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Reinventing the modern workplace
If all an organism needs to do is keep breathing and keep the heart beating, it doesn’t need a brain. Those functions are performed by the brain stem. They’re done autonomously, at a level below consciousness. The conscious brain is needed to manage environmental change.
Organizations function the same way. Most senior managers could step out of the office for an entire week without any detrimental effects, as long as the operations team kept rest of the company ticking. But when a company needs to react to a new competitor, a disrupted supply chain, or changing customer needs, it needs to use its brain. It needs to manage that change.
Change Management is not an implementation problem. Change Management is THE problem.
Puneet Gupta over at ConnectBeam has an interesting post about the Enterprise Knowledge market. He references an intriguing study from McKinsey:
…An individual’s knowledge is self-contained, always available. But in companies—including small ones—it can be hard to exploit the valuable knowledge in the heads of even a few hundred employees, particularly if they are scattered in different locations…
Knowledge Management as a technology discipline is one that I’ve never really been comfortable with. And it’s really only been since I started working on Infovark that I realized why — because using your computer for knowledge is like trying to get your pocket calculator to write you a love song.
Computer’s can’t actually know anything.
To your computer, that brilliantly composed document you just wrote is a bunch of bits on a disk. They are no different to the bits that make up the pictures of your cat or your operating system.
The real knowledge in your enterprise is in your colleagues’ brains. There may be a great deal of information lying around the place too, but that isn’t knowledge.
Let’s look at Twitter. Somewhere, Twitter is a collection of servers siting in a dark server room. Those computers are managing lots of bits on lots of disks. The only thing that Twitter really “knows” is how to connect blobs of data that represent people to the blobs of data that represent tweets.
So Twitter is certainly not a knowledge management system — there’s no managing of anything going on. And yet Twitter is an immensely powerful knowledge catalyst. Huge volumes of information are exchanged every minute. I learn something nearly every day by using Twitter, not because Twitter itself has much to say, but because my twitterfriends are so interesting.
Knowledge, in the Oxford English sense of “expertise gained through experience or study”, can’t be effectively stored, retained, or disposed of. It can’t be centralized or codified easily. Most attempts at knowledge management to date amount to little more than information collection and storage.
This “build a giant library of things we know” approach is a lousy way to transmit knowledge from one person to another. And distributing knowledge is the only sure way of making sure that your organization will retain it. The reason that this “social revolution” is sweeping the enterprise is that by connecting people with better communication and collaboration tools, we facilitate the exchange of information and increase the opportunity to learn.
Most people learn more things from each other than from reading a procedure manual or browsing the corporate library. They learn through on-the-job training and through discussion with their colleagues.
Let’s leave the technology to manage the bits — knowledge is for humans.
Software vendors, ourselves included, love to talk about productivity. On that note…
Productivity can be roughly defined as: Output per unit of input: a measure of efficiency.
Perhaps the only reason to buy any piece of business software is to increase this ratio. “You can do more with what you already have!”. “Think smarter, not harder!”. These are the silver bullets that enterprise software has been touting since its inception. But as the world shifts more and more towards knowledge-based work — work that often involves abstract concepts and ‘ideation’, how can we effectively measure it?
As Jon Husband pointed out on the FASTForward blog, productivity as we know it had its genesis with the Scientific Management of F.W. Taylor at the turn of the 20th century. Right at the heart of the industrial revolution, the ratio of inputs to outputs was a very measurable thing. An automobile factory had discrete, tangible output: a car. The number of cars produced per employee was a measure of the factory’s productivity.
Modern knowledge workers, on the other hand, don’t have such clear and measurable outputs. I was speaking to a friend who works for a consulting firm here in DC, and she was saying that her deliverables were status reports. Quarterly status reports, written by her, based on the services provided in the quarter. Now obviously, Paula isn’t more efficient if she produces twice as many status reports. The traditional manufacturing approach to management doesn’t work here.
Instead, Paula’s employer gauges her efficiency by evaluating the content of those status reports and by surveying her customers to find out how well she is doing. These measures are extremely subjective, and as a result are prone to errors, bias, or manipulation. (Not that any of these things actually happen, of course. We’re speaking hypothetically.)
Enterprise 2.0 claims to improve efficiency by increasing social productivity. The theory is that by making more information available to more people, and allowing them to connect with each other easily, we can collectively get more done. But does this claim hold true? I’m seeing more and more posts from good folks who can’t deal with the overload of this new social graph. The time spent keeping track of all the communications from all of your contacts might actually make you less productive.
There’s no doubt that a more aware and better connected knowledge worker has the potential to be a more productive one. But the social dimension is only one part of the Enterprise 2.0 equation. In a business context, making connections and managing relationships is a means, not an end.
This is the Big Difference between Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. Enterprise 2.0 needs to deliver measurable value – not just get a bunch of people together to click on advertisements.
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.
Joel Spolsky posted an hilarious rant about storage in the cloud. You should read it. I’ll wait.
Joel is upset because the software industry heavyweights are chasing the dream. You know the dream. It’s the dream of every management consultant, technophile and (in Joel’s words) architecture astronaut. The dream comes in many different guises. In various times, in various places, the dream has lured many to destruction — or at least to waste gobs of money and years of effort.
I call it One System to Rule Them All.
It’s the utopian idea that with enough effort you can craft an all-encompassing solution for a vast array of problems using a single, perfect framework. This year’s flavor of the dream happens to be storage in the cloud, or perhaps the belief that click-based advertising can fund everything. A few years ago, solid, respectable banking types had subscribed to the dream of the New Economy. A real estate agent once assured me that house prises in Northern Virginia never fell.
Well, never say never.
Godel’s incompleteness theorem says that all but the simplest mathematical systems will fail internal consistency tests. Most grand theories contain the seeds of their own destruction.
Most organizations of significant size will have hybrid system architectures. No single office suite, operating platform, or synchronized filing system can accomplish everything. One size doesn’t fit all, nor should it. Vive la différence.