What message does a social intranet convey?

Tweet Ephraim Freed| October 10th, 2011 No Comments »

On Friday we were inspired by a tweet about Marshall McLuhan to ask a question:

@thoughtfarmer ”The medium is the message.” -Marshall McLuhan bit.ly/nV5JWj | What message does a social intranet convey? 7 Oct

We quickly received several great responses worth sharing broadly:

@jonhusband @thoughtfarmer < What message does a social intranet convey? > that “the medium is the meaning we consume & create together”? 7 Oct

@conniecrosby @thoughtfarmer teamwork, openness, collaboration, willingness to let employees have some of the control, innovation 7 Oct

@bar2cci The organization values transparency RT @thoughtfarmer: “The medium is the message.” -Marshall McLuhan http://… (cont) deck.ly/~WQLTl 7 Oct

If Marshall McLuhan was right that the medium is the message, then what is the message of a social intranet and how does it differ from the messages conveyed by more traditional intranets?

Please share your thoughts here and on Twitter using the hashtag #intranetmsg.

15 ways to engage users in building a new social intranet

Tweet Ephraim Freed| September 12th, 2011 2 Comments »

Sign up for a free live demo of ThoughtFarmer. Get an inspiring glimpse at true employee engagement and meet one of our friendly social intranet experts.

Social intranets have changed the rules of successfully launching an intranet. While in the past it was quite helpful to involve employees throughout the process, today it’s a virtual necessity.

A social intranet becomes an online community space and employees need to feel a sense of involvement and ownership starting early in the project so they feel it really is their community.

While many of the opportunities for engagement listed below are standard practice for building a good 1.0 intranet, each one represents an opportunity to build a sense of shared ownership and create a shared sense of excitment over the coming change.

15 ways to engage users

1: Send out evaluation survey for old intranet.

If you’re building a new intranet, chances are the current/old one is no good. But you need a baseline of data to prove it. Try creating a simple survey about satisfcation with the current intranet. If you word questions carefully, you can re-apply the survey six months after you launch the new intranet and compare it to the baseline data about the old intranet. You can then continue to send out that same survey every 6-12 month to monitor satisfaction with the new intranet. Keep in mind that self-reported satisfaction surveys are not a complete approach to measuring the value of an intranet.

2: Hold focus groups about intranet problems.

Focus groups are a useful way to capture gripes about the current intranet and gather information about employee needs. Focus groups, as opposed to individual interviews or surveys, create shared experiences (“social” experiences, if you will) that help create a sense of connectedness among colleagues. This can start to lay the foundation for the sense of connectedness a social intranet will instill.

3: Interview key stakeholders early on.

Stakeholder interviews have been a key ingredient in intranet planning as long as intranets have been around. They are an opportunity to listen to leaders throughout the company and build relationships you’ll need throughout the project. Be sure to follow up with all interviewees on an ongoing basis to maintain their sense of involvement.

4: Observe employees in their daily workplace.

This technique is a secret of some of the best intranet managers in the world, but is standard practice for usability experts. Workplace observation gives the intranet team very real-world insights into how people work on a daily basis and the information and tools they use to do their jobs. It can provide much more realistic information than approaches that require participants to self-report.

5: Ask employees to post ideas for the new intranet.

James Robertson famously said “don’t ask users what they need on the intranet” (see James’ blog post on the topic). While that’s a good motto for intranet managers, it can’t hurt to ask people for ideas for the new intranet. Be clear that no idea is gauranteed to make it into the final product, but give people the chance to share their thoughts. You may discover brilliant and innovative ideas the intranet team wouldn’t have come up with.

It is important to set clear expectations about a process like this. Up front, explain how ideas will be vetted and what rewards or prizes will be given, if any. Try to hold this process in an open online space where employees can see and comment on or contribute to colleagues’ ideas.

6: Create a group for content owners.

As soon as you start the project to build a new intranet, get cozy with your content owners. Even on a social intranet, good content is critical for success. Intranet manager Tanis Roadhouse highlighted the need to “treat content owners like royalty” in her blueprint for building a social intranet.

7: Involve key employees in product evaluation.

Finding the right social intranet software is as much art as it is science. As important as meeting business and technical requirements is the need to find a good cultural fit. Strategically select employees to involve in the product evaluation process. Don’t make them scour complex requirements spreadsheets, but do give them demo access if it’s an option and let them get their hands dirty. Consider involving content owners in this process and listen very closely to their feedback.

8: Run a contest to name the new intranet.

Holding a contest to name the new intranet can build excitement and build the brand of the new intranet. You’ll want a structured process that’s timed right to fit into the rest of the intranet project. See our case study of crowdsourcing the name for a new social intranet for specific ideas on how to implement a naming contest.

A naming committee can either be the governing group that oversees the naming contest or an alterntative to the naming process. A company’s culture, the project timeline, or other factors may make a naming committee a better way to select a name for the new intranet than a naming contest. The naming committee could include stakeholders, content owners, and even an executive.

9: Hold voting on graphic design alternatives.

If your intranet project includes the time and budget to compare several design alternatives, this can be a great opportunity to involve employees. Create a simple system for people to vote or comment on two or three different design concepts and be clear from the start about how employee voices will be weighed.

10: Inventory content on old intranet.

This may be the least glamorous way to involve users, but it’s one of the most critical for building an effective new intranet. Usually the content owners conduct the content inventories, guided by the intranet team. This can be a time consuming process, so be sure to start it early and provide plenty of support and cupcakes to the content owners who’ll be doing it.

Alternatively, the intranet project team members can conduct the content inventories themselves, but then work closely with content owners to review the results.

11: Run online card sorting.

Card sorting is a tried and true tool for building user-friendly intranet navigations. Our Senior User Experience Designer, Selma Zafar, prefers to use Optimal Sort for online card sorting – an online tool that lets you gather results quickly and from far-flung locations in a way paper card sorting can’t.

Card sorting can be an opportunity to involve a very large group of employees in a substantive way. You can read about intranet manager Luke Mepham and how he involved 1,200 global employees in card sorting for an intranet redesign project.

If you’re new to card sorting, check out Donna Spencer’s blog post Card sorting: a definitive guide for oodles of concrete tips and hints.

12: Run online task testing.

Task testing is another standard tool in the User Experience Designer’s toolbox and can follow a card sorting effort. While card sorting helps you understand how employees group content in their minds, task testing lets you test how well a draft intranet navigation helps employees complete actual daily work tasks. We like to use Treejack for online task testing. This can allow you to engage large numbers of users, including those in remote locations.

13: Run user testing on mockups or pilot site.

User testing is similar to task testing, but happens on a live site or mockups that include page layouts and some graphic design elements. User testing provides a third round of validation for the navigation structure you are creating for your new intranet and can inform the layout of pages. It involves a smaller group than task testing and card sorting and is a little harder to do remotely.

14: Create pilot groups on new intranet.

If your project timeline allows it, include a period for pilot groups to test out your new social intranet. Most social intranet software includes features for groups (communities, teams, etc) to work together online. Carefully select groups for the pilot phase. Try starting with teams or employee communities that are either tech savvy already or that are most in need of online collaboration tools. Be sure to listen carefully to your pilot users and treat them as partners. The pilot effort can provide critical insights into how to launch and manage group pages and pilot users may become active champions who help with adoption after launch.

15: Identify community managers for early adopter groups.

A key component of social intranets is community spaces and a key success factor for online communities is having effective community managers. A community manager is like a content gardener, an online facilitator and a sherpa. By building a community management strategy into your intranet plan you can increase the chances of adoption of the new social intranet and ensure employees get real value out of it.

As you identify communities that could benefit from your new social intranet, reach out to staff members whom you think would make good community managers and provide them plenty of guidance and resources. If community management is a critical part of your adoption strategy, check out the Community Roundtable, a group of community managers who share best practice stories and hear from experts in the field.

The means ARE the ends

The end results most people seek from their social intranets are high levels of connection, knowledge sharing, and employee engagement. The best way to achieve this is to take a truly collaborative approach to planning and launching your social intranet. The means you use to implement the project from the beginning will be reflected in the ends you achieve.

What is a social intranet? The definitive explanation.

Tweet Chris McGrath| August 10th, 2011 21 Comments »

Sign up for a free live demo of ThoughtFarmer. Get an inspiring glimpse at true employee engagement and meet one of our friendly social intranet experts.

First, what is an intranet?

Definition: An internal website that helps employees get stuff done.

See our full blog post defining “intranet” for a detailed explanation and a fun bit of controversy in the comments.

Next, what is “social”?

“Social” may be the most overused word in technology today. I think you’d find, though, that the average businessperson would struggle to define “social software” and “social media”, resorting to feeble references to Twitter and Facebook.

Social is really just about people interacting with each other. “Social software” is software that enables users to interact with each other. “Social media” is content (“media”) published by a bunch of people who can interact with each other and the content. An “ice cream social” is a party where people interact with each other while eating ice cream. (Given the choice, I’d pick an ice cream social over any other kind of social, any day.)

Definition of “social intranet”

So, to the point of this post. The definitive explanation of a “social intranet”:

An intranet where all employees can author content and connect easily

It takes two things to make an intranet social:

1. Authorship: The ability for everyone to create content
2. Connections: The ability to see the people behind the content and to connect with them in some meaningful way

Traditional intranets have very narrow authorship, restricted to a small handful with official “editor” permission. Traditional intranets also lack connections. Content is basically anonymous and shows no social context, no connection between pages and specific people.

A social intranet allows all employees to author rich content, connects every piece of content to a specific, living and breathing person, and helps people connect with each other. On a social intranet the “people layer” permeates the entire site and makes every page more personal and more human.

Origin of the term “social intranet”

I’m proud to say that I coined the term “social intranet” back in early 2009. Well, it might have been Darren (our CEO). Or maybe we both cried out the term in unison during a moment of epiphany in a meeting. We can’t quite remember which one of us it was, except that we both erupted in enthusiasm when we realized we had captured the term that explained what ThoughtFarmer was (and is). I suppose we should have recorded the event and ran to the trademark office. In any event, we’re pleased the term has taken off.

Not about specific tech tools

We’ve seen some interesting definitions of “social intranet”, some that are too complex and others that define the term based on the specific software tools that have thus far been popular on social intranets (such as blogs, wikis, activity streams, etc.).

Those definitions can be helpful, but limit themselves with reliance on specific technology and formats. Just because you don’t have a blog on your intranet doesn’t mean it’s not social. And the specific tools available next year may not be on this year’s list.

Who knows what new enterprise technology will be common on the intranet of the future? We’re not sure. But we’re pretty sure wide authorship and the formation of connections will be at the core. What really matters is that social intranets humanize the workplace and give every employee a face and a voice.

4 simple questions for governing collaborative content

Tweet Ephraim Freed| June 29th, 2011 3 Comments »

Whether you’re using a real social intranet like ThoughtFarmer or using something more akin to SharePoint team sites, managing the explosion of user-generated content is becoming the intranet manager’s Moby Dick. But you can tackle this beast early and create a strong governance framework for collaborative content by addressing 4 simple questions.

Governance is about people, not just an HR policy

Before jumping into the fray, remember the true nature of good governance. While a company should have smart HR policies in place, that’s only the beginning. The array of official policies on your books won’t magically solve your governance problems.

The real challenges of governance spring up around issues of responsibility and communication. A little while back our man Gord wrote about governance as the decision making process and helped define the issue. Here we’ve whittled governance of collaborative content down to 4 simple questions. Address these and the untamed beast will seem a lot more friendly.

Q1: Who can create groups?

First you need to decide who can create new groups (“team sites” in SharePoint lingo; also “Rooms”, “Spaces”, “Communities”, etc.), which may not be simple because they come in several different flavors.

Common types of groups

• Office
• Department / Division
• Project team
• Community of practice
• Community of interest
• Social group

If any employee can create a new group, before you know it there may be three different groups devoted to a single project. Duplication like this can cause confusion and create new information silos.

But if only IT staff can create new groups, you may find employees reticent to jump through the necessary hoops. The key is to work with your intranet team and find something that makes sense in your company, with your intranet software.

No matter what route you take, explicitly state who will be responsible for tracking creation of new groups and how people will resolve issues that arise. On a social intranet it’s better to make group creation easy, but you need a process to keep tabs on it.

Q2: Who is responsible for each group?

When I lived in Boston I organized weekly after-work soccer games from April through October. After five summers of organizing these games, we had developed a fun and diverse group of players and everyone knew where and when the games would take place. Whenever new folks showed up I’d explain the basic rules and add them to the email list. These games never would have happened if someone (me, in this case) hadn’t consistently looked after the email list, sent out reminders, welcomed new members and helped them acclimate.

A group page on the intranet is like this — it’s an online community that needs an explicit leader looking after it. This leadership role is more like that of a facilitator than a captain. Without someone with explicit responsibility for looking after the online collaborative space, it’s sure to fall into disarray. This role is often considered a “Community Manager” and can happen on both the micro level for each team and a macro level for your entire social intranet.

To address the question of group responsibility, be sure to create a specific role for group managers and come up with a plan for orienting new group managers and providing ongoing support.

Q3: How do you deal with old content?

If it’s ridiculously easy to add new blog posts and upload documents on your social intranet, people will do it. They’ll do it, and do it, and do it until the collaborative content is overflowing.

Many companies have document-heavy processes, which leads to oodles of collaborative content. Even worse, companies with unclear processes and a lack of standards can have even more documents as people reinvent the wheel on every project. Either way, you’ll find working documents will lose relevance very quickly and you’ll soon have a huge collection of content that nobody needs any longer.

To deal with this problem, teams need to communicate about it and agree on a plan ahead of time. Each group manager should continually work with the team to identify the most important types of information to share and establish clear methods for posting and editing that material. You may need to set aside a Friday afternoon every six months for a “purge party” – a time for all the team members to review old content and get rid of or archive what’s no longer needed.

Just like any aspect of a social intranet, dealing with old content is a people issue as much as a technology issue. That’s why it’s so important for each group page to have a responsible group manager.

Postcard from Intranet Secrets

Q4: How do groups build relevant IAs?

If your team’s Shared Drive was a jungle, your collaborative content on the social intranet won’t fare much better.

Even in the world of social computing, information management is still important. In order for team members to find collaborative content quickly and easily, there must be shared expectations about the navigation structure on the group page. The best approach is to move your collaborative processes one-by-one from email and shared drives to your group page and build a categorization scheme as a team.

For example, start writing meeting agendas and notes as wiki-style pages on your group page and email around the links. This can reduce the number of emails team members receive and make it easy for everyone to find the latest copy. Discuss this new approach with the team ahead of time, though, so everyone knows how this specific process is moving from the old workflow to a new one. Make sure all the team members can find the meeting agendas on the group page and know how to edit and comment on them.

A group manager can lead the effort to move collaborative work flows to the group page, but it needs to be a team effort to succeed. As you move workflows, the team can build a consistent navigation for the group page that all members are familiar with. If just one person is responsible for setting up a group page, she’ll likely try to set up a complete categorization scheme that makes sense in her own mind. But that will make it harder for other team members to get comfortable and adapt to the new ways of working.

It will be important for the team to review and revamp their growing group page structure occasionally. Make this a social, collaborative process that involves group members. Again, it’s about people, not technology.

Related: Sign up for our free webinar on July 20th, 2011, “Information Architecture 101: Task Testing“. Use discount code I-SAW-THE-BLOG.

Intranet team’s role: Collaboration consultants

When it comes to governing collaborative content, the central intranet team becomes like an internal consultant. They can provide a simple framework, help teams assign responsibilities and plan for success, and provide ongoing guidance.

Final suggestion: Work with stakeholders and social intranet champions to define these governance approaches. Take a collaborative approach to governing collaborative content.

What would Donald Schön think of your social intranet?

Tweet Gordon Ross| June 9th, 2011 6 Comments »

This article is the third (see Connected companies, complex systems and social intranets and Mechanistic and organic organizations) in what’s becoming a bit of a review of some of the theory shaping the ideas behind social intranets. Let’s continue the discussion in 10 days at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston.

I ended my last post, inspired by Dave Gray’s #connectedco writing, highlighting the 1960′s work of Burns & Stalker and their concept of the mechanical and organic systems and organizations. Important to that post, I hope, is the notion of organizational metaphor and its impact on how we perceive our own organizations, their problems, and the possible solutions to those problems (like social intranets for example).

Of course, organizations aren’t really machines, the same way your car is a machine. Nor are they really an organism, the same way a tree is an organism. But they are useful metaphors for framing and thinking about the problems of organizations in different ways.

While mechanical and organic metaphors are dominant in modern management articles and our own daily organizational language, they are not the only two metaphors that exist. Gareth Morgan, a prof at the Schulich School of Business at York University, wrote a well-known book called Images of Organization in the late 1980′s (I own the 2nd edition which came out in 1997), which devotes a single chapter to eight different organizational metaphors. These include:

• Organizations as machines
• Organizations as organisms
• Organizations as brains (aka the “learning organization”)
• Organizations as cultures
• Organizations as political systems
• Organizations as psychic prisons
• Organizations as flux and transformation
• Organizations as instruments of domination

It’s a great text, coming in at nearly 500 pages, chronicling the roots of the different metaphors, how they take shape, and the implications of each metaphorical approach. It covers a great breadth of thought and is an impressive work of scholarship.

While Morgan’s later work would suggest that he has a favourite or a particular bias towards certain metaphors, his goal with the book was to review each and understand their pros and cons. As his introductory diagram states, “Metaphor invites us to see the similarities but ignores the differences. Metaphor stretches imagination in a way that can create powerful insights but at the risk of distortion.” Morgan’s book has a goal, stated at the end of his introduction, “…metaphor is central to the way we ‘read,’ understand, and shape organizational life. But at no point will you find that view being brought down to advocacy of a single perspective. There are no right or wrong theories in management in an absolute sense, for every theory illuminates and hides.”

Pods, networks, and Donald Schön

Since I wrote my last post, Dave Gray was busy updating his blog with his podular design approach to companies. Dave’s diagrams of pods, which he defines as “a small, autonomous unit that is enabled and empowered to deliver the things that customers value” make visually explicit the notion of a network-based approach to organizational design. The idea of designing or creating a networked organization composed of highly autonomous units that are capable of adapting to ever-changing conditions sounds very 2.0, but it too has been floating around as an idea for the past 40 years. Andrew McAfee recently argued it’s been around even longer.

John Friedman’s comprehensive history of planning, Planning in the Public Domain: from Knowledge to Action, highlights one such example of organization as network thinking, the work of Donald Schön in the 1970′s.

“A similar theme is addressed by Donald Schön’s more journalistic treatment of organizational adaptiveness to turbulence in Beyond the Stable State (1971). Schön proposes the useful concept of a “network structure” to “knit together the still autonomous elements of the functional system in networks which permit concerted action” (Schön 1971, 183). These networks reach beyond organizational boundaries — the become ‘boundary spanning’ — and extend into parts of the organizational environment proper. … When this occurs, the very notions of fixed boundaries, internal and external environments, and central management controls tend to evaporate. A new organizational format takes shape, one that is characterized by temporality and fluiditity and requires continual redesign and adjustment (ibid. 184). The older centre-periphery, or top-down model of organization gives way to a new form of decentralized administration which depends more on multidirectional communication flows than on formal authority structures.” (Friedman, 214).

I sauntered over to the Vancouver Public Library central branch and picked up a copy of Schön’s Beyond the Stable State – it was buried in the stacks (they had to go and retrieve it for me) and it had a library card in the sleeve that said it was last taken out in 1982…

Schön’s book begins with a wonderful passage which introduces the concept of The Stable State.

“I have believed for as long as I can remember in an afterlife within my own life — a calm, stable state to be reached after a time of troubles. When I was a child, that afterlife was Being Grown Up. As I have grown older, its content has become more nebulous, but the image of it stubbornly persists.

The afterlife-within-my-life is a form of belief in what I would like to call the Stable State. Belief in the stable state is belief in the unchangeability, the constancy of central aspects of our lives, or belief that we can attain such constancy. Belief in the stable state is wrong and deep in us. We institutionalize it in every social domain. We do this in spite of our talk about change, our acceptance of change and our approval of dynamism. Language about change is for the most part talk about very small change, trivial in relations to a massive unquestioned stability; it appears formidable to its proponents only by a peculiar optic that leads a potato chip company to see a larger bag of potato chips as a new product. Moreover, talk about change is as often as not a substitute for engaging in it.”

[Note: You can listen to that introduction to his book as Donald Schon gave it as part of the Reith Lecture that preceded his book in November 1970, thanks to the magic of the BBC. Brilliant.]

The crisis which emerges from the erosion of this stable state, the onslaught of change and turbulence that exists in the “modern world,” one that Schön and others apparently felt acutely in the late 1960′s and early 1970′s when this text was written and is still felt today some 40 years later, is then described in the following pages:

“In these situations there is not a lack of information. There is not an “information gap”. There is an information overload, too many signals, more than can be accounted for; and there is as yet not theory in terms of which new information can be sought or new experiments undertaken. “Uncertainty” is a way of talking about the situation in which no plausible theory has emerged. For this reason, pragmatism is no response. We cannot in these situations, say “Let us get the data,” “Let us experiment,” “Let us test,” for there is as yet nothing to test. Out of the uncertainty, out of the experience of a bewildering array of information, new hypotheses must emerge — and from them, mandates for gathering data, testing, experiment, can be derived. But in the first instance they do not as yet exist, and until they exist the method of pragmatism cannot be applied. The period of uncertainty must be traversed in order that pragmatism may become an appropriate response.

The feeling of uncertainty is anguish. The depth of anguish increases as the threatening changes strike at more central regions of the self. In the last analysis, the degree of threat presented by a change depends on its connection to self-identity. Against all of this we have erected our belief in the stable state.”

Schön goes onto outline 3 typical responses to the erosion of the stable state: return to an idyllic past-state (which is not really achievable, nor did the past state ever really exist), revolt (“reactionary radicalism”), and mindlessness (drugs, violence, etc.). All are deemed unproductive organizational responses (no kidding) and he then works his way towards the main premise of his book, a more positive response in the form of a learning organization: a networked, adaptive model that is responsive to flux and change.

More from Schön:

“Constructive responses to the loss of the stable state must confront the phenomenon directly. They must do so at the level of the institution and of the person.

• If our established institutions are threatened with disruption, how can we invent and bring into being new or modified institutions capable of confronting challenges to their stability without freezing and without flying apart at the seams?
• If we are losing stable values and anchors for personal identity, how can we maintain a sense of self-respect and self-identity while in the very process of change?

The present work is an effort to come to grips with these questions. It proceeds on the following assumptions:

• The loss of the stable state means that our society and all of its institutions are in continuing processes of transformation. We cannot expect new stable states that will endure even for our own lifetimes.
• We must learn to understand, guide, influence, and manage these transformations. We must make the capacity for undertaking them integral to ourselves and our institutions.
• We must, in other words, become adept at learning. We must become able not only to transform our institutions, in response to changing situations and requirements; we must invent and develop institutions which are ‘learning systems,’ that is to say, systems capable of bringing about their own continuing transformation.
• The task which the loss of the stable state makes imperative, for the person, for our institutions, for our society as a whole is to learn about learning.

What is the nature of the process by which organizations, institutions and societies transform themselves?

What are the characteristics of effective learning systems?

What are the forms and limits of knowledge that can operate within processes of social learning?

What demands are made on a person who engages in this kind of learning?

These are the questions we will be asking in the pages that follow. ”

The Learning Organization (yet another metaphor)

As this great article written by Mark Smith on the informative INFED site points out, Schön is a direct link to Peter Senge’s work on learning organizations and their design in his book The Fifth Discipline.

Forgive the large cut & paste here from , but I think it’s a great summary passage worth reading (I recommend reading the entire Schon article too, if you have time):

“Two key themes arise out of Donald Schon’s discussion of learning systems: the emergence of functional systems as the units around which institutions define themselves; and the decline of centre-periphery models of institutional activity (ibid.: 168). He contrasts classical models of diffusing innovation with a learning system model.

In this we can see the significance of networks, flexibility, feedback and organizational transformation. At the same time we have to recognize that the ‘ways of knowing’ offered by the dominant rational/experimental model are severely limited in situations of social change. Donald Schon looks to a more ‘existentially’-oriented approach. He argues for formulating projective models that can be carried forward into further instances (a key aspect of his later work on reflective practice).

Moreover, learning isn’t simply something that is individual. Learning can also be social:

“A social system learns whenever it acquires new capacity for behaviour, and learning may take the form of undirected interaction between systems… [G]overnment as a learning system carries with it the idea of public learning, a special way of acquiring new capacity for behaviour in which government learns for the society as a whole. In public learning, government undertakes a continuing, directed inquiry into the nature, causes and resolution of our problems.

The need for public learning carries with it the need for a second kind of learning. If government is to learn to solve new public problems, it must also learn to create the systems for doing so and discard the structure and mechanisms grown up around old problems.”(Schon 1973: 109)

The opportunity for learning, Donald Schon suggests, is primarily in discovered systems at the periphery, ‘not in the nexus of official policies at the centre’ (ibid.: 165). He continues, ‘the movement of learning is as much from periphery to periphery, or from periphery to centre, as from centre to periphery’. Very much after Carl Rogers, Donald Schön asserts that, ‘Central comes to function as facilitator of society’s learning, rather than as society’s trainer’ (ibid.: 166).”

Source: donald schön: learning, reflection and change / infed.org

At this point, I can hear Marcia Conner, Dan Pontefract and other E2.0/social learning cross-over types like Harold Jarche and Jon Husband in my head, saying “Well duh! I told you so!”

Schön’s final point mentioned in the passage above, that the social system learns when it acquires a new capacity for behaviour resonates for me when I put on my social intranet hat.

Social intranets afford a new capacity for behaviour. They allow your organization to communicate, collaborate, find out about each other, and learn as a system. They allow us to see what’s happening at the edges of the organization, diffuse innovation from the periphery to the centre, and communicate results back from the centre to the periphery.

Perhaps some 40 years later, we’re finally getting a bit closer to what Schön envisioned in 1971.

On the value of theory in general

This article is the third (see Connected companies, complex systems and social intranets and Mechanistic and organic organizations) in what’s becoming a bit of a review of some of the theory shaping the ideas behind social intranets, social interaction design, Enterprise 2.0, knowledge management, organizational design, and all the other stuff I’ve been interested in and bookmarking over the years. I’ve had some nice responses to the posts to date and will continue with them if there’s an audience. I hope there is.

I’m heading to Enterprise 2.0 in Boston in a week’s time and I hope that some of the readers of this blog will be there. I feel like the foundational work of our profession, the review of theory like Schön’s or the texts like Morgan’s are lost in the barrage of marketing fodder that companies like ours are responsible for in a new and emerging marketplace. I’d like to think that these posts and the discussions that follow are useful in some way, helping frame and understand the larger nature of the problems we’re trying to solve in our organization, problems which are far larger and more difficult than “how do I get my IT department to listen to me?” or “how do I write a good intranet requirement.”

Don’t get me wrong, we write about those things too and definitely understand the value of providing real-world examples of how intranet managers are helping change the face of their organization. But if you’re interested in the theory behind E2.0 and some of the larger ideas, the ones that might have been written 40 years ago, 400 years ago, or even last week I’d love to hear from you.

Mechanistic and Organic Organizations

Tweet Gordon Ross| April 15th, 2011 10 Comments »

This article is the second (see Connected companies, complex systems and social intranets and What would Donald Schön think of your social intranet?) in what’s becoming a bit of a review of some of the theory shaping the ideas behind social intranets. Let’s continue the discussion in 10 days at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston.

In my last blog post on connected companies, complex systems, and social intranets, I wrote a little bit about the appropriateness of mechanical metaphors and models in complex times. While I never used the term explicitly the competing metaphor to the mechanical, which Ephraim picked up on in his comments, is the organic.

This dualism of the mechanical and the organic is not new in western philosophical thought. In fact, it’s about 500 years old, tracing its roots back to Francis Bacon in the 1600′s. And as recently as 120 years ago, Emile Durkheim helped establish modern sociology using these concepts as central parts of his ideas and theories on the ties that bind people together.

Continuing the tradition of the dualism set forth by Bacon, Durkheim, and others, we fast-forward to the 20th century and the 1960′s work of Tom Burns and George Stalker which had much impact in the field of organization theory, with their study of innovation, management, and structure of Scottish electronics firms. In their writing on mechanistic and organismic structures, they outlined the differences between the two types and solidified the concept in the minds of future generations of organizational theorists and business scholars. [Updated: for a critique / deconstruction of Burns and Stalker's M/O binary, read David Boje's 1999 essay "Five Centuries of Mechanistic-Organic Debate" - Apr 18/11 GR]

Burns and Stalker claimed “a mechanistic management system is appropriate to stable conditions” whereas an “organismic form is appropriate to changing conditions, which give rise constantly to fresh problems and unforeseen requirements for action which cannot be broken down or distributed automatically arising from the functional roles defined with a hierarchic structure.”

The properties of both types of firms are described by Burns and Stalker below:

Mechanistic Systems:

1. the specialized differentiation of functional tasks into which the problems and tasks facing the concern are broken down.;
2. the abstract nature of each individual task, which is pursued with techniques and purposes more or less distinct from those of the concern as a whole; i.e., the functionaries tend to pursue the technical improvement of means, rather than the accomplishment of the ends of the concern.;
3. the reconciliation, for each level in the hierarchy, of these distinct performances by the immediate superiors, who are also, in turn, responsible for seeing that each is relevant in his own special part of the main task.
4. The precise definition of rights and obligations and technical methods attached to each functional role;
5. the translation of rights, and obligations, and methods into the responsibilities of a functional position;
6. hierarchic structure of control, authority and communication;
7. a reinforcement of hierarchic structure by the location of knowledge of actualities exclusively at the top of the hierarchy, where the final reconciliation of distinct tasks and assessment of relevant is made;
8. a tendency for vertical interaction between members of the concern, i.e., between superior and subordinate;
9. a tendency for operations and working behavior to be governed by the instructions and decisions issued by superiors;
10. insistence on loyalty to the concern and obedience to superiors as a condition of membership;
11. a greater importance and prestige attaching to internal (local) than to general (cosmopolitan) knowledge, experience, and skill.”

Organic Systems:

1. the contributive nature of special knowledge and experience to the common task of the concern;
2. the realistic nature of the individual task, which is seen as set by the total situation of the concern;
3. the adjustment and continual re-definition of individual tasks through interaction with others;
4. the shedding of responsibility as a limited field of rights, obligations and methods. (Problems may not be posted upwards, downwards or sideways as being someone else’s responsibility)’;
5. the spread of commitment to the concern beyond any technical definition;
6. a network structure of control, authority, and communication. The sanctions which apply to the individual’s conduct in his working role derive more from presumed community of interest with the rest of the working organization in the survival and growth of the firm, and less from a contractual relationship between himself and a non-personal corporation, represented for him by an immediate superior;
7. omniscience no longer imputed to the head of the concern; knowledge about the technical or commercial nature of the here and now task may be located anywhere in the network; this location becoming the ad hoc center of control, authority and communication.
8. a lateral rather than a vertical direction of communication through the organization, communication between people of different rank, also, resembling consultation rather than command:
9. a content of communication which consists of information and advice rather than instructions and decisions;
10. commitment to the concern’s tasks and to the ‘technological ethos’ of material progress and expansion is more highly valued than loyalty and obedience;
11. importance and prestige attach to affiliations and expertise valid in the industrial and technical and commercial milieu external to the firm.”

Source: Burns and Stalker, Organizational Theory (D.S. Pugh), Penguin, 1990

This description, again written nearly 50 years before systems of engagement became a real possibility inside modern organizations, describes the traits and characteristics that many social business pundits describe in near-utopian terms. Network structures vs. hierarchy, knowledge at the top vs. knowledge everywhere, lateral communication vs. vertical (silo’d) communication, fuzzy definition of roles vs. highly prescriptive job descriptions: the language of the organic organizational model as described by Burns and Stalker reads like an Enterprise 2.0 sales brochure.

So why should we privilege one model over another? Why is it that we think organic models are “better” somehow? Why has this model (to some) become an imperative?

That argument lies at the heart of their article, that ties structure to performance. A commonly observed sentiment is that businesses today face increasingly complex markets, situations, problems, and the model that is best suited for this type of environment is the organic, not the mechanistic. This idea is related to the foundation of Contingency Theory (also developed in the 1960′s), that “there is no one best way of organizing / leading and that an organizational / leadership style that is effective in some situations may not be successful in others.” Organic is more applicable / effective in the complex.

Do organic organizations outperform mechanistic organizations in complex environments? It bears asking the question after all, even if the idea of an organic organization simply feels like the right thing to do in complex situations.

I managed to find this 2006 article by Sine, Mitsuhashi, and Kirsch that revisited the work of Burns and Stalker to attempt to answer that very question, by looking at the performance and organizational models of emerging Internet firms in the late 1990′s (instead of the mature firms often studied and indeed part of the original Burns & Stalker research). And not to spoil it for those of you interested in reading this article, but the conclusion they draw is that a mixture of both mechanical and organic, well-defined and designed in some areas and more undefined, ambiguous, and fluid in others, results in overall better performance.

So while conceptually in “opposition” to each other, the mechanistic vs. organic is really a continuum, with many shades of gray in between, and rarely does one firm entirely exhibit the archetypal characterization at either end of the spectrum. This should be common-sensical to anyone involved in running a business. Some areas are mechanical. Other areas are organic. These can co-exist and should continue to co-exist in order to keep the firm alive and thriving.

Instead of spending time debating one model over another as some kind of debate about universal organizational forms, I think I’ll side with the contingency theory types, who boldly answer, “Well, it depends…” And that means focusing on how to recognize the problem domain you currently face (simple, complicated, complex, chaotic), effectively utilize these two metaphors and their corresponding organizational design characteristics, and ask how technology can then support your organization’s individual and collective decision making efforts.

Connected companies, complex systems, and social intranets

Tweet Gordon Ross| April 6th, 2011 11 Comments »

This article is the first (see Mechanistic and organic organizations and What would Donald Schön think of your social intranet?) in what’s becoming a bit of a review of some of the theory shaping the ideas behind social intranets. Let’s continue the discussion in 10 days at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston.

One of the best parts of my job is the privilege of having conversations about the emerging field of social software, Enterprise 2.0, Social Business, the latest generation of Knowledge Management (or whatever you prefer to label the collection of people busy innovating away at the moment in this area) with some truly brilliant minds and kindred spirits.

One such chat that I recall vividly happened with Thomas Vander Wal, the first time we met in person in Washington DC in December 2009. I was there for a proposal shortlist presentation and dropped him a note to ask if he’d be interested in having coffee. He obliged and what was scheduled for a 30 min chat wound up turning into a close to 4 hour conversation at a local coffee shop. We rambled far and wide on topics, shared our common interests and backgrounds, and I reluctantly left Thomas to the remainder of his afternoon, my head spinning with all sorts of great thoughts.

If you’ve had the pleasure of meeting Thomas in person or attending one of his presentations at a conference in the past few years, you may very well have had a similar experience. He’s just that kind of guy: full of ideas and in possession of a remarkable memory that allows him to reference and recall a great wealth of material in the midst of a discussion. And a great desire and willingness to share those ideas.

It was for this very reason that I had a big grin on my face when I read the opening dedication of Dave Gray’s February blog post, The Connected Company to Thomas as the inspiration for Dave’ s post. I too would like to thank Thomas for his inspiration and role in this post, which I hope does our conversations some justice.

I renewed our discussions in-person at KM World 2010 in DC again last November. It was all too brief, but I have more great memories, in particular Thomas and I huddled around Dave Snowden’s laptop, along with Jon Husband, Bill Ives, while Thierry Hubert gave a demo of their Darwin system. KM World 2010, which clearly had an impact on Thomas, further solidified some of the thoughts that I’ll try my best to articulate below, in large part thanks to previous chats with Thomas, Jon, Euan Semple, Stewart Mader, James Robertson, Lee Bryant, and listening to Dave Snowden’s keynote in DC.

So enough pre-amble. This is a long overdue blog post on my part. Probably 5 years overdue. But sometimes it takes a while to get that long hunch to fully develop.

The broken metaphor of the company

One of Dave’s core messages in his post is that the metaphor which we use to guide our thinking about companies, the metaphor of the machine, is well… broken. Or rather, it wasn’t ever applicable in the first place. Companies aren’t machines, they are systems. Complex systems.

“It’s time to think about what companies really are, and to design with that in mind. Companies are not so much machines as complex, dynamic, growing systems. As they get larger, acquiring smaller companies, entering into joint ventures and partnerships, and expanding overseas, they become “systems of systems” that rival nation-states in scale and reach.

“So what happens if we rethink the modern company, if we stop thinking of it as a machine and start thinking of it as a complex, growing system? What happens if we think of it less like a machine and more like an organism? Or even better, what if we compared the company with other large, complex human systems, like, for example, the city?” – From Dave’s Connected Company post.

The idea of companies as complex systems is still relatively new to many people in the business world, even though the thinking behind complexity theory has been studied and discussed for nearly three decades. “Chaos Theory”, as it was popularized by science writer James Gleick, and the work of the Sante Fe Institute dates back to the 1980′s, as a multi-disciplinary intellectual endeavour to understand the non-linearity and puzzling behaviours of complex systems, which could not be described by simple cause and effect relations.

Many people in the business world describe systems as being complex, while not being fully aware of the nature, dynamics, and attributes of complex systems as formally defined by the field of complexity science. I believe a quick review of those attributes is in order to help those new to the concept. In particular, the  description of a particular class of complex systems which under certain conditions can be referred to as complex adaptive systems.

What is a complex adaptive system?

Sante Fe Institute complexity theorist and pioneer John H. Holland sums it up succinctly and offers a simple starting point: “Complex adaptive systems are systems that have a large numbers of components, often called agents, that interact and adapt or learn.”

Planning professors Judith Innes and David Booher (more on them later) offer this very useful 5-part description in their latest book Planning with Complexity, building a definition from the work of other complexity theorists  Paul Cillers, Ralph Stacey, and Hari Tsoukas.

Five Key Attributes of a Complex Adaptive System

I love this table. I think it’s one of the most clearly written overviews of CAS that I’ve been exposed to.

I only have one point of contention with the description and that’s the use of the “robustness” as a feature – instead the term “resilience” has much more ecological connotations, describing a system able to absorb energy, withstand shocks, and bounce back. Sanjay Khanna introduced me to the importance of the concept of resilience a few years ago (albeit in a different but entirely related context) and more recently resilience took centre stage in Dave Snowden’s closing keynote at KM World 2010, entitled “The Resilient Organization.” For Dave Snowden, robustness is a mechanical / engineering property of complicated systems, not adaptive, resilient complex systems.

Dave Snowden, like Dave Gray, is clear in his message: the mechanical / engineering metaphors that sought robustness, predicated on a systems dynamics approach to problem solving and decision making, are nearing the end of their utility. That is not to say we haven’t accomplished great things under this paradigm, or that we didn’t accomplish great things in the scientific management era that preceded it. [Note: I'm typing this essay on my laptop right now, in the midst of a cross country flight, hurtling through the sky, all thanks to the wonders of the mechanical age.]  It is to say that how things were done then, might not be how things should be done now, given the degree of complexity that organizations face in today’s world. And arguably, if the 400+ year old companies Dave Gray mentions, further detailed  in The Living Company by Arie de Geus,  have anything to show us, it is that those designed to handle complexity from the start have had a long-term adaptive advantage that others have not.

The “design” of cities (and other complex adaptive systems)

One of my favourite design essays that I’ve written about here before is Richard Buchanan’s Wicked Problems in Design Thinking (1995). In the essay, he takes an admirable run at defining just what “design” is and comes to the conclusion there exists four broad design endeavours that we as humans undertake. These four areas of design are easily recognized by their corresponding outputs:

Source: Wicked Problems in Design Thinking, Richard Buchanan; Margolin, V., & Buchanan, R. (1995). The Idea of Design. Cambridge: MIT Press

At the bottom of the table, low and behold, Buchanan includes the design of complex systems or environments for living, working, playing or learning. Buchanan too makes the link to the city, the entity that Lewis Mumford defined so eloquently in his 1938 essay “What is the City?” as being, “in its complete sense then … a geographic plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theatre of social action, and an aesthetic symbol of collective unity.”

And who are those individuals so bold as to attempt to design such monuments to our collective aspirations? Well, as Gray and Buchanan point out, these people are urban planners.  Of course, planners don’t design cities quite the same way a designer designs a material object. Dave’s description of the type of design is a clever turn of phrase; it’s the difference between designing for control vs. designing for emergence. If the emergence of a system-wide, higher order of functioning is the beneficial outcome of a productive, adaptive, and resilient complex adaptive system, who is there attempting to nudge it into this higher state?

I live in Vancouver, which as of this year turns 125 years old and is considered by many to be a remarkable urban experiment in ethnic diversity, urban density, and planning. We’re a young city, far younger than those 400+ year old companies mentioned earlier. And we’re still a work in progress, one which gets a fair bit of attention from planners across North America and around the world who are struggling with their own highly complex civic realities.

Cities, urbanism, and planning have been an interest of mine for a while now, dating back to university, and it’s been further amplified and enhanced by the fact that I’m married to a brilliant, wonderful woman who happens to be a planner. Along with her stunning intellect and personality, I also get to enjoy a wonderful collection of books that came along with her (bonus!): texts on urban planning, transportation, the dynamics of cities, and the philosophy of planning (Yes dear, I do love you for more than your books. Really.).

And while I’m not the one with the graduate degree in planning in the house, I have done a bit of reading on the topic. My initial findings: many urban planners in North America during the 20th century have been under the influence of the same metaphors as corporate organizational designers and systems engineers: a seemingly logical, rational, positivist tradition that assumes linear, cause-and-effect, machine-like systems.

This hypothesis is further backed by the planning theorists and professors Innes and Booher in their excellent and important text Planning with Complexity:

“For most of the second half of the twentieth century both the policy literature and the practice reserved the term rational for a particular approach to public decision making. The idea was that public decisions [the heart of urban planning - GR] should be based on objective data, logical deductive analysis and systematic comparison of alternatives. This powerful normative model is grounded in a positivist epistemology and it implies that neutral experts should gather, compile, and analyze data which, in turn, decision makers should use to make public decision. The data has to be measurable and gathered through known and tested tools like surveys. Knowledge in this model involves seeking facts and looking for laws relating variables. Behind this idea is the belief that there is an objective world out there that can be observed and measured in a consistent way by trained observers. This model also assumes the world can be broken down into analytically manageable components which can be studied separately and fixed independently, like the parts of a machine. Most analytics methods associated with this view in practice assume linear additive causal relations. Though the practitioners of these methods recognized the reality of nonlinear relations and feedback loops, for many years there were not well developed techniques to address these. Most assumed linear analyses were good enough approximations.” (Innes & Booher, pg 18)

While not mentioned directly in his post, Dave Gray’s version of a new corporate urbanism for company design is a whole lot more Jane Jacobs than it is Robert Moses. The end of Dave’s essay, which talks about the importance of “the street”, is all Jacobs, all the time. Jacobs too, as Steven Johnson highlighted in his books on complex adaptive systems and emergence [Emergence, Where Good Ideas Come From], was a fan of the messy coherence of the complex city. No Corbusier here, thanks.

Complex intranets for complex organizations

So that brings me to why this essay appears on the ThoughtFarmer blog. We were in a meeting the other day at work and I tried to quickly summarize to a partner we’re working with that social intranet software like ours is in fact a complex adaptive system affording the behaviour and interactions of larger complex adaptive systems (the company). I got some blank stares (hopefully this blog post makes that better).

The social intranet is a system that comprises a large number of agents (employees of a company) connected through multiple networks. In this case, to dispel any confusion,  I’d describe a network in a Social Network Analysis fashion as a group of individuals connected to each other through their interactions, not a physical network / technology / “hubs and routers” fashion.

Employees then interact dynamically in the system, exchanging information (through the creation of pages, addition of comments, receipt of email notifications, favouriting of content, etc.)  based on heuristics that organize the interactions locally (their job descriptions, the problems they are trying to solve, the strategies they are trying to execute). The effects of this activity on the social intranet propagate throughout the system (through the interactions of employees through content and each other, both primary and secondary) and, as Innes and Booher say, “the result is that the system has a memory that is not located at a specific place but is distributed throughout the system.”

If there was ever a problem that the social intranet was attempting to solve, I think that’s it. A social intranet allows you to access your organization’s collective, distributed memory in order to sense make, recognize patterns, and make decisions.

Nonlinear? Check. Iterative? Check. Recursive, self referential? Check. Feedback loops? Yes please.

How do we understand the intranet’s (and therefore a subsystem of the larger company’s) behaviour? We have to look at the performance of the system as a whole. What did John Hagel attempt to do at Deloitte earlier this year? Look at the overall system’s performance — he moved away from a reductionist model. And good for Socialtext and Traction for getting clients brave enough to participate.

Coherent and novel patterns emerge? Our first deployment of ThoughtFarmer in 2006, chronicled in Andrew McAfee’s Enterprise 2.0 book, had a great moment in it, a few weeks into the launch. We had what Duncan Watts would describe as an information cascade. We thought the beginning of the intranet might be the end thanks to the nature of the cascade, but luckily the organizational culture that led to the creation of ThoughtFarmer in the first place was accepting enough to realize that was just as emergent as all the good stuff they were hoping for but didn’t know would come.

The cascade happened as follows: one user changed his profile picture to be Tom Selleck, Magnum PI era. This, at the time of ThoughtFarmer 1.0, showed up in the activity stream on the homepage. Another user saw that, changed their picture to be Higgins (the PI’s butler). And then someone else changed theirs to be another 80′s TV icon. And another, and another, and so on. Before day end, most of the company looked like Threes Company, the A-Team, or Dallas. It was clear that this intranet was not a static information environment. It was made of people, just as much as it was pages.

Finally, does the intranet display both the capacity to maintain its viability and the capacity to evolve? We think so. 4 years in from the launch of our product, we’ve watched organizations closely with their use of this adaptive and flexible tool. Re-organization of the design firm Continuum was facilitated through the use of ThoughtFarmer. This strikes me as the ultimate adaptive act of any organization; redesigning or re-organizing its structure from the inside.

Standing on the shoulders of giants

Of course, I can’t finish this post without pointing out that many others had made the link between complex adaptive systems and the types of environments that social software affords.

One of the most influential articles that I read was written when distributed, many-to-many intranets were non-existent. Dave Snowden’s Intranet as Complex Ecology written in 2001 is as relevant today in terms of its design implications as it was 10 years ago.

Peter Morville and Lou Rosenfeld sensed the act of information architecture not to be a static endeavour but a dynamic one (and continue to do so) back with the publishing of the Polar Bear book, one that has had a lasting impact for many and defined an emerging profession in many ways.

And Josh Porter called it like it is in 2008 in his book Designing for the Social Web, building on the work of Tom Coates, Jyri Engstrom‘s, Stewart Butterfield and other Web 2.0 pioneers. They clearly understood (and continue to do so) the power of emergence and the dynamics of these systems. We owe them a lot in defining some of the fundamental social interaction design patterns that we now take for granted, which 7 years ago were experimental and novel themselves.

Finally, some important writing continues to stream from long time contributors and practitioners. Just in the last two months, I’ve seen great posts from JP Rangaswami, Geoffrey Moore, Luis Suarez, and of course, Thomas Vander Wal, further contributing to our understanding of just what the hell it is we’re doing.

2011 is off to an exciting start in the field of social software, social business, and all things complex and adaptive. I hope that now the floodgates have broken on my blogging, I’ll be able to continue writing more about this topic and re-engage in the conversations that started this whole thing.

In particular, if we do believe that urban planning as a discipline holds some answers for approaches to how we tackle the design of complex adaptive systems, we (social software professionals, the readers of this blog and Dave’s blog) need to better understand the current state of planning, its historical roots, and some recent philosophical shifts occurring in that field.  As Innes and Booher point out, it’s not all roses and sounds a lot more familiar than we might have expected when looking for inspiration in other domains.

Hiding from the gaze of the social intranet

Tweet Gordon Ross| July 12th, 2010 2 Comments »

Every week ThoughtFarmer calls customers to discuss the practical matters of running an intranet: the good, bad, and the ugly. We do these calls in the hope that we can learn lessons on how to make our product better and more valuable.
I had one such call earlier today with a professional services firm who talked about the evolution of the use of ThoughtFarmer at their company. Like all of the calls we have with customers, it was rich with insights into the real world problems and day-to-day challenges faced in organizations trying to be more communicative, collaborative, and productive.

The firm I spoke with this morning started their intranet journey with us a couple of years ago when they replaced a stale intranet powered by SharePoint 2007. Their SharePoint intranet was a place to store content, a document repository of sorts, but there wasn’t much conversation and it certainly wasn’t a collaborative environment; it was difficult to use and wasn’t providing much value to the company’s project teams.

They evaluated several products and chose ThoughtFarmer to provide staff with an environment where everyone in the organization could contribute, collaborate around projects, and hopefully have their intranet become a knowledge hub for the company.

After the roll-out of ThoughtFarmer, the economy took a nose dive and they lost staff due to lay-offs and a lack of project work. As they lost projects and staff, the professional services firm’s focus on utilization and working billable hours increased. As anyone who’s ever worked as a consultant knows, time is money. Working on billable work is what drives the bottom line in knowledge-worker consultancies.

This shift towards focusing on productivity and staff’s billable utilization had an impact on how the intranet was used. People were not spending as much time with the intranet, not sharing the types of project success stories and communicating with each other on non-related project work, as “no-one wanted to be seen on the intranet.” With all of the activity stream information, status updates, and social visibility features on the intranet, people became concerned that using the tool would be a sign of non-billable work, a sign that they were playing around on the intranet and not doing their “real job.” The ability for their work to be observed and tracked by senior management and executives was scaring employees from using the intranet in the way they’d originally intended. They were afraid to “work in public” on the intranet.

What real work looks like

As a result, news items or team blog posts that were to be posted or interesting content that people wanted to share was now being sent to the intranet coordinator to post to the site, even though everyone had permissions to do so in the “anyone can edit anything” environment they’d created. The reason: the intranet coordinator was seen as a safe person who wouldn’t get in trouble posting content to the site, because that was their job. They were allowed to be on the intranet, after all.

The purpose of their hard times intranet shifted from a collaborative space to a communications space. Official company news items published internally are still read heavily, so too is the CEO’s blog published through the ThoughtFarmer blogging features. “Everyone wants to hear what he has to say,” said my interviewee. But the communications was less of a many-to-many model of Intranet 2.0 and more of a few-to-many broadcast model, a more classic centralized intranet model of communications.

Their business development and sales efforts appear to be working and they are optimistic that their financial recovery is well underway. The future of the intranet will again be more collaborative, as project teams take on new work and again have the challenges of making tacit knowledge explicit and engaging staff geographically distributed across the country and time zones. And we’re happy that while they weren’t able to realize their vision of collaboration during their hard times, the intranet was able to shift its focus and provide value as a communication platform when it was required. It adapted to their business needs and managed to help the company communicate in the way they saw fit.

What’s interesting about all of this publicly viewable work, about the social visibility that intranets like ThoughtFarmer affords, is what it says about the social norms of the workplace and the definitions of what constitutes “real work” and what’s not. And how that changes dramatically when there’s a lot on the line, like in the midst of an economic downturn when jobs are being lost and uncertainty and fear rule.

What opportunities were lost due to people keeping their heads down and hiding from the intranet? What could they have done differently during hard times to better connect people in the organization to stimulate business development efforts? How could forging those connections through the intranet have helped?

I wonder how many other companies struggle with convincing employees that their intranet is a legitimate place to get work done, a credible source of value and productivity within the four walls of the organization. Are the consumer-like design patterns of activity streams and status updates that make social intranets appear like Twitter and Facebook undermining the credibility of the tool, or is there something else at play here?

Enterprise 2.0 Case Study: Continuum, designers of Reebok Pump and Swiffer Sweeper

Tweet Chris McGrath| June 30th, 2010 1 Comment »

There seems to be a big appetite for case studies of how Enterprise 2.0 software is being used in the real world. I want to invite you to check out our case study of Continuum, the Boston-based design innovation firm responsible for brilliant ideas like the Reebok Pump and the Swiffer Sweeper.

This is the latest of our Intranet Case Studies.

Social Interaction Design Webinar Q&A

Tweet Gordon Ross| April 19th, 2010 No Comments »

We had a couple of questions that came out of last week’s webinar on Social Interaction Design with Thomas Vander Wal. Thomas took the time to put together responses and we’re sharing them here.

EphraimJF: How do you address information flow needs for both vertical and horizontal organizational structures?

Thomas Vander Wal: The multi-directional flows can be addressed in a few ways. The first is people acting to direct the flow by tagging or writing pointers in other affinity areas. Tagging provides the means to add context for groups with different interests and key terms. Writing quick posts pointing to something that may be of interest or needs to be seen is one good way.

The second is having an area, page or service where a group can curate what has been found through search, aggregation tools (feeds or alert searches), or found through people who cross purpose.

Last is using feeds of searches or filters to automatically populate pages. Paying attention to other group’s flows on terms that have know interest or affinity.

Josh Glover: We’re trying to source a group of volunteers to gather feedback on ideas for our new intranet – one concern is that we’ll be full of people who will be easy adopters. Any suggestions on how we identify who might be the laggards up front, so we can see what they might want to see and attempt to address that group with initial design/roll-out.

Thomas Vander Wal: One of the better ways of ensuring those outside the early adopters get included is to ask the known early adopters to make a list of people who they continually are helping grasp the new things. This identifies who the next stage adopters or the group after that will be.

Also dig into the ecosystem of how things are done now outside of the tools. Most organizations have one or two central node people who are the ones who act as liaison to new tech or are the person through whom the informal information flows go through. They will be able to help map not only who the next round of adopters are, but they may be able to identify who the experts are as well. Finding experts are hard as they often are not the users of the new social or communication tools, but it is the broadcaster or rebroadcasts of their info that are much more easily seen. The experts are usually overly busy and do not have interest in attracting more attention or work. If you can get the experts into the early rounds or the broadcasters or rebroadcasting types, that would be really helpful.

One thing to keep in mind is those who are often central nodes for communication may be a tough sell as they like their role and the tools as they are as they have value for themselves tied into it.

—————-

Thanks again to Thomas Vander Wal of InfoCloud Solutions and to all of our participants for joining us.

Look for upcoming ThoughtFarmer sponsored webinar announcements on our mailing list or posted here to our blog.