Contribution and Discovery
Pie has a great post musing about the origins and ultimate purpose for Enterprise 2.0. I’ve been thinking about it myself. And as we get closer to getting ready to ship, I think I might be feeling brave enough to try to field an answer to this question…
Previous enterprise solutions tried to solve the problem at a high level. Enterprise 1.0 was defined by expensive, broadly defined solutions whose use was mandated by the top of the org chart. I’m certain that this approach fails because it doesn’t take into account the actual problems of the average knowledge worker.
I think that’s why we have Enterprise 2.0.
Structural holes and the spaces between them are fascinating, but they amount to little more than an academic distraction. I have a lot of respect for folks like Mark and Bex because they are both brilliant thinkers. But somehow I can’t imagine them sitting down with Lisa from Accounting to explain how “the holes between non-redundant contacts provide you with opportunities that can enhance the control benefits and the information benefits of your network!”
Well of course not. Those kinds of things aren’t important to people doing the work. They’re interesting to Enterprise Architects. My point is that we’re drifting far, far away from the actual problems here. We’re back in the same sort of abstract thinking that led to 1.0 solutions. Enterprises are made of people.
The way I see it, as far as ‘knowledge’ is concerned, there are only really two important things to your average information worker: discovery and contribution.
Discovery
Discovery is just that — knowing what you didn’t know before. Common workplace discovery problems are things like “Who knows about this vendor/partner/account?” or “Who was the guy we talked to about that thing?” Enterprise 1.0 tried to address this by mandating a central repository and hierarchical classification system. It forced employees to tell some computer system what they knew and how they knew it. Only after a lot of manual data entry would the system be able to tell them something in return.
This approach failed because knowledge workers couldn’t be bothered. There was too much up-front work to make the search results useful. Without useful search results, nobody wanted to use the system. It was a classic chicken-and-egg problem. Instead, knowledge workers would just ask someone who knew rather than working with a difficult computer and move on. You simply can’t turn your workforce into programmers, historians or archivists. There’s work to be done.
Google changed our way of thinking about discovery. It’s not a filing problem any more. It’s an indexing problem. The problem isn’t that content has been put on the wrong shelf — the problem is the shelves themselves. Digital information doesn’t occupy space and it can be duplicated with perfect fidelity. The strategies for managing a physical library are different than managing a virtual one. Web 2.0 taught us that reckless capture and rigorous indexing can solve discovery problems with much more success.
Contribution
Contribution problems precede discovery problems. How do people add what they know to the organization’s collective memory? How do they get credit for their work? Most knowledge workers are altruistic, but they both want the organization to benefit from their contribution and to recognize their effort.
When I was working in ECM, I used to joke about the “seven-second window.” That’s the period of time between a user finishing a piece of work and moving on to the next task. That window is the length of time users will devote to figuring out where to put content and how to share it. Do I send an email? What folder on the share drive do I use? If you can’t capture the necessary metadata within that seven seconds of “Hmmm. Where should I put this?” then you lose. The system won’t work. People are too busy.
I’m not sure that Enterprise 2.0 has really woken up to the importance of “Contribution Engines”. I define a contribution engine as a tool that automatically captures an employee’s output, indexes it for later retrieval, and shares it with others in the group. Sam Lawrence is looking for a contribution engine when he talks about Attention. But solving the contribution problem is huge. If we could find a way to allow people to contribute to knowledge bases just by doing what they do, then we have the “2.0″ — a solution that’s perfectly aligned with the goals of the individual worker.
Automatic contribution. Instant discovery. Those things will make enterprises work better, because they make people work better.
And I think “working better” is the real point.
Pie said,
Wrote on July 22, 2008 @ 5:11 pm
Great thoughts. While I agree that the Structural Holes thing is a little academic for many users, if it helps us define the “Why”, then we can put it in a form that Lisa in Accounting can understand. If we are unable to do that, then we don’t understand what we are saying fully.
I’m not saying that is the Why. Still pondering some more.
-Pie
Library clips :: Knowledge and its facilitators :: July :: 2008 said,
Wrote on July 23, 2008 @ 6:59 pm
[...] 24/07/08: Contribution and Discovery] Listen Print Email Bookmark Related Forum Chat Track View blog reactions [...]
John Tropea said,
Wrote on July 23, 2008 @ 7:08 pm
Cool post.
I simply think blogs allow you to write how you talk, the blogosphere is like conversations we have in real life…casual and informal sometimes…and we may have those conversations with people with have lots in common with…or people we just met, so we may form a relationship (which may lead to collaboration).
KM 1.0 didn’t do any of this…it just wasn’t humanistic, it wasn’t tuned to how people work…and plus no-one wants to be told what to do…if people feel engaged they will participate.
Since unstructured content in emails is do juicy and tacit (full of know-how) the idea is to try and get these conversations to happen on the web and in blogs…and the rest happens.
I’ve been thinking about this myself lately:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/LibraryClips/~3/342671032/
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/LibraryClips/~3/341678832/
Knowledge Management is Marching Along « Word of Pie said,
Wrote on July 24, 2008 @ 9:33 pm
[...] Server 2007 Overview and DemoPie on Mark Lewis at the 2008 EMC Federal Government ForumContribution and Discovery « Infovark on Enterprise 2.0, What, Why, and Knowledge ManagementChris Campbell on Mark Lewis at the 2008 [...]
bex said,
Wrote on July 25, 2008 @ 4:29 pm
SharePoint does seem to be going in the direction of an “attention engine.” Don’t save locally, save in SharePoint! But that just brings up another problem: bandwidth.
If doing what I do normally is an auto-contribution to my knowledge management system, then how do you solve the bandwidth problem between your workstation and the data center?
They are nowhere near to solving the “discovery” problem, tho… SharePoint is like having baby black holes throughout your enterprise…
Dean said,
Wrote on July 27, 2008 @ 12:02 pm
Hey Bex! Why would we need to move anything to the data center? Our prescription for ending the paper shuffle is creating an indexed knowledge base on your own workstation.
If I want something that Gordon’s working on, it’s much easier for me to find it on his machine than on a central server someplace. Especially one like SharePoint, where it’s been classified according to some taxonomy that neither Gordon nor I understand.
Mark Masterson said,
Wrote on August 6, 2008 @ 1:29 am
Heh. I think that may well be one of the most backhanded compliments I’ve ever received — thx.
My more recent post on mashing up BPM and SNS may well prompt you to come hunt me down and kill me! (But, in which case, I would suggest indicates that you’re misunderstanding me…)
I agree that talking about the naked beauty of structural holes to “normal” people is a waste of time. You’d be surprised (or maybe not) by how many people passionately interested in social software can’t even be bothered understanding stuff like that — I tried talking to Sam about it in Boston, briefly, and he fell into a coma.
But I also think you’re missing the point, a bit. End-users aren’t the audience for structural hole theory (or any other theory) — the people building social software (and the people charged with putting it in the right place in the enterprise) are. I would argue that knowing such things is not only useful, to such people, it’s necessary — otherwise, they’re running blind.
But apart from all that — the whole assertion that there is no “contribution engine” yet puzzles me a bit. Assuming your tags were never more than, say, two clicks away (as del.icio.us is for me in Firefox, with the plugin), in what way is that not sufficient? Why “put” that document anywhere? The whole point of the Web (and REST) is — leave that resource where it bloody is. Link to it. Which (conceptually) you can do, if, rather than thinking in terms of “storing” documents, you start to think in terms of “tagging” them. And it is most definitely possible to enable (rich, meaningful) tagging within the “seven second window”. Methinks.
Gordon said,
Wrote on August 6, 2008 @ 9:57 am
Hey Mark!
Haha - on the contrary, having been an active participant in “the great BPM lie”, I think your latest post is brilliant! - I completely agree.
Back to my post - I think you’re also right - If everything is in the cloud, tagging fits very nicely within the seven second window.
By a contribution engine, I’m talking about the “Dark Matter”. There is still an awful lot of content in the enterprise that is not visible - not REST exposed. A lot of this content isn’t taggable because it’s the byproduct of personal communication in direct channels - like email - and it’s business artifacts like documents and reports that people want to retain inside the organization.
Daria said,
Wrote on August 13, 2008 @ 9:02 am
Gordon,
I think the problems you are referring to can be united under one name – ease of use. Enterprise 1.0 software is complex and does not provide people with absolute freedom to contribute their knowledge to some common repository. Enterprise 2.0 tools eliminate this problem, making it easier for knowledge workers to share information and collaborate. That’s why these tools are often adopted from the bottom up
Library clips :: 7 seconds to knowledge share :: August :: 2008 said,
Wrote on August 19, 2008 @ 6:12 pm
[...] Gordon from Inforvark has a piece on why KM didn’t work, due to it’s non-humanistic processes: [...]
Library clips :: The ubiquity of social tools in context of workflows :: September :: 2008 said,
Wrote on September 25, 2008 @ 7:00 pm
[...] Not long ago I wrote a post called “7 seconds to knowledge share” based on a post at Infovark. [...]
Contribution Engines « Infovark said,
Wrote on October 5, 2008 @ 10:36 am
[...] Masterton left a great comment on my post about contribution and discovery. It’s prompted me to think some more about contribution [...]