Too much socialising is quite antisocial

When I’m not sure if I like a website or an application I think of it as a persons who is talking to me. Sometimes that helps to make up my mind.

When I look at twitter, there is a multiple personality talking to me. Or somebody who is just namedropping, without actually saying anything. The more people you follow, the less communication is happening: you don’t see your real friends anymore you hardly care about what all these guys are saying it’s just noise going on…

This turns twitter from a communication to a publication media – the same antisocial stuff as your old tv station.

This tells me

• it’s in the responsibility of the user if a media is an information-, publication- or communication-media. That’s quite a lot of power and can also influence business models.
• I will unfollow all professional twitter users; they just waste my time for too little benefit.

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Applied collaboration – dont always blame me

Image by Pirkka2 via Flickr

I just came back from vacation and there are not so many but still far too many emails asking for things that should not have waited for me. “Could you fix this, do you know how to do that, what’s the name of the guy who works with…” – I’m not the only person around who knows this, but I’m probably the one whom others suppose to know this. There are a lot of colleagues whom you could ask, and I bet you can find a lot of the requested information in the blogs, wikis and other information sharing services I’m running.
I like the idea of collaborating not only in dedicated collaboration environments, but also – or rather way more – in environments that strongly support networking. Yes, information should be tailored to a certain audience – but everybody should have the possibility to be part of that audience.
Public information provides better accessibility, not only of the information itself, but also of the possibilities and responsibilities: Who did what? Who can fix what? Who knows what? I don’t want to skip hierarchies or substitute managers, I’m mainly thinking about intra-team collaboration: Some colleagues have a sense for what’s going on, others simply don’t. They always need help and guidance, especially if they are supposed to get in touch with people they don’t have to deal with every day.
And that quickly leads to fear, prejudice, stubbornness – which again reduces the quality of information. Actually it even reduces the readiness to look for any information at all.

We know the consequences: Colleagues start to blame each other, questions are understood to be suspicions and wrong information becomes harder and harder to fix – you start to believe in things you know just because you know them, and because it seems to be more comfortable than questioning them.

And maybe the colleagues who asked so many questions during my vacation did not want to blame me… :), but they really just needed to know something.

What’s the end of it: Collaboration does also stand for networking and documentation; collaboration tools should also provide information on who did what. Or the other way round: every tool that is of value for the community or is used by a community should provide collaborative features that

• provide public information
• show who did what and who can be addressed for what
• are easily accessible and not just an administrator’s secret.

Then we can clearly say that collaboration adds tremendous value to media.

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Take this sheet of paper away or I’ll quit

This guy is called Wiki Image by Getty Images via Daylife

My boss asked me yesterday to print something I was working on and file it as a hardcopy. “So that we have it for sure.” If she does that ever again, I will have to quit.

The problem was even bigger: She was concerned about archiving, security and revision history of contents on the intranet. “How can we make sure, that we have all changes documented, that we can also add notes on why which changes were made and with whom they were agreed.”

She suggested to print every document that is to be published on the intranet, put handwritten notes on it and file it. There are about 1000 new documents per year and another 1000 updates. That easily adds up to 12000 to 15000 pages per year that would have to be printed, commented and filed. And we are not even talking about retrieving something in there…

I was horrified.

I just managed to remove every piece of paper from my desk (except some post its, but I hardly used them since I use deadlineapp, netvibes or iGoogle).

I had planned to handle all workflow, versioning and archiving issues in a new cms-workflow that was supposed to come along with a generally remodeled intranet. This project was cancelled because of budget reasons.

In my horror, I now suggested to use a wiki instead.

I’m curious how far I can take that. There will be discussions with authors, editors, internal audit, IT security and of course users. There will be heavy rights management work, intense process and permission design and lots of documentation work for users.

But the most important issue to me: what can I do to build trust?

Many users think of Wikis as anything goes, laissez faire, informal stuff that is not suited for real business use.

What can you tell an internal audit colleague questioning you about how reliable the built-in usermanagement really is, and how you can prove, that the permission setting really work?

And how should you behave in a discussion with people telling you that they don’t want to store business critical information in open source software?

However, I started prototyping last night. And I’m more willing to go through these discussion marathons then to play with paper. If this does not work out, I will have to intensely reorganize something. In which direction whatsoever.

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Applied Collaboration – Participation as KPI

Collaboration – in terms of knowledgemanagement, discussions, sharing or cooperating – strongly depends on participation. That’s a no-brainer.

But why not integrate employee’s participation in the kpis that are part for their bonuses?Andrew MacAfee raised some questions in his blog.

Actually we thought of connecting our future prediction markte to senior managers’ bonuses: They have to make their decisions on what they want to bet on, and the employees’ market will tell them within three months if they were right.

We did not receive very clear answers to that but the other model found definitely more supporters. In that other model, employees trade on the market and senior managers decide afterwards, if they were right and if this idea will be pursued any further.

But still: scientists’ currency are publications, writers and artists have to make themselves heard – so why not rate knowledge workers who claim to be innovative and creative by their collaborative and social output beyond their dedicated projects?

Only thinking about this could help speed up a lot of things.

Applied Collaboration: Respect

Yesterday I joined an event of the Digitalks-series in Vienna covering online collaboration. Two youngsters from small new media/consulting companies presented their view on collaboration and the tools they used in their companies.

Michael Schuster from Systemone tried to make a point in introducing his opinion that we actually don’t want to collaborate, we do it, because we are forced to, but we would prefer to do everything alone. To be honest: I don’t get that one. I don’t want to care about graphics crap, I don’t want to do ukrainian, romanian or whatever translations – I simply can’t do that and I’m really and honestly happy if somebody does that for me.

Part of my confusion is possibly due to Schusters definition of collaboration: He though of two ways, real time collaboration and timeshift collaboration. I missed interdisciplinary collaboration or just teamwork – eg I want my translators to create their version as new pages in our wiki, check the Recent Pages list for updates and subscribe to changes in the pages they are actually working on.

The presented tools were ok: Basecamp, Google Docs, Jira and some more.

Mathias Platzer from Knallgrau took us on a short tour through the Knallgrau intranet which is built with Mediawiki, and showed some semi-business use for Jabber, Twitter etc.

He actually likes to collaborate – that’s what he said – and he insisted of the importance of introducing the surrounding processes carefully but strictly.

The following discussion showed on general problem that we face when we want to introduce new media in companies: It will not work if employees don’t feel that they get a lot of respect. And many consultants don’t have that respect. It’s not only direct “human” respect, but also respect for the jobs that people do. Not verzybody is spending al his day in front of a computer. Not everybody considers it as relaxing to check Facebook or Friendfeed for news from the rest of the world. And not everybody thinks that working should or could be fun: It should be fast and efficient and anything new should not cause additional effort.

Some common basis – where I also agree – was that you just have to start with something, think of good usecases, invest a lot of work of your own – and then only you may hope for some success of getting people to collaborate.

 

Applied Collaboration- fixing errors

Another benefit of collaborative work: It allows to fix errors without having to make a drama out of it.

You can fix your own errors, because your publications are always open for editing and it will be nothing unusual that there is a new version out from time to time.

You can also fix other people’s errors without having to address them directly and without having to waste your time on thinking how to address them properly so that nobody gets upset. (That’s another interesting thing about errors: We often don’t notice our errors, even if people point them out to us. We rather tend to think that people are stupid. So they have to tell us again and probably again – what makes trouble unevitable.)

Of course you can do that only if you are really positive about what you want to change. That challenges the quality of your own work.

So, considering the whole picture: Collaboration does not only improve work results because pepople can share knowledge and experience, but also because collaborators have to work even harder to deliver results that they can’t be blamed for – or to deliver results that are not edited /corrected by colleagues.

Maybe that does not apply to collaboration outside in the everyday world. It definitely applies to internal collaboration in the enterprise: According to my experience, users are very shy and slow in adopting “real” collaboration features; they rather tend to add comments, start discussion threads or work in annotations. It takes a while before they really dare to edit a document even if it’s been there, open and probably assigned to them, for a while.

Let’s not be naive: “Real” collaborators are always a minority.

Besides that, the power of collaboration may also become it’s biggest threat: You don’t publish the information you have on your mind not only because you are shy, lazy and ignorant, but also because you are demanding way more quality from your own work then usual.

You do voluntary work, it can be directly related to your name, actually one reason for doing it is that you want to become a known expert, everybodz should understand, that you are smart. So it has to be twice as good.

And the probability to get some content through collaboration again has shrunk.

Is it anyway worth trying it? To my experience – definitely.

The one contribution you may get through voluntary contribution, maybe in a wiki, is – at least in a professional enterprise environment – more worth then the twentzsomething contributions you get, if you address your peers directly and force them to answer.

 

ECM Summit Day 2: Communication Controlling and Knowledge Management

Today I could listen to another four presentations.

In the morning, the topic was communication controlling: How do you know that your communication activities really achieve their goals, that you reach your audience – and how can you transform that into ideas for and ROI argumentation?

First speaker was Mark-Steffen Buchel from aexea who introduced a case study from Vattenfall. They built a balanced scorecard-like kpi-measuring tool, that showed interdependencies between different criteria and their influence on some main criteria. Eg. download speed of the websites is split into real download time, error rates, download time perception (by users), explicit user satisfaction and some more criteria.

In order to keep the data current, Vattenfall does quarterly user surveys.

Quite a lot of work, but it seems to be promising – if you are asking the big questions, then you have to invest some work to get the answers.

Rolf Schulte Strathaus from eparo held the second presentation. He spoke about a portal relaunch project where they made heavy use of wireframes, wireframe clickdummies and wireframe mockups.

I did not quite get the point why this was supposed to cover communication controlling, but I’m a huge fan of wireframes anyway.

In the afternoon, I attended a panel on knowledge management. Erik Schulz from FH Berlin showed a casestudy from Berliner Gaswerke, where they focused on networks only – and not on technical topics. A lot of places where created where people can talk and interact (while having coffee or eating apples), a culture of sharing was set up in order to make people feel more comfortable, and some tools for storing knowledge where created.

I guess it works great as long as everybody is in the same building; might be difficult with bigger companies.

The second speech was held by Joachim Lindner from ABB. He introduced an international wiki in his company. Standard solution, but a cool approach: To get attention, he invited all 120.000 worldwide ABB-employees to a Web2.0-kick off-conference. 120 came and built the foundation for the first company wiki.

ABB invested three months of work in building the structure (sometimes for three and more levels of pages) and some initial content, another month in a wiki roadshow and now one day per week in monitoring and cleaning the wiki. It’s only a few months old, but it seems to start growing (also through the help of so called wiki-wichtel, who are reponsible persons in the business departments) and might be a very good example for real basic setup projects.

Applied Collaboration – tell them about it

Collaboration is not only about doing things together or exchanging information.
Collaboration is also a very powerful tool in internal public relations: Tell them what you do; make them know about it. Sharing is a way to gain power, to recruit new ideas or comments and enhancements.

Of course it also leaves your work open for destruction. The best way to encounter that is to deliver good work: Maybe it won’t survive the destruction, it won’t be recognized as your success. But if it made sense, it will be easy for you to rebuild.

Sharing stuff forces people to take responsibility – at least inside an organisation. They can’t say I did not know, or I’m hearing that for the first time now.
They can deliver their input and they can even address you directly if they want to tell you that you are talking bullshit.

You need to be stubborn and thick-skinned in order to get along with it. I’m afraid there is no easy way out. But I believe in the power of being th first one, of getting things done and making things happen.
Those who keep telling you that this and that is missing, that things could have been done better or have to be done differently, are very often those who have problems to understand that something had to be done at first. – There is nothing, unless you start to create something.

And what at least I hate most is the regretful thought that I should have tried harder.
Being a diplomat is ok. but do that later.

Applied Collaboration – Spread the Word

We had a long discussion today on how to publish the reports of our research department. They are of very low interest to most users, but very important to some; most of the time they are considered to be nice to have, but they can become very critical information very soon.

• Emailing the reports is the worst solution: they waste space (500k – 1 meg), they are deleted or archived and forgotten and only considered as another annoying newsletter.
• Publishing a summay of every report as a news on the intranet also takes your users straight to boredom – this will be the perfect example of a never read information.
• On the other hand, people complain that they dont find enough information if they search the intranet for business-, market- or country-specific-information.
• The complete information is published on the internet – but employees dont go there to search, and on the research-department’s share – but that’s where employees don’t have access.

We decided to start a report-channel that published only very short abstracts of the reports, containing just enough keywords so that a search on this business or that market should find it. Monthly news highlighting the most important reports will be published to point users to that service and to keep the curiosity alive.
The full reports would be found in the internet only; the summaries will link there.

What a lot of work. But we have to prevent the ongoing experience that there is nothing in the intranet.

What a beautiful solution would it be to have a common report-directory, maintained collaboratively by the researchers, descriptions of their reports on their personal pages or phonebook-profiles and downloadable reports that could be accessed from there.

That would not only mean less work for us a intranet managers, but it would also save the researcher’s time – and it would deliver a much greater value to the users: The easy combination of information empowers searching and browsing features, because the higher density brings better search results and makes menus more understandable, it creates a goof overview of the content’s context (because there is a direct relation to the authors and their environment) – and information would have to be stored only once, but linked to very often.

Other benefits:

• users get more into the intranet, they are invited to look around
• keeping a clear and strict information architecture, but mixing the access to information and providing multiple entry pages (from channels to personal profiles or phonebook entries) makes the intranet more transparent and inviting for users
• it’s actually not exactly collaboration, but it prepares people to use the intranet, to add their own views and contents and to participate and socialise.

Applied collaboration – Share files

It’s ridiculous, but true: It’s still a problem in the enterprise to share files. Emails get blocked because of attachment-sizes and extensions, network drives are not available for everybody and the administrators are unknown. And even if you managed to put the file on a place where everybody can access it, you still have to tell people where it is. And there is no control – once it’s open, you can hardly exclude anybody, you don’t see who already downloaded it, and if you have a new version of your file, the trouble starts all over again.

Applied collaboration should allow you to store files, manage access rights, get statistics, control versions – and, most important: tell people where and how they can find it.
If there is then some realtime editing mode and more stuff that allows “true” collaboration on one file – that’s a nice add on. even though I think that this perception of collaboration does not focus on it’s biggest benefits. Concentrate on information, opportunities and status. Collaboration doesn’t mean that others will do your work.