NY Times Article: $650B loss in productivity due to social tools

August 19, 2008 at 2:13 pm · Filed under Culture, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0

In June, the New York Times reported on the emergence of a new organization dedicated to understanding information overload, the Information Overload Research Group (IORG)*. The context of the article referenced Basex research indicating an annual loss to in the United States of $650B per year in lowered productivity and hampered innovation. Colleague Celine Roque referenced an article that referenced this article. ) More highlights from the research and IORG’s conference last month, are posted at Technotherapy, including:

• 28% of a worker’s time is spent dealing with interruptions that are neither urgent nor important
• 12% of the average worker’s time is spent thinking or reflecting

Lately as I have talked with non-techie family about my work, I’ve described Twitter and FB and how they work. The typical reaction is, “sounds like you can waste a lot of time doing that.” Yes, I say, but … and list all the benefits of keeping in touch, peripheral awareness, etc. (via Valdis Krebs: a great list of benefits and resources in Twitter for Librarians: The Ultimate Guide), but they remain mostly unconvinced.

What I find interesting is that the Basex study (released last December) and information currently available on the IORG website primarily address the email and instant messaging problem. As we past the digital divide represented by the emergence of Gen Y, we will want to understand better whether Facebook/MySpace, Twitter, and reading RSS feeds are performance enhancers or inhibitors. And of course the world has changed since last year.

This upcoming, social, generation may be more relational and capable of leveraging the knowledge, talent, and context of others than any before (but I often wonder whether they will even be capable of reflective thinking, even for 12% of their time, and also whether it matters). Look for a future blog post on this.

One of the Basex survey’s findings was that a significant source of time loss was the time that takes people to recover from an interruption and get back to work. Google Labs has reputably been working on the Email Addict application that lets Gmail users remind themselves to take a break. For MAC users, there is the more profoundly named Freedom, which shuts down your system completely so that you have to go to extra trouble to reboot and satisfy those cravings for connectivity. (Thanks to Dave Weinberger for the tip about Freedom.)

While writing this entry, I let myself be distracted by emails about seven times. I also checked Twitter, Facebook, and Bloglines (wherein I found that Valdis has shared a nice free for listening album by Brian Eno and David Byrne, which made a nice soundtrack for my attention deficit), made a doctor’s appointment, checked snail mail, and listened in on my husband’s call to wish our niece a happy birthday. Sigh.

*on 8/20, Jonathan Spira posted notes from the IORG’s first conference. There is much good detail.

Web 2.0 is Changing the Way We Work: Report from McKinsey

July 31, 2008 at 6:59 am · Filed under Change Management, Culture, Enterprise 2.0

McKinsey has just released the results of a global survey on adoption of Enterprise 2.0. Its results are not dissimilar from the AIIM survey earlier this year (see my earlier blog post), for example, they state that the principle reasons for slow adoption are: management’s inability to grasp their potential financial returns, unresponsive corporate cultures less-than-enthusiastic leadership

More interesting for the future of work, they asked, “How, if at all, has your company’s use of Web 2.0 technologies and tools changed the way the company is managed and organized?” The responses include:

• It has changed the way we communicate with customers and suppliers (38%)
• It has changed the way we hire and retain talent (16%)
• It has created new roles or functions in our organization (16%)
• It has changed the way our organizations is structured — e.g., a flatter hierarchy (14%)

The survey also broke down the results into the categories of companies who reported satisfaction with Web 2.0 tools and those who did not. Of those who are satisfied, 33% report both that the technologies have created new roles or functions in the organization and changed the way the organizations are structured.

Other interesting notes from this great study:

• Companies in which it is the business units, rather than IT, leading the initiative have more success

• Satisfaction is greatest in Asia/Pacific (40%), with Europe and North America trailing at 20%

• Satisfied companies are using Web 2.0 technologies more extensively for interaction with customers (the “Community 2.0″ phenomenon)

Much more food for thought is in this study (breakdown of the use of tools internally, with customers, etc.) and I do hope that more detail is forthcoming on, specifically, the new roles and functions in the organizations and the ways in which companies are restructuring. This data will point us toward the future of work.

Change of Command

July 25, 2008 at 12:45 pm · Filed under Culture, Reviews, Work Design

My brother, Chris, just turned over the keys for the USS West Virginia (a nuclear submarine) to its new Captain during a moving ritual celebration called a Change of Command. As the program states, the Change of Command is a transfer of “total responsibility, authority, and accountability from one individual to another. The heart of the ceremony is the formal reading of official orders by both the relieving officer and the officer being relieved:

“I relieve you.”
“I stand relieved.”

And its over, 2 and a half years of being absolutely and completely accountable for one of the most complicated collections of machinery in the history of the world and of the 130+ officers and seamen on the submarine.

The work, the roles, the responsibilities of each and every man are carefully delineated. No room for ambiguity.

While in Georgia during the celebration of the event, LinkedIn told me that a colleague had a new position, a job title I had never heard before. I thought it was a made up title (though Google has since relieved me of that misapprehension) and was struck by contrast in official and formal duties with the emergent and informal roles in the networks that I write about so enthusiastically. Do made-up job titles come with a bounded set of job responsibilities and expectations?

And what happens when a project group forms? How do those in the project articulate their assumed responsibilities and overlaps? It feels counter to the spirit of self-generating networks to get all explicit about who does what, but I’ve recently seen some local volunteer groups falter because it was not clear, for a given task or project:

• Who was Responsible for each of the necessary tasks required (and who was responsible for coordinating those tasks)?
• Who was Accountable to the group for ensuring that the goals were met?
• Who was needed to Support each task, and the project as a whole?
• Who was available to Consult to those responsible for the task?
• Who needed to be kept Informed of the tasks process, issues, and status?

The acronym of these bolded letters — RASCI — may be know to many as a fundamental organizational development tool that I think is probably underutilized in the context of working in both ad hoc as well as formal production-oriented networks. Not that we all need the degree of specificity for maintaining a smoothly running submarine underwater for 2 months or more, but we do need to internalize the RASCI questions when we start a job, a task, and assign ourselves a title that we think corresponds with a role.

Community 2.0 (Part 3: Leading Enterprise 2.0 Companies)

June 3, 2008 at 4:10 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Culture, Enterprise 2.0

One of the highlights, for me, of Community 2.0 was to hear Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com talk about the kind of company he built. Two of the fundamental strategic choices that have made Zappos so successful:

1. The decision to shift from shipping orders through suppliers to running its own 24*7 warehouse. This decision cost the company 25% in revenues, but made it clear that the focus of the company and its brand would be on customer service.
2. The equation of customer service = brand = culture. Zappos is rigorous about its core values and the culture that it wants to maintain, to the extent that 50% of an employees performance review is based on how the employee lives the companies core values and culture.

Among those core values is #6, Build Open and Honest Relationships with Communication. Zappos goes all the way with communication, including its own Twitter feed (at http://www.twitter.zappos.com — when Twitter is working — you can click through to see the employee tweets.) You can also read (and you can assume that Tony does, too) the comments of customers that fill up the main page. This is open, this is leadership. This is being able to respond in the age of networks.

Today, I just read through Andrew McAfee’s post about Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt. McAfee voiced the frustration he hears from his students who think that no other company can be like Google because it is just unique. He reports how Schmidt responded to the question of what other managers can learn from Google:

“They can learn to listen. Listening to each other is core to our culture, and we don’t listen to each other just because we’re all so smart. We listen because everyone has good ideas, and because it’s a great way to show respect. And any company, at any point in its history, can start listening more.”

In my book, Net Work, I offer two assumptions about leadership in this new era:

• That everyone in a network can influence the relationships in and thereby the outcomes of the network
• That the work of leaders is primarily to to create and maintain the conditions that enable relationships

It’s good to start seeing evidence of truly great companies that are led by people who have this respect for, who listen to, and who nurture communications. This is the future of work.

Allowing for Social Influence in the Workplace

June 1, 2008 at 10:46 am · Filed under Collaboration, Collective intelligence, Culture

A much ignored subject in conversations about the workplace is the role that social influence plays. Recent research shows that when making decisions (any kind of decisions) we are much more influenced by known peers than we are by anonymous people or anonymous information inputs. It is the people that we know and trust that we consider the most credible sources of information. Because we’re much more connected to each other online, we’re influencing each other more than we ever used to.

This  simple fact has huge implications for the future of work. With the enterprise going increasingly social, we’re all observing one another much more. Because we’re connected to each other via internal wikis, department blogs and collaborative workspaces, we’re always watching what our peers say. Some of us comment on that and participate in the internal conversations, others just lurk. But lurking too allows for social influence to take place. Since we’re forced to collaborate more, we’re in turn influencing and being influenced by each other much more too. What are the implications of this? Here are three -

a. Greater internal alignment. Call it the result of increased voyeurism or what you like, but the fact that I have a much better sense of what my co-workers in the neighboring cubicles think, influences how I think and act at work. We’re much more in alignment with each other or inversely my workplace behaviour is a negative response to their actions. 

b. Increased external alignment. Not only am I paying more attention to what’s going on in the work lives of my peers, but I’m also paying more attention to peers outside my own company. What they think and say in this social world, influences my actions within my own organization. This is healthy as it makes me a more informed, educated employee but it can also serve as a distraction.

c. Potentially rebellious employees. Since we’re watching each other so much more, we’re also processing a lot more information and thinking harder about our roles in an organization. Questions like why did one peer get a promotion over another or why do the benefits in one department differ from another crop up a lot more. It means that organizations need to think harder about how it manages perceptions among its employees. 

By and large, social influence presents an interesting opportunity for most organizations. They can allow for positive social influence to take place by pointing their employees to positive, thought provoking influences. It also means that that the organizations don’t control their employee base like they once did. Its just how the world has changed. For more on how social influence work, take a look at this article where I discuss the motivations behind influence.

Work in a world when printed Oxford English Dictionaries are artifacts

May 27, 2008 at 3:27 pm · Filed under Culture

The piles in my office point to my reading behinded-ness but I wonder if anyone else caught the May 11, 2008 New York Times Magazine article reporting that the Oxford English Dictionary has no future plans to publish print versions. The author, Virginia Heffernan  laments:

 ”But while The New York Times and other newspapers have refrained from rash decisions about their print editions, the Oxford English Dictionary — staid, right? — has already shaken off the shackles of print and said cheerio (“a parting exclamation of encouragement”) to books! The stab I felt was sharper than nostalgia. It was fear. “

From TheAppGap perspective it was the OED editor’s reported comment regarding technology that caught my attention:

“ In any case, we’ve only finished from volume ‘M’ to ‘quit shilling.’ We have about 20 years’ more work to do revising and adding entries. Who knows what will happen with technology in 20 years? We certainly don’t.”

“Technology in 20 years?”

Prompted by hearing about Dave Weinberger’s references to Ray Kurzweil at the Community 2.0 Conference  (at which Patti Anklam spoke), I went searching for what occupies Kurzweil these days.  In terms of what technology will look like in 20 years this video is interesting.

 Bottom line. If carbon based humans are challenged to keep up in  an exponentially digital world in 2008 then how will we manage in  2028?  What will work and technology look like then? What trends now will help us see the future?

 A serious question and I look forward to reading your thoughts.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

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.