by Patti Anklam
April 2, 2008 at 4:35 pm
· Filed under Collaboration, Distributed Work, KM, Reviews, Talent Management, social networks
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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Patti - Thanks for mentioning my post. IBM has certainly been strong in this space for some time. It is nice to see them continue and that Kate Ehrlich is involved. Bill
Hi Patti - my fav snippet from your provocative post…
“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”.
Yes, I completely agree that Trampoline SONAR is very much about managing the metadata of human connectivity as a critical resource.
It does seem with the arrival of Trampoline Systems and IBM’s Atlas that the platforms for “Net Work”‘ing, as your book advocates Patti, are beginning to emerge. I’m also watching Stowe Boyd’s “Workstreamr” now in beta with it’s “Work Made Social” tagline. Clearly Trampoline’s Enron Explorer suggests the promise.
Interesting to me about IBM’s Atlas, beyond the serious research Kate Erhlich and colleagues undertook as the foundation is that it literally, (if I understand correctly from Kate as I haven’t yet seen), shows “degree of tie” in the interface.
Can it be that 3 decades plus since Granovetter wrote “The Strength of Weak Ties”, and 2 decades since Valdis Krebs began using organizational network analysis (ONA) within IBM, that the language of social networks is becoming part of the business lexicon? Jenny
great post, patti (i’m blushing!). jenny’s point about how long it’s taken businesses to start understanding themselves in terms of network structures raises some fascinating questions. as early as the 1930s elton mayo’s research was making it clear that emergent groupings and informal networks were crucial factors in business performance. but somehow the straight lines and tidy boxes of the org chart have maintained their tyranny on how people thought of business structures until the present day.
my hunch is that technology has a lot to do with this stubborn persistence, and also with the rapid shift we’re seeing now. it’s easy to forget what an extraordinary informational achievement it was to make a large corporation function in the pre-electronic era. all records were kept on paper, information was circulated from one person to another on paper, strategic decisions could only be made by getting executives together in a room. scaling an organisation operating on these processes naturally emphasised linear structures and simple hierarchic information flows. a complex, network-based informal structure continued to thrive and generate value, but it was pushed underground.
it’s only with the arrival of the internet that the status quo started to change, and even from that point it’s taken thirty years to reach what now feels like a classic tipping point. in any case we’re lucky to be working in this field at this moment in history. i believe the next decade will see some breathtaking changes in how large organisations operate.
: c :
Interesting Charles and how fabulous that you joined the discussion here. Your comments about the challenging transition for organizations from paper to electronic, and how technology plays into “some breathtaking changes in how large organisations operate” fascinating in light of a conversation this morning with Robin Teigland, a University of Sweden based research. (My colleague Victoria G. Axelrod and I were interviewing Robin for a work in progress article.)
We were discussing prospects for wider use of organizational network analysis. Robin commented about the importance of computing power and easier to use tools as key factors. Her first ONA”s in 1996 were conducted using paper surveys.
Relevant to TheAppGap’s focus on the “The Future of Work” was a discussion inspired by a 1989 Cohen & Levinthal graphic projecting growth in knowledge against human absorptive capacity. (Slide 3 in Robin Teigland’s Slideshare that prompted today’s conversation:
http://www.slideshare.net/eteigland/leveraging-social-networks-for-results/
We concluded the lines aren’t going to grow closer any time soon.
Against this reality it’s not hard to believe the “breathaking changes” you see ahead for organizations will not only happen, but MUST take place.
~ Jenny
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