It’s getting clearer and clearer today that the capabilities and dynamics of what started in the consumer realm as social software, blogs, wikis and widgets, are finding their ways into the workplace. 

Why wouldn’t they ? 

After all they are showing us that people like and need to talk, share and do things together online. People offline have always learned through talking, arguing, pointing out other ideas, sources of information and ways to do things. Whether we like it or not, we are  passing from an industrial era, in which things were assumed to be controlled, deconstructed and then re-assembled.In that era and the mindsets it generated, processes are assumed to be clear, linear and always replicable.  That was never true and is even less true in today’s turbulent global business environment, with its fragmentation and connectedness across multiple geographical, professional and organisational boundaries.

Enterprise 2.0 can also be seen as the emergence of new communication technologies, new social structures, social practices, and the application of management science to business process analysis and control of operations.  These forces and factors are converging in contemporary workplaces, where a continuous flow of information is the rule rather than the exception. It is useful if not essential to cast a critical eye on the assumptions about static sets of tasks and knowledge arranged in specific constellations on an organization chart. 

The management guru, Gary Hamel, asserts that there has been little or no innovation in management for quite some time. I would like to offer a nuanced disagreement. I think there has been innovation in how people and their work can be motivated and managed and that this innovation comes from the world of organizational development, in which principles and dynamics are closely aligned to Hamel’s suggestion that “activities will still need to be coordinated, individual efforts aligned, objectives decided upon, knowledge disseminated, and resources allocated, but increasingly this work will be distributed out to the periphery”.

We need to revisit the fundamental principles of work design and the basic rules used to configure hierarchical organizations, where the primary assumption is that knowledge is put to use in a vertical chain of decision-making.  The argument is not that we need to replace hierarchy. Rather, the capabilities of information systems, combined with social computing capabilities, two decades of experience with team development and organizational development processes can permit centralization and hierarchy where and when necessary, and networked configurations where and when necessary.

Organizational development principles that have been developed over the past 30 – 50 years represent a large and coherent body of work that stretches from Participative Work Design, through QWL and quality circles to socio-technical systems, through to self-managing teams and large-scale, strategic participative change methods. These principles enable dialogue and consensus building approaches to management (visioning, objective setting, responsibility assignment, resource allocation, implementation, measurement, etc.).  The various elements of these approaches and methodologies have been pushed or pulled into place over the last several decades. 

We live and work in networks as well as hierarchies. The emergent principles just described have allowed us to soften, mitigate or work around the more rigid and less effective aspects of hierarchical work and organizational design. Knowledge work takes shape as projects or time-limited initiatives, requiring collaboration, discovery and use of knowledge when and where it is needed or can best be put to use. T

In that environment, the architectural challenge is to design work processes and the ways humans interact.  That means understanding the structure and dynamics of networks and the new influence of greater transparency; deciding what is to be centralized or decentralized, who is to be involved and why (competencies, availability, fit with team, and so on), and how accountability, reporting and tracking activities are to be supervised.

Many examples of these factors and influences appeared on the management, leadership and organizational behaviour sections of bookstores, and have expanded rapidly during the past two decades.  The experimentation with inclusive, participative and democratic developmental processes mirrors some of the core dynamics in the more consumer driven and public involvement in use of the Web. As similar dynamics begin to penetrate our workplaces, we will seek methods, practices and philosophies that lead to enquiry, exploration, sensemaking, negotiation and implementation of intractable issues and organizational complexity.

There is an important coherence to much of what has been being developed over the past two decades.  Dave Pollard, a well-known knowledge management expert,  has often suggested that most traditional management methods are almost useless but are still in place as proxies for status and power, but that people keep on working by constantly developing and using work-arounds.

OD (organizational development) has suffered from being seen as “soft” and a “nice-to-have-time-to-do”, especially in the chaotic and ambiguous environment of the first decade of the 21st century.  While it is a maxim in the OD field that “the soft stuff is the hard stuff”, it can be and often is  brushed aside or put down by the hard-nosed management hard-asses, the “I want to measure everything and tolerate no slack” crowd.

Clearly we need objectives, metrics, and well-defined processes as well as enough slack and support to help people learn, adapt and work around ineffective or obsolete policies, practices and processes. Based on the accumulated knowledge and experience we have suggested exists in the OD field, I think there is a coherent and pertinent model available for working and managing effectively in Enterprise 2.0. 

However it is not seen today as the dominant “management” model. 

The dynamics generated by today’s networked knowledge workers using lightweight, easy-to-use social computing tools and web services welded together with existing integrated information systems are similar in reach, scope and pace to the the challenges explored by the field of organizational development.

If re-framed as a coherent management framework, perhaps the fundamental principles of organizational development and learning  represent the beginnings of the innovation in management Gary Hamel is suggesting we need.

Just read a good post by Peter Bregman, consultant and author, Point B: A Short Guide to Leading a Big Change.  He gives a great example about changing the culture of an organization with stories.  And for more tips on storytelling check out Steve Denning’s site.  At KMWorld 2009 you will be able to experience the power of stories by participating in our capstone event – Social Discovery of Knowledge Management which will be led by Dave Snowden.  Watch this space and the new KMWorld 2009 conference wiki for more details.

This is not an analytic blog post, nor a theoretical blog post.

I am merely passing on Dave Snowden’s observations based on his long experience of what was, what is, and what is increasingly being structured to fit with the prevailing management mindsets about productivity.

The theme of this post, and the extract below from Dave’s recent blog post, also for me resonate with Euan Semple’s The Price of Pomposity.

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KCUK09 – conference blog 1

[ Snip ... ]

We then moved on to Richard McDermott who I’ve know for years, populariser of Communities of Practice (CoP) and it’s still his main theme. A Warwick University sponsored research programme underpins his presentation. He argues that every organisation has to balance operations, customer focus and learning. CoPs own learning and this contribute to the firm.

He is really going back to basics (or rather the 90s) here. Suggesting that back then we thought that it was the informal nature of these which worked. Argues that things have now changed, or so his research shows. Originally information connectivity was novel, now people are subject to data glut and its difficult to know where you are or what you should pay attention to.

His theme now is all about people being overwealmed so their participation in communities fell off because it was voluntary. Using the tragedy of the commons and a focus on individual learning now to make a point. I suspect he’s working towards a corporatist perspective. Moves on to suggest five questions that should be asked: (i) does the community matter, (ii) who is minding the store, (iii) staff have to be pressurised to participate, (iv) CoPs should be integrated to the organisation and (v) Communities should have a formal function, such as saving money etc.

One of the things that always worries be about KM research is that it is context free. Now the above are conclusions from current research, at the end of the KM life cycle. Organisations still running CoPs are likely to have formalised them into complements to process, and as those are the only ones to survive its nor surprising that the above conclusions are made – this is especially true if you interview the KM function. I’d be interested to see some field ethnography here. If you give people targets and appraisals that make them participate in communities, then they will. We had the same in IBM, but the real knowledge transfer took place in informal networks, the formal systems had (with some honourable exceptions) lots of compliance and the KM practice reported success to researchers and executives alike. The reality was very different.

With the odd exception the whole thing seems to be going back to the 1990s, its about information management (with KM as a subset), search engines, automation, very traditional and formal approaches to CoPs.

None of this stuff worked back then, do people really think that doing it again and harder will achieve the result?

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My note in conclusion …  I do not think Dave is arguing for free-form willy-nilly anarchic exchanges, but as in any initiative involving flows and exchanges of information and knowledge, that purposeful boundaries and constraints are offered by context and objectives. 

If I am wrong and he reads this, I’ll be glad to be corrected.

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Much of what the average knowledge worker of today sees as “work”  is the daily communion with the computer screen on her or his desk. They access the software with which they work and communicate with other employees through portals, on the company’s infrastructure of applications, or (increasingly) via the Web tools and services.

As we have learned more about how to integrate  software-based capability into our daily work lives, we have seen various forms of employee portals, partnership portals, project management portals and, more recently, comprehensive real-time enterprise computing applications take root and grow in many organizations. The IT infrastructures of organizations, coupled with ongoing growth in the scope and use of smart software, will create a type of integrated nervous system, providing top management and workers with an improvement-and-learning focused feedback loop.

When software connects customers directly to business processes, and employees have “line-of-sight” responsibility for making a clear contribution or directly impacting business results – when most of an organization’s strategy and value proposition is directly coded into its CRM, ERM and B2B applications, will the types of supervision and management we learned in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s continue to be effective?

There’s a very real issue here that is helping to create a sort of conundrum – the more that work activities are encoded and embedded into integrated systems, the more the human will and spirit needs to surface, assert itself.  This polarity is, I think, here to stay and is behind much of the ongoing discussion of conversation, collaboration and social computing.

The proliferation of information technology, business process re-engineering and wrenching changes to established business models created by the rapid development of the Internet is exerting significant pressure on long-standing business hierarchies. Top-down command-and-control management structures and dynamics struggle to maintain effectiveness in the face of free-flowing streams of content-rich information, coming from all directions.  Nevertheless, it’s highly likely that hierarchical structures are here to stay … but it’s equally likely that the exercise of hierarchical power and control will be transformed over time.

The dynamics of how people relate – to work, to markets, to bosses and to each other – are changing. A new organizing principle posited on network dynamics – “wirearchy” – a dynamic flow of power and authority based on connections and conversations, may be emerging as a structural principle and a social dynamic for managing organized activities in  both business and society.

Wirearchy is an informal but pervasive emerging structure of governance, strategy, decision-making and control based on knowledge, trust, meaning and credibility. Things get done and results are achieved through the interplay of vision, values, connections and conversation. Wirearchy is generated by an open architecture of information, knowledge and focus, enabled by connected and converging technologies.  It suggests a fundamental change in the dynamics of human interaction in – and with – organizations of all sizes, shapes and purposes, and represents an evolution of hierarchy as an organizing principle and dynamic.

Wirearchy will not render hierarchy obsolete, nor the need for direction and control; rather, it will render them more necessary. However, it will change the meaning of those terms and how they are used and experienced.

Many people won’t accept authority easily any more. While old-guard keepers-of-the-keys cling to authority and power, the older models of how to lead and follow are unravelling. Organization charts are still useful, but only if and as they become more fluid (for example, when supplemented by Organizational Network Analysis and a deeper understanding of information and knowledge flows, or streams.  Certainly, organization charts are beginning to appear in a much wider range of shapes than before, and often convey new messages about power, status and control.  An example: “Organigraphs,” or pictures of the ways organizations flow and operate, are clearly more pertinent, accurate and useful in many instances when an organization’s activities are more transparent and porous to the external environment, according to strategy and organizational structure guru Henry Mintzberg.  They maintain a focus on the flow of an organization’s activities and processes, as opposed to the identification and location of decision-making power.

How do today’s leaders and senior managers respond to these forces? Clues are evident in initiatives emerging in the fields of customer and employee relationship management, organizational development, human resources management and organizational change: The use of techniques such as scenario planning, dialogue, open space, 360 degree feedback, emotional intelligence, coaching and mentoring have all grown significantly over the past several years. Together, these soften the rigidity of outmoded structures, and help people respond and adapt.

Most organizations carry out ongoing initiatives to create, clarify and improve capabilities in each of these emerging areas. Indeed, a large percentage of the global consulting industry is focused on diagnosing, developing and implementing strategies for these goals.

Wirearchy is significantly different.  While it insists that purpose and a focus on results towards that purpose is a core structural component, it also focuses on the structural and psychosocial dynamics generated by interconnectivity and access to knowledge. From the touchstone of purpose and objectives, it addresses not only with what’s happening at the top, but also what’s happening in the roots and branches of an organization. Where hierarchy created focus and meaning through the control of knowledge, wirearchy implies that the use and control of knowledge acknowledges and involves a much wider range of stakeholders..

Yesterday’s success factors involved secrecy and control, size, role clarity, functional specialization and power. Today’s emerging factors are openness, speed, flexibility, integration and innovation. The concept of wirearchy allows readers to develop a strategy for creating, implementing these factors in ways that respond with value to continuously changing conditions. Its core components are:

* a crystal clear vision and values
* a strategically designed and integrated technology infrastructure
* comprehensive, clear and completely open communications
* pertinent objectives and focused measurement
* characteristics of culture that create, support and enable responsiveness, adaptability and fluidity
* leadership that is clear, focused, open, authentic and shared

It will take time, experience and intelligent customizable metrics in this new era to know what “success” and “effectiveness” mean and look like. In such an era,  where there is literal meaning in the phrase, “everything is connected to everything else,” we will have to watch, learn and imagine how to lead and manage in ways that foster continuous developments in the effectiveness of individual workers, small working groups, the organizations with which they work and the societies in which we all live.

Clay Shirky is a well-know Internet / Web expert who published a book titled “Here Comes Everybody” last year.  While it does not focus exclusively on the workplace, it’s a decent bet that the concepts and dynamics Shirky addresses will have major impact on the future of work. 

As the forces he describes continue to spread throughout society and grow in impact, this organizing principle – Wirearchy — is likely to impact the design of collaborative software, the structure(s) of organizations and the ways work and workers are managed in ways that we have not yet encountered.

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It will be interesting to see if Google Wave, a new tool released to developers, will assist in knowledge sharing and collaboration activities.  Check out the video and sneak peek and a good article from CIO magazine.  “Google’s newly unveiled Wave may be called a communication and collaboration tool, but it’s much more than that. Wave combines key trends that we’ve seen the last couple years on the Web into one elegant application. And it may make today’s enterprise tools such as Microsoft SharePoint look ridiculously complicated.”  It “mixes old technologies like e-mail, IM and online documents in a unified, socially-oriented view, could break down the traditional ways in which we compartmentalize and separate information — both as consumers and businesspeople.”  Looking forward to hearing how this tool might affect knowledge management practices at KMWorld 2009, Nov 17-19, in San Jose CA.

Published by HBS in the fall & you can hear McAfee speak at KMW09.

We are very excited about Andrew McAfee opening KMWorld 2009 and talking about resetting the enterprise with new enterprise 2.0  collaborative tools.  Andrew coined the phrase “enterprise 2.0″ in 2006 in a Sloan Management Review article.  This fall his book on Enterprise 2.0 will be published by Harvard Business School Press.   Keep the conference dates, November 17-19 in your calendar and join us for interesting discussions!  And until you meet him in person at KMWorld 2009,  you can follow Andrew on Twitter, Facebook, and his blog.

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A book was published several  years ago by Bill Jensen (Work 2.0 – Rewriting the Contract), which outlined four principles for the rapidly-approaching interconnected workplace of the near future. The principles are:

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1. Embrace the Asset Revolution - this speaks to Peter Drucker’s observation that “knowledge workers (now) own the means of production”. It’s a two-way street now – employees are deciding where they’ll invest their time, energy and intellectual capital, just as does the employer.

2. Build My Work My Way - Employees know they own the means of production … and they don’t want to waste time, in a complex, ever-flowing world. They’ve got other things to do as well … like try to lead a balanced life … which they’ll define, thank you very much.

3. Deliver Peer-to-Peer Value - Increasingly, employees are aware of how being networked together via email, IM, PDA’s, the Internet and the corporate Intranet necessitates collaboration. They like collaborating, and they don’t want artificial barriers to collaboration to stop them from adding value.

4. Develop Extreme Leaders - Leaders must be accountable … to exercise that accountability in a networked world, leaders must be willing to listen and to be challenged regarding the way work gets done.

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The Interconnected Workplace – An Ever-Changing Flow

The new conditions of an interconnected workplace world – free-flowing information delivered via integrated information systems, linked together in networks of relationships – are rapidly redefining the nature of work.

Knowledge work happens in workers’ heads and in the interactions and communications in which they engage.

Carrying out knowledge work usually involves interacting with large integrated information systems and communicating via email and conversations (whether one-on-one or in meetings). These information systems (such as SAP and PeopleSoft) are now second or third-generations systems, designed to have greater flexibility and customizability than the versions that first appeared in the early to mid-90’s. Nevertheless, due to the nature of information and the paths along which it flows … from the markets and the customers inwards … the work activities demanded of employees have been and will continue to be ever-changing.

No amount of business process reengineering can prevent this, and no system will be infinitely flexible. Customers’ needs, wants and tastes change. Most business processes that are effective today will need to change over time, with a horizon of several years at the most.

In The Flow – Knowledge Work Keeps Changing

Let’s combine this view of how work has changed with the realization that we have also moved from stable job descriptions to focusing on competency models – the sets of skills, attributes and behaviours needed to provide flexibility and effective performance – as definers of work. Competency models are just that … models … and are often accompanied by Personal Development Plans. What we have is a new equation – from the employer’s side – about delivering focused performance and results.

Now, let’s look at it from the employee points of view. During the past fifteen years or so, we’ve all experienced the large impacts of information and knowledge being brought to bear on most products and services that we need, want and use. We’ve learned about the one-to-one marketing relationships, in which what we consume is personalized to our “user profile”. We’ve witnessed an explosion of products and services available in all sorts of blended combinations, based on the understanding that personalization and a wide range of choice will enhance customer choice. This phenomenon is aided and abetted by the realization that tastes and appeal change rapidly – there’s a flow here too. Employees are the ones that buy Jones Soda, or move from one style of jeans to the next, depending upon what the latest buzz is.

The same dynamic is starting to appear in the workplace … and it seems as if it will be the way of the future. For at least the last five years (it actually started about ten years ago) people have been encouraged to:

· Forget about guaranteed employment … the business environment is unpredictable and unforgiving
· Think of themselves as a transferable set of knowledge and skills
· Focus on doing what they have a passion for, and take responsibility by believing first and foremost in themselves

Knowledge Workers Respond To The Flow

Today, a second wave of factors is combining to lend added impetus to these trends. The interconnectedness of networks, joined by the sophistication of information systems capabilities, is combining with a year-after-year wave of well-educated new employees entering the workforce. These employees are rapidly demonstrating that they know it’s their energy and their working capital that employers are using to drive organizational results.

They’re aware that it is their life energy, and their life choices, that are being impacted by the relentless demands for performance.

Guess what? – they like performing well, they like being competent and being well-rewarded, and they’re in tune with the markets out there. They usually know what it will take to deliver a good experience to a customer. They don’t have a lot of tolerance for policies and procedures that have been built to satisfy the company, not the customer.

They’ve been told, time and again, that they’ll have to be continuously learning. In order to learn continuously, they’ll tell you ! “I know how I learn best and work best, and I’d really appreciate it if you asked me how, rather than presuming to know“. People bring themselves to work each day.

What’s that famous line ?

“Treat your employees like volunteers, they can choose whether or not to be at work each day”

The range of cultures, personalities and lifestyles in our society is vastly expanded compared to a decade ago, and it’s abundantly clear that people are infinitely variable. As this infinite variability continues to penetrate workplaces defined by business processes, individual employees will increasingly respond to continuous performance demands by needing, wanting and insisting on working their own way – in the way they know that they can deliver the best they have to offer. Their very own voice will be heard, their very own style will be seen.

The Mass Customization of Work is coming … a wide range of individual working / learning styles, combined in collaborative networks, generating a continuous flow of the necessary results.

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I’m reposting this recent Seth Godin post because it proposes some interesting ideas on what we could do at KMWorld:

Major information flows in organizations, c. 1975

One of the most important things I’ve learned in the last few years is that, except for senior management, no one in most organizations really understands what the business of the organizations is all about — how decisions are made, what information is used and how, etc. And, at the same time, senior management really has no clue about what goes on at the front lines of their organization, or outside their organization — what potential new recruits think, what customers really think about the organization, etc.

This should be obvious, if you think about it. Senior managers are insulated from the front lines and customers. No one wants to tell the boss what’s wrong with the organization — it’s a career-limiting move. And senior managers are too busy to spend much quality time with either employees or customers. To the extent they interact with customers it’s with the senior managers of those customers, who are likewise unenlightened about what is going on in their own organizations. So decisions are made, often, in a vacuum, based on deficient and filtered information.

As for the line employees, they usually have never been exposed to or taught about what goes on in other parts of the organization, or how managers make decisions. This is getting worse: The current generation of young employees are likely to work in 12 organizations in their careers — not enough time to really figure out “the business of the business” in any of them. The tragedy is that often neither they nor their senior managers think they need to know what the business is all about, unless and until they become senior managers themselves. So most employees spend their entire careers feeling under-appreciated, disconnected, unconsulted, and annoyed at stupid instructions and useless information requests from management. An they have a ton of very useful information about customers, operational ineffectiveness, and what’s going on in the world and the marketplace, that is never solicited, and never proffered.

I care about all this because I have spent about 1/3 of my career in an area called Knowledge Management. This discipline began about 15 years ago, and has largely followed the track of other business ‘fads’ like business process reengineering and total quality management — a flurry of investment and enthusiasm, followed by disenchantment and finally abandonment.

The problem with KM is that the people charged with introducing it into organizations were mostly front-line back-office people — middle managers with a background in library management, IT or training. Few of them really knew how decisions were made and resources allocated in their organizations. The library people saw KM as a content management exercise. The IT people saw KM as a set of technology projects (intranets, extranets, groupware). The training people saw KM as an e-learning vehicle. Senior managers were mostly unenthusiastic, worried that it would spawn more IT bureaucracy like e-mail, and not seeing any new value provided by it. Their hope, tragically, was that KM might automate some back office functions and allow cost savings (e.g. blowing up the corporate library).

We might be able to understand the reasons for KM’s failure if we looked through the eyes of senior managers, front-line employees, and customers, at the value of information to organizations. The diagram above shows how this looked in the days before ubiquitous computers — say, in 1975.

At that time, internal memos, typed up by secretaries, instructed front-line and back-office employees what to do, and required them to report production data that managers could use for making decisions. Written information flowed vertically, not horizontally. Managers talked with other managers, and employees talked with other employees, and occasionally with outside colleagues, to learn their jobs and share what they had learned. A few employees had started using the Internet and other electronic sources of information for research, but most research was done using the internal library or outside journals. Customers received printed marketing material from the organization, and submitted their orders. These were the principal information flows in organizations at that time.

This actually made a lot of sense, when you consider how senior managers saw, and operated, their organizations. The job of senior managers was and is to make the organization sustainable. Managers do this by making critical decisions, issuing instructions, capturing performance data, and tweaking those decisions accordingly. The variables they need to watch and make decisions about are:

1. Cash flow: The net result of sales, investments, loans and share issues, government incentives, operating expenses, R&D, dividends, and capital expenditures.
2. Share price: Investors’ assessment of future growth in cash flow, which is critical to obtaining low-cost capital.
3. Risks and opportunities: Threats from new and existing competitors, a variety of threats to reputation and business continuity, regulatory changes, rate changes, supply changes, frauds, disasters, and opportunities to innovate, make acquisitions, outsource, reorganize or change capital structure

To manage cash flow, they pressure employees to find ways to increase sales and reduce costs. Budgets, resource allocations, and monthly targets and reporting are their levers for doing so. To manage share price, they need to ensure that cash flow is always steadily rising. When cash flow from operations fails to meet targets, they look at layoffs, outsourcing, capital budget reductions, increasing government incentives through lobbying, cutting dividends or reorganizing (e.g. divesting unprofitable operations).

To manage risks, they will acquire, sue or out-advertise competitors, hire PR firms to whitewash and greenwash their social and environmental misdeeds, put controls in place to reduce risk of fraud, buy insurance and hedges to reduce exposure to rate changes and disasters, lobby against new regulations, lock in or acquire suppliers, outsource non-critical operations.

To manage opportunity, a few will invest in innovation, but for most larger organizations, it is much safer to acquire small innovative companies, to use leverage (borrow from the bank) when interest rates are lower than profit margins, and through planned obsolescence by constantly forcing customers to replace or upgrade, and locking them in to the organization’s product.

This is what senior managers do. It is not surprising, therefore, that they tend to see IT, KM and training as “non-value-added” activities. They were getting the information they needed before the advent of computers, so why should they invest in new IT and KM projects? And since they expect and receive little loyalty from employees, why should they invest in training them, when the essential knowledge they need must be obtained “on-the-job” anyway?

In the 1980s and 1990s, most organizations invested in three new technologies, mostly reluctantly: fax, e-mail, and intranets. Fax was a faster and cheaper way to send marketing materials to customers and to receive orders, and send instructions to and collect performance data from remote operations, and it was not an expensive technology to introduce. Its heyday was a mere decade.

E-mail and corporate intranets were introduced in most organizations in the 1990s. Senior managers expressed concerns that e-mail would be a scourge, and many attempted to limit its use. They were right about it being a scourge, but not successful in limiting its use. It was a stealth success — permitted because it was not that expensive, but quickly used for mostly inappropriate purposes. Corporate intranets were used at first to automate the two dominant types of shared organizational information: policies and procedures, and directories. Eliminating hard-copy manuals and directories was a welcome change, but intranets quickly became massive repositories for millions of context-free archived documents that were of almost no use to anyone but the author. The consequence has been an explosion in complex server technologies, taxonomies and search technologies — for information that almost no one finds to be of any value. Documents touted as ‘reusable best practices’ were dumped into the corporate intranet and abandoned. Some organizations ended up hiring intranet ‘garbage collectors’ to remove the most useless and obsolete content.

To try to connect to customers, many organizations in the 1990s and 2000s have invested in ‘extranets’ (websites that only customers had access to) and sophisticated, interactive public websites. They found to their chagrin that decision-makers in most organizations were too busy to visit their websites, and that most of the people browsing the web pages they had so carefully crafted were job-seekers, students doing papers, the competitors, and the media.

So here we are in 2009, and the principal information flows in most organizations are still exactly what they were in 1975, as depicted in the chart above. What’s changed:

• Instead of typed memos, instructions are now sent to employees by e-mail; performance data is sent back up to management by e-mail, or captured electronically automatically.
• Peer-to-peer conversations are still mostly real time and face-to-face or voice-to-voice (or IM); asynchronous conversations in e-mail threads are arguably the least effective. E-mail has allowed more conversation with colleagues outside the organization, and with young workers much learning occurs through such conversations, though IT security in most large organizations prohibits many of the social media used by young workers to communicate outside the organization, nullifying much of this advantage and creating considerable animosity.
• The library has been largely supplanted by the Intranet, but it is now much harder to find things and there are fewer information professionals able to help you find stuff, so searching takes longer and is less effective. The Intranet in most organizations is still used principally for the same two purposes: looking up policies and procedures, and directories. Most other Intranet content is unused or in some cases misused.
• E-mail has allowed a massive increase in the amount of work delegation between employees in most organizations. It is easier to delegate work when you don’t have to face the person you’re asking to do it, even though the chance of it being done well is less. E-mail also allows much more procrastination in organizations — people send requests for information to others Friday afternoon, as an excuse to put off working on a project until the next week. There is considerable evidence that e-mail has had a significant negative effect on productivity and work effectiveness, because there is no accountability to the sender for time of the recipients that has been wasted, and because it costs nothing to send an e-mail to an unlimited number of recipients.
• After a period of disintermediation (people doing their own on-line research instead of having librarians, assistants or information professionals do it for them) there has been a swing back to reintermediated research, as most employees learned they lack the significant competencies needed to do quality research. Young workers tend to still do their own on-line research, but only until they find an appropriate intermediary and reach the level at which they are permitted to delegate research.
• Most marketing material is now sent by e-mail and also duplicated on the organization’s public Internet site, but in these electronic forms it is mostly unread.

In other words, in adding to the volume and complexity of information systems, we have added relatively little value, and in some cases actually reduced value. The reason for this is simple:

1. We have not done anything to substantively improve the ability of senior management to manage the business (i.e. to manage cash flow, share price, risks or opportunities).
2. We have not done anything to substantively improve the effectiveness of any of the information flows (arrows in the above diagram) that matter in organizations, or the quality of the information.

We have, in short, implemented a solution that addressed no problem. We introduced new KM tools because we could.

If that were the end of the story, we could just shrug off KM as another business fad and move on. But there is something happening in organizations today that is beginning to improve the quality of information and the effectiveness of information flows that matter, something that creates a second opportunity for KM people to actually do something useful.

What is happening is that people are beginning to manage their own information, and information processes. They are finding workarounds to the dysfunctional processes in the organizations they work in. They are finding ways to draw on people in their growing online networks to do their jobs better. They are realizing that, if tomorrow’s workers will end up working in a dozen different jobs in their lifetimes, they need to take responsibility for their own learning and their own knowledge, and take it with them from one job to the next. Increasingly, they are keeping their knowledge in their own personal repositories, and in their own personal networks.

I have written before about what I call Personal Knowledge Management, which is an attempt to enable workers to do this more effectively. My problem was that PKM is impossible to sell to senior management, because it has no value for them. I toyed with the idea of trying to sell it front-line workers directly, perhaps by starting a magazine called Working Smarter. The problem with this is that everyone is at a different stage in their evolution towards PKM, and there are no standard answers or approaches — we each have to muddle this through for ourselves, based on our own ‘knowledge set’ and information behaviours.

But perhaps if we outlined a future scenario of where this PKM trend is headed, we might be able to evolve an approach that would accommodate the needs of both individual workers and the organizations struggling to cope with this phenomenon.

To this end, let me start with a story of a young business analyst named Jon:

This is a composite of a number of real cases of young people working around dysfunctional information systems I have witnessed in the last two years. I expect it’s going to become more and more common.

Let’s suppose that, in twenty years, Jon’s information behaviour becomes the norm. Eventually organizations will have to face the problem, and end the guerilla war that is brewing between the IT security people and Gen Y in a growing number of companies and institutions. I think it is unlikely that most will be able to resolve the perceived security threats in such a way that they could allow the Jons of the world to do what they want inside the firewall. What is more likely is that, just like the calculator and telephone, the laptop (soon to become even smaller and more powerful) will evolve to be a ubiquitous personal device that people will carry with them everywhere. At that point having redundant computers (and phones) on everyone’s desk will become absurd, and IT security can start to focus on protecting confidential data from being accessed, rather than trying to lock down employees’ appliances. At that point, the role of the rest of IT, and KM, will have to change completely. Here’s a scenario of how I think it might look:

Major information flows in organizations, c. 2025?

In 2025, every individual in every organization uses their own personal computer for both personal and work applications. Almost all information is Web-based, with organizations’ proprietary information only accessible through authorization software. E-mail has disappeared, replaced by a virtual presence application that includes instant messaging, screensharing, voice/videoconferencing, filesharing, calendaring, tasklists. Employees maintain a Company Sector on their machines in which they put information that can be accessed 24/7 by other employees. Most people also maintain a Public Sector on their machines in which they put information that can be accessed 24/7 or subscribed to by anyone in the world (this has replaced blogs and applications like Facebook), and Community Sectors in which they put information that can be accessed 24/7 by other members of that Community. The aggregation of the Company Sectors of all employees of an organization replaces the corporate Intranet of past generations; it can be viewed by anyone in that organization. The aggregation of the Community Sectors of all members of a particular community replaces the community tools (forums, wikis etc.) of past generations; it can be viewed by anyone in that community.

The IT department is still responsible for maintaining security around the organization’s proprietary information, but very little content is left in this category. IT also checks that the information in employees’ machines’ Company Sectors is appropriate for sharing, and auto-replicating properly.

The KM department still manages the purchase of external information, though almost all information in 2025 is free; information producers have realized that their business model is to apply that information to specific customers’ business environment, in consulting assignments, rather than trying to sell publications. Most of the mainstream media were nationalized after they went bankrupt using their traditional business models, and now operate as public services.

Most of what the KM department does now is trying to facilitate more effective conversations among people within the organization and with people outside the organization, including customers. They facilitate many meetings that use the virtual presence application, especially those that involve more than five people. That facilitation includes organizing the meeting, distributing advance materials, facilitating the discussion (conflict resolution, staying on schedule etc.), and even recording, editing and publishing the meeting as appropriate. They run courses in effective conversation, meeting and presentation skills.

In addition, the KM department conducts environmental scans and conducts research in areas the organization wants to focus on, and publishes and runs short video presentations on the results. They also browse the content of the aggregate of the Company Sectors of all employees of the organization, notifying managers and employees of content that may be worthy of follow-up, and they assist employees to manage their subscriptions to people’s Public Sector content. And, when the organization holds sessions and conferences on strategy, risk, innovation or customer relationships, the KM department is on hand to do advance and just-in-time research.

.     .     .     .     .

If you’re in KM, or in a business that has a KM function, I’d be interested in your thoughts on this. I’ve been known to be a bit ahead of my time in thinking about the future of business and technology, but I think this scenario is quite feasible.

I discovered Stan Garfield’s list of knowledge management Twitterers recently. There were 47 at the time and I was pleased to be included. About a third were new ones for me and I decided to follow most of them after checking out their recent tweets. Stan also has an excellent list of knowledge management bloggers.

Stan links to several other lists of knowledge management Twitters including David Gurteen’s KM Twitter list and Patrick DiDomenico’s KM Twitter List.

Stan also provided other KM Twitter groups to join: Twitter Groups Knowledge Management (KM) Practitioners and Flocks/KM.

I also discovered an interesting Twitter app – WeFollow. You can add your Twiter feed and pick three tags. You can also search by these tags to help decide what to choose and see who else is using these tags. I tried the tag, KM, and found  10,355  Twitterers sorted by popularity. The others I tried are listed below with the Twitters at the time of discovery.  The numbers have jumped by several thousand in each in the last few days.

You seem to be able to go back and register again and add more tags. However, they wipe out the old tags so you are limited to three. I ended up picking KM, knowledgemanagement, and enterprise 20 on my third try.

e20 – 7,869 sorted by popularity

enterprise20 – 13,347

KM – 10,355

knowledgemanagement – 3,998

This is another way to find relevant KM and enterprise 2.0 twitters. There is also the enterprise 2.0 Twitter list started by Susan Scrupski.

Twitter on.