chieftech’s blog

User participation is now an established feature of the economy, spreading from product development and software to a much broader base of activities, such as marketing and manufacturing, and sectors, including social media, automotives and cosmetics, among others. Early analyses of user participation pointed to the importance of building large communities, creating effective incentives for participation and implementing more flexible forms of organization. Looking back a few years later, the good news is that active participation continues to spread. The bad news is that harnessing participation is more difficult than we thought. Stimulating a continuous flow of high-quality contributions should be the focus of companies that want to take advantage of user participation.

Well, actually, if you've been hanging around knowledge management and collaboration for a while you wouldn't expect it to be easy :-)

I still think Clay Shirky sums this up best - you need:

"a successful fusion of a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the users"

Q. What are your thoughts on collaborative versus top-down management?

A. Collaboration is one of the most difficult challenges in management. I think top-down organizations got started because the bosses either knew more or they had access to more information. None of that applies now. Everybody has access to identical amounts of information.

Q. Why did that shift occur?

A. I would say two things. One is just the massive information revolution. But equally important is the fact that before, while there were global companies, they were really just a collection of very local businesses operating independently from each other. Now a global company means a company composed of teams that are themselves dispersed. So every team can be global in many senses, not just the company.

But with the explosion of information, and flattening technologies starting with e-mail, I think that a C.E.O. needs to focus more on the platform that enables collaboration, because employees already have all the data. They have access to everything.

You have to work on the structure of collaboration. How do people get recognized? How do you establish a meritocracy in a highly dispersed environment?

The answer is to allow employees to develop a name for themselves that is irrespective of their organizational ranking or where they sit in the org chart. And it actually is not a question about monetary incentives. They do it because recognition from their peers is, I think, an extremely strong motivating factor, and something that is broadly unused in modern management.

Q. How do you create that culture?

A. One thing we use is a Twitter-like system on our intranet called Yammer.

Timely interview considering my comments about virtual teams just now, although there is more to this that just enterprise microblogging!

Hat tip to Andrew McAfee, who also highlights some key points if you want the abridged version of this interview.

While Headshift/Dachis Group's own Social Business Summit kicks off in the Austin Texas, I'll be attending the Hargraves Institute's Innovation 2010 conference to also talk about Social Business Design:

The global financial crisis exposed some very expensive, bureaucratic structures inside companies that represent a drain on productivity and a waste of human potential. Companies that emerge from this period as leaders will be more agile, network-centric and people-powered. Learn about the four Social Business Design archetypes, how Social Business Design can be applied to stimulate and support innovation with customers, the workforce and business partners.

Full details are in the conference brochure.

Kurt Nielsen, the hospital’s director, says that while the doctors are not particularly adept at information technology, they have gradually embraced it. And it helps that the staff was involved in developing the innovations.

“My staff at the hospital is very, very satisfied,” he said. “We build these systems in an incremental way, and seek their input throughout.”

Talking of Social Business Design, I've written before about the need for new approaches to IT in healthcare. It sounds like the Danish have the right attitude more than anything else.

On March 25, Headshift/Dachis Group will host Asia/Pacific's first Social Business Summit, an invitation only event in Sydney, designed for business and technology thought leaders interested in the future of social business.

Currently, the implementation of social tools in business are advancing from experimental pilot initiatives towards mainstream adoption spanning a diverse range of organisational contexts. As with all transformational technology developments, organisational culture change and technology adoption are closely related, with both influencing the other in subtle yet important ways.
We intend to consider and address the impact of social tools on the way we organise, structure and manage knowledge and people in businesses, both internally and externally.

This event is by invitation only and admittance is limited.
If you'd like to request an invitation, please email australia@headshift.com

This is one of a series of global Social Business Summits taking place during March this year - Austin, Texas on the 11th and London on the 18th, followed by Sydney on the 25th.

Also, see Lee's great post announcing the London summit, where he positions the big picture for the Social Business Summit by saying:

The relationship between technology and culture is an interesting one, and it plays out differently in the short-run and the long-run. We can see the increasing speed with which technological change bleeds into mainstream culture through the impact of printing, radio, the telephone, television and, most recently, the internet and social networking. Whether it is Time's person of the year, or the Oxford Dictionary's word of the year, the influence of recent online developments is inescapable. But at a deeper level, more fundamental change is also happening, though less immediately visible, and over a longer time period.

In business, our use of technology is influenced by the way we work; but the way we work, and indeed the way we structure our companies and organisations, is also very much influenced by technology. The Twentieth Century corporation was partly a product of technological innovations in logistics, transport and communications. Those who could afford to exploit these expensive innovations were able to reap the benefits of scale associated with large-scale co-ordination of human and material resources.

But institutions can give longevity to ideas through codification into practice. So as the technological or economic constraints associated with our means of organisation fell away, companies did not always change their structure or practice in response. Fast-forward to the early Twenty-first Century and we face a mis-match between the affordances of the day-to-day technology most people use and the organisational structures they operate within, which have yet to adapt to take advantage of the way new technology changes how people interact and co-operate. This gap represents a huge business opportunity for those companies able and willing to adapt.

If, as Clay Shirky argues, the cost of collaboration is close to zero thanks to social tools, what does this mean for organisational design? Can we dramatically reduce internal cost structures by making better use of emergent behaviour inside the firm? If real-time data has the potential to transform service delivery, then how should organisations be structured to take advantage of it? These are just some of the questions that the adoption of social tools inside the enterprise are raising about the future of the firm. They touch on various aspects of technology, from enterprise architecture to user experience design; but they are also informed by economic theory, cognitive science, anthropology, psychology and organisational design.

Hmm. I'm trying to work the significance of this research (if any). However, more data is good, right?

I can't but help think that their perspective is all wrong, rather than anything else. I get the impression that social networking and social media is thought as something out there beyond the walls of the organisation, rather than something that is in fact everywhere. Does this explain why they are surprised that these tools are being used for collaboration within and between organisation, not just between companies and their customers?

Their main conclusion is the "need for stronger governance and IT involvement", but again I wonder if in fact what they mean is that these new technologies have a broader impact beyond marketing and therefore need involvement from across the organisation to determine how to best integrate them into business as usual.

I come back again to the Headshift/Dachis Group's Social Business Design model - focusing on governance and IT involvement is just a symptom, when what is needed is new perspectives to management.

Hat tip to Oliver.

The debate about personalization vs. segmentation on the intranet has been much discussed and researched by many pioneering intranet designers and consultants. As keen observers of user behaviour in the real world, we believe that well chosen default options are a sound design strategy. Adoption rates of personalization features are low, driven by a lack of understanding of the business benefit from the user and the inertia of human nature to simply be lazy and accept defaults. By placing the user at the centre of the information universe and using their relationships to information and each other as the default filter, we can provide them with an intuitive view of their world, making significant progress towards our goal of a more relevant and valuable intranet.

The team at ThoughtFarmer often have interesting things to say about intranets - in this case, Gordon Ross' guest post on the Dachis Collaboratory describes the benefits of implicit personlisation on intranets. This is an important idea that is reflected conceptually in both McAfee's Enterprise 2.0 SLATES model and Dachis/Headshift's Social Business Design archetypes.

Personally I wouldn't say users are lazy as such, but it is true that people take the path of least resistance. Until relatively recently we also didn't have mainstream access to the technologies that support implicit personalisation plus we lacked the organisational maturity to actually place the user at the centre. However, this is now changing.