Technology and Organizations

In the post on immersive performance I began to speak to the issue of people knowing what they don’t know, knowing how to find what they don’t know, and knowing how to learn from a variety of sources when it’s going to take more than basic information to get the job done. A friend and colleague, Ted Cocheu of Altus Learning, recently posted on video knowledge management, and this reminded me of the value of video, and how limited most of our use of video is.

I’m not talking about the latest viral video on YouTube. (You looked, didn’t you?) I’m talking about using video (and audio) for knowledge transfer – and how to take a cut out of the $65-80 billion in direct costs Ted cites as being wasted by looking for information we don’t find. We give presentations. Hopefully we give good ones that provide knowledge that will be helpful to others. Trouble is, not everyone who needs the information can attend, not everyone who does attend needs the information right now, and even those who attend and learn from the process are likely to forget most of what they saw.

Ok, so why give the presentation? Wouldn’t it be better just to keep working and not stop to prepare and present? You give the presentation to better understand the issues yourself, to better format them for long-term use, and to kick-start new ideas through the ensuing discussion. However, you better do more if you want to get full value out of the process.

Video the presentation and discussion (ironically, it’s more crucial to have high quality audio recording than it is video, but I expect the video still provides value unless the presenter is a monotonic talking head). Save the video with any of the accompanying material (slides, handouts, even links to raw data). Hopefully you’re saving it somewhere it can be found and interacted with. Ted’s company, Altus Learning Systems, provides enterprise-appropriate technologies for this, but maybe you can create a duct tape and twine approach if you really must. Key is to (either now or later as technology gets better) transcribe or otherwise annotate the presentation and discussion. You could ask people to “tag” the material, but will they, and will they in ways that will remain useful as ideas in the organization evolve? Transcription gives you the ability to find the material at the level of the spoken word.  This means that the replay can jump to the topic you’re looking for, which probably comes up in minute 37… rather than starting at the beginning and making you watch 36 minutes of material you don’t need (which you won’t do). Duct tape and twine solutions won’t get you to this level of usability, but enterprise tools will, and who knows what the future will bring.

I do know I can show the money for companies that have taken this route (percentage increases in customer satisfaction where each point is worth millions in revenues) – and these data are from a setting with a very limited implementation effort. The engineers had access to the tools and largely spread the word informally. Think about the possible outcomes from more engaged implementations and customization.

Have you found a way to gain value from video or other rich forms of knowledge capture, ideally in ways that are relatively passive in terms of the extra work required for storage and access? Have you evaluated the direct and opportunity cost benefits?

Tuesday I attended Web 2.0 Expo (thanks to Vineet Jain of Egnyte for the ticket). This conference/tradeshow focuses on applications and underlying technologies supporting the collaborative web. A bit of background: Web 1.0 describes static web pages and content provided formally. Web 2.0 is the moniker for user-generated content. The 2006 Time magazine cover for their Person of the Year issue was a mirror. Based on the influence of YouTube, flickr, blogging, and wikis, Time pointed to the contributors involved in this revolution – the mirror showed that we are all recipients of their 2006 award.

My brief time at the conference stimulated several ideas for posts. Eventually, I hope to these posts into a larger presentation on innovation and mass collaboration.

The folks from Socialtext provided a wonderful informal presentation on workflow and blogs, wikis, and blikis. SocialText is a major platform for Web 2.0 activities. Liz Henry, Luke Closs, and Kirsten Jones spoke from their experience as readers, authors, and platform designers. They have a subtle view of how the different formats of blogs, wikis, blikis, and future forms can work in concert to provide knowledge and information flow. As a basic example, Socialtext employees are distributed around the world. Individuals use daily blog posts to keep their colleagues informed of their activities, questions, and ideas. They described wikis as being generally used to present more idea centric information. Key for me was that they acknowledge that the norms being developed about how people interact with these different formats may get in the way of effective use.

In their experience, people may be reluctant to edit someone else’s words – the whole point of a wiki. Commenting on a blog post, on the other hand, may be something that people are more willing to do. The team from Socialtext is taking on the issue from the technology platform side. Luke has written a tool called Blikistan, which enables designers to create sites with aspects of both blogs and wikis, depending on the behaviors they want to support. The team noted that blogs and wikis could be thought of as simply different views of the same content. This is a more flexible view than others more grounded in specific philosophies of “wikidom” (see Chris Dent on “Is that a wiki?”).

Another example was that while the technology of the wiki (its key feature being editability) may be exactly what is needed for a given site, the site owners may want the site to appear static. I interpreted this as static being a proxy for professionalism.

These examples highlight what Karl Weick was talking about when he said that there is a technology in head as well as the one on the floor. The technology has certain capabilities that serve as a foundation for understanding (e.g., triggers for sensemaking), but the technology can be “abused” (I believe that was Luke’s term) into doing something it wasn’t originally intended to do – if that’s how the users want to use it. This isn’t good or bad, but we need to acknowledge the joint constitution of the technology and the team’s use.

To gain full innovation value of these collaborative tools we need to make some effort. Innovation teams can use blogs, wikis, blikis, whatever, to document their work, collaborate on projects, and engage a broad audience in the development of their ideas. However, these attempts are likely to be orphaned if explicit effort isn’t made to guide the team’s use. That said, there should also be explicit effort around the on-going evaluation of the team’s methods and opportunities for redesign. The technology may change, the goals of the team may change. What is static is the need to explicitly negotiate the interplay between the technology and team’s processes.

Asides:

During the Socialtext presentation there was a discussion of having tags added automatically to enable actions like tracking of posts related to a specific project – see my prior post on the issues of active versus passive input of content — automatic tagging falls into the green zone of passive input.

The Socialtext presentation was part of Web2.0Open. This self-organizing portion of the conference was a highlight for me. Conference organizers set aside space (the open areas around the meeting rooms in this case) and provided the opportunity for presenters to lay claim to a space and time. The audience found interesting sessions by looking at emerging wikis, blogs, and a bulletin board with sticky notes showing the evolving schedule. This approach is related to barcamps and seems to be a great trend in conferences and tradeshows.

Todays’ Loose Wire (WSJ, Jeremy Wagstaff) raises issues of the value of “tagging.” This Web 2.0 process of labeling things (bookmarks, files, calendar entries etc.) is an “Active” form of input into the vast knowledge management system that is the web. However, as John Sawyer and I note in our article “Supporting technologies and organizational practices for the transfer of knowledge in virtual environments,” active systems aren’t likely to hold up — systems are much more likely to work if the input is passive — done automatically as part of the regular work. Question is whether we are wrong if you are dealing with all the people who participate in the web?

Tools that support a “passive” approach:

Tacit’s Active Net
Altus Learning Systems