At higher risk of having good ideas

August 24, 2009 at 2:59 pm · Filed under KM, Web 2.0, innovation, social networks

There has been something lately that the more channels we have for information flow (Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc.) the more we might really be isolating ourselves within a social network of people who are using the same tools that we use, reading the same blogs, and following the same Tweeters all the while we think that the volume of information equates to diversity of information.

Two articles crept to my attention in the first week of August:

• Serendipity, Lost in the Digital Deluge (Damon Darlin in the New York Times)
• Cosy social networks ‘are stifling innovation’ (New Scientist, Technology News Section) A better discussion is in the posts Too Much Networking? by J.C. Cavalcanti; and the original article ($$) is linked below.

The first article suggests that we are losing the ability to learn new things serendipitously as our social networks tend to grow along the lines of people who are like us and we rely on these networks for links to new ideas.  (I am reminded of a conversation on Chris Matthew’s program weekend August 22-23 about reading newspapers. The thing about reading a newspaper is that you never know what you might find when you turn the page.)

The second article newsbit points to a Science Magazine article by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger of the Kennedy School, “Can We Reinvent the Internet?” Mayer-Schönberger addresses the issue primarily from the viewpoint of the open software movement that is currently driving changes to the Internet. He posits that this community is so connected that fresh ideas are assimilated so quickly they do not have time to develop. Cavalcanti quotes the article:

“An overabundance of connections over which information can travel too cheaply can reduce diversity, foster groupthink, and keep radical ideas from taking hold.”

I’ve long been talking about the importance of diversity in networks in my workshops and training, in both contexts of organizational networks and personal networks.

The most compelling research examples in the importance of diversity in networks comes from Ronald Burt, whose books Structural Holes and Brokerage and Closure look at the structure of networks and the positions of individuals in the network. A structural hole represents a person or group who enjoys a singular position between two or more other groups. This person can have competitive advantage by being able to broker information between the two groups. (For a nice explanation of these concepts, see “Where to Get a Good Idea: Steal it Outside Your Group”, NYT article by Michael Erard.)

The point is very simple when you think about it (and this is how I explain it, as simply as possible). If you have a “closed” network, where everyone pretty much knows or knows about each other. A good aspect of this connectivity is that the network can serve as a filter — multiple tweets or retweets about a topic link usually means it’s worth following — and its possible to generate a common language. However, it’s not likely that the richest source of creativity — two unlikely ideas coming together — will occur. You need (or the organization needs) to have connections outside the group. As Burt puts it (using one of my favorite phrases ever, the title of this blog), “People who live in the intersection of social worlds ‘are at higher risk of having good ideas.”

You may not need to steal the ideas, but to take a close look at your networks. Your professional networks may be more closed than you would like, but it’s possible that your many social networks — clubs, hobbies, sports — may put you at risk of meeting people from other fields, with other types of knowledge.

This is equally true and important in organizational networks. The structural holes need to think like brokers and move information around selflessly and intentionally. There need to be weavers (or more appropriately, “mixers”) who provide opportunities for groups to meet and hear what each other is thinking or doing. And there needs to be a good outside listener who can find speakers and experts from outside the domain of the organization’s knowledge, bring them in, and let people find connections and generate new ideas as they will.

Social Media, What’s the Rush?

August 7, 2009 at 1:46 pm · Filed under Web 2.0

A couple of interesting notes from twitter pals this week. @kanter alerted me to a post by Alexandra Samuel, “Don’t Keep Up with Social Technology.”  Ms Samuel makes the point that when you spend a lot of time trying to keep up with all the changes, new tools, new techniques, new options that you are taking time away from actually using social media to get work done. She states it thusly:

The minute you stop trying to keep up, you open a far more exciting possibility: getting ahead with what matters to you, your team and your business.

There is no magic solution that will emerge; you just have to choose the available tools that will do the job for you. (She also provides, by analogy, a delicious observation by a friend who watched her poring over organizing options at IKEA: “there’s no combination of boxes that’s going to turn you into an organized person.”)

Recent research by Jakob Nielson, Social Networking on Intranets, via @sammarshal provides deep insight into the adoption of social media inside enterprises. It begins by suggesting that with respect to responding to expectations about being driven by Web 2.0 to Enterprise 2.0:

• Taking the slow road means that companies will risk losing workers who expect innovation in the outside world to reflect directly on how they communicate at work.
• Going for quick adoption means that companies must find ways to overcome the risks to corporate culture that adopting these tools can entail.

Nielson predicts that  3 to 5 years is a “common timeline for social intranet projects.” And it is of course not surprising to see that this research also shows that traction for using social media in companies comes from the grass roots, who are self-selecting tools that enable them to get ahead with business: “It’s about what the tools let users do and the business problems that tools address.”

The web summary of the report linked above contains a number of gems; it’s worth the read, as is the full report (168 pps, $$, from Nielson Norman Group.)  I am always happy to find corroboration for my deep-seated belief in the power of training and in investment of community managers and facilitation to assist people in becoming comfortable with new tools.

Adoption stories

July 17, 2009 at 3:59 pm · Filed under AppGap Tips, Change Management, Collaboration, Culture, Distributed Work, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Web Apps, social media, social tools

I’d saved a wonderful story by Michael Idinopulos of Socialtext about how moving from a shared space to private offices (What my Granddaddy Taught me about Information Flow). In the days before computers, brokers worked in a large open space in which information moved vary rapidly from one end of the floor to another. When the office layout was changed to give more people private offices and people began focusing their attention on their PCs, people “…lost the ability to communicate, and nobody had the slightest idea what was going on.”

You can’t read the story, of course without catching on that the open office floor in which information moves in waves is a lot like Web 2.0. From our PC (and Mac!) silos, we are finally liberated and can catch the breath of new ideas rolling over our shared spaces.  This is happening, outside.

Inside, adoption of Web 2.0 tools is not so much of a wave as a trickle. Inside companies, managers think about technologies in terms of security (bring it inside) and cost (it costs money to maintain something inside, so we can’t let people use free tools. [Hat tip to John Bordeaux for pointing to the irony in this story.]).

Inside, we deal with a series of waves, incremental introductions of technology and Web 2.0 services and look for the best way to encourage adoption. I’m guilty myself of responding to clients’ reason for lack of adoption as “the culture” when it can often be the manner in which  the new tool was introduced, or a lack of attention to the user interface/experience.

Adoption and culture being very much on my mind, I was interested to see Hutch Carpenter’s post in the Social Computing Journal Enterprise 2.0: Culture is as Culture Does. He argues that most companies are ready for social software at least to the extent that they acknowledge that employees are their most important asset.

He goes on to put together a wonderful graphic illustrating two paths to adoption of social tool pilots. He anchors the flow chart by two decision points.

• Defined use case? is the determinant of whether adoption goes in an official or a viral flow. This assumes that a well-defined use case has proven business value and that undefined use cases may not.  I agree that for a successful pilot in an organization, the defined “use case” must be centered around teams or groups that are engaged in some joint activity that requires flow of information.
• Exceed expectations? is the measurement that occurs when the two flows come back together and employee feedback has been processed. This decision point really implies that there is a funding decision to be made at this point.

Enterprise 2.0: Pilot Deployment Flow

There’s some good stuff in this diagram, and it’s flexible enough for adapting to specific circumstances. I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if, at the dawn of the PC era, Michael’s Granddaddy had through to work through the use cases of how PCs would affect the information flow on the trading floor.

The Connection <--> Collaboration Continuum

July 8, 2009 at 10:09 am · Filed under Web 2.0

Oliver Marks picks up on a conversation he didn’t know I was having with myself in his blog post, Collaborative Networks vs Social Networks. This social vs collaborative thread resonates with a tension that I’ve noticed in my client work lately, and also in trying to map social & collaborative tools to meet clients’ needs in supporting networks. It boils down to whether the emphasis in the network is to make connections to share experiences, contacts, ideas; or to collaborate, engaging in activities to produce something. It’s not an either/or, of course. Web 2.0 has made us aware of the vitality of that comes from socially-generated content — comment streams on blogs, activity streams in microblogging, and so on — which can be precursors of collaborative activity.

In terms of tool selection, I did a very quick review of three “free” cloud platforms for a client to compare some of the specific features. I discovered that platforms strong on the connection side (profiles, activity streams, blogging)  were weak on the collaboration side (wikis, workspaces, file folders, task management).  A real sticking point for many groups is the need (perceived, perhaps, because we are so used to organizing this way) is for file folders and folder management.

This tension, in particular with respect to software/platform selection, was highlighted by an observation on an E2.0 conference panel. Walton Smith, a senior associate from Booz Allen Hamilton presented this year’s Open Enterprise Award gave a great talk about  hello.bah.com, a social networking platform developed for the consulting firm’s worldwide network. hello.bah.com, he said, is built around people, focusing on connections and activity streams — finding people and seeing what they are up to. But when asked about collaboration, Smith admitted that they continue to use SharePoint for that.

Lesson: you can develop a good social network inside the organization to satisfy the needs for connecting, but when you want to collaborate, you need a tool that provides more rigor for content and task management.

The  tension between connection and collaboration (and how to balance it) (and the role of content) is one of the most important issues in supporting networks in Enterprise 2.0 organizations.

Twitter in the Enterprise

June 26, 2009 at 11:50 am · Filed under Web 2.0

Fellow AppGapper Bill Ives has posted a great summary of the perspective that he brought to the Twitter Panel at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference (wonderfully moderated by Jessica Lipnack, whose post you’ll find at this preceding link).  I was deeply honored to be on the same panel, offering an enterprise perspective. I related what happened when the CEO at one of my clients requested a “twitter channel” for questions during an all-employee forum.  A handful of people (64) in the 7,000-person company. Following the event, I was requested to conduct an after-action review with those who had actually twittered questions during the event.

The after-action review surfaced one of the primary concerns about using Twitter in the enterprise: security.  While most employees are and will be sensitive to providing sensitive information about the company on Twitter, it’s always a risk.  In this case, the corporate IT security folks had raised a (very big) red flag about using Twitter for the employee forum, but the CEO decided that, for this short duration experiment, the risk was manageable.

The benefits of having a Twitter channel during an event:

• People can ask questions as they occur to them while listening, so that they don’t have to wait until the end
• Twitter allows for a nice back-channel, in which people who have similar questions or ideas can discover one another
• The potential for anonymity in a Twitter ID lets people who are hesitant to ask questions in public have a voice
• The short form requires questions to be pithy!

At the E2.0 panel, we were asked about other benefits  of using Twitter inside an enterprise. Here’s my short list:

• Situational awareness, both geographical (who is traveling to different company sites) and contextual (who is working on a particular problem type)
• Crowd sourcing: tweeting questions and getting answers from friends but also friends of friends (via the Retweet mechanism)
• Developing and maintaining relationships. Tweets help you get a sense of who a person is, and whether it’s a person you may want to collaborate with.
• Tweets with links, and especially retweets with links provide a good information filtering mechanism

I think that the challenges for enterprises who want to bring microblogging tools inside the firewall include:

• Migrating people who are already using Twitter to an internal tool. When people are using Twitter, they develop a natural style that lets them speak to their communities both inside and outside the enterprise.
• It is important for enterprise microblogging tools to enable the option to post out to Twitter anything posted internally.
• Integrating microblogging with social networking and collaboration applications that already exist or that are in plan.  It is becoming hard enough to keep track of our multiple internal and external identities as we move about software platforms for connection and collaboration that we (okay, I) don’t need additional splintering of my conversational threads
• Companies should get started sooner rather than later if they want to do internal microblogging. Now is the time to experiment, and see how it will be useful, find the early adopters (who are not all necessarily GenY, btw), and let them develop a corporate style.

Use Precedes Strategy: The nature of Enterprise 2.0 is that it is (as often defined), “the adoption of Web 2.0 tools inside the enterprise.”  The use of these tools therefore necessary precedes strategy.  Experiments using Twitter or even home-grown internal tools are a good beginning.

The power of conversation: Cluetrain at 10

June 20, 2009 at 8:24 am · Filed under Web 2.0

I attended an anniversary celebration for the Cluetrain Manifesto at the Berkman Center last week.  Two of the declarators of the manifesto, Doc Searls and David Weinberger (both Berkman fellows) participated in a lively conversation facilitated by Jonathan Zittrain at the SRO event.

I’d been thinking a lot about 1999 lately, as I used that as a pivot year in an article I was working on (for publication in September in The Learning Organization), so the event was timely. Just as timely, Andrew McAfee shared Chapter 1 of his new book, Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for your Organization’s Toughest Challenges.

To complete the convergence, the whole world was listening to tweets from Iran. An A revolution whose beginning was marked by the publication of 95 theses is enabling a political revolution based on what the manifesto foresaw:

#9. …networked conversations are are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.

#42. As with networked markets, people are talking directly to each other inside the company…

The manifesto acknowledged what was already happening with respect to the way that companies were using the Internet as yet another broadcast mechanism, ignoring the power of the Internet to enable conversations. It was no longer possible for a company to control its messages — the market, the people on the Internet, were free to talk about companies and products in an open and honest way. People could talk back.

Inside companies it has taken a bit longer to reach a point of freedom of conversation, and companies still need to learn how to listen wisely. I how McAfee describes the trend in the use of Enterprise 2.0 technologies: “…to bring people together and let them interact, without specifying how they should so so.”

Markets, companies, countries, no longer have the power to dictate how people will interact, nor what they say, nor who hears it. Companies have learned to harness communities on the web and to leverage listening technologies so that they can hear what customers are saying. The E2.0 trend signals that they are learning to listen to what their employees are saying. And so we watch Iran, to see how what this  messy and momentous conversation will generate.

Predictions for the future of collaboration

April 28, 2009 at 10:57 am · Filed under Web 2.0

From the Learningtrends network, I found a series of posts byPadmasree Warrior, CTO of Cisco.
The 5 predictions for the future of collaboration are:

1. Collaboration networks will be to Enterprises what Social Networks are to Consumers.
2. It’s not about “on-premise” vs. “on-demand”, it will all be about the User Experience.
3. Innovation will be redefined by Operational Excellence
4. Organizations without boundaries will drive the next wave of productivity
5. Information technology will evolve into Information Fabric

Items #1 and #4 are all about networks, not surprisingly from the company that launched its “Human Network” brand campaign in 2007.  The information network enables the human network to communicate across distances of time and space and enables a single organization to achieve remarkable results by reaching out, establishing a network that crosses boundaries, and nurturing that network.

These posts are strong on vision from a company that has played and will continue to play a vital role in connecting us. Warrior’s example of an ad hoc expertise community in Cisco (Mac users) is self-referencing. Of course technies use tools!

The vision meets reality in the hard work of the social architecture, which includes attention to the following human elements:

• Getting over the barriers to adoption of the technology
• Designing collaborative spaces not just to serve the functions of collaboration, but the purpose of a specific network or collaboration
• Modeling and supporting the behaviors of collaboration

I am challenged and invigorated by the work of bringing organizations into this predicted future.