Changes came fast enough in the eighties and nineties, but the year 2001 really lit the afterburners. The collapse of the dot-com bubble was followed in turn by the ripple effects from September 11 and the extremely upsetting collapse of Enron. As businesses scramble to respond, these three very different but powerful events have created challenges for organizations on three fronts:
They must reposition the Internet in their business plans
They must plan for wildly unforeseen world events
And they must conduct complete reviews, if not complete restructuring, of their financial reporting
This is all for the good, of course. These seemingly unrelated but cascading events have forced issues that needed to be reformed. They are issues that call for change and increased communication within the organization and beyond it.
In this chapter, we explore trends that already are taking hold in large companies and will trickle down to smaller companies as reports of their success, best practices, and value circulate. We've alluded to some of these trends already. We point out the need for changes in accounting practices for businesses to quantify the value of their knowledge networking assets. Return on investments made to foster productive online conversation must be demonstrated to justify further investment in building both social capital and knowledge flow.
We can see much of the future forming in the present. To help put these trends into words, we call on some of our favorite technical observers and social philosophers, including Thomas Davenport, David Weinberger, and Etienne Wenger.
Davenport, coauthor of Working Knowledge, is a systematic investigator of organizational behavior who combines the knowledge of an insider with the analysis of an academic. Weinberger, coauthor of The Cluetrain Manifesto, is a "big picture" guy who views the human adoption of the Net in terms of the cultural climate of our era. To him, the Net is underhyped; is radically changing society, and businesses are still very much in denial about the depth of change that the Net is making in the marketplace. Wenger, visionary leader of what could be called the communities of practice movement, understands how focused groups work and is helping organizations learn to lead by following the natural human tendencies of their most creative workers. His work is less conceptual and more "just do it": Knowledge-sharing conversations want to happen, so put them to work. Whatever organizations do right now to make knowledge sharing more effective through the Net is the necessary preparation for future sustainability.
The rapid expansion of the global Internet and the explosive growth in the number of people and organizations using it have radically transformed communications and the ways by which we relate to one another. This transformation presents us with a double-edged sword. The vast improvement in our ability to interconnect has invited many more people to send messages and allowed many more people and organizations to produce, provide, and send information. The challenge and reason for forming effective knowledge networks are to balance the advantages of connectivity with the overwhelming amount of information there is to sort through.
Humanity is now almost totally interconnected, not in terms of people with access to the Internet—where with 6 billion still lacking access we're just getting started—but in terms of news being able to reach most locations around the globe in a matter of minutes. When 19 terrorists crashed four airliners on 9/11, the immediate effects of destruction, death, and horror proved to be only pebbles dropping into the pond. As the ripples radiated outward around the world, the travel industry lurched to a halt, jobs associated with travel disappeared, and then whole regional economies reliant on tourism went into a swoon. Many companies not directly related to the events of 9/11 were affected severely by its repercussions. With the ever-increasing amount of interdependence in the world today, all organizations going into the future will stand a higher chance of being affected by events in the world. Surprises are likely to come at any time, so the rising challenge is to be ready and adaptable.
As the effects of the 9/11 attack spread around the world, lower Manhattan, still covered in the dust of the World Trade Center, saw the stock market return to activity amazingly quickly. The interconnectedness and redundancy of its networked systems and the survival of key personnel brought the system back online while other parts of the New York City infrastructure were just beginning to dig themselves out. Networks—of computers and of people—are good insurance against sudden disaster and instability. Networks help organizations adapt to changing circumstances.
Conversational knowledge sharing is a natural way for people to distribute relevant information and experience as they deal with rapid change. Using the Net as the conversation environment allows a broader population of participants, bringing in viewpoints and expertise from more locations. Through the Net, organizations can get closer to their customers, and workers from different parts of the organization can connect and form closer working relationships with one another.
Ongoing conversation is an adaptive group behavior in which participants share observations, ideas, and their diversity of information sources. When it goes on within an organization, it can expand the thinking and problem solving of senior executives whose perspectives may be limited in scope due to their isolation from the workplace and the consumer. Wide-ranging conversation is the organization's equivalent of ants waving their antennae about, reading the environment for scents indicating potential threats and opportunities. Those antennae will become required equipment for organizations in the future, but to develop them, they have to align their cultures with the values that make knowledge sharing happen.
Tom Davenport's latest book, written with John C. Beck, is titled The Attention Economy[100] and describes the workplace and the marketplace that have been transformed by the Internet and the accelerating flow of information. In the book, Davenport describes the world most of us have gotten to know only too well. It's a world where the competition for our attention has become so great that organizations must now figure out how to (1) focus their workers on the information and tasks that matter most to the company and (2) distinguish themselves, in the minds of consumers, from the blizzard of ideas, products, and other organizations that compete for their attention.
The Internet continues to grow in importance as the number of people using it increases and as it sees improvements in speed, interface design, and software. Access to the Net has brought changes in business process, communication, and the distribution of knowledge. But as its rapid growth continues, we are all challenged in our attempts to adapt and deal with the unprecedented volume of information the Net brings to us.
As technology advances and broadband connections increase the speed of information, how will we pull the important and timely information we depend on out of the nonstop avalanche of data, polling results, queries, opinions, ideas, suggestions, invitations, and junk mail that floods our monitors and inboxes? There's a crying need for the foolproof, personal searching-filtering-archiving system, but systems don't think like people do.
As individuals, our most insightful and understanding filters are other people. A community of trusted sources, each networked with other trusted sources, can not only understand what you want to know, but it can also respond to the reason you want to know it. Information filtered through an active knowledge-sharing community will have a much higher hit rate than an advanced Google search.
Selective engagement in online conversation is a very effective (and elementally human) method for directing one's limited time and focus. As the practice of online communication becomes more prevalent and normal, people will have more choices in where they spend their time looking for vital information and with whom they converse in their searches. In a future filled with bigger pipes and faster delivery, information overload will continue to balloon to absurd levels, and people will seek the most meaningful and productive ways to spend their limited attention on the Net.
With too much information to process already, why would organizations want to foster more conversation among their workers? Why would they expect workers to participate if it might overload them? The answers are that organizations have some critical problems to solve, and the wise use of group interaction may be the best and most economical way to find solutions. Workers will participate if they know it will help them do their jobs. But improvements must be made in technology, in the way technology is applied, and in the methods organizations use to calculate the value of their online conversations.
In a recent interview with Agilebrain.com, Tom Davenport was asked, in light of the dot-com meltdown, where he thought we were along the path to making optimum use of the Internet. He answered: "The Internet is still there, and companies are still quite interested in how to take advantage of it more effectively. We're just at the beginning of thinking about how we change our processes and our cultures and our governance structures to do anything differently with it."[101] In other words, the impact of the Net has yet to reach the parts of business that most need to change to keep up with the very changes the Net is bringing to other parts of the business universe.
The processes, cultures, and governance that Davenport refers to are social rather than technical in nature and more internal to the company than external. Yet the ultimate aim of changing them is to deal better with the external online marketplace, which continues to grow in significance, although it still receives a small portion of most companies' attention.
The previous decade has shown that as more people join the Net, there is more information to choose from and there are more conversations taking place. Organizations that change their processes, cultures, and governance to better use the Internet to know and understand their external stakeholders will gain a competitive advantage.
Adaptation within organizations to the increasing speed and information flow of the Net must happen on both the technical and social levels if they expect their workers to engage in the practice of online conversation. In previous chapters, we've described what we've found to be state-of-the-art approaches for supporting that practice both technically and socially. In our search for pioneering role models, only a select few organizations are blazing new trails. But as more organizations (and communities of interest and practice) discover incentives to adopt online conversation as a business tool, interface refinement will follow and the online conversation process will "learn itself" into being a more productive form of knowledge generation.
As more organizations implement knowledge-sharing technologies and practices, there will be more need, interest in, and accumulated track records of positive returns. When enough studies and analyses have been done to make a convincing case for the return on investment from the wide variety of internal and external online conversations, the incentives will be there for more widespread adoption.
People already loaded with responsibilities, swamped by information, and working in companies that have reduced their staffs don't have the time or mental bandwidth to learn new skills and engage in new knowledge-sharing activities. To persuade such overloaded workers to change their habits, incentives are required, one of which is greater convenience through improved design of technologies. If the interface and the tools made available can help workers solve problems and do their jobs more efficiently (without falling behind while learning a new, untried process), they will be adopted and used.
Technology must be a big part of the solution to the info-glut problem it has made possible. Social reorganization alone won't make knowledge sharing as effective as it needs to be. Aside from lack of understanding and compelling need, usability is the main barrier to the adoption of new technologies. As new handheld devices with wireless Web access multiply, designs for customizing our interface with the Net—to bring us only the information we want, just when we need it—will have to improve.
Peer-to-peer models allow the more ambitious and technically adept to move ahead of the pack (and the intranet), unfettered by centralized systems that can only be improved at the pace of an often overburdened IT department. By using basic email, instant messaging, or more sophisticated software like Groove, spontaneous knowledge networks, virtual teams, and CoPs may be supported, but P2P is not an ideal solution for the majority of workers as we explained in Chapter 7, "Choosing and Using Technology." Most workers don't want to go it alone without the handholding of IT. They simply need more useful interfaces provided through the company intranet.
Portal design is developing rapidly in a competitive market. Eventually, as application integration meets personalization, workers will be able to create and easily configure their own personal dashboards to increase their efficiency and effectiveness. A dashboard may contain links to prioritized and custom-sorted information and contacts, with gateways to (and automatic updates from) conversations in which the worker is engaged. In effect, the worker will choose to engage in numerous simultaneous conversations—some with people, some with database servers—and will be able to filter the input from all of them to fit time and attention constraints and to get just the right knowledge at the right time.
If intellectual capital is like cash in the bank, then knowledge flow must be like cash flow. Intellectual capital (IC) is gradually being recognized as a true asset to organizations, though there are many theories on how to measure it. Like IC, knowledge flow will become recognized in the future as a strong indicator of the organization's capacity to adapt, to innovate, and to survive.
Many businesses are now learning from knowledge already contained in their databases and in the minds of their workers and customers. To that end, they have spent considerable money on advanced software and systems integration to move data around and turn it into information that can be learned from. That doesn't necessarily mean that they actively promote knowledge exchange among their employees or with their customers. Some, as we've described, are beginning to do that, and many enterprise-level companies now recognize the value of communities of practice. There are now enough success stories to at least provide best practice examples that can be adapted to current business models.
But business models will have to adapt continuously as the rules and growth of the Internet press harder on large organizations still held back by tradition and older technology. Though some of these large companies are beginning to lever age the potential of online CoPs, most of them still have a long way to go before they can tap into the full value of the Net. When a valid and widely accepted means for measuring the knowledge flow in an organization is available, the results may persuade large companies to make the changes necessary to be competitive with companies that already are putting online conversation to work.
As businesses get wired, both technically and socially, the overall business environment evolves, and online communication skills become more important in job descriptions. Computers will continue to take over more of the tasks they do best, and humans will be spending more time in what they do best: collaborating, conversing creatively, and innovating for the benefit of the organization. Innovation is even more important to the survival of organizations today because world events may preclude long stretches of stability in the economy. Organizations today must become more communicative and lighter on their feet.
A school of study has been developing over the past decade that will become increasingly relevant as organizations make use of knowledge-sharing networks. Social networks, as we've mentioned in previous chapters, are made up of connections between people and connections between people and content. These connections range from the close and important ties of cohesive communities to the loose and episodic ties that characterize most relationships within organizations and between businesses and their customers. But as more people are given the opportunity to join online knowledge networks, the mapping methods of social networking analysis (SNA) will be put to greater use.
In his book The Tipping Point,[102] Malcolm Gladwell wrote of Connectors (people who know everyone) and Mavens (experts who love to teach) as catalysts of social epidemics. In social networks, these are the kinds of visible and influential people who attract and nurture communities. Identifying and empowering such people in an organization can jump-start knowledge networks. It's likely that the natural teachers and facilitators in organizations have spontaneously begun to do that already. Social networking analysis is a valuable technique for understanding how knowledge flows within communicating groups.
The principles of SNA are described well in a paper titled "Researching Organizational Systems Using Social Network Analysis,"[103] by Michael Zack. We've included many of these principles in our descriptions of the various roles in knowledge-sharing networks. Emergent leaders, who have the skills, experience, and confidence to step forward in new online meeting places, are key actors in SNA. The degrees of reluctance and enthusiasm that surround the introduction of new social technologies are measured by SNA techniques based on the ties that people have with other people. The influence of those ties can be affected by how close the people are located physically in the workplace, how close they are in their working relationships, and how dependent they are on each other.
As your company pays more attention to the social techniques of fostering productive communities of practice, you'll want to learn more about SNA. It may help you choose and configure technologies to support your online social interaction. One of the leaders in the development of SNA is Valdis Krebs, whose paper, "An Introduction to Social Network Analysis,"[104] can be found at www.orgnet.com/sna.html. It's a starting point for further study and is worth reading to gain a different perspective of the workings of your organization and its various overlapping and interwoven internal communities.
The challenge for organizations in the future is to adapt and sustain their meaningfulness in a fast-changing world. To meet that challenge, they will need to accept and embrace some different ways of operating and relating with people inside and outside the organization. Rigid structures and hierarchies will have to give way to more distributed ways of managing that provide less control but more flexibility. Human knowledge will need to be identified and used more effectively as the limitations of software are reached. Companies that are slow to adapt will be pushed to speed up the change process as smaller, quicker, less encumbered competitors seize opportunities. Companies will need to get closer to their customers to understand where the market is heading as early as possible. Faster learning, increased collaboration, and greater emphasis on building trust within the organization and with its stakeholders will be the drivers of organizational success in the future.
More than ever before, organizations are recognizing knowledge as an asset— not only the knowledge held by their company officers and well-educated professionals, but also the knowledge of every worker who understands his or her job. For strictly bottom-line reasons, companies need to preserve the knowledge of all workers because it costs more to replace them and retrain their replacements than it does to keep them and help them share what they know. This is especially true as organizations seek to "go lean" and cut staff numbers to the minimum.
Every bit of experience, know-how, competence, and individual learning counts now. Good workers need to share what they know and be rewarded for both knowing and sharing. It's in the self-interest of the organization to help workers collaborate and understand the value to the company of what they know about their jobs. This is true today, but the future will see the most successful organizations changing their cultures and values radically to become adaptable and sustainable entities.
The knowledge held by workers is not just valuable to their workmates; it is also increasingly of value to customers. Workers in positions that historically have been out of sight and out of reach of customers now find that they represent key links to customer loyalty and involvement. Product designers, systems engineers, and sales and shipping clerks all hold keys to the positive customer experience. When they do their jobs well, the company prospers because customers are pleased. Some companies have chosen to expose these previously anonymous servers of customer needs. The designer of the Daimler-Chrysler PT Cruiser, for example, became a star and a celebrity to owners and fans of the vehicle.
In the future, there will be more direct links from customers to the desktops of "back room" workers and innovators. They will be invited to respond directly to customers because the knowledge that can be shared between a customer and the designer of his tool, or the person who sends that tool to him, will become a competitive advantage. In the eyes of the consumer, the hierarchy of the business looks increasingly flat. People can track the packages they send through UPS on their home PCs. The shipping clerk who gets the product to the customer promptly is becoming a more meaningful contact to the consumer than the CEO ever was. To most company leaders, accustomed to keeping customer communications compartmentalized, this view of the future looks threateningly chaotic and filled with risk, but some see it as an inevitable reality.
Dave Weinberger, in an interview with CIO magazine said, "Businesses are taking on the structure of the web—decentralized, messy, self-organizing."[105] In the same interview, he also gave this warning to companies determined not to loosen their hierarchical ways: "Many businesses are devoted to maintaining the org chart through everything from disciplinary action to body language, so hyperlinked teams route around org charts." People are able to contact whom they want and need to contact, and they will do so if it means they can get their jobs done more easily or if it can bring them better service. The Net has changed the playing field to one with its own built-in rules that are not necessarily compatible with those of old-style organizations. Resistance to the messy ad hoc efficiency of hyperlinking is futile. Organizations must change proactively rather than adapt reactively to the changing marketplace and to the changing character and growing independence of their workers and customers. But a reactive change is still better than no change at all.
Weinberger also strongly promotes the need for companies to communicate with their customers in normal conversational language. The voice of the consumer is all over the Web, interpreting the marketing and sales messages of business that don't seem to be emanating from fellow human beings. Conversations among consumers are becoming more sophisticated at sorting the wheat from the chaff and the truth from the BS.
Weinberger, in his CIO interview, notes this ongoing translation of obscure business-speak into the natural language of the Web-enabled marketplace: "Business information now is wrapped in human voices, and that's an essential part of our ability to make sense of this information." More consumers are demanding an open dialogue with companies, but companies insist on obscuring their message, talking at their customers instead of with them. Consumers confront a smokescreen of marketing jargon and are finding ways to penetrate it. They are also choosing which companies to do business with based on the companies' willingness to address them as peers rather than as submissive customers.
Along with the adoption of the Net as a conversational environment, businesses need to realize that consumers are more willing to converse with them if they speak back in voices not scripted through the marketing or PR departments. Customers are tired of being spoken to like children. They just want to connect as fellow consumers (since even those who sell products must also buy products) and get the respect they deserve.
The idea of the learning organization has caught on, but how much of what has been learned has turned into increased productivity and profit? As the economy struggles to rise out of recession, early attempts to implement knowledge management solutions are being evaluated, and some truths about online knowledge sharing are becoming clear as indications for the future. Organizations in the future will do a better job of finding relevant knowledge, distributing it, and putting it to use because some pioneering companies and analysts are discovering today what works and does not work.
In an interview after publication of The Attention Economy, Tom Davenport was asked, "What's going on in knowledge management these days?" He responded that the greatest treasure to be found in KM is the insight that it brings to companies, but that business intelligence, rather than the sharing of best practices, was the area currently seeing the greatest advances. He also said, "The smart companies realize it takes a lot of very bright human beings around in addition to the software, and that's sort of a knowledge management-oriented insight."[106] Software meant to mine data for information can only take a company so far. Unless it has smart people around who can convert data and information into usable knowledge, the output of software brings limited improvement.
Those "very bright human beings" are often the ones starting and participating in spontaneous knowledge-sharing communities. These communities use a variety of technologies, often simple and often in applications different from the purposes for which the company provided them. When communities of practice build email lists to collaborate and share, they are adapting social intellect rather than trying to invent or design new technologies. When workers independently download and install popular IM clients like ICQ so that they can stay in more immediate contact on project development, they are choosing simple technological solutions instead of elaborate and expensive software structures.
As Deloitte Research reported in a paper describing collaborative communities, "virtual communities defy many hierarchical practices."[107] Members of these communities are smart people seeking the most efficient ways to get their jobs done using whatever technologies are available, from their Web-enabled desktops to Blackberry mobile devices. The companies within which these communities operate must first of all know that they are present and identify them. Company leaders must get to understand them and what they are about and then carefully go about connecting them with each other so that knowledge can be shared among them appropriately. The Deloitte paper concludes, "Companies that learn to manage and leverage these networks effectively will be more agile, more efficient, and more innovative than those that do not."
Company leaders also must understand that their smartest employees may bring more value than expensive technologies, but appropriate technologies can raise the effectiveness of those employees and of their spontaneous communities of practice. Though many productive CoPs use email as their meeting environments, that original choice of platform is often made based on the lack of available Web-based discussion environments that allow multithreaded conversations and more accessible records of those conversations. The Web, with its ability to hyperlink between resources and its capacity to weave content with conversation and personal profiles, offers significant improvements over email in terms of the effectiveness of its support for knowledge sharing.
A study by Forrester Research,[109] surveying 50 Fortune 1000 companies, showed that although the great majority use email in collaborative product development, only a small percentage use Web-based tools. Executives responding to the survey projected that without a Web-based approach to collaboration, in-house best practices would take an average of 27 months to be conveyed from one part of the organization to another, even in the best of firms. That time represents money lost. If the easy linking capabilities of a Web-based environment can cut the time of best practice dissemination in half or even better, the conversion from email is almost certain to have a positive impact on the company's bottom line.
It's not just the creative people inside the company who need to be empowered and leveraged; the helpful customers outside the company need to be hooked into the network, too. The Deloitte paper recommended that companies wishing to get full value out of their spending on CRM projects begin treating customers "as partners in anticipating, designing and delivering on their current and future needs." To build that partnership around customer-centric strategies, companies must create "an environment that allows for ongoing, consistent dialogue."[110] Again, this calls for simultaneous change in organizational culture and in improved access between knowledge-sharing groups both inside and outside the organization.
As markets are conversations, the marketplace is changing fast in part because the number of conversations is rapidly increasing. Companies that relate to their customers understand that the question no longer is simply "what do they want?" but "how do they want it?" The first generation dot coms may have been unrealistic in their visions of how fast their new business models could be established, but they were very practical when it came to serving consumers through a commonly available interface. In that respect, at least, they set the new direction of the changing marketplace.
Change has occurred much faster and on a wider scale than has the adaptation of many enterprise-level businesses. Large companies, even those that take action to modernize their technology, change slowly. In Tom Davenport's interview, he says, "We've had ERP [enterprise resource planning] for 20 years, and only a small fraction of companies have started to change the way they manage using the systems. I think that will be true of the Internet."[111] If it takes 20 years for some companies to adapt their management to the changes in the Internet-powered marketplace, there's enough time for a second generation of dot-com frenzy to take place between now and then that could still grab business opportunities from slow-to-change competitors.
There is evidence, though, that large companies are continuing to try to keep up, at least on the technological end. In a paper titled "Communities: Sociology Meets Technology,"[112] the Gartner Group made some high-probability (Gartner-rated at 70 percent chance or higher) predictions for the year 2002. We list them in Table 10.1.
Table 10.1. High-Probability Predictions by the Gartner Group for 2002
GARTNER PREDICTION FOR 2002 | IMPLICATIONS |
|---|---|
The market for Web conferencing will exceed $500 million, doubling by year's end. | A lot of that expense will go for expensive virtual meetings through interfaces like Placeware and Webex. The more budget-minded companies will be installing discussion boards and instant messaging applications. |
A wide range of "smart mobile devices" will begin to proliferate through the year. | These include wireless technologies for virtual team collaboration. Some other examples of their use: media content management, voice portals, geospatial information management, and personal knowledge management. |
Six or more companies will offer packaged "smart enterprise portfolios." | These will integrate the functions of the portal with content and document management, KM, and collaboration products. Gartner believes many of these will include e-learning features. Such platforms can support self-managing knowledge communities in the same way that the software platform (described in Chapter 7, "Choosing and Using Technology") is designed to do. |
Technology for locating experts in the workplace and for managing the searching and profiling functions will grow the fastest in terms of expanding its user base. | More than half a million workers will have access to such tools by year's end. People look for other human resources—as mentors, as sources of experience, for fact checking, and for inviting into collaborative relationships. Once these resources are found, conversations can begin. |
Purchasing new technologies that promise to solve knowledge-related problems is slowed, for the most part, by lack of proof that they will be worth their expense. An article in Infoworld[113] highlighted the continuing concern over new communication technology's ability to pay for itself. ROI continues to be relied on as the main justification for adopting collaborative practices and technologies, and if the ROI case cannot be proven using traditional metrics, the adoption of new practices and technologies doesn't happen.
In the Infoworld article, George Paolini, the chief marketing officer of the email-on-steroids application Zaplet (see Chapter 7), claimed that businesses still see collaboration as a "nice-to-have, not a must-have" system. The must-have status will only be recognized, he said, when current practices prove to be costing the company instead of saving it money. It's still easy to picture thousands of workers, perfectly happy with their simple email and scheduling application and the routine exchange of attached documents. Why pay for an upgrade if they are satisfied with what they have now? As Paolini explains, the ROI from software-mediated collaboration can only be demonstrated after a company has adopted and developed the new practice. Thus, companies relying on proof of ROI to trigger change are likely to adopt the new practice only when the current system's costs in inefficiency prove to be intolerable.
The article also acknowledges that the benefits of collaborative software, although not easily quantifiable, contribute indirectly to ROI through increased efficiencies such as "opening up communication bottlenecks, improving information redundancies, and combining disparate knowledge." As investments in collaborative technologies grow, it will be interesting to see how traditional measures of ROI evolve to include their contributions to the business.
Most cases of failed ROI from collaborative technologies reflect two basic management errors: an overinfatuation with cutting-edge software as the solution and the inappropriate application of software solutions to socially based networking situations. In fact, only a small part of the genre referred to by industry and the press as "collaborative technologies" is software to support online conversation; much of the attributed costs for that genre go for very expensive system-level technologies, systems integration, and middleware rather than for tools meant for interpersonal interaction.
Return on investment is more easily achieved if initial investments are kept small and increased incrementally only as paths for successful use are discovered. For conversational technologies, companies that follow a path that includes leveraging spontaneous communities, keeping the technology as simple as possible, starting small, learning and following a phased growth plan—with the users of the system leading the expansion—will prove effective in keeping initial costs low and seeing direct benefits more clearly.
Changes in organizational culture that make collaborative tools effective are happening, but slowly. Likewise, the proof of ROI is gradually emerging from the use of those tools. Soon, we believe, companies that have invented and implemented collaborative solutions over the past few years will have abundant proof to justify those investments. In the future, we believe that the period for proving the ROI of technologies that enable knowledge sharing will be extended beyond the traditional single-year timeframe. Investments that require social as well as technical integration and are meant to build the sustainability of the company must be given more time to become ingrained in organizational culture and practice.
Organizations whose products and purposes relate to lifestyle communities will gain both loyalty and knowledge by providing opportunities for customers and constituents to converse on the Net. As attractions to these natural communities, organizations like REI—the outdoor equipment store that began as a cooperative and now manages one of the more effective online shopping sites—become hubs of customer interaction and sources of valuable market intelligence.
The key functions of these community opportunities are described clearly by REI in its "Learn & Share" area, pictured in Figure 10.1. Customers, who originally come to the site to shop for outdoor gear and clothing, can learn from fellow backpackers, skiers, and canoeists how to select the right equipment for their conditions or fitness. They can offer their advice to those coming to the online forums to learn. They can find partners for their adventures and suggest favorite hiking routes. By facilitating the contact between people with interest in outdoor activities, REI helps to build a loyal and informative market for its products.
Because of experience gained in its brick-and-mortar stores, REI understood its customers before it built its Web site. Many companies, though, have fallen behind their customers in learning how to communicate. They have to catch up. Dave Weinberger says, "The web is enabling markets to become much smarter, much faster than businesses can hope to—at least businesses along the old model."[114] The market becomes as smart as its smartest person because "the web enables global conversations in which people speak the truth to one another in their own distinctive voices." Again, the issues of trust and genuine voice arise. This is not about the technology as much as it is about the company providing the interface and the words that customers understand as they look for solutions. REI is a good example for the future because its employees and the editors of its Web site are outdoors enthusiasts just like its customers. It speaks the language of its customers.
In Chapter 9, "Conversing with External Stakeholders," we described Hallmark's Idea Exchange, an online community composed of Hallmark customers and consumers invited to participate through phone calls and email. We believe that more companies will adopt the Hallmark model of close consumer involvement with product design and service feedback in the future, so in February 2002, we conducted an interview with the initiator of the Idea Exchange, Tom Brailsford.
Since the report that informed our initial description of the consumer-as-consultants project, Hallmark has started two more online communities: one for grandparents and one for Hispanics. As with the original community, made up of mothers with young children, the company plans to limit the populations to about 200 members at a time. Additional communities—specifically, their composition—are under discussion within the company. Brailsford says that one way consumer communities save his company money is by enabling faster research. "There's a financial value associated with time too."
Brailsford set up the original Idea Exchange so the company could have an ongoing dialogue with its customers rather than just "point in time" focus groups or surveys. Part of customer loyalty, he maintains, involves the customer thinking of the company as a partner. He recognizes that for these communities to work the participants must also have a compelling reason to want to talk with one another, such as exchanging child-raising tips or having a voice about issues that are deeply important to them.
The communities, Brailsford says, are always "morphing"; that is, they are living, organic, works in progress. Members regularly leave and new ones are recruited (or join voluntarily) to replace them. At first, the company's goal for the Idea Exchange was to come up with one good new product idea a year from the insights generated there. Last year he believes they came up with at least two ideas for entirely new businesses.
Hallmark's employees don't participate as regular members of the Idea Exchange communities but can visit and observe by using guest passes. The availability of these passes is made known within the company by word of mouth; they have not been advertised or promoted. So far, more than 400 people have used the guest passes, and although the members of the consumer communities are aware when a guest is present, the guests themselves are asked not to interfere or disturb the normal interactions of the consumer members. Hallmark tries to be very careful to preserve its trusted relationship with the consumer community participants. It is aware that if the communities are overly influenced by Hallmark, the Idea Exchange(s) may no longer be a valid market research tool.
Members of the communities are empowered to start their own discussion topics and to launch their own surveys. Hallmark's creative writers take special note of the language that consumers use to describe day-to-day life events and feelings. Brailsford projects that in the future they may allow the consumers to do their own recruiting for their communities and become even more self-governing than they are today. He considers what Hallmark is doing with consumer communities to be a kind of online anthropology where the company can observe consumers interacting in a relatively controlled but uninfluenced environment.
"Many companies are moving toward decentralized and team-based work environments to improve their responsiveness." So says the Deloitte Research paper on knowledge networks.[115] Such companies have realized how far the marketplace has pulled ahead of them. Their old, rigid, hierarchical structures could not respond fast enough. Now they need to go faster and grow leaner to save money and learn from where they've been. This defines a clear need for the efficiencies and adaptability of conversational knowledge sharing.
Tom Peters wrote In Search of Excellence, a book that years ago helped bring attention to exemplary companies that had recognized and were adapting to the changing marketplace. In an article in Fast Company, he says that companies "need to achieve liberation. Today, it's all about the freedom to try new things."[116] He compares this to the days when he wrote his groundbreaking book, way back in 1982, when he concentrated on "people, customers, and action." Today, he says, "it's about ideas, liberation, speed...the power of good ideas that passionate, motivated, fully engaged people can generate." The speed that Peters is talking about today is "speed to learning," and it's a kind of speed that doesn't waste time worrying about what just happened. It's a forward-looking speed, eager to anticipate and adjust to the future.
Similarly, Tom Davenport sees companies today not worrying about what just happened, but trying to gather their wits and move ahead as smartly as possible. Speaking at the end of year 2001, he said, "Right now, we're sort of in a period where there's no really big new ideas, and a lot of managers, employees and organizations just want to take all the ideas that have come along for the past several years and put them together, integrate them, simplify them and get some value out of them. They're all looking to extract some value from their existing infrastructures and, at this moment, cut costs from their existing infrastructures."[117]
How much time they have to do such analysis will depend on the patience of their markets. What Davenport describes is a characteristic of the new lean company model, where only the essentials to success are retained and where no extraneous infrastructure or staff is carried that will slow the company down and cut into its profitability. The companies he describes are gearing down for their anticipated acceleration into the fast-learning lane described by Peters.
A study done by consulting giant Accenture indicated that more than 70 percent of surveyed executives from Fortune 1000 companies see the Internet as one of the most important factors in fostering greater collaboration with key business partners because of the visibility it provides in the supply chain.[118] Collaboration, in this context, is a necessary result of executives outsourcing more of their business functions like transportation, logistics, and procurement and working harder to eliminate supply chain inefficiencies. Although this doesn't mean that they are fostering more online conversation, the results of partner collaboration—sharing or integrating software so that data are compatible with partnering organizations—are certainly a form of collaboration that is likely to require more direct online communication.
Other clues point to increased emphasis on conversational collaboration in the workplace. The previously cited study by the Gartner Group also included interesting projections about online communities and interaction. Companies will implement more online business communities from now through 2004, and Gartner predicts that employee-focused communities (B2E) will appear in the greatest numbers. This makes sense because employees have established reasons to communicate and share common communication technologies. Interest, though, will be highest in building customer communities (B2C) because companies are being asked increasingly by their customers to provide better channels for support. Leading the way in measured ROI will be partner communities (B2B), probably because they are closer to actual business transactions than the others. We believe that by 2004 more valid and accepted ROI measurement techniques for the B2E and B2C communities will drive their adoption by more companies.
Gartner believes, based on its research, that by 2007, "the time spent interacting with others in the virtual world will exceed the physical connections by a factor of 10-to-1." And by the same year, "more than 60 percent of the European Union and U.S. population will carry or wear a wireless computing and communications device at least six hours a day." These numbers, if they prove even close to accurate, will certainly have an impact within business practice and culture.
These projections describe a very communicative and collaborative workplace—one that organizations should be preparing for today in their strategic planning and in their changing operations. As communication among workers increases, the productive value of specific technologies, online leadership, and online conversation skills will stand out. Innovation spurred by interaction between customers and companies will become more important, and the amount of tolerance and flexibility ingrained in an organization's culture will prove to be either a lubricant or a source of friction on its path to sustainability. Yet the increase in interpersonal interaction in the virtual world must be metered carefully so as not to become another form of information glut.
Not surprisingly, as one senior executive says, "Nobody in reality wants to collaborate for the sake of collaboration." Darren Lee, senior VP of NextPage, admits, "We're finding [collaboration] only has significant value when it's combined...with mission-critical information, attached to a business-processing context."[119] That's a fancy way of saying that working people need to get things done and that online collaboration needs to be made as efficient as possible.
We agree that "collaboration for the sake of collaboration" can be wasteful of valuable time, but we also warn against holding too high a standard for what "mission-critical" means, at least when the collaboration involves online conversation. Informal practice of online communication skills is important; it leads to learning and allows people to develop the new skills, habits, and trust required for productive interaction.
But besides practice, productive online collaboration also requires appropriate software environments and interfaces for the specific community and task. Often, the community finds an available environment for online meetings—for example, email combined with content on Web pages—and settles in with it rather than seeking more powerful software that might actually be more useful for its purposes. The end users can't be relied on to be the ones pushing for change in the collaborative interface. End users are often the most conservative forces in terms of pushing for change and new things to learn.
As Andrew Mahon, senior director of product marketing at Groove Networks, notes, "Collaboration usually is aimed at the long-term efficiency and effectiveness of a group, but that's not how people behave—they behave in their short-term best interest."[120] Mr. Mahon is referring to the lack of demand in the workplace for tools like Groove. He can't be blamed for wanting businesses to buy Groove, just as Mr. Paolini wants them to convert to Zaplet Appmail. But workers aren't yet demanding change on the level that would drive institutional demand for their products.
Email and instant messaging may be the platforms of choice and may indeed work well in the short term. But when collaboration is adopted as a long-term solution in the company, software that can make every collaboration more efficient—providing document sharing, calendars, and project management timelines—will be more appropriate and effective for the company as a whole.
As innovative thinking and action become more important to organizations, so will inspirational leadership and stimulating culture. Businesses must learn to be less mechanical and more social because people communicating can create and adapt for situations better than computers and machines. And as the Net brings people outside organizations closer to people inside them, the human side of the organization must be nurtured. Tom Davenport was asked in an interview about the importance in workplace culture of "how you manage people's spirits." He responded, "If you want employees to think creatively and share their ideas and so on, you have to work on that kind of stuff."[121]
Managing people's spirits is not the stuff of traditional business, but increased internal communication is changing the way organizations see themselves. Referring to his latest book about the scarcity of attention, the interviewer asked Davenport about online communities, pointing out that they get attention, sustain attention with user participation, and encourage knowledge sharing where novices learn from experts. Did Davenport see companies embracing the idea of internal and external online communities?
"I think online communities are great and they have a number of positive attributes," he said, "but I think a lot of companies try to do them on the cheap, and they don't really take experts and put them in roles to facilitate communities." Because they can be so difficult and expensive to facilitate, he sees online communities evolving into what he described as "kind of another unit of organizational structure." Employees will work within a specific department of the organization, such as accounting, but they may actually be active in communities that cross the boundaries of departments. Community structures will define a constantly changing organizational network within the organization.
We see online communities in the future spanning not only internal boundaries but boundaries between the company and its customers. The people who design and market products share a common interest with the customers who buy and use those products, and together they comprise a community of focus and purpose: to end up with the highest quality product. The Internet now provides the potential meeting place for these potential collaborators. To open the conversation between them, companies must change themselves from within.
Michael Hammer wrote Reengineering the Corporation, a book that helped set off waves of reorganization and change in the way businesses were managed. That was 1993, and today his viewpoint has evolved with the marketplace. He now believes that the equation has changed "from scarce goods to scarce customers." Customers are more educated today and have become more particular, so companies must reengineer in this age to "face the customer, to serve the customer, and to make life easier for the customer."[123]
The Net makes this obvious to those of us who have been online steadily for years, but as more people log on and become more comfortable doing business through the Web, the pressure for companies to open up to the market through the Net will become irresistible. The customer will be more and more defined by what happens through the Net, where the marketplace expects there to be a conversation.
The innovative company of the future will need to find sparks of creativity in places it has never looked before. Organizations can learn from customers, consultants, and other external sources, but when looking for solutions to internal problems, ideas drawn from outside the company often hit cultural roadblocks. Solutions developed within the framework of a culture, rather than introduced from outside it, are more likely to be adopted and sustained. This is human nature. But an organization looking inward for solutions may wonder where to begin its search.
Recognizing internal deviants in the culture as innovators (rather than crackpots, eccentrics, or rebels) is one approach to finding fresh new solutions. People deviate from the norm for different reasons, but one is that the norm is not effective enough for them; they feel it is holding them back. So they try different ways of doing things. Sometimes they break rules or ignore protocol. Sometimes they download and install software not provided or approved by IT. Sometimes they create their own discussion groups just to learn something new about their job or profession. Their behavior may go against corporate norms of playing it safe and submitting to the organization, but deviation can be recognized as leadership rather than rebellion.
Jerry Sternin's job with Save the Children was to help save starving children in a specific region in Vietnam. Faced with an impossible timeframe for figuring out and implementing lasting solutions, he decided to look for the rare examples of children that were not starving in the region. Compared to the vast majority of families whose children were suffering, these deviant cases might provide workable solutions for everyone. But that was only part of the challenge. The most important challenge was in getting these solutions adopted by many families and in changing entrenched cultural behaviors.
Sternin knew from experience with businesses that when outside consultants come into an organizational culture and introduce new practices, they may be adopted for a while, but once the consultants leave, the tendency is to revert to old practices. Cultural trust is a powerful thing. Foreign intervention, no matter how helpful, is still foreign. As Sternin said: "The traditional model for social and organizational change doesn't work. It never has. You can't bring permanent solutions in from outside."
Sternin knew that the most effective way of introducing new ideas was to find successful but unusual practices that were working for some people, in some circumstances, in the organization and "amplify them." People sometimes unwittingly discover paths to success that can benefit the entire organization. They need to be discovered and to have their ideas disseminated. But acceptance by others in the organization can be tricky. People like to think that they have discovered the ideas they adopt. They tend to resist having new ideas imposed on them, even if they are improvements over their current practices. When people feel that they have a part in discovering a solution, they "own" it, trust it, and are more likely to continue using it.
In Viet Nam, Sternin found families whose children were not malnourished and studied the differences in their diets from the norm. He and his wife introduced other families to the foods in these deviant diets, but they did so casually, without proselytizing. This let the families feel that they were discovering the new foods on their own rather than having them introduced as part of a "nutritional program."
Applying the deviant solution approach to organizations, the incremental successes of deviant groups (like spontaneous communities of practice) can be publicized in a low-key manner through the intranet, where other groups can appreciate the new ideas and adopt them as they choose to fit their situations. To overhype the specific deviant group ("Everybody go look at what the widget team is doing!") could endanger its effectiveness. To force all groups to form communities of practice is sure to breed resentment and awkwardness. But spreading exceptional practices by seeding them as ideas through the organizational culture introduces the elements of choice and creative collaboration— elements that contribute to group trust, creativity, and loyalty.
The dot coms pioneered some novel ways of measuring success. Page views were as good as money for several years. In 1999, click-throughs were going to be the standard for setting ad rates. Eyeballs—the number of unique visits or unique visitors—drove share prices. Being first to market was an automatic symbol of success, and winning dominant market share was seen by the stock market as worthy of huge investment. Revenue and profit would come in their natural course, eventually.
But page views didn't sell product. Click-throughs stopped happening, and eyeballs did not reliably translate into revenue for anyone. Profit and ROI were reclaimed as the bedrock measures of business success. But the Net, in speeding up the flow of information and introducing many new ways of relating people and information, did create some new benchmarks for performance measurement. These will be refined, adopted, and used in the future, led by the most innovative companies who understand the importance of monitoring their real-time performance as they constantly try new ideas and react to shifting markets.
Michael Hammer is one of those who believes conventional business measures have fallen behind the marketplace and must be changed. In a September 2001 interview,[126] he calls most conventional measures "worthless" and charitably labels the others as only "dangerous." What measures is he referring to and what's his complaint? "Financial measures—profitability, return on investment, discounted cash flow, or any of the technically complex measures used by financial engineers—tell you little, if anything, of what you need to know about your business." He calls the basic profit-and-loss statement "an autopsy." Hammer does accept, though, the importance of a strong balance sheet and healthy P& but only as outcomes, not as the most useful measurements of business health.
Hammer believes businesses should be tracking more measurements of their actual performance: how much they are getting done and how well they are doing it. "The fundamental language of business is about things like customer satisfaction, speed, and error rates," Hammer says. He wants "[real] operating measures, metrics that matter not to the accounting department, but to the all-powerful customer." Customers don't care and can't tell if your company made a profit last month, but they do care and can tell if your delivery came on time and if the invoice you sent them was correct. Customers can be lost if service is bad, even though the company's balance sheet looks healthy. In a fast-changing marketplace, service and performance must be monitored constantly.
Performance measures as described by Hammer help describe a company's effectiveness as tied to its customer satisfaction. We believe that knowledge exchange also must be measured as a kind of intellectual performance that can be tied to cost savings and to revenue-generating ideas and relationships. Conventional measures of business success must be expanded in the future to recognize the effects of communication through the Net on efficiency, innovation, knowledge generation, and the overall health and prospects of companies. In a more communicative wired marketplace, companies will be valued in part by how well adapted they are to that environment.
Thus, in addition to ideas like those suggested by Michael Hammer, we would add other measuring criteria such as:
How many new product or business ideas have been stimulated by direct interaction with customers?
How many employees are involved on a daily basis in knowledge-sharing communities?
How many customers are participating in company-sponsored online conversation?
How fast do best practices disseminate through the company?
Conventional accounting doesn't include any means for recognizing the value of a company using the Net to engage in conversation with its customers and partners. As Tom Brailsford of Hallmark's Idea Exchange asked in our phone interview with him, "What is the value of thinking?" Conversations in which knowledge is shared amount to collective thinking. The fact that it is happening within an organization identifies the potential for generating useful as well as mission-critical knowledge and ideas. Correlating conversations with the value of their creative results—new products, more efficient processes, faster time to market, improved customer and employee satisfaction—should be considered the new frontier of accounting in the knowledge-focused marketplace.
Business has been paying attention to the brainpower within organizations for many years. Measuring intellectual capital is not a new idea by any means, but the Internet continues to spawn new examples of group intelligence that don't yet fit into recognized categories for measuring intangible assets. Dynamic knowledge generation and its positive by-products need to be integrated with parameters like competency models, balanced scorecard, benchmarking, and business process auditing.[115] If a company invests in using the Net to harness the power of consumer input and feedback, if it grows communities of reliable consumer consultants, then those assets should be represented somewhere on the balance sheet.
Online knowledge sharing is a new way of doing business and will require the learning and adoption of a new set of skills. Depending on a person's role and the nature of the conversation, these skills can be as natural as starting and maintaining an interesting conversation or as challenging as herding cats. The personal assets that make a productive online conversationalist can be as mundane as good typing skills and as elusive as inspirational leadership.
Every organization and every culture will need its own special skills to manage this virtual social activity. We describe only general categories here because skills such as effective message writing, operating in a flattened hierarchy, applying online etiquette, and conversational leadership are important to any wired organization, but to different degrees. Every cultural unit, whether a distinct company or a line of business within a company, needs to discover on its own how these skills should be tailored to its particular needs.
For his book on the scarce resource of human attention in the information-flooded workplace, Tom Davenport studied what business leaders pay attention to. This is important to know because wherever executives spend their limited attention is more likely to influence the strategies they implement. In his interviews at Agilebrain.com,[127] Davenport described what executives chose to zoom in on. It turns out that, at least in the case of online communication, executives behave a lot like the rest of us.
Davenport and his coauthor asked executives which medium they paid the most attention to. They responded: email. The executives were then asked which attributes of an email message were most important to them in deciding whether it was worth further attention. Their responses ranked the attributes in the following order, beginning with most important:
- Personalization of the message.
Executives looked first at messages written specifically to them rather than to a group.
- Brevity.
Keeping the message "short and concise" was likely to convince them to spend time reading it.
- Emotion.
If the message evoked either a positive or negative emotion, it was more likely to draw their interest than if it did not.
- A trustworthy source.
Even long, dry, impersonal messages from someone known and trusted would get a look.
Over the years, we've found the same attributes of online interpersonal communication to be important for most people. When the number of messages— whether email, message board, or IM—becomes too great, people apply their own sorting and prioritization systems. First to get ignored always seem to be the least personal messages, followed by the long time-consuming ones. Boring messages are a labor to read, and those coming from unknown sources probably don't have as much relevance as those coming from friends, associates, and workmates.
People (and businesses) have to work hard to become known as trustworthy sources and thereby to attract attention. Businesses and business leaders who need to contact many people at once also must work hard to make their messages seem personal. These factors apply to messages posted in message boards or anywhere in the online environment. The new skill set of the knowledge-sharing future includes an understanding of how to attract attention when the audience, not just executives, is learning to filter its input and aim its attention based on factors such as personalization, brevity, emotional impact, and trust.
In the flattened hierarchy of the Net, leaders are recognized more by their communication skills than by the number of people who report to them. In companies where executives spend most of their attention on email, they may not spend any time in group conversation environments such as discussion boards or as member/participants in ongoing email lists. But as online conversations become more popular as meeting places and collaborative environments, executives will find it more difficult to keep a finger on the pulse of the organization without spending time involved in some of those conversations. Leadership must become accustomed to proving its mettle in Cyberspace.
Dave Weinberger, who campaigns constantly for businesses to express themselves like normal people, also thinks that business leaders need to learn the importance of addressing the marketplace with substance rather than spin. "An important new skill is being required of our best communicators," Weinberger says. "They need to stand for something, to care about what they're talking about, to be able to talk from the heart in their own words."[128] Michael Hammer strikes a similar theme when he says, "You're not going to get passion in your organization by talking about shareholder value. You have to give people a sense of transcendent purpose."[129]
Millions of people have now used the Net as a medium for serious, heartfelt, passionate communication. They understand that it is not a toy and is not a broadcast medium like television where they can simply mute the commercials if they offend. The Net is a two-way medium among virtual peers. People expect to get back in truth and sincerity what they put out. They expect leaders to be able to use the medium to communicate from the heart and to inspire people behind common causes.
Weinberger recognizes that in a communications-rich marketplace, leaders must be more than managers of people in offices. They must, as he says, "earn respect by being out in the fray, by being able to laugh...especially at their own mistakes." Respect is earned, he says, "by being a participant just like everybody else. That's pure democracy."[130] That's also consistent with the very real flattening of the hierarchy in the modern organization. The Net makes it so. Networks need competent and trusted coordinators more than they need commanders.
Hammer says, "The old leader was a guy who sat on the 59th floor and made financial decisions. The new leader must be a charismatic persuader, someone to whom others can relate, a person who can set sights higher than the next quarter's earnings report."[131] The next era of reengineering, he says, will depend on "on qualities that emanate from the right side of the brain: devotion, trust, empathy, and all of their touchy-feely cousins." We may be 30+ years beyond the end of the sixties, but Hammer sees management entering an age of "empathic identification." The Net makes us all more exposed to each other, businesses and consumers alike. It's time to accept that fact and learn how to take best advantage of it.
Facilitation means to make something easier. The leaders of sustainable organizations will be responsible for making it easier for workers and knowledge-oriented communities to communicate and learn. Those leaders will have to understand how online conversation works. And to do that, they will have to use the tools their workers use so that they can experience and join online conversations. Leaders of sustainable communities will be active members of knowledge networks and will therefore understand their needs.
Facilitation also means making productive conversation easier for participants. There are specialists who do this for a living or who fill this role in online discussions, but we believe online facilitation skills will become common to knowledge workers in the future. Good facilitators maintain focus, help people understand one another, and bring the group to resolution within set time limits. They pay attention to every individual and to the conversation as a whole. Good facilitators understand the practical attention limits and capabilities of people conversing online. They manage meetings according to the time and attention people are most able to give. They perform helpful tasks like clarifying points people attempt to make. They provide summaries of past meetings and agendas for future meetings.
The more people in any online meeting who are participating with a facilitator's level of attention, the more productive the meeting can be. Not every online conversation needs a facilitator, but where efficiency and time are involved, every online knowledge-sharing conversation should be managed as a facilitated meeting. In a knowledge-sharing environment, we expect group communications skills will become more important as a requisite skill. We foresee companies providing training and practice to get all of their workers up to a much higher level of sophistication than exists today.
In Chapter 7, we described a range of technical genres, platforms, interfaces, and approaches that can serve the needs for knowledge exchange within and across the firewall. We included some products and ideas that we believe represent the future, or at least the next step of technology for the virtual knowledge-sharing organization. In this last part of the final chapter, we'll touch again on some of the technical themes we believe will support the expansion of online conversation in the workplace and marketplace.
Decentralization is one theme. Application integration is another. But as we've emphasized many times in this book, self-motivated knowledge-sharing communities are not limited by the shortcomings of centralized systems or the slow pace of integration. They find tools that work in the present because they need to converse and learn now, not later.
The recognition of businesses as communities and of communities within businesses also will affect the direction of technical development for and within organizations. Communities of practice are catching on in corporations, and some of the best practices for tapping into customer knowledge are now known to involve online conversation. The future of knowledge networking will feature more personalization and more ongoing collaboration between IT, Web designers, and portal builders. Workers dependent on their knowledge-sharing communities will need the technical means to stay engaged remotely through different devices. But beyond these few assumptions, the technical future of knowledge sharing will depend on where the actual practice of knowledge sharing leads it.
Portal design today is a very competitive business, with many companies trying to serve widely varying corporate needs by including just the right mix of information searching, application integration, employee profiling, and collaboration tools. The portal market is being driven by increasing dissatisfaction with existing intranet deployments and the recognized need to move toward Web-based interfaces as the standard for information delivery and knowledge sharing. All of the major business infrastructure providers such as SAP, Oracle, and PeopleSoft have rewritten their programs for operation as Web applications.
We expect knowledge sharing to be one of the more sought after functionalities in future designs because portals will be where more employees spend their time and get their information. Portals will become the means through which more enterprises tap into what their employees know and provide the means for employees to share with each other what they know.
The ability to provide mobile, remote, and distributed workers with organized access to the applications, knowledge, and information they need for sound decision making has become vitally important for businesses striving to be productive, agile, and profitable. The attractiveness of Web-based computing combined with the need to expedite information access and skills training has led to the design of what are called e-learning portals.
Centra (www.centra.com) is, like Placeware, a provider of real-time Web-based communications. Through integrating its services into the local portal, companies can bring virtual classrooms into the organization. The importance of bringing an entire staff up to speed on new skills is crucial to organizations needing to keep pace with the fast-changing marketplace, and portals will be the primary channel through which the necessary training will be delivered. E-learning portals will connect directly and seamlessly with enterprise resource planning (ERP), business intelligence, customer relationship management (CRM), and other mission-critical enterprise systems so that workers can learn within the actual information environments that define their jobs.
Open source technologies allow programmers to build new platform-independent applications for virtually any device, including wireless and handheld communication devices and information appliances. Mobile users will be able to move seamlessly from one device to another and receive consistent, personalized learning and knowledge. These applications will be integrated into portals where all information and personalization options will be located—where individual workers will configure and maintain their personal dashboards.
Three main approaches to integrating technologies are developing today that will open the doors to wider collaboration in the B2B, B2E, and B2C arenas: Web services, application service providers (ASPs), and virtual network organizations. Many businesses are unable to collaborate with each other because of incompatibilities among the applications they use. Two different ERP systems may not be able to exchange information, for example, preventing the time-saving efficiencies that could be realized if data could be smoothly exchanged. Because such relationships are blocked by incompatibilities, the need and opportunity for conversations among potential collaborators do not exist. Integration solutions will allow different applications to be shared by different organizations under different technical arrangements, thus allowing many more collaborative relationships to form in the future.
We've mentioned Web services previously in the book, noting that they still face some problems in standardization and cross-company implementation. They represent the next natural evolutionary step in the development of tools for the distributed network of the Internet. Using current industry standards like XML to build them, they are software tools that can be used by other software applications.
Web services rapidly can interconnect existing applications and information. Their use can wean end users from the complexity of incompatible legacy systems. And in the words of Dirk Spiers, describing the consensus expressed at Infoworld's Next-Generation Web Services Conference in January 2002,[132] they will "cause the Internet to become a big, programmable software soup, with virtually unlimited components that can mix and match themselves."
At the conference, the cofounder of one Web services provider admitted, "We tend to underestimate the speed at which we do simple things and overestimate the speed at which we do hard things." For even as Web services are being developed and deployed at a rapid rate, the perception of many speakers at the conference was, as Spiers described, that the industry "remains some distance from a solid set of services upon which real businesses can be built." What "some distance" means is anybody's guess, but the need is indeed there for what Web services can do. Locally—integrating the applications used within a single organization—the implementation of Web services is less problematic than it is between different companies with different software and cultures. So in the short term, we will see Web services used internally, in combination with portals to provide consistent interfaces for workers to what would otherwise be incompatible applications.
This internal integration will aid knowledge-sharing communities by providing them with more flexible access to the information coming from different processes in the organization. Cross-company knowledge communities— involving both CRM and marketing, for example—will be able to learn better from each other when the information provided by their distinct software applications is delivered through more standardized interfaces. The CRM staff will be able to access and interpret marketing data and marketing will be able to do the same with CRM data, providing context for more productive conversation.
When a company runs part of its technology through an ASP, it spares the IT department of certain responsibilities and expenses. It allows the company to concentrate on its core competencies rather than manage peripheral applications, and it reduces pressures to hire the professionals it would need to run the applications internally. For an ASP solution to work, there must be sufficient secure bandwidth connecting the company with the ASP. So far, this has been one of the bottlenecks in adoption of these solutions, and it is where ASPs intersect with the virtual network organizations to be described.
System integration is not necessarily smooth in the use of ASPs. The application may be run and managed remotely, but it still must fit smoothly into the overall business system so that it can be used most effectively. This applies in arrangements like B2B exchanges where different companies using the exchange will come with their own different applications. Integration might mean building interoperability for many vendors and buyers with a single ERP system. This is where Web services intersect with ASPs. And there are still problems in matching the design assumptions of the ASP with the organizational realities of the ASP client. As Tom Davenport opined, "I think it's fair to say that few companies or industries have solved [ASP integration] yet. What you're getting into is inter-organizational reengineering, and it's very time-consuming and very expensive."[133]
One expected voice of optimism is John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems. He was asked in an interview if the Internet had lived up to his expectations. His response was interesting, especially in light of the tremendous slide his company had taken over the prior 18 months as demand fell for the boxes that his company supplies for Internet expansion.
"The Internet has overachieved my expectations," he said. There is too much pessimism about the role of the Internet and its capability, he argued. "We'll see wave after wave of applications of the Internet. One will be a virtual network organization,"[134] which happened to be his company's message at the 2002 Comdex. He's probably right, though, in spite of his marketing spin, for the model of the virtual organization is one in which the company uses a network to tie together all of its functions—outsourcing to ASPs the functions that other companies are better at, continuing to do the functions that the company excels at, and creating what Chambers calls, "the ultimate killer application." But there still seems to be the hanging problem of Web services at the software integration level.
All organizations recognize the need to solve integration problems to move forward with collaboration, both internally and with other companies. The current challenges will eventually be solved, led by companies that are most willing to change established practices and legacy systems. The efficiencies of collaboration are too great to ignore or to delay, and as leading companies solve the technical and social puzzles that block their ability to exchange information and share knowledge efficiently, the competitive map will be altered to their favor.
But this still seems all too mechanical as a description of the future of conversational knowledge sharing. Where are the people and the personal relationships, the trust and the familiarity, in all of this system integration? What if organizations chose to concentrate on building environments where the emphasis was on creative interaction in virtual meeting places rather than on information and data exchange?
We thought a good ending for this book would be to envision a future that went beyond the limitations of text on a screen and relationships built entirely around words. What if the future of online knowledge sharing looked more like a game?
Some years ago, we had a computer game called SimCity, produced by Maxis Software. Players could design and build a city from scratch, including factories, power stations, water systems, roads, businesses, and homes. The trick was not to run out of money and not to allow the city to burn down or wash away because there was insufficient investment made in public safety or environmental safeguards. It was a fascinating game, and millions of people got hooked on it. SimCity had hired some very good urban planners to advise them on the structure and content of the game.
Now years later, the concept of the player building a virtual environment is offered on the Web as The Sims.[135] The scale has changed from SimCity's godlike (or at least, mogul-like) viewpoint—operating from an aerial view of the town—to a more human viewpoint, from which the player lives on screen as a character in a household. The Sims' characters come with options for predefined personality traits (neat, outgoing, active, playful, nice) and straightforward needs (hunger, comfort, hygiene, bladder, energy, fun, social, and room).
As described by J.C. Hertz, founder of Joystick Nation, "The Sims is a remarkable example of how a company and its customers can help a product evolve to the point where customers not only do a large portion of the innovation and marketing but also produce as much intellectual capital as they consume."[136] Player/ participants in The Sims can build houses, rooms, and gardens. They can buy hot tubs, swimming pools, and big-screen TVs. They can exchange houses, families, and music albums using a teleportation device.
Sims' players interact. They use the Sims' home page as their portal and home base where players can chat, converse in message boards, link to each other's sites, and teleport their families and albums for everyone to see. The Sims' site also is like the general store, where objects and other utilities can be downloaded. It looks and acts so much like a portal, but includes so many ways to exchange and collaborate, we wonder if the Sims, at least in function, might be a hint at the next generation of collaborative software.
The Sims supports a huge virtual economy, with many fan sites, many artists creating custom content, and tens of thousands of collectors of custom-created objects. Players don't need any programming skills to create and modify their standard-issue Sims' characters and to create custom objects of just about any description in their Sims' environment: chairs, automobiles, lamps, ladders, and so forth. Hundreds of fan sites in over 14 languages furnish 90 percent of the game's content.
J.C. Hertz, an online gaming expert who has studied the Sims as both a gaming and social phenomenon, believes it provides two lessons for the business community:
"The first is that interactive design trumps graphics." The experience of the Sims derives its richness and complexity from the people who create and manipulate the characters, and from their engagement with each other and with the place. The knowledge-sharing conversation needs richness and complexity. It needs to feel the humanity of its participants to become an attraction rather than a duty.
"The second lesson is that online businesses don't just exist, like buildings, in space. They exist, like cities, in human context over time." We have always said the same thing about communities: A great part of their value is in their learning and history. Yes, they are messy and never finished. They evolve and their members become more and more interconnected, not just bigger. The collective experience is part of the ride. And as J.C. Hertz says, "When you open your window, there's a there there."[137]
It very well could be that 10 years in the future, workers will log on to assume graphic online personas in a virtual marketplace of things and ideas, meeting in rooms of their own design with customers and coworkers to learn and share not only what they know but also what they have created. The rich knowledge-sharing environment of the ancient bazaars will be realized again as the virtual conversational marketplace of ideas, opinions, and experience.
As always has been true, those who communicate more learn more and learn faster. Groups who use the Net to collaborate and share knowledge will excel over those who don't. Such groups are not limited to who is local and can show up at a meeting. They are not limited by widely separated time zones and conflicting schedules. They are not limited by the need to print and mail documents.
There will always be groups within an organization who spontaneously organize and use the Net as a key meeting place. But there are still too many valuable resources going wasted, not being tapped because they have not been invited to sit at the table and share what they know. There are still too many organizations that, wittingly or unwittingly, inhibit their workers from collaborating for the common good. There are still too many people who, for many reasons, haven't learned to use the Net as a regular communications tool. And there are too many people who don't trust the Net because they haven't learned how to use it.
The future of online knowledge sharing will feature many more conversations as companies encourage and enable them. The study of social networks will become more widespread as organizations look for better ways to analyze the group power of their human resources. And as more people in and outside their workplaces become more accustomed to using the Net as both a social channel and a business environment, the potential for sharing knowledge and experiences will open new and unanticipated doors. The organizations that make the best use of that undeniable trend will best be able to deal with a future that is sure to include instability, unpredictability, and a need for trusted conversation.