Welcome to my weblog, which I use for keeping track of interesting stuff. It serves as my basecamp for the exploration of the Internet, the "Blogosphere" and life in general.
Just saw a great video of David Weinberger in which he explains the thoughts displayed in his new book Everything is Miscellaneous. Generally very good stuff on how we have been treating and ordering information and knowledge for ages and how that is started to change in the digital age. And by the way David Weinberger is a really enthusiastic presenter!
I was triggered to the subject by this nice slideshow about “Everything is Miscellaneous” created by Robbert Homburg:
By the way, David Weinberger is coming to Amsterdam next week and I am really trying to get into the “invitation-only” event. Let’s see how it will work out…
Andrew McAfee, one of my Enterprise 2.0 guru’s at Harvard, just posted an article The Pursuit of Busyness that voices the concern and frustration of a lot of people trying to bring social software tools into the workplace, but fail because of general lack of participation.
To quote:
Companies that are full of knowledge workers and that have built cultures that value busyness face a potentially sharp dilemma when it comes to E2.0. These companies stand to benefit a great deal if they can build emergent platforms for collaboration, information sharing, and knowledge creation. But they may be in a particularly bad position to build such platforms not because potential contributors are too busy, but because they don’t want to be seen as not busy enough.
And even if the leaders in such companies sincerely want to exploit the new tools and harness the collective intellgence of their people, they might have a tough time convincing the workforce that busyness is no longer the ne plus ultra. Corporate cultures move slowly and with difficulty, and it will take a lot more than a few memos, speeches, and company retreats to convince people that it’s a smart career idea, rather than a poor one, to contribute regularly and earnestly to E2.0 platforms.
Where I come from, we just finalised a big survey around the company-wide wiki, with as most frequent mentioned anwers, explaining the lack of participation, being “no time”.
It is difficult to overcome the “what’s in it for me” hurdle without clear management signals that participation is seen as “valuable contribution”, for tools that do not have a “direct-reward-after-contributed” effect. Social bookmarking might have that, but a company wiki surely not.
So our strategy is really geared towards exploiting management buy-in signals whenever we can, besides the usual highlighting of beneficial user cases etc.
It is all about changing culture…and as I wrote in an earlier post called Enterprise 2.0 does not come costlessly it is all about realising the impact and benefits of social software like in the chart below:
In the article David explains how new tools like blogs, wiki’s , RSS and tagging can provide the enterprise with at least part of the benefits that were promised, but failed to be delivered during the good old days of the Knowledge Management hype.
The KM hype ended, because users didn’t see the pay-off for themselves of formalising their knowledge into big systems.
David see the new tools creating value because:
...when people are socialising, even in a work context, they are much happier to share their thoughts and their experiences.
Go into a busy staff canteen and listen to the hubbub. You can be sure that a high percentage of those conversations are work-related. They don’t show up on any statistics and they’re not managed or facilitated by any computer software, but knowledge is being freely exchanged.
This is exactly what happens with social software except, instead of an audience within earshot, the audience can be as big or as small as you like. They’re brought together by common interest, by trust and by the fact that an exchange is taking place rather than a one-way “sucking their brains out”.
and
...an environment is being created in which knowledge can flourish and flow. Many of the benefits of social computing are those corner-of-the-eye things where you pick up thoughts from here and there and you discover that your own insight and understanding evolves. Knowledge itself seems to exist in the connections between information elements and between the participants as well as in the individuals’ heads.
and
Knowledge will never be managed but the environment in which it flourishes certainly can be.
In my endless search for wisdom on the subject of the value of social software for companies, I recently revisited the case of the BBC. It may surprise a lot of you, but the big state-owned BBC is actually quite far ahead with the use of social software to improve their “internal globally distributed conversations and communications”.
The most visible champion of the BBC in terms of social software is Euan Semple. Although Euan, in his role as head of KM solutions, was not the first to implement tools like wiki’s, blogs and discussion forums at the BBC, he played a vital role in selling the tools and gaining acceptance for their use BBC-wide.
So what did the BBC do exactly? Here are a few of their achievements, as I learned from the sources mentioned below.
Discussion forum
The story starts with the introduction of a company-wide discussion forum, which just allowed people to ask questions or enter in discussions. It paid off: at one point in time more than 75% of the BBC employees (21.000 in total at the time) had used the forum.
A lot of stuff discussed in the forum is mundane, but it still helps a lot of people. Policy issues are also uncovered and discussed and policy was improved. A nice quote “Not knowledge is power but knowledge sharing is power”. The forum democratises the company (everybody is equal there) and it is perfect for geographically distributed business (like the BBC).
To close off this section I present one off Euan’s nice anecdote’s: the audio- and video editors of BBC were silo-ed (in different departments) during the work hours, but at night, at home, they were sharing their experiences and knowledge on the Internet with the world. Why not try to bring this knowledge sharing in the company?
Expertfinding
Then they introduced a tool which allowed people with the same professional interest to find each other. It helps identify the informal organisation: what people do, skills, hobbies. The tool also allowed to create interest groups.
Weblogs
Then came the weblogs. One of the leading figures that use this tool is CEO Richard Sambrook, who wanted to really engage with the people of the BBC, even on strategic issues, but not using e-mails or newsletter. A weblog allows easy and genuine feedback and it very accessible. The CEO now has a regular audience of 4000 people. It gives the CEO a new sort of internal “power”, that other executives do not have: to influence the organisation in a really authentic way in stead of staff e-mails and newsletters. Within the BBC, there are now also a lot of other internal bloggers (more than 100), while the CEO has even gone out and started an external weblog.
Despite the success of the weblogs in the BBC, Euan Semple is still rather cautious of their chance of success in other companies, because “they work on the basis of having an opinion and expressing it, which is not trivial in every organisation”. “Sometimes it may be quite difficult to say what you think”.
Wiki’s
After the weblogs came wiki’s. Euan admits that the wiki’s were the toughest, because of their apparent complexity. But they were used; at first for sharing information and creating websites for which they had no budget and in later stages also to perform company-wide collaboration on policy documents (they created a blogging policy for example), which were written without the need for actually meeting face-to-face.
RSS
RSS is also being used extensively as a way to manage the increasing number of conversations and to connect everything together.
Tagging
Finally the BBC is experimenting with tagging: allowing Internet/Intranet content to be tagged with self-invented keywords (folksonomy) allowing great sources to rise to the surface and other people to find those sources and to find people with the same professional interests.
Some additional thoughts from Euan:
With these tool organisations get much more transparent and the real valuable parts (and people) start to surface.
And last but not least: organisations will increasingly feel a pressure to introduce these tools by the new employees that will enter the company the coming years, employees who are from a generation where working with these tools is a natural thing: they will expect these tools to be around or…
About a half year ago, Euan left the BBC to start on his own as a consultant. On his weblog he very recently shared his experiences with spreading the message to other companies in his new role in a blog post called Consultancy 101. A couple of nice comments there also. One quote I hang on to this weekend:
“Every organisation, no matter how regulated or profit motivated employs people and those people need to trust and communicate with each other to get things done. This stuff puts those abilities on steroids.”
I completely agree!
Some interesting links:
A really nice short presentation by Euan Semple as uploaded to Google Video (24 minutes) where he shares his experiences. You will love it!
Sometimes this place is functioning as my notebook. A few minutes ago I “googled” for sharing culture and the first article by David Gurteen, called Creating a Knowledge Sharing Culture provided a nice segment on the difference between data, information, knowledge and tacit knowledge:
Knowledge is often seen as a rich form of information. This differentiation however is not terribly helpful. A more useful definition of knowledge is that it is about know-how and know-why. A metaphor is that of a cake. An analysis of its molecular constituents is data – for most purposes not very useful – you may not even be able to tell it were a cake. A list of ingredients is information – more useful – an experienced cook could probably make the cake – the data has been given context. The recipe though would be knowledge – written knowledge – explicit knowledge – it tells you how-to make the cake. An inexperienced cook however, even with the recipe might not make a good cake. A person, though, with relevant knowledge, experience, and skill – knowledge in their heads – not easily written down – tacit knowledge – would almost certainly make an excellent cake from the recipe.
The article where this quote came from, is actually really worthwhile, although written in 1999.
I just feel this new development around “sharing to world’s knowledge” is very important!
If we are to believe Larry Sanger, the man that came up with the original idea of Wikipedia, and the man behind the new initiative, the Citizendium will be the wiki it was supposed to be in the first place. The current Wikipedia, Sanger explains, “is only half of the original conception of the finest encyclopedia in the history of humankind: the wild-and-woolly half…
While the new project launches a great number of changes to the internal structure of the wiki, the most important one is the new power of “invited expert editors”.
If the new Citizendium project is a success, we will probably end up with a small part of Wikipedia content getting the “experts approved stamp”, while for the newer stuff and not-interesting-for-experts stuff (I guess this is the majority) we will still have the real community based content.
My conclusion: although I am not an expert in Wikipedia’s inner workings, I welcome every effort to get the world’s real experts (academia and the like) involved in a project like this. I just hope it works out this way.
People say that the “untrue” does not live long in the Blogosphere. Well here is my part in the mechanism.
Today I read this very nice article on Enterprise 2.0 in Optimise Magazine. The article by the way is a transcript of an interview with the two leading Enterprise 2.0 experts in the field: Andrew McAfee and JP Rangaswami. At the end of the article the reader is confronted with a very divergent opinion on the potential value and acceptance of social software in companies.
The opinion comes from Thomas Davenport an long-time expert of IT, Business and Knowledge Management. Mr. Davenport was very negative on the prospect of Enterprise 2.0 happening. But more appealing was the fact that he seemed to need some untrue facts to prove his points. In his attack on the viability of blogging Davenport stated:
In corporations, blogs have another problematic attribute: Your company doesn’t really want you to say what you think about it. A number of people have been fired for blogging, and probably greater numbers haven’t been hired at all because of their blogs. Robert Scoble, who gained fame as the most visible Microsoft employee with a blog, has left the company. Only one Fortune 500 CEO—Jonathan Schwartz at Sun Microsystems—writes a blog. Moral: If you want to be a CEO, don’t write a blog.
I will not argue about the whole blogging issue here, but suggesting that Robert Scoble left Microsoft over blogging is outrageous if you ask me!
Or am I wrong here?
Let’s see if this Blogosphere thing works: testing, testing 1, 2, 3 … Robert could you pick this up please?
Recently I listened to a podcast interview by Dan Bricklin with Toby Redshaw, Corporate Vice President of Information Technology Strategy, Architecture & e-Business of Motorola (man, what a job title!).
The interview was about the use of social software and focussed on wikis and blogs. Please find some highlights I wanted to keep for myself, but of course you can look over my schoulder:
General:
it is all about “volunteer knowledge”
viral creation of wiki’s and blogs by people doing the real work (as part of work process!).
On blogs:
blogs provide more reflective communication in teams, very refreshing
with blogs it is easy now to become engaged or participate in discussions, also for those not in the team.
blog posts are better than a memo that are generally hard to react to
blogs at Motorola also used for deeply tech stuff and not only for management
a (geographically) distributed not really connected community becomes tightly knit and this accelaterates the communication by a factor 1000
blogs develop a better way of listenening. What is it somebody wants to say to me in this comment?
On wiki’s:
the use caught on like wildfire
wiki’s have two sides: self editing, self maturing environment with dynamic content plus community and knowledge in people’s head’s becomes available
wiki’s are often used where you have a process part and project part
Bricklin: “bad behaviour in some instances?” Not really, there is a general (social) pressure to get things better.
What was replaced by the introduction of blogs and wiki’s:
info on personal drives, note books gets replaced by wiki’s.
wiki make information more organised.
“I know somebody worked on this so now I know where to look for it” (on the wiki of course)
it replaces ad hoc intranets.
barriers to publish on intranet went away.
barriers to ask stupid things went away (in blogs you much faster ask questions: users find it more easier to do it their without hesitation, embarrsament
Things they learned:
a near zero work effort thing: no training effort, helpdesk
we just launched it and it got adopted, via word of mouth
there is a saying “quality of the software is inverse proportional to the thickness of the user manual”. The was no manual for these things!
better info quicker, in better ways , in a more open collaborative approach
A nice quote to conclude:
A collaborative infrastructure like this, has to be good for every company!
There is a world of podcasts to expore on the internet. Go ahead, see for your self and learn, learn, learn.
This is a very quick one, but it was nice to hear this coming from Robert Scoble. He talks a little bit about managing knowledge in email boxes at Microsoft, or rather about destroying knowledge. An internal blog would be much better:
I’ll probably open an internal blog and see if I can get all the good stuff outside of email and onto the intranet so that if I get hit by a bus someone can step in and learn everything I was doing in email and continue.
All content on this weblog is presented on my personal account, representing my own views, and as such does not necessarily reflect the views of my past, current or future employers.
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posted Sep 21, 11:29 pm on Sep 21, 2007 |
category: Books
/ Knowledge Management
In my endless search for wisdom on the subject of the value of social software for companies, I recently revisited the case of the BBC. It may surprise a lot of you, but the big state-owned BBC is actually quite far ahead with the use of social software to improve their “internal globally distributed conversations and communications”. 
I just feel this 
Recently I listened to a