Archive for Enterprise Social Computing
by Jon Husband
November 14, 2009 at 12:24 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Collaboration, Connected Enterprise, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Management Theory
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These days there are incessant debates about the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 platforms, tools and practices.
We’ve been here before … we just did not have the infrastructure or the tools, nor the awareness or skill levels of large numbers of people.
As information technology first began its relentless march into the daily lives of people in the areas of work (mainframes, early integrated systems, desktops computers in the workplace) and general information-seeking (early days of websites and the Web), thinkers and organizational development conultants began paying attention to the intersection of technology and sociology. Many of the grandfathers and grandmothers of the field of organizational development will find the material on socio-technical systems familiar, and perhaps refreshing in the context of networked workplaces.
The material outlined below comes from a comprehensive Wikipedia entry on Socio-technical Systems, and I have edited it for the purposes of this blog post.
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Sociotechnical systems (or STS) in organizational development is an approach to complex organizational work design that recognizes the interaction between people and technology in workplaces. The term also refers to the interaction between society’s complex infrastructures and human behaviour.
In this sense, society itself, and most of its substructures, are complex sociotechnical systems. The term sociotechnical systems was coined in the 1960s by Eric Trist and Fred Emery, who were working as consultants at the Tavistock Institute in London.
Sociotechnical systems theory is theory about the social aspects of people and society and technical aspects of machines and technology. Sociotechnical refers to the interrelatedness of social and technical aspects of an organisation. Sociotechnical theory therefore is about joint optimization, with a shared emphasis on achievement of both excellence in technical performance and quality in people’s work lives.
Sociotechnical theory, as distinct from sociotechnical systems, proposes a number of different ways of achieving joint optimisation. They are usually based on designing different kinds of organisation, ones in which the relationships between socio and technical elements lead to the emergence of productivity and wellbeing.
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It’s too intensive an experience to go into the deep details of STS here, but let me draw out a few of the core elements of socio-technical systems theory and principles. It should be self-evident that they are central to the examination and adoption of collaborative social computing in todays modern organizations
Sociotechnical refers to the interrelatedness of social and technical aspects of an organization. Sociotechnical theory is founded on two main principles:
- One is that the interaction of social and technical factors creates the conditions for successful (or unsuccessful) organizational performance. This interaction is comprised partly of linear ‘cause and effect’ relationships (the relationships that are normally ‘designed’) and partly from ‘non-linear’, complex, even unpredictable relationships (the good or bad relationships that are often unexpected).
- The corollary of this, and the second of the two main principles, is that optimisation of each aspect alone (socio or technical) tends to increase not only the quantity of unpredictable, ‘un-designed’ relationships, but those relationships that are injurious to the system’s performance.
Therefore sociotechnical theory is about joint optimisation.
Principles of Socio-technical Systems Theory
Some of the central principles of sociotechnical theory were elaborated in a seminal paper by Eric Trist and Ken Bamforth in 1951.
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The key to responsible autonomy seems to be to design an organization possessing the characteristics of small groups whilst preventing the ‘silo-thinking’ and ‘stovepipe’ neologisms of contemporary management theory. In order to preserve “…intact the loyalties on which the small group [depend]…the system as a whole [needs to contain] its bad in a way that [does] not destroy its good”.
In practice this requires groups to be responsible for their own internal regulation and supervision, with the primary task of relating the group to the wider system falling explicitly to a group leader. This principle, therefore, describes a strategy for removing more traditional command hierarchies.
Adaptability
“…the organisation tries to deal with the external complexity by ‘reducing’ the internal control and coordination needs. …This option might be called the strategy of ‘simple organisations and complex jobs’”.
Many type of organisations are clearly motivated by the appealing ‘industrial age’, rational principles of ‘factory production’, a particular approach to dealing with complexity: “In the factory a comparatively high degree of control can be exercised over the complex and moving ‘figure’ of a production sequence, since it is possible to maintain the ‘ground’ in a comparatively passive and constant state”
In Classic organisations problems with the moving ‘figure’ and moving ‘ground’ often become magnified through a much larger social space, one in which there is a far greater extent of hierarchical task interdependence. For this reason, the semi-autonomous group, and its ability to make a much more fine grained response to the ‘ground’ situation, can be regarded as ‘agile’.
Added to which, local problems that do arise need not propagate throughout the entire system (to affect the workload and quality of work of many others) because a complex organization doing simple tasks has been replaced by a simpler organization doing more complex tasks. The agility and internal regulation of the group allows problems to be solved locally without propagation through a larger social space, thus increasing tempo.
Whole tasks
Another concept in sociotechnical theory is the ‘whole task’. A whole task “has the advantage of placing responsibility for the task squarely on the shoulders of a single, small, face-to-face group which experiences the entire cycle of operations within the compass of its membership.” The sociotechnical embodiment of this principle is the notion of minimal critical specification. This principle states that, “While it may be necessary to be quite precise about what has to be done, it is rarely necessary to be precise about how it is done”
The key factor in minimally critically specifying tasks is the responsible autonomy of the group to decide, based on local conditions, how best to undertake the task in a flexible adaptive manner.
This principle is isomorphic with ideas like Effects Based Operations (EBO). EBO asks the question of what goal is it that we want to achieve, what objective is it that we need to reach rather than what tasks have to be undertaken, when and how. The EBO concept enables the managers to “…manipulate and decompose high level effects. They must then assign lesser effects as objectives for subordinates to achieve. The intention is that subordinates’ actions will cumulatively achieve the overall effects desired”
Meaningfulness of tasks
Effects Based Operations and the notion of a ‘whole task’, combined with adaptability and responsible autonomy, have additional advantages for those at work in the organization. This is because “for each participant the task has total significance and dynamic closure” as well as the requirement to deploy a multiplicity of skills and to have the responsible autonomy in order to select when and how to do so.
This is clearly hinting at a relaxation of the myriad control mechanisms found in the more classically designed organizations.
In classic organisations the ‘wholeness’ of a task is often diminished by multiple group integration and spatiotemporal disintegration.
The group based form of organization design proposed by sociotechnical theory combined with new technological possibilities (such as the internet) provide a response to this often forgotten issue, one that contributes significantly to joint optimisation.
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I’ve done a significant amount of editing above (by chopping out significant-but-complicated-and-jargon-laden parts of the extract from Wikipedia). Suffice it for now to say that socio-technical systems theory and principles anticipated the dynamic tension between the (potential) every-which-wayness of hyperlinked human activity and the need for concentration on setting and achieving meaningful objectives that drive organizational performance.
It seems clear to me that as organizations explore and take action regarding the implementation of Enterprise 2.0 capabilities, knowledge work will need to be designed differently .. away from the linear ’cause-and-effect’ and sequential thinking evident in today’s job descriptions and organizational charts, towards adaptability, autonomy, whole tasks and individuals taking responsibility for the effectiveness of the networks in which they are engaged that address the organization’s objectives.
The socio-technical systems approach involves complex organizational work design that recognizes the interaction between people and technology in workplaces, as a subset or mirror of the interaction between society’s complex infrastructures and human behavior.
The elements of the approach brought to a specific organization are:
Job enrichment – giving the employee a wider and higher level scope of responsibilitiy with increased decision making authority. This is the opposite of job enlargement, which simply would not involve greater authority. Instead, it will only have an increased number of duties.
Job enlargement – increasing the scope and reach of a job’s duties and responsibilities. This argues against over-specialisation and the division of labour whereby work is divided into small units, each of which is performed repetitively by an individual worker.
Job rotation - an approach to employee and management development. A schedule of varying assignments gives people a breadth of exposure to large parts of or the entire operation.
Motivation – stimulating and enhancing the initiation, direction, intensity and persistence of positive and constructive behaviors, or more simply increasing the desire and willingness to do something.
Process improvement – actions taken to identify, analyze and improve existing processes within an organization to meet new goals and objectives. ‘Process’ in a networked environment is an emerging area of study, as the linear BPR that has dominated the past two decades will be impacted, sometimes dramatically, by the dynamics of purposeful network activity.
Task analysis – how tasks are accomplished - information which can be used for many purposes, such as personnel selection and training, tool or equipment design, procedure design and automation. Again, the notion of ‘tasks’ will sometimes (often ?) see dramatic impact as networked activity around an objectives increases.
Work design – the application of sociotechnical systems principles and techniques to the humanization of work. The aims of work design to improved job satisfaction, to improved through-put, to improved quality and to reduced employee problems, e.g., grievances, absenteeism.
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Many thinkers and consultants in the Enterprise 2.0 space are recognizing and discussing the need to re-design knowledge work and the small and large structural elements of organizations, due to the growing pervasiveness of today’s information-flow infrastructure.
The principles and elements of socio-technical systems theory, and offshoots like Emery and Trist’s Participative Work Design (on which I have written before), are in my opinion very useful and practical sources for thinking through and implementing some of the changes … in mental models and in practices … that I believe will be necessary to obtain the latent potential available in purposeful social computing aimed at an organization’s objectives for better and more responsive performance.
I’ll be glad to learn what you think.
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by Rob Paterson
September 16, 2009 at 12:35 pm · Filed under
2.0 Business Model, 2.0 Design Thinking, Bryant Park Project, Business Model, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, NPR, PBS, Platforms, Public Media, Public Radio, Public TV, Relationships
I was talking yesterday to a CIO of a major financial services firm. He and his colleagues have been wracking their brains over how a 2.0 view would make a difference. Of course a lot of their discussion revolved around technology and the social aspects both in the organization and outside it.
I bet that many organizations are also having the same internal conversations and being as frustrated as he is.
Looking at where the death threats are is a more productive area of discussion.
For public media Death lurks here – We have to have a much wider based and much larger public that thinks that we are not merely important but VITAL to them. If we don’t we wont make it.
“Wider based” means that we have to break out of our current demographic – of on TV being over 50, mainly white middle class and well educated – on radio of being over 40 and the same.
The challenge of doing this has been the restrictions of our “Air”. We have only 24 hours and one place on the dial.
So to change programming enough to bring in a very different demographic is to piss off the existing foundation with no real chance of adding the new. Example, the CBC have quite good show on the Native Canadian world – my bet is that most of the traditional audience switch off immediately and that First Nation’s people are not going to be tempted to become enthusiastic listeners of the CBC based on one program. This type of programming is lose lose. For NPR it was a new hip morning show called Bryant Park. What station in its right mind will drop Morning Edition for a new entrant aimed away from its main audience?
So long as Public Radio and TV have a secure foundation on their Air – they cannot expand their audience.
Also loyalty and more important financial and voting support merely based on liking content is no longer enough. When I came to Canada in 1972, I was used to the BBC and became a fanatic PBS watcher. There was no other source of good content then. Now there is tons of great content elsewhere. The old tie to content is much weaker.
So how then can Public Media avoid DEATH? How can it expand its reach to a much wider and diverse public? How can it deepen the connection beyond the relatively weak one of content?
An answer is appearing in the work of 70 plus stations working in the 32 worst hit markets in the US where the Economy is destroying the middle and lower classes. In this project – called Facing the Mortgage Crisis – stations are working with each other to pull together/convene groups of community support into a platform that can help people cope with this the greatest crisis to hit most Americans since the 30’s.
This is where the DEATH threat can be answered and this is where Social Media and the whole 2.0 perspective is invaluable.
Here stations are helping people who do not and will NEVER watch our mainstream Air. BUT they do interact with our specialty Web Sites that are focused on this issue and hence on them. More we do a lot face to face. Sometime at the station and many times in libraries and other places of trust such as churches. More, we give the community partners a face and a voice too.
It is the 2.0 web that is at the heart of this ability to offer something meaningful to people who will not connect to our traditional content on our traditional air. Ironically, as the crisis affects all, many of the white middle class are now in the same boat. They too use our 2.0 world as a new resource. In time a common crisis, as in war, brings all together. All people share a common fear and grief. All wonder what to do and how to keep going? All worry about their kids.
I predict that something great can emerge from our web – but it is not about getting more people to watch Nova or listen to All Things Considered.
So what then was my CIO’s Death fear?
I offered up this to chew on. They are in the mutual fund business. Their funds are sold by brokers who do not work for them.
Trust in Brokers, in the market and even in the idea of getting rich by punting in the markets has been weakened. Fund managers still tout their ability to realize performance that can only be achieved by taking huge risk.
What would happen to their business if we had a 1933? After the crash in 1929, the market recovered as it is today. But like today, the market came back independent of how people lived and how the economy at the human level existed. It was a second bubble. The market crashed again and the great depression hit full force. Employment did no rebound until 1941. Stock prices and activity in the market did not return until 1954.
What if we have another 1933 in 2010? Would such a collapse end all faith in the current financial system? What is the risk of that happening – 10% – 30 % – 50% – 60% – whatever the risk is substantive and worth planning for.
My idea of his DEATH threat was that if they did not do something to show that they could be trusted, that if we had a 1933, they would disappear as did most people like them in 1933.
So how could they become legitimately trusted? How could they hold onto to a public that had lost trust in the system? My advice was this.
Most people are fiscally illiterate. Most know nothing about household economics in the Greek sense of the basics of the human financial life cycle. People know nothing about how to save and why, borrowing, cash flow, how mortgages work, compound interest. Most know nothing about the value of and how risk works. Why you can take risks early but not late in life etc. If they did most would not be in the trouble that they are in now. Most think that it is normal and to be expected that they can get Maddof returns year after year not seeing that such returns imply impossible risk.
The entire fund business is like the food business – we have been trained to seek something that is not sustainable – double digit returns for ever and cheap food forever. Can we train people to be more real? I think not but people can train each other.
Most people now are waking up to the fact that they don’t know enough about money and how it affects their life. They are hungry to learn more. To take control over their financial lives, just as many today are using the web to take control over their health.
What if this firm was to set up a foundation to act as the Trusted Place on the web where people could teach each other all these things?
Here is where all the rules of 2.0 would come into play. The web, interactivity, social groups, partners – the whole gamut of 2.0 is here. By learning how to do this here, the old firm will also then see with new eyes what else they can do back in the mainstream.
I asked in closing what would this mean in terms of the brand and the industry if they were to do this? What if they did a really authentic job of providing the trusted space where people could help each other take back their financial power?
He could see in a heart beat that this would change the relationship – just as I am seeing signs that FTMC is changing the relationship with Public radio and TV. At first the two worlds of the “Academy” and their traditional business would be separate. But over time there would be some kind of convergence. For who of us knows as much as we should and who of us does not have something to offer?
In time the very nature of the business would change too as will in the end mainstream TV and Radio – but this way the change would be shaped by the active participation of millions of people formerly known and “audience” or “Clients” who right now don’t even have a name.
For what is the label for a person who is part of the ecology that is the new wider enterprise?
So what do you think? Can you radically change your foundation offering without killing the golden goose? Think GM or the Newspapers – all their cash flow came from the old – but DEATH was waiting for sure. How could they have found another part of life where they could have added real value and so attached a much bigger group of people to them?
I am sure that there is an answer. Do you have one?
by Jon Husband
September 10, 2009 at 1:00 pm · Filed under
Collaboration, Connected Enterprise, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Organizational Design, Social Computing, User Revolution, Wisdom of Crowds
McKinsey, a leading organizational consulting firm, has just released its most recent study regarding the usage of Web 2.0.
From a read of the announcement, it appears that collectively we are still on the path towards social computing becoming a fixture in the knowledge-based workplace … hardly a surprise.
I (and many others) have said here, and elsewhere, that the ubiquitous presence of the Web, the growing ease-of-use of tools and services, and the growing understanding of productivity in a networked era, are leading inexorably to a fundamental re-think of the way(s) knowledge work is carried out and the type(s) of organizational culture necessary to support that productivity.
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Across all categories, the use of Web 2.0 technologies by employees for internal purposes has increased from 53% in 2007 to 65% of respondents in 2009.
The largest components of growth have come from using Web 2.0 to develop new products / services internally, to manage internal knowledge and to reinforce the company culture via tools such as internal social networking applications.
The companies who have embedded these tools in their day-to-day activities and processes have seen the largest impact by improving communication across silos to reduce duplicate work and leverage experts in other areas.
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The report notes that enterprise use of Web 2.0 technologies to connect and interact with business partners and suppliers has slowed down or stagnated … again, not much of a surprise given the often transactional nature of those relationships and the fact that electronic connections between those parties have existed in one form or another for quite some time now.
The final statement of this most recent McKinsey report offers, in my opinion, some clear writing on a big wall … “expertise in the use of Web 2.0 technologies is becoming a required skill for all enterprises.”
When will your organization adopt, or grow its capabilities and culture with respect to, collaboration platforms and Enterprise 2.0 expertise and dynamics ?
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The momentum we see in the growth of Web 2.0 technologies implies we will see higher penetration in 2010 for using these technologies for employees to collaborate and to facilitate interactions with customers.
To drive increased usage for managing interactions with suppliers and partners, companies will need to find ways use these technologies to augment the formal relationships between business entities and not substitute formal interactions with more ad hoc ones.
Nonetheless, it is clear that expertise in the use of Web 2.0 technologies is becoming a required skill for all enterprises.
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by Jon Husband
September 3, 2009 at 11:40 am · Filed under
Collaboration, Enterprise Social Computing, Measurement, Network Effect, Social Computing
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Further to my post a couple of months back about the ROII (Return on Investment in Interaction), I noticed AppGap blog colleague Patti Anklam’s guest post on Dave Snowden’s Cognitive Edge blog wherein she riffs of a blog post titled "Enterprise 2.0 – Skip the Pilot".
Notwithstanding Michael Idinipulos’ claim to be committing heresy, in the past I have read any number of E2.0 pundits’ suggestions that value will be realized more quickly and more steadily when social computing is introduced to an organzation as "the way things get done around here" when it comes to dealing with and responding the need to beuild useful knowedge from information flows … rather than in small controlled pilots.
Michael adds his voice to that chorus.
Patti picks up on that point and adds to it the notion that the ROII may come from harvesting the output from increased numbers of people, increased numbers of interactions and increased diversity (of perspectives). These metrics are not as hard as past metrics used to measure work and effectiveness, but given that a number of well-known voices have coalesced around the same observable network dynamics, we can expect that they will come to be reference points regarding the effectiveness of adopting E2.0 tools and services.
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Piloting Social Media
A good blog by Michael Indinopulis, "Enterprise 2.0: Skip the Pilot" introduces a nice complex notion. His actual premise is that piloting (the sense that we pilot collaboration software, something I’ve done quite a bit of) is based on using small control groups. We introduce the software carefully, exposing it to only a few people, learn from them what the strengths and weaknesses are, work up required training, make the change management plan, and so on.
But social media is different from traditional software. As he says, "Traditional IT enables transactions; Enterprise 2.0 enables interactions." And interaction is fundamentally different from transactions, which are bounded and constrained. We can’t understand the power of interactions until there are many of them, going out in multiple directions, increasing exponentially.
And there is no value to any individual until there are sufficient interactions bouncing around out there. The solution, therefore, to a moribund social media pilot is not to shut it down and reconsider, but to "Make it bigger. Open it up. Invite more people. Tell them to invite even more people. That’s the only way you’re going to find out the real behavior and the real value."
One of my early lessons about increasing knowledge flow in organizations was the answer to the question, "How do you stimulate knowledge flow in a network?" Possibilities:
Increase the number of people
Increase the number of interactions
Increase the diversity
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by Joe McKendrick
September 2, 2009 at 5:33 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, User Revolution
McKinsey has just published the results of a survey of nearly 1,700 executives from around the world which paints a highly positive picture of the business returns being seen from Web 2.0 deployments.
Close to seven out of ten respondents (69%) report that their companies “have gained measurable business benefits [italics mine], including more innovative products and services, more effective marketing, better access to knowledge, lower cost of doing business, and higher revenues.”
This is probably the most significant set of survey findings I have seen yet that document actual benefits being seen from Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 deployments. There has been quite a stir in the blogosphere lately about the lack of actual results being seen from these new methodologies (check out Dennis Howlett’s latest post on the topic, along with my colleague Paula Thornton’s observations).
What kinds of benefits, exactly, does McKinsey see coming out of Web 2.0 sites? In the survey, half of respondents report that Web 2.0 technologies have fostered in-company interactions across geographic borders, 45 percent cite interactions across functions, and 39 percent across business units.
The measurable benefits cited span both knowledge management and simple cost-cutting:
Increasing speed of access to knowledge 68%
Reducing communication costs 54%
Increasing effectiveness of marketing 52%
Increasing speed of access to internal experts 43%
Increasing customer satisfaction 43%
Decreasing travel costs 40%
Increasing employee satisfaction 35%
With the growing availability of services over the network, you can see how there will be increased velocity of knowledge and improved communications. It would be interesting to see how employee satisfaction, cited by more than a third, is measured.
Interestingly, the highest-rated Web 2.0 technologies/services in terms of business benefits delivery among companies are video sharing and blogging.
The top-rated technologies in terms of internal use include the following:
Video sharing 48%
Blogs 47%
RSS 42%
Social networking 42%
For external use, such as connecting with partners and suppliers, the following technologies delivered the most benefits:
Blogs 51%
Video sharing 50%
Social networking 49%
RSS 45%
The more the technologies are used, the more benefits seen, the survey also shows. As McKinsey puts it:
“Web 2.0 delivers benefits by multiplying the opportunities for collaboration and by allowing knowledge to spread more effectively…. Among respondents who report seeing benefits within their companies, many cite blogs, RSS, and social networks as important means of exchanging knowledge. These networks often help companies coalesce affinity groups internally. Finally, respondents report using Web videos more frequently since the previous survey; technology improvements have made videos easier to produce and disseminate within organizations.”
McKinsey also observes that more than half of the companies in the survey plan to increase their investments in Web 2.0 technologies, while another quarter don’t expect their level of spending to change. The study also suggests that the turbulent economy may have increased interest in Web 2.0 technologies.
Of course, there are still about a third of respondents that absolutely have not yet seen any business benefits from Web 2.0. What is not clear is whether employees at these companies are using Web 2.0 under the radar, and thus progress cannot yet be measured.
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