I just discovered, tangibly, something I have thought of before and had imagined might happen. I did not experience it until today.
I have been writing and blogging more over the past six months or so about social computing inside the firewall, and have spoken at several conferences about the issues and dynamics therein.
Today I used Google to search for references to me and my work, and so rediscovered a blog post I wrote four years ago about the use of blogging in organizations to stimulate dialogue, learning and innovation.
Obviously, people looking for references to my past writings on the use of blogging inside the firewall have helped this old and forgotten blog post to surface.
Update for the fact that there are now more collaboration platforms and applications, change the verb tenses and few words to make it pertinent to today’s Enterprise 2.0 context, and I think it’s still relevant.
Over the past couple of years many knowledgeable and committed bloggers have held forth on how blogging can replicate the dynamics of dialogue. They have also offered opinions and examples of how blogs and blogging can (potentially) be extremely useful for what we call "knowledge management".
In addition, there have been various anecdotes and examples of how reading blogs, commenting on blogs, and creating blog posts are activities that accelerate learning.
All this makes good sense. There are core aspects of blogging that facilitate learning in simple and effective ways.
Firstly, individual or group blogs that are focused on a domain of information and expertise chronicle and catalogue the blogger(s)’ knowledge. Over time, this grows to create a recognizable "body of knowledge".
Secondly, by offering the capability of commenting and interacting, the information on offer can be better defined, refined, explored, tested, and built upon.
Thirdly, the information on offer provides a latent platform for action - information that can be acted upon often turns into knowledge that can be shared and used in various ways.
Fourth, by linking to the blog or blogs that offer related information, the knowledge that is built can be shared more and more widely, if desired.
Fifth, the rhythym and cadence of the posting, reading, commenting and linking replicate the dynamics of dialogue in very effective ways. There aren’t the same kinds of interruption and distraction that so often occurs in conversations that only weakly replicate the dynamics of dialogue.
Finally, an ecosystem of knowledge can develop that consists of the aggregated sets of links and content the participants in a blogalogue create. And this "body of knowledge" and understanding remains online, available to anyone who cares to become involved.
I think these dynamics hold great promise - they demonstrate the characteristics that many have suggested are desirable and necessary for learning communities and learning organizations.
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.
A couple of weeks back, I ran a couple of posts (here and here) that talked about how social networking and Web 2.0 technologies may make things different for people in the next economic downturn — be it this year or some other time in the future. New technologies and online services may help empower people to forge through lean times with new opportunities, versus becoming victims of the economy — as has been the case in times gone by.
Rob Paterson just posted this account of a Yahoo employee who was Twittering his way out the door after being laid off. What better way to communicate your situation — and availability for new opportunities — to the world? Truly astounding, and an incredible , empowering resource. That dude probably won’t be spending too much time on the unemployment rolls.
Forrester’s Josh Bernoff has weighed in with some of his thoughts on how Web 2.0 would prevail through a down economy. “Things are different this time,” he opines. For example, we won’t a repeat of the devastation of the 2001 recession, because this is “not a tech bubble” as it was in 2000-2001. “Technology spending is not irrational,” he points out. Agreed.
Josh adds that social networking platforms will flourish in a down economy, however. While advertising may get cut, marketers will see greater value in blogs and social networks. And the best part is that social applications “can be nearly free (think blogs, Ning.com, facebook pages) and even more sophisticated communities are typically $30K to $200K — a lot cheaper than a significant sized ad campaign.” Plus, being all digital and all, social network-based responses are extremely measurable.
So the social networking platforms will do just fine in the event the economy were to go south for a while — and in fact, may even receive a boost from companies seeking inexpensive channels to their customers. And, as I mentioned previously, end users will have that power in their hands as well.
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I think Forrester has been pretty steady and early in their understanding that blogging is here to stay and will have large impacts upon marketing, PR and the evolution of knowledge work inside the enterprise. Forrester’s Charlene Li was early to the party and produced some good research about the blogging and social software phenomena in a business context …
… and more recently Forrester had the good sense to hire Jeremiah (Owyang), a smart and well-informed fellow.
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It will be interesting to watch and read Colony’s blogging, and over time see if he, like many other people, comes to believe that it is useful to think, question and listen in public and "out loud".
I have a sister-in-law who just turned 50 who has been until recently remarkably (and determinedly) resistant to online activities. She has basically not ever used the Internet for anything but email, and even that sparingly. Part of her reluctance and resistance is lack of familiarity (beginner’s embarrassment) and the other equally strong aspect has been her clear sense of how online can encroach on or steal time from what many will call "real life".
That there are forms of emergent social isolation and alienation, and addictive behaviours, that have developed as the online world has grwon and spread is irrefutable … just as the number(s) and types (s) of connections and interactions have multiplied and led to interesting behaviours and outcomes.
Back to my sister in law. She is also a very good cook (let’s say amateur gourmet chef) and a talented amateur photographer. As she has grown in her capabilities with a digital camera, she has also gotten more familiar with online environments. Bit by bit, her attitude has been changing. Recently she discovered StumbleUpon, and has almost become an evangelist, taking time out from conversations to show people who visit the interesting things that one can stumble upon just by clicking once. It was also interesting to see her and her girlfriends’ initial reaction to finding people they knew on Facebook.
Slowly and surely, more and more people will use services and tools on the Internet as it weaves its way into and throughout our lives. And as that happens, people will notice more and more the smooth sides and sharp edges of ways this spreading and weaving will impact the ways we live and work .. as will whatever the Cloud becomes.
"2008 is the year that sees Microsoft’s ambitions challenged" is a line halfway through the movie posted below. Eerily prescient, no?
What also seems certain is that even if Microsoft does not acquire Yahoo !, other acquisitions and mergers (and the concomitant convergence and integration) are sure to happen over the next decade
Maybe EPIC 2015 (originally released as EPIC 2014 in 2004 by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson) does not seem so weird or impossible today ?
This new CRC report reveals the major drivers of user-led innovation and explores how it is affecting organisations’ relationships with key stakeholders.
It investigates how user-led practices generate business and social value through a major case study of the virtual world Second Life. The report canvasses a number of pathways for organisations to leverage the participation of their audiences, customers and citizens in the interest of co-creating new products, services and platforms.
The research draws on extensive interviews with some of the world’s leading thinkers on the social, economic and legal aspects of user-led innovation including: Eric von Hippel (MIT), Yochai Benkler (Harvard), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Siva Vaidhyanathan (Virginia), John Howkins (Adelphi Charter), Michel Bauwens (P2P Alternatives) and Mitch Kapor (Linden Lab).
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The people interviewed, as cited, are certainly amongst those that are seen to carry significant authority in this Internet era. The same can be said of the Aspen Institute Roundtable participants, who included John Seeley Brown , Joi Ito, John Hagel (featured speaker at the upcoming FASTForward08 conference), Tom Malone of MIT, and other clearly credible folks.
At the risk of being seen to be involved in repeated and shameless self-promotion (I tagged this on to the previous post as well), I’d like to tag onto this emerging activity the working definition of wirearchy from a couple or so years ago. I promise I’ll stop soon
"a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology"
"It" is interactive, it’s fast, the flows of information are overwhelming, it feeds social computing, it’s not going away, and it will be coming to a workplace near you. It’s also becoming clearer and clearer that the pressures due to a growing demographic shift are getting more and more tangible every month. When the Gartner Group starts predicting that the coming generations of knowledge workers will understand how to work in wirearchies, and predict that their influx will cause 40+ % annual growth in the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 capabilities .. well, one might say that awareness is growing.
Remember sending groups of people off for training on the latest complicated software ? Will that change ?
JP Rangaswami, who writes often about the use of social software in the enterprise based on his experiences at DkW and BT recently emphasized the coming impacts at the LeWeb 3 conference in Paris, noting in his presentation that:
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The digital natives now starting to flood into the workplace are already all trained up on these (social software) tools.
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This also reminds me of the central issues raised in a seminal article article in the Economist 18 months ago titled The New Organization, namely that most organizations have watched the rise of the networked worker (and equipped them all with Crackberries) without making fundamental changes to organizational structures and work design,
I suspect that’s one of the core targets of Gary Hamel’s new book The Future of Management, in which he lays out this key challenge for executives and managers everywhere.
Here’s one Gartner Group analyst’s take on the coming challenges associated with Enterprise 2.0 and the war for talent in a digital era.
Analysts delve into how businesses might leverage blogs, wikis and other social networking tools.
LAS VEGAS—Digital natives—people who grew up using interactive Internet tools—will push the enterprise social software market to grow at a compound annual revenue growth of 41.7 percent through 2011, said Gartner analysts at Web Innovations here Sept. 19.
As these digital natives grow up, they’re moving into the work force, taking with them blogs, wikis, mashups, RSS feeds and other so-called Web 2.0 social networking tools that will enable them to collaborate more freely in an enterprise environment, said Gartner analyst Anthony Bradley.
"They bring with them a set of expectations of how they will interact and the tools they’ll use to interact, and they can be woefully disappointed walking into organizations that don’t have some of the Web 2.0 tools that they’re used to using for building relationships and getting things done," Bradley said.
Digital natives will thus usher in what Gartner calls the Enterprise 2.0, where users will use rich Internet applications, social software and a Web platform to execute tasks.
Social software includes social networking (Facebook-like profiles), social collaboration (JotSpot-like wikis and blogs) and social publishing (social tagging, think Digg) tools to interact socially and boost organizational effectiveness.
While traditional Enterprise 1.0 tools were more rigid and siloed, Gartner analyst Tom Austin said Enterprise 2.0 technologies need to be "free form," or informal, messy and participatory, to make co-workers comfortable.
Gary Hamel has called for fundamental management innovation in his recently-published book The Future of Management. This call to exploration, exploration and action is concomitant with the emergence of the much-debated arena of what has been called Enterprise 2.0.
Here’s a key excerpt:
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This may not be a detailed design spec for a 21st-century management system, but I doubt it’s far off. Argue with me if you like, but I’m willing to bet that Management 2.0 is going to look a lot like Web 2.0.
Most of us grew up in a “post-industrial” society. We are now on the verge of a post-managerial society, perhaps even a post-organizational society.
Before you object, let me assure you that this doesn’t imply a future without managers. Just as the coming of the knowledge economy didn’t wipe out heavy industry, so the dawning of a post-managerial society won’t produce a world free of executives and administrators. Yet it does herald a future in which the work of managing will be performed less and less by “managers”. To be sure, activities will still need to be coordinated, individual efforts aligned, objectives decided upon, knowledge disseminated, and resources allocated, but increasingly this work will be distributed out to the periphery.
While Management 2.0 won’t completely supplant Management 1.0, the two versions aren’t entirely compatible. There are going to be conflicts. Indeed, I think the most bruising contests in the new millenium won’t be fought along the lines that separate one competitor or business ecosystem from another, but will be fought along the lines that separate those who wish to preserve the privileges and power of the bureaucratic class from those who hope to build less structured and less tightly managed organizations. Richard Florida sees the same battle shaping up. In The Rise of the Creative Class, he puts it bluntly: “The biggest issue at stake in this emerging age is the ongoing tension between creativity and organization.” This is, perhaps, the most critical and intractable management trade-off of all, and therefore, the one most worthy of inspired innovation.
It will take more than advances in technology to issue in the post-managerial age. As I noted earlier, management and organizational innovation often lags far behind technological innovation. Right now, your company has 21st-century Internet-enabled business processes, mid-20th-century management processes, all built atop 19th-century management principles.
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It’s getting clearer and clearer today that the capabilities and dynamics of what started in the consumer realm as social software … those funny things called blogs, and wikis, and widgets stitched together into and by web services … are finding their ways into the workplace. Why wouldn’t they ? After all they are the means by which we are discovering how human activity (purposeful and otherwise) translates to the online environment. People have always been creating and building up “... knowledge through exchanging information, talking and arguing and pointing out other ideas and sources of information and ways to do things.”
The 2.0 label is said to denote a more interactive, less static environment. Whether we like it or not, we are passing from an era in which things were assumed to be controllable, able to be deconstructed and then assembled into a clear, linear, always replicable and thus static form to an era characterized by a continuous flow of information. Because it feeds the conduct of organizations large and small, it is a flow that necessarily demands to be interpreted and shaped into useful inputs and outputs.
What is today called Enterprise 2.0 can also be seen as the emergent stage of the intersection of significant advances in information technology, management science applied to business process and the analysis and control of operational activities. These forces and factors are converging in today’s workplaces, wherein a continuous flow of information is the rule rather than the exception. Thus, as Hamel asserts, it’s useful if not essential to cast a critical eye on the assumptions about static sets of tasks and knowledge arranged in specific (and relatively static) constellations on an organization chart. See all major job evaluation methodologies for more detail
I believe that we need to revisit the fundamental principles of work design AND the basic rules used to configure hierarchical organizations in which the primary assumption is that knowledge is put to use in a vertical chain of decision-making. I am not arguing that we need to replace hierarchy holus-blous … rather, I am suggesting that the capabilities of information systems combined with social computing capabilities and two decades of experience with team development and organizational development processes can permit centralization (read hierarchy) where and when necessary, and networked configurations where and when necessary … both centralization and decentralization.
As for the management innovation called for by Hamel … it is my belief that the organizational development principles that have been developed over the past 30 - 50 years represent a large and pretty coherent body of work that stretches from Participative Work Design through QWL and quality circles through socio-technical systems approach(es) through self-directed and self-managing teams and “workouts” on into inclusive and participative large-scale strategic change methods and dialogue-and-consensus building models and approaches to “management” (visioning, objective setting, responsibility assignment, resource allocation, implementation, measurement, etc.) like Future Search, Open Space, and dialogue circles. The various elements of these approaches and methodologies have been pushed or pulled into place over the last several decades as the application of information to products and services in ever-increasing amounts and more and more rapid and both integrated and fragmented flows.
Now we more and more often live and work in networks as well as hierarchies. The principles cited in the paragraph above have developed over the past several decades to soften, mitigate or work around the more rigid and less effective aspects of hierarchical work and organizational design. The daily and copious flows of information both internally and from customers and markets essentially dictate, now, that much knowledge work takes shape as projects or as time-limited initiatives and requires collaboration and the horizontal discovery and use of knowledge when and where it is needed or can best be put to use. The architectural challenge is to design and implement both work processes and the ways humans interact (with both the work and each other) intelligently whilst allowing for change(s) as needed. That means understanding much better the structure and dynamics of networks and the new influence of greater transparency when addressing issues such as deciding what is to be centralized or decentralized, who is to be involved and why (competencies, availability, fit with team, and so on), what is individual or group activity, and how accountability, reporting and tracking activities supervised,
Many examples of these factors and influences have appeared on the shelves as the management, leadership and organizational behaviour sections of bookstores have expanded rapidly during the past two decades. The experimentation with inclusive, participative and somewhat democratic developmental processes mirrors some of the core dynamics in the more consumer driven and public involvement in use of the Web. As similar tools, services and dynamics begin to penetrate our workplaces, I expect we will seek methods, practices and philosophies that track closely in parallel with the process of enquiry, exploration, sensemaking, negotiation and implementation set out by Dave Snowden’s Cognitive Edge approaches to intractable issues and organizational complexity.
I think there is an important coherence to much of what has been being developed over the past two decades or so. To reiterate, as it has developed much of it was aimed, bit by bit, at mitigating the harsher effects of having to lead and manage hierarchically under old models while coping with what actually “is”. Dave Pollard, a well-known knowledge management expert, has often suggested that most traditional management methods are almost useless but are still in place as the proxies for status and power, but that people keep on working by constantly developing and using work-arounds.
I think OD has suffered from being seen as “soft” and a “nice-to-have-time-to-do”, especially in the chaotic and ambiguous environment of the first decade of the 21st century. While it is a maxim in the OD field that “the soft stuff is the hard stuff”, it can be and often is brushed aside or put down by the hardnosed management hard-asses, the “I want to measure everything and tolerate no slack” crowd.
Clearly we need both objectives, metrics and well-defined processes AND enough slack and support to help people learn, adapt and work around ineffective or obsolete policies, practices and processes. I am increasingly of the opinion that there is a coherent and pertinent model available for working effectively in Enterprise 2.0. However it is not seen today as the dominant “management” model.
The dynamics generated by today’s networked knowledge workers using lightweight, easy-to-use social computing tools and web services welded together with existing integrated information systems are similar in reach, scope and pace to the the challenges explored by the field of organizational development … only with more regular frequency and greater intensity.
Taken together as a coherent management framework, perhaps the fundamental principles of organizational development and learning represent the beginnings of the innovation in management Gary Hamel is suggesting we need. Another of the great management thinkers, Stan Davis, suggested as much twenty years ago at the end of Chapter 3 in his 1987 book Future Perfect:
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“Electronic information systems enable parts of the whole organization to communicate directly with each other, where the hierarchy wouldn’t otherwise permit it. What the hierarchy proscribes, the network facilitates: each part in simultaneous contact with all other parts and with the company (see expanded definition above)as a whole. The organization can be centralized and decentralized simultaneously: the decentralizing mechanism in the structure, and the coordinating mechanism in the systems.
Networks will not replace or supplement hierarchies; rather the two will be encompassed within a broader conception that embraces both.”
Anyone who is still in denial about the movement away from local bloatware stored on your PC or server and toward online services should sit up and take notice of a site maintained by Ismael Ghalimi — one of the most connected individuals I know.
Ismael — with the help of contributors — documents all the Office 2.0 tools and technologies you could ever need to avoid bloatware of any kind and run your business entirely from services delivered over the network. Some are completely free, others charge on a per-use basis.
He lists the tools he personally uses, and offers an abundance of alternative services as well.
This wasn’t mentioned on Ismael’s list, but corporate Intranets are also covered — Bill Ives recently surfaced the possibility of Facebook fulfilling this role.
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