If a couple of days ago I created a blog post over here where I shared some further details on a recent podcasting episode I recorded with Jon Mell, from Trovus, over at Case Study Using Wiki and Social Software in the Enterprise - Conversation with Jon Mell, I thought I would follow that up with another podcast I was invited to chime in earlier on in the week with Matt Moore, from Engineers without Fears, where I shared some extended commentary on my experiment of giving up on e-mail, i.e. work related e-mail. And the interesting thing from this particular podcast I participated in was the fact that we did it with a couple more guests: Patrick Lambe, from Straights Knowledge & Green Chameleon, and Alex Manchester, from Melcrum - Connecting Communicators, two of the folks I have been following up on the Knowledge Management & Social Computing spaces for quite a while and whom I was really looking forward to exchanging some ideas on the topic!

Thus with that initial setup, off we went into what turned out to be, in my opinion and if I may say so, a fascinating discussion on the overall topic of stop using e-mail at work and use, perhaps, other much more productive and collaborative tools, within the social software space. So interesting that in the end what was supposed to be a single podcasting episode turned out to be three (Yes, three!) for a total amount of nearly 50 minutes!

Matt Moore himself has already blogged about each of the different episodes, so instead of just me detailing what you will find in each of them I am just going to keep things short and share over here the table of contents that Matt already put together. That way you can get busy right where the meat is and enjoy one of the best conversations I have had on this topic in a little while now. Here are the links with the contents then:

- Download Part 1 now (16:48, 4.0Mb)

01:00 - Luis describes his email detox moment in 2007.
03:10 - Luis challenges his email correspondents within IBM.
06:10 - How do you bring people round to the post-email world?
11:00 - Where is email appropriate?
13:00 - Instant messaging & social networking.

- Download Part 2 now (20:23, 4.8 Mb)

00:00 - Patrick raises the infrastructure question.
03:00 - Luis brings up wikis.
04:10 - Luis talks about discussing the detox with his team.
07:55 - The laziness issue.
09:00 - Do we love email?
10:00 - Alex mentions email overload.
11:00 - Generational issues.
13:00 - Patrick raises the politics question.
15:00 - Luis busts the whole thing wide open.

- Download the final part of the email detox podcast

00:00 - Alex agrees with Luis on email politics.
01:20 - Humans as political animals - in public or in private?
03:00 - Should we be selling tools or solutions?
06:00 - Applying social software to business problems.
08:00 - The email detox workout video.
10: 00 - Wrap up & next steps.

And that’s it! Hope you enjoy it, just as much as we did getting together and exchanging some ideas on how it is really possible to move away from work related e-mail and still be as productive as ever, if not more, making extensive use of other more collaborative tools, like social software tools. The perfect segway for my next blog post where I will be sharing the weekly progress report on what’s happened this week. Stay tuned!

Matt, Patrick and Alex, a real pleasure taking part on the podcasting episodes with you guys and thanks much for such refreshing conversation! Excellent stuff!

Tags: IBM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, e-mail, email, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Productivity, Conversations, Dialogue, Openness, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Collaboration 2.0, Communication, Jon Mell, Trovus, Matt Moore, Engineers without Fears, Patrick Lambe, Straights Knowledge, Green Chameleon, Alex Manchester, Melcrum, Connecting Communicators, Podcasting, Podcasts, Episodes

Continued from The Impact of Web 2.0 on Knowledge Work and Knowledge Management by Dave Snowden and Jon Husband - Part V

Finally, both Jon and Dave comment further on where we are with both the enterprise and the Web 2.0 space and how a successfully merge into would become eventually Enterprise 2.0 would have the break the current polarity we are under: the enterprise guys reject social computing as anarchy and the social computing folks reject any formal structure and excessive control (Extreme order versus extreme anarchy, that Jon sums up quite nicely).

Dave concludes the podcast with Jon by saying something that will make plenty of folks think about it for a while: everybody he knows as an expert in Web 2.0 avoids being associated with the Knowledge Management word like a plague, based on its reputation for over-structure. He thinks KM is in the Long Tail and is going to disappear as a formal organisational title. The function will become much more important though, but it will be requiring a massive shift: the collapse of the dominance of the IT department. There should be more security that would go on the corporate data, and less security on the collaboration going beyond the firewall! (Brilliant!)

Just fantastic! As you may have been able to see from the series of blog posts I have thoroughly enjoyed the podcast and I am surely glad that they have both shared with us. You can now get a glimpse of why I have been recommending it to a bunch of different folks, from both ends of the spectrum (That pendulum that Dave mentioned). If Enterprise 2.0 is going to make it into the corporate world, I am certain we would need to go through a number of different changes. Some of those are already in place, but for some of the others we still need to do some more work and both Dave and Jon have just paved out what lays ahead and where we should be going. I am not sure what you would be thinking, but we are facing some exciting times ahead of us, don’t you think?

Tags: Jon Husband, Wirearchy, Dave Snowden, Cognitive Edge, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Media, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, Podcast, Podcasting,  Connections, People, Conversations, Anarchy, Structured Unstructured, Long Tail, IT Department, Control, Trust, Learning, Knowledge Management 1.0, KM 1.0, KM 101, Knowledge Management 2.0, KM 2.0, Collaboration 2.0

Continued from The Impact of Web 2.0 on Knowledge Work and Knowledge Management by Dave Snowden and Jon Husband - Part IV

Heading now into the second part of the podcast, where Jon asks the question of whether it is still valuable, from a traditional KM perspective, to do audits of knowledge assets within a business, now that Web 2.0 is becoming more and more Enterprise 2.0 savvy and the variety of platforms has increased tremendously. Would there be a change in the scope?

Dave’s quick answer: Forget using the word audit, as it still implies the concept of knowledge as static, i.e. it is a thing, probably going back to the model of both tacit and explicit knowledge. To him, the most effective knowledge exists in flows (Going back to his second KM rule I mentioned in a previous blog post). "The human knowledge is the real time assembly of multiple fragmented memories in a real time context to create a new unique application. A knowledge audit, you cannot audit fragments".

He concludes that Web 2.0 is too unstructured in its own to make the knowledge it contains a complete corporate asset. And as such it would be too difficult to categorise, yet to organise. According to Dave ,categories and keywords (as in tags) will be crucial. ("There are no deep structures in language") The combination of taxonomies and folksonomies into coming up with a defined tagging convention is probably where the next challenge is going to be.

Dave already provides some good tips that I am not going to spoil, so that you can listen to them, on where we should be heading. Here is a hint. The most sophisticated thing is human based tagging. "Human beings have evolved to handle context. Computes haven’t". Fascinating stuff for those folks who are into semantics and the semantic Web, context, reputation, trust, etc.

So, in the end, we should not be focusing on those knowledge audits per se, but on "a map of the dependency of your core business processes on knowledge objects". The only way you can agree to invest in any Knowledge Management program is "if you got the right relevance to things that matter to executives with money". Goodness! This is just so spot on! I am really glad that Dave did mention that in the podcast, because it surely puts things in perspective on what should be one of the main areas to focus on: those knowledge objects ("anything coherent that we can see how we can manage and tests to be unique to every organisation"). And it gets better … Bottom up = knowledge objects, Top down = metrics … Go and have a listen

To be continued …

Tags: Jon Husband, Wirearchy, Dave Snowden, Cognitive Edge, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Media, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, Podcast, Podcasting,  Connections, People, Conversations, Knowledge Flow, Fragmented Knowledge, Knowledge Audit, Tagging, Tags, Kewords Categories, Categorisation, Folksnomy, Context, Knowlede Objects, Learning, Knowledge Management 1.0, KM 1.0, KM 101, Knowledge Management 2.0, KM 2.0, Collaboration 2.0

Continued from The Impact of Web 2.0 on Knowledge Work and Knowledge Management by Dave Snowden and Jon Husband - Part III

"Knowledge work becomes the way we do things around here"

"It’s not something subject to corporate objectives or focus or to formal roles". Perhaps the end of what we used to know as traditional Knowledge Management. WOW! How is that for an statement! (Loved it!) And what about this other one: "The role of the technology (IT) department is to create connectivity between people". Or this one: "It is time for the firewalls to be brought in to the raw data […], but for everything to do with e-mail, collaboration and exchange, there is no point in making a corporate decision about that […]. Let people go free in the Web. […] It is much more fluid and is free and people now well adopt and pick up new tools very quickly. […] Novelty is very important […]"

(Not going to spoil what Dave mentioned just after this, but it is just priceless and a clear indication of where we are heading on the existence, or non-existence, of collaboration tools behind the corporate firewall. You will enjoy his quote on what should be done with mail attachments and, even better, what the role of the IT department should be like!! Not quite what you would be expecting, I am quite sure! )

From there onwards Jon gets to touch base on a couple of points that Dave mentioned throughout the podcast on the motivation of sharing knowledge and the voluntary need of exchanging information with other knowledge workers versus reaching whatever targets and how incentivation for knowledge work paved out for him. Worth while listening to his story, because it is also one of those that clearly defines the role of incentives in a knowledge sharing culture, which then Dave comes to complement rather nicely giving the example of how McKenzie does it (An eye-opener, to say the least), along with a lovely trip down the memory lane on how consultants and consultant work came together till today. Worth while listening to it, if you are a consultant and want to know where it all got started and where we are now.

To be continued …

Tags: Jon Husband, Wirearchy, Dave Snowden, Cognitive Edge, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Media, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, Podcast, Podcasting,  Connections, People, Conversations, Control, IT Department, Firewall, Motivation, Volunteering Knowledge, Learning, Knowledge Management 1.0, KM 1.0, KM 101, Knowledge Management 2.0, KM 2.0, Collaboration 2.0

Continued from The Impact of Web 2.0 on Knowledge Work and Knowledge Management by Dave Snowden and Jon Husband - Part II

Right after Dave moves onto one of the sections of the podcast interview that I have really enjoyed the most and which I am sure plenty of folks out there would have difficulties in trying to understand it, more than anything else because all along we have been doing quite the opposite, and funny enough without success.

Yes, there it is when he mentions how Web 2.0 "moves knowledge outside of the corporate control". For quite some time now, Dave has always been arguing rather strongly the fact that (Paraphrasing here now) in knowledge work you should never provide any incentives, because "reward people for contributing to a KM database fails to understand the basic trust implications of the knowledge interaction". Like, if you ask for something that you need in the context of genuine need no-one is going to refuse that knowledge exchange. However, if you ask to share your knowledge in anticipation for a potential need by someone you may not know in the future, there is a great chance that will never happen. It’s "that immediacy, that context that matters".

Dave comes to conclude that there would be a couple of consequences around the subject of incentivising knowledge workers for sharing their knowledge: if you give people incentives or money for posting knowledge to a KM system then the people who are very good at achieving their targets, they will always find materials to submit to the system to get the rewards. So in a way the focus would be more on the incentives themselves more than in the knowledge sharing activity in the first place, with the consequence that abuse of trust may result in the end on not providing the knowledge and information any longer, even if it were really needed.

I am sure that by now, if you have been reading this blog for a while, you may identify how this very same topic goes along the very same lines of what I have been saying for some time now and which also comes pretty close to Dave’s words of wisdom on some Knowledge Management rules:

"1. Knowledge will only ever be volunteered it can not be conscripted.
2. We only know what we know when we need to know it.
3. We always know more than we can tell and we will always tell more than we can write down."

And the nice thing as well is that these very same thoughts fit in quite nicely with the recent conversations I have been having over here around the subject of ROI for Social Software. This is exactly the main reason why trying to figure out the traditional ROI for Social Software is not going to work really nice and Dave comes to put it quite nicely when he comments further on how can you create a knowledge sharing culture. You can’t, he asserts.

What you can do is "increase the interaction between people, increase their interdependency and increase the immediacy of that Knowledge Management request". Pretty much like e-mail back in the days versus what is happening today where we seem to have developed an addiction to it. I really enjoyed his comments on having to break the current mail system(s), because that is exactly what Web 2.0 is currently doing, and succeeding, in my opinion. And a few seconds later Dave comes up with what I think is one of the best social computing definitions (And KM, for that matter) I have heard to date:

"Knowledge work becomes the way we do things around here"

To be continued …

Tags: Jon Husband, Wirearchy, Dave Snowden, Cognitive Edge, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Media, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, Podcast, Podcasting,  Connections, People, Conversations, Control, Incentives, Rewards, Immediacy, Context, ROI, Return On Investment, Trust, Knowledge Interactions, , Volunteering Knowledge, Learning, Knowledge Management 1.0, KM 1.0, KM 101, Knowledge Management 2.0, KM 2.0, Collaboration 2.0

Continued from The Impact of Web 2.0 on Knowledge Work and Knowledge Management by Dave Snowden and Jon Husband - Part I

From there onwards it gets even much more interesting on the interview, because Dave comes to share his own experiences about blogging and how blogging is impacting the way he has access to knowledge and information by having to learn to trust a bunch of the folks that he reads on a regular basis and who already filtered somewhat the information that comes through to him. Yes, indeed, the basics of syndicating the content of those folks you learn to trust from their regular contributions as blog comments and connections they make in the various social networks. It is all about voluntarily (How important that concept is!) making connections, therefore no censorship, no control, no structure. The whole thing is self-organising as mentioned above in a previous blog post.

Right after that, Jon comes to ask the question on where all that leaves the enterprise, existing organisational structure and where Enterprise 2.0 may well fit. And while I was listening in I just couldn’t help smiling towards Dave’s words: over the last decade the most neglected word in Knowledge Management has been … context. And from there onwards he makes the connection on how Web 2.0 "makes the context in which you receive and filter information and knowledge more critical, partly because you can control that context by exchanging with people you already know or trust".

To be continued …

Tags: Jon Husband, Wirearchy, Dave Snowden, Cognitive Edge, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Media, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, Podcast, Podcasting,  Connections, People, Conversations, Context, Control, Trust, Censorship, Structure, Volunteering Knowledge, Learning, Knowledge Management 1.0, KM 1.0, KM 101, Knowledge Management 2.0, KM 2.0, Collaboration 2.0