“If Jeff ever leaves…”

I’m sure you have experienced the “Oh crap” feeling where you have a problem and Jeff is on vacation or unavailable. Jeff happens to be one of those people who’s worked at your organisation for years and has developed such a deep working knowledge of things, it seems like he has a sixth sense about everything that goes on. As a result, Jeff is one of the informal organisational “go to guys” – the calming influence amongst all the chaos. An oft cited refrain among staff is “If Jeff ever leaves, we are in trouble.”

In Microsoft’s case, this scenario is quite close to home. Jeff Teper, who has been an instrumental part of SharePoint’s evolution is moving to another area of Microsoft, leaving SharePoint behind. The implications of this are significant enough that I can literally hear Bjorn Furuknap’s howls of protest all the way from here in Perth.

So, what is Microsoft to do?

Enter the discipline of knowledge management to save the day. We have SharePoint, and with all of that metadata and search, we can ask Jeff to write down his knowledge “to get it out of his head.” After all, if we can capture this knowledge, we can then churn out an entire legion of Jeffs and Microsoft’s continued SharePoint success is assured, right?

Right???

There is only one slight problem with this incredibly common scenario that often underpins a SharePoint business case… the entire premise of “getting it out of your head” is seriously flawed. As such, knowledge management initiatives have never really lived up to expectations. While I will save a detailed explanation as to why this is so for another post, let me just say that Nonaka’s SECI model has a lot to answer for as it is based on a misinterpretation of what tacit knowledge is all about.

Tacit knowledge is expert knowledge that is often associated with intuition and cannot be transferred to others by writing it down. It is the “spider senses” that experts often seem to have when they look at a problem and see things that others do not. Little patterns, subtleties or anomalies that are invisible to the untrained eye. Accordingly, it is precisely this form of knowledge that is of the most value in organisations, yet is the hardest to codify and most vulnerable to knowledge drain. If tacit knowledge could truly be captured and codified in writing, then every project manager who has ever studied PMBOK would have flawless projects, because the body of knowledge is supposed to be all the codified wisdom of many project managers and the projects they have delivered. There would also be no need for Agile coaches, Microsoft’s SharePoint documentation should result in flawless SharePoint projects and reading Wictor’s blog would make you a SAML claims guru.

The truth of tacit knowledge is this: You cannot transfer it, but you acquire it. This is otherwise known as the journey of learning!

Accountants are presently scratching their heads trying to figure out how to measure tacit knowledge. They call it intellectual capital, and the reason it is important to them is that most of the value of organisations today is classified on the books as “intangibles”. According to the book Balanced Scorecard, a company’s physical assets accounted for 62% of its market value in 1982, 38% of its market value in 1992 and only 21% in 2003. This is in part a result of the global shift toward knowledge economies and the resulting rise in the value of intellectual capital. Intellectual capital is the sum total of the skills, knowledge and experience of staff and is critical to sustaining competitiveness, performance and ultimately shareholder value. Organisations must therefore not only protect, but extract maximum value from their intellectual capital.

Now consider this. We are in an era where baby boomers are retiring, taking all of their hard-earned knowledge with them. This is often referred to as “the knowledge tsunami”, “the organisational brain drain” and the more nerdy “human capital flight”. The issue of human capital flight is a major risk area for organisations. Not only is the exodus of baby boomers an issue, but there are challenges around recruitment and retention of a younger, technologically savvy and mobile workforce with a different set of values and expectations. One of the most pressing management problems of the coming years is the question of how organisations can transfer the critical expertise and experience of their employees before that knowledge walks out the door.

The failed solutions…

After the knowledge management fad of the late 1990’s, a lot of organisations did come to realise that asking experts to “write it down” only worked in limited situations. As broadband came along, enabling the rise of rich media services like YouTube, a digital storytelling movement arose in the early 2000’s. Digital storytelling is the process by which people share stories and reflections while being captured on video.

Unfortunately though, digital storytelling had its own issues. Users were not prepared to sit through hours of footage of an expert explaining their craft or reflecting on a project. To address this, the material was commonly edited down to create much smaller mini-documentaries lasting a few minutes – often by media production companies, so the background music was always nice and inoffensive. But this approach also commonly failed. One reason for failure was well put by David Snowden when he said “Insight cannot be compressed”. While there was value in the edited videos, much of the rich value within the videos was lost. After all, how can one judge ahead of time what someone else finds insightful. The other problem with this approach was that people tended not to use them. There was little means for users to find out these videos existed, let alone watch them.

Our Aha moment

In 2007, my colleagues and I started using a sensemaking approach called Dialogue Mapping in Perth. Since that time, we have performed dialogue mapping across a wide range of public and private sector organisations in areas such as urban planning, strategic planning, process reengineering, organisational redesign and team alignment. If you have read my blog, you would be familiar with dialogue mapping, but just in case you are not, it looks like this…

Dialogue Mapping has proven to be very popular with clients because of its ability to make knowledge more explicit to participants. This increases the chances of collective breakthroughs in understanding. During one dialogue mapping session a few years back, a soon-to-be retiring, long serving employee relived a project from thirty years prior that he realised was relevant to the problem being discussed. This same employee was spending a considerable amount of time writing procedure manuals to capture his knowledge. No mention of this old project was made in the manuals he spent so much time writing, because there was no context to it when he was writing it down. In fact, if he had not been in the room at the time, the relevance of this obscure project would never have been known to other participants.

My immediate thought at the time when mapping this participant was “There is no way that he has written down what he just said”. My next thought was “Someone ought to give him a beer and film him talking. I can then map the video…”

This idea stuck with me and I told this story to my colleagues later that day. We concluded that the value of asking our retiring expert to write his “memoirs” was not making the best use of his limited time. The dialogue mapping session illustrated plainly that much valuable knowledge was not being captured in the manuals. As a result, we seriously started to consider the value of filming this employee discussing his reflections of all of the projects he had worked on as per the digital storytelling approach. However, rather than create ‘mini documentaries’, utilise the entire footage and instead, visually map the rationale using Dialogue Mapping techniques. In this scenario, the map serves as a navigation mechanism and the full video content is retained. By clicking on a particular node in the map, the video is played from the time that particular point was made. We drew a mock-up of the idea, which looked like the picture below.

While thinking the idea would be original and cool to do, we also saw several strategic advantages to this approach…

• It allows the user to quickly find the key points in the conversation that is of value to them, while presenting the entire rationale of the discussion at a glance.
• It significantly reduces the codification burden on the person or group with the knowledge. They are not forced to put their thoughts into writing, which enables more effective use of their time
• The map and video content can be linked to the in-built search and content aggregation features of SharePoint.
  • Users can enter a search from their intranet home page and retrieve not only traditional content such as documents, but now will also be able to review stories, reflections and anecdotes from past and present experts.
• The dialogue mapping notation when stored in a database, also lends itself to more advanced forms of queries. Consider the following examples:
  • “I would like any ideas from lessons learnt discussions in the Calgary area”
  • “What pros or cons have been made about this particular building material?”
• The applicability of the approach is wide.
  • Any knowledge related industry could take advantage of it easily because it fits into exiting information systems like SharePoint, rather than creating an additional information silo.

This was the moment the vision for Glyma (pronounced “glimmer”) was born…

Enter Glyma…

Glyma (pronounced ‘glimmer’) is a software platform for ‘thought leaders’, knowledge workers, organisations, and other ‘knowledge economy participants’ to capture and trade their knowledge in a way that reduces effort but preserves rich context. It achieves this by providing a new way for users to visually capture and link their ideas with rich media such as video, documents and web sites. As Glyma is a very visually oriented environment, it’s easier to show Glyma rather than talk to it.

What you’re looking at in the first image above are the concepts and knowledge that were captured from a TED talk on education augmented with additional information from Wikipedia. The second is a map that brings together the rationale from a number of SPC14 Vegas videos on the topic of Hybrid SharePoint deployments.

Glyma brings together different types of media, like geographical maps, video, audio, documents etc. and then “glues” them together by visualising the common concepts they exemplify. The idea is to reduce the burden on the expert for codifying their knowledge, while at the same time improving the opportunity for insight for those who are learning. Glyma is all about understanding context, gaining a deeper understanding of issues, and asking the right questions.

We see that depending on your focus area, Glyma offers multiple benefits.

For individuals…

As knowledge workers our task is to gather and learn information, sift through it all, and connect the dots between the relevant information. We create our knowledge by weaving together all this information. This takes place through reading articles, explaining on napkins, diagramming on whiteboards etc. But no one observes us reading, people throw away napkins, whiteboards are wiped clean for re-use. Our journey is too “disposable”, people only care about the “output” – that is until someone needs to understand our “quilt of information”.

Glyma provides end users with an environment to catalogue this journey. The techniques it incorporates helps knowledge workers with learning and “connecting the dots”, or as we know it synthesising. Not only does it help us with doing these two critical tasks, it then provides a way for us to get recognition for that work.

For teams…

Like the scenario I started this post with, we’ve all been on the giving and receiving end of it. That call to Jeff who has gone on holiday for a month prior to starting his promotion and now you need to know the background to solving an issue that has arisen on your watch. Whether you were the person under pressure at the office thinking, “Jeff has left me nothing of use!”, or you are Jeff trying to enjoy your new promotion thinking, “Why do they keep on calling me!”, it’s an uncomfortable situation for all involved.

Because Glyma provides a medium and techniques that aid and enhance the learning journey, it can then act as the project memory long after the project has completed and the team members have moved onto their next challenge. The context and the lessons it captures can then be searched and used both as a historical look at what has happened and, more importantly, as a tool for improving future projects.

For organisations…

As I said earlier, intangible assets now dominate the balance sheets of many organisations. Where in the past, we might have valued companies based on how many widgets they sold and how much they have in their inventory, nowadays intellectual capital is the key driver of value. Like any asset, organisations need to extract maximum value from intellectual capital and in doing so, avoid repeat mistakes, foster innovation and continue growth. Charles G. Sieloff summed this up well in the name of his paper, “if only HP knew what HP knows”.

As Glyma aids, enhances, and captures an individual’s learning journey, that journey can now be shared with others. With Glyma, learning is no longer a silo, it becomes a shared journey. Not only does it do this for individuals but it extends to group work so that the dynamics of a group’s learning is also captured. Continuous improvement of organisational processes and procedures is then possible with this captured knowledge. With Glyma, your knowledge assets are now tangible.

Lemme see it!

So after reading this post this far, I assume that you would like to take a look. Well as luck would have it, we put out a public Glyma site the other day that contains some of my own personal maps. The maps on the SP2013 apps model and hybrid SP2013 deployments in particular represent my own learning journey, so hopefully should help you if you want a synthesis of all the pros and cons of these issues. Be sure to check the videos on the getting started area of the site, and check the sample maps!

I hope you like what you see. I have a ton of maps to add to this site, and very soon we will be inviting others to curate their own maps. We are also running a closed beta, so if you want to see this in your organisation, go to the site and then register your interest.

All in all, I am super proud of my colleagues at Seven Sigma for being able to deliver on this vision. I hope that this becomes a valuable knowledge resource for the SharePoint community and that you all like it. I look forward to seeing how history judges this… we think Glyma is innovative, but we are biased! 🙂

 

Thanks for reading…

Paul Culmsee

www.glyma.co

www.hereticsguidebooks.com

Hi all

Just a quick note to mention that I’m off travelling again, this time swapping 39 degree Celsius summer weather of Perth for somewhere between –6 to 5 degrees of Canada. I’ll be spending a week in Canada running two classes – one public and one private. The first class is a public SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture class running in Vancouver. MVP Michal Pisarek of SharePointAnalystHQ fame will be there and it should be a terrific two days of learning how to think a little differently to govern SharePoint strategy and deployment. You will learn a bunch of new skills, techniques and perspectives. Best of all, the skills learnt are applicable for many other types of complex projects.

The class flyer is here: http://www.sevensigma.com.au/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2011/02/SPIA.pdf

The registration site is here: http://spiavancouver.eventbrite.com/

In terms of course coverage and content it is worth noting the research performed by the Eventful group (who run the Share conferences). According to them, the hot topic areas for SharePoint are governance, user adoption, change management, information architecture and user empowerment. These sort of topics are the sort where plenty of people tell you what the issues are, but are typically lighter on what to do about them. This class covers why this is, as well as dealing with all of these areas and presents detailed strategies, tools and methods to address them. Furthermore, aside from the 500+ page manual of meaty governance goodness, as a take home, we supply a CD for attendees with a sample performance framework, governance plan, SharePoint ROI calculator and sample mind maps of Information Architecture.

At last count there were 5 places left for the Vancouver class, so if you have been pondering if it is a worthwhile class, check out some of the feedback from the class web site. Also, if you know anybody who might be interested in attending, please pass the course flyer and registration site details to them. We always end up with people who tell us “Ah – if only I knew about the class!!”

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

www.hereticsguidebooks.com

For one night only USA…

Ah, Erica Toelle – what a legend! Thanks to Erica and Fpweb, I’m thrilled to confirm that the Seattle SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture class is all systems go. Save the date as its very likely indeed to be the only SPIA class in the USA in 2011.  If it wasn’t enough that Erica will be joining me, but Ruven Gotz will be there too.

Thursday and Friday, May 05-06, 2011. (http://spiaseattle.eventbrite.com/)

The location is the Silvercloud Inn, 14632 SE Eastgate Way Bellevue, WA 98004

In this multimedia extravaganza of a blog post, lets take a closer look at this class and what you can expect. Below is a snippet of a talk I did in New Zealand called “SharePoint Governance  Home Truths”. This clip shows a little diagnostic test that I do on my audience, to see whether they have experienced the visible signs of wicked problems. If you want to know why you should go to SPGov+IA, then take my 2 minute test yourself.

If the two minute test has taken your fancy, then you might want to see what is in store on the course itself. Below is the first half-hour of module 1 (in the form of a conference session), as well as the accompanying slide deck.

 

Course Information:

Download Course Outline (PDF)

Download Class Flyer (PDF)

Most people understand that deploying SharePoint is much more than getting it installed.  Despite this, current SharePoint governance documentation abounds in service delivery aspects. However, just because your system is rock-solid, stable, well-documented and governed through good process, there is absolutely no guarantee of success.  Similarly, if Information Architecture for SharePoint was as easy as putting together lists, libraries and metadata the right way, then why doesn’t Microsoft publish the obvious best practices?

In fact, the secret to a successful SharePoint project is an area that the governance documentation barely touches.

This Master Class pinpoints the critical success factors for SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture and rectifies this blind spot.  Paul Culmsee’s style takes an ironic and subversive view on how SharePoint Governance really works within organizations while presenting a model and the tools necessary to get it right.

Drawing on inspiration from many diverse sources, disciplines and case studies, Paul Culmsee has distilled the "what" and "how" of governance down to a simple and accessible, yet rigorous and comprehensive set of tools and methods that organizations, large and small, can utilize to achieve the level of commitment required to see SharePoint become a successful part of your enterprise.

Some workshop sessions are hands on, we provide all of the tools and samples needed but please bring your own laptop.

Course Structure:

The course is split into 7 modules, run across two days.

Module 1: SharePoint Governance f-Laws 1-17:

Module 1 is all about setting context in the form of clearing some misconceptions about the often muddy topic of SharePoint governance. This module sheds some light onto these less visible SharePoint governance factors in the form of Governance f-Laws, which will also help to provide the context for the rest of this course

• Why users don’t know what they want
• The danger of platitudes
• Why IT doesn’t get it
• The adaptive challenge – how to govern SharePoint for the hidden organisation
• The true forces of organisational chaos
• Wicked problems and how to spot them
• The myth of best practices and how to determine when a “practice” is really best

Module 2: The Shared Understanding Toolkit – part 1:

Module 2 pinpoints the SharePoint governance blind spot and introduces the Seven Sigma Shared Understanding Toolkit to counter it. The toolkit is a suite of tools, patterns and practices that can be used to improve SharePoint outcomes. This module builds upon the f-laws of module 1 and specifically examines the “what” and “why” questions of SharePoint Governance. Areas covered include how to identify particular types of problems, how to align the diverse goals of stakeholders, leverage problem structuring methods and constructing a solid business case.

Module 3: The Shared Understanding Toolkit – part 2:

Module 3 continues the Seven Sigma Shared Understanding Toolkit, and focuses on the foundation of “what” and “why” by examining the “who” and “how”. Areas covered include aligning stakeholder expectations, priorities and focus areas and building this alignment into a governance structure and written governance plan that actually make sense and that people will read. We round off by examining user engagement/stakeholder communication and training strategy.

Module 4: Information Architecture trends, lessons learned and key SharePoint challenges

Module 4 examines the hidden costs of poor information management practices, as well as some of the trends that are impacting on Information Architecture and the strategic direction of Microsoft as it develops the SharePoint road map. We will also examine the results from what other organisations have attempted and their lessons learned. We then distil those lessons learned into some the fundamental tenants of modern information architecture and finish off by examining the key SharePoint challenges from a technical, strategic and organisational viewpoint.

Module 5: Information organisation and facets of collaboration

Module 5 dives deeper into the core Information Architecture topics of information structure and organisation. We explore the various facets of enterprise collaboration and identify common Information Architecture mistakes and the strategies to avoid making them.

Module 6: Information Seeking, Search and metadata

Module 6 examines the factors that affect how users seek information and how they manifest in terms of patterns of use. Building upon the facets of collaboration of module 5, we examine several strategies to improving SharePoint search and navigation. We then turn our attention to taxonomy and metadata, and what SharePoint 2010 has to offer in terms of managed metadata

Module 7: Shared understanding and visual representation – documenting your Information Architecture

Module 7 returns to the theme of governance in the sense of communicating your information architecture through visual or written form. To achieve shared understanding among participants, we need to document our designs in various forms for various audiences.

Putting it all together: From vision to execution

Attendees will be taking home a manual ~480 pages, containing the Seven Sigma Shared Understanding Toolkit CD with a sample performance framework, governance plan, SharePoint ROI calculator (Spreadsheet), sample mind maps of Information Architecture. These tools are the result of years of continual development and refinement "out in the field" by Paul Culmsee and have only been recently released to the public through this Master Class.

More Information:

• Praise for SharePoint Governance and IA Masterclass

Refund Policy:

No refunds will be issued for attendee cancellations once payment is recieved.  Class cancellation by the organizer will result in a refund less transaction fees.

http://spiaseattle.eventbrite.com/

 

• The facets of collaboration Part 1–Meet robot barbie
• The facets of collaboration Part 2–Enter the matrix!
• The facets of collaboration Part 3-The feature jigsaw
• The facets of collaboration Part 4 – BPM vs. HPM

Hi all

Welcome to another exploration of the collaborative world through a lens called the facets of collaboration. If you are joining us for the first time, I am writing a series of posts that looks at how our perception of collaboration influences our penchant for certain collaborative tools and approaches. SharePoint, given that it is touted as a collaboration platform, inevitably results in consultants never being able to give a straight answer. This is because SharePoint is so feature-rich (and as a result caveat-rich), that there are always fifty different ways a situation can be approached. Add the fact that many clients do not necessarily know what they want and learn about their problem by examining potential solutions, we have all the hallmarks of a wicked problem in the making.

These wicked problems, underpinning SharePoint, often results in Robot Barbie situations (cue the image to the left), which is the metaphor that I started this series with. Robot Barbie represents everything wrong about SharePoint deployments, as it is symptomatic of throwing features at a platitude, pretending to be solving a real problem and then wondering why the result doesn’t gel at all. It is a pattern of behaviour that is similar to an observation made by the very wise (and profane) Ted Dziuba who once spoke these words of wisdom.

If there’s one thing all engineers love to do, it’s create APIs. It’s so awesome because you can draw on a white board and feel like you put in a good day’s work, despite having solved no real, actual problems. Web 2.0 engineers, in addition to their intrinsic love of APIs, have a real hard-on for anything having to do with a social network. For example, developing a Facebook application lets them call their shitty little PHP program an "application" running on a "platform," like a real, live computer programmer does. Make-believe time is so much fun, even for adults.

Apart from making me giggle, Dziuba may have a point. Elsewhere on this blog I have spent time explaining that there are different types of problems that require different approaches to solving them (wicked vs. tame). My conjecture is that collaboration itself is exactly the same in this regard. People who espouse a particular type of tool or approach as the utopian solution to collaboration are taking a one size fits all approach to a multifaceted area and even worse, treating that area as a platitude. Anyone who calls themselves an Information Architect and doesn’t at least give cursory examination to the dimensions or facets of collaboration is likely to be doing their stakeholders a disservice.

All of us have certain biases, and I am no exception. For a start, I am generation X – the so-called cynical generation. Apparently we whinge and whine about everything and then blame it all on generation-Y. Thus, if cynicism is the gen-X stereotype, then I will happily accept being the poster child. I mean seriously, all of you vanity obsessed, self interested generation y’ers, if you spend a little less time preening and more time thinking, we might get some wisdom out of you (see – I am such a cynical gen-X right now).

So let’s recap the facets of collaboration. The model I came up with identifies four major facets for collaborative work: Task, Trait, Social and Transactional.

• Task: Because the outcome drives the members’ attention and participation
• Trait: Because the interest drives the members’ attention and participation
• Transactional: Because the process drives the members’ attention and participation
• Social: Because the shared insight drives the members’ attention and participation

In the last post, I used the model to examine the notion of Business Process Management versus Human Process Management and looked at some of the claims and counter claims made by proponents of each. This time let’s up the ante and talk about something curlier. We will examine the notion that social networking in the enterprise is the answer to improving collaboration within the enterprise. On first thought, it makes perfect sense, given the incredible success of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Nevertheless, there is ongoing debate about the use and value of social tools in the enterprise driven by their rise outside of organisational contexts. One particularly strongly worded quote is from Aaron Fulkerson, co-founder and CEO of MindTouch who doesn’t mince his words:

This class of software forces business users to adopt the myopic social visions imagined by the developers, which are nearly identical to their corresponding consumer web implementations. In short, social software is not solving business problems. In fact, these applications only serve to treat symptoms of the problems businesses face. They exacerbate the real problems within businesses by creating distractions and, worse, proliferate more disconnected data and application silos.

Ouch! Even within the SharePoint community there is significant variation of opinions as to the value of social. While I better protect the innocent and not name names, I have spoken with several well known SharePointers who think social is a giant waste of time, versus those who see real value in it. Irrespective of your opinion, you cannot ignore the fact that social is a significant game changer with effects still being felt. While web 2.0 has dropped off the Gartner hype cycle, its effect on particular sectors has been far reaching. Now it seems that all sectors have a 2.0 on the end of their name. For example:

• Enterprise 2.0
• Education 2.0
• Legal 2.0
• Government 2.0

Clearly, if things were just a flash in the pan, why are governments around the world trying to revitalise their public sector by utilising these tools?

Look at Microsoft as another example. They have, I think smartly, recognised industry trends and reacted to them via the introduction of a number of new SharePoint features, such as tagging/folksonomy via managed metadata, ratings columns, enhanced wiki capabilities and a significant investment in the capabilities of my-sites. Their clients now have the option to leverage these features should they choose to do so.

So just as there are naysayers, there are the pundits. Many people cite the reasoning that these features are necessary to attract and retain the next generation of workers, who have grown up with these tools in their personal lives. Whether this claim is valid is debatable, but I have to say, I really like the Enterprise 2.0 slide deck below by Scott Gavin for a number of reasons. I think it encapsulates the 2.0 vision, underpinned by social/cloud technologies very nicely. I sometimes ask people to discuss this slide deck in my IA classes and discussion is equally polarising as social networking in the enterprise itself. Some people think it represents the vision for the future, and others think it is hopelessly idealistic and doesn’t reflect cold, hard reality. Take a look for yourself below…

And the survey says…

Using the facets quadrants, we can start to see patterns for success of these tools for the enterprise and whether Aaron Fulkerson’s argument has merit or whether Scott Gavin is on the right track. An interesting use of the facet diagram is to plot where various tools and technologies are located. in my classes, I ask people to plot where Facebook belongs on facets diagram. Guess where it is usually drawn? 

While some people will draw Facebook at various levels on the vertical axis, everyone pretty much describes Facebook (and LinkedIn)  as trait based, while being highly dominant on the social quadrant. As discussed in the last article, if I ask people to plot a crowdsourced tool like Wikipedia, the dominant characteristic is always trait/social. In other words, people maintain and update Wikipedia articles because of their interest in the topic area, not because it helps them get something done.

Clearly, big social networking technologies are successful in the "trait based social” quadrant. In other words, we tend to use Facebook more for common interest collaboration than to solve a task based collaborative issue (such as deliver a project). Another interesting thing about a lot of social networking technologies is that for many, our work-based collaborative life tends to be more task based, compared to our non-work which is more trait based. In other words, for a lot of us, our work life revolves around working with a group of people for a common outcome and if it was not for that common outcome, we wouldn’t necessarily have much in common (I risk falling victim to my own generalisation here – so I will come back to this later in the section titled “Why User Buy-In Is Hard”).

When you look at where Facebook sits in the quadrant, it begs the question of how well this type of tool (or the building blocks it is based on) would work in an organisation that is project (task) based and highly transactional. To that end, consider a project management information system, such as the basic one that Dux espouses in his book or the more complex one that Microsoft sell to organisations. Where do you think it belongs on the quadrant?

When I ask people to plot their project management information system, I typically get this response:

I speculate that the further away two tools lie on the spectrum, the more likely we are to have a robot-barbie solution if you blindly mix features that work well in each individual quadrant. The wiki argument I made in part 3 seems to support this contention. If you recall, in part 3 of this series, I mentioned that I ask every attendee of my classes if they had ever seen a successful project management wiki.  Irrespective of the location of the class, the answer was pretty much “no”. I noted that where I had seen successful wikis tended to be where the users of the wiki were linked by strong traits.

Looking Deeper

While that is interesting, I think the facets diagram tells you more than it intends. Obviously, it is clear that these project management systems such as MS Project Server are oriented toward task/transactional (“getting things done”) aspect of project delivery (ie, time, cost, scope, budget and the like). While some people might point to this and say “there you go – I told you all that social crap was a waste of time – bloody gen-Y and their social networking hubris”, I feel this is naive. If task based transactional tools are sufficient, then why do so many projects fail?

I have stated many times on this blog that shared commitment to a course of action requires shared understanding of the problem at hand. The act of aligning a team to project goals and developing this shared understanding is the realm of the task/social quadrant (the top left), where insights and outcomes come together. When I ask people to name tools that live in this space, few can name anything. Obviously, most project management systems are devoid here. Worst still, we subsequently delude ourselves to thinking that shared understanding can come from a few platitudinal paragraphs labelled as a “problem statement”.

Social networking pundits implicitly recognise this issue (and frequently butt heads against command and control type project managers as a result). But i feel they make the mistake in applying a one size fits all approach to collaboration and apply trait based tools as a panacea when they are not wholly appropriate. The social tools seem to fit exceptionally well into the top right quadrant, but not in the top left.

In fact the only tools that spring to mind that belong in the top left category are the sensemaking tools that my company practice, such as Dialogue Mapping.

Where’s the proof, Paul?

So I guess I am arguing that using social tools because they are the “choice of the new generation” ignores a few home truths about the nature of these tools versus the nature of organisational life. Just because Microsoft provide the tools for you, tells you that they are hedging their bets rather than having any more insight than you or me. So to test all of this, let’s use the facets model in a different way to back up some of my observations and suggestions in this post. Guess what happens when I ask people to plot SharePoint itself on the facets map?

When I asked SharePoint practitioners to do this, they initially drew SharePoint 2007 as a circle over the entire model. Once they did so, they would very often adjust the drawing to emphasise transactional over social collaboration as shown below.

 

When practitioners were asked to draw SharePoint 2010, they usually indicated a higher representation in in the two social quadrants, but favoured the trait based social over task based social as shown below.

What was interesting about this experiment is that very few people drew SharePoint over the entire facets of collaboration. Social collaboration with SharePoint it seems, only stretches so far. This leads me onto more conjecture, and now we get to the bit in the post where we name a giant SharePoint elephant in the room.

Structured tools for social collaboration?

Many collaborative tools purport themselves as operating in the social space. SharePoint 2010 clearly does so, principally due to the Managed Metadata service, pimped MySites with tagging/rating capabilities. But SharePoint’s core heritage is database/metadata driven, document based collaboration. If we go back to our definition of social collaboration as dynamic, unstructured, with sharing of perspectives and insight through pattern sensing, then social collaboration is clearly not a predefined interaction.

Yet, database driven tools like SharePoint, and its building blocks like site columns and content types require considerable up-front planning to install and govern. Many, many inputs need to be well defined and furthermore, unless you have learnt through living the pain of things like content type definitions in declarative CAML, SharePoint buildings blocks are difficult to maintain/change over time. SharePoint suffers from a problem of reduced resiliency over time in that the more you customise it to suit your ends, the less flexible it gets. In the case of social collaboration the problem is worse because we are trying design for outputs where the inputs are not controlled. Trying to turn something that is inherently organic and emergent to something that has an X and Y on it may be misfocused and destined to fail in many circumstances. The realm of well-defined inputs is the realm of transactional collaboration, where workflow and business process management thrive and change is much more controlled before SharePoint ever gets a look in.

SharePoint excels at transactional scenarios as this is its heritage – after all, the majority of its feature set is oriented to transactional collaboration. The fact that people are prepared to draw SharePoint as dominating across across the transactional half of the facets diagram illustrates this.

But this raises interesting, if not slightly heretical question. If we need to use information architects to get a collaborative tool deployed for social collaboration (to get those inputs defined), then are we pushing the solution into the transactional side of the fence? Recall that in part 3 of this series, I looked at document collaboration and noted that when asked to draw team based document collaboration, people typically drew it operating in the social half of the matrix (pasted below for reference). I also noted in part 3 that for team based collaboration, rules and process are much less rigid or formalised with regards to document use and structure. I then referred to a recent NothingbutSharePoint article where a large organisation’s attempts to introduce the usage of content types largely failed. Like the seeming lack of success of wiki’s for task based collaboration, maybe content types simply are not the ideal construct as you move up the Y axis from transactional to social?

Now do not assume that I am anti metadata/content types here as this is not the case at all. Content types rock when it comes to search and surfacing of related information across a site collection (and beyond if you use search web parts). What I am calling out is the fact that if the SharePoint constructs that we have at our disposal were the panacea for social collaboration, where are the best practices that tell us how to leverage them for success? Perhaps the nature of the collaboration taking place plays a part in the lack of take-up reported in the aforementioned article? Those who advocate highly structured metadata as the only true solution may in fact be pushing a transactional paradigm onto a collaborative model that is ill-suited to it?

The knowledge worker paradox – one of the reasons why user buy-in is hard

Finally for now I’d like to cover one more aspect to this issue. Last year, one of my students looked at the facets and said “Now I know why my users aren’t seeing the value that I see in SharePoint”. When I asked him why, he explained:

“Many of my users are transactional and governed by process – that’s their KPI. Here I am as a knowledge worker, seeing all of these great collaborative features, but I am not judged by a process or transaction. I don’t live in that world. I forget that someone whose performance is judged by process consistency is not going to get all excited by a wiki or tagging or a blog.”

I call this the knowledge worker paradox and it is reminiscent of what I said in part 4 where we looked at BPM vs. HPM. Each role on an organisation is multifaceted. For many roles, there is varying degrees of transactional work taking place. Accordingly some people are very much process driven just as much as they are social driven. Gross generalisations that make statements that “80% of people are knowledge workers or perform knowledge work” do not help matters. In fact they serve to feed the one size fits all mentality that has proven to be detrimental to projects when people fail to recognise that some projects have wicked aspects.

SharePoint people are almost always knowledge workers. Thus if you, as a knowledge worker who is rarely governed by transactional process, think that you have the vision to prescribe a SharePoint driven meta-utopia to meet transactional needs without having lived that world, then if your results are not what you hoped for then to me its hardly surprising.  My student in this case realised that he had been approaching his user base the wrong way. Like Jane in part 1, he did not take into account the dominant facets of collaboration for the roles that he was trying to sell SharePoint into.

When you think about it, the whole argument around records management versus collaborative document management is in effect, an argument between a transactional oriented approach, versus a social oriented one. It is the same pattern as BPM vs. HPM. In records management, the paradigm is that management of the record is more important than the content of the record. Furthermore, that record shouldn’t change. Yet with team based document collaboration, without content there is no document as such and furthermore, the document will change frequently and require less strict controls to grease the gears of collaboration.

Both records oriented people and social pundits commonly make the same mistake of my student, where they force their dominant paradigm on everyone else.

Conclusion

Food for thought, eh?

This is probably my last facets of collaboration post for a while. It is one of these series of articles that I feel has value, but I know it won’t be read by too many 🙂 Nevertheless, I do hope that anyone who has gotten this far through has gotten some value from this examination and sees value in the model to help users make more informed Information Architecture decisions for SharePoint and beyond. I certainly use it now in most engagements and hope that it can be improved upon as a tool, or somehow incorporated into some of the SharePoint standards or maturity model stuff that is out there.

Remember the most important thing of all though. Despite all I have said, it is still definitely all generation y’s fault!

Thanks for reading

 

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

 

• The facets of collaboration Part 1–Meet robot barbie
• The facets of collaboration Part 2–Enter the matrix!
• The facets of collaboration Part 3-The feature jigsaw
• The facets of collaboration Part 4 – BPM vs. HPM
• The facets of collaboration Part 5 – It’s all Gen-Y’s fault – or is it?

Hi all and welcome to part four of my series on unpacking this buzzword phenomenon that is “collaboration”. Like it or not, Collaboration is a word that is very in-vogue right now. I see it being used all over the place, particularly as a by-product of the success of x2.0 tools and technologies. Yet if you do your research, most of the values being espoused actually hark back to the 1950’s and even earlier. (More on that topic in my forthcoming Beyond Best Practices book).

As it happens, Dilbert is quite a useful buzzword KPI. Once a buzzword graces a Scott Adams cartoon, you know that it has officially made it – as shown below:

So back to business! Way back in the first article, I introduced you to Robot Barbie, a metaphor that represents all of those horrid SharePoint sites remind you of a cross-dressing Frankenstein’s monster. I had an early experience with a client who championed a particular vision for a SharePoint project, only to find little buy-in within the organisation for that vision. This, and a bunch of other things, got me interested in the softer areas of SharePoint governance, where no tried and tested best practices really exist. If they did and were so obvious, Microsoft would published them as its in their interest to do so.

This all culminated in when I wrote a SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture training course last year. I read a lot of material where authors attempted to unpack what collaboration actually meant. My rationale for doing so would be to hopefully avoid creating SharePoint solutions that were Robot-Barbie Frankensteins. The model that I came up with is illustrated below:

The basic model is covered in detail in part 2. But to recap here is the basic summary: This model identifies four major facets for collaborative work: Task, Trait, Social and Transactional.

• Task: Because the outcome drives the members’ attention and participation
• Trait: Because the interest drives the members’ attention and participation
• Transactional: Because the process drives the members’ attention and participation
• Social: Because the shared insight drives the members’ attention and participation

In the last post, I used the model to compare and contrast the use of particular SharePoint features, such as wikis, SharePoint lists and the different aspects of document collaboration. With regards to the latter of these three, I l looked at the effectiveness of certain SharePoint building blocks like content types and site columns within the different facets.

In this post and the next, we will use the facets in a different manner. We will take a quick tour through some common philosophical smackdowns that manifest in organisational life. These smackdowns emanate because of the different viewpoints that people with particular job titles and respective bodies of knowledge have.

Any suggestion that a philosophy might be wrong or incomplete often calls into question the self-identify of the practitioner, which causes much angst among adherents. For this reason, I will leave the “agile is great” vs. “agile sucks” debate for another time, because if you search the internet for criticisms of agile you tend see really passionate programmers get all riled up and flame the hell out of you.

Instead, I will start with a relatively easy one…

Business Process Management v.s. Human Process Management

What does painting the Golden Gate Bridge and Business Process Management have in common? With both, you find that by the time you get to the end, you need to go back to the beginning again. I have personally seen organisations fill an office full of people and take literally years to define and then document key processes all in the name of various best practice frameworks or a regulatory requirement. They then find that, once a thick process manual is created, no-one actually follows it unless an auditor is watching or their performance-based remuneration is directly measured by adherence to it. Of course, I’m not the only one to notice this. In fact, the entire discipline of business process management has taken a bit of a battering in recent years.

If we consider a “process” as the means by which we convert inputs of some description into outputs, Business Process Management has long been the discipline that concerns itself with process optimisation. But in a pattern that is seen in all disciplines like Project Management and Business Analysis, someone will inevitably come along, tell you that you have it wrong or are not being “holistic” and invent a new term to account for your wrongness. In the case of BPM, we now have people arguing for various terms: such as Human Interaction Management, Human Centric Business Process Management, Non-Linear Business Process (thanks Sadie!) or Human Process Management. We will use the latter term, but they are essentially talking about the same thing.

So before we see an example Human Process Management (HPM), let’s review Business Process Management and see what the HPM fanboys are whining about.

Business Process Management

BPM is a structured approach to analyse and continually improve and optimise process activities. Process structure and flow are modelled via diagrammatic tools, allowing organizations to abstract business process from technology infrastructure and organisational departmental/jurisdictional boundaries. This abstracted view allows business to holistically examine process and increase their efficiency and respond rapidly to changing circumstances. This in turn creates competitive advantage.

BPM is often used within the broader context of process improvement methodologies such as Six Sigma (which if you have never read about it, will finally prove to you that all that high-school mathematics that you found mind-numbingly boring was actually useful). While BPM on its own provides excellent visibility of process via modelling them, Six Sigma also incorporates additional analytical tools to solve difficult and complex process problems. Thus, BPM and Six Sigma augment each-other, because process improvement efforts can be more focused via BPM modelling. Thomas Gomez, in an article entitled “The Marriage of BPM and Six Sigma", had the following to say:

“Without BPM, Six Sigma may flounder because executives lack the critical data needed to focus their efforts. Instead, the executives bounce all over the place looking for performance weaknesses, or they focus on areas where successful performance improvements provide only marginal results. With BPM, Six Sigma projects can pinpoint problems and address the underlying causes.”

But that is where the fun ends according to the BPM critics. BPM nerds have had to suffer the indignation of hurtful labels like “Sick Sigma” and stories of long term problems with innovation because of such initiatives. They cite examples such as  George Buckley of 3M, who wound back many of his predecessor’s Six Sigma initiatives.

"Invention is by its very nature a disorderly process. You can’t put a Six Sigma process into that area and say, well, I’m getting behind on invention, so I’m going to schedule myself for three good ideas on Wednesday and two on Friday. That’s NOT how creativity works."

Ouch! Its enough to make a BPM feel all flustered and defensive of their craft. Nevertheless the above quote echoes the main points made by BPM critics. That many processes are not structured, predictable or logical and therefore, BPM approaches force a structured paradigm when none necessarily exists (Mind you, many other methodologies do precisely the same). In an appropriately titled article “The H-Bomb of Business Processes: Humans”, Ayal Steiner makes a point that also cuts to the heart of tame vs wicked problems debate too.

“The modern idea of BPM stresses a well-defined business process as the starting point but this is not always the case. Therefore, in a project that involves new practices or a cross-functional learning among participants, BPM has always had a tough time dealing with the humans.”

The notion of the well-defined starting or ending point is one of the characteristics of a tame problem. Wicked problems are often characterised by poorly defined staring and ending points. In fact with a wicked problem, often participants cannot agree on what the problem is in the first place!

Critics like Steiner also argue that many roles within an organisation, tend to deal with more tacit, dynamic situations and as such spend a large amount of their work time performing collaborative human work, when compared to transactional business process work (knowledge workers is the prevailing label for this type of role). While the main area of benefit for BPM’s is its ability to increase the efficiency of a core business process, the sort of thinking required to re-think processes in a systematic manner involves collaboration and systems thinking (in other words, beyond the process in front of us and how it interacts and interrelates more broadly since the whole of the broader system is greater than the sum of its parts). This is a human-driven activity as it is based on humans collaborating and innovating.

Closer to SharePoint home, Sadie Van Buren noted this same distinction in May 2010 which was around the same time I started the development of my IA class.

Human Process Management

So if BPM is incomplete, enter Human Process Management (HPM). HPM is concerned with process that is not easily defined, nor well structured, where it is hard to prescribe the execution of the process based on some model of the business. With human process, it is generally known how to achieve an intended result, but each case is handled separately and requires tacit judgment (for both decisions and flow) as part of the process. There is not enough standardization between instances of the process that allows for a formal, complete and rigorous description of the process end-to-end.

The obvious downside of human processes, say the critics, is that they are far too fluid and dynamic to be made part of an Enterprise BPM system. As a result, these processes tend to be handled through email, which in turn contributes to information overload and poor information worker productivity – precisely why we look to tools like SharePoint in the first place! The implication of HPM is that we need to shift emphasis to tools and practices that help us deal with unstructured or ad-hoc processes (and the information created/used during that process) more so than tools that deal with the well-defined world of BPM.

To be fair to the BPM crowd, these above criticisms will be seen by BPM practitioners as naive, since from their point of view, the less structured side is simply a part of the entire BPM spectrum. They argue that critics do not properly understand the principles and philosophy of BPM in the first place (Agile and PMBOK defenders say essentially the same thing when defending from critics). Supporting this counterargument is a key theme for BPM success that is regularly emphasised. That is, the critical pre-requisite of clarity of purpose and shared understanding of the end in mind. Mohamed Zairi, in a paper called “Business process management: a boundaryless approach to modern competitiveness” stated:

“The achievement of a BPM culture depends very much on the establishment of total alignment to corporate goals and having every employee’s efforts focused on adding value to the end customer.”

Therefore the BPM crowd are arguing for the same human process that HPM base their criticism on. Developing a culture of alignment to corporate goals is very much a human process. Are the HPM fanboy criticisms well founded or is it more a case that some BPM guys forget about strategic goal alignment and optimise process in isolation?

What do the facets say?

Clearly, there is a natural tension between these two polarities of BPM and HPM and this often plays out in organisational life in how we collaborate to deliver organisational outcomes. While there have always been process nazis, the emergence of social collaboration platforms that do not have a great deal of formal structure (think tagging and folksonomies) has led to a great deal of debate and self examination in BPM circles and beyond. Understanding these traits is critically important on the use of SharePoint tools, because SharePoint – and in particular SP2010 offers features for both BPM and HPM aficionados. Putting the two together however might risk Robot Barbie scenarios.

Straight away, it seems that the transactional vs. social axis of the facets of collaboration neatly explain the Business Process Management (BPM)/Human Process Management (HPM) challenge. Both areas are concerned with producing an output or getting something done. Therefore I have drawn BPM and HPM leaning toward the task side of the model. HPM proponents argue that human process is unstructured or semi-structured, dynamic, intertwined and borderless, which fits in well with the task/social trait of process and insight. BPM naturally fits into the lower transactional half where inputs are well defined.

 

While I would agree with the assertion that many processes are ill-defined and rely on tacit knowledge to be completed, HPM proponents go further though. For example, Ayal Steiner who I quoted earlier, argues that “analysts are now realising that human processes account for 80% of the business processes carried out in most organisations”. That is a big call, in effect, arguing that the majority of workplace interactions occupy the social quadrants above. I disagree. From my experience, most organisational roles have extremely varying degrees of transactional vs. social collaboration and some roles are in fact dominated by transactional collaboration. Perhaps there is some confirmation bias going on here, where knowledge workers who put in collaborative systems tend to think that everyone are knowledge workers too.

Here is an example. Mrs CleverWorkarounds used to be a medical nurse. When I first showed her this model I asked her to describe where nurses would fit in terms of their collaboration. She indicated two areas.

• Firstly, nurses are strongly linked by trait and transaction. This is because they all have a minimum degree of knowledge and skill. As stated in part 2, the key tell-tale sign of a role with transactional collaboration is how easily individuals performing that role can be replaced by someone else with similar experience at short notice. Supporting this, if a nurse is sick or unavailable, a replacement nurse can be called in to perform the same tasks.  Collaboration between nurses according to Mrs Cleverworkarounds is quite transactional as well. Routine and process consistency via tracking the status of patient care is a critical task – patient status is everything. Thus, data driven tools with version history and well defined inputs make this form of collaboration easier. In fact, Mrs CleverWorkarounds taught herself InfoPath and SPD Workflows because she was so convinced that automated forms with consistent audit trails via workflow would make her job easier.
• Yet at the same time, the sort of collaboration between nurses and patients is completely different and highly social in nature. No process is going to govern the interaction between nurse and patient. The type of care and counselling to get someone well is going to vary the type of interaction. A broken leg is one thing, health problems from say – alcoholism is something else entirely. The latter has much deeper symptoms than just the illness as presented. Here the focus is on patient well-being and goes beyond status of meds, when doctors have visited or accurate handover notes from one nursing shift to another.

State machine workflows?

Interestingly, even seemingly well-defined business processes tend to have ad-hoc and dynamic aspects to them. When there is an exception to the standard process, those exceptions tend to be handled in a relatively ad-hoc, case-by-case manner. Microsoft developer Pravin Indurkar cited an example of a seemingly transactional purchase ordering system.

“Often the business processes contain a prescribed path to the end goal but then there are a lot of alternate ways the same goal can be achieved. For example, a purchase order can contain a prescribed path where the PO goes from being created, to approved, to shipped, and then to completed. But then there a multitude of other ways in which the PO can be completed. The PO can get changed, or back ordered or cancelled and then Reopened. All these paths must be accounted for.”

Indurkar studied the purchase order system of a small business and found that apart from the one standard traditional order fulfilment process, there were about 65 different variations on the same process depending on the nature of the order. This is when BPM diagrams start to get scary. If you think that this workflow below is scary, then be more scared. It is page 12 of a 136 page process!

Naturally, trying to hardwire such a large number of alternate paths is very difficult and traditionally, there were two ways in which this was dealt with;

• Either the business process was hard wired to accommodate all the paths as shown in figure 1, which made the implementation of the business process extremely complex, brittle and hard to maintain.
• The alternate paths are simply not dealt with and any situation of the ordinary was dealt outside the domain of the process. This meant that tracking and visibility were lost because people would create manual systems to track such out of the ordinary situations. The facet diagram below illustrates this:

In Indurkar’s article that I quoted with the purchase order example, he argued that the solution to this sort of problem was via state-based or state-machine workflows which SharePoint has supported in a basic fashion, out of the box since SP2007. This kind of workflow, if you are not aware, is when the workflow waits for one or more events to move it into another state. There is no sequence as such, because this new target state can be any of the defined states in the workflow. This makes state workflows reflect the unpredictable nature of process variations.

Thus, it could be argued that BPM is not incomplete as what the HPM fanboys think, but that critics have a less than holistic understanding of the craft?

Conclusion: A Process Analysis Tool…

To be honest, I don’t want to answer the question of which fanboy is right because it is a bit of a zero sum game. When you think about process, many seem to have elements of transactional and social in them (just like job roles). For example, an “Approval” decision diamond in a business process diagram will determine the path a process takes. Apart from stating the fact that this process is a gateway where a decision is made, this says nothing about whether the activity of making that decision is transactional or social. In some processes the decision may be made by a rigorous data driven process (like a point-score based credit check for a loan applicant). In others it may be on gut feel (such as choosing the right applicant for a job position).

So to me, whether you are the most regimented process nazi or the most cowboyish non-conformist hippie, modelling a business process according to its ratio of transactional to social facets is probably very useful indeed to complement a BPM model. It help us understand how much tacit judgement is required in a given process and whether modelling every variation in a sequential workflow is worthwhile. Check out some examples on how this could be done below. In first example on the left, a business process where the majority of the steps are performed by tacit judgement might look like something like how I have drawn, with a task based social dominance. If the process in question indeed looks like this, then attempting to document every minute variation on the paths the process can take might not be worthwhile. Perhaps documenting the broad process (within the constraints of any compliance regime requirements) might be a better idea. In the second example, the process seems to be oriented around a repeatable set of choices (task based transactional dominant). As a result it may be worthwhile formally documenting these variations.

 

By combining these “process diagnostics” with the actual diagram, we might now offer additional insights into how the organisation really works with a certain process and do crazy stuff like produce something akin to my mockup below:

Hell, throw in a RACI chart and now you start to see process accountabilities as well!

Of course, you could always remove the task/trait axis if it is not needed and simply use a sliding scale. Nevertheless, what this shows is that the facets of collaboration model offers an extra dimension to any process being modelled and would help many to better understand the nature of the process being modelled, as well as strategies for improving that process via SharePoint.

Thanks for reading

 

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

p.s If you are a real trainspotter/glutton for punishment and want to dive deeper, google “Human Interaction Management” and “Role Activity Diagrams”