Social networks still frowned upon in offices

October 22, 2009 at 10:09 am · Filed under Web 2.0, productivity

The pressure to boost productivity in order to keep afloat, a lack of patience in understanding social networks, or just a general distrust of these tools – whatever the reasons, 54% of CIOs said their companies completely prohibit the use of social networks. This is according to a survey commissioned by Robert Half Technology of over 1,400 large US companies.

Almost a fifth (19%) allowed it but solely for business purposes – it’s unclear how compliance was monitored. A shade less (16%) did not mind granting permission for limited personal use, while a tenth of the respondents had even more relaxed rules, permitting personal social network usage inside the office without restrictions.

“Using social networking sites may divert employees’ attention away from more pressing priorities, so it’s understandable that some companies limit access,” said Dave Willmer, executive director of Robert Half Technology. “For some professions, however, these sites can be leveraged as effective business tools, which may be why about one in five companies allows their use for work-related purposes.”

With this prevailing corporate mindset, employees were advised to keep themselves informed about company policies, get familiar with privacy settings of frequented sites, be aware of time spent networking while at the office (if allowed), avoid negative remarks about the company and maintain a “clean” profile. You never know who could be watching.

I wonder how effective these regulations are, though. For one, there are lots of mobile Facebook and Twitter clients. If these sites are blocked via the office network, employees can always use their phones to access them. Laptops with 3G capability are also becoming popular. In addition, the study was silent on whether blocking applied to all employees or if certain departments or upper managers were given some level of access. Breaking down the responses per industry might’ve yielded interesting results.

Social networks can be a boon for business if employees are trained on how to use them properly. Without access to social networks, undisciplined workers will still probably find other ways to waste their time and avoid actual work.

Focus and distractions

October 6, 2009 at 9:06 am · Filed under Management, productivity

Beeping, ringing, flashing – it seems our tech tools distract us at every opportunity (or rather, we let them distract us). David McCandless attempted to find a method to the madness by observing how each of them capture his attention, and sorting them according to his priorities. That is, assuming they all occur simultaneously, which ones will he be more likely to attend to? The results were presented in a triangular graphic on his blog which he called The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions.

He noticed that receiving messages from Facebook and other social networking sites would quickly make him stop working just to read them. However, if he gets a Skype or landline call, Facebook takes a backseat. In the middle of a call, Twitter messages, important emails (mass redundancies?), and text messages were likely divert his attention. If anything is happening on his iPhone, he can’t stop himself from checking it. Of course, all these grind to a screeching halt when any of his devices fail, consuming most of his energies trying to fix it.

Not everyone will behave in the same way. For some, their guilty pleasures are Youtube, Wikipedia, RSS, StumbleUpon, or Digg. Others are hooked on their portable media players or gaming consoles (I’ve seen many bring theirs to the office). Whatever your favorite distractions are, if you’re serious about taming them, being aware of how they affect you is paramount. Someone pointed out the difference between urgent vs important. Time-sensitive tasks like answering a phone call is urgent, but it’s not always important. If you have caller ID, you can check who’s calling at a glance and return to work if it’s not anyone you know (or someone you’re avoiding). The trick is to stay calm when the beeps and rings start. Stand by your real priorities.

Managers deal with distracted employees everyday. Studying why some things are more distracting than others could give them an insight to what can be done to minimize their effects and increase office productivity.

The 3rd KM: personal knowledge management

October 5, 2009 at 3:30 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, KM, Web 2.0, productivity, social tools

Personal knowledge management (PKM) is something that we all do all the time, but often take for granted. I suppose, in that respect, it’s not unlike the other 2 KMs, Big KM and Little KM. There is always (has always been) some kind of KM going around, but until it was brought into the foreground as a distinct topic we did not approach it intentionally. Intentionally, at a gross level, PKM is about the tools that we use and strategies we employ that make it easier for us to identify, locate, and process knowledge.

“Being unconscious about your tool set is unconscionable.” — Tony Karrer

The idea of personal knowledge management was initially related to personal information management. Perhaps some of you recall the the days when those devices, called PIMs, did not have telephones built in! In 2003-2004, Tom Davenport conducted research with the Information Work Productivity Council to look at the current state of knowledge workers with respect to their handling of personal information and knowledge. (See Thinking for a Living for more detail.) Addressing managers of corporations (for whom productivity is a business issue), Davenport summarized the key learnings as:

• Individuals need to recognize how much of their time and productivity is tied up in PKM (the average user in the survey spent 40% of their time each day using technologies to process work-related information)
• Companies need to realize that their workers are wasting lots of time trying to manage information and that better personal information management means greater organizational success

However as recently as March 2008, a LexisNexis productivity survey found that “sixty-two percent of professionals report that they spend a lot of time sifting through irrelevant information to find what they need.” What applies to knowledge workers inside corporations applies equally well to the community of independents.

Note that this study just preceded the explosion in the availability of Web 2.0 tools.So we have a lot more tools to manage our information but don’t appear to be much closer to becoming more productive. But productivity isn’t the only benefit of personal KM, especially as our world and our knowledge becomes more social and more fragmented.

I reviewed some of the great work done by colleagues on the topic over the past 5 years, and found some common threads.

Distinguish Skills from Tools

Tools enable us to augment our skills, or (as Steve Barth puts it): “PKM tools help an individual knowledge worker to automate, accelerate, augment, articulate and activate the information and the ideas that he or she works with every day to perform their job.” A critical set of seven skills (catalogued by Paul Dorsey at Milliken and written up by Steve) begins with Accessing Information and Ideas and concludes with Securing Information, and in between describes the skills of organizing, evaluating, analyzing, collaborating around, and conveying information.

So what are KM “tools?”  Paper is still the key tool of preference for many; it supported information work for many centuries before the advent of the computer. But today we think more in terms of desktop productivity and personal content management applications (document processing,spreadsheet applications,  file folders, desktop search, concept mapping tools,  Internet browsers, specialized applications, and so on) and Web 2.0 tools (blogs, wikis, social bookmarks, RSS feeds and filters, microblogging, and so on).

(Tony Karrer’s Tool Set 2009 is a great place to start if you want to think from the purpose outward; that is, don’t start with the tool. This link is also the source of the quotation from Tony, above.)

Tool Selection is a Matter of Personal Preference

Tools are only as good as the skills that exist or evolve to make the best use of them. File folders, for example, are an excellent PKM tool, but people who don’t have experience or training in categorization may not find them very useful. These people (or people who can’t always remember their own classification schemes) may rely exclusively on a good desktop search tool to retrieve content when they want it.

People are not Born Knowing How to Use Tools

This is a phrase I use often when I talk with clients who are fretful about the adoption of their collaboration platforms. Training is not the only answer, of course, but the integration of the tool into the knowledge processes, and adequate time for users to become comfortable with the tool is a big step. (I am probably showing my age here, as I should probably say — in light of Gens Y and Z, that “people were not always born knowing how to use tools.” Sigh.)

The more tools we have ready to hand as we work, the more productive and effective we can be. But all of knowledge workers know that we probably use only a fraction of the features of any one of our favorite tools. One of the best PKM practices I know is to set aside even 10 minutes a day to explore a new tool or a new feature of a tool that you already use.  The payoff  can be huge.

Distinguish the  Private from the Social

Harold Jarche has developed a model for thinking about PKM in terms of the internal knowledge activities (sort, categorize, make explicit, retrieve) and the external activities (connect, exchange, and contribute). He goes on to list which social tools support internal activities vs. external activities; for example he aligns the use of social bookmarks (deli.cio.us and Diigo) as follows:

(It’s a nicely done piece of work. You should go look at the whole thing.)

This  idea of connecting and exchanging as part of personal knowledge management has been well developed by another colleague who has been writing about PKM for years, Dave Pollard. In his talk at KMWorld last year, he described the shift in knowledge management as:

from content & collection to context & connection

In this sense, all KM (big and little) needs to think about personal KM at the center. On the content side, everyone manages their own content which (in Dave’s words) is “just-in-time and harvestable.” Another key component is to set mechanisms in place for people to connect. Canvassing for expertise is one mechanism — “old fashioned” Listservs are still good for this; expertise location capabilities in social networking platforms represent a slightly new wave — as are processes and mechanisms for telling and sharing stories about experiences and sense-making methods.

The Leader’s Net Work and Personal Net Work

The great shift in the world of KM has been the recognition that knowledge about people and  context can be more important than content knowledge. To ensure that knowledge flows — is created and accessible — across an organization requires work on the part of the organization’s leadership. What I call the leader’s “net work” are those sets of activities that ensure that strong networks will support individuals and ultimately the organization:

• Network intentionally and practice network stewardship
• Leverage technology
• Create the capacity for net work — encourage people to think about “context & connection” and make it easy for them to build their networks (with and without technology)

I will have more to say about “personal net work” at the Boston KM Forum on October 22 (which is all about personal knowledge management). I’ll write about that here as well.

Conclusion: The 3 KMs

Selecting one of the 3 KMs  is not an either/or/or. As in economics and practically everything else, it depends. Different purposes, the target audience, and available resources will guide the approach that is used.  To recap:

• Big KM is about top-down, structured and organizationally distinct “knowledge management”
• Little KM is about safe-fail experiments embedded in the organizational structure
• Personal KM is about access to tools and methods to ensurethat knowledge, context, bits, fragments, thoughts, ideas are harvestable

In this last, the role of the corporation in supporting KM then becomes facilitating personal content management, providing methods (and training) to support information processing, and providing a rich and integrated infrastructure for employees to use the personal content management and the social tools that make sense for each them, their teams, and their communities.

Busting the myths of multitasking

September 28, 2009 at 7:31 am · Filed under productivity

There have been many studies conducted on the subject of multitasking. In this fast-paced world, it has become too widespread a phenomenon to ignore for businesses and other purposes. Of course, we don’t really do tasks simultaneously so much as switch our focus rapidly. While it has been shown to actually decrease productivity, a group of researchers at Stanford University were curious as to whether those that tend to mutitask heavily are somehow better at switching their focus. Their paper entitled “Cognitive control in media multitaskers” was published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science.

The researchers made a survey of media consumption habits, asking respondents about their tendencies to mutitask listening to music, watching tv, working on the computer, using the phone, and others. Based on their answers, the respondents were grouped into heavy, average, and light mutitaskers. Discarding the in-betweens and focusing on the two extreme groups, the remaining participants were given further hands-on tests to determine their level of attention and cognitive control.

The result was that the heavy multitaskers did much worse than the light multitaskers. The former was more prone to distractions while the latter was better at maintaining focus. Surprisingly, despite their tendency to multitask often, the heavy group were in fact slower in changing task types than the light group. However, the researchers were quick to point out that this “may be a difference in orientation rather than a deficit”, and that multitasking could still have benefits in areas not covered by this particular study.

“With the diffusion of larger computing screens supporting multiple windows and browsers, chat, and SMS, and portable media coupled with social and work expectations of immediate responsiveness, media multitasking is quickly becoming ubiquitous. These changes are placing new demands on cognitive processing, and especially on attention allocation. If the growth of multitasking across individuals leads to or encourages the emergence of a qualitatively different, breadth-biased profile of cognitive control, then the norm of multiple input streams will have significant consequences for learning, persuasion, and other media effects. If, however, these differences in cognitive control abilities and strategies stem from stable individual differences, many individuals will be increasingly unable to cope with the changing media environment. The determination of cause and effect and the implications of these differing strategies for other types of information processing are critical issues for understanding cognition n the 21st century,” the study concluded.

Working with low-tech solutions

September 15, 2009 at 9:21 am · Filed under productivity

We’re surrounded by ever more sophisticated hardware and software to manage most of our daily work tasks. Even so, there are instances when some of us prefer to use more traditional ways of working using plain equipment. Take Bill Gates, who must have had all the latest technologies at his disposal as the CEO of Microsoft. In an article he wrote for CNN way back in 2006, he detailed how the company’s shift to digital documents made them more efficient, and how he was able to do (almost) everything on his triple-monitor desktop and Tablet PC. However, there was a certain “primitive” artifact that he couldn’t do without:

“The one low-tech piece of equipment still in my office is my whiteboard. I always have nice color pens, and it’s great for brainstorming when I’m with other people, and even sometimes by myself.”

Like Mr. Gates, I’ve also found that having a whiteboard in my (home) office quite valuable. Always in plain view, it’s an easy way to remind myself of important things at a casual glance. I’ve divided my 100×70cm whiteboard into several sections with different functions. There’s an area for my personal goals for the current month & the rest of the year to keep me focused. I also have a small calendar drawn on it so I can make notes on pertinent dates. Additionally, there are spaces for brainstorming special projects and a random ideas repository. The closest technology I can think of is Microsoft’s Surface, but the cost is too prohibitive, the technology has yet to mature, and the added complexity seems unnecessary at this point.

Back when I was a student and didn’t have a laptop, I used to print out Outlook calendars and scribble my daily schedule in-between classes. I found it more convenient than a “proper” organizer, because I could bring it wherever I went, it offered a quick bird’s eye view of my activities, and it was easy to fold and put in my pocket. Nowadays, I use Google Calendar, but sometimes I go back to an old-school paper calendar when I have to go to places where the Internet is scarce or bringing a laptop is too much trouble.

As for others, I’ve read about people who create their own customized solutions for GTD like the Mind Depositor notebook by Patrick Ng. Instead of using one of the various software available to implement the system, it utilizes formatted index cards and a notepad tucked into a well-crafted leather jacket. Similar but even simpler systems exist like The Hipster PDA featured on 43Folders.

Do you have your own favorite work-related low-tech equipment? Why do you keep it and what would it take for you to switch to an electronic/digital solution?

McKinsey – How Web 2.0 Usage Is Changing Over Time

September 10, 2009 at 12:52 pm · Filed under Change Management, Web 2.0, productivity

McKinsey, a leading organizational consulting firm, has just released its most recent study regarding the usage of Web 2.0.

From a read of the announcement, it appears that collectively we are still on the path towards social computing becoming a fixture in the knowledge-based workplace … hardly a surprise.

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Across all categories, the use of Web 2.0 technologies by employees for internal purposes has increased from 53% in 2007 to 65% of respondents in 2009.

The largest components of growth have come from using Web 2.0 to develop new products / services internally, to manage internal knowledge and to reinforce the company culture via tools such as internal social networking applications.

The companies who have embedded these tools in their day-to-day activities and processes have seen the largest impact by improving communication across silos to reduce duplicate work and leverage experts in other areas.

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The report goes on to say that enterprise use of Web 2.0 technologies to connect and interact with business partners and suppliers has slowed down or stagnated … again, not much of a surprise given the often transactional nature of those relationships and the fact that electronic connections between those parties have existed in one form or another for quite some time now.

Finally, the McKinsey report outlines what for many has become an item of faith about social computing in / by the enterprise.

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The momentum we see in the growth of Web 2.0 technologies implies we will see higher penetration in 2010 for using these technologies for employees to collaborate and to facilitate interactions with customers.

To drive increased usage for managing interactions with suppliers and partners, companies will need to find ways use these technologies to augment the formal relationships between business entities and not substitute formal interactions with more ad hoc ones.

Nonetheless, it is clear that expertise in the use of Web 2.0 technologies is becoming a required skill for all enterprises.

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How Things Are Supposed To Work …

August 30, 2009 at 2:25 pm · Filed under Distributed Work, QuickBase, Technology Management, Virtual Environments, productivity

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The title of the blog post (excerpt below) says it all. 

Kudos where kudos due, this short story show how customer support is supposed to work today.

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A Grateful Customer

24 August, 2009 (19:28)

This weekend my laptop had a total meltdown on the drive and I lost all my data (may still find a way to get it back – yet to be determined) due to a combination of a Windows update gone bad (first one in 14 years) and the incomplete removal of Linux (Grub boot loader remained.) For whatever reason the .net framework update completely munged on my computer and in doing so it wiped out the MBR (master boot record). Now normally that’s not a big deal you simply …

[ Snip ...]

Now I need a Windows computer for work and I needed to be at work this morning so I thought well screw the data I’ll go buy a copy of Vista and install it. Off to the only local store open on a Sunday …

[Snip ...]

Enter my new HP G60-439CA

Well I’m back up and running and if I can get XP installed on the old one I might still retrieve my data as I have XP backups on an external USB drive but Vista does not know what to do with them.

[ Snip ...]

Anyway to the title of this post. The one thing that had me sweating bullets was the loss of Quicken.

Now I regularly back it up to an external USB drive and when I bought Quicken 2009 I saved the downloaded install file to that same drive. So after I got my new laptop up and running I went to reinstall Quicken from the saved file and uh oh I got file corruption errors.

After buying the laptop I have no funds left to buy yet another copy of Quicken – especially since they forced me to upgrade just two months ago when they expired online banking in my 2006 version. So I visited their site and contacted their email support team, explained my problem, used all the same contact info I had used when buying from them and waited hopefully for a positive response.

That was late yesterday afternoon and this morning I received an email from them with a link to download a fresh version of the install file, no questions asked. It installed perfectly and I was able to import my data from the 2 day old backup with no problems at all. So I want to take this opportunity to really thank Intuit software and the Quicken team for coming to my rescue like that.

I’ve been a Quicken customer since the mid 90’s and I will stay one for as long as I can now. It’s the best money manager out there and that was tremendous customer service.

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(Disclosure: Intuit is the spnsor of this blog)

The moment where the customer gets real and satisfying service .. what hundreds and sometimes thousands of people in a single company strive for. 

It’s a real, and randon, blog post from a guy I know who has no incentive whatsoever to post this story on his blog.  That’s why I noticed it, and why it’s such a good example of doing things the right way, the customer-centred way.  Well done.

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