My last post was unexpectedly timely. I was catching up on recent posts at Flowing Data yesterday and discovered that Google Image Swirl are working on much the same approach to Image Search over in Google Labs.
Being Google, it’s cooler, richer and far, far cleverer. It also confirms my view that this method is good for situations where you want to hide the irrelevant stuff.
Here – have a go:
Google Image Swirl
Enjoy.
Selling collaboration services and development services within an organization? – Art Gelwicks recently posted this as a question in the SharePoint Users Group on LinkedIn, and I found myself writing more than would fit in a discussion forum. So here it is.
Are you selling ‘bottom up’ by putting SharePoint out there and letting people use it spontaneously, or are you selling ‘top down’ by finding a sponsor with a requirement and using SharePoint to fulfil it?
There are pros and cons to both. The keys to working out these pros and cons for your organisation are
Culture
How your organisation takes to SharePoint depends in part on the culture. Some cultures are enthusiastic about collaboration tools like Instant Messaging, Live Meeting and SharePoint, and others see these sorts of tools as time-wasters. Here’s how to work out which one yours is.
Goffee and Jones do a great 2×2 for the culture of an organisation. They say that the glue that enables a team (department, company) to work together is either sociability or solidarity; organisations with high sociability scores are ‘networked’ and organisations with high solidarity scores are ‘mercenary’. There’s more to it than that, their book is very readable and includes diagnostic tools.
I have seen people in departments where the glue has been sociability take well to the collaborative features of SharePoint like discussion forums, alerts, review workflows and MySites. I’ve not tested this, but if your organisation is networked (and read Goffee and Jones to decide if it is) then a bottom up approach would probably work well. Look out to see whether the people are already comfortable with tools like Instant Messaging and LiveMeeting, whether they are active on Twitter, LinkedIn and FaceBook, and whether Monday mornings start with a chat about the weekend. This isn’t about people who are early adopters of technology, it’s about people who like technology because it is a social and work enabler.
By contrast I have seen people in ‘mercenary’ organisations who are so busily focussed on deliver-deliver-deliver that they don’t have time to ‘waste’ learning how to use a new tool like SharePoint. In an organisation that’s mercenary (again read Goffee and Jones – they mean it in a particular way) you need a sponsor and a project. Work out what your sponsor’s driver is and fulfil it. They may want to cut down storage costs, or improve a specific set of working practices, or control the published versions of training material.
Find a sponsor with a specific need and fulfil that need.
Rinse and repeat.
This brings us on to:
Use Cases
One of the problems with SharePoint is that it’s a swiss army knife of a tool – useful for such a large number of things that it’s hard to stay focused on just one or two. In a ‘mercenary’ organisation the problem is handled for you – your sponsor has a specific task and you focus on that. The challenge is in the ‘networked’ organisations where everyone who comes across SharePoint wants to play with it all, now, as soon as possible, shiny, shiny, new, cool.
Rolling out the whole of SharePoint across the whole of the organisation is a distraction for them and a management nightmare for you. You need to identify a single use-case, but it is much harder because there isn’t a single obvious business requirement and there may not be a single sponsor. Worse, you may have a sponsor who has a vague vision like ‘collaboration’ or an unrealistic one like ‘getting everyone to use their My Site like an internal FaceBook profile’.
If you are going bottom-up you need to roll out solutions to one or a maximum of two use-cases at a time. To find out which one, put together a survey and ask what stops people collaborating well right now. Word it terms of how they work, not in terms of the SharePoint features so:
Pick one of the popular ones, create a simple solution, and run with it.
Let’s read that again.
Pick one. Not a couple because they’re similar. Not three or four because Internal Communications want them (that’s your sponsor-and-project scenario and a very nice place it is to be too). Not two or three variants to cover all the bases. Just one.
Create a simple solution. Yes, there are half a dozen different ways to build and display a discussion forum in SharePoint. If you can’t tell which one works best, then put together one that works well and stick to it.
Then run with it. Get it out there. Get it used. Get comments and feedback. Improve it.
Only then move on to the next one. Bite size chunks. Could be as close to a month apart, but bite size chunks for you and your users.
The subtext here is simplicity. Turn off the ability to make subsites, remove most of the templates, switch off the themes. Lock it down. Shut it down. SharePoint is a casket of magical delights. You can always open a lid you’ve kept shut, but it is much harder to shut down a lid on something you’ve left open. SharePoint baffles new users and new organisations with choice. Lead them step by step through those choices.
And finally:
Champions
People like SharePoint. They really like SharePoint. Not everyone, but enough.
These people who like SharePoint are your friends. They are natural evangelists, experimenters and testers. They’ll pester you for the features that you’ve turned off, and they’ll come up with workarounds that’ll have you blessing and cursing them by turns. But they’ll promote it and provide free consultancy to their co-workers and come up with solutions to problems you didn’t know existed.
Really work your champions. Create a user forum and refuse to answer questions unless they are posted there. You’ll feel very prissy, but your Champions will gravitate there and get to know each other and do half your support work for you. Invite them to do in-house webinars on cool things in SharePoint, (20 minutes demo, 10 minutes Q&A). Create a SharePoint community of pratice with these people at its core. Take their advice on how to move your service forward.
So, how to sell collaboration services?
They key is asking the right question; in this case not ‘how do you roll-out SharePoint’ but ‘what does your organisation want to use SharePoint for?’
Oh, and bite size chunks.
Always bite size chunks.
Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom
This very readable book has impeccable academic credentials: Fraser and Dutta are on the faculty at INSEAD but they wear their scholarship lightly. They consider the effects of Web 2.0 on business and society, and their case studies include FaceBook’s patchy relationship with its users and their employers, the destruction of the music business by the internet, and the 2008 US presidential election. It’s comprehensive and accessible and has a superb bibliography, what more can you want?
Occasionally I disagreed with Fraser and Dutta’s arguments. They use examples from medieval France and the Knights Templar to illustrate the fracturing of hierarchical power structures. Now colour me cynical, but would they have done that if it weren’t for Dan Brown?
More seriously, they are naive about the height of the barriers of entry to online fame and pin a lot of the first section of the book on the unsupportable assumption that online fame is open to all. They talk breathlessly (well, breathlessly for academics) about Joe Nobody from Nowhere obtaining online fame. But that doesn’t mean it’s replicable: the fact that they cannot see how it happened doesn’t mean that there weren’t reasons for it happening. I mean, haven’t they read Outliers? Online fame doesn’t come for wishing as Sandi Thom’s publicists discovered. Exactly the same astonishment was expressed about the working class rock heros of the 60s, but for every Lennon and McCartney there were …. well there weren’t any other Lennons and McCartneys. Which is my point.
They are balanced in their reporting of Web 2.0 evangelists and Web 2.0 apostates. This makes a refreshing change. In fact, they aren’t just balanced on the subject, they delve deeply into why and how corporate and governmental organisations resist Web 2.0. This is the nub of the book, and no-one else is saying just these things in quite this way. But even so, they are reluctant to admit that there are some serious Orwellian implications for all our futures.
So I am not sure why I’m not raving about it. Perhaps because I like books that give me epiphanies. This one was rich and informative but didn’t shift any of my paradigms. They close their arguments down in a rather authoritarian way, which doesn’t set the brain fizzing with ideas. It may just be that their usual ‘voice’ is the de-personalised style of academia. Don’t be dis-heartened by my faint praise: it is much better than I make it sound.
Definitely a must-read, though possibly in paperback, for anyone considering the role of Web 2.0 in any kind of organisation, or who has an interest in the recent history of the internet or in how technology affects individuals and society. Worth it for the case studies and the bibliography alone – everything else is a bonus.
PS – I thought I’d reviewed Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell – turns out I hadn’t. That’s easily remedied.
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Posted in Academic, Book Reviews, Business, Business Analysis, Culture, MSc, Resources, Semanatic Web, Social Media, Web 2.0
I thought I had put more book reviews up here than I have. Here’s one of the ones I thought I’d posted. At the moment I’m doing a lot on Knowledge Management so here is high praise for Organizing Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organization Effectiveness by Patrick Lambe.
Lambe is that rare mix, both a theoretician and a practitioner. The book is solidly based in theory and well-proven by practice. In the first half, Lambe takes you on a readable tour of how people have organised knowledge in the past and compare different approaches (hierarchies vs facets, for examples) and some of the implementations (the Dewey decimal system, and so on). While the second half gives you tools and strategies for defining and introducing taxonomies to an organisation. He doesn’t pretend it is easy, but the tactical tools and the methodological framework are workable. He’s clearly refined them by using them and some of the pain he has felt on the way comes through between the lines. I sympathise with him almost as much as I admire him.
The book has the benefit of being fairly short. I’ve noticed this with other books on the subject – perhaps books about online technologies need to get out so fast there’s no time to add padding, or else people dealing with knowledge management think too clearly to waffle. Either way, it’s pricey per page but benefits from its brevity.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough if you are working in this area or are responsible for information architecture, knowledge management, or pulling sense out of corporate folksonomies.
If you want more from Lambe, he blogs at Green Chameleon.
I am currently reading “Irrationality” – an excellent book in which Stuart Sutherland describes the mechanisms by which we leap to conclusions, confuse and deceive ourselves.
I am deeply amused by the publisher’s cynical use of the techniques that Sutherland describes to promote the book. Sutherland discusses the halo effect (when we assume a person’s good or bad characteristics apply more widely than they do), and they way we give more credence to authority figures than perhaps we should. It’s a book about cognitivie processes, right? So you’d have to be a psychologist to give authorative recommendations, right? Now, Richard Dawkins is a hero in his own field and Oliver Sacks is another, but how come a geneticist and a neurologist suddenly have expertise in psychology? It can only be the halo effect and that pesky deference to authority.
These ironies aside, it’s an excellent book and if you think, evaluate evidence or make recommendations for a living then it will keep you awake at night.
In a good way.
Posted in Book Reviews, Business Analysis, Resources, Tools
Tagged Dawkins, LinkedIn, Oiver Sacks, psychology, Richard Dawkins, Sacks, the Halo Effect
There are any number of business related podcasts out there and more every week. Many are too pompous to listen to: universities use them to advertise expensive masters degrees and consultancies use them as infomercials. Me, I like more grounded company on my drive to work.
Here are are some of the regulars I spend a couple of hours with each week.
5 minutes of infuriatingly intelligent common sense. Lucy Kellaway writes for the FT and is a bright cookie with a degree in Philosopy, Politics and Economics from Oxford. She’s ruthlessly sarcastic whenever business or business people get above themseves, and is particularly hot on language, bulls***, and self-regarding egotism. I frequently disagree with her but she’s always thought it through. She can sound like the celebrity old-girl speaking at a school prize-day day, but get past that and listen to what she says. She’s funny too.
Superb 30 minute programmes from the BBC. Peter Day tackles a specific topic each week, looking at it from several perspectives within different organisations. Day gets insightful and illuminating answers out of the people he interviews, which says a lot about the questions he asks. Topics in autumn 2008 are: branding, risk management in casinos and banking, agriculture, the future of the internet, and biotech and medicines. Wide-ranging, meticulous, insightful and fascinating.
Another 30 minutes from the BBC. Ewan Davies invites some of the UK’s most senior executives to kick-off their shoes and compare notes. It feels like listening to experienced friends at a Sunday afternoon barbecue talking relaxed and slightly theoretical shop. Davies directs things with a light hand on the conversational tiller. Superb.
Another conversational programme: John Byrne, the executive editor of Business week, spends 15 or 20 minutes chatting through the week’s cover story with whoever wrote it. It’s a painless way to keep informed about the forces in American Business as well as the occasional headline news item. These podcasts were my first introduction to terms like “sub-prime”, “credit crunch” and “toxic title”. These are often recorded late at night as sub-editors add the graphics and finish the layout. On a couple of occasions Byrne and the magazine’s chief economist Mike Mandel were clearly a couple of drinks over a headline, but most of the time everyone concerned is on the tips of their well-researched and analytical toes. An additional treat is Byrne’s baby-boomer taste in intro tracks.
A show by and for pragmatists with nothing to sell, its for those of us trying to keep our heads above water and below the parapet. It’s engaging, conversational, informative and oddly comforting. Oh, and funny. I like Wayne Turmel’s energy and enthusiasm too. The podcast is long on experience which makes it a good counterpoint to the journalists’ analysis and the academics’ theorising. And it’s got one of my favourite words in its title.
Most of us are familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs which suggests that we prioritise bodily needs over security, our sence of belonging over our own self esteem (which is how peer pressure works) and that we won’t tackle the things that fulfil us until the rest of our needs are met.
What is discussed less frequently is that organisations have a similar hierarchy of needs, and that organisational focus shifts in turbulent times.
As I understand it, Donald Marchand suggests that organisations focus their attention on information like this:
This is a sequence I recognise, in large organisations at least. Mind you, it seems to me that small organisations and entrepreneurs run the sequence in the opposite direction. Maybe that is what makes them entrepreneurs.
Marchand presents it diagramatically thus:
I’ve not yet read Marchand on the subject (I came across the idea in an excellent book on Taxonomies by Richard Lambe). I need to go to the source to understand the details of he is saying, why he has drawn it like that, and whether or not I agree with him, but this a useful thought-provoker, and may also be helpful tool for working out where strategic attention is or should be focused. I’m tempted by the tabloid thinking which suggests the banks’ sudden attention to risk is because they spent too much time in the previous years creating a new reality in terms of mortgages-repackaged-as-“securities”. It’s tempting, but I think there’s more to it than that.
Marchand’s framework is about knowledge. Lambe, who references it, thinks it misses out two important areas of corporate knowledge, specificially: strategic planning and talent management. As I said, I’ve not yet played with the framework, so I’m reserving my final judgement.
However, translating the hierarchy of needs from people to organisations is something well worth doing in these interesting times.
Sources:
Lambe, Patrick Organising Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organisational Effectiveness. Oxford: Chandos Publishing. 2007.
Marchand, Donald, (ed) Competing with Information: A Manager’s Guide to Creating Business Value with Information Content. Chichester: John Wiley. 2000.
Wikipedia: Abraham Maslow.
It’s a fair cop. I’ll hold my hand up to it: in these days of cyber-vetting I wanted anyone who googles me to find my professional persona. The quickest way to make sure of that seemed to be to write a blog, but the days of “build it and they will come” are gone so you’ve got to put in some effort.
“Quick” is a relative term of course, and this is the first time I’ve actively promoted a blog rather than allowed it to grow organically, and that has been time consuming bit. If you are about to do this yourself, you might like to know how long it takes.
There are a whole bunch of ways to kick-start a blog, once you’ve got a blog to promote:
Content:
You’ve got to have a blog to promote! If your content is poor, the blog will fail. Unfortunately it needs more than good content to succeed.
Links: put links in your posts. Your blog is more useful and therefore more attractive; your stats will be more informative and that tells you what your hot topics are. Some of the people you link to will call by to see who is linking to them. Your blog becomes a conversation rather than just a speech, and that helps the blog build up a reputation.
Tags and Categories: use them to label your blog. Categories help people find their way round your blog, tags are useful for infrequent topics. They both help people find similar blogs, and they help search engines find you.
Promoting to real people
Networking: put the word out among friends and colleagues and in the online places where you already hang out. I’ve got links from my profiles in Facebook and Linked-In, I emailed some pals, I posted the site’s address in a few of the forums where I’m a regular and I added the link to my email signature. Not surprisingly, the first few comments were from folk who know me. They know who they are, and the drinks are on me.
Building a reputation: is a matter of getting out there and joining in. No, not hustling. Not spam. Not “Cool site. I link to you.” Reading is more interesting than writing anyway, but I sometimes find it’s easy to let it fall by the wayside, so this is a discipline that has become a pleasure. I use Google Reader to gather together the new posts in blogs I read regularly.
Online Listings
Blog Directories: this is the arduous work of submitting your blog to blog directories, but it’s worth it. A quick google produces a long list of directories, and then you just register with them and add a reciprocal link to your site. I say “just”: this is time consuming but mindless. The directories I’ve submitted this blog to are in the column on the right, but don’t take my word for it: google for the latest advice. (Update: Robert A Kearse has commented on this post and provided a link to the list of 300 or so active blog directories on his site – an extremely useful resource).
Beauty contests: is the term I’ve used for sites like Delicous, Stumble Upon and Digg where readers vote on their likes and dislikes. I’m not convinced by the wisdom of crowds so I find this soul-destroying. I’m not an active users of any of the sites and, stupidly, I’m not convinced that the people I want to read my blog will use them either.
Which brings me to the question of who is my reader?
Who are you, Reader?
I fondly imagine that you are some other IT-like person and we are in a pub after work shooting the breeze. But who knows? I’m a little afraid to ask. I’d love it if you came back again and again, subscribed to my feed, hung on my every keystroke, trembled when I posted, quivered as you read.
In fact you were chasing a search term and will probably never come by again.
It was nice…
… oh, you’ve gone…
So – how much time did this ruthless self-promotion take me?
Content
Creating content – up to an hour a post: the first draft is always longer. Adding links, tags and categories is a matter of minutes or moments.
Look and feel – a couple of evenings messing about with WordPress Themes and widgets: this is so soothing that I still tinker with it every now and again.
Promoting to People
Networking – hardly any time at all: I mentioned it in passing and left it at that.
Reading and commenting – I set myself a target of between one and two hours every evening for two weeks and then a couple of hours once or twice a week thereafter. First of all you have to find the blogs, which is where all those blog directories finally prove their worth, but then it’s just a matter of subscribing. Reading and commenting is the fun bit though, where the web turns into a dialogue.
Online Listings
Blog directories and beauty contest sites – several evenings and a couple of weekends: dull but easy to multitask (I cooked food, watched tv, gossiped on MSN, listened to podcasts, stroked the cat and drank tea while I did it).
Is it worth it?
What’s “worth it”? At the quantitative end of the scale, I can tell you how many visitors I get but with a blog like this it’s not just numbers. If I wanted numbers I’d put up pics of public people’s private parts, or cute pictures of cats with illiterate captions, such is the wisdom of crowds.
I’m pleased that the blog is sparking conversations, and I enjoy the conversations it’s sparked.
I guess the acid test would be unsolicited job offers. But now I’ve mentioned it, they wouldn’t be unsolicited.
Damn.
Should have thought of that.
Posted in Blogging, Business Analysis, Resources, Tools, Web 2.0
Tagged blog, blog directories, blog promotion, blogging, how to promote your blog, optimisation, seo, tagging, tags
My car was written off a few weeks ago. The insurance claim made an ironic conterpoint to a Lean course I went on the same week.
“Lean” isn’t an acronym, though it sounds like one. It’s a description of how Toyota make their cars. They don’t waste a thing: not time, not effort, and certainly not materials. No fat: it’s all lean. Lean is about a lot of things, but ultimately it’s about cutting out waste and making sure that each step in a process explicitly adds value for the customer.
There’s a lot that I really like about Lean, for instance it assumes that the people who operate a process know more about it than anyone else. Who’d have thunk?
I don’t want to turn this into a whinge-fest about my insurance claim. You’ve been there, you know what a nightmare it is if your car is totalled by three unknown lads in a stolen transit.
However it seems entirely ludicrous that I ended up with the notes from 15 phone calls made to four different companies on my pad, and those were only the calls when there was something worth noting down. And why four companies? Why was I the one co-ordinating the insurance claim itself, the legal claim for uninsured losses, the loss-adjustor’s valuation, the purported hire car while the claim was settled and the other purported hire car while the claim was settled? Actually, that’s five companies, isn’t it?
Breathe in, two, three
Breathe out, two, three
Think of Calm Blue Light
It made an interesting case-study on the Lean Course, and I wonder if there is money to be made creating a “Lean and Mean” accreditation for organisations. If an insurer could prove they had a Lean Claims Department, it would make me choose to use them.
Just one phone call to sort out a claim? Who wouldn’t go for that?
More on Lean:
Posted in Business Analysis, Lean, Process analysis, Resources, Tools
Tagged Lean manufacturing, Lean processes, LinkedIn, Process engineering
I’m sifting through books I’ve bought for my MSc, sorting the ones I’ll keep from the ones I’ll resell on Amazon. One of the keepers was part of my Change Management module, and is a book by Goffee and Jones and called The Character of a Corporation.
It’s about the glue that holds teams together – is it friendship, or is it vision? Goffee and Jones consider it’s a combination of both. For some teams, departments and even companies what holds them together is sociability: friendship, chit-chat, and helping out because you know and like the person who asked and they’ve helped you out in the past. Other teams, departments, companies are glued together by a shared focus on goals and objectives, on hitting deadlines and targets, on getting the job done. Goffee and Jones call this solidarity.
I’ve worked on every kind of team they mention, on “Networked” teams, “Mercenary” ones, a couple of “Communal” ones and the odd “Fragmented” team that isn’t really a team at all, so the book was full of “ahah” moments from start to finish. It explained how some of my previous bosses thought, not to mention the odd colleague. The very odd colleague, in some cases.
It’s got a good academic pedigree, but it’s an easy read. What more could a girlie-swot want from a book? Definitely a keeper.
Posted in Academic, Book Reviews, Business Analysis, Resources, Reviews, Tools
Tagged Corporate Culture, Goffee and Jones, LinkedIn, Sociability, Solidarity
Aphra Behn - danger of eclectic shock 
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