Victus pro Scientia Opus -- Food for the Knowledge Worker

Ambient Awareness Redux

At this weekend's U.S. Open in Merion, two things were quite noteworthy:

 

1.  As it did in 2011, except more so, it felt at once liberating and scary to have to leave our smartphones outside the gates to the facility.  (The USGA does not permit them to be brought into the event, although I saw several people using smuggled devices to catch somer amazing pictures.) 

This, of course, heightened my awareness of just how much we have come to depend on our mobile devices for everything to knowing what time it is to planning meetups via a quick text to researching anything and everything about the tournament (toughest hole?  18.  Sorry, Phil.).  The ubiquity of these devices and the verging-on-OCD degree to which we count them is well-documented at this point.

2. I also ran into quite a few old friends from the Philadelphia area, some who I hadn't seen in 5-10 years.  Pretty much all of them knew that I had recently taken nine weeks off between the end of my old job and the beginning of the new one, and expressed a mix of congratulations, wonder, and concern that I had taken the time off.  (I highly recommend it, and make a point of doing it once every 20 years or so).

This phenomenon really underscored the "ambient awareness" concept that I first encountered in the New York Times in 2008.  I was struck by the degree to which most of my conversations with many Facebook friends started halfway through, due to their our each being "read up" on the other via Facebook and other social media.   As we start to see more adoption of enterprise social platforms in our workplace, I hope that more of my conversations in the workplace will work the same way.

 

Impressions of the 2011 SharePoint Conference, Part 4 (Microsoft Roadmaps)

A second Microsoft roadmap session I attended at last weeks’ SPC was session SPC271, David Pae’s “SharePoint 2010:  Improving Productivity with Social.”  It was actually somewhere between a roadmap session and a case study session, with examples of social computing inside Microsoft (and of course, Contoso) that illustrate where SharePoint 2010 and complementary products can foster social computing initiatives.

David Pae and colleague Paul Javid (Social Product Manager) walked us through the history of social computing, Microsoft’s Enterprise Social Strategy, some specific examples and demonstrations of social capabilities of SharePoint and other complementary Microsoft technologies.

The most noteworthy things from this session:

1. A REALLY cool demo of Lync doing real-time English-Spanish translation of an instant messaging thread – I’m dying to see more of this, and think that the Lync/SharePoint combination provides an unparalleled communications and collaboration platform.
2. A good audience question about a limitation of the “noteboard” capability in SharePoint 2010.  Out of the box, it is not possible to comment on a comment, or to “like” or rate a comment.  [This question underscored how hard the presenters’ job is in a conference where Microsoft has committed to not discuss product futures, and it’s not fair to certain ISVs to discuss/promote others. (cough:  NewsGator!)]
3. The Microsoft products NOT mentioned.  Although Microsoft does a nice job of presenting a story that incorporates SharePoint, Exchange and Lync (on-premise or in-cloud or hybrid), the following technologies with social or collaboration indications were prominently NOT mentioned: 
   1. Skype, a social and collaboration tool with a huge user base, but what feels like a lack of an enterprise integration story ready to be told by Microsoft (whether for statutory or strategic reasons)? 
   2. SharePoint Workspace – how does the offline client, a necessity to many mobile information workers, impact the social computing experience?
   3. OneNote – shared note-taking is at least as social as IM, and the syncing capabilities with SharePoint create interesting opportunities.

Overall, this session provided a solid overview of out-of-the-box social computing capabilities of SharePoint, although not too much of it would be new to our clients running SharePoint 2010.  There will be, however, some more details gleaned from customer case study sessions (still to come)...

Echoes of Enterprise 2.0, Part 1: Don't Re-Tweet the Revolution

Among the highlights of this year’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston were the keynote presentations.  The keynotes are always a high point of the conference, and this year’s were remarkable because of the size, complexity, and sophistication of the organizations represented (e.g., Microsoft, Deutche Bank, Eli Lilly, Cisco, Avaya, etc.) , and the expertise of the presenters themselves.

One presentation I found compelling was that of John Stepper, a Managing Director at Deutsche Bank.  John’s theme was “Stop Evangelizing, Start Doing,” and he echoed a central theme of this year’s conference:  BUSINESS VALUE.

One of the sub-themes that resonated with me was the business challenge: “Help me get through compliance,” a common lament of workers in organizations with strict compliance requirements. Compliance adds cost, time, and hassle to many business processes, often because workers aren’t aware of what the compliance group needs from them.  Not surprisingly, this theme has a corollary from compliance workers:  “Help us avoid surprises.”

Social computing at Deutsche Bank transformed compliance processes by making them more transparent, resulting in:

• simpler processes (internal “customers” can help refine processes that they can see and understand), and
• better-qualified projects (with compliance requirements and processes highly visible, higher quality submissions were received, resulting in a reduction of costly iteration/re-submission).

In providing this and other examples of the commercial benefit of social technology within Deutsche Bank, John showed real business transformation and encouraged the audience to seek similar opportunities within their own organization.  Rather than working from a script of best practices, seek out high-value opportunities that are relevant to you.  Or, as he more succinctly put it: 

“Don’t just re-tweet the revolution – start your own.  Change the work!”

[of course, like 50 people in attendance re-tweeted this pithy remark, some more ironically than others]

One additional note on form:  John also benefited from a slide deck that was as simple as it was beautiful, rooted in the Presentation Zen philosophy.  I'll post or tweet a link if I see the deck posted.

Social Computing Served Three Ways

In the most recent season of "Top Chef All-Stars," eventual winner Richard Blais liked to present one ingredient in three ways, to show off all of its flavors.  In his honor, I present to you my own trio of delights. His were culinary, mine are centered around social computing, as my expertise is in working environments far less noisy and hot than his.  Hopefully, my output will be similarly tasty, if only because three is a magic number.

Lask week, I was privileged to attend a program at the Center for Information Management Studies (CIMS) at Babson College:  "Enterprise 2.0, Social Software and Collaboration."  The program featured three excellent presentations on the theme:

Noted author Paul Gillin's session about "the quiet revolution behind the firewall," where he guided us through ten key business benefits of social media.  The single best insight I got from this session was a quote from Kartik Hisanagar, professor of operations and information management at University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business:

"Today, social networking is being thought of as a separate thing.  We'll see that fade over time, and it will become just part of the way we interact."

Source:  "Is Business-centric Social Networking a Revolution -- or a Ruse?", Knowledge@Wharton

The second session had a more academic slant to it.  Professors PJ Guinan and Sal Parise reviewed their recent research.  They performed over 70 interviews with social media practitioners at 50 large companies about "corporate culture and social media strategy development,"  and discerned four major strategies. The results of their research are soon to be published in the Harvard Business Review, and I recommend looking out for it as a good guide to assessing your organization's social media strategy relative to size, tolerance for risk, constraints and opportunities.

The third and final session I attended blended corporate and academic themes, as Stephen Laster, CIO of Harvard Business School, presented on the topic of "enabling the social generation" and customizing the enterprise's response to them. He related the broad themes of convergence, consumerization, crowd-sourcing, and how "digital natives" use social tools to research, collaborate, produce and leverage content in new ways.  He then proposed ways CIOs can engage these users and enable the future workforce, which broke down into:

1.  Understand the possibilities (not just the risks!). 
2.  Partner to prioritize, and listen to the business.
3.  Deliver with excellence:  on time, on quality, and on budget.

The CIMS event was the first of a flurry of upcoming events tied to the theme of social computing, including:

SharePoint Saturday Boston (April 9th at Microsoft's Waltham office), where there's always a good assortment of content about social computing in SharePoint.

The SIM (Society for Information Management) CIO panel on social computing, April 14 at the Needham Sheraton.

Last but not least, KMA's April webinar with NewsGator on April 20, where we'll explore social computing capabilities native to SharePoint 2010 and how NewsGator Social Sites can help take enterprise social computing to the next level.

I hope to see you at these events!  Stay social!

Comedy 2.0: You Had Me at "Social"

Saturday night, I was fortunate to see a professional comedian perform.  Paul F. Tompkins played a one-night-only show at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, MA.  Although there were many noteworthy things about this performance, the most BLOG-worthy thing was Mr. Tompkins’ question as he took the stage:  “How many people are here because of the Facebook group?”

This was clearly a different way to make a comedy show happen.

Mr. Tompkins has embraced social media in new and interesting ways, promoting Facebook groups like “Bring Paul F. Tompkins to Boston” that are largely created and maintained by fans, and relentlessly nurtured by him via his presence on:

• Facebook (3,325 friends as of this writing),
• MySpace (11,323 friends) and
• Twitter (82,827 followers). 

He also uses his website, blog and podcasts to distribute unique content (e.g., “The Pod F. Tompkast”).  It is interesting to see the traditional “agent/venue” channel erode at the expense of more democratic and interactive platforms.  The level of connectedness Mr. Tompkins is able to create with his dedicated fans across North America is really amazing to see and watch, but it requires full-time care (over 14,000 tweets, for example).

Note, however, the interesting dichotomy here:  Even though Mr. Tompkins is a highly collaborative comedian, with a long history of working in teams on sketch comedy, improv, and a running gig in Los Angeles that frequently features an extensive guest list of performers, his social media efforts are mostly about promotion, connections with colleagues and fans, and logistics, and far less frequently about collaborating on content.  It would seem that social media tools are a great way to make a comedy SHOW happen, but perhaps not the best way to make comedy happen.

The creative process of writing comedy, it seems, is social in a very “meatspace,” 1.0 kind of way – people on stage together, or gathered in person around the same conference room table.

So, the broader lesson I learned from Mr. Tompkins is not only the efficacy of social media as a way to connect to a base of fans, followers, or clients, but also its limits. Some processes requiring large numbers of loose ties are highly conducive to the “social” phenomenon, while some remain closely tied to a more intensive, visceral level of collaboration:  people in the same place, riffing off of one another, reading one another’s faces, voice inflections, and body language.  Understanding which of these categories your business challenge falls into is just as important as effective use of social tools.

Oh yeah -- in life, it helps to be funny.  Thanks, Paul, for reminding me of that.  Herewith, a favorite (for reasons that become clear at 1:37) bit that Paul wrote:

Mashing up Private and Public

(Flickr photo hello, neighbours! by D'Arcy Norman)

As someone who is:

• active in several social media communities, 
• committed to helping clients think about how information is shared and secured,
• interested in current events (like the newly enacted Mass Privacy statute and well-publicized data security breaches), and
• fortunate to have access to some really smart people on topics involving knowledge management, social computing, and information security,

I think a lot about private vs public communications.

For a while, I have considered on-line privacy in light of a construct I first saw courtesy of Doug Cornelius through one of his many presentations (perhaps at the Boston KM Forum).  I appreciated the concise summary of how people share information on the internet via the "Four Ps:  Personal, Professional, Public, and Private."

Last week, I felt the lines among those four quadrants blur more than a little as I read the speaker's crib notes from a keynote presentation given at the recent South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) conference by danah boyd.  ms boyd is a researcher whose focus includes studying how young people use the internet and social media, and she spends a lot of time listening to young internet users and thinking about how expectations and social mores are evolving around the concept of privacy.

In Dr. boyd's keynote speech, she highlights several instances where online systems are evolving in unexpected ways (e.g., well-publicized unseemly goings-on on chatroulette, mash-ups of location-based applications used as farcical "robbery helpers"), and instances where service providers have changed the rules unexpectedly by commission or omission, often hiding under the self-serving rubric of "Privacy is Dead." 

If you live a fair amount of your life on-line (yes, I'm talking to you, Facebookers), a quick look to take stock of what information you're broadcasting, whether intentionally or inadvertently, on the Internet might be in order:  the best data point from Dr. boyd's presentation might be that 65% of Facebook users have left their privacy settings at the lowest level (all open to the public).  This is severely at odds with the Pew Foundation's research that 85% of all adults want to control who has access to their personal information.  Have you checked your privacy settings lately?

So, in addition to creating a reminder to yourself to get your car's oil changed, to change the batteries in your home's smoke detectors, and to get your annual free credit report, perhaps you should consider a periodic "on-line reputation monitoring" exercise.  Search for yourself using the search engine or your on-line social community of choice every few months, and see what you've been broadcasting about yourself to the world.  You may be surprised at what you find.

If you develop or use on-line communities in your place of work, heed Dr. boyd's advice to consider whether you are providing a space that is clearly and unequivocally public, or one that provides a feeling of privacy.  If the latter, spend time considering your policies and norms, and listen to your users to understand their expectations.  The price of publicly exposing information thought to be private can be enormous, in both economic and real human terms.  As Dr. boyd's examples illustrate, there are lives in the balance.

How Does the Internet See You?

The title of this post is the key question posed by the "Metropath(ologies)" exhibit at the MIT Museum, one of Boston's best-kept secrets.  I had the chance to try out an on-line component of this exhibit called "Personas," an installation that comments beautifully on both the power and fallibility of data-mining.

When you enter your name into Personas, a computational process kicks off that assembles a "seemingly authoritative personal profile," beautifully presented as follows:

It's not meant to be useful or accurate, but to spur thoughts about reliability of algorithms being created inside "black boxes" that can have significant impact on our lives:  showing up on the first page of search engine results, having misinformation about us "out there" for credit reviewers or hiring managers because of past indiscretions, sharing a name with someone else, or something as simple as a misapplied tag to a photo on a social networking site, etc.

Although it took me a while to discern what is meant by "illegal" in my results (it's not as bad as I had thought, but it did indeed make me think!), I enjoyed not only the visualization of my "on-line identity", but also the thought that the artist  put into the project.

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.

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!

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.