October 2007

Direct from an anagram generator Dion Hinchcliffe has been using to describe in The State of Enterprise 2.0 the characteristics of the brave new world of (wired) work that the Web is enabling and supporting ..

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As I read across the components of the new acronym, I keep seeing the components of wirearchy.  I am blinded by my own lens, in this case.

It’s a well-written article that pulls together some of the experience and knowledge about how knowledge work is being affected by hyperlinks, widgets, plug-ins, RSS … all the components of the framework we are coming to call social computing.  Dion tells us (going through this list reminds of being in conversation in a pub with a bunch of the other people who are interested in this subject area that I have gotten to know through blogging over the past five ears …) that …

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Lesson #1:     Enterprise 2.0 is going to happen in your organization with you or without you.

Lesson #2:     Effective Enterprise 2.0 seems to involve more than just blogs and wikis.

Lesson #3:     Enterprise 2.0 is more a state of mind than a product you can purchase.

Lesson #4:     Most businesses still need to educate their workers on the techniques and best practices of Enterprise 2.0 and social media.

Lesson #5:     The benefits of Enterprise 2.0 can be dramatic, but only builds steadily over time.

Lesson #6:     Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t seem to put older IT systems out of business.

Lesson #7:     Your organization will begin to change in new ways because of Enterprise 2.0. Be ready.

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In the ZDNet article, Hinchcliffe summarizes in conclusion that:

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The atomization and portability of information, such as what RSS has enabled, has been vital to the successful growth of communities like the blogosphere and one vital point about Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 that many organizations don’t yet fully understand: Our enterprises are NOT the Web.

And to get the full benefits of the Web 2.0 era, we must begin adapting our organizations and their information and IT resources (with suitable enterprise context) to this network-oriented model that has worked so for us globally on the Internet these last 15 years.

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The article resonates for me, and it feels a lot like much of what I have been saying or trying to say for the past several years … so I like it.

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Tags: Dion Hinchcliffe, Enterprise 2.0, wirearchy, Jon Husband

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I have been extended the honour of being interviewed about the concept of wirearchy by Traci Fenton, Founder and CEO of WorldBlu.com, which published the world’s first comprehensive list of organizations striving to be as democratic as possible given that organization do not elect leaders / representatives of the employee and customer constituencies.

I have been aware of and watched WorldBlu over the past year-plus, and Traci is indeed a person on fire with ideals, passion and the nouse (knowledge) to get people engaged and things done.  I suspect that she will be a force to contend with as she (and many of the rest of us) work at tapping into the ferocious desire on the part of people all around the world to make more meaningful contributions to a better life for all through their work and careers in organizations whilst also fulfilling some of their individual quests for meaning and fulfillment.

Thanks, Traci, for extending to me the privilege of making a small contribution to your cause !

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Interview with Jon Husband: Do You Know About “Wirearchy?”

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to talk with Jon Husband, founder of a blog on “wirearchy”, a term he coined and defines as “a dynamic flow of power and authority based on trust, knowledge, credibility and a focus on results enabled by interconnected people and technology.”

I was intrigued with his thinking and how much his ideas relate to and reinforce the idea of democracy in the workplace so I decided to interview him for our blog. Here are Jon’s thoughts on the future of work and wirearchy.

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The rest of the interview is here …

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Tags: WorldBlu, Traci Fenton, organizational democracy, wirearchy

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Hugh Macleod posts some thoughts he’s experienced whilst going about what he does

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7. When thinking about applying social media to companies, "What social media tools should we use" should not be the first question. "How do we wish to talk to people differently" should be the first question. If you don’t have an answer to this, quit your job and go find something else.

8. None of this stuff is rocket science. Most of it is glaringly obvious. And sadly for folks working in the social software industry, "The people who get it, don’t need us. And the people who need us, don’t get it." Which is why being a "blog consultant" or whatever is a lot less lucrative and rewarding than people often think.

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Tags: Hugh macleod, social media, social software, Enterprise 2.0

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Here’s the content of three introductory slides from IBM Lotus’ take on the emerging world of Enterprise 2.0 (principles and applications of Web 2.0 applied to knowledge work).

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First Slide

The Virtual Workplace

- 58% of IT Executives consider their company to be a virtual workplace

- 90% of employees work in locations other than headquarters

- Between 60% and 70% of employees work in different locations from their bosses

- The number of virtual workers has increased by 800% over the past five years

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Second Slide

IBM’s CEO Survey

- 750 CEOs cited collaborative innovation as the most important competitive advantage they must cultivate.

IBM 2010 CIO Outlook
1. Employee driven integration
2. Global collaborative innovation
3. Aggressive pursuit of simplicity and hosting

Priorities:
Digital Collaboration Infrastructure

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Third Slide

Dealing With Technological & Cultural Change

• Technology savvy generation is entering the workforce

• The Consumer world and Enterprise world are merging

• Gaming can teach us a lot about collaboration

• Content includes much richer forms of media

• Knowledge workers can now assemble “do it yourself” applications.

• Communities are forming both inside and outside the firewall.

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Tags: virtual workforce, collaborative innovation, collaborative infrastructure, technological change, cultural change, wirearchy

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Well, maybe not so random.  I did use Technorati, after all, to find this thoughtful blog post titled "Workplaces Internally and Externally" by Wade M. (Thoughts from a twenty-something guy living in Sydney, Australia - The Brain of Wade). 

If he really is twenty-something and is thinking as deeply and cogently as I infer from reading this blog post and others on the blog, I feel for him … because he’s seeing the big picture at a pretty early stage in life, I think, and there are times as you get older that the big picture can seem pretty disheartening.

On the other hand … there will not be any shortage of thorny complex problems with which to engage.

Always look on the bright side of life, ta-dum, ta-dum …

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Workplaces Internally and Externally

[ Snip ... ]

From my limited direct experience, as well as second and third-hand understanding, the cubical and the process-worker still seems to be the way most workplaces are run. These structures seem to inhibit enjoyment, co-operation, communication, and happiness and effectively dis-able their employees.

When as people we feel involved, and responsible for our actions and output, we feel happier, and do a better job. When we are allowed to think, we become enabled nodes and peers, no longer following, but helping to shape and create something greater than before. From nothing comes something. The success of peer2peer file-sharing, and wikipedia shows the power of self-coordinating peers, when allowed to act and do.

An employee who feels passionate about his workplace, who enjoys the people and his work, is less likely to be sick, and more likely to stay a part of the developing company. The company gains even greater productivity as well as knowledge retention. Dialogue and communication take places, collaboratively they steer the ship to their common vision, not some top-down management approach that seems illogical to the employee. This is the wirearchy.

A workplace when buying (raw) resources looks at the capital investment required. Most often, the lowest costing resource is brought about through lowest/slave labour and the unsustainable pillaging of resources. This model in both the short and long term hurts the local economies hindering their development, keeping them trapped. They have no money to spend locally, they can’t buy anything locally, they can’t develop or invest money back into their economy. Resources that are taken at low margins from these places are converted elsewhere, and finally marked up sometimes 100’s of percent.

The workplace sees the buying of the resource and the selling of the finished produce as two unrelated events. The flow of profit, does not go back to where it’s needed to help bring local worker and economies out of poverty, instead it is kept for it’s own sake. Again we have the slave to the capital. It’s accumulation makes the companies slave to the dollar, no longer a tool for development. Please drink Dilmah tea.

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Tags: democratic workplaces, empowerment, WorldBlu, wirearchy

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Dave is a busy fellow.  Dave is also a very smart and very practical fellow.

The most recent issue of the Harvard Business Review (HBR) carries an article by he and co-author Mary Boone titled "A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making".  One of the most interesting things about the framework to which the title refers is that is based upon and derived from complexity science.

Notwithstanding any speculation about the need for leaders that folks like me and Dave Pollard get up to, I am quite certain that we humans will keep using leaders as a fundamental part of how we make decisions and take actions for a while yet.  So providing leaders with a framework based on science rather than, say, gut feel seems (to me at least) like something worth investigating.

Given it’s likely that we won’t collectively jettison the placement of leaders at the head of our collective or organizational decision-making processes in the next short while, I am glad that Dave Snowden and Mary Boone’s framework is getting wider exposure.  It was developed over the past decade or so with help from some of his colleagues - I don’t know the full story of it’s development.

I took a three-day intense (!) course titled "Complexity, Narrative and Sensemaking" last February to become a certified Cognitive Edge practitioner.  The course, along with the significant volume of pre-course reading, outlined the theory, the methods and the application of the Cynefin Framework for sensemaking.

I have told any number of people that for me this framework has pulled together more than 20 years of pretty deep exploration and study of strategy, organizational development, cultural anthropology and organizational change theory and methods. 

It simply was one of the two best courses about core organizational and business issues that I have ever attended.  The other was a three-day master class with 10 other people in London in 1992, led by Charles Handy.  Dave is in good company there.

The excerpt below is from HBR’s editor’s review / introduction to the article, which is available here behind the HBR paywall.  Thomas Stewart has a pretty good grounding in these and related issues himself, having written the book "Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations" a decade or so ago.

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What Kind of Decision Is It?

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What they have learned, and what this article shows, is that often people respond to issues almost reflexively, like the proverbial man with a hammer to whom everything looks like a nail. Smart leaders choose their tools according to their sense of the kind of decision they face. Simple situations are best met with simple tools, like rules: "Don’t stick your finger into an electrical outlet," for instance. Other situations — for example, complicated problems with many different parts that nevertheless have a right answer — call for the services of an expert: If your wiring is bad, better call an electrician rather than try to fix it yourself. Still other cases are so chaotic, so senseless, that a leader should simply step in and do something, like a teacher wading in to stop a school yard squabble.

The situations leaders encounter most fall into none of these classes but rather into a fourth: circumstances that are complex, where the truth is not immediately evident even to an expert but emerges over time, where cause-and-effect relationships are not well established, where positive results come from offering incentives rather than issuing commands, and where, consequently, the tools of influence and decision making are subtle and ill-defined. Most leaders are told that it is important to be (or appear to be) decisive.

Fair enough — but how is one to reconcile the imperative of decisiveness with the reality of ambiguity? There’s a growing body of academic research about decision making under uncertainty. (If you Google the term, you will get — or I did — 284,000 hits.) Not much of this research has worked its way into practical frameworks for managers. To me, one of the great values of "A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making" is that it lives up to its title. In so doing, it connects sense-making to action in ways that are both wise and practical.

Thomas A. Stewart

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Tags: Dave Snowden, Mary Boone, HBR, complexity science, leadership, decision making

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Here, to my way of thinking, is a pretty clear indicator as to the permanence and evolution of the changes we have been watching arrive and grow over the past several years.

Not a very challenging forecast to make, I don’t think, given the high likelihood of the persistent and pervasive presence of the Web and things digital in our individual and collective futures.

The key, and obvious, point is that decline is happening in what today we call "traditional" areas while the digital media elements are being beefed up.

Via the Guardian Online

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BBC cuts: as bad as we thought?

Is Mark Thompson’s ’salami slicing’ cost savings plan the best way to secure the BBC’s future?

Jason Deans

So now we know, pretty much, what BBC director general Mark Thompson’s six year cost savings plan looks like.

Mr Thompson is outlining his proposals to BBC staff this morning. But from the BBC Trust statement yesterday and leaks from the briefings given to senior executives and programme makers over the past two days, we already know most of the detail.

Some headlines:

Net reduction of 1,800 from BBC headcount, with 2,500 posts to close, but redeployment and creation of around 1,000 new jobs - mostly in digital media - to account for the difference.

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The full article is here.

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I keep going back and reading this post just because … because I like this guy’s style, and he conveys in such an accessible, honest and real way just the process of two friends hanging around, which of course reminds me of my all-time favourite Kurt Vonnegut quote …

"We are put on earth to fart around," said Vonnegut, "don’t let anyone tell you any different."

Thanks, Brian (aka bmo or the repurpussing coach).  He, Vonnegut and a few other special oddballs in my life (and of course Raman, who is not odd at all) help keep me on purpuss.

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Montreal:Notes
Sunday, September 30, 2007

Jon Husband has written a lovely account of a few hours spent together in Montreal last weekend. It was a hoot. Increasingly, I am seeing Montreal as the place I would like to live. When I was much younger I dated a young Swiss woman who lived in Montreal. I adored the place then, and do so now. It was at a time of great crises in my life. Montreal was sweet comfort. Odd to say that now, though, as within a day, I will be moving to Toronto with my son. We have found a very very very small apartment in a house in the old city’s east end. But it’s lovely. It’s just about perfect, all things considered. BUT, I really would rather be moving to Montreal. So would my son. He is mesmerized by the architecture, for sure. I’m not sure what other things have him smote. I’m not sure the quality of life can be measured here. Montreal cannot be quantified. Jon often quotes aptly Leonard Cohen on measurement. Outremont is stunning. We sat in the evening for a small glass of white wine in roughly the same spot we would sit the next morning for latte in a bowl. And stared at the beauty of these grand four and five story apartment buildings. I did. Jon was staring at other things. Like the cars. But the walk on Sunday to Marche Jean Talon, a market unlike any I’d visited before, was a treat. Leisurely, relaxed. Transported me out of my head, where I have been spending too much time recently. Stopping to examine a poster on a wall or a coffee maker in a shop window. Nice. It’s still a small city Montreal but on foot with the details up close the place becomes huge. Sick. Hanging with Jon means spending time on an abstract plane. Things - objects, spaces, ways, avenues, dress, mess - have meaning. Patterns are recognized, acknowledged. A new sort of language is awkwardly crafted. Needs to be discovered. With a strong laugh along the way. Because it’s all about the unseen. Which is the way artists see the world. I think. They translate the unseen and make it real. See a piece of art and you see the world in a new way. That’s kinda the line, anyway. Which is the point of all this, isn’t it. If you can’t be transformed - get jazzed, engaged, involved - then why do you exist? Which sounds like the prelude to a midlife crisis. Stay tuned. Ultimately though, the thing with montreal is the way people engage with one another. Life trumps work. The corporate exodus of thirty years ago was huge.

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I recently caught up with Dave Snowden, the well-known complexity theorist / expert and acknowledged guru on the construction and use of knowledge … quite a feat given Dave’s last-minute bout with gastroenteritis,

"The best laid plans of mice and men … oft gang aglay (go astray)".

So goes the old saying.

… Krugman in italics below in response to a question from one of the members of the comment community at Firedoglake.com

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SanderO @ 128

Simple questions:

Are you a believer in capitalism?

If so how is that different from what we have now?

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"Um, there’s capitalism and then there’s capitalism. Sweden is capitalist — most of the economy is market-driven, profits are a key signal driving investment decisions, etc, etc.. But there’s also a strong safety net so that nobody goes without adequate food, shelter, and necessary health care; there are institutions like strong unions that police excesses in the private sector; and so on.

I’ve got the conscience of a liberal, not the belief system of a socialist. I think markets are a great way to organize a lot of what goes on in the economy. But the market system is a tool to be used when appropriate, not a deity to be worshipped without question."

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I’ve been reading a bit about the wee brouhaha ginned up by the NY Times .. announcing Al Gore’s winning of the Nobel Peace Prize while presenting split opinions underneath the captioned photo.

Via Euan Semple (with whom I had a highly frustrating and stimulating Skype / iChat / telephone conversation this morning).

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AKMA on the inevitability of Web 2.0

Change is happening, and it will overtake our institutions willy-nilly. I’m inclined to argue that by paying attention and getting involved, they’re more likely to experience that change as productive and invigorating, whereas by ignoring and resisting change , they’ll experience it as threatening and destructive.

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At the risk of boring my several readers to the point of complete disinterest:

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Wirearchy - a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results,

enabled by interconnected people and technology

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I am still lamenting (and cursing) the loss of almost a whole summer’s swimming due to the months-long strike of Vancouver municipal workers.

I only got in about 15 swims in this, my favourite swimming pool, before it closed, as it turned out for the duration of the summer.

That’s me with my left arm coming out for the next stroke …

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I do not drive very much … about 5,000 kilometres (3,000 miles) per year, and have a 15 year-old car, which I maintain quite well.

I thought I’d share a few photos of it after a wash.

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Putin, Sarkozy bridge gap on Iran

MOSCOW, Russia (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that Iran must be encouraged to make its nuclear program fully transparent, but also underscored there is no proof it is pursuing a nuclear weapons program.

Putin and Sarkozy discussed how the world should respond to Iran’s nuclear activities.

"We are sharing our partners’ concern about making all Iranian programs transparent," Putin said at a news conference after talks with visiting French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

"We agreed yesterday, and Mr. President confirmed it, that Iran is making certain steps toward international community to achieve that."

Sarkozy, on his first presidential visit to Russia, said the two countries had bridged some of their differences over how the world should respond to Iran’s nuclear activities.

"Our positions moved much closer together" on Iran, Sarkozy told reporters. He mentioned "many convergences" over Iran during their three hours of talks Tuesday night.

Sarkozy has hardened France’s stance on Iran in recent months, shifting closer to the United States in his insistence on tough U.N. Security Council sanctions and even his mention of the possibility of war.

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Don Tapscott’s most recent book Wikinomics - How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything is one of six nominees for the Financial Times and Goldman sachs Business Book of the Year award.

Congratulation to SoMedia Inc. on the overnight launch of VancouverIAm.com, a social media site that aggregates information, postings and whatnot related to goings-on in Vancouver.

You’ll notice that the VancouverIAm site aggregates Vancouver blogs, lets you create or participate in group blogs, talk about what you may have overheard or seen (Start A Rumour .. let’s hope this is used in appropriate ways, by which I mean in ways that do not attack people, promote hate, or contribute to divisiveness and hostility), upload videos and add your blog if you are writing about Vancouver or things and events related to Vancouver.

I think that this is a very interesting way to highlight the life of a city, and I wish VancouverIAm.com success (disclosure: I have a working relationship with the company that has created VancouverIAm.com, but that relationship is not specifically related to the IAm concept at this point in time).

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Tags: Vancouver, SoMedia Inc., urban blogging, location blogging, blog aggregation

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.. and getting things done.

Organizing and providing the capabilities for getting things done in an environment characterized by constant flows of information and people connected to each other in ever-shifting and intersecting Venn diagram-like spheres of influence is a hearty challenge.  It happens organically, more or less .. this much at least we have learned from the growth of the blogosphere, LinkedIn and a range of social networking applications that have come, gone and sometimes come again or shifted to a more receptive social space (Orkut’s popularity today in Brazil comes to mind, though this may be an overused example).

Why is it a hearty challenge ?  Organizations are not designed for organic growth based on cross-fertilization of ideas and knowledge via conversation (even though that happens all the time .. social network analysis (SNA) has proved this, I think).  It has been clear for some time that the social networks that operate in most organizations are significantly different than the responsibility, status and power relationships formally presented buy organization charts, titles, job descriptions, reporting relationships and the other trappings of organizational life that have been derived from the design principles that informed the industrial revolution and its primary idioms … mass assembly, mass production, division of labour derived from a quest for maximal machine-like efficiency, and the treatment of labour inputs as a cog or a part of a machine, with a depreciating useful life.

These assumptions did not foresee well what we today call "knowledge work" and have not changed much … in spite of Drucker and a host of other management theory luminaries arguing for significantly different treatment of these ideas.  People are no doubt going to argue with me and suggest that knowledge work is effectively covered off by the fundamental assumptions of today’s management ’science", but I see little real evidence of that.  Yes, I do see a better understanding (sometimes) of white-collar productivity, and I understand that there is greater understanding of creativity and right-brain dynamics in today’s workplace / management punditry.  Nevertheless, the same structural design principles developed in the early 1950’s operate today in job evaluation practices  (no, NOT performance evaluation but job evaluation .. a job’s size and weight, and accordingly its place in the organizational pecking order, or as per a phrase in common usage today, one’s "pay grade"), and it is these practices that determine an organization’s pecking order and reporting relationships (and thus, much of the management responsibility for getting things done).

However, increasingly today’s knowledge work is about several people, working on projects in teams, stitching and seaming information together to create something or to get something done.  Dave Pollard articulates this clearly in today’s blog post titled The Short Shelf Life Of Information (And The Long Life Of Memes):

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Here are six important discoveries I’ve made as a result of fifteen years’ work in so-called ‘Knowledge Management’:

- Almost none of the ‘just-in-case’ archived content of most corporations gets used at all, and the older it gets the less likely it is to be used
- Most public Internet sites are used mainly by job-seekers and by students for homework, not by customers or even the general public
- What is valued is know-who (not know-what) – connection not collection
- What is valued is just-in-time knowledge acquired through context-rich interaction (i.e. conversation)
- But even most conversations are only valued by their participants, and only until a few days after the conversation has passed (by which time it has either been internalized or forgotten)

What is valued is information to which value (meaning, suggested action) has been added through visualization, synthesis and analysis

I don’t think any of these discoveries should come as a surprise to anyone, yet we blithely continue to behave, in most organizations, as if they were not so. The cost and energy that goes into acquiring ‘raw’ information, organizing, presenting at and attending conferences, and populating and maintaining Intranets, public Internet sites, document repositories, groupware etc. is staggering, even though most of this work has little or no value.

What does have value, but only for awhile, are these five types of content:

1. Conversational content — face-to-face, Open Space, phone, Skype, desktop videoconferencing, IM, blogs, podcasts — mostly of value to the participants in the conversation (who have the necessary context to understand it), and only until they have internalized it (shelf life: maybe a week)
2. Visualized and otherwise synthesized, filtered and analyzed content — the work of information professionals that (like the example visualization above) tells readers/listeners succinctly either what something means, or what should they do about it (shelf life: maybe a year before it’s obsolete)
3. Project content – the organized collection of stuff relating to an active project, in wikis, file folders or other places accessible to the full project team (shelf life: the duration of the high-activity stage of the project)
4. Know-who directories — the (rare) up-to-date lists of who knows what (not to be confused with internal phone directories or organization charts, which are generally valueless unless you are studying how management wishes things worked) (shelf life: as long as they’re relatively complete and current)
5. Stories — context-rich anecdotes about things that have actually happened, from which we can learn, and which can provoke good ideas to respond to (not to try to change) those realities (this includes cultural anthropology stories — direct observations of and conversations with customers ‘in their native habitat’) (shelf life: as long as the culture that gave rise to the story remains unchanged — usually a long time)

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It will not be a surprise to anyone who has read my blogging before, or who may read it somewhat regularly, that I believe that we will live and work in a more participative and interactive environment from now on (as always, I must say here "for better and for worse").

We need to design work and organizations for the "archy" of being "wired" … wirearchy … not the archy of being higher or lower on  chart that purports to represent the vertical acquisition and use of knowledge, expertise and experience. Yes, that knowledge, expertise and experience play a role in effectiveness and getting things done.  No, that is not (increasingly) how work happens or how we should be designing work and the organized groups of people in which and with which work happens.

More and more often work and getting things done is happening horizontally, by node of knowledge "X" getting together with idea "Y" and getting-it-done-through experience node "Z" … these nodes negotiate with each other as to when, what, how, and then these nodes and their other connected nodes interact, distribute information, and  putting layer after layer of information together to create actionable knowledge.

We need to design wirearchies, which will include or incorporate negotiated just-in-time or just-for-results hierarchies when and if needed.

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Tags: hierarchy, wirearchy, let’s call the whole thing …

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I will be speaking at the upcoming KM World & Intranets Conference (November 5 - in San Jose, CA.

It will be a nice opportunity to catch up with friends Dave Pollard and Dave Snowden, re-connect with Cindy Gordon,

I’ve alluded before to what for now I’ll call eOD (Hyperlinked Mass Collaboration Will Create A Field Called eOD).

I’ve written several times before about ROII (Return On Investment in Interaction) or ROHI (Return On Human Interaction) as metrics that will need to come into being as social software takes up more space and time in the enterprise setting .. whether we like measurement or not, and whether or not we believe it is obvious that humans build and use knowledge purposefully by interacting with each other..

It seems like the time to spell it out may be getting closer … in a ZDNet article (ROI is so Business 1.0: Not) Dennis Howlett outlines some of the issues, citing Luis Suarez and Jay Cross.  Dennis concentrates on the issues from a CFO and CTO perspective, but notes that this perspective may be narrow, as incumbents will more often than not understand only value based on tangible assets, cash flows and working capital.

Nevertheless, it seems clear to me that the measures Jay Cross is suggesting are derived from or support the organizational performance issues on which organizations spend many consulting dollars.  It may be useful to think that organizations as they are structured today only really understand siloed responsibility for work design issues - issues that in an increasingly networked era fundamentally need to be viewed from a cross-disciplinary and cross-silo perspective. 

So, are today’s Enterprise 1.0 organizations hamstrung because of established and understood buying channels, or "second-order" silo-based responsibility, i.e. it’s line manager "X" and the HR department and a few OD consultants that are still going about "enhancing organizational effectiveness" more often than not without looking at basic work process design (that, after all, has been left to the reengineers and ERP change management specialists) ?

I still wonder when the field of eOD will start to take wing.

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Take this from Luis Suarez:

"If social computing is supposed to revolutionalise the way we share our knowledge, connect with others, collaborate, communicate and innovate, then I think it is about time we move into the 21st century, progress further in that Knowledge economy and try to figure out how to get the most value out of it, because figuring out its ROI, in my opinion, is going to be a waste of time, energy and resources."

[ Snip ... ]

In his discussion, Luis references Jay Cross who talks about social computing from the learning perspective. He suggests three broad measures:

Sales force readiness. You think you have a problem keeping sales people up to speed? Consider Cisco. On average, Cisco acquires a new company every month. If systems engineers tried to learn via traditional methods, they would have no time left for customers. Instead of training, Cisco “Google-ized” product knowledge, sales presentations, and competitive information, making it available on demand throughout the company. Sales people learn by using that information, not by being trained.

Benefits: better-informed sales force, more competence on sales calls, more cross-selling, better presentations, easier to bring partners up to speed, avoid cost of product training.

Eliminate bureaucracy. Knowledge workers waste a third of their time looking for information and identifying the right people to talk with. They often spend more time recreating information hidden in someone else’s file cabinet than creating original material. I just heard about a company where the workers think doing their email is the work; that’s how they spend almost all of their time. Expert locators, bottom-up knowledge management, instant messaging, organization-wide wikis, and organizational network analysis all attack this plaque in the organizational arteries.

Benefits: speed flow of information, cut time wasted searching for answers, streamline organizational process, cut email by half, cease re-inventing the wheel, increase worker throughput 20% to 30%.

Conversation. Conversation is easily the most important learning technology ever invented. Conversations carry news, create meaning, foster cooperation, and spark innovation. Encouraging open, honest conversation through work space design, setting ground rules for conversing productively, and baking conversation into the corporate culture spread intellectual capital, improve cooperation, and strengthen personal relationships.

Benefits: faster cycle time, improved problem-solving, more time on mission, higher morale, lower turnover…

While I can argue with the detail (who says knowledge workers ‘waste a third of their time?’) the basic premises are eminently reasonable as value indicators that could form part of an ROI equation. Unfortunately, Jay then goes on to alienate the very people the social computing crowd should be wooing:

Hold your breath a moment, for some of you will choke on this one: ROI and accounting are inappropriate measures of performance. ROI is a relic of the industrial era, when assets were tangible and repetition was the path to success in the factory. Today, the intangible assets you cannot see are far more valuable than those you can.

It doesn’t matter that ROI may appear to be a relic. As a partially reconstructed ex-CFO I have some sympathy with Jay’s view, but he seriously misunderstands the ability of CFOs to understand value beyond tangible assets.

His declaration is something that MBA students have known for as many years as Paul Strassmann has been talking about Google although I sense the world has moved on from Strassmann’s view that CFOs and CIOs are disconnected by different mindsets. CFOs routinely spend time with those on Wall Street analysts who are arbiters of intangible corporate value. Jonathan D. Becher who authors Managing By Walking Around (an HP mantra) points the way of the future where he suggests:

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Read the rest here. 

I personally am not so sure about Dennis’ assertion that CFO and CIO ability to understand is seriously misunderstood.  There are (again, just an opinion) a number of semi-conscious issues that many senior organizational people will have about the landscape of tools, applications and dynamics associated with Enterprise 2.0.  That seems obvious to me, if we but cast an eye back to the thousands of discussions and examples about the resistance to the use and growth of social software.

A similar kind of thing is playing itself out in the field of journalism, is it not ?  The upstarts who are holding lighters to the toes of the established institutions, structures and mindsets are being denigrated as not understanding the seriousness, the quality issues, the responsibilities …

And so shall it go.

I promise to pay more attention to the serious side of what ROII metrics … quantifiable, observable, tangible metrics … might look like some day reasonably soon.  Just after I get a bunch of other things done.

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Tags: Business 1.0, Business 2.0, Enterprise 1.0, Enterprise 2.0, Dennis Howlett, Luis Suarez, Jay Cross, ROI, ROII, ROHI

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… in the July 2006 issue of Wired magazine ?

Clues:  Very very rich, very very influential, not American, generally respected for business acumen but not liked by many (though that may be conjecture on my part).

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"To find something comparable, you have to go back 500 years to the printing press, the birth of mass media – which, incidentally, is what really destroyed the old world of kings and aristocracies.

Technology is shifting power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the media elite. Now it’s the people who are taking control."

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And no, it wasn’t Andrew Keen.

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I’ve just joined FreeTheNet.ca by buying a Meraki Mini wireless mesh router and plugging it in.

By doing so I am providing support to the FreeTheNet wireless mesh movement and am also offering free wireless broadband access to any one within about 200 metres in any direction.

That means all the (200 or so) condos in the yet-to-be-completed Tapestry condo development, all my neighbours in several other 30-unit buildings, all the offices in the City Square shopping and office complex over half a block and across the street, probably all of Vancouver City Hall and the 100-room Plaza 500 hotel a block and a half over.

Now all we need to cover off

Anyone other than me sick and tired of everybody ending all sorts of short conversations with "awesome !!" ?

99 out of 100 times - actually, maybe 999 times out of 1,000

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At least once a day, the Web either helps me realize, or makes very clear, just how small, narrow, limited and inconsequential are my thoughts, actions, utterances, connections and desires.

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Via the Toronto Globe and Mail.

When I get a moment I will compare and contrast to the 2001 presentation on the same subject (2001 Workplace Odyssey) that I recently pulled out of my archives.

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In the words of a business guru

If you feel like work is getting harder, it’s not just your imagination, says Malcolm Gladwell.

The bestselling author of Blink and The Tipping Point says the mental demands of the workplace are steadily growing — and we’re all going to have to smarten up if we want to succeed.

"I’m quite prepared for the possibility that the next revolution is not going to come from a machine," says Mr. Gladwell, 44, a staff writer for New Yorker magazine, who has carved out his own niche as a business guru. "It’s going to come from creating a more thoughtful work force and giving people the opportunity to be thoughtful."

Among his recommendations: Business leaders should get more involved in education policy debates, Canada should consider other countries’ models for teaching advanced mathematics, and hiring managers should stop looking for a perfect fit when scouting for employees.

A native of Ontario, Mr. Gladwell is returning home this month (Oct. 14-16) for the University of Waterloo’s "Workplace 2017" conference, where he will interview Research In Motion co-chief executive officer Jim Balsillie about the future of work. In a recent interview, Mr. Gladwell talked about the challenges ahead for businesses as the nature of work evolves and the baby boom generation retires.

Imagining the workplace in 10 or 20 years is tough … How do we think about the future in a way that’s helpful and not just an exercise in futility?

Probably the wisest course is to stay away from the areas where there’s the greatest uncertainty. So I don’t think we can predict what the hot areas will be 10 to 15 years from now; that’s just a sure path to embarrassment to try to figure out what the much-needed technology will be. But we can have a pretty good sense of things like demographic trends. We know with absolute certainty that the cognitive demands of the workplace will be greater, not less; we know that Western industrial nations are unlikely to be regaining manufacturing jobs. We can be reasonably certain of those kinds of broad trends.

When you say that the cognitive demands of the workplace will be growing, what do you mean?

We will require, from a larger and larger percentage of our work force, the ability to engage in relatively complicated analytical and cognitive tasks. So it’s not that we’re going to need more geniuses, but the 50th percentile is going to have to be better educated than they are now. We’re going to have to graduate more people from high school who’ve done advanced math, is a very simple way of putting it.

Unfortunately, it seems like we’re heading in the opposite direction in terms of test scores and math literacy. How do we turn that around?

There’s a cheap solution, which Canada has actually excelled at, which is simply to import your brains. As the son of an Englishman who came to Canada to teach math, the Gladwells [and myself] are part of that earlier cheap solution. So that’s one route, and we can continue to do that, there’s nothing stopping us.

And Canada will not become less desirable over time; I suspect that 10 years from now, Canada will be an even more desirable location for lots of people from less-developed countries.

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Tags: Malcolm Gladwell, workplace of the future, literacy, learning, innovation and change, diversity, Canada

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But fleecing borrowers and shareholders … hey, that’s good ole free enterprise.

Via the NY Times …

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Enron’s Second Coming?
By Paul Krugman
October 1, 2007

In May 2005 NYSE Magazine featured an article titled “American Dream Builder” — a glowing profile of Angelo Mozilo, the chairman and C.E.O. of Countrywide Financial, the nation’s largest mortgage lender. The article portrayed Mr. Mozilo as a heckuva guy — a man from a humble background determined to help other people, especially members of minority groups, achieve the American dream of homeownership.

The article didn’t mention one of Mr. Mozilo’s other distinguishing characteristics: the extraordinary size of his paychecks. Last year Mr. Mozilo was paid $142 million, making him the seventh-highest-paid chief executive in America.

[ Snip ... ]

In late 2006, even as Countrywide began using shareholders’ money to buy back its own stock at more than $40 a share — it’s now worth only $19 — Mr. Mozilo was selling. Between November 2006 and August 2007 — that is, during the months before investors fully realized the extent to which his company would be hurt by the subprime mortgage crisis — he unloaded $138 million worth of Countrywide’s stock.

Again, unless the stock sales lead to insider-trading charges, there’s nothing in this story that involves illegality. Still, how can it be that so soon after Enron, WorldCom and other scandals rocked the business world, we’re once again hearing about executives cashing in just before their companies are revealed as less successful than advertised? The answer, of course, is that we never dealt properly with those scandals.

Here’s what I wrote back in May 2003:

“Last summer it seemed, briefly, as if the torrent of scandals — and the revelations about how closely some of our politicians were tied to scandal-ridden companies — would bring about a public backlash against corporate malfeasance. But then the topic largely vanished from the news, driven out by reports about Iraq’s nuclear weapons program and all that. And after the midterm elections, which put apologists for corporate insiders back in control of all the relevant Congressional committees, we might as well have had the sirens sound the all-clear.”

Sure enough, C.E.O. paychecks, which came partway back to earth in 2002, more than doubled between 2003 and 2006. And with those huge paychecks came renewed incentives for malfeasance. Once again, executives could become richer than Croesus by creating the illusion of success, even for a little while.

There is one big difference this time: the number of victims — misled borrowers, homeowners whose neighborhoods are being destroyed by foreclosures, investors who thought they were buying safe assets — is even larger.

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Tags: Countrywide Financial, Antony Mozilo, ABCP, potential crook

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