Enterprise 2.0 in a nutshell or knot?

I’ve seen Slates, I’ve read about flatnesses. I’ve gone to the conferences, read the focused and tangentially-related books, pored over blogs, tested software until my arms were numb and my eyes were blistered and observed and participated in the work of large organizations until I looked like I belonged there.

I’ve seen the term social software go from useless to descriptive to hyped to misunderstood to nearly devoid of meaning and I’ve seen its first uttering – social – define 2005–2009 the way marketing defined the ’70s, finance defined the ’80s and design/innovation framed 1995–2006 (or thereabouts).

Since “social” is being used so much, Jive has come up with the Social Business Imperative (get the worthwhile PDF by registering) while others are trying to stand out from the pack (and believe me, a pack it is) by saying that social is all well and good, but collaboration networks are what you want. What we want, in fact, is a bit of reliable information and best practices on how to make social software add value in organizations.

Get a certificate?

A few programs are popping up here and there to teach us how this all works. AIIM has an interesting, if unintentionally hilarious offering that calls forums “enterprise 1.5″ technology. No seriously, let me quote them:

• […] Enterprise 1.0: email, forums, chat rooms, bulletin boards, web/tele/videoconferencing, and static web
• […] Enterprise 1.5: web services, IM, SMS, collaboration filtering, social networking, social networking analysis, portals, and dynamic web
• […]  Enterprise 2.0: participate web, tagging, mashups, blogs, wikis, feeds, podcasting, and social voting, bookmarking and ranking

It may well be that AIIM has some very interesting insights to share, but it’s hard to trust whatever advice they give completely when they manage to invent a term such as Enterprise 1.5. After all, Enterprise 2.0 is still just a word with a plethora of meanings, not a well-defined concept. Telling people about Enterprise 1.0, 1.5 and 2.0 opens the door to Enterprise 2.1 service pack 3 revision 1. These are ideas for discussion, not patterns to be implemented without thought or care.

A class worth its cost?

The University of Michigan’s School of Information seems to be doing a better job of teaching what we can do with these new tools. Just take a look at what you could have learned at their three-day course, entitled Making social computing work in your enterprise held a few weeks ago.

Core conceptual ideas

• Everyone can be a source as well as a consumer of information
• People’s choices of actions as well as their words are good sources of information
• Effective socio-technical systems involve the design not only of technical features, but also social features such as incentives and norms

Central questions

• Which technology features are most useful for meeting business goals?
• What organizational and social interventions should accompany technology rollout so as to encourage productive use?
• What metrics should be used to assess the potential value of an Enterprise 2.0 project, and to manage the project on an ongoing basis?

Note that only one buzzword was used in the list above. Interestingly, none of the instructors are well-known in the E2 space (two are from NewsGator, btw). Personally I’m not sold on the correlation between being known and knowing how to make constructive use of social software in organizations big and enormous.

That’s the point, by the way, to make social software work for you, in whatever way is most efficient given where you are and what you have to deal with. I have seen cases of people getting huge dividends from very simple and inexpensive deployments of social software, but the truly large benefits require a more thorough approach.

Hammershøi

Coordinating your dance with the users

Práctica by Shabok

One of Danah Boyd’s recent talks contains a Jenny Holzer-like nugget:

The key lesson
from the rise of social media
for you
is that a great deal of software
is best built
as a coordinated dance
between you and the users.

Note that she says “a great deal of software”, not “all software”, “websites only” or “social software only”.

Note too that she says “a coordinated dance”, not “a haphazard mess of customer input”.

All dances have a set of rules – tacit or explicit, simple or detailed – that govern behavior. Without coordination, a wealth of input turns into a muddle – more ingredients make the pie worse, not better. Without a framework to attach to, all that activity makes nary an anthill. Also, the high pace and now-now-now focus of ever-new services can trick us into thinking there’s no longer-term perspective. Of course there is. However else did we get here?

When engaging with your users, strive for enough consistency (tone of voice, response times, mechanisms for capturing and utilizing input) to enable scale, and enough variability to deal with the uniqueness of each situation. With that framework, you can coordinate that dance with the users.

Last, but not least, don’t expect your users alone to tell you where to go precisely. Keep planning, keep working and stay close to where the action is. Helmuth von Moltke’s quote “No plan survives first contact with the enemy“ (Kein Plan überlebt die erste Feindberührung) is not advice against planning. It merely recognizes that things do not work out as anticipated, that you need to keep plan b, c, d and e handy for you rainy day.

We lower risk by building change into our systems from day one. We manage risk by keeping our ear to the ground and working to understand what forces are at work in our service. Last but not least, we know when to take the lead, when to step back, and when to to follow.

A great deal of software is best built as a coordinated dance between you and the users.

It’s all on the same map

Why would you want to read Mark Granovetter’s often-cited paper The strength of weak ties? Because it helped form the quote below.

“The most efficient networks are those that link to the broadest range of information, knowledge, and experience.” (source)

Why might you want to read Albert-László Barábasi’s book Linked? Because it gives a pretty accessible introduction to how networks take shape, function and why we need to figure out what to do with power law distributions. I read it before I read The Starfish and the Spider, which posits that you can’t knock down the internet due to its distributed nature.

While it’s true that port 80 and our browsers would continue to work even if a highly connected node exited the network, Barábasi claims that, when enough hubs are removed, the network as a whole breaks up into smaller networks that are not in touch with one another. Have a look at GustavoG’s analyses of Flickrland in 2005 and 2008 to see clusters of highly connected groups and disconnected miniature networks.

Many of us are already highly networked and highly articulate about how we continuously link to one another, make use of our connections and also need to give back. It’s no small irony that we can be such skilled network users and yet understand so little of how they really function.

At the 2006 World Knowledge Dialogue, Paul Cilliers offered some consolation as to why we can’t fully comprehend, much less control, networks.

Due to their non-linear nature, complex systems are incompressible. They are also open systems and cannot be understood without also understanding their environments and their history. To fully know something complex will therefore involve incorporating all the complexity of the system and its environment. This not humanly possible, perhaps not even possible in principle. […]  Read the full text here.

I don’t know about you, but the fact that I’m living in a complex system variously makes me want to…

1. ignore the matter, become a modern luddite and go live a low-emissions life in a cottage made from reclaimed wood (or something),  a luddite and live in a cottage
2. read Latour’s books on Actor-Network theory until I “get” them. I’m not sure that’s possible, but perhaps I’ll enjoy imaginary dialogues on the matter.
3. be kind and try to live as good a life as I can (Pascal’s wager still holds)
4. some combination of the above, skewed towards #3.

Imagine my relief, then, when I came across Marco Quaggiotto’s ATLAS project, which uses a cartographic approach to make the social structures of knowledge detectable.

Knowledge cartographies / Trailer from Marco Quaggiotto on Vimeo.

If you look closely at the video, or a the full-size screenshots available on the Knowledge Cartographies website, you’ll see not just an excellent visualization but also a partial map of my world. Visualization, design, sociology, communication, intefaces and interaction design, information architecture … yep, it’s all there. I hope to see an API for it soon. I’d love to get an ATLAS point of view on my work landscape. Wordle (below) is fun and illustrative, but doesn’t show which items are related.

How Wordle views my bookmarks on Delicious

Interestingly, IBM’s network visualization tool is also called Atlas. See a screenshot on slide 28 in this SlideShare presentation. I’ll be back with more on social visualization (ooh, I think I coined a term there ) soon.

Musical evaporation

In 1999, I moved to Finland to study at the University of Art and Design Helsinki. I had decided to bring my trusty, how-on-earth-did-I-get-them-so-cheap BeoSystem 5400 and Beovox speakers and just about every CD I owned. The CD part was easy. I threw away all the jewel boxes and put the CDs in the biggest Case Logic folder I could find. The stereo part was pure luck: an extremely hung-over cargo handler mistyped the per-kilo freight cost and charged me about NOK 1000 to fly the three stereo-filled suitcases to Finland.

As an interface, the Case Logic folder works quite well. After investing a little librarian-time in sorting and grouping your music, you’re good to go, and like a skilled fourth-grader handling a dictionary, you know pretty much where to find what.

Now here was an excellent resource. In contrast to my stereoless co-students, I always had a good listen close at hand. It also made our apartment an obvious venue for dinners and parties. The physical nature of the Case Logic folder “interfaces” makes it ideal at parties. Several people can browse simultaneously and it’s quite efficient cognitively, too. I’ve always preferred browsing through music by album cover rather than by title or artist; my internal taste-o-meter handles queries at least ten times faster.

Physical interfaces for digital music

Around this time, plenty of people were thinking of how physical interfaces could make the listening experience better. They weren’t thinking about screens. Creating value by design, a book by Stefano Marzano (PDF, agh) and Philips Design includes a music controller design that is a book of CD covers, each with it’s own “play” button. Others too abstracted the link between the controlling container and the actual music, using RFID tags, UPC or QR codes and so on. However, I never came across a thingamajig I could buy, so I stuck with my Case Logic folder for quite a long time. FYI, mp3’s weren’t interesting to me at this point: I didn’t like the audio quality of files from napster, hadn’t seen a good mp3 player and liked having LPs and CDs.

In early 2002 I got my first iPod (NOK 5000 at the time – insane!) and immediately began ripping my way through the hundreds of CDs in my Case Logic bag, eventually stowing it. Bringing 1000 songs to a party was great, but it lacked social skills. There were no covers to browse through and only one person could browse at a time. Aside from oft and mighty risks to the device itself, my music was suddenly safe from the inebriated escapades of old, new and non friends.

A bucket for your music

At school I created a rather naive-looking CD-ripper-cum-digital-music-player that put a (hard to manufacture) round screen inside a huge dial that you could use to spin through your music collection. A complete iPod rip-off if there ever was one. At the time flat panel monitors were seldom larger than 19″, but soon after handing in the assignment I saw a Wacom Cintiq monitor and realized what a fool I had been. A large touch-sensitive screen would have been far better than my musical bucket, especially if combined with a physical controller for volume. Where I had used a 7″ monitor that could barely show one CD cover plus controls, a larger screen could have shown multiple covers in a matrix, with axes for listings by genre, band, album, similar, different and so on.

I merely had an idea of what I was looking for, but others were more industrious. Andew Coulter Enright blogged about his idea of visual browsing and posted it to his blog (Archive.org mirror; the real version has had its content removed), an idea that Jonathan del Strother of Steel Skies came across and developed as an application stumbled upon, and began to develop a piece of software that could do the trick.

Andrew Enright Coulter's early visual browsing concept

Another visual browsing design from Andrew Enright Coulter

I was an early and eager user of the app, which was eventually called CoverFlow. I found the fake 3D stack-unstack and carousel scroll modes far more clever than my album cover grid viewer, which never got past the studio stage. CoverFlow, on the other hand, got better with each upgrade. Upgrades were required, by the way, as each version had an expiration date, a feature that hinted at a possible sale of the software to Apple, which eventually came to pass.

An early version of the CoverFlow app, via Eifion on Flickr

It’s hard to beat a digital music player when it comes to speed. You click the button and the song starts. When it comes to browsing however, a list – flowing, filterable or searchable – is still just a list. Yes, I really do miss the physicality and non-computerness of flicking through a stack of CDs or LPs.

What do I need all these files for?

Digital music is compact, but it’s not entirely weightless. I have about 40 days worth of music in iTunes and it takes up a lot of space. So much, in fact, that if I had it all on my laptop’s hard drive, there would be space for little else. iTunes handles this rather badly. Sure, there are applications for handling multiple libraries and some native support for this in the app itself. I’ve tried putting all my music on a portable drive, putting some music on the machine, having music on my iPod only and have put the files on a server online and at home so I always had them available. No dice.

Then there’s the matter of the covers which, you by now understand, are pretty interesting to me. Many of my CDs were ripped years ago and lack covers, and iTunes doesn’t automagically add them. CoverScout, now in version 3 (below), is a full-featured browser tweaked to search for the missing covers in your music library. It works pretty well.

The problem is, it’s too much like work. I don’t like sorting through all those files, removing duplicates, looking for covers. I just want to listen to what I like and occasionally discover new music. Scrobbling to Last.fm offered a new way to discover music but they didn’t and still don’t let you play the song you want to, nor did Pandora, which is now available in the US only.

Sadly, I’ve never been able to try Rhapsody as they, too, are stunted by 1900s contracts that carve the world up into regions. The natural option for most is to download via networks or swap hard drives with friends.

Use, not own

Listening stations, by roboppy

Last October I decided to give Spotify a try. As a lot of people were (and still are) looking for invites, I decided to just cough up the NOK 99 and get a premium account. Let me tell you why this is an excellent deal. First, I don’t like downloading music because it’s a lot of work. Whether you do it in the iTunes music store, via eMusic (where I had a 75 tunes per month subscription for years) or via eMule, it’s work. Figure out what you want, look for it, get it now or save it for later, download it, import it, fix the cover … does this sound like fun?

Spotify, on the other hand, is just music. While it’s too bad that they’ve been forced to cull songs from their archive, they are still adding music to their catalog. Rumor has it that Rhapsody has more music, but that’s a moot point as long as I can’t use it. On a sidenote, I really can’t figure out why friends and colleagues opt for the free, ad-laden version of Spotify.

I think music is worth paying for and I think Spotify is the best deal ever. Think of it: if they had come out in the 1990s, when I began buying CDs, I wouldn’t have bought ca 500 CDs at an average cost of NOK 150 per CD. For those NOK 75 000, I could have subscribed to Spotify for 63 years, or from 1993 to 2056, and I wouldn’t have had to buggle around with files, physical media or dead hard drives. Nor would I have had to drag that huge Case Logic folder til Finland and I could have shared links to songs without any manual bungling.

So yeah, I think paying NOK 99 per month for “all” the music you want (from a very large selection) is a fair deal.

Where is my physical-ish musical interface?

There are a lot of interesting conversations taking place at Spotify’s GetSatisfaction forum about how the player and the service could be improved. Spotify already scrobbles your listening habits to Last.fm, but I’d like to see the reverse happen, too, and get Last.fm’s recommendations into the Spotify player. I (and 62 others at the time of writing) want an API so I can pipe my music wherever I want, not just through my computer. There’s been a great suggestion for a party mode that lets your guests add new tracks to a playlist but locks down the player controls, for more pleasant, less staccato evening.

Alias|Wavefront's Portfolio Wall from 2001, via Car Design News

I love many of the ideas at the Spotify forum, but I’m still looking for a better cover browser (Microsoft Surface could be interesting) and a physical, token-based interaction that my kids can use. Retrofitting my BeoCenter 7007 with a multitouch screem for browsing through covers wouldn’t be bad either. I might just have to make one.

Thanks for reading! If you have an idea for a new and improved way of discovering and listening to music, or a link to share, please do add your comment below.

The culture of collaboration

In his book The Culture of Collaboration, Evan Rosen explores ten cultural elements of collaboration. An article over at Knowledge @ W.P. Carey offers a nice outline of the ten elements, and I’ve pasted them in below.

Evan Rosen’s ten cultural elements of collaboration

• Trust. To exchange ideas and create something with others, we must develop trust. This is a challenge, especially in competitive organizational cultures. Nevertheless, we must get over our fears and develop trust if we are to collaborate freely.
• Sharing. Hoarding information prevents the free flow of ideas and therefore sabotages collaboration. Sharing what we know improves collective creation by an order of magnitude and therefore makes everybody more valuable.
• Goals. Taking the time to agree on goals at the beginning of a collaborative project pays off exponentially by providing the impetus for shared creation. Innovation – The desire to innovate fuels collaboration. In turn, collaboration enhances innovation. After all, why collaborate just to maintain the status quo?
• Environment. The design of both physical space and virtual environments impacts innovation and collaboration.
• Collaborative Chaos. While all people and organizations require some order, effective collaboration requires some degree of chaos. Collaborative chaos allows the unexpected to happen and generates rich returns.
• Constructive Confrontation. Great collaboration requires exchanging viewpoints, and sometimes that means construction confrontation – expressing candor about ideas. Collaborators must confront each other so that they can hash out their differences and make their shared creation better.
• Communication. Collaboration is inextricably linked with communication, both interpersonal and organizational.
• Community. Without a sense of community, we often lack comfort and trust. Therefore, community must be present for effective collaboration to occur.
• Value. The primary reason we collaborate is to create value – reducing cycle or product development time, creating a new market, solving problems faster, designing a more marketable product or service, or increasing sales.

Common attributes of collaborative cultures

According to Rosen, a set of common attributes can be found in collaborative cultures. As outlined by Christopher Ken Mays in his brief review of the book (PDF), they are:

• Frequent, cross-functional interaction
• Leadership and power spread around organization
• People are accessible regardless of their level
• Reduce fear of failure
• Broad input into decisions
• Cross-pollination of people
• Spontaneous or unscheduled interaction
• Less structured interaction
• Formal or informal mentoring
• Tools fit work styles

All in all, the book offers useful heuristics for gauging an entity’s collaborative capacity. I’m a little skeptical of the neat packaging, however. I don’t know why collaboration has precisely ten cultural elements. I’m guessing I could search for commonalities between organizations where people work well together and come up with five, ten, fifteen or more shared attributes. Such is the editing process, I suppose.

Pretty numerals aside, I’m sympathetic to Rosen’s non-technological framework for observing how well people get things done together. He’s writing a third book on the matter and blogs regularly at The Culture of Collaboration. I’m interested in learning how others have applied his insights to their projects, so if you’re on that track, please let me know.

Friday photo shoot

Erlend's excellent photo of me

On Friday, Erlend was photographing our new employees. He had to test the lighting setup before working his way through the queue, of course, and the above is the result. I’m thoroughly pleased.

Kom og hør Puccinis Messa 6. og 7. desember

Vanligvis synger jeg i Akademisk Korforening, men denne høsten har det vært travelt, så 7. desember får jeg gleden av å være tilskuer. Verket er Puccinis Messa di Gloria og du kan høre det i Bragernes kirke i Drammen lørdag 6. desember kl 16 og i Grønland kirke i Oslo søndag 7. desember kl 18.

Erfarne konsertgjengere vet at det er greit å ha hørt verket før man ankommer konserten. Lytt til det på Spotify eller sjekk det ut på iTunes.

I følge en studie jeg nå ikke husker kilden til er det vesentlig å inkludere kart når man skal oppfordre folk til å komme seg ut av døren og delta. Derfor gjentar jeg essensen, med kart:

Kom på konsert i Bragernes kirke i Drammen lørdag 6. desember kl 16

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Kom på konsert i Grønland kirke i Oslo søndag 7. desember kl 18

View Larger Map

Så, om du ikke har fått det med deg nå, så kan du se på denne plakaten:

Du kan også laste ned plakaten (PDF) og skrive den ut slik at du husker hvor du skal i helgen 6. & 7. desember. Dette blir utrolig bra og jeg gleder meg stort. Vi sees!

An approximation of competence

Eskimo Roll, care of Popkid on Flickr

Obeying rules

without an understanding

of the reasons behind them

creates an approximation of competence

which leaves one vulnerable

to the exceptions.

- Sea Kayaker’s Deep Trouble

Footage of Galloping Gertie

If you haven’t seen how the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge danced around, take a look below.

For a more in-depth look at the history and backgrond of the bridge’s construction and eventual collapse, I recommend this unembeddable ten-minute documentary over at YouTube.