Infovark

Jeremy Thomas, over on Social Glass, asks if “Enterprise 2.0 is only relevant to doers“:

“…Management spends most of its time in meetings reporting progress and being appraised of new initiatives. Does Management really have time to make sense of all of the blog posts, wiki pages and social bookmarks in their Enterprise 2.0 Solution? I’m not sure they do…”

It’s an interesting question. In my last job, my two bosses would sit me down once a week to give them a brain dump of the ten or so different projects I was working on. They’d furiously take notes about what was under control and what was on fire so that they could report up the management chain, respond to clients, and focus my efforts.

There were two problems with this weekly ritual. One was that I was often so engrossed in in whatever I was working on on Friday that I’d forget the stuff I’d done on Monday. For fast-moving projects, they could schedule additional mid-week meetings, but that raised the second problem: The time I spent discussing status was time that couldn’t be spent on getting work done.

It’s a tricky balancing act. Much of the art of management is calibrating the frequency of status reports. Monitor too closely, and nothing gets done. Monitor too infrequently, and you miss out on important information.

A lot of this E20 stuff is about transparency — improving employee awareness within the organization. Better visibility helps managers too — perhaps more than the average employee — but they’ll need a different set of tools to search and filter social content than “doers” will. The knowledge worker needs to find content so that they can do their work. A manager of knowledge workers needs to find out about the status of that work so they can measure progress and productivity.

Managing people becomes a lot less complicated when you don’t have to constantly pester your staff to see what they are up to. Since Enterprise 2.0 encourages transparency and visibility, there’s more ways for management to find out what’s going on. Workers can spend more time working and less time on TPS reports, which increases productivity. Managers gain a more accurate picture of project status, which increases accountability and leads to better decisions.

The challenge is that managers have more data to monitor and measure, and frankly, the tools just aren’t there yet. (Though we’re working on it.) In the long run, I think management might have more to gain than the people actually doing the work.

Here’s an elegant restatement of the battleship gray syndrome in pen and ink, provided by It’s Just a Bunch of Stuff That Happens.

Found via ReadWriteWeb.

I just stumbled across a study today from MIT that reports that it pays to be an information hub. Knowledge workers that take active part in a connected network were more productive than their less connected colleagues.

…A diverse network of contacts is associated with higher productivity.
While employees who constituted hubs in the firm’s information flow — in other words, people who were in the center of more e-mail flows — were more productive, those less-connected to the network suffered in productivity, on average. “The most productive people were the ones who were the information hubs,” Brynjolfsson noted. “We found that this reflected their ability to learn novel information more rapidly than their colleagues…

You can read a summary or download the complete PDF abstract here.

The study used e-mail networks to determine an individual workers level of “connectedness”.

This is one of those pieces of research that leaves me thinking about causality and commonality. The two are frequently confused and misinterpreted. Are people more productive because they are better connected? Or are they better connected because they are more productive?

The other interesting piece of information I gleaned from Professor Brynjolfsson’s conclusion was that better connected employees often had more tasks to do, and subsequently proved to be more adept at multitasking. Could this indicate that there is a relationship between task diversity and productivity?

Personally, I certainly feel like I am more effective at solving problems when I have more things going on… Perhaps the innate ability of the brain to recognize patterns allows for more creative and productive thought when confronted with more detail, more variables and more related information.

Maybe easily consumable, relevant, social information streams could enable productivity.

(Hey, that’s pretty much what Twitter is… can someone do that study so I can read it too?)

Just because, Here’s my wish-list for Enterprise 2.0 solutions:

1. Openness

Early enterprise solutions focused on the best way to secure information from prying eyes, but I think it’s time that systems took a more trusting attitude to governance. After all, people are willing to share their personal information voluntarily with the world via MySpace and Facebook. Shouldn’t you be able to trust the people that you work with more than random Internet surfers?

Information Hoarders inhibit the scalability of organizations. The disconnected silos of information they build represent knowledge that the organization can’t exploit. We need to discourage this practice.

2. Connectedness

Older solutions focused on individual computer independence, as if everyone worked in a vacuum. Contributing to the enterprise repository is akin to dropping a letter in the mail chute. The prevalence of data mining and business analysis tools comes from our existing solutions’ data being hard to interpret and largely disconnected from us. The divide between the people and their content leads to an organization where silence can thrive. New solutions should presume two way connections — and not just between content and people, but between colleagues and between concepts and content. After all, nobody actually wants to plug computers together. It’s the knowledge exchange that counts, right?

3. Emergence

Enterprise software is frequently forced upon knowledge workers. That’s why consultants tend to spend so much time talking about “adoption” and “change management” and training plans. That’s why phrases like “project champion” and “senior-level sponsor” get thrown around during the implementation phase. Corporateware is designed to be force-fed to employees by some “thou shalt” memo handed down by the boss and implemented in the back office by the IT team.

Instead, we need to build software that can grow organically within an organization, one user at a time. That means it needs to deliver benefits to individuals and small teams at the outset, and not just the organization as a whole once the solution is fully deployed. People should want to use their enterprise software.

4. Adaptability

To paraphrase Tim O’Reilly, Web 2.0 in three words goes something like this: “Users Add Value”.

This is true for any computer application, enterprise software included. It would be nice if our systems reflected that fact. The data in them needs to be able to be reused — and not by some SOA process architect, but by the end users themselves. Content should be able to be easily re-purposed, re-evaluated and shared.

5. Personalization

Traditional enterprise solutions haven’t been about the individual — they’ve been about the role that the individual was performing. People are different; they have feelings. It would be nice if Enterprise Software could allow their users’ personal preferences to be reflected, and broadcast to their peers — promoting better engagement, and community.

6. Community

Treating a user as a mere box in an org chart forgoes the notion that work is fundamentally a social activity. Improving relations between people is a key aspect of ensuring a smooth-running enterprise. This social-ness is at the core of what we do. We aren’t fleshy work-robots. How come our enterprise software seems to treat us like we are?

7. Reckless Capture

Previously, entering information into a computer was a formal activity. It was parsed, validated, organized and systematized. But Enterprise 2.0 solutions deemphasize structured data entry in favor of capturing loose collections of stuff on the off-chance that it will be useful. As storage becomes cheaper and more readily available, and as search techniques improve, the idea that humans need to scrub and condense data until it’s fit for machine consumption will go out of fashion. The Google index is filled with pages that no data technician ever entered and no analyst has ever seen.

Sometimes a golden needle hides in the haystack of unfiltered, unvetted information. Each enterprise should be comfortable with its own long tail.