E-mail RIP?

Been away on holiday so not been blogging as much

Found in Fast Company today

Business email will eventually be replaced by more accessible forms of communication like Twitter and company wikis."
- Inspired by Alex Iskold, ReadWriteWeb.

Remember wikis aren't just for use in knowledge management, but they are also useful as a means of collaboration and then when the project is finished can remain a repository of information about that project and give you insights into the contextual knowledge that you need.

I was reading an interesting article last night from McKinsey's which was an interview with Marina Levinson the chief information officer of Net App in California.

I'm always interested in trends in this area as I have worked in organisations where the IT function seemed to take a perverse delight in hindering and not helping the business to develop or even automate certain functions or helping us to analyse information.

It was interesting, that for the major parts of the business that had say a global aspect, that there was a key decision maker in the IT department who was allocated to cover that business.

In these days where more organisations are covering a matrix style organisational structure and project teams that form and dissolve that a key IT person who can deliver IT that helps that business improve itself and understands the type of business and the work that it undertakes would be of benefit. The hope is that they would be a partner and not a stopper.

Based on that the concept of the IT link to a large part of the business would enable that person to answer two key questions in my mind:-

' How can IT help my division to be able to collaborate effectively, to assist innovation and to capture and share knowledge with a high level of systemic reliability'

' What are your business challenges and how can IT aid you in delivering on these challenges.'

The IT person attached to the business should look to see where the capability gaps are - ie does the IT support the divisions strategic delivery plans.

They should also consider whether they should buy in IT - or if the capability exists build the software them selves.

This week, there has been a major conference on Enterprise 2.0 and I find one particular question and response of interest in the light of that conference and also from a KM viewpoint.

Question

In the last decade, companies made major investments in automating structured processes and routine tasks. More recently, investment has supported knowledge workers who base decisions on a combination of structured and unstructured input and dialogue. How do you see this shift?

Answer:

There isn’t much innovation left in the structured world. If you want to innovate, you really need to look at collaboration and the creation of communities. Businesses are not as advanced as consumers in creating these communities, but I think there are a lot of opportunities for very interesting innovation that we haven’t seen yet.

We have some of this activity happening at the grassroots level in our company, such as deploying wikis for the engineering staff. But it will become necessary to develop a Web 2.0 strategy that benefits the entire company. You have to allow some chaos at first to get people to experiment. But at some point, you have to create a framework, some kind of order. And, of course, it’s impossible to quantify the benefits right now—you just need to believe that collaborative technologies help to improve employee productivity.

Amen to that and I also see the job of the IT person to ensure that projects are delivered - one post I read last week about how to kill enterprise 2.0 in the business had this quote.

They will grind down their early adopters until they give up. I'd like to add that this can be done through the bureaucracy within companies where a good idea is lost in some Kafkaesque procedure until either the idea is lost, or takes so long the technology is obsolete.

I've put a link to Euan Semple's article here and it is interesting to read as are the comments. It begs two questions.

• whether the majority of organisations are like this and

• are IT departments themselves agents of change or agents of reaction.
  

I'd also like to agree with a comment from Steve Dale who cross posted this article. I agree with him that in some organisations the phrase one size must fit all is used.

The beauty of Web 2.0 is in it's flexibility and ease to set up and if people within an organisation are frustrated by the lack of internal solutions then they will go and find workable external solutions that are cheap enough to sneak below the budgetary radar.

Knowledge workers require IT that helps them in their job and answers the top two questions. These tools can help and support a firms knowledge management process though it is always the people first and the technology second - you shouldn't start by looking at it through a technological prism.

In the end the IT is a tool that can help you move from being an island of knowledge to an army of people who see knowledge and its use as they key weapon in your businesses future survival thorough collaborative and connective technology and person to person communities.

As regular readers will know - KM in my eyes is the convergence of people, technology and process to help the organisation meet its strategic aims.

Finally

Many thanks to Doug Cornelius and all the others who have placed their thoughts on the E 2.0 conference during the course of the week. I wish I could have been there - despite the problems with the wifi - their posts have been excellent and I will no doubt post about this during the course of next week when I've reflected on it

E-mail Collaboration vs Wiki Collaboration.

As many of my readers know, I am interested in how wikis can help us to collaborate and as a picture can say a thousand words, I thought that I’d share this diagram as used by Chris Rasmussen but picked up on via Jim McGee.

Serendipitously on the day that I picked this up a work colleague came and asked for my help in trying to pick through a wade of e-mails to try and ensure that he had not missed anything in respect of the requirements for a piece of work he was undertaking.

Well about 90 minutes later after reading through a blizzard of papers I had actually bottomed out the request. After about 30 minutes I was looking at this picture and wishing that someone had used a wiki in this instance. There have been a few times ie when working on a conference, that I have also thought about the wiki way.

However although the diagram makes it look easy, I think for a lot of senior managers it would take a leap of thought for them to move to using a wiki wedded as we are to e-mail.

Also a lot of firms don’t have RSS feeds as they are still using IE 6 and would have to put a specific watch on the page which means that you get an e-mail caught up in all the detritus of other e-mails – an interesting one would be if it linked up to something like Twitter in an enterprise setting so that the post would generate a twittergram. alternatively have a discussion with your IT department about using safari for Windows or Firefox - both excellent browsers with inbuilt RSS readers.

I'd also like to think that organisations might have two uses for wikis - one for collaboration and one for knowledge management - one to look at for the future.

The talent powered organisation

This is quite a long post to make up for my recent lack of posting

An interesting little hand out by Accenture about the talent powered organisation which highlighted that the key to winning on talent is multiplication and not addition. I have been interested in this area of talent management hence my reading of posts that cover this subject.

Accenture like everyone else has recognised that talent in the future will become an organisations most important competitive asset.. They consider that companies who truly seek to become talent powered organisations will need to build a capability called talent multiplication.

I always love it when consulting firms consider that they have re-invented the wheel and sell an idea to companies at of course reasonable fees. If managers aren’t already doing this talent management and acting as T shaped managers i.e. driving the business forward and meeting their financial targets as well as acting as coaches of growth and learning, then I’d worry about the state of management development.

It highlights 4 specific capabilities

Defining talent

Defining your talent needs based on a clear understanding of key performance jobs and skills to meet the needs of the organisations future goals.

Leaders that articulate how talent creates value for the organisation

Then look to define these in to key competencies to help with either the development or recruitment of the talent needed.

Discovering talent

I do agree that companies need to be more innovative in the ways that they harness talent pools and may have to look outside their traditional local market to bring people in with the skills they have. Some people will look at the developing number of graduates being pumped out of especially India and China – but there has been some articles highlighting that further training is still required locally to bring them up to the required standard.

What is interesting is that HR departments (more on this later) should look at themselves as part of a value chain and look how they can improve their processes so that recruitment is a more speedy process.

Developing talent

Nothing new here – but the usual comment about the need to developing the capabilities of the employee linked in to the firms business needs. The interesting element is the speeding up of the process. I’ve been reading a paper last night by Chatti and Jarke on the future of e-learning and the failures of current learning management tools delivered via the PC or laptop – mainly because of the focus on content and technology. Though they consider that the use of Web 2.0 technologies might be the answer especially with the rise of social software which crucially as I’ve said for some time links people to people and especially through the use of wikis and blogs and the use of RSS allied to intelligent social search engines that build on user recommendations, reviews and filtering to locate quality resources.

I’d also like to see the option some time in the future to capture phone and video conferences so that these can be posted and utilised a la You Tube – basically little nuggets of information in a rich media format (something I was talking about in 1998 – but now a little closer to reality)

From having developed talent we move to

Deploying talent

No surprise here and it mentions the usual words about engaging the workforce to the organisations goals and it recognises as I have previously identified that these need to buy into peoples own personal & professional aspirations. Managers will have to become increasingly smart in the way that they develop systems that support talent markets. Line Managers and Supervisors will need to work harder in the appraisal process to ensure that agreed actions for improvement are followed through and ensuring that challenges that employees want to undertake are realised. I also consider that there will be a global internal organisational talent market where people identify projects they want to work on and will be rated on the skills experience and people management skills that they have bought to the team and receive ratings from the team leader on the spot rather than at an appraisal and even client comment.

Interestingly enough I was reading a post by Seth Godin on changing the name of Human Resources. A bit like Patrick McGoohan in ‘The Prisoner’ I am a man not a number and increasingly professional people will resent being known as a resource and some fungible commodity – I like to be seen as someone who is a professional and looks to add value to the process I’m not a natural resource like a tree.

He makes a suggestion that ties in with my earlier element of this post - i.e. Change the name of the department to Talent – some people might be cynical about this i.e. when this department went from personnel to HR.

However would the change of name to Talent change anything – possibly if you were the head of talent in your office, you understand that talent is becoming hard to find, difficult to manage and to retain. You may then look at the ways that you run your department and look at ways of reducing bureaucracy and liberating life for the talented knowledge workers that you have. As Godin concludes and I concur ‘Great companies want and need talent, but they have to work for it.’

It's the end user!!

I saw this post by Gaping Void (Image © Hugh McLeod - www.gapingvoid.com 2007.) and thought of this when talking about new technology and introducing into an enterprise.

The software has to help the user and it has to match what they want to help them achieve their day to day work. It is why I like to use wikis because they are easy to use and easy to set up as are blogs. However all the technology in the world is like Ozymandias's legs - useless unless people want to share with their colleagues which is a social and cultural way of life.

It’s about recognising that we now live in a world where we use knowledge and information on a daily basis and that sharing it should be front of mind — that is:

1. sharing ways of doing things
2. sharing best-practice and better practice
3. sharing information and where we found it
4. being collaborative rather than secretive

The main problem I've found is that most intranet's that I've seen are too top down and also aren't very easy to utilise on a day to day basis and from experience, if people want to use the technology, they will find a way to do it to help them achieve the four objectives above and will by pass technology that does not assist them.

Intranets as they are currently formulated don't seem to be the way forward to foster collaborative work especially if it is of a multi office approach.

When I was trialling an extranet back in 1999, it was sold to sceptical partners because it took me 45 minutes to set one up from scratch and it could be deployed in an emergency - quicker than going through an overly formal approach. At the end of the day any system should deliver on the following points to help the earlier 4 points be realised:-

• serve the end user and deliver benefits to the business
  
• be simple to set up.
  
• take no more than 15 minutes to train someone to use the system.
  
• be simple to use.
• the ability to preview.
• a three step process - write, preview and post.

Does your intranet or any other system that you are using in your enterprise deliver this and if not should you be working with your IT team to deliver systems that achieve this aim. Just some thoughts based on some experience.

I collaborate, e-collaborate, we collaborate

Just from my browsing of other web sites - spotted a useful download courtesy of the International Institute for Communication and Development and a hat tip to Lucie Lamoureux for spotting it and making it available.

The download is available by clicking on the title of this post.

It is a collection of articles based on the experiences of non governmental organisations and howe they have used technology to encourage collaboration. They are using tools i have heard of such as delicious but also some tools like Moodle that I haven't.

If you do download, this please remember to give a hat tip to the person who found it first. Just remember that altruism as I have posted before is often reciprocated.

An old article revisited on wikis

I am a big fan of Commoncraft who do excellent small movies to explain technology to dummies like myself. I was browsing through some of my old posts and as I was asked about a wiki - thought that I would repost this useful video of what is a wiki.



I'm a big fan of wikis to use on small scale projects and feel that they can assist with the creation of a high performance workplace by improving communication and also because as I have cited before, these will be part of the IT plumbing. The main issue for me that it isn't that the plumbing is there people have to be shown how to use it but also understand some of the more advanced functionality to get the benefit.

I was talking to an old colleague the other day and he advised me that he was talking to an IT manager who had found by accident that younger employees where using a wiki that was hosted externally to the organisation because the firm had not allowed them to trial an in house wiki. By encouraging people to link people start networking internally and can aid each other as well as tapping in to and learning new knowledge.

Anyway I hope that if you haven't used a wiki, this will encourage you to try. If enough people reply then maybe there is someway we could trial a wiki on a KM subject or anything else that takes your fancy.