Portals and KM

Multiples of One

Thanks to Kate Ehrlich for telling me about the Multiples of One conference held last November at MIT. It brought “together leaders in design, organizational strategy, technology and law to examine the critical issues facing organizations as they transform into powerful networks of people. The conference is unique in addressing these issues from the perspective of the individual in the network; through the lens of product development, workplace design, and, social and technological regulation. Networks are about people interacting -- Multiples of One. “

It was designed to “spark conversations round these topics in three thought provoking sessions, NODES (the individual and product development), PODS (the individual in the workplace) and POOLS (the individual in society).”

Continuing on it further describes these three components:

N O D E S considers how devices and new technologies can amplify the individual voice to be effective in designing future products and services. In this session we ask, 'Can an individual working alone truly influence new products? And if so, how does the individual affect innovation?'

P O D S looks at how individuals shape their physical and organizational environment to encourage creativity. In this session we ask, 'What makes a productive workplace? What new ways can companies organize to create value? How can individuals actively create collaborative environments?'

P O O L S takes us into the world at large to examine how individual behavior responds to existing social and government policies. What is the responsibility of the individual in defining the new frontiers of regulation? In this session we ask, 'If broadcast spectrum is allocated on a democratic model will this make traditional broadcasting unconstitutional?'

Microsoft Research’s Social Computing Group

Thanks to John Maloney for pointing me to a very interesting set of projects that Microsoft is working on. The group’s mission is “to research and develop software that contributes to compelling and effective social interactions, with a focus on user-centered design processes and rapid prototyping. Our work includes the Sapphire project, sharing, mobile applications, trust and reputation, collaboration, and story telling. To facilitate the rapid prototyping, we also have an online lab for running studies to evaluate our social user interfaces.” Here are a few of their projects.

Wallop allows you to share photos, blog, and interact with friends. Wallop is a research project that explores how people share media and build conversations in the context of social networks. Microsoft is conducting a small, real world trial of Wallop with small friendship groups so only those in the group can use it now.

Sapphire as the site says: “We model the user experience after the way people (vs computers) think, feel, organize and remember. This simple but fundamental change in perspective has caused us to rethink the way the system is experienced and designed, from the user experience to the lowest levels of the system. The current desktop assumes you organize files by manually sorting into folders. As the amount of information increases, finding items becomes more frustrating. Our goal is to have automatic, dynamic grouping by association replace folders as the primary means of organizing.”

There is a social networking tool they call Personal Map. As the site relates, “The goal of the Personal Map is to help users organize their email contacts in a meaningful way, based on their email behavior, without users having to provide any additional information. The Personal Map models the users social network (who they care about and their informal groups) based on communication behavior such who they email the most and who they email together.” They have integrated it with Outlook.

I especially liked Photo Story and can think of many personal uses for it. The site describes as follows: “Recent advances in technology have combined to make the production, archiving, and storage of digital photos possible, yet most software fails to address the principle reason that people share photos in the first place: to tell personal stories. A key goal of Photostory is to allow novice end-users to quickly and easily share photo-based stories with people in a way that is simpler and more emotionally compelling than a static slide show with text.”

There are many more, including a peer-based reputation system that they claim can reduce on-line bad behavior as well as welcome make introductions. There is also a project that borrows a name from Lotus, Raven, to look into Groove’s space. “Raven simplifies the building of multi-user applications letting two client-side webpages talk to one another (peer-to-peer) without a server involved.”

A number of research papers are listed and some are available for download, including

Kelly, S., Sung, C., & Farnham S. (2002). Designing for Improved Social Responsibility and Content in On-Line Communities. In Proceedings of CHI 2002, Minneapolis, April 2002.

Davis, J., Farnham, S., Jensen, C. (2002). Decreasing Online Bad Behavior. In Extended Abstracts of CHI 2002, Minneapolis, April 2002.

There are many more that are available. I wonder how many of these projects will become commercial. It would think that a number of niche vendors would be concerned.

iQuest – Searching Human Capital

Josh Rosenthal, a former colleague, recently started Leading Indicator Advisory Partners to provide methodologies, analytics and technologies to help organizations measure — and manage — their human capital and the supporting systems and processes. A major component of their services is iQuest™, a hosted application that paints a detailed picture of a company's people, their capabilities and their potential.

It provides an organization with the information necessary to develop a comprehensive human capital strategy. To support this effort, iQuest™ does extensive data mining to identify gaps in skills, understanding and performance in key areas and map the path to close those gaps. iQuest™ contains a proprietary knowledge base and architecture driven by its Contextual Analysis Engine™ and its own approach to data analysis and solutions implementation. It is designed to be a comprehensive search engine for human capital.

iQuest™ measures current performance across the enterprise in the following areas:

• Organization strategy
• Organization performance
• Management and employee competencies
• Marketing and distribution information systems and structures
• Critical information access, analysis and integration
• Internal communications

I have seen sample reports and was very impressed. For example, trend analysis is available that plots management perception of enterprise performance across a series of dimensions such as customer strategy, operational alignment, and actionable communication. An operational impact report identifies performance gaps segments by functional groups. You can see the relative importance and performance on critical skill areas and whether there are gaps.

A skill requirement report calls out management and organizational competencies that may be required to fill identified performance gaps. It looks at the match between the current skills of managers and the requirements of their roles to execute the business strategy. You can also see the degree to which management’s business strategies are aligned with individual job performance through the personal impact report.

It would be interesting to use this tool in consort with some of the social networking analysis tools such as CKN to look for convergence in findings. iQuest looking at performance and CKN looking at how the performers interact.

Maximizing Influence through a Social Network – Bruce Hoppe

Bruce Hoppe shares an interesting discussion with Kate Ehrlich of IBM's Collaborative User Experience Research Group. This group conducts "Computer-Supported Cooperative Work" research with emphasis on the interaction between people and computer systems in support of collaboration. Bruce writes:

“Kate and I talked about potential contributions to this research from the field of network optimization. Much of the work in social network analysis to date has focused on modeling sociological phenomena (for example, observing the existence and impact of structural holes) . Given a reasonable model, a natural next step is to consider how to use this model as both a predictive tool and a basis for action. Put another way, not only do I want to know that structural holes are valuable sources of innovation, but I also want to know where is the most valuable structural hole in my organization right now, and what can I do to exploit it.”

There is much more and links to some interesting papers.

Esther Dyson on Social Networks: The Good and the Bad

Release 1.0's Esther Dyson examines the promise - and confusion - around social networks such as LinkedIn, Orkut and Plaxo in a useful article that appeared on July 15, 2004. She makes a great point:

“In the end, the value isn't how many people you can link to, but rather how strong those links are. (There's a difference between business services such as LinkedIn, where the focus is mostly on increasing efficiency and limiting contacts to valuable ones, and the more social and would-be portal sites, such as Friendster or Orkut, where the focus is more on increasing the number of contacts. And, of course, some people use either kind of service for the opposite purpose, which only confuses things.)”

She adds: “The fact is, most of my social networks happen in the context of communications about something or other; they happen in my regular mail, not via some social network platform. With many of my contacts, I share several activities, seamlessly.”

I agree and my email folders, organized around logical communities, and my Outlook contacts are my social network system. The ability of Outlook to offer a menu of people with same first letter in their name as the letter I type is a huge productivity gain for me as I create a customized email list for a particular effort. Esther goes on to offer some useful advice to LinkedIn and other similar tools. I have joined LinkedIn myself, originally through an invitation from someone else and I continue to accept invitations but it is a novelty for me at the moment, and I have not figured out how to put it into my personal workflow in a useful way. I have to confess that I am sure I am a LinkedIn underachiever with only 25 friends.

I went to the Plaxo site and there are over 2,500,000 members and counting with over 800,000,000 connected contacts. Soon they will pass the number of blogs. What does this mean?

Collaborative Knowledge Networks at MIT

On Friday, I had lunch again with Peter Gloor who continues to do very interesting work in social network analysis (SNA) through the CKN tool that he and his colleagues have developed. The Collaborate Knowledge Networks project is sponsored by MIT Sloan’s Center for Coordination Science and the Dartmouth Center for Digital Strategies.

As the site says, “the CKN project conducts research on how organizations can become more innovative, efficient, and a better place to work by applying the principles of Collaborative Knowledge Networks.” Their goal is to “come up with a framework of temporal communication patterns typical of different types of collaborative knowledge networks.”

By data mining e-mail files and other forms of electronic communication, including blogs and wikis, they can generate visualizations of social networking patterns that move over time in a flash movie format. For example, they have found ideal patterns at the different stages of an idea’s life cycle. At the initial innovation stage, a core team typically engages in a dense dialog of equals around the leader to generate ideas and they are surrounded by supporters. After the idea takes form, the team leaders communicate the vision out to the broader organization. Finally, pockets of networked communities of interest support the idea on an ongoing basis.

The web site provides much more detail and you can watch flash movies of the communication patterns as they evolve over time. You can also download their open source tool for your own use, as well as many of their research papers.

SNA in Sales

In the same issue of KM World as Dave Weinberger’s column described above, there is a concise and clear introduction to the use of Social Networking Applications for Sales. It covers Visible Path, Spoke, and Contact Network Corporation.

I will not repeat the content here as the writer, John Harney, did a nice job. Conspiracy theorists will have a field day with these tools. I tend to be old fashioned and look for more manual and personal ways to make contacts. But then I was a late adapter to cell phones because I did not want the intrusion and now I am semi-reliant on them.

In fairness to these tools, I know that when I was in a “buyer” position for alliance partnerships in a large corporation, I was much more likely to listen to, and positively respond to, someone who had a mutual acquaintance that provided a recommendation and I think most people are this way. So when used with integrity, which I am sure is the goal of the software providers, they should add value. In fact, Visible Path discusses the “Science of Trust” on its home page.

This is something I have posted on before. I certainly want to explore the tools in more depth and will offer some future posts on them.

SNA: Not to be confused with SNA

I have been exchanging thoughts with Cesar Brea on social networking and forwarded an article questioning the value of public social network applications like LinkedIn that I received from another friend. He agreed with the article and posted a blog which included the following along with some good observations.

He said: This morning I got the following email from the service:

"Dear Cesar,
As more professionals are actively adopting LinkedIn, you may have noticed that you are also getting more emails from people inviting you to be their connection. While this is the easiest way to build your network and a testament to your reputation as a professional, we recommend you only accept invitations from people you know and who you are willing and able to recommend to other professionals you know. To prioritize your inbox and reduce the number of invitation messages you receive, you now have the option of limiting incoming invitations to those coming from people who you already have in your address book. Turn on invitation blocking..."

Now I must have become a "social isolate" because LinkedIn did not send me the e-mail nor have I been hounded by thousands seeking to be added to my LinkedIn account. But then I stopped using the service after the first few days I made the transition to free agency last month. It initially seemed a good way to network and re-connect with people I had not spoken to recently. The novelty quickly wore off and there was only a limited sub-set of my connections I wanted to make public anyway. I resorted to e-mail to continue my networking and quickly forgot about the networking tool. In fact I had even e-mailed everyone I invited to be “linked-in” before sending them the LinkedIn invitation. It only seemed more personal and the polite thing to do. Now in fairness to LinkedIn there is one useful application that another friend pointed out. She uses it to find out who her contacts know that she did not know they knew. The she asks them to make an introduction. This makes sense and is potential value added

Finally getting to the title of this posting, I do think there is a great potential in social network analysis as I said in my own posting below but this is a different animal. I am concerned that it might get tarred by having the same acronym as social network applications.

Social Networking in NYC

A few weeks ago I attended a session of KM Cluster in New York at the Deloitte office near Wall Street. KM Cluster is run by John Maloney of Colabria as a collaborative community that sponsors events and shares information on KM. It started on the West Coast and is now growing in the US and internationally. The theme of this meeting was social networks, a topic whose importance for organizations is hopefully becoming more recognized. Business 2.0 named Social Network Analysis (SNA) the "Technology of the Year" in November 2003. I have been convinced of its importance for years since every job I have ever gotten came from a personal connection, starting with watering a local fraternity lawn over the summer when I was ten, working at a summer camp as a teenager, operating a wind mill right out of college, and so on down to the present day.

Rob Cross of the University of Virginia, one of the speakers has a new book, Hidden Power of Social Networks (Harvard Business School Press) with the subtitle – Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations. He writes in a description of this book:

“In today’s flatter organizations, productivity and efficiency demand effective collaboration within and across functional, physical, and hierarchical boundaries. Though often concerned with external relationships, executives generally pay little attention to assessing and supporting linkages among employees within their own organizations. These “invisible” social networks don’t appear on any formal organizational chart—yet significantly affect performance and innovation.”

Rob’s talk, and his book, cover very useful ways to better understand these relationships. It is nice to see new developments in the more tacit side of knowledge management after all the work pushing the more explicit side through the new content management tools. Peter Gloor’s work, commented on earlier is another excellent example.

Valdis Krebs was another speaker with extensive research and practical applications of social network analysis. His site, orgnet.com, provides both software and services and offers a good introduction to the possibilities. I was pleased to see one of his studies recently quoted in a review of Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack (Boston Globe May 2, 2004). The review quoted a study by Valdis that found that of all the political books hitting the best seller charts, few actually gain audiences across the broad political spectrum outside of their niche. While this result is not surprising, it is refreshing to see social network analysis tools turned on the issue.

QUESTIONS: While I am convinced of its value, SNA is one of those things that some business leaders might not want to admit is important and yet everyone will want to see the results of a social network analysis on their group. I think SNA will face the same challenges that other "soft" solutions have encountered. There will be a small core of true believers, I include myself in this camp, who like innovative and intellectually interesting solutions to business issues. The most successful proponents will sell SNA on business value but it will, I fear, be an uphill battle with many business buyers. How can SNA best overcome this challenge?

Interesting SNA tool at MIT

Social Network Analysis (SNA) is another potential candidate for TBNT - see Social Networking in NYC. I had the pleasure of spending time last month with Peter Gloor of MIT Sloan CCS and the Dartmouth Tuck School. Peter is the former head of the eCommerce practice for Deloitte in Europe. He and his colleagues at MIT/Tuck have developed an open source SNA tool. You can find and download it at ickn.org. The tool analyses social networks by looking at e-mail patterns. It can be used to understand the communication patterns within work groups and others who communicate through e-mail. Both functional and dysfunctional patterns can be determined and this analysis can provide guidance for corrective action to increase work group productivity. Peter and his colleagues are especially interested in the use of SNA to promote innovation.