Sep 30
Sharepoint and Magic
In Singapore we’re surrounded by people who are struggling with dense jungles of Lotus Notes databases and Team Rooms which, because they were so easy to use, sucked up vast amounts of wonderful collaboration… but because they had very little governance or structure, grew like Topsy in all directions and eventually became too confusing to use. So they’re all migrating to a “simpler” document sharing solution in the form of Microsoft Sharepoint which, because it’s so easy to use, will… well you get the picture.
Sharepoint, by all accounts (I mean user accounts, not salespitch accounts) is a good collaboration platform, but it’s not naturally good at large scale enterprise document management. It doesn’t handle metadata, taxonomy management or search well for that kind of function – at least out of the box. If you work it pretty hard and add non-native functionalities, you can make it serve your knowledge organisation purposes. But you need to know what you want it to do beyond “get me out of my Lotus Notes jungle problem”.
The actKM forum has been discussing the idea of Sharepoint as a perceived “magic bullet” for some weeks now. In the midst of a generally good discussion came one of those occasional lucid, brilliant, succint, experience-based summaries you sometimes get on listserves and for which they are worth their weight in email. Mike Gardner of EDS wrote:
“From someone who has been very closely involved with SharePoint / MOSS over the last few years in terms of implementing it as an information repository for our company I can certainly talk about the tool and the related business requirements. SharePoint is like any other tool, implement it without thinking about what you are doing and you can end up in a bigger mess than you started with.
Many companies have looked at SharePoint as a useful collaboration tool and allowed their folk to use it that way. This can be appropriate, but you need to think of the potential consequences. This can easily result in everyone starting to create their own siloed repositories and want started out as a way to get folk to collaborate has resulted in thousands of little repositories with mountains of duplicated content, making finding what you need even more difficult than before. If you just want folk to have a collaboration area then SharePoint can be appropriate but you need to think what happens to the content in these collaboration areas. How does it get promoted in to the corporate information repositories (in whatever tool these are)? Do you simply allow collaboration sites to exist for a period of time and then delete them (and all their content)? – could be appropriate but are you losing the value of the content?
SharePoint can be used as an information management repository for the corporation and then this can be supported by using it as a collaboration environment as well (which is what we have done). However, this needs to be properly structured so that the “best” content can more easily be identified and found by search tools (be they out of the box SharePoint search or other search tools). It also needs some careful consideration of metadata management (column management, something SharePoint is currently very weak in).
By building (or buying) additional tools you can maintain consistent metadata across thousands of sites enabling very effective metadata search capabilities across millions of documents. You then have an information management repository solution that can be fairly simple for the users to use.
However, the tool needs to be supported by the right business processes to encourage folk to store and share their content (as well as to look to reuse content where it is already available). This may also mean looking at reward cultures and thinking about these (do you reward subject matter experts? if so, are you encouraging them to hoard their knowledge and not share it?) If people are not sharing, think about why not? Look for ways to encourage them. These may even be short term to get them in to the habit of sharing. Make sure the senior managers are exhibiting the right behaviours. All of the obvious KM type factors.
SharePoint can be a very effective tool, but it does need to be thought through.”
Nuff said. Thanks Mike for permission to quote here.
Sep 29
Ambiguity, Trust and Common Ground
There are some ideas that one just keeps circling back on. Once of those for me is the notion of common ground as a shared understanding among members of a team. Crandall, Klein and Hoffman describe the process of maintaining common ground as:
”...the continuous maintenance and repair of calibrated understanding among members of a team. It is necessary for coordination; otherwise, the team members can misinterpret intentions and messages.” (p.140)
Some months back I had a long conversation with Gary Klein about this topic in the context of team knowledge – the ability of a team to work effectively together. What struck me then was the importance of gaining a strong mutual familiarity among the members of the team, since this allows team members to form reasonably accurate expectations about how their fellows will react in different circumstances, even when they are not co-located, and in the absence of explicit communications about what they are doing.
Following on from that was Gary’s suggestion that common ground is always in the process of being broken down as individual team member circumstances and understandings change, and as they meet the limits of their mutual familiarity. This is why maintenance of common ground – essentially regular re-calibration of mutual understandings – is a critical team process. It can be as simple as regular meetings, habits of keeping each other informed, habits of checking one’s understanding and not making too many assumptions, or it can be as complex as having formal verification and validation mechanisms. This is important in the military, where the breakdown of common ground can lead to fatal friendly fire incidents.
Recently however I have been in a team situation where familiarity was not the issue but trust was, and it had some interesting effects on common ground – specifically, absence of trust accelerated the breakdown of common ground astronomically. In a nutshell, two of us in the team simply didn’t trust each other, though we are very familiar with each other. It started when one party stopped engaging in the small common ground maintenance activities. What happened then, I realised, was that whenever ambiguity arose about what the other party was doing, where in a trusted relationship we form our expectations based on assumptions of best efforts, in this case we were both imagining – and worse, communicating – our imagined worst suspicions.
Small ambiguities, and small lapses in common ground maintenance (like keeping each other informed of small steps) quickly got inflamed into conflicts, which further inhibited both of our motivations to engage in the common ground maintenance activities. In the end, it simply got to a point where one of us had to be very explicit about how and when actions and communications were to be conducted – less of a team effort and more of a reporting relationship.
It wasn’t pretty, and it was very uncomfortable (I am sure for all the team members including the reluctant observers to the fireworks show) for a few weeks, and I am not sure that the relationship is repairable, but at least we are functioning again. But it struck me how much for granted we take those small common ground maintenance activities, and how fragile we are as teams when trust is not there to carry us through the lapses and ambiguities. At one point in the conversation I mentioned earlier, Gary Klein remarked that he was sometimes surprised at how resilient teams are, given the ease with which common ground can be threatened. My uncomfortable adventure leads me to suspect that trust takes us a long way towards that resilience.
Sep 19
Wikilogical Warfare
A hilarious post from Seth Gottlieb on how to drive your colleagues to distraction with multiple uncontrolled edits of drafts in Word, and then off-handedly let them know it would have been much easier using a wiki. The serious point is “If you can’t eliminate the learning curve of a wiki, you can expose the inefficiency of collaborating without one.” Thanks again James!
Or you could just try this. (Original here, thanks to Mick for this lead).
Sep 18
Enterprise 2.0 is not Web 2.0
From Thomas Vander Wal the clearest statement yet of why Enterprise 2.0 is substantively different from Web 2.0. Some gems include:
- Web 2.0 is like building a tunnel through land – it can have defects and still work; Enterprise 2.0 is like a tunnel under water, failure tolerance levels are very low
- Adoption rates for Web 2.0 are low (5% of the internet population in the USA) and this will make executives nervous if translated to the enterprise
- “Build it and they will come” works on the web better than in the enterprise – Enterprise 2.0 needs change management effort
- “Web 2.0 does not work well in enterprise, but the approaches and understandings of Web 2.0 modified for enterprise work really well.”
Thanks James.
Sep 17
Stories, Spin and the Loss of Intellect
I was watching this advertisement for Adidas in the cinema the other day and reflected on how pervasive storytelling has become. Here’s an ad that says practically nothing about the product but is clearly aimed at re-personalising a brand. To do it, Adidas corporate needed to have recognised the power of narrative.
And then I thought a number of things (not sure they were what Adidas wanted me to think):
1. Storytelling is becoming more pervasively recognised in corporate culture, as a spectrum of folks from the pragmatic Anecdote guys all the way to Dr “Cure-All” Denning keep reminding us.
2. This is probably because the world is more complex and we (the audiences in the markets or the audiences in the companies) crave simpler frames for looking at this complexity – stories are extremely powerful ways of making complexity comprehensible while maintaining its richness
3. Over-enthusiasm for story can have bad effects – when it is allied with a distaste for thinking things through analytically and critically, story becomes less of a sensemaking device and more of a spin-device. Two weeks ago I visited the House of Terror in Budapest, the former secret police headquarters where thousands of Hungarians were tortured and killed by both Nazis and Soviet-advised Communists. The building is full of the stories of survivors reflected from every wall on video screens (it was one of the most depressing afternoons of my life). But behind all of those stories and of the half-century of social apparatus they reflected were the bigger spin stories of Fascism and Communism, stories that subverted reason, diversity and even the right to think.
4. We may not have such a proliferation of vicious, simplistic regimes to deal with now (though they are still around, and they are still capable of flourishing again), but we have the same intellectual laziness in our societies and our organisations, the same willingness to relax and switch off our minds for a good tale. In a newscast from the Republican convention the other week, I saw one delegate rave about Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin: “She spoke to us in simple words we could understand” in an obvious jab at the “intellectual” Barack Obama. Clarity of communication is wonderful, but wanting to be spoonfed easy messages that fit a cartoon-character story is dangerous.
And then the movie started.
Sep 16
Eliciting Stories by Telling Stories
A nice tip from Shawn at Anecdote about how to elicit stories when the “tell us a story about…” question doesn’t work:
“When I see my teenage daughter after school I would often ask how her day went, whether anything interesting happened at school, and the standard response is often monosyllabic: yep, nup. In fact the more questions I’d ask the shorter the answers. So I changed tack and rather than ask questions I simply recounted something that happened in my day. I would launch into something like, “I met a bearded lady today. This morning I drove down to Fitzroy to run an anecdote circle for …” and immediately my daughter would respond with an encounter from her day. A conversation starts and it’s delightful.”
Of course if you’re doing an anecdote circle to discover something about how a group thinks, you’ll have to be careful about not priming the group to tell the stories you want to hear. But I like this idea of using narrative to stimulate narrative.
Sep 15
Double Oh Dear
Courtesy of Luke “Dubai” Naismith. The original mashup here.
Sep 15
Dilbert Reads Green Chameleon
I got there first! Original here.
Sep 13
Connect, Contribute, Develop
Tony Burgess of Company Command fame made a very striking contribution on the Comprac listserve the other day, which I’m quoting here with his permission. As I read it, he’s talking at least in part about Wenger’s idea of personal trajectories of deepening involvement with a community of practice (moving from periphery to active participation). He suggests there are three main dimensions of involvement in a community:
”(1) Connection: As a result of this experience I am becoming connected to like-hearted leaders who I value. This is about relationship.
(2) Contribution: I am able to give back and make a difference—to contribute my unique experience and talent to something greater than self. I am making a positive difference for people and a collective that I value.
(3) Personal Development: As a result of this experience, I am personally developing and becoming more effective as a leader and a person than I would otherwise be. I am being exposed to people and experiences that change me. I’m learning.”
I’ve been doing some work recently on the value exchanges that take place in and around communities, and also on evaluating the different kinds of value that are created – for the host organisation, for the community as a whole, and for the people who become involved and participate in them. It seems to me that this last “value proposition” for want of a better phrase is the foundation for all the rest, and Tony’s summary of the progression from connecting to contributing to developing is a wonderfully clear way of expressing how the relationship builds.
This is not to say that it’s a mechanical step by step progression: first you connect, then you contribute, then you develop – for example, it’s hard to connect in a community without contributing, and personal development can motivate participation in a community from the start. But in terms of principal focus it’s spot on. When you first join, it’s hard to contribute in context, in a way that is tuned to the current conversations the community is having. You need to figure out who’s who, something of the history and context, and establish some preliminary working relationships before you can contribute with any great consistency and depth. And contribution at consistency and depth is hard to sustain if you’re not getting feedback and learning and development from the experience.
For more on this, read Tony’s paper (you will need to join the comprac group, but hey, that’s not going to do you any harm).
Sep 09
Ambient Awareness
Here’s a very interesting IHT article about the impact of social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter (thanks to my friend Michael Riggs via Facebook). Users of these tools develop “ambient awareness” of people to whom they are connected, whether strongly or weakly. So for instance I’m connected via Facebook to Bob who graduated from high school with me 20 years ago. We haven’t met since, but through his daily updates I now get a very good sense of his loathes and loves. Multiply this by many other connections and you get this “ambient awareness” of your entire network.
