Author Archive
by Euan Semple
February 8, 2007 at 6:46 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
One of the reasons that we chose to promote the use of our social computing tools at the BBC by word of mouth and individual advocacy rather than by having a corporate campaign was that I knew that if people were going to feel comfortable enough to start expressing themselves and sharing what they knew they were going to have to trust each other and the environment in which they were operating.
One of the ideas that is emerging here at FASTforward ‘07 is of search as a platform. Search as the glue that holds “small pieces loosely joined” together and potentially replaces the more structured approach of enterprise software to date.
During his opening keynote last night Ray Lane characterised the enterprise software industry thus far as having delivered overpriced and over-complex tools that have under-delivered and created an atmosphere of mistrust.
If search tools, and the companies that deliver them, are truly going to work as a source of organisational cohesion then they are going to have to be trusted.
I am going to have to trust that they are finding and delivering the stuff that I need to do my job better than my home grown network of blogs, wikis and RSS feeds. I am going to have to trust that they will index and discover only my stuff that I am happy for them to do so and that they will reflect changing contexts over time. I am going to have to trust that those deploying the technology and those delivering it are more trustworthy than those who have made me wary of corporate computing thus far over the years.
These are non-trivial challenges for the search industry.
[Tags: ff07]
by Euan Semple
February 3, 2007 at 3:40 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
I just wrote this in a comment on Jon Husband’s blog and rather liked it.
The real gold dust [in social computing] is in difference, dissent and debate. Surfacing things you didn’t know, dealing with the things you’d rather not and connecting people you’ve kept apart.
What do you think?
by Euan Semple
January 29, 2007 at 12:20 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
There has been an interesting exchange between James Dellow and James Robertson about this blog and whether or not it has been useful. I have pondered through the day as to how, if at all, to respond and I have tried to pull together something coherent - as coherence seems to be something that is felt to be lacking.
However I have failed. So here, in the spirit of small pieces loosely joined are my thoughts.
- There was no brief for those of us asked to contribute to this blog other than to write about Enterprise 2.0. There was no request for consensus or even to be “useful”.
- I was wary about getting involved because there is a real risk of Enterprise 2.0 turning into a “thing” and a thing that can be done correctly or incorrectly with a whole load of people telling you what correct is. This IMHO is not good and is what led to KM disappearing up its own proverbial and being devalued.
- I have actually enjoyed reading and writing for this blog more than I thought and have appreciated the fact that those contributing have diverse and in some cases divergent views. This for me is one of the key pleasures of the web. I can build rich and subtle tapestries of information and ideas and assemble and re-assemble them into my own view depending on context and mood. IMHO it truly is small pieces loosely joined with the emphasis on the loosely!
- If I had a list of five things that I’d suggest people do there would only be one - don’t do what people tell you to do. Do what makes sense, do what works and do what you have the energy to sustain in the face of the considerable challenges that will be thrown before you. By all means have conversations with people who have been around and seen and done related things and who are happy to have interesting conversations with you but that is it. No formulas and no experts.
by Euan Semple
January 24, 2007 at 10:19 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
I was talking to someone recently who had begun blogging inside a large organisation. He and a colleague had heard me talk last year and they wanted to take their first small steps towards creating a social computing environment in their organisation. He told me that in an attempt to draw in more readers, and create the sort of interest that gets conversations started, he decided to put a quiz on his blog. An innocent enough idea one would have thought but he was told to take it off his blog because it was on a non-work related subject. I was staggered.
What is the harm in kicking off these non-work conversations? Do they think the workplace will grind to a halt, people run amok and profit margins start to suffer? The irony is the very same organisation no doubt has creativity and innovation in their mission statement and probably employs a team of people to foster such activities yet they squash creativity as soon as it surfaces in the “wrong place”.
I reckon there are two lessons in this story.
The first is that the technologies we are talking about here, whether we call them social computing or Enterprise 2.0, are inherently social. They are about people and the associations they make both between bits of information and with each other. In order to do this they have to “be” social. They have to rub shoulders with each other and learn to trust and understand each other. This doesn’t happen if all you talk about is the latest sales figures or the latest corporate message.
While I was at the BBC we actively encouraged people to engage on any subject in the wikis, forums and blogs so long as they kept within the law - and I mean any subject! On one occasion there was a thread about the pros and cons of being single. This was testing even my resolve as at times it appeared to be turning into some sort of online dating service. I imagined someone somewhere having the same sort of reaction that my friend got to his quiz and I was getting nervous. But then after a couple of days a TV producer joined the conversation and said “I am about to make a programme about being single and this is fantastic - you guys have done half my research for me. Many times threads that appeared to be frivolous or a waste of time morphed into examinations of really interesting and business critical issues. It fascinates me that people can be in business, which is surely about providing value in the world at large, and yet have a culture in which talking about the world, and all the messiness that it involves, is seen as un-business like.
The second lesson is about structure. Show me an organisation that doesn’t say it wants innovation and creativity but, as I said, most of them throttle any chance of these with process, structure and a constraining attitude. Things have to happen in the right way in the right place. People build systems with this in mind and spend a lot of time and energy pre-planning and pre-empting activities and are spooked when they happen spontaneously. Yet one of the main benefits of engaging in social computing is the potential for serendipitous connections and encounters, It excels at enabling the unplanned and the unforeseen. It is invariably picked up by those at the margins or who are unrepresented and these are very often the people who bring innovation and creativity to the workplace. Innovation comes about because of dissatisfaction with the status quo and if all your systems focus totally on that status quo then you are in trouble. Surely it is better that energy surfaces and things get done even if this isn’t where or how you expected it to?
To quote Stowe Boyd who coined the title Edglings for this new breed:
“As power moves from the center to the edge the “Centroids” — those that hold with the centralized power of an industrial era — will scream about all the negatives that they perceive in the out-of-control future that threatens the basis of their worldview. But the Edglings will find it liberating to get out of the stranglehold on information, communication, and the marketplace that centralized organizations attempt to impose.”
It is true that there is something inherently disruptive about this stuff but it doesn’t mean it is uncontrolled. The art of managing these environments is in taking part - saying what you think and expressing your point of view. The type of engagement is different from conventional business. It IS personal, people do connect and they do start to expect to be able to act differently. They expect to be not only able to speak but to be listened to. Managers who learn this and engage with it can become increasingly effective in carrying out their day to day work.
Lets face it each person in an organisation whether at the top or the botom is part of a network of trusted individuals and having a more effective way of connecting and communicating is surely in everyone’s interests.
Isn’t it?
by Euan Semple
January 16, 2007 at 4:36 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
OK maybe enemies is a bit strong but, having spent the past year working with a wide range of clients, if there is a single, common block to introducing social computing into organisations it is IT departments.
Part of this is a cultural thing. Corporate IT guys been brought up to manage risk rather than creativity and the free wheeling, individualist nature of Enterprise 2.0 scares the wits out of a lot of them. Even the word social makes them jumpy.
Part of it is a technological thing. PHP and Perl might as well be foreign languages to your average IT bod and many of the innovative platforms for Enterprise 2.0 are seen as sub-professional and inherently risky.
Part of it is remoteness. A lot of IT departments have grown apart from their businesses either through the growth of their own empires or as a reaction to being the fall guys when things go wrong. Either way they are not seen as enablers and part of the business of business.
But things are about to get very different. As Adrian Sannier of Arizona State University says in a recent article in The Economist:
In the past, innovation was driven by the military or corporate markets. But now the consumer market, with its vast economies of scale and appetite for novelty, leads the way. Compared with the staid corporate-software industry, using these services is like “receiving technology from an advanced civilisation”
If Enterprise 2.0 is going to happen then the way we relate to our IT is going to have to change and as in any relationship the only thing we have the power to change is ourselves. We have to make it easy for our IT guys to help us. We need to approach them with a desire to work together rather than a desire for retribution and we need to find ways of conveying the business benefits along with the fun!
by Euan Semple
January 8, 2007 at 2:42 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Woops - sorry - I mean Managers Say the Majority of Information Obtained for Their Work Is Useless, Accenture Survey Finds
Jack Vinson picks up on this survey that rang many bells for me and brought back my brief period in charge of the intranet at the BBC. I can so well remember the frustration when managers would say “I can never find anything on the intranet” as if it was my fault. On my grumpier days I would respond with “Have you ever tried sharing anything on it yourself” but mostly I bored them into submission with explanations about why intranet search couldn’t work like Google as this was basically what they thought they wanted.
With all due deference to the sponsors of this blog - remember this was around five years ago and be sure to read the interview with John Markus Lervik below for more context - I came to the conclusion that corporate intranet search was pretty much pointless. Not enough people created linky content so Google was out. Most stuff was static documents stored in “knowledge coffins” (hat tip to PWC for the terminology) that relied too heavily on structure, determined by someone else and without the benefit of context and lastly, with a few rare exceptions, once you found the document it was likely to be badly written, barely relevant and out of date!
Like Jack I came to believe that what people really wanted was to find someone who knew what they were talking about. Even if that “knew what they were talking about” meant knowing which document to read, why and where it was to be found. So what we did was start building online social spaces like forums, blogs and wikis in which highly contextual, subjective, complex patterns and information could start to surface about anything and everything in the business that was interesting and worth writing about.
The result was that when someone said on our forums “I need to find the official documentation on x because I am about to do y” they were usually rewarded, and very quickly, with multiple answers along the lines of “Well I found this document answered my questions because ….. ” pointing them at the documentation. Indeed increasingly the source they were directed to was a blog or a wiki containing up to date, contextualized information.
Having context in the question, context in the answer and the collective memory of your corporate meatspace, empowered by the mighty hyper-link, in between is hard to beat. Add to this the trust of your sources built up over a period of online socializing and you might have less managers whining that they can never find anything!
by Euan Semple
January 2, 2007 at 5:36 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
The above is a quote used by a friend of mine going through counseling training many moons ago and it has always stuck in my mind and been a salutary reminder in so many situations. I also feel it is worth bearing in mind when talking about Enterprise 2.0.
Basically the point is that telling someone, or an organisation, that they are broken and need fixed is one of the most dis-empowering and disabling messages you can give them. When you then add to this the message that you are the one who has come to fix them and are therefore de-facto superior to them you are likely to create even more resistance. When you then add in a geeky glint in your eye as you rave on about blogs wikis and online fora and fauna then you’ve lost 90% of your audience.
A while back I wrote on my own blog that the challenge with social computing, or Enterprise 2.0, is cultural and huge. We are talking about a significant shift in world view here if we are to make any real headway and these things don’t happen overnight nor without a few casualties on the way.
The main work, as I see it, for those of us committed to the possibilities of this new way of working is in slowly, carefully and patiently working it into as many corporate conversations as possible, building catalogues of stories that illuminate aspects of the culture and give people a glimpse of its potential but perhaps more than anything else it is in giving people the space and time to find their own way to and to have their own “aha” moments. This isn’t to say that a laisez-faire approach. It takes a lot of energy and commitment to care enough to engage with your organisations and frankly courage to allow it to happen at its own speed.
Patience is one of the main characteristics of those who have made social computing happen stick in the workplace combined with a respect for their quarry. At risk of being overly self-referential in this post I suggested some time ago that the skills of a fly fisherman were what were required and bemoaned the dominance of a trout farming mentality amongst so many practitioners!
by Euan Semple
December 21, 2006 at 4:14 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
I have to confess to worrying about Enterprise 2.0.
A lot of the writing about it sounds very like Enterprise 1.0 or even 0.0 and feels at times like an attempt to dissipate the effects of a disruptive technology and assimilate it into “business as usual”. Trouble is I don’t think this is possible, the genie is well and truly out of the bottle and I believe we are on path analagous to the one enabled by the printing press. That led to The Reformation and The Enlightement and shaped the world view that so many of us now take for granted. What will our equivalent of The Enlightenment be like fifty or a hundred years from now?
I am not about to make predictions, nor am I big fan of techno evangelism, but I do believe it is important that in blogs like this, and in the upcoming conference, to be challenging and prepared to be challenged - to feel uncomfortable and be made to question some of our assumptions. There is a high degree of collusion in the fiction that is the grown-up world of business with all of its cultural norms and assumptions. It takes guts for people to break ranks with that and frustrating for those who are not allowed to be part of it - but the fact is that tools like forums, and blogs and wikis flatten playing fields. They give voice to those currently unheard and can expose embarrassing silences.
These conversations will happen whether inside the firewall or outside it and in my view it is better to be part of them than not. We began latterly amongst my team to talk of our work at the BBC as democratisation of the workplace. If this makes some people uncomfortable maybe they should consider that democracies are considered by many to be the pinnacle of man’s ability to organise himself - to the extent of taking up arms to defend them - why shouldn’t they work for business?
Would your organisation qualify for Most Democratic Workplace 2007?
by Euan Semple
December 20, 2006 at 1:17 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Elsewhere on this blog Jerry Bowles just reposted his “Top 10 Management Fears About Enterprise Web 2.0″.These are still questions that I hear occasionally when working with clients and they will continue to be asked for a long time I have no doubt. What worries me though is that they are very “old world” questions and they are not the questions that people who have grown up on the web ask.
Things are changing though and those in business who are attracted to this way of looking at the world tend to ask different questions and have different fears so I thought I would put together a list of questions that I believe companies “should” be asking themselves.
Feel free to disagree in the comments!
1. How do we find the people in my organisation that get this stuff and get them to trust us enough to help make it work?
2. How do I get my IT guys’ heads around the technologies without scaring them off?
3. How do we balance the possibilities of greater networking capability and openness with the constrictive reporting legislation we are currently subject to?
4. How do I capitalize on the female qualities of this new world and move away from the dominance of male characteristics in the workplace?
5. How can we increase the chances that the behaviours in these new environments will be better than those that have gone before?
6. How can we ensure that we achieve the diversity and engagement required for the wisdom of crowds to operate?
7. How can we ensure that our legacy “knowledge” is accessible enough that this connected world can breathe life into it again?
8. How do we get over the fact that this stuff doesn’t cost much money?
9. How do we attract the right people with the right skills before our competitors do?
10. How can we be honest about the impact on our business to enable it to reinvent itself before current business models collapse?
by Euan Semple
December 18, 2006 at 5:59 pm · Filed under
event announcements
The trouble with trying to describe what is going on in organisations as social computing breaches their defenses is that we have to resort to some pretty clumsy labels in order to do so. Enterprise 2.0 is probably the clumsiest of the lot but like Web 2.0 it will serve a purpose if used with due care and attention.
But even subtler language can cause problems.
Niall Cook picks up on two phrases attributed to JP Rangaswami in the recent Information Week article about him and his work:
When asked about the respective roles of blogs and wikis in organizations, he said that blogs are for the “creators and thinkers” whereas wikis are “about doing things rather than thinking about things”.
I am not sure that JP actually meant such a clear distinction as the language suggests and in my own experience categorising one group of people as “doers” and another is “thinkers” creates artificial separation uncomfortably close to a class system. I believe people move from one type of activity to another and back on a frequent basis and our experience at the BBC was that people became pretty confident at moving from forums to blogs to wikis depending on what they were trying to achieve and using hyperlinks to weave a web of meaning between them.
This is why Niall’s main point is really interesting:
I’d argue that there is a fourth type - the connector. They may not be a creator, a thinker or a doer (at least not in the blog or wiki sense). But by tagging the blog posts and wiki pages that they find interesting, they automatically - perhaps even unwittingly - create connections between intellectual property and the people who create it. The tags they use to “describe” these resources become the glue that holds the whole continuum together.
If we can set aside the idea that these different activities are associated exclusively with different types of people they are nonetheless very useful as ways of describing different types of behaviour.
One of the joys of the new way of looking at work enabled by these new technologies is that it makes it easier for people to break out of the rigidities imposed by old labels and the pre-conceptions that came with them. Moving fluidly from one type of behavior to another while moving around the computer screen and fusing them all into a new and powerful capability is a skill that is just emerging and will, I believe become essential in business.
