Thoughts and observations on the intersection of technology and business; searching for better understanding of what's relevant, where's the value, and (always) what's the goal ...
Enterprise 2.1: Exiting the Trough of Disillusionment
Enterprise 2.1: Exiting the Trough of Disillusionment
"What will you do with that car if you actually catch it?"
-- what the cat asked the dog (from the Chicago Reader, circa 1989)
So you've gone all "Enterprise 2.0", spinning up a wiki, a blog, and a SharePoint or Drupal server inside your firewall. Now what happens?
The groundswell of interest in "cool tools" brings a wave of users and a burst of feed reader activity - for a few weeks. Before long, however, the organization will get some rush orders, a month-end close, a project deadline, and/or a few vacations on the team ... and the same old excuses begin to weasel their way into the conversations. Folks begin to realize that collaboration and participation is more than reading (I actually have to type something into this thing?). Management styles are tested, and we find out if KM can be pushed on or pulled from the group. The questions start on a familiar note ...
Why?
The classic pushback against documentation; we see no immediate value added. When I'm programming or implementing a system, I'm making stuff happen; when I'm documenting, I'm only creating files that no one reads (and some ambient white noise for my cube neighbors). Of course, if there's only one person in the department that knows how the system works, and if they happen to be out on vacation when a problem arises, it's all hands on deck and a general scramble to figure out how things work. Imagine your consternation when you find out it's a five-minute fix ... if only they had written something down ...
There's also the career flexibility issue; if you're the only one that knows how something works, you'll never be able to move to the next interesting technology - stuck maintaining the Unknown System. Unfortunately, a plea to the value of Future Flexibility doesn't help when you're dealing with someone who likes to maintain control over the Predictable Present. Sooner or later, the benefit of getting rid of their inflexibility far outweighs the cost of reengineering anything ... it's just delayed pain.
Who?
Another classic question (who is supposed to write this stuff? Not Me!), with a contemporary twist ... the collaborative tools allow us to quickly broaden our audience/author pool, including folks outside of IT. In fact, this is a significant difference from fads gone by - non-IT folks are getting exposed to collaborative documents on publicly available, open environments like Wikipedia and Google; it's getting easier to talk to a growing number of people about interacting in a collaborative environment; the team isn't limited to the techies any more!
Which?
A much more important question - which platform should we use to capture this knowledge? When do you use a blog versus a discussion forum? Will I wiki, or should I SharePoint? Choosing IM over eMail is easy, but when should I tweet instead?
If you're working on this question, it's actually a good sign - folks have enough hands-on to understand the good and the bad about a variety of collaboration media. Experience is your best guide here; wiki's are great for fast entry and immediate distribution, but (IMHO) it's difficult to maintain a table of contents, index, or any multi-chapter / multipage chunk of knowledge. At home, I'm building the fifth generation of my home software development environment, and I've already passed over my personal wiki tool as unsatisfactory. Too many processes and interlocking technologies surrounding the servers, development environments, and push-to-production processes. It's much easier to create an actual Administrator's Guide (sample); a formal document with table of contents, chapters, diagrams, even page headers and footers. If I bothered to print it out, it'll look great - but I don't care about the paper. I like the structure that a book gives me - this is broad collection of information about a set of technologies and processes required to do one basic thing.
Each of the different Web 2.0 / KM tools has different strengths and weaknesses - flexible info structures, formatting efficiencies, ease of distribution, and support for collaboration / version control. The light will come on when you understand your biggest problem is collecting the knowledge; presentation, distribution, search, and sharing are covered nicely by the various intranet technologies, but the magic is in the making.
Doom and Gloom - and a Silver Lining
Disruptive technologies come and go, there are no silver bullets, and there's always a problem somewhere. If the environment is user friendly, it won't scale. If users accept the concept, they won't have the time to create content. If you can get all of these budding authors to write prose that is readable, you'll struggle with making it findable.
But hey - we're trying to pull out of this "trough of disillusionment" - so focus on the things that Web 2.0 does well ...
Lowers the technology bar for collaboration - all you need is a browser!
You're not introducing new ideas, you're just making them work within your company
Widens the author pool (and experience base!) for knowledge capture
... and focus your attention on the "next version" (2.1) - practical questions of why? who? which?
Previously ...
- The Law of Large Numbers - or, why Enterprise Wikis are Fundamentally Challenged (September 26, 2006)
- Search as the Killer KM App, and Good Writers will Rule the World (November 5, 2006)
- Moving from Search to Find: Anticipate the Next Big Problem (April 16, 2007)
- More Challenges for Applying Web 2.0 inside the Firewall (July 2, 2007)
- Driving Participation and Contributions on Internal Blogs and Wikis (July 7, 2007)
- The Best Way to get Web 2.0 Into the Enterprise (March 3, 2008)
- Success, Failure, and Insights after 12 Months of Internal Web 2.0 (March 10, 2008)
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Finally! Relevant Applications for YouTube and Twitter in the Enterprise!
Finally! Relevant Applications for YouTube and Twitter in the Enterprise!
If you are involved with manufacturing these days, you've no doubt heard about Lean Manufacturing. I'll not go deep into this area here, but one fascinating (for me) aspect is the thread (in some quarters) that ERP and computer systems are the enemy of Lean. On the whole, I don't disagree - process improvement, kanbans, and attacking muda are typically very physical exercises; roaming the floor, walking through the processes (gemba walks), reorganizing workspaces for flow, designing and simplifying standard work - all very visual, participatory efforts that continue over time (constant improvement). Computer systems can just get in the way - metrics and measurements that require extra data entry, or inflexible processes that can't be changed quickly. Much of Lean thinking is common sense and practical, applied thought - computers can over-complicate things!
However, it's that visual, participatory nature of process improvement that can be something of an obstacle, especially if you're working in an extended organization with many locations. It's difficult to gain insight over the assembly process unless you're standing at the bench, twisting and turning to reach for components. It's hard to design practical speed improvements for changeovers if you aren't there handling the tools / molds. And it's often extremely difficult to get the folks who know how to do this stuff (operators) to effectively document their work!
Enter the YouTube idea (which I freely admit is not my own, but the originator has no problem sharing his insights). Travel budgets are shrinking, time away from the shop is tough - but all I need is a 5 minute show-and-tell of a process. Why not a quick video? It's hard to describe how I can easily, visually manage WIP until you stand in that one key spot on the floor, and see how the sight lines to the various workstations all line up perfectly. Why don't I just show you ...
What about Twitter? Well, eMails, blogs, and wikis are really just fancied-up documentation tools, and nobody likes to create documentation. But Twitter can be terse, instant, and informal - not too intimidating for the itinerant author. Heck, sending tweets about ideas and observations on the job would be very much like sending text messages from your cell phone, an increasingly common, popular, and non-threatening task. The bonus, however, is that Twitter traffic can be broadcast (unlike your typical point-to-point text) and saved to a database for further review and insight.
Now, the public YouTube and Twitter sites are probably not the way you want to implement these ideas; much of what we're Tube-ing and Tweet-ing is company confidential. Corporate IT should get involved - either host it yourselves or properly vet a third party site for access & availability, storage & security.
... finally, a chance to walk into the COO's office and say "tweet" with a straight face ...
Interested in more Lean Manufacturing resources? Here's the best of what I've found on the 'net ... check 'em out!
Previously ...
- Customer DNA - A Different Take on Understanding Markets and Networks (June 11, 2005)
- Misapplying the Pareto principle (January 7, 2006)
- Quality requirements for technical documentation are lower than user documentation (April 3, 2006)
- Thoughts on Why Tech Folks Hate Documentation (July 8, 2006)
- The Iron Triangle - Quality is a Feature that We Choose to Omit from Projects (October 28, 2006)
- Project Status Dashboards Best Practice (and a PowerPoint trick) (May 3, 2007)
- Integrated Supply Chain Benefits Go Beyond the Internal Stuff (November 11, 2007)
- Defining an Effective IT Metrics Framework (January 21, 2007)
- Defining the Business Value of a Project (October 25, 2007)
- Innovation That Matters - Substance Over Style (January 12, 2008)
- Three Business-Case Arguments for Agile, & The Moose On The Table (January 14, 2008)
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The Right Web2.0 Tool for the Audience (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook)
The Right Web2.0 Tool for the Audience (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook)
The volume of Twitter posts popping up in my feed reader is ticking upward, a phenomenon I find interesting because of something I noted recently on LinkedIn. A few weeks ago, a new feature appeared, enabling me to report what I'm working on - Twitter for the office crowd. Always willing to try some flair, I jumped on the bandwagon, and set up a recurring ToDo for updating my LI-net on the day's focus.
meta-tweet
That lasted less than two weeks - some clear (and discouraging) trends had emerged:
- Few people in my network were using this feature, and actively noting what we were doing - and it was primarily folks that I know are active bloggers, engaged in the practice of Web 2.0 (and they, too, have trailed off in their LI-tweets)
- For the "regular" folks in my network, it was the one activity (daily or twice daily updates) that generated the most inbound comments. I got multiple e-mails, noting that I must be manufacturing additional hours each day.
- Without fail, whenever you mention SAP, data warehousing, or any other specific technology, every product sales rep or consulting firm in your network will call that day and offer a$$istance.
I remain a fan of LinkedIn and social networks in general, but my personal jury is still out with Twitter. I think I want it to succeed, but I'm not sure exactly what it can succeed at. The ideas and innovations are still coming in - one of them is sure to make sense to the wider audience, right? In the mean time, I just don't see it catching on in the mainstream enterprise business environment.
I wonder if the gap is generational, or just a different target audience? Much like the difference between Facebook and LinkedIn - is it GenX vs the Millennials, or is it social network versus professional network? Earlier this week, Bernard Lunn weighed in with his compare and contrast post, and observing that both platforms attempt to add Yet Another Messaging Medium to your current array. Dennis McDonald's reply post backs up the notion that there are different audiences in play here - he also has done a deeper dive in Facebook than I have, so if you want a more qualified and detailed comparison, check out Dennis' work.
Or maybe Hugh MacLeod (gapingvoid) has it pegged ...
insightful
Note that Mr. MacLeod is clearly a Twitter fan - maybe he gets this stuff it better than I ...
Previously ...
- Leveraging your Personal Network - Jobs, Tech Help, Connections (October 24, 2006)
- Twitter (March 22, 2007)
- LinkedIn Networking Generates Some Hits; Thoughts on Facebook (April 4, 2007)
- Lots of interesting stuff going on in IM and Presence (April 6, 2007)
- New Twitter features starting to make things more relevant (June 3, 2007)
- The Right Web2.0 Tool for The Job (July 16, 2007)
- My Networking CV (or, What's In It For Me?) (January 26, 2008)
- Anthropology of LinkedIn Answers: Five Days of Posts (February 2, 2008)
- The Best Way to get Web 2.0 Into the Enterprise (March 3, 2008)
- The Innovation Generation - Communication Styles (April 1, 2008)
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Thoughts During a Power Outage
Thoughts During a Power Outage
I am sitting in the cube outside my office, connected by wireless to our corporate network in an otherwise darkened office. The power is out - started around 3AM, and it is apparently affecting a large area, not just this building.
- Kudos to the infrastructure team that strung up the wireless access points here - thanks for plugging them into the same circuit that is powering the emergency lights. not sure if that was by design or a happy accident, but coupled with notebooks running on their batteries, we have the ability to get some communication of status out to the world.
- Some concerns about battery life, however - I use a Dell Latitude D620, and it is (in my opinion) really poor at power management. I expect to get about 60 total minutes of work out of the thing - kinda sad if you ask me.
- No affect on my Blackberry - I am sending and receiving just fine. If you haven't checked out Blackberry Messenger, I'd look into it - definitely useful for sending out quick updates to key folks.
- Not sure if it would do any good to call folks on my teams re: working from home - zero insight as to when the power will come back on. I just made an entry into my internal blog, so I suppose if they happen to catch that post (or this one!) before they come in, they can give me a shout on the cell phone to let me know if they are coming in. Use best judgement - if you had a meeting scheduled, for example, I would definitely come in, just in case.
- I just spoke to someone who did make it in - another early bird like me. He heard on the radio coming in that this is affecting a big part of the area.
- I tried to Google for a status update, but am not able to find anything. That might be something nice for Commonwealth Edison / Exelon to set up - definitely a shortcut that I would set up on my Blackberry.
- This is definitely a case for Twitter - unfortunately, that's blocked by our network policy.
I'm having a bit of fun here, blogging at near-real time to capture thoughts. Part of continuous improvement and innovation is capturing learnings from any situation, so this is my great experiment on blogs as news delivery (as opposed to spouting opinions / capturing deep thoughts - my regular meme / schtick).
That's all I know at this time ...
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New Twitter features starting to make things more relevant
New Twitter features starting to make things more relevantHere's a new plugin for Firefox that's helpful for my use of Twitter - twitterbar. Yes, there's a number of plugins designed to integrate Twitter with Firefox, but this one seems to work fine. Note that it works better now that I've upgraded to Firefox 2.0 - always a good idea to keep up with your software upgrades.
Also, the good folks at Twitter have completed some nice updates to their mobile site - here's how it looks in my Blackberry browser ...
Click on the picture for a full-size image!
These are the kind of incremental improvements that applications go through until they settle into that comfortable niche of relevant, soon to become in use daily. I will admit I am forcing myself to enter "tweets", but that's because I now see them as adjuncts to my CV page; I'm taking them off of this blog - not sure if they are useful here - but if someone is looking to understand what I'm working on Right Now, that's the place to look.
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