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).
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).
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.
… 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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 cancoherently 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.
… is that the contributors to this blog have for the past nine months or more been analyzing and opining upon the issues about Enterprise 2.0 takeup and implementation that are highlighted by this article in today’s ZDNet by Dennis Howlett.
Notwithstanding a substantial amount over the past two years of online and offline "press" about the Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 phenomena and the increasingly participative and interactive online environment (first for consumers and now increasingly apparent as "the" future for the workplace), decision-making about enterprise software in general continues to warily circle the issues involved with implementing community-based collaboration or more broadly defined, "social computing".
You’ll note that in the article (excerpt below) Dennis checks in with FASTForward’s Jevon Macdonald, who is of the opinion that Microsoft Sharepoint may well be the safe, "default" implementation of choice. Certainly Sharepoint has developed some key alliances over the past year that seem designed to support that point of view.
Here’s a You Tube video (also featured in Dennis’ article .. thanks for the pointer, Dennis) that presents a wide range of views on the question "Enterprise 2.0 - Hype or Happening?"
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Enterprise 2.0 - Hype or Happening ?
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In the ZDNet article Dennis (and Jevon) make a key point about value propositions. That said, getting an enterprise IT shop to listen seriously to the value proposition of a small startup is a key challenge in and of itself, regardless of how good it is.
I also believe (even after a decade or more of general agreement that functional stovepipes and silos are not helpful) that a large number of enterprises do not really know how to come to grips with regular and continuous flows of information across functional boundaries and throughout the organization. And it’s quite likely they won’t be able to come to grips with using such flows effectively (in any practical sense) until the architecture of their IT systems enables it and supports it, and the management learns, and practices with, using these flows to feed effective collaboration.
…as you know it. Right now I’m falling over startup vendors vying for attention in the so-called ’social software’ space. The fact enterprise people hate the term doesn’t seem to bother those who are bypassing IT as they sell into the marketing departments of companies at departmental budget prices. But there is a battle brewing on two fronts.
First, we have the mega vendors who think they ‘own’ the enterprise but have little clue what they’re doing when it comes to providing community style collaborative software. As Barry Libert, chairman of Mzinga said to me: “Does Microsoft have a relationship with me? Do any of the ‘monster’ vendors?” Second, we have the startups who are largely making their money by selling social media style solutions to marketers. While the two solution sets may look the same from the outside, they are being bought in fundamentally different ways and are setting up a tension that today is barely felt but which will have a disruptive effect on the software buying patterns of the future.
It is particularly appropriate that Phil Wainewright has penned an article dubbed Enter the socialprise as this plays directly to the themes I am currently exploring.
He says:
But enterprise computing is still designed for the old, stovepipe model in which every transaction took place within the same firm. There’s no connection with the social automation that’s happening between individuals.
[ Snip … ]
I then spoke to another Irregular, Jevon MacDonald who has been working in the so-called Enterprise 2.0 (aka socialprise) space for some time. He said that where the startups fail but where the incumbents succeed is in identifying a specific value proposition within specific industries.
His view is that Sharepoint will be a ‘big winner in the next five years.’ If the amount of noise being made by Microsoft is indicative, then it should be a winner. But…he also says: “Sharepoint deployments are horrendous and I really don’t know why people put up with them.”
In a recent keynote at SXSW, Charlene Li of Forrester Research predicted that social networking platforms will be "like air" … "They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be."
More specifically, she broke down the use of such platforms into four components of utility and impact:
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Profiles - universal identities
Relationships - a single social graph
Activities - a social context for activities
Business Models - social influence as a key definer of marketing value
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Here’s an item from the NY Times about recent speculation that Yahoo may join OpenSocial, the Google-led social networking alliance that aims to bring significant degrees of openness to social networking platforms, thus (eventually) stimulating and enhancing ubiquity and pervasive use.
Yahoo intends to join OpenSocial, a Google-led alliance that is developing a common set of standards so developers can create programs that run on many social networks and other Web sites, according to a person with direct knowledge of Yahoo’s plans.
Yahoo’s backing, which could be announced as early as this week, would bring a large base of users to the OpenSocial alliance, which is seen as a counterweight to Facebook’s successful courtship of application developers. The alliance, which was announced in the fall, already includes MySpace, Bebo and several other social networking sites.
Yahoo’s participation “would mean that the site with the largest group of users, and with the largest base of registered users, would be joining OpenSocial,” said Charlene Li, an analyst with Forrester Research.
When asked about Yahoo’s OpenSocial plans, a company spokeswoman said: “Yahoo has a rich history of supporting open standards, such as OpenID and Apache Hadoop, as we believe industry collaboration is beneficial to the developer community and the Web as a whole. While we are evaluating OpenSocial as an emerging standard, we do not comment on speculation or rumors.”
Yahoo has said it wants to speed up efforts to open its site to outside developers. Although it is not a social network, Yahoo could benefit from third party “social” applications that allow users to share, say, their favorite photos, music or movies with their friends.
I think that much of what is written here at the FASTForward blog by my colleagues also supports the distinct probability that the foundation is being created for the step-by-step (depending upon take-up and implementation) of collaboration and social computing platforms, tools and services which will redefine the dynamics of knowledge work and tie, tightly, into Charlene Li’s four key components of social networking platforms.
I remember literally scores of conversations over the past five years with smart people in various areas of business and the professions … almost all of whom were over approximately 35 years old … in which they were dismissive of blogging, for one or other of the various now-well-known reasons that blogging is often portrayed as demonstrative of human foibles, warts and the fact that not everyone is a well-read, thoughtful and considerate person when expressing themselves.
Here, via the Guardian (UK) is a brief report that demonstrates how far and wide the impact of blogging has spread. We know that many mainstream online publications have adopted many of the features, and worked at increasing interactivity with readers, and I suggest here that this is but a harbinger of things yet to come.
From Prince Harry in Afghanistan to Tom Cruise ranting about Scientology and footage from the Burmese uprising, blogging has never been bigger. It can help elect presidents and take down attorney generals while simultaneously celebrating the minutiae of our everyday obsessions.
Here are the 50 best reasons to log on.
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The spread of the use of wikis and blogs into the world of enterprises began being considered not long after the rise of blogging as a sociological phenomenon, and made clear the different dynamics and structural impediments that would be encountered as the tools and services spread into the organizational environment. Humans spend a lot of their time communicating with each other … always have done, and always will do so. And wikis and blogs make it easier to do so in an interlinked environment in which humans use integrated information systems, keyboards and computer screens and software to enable their communications.
I know I am stating the obvious here, but the concepts of knowledge work and knowledge workers take on additional meaning, I think, when one considers that much of the products we purchase and use are manufactured elsewhere, such that much of business and the activity of many organizations consists of exchanging information in the pursuit of product design and development, marketing, sales and customer service.
Email is still in many cases the "killer app" for human communications, but the advent of wikis and blogs lent some additional structure and focusing-of-purpose (in the context of knowledge work in an enterprise) to communicating for the purpose of accomplishing objectives. That’s a key reason why essentially every purveyor of enterprise software has incorporated the capabilities of wikis, blogs and easy publishing to the Web into the collaboration suites they are now working at selling to the enterprise IT function.
It was this realization, for example, that led to the writing of "Making Knowledge Work - the arrival of Web 2.0". I was a reasonably early adopter of blogging, and because I had been involved in the issues of work design for the past two decades, I became convinced that wikis and blogs would spread into the enterprise setting. I thought they were a natural extension beyond using email for people to communicate and share information that may be useful to small groups of other people interested in the same or similar issues.
In 2003 I began arguing about that with a man who was on the Board of Directors of the blogging start-up I co-founded (Qumana) and who at one time had been the head of KM research at the Gartner Group. His position was that it was just a fad that teenagers and cranks were using to bleat on about whatever it was they wanted to bleat on about, and my position was that "yes, there was that aspect to it", but that it was also a natural way for people to express ideas, opinions, point others to useful information, carry out arguments and dialogue and spark insights and the need to collaborate.
Well, blogs and wikis continued to spread and eventually Web 2.0 and then Enterprise 2.0 became recognized as domains of ongoing activity in which participation, interactivity and collaboration were key dynamics. In 2006, he (the man I was arguing with) basically said "OK, you win" and challenged me to add the observations and knowledge about the use of social computing (wikis, blogs, etc.) to the existing edition of "Making Knowledge Work" which had not foreseen the rise and penetration of Web 2.0 tools, services and dynamics into the enterprise setting.
It will be most interesting to see what the state of human communications looks like in 2015, both inside the firewall of organizations, and outside … although it may be that the lines between "inside" and ‘outside" continue to blur, the beginnings of which we have already seen and which has been much discussed, though to date mainly in the realms of marketing, PR and more recently product development.
I sat down recently for lunch with Darren Gibbons and Gordon Ross of OpenRoad Communications, a small Vancouver firm focusing on the design and implementation of corporate intranets and internal communications strategy.
As part of their work with clients over the past several years and their experiences in designing and adapting intranets, they developed a hybrid wiki, blog and CMS platform called ThoughtFarmer.
Beyond wikis - Knowledge Sharing for the new enterprise
ThoughtFarmer combines structure and social networking with easy wiki authoring, helping companies share knowledge and strengthen community.
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ThoughtFarmer has gained some significant clients over the past year or so, including NESTA (National Endowment for the Sciences, Technology and Arts - the largest single endowment devoted exclusively to supporting talent, innovation and creativity in the UK), IDEO (the globally renowned industrial design firm) and most recently eHarmony.
I’ve known about ThoughtFarmer since its early days, and wrote up a descriptive entry in the recent book "Making Knowledge Work - the arrival of web 2.0", published by the ARK Group (UK).
I wanted to delve a bit further into the why’s, what’s and how’s of ThoughtFarmer, to find out more about the appeal it held for client organizations who are serious about tackling the issues and dynamics of Enterprise 2.0.
I ran through the following 4 questions with Darren and Gordon in a question-and-answer interview format. .
1. I understand that ThoughtFarmer is an hybrid collaborative platform comprised of a wiki, social networking capabilities and various modular elements that traditionally have formed part of an enterprise’s intranet platform. Is that correct, and can you offer us a more concise description ?
D & G - Yes, it’s a hybrid, which is actually becoming a fairly standard architecture or configuration for Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platforms.
Our conception of ThoughtFarmer and its initial design came out of our work with clients helping them implement intranet publishing tools. As Web 2.0 tools and services became more prevalent, we realized that it would be natural to incorporate these into an intranet publishing and knowledge-sharing application, and so we set about designing and building what became ThoughtFarmer 1.0, a platform to support easy user publishing and the sharing of pertinent information and knowledge in an intranet environment.
Our first client, IntraWest (at that time owner of Whistler Blackcomb and other ski resort properties), essentially provided us with the design principles. They wanted a platform that would make it easy to:
- publish and maintain current, up to date and relevant content - create and sustain a content repository that would also serve as the company’s central knowledge repository - strengthen workplace community by bringing forward and exposing the relationships amongst colleagues who were spread out geographically, and - minimize any additional work (the "thing" would have to be self-sustaining and create no additional employee headcount).
Interestingly, these design principles came out of the (admittedly progressive) HR function, who insisted that we focus on the needs of both the organization AND the users. Initially, IT said "Use Sharepoint" but that involved some fairly significant customization and user training efforts. HR said "that’s a non-starter", and so off we went. .
2. In your opinion, what most clearly differentiates ThoughtFarmer from the other recent arrivals on the Enterprise 2.0 scene that combine wikis, blogs, social networking, enterprise search, etc. ?
D & G - We think that the answer to that question has to be "ease-of-use". The core design principles can be summarized as "Simple" and “Social”
Simple - we got rid of as much jargon as we knew how - for example, everything a user posts is a "page" - and we provide the users with a fair bit of simple but clear structure. There are lots of simple "tools" that help users re-structure and shuffle around the content, such as by re-labeling or sorting the content, through the use of easy-to-manage tagging.
ThoughtFarmer offers full text search, making it easy to find all sorts of content, and the newer version (2.5) incorporates such useful features as activity tracking whereby everything that takes place is logged for easy future reference.
Social - we also focused on "Social" as a design principle, which essentially means that every feature and the pages on which the activity takes place follow the axiom "simple rules for complex spaces". We’re big fans of Edward T. Hall (The Hidden Dimension), and worked to introduce attention filters that allow for the customization based on the cognitive capacity of individual users. ThoughtFarmer features something we call activity tracking, which is based on Hall’s theory of proxemics (the study of the human use of space within the context of culture). We implemented a sllder-based attention filter that enables zooming in and / or out and lets a user see all the projects in which she or he is a member and all of the related project content and activity on the intranet.
We believe that his is a deeply humanistic design principle for knowledge work in social settings.
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3. I understand that for a small not-Silicon-Valley-based Canadian Enterprise 2.0 startup, you have had some impressive initial client wins. What is the implementation of ThoughtFarmer you are most proud of, and why ?
. D & G - We’re proud of the fact that some very innovative and innovation-oriented companies have chosen to use this application designed by a small Canadian communications firm. We’ve only just recently been able to talk about the fact that IDEO (designers of the Palm V, the Swiffer, the Apple Mouse and many other innovative products) chose ThoughtFarmer. IDEO evaluated every Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform they could find, and chose ours. They are currently using it on their main intranet and are rolling it out to their offices around the world..
4. Is it plug-and-play, or does it’s implementation involve customization and set-up depending upon a given enterprise’s overall information systems architecture .. or is this even the right question ?
. D& G - Yes, it’s essentially plug and play, although of course every organization will have different requirements and a different IT architecture with which ThoughtFarmer must operate. But to offer an example, a recent installation of ThoughtFarmer at eHarmony (involving more than 250 employees) required only 5 days to install the platform, train the employees and migrate all the pertinent content. ThoughtFarmer is Microsoft-based (SQL server and .Net), and is "IT-shop" friendly. OpenRoad is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and ThoughtFarmer was recently certified for Windows Server and SQL Server 2005 by Microsoft’s product testing labs. Even though we like to consider it "plug-and-play" the design does not preclude customization and specialized integration with complex corporate IT architectures. ThoughtFarmer can also be used as a collaboration-oriented module within larger-scale intranets, and of course a wide range of other business applications can be integrated into the core ThoughtFarmer platform.
