It Takes A Long Time For Change To Happen Quickly

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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Size Matters - When Small is Big

March 31, 2008 at 5:04 am · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Analytics, Artisanal Economy, Brian Hurlburt, Business Model, Change, Enterprise 2.0, Interview, Long Tail, Marketing, MicroBrand, Personal Branding, Social Media, Social Networking, Trusted Space, WalMart, Web 2.0, Web Advertising, Web Services, Wikinomics, barriers, metadata

Sam Walton’s wife’s deal with Sam when they got married was that he could do whatever he wanted - he wanted to be a retailer - but she would never live in a community that had more than 10,000 people. So his constraint was to build an epochal retail system but in the boonies. Look at what he accomplished with this as a restraint! He also found on his path that being in the boonies also gave him a defence against the huge competitors such as Kmart and Sears. No one took someone who worked in the boonies seriously. That is until it was too late!

My point is that, no matter what you think of WalMart now, that we are predjudiced about the boonies. Smart people in all fields - not the least in Social Media - tend to have a big city bias. We too often over look the boonies and those that live and work there - how could they affect us? We all know that you have to be in the big city to know what is really going on. Of course that is why Warren Buffett is the richest man in the world!

My story today is about a man that you likely have never heard of - who lives and works in a small town that you also may never have heard of. We can never know today if he may become the Sam Walton or the Warren Buffett of media, but my bet is that if he does not then someone like him will be.

My bet is that at the heart of the real social media revolution is that if we do indeed move to a networked world then small communities will be able to stand toe to toe with the big cities.

Meet Brian Hurlburt who lives in Yarmouth Nova Scotia a small port on the southern tip of the province where the high speed ferry comes in from Portland. Brian owns a runs a Web “Something” (Yarmouthcounty.com) that tells the aggregated story of everything that happens in Yarmouth. I call it a web “something” because it is more than a web site - it is closer to the old style of really local newspaper that you might see in a western.

Until Brian, everyone had ignored Yarmouth. The fact that the domain was available told Brian that no one cared. The Province did not care - Yarmouth is off the radar in Halifax. Tourists from the US got off the ferry and drive through town and onto other more exotic places that were better known. (Nothing is really exotic in Atlantic Canada but you know what I mean) The B & B’s were all separated and isolated and could not get their message out.  So were all the social groups such as Church groups. Small business struggled to get noticed and worried about maybe a WalMart coming to town. The social capital of Yarmouth was draining away. At some point, it would no longer be a community at all.

So who is Brian Hulrburt? Is he some flash young techhie? No Brian is a regular guy who knew next to nothing about the web. Everything he now knows about how the web works he has learned by trial and error. All the fears that a church or a B & B may have about the web - he has experienced himself.

Fear is the great barrier that we all have of the new. So how Brian learned and how he is - an open and vulnerable man - is an important key to his success in bringing so many parts of his community together online. He can describe what has to be done in language and in a tone that does not judge or appear mysterious.

He also did not try and monetize the site until it was ready. He had faith that if he was able to reach a critical mass that the money would come. So he also did not carry a lot of costs himself. He could not afford to have costs involved that would force him to force the economics before the time was right.

Is this not the Craigslist model?

What he has been able to do is to aggregate the life of Yarmouth online. Aggregation in a safe and trusted place is going to be one of the key value creation processes in a world of infinite content. By not pushing the economics he has built the trust and now “owns” the space.

The underlying metrics are also emerging that will drive an economic model that benefits not just Brian but all those who inhabit the site.

In 2007 the site had 100,000 visits. Not hits, over 1 1/2 million of those, but real visits. Because of the power of aggregation, all those that live on the site have now access to al this traffic that they could never have reached on their own. The local paper reaches about 20-30,000. So Brian is reaching more and at a fraction of the cost of the paper. He also enables a growing interaction between all parties which is not possible in a paper.

This is more than Google Local or Craigslist - this is a personal aggregation that includes a filtering that is part Brian and part the client. It can therefore be trusted more than a simple mechanical aggregation. It will over time therefore have more value than a simple algorithm.

A growing part of what Brian can now offer his family of clients is the kind of measurement that conventional advertising cannot. Brian is becoming expert in analytics.

Here I think is part of the core of the new economic model. Mass Marketing needed a mass market as there was so much leakage. With no precision possible, as in WWII, only area bombing was possible. So what could a small place do like Yarmouth. Their feeble sums of money wouldn’t even be noise in the larger scheme of trying to get noticed. What Brian can offer is precision - the Long Tail in action. A B & B can see exactly who it is reaching online and can adjust to get a better focus and hence result.

This will kill the mass media alternatives. Niche + precision = high return.

For me the lessons that  I have gained from looking at Brian are these:

• Niche is where the energy is - the Value will be on the right hand side of the Long Tail
• Aggregation around niche is where the value is - the more personal the better
• Precision about what happens in the aggregated niche is what drives the economics and the return
• Power will shift from the large and diffused to the small and concentrated

I asked Brian “where is it going?” He replied by saying that “The web is changing the world. It is helping us help each other again. We can take charge of our own lives again. I want to be part of this.”

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The Voice of the Revolution

February 28, 2008 at 1:03 pm · Filed under Change, Control, Economics, Enterprise 2.0, FASTForward '08, Freedom, Social Networking, User Revolution, barriers

Marketing Daily released a piece today that sounds remarkably similar to the key messages shared at FASTforward ‘08.  It details the actions of Ford of Canada:

FORD MOTOR COMPANY OF CANADA is launching its biggest marketing push in six years with a campaign that focuses on letting Ford customers serve as brand ambassadors.

The ads carry the theme line: “A car is just a car until it’s powered by you.”

The campaign also includes a new Web site, Fordpoweredbyyou.ca. The site is intended as a social-media forum where consumers can air their opinions of the Ford brand, technology and vehicles.

“We don’t own the brand the way we used to; consumers own it. It’s not about claims any more. Consumers don’t want to be preached to. It’s about a dialogue and discovery, giving people the chance to comment,” he says. “We see it as more of a consumer site than our site.

I draw attention to the fact that Ford is an American company with the actions taking place in Canada. I add to that the fact that many of the brightest voices on this blog, are Canadians (I can only claim founder heritage in the 1600s).

I have noted more and more conversations where the opportunities to leverage 2.0 (or the willingness to embrace/adopt, typically in pursuit of innovation) are greater outside the US. The US was founded on the pursuit of freedom to act. With that freedom it became the economic leader of the free world. Are US enterprises typically places where people are free to act?

It would appear that the titans of industry need to take a step back and rethink their positions and their methods of conducting business. As Don Tapscott so powerfully illustrated in his keynote last week, the tsunami is on its way. There are crumbling foundations that will not withstand the force. And there won’t be armies bearing humanitarian aid in the aftermath.

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Dealing with social in the enterprise

February 19, 2008 at 11:31 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, FASTForward '08, barriers

The theme at this year’s FASTForward conference is the “user revolution.” Don Tapscott gave a nod to Time Magazine’s selection of “You” as the person of the year in 2006 as part of his keynote Monday evening. References to Facebook, Flickr, and Wikipedia have been rampant throughout the general sessions and in hallway conversations. The question that remains unasked and, thus, unanswered is “how are things different inside the enterprise.”

One obvious difference is scale. Applications and services on the net have the entire population of net users to draw from. The 1/9/90 heuristic works nicely on the scale of the net as a whole. Inside the enterprise, the rule suggests that implementation efforts need to consciously manage participation and activity to compensate for the smaller population.

The second important difference arises from the need to manage participation within the enterprise rather than capitalize solely on “natural” participants. This collides with the aspects of the enterprise that substitute artificial order for natural order. Large-scale enterprises explicitly design roles and responsibilities to address task requirements in a controlled fashion.

While organizational researchers and designers have been pointing out the limitations of control thinking for much of the last 20-30 years (if not more), the reality in enterprises is that control remains central to enterprise DNA. While insightful folks like Andrew McAfee identify the importance of emergence in the successful uptake of Enterprise 2.0 technologies, I think they tend to downplay the barriers created by the reliance on control. When McAfee talks about the importance of culture in successful Enterprise 2.0 efforts, he is fundamentally talking about enterprises that have managed to move past classical models of control. What makes this such a challenge is the extent to which these models are unarticulated or regarded as axiomatic.

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A Meaning for the Yahoo bid by MSFT

February 2, 2008 at 6:59 am · Filed under Apple, Business Model, Enterprise 2.0, Microsoft, NPR, PBS, Public Media, Relationships, barriers, iTouch, iTunes, podcasts

As sure as the sun rises in the morning - the web will become the primary delivery platform for all information.

Many in public radio and TV, have told me that my feelings about how fast the shift would take place from “air” and cable to web are exagerated. My argument is this. “Weight of money”.

When you pay $45 billion dollars you are not fooling around.

MSFT wish to get ready NOW for this new reality for when the bulk of advertising revenue and action are on the web. Ad revenues are $50 billion right now and are expected to rise to $80 billion by 2009/10. This is the prize. When the ad money shifts out of traditional media, you will hear the sucking sound of a mortal wound. It will be too late to reinvent your self then.

All the supporting parts of a web based radio and TV will have to accelerate their plans

• The viewing platforms such as the iPods and the large screen TV’s are ready now for a direct link. The Early Adopters are watching the bulk of their video online.
• Many listen to radio online at the office or on their iPods on their commute
• YouTube is bursting with great content both from traditional sources and from new entrants
• Channels such as iTunes and Miro are building capacity - it will be the ease of use that these channels offer that will pull in the Early Majority.
• Major Networks have their toe in the water and are offering some content online

The Yahoo bid will accelerate all this work.

So what is the work that Public TV and Radio have to do in this context of no time? It is to solve the business model problem. How to offer the best content from TV and Radio AND keep the stations whole. How to do that? I think the answer is to make the offer direct with the forced choice of the show and the station.

I am not saying that people will not listen to radio nor am I saying that people will stop watching TV. People will still buy SUV’s and Trucks. But the bulk of the people, especially people who are naturally curious will make the switch.

Remember Mikey - “Give it to Mikey - he hates everything. Well my wife Robin, is the tech Mikey.

Robin is very very resistant to gadgets. BUT …….. She now listens to all her radio online - loading the podcasts onto her MP3 player which she uses when she is doing stuff around the house and walking the dogs. And in her down time, I hardly ever see her anymore - she has discovered YouTube. She has discovered that it is packed with content that she wants to watch - content that is “serious” that is just what a good Public TV member would want to watch. She has discovered that it is easy to watch and listen to what she wants when she wants and that there is tons and tons of great content out there.

She is closer to 60 than 50 and is in the centre of the demographic for Public TV.

So Robin’s desire for interesting content that intrigues her has been met already. Just imagine how easy it will be for her to have access to even more and what her choices will be soon.

Don’t you want her and the millions like her as your audience?

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Critical Voice: Jon Husband

January 2, 2008 at 12:10 pm · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Change, Enterprise 2.0, barriers

For me, it’s frustrating when making/defending a critical point (fundamental for increased understanding), only to realize that I’d been making the point over and over again for a decade (accepting potential problems with the message, I’m not convinced it’s the primary barrier). So I’m sensitive to other people, like Jon Husband, with key messages that are traction-challenged (barring recent attention in KM circles). Indeed, even Jon was lamenting repeating himself over and over again in his comments to an earlier post by colleague, Tom Mandel.

In 1999 Jon coined the term wirearchy to capture a reality where authority isn’t hierarchical, where interconnected listening is fundamental to success:

“a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority, based on knowledge, credibility, trust and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology

Hierarchy has typically meant:
- Size
- Role Clarity
- Functional specialization
- Power

Wirearchy is shaping up to mean:
- Speed
- Flexibility
- Integration
- Innovation”

From my perspective, this definition positions wirearchy as a conditional means to achieve 2.0.

Jon really caught my attention in an exchange of comments to one of my own posts. The topic wasn’t as important as his way of thinking about achieving a 2.0 future state:

“I’d call it redefining knowledge work along the lines of more natural human cognitive processes (they of course existed, but were constrained and handicapped by structure, protocol, policies, reporting lones, exclusion from basic decision-making, and so on).  These processes occur in the hands and with the heads of knowledge workers, and find more effectiveness in interaction and collaboration … constructing purposeful knowledge out of relevant information.  The heavy-duty databases have by and large been built, the social computing tools, services and platforms can be layered over those databases, and information and expertise are now beginning to find ways to find each other and get to work.”

I concurred with the constraints he pointed out:

“Amen. The problem from where I’m sitting is that the list of handicaps are still well-entrenched in most companies and will only be ‘moved’ via the efforts of the collaborative masses. It’s a bit difficult to affect/challenge anything that’s not recognized as being in existence.  

The biggest challenges: denial and apathy.”

Jon added:

“Agree, and might go a tad further. The people in organizations charged with ‘designing’ and managing work use the same tools and methods, by and large, today, as they did ten or twenty years ago, and those are based on assumptions and beliefs that have been around for quite a while.

If you don’t have ways and methods, etc. of organizing (and managing, controlling, measuring, etc.) then maybe what is shaping up in front of you, you can’t ‘see’”

That’s what I mean by ‘redefining’ knowledge work. What does this new territory mean for .. job descriptions, job evaluation, competency analysis and models, performance management schemes, compensation policies and practices, teleworking. and so on, and so on.  Slippery beast … I doubt many organizations will let their workers work as a small startup might (although they could !!). 

Gary Hamel’s new book The Future of Management is basically exactly about this stuff. He is calling for a new Management 2.0 that takes its cure from Web 2.0.”

As I explored Jon’s thinking further I uncovered:

• His insights from reading Gary Hamel’s book [My placeholder for top quote: “Right now, your company has 21st-century Internet-enabled business processes, mid-20th-century management processes, all built atop 19th-century management principles.”]
• Great commentary from others who listened to the podcast of Jon interviewing Dave Snowden. [1]   [2] 
• Jon’s frustration over losing great ideas without a digital voice recorder (I just gave in and ordered one)

Jon has his finger on the pulse and knows how to ask the right questions. He’s a key synthesizer. Not only can he connect the dots, he knows which dots are relevant to the picture. More importantly, he believes there is a picture, while most others don’t even notice the dots, let alone believe that they can or should be connected.

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Facilitating Networking

December 26, 2007 at 2:07 pm · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Facebook, Social Networking, barriers

This is in response to a comment from my colleague, Bill Ives, who asked for my thoughts as to the potential shakeout of social networking tools in the Enterprise. Bill has previously reported both on a major software developer, Serena, which has adopted Facebook to REPLACE their intranet (supporting 800 employees — the numbers can matter here) and WorkBook.

There are a number of factors at play here. Which of these are most relevant, depends on the circumstances.

1. Size/Effort/Culture

These are so closely tied together it’s hard to unravel them from one another. The success of social networking technologies depends on adoption and buy-in. The culture of 800 employees can be far more readily influenced, as a collective – particularly when replacing an intranet in total — than situations with the following:

• Thousands of employees. Likelihood of a ‘cohesive’ culture diminishes and increases the effort to implement/adopt, unless it fills a void, or replaces and enhances the value of something already in use (e.g. the results of a people lookup).
• A technology culture with security phobias. Many enterprises would never consider the Facebook path Serena embraced, simply because of firewall/security policies (based on sound rationale or not).
• A social culture that may have pre-conceived notions that the technologies might be non-productive, threatening, or fill-in-the-blank-challenge (we’ve seen this with all 2.0 technologies — because of the perceived ‘control’ factor). This list would also include outright apathy (which is fairly significant in many cultures, both on the ‘permission’ and the adoption side).

2. Degree of Interconnectivity

You can’t really use the term ‘online’ any more to cover all aspects of being ‘connected’. Regardless of device or means of interaction, the value of social networking goes up the more resources are enabled to contact and interact with one another. There are many business models that provide limited means for employees to connect to the company, let alone one another. For a technology company like Serena, nearly everyone is likely ‘connected’ to do their work. But being connected isn’t the same as being interconnected.

Using a computer for mostly ‘offline’ activities (stand-alone applications), is not the same as doing ’shared’ work that is constantly showing updates, where individuals are connected to the ‘pulse’ of the business and can ’see’ exchanges of activities going on. The further away an employee is from a ‘live’ pulse of the company, the less likely a social networking technology will add value, unless it is being leveraged in an intentional effort to connect employees. Connecting people to have conversations and/or debates when they have limited facts is counterproductive.

Many companies are not strategically leveraging their intranets as ‘the face of work’ within their organizations. Employees go there on a ‘have to’ or ‘as needed’ basis. Such environments can reinvent themselves either by replacing or adding a social networking dimension, but then, this was often the justification for many companies implementing portals (aka. collaboration). Such strategies have to be brought together — they’re pieces of the same story (or should be).

3. Interface Saturation

We’ve lived a long history where every application has its own interface. Even though internet browsers brought some degree of continuity to an online experience, its influence over the total experience is limited. Adding another interface is not the goal here; adding a capability is.  Exactly how would employees’ ability to network among themselves be increased?

Serena was on the right track replacing their intranet for Facebook because:

• They weren’t competing against themselves for attention, or asking employees to choose an allegiance (what’s set as your ‘home’ page at work?)
• They enhanced Facebook to better meet their own needs (expanding its purpose reinforced their commitment to it)
• [There are a lot more…add yours.]

What about something like Worklight’s WorkBook? My first question would be, what will it replace and/or what will it bring together? Then, how is it different than anything else already in place that offers access to friends, news, groups, or applications, including email? If I can look up the current status of my colleagues today in Outlook, or grab their phone number, why wouldn’t I expect the same interface to give me direct access to ‘more’ about that individual? Or, how will the social networking solution ‘play’ with the conversations already going on via email? How will it replace or divert email exchanges?

Why do I need to have all these competing interfaces asking for my attention, diverting me from my work? Remind me again, what was I doing?

STEP AWAY FROM THE INTERFACE. What are the functions being delivered and how do they fit with all other existing functions?

Let me simply ask companies some very serious questions.

• Social networking is not a technology, although the label can be used to identify unique technology solutions. What do you know about how employees are already interacting with each other (IM, email, phone, text messaging, etc.)?
• How would a ‘new’ function/interface enhance existing social networking and what specific value would/should it add? 
• What role does social networking already play to contribute to increased productivity? Where does the ability to connect to one another break down and how does this impact productivity? Will a new technology address this?
• Where does corporate/enterprise social networking end and industry social networking begin? [I existed before I joined my current employer and will exist afterward…my identity is not unique to my employer. My incentive is not to maintain my corporate identity but my industry identity, which may be separate from my alter-ego ]

If you don’t know, you’ve got bigger issues to deal with than making decisions about social networking technology.

And yes, some 2.0 junkies might insist that it should just evolve. There should be an element of evolution balanced with insightful decision. Evolution has a premise: survival of the fittest. ‘Fit’ is not something that happens randomly. Evolution is not equal to random. There are already far too many careful, restricted decisions made that are still quite random (e.g. forced by process, culture, power, naivety, time constraints and combinations thereof).

P.S. To put the value of my opinion in perspective, I advised my husband in the late ’90s that ERPs were not a good stock investment — they ended up being the high-flyers of the market at that time. The problem was that I tied my opinion of the technologies (their lack of robustness/completeness, and/or solid design) to their market potential. I failed to factor in the absence of alternatives to address a serious ‘perceived’ problem at hand. I also failed to adjust for the afore-mentioned randomness factors that drive major technology contracts – not tied to outcome.

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Why the Future of Corporate Computing is ‘Informal’

December 1, 2007 at 6:07 pm · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Facebook, IT Department, Information Management, Messy World, Social Computing, Web 2.0, barriers, enterprise software

Nick Carr may be down on IT, but he’s hot on social networking software. The author of IT Doesn’t Matter has sparred frequently with Harvard colleague Andrew McAfee on the value of Enterprise 2.0, but makes the following admission in one of his latest posts:

“It seems increasingly clear to me that the social networking phenomenon will, in some yet-to-be-determined form, invade corporations.”

Nick says that social networking applications will occupy a very different place within enterprises than traditional enterprise software, however. Social networking applications will be part of the informal organization (collaborative and non-hierarchical), versus the way software has traditionally been applied within the formal organization (very hierarchical, procedure oriented, highly political).

Here’s the challenge: The informal organization has the greatest impact on companies, since this “governs the real flow of information and influence in a company, that defines who’s in the loop and who’s not, what’s important and what can safely be ignored.”
However, the catch is “most corporate IT systems, unfortunately, are geared to the needs of the formal organization and ignore the informal one. Designed through elaborate, top-down processes, these so-called enterprise applications usually end up as rigid, cumbersome systems that are disconnected from the everyday jobs of workers.”

Ultimately, the future of corporate computing may actually lie with online services such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Nick Carr predicts. “It’s easy to make fun of these sites. Used mainly by kids and students, they often resemble the junkyards of popular culture – crude, silly, and disposable. But don’t be fooled by the garish surface. Social networks are popular – and powerful - because they are constructed in response to, and through, the actions and conversations of their members. In stark contrast to corporate IT systems, social networks shape themselves to their users rather than forcing the users to adapt to preset specifications.”

The proof is already here. FastFoward blogging colleague Bill Ives recently surfaced the role Facebook is playing as a corporate intranet.

As Bill reports, Serena, a software company, is replacing its existing intranet with Facebook as a front end linked to a low-cost content management system behind the firewall:

The 800-employee firm “is going through a major transition as they move from more traditional enterprise applications to web 2.0 mashups. The leadership wanted all employees to be better connected so they could be on the same level of understanding, excitement, and commitment to this transition. They also thought that using a web 2.0 tool, like Facebook, represented the best way to take the whole company into this new space.”

Using Facebook, Serena enjoys far more collaboration between internal groups, as well as with external constituencies, than they would with a far more expensive and maintenance-heavy traditional intranet.

Nick Carr observes that social computing services “do what corporate systems so often fail to do: they make the codification and sharing of valuable information easy.” This is certainly the case with Serena. However, ever the skeptic, Nick also cautions that such services face hurdles in enterprises — “matters of data security need to be worked out, as do protocols for sharing sensitive information within and between organizations.”

He also predicts headwinds of resistance from many within management ranks. “Just imagine what will happen when the informal organization suddenly becomes as visible as the formal one. I suspect that some people at the top of the org chart will be less than pleased.”

Back in my days as director and editor of AMS, the management association, the mantra for greater productivity and peak performance was “invert the pyramid, flatten the hierarchy.” Perhaps social computing will make that a reality.

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The walls are coming down - ABC has a Facebook Page

November 26, 2007 at 7:18 am · Filed under ABC News, Enterprise 2.0, Facebook, New Realities, Public Media, Relationships, Social Media, barriers

ABC News are getting deeply involved with Facebook - their intent is to have a more interactive relationship with the “audience” and to allow their audience to have a relationship with each other. (NYT)

ABC News and Facebook have formally established a partnership — the site’s first with a news organization — that allows Facebook members to electronically follow ABC reporters, view reports and video and participate in polls and debates, all within a new “U.S. Politics” category.

To underscore their collaboration, the two organizations will announce today that they are jointly sponsoring Democratic and Republican presidential debates in New Hampshire on Jan. 5, three days before the primary election there.

“Through this partnership, we want to extend the dialogue both before and after the debate,” said Dan Rose, Facebook’s vice president for business development.

The announcements are another sign that news organizations are looking to capitalize on the potential power of Facebook, which began as a database of college friendships, and other social networking sites. Media companies like The New York Times and The Washington Post have produced pages for use on Facebook and some newspapers, magazines and television stations have recently invited users to join special pages that are set up to follow reporters’ political coverage. But ABC’s new relationship is intended to be deeper.

“There are debates going on at all times within Facebook,” David Westin, the president of ABC News and a new Facebook member, said. “This allows us to participate in those debates, both by providing information and by learning from the users.”

The collaboration between ABC News and Facebook started quietly several weeks ago, with personal pages of network reporters like Rick Klein, the author of ABC’s widely read political newsletter The Note, and Sunlen Miller, who has been covering Barack Obama.

Encouraging users to interact with reporters is a significant step for a news organization like ABC News. Until recently, a viewer wanting to respond to Mr. Klein’s daily essay could only write a comment or send an e-mail message to a generic address. Now, they can send private messages directly to reporters or can post them on the reporters’ public Facebook pages. For now, while the number of comments remains relatively small, reporters engage in dialogues with viewers.

Mr. Westin and Mr. Rose said that no money changed hands in the deal. For ABC News, the collaboration puts political content on a site with 56 million active users. For Facebook, it adds an authoritative source and fresh content for the site’s political section.

Around 250 users have signed up to follow Ms. Miller, an off-air reporter, making her the most popular to date. Ms. Miller believes her popularity is tied to the strong backing for Mr. Obama among Facebook users, with 164,000 declared supporters, more than twice as many as any other candidate.

“If you’re ABC News, your content can spread virally through all these friend networks,” said Steve Outing, an interactive media columnist for Editor & Publisher magazine.

For example, Eloise Harper, another off-air reporter, used a digital camera to record a 50-second clip of flags falling down behind Hillary Rodham Clinton at a campaign appearance in Iowa. The clip has been viewed over 350,000 times on ABCNews.com and Facebook.

Yes the walls between us and reporters are coming down as are the walls between us as we seek to talk about things that are important. I wonder what all of this will be like in 2 years time?

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