21st Century Organization

Proving the Value of Connecting Intelligence: Learning from Bill, Victoria, Ed & Renny

Bill Anderson, blogging colleague Victoria Axelrod, Renny B. Amundsen and Ed Vielmetti were all kind enough to add thought provoking comments to my earlier post reflecting on 20 years online.  The result, thinking back to some of the interesting topics uncovered in research for our Knowledge Tree article. Here's some additional thoughts building on their insights.

1. Paying Attention to What we Leave Behind and Managing Identity

Bill Anderson, your observation that:

"Then again, maybe it won't be so great. I don't know about you, but I keep various aspects (not all aspects)of my life separate. And I like it that way."

reminded me of Sandy Pentland and co's work at the MIT Media Lab we've been following. If you are not tracking you might find interesting for considering the breadcrumb trails we leave through our connected lives.  And to me this study of "Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with history flow Visualizations" is stunning.

Victoria, thanks for the pointers to considering our "separate identities" and the move to managing a "single profile" as social networking unfolds.

2. Patti Anklam's "Networks in the World"

Ed Vielmetti, absolutely resonated with your:

"It's really remarkable now that you can bootstrap a 100 person organization.. with no code and no cash outlays (as long as you are will(ing) to tolerate a few advertisements sprinkled throughout)."

For our article I talked with Patti Anklam whom you might know, author of Net Work. Patti speaks about how, in a networked world, we can create "ad hoc organizations"... "to create articles, do business together, learn by stretching ourselves into different media".

I don't know your take on Yochai Benkler's "Wealth of Networks" but to me it seems organizations generally need to be paying closer attention to dynamically creating "networks in the world" and leveraging "social production" for nimble operation in a connected world.   

3. What's Next?

Trust Renny that you will share highlights of your speech to the software company user group.

Thanks everyone for rich comments.  Appreciated.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Bill Anderson- Web 2.0'ing: Valuing a Scientific Mind

Bill Anderson, "Thank you" for a glorious excursion into Web 2.0 and its impact on organizations and especially for your intriguing conclusion, your focus on the human element, the importance of "culture", and "collaboration and participation" skills.

Your posts have provided gems to revisit ranging from your pointers to Jerry Michalski's long list of technologies the world demands we now master; the quintessential Web 2.0 pic via Nancy White and reminder that "While it can be a lot of fun swimming in the ocean, you can't go to sleep."; to your concern about co-development with users; deep dive into "The workgroup in the organization..2.0" and "My 2.0 profile .. and my network limits."  You've certainly captured my Web 2.0 stretch!

While I appreciate your broad view of Web 2.0 and its impact on organizations and individuals most of all I value your scientific mind and rigorous approach to discussing this issue. One of the themes we're tracking in this 21st Century Organization blog is the growing demand for analytical skills that technology brings. Your scientific training, commitment to validating your case and not settling for opinion, enrich your posts.

Please visit again soon to help us think about how the social web impacts each of us and the organizations in which we participate.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

A few 2.0 questions.

Now that I've spent five days writing and thinking about Web 2.0 effects, affects, and promises I find myself left with questions. I hope they are generative.

In a comment a couple of days ago, Richard Cross linked to an article about recovering lost group communication skills. This is a very encouraging report of how we can use what we already know to know more about what we're currently using. We need to be doing more of this.

It makes me wonder if, and how, our experiments with Web 2.0 technology will help us with collaboration and participation skills. As my anthropologist friends continue to remind me, "culture always wins." So we need to ask what kind of culture are we building? Is our current culture helping us move forward, or holding us back? How might we know?

Finally, I've long kept myself distant from computer games, but I think that the wider gaming community is all about collaboration and participation. I know this is important. Games have long been used to help people adapt to new technology. A colleague once worked on a project that used computer games to help NYC subway mechanics become comfortable with using computer-based diagnostic tools. It's also well known that the military uses games for training soldiers, and airlines use simulators to train and test pilots. My son spent endless hours with SimCity and before that in the Dungeons and Dragons worlds. Gamers have been developing serious social change activities around poverty, race, and the environment. And there seems to be real business going on in Second Life. (One interesting note about Second Life is Nick Carr's posting on the real world energy cost of virtual world activity. Do read the comments. It's important to keep reminding ourselves that everything has a cost.)

My last questions are speculative. Should companies be creating their own internal virtual environments? Should they just create virtual organizations in game arenas? It seems reasonable, but how might if affect productivity or the bottom line? That question makes the suggestion sound subversive. That could be good.

Organizations and individuals (that means me, too!) need to learn what they can from games and their associated communities. I'll take that as my 2.0 homework assignment; to get a Second Life!

-Bill

Ouch! I stubbed my 2.0!

Last week Jerry Michalski posted a list of technologies that folks in business need to be, or are expected to be, aware of, our accustomed to, or expert with (on?).

Here's Jerry's list (for the links look at the blog entry):

Cellphones (voice dialing? camphone? carrier? roaming? Web? apps?)

Office phones (still that pesky internal dialing)

Voicemail systems for each phone (with different command structures)

BlackBerry (with its own email app and commands)

Microsoft Windows or Mac OS

The Office suite: Word, Excel, PowerPoint (oy, PowerPoint!), Outlook

Antivirus and backup apps; avoiding Trojans and phishing

Printers (toner!) and corporate networks

WiFi snargling so you find and keep a connection

IDs and passwords for everything; password management

IM (SameTime, AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk)

The browser(s) (IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari) and their lingo

Google searches

Web-based email (Hotmail, GMail)

Other Web apps (Basecamp, Wikipedia, Yahoo Finance, Salesforce.com)

Possibly Skype or some SIP or VoIP apps

And iTunes isn't really a business app, but really...

Daunting, no?

That's before learning about blogging, wikis, Flickr, del.icio.us, tagging, podcasts, screencasts, YouTube, MySpace and Second Life, never mind peer production and folksonomies.

I have to say that I am daunted, have been daunted, and expect to continue to be daunted for some time to come. Did I say I like being daunted? Um, no I didn't, but that's my problem.

Nancy White tags this pic as quintissential Web 2.0. I think Jerry and I can rest our case. While it can be a lot of fun swimming in the ocean, you can't go to sleep!

I think that the only way to approach this entire 2.0-ishness is to view it as research and experimentation. Werner von Braun is quoted as saying that "Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing." This is good, and if we understand it as experimentation then we can be on the lookout for the results, and even spend time reflecting on our experiences. I most often learn by doing, and doing in the Web 2.0 world is, for me, being faced with a myriad of new ideas and technologies, all competing, as far as I can tell, for the same "sweet spot" (or is it "suite spot"?). I can use tags in del.icio.us to keep track of all those URLs I want to keep track of. This is orders of magnitude better than saving bookmarks, but I do that sometimes too. Do you? But in addition to del.icio.us, Nature has its own tagging service "Connotea" for researchers and academics, and it can produce those well formatted citations so necessary for published papers. So now I have two tagging services, and sometimes I put the same URL in both. I have yet to figure out exactly what I'm doing when I do that, but, hey, this is research. And when I want to show someone a web-based service that allows simple tagging and description of URLs I usually recommend furl.net, which is far easier to explain to people, and pretty darn easy to use.

I appreciate how energizing the newness and rapid development of gizmos is; I hanker to be good at it, but I think that I've reached my limits. My only rational response is a kind of triage. The result is that I will be marginally adept at, and with, the many devices and techniques that I need to know how to use.

What does this have to do with 21st century organizations? Erik Brynjolfsson (and others) are doing research at MIT to show how IT intensive businesses are more productive. However, now that we're in a demanding phase of experimentation, I'm thinking that productivity is going to have to wait until we figure what we're doing, why we're doing it, and how to do it well. According to Langdon Winner, technology has three important aspects: the apparatus (the gizmos), the techniques (how to use 'em); and the organization or social arrangements required or enabled by use. For me, productivity requires adjusting to these three changing facets and that will continue to result in a number of stubbed toes, so to speak. How's it going for you?

-Bill

How are people 2.0-ing?

Thursday, November 30, 2006 2:18:19 PM

Today Robert Scoble links to this technology-out view of Web2.0 applications from Don Dodge. Ross Mayfield (my go-to guy for a more nuanced view of how wikis are influencing business (and vice-versa)) also gives Dodge a mention. I like this quick summary and the basic conclusion. But I want to see the "people-" and "work practice-"in view.

Specifically I'd like to see Dodge's "build it and they will come" view replaced by a user oriented, participatory "let's find out what people are really doing before we build anything" approach. The build it first way definitely has it's place. Who knew we could do so much with a photocopier, or a personal sound device, before we had them? No one. However, I want to look a bit more deeply at the user and participatory practices that run through Web 2.0 visions.

As I mentioned the other day, Tim O'Reilly's What is Web 2.0? paper is mostly about the software. But nestled in there are some ideas about participation among people and a core competency that Web 2.0 companies need to have; viz., "trusting users as co-developers". What, exactly, does that look like? Fortunately, this has been done before, and we can look it up.

Co-development with users has been practiced in Scandanavia and Europe under the name "Participatory Design" (PD) since the 1970's and in the US since the late 1980's. (Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) is a good starting point for learning about PD and linking to PD resources.) PD grew out of sociotechnical systems and action research work in the 1950's and 1960's at the Tavistock Institute in London. Bringing social science to bear on business and management problems was a hallmark of this work. In addition, Kristen Nygaard, the inventor of the Simula object-oriented programming language, was also a major proponent to PD approaches to system development. So this key requirement for business has long roots in both technology and the humanities. Maybe, just maybe, these new internet practices will force us to appreciate the social nature of technology development and use. Maybe our adoption of the new will help us remember and bring forward the parts of the past we can use right now. I hope so.

So we're good with co-developing systems and applications with users. What does it take do this well and to be successful? Joan Greenbaum and Morten Kyng (quoted from this Kuhn and Winograd profile on PD) identify four design techniques that are based on PD:

1. The need for designers to take work practice seriously—to see the current ways that work is done as an evolved solution to a complex work situation that the designer [or programmer] only partially understands.

2. The fact that we are dealing with human actors, rather than cut-and-dried human factors—systems need to deal with users' concerns, treating them as people, rather than as performers of functions in a defined work role.

3. The idea that work tasks must be seen within their context and are therefore situated actions, whose meaning and effectiveness cannot be evaluated in isolation from the context.

4. The recognition that work is fundamentally social, involving extensive cooperation and communication.

Putting these techniques into practice requires an entirely new paradigm of software development (cf., Floyd, Reisin, & Schmidt); one that moves engineers and designers out into the workplace of the potential users, so that they can actually understand what the work entails. This knowledge can enable the development and deployment of systems and tools that really augment the work and enable the discovery of new work.

So, how's it going for "trusting users [the people in the 2.0 world] as co-developers"?.

Well, one thing to say is that more and more anthropologists, sociologists, and ethnographers are getting involved with software development companies (cf.; the anthrodesign e-mail list; interaction design; contextual design). In most cases, these people really are looking at work and work practices. They do still need to translate what they know into information that engineers and programmers can use. And this doesn't get the engineers out, but people who know how to look and how to ask can bring in key product requirements.

On the technology side, agile approaches to software development are facilitating concerted efforts to engage customers (not always the end users) directly with engineers to deliver small solutions quickly, and to refine what's needed through use. Not only is there cooperation; there's a neat division of authority and responsibility. Customers get to say what they want; developers get to say how long it will take. When this works there's lot of discussion and communication about needs and costs. However, customers and users are often represented on the engineering team by a single person. This is better than letting engineers imagine how work is done, but the details and context of the user's work practice is often lost -- it's hard for one person to know everything. Not to mention that when you hang around with engineers you eventually see the world as they do.

And, finally, on the consumer side there is a steady drumbeat (start with The Cluetrain Manifesto) to find ways to talk directly with customers; to get unfiltered feedback about how your product or service is working "in the wild". Here wikis and weblogs, etc., look like great tools. But very often I don't want to have a conversation with my vendor; I just want to buy the digital camera and start taking pictures. This participatory customer / vendor relationship seems like a great idea. But I don't know if it can capture enough of the context of my complaint or need. And I don't know if it can scale. Could conversations between every MS Word user and Microsoft even be supported? Are there enough hours in the day for that?

Even with all the questions I think it will get better for people in the 2.0 world. Definitely! And some bloggers continue to re-enforce that the web is all about people, people. That's good. It's all good.

- Bill

My 2.0 profile ... and my network limits

Act I. My 2.0 profile ...

I'm social - got that right!

I like talking with others and telling stories - check!
But I still need to practice listening.

I believe in emergence - let's see what happens!
And in improvisation - hey, nice one!
And the wisdom of the crowd - definitely!
But I worry about mobs.

I love the long tail - w00t!
Heck, I am a long tail - Yes!
But what about all those "A-listers"?

I'm all about collaboration - Skype me!

I need a digital identity ...
But I still can't settle on a name.

Even though there is no "Houston" I can call, I'm pretty sure I have a problem.

--- Intermission ---

Act II. My network limits.

Today Nancy White wrote about collaboration and group size. It's a very generative post and Nancy speculates about what collaboration means in large networks. I'm not sure I agree with her, but this is a start towards developing concepts and models that can help.

Today I also followed Jenny's pointer to the Center for Collective Intellilgence at MIT and specifically to a video recording of a talk by Bob Metcalfe. Bob is a very engaging speaker, who does not use Powerpoint (so the talk is a great example of how to speak without slides, but with notes), and his talk examines aspects of what he calls "connected intelligence", the idea that the intelligence of a collection is a result of connections among the members. The more connections a collective member has with other members, the greater is the value of the collection. The eponymous "Metcalfe's Law" is simply the assertion that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of members. Bob is careful enough to distinguish not just connections, but affinities; some connections are more valuable, or personal, or special in some way, than others. This I know is true. Bob also hinted that there might be a leveling off effect and when networks grow past a particular size the value actually decreases as new members are added.

I think the question is how many connections can I maintain? And how is that number a function of the kinds of relationships they represent (family, friends, immediate colleagues, intermittent colleagues, occasional committee members, etc.)? My recollection is that I could manage to keep track of more people when I was younger. I could also keep track of all my college homework assignments without writing them down. But now I write down even a short shopping list. And I'm sure the number of people that I can stay aware of simultaneously has diminished with age. But it may be that as I got older I took on more diffuse responsibilities for families and other personal activites, and this limits how many connections I can manage. Maybe social networking software can help with this. Maybe not.

21st century organizations are already made up of people who have experienced a number of computer-network based collections, so exploring the relation between connectedness and network value, or the collective capacity for work needs some attention. We already have a good deal of experience in collectives, and we get more with each passing day. We'll need tools that help us measure and improve these experiences. Note to self: do a little more research here.

- Bill

The workgroup in the organization ... 2.0

In May 1973, the journal Psychiatry published "The Work Group Within the Organization: A Sociopsychological Approach", by Peter M. Newton and Daniel J. Levinson. I can't find this article online, the closest link I have is a PubMed link. (When will we have research literature online?) The abstract is worth reading on its own.

"The small work group is a basic component of modern organizational life. Crucial tasks at very level of the organization are entrusted to work groups of various kinds: executive committees, staff meetings and committees with responsibility for policy review, budget planning, training, integration of services, and the like. Work groups abound in the clinical facility and university as in the business firm and government agency. The work group is an important linking device between the organization and the individual. From the point of view of the organization, it serves as a mechanism to accomplish or undermine diverse organizational goals. From the point of view of the individual the work group is a significant arena in which he can learn about the organization and have a voice in the shaping of its policies and practices -- or in which he can experience the corruption of the organization and his own powerlessness within it. By and large, work groups do not work very well; they do little either to accomplish organizational tasks or to elicit the responsible, constructive participation of individual members. The resultant costs to both the organization and the individaul member are enormous. Despite widespread dissatisfaction with work groups, relatively little effort has been given to the systematic analysis and improvement of their functioning."

The authors characterize work groups with respect to (1) task, the goal or objective of the work group efforts; (2) social structure, the evolving divisions of labor and authority; (3) culture, the values, assumptions, and beliefs and frame group actiion; and (4) social process, how the group actually goes about accomplishing or avoiding its work. These are admittedly broad definitions of words that have a variety of meanings. But I have found this framework to be extremely useful in understanding my own work life experiences and in formulating ways to build a more productive and effective work group.

One thing that Newton and Levinson mentioned is a prevailing belief in mental health, educational, professional, and business organizations generally that "... committees and other work groups are essentially incapable of productive work .... The 'real work' ... is done outside of the meetings by one or two powerful individuals." Now this was 1973, but I remember hearing and believing the same thing when I worked for a Fortune 500 company between 1985 and 2001. And sometimes I feel the same way about the work of scientific NGOs.

So how are the new technologies and exigencies and the rapid pace of 21st century life actually influencing organizations and their work groups? Does this work group analysis framework help us assess how we're doing? I think it might, but I'd like to have (or see) some first-hand experience and to see current assessments of organizational life. I've talked with colleagues at large companies where IM has replaced e-mail and even the phone for quick interrupts and messages. Sounds right; let's use e-mail for correspondence -- it works well for that. But the same problems of bureaucracy and size obtain. At SXSW2006 Interactive several sessions featured presentations by young entrepreneurs on the issues of building and running a business. Guess what? They still had to manage issues resulting from the division of labor and authority. I didn't hear how well they were handling the personal and personnel issues, but I did hear that web-based, collaborative, planning and project management tools (Basecamp was a prominent example) definitely helped distributed teams manage their work. That's progress. But no matter how far the technologies can take us, they're not enough. We still need to solve the human and practical problems of working together. What tools, intellectual and operational, do we have to help us?

Well, I wasn't planning for such a gloomy end point. Let's have more fun tomorrow.

- Bill

Where the 2.0 am I?

After many years working as a chemist and a software engineer, I still have to work hard at adopting, and adapting to, computer based systems. Of course, this can be put down to age (but I've noticed that no one is getting younger), but I still cling to the notion that the systems might be better designed and easier to use. But, hey, that's just me.

I have to admit that my experience in software engineering and product development colors my appreciation of the use of "2.0" as part of a name. And it started with the publication of the magazine Business 2.0 in the 1990's. Maybe it's my own aversion to using version nomenclature as a shorthand name for ideas that actually require explanations. When a software system's version changes from "1.0" to "2.0" that usually means that most of the software is new, the design may be new, and the way the product is used may also be new. And as a definition this fits very well with the summary presented in Tim O'Reilly's September 2005 article "What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software".

However, one problem with tagging "business", "office", "enterprise", and "web" with version numbers is that after a while we actually believe that we are using something new. I do believe that much has changed, but, also, that much remains the same. One of the challenges in actually talking about a 21st century organization is that organizations today are largely made up of people born in the 20th century, and they will remain so for another, say, 15 years. And even more importantly, people born in this century won't be in positions of power in these organizations for another 25 years or more. Furthermore, the technology that we're so keen on using is based on 20th century science, engineering, business, and practice, and this will remain so for some time. So things are new, but maybe not that new.

What stands out for me as the most generative ideas in Tim O'Reilly's article are those dealing with people: participating with the users and harnessing collective intelligence. The bulk of the article is about the technology, and while it's interesting, technology is changing way too fast to really keep up. And that's true for the technologist too. Recently, Nick Carr posted a critique of 2.0 architecture and implementation. I have my own engineering concerns about "The end of the software release cycle". But don't get me wrong; changes are afoot. One day, and maybe quite soon, we will be faced with a computer that has a kind of native machine intelligence. This will be a remarkable, fascinating, and possibly frightening event. And especially so if such a machine has some reliable electro-mechanical connections to an airplane navigation system, or an emergency room ICU system. But until then it looks like I'll be having fun learning to use robotic vacuums. I know I should buy one, but still, I resist ....

So I hope to use this week to look a bit at what we know about people participating and collectively thinking ... what's new, what's borrowed, and what we might look forward to. Maybe we'll get to talk about what our tacit understandings are that both help and hinder our adoptions and adaptations. The other day Jenny blogged about continuous partial attention. Is this a real skill to learn? Do I need it? And if I'm good at that will I still be able to spend five years focusing on a single problem in thermodynamics or mathematics? Can I be a "live node on a network" while I'm sitting for 40 minutes attending to my breathing?

Finally, by way of introduction I'll say that I'm definitely a child (and an adult) from the 20th century. A child, in fact, of the 1960's when I was optimistic and naïve enough to believe that it would be easy to change how the world was and how things were done. Now I'm older and I know that whatever isn't working for us, collectively, today, is going to take some real effort to change. However, I'm an optimist and an empiricist, so I think I'm ready for our experiment in using the world-wide web to do things differently. Whether I am ready or not isn't really important; we're experimenting right now.

- Bill

Welcome Bill Anderson: Web 2.0. What's Real and Important? What's Next?

Bill Anderson is a theoretical chemist and a recognized computer software industry veteran with roots in participatory approaches to software product development at Xerox and a number of other companies (medical, pharmaceutical, telecom, and network systems).

Today Bill is a consultant and is visible through his blogging at Praxis101 and his work with the U.S. National Academies and the Committee on Data of the International Council of Science, promoting policies and practices for permanent access to scientific and technical data in developing countries.

Bill will spend a week with us delving into the plethora of 2.0 computer-based ideas and initiatives. You might know them as Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Office 2.0, Working 2.0; … the list goes on.

• What are these technologies about, and what is their impact on organizations?
• How do organizations need to adapt to leverage the potential of social computing these represent? 
• And what's next?  How real is Web 3.0 and when will it arrive? 

Please join us in welcoming Bill and contributing to the conversation by posting your comments.