Catherine Shinners

Blockchain in Government Conference 2018 - convening important conversations in the public sector

Conference overview

Euan Semple hosted a new Blockchain in Government conference in Washington D.C., November 7 & 8 - an initiative of his and Jane Dysart, longtime organizer of KM World and related conferences.

The Blockchain in Government event was targeted to begin wider conversations around the opportunities for the blockchain model to make a difference in the work and services of governments and social impact organizations.

Experts as well as experimenters from Europe and the U.S., came together to share their projects, explorations and early learnings. Speakers as well as attendees were able to have insightful and broad-ranging conversations that explored the challenges of early projects, and probed the ways the decentralized trust structure of blockchain could bring an ecosystem of new services to the public sector.

Over a series of blog post (and this is the first), I’ll summarize some key presentations and then provide a synthesis of the dialogue over the course of the conference.

Getting grounded - Blockchain characteristics & applications in the public sector

The first day’s speakers included Kevin Werbach Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and his talk was helpful in grounding the attendees to the value proposition of blockchain.

Werbach is known for his work in gamification (and I took his Coursera MOOC in 2014), and as he noted gamification is about using structures to excite and motivate.  Bitcoin started with a unique motivational challenge - how can you get people to verify other people’s transactions - essentially what Bitcoin mining is about. There’s got to get someone who pays that cost of trust (i.e., when you don’t have a ‘institutional’ intermediary in the middle).  

What Satoshi Nakamoto did with the proof of work consensus was to create a game for which one is paid - if you win the block award as a miner.  This motivational aspect of the blockchain idea interested Werbach - what could we learn from gamification, technology and internet policy over the years within the blockchain frame?  (Werbach was a member of the Federal Communications Commission in 1994 when the internet had 30 million members).

He feels that many of the conversations about blockchain focuses on highly hyped areas (i.e. cryptocurrencies) and are missing the depth of its potential which he sees could have as much impact as the internet protocol.

To understand the innovative concept around blockchain, Werbach referenced three main trust architectures that have play a role heretofore in commerce and government.

• Peer-to-peer (i.e., families or close knit communities)
• Leviathan (trust in governments as backstops, i.e., a contract is a legal agreement, that if violated, parties have recourse in a court, and judiciary is an arm of the government). While a government stands behind transactions, there’s lots of inefficiencies, redress only works after the fact, high overhead (need legal expertise), and you aren’t sure you will obtain the results you want
• Intermediary - parties trust the platform that intermediates a relationship.  The challenge is that intermediaries can become a monopoly, extracting value out of the individuals in the parties as well

 

The blockchain trust structure

The blockchain model allows an individual, as a user/participant, to trust the output of the system without trusting any one actor in the system.  You can trust that a cryptocurrency is worth something even though you might not know or trust anyone in the network Everyone is incentivized to come together with consensus (the provable consistency across a network without central control).  This, in a sense, is a well-designed game - everyone is incentivized to behave through consensus. The system as a whole produces something of value.

Blockchains are systems that produces trustworthy outcomes and are not limited to crypto-economic trusts systems (systems that uses tokens as the mechanisms to incentivize that verification).

Permission systems don’t use a cryptocurrency but still have the same character - you can trust the system and outcomes - it could be constructed as a consortium or a smaller group of actors that come together in the ledger, none of whom, individually have the power where you would  have to be sure they are trustworthy as an individual actor.

Blockchain Value Propositions

Werbach called out the primary value propositions of blockchain, especially for government.

• Trust minimization - No dependence on state, single point of failure, monopoly tax  (if you have to trust someone you can end up being dependent on them, and they can take advantage of you)  You don’t have to have any political or ideological positions to understand that there can be downsides to trust - If you have to put trust into a centralized entity, that can be problematic) (Can be a central point of failure or risk) If it was possible to rely on the outcome of a system without having to rely on any one actor, that would be very powerful).
• Trust expansion - Avoid reconciliation, automated execution, integral audit-ability.  Often there’s not enough trust i.e., there are vast number of situations where different parties have to work together such as supply chain - a massive multi-trillion $ set of activities - all the goods and services that we interact with are moving between companies, and don’t necessarily trust one another).  Every supplier has their own databases, no one can trust that they’re all seeing the same information that’s why we have settlement and reconciliation. Each party will say - "Here’s the API to my database, you can plug into my database, you’ll give me an API to get into your database."  But now we have two databases - Lots of cost, duplication and possibility for error. Because there are gaps in trust, everyone can’t be sure they are seeing the same information. So there has to be a whole set of processes around settlement and reconciliation.
  

Blockchain overcomes trust barriers

• Because there is a common framework, if we can all see a common ledger, then that’s a foundation.
• Like the Internet - a common basis for applications - blockchain becomes a platform.
• The internet “won”  because it was a simple platform and was widely used
• Something similar is potential with a blockchain substrate - code that executes on the network - crypto-currency  transactions just code that executes on the network - a Smart Contract executes on the blockchain platform

As Werbach noted, “we are not there yet - the promise far greater than the reality. There are huge questions about scale and interoperability for instance.”

Three primary blockchain phenomena

Cryptocurrencies - the tokens themselves are useful as money, for something like Bitcoin, and to power DeCentralized Apps (dApps)  a raft of token offerings i.e., Filecoin are using tokens to power decentralized cloud file storage,

Distributed ledgers ( a lot more real for enterprise business and relevant to public sector)

Not using a token as a focal point, but  focused on the shared ledger of information so that that everyone can see the same info without a central actor. Useful for areas such as

• Tracking - think supply chain
• Authentication - identity management for service delivery (governments)

Cryptoassets

Wall Street is moving aggressively (or as Werbach puts it “swallowing”) cryptocurrencies as a new asset class (not tied to anything physical in the world) to create markets with these assets (that are Infinitely sub-dividable and infinitely trade-able).  Leading players like Fidelity, Goldman Sachs and others are pushing into tradeable cryptoassets. The industry is now going through a process of working out the regulatory processes many jurisdictions around the world are working.

 

Blockchain for government (why does this make sense for public sector applications?)

• Environment - In some locales there is low trust in government institutions - situations where there’s a gap in trust, i.e., places where corruption is endemic and important civil activities don’t happen because of it.
• Resource flexibility - governments and public sector operate with constrained resources, but blockchain is a basic technology, is open source and uses a shared infrastructure.  As its decentralized, a government doesn’t need to invest in a vast amount of centralized infrastructure.

Common requirements of government applications

• Strong security essential - blockchain provides some new sorts of decentralized security - designed at the core to be secure
• Transparency for monitoring and accountability - the blockchain ledger allows transactions to be visible - public very transparent, private has a variety of different structures - it’s possible to embed automated accountability into the system.  It’s possible to track transactions to make it auditable - not to have private info or control of those transactions in order to track what’s going on and these are important elements for government applications

Benefits

Government blockchains, then, can be seen as a kind of  platform or foundation for a whole variety of applications. For instance government can create a trust infrastructure for a whole range of identity-based applications- birth certificates, social security.  Many states and CIOs of cities are interested in bringing in blockchain as a way to foster economic development. People are looking to organizations that are looking to experiment in both public and private sectors.  

Here are some sample applications that are useful in the public sector, and can springboard private sector opportunities

Example: Accurate Record-keeping

Recording-keeping - It’s actually a hard problem - and many times because it’s a centralized function.  Chicago is beginning to use it for land title records - Anchored to the bitcoin blockchain. It’s a foundation that third parties could use - i.e., to build mortgage applications on this infrastructure

Jack Markell - former governor of Delaware announced a project for corporate shares that can be issued on the blockchain.

• Delaware is dealing with the problem that people don’t know their cap table or the state of each share at a particular moment in time.   A central intermediary manages this now, but a blockchain system could potentially in real time keep track of all a company’s shares.

Example: Efficient service provision

• World Food Program (WFP) provides cash grants to refugees  - i.e., In Jordan for Syrian refugees - money that they can use at a set of markets in the refugee camps
• People don’t have identities - how can you build a trusted system to distribute money to refugees in needs. Which keeps a record of the cash transfers that go to the refugees, and gets tracked back to the markets.  There is also use of biometrics.
• Where they hope to go next - they hope to layer other services on top of it.  Right now the WFP is the only actor in this blockchain network, but they hope to get other NGOs, other actors involved including private sector companies, i.e., job training.

Example:  City of Berkeley, CA

Issues city bonds on blockchain

Example: Secure Voting

West Virginia, Siera Leonne

 

Thinking through blockchain - relevance solution to particular problems

• -Do you need or want a blockchain?
• -Can the assets or activities be digitized securely?
• -Are the assets or activities outside the control of one entity?
• -Do you want to share data without giving up control over that data?
• -Are you more concerned about attacks than crashes- availability?
• -Do you want an immutable history of transactions?

Many times, technology isn’t the issue for permissioned networks.  For example, IBM and Maersk struggled to sign partners to a shipping blockchain - often it’s really a question of governance.

Werbach noted a recent survey done in June 2018 by Cowen & Co., that indicated robust enterprise and government adoption will take time - significant percentages those surveyed agreed on an average of six years.   This should not be surprising to anyone who has worked on large scale, mission critical applications in business or government. Like the internet, it will take experimentation, astute evaluation of where blockchain will be most strategic and useful, and the lead time on developing talent, and management education related to decision-making on the right investment in blockchain applications.  Werbach's new book on blockchain as the new trust architecture is going to be published on November 20, 2018.

 

Werbach's conference slides

Werbach's book

 

#BlockchainInGov

Teams at Google - high performing units of learning

Last year, Google’s approach to team effectiveness was featured in an extended New York Times Sunday magazine story by Charles Duhigg  - What Google Learned from it’s Quest to Build Perfect Teams.  That quest was based on years of research and analysis on the nature and practice of effective teams the distillation of which brought to light five core dimensions of healthy, productive teams.

The Silicon Valley Organizational Development Network hosted a conversation with Mark Ball, of Google’s People Operations early in September 2017.    Mark’s work with People Operations is to put Google’s research-based model for team effectiveness into practice and he indicated they've worked with hundreds of teams across the company.

Some baseline characteristics of teams are groups of nine to fifteen individuals, not reporting to a manager per se, but have some sort of shared workflow.   Groups beyond fifteen people becomes unwieldy.   In their research phase, Google worked to identify shared characteristics of high performing teams - the teams themselves see their performance as high, their manager(s) do as well, and a senior leader recognizes their high performance.    

As the New York Times article notes and Mark Ball elaborated, Google took time to survey their own teams, review leading research and try to determine the fundamental dimensions of team effectiveness.   Was co-location correlated?   Are they consensus-driven?  Was there a particular introversion-extroversion balance?   Was there a particular kind of leadership?   

After years of rigorous study, they identified in order of importance these five dimensions of healthy, productive teams.

• psychological safety - it’s safe to take interpersonal risks
• dependability - teammates do excellent work, on time
• structure and clarity - we are good at making decisions and have clear goals
• meaning - my work is personally important to me
• impact - our work matters to the company

It must be noted that teams at Google operate within a company-sanctioned  'policy of obligatory dissent’  - individuals are encouraged, if not required to bring forward questions or disagreements no matter  “rank” or “level” of people in the discussion - so the cultural organizational norm already establishes psychological safety.  Ball also observed that people at Google are not arrogant, they listen to each other.   

Once Google identified these five dimensions, Mark Ball and the People Operations group developed responsive services to teams within the organization that are designed to help them assess their team effectiveness and supports team development towards high performance.  While some of their work can be customized for team needs, they do have an internal tool that teams is used to look at current team culture and operations.

The People Operations team provides trained facilitators to conduct a post assessment session structured to review the results of the assessment, facilitate a conversation about their teaming practice and to guide them towards things they want to change.  A typical post assessment session might flow as follows.

• 10 minutes of what the report surfaced
• 30 minutes on whatever the team wants to talk about
  • The tool gives them a structure to have the conversation about their teaming
  • Allows topics to be brought up that are of interest or highlight challenges
• 45 minutes - what’s the action the team will take

Ball indicated that they encourage teams to focus on taking simple actions that might improve various dimensions.    To strengthen psychological safety, Ball had some easy habits and interventions - have lunches together, put laptops down during meetings, if there’s been a bit of tension don’t talk bout anyone else on the team until 24 hours have passed.  

Psychological safety is about humanizing team members to one another (and a powerful story to that effect was highlighted in the NY Times article).  Humanization comes from spending time with one another, telling each other stories.    As the group accepts their members' authenticity and even vulnerability, they begin to operate in an environment where people can take risks and see that the entire team is supporting them.

Other kinds of small, but effective interventions can help strengthen other dimensions.  For meeting agenda items, note if the item is a Decide or Discuss topic.   This can be helpful when a team wants to improve decision-making.  A note-taker for the meeting could say “what did we decide?” to help clarify if people are really on the same page.   Mark Ball observed that non-productive conflict happens when a team doesn’t have a clear goal.     

Managers need to understand what is meaningful for different team members.   It’s very different for each individual, but supporting them as individuals helps them be strong team members.  Senior leaders have to communicate how a team’s work fits in and helps the larger whole.   

I spoke with Ball for a few minutes and shared that we use some of the Google material in the Information and Knowledge Strategy Master’s program at Columbia University School of Professional Studies where I am on the faculty.  In one of the courses I co-teach, Networks and Collaboration, we explore how we effectively use team and network collaboration for impact.   Collaboration through networks, communities, alliances and project teams is essential in the modern organization, and we use the Charles Duhigg article and Harvard's Amy Edmondson readings on teams. 

Ball noted that a culture of productive teams also creates a continuous learning culture that is so vital for a company to thrive.   People need holistic context to engage deeply and effectively in their work and the five dimensions of the Google teams approach brings together the elements people need to sustain that context for productive and meaningful work.

Reflections on white collar AI on the horizon and a talk by Euan Semple

Over the past few years my work has been focused on helping people in organizations to re-think how they work, communicate and engage in a digital workplace.   Despite the proliferation of collaboration, communication and social network tools and technologies within companies, people still work with pre-digital mindsets and behaviors. It takes time, conscious effort and some re-skilling to move people into fully inhabiting the digital workplace.   As automation with artificial intelligence capabilities gains momentum, how will these elements affect what we think of as the digital workplace?

So it was with great interest that I attended a conversation around the growing impact of artificial intelligence in the world of knowledge work in a talk given in March 2017 by Euan Semple for students and alumni of the Information and Knowledge Strategy Master’s program at Columbia University where I am adjunct faculty in the program.

As Euan noted, our lived experience is increasingly digitized.   We’re challenged as individuals to catch up with the pace of technological change and advancements. 

Organizations struggle to respond institutionally to the unpredictability of technological abundance and change - the power in our pockets.   Euan noted that we perhaps also over-estimate the millennial ability with technology.   While adept at the mechanics of interactivity, it’s not always a sure bet that they make the most productive use of the computing in those pockets.   But they surely have different expectations about technology use in organizations - that it’s always available, in any context, in any location.  Companies and organizations are eager that their workforce become more flexible, independently interactive, pro-active at knowledge sharing and masterful at collaborating.

Despite advancements in technology, organizations still operate and structure themselves along very Tayloristic models according to Euan.   They’ve been organized to minimize risk and unpredictability and maximize efficiency of repeatable processes.   As he noted, people are recruited and rewarded for a set of characteristics that can support Taylorism.    But that’s not the workplace that we’re transitioning to in an age of digital disruption and certainly not the level of disruption and opportunity afforded by the integration of artificial intelligence into the structure of work.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will impact all sorts of work processes - and not just manufacturing and customer service.   Routine, predictable processes and knowledge work are ripe for AI - in the legal, medical, insurance and financial services sectors, for instance.   What happens to the legions of “white collar” workers over the next 5, 10, 15 years - people whose careers have been built on reliably performing this kind of work in Tayloristically structured organizations?   I’ve recently read a late 2015 McKinsey Institute report Four fundamentals of workplace automation which noted that while entire jobs may not be replaced, many aspects of certain kinds of functions will be.  In McKinsey’s estimation “45 percent of the activities individuals are paid to perform can be automated by adapting currently demonstrated technologies.”  This would represent about $2 trillion in annual wages in the U.S.

staying ahead of robots

So how do we “stay ahead of the robots” as Euan asks?   How do we enhance the things we’re good at to stay relevant, engaged and employed?

How we even think about work may change - what will constitute work when certain aspects of it are automated?   As Semple notes, historically we have thought of work in somewhat puritanical terms - something that might be demanding, unpleasant, a duty, not a joy.   

the manager and the managed

People who inhabit managerial roles may become a thing of the past, as our increasingly automated and digital way of working obviates managers as purveyors of information or coordinators in chief.   For Euan, there is a fundamental shift - management styles, assumptions, morays and procedures are based on the model of managing conscripts.  
He noted that he had been on a panel where discussants had reflected that given how bad people’s experience of management has been they might well prefer to have an algorithmic driven interface with the management of their organization as long as it was transparent and clear how it was presenting decisions. 

What constitutes management in an AI driven world?   Given the networked nature of our world, individuals have the capability and can master skills to work within various networks. They can access the information and data that they need.   Networks of autonomous thoughtful, tolerant individuals can coalesce to work productively together as freelancers or networks of freelancers.   

Work performance in the Tayloristic model is bounded by consistency, adherence to protocol or procedures.  In a different world of work, we may discover whole new ways of adding value to one another.  As Euan said "If robots are doing all the routine stuff, organizations will need to attract people who are smart enough to willingly step up and make a difference...and manage the robots.”   Organizations say they want transformation, but in actuality they want to tinker, not transform.

the broader society and whither the internet

Organizations and companies and the people in them are challenged, as are our civic institutions.  The pace of change and new complexities are outstripping institutional capacity for rational adaptation - leading to frustration and distrust among the populous.  Our sense of media being a reliable "fourth estate" has been compromised by propagandist web and TV properties, a proliferation of manufactured, bot-led conversations on social media so we have an increasing sense we live in a ‘post-truth’ society.   For Euan, the web is a place of too much marketing, packaged commercial material and so a sense of the promise of the internet is not fulfilled.  

As Euan Semple reflected, in the face of the unpredictability in the workplace and sense of the untrustworthiness of the media, people are using their own networks to create meaning and civic cohesion.

The internet is only thirty years old, the web only twenty years on.   What can we imagine it will be at fifty?   Euan implied that it will need our continued, active, direct engagement in the spirit of  David Weinberger - writing ourselves into existence.

Communities for Change

Companies continue to use traditional change management approaches to move important initiatives across their organizations - initiatives such as Agile development, data science or overarching digital transformation efforts.    Such initiatives not only involve getting stakeholder support and orientation and baseline executive buy-in, but means moving major cohorts of the workforce, if not the entire workforce to be educated in new skills and practices.   Last year, in article Changing Change Management, McKinsey Quarterly noted that 70 percent of change programs fail, but noted it was time to integrate digital strategies to address the pace and breadth of change that needs to flow through organizations.

 

New skills and practices often require fundamental mindset shifts in the way to approach business problems and models of interaction and managing work and information flows.   An organizational memo and power point briefing will not suffice to transition the workforce, but instead requires leveraging new network-based social structures and digital tools to broadly increase the uptake of new skills and embed new practice into organizational culture.

 

Companies or organizations who have made the investment in enterprise social networks or widely available collaboration platforms have the technology to integrate Communities for Change as a powerful component of change programs.   Communities provide important value for change initiatives.   Organizations can expand the reach of the change program by activating horizontal knowledge flows and decision-making.  Community interactions provide more two-way processes to engage stakeholders and broaden social learning in the context of work and socializes knowledge management.  A community becomes a venue for sustained peer-to-peer exchanges, surfacing expertise.  A community for change also gives leaders and executives a view into breadth and depth of the change program’s effectiveness.      

 

Here are some models of Communities for Change

 

Business integration champions -  Coalescing a community of business-side champions can be a vital element in an overall change initiative.   A business integration champion community brings together identified leaders who become advocates for the change across their organizations.  An online community program can be structured to engage its members to provide input into change strategies and guidance, suggest and help design adoption campaigns and participate in discussion forums and virtual roundtables on initiative topics and challenges.   Importantly through the online community experience, champions can gain a sense of connection with one another.  

 

The community becomes an important resource for guidance and governance material, communications tools, and shared success stories, showcasing case examples of business process integration.   The community also becomes an opportunity for both expanded professional networking and recognition.   As with all successful communities, this kind of champion community entails a program design that includes curated and original content, a blend of online and live events, active facilitation of member interactions by a community manager, and an opportunity for leadership to participate and bring their voices to the mix in focused ways.

 

Education and applied practice - Communities of practice have proven to be effective for advancing the expertise or practice within a domain, and members have some form of pre-articulated or validated reputation or credential.   The formal experience of practice is a learning resource in an of itself.

 

Communities for Change include dimensions of a community of practice augmented with additional program features that are well-suited to initiatives that seek to introduce new disciplines and practice such as Agile or applied data science into an organization.   Often in these kind of initiatives, there is a strong element of initial education, training and credentialing of a cohort of members who will be directly integrating these new practices into their work and business processes.  

 

Key resources in these types of communities includes not only access to training, but access to sets of approved methodologies and tools.    As individuals move through training and initial practice, they also find the community a place for ongoing advancement of their expertise via interaction and knowledge exchange with their peers and senior mentors.    Another key element is to design the community to include a curated portfolio of applied projects to the business so that practitioners can learn from relevant projects and executives can gain insight into how to sponsor or bring projects into their own lines of business.   Other key community-based resources can include thought leadership or innovation examples from sources external to the organization.   The community can also be the launch point for crowdsourced responses to challenges or missions for members of the community to tackle.

 

Accelerating strategic initiatives - Communites for Change models can be used to coalesce and accelerate strategic initiatives.   A fine example of this is a case study highlighted in the book “The Social Organization: How to Use Social Media to Tap the Collective Genius of Your Customers and Employees” by Mark P. McDonald and Anthony J. Bradley.

In this instance, CEMEX, a global cement and building materials manufacturer wanted to increased the use of alternate fuels in their plants.   CEMEX used community collaboration to gather their plant staff and drove three cycles of engagement in the community.   The first was to engage 500 plant managers and engineers in the initial call to assess each plant’s practices.   The second cycle was a collaborative and transparent review of practices across all plants, identifying best or innovative practices.  The third cycle was transitioning the community to an ongoing knowledge sharing group, that not only brought improved practice, but helped even the best performing plants move towards continuous improvement.    This kind of initiative would have taken two years with more traditional approaches, according to McDonald and Bradley, but in this instance took six weeks.

 

In a 2012 Harvard Business Review article entitled Accelerate! , John Kotter proposed a new concept of using network models of interaction to coalesce “informal networks of change agents” whereby “the network and accelerators can serve as continuous and holistic change function.”    As companies embrace these more network-based models, Kotter proposed that companies would begin operating in what he calls a 'dual operating system' of both hierarchy and networks.

 

 

Fundamental underpinnings of successful communities are careful design and strong facilitation and stewardship through community management practice.     Communities for Change are highly leveragable network-based social structures to mobilize, accelerate and enlarge change initiatives and can be incorporated as a powerful addition to change management practice.

 

The Future of Work is Now

In the last two weeks of June 2016, four major technology companies entered into watershed relationships that harken the arrival of the Future of Work.   On June 13 Microsoft announced it’s intent to acquire LinkedIn.   This acquisition signals the driving of the value of the network into organizations.   The fundamental message - the network of people is now the membrane of the organization and will give the enterprise the flexibility it needs to identify and orient talent to where it’s needed.  

 

Some of the value points of the merger include the universal profile - an individual’s profile is now a strategic asset for the company as well as the individual, within as well as across organizations. An intelligent newsfeed will bring consolidated access and awareness to information.  A personal network digital assistant connected to the enterprise and the broader professional network will bring professionals high degrees of contextual coordination and relationship insight.   Via it’s own acquisition of Lynda.com last year, there’s an opportunity for LinkedIn to become a component of ‘just-in-time’ skills building for an enterprise workforce.  

 

The second announcement on June 30, brought forward a strategic Cisco and IBM partnership that will nominally bring more coherency to broad-based knowledge work and collaboration modalities through the integration of Cisco's Spark, WebEx and IBM’s Verse and Connections.   A key differentiator in this announcement is the intent to bring the capabilities of Watson into the mix - applying its analytical power to deliver what Jens Meggers, SVP of Cisco's Cloud Collaboration Technology Group calls ‘intelligent collaboration’ to deliver insight and augmented context to individuals as they work.

 

These significant technology movements and others like them will begin to enable tectonic shifts in organizational design, leadership models, and the social contract with a global workforce that is more multi-generational, diverse and multi-cultural than ever.  The Deloitte Human Capital Trends 2016 report’s orientation this year was “Different by Design” calling out the need to reshape leadership, rethink workforce engagement fundamentals, move learning to an ongoing and integrated experience, analytics tied to talent management, and weaving the resources of a growing gig economy into workforce management and operating models.    These and others trends touch every facet of organizational life and structure in companies.

 

Looming on the horizon are high impact technology advances such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), blockchain, and Internet of (Nano) Things, that the World Economic Forum notes will continue to shape, if not profoundly disrupt, our current understanding of the way people work in the knowledge economy.  For whether it’s the gig, sharing or digital economy, it’s still the knowledge economy and organizations orient resources - human and machine - toward knowledge work that is the major source of value in the world today.

 

 

 

Future of Work (#FOW) Disconnnect

Despite the momentum of technological advances and these important new technology partnerships, there’s often a significant disconnect between current models of organizational design, leadership approaches, operational models and human talent assessment that would lead to real Future of Work organizations.

 

Skills

Both workers and leadership in organizations seem to have a level of disconnect in the area of skills.   In June 2016, the City and Guilds Group published a Skills Confidence report based on surveying 8,000 workers in the United Kingdom, United States, South Africa and India.  Alarmingly, those surveyed felt both their skills and their jobs would be relevant over the next ten years, belying an awareness of the magnitude of disruption likely from the aforementioned technology advances.

 

In a 2013 report by the Conference Executive Board, Breakthrough Performance in  the New Work Environment: Identifying and Enabling the New High Performance noted that profitable growth was expected out of increases in worker efficiency and productivity, a technique that had been successful over the previous two decades.   Workers, however, were feeling  tapped out and at a loss to adapt to increasingly complex work environments.  The report advised executives to proactively identify and support new skills building, including teamwork, organizational awareness, problem solving, proactivity, influence, decision-making, learning agility and more.

 

The World Economic Forum and the Institute for the Future have also articulated similar ‘new skills for the 21st century’, but in the City and Guilds Group report, workers don’t seem to be expressing an awareness of the skills they need to develop, nor are they finding the leadership guidance they need towards building those skills.

 

Organizational Design

Enterprise Social Networks and cloud technologies are now commonplace in many organizations.   Digital transformation affords the organization the opportunity to transform core operating models and common business process workflows and communication patterns.   However, Enterprise Social Networks in particular have often been implemented as a new layer of technology without strategic re-alignment of core communications and business workflows.   Workers are therefore doing many of the things the way they did before while trying to adapt to the new technology without a sense of business focus.    Leadership is often not directly engaged, nor driving expectations and investments in re-architecting old ways of operating to new efficiencies.   

 

But the technology delivered is expected to bring both new efficiencies and innovation.  Microsoft, for instance, explicitly calls out how they expect the combined Microsoft-LinkedIn capabilities to affect the sales process, as well as talent management and skills development.   

 

Leadership

Like knowledge workers, leaders are also experiencing great change and expectations relative to the scope and nature of their roles.  The Conference Executive Board in 2014 published the results of a survey of 23,000 business executives in their report The Rise of the Network Leader: Reframing Leadership in the New Work Environment.  These executives, according to the report, by large measure indicated the scope of their responsibilities and objectives had grown, as well as the mandate to deliver business results faster.   They also, in many cases, have a more global role with frequent shifts in responsibilities.  As the report notes, leaders need to cultivate new skills themselves beyond the core leadership arenas of transformation and transactional leadership (core areas of management performance today) to add network-based leadership.   It is worth quoting specifically from the paper the characteristics of network leadership.

 

"Network Leadership—This role involves establishing strong network performance by building, aligning, and enabling broad networks both internal and external to the organization. Network leadership is more about influence than control; it is also a more indirect than direct form of leadership, requiring leaders to create a work environment based on autonomy, empowerment, trust, sharing, and collaboration."

 

The Deloitte Human Capital Trends 2016 report noted that traditional models of leadership development are not keeping pace with business demands and the rate of change that companies are facing.    Both the Deloitte report and the City and Guilds report indicate a need for leaders to be more actively involved in organizational re-design and to proactively guide their workforce towards skills building and expectations for continuous learning.   

 

Culture and Ethos

As the articulation of network leadership by the CEB notes, leaders need to create a work environment based on autonomy, empowerment, trust, sharing and collaboration   The technology shifts indicated by these most recent business acquisitions and partnerships do much to enable the empowerment and collaboration of a workforce, to help them be able to shift rapidly to new work teams, projects and contexts and to be more responsive and adaptable to changing business needs.  In an environment when network leaders support this kind of culture and ethos, then knowledge workers feel empowered to take up the tools and interactive and learning modalities to become proficient ‘future of workers.” 

 

Along with new models of leadership, new approaches for worker performance and recognition will evolve to include not only individual performance, but network contribution.   Like network leaders, individuals will be active agents on the network, both internally and externally to an organization.   A network performer will be able to make their knowledge and skills visible, use their network acumen to move rapidly and productively into new teams, and weave learning into their everyday experience.

 

A Good Place to Start

The Microsoft acquisition of LinkedIn and the Cisco and IBM strategic partnership are powerful indicators of where the Future of Work is soon headed.

 

However, many companies and organizations already have digital and social collaboration tools will let them move more actively in that direction right now.   Leaders can begin to adopt network leadership behaviors and skills, driving strategies to actively move critical workflows and business processes to these platforms and identifying key Future of Work skills that workers are expected to master.   Knowledge workers can begin to cultivate their own network agency and adaptability by proactively adopting the tools and technology and incorporate skills building as a steady part of their work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Something's on overload, but it's not collaboration

Rob Cross, Reb Rebele and Adam Grant just published an intriguing article in the Harvard Business Review, decrying Collaborative Overload in the workplace. It seemed to me that much of the challenges and issues they called out did not have much to do with collaboration, per se, but with poor interaction and knowledge management practices, irregular or vague governance and guidance, and haphazard project and team management processes.   In my work with organizations and companies, it’s often these kinds of issues that impact productive collaboration.

 

The knowledge worker of the 21st century is indeed experiencing overload - expectations of continued workforce productivity gains often outpaces the ability of workers to maximize the potential of the use of new technologies while increasing their output.  A 2013 Conference Executive Board Report noted unambiguously the high impact of workforce productivity on the bottom line.

 

“Since 1993, revenue per full-time equivalent (FTE) had grown at a 3.23% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) compared to no growth in revenue per cost of goods sold (COGS; CAGR= 0.16%)  and a -0.61% in revenue per invested capital."

 

The climate of knowledge work has changed dramatically in the last fifteen years - people are often working on varied. globally dispersed, teams rolling up to multiple reporting structures.  They're collaborating and interacting with customers, prospects and partners online.   Workers often must interact with 10-20 people per day to get their job done - a job that is increasingly dependent on information.   Add to this day-to-day team, information and interaction complexity are increases in the number and more rapid cadence of organizational shifts and restructuring that knowledge workers must adapt to.   As the CEB report notes even with these new work challenges growing, there is also the expectation of a 20% workforce performance improvement among global executives.

 

Interaction doesn’t equate to collaboration, and some aspects of this article imply as much by focusing the modalities (emails, phone calls, etc)  rather than the contexts for collaboration. It's true that using the wrong tool or modality for the job can be grossly inefficient (email to manage complex workflows, for instance) but some of the overload may be about other issues rather than too much collaboration.

 

Inquiry overload

Aspects of the collaborative overload the article focuses on areas that don’t appear to be collaboration issues (or ad hoc collaboration requests as Cross et al. refer to) but knowledge management work practice gone awry.   Many organizations have that ‘go-to’ person who seems to know how to find things quickly or has expertise at their fingertips to share, or seem to be ‘in-the-know’ about what’s going on with organizational shifts and changes.      That ‘go-to’ person becomes a human knowledge repository; it’s easier to ‘ask Joe’ rather than seek the information in other ways.    Often that person can provide background, insight and context around the information that’s being sought.    

 

There are often three facets to this problem.   The first is that people don’t want to bother with searching for the information they need, or the information seems difficult to find, and therefore often turn to that ‘go-to’ person first.    Why might information be difficult to locate?  The organization’s search technology may not be up to date or well implemented so that search results are incomplete or bring in too much extraneous, irrelevant results  Often much information is buried in email chains that’s simply not broadly accessible.

 

The second challenge is that guidance and governance to the workforce on how to appropriately utilize content management systems is undeveloped or not well-understood.   Workplace norms around  labeling, tagging, distribution and storing practice are missing.  Work practices remain locked into 1990s modalities of using email to coordinate and communicate around complex work processes and as ways to distribute vital business content.

 

  

Finally, the worker who’s being continually tapped, may be in demand, yet disengaged because they’re not able to leverage what they know.  They may be getting similar questions from multiple sources.   They’re barraged by one-offs - their inputs or responses not visible or scalable.   As Cross et al. notes, those workers would value mentoring, coaching or training others.  

 

New digital and social tools can help individuals create conversational spaces where common questions get answered, or discussion around key topics can take place online, and others can see, learn from and repurpose without interrupting the knowledge expert.   The conversational aspect of the tools also affords the expert the opportunity to provide context, and there’s a dynamic, sustained thread of their shared expertise. Social collaboration tools also afford the opportunity to create collaborative communities of practice or knowledge networks where expertise can be more broadly and transparently shared and more centrally discovered by seekers.

 

Many companies are bringing social collaboration environments (enterprise social networks) into the collaborative mix.   An important, but frequently underutilized component of enterprise social networks is the rich profile.   Similar in concept to a LinkedIn profile, these rich profiles allow a worker to provide information about their background, expertise, interests, their network across the organization, and current work activities or products or blog about their work.   Yet this aspect of enterprise social networks are often not uniformly employed to good collaboration effect.   Knowledge seekers can use the social profiles in enterprise social networks to identify a variety of individuals with expertise or connections around a topic or information need.    An important 21st century work skill is to effectively use and develop networks. Knowledge workers need to develop the practice of searching social profiles for experts as a element of that network skill.   Leaders need to put in place work practice change programs to help workers effectively develop and use this skill.

 

Meeting overload

One of the most intractable challenges in companies today is real-time meeting overload.   The ease of access and usability of real-time web meeting tools has helped teams come together easily and quickly to aid in their project work.   Unfortunately workers are often in meetings, back to back for 6-10 hours day.    Just because people are in meetings, doesn’t mean they’re collaborating.   Often they’re multi-tasking since there’s little time to do other work or the meeting content is not applicable to their participation thereby diminishing their productivity elsewhere.

 

Here are some of the challenges I frequently observe that are not collaboration issues per se

• Meeting norms are weak or lacking  -  A meeting topic might be established, but no agenda is published in advance  to allow people to prepare, evaluate materials, ahead of time.  Since people are in back-to-back meetings, there’s no time for people to prepare or publish status or project updates in other, asynchronous formats, so additional meeting time is needed for status updates (for which half the attendees may not find relevant to their portion of the project).   

• Collaboration or project norms are weak or lacking -   Got a project?  Set up a recurring meeting.   New projects or new matrix teams often don’t spend a little time at the beginning of joint work to set up simple collaboration norms.  Here are some questions that project teams might ask in order to streamline or eliminate meetings. 
  • What tools should we use to communicate and capture project activities?  How should we tag and distribute content so it is consistently findable and people receive timely alerts for new content?   Who should be in project meetings?   Do we need to meeting regularly?   If so, do we all need to be at every meeting?   Can we structure the meetings in a way that we use that meeting time to address things that we cannot accomplish as well using other collaboration tools?

Given the over-scheduling of meetings, it’s often difficult to start in a timely manner.   If one knowledge worker is in eight 1-hour meetings/day and each meeting started 5-7 minutes late, at the end of the day they would have lost 40-45 minutes of time and perhaps as much as 160-200 minutes/week.   Little of this time would be engaged in effective collaboration.

 

The challenges that Cross et al. call out are less issues with over-collaboration and more about reliance on unproductive default behaviors.     Here are some 21st century digital work practices that companies and knowledge workers need to consider to ameliorate overload and support more effective collaboration.

 

• Part of a work product includes connecting it to and making it findable on a network (link-ability, tagging, connecting to social profiles)
• Part of collaboration means consciously adapting to more transparent ways of working (Working Out Loud) 
• Part of team work includes establishing collaborative norms (which tools and modalities for which contexts)
• Part of knowledge worker productivity includes proactively managing flows of information, bringing elements like activity streams and tagged content into their realm of access and awareness.

 

All collaboration is not equal - contexts for collaboration 

In discussing challenges to collaboration or identifying ways to help individuals and organizations to engage in collaboration more productively, it’s important to be clear about the contexts for collaboration. 

 

Knowledge workers (and this includes leadership) inside organizations have to span these contexts and must

• be competent in being able to productively contribute to complex business processes and team projects employing digital and social tools and skills   
  
• be able to develop relationships and participate effectively in knowledge networks to advance their continual learning and skills development and to advance the knowledge capital of the broader organization.  
• deftly cultivate, navigate and participate in wider networks for broader insight to emergent and related knowledge fields and access to expertise beyond organizational boundaries.

 

Equally, in evaluating collaboration effectiveness it’s important for knowledge workers, leaders and others to understand that different kinds of collaboration and the inherent value of the collaboration are influenced by the nature of the collaboration context as outlined in the table below.

 

 

 

The purpose and depth of sustained interactions or relationships in team and community collaboration brings specific kinds of value, learning and outcomes.    To attain those kinds of value and outcomes requires leadership understanding and support for the right infrastructure, tools, guidance and governance.   

 

Organizational culture and practice can also enable good network collaboration (cooperation really) where knowledge workers and leadership can easily traverse the company as a network, and through less formal or sustained interactions seek the resources of the network to quickly solve problems, share ideas, seek expertise or make connections for future use.

 

Leaders also need to understand the new social structures of collaboration that include communities and crowdsourcing.   I've seen internal crowdsourcing used effectively to gain proposals from senior leadership in the organization for new business opportunities against a set of strategic objectives

 

 netWorking skills and competencies

 

Engaging in productive collaboration towards business purpose and outcomes is just one of many 21st century skills that knowledge workers and leadership need to master and be able to assess.     Knowledge workers are developing these skills as they work more and more in a web-workplace - using digital, cloud and mobile tools to engage and connect and work with global colleagues.   Leaders are developing new skills to convene networks and set in motion communities towards business purpose.   I co-teach a Social Organization course at Columbia University's Information and Knowledge Strategy master's program that focuses on how leaders launch, manage, measure and take in the learnings from communities.  These are vital practices and processes for 21st century management practice.

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

In future blog posts, I'll explore more about these skills and practices. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lurkers are learners: new approaches to understanding participation

Some concepts become embedded in common parlance as a standard truism but in fact serves to obscure real value in online behavior.  The 1-9-90 model of online community participation is one of those shorthands that doesn’t serve us well anymore.   The ratio of 1-9-90 articulates that 1% of online community participants are active creators, 9% make some contribution and the majority 90% are mere lurkers, individuals who seem to make no real contribution to the community dynamic, but consume for their own purposes.

 

This 1-9-90 model is too simplistic, and the lurker term originated in the early days of bulletin board chat forums.   Online communities are now an important element in businesses and organizations - both within the organization and as vital points of engagement with customers and partners.   

 

The Altimeter Group came up with a more nuanced model of online participation called “Social Technographics” in 2007 but was oriented around consumer behavior in online social experiences. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More recently, the Community Roundtable has released some interesting data on member types and new insight into the range of participation across four broad types.

Their research looks at both best in class communities as well as average performing communities and their 2015 numbers show these trends continuing.     We’re solidly beyond the 1-9-90 era.

 

What we’re seeing is that individuals are participating actively across the entire spectrum of possible behaviors.    Community members are contributing and actively participating in very robust percentages.    Active members are active consumers, not mere lurkers.     Keep in mind that community members may exhibit different behaviors on different days or months.   Just because they are a consumer on Tuesday, doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be a contributor on Wednesday.

 

Let’s talk about lurkers and why they are really learners

 

Community members in the “consumer” category may not exhibit overt participatory or contributory behavior at times for any number of reasons.

• They are new to the community and want to observe the social norms or etiquette of the group
• The focus of the content, raison d’être of the community is new to them, and they wish to familiarize themselves with content, current dialogue before jumping in.
• They are unfamiliar with how to participate in online communities - it’s a new behavior

But community members in the ‘consumer’ category do benefit and can spread those benefits beyond the community

• They may download and share content elsewhere in their own network
• They observe and learn from the dialogue going on in the community - vicarious, contextual learning 
• They may encourage others within their own network to join and explore the community
• Consumers can learn about the community while observing and in turn make meaningful contributions over time

Lurker is an negative term of little utility.    The word itself has unsavory connotations, drives the impressions that an entire segment of one’s community are passive observers, and obscures any nuanced understanding of these community members needs or aspirations.   In addition, community members often move from one set of behaviors to another a different times due to varying interests or workload demands.   

 

Thinking about and categorizing community members with more meaningful terms helps you, as a community manager, convey more value and insight to your stakeholder and management - people who may be resourcing or supporting your community.

 

It also helps drive your strategies for engagement - how should you be helping community members move from inactive to consumers or consumer to participant?   Understanding behavior profiles will more accurately inform your programming, content curation approaches, outreach and communication and engagement strategies.   It’s useful to think of all your community members on an engagement journey.

 

 

 

 There are a range of behaviors and types that one can consider when devising your community management approaches and strategies.   Here is a sample of some types that might resonate, and ways that you can engage and enlist those community members.

 

 

Let’s let the 1-9-90 mantra go and move away from the lurker nomenclature.    These community members are learners.

Community as durable competitive advantage - A tale of two companies at #kmworld

Jean-Claude Monney, Global KM Lead for Microsoft Services and Louis-Pierre Guillaume, Knowledge Manager at Schneider Electric, gave ample evidence of the major role communities play in each of their organizations in a joint talk at KM World in Washington DC on November 7.   Both companies see the strategic value of communities, and have comprehensive management, support and measurement structures in place to ensure not only community vitality, but business impact.

Schneider Electric is a global specialist in energy management and efficiency technologies with 25B Euro revenue and 160,000 employees.   The company has 130 communities with combined 24,000 members and 150 community leaders - 33 of those communities have been voted as very active.   Schneider Electric put in place a comprehensive program a few years ago - called Communities@Work, it provides a framework that includes communities working with charters, supported by a collaborative work environment that’s animated by active community leaders, and aligned to common strategic vision provided by a business sponsor.   Communities at Schneider fit within an overall landscape of knowledge management that include other methods - such as after action reviews and formal transfer of practices and mentoring programs.

For communities - a return on engagement

Schneider Electric looks at the value of communities in terms of a ‘return on engagement’ not ‘return on investment’ model, according to Guillaume.  They look at various indicators of basic community health, such as adoption and participation using platform measurements and community event attendance.   They also use the NetPromoter model to assess engagement and use a simple survey to gauge satisfaction.   Finally they also invest in publishing and promoting success stories and inspiring anecdotes to underscore the impact of the community model.     What is clear as well is that employees are tapping into the power of community networks to galvanize expertise and resources for business opportunity.  In one example, a community member catalyzed  a response to a customer proposal for a mobile electric substation tapping into far flung expertise and market insight across the company.   In another case, community engagement was crucial to the bringing the right resources and expertise together to win a large health care project.  

Schneider Electric’s program further ingrains practice and community excellence by inviting all 24,000 community members to vote and recognize the most high functioning, high value communities.   Thirty-three communities were acknowledged in 2013 for their level of member satisfaction and robustness - which allows smaller communities to be recognized for value and impact.

Communities - building a cycle between tacit and explicit knowledge

Knowledge management is strategic, says Jean-Claude Monney, the Global KM Lead for Microsoft Services because it’s the effective leverage of innovation.  For Microsoft, Monney says, knowledge sharing, improvements and reuse drives efficiency, innovation, predictability and quality, in turn driving customer satisfaction.  Many people confuse innovation with invention, but he sees innovation in collaboration.

Monney sees community of practice at the center of new ways for companies to obtain increased returns on intangible assets, to create value, and to lead.   At over 21,000 employees, Microsoft Services is the largest division within the company.  Eighteen thousand of those employees are members of communities from over 100 countries.  The services division previously had over 100 communities, but they have recently focused it down to 70 communities of practice in four domains - technical, architecture, industry and business (i.e., risk management, delivery management).    Over 1000 of the members are designated subject matter experts and an increasing number of members are joining from other parts of the company.

A key to the success of communities at Microsoft is the re-alignment of the company’s performance management system.   According to Monney, the company used to have a five point rating scale that would result in workers competing with one other.   At Steve Ballmer’s direction a few years ago, the company shifted it’s approach to a new, three-tiered assessment model that looks to evaluate the individual’s own impact, how the individual has demonstrated sharing knowledge to increase impact, and how the individual has shown that they’ve reused knowledge to increase impact.

A remarkable feature of organizational maturity in their approach is the commitment to community facilitation and leadership.   There are seven full-time employees who function as community directors, driving the overall program, with 70 community leads that have community management a component of their job.    

They’ve also developed a community health index to evaluate community membership growth, interactivity such as content sharing, rating and message posting, responsiveness and liveliness.  Like Schneider Electric, the Microsoft approach seeks out and acknowledges community performance.   They have a twice yearly collaboration and community award, with 150 submissions or stories submitted.    The award is a team award and has to be a customer story, calling out how many communities they engaged with, what IP they used.   A reviewing team selects ten top stories with three teams finally awarded on stage with the CTO at an employee event.

Leadership and culture shifts

Strategic leadership that shifted culture also played a significant role in the depth of community success.   The CEO at Schneider Electric, Jean Pascal Tricoire, in 2012 prompted a question to all employees via a community "What if Schneider knew what Schneider knows?", essentially to foster awareness and dialogue on the need to increase knowledge sharing, collaboration, and the need to move across organizational silos.  According to  Guillaume, communities became one of the top strategic initiatives for the company.  This past year an additional 30 communities were established to help drive collaboration in business critical areas for the company.    Like the performance management change initiated by Steve Ballmer at Microsoft the leadership actions at Schneider Electric invoked significant culture adaptions.   

In a review I did of Mark McDonald's book The Social Organization a couple of years ago, I said understanding how to derive repeatable business value from collaborative community is an important senior management skill to master.   Both Microsoft and Schneider Electric exhibit real mastery in this important new management capability.

Enterprise Social Network - KM World Workshop

The Enterprise Social Software (ESS) market is predicted for robust growth over the next few years.   Companies are embracing and adapting to enterprise social networks - some may be considering it as a first-time implementation.   Others may be looking to unify on a single platform after an era when social popped up in different business units or geographies.  Some organizations are perhaps looking to move from on-premise to cloud-based services.    Still others are looking to expand their strategies with more robust integrations or to rev-up their initial adoption efforts.

No matter where you and your company might be on the spectrum - whether looking to introduce or improve your enterprise social efforts, you’ll find something of value in a new workshop my colleague Carrie Basham-Young and I are delivering at KM World in Washington, DC., on November 4 from 1:00-4:00 p.m.

Social and collaborative technologies are key to empowering employees to transform the way they work, interact, and engage, enabling companies to catalyzing product and service innovation and deepening customer insight and relationships—in essence redesigning the way business is done. At the same time, an enterprise social network is inherently “human,” allowing people to be people by facilitating with technology the informal social connections that already thrive. 

Implementing an enterprise social network can also mean rethinking workplace practices and a need for new governance models, leadership skills, and transforming the way we communicate.  Our workshop will help you understand the key elements of an enterprise social networking initiative, from business case development to ROI and value-measurement principles to cultural and organizational readiness, through use case development, leadership skills and engagement, social network analysis, governance strategies, and adoption planning and ongoing engagement. 

Get a comprehensive view of key planning elements and useful tools that have worked for organizations big and small. Targeted toward executive sponsors of social initiatives, community managers, and technical leaders of social product portfolios, this interactive workshop gives you the key elements to develop or tune-up your enterprise social networking initiative.

shutterstock:MichaelDBrown

Enterprise social networking profiles as strategic asset - Network Mindset series

Enterprise social networks (ESN) and related social collaboration tools have made their way into enterprises over the past few years.   User experiences have evolved to be more intuitive, the environments have become richer with integrations and new capacities such as gamification to support engagement and connection,    Knowledge workers have adapted to more collaborative, transparent work practices (see Working-Out-Loud)  Managers and executives have begun to explore how to express leadership and catalyze broad collaborative purpose across ESNs.   This shift to wider engagement with ESNs helps companies enable a more nimble and adaptive workforce and unleash and apply knowledge workers' tacit knowledge and experience.

Yet there is often an area that lags significantly in these networks - a consistent work practice of activating and maintaining a robust individual network profile.      One of the key benefits of social collaboration is that it supports a sense of personal connection of the individual to the content and a transparent, conversational approach to knowledge sharing and work activities.    

While engagement and work has gotten more social, the way people are known in the network remains bound primarily by a sense of orientation to a reporting structure and identification of the people in that hierarchical reporting structure by generic job titles.   Profiles are often linked to corporate directories that pull in job-title, location and reporting structure information.

Let’s take Jane Doe in this hypothetical example.   Here we see Jane Doe as a Program Manager and she is third-level down from the vice president of supply chain.   She also happens to be based in Los Angeles.    Typically, her job title focuses on a ‘grade-level’ HR category.   Here the emphasis is on her organizational identity and reporting-based ties.

What you can’t see about Jane, aside from perhaps a profile photograph, is information about her active role and current projects, nor her background, her range of tacit knowledge and her social capital outside of the hierarchy.

Enterprise social networks support rich profiles with functions not unlike LinkedIn to expand the sense of an individuals background, expertise, and social and knowledge graph.   Let’s take a look at LinkedIn Profiles to expose some of the meta constructs that now apply within enterprise social networks.

LinkedIn has become the defacto resource to develop and manage one’s networked identity as a professional.    Using LinkedIn, individuals can construct and groom their professional identity - creating a sequential account of their ‘assigned’ roles in their professions, but also their own story about those roles.   People can validate their expertise through outlining their credentials - education, licensing and certifications, and even include samples of their work.

Professionals can also cultivate social, reputational and knowledge capital - not only through their own direct connections, but by receiving role-based recommendations, affirmations of their posted content and skills endorsements.  LinkedIn members can also demonstrate the quality and robustness of their network, and activate connectivity through social sharing, commenting, 'like'-affirmations, discussion forum participation and group affiliations.

The profile in LinkedIn is the launch point for developing new connections and reinvigorate existing connections.   LinkedIn has increased the variety of prompted affirmations (work anniversary or new job notice, or profile views reports).

Individual profiles and their connections are now assets in the network, and can be activated and mobilized for intent.     Professionals use it to find out about companies and jobs, recruiters use it to identify talent, sales people use the network to engage in a social selling process, and anyone can use the entire network to do big data analysis of trending behaviors, job titles or expertise.   The LinkedIn service supports search, research, direct engagement and outreach across the network. New mobile applications such as Broadli are being developed to let LinkedIn users drive the activation of their own network with purpose.     Many professionals use LinkedIn - there’s over 300 million users (67% global) and over 100 million in the U.S.

Yet when individuals approach the same functional opportunity inside their company, many people leave their profiles on ‘mute’   

Let’s take a look at how engaging with rich profiles can make a difference in a work place

In this hypothetical example, we have two individuals who, for very different reasons, need to know about sustainability, labor and environmental practice in the company supply chain.  One is helping prepare the company's annual corporate social responsibility report, the other is coordinating an international trade mission.    As they search the company’s enterprise social network, they come up with a key resource.

Here's how Jane Doe's profile becomes a rich resource for herself, her work, and her company.

While the corporate directory lists her as a program manager, she’s actually managing the company’s supply chain sustainability processes.   She works in a complex, rapidly evolving domain, and she's a primary interface to external industry and policy bodies.  She updates her profile at least quarterly, describing the focus of her work.  Jane

• blogs about key business challenges in supply chain sustainability, and discusses where best practice and policy is headed with respect to suppliers
• posts information about industry consortiums that she’s a member of
• shares video recordings and presentation files from industry speaking engagements
• tags her content, skills and expertise so that fellow employees can easily find her content and information
• provides links to her public-facing social network presence - LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+

Her activity stream is rich with commentary and observations about her many trips to Asia-based suppliers (she’s in LA due to the frequency of travel to Asia).   She’s a member of the sustainability and innovation communities of practice and knowledge networks inside the enterprise social network, and so she’s a great connecter to other resources.

For today’s enterprise knowledge worker, a rich profile inside enterprise social networks is not just a one-time ‘form-fill’ exercise.    It’s a connected, dynamic resource for the knowledge worker who becomes an active network agent.  Their profile becomes a launch point for knowledge sharing and networking.    It reflects the multi-dimensional facets of assigned roles, activities, external and internal projects and it becomes an important resource for talent discovery inside the organization.   It's truly a 'future-of-work' practice and skill to develop.

 

See also slideshare

A Network Mindset: Practical Approaches to Everyday Networked and Collaborative Behaviors from a talk I gave at Columbia University, April 2014