It’s full of physics, and light wave-particle duality, and art theory, and it’s exactly the kind of thing that a card-carrying geek like me saves to Instapaper to read on his Kindle on a Saturday Morning.  But as I was lying in my hammock in the Australian sunshine, reading it, one illustration really stuck out – It’s this one:

Believe it or not, "A" is the exact same color as "B"...

To find the exact reasons behind this mind boggling image, you’ll need to read Jason’s original post, But the thing that really got me thinking was that this was just more evidence of the way our brains are hard-wired to view things in context.

The shadow cast by the cylinder means something to us, and it affects the way we process the visual information contained in the rest of our image.  Even to the extent that we process the information completely wrong.

I suspect that this phenomenon affects a lot of our thinking, particularly when it comes to the way we  work. Being able to get the correct information isn’t enough — it needs to come within the context that we expect it to be in.

Most of today’s software applications present information in a manner that’s completely devoid of context. Email arrives indiscriminately — and without warning — in your inbox. If we’re lucky, we can follow the thread of conversation to get a little history behind each message, but it can’t help us fit these items into the overall picture of our project or our business.

Social tools like Facebook and Twitter display a constant stream of communication. Item follows item, each a discrete, disconnected chunk of information. The evolution of #hashtags, @replies and lists are community-driven efforts to redress this lack of context. They might help us keep up, but they don’t help us make sense of what’s going on.

Ultimately, the burden falls on us  to contextualize this information.  What’s relevant? What isn’t ? What’s related? What isn’t?

Information by itself isn’t enough.

Information + Social Connectivity isn’t enough.

What’s required for productivity is Information + Context.

Related posts:

1. Expanding your project context
2. Establish your project context

If you’re a knowledge worker, Mohammed’s morning ritual probably sounds familiar to you. Some of us are night owls, and prefer to do our email triage at night, and some of us, like Mohammed, tend to do it in the morning. Some of us might replace the coffee with tea, or the desktop computer with a handheld device, but the point is the same: to make sense of the mountain of information that arrives in our inboxes every day.

A mountain of email awaits poor Mohammed

You see, most of today’s businesses reverse the old proverb, “If Mohammed will not go to the mountain, the mountain will come to Mohammed.” Today, the mountain of information is brought to Mohammed by default. It arrives every morning, and Mohammed spends a good portion of every day dealing with the heap of information deposited in his inbox.

This is, of course, massively inefficient. Modern business moves mountains of information needlessly. Mohammed is a savvy knowledge worker of the 21st century. He is a motivated, educated individual. He knows how to seek and find the mountain when he needs it. He knows how to use search engines and feed readers. He is a zen master of web technology. Yet today’s business still dumps tons of information on him every day, unasked, and Mohammed must deal with it.

Mohammed files and flags his email. He sets tasks and reminders. He jots important information on paper and leaves yellow sticky notes everywhere. Then, and only then, is he ready to begin his day. He does this because the mountain gets in his way.

Mohammed could accomplish more if he could clear away the mountain faster. He could accomplish much more if the mountain were not brought to him in the first place. If Mohammed’s employer wanted to increase Mohammed’s productivity, he would find ways to prevent the mountain from falling on Mohammed each morning. Then Mohammed could focus on his primary tasks: gathering, analyzing, synthesizing and creating new knowledge.

The tools are available. Mohammed is able to visit the mountain. Mohammed is willing to go to the mountain. Stop bringing the mountain to Mohammed.

No related posts.

Venkatesh writes that while the technical challenges faced by enterprise search are daunting, they can be solved with enough engineering talent. He thinks the real reasons for failure lie in organizational behavior.

I desperately want him to be wrong about office politics undermining enterprise search, but I suspect he’s right. I’ve experienced it.

The situation

In a previous job, I served as a consultant deploying enterprise content management systems. The company was making a big push to get their software installed on every workstation. Getting the software onto more computers meant more employee licenses meant more money.

Most end users disliked the content management system. Putting stuff into the systems was time-consuming and difficult process. Unless managing corporate records or documents was your job, it competed with all the other work you had to do.

The enticement for registering material in the content management system was that it became searchable and sharable. That’s nice, but many employees had worked out some method of finding stuff on their own computers, however inefficient. And you can always share stuff by sending endless streams of email back and forth, however much people say they hate that. No, the real draw of enterprise search was being able to find other people’s stuff.

My job was to battle the adoption problem. You needed a large base of employees contributing material to build the network effects. You needed enough other people contributing their stuff to entice you to search and contribute your stuff. If you didn’t get a critical mass, the system wouldn’t work.

So you’d think that the software company I worked for would have invested massive amounts of time and effort in making the search and sharing features as attractive and usable as possible, right?

Wrong. The search and sharing features sucked.

It took me several years to figure out why.

Cross purposes

Although the more users = more licenses = more money equation seems simple enough, my old software company knew that the secret to sales was getting upper management to sign the check. And their reasons for paying for a system are quite different than employees’ reasons for using the system.

Usability failure.

At one company I worked with, the biggest champion of the content management system was the corporate counsel. She wanted all important records and documents collected in one system. This would bring the company into compliance with Sarbanes Oxley and a host of other government regulations. Public companies are required to keep records.

But public companies hate being sued. And they really hate the “discovery” process by which lawyers pick through corporate records looking for misdeeds. An ideal content management system, she explained, would be one where you could add records (as required by law) but never get them out again (to keep the company out of trouble).

At another company I worked for, a senior leader wanted more information about far-flung satellite offices. He had responsibility for service delivery and quality control, and wanted to monitor everything. His position and authority depended on him being “in the know”.

But it also depended on others not knowing the things he did, or being able to draw their own conclusions from his data. He particularly didn’t want these satellite offices coming up with their own ways of doing things, without help from headquarters and from him. An ideal content management system would vacuum data directly from all his service techs machines — ideally without their intervention — and piped directly to him for analysis. Only he or members of his staff were to have access to the information in the system after it had been entered.

For these check-signers and management champions, the fact that our enterprise search sucked was a feature, not a bug.

Cognitive Dissonance

Most organizations simply aren’t ready to adopt the radical transparency and decentralization that pervades the web, even if they accepted these things as worthwhile goals. Many wouldn’t think it necessary. And some will actively resist it.

The same features that engage knowledge workers may actually put off those in management. This inevitably leads to compromises in the design and implementation of enterprise search tools.

And if enterprise search isn’t comprehensive, a lot of what makes it compelling as a solution is lost. It becomes yet another repository that must be consulted and cross referenced, in addition to all the other partial solutions that already exist within the organization. It will add to the noise, rather than reduce it.

Venkatesh is surely right that if your organization’s culture is hostile to information sharing, or even ambivalent about it, your enterprise search initiative is likely to fail. You’ll be forced to make compromises that undermine the system. And there are plenty of consultants and software companies that will help you sabotage your effort. You’ll get a broken system, because on some unconscious level, that’s what your company wanted.

But if there’s a shred of hope, it’s this: Not all corporate cultures are hostile to information sharing. Some enterprises thrive on it. And politics and culture can be changed. It just isn’t as easy as buying and installing software.

Related posts:

1. Defining Enterprise 2.0 : Emergence
2. Why Enterprise 2.0 Will Fail
3. Paul Graham on Enterprise 2.0

The root of the debate is whether you feel it’s better to focus on organizational effectiveness or individual productivity. Oscar Berg highlights some influential articles from both sides and notes that there seems to be a bias toward personal efficiency in most of the arguments made to support Enterprise 2.0

I think he is right that there is a bias for personal efficiency. I think it’s a healthy one, though others disagree.

The two strategies

Every organization is composed of multiple functions. These are normally grouped into logical departments such as accounting, marketing, product development, and so forth. The proponents of organizational effectiveness ask the question, is there a better way to arrange these parts? Can we reduce the friction between these components?

Now, let's see... should marketing report to sales or...?

If you fall in this camp, you want to do things like improve interdepartmental communications, establish clear lines of authority and areas of responsibility, break apart organizational silos, ensure smooth hand-offs, and improve business processes.

Those that focus on knowledge worker productivity, on the other hand, focus on whether the parts themselves can be improved.

Adopting bright ideas to save time and effort.

If you fall in this camp, you’re concerned about knowledge sharing, expertise location, cultivating talent and skills, and making sure that individuals have the right information for making decisions and the right tools to take action.

Power to the people

Both approaches are valuable and necessary. Which one you prefer has much to do with where you sit within the organization, as this article on productivity points out. But there are good reasons why we should favor the personal productivity over organization effectiveness.

1. Web 2.0 technologies follow a user-centered approach. Applying Web 2.0 sensibility to organizational problems will require lots of customization and re-engineering. Applying those designs to knowledge workers is a much better fit.
2. Many employees are already familiar with the conventions of these social tools. They use them at home. You lower training costs by following those models as closely as possible.
3. User adoption has been a major stumbling block in most Enterprise 1.0 technology deployments. It makes sense to highlight the benefits to employees.
4. While there have been at least two or three different waves of enterprise products targeted at organizational effectiveness (ERP, portals/KM, BPM, CRM, etc.) the suite of office tools used by knowledge workers have changed very little since the early 90s. There’s simply more opportunity for improvement there.
5. Small changes applied across all knowledge workers can lead to dramatic gains. Just like in finance, productivity improvements yield compounding interest. If you can save a few extra minutes per day or per week, over time it can add up to something revolutionary.

For these reasons and others, I believe that companies pursuing Enterprise 2.0 should start — and think — small. What can we do to simplify, streamline or eliminate the tasks that prevent our knowledge workers from producing their best work? How can we provide support to small, agile, ad-hoc teams? 

For me, the defining characteristic of Enterprise 2.0 is that it is about the individual, not the organization. There would be no need for an Enterprise 2.0 approach if Enterprise 1.0 approaches had worked.

Instead of Enterprise 2.0, perhaps it should be Employee 2.0?

Related posts:

1. Why Enterprise 2.0 Will Fail
2. The Second Biggest Mistake of Enterprise 2.0
3. Two Kinds of Enterprise Software

Okay, so imagine you walk down to the local store and buy a lollipop, which you then proceed to happily lick all the way home. In this instance, you’re the purchaser and the consumer. You have a direct relationship with the company that makes the candy. You buy it, so you are funding their existence, and you eat it, so you are also the direct judge of the effectiveness or quality of their product.

This direct relationship is exactly what happens when people buy products for themselves. Per sale, the company has one customer, and that leads to the product being developed and grown with a linear relationship — feedback from customers is meaningful, and important. It’s this model which led to “The customer is always right” — after all, you’re not going to argue with your customers. If your latest Snozzberry flavored candy isn’t selling well, it’s safe to assume it’s because consumers are not fond of it. Hits and misses become immediately apparent.  An increase in purchases can be attributed  directly to an increase in satisfaction.

Me and My Shadow - Combined Purchaser and Customer

Sadly, the world isn’t often this simple. There are many situations when the consumer and the purchaser are different people. Let’s consider the scenario where your twelve-year-old daughter is trying to convince you that she really needs those designer sneakers.

In this instance, the consumer and the purchaser are different. You won’t be wearing the sneakers, so your criteria for purchase is likely to be much different from your daughter’s. As the purchaser, you’ll be looking at price, and value for money. You might be looking for things like good quality stitching, materials or the country of origin. Your daughter, on the other hand, doesn’t care about any of those things. She only cares that they are awesome and that her friends will be soooo jealous.

The sneaker company has a dilemma – to optimize the product for purchase by parents, or for its appeal to teenagers? An increase in sales may not actually indicate satisfied customers (as any kid who was forced to wear sensible school shoes can attest). Per sale, the sneaker company has two customers to keep happy here. And the criteria for success are different.

Split Personality - What if the purchaser isn't the consumer?

If push comes to shove, and the shoe company has to decide between a feature that delights a teenager or a requirement that satisfies her parents, we know which ones will appear in the final product. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

The other shoe drops

If the central tenet of Web 2.0 is, in Tim O’Reilly’s words, that “users add value,” a Web 2.0 company wants as many users as they can possibly attract. To build the largest audience for their Web 2.0 tools, these hot new companies developed a razor-sharp focus on the user experience. Every other imperative — including profitability — was secondary.

The wave of innovation that followed was all about design. Simple, attractive, usable and useful sites sprang up everywhere. Emergent, free-form sites that generated communities and empowered individual users.

All of this was possible because the customer was the user. Individuals could vote with their feet — or their wallet — for the solutions that worked for them.

When Web 2.0 software gets translated to the corporate environment, where the customer is not the user, you have to be extremely careful that the features that get cut aren’t the ones that employees were clamoring for in the first place. Did you sacrifice an intuitive user interface because it didn’t match the look and feel of your company’s intranet? Did you substitute free-flowing, spontaneous conversation for a lengthy edit-and-approve cycle? Whoops. You just forced your 2.0 employees back into a 1.0 solution.

It’s no wonder that most users in the enterprise are wearing uncomfortable, tight-fitting sensible shoes.

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