Archive for March, 2010
by Jim McGee
March 18, 2010 at 11:42 am · Filed under
FASTforward'09
I’m struggling with the issue of incentives in organizations trying to promote improved knowledge management and more effective use of new collaboration tools such as blogs, wikis, and the like. Invariably, after an early spurt of activity and experimentation with the new systems, usage plateaus and talk turns to devising incentive systems to promote more participation. Behind the talk is the assumption that we can treat knowledge workers as rational economic actors and that the proper incentives will produce the desired behaviors.
The problem is the raft of research demonstrating that we are anything but rational economic actors. Spend any time digesting the insights in such work as Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational or Daniel Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, to pick two recent examples, and you conclude that most organizational incentive systems are naively designed at best and actively harmful at worst. While carrots and sticks might be marginally useful if you need to crank out widgets or insurance claims, they aren’t for any work requiring significant creativity or discretion. Yet, we keep trying to devise simple reward systems and wondering why they fail.
The underlying issue is that focusing on designing incentives feels safer and easier than dealing with the hard managerial work of sitting down one-on-one with the individuals and planning out how to integrate these new tools into the day-to-day execution of knowledge work tasks. As Tom Davenport put it so pithily in Thinking for a Living the default managerial approach to knowledge workers is to “hire smart people and leave them alone.” If the quality of knowledge work done by an organization is, in fact, a key differentiator in overall success, then this laissez-faire approach to managing knowledge work isn’t likely to be sustainable.
Behavioral complexities of knowledge work
There are actually two problems to be solved. The first is to get a handle on the behaviors that contribute to more effective knowledge work. The second is to understand what kinds of feedback will influence whether knowledge workers engage in the desired behaviors.
Consider the kinds of behaviors that you might see in an organization using its existing knowledge more effectively than average. Activities you might expect to see include:
- Seeking out and finding experts elsewhere in the organization who can answer your questions
- Experts in the organization making time to respond to questions they receive
- Experts recognizing when repeated questions signal an opportunity for a new service or a deeper problem to address
- Project teams experimenting with and adopting new practices such as After Action Reviews as part of their standard project plans
- Individual knowledge workers revising their work practices to more easily find and incorporate previous work into new work
Multiplying examples would only reinforce the point that these behaviors are significantly more subtle and complex than those that find their way into typical incentive systems.
Rewarding something because it happens to be measurable isn’t going to help, even if that is the all too common response in organizations that have fallen hostage to empty dictums that “you manage what you measure.” You manage what you talk about. If that conversation can be boiled down to where the needle is pointing on one or two dials, then you live in a much simpler world than I do and I envy you.
In my world, there is a complicated and often mysterious relationship between what people do and what happens sometime later. You invest in getting to know the key people at a small software vendor. They get an email inquiry from a company interested in updating their approach to knowledge management that the software vendor forwards to you. You reply to the email, have a brief phone conversation, develop and submit a proposal over the weekend, and, three days later, land a substantial contract with someone you still haven’t met face-to-face. How do you map that into a performance measurement system?
Consider another example. A consulting firm is encouraging experts to submit their best work to a central document repository. Your call center expert responds and contributes an Excel spreadsheet used to analyze operating performance in an outbound call center. One of your smartest consultants (with an Ivy League Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics) grabs the spreadsheet for another call center project. Unfortunately, the Ph.D. mathematician doesn’t have time to discuss the document with the resident expert and proceeds to employ it incorrectly. Client damage control ensues. Is this a design flaw in the knowledge management system? A training problem? A developmental opportunity? Was it a staffing problem when our Ph.D was originally assigned to the project? What measurement system would signal this problem before it occurred? What measurement system would reveal the problem after the fact?
Focus on better feedback systems instead of incentives
You certainly want feedback systems that provide a picture of how knowledge workers in your organization are interacting with the tools and information you make available to them. Better yet, these feedback systems ought to let you detect and deconstruct patterns of practice over time. What you can’t get is a manageably small set of measures that you can reliably link to performance. You can’t operate on autopilot.
Two approaches come to mind. Both assume that individual knowledge workers have primary responsibility for figuring out how they contribute to creating value for the organization. Secondary responsibility for coaching knowledge workers through this effort lies with their immediate supervisors.
The first approach is to look for successful patterns of use within the existing knowledge sharing system. Use After Action Reviews or other techniques to examine and evaluate how a particular knowledge sharing opportunity played out.
The second approach is to add some basic instrumentation to the knowledge sharing system. Make it simple to count things like blog posts made, comments made, documents contributed, documents consulted, and pointers shared. Use that data to distill and identify patterns of practice worth emulating. For example, some knowledge workers might be adding value by connecting and integrating materials in the system to create new knowledge. Others might be helping by weeding out obsolete information or adding important caveats. There won’t be a single pattern of successful usage that all should emulate. It is much more likely that there will be multiple patterns. The managerial task is to help knowledge workers identify the patterns that they are most adept at, helping them refine their usage patterns over time, and monitoring the system as a whole to ensure that there is a good balance among usage patterns.
This is clearly a more complex and judgmental task than simply rewarding everyone for contributing more content. But it feels more suited to the actual complexities of doing and managing knowledge work in today’s environment.
by Bill Ives
March 17, 2010 at 3:54 am · Filed under
Social Media
Eric Gilbert and Karrie Karahalios at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently published an interesting paper on Predicting Tie Strength With Social Media. Building on the theoretical work on strong and weak ties started by the classic Mark Granovetter 1973 paper “The Strength of Weak Ties,” they looked at whether social media behavior could be used as a predictor of tie strength. In this paper the researchers present a predictive model that maps social media data to tie strength. The model builds on a dataset of over 2,000 Facebook relationships and distinguishes between strong and weak ties with over 85% accuracy.
They asked 35 people to rate a number of their Facebook friends that were randomly selected. Then they looked at the Facebook behavior of these people to see if could accurate predict the strength of their ties as reported by the participants. Dimensions such as the use of words associated with intimacy and intensity, duration of communication, social distance, and other factors were looked at for their predictive power. The complete set of variables was combined to form the predictive model that worked in 85% of the instances.
I am sure that the researchers would be the first to agree that more work needs to be done. As a former researcher I can see many potential confounding variable but, at the same time, the work looks promising. They offer some practical applications. For example, a “system that prioritizes via tie strength, or allows users to tune parameters that incorporate tie strength, might provide more useful, timely and enjoyable activity streams.”
This is especially true as many people are building friends or followers that number in the hundreds, if not thousands. This would also apply within the enterprise as the use of social media within the firewall continues to grow. As this approach gets validated through more research it could be translated into an application feature.
by Jon Husband
March 12, 2010 at 12:07 am · Filed under
FASTforward'09
First … no answers here. Only questions and ideas based on past HR experience, observations and some familiarity with interactive and participative dynamics online.
Back in January in one of the sections of a post titled “Exploring the HR Management Framework for Enterprise 2.0” I offered up the following:
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Employee Performance
Performance management has been a hot-button issue in most enterprises for a long time. At its best, a well-designed and disciplined approach to performance management can play a positive and constructive role in delivering sustained high performance, and can be central to creating a performance oriented culture in the enterprise.
All too often, however, performance management schemes serve to remind us that too many workplaces are the adult version of grade school, with report cards and a parent-like boss who has unwanted power over employee’s future and fate.
360-degree feedback processes (soliciting input on performance from subordinates, colleagues, superiors and even external customers and liaisons) have been around long enough now to have most of the kinks worked out, and are probably a decent pre-cursor to forms of ‘crowdsourcing’ input on employees’ performance. Many (most ?) of the social computing / collaboration platforms out there have features and functionality designed to offer support to gathering and processing information about peoples’ performance.
The culture of an enterprise is an all-important aspect of why and how performance management is used. I expect that this aspect will become more important as social computing and collaboration continue to grow and spread.
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Let’s talk a little bit more about how managing peoples’ performance might be practiced in an interconnected, interactive (and cross-silo / cross-organization) and more transparent organization.
Sharing information and building pertinent and applicable knowledge from that sharing is one of the core (and still much-discussed) tenets of knowledge management (KM) – the buzzword that won’t go away. Sharing information .. links, content, opinions, specific expertise, etc. … is also at the core of using social computing in the enterprise. Some of the skepticism about being able to control it comes from not understanding clearly how it will fit into, or with, existing business processes, and I suspect that there is an accompanying fear that it may upend or distort some or mamy business processes, if the inmates are handed the keys to the gates.
At the same time, we are at the back end of at least 20 years of calling for breaking down or at a minimum de-rigidifying the walls of specialized functional silos in most hierarchical organizations.
In some sense, the invaders, or the barbarians if you will, are at the castle gates clamoring for the gatekeepers to let them in. They’ll argue, with some reason, that customers have more power, and that empowered and trusted employess can and want to contribute more to any given organization’s effectiveness.
So … let’s assume that Enterprise 2.0 implementations continue to spread and grow. Let’s further assume that many of them are at least semi-successful, and that net-working in collaboration with flows of information feeding increasing flexible business processes gains more and more traction. Will we need to begin setting objectives and targets differently, and will that in turn necessitate that in a socially-networked or ’social business’ environment employees’ performance will need to be assessed and managed differently ?
My sense is that the answer is probably Yes. People will be working differently, and in all likelihood in more interdependent ways than in more traditional teams.
Setting objectives, for example, will probably need to consider more the role and dynamics of the networks that are pertinent .. whether it involves greater connections to/with customers and markets, or to what purpose and degree the work that addresses the objective involves net-working inside the organization. In other words, I think it will mean considering the nature of the work more than ever before.
Bring an organizational objective down into an individual net-worker’s performance objectives will also require consideration of how she or he works in the relevant networks, and what kinds of contribution are generated from the interaction in which they engage with others in the network(s) that are addressing the organizational objective.
I believe that there are a range of work design tools that can be useful with these issues .. mainly drawn from the organizational development (OD) field, such as the RACI matrix and accountability mapping. They would need to become more commonly and frequently used, and I suggest that they would become as or more important than the traditional job description, with its assumptions about relatively static tasks and accountabilities.
Competency models are the most recent work design tool (I’ve written briefly about them here) that has become embedded in most workplaces in support of recruitment, employee – performance fit and as a foundation for assessing individual performance. I also believe that the competencies associated with most roles (and certainly those that operate mainly in networks and with social computing and social networking tools and platforms) will need to be re-visited as the cross-functional, cross-organizational and internal – external connections proliferate.
In terms of actually assessing performance against objectives and required / desired competencies, today’s organizations have a foundation upon which to build. Many organizations have implemented and have experience with using what is called 360-degree feedback as a core element or the input about demonstrated performance in a role or job. The 360-degree feedback process can, I think, be reasonably well-adapted to the E2.0 context … the more difficult challenge is articulating the performance objectives in clear and meaningful ways whilst acknowledging that the roles being performed are participating in a range of networks and flows of information and activities.
Additionally, most (if not all) E2.0 collaboration platforms have or will have mechanisms that track activities, whether around objectives or around issues using tags, click counts, and elements of social network analysis (SNA), organizational network analysis (ONA), or value network analysis (VNA). As organizations acquire more experience and expertise in using these concepts, I think there will come to be a base of information that will enable new forms of ROI .. namely what I and others have called Return on Investment in Interaction (ROII).
Performance management in organizations has always been a complex set of sociological and political processes. It doesn’t promise to become any easier, but there are signals on the horizon that suggest some ways forward.
Like I said .. no answers, just ideas and questions at this stage. Beyond the ideas outlined above, there are more far-reaching ideas and issues being discussed in some of the conversation circles I inhabit that are examining more human-centered notions of knowledge work and how they may come together in new forms of organization. Those ideas and issues will no doubt continue to evolve as collaboration platforms and the Web continue to grow their impacts upon today’s organization and the work that is carried out in those organizations.
I’d be really interested to hear what you think.
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by Joe McKendrick
March 11, 2010 at 10:16 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Event Announcements, FASTforward'09, SOA, Social Computing, Social Media, User Revolution, Web 2.0
I just got back from the FASTforward event held in New York City, in which more than 400 attendees were treated to a range of applications and new thinking around the way organizations collaborate. Bjorn Olstad, distinguished engineer for Microsoft and CTO of FAST, kicked off the proceedings with an overview of the latest FAST search functionality, available as part of Microsoft SharePoint or as a standalone solution. He discussed the growing interconnectness between search — offered via internal networks as well as through customer-facing portals — and collaboration and real-time customer experiences.
Major organizations are leveraging collaborative tools to improve the experiences for customers and constituents, and this was explained by representatives of two major global organizations. G. “Gurvais” Clayton Grigg, chief knowledge officer for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, explained how his agency is managing an enormous flow of data into an already massive amount of content and documents. He said it was estimated that the FBI maintains enough paper to create a tower 178 miles high.
The challenge is transfer the nuggets of important information on some of this paper to a digitized and accessible form, Grigg says. Paper artifacts will be around for a long time to come, he points out. “The bad guys aren’t going to be organizing their evidence as metadata,” he says. “They’re not going to hand you everything on a CD.”
He said the agency’s strategy is to better leverage three sources of information — data, paper, and people.
Questions that need to be asked about information include “What do we know?” “Who knows it?” “How is it being used?” and “How is it being shared?” Grigg says. The ability to connect people and help them collaborate is paramount, he adds. “While it’s really good to help people find data, it’s even better to help them find the people with the data,” he says.
Technology needs to take a back seat to people and business considerations, he adds. “When people come to me requesting a technology, I first ask them to describe the problem without technology. If they can do that, they understand the problem better.”
Michael Rossotti, application services sr. analyst at Merck, explained how the pharmaceutical giant was leveraging the FAST Enterprise Search Platform and complementary solutions to deliver the latest information to physicians and consumers around the world.
The company maintains two primary portals, Merck Medicus, for doctors, and MerckSource for consumers. Both now have search capabilities built in.
The goals of the implementation, begun in March 2007, were to “have the user experience be central,” Rossotti says. “We wanted to build trust with the customer. Sometimes our only interactions with customers is through our portals.” The company conducted a phased rollout of capabilities, starting with an advanced search feature for Medicus. The first phase was linking to 50 companies across the enterprise that were crawled on a daily basis. The portals were later enhanced with a federated search capability to other search results, but still contained within the portal page. In 2009, the company integrated its portal search capabilities with SharePoint, he says. Currently, the system sees about five queries a second, he says.
Rossotti says some of the lessons learned from the experience include the need to “be wary of feature creep,” as departments seek to activate more tools and enhancements at the sites. “If you start to do too much, the experience for the client can become too complex.” The priorities, Rossotti, are to “step forward on governance, and meet increased demand.”
by Rob Paterson
March 11, 2010 at 3:31 pm · Filed under
2.0 Business Model, 2.0 Design Thinking, Adoption
We are all “selling”. At the heart of us all we would at least like others to see what we see. True power is being truly heard. This may be selling a product. Or it may be changing the world of food or school – whatever. True power is when you and your idea finds dominance.
Until recently, we had to use immense resources to pull this off. After all this was what marketing and politics was all about – getting hold of vast sums of money to push out our POV.
Only the big could play – until now.
Please excuse the diagram – but I know of no other way of showing this right now. This comes from some work I am doing with a client who has a service that is of interest to researchers. We built this model of the “Field” of a University as it pertains to how we might influence the Profs.
Simply put, if you want to have a lot of Profs use your service, you have to start not with the Formal University and least of all with the most tenacious gatekeeper IT. You are best to find the Big Man on Campus – the most influential Prof with the Lab that all look up to. If she likes what you have, she can find her own money to buy it. Being a “star” she does not need the university as lesser Profs might. If she buys and uses and likes it, then the lesser stars join. The laws of Adoption come into play.
Not only does the BMOC influence her colleagues in her university but because she is a true star, she carries weight in other universities. She may also have formal links in that she may be collaborating with another Lab or Labs. She is a vector for “infection”.
If you have a service that can also serve the small, then you can increase your power by finding the Rising Star. This junior prof has no money. He is new but brilliant. He too wishes to rise to be a dominant player in the field. If you can have a close to free version of your service, he can use this to rise. Then all the rest have to follow as well.
It is better if you then can find local allies. In every system you will have the cops and you will have the social workers. The cops are usually IT or HR in organizations. The nice people in Universities are the Libraries. They are usually genuinely interested in learning and in serving and tend not to be tied to any Right Way. My bet is that every field has these brakes or accelerators.
Finally, to get the big boost, it is likely that you will find regulators or agencies who may find that your service serves them too. With their support, you can tip the system.
I don’t think that this model is confined to Universities. I think that it is Fractal.
I think that all fields have the same deep structure and so are open to this type of approach. In every field there is a dominance hierarchy. There is an external boundary. The job in every field is to get to the centre and to hold the dominant role. This is true in music, in art, math, banking in everything.
There are Stars at the centre, there are gatekeepers, there are Rising Stars, there are infection vectors, there are sponsors, there are pitfalls. All fields have this kind of structure. If we said that the university model was classical piano – it would be the same. If we said it was war doctrine, it would be the same. Hey it is the same for Social Media.
So why is this helpful to you? Because this approach is a true game changer. You don’t have to have vast resources to capture the interest of a field. You do have to have something that is authentically good. But if you have this, then we can use this model to move up the adoption curve with few resources. In fact once you get momentum, the system will do nearly all the work for you.
If I am correct, then this model is a simple map of any field and so enables anyone who wishes to rise or influence any field, to plot a strategy.
This then brings us back to my first post. If this is the map, then we also know how best to harness our social power to have the best journey.
Do we know enough now for you to have the optimal team set up in the optimal way to have the power to get influence on the field that matters to you?
I think we do – but what about you?
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