Is Business-centric Social Networking a Revolution -- or a Ruse? - Knowledge@Wharton

Is Business-centric Social Networking a Revolution -- or a Ruse? - Knowledge@Wharton

An interesting article to read on the subject, as the jury is out on this one for a lot of companies. I hear a lot of claims for this and wonder if it is just part of the normal technological hype that you see from time to time or does it have a role in business helping people to go across silos.

Do we need this or could something like Instant Messenger which is part of most organisations capabilities as part of their office suite be just as effective as say Yammer.

It could be that it just becomes part of the plumbing to businesses as the Internet has become since it's introduction and that the technology will evolve into standard enterprise software and become standards.

I think for a lot of companies they will try it as an experiment so long as it is done on a reasonable scale and see how it impacts on peoples day to day performance and also how it has helped the business to deliver real value to the end client. (I can remember trying Google Wave as a test and we soon found out it's limitations)

Anyway, please read the article and post any comments you might like to.

Reorganise for resilience - lessons for KM

Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Organization by Ranjay Gulati

In an era of raging commoditisation and eroding profit margins, survival depends on resilience: staying one step ahead of your customers.

Sure, most companies say they're "customer focused," but they don't deliver solutions to customers' thorniest problems.

Why? Because they're stymied by the rigid "silos" they're organized around.

In Reorganize for Resilience, Ranjay Gulati reveals how resilient companies prosper both in good times and bad, driving growth and increasing profitability by immersing themselves in the lives of their customers.

This book shows how resilient organizations cut through internal barriers that impede action, build bridges between warring divisions, and transform former competitors into collaborators.

Based on more than a decade of research in a variety of industries, and filled with examples from companies including Cisco Systems, La Farge, Starbucks, Best Buy, and Jones Lang LaSalle,

Gulati explores the five levers of resilience:

1) Coordination: connect, eradicate, or restructure silos to enable swift responses.

2) Cooperation: foster a culture that aligns all employees around the shared goals of customer solutions.

3) Clout: redistribute power to "bridge builders" and customer champions.

4) Capability: develop employees' skills at tackling changing customer needs.

5) Connection: blend partners' offerings with yours to provide unique customer solutions.
This is a piece of personal knowledge management but has a lot of relevance to knowledge management and the increase of collaborative software to tackle it.
We just need to convince managers and people that there is something in it for them.

Review: Google Wave An Experimental Ride

In view of my post yesterday, I thought that I would copy in this review of Google Wave from Tech web who abstracted it from Information Week - well worth a read in full.

To paraphrase Edwin Starr: Wave -- what is it good for?

The answer: A little of everything.

Almost nothing else Google has created has generated as much interest, and as much confusion, as Wave. Just describing it to others forces you to pick your words carefully -- it's not e-mail, or instant messaging, or a Web chat system, or a message board, or a collaborative-document system, but a hybrid of many features from all of those things.

"Experimental" is the most encompassing word for Wave, in the positive and negative senses of the word. Mitch Wagner believes Wave is one of Google's "concept car" creations -- a showcase for a slew of technologies that will eventually be repackaged in other forms. The most crucial being Wave's native protocol, which in theory can be implemented by anyone who wants to write a client or server for it.

In this article I'm going to walk through Wave as it embodies the aspects of a number of other things we should all be familiar with: e-mail, wikis, blogs, instant messaging, online collaboration apps, and many more. In some cases it substitutes quite ably for the item in question; sometimes, it's short of the mark (and not just because the other guy you want to involve in what you're doing doesn't yet have a Wave account).

E-mail 

If Wave has been described as any one thing, it's as an e-mail killer -- a way to take the inbox/message/threaded-discussion metaphor and push it into an entirely new realm. In many ways, at first glance, Wave does resemble an e-mail client of sorts: there's an inbox, there are folders, and the messages resemble e-mail messages organized into discussion threads.

These design analogies are probably quite deliberate. Most people have trouble working with something that presents absolutely no parallels to what they know and worth with -- and if there's one environment that even most non-technical people are familiar with, it's an e-mail client (be it Outlook or Google's own Gmail). Others have superficially compared Wave to "Microsoft Outlook / Lotus Notes on steroids," since Outlook (especially in conjunction with Microsoft Exchange) sports a great deal more than just mail: contact management, calendaring, note-taking, etc.

Because Wave is an invitation-only protocol -- at least in its current incarnation -- that makes it a good deal more secure than e-mail. Conversations are only possible among trusted peers. What's not present is a sense that Wave can be transitional -- e.g., you can't take your existing e-mail and slurp it up into Wave. Maybe this isn't so bad, since it further underscores the difference between the two, and since Wave itself is not at this time intended to eclipse other, more broadly accepted things.

Perhaps Google's stance with such things is that they will provide just enough API-level functionality to allow other people to mortar over those gaps. Example: a third-party bot allows people to be automatically notified by e-mail when changes are made to a given conversation. A good idea, but it's something that belongs in Wave by default -- especially this early on in Wave's evolution.


Discussion Boards 

Another commonplace metaphor Wave emulates is that of a threaded discussion board or USENET group. Unlike the former, though, all Wave discussions are inherently moderated to some degree: people can only participate in a discussion on your explicit invitation. Unlike the latter, though, simply having a Web browser isn't enough: the other person also needs to have a Wave account.

One thing Wave adds to the discussion-board metaphor that isn't available -- and which adds to many other aspects of using Wave, too -- is the "playback" command. With this, you can see how messages were added, changed, or deleted as if you were pressing the play / fast-forward / rewind buttons on a VCR or DVR. It's an interesting way to see how a given thread has evolved over time, and what directions the conversation may have taken.

Unfortunately, some other things common to message boards are just plain missing. You can't prune and graft message threads, for instance; the only thing remotely close to this is the ability to copy a given message into a whole new wave.

So, again, a lot of what Wave offers is a little too specific to its current incarnation to serve as a substitute for other services. But from what we've seen, the goal isn't so much to substitute for those things as to present analogs to them as ways to allow people to acclimate themselves to the Wave way of doing things.

Wikis / Note-Taking 

Another example of this kind of analogous functionality: the way a wave can be used, sort of, as a wiki. Not in the sense that Wave supports wiki-style formatting, but in the more general sense: as a freeform repository for information that can be updated quickly by all participants.

The biggest downside of using Wave as a wiki is the lack of versioning as we have come to know it in Wiki-land. I mentioned how the "replay" function works with conversations, and it has the same function -- and the same limitations -- when dealing with a conversation that's being used as a generic information store. There's no diff function, as one might find in even the most rudimentary wiki tools. The only way around this right now is to rope in tools from the outside (e.g., a Web site where you can cut and paste to perform a UNIX-like diff on the texts in question), but that defeats the point of using Wave in the first place, where all the tools should be right in front of you.

One thing Wave's formatting does bring to wiki-style information management is an inherent sense of organization to conversations about a given piece of material. Anyone who's attempted to participate in the "Talk" page for a Wikipedia article quickly understands how difficult it can be to follow or keep track of discussions, as the format for such things is an ad-hoc creation that is not really enforced by the wiki software itself. Wave discussions fall into their native format automatically, so both document and discussion are consistent.

Wave also allows multimedia (at least, a subset of common multimedia types) to be inserted directly into conversations. This allows for that much greater a breadth of material to be included, not just plain text or HTML. Note that some document types may be interpreted strangely within the context of a wave: a "classic" Word 97-2003 document, for instance, shows up with the proper icon, but a .DOCX or .ODF document shows up as a .ZIP archive. Experiment before you embed.

Instant Messaging 

Many people had plenty of experience with instant messaging even before things like Google Talk ever appeared, but between that and things like Facebook's chat function the concept of an in-browser instant messenger has become familiar territory. Wave isn't a substitute for other instant messaging apps -- e.g., AIM -- but more like a parallel venue for real-time discussion.

Like instant messaging, wave discussions are logged as they happen, and the other person's typing can register on your own screen in real time. Unlike instant messaging, though, you're not obliged to respond only to the last thing someone posted -- or, rather, you can comment contextually on previous posts without the conversation derailing itself. If you and your friends in the discussion have a habit of jumping around or engaging in several parallel discussions at once, using Wave to hold that kind of talk imposes order that would be next to impossible to find through a typical chat client.

...But What Is It, Really? 

When Wave first premiered, it was widely rumored that it would replace or eclipse any number of other, existing systems and services. E-mail, mainly: Wave has a high degree of built-in security, while e-mail is natively about as secure as sending a postcard written in pencil.

The more people were able to work with it, however, the clearer it became that Wave wasn't intended as a replacement for many things -- and now it's clear that it might not even be intended as an adjunct to them, either. Instead, it's entirely possible that Wave is being used as one of two things.

The first is the "concept car" analogy I mentioned earlier: it's a demonstration of a whole group of different Web 2.0 (and possibly Web 3.0) technologies that could be broken out on their own and put to use in any number of contexts.

The second is a little trickier: Wave is an extended experiment in application interaction -- a way to take many common user interface metaphors (e-mail, discussion groups, IMs, etc.) and re-implement them in new ways. Most of us are so familiar with the concept of e-mail that any thinking about the way it's put together tends to stop right there: there's an inbox, a spam trap, a list of unread messages, etc. Wave's ingenuity is in taking the outward metaphors of many things we take for granted and combining functionality among things that, on first glance, might not seem to play well with each other.

A programmer friend of mine described Wave as "a research project in human-computer interaction." It makes sense: by creating something a great many people will want to try out in an enthusiastic if also provisional way, Google can figure out which parts of the protocol -- both on the backend and in the implementation -- are worth developing, and which parts are best left as add-ons by third parties or discarded entirely. And Google's long made a name for itself as a company that creates things that are experimental by their very nature, with their years-long beta cycles.

Because Wave is so amorphous, many things are missing, and many of those omissions are almost certainly by design. One is a way to migrate to Wave -- for instance, a tool that would let you take your existing e-mail store and convert it into a set of Wave conversations. No such thing exists right now. Not just because no one's written it, but because Wave itself is a moving target, and so migrating to it would be pointless. The protocol could be nothing like what it is now by the time people other than Google start using it. (In theory one could build Wave servers that run in parallel to one's existing e-mail system, create gateways between the two, and then incrementally migrate the functionality of the latter into the former -- but again, why do that when you don't know what you're really migrating to in the first place?)

Another and far bigger issue: Right now, the only version of Wave is Google's Wave. If Wave is meant to be an open protocol that can be implemented by any number of people, either on the client or server side, it'll have to exist in multiple independent implementations before it can be considered any kind of protocol or platform to use in a production sense.

The last word on Wave for now would seem to be that it's aptly named. It's a moving target, and whatever its final incarnation -- if there is one -- it's likely to only resemble what we have now in the most distant way.

For Further Reading 

Is Wave A 'Concept Car' For Google?

Enterprise 2.0: Google Wave, A Solution Seeking A Problem?

Google Buys AppJet To Power Wave

The psychology of Google Wave and a sceptic won over

Innovation: The psychology of Google Wave - tech - 09 October 2009 - New Scientist

I was reading this article and then tweeted an article by Chris Brogan on how he had started to like Google Wave and was using it to help him on managing a project that he is working on with a colleague.

I also think that it would be useful to do a brain storm style exercise when the team are distributed throughout the organisation or for example when bad weather sets in (as I type this it has started to snow again)
 I think that this is probably what I'd want to use it for - however the major problem and I hope that Google sort it out is to allow people to use say their work e-mail addresses to use rather than if you aren't already signed up to a Google account.

It will be interesting to see if this forms part of the Google Apps Premier edition where as I see it you pay $50 a year or £33 in the UK. A colleague was telling me that her husbands company (Jaguar Land Rover and is advertised as a user on Googles site) has already signed up - a few teething difficulties but generally ok. Google Wave might be a useful add on as part of the collaborative element of the site especially for small businesses.

However what about the 600 pound gorilla companies with all their legacy systems - will they for example start to put pressure on Microsoft to develop something similar for Sharepoint 20XX. Or will frustrated people use skunk fund monies to sign up a few users because their IT department can't deliver. £33 isn't a lot.

I looked back through some of my old reader feeds and came upon the article in the New Scientist - not a publication given to hyperbole as I wondered how this might change the way we communicate if it was in wave format as I find that e-mail tends to be more formal an electronic version of memos that I used to send to my boss. My wife tends to say that some of my messages tend to be stream of consciousness which lends itself more to a Wave style conversation.

Two of the features of Wave that are likely to alter how people communicate are related to time: it allows users to see others typing live, even if they later delete that text; and a "replay" function plays back the complex tangle of interactions that produced a wave.

Past research has shown that the real-time, synchronous, nature of instant messaging (IM) encourages an informal tone, says Susan Herring, who researches the convergence of computer communication platforms at Indiana University in Bloomington. "It invokes face-to-face communication and encourages people to use conversational strategies," she explains.

Seeing live typing may accentuate that effect, but Wave can also be asynchronous, like email. "We won't see the difference between the two types of communication disappear," says Herring. "More elaborate messages are still possible, but when the other person is online you will be drawn to a more informal style." The pace and style of communicating with Wave will be more varied than with email.

The replay button I think can be useful as it gives you a way of seeing what the other correspondee was thinking about a little earlier and gives more of a sense of the conversation.

The problem that this article doesn't address is the culture of the organisation and whether it encourages more free wheeling conversation and whether in working in a project group you would address say the project leader in a more relaxed format.  I consider that people will tend to use the more relaxed style amongst their peers. I've found by experience and across cultures that people express more individual opinions and brainstorm more openly when a senior member of the team isn't present. I'd also find this useful if I was in a small informal community of practice and wanted a quick tool to work on a dialogue on an issue if I didn't have any internal forums that could be quickly set up.

If you have a number of you in the organisation and you have access to Google Wave why not try it on a small and relatively unimportant project either to project management or to brainstorm an issue and see how you find it.

My tweetcloud

I use twitter from time to time and a mac colleague pointed out this useful little idea, so that I could see what words were being used. It acts like a tag cloud on delicious. It would be useful in a work setting if you could aggregate a couple of feeds and see what people were talking about in the enterprise. My blogs will be a little light this week as I'm preparing an overseas conference in Hong Kong and it's getting down to the last few days - so it tends to be all hands to the pump with last minute adjustments.

The future challenge to knowledge management

I've been catching up with some reading this weekend. The front cover of the Economist is titled "The Great American slowdown' and that they consider that the American economy has slipped into recession. and that the American consumer is in no fit state to start picking up the baton and start spending, in fact they are starting to re trench. I don't think that the recession will be deep but in America and for the world it might be long. However, I think that the concept of economic decoupling might mean that the recession is likely to be uneven in its impact especially in India and China.

I was then reading an article in Legal Week covering knowledge management - side by side with an interesting article by Bruce MacEwen over at Adam Smith who comments on the economics of law firms.

This has started to posit a thought in my mind regarding knowledge management in organisations as a whole. The thought is this - is a recession in the world economy going to help or hinder knowledge management in organisations.

One of the areas that I have studied is the lack of time that people have to share knowledge within their organisations - now you would argue that as a recession bites that a wise management would work with people and encourage them to replenish the organisations knowledge banks to make up for the reduction of work volumes and also start to develop both client and internal knowledge networks.

However if you have an economic model of business that charges according to time spent on a matter, and rigidly keep to it, then if those people don't hit the targets and you decide to lose them, then you take a double hit a loss of potential fee earning when the economy turns up as well as a loss of knowledge. 

I'd be taking the hit in term of fee income but retaining people for the turn up and for those areas which aren't so busy ensure that they are updating their knowledge banks, more training, increased mentoring and those all important client and social networks so that they have got the reserves to draw upon to become better problem solvers both internally and externally.

Of course if you start to make people redundant , then you send a message that you keep working as hard as you did and that sharing knowledge still isn't on the managements agenda be it good times or bad times. This leeches into the organisations culture and then future knowledge sharing becomes more difficult because of the Hawthorne effect described by Roethlisberger and Mayo.

In a recession, because of the fear of redundancy, most people traditionally will decide to hoard knowledge, thinking that this is the way to stay safe by concentrating on their own work silo rather than helping colleagues by sharing knowledge. Will managers reward those who share knowledge or those who hoard - the decision is up to senior management to decide which side they choose to reward.  People surely should not be measured in how many hours that they work in a week, but in how the solve a clients problems and work with their fellow colleagues both as people but also by sharing knowledge for the betterment of all.

At the end of the day people learn that sharing knowledge isn't a core concern of the organisation and because of this learn not to share knowledge within their organisation and that being homo economicus - the return on investment does not match the original investment. 

However people are not wholly economic animals and even Adam Smith recognised this when he said 'that an individual stands at all times in need of the co-operation and assistance of great multitudes'  He also states in Moral sentiments with a quote on which our well being in the future might depend " How selfish so ever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others and render their happiness to him, though he derives nothing from it." 

I talk about reciprocal altruism, and believe that people do share knowledge even though they might gain nothing from it now - they share it because of care for a fellow human being and for me the ability to look into a mirror and see the person my parents wished me to be and that ones active principles should be that of generosity.

 Though I recognise that the temptation in troubled times must be immense not to share knowledge with a colleague who you suddenly see as a competitor and that you may have to fight figuratively speaking to save your job, your standard of living of you and possibly your family. 

Does knowledge sharing go even more backward in your thoughts at this time or do you have enlightened management that supports knowledge management in tough times recognising it as an investment in the future of the organisation or do they see it as an easy target for budget cuts a nice to have rather than a core necessity. It is a long term change for senior management in any professional services environment and I don't think that any one management theorist has all the answers - but it is a challenge that we need to address to keep our organisations going in the future.

The business value of Twitter

On occasions I like to go over to CIO to see what Chief Information officers are talking about. Well following my recent posting on Twitter I have been interested in whether organisations will find a use for Twitter - any way here is an article by Abbie Lundberg that could act as a starting point for discussion. I have also seen comments from other bloggers on this point so - obviously it is a technology that may come into the work place and have a role though at present I want to consider it further.

I use Twitter and might try to find fellow like minds to try it out as an experiment to see where it leads. for example I saw it being used very effectively to monitor the progress of the Olympic torch through San Francisco this week and can imagine it being used especially useful with selected groups of people in a global setting.

Knowledge Management on the decline??

There has been an interesting article from the Harvard Law school that I saved last year and from time to time I re-read old articles to see if they are still relevant and it is. Looking at this article a year later the debate has moved on, though companies still believe that giant databases of information will solve their problems. Knowledge management to my mind is still predicated on people processes and technology as well as organisational culture and norms (back to Hawthorne). But a bit like the bible the most important of these are people and giving them the ability to connect and share information be it over a coffee, doing an after action review, sharing a story about how to deal with a client. It is allowing people to meet and make that primitive connection that encourages you to share that tacit knowledge. However if you are in a large organisation you can't always meet everyone and so the rise of social web 2.0 technology that I ramble about on supports the social sharing of information.

Here is the article from March 2007.

Knowledge Management on the Decline?: The law of diminishing returns is affecting those firms that invested heavily in giant IT databases - because a lot of that information is becoming available on line and it’s quality is steadily improving. It does beg a question as to say in 5 years time will in house precedents (or at least the vast majority of them) be as quaint as a buggy and whip.

Therefore firms will need to look at the way that people share knowledge if they wish to maintain a competitve advantage over their rivals.

Competitive advantage comes from possessing some attribute that is valuable, rare and not easily substituted - the tacit or people knowledge in a firm is that advantage not as previously perceived what is held in a database.

Another article highlights the rise of Generation Y lawyers who want to have their own internal blogs as a way of advertising their expertise to other people in the firm, so that they can undertake work on interesting projects.

Firms have noted a significant rise in the number of requests for blogs especially and even Microsoft has noticed - putting a blogging facility into Sharepoint 2007.

Also they want to have a say in developing more flexible taxonomies than the ones that they feel are foisted on them by IT departments that aren’t lawyers and don’t always bear reality to what and how they work.

Always remember, the technology is there to help people with their day to day work and that without the people getting involved - you end up with an expensive white elephant.

Facebook for the Enterprise

One of the things that I've been interestingly watching for is a company that can deliver a Face book style system behind the enterprise firewall. 

Well I was reading Macworld Uk on the net this evening - click on the title of the is post for the link to the article.

The article highlights work undertaken by a company called Work Light in the US in delivering this for a price of 10 Euros per user per month. 

WorkLight said that the application would allow employees to use Facebook to find colleagues by name, location, department, project and area of expertise, while allowing them to collaborate securely with peers using familiar Facebook capabilities. According to the company, WorkBook would also allow users see general and personalised company news direct from a Facebook news feed, and lets users create groups around shared interest areas and work-related projects.

More importantly, WorkBook provides compliance with existing security policies - enterprise security integration authenticates WorkBook users via corporate authentication facilities, enforces access control policies and supports Single Sign-On (SSO).

From my experience a number of firms intranet sites offer a lot of these so it will be interesting to see what the USP apart from a Facebook style interface it can offer an organisation. If it allows people to create these very easily with one click and also get involved in a talent market like Linkedin for the Enterprise, then this could be very interesting. Something for me to browse over and have a look at to see whether there is anything of interest to take this issue forward. 

I do think that intranets do need to change to match the flexibility of some Web 2.0 applications otherwise their end users will find other applications that help them do their work easier and with minimum set up time.  My consideration is that widgets iGoogle and NetVibes will all leach into the organisation.  

When I first started looking at the Internet in 1997 employers saw it as a danger - but in the end they saw the benefits - at the end of the day, this revolution will occur and the question is do you start to ride the wave now or wait until it overwhelms you. 

Yes there will be internet goofing - but there will also be the opportunities to develop communities of interest that might coalesce people about a range of interests and bring them into the spheres of people they might never have talked to across the organisation be it UK based or global.

The War for Talent - an update (long post)

In 1997 McKinseys undertook a study and released the findings called ‘The War for Talent’ Well, ten years later they have revisited the subject and I thought that it might be useful to summarise some of the findings. As in 1997 most of them are ‘unprepared for the challenge of finding, motivating and retaining capable workers as they were a decade ago.’

The problem hasn’t gone away, in fact it has got worse because of demographics and a question mark of the talent in some of the BRIC countries and other emerging markets. In addition globalisation and the rise of the knowledge worker have forced this issue up the managerial agenda.

A recent survey by McKinseys highlighted that for 50% of global business leaders this was likely to be the single most managerial preoccupation for the remainder of this decade.

Although some progress has been made, the article highlights that for too many organisations, ‘talent management is dismissed ‘as a short term tactical problem rather than an integral part of a long term business strategy’

One of the main reasons is that managers aren’t ‘rewarded’ for their efforts in developing this side of their business (just like knowledge management also) In a number of respects, as I have highlighted earlier, it is that sometimes talent management is seen as cultivating the ‘A’ players and not as DeLong et al in a HBR article in 2003 recommended, also looking to set up your B players.

(Interestingly De Long has a section in this months HBR on Leadership and Strategy covering how mentoring employees can also deliver success in developing talent - intriguingly he highlights that the same amount of time given to a B player as an A player goes just as far.) Once I have read the article, then I shall comment on it in more detail.

Top talent in a firm is not restricted to just you’re A players – you need to manage the vital many who can be alienated by an exclusive focus on high flyers. As McKinsey highlights it picks up on how the knowledge management use of internal networks can improve the effectiveness of top talent by being part of a vibrant internal network covering a range of skills and issues. As we have known since Hawthorne in the 1930’s, performance can suffer when social networks either constrict or are absent.

Interestingly HR professionals at multinational companies highlight that candidates for engineering and general management positions exhibit wide variations in suitability. Poor language skills esp in English, and doubts about the validity of educational qualifications were amongst two of the reasons most widely cited. Another concern is the lack of executives willing and able to work abroad but also talented local people with an international mind set but who can understand local ways and local consumers.

So what are the top 7 obstacles to good talent management by % of respondents?

• Senior Managers don’t spend enough high quality of time on talent management 59%
  
  
• Organisation is siloed and does not encourage constructive collaboration sharing of resources 48%
  
  
• Line Managers are not sufficiently committed to development of people’s capabilities and careers. 45%

• Line Managers are unwilling to differentiate their people as top, average and underperformers. 40%
  
  
• CEO’s, senior leaders are not sufficiently involved in shaping talent management strategy. 39%
  
  
• Senior Leaders do not align talent management strategy with business strategy. 37%

• Line Managers do not address underperformance effectively even when chronic 37%

However I think that McKinsey’s biggest criticism is levelled at executives, the declining impact of HR departments leading to talented managers wanting to avoid working in this area of an enterprise; thus restricting the business knowledge in the HR team and that some HR managers are seen as administrators rather than aids in contemplating and producing proposals on this issue.

The biggest gap of 33% points between HR professional and line managers is ‘HR lacks capabilities to develop talent strategies aligned with business objectives. However the more interesting one to my mind is the 28% gap where HR is not held accountable for the success or failure of talent management initiatives.

Executives as mentioned earlier tend to have a short term view and ‘treat talent as a knee jerk manner hiring additional people ‘ say when a new product takes off.

Also from an accountancy view point investment in talent tends to be an expense rather than being capitalised – and therefore when say there is a downturn in the economy companies cut discretionary expenditure on training their people. As the article cites this can lead to a vicious spiral ‘a lack of talent blocks corporate growth, creating additional performance pressures that divert the attention and thinking of executives towards the short term’

So what does the article suggest as a remedy?

• Develop a number of value propositions – currently a lot of companies do utilise a VP however it tends to be one only. Basically the writers recommend that as in marketing so the VP for different segments of the work force is different. As I have pointed out in earlier posts, the lifestyle choices of Gen Y is different from those of Generation X as well as different cultures and the article concludes that a one size fits all proposition won't work especially in global companies.
  

• It also suggests bolstering HR and move it away from being an administrative backwater just developing and implementing standard processes i.e. recruitment, training and compensation. Some heads of HR are perceived as being distant from the shop floor and not knowing where the talent is.

I’m not sure that this is the best approach as I think that this is likely to be an abdication for senior management of one of their core roles. Larry Bossidy who worked at GE – feels that one of the core responsibilities of any manager is to develop the talent around them.

This needs to be a deep conviction amongst managers to avoid the lure of short term pressures and maybe look to spend 20 to 30% of their time developing the capabilities of their team and developing the leaders of the future. HR can help in developing this but at the end of the day managers need to commit to the future of their companies by developing the future.

However they could be supported by an HR team who were held accountable for helping devise and implement the success of talent management initiatives. Perhaps though companies need to consider whether as they do in Japan that a stint in the HR team should be part of a manager’s rotation so that both parties benefit from the input.

It’s a long post and one of my first of the New Year but I do believe that talent and knowledge management are two of the key managerial issues that will help organisations primarily survive but also as an engine of growth for their businesses.

Microsoft & Facebook - some thoughts

This obviously has been one of the talks of the week - in terms of Microsoft buying a very small stake in Facebook (1.6%).

I think that in the next iteration of Sharepoint for enterprises, I won't be too surprised to see something I started advocating 2 years ago - ie a personal web site within an enterprise and for people within enterprises to set up their own communities of practice covering an area of interest be it work or socially related.

I read a quote in Doug Cornelius's blog from Stephen Collins who said

Through use of social media tools, people who work around the corner or across the world from each other are able to overcome the challenges around meeting and learning about someone (colleague, friend, someone who shares an interest, whatever) and jump straight in and do great work, share knowledge, have engaging conversations and build relationships to a deeper level more quickly."

I do have ideas how this could be used throughout the employees life from induction, to appraisals to when they depart the firm - as I feel that tracking alumni of a firm is important in terms of retaining their knowledge

It will be interesting to see though whether at some stage Googles new social software site will link in with it's Google Apps to give people a way to do the same without the clammy embrace of Microsoft all over it.

I was reading a report yesterday that people outside of the teenage/20's range that started to use social networking are now starting to use MySpace and Facebook - the so called "Saga Book" for those in their 60's and beyond. One of the problems that I have discovered with new technology is people's fear of using it either dismissing it as a fad or saying that it has no work relevance. I didn't grow up in the computer age but I discovered by setting up small limited experiments in a non fail setting helped people who were wary come to terms with the new technology at a speed that they feel comfortable with.

If you are working in a large global concern then social media can help in breaking down barriers in that first meeting because they have put some personal information about them selves - ie they like Apple Computers or share a sports interest that you can build on and start to understand their thought processes.

Harvard Business Review - November Edition

Just received my normal monthly subscription and have noticed that Dave Snowdon from the Cognitive Edge Blog has had a major article published that highlights the Cynefin Decision making framework.

I have read the summary and think that this is a must read as and when the hard copy magazine arrives especially as most managers today are finally realising the fuzziness of decision making.

However there is for me a more interesting article by Gratton and Erickson on the eight ways to build collaborative teams which I will also be studying and will provide a summary of in due course as it not only impinges on the knowledge sharing environment but also the innovative company. - so watch this space for some more details.

Anyway more later.....

What a Community of Practice (COP) might look like

I was thinking about the structure of what a COP might look like as mentioned in my earlier post of last night and was thinking of the old doughnut organisation as thought of by Charles Handy in the 1990's. I noticed today via Rob Patterson an image on the components of a clandestine group via David Kilcullen who is advising the US forces in Iraq. This is of course what a number of informal networks have had to look like in the past - just think of the skunkworks projects in the past.

Obviously this relates to a terrorist cell but could equally apply though of course not so hard core to the outlines of the informal networks that I posted earlier. I would take the cadre element out and probably restrict it to 4 rings.

The power of informal networks

I note that McKinsey have over the weekend released access to a piece of work by Lowell Bryan et al regarding the harnessing the power of informal employee networks.

All knowledge managers are aware of the existence of these networks in an organisation which for a variety of reasons such as self interest or just interest in a topic leads people to share ideas and to collaborate which as I have discussed before can not only help knowledge sharing but also innovation in a business.

One of the reasons for this as the article states is that it extends collaboration beyond the departmental silo walls as peoples interests are not just restricted to their departmental ones.

There is a lot of supporting literature on this point and I when carrying out a knowledge audit was looking to identify these employee networks and there has also been good work by Verna Allee in this area as well as the classic article by Etienne Wenger.

The article does recognise the role of the boundary spanner who has power in the group because of connections and not their formal position in the official hierarchy. The boundary spanner is a well known concept in KM because of their connections and abiility to cross silos and to put people in touch with other parties not always covered by the formal hierarchy.

See the picture below



The article goes on to say that these groups tend to be serendipitous in nature and that they can't be managed. I would agree that they can't be managed in terms of typical command and control, but they can be encouraged with light touch management and an interest.

Though one of my recommendations sadly not taken up by one organisation, was to utilise slightly more formal networks which could harness the advantages of the informal network. These could cover a variety of areas such as improving technical knowledge, but also how to improve client service or improve knowledge in a particular sector or finally looking forward to examine trends that might affect the business in the future.

It was to have as the article suggests a leader - but I would say that the leader needs to be appointed by the team and not relying on formal authority but maybe on expertise or get-along ability. I had also devised ways that provided training for people in how to run one of these groups but not too overly bureaucratise it.

I would like to let it loose on a variety of subjects and give it a blog or a wiki that it could use to capture its thoughts and it's history. It also gets round the problem of loads of e-mails that clog up a system and are too unstructured to capture the groups thoughts and knowledge.

The approach to use a wiki, would trigger off a support system and allow management to lightly monitor the setting up of these groups. More support would be used if say for example funds were needed and also some agreement as to objectives for the group and it's leader.

I think that the article is interesting though it needs to recognise that a lightness of touch is needed with these groups rather than a heavy hand for using these within a traditional organisation. Good informal networks as on something like Facebook have a centripetal force that attracts participants to it - and poor ones with little or no interactions tend to wither on the vine. I'd be happy to talk to people about my experiences in this area and some of my proposals for improving these communities in their business.

Slight delay but looking to the Star Wars

Been a bit busy with some family events over the last few days which required my assistance throughout the UK. So haven't posted but have been able to view some blogs and some You Tube. A hat tip to Matthew Homman for posting this You Tube video on his blog

Millennium Falcon Lego

I thought like he did that it was a really clever idea to use a team to construct something over a period of a few hours.

In fact Lego do do something like this and in fact hire people out to encourage teams to use Lego in their organisations. I've blogged on this on the 18th July 2007 if you want to read further about this.

Anyway I will be back to finish off my earlier comments on the sins of knowledge management that I posted on Friday.

Enjoy.

About to start a project - do you use prospective hindsight

One of the ideas, that I worked on was a variant of that well known practice within knowledge management of carrying out an after action review to gather the lessons and knowledge from every major project. The area that I looked at was going to be a before action review. The aim was two fold - one was to gather some of the participants  thoughts on the project and to tap in to their tacit knowledge. The other was to stop projects failing which they tend to do at regular intervals. I wanted people to bring their experiences to the table and to contribute any reservations or benefits before the team set off down the road so to speak.

There is an interesting article within the Harvard Business Review for September 2007 which highlights work done in the 1980's by Mitchell, Russo et al which discovered that 'prospective hindsight - imagining an event that has already happened increases the reasons for future outcomes by up to 30%. 

Gary Klein has utilised this research to suggest a pre-mortem approach to projects, which is used to identify risks - and asks team members to imagine that the project has failed spectacularly.  

Project members then write down independently every reason that they can think for the failure. Then team members are asked to read one item from their list (bit surprising this one as people depending on the culture of the firm will probably read out the one that is the least politically sensitive). 

It was interesting to read how this had been used to tap into a participants tacit knowledge and the groups social network to solve a potential project stopping issue.

It is interesting that Klein concludes as I did in my proposal - in that project team members then feel valued for their intelligence, experience and that other team members can learn valuable lessons from them. 

Also by examining problems at the start it also acclimatises people to look for early signs of trouble in the project and hopefully avoid the need for a painful after action review where people are too busy avoiding blame that useful knowledge doesn't get discovered and used for the benefit of the organisation.

A light day

I've been chasing a few things up today but did some light reading over the weekend about projects and harnessing the wisdom of expert crowds as well as some old McKinsey articles about 'the war for talent'.

A couple of quotes stuck out from some of the articles and I thought that I'd like to share them with people just for a thought stirrer.

From Mary Cullinane at Microsoft's Partners in Learning.

"Companies are getting worried that they're not going to be able to find enough good employees."

From Scott Allen and David Teten in their book "The Virtual Handshake"

"Your success is driven in large part by your ability to leverage the community you build around you."

And finally - courtesy of  David Gurle quoted in Fast Company.

" A communications tool is only as good as the number of people it can reach."

I thought of these quotes to bear in mind when thinking about knowledge sharing in organisations when we consider the role of new collaborative technology and the human element. I'll be posting in a bit more detail on some of my reading during the week.

Knowledge combinations in work

Not wishing to sound like a blues song, but I woke up this morning to listen to two commentators discussing the use of Facebook in the work place. The discussion seemed to veer between two extremes. 

My experience is that most people are sensible in their use of internet facilities and Facebook is another example of internet usage. Whilst I'm sure that some people may 'goof off' using the Internet, it makes me wonder whether an organisation is providing fulfilling work for people if they feel the need to use Facebook for such long periods of time. 

However not one of the commentators considered the case for internal  facebook style networking which I have discussed in previous posts.

Maybe we need to be intelligent enough  as an organisation to say that if people are using Facebook to access, say, a professional network for IT people, or say as a KM professional,  posting to get peoples views on a issue then it is a justifiable use; as ultimately it is of benefit to an employee and to the organisation, as it is helping to speed up the process of work by helping people tap into other peoples knowledge base. 

Perhaps if organisations treated their staff like professional adults rather than micro managing them and what they do, they will get the professional adult behaviour that their organisation needs.

Interestingly today I read a McKinsey report about connecting employees to create value in investment banks.

One of the problems that investment banks have is to leverage talent across the various business units that they have. However clients just as in other professional service firms are looking for services that are integrated and tap a variety of functions. 

The problem tends to be that organisations have departments that have grown so large and have their own targets to achieve, that they have frozen these departments into silos. By asking people to achieve short term targets or billable hour targets they have frozen out the possibility for people to develop true collaborative and professional networks.

Some organisations have tried to do this by combining parts of the organisation but that of course can be disruptive in terms of merging two cultures say a tax department with a corporate department in a law firm.

Another way that it could be done the article posits is the use of informal networks and utilising what I proposed at Wragges,     with the use of deep dive interviews to not only share knowledge but also to investigate the opportunities for possible collaboration and for creating innovative new services.

Another approach that was not considered in the article was the use of an internal Facebook style approach which, can help organisations to understand internal networks Another approach considered was by analysing the internal flows of e-mails to see who is connecting to who internally. 

All this is very good but I also discovered whilst carrying out my knowledge audit that one of the best approaches in identifying the internal networkers and they key people in them and especially the people who were in more than one group was by talking to people on the 'shop floor' and finding out who the key players are in the organisation. 

To assist the co-operation in terms of encouraging this it needs to ensure that it considers ways of developing initiatives to develop people who undertake horizontal promotions as a way of not only understanding the organisation better but also as a means of developing cross fertilisation. 

Another way is for the management team to look at ways that it can concentrate on themes that cross boundaries say no more than 3 - 5 with real economic benefits not only to the organisation but to the people in the group themselves. 

Organisations are, as I was reminded in this mornings discussion, profit making, not charitable, and knowledge sharing and encouraging these groups do need to have some economic benefit to the organisation or it's not worth undertaking it in work time.

These can have the benefit of not only sharing knowledge but also identifying talent throughout the organisation.

Social Network Metrics

One of the major issues I found when talking about social networks was the concept of measuring the effectiveness of them. I had considered the use of a few metrics that I could easily track either anecdotally or by use of on line survey using something like surveymonkey. These could then be related to the business and to the owners of that business without getting in to the realms of jargon.

One of the leading commentators in this field is Valdis Krebs who looks at Social Networks and has a great blog covering this subject. He has done a recent post

He has identified four metrics for people to use and they are as follows:-

Increase in Size of Network -- attracting new people to the mission.

Increase in internal network connectivity -- connecting the right people to get things done

Increase in connections to valuable third parties -- bringing in outside skills and perspectives

Increase in projects formed with all of the above -- creating value-added projects out of the interconnected skills.

I agree with Krebs that these four metrics would be a good leading indicator as to how people within the organisation are getting to grips with social networks either on line or in person.

I do think though that some professional firms will need to be more outward looking in utilising their external connections say from clients or by acting as boundary spanners and introducing people to other networks so to achieve reciprocation in future events.

We also need to consider the role of after action reviews as a means of achieving point 4 - though I think that value added as a phrase may disappear and that it will be replaced by being the way we do business naturally as clients expect us to develop and harness skills within our organisations.

I'd also like to see clients involved as part of the process of meeting these metrics rather than just an internal metric - say if they are involved in say a wiki with us on a project.

Certainly an area for us to consider as we as KM professionals start to understand and utilise the social network as part of our knowledge programmes.