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Accelerating Individual and Organizational Learning – Case Study from a Rock Band: Part 2 of 2


This is Part 2 in a 2-Part post – please see Part 1.

Quick Recap

This post explores how a semantic wiki can support self-organizing teams, using a rock and roll band as a case study.  We developed a semantic wiki using the Symcordia™ platform to enable the band’s development and learning – both collectively (organizational learning) and for band members (individual learning).

Necessity is the Mother of Invention.

The band began as a vehicle to cover classic rock songs.  Over the first week or so, we found ourselves drowning in endless email chains, with lists of songs to cover, suggestions for band names, and so on.  I’ve always found emails to be both inefficient and frustrating as an approach to coordinating and sharing knowledge across a work group.  We were finding it tough to keep track of all the suggestions and maintain a “single source of the truth” to guide our practice and development.  We believed there was a better way, so we quickly (initially about 3 hours work) built a band wiki using my company’s Symcordia™ platform.

A band has several characteristics that make a wiki a great enabler:

  1. Playing in a band is a highly collaborative endeavor.  Wikis are inherently collaboration tools.
  2. Playing in a band demands shared knowledge:  What are we going to play?  Which key should we play it in?  Who will take which parts (e.g., lead vocal, harmony vocal)?  Wikis are a fabulous way of capturing and sharing knowledge.
  3. A band must develop and grow – or it dies on the vine.  Wikis are wonderful enablers of individual and collective growth and learning – they can put at your fingertips all that you need in terms of knowledge and tools to develop and grow – things like musical scores, YouTube tutorials, song lyrics.
  4. For a developing band, history and shared experience is crucial to learning: What did we try and why?  What worked well – and not so well?  A wiki is an ideal vehicle for capturing history and creating shared learning.
  5. A band depends on all sorts of creative decisions:  What’s the best sequence of songs for a given context?  Which settings worked best for amplifiers, mixing boards and effects pedals?  A wiki is a great way of enabling and capturing those decisions and the logic and collective wisdom behind them – one place to keep a ‘single version of the truth.’

Initial Design and Features

Given these characteristics, we came up with our initial design.  Here’s a screen shot of the wiki sidebar – a primary navigation mechanism.  Note, we’ve not yet tried to make the site “pretty” – we will eventually create a public face into selected portions of the band wiki, and use a more fancy style sheet for that:

There’s an inevitable section about the band – each member has a page where they can post personal details, photos, videos, etc.  We’ve also worked up some “principles” or “simple rules” about how we want the band to work (e.g., We encourage band members to move from instrument to instrument.)  Having these on the wiki allows us all to collaborate on developing the principles and bringing them to life.  We struggled with naming the band, so we created a space for us to develop naming ideas, comment, vote and converge on a final name.

The most important space, in terms of developing as a band, is the Band Repertoire.  As you’ll see above, there are sections for:

  • Performance Ready Songs – songs we feel are ready for performance to an audience.
  • Songs In Development – songs that we are working on with a view to readying them for performance, at which time they get promoted to Performance Ready pages.
  • Prospective Songs – songs that we’d like to perform and within our talent and limitations, e.g., if it needs a flute, we probably can’t do it (sorry, Jethro Tull!)
  • Song Ideas – suggestions about songs we’d like to try at some time.

Typical Song Page

Here’s a partial screen shot of a typical song page:

Key here is:

  • The version of the song (some songs have multiple versions by different performers – for example the Guns ‘N Roses version of Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door is quite different from the Bob Dylan original).
  • A YouTube of the song by the performer we are trying to emulate, so we’re all aiming for a common performance outcome, or at least, a starting point to develop from.
  • Links to the tablature (music) for guitar, bass, drums, keyboards and any other learning aids.
  • The key we will play it in.  (Four band members playing a song in different keys does not sound so good!)
  • Performance Notes – clues about how to perform a song, and observations on how we are doing so far.
  • Song lyrics – lead vocals and harmony vocals singing different versions of the lyrics can really spoil a performance!

Semantic Properties

Each song page has a Semantic Properties box:

In order to protect my band mates privacy, I’ve ‘faked’ the assignment of parts to be all me!  But each part (vocal and instrument) can be assigned to different band members, and we can try different assignments at our practice sessions to see what works best (and capture this in our Performance Notes).

We can also vote on different aspects of the song.  The things on which to vote change depending upon context – e.g., whether it’s Performance Ready, Song In Development, Prospective or Song Idea.  For Performance Ready songs, a question is, “How well do we perform this song?”  For a Song In Development, it is, “Are we getting better with this song?  Are we ready to perform this song?”  And for a Prospective Song it’s, “Do we want to work on this song?”

Because these are Semantic Properties, we have pages that dynamically generate reports, such as:

  • Which parts I am playing what roles on?
  • Which songs do we most want to work on?
  • Which songs are improving the most quickly – or slowly?

Capturing Performances

We capture MP3 recordings and video clips of our performances and embed these in the song pages, track and rate how our performances are evolving over time – creating an historical record of growth and learning.

How Is It Working Out?

I’m going to save my richer response to this till we have a little more experience under our belts, but there are some early insights that I’ve seen many times before with my business consulting clients as they try to leverage collaborative tools like this:

  1. Email habits die hard!  For all the frustration with email overload, and the inefficiencies and inadequacies of email for collaboration, band members’ first instincts are to send an email, which begets a natural reply response.  Good thoughts are lost to the ether and invisible to the wiki!
  2. It’s tough making time to learn – even though the learning curve for a wiki is trivial.  The late Dr. Stephen Covey talked about the man struggling in the woods to saw down a tree.  An old farmer came by and observed, “That saw looks pretty dull.  Why don’t you sharpen it?”  The man replied, “I don’t have time to sharpen the saw – I’m too busy sawing!”
  3. I know from my business client experience with wikis that they gain the most traction when their use is ‘in the natural flow’ of daily work habits.  For our band members, they tend not to sit at desks with a computer screen and a browser.  They are busy executives moving from meeting to meeting and town to town.  Their dominant means of communicating beyond their meeting context is via Blackberries – phone calls and emails – so the band wiki is not ‘in the flow.’  This will change when we release a version of Symcordia optimized for smart phones and tablets.

Lessons Learned from a Reader

I’ll close this post by pulling a comment from the Part 1 post.  The comment came from Glenn Remoreras, one of my favorite bloggers (See Simple Processes.)

Based on my experience of championing the use of wiki with my team, it was a bit of a crawl, walk run process– and we are still crawling after a month. Here are our lessons learned:

  • Adoption champion is critical to success of the process. (I took this challenge myself as the manager of my area). As champion I generated initial contents and encourages to channel collaboration through the tool by suggested practices.
  • Different team members will have a different level and pace of adoption. That’s normal and acceptable. I did not force my team to use the tool, I slowly introduce it in our meetings and reporting.
  • Leader’s example is important. The leader spearheads the different ways to use the tool by doing it himself/herself. Later on the team will realize the benefits by experiencing how it changes the way they work.
  • Crawl walk run approach is necessary to not force the team adoption. Team members will adopt when they realize that it actually facilitates better flow of information and better team collaboration. Don’t rush it!
  • Subsequent and consistent use of the information in the community (wikis, blog, forum, file sharing) for information purpose to outside entities strengthens importance and drives team members to adopt.

My team is getting there collectively. Now we are managing some of our project status reporting, meetings, team locator, activity-task assignment, forum, and file sharing through the team community we have established.

Disclosure

My company is centered around a semantic wiki platform – currently optimized for IT groups (see Symcordia.com for more) so I do have a few axes to grind.  But I’m also a true believer in wikis as an enabler of collaboration and performance improvement. This is based upon my experience as a consultant and our client’s experiences using Symcordia™, our semantic wiki platform.  The platform is built on the underlying Confluence wiki engine, with a variety of plug-ins that add semantic properties, sortable tables, page ratings and so on.

Image “Classic Rock” by C.F. Payne courtesy of Reader’s Digest

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Accelerating Individual and Organizational Learning – Case Study from a Rock Band: Part 1 of 2


My regular readers know that I post from time to time about how wikis can enable organization performance and increase organizational clarity.  (For example see here, here and here.)

In the interests of full disclosure, my company is centered around a semantic wiki platform (currently optimized for IT groups – see Symcordia.com for more) so I do have a few axes to grind.  But I’m also a true believer in wikis as an enabler of collaboration and performance improvement. This is based upon my experience as a consultant and our client’s experiences using  semantic wikis.  Symcordia™ is built on an underlying Confluence wiki engine, with a variety of plug-ins that add semantic properties, sortable tables, page ratings and so on.

From IT Leadership to a Rock and Roll Band!

I’ve also posted before on lessons from the performing arts – see here.  Now, I’m adding to my business and consulting experience through my ‘non-day job’ as a member of a rock and roll band.  We are using Symcordia to enable our development and learning – both for the band (organizational learning) and its members (individual learning).

The Importance of Passion as an Ingredient for Collaboration

I was excited to get into this as it combined two of my greatest passions – wiki-enablement of growth and learning, and playing rock and roll!  In the words of the band Cheap Trick – this feels like Heaven Tonight!  (My business partner, Roy Youngman, created an excellent post on the importance of passion to collaboration.)

As you read this, think about interest groups you might be part of at work – a special project team, a six sigma team or whatever.  How could you use a wiki to enable development and learning to increase their effectiveness and ignite some passion for their work?

Here’s the Back Story

Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention.  We started the band – a conglomeration of 4 very passionate musicians – as a vehicle to cover classic rock songs.  Over the first week or so, we found ourselves trading emails, mostly with lists of songs to cover, styles and genres to try, suggestions for band names, and potential dates to meet for practice sessions.

Having spent several years of my career successfully using wikis as a way to escape from endless email streams and knowledge lost in Windows folders, I found this both inefficient and frustrating.  I tried to keep track of all the suggestions, consolidate them and publish them as “the list” of stuff we’d work on, but it was all but impossible to do.  The list kept changing – both in content and purpose (some of the song ideas were aspirational, some were deadly serious, some were deliberately frivolous).

I had this nightmare vision of us turning up for our first practice, with no collective idea of what we were working on – we’d each prepared a different set of parts for a different set of songs!  Each band member is more or less multi-instrumental, but when 4 band members have each prepared the same lead guitar part, and nobody has worked up the bass part, keyboard part, etc., there’s a train wreck in the making!

I believed there was a better way, so I quickly (initially about 3 hours work) built a band wiki using my company’s Symcordia™ platform and got the band members onto it.

Why a Wiki for a Band?

A band has several characteristics that make a wiki a great enabler:

  1. Playing in a band is a highly collaborative endeavor.  Wikis are inherently collaboration tools.
  2. Playing in a band demands shared knowledge:  What are we going to play?  Which key should we play it in?  Who will take which parts (e.g., lead vocal, harmony vocal)?  Wikis are a fabulous way of capturing and sharing knowledge.
  3. A band must develop and grow – or it dies on the vine.  Wikis are wonderful enablers of individual and collective growth and learning – they can put at your fingertips all that you need in terms of knowledge and tools to develop and grow – things like musical scores, YouTube tutorials, song lyrics.
  4. For a developing band, history and shared experience is crucial to learning: What did we try and why?  What worked well – and not so well?  A wiki is an ideal vehicle for capturing history and creating shared learning.
  5. A band depends on all sorts of creative decisions:  What’s the best sequence of songs for a given context?  Which settings worked best for amplifiers, mixing boards and effects pedals?  A wiki is a great way of enabling and capturing those decisions and the logic behind them – one place to keep a ‘single version of the truth.’

Please join me for Part 2 of this post in the next week or so – I’ll cover the basic design for the wiki, screen shots of how we are using it – especially, how we are leveraging the semantic properties, and our early experiences.

Graphic courtesy of Cox Mpoperi Wilson Education Consultants

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Are Linked-In Groups Worth the Time and Effort?


I love the idea of LinkedIn Groups!  The reality, however, from my perspective leaves much to be desired!

As a huge believer in social networking as a business tool, but so far disappointed in the impact this has had on most businesses, I really hoped that LinkedIn Groups would work for me.  Let me define “work for me”:

Create a positive return on my time investment in being active in a select set of groups around topics of great interest to me.

Sporadic Success

Over the course of about 2-3 years, I’ve joined 12 groups, been very active in 4 of these, and co-moderate one of them.  There have certainly been periods where activity blossoms – often started by someone posting an interesting, challenging or provocative question or opinion, with others then weighing in, adding perspective, insight, and experience.  But these peaks of constructive activity seem to be few and far between.  In the gaps, a given group can drift from endless self-serving commercials for offerings that have nothing to do with the group’s mission, to periods of total inactivity.

Lazy Learners

I recall reading The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric S. Raymond’s seminal paper analyzing how and why the open source movement works so well.  Eric wrote about the culture of the communities and forums and the importance of ‘hanging out’ long enough to learn the ‘unofficial’ protocols of participation before you can be accepted as a credible member of the community.  I contrast that with the mindless posts I see from new group members who clearly have not taken the time to look back over the discussions in order to familiarize themselves with the group, or to find answers to their questions.  For example, (fictitious, to protect the guilty!) you might see a post from a new member of the Enterprise Architecture network asking, “What is EA and how do you do it?”  I’m not saying that naive questions don’t have their place, but questions like this have been beaten to death, and if the new member had taken the time to familiarize themselves with the group’s activity, they would never have posted such a question.

Spammers

A particular peeve of mine is people who trawl a whole bunch of groups posting some self-serving promotion, then “Like-ing” all their posts!  To this point, I was participating in two groups serving virtually identical missions (one of the downsides of self-organizing networks – I guess that over time one of these groups will fade away or the two will merge).  One of the groups was closed – you had to apply to join.  (This was the group I was co-moderating, which gave me an interesting perspective on the types of people requesting membership.)  The other group had started off closed, and then was made an open group.  Given the time I was spending moderating requests to join, I was tempted to make our group open, but I held off, preferring to see how this other group would fare with open enrollment.  Unfortunately, it did not fare well.  Spam reigned supreme – it was actually amazing to me that some people will put their name on inane and/or offensive posts, “like” them, and keep repeating the offense day after day!   As a result, and many complaints from group members, the moderator returned the group to a closed model.

A Total Waste of Time?

It would be irresponsible of me to damn all LinkedIn groups based upon my own experience.  I am hanging in with the groups I get the most value from, and will continue monitoring other groups of interest.  It may be that based upon the groups you chose, or what you hope to get out of/put into a group, you are having a very different experience.  Please let us know your own experiences – what works, what does not, and how to get more from the LinkedIn group capabilities.

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The Futility of Collaboration without Context


The term ‘collaboration’ gets thrown about as something inherently valuable and worthwhile – an end in itself, rather than a means to an end.  In reality, collaboration in of itself is:

a). Unlikely to happen
b). Unlikely to create anything of value

So Many Collaboration Platforms, So Little Collaboration!

Collaboration platforms are everywhere!  Most IT shops have at least one collaboration platform (usually SharePoint) and often several others.  And some people do participate.  The question is, with what result?  The answer often is little that is really worthwhile, and even less that can truly be called “collaboration.”

I used to wonder if there was something in our human nature that inherently resisted collaboration.  Of course, the opposite is true – human beings are both inherently gregarious and naturally collaborative – it’s in our instinct for survival.  The reason I was seeing so little collaboration on collaboration platforms was not that people did not want to collaborate – it’s that they did not understand (or believe in, or want) the purpose for collaboration.

The Collaboration Context

Alan Kay is credited with one of my favorite quotes, “Context is worth 80 IQ points!” In the case of collaboration, context not just the extra IQ points – it’s the whole enchilada of collaboration!

Several years ago, while I was an Executive Vice President at the The Concours Group – a management consulting, research and executive education firm, we were acquired by a company that had developed a collaboration platform.  Our new management was very keen for us to “eat our own dog food” and encouraged everyone in the company to get on the platform and ‘collaborate.’

I found this to be an interesting and enlightening experiment.  Most of us did indeed get on the platform.  Thoughts were posted and commented upon.  Interest groups popped up.  We had a ‘social reputation’ system, and I was proud the day my avatar suddenly listed me as a “Docent”, though I could not find out what that actually meant in this context!  After an early spike, usage dropped.

After a while, someone introduced Yammer into the firm.  A new groundswell of so-called “collaboration” surfaced, but after a while, that too dropped.  I observed that in spite of putting time and energy into “collaboration”, in reality, people were engaging in conversations that, while they may have been interesting, never went anywhere.  Conclusions were never drawn, deliverables were never created, insights never extracted, lessons never learned and applied.

The problem was not the tool – it was a lack of context.  There was no clear purpose or intent to the collaboration.

So, What’s Your Collaborative Intent?

  • Are you trying to engage people in problem solving?  For example, stakeholders and/or subject matter experts might be invited to review and expand upon a cause-effect analysis.
  • Are you trying to create a deliverable, such as a project proposal?  People might work together on creating the proposal, perhaps each working on their own section, but reviewing and commenting on others sections such that the whole is coherently structured and internally consistent.  Or you might wish to get everyone’s input to the whole proposal, rather than have people focus on their section.
  • Do you want a community of practice or interest to capture and evolve a body of knowledge – best practices, templates, examples of how to do something, such as charter a project?
  • Are you creating an ‘operating manual’ for an organization, with processes, roles, competencies, rules of engagement, and so on?  Perhaps people will be encouraged to not only create and/or refine the knowledge content, but will also rate the content based upon usability, clarity or how well the organization handles a given situation.
  • Are you encouraging people to share across organizational silos – looking for points of leverage or redundancy?

Each of these ‘collaborative intents’ implies a specific goal or set of goals.  And each goal, in turn, might lend itself to a different type of collaboration mechanism.  While content or document management systems might be great for managing ‘documents of record’, they might not be so effective at encouraging multiple authorship.  In fact, document-centric tools tend to deepen and strengthen the traditional document mindset, where a document is something you email around to people to get their input.

It’s all a question of context – what are you hoping to gain through collaboration?  Is the goal clear?  Do those that must participate understand and believe in the goal?

Graphic courtesy of diagoal

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The Semantic Wiki – Driving IT Organizational Clarity and Performance: Part 2


This is the 2nd in a 3-part post representing the culmination of 5+ years of work for my business partner, Roy Youngman and me.

A Quick Recap

Roy and I had become frustrated with the state of management consulting and the lack of “stickiness” with our consulting work.  In helping clients develop business-IT strategies and realign their IT operating models, the deliverables we would leave behind as the artifacts of the work (usually PowerPoint slides, Word documents, etc.) rarely became part of the client’s organizational fabric.  Another source of frustration was that we’d typically arrive at those deliverables through a series of workshops – usually with the CIO and IT leadership team.  Middle managers and the ‘troops’ who had to bring those strategies and operating models to life often did not get exposure to the work until relatively late in the day.  Because they had not been part of the work, they were slow to understand and embrace it.

As Web 2.0 and social media began to take hold, we started to see and experiment with better ways to help our clients – engaging broader and deeper participation by client staff, and leaving behind a ‘living, breathing’ IT strategy and/or IT operating model, captured as a set of wiki pages developed collaboratively with our clients.  As such, the act of development and deployment became more concurrent.  Defining the IT operating model was part of deploying it, and vice versa.

However, we’d found that IT organizational attempts to improve collaboration and support knowledge management typically met with limited success, and that collaboration tools and platforms deployed by IT were falling short.  While the power and simplicity of wikis were appealing, their ‘one size fits all’ approach was not well suited to supporting an IT operating model.  We closed Part 1 by summarizing the strengths of a wiki, and suggesting that these strengths also create vulnerabilities.

The Proverbial Double-Edged Sword!

A wikis strengths also create vulnerabilities.  For example, the ease with which users can create and edit pages can quickly lead to a chaotic free-for-all, as content becomes subject to the whims of authors and editors, and absent a meaningful underlying structure, pages proliferate.  The lack of review before modifications are accepted can limit the credibility of a given wiki page as a ‘source of truth.’  A process definition, for example, may have been last edited by someone that introduced a serious error – and that error can proliferate as people refer to and use the process with the assumption that the content on the page is valid.

Sites such as Wikipedia mitigate these vulnerabilities through a robust system of editorial administration, oversight and management – enhanced by the ‘law of large numbers.’  In this case, with a sufficiently large universe of editors, the content of any page quickly converges towards a mean, reflecting “the wisdom of the crowd”.  But with an internal wiki – say one used by an IT organization or other shared services function, the law of large numbers does not apply, so without other mechanisms to manage structure and content, the wiki degrades in quality and value over time.

SharePoint as a Common Culprit!

This degradation is commonplace in organizations using Microsoft SharePoint as their collaboration platform.  While typically deployed to support collaboration, the reality quickly scales back to “a place to store documents”, which, in the words of one of my clients, soon degenerates to, “a place to lose documents!”

The other problem with SharePoint is that its strength is also its weakness.  While it is a good document management system, documents in of themselves are rarely the proper end goal of collaboration.  Collaboration is largely about having multiple authors create, evolve and use content, and documents are a poor medium for developing, codifying, and sharing knowledge.  Wikis provide a far more valuable alternative approach.  As my colleague Roy Youngman noted in his blog:

The nonlinear nature of a Wiki enables well-factored content, thereby minimizing redundancies and preventing contradictions that confuse people. It also allows people to contribute to whatever area of expertise each person happens to have so everyone is drawn in, not just the elite few.  A Wiki approach enhances the discovery of knowledge and exposes the subject matter in the greatest need of improvement.  And the improvement is a constant theme – the very heart and soul of a Wiki.”

Semantic Wikis to the Rescue!

But all is not lost, as the world of Web 2.0 gives way to Web 3.0, tapping into the special properties of the Semantic Web, a term first coined by Tim Berners-Lee.  Tim was the inventor of the World Wide Web and is director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the development of proposed Semantic Web standards.

Berners-Lee defines the Semantic Web as, “a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines.”  A Semantic Web goes beyond the traditional web concept of hyperlinked, human-readable web pages by inserting machine-readable metadata about pages and how they are related to each other.  This enables automated agents to access the Web more intelligently and perform tasks on behalf of users.  As the W3C describes it:

In addition to the classic ‘Web of documents,’ W3C is helping to build a technology stack to support a ‘Web of data,’ the sort of data you find in databases. The ultimate goal of the Web of data is to enable computers to do more useful work and to develop systems that can support trusted interactions over the network.”

In some respects, the Semantic Web is designed to overcome the all too familiar limitations of today’s Web – a proliferation of untrustworthy content that can be hard to navigate and make sense of.  Building on the Semantic Web concept and standards, a Semantic Wiki has an underlying model of the knowledge described in its pages, thereby capturing the meaning of the data within the wiki.

While traditional wikis have structured text and hyperlinks, a Semantic Wiki captures and identifies information about the data within its pages, and the relationships between pages, in ways that can be queried or exported like a database.  While conventional wikis provide users a simple means of expressing data and metadata, typically through tagging, Semantic Wikis include additional ways to express semantic declarations.  They are therefore able to understand and display the relationships between pages or other data.   For example, you can declare the underlying semantic properties of an IT Operating Model, such as:

  • Processes require people taking on specific roles
  • Roles point to specific competencies people must have to fill them
  • Competencies comprise specific Knowledge, Skills and Behaviors
  • Metrics define process performance

Having these semantic properties explicitly defined enables wiki governance rules and workflows – for example, someone defining a new process will be prompted to define the associated competencies needed for that process, and an appropriate template can be automatically loaded for defining those competencies, thereby encouraging consistency and quality.  A simple query can highlight roles that are missing, or identify associates who are qualified to fill a given role.

The graphic below shows a partial example of the underlying semantic structure for an IT Operating Model.

Example Semantic Structure for an IT Operating Model

Several wiki platforms offer semantic extensions, including Semantic MediaWiki (which extends MediaWiki, the underlying open source platform that powers Wikipedia) and zAgile’s Wikidsmart extension to Atlassian’s popular and powerful Confluence platform.

In combination with other plug-ins and extensions, such as Page Rating, Social Reputation, Workflow and Task Management, a Semantic Wiki can enable real and meaningful collaboration for IT organizations (or any other environment where collaboration can improve service quality, speed of delivery and organizational clarity.)

I will pick up in the 3rd and final part of this series by discussing the two primary value propositions for an IT organization and how a semantic wiki can provide a single integrated space for enabling these differentiated needs.

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The Semantic Wiki – Driving IT Organizational Clarity and Performance


This will be Part 1 of a 3-part post.  This short series represents the culmination of 5+ years of work (on top of a 40 year career in IT!) for me and my business partner, Roy Youngman.  The series of posts also marks the formal announcement of The Merlyn Group, LLC, a business venture we actually started one year ago, but have been ‘flying below the radar’ while we worked with our initial clients and technology.

A Little Historical Context

Roy and I started working together at Ernst & Young back in the early 1990′s.  About 5 years ago, we both became very frustrated with the state of management consulting.  The main problem we saw was a lack of “stickiness” with our consulting work.

Most of our consulting work was either helping clients develop business-IT strategies, or helping them realign their IT operating models (processes, services, governance, organization, metrics, and so on), often in support of new Business-IT strategies.  Our deliverables typically comprised PowerPoint slides, Word documents and Excel spreadsheets.  While these all played an important part of informing and aligning our client teams, the artifacts we’d leave behind rarely became part of their organizational fabric.

This was exacerbated by the fact that we’d typically arrive at those deliverables through a series of workshops – usually with the CIO and IT leadership team.  Middle managers and the ‘troops’ who had to bring those strategies and operating models to life often did not get exposure to the work until relatively late in the day.  Because they had not been part of the work, they were slow to understand and embrace it.

A smaller, but no less important concern was the travel involved in all of this.  Post 9-11, travel costs typically added 20% to the cost of an engagement – good for the airlines and hotels, perhaps, but not good for the client and certainly not good for us.  Time lost commuting and the wear and tear on mind and body took their toll.

Enter “Consulting 2.0″…

As the technologies and sensibilities of Web 2.0 and social media began to take hold, Roy and I started to see a better way to help our clients – a way that would engage broader and deeper participation by client staff at all levels, and that would leave behind a ‘living, breathing’ IT strategy and/or IT operating model, captured as a set of wiki pages.  These pages were developed collaboratively with our clients, so the act of development and deployment essentially became concurrent.  Defining the IT operating model was part of deploying it, and vice versa.

This 3-part series of posts will explain how we did this, and highlight some of our key learnings along the way.

The Unmet Promise of Collaboration

We had observed that IT organizational attempts to improve collaboration, enable knowledge management and drive organizational clarity typically met with limited success.  In our research and consulting work, we’d found that limitations with collaboration tools and platforms deployed by IT were a key factor in these disappointing results and that a ‘one size fits all’ approach was all but doomed to failure.  Some aspects of IT require a highly structured and tightly governed approach to enabling collaboration – process management and continuous process improvement, for example.  Other aspects, such as enterprise architecture and business-IT relationship management work best with a looser and more emergent approach.

The Art and Science of Collaboration

The great news was that a new type of tool was emerging – the Semantic Wiki.  We recognized that a semantic wiki would easily accommodate the complexities inherent in IT Operating Models.  But first, let’s review how wikis came about – and how their strengths can create serious limitations for use in an IT organization.

1995 – The Wiki Is Born!

Wikis have been at the heart of collaboration since Ward Cunningham created the first Wiki, known as WikiWikiWeb in 1995.  Ward and co-author Bo Leuf, in their book The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web, described the essence of the wiki concept as follows:

  • A wiki invites all users to edit any page or to create new pages within the wiki Web site, using only a plain-vanilla Web browser without any extra add-ons.
  • A wiki promotes meaningful topic associations between different pages by making page link creation almost intuitively easy and showing whether an intended target page exists or not.
  • A wiki is not a carefully crafted site for casual visitors. Instead, it seeks to involve the visitor in an ongoing process of creation and collaboration that constantly changes the Web site landscape.

According to Wikipedia, the world’s best-known and largest wiki:

A wiki enables communities to write documents collaboratively, using a simple markup language and a web browser.  A wiki is essentially a database for creating, browsing, and searching through information. A wiki allows for non-linear, evolving, complex and networked text, argument and interaction.  A defining characteristic of wiki technology is the ease with which pages can be created and updated. Generally, there is no review before modifications are accepted.”

The Wikis Strengths

The keys to a wiki are:

  1. The ease with which people can collaboratively create, access and edit documents.
  2. The fact that those documents can be hyperlinked to create complex and networked text that allows the reader to navigate both linearly (as with traditional text) and non-linearly (jumping from idea to idea).
  3. The ease with which documents can be searched – with the knowledge that you are always looking at the current and only version of the page.
  4. As an inherently web-based concept, wikis benefit from evolving Web standards and technologies such as browsers, mark-up languages and even the magical world of open source – enabling Wiki users and developers to participate easily in a rapidly growing ecosystem of plug-ins.

The Proverbial Double-Edged Sword!

But these strengths also create vulnerabilities. Join me for Part 2 of this series, where will will look at the weaknesses of a wiki as an enabler of IT collaboration, and how a semantic wiki overcomes those limitations.

Graphic courtesy of Semantic Wikipedia

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Why Some Projects Should Be “Led,” Not “Managed”


I’ve posted before (many times!) about Business-IT Maturity, and the common “sticking points” that most IT organizations run into around the mid-point between low and high maturity.  (See, for example, here, here, and here, or enter “Sticking Point” into the search box.)

Walking Ever Faster Will Not Get You Running!

If, arbitrarily, you pick 3 levels of Business-IT Maturity – say Level 1 = low, Level 2 = medium and Level 3 = high, you will typically find that the things you have to do to get from Level 1 to Level 2 not only won’t get you from Level 2 to Level 3 – they will actually prevent you from reaching Level 3!  The trick is to recognize what these things are, and that you are entering a very different learning curve.  For example, if your solutions delivery process is broken, you need a great deal of rigor and discipline – in the form of Project Management and a Systems Development Life Cycle.  That will get you from “chaotic” (Level 1 in my hypothetical 3-Level scale) to “managed” (mid-Level 2).  But over time you will find the limitations of a “managed” approach to solutions delivery – especially when you need to implement “fuzzier” solutions, such as social media, or business analytics.

One Size Does Not Fit All

With solutions delivery, one-size does not fit all, and the methodology that works well for a relatively easily pre-specified transaction processing system (order-to-cash, for example) will not work well for something that is less predictable and more emergent.  Hanging in there with the “official” methodology (for fear of reverting to the chaotic situation that persuaded you to implement the methodology in the first place!) will frustrate the developers, annoy the business client, and will probably lead to a poor or unworkable solution – which will upset everybody!  What is needed is a finer-grained way of categorizing types of business solutions, and flexibility with methodologies to fit the best approach for a given solution type.

What Worked for Transactional Systems Won’t Work for Innovation Solutions

Collaboration and Knowledge Management initiatives are not readily planned using traditional project management methods – they tend to follow an ‘emergent’ pattern that is typically non-linear and somewhat unpredictable.   A traditional planning style, with detailed deliverables, work steps, activities and due-by dates must give way to a more iterative and organic approach.

Social Media Projects Should be Led

You cannot mandate participation in a community – you can invite participation and create reasons to do so. You cannot schedule a date by which a given percentage of a community will be collaborating on a wiki, for example – you can only set expectations, model desired behaviors, and create good reasons for people to become active users of the wiki.  Then you must reevaluate the results and adjust the approach in the light of experience.

Recognizing the Hard-Won Battle – and the Need to Fight New Battles

It seems that sometimes the battle of getting from Level 1 to Level 2 Business-IT Maturity is so hard won, and the win so apparently fragile, that leaders hang on to the methods that got them to Level 2.  This is about being really good at solving yesterday’s problems.  It’s a different world today, and the ways that technology and information can be exploited for business advantage demand different approaches.  Don’t let the trappings of Level 2 restrict your ability to get to the next level!

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More Hurdles in the Shift from Documents to Wikis


Last week, I posted about The Painful But Rewarding Shift from Documents to Wikis.  In the post I shared some of the lessons my partner and I have learned from our experiences helping IT organizations shift to a Wiki approach for creating organizational clarity and getting people in the organization to engage in continuous improvement.  I will continue with this theme in this post.

When to Edit, When to Comment?

I guess this issue exists equally with Word documents – MS Word has its powerful Reviewing mode with its ability to add comments or to actually edit a document.  The same is true on a Wiki – you can comment on a page, or you can go in and edit the page.  The difference is, we have all been commenting on and editing Word documents for years!  But when you get to a Wiki, you typically don’t have the years of experience, nor do we have the shared but tacit understanding of when commenting makes sense compared with editing.  To the Wiki novice, not feeling sure about when to edit versus comment can freeze you into inaction!  You feel much more ‘exposed’ about making either comments or edits – but edits feel somehow more ‘in your face.’

We have found that a few supporting pages (themselves, a natural fit for a Wiki approach) can be very helpful in covering questions such as “edit or comment”.  Examples include:

  • Wiki Collaboration Guidelines and Procedures
  • Wiki Manual of Conduct
  • Wiki Manual of Style

Additionally, we have found that the gentle guiding hand of a Collaboration Manager and/or a Wiki Gardener can both demonstrate by example and, where appropriate, make adjustments to shift comments to in-line text edits or vice versa.  And, for those who can’t wait to find out the answer by trial and error, we’ve found the general principle is – if you are certain about the change you want to make, go ahead and make it!  The Wiki will let others with an interest in the page see the changes you have made, and they can always be backed out – nothing is ever lost!  If you are less certain, post a comment, quoting the text you want to change (most Wiki tools make that easy to do) and raising the points of discussion that lead you to be tentative about making the change.

Blank Pages Are Intimidating!

I’ve run experiments, creating a new page with an important page title (such as Potential Wiki Governance Principles) and asking folk to “weigh in.”  Perhaps not surprisingly, nobody does.  Add a few threads of text, or a contentious issue (that might be addressed by a principle or two) and people start to weigh in.  As I said, this is not surprising.  People are intimidated by blank pages.  Having said that, as a consultant who has facilitated hundreds of workshops, I know that starting with a “clean sheet” is rarely a good idea.  However, there are situations (and team dynamics) where a clean sheet is exactly the best place to start.  Which is why I ran the ‘blank page’ experiment.  At least one lesson learned would be: you can make things happen in a facilitated workshop that you can’t achieve on a Wiki!

Free, Open (and Risky?) Versus Controlled, Closed (and Safe?)

For whatever reason, my partner and I tend to find ourselves working on social media and collaboration initiatives with companies that have traditionally been somewhat “locked down” and conservative – often in highly regulated industries.  They have an inevitable (and understandable) bias towards controls and regulations – more concerned with “stopping bad things happening” than with “making good things happen!”  Unfortunately, this is not an ideal culture for open collaboration and knowledge exchange!  As much as they want to move to a more open and sharing culture, their natural instinct is to “govern and control.”

Given this, one of the issues we find ourselves coming back to as we navigate the changes inherent in becoming more open and collaborative is, ‘Do we manage the change from the current culture or from the culture we hope to change to?’  The temptation is to draw up a list of rules and create governance bodies and processes to manage the environment.  This is what people expect – but the question is, do such approaches serve to reinforce the current culture as opposed to fostering the desired culture?  Do rules and regulations send a message to people, that, “This is business as usual – be careful, think twice before you write or comment!”  And do such messages, unintended as they may be, tend to shut down otherwise valuable dialog and knowledge exchange?  Do they perpetuate the status quo?

We argue (and have demonstrated) that less rules and regulations are more effective in engaging stakeholders and fostering healthy dialog – without bringing the organization to its knees or being overrun with lawyers!  Of course, someone (the role is often called Wiki Gardener) has to monitor the site and take corrective action when needed.  They have to coach accidental transgressors.  Deliberate or malicious transgression is a performance management issue and must be handled as such – with firm and immediate action.

What have your experience been with Wikis in IT?  How have you handled “rules and regulations”?

 

Photo courtesy of Bionic Band: Home of Bionic Band Sports

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The Painful But Rewarding Shift from Documents to Wikis


I posted recently on the question, Can Social Media Significantly Improve the Ways IT Work Is Performed?  The post began to share some of the lessons learned as I continue to work with IT organizations that are pushing into the “social media” age and using tools such as Wikis and Social Networking to drive IT performance improvement.

Document Orientation – The Wikis Greatest Enemy!

My colleague and business partner Roy Youngman posted a while back on the question, “Why are Wikis in Corporate IT Rare?”  In the post he posited that most corporations, especially IT departments, are entrenched in a document-oriented approach as the means for developing, codifying, and sharing knowledge.  Roy made an important point that:

Paradoxically, ‘document-orientation’ is both the main reason why Wikis are rare in the corporate world and the main reason why Wikis are great for the corporate world.”

Wiki Benefits – A Solution to the Shackles of Document-Centricity!

Roy went on to explain that:

The Wiki approach addresses almost all the short-comings of ‘document-orientation’.  The nonlinear nature of a Wiki enables well-factored content, thereby minimizing redundancies and preventing contradictions that confuse people. It also allows people to contribute to whatever area of expertise each person happens to have so everyone is drawn in, not just the elite few.  A Wiki approach enhances the discovery of knowledge and exposes the subject matter in the greatest need of improvement. And the improvement is a constant theme – the very heart and soul of a Wiki.”

From Document to Wiki – Changing Mindsets One Page at a Time!

I’ve been using document-centric tools such as Word and PowerPoint since they first became available in the late 1970′s.  Beyond the simple accessing of Wikipedia, I’ve been actively using Wikis such a MediaWiki and Confluence since 2005.  So I have significant experience both in the traditional world of documents, and the more contemporary world of Wikis.  And I can tell you, the shift from document-centricity to Wikis is non-trivial!  I can also tell, it is HUGELY BENEFICIAL!

Here’s a sampling of the mental hurdles I’ve had to navigate in order to realize the full benefits of a Wiki approach.

When to “Polish” Versus When to “Collaboratively Evolve”?

Historically, when I’ve been creating some kind of deliverable (a Word document Project Charter, or a client project briefing PowerPoint deck for example) I’ve always felt that it has to be polished to a high degree.  Many years ago, a wise and seasoned consultant and mentor advised me to always produce quality documents – both in terms of content and look and feel.  He said, “If it looks shabby and full of typos, how can you expect the client to take it seriously?”  The latter point is not necessarily obvious based on the deliverables I see from many consultants.  As an example, I saw a key deliverable produced by a large consulting firm that was full of typos, grammatical and formatting errors.  The final insult was that a PowerPoint slide misspelled the CIO’s name – in a key presentation that was given to the CIO!

By contrast, when I start to create a Wiki page, I feel almost obliged (and grateful!) to start with a much rougher “draft” and look forward to the ensuing “collaborative polishing” that will emerge.  Sounds obvious, but getting comfortable with a “rough draft” as a starting point did not come easily to me until I began to notice that people were less inclined to collaborate on a document if it looked highly polished and “print ready”.  Learning when to “polish” and when to release “draft” material is not always obvious and is very situationally dependent – demanding a keen sensitivity to the specific context for the document.

Structure, Linking, Tagging and Factoring in a Wiki World

I’ve always paid attention to document structure.  I believe I understand the basic principles of good structure, and learned a lot about logical structure from the powerful Minto Pyramid Principle back in the late 1980′s.  But when you get to a Wiki, things change!  The ability to hot-link across “documents” and to external sources in ways that just don’t work in a document-based world (who knows where any given document will be located?) changes the way you think about structure.

Tagging and Folksonomies create another layer of possibilities (and another layer to think about!) that is rarely used effectively in a traditional document environment.  The concept of factoring, well understood (if not always followed!) by programmers, involves structuring content for maximum reusability, minimum redundancy, and ease of search.  These are typically not considerations in a traditional document approach.

One of the many benefits of a Wiki is that it enables an entire collection of ideas and information to be placed into a single, hyper-linked space.  But if that space is a messy structure, the benefits may quickly erode.  If you aren’t a programmer (or, at least, not a good programmer!) you may need access to a Wiki expert for help in thinking through the structuring of a given space – especially if you are using a Wiki that allows for a hierarchical structure among pages.

Does eMail Traffic Really Reduce?

A client I was working with recently was (appropriately!) paranoid about anything that drove up eMail traffic.  When they learned that the Wiki could send eMail notifications about changes, they were immediately hesitant to utilize this feature.  While it’s natural to want to find ways to reduce eMail traffic, we’ve found that there’s an important distinction between “normal” eMails, that come from people and automatic notifications.  The former typically demands time and activity – responding to the email.  The latter is purely and helpfully informational.  Also, if you aren’t finding the information helpful, then turn off the automatic alerts!

The great news for this client, in addition to discovering that automatic informational eMails in the form of Wiki alerts were far less intrusive and demanding than real eMails from people, was that the transition to a Wiki approach dramatically reduced the person-to-person eMail traffic, as the endless cycle of passing documents around was replaced by collaborative editing of a Wiki.

I’ll look at more of these “mindset changes” associated with the shift to Wikis in upcoming posts.

Image courtesy of Westwood K-8 Technology

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Can Social Media Significantly Improve the Ways IT Work is Performed?


It’s been a while since I posted to this blog.  My excuse, if one is needed, is that I started a new business venture earlier this year.  Unfortunately, shortly after incorporating the company, I was admitted to hospital for quintuple heart bypass surgery!  I’m pleased to say that while I’m more than fully recovered from the surgery, the new venture has derailed my blogging routine.

My New Venture

The venture is a partnership with my dear friend and long-time colleague, Roy Youngman.  (See Roy’s blog).  Roy and I have been on a fascinating journey over the last 20 years – learning about the levers that impact IT performance and business value.  Back in the 1990′s, I was a Partner at Ernst & Young‘s Center for Business Innovation while Roy led a team at the Center for Information Systems Planning and Delivery, taking what the Innovation Center discovered and developing tools and methods for use by E&Y’s consultants and clients.   Since then, Roy and I worked together at The Concours Group (and nGenera, when they absorbed Concours) and as independent consultants.

Social Tools Shape a Vision…

For the last 5 years, we have focused on driving IT improvement using social media and, though I hesitate to use the term, leveraging Web 2.0 and 3.0 capabilities.  We have worked together on client engagements and multi-company research.  We have worked to improve how management consulting works – a process that has always struck us as a “leaky” and inefficient!

We’ve focused on three questions:

  1. How can the business value of IT be increased using the kinds of social tools that are transforming they ways friends and communities interact, share and collaborate?
  2. How can social networking and collaboration capabilities be used to increase organizational clarity and drive higher engagement among IT professionals?
  3. How can the knowledge transfer process be improved to, within and between our clients?

We’ve worked with various tools (e.g., SharePoint, MediaWiki, Confluence) and with a variety of plug-ins and extensions in support of IT organizations who are trying to improve their performance and the value they deliver to their business clients and customers. We’ve created a meta-model of IT Capabilities.  We’ve created an architecture for a Semantic Wiki, based on this meta-model and populated from our combined 60 years of IT experience.

The ‘learning journey’ has been rewarding, and from it a vision has emerged – one where IT professionals and their customers deliver services through a Web-based social context.  I will use this blog to post about what we have learned and are learning.

In time, we will create a separate web site and provide the means for others to collaborate with us on this journey, but for now we are strictly focused on our client work (and our respective blogs!)

Some Early “Lessons Learned”

Create a baseline quickly

Set the quality bar high, and make rapid, incremental improvements thereafter.  The name of the game is “emergence” – you need sufficient structure to help people have some sense of the destination, but not so much that they can’t participate in shaping the journey.

The most effective way to instill change is through “Pathfinder Projects”

Pathfinder Projects are ones that have to be undertaken anyway (their primary purpose) but that have an explicit secondary purpose of leveraging one or more social capabilities, such as a Wiki (e.g., adding quality content) as an outcome of the project.

Be “in the flow”

The social tools need to be incorporated into the natural work flow.

Take a ‘cascading’ approach to deployment

Deploy in “waves”, starting with IT leadership and Pathfinder Projects, continuing with Process Owners, natural Communities of Practice, and grow from there based upon how the collaborative/social energy flows.  But also be sensitive to naturally emerging opportunities – go to where the puck is going!

Pride in workmanship trumps controls!

It is far more important to instill a pride-in-workmanship than to install a complex review and control process.

Expect a Power-Law distribution

A Power-Law Distribution is expected and good; a few will contribute a lot and some will contribute little, but everyone has something worth contributing.

Leaders demonstrate commitment by example

Leaders must demonstrate their commitment ‘by example’ while avoiding the temptation to criticize (which will be initially easy).

Are you working with Social Tools to improve IT work?  What are you doing and how is it working?

Image courtesy of pcms consulting

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