Via Shawn Callahan this morning, a link to a scenario about the future of work by Dave Pollard. (These two apparently had a swell conversation in Melbourne this week.) In his post, Knowledge Management in 2020, Dave describes the work lives of two professional consultants at a global consultancy, “Omni,” and an entrepreneur who is an Omni client.
Omni’s business is focused on “personal productivity improvement, facilitation, cultural anthropology, and design and communication skills development services.” Managing the rich flow of information available via blogs and RSS feeds is core to Omni’s work; for itself and its clients, it digests, interprets, summarizes, and offers recommendations on the immeasurably large flow of raw information now available. Omni has “abandoned” their traditional website in favor of a its collection of blogs and interactive directory of people.
This is obviously a vision of the future of work for a small slice of the population, but it also triggers thinking about the importance of rediscovering (as Dave says) the value of information intermediaries, and this need will apply in many business and work scenarios. RSS was supposed to help us filter and customize, but Pollard supposes a legion of these intermediaries like the Omni professionals described in the scenario.
What a great conversation that must have been! Wish I’d been there. Now I wonder if future applications will allow us to enable eavesdropping via podcast…
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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).
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).
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.
… 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.
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."
I heard a great talk by Jim Coogan this morning on the monthly SIKM call that is hosted by Stan Garfield of HP. Jim leads the Knowledge Process team in Boeing’s Integrated Defense Systems group. Jim described a rich tapestry of KM capabilities that support Boeing’s definition of knowledge management: ” a disciplined holistic approach to effectively utilize expertise for competitive advantage.”
Boeing’s KM community is mature in that knowledge management expertise is spread widely across the company; practitioners in different roles in different divisions work as a community of practice to provide tools, methods, and techniques that can be applied to specific business problems and opportunities. Jim’s current approach and attitude to the onslaught of Enterprise 2.0 is, I think, typical of that of mature KM folks, and so I’d like to highlight a few of the topics that came up on the call.
The past year has seen an upsurge of wikis, blogs, and the use of RSS feeds. He cited 300 active wikis as well as instances of senior managers who blog regularly.
Instant messaging is in very wide use, and is used very specifically for getting business done.
They are using SharePoint (MOSS) and getting ready to deploy SharePoint’s MySites, which they see as an opportunity to help people make connections and spread knowledge around the company even more.
New hires need a jumpstart on building their social networks, so Boeing is careful to make sure that new hires get introduced to people who can help them build their networks quickly.
Despite the availability of new tools, many of the technical communities continue to use good old fashioned LISTSERVs, and Jim does not see that these will go away for a while. LISTSERVs are perhaps the original social tool. As I have seen, and as Jim suggested, they are a way to build a community, for people to get assistance and introductions into a specific knowledge space very quickly, and allow a great deal of freedom for conversation within a secure, behind-the-firewall environment. The challenge for companies who want to embrace Enterprise 2.0 is to integrate the LISTSERV content into the rich ecosystem of social tagging, linking, and expertise location.
Recall that leveraging expertise in their very definition of KM. I believe that for technology companies, and possibly for many others as well, it’s vital to be able to “connect the dots” as Jim says and bring experts together. Moreover, the big gap right now is having intelligent agents that anticipate what you need, bring it to you, and tell you how to connect with those others.
My previous blog on this topic touched on how important it is for search engines to return information about our connections with people who may have the expertise and experience we need to tap. We must also arrange for people to bump into each other (in physical and virtual spaces) who may not know that there is experience available for the tapping. Jim calls this the art of making “accidental collisions” — causing people to bump into each other so they can whatever sparks may be, will ignite.
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… 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.
I had a recent conversation with Kate Ehrlich on the topic of expertise location, following on my reading of a blog, “Googlizing Knowledge Management at IBM” by AppGap colleague Bill Ives. Kate has been publishing research in this area for quite some time, and was part of the SmallBlue team whose work became IBM’s Atlas. Bill’s blog also mentioned the IBM Human Capital Study and IBM’s related consulting services. The key point of the study (for me) was the emphasis that companies who rated themselves “Very capable” of adapting to changing business conditions placed on the following capabilities:
Predicting required skills and their future availability over the next three to five years
Identifying and locating individuals with specific expertise
Fostering an environment that allows people to collaborate across organizational boundaries
Let’s look at these last two. Not only is it important to identify people with specific expertise, but it’s also important to foster an environment in which people can collaborate. The ability to collaborate has a lot to do with the capability for connection and the ease with which that connection may be made.
What this means to me is that when I search for something, inside or outside a company, I want to find the best “stuff” but I also want to know which people are the major contributors to the best stuff, and furthermore I want to know how I am connected to them. That’s what Atlas, Metasight, and the newly launched SONAR platform from Trampoline Systems is designed to do. (Trampoline’s product suite includes Metascope, software for social network analysis, and Flightdeck, an “organisational intelligence tool”. I’ll blog further about each of these anon.)
SONAR is user-centric. My dashboard shows my profile (which I can modify) and the themes that occur in the documents I write, the blogs and wikis I post to, and in my emails. A natural language processing (NLP) engine extracts themes from content in the intranet and attaches these to individual profiles. So when I search, I get a list of relevant themes and get to pick which one is most applicable to what I am looking for. When I’m satisfied with that, SONAR shows me (on my dashboard), brief profiles of the people in my organization who are most associated with that theme. Then, I can click on “Explore” and see how all the people tagged with that theme are related. I can also see if any of these people share other interests or themes with me.
Now I can figure out, when I see the work associated with what I am looking for, how various people who might be assumed to be able to help me, are related (to each other and to me). This is a new form of metadata, the metadata of relationships that is so intriguing to me. Our modern lives can feel very fragmented, especially in organizations where people are working on multiple projects and multiple teams at the same time. Each project, team, meeting, has a context that needs to be discoverable and made known. Visual thinking is very important (as in Shiv’s post of a few days ago) but visual prompts and cues such as we are not starting to see in software can also inspire new thought.
I was very excited when Trampoline’s CEO Charles Armstrong contacted me a few weeks ago to tell me about these great developments; I had last seen him over a year ago and the scope of these products had not yet been fully envisioned. I must disclose that I am keen enough to get my hands on these products that I might enter into some business arrangement with Trampoline or a partner.
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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.
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.
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.
Every week or two it seems that another example of ways that software, network dynamics, bidding and negotiation between sets of skills, collaboration, cooperation and similar activities are leading to an emerging synthesis of social networking, brainstorming, collaborative work, predictive markets, and peer-to-peer negotiations (see Michel Bauwen’s work on Peer-to-Peer Economies)
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“Knowledge workers own the means of production in a Knowledge Economy” - P. Drucker
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Kluster is a platform for crowdsourcing and then organizing and putting to use skills, energy and availability on projects and initiatives. It presented (unveiled itself ?) at the recent TED conference in Monterey, California.
Here’s an excerpt of the early review from ReadWriteWeb.
Crowdsourcing firm Kluster officially launched yesterday at the TED conference, which is underway this week in Monterey, California. Founder Ben Kaufman, who bankrolled the company in part with money from the sale of his last company Mophie, has organized a gimmick over the course of the TED conference he hopes will prove Kluster’s worth. Kaufman intends to let TED attendees — and users from around the world — design a completely new product over the course of 72 hours.
The idea behind Kluster is that a group of passionate people working together can come up with better solutions for any decision-making problem than a single person. Whether that is planning an event, designing a new logo, or creating a new product, Kluster believes their system can.
[ Snip … ]
The Kluster system works by breaking down products into manageable chunks. For each chunk (or “phase”), people submit what are called “sparks.” Sparks are proposed solutions for that phase. For each spark, other participants can submit “amps” — which are improvements to that idea. Users also assign “watts” to sparks and amps they like. Watts work kind of like investments. You accrue points based on participation and other factors, and can invest those points (watts) in ideas you like.
Then an algorithm that takes into account “each user’s successes, failures, reputation, areas of expertise, and overall history” goes to work to determine which sparks are the best. Companies interested in using the Kluster system, put up cash prizes that are doled out along the way (at the completion of each phase).
It seems more like wirearchy than hierarchy as an organizing principle to me .. though I am sure that pertinent elements of hierarchy based on direction (setting up of initiatives), ranking and filtering will come into play.
It will be very interesting to see how much organized work will resemble this form of organization in another ten years. I hope I am around to see and comment.
Of course it’s silly .. but this post by Hugh Macleod titled “Buckets” got me thinking …
If nature was designed like today’s business and software, water would trickle down the valley in buckets, from bucket to bucket.
More specifically:
We have wireless in coffee shops, Skyping on transatlantic flights, Blackberries, smartphones and laptops wherever we go - why not let (server based) systems do the delivery of work-orders, run the events, do the transactions and capture the data? Why not have the flows defined with loops and warts and all ready to be refined daily as the organisations learns and grows?
“Anataxonomy” and “Flow”, combine those two principles and use the wonders of technology accordingly.
So what does this mean? Sure, we’re already getting used to the idea of big commercial Open-Source software companies like Spikesource. But what about non-software? Open-Source Exxon’s? Open-Source General Motors’s?
This is when “Flow” starts getting REALLY important.
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Smart knowledgeable people who have studied deeply the issue of why hierarchy seems such a durable concept tell us to get used to it … they say that there are good reasons why hierarchies thrive, even in the face of increasing flows of information and spreading forms of networked semi-transparency.
But hierarchies don’t have to remain static … and this is one of the big deficiencies in current models and with the existing tools of organizational design. Think about it. How often are there reorganizations, changes to departmental structures, downsizing, mergers or acquisitions - and the org chart gets tossed up in the air like a set of pick-up sticks. In the case of larger organizations, the “pick-up sticks” always come down in highly-organized, very neat looking boxes with straight lines that essentially state … “this is the right design .. this time we’ve got it” !
Until the next change.
Really, organizational structures are basically a rolling flow of change. Why the assumption of stability, of more-or-less static structure ? In my opinion, it’s just that many executive and management types don’t really like the feelings of messiness and control based only on engagement and willingness that accompany the conditions of continuous change.
So … what if work meant that at different times and for different projects, you could get *tagged* with different tags for different skills, and *linked* with other relevant of pertinent skill and personality *tags*, and so on ? Then, these new-style indicators (of capability) could be combined with availability / scheduling optimization software, and you’d have the basic format for a new form of organization chart.
Hierarchies could be developed at a specific time, for as long as may be necessary, and may involve different people or peoples depending upon the situation, the problems and the desired or hoped-for outcomes. So too for teams and purpose-focused networks of skills, abilities, competencies, willingness and availability.
If you stop and think about it for a moment, you can almost *feel* that this would probably seem more natural and more probably effective. But, we have a large legacy system in place.
Hmmm …
Back in the mid-1980’s there was a brief eruption of self-managing teams and what was called socio-technical work systems, where some of these types of issues were addressed - except that then the concepts of *knowledge work*, and mechanisms for manipulating information flows, like tags and hyperlinks, were only really fringe ideas.
Not anymore … but the org charts and the performance management and compensation practices are still (generally) what were used 30 and 20 and 10 years ago.
How much longer will yesteryear’s tools continue to suffice ?
This is basically the question Gary Hamel addresses in his recent book The Future of Management.
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The Web is a near-ideal mechanism in which to culture new strains of social organization. From Craigslist to MySpace to FaceBook to Second Life to eHarmony, from instant messaging to podcasting, blogging, video chat and virtual worlds, the Internet is radically changing the ways in which people find romance, manage friendships, share insights, learn, build communities, and more.
For the moment, though, most of this joyous and frenzied experimentation is taking place outside the plush-carpeted hallways of the corporate old guard.
I find this ironic.
While no company would put up with a 1940’s-era phone system, or forgo the efficiency-enhancing benefits of modern IT, that’s exactly what companies are doing when they fail to exploit the Web’s potential to transform the way work of management is accomplished. Most managers still see the Internet as a productivity tool, or as a way of delivering 24/7 customer service. Some understand its power to upend old business models. but few have faced up to fact that sooner or later, the web is going to turn our smoke-stack management model on its head.
