Design Dogma

June 30, 2008 at 2:42 am · Filed under AppGap Tips, Tips + Pointers, Work Design

I was recently reading through an article by Eric Reiss‘ on dogma for making websites usable. With a number of AppGap authors writing about work design and information design recently, I thought I would share Eric’s take on Orwell’s Rules for Authors applied to online information system design:

1. Anything that exists only to satisfy the internal politics of the site owner must be eliminated.
2. Anything that exists only to satisfy the ego of the designer must be eliminated.
3. Anything that is irrelevant within the context of the page must be eliminated.
4. Any feature or technique that reduces the visitor’s ability to navigate freely must be reworked or eliminated.
5. Any interactive object that forces the visitor to guess its meaning must be reworked or eliminated.
6. No software, apart from the browser itself, must be required to get the site to work correctly.
7. Content must be readable first, printable second, downloadable third.
8. Usability must never be sacrificed for the sake of a style guide.
9. No visitor must be forced to register or surrender personal data unless the site owner is unable to provide a service or complete a transaction without it.
10. Break any of these rules sooner than do anything outright barbarous.

Eric’s words are a reminder that often we forget that our designs often don’t fit the worker, but are implemented to suit something else, whether a management practice or someone’s ego. What we end up with is something that is less than fit-for-purpose.

When we bring new tools and practices into the modern workplace we shouldn’t forget the philosophy of user-centred design and take time to consider:

1. Who are the users?
2. What are the users’ tasks and goals?
3. What are the users’ experience levels?
4. What functions do the users need?
5. What information might the users need, and in what form do they need it?
6. How do users think things should work?

Maybe if more of us drew on these questions in our craft, as do so many of those evangelists who’ve brought us web 2.0 tools like wikis and blogs, then practices like knowledge management would have been more successful.

M

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2008 CIO Wishlists — SOA or Web 2.0?

May 29, 2008 at 2:14 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0

A recent Rust Report details the wishlists of CIOs, with service-oriented architecture, not Enterprise 2.0 toys like wikis and blogs, dominating the shopping lists [1]. This focus is seen as an important enabler for improving internal business and technology processes, business reporting and information management, infrastructure, and communicating with partners, suppliers and customers. But does this focus mean Web 2.0 is loosing the game?

Some, like John Hagel, might suggest that there’s a cultural divide between SOA and Web 2.0, that may be at work.

“The evangelists for SOA tend to dismiss Web 2.0 technologies as light-weight ‘toys’ not suitable for the ‘real’ work of enterprises. The champions of Web 2.0 technologies, on the other hand, make fun of the ‘bloated’ standards and architectural drawings generated by enterprise architects, skeptically asking whether SOAs will ever do real work.”

I think Dion Hinchcliffe’s article on mashups, though, puts the CIO wishlist into perspective:

“the continued proliferation of high quality Web parts and open APIs, especially in the last couple of years, has offered compelling sourcing options for enterprise mashups is the making the expanding Global SOA compelling as local IT resources for building and improving business solutions.”

Hinchcliffe’s diagram suggests a world in which the SOA serves to support the interaction of components for a variety of users and purposes, of which social computing tools play a specific role — visualisation of deep-content from disparate systems, repurposing data, and knowledge entry points for further repurposing.

I guess you can have your cake and eat it too!M

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1. Rust e-Research (2008). The Rust Report, March 2.

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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.

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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

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Global tools for global workers

May 7, 2008 at 12:00 am · Filed under AppGap Tips, Web Commuting

The world just seems to be getting smaller and smaller.

I recently visited the USA for a conference and had to keep in touch with my work projects back home in Australia. The main problem, of course, were the time differences. To work effectively, I needed were a few tools to keep track of the different time zones back in Oz — Canberra (home), Melbourne and Adelaide — as well as the local times where I was staying as I travelled around — Miami, Florida, Anaheim and Honolulu.

Here’s the tools I used for roaming the globe:

• iTouch: Like it’s big brother, the iPhone, this MP3 player has the ability to add a number of different city times and includes an alarm to let you know when you’ve got appointments. It’s also good for flights with its fairly good music and video capabilities — especially good when you get stuck on long domestic flights without personal in-flight entertainment
• Google Calendar: A part of the Google Office suite, this Web 2.0 app is great at handling and keeping track of different time zones and the events and appointments that go with it. It kept the times as I needed them, but when I viewed my calendar as a widget through the iTouch, Google detected I was in Honolulu and change the time zones to Honolulu time
• Motorola Razr: It’s now an old phone, but it is quadband GSM, meaning with global roaming I can take it just about anywhere in the world. Global roaming tends to be very expensive, so I just bought a pre-paid SIM card from AT&T and a telephone card. It made the difference between $2 and 12 cents per minute calls from the USA to Australia. Obviously, the downside is the number of digits you need to enter before you actually get to listen to the person on the other end of the phone! I would have preferred to use Skype, but I wasn’t always confident that I would have internet access during the four weeks I was travelling.
• Dual time-zone watch: While it’s not uncommon, having a wrist watch that could display two time zones at the same time was incredibly valuable. I just changed one time to reflect the local time and at a glance I could also see what time it was back home in Canberra
• Toshiba R400 tablet PC: I’ve been using a tablet PC for about 6 months now and I’ve not picked up a paper notebook since. Weighing only 1.72kg (3 pounds 7 ounces … note that the Apple MacBook Air weighs 1.36kg or 3 pounds), and with all flavours of WiFi you could want, it’s the perfect travelling companion for those on the move who want to take all their stuff (paper and electronic) with them

It’s an array of tools that works very well for me. I might not have given up all my desktop software just yet — I still have a need for Microsoft Visio for creating workflow diagrams, Mindjet’s Mindmanager for creating mind mapping, and Axure’s RP for prototyping great user experience web app designs — but I can see that one day soon all I will need is an internet connection and I’ll be able to work from anywhere around the world.

What tools do you use?

M

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Where have all the intranets gone? Long time passing

April 14, 2008 at 8:12 am · Filed under Collaboration, Intranets

Intranets first emerged as recognition that because the web was a great way to communicate with an external audience it must also be just as equally effective at communicating with internal staff and stakeholders [1].

And as the internet boomed, we saw many other opportunities to capitalise on. Not only did we expect that intranets should be the main vehicle for internal communication, but we also began to expect them to help us share knowledge and collaborate on ideas [2]. Unfortunately, studies suggest that we have failed to capitalise on these opportunities. [3]

What has resulted from our investment in our intranets has been little more than the paper equivalent of a filing cabinet. Business divisions publish information on themselves with very little care for their audience, in both communication of information and the services they provide in a way that has meaning to their internal audience and in categorising it so that others are able to easily find it later. Some analysts suggest that the reason intranets have failed to meet our expectations is because information is never well structured and they just are so hard to use. As a consultant and an Information Architect working in Australia, this is what I see all the time – websites that reflect those who publish information and structured in a way that reflects their internal processes, functions and organisational structure, rather than the needs of the target audience. While I try to advise that in the creation of websites that the owners and authors consider a user-centred design approach, it often fails to achieve real traction when intranets are concerned.

What ever the reason why intranets fail, CEOs now consider intranets little more than an information tool [4] – about storing and retrieving information. With the excitement of wikis and blogs in the corporate space, people like Charlene from Forrester are advising executives to ” throw out your Intranet and replace it with a wiki” [5]. And it’s a message that is being listened to because:

“Regardless of the type of innovation undertaken, over 75 percent of CEOs indicated that collaboration is very important to innovation. One CEO described its importance on a scale of one to five as “enormous. I’d give this a six if I could.” [6]

Unfortunately, the road to knowledge management hasn’t been a smooth one. Many vendors in the 90s touted their products as providing ‘knowledge management’ without regard to the true and underlying issues for effective knowledge management – that sharing knowledge is a social activity, not a technology-based one. When we have news to tell friends and colleagues we usually meet them for coffee or pick up the telephone and have a conversation. When we need to share ideas about how to make a process work more effectively we meet in a little room for a little while and brainstorm ideas. When a project finishes we often have ‘lessons learned’ in a hope to tell others about the successes and failures in order to learn from them. Enabling these activities to occur easily and encouraging them is real knowledge management in practice. The only problem is that the people you want aren’t always around and we’re not good at recording the truth and meaning behind these activities adequately because processes the processes for recording what we have in our heads is typically just too slow. When publishing information and sharing knowledge through our intranets we usually have policies that mean content requires approval, editorial attention, and so on. The same goes for records management processes. You need to title the file in a special way, with special metadata that only trained records managers know about, before you can store your information away for posterity. While these policies and procedures are to ensure that official corporate information is the ’source of truth’ handling it in the same way as we communicate information through our internet sites just isn’t productive.

Ultimately, the way we typically govern our information repositories hamper an individual’s ability to share their knowledge. And this is the thing that social computing tools have over our intranets – instant gratification.

Wikis have soft security models: anyone can create new content; change content; correct spelling mistakes made by others; correct facts; expand the ideas; and interlink content all without a formal approval processes. Ultimately, it means that those who want to create content and contribute are free to do so without the hurdles we’re used to seeing with intranets.

Blogs are pretty much the same. In it, people share their personal thoughts and ideas and self-publish their information without the proverbial chains of the information gatekeepers. If we look back to the rich oral history of many of our cultures, blogging is a reflection of the need to story-tell, carrying with it important information not only on the what – the facts like the reports we typically store in our recordkeeping systems – but also the meaning behind the why and how.

And this is where our intranets have gone. It’s not so much a suggestion that intranets are out-of-date, but that as technology grows, we have new tools that are better suited to the ways in which we want to share knowledge and information at work. So long as our CEOs and CIOs understand that these tools won’t deliver knowledge management themselves, but help to enable it, I don’t think I mind so much if traditional intranets fade away.

M

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[1] Lawton, S. ( 1995) Intranets fuel growth of Internet access tools. Dgital news and review, 24 April, 1995

[2] Melcrum Intranet Survey (2001)

[3] StepTwo Designs (2001)

[4] Manchester, A. (2007) Intranets: getting senior management buy-in. The Melcrum Blog. 27 August.

[5] Leib, R. (2008) Wiki-ize Your Intranet. ClickZ. http://blog.clickz.com/080309-131558.html

[6] IBM Institute for Business Value, The Global CEO Study (2006), March.

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Advice from Australian Government — use IA

March 22, 2008 at 3:30 am · Filed under Information Architecture, Web Apps

How do you know whether your web tools or apps will be effective and usable?

Advice from the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) suggests that government agencies draw on the discipline of information architecture to ensure “ensure that sites meet [both] business and user needs”. A key role of AGIMO is to identify and promote ‘Better Practice’. They’ve created several checklists to help with the key issues for websites in the Australian Government context — checklists that are equally important for businesses who are endeavouring to deliver Web 2.0 applications into the market.

Australian Government agencies are finding that [information architecture] issues are particularly important when they are redesigning or redeveloping existing websites … Sites established several years ago may have grown in an ad-hoc way or grown very large. As a result they may be confusing to users and difficult to manage and may not accurately reflect current agency priorities.

With Web 2.0 applications like Flickr and Facebook quickly becoming the benchmark for user-interaction online, AGIMO’s advice is a timely reminder that online applications and collaborative software, need to be designed well, and information well-structured, in order to assist people to achieve their information needs.

IA is the foundation of good website design. It is about planning where information and services will be located on the site in the most convenient and logical way for users. Effective IA helps ensure that sites meet [both] business and user needs.

M

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Beyond Web 2.0

March 7, 2008 at 1:22 pm · Filed under Semantic Technologies, Web 2.0, Web 3.0

While organisations continue to struggle with adopting E2.0 through Web 2.0 products, some are looking beyond and asking the question “what’s next?”. If Web1.0 was about communication, and Web 2.0 about collaboration, what should we be doing now in order to prepare for the future demands of users and the workplace, and have the upper-hand on competitors?

To prepare for the future we need to understand the evolution of the web, and Gary Hayes suggests that it is moving toward a more immersive environment.

We’re just starting to see that now with Web 2.0 — pushing the boundaries of information sharing from centralised and controlled by organisations to decentralised, collaborative and controlled by consumers. In essence, this means:

• Web 1.0 - unidirectional and “push”. E.g. traditional brochureware-style websites
• Web 2.0 - interactive - “push” + “pull”. E.g. Social computing websites like MySpace, Wikipedia, and Facebook
• Web 3.0 - immersive. E.g. 3D Virtual Worlds and ubiquitous computing
• Web 4.0, 5.0 … the semantic world with intelligent agents and adaptive information

The real benefits of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 (as defined by Gary) are just starting to emerge, with online spaces to work and share information, technology that truly supports information anytime and anyplace. Society is witnessing the emergence of digital natives who are born ‘technology aware’ and expect to be able to use the same technology they take for granted in their social lives in the work environment. And while some may have thought that the notion of a truly semantic web was dead and burried, the problems with database interaction and data interoperability to provide true intelligent context to data and information in online environments has raised the issue again:

How can we prepare and provide for the future of the web?

Annie Rowland-Campbell, a researcher with FujiXerox, suggests that we need to start preparing our data systems for the future by using semantic technologies. That is, separating out our data and metadata, and introducing ontologies to articulate the relationships between data sources, and their relationships, in order to provide true context and meaning to information.

Why separate out these elements? Simply put, traditional database design isn’t scalable to the extent we need to provide for intelligent agents and adaptive information of Web 4.0 and beyond. Even if we’re only dealing with data exchange between 6 stores, for example, to provide a true and complete context of information to users, we still need 24 points of integration.

If we use semantic technologies, and introduce an ontological layer, suddenly we reduce the overall design complexity from 24 to 6.

For organisations in Europe, where language is the common barrier to information exchange, this approach is already reaping rewards, and is where the ISO/IEC 13250:2000 standard Topic Maps was born. The approach turns our original concept of the semantic web, a layer on top of the current web that annotates information in a way that is “understandable” by computers, into something that is actually able to be fully-realised to meet the needs of Web 2.0’s future.

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Twittering away

February 14, 2008 at 5:37 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Reviews, Web 2.0, Web Apps

We’re all time poor these days, so keeping up with friends, colleagues and team mates (even virtual ones) can be difficult. Whether it’s just reaching out for help or saying “hi”, Twitter has become a tool I’ve grown quite fond of to help me stay connected.

Launched in October 2006, Twitter is a combination of web instant messaging and sms-mobile phone texting. It allows you to:

• immediately communicate with all those registered users within your trusted network

• receive Twitter direct messages on your mobile phone or by email

• immediately communicate directly with an individual in your trusted network in much the same way as you would send an email or a text-message

• manage that trusted network, from whose messages you follow to those who you allow to see your messages

Given that a team’s cohesion, even the virtual ones, rely on a balance of both task and social factors, Twitter’s simplicity allows it to fit very neatly into the mix to meet both needs. It’s probably best used as a browser-plugin, like Twitbin for Firefox, sitting on the side of your browser giving you message updates from those who you follow every 5 minutes or so.

And it’s a tool that more and more individuals are using for quick communication with HitWise statistics for Twitter from Aug 06 to Mar 07 show that adoption is still on the rise.

You can even get BBC news feeds via a convenient mashup by Mario Menti. As far as user-managed subscriptions go, I wouldn’t be surprised if corporate bodies started to take notice of this simple yet powerful platform and begin twittering to their audience and even listenning to them via this channel as well.

M

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Communication, communities and collaboration

February 3, 2008 at 8:17 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Communities

Web 2.0 technology is completely changing how we interact online and the way in which modern businesses operate. But with the implementation of this technology, many organisations are experiencing stumbling blocks along the way. Why is it that some organisations are more successful than others in evolving in this direction? I think communication is an important factor.

I remember some years ago, when I was studying psychology, we examined communication structures and investigated which ones were more effective. Bavelas [1] [2] and Leavitt’s [3] research is the foundation for much of this work. They examined these factors about 50 years ago, and produced four models to describe communication structures:

1. Star (aka Wheel)
2. Y, and
3. Line (aka Chain)
4. Circle

Bavelas [1] reported that some configurations were better than others. Specifically:

• Time: The Wheel and Y were considerably faster, on average, than the Chain and Circle. The lack of hierarchical structure in these two models gives individuals greater ability to share information more quickly as each member is only one or two nodes away.

• Messages: The Wheel and Y used the least number of messages to communicate knowledge and information on task completion. The Chain was next, than the Circle (which used quite a bit more).

• Errors: The Wheel, the Y and Chain made the fewest errors in the tasks they were given, while the Circle made the most (however, the Circle had the most error corrections). This is because individuals have access to everyone else, rather than needing to use someone as an intermediary in order to confirm information.

• Satisfaction: The subjects in a the Circle network enjoyed themselves the most, followed by the Chain, the Y and finally the Wheel. This is factor is due to a perception of social equality in the groups’ structure: no one person receives more information than anyone else; and no one person is seen to be more important as a result. Obviously, given social equity is culture-specific, these findings only apply to those cultures low on Hofstede’s Power-Distance index.

• Leadership: The probability that the group had a leader went up in the order: Circle, Chain, Y, and Wheel. In addition, agreement as to who was the leader increased in the same order (it was 100% in the case of the wheel).

• Improvement: Circle people were very likely to say that they could have done things more efficiently and that was missing was “a system”. Wheel people did not feel they could improve much.

Etienne Wenger, a globally recognised thought leader in the field of learning theory and its application to business, suggests [4] that Communities of Practice create horizontal connections, not vertical ones of the type we see in the Chain Model reflected in the top-down structures in many traditional organisations. The implication is that the traditional hierarchical structures reflected in Chain communication models can impede the ability for individuals to communicate in order to work collaboratively, and, in turn, render the technology employed to collaborate ineffective.

For organisations willing to change to more horizontal communication models as a part of their organisational culture, task completion will be faster and more efficient because knowledge and information can be more easily transferred between members. If change is not forthcoming, then the adoption of social computing tools is likely to fail.

To achieve this end, therefore, the message is clear:

1. Change your top-down communication styles to something that is more horizontal — this doesn’t mean no hierarchy or leadership, but choosing a style that reflects both the social and task needs of the individuals, so that all members of the community of practice can help each other.
2. Encourage individuals to communicate and collaborate across organisational silos — individuals are rarely just a member of one community. Encouraging knowledge and information sharing across these communities, using ’s Bavela’s model, will likely decrease errors in task completion.
3. Empower individuals with tools that not only help with their work, but also facilitate horizontal communication — communication within and between communities doesn’t necessarily mean it has no work value. Organisations are even starting to see that social environments like Facebook serve as excellent corporate intranets.

M

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[1]. Bavelas, A. (1950) Communication patterns in task-oriented groups. Journal of Acoustical Sociology of America., 22, 725-730

[2]. Bavelas, A. (1948). A mathematical model for group structures. Applied Anthropology, 7, 16-30

[3]. Leavitt, H. J. (1951) Some effects of certain communications patterns on group performance, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 46, 38-50

[4]. Wolf, P. (2003) Interview with Etienne Wenger on Communities of Practice, 3 Nov. Online at: <www.knowledgeboard.com/…/item.cgi?id=458>, accessed on 4 Feb 2008.

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