Category Archives: Technology

information & communication technology

stop talking about jobs

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Andy McAfee reports in HBR that United Technologies is laying off workers, even though its stock is at an all time high and sales have increased by 35%.

I simply want to point out that if this example is part of any larger trend, then we cannot rely on economic growth to fix our current problems of unemployment or underemployment. Because even for individual companies, economic growth has become so decoupled from employment growth that the former goes up while the latter goes down.

I have been observing for quite some time that most work is getting automated and outsourced, while only complex and creative work remain valued, and therefore wealth-generating for those who do it. The construct of the JOB highlights this problem, because jobs are designed around work that can be copied and workers who can be replaced, but anything that can be reduced to a flowchart will be automated. Relying on the job as society’s main wealth-sharing mechanism is a major mistake in the network era, but one that politicians and many others continue to make. We are entering a post-job economy.

Part of the solution is taking control of our own professional development. Another is developing new systems of wealth exchange, such as the many new models examined at Shareable. But most importantly, we need to change our language as we discuss work, wealth, and economics. We need to stop focusing on job creation and figure out better systems of wealth redistribution for a networked society.

employment opportunities

Open as in commons, not garden

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Once again, it’s time to put my money where my mouth is. I have been a proponent of the open web and open source software for the past decade and more. This site was Creative Commons licensed when CC was in its infancy. I have talked several times about the importance of owning your data. I deleted my Facebook account over a year ago, having no more time for this enormous walled garden, and I deleted my LinkedIn account and started to rebuild it last year. The latter was an interesting experience, as I saw how much more controlling and channelling LinkedIn was with new users than when I first joined.

This week Google announced that it will close down Google Reader, an RSS aggregator that I have found useful, after Bloglines went offline and then changed its operating model. Reader is a very important part of my PKM process, especially the “Seek” part. I have just switched to Feedly and will see how it works. At this stage I am more inclined to find paid services than free ones. As they say on the web, if you’re not paying for it, you are the product. For more commentary on Google Reader see Stephen Downes’ posts.

I would not be surprised if Feedburner, another Google service, gets shut down soon as well. Many subscribers here get their email notifications via Feedburner. As I move away from the Google web domination machine, I will be removing Feedburner as an option, though existing subscribers will continue to receive notifications until Google inevitably pulls the plug.

In the meantime, I will try to set an example and remove myself from as many walled gardens as possible. Google Plus is probably next, as is Google Analytics. I still get value from Twitter and LinkedIn and will continue to use them, though I am under no illusions that they are serving my interests.

I will also look for good platforms that are either open source, like wordpress.org, which powers this site, or services that charge a fee and cater to their customers. For instance, I gladly pay for my Flickr service.

We are going through another transition of the web and I have no intention of leaving the whole thing to a few corporate interests. This site will remain ad free and open access, not residing on some commercial third-party hosted platform. It’s a very small thing I can do.

open

From ideas to ideology

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Charles Green wrote a few years ago that management is still fighting the industrial revolution:

Ideas lead technology. Technology leads organizations. Organizations lead institutions. Then ideology brings up the rear, lagging all the rest—that’s when things really get set in concrete.

So basically, ideas are enabled by new technology around which new organizations are created. Only then do new institutions get built in order to support the new dominant ideology.

So what does the current set of pillars that informs management look like?

The industrial era was based on the notion of standardization and best practices. Factories and mass production enabled corporations, like General Motors, from which business schools such as MIT’s Sloan School of Management (Alfred Sloan was president & CEO of GM) were created to develop managers trained in some variation of the principles of scientific management. Here is an excerpt from F.W. Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (1911):

It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone.

The network era is starting to take shape and some of the pillars are getting set in place, while others are in the making and not yet guaranteed to be part of the mix. Ideas like wirearchy and open business have been taken up in conjunction with new internet technologies, especially social media. There are experiments with new organizations, like  B Corporations that have social and environmental components, or peer to peer production.  It’s not obvious what the new institutions will look like, but we are seeing frenzied action in the educational sector as new and old players vie for dominance.

Perhaps new institutions will look like Massively Open Online Courses (MOOC’s). Perhaps not. But before a dominant ideology emerges we will see much more experimentation during this shift period. Will the dominant ideology be more like the “unassailable techno-humanitarian” TED Talks, or perhaps have the grassroots qualities of Shareable? My initial stab at a new ideology is a Taylorist mash-up: The principles of Connected Management:

It is only through innovative and contextual methods, the self-selection of the most appropriate tools and work conditions, and willing cooperation that more productive work can be assured. And the duty of being transparent in our work and sharing our knowledge rests with all workers.

However, if history is to be repeated, things will only stabilize after the new dominant ideology sets in place. Meanwhile, we will continue to live in very interesting times.

connected management

Cooperating in the open

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I’ve been thinking about collaboration and cooperation a lot lately. I see PKM as mostly comprising cooperative behaviours, as well as being self-serving (in the good sense). With cooperation, there is often no direct feedback on behaviour. Feedback emerges from the network through time. The image below is based on a previous post on tools & competencies for the social enterprise.

collab-coop competencies

Cooperation is for the long term, while collaboration is usually bound by time, such as one’s career, a job, or a project. This difference is perhaps why I have been avoiding many online community invitations. These communities are often nothing more than a bounded social network. Google Plus communities are an example. If I want to cooperate, then the most porous and least bounded social network is the best for me. This is what my blog (open to anyone) or Twitter (public stream as default) help me do. If I wish to to be bounded through membership in a community then I need a reason to do so. A project is a good reason. I belong to several collaborative online project-based communities.

This brings me to a simple way to decide if I want to join an online community. If it does not have a stated expiration date, objective, or end point, then I won’t join. I will keep my cooperation open, not within a walled garden. If I wish to collaborate to get something done, then a walled garden, with some end in sight, makes sense.

social ties collaboration cooperation

I think one of the problems today is that many online social networks are trying to be communities of practice. But to be a community of practice, there has to be something to practice. One social network, mine, is enough for me. How I manage the connections is also up to me. In some cases I will follow a blogger, in others I will connect via Google Plus or Twitter, but from my perspective it is one network, with varying types of connections. Jumping into someone else’s bounded social network/community only makes sense if I have an objective. If not, I’ll keep cooperating out in the open.

Tools and competencies for the social enterprise

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This past year I have worked on several projects that have extended my thinking on how we can use social media to promote cooperation and collaboration within and outside the enterprise. I explained some of this in a previous post on enterprise social network dimensions, which is based on the work of several others.

Ian McCarthy’s honeycomb of social media was an initial inspiration, showing how one could quickly and graphically portray differences between social media platforms. The Altimeter Group’s recent report on making the business case for enterprise social networks provided more detail on what happens inside organizations. Finally, Oscar Berg’s digital workplace concretized gave a good picture of what people-centric, service-oriented businesses should look like.

I would like to expand on this, highlighting some additions to that previous post in November. It seems that the seven facets identified by Oscar Berg align with some general digital competencies that are necessary for connected knowledge workers everywhere. These also align with the PKM framework that can support the flow of cooperative and collaborative work in a coherent organization. I have also shown examples of how one can look at various enterprise social network tools, such as the ubiquitous Sharepoint. I am not a Sharepoint fan, but almost all large organizations have it and it is usually a key part of their social network framework. Finally, I provide a few words of advice that I have learned from many projects. This presentation is a visual summary of a significant part of my work in 2012. I hope it is useful and I always appreciate discussions on how it can be improved.

The right information is not enough

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There is quite a bit of research on the significant value of making the right information available to the right person at the right time – and quite a bit of research shows clearly that Enterprise Search has a direct impact on the success of organizations. So enterprise search platforms must include social capabilities to tap into powerful ways to find the information that employees need more quickly and accurately. This calls for integration into a single platform that continuously evolves as the workplace changes.

This is the conclusion made by Julie Hunt in a comprehensive post on enterprise search. I would like to contrast this with a statement made by Dave Snowden that I noted in negotiating between chaos and project management.

Fallacy: If you give the right information, to the right people, at the right time, they will act accordingly. As “pattern-seekers” we may not even “see” the data when it is presented.

This is a problem with technology-centric solutions to business problems. Business is about people and how they interact. No single technology has ever addressed an entire area of business. No technology will resolve our search issues because we don’t have search issues. Our business issues are more like understanding disparate data; finding information to support or refute what we think we know; and getting information that helps us take appropriate action. There is a danger that a single social search platform could be seen as replacing the need for personal reflection and providing time for individual sense-making and sharing it. It has happened before with knowledge management and learning management systems.

I am a strong proponent of manual, not automatic, sense-making frameworks. Each person is the indivisible unit of knowledge work. If the aim is to improve organizational knowledge, then people have to take time to make sense of it. If not, it remains merely information, whether in a unified search tool or elsewhere.

While Julie Hunt provides a good overview of how social re-connects enterprise search, we should not let search tools, or any other tools, override the social (human) aspects of business. As Jay Cross says, business is VERY personal. Sense-making, or learning while we work, is too important to be managed by a single technology platform.

Do not underestimate the power of audio

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I once wrote a paper on educational radio programming on the CBC during the 1930′s and 1940′s. The achievements of early radio have similarities with web-based social learning. Two of the more popular programmes on early CBC radio were the Citizens’ Forum and the Farm Radio Forum.

Farm Radio Forum, 1941-65, was a national rural listening-discussion group project sponsored by the Canadian Association for Adult Education, the Canadian Federation of Agriculture and CBC. Up to 27 000 persons met in neighbourhood groups Monday nights, November through March, using half-hour radio broadcasts, printed background material and pretested questions as aids to discussion of social and economic problems.

Farm Forum innovations included a regional report-back system, whereby group conclusions were collected centrally and broadcast regularly across Canada, occasionally being sent to appropriate governments. In addition, discussion – leading to self-help – resulted in diverse community “action projects” such as co-operatives, new forums and folk schools. Farm and community leaders claimed that the give-and-take of these discussions provided useful training for later public life. In 1952, UNESCO commissioned research into Farm Forum techniques. Its report was published in 1954, and consequently India, Ghana and France began using Canadian Farm Forum models in their programs.

Radio is a one-way medium but innovations such as programme guides by mail one week in advance, local discussion groups and national feedback on individual responses, kept people actively involved. Imagine a group of farmers gathering at a neighbour’s house, bringing food for a communal supper, and then discussing issues of great social relevance,  like the possibility of medicare. This was real public radio, not just commercial-free airwaves. Today, the CBC produces programmes such as Cross-Country Checkup and the Radio Noon Phone-Ins for similar purposes.

Donald Clark has looked at the medium as well, in Radio Education: huge and hugely underestimated and provides a view of the further potential of this medium in the Internet era.

Radio and new media
Podcasting is the true heir to radio. To timeshift an audio experience and put it in the hands of the learner, gives them is convenience and control. Internet radio has given many access to distant radio stations and led to growth in stations with a very specific focus. Far from being a dead or dying medium it is finding new purposes and new channels.

Conclusion
Radio is scalable, in the broadcasting sense. It’s low cost and reach have seen widespread use, not only in the developing world but in developed countries like the UK, where radio has long been respected as a source of high quality educational content. Video is very far from killing the radio star.

Sometimes it’s good to go back and revisit what we have collectively learned. We should not underestimate the power of audio, whether it be as podcasts or live radio.

Message for email subscribers

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At last count, there were 565 people subscribed to this blog via email. This service was provided by FeedBurner, a Google company. There used to be a place on the right side of my Home page where you could subscribe. However, Google has stopped development on Feedburner and rumours are that the service will shut down on 20 October 2012, so I have removed that option. As of yesterday, the Feedburner email subscription service was still working. I am not sure how much longer it will be up, given that Feedburner tells me I have zero subscribers.

I have recently added a subscription notice widget powered by WebFish, but it only gives you the link to the new post, not the entire post in the email itself. At this time, this is all I have found that is available. If you would like to continue to receive updates by email, I would suggest subscribing to the new notification system located on the right column of the Home page.

Top 10 Tools for Learning

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Jane Hart is asking for submissions to her annual Top 100 Tools for Learning. Please vote, in the next 10 days, before it closes for another year. I really like the fact that Jane has done this for several years and we can see some interesting trends. Stay tuned for Jane’s analysis this year.

Here are my top 10 choices, with a few changes over the past year:

10: Google Plus: I am still learning how to use this platform which gives you great control over filtering how much information you get. The live Hangouts feature is a killer app, in my opinion.
9: Slideshare: An easy way to share presentations so that people can view them before or instead of downloading them.
8: Flickr: Still a great way to share photos online. I like the feature that automatically creates images in multiple sizes.
7: Gimp: An open source (free) image manipulation tool is very helpful for presentations and papers.
6: BuddyPress: This variant of WordPress powers the Social Learning Centre and has allowed me to deliver my workshops to more people.
5: Keynote: Apple’s presentation application has enabled me to improve my slide presentations, through its simplicity and lack of clip art.
4: Twitter: The micro-blogging platform lets me stay in loose touch with many people.
3: Diigo: Social bookmarks are a quick way for me to save a web page and find it easily (I do an auto backup to Delicious).
2: Google Reader: This feedreader lets me subscribe to many websites and stay current with bloggers and news feeds.
1: WordPress: It powers my blog, which is the core of my self-directed learning and online reflection. It’s easy to use, has a large community, and there are many plug-ins and additions available.

Innovating our way out of the industrial era

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I have frequently said that simple and complicated work is getting automated and outsourced and that the real value in the networked enterprise is in complex (creative) work. Standardized work, that can be done by many, is low value in the network era. See my posts on Job Automation or Exception Handling for further reading.

 Bob Cringely clearly shows how this works in information technology.

Toward the top end of IT the value of individual contributors becomes extreme. There are many IT organizations where certain critical functions are dependent on a single worker. These are complex or arcane tasks being done by unique individuals. You know the type. Every organization needs more of them and it is easy to justify looking wherever — even overseas — to find more.  It’s at this level where the commodity argument breaks down.

The bad news is that routine, standardized work has increasingly lower value. The good news is that almost every person has the capacity to do more complex and creative work. We have been designed as learning organisms. Our main constraints are our artificial structures, especially our schooling systems. Much as we no longer need the majority of the population to grow crops, we no longer need a large workforce of widget makers or data processers. However, we have an infinite demand for creative products and services.

As Cringely concludes:

So we have a standoff. Corporate America has, for the most part, chosen a poor path when it comes to IT labor issues, but CEOs aren’t into soul-searching and nobody can turn back the clock. Labor, in turn, longs for a fantasy of their own — the good old days.

The only answer that makes any sense is innovation — a word that neither side uses properly, ever.

The only way out of this mess is to innovate ourselves into a better future.

Between organizations, innovation can start by increasing connections, as it is obvious there are few connections between labour leaders and CEO’s.  Inside organizations, innovation can be facilitated through narration, transparency and power-sharing. That’s how we can start to get ourselves out of this wicked problem of work in the 21st century.