everything is miscellaneous

I have made a bookreview about the latest book by David Weinberger.

Procesmanagement, Just creating a community

In our studies for finding the link between BPM and Social Networks, we found a simple, but interesting conclusion in an article of Armistead (Business Process Management, exploring social capital within processes). A process is just a community with a common goal. So a community is a group of people exchanging ideas. If one thinks about this and projects it on BPM, then this opens new doors. So why is it not standard practice in the BPM field to make sure everybody in the process knows each other. May be we sometimes don't need structure, but just time to get to know eachother and refind the common goal, results for the customer.

But this leads to some new questions, do we need to know all the people in the process to be more effective. Probably not. So what is the most effective social structure. I think this depends heavily on two things, 1. the exceptions in the process 2. variety of the output. If we need to solve exceptions quickly, we better know the people in the process. Then we can find the right person fast to solve it. On the other hand, in BPM we don't want too much exceptions, becasu this is ineffective and inefficient. So traditionally we first would get the maturity of the process up, and reduce the exceptions. And then if 99 procents of the work is standardised and stable, then we just have to do our thing and we don't need to know the others. This leads to my second believe, variaty of the output. In more and more processes the variaty of the output is not standard. Why? Because the processes are more knowledge intensive and can be not be standardised fully. For example think about creating policies in a government agency, or a case of lawyer. So in processes where exception (or better collaborating and exchanging knowledge) is more a standard practice, we need to focus more on the people in the processcommunity. And this is of course, where it gets interesting.

embedding in enterprise 2.0

One big trend in Web 2.0 is embedding. Embedding means showing a piece of content from another site. An example is showing your librarything items or your delicious tags on your blog. Every web 2.0 site is offering badges, embedding HTML, icons and other stuff to put somewhere else, or at least they should! Most people use them on their blogs but of course they can be used on all sorts of places as long it is HTML. A nice example is the blog of euan semple, showing all kinds of stuff from other sites!

 

Embedding is not entirely new and looks a lot like portalfunctionality. Portals have been around for sometime. Embedding, I think, has more future because of its simple nature. Embedding does not require the showing site to have any functionality at all. Portals and portlets do require functionality on the showing site.

 

In enterprise 2.0 people will want to embed functionality and content from inside the firewall and outside the firewall on one spot. This is consistent with the vague-ing border between personal- and worklife. The other thing is that is useless to develop some functionality inside the enterprise that is for free on the outside! Unless there are some security issues of course. Why develop your one video sharing functionality while you can embed a youtube video on your internal wiki? 

 

Embedding is a perfect example of innovation in assembly. A concept introduced by Dion Hinchcliff. Another example is open API what facebook is dooing right now.

Youth & Digital Technology

Last week the results came out of an extensive study by Microsoft, MTV and Nickelodeon about the use of technology by kids. They surveyed 18,000 kids (age 8 to 24) in 16 countries (including Holland). You can find an extensive press release about the results here (I haven't been able to track down the full report yet).

The results of the study challenge some of the commonly held beliefs about kids and technology. I will not repeat all the findings here, but the quote that sums it all up for me is: young people are not geeks. They don't use iPods, camera phones and MySpace because they're gadget freaks, but because all their friends use it. It is an integral part of their lives. Globally, only 20% is interested in "technology". That number is even lower in countries like Holland and Denmark.

adding metadata, the difference between personal and corporate life

During my vacation I read the book everything is miscellaneous by david weinberger. I think the book is great in describing the third order of order and giving 4 new principles in ordering information. If your interested please read the book, it is excellent. In personal life some people tag a lot and the tools doing so are very good. But in corporate life tagging is not very wide spread. At the moment tagging is one of the best ways to show the miscellaneousness of information. In, lets say, delicious the use of tagging gets clear fast and results are instant. Because tagging and search go hand in hand. In corporate applications this is not the case. Workers mostly hate to add metadata because it is of no use to them and the benefits are unclear (i.e. search is not working properly). Tagging and search have to be synchronised in order for workers to instantly see the benefits. Why do sites like delicious got this working and a document repository not?

Looking back on Communities & Technologies 2007

photo by Ed Schipul

The Communities & Technologies conference ended today, so it is time to share some of my personal highlights with you. It was certainly a very worthwhile conference with Charles (Chip) Steinfeld (pictured above) as an excellent host.

The first keynote on Thursday night was by Marc Smith of Microsoft Research, who shared some of his insights based on the analysis of newsgroups. What I found most striking was the fact that only 2% of that community supplies all the answers (what he calls the "answer persons") and 66% only posts once. So a very small group of people actually defines such a community.

The keynote on Friday was a hilarious presentation by Rob Malda and Jeff Bates, the founders of Slashdot. The quote I take away from their story is: give people a number, and they will try to maximize it. In their case, this relates to a reputation score, but this principle was a recurring theme in many of the other presentations: a lot of things can (and will) be treated as a game.

Another thread that ran through the conference was that of social network analysis. One impressive visualization followed the other, often involving enormous data sets. A much needed word of caution was presented by Marleen Huysman and her colleagues. We have left a period behind us where we thought we could store and transfer knowledge by means of information technology. The danger is that we will now use that same instrumental approach for social networks: managers trying to create and optimize networks for knowledge sharing that are not properly embedded in the work practices.

The keynote this morning was by Judith Donath of MIT Media Lab, who gave an interesting talk about signaling. In biology, signals are a way to indicate qualities that are not directly observable. However, humans are able to manipulate these signals. I can rent an expensive sports car for a day to signal that I am rich, even though in reality I am not. In a computer-mediated context, this becomes an even bigger issue. I can create a very desirable avatar in Second Life that has very little to do with what I really look like. One of the keys here seems to be cost: an avatar in Second Life takes maybe fifteen minutes to create, a level-70 character in World of Warcraft takes months. The latter signal is therefore much more reliable.

Presentation at Conference on Communities & Technologies

Here is the presentation I gave yesterday during the workshop on Communities of Practice in Highly Computerized Work Settings, as part of the Third International Conference on Communities & Technologies at Michigan State University. Volker Wulf and Aditya Johri were able to assemble a diverse group of people for the workshop, which led to many interesting avenues of discussion throughout the day.

With regards to my presentation, I was happy to receive a lot of positive feedback on my research perspective. The timeliness and relevance of studying virtual worlds as a test bed for possible new ways of working in organizations was acknowledged. The theoretical foundation seems to be fairly solid, as well. But as before in Finland, the group struggled with the tension between work and play (as do I).

The most interesting element of that discussion was a contribution by Karsten Wolf (who also presented a paper on his own World of Warcraft research during this conference). He argued that perhaps the tasks that are being performed in a virtual world (he used "killing a dragon" as an example) are much simpler than the tasks performed in a work context. Maybe simpler is not the right word, but at least they are not ambiguous or polluted by politics, which makes collaboration easier.

We also discussed possible reasons for the fact that these virtual world communities thrive without face-to-face contact (as do many open source communities) and came up with a "technology expectancy" theory: if you expect to be able to communicate face to face at some point, you will see computer-mediated communication as a hindrance. If you do not anticipate to communicate face-to-face, you will see the same technology as an enabler.

I will post some more comments about the conference tomorrow.