Technology and Organizations

… and those you want to join your network.

My elder niece came home from pre-school one day talking very seriously about making “good choices.”  Apparently a little boy in her class had not been making good choices and was sent to a different room.

Making good choices becomes more difficult the more choices you have.  I’m struggling with making good choices about my own knowledge sharing.  I generally share my knowledge via (in order of formality and timeliness): Twitter, Business Exchange, this blog, class, and my academic publishing (pdf of my vita).  Each of these channels ties me to a different network.  The networks overlap to a small degree.

Below I present five dimensions to help my clients (and me) make good choices about sharing knowledge with their networks.  This is another topic related to how we all are becoming systems designers — we all need to make good choices about how we share our knowledge so that we get the knowledge to the people who need it, when they need it, in a form they can use, and in a way that doesn’t overburden them.  These are decisions based on technology, organizational practice, and people: part of TOP Management.

Formality and timeliness are two dimensions I’ve already mentioned.  For example, I don’t tend to post to Twitter about past research unless some new and hopefully interesting thought strikes me.  On the other hand, I don’t necessarily expect academic readers to be interested in this week’s current event given that the article won’t be out for over a year.  To do otherwise would be to ignore my audience’s perspective.

Content interest is another dimension to consider as you share your knowledge.  I assume that my networks are interested in gaining benefit from managing technology and organizational practice, and innovation more broadly, or they wouldn’t be following me on my Twitter/Business Exchange/blog/class/academic networks.  That said, I do toss in a sailing or golf reference from time to time because it provides context about who I am.  I like knowing a few details about my own knowledge providers gives me background for interpreting their content.  It also gives us more of a social connection if we have the chance to meet face to face.  Kind of like the beer effect without the beer.

I’m told that detail and depth are issues I should consider as I share knowledge.  References (e.g., Barley, 1986; Weick 1979), as part of the sentence are not as interesting to most people as they are to academics.  (Really, they are interesting to us!)  Each of my channels provides the opportunity for more and less detail and depth — either by technological limitation (e.g., Twitter and 140 characters), human preference (e.g., my blog audience’s interest), or organizational requirement (e.g., the APA Style Manual).

Signaling is my final dimension, so far.  Signaling is how you let your networks know that there has been a new contribution.  Some of the technologies have their own signaling capabilities.  A few examples:

• Twitter: Network members can decide whether they want email or SMS notification of new posts from specific network members.
• Business Exchange: Network members can follow specific topics or specific people.  Business Exchange then summarizes new activity on the user’s homepage.
• Blogs: Network members can opt in to to automatically receive new contributions via RSS reader or email.

Ideally, some contributions on one network will be of interest to members of other networks.  Often I post announcements of new blog posts to Twitter, my LinkedIn account (the short message area on the bottom left), and my Facebook account. I give enough information so the people on that network will know if it’s worth it to click through or not.  My blog is also tied to LinkedIn’s Blog Link and NetworkedBlogs on Facebook.  As long as these networks have limited joint membership, this crossover signaling is ok.  The more interconnected your networks become, the more careful you have to be about duplication.  Duplication is akin to spam.

We all have multiple opportunities to provide original knowledge contributions (a blog post, and comment to a blog) and/or to share valuable links. I’ve provided these dimensions:

• Formality
• Timeliness
• Content
• Detail/depth
• Signaling

Do you have other dimensions that will help us all make good choices?

Apple’s annoucement of their new iPhone 3GS includes the news that the phone will shoot video. The Flip video camera has already turned HD video into a 3.5 oz proposition — with one click to YouTube. What does this mean for our organization knowledge gathering and consumption?

In prior posts I’ve talked about the value of video: Ease of use and the value of the content are critical. Ease of use refers to both gathering and consuming the video. Gathering is helped by these new lightweight easy-to-use cameras. Consumption — finding what you need to know — is more difficult but where there is pain it is likely someone will try and reduce it. Autotranscription, tagging, and video search are some avenues. (Thanks in advance for comments providing links to good tools.)

The value of personal video is an open question. Do we as individuals know what will be valuable? Do our organizations understand the kind of video it is important to support? Just as we are given the opportunity to be “accidental systems designers” by the possibilities of our technologies, now we are being given the opportunity to be “accidental” producers, directors, talent, and videographers.

Research focused on more formal multimedia content may be applicable. Kai H. Lim and Izak Benbasat have the following result:

Multimedia facilitates the retention and subsequent recall of explanative information but not of descriptive information. Explanative information is organized facts connected by their underlying functional relationships. Descriptive information consists of isolated facts without an explanation of the relationships between these facts. The ability to retain and recall explanative information, in turn, leads to a greater ability to make correct inferences about new organizational situations.

(Interesting eyetracking study on text versus multimedia.)

What about videochat? Seesmic, for example, provides a Twitter-like stream of video communication. How might that provide knowledge management value in organizations? What does video add? What do we add when we communicate via video? My brother just looks and sounds like my brother when we video chat. His daughters grab their latest stuffed animal, piece of art, sing….

The Flip camera is out now. The new iPhone arrives June 19th. How will you contribute to your organization’s knowledge base given these new tools?

Google Squared is a new Google search feature.  The question for me is how we can use our own “proactive integration” to make this an even more powerful knowledge management tool?  By proactive integration I mean the personal combination of information or knowledge into a new idea or understanding.  When we read a variety of reports and come to our own conclusion about overall trends, for example, that is proactive integration.

Google Blogoscoped provides a nice review, but the basics:

• Your search is presented in spreadsheet form: Items matching the search are presented in the first column, some other columns may automatically appear (I did a search of “Management Journals” — image, description, ISSN, telephone, publisher were automatically added)
• You can add different columns (e.g., I added rank and peer reviewed)
• You can delete results that don’t fit and then ask for more instances to be added
• Each column provides a link to its source, and the confidence around its value

Google Squared gives us the opportunity to either blindly collect a spreadsheet of information, or to carefully craft searches that help us create new insights.

I haven’t had a chance to play with Wolfram Alpha.  How do you think it compares in terms of pushing for our own deep and active thinking?