Enterprise 2.0-- working in the open

A week doesn't go by where I don't hear from some administrative group who wants to work in a wiki, but wants their work to be private. When this happens I almost always tell them, "Then a wiki isn't for you. If you want to collaborate with a small group where no one else can see it use Google Docs." When I say this they almost always respond, "We dont mind people seeing it, but we don't want them to see it until it is more polished." Of course, that defeats the whole purpose of a wiki where the values that are "baked-in" declare that everyone, no matter what their role, has something of value to contribute. If you mess with the values you break the very conditions which allow the tools to work in the first place. I personally don't believe you can be a little 2.0. I think it's more binary.-- you are or you aren't. Which is why I think most enterprise 2.0 efforts will fail. You have to believe.

I am a huge believer in workstreaming technologies for this exact reason. I've talked to several groups struggling with distributed work teams in the last few weeks, and in every instance the missing ingredients were the workstreaming capabilities, and because it's all blurring, the associated lifestreaming technologies.

Which brings me to this Coding Horror post: Don't Go Dark. I'm thinking there is much that old-school management can apply to their jobs that has been learned from the agile software development world:

Don't go dark. Don't be that guy in the room. Hiding your code until it's "done" may feel safer, but it isn't. Sharing your ongoing code with your coworkers is scary, much less the world -- but it also results in feedback and communication that will improve your code and draw you closer to the project you're working on. And isn't that why we all write code in the first place?

That advice doesn't just apply to writing code it applies to everything that we do. It's why wikis work. It's why I tell people who want to work in the dark in a wiki that they should use something different. If you aren't ready to work differently don't think for a minute that the enabling technologies will work for you.

As they say, transparency is the new black. Step one in moving to agile management is to stop being a scaredy cat and to start working in the open.

Filtering on the way out as an enterprise strategy

So you want some of the peer-production hyper-productivity for your organization? I was thinking about this some this morning and came up with some guidelines:

• Include everyone you possibly can
• Your borders, no matter where you draw them, will be porous -- error on the side of porosity
• To make it work you need lots of people-- so don't put up barriers to entry
• Exclusivity is for country clubs not social networks
  
• Flatness, transparency, and the freedom to create are essential elements
  
• Micro-management will kill the conditions which make these tools work
• Publish/Release each piece of content when it is ready
• The overwhelming majority of people come to content conversations through search. They go directly to the information they are seeking
• Most look at a single piece of content conversation and leave
• There's not a single good reason anyone can site for waiting
  
• Every piece of content conversation stands alone
• The only thing that should tie one piece of content conversation to another are relevant and embedded hyperlinks. Period.
  
• Filter on the way out as an enterprise strategy... (one of David Weinberger's four pillars from Everything is Miscellaneous recast in a slightly different manner.)
• If you must do QC then do it at the last minute -- just in time...
  
• Do not filter on the way in... (See the first bullet)

These are mine.. Can you think of some more?

The looming leadership paradox

At the Metaverse U conference a week or so ago, Byron Reeves of Stanford asked, "Do you know who the guild leaders are in your organization?" He went on to comment that IBM had just completed a survey of its management and found that they had 1000s. I've been thinking of that off-and-on ever since.

The basic idea Byron was expressing is that the current generation of business leaders are sorely prepared to deal with the modern Enterprise 2.0 world with its flatness, lack of hierarchy, transparency, burstiness, lack of presence, and new metrics for measuring performance. He mentioned that the next generation of business leaders might better be selected from those that are adept at leading online virtual teams in executing complex missions. The very skills being developed by accomplished gamers.

So it was with interest that I read this Paul Hemp piece in Harvard Business: Does Your Leadership Development Strategy Include World of Warcraft?

This echoes a theme in the interview I did with HBS professor Linda Hill that appeared in the January issue, entitled “Where Will We Find Tomorrow’s Leaders.” One of Linda’s key points is that organizations risk overlooking potential leaders because they are “invisible” – that is, lack the high-profile personal characteristics such as compelling communications skills that we associate with leadership. Ironically, these invisible leadership candidates may in fact possess characteristics – for example, modest egos that don’t get in the way of collaborative work – that are ideally suited to tomorrow’s business environment.

And therein lies the paradox. How will the current generation of business leaders, with their gregarious "people skills" find, value, and promote this next generation of leadership? The current generation of leaders are making personnel decisions, and most haven't a clue about these new tools, and new ways of working. They don't use the tools, don't understand them, and are often frightened by the very organizational culture necessary to make them work.

The next generation of leader doesn't look anything like the current, and I don't see the one truly valuing the other any time soon. We are headed for a serious disconnect. It'll be interesting to watch how this all plays out.

QOTD: David Weinberger on un-managing our information

David Weinberger via Joe McKendrick at FASTForward: Let’s Start ‘Un-Managing’ Our Information:

By using tools that allow that information to be broken out of its assigned categories, you will discover relationships you didn’t know were there. You’re going to spur innovation, you’re going to discover efficiencies and you’re going to enable people across your organization to find other people who share their passions.

Which sounds wonderful to me, but we also need to realize that many people are fat-and-happy hanging out in their comfy silos.

If you want openness, flatness, ideation, collaboration, peer production... all of the great things that these new ways of working are enabling, the very first thing you'll need to do is to free your information. You need to know, however, that your efforts will be fiercely resisted.

The walls of the silos are very thick. You'll need to call in the bunker busters to get it done.

They aren't your communities to manage

I've been giving some thought to this idea of building "your" own social networks. My thinking was further confused this morning when I read Jeremiah Owyang's : The Four Tenets of the Community Manager. This is the corporate or organizational approach to community building. He lists these four commonalities in the job descriptions of the "community manager":

• Community advocate
• Brand evangelist
• Communication skills/shapes editorial
• Shapes requirements for future products/services

Keep in mind, I'm thinking out loud a bit, but this approach seems totally clueless and old-school to me. I'm not questioning Jeremiah- he's just reporting what he has observed. I have no doubt that what he describes is accurate. It reads to me like a strategy concocted by people who wouldn't know an affinity group if they saw one. People who have not been the ball themselves.

Here's my take on the responsibilities of the "community manager":

Advocate- An intermediary to be the voice of the community? You're going to create a new job to get-in-the middle between your organization and the community? People think this is a good idea? Shouldn't your goal be disintermediation wherever possible? In late 2007, I'm thinking you should be all about letting people speak for themselves. If it were my organization, I would want as many of our people as possible interfacing with the community and conversing in every conceivable way. I'd want this in every employee's job description. I would not want to make this any one particular person's job.

Brand evangelist- Isn't your best evangelist a satisfied customer? One person paid to evangelize your brand is supposed to counter balance the voice of the entire community? What brought the community together in the first place if they weren't already evangelists? Again, I would not want to make this a person's job. I'd want this in every employee's job description as well.

Message shaper- Are you kidding me? You're going to walk into a social network and try to "shape" the message? Corporate spin? Yeah right. How about open and honest conversation? Real dialog involving anyone and everyone who wants to participate.

Shapes requirements for future products/services - Ideation? This will be someone's job? You're going to create a single point of failure on something so important to your future? Again, how about it being everyone's job. If there is any one area where you need flatness, transparency, and openness it would be here.

So, let's return to the concept of the community manager. Whose "community" is it to manage? The people in your organization may be a part of a community, may have even participated in birthing it, may even be trusted members, but to think they occupy any special super-node is nothing short of delusional. Does making someone responsible for these functions absolve others in your organization from active participation? It's not a community if everyone doesn't feel free to participate as an equal. As soon as you make this someone's job you devalue the contributions of everyone. I'm thinking the whole concept of a "community manager" is a very bad idea.

Clueless: Social networking and enterprise software

Dan Farber & Larry Dignan at ZD-Net have a good read on the race to "drop" social networking ways of working into legacy and legacy thinking sort of applications: Social networking: Quietly being subsumed by your everyday apps

Increasingly, social networking is looking like a feature more than a business. There will be big ramifications to consider as social networking becomes integrated into your everyday applications.

I don't think this strategy stands a ghost of a chance of succeeding. People who think that social networking is about "feature sets" are sorely misguided. It is way more about the culture and values that have been baked-in to these environments. Mess with the culture, and you break the conditions which give these applications their magic.

I've said it before, but I will say it again, what we see happening in the social networking space is more about values than software. If you don't understand the values inherent in these applications you are doomed to failure. It is obvious to me that the people trying to add these "features" to existing software haven't a clue what they are doing. The future is not a hybrid of the old and new-- it's completely different.

Trying to mix social-networking into a hierarchical command-and-control framework is like trying to mix oil and water. Mark my words-- these hybrid attempts are headed toward a colossal failure.

Getting to burst productivity

I've been following with great interest the discussion of burst versus busyness:

There’s a productivity paradox emerging with the rise of Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, and social networking approaches and technologies. That is, the end users that engage in these new ways of working see their productivity occur in “bursts” of activity and innovation, versus a more incremental, plodding progress measured by the time clock.

This is at the heart of the hyper-productivity of Enterprise 2.0 tools. Moving to burst seems more critical to adoption than the tools themselves. Burst embodies a fundamentally different philosophical approach to "work".

How can you tell if you're getting to burst-- look at your logs. When does the work occur in your wiki, when are people chatting, when do your code check-ins occur? When are your organization's blog posts written? (Your organization does have tons of blogs correct?) If you've made it to burst there should be no enterprise-wide pattern. I'm not talking about individual productivity, and when specific individuals do their work. In true burst mode that doesn't matter one darned bit. I'm talking about your whole organization's pattern of work.

If you're truly making the transition to Enterprise 2.0 the bursts of productivity shouldn't be happening in a 9-5 window. If the bulk of your organization's work is occurring primarily within the traditional workday you're old an old economy organization. You can tell how serious your problem is by simply looking at when the real work takes place. Everything your organization does is recorded somewhere-- just look.

Some more burst links worth reading:

• Web Worker Daily: Busyness vs. Burst: Why Corporate Web Workers Look Unproductive
• Fast Forward: ABC News Discovers the ‘Burst’ Economy!
• beyond utility: Busyness Economy v Burst Economy
• James Governor's Monkchips: Ready Your Company For The Burst Economy: Kill PR, mashup IT and marketing. A 7 Step Program

The neats and the scruffies

I just loved this blog post from Jim McGee at the FASTForward Blog: Knowledge management: the newest battle between the neats and the scruffies. A taste:

In most large organizations, knowledge management has been characterized as a technology problem or as a analog to financial management; placing it squarely within the purview of the organization’s neatest neats. This is a recipe for disappointment, if not outright failure.

It might possibly be an open question whether knowledge management can be eventually reduced to something as structured as accounting or library science. But it is a lousy place to start. Most organizations aren’t yet mature or sophisticated enough about knowledge work issues and questions to be obsessing about taxonomies or measurement and reward systems for knowledge work. But those are activities that are neat and specifiable and only superficially relevant. They lead to complex efforts to get to the right answer when we would be better served by simpler efforts to make things better.

Pretty much sums up the dilemma of Web 2.0 adoption in the enterprise. Somewhere along the way our IT shops were taken over by the neats. If enterprise 2.0 is going to make it we're going to have to restore some balance. Fortunately, the 2.0 technologies are organic and bottom-up and can't be easily contained.

QOTD: Jevon MacDonald

From Jevon's reflections about the use of enterprise tools: A lost soul - What will I do without Enterprise 2.0?

You see, if you want to be successful with social computing in your organization — you have to bet on it and not look back.

Guts or no guts? What kind of organization do you want to be? I especially loved his question, "Ask people what they think your organization would be like without Management. Ask them what it would be like if everyone was Management." Good stuff!

Wrapping-up the Enterprise 2.0 conference

I've been following the twits and blog posts from the Enterprise 2.0 conference the last few days with great interest. I thought this article from Yahoo News was informative: Younger Workers Demanding Web 2.0 Tech On The Job

Moore then put up some IDC research numbers showing that 45% of companies have workers blogging, 43% use RSS feeds, and 35% of companies have employees using wikis.

What's interesting about that, according to Susan Feldman, VP of content technologies at IDC, is that the study also showed that IT managers and executives largely didn't know any of this was going on. She told InformationWeek that with Web 2.0 technologies increasingly becoming part of people's social lives, they will demand that it be part of their work lives, as well. And a lot of companies may have this new technology inside their firewalls that they simply don't know about.

It used to be that IT shops were charged with innovation and providing their organizations with a strategic advantage. Somewhere along the way they became the favs of the organizational control-freaks. Thank goodness these new tools are outside the IT shops sphere of influence. The only way to shut these tools down is to firewall the Web. No way that's going to happen. It's just a matter of time until these tools are pervasive.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention firewalling workers from the Web will be the primary use of Google Gears. It'll be used by our IT shops to keep workers from getting to those nasty distractions that are just a click away. So where organizations will never firewall their knowledge workers from the Web, have no doubt that it will be used for evil purposes by far too many. Maybe this should be a separate post?

The Empty Quarter

Andrew McAfee discusses who in organizations is adopting social networking software or as he calls it “Enterprise 2.0” tools, Evangelizing in the Empty Quarter.

The ‘empty quarter‘ of non-adopters is the upper right-hand section of this graph. These are the folk who are relatively unlikely to pick up new tools and run with them.

But so what? It‘s unrealistic to expect 100% adoption of any new technology that‘s not mandatory, so there‘s always going to be an empty quarter (I have it on good authority, for example, that there are still faculty at Harvard who have their emails printed out and brought to them.). Given this, why should a business leader care about Enterprise 2.0‘s empty quarter? After all, it‘s only going to shrink over time as newbies continue to enter the workforce. In addition, some of the people in the empty quarter will probably benefit from the new technologies, even if they don‘t use them. They might read another employees blog and learn something, for example, even if they don‘t blog themselves. So why not just leave the inhabitants of the empty quarter be?

I think Andrew does an excellent job of describing the problem of getting people to adopt new technologies. It is no small challenge, and the “empty quarter” metaphor describes the issue perfectly. But, as a person who has actually been to the Empty Quarter I can tell you that it is like no place anyone in western culture has ever experienced (unless they‘ve actually been there). This is why I struggle a bit with the somewhat naive solutions he suggests.

The great majority of companies today are far from this scenario because their empty quarters are so large. Are there effective ways to evangelize within it and convert people to Enterprise 2.0 tool use? One strategy is to keep working on the tools themselves, making them more obvious and easy to use. This is certainly a good idea, but I don‘t have a lot of confidence that it‘ll bear a lot of fruit in the empty quarter. Old habits die hard, and the 9X problem of email is particularly acute among non-techies.

A more promising strategy, I believe, lies at the intersection of coaching, leading by example, and policy-setting. Of these, policy setting is the least obvious and most risky, what would a pro-blogging policy look like, and what would keep it from backfiring? I‘ve heard a couple clever examples. A Google employee at a conference I attended, for example, said that employees there sent a short (five line) email to a specific address each week, telling what they‘d done. These became part of a searchable archive.

Right, that‘ll work. Nice try Andrew, but you‘re dreaming here. One should never try to fix, trick, or otherwise impose solutions on a space like the empty quarter. You can only work on the peripheries, because once you venture into the desert you are in a completely different world. I suggest a better strategy is one that has been the model for diffusing innovation for the ages. You find those key actors that are comfortable living in both worlds, and focus your efforts there. You can‘t focus your attention on the whole. You must find those innovators that reside in San‘a, but that occasionally like to visit with the good people in Mar‘ib.

When I was in the empty quarter we stopped at a little Bedouin village for several hours to wait for some others who were traveling with us. (That‘s a long story for another day.) As we pulled into the village my driver says, “Stay close to me Dr. Gamble these are very dangerous people.” If you are the person venturing into the empty quarter you must do so with great care. It isn‘t that the non-adopters are indifferent, they can be dangerous. They won‘t ignore you, they will actively work to undermine your efforts. You are messing with their space and changing the organizational balance of power. Never underestimate the ferociousness that the Bedouins will resist your efforts to modernize them.