Social Glass

There’s been a lot of discussion about 37 Signal’s Basecamp over the past few months. I was curious, and from a timing perspective it just so happened that I was leading up a new project, so I went over to the site and created a new account. I’ve got a team of about 5 or 6 young and enthusiastic people working for me on the Strategy phase and the first thing I did was set them up. The second thing I did was migrate the Milestones from my project plan to Basecamp, and I also added a few TODOs.

Within about an hour my RSS aggregator was buzzing with updates. My team started posting messages (blogging), comments and content through the Writeboard (kind of like a wiki).

“Is this Enterprise 2.0?”, I asked myself.

Not quite, but close.

Basecamp is perhaps more structured than I’d expect an Enterprise 2.0 solution to be as it’s centered around project management (the notion of “Milestone” and “TODO” seems to me to be project oriented). But the collaboration and capture of tacit knowledge elements are certainly there, and the signals, boy do I love the signals. Maybe we can call this “Project 2.0″.

Anyway, I think the folks at 37 Signals have done a great job and I’m eager to try out their other products.

I had an amicable debate today with a co-worker about the role of Groups, or Moderators, in an Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem. I must admit I’d previously discarded any notion of content moderation as it tends to stand as a barrier and discourages contribution, but now I’m thinking twice.

My colleague worked in the content management space for a few years and he’d recently been across a project helping a client setup a new extensive knowledge management system.  So, he knows his stuff. Regarding Enterprise 2.0, his point was this (and I’m paraphrasing), “Large enterprises are used to implementing knowledge management software with controls - gateways that content must pass through before being approved for public use - and the notion of unbridled content being published with little or no review process or standard seems chaotic and irresponsible.”

To expand on this point, say, for example, a telecommunications knowledge worker creates a wiki page about the sequence in which carrier codes should be manually associated with broadband service when the automated system fails. A subsequent search with the phrase “carrier codes manual” on the Enterprise Search system yields the new wiki page as the 3rd result. Is the content to be trusted? Can the instructions on the wiki page be followed verbatim? Enterprise 2.0 advocates would say “maybe not, but if it’s wrong the content can be corrected by the next knowledge worker”. True. As the theory goes over time collective intelligence will evolve enterprise content towards correctness. But, for the time being, inputting an incorrect sequence of carrier codes delays the order by 2 weeks (retail/wholesale setup), and this costs the telco $5,000 in additional fees.

In this case the enterprise cannot afford to have this incorrect information cascade across the enterprise, at least not when there’s no distinction between approved content and tacit content, and this, according to my co-worker, is why we need Groups and Moderation.

The idea is that a subset of the organisation, so-called experts in a given and perhaps general area, are tasked with moderating content within a subject domain. These moderators are then held partially accountable for the correctness of the content within their domain. In this way knowledge workers have more reason to trust the information they’re discovering through Search.

To me this sounds reasonable, especially in the early days when companies are just starting to look at Enterprise 2.0. Moderation might settle the angst of those knowledge management traditionalists.

Rod Boothby has some great ideas around how Enterprise 2.0 can help companies innovate.

I thought it’d be interesting to cover one basic scenario to illustrate some important points.

Point 1 - Discovery and Collaboration
Take a simple example where a bank has two departments, Consumer Loans and Commercial Loans. Both departments report to “The Head Honcho”, have one Department Lead and a few knowledge workers beneath them. A knowledge worker from the Consumer Loans department has an innovative idea. He wants to create a special loan package for customers who already have a consumer loan and are seeking a commercial loan (i.e. for their small business). To do this he’ll need to work with somebody who understands commercial loans.
The Enterprise 2.0 Discovery process allows the consumer loan knowledge worker to search for and locate (say, through an Enterprise Search tool) a commercial loan knowledge worker in the other department who has relevant knowledge and experience (as manifested by the blogs and wiki pages he’s authored, all of which are also discoverable).

So, the two knowledge workers from different departments begin collaborating and come up with a new idea for packaging loans.

Without Discovery and Collaboration it would have been difficult for consumer loans knowledge worker to find somebody in the commercial loans department with relevant insight.

Point 2 - Organisational Readiness

Which one of the Department Heads gets credit for the new idea? Do they allow the knowledge workers to pitch the idea directly to the Head Honcho cutting them out of the process?

Organisations need to be ready to embrace innovation from lower levels and from lateral departments. If the Deparment Heads feel threatened by said innovation, this ficticious bank will fail to realise the benefits of its Enterprise 2.0 system. Enterprise 2.0 is very much about changing organisational cultures to encourage, identify and seize innovation from all levels.

I’ve been traveling from Australia to Colorado during these past few days and was thinking of a scenario where Enterprise 2.0 would add significant value.

The Scenario

Imagine working for a consulting firm that has implemented Enterprise 2.0 with the Discovery and Collaboration capabilities I outlined a few days ago. The first think you do as a new hire is setup your personal profile, including resume details, likes, interests and possibly an avatar. This serves two purposes. The first is satisfying HR’s requirements that your skillsets be registered somewhere so you can be located when an appropriate role on a project becomes available. The second is establishing a single instance of “you” that will be used to link you to blogs and wiki entries you author and documents you might bookmark. It’s important that you have only one identity so that you get credit in this environment of reciprocal altruism.

The enterprise search system (i.e. Google Search Appliance) then indexes your profile making you discoverable to fellow knowledge workers. Because you’ve entered resume information, you’re searchable by more than just your name and title, you’re also searchable by resume content (i.e. “telecom service management platform“).

You might then post a blog about your past experiences, or create a wiki page on a topic you’re an expert in. This helps you get credit for the work you’ve done with previous employers and also elaborates on the resume content you’ve posted with your profile - narratives are generally better than a list of accomplishments and skills. This exposes you and the reason you’ve been hired to the rest of the enterprise and increases the likelihood that you’ll add value sooner. So, after a few blog and wiki entries, you’re now discoverable not only based on profile, but on the content you’ve just authored.

After discovery (either by an HR person or fellow knowledge worker), you’re now assigned to a project. So you register with the “project group” on your social networking page and now collaborate with others on the project. Others in your project group can get a quick rundown on who you are by checking all the wiki and blog entries you’ve authored and your social profile. Project management can then better integrate you into the team and refine your role to suit your background and career aspirations.

Why don’t companies do this?

All of this seems too easy to me. I don’t know why companies don’t do this. Instead we’re faced with 4 HR systems (one for CV compliance, one for listing skillsets, one for forecasting etc) and no standard for capturing the wealth of knowledge new employees bring to the table.