Victus pro Scientia Opus -- Food for the Knowledge Worker

On-Line Social Stratification: Different = Bad

I recently had the opportunity to hear danah boyd of Microsoft Research speak at a Mass Technology Leadership Council (MTLC) event about social media.  Although the principal themes of the event were supposed to be about ROI on Social Media, Ms boyd's remarks were the highlight of the day for me.  Her topic of study (through her work for Microsoft, Harvard University, Cal-Berkeley, and others) is the intersection of technology and society, mostly in the form of how young people use social media, and her remarks provided useful insights into how tomorrow's information worker regards social media technologies.

Several weeks after the MTLC event, I happened upon a transcript (actually, her crib notes) of Ms boyd's remarks from a later presentation to the Personal Democracy Forum in New York.  It captured and built on some of the themes we heard at the earlier event, and provided some timely updates to social media use cases (#iranelection, Michael Jackson's death).

The single most resonant point in Ms boyd's remarks was one that not only applies to Internet-based social media sites, but also much more broadly:

"One thing to keep in mind about social media: the internet mirrors and magnifies pre-existing dynamics."

She uses this point to underscore social stratification in on-line communities along lines of age (teens don't Tweet), socio-economic status (Facebook vs MySpace), race, sexual preference, etc., but it also applies to smaller communities.  It's critical for us, as those who help information workers effectively implement and use these technologies, to keep this in mind as we look to social media and on-line communities as ways to bring people together within an enterprise.  We heard plenty of "Mom and apple pie" sentiments of this type at the recent Enterprise 2.0 Conference, e.g., "It's about culture, not tools," "It's 90% sociology, 10% technology," etc., but seeing this point borne out in the larger Internet environment and supported by broad, rigorous research really brings it home.

A good rule of thumb in practice seems to be:  if your people won't pick up the phone to call one another to ask for or offer help, a well-engineered implementation of SharePoint, Lotus Notes, SocialText, Jive, etc. although useful for many things, is not the solution to your collaboration problem.

Enterprise 2.0 Keynote #1: Driving Action by Design

At this week's Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, there was a wide variety of content, but one of the more compelling presentations I caught was a Tuesday morning keynote speech by Jascha Franklin-Hodge, CTO of Blue State Digital, entitled "mybarackobama.com: The Secrets of Obama's New Media Juggernaut."

Notwithstanding anyone's political leanings (more on this later), the presentation illustrated many topics of real and immediate interest to anyone doing business in this day and age, especially those of us who use social media and the web to build business and connect with our clients and prospects.

Mr. Franklin-Hodge spelled out six core principles of a successful new media campaign:
1.  Drive Action
2.  Be Authentic
3.  Create Ownership
4.  Be Relevant
5.  Build a Strong, Open Brand
6.  Measure Everything

The first of these, "Drive Action," resonated most strongly with me on a few levels. First, as I look at our firm's website, which we're in the process of re-designing, I see many opportunities for improvement, and few places where a user is directed to "Ask us for more information," or "Get started now."  Clearer calls and lower barriers to action help convert interest to action at the point where a prospective buyer is most likely to buy, and this was a cornerstone of the Obama campaign's web strategy.

Not only is "Drive Action" a mantra for web site design, however, it's worth considering in light of other business communications as well.  I frequently get e-mails that SCREAM for action implicitly, but no explicit action is requested by the author, so time is wasted on communications (i.e., negotiating the follow-up) that accomplish little.  For example:

 Author:  We need to meet to review this deliverable.

 Respondent:  Yes, I agree, let's meet. (READ:  "Back to you, author!")
 
 and so on.

GAH! Several cycles could be cut out of this communications loop by simple addition as follows:

Author:  We need to meet to review this deliverable.  I looked at your calendar, and it looks like  you're  free at 2 pm.  Can we meet then for 15 minutes?  Please let me know, and I'll send an Outlook  meeting request.

As a result of this presentation, I am committing that I will be more cognizant of ASKING for action when I want it.  There's a fine line between this and bossing people around, I suppose, but being clear and concise about what the next steps are, in any business communication, is critical to effective action.  How many meetings do we walk out of without a clear agreement on who is doing what next, by when?  Unacceptably many.

There were similar insights for each of the six core principles, and many great examples of beautiful, functional, effective design, but I must confess that for me they were diluted a bit by the partisan tone to the presentation, as illustrated by the following: 

• From the presentation's tone and content, it would appear that Republicans are immune to social community-building, mired in a 1950s world of press releases and position papers handed out to fedora-wearing, dead-tree media types. 
• Also, as some colleagues later suggested, I would also have been VERY interested to see a timeline showing how the Obama campaign's efforts were re-allocated from beating Hillary Clinton to beating the McCain/Palin Republican ticket (the presentation only focused on the D vs R segment of the presidential campaign).

Crowd-Sourced SharePoint Governance via DebateGraph Visual Wikis

I read with interest a recent post by one of my favorite bloggers, Paul Culmsee that I want to share.  I especially like Paul's blog because:

1. He and I care about some of the same things:  Project Management, Governance, SharePoint, and pop culture (although I prefer Eric B & Rakim to Opeth, and I haven't yet had cause to integrate Tom Cruise into my blog's content, thematically)
2. We're unlikely to compete with each other for business, given the distance from Perth to Boston, MA (11,635 miles).
3. He's generous with his knowledge and his opinions, and has welcomed correspondence and feedback on these topics.
4. He writes in a breezy style, accessible yet insightful.

OK, now that the honorifics are dispensed with, I'll get to the point:  Paul blogged this week on an innovative approach to SharePoint governance:  a product called DebateGraph, which serves as sort of a visual wiki that shows graphically how ideas relate to one another.  An example follows (sorry for the static image -- can't fit the interactive version into this format):

Seven Sigma has created downloadable DebateGraph SharePoint web parts to allow users to visually show the debate of any issue within a SharePoint wrapper, but to me the most interesting application is the one where "n" is the biggest:  Seven Sigma's public, Internet-facing debate about SharePoint governance, shown in the example shown above.

So, if you have strong opinions about SharePoint governance (I know you're out there -- you haven't been shy about expressing your opinions with me), please take a look, vote, and make your voice heard about what works and what doesn't in SharePoint governance.  Join the debate today!

Putting More "ME" in "TEAM"

As someone who works every day with teams, some as long-lasting as a consulting practice team and some formed and dissolved as quickly as it takes to create a presentation, I always find it interesting to read research about what makes teams succeed or fail.

In the May, 2009 issue of Harvard Business Review, senior editor Diane Coutu interviewed (note: subscription or purchase required) Richard Hackman, a Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology at Harvard University and expert on teams.

I found Professor Hackman's insights on team dynamics fascinating, and expect to use them as both a participant and a leader of teams.  Some of the key insights I took away follow:

1.  Dissent is important.  An important role on the team is that of the deviant, defined by Hackman as someone who challenges the status quo, the person willing to incur personal cost to say things that nobody else will, the person who won't hesitate to say, "Why are we doing this at all?"  As the summary in another HBR article (from 2007) states, "The absence of conflict is not harmony, it's apathy."  Having social norms that encourage healthy dissent and lively debate, and an environment where people can feel comfortable hashing out ideas is critical.  Note:  Dissent is different from discord, which is divisive and corrosive.

2.  Don't underestimate the cost of newness.  There is significant research (by NTSB, NASA, and others) about the effects of inexperience in working together on team performance.  Plan for the "forming" stage in the group development lifecycle of forming --> norming --> storming -->  performing.  Leigh Thompson's work, such as her book "Making the Team," is worth reading for more detailed guidance. 

3.  Teams aren't always the answer.  In truly creative endeavors, too many participants may be more of a hindrance than a help.  Authoring this blog post would have taken longer to coordinate, and the key themes and message would have been diluted, if I had to develop them with a team.  Hackman challenges team leaders to find "the balance between individual autonomy [frequently the reason why people get into the consulting business] and collective action." This is one of the core challenges for any team leader in a creative field such as design, software development, etc.

I completed the article with:

• a renewed commitment to better define my teams' mission, boundaries, and members' roles;
• thoughtfulness about which tasks are best-suited to a team, and which to individual contributors;
• a desire to get the assistance of my partners in committing resources to organizational support, structures, and coaching to help all of our teams perform better; and
• a new book to add to my reading list:  Hackman's "Leading Teams."

On-Line Identity Management 2.0: DandyID

Our firm focuses a great deal on collaboration as a way to solve business problems, and we view social media tools as a great addition/complement to the Microsoft Information Worker technologies we use and advise our clients about every day.  Accordingly, several of us have accounts with such services as:

• Typepad (blogging)
• Flickr (photo sharing)
• Delicious (social bookmarking)
• Twitter (microblogging).

One of the most difficult things about using all of these "best of breed" services is maintaining a centralized record of account credentials for each of these services.  I recently learned of a tool that I've been looking for for quite a long time: DandyID, an on-line tool for managing, in one place, all of my on-line identities.

I tried out DandyID this week, completed my profile, associated my DandyID with my various on-line profiles (out of the hundreds they offer), and used DandyID to verify my credentials with the services that offer this option.  I also was able to see where I rank among the digiterati, as far as the number and quality of my on-line presences.

I then took a link to my DandyID profile and dropped it into my e-mail signature so that people can follow me on-line using the services and accounts I've chosen to share with them.  (NOTE:  This is not managed on a user-by-user level via DandyID -- content is shown or hidden based on security/privacy settings in each of the individual services.)

  

I've used the free version to do everything I've described here, but DandyID also has a premium offering for $4.99 a month that includes social stats and analytics about how and where people interact with you on the Web.  I've also yet to explore the "Contacts" functionality in DandyID -- looking for a good use case to test this.

Now, if I could only find a centralized service to manage all my passwords across those accounts...

NOTE:  Shout-out to @DougCornelius and @jackvinson for the Tweets that led me to this tool.

SharePoint Workflow via K2 blackpoint

As a firm with deep investments in .NET development at more of a "foundation" level (e.g., Windows Workflow Foundation), KMA has been somewhat hesitant to invest aggressively in third-party workflow solutions for SharePoint such as Nintex, AgilePoint, and K2.  In the meantime, we've invested in developing a thorough understanding of three key approaches to SharePoint workflow:

1. effectively using SharePoint's native workflows
2. creating SharePoint workflows with SharePoint Designer (now a free download from MSFT) 
3. creating custom workflows in .NET with Workflow Foundation.

In fact, a few years ago, we created a white paper about these different approaches, detailing the strengths and weaknesses of each.  At the time, we consciously chose not to include ISV (Independent Software Vendor, or third-party developer) solutions because it would expand the scope of the white paper too broadly.

Meanwhile, we've monitored the marketplace for ISV workflow solutions.  This week, I attended the monthly New England SharePoint User Group meeting, including a featured speaker from K2, a leading workflow ISV.  K2 has had a presence in the workflow market for many years with their K2.NET and blackpearl workflow engines for the enterprise.  blackpearl is K2's current enterprise offering, and it contains some capabilities for SharePoint-specific workflow development.

In this week's session, we were shown key differences between K2's new blackpoint offering and the richer blackpearl as follows:

• blackpoint has business-user-oriented user interfaces for workflow design that blackpearl does not have in its current version: 
  1. blackpoint Studio, a standalone Integrated Development Environment for creating workflows
  2. blackpoint Web designer, a SilverLight-based tool for visually designing workflows from within SharePoint
• blackpoint has reduced complexity (read: reduced functionality) to make it easier for business analysts and business users to develop SharePoint workflows without writing .NET code.
• blackpoint is priced much more aggressively than blackpearl, its enterprise-class cousin.  blackpoint pricing spans from $5,000 to $15,000 per server; blackpearl is orders of magnitude higher.

Given the aggressive pricing for blackpoint and K2's reputation in the Microsoft community, I look forward to our firm's being able to see more and test blackpoint, as many of our clients are approaching business process automation as a key initiative in their "sophomore year" with SharePoint 2007.

SharePoint Search and Information Architecture Webinar Series

KMA's Sadie Van Buren is speaking at an upcoming webinar session from Earley & Associates entitled "Optimizing Your SharePoint Investment Through Search & Information Architecture."  She's presenting in session 2, June 11, from 12:30-2pm EDT.

If you have any burning questions about the webinar content or how to take advantage of SharePoint's built-in search, please feel free to contact me, or contact Sadie directly.

Braindump: 2009 MIT CIO Symposium

In addition to the data stream of 140-character bons mots, I feel inspired to write in more depth on some of the themes we explored at yesterday's MIT CIO Symposium, perhaps due to a great article by Adam Singer entitled "19 Reasons You Should Blog And Not Just Tweet."

This MIT CIO Symposium, my fourth, was themed, "Sustaining CIO Leadership in a Changing Economy," and I attended sessions as follows:
-- CEO Keynote Panel
-- Academic Keynote Panel
-- CIO Keynote Panel
-- Lunch Presentation from Attivio
-- Breakout:  Enterprise 2.0 Panel
-- Cloud Computing Keynote Panel

The CEO Keynote Panel was noteworthy because of the assembled CEOs' ability to succinctly talk about what they  need and expect from CIOs in a changed world.  A key concept that they stressed was simplicity.  In fact, they emphasized that CIOs should use this downturn as an opportunity to prune their portfolio of projects (and vendors) to focus on those most closely aligned with the organization's strategy.  One CEO's best-of-show aphorism was "Do less with less," while another's was to "Stamp out diversity [of platforms]."  The CEO panel also told us that the CIO's job is to "hold up a mirror to where the CEO is not thinking about the business correctly," although we all know what a challenge it is to do this directly and still keep one's job.  (link to prev blog article on CIO/CEO exchange)

The Academic Keynote panel is always a favorite of mine, as it represents the chance to listen to some of the best and brightest researchers from MIT relate their thoughts on the "Next Big Thing" in IT.  Of the most interest to me was Tom Malone's assertion that the NBT is "Collective Intelligence," the collecting and harvesting of knowledge via tools like Google, Wikipedia, and Innocentive.  I'm interested in how organizations use social media and collaboration tools to drive efficiency, speed, and innovation, and will follow this trend closely.  Professor Malone suggested that perhaps we should be talking less about "Cloud Computing" and more about "Crowd Computing."

My biggest takeaway from the CIO Keynote Panelwas the emphasis on Portfolio Management, deemed a critical skill/process for CIOs -- this should be welcome news to our partner William George Associates, who should benefit from their specialization/expertise in this discipline.

The lunch was punctuated (rather than interrupted, as in the past) by a brief presentation from Sid Probstein, CTO of Attivio, a company I've been kind of ambiently following for quite some time via a friend who works there.  Their value proposition of integrating SQL-style joins among structured data sources with rich full-text searches of other unstructured data sources could make for a separate blog post on its own, and I will be researching this more.

I had high hopes for the afternoon's Enterprise 2.0 Panel, not least because I always enjoy Andrew McAfee as a moderator and/or participant.  However, I was disappointed in that there was only one CIO actually on the panel, and there was relatively little talk about how enterprises were using Enterprise 2.0 applications behind their firewall.  The most interesting answers for me were to the question "Are people acting differently [as a result of these tools]?"  Several changes are afoot that the panelists summarized as:

• increased desire to/comfort with "putting one's thoughts out there"
• the blended lines between private and public communications (save for regulated communications)
• the increased permeability of organizational boundaries and informality of corporate communications
• the increased velocity of information (e.g., wikis for agile development, integrated presence)

The final panel of the day was dedicated to the theme of the "cloud," loosely defined by the panelists as computing:

• with no capital expenditure (via a third party, outside your organization's own data center)
• with elasticity of supply (pooled resources delivered over the web)
• powered by software
• providing new business capabilities

One data point of interest mentioned by the panelists was how consistently an upgrade in an organization's core messaging platform (e.g., Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes) served as an inflection point for CIOs evaluating moving applications to the cloud.  There is enough acceptance of cloud applications (e.g., SalesForce.com) in the marketplace and price pressure to force them to consider this option.  Principal barriers to CIOs adopting applications hosted in the cloud were observed to be:  regulatory requirements, sunk costs in data centers, and "fear of trying."

Through the day, there were lots of references to many IT standard heuristics, for example, "5% of revenue dedicated to IT," "60-70% of all IT expenditures dedicated to maintenance," etc. but there was also an interesting glut of references to the recently released McKinsey study (pdf) debunking some conventional wisdom about cost savings of cloud computing.  The debate has been ongoing since the days of time-sharing on mainframes, and won't change any time soon.

All in all, this is an event that I look forward to each year.  Through KMA's affiliation with both SIM and MIT, we know many of the attendees, enjoy learning side by side with our clients, and have a significant presence here.  We are already looking forward to May 19, 2010. 

Some final, relatively random, thoughts and musings from the day:

• "Never waste a crisis" -- most of current Fortune 500 companies were formed during past economic downturns.
• CIOs need to do less with less, by de-selecting projects.  Focus on customer-facing initiatives.
• CIOs need to "seduce the business people" with capabilities that add value in order to get joint sponsorship/CEO's ear.
• Four years into my attendance at MITCIO, and I've heard presenters refute Nicholas Carr ("IT Doesn't Matter") each year.  Think he hit a nerve?
• On Federal Economic Stimulus accountability:  "We are bound to not get it right the first time."  (evolving processes)
• On Enterprise 2.0:  Beware the "trough of disillusionment"phase of its lifecycle.

Serendipity and Weak Search -- For When The Stakes Are Low

I've been playing a lot lately with a music service called blip.fm (@mikegil), where one can "virtually DJ" songs stored by others to create a playlist.  When trying to find songs based on a keyword or theme, I'll often search based on that word (for example, "Saturday").

Blip.fm doesn't have anything like faceted search, and very little metadata associated with the songs, so the search results may return anything from songs with "Saturday" in the title to bands with the word "Saturday" in their name.  Pretty sloppy, right?  Lousy user experience, right?

As it turns out, no.

Perhaps it's the unique nature of music, but the imprecision of blip.fm's search actually makes my searches fun -- I often find some little pearls that I didn't expect and frankly wasn't looking for, but am happy to encounter.  I've discovered songs and artists I never would have found otherwise.

Commentators often lament the "niche culture" and "death of serendipity," those precious moments where you find the unexpectedly fascinating article on page 2 of the Metro section instead of the one article you googled and found on Boston.com, so this imprecise search has been a breath of fresh air.

However (and this underscores points we make all the time about the difference between enterprise data and consumer data), I'm not seeking serendipity when I'm searching for my firm's institutional knowledge.  I need one authoritative data point, not ten decent ones.  This requirement frequently means insertion of a human into the process to broker the flow of knowledge. 

Am I going about it wrong?  Is there a place for serendipity, for Amazon-esque "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought..." suggestion, or is precision the most important?  Is the distinction a work/fun one?  An enterprise/consumer one? 

There's some great reading on this point -- I especially recommend the work that Dan Keldsen and Carl Frappaolo have done on behalf of AIIM in the area of findability.

Blog Rally to Help the Boston Globe

[originally based on Paul Levy's idea -- I'm happy to contribute, and to be counted among the bloggers offered the chance to amplify this message]

We have all read recently about the threat of possible closure faced by the Boston Globe.  A number of Boston-based bloggers who care about the continued existence of the Globe have banded together in conducting a blog rally.  We are simultaneously posting this paragraph to solicit your ideas of steps the Globe could take to improve its financial picture.

We view the Globe as an important community resource, and we think that lots of people in the region agree and might have creative ideas that might help in this situation. So, here's your chance.  Please don't write with nasty comments and sarcasm:  Use this forum for thoughtful and interesting steps you would recommend to the management that would improve readership, enhance the Globe's community presence, and make money.  Who knows, someone here might come up with an idea that will work, or at least help.  Thank you.

As an inveterate reader, media junkie, blogger, thinker, and citizen, my visualizing Boston without the Globe is sad and scary.  I think of the role that the media plays as a check and balance to those in power (the famous line attributed to Jimmy Breslin about the media's role being "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable" comes to mind), from government to church to corporations to higher education, and know that Boston needs a world-class daily newspaper.  So, how would YOU propose to save, improve, re-direct or otherwise enhance the Globe?