops beyond face to face oral conversation is new for all of us.

But when our kids and grandkids will be in the workplace … ?

We don’t need no steenkin’ desktops.  But I’ll bet they’ll be around for a while yet.

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