Skilful Minds

I’ve noticed a few people coming to Skilful Minds after searching for access to the Flowgram Beta program. I have been given ten invitations for the Flowgram Beta program if anyone who reads the blog is interested in testing Flowgram yourself. I’ll forward the invites to the first ten people who request one by leaving a name and email address using the Contact form.

I provided an overview of Flowgram previously, and did a demonstration here.

Howard Rheingold provides an interesting video podcast of an interview with Mark Elliott regarding the use of wikis in city planning, particularly in Melbourne. The Melbourne wiki uses the tagline, “the city plan that anyone can edit.” Mark indicates there were 500 registered users and 7,000 visitors to futuremelbourne.

I’m not convinced by Mark’s concept of stigmergy, analogizing patterns of insect behavior — specifically ants — to the activity of participants in a wiki. However, his overall point about the benefits of using wikis for collaboration between public officials and the community in civic projects, such as the New Zealand police act wiki, is persuasive.

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As I noted previously, I applied to join the beta testing for Flowgram. I’m happy to report that I was provided with access yesterday. So, I decided to give it a try. Overall I’m pretty impressed.

I decided to use Flowgram to provide a new feature on Skilful Minds which, for lack of a better term, I’m calling a blogflow and making it a category to organize future blogflows.

The blogflow I created with Flowgram reviews several posts available to this date that cover the topic of collaboration. This was a first pass effort. However, I’d be interested in what anyone who takes the time to review it thinks of the concept as a media resource for blogs.

A Skilful Minds Blogflow — Collaboration

At least since publication of the Cluetrain Manifesto, with its basic point that markets are conversations, the importance of customers, online and off — but especially those online, to innovation gained widespread recognition. Pointing out the importance of customer communities to sustaining innovation is not exactly a new insight. In recent years the term co-creation emerged to describe the process, whether applied to established companies or start-ups. However, understanding what leads customers to engage in co-creation is important. A story at Nokia Conversations points to a recent study sponsored by Nokia Beta Labs that offers a profile of the customers active in their community, framing the relationship as follows:

While on one side it seems cheap to release unfinished goods and ask for help. But at the same time, it’s amazing to involve eager customers who not only make the product even better than if we did it alone, but are all lined up to take the product they helped make…

Understanding which individuals are more likely to engage in co-creation can benefit efforts to engage your company’s customers in product innovation. No doubt, participants in the Nokia customer community differ from those who might belong to a community of customers outside the mobile device market. However, the Nokia community research study provides information about the characteristics of 691 customers who participate in the Nokia community and what motivates those customers to engage in co-creation. Nokia Beta Labs allows users of Nokia mobile devices to download applications and provide private feedback or public feedback via blog posts.

The Nokia report observes that a much larger number of respondents to the survey (53%) simply downloaded a Beta Labs application, compared to the 35% who downloaded an application and gave feedback. Even fewer, 19% of total respondents, provided public feedback. Almost 80% of respondents reported that they try Nokia Beta Labs applications from interest in the technology and following what is happening in mobile devices. Around 65% of those providing feedback indicated they do so to help others and make a difference. Of those who provided public feedback, around 75% indicated they do so to enable discussion. In addition, over 40% of those providing public feedback also indicated they do so because it makes them feel more connected to other community members.

The age range of respondents to the Nokia study was between 14 and 65 years, with an average age of 30.4 years. Around 96% of respondents were male and almost 70% either work in a technology related occupation or possess a technical education.

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Screencasts are effective ways to share ideas, images, concepts, experiences, and a range of information for a variety of purposes including eLearning, collaborative problem solving, or just fun. I just ran across a new technique for doing screencasts called a Flowgram.  Eric Schonfeld over at TechCrunch describes it as,

…a full-screen player with what appears to be a screencast with a voiceover. Except that you can control the pages by scrolling up and down, watching any videos that might be on the page, or clicking on the live links (which takes you out of the Flowgram to that Website, but if you hit the back button it picks up where it left off). You can also add comments and share the Flowgram via a widget…It’s an interactive screencast, a way to synthesize the Web by pulling different pieces together The voiceover acts as the glue. It can be used for slide shows, travel guides, tutorials, sales pitches, or just to explain something to a friend.

I’ve signed up for the private beta access program so I can build a few Flowgrams of my own to get a better sense of how this tool compares to applications like Captivate or Camtasia. After briefly interacting with several of the Flowgrams available it looks quite promising. I like the ability to scroll pages as well as play videos embedded in pages presented in the Flowgram. I’m not sure why the developers decided to navigate out of the Flowgram when you click on a link that takes you to a page outside the Flowgram, rather than opening a window to view it, but when you click the back arrow the flow of the Flowgram seems to pick back up where you left it. Take a look at a Flowgram for an overview.

Do you know who is on your team? It seems like an easy question for people who work in large corporations to answer. Reviewing Socialtext People recently led me to remember an interesting study I read a few years ago that reported rather surprising findings with significance for Enterprise 2.0, and to the lead-in question above. The study, largely ignored in the social networking literature, pointed to a clear limitation to collaboration in national and global corporations that organize teams geographically distributed.

Mark Mortensen and Pamela Hinds published a chapter titled, “Fuzzy Teams: Disagreement in Distributed and Collocated Teams”, in an edited collection called Distributed Work  way back in 2002. The book itself contains an interesting range of studies on the challenges involved in organizing work across members of geographically distributed teams. However, it seems to me that Fuzzy Teams offers a key insight into the way Enterprise 2.0 applications, especially wikis, help to meet challenges in organizing distributed work that are often overlooked.

Mortensen and Hinds surveyed twenty-four product development teams. As part of their survey about the way employees organize distributed work, Mortensen and Hinds provided each respondent with an official, manager-provided list of members of teams on which the employee worked. Each respondent was asked to “correct” the team list for inaccuracies. Mortensen and Hinds noted that most analyses of collocated teams, where members work in proximity to one another, assume that the employees involved agree on the team boundaries.  Additionally, they noted that the assumption implies mutual awareness of all employees regarding who is, and is not, a team member. In collocated teams the assumption is a valid one to make. In distributed teams it is not, even with email and threaded discussion lists.

Specifically, Fuzzy Teams reported that,

Of the twenty-four teams surveyed, not a single team was in complete agreement on its boundary: who was and who was not a member of the team. In fact, the average level of agreement within the sample was only 75 percent, such that any given team member was likely to disagree with the rest of his or her team on one-quarter of potential team members.

In their conclusions, Mortensen and Hinds offered the following suggestion:

We believe it is possible to address the issues surrounding team boundaries through the use of social network methods. By collecting team data as social networks, membership can be determined through an analysis of the patterns of interconnection among all potential team members (. p.304)

Those advocating Enterprise 2.0, especially wikis, may consider the benefits described back in 2002 by Mortensen and Hinds obvious. However, I’d be surprised if managers in global organizations using cross-functional teams would agree that, on average, only 75% of the employees on any given distrbuted team agree about who is, and who is not, on their team. The implications for collaboration are significant. At the same time that wiki applications such as Socialtext People provide increased awareness of the boundaries of a team, they also increase the likelihood of finding people outside the team with expertise relevant to team challenges, resulting in more boundary spanning across teams. Overall, information sharing within teams and across teams increases.

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As a member of the boomer generation, a recent post by Stewart Mader on the use of Enterprise 2.0 at Wachovia  caught my attention because it relates to a range of ongoing discussions on the relationship of age and innovative uses of technology in supporting collaboration.

Stewart points approvingly to a recent InformationWeek article on Wachovia’s use of wikis, blogs, and social networking to develop mutual mentoring between younger workers and senior staffers. Wachovia is assigning younger staffers to mentor senior staffers about the benefits of using collaborative networks. However, Stewart goes on to qualify the point of such mentoring with the following insight:

We often talk about how the millennial generation has an advanced grasp of these social and collaborative tools, but just half of the story in my opinion. I see enterprise 2.0 tools not as the exclusive domain of youth, but as a better connector for multiple generations, so that wisdom, tacit knowledge, and business know-how from the experienced can be shared with younger workers.

The point is bolstered by recent research, though with a couple of crucial caveats. AIIM recently released a report, Enterprise 2.0: Agile, Emergent, and Integrated, on its survey of 441 end users in corporate enterprises. The report indicates age doesn’t matter as much as culture in determining whether an employee thinks Enterprise 2.0 is crucial to achieving organizational goals. AIIM surveyed Millenials (20-35 years old), Gen Xers (36-50 years old), and Boomers (51 + years old). The AIIM report provides data to support the observation offered by Thomas Vander Wal in a post on The Social Enterprise.

Vander Wal contends those who assert that a demographic digital divide exists in relation to adoption of social web tools in corporate organizations misperceive the crucial issue.

Around the current social web tools (blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, favoriting, shared rating, open (and partially open collaboration) I have been finding little digital divide across the ages. Initially there is a gap when tools get introduced in the corporate environment. But this age gap very quickly disappears if the incredible value of the tools is made clear for people’s work life, information workflow, and collaboration, as well as simple instructions (30 second to 3 minute videos) and simply written clear guidelines that outline acceptable use of these tools.

The AIIM report observes that no real differences exist between generational cohorts on the perceived importance of increased collaboration as the key benefit of Enterprise 2.0. The differences among the three cohorts appear to relate more to the respective assessments of the range of applicability of Enterprise 2.0 to business practices (R&D, Marketing, IT/IS, Customer Support) rather than to its overall importance. Millenials, with their experience using Web 2.0 applications, appear more apt to recommend use of such tools in all business settings.

All in all, I’d suggest that Ross Mayfield’s point — that Generations may not matter, but they are different – captures the most important point to keep in mind when thinking about Enterprise 2.0 implementation in the context of overall employee adoption and organizational success.

Thanks to Ross’ blog for the pointer to the AIIM report.

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Wikis are largely about creating, organizing, and sharing knowledge. Most people think of textual and static graphic information created, organized, and maintained by groups of people when they consider what makes up a wiki. The integration of visualization tools is one of the more interesting developments in wikis recently though. As an example, the Thinkbase tool provides an ability to visually navigate and explore Freebase, an open, shared database of the world’s knowledge. The Thinkbase Blog is a good resource for learning about Thinkbase.

In fact, John Hosking recently provided an overview of how to use visual wikis. He discusses three types of visual wiki applications, including using Thinkbase and Freebase together to augment search and navigation, development of a Visual Body of Knowledge Explorer (VBKE) using ThinkMap and Convergence (an organizational wiki) to support a dynamic view of the information architecture of Convergence, and ProcessMapper (using ThinkMap and MediaWiki) to support visualizations of business process mapping in a wiki.

I just recently ran across Forbes’ early beta version of a Wiki application for visually creating organization charts of U.S. corporations. The idea is to tap into the collective knowledge of readers of Forbes to build organizational charts of various corporations. The introduction of the application noted:

This is an experiment in collaborative problem solving, where our goal is to create something of great value to the whole web community. While it may be tempting for some to erroneously delete people and to create mock titles for others, we hope the community will protect the integrity of this experiment.

The main screen of the Org Chart Wiki looks like the following:

The visual Org Chart Wiki allows you to search by company or person to view the organization chart of publicly listed U.S. companies, their boards of directors and senior executives. The concern about maintaining the integrity of an open visual wiki like the Forbes Org Chart Wiki is legitimate. Stewart Mader pointed to this kind of challenge for wikis in wikipatterns, noting that it is useful to distinguish between an “All-Virtual” wiki community, such as Wikipedia, and wiki communities organized around connections and relationships in organizations, such as Enterprise 2.0 applications.

It will prove interesting to follow the Forbes’ Org Chart Wiki. However, it seems to me that developing a visual organization chart wiki for enterprise purposes, such as mapping out customer organizations in B2B market segments, perhaps even specifying links between positions, i.e. people, in multiple customer organizations, offers a useful variation on the approach taken by Forbes. I’d be interested in hearing about other uses of visual wikis.

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Back in the late 1980s, I worked in the telecommunications industry as a methods analyst, a euphemism for a technical communication staff member who primarily analyzes business processes. One of my assignments involved work on the design team for a records management system. The company served a regulated industry with regular audits from both federal and state agencies. It, therefore, needed to make sure it retained all paper records only as long as regulations required, and no longer. In other words, records management was essentially a risk management function. Well, you may ask, how does this relate to e-Learning 2.0 and LMS?

Before getting to that discussion, we need to clarify the terminology used here. The term e-Learning 2.0 refers to implementations of Web 2.0/social networking technologies to complement traditional learning processes managed by the training or human resource functions in organizations. Blogs, wikis, and other social software are useful in nurturing e-Learning communities of practice and enabling knowledge sharing in new ways. The eLearning Guild’s recent 360˚ Report on Learning Management Systems 2008 offers a few unique insights into the relationship between e-Learning 2.0 and LMS.

The Guild report summarizes developments in the e-Learning industry related to LMS deployments among 1,250 eLearning Guild members representing over 1,150 organizations. The report is full of useful information regarding such things as how different tools compare on market share, satisfaction, total cost of ownership, and implementation challenges. Any training or human resource executive whose organization is currently considering an LMS implementation will benefit from reviewing the Guild report.

Among other key findings, this post looks closely at the following:

LMSs score some of the lowest satisfaction scores we’ve seen in any report, particularly for the ability to supportspecific and complex business process models (2.28), support for Immersive Learning Simulations (1.62), Support for Talent Management/Human Capital Management initiatives (2.23), and support for Web 2.0 features (1.87).

The point I’d like to highlight relates to the dissatisfaction of Guild members with LMS support for Web 2.0 features. The Guild report provides a succinct summary of the issues involved, noting:

Already, 42.1% of Guild members consider LMS support for blogs, wikis, Podcasts, and Immersive Learning Simulations (ILS) to be very important, and 36.2% consider support for informal learning initiatives as very important. So, how does the LMS grasp onto, and manage, these quicksilver elements? Indeed, one could argue that ITM [Integrated Talent Management} and Web 2.0/social networking are diametric opposites with their forces pulling the LMS in different directions. ITM is very much about centralizing learning and performance, while Web 2.0 is about decentralizing learning and performance.

So, should the LMS even deal with Web 2.0 things at all? (p. 4)

The Guild report doesn’t answer the question of whether organizations need to implement LMS within an ITM environment, or a Web 2.0/social networking system (e-Learning 2.0). Though it does provide a useful overview of the ways the three types of implementation (ITM, LMS, and e-Learning 2.0) support human capital architecture and, as a result, points to the salient issues involved in selecting a strategic approach to the issues. One glaring oversight in the report is its failure to address the relationship of e-Learning 2.0 to social capital, but that is a topic for another time.

The Guild report provides two case studies, Dr. Nancy Grey’s essay, The LMS and Web 2.0: Natural Progression or Natural Disaster, and Bill Gayler and Jane Holcombe’s essay, NCSL: Marrying Learning Management Systems and Social Networking, which address the issues of integrating LMS and e-Learning 2.0. Both case studies are especially instructive in considering the issues involved in attempts to integrate e-Learning 2.0, with its robust support for informal e-Learning, and LMS with its traditional emphasis on formal management issues. I will focus briefly on Nancy Grey’s essay because it really highlights the possibilities and limitations of any attempt to integrate traditional LMS with e-Learning 2.0. As Grey notes, “E-Learning 2.0 combines blogs, wikis, and other social software to power e-Learning communities of practice for instructors, and to harness the Web’s host of knowledge resources” (p. 169).

Some observers, like Grey, attribute the focus on Web 2.0 tools to the need to serve the generation of young adults who grew up using social networking tools to learn and communicate, referring to this cohort as the net generation. As a person who started communicating with Bitnet for email and Bitnet Relay for chat in the late 1980s, I find the identification of this development with a specific age group a little irksome. However, the sheer number of young adults accustomed to social networking technologies commands attention and makes it necessary to consider their use for e-Learning.

As noted here previously, Web 2.0 social networking is quite useful in onboarding new employees, regardless of their age, as well as managing change in periods of transition, such as downsizing, outsourcing, or merging organizations. Nancy Grey emphasizes the importance of communication in any effort to integrate LMS and e-Learning 2.0.

The traditional LMS, at minimum, tracks a range of employee learning activities from attendance, to test scores, as well as additional course requirements, while providing extensive reporting on the entire process. Grey notes that LMS vendors who integrate tracking for social networking content often emphasize the ability to see which employee generated content is accessed and linked to the most and by whom, making it possible to develop rankings for contributors. Such rankings are potentially useful in performance reviews or other human resource programs. Yet, Grey points out, using SCORM or AICC protocols to track e-Learning 2.0 activity also carries legal implications and makes it unlikely some organizations will risk retaining records related to those communication patterns. The cautionary, risk management approach Grey highlights is especially likely to gain recognition in companies operating in a business environment subject to government regulation, such as pharmaceuticals and financial services.

Grey suggests that any company facing organizational change driven by layoffs, off-shoring, or implementation of new technologies can benefit from e-Learning 2.0 and benefit sufficiently that company executives need to bring the training and legal departments together to work through any concerns about risk. Nevertheless, the fact that e-Learning 2.0 is an informal process, and learning processes governed by an LMS are formal in nature, lies at the base of Grey’s analysis. Her conclusions ring true to me. “In the end, employing Web 2.0 technology in e-Learning does not have to be an all-or-nothing proposition. If tracking how often someone views a blog, or accesses a particular wiki article, benefits the company’s bottom line, then do so. But who says you have to spend resources tracking everything?”

Copyright © 2008 by Larry R. Irons

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I’ve discussed the importance of customer communities to innovation, customer experience, and customer dialogue as an antidote to self-orientation by companies. David Weinberger recently posted about the Community 2.0 conference, pointing out the Starbucks suggestion box as a good example of customer community. David also pointed approvingly to the arms-length participation of Tivo in the independent forum, TivoCommunity.com, speaking to the point that communities of customers often form on their own.

Coincidentally, I received an email recently soliciting me to join a community of Best Buy customers. I’m not an especially enthusiastic customer of Best Buy, but since CompUSA closed its doors in St. Louis, most of my electronic purchases are at Best Buy. The first thing I took note of in the invitation was its blatant point that Best Buy is selecting members for its community. The email stated:

If you are selected to join the online community, you will discuss and share opinions on a variety of topics, react to questions posed by Best Buy and provide insight into your lifestyle. In addition, you will build rewarding friendships with other members, and receive periodic rewards in exchange for your participation. This is a unique opportunity for you to share your thoughts and ideas with Best Buy – only about three hundred people will be chosen.

To see if you qualify, please click on the link below to complete a 10-minute questionnaire.

The email solicitation sparked my curiosity and I clicked on the links to check out the survey it requires you to complete before learning whether you qualify. At the end of a lengthy sequence of questions, I learned that I just don’t fit into their community plans. Probably because I didn’t answer all the questions, such as what is your family income and other fairly personal items. It seems obvious to me that Best Buy doesn’t really want a community. Rather, they are selecting people for the equivalent of an online focus group representing one marketing segment. I’d suggest Best Buy rethink its strategy.

Copyright © 2008 by Larry R. Irons