Technology and Organizations

Internet resources provide us with amazing power for innovation. For example, we have the ability to simulate earthquakes with great precision and thus stimulate new building approaches for greater safety; quality (and sometimes just fun) video production is in the hands of the masses (e.g., YouTube), and there is the broad availability of Internet interfaces that engender “mashups” across major platforms such as GoogleMaps  (here’s one that shows the “walkability” of your neighborhood).

However, these technologies are also relatively abstract.  They are available for our use – but will we think to use them?  A computer is just a dark screened paperweight until it’s turned on.  Does that trigger your thinking for innovation the same way a physical object would? Would the Houston engineers of Apollo 13 “Houston, we’ve had a problem” fame been as likely to find a jury-rig solution to fit a square carbon dioxide filter in a hole for a round one if they’d had to imagine the objects the astronauts had rather than having access to physical duplicates?

People are generally lazy – or perhaps “efficient” — even with just their thinking.  Louis and Sutton called this “habits of mind”.  We have to trigger new understanding if we want to spur on innovation. 

I’m getting to my question of the day.  Think about the Amazon Kindle eBook, recently promo’d by Oprah and so apparently moving into the mainstream.  Electronic presentation of written material has been around for a long time.  Yet only recently are we seeing electronic textbooks in significant use.  We don’t see people reading books on more general use laptops.  The University of Texas is running a pilot project where students get their textbooks via the Amazon Kindle eBook.  Is it the physical nature of the eBook that will make the difference regarding people reading electronically versus on paper?  The outcomes may extreme: smaller backpacks, smaller bookstores, no “used” textbook sales.

The physical existence of the eBook (and certainly the improved quality of the text in the high-end models) may be playing a triggering role.  Sony seems to understand the role of physical objects in changing perspectives.  Their Sony PRS-700 eBook is being introduced by 1000 specially trained sales people in 3000 physical stores.  They say this is important as people changed their minds about being “uninterested” in reading eBooks after physically being exposed to the product.

Do we need physical objects to help along otherwise abstract innovations? What other examples do we have?

I’m still a Twitter holdout, but Jessica Vascellaro’s WSJ column today claims Twitter Goes Mainstream.  As noted in my previous post on microblogging more generally, Twitter allows you to post “tweets” (messages of 140 characters or less) that are read on-line or on your phone.   I’ll let Jessica’s more informed perspective describe the possible work-related benefits of Twitter, but I did take note of the following:

 

To help employees get the hang of the service, Zappos has begun offering classes. They range from teaching basics like how to follow a friend’s updates to “advanced” topics like using third-party services for fancier tasks, such as adding images to one’s Twitter stream.

Microblogging has yet to find an obvious enterprise sweetspot – but if there are formal classes going on it may be time to pay attention.  Classes would help implementation by providing the basics of usage, and perhaps more importantly, the opportunity to brainstorm about uses that would help employees and the firm.  I believe an evolutionary (versus intelligent design) approach is less likely to consider the integration of both organizational practices and technology tools.  If a valuable mutation occurs, great.  But classes with formal discussion of possible links to other enterprise systems, consideration of organizational policies or procedures that might be effectively adjusted, discussion of pain points that might be addressed, and organizational support, are more likely to result in a technology system that provides value.  This intertwining of organizational and technological aspects is needed for Twitter or any other change introduction.  Ideally the implementation becomes a negotiation with full consideration of the costs and benefits for involved stakeholders.

Has your organization offered classes related to more “social” technologies such as Twitter or Facebook? Were the classes about how to use them for organizational benefit, or policy statements about inappropriate behaviors at work (remember when email wasn’t accepted at work?)  Were there opportunities to brainstorm about new uses?

Slowly but surely the pieces to the healthcare/technology puzzle are falling into place. Amar Gupta’s detailed article in today’s WSJ speaks to the integration of information technology into healthcare. This article provides a clear analysis of how you can’t change just one thing in organizations. (Nor can you change everything all at once. Some people argue that FoxMeyer’s demise was a case of doing too much at once, with too little resources.) Gupta highlights how credentialing, billing, IT security, market forces, and research on work and sleep are finally at a intersection that supports significant innovation in IT and healthcare.

I’ve made the “just one thing” point in multiple posts, and I make this critical point as part of the first class session in every course and exec presentation I make. I’ll continue to highlight examples of excellent analysis or implementation as I find them.

Some prior discussions:

• Organizational Design, virtual work — and the Skwish toy model
• Document retention

I’ve been getting questions from students about quick and easy ways to run their team projects. They correctly believe that they could do better than Yahoo Groups and/or Google Groups. In August I wrote a basic post about designing communication and workflow infrastructure for multi-organizational project teams. More recently I created a short “audit” to help people think about their requirements and options. Today my research assistant said she’d be interested in a “how to” about how I created the Google Sites project site she and I are using to work together.  This approach combines a useful technology tool (Google Sites) with basic ideas of team and project management - including some implementation tips.  Here it is:

Disclaimer – Limited QA here – I may have left out a click or two – be sure to save your work at each stage.

Simple (using a student project as an example) — See bottom for a more sophisticated version.

Three basic components – To Do list, Discussion Tool, and a File Repository. Here’s the demo site.

Create a Google Site for your project (you do need a Google account – free):
Go to http://sites.google.com
Click on Create New Site
Give it a Name and a URL (they don’t have to be the same, e.g., Primo Project for Name and http://sites.google.com/site/primoprojectsite for the URL)
Click appropriately for adult content
Click on whether sharing is with the world, or just with people you will specify
Pick a theme
Enter the funny text that proves you’re human

Presto! Now you have a site.

Immediately “Create a New Page” and choose Dashboard as the format. Click that you want this page created at the “Top Level.” I like to name my Dashboards –ok, Primo Project Dashboard. Very creative. Click on “Save.”

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{This section is my kludged way of getting the Dashboard as the home page – Google Sites automatically creates a “Home” page – but I want a Dashboard at the top of the site and I can’t figure out how to do that initially. I’ll edit this section if I ever figure out how to do it more simply.}

Click on Site Settings (top right of page)
Click on the “Other Stuff” tab
Change the “Landing page” to your dashboard page. Click “OK” then “Save Changes”.

Return to the site and delete the page with the title “Home” (go to the site, click on the link called Home, click on the “More actions menu” then “delete”). Now your dashboard page is your home page.

Create another new page. Choose the “List” format. Call the page “To Dos” and have it put underneath the Dashboard page in the site structure (this is an option you have to pick). I like the “Action Item” style, though you are given other choices.

Create another new page. Choose the “File Cabinet” format. Call the page “Files and Documents.” Put it under the Dashboard in the site structure.

Create yet another page. Choose the “Announcements” format. Call the page “Comments and Questions” and put it also under the Dashboard in the site structure.

Now for the fun. We need to link these pages to the Dashboard. You can’t create the dashboard links until you’ve created the pages to link to. Makes sense.

Go to the Dashboard page. Click Edit. You should see four place-holders for “gadgets.” These gadgets are the tools of the dashboard – they keep track of changes in the other pages you created. Click on the first gadget – use the dropdown box to insert the “Recent List Items” gadget – this will now keep track of and provide a link to your To Do page. Click on Save. Click on the next place-holder and link to “Recent Files.” Click on Save. Click on the third place-holder and link to “Recent Posts” (links to your Comments and Questions page). Click on Save. Go crazy. Use the fourth place-holder to add a link to an existing shared Google calendar (you’ll need the URL from the calendar’s site. For more info click here).

Click on the save tab near the top of your page and you will see your dashboard page with its three gadgets (four if you added the calendar). The site map will let you go directly to the underlying pages – or click on the links provided by the gadgets. (I like to put in a test “comment” so people know how to use the comments and questions section).

Click on the Files page and add any files you already have. Decide as a group whether you want to post separate files (e.g., stand-alone Microsoft Word or Excel files), or whether you want to use Google Documents – see this education focused discussion on Google documents.

Take on the hard but critical task of deciding as a group how to do the work. If possible, do this over a beer or coffee in a place with wireless.

• Bring a laptop and do some group design on the site.
• Ask people to bring their resumes so you can get to know their strengths.
• Convince everyone to “subscribe” to changes to the site – this means that they will get an email each time a change is made (under the “more actions” tab, click on “subscribe to site changes”.
• Add any other gadgets to your dashboard that the team thinks will help you get the work done. (I added the Santa Clara logo by using the “Insert” tab and then uploading the image from my desktop.)

Dylan Salisbury (SCU http://www.Scu.edu MBA student and author of a thoughtful blog) http://blog.dylansalisbury.com/ had some additional suggestions after he read a draft of this post (he’s also suggested a post on team roles, I’ll do that next):

For an actual MBA class project, I think that e-mails directly to the project mailing list is the best format for all group discussion — announcements and discussion boards are not as useful (but you knew I was going to say that!). It’s very common to see an e-mail from somebody that comments on all the three current open issues and expresses an opinion about what to do next, which is good. The quarter moves so quickly that I *want* multiple discussion threads to be consolidated whenever it’s appropriate, and I want a linear view of all the communications at the potential expense of not seeing the threads so clearly. I don’t want any chance that I update a discussion but only 3 of the 5 team members sees it right away. Also, each of us has our own e-mail client that we can use to create a threaded view — we own our tools! {TG asks: Dylan (or anyone else), do you still feel this way if you are getting email announcements of changes to the page?}

Announcements and Q&A pages are really helpful for some of my real-world projects where we have a team of 4-5 people but 20 or 30 possible stakeholders who occasionally want to browse the web site to understand what’s going on.

But it may be good to start some wiki pages for various ideas and things that need to be collected during the project, outside of the discussion format (List of URLs of relevant articles, list of open questions, ideas for the paper, etc). {TG notes: To create a basic wiki page in your team’s Google Site, create a new page and choose the “web page” as the format. This format has the ability to “see earlier versions” and then the possibility of reverting to an earlier form if you need to}

Get an “A” on the project because you have an excellent collaboration process.

More sophisticated version (includes project status, background on project, background on team members – site example provided by www.enterprise-dashboard.com)

The Leavey School of Business moved into wonderful new Lucas Hall this summer.  Lucas Hall provides us with state-of-the-art teaching and collaboration tools.  The picture above is an example of what I’m calling our training wheels.  The flier on the door says that this conference room was booked for our Faculty Retreat.  The snazzy screen to the left is an electronic device that said the same thing – and was controlled from the central room booking website. (Sadly, I took this picture after the retreat ended, so you’re missing the big red bar that showed the room as booked over the hours of the retreat – as well as displaying “Booked” in big letters.)

We’ve had these electronic booking devices for a few months in our equally high-tech new “learning commons.”  However, as far as technology features go, these devices are not that vivid.  Yes, they are near the door (though for some rooms they may be 15 feet away from the door itself), but people see door handles and do not instinctively look for high tech monitors to tell them the status of the room…. At least not yet.

“Training wheels” are implementation tricks that help to trigger sensemaking around new technologies and practices. Hopefully this one instance of flier use will be enough to draw peoples’ attention to the new tools, and ultimately learn to efficiently plan and schedule on-line.  Are there other forms of training wheels you’ve used in implementing technologies with less than obvious uses?