Do we need words anymore?

Earlier this week I was in a large office in Central London and I found myself listening to the things that were going on around me. There wasn't much talking, but there was an awful lot of tap-tapping as people punched out emails, composed Word documents on their computers, or entered data into web forms and applications. A huge volume of written content was being created just on that floor. Multiply that by the number of floors in that building; by the number of buildings in London; by the number of cities around the world and you'll end up with an (almost) incalculable number of words. Most of that content will be available to us via the web.

I've read reminders that Moore's Law does not and cannot apply to the human brain. Human beings are beginning to suffer from information saturation. And what about people in developing countries who cannot read or write. They don't have this skill, but they are increasingly getting access to the technology allowing them to connect to content. What use are all those words to them?

Is the answer video? We can assimilate knowledge video messages much faster than we can through the written word, and it allows an additional dimension to the message - facial expression, body language and so on. The barrier to entry has really dropped with the growing popularity of YouTube and other video sharing sites. Creating content is also easy with the wide availability of video capture capability on mobile phones and portable mini cameras such as the Creative Vado. With all these tools it may even be quicker to create video than writing the same content as words.

Hmmmm.

T-Shaped people

I was reading a document about how the culture of an organisation has changed over the past 10 years. It referred to “T-shaped” people. “T-shaped” because they are deep problem solvers in their own specialism but are capable of understanding and interacting with a wide range of other specialisms. These are the kind of people that will enable collaborative organisations to come to life and squeeze most life out the collaborative tools that we offer. I agree.

Double Edged Sword

I’ve been a flexible worker for a number of years. I have zero dependency on paper or a physical presence and excellent technology which means I can work from just about anywhere. And it has proved quite liberating. One of the main drivers behind the ‘blending’ I have talked about in previous posts. However, it can be a double edged sword from the enterprise perspective.

When we all worked together in an open plan office, one of the key components of knowledge management – people to people conversations – happened naturally. If you learned something useful you could tell your colleagues. If someone in your team needed help, they could raise their head and ask. Chances are, someone in the same office would know the answer. And you would overhear conversations which might not be relevant at the time but which you could store away for when you needed to ‘know’ something.

With flexible working, you lose much of that. You lose much of the context for a piece of knowledge – “Jane did it this way when she was up against a tight deadline” The latter half of the sentence being the context. Because flexible workers are not usually in the same place at the same time, this can drive an increase in the use of asynchronous tools such as email. In their own way, these tools then spawn a set of behaviours which can dilute decision taking and reduce the agility of a business. Things such as copying everyone to cover your back. Or asking ten other people instead of taking the decision yourself.

So, on the one side there are major benefits from flexible working around increases in productivity and motivation amongst flexible workers, and on the other side the same people can become increasingly isolated, disconnected and out of the knowledge loop.

All this is just one of the reasons social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter should be explored enterprise use. They can re-connect people and begin to restore the context. Because they are open for viewing by everyone in your extended network – not just the people on the email distribution list – they can provide that always on stream of context. What I’m doing. Issues I have. Help I need. It’s all out there again.

Connect me to someone who knows

On his The Obvious blog Euan Semple recalls how at the BBC he found that ways of effectively putting people in touch with people became more important that putting people in touch with information. With social networking technology out there now that facilitates this, I think we should think very carefully about the knowledge management priorities inside any organisation we are involved with. Especially as business (and life generally for that matter) moves so fast and changes so often. Codifying knowledge so that it can be input to a system may just be a waste of time if it loses its context and is obsolete within a very short time period. Maybe.

Tomorrow's Intranet Is Already Here!

I was in a workshop the other day with my colleague Richard Dennison and we were thinking about the future of Intranet content. Richard summarises our findings nicely on his blog. The key consideration for me, was that we’ve now created a world inside the organisation where all content can now be classified as collaborative. Previously, we’d used words such as definitive, official and so on which implied it was owned and published by and individual, or very few. Official content is probably already a minority of the content we have available to us, and as a proportion of the total it will continue to shrink. What’s interesting about this new world is that this democratisation of publishing and crowd-sourcing of content is just the beginning of some fundamental changes we’ll see in the very fabric of organisations over the next decade. Businesses can no longer hold on to the top down structural models and processes constructed centuries ago during the age of empires. Big changes are foot!!

Knowledge or Information?

I’m doing a fair amount of work these days on the governance arrangements which need to be in place for some of the new social media tools, such as blogs and wikis.

The wiki phenomenon in particular is an interesting one.

One of the key success factors for traditional intranets is the implementation of tools to ensure content is kept up to date, is usable, accessible for people with disabilities, and complies with the organisational policies and any regulations that affect your industry. Important so that users can have confidence that the material they are viewing is safe to use as part of their business dealings. Trusted content. This is most often achieved by having clear ownership of content. Someone you can pin responsibility to. However, in the new collaborative world of crowd-sourced content there is often no one particular owner of content, so who do you pin responsibility on?

This means we need to think differently about content governance.

But there’s another dimension. People sometimes refer to the content on these collaborative platforms as knowledge. Explicit knowledge. I don’t think there’s ever really been agreement about when explicit knowledge becomes information. There are as many views as there are practitioners. Whichever way you look at it a significant overlap will exist between knowledge management policies and information management policies. The two need to be taken together.

Then you have the issue of whether a single organisation – even some of the largest – can ever really generate effective ‘crowd-sourced’ content. Wikipedia is a good example of effective crowd-sourcing and the wisdom of crowds. It depends on a substantial volume of people having sufficient knowledge of a subject reviewing and editing content such that its accuracy and relevancy increases in, typically, small incremental steps. However, inside an organisation there are often only a handful of people who have sufficient knowledge of a subject to make a valid contribution. A handful of people does not constitute a crowd! So what happens is that the wiki platform – put in place for crowd-sourcing content – starts to be used as a (sometimes simple) content management platform, by-passing the controls and policies in place on the normal content management system. Sometimes this is done for mischievous purposes – to get people out of the rigour associated with owning important content. However, it’s more often because the wiki platform is so much easier to use than the official organisational content management system. So you can’t blame people.

You can add to that the tension between knowledge management (keep everything so we can learn from it) and information retention (get rid of everything as soon as you can).

And the fact that a wiki platform will often contain a mix of genuine crowd-sourced material and individually owned ‘published’ content.

It’s complicated.

So what’s the answer? Should we re-classify traditional content managed intranets as ‘legacy’ intranets and move to a different form of governance for the whole intranet, or should we try and force different kinds of kind onto different platforms, which will be difficult as people will naturally gravitate to the platform of least resistance?

What is clear however, that the drivers of these policies are still there, and in fact are becoming more prevalent. Growing concerns about data privacy, identity theft, stories about the potential impact of loss of data etc. mean that governance is likely to be tightened rather than relaxed. Another tension.

I’m going to have to think about this some more! Watch this space.