Infovark

One of the recurring themes at E2.0 Last week was the notion of Generational Adoption. It’s the idea that Baby Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y all had an innate relationship with various ways of working, and that these different work habits are a major factor in the adoption of new technology. Jay Hariani at the e2.oh blog has a nice wrap up of the generational adoption meme. Since then, Ross Mayfield, Jeff Nolan, and Larry Dignan have all chimed in, with various cases for and against.

I was lucky enough to share a drink last week with with Rob Salkowitz, Author of Generation Blend: Managing Across the Technology Age Gap, who was presenting at the E2.0 conference. I haven’t read Rob’s book yet, but In the wake of our conversation, I am definitely going to check it out. (Venkat’s Review over on RibbonFarm is also a good read).

The Millenials Are Coming is the new Y2K Bug

I have big problems with using the generational argument to drive adoption of Enterprise 2.0. It feels like another vendor-inspired bogeyman designed to convince companies to buy heaps of software they don’t need. (Install our compliance software or Sarbanes-Oxley will get you!)

The notion that the millennials are going to “demand” some kind of “Facebook” to do their work is just plain rubbish. Think about when you joined the workforce. What exactly did you demand?

When I first left school for the workforce, I wasn’t in a position to demand anything. It took me five years of working within the system before I realized which parts were broken. And it was only because I’d put in the time working within the system that I was trusted to actually influence things a bit.

Generational change happens gradually. There’s not going to be some giant “MySpace Revolution” where “The Kids” take over with their externally hosted collaborative tools. Instead, these people will join the workplace as wide-eyed and impressionable new starters, and they’ll do their best to work within the framework that they are given with the tools that are allocated to them. Then, slowly, their own ideas will become part of the way people work, including their favorite tools and technologies.

Sure, the generational issue is interesting from an anthropological perspective. It’s indicative of a lot of things, most notably progress in society. But as a call to arms for business to rush out and spend cash on some new-fangled social media tool for your enterprise, it leaves a lot to be desired.

(But hey, what would I know. I’m just a disgruntled Gen X’er who has no respect for authority, right?)

We arrived here in Boston tired, and pretty scruffy looking after the red-eye train from DC. But, we made it!

We just missed an interesting sounding opening presentation from Rob Carter from FedEx - it looks like FedEx are making extensive use of the web, facebook and blogs and wikis both within and external to their organization.

Sean Dennehy and Don Burke then presented a great seession on their work at the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA’s knowledge sharing ability has been greatly enhanced since they deployed their “intellipedia” - a mediawiki implementation that allows CIA staff to edit and share information freely, and without editorial regulation.

My favourite quote from Sean - “Wikis don’t work in theory - they only work in practice”

Other than removing the ability to make anonymous edits, not much was changed by the CIA when they launched intellipedia, last year.  They claim also to have a much higher contribution rate (Wikipedia has a markedly low percentage of users who actually edit it - often guessed at about 1-3%) - but they are still working with the early adopters - intellipedia hasn’t been wholly rolled out to the entire organization.

“A culture problem - not a technology problem”

Don mentioned that there was substantial resistance to their efforts to incorporate this crazy wiki thing into their business. Primary benefit comes from working at the broadest audience possible. The wiki approach also focuses more on topic than on organizational structure - it means that the point tends to be on content, rather than process. That’s a really good thing.

” But - I don’t have time to edit this intellipedia thing”

Don and Sean seem adamant that the best way to deal with this kind of response is for people to stop writing emails and documents, and start writing intellipedia articles instead. (I suspect that that’s going to be a friction point for them. People don’t like new ideas very much. )

All in all, this was a great session - intellipedia seems set to be a great success.

As long as I’m picking on Microsoft for releasing developer tools before they’re fully baked — a cornerstone of Microsoft strategy, according to Joel Spolsky — I might as well take a swipe at their laughable not-quite-a-wiki.

At the bottom of most pages on MSDN is a section called “Community Content”. It’s the Microsoft’s way of encouraging participation from the developer community. Ever since Steve Ballmer skipped onstage chanting developers, developers, developers, developers, Microsoft has tried to recapture the attention — and most importantly, the talent — of the independent developer community. Most of those developers have long since fled to other platforms. Most of these alternatives are open source, meaning that they’ll accept contributions from any programmer with a good suggestion.

This is important, because before most good programmers get their first job, they’ll begin contributing to open source projects. It’s a way to gain experience and confidence, while helping to build their resume. Once they enter the working world, they’re likely to stick with the open source technologies they know. Microsoft is painfully aware of this, and not quite sure what to do about it.

Hence the Community Contribution section on MSDN and Microsoft’s recent open source initiatives. It’s their attempt to bring back the magic and infuse their technologies with teh awsum. While they’ve done a great job with CodePlex, and there’s a healthy Microsoft blogging community of consultants, partners, and independent developers, Microsoft suffers many of the same difficulties switching to an Enterprise 2.0 mindset as other large corporations.

So, you’re a developer, and you’ve found an oddity — possibly a bug, definitely a surprise — in one of the .NET framework’s gazillion objects. Naturally, after exhausting all other avenues for help, you found yourself (shudder) actually reading the documentation on MSDN. Unsurprisingly, it makes no mention of the quirk. You think to yourself, hey, maybe I’ll leave a note using this Community Content thingy. So you click the “Add new content” link and see the following screen.

How many problems did you spot? OK, the image is a little small. I’ll enlarge and highlight a few things.

First, if you’re trying to encourage participation, never, ever, say that this is “not the right place”. If someone wants to make your website better by adding detail, let them. If it turns out that the contribution is not relevant, you can always edit, move or moderate it later. And if you must point out that another forum or communications channel is more appropriate, at least be so good as to provide a hyperlink to it. This is the web, after all.

Second, don’t scare your users with legal threats. They won’t work. The nice users won’t contribute to your site out of fear, and the obnoxious jerks will post whatever they want anyway. It’s self-defeating.

And did you spot the third, final problem? This one’s tricky.

There it is: I’m already signed in to MSDN. They know who I am. I’ve agreed to their terms and conditions once already. They can ban me from the site if I don’t behave. Or they can leave my inappropriate post right where it is, so that everyone will know what an obnoxious jerk I can be. This entire page is nothing but a waste of time.

I could have said something incredibly useful. But hey, I’ve got important things to do. I don’t have time to read through another Microsoft EULA, thanks. Instead I’ll just get back to work.

When I was starting out as a Software Project Manager, A Zen Master taught me something that I never forgot. It happened when I was complaining about the lack of process behind the development team that I had just inherited.

I was younger then, and was frantically trying to introduce more structure to the way that my team shipped software. I could see a lot of the reasons for the product delays and the quality assurance failures. I just wanted to help. I had policy documents, and process plans, and Gant Charts. Lots of Gant Charts. But every effort I made to modify the process was met with stony resistance. In conversation, people could see that I was making sense. They would agree that yes, things were broken, and they probably shouldn’t be.

And yet I couldn’t get them to change anything. That was when the Zen Master appeared:

Me: “Grrrr! These guys are just making it up as they go! Everybody is just sitting around waiting for the developers to be finished. No wonder everything is so crappy and full of bugs. There is no structure or process here! ”

Zen Master: “You are wrong. There is structure.”

Me: “???”

Zen Master: “Structure comes in two states: implicit or explicit. You are complaining because there is no defined structure. Particularly no structure that has been defined by you.”

As is so often the case in fantasy Zen Stories, the master was right!

There was plenty of structure to the way people worked. It had grown organically based on the way that people wanted to work. It was hard to describe, and it was optimized more for individual happiness than for productivity, but it was there.

It dawned on me then that the best way to effect change was to embrace the practices that were implicit.

This kind of thinking led to Agile Practices. It led to Extreme Programming.

And it is the central premise behind Enterprise 2.0 or Social Productivity software. Harnessing the implicit structure of an organization can be the best way to improve it. People are innately social. They like to talk. They like to discuss things. They like to achieve things. They like to share. They like to boast.

It turns out the easiest way to get things done is to optimize the way people innately tend to do them.

Incidentally, If your PM is complaining about a lack of processes, it means that she can’t effectively bring about the cultural change that is required. You should either give her more authority, or hire a new PM. Or you could see if you can rustle up a Zen master to change her mind.