Technology and Organizations

Email is selfish. If we are working on a team project and I send a message only to you, only you have access to it. I might have meant for only you to have the info (maybe I was griping about another team member), but more likely I just didn’t think the others would be interested and I was trying to keep their in-box clutter to a minimum. On the other hand, maybe I just didn’t know that the other team members were actually just then wondering about that information, or I didn’t know that you were about to quit the team and now the person taking over your role won’t have access to the info unless I figure out that I need to resend to them. Email requires a lot of forethought – and when was the last time you seriously thought about the information architecture of your team project as you were popping off that message? True, systems like those available from Tacit can mine email for content, but does your team have access to such tools?

Email is unwieldy. To file or not to file. Do you structure your email in well-considered folders, or actively label/tag as GMail would suggest you do? Do you save every single email you send and receive? Can you easily search your archived email? (As an Apple Mail user I don’t believe I can – though I could if I bought add-on tools.)

As Wired magazine might put it: email is tired, pages are wired. Pages are the structure of Facebook and Google Sites. Portals may be the enterprise version (e.g., w3 from IBM). Pages and portals push us to think of content as content, rather than as a fleeting message. Communication within pages is persistent and searchable – as people change roles, the material stays put. (July 2008 Wired has an article by Clive Thompson about email management tools — describing current email use as “The Great American Timesuck.”)

I don’t yet have a clear-cut platform/page structure to suggest for a project team (would be great if people would post possible examples in the comments). I am thinking hard about how to best structure the content for my upcoming EMBA Managing Innovation and Change course. We use Angel as our course management platform and it has some blog/wiki capability (and needs to be private in some areas), but maybe I should be thinking about Facebook instead. If this were an undergraduate course I expect I’d make the leap as that would give them more of a one-stop shopping experience for their on-line activities. (I’ve heard from more than one place that email is just for old fogies.) In an earlier post I talked about using freely available tools to handle complex tasks. Please comment if you have found a way to move your group away from email using freely available platforms. Clearly there is still a place for point to point communication, but is switching over to your separate email application going to be as attractive if the rest of your workday is taking place on a more full function platform?

Dana Mattioli’s article in the Wall Street Journal provides examples of digital communication faux pas (e.g., receiving a loving instant message while your screen is being shared, lettuce stuck in your teeth becoming part of the company video archives – possibly even in high-def), and suggestions for how to avoid them. I’ve certainly done embarrassing things in meetings – for example, delivering an amusing (if I say so myself) “one-liner” that would be fine face-to-face, and not recorded – but the stakes go up if recording is turned on, or if you’re not sure who is in your audience. While some of the comments to the WSJ article argue that too much weight is being put on delivery over content, the fact is that the perception of the content is what matters – and perception is a combination of the content and the medium.

Technology (the medium) changes communication understanding – but not always in obvious ways:

• Perceptions of “bandwidth” or the perceived richness of the medium can vary by the communicators’ experience with the technology, the task, and with each other (Timmerman & Madhavapeddi, 2008; Carlson & Zmud, 1999).
• Some media have greater perceived seriousness – e.g., do you send a note of sympathy to a friend via email, regular mail, or face-to-face?
• Managers make media choices based on positive versus negative content, self-presentation, etc. (Sheer & Chen, 2004)

Media choices are also made based on attempts to manage the behaviors of others. Recently I’ve heard of video conferencing being used (versus just audio conferencing) when the leader(s) have felt there was too little focus on the meeting given participants’ additional focus on email, instant messaging, and the like. Rather than directly address the issue of multitasking during meetings, there seems to be a belief that by forcing people to appear as if they are listening, that they will listen. (See my earlier post on laptops in face-to-face meetings for more thoughts on managing technology and meeting behavior.)

The need to know how to write a formal business letter has been reduced given word processing wizards to help us with the formatting. However, we are not to the point where there are “wizards” to coach us through dressing for video conferences; or to help us make good choices around when to communicate via email, IM, a text message, or a Facebook post.

Many companies are likely moving in the direction of setting company standards, or at least providing guidelines. However, it’s difficult to set guidelines around this complex topic. The complexity comes from a vast array of sources:

• the technology continues to evolve
• there are differences in audience expectations (based on experience, company culture, country culture, etc.)
• we may not know how recorded information will ultimately be used
• … and feedback on the outcomes of our choices may be reduced given the media we are using, thus limiting our ability to learn and make adjustments based on that feedback

I suspect that awareness and a focus on making sense of the particular setting will provide more benefit than rigid rules.

I welcome discussion based on how best to make these decisions, and how to know to make changes based on the outcomes of the decisions you’ve made. Links to public statements of company guidelines are also appreciated.

In The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson provides a fictionalized account of the architecture tasks (as well as serial killing) related to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Trains (a crucial technology in the modernization of business), enabled a distributed group of architects to participate in this world changing event (e.g., extension of the “raft” foundation enabling skyscrapers, the ultimate choice of AC v DC electricity). Modern technology has enabled a thinning of physical organizational boundaries. I’d like to highlight three organizations that use modern technology infrastructure to enable creative organizational forms by reducing traditional space and time constraints. These examples may be useful in your own settings, or spur you to consider additional opportunities – which I hope you will share with the rest of us via the comments section below.

The Internet is likely a more valuable lever to most of us than are the trains mentioned above. Many modern jobs include work process/product that is amenable to electronic presentation/transport. The point is that technology can provide access to the market and reduce transaction costs, but that this is even easier to the extent that the work itself has a strong electronic component.

I met the principals of oDesk, my first example company, at the 2007 Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. The 2008 Web 2.0 Expo was last week and I was happy to see them again. They describe oDesk as “..an online staffing marketplace and management platform that provides a convenient way to hire, manage, and pay individuals no matter where they are located.” “Certified professionals. Verified work.”

What initially caught my eye was their “filmstrip view of work performed.” In 1984 I started studying telecommuting. A common lament among managers was that they couldn’t manage without being able to see the work being done – and thus an increased emphasis on electronic monitoring (my term, not oDesk’s). I think the “The Work Diary” – that’s oDesk’s term – provides monitoring as a service versus a more punitive form of monitoring. (For more on the distinctions, see my chapter on monitoring entitled “Social and Technical Aspects of Electronic Monitoring: To Protect and To Serve,” paraphrasing the motto of the LA PD.)

oDesk uses the Internet as a foundation to enable virtual work. They bring together organizations and web/software developers, QA specialists, etc by providing a platform for hiring, managing, and paying professionals from around the world. They are happy to share their results (including a live “oConomy” tracker), so expect to see more about oDesk as I get to know them better.

Pixel Corps, a guild of media developers is my second example. As a “guild” they train both face to face and in a distributed form. They provide low cost licenses of expensive software to their membership via relationships with vendors. Their infrastructure allows for global distribution of the work – including to the developing world. They create on-line “challenges” to extend learning and allow the guild members to get experience working on group projects through “peer to peer learning”. Their website provides a clear description of their approach and goals “Production companies have already begun to use the Pixel Corps as a resource for staffing. As we grow and if we are successful in our training and networking, we could become the most direct route to work. Our growing membership alone offers a building network of freelancers able to trade work among themselves.” “The Pixel Corps is not about simply collecting current computer artists… It’s about providing access to anyone interested in the field…Enthusiasts with little interest in a fulltime career, graphic artists migrating to greener pastures, visual effects artists keeping up with an ever-changing field, educators staying current with industry trends, Students augmenting their schooling, and those who can’t afford traditional schooling but still have the will and drive to enter the industry.”

“We are committed to collecting these individuals, training them to be the best in the world, organizing them to work more efficiently than any other group in the world, providing them with the benefits of collected effort and, together, taking over the industry… and while many will struggle in a changing economy and quickly shifting market, our members will drive the change rather than wait for it to come to them.”

And this perfect statement regarding the social construction of this style of learning and work: “The easiest way to predict the future is to create it.” Guilds are foundational to skilled work. The Oxford English Dictionary places the origin in medieval times. Pixel Corps has reinvigorated this organizational form based on the ability to learn and work virtually.

But even televised sports coverage, something which requires the camera and the action to be physically together, has been enabled by Internet infrastructures. At the Pacific Life Open in Palm Springs, CA, I had the pleasure of a seat directly behind the baseline, such a good seat that it was also where the main TV camera was set up on that court. After four hours of great tennis, I’d had ample opportunity to study the equipment and chat with the cameraman. What made the experience interesting in terms of this post was the European phone numbers on the camera which was being operated by a local freelance cameraman. Each piece of the equipment had a barcode and the name of the equipment rental company, in this case from the UK. A TV network had rented the gear, hired the contractor, and was then providing the video from this secondary court (often where the best action is) to other networks. Contracting was enabled via the Internet. While this contracting approach to media has been around for decades, it is facilitated and spread via current technologies.

Questions: What other organizational forms are offered by broadly available technologies? What are the trade-offs and/or management shifts your firm has had to make to gain value from these new forms? What happens when you try to make a change to a new style of technology-enabled work, but do not make changes in how the work is managed?

Card, Mackinlay, and Shneiderman describe visualization as “The use of computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of data to amplify cognition.”

Long long ago I was an undergraduate research assistant at UC Berkeley. Because of my job and ability to scrounge, I had a few “accounts” (at the time, computing wasn’t a free good) that let me access one of the mainframes used to run statistics packages. Other RAs, some of them my good friends, also had accounts. These were the days of terminal rooms and we were often working in different buildings in the middle of the night.
We would use the “who” command to see who else was working (and thus who could either help with a problem or go for coffee). This was a primitive form of creating situational awareness in a virtual work setting. Note that this required an action – issuing the command and then looking for the arcane login of your friend. The only representation of the data was what could be gleaned from the particular processes they were running at the time.

More modern approaches are to watch team members’ IM status (immediate feedback, can include what music they are listening to), blog updates (see description of how SocialText does this — generally longer cycle time), facebook or myspace postings (cycle time varies), Twitters (see this real estate example), and the like. Some of these may require action on the part of the tracker, trackee, or both, depending on how the systems are configured. More to the point, they require some kind of effort, and are not specifically designed to support team situational awareness through visualization.

Certainly technology provides us with the ability to create visualizations of teamwork, but what visualizations are useful?

The following are the first entries in my notes on this topic. Briefly, explicit and implicit coordination of communication and tasks may be the most mature areas of study and examples. Both have the ability to support coordination based on either direct or anticipated actions and needs of teammates and task demands. Visualization around mutual awareness, accountability, social dynamics, and work patterns (e.g., editing patterns in Wikipedia) appear fruitful, but also more complex and idiosyncratic in terms of what would be valuable for team performance.

Comments appreciated on other sources for extending this review and/or on examples of how your teams use visualization for fun or profit.

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Unavailability and Rhythm Awareness – current and future availability. Begole and Tang describe the use of “Lilsys” and “Awarenex” within a research group at Sun Labs. Awarenex showed an augmented IM contact list which provided location, keyboard idle time, whether engaged in instant messaging, phone conversation, or scheduled for an appointment in the calendar. “The design of Awarenex transmitted awareness cues so that people could interpret the information to infer whether it would be a good time to interrupt…” (p. 12). (They do discuss the tradeoffs regarding privacy issues.) Lilsys used a sensor-based system (motion, sounds,phone, door, computer) to link to Awarenex and add machine interpretation of whether or not the person was likely to be receptive to communication. Later stages of the research used logs of this data to create visualizations of (for example) day-of-week rhythm patterns of activity. They note that this information could support contact coordination.

Coordination Requirements – “Who must coordinate with whom to get work done.” Cataldo, Wagstom, Herbsleb, & Carley report on their efforts to design collaboration and awareness tools. They developed a technique to measure task dependencies. Among other things, they created a coordination requirements matrix based on software modification request reports from a software development project within a large data storage company. They offer that a tool using their approach could provide stakeholders with visualizations to trigger facilitation of appropriate flows of communication. TUKAN and Palantir are mentioned as tools for supporting collaboration and awareness in software development – and that these tools could be augmented with better understanding of congruence between coordination requirements and coordination activities.

Team Implicit Coordination Processes: A Team Knowledge-Based Approach – Rico, Sanchez-Manzanares, Gil, and Gibson describe implicit coordination as “when team members anticipate the actions and needs of their colleagues and task demands and dynamically adjust their own behavior accordingly, without having to communicate directly with each other or plan the activity” (p. 164). Team situation models “are dynamic, context-driven mental models concerning key areas of the team’s work, such as the objectives or roles of colleagues.” The “sharedness and accuracy” of the team situation model feeds into implicit coordination (with a feedback loop), which is expected to support team performance.

Social Translucence — IBM Watson Research Center’s Thomas Erickson, Christine Halverson, Wendy A. Kellogg, Mark Laff, and Tracee Wolf note that “humans are remarkably skilled at using subtle cues about the presence and activities of others to govern their interactions.” They describe how people make decisions based on their being able to see “traces” of others’ activities. They propose digital systems that support mutual awareness and accountability. Social Translucence (not transparence) – visualization that people are doing something (e.g., participation in synchronous or asynchronous conversations, interaction in a lecture), but not exactly what they are doing/saying.

Augmented Social Cognition (blog) — Ed Chi and Peter Pirolli of PARC describe ASC as “the enhancement via technical systems of the ability of a group of people to remember, think and reason, acquire and use knowledge.” They have created a tool called wikidashboard that they hope will “surface social dynamics and editing patterns that might otherwise be difficult to find and analyze in Wikipedia. We are also interested in applying this tool to Enterprise Wikis.”

I’m paraphrasing Qwaq’s tagline: “Virtual Spaces for Real Work” based on a great workshop I attended Monday at SRI. I’d almost said “no, thank you” to Eilif Trondsen’s offer of a guest slot at their latest meeting of the Virtual-Worlds Consortium for Innovation and Learning given my dim view of the readiness of Second Life for real work. Twelve hours of interaction later, I’m back to being excited about virtual worlds in real world enterprises. Key to this transformation were the representatives from (links are focused on their virtual world activities): Cisco, Forterra, IBM, Intel, SRI, Stanford, Sun, Visual Purple, and Qwaq.

My short summary of top picks for particular goals (standard disclaimer for this blog – how the technology is actually intertwined with organizational practice is what determines the overall effectiveness – the summaries below highlight particular strengths and histories of the specific environments – they are each flexible/customizable and can be used in a much broader set of uses than described below):

• Qwaq Forums for doing collaborative work
• OLIVE (Forterra) for training
• Wonderland (Sun/Open Source toolkit for creating virtual worlds) is up and coming – and free
• Second Life (Linden Labs) for fun (e.g., the Flying Tako Sailboat provides the best sailing simulation I know – and you can participate in real-time regattas)

Longer thoughts (based on this workshop — many other topics and tools were discussed, but there are the ones I feel I can do justice):

Virtual worlds may provide opportunities for people to engage in ways they cannot in the real world. Virtual teams may be able collaborate on projects in more natural ways in a virtual environment. Serendipitous interactions may provide social- and innovation-focused interaction that might otherwise not occur. See Christian Renaud’s blogs (here and here) for some excellent discussion (and feel free to add other suggestions by posting comments – focus on enterprise uses please).

Second Life provides the ultimate freedom for virtual world interaction, self-design of your environment, and a true economy. However, while it can be effective in the enterprise (see for example IBM’s use of Second Life for rehearsal), there is a relatively high learning curve for moving around, many companies have security concerns given it runs outside of their own firewall, and IT stability is a common complaint (see discussion here of Linden Lab’s actions for improvements in these areas).

Wonderland is all about opportunity. It is an open source toolkit for creating virtual worlds on your own servers. This may be especially valuable in educational environments where control and cost are high priorities. Please see the new media consortium’s discussion the values of an open source model for virtual worlds.

Visual Purple: Their lunch time presentation of a custom training tool stopped conversations (virtual world stories with interactive coaching).

OLIVE was built as a training platform. Forterra supports healthcare, emergency services and the like. It has a feature set that makes it very powerful in this mode. It is amazing to think of the value of being able to “replay” an emergency response situation that has been played out in the virtual world – while being able to look at this replay from each of the participants’ perspectives, or from a bird’s-eye-view. While IBM’s great expertise in Second Life allows them to do immersive training and rehearsal using machinima (movies done within the virtual world), with OLIVE this is native. You can also have the world designed to automatically keep track of specific actions (e.g., number of times a patient’s blood-pressure was checked), or bookmark the proceedings for easier debriefing. Evidence-based training?!

A Qwaq Forum is a slimmed down (vis a vis Second Life), customizable collaborative space. They are focusing on the collaboration, rather than creating lifelike avatars and true in-world physics. It’s ok with me if I look like a gingerbread man, if my team can get work done.

Built on the open source Croquet platform, you can drag and drop your browser and/or files from your desktop into the Forum space and co-edit with your team members. Their representatives talk about easily creating a space “on the fly” while at the same time supporting persistence (your work will be there – either as you left it, or as your colleague edited it). I came away believing that I could get work done in their space — meetings and collaborative activities made sense here. They also provide drop-down menu support for navigation and interaction with the space. This is to support users less focused on using the avatar as a mechanism of interaction. Qwaq supports audio and enough “presence” to know if your colleagues are looking at the same document you are, how active they are, and the like. Their use of a Polycom VOIP
“speaker phone”

– worked great in this conference room. Prof. Renate Fruchter (Stanford) mentioned some of her research in Qwaq settings and peoples’ ability to see “traces” of others’ work. (See earlier presentation of some of Prof. Fruchter’s work.) I’m especially interested in how this kind of a collaborative space can help teams form situational awareness (more here and here) in virtual settings.

I welcome discussion of the use of virtual worlds for serious work. I thank the participants of this workshop for expanding my horizons.