C3 Associates Inc.

I had a very interesting email exchange with my colleague Simon Forman earlier today about whether openness is a prerequisite for success in the deployment of Enterprise 2.0 applications within an organization.

The discussion started from a comment Simon made on my retweet of Mary Abraham’s comments on Open Text Enterprise 2.0 expert Cheryl McKinnon’s webinar on Enterprise 2.0 in the Legal world (and no, my mother would have no idea what that all means but I hope you can follow along at home).

To paraphrase, Simon’s point is that restricting social networking tools like del.icio.us “isn’t very social”. In general terms I agree with him; openness should be the primary modus operandi of any ECM or Enterprise 2.0 implementation (or as I tweeted earlier today, ECM should be “open by design, closed by exception”).

I don’t think organizations should prevent people from using social networking tools inside the firewall and frankly can’t prevent them from doing so in their personal lives. In either case it is critical to educate them to be smart about it.

An example: What if the CEO’s del.icio.us links were all about mergers and acquisitions, potential target companies and research about management consultants who can integrate two big companies? That would be a bit of a tip off that something might be up.

In the end I think it’s easy to forget that social computing is in its infancy and that many organizations are struggling to find the right balance between openness and (appropriate) controls. A good start is to educate your workforce about some of the potential pitfalls of social computing and to put formal controls in place as necessary. My advice; don’t be afraid of the openness required for social computing to be successful in your organization. The good will outweigh the bad in almost every case.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the (possibly) outdated concept of knowledge management as I do a bit of work with a client to help define a KM strategy. The twitterverse has given me some excellent resources on the debate about whether KM is dead, none better than a video unearthed by Helen Nicol. In it, KM gurus Larry Prusak and David Snowden debate whether KM is simply another management fad or, despite the trend towards social computing, it has a future. Rather than paraphrase the summary provided by Twitter pal Chris Jones or the video itself, I suggest you check it out on here.

My opinion: the core concepts of KM apply now as much as they ever did regardless of how they are applied in the enterprise. The term KM may be going out of style but the concepts are valid.

To that end I’ve been thinking about how knowledge embedded in business processes is perhaps the best way to realize the seemingly limitless promise of KM. To me, a successful “process knowledge” scenario might look something like this:

Organization X has a resonably well defined set of engineering standards but not everyone knows about them (and therefore not everyone follows them) nor is the process for providing feedback on the standards well understood. This has led to variations in engineering design processes which have impacted how quickly the organization is able to complete engineering projects. In this economy this is obviously a situation they would like to correct.

The organization agrees to undertake a project to surface these standards through their intranet linked back to their source location in their enterprise document management repository. The goal is to ensure that everyone in the company knows where to find the standards by either browsing or searching. Once in the intranet workspace, users find clear instructions about how to provide feedback on current standards, request updates or ask questions. The business owner of the standards (or her team) may either respond to questions on a threaded discussion and/or she might blog about ongoing updates and revisions to the standards.

Anyone new to the company can find the workspace on the intranet just by poking around but if they can’t (or choose not to) their colleagues will point them there because “that’s the way we do things around here”. The owner of the standards and her team will also hold regular face to face meetings with key stakeholders to discuss change requests and to communicate best practices. Meeting schedules, agendas and outcomes would be posted to the site for all to see, comment on and possibly even update (perhaps in a wiki). This community would be related to other communities that deal with other aspects of the engineering and operations function within the organization.

To this point, none of what I’ve talked about is particularly new or radical. It is the definition of a classic Community of Practice that many, if not most, KM initiatives will implement. The extension of the CoP is that the business process for creating, maintaining and distributing standards no longer relies on the knowledge with one person (or group) to succeed. When the owner of the engineering standard moves on the process not only survives, it thrives. When new people join the company they are brought up to speed quicker. When new ideas occur or when new requirements are identified the organization is able to respond quickly. And all of this capacity is embedded in the business process, not the person.

It is important to understand that implementing such a process will be an evolutionary change and that these projects will have successes and failures along the way. The tools choosen to enable the development and propagation of process knowledge are largely irrelevant but will guide what the organization is able to do and their areas of focus. If the application isn’t “ATM simple” people simply won’t use it.

Continuing on with the catch-up work, here are a couple of links to presentations I gave late last year.

The first was to the first ever (and hopefully first annual) AIIM Calgary Chapter Conference, which was a huge success. Over 150 people attended the event and there were nearly a dozen vendors represented in the vendor showcase. A big thank you goes out to the committee which was ably led by Kit Bright and Shelly DiGiovanni. Great work you two!

The impact that SharePoint will have (and has already had) on the ECM landscape continues to be a hot topic and this was the subject of my presentation. SharePoint and the Future of ECM led to a lively discussion about whether Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 can really be considered an ECM tool. In a nutshell, my take on this question is:

1) SharePoint is a big deal;

2) SharePoint really is an ECM application;

3) There is room for everyone: Traditional ECM applications will survive and thrive.

Check out the presentation and please let me know your take on this issue.

The second presentation was to a group of senior managers from small to mid-sized companies. This group gathers regularly as part of the Renaissance Executive Forums program. We discussed the issues surrounding the management of knowledge in smaller organizations and had a great discussion about both traditional ECM tools and the use of emerging ‘Enterprise 2.0′ apps like Facebook.

You can find the presentation here. I hope you find it interesting and again I’d appreciate your feedback.

This is either the end of the world as we know it or a very positive move. The CIA is rolling out a social networking system modeled on Facebook called A-Space. If there’s any group who can benefit from a bit more internal collaboration it’s probably a large government agency like the CIA.

It’s interesting that they’ve made it voluntary to use. This is likely counter to their command-and-control culture but paradoxically probably the factor that will most contribute to its success. I’m curious to see if this works for them. If it works for the CIA, is there any reason that blogs, wikis and other social networking tools can’t work in your organization?

It looks like I’m going to have a lot more time on my hands now that my Calgary Flames are being badly beaten by the Detroit Red Wings in the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs. It’s not over yet but it will be soon if the Flames keep playing the rest of the series the way they did in the first two games. Oh well, more time to blog, right?

Speaking of blogging, I had the opportunity to attend a presentation by Barry Oxby of Sierra Systems last week at the monthly CIPS luncheon. Each year for the past several years Barry has shared his views on the trends shaping the world of IT. His past predictions have proven prescient, correctly calling Y2K as the non-event of our lifetimes and identifying web services as slow to catch on way back in 2002 (we’re just getting there now). He was also good enough to admit some of his predictions haven’t quite hit the mark (like calling Google a ’side show’ in 2004…oops).

This year, Barry framed his discussion with his thoughts on how social computing is going to change the way we work (you can find his entire presentation here). He noted that ‘prescriptive computing’ has failed miserably and used an interesting model to illustrate how he feels organizations will interact in the near future. Here is his “New Hierarchy” model:

Barry used this model to talk about how traditional organizational hierarchies are changing to accommodate the way that individuals want to interact, both internally and externally with business partners, customers and suppliers. This is driven by an increased availability of easy-to-use collaborative tools and an increased familiarity in using these tools in our everyday lives. It also tends to be the domain of those people now entering the workforce who have “grown up digital”, but not exclusively. To me this is an excellent visual representation of the Enterprise 2.0 concept popularized by Harvard professor Andrew McAfee. In a nutshell, Enterprise 2.0 tools are social software applications like blogs and wikis used behind the firewall that are free-form, optional to use and egalitarian (or at least indifferent to formal organizational identities). See this post for more detail on Enterprise 2.0.

What is interesting to me is not whether organizations will change as Barry predicts, but how quickly. Expecting a baby boom-era engineer to start blogging about her projects might be a bit ambitious, but then again maybe not. What if it finally gives her the tools she needs to share information with a far-flung team and gather feedback in a way that no amount of “reply-all” email ever could? If the tools are easy enough to use and are as unconstrained as their Web 2.0 brethren, why not? But there’s the rub. Many (most) organizations are going to struggle with granting the freedom necessary to enable free-form collaboration. Putting this is a Calgary context, can we really expect large oil and gas exploration and production companies to be the first to embrace corporate blogging? Probably not. Yes, many E&P’s are starting to deploy collaborative tools to enable project teams but these tend to be constrained by traditional organizational boundaries.

To me, that’s one of the great paradoxes of the oil and gas industry. While there is a stunning array of technology employed to make sense of seismic data and to communicate with drilling crews in Zama and beyond, the same level of investment doesn’t tend to be made for things like collaboration tools that don’t have as clear a cost-benefit relationship. That doesn’t mean there is no cost-benefit relationship, just one that’s much more difficult to quantify.

Further compounding this problem is the fact that many companies are organized along geographical lines (often to the point of a single company really being several vertical companies complete with their own admin staff and IT budget) and there is often little, if any communication between groups. This may make sense when running drilling rigs or gas plants, but it has always struck me that there’s a huge opportunity for the organization that can tap into the collective wisdom of smart people from throughout the company to find more oil and gas and to pull it out of the ground cheaper, faster and safer than everyone else. Enterprise 2.0 tools seem to be a good fit, but how is this going to happen? I see three things that need to be in place:

1. Trust that the community will police itself;
2. Tools that are easy to use and just flat-out work, and;
3. A business problem to solve (i.e. a need for innovation, communication challenges in dispersed project teams, etc).

I recognize that I’m generalizing here, but it has been my experience that oil and gas companies don’t tend to be world leaders when it comes to communicating across organizational boundaries. I’m not as familiar with other industries but I imagine this sounds familiar to at least some of you out there?