Author Archive
by Jon Husband
July 5, 2008 at 12:21 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Change, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Social Computing, Web 2.0, enterprise software
I am pleased to report that I will be speaking at KMWorld 2008 in San Jose, California later this year. the working title is "The Emerging Enterprise 2.0 Workplace: Cultural Markers, Competencies, & Core Change Challenges".
I’d like any of you who may be interested to help me, and perhaps help advance the general state of awareness and understanding of the type and scope of impacts the developments of the last several years have brought to the knowledge workplace.
A couple of months ago on this blog there was an interesting discussion unfold around an exploration of KM’s past and Enterprise 2.0’s present and (possible) future titled Retrospective on KM and the Impact of Web 2.0.
In one camp some commenters gathered around the possibility that the post neatly "outlined the nexus of Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, and KM 2.0." In the other camp the position was taken that:
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1. KM is not adaptive, Web 2.0 is.
2. KM supports collaboration. Collaboration is not social networking; 2.0 supports the latter.
3. KM wants to manage things; 2.0 wants to free things in loosely connected ways
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It seems clear that web services and personal "knowledge management" tools are migrating from the consumer Web into the workplace. That phenomenon, combined with RSS feeds, wikis, search capabilities that are pushing towards the confluence of intent, imagination and serendipity and the growing scope of interactivity all of us are learning from the constant presence of the Web, may be forcing the issue of fundamentally rethinking the established and still-accepted ways of structuring, organizing and managing knowledge work. Then again, maybe not ?
I know my position … I have argued for quite a while that the fundamental principles of work design need to change from those underpinning the industrial age to principles that stem from network structures and dynamics and yet still respect relevant core assumptions about domains and bodies of knowledge. But there are very many other perspectives, concepts and examples that can either rebut or amplify that position.
I’d really like to take a stab at advancing the general debate about the issues cited above, as I believe there is a real opportunity to 1) stimulate the widespread and rapid shedding of obsolete elements of Industrial Age work design, 2) create much wider understanding about the congruence between some of the fundamental concepts of traditional KM and some of the fundamental dynamics of enterprise social computing, and 3) help popularize and make simple and easy to understand why there are real opportunities now for enterprises to (insert cliché here) tap into the potential and collective wisdom of employees and customers whilst also offering (and benefiting from) enriched jobs and more flexible and responsive cultures.
So … what I’d like to do now to is gather your input in the form of questions, assertions, opinions and links to references such as articles and essays that speak to the differences, similarities, complements and conflicts between the concepts of KM and the use of social computing in the workplace that has been labeled Enterprise 2.0. With that input there’s a chance I may be able to synthesize the content (mine and yours) to present at KMWorld 2008 that helps to clarify what’s new and useful and what’s not.
That’s what the comments section below is for. Let’s see if we can create a knowledgeable, practical and useful conversation.
I’d also like to bring your attention to a new book by British author Niall Cook (with foreword by Don Tapscott of Wikinomics fame) titled "Enterprise 2.0 - How Social Software Will Change The Future of Work".
Evidently I or we are not the only ones who think there are large opportunities for both intelligent, common-sensical and incremental improvements to knowledge work and for radical innovation and fundamental change.
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by Jon Husband
June 23, 2008 at 2:47 pm · Filed under
Change, Culture, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Social Computing, Trust, User Revolution
By now so very much has been written and said about
- the impacts both positive and negative of hyperlink-driven mass collaboration,
- the vast potential for increased effectiveness related to sharing information and scaffolding knowledge, and
- the apparent flattening of organizations that will follow.
I have been a proponent, though I would like to point out that I have never suggested hierarchy will disappear or that it is not a necessary component for decision-making and direction in many if not most contexts.
I have been blogging for at least five years. I consider reading comments and sometimes adding a comment of my own to be an integral part of blogging .. in fact, as often as not I learn more and get more out of the comments section than from the blog post itself. I have also consulted to organizations for about 20 years on work design, work effectiveness, competencies and performance, knowledge management, management and leadership development, and organizational learning and change.
Euan Semple is well known for helping to create, grow and sustain the effective use of social software tools in a complex knowledge-intensive environment (the UK’s BBC). Part of his role in doing so was to offer workshops for managers and leaders about working effectively and "managing" knowledge in that environment. No doubt part of the effective use of such tools and processes involved people "thinking outside the box" out loud, in the semi-public exchanges between colleagues in the organizational context.
Here’s an excerpt from an anecdote he published last year titled "Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There".
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"I could never trust my staff to use these sorts of tools", he said, "they would end up wasting all of their time".
[Snip ...]
The first thing I did was to ask if he thought his recruitment policy was working for him. If he couldn’t trust his staff to make minute by minute decisions about how they spent their working days how on earth was he going to trust them to make bigger decisions on his behalf? He brushed this aside and restated that whatever his staff’s judgment the sort of activity I had been describing was still a waste of time.
To this I replied first that, contrary to his assumption, people took moments to glance at a forum or a blog and if by responding they answered a worthwhile question their answer could benefit thousands of others and save a lot of time and effort.
Secondly I responded that people have always had all sorts of ways of wasting time available to them from staring out of the window to having a coffee and if they are truly wasting time then surely it was his job as a manager to deal with them and their under-performance?
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In knowledge work environments people are always reading and talking, exchanging information and opinions, pointing to things of pertinence and related interest. In a sense, people are already doing substantial parts of what is involved in the use of blogs and wikis … it’s just that the new tools are making it more visible and let workers capture the content for immediate or future use. I do not think that there is much constant full-on dedication to executing a chronologically-arranged set of daily tasks (though much reengineering and embedding of work processes in the "electronic concrete" of many ERP systems in search of constant efficiency would mitigate my assertion).
So … it’s logical to assume that one of the key propositions of value to enterprises with respect to the use of blogs and wikis is the learning and the construction of pertinent knowledge that derives from the interaction and exchange of participants.
This visible interaction and exchange is also the area that I believe raises skepticism and resistance on the part of many managers and executives. I suspect that in many enterprises unless the tools’ use and the conversations they engender are always aligned with the mission and objectives of an enterprise or the projects / initiatives where the tools are applied, the conversations will be seen as wasting time, or creating or supporting unwanted questioning and dissent.
I think it’s also quite possible that without effective moderation and facilitation a fair bit of the interaction and exchange of information enabled by social software inside the firewall will be cautious and measured, which can have a damping effect on the full range of the potential available when people converse on purpose about shared focus and activities.
It has often been suggested that organizational culture is or can be a significant obstacle to the effective and productive use of social software in enterprises. I’d add managerial style and leadership philosophy (see Gary Hamel’s The Future of Management). There is quite a bit of evidence available from the growth of wikis and blogging that publishing relevant content, commenting and the interaction that can follow facilitates increased and / or more rapid learning and idea generation. As we become more experienced, we are learning that social computing initiatives are greatly affected by the context, purpose, boundaries and moderation styles in use for a given community.
So … I suspect that there will be wave after wave after wave of examples where enterprises begin to use blogs and wikis, don’t pay enough atention to context, purpose, boundaries and moderation, and find that the organization’s culture and the style(s) of various managers are at odds with the dynamics of blogs and wikis. When things seem looser or less aligned, I suspect that there will often be reversion to command-and-control, whether by tightening the ways the blogs and wikis are used or by canceling the experiment.
I also think that there are many employees in many organizations that mostly want clear direction and a clear set of tasks and objectives to be given to them by management, in exchange for a wage, decent working conditions and some possibility of some employment security. They want hierarchy, to reduce ambiguity and possible confusion and uncertainty (Lou Gerstner of IBM once said that his toughest challenge in making substantial change work was the desire of many to "delegate upwards").
It takes an inspiring vision and purpose and a healthy respectful culture for most people to get excited about engaging in improvement, responsiveness and innovation. Implementing social software towards the creation of an Enterprise 2.0 will I believe be a significant leadership and management challenge, and will often sharpen the issues for personal, management and organizational development.
Implementation of Enterprise 2.0 initiatives will often be a major organizational change, mainly in terms of the communications and management challenges, and sharpens the game with respect to listening, empowering, coaching and responding clearly and truthfully.
Hierarchy 2.0 ?
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Tags: organizational change, hierarchy, wirearchy
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by Jon Husband
June 18, 2008 at 5:36 pm · Filed under
Business Model, Change, Emergent, Social Computing, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0
(originally posted to Supernova Conversation Hub blog)
I sat down earlier today with Umair Haque, who had been scheduled to present his Manifesto for a Next Industrial Revolution today at Supernova 2008.
Unfortunately his mother is quite ill and so he was not able to travel from London to be here.
He graciously shared with the Supernova attendees a write-up of the Manifesto, and also made himself available for this interview. Thanks, Umair … and I’ll do my best to do justice to his thinking and message.
Over the past seven or eight years the users of the Internet and the architects and developers of web services have created a new infrastructure and architecture for people to interact and create value in a wide range of human activities. Many have spoken for at least a decade about the transformative power of the Internet, and we have seen at least two waves of innovation develop … the initial dot.com boom and bust and the subsequent arrival of the broadly defined Web 2.0 phenomenon of social computing.
Umair suggests, provocatively, that while we are increasingly living and working in these new interconnected conditions, we are still by and large using industrial era assumptions and logic to drive the purpose and, yes, the dynamics of creating economic and social value. We have (collectively) inherited a dominant economic model based on exploiting resources, capital and talent in order to create, grow and make more efficient, a model that increasingly appears ill-suited to the challenges of a world whose population is growing, whose complexity is accelerating and whose ambiguities and pernicious challenges are clearly more threatening than at any time in the past. Haque argues that we need to undergo a fundamental DNA-like change in our dominant concepts about economic purpose and value. We need to organize differently, in order to seek value from new forms of efficiency, more constant innovation, easier and more comprehensive adaptation and more consistent effectiveness.
One of the key issues contained in this major challenge is that of raising the awareness for entrepreneurs, investors, executives, managers and policy-makers everywhere the need for and availability of “flexible centralization / decentralization”. This is the ability to centralize the parts of a business or organizational operations necessary for greatest effectiveness while simultaneously decentralizing other parts of the operations into distributed networks to gain the greatest benefit possible from those dynamics.
Umair said he wrote this manifesto because of his conviction that the necessary “DNA” (see the reasons for the scare quotes below) is coming out of, or being generated by the dynamics of the Web 2.0 environment wherein information is being shared and relevant utility, knowledge and business logic is being constructed during the course of (generally) non-hierarchical social interaction.
However, he believes there is a trap, which he is now calling the Facebook Trap. It’s not clear what Facebook is organizing or what specific purpose of form of economic value it is supporting or creating, other than personal profiles and page views against which to match contextual advertising. This extends into the point noted above, that by and large with current developments on the Web we are still using 1.0-ish economic and business logic. While it’s true that there are more and more conversations searching for conceptual pathways and answers at edge-dwelling gatherings like Supernova, it’s also true that the significant applications and services on the Web to date are still primarily concerned with monetization and economic performance based on existing business logic.
In his opinion, Silicon Valley (as an example) is either ignoring or refusing to confront some simple economic logic … use of the Web to build services and solutions won’t stop, it has become a structural component of our societies and economies, and it’s not about charities or about games. As he noted during the interview, the marginal scarcity of water or food may not be a huge problem for the Valley, but it’s in solving such economic problems that there exists the potential for creating huge, and progressive, economic and social value … for building a better, and interconnected, world.
In his words “the Valley should be the crucible of asymmetric competition“, out of which will emerge new companies using new mental and physical models to solve problems the old companies aren’t equipped to solve,. And when they emerge, they will do so much more quickly than did yesteryear’s examples of creative destruction.
I challenged Umair on a pet peeve of mine … academics, management and organizational theorists and business consultants everywhere often talk about organizational and economic DNA. I suspect that organizations and models don’t actually have DNA … it’s a fundamental component of a coherent organic entity. Rather those who work with and in the concepts and knowledge of given domains or in the structures of a given industry are so immersed in the models and dynamics that they “feel” the fundamental assumptions are natural. Thus, these fundamental assumptions are like DNA in that the core principles drive the thinking, perceptions, analyses and actions.
Haque agreed, and we both agreed to agree that the use of the term DNA is in effect (for our purposes here) a metaphor, a useful mental construct for helping to guide evolutionary processes and growth. And thus back to Umair’s central point … time is short, powerful new conditions are at hand, and the problems we need to solve are important, urgent and present significant new opportunities. But we need to look at them using new attitudes and new logic, or in Umair’s words, new DNA.
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Tags: Umair Haque, Havas Media Lab, Next Industrial Revolution, Supernova 2008
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by Jon Husband
June 12, 2008 at 9:14 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Adoption, Community, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, IT Department, Microsoft, Social Computing, Social Networking, Web 2.0
Notwithstanding the points raised in recent and past posts about hesitation, resistance and other various challenges to E2.0 implementation and adoption as organizations circle it like a group of neighbourhood dogs nervously eyeing and sniffing a porcupine, it seems clear that eventually organizations will have to realize that the tools and services that comprise what we call Enterprise 2.0 are tools and services that address in fundamental ways how people do knowledge work.
It’s that simple … to do much of what we call knowledge work (other than filling in boxes on forms) people need to connect, talk, listen, point to sources and noodle together over ideas and new information. They look, in conversations, for ways to stitch information and knowledge together so that it becomes useful. That’s what humans have always done .. it’s only in the last 100 years or so that we have had the sequential arranging and measurement of tasks and highly-structured division of labour that we have understood as work during most of this lifetime. As Bill Ives points out in the previous post, things are changing, and (relatively) fast, even though I am fond of the phrase "it takes a long time for change to happen quickly" (think about that for a second).
One more piece of evidence that "organizations will have to realize …" is the recent announcement that Microsoft is testing, and may offer the corporate market, a Facebook-like application called TownSquare, a business-user-focused social networking application.. Whether one think Microsoft is the answer to E2.0 for their organization or not is not the point here … the point is that most or all of the large vendors are now adding features and functionality (or acquiring them) such that the platforms being used to support the work of knowledge workers will have been substantially re-tooled before another 5 years passes. And that re-tooling will consist largely of social computing capabilities.
And then there’s the culture issue 
Will Management 2.0 be needed before or after an organization addresses E2.0 ?
The excerpt on Microsoft below via ZDNet:
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Microsoft to show off a corporate Facebook-like prototype
Mary-Jo Foley
Office Labs – an incubator within Microsoft testing business-focused technologies that may or may not end up part of future Microsoft products — is showing off this week yet another of its ideas.
The latest, known as “TownSquare,” is a business-user-focused social-networking tool. According to Computerworld, Microsoft will demo the new offering at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston on June 12.
TownSquare, via a layout similar to Facebook’s, provides internal company information, ranging from promotions and anniversaries, to a list of shared-document modifications pertinent to individual users.
TownSquare was launched inside Microsoft in January, according to the aforementioned report, and has been test driven by 8,000 Microsoft employees so far.
Microsoft has been stepping up its work on a number of other social-networking-related projects throughout the company. At its TechFest research fair earlier this year, Microsoft officials showed off a FriendFeed-like aggregation tool, codenamed C2, which is likely to find its way into Windows Live for Mobile some time in the relatively near future. And earlier this week, Microsoft rolled out a test build of a SharePoint Server plug-in for producing/managing podcasts.
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by Jon Husband
June 11, 2008 at 11:38 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Adoption, Change, Culture, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, IT Department, Social Computing, User Revolution
Euan Semple is one of acknowledged experts with respect to the use of social computing inside the firewall of an organization, based on his work when employed by the BBC to facilitate the use of wikis and blogs as part of the organization’s intranet. He is also a contributing editor emeritus of this blog.
His recent blog post titled "Most companies who try to do Enterprise 2.0 will fail" resonated with me, notwithstanding Andrew McAfee’s point (made at several presentations I have attended) that he is not aware of any social computing pilot projects / initiatives that have gone catastrophically off the rails.
Amongst those who follow the domain known, for want of a better name, as Enterprise 2.0 will also recognize that it is becoming conventional wisdom that the main challenges to effective implementation and use appear to be cultural and related to widespread assumptions-in-use about effective management … a notion that Gary Hamel takes to task in his recent book "The Future of Management" (earlier post on this issue here).
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Most companies who try to do Enterprise 2.0 will fail
And it will be for these reasons in no particular order:
1. They think it is about technology.
2. They aren’t prepared to deal with the friction that allowing their staff to connect generates.
3. They will assimilate it into business as usual.
4. They will try to do it in a way that "maximizes business effectiveness" without realizing that it calls for a radical shift in what is seen as effective.
5. They will grind down their early adopters until they give up.
6. They will get fleeced by the IT industry for over engineered, under delivering solutions, think that Enterprise 2.0 failed to live up to its promise and move on to the next fad.
7. Lack of patience
8. It is not companies who do Enterprise 2.0 it is individuals.
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by Jon Husband
May 29, 2008 at 10:08 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Change, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Social Computing, Trust, User Revolution, Web 2.0
Those who have read some of my posts in the past will know that I tend to drone on and on about what I believe is an emerging organizing principle I call wirearchy:
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A dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results,
enabled by interconnected people and technology
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In his most recent blog post, Andrew McAfee of Enterprise 2.0 fame notes he’s been invited to a heavy-hitter discourse on "the Grand Challenges for 21st century management" and outlines in the blog post a key point he intends to bring up.
It has everything to do with the current methods of work design (and organizational architecture) used by most organizations today, which are derived from FW Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (see my previous post on this issue). The methods in use today did not foresee the advent of the web nor the extensive (okay let’s say nearly ubiquitous now) use of hyperlinks and various emergent forms of (trying to manage) flows of information.
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What I Said about the Revolution
[ Snip ... ]
Impediment or design flaw: People and Information are Deeply Mismatched in Most Organizations
Within most organizations at present, the great majority of consultable digital information is either highly structured (customer order records stored in a database), a reflection of the viewpoints and priorities of the formal hierarchy (newsletters), and/or static (document repositories). As a result, this consultable information does not show the current state of the organization as perceived by its members, nor does it accurately represent their views, skills, judgments, experiences, activities, etc.
In fact, it is striking how few opportunities people have to generate, modify, and share information freely and widely on the Intranet, especially when compared with their abilities to do the same on the Internet. Since so many organizations describe people as their most important assets, it is puzzling why these opportunities are so constrained.
These constraints have an important consequence: while most organizations are drowning in many kinds of data they are simultaneously starved for vitally important information—information that comes over time from ‘wetware,’ or the minds of involved people. Lack of access to this information leads to sluggishness, redundancy, inferior decisions, and missed opportunities.
Radical Remedy: Create an Emergent, Social Enterprise Information Environment
An organization should deploy a universal digital environment that lets members contribute and modify content in a ‘freeform’ manner—with a minimum of imposed structure in the form of workflows, decision right allocations, interdependencies, and data formats specified ex ante. This environment should contain mechanisms to let structure emerge over time; such mechanisms include linking, tagging, voting, rating, and trading, as well as algorithms that generate recommendations, assess relative popularity, etc.
Managers’ roles in this environment are to set expectations, guide the development of healthy norms, indicate appropriate uses, and lead by example. A managers most fundamental role here, however, is to ‘get out of the way’—to stop using technology to impose constraints and culture on people and their work, and to instead encourage the appearance of an emergent structure.
This remedy does not necessarily include the transfer of any decision rights beyond those related to content creation. In other words, this remedy does not advocate that decisions related to the running of the organization be turned over to any emergent collective. It simply entails the creation of a novel information environment.
Decision makers will hopefully consult this environment, but the environment does not become the decision maker.
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I’ve shared with Andrew my thoughts regarding work design and the arcane discipline of job evaluation (NOT the evaluation of performance in a job), but have yet to hear back from him despite his stated interest in the issue.
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Tags: hierarchy, wirearchy, work design, organizational architecture
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by Jon Husband
May 27, 2008 at 3:10 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Blogging, Change, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, IT Department, Social Computing, User Revolution, Web 2.0, enterprise software
Today I noticed this piece in Canada’s national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, announcing that Open Text has just signed a 7-year contract to lay "the foundation for the government’s 2.0 strategy".
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Open Text strikes Web 2.0 deal with Ottawa
MATT HARTLEY
The Canadian government is getting a Web 2.0 upgrade.
Waterloo, Ont.-based business software maker Open Text Corp. [OTC-T] announced Tuesday it has landed a seven-year maintenance contract with the federal government to supply the tools that will “provide the foundation for the government’s 2.0 strategy.”
Open Text said the agreement will see its software used in all federal departments, agencies and crown corporations helping to create internal wikis, forums and blogs to help the government be more responsive to Canadians.
Open Text, which became Canada’s largest software company when International Business Machines Corp. purchased Ottawa-based Cognos Inc. last year, produces “enterprise content management software” that helps businesses to store, organize and analyze records and documents.
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Perhaps I’m mistaken, I can’t help but think that this will be the knowledge-worker equivalent of acquiring and implementing a large ERP system which will require enormous amounts of training so that everyone uses the tools in the same way, so that they push and pull content to and from each other in the same ways. Will it become a new form of email for use internally ?
From what I have been able to understand about using social software to carry out social computing inside the firewall, this approach (or my interpretation of it) flies in the face of much of what we have learned about social computing. I strongly suspect that different government departments of varying size and scope will carry out different kinds of knowledge work, and have different requirements for when and how to use collaboration to develop policy and deliver services. However, I am sure that there will have been consultant studies and recommendations backing this decision.
I think it might be better to consider a 2.0 strategy that takes into consideration those different requirements and look at a range of possible solutions, with the intention of acquiring and implementing that which will work best. After all, many of the 2.0 collaboration platforms can co-exist nicely with existing information technology architecture and what differentiates with respect to effectiveness is the take-up and use of the 2.0 capabilities by the end-user.
My sketchy opinion notwithstanding, it may be the case that such issues have been considered will be addressed with the Open Text solution. Open Text has been a leader in the collaboration space for some time now, and my thinly-informed interpretation of a short newspaper article does not have the benefit of the details of the Canadian government’s 2.0 strategy.
But my knowledge of the structure and dynamics of the work of government departments (I have consulted to a number of them in the past) suggests to me that there will be many procedural binders and lots of day-long training sessions trying to help workers become familiar with the new tools and which categories to use for which piece of content, etc.
I believe that control is still a very important consideration, if not the primary factor, in the design of work in government departments.
It will be interesting to check in 3 or 4 years down the road and see how things are going. Nothing would be more pleasing than to discover that my country’s government is reaping the benefits of using social computing inside its firewalls.
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by Jon Husband
May 24, 2008 at 4:44 pm · Filed under
Artisanal Economy, Blogging, Economics, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, IT Department, Information Management, New Realities, Relationships, Search, Social Computing, Social Networking, Trust, Web 2.0, Wisdom of Crowds
I just discovered, tangibly, something I have thought of before and had imagined might happen. I did not experience it until today.
I have been writing and blogging more over the past six months or so about social computing inside the firewall, and have spoken at several conferences about the issues and dynamics therein.
Today I used Google to search for references to me and my work, and so rediscovered a blog post I wrote four years ago about the use of blogging in organizations to stimulate dialogue, learning and innovation.
Obviously, people looking for references to my past writings on the use of blogging inside the firewall have helped this old and forgotten blog post to surface.
Update for the fact that there are now more collaboration platforms and applications, change the verb tenses and few words to make it pertinent to today’s Enterprise 2.0 context, and I think it’s still relevant.
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Blogging, Dialogue, KM and Learning
by jonh on Thu 03 Jun 2004 12:17 PM PDT | Permanent Link | Cosmos
Over the past couple of years many knowledgeable and committed bloggers have held forth on how blogging can replicate the dynamics of dialogue. They have also offered opinions and examples of how blogs and blogging can (potentially) be extremely useful for what we call "knowledge management".
In addition, there have been various anecdotes and examples of how reading blogs, commenting on blogs, and creating blog posts are activities that accelerate learning.
All this makes good sense. There are core aspects of blogging that facilitate learning in simple and effective ways.
Firstly, individual or group blogs that are focused on a domain of information and expertise chronicle and catalogue the blogger(s)’ knowledge. Over time, this grows to create a recognizable "body of knowledge".
Secondly, by offering the capability of commenting and interacting, the information on offer can be better defined, refined, explored, tested, and built upon.
Thirdly, the information on offer provides a latent platform for action - information that can be acted upon often turns into knowledge that can be shared and used in various ways.
Fourth, by linking to the blog or blogs that offer related information, the knowledge that is built can be shared more and more widely, if desired.
Fifth, the rhythym and cadence of the posting, reading, commenting and linking replicate the dynamics of dialogue in very effective ways. There aren’t the same kinds of interruption and distraction that so often occurs in conversations that only weakly replicate the dynamics of dialogue.
Finally, an ecosystem of knowledge can develop that consists of the aggregated sets of links and content the participants in a blogalogue create. And this "body of knowledge" and understanding remains online, available to anyone who cares to become involved.
I think these dynamics hold great promise - they demonstrate the characteristics that many have suggested are desirable and necessary for learning communities and learning organizations.
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Tags: Enterprise 2.0, blogging, dialogue, accelerated learning
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by Jon Husband
May 3, 2008 at 2:26 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Adoption, Change, Culture, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, SOA, SaaS, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, barriers, enterprise software
Taylorism changed a lot about the nature of work in North American and western Europe pretty quickly, all things told … but it still took thirty or forty years to emerge into its relatively full-blown effects. At its heyday, the manufacturing might and effectiveness of the United States that Taylorism helped create enabled it (along with important agricultural and resources capabilities and growing financial clout) to become the world power economically over several decades at most.
In an important sense, it was useful to his theories that 1) they helped respond to the massive spread of the Industrial Era’s requirements for growth in the first half of the 20th century, and 2) World Wars I and II came along in the late 1910’s and in the late 1930’s to provide a massive need for manufacturing.
30+ years elapsed from the publication of Principles of Scientific Management in 1911 to the codification of those principles into work design methodologies in the 1940’s and early 1950’s. He and his theories get a bad rap today, but it seems clear that they were highly useful to the process of creating wealth by improving manufacturing processes and capabilities.
It seems banal to say that those theories are less effective today, but I am not sure that’s the case. There have been no comprehensive theories and principles come along (yet) to replace them, notwithstanding a plethora of management books published since the mid-1980’s promising enhance organizational effectiveness … more often than not by combining Taylorist principles with developmental workarounds and adaptations.
The recent emergence of the field called Enterprise 2.0, and clarion calls for management innovation that have followed (see Gary Hamel, Andrew McAfee, Tom Davenport, Don Tapscott, Dave Snowden and many, many others) promises much potential disruption. It also portends significant struggle as the forces of buttoned-and-battened-down efficiency derived from a manufacturing-focused era vie with the forces arising from networked flows of information in an era where economic value is derived from the construction and application of knowledge to product and service design and delivery (manufacturing happens in China now).
Via Wikipedia:
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Taylor published his Principles of Scientific Management in 1911, which elucidated four core principles:
1. Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.
2. Scientifically select, train, and develop each employee rather than passively leaving them to train themselves.
3. Provide "Detailed instruction and supervision of each worker in the performance of that worker’s discrete task".
4. Divide work nearly equally between managers and workers, so that the managers apply scientific management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks
Management theory
Taylor thought that by analysing work, the "One Best Way" to do it would be found. He is most remembered for developing the time and motion study. He would break a job into its component parts and measure each to the hundredth of a minute.
[ Snip ... ]
He was generally unsuccessful in getting his concepts applied and was dismissed from Bethlehem Steel. It was largely through the efforts of his disciples (most notably H.L. Gantt) that industry came to implement his ideas.
Managers and workers
Taylor had very precise ideas about how to introduce his system:
"It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone." (Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management, cited by Montgomery 1989:229, italics with Taylor)
Workers were supposed to be incapable of understanding what they were doing. According to Taylor this was true even for rather simple tasks.
"’I can say, without the slightest hesitation,’ Taylor told a congressional committee, ‘that the science of handling pig-iron is so great that the man who is … physically able to handle pig-iron and is sufficiently phlegmatic and stupid to choose this for his occupation is rarely able to comprehend
[The scope of] Taylor’s Influence - United States
- Carl Barth helped Taylor to develop speed-and-feed-calculating slide rules to a previously unknown level of usefulness. Similar aids are still used in machine shops today. Barth became an early consultant on scientific management and later taught at Harvard.
- H. L. Gantt developed the Gantt chart, a visual aid for scheduling tasks and displaying the flow of work.
- Harrington Emerson introduced scientific management to the railroad industry, and proposed the dichotomy of staff versus line employees, with the former advising the latter.
- Morris Cooke adapted scientific management to educational and municipal organizations.
- Hugo Münsterberg created industrial psychology.
- Lillian Gilbreth introduced psychology to management studies.
- Frank Gilbreth (husband of Lillian) discovered scientific management while working in the construction industry, eventually developing motion studies independently of Taylor. These logically complemented Taylor’s time studies, as time and motion are two sides of the efficiency improvement coin. The two fields eventually became time and motion study.
- Harvard University, one of the first American universities to offer a graduate degree in business management in 1908, based its first-year curriculum on Taylor’s scientific management.
- Harlow S. Person, as dean of Dartmouth’s Amos Tuck School of Administration and Finance, promoted the teaching of scientific management.
- James O. McKinsey, professor of accounting at the University of Chicago and founder of the consulting firm bearing his name, advocated budgets as a means of assuring accountability and of measuring performance.
I’ve long appreciated the aphorism that is the title of this post, and I think of it regularly when surfing and reading the latest insight from the many pundits and critics of the Web. And today I am thinking about "the future of work".
It’s my assertion that the changes social computing will bring to knowledge work and knowledge-based workplaces may be even greater than the generally immature experiments that have taken hold today as early adopters play with tools that allow them to connect, create, converse, convulse, coopt, and carry on about all manner of things … including work issues, challenges and opportunities.
David Weinberger is a well-known expert on knowledge management and the hyperlinked web / organization. He has from time to time written about how the digital infrastructure and the dynamics it fosters "cuts the slack out of interactions" (The Need For Leeway, October 2002) . We need "slack" to reflect, to think, to imagine, to support the filling in and filling up of the connections we have made between people, information, task and problems. And we need analysis and measurement, specialized skills, budgets, accountability and best practices to optimize work and eliminate what is clearly unnecessary, not useful and / or wasteful.
But efficiency is not and will not be the hallmark of human interaction, and human sociology in the modern workplace cannot forever take its architectural design principles for Taylorism. As we watch Enterprise 2.0 emerge, I watch what seem to be regular waves of dots (widgets, applications, platforms, services and people in equal measure) joining together, using the Web, to meld efficiency and slack … the "both / and" so often cited as characteristic of this new environment. A flow of questions, responses and pertinent information soldered together to provide a design, or a service, is not the same as carrying out efficient repeatable supervisable step-by-step tasks the result of which are combined with other sets of efficient repeatable supervisable step-by-step tasks to produce repeatable products or services (You can have any Model T you want, as long as it is black).
There’s an enormous amount of resistance, both intellectual and cultural, to acknowledging that maybe work cannot be designed and structured based on the principles that have been in place for more than three-quarters of a century now. A lot of that has to do with what "management" still means to us (especially the incumbents of managerial roles). It’s hard to give up power and control, especially when you are charged with making stuff happen and the budgets and performance management and compensation bonus schemes reinforce that charge. So, while it appears that the Internet, and thus the difficult-if-not-impossible-to-control flows of information, are here to stay, it also seems that about every 6 months or so there’s another wave of "this newfangled hyperlink stuff, personal publishing, connecting social-this-and-that is now officially over and it hasn’t yet changed the world".
Generally, I agree but with reservations. Those reservations are that "we tend to overestimate the impacts in the short term because we overlook all the details of how things are done and the tenacious stickiness of peoples’ habits, and tend to underestimate the impacts in the longer term because we overlook or ignore the scope and depth of accumulated change" (not verbatim).
Today I found this snippet from Clay Shirky’s now-well-known Web 2.0 Expo keynote.
In my opinion he puts none too fine a point on the fact that the Internet seems to be with us to stay, and that it’s impacts will continue to accumulate. Tomorrow’s workers won’t understand meetings, collaboration, supervision or accountability in the same way we do … all because of gin and that damned mouse.
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Gin, Television, and Social Surplus
… a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.
The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.
And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.
It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.
If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom.
[ Snip ... ]
I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment.
Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?”
And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”
Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.
Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change.
Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.
[ Snip ... }
I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?
Well, the TV producer did not think this was going to be a big deal; she was not digging this line of thought. And her final question to me was essentially, "Isn’t this all just a fad?" You know, sort of the flagpole-sitting of the early early 21st century? It’s fun to go out and produce and share a little bit, but then people are going to eventually realize, "This isn’t as good as doing what I was doing before," and settle down.
And I made a spirited argument that no, this wasn’t the case, that this was in fact a big one-time shift, more analogous to the industrial revolution than to flagpole-sitting.
I was arguing that this isn’t the sort of thing society grows out of. It’s the sort of thing that society grows into.
But I’m not sure she believed me, in part because she didn’t want to believe me, but also in part because I didn’t have the right story yet. And now I do.
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by Jon Husband
April 23, 2008 at 6:25 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Interview, SOA, User Revolution, Web 2.0
Over the past two weeks in between a lot of work and some more hard work, I managed to pop in to several sessions at the OpenWeb Vancouver conference, a two-day conference focused on "showcasing open web technologies, communities and culture, and evangelizing the Open Web to developers, designers, organizers and the community at large".
At OpenWeb I was introduced to one of the presenters, Duane Nickull, Senior Global Technology Evangelist for Adobe. According to Duane, he is Adobe’s only Vancouver employee (nice work if you can get it, jetting all over the world whilst coming home every once in a while to this lovely little corner of the globe). Duane has also just co-authored a book with Tim O’Reilly … I’m pretty sure it’s about SOA but I can’t quite remember. I’ll clear that up soon and report back in the interview (see below).
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The main focus of my professional career has been working for both the United Nations CEFACT committee and OASIS for the purposes of writing and building new architectures for global integration of multiple systems. I also work for Adobe Systems which I love. Great company!
Since 1996, I have been fortunate enough to work on multiple enterprise architectures including many service oriented architectures (SOA) within various standards bodies including W3C, UN/CEFACT, OASIS and others. I have also contributed to many SOA papers and articles on service oriented architecture. My focus has shifted towards many web service standards in recent years.
I have worked on many other interesting technologies including the first contextual XML Search Engine, an Alternative fuel hydrogen project and the new UN/CEFACT eBusiness Architecture and related technologies. The next level of this work will probably be linked to Ontology work. I participate in the Ontolog Forum which is a great group.
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Duane’s OpenWeb Vancouver session was titled "Web 2.0 Design Patterns, Models and Analysis".
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"Many enterprises seek knowledge of the design patterns used by successful Web 2.0 companies. This session starts with Tim O’Reilly’s list of Web 2.0 examples and distills the abstract architectural patterns from behind the examples. By using the patterns notation, the core knowledge of the design principles is preserved in a template which can be reused in multiple domains including government."
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I asked Duane if I could interview him … about Adobe, it’s plans for Enterprise 2.0, what flows of information mean to him and his colleagues at Adobe and insights on noticing, and using patterns to design and build better, easier-to-use, more flexible and more powerful applications.
We’re still looking for a mutually convenient date (he travels a lot and is speaking at the Web 2.0 conference at the moment, so this really means when will Duane next be back in Vancouver ?), but it looks like I will interview him sometime in the first week of May. I hope you’ll check in for what I will strive mightily to make an interesting and educational interview.
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by Jon Husband
April 11, 2008 at 2:07 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Change, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Wisdom of Crowds, enterprise software
Cross-posted to the FASTForward blog.
Much of what follows may not be new for anyone who may read this blog. Nevertheless, I think it’s always useful to look back every once in a while, if only to see how far and fast (or not) we’ve come since this Web thing started to penetrate more deeply and spread more widely into the workplace.
The changes to what we call knowledge work are now coming thick and fast.
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Knowledge management (KM) sometimes seems like the business buzzword that won’t go away. But that may be changing. As Web 2.0 penetrates and spreads through workplaces, will it render KM as it was once known obsolete … or not ?
We have all been wrestling with the massive changes brought onto the scene by Web 2.0 technology and capabilities … changes that portend transforming the relationship between information technology, the nature of knowledge work, how organizations are structured and how humans operate when surrounded and penetrated by ongoing flows of information. It’s doubly important to note and understand that we are in reality still only in the early days of these fundamental changes to both the processes of work and the capabilities of the electronic infrastructure of hardware and software, aluminum, silicon and logic that supports these transformations in behaviour in the digital workplace.
A first wave of what we currently call knowledge management (KM) appeared in the mid-to-late 1990’s as organizations began coming to grips with the potent combined forces of information technology and its twin sister, information-based knowledge work. Much of the attention and effort centred on integrated information systems and specialized information technology that combined enabled the categorization, archiving and easy access to documents and other codified knowledge. Debates raged about the best ways to move back and forth between the codified ‘explicit’ knowledge and the less obvious, often invisible ‘tacit’ knowledge that surfaces in human interaction, and how best to enable or enhance the collaborative and interactive use of information and knowledge to get things done or create additional useful knowledge.
Much water has passed under many bridges over the past five years or so. Blogs and wikis began to appear on the scene in 2001 and 2002 and some speculated then that these tools - or more accurately their derivatives - would create a major impact on the knowledge workplace. They were followed by the evolution and expansion of what has come to be known as Web 2.0 … features, functions and web services enabled by plug-ins, widgets and other easy-to-use digital mechanisms. It was not until the middle of 2006 that IT executives and managers began to realize that lightweight, easy-to-use-and-integrate capabilities for finding information, pulling it apart and putting it together again in different ways, and exchanging that information to build useful knowledge would probably transform key areas of knowledge work and its attendant dynamics.
Today there is rapidly growing awareness that the Web will play a major, if not dominant, role in the use of information technology by organizations small and large, whether through upgrading to the latest versions of major ERP systems that incorporate social software and collaboration capabilities and a range of useful widgets and plug-ins, or through wider adoption of SaaS or a make-over of an enterprise’s work systems to incorporate collaborative platforms and capabilities. Increasingly, changes to functionality, systems integration and IT architecture will need to be built around both individual and group cognitive and interactive styles and needs as well as the enterprise’s business process requirements
Many interviews with some of the acknowledged experts in the domain of knowledge management and in technology companies have led to forecasts of some version of the points outlined below (and of course many variations on the theme that each point suggests):
1. KM assumed that knowledge work in information-based organizations basically remains more or less the same … more static or stable as opposed to dynamic (and always under construction) with ongoing reference to core dependencies on knowledge objects. In other words traditional KM was over-reliant on structure where structure when working with flows of information is difficult to impose and fix into place
2. “how to create a knowledge sharing culture?,” is not the right question. It’s more important to ask and understand “what you can do to encourage and facilitate connections?”, supplemented with tools, capabilities and socially-generated context, to help the appropriate information and knowledge be available when and where it is most needed and best used. This means that a much-needed role and focus is as a catalyst and facilitator of connections, helping others see why it is now this way and how things work
3. Knowledge transfer is self-assembling and self-organizing. It really can’t be otherwise … it is done by humans in interaction
4. By and large, incentives should not be used to stimulate information contributions. Generally, this leads to gaming by those that are better at managing than at creating/innovating
5. Had today’s Web 2.0 tools and capabilities had been available a decade ago, what we have called knowledge management would have been embraced and used more successfully
6. Considering or planning a “knowledge audit” implies auditing static “physical” knowledge assets. The knowledge accessed and used in organizations is better thought of as a dependency relationship of business / organizational processes on knowledge objects which underpin the social construction of just-in-time knowledge from ongoing flows of dynamic information.
7. We need to think more carefully about combining top-down design and direction of business processes with the bottom-up use of knowledge objects. The combination of structure and organic generation and synthesis can help manage effectively in continuous flows of incoming and outgoing information (knowledge objects are anything that we can coherently manage).
8. An appropriate amount of structure (design constraints) is necessary to enable consistent recall and findability of information.
9. Computers alone cannot competently tag content. Authors must tag the content they create and / or use. Putting names and labels to content is essential and often may be words that do not appear in the content (this is the essence of metadata).
10. Centralized IT control is on its way out. Much more of the decision-making about what platforms / applications / software to be used will be made in by line management or by project teams. Security concerns are real due to Web 2.0 but not apocalyptic and should focus on protecting corporate data, not in regimenting the means of collaboration.
11. Human Resources (HR) will in all likelihood need to undergo a massive transformation. The nature and design of knowledge work keeps changing and as that change accelerates, it’s likely that companies will need to move towards the self-organizing of work … including people, tools and methods.
Exploration of the issues in the field of Enterprise 2.0 has also more recently led to the understanding that social computing depends to some degree on the architecture, engineering and specialized knowledge handling technology that has come before. Numerous vendors with KM-labelled products (mostly leveraging intranets) appeared in the market in the late 1990s and early 2000’s. During that same period, hundreds of major enterprises developed and implemented KM programmes and / or functionality, to some degree or other.
Social computing in the enterprise is intended to improve the collaboration, use of information and knowledge and the decision-making effectiveness of individuals, teams or the whole enterprise. Today, more and more of the established KM-oriented products have added social-computing functionality. Existing capabilities and implementations are being adapted, re-designed and/or added to by Web 2.0 applications, platforms and capabilities that make it easier and faster for knowledge workers to exchange information, collaborate and build and use.
While through the spread of social computing KM may be coming out of an initial identity crisis, the advent and rapid spread of what is termed Enterprise 2.0 has helped create for KM a new Identity Crisis 2.0. Today it seems clear that the new crop of collaboration tools, platforms and methods for enhanced collaboration are rapidly synthesizing and integrating fragmented or separate components of what was understood to be a KM-oriented system a few short years ago.
And whatever the current guise (which is likely to be different in virtually every organization) increasingly practicality and ease-of-use will rule the day.
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