Nowadays, companies are eager to try a wide range of cost-cutting measures to help them weather the storm. Among these is the use of videoconferencing tools to minimize business travel expenses. In the past, implementations were costly and not very reliable, with low quality videos, frequent disconnections and long lag times – factors that certainly contributed to slow adoption. Fortunately, much progress have been made over the years which make it a more viable option.
Using the Internet instead of dedicated lines helped minimize lag, free internal network resources, and bring costs down. The leading players now charge a small fraction of what they once did, and more importantly for small businesses, free and inexpensive solutions such as Skype, iChat, and Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro are widely available. For frequent fliers, airline travel savings eclipse any bump in broadband charges to ensure a fast connection.
While it’s not going to replace travel all the time, it makes doing some tasks faster and easier. Doctors can receive patients from remote areas, court hearings are brought closer to people, and professors can give lectures to students anywhere in the world. Congressional work that don’t require physical presence can be done via videoconferencing to reduce travel from their home state to Washington DC, resulting in less tax money spent. In disaster situations where roads are impassable, emergency meetings can be done via video to assess the damage and determine the next move.
With all its advantages, videoconferencing should be a no-brainer, right? Not exactly. We need to be aware that while it’s good for some things, it can be bad for others. Jim Ware pointed to a NY Times article about its ineffectiveness in certain situations, wherein simpler means like the written word may be more appropriate. Kinks have to be ironed out, definitely, but we must also be mindful that different media are good for different things, and it’s up to us to utilize their strengths. I know a lot of people who prefer to send text messages rather than call for sensitive subjects. It’s all about context.
Right now, a lot of things still need to be overcome for the technology to go mainstream. Interoperability is a key factor, as well as complexity and bandwidth constraints. While visual cues can add a lot to communication, some studies have shown that our sensitivity to being in front of the camera can actually be a hindrance. More than any the technological barriers, our greatest problem might be our comfort level. In time, we’ll surely get used to it, and as the younger generations embrace it as the normal way of doing things, videoconferencing will pick up. By then, maybe we’ll wonder how we ever got on without it for so long.
Business Week’s current issue is focused on changes in R&D, by which the future of Innovation.
IBM, which has maintained its R&D spending at a steady rate despite the economic downturn, is now launching a global initiative to work with other companies and countries in what it calls collaboratories: partnerships aimed at generating more product ideas while establishing long-term relationships. Here’s what the article says:
The attraction for IBM is clear. The collaborative strategy snags more research with roughly the same amount of IBM money. Performing research with a variety of partners in many locations also exposes IBM to science challenges and ideas that it might not otherwise encounter.
There it is again: IBM is putting itself at risk of good ideas. It’s just sound business. In one example, IBM has established a nano-technology partnership with a ETH Zurich, a Swiss government funded university. The value to the countries is the potential to launch new industries while its universities can “attract the best faculty and students.”
IBM is literally covering the globe with the collaboratories. Each project meets a complex set of criteria, which I assume has a heavy dose of value network analysis (even if they don’t call it that).
The initiative is not without the issues that confront networks (intellectual property negotations can bring a project to a halt) and economies (why should IBM be focusing outside of the U.S. at a time of great economic need here?). But it is a network vision of amazing reach.
The idea really isn’t new, and the data isn’t that surprising, but it’s nice to see the recognition growing that cubicles don’t work – or produce good work by their “inhabitants.”
Here’s one brief excerpt:
Companies are finally realizing what their employees have known for ages: Cubicle cultures just don’t work. With concerns about knowledge-sharing among older and younger generations of employees skyrocketing, organizations are concluding that impersonal “cube farms” discourage collaboration, stifle employee engagement and, as a result, strangle innovation at the exact time when it’s desperately needed.
Perhaps the most important idea in the article, however, is something I’ve long believed: Baby Boomer and Millennials/Gen Y have more in common than most people think–especially when it comes to how they view the workplace:
“Bookend Generations,” a study of how Baby Boomers and Generation Y view work, found that both Boomers and Gen Ys prize interacting with high-quality colleagues—so much so that both generations rank it equal to or higher than financial compensation. Far from glaring at each other across the generation gap, 58% of Boomers say they enjoy helping Gen Ys navigate the workplace and the same number of Ys report that they look to Boomers for professional advice more than any other generation.
By now, everyone has probably heard of Google Wave, the innovative communications and collaboration tool that’s been turning heads since it debuted last May. With its rich feature set, it definitely seems to have a promising future, both for consumers and the enterprise. However, the thing that struck me most about Google Wave is that it’s not just an application, but a powerful open platform.
This means that APIs can extend its functionalities even more, in ways faster and more creative than if Google decided to keep it inside a walled garden. Since its launch, thousands of eager developers have been given an access pass for testing, and the company has held events to sustain interest in the platform, as well as showcase what the community has done so far. Here are some of the more enterprise-friendly extensions under development today from the Google Wave gallery:
Twiliobot. This extension uses the Twilio Phone API to recognize phone numbers in a wave, making them clickable links. If the user selects one of these links, the number is dialed (click-to-call). The conversation can be recorded and transcribed automatically, with the text available for pasting back into the wave. Twiliobot can be further enhanced to include a voicemail manager.
Groupy-the-bot. A wave robot for creating and managing groups using Python. It also has a web interface to make management easier. Administrators can add new groups, remove a group, add someone to a group, remove someone from a group, moderate add request, etc. When finished, this should be very useful for project collaboration.
MediaWiki Wave. Enables you to embed Google Waves inside wikis. Part of an initiative to improve the usability of the MediaWiki engine for editors. It adds Wave’s real-time collaboration, unlimited viewable versioning and WYSIWYG editor to an already popular platform.
Checky. A clean and simple checklist gadget. It takes its inspiration from Basecamp’s to-do lists, supporting drag and drop. Checky offers just a glimpse of how PIM (Personal Information Management) can be integrated into Google Wave.
Apart from these, there are even some games and musical extensions being created. It seems the only limit to Google Wave is the developers’ imagination. During the Google I/O Conference, the team behind Google Wave was clear that they wanted to involve the developer community early so that by the time the service is ready for public use, a good number of extensions can go along with it. Perhaps this is part of their learning experience with the Chrome browser, and I think it’s a great decision on their part.
Intranets have been with us for many years now. Stephen Lawton was the first to coin the term in an article he wrote for Digital News & Review in April 24 1995. Essentially, he observed that people were creating small websites inside their organisations to share knowledge and communicate information. Nearly 15 years later, many of us continue to use intranets in this way and have not yet moved beyond the publishing of static information because we assume that this provides sufficient value to the modern knowledge worker.
I think this mentality was born out of a whole generation of workers who have effectively grown up in their professional lives with Microsoft Office styled products — the idea that, much like print publishing, documents are worked on by individuals and then released to others once it is finished and officially approved. KM guru David Gurteen suggests that this “create and publish” behaviour is also likely to be the result of early knowledge management efforts to bring structure to information in the organisation and make it searchable and easily accessible to employees. Unfortunately, as Gurteen highlights, too often employees didn’t see any value in this for themselves and, as a result, such systems failed [1].
The essence of this failure of early intranets to bring true communication value into an organisation and to its employees is perhaps bound with the lack of recognition and understanding of how knowledge is created and information is shared by people. It’s also the factor that underpins Web 2.0’s success where traditional intranets have tended to fail. That is, that information is shared through social networks, from person to person, and that there are a number of roles in that social exchange.
With Web 2.0 tools being assessed for their worth to enhance intranets Forrester’s Social Technographics is a timely reminder of the social exchange — people’s behavioural requirements for sharing information — needed for a successful intranet, and further, a modern digital workplace. Microsoft’s newest offering, SharePoint 2010, which is about to released soon, reflects this trend. We first saw blogs and wikis integrated into this offering a few years ago, helping to meet what Forrester terms “Creator” and “Critic” rolls. While the upcoming version will debut free online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote for the production of all types of content by Creators [2], making a step closer to a truly online, digital workplace, out-of-the-box it is still unlikely to meet the needs of “Joiners” or “Collectors”. [3]
Joiners need to feel they belong, what Maslow would call Social and Esteem needs. As such, Joiners need to be able to maintain their personal profile as it fits with the behavioural and cultural norms displayed by the group. Collectors’ need RSS feeds, to vote for content they feel adds value to the group, and to add to the way in which information is typically classified (by adding tags to a folksonomy) by the group so that its members can more easily find it.
In embracing the move beyond the standard intranet to an enterprise 2.0 world, the world of the digital workplace, more needs to be done to understand the real human reasons why we’ve failed in the past to deliver technology to support people at work. In reality, this requires organisations to come to terms with the ways in which people create knowledge through the social exchange of information. It means embedding the understanding that a one-size-fits-all approach is unlikely to work into the organisation’s IT strategic plan. It demands acknowledgment that embracing technology variety will enable people to be naturally drawn to those tools that best suit their personal communication and interaction needs, based on their Maslow-described motivations, their group’s communication and behavioural norms, and their individual role preferences for creation, joining, critiquing, collecting or just spectating.
M
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1. Gurteen, D. 2008. KM (2.0) goes social. The Gurteen Perspective, Inside Knowledge. 29 Feb, 11, 6. Online at:
2. Marks, O. 2009. Anticipating Sharepoint 2010: Making Enterprise Foundations More Flexible? 13 Aug. Online at: http://blogs.zdnet.com/collaboration/?p=816
3. Not to mention that the user experience inherent in opening up a Word document means that the most logical place for a Critic to read and rate the content is inside the document, but the most useful place for someone else to see that rating is before the document is open
As many of you will know, there’s been a debate going on for some time now about the relative effectiveness and the ROI of formal and informal learning (formal learning being structured-and-scheduled courses and other measurable forms of content delivery, informal learning being the myriad ways people exchange information that becomes incorporated into one’s perspective or ways of doing things).
This debate has been intensified by the growing presence and uptake of collaborative platforms which seek to engage peoples’ social tendencies and mimic the ways they interact with information and each other to get things done.
The points made by these three executives from T Rowe Price, Sun Microsystems and Booz Allen Hamilton aren’t new to those of us who have been following and facilitating the uptake of this new generation of knowledge work tools and methods.
They do, however, underscore how clear it is that the dynamics spawned by a half-decade’s experience with social computing and social networks will undergo a massive migration into the knowledge workplace of the near future.
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Learning Executives Discuss Social Learning at the ASTD 2009 International Conference
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.
Be sure to catch Bill Ives' ongoing review series in which he looks at online, sharable database apps. The focus of Bill's reviews: web-based business software that enables companies and individuals to better organize, track, and share information, as well as better manage projects, processes and workflows.
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