Emphasis Added : IT, collaboration and social computing

Generational Battlelines: The KM/SM War

Rob — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 03:11:00 GMT

A few weeks ago, my pal Venkatesh Rao, who usually blogs at Ribbon Farm, wrote a terrific piece over at Enterprise 2.0 Blog discussing the growing disconnect between the traditional Knowledge Management (KM) approach and the insurgent Social Media (SM) strategy for sharing information and tacit knowledge in the enterprise. Venkat observed:

The uber-cause of this war is that Knowledge Management was conceived as a top-down Boomer (born 1946 - 62) management effort, created by this generation just as it was moving into leadership positions. Social Media, on the other hand, is a Millenial/Gen Y (born 1980 -) movement. This overall generational cultural divide has shaped the ongoing corporate cultural war.

He then went on to list five points of generational conflict and five technical dimensions of the issue, concluding that:

It takes no great genius to predict how the war will end. The Boomers will retire and the Millenials will win by default, in a bloodless end with no great drama. KM will quietly die, and SM will win the soul of Enterprise 2.0, with the Gen X leadership quietly slipping the best of the KM ideas into SM as they guide the bottom-up revolution.
And it won’t be just a victory of fashion. It will be a fundamental victory of the better idea. SM is an organic, protean, creative and energetic force.

The entire piece is worth your time. In any case, Venkat's observations drew a bunch of excellent commentary around the KM blogosphere, both supportive and skeptical. Here are some of the links:

He asked me to weigh in, which I did via private email. Here is the text of my response, for what it's worth:

Venkat, I emphatically agree with your analysis. I think you accurately locate the enthusiasms and skepticisms of each generation toward the different approaches. I also think there are other issues that may seem obvious, about how social media displaces authority and hierarchy, and is therefore inherently more threatening to the senior cohort in the workplace, regardless of their generational orientation. People who got to the top by hoarding info don't want to share; they want to manage access. People at the bottom looking to move up quickly want immediate opportunities to contribute and be recognized, rather than working through approved channels. I suspect Millennials will be much less enthusiastic about whatever succeeds SM in the enterprise if it is suddenly their knowledge and authority at stake.
However, I think it's necessary to back up a bit and look at the strategic objectives of the KM/SM initiative in the first place. The goal is to share knowledge to improve some aspect of performance, innovation, service, etc. Sharing knowledge has three components - capturing knowledge, locating knowledge, and consuming knowledge. Any knowledge transfer solution, from classroom training to wikis, has strengths and weaknesses in each of those respects.
I use the following slide in my presentations to talk about this issue:

Basically, knowledge transfer can be oriented on an grid whose axes are Structured vs. Unstructured (X axis) and Personal vs. Impersonal. Printed documentation is the quintessential structured, impersonal (and static) type of knowledge repository. Search is unstructured/dynamic, but impersonal. Real-time communication is unstructured and personal, etc.
If you have a multi-generational workplace and the goal is to get the knowledge-bearers to share, and the knowledge-needers to consume, you need to cover as much of the spectrum as possible to accommodate the whole range of learning and capturing styles, bearing in mind that it will be very difficult to get Millennials to appreciate or accept the highly-structured and linear modes of communication (but it will be just as essential to have these options available for "Boomerang Boomers" who join the organization in lower-level roles).
In the long run, the triumph of social/unstructured knowledge transfer is inevitable, but the "long run" is going to be longer than is convenient for many of us. Boomers won't be past the tipping point of organizational influence for 10-15 years. In the meantime, organizations will need to keep a parallel, legacy knowledge infrastructure in place to support the Boomerang Boomers and laggard X-ers who require static, authoritative references, as well as more dynamic social media for the Digital Natives. One of the goals of reciprocal mentoring, which Dan and I talk a lot about, is to engage younger workers to help capture the knowledge of their older peers in social media repositories and channels, with the hope that some of the domain expertise of the elder will rub off on the mentee, while the facility with social media tools and practices will adhere to the mentor. Once the Boomers internalize and "own" the social media channels, the top-down pressure for a managed, KM-oriented strategy will probably start to die a natural death.

Anyway, Venkat expressed the desire to continue the conversation here. You are welcome to do so!

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The Shape of Things to Come

Rob — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 15:31:00 GMT

Sorry for the recent low levels of blog activity. In addition to the usual summer doldrums, I've been wrapping up a bunch of projects and tooling up for a busy fall season of writing and speaking.

For the past couple of weeks, I have been focused on revising and extending the text of Listening to the Future: Insights from the New World of Work, a collection of white papers that I co-wrote with Dan Rasmus at Microsoft, previously issued as a special-order edition from Wiley. Now Wiley plans to issue a trade edition with about 50% new content, including a series of new papers on the "new world of business" that are only just going through final review and approval. The retail edition is scheduled to ship around November 1, which is right around the corner, publishing-wise, so Dan and I are scrambling to whip the manuscript into shape.

Here's a quick preview from my draft of the introduction (likely to undergo substantial alteration as Dan and I hash through it), which gives a flavor of the theme and direction of the rest of the book.

People Make the Future
Earlier stages of the information age saw the implementation of large-scale enterprise systems to gather system data and automate business processes. While these kinds of systems still deliver value, we believe that the majority of benefits have already been realized and further refinements of their capabilities will provide only marginal gains. The real action in enterprise computing is now happening at the micro level, in the routine tasks that information workers perform dozens of times per day, which have never been cost-effective to automate through the development of “big IT” solutions. Today, the most powerful dynamics driving the transformation of work and business are at the intersection of people and technology: the systems that connect people to information, processes and one another. These are areas where end-user demand, grass-roots adoption and the wide availability of consumer-grade applications of unproven quality and business value collide with the imperatives of business and IT to provide consistent, secure processes and high levels of measurable productivity. This is also where new work-related technologies and practices rub up against the established workstyles and values of workers and managers, or challenge the prevailing organizational culture.
The influence of social computing and mass collaboration is already making its way into enterprise from the consumer marketplace. This is having a turbulent effect on work practices and culture as work becomes more collaborative and transparent, and the expectations of sophisticated “digital natives” clash with more traditional approaches to work. Blogs, wikis, instant messaging, interactive multimedia, subscription-based content, remote and mobile computing, social networks, content filtering, mashups, and all the other accoutrements of the Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 toolset are redistributing power from centralized hierarchies to the network, changing the way decisions are made, and affecting every process in the workplace.
These types of technologies are fundamentally different from previous waves of ICT in that they depend intimately on human knowledge and human participation. Introducing a user-created content repository or a collaborative extranet for partners is not like re-tooling an assembly line. To get the most out of the next wave of ICT investments, organizations need to look much more closely at the relationship between people, process and information and make sure they have all the bases covered – not just the application capabilities or the infrastructure. Unless you surround the introduction of the technology with a whole variety of adaptations to the management structure and culture, the technology alone is unlikely to generate the expected benefits for the organization.
Because people are at the center of the next wave of technologies, the attitudes and values that people bring with them into the workforce from their outside lives, their national backgrounds, their generational experience, the consumer culture, and all the other complexities of the modern world have the potential to deeply affect their performance as workers and managers. The complexities of the new world of work and business therefore encompass all the complexities of the world at large. Our holistic approach to mapping out a set of futures and a set of questions for organizations may seem unusual, but we feel it is the only way to get a clear picture of the challenges ahead.

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More Handwringing about the Business Value of Social Networks

Rob — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:32:00 GMT

Another day, another white paper wondering about all the wasted productivity of workers frittering away productive hours and compromising company information on social networks. This one is called "Networking or Not Working - Social Networks: Brave New World or Revolution from Hell?" and is published by MessageLabs (via Web Buyer's Guide), a network security firm trying to peddle managed security services to block and filter unauthorized net-noodling. In addition to making the usual arguments pro and con, the paper arrives at this interesting assertion:

Maybe posterity will actually show that, with its emphasis on two-way conversation rather than traditional top-down online communication, social networking really was a bridge too far for business – and that the minuses outweighed the plus-points.

Two-way conversation is perhaps a bridge too far for the military, the Catholic Church, or the Republican Party: organizations where hierarchy serves a purpose so clear and so well-established that it is impossible to imagine them organized any other way. I'm not sure of businesses that fit that description. I'm sure many think they do, and will try to cling to command-and-control management styles even as they are outmanuevered and out-innovated by competitors who embrace the opportunities of transparency and many-to-many communication.

Moreover, the short-term challenges of managing in an open environment are problems for management, not technology. The paper makes this point as it pivots from market analysis to technology sell:

But framing an access and usage policy – and making employees aware of their responsibilities (even outside working hours!) – is only a first step. The trouble is, unless your Web security capability is equal to the task of enforcing it, you might just as well not have a policy at all.

Sorry, no. No one's security capability can enforce standards beyond the workplace or even beyond the enterprise infrastructure. Even the best security solution only solves the hygene problem of preventing malware from infiltrating enterprise desktops. Workers who are determined to participate in social networks during work hours will do so on portable devices. Those with poor work habits will find other ways to waste time. And people with an axe to grind don't have to be at work to spread harmful information or make foolish disclosures of company business online.

Technology solutions are limited at best and misleading at worst, if they lead management to the conclusion that a firewall can substitute for open communication, reasonable standards, results-based management, and good old fashioned trust. If professional workplaces can't trust their employees to get their jobs done properly, even in the face of various distractions and new opportunities to blend work and life, they might want to re-think their hiring policies, not their IT policies.

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Age, Power and Social Computing

Rob — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:44:00 GMT

Mike Gotta points to this article by Dennis Howlett called "The poverty of enterprise 2.0 and social computing," in which Howlett observes:

In the context of ’social’ anything, these are incredibly important concepts because what we’re really talking about are power relationships. In any business, power relationships are what provide the hidden glue that makes organizations develop hierarchies and structures. We see this reflected in almost every major form of software you care to examine. From process workflows that mange order to cash, through problem resolution in the call center and out to procurement. We have baked those relationships into the structure and organization of everything we see as providing the means of operating successful businesses. Then all of a sudden, business leaders are asked to forget everything they know, accept that structures can and will be subverted but that it will all be OK because people will naturally want to collaborate to get things done. This is a fundamentally incorrect assumption. [emphasis added]

In my view, this is exactly correct. Social computing applications are not like most other IT, in that they actually transform social relationships in the workplace rather than merely expedite or automate existing processes. You can't buy the technology and receive the hoped-for benefits (spread of tacit knowledge and best practices, improved communication and responsiveness, faster organizational learning, etc.) without also experiencing at least some redistribution of power away from knowledge and process owners.

This is, as I write in Generation Blend, especially problematic when clout correlates with seniority, as it typically does in most organizations. Older power holders got where they are by using pre-collaborative tactics of monopolizing knowledge and using it as a competitive advantage in their own career development, either consciously or not. Perhaps not everyone in an organization is as careerist and attention-focused, but certainly many star performers are, and it is not an irrational response in a labor market characterized by frequent bouts of downsizing and outsourcing.

The novelty of social computing technology and its similarity to consumer software of conspicuously questionable business value provides senior power-holders with a ready-made argument. They claim the software is not read for prime-time, when in fact, what they themselves are not ready for are the power-implications of having to share knowledge, distribute decision-making, and make their work more transparent.

IT departments are not paid to think about stuff like that, and if the business value of social computing is pitched to IT decision-makers in terms of optimizing processes, reducing costs, and all the familiar arguments, even good solutions may not make a dent if they neglect the disruptive effects on the underlying system of incentives and prerogatives supporting the power-holders within the organization.

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New Study on IT Risk and Millennials

Rob — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 18:59:00 GMT

Symantec, the IT security company, recently released a study of IT risks posed by the social computing workstyle of Millennials in the workforce. Obviously Symantec is not a disinterested party, but their findings are very interesting and validate many of the observations made in Generation Blend. Among the highlights of the study:

66 percent of Millennials regularly access social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace at work, vs.13 percent of other workers.
75 percent of Millennials access Webmail at work vs. 54 percent of others.
46 percent of millennials use IM at work vs. 22 percent of others.
Less than half (45 percent) of Millennials stick to company-issued devices or software as opposed to nearly 70 percent of other workers. And 69 percent of Millennials will use whatever application/device/technology they want regardless of source or corporate IT policies (only 31 percent of others).
Three times as many millennials have downloaded software at work for personal use (75 percent vs. 25 percent).
Millennials regularly store corporate data on personal devices - far more than others. Common channels are personal PCs (39 percent vs. 24 percent), USB drives (38 vs. 14), personal hard drives (20 vs. 13), and smart phones (13 vs. 6).

Findings of this nature highlight the imperative that organizations face in harmonizing the workstyles of their younger workers with the legitimate security, governance and compliance issues raised by the use of consumer-grade technologies in the enterprise.

This need not - and, I would argue, should not - be simply a matter of enacting and enforcing stricter IT regulations. When organizations are competing for talent, IT policies are HR policies. They send a message about the overall level of trust and transparency in the workplace, and the quality of the work experience, which is a primary factor in the job choices of many talented Millennials.

In Generation Blend, I offer some guidance for organizations about how to have productive conversations around IT policies with Millennials, in ways that include and respect their perspective rather than simply issuing command-and-comply edicts from above. As we get more data such as the Symantec study, the ability to have those conversations will increasingly be a competitive asset for organizations scrambling to employ the talents of Net Generation workers.

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Generational OS

Rob — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 18:20:00 GMT

I was talking to a friend at Microsoft who says the folks in Redmond are finally starting to pay attention to Apple as a competitor on the PC desktop. They are concerned about ways to make Windows a cooler brand. Seems to me that Apple is winning in a certain market because they have optimized the individual experience with their products. When you use a Mac, you feel like it's about you, not about the machine. Vista? Not so much.

Consequently, Apple has always had a unique appeal to GenX - not only because they were there first (many Xers remember their first Apple II or Mac Classic) and were in schools when green-screened DOS-based PCs were on corporate desks - but because of this highly personalized brand experience. Also, their stuff works.

Seems to me there is an opportunity to create a desktop OS that is optimized for the group exeprience. Microsoft has already successfully differentiated Xbox with the Live feature, and has taken that strategy with its embrionic iPod killer, Zune. Move past the GenX market of self-conscious individualists and try to tap in to the social, technology-transparent attitudes of Millennials. Of course, they don't pay me for my advice on this stuff. Oh, wait...

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