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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I’ve read much of the pros and cons (not all) and understand why some people consider it the best thing since sliced bread, and why others consider it a massive time sink and / or an invitation to get bombarded by unwanted marketing activity.

What seems clear to me is that it can often function as an effective means for searching for pertinent information.  To my mind, Twitter replicates the experiences I have often had after blogging for some time … because of my social networks mainly focused on issues, and people who are paying attention to those same issues, there is a regular experience of  ”synchronicity”. When something is on my mind and I start searching for information, I mre often than not “stumble upon” it, almost as if by magic (why do you think the web service Stumble Upon came into being ?).

When we use Twitter, we make decisions about who we follow, and so I think we invoke a social-network-of-purpose-driven filter that we apply.  Yes, we can follow thousands of people, but by and large we interact most with those concentric rings of trust and connection closest to us.  Often, the innermost rings of connection and trust are people that we have already connected with (through blogging or or professional / interest-driven networks), or whom we are learning to trust and to whom we come to pay attention.  

This selection of people with whom we interact (the innermost concentric rings of connection) provide context like no algorithm can (I’d love to know what the FAST search experts think of that assertion on my part).  The people with whom we interact most frequently on Twitter are paying attention to the same or similar things (and different things) as are we, and we are reciprocating.  So, when you push a question out into the twittersphere, those who are paying attention to you or notice your tweeted question may well have something to offer you that may be directly or closely aligned with the search you are carrying out.  There is the “ambient intimacy of context” that comes into play.

Now for the “on the other hand” … there’s an awful  lot of noise to churn one’s way through to get to the signals.  I know that there are various efforts underway to enhance the relevance and pertinence of finding one’s way through the mass of content that’s in the daily twitterstream, but I suspect that there’s a long way to go yet for such efforts to take new Twitter-related capabilities beyond the purview of the early adopters.

I also think that as large masses of people take to the newest socially-connected-streams-of-content to engage in purposeful activities, rather than trying to drive or acquire attention for attention’s sake (or to make money), we will find that Twitter-like capabilities or Twitter clones will be built into most, if not all, social-network platforms and collaborative-work platforms.

I suspect that this emerging concentration of attention and time allocation onto purposeful activities is what is behind the thinking in this extract from a WebGuild piece by Daya Baran titled “Twitter Will Be Obsolete In A Year“.

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Twitter Will Be Obsolete In a Year

[ Snip ... ]

He says Twitter won’t be as important as some think. He points to Friendster and how it was surpassed by MySpace which in turn was surpassed by Facebook in a shorter time doing the same thing.

He says as with any internet “gold rush,” as soon as others demonstrate success, everyone moves in, and the “next big thing” is born.

“All I have to do is mention QuickBooks, and I have 30 QuickBooks “experts” following me in hopes of getting business. How long will it take to wear people down dealing with these kinds of requests?… I predict Twitter will find its social media and marketing niche, but I cannot see it being nearly as important as some marketers are making it out to be.”

He also points out the retention rate of Twitter is ONLY around 30 percent, which means seven out of 10 people try it out once and don’t come back. So to get users the hype must continue and the process it becomes overhyped.

“Twitter seems to be proud of the fact that it has no profit model. I’m imagining that the company will want to keep the hype building long enough to sell the company for a few billion dollars… I also cannot foresee Twitter’s user base growing too much higher than it is now.

The simple functionality of Twitter will also lead to a glut of competition in the next few months, with companies duking it out for the best implementation of the microblogging model. There’s not enough to Twitter to keep it on the top of the heap. Being first in this case, as we’ve seen, is not a guarantee that you will have longevity.”

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I’d love to learn what you think.

For Twitter use #swineflu

Of course it goes without saying that the web community will offer the fastest and the most relevant coverage. Why we should care?

A Wisdom of Crowds tactic being adopted by the new administration … interesting idea, we’ll see how it plays out.

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Obama Crowdsources Daily Ideas with Citizen’s Briefing Book

I just learned from Leverage’s Mike Walsh that Obama will receive a briefing from the top voted ideas that were submitted by the American people each evening see Change.Force.com (a play off) . This method of keeping in direct communication by ‘listening’ to the citizens leans on voting style technology similar to Dell’s Ideastorm. My colleague Josh Bernoff will be pleased, as he requested this feature a few months ago.

You’ll need to login and register (I suspect they can use IP addresses to determine point of origin within US) in order to confirm location but that’s not completely accurate. How can Obama extend this further? Make a similar site for all other nations to submit ideas for foreign policy. This doesn’t come without challenges of course, the system could be gamed, and there’s no promise he’ll make changes based on our feedback, we’ll see.

I talk to the executives of the world’s largest brands, after Obama won the election, I get a lot less push back –it’s rare I have to have discussions now about the validity of social technologies.

Of course, social technologies still come with risk, but for some reason this feels really good, we’re all a bit more connected and the internet helps to bring us together.

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I’m not surprised.  if I were the leader of an organisation, I would just get on with it, as it seems clear to me that the permanent and ubiquitous presence of the Web in our lives is creating what is effectively a new sociology of expectation, namely of at least having a voice and to some degree being "heard" by hierarchical leaders in our societies’ institutions.

A culture continues to grow, informed by a "two-way flow of power and authority, based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results"

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Thanks to Martin Dugage of France’s Boostzone Institute, who provided the following commentary on the video clip.

My emphasis below … I am reminded of Euan Semple’s classic post about implementing social computing (The 100% guaranteed easiest way to do Enterprise 2.0?), and I don’t doubt that one of, if not the, the hardest part is senior managers and executives getting used to the idea of less or different control.

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Cisco is undoubtedly a lab for E2.0, and Chambers is definitely in the pilot’s seat. His point about collaboration revolves around productivity and speed.

My attention was drawn by a couple of things he said, such as the new ability of the company to pursue 26 top priority projects at the same time instead of just one or two last year; or the fact that Chambers meets more customers now but less often face-to-face and more often virtually, less often one-on-one and more often as a group; or the fact that he had to get rid of 20% of his staff composed of control freaks who didn’t get it.

Chambers believes that communities are the very core of E2.0, and he admits that he had a hard time getting used to it.

-[ Snip ... ]

Based on Cisco’s own experience in the past several years, organizations will completely restructure around these new capabilities. Indeed, he offers up his company as a paradigm of this vision. Once a hierarchical, command and control-based organization, Cisco is now much flatter, a company running “off of social networking groups.” Councils with cross-functional responsibilities suggest and take on many more projects (from emerging markets, to video, and smart grid boards); from one to two major ventures per year, to this year’s 26 launches.

The next generation company is “built around the visual.” Cisco employees do non-stop teleconferencing with collaborators around the world. The company hosts 2500 such virtual meetings per week. It also employs Webex, Wikis and blogging to move work along.

With this kind of communication and carefully managed process to match, “operations can be turned on a head,” says Chambers. It’s the recipe for market-dominating speed and scale. Chambers is “loading the pipeline” with projects that assume other companies will want what Cisco has and makes.

“If we’re right, we’re developing a huge wave of revenue opportunity.” Perhaps this is one reason why he’s “an optimist on global productivity, global economy and our ability to handle the challenges.”

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These are questions put forth in an interview I had several years ago with Allan Frank, chief technology officer for AnswerThink Consulting Group Atlanta and formerly national partner-in-charge of enabling technologies for KPMG Peat Marwick LLP. As Allan so aptly put it, knowledge management has always been a confounding issue for organizations seeking to better digitize, if you will, their collective knowledge. All too often, huge pieces of that collective learning have walked out the door to other organizations or to retirement.

Now, of course, we see social networking as a way to organically capture an assemble that collective knowledge, both within and outside the enterprise walls. But how is the more informal, almost free-for-all social networking approach meshing with more formal efforts to capture and leverage knowledge?

Xerox researcher Venkatesh G. Rao, said that the emerging tension between social media and knowledge management is a “generational war,” with younger participants opting for Web 2.0-ish approaches, versus the command-and-control nature of knowledge management systems.

However, in a post responding to Venkatesh’s observation, Tony Baer called the idea of generational war, at least here, as “hogwash.” As Tony observes, Web 2.0 isn’t wasted on the young: “Twittering, Facebook et al tend to hit more of a younger demographic, but use of Web 2.0 tools is definitely not restricted to people under 30.”

In fact, social media is being embraced with a lot of gusto by end users of all generations. “There have been many of us around for years who have always contributed “folk” knowledge, but until recently lacked the tools to share it.”

There are distinct differences between conventional knowledge management approaches as we’ve known them and social media, however. Tony points to parallels with the software development world. “Conventional knowledge management is more of a waterfall process [one department hands off work to another], whereas social media tends to be more agile [working collaboratively, real-time].”  In other words, conventional knowledge management systems have been top-down mega-projects, versus the more grassroots, democratic nature of social media.

As Tony puts it. the rise of social networking introduces a new dimension to the art and science of knowledge management:

“The question is whether you do so in a carefully organized top down fashion or instead encourage a culture of more informal or organic knowledge sharing. There’s no single silver bullet that works, but what’s always disturbed us have been those top-down enterprise knowledge management projects that to us appeared as little more than make work for highly paid enterprise consultants…. Along came Web 2.0 and social media which provided new technologies for the grassroots to simply not wait for some project manager to start a harvesting session which is then converted into retrievable assets from some application requiring significant custom coding. Instead, the notion of Wikis, blogs, microblogs, chats, forums and so on is to use the right tool for the purpose as the purpose arises. Some call it fun. We’ve thought of the new social media as the next generation Knowledge Management.”

Machine “understanding” of sentiment – which promises to unlock the information in social media in particular – is a technology that has been part of search as well as a field called text analytics for years. We may have reached a “tipping point” for this technology – at least that’s my impression from my recent visit to the 4th annual Text Analytics Summit last week.

Text Analytics is one of the “adjacent” areas that overlaps search, and the boundaries are getting fuzzier by the year. It remains a small specialty market but it has grown well beyond its roots with government and pharma customers, and this year’s summit had a nice buzz to it (in contrast to last year, which was noticeably flat). Given the blurry adjacencies to Enterprise Search and Business Intelligence, and the rash of acquisitions over the last year, one can’t help wonder how long it will be until text analytics is no longer its own market. At the vendor and analyst panels, many of the panelists thought text analytics would become subsumed into applications (like Voice-of-the-Customer or market-influence-analysis), acquired into search and BI, or both.

One of the interesting things to me was that sentiment analysis was everywhere. The vendors exhibiting all highlighted sentiment analysis, the Microsoft Research talk demo’d sentiment analysis, half of the talks mentioned sentiment analysis. Nick Patience of the 451 group listed 20 vendors supplying sentiment analysis, and he missed a few I know of. Andrew Bernstein of Cymphony (a longstanding provider of “market influence analytics”) went so far as to say that an analysis of social media was practically useless without it.

But as far as I can tell the technology hasn’t changed dramatically over the last couple of years. FAST customers have been using sentiment analysis for about 4 years now, and many of the offline text-blob analysis applications (which FAST doesn’t do but which a number of vendors do quite well) have been around for equally as long. So what’s changed? Why the extra buzz this year?
Some people seemed to think this was the ebb and flow of the market; other folks felt the tipping point had been reached, or that acquisitions of ClearForest, Teragram, Inxight, etc had raised the level of interest and broadened the sales channel.

I think there’s another factor, too – business analysts are getting used to fuzziness, and the packaging of this technology has become simple enough to reach the point that you don’t need to be a linguist to use it. This technology will never be perfect, but it is good enough to add real value, and I think it gets even more traction when you stop focusing on how it works and start just using it. I heard none of the usual disclaimers about how machines can’t understand sarcasm, which was refreshing – this group at least knows that there are always limitations in the machine understanding of human language, and seems to have moved on.

Whatever the reason, it was fun to see some real success stories – real companies getting real benefits out of analyzing their unstructured text. Of course, it’s always fun to party with other people who care about the surface forms of sentiment, and like finding new ways to combine statistics and linguistics. But the feeling at this summit was different than I expected – more real, more pragmatic, more mainstream. And there was a certain sentiment in the air…

I have been writing and blogging more over the past six months or so about social computing inside the firewall, and have spoken at several conferences about the issues and dynamics therein.

Today I used Google to search for references to me and my work, and so rediscovered a blog post I wrote four years ago about the use of blogging in organizations to stimulate dialogue, learning and innovation.

Obviously, people looking for references to my past writings on the use of blogging inside the firewall have helped this old and forgotten blog post to surface.

Update for the fact that there are now more collaboration platforms and applications, change the verb tenses and few words to make it pertinent to today’s Enterprise 2.0 context, and I think it’s still relevant.

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Blogging, Dialogue, KM and Learning
by jonh on Thu 03 Jun 2004 12:17 PM PDT | Permanent Link | Cosmos

Over the past couple of years many knowledgeable and committed bloggers have held forth on how blogging can replicate the dynamics of dialogue. They have also offered opinions and examples of how blogs and blogging can (potentially) be extremely useful for what we call "knowledge management".

In addition, there have been various anecdotes and examples of how reading blogs, commenting on blogs, and creating blog posts are activities that accelerate learning.

All this makes good sense. There are core aspects of blogging that facilitate learning in simple and effective ways.

Firstly, individual or group blogs that are focused on a domain of information and expertise chronicle and catalogue the blogger(s)’ knowledge. Over time, this grows to create a recognizable "body of knowledge".

Secondly, by offering the capability of commenting and interacting, the information on offer can be better defined, refined, explored, tested, and built upon.

Thirdly, the information on offer provides a latent platform for action – information that can be acted upon often turns into knowledge that can be shared and used in various ways.

Fourth, by linking to the blog or blogs that offer related information, the knowledge that is built can be shared more and more widely, if desired.

Fifth, the rhythym and cadence of the posting, reading, commenting and linking replicate the dynamics of dialogue in very effective ways. There aren’t the same kinds of interruption and distraction that so often occurs in conversations that only weakly replicate the dynamics of dialogue.

Finally, an ecosystem of knowledge can develop that consists of the aggregated sets of links and content the participants in a blogalogue create. And this "body of knowledge" and understanding remains online, available to anyone who cares to become involved.

I think these dynamics hold great promise – they demonstrate the characteristics that many have suggested are desirable and necessary for learning communities and learning organizations.

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Tags: Enterprise 2.0, blogging, dialogue, accelerated learning

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Much of what follows may not be new for anyone who may read this blog.  Nevertheless, I think it’s always useful to look back every once in a while, if only to see how far and fast (or not) we’ve come since this Web thing started to penetrate more deeply and spread more widely into the workplace. 

The changes to what we call knowledge work are now coming thick and fast.

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Knowledge management (KM) sometimes seems like the business buzzword that won’t go away. But that may be changing.  As Web 2.0 penetrates and spreads through workplaces, will it render KM as it was once known obsolete … or not ?

We have all been wrestling with the massive changes brought onto the scene by Web 2.0 technology and capabilities … changes that portend transforming the relationship between information technology, the nature of knowledge work, how organizations are structured and how humans operate when surrounded and penetrated by ongoing flows of information.  It’s doubly important to note and understand that we are in reality still only in the early days of these fundamental changes to both the processes of work and the capabilities of the electronic infrastructure of hardware and software, aluminum, silicon and logic that supports these transformations in behaviour in the digital workplace.

A first wave of what we currently call knowledge management (KM) appeared in the mid-to-late 1990’s as organizations began coming to grips with the potent combined forces of information technology and its twin sister, information-based knowledge work.  Much of the attention and effort centred on integrated information systems and specialized information technology that combined enabled the categorization, archiving and easy access to documents and other codified knowledge.  Debates raged about the best ways to move back and forth between the codified ‘explicit’ knowledge and the less obvious, often invisible ‘tacit’ knowledge that surfaces in human interaction, and how best to enable or enhance the collaborative and interactive use of information and knowledge to get things done or create additional useful knowledge.  

Much water has passed under many bridges over the past five years or so.  Blogs and wikis began to appear on the scene in 2001 and 2002 and some speculated then that these tools – or more accurately their derivatives – would create a major impact on the knowledge workplace.  They were followed by the evolution and expansion of what has come to be known as Web 2.0 … features, functions and web services enabled by plug-ins, widgets and other easy-to-use digital mechanisms.  It was not until the middle of 2006 that IT executives and managers began to realize that lightweight, easy-to-use-and-integrate capabilities for finding information, pulling it apart and putting it together again in different ways, and exchanging that information to build useful knowledge would probably transform key areas of knowledge work and its attendant dynamics. 

Today there is rapidly growing awareness that the Web will play a major, if not dominant, role in the use of information technology by organizations small and large, whether through upgrading to the latest versions of major ERP systems that incorporate social software and collaboration capabilities and a range of useful widgets and plug-ins, or through wider adoption of SaaS or a make-over of an enterprise’s work systems to incorporate collaborative platforms and capabilities. Increasingly, changes to functionality, systems integration and IT architecture will need to be built around both individual and group cognitive and interactive styles and needs as well as the enterprise’s business process requirements

Many interviews with some of the acknowledged experts in the domain of knowledge management and in technology companies have led to forecasts of some version of the points outlined below (and of course many variations on the theme that each point suggests):

1.   KM assumed that knowledge work in information-based organizations basically remains more or less the same … more static or stable as opposed to dynamic (and always under construction) with ongoing reference to core dependencies on knowledge objects.  In other words traditional KM was over-reliant on structure where structure when working with flows of information is difficult to impose and fix into place

2.    “how to create a knowledge sharing culture?,” is not the right question.  It’s more important to ask and understand “what you can do to encourage and facilitate connections?”, supplemented with tools, capabilities and socially-generated context, to help the appropriate information and knowledge be available when and where it is most needed and best used.  This means that a much-needed role and focus is as a catalyst and facilitator of connections, helping others see why it is now this way and how things work

3.     Knowledge transfer is self-assembling and self-organizing.  It really can’t be otherwise … it is done by humans in interaction

4.  By and large, incentives should not be used to stimulate information contributions.  Generally, this leads to gaming by those that are better at managing than at creating/innovating

5.    Had today’s Web 2.0 tools and capabilities had been available a decade ago, what we have called knowledge management would have been embraced and used more successfully

6.    Considering or planning a “knowledge audit” implies auditing static “physical” knowledge assets. The knowledge accessed and used in organizations is better thought of as a dependency relationship of business / organizational processes on knowledge objects which underpin the social construction of just-in-time knowledge from ongoing flows of dynamic information.

7.    We need to think more carefully about combining top-down design and direction of business processes with the bottom-up use of knowledge objects.  The combination of structure and organic generation and synthesis can help manage effectively in continuous flows of incoming and outgoing information (knowledge objects are anything that we can coherently manage).

8.     An appropriate amount of structure (design constraints) is necessary to enable consistent recall and findability of information.

9.     Computers alone cannot competently tag content. Authors must tag the content they create and / or use. Putting names and labels to content is essential and often may be words that do not appear in the content (this is the essence of metadata).

10.  Centralized IT control is on its way out.  Much more of the decision-making about what platforms / applications / software to be used will be made in by line management or by project teams.  Security concerns are real due to Web 2.0 but not apocalyptic and should focus on protecting corporate data, not in regimenting the means of collaboration.

11.  Human Resources (HR) will in all likelihood need to undergo a massive transformation.  The nature and design of knowledge work keeps changing and as that change accelerates, it’s likely that companies will need to move towards the self-organizing of work … including people, tools and methods.

Exploration of the issues in the field of Enterprise 2.0 has also more recently led to the understanding that social computing depends to some degree on the architecture, engineering and specialized knowledge handling technology that has come before.  Numerous vendors with KM-labelled products (mostly leveraging intranets) appeared in the market in the late 1990s and early 2000’s.  During that same period, hundreds of major enterprises developed and implemented KM programmes and / or functionality, to some degree or other.

Social computing in the enterprise  is intended to improve the collaboration, use of information and knowledge and the decision-making effectiveness of individuals, teams or the whole enterprise.  Today, more and more of the established KM-oriented products have added social-computing functionality.  Existing capabilities and implementations are being adapted, re-designed and/or added to by Web 2.0 applications, platforms and capabilities that make it easier and faster for knowledge workers to exchange information, collaborate and build and use. 

While through the spread of social computing KM may be coming out of an initial identity crisis, the advent and rapid spread of what is termed Enterprise 2.0 has helped create for KM a new Identity Crisis 2.0.   Today it seems clear that the new crop of collaboration tools, platforms and methods for enhanced collaboration are rapidly synthesizing and integrating fragmented or separate components of what was understood to be a KM-oriented system a few short years ago.

And whatever the current guise (which is likely to be different in virtually every organization)  increasingly practicality and ease-of-use will rule the day.

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