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?

I’ve been meaning to write about Facebook and project management.  It’s taken me a while because I’m “on” Facebook, but don’t do much work via Facebook.  I know renegade teams in Fortune 100 firms who do — so this has kept me wondering what they see that I don’t.  (I tend to use home built Google Sites to support my projects.)

I started my research with a search on “Facebook project management.”  I also tried “Basecamp,” a popular project management tool, and “Facebook” in a separate search.  Basecamp doesn’t seem to have built an application for Facebook (yet?), though there have been calls for integration on the Basecamp forums.

The following are some lightly informed thoughts.  Hopefully we can get a conversation going among people who use these tools.

Interesting aside: Facebook and Basecamp were founded on the same day.  On Feb 4, 2009, both sites turned 5.

There are a variety project management applications available on Facebook (run a search on “project management” from the Applications tab).  Toodooz and Workspaces by Huddle (full web version of Huddle) caught my eye.

• Toodooz: You can upload files up to 1MB in formats: .doc, .gif, .jpg, .txt, .xls, .zip Toodooz seems to be built for Facebook and includes all the basic project management tidbits: Milestones, Tasks, Files, Discussions, Invites, and Notification.
• Workspaces by Huddle: You can upload 2MB files and there didn’t seem to be restrictions type — and you can edit Word and Excel files on-line (note: this is not the same as editing and then syncing with your desktop version — See more here).  Editing does “lock” the file so others can’t edit at the same time.  Huddle also can connect via LinkedIn.  Most of Huddle’s power seems to come from the full web version – the Facebook version seems to only have Files, Notifications, and Invites available (please correct me if I’m wrong).  The full web version syncs with your Facebook version.

Summary: I suspect both of these tools will gain power over time.  For me, I’ll be staying with Google Sites for the time being.  The value of collaborative real-time editing is key for me, so I’m willing to put up with the overhead of creating my own project management workflow.  For folks who live their lives on Facebook, and don’t need collaborative editing, Huddle, Toodooz or any of the other tools may be better as they are purpose-built for project management.  I’ll be interested to hear what my students think about the tradeoffs.

That said, this line alone from the Toodooz page was enough for me to want to try it in my next project: “Create Tasks and assign them to your Toodooz friends.”  I love creating tasks and assigning them to my friends.  Now if I could only get my friends to do those tasks….

As with all such services, please read the terms of service carefully to ensure that it matches your business needs.

Value of Being There (Stickiness) will be my next post.  A reason Facebook is an attractive platform for project management is because people are already there.

Erik Schonfeld summarizes the Abrams Research Social Media Survey (pdf) in his TechCrunch article Survey Of Insular Social Media Elite Says: Twitter Is Better Than Facebook For Businesses. As he notes, this is a biased population, but they are well informed about the features and how companies are using the tools.

Two key questions were:

1. Which social media service would you be most likely to pay for?
Facebook 32.2%
Linkedin 29.7%
Twitter 21.8%
YouTube 13.4%
MySpace 1.5%
Digg 1.5%

2. What social media service would you advise a business pay for?
Twitter 39.6%
Linkedin 21.3%
YouTube 18.8%
Facebook 15.3%
Digg 3.0%
MySpace 2.0%

I’m a bit surprised about YouTube being below LinkedIn. I can see Twitter as gaining value for collaboration, same for Facebook or something like it. LinkedIn perhaps is gaining votes given the possibility of mining your network for leads, but that could also be their demise. YouTube is an open resource for training (see CommonCraft post) and video has its own unmined value.

Corporate Usage:

4. Which corporation has done the best job of using social media? (Respondents were asked to choose one; these were the most popular choices, ranked accordingly)
1. Zappos (online shopping site)
2. Obama (campaign and presidency)
3. CNN
4. Comcast (“Comcast Cares”)
5. Jetblue
6. Dell
7. Burger King
8. NPR
9. New York Times
10. Ford

Some of these firms are using social media for marketing, some for management, and some for both. Please see my prior posts on Zappos and the U.S. Government One, Two for examples and issues of organizational use of social media tools.