Governance in a Networked World

Apple doesn't have internal divisions

2011-12-25T17:51:00.001-08:00

Xmas reading - Steve Jobs biography. In the chapter on how Apple was able to out do Sony ... The inventor of the Walkman when they launched the iPod was that Sony, like many large corporations, create internal competition by setting department P/L. Tim Cook ... Apple's COO notes that Apple don't have separate divisions with their own P/Ls. Of course having a strong CEO reinforcing the message helps!

Business Value: Is there something missing from the BAs Toolkit?

2011-12-21T16:22:00.000-08:00

New white paper available:

http://www.optimice.com.au/documents/BusinessValueAnalysis.pdf

An importantcontribution that business analysts regularly bring to a business is a set oftools for visualising the activities of the business in a way that improvement opportunitiesand supporting systems can be effectively deployed. The ubiquitous businessprocess map has been the tool of choice for this activity. But how confidentare you that it is an accurate reflection of what is really going on? After theinitial use are they relegated to being expensive wallpaper for the BA office?Despite tediously working your way from the top to the bottom of theorganisation to produce these charts are they still missing some important, butsubtle, workings of shop floor operations? Are your logical and rational recommendationsfrom analysing these charts still being resisted for some reason? If thisdescribes your experiences then it may be worth reading further. In thisarticle I describe a bottom up analysis method based on business value networkmodeling which promises a more holistic mapping of the business based on valuemore so than simply process flows. Additionally it leaves the businessparticipants with some relationship governance tools that can be deployedindependently of any future systems development. A six-step process isdescribed using selected case study data.

Outsourcing Report - Multi-sourcing

2011-12-20T02:15:00.000-08:00

Giarte report on Outsourcing Performance

The above report from Dutch consultancy Giarte focusses on Multi-sourcing and Innovation. I was interviewed for this edition on multi-sourcing networks....

My next Management 2.0 Principle

2011-12-18T19:53:00.000-08:00

Reciprocity and Trust Networks

Published by Laurence Lock Lee

on 18-DEC-2011 to Management 2.0 Hackathon (HOME)

In command and control structures reciprocity doesn't exist. Of course reciprocity isn't new..."Do to others as you would have them do to you" is quoted in the Bible. Its time for us to rediscover this principle in Management 2.0. Reciprocity is an indicator of trustworthiness, which as a principle already nomiinated.

Example:

We track reciprocity networks using SNA techniques as an indicator or 'trust' in an organisation:

My Management 2.0 Hackathon principle post

2011-12-18T19:29:00.000-08:00

Community takes precedence over the line management

Published by Laurence Lock Lee

on 16-DEC-2011 to Management 2.0 Hackathon (HOME)

Description

In traditional Management 1.0 the line management takes precendence over everything, including the corss organizational communities that form naturally in virtually every organization. This principle is about turning this around and putting community in pole position, with the line management tasked with supporting community in any way it can.

Example

My best example is the story of Ebay. Ebay was founded on the principle of building community. Its first post founder CEO, Meg Whitman famously noted that whenever they strayed from that founding principle, their business was damaged.

Join the Management 2.0 Hackathon

2011-11-18T15:05:00.001-08:00

I'm in ..... Listen to Gary Hamel's promotion...Management 2.0 Hackathon

Which side of the Social Enterprise are you on?

2011-11-16T19:40:00.001-08:00

I recently attended an open forum on the Social Enterprise which featured Australian of the year Simon McKeon. Now I knew that when I signed up that the session would be coming from the philanthropic, 'not-for-profit' aspect. This is in contrast to my trajectory in trying to reintroduce 'social' into traditional 'for profit' corporations.

The keynote speaker Simon McKeon comes from a corporate banking background but is best known for his contributions to the 'not-for-profit' sector. One does not become Australian of the year by being a greedy banker :). After Simon spoke we had a number of other speakers talking about their 'social enterprise' experiences. They all came with a philanthropic style mission but to my surprise were keen not to be seen as 'not-for-profit'. Many had investors (not donors) and just like the private sector organisations, keen to return a dividend, even if only small. In fact they preferred to see themselves as just like any for profit business, though with a more philanthropic mission.

Now from the side I'm coming from we have had the 'triple bottom line' for quite a while now. Sometimes the 'not for profit' objective is called a 'license to operate' ... well at least if you are a mining company. My interest is not some much this angle, but that corporations can improve bottom line efficiencies, effectiveness and innovation through the use of social business practices. I've written previously about this here.

What I'm noticing here is a convergence around the Social Enterprise that does not involve purely 'not-for-profit' motivations from either trajectory. In other words 'Social' does not have to mean 'Social Welfare'. The Social Enterprise will therefore be characterised more so by its business practices than anything else. That is, more networks, less hierarchies; staff driven by passion more so than pay; client led more so than profit led; co-operative more so than compliant.

I think I would be happy working for a 'Social Enterprise', what about you?

The Business Analyst and Complexity Theories

2011-11-03T16:09:00.000-07:00

This month I'm teaching a couple of courses to Business Analysts on requirements specifications. The text book approach is typically a top down analysis of the current business, the development of a future model and then fill the gap with a system of sorts. The main issue I get from BA's is 'the end users just don't know what they want, so how can we specify their needs?'. This hasn't changed in the decades that I have been involved in and around IT business analysis. Ingrained thinking around top down decomposition of businesses to develop specifications and business process management solutions are not helping any more. I think its time to stop getting a bigger hammer and start looking more broadly for new and different tools.

I've written recently on this topic suggesting a complementary 'bottom up' analysis approach...Business Value Analysis: Is there Something Missing from the BA's Toolkit?.

This week I attended a dinner/presentation at my alumni at Sydney University who had invited Complexity thinker and entertaining speaker David Snowden to address us. While I've heard Dave's story many times, he is very entertaining and I always come away with something new, even if you do need an on-line encyclopedia plugged directly into your brain to keep up with him. In the context of business analysis the concept of distributed cognition and the BAs being 'pattern watchers and interpreters' is along the same lines that I promoted in the above paper. That is, BA's should think less of themselves as interrogation units who drag 'secrets' from end users to plonk them into the developers in-tray, but more of a facilitator of conversations within the community of stakeholders supporting a new systems initiative. Now this will sound heretical to the traditional BA, but I think the time for change has come!

When Networks Collide? Council vs the Greenies

2011-10-10T23:34:00.000-07:00

Well maybe the local council isn't exactly a network. The picture on the left is the site of the latest war zone in Newcastle (Australia) where the Council is in the process of removing some long standing fig trees. The premise is that they are old enough now to be in danger of falling in strong winds and injuring someone. More importantly they can't get anyone to insure against these events now....and givien the litigious society we now live in, this could be a huge risk for the council.

Now last year the battleground was a desire to remove the railway line so that the city could be connected to the harbour. Also the encroachment of mining onto agricultural lands is a growing mine field (excuse the pun)....and the list goes on at huge cost to the community.

No doubt that when we get two "networks" colliding with different philosophies the result is invariably ugly and costly. This is where top down hierarchies work well. Any disagreements and it just gets sent 'upstairs' with those at the top being accountable in the end. This blog however is more about bottom up than top down management, as I strongly believe the benefits are increasingly outweighing the costs by working this way. That said, we do need a way of resolving differences between networks when they inevitably 'collide'. In the fig tree case the council 'network' was divided with the Mayor actively supporting the other other network. But that's how networks are, not everyone will agree but there is a point where members do have to 'accept' that a decision will be made that they won't agree with.

In the case of the figs I have some sympathy for the Council. Democratically elected they voted to remove the trees, so even if we don't agree with the decision we did essentially vote for the process of decision-making. One of my favorite HBR articles is the 2003 classic "Fair Process: Managing in the Knowledge Economy" by W. Chan Kim, Renee A. Mauborgne. Their essential argument is that once a decision making process has been negotiated and agreed to be fair, then it is much easier for warring parties to accept a decision even if they don't agree with it. In the networked world strong personalities can often have an unbalanced effect on decisions that are made.

Perhaps its time for us to vote for fair processes rather than personalities.

Facebook or Linkedin? Where do I put my work stuff?

2011-10-05T18:16:00.000-07:00

Just finished reading a book on "The Facebook Effect". I like reading the latest modern history books ... story of ebay, google, etc... it read just like history but is less than 10 years old! What is apparent, other than how young the CEOs are, is that these leaders were all driven by a sharing principle first and money second (or even lower). Facebook has Microsoft as a major investor and partner, but is always trading them off against Google, who would dearly love to buy them. The holy grail is the single ubiquitous platform for sharing, be it for social or business purposes. To date I have been comfortable splitting my home and work life between Facebook and Linkedin. Facebook is making this harder to do now though as my business 'friends' are continually leaking over to my Facebook side. While 'friends' was the genesis of Facebook, Facebook is now referring to nodes in their social graph as 'objects' to accommodate non-people things like TV shows, Books, Companies etc.. Starting to sound ubiquitous? The underlying architecture is still a graph though, social or not. Its the core framework which underpins how we work and live today.

Its about time we through all those linear business process maps away and accepted that the network graph is the best fit for how things really work. But one of the reasons that people like business process maps is that they cater for our need to see order in things (even if it doesn't exist). Facebook is disrupting the order I had between my work and home, which may not return until Facebook kills off Linkedin?

What do you think?

Social Business Presentation

2011-09-20T06:03:00.000-07:00

Here is a presentation I recently prepared for the KIN network 10th Anniversary conference in the UK.
If the embedded presentation doesn't fit well on your screen here is a separate link:

http://go.knovio.com/watch/3fda5f5f7fac4ef6ae3c5b8054e02933

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Google doesn't have business units!

2011-08-15T16:05:00.000-07:00

I knew there had to be something different and special about Google to make it the success story that it is. This is what the Googe CFO had to say in a recent McKinsey interview:

Patrick Pichette: We don’t have business units. Once a company has business units, managers tend to take ownership of these units’ resources. Managers have a plan, and the natural instinct is to say, “Those resources are mine and I have to fight to keep them.”

This is exactly the issue we regularly see in our organisational network analysis studies. We even wrote about it here in "The Tyranny of Top Down"

Is Rupert Murdoch really responsible for phone hacking?

2011-07-20T16:22:00.000-07:00

This is the question I put to Larry Prusak the knowledge management Guru and best selling author, while he was presenting to us on "Organisational Judgement" (his next book) at a dinner at Sydney University on Monday night. Larry was suggesting that knowledge is not enough when it comes to making good decisions and demonstrating good judgement. Sprinkled across his arguments were the now familiar role of networks, working from the bottom up, empowerment of the knowledge worker and the suggestion that the influence of the CEO was becoming less and less ... at least in a traditional sense. So back to Rupert Murdoch ... given this global trend, isn't Murdoch's claim to not being responsible for phone hacking therefore defensible?

So what was Larry's response?

Abosulutely, he is responsible. Larry responded with a personal story of the Lehman Brothers debacle and how in that instance the CEO was in fact absolutely responsible and new exactly what he was doing.

Personally I think that we are dealing with words here. Does "responsible" mean "directly responsible" or even "accountable" (I would say Murdoch is accountable but only indirectly responsible...more on this later). It is unreasonable to expect the CEO of a corporation with 50,000+ staff to know the detail of everything that is going on. But what I think Larry was alluding to is that the CEO is however in the position to establish the values that impact the culture of an organisation. We know that executive decisions that promote a 'value' at great commercial cost to a company can send a very strong 'values based' message to all staff .... think about companies who made expensive safety related product recalls. Perhaps if Murdoch had led the industry by banning the use of private investigators by his news teams, that would have sent a strong message about News Ltds ethics and values position and it is highly likely that he wouldn't be in the position that he is today.

So what can our learning be from this in terms of governing networks? This is a wakeup call for networks proponents that networks can propagate the bad as well as the good. In fact the 'bad' can often propagate faster! In terms of governance, if the leader has less direct influence over their staff in the networked world how can they avert a News Ltd fiasco?

My take is that in the networked world leaders will no longer be as effective at transmitting work instructions, compliance rules and dictates. What they can be effective at is using the network to communicate their values and ethics positions. This will be best done in the form of anecdotes, story and the rational behind some of the bigger decisions taken which demonstrate these values in action.

If Rupert Murdoch is guilty of anything it is in not communicating a value system that would have strongly discouraged (not prevented entirely ... their are no guarantees) the acts that have been perpetrated.

IT Governance as a part of Corporate Governance?

2011-06-13T16:51:00.000-07:00

I have provided my perspective here in this LinkedIn forum.

Social Business Forum 2011

2011-06-08T23:46:00.000-07:00

Well that it for another year, the 4th Open Knowledge forum I have participated in. The language this year has evolved from 'Enterprise 2.0' to 'the Social Business', signaling the growing acceptance of linking the 'Social' word to the 'Business' word. With record registration (closed off at 1,400), the interest is clearly booming. Highlights for me included Andrew Gilboy from Oracle again entertaining us with the story of his son's music exploits in the radically changing world of the music industry. His right brain-left brain characterizations and the declaration that Italians have a right brain preference for less precision brought a smile as he looked at his watch and the programme already 15 minutes late ... but well within Italian time six sigma limits :) The stories around crowdsourcing and crowfunding were very compelling. Claire Kavavagh from giffgaff wowed us with her 'community based' customer service story in the tough mobile telecommunications market. Not bad for a kiwi :) ... Luis Suarez (mister 'don't send be email') and George Siemens are both previous speakers, returning with an update on their work with communities and learning. Sameer Patel, also a returning speaker showed his passion for the connected enterprise. His now famous blog post 'Why Process Barfs on Social' is still a theme, one that Keith Swanson from Fujitsu and the co-author of Social BPM continued in his closing keynote. While Keith may fall short of calling himself a 'reformed BPMer', in my view he is a great example of a BPM zealot who does not Barf on Social!

More later ... have to run

My First Harvard Business Review Article - "Towards the Social Business"

2011-05-26T00:50:00.000-07:00

.... however its in the Italian HBR and even I can't understand it :) ... have to thank my co-authors though...they did a great job (I think).

Gold Dust and Grenades

2011-05-25T23:33:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I completed a briefing with a client on the initial results of an organizational network analysis study we had just conducted. I think he was quite pleased, even a little excited with some of the insights that the results provided him with. His parting comment however was that we had provided them with some real "gold dust and at the same time grenades"! Now I do regularly warn clients that sometimes the results may be confronting and that's why we do these 'sensemaking' sessions to ensure that its not because of gross data errors and the like.

On reflection however, I started to think that maybe gold dust and grenades are the same thing in this context. However, while we gratefully accept gold dust, we run away from grenades! Unfortunately its reacting appropriately to the grenades where the most value is obtained. Many of my clients gratefully accept and act on the gold dust but tend to shy away from the grenades. I can't say I know the answer to this .... as with any confronting review results one will often question the 'science' .... but as we have seen with climate change, if its not black and white then we will choose our own colour. And network analysis is an inexact science. But given that we have just identified the opinion leaders and influencers in their organisation, perhaps this is where we start :)

Mixing up shared service centres with Centres of Excellence

2011-05-08T16:02:00.000-07:00

I've just read an interesting article from Deloittes on next generation service delivery models http://bit.ly/iy4hTP. In the article they talk about shared service centres....nothing new here....cost minimization by pruning transactional cost activities. They however contrast these centres with Centres of Excellence (COE) which are expertise centred and whose metrics for success are centred on capability, not cost. The collective of SSC and COE are promoted as the next generation model for service centres.

COEs are nothing new either. Perhaps the impact here is in table which shows the differeing characterisitics of SSC and COE.

I can't help but think that many of the service problems that we currently experience are due to companies only knowing about SSCs or in fact building an COE on erroneous SSC principles!

Is Governance in an Open Network world like managing a Windows PC?

2011-04-29T17:30:00.000-07:00

About 18 months ago I decided that I was spending far too much time working inside my high powered Windows machine, than doing productive work on it. I bit the bullet and converted to Mac. While the problems don't go away completely I feel I'm definitely more productive now. Except of course when my wife (who I generously passed on my high powered PC to) calls upstairs to say 'I can't xxxx any more... why is this happening.... why do I get the old hand me downs?' Now she has very simple needs, a bit of word processing, email and web surfing. Its with great reluctance that I tramp downstairs to repeat what I regularly used to do for my own purposes. As I explained to her...PCs are not like other machines. They have software in them that makes them alive and kicking, so there is no guarantee things will keep working even if you touched nothing! Spurious messages will pop up, virus warnings...some real, some not. Managing a PC is not like looking after your washing machine. Its more like managing a Brazilian Rainforest! Things will change on a daily basis, and the propagated effects of even the most innocent activity is almost impossible to trace.

Well this post is not so much about Mac vs PC but one of when the networks can get out of control who can you trust? Is that program promising to rid your machine of a nasty problem actually just another problem? As liberating as the world of networks can be, and I'm obviously a great fan of networks, its important to respect the 'dark side' to achieve an appropriate balance. There is definitely room in the PC world for tighter 'qualification' of 3rd party software. There is a productivity 'tipping point' around having access to a rich open market of software applications and keeping your machine operating robustly. The tipping point might be further away if you work for a large organisation with a legion of help desk techos to come to your aid. But that could be just disguising the true cost of ownership. The same could be said for organisations. An overhead cost is an overhead cost no matter what. While we may want to continually reduce the cost of overheads, in reality its best to manage them to the 'right' level.

Can SNA be the new Six Sigma?

2011-03-28T00:33:00.000-07:00

Social Network Analysis (SNA) has been with us in the research communities for over 70 years now. Its adoption as a mainstream business tool is still however trivially small. Of the over 500,000 management consulting firms in the world today I suspect well less than 100 have ever done an SNA project. There are a number of practitioner groups out there now and I recently heard of this conference that I'm now planning to attend http://circuitsofprofit.com/ in Hungary which has a business focus. There are very few practitioner SNA events, but lots of research events. My view is that a big part of what is holding SNA back as a mainstream business tool is its research heritage. Those consultants offering SNA services, approach them as research projects. This in itself is not a problem, but by not aiming to standardize the approaches in a way that any business consultant can learn and apply the basic techniques, the diffusion to the other 499,900 management consulting firms out there will not happen.

I recently dragged out my copy of "Whats the big idea?" by Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak and rediscovered that the most successful business ideas had been practitioner led, not science led. Also most explicitly addressed the core business needs of efficiency, effectiveness and innovation.

Now this brings me to Six Sigma. It sounds very technical and statistical ... something that would make most of us run in fear. However, its inventors, Motorola, took a very pragmatic approach to its use. Its goal was to reduce variation in manufacturing processes (hence its name). Apart from that, at least in my experience, no complex statistics to be seen until you get to the very top of the certification program (Black Belts) and even then most statistics professors would say the statistics is basic in nature.

So I believe SNA can take a leaf out of Motorola's book. No more talk about indegrees, outdegrees, block densities, betweenness, closeness, structural equivalence, structural holes and more about measures to improve efficiency, effectiveness and innovation.

ERP Gymnastics

2011-03-06T18:33:00.000-08:00

This is the picture I wanted to put on the front page of our new white paper on The New Enterprise System: Bridging the Gap between ERP and E2.0

Is this what it feels like when you have to use your enterprise systems?

"Exceptions are not exceptional - they are the norm"

2011-02-23T20:06:00.000-08:00

I got this quote from a recent Deloitte publication on Social Software for Business Performance. Based on recent experiences in dealing with various service organisations I had started to think that maybe I really did have peculiar requirements, though to me virtually none of them was exceptional. As we know nowadays if you fall outside the 6 sigma band you are nowhere! expect nothing! and get nothing! Well based on Deloittes comments I'm not feeling so exceptional after all. So here is the logic of industrial age methods .... standardise processes, remove variation, keep within the 6 sigma bands by continually reducing the variation. Here is the logic of the todays businesses that are mainly service based. Respond to all customer enquires/problems ASAP, surprise the customer by anticipating their needs, gain customer insight to maximise the amount we can sell to them.

Notice that one approach is driving out variation and the other is embracing it? One is a product "Push", the other is a customer "Pull". This is particularly relevant for Government departments. Will the public be happy with a product push approach to services? Will they vote for you again?

Anyway the crux of the Deloitte proposition is that a big benefit of social software is the ability to help handle exceptions. And if exceptions are now the norm, then perhaps we need to re-think what enterprise software really means. Watch this space as we will be releasing a white paper on this topic in the next week.

The hidden cost of overzealous workflow systems

2011-02-13T14:22:00.000-08:00

We often hear stories of how computing systems are making our lives easier by orchestrating our workflows. Unfortunately many of these workflow systems make light of the human cost of using them, especially if the need falls just 1% outside the tight scope of what they were designed for. Recently I spoke with a friend of mine who is a specialist medical clinician at a major hospital. His time is worth 'real dollars' to the hospital through the specialist consultancy he can provide. He spoke about the time he had to spend in shepherding through the purchase of a new machine for the practice. Multiple levels of sign off, many points of potential failure or delay. He even came into work off his holidays to ensure a particular stage gate was traversed successfully.

On a similar note I recently taught a post grad course in Hong Kong for a university. I had done this same course a few years ago and was impressed by how easy their per diem system for expenses worked. Fixed amount given, you spend more, its at your expense, spend less then you keep the change. Now they have installed a new expense tracking system. The unintended consequence is that much more expensive meals are now consumed as you need to eat at a restaurant which takes credit cards. If you use cash, as I did, you now have to account for each transaction, keep receipts even for the most trivial expenses and then type them in laboriously into the expense tracking system for several layers of management to review and approve.

Now I can see the accountants singing praises about how these systems have reduced their 'visible' spend. I can't help but think what they would think if we charged our time spent in using these systems back to the same accounts that show the cost saving!

I'm sure you all have your own horror stories, I'd be interested in hearing about them.

Fair Process and Social Computing

2011-01-27T19:29:00.000-08:00

I was reminded recently of a diagram published in one of my favourite HBR articles on organisational change management called "Fair Process"by Kim and Mauborgne back in 1997. The main message was that if people agreed that a process was 'fair' then they are more likely to accept outcomes that they not agree or like. So what has this got to do with Social Computing? Well we wrote a white paper recently about organisational networks and beyond business process mapping and analysis http://www.optimice.com.au/documents/OrganisationalNetworkAnalysis.pdf which basically suggests that top down, compliance driven systems ... read ERP, IM etc.. that try and orchestrate human activity via work flow management are well past their use by date. I have also written about how compliance systems de-energise staff and force them into a position where they attempt to minimise their responsibilities and therefore the risk of non compliance penalties....the result being huge service gaps when anything falls any distance outside the norm. I could fill a book with examples of that!

Well the above article has a graphic which illustrates this well


Kim & Mauborgne, "Fair Process: Managing in the Knowledge Economy", Best of HBR 1997

On the performance axis where high levels of co-operation are needed (which is now just about always), the relative performance differences can be seen. I would argue that in this environment, it pretty much also maps the difference between an ERP/IM solution and a Social Computing solution when looking to orchestrate a business (one proviso here to note is that it is the orchestration part of ERP/IM solutions I am talking about, not their tracking and storage functions, for which I think they are ideally suited).

Aren't government departments lucky that their 'clients' don't have a choice!

2010-12-20T15:09:00.000-08:00

More 'Forms' Stories. I was helping my elderly Aunt get a health card which she is clearly entitled to. The short story of a long saga is that the saga has stretched out to close to a year now. Since I have taken on the task personally the department has duly scanned all the required documents now. After a month I thought I would enquire on how the application was going only to be informed that it had been rejected because of some obscure timing rule. Of course no advice of this rejection was forthcoming. We had become a 'process exception'. As we know processes work extremely well other that the 'exceptions' which make up the 'long tail'. So what happened? We got another form to start the process all over again. Did they ask for any information that they haven't already got previously? Of course not!

All I can say is that government departments do not have the right to call citizens 'clients' until they have to compete for their attention. Until then I'd suggest 'victims' is more appropriate.

BAN FORMS! IT just can't keep up with business networks

2010-11-17T23:01:00.000-08:00

Have you ever been frustrated by being asked to fill in a form where the requesting organisation already has most if not all of the information being requested on one of their systems somewhere?

Now the other day I was looking to close an account in one part of a bank (admittedly a different company, but nevertheless owned by this bank) and to move the money to another account in this bank. There was some urgency so I was happy that the accounts were at least in the same banking organisation. To my disgust a week later I received a paper withdrawal form in the mail asking for information they clearly had in their systems. Of course they wanted me to snail mail it back so no doubt they could have some outsourced provider key in this information again. And then several weeks later.....

Recently I read an account of an incoming CIO into a well known telecommunications company bemoaning the fact that customers on the legacy, rather than new system, were being charged extra for the extra work this legacy system was costing the company! I also was the victim of being a too early a customer of another telco and was unfortunately on the legacy systems and not scheduled to be moved for a long time out. At least they didn't try to charge me for the my presence on this legacy system, which in essence made it impossible for me to know my mobile phone spend until after the bill came.

Paper forms are clearly an indication that a firm has poor systems or they are just being too lazy to navigate the maze and therefor asking the poor customer to be the data entry person again. If paper forms were banned then organisations would have to get their act together, integrate their information sources and for once be client friendly!

Now I fully appreciate the legacy system challenge. Organisations are paying for using the IT cathedral approach to software development, where software was basically customised for the need of the time. But as businesses accelerate their networking, partnering, mergers and acquisitions, IT systems built in the 'cathedral' just cannot adapt fast enough. Now there is nothing wrong with customised software if it adds a competitive advantage. But is it time to create these customised solutions from standard components that can be rearranged as quickly as lego blocks (acquired from the IT bazaar :). Yes this sounds like interconnectivity standards again....something that the major vendors would avoid if they could. But I'm sure you would get plenty of support from CEO's and CIOs if our systems could be reconfigured just like lego!

ROI or COI (centres of influence)

2010-11-12T15:24:00.000-08:00

I've just read this post from Troy Janisch about 'Selling Social to the C-Suite'. Off course I agree with him that for networks its much esier to sell the centres of influence that ROI.

http://socialmediatoday.com/troyjanisch/232377/selling-social-c-suite-power-referrals?utm_source=smt_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter

Nevetherless at some point we have to demonstrate a relationship (hopefully positive) between a focus on COI and ROI.....the grim reality :)

How do we measure competency/capability?

2010-11-10T22:35:00.000-08:00

One of the key considerations that organisations have today is to understand what their depth of competency might be in critical areas. We have a client who is keen to understand how effective the Health, Safety and Environment function is? Now I suspect the traditional approach would be a top down review of the function. Perhaps looking at the individual qualifications and experience of the staff in the function, followed up by an interview with their 'customers' to assess the level of diffusion of best practices. But is this enough? Do we really know from this the depth of capability, how knowledge is shared to deepen capability, how well respected the function really is beyond the compliance aspects?

But what if we were able to look at the 'trust network' as represented by reciprocated problem solving ties. From this we can see the depth of collaborative relationships that the function has as well as the density of connections with 'clients' of the function. Whats more its operations based and potential predictive of future performance, rather than the 'arms length' reviews that could become very subjective and biased around the opinions of just a few.

Health, Safety & Environment is Navy Blue. Looks like the capacity is divided into 3 silos with one or two key players. Diffusion also potentially limited. The interventions to deepen capability are clear from this.

What do you think?

Cross Cultural Networks -a bigger governance challenge?

2010-10-12T16:23:00.000-07:00

I've just returned from a couple of weeks in Europe, during which I was on a cruise down the Dalmation coast with a mix of nationalities from France, UK, Asia, Australia, USA etc... It was interesting to observe how the emerging social groups were so strongly defined around firstly language (somewhat as expected) and then country. On my return I had to rush off to deliver 2 Knowledge Management lectures to post graduate masters classes which have an equal mix of cultures, from Asia, Middle East, India, Scandinavia and a sprinkling of native English speakers from Australia and the USA. The topic was KM tools of which the social software tools were a major part. In a class of mostly 20 and 30 year olds, I was surprised at how few used tools like blogs, wikis, twitter and Linkedin. Facebook had a slightly greater showing, but what was becoming clear is that social software as we know it, is very much a "western world" thing. One of the discussion session I run is to have the class identify barriers for introducing social software inside organisations. One group from the middle east mentioned that in their culture it is still not universally accepted that men should communicate with women in the workplace!

Then last night I was reading an interesting article by UTS's Prof Wanning Sun in the UTS Business 21C magazine. The article was entitled "The Social Life of Peasants" and reports on Professor Sun's research into the social media habits of 200million rural migrant workers in China. Now from an earlier visit to Shanghai this year I found out that the Chinese are not big users of western world social media tools, but have instead developed their own equivalents that are more culturally aligned. Professor Sun's research identified that peasant workers had taken to instant messaging on cheap mobile phones. These phones can be used for a monthly cost of about 85cents! and the most popular instant messaging service has some 80 million subscribers! In fact they have "missed the PC/Laptop" phase and gone straight to mobile devices.

What we do know is that humans are social beings, no matter what their ethnicity. Common language is a barrier for cross cultural networks ... but just perhaps "text talk" may have a future in cross cultural communication!

c u latr

Keeping track of stakeholder relationships

2010-09-22T00:35:00.000-07:00

We've had quite a bit of interest in "navigating the network" of stakeholder relationships that we invariably have. Could this be a social CRM solution?

The "Knowing Doing Gap"

2010-09-21T05:04:00.000-07:00

Steve Denning recently posted this piece on his blog about radical management and government bureaucracies. Steve had worked for the World Bank so had some first hand experiences with large bureaucracies ... in fact perhaps the experience drove him to pursue his ideas around radical management.

For my part I never cease to be amazed at how well informed many public servants are on modern management methods. They are often very studious and thoughtful when discussing the merits of the different approaches. In fact I would suggest they know exactly what is needed to bypass the red tape and improve the performance of their respective agencies. But for some reason the 'secret hand' of the public bureaucracy smothers effective action. This is a knowing-doing gap that I'd certainly like to know how to overcome!

"Keeping Your Enemies Close"

2010-08-23T22:41:00.000-07:00

This is a quote from a participant in a stakeholder engagement workshop I was running this week. The context was around how we can tell how well we are doing with external stakeholders, that are on the "antagonistic" side. The intent of the comment was if we keep them close we are likely to turn the relationship around, rather than avoiding them and therefore letting the bad feelings fester.

I like it and will definitely use it in the future

Power of Pull

2010-08-15T20:51:00.000-07:00

I'm part way through reading the Power of Pull which is co-authored by John Seeley Brown, who also co-authored another of my favourites...the Social Life of Information. His co-authors have recently undertaken some research on what they call the "Big Shift", which amongst other things has data showing that ROA performance of US firms is lower than it was in the 1960s. Intriguing as this is, what is more common is the disbelief of traditional management when faced with these facts. Now how many of you have been disappointed by a lukewarm reception when presenting some startling facts? Lets say you passed the test of validity etc... I'm meeting with a client to present some results next week which I expect a similar sense of disbelief in the results. There will be a lot of rationalisation as to why it looks like that, but essentially I expect the motivation to make radical changes will be less than I desire. So what should my strategy be? Storytelling? Visioning? Strategic Conversations? more rational arguments?

Its not Who You Know but How you cope with knowing

2010-07-25T22:03:00.000-07:00

I'm a great fan of Ron Burt from the University of Chicago. He is one researcher that has mastered the art of simple talk. Here is a preview of his latest book http://www.chicagobooth.edu/capideas/oct09/2.aspx. Now without giving it all away, Ron has found that the "prestige" measure which assesses how many "well connected" people you are connected to is actually of no benefit. The benefit actually comes from the skills you build in translating between tight clusters and diverse groups.

I love his phrase "...networks don't give you better glasses, they give you better eyes..."

I think Ron has wonderful eyesight :)

CIO Dilemma - Social Software vs ERP

2010-07-12T20:38:00.000-07:00

This is part of a post I made to a recent discussion on Communities vs Social Processes. The bigger issue appeared to be how CIOs deal with the fact that their clients merely "tolerate" the existing ERP/CRM/BI enterprise apps but are really excited about the social software stuff. This slide from Andrew Gillboy from Oracle presentation in Milan:

While "bolting on" of the new stuff seems harsh I think I agree with Andrew Gillboy from his presentation in Milan http://www.slideshare.net/E20Forum/international-forum-on-e-20-oracle-andrew-gillboy that the E2.0 tools do need to be eventually integrated with that mainstream ERP/BI toolsets. Whether we like it or not, names like Oracle, SAP, IBM, Microsoft legiitimise the enterprise purchase of E2.0 tools. The CIO dilemma Andrew talked about will be cured, as it has in the past, through this form of legitimisation. Of course CIOs have always had delimmas like this. I might be showing my age but I can recall similar dilemmas on the introduction of client server computing, PCs for business use, email for business use etc.. They were all solved by the 'legitimate' enterprise provider eventually adopting the 'renegade' technology providing the organisational "insurance" that CIOs crave. I only hope that they choose to adopt by acquiring/merging the "best in market" E2.0 providers, rather than trying to invent on their own and therefore subjecting their clients to inferior technology and user experience. The sting for the 'legitimate' providers is if they are slow to adopt they not only lose their status as 'legitimate' providers, they might disappear completely! Remember Digital Equipment, Data General, Silicon Graphics, etc...

Multipe Identities

2010-07-01T16:11:00.000-07:00

I've recently returned from a trip to Europe as well as my very first trip to Shanghai and the world Expo there (along with a few business meetings). In a workshop I was leading in Milan I mentioned that I could legitimately hand out up to 5 business cards of entities that I represent. Now I don't have 5 different business cards but through my prime company (Optimice) we have partners in Europe that would know us through our partners there. We are also distributing innovation software (www.spigit.com) in their name and therefore have established another company Open Knowledge Australia to do this. Individually I casually teach at a university business school and for a private training group. I am also a member of a "co-operative" of discipline experts of which the leader is attempting to create a business model around being able to draw "pre-allianced" expertise into projects on a "as needed" basis.

I guess this is the networked world in operation. I never try and hide the fact that I play these multiple roles. I actually don't think the clients of the organisations I represent think any less of the organisations because of this. But what do you think? We hear a lot about companies not valuing staff loyalty any more and Gen X and Ys not looking for the "job for life" anyway. As customers do we care?

Managing sideways

2010-06-01T19:32:00.001-07:00

Most of the themes in this blog are around ways for managing sideways. What I mean by this is how we manage to engage in peer to peer relationships without the benefit authority built into a senior position or a from a dominant organisation. I have been reflecting on who we might nominate as "world's best" sideways managers. For me names like Mahatma Ghandi, Martin Luther King, etc..come to mind. I will write more on this shortly...but for the past couple of days I've been at the Canterbury Health organised conference on "Improving patient journey"in Christchurch New Zealand. I heard about Don Berwick who influenced hospitals in the USA to save 100,000 lives through better practices. While Don does hold a "CEO" position he is most recognised for the influence he had through his movement.

I will shortly be creating a list on this blog which I'm looking forward to some other suggestions

The Network Law of Diminishing Influence

2010-05-27T22:40:00.000-07:00

On social media adoption (wikis in particular) we have heard of the 90-9-1 rule i.e. for every 90 viewers we can expect 9 edits or comments and only 1 new contribution. Its not just wikis. I've organised an ideas competition based on the social software platform spigit. It started off like a house on fire as I got all my close contacts to participate. The next week we must have emailed over 300 not so close contacts, expecting a huge growth. What we got was a growth in viewers but not contributors. The 90-9-1 rule was looking about right. Well its not so much a rule but an observation. If we ask why is this so? we have to look at the underlying social dynamics behind how one can influence others to do something (like submit an idea into an open platform) that they might not normally feel comfortable doing. My close contacts contributed because I hounded them and called in favours. But going out the next layer my influence had diminished to the extent that people would look/lurk but not participate. I've coined this the Networking Law of Diminishing Influence. This is related but not the same as the law of diminishing social returns.

Now can we attach some measures to this law? Perhaps we should go to Dunbar and his estimation of how many true friends one can really have. Dunbar suggest that you can only sustain around 150 friendships and only a handful could be consider "close" friends. Well now I tend to treat Facebook as my social "friends" network and Linkedin as my business network. My linkedin connections are 200+ but facebook friends less than 100. Now there is likely to be a difference between the what influence means when it comes to social friends and business contacts. However, influencing someone to do something that they might naturally shy away from I think would be the same for both....and I think that number is far less than 150.

So how about this.... "the degree of influence you can have over a friend or business contact is the maximum for the closest 5% of your friends or business contacts. The next 20% may give your propositions serious consideration, the next 50% will at least read the post or open the email, the remaining 25 % will ignore (without deleting:)).

International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 - Milan June 9/10th

2010-05-25T13:15:00.000-07:00

I will be attending this forum and running some workshops on Governance and Innovation. Here is a link to an interview I gave in support of the event.

Press 1 if you want us to treat you like a machine; Press 2 if you want to be treated like a human being

2010-05-20T19:51:00.000-07:00

A number of years ago a wrote an article entitled "Re-humanising the Corporation" as a parody of the more famous "Re-engineering the Corporation" book which launched the business process re-engineering movement. Yesterday I was facilitating a value network analysis workshop with some folks from Centrelink. I had some of them play the role of one of their external stakeholders as they negotiated the tangible and intangible aspects of their "engagement". The internal Centrelink role initially played the "contracted services response" of "we will respond in 48 hours". The external role was pleading to have access to some real people! What is so sad about this situation is that Centrlink, like most social service agencies, is made up of people who really do care. But they appear to be locked up in the "machine" of contracted services. Now this is not for good reason....the queues at the counter are getting increasingly longer, so this has to be dealt with in some way. So here we are again.... "we met our service level agreement....but the customer is still not happy".

This is clearly not a simple situation. But perhaps the place to start is to start with the premise that all stakeholders are people and need to be treated as such. (why is the "press 8 if you want to talk to a person" always the last option!). Once we put ourselves in their shoes (as the Centrelink folks did an admirable job of), you can start to become creative about how to address the problem (which by the way they did).

My good friend Stephen Denning of Story Telling and Work Bank fame has recently blogged on this topic which he is calling "Radical Management". I'm not sure if I like the label as I can't see too many managers willing to take the risk on a radical change, but the principles I certainly agree with.

Are your clients now the point of service integration?

2010-05-11T18:02:00.000-07:00

I was recently having lunch with a former work colleague who was bemoaning the firm's current arrangements for desktop support. Outsourcing had started more than a decade ago, so he lost his 'local' desktop agent who provided wonderful personal support. Outsourcing brought in the dreaded "help desk" but at least they still spoke English and some were actually "local" and nearby so they could visit from time to time. The most recent years have seen firstly "off-shoring" ... there goes the local support and native English speakers. Now there is the multi-sourcing, which he now thinks there are up to 3 outsourcing firms playing some role in supporting his simple laptop.

Now he feels with all these service providers he has now become the point of integration...clearly an unwanted governance role! Each new "helper" feels the need to go through the "script" ... have you turned the machine on? etc... he happens to have a PhD in Engineering!

.... just another war story from the world of multi-sourcing....who is really governing your IT?

New White Paper on “Organisational Network Analysis: Beyond Business Process Mapping”

2010-05-06T18:52:00.000-07:00

In this paper we position Organisational Network Analysis (ONA) between Social Network Analysis (SNA), Business Process Mapping (BPM) and Value Network Analysis (VNA). We illustrate the approach with a case study. We suggest that its application is appropriate for organisations looking for a quick and inexpensive method for gaining broad based organisational insights or looking for areas of focus for applying the more detailed BPM or VNA techniques.

The paper can be downloaded from: www.optimice.com.au

Australian Open Innovation Competition at http://ausinnovation.spigit.com

2010-04-26T19:23:00.000-07:00

In association with the Australian Innovation festival, which officially begun this week, we have organised an open innovation on-line competition using the Enterprise 2.0 ideas management platform Spigit (www.spigit.com). This is no ordinary suggestion box scheme ... it simulates an idea market place with investors, promoters, inventors etc... and is very realistic, fun and dangerously engaging (I've been participating in the Cisco I-Prize competition that this one is based on). We are soliciting ideas in the categories of: A Better Future for Our Children; The Connected World; The Recovering Economy; and Sustainable Environments.

Even if you don't have a good idea you can comment and help build on other peoples' ideas. There are awards for both idea providers and idea investors and supporters. For overseas participants unfortunately most of the awards only make sense to Australian residents, but don't let that stop you from participating! The link is at:

http://ausinnovation.spigit.com

I organized this so it would please me greatly if we could generate some real buzz around it.

One up for Telstra - Eat your heart out Heathrow!

2010-04-19T17:36:00.000-07:00

I would venture to say that Hyden airport located in one of the red dirt areas of Western Australia (there are many!) had more flights than Heathrow in the last few days. Never one to miss an opportunity you can see the airport "lounge" dominated by Telstra .... I bet they didn't even have to pay for advertising space!

Is the "Telecentre" the new "Water Pump"?

2010-04-19T17:15:00.000-07:00

Several years ago I was touring villages in Rajistan in India. The government had undertaken a comprehensive programme of installing new water pumps to access underground water sources in what is a very try and arid environment. I was struck by how the water pump became the centre of attention for the community as families came in the morning with all manner of pots and vessels to collect their water for the day. It became THE meeting place for the community.

Just recently I was touring around the not so arid but still sparsely populated areas of Western Australia. These are areas that the National Broadband has come nowhere near and that even mobile phone coverage is a luxury. There were however these telecentres that were popping up in the smaller towns, often attached to the local library. We met with a lady at a B&B that we were staying at who had been researching "lobster towns" in WA, which are mostly small fishing villages. She told me that the local telecentre was where she spent a lot of her time and a place where she could access much of the community in her research. Is the telecentre the 21st century water pump? Would we be doing these communities a disservice by bringing the Internet to their homes and potentially cutting out one layer of local community in favour of a more remote global community. I think telecentres can potentially give us both and at the same time lower the cost of the National Broadband Rollout substanitally.

Complicated or Complex? The "suck it and see" approach

2010-03-19T16:27:00.000-07:00

I am a big fan of the Cynefin framework which amongst other things aims to differentiate between "complicated" environments and "complex" ones. The proposed problem resolutions that might arise between the two are quite different, with the complicated regime supporting our natural tendencies to break thing down to analyse things in smaller chunks before combining them back up into a hopefully good solution. On the other hand for complex environments it is suggested that this approach is simply fruitless, and one needs to probe and experiment and then observe emerging patterns before taking action. My question is, how do we tell when an environment has gone from the complicated to the complex?...given that the governance decision making process varies so widely?

We face this dilemma all the time. This recent McKinsey quarterly article on behavioral strategy took me back to my own MBA research in the 1980s where I tried to differentiate the management task as either art or science? The general thinking for this differentiation between complicated and complex was that if the "object" was mechanical in nature and therefore could be logically dismantled and re-assembled e.g. like a sophisticated aircraft, then it was in the complicated domain. However, what about the Internet? It's run on machines that basically can only differentiate zeroes and ones. Who would think that the Internet is only complicated and not complex? I was recently working in "agile development" mode with some software development partners. Even though they were working with their own software the resolution pattern was definitely the "suck it and see what happens" approach identified for complex environments.

So how should we determine when to use complicated regime or complex regime resolutions? I think its basically a personal cost/benefit equation. Whatever gets you to a satisficing answer fastest. I can see growth in the "suck it and see" problem resolution approach as our work environments become increasingly complicated...or do I mean complex?

Tyranny of Top Down - Problems with "Programmes"

2010-02-04T22:09:00.000-08:00

I was in London last week at an event sponsored by my European partners Open Knowledge and one of our clients, Kent Council on leveraging Social Capital for organisational performance. (slides here http://www.slideshare.net/OpenKnowledge). While there were a few presentaions we also had the opportunity to engage the audience of mostly local government staff in extended conversational workshops. Consistent with the heading on this post I heard that in managing local government partnerships the majority of the time and effort was spent in trying to design the governance rules, developing governance documents, communicating where they were and how to use them etc. etc.. So in essence what we end up with is all the effort and energy is spent on designing the formal governance proceedures for how we are going to work together and precious little on doing the work!

In my closing presentation I was happy to be able to provide my ideas on why this is so (basically the complexity argument - simple solutions really don't fix complex problems) and some resolutions based on buiding social capital through understanding the partnership network (using ONA/SNA techniques). Find our paper on the topic with case studies here: www.optimice.com.au/publications

Its better to be debating the balance between left and right than being at either end

2010-01-26T02:27:00.000-08:00

I tend to catch up over the Xmas New Year break on reading that I normally wouldn't get around to. Jung Chang's Wild Swans has been lying around home for years. Everyone else in the family had read it. Given that I'm the 4th generation Australian born Chinese you would think I would have got to it first. As you get older you start to think more about where you come from. Late lastyear I saw Mao's last dancer, then read the book and then saw the movie again. I'm now 3/4 the way through Wild Swans ... the story of 3 generations of women living in China before, during and after Mao. What struck me most was the extremes of political environments they had lived through, with the common denominator being that both extremes resulted in the ordinary people starving.

I'm currently in Italy. The Italians are passionate about their politics, but largely people aren't starving. As in Australia we like to debate the fine line between left and right, but in the bigger picture, we have experienced nothing like Mao's last dancer or the wild swans. Jung Chang makes it clear that both the left and the right have positive principles that can enhance life, but when taken to the extreme, the results are tragic.

We learnt about Yin and Yang from the chinese ... obviously a harsh lesson to learn. In terms of governing networks, we need to continuously appreciate that networks taken to their extremes can have tragic results viz... global financial crisis, AIDS virus, terrorist networks. How we provide the "soft touch" governance required to facilitate without breaking, is an art that we all must strive to master. Balance is the key. Enjoy the debates of how much left and how much right. The Chinese experience has taught us the consequences of getting out of balance.

Are we having fun yet?

2010-01-20T01:46:00.000-08:00

In the last couple of days I've come across videos from here http://www.thefuntheory.com/form a number of different sources. They are fun to watch, especially the stair made into piano keys to encourage people to take the stair instead of the escalator. Much of the discussions I have read are around how these example generate behavioural change so positively. And for most of us working in and around organisations this is always a challenge. With networking, no doubt all of us love to work and network with people that are fun to be with. We design workshops that can be both fun and educational. These are relatively easy things to do. What impressed me most about the videos is that they influenced people into doing things that they normally would resist doing. I love it but I'm not sure that I have a creative enough mind to think up something like turning the stairs into piano keys, or the bottle recycling bin into a slot machine.... but at least now I'll be thinking about how we can make our latest stakeholder engagement tool into something that is fun to use. I'm open to ideas. Perhaps we can add some fun things like "guess how your stakeholder will rate your new value deliverable to them?" If you get it right perhaps we can use that slot machine macro to pay out!

What is your tacit knowledge productivity premium?

2009-12-18T13:07:00.000-08:00

I blogged elsewhere about the "death of the manual" http://industrynetworkmaps.blogspot.com/2009/11/learning-20-end-of-manual.html.

Over the past week or so I have been busy integrating our product suite into a Confluence Wiki platform. There are many levels that you can work with on the confluence wiki. Using it as a publishing space is no more difficult than browsing the web and writing in a word processor. The next level is working with the "plug-in" macros which in terms of complexity are not dissimilar to other Macro languages e.g. Excel. The lowest level is writing your own plug-ins, which requires a knowledge of java and is sadly now beyond me (despite having programmed in machine code assembler languages in the 1970s).

Anyway to the point ... I started working at the limits of my comfort zone...being the macro level. As indicated in the previous posting the support is now substantially forums, rather than formal manuals. They are there .. I eventually found them.... but the real juicy useful bits are in the forums. Now most technical forums are set up to act like communities. We even run our own for our own products. In essence however, they tend to work more like a help desk for the product author. Even if you know an answer, you may hold off knowing that the true specialist will have a better one. That said the forums do help a lot if you don't have an expert sitting right next to you. I spent nights hoping that by naive newbie questions would get answered over night.

So this brings me to the crux of this post. I think my productivity on task would have been at least 300% higher if I had direct access to the experts. Many of the "little funnies" I experienced were such common knowledge to the practitioners that they didn't even make the forums, but confused me for hours. True there were things I just simply hadn't learnt well enough. But the real problems were the unpublished "features" that the "experts" would know about instantly, but could hold you up for hours, if not days, experimenting with different options.

In the software industry we know that the productivity difference between a great software engineer and an average one is in the 100%s .... far more than I suggest would be the case with say an electrician, plumber, even doctor or dentist. Perhaps its time for us to try and measure and reward this tacit knowledge premium.

What's in a name?

2009-11-05T22:57:00.001-08:00

Its common for organisations to "adopt" particular terms and "banish" others as reflective of something that has been collectively rejected. This can be tricky territory for consultants who aren't aware of what the banished terms are. I know we banished "Knowledge Management" in favour of "Knowledge Sharing" as a better way of expressing intent. Others are adopting "Stakeholder Engagement" over "Stakeholder Management" for similar reasons. Yesterday I met with Christine Gardner from Railcorp and by way of updating myself with what the buzz was since I last worked there, I asked her what the"hot terms" were at the moment. She said we talk about having "confidence" in our partners. Subtlety different to the "engagement" term it no doubt fell out of some deep discussions arund the organisation on partnering.

So what's in a name? I guess the organisational story about how it came to be. Do you have a "hot" term with an interesting organisational story?

Too Close to Call Relationships

2009-10-23T15:17:00.000-07:00

I've probably now done over 50 Social Network Analysis projects and it hadn't occured to me that someone might miss identifying a close contact because they were too close to even think about it. In reviewing an SNA map recently I had a client mention that two people hadn't nominated each other even though they virtually worked in each others' back pockets! One might think this was a one off anomoly, but at the recent act-KM conference in Canberra we provided an SNA map for the conference registrants. We find that an SNA map is always a good conversation starter at conferences and assists with networking. I missed the first day when the poster was first put up, but apparently there was great amusement when a couple who have been married for nearly 40 years and now work side by side failed to nominate each other, and in fact were on opposite sides of the map! In speaking to me later they indicated that they did have different networks but it hadn't even occured to them to nominate each other :)

Re-launch of www.optimice.com.au

2009-10-08T23:38:00.000-07:00

We don’t normally do mail outs like this, but with our re-launch of the Web site being such a significant event for us, we wanted to share it with you all. It is now 3 years since we launched www.optimice.com.au and it has continuously grown in popularity over that time. We have made freely available some 40 papers, presentations and videos, something we intend to continue.

The most significant change is the incorporation of Web 2.0 functionality through our “Friends of Optimice” feature. We aim to now not only be a publishing site, but to also help our readers connect with each other. By answering a simple survey you can see how your profile fits with other readers on a dynamically changing social network map. If you want to make yourself available for contact with fellow readers simply join our “Friend of Optimice” LinkedIn group http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1807808&trk=hb_side_g

We haven’t forgotten the publishing side. We have two new white papers:

“The Tyranny of Top Down: Learning to Manage Sideways” which provides evidence through case studies as to how limiting top down management can be and offers 10 tips for managing sideways.

“Departments @ War” uses organisational network analysis to identify trust (and mistrust) networks across organisations and shows how value networks can be used to help build trust.

Finally, we are launching our new Visual Markets market research service with a major report which overviews the methods and provides a detailed analysis of the Australasian IT&T market. The report will be available for purchase in November but you can get free chapters from the pre-release here.

We look forward to meeting you in Friends of Optimice!

Visual Markets Report in Production Phase

2009-09-29T18:07:00.001-07:00

We have finally got our Visual Markets report to the production phase. Some 100+ pages of new analytical market research results of the Australasian IT&T market, providing new insights through the use a network analysis approach to market research. We hope to have it available for purchase by November, but you can get a pre-release extract from here www.visualmarkets.net

Business Analysts vs Project Managers

2009-09-23T16:26:00.000-07:00

I presented on Governance at a BA World conference in Canberra this week. My intent was to walk through the value network approach to partnering with BA's but we barely got though the BA vs PM war. No doubt as a BA conference the opinions were somewhat biased.

I believe a lot of time and energy is wasted trying to define territory through role descriptions. There are some clear role differentiations between BAs and PM but a lot more grey space which is there for negotiation/conflict etc.. My point to the group is that the grey areas are often the softer, intangible areas ... an area of strength for the value network analysis approach, and that partnerships need to be negotiated around value exchanges, which will be contextual! i.e. they will differ depending on the organisation and even the point in time.

The Tyranny of "Top Down"

2009-09-13T06:09:00.000-07:00

I'm just finalising a paper to support a presentation I am giving in London next month entitled "The Tyranny of Top Down: Learning to manage sideways" and was happy to come across this interview with John Chambers, Chair of Cisco, done with McKinsey http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Operations/Performance/McKinsey_conversations_with_global_leaders_John_Chambers_of_Cisco_2400
He speaks about his transition from a top down manager to a facilitator of distributed management. Fits perfectly with my talk!

Government 2.0 its not a digital divide but an e-paperwork divide!

2009-08-20T16:52:00.000-07:00

I attended an open forum on Government 2.0 last night in Sydney. Didn't really participate, mostly there to listen to what the buzz was all about. I thought I would attend as some of the work I have been doing in the government space was leaning toward government agencies taking on a stronger facilitative role amongst their constituents, more so than being seen as a source of information and money.

Most of the chat was about making government information more accessible and the issue labelled as "the digital divide". Plenty of talk about access for the disabled. I couldn't help but think about my experience earlier in the day at looking at the R&D tax registration process. I had been encouraged by a government agency officer to register and that I wouldn't need to engage a consultant to help. When I saw that the not too lengthy form was accompanied by hundreds of pages of support documentation which had to be downloaded in around 10 different bites, I can see why people do use consultants! So how about accessibility to those allergic to bureaucratic legalistic government mumbo jumbo services that require translators to make use of? Doesn't this create an access problem? Even for the not so intellectually disabled?

I know the Government could claim some kudos for job creation amongst the legal fraternity, but wouldn't it be easier to make these services more intellectually accessible to the non-legal community?

How to get a guaranteed 20% minimum productivity gain from your organistional restructuring consideration

2009-08-03T15:18:00.000-07:00

Stop right now! Call it off, tell staff that in these challenging times its more about them than some shallow tinkering of the org structure. The GFC created a growth market in organisational restructures. They rarely deliver sustainable value and simply paint the executives perpetrating these changes as lacking in imagination. Of course restructuring decisions are never made in an open and honest environment. A selected few are engaged in playing with the chess board....something that is clearly an ego boost. Much better to be a player than a lifeless chess piece. For the pieces, they are left to congregrate in the halls to share wispers and speculations about who might end up doing what, polishing up their resumes, just in case, and probably the last thing on their mind is doing any productive work.

So after an extended playing session, the chess board gets announced along with an extended and expensive organisational change management program to go with it. By the time this gets bedded down its time to start the process all over again. Did I say 20% productivity boost ... perhaps its more like 100%+.

Organisations are not like cars. They can't be tuned or refurbished in the same way as the parts are people, not mechanical parts that can't think for themselves. So having provided a 100% productivity boost by NOT restructuring how do we get the next 100% productivity boost? I would suggest that once staff are aligned with what the organisation's charter / mission, provide them with room to meet and negotiate how they could best work with other departments to achieve the mission. Facilitate and allow time for familiarity and trust to be built across the organisation. Emphasise that commitments made to peers are equally, if not more important, than those made to their line management. A trustful organisation is a highly productive one.

Government 2.0

2009-07-02T16:27:00.000-07:00

I recently attended a NSW KM Forum on Government 2.0 ... fuelled by the interest in Web 2.0 technology. The federal government has taken all this on board and to their credit are actively experimenting with the technology. Its hard however not to be overawed by the challenge of cultural change that would be required for governments to truly adopt the spirit of Web 2.0. We all know where the word "bureaucracy" came from and this is the antithesis of what Web 2.0 is all about. However credit where credit is due. I applaud the initiative and will obviously contribute as much as I am able to overcoming the "challenge".

Paris - a model for IT Arrchitecture

2009-07-02T16:23:00.000-07:00

I notices this article from the McKinsey Quarterly http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Business_Technology/Infrastructure/The_Paris_guide_to_IT_architecture_853 . I blogged nearly a year ago now on this topic after a visit to Paris. Clearly there are many other thought leaders appreciating the foresight of the Paris city planners!

European Sojourn

2009-06-18T07:32:00.000-07:00

Just getting to the end of my European Sojourn. The Conference in Milan on Enterprise 2.0 was a huge success .... over-subscribed with over 500 attendees. Not bad for a recession. Even better the talks are all on-line here http://enterprise2forum.it/cms/pages/home-en-2009/agenda.php .... though for some talks you need to understand Italian.... but not mine :)

Just came back from an SNA/ONA project workshop with a progressive UK council who want to change the way public programs are delivered from the current "project office" approach which is not working well, toward a more peer to peer partnership model. Challenging but will be game changing if we pull it off.

A brief break in Morocco reminded me as to how powerful the human network can be, especially when the participants are as strongly motivated to sell you something as these enthsiastic Africans. The speed with which your needs are communicated to the "partner/relative" at the next corner is mind boggling. Made me think about the ubiquitous call centre. Even the best technology in the hands of unmotivated staff will still result in a lousy service. Just think how powerful a third world country would be if they had the same technology matched with their exceptional enthusuiasm to serve/sell.

International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 - Milan

2009-05-31T17:19:00.000-07:00

I'm on my way to speak at http://enterprise2forum.it/cms/pages/home-en-2009.php?lang=EN this time in Milan, Italy. There was a big crowd last year in Varese and apparently the numbers will exceed 500 this year so the event appears to be recession proof! And what better way to survive a recession than to collaborate more with E2.0 tools. My talk is less technical though and more on the underpinning corporate social capital theme. We will also be doing an affinity sociogram for the attendees (c/- Cai Kjaer). More on this after (and during) the event.

Death of the corporate portal?

2009-05-02T20:15:00.000-07:00

Maybe thats a bit harsh ... but as a former corporate KM person I know how hard it is to encourage staff to participate in collaborative corporate portals. A couple of years ago I met a lady from a global portal software provider who was dispairing about how someone had set up a Linkedin group for their firm which attacted in a matter of days hundreds of members. In contrast getting people to join up with the corporate portal was like pulling teeth. We don't have to speculate long to understand why this is so. Just this past week I was speaking with my Italian partners Open Knowledge who have a project with another vendor to help them understand the nature of their LinkedIn groups and how they might be able to influence the members.

Just scouting the LinkedIn groups of some major portal software companies who no doubt have excellent internal portals (at least from a software perspective) I can see lots of informal groups with many members: e.g. Oracle (78 coporate groups; biggest with 1,000+ members); SAP (105; 3,000+); Microsoft (150; 5,000+); EMC (13; 2,000+); IBM (91;10,000+). Obviously not all are current employees but where is the corporate knowledge going to reside in the future?

Two very different publishing experiences!

2009-04-17T17:22:00.000-07:00

It will probably never happen again (at least for me) but having never published a book before I had two books hit the market in the same month! My book on IT Governance in the Networked World http://www.igi-global.com/reference/details.asp?ID=33275&v=tableOfContents went down the traditional route ... 6 months to write and then 12 months from final manuscript to book on my shelf. Several editing and reviewing stages, marketing etc etc.. The second book was unplanned. A German academic publisher found my PhD thesis on-line and offered to publish it in book form at no cost. All I had to do is upload it with some additonal information and select some cover designs and press the button. All in all about 6 weeks from submission to book on my shelf (actually beating the conventional book by 2 weeks, not to mention the conventional book being sent not to my home address, but to the address of an old employer of more than 2 years ago ... you would think a simple email confirming an address might be more effective than I suspect googling me!). Both books now sit proudly together on the Amazon site http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Laurence+Lock+Lee&x=14&y=17 showing publications dates just 7 days apart, making me look a far more prolific a writer than I really am. Now I'd have to say that the traditional path book is of a much superior quality, hard covered and very professional looking. But you can't tell that on Amazon :)

One can't help but think that there has to be a middle ground and I think it will be through the use of social media. I had a conversation with Wiki evangelist Stuart Mader http://www.ikiw.org/stewart/ in a cafe in San Fancisco last year where we chatted, amongst other things, about our book publishing experiences. He managed to convince his traditional publisher to use a wiki to develop his book on wikipatterns. His time to market was similar to my second experience, though with a superior editing process happening concurrently as the book was being written. I'll definitely be trying this path next time!

Paper makes Social Science Research Network's top 10 downloads

2009-03-27T04:46:00.001-07:00

My co-author of a paper I presented at an Intellectual capital conference in Matera, Italy last year posted the paper up on the SSRN web site last week. I haven't had a paper posted there before so I was pleasantly surprised when I received an email to say it was in the top 10 downloads. The paper is entitled "The Role of Corporate Social Capital on Business Innovation Networks" and is available for free download here.

Hargraves Innovation Conference 2009

2009-03-15T15:09:00.000-07:00

The Hargraves Institute is a think tank comprised of member organisations committed to success through innovation. I was fortunate enough to be invited to provide a keynote speech at their conference this year. The conference was well attended with over 200 registrants, demonstrating that despite the current financial climate, innovation is seen as critical to both survival and thriving longer term. In fact as Optimice we played a more active role than previously. My business partner, Cai Kjaer, conducted a short interest profile of the registrants and then created a large affinity map showing how the registrants were related to each other via common interests. The map was a huge success and a real conversation piece. We intend to replicate this for other events now.

On the conference itself I was pleased to see that networks figured prominantly and that many of the 1st day speakers provided an excellent entre to my own opening speech for day 2. Narelle Kennedy from the Australian Business Foundation reported on a significant research study on common attributes of a successful innovation. The critical elements like being people centric, people networks, tacit knowledge flows etc.. aligned wonderfully with my own topic on trust networks and the speed of trust in innovation.

Daryl Mann from Systematic Innovations spoke of innovations occurring at the point of contradiction i.e. solutions that solve contradictions tend to be the most successful innovations. Daryl noted that the ipod had demonstrated this and did not require major market research to achieve this. I view organisational network analysis as solving the contradiction between top down and peer to peer management.

John Russell from Russell Mineral Equipment gave a very earthy (excuse the pun) talk on how his company had achieved award winning innovations. Of note to me was the critical innovation brokering role that his chief engineer played. The chief engineer has no direct reports yet is one of the highest paid employees that he has. Congratulations to John for recognising the value of the broker/bridge.

This is just a snippet of all the good talks and discussion had. Congratulations to Hargraves for anothe wonderful conference and learning experience. We should have both my own and Cai's presentations up on our web site shortly. The talks were all filmed by Hargraves so perhaps you will also have access to this online soon.

Culture Surveys and ONA surveys

2009-03-15T15:05:00.000-07:00

I am currently reading Rob Cross (with Robert Thomas) on "Driving Results through Social Networks" which is basically the cumulative experiences from his Networks Roundtable activities. He has a piece on ONA and cultural surveys which resonated with me. He observed, as we all have, that the culture or engagement survey results tend to average out the extremes (and potentially the most interesting) perspectives. The survey results usually can be "cut" by department, giving those departmental leaders some localised insight. The problem that Rob alludes to is that this only gives a top down, formal organisation view. It basically tells us how well we are engaged with the management and executive or direct report staff in a top down sense. Nothing about cross-wise employee engagement. Now an interesting idea (which I intend to explore) is that if we team an ONA survey with a staff engagement/culture survey and then "cut" the data by those who are in the "key influencers" sector as identified in the ONA.... how powerful would that be? Are our key influencers culturally aligned?. We could do the same for other network roles like bridges/brokers and peripheral specialists. I suspect that the outliers may not get averaged out this time and the value from the exercises could be significantly enhanced.

Maybe I'm just starting to "get" twitter?

2009-03-02T17:20:00.000-08:00

I've been mostly a bemused twitterer, been the suject of a twitpic, and in common with most others saying "what is the point?" . I have been reluctant to connect twitter to my iphone in case I get floooded with irrelevant tweets. However on reading this "how to" brief , I get the idea is not so much to say "what am I doing"... which I expect many aren't too interested in, but to ask questions that trigger interaction. OK but what can you find out in 140 characters? Finally I saw a note from David Snowden on how he used twitter and I can see now that when one has generated a truck load of followers you can put them to use by asking them anything! Given a choice we would all probably like to use a human search engine because we tend to get qualifications on the information. One problem though .... would you want to follow someone who keeps asking you irrelevant questions like "what time does the next bus come". I guess Twitter might let you segment your followers .... but that starting to sound like hard work!

Cool Facebook Mapper

2009-02-19T22:07:00.000-08:00

Have a look at this http://apps.facebook.com/mynet_phaseone/ ...but you have to be able to use UCINET or Netdraw to visualise.... here is mine. I left the name labels out but the clusters show my personal communities...a few orphans who I know but they don't know anyone else I know. Matches up pretty well with my own perception. What could one do with it? Well maybe I could get out a bit more and meet more strangers :)

Communities and Networks Connections

2009-02-12T17:09:00.000-08:00

RSS feeds may help you make some sense of the blogsphere that is growing at Internet speed. You can't help but think you might just have missed something out there that might really interest you. Nancy White and Co. have created a Communities and Networks Connections site to be officially launched Ferbrary 17th 2009 as a sort of meta-site for invited blogs addressing the topic. Look for the badge, search and tags on the right side of this blog. Explore and Enjoy!

Emergency Services - the ultimate self organisers?

2009-02-12T14:52:00.000-08:00

The tragic bush fires in Victoria, Australia is just another reminder of how powerful self organisation can be when faced with a common and compelling purpose. In the media there has been nothing but praise for the emergency services and volunteer services that have come to the aid of the unfortunate victims of this once in a lifetime natural disaster. The shear logistics of organising support services is immense. Unlike the Cyclone Katrina exerience in the USA the government appears to have played an appropriate supporting more so than directing role. The last thing you want in an emergency is a bunch of forms to fill in and a team of lobbyists in tow!

Of course what we are seeing with the emergency services is the essence of governance through networks. Its unfortunate that we often need to have a literal "burning platform" to achieve the levels of co-operation we all desire, but amazing when you see it in operation and the power of what can be achieved.

Recreating Capitalism

2009-02-12T14:39:00.000-08:00

I've just listened to a facinating podcast by Jay Bragdon on his "Living Asset Stewardship" approach to business. On the surface it looks just like all of the other triple bottom line, living systems, intangible assets, green investment approaches that criticise the current industrial models we have and like to critique. One interesting point he makes on the failure of these business models is the size of the US recession bailout being mopre than 50% of the GDP! anyway what was most impressive is his Living Asset Management Performance (LAMP) Index of companies he sees working by living asset stewardship. If you like he is using an industrial measure to measure the performance of a non-industrial apporach ... and it looks pretty good. 10% annual growth in the current climate? Who wouldn't go for that!

Economic downturn means relationship upturns

2009-02-06T13:25:00.000-08:00

There's nothing like a good recession to get business relationships going. As vendors get hungrier, client organisations doing more with less, those out of work looking to network to their next job, networking and partnering are definitely on the rise. Its in times like these when we all feel a little more vulnerable that we are more likely to reach out for that contact or opportunity that last year you would have let ride. In terms of client/vendor relationships the onus on negotiating an equitable value exchange has never been stronger. As Len Rust reports in his latest newsletter, the days when organisations just followed the crowd on the latest technology trend are over. Identifying true value exchange requires more than the client telling multiple vendors what they want and waiting for the competitive response. More often than not it is the process of negotiating the intangibles where most of the true value is exposed. Our experiences with Value Network Analysis and Partnership Scorecards invariably identify the intangibles being where most of the value now lies .... a veritable untapped resource waiting to be mined!

We should also thank Len Rust for his unsolicited plug for Optimice in the newsletter. Its nice to be recognised from time to time .... helps you keep going in a recession :)

Removing SLAs as a sign of maturity!

2009-01-27T03:13:00.000-08:00

I was intersted to see this story about Shell deciding to do away with SLAs for a finance shared service. We are so used to hearing a sign of immaturity in service provision being the lack of SLAs. What Shell are saying in essence is that SLAs being outcome based (and contractual) are too restrictive. They would prefer the finance services to be a finance "operation" with the same status as any other Shell Operation along with an expectation of continuous improvement using Siz Sigma, Lean etc.. as are the other operational areas.

I was pleased to see this development. I have always felt that once service areas had developed to a satisfactory service level most of their innovation was spent in negotiating and meeting SLAs, with the SLA being the driver rather than the business they were serving. Shell have obviously understood that SLAs only identify a proportion of the needs of the business, and usually only those needs that can be "contracted" explicitely. Being an "equal" partner to other operational groups means that the unfortunate "master/slave" relationship with the service units can also be dispensed with.

Compliance vs Trust: substitutes or complements?

2009-01-15T02:57:00.000-08:00

I have been taking advantage of the Xmas/New Year break to catch up on some reading on organisational trust. One of the themes I was following in the academic literature is to whether compliance and trustful relationships are indeed substitutes or complementary governance mechanisms. The conventional wisdom had been that they are substitutes. That is, if one decides to govern by comprehensive legal contracts then in effect the aim is to leave no room for opportunitistic behaviour. In fact it is suggested that organisations that rely totally on contracts drive out the possibility of building trust. On the other hand we have the "handshake" agreement, no legals, just trust and honour. Of course there is always middle ground where one can choose the point in the continuum between contracts and trust relationships as appropriate, but they are still substitutes.

Now the above had always sounded plausible to me but I came across a theme of argument which suggests that they could be complementary i.e. dense contracts and high trust could co-exist and in fact reinforce each other. Several of the arguments related to the build up of trust as one co-operated in formulating a detailed contract. This may also be plausible but I guess the test is how and if the resulting contract is enforced. The other end of the argument is probably the most plausible though. If you have no contracts and no trust then they will definitely complement each other in providing a poor result!

Lean manufacturing boards

2008-11-22T00:16:00.000-08:00

I'm currently up in the Pilbara area of Western Australia working with a mining company on some netwrk analysis and partnership scorecard projects. I had the opportunity to sit in on some "Lean Board" meetings where staff gather at the begining of the day to review their Lean KPIs. While I haven't been a great fan of Lean when it comes to Services I did see a very positive thing happening ... the process forced people to meet and share performance information. The meetings were time boxed to 15 to 20 minutes (they even painted the quarter on the clock to make sure!).

I noted that Lean provides much diagnostic information. Actions however are left to a nominated accountable staff member. Mechanisms for helping actions be taken were a little light on, copmpared to the diagnostics. I can see the perfect fit now for our Partnership Scorecard and Lean under the 'teamwork' principles part of the Lean board.

SNA ....Art or Science?

2008-11-06T02:37:00.000-08:00

Art appreciation isn't a strength of mine, yet I've been to many galleries around the world tagging behind my art teacher wife. On the weekend we visited the NSW Art Gallery for the Monet exhibition with some friends. In fact this year I've had impressionist overload as we were also at D'Orsay in Paris earlier this year, so I know now that Manet isn't just a typo on the Monet program. Anyway its always interesting to listen to art lovers commenting on what they are looking at, sounding far more educated than I ever will. One fellow was commenting to his fiend that he thought the artist he was observing was probably painting off a photo. My arty wife who knows a lot about art (as far as I can tell) scoffed and said to me that that artist lived way before cameras were even invented!

This got me thinking about what life was like before photos and now the instant gratification of digital photography. I could imagine that painters would have been in high demand for accurately capturing a scene for prosperity. In fact I would expect that the skill of the painter may have been judged by the detail and accuracy of the reproduction. It seems that the impressionists were the renegades and didn't seem to paint accuratey at all...in fact tried to communicate more than an accurate reproduction of a scene, but to also communicate a deeper meaning of what they were observing (am I starting to sound arty :) ) Anyway, so what has this got to do with SNA. Well lately I have been doing a number of validation sessions with clients for some SNA work I am doing. Its always an exciting time in an SNA project when the first maps come up. My clients are always anxious to get an early look and tend to pour over them with the sort of enthusiasm that you might see at the opening of a Monet exhibition! They know the people in the maps and therefore their intrigue is always more than mine, as I try to be the objective observer and warn against over-interpretation etc.. That said the context that the SNA observers bring will differ depending on their own knowledge of the people in the maps, so the discussion is usually animated and lively. My observations by not knowing the people is usually clinical in terms of central connectors, brokers, structural equivalence etc... As scientists we often warn against reading too much into the numbers. But could this always be true with an SNA map interpretation? Typically what we call a validation session could equally be called a sensemaking session. Often I will observe people finding reinforcement of their perceptions in the maps, but also surprise that some expected patterns not being there. So getting back to the topic ... what I tend to observe when people gather around an SNA map for the first time, is not unlike the people that gather around an impressionist piece of art.

Now I can't claim any real insight in terms of SNA and art as the connection has been made many times in the past. In fact several years ago I was visiting Valdis Krebs in Cleveland at a time when Mark Lombardi's hand drawn SNA maps were doing a tour of the art galleries and just happened to be in Cleveland at that time. Valdis and myself spent a number of hours admiring his art work and watching a video on how he went about his business of creating his somewhat intriguing and controversial money laundering maps. Now I can't speak for Valdis, but I think a Lombardi exhibition beats a Monet one any day!

Unintended consequences of a networked world

2008-10-27T00:39:00.000-07:00

We don't have to be reminded of how everything is connected to everything. The global financial crisis is now in our faces every day. We are currently watching the unintended consequences of the Australian government providing deposit guarantees to bank deposits. The flood from non guranteed funds to the banks has been prolific enough to force some fund managers to stop all withdrawals. Too bad for the retirees who had chosen to use these funds like bank accounts.

Perhaps the point is that the level of connectedness is such that no amount of sophisticated modelling can predict the consequences of any particular action. This year in Australia we have seen record everything ... from stock market movements through to the hottest August day, the coldes October day... and the list goes on. Perhaps the media reports on these things more now, but my guess is that the world is becoming more volatile.

So what can we do about it? I suggest we do less planning and more reacting (agile). Perhaps in the networked world one is rewarded more for agility than planned response. Easier said than done I'm sure....

act-KM 2008 - a nice Balance

2008-10-16T15:35:00.000-07:00

I have just returned from the act-KM's 10th anniversary conference.... so there was the old-timers and therefore an opportunity to catch up with old friends, the real 'we have been through the war together' feeling as we discussed the KM trials, tribulations and rejoiced in the successes of the past decade. But also a good influx of newcomers, new people to meet, new perspectives, suggesting that KM is not dead but perhaps evolving toward a 'drop in centre' for those struggling with different business issues looking for a non-mainstream perspective that could trigger a path to resolution.

On the conference itself Dave Guteen launched the theme for the conference which ended up being 'everything 2.0' ... a good way to launch act-km into its second decade....act-km 2.0 :) Another prevailing theme for me from many of the talks and discussion was a new preparedness to face up to reality. Matt Moore re-acquainted us with Arostotle's two roads to the truth... the logic road which has dominated western thinking and rhetoric, which we are only now starting to re-discover. These two roads to the truth were first introduced to me by Tony Goldsby-Smith who was brought into then BHP by believe it or not, the chief engineering executive at the time. Andrew Campbell provided us with an excellent example of leveraging both paths in his impassioned, yet research data rich plea for the world to take notice of climate change issues ... move over Al Gore! Jane Crystal gave us a view of what it was like working on the ground with climate change issues around water catchments . I was impressed by her dedication... clearly highly qualified, having worked all around the world, but has chosen the small town of Wellington in North Western NSW from which to make her mark.

Organizational Zoo man Arthur Shelley has now joined a new zoo, popularly called universities, and is clearly shaking up the traditions through his wiki enabled courses. Having done my share of academic course giving, the delivery is the easy part....its the assessment that sucks. So Authur's use of collaboration stats from wiki use logs resonated well with me. My thoughts while Arthur was speaking was that wouldn't it be good if the students themselves voted for who should get the High Distinction through referencing their work in their own work. Therefore in order to get the HD you would have to post your contributions early and ensure they were high quality... no more last minute and rushed contributions!

The last presentation of the 1st day was from Graham Durant-Law who's concept of business network analysis are closely related to my own work. Graham is using a PhD platform to explore his ideas, which I can relate to quite well. I was impressed with how he was able to extend the traditional social network analysis approach to include nodal objects like projects, policies and business processes ... hence the name "Business Network Analysis". The insights from his applied work on large defence programs with highly interdependent projects and also the identification of a raft of policies with no ownership as responsible job roles are restructured, was refreshing in the way that it challenges the notion of neatly presented project/program charts and policy frameworks with a picture of what it really looks like! Sociograms are good for showing it as it is....nearly the antithesis of a project gantt chart of business process flow map.

The evening and the next morning was largely conducted by my good friend Serena Joyner, who I worked with on a knowledge audit come SNA exercise at Sydney Catchment Auhtority some years ago. Serena is emerging from full-time mum to full time worker (and full-time mum:)) and undertook the challenge of trying to get us to collaborate in the collaboration cabaret before the conference. Her show host performance for the dinner however showed us that she definely has a backup career opportunity should she ever get tired of KM.

My session was a repeat of a Singapore session I ran earlier in the year on applying the partnership scorecard and value network analysis to the KM context. We had 'antagonist' roles for HR, IT and Business Execs for the KM managers to work with. I will be posting up the value network we came up with shortly.

Matt Hodgson took his on-line musings off-line for us and provided a passionate address on how he now really believed their was a KM 2.0. The colourful Corey Banks ran us through an exercise on after action reviews and peer assists and how valuable they were, which was followed up by an even more colouful David Snowden who told us among other things that many of those old KM practices like AARs and Peer assists don't really work....fortunately we know Corey has a thick skin and Dave was not really gunning specifically for Corey... he had bigger targets to shoot at in his session. As always Dave's talk on narrative applications was insightful, informative and irreverent, yet entertaining, which makes him such a good keynote speaker. Of course Dr. Vain got his own bit of irreverence in the night before. The conference ended with David Guteen teaching us how to think backwards with some 'reverse brainstorming' ... which showed us that we all like to have a gripe ... something we will be shortly launcing a new site on... so what this space.

All in all a good time was had by all ... for me only spoiled by the person who left that deceased wombat on the road that I couldn't avoid on my way back to Sydney!

Lean manufacturing and services - My Wikipedia edit

2008-10-08T07:18:00.000-07:00

I couldn't resist it. I was having a quick scan of the wikipedia entry on Lean Manufacturing and came across a paragraph on how Lean Manufacturing was now being used for service management. I haven't been a big fan of taking manufacturing business models into the people centric services industry. These cross discipline applications from manufacturing tend to either forget people or treat them as just another cog in the machine. The paragraph on Lean and services identified the application of Lean Manufacturing by British Airways for their terminal 5 construction. The attached article duly praised the work being done and the wikipedia author noted it as a 'spectacular' example. Unfortunately as we all know now it was indeed a spectacular example of a failure, rather than a success, demonstrating the danger of declaring success too early. I simply added a word of warning and an article link on what actually happened. Looked ugly!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_manufacturing (look under the section on 'origins')

Sub-prime mortgage crisis - should we just let nature take its course?

2008-10-02T14:27:00.000-07:00

Earlier I wrote about the contagion effect of the financial crisis and how we could now expect even thicker regulatory responses. As I write this the US government is considering a revised 'rescue package' . On the Sunrise morining show today David Koch, a financial specialist, reflected the general opinion of his financial expert peers....either pass the bill or the US goes into recession, so why they be so stupid enough to deny it? However in the networked world, everything is connected to everything. I can fully appreciate why this decision isn't a 'no-brainer'. We are in this situation because some financial institutions lent money that they didn't really have to people who couldn't really afford to repay the loan. Other banks, showing similar irresponsibility were also buying into these loans. Short term gain, but long term pain. The US government, heavily in debt, had some big expenses on wars and natural disasters of recent times , now looking at purchasing high risk loans.... sound familiar...short term gain, long term pain?

What we are observing is a stock market that is acting as a huge amplifier of even small network disruptions. The government is appropriately looking to 'govern' or limit the extreme effects. However, at one extreme the 'living systems' view would say that if we let nature take its course, that is, do nothing, the US goes into recession and takes with it many other countries. The hard lessons are learnt and stay with us for a very long term. At a personal level we are much more circumspect as to where we put our money. If we can't see or understand the value proposition we don't invest. we become more conservative, we therefore don't grow as fast, but also don't suffer the roller coaster rides that seem to be only getting wilder. In other words, nature becomes its own best governor.

A little while ago I was visiting friends who had young children. One of their boys had misplaced some money he was taking to school to pay for an activity. He was devastated and crying, nearly inconsolable. However, as his father had said to me, this wasn't the first time this had happened. He had been somewhat careless with money. The easy thing to do was to simply replace the money. However this would mean their son would learn little from the experience. Mum or Dad would always be there to bail him out. They could replace the money but dock his pocket money for the next few weeks. This would at least mean he might learn something as long as they remembered to do it. The hardest thing would be to do nothing and let him suffer the consequences. It could result in some life long learning for their son, but as parents could they be strong enough to watch their son go through the painful consequences? As parents we have all faced this dilemma....so lets have some empathy for those US senators that are taking their time deliberating their decision.

What is the value of formal organisational structures?

2008-09-25T15:46:00.000-07:00

When we talk of organisations we are naturally drawn to organisational structures. When we arrive at a new organisation we want to see the org chart, we want to know "who's who in the zoo", what does the power structure look like. It nearly always looks like a tree reflectng how organisational authority is promulgated throughout the organisation....or is it? ... or more accurately is it still? JB Quinn in his book on the Intelligent Enterpise http://books.google.com.au/books?id=tyOvBIA3WosC&dq=Intelligent+Enterprise&ei=eRbcSNPaGY-4swPhi-TeDg talks about the inverted organisation, more suited to today's services economy, as oppposed to the traditional industrial model. In the inverted model it is the front line customer facing staff that are seen to hold the power for impacting the organisation's fortunes, with the management providing support more so than control.

I am currently reading Meg Wheatley's "Leadership and the New Science" http://books.google.com.au/books?id=Bu_HAAAACAAJ&dq=leadership+and+the+new+science&ei=dhfcSOntFIPstAPMiKC0CA . I was first exposed to her work about a decade ago when introduced to the "above and below the green line" thinking. Basically Wheatley continues to challenge the "machine" thinking that continues to pervade our thinking. The traditional hierarchy is a "divide and conquer" approach to dealing with complexity. Her numerous examples from science and nature shows us why the approach is becoming increasingly ineffective. Executives love to play around with the structure. A new merger, acquisition, regulatory change, divestment etc.. is met with a frantic executive focus on "re-organising". For those not directly involved "business as usual" becomes a challenge. Its nearly like "lets put everything on hold while they work out what they are doing upstairs".

So why is it so hard? In my view organisational structures are being seen as THE tool for effecting organisational change. If we get it right then behaviours will be aligned and everything will be sweet. Of course the more we play that card the less effective it becomes .... "if you don't like the new structure, just hang around for a month or so....it will change again!". More importantly though the reason we see such churning and continuous restructuring, fine tuning etc...is that there IS NO PERFECT FORMAL STRUCTURE. As Wheatley reports, even if there were and the machine worked perfectly, we are in effect dooming ourselves to atrophy, no innovation, no growth, no job satispaction, no challenge, no development etc....

So how about this..... we accept that formal structures are best used for efficiency reasons. We do our business process maps, we know where the communication critical parts are and we cluster units involved to be organisationally 'close'. We don't worry about personalities, we don't consider could Jill work with Frank etc..We are only concerned with efficiency. We are just building the 'machine' and all the parts are just undifferentiated machine parts. Now you will all be saying .... well that won't work! People aren't just machines! and of course you are right, so now we have to de-emphasise the importance of the formal structure. It should no longer reflect the power structure or even who is more important. It becomes like the "terms and conditions" attached to product use. We know its there, we know we have to agree to it before we get to use the product, but what we are really interested in is the product itself. So having browsed the formal hierarchy now we want to know how things really get done around here! Where are the informal networks? Who do I need to influence to get stuff done? This is where the real "effectiveness" lies. The hidden structure can form an impenetrable 'immune system' for change or alternatively a 'happy virus' where positive change rapidly pervades the organisation. You just have to know how to work the network.

"Use formal structure for efficiency, but networks for effectiveness"

Food for thought..... You come to work in the morning, you have two e-mails from your CEO in your In-tray. The first is a message to all staff crafted with the assistance of the corporate communications department. The second is a link to the CEO's personal Blog. Which one do you open first?

Visit from Norman Lewis

2008-09-20T19:12:00.000-07:00

Fellow speaker from the Enterpise 2.0 conference in Varese Italy http://enterprise2forum.it/cms/pages/home-en.php?lang=EN Norman Lewis, was in Australia for his nephew's wedding, called in yesterday morning with his wife Sheila. As well as a social visit he and Sheila were interested in how we could apply SNA to a local government opportunity. Norman and Sheila live in the UK and were talking about how local councils get graded now and the ones who are graded as excellent are given permission to sell their services outside their own organisations. The application we started to focus on was the complex social network that exists between government agencies and their NGO partners, especially in the social services space. I had applied some value network analysis to an aged care application a number of years ago and discovered just how important the personal relationships were. Would a service around stakeholder engagement in local council be valued? I expect the answer is yes. What would such a service look like? I expect it would look like a consulting service supported by a suite of tools and techniques like Optimice's partnership scorecard http://www.partnershipscorecard.com/ and some ONA stakeholder assessment tools, but packaged as a local council offering, including all the contextual material to make it attractive to other councils. We could include all sorts of benchmarking performance data etc..

Any takers?

Deloitte Paper on Value Network Alliances

2008-09-17T15:59:00.000-07:00

I came across this recent paper fro Deloitte http://www.deloitte.com/dtt/article/0,1002,sid%253D108577%2526cid%253D188842,00.html on strategies for alliance partnerships. It provides a good background to the issues and a strategy-formation-management framework. As with many consulting pieces though it does a great job of identifying the issues, reviewing the current thinking but is a little light on or too high level at the action end. The governance advice really came down to a discussion on shared equity and formal and informal structures but not much depth there at all.

However to be fair it does a good job of awareness raising starting with some data like alliances up 25%/year, value up to 30% of revenue, failure rate 60-70%....should be enough to get any business executive's attention .... we just need to have some good answers!

Australian Innovation Report plugs social networking

2008-09-17T06:10:00.000-07:00

The long awaited report on a review of Australia's innovation systems was recently released
http://www.innovation.gov.au/innovationreview/Pages/home.aspx. The report was somewhat damning on the previous Liberal government showing data on how Australia's innovation capability had been systematically eroded over the decade or more that they were in power. As far as networks were concerned the report gave a plug to social networking and web 2.0 and even suggested some experimentation by government agencies. I know many public servants who are 'closet' social networkers but when it comes to work, the cultural barriers are fierce. However, I applaud the reports authors for having a go and lets see what happens...

The hidden hand of Government: Fall of the NSW Premier

2008-09-05T23:29:00.000-07:00

All the news yesterday was about NSW Premier Morris Iemma's forced resignation. The build up to his eventual resignation it seems was some heavy lobbying (networking) on his part to try and win support for some of the radical changes we was looking to make to his front bench. So much for authoritarian rules...what happened to "I'm the boss, I make the decsions, I live by the consequences". I guess the Iemma example is just another example of "authoritarian no longer rules". So even when you are the boss you also have to be an astute networker, building the coalitions behind what you want to do. Life was no doubt a lot more simple when what the boss says goes....but I can't see this situation returning now.

So if you were the new Premier and you wanted to keep a tap on how your 'network' was doing wouldn't you love to be able to "net mine" the emails, text message, phone calls of your cabinet. You wouldn't even need to see the content, just the contact information would probably be sufficient. I recall seeing some data on the e-mail mining of the Enron e-mail store shortly before it collapsed. From memory the emails were shorter and much more frequent. I expect you would have seen the same thing if you were able to mine Morris Iemma's e-mail over the past week!

From numbers to Narrative

2008-08-26T15:02:00.000-07:00

I attended a talk at the NSW KM forum last night by my research colleague from Sydney Uni, John Dumay on valuing intangibles. John talked about the 'accountingisation' of intangibles i.e.trying to turn everyting into numbers. John's theme was around the value of narrative in leveraging intangible value. Perhaps there is a complementary theme here. Conventional top town governance is numbers driven, compliance to benchmarks etc...however governing in a networked world is more about engagement through dialog, strategic conversations and narrative.

Balancing Explore and Exploit:is this the right question?

2008-08-14T10:23:00.000-07:00

I attended an interactive session at the AOM meeting on Balancing Exporation and Exploitation. All the papers were dealing with the issue of the balance between explore and exploit. Since the theme for the conference was "The questions we ask"...i.e. are we asking the right questions, I put my two cents worth in suggesting that this was the wrong question.There are many successful companies at both ends of the spectrum, from those that are great explorers and those that are great exploiters. The key issue for me is that its not a choice, but a process. The important question is how we can effectively flow from explore to exploit. I have inserted the "engage" process between explore and exploit and believe this is what we should be researching:

http://www.optimice.com.au/upload/Optimice_3Es_of_Innovation.pdf

Seems obvious to me and it seemed to resonate with the group and the facilitator acknowledged that this would really re-direct the research agenda. Afterwards I met a Stanford PhD student from the session that was focussing on this exact issue and was pleased that it was at least brought up. This brought home to me how even the explorers of the world, being our research community, can easily get into the group think situation and not see some things that appear obvious to outsiders. Also how insightful the conference organisers were in developing their theme. Sometimes we are so entrained in our own community and themes of discussion that we forget to get to look up and see what else is happening.

For example is governance always a compliance issue?

Academy of Management Meeting

2008-08-08T04:38:00.000-07:00

I'm off this week to the Academy of Management meeting in Anaheim. I'm not sure if locating an academic management conference next to Disneyland is sending any sort of message, but my expectations are that with 6,000 + management academics and professionals its going to be a full on week. I'll be presenting my research work on corporate social capital and its link to firm performance. The program is enormous. Its definitely the place to be if you work in a business school. For me I'm looking for a mix of academia and practice. I expect to see a lot on networks and governance, so watch this space for my reviews.

On another note I was contacted by an organisation called insightory to become their featured expert this week. I don't know much about them but their site looked interesting and has the potential to connect people interested in management studies and practice.

Is the subprime mortgage crisis an example of failed governance?

2008-07-31T18:28:00.000-07:00

I have just been perusing the research on the propagation or contagion effects of the US Subprime mortgage crisis. The fact that there is a growing amount of research on this topic e.g. here and here identifies the size of the global impact. Here in Australia all for the big 4 banks have been significantly impacted. So is this a governance issue? I'm sure if one went in to each of these organisations to review their governance procedures, they would appear comprehensive and up to date with "industry best practice". Their lending practices do not (at least visibly) mimic USA subprime lending practices. So why are they suffering so much? Maybe the answer lies in the fact that the governance procedures have not kept pace with the growing complexity of the business environment. Virtually all governance procedures start at the top of an organisation (boards and directors) and work downward. Governance procedures are formulated and approved by the top executive and are then promulgated as compliance rules throughout the organisation. Now lets lift our sights a unit level of analysis higher, from the firm or organisation to the market level. Now we are exposed to the full complexity of the interconnections between firms aided by the increasingly powerful tools of electronic communications. Where is the board of directors for a mortgage market? Who writes the governance rules? Who enforces compliance even if they did exist?

Now using one of my favorite thinking frameworks cynefin to explain what I believe is going on. Virtually all governance schemes are developed at the firm or organisation level. In cynefin terms they are developed with an expectation that the business environment can be analysed and cause and effect determined (simple and complicated regimes). In reality financial institutions are becoming increasingly interdependent in the way they share the world's liquidity pools. When perturbed the effects are not not just simple or complicated, but complex and even chaotic! The traditional forms of governance may just have to be turned on its head, or at least reformed substantially to cater for the subprime mortgage like puturbations in an increasingly networked business environment. Perhaps a little probe, sense and respond? One suspects however that this may not happen too quickly though. At least not until an extra few volumes are added to Sarbanes-Oxley and the next few subprime mortgage like 'mishaps' still occur :)

Brokering can prevent Alzheimers?

2008-07-29T04:05:00.000-07:00

Following on from the post on Rob Burt's talk about the characteristics of brokers and their 'tolerance' of ambiguity and their willingness to explore new areas, I recently saw a piece on a breakfast show recently on how one might avoid getting Alzheimers. While many commentators talk about keeping the mind active by undertaking mentally difficult tasks like puzzles, the presenters claimed it is not so much the complexity of the task but how different the task is to what you are used to. In other words if you always do cryptic crossword puzzles and have become quite good at them, then doing one more would exercise the brain less than say, brushing your teeth with your non normal hand.

So I guess Ron can add one more benefit to the list of why one should become a broker bridging structural holes .... it prevents Alzheimers!

UK SNA Conference

2008-07-23T22:28:00.000-07:00

I'm now back in Australia after a brief stop in Singapore and a presentation to the local KM society on value networks and partnerships for KM adoption. I attended and presented at the UK SNA conference at Greenwich university. It was great to be able to have personal contact with keynote speakers like Ron Burt (Structural Holes), Mark Everett (UCINET) and Tom Snijders at a smaller event than Sunbelt....where you would have no chance. To their credit they were all generous with their time for people attending the conference. Mark was kind enough to help me out with some analysis I am doing on the Wikipatterns site, looking at social patterns of wiki editors. Ron Burt was his usually entertaining self and we were all keen to hear his latest musings on the balance between brokerage and closure. Of course this tension is no different to the topic of the blog and the topic of my talk at the conference on the tension between top down (closed/compliance) and bottom up (open/brokered/co-operative) governance. Ron has long aurgued the value of being a broker and sustaining brokerage behaviours, which he strongly supports with his empirical research. One new insight for me was that Ron mentioned that those people who demonstrated good brokerage skills were also able to demonsrate excellent closure skills. This sounds confusing to one who saw them coming from different planets i.e. explorers vs six sigma. But it probably also reinforces a view that particularly talented individuals are needed to achieve the appropriate balance between brokerage and closure as it would also be for open vs closed governance mechanisms. It also helps with some other crticisms that Ron mentioned were surfacing in the academic literature around "what is the impact of having a world full of brokers?". My presentation can be found here.

Tetbury in Bloom

2008-07-17T23:09:00.000-07:00

Have spent the last few days exploring the Cotswolds in the UK and staying at a lovely market town called Tetbury. Yesterday was judgement day for the "best town" competition. Tetbury had won last year and the community was out in force looking to repeat their success. The town was in great shape.

It is sometimes worth reflecting on where some of our modern 'network' terms arise from....and 'community of practice' is the one that comes to mind. In the netwrok world much is achieved through the pride and passion of those working and living in local communities, working to make their community just that little bit more distinctive than others. Success breeds success. Yes it is sometimes competition as is the case for Tetbury, but it is friendly competition and the end result, despite who the overalll winner is, is a lift in standard for the whole. For those in high governance roles it is worth looking at the "better towns" programs and ask is there no better way to raise community standards than look to ignighting local community passion and pride.

Paris city planners

2008-07-14T00:20:00.000-07:00

I'm currently in Paris and today is Bastille day....so a good time to be in this wonderful city. This is only my 3rd visit to the city, the last time being some 16 years ago, but the image that has hit me each time is the foresight of the city planners. The wide boulevards, major green areas and spectacular public buildings are testimony to "top down" governance planning. However one is not enchanted only by these major public artefacts. What also gives the city a unique character is the way that these major 'planned' artefacts are blended with the mess of narrow,somewhat haphazard neighborhoods of the left and right banks, the Latin quarter,Montmartre etc. which give the city its real character.

My point here is that Paris is a good example of the balance of governance from the 'planned' to the 'emergent'. When I think of other major cities in the world like London, New York, Rome, Sydney, Washington, Tokyo etc..there is elements of this blend but in my opinion, none have done it quite as well as Paris.

Evangelists and Connectors? common attributes...

2008-07-04T02:16:00.000-07:00

During by recent trip to Varese, Italy to present at the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 our hosts were kind enough to host a dinner for the speakers to meet physically...many for the first time. The wife of our dinner host commented on the program that three of the speakers had 'titles' of "evangelist"... in my view a somewhat new age funky title that creates an image of passionate promoter who travel broadly preaching the message of their chosen mission. It has both positive connotations in terms of the passion and commitment that it engenders. It also has negative connotations perhaps related to parochialisms and the ability to see alternative perspectives.

The 3 "titled" evangelists, with their comments on the forum are:

Social Computing Evangelist Luis Suarez

http://www.elsua.net/2008/06/23/trip-to-varese-to-present-at-international-enterprise-20-forum/

Wiki Evangelist Stewart Mader

http://www.ikiw.org/2008/07/02/europe-conference-coverage-wiki-intranetblogru-interview/

and Telco 2.0 Evangelist Norman Lewis

In my conversations with the said evangelists, they certainly fitted the image and while parochial to their mission I certainly didn't find that they were ignorant of other perspectives, in fact quite the opposite. Which brings me to the link to 'connectors'.

The day after the forum I was in Matera in the south of Italy to present at the International Forum for Knowledge Asset Dynamics. My presentation was linking social capital to innovation and introducing our 3Es model of innovation. The 3 Es are Exploration, Engagement and Exploitation, with the engagement role seen as the critical 'connector' role connecting exploration networks with exploitation networks. The model resonated well with the audience as I argued that it was not a question of balancing exploration with exploitation, but a matter of managing the process of innovation through engaging, rather than trading off between them. This was totally aligned with the keynote speech of Goran Roos who also argued for innovation as a managed process and not one of serendipity.

So can evangelists play the "engager" role in innovation? One thing is for sure the 'engager' requires the passion and focus of the evangelist. But they also need the respect of the exploitation networks....and perhaps the image of the evangelist might unfortunatley work against this, despite the personal attributes that I have recently observed in Varese.

Enterprise 2.0 conference at Varese, Italy

2008-06-27T21:20:00.000-07:00

I had the great pleasure of being part of a very succssful Enterprise 2.0 conference,organised by my good friends at Open Knowledge in Varese International Forum on Enterprise 2.0, Italy on the 25th June. An excellent review has been provided by Sean Carlos http://www.antezeta.com/blog/enterprise-20-varese/ so I willl limit my comments to my reflections on governance in networks:

Norman Lewis' presentation on intergenerational use of technology challenged the common notion of our children being smart because they can use the technology better than ourselves. In some ways Norman was extolling the virtues of children needing to listen and learn from their elders (us!) if they were to really become smart...so everything is changing but nothing has changed :)

In terms of governance in networks Norman's talk reminds us that despite the excitement and gay abandon that the "bottom up" networks can display, ultimately to be really smart, we still need to retain appropriate respect for the hierarchy and formal governance mechanisms.

Emanuele Quintarelli showed an interesting slide on the the adoption rates of the technologies that make up Enterprise 2.0. Predictably wikis, blogs and RSS feeds were high on the list and just making the list was social network analysis (SNA) which at least vindicated my presence on the speaking panel! I commented in my talk that while SNA is new to the Enterprise 2.0 world it has a heritage that goes back some 75 years.

Listening to David Terrar's talk on on-line communities provided a deja vu experience for me from my days of working with communites of practices at BHP Billiton. While those communities were only lightly "on-line" using discussion lists and early stage on-line community tools and still relying on face to face meetings, the important community roles of community leader and communications facilitator and general support bodies appear to map directly to the on-line only community world.

I have been working virtually with Stewart Mader on applying SNA to his wikipatterns site, but had met him in person for the first time at this event. I was not alone as many of the panel members commented on how this was the first time that they had been able to meet their "on-line" buddies in the flesh. One of the more interesting findings from my analysis was the number of highly valued relationships that had been created by participation in the wikipatterns community, many that had now moved beyond the wikipatterns site. I will be writing a full report on the project....in a wiki of course! Stewart in his talk managed to make me feel guilty about writing my book in the traditional way, with the typcal time consuming processes involved with editing and publishing. Creating his last book on a wiki looked absolutely sensational. I'll definitely look to following his lead next time.

Thomas Vander Wal's talk on folksonomies filled a knowledge gap for me. Social tagging has the potential to being a librarian's headache for some time to come. Again the tension between top down categoration and bottom up 'freewheeling' with the winner being the end user was clearly evident. No doubt the appropriate governance response will be somewhere in the middle, so in the mean time, as social tagging grows it will be interesting to watch the response from the librarian 'establishment'.

Luis Suarez is a fun guy and willing to put his beliefs into acti0n by no longer using e-mail. I'd like to stay in contact with Luis, but will have to now work out how :) Perhaps the governance insignts from Luis comes from our discussions outside the forum. Luis some how managed to talk his 'establishment' employers into letting him work from an island in the Mediterranean...obviously got them at a weak moment...but apparently the empire is striking back...something I'm sure all remote workers have experienced. Again an example of the governance tension that exists between top down management and embracing the bottom up "power is in the network" approaches.

CeBIT Australia and the Partnership Scorecard

2008-06-11T01:03:00.000-07:00

We were happy to be a finalist in the "Early Innovators" award for our Partnership Scorecard at CeBIT Australia this year. The award is targeted at the big research units so we were pleased that our garage level R&D was in such good company. It was also our first time manning an exhibition stand. Here id Cai Kjaer and I at work!

IT Governance and compliance approaches

2008-06-11T00:47:00.000-07:00

I am just completing the preparation of a paper I will be presenting at the UK Social Network Analysis conference next month called "Governance and Corporate Social Capital: Friends or Foes?" The basic point I am making is that governance schemes today are largely compliance driven, which assumes that there exists a "best practice" standard against which compliance can be measured. I make the point that the IT industry and IT governance are complex environments, made even more complex through the introduction of Enterprise 2.0, Open source, Multi sourcing, public iIT infrastructure etc.. I use the Snowden Cynefin framework to illustrate this fact. I introduce corporate social capital as a means for offering a complementary co-operative approach to IT governance and a new frwamework for IT governance inclusive of it

More on objectivity

2008-05-27T04:34:00.001-07:00

I have just been reading a major government call for expression of interest for a major construction development in Sydney. The pages devoted to probity reinforced the benefits of objectivity and why one might strive to achieve it to ensure that the market place works fairly and without corruption. People however, are not machines and we all "suffer" from our own biases and perceptions built up from our own personal experiences. Those assessing government tenders are no exception. While the tender evaluation process aims to be objective and probity officers are employed to watch out for conflicts of interest, can we be sure that social structure is not having an influence on decision making? I don't think so. Perhaps we should be emphasising "fairness" over "objectivity". Social structure can work to enhance fairness by excluding those that are perceived to be operating unfairly. Objectivity tries to exclude social structure effects, with doubtful results.

The Illusion of Objectivity

2008-05-25T04:05:00.000-07:00

In 1985 aclaimed sociologist Mark Granovetter wrote an important paper arguing that all transactions are embedded in some form of social structure.

Granovetter, M. (1985). Economic action and social structure: The problem of embeddedness. American Journal of Sociology, 91(3), pp.481-510.

I am constantly reminded of this in my day to day business life. We have just finished exhibiting at CeBIT 2008 in Australia. As a fledgling business with a new product, "The Partnership Scorecard" we thought we would jump in and nominate for the early innovators award. The nomination form identified the criteria by which the award was to be judged and a limited space in which to respond. To our surprise we were selected as one of three finalists . We were expecting that the judges would come to our exhibition stand to do the final evaluations in person. TO our surprise this didn't happen. We didn't win, but in speaking to the eventual winners they also did not appear to have met with any judges. While we believe the eventual winners were more worthy than ourselves, it begs the question on objectivity. By making judgements on purely written submissions one could argue that the decisions would be more objective and not swayed by subjectivity introduced by meeting with the candidates. On the other hand, without meeting with the candidates it would be hard for the judges not to be influenced by pre-exisitng "brand" knowledge or even personal knowledge of the individuals nominating. Either way, social structure definitely has an influence.

Another example I was confronted with was when considering applying for a government sponsored commercialisation assistance grant. As with most governnment systems of this ilk the documentation is voluminous and comprehensive. There are also "business advisors" there for helping you complete your application and advise you on your likelihood of success. These business advisors are in the invidious position of having to be "objective" advisors. When I pushed one advisor to advise me on the "real" criteria, the discomfort was audible on the phone line. "I'm here to help you but I can't tell you any more than is written in the documentation..."

We certainly weave a tangled web when we try to give the illusion of objectivity. This can happen in all business situations. Business Process Re-engineering was arguably the greatest villain in this way, quickly followed by Business Process Management. Both place people and social structures in the appendix (and even that is questionable).

So why don't we call it as it is? Perhaps the instructions for an award or grant application should read like:

"Applicants should complete the following forms addressing the criteria as best they can...but to enhance your chances of success it is suggested that you get to know the assessors personally. Try to understand their frames of reference, their biases and preferences. If they choose not to meet with you then you are probably not going to be successful. Speak to past successful winners. Find out how they managed to effectively influence the assessors. Do your background checks. Who do the assessors rely on for advice. Build a social network map of how they are connected to others and work out how you can infiltrate their networks. Be careful however not to offend or be too intrusive, as no-one likes to be harrassed. Remember, its not only what you know but who you know that breeds success"

Sound objectionable? Only if you are being fooled by the illusion of objectivity.

More examples in future posts...I'd like to hear about your examples.