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July 3, 2011 by Patti

SoMe and KM lessons learned — more from E2.0

As I mentioned in my last post, previous Enterprise 2.0 conferences had a big focus on “adoption” — how to get companies and the people inside them to use new tools to get their work done. As I sat through sessions in 2010, I heard the lessons of knowledge management being learned anew. That is, I felt I could trace a direct line from these lessons to many of the bullet points I myself had used on slides during the years 1997 - 2005 as I worked inside organizations and as a consultant to knowledge management initiatives:

  • Focus on a business problem
  • Have senior management support
  • It’s 10% technology, 90% people
  • KM must be integrated into your business processes; it is not something “extra”
  • Look for key partners in HR, IT, and Operations
  • Capture and distribute success stories
  • Address “what’s in it for me”
  • “ROI” is very, very hard to measure and may not be worth the trouble
  • Culture trumps everything (that’s a direct quote from Tom Davenport)

And yet, speaker after speaker at E2.0 talked about these lessons without reference to the accumulation of learning within the knowledge management community (from which I believe many of these same folks came). I suspect that part of this lack of acknowledgment comes from not wanting to be tarred with the KM feathers. (Many people still don’t get it that “KM” isn’t one big monolithic system; that it is a collection of methods, practices, and tools that all support various aspects of identifying, creating, transferring, and augmenting both the hard and soft, explicit, tacit, and in-the-flow information, knowledge, and understanding that people need to know to get their jobs done. Think of these tools, methods, and practices as “apps” and good knowledge managers as people who are integrating these apps onto a platform. That’s the 2.0 way to think of it.)

Ok, so I got that off my chest. What was interesting to hear this year, 2011, at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston was that as the themes shift from technology to business transformation, the “K” and “KM” words are creeping in. (Yeah!).

  • Sarah Roberts (@robertsgolden): “You can make information flow down in the organization, but can you make knowledge flow up?” “Individuals, left to their own devices, are pretty resourceful and knowledge-sharing prone.”
  • Tom F. Kelly (@Moxiesoft): “The three key elements of success in social media: simplicity of design, knowledge as a center point, leadership” “Collaboration is about sharing knowledge, not data.”
  • Mike Rhodin, IBM Social network in an enterprise is an everlasting knowledge repository.”
  • Ross Mayfield (@ross): “Social software needs to create the knowledge trail as a byproduct of getting the work done, not as a discrete silo of “perfect” information.”
  • Daniel DeBow (@Rypple) “For HR, it’s ‘who has the knowledge’ in the organization and collaborative tools can provide the answer.”

One of the “KM fellow travelers,” http://www.elsua.net/(@elsua), an IBM evangelist was also tracking a lot of the KM themes throughout the conference. Mining the tweet streams (I shower blessings on the capture of these by @jimworth), I found an number of Luis’ nuggets of recognition of KM themes:

  • @elsua @joshscribner: finding experts, finding information, sharing knowledge. #IBM #BlueIQ ‘s 3 core values for socbiz. #e2conf” / Yes, sir!
  • @elsua: #e2conf knowledge transfer remains one of the biggest issues for any collaboration strategy, regardless the generations #e2conf
  • @elsua: #e2conf Ohhh, another flashback from KM in the late 90s: technology, process, culture (=people); was missing it, too! :) #E2conf

Most astounding to me was that Andrew McAfee, who coined the term eponymous term “Enterprise 2.0” gave a big shout out to one of knowledge management’s clarion calls from 1998, a quote from Lew Platt of HP: “If only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times as profitable.”  (And,  If Only We Knew What We Know was the title of APQC‘s O’Dell and Grayson book that was one of the first KM books.)  Then as if in answer to my unspoken question (“How does E2.0 take KM to the next level?”) he says, “Enterprise 2.0. Succeeded because it solves knowledge problem and gives everyone in the organization voice in a community.”  McAfee’s talk addressed, in a way, the tacit/explicit model in KM. In the first part of his he cautioned against letting “old fashioned management” get in the way of using social technologies that promote tacit exchange and knowledge generation. The second part, on “new-fangled computers” , he focused on IBM’s Watson and its Jeopardy championship. His conclusion: the explicit part of knowledge capture, storing and recovery has been solved. Let’s now focus on “looking for questions that computers are not good at answering.”

I am thinking that this new territory, that computers are not good at answering, and which even in its fledgling days (Marcia Connor said of E2.0, “We’re in the first minute of social business. The next 5 years will tell so much more.”) is pushing beyond what knowledge management was able to address: relationships.  I’ve said before, in the 3rd (current) era of knowledge management, “knowledge is in the network.” Social tools, within, beyond, outside, and organizationally orthogonal to the enterprise are going to give us unbelievably new kinds of knowledge about who we are, how we interact, and the creative results of those interactions. These are the lessons that we haven’t learned from KM. Now that we have tools for creating, evolving, mapping, and -especially — analyzing the impact of relationships we are going to learn a whole lot more.

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June 30, 2011 by Patti

New themes for “Enterprise 2.0”

I spent two days at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston last week  to get the pulse of this emergent ecosystem of vendors, practitioners, consultants, and thought leaders and to connect with many of my favorite fellow travelers from the KM world. A lot has been written already about the conference, and as usual the earliest blog posts were reportage and those coming along this week a bit more reflective. See especially Cecil Dijoux, Esteban Kolsky,  and Sameer Patel (so far).

On the vendor side, it’s clear that as the market is maturing; it’s all about the platform now (see my previous post) and there are a number to choose from. (Some look a lot like intranets, but I think we’re supposed to think that intranets are passé. To me, the intranet is the “home page of the enterprise,” social or not; it has to be where eyeballs start the day, where hands go to search, and where people connect with people and content.)

What felt different (and this has been said by many) is the shift in tone that occurred based on the selection of keynote speakers  away from vendor pitches (with a glaring exception or two) and toward thinking about the nature of business and work. The Wall Street Journal picked up on Jive‘s CTO’s comment  “that the emphasis has shifted toward business outcomes” in its article Enterprise 2.0 is growing up.” But it was not just about business outcomes.

It was also about the nature of business, relationships (companies <-> customers <-> employees), and some pretty simple principles of management. I had picked Mike Gotta‘s workshop, Organization Next, to attend on Monday, bypassing (except for an occasional drop-in) the Blackbelt practitioner’s session. (Ok, so I was just looking for a larger picture all along and at least at this E2.0 conference I found a lot of good stuff to listen to.) Mike’s workshop was HR-focused, looking at ways that HR managers are coping with/thinking about responding to changes in the employer/employee relationship. Daniel Rasmus did a nifty scenario planning workshop that brought home the number of uncertainties that exist about the world we live in.  Sara Roberts of Roberts Golden also did some great interactive exercises around organizational agility and change management. It didn’t feel like a technology conference at all.

(Sara also did a terrific keynote on Wednesday, “why employees are/should be managing the company,” introducing the notion of working within a complex system: setting the proper boundaries that enable leadership to emerge. She started with the metaphor of streams of humanity on the sidewalks of New York and how people can move in and out of the stream easily.)

In his elegantly constructed Tuesday morning keynote, the always inspiring John Hagel nimbly set  the tone for a business-focused conference. Starting with last year’s big E2.0 question “How do we get adoption for social software?” he linked adoption to passion and performance (“If you are interested in performance you have to be interested in passion”). People who are engaged in activities they are passionate about will connect with other people — and if you’ve got the platform available, and right, then they will use it in conjunction with passion. The only metric that matters is engaging passion.

(Later in the morning, Bryce Williams from Eli Lilly talked about how social collaboration was enabling emergent leadership in the organization. In his terrific stories, he emphasized how people succeeded because they were able to follow their passions. In the afternoon, in a session on innovation, Roy Rosin from Intuit talked about building an innovation environment: “[it means…] letting people build on their passions.” Sara Roberts said, in her workshop on Monday: “Meaning is the new money.” )

Rachel Happe, of the Community Roundtable, talked about the strategic imperative of communities: “Relationship and Culture are the only sustainable advantage.” And, she insists, that it takes time to cultivate communities, that our tools and technologies are pushing people “on a collision course” with information (beyond the capacity of our brains to process well),  that people must be given time to develop relationships and in an environment — culture — that provides the context for acting on information. “All management is community management.”

Rachel also emphasized changing organizational structures, confident that network structures will remain viable.  Organization structure had also been a big topic for Sara on Monday, who brought it all down succinctly to “What are we trying to do?” “Who needs to be connected with whom?” “Who is already connected?” “How can we foster the connections we need?”

John Stepper described how the “social media” journey at Deutsche Bank started with that core KM method, communities of practice, followed by a community of media enthusiasts, and a focus on expertise before going to technology. He summarizes this approach nicely here. In his keynote, he described how working in networks (oops, I mean communities) helped people to “step out of the org chart.” Terrific phrase. More organizational talk from Jim Grubb, VP of Communications at Cisco: “Your “org chart” is a people chart that needs to be dynamically ordered according to what you need to do in the moment.”

Enterprise 2.0 itself is a highly collaborative event and organizational microcosm. The tweet stream transcripts (767 pages, 20 per page) and links to presentations and blog posts are all posted in the self-organizing wiki set up by Jim Worth.  The community that organizes around this conference deserves a better name than Enterprise 2.0 (and “social business” doesn’t cut it, either). This conference was renamed and repositioned from a series of conferences on collaboration software and technologies, I think around 2008 (after Andrew McAfee coined the term, which was just 5 years ago.)  The co-evolution of people and technology is reaching a point where we can, and should, be looking outside the boundaries of enterprise technologies to understand how to manage, work with, and enable people to work together to create value beyond the corporate sector. E2.0, Boston 2011 has opened the door to many more conversations about how we move into this future.

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June 17, 2011 by Patti

On the Platform

Enterprise 2.0 is in Boston next week. Since my press pass was approved, I’ve received emails from a number of vendors who’d like to talk to me about their products. Many of these emails refer to their products as platforms. I’m intrigued about platforms, not because I don’t understand the term, but because since reading Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, I’ve been thinking about the term in a different way.

Let me start with the term. Platform. Railroad platform. Platform shoes. Platform bed. Diving platform. Political platform. Speaking platform. From the French, plate-forme, diagram, map, literally flat form (Merriam-Webster). The use in computer technology derives from the sense of a platform as a set of architectural standards consisting of hardware, operating system, and applications that provide the basis for a stable and (presumably) long-lived computing environment. A recent Economist article celebrating IBM’s 100th anniversary attributes IBM’s success to its ability to migrate itself (and more importantly, its customers) from one computing platform to another. Microsoft, Apple, and Google provide competing platforms on which to build information systems and applications.

In his landmark article, Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration, Andrew McAfee used the term platform 31 times referring to the online intranets, external web sites, and bespoke applications used for “generating, sharing and refining information.” A month or so later he elaborated on this definition of Enterprise 2.0 as “the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers,” and fully defined his use of each of those terms: “Platforms are digital environments in which contributions and interactions are globally visible and persistent over time.”

The notion of visibility resonates with some of those other platform-y items: diving platforms, speaking platforms, even political platforms all suggest something that is distinct, somewhat above and differentiated from the fray. The emphasis on contributions and interactions doesn’t suggest the vertical aspect of platforms. I especially think of a diving platform: you climb it or climb onto it and from it, launch yourself into an immersive experience. But I also think of the platform as a place on which to stand, a place from which to move more creatively.

Steven Johnson evokes this aspect of platform. He sets the scene (as he does often in his book) by talking about Charles Darwin’s discovery of the coral atolls in the Indian Ocean. The coral ecosystem, initially structured on volcanoes submerging over eons, continues to build upon itself, a platform on which to build the next layer, always becoming, always emerging from what came before. He extends the metaphor, also, to computing systems and applications noting that even Twitter itself is a platform on which innovators continue to build and extend. “Emergent platforms derive much of their creativity from the inventive and economical reuse of existing resources,” he says, linking the notion of building upon and re-using to the way that city neighborhoods shift over time, as buildings are reclaimed, re-purposed, and re-occupied.

I really like the image of the collaborative platform as a coral reef, a rich ecosystem of people and ideas both using and building on the platform, contributing while they interact. Big schools of small fish, small schools of big fish, eels, crabs, and skates; rainbow fish and clowns; shy tetra and angels and sergeants finding their way, their food, their friends among the diversity of coral. And, like the Chihuly sculpture I mentioned in my recent post, the result is always unpredictable, but within the context of of a set of boundaries and constraints, designed for emergence.

 

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June 16, 2010 by Patti

#e2conf Keynotes JP Rangaswami

JP Rangaswami, CIO and Chief scientist, BT Design was the first keynote speaker at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston Tuesday morning. Clearly aware of the high volume of tweeting, he acknowledeged that he knew he was talking at the “risk of being tweeted out of existence.”

He is a person profoundly aware of the ways that the Internet and our constant connectivity are changing us. We have gone from being silos to being the network, from stocks to flows. He illustrates an instance of the kinds of changes we are seeing by being onstage “playing the instrument that is his voice, while [a colleague]  plays an instrument called the screen.” (The screen images were distracting, but then it’s possible that it is I who is not yet fully capable of living in this new world.)

He characterized this new world, interestingly, as one of loss of control:

  • Loss of control of the perimeter of the firm. The environment of business has altered to the extent that it’s no longer possible to understand where the boundaries of the enterprise are. Yet, companies still try to put boundaries around units inside the company and between the company and its partners, customers. Such efforts are misguided, I think I heard him say; my interpretation is that everything that happens inside is relevant outside and potentially vice versa.
  • We have lost control of our tools; they are now mobile, location-sensitive. Employees want to bring their own devices into the workplace and want to use their workplace tools to connect to the outside.
  • Similarly, we have lost control of our data. It’s an ocean, now, once you let something (even one tiny thing out), it is swimming in that ocean and you cannot control it.

As we lose control over our tools, our data, our boundaries, we have to ask whether these tools are making us dumber? If we are getting dumber, are the organizations in which we work getting dumber? His answer is “perhaps,” then “no,” we may be individually getting dumber, but collectively our organizations are getting much, much smarter.

Worrying about loss of control is managing for scarcity. We need to do is to design for abundance, for the abundance of what is available to us outside the perimeters, outside the walled tools and data, and outside the limited view of the individual.

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June 14, 2010 by Patti

#e2conf The Real Story on Software Selection

Tony Byrne,( CMSWatch,which is now a component of The Real Story)  is always worth listening to. He has such a rich experience in understanding how software applications meet user needs and is so knowledgeable about specific features of different software application that he has been able to condense a complicated subject into a useful set of checklists. Originally (2001) focused on content management, the consultant practice now includes evaluations of vendors who are playing in the social media space.

In this E2.0 conference workshop “Insider’s Guide to Evaluating and Selecting Social Software”, Byrne begins by distinguishing the boundary between collaboration and networking. (I like distinctions, and this is a good one.) It helps to understand that some products are designed with a focus on networking, others with a focus on collaboration:

(C) 2010 The Real Story Group

What is happening, of course, is that vendors who start in one position are moving to the other as they rework the platform, add features, and so on. So the checklist addresses elements of each of these.  The CMSwatch framework has four checklists:

  • What business scenarios (external: branded communities, professional networking; internal: project collaboration, KM, info sharing) does it support?
  • What business services (wikis, blogs, file sharing, discussions) does does it support?
  • What infrastructure capabilities (anti-spam, filtering, document repositories) does it support?
  • What system administration functions (backup/restore, configuration, internationalization) does it provide?

These questions must all be answered in the context of software you are looking at.  CMSWatch provides an interesting taxonomy of collaboration and community software:

Tony goes on to provide insights into each of the platform vendors, with a strong concentration on Microsoft SP 2010.  Using his checklist, Tony can only conclude that SP is a jack of all trades and master of none. It does nothing really well, does pretty much everything (even if quirkily) and has a user interface that can only be navigated by experts. This next version does, however, integrate really well with MS Office products even though it’s not great on how it manages communities.

It appears that none of the platform vendors have successfully added a “social layer” to their existing applications. Nor have any of the ECM vendors successfully added a social layer. So much for the two types of vendors that started from the collaboration side of the boundary. On the other, networking side, the vendors are more agile and able to innovate by adding features as they see them emerge.

Whatever path in selection that you take, some of the key dos and don’ts:

  • Understand the difference between platform and product. (infrastructure vs.  quick deployment)
  • Try before you buy (Tony heartily disagrees with Andrew McAfee’s Drop Pilot position
  • Understand the vendor as much as the software
  • You may need to use different tools for different scenarios but focus on the scenarios

Tony concludes by suggesting that you can look at the main scenarios that you want to support and build a matrix of features needed for each.  In my work with software pilots, I have tried to focus on these use cases and design templates (or archetypes, as Tony calls them) for each type of community.

A well-done session on managing the complications of selecting tools, even if the market will stay unsettled — with new things coming — for the next three years.  “A vibrant social software marketplace awaits.”

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