social networks | Emergent Meccano

Human Factor, and the inevitable messiness

October 19, 2012

The real treat to the on-going online conversations is humans interacting and sharing, adding flavours to the context in where they do their provisioning and knowledge foraging.

Creative Space, emerging ways of learning

Learning Networks

Game Plan

Why the Landlord’s social game evolve and create such embedded culture? Organising people is hard, herding the cats really makes sense, since most collaboration amongst people hold in-built power relations, and we constantly disagree. Even in the small world examples as within a family or between friends, we argue. The fruitful conversations helps us pane out the negotiated truth. Rules help us find a pattern useful for collaboration, as with Monopoly. The basic rules of this game are very simple, so simple that even kids grasp the core concepts in a snippet. What makes this game so intriguing is the social layer that is not codified in the rules. We as players expand, cheat, remix, i.e. building pacts to win. Refine the money transactions with add-on rules that the taxes paid should go into growing pile of money, that anyone stepping on the free-parking collects. This is why people with very strict morale and compliance to rules have difficulties to engage in the extra layers to the game. Whereas most of us others who are adaptive, go with the flow and have fun.

When organisations do engage in knowledge management, they have tried to codify and apply rules that are overly complex, which leads to a mess. Since people obstruct, when they can’t comprehend the plan and don’t know how to behave in this strictly regulated environment. In information management practices derived from us being information professionals, we stretch the matrix with way to many metadata steps in provisioning. Killed by taxonomy! We are only able to add context within our enacted environment. The matrix machinery behind the scenes has to help us and refine the provision and uses in the pathway of the user and their networks. This fluid notion to knowledge is a much better reflection to how we humans act and reflect. And the matrix machinery (digital information infrastructures i.e. ecm, search, taxonomy, ontologies and so forth) has to be adaptive, and let the social layers and human factors and messiness be part of the calculation.

There will never be a perfect match, only information tidbits in the social fabric. The notion of social business and uses of social platforms will in a good setting lever the similar patterns to the ever growing public learning happening on the Internet. Appreciate the power of difference, and be aware of the echo chamber problem, with closed silos. Make the networks smarter!

But the enterprise social platforms do need a game plan, as simple and crispy as for Monopoly. Without a goal, and a framework for engagement and collaboration, there will only be technology without a relevant use.

The Remix Culture

Youth of today, level positive deviance and the knowledge creation in emerging networks. The entrepreneurial learner generation embrace the notion of networks, and take the information abundance for granted. Remix and Lego go hand in hand, since the most compelling part of playing with Lego. Is not only to go by the book, develop the bought package according to the manual, but rather the steps beyond. Where you take the simple building blocks and innovate new creations, or even program the tool through Lego MindStorm. The kids of today apply same passion to learn, through tinkering as we grown ups did. But with the big difference that their room is global, always connected with networks of peers who share the same passion. This is the reason why games like Minecraft grows with mind blowing speed, we like to co-create things and learn in the flow of events. This behaviour is in-built in our spines. How do we embrace creation spaces in the enterprise setting, and apply similar inspiring ideas to our workforces?

Reflections from the on-going conversation oozing out (#kmw12, #kmworld) from KMWorld 2012 conference. More reading from leaders in the KM guild, John Seely Brown, David Weinberger, Lt Col David Sanchez and more…

Leave a Comment » | information management, knowledge management, social networks, Uncategorized | Tagged: knowledge management | Permalink
Posted by Fredric Landqvist

Me, Myself and I: reflections on identity mashup

November 15, 2011

Living through the days of social internet changes, puzzles your own ego sometimes. A very fruitful and delicate debate, and was the main topic as web2.0 summit last month, has arisen amongst both internet intellectuals and ordinary folks like me. Who am I in the different representations of my daily life online? Split personality issues arise daily, given that you mashup professional feeds with family and truely private spheres.

Obviously I would love to have the simplicity of a seamless integration of services and spaces online without having to fill in forms from hell. Hence the rise of Facebook Connect, Twitter and Google alike mixes. They have different approaches to the problem from both technical and privacy/integrity stand-point. Facebook and Google+ stress authentic personas to clean out any internet-trolls diluting the conversation, whereas Twitter have more open strategy with psedonymn spaces. I do need both, as do we all.

It becomes even more relevant for people living under stressful and threatning environments of change or weird power relations to become a internet-handle rather than the exact person you are. In his recent book Evgeny Morozov, The Dark Side of Internet Freedom strikes against the utopian internet change perspectives. Which is really a good read, but then he sadly becomes one of these trolls in the furious debate with Jeff Jarvis and his recent book Public Parts.

But still the opportunities with identity2.0 needs to be amended, as from my personal reflection being researcher, practitioner, family father and so on. I use Google stuff to run my small business, but want that to work in tandem with my public google profile on G+. Happily I am not a well known name, and have not been struck by either Facerape or the like. The well known author Salman Rushdie used his social means to take-back his persona on Facebook, and I think this is only a fraction of all the issues and pains we are going to see going forward.

The social construct of personality is not easy, and have been heavily researched from many perspectives, and in the days of status updates reveiling our ‘best selfs’ reflections one do get The Picture of Dorian Gray in mind 😉

Your digital trails and profiles, is big bucks, no doubt about it. A marketers wet dream! Integrity, privacy and openess to conversations in different spaces will be one of our hardest nuts to crack, but I think the community online will tailor this a long the road. Blend the utopian and reality-check messages and raise your voice in the places your voice matters. Do not get overun by either market or govermental policies, it is time to act for your future and your kids. We design this together!

1 Comment | social networks, Uncategorized | Tagged: identity 2.0, privacy | Permalink
Posted by Fredric Landqvist

Bring out the eminence of your workforce

September 22, 2011

The notion of social business, resonates to many people today, given that we are seeing the swift change to more transparent business practices. And true engagement to the different constituents within the ecology for the enterprise, being the customers, consumers, partners, suppliers and obviously the leadership & workforce.

Why will open be so engraved to what we do in our everyday work. It all boils down to be authentic. Companies will not prosper with double standards, simple as that! Or as Lincoln ones said, character is like a tree, and reputation is the shadow.

For us who actively participate in this change, it is a true prerogative.

What facinates me, is what happends when we get the mutual adjustment of the crowds. Conversations orchestrated in similar ways as the virtual choir. We build bonds and relations, through our insigts and emotions to relate and see other peoples interests resonate our own being.

The creation of constituencies will emerge, and if these groups of people sharing values and insights also nourish curiousity and serendipity to new ideas. We are on the right path, again open! Contrasting this is the personalization of delivery. A matter of filter the abundance of triggers, feeds, content and flow of events that takes place all over the place. This notion is already very in front today in politics in US blocking their economy. This creates stove pipes, and balkanization of something that should go the opposite way. The bots already raise this issue of filter bubbles, i.e. the feed in Facebook or Social Search from Google. Algoritmic filtering in conjunction with social filtering might ease our minds in short term, but these small world scenes have to intersect and be intertwined! Our Circles overlap, as in the recent G+ design!

So if you are running a business, or are about the embark in the enterprise world. I would bring out the eminence of your workforce. As people connect with people, and embeddning this into the core values. Every discrete unite of practice will lever new knowledge creation. And build constintuency that will be a competitive advantage, regardless of what type of business you do.

The fear of loosing control, when the workforce speaks up (as in social media), should rather be reflected back to the leadership who fails to behave and act in the open. A good coach and thought leader will get people engaged to the cause and mission if the ways of working also is lived by the managers. The social networks run our lives, and helps us in continous learning. That is key to all this!

The art of long view, have to be intersected into how you run your business. Diversity and always learning and innovating outside your comfort zones, charge the influencers. From the inside out!

Who you are, speaks out so loudly, that I can hardly hear what you say!

We are seeing the contours of a new collaborative profession. The path to co-creating the social business.

4 Comments | Enterprise 2.0, knowledge management, social networks, Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by Fredric Landqvist

Information Tidbits in the social fabric!

May 19, 2011

Terminology, is what we talk about in our daily practices, share insigts and ideas with peers related to our business processes and embeded/intersected into our information systems. To harmonise, standardise and communicate coherent use of terms across the enterprise is a continuous improvement (think ‘lean‘). There will never be one golden standard only useful tidbits in the social fabric!

Lately we have seen an abundance of ‘terminology’ feeds into the ‘social’ realm. As Social Business, or Social Collaboration. This is an obvious tautology, never the less it comes into fashion 😉 In my research practice I have the refined use of terminology amongst peers, to get acceptance in relevant contributions to my part of the world, same goes when I do put on the business suit (like Mr Walker contrasting the Phantom). Same thing with different ways of communicating!

I took a detour into my reference litterature to grasp things ahead of me, and realised still how crispy and mindblowing the book ‘The Social Life of Information‘ is! Even if it was written during the haydays of 1998 (internet era or dot com) all things match with todays business arena. When we talk about the emerging social intranet (or social collaboration, or enterprise 2.0, etc), we as IS/IT-saviours get hooked into TOOLS! and forget that the social fabric that makes up any organisation. People will undertake predictable irrational uses.

As Mr James Robertsen, states in his recent post:

You can’t change corporate culture using social tools

Spot-on!

Communication and conversations amongst people is all about sense-making to cope with your everyday persuit. Hence in the midst of this resides our terminology, the way we express our self, manifest our agreements and rule out our policies and procedures to work together in a polite and easy manner. To narrow down the scope for this post into the theme around social intranet. I took the itchy part called Findability! One albatross around his neck, that any intranet manager could testify is intranets poor findability. Pragmatically we all agree that it should be easy to find things of high relevance to my needs, second it would be sweet if it also were simple to contribute in such a manner that I add things with high quality. And not dilute the information landscape with abundance of crap!

So findability isn’t a quest for a new search engine of preferred taste, it is all about pragmatic use of search patterns, and provision with good/simple to use information management practices. In all this our terminology is the glue to sense-making. Hence if one took a snippet of the social intranet tools and used it to cope with ‘the enterprise terminology‘! These terms are heavily embedded into the ICT tools we use. Be it in the Business Applications arena (structured data) or Enterprise Content Management arena ( unstructured data).

Here in this hot-spot we really could get attention, engagement and lively debates about the use of words in the enterprise, and their different interpretations. Social as anything! and for a good cause. With this practice in place (networked governance), the future state of enterprise linked data makes sense in everyday business. And we would also get pathways for our wayfinding to corporate culture and social fabric via the conversations around terminology….set into action in search engine refinement, guided classification means in any provision and so forth. All in all improving the information architecture and obviously findability….

3 Comments | Enterprise 2.0, information management, social networks, Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by Fredric Landqvist

Rebooting enterprise collaboration: the emerging Social Intranet

November 1, 2010

Social Intranet, originally uploaded by fredriclandqvist.

Collaboration runs the show in any business, since we all are social creatures and even if mechanical devices helps us to become more networked it all boils down to our inherited path of social constructs. Internet have been the melting pot of new opportunities, and lately with masscollaboration and macrowikinomics we see emerging new practices in basically any domain.

So why is still the Intranet such an difficult place to be in? Land of confussion!

Well from my researchers perspective, having the intranet as platform perspective it is all pretty clear. We lack the open tinkering and innovation of the Internet. Command and control still runs the internal scene, not only from a techie perspective, but even more in terms of governance of the intranet (instead of networked/community based intranet governance?) and use patterns. Business models and ways of working do not change that easy! All Enterprise 2.0 gurus share the same stories about angst to change, and user adoption of the emerging social collaborative platforms, regardless of brand of choice.

From the end-user perspective, we get disjoint end-user experience and clutter rather than slick, simple and seamless workspaces where we are able to contribute and share in the on-going conversations inside and outside the corporate walls. The traditional intranet that we all have used, do reflect top-down publishing metaphores and sometimes look like maze-like gigantic fileshares. Side by side to this creature we have also seen the growing use of collaborative (CSCW) platforms since the 90’s now reshaped in web collab workspaces, such as Sharepoint or the like. When the ambition is set to become the web desktop for any user, we also link to business applications that is supposed to support our daily work (tasks). Sadly the abundance of business apps really clutter the user-experience. Seamless is the last word the end-user use in my research. The remedy is then focused on knowledge discovery, or as the end-user puts it: I want to Google my internal work spaces, rendered as the intranet. Not an easy task, as we all know!

Rebooting the business? Why social web themes outside will drive change inside…

Intranet challenges derived from experience, research and elsewhere that any Intranet Manager needs to think about

Findability
Connectivity / Connecting People
Interoperability / Integrated
Ease-of-use
Externalisation
Mobility

Do these reflect your business challenges as well?

The 5 mega-trends in the intranet space, envisioned from Jane McConnell:

#1 The intranet is becoming the front-door into the “workplace web”, #2 team-oriented, #3 real-time, #4 place-independent, #5 people focused

How to disenthrall the personlized one-stop-shop (portal) intranet paradigm

The last decade most organisations have joined the enterprise portal journey. The casualties, and wounded from the trenches with intranet-professionals tells a bloody story for us to consider going forward. Failures in enterprise portal implementation and governance, is one of the pillars in knowledge management research in conjunction with (CSCW) collaboration backdrops! Is it possible to address the challenges above from an different angle? Through the cues in emerging Collective Action with Electronic Networks of Practice, and new ways of working for the communications guild with tight intersection to everyday work, so things do not get lost in transmission!

What new intranet design implications decrease the portal-peril?

part #1

If you mash the 4 first challenges (ease-of-use, interoperable, connected and findable) into the stew. You have too spice the design with new social flavor (emergent social software platforms) and information-mechanical (semantics) devices. First one-size-do-not-fit-all, hence the one-stop-shop will always be problematic from a information architeture perspective. (FYI I wrote this popular science printed matter 2006, What is the right information to the right person at the right moment?)

While using Internet you use Google to locate things, but this space has become more social with referals (social objects). Google’s business model to deliver all information to all anywhere, will inside the corporation become a similar claim for the Intranet manager: ‘The intranet will be the access to all information and people, anywhere, everywhere using any device.’ Pretty bold, but as Mark Morrell Intranet Manager at BT tells his story, this overarching perspective makes his Governance model actually more crispy.

The intranet with only one landing page, being a big search button?

In the best of worlds, the internal information environment consisted of well hyper-linked resources, where content provision practice flourished with world-class information management and all things where open to anybody. Then this might apply! Sadly, most enterprises consists of closed silos, abundance of both structured data (hidden in information systems) and unstructured data ( all the rest!) Common sensical approach to information management and structure will obviously improve findability and emerging search patterns. This part of the cake, isn’t a redesign thing, it is a never ending story of refinement. With smart-mechanical-devices (info-flow and the meta-data gadget [1,2]) givin’ a helping hand in any content provision, to lower the threshold we will see improved intranet findability.

For all of us trying to find relevant and timely content on the intranet to solve our daily issues and pains, we frequently use social networks to make-do. Connected to the corporate collective intelligence is key. This is why emerging technologies that fosters and cultivate networking and participation thrive, such as Yammer (microblogging). Cross-talk in large distributed work environments is difficult, and the ol’ school CSCW, Document Management and work-flow paradigm didn’t fullfill the ease of contribution. Several of the large scale implementations of i.e. Sharepoint2010 sites I have used for my research, have seen a exponential growth of Yammer use, contrasting the management pref. choice being Sharepoint 😉 simply because it is easy. The same goes with other more open collaborative platforms, such as wiki or blogs. Where trad. CMS contrasts simplicity in Confluence Wiki or WordPress. Interesting enough is that the better user adoption we get from collaborative platforms (open) the better findability we get! People want to have their intranet as easy to network within as Facebook, and simple to contribute in as Wikipedia, or in the blogosphere, and simple social enabled organisation as Delicious.

Interoperability, the rope-trick to keep it dead simple, as with the use of rss. If we get the second wave of users in the collaborative environment to contribute according to our high information management standards and policies with good and helping tools. We get content chunks that will be able to mashup with simple means as web oriented architecture suggest. Contrasting more complex schemes as SOA! Simplicity works, and makes sense.

When we use mashup technologies inside the intranet, social enabled collaboration and pragmatic information management we actually get ease-of-use as the business value from start. The intranet moves away from being indifferent (top-down) to become everyday work. Hence the emerging social intranet. Not one-stop-shop but a web of things, places and people connected as with Internet. Obviously intersected with SSO and proper Identity Management tools (back-end portal services). Push, pull and real-time into one vidid, and living intranet conversation!

part #2

Externalisation and Mobility challenges. The conversations within the corporation on all levels will prosper in the emerging social intranet, but what happends with all the daily conversations that we all engage in outside the corporate walls? Social Media is all over the place, and many knowledge workers do have extreme mobile workspace environment (inluding myself). The collective intelligence and participation on the Net through either stationary or mobile devices is already in action. Sanity check reveals that many times the ordinary business users, prefer to set-up simple collaborative environments such as Google Apps / Docs with their professional networks outside the firm, instead of using the internal platform. Why you might ask, well simplicity and easy access to connect and intersect in inter-organisational conversations. This challenge, will evolve into the open-intranet (which already some corporations use daily). At the fringe of the enterprise, we see new value networks emerge. Outstanding question, what will remain in closed silos inside the intranet? and how open and tranparent do the enterprise dare to become. Loosing control and behave according to the five principles for the age of networked intelligence (wikinomics and macrowikinomics) #1 collaboration #2 openness #3 sharing #4 integrity #5 interdependence.

How do we cope with this more complex semi-internal information environment?

Diversity of talent! Organic learning, flourish! Customize to the context

7 Comments | emerging technologies, governance, social networks | Tagged: enterprise 2.0, social intranet | Permalink
Posted by Fredric Landqvist

The pillars of the Earth: web squared a sanity check

August 17, 2010

We all get enlightened ideas, and creative innovative challenges popping up in our minds while being at ease. Not feeling the stress from everyday life, as i.e. being on vacation.

The emerging information shadow of intelligent things, combined with our social fabric will change the perception of everyday life. Augmented Reality has changed the way we look at real things, and get new lenses. Hyped to far reaching crescendos, but still in its fancy! Stepping back into more useful challenges, we realise that the apps we are about to try out do reflect more common grounds, such as shopping helpers to do well informed choices based upon both referral social constructs, as well as pricing and location angles.

This summer, I embarked into a very nice visit to Sicily with family and friends, and while being abroad I realised a few things:

The lack of connectivity, due to stupid roaming deals amongst telecom operators. While at home, you use your mobile device daily to look-up things relevant to where you are, and what you are up to at the moment. Held back by costly data-traffic deals, you feel held back by the opportunity to be connected as a tourist. Trying to locate a WiFi hotspot….. Why can’t one buy a travel-pack from your telecom operator to a specific destination? I would be happy to pay a fixed price for the ease of use….
Shopping, as a nice treat when being a tourist! Ask my wife 😉 How do one compare the things available in the local setting with a global networked manner, to do well informed choices?

Web Squared do hold several options, to bridge smart things and places with mobile devices and the Net with its ever-growing social scene. Who wouldn’t be happy to raise a question about a shopping choice, and get advise from both comparison services and friends!

With all emerging web services, and mobile devices and smart things we have now a scent of what will become a reality sooner than later. Given that I am ‘trigger happy’ when it comes to early adapter of technology, I recall one of my first mobile video encounters, sharing my experience from Milano at the Dome with the family. Crappy lo-fidelity and high-cost! Second, my first cracked iPhone that my beloved kids nicked at pool site in Turkey viewing YouTube clips from Donald Duck. The result a phone bill from hell. Lastly a recent real scenario: my wife finds a very nice product on site in Sicily, and I realise that I would like to compare both local and other on-line options to compare the product at hand. Challenged by the in-built constraints with both expensive mobile data price models, and a less coherent and seamless, easy to use service pack. My mind started to wander, if this wouldn’t be a perfect mashup social and networked business model? In its simplest incarnation, a bar code scanning app for the iPhone and an SMS-service, while being abroad. At home with fixed mobile data cost, a more seamless app with connections to Google Product Search and social consumer networks.

Coming back to work reading my flooded reader-feed finding a on-spot article, I started to use an app called Bakodo (bar code in Jap.), and it works 😉 Well it have obvious drawbacks given that it still is mainly focused on US, and do not hold a good back-end data raw material. I used my summer reading, Pillars of the Earth and got a quick response.

Other bar codes didn’t match due to the constraints of raw data in the information shadow. Building a Cathedral takes craftsmanship, time, resources and effort, given the book I read, and the same goes for the information shadow.

Similar, experience with Foursquare, WikiMe and several other location based thingy’s that I use daily. I am thrilled about how this set of services, apps and uses will meld into seamless everyday solutions.

The mashup economy, and future business networks will strengthen the consumers and improve the services, and product we use daily. Buying groceries and get detailed information about how sustainable choices you make daily, to well advised choices being in travel mode.

Our kids take this for granted, and my son (8yrs) who is a knowledge seeker, do expect my iPhone with all the apps, provide him with timely and well-matched knowledge discoveries(i.e. Wolfram Alpha my most expensive app). Drop any subject, and you will get the information handy to answer your kids.

Or as Shazam looks-up new music you hear, since my doughter wants her dad to update his preferences from the Beatles?!, and connect to new vibrant youngster music 😉

3 Comments | emerging technologies, Open Innovation, social networks, Uncategorized, web squared | Tagged: apps, bar code | Permalink
Posted by Fredric Landqvist

Panopticon or Beacon revisited: What’s the currency of your digital trails and social graphs?

April 24, 2010

The network society have never been more connected, and intertwined and every day we take gigantic steps into unknown territories and the philosophical appearance of ‘you/me’. In my quest, being researcher within knowledge networking in the era of Internet use, it is truly fascinating to sense this adaptive environment. Two well-known Internet brands (Google and Facebook) compete at the frontiers to learn all about the collective mind, and in their ecologies we see several symbiotic application spaces (Twitter et.al.).

Prior to the event of web 2.0 and social media and more specifically Facebook we have never had the opportunity to connect all our facets of ourselves and the networks we act within. The ease of sharing and contribute, is the main motivation for people being engaged online, since it strengthen our self-esteem, self-manifestation and persona amongst our peers. Recent emerging technologies from either Google (Buzz) and present also Facebook (Open Graph API) stress the privacy issues into new terrain. Before the event of Internet where we expose our everyday life into the digital trails of our information quest, and social networking, we didn’t have to tailor our privacy settings [1]. Some countries use surveillance on their citizens (panopticon)……are we heading the very same path on Internet? Many Internet savvy peers, who question the ‘good’ of letting your digital trails and contributions to become the currency for large brands, will reinvent tools and practices to act under the radar of corporate surveillance, no doubt about it. Whereas the crowd, not being Internet savvy stay put!

Social Mashup- here comes everybody – into one space?

Why, is something we all question in our everyday life online? It feels strange to share conversation space with relatives, peers, co-workers, customers, friends and family (including mother-in-law, and kids… expanded family). One has to consider who will be presented with your status updates, and sometimes-different networks simply do not comprehend to messages sent. In my case, who is über-social-networked compared to many peers this happens daily.

It isn’t difficult for me being a frequent user of social media; too see these changes as disruptive to the web per se, but also too future business models. Obviously Facebook wants to tap into the knowledge about Us as Google have been doing in a very prosperous way. A snippet of Adsense success and cashflow! 10 reasons why Facebook focus on Facebook and not the open-web 😉 = $!

I really like the idea of making things easy to share, and too network with my peers to connect, and for me the web isn’t the corporate BS stuff that have been flooded since 1995 with indifferent corporate web sites. The frustrating theme in all this is that these emerging standards to do mashup, aren’t interoperable. Open Social and Facebook Connect and Open Graph do not act seamless.

Internet in either modality, stationary or mobile needs to nurture the open arena, open innovative and emerging standardisation efforts to build new application layers upon previous efforts, with no proprietary owner of one protocol. My hope is that Open Social and Open Graph use will merge into a more coherent social networked space. We all need filters to cope with information overload issues, and in that social search and social networking becomes our most tangible use patterns (Search Patterns, Design Patterns for Social Web). RSS, Twitter and future use of Open Graph will evolve in this individual channel and conversation filtering. But it won’t erase my need to embark into different search patterns. My social networks gathered in i.e. Facebook do not always match the everyday needs I have, so I don’t think Facebook will eat the whole cake from Google or similar places.

Facebook Beacon revisited, or a Google Buzz big step-into ‘social-surveillance-shit-creek’ ought to be learning spaces for these innovative brands, but still they sometimes act in such a hyper-speed manner without consideration, reflection and thought through mind-sets. Yes, innovation – but to what cost? In the best of worlds we get crowd sourcing and knowledge networking for the common good, the flip side of the coin is mobs where ignorance shows its ugly face. The ease to lever in the social contribution value chain from viewer, listener, to lastly become curator is a good thing, since the more people share the closer we get in some sense. Smart-mobs taking the means at hand to change the power relations overhaul countries with less transparency and democracy.

Lastly a reflection about the conversation about Enterprise 2.0.

I have been engaged to many different arenas to talk about the change, and what strikes me is the lack of overview perspective. IT-folks do get hooked upon the emerging technologies, but fail to go beyond the developers’ backyard. PR/Media/Marketers gurus do build early adapters networks of in-breed conversations. But neither of these practices builds cohesive groups with mixed resources, since they have different quests to the business landscape. All reflect early adopters that test and develop the maps in the new human social terrain. Meantime everyday users contribute daily, without tag themselves as social media savvy or gurus. This later mass of people reflects all other areas within our corporations of today.

If leadership want to build future Enterprise 2.0 business, they need all of the corporate clans to collaborate and coordinate their conversations. The problem is that we are living in two different time zones, since change on the Net is in hyperspace speed, whereas internal enterprise change takes much longer time. Still intranet is a poor reflection of Internet behaviour, and usually way behind in ease of use. Mashup of our daily lives will continue, no doubt, but consider the less than zero business model always have a flip side of the coin. Your Privacy – the most tangible asset of our time.

2 Comments | emerging technologies, Enterprise 2.0, Open Innovation, social networks, Uncategorized | Tagged: Facebook Open Graph, Google Buzz | Permalink
Posted by Fredric Landqvist

Coaction and apophenia: patterns of the collective mind

March 28, 2010

The act of participation and collaboration is one deeply engraved pattern amongst us human beings. Our brain capacity is far reaching when it comes to adaptation. The senses we use to communicate remains the same, but our tools change as well as our everyday pursuit. Teamwork is a well-researched area, as well as knowledge management but I would like to give some cues to future networked coactions, from two similar but still different experiences. Both cases do reflect the need to coordinate, collaborate with a specific outcome and timeline. Highly time-stamped, as they both represent live events for knowledge creation. Both cases have co-located and distributed networked resources, where the first all participants work at the same enterprise and the second case several actor networks contribute in the collaboration.

Themes on knowledge networking

Intra-organisational
Inter-organisational

When pulling together a teamwork effort, to create any information and knowledge to be shared we all agree that being co-located will the best way to deliver. But one cannot squeeze all resources into one spot, without a great effort and to a high cost, so we daily rely on distributed networks to get things going.

How do we get knowledge flows seamless with different modalities to interaction, prior, during and after an event?

Case I: Intra-organisational. A consultancy firm with a Community of Practice, being experts within enterprise content management.

How does one expand a live event experience into a multichannel knowledge flow?

The setting, 150+ in the CoP and a corporate body with 1300+ in several countries, but mainly Swedes. A two days event off-site and a nice location with invited guest artists with fixed theme. Prior to the event a wave conversation emerged to develop the agenda, shared ideas to our joint outcome after the event. The internal SharePoint collaborative space and a Yammer mixed the channels, but the main contribution in Wave to trial multi-user-wiki experience, and to expand the prior-event conversation to the guests as well.

At the event, a live HD-Video broadcast were set-up to capture and stream the guest artists to everybody not being on-site. Collaboratively participants contributed to the vivid and lively wave conversation, and posting internal tweets using Yammer to get cross talk within the whole corporate body. The idea generation from the event, used a tailored Moderator series, were distributed resources could add questions to the participants, while listening to the video streaming experience and following the simultaneous contribution channels.

Outcome? Well, it took awhile to get all accustomed to Google Wave (well documented drawback), but when 90+ peers work from one highly connected place, in time and space. Things do emerge and new ways of knowledge contribution in a never before seen fluid way, really made the event a success. The distributed approach to invite people to an onsite experience while being away, really worked well and we got several ‘spot-on’ questions in the idea-generation in Moderator that converged well into the stew. Good quality streaming and video/sound and fun new conversational spaces enlightened all participants. The art of community is a social construct, and the digital habitats needs stewardship.

Case II: Intra-organisational. A live Tech Business Case Competition, with students, University and Corporate resources co-located and distributed

Will open-spaces and Internet based (i.e. ‘social media’) collaboration improve knowledge sharing?

The setting, 16 teams from top Universities from all over the world were invited to a 24h race, where they would develop a tech business case and present it to top-corporate management. Winner gets 25 000 USD. The joint taskforce from the corporate world and University, wanted to tap into the collective mind and the stream (‘social media’ use amongst smart MBA students anno 2010), to capture the vivid online conversation. This years quest ‘Navigating the sea of Connectivity‘!

Prior to the event several different means were used to collaborate, Google Apps/Docs, Wave, email, teleconferences, and inside the corporate walls SharePoint spaces. Different means to develop a coherent plan of actions and activities, simply put distributed-teamwork. To engage the students before arrival Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Linkedin, and a Univ. Blog and corporate dot com sites where used. At the event a very distributed team from both the corporate and university worlds acted both co-located at the university site and on the Net. All competing teams were given a twitter accounts, and shared principles for participation and contribution were used. To glue all channels together a social tagging scheme were proposed. Given that the teams managed to aggregate the online conversation regardless of contribution space in a coherent way, using Google Reader, Twingly, Tinker and Yahoo Pipes. This mashup tinkering and pragmatic approach delivered a very comprehensive and easy to use flow. During the 24h race the tweets from the different actor networks melted into one social tag space, and cascaded into live-blog entries and Facebook page updates. The same path emerged from video, sound and picture uploads. The co-located competing teams used many different tools, such as DropBox, Google Docs and Slideshare in their knowledge creation before presenting to top-management.

Post event, the ambition is set to develop a collaborative story telling based upon mashup technologies and i.e. Wave conversation (to be told in future posts)

Apophenia, the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things

Traditional collaborative spaces, i.e. old school Notes used during the 90′ and today’s corporate use of SharePoint have well documented draw backs, so will new emerging technologies in the social media and mashup spaces (Enterprise 2.0) unleash new ways of knowledge sharing internally or externally? Given these two very simple cases, there are some tangible cues:

Mashup, bringing all channels together and all actor networks. Filtering is key, since we all act as individuals in the ecosystem of our everyday life. Simple integration works.
Being social! Well, network effect runs the show! Constraints given the mission impossible to squeeze everybody into one room, will find its remedy using social media tools.
Open collaborative spaces unleash innovation. Serendipity will be a beacon when we all connect. Cross talk inside the corporate walls or on the Net glues the collective mind into an emerging tapestry.
Simplicity rules, low-cost and fast deployment of context specific collaborative spaces. Technical infrastructures and information interoperability between platforms, a modular architecture. Disruptive Technologies runs innovation.

These new tool-kits to undertake teamwork as in both cases; do give us new means to solve the problem. A richer experience! But one obvious warning to all this, it is not about the tools. The social fabric will emerge, and we do not always know which tool kit that will fit for purpose. The answer to the questions raised based upon the experience from these two separate events is:

To get knowledge flows seamless, one have focus on simplicity of contribution and integration
To expand a live event, one have to have orchestrated and well governed approach, spiced with loads of pragmatism
Emerging technologies for collaboration do improve the outcome

Are there any patterns of the collective mind? Yes, make-do and pragmatic tinkering works regardless of technology. We as humans adapt!

A fun notion to all this, is that prior to the events in the two cases, SharePoint worked pretty good to capture the preparation, but ones the event went live the distributed teams needed to mix modalities from being mobile (using Facebook, twitter, flickr, youtube and texting) and stationary producing blog entries, content and presentations. Micro-coordination had to cope with this multitude of channels and modalities. By no means this happened to be workflow, or traditional document management. Having SharePoint on your mobile device yet? think not! but a set of social media tools….future posts will continue these early thoughts.

Leave a Comment » | emerging technologies, Enterprise 2.0, Open Innovation, social networks, Uncategorized | Tagged: casecomp2010 | Permalink
Posted by Fredric Landqvist

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder: augmented reality or death by information overload?

September 7, 2009

Remember a day in life, when ‘triggers’ didn’t disturb your ‘thinking’, and you got the treat to think all through and possibly solve this issue or task at hand? Well, I rarely do these days, being engaged into new related themes all through my working day. The stark contrast to reality when your iPhone is dead, low on battery, and you do not have any network at hand 😉 Information addicted as anything, yes I confess, this is me.

Well the theme, isn’t by any means a new one, we cary a big load of stored memories and stories easy to retrieve and read, and even act upon, but interseption of ‘friends’ connect is a new one. Who doesn’t like to be friendly and polite, responding to a email within the blink of an eye? The death is the final curtain, so death by information overload might come sooner than you think.

Filters, do matter: this is the simplest coping strategy of them all. Lay down your weapons, and face the fact, you can not address all incoming messages, read all possible rss feeds and be all around educated in all possible angles to life, universe and everything. Cherry picking, and refined and well sought for friendly tweets might be good enough.

When reading the first edition of ‘Smart Mob’ by Howard Rheingold, I got bewildered by the ‘fun experience’ to get augmented reality, and now this is in my hands as we speak. The improved reality if you will, does it make life more beautiful? well I think it surely will help a lot in many spaces, especially spiced with the ‘collective mind’ and the stream we all follow. Obviously the marketers want to tap into your brain to do major brand surgery to this space as well. Refined social filters will still rule the game. Enjoy our new improved reality, with a sanity check ones in awhile. Don’t walk into the information shadow!

1 Comment | emerging technologies, social networks, Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by Fredric Landqvist

Enterprise Inferno, are you Content?

August 28, 2009

There is a big divide in how the internal information environment, e.g. intranet, we use daily in any work practice works compared to our external use of Internet services and resources. Being a researcher with focus on enterprise content management, knowledge management and social networking this becomes the beacon and most obvious reply I get daily from respondents in either surveys or in interviews.

Enterprises do emerge, and grow into the big corporations over time, depending upon the business climate they act within and time. Enterprises are social constructs, where our inbuilt behaviour of using tools will be the competitive advantage if the human actors will be content with their task.

Being social implies that we act with different facets (mind-sets) depending in what network our interaction takes part. Our minds share ideas, interests or other relational aspects to life. The outfit we carry relates to our perceived role in the network, e.g. while at work we have assigned roles and responsibilities that come with expected outcome, look and feel. Our experience and know-how is embodied in the craftsmanship, in how we act and solve problems at hand. We all depend upon given infrastructures in life, as traffic rules, or shared spaces like Intranet, cities or houses. We walk around in this maze of defined or undefined infrastructure. In our quest to reach out to our networks and engage in conversations, we have always used different communication tools, today reflected with Internet use. Media is our storytelling techniques to share insights stored on papyrus scrolls or multimedia spaces like YouTube. Lastly we hang out in groups/networks, like to play different characters in these settings, either being within the family, with friends, co-workers, or neighbours or fellow citizens.

being social

The business environment that we all act within stresses new options to solve our daily tasks at hand with our peers and with good leadership (if possible). The problem is that size doesn’t always matter if the counterpart of competitive advantage lies in the hands of human’s social behaviour. Obviously some businesses have very expensive tools (resources), and in the industrial era the access to these resources gave an upper hand.

How to cope with this inferno? The answer might be within reach, when corporations turn into networked entities within their realm and embrace the emerging collaborative opportunities outside the company walls. Not invented here, might be the key to future success, if cultivated into the spines of culture of the enterprise. If corporations don’t accelerate and become more adaptive and agile, they will become yesterday’s news, and left over’s in the trash bin of the enterprise world. Simply put, end-users realising that their internal information environment won’t realise good enough findability, will refocus outside the company wall. With despair reaching out to the larger community living on Internet.

A Healthcare & Lifescience scenario

What is the enterprise today? It is all about networks! A very recent and hot topic, that will be useful to illustrate the new tapestry, is the healthcare and life science space.

There are obvious actors in the network, but they fail to converge into a coherent semantic space, where the citizen and patients will be tightly intersected. The bolts in this meccano are the enterprise applications supporting the process, to either provide efficient healthcare, or develop new treatments that will improve life for us being humans. All supporting information systems within the work practice have grown out of proportions, and now when national or international actors try to harmonise the structure. They fail to see the crispy and clear picture! Focus should be set to the edges and use interoperability as one building block, combined with social constructs and behaviours deeply embedded into the pragmatic work practice. Instead the technology and deterministic worldview still prevail: lets build ONE system (large scale)

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

All available research within the domain enterprise wide system, enterprise architecture and the diffusion of technology, shows with thousands of academic papers and best-practice and valued data that this path will only lead to failure.

Crowdsourcing and inviting the citizen and patients to a co-creation of better healthcare and life science is the only feasible route. The national imperatives should only state traffic rules, improve network infrastructure, such as interoperability means and reach for open innovation spaces where practitioners will be able to create common good. One outstanding critical issue relates to new identity and security management standards to be able to be more open without loosing credibility. Patient data shouldn’t be widely open!

Emerging Architectures will rule

It is all happening as we speak that new value networks create both greater speed to change and real value back to the end-user community than traditional value chains ever have. For IS/IT professionals one have to cope with the perpetual beta and technology drifting as the building block in the architecture. Good examples with Twitter ecology, or Facebook and Google Open API Lego pieces. The enterprises that release to power in ‘emerging architecture‘, and open innovation in their value network will get content end-users. And the inside-out picture will be blended into new ways of doing business, e.g. enterprise 2.0 thinking. The culture of change is represented by for instance Cisco, as Tom Malone, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, sees Cisco as a pioneer for a larger trend. Traditionally, he says, management was about “command and control”. Now, as technology makes communication much cheaper, bosses should move to a more flexible view, best described as “co-ordinate and cultivate”

5 Comments | emerging technologies, Enterprise 2.0, Open Innovation, social networks, Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by Fredric Landqvist

The Remix Culture

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