Social Glass

Google is famous for allowing its engineers time to work on personal projects. This makes the engineers happy as they get a chance to be creative and show what they’re made of. And it makes Google happy because they get lots of innovative ideas and products from this personal time.

I’m trying to instill a similar culture across my development team at active.com. We’re in the middle of “Web 2.0ifying” the site, and my guys (and girl) have lots of awesome ideas. The challenge I have as a development manager is balancing the allocation of tasks the business needs completed while allowing enough time for my team to “innovate”. What I’ve found is they “innovate” anyway.

Case in point: on my my engineers developed a locator tool which mashes up Google Maps with an XML RPC (dare I say REST) service that we use internally. It’s a nifty little app with strong visual appeal. Last week our product director asked us to start designing and developing a feature for the web site that requires 80% of the functionality in the mashup. He hadn’t seen it before. When we showed it to him he had an “oh yeah” epiphany and subsequently modified the requirements to be more inline with the mashup as he thought the functionality in it was more consistent with the rest of the site.

What do we, as an organization, gain from this?

1. The engineer who created the mashup gets to see his idea become part of the broader product and gets recognized for his effort.
2. The time required to design and develop the new feature is significantly reduced – we already have a prototype.
3. The feature has been thought about and refined from several angles – that of the engineer and that of the product developer (no waterfall here baby).

Imagine, then, if we could reach out to other groups and leverage their ideas. In this case, the engineer, product developer and I were aligned organizationally. But what if we had the ability to discover others within my large, global organization, who had concepts or demos that could be used in a similar way? What if we had Enterprise 2.0?

Infovark, a stealth Enterprise 2.0 startup founded by two ex-Management Consultants Dean Thrasher and Gordon Taylor, has shed some light on what it is they’re actually doing. These guys write one of my favorite blogs and I recommend adding them to your reader. By all accounts they have solid technical skills and a comprehensive understanding of the enterprise. They summarize the problem with enterprise applications as:

The main problem with enterprise software is that it’s targeted at an ill-defined customer: the enterprise. The enterprise is not a single thing; it’s a collection of things. It’s the people, policies, practices, strategies and culture that together comprise an organization. Most business software is targeted at the policies, practices, and strategies, but there’s really only one item in this list that matters: the people. Everything else is an emergent property that arises from the interaction of people.

I couldn’t agree more. They go on to point out that, although most employees don’t understand or follow internal processes and procedures, work gets done and businesses make money.  This means that businesses depend more on emergent outcomes than one might think.  Their product (does it have a name?) is geared toward enabling people in an effort to catalyze emergence.

If you watch a bunch of kids on the playground at recess, you’ll notice patterns and order emerge. Groups will form, ideas will be shared, norms and rules established. These things happen naturally. The same is true of enterprises, businesses, organizations and associations. If you want to get enterprise software to work properly, you’ve got to focus on the interactions of the individuals involved. If you want your employees to share information more effectively, find out what would motivate Bob to share his weekly safes figures with Mary. Construct the system from the ground up.

Check out the latest post on their idea here.

Andrew McAfee makes an insightful point about the value of social networking within the enterprise. He discusses the strength of weak ties and shows how casual relationships broaden the diversity of knowledge available to a knowledge worker. Strong ties result from “long-term, frequent, and sustained interactions”, whereas weak ties arise “from infrequent and more casual” interactions.

Given that knowledge workers “A”, “B” and “C” work for a given company, McAfee goes on to show that:

This might be a good thing in many ways, but it’s bad news if A needs a piece of knowledge that she can’t find inside her own friendship circle. Because of the overlap, B’s circle is likely to be redundant with A’s, and so unhelpful to her. In other words, her tie to B does her little good in her search for knowledge. If A and C have a weak tie, however, many of C’s friends are likely to be strangers to A, and so are good resources as she looks to inform herself.

I’m a visual learner and have drawn a simple diagram to illustrate this point. It shows that knowledge workers A and B, who share a strong tie and have a substantial overlap in their social networks, have access to a non-redundant group of knowledge workers through a weak tie between A and C. This relationship broadens the scope of information access for all groups, and this is very important for companies that rely on their knowledge workers to innovate.

1. Visibility = recognition
2. Knowledge workers compete for recognition.
3. Competition fuels participation.
4. Participation –> more quality information assets –> increased probability of innovative ideas surfacing.
5. Innovation = increased economic viability = happy enterprise.

Update: The “recent” article I link to in fact is not very recent at all.  It was published in March, 2006.
I’m fascinated by how collective intelligence can be leveraged to produce value to the business that wasn’t harnessed before. Ideas like prediction markets and enterprise knowledge markets are indeed intriguing. And this is why I enjoyed a recent article in the New York Times called Here’s an Idea: Let Everyone Have Ideas. The article cites a company called Rite-Solutions that has built an ingenious

internal market where any employee can propose that the company acquire a new technology, enter a new business or make an efficiency improvement. These proposals become stocks, complete with ticker symbols, discussion lists and e-mail alerts. Employees buy or sell the stocks, and prices change to reflect the sentiments of the company’s engineers, computer scientists and project managers — as well as its marketers, accountants and even the receptionist.

The founders are quoted as saying “At most companies, especially technology companies, the most brilliant insights tend to come from people other than senior management. So we created a marketplace to harvest collective genius”. And so far the marketplace has been working for them. An idea from an administrative staff member lead to a contract with Hasbro, for example.

What Rite-Solutions is fantastic, but I think it could be extended to include other knowledge items that aren’t explicitly submitted to be “traded”. Why not create a discovery application that measures statistics on content items (similar to Google Analytics) to create a value index for them. Statistics about:

• Page Views
• RSS Subscriber Count
• User Rating
• Incoming Links

could be used to programmatically generate the index. This raises the visibility of content generated by authors may not have thought to submit it to the marketplace for consideration by the broader organization and provides more comprehensive coverage of potential innovative content as a result.