Technology and Organizations

Organizations are global, partnered with other organizations, and more and more run via virtual teams with limited physical interaction… and those are the recognizable organizations. There are other organizations that remain on the fringe in that their work is done by freelancers so indirectly connected to the organization that it’s hard describe them in organizational terms. Wired’s recent article (by Daniel Roth), The Answer Factory describes one organization where clear decisions have been made to freelance some work, and turn other work over to computer algorithms. True, and thought provoking, integration of technology, organizations, and people.

My university had the honor of hosting a presentation by Jonathan Zittrain, cyberlaw expert and Harvard Law Professor (currently a Visiting Professor at Stanford). His presentation, “Minds for Sale,” focused on “the application of human brainpower as purchasable and fungible as additional server rackspace.” He opened with a pyramid similar to this one:

Each of the organizations in the pyramid uses the Internet to recruit people to do work. At the highest level of Zittrain’s pyramid is InnoCentive, a market for innovation. “Seekers” describe challenges and offer rewards for the solution. Many (most?) of these are serious scientific challenges like this one ($50K reward): “The Seeker is looking for a method to produce a hardened sharp edge from a polymeric, polymer-like, or composite material using a low cost rapid production technology.” At the next level is LiveOps. They also provide a market, but for on-demand call-center workers. LiveOps adds value by training and screening the providers, and then linking providers to companies with call center needs. Mechanical Turk (Amazon) is a self-described “Artificial Artificial Intelligence.” This is another market to match tasks and people, but the tasks are smaller and sometimes routine (e.g., creating key words for images, identifying web sites, writing short paragraphs) — many pay just few cents for completion.

The ESP Game and Google Search are fundamentally different. These are not markets for work, but work is still being done. In the ESP Game you look at images and try and guess a keyword that someone else on the Internet is also adding to that image. You get points for correct matches. It’s a game, but a “game with a purpose.” In the case of ESP, Internet search engines will do a better job because of the keywords added by the people playing the game. The matching of the keywords serves as an easy form of quality control.

Then there is Google Search. Zittrain’s comments gave me a context for thinking about how Google benefits from the fruits of my labor. Every time any of us creates a web link (for example, each of the links I use here as a way of providing a reference), we are adding the the intelligence Google’s search engine uses to pick what search results to show. If I, and many others, link to a place to buy Zittrain’s book The Future of the Internet, then that link is likely to show up near the top of searches on Zittrain’s name, the keywords/title of the book, etc. We’ve done some of Google’s work for them.

An thus the ordering of the pyramid. At the top are clear job opportunities. With InnoCentive, Seekers and Problem Solvers are actually in contact and can interactively refine the work task. LiveOps doesn’t have a direct connection between the person taking the calls and their temporary employer, but there is an interactive training and evaluation process between the call taker and LiveOps. Mechanical Turk and the ESP Game are both instances where the tasks are broken down into relatively small bites, with commensurate rewards. And finally, our work for Google (and all the other search engines) has no interaction, nor explicit permission to use our labor.

Zittrain’s ideas around “Minds for Sale” is that the Internet enables a whole slew of new ways to work for organizations — sometimes without even knowing that you are working for the organization! His discussion goes into far greater and more sophisticated detail, touching on child labor laws, your rights to carry your reputation with you from one market to another, and privacy. This last raised the issue that without interaction, we may not understand the ultimate consequences of the work we are doing. One of his examples highlighted the possibility for the mass identification of dissenters — you can’t hide in the crowd if thousands of people are available to match international identification pictures with pictures from a protest.

As an Internet optimist, I’m focused on how organizations and workers can find new value from boundaryless organizational forms. Zittrain’s work helps me understand new “people” implications that can result from our integration of technology and organizations. In my consideration of TOP (Technology, Organization, People) Management I generally think of people as relating to skills and capabilities, not human implications. Minds for Sale was of value across the full range TOP issues.

pdf of Zittrain’s paper Ubiquitous Human Computing

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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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The admonition “don’t do math in public” clearly doesn’t apply to modern R&D. While the Lockheed Skunkworks and Apple are known for their secrecy, many organizations now open up their process so that we can all participate. This is more than “open innovation.” This is public, interactive, innovation.

IDEO, Google, PARC, Yahoo! have/had public websites for their “labs”:

• IDEO Labs: “… is a place where we can show bits of what we’re working on, talk about prototyping, and share our excitement over the tools that help us create.”
• Google Labs: “Explore Google’s technology playground”
• PARC Living Laboratory: “In the spirit of open innovation, this is one of the places where PARC scientists and engineers share their prototype web-based services, alpha-stage software downloads, proof-of-concept for various competencies, and collaborative development programs. These are available free to the public for trial and feedback; in turn, we hope to draw on the diverse perspectives the online community will share. We do not currently provide access to inactive projects (e.g., Map Viewer) here.”
• Yahoo! Next: (defunct?) “… is a showcase of some of Yahoo!’s newest and upcoming projects. It is essentially an incubation ground for future Yahoo! technologies in their beta testing phase, and a chance for the Yahoo! community to interact and have a say on how upcoming products are designed and fine tuned. Each prototype can be discussed in its own individual Yahoo! Next forum. The Yahoo! Next website is currently offline for redevelopment” (from Wikipedia.)

These sites provide outsiders with early access to interesting work, and early feedback from enthusiastic followers. To the extent that we are becoming a sharing/collaborative community, these organizations can gain great value and we can participate in the process.

But, how do you make the choice of openness? How do you decide what to be open with and what to keep secret? There is a full range of possibilities (the range of formal arrangements is nicely covered in When is Virtual Virtuous, by Hank Chesbrough and David Teece). They highlight the issues of whether or not the innovation exists, or must be invented; and whether the innovation will be autonomous or systemic to the organization’s goals and processes. Note: you don’t see Google open sourcing their algorithms.

SAP Labs shows a middle ground. They appear to have standard R&D, but with a local and co-innovation flavor:

“The SAP Labs Network leverages SAP’s rich diversity and technical and business expertise to deliver the best software solutions and services in the IT industry.

Located in high-tech centers across the globe, the SAP Labs Network helps SAP engage the local ecosystems and enable co-innovation.

Seen as a local company within a seamless global network, each SAP Labs location increases SAP’s adaptability and agility to rapidly address changing markets and meet evolving customer needs.” (Thanks, @nilofer for the example.)

Here’s a twist: 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? I have a couple of examples and will do a follow up post — but it would be wonderful if you could share any examples you have. These can be self-organizing (like much of the open source software), facilitated by membership enthusiast organizations, or….

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I don’t generally make futurist-style statements, but the last two days are begging for one: A big piece of Web 3.0 is going to be the transition from “Live in your In-Box” to “Live in your Browser.” The quote “I live in my in-box” came from a participant in a workshop I co-presented with Scott Schnaars of Socialtext. We were talking about the value and methods of moving from an email centric workflow to one more focused on portals and collaboration workspaces (building from my Kill Email post). The idea isn’t that the work we do while “in our in-box” isn’t valuable — it is real work: we are often communicating about projects, ideas, etc. The idea is that the in-box work carries with it more overhead than the same work would if it were done within a project workspace.

Moving into your browser may be a more efficient place to be, and Gen Y may be there ahead of us. Gen Y doesn’t have to unlearn our (Baby Boomer) email habits.

The other event that pushed me to join the futurists was a discussion I had with Caleb Carter, CEO and Founder of ExistInts. ExistInts joins Google, Facebook, and many others in trying to provide you with a new web home. ExistInts adds a local flavor, while also striving to cross work and social boundaries — smart as many of us have woven our work and social networks and activities together already. Having a “home” that is built to support that model makes sense.

The organizational question is what is the right level? Your social network does provide you work value, and vice versa. These are going to be tied together in our workspace. Should organizations be building portal homes at a company level or at the level of the project? Should individuals be building their own portal homes with rooms for work and play?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nwseaport/ / CC BY 2.0

I feel like we are at the stage of construction where the ground has been cleared and the materials are beginning to arrive. Google is gearing up (pun intended) with Google Wave and the Chrome OS:

We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

.. while smaller firms like Socialtext and ExistInts are providing purpose-built capabilities.

We all need to consider what’s going to make the best neighborhood and architecture for getting our work done. I’m sure it’s going to be in the browser. Have you already moved? In my case, I think I’ve moved, but haven’t completely unpacked. Email still makes up the majority of my work communication and my organization has not yet taken the big step to a web-based workflow. Suggestions appreciated from those of you who’ve moved, unpacked, and finished putting up your pictures.

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I can’t say there was standing room only at Marissa Mayer’s (VP of Search Products & User Experience) PARC Forum talk “Innovation at Google: The Physics of Data” — because the fire code for the auditorium doesn’t allow standing. They did bring in extra chairs and let the rest watch via TV in the lobby.

So many reasons for the talk to be popular: Google, Innovation at Google, Big Data issues, Marissa’s presentation style (engaging, you feel like your getting a secret tour). I’d gone because of the big data and innovation focus and came away with a better understanding of their process, and how their management style is as empirical as their products.

She opened by explaining the title of the talk. Besides the fact that it sounds cool, Google is on a physics kick with products like: Google Wave, Google Fusion, and their focus on acceleration.

She quickly moved to how data helps them build better products. She gave a clear example in terms of the testing that went into their choice of the shade of blue used in their links (see mention on Gigaom). Another example was how Google Trends can help anyone know if a product is trending up or down to help them think about stocking. Below is a Trend search on Crocs.

The highlight for me was how a culture of data/evidence supports their management. I’d seen Marissa talk about this in a video (below, section starts at 16:28) as “Data is Apolitical.” Evidence-based management (here and here) at a company that builds the tools that let us all organize our evidence.

From the video:

I think that the internal politics inside of Google have remained minimal compared to other corporations of its size because we rely so much on the data and we do so much measurement that you don’t have to worry, will your idea get picked because you’re the favorite, or will someone else’s idea get picked because they’re the favorite or because they have a better relationship with the person who’s the decision maker. The decisions get made based on data, and that really frees people from a lot of those types of concerns.

How can we use big data to make better management decisions? In earlier posts (here and here) I’ve listed a few tools and asked similar questions. Marissa described the power of other Google Tools to help us “understand problems in new ways”:

• Trendalyzer -- animations of trends over time
• Fusion Tables -- largely for researchers -- mashups and embedding of datasets.
• Google Squared -- googling your Google search results (thus squared) or the square that results. Not perfect -- but it is editable (e.g., you can add your own columns).
• And of course their (and everyone else’s) move to manage the real-time web.

What problems can we understand in new ways? How can the exploding amount of data (for example from the US Government) help us manage better?

Some starters: Facilities planning, recruiting, flexible work based on better predictions of business cycles, data mining of employees’ social media content…

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