cazh1 » Web 2.0

Fragmentation of Social Sharing Environments

Jim MacLennan — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 22:06:47 +0000

Progress requires innovation, success spawns imitation, competition requires differentiation – and after 7+ years of “Web 2.0”, there are multiple sharing environments vying for our attention (and participation).

Content Creation

Blogging has morphed beyond it’s “personal diary” origins; Blogger, WordPress, and the various CMS platforms have moved to become a long-format publishing platforms that continue to evolve. My own experience with this blog (cazh1) and internal blogs at work has shown that “posts” are more essays, articles, documentation on what and how, status reports for projects or trips.

I’ve recently begin experimenting with a new (for me) type of blogging – I’ll call it short-format, and it hearkens back to the old-school, diarist model. This is a place to put short notes, observations, maybe sketches / photos for an Artist / Designer, code snips for a Engineer / Developer, or experimental prose for an Author / Poet. The format is exemplified by tumblr, a fast-growing platform that hosts some amazing content and is giving the old stalwarts some competition.

Click for the original ...

Content Sharing

But what about the Usual Suspects – Facebook and Google+? I don’t see these platforms as content creation engines as much as they are content sharing engines; ubiquitous Share This! links, the +1’s and Like buttons that give “social media” their differentiating characteristic; networks of contacts that are of a like mind, in your Circles or Smart Lists, add value and context to the original content.

I see Flickr and YouTube as hybrids. Flickr is driven by people adding pictures; you can see / browse / search, and it has a personal, sharing-my-photo-album quality. YouTube, in the other hand, is more like a new video broadcast network; lately, it seems like the number of personal videos is dwarfed by ad campaigns, political messages, and music / entertainment videos.

Antics with Semantics

Yes, I understand that you can Follow other tumblrs. Facebook pages and Google+ circles are creating content as profound and banal as the bloggers. And I’m glossing over professional networks like LinkedIn, which can be oversimplified as an electronic form of career networking. All of this has great value, is very relevant to the conversation – but all have subtle nuances, different use cases where they drive value.

Where does Twitter fit in? The best description to date seems to be micro-blogging; the 140-character limit forces a style and controls depth of meaning – Twitter is more of a broadcast medium, a virtual bulletin board or cocktail party, best understood by watching trending topics when events are breaking. Content is created, and RT’s and hash tags give weight to an ideas current mindshare.

An Excuse for Experimentation

Clearly, there is no one best answer when trying to figure out how social networks can drive a business. There are many platforms and technologies, all of which are evolving to deliver different messages and produce different results. There is no one best solution – and the only way to be able to glibly comment on how this might impact your business is by diving in, learning what these things can and cannot deliver. Or find someone who had done it, who is still doing it.

Just don’t go by what you read in airline magazines or see on TV – sound bites won’t cut it.

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Post tags: Blog, Blogger, business value, Facebook, Google, Google Plus, LinkedIn, networking, Social Media, Social Networks, Tumblr, Twitter, Web 2.0, WordPress, YouTube

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Google+ is Active, not Passive, Social Networking

Jim MacLennan — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 19:22:21 +0000

This past week saw the introduction of Google+, the search behemoth’s entry into the social networking fray. A slew of posts, articles, opinion pieces, etc. were sure to flow – and as I settled down with some time and a backlog of links to review, here are my initial thoughts on the service.

Do I need yet another social networking platform? Not really, I’ve got my personal (Facebook) and professional (LinkedIn) networks somewhat segregated, and I am falling a bit behind in regular tweets and blog entries – the value waxes and wanes over time. Still, I’ve been impressed with Google’s overall track record on innovative tools for the “personal cloud” (i.e. how can I run my own life / my start-up / my virtual business sans infrastructure?)

Ahem … Google Wave notwithstanding … but everyone gets a mulligan every once in a while, yes?
In the various reviews / blogs, many call out that Google+ will replace / obviate the need for Google Buzz. Funny, I barely registered that one … a finnegan?

First impression: the basic interface / layout seems unimpressive, just another “skin” over the basic LinkedIn / Facebook layout. The UI tricks in Circles (drag and drop into groups) is cute, and it’s the little “usability” things that get a fair chunk of the universe to salivate … but I’m looking for something insightful …

Sparks just looks like Yet Another take on aggregated, automated search. I can follow news topics in Google News or companies on LinkedIn, subscribe to Google Alerts in eMail or RSS feeds in my feed reader; Sparks is just the Google+ version of an in situ enabler for watching the world go by

Hangouts actually looks promising – a video chat room that allows groups to speak and see each other. The first-time install process was a typical, classy example of well designed, tech savvy, user-empathetic instructions that eludes corporate IT.

Ahem … looking for examples of why folks don’t like corporate IT? Or, suggestions for skill sets and training required in modern IT?

However – to be a real enterprise tool, it desperately needs the ability to screen-share. The majority of my collaborative, video-enabled meetings-at-a-distance typically revolve around a presentation or spreadsheet that we are reviewing.

Active vs Passive: I found that I was looking for ways to incorporate feeds from Twitter and this blog … but I noted what MC Siegler called out in his writeup. Content doesn’t make it into Google+ unless I specifically put it in there; if/when I build up an active, complex nesting of Circles, that editorial tweak has the potential to jack up the overall relevance score, and make Google+ an impactful tool for workgroups in a professional setting. Combine that with the readily-available face-to-face Hangout interaction – it’s a social networking platform that leans a bit more to Active, not Passive, connections. Marshall Kirkpatrick has some very insightful notes on this idea, expanding on the notion that communication needs contextual integrity (a reasonable expectation of the proper level of privacy in this context – or, freedom from worrying about who’s listening in).

At this point, however, it’s very tough to get real interactions going – I need to get folks that I know – and would actively participate – to join Google+. I got my invite through a Lifehacker forum last week, and the person that kindly sent me an invite hasn’t even completed their profile yet.

Social Networking for the Enterprise: The really interesting notes come from folks like Dennis Howlett and R. “Ray” Wang, longtime commenters on the enterprise IT scene. Howlett’s writeup on Google+ in the Enterprise is a bit breathless, but I suspect this comes from years of wading through the so-called Enterprise 2.0 offerings from other quarters; he also notes the contextual power of Circles (when done right). Wang writes about the Google+ and the consumerization of IT – where I (above) call out the usability, he is stressing his five pillars of Consumer Tech and how Google’s approach lines up so nicely with what the consumer market has been trained to expect.

But don’t take my word for it – check out these writeups, my link list for the topic (hey, I even tagged and shared ‘em via Google Reader … and the

Whitson Gordon at Lifehacker gives a quick tour here – best place to go for the mildly curious
MC Siegler at TechCrunch captures his thoughts, including the seed of the Active vs. Passive idea
Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb on the intricacies of Circles – and an XKCD comic
A threat to Facebook? David Cohen at All Facebook weighs in with his alternaview
Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb writes on her “stress test” of Circles – and shares the findings of Florian Rohrweck on possible future offerings for Google+

At this time, Google+ is still invite only – last weekend, there was quite a rush of wannabe early adopters, so I am not in a position to give out invites – but if you are interested, let me know, and I will send out invites as soon as I am enabled!

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© Jim MacLennan for cazh1, 2011. | Permalink | No comment |
Post tags: collaboration environments, Dennis Howlett, effective design, Facebook, Google, Google Plus, Lifehacker, LinkedIn, personal cloud, R. "Ray" Wang, social networking, Wave, Web 2.0, YouTube

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More Amazing Social Media Statistics

Jim MacLennan — Wed, 05 May 2010 04:36:16 +0000

A follow-on from my last post; speaking of interesting Social Media statistics … would you believe …

If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s 4th largest
80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees
In 2009, Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices
25% of search results for the world’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content

Pretty amazing stuff … check out this video for more …

I was referred to this video short by a friend, and I dug into the source a bit – check out the Socialnomics blog for more stats and videos. For example, this one on Social Media ROI …

… although, I am currently still of the opinion that social media is applicable to consumer markets; I’m not sure how it applies yet to B2B industry.

However, I’m not going to wait around to find out … but I guess I can’t talk about that right now …

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Post tags: Facebook, Google, information, interesting stuff, LinkedIn, millennials, networking, possibilities, Presentations, Social Media, Social Networks, Socialnomics, trends, Twitter, video, Web 2.0, YouTube

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eMail is Dead, Long Live Social Networking: Don’t Get Left Behind

Jim MacLennan — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 03:29:11 +0000

via Fred Wilson – a stunning slide from Morgan Stanley’s recent Internet Trends report:

Click to enlarge ...

The primary topic of the report is the growth and future prospects of the mobile internet – reason enough read through all 87 slides. However, I am slightly amazed by the fact that eMail runs second to the relatively new phenomenon of Social Networking, driven primarily by consumer behavior and Generation Y.

Admit it – more than once, YouTube and Twitter have made the water-cooler talk circuit, as folks text their kids and rave about connecting with long-lost high school and college chums on Facebook. We’ve all seen upticks in LinkedIn traffic as the economy has driven job networking skills to this professional social network.

The Internet’s “Gen-X” Surpassed

Another Morgan Stanley slide shows how the young-uns have surpassed their web-based brethren – first YouTube, now Facebook have taken over the internet …

click to enlarge

In just three short years, a significant movement of mindshare from one web property to another – but don’t stop there. The immersive user experience of Facebook and YouTube is very different from personalized Yahoo and Google portals, and business and social messaging has changed rapidly to adapt.

So how does that translate to business productivity and process management environment?

Business Process Automation Architecture is Falling Farther Behind

eMail is still the dominate business process environment in corporate America. Don’t believe me? Got users clamoring to switch from Notes to Outlook, or desktop-based to cloud-based service? Try introducing mailbox size limitations or document retention limits, and see how many folks squawk. Spin up a few SharePoint sites and insist that all file sharing be done in shared folders (no attachments allowed!). Insist that all discussions take place in forums, not via Re: and Fw: eMail chains. How successful do you think that will be?

Now, there’s no reason to panic; the population within many corporations have an interesting ability to want consumer level flexibility, speed, usability, and “fun factor” in their personal electronics, but few have that same sense of humor about their day-to-day job. “Go ahead and upgrade, as long as my process does not change at all”.

I’m sure this varies at different corporations – based on the average age of the user population. This is not meant as a slight, just an admission of reality – even I don’t quite get some of the communication norms embraced by my daughters.

However, I am very aware that with each passing quarter, new employees and incoming contractors join our work teams, expecting increasing levels of openness, information access, and social connections. It’s only a matter of time until the internal preference measures match the switch shown in the first slide above – will our business process teams be ready?

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Post tags: behavior, eMail, Facebook, Gen-X, millennials, Morgan Stanley, networking, social, Social Networks, trends, Twitter, Web 2.0, YouTube

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Underwhelming experiences with Google Wave

Jim MacLennan — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 01:22:00 +0000

Took some time today to work with the new communication meme – Google Wave. I wouldn’t call it a fundamentally new way to communicate – well, not yet. I think Google is safe to continue with a “preview” label – clearly not even “beta” yet. No horrible bugs – at least on the Windows platform – but some obviously missing features. And, I am not all that impressed with the basic idea – it’s just a mashup of Google Docs, instant messenger, and eMail.

Problems

All of my experimentation has been from a Windows machine – I am experiencing horrible performance issues with Firefox 3.5.3 on Ubuntu 9.04. I freely admit that this might not be a Wave issue – for the last two weeks, all of my Google sites (Mail, Docs, iGoogle, Reader …) run brutally slow, timing out by graying the browser window. I know it’s a weird issue because I can’t Google for an answer (a disturbingly tight loop). Wave refused to even show me the stills from the introductory videos until I disabled Greasemonkey. Yes, I’m sure it has something to do with my setup, my installed plugins – I’m just surprised that the problems have been this stubborn.

So, to get anything done, it’s back to Windows – still using Firefox, but no hint of platform troubles. Just an underwhelming experience with the fancy new toy.

I Am Legend

Interconnections on the internet are a wonderful thing; I put out a Tweet (sic) regarding my Wave invites, and a note in LinkedIn as well. Twitter generated the most responses, with folks I’d never met – great fun to connect like that. The following day, I got a note from someone looking to connect via Wave – I’m guessing from the information that I can see, this person saw one of my original notes via Friendfeed. Amazing how those copnnections were practically spontaneous …

… while Wave feels like I’m in a walled garden. I still feel very cut off in the Wave world – a different domain from gmail.com means a new address to track, a new contact list to build. And it’s difficult to find connections with folks you already know; I received another Wave invite from a friend, but since I didn’t need it, I tried to figure out how to connect to him via Wave (I thought it a reasonable assumption that he, like me, has dived in). Unfortunately, I had to resort to an email message and some detective work to find out his Google ID – not something I could explain to most business users.

Yet Another Email Client

Yes, I am still at that opinion. Most of the opinions and articles I’ve scanned make it sound like we are working with a next-gen email client that does some of the basics right. I do note that the amplifiers tend to gush a bit, while the attenuators work hard to impress with wit.

Generally Pro

Generally Con

Maybe It’s Just Me

One of my random invites went to this guy, who’s review was a bit more positive than mind. Ok, maybe I’ll jump into the with:public pool and wade around a while – it’s probably the only way I’ll really get it. However, I am very willing to be patient and continue the experiment – took me about 3 months to get Twitter.

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Post tags: Collaboration, Google, innovation, Knowledge Management, LinkedIn, mashup, Twitter, Wave, Web 2.0

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Wikis in High School

Jim MacLennan — Sun, 03 May 2009 20:17:00 +0000

Last month, Vinson wrote about the use of wikis in school projects, and it reminded me to dust off some notes I took from a conversation with my daughter Sean MacLennan, late last year. It was a history project about World War II, and the class was asked to compose their reports on a wiki. Sean is a pretty good writer, and she likes to write, so I was interested in her thoughts on the wiki as a medium, and the collaborative process …

Since there were so many parts of WWII, the wiki format helped, because you could break it down into categories – chunk up the tasks into parts. Plus, we could create the categories we wanted, under the outline [stubbed out by] the teacher.

There were 24 kids in the class, but this was a project across multiple history classes [4], so we’re talking about 100 authors. All were split into groups of 3-4, each had to do part of the shared paper. Each group had their own subset of the assignment, and built their own mini-wiki – a home page plus 10 pages of “categories” or topics.

We literally started with a blank sheet. The assignment handout had the high-level outline, but we had to key it into the wiki / web site to get things started.

So, much of the lesson was about the mechanics of the new medium.
Q: How did you carve up the assignment?

We used the sidebar to create the sub pages and a table of contents. Everybody got in a workgroup, discussed how to divvy up the categories, and then started to work on their own pages – add the page, then fill it out. We got to give feedback, too – we had to critique each other’s work, but it was more like “ooo, stop, you are adding too much text”. I noticed some competition / peer pressure starting, to add as much as the other people.

We could add pictures, links to other web pages, and references to Wikipedia with a hot link to it.

One challenge I noticed: some were copying and pasting from the web, and adding no value or reading what they were copying (ex “… if you look at the picture below …”). Some were not putting a lot of effort into it, and the others thought this might bring the group’s grade down; we were definitely nervous about it.

“Peer review” extended to looking at other pages in your own group and grading them.

So, participative collaboration is part of the lesson as well – the group dynamic, and the idea that not everyone wants to be an author. She also hit the issue where one person needed additional training, and hands-on assistance with some of the mechanics (ex. how do I make a table?) – yet another form of collaboration, and plus awareness of the need for web 2.0 tools to be easy to use (transparent vs opaque?)

What about grading?

There was no coordination on look/feel of the overall structure – once the groups had their subset, they just did their own thing. However, the grade for the group was partially based on whether or not all the information came across. No bonus for the group grade on style points; one person’s page could include images, maps, even videos, and another page could just be text cribbed from elsewhere. The individuals got points on their content, but the only part of the group grade was simply whether or not the list of categories was covered. There was some part of your grade for content, however – had to include at least one image, table, graphic, etc., and those had to be spread out reasonably well. There was a target list of 10 content add-on elements, and they had to be spread evenly across the group.

So it was a technical learning event – how to build a page and add content (text and other) – but not a qualitative thing (how good was the writing?).

Any last comments?

No, just get this done and go set up the Wii to the internet, so I can Mario Kart with my friends!

Clearly, there is more than one way to collaborate!

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© Jim MacLennan for cazh1, 2009. | Permalink | One comment |
Post tags: class, Collaboration, high school, Mario Kart, school projects, Web 2.0, Wiki, Wikipedia, workgroup

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Business Benefits of Social Networks Exist, but …

Jim MacLennan — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 04:10:00 +0000

When I see / read articles like this, or hear the breathless claims of vendors, pundits, and True Believers, I’ll privately chuckle to myself. All of this stuff – social networking, collaboration, and innovation – are 21st century takes on good old Knowledge Management (KM), circa 1998.

Do these sound like presentations from your recent Enterprise 2.0 conference?

Managing Cultural Change to Create a Knowledge Sharing Environment
Effectively Managing Information Overload in the Information Age
Information Content and Security in Document Management Systems
Using Technology and the Project Management Workbench to Accelerate Product Development Efforts
Shifting the Burden of Knowledge Sharing to All Employees

I dug up an old copy of the proceedings from a 1998 KM conference; if I did a global text replace of “Innovation” for “Knowledge”, I could probably get a bunch of folks to sign up today!

Ok, a little sarcasm is fun, but once you realize the similarities, there are other parallels with 1990′s KM efforts – not the least of which is the identification of business benefits. Anyone involved with projects back then can testify to the difficulty in predicting hard benefits – clearly quantifiable impact on top line or bottom line, derived in a predictable, measurable manner. Sorry, it just didn’t work out that way for KM – and it won’t for Social Networks, either! The hype cycle will prevail …

Hard Benefits of Social Networks Do Not Exist, but …

Why do people insist on expecting a hard business benefit from social networks, or a payback from a project to implement a funny-sounding technology (wiki/blog/tweet) inside the enterprise? Has anyone ever gotten a quantifiable business benefit from participating on Facebook, LinkedIn, mySpace?

Well, yes, actually – plenty of folks have connected with friends / colleagues, collaborated on business ideas, come up with innovative new approaches – actually monetized all the goofy sounding tools. I myself have written about successes, and have made connections I could never have anticipated. Heck, the old KM conference guide has a couple of case studies as well.

Ah, but do you see the pattern? Business benefits are not predictable, they are always opportunistic and anecdotal. Success is characterized by stories of the home runs (rarely accompanied by comparable stats on strikeouts, by the way). You can’t implement a social network within a company or a group, and predict how much and when the profits / savings / growth with start rolling in. You are setting up an environment of opportunity – nothing more.

When I hear people talk about business value or business return of social networks as if they could predict it, I cringe. They’re trying to apply financial controls on something that’s governed by chance – you can’t do it. The incorrect assumption is that you can control good luck – but you can tweak your chances.

Active networkers know – I’m talking about people that have been networking for years, when connections were made face to face. Career coaches would exhort us to get out there and build our professional network – make the office visits, get on their calendar, develop some connections. You have no idea what could happen from any one connection or conversation – nothing might happen or something might happen – you trying to make your own luck.

What is it they say, luck is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration? Social networking is just automation for some of that 90%. And benefits will happen – just don’t ask me when.

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Post tags: Blog, business benefits, business value, collaboration systems, conference, Facebook, innovation, Inspiration, Knowledge Management, LinkedIn, networking, Social Media, Social Networks, Web 2.0, Wiki

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Five Stages of Twitter Relevance

Jim MacLennan — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 03:36:00 +0000

Click for the original

I’m already fielding internal (as well as external) questions about the application of Twitter in a manufacturing company, and I’m developing a reasonably good model, I think – one that will apply to the hard-core, salt-of-the-earth, manufacturing business leader that I’ve worked with at many organizations.

This “maturity model” approach has been used before; back in December of 2008, Bhagarva sketched out the Five Stages of Twitter Acceptance – but that model only helps existing bloggers and social networkers understand this terse little idea spitter. Kind of like explaining OOP to a COBOL developer – I get the general idea of coding (communicating), but you’ve changed some of the basic rules like procedural vs. event handling (short and immediate vs. in depth and permanent).

This doesn’t help explain YACMTTCDFE (Yet Another Communication Method That They Can’t Distinguish From Email) for those still struggling with Web 2.0 and Social Networks. If it doesn’t arrive in their Outlook inbox, I’m still facing an uphill struggle getting them to understand the mechanism, let alone the concept.

However, I’m getting a decent level of results when I draw parallels to concepts that these folks “grew up” with. The level of understanding and acceptance directly correlates to the level of relevance that the Twitterverse might have for their current information sharing needs. They typically ask …

How exactly do I understand Twitter and it’s relevance to my work day?

Pointless: This has absolutely no value add, a complete waste of time – get back to work!
Cute: An interesting and different communication medium, but I gotta get back to work. Maybe over lunch …
Web-Based Texting: Conversations about nothing in particular, but at least you’re starting to connect. Not sure how it is better than IM, but some don’t even use that …
A Cocktail Party (or maybe the corner bar): Twitter is filled with cliques that are easy to eavesdrop / butt in on – a chance to develop your skills and awareness, and engage larger, targeted networks with pointed conversations about specific topics that I deal with every day. But no pressure, we’re just hanging out ..
A Community: Like a trade group, guild, or local Chamber of Commerce, one that requires and rewards participation. At this highest level, Twitter is both a source and a use of awareness, knowledge and understanding; conversations are multi-directional, real business value is being generated.

I can illustrate these levels with examples from my favorite Twitter Search columns in my Tweetdeck (Search:SAP)

Do I really care if the sap is running this spring?
Funny, I get hits when people watch sap-py movies. Oh, those wacky homonyms …
Twitter as a job board – every SAP job listing pops up. Wait, did I just see a trend tweet by?
Hmm, lots of interesting SAP practitioners are talking about live projects and cutting edge programming work …
Interesting conversations pop up when Oracle buys Sun, or SAP announces the latest product enhancements – I can get a near-real time pulse on market sentiment

I’ve piqued their interest, but now they want to know what “real business value” really means. I’ll post on that next time … stay tuned!

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Post tags: SAP, Social Networks, Tweetdeck, Twitter, Web 2.0

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A Plea for Empathetic Communication

Jim MacLennan — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 04:10:00 +0000

It’s impossible to over-communicate

Sounds a bit strong, but if you think through your real-world experiences, this shouldn’t surprise anyone. No matter how hard you try, your message will be missed by someone …

Problem: It’s all their fault!

Rely on Web 2.0, and …

… they won’t subscribe to the RSS feed; they don’t understand the concept, and have no other information sources that supply feeds
… they won’t sign up for the email notifications; that feature is hidden, no one told them about it
… they won’t read / browse / search the wiki; there are too many unfinished pages in there, and they don’t consider it reliable
… they can’t find it using intranet search – they don’t know where this feature is located. And even if they did, the results aren’t as targeted and “right-on” as Google

So, you try to rely on “first generation” electronic media, but …

… they didn’t read the email, it got lost in their inbox with 100 other new messages today
… they didn’t see, therefore, didn’t read the attachment
… they did not check their voice mail

Even the “old fashioned way” doesn’t always work …

You are having a face to face conversation, but it’s not sinking in because they are checking their Blackberry and thinking about the currently unfolding interruption …

Solution: Don’t jump on the latest communication bandwagon and expect a Silver Bullet – you need to balance flexibility and focus. Different media work for different people, so work to communicate your message using a variety of methods. Of course, if you try to supply all media for all tastes, there won’t be enough time to get any real work done. Just know that there is no one best way to get information out to all who need to hear your message – and adjust accordingly.

Problem: It’s all your fault!

If you can get them to the electronic content, you still have to create content that actually communicates the correct information. Even if they are capable of subscribing to RSS feeds, or opening a document attachment – if the content does not convey with clarity, they won’t catch your drift. Worse yet – if the first one or two samples don’t convey anything, they will stop listening to everything.

Solution #1: Practice practice practice – The only way to get better at anything is to keep iterating.

Observation: It’s no one’s fault – it just is …

Think about it – don’t you receive messages in your inbox that are not clear / difficult to read, or hear about things after the fact or through the grapevine? And don’t you glance at your Blackberry during meetings? When you set your phone to vibrate, you avoid distracting others (good!) but you are invariably distracting yourself (who just called ….?)
Fact is, we are all swimming in a sea of information, bombarded with messages from all sides – and we’re bombarding others as well. A little humility and a lot of empathy go a long way …

Get feedback – if your medium or your content are not effective, find out why. Ask your intended audience what works best for them. Majority rules, so if you have a few email holdouts that don’t know how to set up an RSS reader, do it for them. Better yet, do it with them – and show them what else they can subscribe to!
Understand what the current corporate / organizational / local culture is, and play to that. You don’t have to accept the status quo – but don’t tilt at windmills just because wiki is a cool sounding word that would look good on your resume. Introduce change judiciously, and don’t let it override the goal at hand – you need to get the status of this project updated!
Never underestimate the power of face time. When you craft a beautiful, concise, complete summary of the upcoming meeting, and someone still insists on calling you up and talking about it – don’t look on this with disdain – it’s an opportunity! What was it about the email / document that was incomplete? Was I not clear? Also, since most recipients of project updates are getting them for a reason (stakeholders!!), it’s a great opportunity to make sure they get the big picture, understand the original objectives, and are still in support of the initiative.
Projects end, but relationships go on. It’s always good practice to improve your communications and connections with the various technology and business process teams, in and out of the company. These is always a “next time”, and next time could be that much easier if you are consistently building your foundation of clarity, openness, completeness.

Effective communication is very difficult, and requires constant work. Realize this, model your actions accordingly, and your impact and influence will grow.

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© Jim MacLennan for cazh1, 2008. | Permalink | One comment |
Post tags: Art, BlackBerry, Communication, communication style, creating understanding, empathy, feedback, flexibility, Inspiration, Knowledge Management, knowledge transfer, passion, RSS, silver bullet, technical communication, Web 2.0, Wiki, writer

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Enterprise 2.1: Exiting the Trough of Disillusionment

Jim MacLennan — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 01:46:00 +0000

“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?

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Post tags: Blog, Chicago Reader, Collaboration, Documentation, Enterprise 2.0, Google, intranet, Knowledge Management, knowledge management tools, People Management, project, Project Management, project manager, project status reports, SharePoint, Social Networks, Twitter, Web 2.0, Wiki, Wikipedia

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