Archive for December, 2008

Settling accounts

Published 24 December 2008 Blog , Personal 3 Comments

It is an old English tradition that Christmas Day, as one of the quarter days, is a day for settling accounts. Over the past eleven months I have unexpectedly and gratifyingly incurred a number of debts.

The most significant is owed to Mary Abraham, who posed a question to a few of us back in November: how do you decide how/what/when to blog?  Finally, here are my thoughts.

The how is easily dealt with. I use whatever comes to hand when I have an idea. I have started blog posts from my Blackberry, using the wordpress.com mobile tool; I have worked directly in the full WordPress dashboard; I have recently started using BlogDesk as an offline editor — very useful when on the train without connectivity; and I have sometimes written the bulk of a blog post in long-hand (for which, read “scrawl”) in my notebook. Essentially, I use whatever works at the time.

What I blog is linked inextricably to why I blog. I have come to rely on this as my place for crystallising thoughts. More than anything else, I am continually learning about things that are at least tangentially related to my work. I find I learn best by reading, cogitating and discussing (which can extend to formal presentations or writing). The blog is therefore my place to do this — primarily for my own benefit. I do something similar at work, but that is only a limited solution. I have found that two significant things characterise people who do KM. They are firstly extremely willing to discuss ideas, even with total strangers. This makes KM conferences especially useful for the mingling time, even if the official content is of marginal utility. The second thing is that they tend to be rare or isolated within their own organisations. This makes it (a) difficult to find local kindred spirits with whom to discuss KM topics, but (b) easy to created mutually rewarding realtionships with KM people in other organisations. As a result, I think sharing my thoughts here results in a greater benefit to me and to the firm I work in because of the way that people in the wider world engage with it.

So the things I blog about are the things that pique my interest and which I think can usefully form the basis of this wider engagement. When I started out, I thought I would be able to use the blog to challenge accepted KM truths and traditions. This hasn’t worked out quite as I expected, but I may yet get there with time.

Finally, when do I blog? Practically speaking, it tends to be in the gaps of the day — on trains, while the children watch TV, and so on. Taking a different perspective on the question, I tend to write when I have been free to ponder for a while. At times when work requires more action than thought, it is harder to get round to blogging. That explains some of the gaps in transmission during the past year.

One of the reasons I eventually took the plunge to start blogging publicly was that I found conversations via comments on other people’s blogs valuable. In particular, Doug Cornelius’s KM Space and Neil Richards’s Knowledge Thoughts provided places where I developed some of the thinking that started me on this track. Having started by commenting, I particularly appreciate those who have commented on or linked to my posts during the year:

Many thanks to you all, and I hope the festive season brings you all you hoped for, with an exciting new year in prospect!

(For completeness, you might be interested in the answers provided to Mary’s question by Jordan Furlong, Patrick Lambe and Doug Cornelius.)

Defining the Millennial organisation

Published 18 December 2008 Clients , Innovation , Management 2 Comments

After a night’s sleep, it occurred to me that it might not have been clear what I meant by a “Millennial organisation” in my last post. Here are some thoughts.

We have heard a lot recently about people in Generation Y and how they feel about work. (Here, via David Gurteen, is an example from Teresa Wu that generated spectacular amounts of heat and little light — check some of the trackbacks, especially this rather grumpy one.) What if businesses change in the same way? What would a Generation Y organisation look like? Before suggesting some answers, it is worth briefly summarising why organisations might need to change.

  • Climate change is still with us. It may have been pushed off the front pages, but it is still a reality. It will affect many business models directly, and many more indirectly.
  • The economy is front page news. The collapse of many shared assumptions about growth and prosperity should make us take stock and possibly re-focus.
  • Technology is facilitating many more interesting interactions. 5-10 years ago businesses learnt that they could not survive without at least a brochure-ware website. Now it is becoming essential to identify where and how your market is conducting its conversations online, and join in.
  • People’s expectations are changing. This is not just a Generation Y thing — customers of all generations are challenging their suppliers in ways that were impossible to predict just a short time ago. Employee profiles are also changing — the products of the baby boom are starting to retire in large numbers, potentially leaving a significant gap in the workforce.

That’s a lot of potential for disruption, and there is probably more (I haven’t even touched on globalisation, for example). What will an organisation that deals effectively with all those challenges look like? How might it behave? I can see at least six things, which correspond roughly to the six points made by Teresa Wu.

  • Millennial organisations will support and promote talent, wherever it arises. In doing so, they will need to be able to identify it first.
  • They will take seriously the work started by Ted Levitt in asking the question “what business are you really in?” They will not be afraid to re-invent themselves. (Compare Ford’s and Toyota’s approach to diversification into prefabricated housing, and consider the health of those businesses now.)
  • They will generate a sense of community and common purpose in their people by encouraging them to share and communicate what they know.
  • They will tend to have a flatter hierarchy than traditional organisations, and the leadership will actively involve people from across the organisation in key decision-making processes.
  • They will engage more actively with their clients or customers, in whatever way best suits the client or customer. (Because, as Jordan Furlong makes clear, the market does not care: “You have no right to make money from every problem or opportunity clients face, and the humility that comes from approaching clients that way matters.”)
  • They will encourage their people to bring a sense of commitment to the work that they do, to create better-quality work and a better-quality workplace. This means that badly behaved high-achievers will be tolerated less than they are at present, as will clients who make people’s lives a misery. (Bob Sutton is the guru for this one.)

An organisation with these characteristics will not be frightened of unapproved chaotic information — instead it will recognise the inevitability of the existence of such fragments and seek ways of bringing them to wider attention. It will also be constantly aware of the need to respond to changing markets by changing itself as often as necessary. (I wonder whether this also means that they will have to be smaller in size than they are now.) It probably won’t behave like the firms in Jordan Furlong’s article “The failure of billable-hour compensation“, which describes with alarming clarity ”an under-publicized way in which the billable hour poisons the [legal] profession.”

The millennial organisation

Published 17 December 2008 Culture , Knowledge , Sharing , Web2.0 2 Comments

I can’t remember how I found it, but there is a snappy presentation by Sacha Chua on Slideshare entitled “The Gen Y Guide to Web 2.0 at Work.” I think it is misnamed — it is actually a valuable guide to Web 2.0 for people of any generation. See what you think:

Slide 5 is the best:

Here’s how to wow with Web 2.0:

  1. Read
  2. Write
  3. Reach out
  4. Rock
  5. Repeat from #1

So true. Almost everything I try and do (and encourage others to try and do) comes down to one or more of these things.

However, there is something else buried in the presentation which I found just as interesting. I thought this was an internal presentation for people at IBM (where Sacha works), and so when I saw a link to their blogging guidelines I assumed they might be behind the IBM firewall. In fact they are on public view, and are well worth reading. Apart from the content, which is balanced and intelligent, this statement caught my eye:

In the spring of 2005, IBMers used a wiki to create a set of guidelines for all IBMers who wanted to blog. These guidelines aimed to provide helpful, practical advice—and also to protect both IBM bloggers and IBM itself, as the company sought to embrace the blogosphere. Since then, many new forms of social media have emerged. So we turned to IBMers again to re-examine our guidelines and determine what needed to be modified. The effort has broadened the scope of the existing guidelines to include all forms of social computing.

So that is why the guidelines are balanced and intelligent — the people they affect have collaborated to create something that serves IBM well, in addition to taking account of the reality of engagement with social media.

IBM is clearly a company that understands the positive impact of social media on its business. I don’t think this is solely because part of the business is actually to develop products for collaboration.

Compare this approach with a comment in an article in the Financial Times last week: ” Law firms are at the cutting edge of internet tools.” We’ll ignore the verity or otherwise of the headline — maybe that’s a topic for another day. No — something curious was buried in the middle of the article:

Enterprises often let the beast out of the cage by introducing Web 2.0 and are faced with the ramifications of clogging the enterprise with unapproved, chaotic information.

Who said this? A fuddy-duddy technophobic managing partner? A stereotypically controlling CIO? No. It is a direct quote from Dr Michael Lynch, OBE, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Autonomy Corporation plc. I find this really odd. Here is Autonomy’s vision:

Autonomy was founded upon a vision to dramatically change the way in which we interact with information and computers, ensuring that computers map to our world, rather than the other way round.

Human-friendly or unstructured information is not naturally found in the rows and columns of a database, but in documents, presentations, videos, phone conversations, emails and IMs. We are facing an increasing deluge of unstructured information, with 80% now falling into this category and, according to Gartner, the volume of this data doubling every month. As the amount of unstructured information multiplies, the challenge for the modern enterprise is trying to understand and extract the value that lies within this vast sea of data.

I suspect that Lynch’s full comment has been cut short by the FT. Surely he meant to go on to say that his company could undo this chaos? As reported, however, the statement is more likely to be used by more risk-averse firms to avoid adoption of social software inside the firewall. In doing so, they will miss one of the key points of this kind of technology.

As Andrew McAfee puts it (building on a 1973 article, “The Strength of Weak Ties” by Mark Granovetter), the use of social software inside the firewall creates opportunities for innovation and value-creation. (Strong ties are found between colleagues who work closely together, while weak ties are found in a wider, more casual, network.)

A tidy summary of SWT’s conclusion is that strong ties are unlikely to be bridges between networks, while weak ties are good bridges. Bridges help solve problems, gather information, and import unfamiliar ideas. They help get work done quicker and better. The ideal network for a knowledge worker probably consists of a core of strong ties and a large periphery of weak ones. Because weak ties by definition don’t require a lot of effort to maintain, there’s no reason not to form a lot of them (as long as they don’t come at the expense of strong ties).

Information in the network of weak ties can surface by a variety of means — especially tagging and search. Information only exists in that network if people adopt an approach like Sacha Chua’s — read, write, reach out. If a business fails to provide opportunities for its people to build and contribute to networks of weak ties, they make a serious mistake.

Tom Davenport has asked “Can Millennials Really Change the Workplace?” Maybe we should looking not at Millennial individuals, but at whether our businesses are themselves behaving millennially, and facilitating Generation Y approaches for all our people. Frederic Baud is sceptical :

Enterprise 2.0 represents a real paradigm shift for process oriented organizations.

I hate to use the term “paradigm shift”, because it has been used so many times, and for quite common situations. But in this case, I’m starting to wonder if there is not indeed a very distinctive approach between the two modes that would require organization to adopt very different ways to think about their internal dynamics.

This may be true, but now is surely an obvious time to think about those internal dynamics. Competition between enterprises in all markets is becoming increasingly close. Businesses worrying about coping with “unapproved chaotic information” may well find that their unsinkable ship has the tidiest set of deck-chairs at the bottom of the ocean. Those who start thinking creatively about the power of these disruptive technologies will probably find that they are first in line for the life-rafts.

If your organisation is thinking of getting serious about becoming Millennial, you will find few better summaries of the practical issues than Lee Bryant’s “Getting started with enterprise social networking.” (And if the sinking ship metaphor is too brutal for you, try Jack Vinson’s porch.)

Do you know where you’re going to?

Published 16 December 2008 Lawyering , Rationality , Web2.0 2 Comments

Via James Mullan, here are “35 tips for getting started with social media.” The list is positioned thus:

If you are going to start using social media, you should at least have an understanding of what it’s about. Social media is not about the tools, the tools are only a facilitator.

Up to a point, Lord Copper. Actually, this is an interesting list, but it is not particularly coherent. Anyone facing the world of social media needs to answer a simple question for themselves: “why am I doing this?” There are many possible answers:

  • To find out more about the world of Web 2.0
  • To connect with people I already know
  • To connect with people I don’t yet know who have a common interest
  • To position myself or my business in this new market
  • To make money
  • To contribute information and knowledge

…and so on.

Some of these aims are honourable, some less so. That’s fine — the whole gamut of relationships can be facilitated by these tools. But you need to know what you want from them. Before working through this list of 35 tips, you need to be able to judge whether any one of them will help you serve your vision of what you want from social media. You also need to be aware that the authors of lists like these may have a different vision from yours.

The same is true for shorter lists. Kevin O’Keefe has named his top three social media tools for law firms. They are blogs, Twitter and LinkedIn. That may be true for those firms (and their clients and potential clients) that are comfortable with those tools. If they are just a me-too choice, that will be glaringly obvious to others. That is because the main goal of these tools is connection. If you or your firm feels more comfortable connecting in a different way (whether that is Web 2.0 or not), do that instead. Those you connect with will respect you for it.

And if you do follow Kevin’s advice, connect properly. Clients find it irritating enough when law firms stop producing traditional briefings. Imagine their discontent when you are no longer connecting with them via a blog that they have come to know and respect.

So what do you want from your social media? What will success look like? Can you sustain your interest in it for the long term? Once you have answered those questions, you are ready to think about the tools you need and a strategy for deploying them.

Yes — you do need a strategy. Think about e-mail. That is just a tool. It facilitates connections. But it has become a monster for many people because we didn’t think properly about how we intended to use it and the limits we should put on it. All the social media tools that look today like fluffy kittens also have the potential to become monsters as scary as e-mail. If we bear that in mind when giving them house-room, we might be able to cope better when they start to grow.

(Hat tips to Mary Abraham and Doug Cornelius for the link to Kevin’s post.)

We can get through this together

Published 4 December 2008 KM , Management 2 Comments

It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone by now that we are facing one of the most severe economic downturns ever (possibly the worst — history will tell). One response to this is to go on the defensive. This is a tactic that anyone can adopt. The whole business can decide that the best way to cope is to defend its existing position. Some of the investment banks have tried this and failed. The US auto industry has also adopted this strategy with little success so far. Individual business units or cost centres can also go down this route. Mary Abraham has a blog post showing us how KM teams might defend their position in the hope that they avoid the worst effects of cost-cutting.

Let’s rewind a bit. How do you know why you have been successful up until now (as a business, revenue stream or cost centre)? What if that success has been a product of factors outside your control — a buoyant economy or demand for your services driven by me-too purchasing or management, for example? If that is the case, you have no position to defend. Your business will fail, or your cost centre will be cut to the bone (or even removed entirely). If your firm has a large knowledge management function merely because everyone else does, it is unlikely that it will escape unscathed even if you can show that it makes a real difference to the bottom line. The only means of survival is to prove that without KM the firm is actually worse off.

How to do this? Joe Firestone has the key . His definition of knowledge management requires that it is used to inform and improve problem solving at all levels of the business. That includes strategic decision-making.

Strategy is a type of knowledge and is itself an outcome of knowledge processing. If the purpose of KM is to enhance knowledge processing, then KM precedes strategy and every other knowledge outcome. To argue the reverse is to grant strategy an exception that it does not deserve. Why should strategy be any less subject to knowledge-production processes than other knowledge outcomes? We call the idea that strategy comes first the ‘strategy exception error’. If KM is to have a future, we must eliminate this error and recognise strategy as just another set of knowledge claims that flow out of knowledge processing.

The most important form of strategy addresses an organisation’s capacity to learn and adapt. Strategies come and go, but in order to survive over the long haul, the quality of an organisation’s systemic capacity to learn and adapt must be high and sustainable. This is ‘sustainable innovation’, the fundamental strategy of every organisation wishing to survive and prosper.

Most of what currently passes for KM initiatives aligned with strategy are really IM (information-management) projects. Their focus is on capture and delivery of information required to support strategy. While valid and useful, these are not KM initiatives per se. The purpose of KM is to enhance knowledge processing, which, in turn, enhances an organisation’s capacity to produce strategies. It is IM that afterwards must be aligned with and support strategy, not KM.

If the leaders of the business are planning their way out of this crisis without using your knowledge management tools and techniques then one or both of the following propositions is probably true.

  • Your KM activities are not properly targeted on the business problems that make a difference
  • Your business leaders are taking the wrong approach to solving this problem

If either of these is true, the prognosis is not good for your KM team. It is probably more likely to be cast aside when cost-cutting starts to bite, or it will go down with the firm. If they are both true, then the firm is probably going to sink faster than its competitors.

Andrew McAfee shows us a way out of the morass. In “The Enterprise 2.0 Recovery Plan” he asks himself what he would do if he were put in charge of IT as part of the turnaround effort at a big US automaker. His approach would be guided by ten principles.

  1. The company ‘knows’ the answers to our questions
  2. Most people want to be helpful to each other, and to the company
  3. Expertise is emergent
  4. People are busy
  5. Weak ties are strong
  6. The ability to convert potential ties into actual ones is valuable
  7. Platforms are better than channels
  8. Search is the dominant navigation paradigm
  9. The mechanisms of emergence should be encouraged
  10. Anyone can learn the new tools

So what would adherence to these principles lead me to do? I’d roll out as quickly as possible a single integrated suite of emergent social software platforms (ESSPs) to all employees of the company. This suite would include blogs, wikis (including collaborative document production tools like Google Docs), discussion boards, SNS, a microblogging tool like Twitter or Yammer, a tagging utility, prediction markets, ways to vote on good content (a la Digg) and ways to give praise or good karma to particularly helpful colleagues.

This is a really interesting article, especially as it gathers together a number of strands that have permeated McAfee’s work into one location. These are not necessarily IT priorities either — for many businesses, the KM team has taken or should take a lead in driving these technologies that connect people and their knowledge to each other. If you still need proof that the defensive approach has merit, the New York Times has drawn some interesting parallels between Detroit’s demands today and those of the British motor industry in the 1970s and 1980s. (Incidentally, if you want to explore how Austin, Morris, Rover (and Land Rover), Jaguar, MG, Riley and Triumph (and a host of others) went from market leading innovators in the motor industry to a set of brands and factories owned by a mixture of Chinese, Indian and other foreign investors, AROnline has the potential to consume vast amounts of your time.) And if you think that the motor industry suffers from unique problems, you need to check in with Bruce MacEwen .

So, following McAfee’s lead, perhaps we should imagine how KM can help to lead our businesses out of this crisis in collaboration with our colleagues. At least we should bring this article to the attention of the leaders. Otherwise, we need to use our knowledge to locate the lifebelts.

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