Enterprising Knowledge

2011-04-02T20:57:00.001+01:00

I made this announcement to all staff yesterday:

"As many of you will know, the team that has been evaluating intranet software for the past few weeks has been having difficulty determining the best choice for the charity. It has therefore been decided to ‘skip a generation’ of technology and adopt emerging best practice. This new technology not only enables more effective communication and knowledge-sharing but has very low TCO (total cost of ownership). It is also easy to maintain without technical skill. The new intra-net will consist of a large net made of fine plastic cabling, formed into a geodesic-dome style receptacle. Those wishing to participate simply climb into it and begin to associate with each other. In accordance with the well-understood net-work effect, the more who participate the more intense and productive communication becomes.

If we can get all 100 of us into the net at the same time we might learn a lot."

Getting cynical - or real? - about E2.0

2010-11-05T15:35:00.004Z

Is the Enterprise 2.0 concept going anywhere? Ever since Andrew McAfee coined the phrase there have been various evangelists beating the drum for it. I suppose I could count myself as one of them, at least to a degree. There are various definitions, but I want to stick with what seems to me to be the most radical version, which is the concept of making organisations less hierarchical, less command-and-control, more 'human' and maybe a little anarchic, as a result of introducing Web 2.0 style technologies into the enterprise and getting the workforce to use them.

It's a lovely idea, it really is. But, you, know, it has me thinking back to past 'enthusiasms' relating to the re-invention of corporate life. One of these was TQM (now pretty-much morphed into Six Sigma). TQM was more than just techniques for using statistics and measurement to identify the root cause of defects and so enable process improvement. It was that, but it included - read your Deming - calls to "drive out fear", and "Remove barriers that rob the hourly paid worker of his right to pride in workmanship". Many managers viewed this sort of talk as subversive, and internal consultant types who promoted it, like me, as dangerous anarchists. Ditto 'change programmes': very cathartic for junior workers who at last had a voice with which to grass up the more egregious managers, and fun if you were a facilitator, but, not surprisingly, anathema to middle management. Yet the objections often remained unspoken, because it would be like objecting to motherhood and apple pie.

What these managers (some poor, but some actually rather good) really wanted to say was, "I hear what you say, and it's good in theory, but let me tell you two things: 1. It's not how real work gets done, and 2. I have a team to run, and I'm damned if I'll let your initiative or any other get in the way of that."

So what has this got to do with Enterprise 2.0? A great deal, I suggest. Many managers will see wholesale public transparency of thought on the part of the workforce, even behind the firewall, as dangerously subversive. They will pay lip service to it, because it's hard to voice objections without seeming to be a fascist. But they won't encourage it, and may well put roadblocks - disguised, perhaps, as security concerns - in the way.

How about just getting rid of all middle managers? After all, with the improvement in communication and collaboration that Enterprise 2.0 offers, who needs them? Strange how that question seems to have been posed repeatedly for several decades, even before the advent of E2.0, but it never seems to happen. Maybe they're needed after all?

Linked Data: the future of the Web?

2010-09-24T14:35:00.004+01:00

I attended a one day conference, organised by the UK arm of the International Society for Knowledge Organization, earlier this month. The subject was Linked Data. This being a subject I knew very little about, but which I suspected might be important, not least because it's related to Sir Tim Berners-Lee's Semantic Web concept, I decided to pay the fee and see what I could find out.

There was a very international group of speakers, including two from France, one from the Netherlands, one from Germany and one from Austria. The degree to which they engaged me varied, but most had something interesting to say. Presentations that I particularly liked were Nigel Shadbolt on what the government is up to with its data, and John Goodwin on Ordnance Survey.

The basic idea behind linked data is to extend the hyperlink concept of the Web from the current norm of linking web pages and other (largely) unstructured media like documents and video clips, to the linking of datasets. Provided this is marked up in a standard way, using RDF (resource description framework) it can be made sense of by machines and re-used in, for example, mashups.

There's a lot of quite complex stuff related to ontologies, with a nice new collection of acronyms to learn, such as OWL and SPARQL. There was also a fair bit of quasi-philosophical talk about the difference between the name of a thing and the thing itself. One of the problems with this conference was that it was billed as being for beginners (albeit KM-savvy beginners), yet it assumed an understanding of some of these concepts. I don't think anyone explained what a 'triple' was, for example.

The process of putting linked data out there on the Web, and using other people's linked data, is not one I can see non-technical people getting to grips with, at least in the short term. Maybe the process will become easier just as putting up a web page has. Remember when that required knowledge of HTML? Now it's all wysiwyg. I can, however, see how linked data could work nicely where a data provider (such as government - www.data.gov.uk) wants to see its data used and presented, but doesn't want to build the UI for that. Given that there are loads of developers out there willing to do it for them, why should they? Equally, if you build aps you'd be grateful for lots of free linked data to power them.

There are of course risks. I do wonder whether the government has really thought through the implications of licensing its data for any purpose, allowing even that it be modified. When this thought was put to Professor Shadbolt, he rightly pointed out that the media routinely (mis?)present data the way they need to for the 'angle' they are taking, so this is no worse. Good point, but I think the jury's out. It feels like a welcome move towards transparency, though, and could save the taxpayer money.

Where's this all going? I have two opposing thoughts on this, both related to the structured v unstructured information debate. The first is that one of the primary reasons for the success of Tim Berners-Lee's brilliant invention, the World-wide Web, was its focus on unstructured information (web pages with text and some images, mainly), because that's what non-technical people relate to most naturally. A move away from this would therefore be retrograde, it could be argued. The counter argument is that the Web only really got going properly when databases started being used behind the scenes to drive websites. Search engines and ecommerce sites both depend on them, and there are countless other examples. So linking datasets across the web is just an extension of this and could bring even greater benefits, perhaps.

I think the second argument's possibly true, but only if the structure of the data is kept well hidden from the layman, and he doesn't have to learn a second meaning for that nocturnal bird of prey with the round face.

What do you think?

Facebook and ZDNet

2010-09-11T20:38:00.004+01:00

Here's what I was going to reply to Phil Wainewright's post about Facebook on ZDNet, until I realised I had to register to comment...

"You read it here first? ;-)
http://enterknowl.blogspot.com/2007/07/mixed-feelings-about-social-networking.html
Actually, a lot more has happened since then. It's not all negative, but there is clearly a move to lock-in / walled gardens, of which some of us are very suspicious. But then again, the 'small pieces, loosely joined' idea is a bit arcane for some people, who probably prefer a structured package. And, to be honest, Facebook does clever (and, to many, attractive) things within that structure. "

I know a site that requires registration to post comments isn't a monopoly, but.... ;-)

How not to make cost savings, and how it could be done well

2010-08-26T17:38:00.004+01:00

I had to have a scan recently (all clear, thankfully) and decided to order a copy of it. I'd been told by the specialist I'd have to pay, so was rather surprised to be told by the receptionist in radiology that it was free for me, because I was ordering it within 40 days of the scan taking place. I commented that this seemed a bit eccentric, and she readily agreed. There had been a change to the rules recently, and she thought the change (making it free) didn't sit well with the cost-saving initiatives currently going on in the NHS. At the same time as making the copy of the scan results free, for example, the person who used to do the scans had been laid off, so they now take at least a couple of weeks to produce, by whomever has a spare moment. I agreed this seemed odd. 'They obviously haven't asked the staff', said I. 'But what else would you expect from NHS managers?', she said.

Assuming she wasn't embittered from, say, being on the at-risk-of-redundancy list - and she didn't appear disgruntled - I thought:

- consulting staff to get cost-saving ideas (as distinct from radical downsizing) is basic managerial good practice and has been for several decades;
- I got this from a 5 minute conversation - what more could be obtained from, say, an hour's workshop?
- I actually wouldn't mind a crack at this, but every role I've seen advertised relating to the NHS has required deep and extensive, specific, prior NHS experience.

Something's not quite right...

How regulated organisations can deal with social networking issues

2010-08-03T16:19:00.004+01:00

In my last post I raised the point that in amongst the excuses applied in some organisations, particularly regulated ones, to avoid letting employees use social media, there are some real issues. This post looks at some of them, and proposes solutions.

I can think of four main types of issue, which I'll call, respectively, Conduct Unbecoming, Company Secrets, Off-the-Record Contracting and Chinese Walls. Let's look at each in turn.

Conduct Unbecoming

This rather old-fashioned expression I take to mean anything that an employee might say that the firm would not wish to be associated with its name. This could be inside or outside the firewall. The fears are more reputational than regulatory, although for internal-only material they may well be more about power and the prevention of the usurping thereof.

It should be possible to deal with both instances (inside and outside the firewall) by means of a policy. I'm tempted to say this could be as short as "Don't give away company secrets and don't diss the firm", but it will probably be a little longer and more formal than that. Nevertheless, that's basically the message. Whistleblowing rights would of course remain, but those aside a company can reasonably expect some measure of loyalty and good behaviour from its people.

Company Secrets

This covers commercially confidential material, client confidential material and so on. There's an art to saying something interesting online that doesn't breach confidences. Ever since the invention of email people have been learning the hard way that people react differently to opinions expressed in writing as opposed to face-to-face or on the phone, especially when the opinions are negative. It's not a simple matter to craft work-related posts that are interesting to you and your readers, and at the same time won't upset your boss. But this art must be learnt, because short of never mentioning work online - which probably means not being online at all - everyone will have to face up to the consequences of getting it wrong. As far as the company's concerned, again policies have a role, but they might amount to closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. Someone who doesn't understand 'netiquette' might blunder even though s/he's read the policy, and once that tweet or Facebook post's in the public domain it's too late. So there's a role for training here: in how to use social media effectively and safely in a work-related context.

Off-the-Record Contracting

This is the issue of people using unofficial channels to record or make agreements which could bind the firm legally. The issue isn't so much about secret or under-the-counter deals - intentional concealment - as people wanting to do them will always find a way, and there are legal sanctions available to deal with transgressions. It's more about the fact that there's a grey area between the conversations that lead up to a deal, and the formal contract documents. A firm can't afford to lose track of even the 'grey' bits. That is very tricky even if email were to be the only channel used, both in relation to finding stuff later and to dealing with multiple email accounts and platforms. Banks that I have worked for tend to block webmail at work to try to deal with the second point. (As for finding stuff for, for example, disclosure purposes, social media platforms can score over email there, but that's a bit off topic). The problem with blocking email, as opposed to making it a policy not to use non-firm email for business purposes, is it's a slippery slope towards banning all non-firm communication platforms. This can mean no access to (public) blogs, wikis, social networking sites and so on. in fact, no Web 2.0 at all. For me, that's throwing the baby out with the bath water. A better approach would be to state in a policy that such channels shouldn't be used for anything that could have contractual implications. But, of course, the regulators, and not just the firms, need to be convinced that this is satisfactory before it has a chance of flying.

Chinese Walls

A well-known concept in banking circles, the Chinese Wall is a necessary separation of communication between certain departments, usually to prevent conflicts of interest. Any 'social' platforms must take them into account. Broadly, there are two possible approaches. the first is to make all social platforms inside the firewall accessible to everyone in the firm, and make it clear that no discussion that should be bounded by a Chinese Wall should appear on them. This has the virtues of simplicity, clarity and ease of maintenance. Its downside is that it precludes the use of social tools within a Chinese Wall, which can seriously limit useful knowledge-sharing and collaboration. If a firm does decide to allow confidential social platforms it needs to be aware that it could let itself in for a big maintenance overhead - as I know from experience! The chances are that your Active Directory (or equivalent) does not flag people with the characteristics that your Chinese-wall-related privacy settings require on your social platform. Therefore, you'll need to have someone constantly adding leavers and joiners of the department or project in question, possibly by hand. It's wise to think hard at the outset how you can best set things up to minimise this manual effort. If you use Sharepoint, make sure you fully understand how security-enabled groups work.

Policing

Whether you adopt the approach that, broadly, I'm recommending, namely to allow quite liberal access to Web 2.0 sites outside the firewall and encourage their equivalent inside it, and deal with potential 'issues' by means of policies and training, or you decide to 'batten down the hatches' and block or ban most things Web 2.0, you'll probably wonder how you can police what's actually going on. In an ideal world you'll have trusted and trustworthy employees who are netiquette-savvy and won't put a foot wrong. If they do, however, you will probably want to know about it. But how to do this?

You might run searches for the company name on, say, Google. This should pick up most stuff on public platforms. It won't pick up 'walled' material like email, of course, or Facebook posts behind privacy settings. Then, of course, as there's no search that I know of that will pick up only 'inappropriate' comments about the firm, there will be a lot of link-clicking and reading for somebody to do. Auto-moderation software exists, and I'm guessing this could pick up combinations of swear words plus company name, for example, thus narrowing things down. But there might still be a lot to read, and as I said earlier, it will be after the fact. So you might decide not to monitor at all, and just deal with incidents as they arise and are made known.

A bit scary? Welcome to the new world! Now's maybe the time to reflect on the way your employees might feel about the firm, and, if that feeling's more negative, overall, than positive, whether it's actually realistic to try to keep the lid on that.

Social Media in Corporate Environments: Realism Needed

2010-07-13T08:37:00.004+01:00

Prompted by a tweet by Phil Bradley, linking to his blog, it occurred to me finally to get round to posting something on the subject of control, trust and social media in large (especially regulated) organisations.

Many of my social media / Enterprise 2.0 evangelist friends seem to be pretty laissez-faire when it comes to the subject of the amount of freedom employees ought to have in relation to the use of social media tools. I have a lot of sympathy for that viewpoint. Widespread adoption of blogging, tweeting/yammering and the use of collaborative spaces within and even outside the firewall has the capacity, at least in theory, to open up an organisation and make it both more effective and more congenial a place to work. Or, to turn that around, the open culture required to enable widespread use of these tools is a prerequisite to an effective and congenial organisation in the modern era.

I also think, though, that the extreme libertarians, if I can call them that, are either unaware of, or are ignoring, some important legal and regulatory matters that apply to many large firms. If these are ignored, a firm can easily find itself exposed to reputational damage, loss of confidential information and/or perhaps regulatory sanctions.

The problem is that in some, probably many, firms these issues are cited as the reason for not letting employees use social media. They may have genuine fears about the legal or commercial risks, or they may simply not want to do it for other reasons, and use these risks as an excuse. The ones with genuine fears and concerns can be helped, and my next post will provide some ideas for tackling the issues. Those firms that are making excuses will need to get through their state of denial before anything can be done. As a starting point they need to realise that the genie is out of the bottle; that social media/networking is here to stay, and that if they don't get involved their competitors will start to leave them behind.

Facebook: too public or too private?

2010-05-16T20:47:00.004+01:00

There has been a lot of condemnatory talk recently on Twitter and elsewhere about Facebook's allegedly cavalier attitude to privacy. The argument is that there have been creeping, and concealed (or at least, not transparent) changes to the privacy policy since Facebook's inception, that have steadily eroded the ability of users to keep their information out of the public domain. There's also the fact that setting privacy controls on Facebook accurately to reflect one's intentions is not a trivial matter.

An interesting counter argument has been put forward by Robert Scoble, who basically says that he does (and, he implies, everyone else ought to) act as if everything he writes on the Web is available to be read by the whole world, and that, if anything, Facebook's problem is not that it's too public, but that it isn't public enough.

Personally, I think both arguments have merits, but the key point for me revolves around expectation and trust. Facebook's Mr Zuckerburg created a site which started out as one thing (a private place) and gradually converted it into something else. The way he did it has all the appearance of subterfuge. Some argue that most users don't care - either know and don't care, or don't know and wouldn't care if they did. That might be true, but it's not the point. The point is that it's been done in a rather sneaky way.

I've not closed my own Facebook account, nor have I (tried to) ban my children from using it - in fact, I've just helped one sign up today. But I have made sure all the settings are for 'friends only' where possible. This of course won't stop some information leaking out, which is the cue for the next lesson, regarding which I agree with Robert Scoble: assume everything you post could be read by anyone, someday.

Social Computing, new government, smoke-filled rooms

2010-05-12T12:37:00.005+01:00

As I write, after several exciting days of speculation and intrigue concerning the composition of the next government, David Cameron is putting the finishing touches to his cabinet. There was, of course, a massive amount of Twittering going on during that period, and I for one had one eye permanently on Tweetdeck. The other was on the BBC website's live updates page, and it was interesting to note that some of the breaking news came from tweets written by politicians or aides.

In contrast to the openness and transparency of the activity on the social networks, the actual negotiations were taking place in great secrecy, with ne'er a leak. The only exception I know of is the mini-scoop by a Guardian photographer who got a shot of Nick Clegg's list of negotiating points. Some commentators objected to this 'horse-trading', saying that it was undemocratic to have a small coterie of individuals determining the next government. Personally I found that view strange and rather naive. I would argue that the country gave the three main parties the right to negotiate a government by not granting an overall majority to any of them, and that such negotiations would be much slower and might not work at all if they weren't confidential.

But this isn't supposed to be a political blog. Since my interest is the use of social computing within organisations I'm now thinking what the implications for it might be of the formation of this new government. Clearly the biggest issue is going to be the impact of the tax rises and public spending cuts that will be necessary to tackle the deficit. These will put great pressure on companies - and public sector bodies - to get more from less. And I stand by my previous post on that subject. I also feel optimistic - at the moment - that we might be entering a new era in which politicians co-operate more in the national interest, instead of trying to score points all the time, and that this chimes well with the sort of altruistic behaviour that is often seen on the Web. Perhaps this will help lead more companies along the road to Enterprise 2.0 - whilst not changing the fact that some decisions need to be taken confidentially in a (probably smoke-free) boardroom.

Wiki Wednesdays are back!

2010-02-18T11:10:00.003Z

I was pleased to discover, via Facebook, that Wiki Wednesdays are kicking off again in London. I used to enjoy these. The format was informal, the people attending had varied interests, and there was (at the best ones) an atmosphere of enthusiasm for the world of Web 2.0 and all its possibilities. I suppose it did go into a bit of a dip after a while, and perhaps that was why it was temporarily 'retired'. David Terrar has worked hard in the past to organise these sessions, which date back several years, so it's good to see he's still involved.

If you're interested in the 3rd March event, sign up on the wiki. (You might need to register with Socialtext first.)

What is the role of KM?

2010-01-20T15:39:00.006Z

Now that I'm a regular Twit(terer), I find it quite hard to blog. This is largely because, in comparison to Twitter, the bar to hitting the keyboard seems much higher. I feel I need to have something deep to say before I blog. And, er, OK, let's leave it there.

Paradoxically it's a link from Twitter to a blog post on a very deep subject that has prompted this post. John Tropea tweeted about a blog post by Mark Gould which discussed a blog post and paper by Patrick Lambe . In essence the argument put forward is that knowledge sharing is about a lot more than just getting thoughts onto (virtual) paper in public places and spreading them around using technology. The author went on to argue that knowledge managers ought to be taking account of the psychological processes that are involved in knowledge transfer. Indeed, the author seemed altogether impatient with a technology-based approach to knowledge sharing.

This prompted me to reassess my own position. Being a short attention-span Twit these days, I'll be brief. I agree that knowledge-sharing is a rich and complex subject. But I don't think it's the job of knowledge managers to be concerned with all aspects of the process. This is for two reasons. The first is that most of us don't have time to complete the in-depth academic study needed to become the true KM all-rounder implied by Lambe. The second is that many aspects of knowledge-sharing are better left to the individuals who have the knowledge and who are doing (or attempting to do, or would do if they had the facilities) the knowledge sharing.

I've never really liked the phrase 'knowledge manager'. It's too overblown, pretentious. We are concerned with facilitating the sharing of certain types of information, that's all. If we get a bit dry and technical about it at times, it's because that's a big part of the job.

Do you agree?

Social Computing in Business

2009-11-14T13:22:00.008Z

The talk seemed to go down well. It turned into more of a workshop, really, which is what I really wanted. I tried to cover a very broad field in one hour, which was a challenge. I began by checking knowledge levels, and by asking who was more interested in the tools and who in the business-related issues. I got a strong vote for the latter. Nevertheless I did a run-through of the tools, and dwelt a bit on the concept of 'small pieces loosely joined', and the 'glue' of tagging, folksonomy, RSS and so on. There were some ah-ha moments with Delicious, when I explained how the social tags provided an alternative way into the web to Googling.

I covered adoption barriers such as security, 'fear of The Cloud', Chinese Walls and corporate politics, and emphasised that these were important issues but that they aren't insuperable. Towards the end we looked at the idea of companies becoming perhaps more human places as a result of the adoption of social computing / Enterpise 2.0'. That struck a chord with quite a few people. Given that many of them were in jobseeking mode, this did not surprise me. We also talked about the potential value of loose ties when it come to networking in general.

One of the most interesting things for me was to be reminded how broad this topic is, and how it touches on some quite deep issues such as personal identity, organisational behaviour, the role of management and the nature of work.

Here's a link to my talk outline on Mind42.

Social Computing in Business

2009-11-12T14:44:00.004Z

I'm giving a talk this evening at TfpL on the subject of Social Computing in Business. This is, of course, a very broad field, and it will be a challenge to cover even parts of it in the hour available. But I'm sure it will be interesting. I'm looking forward at least as much to hearing what the audience has to say on the subject as I am to saying my piece.

Corporate Knowledge-sharing: a glimmer of hope

2009-06-20T17:12:00.002+01:00

Recent experience in a large professional services firm has confirmed a number of my expectations about difficulties in facilitating knowledge-sharing in such an environment. In no particular order:
- Dear old Sharepoint both enables and inhibits, in roughly equal measure. Yes it's got lots of features, but many of them are mediocre and it's a clunky, unintuitive piece of kit to build anything with.
- Security concerns, standardisation of builds, etc inevitably mean what's available to the staff behind the firewall is disappointing compared with the burgeoning Web 2.0 world at large on the Web.
- The email habit runs very deep, and won't be shifted easily.

I'm still optimistic that we can make a go of this KM initiative, though. Why? Because there is strong business need and because senior people are behind it. Essential, though often lacking in KM-related work. What's more, there's an understanding that there needs to be a move from email silos to open, web-based discussion and document sharing. It's 'just' a question of changing habits. And on that note I've discovered than those of us who've been using the web for years need to remember that not everyone understands how to copy a URL and paste it into an email. In fact, 'basic training' might be one of the key requirements for success.

Could URL shorteners break the Web?

2009-04-10T18:08:00.002+01:00

Many of us use URL shorteners like www.tinyurl.com and www.bit.ly. For Twitter they are well-nigh essential, if you're not to use up your whole 140 character quota with a single URL.

I think it was Euan Semple in his Twitter incarnation @euan, who originally alerted me to the idea that these shortener sites might be a risk to the architecture of the web. As every schoolboy knows, the Internet was designed to continue functioning after major structural damage, such as that which might follow a nuclear war. It does this by virtue of its addressing system, which allows messages, in the form of 'packets', to be routed through many possible pathways, so that they always get through even if some pathways are blocked. Unfortunately URL shortening might be able to jeopardise this welcome redundancy. Shortening works (I think - correct me if wrong) by the storage on the shortener's server of a match between the shortened URL and the original one. Someone who clicks on the short URL gets redirected to the original (long) one. In theory, if a shortener's server went offline, because for example the shortener went bust, all the links would be lost.

What's to be done? There are a number of shorteners, so using a range of them reduces the consequences of failure of any one of them. But the impact could still be significant, especially if the most popular one failed. And the more paranoid might even see possibilities of duress here, should a shortener fall under the control of an ill-intentioned person. Admittedly the consequences of failure of any 'cloud' service, including good old webmail, could have serious consequences, but those are arguably less systemic than shortener failure would be.

Should there be some sort of process for putting URL shortener databases into escrow, or is there another answer, perhaps?

World Wide Web is twenty

2009-03-14T22:46:00.003Z

'Twenty years ago this month, something happened at CERN that would change the world forever: Tim Berners-Lee handed a document to his supervisor Mike Sendall entitled "Information Management : a Proposal". "Vague, but exciting" is how Mike described it, and he gave Tim the nod to take his proposal forward. The following year, the World Wide Web was born.'

http://www.w3.org/2009/03/CERNweb20th.html

"Information Management : a Proposal": understatement of the century?

Transport Chaos

2009-02-03T11:52:00.003Z

Thanks to Euan Semple for pointing me to this one. (Before you ask the relevance to this blog, it's a mashup):

Clever old Twitter

2009-01-18T16:53:00.004Z

When I first came across Twitter, I thought, "What the heck is the point of that?". Later, I came to see the value of it for at least one specific purpose: following the movements of my preferred candidate for mayor of London. Recently, I've found myself using it more and more. Why is this?

I think there are are a number of reasons why Twitter hits the spot in a way that no other social software tool does. Firstly, it is simple. You post, you follow people, and people follow you. Not difficult, that. Secondly, despite this simplicity, it succeeds in blending together the features of a number of other types of tool. This makes it either the best of a number of worlds or a decent compromise, depending on your point of view. The first of these features is the 'friends' concept of Facebook and LinkedIn, but with a twist. Whereas in the former social networks a relationship cannot exist unless it is reciprocated, on Twitter it can be one way. This, for me, 'lowers the bar' when it comes to deciding whom to follow, whom (if anyone) to block, and if/when to de-follow somebody. None of this feels as personal and therefore possibly hurtful as it would on Facebook or LinkedIn. And the consequence is better 'liquidity' of contacts. There need be no stale ones.

The way contacts work on Twitter also makes it easy to select the people you want to follow - by seeing who the people that you follow, or might wish to follow, follow. This is possible on Facebook and LinkedIn, at least to some extent, too. But that reciprocation thing gets in the way.

The second feature is the threads concept of forums. However, whereas in forums, threads are very central to the way a forum works, in Twitter they are very weak. The only way a thread manifests itself is as an @ reply, which links a response to an original comment. At least I think this is the case - any Twitterers reading this who know otherwise, please correct me. De-emphasising threads is arguably no bad thing. At least it prevents the sort of rambles/flames/rants that can spoil the debate on forums.

The third feature is the blogging concept. Or, in Twitter's case microblogging. It's blogging because it's relatively standalone - the blogger on his or her soapbox. But it's different because of the limitation in length of post - 140 characters or 15-20 words. Despite the fact that it's possible to cheat by breaking up a long post into 140 character chunks, this length limitation in practice works to make authors be concise and be interesting - particularly as they would not wish their adoring followers to desert them.

And now for Twitter's pièce de résistance: intimacy with celebrities (as it were). I do not know if this is merely a function of Twitter's newness, or if it will endure. But at the moment it really does feel that if you follow a celebrity Twitterer you are getting a more intimate view of their life than you ever would through other media. Personally, at the moment I'm following Lance Armstrong, John Cleese and Stephen Fry. There are many aspects of celebrity, and the way the broadcast media handle it, that I usually hate. Somehow Twitter turns celebrities back into normal people again. The posts I've seen seem totally authentic, you know they aren't getting paid to do it, and there's always the tantalising thought that you might get an @ reply to one of your comments.

Finally, I think Twitter would be a very good tool for the enterprise. It could either be within the firewall (I think Yammer is an enterprise Twitter-like product for this) or Twitter itself could be used, probably with certain precautions. It could be used to let colleagues know where each other is and what they are doing, but also to create the 'loose ties' of people in different departments or locations that have so much potential for mutual help.

I have converted from Twitter sceptic to Twitter fan. How about you?

Web 2.0 tools for the recession

2009-01-07T16:40:00.003Z

In what way can the read-write Web help in a recession? You can, of course, flog all your belongings on eBay, or you can go to your favourite social networking site and have a good gripe about the state of the economy. Perhaps more usefully, there are a number of sites that facilitate pooling of resources that might be worth a look. Sites such as Liftshare and TfL's London Liftshare could help reduce the cost of running a car, as well as helping the environment a little. Instead of buying or selling services - both difficult when times are hard - maybe try exchanging or bartering skills with others, through Teamuphere or Skillsexchange (read that one carefully...), for example. Then there's the old concept of home exchange (Home Base Holidays - again, read carefully ;-) ) or Home Exchange. There are no doubt many more ways in which pooling or sharing can take place, and Web 2.0 sites are tailor-made for facilitating them.

I found these during a short Google. Disclaimer: I haven't tried any of them - but may well do so soon.

Does anyone have any other ideas and links along similar lines?

Whatever happened to the 'Death of Distance'?

2008-11-16T15:56:00.002Z

The term was coined by Frances Cairncross back in 1997, and made the title of her book. I assume it was meant to include the idea that as a result of the communications revolution we wouldn't need to keep flying round the world for business meetings and conferences.

Why, then, is it that most of the 'Web 2.0' people I know seem to spend much of their time doing just that? Could it be that they do it for pleasure? Fine by me, just as long as none of them lectures me about carbon footprint size....

Sharepoint Summit

2008-10-19T10:37:00.006+01:00

Thanks to TFPL, and especially John Davies, for inviting me to their 'Sharepoint Summit' last week. As I said previously, I came to this fighting against a degree of prejudice regarding Sharepoint. My own experience of Sharepoint 2003 had been fairly underwhelming, and the views expressed at Wiki Wednesday had been fairly negative, too.

In many ways my fears proved founded. During the eight or so presentations plenty of weaknesses and limitations were highlighted. I won't go into detail, as James Lappin of TFPL has listed them on Twitter already. Not too surprising, perhaps, as Sharepoint attempts to cover six major information management bases: collaboration, portal, enterprise search, ECM, business processes & forms, business intelligence. It would be pretty surpising if it were best of breed in all these. The trouble is (although not for Microsoft or their certified partners) that IT departments are choosing Sharepoint as the solution to whatever the problem might be, then trying to patch up the deficiencies with widgets, bespoke code, etc. This all takes time and costs money. And it can be very messy. If one message came across loud and clear from the presenters, it was that you must think and plan ahead before implementing Sharepoint. If you don't you can get into a right old pickle.

Call me old-fashioned (actually perhaps new-fashioned is better here), but I thought the new wave of Web 2.0 in the enterprise was about lightweight software, small pieces loosely joined, mashups, emergence and so on. Sharepoint doesn't much sound like any of that to me. Then again, to be fair, I have been focusing mainly on collaboration / knowledge-sharing, which is only one of the six Sharepoint segments. Most of the case studies at this summit involved something more formal - a major intranet, a public website, a hub for integrating information being entered in multiple geographies, a workflow system. But I was left wondering about the wisdom of using Sharepoint for everything instead of picking best-of-breed products. I suppose it's a bit like the old debate about Hi-Fi: do you buy separate speakers, amp and CD player, from different manufacturers, or do you plump for a package from one? The argument for the package was put by Sharon Richardson of Joining Dots. Sharon should know a fair bit about Sharepoint, as she worked for Microsoft from 2000-2006 as Lead Technology Specialist for Sharepoint products in the UK. She took us back to the early '90s - which I am certainly old enough to remember - when Wordperfect was the No 1 word processor and Lotus 123 was the spreadsheet of choice. Word and Excel, she claimed, weren't necessarily better, they just worked better together. And the same argument applies to all the bits of Sharepoint. Well, this is something that jars with me, for two reasons. First, I'm not sure the interoperability of the early Office products was all that stunning, and to the extent that it was, was there not a little issue of some Windows code being concealed from non-Microsoft developers? Second, we're not talking any longer about an office suite of desktop products. The new standard is www (something that Bill G took a little while to 'get', incidentally). It should not be necessary to buy a suite like Sharepoint to get the interoperability and integration you need.

Perhaps I'm being overly negative. As some speakers said, Sharepoint can be tolerably good out of the box for an SME with modest requirements. And if you are a bigger firm which is happy to invest time to customise and extend basic Sharepoint, and prefers to work from a pre-existing platform (ready-made foundations, if you like) rather than build an app. from scratch, it might make sense also. One thing is clear: the Microsoft marketing machine is ensuring that for many companies Sharepoint becomes the one and only migration path for those whose world currently only contains Office, shared drives and Exchange, to one that is Web 2.0 - ish, if not Web 2.0 proper. Whether you like Sharepoint or not, it's going to be hard to ignore it.

Thanks again to TFPL for arranging a great day, and letting us see the warts as well as the beauty.

London Wiki Wednesday and Sharepoint

2008-10-03T11:17:00.005+01:00

Wiki Wednesday yesterday was the first I have attended for about 9 months, I think, not least because they were put on ice for a while. Hosted jointly by the BCS North London Branch and Bearingpoint, the initial theme or hook was “Microsoft SharePoint as social media platform - Any chance to fight your IT department when they suggest it?”. This was a topic I did not want to miss, particularly as I shall be attending a one day seminar by TFPL later this month, which will be taking somewhat the opposing view.

David Terrar, organiser of London Wiki Wednesdays, had framed the proposal, and whilst he has his own competing product called Wordframe, I believe he's genuine in his desire to highlight the comparative benefits of not only his own product but of others of similar ilk.

A number of audience members who had had experience of Sharepoint implementations in their own organisations offered their views. There seemed to me to be a consensus that Sharepoint is touted by Microsoft as both 'free' and 'out-of-the-box', but isn't really either of those things. Firstly, a MOSS licence isn't free, and unless you upgrade to MOSS from entry-level Sharepoint you basically only have a document management system and miss out on Web 2.0 tools such as wikis and blogs. It needs a lot of customisation, which can take many man-hours of IT people's time. Someone described it as a toolset rather than a product for end-users. As (I think it was) Andreas Rindler argued, no product will be suitable for deployment in many organisations without any customisation. But with Sharepoint it is not possible for an end-user, for example, simply to add widgets by selecting from a tick-list, as they (allegedly) can with other products.

I must suspend my suspicion that this is all a typical Microsoft lock-in strategy, along the lines of "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM, no wait, Microsoft", thus giving an easy choice to the IT procurement people, then nice employment for their folk, etc. I must also stop thinking that Sharepoint is a mediocre product, since I haven't touched it for 2 years. I'm looking forward to the TFPL day so I can hear the other side of the story.

For a write up of the rest of the 1st Oct Wiki Wednesday (and there was more good stuff), see here

Systemic risk and social media

2008-09-23T13:41:00.003+01:00

Presumably there's nobody who hasn't heard of the recent, er, problems in the finance industry. Whilst the wailing and gnashing of teeth are going on, presumably the FSA, SEC and other regulators are pondering how to ensure it 'never happens again'. Targets in the firing line seem to include bonuses and shorting, plus that rather vague term 'transparency' (or rather, opacity, since that's the bogey).

But is there anything much that regulators can do, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater (ie over-regulating and thus stifling enterprise)? And if so is there any connection with social software in the enterprise, thus justifying this post?

I think there might be, but it's not a nice thought. Let me step back a moment. The credit crunch and recent investment bank failures stem from the fact that a duff security - sub-prime mortgages - was wrapped up into opaque financial instruments such as CDOs (collateralised debt obligations). If I understand it correctly, this opacity made these instruments easier to sell than the underlying assets alone would have been, and it became harder for banks to know the true systemic risk they were running. When the sh*t hit the fan, ie the mortgages became worthless because of falling property prices and consequent defaults, not only were the CDOs etc devalued but putting a price on the devaluation became very hard, as did knowing which bank was exposed to what. So the problem was a combination of devaluation and ignorance. It was the ignorance as much as the loss of value that led to the credit crunch and the failures of Bear Stearns, Lehmans and (nearly) Merrill Lynch.

So where am I going with this? The regulators need to get a better, and earlier, hold on systemic risk in future, no matter what gives rise to it. This is not easy to do. Theoretically it can be done by external observation of economic indicators. It might have been possible to deduce that property prices were about to crash and that mortgage-related securities would go with them. But it's always hard to guess when a market has reached its peak, otherwise we'd all be rich. And probability is only one element of risk, the other being consequences or impact. The latter was probably very hard to measure, again because of opacity of the instruments. It all reminds me a bit of the problems at Lloyd's of London in the 1980s with the so-called LMX Spiral: risk accumulated through a chain of reinsurance contracts and no-one knew (until the s*it hit the fan) that it had ended up with a small number of syndicates, who were left holding the parcel when the music stopped.

But is it really true that no-one knows? I emphatically think not. The people who know are those doing the business. You can bet that there were people who knew how potentially toxic those CDOs and what-have-you were. I'm not talking about fraud here, although that did happen also. I mean people doing a relatively honest (by investment banking standards) job, who could see the risk, but had no incentive to do anything about it. In fact they had a big incentive not to - their bonus.

So how does a regulator find out about these risks? S/he needs to tap into what the traders are saying. Once upon a time they just said it in pubs and on street corners. Then, when email came along, some indiscreetly wrote things down, thinking it would remain private. But the regulators could order discovery of it as evidence when something went wrong and it appeared that rules had been broken.

Finally I'm getting to the point. Just as young people often blab about everything they are doing and thinking on social networking sites, then get embarrassed (and maybe risk their employment prospects) when they realise who might be reading it, we can perhaps expect such indiscretion inevitably to occur on social media within the enterprise, when its use becomes widespread. It might come to include traders talking about the latest securitisation wheeze, and how it's gonna be a great little earner for a couple of years until the sh*t hits the fan when x happens. Regulators would be very interested in seeing this material. We may even come to see it as their duty to obtain it. And perhaps to obtain it not just after the horse has bolted, but on an ongoing basis. Not a nice thought, but perhaps inevitable?

'Knowledge management' again

2008-08-28T16:57:00.002+01:00

In a Google group related to content management I saw a post today about KM. Someone had been tasked with setting up a KM system but didn't know how to go about it. This prompted me to comment along the following lines.

It's possible to argue endlessly about what 'knowledge
management' means. I think what most organisations want (or should
want) is an information management system which includes not only
formal-ish documents like reports, but conversations. The latter is
where blogs come in. Old-style KM tried to make people enter
'knowledge' into separate systems - they didn't want to and didn't
have the time. A better approach is to have them write in blogs,
discussion groups and wikis as part of their work, so that the
information is captured and is accessible to all. This is in stark
contrast to information that resides on shared drives and email. You
can give it structure through tagging, enabling the creation of a
folksonomy. This is an ad hoc taxonomy, less controlled (and a bit
more hit-and-miss) but still useful and better than free-text
searching alone. Pop in an RSS feed and people can subscribe to the
subject areas or authors they are interested in. The hard bit is
weaning people off the tools they are used to - email, Word documents
and Powerpoints on shared drives. Old habits die hard.

Do you agree?

'Managing' email inbox

2008-08-10T08:38:00.000+01:00

I used to work on the principle that my email inbox needed to be actively managed. Every message should (ideally at least) be read once then either replied to, filed or deleted. As volumes increased, and I used the Blackberry more and more for email - on which, with my set-up, I can't file - this process became too difficult. Now I set the Blackberry to delete all emails over 15 days old (on handheld and mailbox). The idea is that if the email matters, I'll attend to it. If it doesn't, it dies a natural death.

I no longer feel a burden of fear and guilt from contemplating a massive list of unprocessed messages.

Enterprise 2.0 in a downturn?

2008-07-21T16:47:00.004+01:00

I haven't seen much mention on the Enterpise 2.0 blogs of the R word. Is that because Enterprise 2.0 evangelists are in denial, or are they just such eternal optimists that they shrug such matters off as trivialities?

Anyhow, I've been wondering what, specifically, might be the selling points for an Enterprise 2.0 programme during an economic downturn. Here are my 'top 5' suggestions. I'd like to know what you think - are these right, are there others?

1. In a tough business climate, you need all the tools you can lay your hands on to make yourself more effective. Especially if they are cheap. E2.0 tools are effective and cheap.

2. You'll save cash when you migrate to SaaS from home-grown LANs, data centres, client apps etc. Most E2.0 tools are available as SaaS (and possibly only so).

3. You'll save time and thus money by using email less, and blogs, wikis, RSS etc more. This is because you'll reduce information 'noise' and thus time lost looking for the 'signal'.

4. If it comes to lay-offs, you'll communicate well with your staff about the need for them, and about the process, because you know that everyone in the organisation will know if you don't - and if you do. No more 'disappearances'.

5. You might find that staff come up with creative ways of helping the business ride the trough of the wave.

Enterprise 2.0 tools for projects

2008-06-24T15:18:00.003+01:00

I originally posted this as a comment on one of Andrew McAfee's blog posts, then realised I should be putting it on here, too.

I've been trying to get a project team to use E2.0 tools recently. It's been harder work than I expected. We've been using Google docs to hold project documentation. This includes a spreadsheet that is the project plan. I had to switch to Zoho for the plan, because it became too big to upload to Google Docs. So that made 2 places to look, and 2 applications to learn. I thought both Google Docs and Zoho would be 'no-brainers' to get the hang of, but some people found it difficult. And we've had glitches, both human (eg my forgetting to give the right people access to a document) and technical (a bug in Google preventing editing of access permissions).

However, despite all these issues I think we've begun to see some benefits, and no-one has refused to play ball out of our small team of half a dozen or so. It's also been interesting that, some sensitive customer data apart (which was kept off the system) there has not been too much concern about putting the project data onto third party servers.

Incidentally, the team comprises the customer for a system, the supplier, and myself as an independent project manager. The fact that we're from three different organisations made it beneficial to use SaaS platforms (no access problems), but it also meant I didn't have the power to make the choice of tools and methods a matter of diktat.

Wikis and Blogs: same but different?

2008-06-16T14:06:00.005+01:00

It struck me today that the types of Web 2.0 tool (or at least, publishing rather than finding tool) can be roughly divided into two paradigms. We could call the first the add-a-post paradigm. Into this camp fall blogs, Twitter, discussion forums (or bulletin boards, if you're old school) and, I think, social networks. The second paradigm could be called the overwrite paradigm. It includes not only wikis but Google Docs, Zoho and online mindmapping like Mind42.

It also struck me that the first paradigm seems to be the more intuitive for most people. Or at least, it seems to be easier to get people to adopt it. Much has been written about the problems involved in getting wikis to take off. As Jay Hariani says here, "When we hold presentations with the goal of explaining to users that Word is the past and Clearspace, Confluence, Zoho, or Google Docs is the future, they often smile politely, but have trouble seeing how things might be. Selling them on the E2.0 ethos of knowledge reuse, search not store, and folksonimies takes a lot of convincing." Why this is, isn't quite clear, although I suspect it's a combination several things:
- people like to see 'their post' being responded to rather than changed;
- they might feel diffident about changing someone else's work
- they might feel an overwrite paradigm space is 'owned' by someone else in a way that they don't about an add-a-post space.

If I'm right about all this, it will take longer to see widespread adoption (assuming other things are equal) of the overwrite model in organisations than it will for the add-a-post model. The only exception I can immediately think of would be for a heavily templated or structured overwrite space which meets a clear and specific business process need.

What do you think?

Students don't expect their tutor to see Facebook

2008-06-12T19:49:00.006+01:00

During a drink last night with a friend who is a noted academic at London University, we talked a bit about social networking. I was interested in the extent to which university students were using Web 2.0 facilities in general as part of their studies. My friend did not seem to have deeply integrated these tools into her teaching methods, but she did remark that she had run a quick search of Facebook and found twelve of her students on there. The interesting thing was the reaction of these twelve on being told that she had done so - deep shock. She emphasised to me that her motives were strictly honorable - no dirt-digging was involved. In fact, she had been thinking of using Facebook as an internal forum for her student group, and that was the reason for checking who was on there. Despite this the reaction of the twelve could not have been stronger if she'd just told them they had all flunked their course.

This came as a surprise to me. I'd assumed that young Facebook users simply didn't care who saw what they were posting. Apparently not. If this group is representative of the whole - and, although it's a small sample, I see no real reason why not - it seems more as if they assume anyone over, say 40, either hasn't heard of Facebook or can't do a search.

Projecting this situation into a corporate context, I'm again having to revise an assumption. This was that young joiners, social networking users to a man (or woman), and of the 'let-it-all-hang-out' style to boot, would pressurise companies to change their culture, and that this in turn might accelerate the adoption of Enterprise 2.0. I now wonder if it isn't more likely that social networking will be a leisure-related medium only, as that's the way 20-somethings want it.

What do you think?

Consulting in Enterprise 2.0: all things to all men or shrink-wrapped product?

2008-05-20T11:07:00.003+01:00

What do those of you who consult in Enterprise 2.0 find is the best way to go about your business? It seems to me that at one extreme there's the approach which says, "I am the ultimately flexible consultant. I'll talk to you about some of the high-level ideas behind Enterprise 2.0, I'll listen to your needs, then we'll implement something together - no preconceptions."

At the other extreme is the consultant who is really trying to sell a product - perhaps a piece of software, perhaps a 'TM' methodology, perhaps a training programme, or a combination of these.

I think the first approach is the more genuine service, but the second perhaps appeals to the many of us who like to buy something 'off the peg'.

What do you do?

Moblogging from Seafrance

2008-04-15T15:56:00.003+01:00

I ought to moblog more. I tend to forget I can. When I remember, I'm always surprised at how simple it is, especially with a querty keyboard device like the Blackberry. This one is being written from the Calais-Dover ferry, after a pleasant few days in La Belle France.

Google Docs, Mind42 for projects

2008-03-13T17:02:00.003Z

Google Docs is of course well-known. But maybe like me you were aware of it, tried it a while ago, and then didn't use it for some time. If so, have another look. It's truly brilliant now. You can upload an Excel workbook and retain all the sheets, and most of the functionality. And of course, in addition, you can use it collaboratively, and it keeps a change history. I've been using it on a project for a client recently. My client is an accountant. He described it as 'cool'. How often do you hear an accountant say that about anything? ;-)

I've also been using Mind42 for a little while now. I've got a few pretty hard-baked developers hooked, and the accountant I just mentioned likes it, too. There are a number of mind-mapping programs, such as Mind Manager and Freemind, but as far as I know thay are not SaaS and not collaborative. Mind42 is. It's only real weakness, for me, is the lack of a facility to relate concepts laterally by drawing arrows.

The more I use collaborative tools the more I like them, and the less I like the 'old way': emailing versions around and then losing track of them.

Do you agree?

The New KM - a year ago and still spot-on

2008-02-20T15:14:00.005Z

Ever up-to-the minute, I have just come across this article by David Tebbutt, which encapsulates extremely well my own views on 'KM', and how Web 2.0 tools change that particular game.

I always find David's articles in IWR worth a read.

Google and blogs

2008-02-09T20:51:00.001Z

A friend and neighbour told me today that he'd found my weblog. Wasn't too sure how, but thought it was probably via Google. This reminded me how I had been surprised, when I first began this blog, how quickly Google had indexed it.

So far, so trivial, perhaps. However, it reminded me of what for me is one of the key points about information management and the Web. Search. As Andrew McAfee has pointed out with his SLATES notation, search is one of the central tenets of Enterprise 2.0. And it's an area where the contrast between the World Wide Web and the average corporation or not-for-profit organisation is extreme.

Because the WWW is all web-based (obviously), but the internal organisational environment isn't.

Do you agree that this is a fundamental (and quite puzzling) point?

I finally get Twitter

2008-02-06T15:25:00.000Z

Oh dear, is it really nearly a month since I last posted? I'll have to make a belated New Year's resolution to post more often. Perhaps little and often, the little I hope referring to quantity rather than quality.

On that note, I 'got' Twitter today. I've had ambivalent feelings about Twitter for a while. It seemed to be about, well, (t)wittering on about trivia, yet many raved about it, including Euan Semple who posted about how Twitter made him feel safe.

I've been supporting Brian Paddick's bid for mayor, and signed up to 'follow' him on Twitter. Today I received a text message from Twitter, relaying a Tweet in which he said he was going to Croydon today then appearing on a TV show at 3.00 pm. So now I know what Twitter is for - being alerted to what selected people are doing, if you want to be.

I feel a bit sheepish writing this. I can almost hear "Call yourself a Web 2.0 expert, man?" ringing in my ears. But that's what blogging's meant to be about, isn't it? Letting it all hang out, dirty linen and warts and all.

Don't worry, that's all for now...

Blogs don't have to be for blogging

2008-01-09T13:29:00.000Z

..And wikis don't have to be encyclopedias.

A blog is a website with a predetermined format - posts in date sequence. It doesn't have to be used for writing an online diary or collection of online musings.

A wiki is a website that anyone can edit. Wikipedia is the only wiki that many people have heard of, so these people often think wiki equals encyclopedia.

What might an organisation's collection of written material be like if was all on blogs and wikis?

Doc Strangelove:

2007-12-19T17:32:00.000Z

Or how I learned to stop worrying about documents and love web pages.

Enterprise 2.0 is going mainstream

2007-12-04T14:46:00.000Z

It was a year ago, at the Online Information exhibition, that it first occurred to me that a combination of blogs, wikis, search, social bookmarking and RSS within an organisation could create a new and viable approach to knowledge management - KM 2.0, if you like. I've just been to this year's event, not least to see how much prominence is being given to Web 2.0 and the rest of it. There's a whole conference stream this year devoted to the subject. Knowledgeable folk like Euan Semple and Lee Bryant of Headshift, as well as the legendary Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia were down to speak at that.

Being a cheapskate I didn't pay to attend the conference but instead headed for the free seminars in the exhibition hall. I failed to get into the first two sessions - both on the subject of RSS - because they were full. A lesson there, and a clue: this subject is now very popular. The third session, with Crispin O'Brien, Chairman of KPMG's Technology Group, I did get into, by being much earlier.

Crispin was clearly an enthusiast for Enterprise 2.0, and argued strongly for the benefits. He quoted some impressive statistics from a recent Economist Intelligence Unit survey that indicated very strong support for Enterprise 2.0 concepts among mid-level executives. Refreshingly, for an evangelist, he also saw clearly how high the barriers are, especially in highly-regulated industries. He reminded us that, as a partner, his liability is unlimited, and that he was a little nervous of the idea of employees saying what they like in print, without regard to defamation or intellectual property laws.

Enterprise 2.0 seems to be turning into an oxymoron: it's a sort of 'inevitable impossibility' ;-)

Trovus seminar at IBM

2007-11-30T16:50:00.000Z

I went along to the seminar on Web 2.0 hosted by Trovus at IBM's South Bank offices today. I'm glad I did. Being aimed at companies that have heard the term, know thay need to find out more but are otherwise new to the subject, much of the content was familiar to me. Ed Charvet of Trovus had kindly invited me along to observe and hopefully make some sensible comments afterwards. I was impressed by Caspar Craven's and Jon Mell's presentations. Brendan Tutt of IBM also gave an engaging overview of IBM's Connections suite, and Chris Gabriel of Logicalis gave a great presentation too.

I've tended to focus in this blog on the potential of Web 2.0 tools for knowledge sharing within organisations - "KM 2.0", if you like. Trovus look at the bigger picture, encouraging organisations to examine how they could interact better not only within an organisation but between it and its customers, prospects, suppliers and so on. Their starting point is often the organisation's existing website, and the extent to which this is currently succeeding or failing to help them achieve their aims. I think this is a good starting point, overcoming as it does the usual difficulty in explaining in layman's terms what the potential benefits of Web 2.0 (horrible term, but we can't stop using it now, can we?) actually are.

Trovus also like to raise the issue of demographics. I've talked before on here about the younger generation expecting companies to provide social software tools, but the point was also made that the 'baby boomers' are about to leave in droves - through retirement. They will take their knowledge with them. This made me think that there are two powerful drivers here: you need to have Web 2.0 tools to keep the youngsters ('Generations X & Y') happy (and productive); but you also need to transfer tacit knowledge from the older workers to maintain corporate memory. And, provided that you can get them to use Web 2.0 tools, and you make sure you accumulate a repository, you can do both at the same time.

Finally, I realise I must take instant messenger more seriously. At IBM it's considered more mission critical than email. And how about this statistic: a survey of prospective university entrants found that for 42% of them, IM availability would influence their choice of uni. That really is a wake up call.

Social Networking Sites - Merrill Lynch Survey

2007-11-22T22:24:00.000Z

I've just been sent, and filled in, a survey by Merrill Lynch on social networking. As a reward I got to see the results of the survey so far. Unfortunately I have no idea how the sample was selected. You might like to try it, too. Here is the url.

It reached me (indirectly) via Thomas Power of Ecademy, the business networking site. Presumably, as someone running a subscription model, Thomas was interested in and possibly alarmed by the results for question 31: "How much would you pay to access a social networking site? 75% said they wouldn't pay, the next largest group saying £1-3 per month.

Respondents seem to see social networking as being here for the long term, though: 84% expected still to be using social networking sites in 5 years time and, in the case of 64%, even in 10 years time. If a week is a long time in politics, how long is 10 years on the Web?

Mainstream KM ignores Enterprise 2.0

2007-10-28T16:48:00.000Z

I went to a meeting of information specialists last week, about Knowledge Management. The main speaker runs a course at a London University (note: A London University, not the University of London). She had also persuaded a few ex students, now working for City firms, to talk about their KM experiences at work.

With one exception - the lady from Ernst and Young - they did not seem to be aware of any of the key 'Enterprise 2.0' tools of blogs, wikis, RSS, social bookmarking. Or at least, not aware of their potential application in organisations for knowledge sharing. After the presentation I spoke to a young guy who is signed up on the course in question. He seemed a lot more tuned in to Enterprise 2.0 than his tutor.

I was thoroughly disappointed by the experience. Is it typical of the 'KM World' these days?

The development process

2007-09-26T20:18:00.000+01:00

I was reminded of this one today. I love it. It also illustrates to me that systems or website development is essentially about communication. And of course that's what Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, social networks and so on are all about, too.

Social networking bandwagon is rolling

2007-09-16T10:57:00.000+01:00

I've spent the last few weeks working very intensively to help get a website launched. It's a women's fashion site, and all of us who have been involved are pretty pleased with ourselves at how much we've achieved in such a short time. A few years ago such a site would have been simply an online magazine, perhaps with eCommerce included. From now on, social networking is de rigueur.

I'm not going to go into detail about the project, or even name the site, as the work's ongoing and there might be perceived to be commercial confidentiality issues. (Sorry!) The point I want to raise, I guess, is that I get the impression that just about everyone building a website these days is going to want it to have a social networking component. What does this mean? I think it means that there are soon going to be a heck of a lot of places one can go to on the web to interact with others. I'm not sure how many social networking sites we want or need. Is the latent demand so great that they'll all thrive (at one extreme), or will the whole 'market' consolidate down to 2 or 3 biggies, like Facebook and MySpace?

Any thoughts?

Mixed feelings about social networking sites

2007-07-24T16:17:00.000+01:00

Many, many people seem to be signing up with social networking sites - LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Ning, etc at the moment. I've done so myself. For some reason, though, I can't really get excited about them in the way that some people seem to. All this 'poking' and sending virtual presents just seems, well, childish. Not that I'm above being childish, as some of my posts on my motorcyclists forum of choice will testify. So I'm actually struggling to put my finger on what it is exactly that annoys me about these sites.

Perhaps I shouldn't lump them together. LinkedIn is focused on professional networking and attracts more serious behaviour than Facebook or MySpace. If it irritates me it's only in the way that 360 degree feedback used to at work: the sense that all that praise is of diminished value because everyone can find someone to say something nice about them, especially if the favour is to be returned. No, my target is really Facebook. I'm not criticising the creators of Facebook, I just don't somehow feel inclined to join the big party that they are hosting.

I think it has something to do with my personal history of Web 2.0 behaviour. I've used discussion forums, mainly in connection with my passion for motorcycling, for about seven years. I was very addicted to one in particular for some time. Back in the autumn (fall) of 2006 I realised how blogging had taken off, how wikis were coming to prominence, how tagging was taking off, and how combining these three things and using RSS also could revolutionise knowledge-sharing within organisations. This of course had been spotted earlier by others and dubbed Enterprise 2.0. I started blogging on the subject and discovered a community of people doing the same. I was, and continue to be, very impressed at the quality of the material that was posted on these blogs. I came to feel that what Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 really meant was not only an increase in interaction and 'emergence' on the Internet and inside the forewall but an increase in maturity of use also. Facebook has dashed that hope. By comparison with the profession-related blogs the content is dross. If a good blog is the Web 2.0 eqivalent of the Financial Times, Facebook is The Sun (and MySpace is the Daily Sport).

Or maybe I'm just becoming a member of the crew of the TV programme, "Grumpy Old Men".

What do you think?

McAfee v Davenport

2007-06-26T15:58:00.000+01:00

In Andrew McAfee's recent post he links to a video of his debate with Tom Davenport. If you have half an hour to spare, it's worth a watch, provided you're not hoping for blood on the carpet. Both men are measured and rational in their analysis of what Enterprise 2.0 is and where it might be headed. They agree about a lot: the tools are not individually especially new, but the combination of them probably is; their adoption by corporations may perhaps not prove to be transformational; the outcome is hard to predict; the ROI is tricky to quantify. Even their points of disagreement were more matters of degree than they were a dichotomy: how much potential there is in the concept of emergence; how significant corporate culture is as compared to the tools; how much value there is in the 'wisdom of the crowds'.

So perhaps this was not quite the 'big fight' that some billed it as. On the other hand, the wide areas of apparent agreement conceal what I think is a strong difference in view on a key issue: the nature of corporations and, indeed, human nature. Tom Davenport has a somewhat cynical, or at least sceptical view to Andrew McAfee's slightly utopian one, when it comes to the possibility of hearing the voice of the grass roots in organisations.

So who is right? I don't think there is a simple answer. Personally I do agree with Tom Davenport that the cultural barriers to widespread blogging and wikiing are very high in many organisations. But I also think the potential that resides in combining a number of tools for uncovering know-what and know-how is greater than Tom Davenport says he thinks it is.

What do you think?

Librarians and Web 2.0

2007-06-14T10:51:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I attended a seminar organised by the City Information Group, entitled "Will technology replace the research centre? How will the corporate librarian's role evolve?". There was a small panel comprising Euan Semple, Mike Angle (Alacra) with Mark Chillingworth as chair(Information World Review).

The members of CIG are largely corporate librarians and researchers. Much of their time is spent fulfilling requests for information by accessing proprietary online databases such as LexisNexis. The thrust of the panel's argument was that Web 2.0 is a potential threat to this role, since it is essentially that of an intermediary, and Web 2.0 implies disintermediation.

I expected the audience to be largely up to speed on what Web 2.0 is, but that did not appear to be the case. At least, several of those who spoke up appeared to be deeply ignorant of the subject. And a show of hands implied little hands-on experience, at least, with blogs and wikis, Wikipedia excepted.

The other theme from the audience was authenticity/accuracy of the information to be found in blogs, wikis and social networks. Many of them were very keen to believe that it was unreliable and could therefore be ignored.

I felt a sense of déjà vu. I am not a trained librarian, but I managed a corporate information centre for year back in 1998. At the time the Web (Web 1.0?) was really beginning to gather steam, and I found myself grappling with not dissimilar issues then.

So what in fact has changed, if anything, and is there more need now than 9 years ago for the role of librarians to evolve? I think two things have changed in the last couple of years. The first is that the arrival of mass publishing via blogs, wikis and other social media has made available a great deal of (free) information which can be surprisingly accurate and current. The second is that there are in effect now a lot of amateur librarians out there on the Web - people who are willing to spend time uncovering information for the benefit of others, and linking to it. These two facts taken together imply pressure on the paid-for, authenticated information sources and pressure on the professional searchers.

So what's the answer for library people? Throw in the towel? I don't think so, but in my view a fairly radical change of role is needed. Information specialists need to include the 'informally created' material in their universe of relevant information and they need to understand how best to access it. They also need to act as enablers of the setting-up and fostering of the frameworks that make creation (and retrieval) of such material possible within an organisation.

That's my view. What's yours?

Off to Wiki Wednesday

2007-06-06T16:04:00.000+01:00

Today is Wiki Wednesday in London. Perhaps not a headline event for Londoners at large, but over 50 people have signed up for it - on the wiki of course.

I'm looking forward to it. The last one I attended, back in February, had quite a buzz to it. And of course it's nice to be able to preach to, and be preached to by, the converted.....

How trustworthy is Facebook?

2007-05-31T19:29:00.001+01:00

I sent this email to Facebook a few weeks ago:

"I have just visited Facebook home page for the first time. You invite me to submit my email address and email password. Firstly, I am surprised you are asking me to submit my email password - what is the purpose and justification for this? Secondly, how do you obtain access to the contacts lists of webmail users? Finally, why is none of this (as far as I can see) mentioned in your privacy policy?

I look forward to hearing from you.

Simon Carswell"

I received this reply:

"Hi,

If you are referring to the "friend finder" feature, we created this
tool to help users quickly find friends who are already on Facebook.
This tool temporarily accesses your addressbook after you have entered your email information and displays the friends in your addressbook who have already joined Facebook. You will also have the option of inviting friends who have not joined Facebook yet. None of the information you enter is saved, and this feature is completely optional; you do not have to use this feature to use our site.

Let us know if you have any other questions.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Don
Customer Support Representative
Facebook"

I don't know about you, but I don't like the idea of handing over my email password to anyone. I suppose to be honest I have done it, such as recently when I acquired a Blackberry and needed to enter it to set up my email account on there. But delving into my address book feels different. And if the information is not saved, why is this not mentioned in the privacy policy?

Journalists fear Web 2.0

2007-05-15T17:38:00.000+01:00

Or at least a collection of them felt it worth getting together recently to discuss the impact of the Internet on traditional media. It was organised by my old Oxford college, and indeed the speakers were from there - spanning several generations.

A range of views were expressed about the likely impact of the Web on journalism and broadcasting. Some welcomed the democratisation of publishing that characterises 'Web 2.0', whereas in other cases there was more than a tinge of fear and loathing. The 'pro pros' could see the benefit of whistle-blowers (apparently a blogger exposed corruption among certain journalists during the Enron scandal), the increasing levels of participation and feedback that Web 2.0 entails, and so on. The 'antis' were in some cases, frankly, mere knee-jerk net-haters, trotting out old lines about quality control, paedophiles and so on. In the middle ground were those who saw benefits of the net, but thought that traditional journalism would survive thanks to the 'professionalism' of journalists. This seemed to boil down to informed comment and authentic sourcing.

Where views smacked of protectionist thinking I tended to discount them. Not being a journalist I don't share the fear of obsolescence. I did find myself wondering a bit about quality/authenticity - but not much. Librarians have cited this objection to the 'net for years. I don't really buy it. I find it relatively easy to figure out if what I read on the web is trustworthy or not, and if I'm unsure there are plenty of ways to cross-check. I do agree this takes time, though. A journalist who has done it for me should be worth his cover price. But how many do?

There also seemed to be a widespread ignorance of how high the quality is of many blogs, probably because most members of the audience had not figured out how to use the Web 2.0 tools of tagging, RSS and so on to identify the blogs that they might want to read.

Some of these concerns get raised as objections to Enterprise 2.0 as well. Any thoughts?

'Social Computing' versus Enterprise 2.0

2007-05-03T14:24:00.000+01:00

A couple of recent experiences have prompted me to think about definitions, or, more interestingly, what someone might have in mind when they use one of the many terms for Web 2.0 etc.

The first was my getting involved in a tender for a contract with a public sector archive organisation. Perhaps not the stuff of Web 2.0, you might think. But this organisation is keen to investigate applying 'social computing' to its archives website. In their case their definition of social computing is broad, which is fine, because what they want done is a survey of the field. But if they had simply decided to award a contract to build a 'social computing' facility, the wise contractor would have taken quite a lot of trouble to pin down the definition. Otherwise, how long is a piece or string?

The second was an interesting chat with an information manager in a firm of headhunters. She wasn't hunting my head, just kicking a few ideas around with me. My knee-jerk assumption when talking about Enterprise 2.0 is that it'll be about internal knowledge-sharing via blogs and wikis, loosely structured and 'socialised' via tagging and RSS. She was skeptical about the chances of this taking off in her organisation. People don't have time, incentives don't support sharing, culturally information is something that has to be 'pushed'. On the other hand, there is great interest in social networks of the LinkedIn kind, because a headhunter's business is people and the relationships between them. Nirvana would be to be able to integrate information from external sources and the internal contacts database to give an overview of connections, LinkedIn-style.

I have learnt that when I start talking about "Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 / Social Computing etc etc" I need to make sure we're both on the same wavelength. And probably each organisation will have a subtly different need.

Enterprise 2.0 - the big and broad picture

2007-04-20T21:59:00.000+01:00

This interview with Don Tapscott, well-known guru and seer in the world of technology and business, is interesting for the way it paints the Enterprise 2.0 future as being a major revolution. Don also covers a range of topics, from the importance of the expectations and behaviour of the younger 'net generation' as they enter the workforce - a point referred to in my previous posts - to changing business models. He thinks it's going to be big - massive - which may be true as he's a bit imprecise about timescales. Worth a read.

Which companies are blogging and wiki-ing?

2007-04-04T16:07:00.000+01:00

I'm getting the impression that plenty of large companies pretty much haven't heard of the Enterprise 2.0 concept, and I've been surprised how "off the pace" some information management professionals are on the subject. Good news, perhaps, for those like myself who see these companies as their market.

But if all organisations were at that stage then it would be even more of an uphill battle than it is to turn these ideas into reality. Fortunately there are some early adopters who, as far as I can tell, have had some success with their projects. I'm going to sprinkle a few names around that I've picked up over recent weeks. I don't have first hand knowledge of the success of these projects, but I've no reason to believe that they have been over-egged any more than any project is. Here we go.

The BBC has adopted wikis and blogs at the instigation of Euan Semple. At a function I attended recently Euan mentioned one example that sticks in my mind: joint authoring of a policy document by about 90 authors, in a fraction of the time that similar documents have taken to produce the traditional, sequential way.

Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW) achieved extensive use of a wiki in their (large) IT department, thanks to the efforts of then CIO (now Confused of Calcutta) JP Rangaswami.

Allen and Overy has implemented social software, driven by Ruth Ward and colleagues, and aided by Headshift.

According to Lars Plougmann a major pharmaceutical firm he worked with created an intranet from a wiki, and generated user traffic that was so great as to be embarrassing to at least one guardian of a traditional, 'top-down', centrally-managed intranet in another organisation - especially since the wiki needed no maintenance.

I find it helpful to quote examples like this when trying to convince the sceptics that there might be value in all this. But, of course, that's OK for those organisations, isn't it, but we're different....

'Great minds' thinking alike

2007-03-24T14:42:00.000Z

During a very interesting discussion with Nick Chapman of Thrupeople this week, the topic of young graduate entrants to companies came up. Nick agreed with me that this group is significant when it comes to take-up of Enterprise 2.0. We found ourselves agreeing that the culture of many organisations is in all probability incompatible with the expectations of this group. We kicked around some ideas for addressing the issue with a social networking approach. Nick suggested I might do some research among a sample of graduates to see what those expectations and aspirations might actually be. I might well do so, especially since I missed this ITT.

After the meeting with Nick, having already formed the view that there were a number of minds, great or otherwise, thinking alike on this topic, I picked up the March 2007 issue of Information Age, and read this:

...a generation of IT-savvy graduates - all of whom have whiled away their university years in 'chat rooms' and on social networking sites - now entering the workforce. "This generation has different values from the baby-boomers...tending to be more transparent, willing to share information, used to getting things more immediately, and wanting to interact quickly."

Increasingly, employers have had to become receptive to to the expectations of what Forrester Research has dubbed the 'Millenials' - those born between 1980 and 2000 - making collaboration a key recruitment issue....For many of these people, going into a company which says, 'No, we do it this way', is going to seem really antiquated...

Do you get the impression, as I do, that we have a strong driver for social software take-up here, and possibly for organisational culture change? Could such changes be a prerequisite for attracting the younger generation into the workforce, and a real differentiator between successful and unsuccessful organisations?

My Generation

2007-03-12T10:14:00.000Z

Well, not mine, actually. I'm in my late forties and certainly don't 'hope to die before I get old'. I'm talking about the recent graduates and other young people in their early twenties currently entering the workforce.

Personally I've been using 'social software' in the form of discussion forums (mainly for my hobby of motorcycling) for about six years. I'm old enough and ugly enough to have become a fairly hardened sceptic about the possibility of such apparently trivial activities taking hold in an enterprise. But the younger generation are not. It's reasonable to guess that many of them have presences online, in the form of MySpace sites and so on, and that they may expect similar facilities inside their employer's firewall. I'm not the only person to think this (not surprisingly). Euan Semple, for example, has made the point in his recent, minimalist post on the subject. But one or two recent discussions with people trying to 'do KM' inside organisations bear this out, and it makes me optimistic.

Why? Because, for the younger set, at least, you can sweep aside all the usual issues about how hard it will be to break habits, change the culture, etc. Just build and they will come. These young people also tend to be eager to show how knowledgeable they are, as they thrust their way up the hierarchy. At least that is what I was told by an information manager at one of the Big Four accountancy firms the other week. This, too, is helpful: it's a driver for content.

This all sounds very positive. Just set up the software, tell the twenty-somethings about it, and off you go. But is that the biting of nails I hear in HR and legal departments, as the prospect of MySpace-style material appearing all over the corporate intranet?

What are the catches with Enterprise 2.0?

2007-02-28T15:59:00.000Z

I outlined in the previous post how an Enterprise 2.0 approach to knowledge sharing might work, and acknowledged there could be catches. So what might these catches be?

I can think of a number of disadvantages, but before I list them I think it's important to point out what the baseline is. In many organisations the knowledge-sharing environment is badly dysfunctional at the moment. A large organisation in which almost every written communication is by email has so little ability to exploit the knowledge base that is in its employees' heads that almost any alternative approach that increases the ability to do so is worthwhile. So it's not sensible to be too critical of whatever alternative is suggested.

That said, I think the main weaknesses of the approach I outlined in my previous post are these:

We're introducing more places to look for and/or place information. A lot of people find it hard to keep up with email and the intranet and maybe something else like Sharepoint. They aren't going to thank you for suggesting they should use more software in their day-to-day activities, perhaps
The niceties of what you can say and to whom online are managed in a very fine-grained way on email at the moment - even forwarding tends to be done judiciously by experienced users (and that's most employees). The approach on a blog or wiki would need to be different. The change of habit could be a barrier to use
RSS (and aggregators) and tag clouds might seem intuitive to a geek, but may be less so to the average user. Again, we are talking about a small extra effort being enough to put many people off switching from what they know and (sort of) love now.

If the potential benefits are so great it is important to overcome these barriers. Thoughts welcome!

So why might Enterprise 2.0 be better?

2007-02-19T15:27:00.000Z

Let's assume that in practical terms Enterprise 2.0 means the use by employees of these technologies within an organisation:

blogs (weblogs)
one or more wikis
tagging and the resultant folksonomy
RSS feeds and aggregators
a social bookmarking site like deli.cio.us
quality free-text search of the type you get with an Internet search engine like Google.

Assume also that all of these would use a web platform and be inside the firewall.

Imagine this possible scenario. Everyone has a blog of their own, and they have access to a team wiki and an enterprise-wide wiki. They've had a small amount of training - just familiarisation, really - and know how to use both of these applications. They also know that they can (and it would be really helpful if they did!) add tags to their posts. They have been encouraged to pause before they write an email and think, "Would this be better on the wiki or the blog?" They have also been encouraged to save all bookmarks/favourites - whether internal or external to the organisation - to the social bookmark site.

What might happen over time? If things went well, more and more useful content would accumulate on the blogs and wikis. This information (knowledge, perhaps) would be accessible to many other people, through:

search
RSS feeds
the folksonomy that has been created through the tagging by users of their own posts
browsing the folksonomy for bookmarks of other people on the social bookmarking site

In other words, there would be a number of routes in to information that was previously only in people's heads, or locked away in email silos. The originators would not need to decide who might find that information useful and 'push' it to them. Equally, someone wanting to know about something would not need to work too hard to find it. And there would be no need for anyone to maintain the structure in the form of a taxonomy, for example.

Magic, eh? Surely there must be a catch? Of course, but that's for the next post.

Summary and looking forward

2007-02-08T17:25:00.000Z

I'll quickly summarise my last few posts. I've said this blog is an enquiry into whether relatively recent developments on the Web, known collectively as Web 2.0 or Social Software, can help address knowledge-sharing challenges within organisations that have proved intractable in the past. I've examined various tools that have traditionally been used and explained why I think none of them are really up to the job. And I've particularly homed in on email as being something that has reached the point where it creates as many problems as it solves.

So why do I see Web 2.0 tools as different and better for knowledge sharing than its predecessors? First of all I must emphasise that I do not see them as a cure-all. They don't need completely to replace other tools. And making them available is not the same as getting them to be used. And getting them used is not necessarily the same as creating a knowledge-sharing culture.

Putting those caveats to one side for the moment, these technologies are, I think, sufficiently enabling of collaboration and knowledge-sharing for me to be optimistic that they can be used as a lever to create a knowledge-sharing culture.

Email: a victim of its own success

2007-02-02T16:47:00.000Z

I said I'd lay the boot into email, but actually I'm still rather fond of it. It's rather like an old friend - in my case the relationship goes back two decades - who doesn't really have as much as common with you as he used to, but you still like to spend time with him. But then some friends force us to spend a little more time with them than we really want, don't they? And email is a bit like that.

Long gone are the days when an email system existed but was little-used. Long gone also is the time when it was used my most, or all, employees but selectively. Other methods of communication were used in preference to it where they seemed more suitable. (Or is it my memory that is selective here?) Nowadays email is used for pretty-much every kind of unstructured communication.

Infrastructure departments will complain about the bandwidth and storage used. It's increased exponentially, and not just because of spam. It's because email gets used a LOT, and not just for text but for the transmision of attachments - often addressed to multiple recipients, and of course saved by the sender, too. But bandwidth and storage aren't the most important issues. Far more important are information overload, on the one hand; and information retrieval, on the other. (There's also a pretty hefty records management issue, too, which whilst closely allied to information retrieval, is a little off topic, at least for now.)

In my view, the significant problems of email now are:

because it's used for everything from arranging lunch to setting out an important business proposal, the important things get lost in the overall volume of material
it's hard to find these important things later, because most email software doesn't allow easy categorisation or free text search and most users don't find it easy to get organised using the few facilities that there are
we're all so hooked on it that we can't see the enormous inefficiencies involved in trying to collaborate on documents by emailing them around to each other as attachments
important information is trapped in email 'silos' which cannot be seen by those who weren't copied in.

I don't believe email is no longer useful - far from it - but for many purposes there are better tools. But - as Andrew McAfee says in his post "The 9X email problem",

"Email is virtually everyone's current endowment of collaboration software. Gourville's research suggests that the average person will underweight the prospective benefits of a replacement technology for it by about a factor of three, and overweight by the same factor everything they're being asked to give up by not using email. This is the 9X problem developers of new collaboration technologies will have to overcome. "

So that suggests there'll be considerable inertia or passive resistance involved in trying to get people to use Enterprise 2.0 technologies in preference to email. And email has to be one of the prime targets.

Knowledge-sharing? What's the problem?

2007-01-29T14:16:00.000Z

Why do some (many? most?) organisations think that the tools they use now to enable knowledge-sharing are adequate? They will point to phones, email, perhaps texting, maybe instant messenger, shared drives, and assert that these are all that is required. (The first three, by the way, were mentioned by my 7 year old son when I tried to explain enterprise knowledge sharing to him.) They might also have videoconference facilities, web-based conferencing like Webex . Maybe somewhere someone uses an EDRMS / ECM system like Filenet or Documentum. (ECM of course stands for 'Enterprise Content Management', but does everyone have access to it? Probably not. More likely, a particular department uses it for a single purpose; for example the operations department uses it to scan paper transactional documents.)

So there is no shortage of channels available. But just as the existence of a wide choice of secondary schools in London does not mean that I have a satisfactory solution to my children's educational needs, the wide choice of communication channels available in the average organisation does not necessarily mean that they are able to share knowledge adequately, let alone well.

Let's look more closely at the problems associated with the the channels mentioned above. I'm going to save email for last, so I can devote plenty of space to laying the boot into it.

Phones, texting and IM are great for instant, one-to-one and one-to-several communication. It's not for nothing that the world has been using phones avidly for 100 years and that mobile phone companies are able to charge such premium prices. Their immediacy is a plus, and with phones, at least, there is potential richness to the communication, thanks to the use of intonation and so on. But where is the record? Does anyone store voicemails and use them as a knowledge base? I doubt it. And while clever companies like Autonomy claim to be able to search and manipulate the spoken word, this particular technology is used for (and I suspect will continue to be confined to) specialist purposes.

How about shared drives? Encourage people to use a shared drive instead of H: for team-relevant documents and the problem's solved, isn't it? Well, no, actually, as I suspect most people who have tried this will testify. In all but small organisations the shared drive is still usually an island, separated from other teams by the moats of team- and department-level access control. Not in the department? Sorry, you can't get at the stuff. "Don't worry, I'll email it to you." Damn, I said I'd leave email till last....

I've not finished with shared drives. Ever tried finding what you're looking for on a shared drive? It might contain a hierarchy of folders, but it probably won't have been designed with input from all users. It probably just grew organically. Or maybe the hierarchy was set up by an ex-member of the department some years ago, and no-one can remember the rationale behind the folder names. Then when you click on a folder and look at the contents, you get a baffling list of obscure titles. Want to find out what's inside? You have to click on each document, then close it when you find it's not what you were looking for. All very frustrating and time-consuming. In fact, if you know who the originator was, you'll probably pick up the phone and ask him or her to e - no, I said I'll leave that till last.

How about searching the shared drive using Windows Find? OK, sorry I even said it.

I'm going to lump Sharepoint in with shared drives. Having used Sharepoint regularly for about six months recently I think I know what I'm talking about. Sharepoint solves the 'islands of information' problem associated with shared drives, because, being web-based (yes, please!) it provides an enterprise-wide platform with (if desired) universal access. It also has some other quite decent features that I won't go into here. It's big weakness is that it's still structured like a shared drive, or at least it encourages you to use it that way. So you end up trying to navigate through the same inscrutable folder/document collections as before.

I'm going to skip over VCs and web conferencing, because they suffer from the same problem as phone/text/IM - no really useful repository.

What about EDRMS / ECM systems? Well, they are impressive suites of software, aren't they? They also have an impressive price tag. Furthermore, those that I have seen, insofar as they are used by everyone in the organisation - if they are - tend to be used as an overlay to MS office, shared drives and so on. They provide a management layer, which is OK perhaps, but really they are used to manage the mess that's been created through the use of the wrong tools in the first place. It's a bit like using a complicated computerised steering correction system in a car when you could simply have had the wheels rebalanced and the bearings adjusted instead.

Now, email... actually, I think I'll save that for the next post.

KM Mindmap

2007-01-25T10:23:00.000Z

Here's a mindmap I drew a couple of days ago. It was really to help me get my thoughts together, and probably isn't very clear to anyone but me (and maybe not to me.....). I'll probably use it as an agenda for further posts, which should be more enlightening.

Will Enterprise 2.0 equal successful KM?

2007-01-19T15:06:00.001Z

I remember when 'knowledge management' became a buzzword. I think it was in the late '90s, at a time when the corporate world was using email regularly and was beginning to wake up to intranets. The realisation began to dawn that information locked away in people's heads could perhaps be shared and that this would benefit an organisation if it happened. Some people (myself included) became very keen on this idea, and some even got jobs with titles like Knowledge Manager, of Chief Knowledge Officer.

After a while, it all seemed to go a bit quiet. Somehow, the idea didn't really take off, or if it did, it was in a relatively modest way, in a fairly small subset of organisations. Mostly, these were professional services firms such as legal practices and management consultancies.

What about the rest of the world? I suspect the reasons KM did not take off in them included one or more of the following:

They didn't understand the concept in the first place
They believed they were using all the tools they needed to do the knowlege sharing they wanted to do
The culture didn't allow knowlege sharing to take off
Inertia killed off any intiatives

So what has changed in the last 5-6 years? I'm a great believer in the principle that as far as computer-enabled communication is concerned innovations happen first on the public web and only later (if at all) inside organisations. And what has happened on the web during the last few years in this space includes, firstly, the proliferation of discussion forums, many of them powered by Jelsoft's vBulletin. These have introduced many a hobbyist to the addictive pleasures of online discussions (and/or rants!). Secondly, we have seen the rise of blogging - the number of bloggers doubles every six months, I heard Robert Scoble say recently. Third, there's wikis (maybe a dark horse and not well-know apart from Wikipedia) and fourth, the use of folksonomies. These applications, and any others like them that facilitate the creation of interactive communities, are known, I understand, as Web 2.0. (If you're getting the impression I think Wikipedia is a good source of definitions for all this stuff, you're right.) The application of such technologies to organisations is becoming known as Enterprise 2.0, as I learnt recently from Phil Wainewright, who steered me towards Andrew McAfee.

Should or could these changes have any impact on the process of knowledge sharing within organisations?