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 am not a technologist. There, that’s out, for anyone who may still be labouring under the misapprehension that I understand anything about information technology even remotely, other than conceptually what it does and how it gets done.. However, I do spend a lot of time thinking about the impacts of technology and its use on human sociology and anthropology in the work and business arenas..
“End-users of information access technology do not recognize, respect and treat as reasonable the divisions that application architecture have forced on information access strategy.”
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It can be argued, and successfully (I think) that notwithstanding much work at integration there’s a lot of siloed and compartmentalized information systems in use out there … and you can even be forgiven for assuming or thinking that information technology designed to do what a given business process needs done is natural. However, it remains problematic for many organizations today that accessing information is mightily influenced by the architecture of specialized applications, and those specialized applications have often been designed for siloed or functionally separated business processes and organizations
The "forcing of architecture on access strategy" has (both unconsciously and at times consciously, I think) come about due to 1) a general replication-of-reporting-relationships-on-the-org chart as the formal route or map for the information flows supported by the architecture, and 2) insufficient attention to the patterns of information flow actually used in the process of putting information and knowledge to work.
Silo-busting and improved cross-functional communications have long been two of the primary objectives of many organizations in their quests for greater effectiveness and efficiency, or their "search for excellence" as they work on going "from good to great". And more often than not they still are.
However, with the advent of the "user revolution" that Web 2.0 continues to promise and enable, real and substantive change can be seen on the horizon. I have said before, and continue to believe, that the use of social software with minimal policy restrictions beyond "don’t be stupid" would go a long way towards silo-busting and opening up cross-functional flows of information, support accelerated and deeper learning and increase the opportunities for innovation that bubble up from committed and engaged people working together on purpose.
End users in a Web 2.0 environment now have a wide choice of tools for sharing and shaping what they know and what they learn, and it’s highly probable that they (as a generality) do not want one or a few applications imposed by the organization "forcing their hand" so to speak. They want to use the tools they find easy, or that work nicely with their cognitive, communications and collaboration styles, and they want to be able to change when something better comes along. And increasingly they don’t "understand" why what they want to use won’t work with the systems in place.
"End-users … do not recognize, respect and treat as reasonable" ….
Welcome to another episode of the "mass customization of work".
Remember all the systems training courses to which you used to send all sorts of workers ? As JP Rangaswami has been known to state, "Tomorrow’s workers have been using online applications, platforms, widgets and services for a while now, and so they’ll be all trained up when they report to work".
It’s the organizations for which they will work that have to be trained now
… 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.
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.
Explicit user-generated information is information that people knowingly and deliberately generate by contributing to online platforms. Examples of explicit information include a blog post or comment, a wiki edit, a vote or rating, a trade in a prediction market, a link, and a tag.
Implicit user-generated information is information that people unknowingly generate as they work online. It’s the digital fingerprints or traces that people leave as they follow links, look at content, consider one product then buy another, etc.
This article helped me to think about this distinction in the context of “what the user sees and does” (tools and applications) versus “underlying technologies” (collaborative filtering, visualization, mashups, data mining, etc.) It is the tools and applications that link people and content to collaborative and to co-create. It is the underlying technologies that capture and process the implicit information that provides additional explicit information into the mix. It’s a nice little ecosystem.
McAfee’s blog actually centered on the question of which is more important, implicit content (as Tim O’Reilly suggests) or explicit and came to this same conclusion: the more explicit content that is available (the more people contributing to the ecosystem), the more implicit content will become available, enriching the content environment. As E2.0 spreads, McAfee says, decision-makers who bring tools and technologies into the workplace need to be aware of (beware of) the difficulties in analyzing and using implicit data. There are privacy issues and measurement issues (are contributions individual or group? are people contributing to “look good” or to enable?). Along all of these, we’ll be wobbling for a while.
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How do you know whether your web tools or apps will be effective and usable?
Advice from the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) suggests that government agencies draw on the discipline of information architecture to ensure “ensure that sites meet [both] business and user needs”. A key role of AGIMO is to identify and promote ‘Better Practice’. They’ve created several checklists to help with the key issues for websites in the Australian Government context — checklists that are equally important for businesses who are endeavouring to deliver Web 2.0 applications into the market.
Australian Government agencies are finding that [information architecture] issues are particularly important when they are redesigning or redeveloping existing websites … Sites established several years ago may have grown in an ad-hoc way or grown very large. As a result they may be confusing to users and difficult to manage and may not accurately reflect current agency priorities.
With Web 2.0 applications like Flickr and Facebook quickly becoming the benchmark for user-interaction online, AGIMO’s advice is a timely reminder that online applications and collaborative software, need to be designed well, and information well-structured, in order to assist people to achieve their information needs.
IA is the foundation of good website design. It is about planning where information and services will be located on the site in the most convenient and logical way for users. Effective IA helps ensure that sites meet [both] business and user needs.
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UPDATE: The post by my blog colleague Jim Ware directly below motivated me to first look for, and once I found it, decide to re-post this item here on the AppGap blog. The first time I posted it I mistakenly used the date from the original post (September 26, 2006) and so the item posted to the AppGap blog back in the archives rather than on the front page.
I sincerely hope no one gets too cross with me for doing so, and if they do, I am sure I will hear about it.
But I thought that it might offer some additional interesting perspective to the issue Jim has posted about directly below.
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They Are Your Future Employees … and they will be coming soon to a workplace near you.
The title itself (They are the future; And they’re coming soon to a workplace near you. The next generation of your staff is challenging the accepted ways of doing things in the business world) is evocative of the rest of the article (Lee Rainie explains who they are and why they are different - and what employers need to think about to attract the best.).
From the first paragraph on, the scene is set with an extract from a study carried out by Marc Prensky:
As consultant Marc Prensky calculates it, the life arc of a typical 21-year-old entering the workforce today has, on average, included 5,000 hours of video game playing, exchange of 250,000 e-mails, instant messages, and phone text messages, 10,000 hours of mobile phone use. To that you can add 3,500 hours of time online.
Our work at the Pew Internet Project shows that an American teen is more likely than its parents to own a digital music player such as an iPod, to have posted writing, pictures or video on the internet, to have created a blog or profile on a social networking website such as MySpace, to have downloaded digital content - songs, games, movies or software, and to have snapped a photo or video with a phone.
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Prensky also puts into perspective the age of this new generation of workers, notably in terms of their relationship with and to the Web.
“Today’s younger workers are not ‘little us-es’,” argues Mr Prensky, an educator, gaming expert, and author of Don’t Bother Me, Mom - I’m Learning. “Their preference is for sharing, staying connected, instantaneity, multi-tasking, assembling random information into patterns, and using technology in new ways. Their challenge to the established way of doing things in the business world has already started.”
Those challenges often flow from young workers’ embrace of technologies that have grown up with them. Today’s 21-year-old was born in 1985 - 10 years after the first consumer computers went on sale. When this young worker entered public school in 1990, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a computer program called the World Wide Web. Our worker’s college career saw the rise of blogs, Wikipedia, MySpace, Del.icio.us, Skype, podcasts, and YouTube.
And so, the reality is that these young "emigres" at home in the digital world are thrusting their way into a workplace where the royalty still consists of immigrants and illiterates, in terms of the demands of the digital world. There’s a clash in perspective, to say the least.
Now, this 21-year-old and his peers are showing up in human resources offices as digital natives in a world dominated by digital immigrants - elders who often feel less at ease with new technologies. Here are five realities of the digital natives’ lives that must be understood by their new employers:
The 5 realities that employers today must understand and integrate into their practices before seriously thinking about employing this new generation :
*Reality 1: They are video gamers with different expectations about how to learn, work, and pursue careers.
A host of experts has affirmed that today’s young workers have internalised the new realities of work. “Job entrants now do not expect lifetime employment from a single employer,” argues Edward Lawler, co-author of the forthcoming book, The New American Workplace. “To them, the word ‘career’ is plural.”
These attitudes clearly reflect the larger realities of the changing nature of work. Yet there is also some evidence that the ethos of video gaming plays a role. John Beck and Mitchell Wade argue in Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever that games are the “training programs” for young workers (especially males) that help shape the way they behave in a world full of data-streams, where analysis and decisions come at twitch speed, where failure at first is the norm, where the game player is the hero, and where learning takes place informally.
For companies, this puts a premium on designing engaging work that allows workers to make a clear contribution and be rewarded for the same. If “organisation man” has become “gaming man”, then the importance of worker morale is elevated - as is the value of basing work on completed tasks, rather than other measures of work effort such as hours on the job.
“Give them projects to complete and then stand out of the way,” argues James Ware, who helps run Future of Work, an organisation for facilities, IT and human resources professionals based in Prescott, Arizona. “These kids quit when they are frustrated trying to finish a quest that will ‘get them to the next level’.”
*Reality 2: They are technologically literate, but that does not necessarily make them media literate.
Our research has found consistently that the dominant metaphor for the internet in users’ minds is a vast encyclopedia, especially among younger users, who have grown up relying on it to complete school assignments, perhaps too often clipping and pasting from websites into term papers.
Sandra Gisin, who oversees knowledge and information management at reinsurance giant Swiss Re, says her colleagues marvel at the speed with which younger workers communicate and gather information. But she has had bad experiences with younger workers accepting uncritically the top results from a Google search: she says the firm will begin training programmes next year to teach workers how to evaluate information and to stress that “not all the best information is free”.
Dow Jones news organisations have similar worries. They have created programmes for journalism educators and reporters-in-training to drive home the point that journalists should not rely on a web source without checking its origin and confirming the information in other ways. “We drive home the point that it’s not good enough to say, ‘I read it on the internet’, without taking other steps to verify it,” notes Clare Hart, president of Dow Jones Enterprises.
At the same time, younger workers’ comfort with online tools can be a boon to marketing departments. Ms Hart, 45, says younger workers on the staff “convinced us baby boomers” to put more information from Dow Jones conference presentations online and to create podcasts of the best of them. Since then, e-mail offering podcasts is opened about 20 per cent more frequently than traditional marketing e-mail.
*Reality 3: They are content creators and that shapes their notions about privacy and property.
More than half of American teenagers have created and shared content online. They think of the internet as a place where they can express their passions, play out their identities, and gather up the raw material they use for their creations.
So, why shouldn’t a young employee think it clever and fun to post on his blog pictures of Apple computers being delivered to the loading bay at Microsoft headquarters? That is what Michael Hanscom, a temporary employee for a Microsoft vendor, did and was fired for violating the company’s non-disclosure rules.
In the many-to-many broadcast environment of the internet, the prospects for data haemorrhage from companies have grown exponentially. Clearly, companies need to create policies about how internal bloggers should treat company information, what kinds of intellectual property need to be protected, and basic norms of behavior that should guide people who want to create online material.
*Reality 4: They are product and people rankers and that informs their notions of propriety.
This is the wisdom-of-crowds generation that grew up rating peers’ physical attributes (amihotornot.com), pop culture creations (Amazon metacritic.com reviews), teachers’ style and grading practices (ratemyprofessors.com), and products (epinions.com). No surprise, then, that there are websites drawing decent traffic for people to rate their bosses, their clients, and their customers. The tone of online commentary is often racy and retaliatory.
So, organisations might ponder a new clause or two in the policy manual about online etiquette inside and outside the workplace. “Most companies have policies in place against harassment based on things like sex, race, and ethnicity,” says Lynn Karoly, an economist at the RAND Corporation who has studied the 21st century
workplace. “But we should probably create new categories of policies to handle unacceptable online behaviours where liability might emerge.”
*Reality 5: They are multi-taskers often living in a state of “continuous partial attention”, where the boundary between work and leisure is quite permeable.
The ubiquity of gadgets and media allows younger workers to toggle back and forth quickly between tasks for work and chatter with their friends. Many marvel at their capacity to juggle multiple tasks simultaneously. An even sharper insight comes from Linda Stone, a technology consultant, who has noted that many technophiles function in a condition she refers to as “continuous partial attention”, where they are scanning all available data sources for optimum inputs.
Those who operate in such a state are not as productive as those who stay on task. They also do not make distinctions between the zones of work and leisure, consumer and producer, education and entertainment. “Their worlds bleed together,” argues Charles Grantham, another principal at the Future of Work. “It is pretty useless to try to draw borders around different spheres for them. It’s better to let them shift among them at their choosing as long as the work gets done.”
Again, companies would be wise to spell out their tolerance levels for the amount of personal activity workers are allowed and their expectations about the availability of workers outside the office and after hours.
Many companies see no option but to embrace the world of digital natives. Agilent Technologies, a top global measurement company, began early this year to distribute iPod Nanos to new employees hired from US college campuses. The Nanos were preloaded with podcasts describing each of the benefits offered by the company, such as the 401(k) retirement plan and options for health insurance. “The college kids loved getting the benefit overviews preloaded on the iPod, while our older workers often preferred to read about these things on our website,” notes human resources manager Cathy Taylor. “There are different generational learning styles.”
Still, the ethic of podcasting information is now spreading through the company and some of those older workers have caught the bug, too. For a recent retirement party, staff from Agilent’s far-flung offices collaborated on a podcast for the retiree. “You Raise Me Up” by Andrea Bocelli was dubbed over the voiced well-wishes and the podcast was played over a WebEx teleconference. “It was a first for a virtual retirement party,” enthuses Taylor. “We’ll be doing it again.”
In a recent keynote at SXSW, Charlene Li of Forrester Research predicted that social networking platforms will be "like air" … "They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be."
More specifically, she broke down the use of such platforms into four components of utility and impact:
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Profiles - universal identities
Relationships - a single social graph
Activities - a social context for activities
Business Models - social influence as a key definer of marketing value
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Here’s an item from the NY Times about recent speculation that Yahoo may join OpenSocial, the Google-led social networking alliance that aims to bring significant degrees of openness to social networking platforms, thus (eventually) stimulating and enhancing ubiquity and pervasive use.
Yahoo intends to join OpenSocial, a Google-led alliance that is developing a common set of standards so developers can create programs that run on many social networks and other Web sites, according to a person with direct knowledge of Yahoo’s plans.
Yahoo’s backing, which could be announced as early as this week, would bring a large base of users to the OpenSocial alliance, which is seen as a counterweight to Facebook’s successful courtship of application developers. The alliance, which was announced in the fall, already includes MySpace, Bebo and several other social networking sites.
Yahoo’s participation “would mean that the site with the largest group of users, and with the largest base of registered users, would be joining OpenSocial,” said Charlene Li, an analyst with Forrester Research.
When asked about Yahoo’s OpenSocial plans, a company spokeswoman said: “Yahoo has a rich history of supporting open standards, such as OpenID and Apache Hadoop, as we believe industry collaboration is beneficial to the developer community and the Web as a whole. While we are evaluating OpenSocial as an emerging standard, we do not comment on speculation or rumors.”
Yahoo has said it wants to speed up efforts to open its site to outside developers. Although it is not a social network, Yahoo could benefit from third party “social” applications that allow users to share, say, their favorite photos, music or movies with their friends.
I think that much of what is written here at the FASTForward blog by my colleagues also supports the distinct probability that the foundation is being created for the step-by-step (depending upon take-up and implementation) of collaboration and social computing platforms, tools and services which will redefine the dynamics of knowledge work and tie, tightly, into Charlene Li’s four key components of social networking platforms.
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
