Category: Knowledge work

More on management and messiness – video interview from FASTforward’09

Joshua-Mich le Ross did an excellent set of interviews at last week’s FASTforward’09 conference. We talked some more about the challenges of managing innovation. Here’s the video for those of you who might be interested.

FASTforward 09: Jim McGee, Managing Director of New Shoreham Consulting

by Joshua-Mich le Ross

February 11, 2009 at 11:15 am Filed under FASTforward’09, FFC09 Interviews

Jim s comments focused on two basic themes. On the plus side is the notion that the heavy lifting of search is being hidden from end users who can t/won t learn to do sophisticated search queries on their own. On the mildly troubling side is something that he posted to the blog about this afternoon. As Jim explained, that post addresses the following notion: one of the management challenges being glossed over in the marketing focus of the conference is that managing search implementations and enterprise 2.0 implementations runs counter to the sense of order that makes most managers comfortable.

To manage these changes requires managers to become much more comfortable dealing with a messy environment. More importantly, perhaps, they need be careful lest they cripple innovation and experimentation by imposing an inappropriate level of management overhead and structure on these efforts. Technology management has become gunshy in too many organizations about technology project failure. They need to be careful to not take those lessons over into Enterprise 2.0 or they will kill the necessary degree of innovation we need to see.

BIO: Jim McGee: For over 30 years, I ve helped executives and organizations become more effective by making better use of information and communications technology. I ve attacked these problems as an entrepreneur, senior executive, professor, author, blogger, speaker, systems developer, designer, and consultant. Today, I work with senior executives in organizations to formulate, structure, and solve problems in the effective use of information technology in complex knowledge work settings. I am adept at working with organizations to recognize patterns and make sense of complex situations. My clients and I then collaborate to design and build new business patterns and practices to take advantage of these situations and opportunities.

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Management and messiness

Clay Shirky

Image via Wikipedia

[Cross posted at FASTforward blog]

I’ve been mulling over Clay Shirky‘s remarks yesterday at FASTforward09. The bookends to his talk hint at some key challenges to managers contemplating their entry into the world of social media and Enterprise 2.0. Clay’s opening five word summary of Enterprise 2.0 is simply “group action just got easier.” While he shared a number of excellent stories and lessons, it was his closing discussion of how Amazon added social elements to its existing pages that I want to focus on.

By Clay’s count there are some 16 different social elements that are today part of the typical product page on Amazon. Each of these elements became part of the page as the outcome of an individual experiment. Amazon’s approach is to make it easy, and organizationally safe, to run experiments quickly and cheaply. While there is a technological component to making this experimentation cost-effective, it is the management and cultural aspects that are critical to success.

What Clay is calling attention to is the value to be found in encouraging the fundamental messiness and disorder of invention and discovery. Unfortunately, managers generally don’t become managers because they are fond of disorder. Even managers who have long ago abandoned the caricatures of command and control models are likely to find guiding this kind of innovation a source of discomfort. But it is discomfort that is essential to encouraging the sort of retail level innovation made possible in the technology environment that is emerging.

Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling once observed that “the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.” That’s the mechanism at work at Amazon and with Enterprise 2.0 innovation in general. What Clay skipped over in his remarks was a look at the number of ideas that were tried and never made the cut at Amazon. This is unfortunate because it can encourage executives to ignore the “lots of ideas” prerequisite to “good ideas.” Amazon’s approach is sometimes portrayed as lowering the cost of failure. More appropriately, it is about lowering the costs of all experiments. While the technology environment is one factor in lowering the cost of experimenting, there are also managerial and cultural costs to manage. For example, if you insist on wrapping too much methodology and project management overhead around experimenting that will discourage ideas and fewer ideas implies fewer good ideas.

This is not a suggestion that there is nothing to manage. Instead, it’s about seeking just enough control. It’s also about becoming comfortable with trusting your people and the process of experimentation and learning.

 

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JP Rangaswami on KM … “Clear, Transparent, Searchable, Archivable, Retrievable”

This has been lurking in my RSS aggregator for quite a while, courtesy of Jon Husband. There is really a lot of highly condensed insight in this post.

Thanks to JP Rangaswami for distilling social computing (in the context of work) to an essence.

From his post “Facebook and the Enterprise, Part 5: Knowledge Management“.

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“More and more, knowledge management is going to be about reducing the cost of, and simplifying the process for, letting someone watch what you do. Nonintrusively. Time-shifted. Place-shifted. Searchable. Archivable. Retrievable.”

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Via Dave Pollard via Nancy White

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JP Rangaswami on KM Clear, Transparent, Searchable, Archivable, Retrievable
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Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:08:06 GMT

Technology Leaders Association presentation

I’m presenting today to the Technology Leaders Association meeting in Chicago on the topic of “Technology for Us.” I’ve uploaded my slides to Slideshare.

 

Technology for Us – Tech Leaders Association

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: knowledge-work socialmedia)

 

I’ve also tagged a number of links at delicious; both of sites we may check out and references to follow up materials. Those links can be found here.

links for 2008-10-01

  • The Contribution Revolution: Letting Volunteers Build Your Business – An excellent executive introduction to the business implications of social media and user generated content by Scott Cook, CEO of Intuit. Nothing terribly new here if you’ve been paying attention to the social media environment at all. On the other hand it summarizes and packages the concepts in a way that helps legitimize it in a C-level executive context
  • The Contribution Revolution / FrontPage – Scott Cook and Intuit have created a wiki to accompany Cook’s recent article about social media and user contributed content in the Harvard Business Review. It’s goal is to become another resource for making sense of this area.

    • links for 2008-09-24

    • ChiefTech: Aligning business needs to SharePoint capabilities
      A thoughtful analysis of the potential limits of SharePoint as a platform for collaboration in enterprises. I suspect that SharePoint is becoming the "safe" choice for a lot of organizations interested in elements of social networking and Enterprise 2.0. This post offers some insights into the risks of that default strategy for enterprises that become more sophisticated in their approach to collaboration over time.
      (tags: sharepoint km enterprise2.0)
    • Viral Marketing gone bad
      Funny bit of video suggesting where viral marketing efforts might take us if we aren't careful. Enough truth in it to be scary
      (tags: marketing video sch)
    • How Wall Street Lied to Its Computers – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com
      An interesting and insightful analysis to remind us that GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) is still a relevant bit of advice to keep in mind as information systems become more sophisticated and more tightly embedded in organizational decision making. No matter how clever the model, if management wants to get a particular answer they can find a way to do so.
      (tags: technology risk quants)

    links for 2008-09-17

    Knowledge work and micro-processes

    [cross-posted at Fast Forward blog]

    Recently, I sat through a presentation about a Sharepoint-based intranet project to improve processes within the HR group of a medium-sized organization. The process in question was one of collecting annual performance reviews throughout the organization. Using Sharepoint, the HR group and their consultants replaced Word documents, spreadsheets, and email with Infopath forms and programmatic workflows. The client was happy and the consultants had a nice demo they could show to their prospects. Nonetheless, I found myself dissatisfied.

    For all the new technology deployed, this effort struck me as an example of what my old friend and mentor Benn Konsynski calls "speeding up the mess." This HR process is an instance of the micro-processes that comprise knowledge work activities in organizations.

    Other examples might include:

    • Customizing an existing sales presentation for a meeting with a new prospect
    • Designing the agenda and preparing materials for an internal brainstorming meeting
    • Putting together the briefing materials for a quarterly business review meeting
    • Analyzing and making sense out of a competitor