Adventures in home working

Microsoft’s Knowledge network looks interesting, it uses a client side component to gather information from your PC including email authors and recipients, Outlook contacts, IM contacts, manager (as defined in Active Directory), managers direct reports and your direct reports and SharePoint 2007 colleagues and it also analyses email subject and body text for keywords that reflect your areas of expertise. 

Once assembled you get the chance to decide whether the resulting Keywords, Colleagues, or External Contacts are visible to – Only Me, My Manager, My Workgroup, My Colleagues, and Everyone.  The information is then published into your SharePoint 2007 “My Site”.  Integrating this information into the My Site is a great idea, because it already contains a lot of rich information about you, including – if you choose to keep one – a personal blog as well as AD info about your title, department, manager, group memberships, interests, skills, your picture and your colleagues.

Knowledge Network uses this information to extend the people search capability of SharePoint 2007.  You can find out more information about Knowledge Network from the excellent blog and web site.

If you want a good overview of social networking in general then I recommend this overview from Dave Pollard.

Collaboration is a key competency for today’s enterprises and yet despite the fact that the Internet is awash with a myriad of different collaboration solutions many teams still struggle to be effective and most projects continue to fail by at least one metric.  

 Many people assume that collaboration comes naturally – provide people with a tool and off they go, unfortunately it’s rarely that easy. Despite the fact that hundreds of books have been written about how to help teams collaborate and how to successfully manage projects, many team leaders lack a simple framework to help them assess the scale and nature of the collaboration challenges that their teams face. Once the challenge is understood teams need practical guidance on where to focus appropriate process and technology improvements.

One approach is to look inwards at the team and the complexity of the task to assess the level of challenge according to four categories (see fig 1).  The first and probably the most important, is the degree of – common ground – shared by team members, teams with a lot of common ground collaborate more naturally together and common ground becomes increasingly important as complexity increases. 

Where you set the dials for complexity and common ground will dictate the relative importance of technology and process readiness. Understanding nature of complexity and the areas where common ground is lacking (the focus of this article) will help you to home-in on the types of technology and process tools that you need to make your team a success (a future article).

The application of this approach is best illustrated by an example; in this case a typical corporate strategy team which is undertaking a regular yearly review cycle. Their review is not particularly urgent, but is complex (see fig 2) because of the interdependence of different tasks, the need to innovate to stay competitive, the number of decisions still to be taken and the need for different stakeholders to negotiate.

The team lacks common ground (see fig 3) in quite a few areas but the fact that they don’t all know each other, will be working virtually across multiple time zones and will need to work both on and offline will be a particular challenge to them given the complexity of their objective.

Initially the team should focus on building the relationship and trust between team members, probably push for a kick off using a professional video conferencing session and concentrate on well facilitated audio conferences while the team members get to know each other. Common access to information will be very important, so the team need to ensure they use an information sharing/discussion system that is available to everyone, is asynchronous and works well off-line, these characteristics are essential and can be achieved even with disciplined use of email and conference calls.

If the team wants to push the boundaries they should consider a web hosted team room with off-line support and also routinely recording their meetings; this will make it easier to create focus, manage information, engage new team members and involve specialist contributors.

Longer term the team members should consider Instant Messaging and Blogs, as these will allow members of the team to get to know each other much better, help them understand each other’s challenges and perspectives and extend the strategy review process throughout the year. 

A refinement to this simple framework is to consider how the needs of the team will evolve over a projects lifecycle, teams need different processes and tools during the storming and forming phase than during the performing stage for example.

Rod Boothby has some useful comments on a list of the top 10 management fears associated with enterprise adoption of web 2.0 technologies.  Here are my comments on Rod’s comments!  in blue

Enterprise Web 2.0 Technological Barriers

1. How can I be certain that the information that is gathered and shared behind the firewall stays behind the firewall?

Blogging is part of the communication continuum – Instant Messaging, Email and Blogs. Your employees currently follow a policy to keep some information only “behind the firewall” when using IM and Email. They will need to follow the same rules when it comes to using and sharing information they find with your Enterprise Web 2.0 tools.

I agree with the key point,  but I also think its worthwhile questioning the amount of information that we keep behind the firewall, posting outside the firewall makes it much easier for customers and potential customers to interact with you and also helps build a community with other companies/individuals trying to solve the same problem.  Rod’s blog is an example how how hopefully his company has benefited from the discussion around the use of blogs in the enterprise.  If Rod had only blogged about enterprise blogging behind the firewall I would suspect that his thinking would have been less refined.

2. How do I control who has access to particular levels of information and databases?

Set up a simple 3 layer system. Everyone, Department Only, Project Team. For specific project blogs, set a default access level, and then make exceptions on an article by article basis.

Enterprise blogging tools like WordPress MU can dynamically re-draw pages depending on the viewers access control.

Setting up the read access lists is also fairly easy. The user experience looks like addressing an email.

Again I agree, but it’s worth mentioning that its not just about controlling access, but also about making sure that the people who NEED access actually get subscriptions pushed to them.  For example a Programme Manager needed to be auto-subscribed to the blogs of all of the projects in the programme,  a project manager to all the staff on his project and all his peers within a programme etc.

3. How do I protect the integrity of the information from malicious tampering by disgruntled employees or managers?

You use the wisdom of the crowd combined with audit trails and roll-back features. For example, say you are using Social Text as an enterprise Wiki to document policies and procedures. If an angry employee changed one of the policies, Social Text would keep track of who changed it, what changes they made and when. The group (aka the wise crowd) would be relied upon to catch the error. The employee could then be held accountable for their actions.

It should be noted that most companies have this problem today, but it is actually much more serious. There is no access control over most policy and procedure documents. The docs just sit there on a shared drive, available for hundreds of people to anonymously edit.

And, in today’s environment, there is an even greater risk: without the enhanced search and cross-linking features of blogs and wikis, most employees have trouble getting the information they need when they need it. The result is a high chance for mistakes because people are not familiar with the policies.

I have seen many companies start off worrying about this issue, only to find its very minor and that the mechanisms built into blogs and wiki’s easily provide self governance within the enterprise.

4. How can I be sure that information is being “tagged” properly for efficient retrieval later?

Social tagging works.

Just as the government does not have to enforce a proper price for beer or any other good or service in an open market economy, the knowledge management department does not have to enforce a rigid standard for how things are tagged. People will tag things as they want, and eventually, cultural standards will arrive. See Stu Downes Folksonomy in the enterprise for more proof.

Yes,  in fact as Stu states as the number of people who tag increases above 50 you quickly cease producing unique tags, and 50 people in a community is a viable number in most enterprises

Also, remember that things are not tagged on the open Internet, at least not according to any centrally planned taxonomy, and yet you can still find exactly what you are looking for. You use Google.

After you deploy your Enterprise Web 2.0 solutions, if you are still having trouble finding what you need, buy a Google Mini. The Google Mini doesn’t work all that well in Web 1.0 Intranets, but with all the additional cross-linking that will automatically happen in enterprise blogs and wikis, Google Mini should work just fine.

5. What kind of training do employees need before they can effectively use the technology?

Some employees will need no training. Generally, these will be younger employees and the 5 to 10% who already have a personal blog.

I have recently seen some research that suggests that people in the 35-45 age group tend to be pretty early adopters of many of these technologies. Within an enterprise – as distinct from an academic – context you often find that its this age group rather than the 25-35 group who are the blog and IM users.

Other employees will need fairly extensive training.

Enterprise Web 2.0 Cultural Barriers

6. How can I monitor the system to make certain that what individuals are saying and sharing reflects company policy?

This is less of an issue if you are dealing with Internal only deployments of Enterprise Web 2.0.

Today, you have to deal with this issue when if comes to emails, voicemails, phone calls, instant messages, etc.

The one advantage to Web 2.0 is that if someone puts up something offensive in a Blog, you can take it down. Once an email is sent, if can be forwarded on to millions.

This is also a cultural issue, many companies who allow blogging recognise that whilst there is a risk associated with employees not following company policy, that the benefit of allowing company policy to evolve in response to the opinions of their workforce, customers, suppliers and other interested parties can be very valuable.  Certainly within an enterprise this discussion and debate is even more valuable in a company that is culturally ready for it.

7. What are the legal dangers in saving and sharing so much loosely supervised input?

In some instances, there are serious legal dangers. In a consulting firm, if you promise the client to only share client information with the project team, that information better not be shared with the whole firm.

The best way to address this issue, is to develop a one-page set of rules for employees. Simple guidelines on what they should and what they should not post. The guidelines should be blunt, easy to read, and feel almost like Enterprise Web 2.0 commandments.

Thou shall not flame thy colleagues.

If the legal department helps with crafting the guidelines, along with input from HR, you should be able to minimize the implications of this risk. Note also, that this is a danger in today’s environment. Except you have little to no ability to see who read what on the company’s shared drive. The result is no accountability in today’s systems.

I’m no lawyer but I would imagine that the issues are already addressed in most companies IT acceptable usage policies for email and intranet use.

8. How do I distinguish “productive” use of the technology from horsing around?

How do you distinguish between productive use of email and horsing around? Or even worse, how do you distinguish between productive use of email, and CC’ing to CYA internal spam where co-workers fill each other’s inboxes with stuff they only ends up wasting time. “Just in case you might need to know about this in six months, let me re-cap today’s meeting”. That stuff can now be put on the blog or into the wiki, and found when it is needed.

Same comment as above,  this issue should already be addressed in an acceptable usage policy for IT.

9. How do I “manage” the gathering and disseminating of so much unstructured information?

This is like the tagging issue. There are tools out there, such as RSS that help.

However, I also believe that it is important, in the enterprise setting, to impose a little structure. Instead of having blogs, for example, have purpose specific blogs:

• People Work Sites can be a combo of resumes, current projects, contact info and personal blog
• Project Work Sites can list the client, include to-do lists, related docs, include updates, and have links to the people working on the project.

The right list of Work Site types (or purpose specific enterprise blogs) depends on the company, and like everything else, will probably evolve over time.

Hmm,  I think special purpose blogs are useful in an enterprise context, however think that an individuals contribution is best represented by an individual blog, individuals who need blogs would tend to be leaders and subject matter experts.  I also think the project blogs, programme blogs, department blogs etc are very useful, but they complement and don’t replace individual blogs.  Take as an example a project manager,  she might maintain a project blog, but her personal blog would have different content, maybe with some overlap.

10. How do I know if I’m getting my money’s worth out of the investment in technology?

What investment? This stuff is so cheap, you will hardly be able to notice the expense.

With customizations, hardware costs, integration costs and deployment costs, you are looking at less that $50,000 for an enterprise blogging system for thousands of users.

I agree, cheap.  I would start off though promoting the idea of blogs to people who will set a good example, subject matter experts, leaders, project managers etc and then let them encourage others by their example.

I used to laugh at the idea of the paperless office,  over the last 20 years I have presided over a number of projects that I thought would reduce paper but actually increased usage, so I am pretty cautious now.  However having seen for myself that the combination of a desktop scanner, 3 monitors and a Tablet PC can almost totally eliminate paper from my lifestyle I think there is a viable way forward.  I have written a few posts on this topic myself, and have just come across a useful discussion of the topic over at Silicon.com, this comment was particularly useful:

Andy Jones, a director at Xerox Global Services, explains a crucial change in the way we use paper. “Thirty years ago paper was the definitive record of so many things that happened within business. Today it is increasingly the case that the electronic record is the definitive copy, while paper is becoming much more a work-in-progress medium,” he says.

I agree with the work in progress role of paper, and its this role that multiple monitors and a Tablet PC address.  The Tablet is great for sketching, note taking, review and markup as well as reading on the plane/train.  Multiple monitors avoid the need to use paper as a reference copy while you work on another document on a single PC display.

tags: paperless, tabletpc, multiplemonitors

I use my blog as a personal knowledge management tool.  Every day I collect up 20-30 blog posts, web pages, PDF files etc to read.  They are all there on my Tablet PC as different tabs in Maxthon, the following morning I read them and then for those that need some sort of action I add them to Maxthon groups like For action, To watch, To blog, etc. 

For action stuff I work through when I get chance and it tends to be software to download, emails to send etc

To watch stuff is self explanatory,  the only twist being that I try and download stuff to watch onto my Tablet so that I can watch it when I am at a loose end, waiting to pick the kids up from swimming for example

To blog stuff, is anything that I find really interesting and want to remember for later,  I find blogging it much more useful than just tagging it because not only do I remember it but I get to think a little about the context and how it links to other things I am interested in.  Of course the spin off benefit is that I get to share it with others in my company and beyond.  I also post stuff on my blog in answer to questions that people ask me, it’s more efficient than email.

I find this usage model for my blog very effective,  in almost every conversation I have now – after writing a blog for 3 years – I tend to illustrate the point I am making with a few links to articles I have already written,  it makes me seem super efficient!

There are many more uses for blogs in the enterprise, some of which I have described on by blog already,  but this post by Martin provides an excellent overview and of course Rod Boothby has consistently excellent posts on the topic.

By the way,  for any of you wondering at the number of posts today – I have just got back from holiday and have an hour to work through my “To Blog” lists before I go swimming!

Microsoft have just published a set of short videos that give a great introduction of the new features in Exchange 2007, definitely worth checking out.  Most of these videos use OWA, for more information on Outlook 2007 with Exchange 2007 check out the better together site.  I liked the unified messaging videos best!

Integrating Communications With Exchange Unified Messaging
110 KB | 300 KB
Phone-Based User Experience With Outlook Voice Access
110 KB | 300 KB

I must have been asleep during May because I missed the announcement of this tool, which is an add-on to Office SharePoint 2007 and also includes a client component that allows an individual to control the information from their local Email folders and IM that they want to submit to SharePoint search so that it can be mined via SharePoint people search.  Microsoft certainly seem to have taken privacy concerns seriously and also used a lot of social networking smarts as this snippet from their blog shows:

When you run the KN client for the first time on your local machine, you can choose which Microsoft Office Outlook folders are included in your local analysis. (The KN client supports either Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007.) After the KN client is done with its local analysis, it will recommend keywords and contacts for you to act on. The word “recommend” here is very important in that KN is only recommending keywords and contacts. It is only you who can decide what to accept, edit, or reject before your profile information is published to the server. You can also decide at this point whether or not you are willing to help your colleagues in an anonymous manner.

 

Once your profile information is published to the server, when your colleagues use SharePoint Server’s search facility to try to find someone with a particular area of expertise or particular contacts, the KN server responds to the query with personalized results that are displayed according to social distance and inferred relationship strengths, which were calculated by the innovative algorithms that we’ve developed.

 

So, KN can save you significant time when you’re trying to find the right people to connect with. It also allows you to choose the information you want to selectively share with your manager, your immediate workgroup, your colleagues, or your whole organization.

Definately looks like this is a blog that’s worth subscribing to.

Activity centric computing is central to IBM’s personal knowledge management and collaboration vision and this paper lays out some of the underlying concepts that we will hopefully see start to emerge in the Hannover release. The following snippet from the paper lays out the challenge IBM is trying to address:

The “big picture” is the activity. But working through to completion of the activity involves people in many kinds of interactions and the use of many different file types, communication modes and outputs such as emails, instant messages, phone calls,  presentations, spreadsheets, documents, meetings. These don’t interoperate, and their outputs live in different containers and locations. Some of the outputs are in forms that might be posted to a team workspace if one has been created; some are never shared effectively. 

People try to get organized, but it isn’t easy. There are folders for email, folders for documents, folders for photos, folders for videos, No folders for instant messages, etc. Whether working on individual or team projects, participants must remember and mentally hold in context the many related outputs and exchanges that advance the work. That is, the humans must provide the adhesive that glues the whole project together.

 The paper sums up with this vision:

“Right now, the ‘glue’ that associates tasks and objects within an activity remains in the users’ heads. But if we’re able to create and save the thread of an activity, we should also be able to preserve it as a pattern that others can reuse when performing the same or similar activities. In effect, people will be writing their own programs for executing business processes at the same time as they execute the processes. It’s going to make capturing best practices a lot easier for organizations, and it has the potential to change the way organizations think about programming.”

having taken a good look at Office 2007 and in particular Groove and Outlook I don’t think Microsoft will have anything approaching the sophistication of this concept for a while,  so it will be interesting to see if IBM pull it off and start winning over the hearts and minds of their users, in the same way they have with system admins and IT managers.

Rob Boothby has written yet another excellent paper on the subject of web office, which is his term for a collection of web based tools which are rapidly disrupting established business systems for knowledge workers, key elements of the toolkit include not surprisingly blogs, wikis, social networking, search, podcasting/event recording, web email, instant messaging, presence and IP telephony.  Rod concludes the paper with 5 compelling reasons why business needs to take this seriously:

There are five reasons why any senior executive needs to start thinking about Web Office now:

1. Web Office technology will make partnering and out-sourcing more efficient by creating a platform that can seamlessly support virtual ad-hoc teams. Thus, it will quickly reduce your costs.
2. If you have any competitors using Web Office technology, they are going to have a significant productivity lead over you. Web Office will be as big and important as email, and you wouldn’t imagine running a business today without email.
3. Your new hires are already using this technology. The MBA class of 2006 has lived and breathed the web since they were in high school. If you don’t provide company endorsed solutions, they will end up using tools that are available on the open Internet until you do.
4. Most importantly, Web Office will help you to increase the pace of innovation within your organization. As I explained in my last paper “Turning Knowledge Workers into Innovation Creators”, constant innovation is the only business strategy capable of producing a stream of above average profits. To achieve constant innovation, senior executives need to bring everyone into the effort. Web Office is the ideal tool to help achieve that goal.
5. Web Office is cheap. You will get a lot of bang for your buck.

A couple of days ago I wrote a post that discussed the importance of considering blogs and Wikis as a complementary pair technologies.  Today I came across this great description of a blog on Rod Boothby’s blog:

a blog is an entire CMS implementation for one person, available free and at the click of a mouse, with virtually no set-up but infinite possibilities for customization and configuration.

Sounds pretty impressive put like that,  I just wanted to add though that a blog is only part of most peoples Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system, ie the part of the PKM that handles personal publishing.  Rod goes on to provide a great post that describes the challenges and opportunities associated with enterprise blogging.