Technology and Organizations

In my post “First there was Yahoo Groups” I promised an audit as a starting point for building a team or project “information architecture.”  I’ve had both on-line and face-to-face conversations with readers offering that email with distribution lists is still the best option for short-term teams.  I’ll try and respond to some of those points below.

Disclaimer: This is not an overview of the full space of available tools.  These are questions to ask as you think about the design of your team’s portal architecture.

1. Who are the participants?  Key to this is whether they are all inside your organization or not.  This matters first because it determines whether or not they will have access to platforms provided by your organization.  For example, are they included under your Microsoft Sharepoint license?  Are they allowed to make design changes to a Sharepoint site you set up?  What happens if you leave the group? Will the group lose access to the site? 
2. What tools do you have access to?  Will your company allow company work to sit on external servers (e.g., Google Sites)?  Will your company allow non-company work to sit on their servers (e.g., you have access to Sharepoint and/or Basecamp, can you put your grad-school team’s work on the company servers)?
3. Cost.  If you are using a fee-based tool, who pays? Is it your account and you can bring others in as you choose (see my concern about what happens if you leave the team)? Is it by the team member or by the project?
4. Who do you want to be able to redesign the site? Different wikis have different features around how you can free up or close down permissions.
5. What capabilities do you need for your site? 
   1. File storage
   2. Versioning of files
   3. File syncing – systems that are passive are more likely to be up to date as the system is managing the uploading of the most current version.  Right now I’m running several team projects via Google Sites, but I have yet to enact the part that would manage syncing.  This means that team members have to remember to upload the current versions of the files to the site. 
   4. Notification of changes to the materials on the site – I may wish email dead for moving information in collaborations, but it’s perfect for being notified when new work has been done, or a question has been asked.
   5. Threaded discussions
   6. To-do lists
   7. Gnatt-charts
   8. Calendars
   9. Personal blogs.  Socialtext keeps team members up to date by having members blog about the work they are doing.  Think of this as stopping by a team member’s office and saying “what’s up?”  This gives needed unstructured visualization into member’s work, and helps the rest of the team coordinate.
6. How long-term is this team? Are any learning curve issues acceptable given a longer view?
7. Ease of design.  I’m having good luck with modular/Lego-like sites.  Google Sites, Facebook, web-versions of Blogger, WordPress, etc. don’t assume you have a personal website, know how to program, etc.

Why not just use email with a distribution list? Besides the issues raised in my Kill Email post, who maintains the distribution list?  With a portal strategy people are having to go look at the portal and are actively involved in their own account maintenance.  How do you know that your version of the file is really the latest version? You may have a date on the file you have, but your spam filter may have eaten the version that came after (I speak from experience).  Discussions around the material are piecemeal and may be distracting to other work you’re trying to do.  You don’t have control (or even awareness) of how the material looks to other parties (do they read from the top down, bottom up, or via Gmail and so in a full conversation?)  How much email do your team members get a day – will they even see yours?  When they are ready to work on the project, do they have the skills to track down all the different related emails that have come through since they last took action?  Email is asynchronous with little control over permanence of the materials.  You’re relying on the skills and attention of your team members, and that may or may not be a good idea.

Yes, there are start up costs to a “portal” versus email approach.  But I’ve gotten it down to about 15 minutes per Google Site.  In a following post I’ll describe the basic format I’m using and talk about plusses and minuses.

What have I forgotten in this audit?  I see this as a starting list, please help us build it out.

Yesterday, David F. Gallagher wrote “I’m in Your Google Docs, Reading Your Spreadsheets” for the NY Times Bits blog. He describes how he was mistakenly sent a sharing invitation to a set of Google Docs by an employee of Community Newspapers Holdings Inc. — based on his email being similar to that of a CNHI employee. This gave him access to spreadsheets (among other things) with detailed financial data.

This highlighted for me the true but mundane statement that “Security is human,” and the role that security needs to play in our current discussion of the design of communication and workflow infrastructure for multi-organizational project teams. While I mentioned yesterday how I redesigned my prototype site based on specific needs for password controls, I haven’t yet broached the issue of how when you self-design for collaboration, you also need to self-design the technical and human aspects of security for your collaborative systems. We make decisions in face-to-face settings about whether to leave the conference room door open or closed, and we need to make similar decisions in more virtual settings.

Many of the current 35 comments to Mr. Gallagher’s post focus on bringing the collaboration tools behind the organization’s firewall. That works for some collaborations, but not for any of the ones I work with as they are all multi-organizational. Ultimately, security is human. Yes, it would be nice if Google Docs would do a check and ask you if you really mean to share with someone you’ve never shared with before – a suggestion Mr. Gallagher provides. (Google Sites does query your intentions when you add someone from outside your own domain.) However, as he notes,

in the end, security requires careful typing — and perhaps some careful decisions about whether some documents would be better left behind the corporate firewall.

I’ll add that careful consideration of permissions, access controls, version tracking, and the like are all part of the human/technology system that must be carefully intertwined in modern environments. We need to actively consider our security just as we should actively think about what to write on the white board, how the tables and chairs should be arranged, and who should be involved. When we make the decision to use teams, we take on the responsibility of proactively designing them as well.

This is the first of at least two posts on designing communication and workflow infrastructure for multi-organizational project teams.  Here I’ll speak to the general features needed.  In the next post[s] I’ll focus on how to do a system “audit” of what is available in a particular setting and the roles of adoption/implementation for both the technology and the team practices.

How will this discussion differ from project management applications?  Project management systems (Basecamp being one that gets solid reviews) are a commitment to a particular system, and at least one of the users must be footing the bill.  The licensing has improved in that, using Basecamp as an example, they allow unlimited clients/users and bill by the project, apparently without limitations as to organizational boundaries.  (In the old days, many of these systems were “site” licenses and so not appropriate for multi-organizational teams.)

How does this go beyond my earlier posts on visualization for teams?  There the focus was more on team member activities, here it is more on organizing the work, with team member activities as a part of that.  While this style of project management is a start towards full-blown visualization, I think we still have some distance to go to provide full visualization to virtual groups (e.g., anticipation of availability as discussed by Begole and Tang at Sun Labs.

Now we have the ability to design our own tools.  Both Google Sites and Facebook provide a “lego” style capability of clicking together electronic file cabinets, pages of links, discussion forums, and applications/widgets to suit your team’s needs.  Yes, both of these systems are in their infancy when it comes to being full-fledged enterprise-ready platforms (see 2007 discussion of why Facebook isn’t ready for business users) but they give us the ability to design on the fly and adapt the systems as the groups and tasks evolve. 

Last week I built a prototype Google Sites platform for SCU’s Technology Entrepreneurship programs.  I spent 45 minutes talking with the leadership for the program, colleagues who will be teaching in the program, and administrators who work with students like those in the program.  We thought hard about building the first prototype on Facebook given its high level of adoption among the students.  However, the low level of adoption among faculty, and our limited understanding of its possible document and project management capabilities pushed us to Google for this first design.

It then took me 2.5 hours to build the initial site.  This included backtracking when I realized that I would need to build a separate “Site” for each program to manage the permissions such that some materials are available only to the specific program (e.g., the Fall 2008 group, the Winter 2009 group).  This is either a weakness in the Google Sites feature set, or in my conceptual understanding of what a “Site” should be.  Initially, I designed a single “Site” for the Technology Entrepreneurship overall program.  The idea was that access could be “provisioned” such that general materials would be available to all participants and faculty, but that specific readings, discussion forums, etc. would be available to only the individuals in a single program.  Instead, it seems that each program needs to have its own “Site,” those these sites can be linked via URLs.  Thus my backtrack.  I had to disassemble the overarching structure and put the separate parts into separate Sites.  What I have yet to formally test is whether there is a “single sign-on” capability such that once you have logged-in, you are in to all “Sites” in your “My Sites” section.  If so, the process of moving from one Site to another should work just as well as if there were a single Site with webpages provisioned to the individual user.  (Downside is that the Site map obviously only maps the single Site – so the overall architecture may need to be explained to the users – or we may need to draw our own general site map that covers the linked Sites. 

I’ll stop here and ask for advice. This prototype provides the ability for password protection, social networking, filesharing, discussion forums, calendaring, and announcements. Are there missing features that multi-organizational project teams are likely to need?

Footnote to the Title: Yes, I know Yahoo Groups was a later addition to the party that is “computer supported cooperative work,” but Yahoo Groups was the first major free tool I saw with mass adoption in the MBA student ranks.  These students often had access to more powerful systems at work (e.g., Lotus Notes), but they couldn’t use them with outsiders.  The students also had access to purpose-built systems provided by the university (in our case, Prometheus and now Angel).  However, the students never took to these systems in the way they did to Yahoo Groups (also possibly because each faculty member could configure the system differently, sometimes even turning off the ability for students to provide attachments or to start their own discussion threads).  Yes, Yahoo Groups went down one day when final papers were due, but the students soldiered on.

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?

A few months ago I wrote a post called “Group Mind and Memory with Duct Tape and Twine.” My goal there was to highlight some easy actions and tools for supporting teams. In that post I was focused on helping virtual teams overcome some of their weaknesses in terms of having common ground across the members, as well as some other meeting basics. Here I’d like to hit on the flip side, how can we do better by integrating technology into our face to face meetings?

John Sawyer, Maggie Neale, and I have written about hybrid teams: teams that meet face to face but also make use technology support. I have a hard time imagining a setting where some form of technology wouldn’t provide value in a face to face meeting – even if the technology is just a piece of paper (a weak option as it’s hard for everyone to see) or a white board (better). Seems pretty easy to take team notes on a big piece of paper or a white board, but I’ve attended a number of face to face meetings recently where no notes were taken that were visible to the participants. “Poof” went many of the ideas – for those of you on Macs, think about the animation and sound when you drag an icon off the taskbar – “poof,” it’s gone.

Sure, some individuals were taking notes, but in these instances none of those notes are available to the meeting participants. The leader in each case was clearly taking some notes, but in all the instances I’m thinking about they were also the main meeting facilitator, meaning their main focus wasn’t on note taking.

Frankly I don’t like my ideas going “poof,” so I emailed the leaders with the ideas I thought best. This made the best of the situation from my perspective, but isn’t the best group outcome as I know I filter my notes as I go.

I’ll quote from my earlier post about the benefits of notes that are visible to the meeting participants: “If the team rotated who took notes (perhaps using the agenda as the base for the notes) – and more importantly, took notes in a way that all could see them as they were being taken, they would gain at least four benefits. First, the real time nature of the notes provides a visualization of what one member thinks is being said. The rest of the team can then chime in with corrections, elaborations, agreement to action items and the like. There is stronger engagement as the team is going to be held to their immediate agreement about the outcomes of the meeting. Second, once the meeting is over, value added work can begin, rather than spending time typing up notes from work that has now past. Third, since the team lead isn’t trying to take notes and run the meeting, both activities should be of higher quality. Fourth, the minutes are a living document versus an attachment that seems to just get archived and not looked at again.”

As I watched our process over these meetings, another benefit to “group” notes came to mind – progress can be dynamically tracked. If we get bogged down or aren’t addressing the goals of the meeting it will be more apparent through the artifact of the notes. The notes begin to serve as a way to hold the meeting participants to their goals. Without the group notes, the conversation can digress without evidence to the contrary.

The benefits of agendas, having materials available in advance, and note taking are as old as meetings (what do you think those cave drawing are?). Let’s move into the 21st Century and make use of the technologies that are available to us. In each of my example meetings we had access to projection systems and could easily have used a projected agenda as a template for our notes. Yes, as noted by an astute colleague of mine, agendas and notes could provide so much structure that they hamper creativity, but in each of these cases I would have been willing to take that risk over the ideas going “poof” and us having to cover the same ground again in the future. Let’s help our meeting leaders by offering to set up the computer and take the notes.