Technology and Organizations

Events happen, and then they’re done. That’s why they’re “events.” But can we really rely on just our brains and notes to gain value from events? Meetings happen, and then they’re done. Presentations happen, and then they’re done. Even the best events, meetings, and presentations have limited value if we can’t step back in time. Two recent posts talk about how to take those steps back in time — by planning ahead — and using available technology and tools to hold onto the material such that it can be found and used when needed.

Charles Hamilton writes about Using the Web and Social Media to Create More Effective Events. He gives a great explanation of what he did to support an “unconference” on the future of journalism (site here). I know I’m going to return to this post the next time I’m organizing a meeting (and I should be thinking about what I could even do for class presentations). One of the key take-aways for me was Charles’ comment that, “In the future, I would recommend creating the event-specific web site much sooner, and using a simpler CMS-, group-blog, social-network or wiki-based system for posting pre-event discussions and comments.” Get the group going early and make it easy for them to connect.

His overall evaluation of the process:

I found that attendees’ blogging, tweeting, recording and instant posting about the event reinforced what they were thinking and learning. Thus, the effectiveness of the event was increased, along with the potential for new learning and insights to cause change in the wider world.

By planning ahead, and interacting ahead, they were able to build the background for greater learning and future reuse. For some of my earlier thoughts on this please see “Poof” goes your idea… When face to face meetings are worse than virtual ones.

My second example is more personally exciting. My friend and colleague, Ted Cocheu (Founder & CEO of Altus) was interviewed by Robert Scoble for Building43!

From Altus’ website:

Altus’ end-to-end video management software enables users to capture, share and search rich media content down to the spoken word. With Altus vSearch, content is accessible on-demand where it can be instantly located and reused.

Imagine being able to search the spoken and visual content of your events, meetings, presentations. Imagine being able to reuse the material and learn what you need, when you need it. Altus provides the tools and services to make this happen.

Companies like Cisco and Oracle have seen the value in this process for years. They have to constantly update their employees and their customers on quickly changing products and services. Other companies have been triggered by the economic downturn to hold their events virtually or in a hybrid form — but have seen that there is a multiplier on the value of the on-demand content — if it is searchable and easily available for reuse.

Ted tells Scoble that though a relationship with a new client often starts because they want to generate content from an urgent, upcoming meeting — that then many clients quickly see how much more value they could be gaining from all the other video content they already have. The content can be more accessible using the Altus process and more social. Individual’s who’ve given a presentation or created other kinds of content have profiles so you can find more of their work, and/or make connections to your own. You can also see their groups and decide whether those groups would provide value to you too. Sure, there are “point solutions” that can do pieces of this, but Altus has the jump on the end-to-end, secure, solution.

One thing I wish… That the Building 43 video had been put through the Altus process so I could search through it…. I will help you out with some timestamps:

• 11:40 in discussion on the difference between “point solutions” versus an overall approach.
• 21:20 discussion of the “spoken word” aspects and search quality — ties nicely to modern presentation formats (more pictures, less text to search on, unless you have the transcript or speaker notes).
• 23:00 Seb Grady of Altus demonstrates the search capability. He reports that the average YouTube video is 2-3 min; in the enterprise the average video is 47 min — none of us have time to watch the whole thing. We need to find what we need, when we need it, on whatever platform is best.
• 25:00 More use case info — Scoble talks about the trouble they had building presentations at Microsoft from material they already had — and how even when they did find the right slides, they didn’t have the accompanying material related to those slides.

Events, meetings, and presentations count as organizational practices in the world of TOP Management (technology, organization, people). Just as any single technology or person can’t run the business on its own, neither can an organizational practice provide needed value without support from the people (the content providers) or the technologies. Both Hamilton’s example and the Altus approach are ways to powerfully leverage technology, organization, and people for greater value over the long haul. Don’t let those ideas go “poof”!

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The energy around innovation activities is keeping me sane as we get to the shortest day in the Northern Hemisphere. Web 2.0 infrastructures and Enterprise 2.0 ideals are energizing innovation in a way not possible with just a few people in a garage. Recruiting, Knowledge, Evaluation, Tools, and Market seem to be five foundational ways Web 2.0 supports innovation.

Last week I ran across BuildItWith.Me:

Build It With Me is a tool that connects design & development entrepreneurs. It exists to make creating apps easier by connecting you with like-minded designers & developers with the same goal: create cool & useful apps. Getting funding for your app idea is hard and often unrealistic. Most of the time you may just need to connect with a partner who has a skill set you lack to finish off your app. This is where Build It With Me is comes in, connecting you to those people. Skip the funding. Build It With Me will help you bootstrap your ideas into actual apps.

Recruiting

Build It With Me supports innovation through both knowledge and labor. You may be able to find someone with a skill you don’t have, but need, for your innovation — or you may be able to find someone to just share the workload. Key is that you find them by skill/interest rather than location or ad hoc connections.

Knowledge

But not everyone who helps your with your innovation has to be a member of the team.

Communities of practice have always shared knowledge amongst their members. Knowledge sharing is one of their hallmarks. Web 2.0 versions of Communities of Practice increase the reach, speed, and ease of the process. For example, the Experimental Aircraft Association’s Home-Builders Corner was part of their 1953 newsletter (pdf). Through the wonders of the Internet I can find not only that 1953 information, but of course have access to the current 24/7 searchable discussion board version of Homebuilders Corner.

Evaluation

Not all ideas are good ones.

Many innovation support systems allow people to rate the idea, point to where aspects of the project might have already being done, etc. Cisco used a hybrid social networking approach in its I-Prize. The I-Prize was an open innovation prize competition, but the early stages were evaluated by the community. Intuit’s Brainstorm tool similarly provides a hybrid approach offering evaluation and more (recruiting, workflow support, etc.) across either an internal audience, or one that crosses organizational boundaries.

Tools

In this first example, when I say tools, I mean tools: lasers, saws, 3D printers:

TechShop is a 15,000 square-foot membership-based workshop that provides members with access to tools and equipment, instruction, and a creative and supportive community of like-minded people so you can build the things you have always wanted to make. You can think of TechShop as a health club but with tools and equipment instead of exercise equipment.

Technically the tools themselves aren’t Web 2.0, but the Web 2.0 connection is there in that members collaborate and share knowledge via the TechShop Member Forum.

Other examples of Web2.0 tools are more straightforward (e.g., open source software), but not as likely to throw off sparks.

Market

One of the keys to user innovation (versus closed corporate innovation) is that it be able to compete (Von Hippel, p. 118, free pdf of book). Software/web innovation has it easy in that transportation costs are virtually nil, but all innovations can take advantage of social media to gain immense marketing reach for little to no money. (Perky video on Social Media ROI: Socialnomics.)

Recruiting, Knowledge, Evaluation, Tools, and Market. Web 2.0 provides us with collaborative avenues toward innovation. What have I left out? How about incentive? Are we more likely to participate in innovation activities when we can interact with many more like-minded collaborators – even if we never get to meet? Are we more more or less likely to participate when our actions can perhaps been seen on a global stage? I’m hoping to write a follow-up post on Generating and Maintaining Energy for Open Innovation Platforms and would be happy to collaborate….

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For more on Open Innovation – with a review of some of Carliss Baldwin & Eric von Hippel’s recent work, please see More proof that sharing is good, von Hippel style.

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What do electric planes, home brewed beer, automobiles, and personal computers have in common? They are all innovations with enthusiast organizations to thank for their development.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about “public” innovation labs like Google Labs, PARC Living Laboratory, and IDEO Labs. At the end, I asked:

Each of the above public examples have an organization taking the lead and gaining its own benefit. What if the users took the lead? We see this with the free and open source software collaborations. What about more physical innovations, or cases where the it’s not a joint project, but many people still contribute?

An excerpt of Huggy Rao’s 2008 book Market Rebels and Radical Innovation gave me some great history and insights (video of Prof. Rao talking about book). He points out that automobiles, personal computers, and home brewed beer each had a “hot cause” to arouse emotion and create a community of members, and “cool mobilization” — think jazz “cool” — to signal the identity of members and to sustain their commitment:

• Automobiles had enthusiast organizations with with hot cause goals of shielding owners from legal harassment and solving problems of transportation (this was the late 1800s). The cool mobilization strategies were reliability contests (though some of them seem to have gotten pretty “hot” – women screaming, men stomping on hats…)
• Personal computers had “the tyranny of the central computer” as their hot cause and hobbyist clubs (most famously, the Home Brew Computer Club where the Apple I and many others made their debut) as their cool mobilization.
• Microbrewing and its American Homebrewers Association had the democratization of the production of beer — with the downfall of “industrial beer” (”thin and overcarbonated”) as their hot cause, and home brewing, frequenting brewpubs, and beer festivals as mechanisms for cool mobilization.

I’ve added electric planes to give us thoughts for the future. Electric plane enthusiasts have EAA (Experimental Aircraft Association), the CAFE Foundation, and NASA behind them. While there might not be women screaming and men stomping on hats, there is a $1.5 Million prize “for aircraft that can average at least 100 mph on a 200-mile flight while achieving greater than 200 passenger miles per gallon” – and electric power is likely to play a role. Clearly “green” is hot — and NASA is cool.

But such collaboration isn’t natural or easy. In Steve Gillmor’s recent interview with Ray Ozzie (Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect and creator of Lotus Notes and Groove), Ozzie says about collaboration:

“… people don’t like to work on things that are joint objectives; they like to work on things that are their key — that satisfy their KPIs [key performance indicators], their objectives, not necessarily the joint ones.”

Rao’s “hot” and “cool” (and his deeper analytic links between radical innovation and insurgency) may be the explanation for our examples of collaborative efforts related to these innovations: the causes were so motivating and the social movements so strong that they did (do) help people meet their own objectives.

Photo by rmhermen

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I developed the term “Immersive Performance” while working with a Fortune 100 Tech company. They have over 3000 employees focused on combining personal expertise with information from the company business units in order to design better products and services for their clients. These employees use their organization’s world-class intranet, third-party applications, and electronic access to their peers to do this work. Their world is one of constant information search, knowledge development, and continuing education. Done well, it is like watching a conductor pull the best from musicians and their instruments.

Many organizations are beginning to work with “Embedded Learning” where learning is part of doing the work. With embedded learning, tools are easily at hand during performance to support learning when needed. (IBM calls this “On Demand Learning”- pdf link.) Embedded learning can combine formal learning (e.g., formally designed e-learning) or access to sources for informal learning (e.g., video-on-demand, intra or internet knowledge bases).

I think we can go steps beyond embedded learning by integrating learning with the rest of performance. In an ideal world, which I believe is technically possible today, knowledge workers can seamlessly (while staying immersed in their work) access the information they need from within their established workflow. This is a sociotechnical process (see earlier post on intertwining technology & organizational practices) in that people need to know what technologies are available to support their workflow, need to know what they do and don’t know about the task at hand; and they need to know how to react when they don’t know: learn formally (e.g., attend training), learn informally (e.g., find it on the Internet), or find someone else to help. Performance becomes a process conducted by the knowledge worker with their own knowledge, tools, and services available within and outside the firm.

Immersive performance is a different form of performance where the focus is on understanding what you know, what you need to learn, as well as “doing.” The required knowledge, skills, and abilities for immersive performance include:

• ability to judge what you do and don’t know
• knowledge of the tools and services available
• ability to make judgments about the best course of action for the situation
• access to a solid social network of experts

What’s left out in the above approach is an initial assessment of self-knowledge (do you really need to learn this, or do you already have an approach that will work?), an assessment of the available tools and processes (do you really need to learn this, or is there a system that will already do the job if you just turn in on), and an assessment of who is either better for the job or would be a perfect mentor to learning about the task (I do raise the issue in class of better team formation through figuring out who in the class knows what – but we generally still are focused on “do your own work”). I let myself off the hook in that my job at the university is to teach the individual, not to get the work of a particular organization done. However, within organizations, the focus should be on the above “Immersive Performance” approach. Organizational performance is not done within the boundaries of a single employee’s head. We need to move to supporting employees to be more effective within the open and evolving systems of their organizations and communities of practice.

In earlier posts I’ve discussed my colleagues’ and my work on designing social and technical systems for better performance (there we described it as weaving a fabric versus conducting a symphony). Think about your own organizations training, support, and/or on-boarding processes. I would appreciate examples of how firms are helping employees be better conductors, rather than soloists. Is it training about what tools and resources are available in the firm, who’s available in the firm with what skill set, performance appraisal that’s focused on building teams and processes rather than individual work, or something more creative?

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My colleagues and I recently published an article making the following point (paraphrasing): Dealing with social and technological systems of organizations in concert, which was a critical part of sociotechnical systems theory in the 1950’s, is an approach that we need to rediscover because information technology has become inextricably intertwined with social relationships in weaving the fabric of organization.

That point describes my perspective and that which underlies each of the posts in this blog (like these examples). However, in talking with some readers, I realized I had never explicitly described the background for this lens. The basic idea is that implementing a new technology or organizational practice is effective only to the extent that practices and technologies are jointly considered as part of the overall design and implementation. Many change failures are the result of a “magic” or “silver bullet” approach where there is an assumption that simply adopting a new technology or practice will have a determined benefit (Markus and Benjamin provide an excellent overview) — For example, thinking that building a team portal for sharing documents and ideas will result in greater team collaboration. However, no silver bullet for integrating technology with organizational practice has yet to be discovered and without this integration is it unlikely that benefits will be realized. A team portal may have no benefit if the team isn’t involved in an overall evolution of practice at the same time as a new tool is designed and implemented. Sometimes it’s a team’s practice that needs to adjust with the opportunity to use a new technology tool. Sometimes it’s a new technology that needs to support a team’s new practice. Ideally, both are being considered at once.

The following are links to some of my key sources (my own work in this area is best represented in “Technology Features as Triggers for Sensemaking” and “Why New Technologies Fail: Overcoming the Invisibility of Implementation”).

Stephen Barley
Technology as an Occasion for Structuring: Evidence from Observations of CT Scanners and the social order of radiology departments

Bijker, Pinch, & Hughes
The Social Construction of Technological Systems

DeSanctis and Poole
Capturing the Complexity in Advanced Technology Use: Adaptive Structuration Theory

Jasperson, Carter, & Zmud
A Comprehensive Conceptualization of the Post-Adoptive Behaviors Associated with IT-Enabled Work Systems

Wanda Orlikowski
The Duality of Technology: Rethinking the Concept of Technology in Organizations

Karl Weick
Technology as Equivoque: Sensemaking in New Technologies

Organization Science Special Issue: Information Technology and Organizational Form and Function

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