21st Century Organization

Facebook Groups in Business Webinar: Learn from Kimberly Samaha, Eric Edelstein & Francois Gossieaux

Multiple posts to this blog chronicle the Facebook Groups in Business Investigation convened with colleagues Bill Anderson and Victoria Axelrod.  Data gathering began last December, 2007 and concluded February 2008. First results were presented to the University of Warwick's Knowledge Innovation Network's spring workshop March 2008.

Tomorrow, Wednesday June 25 at 3pm EDT we have the privilege, thanks to TheAppGap blog sponsors Intuit Quickbase, of discussing our learning in a webinar.  We will be joined by three of our contributing Facebook Group owners: Kimberly Samaha, Eric Edelstein and Francois Gossieaux, who will share their experiences using Facebook Groups in support of business goals.

Through our Facebook Groups Investigation we're very aware of the many time demands challenging each of us. At the same time your finding time to participate and share your experiences and insights about Facebook Groups in Business is appreciated.

More about the webinar addressing "Should Your Business Be Friends with Facebook?", and how to register are here. The invitation to contribute questions in advance remains open.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Community 2.0 Brain - netWORK Mindset

Attending a four day conference and making sense of it for someone else is tricky at best.  Everyone attends with biases, assumptions, and expectations. Other than sharing time and space together it is a unique individual experience.

We ran our workshop on Social Capital: Glue for Sustainability at the Community 2.0 Conference in Las Vegas.  "Social capital" and "community" have a lot in common as they both are about building relationships and value is created from the knowledge embedded from emergent conversations.  Linked conversations through networks is our focus and a netWORKED mindset is our workshop subtitle.

But there were only two sessions at the conference over 4 days that focused in part or in whole on seeing organizations as networks - Patti Anklam's keynote and our workshop. Mapping the network of keynote presenters is my take on revealing the collective value of the conference.

Consider clicking here an experiment in a netWORKED mindset- a means to capture my experiences and our workshop. Using a dynamic network mind mapping and knowledge visualization tool by the brain technology, I have  written my conference notes and made links to  keynote speakers and our workshop.  There are web links to Flickr, Slideshare and presenter sites as well. This may take a few minutes to open, but worth a try.

netWORKED mindset tab will take you to our networked organizations wiki which is private.  If you want to see it, let us know so we can send an invitation.

Once in the CORE tab, click "of interest", then click "video" to hear how we bring networks of stakeholders together.

The Brain has an enterprise version for organization wide knowledge capture and interactivity (multiple individuals can author and edit), so the technology scales.  The personal version I used can be downloaded for 30 day free trial allowing multiple maps to be created. Uploading to your website for read only viewing is fairly straight forward with an FTP program.

The netWORKED brain is lots more fun and has plenty of options for use to create a "shared"  experience.  Let me know what you think.

~ Victoria G. Axelrod

The Power of Open Networking an Article: Wisdom to Sift and Abundant Credits

An earlier blog post here announced the article Victoria G. Axelrod, (my never to be underestimated 21stCenturyOrganization blogging partner) and I were preparing for Effective Executive Magazine.  The article seed is a 2007 quote from KM "father figure" Robert H. Buckman indicating:

"...but I never did try and manage knowledge. What I really tried to manage and nurture was a culture that would encourage and expand the flow of knowledge..  ~ Robert H. Buckman

Thanks to an introduction from Jerry Ash, (Inside Knowledge Magazine's Editor), Mr. Buckman's latest thinking is woven into our article.  We're deeply appreciative.  In addition we must also credit the power of networks for unexpected contributions that both informed our thinking through the sources they brought, direct contributions, or nudges to our thinking.

Via phone conversations, Facebook and email exchanges we included quotes from:

Doris Spielthenner, Mike Wing, Patti Anklam, Ricardo Dos Santos, Rob Cross, Robin Tiegland, Steven Malkiewicz, Simon Wardley, and Valdis Krebs

Our word limit precluded mentioning insights from our following valued connections but your nudges to our thinking are sincerely appreciated:

Carl Frappaolo, Cheryl Cooper, Chris May, Connie French, Dan Keldsen, Philip Lawrence, James Dellow, John Maloney, Laurence Lock Lee, Kristoffer Hartwig, Mark Masterson, Nick Barker, Steve Ardire, Tracy Cox

We also drew on oft cited sources John Seely Brown & Estee Solomon Gray, Ron Burt, Ranjay Gulati, Peter Gloor, Ross Mayfield, Stowe Boyd, Verna Allee.

Our new find (thank you John Maloney) was the 2002 work of Bonnie Nardi and colleagues Steve Whittaker and Hienrich Schwartz 2002. How is it that we had not previously encountered Nardi et al's focus on "netWORK" and "intensional networks"?

Our article is scheduled to appear in a special June Effective Executive edition.  Meanwhile as it was inspired by a quote from Robert H. Buckman here is his nugget from our email exchange that closes our piece:

"Need always has to be there as the driving force that causes knowledge to be sought, and if trust exists, then it will move in response to the need."

~ Robert H. Buckman

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Socialprise

  Apparently, the latest buzzword is yes – “socialprise.” That is social, as in we are humans and we interact to get work done. Seems intuitive, but it is not the first thing that comes to mind when social is used in business.

That may be a moot point as the technology to map workplace interactions and relationships is “now becoming part of standard enterprise computing systems” according to a NY Times piece MySpace Mind-Set Finally Shows Up at the Office – the ultimate mashup. Socialprise was coined by Insideview

But I think we need to make a careful distinction between “social networking” and “social network or organizational network analysis” (SNA/ONA) especially for business. Social networking platforms for business like VisiblePath (now part of Hoover’s) used by sales groups and law firms is useful in mining who knows who, what work was done with what client as people move through their normal trajectories. Insideview’s twist is to marry up search data or intelligence with social data. It certainly enhances the potential for connections if one looks around the existing network.

Social network analysis or organizational network analysis, the easier term for business leaders to accept, can be used very strategically to ferret out connections that might not naturally occur, or if they did would take years to emerge, particularly in networks outside of the organization. Call it the Outsideview.

This is not network analysis for business as usual. Instead think of mapping the intellectual property landscape to find the key contributors in a narrow field – the needle in the haystack. Boston Consulting Group did an intellectual property map for The Myelin Repair Foundation, reported in Mapping the Crowd a Business Week story. The challenge for MRF was to identify the few research scientists with the greatest number of relevant patents in order to accelerate research. The result was a network visualization allowing managers to see both opportunities and key centers or nodes of research they might not have found for years.

Touch Graph software was most likely used by BCG as they openly acknowledge creating solutions for clients – Interpublic Group -advertising, Newforth – M&A, and the British Natural History Museum – biological networks.

As social networking tools become a standard feature of enterprise computing systems for day to day business, they will lose their competitive advantage like all other tools. However to understand why a particular product or service may not have launched as well as expected, or to capitalize on macro network opportunities for technical and science initiatives, a standard platform may not be the optimal approach. Unique ONA applications will still have their place in the socialprise.

~Victoria G. Axelrod

Thinking about Open Network Business Models: Your Insights Invited

Victoria Axelrod (my 21stCenturyOrganization blogging colleague) and I are on deadline for Effective Executive, an India based business magazine published by ICFAI University Press. Working title of our piece is:

Open Net-Working Organizations - Co-generating Knowledge and Innovation

Our article explores themes we've blogged about here over the past 2 years, research for two recent Inside Knowledge Magazine articles ("Broadcasting Innovation: Organising to Connect Intelligence" and "Prediction Markets: Co-creating the Organisation", my Enterprise 2.0 Summit Hanover presentation, and our forthcoming Social Capital: Glue for Sustainability Workshop, May 5 in Las Vegas, following the Community 2.0 Conference. (As Victoria previously wrote please use code SPKRM2005 for a friends 20% discount if you can join us.)

We like to practice what we advocate so as our article is about open, networked, working we're sharing our article outline here and inviting fresh perspectives and contributions of interesting sources.  Our article focus reflects we are contributing to a special Effecutive Executive Knowledge Management edition.

Overview

"In a March 2007 "Long Live KM" online discussion through the AOK Group, Robert Buckman (described by Infoworld as "KM's father figure") wrote:

"Jerry, thank you for the kind words, but I never did try and manage knowledge. What I really tried to manage and nurture was a culture that would encourage and expand the flow of knowledge. It was because economic value could only be obtained in our environment when knowledge moved across the organization in response to a need."
~ Bob Buckman, March 6, 2007 AOK Yahoo Group Post

Two decades since Buckman's pioneering work to encourage and expand knowledge flow and innovation, taking a network view of organizations and using the tools of Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) facilitates creating open, collaborative organizational cultures. More importantly, an intentional open net-working approach aids understanding how "social capital value" is created in organizations through dynamic interactions and relationships between all of an organization's participants and stakeholders. Examples from our research and experience of organizations using new open network models to promote knowledge sharing, innovation and value creation are included.

While we will revisit open working models investigated in our Inside Knowledge articles:

• Qualcomm's Venture Fest using prediction markets
• The Bordeaux Energy Colloquium, a Think Tank Network,
• Executive to Executive Marketing Networks as implemented at Avaya
• Procter and Gamble's "Connect and Develop" and innovation marketplaces like Innocentive

we're also exploring approaches including:

• Boston Consulting Group's use of mapping tools to understand networks around patents and identify high potential talent. (Did they really just use Touchgraph as Manuel Lima suggests commenting on the Business Week article?)
• IBM's use of open network initiatives including sharing research with partners and clients. (Thanks to John Maloney for this paper find.)
• The innnovative and business critical collaborative knowledge sharing initiatives presented at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit, Hanover.

In writing about open network approaches we're alert to investigating when such models appear not to work effectively. Hence we're striving to understand what caused Boeing's decentralized 787 supply chain to become a critical factor in the company's high profile and costly aircraft delivery delays.

Yesterday discovering Robin Teigland's presentation on Slideshare, (displayed as a "Related Slideshow" to my Hanover presentation), I was reminded of the potential value that can be created through openness in knowledge sharing. This is especially so when you intentionally start by "looking around" as John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid encouraged in "The Social Life of Information", 2000.

Hence this blog post sharing our article themes and ideas. Any and all reactions to our focus and examples, insights into Boeing's supply chain issues, and or fresh insights and interesting open net-working business models are welcomed and appreciated.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Yale Symposium on Reputation Economies 20071208

      Yale Law School Reputation Economies Symposium organizers are congratulated on a stellar event that assembled leading thought leaders on an array of legal aspects from privacy to trademark and copyright laws, and more. The speaker and panels links give a taste of the day.  The position papers (available through the panels link) make interesting reading.

       While each session provided interesting nuggets the following stood out for me:

1. Professor Beth Noveck, Director, Institute for Information Law and Policy NYLS addressing the issue of who owns an online reputation? 

        Context was the case of eBay removing a member's profile and reputation rankings built over 8 years. The member was selling an Avatar that Sony claimed violated their copyright/trademark violation.

         Professor Noveck's position paper argues reputations are not individually owned:

"This requires, first, that we recognize that in on-line settings reputation is not the creation– and hence not the exclusive property – of the individual who is being rated nor of the publisher who supplies the tools for reputation-creation. Rather, it is the community in a social network that creates reputation.* My eBay score is the collective product of the members who contributed to that reputation.

The group should have a voice in how that reputation is treated and the legal treatment of reputation should recognize the community, not the individual and not the technological intermediary, as the rightful “owner” of reputation."

2  Alessandro Acquisti, Assistant Professor of Information Technology and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon, School of Public Policy and Management

       This presentation addressed "Searching for Privacy and Looking for Fame: Thoughts on (Bad) Reputations, Online Social Networks, and Behavioral Economics". It added interesting dimensions to the Facebook Groups in Business Study peers and I are conducting.

3. John Clippinger, Senior Fellow Berkman Center for Internet & Society at The Harvard Law School       

    Clippinger directs the Higgins Project, "a program on open security and digital identity that gives people control over their personal information". He is the author of A Crowd of One: The Future of Individual Identity, Perseus, Public Affairs, 2007.

His position paper argues:

"What is important about the example of reputation systems in biology for human based reputations – off line and online – is that they are constantly evolving and that the locus of control is with the individual, at the edge of the network.  Although there are aggregation or “mashups” of individual entities resulting in social networks that take on their own identities and reputations, the viability of these aggregated networks is dependent upon the persistence and stability of the individual entities." ~  John Clippinger

A couple of take-aways

i.  The array of issues and early days in evolution of reputation economies.

     It is clearly early days in understanding how reputation economies work and the legal aspects.  On this though I have to respectfully question Facebook advisor and retired Federal Trade Commission member Mozelle Thompson's observation about Facebook confronting legal issues at the edge.

      I suspect my PRODIGY alumni colleagues who were lawyers deeply involved in translating existing laws into day-to-day practice two decades ago, and influencing early legislation regarding online services, may argue significant foundations have been laid.

ii.  I will never count technology company behemoths IBM and Microsoft out.

Both were present revealing their constant attention to the 'edge" and research commitments

      IBM was represented on the last panel of the day by Bob Sutor, Vice President Open Source and Standards, Chairman of the IBM internal Corporate Standards Advisory Committee and the Open Source Steering Committee.
His speaker description indicates he is:

".. the executive responsible for driving and executing the cross-company business and technical strategy for open standards and open source as they relate to software, hardware, services, vertical industries, and emerging markets. In particular, helps move IBM from its traditional technical and intellectual property approach to one where business exploitation of standards and open source for greater customer value is paramount*, especially in vertical industries and emerging markets."

    Microsoft was the event sponsor and represented by Microsoft computer science PhD. and Senior Researcher Darko Kirovski  whose speaker bio reveals his interests and accomplishments as:

" Web services including reputation networks, reliable computing, system security, multimedia processing, and embedded system design*. He has received the 1999 Microsoft Graduate Research Fellowship, the 2000 ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference Graduate Scholarship, the 2001 ACM Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award in Electronic Design Automation, and best paper awards at the ACM Multimedia 2002 and the IEEE MMSP 2006. He has authored more than 100 journal and conference papers and filed more than 40 patents."

While Saturday's rich conversations focused on the legal dimensions of reputation economies, for me it is the interaction between technology driving change, human behavior, and the legal system striving to adapt that is really interesting.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

  * My highlighting   

Prediction Markets: Connecting Intelligence in Organizations

The prospects for wider adoption of prediction markets in organizations have intrigued me since attending the New York Prediction Markets Cluster event early 2006. Searching for prediction market applications to reference in our recent article a 2005 Bo Cowgill piece on Google's use was the most readily accessible. 

The Consensus Point hosted Prediction Market Conference September 24 in New York revealed I was clearly not looking in the right places.  Hats off to David Perry and Ken Kittlitz for a rich gathering and update on the prediction markets landscape. You answered my questions and more about what companies are using, for what business objectives, and why prediction markets are not more visible.  Following are some highlights.

1.  Hearing Robin Hanson Speak

It's interesting knowing about a tool and then discovering oneself in a room talking with the person credited with being the "the first to set up and run a corporate prediction exchange —at Xanadu, Inc., in April 1989". Robin Hanson is an "associate professor of economics at George Mason University, and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University." His presentation is laced with graphs and focuses on how value is created. Devoting time to exploring his presentations is recommended.

2. Getting Insight into How Leading Companies are Applying Prediction Markets

Hearing the experiences of companies the caliber of GE Research, Misys Banking Systems, NBC Universal, Best Buy and Qualcomm using prediction markets to improve decision-making and project management is attention getting. That answered my question about what companies are adopting.  Learning Consensus Point serves companies that do not reveal prediction market applications for data sensitivity and competitive intelligence reasons helps understand why this tool doesn't have a higher profile.

3.  Hearing from "The Wisdom of Crowds" Author James Surowiecki About Challenges 

Essentially implementing prediction markets challenges traditional hierarchical organizational structures, notions of power, and mindsets, "the deep seated impulse to find the one person with the right answer."  I heard Surowiecki say:

"Prediction markets are not just about improving decision-making. Also about transforming organizations as a whole."

4. Listening to Jed Christiansen and being Reminded of the Growing Demands for Analytical Skills in Organization

Jed presented his London School of Economics thesis study results investigating prediction markets to group forecast rowing race winners. (His Mercury's Blog includes video presentations explaining prediction markets and how they can help companies.)

Listening to Jed talk about calibration, accuracy measures, scoring rules, trader distributions, data scatter, linear best fit, and probabilities you cannot escape recognizing the increasingly quantitative talent demands of 21st century business.

5.  Noting the People Connecting Impact of Prediction Market Initiatives

A thread among the presenters was how prediction markets expand people connections in organizations.  Through market participation employees from disparate parts of organizations discover unknown people with similar interests and unexpected talents.  Market activity becomes a thread in employee conversations. Previously unrecognized expertise emerges through successful trading and listing on leader boards.

Smart companies are exploring use and adopting prediction markets to connect intelligences and improve decision-making and forecasting. But doing so demands leadership that is not threatened by discovering what the collective wisdom can tell them, especially when the information shared is not what they want to hear.

Considering Robin Hanson's first corporate prediction exchange dates to 1989, and Ken Kittlitz has been developing exchanges for fourteen years, gives some insight into the realities of putting prediction markets to work in organizations.  Has their time come?

~ Jenny Ambrozek

 

OQ and SNA - Borgatti to Kentucky

What's Your  OQ?  Just when you thought you had figured out your IQ and EQ (emotional - for anyone still looking for the missing link) along comes Organizational Quotient - coined by the savvy team at Katzenbach Partners, a New York based leadership consulting firm.

Featured in the July 23rd Fortune magazine story The Hidden Workplace Jon Katzenbach makes the case for people with high OQ as those who are able to "toggle between both power structures" - formal and informal of the organization.  The hidden workplace refers to the informal  social network which if mapped through social network analysis (SNA) reveals the  connections through which people get work done.  Ability to influence the informal network is a critical factor.

Several good business cases where SNA/ONA was used to decipher organizational issues are in the article: Raytheon, Procter & Gamble, Lehman Brothers and Fluor. While SNA and ONA are used with these organizations it is important to note that the Katzenbach work at Bell Canada used more traditional organizational survey methods to find 14 key individuals who demonstrated unique behaviors -

"committed, passionate, and competitive".  Through further interviews it was determined that they also engendered

... the ability to get people to trust them and to solve problems rather than complain about them. "These people have incredible influence," says Elliott. "It's like the [Life cereal] commercial - Will Mikey eat it?" The initial group then recommended another 40 associates.

It would have been interesting to see if these 14 people would have appeared in an ONA as significant nodes or hubs  in a network map and how strongly the 40 associates they picked were connected.

And today July 26th, Steve Borgatti,PhD one of the leaders in the field of SNA announced that he, his research and related consulting businesses are off to the University of Kentucky's Gatton College of Business & Economics. They have created the International Center for Research of Social Networks and Business - called LINKS  http://networklinks.org/

From their overarching message:

The core insight of the network perspective is that the pattern of relations among the elements of a system—be they people, organizations, neurons, or computer servers—has important consequences for the system's performance. 

We could not agree more and congratulate Steve on his new post.  We know the results from the varied list of  research topics  will improve our collective OQ.

~ Victoria G. Axelrod

 

 

Catalyst

I have always found the word catalyst unique in its ability to communicate so much dynamic energy which is probably because it conjures up my high school chem lab, even the smells and sounds, of what catalyzing agents can do. They are unique as they participate in reactions but are neither reactants nor products of the reaction they catalyze.

Understanding the "economic catalyst" as a  business process is illustratively detailed by David Evans and Richard Schmalensee in their new book Catalyst Code.

If you want to hear David interviewed, a podcast is available on The Invisible Hand Podcast

What I took away was the concept of the powerful interplay of what they call the "two-sided" business, especially when they start up.  Although some of their examples pre date the web - Dinner's Club for instance, most are enabled by the very nature of today's web - interactivity.  The web-based businesses are no surprise, Google and eBay, who figured out the participation of the interaction ahead of time. The "two sided" interplay is still not yet grasped by traditional businesses or remarkably even web-based startups.

The Economic catalyst is:

An entity that has a) two or more groups of customers; b) who need each other in some way; but c) can't capture the value from their mutual attraction on their own; and d) rely on the catalyst to facilitate value-creating reactions between them. For-profit businesses, joint ventures, cooperatives, standard-setting bodies, and governments operate  catalysts.

Catalytic reaction: In the economy, the process by which value is created by facilitating the interaction between two or more mutually interdependent groups of customers.

Market Design work and a course by Al Roth and Peter Coles at Harvard who both research and teach experimental economics, a sister of behavioral economics, seems to fit well with the idea of "economic catalyst".

Here is a list of the top ten (no priority) of 26 ideas which they have culled from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.  All articles describing these Market Design businesses are at link.

1. Matching borrowers and lenders without banks
2. Ticket price Futures
3. Recruiting college athletes (matching athletes to colleges)
4. Online recruiting
5. UK Medical Matching (without preferences)
6. The "Upfront"  (futures) market for  television advertising
7. Internet real estate sales (without realtors)
8. Post season college football bowls
9. Market for votes (at Harvard)
10. Economics of virtual worlds

Both of Catalyst Code and Market Design help make the economic case for participation and the mutual relationship required of business to be value creating successes.

~ Victoria G. Axelrod

07.07.07 - Live Earth

The critics are out in force on Al Gore's global Live Earth fest but I think they are missing the point - mobilizing young minds (and a few million more senior) to take a small step toward addressing the earth's climate crisis.

It's not about the music, it's not about the event, its about connecting so many people both physically and online in a monster network to participate and influence and issue.

I am old enough to have participated in the first Earth Day and still have my button!  Having grown up around east coast rivers that were polluted beyond recognition from industrial waste I thought this was the norm and that I would never see them as habitable for wildlife or humans.  But we know the end of that story - we did pull together in the US and saved our waterways and more.

Thumbs up to AL and company for using a multimedia platform to effect grassroots changes to consumer behavior and prod corporations, political leaders to step up to sustainability.  I fully expect to see positive results.  Live Earth sure beats Dead Earth.

~Victoria G. Axelrod