Year: 2009

Tom Vander Wall Nails My Sharepoint Experience

Azul DeCobalto vs. Touchez LaSurfaceFor a number of years I have cringed every time one of my clients tells me that have or are planning to deploy Microsoft SharePoint as a collaborative platform. They say it is their “social media” deployment. SharePoint is many things, but it misses the critical element of social media which is networked connection between people and ideas, easy discoverability, makes visible and allows people to act on weak ties, and support for other network-like interactions rather than closed group performance.

I am not an IT manager, nor would I say my main competence is in portals and intranets. My focus is on what people DO with these tools, and very often I’ve seen people struggle with SharePoint.

Recently Tom Vander Wall has posted a really thoughtful blog post that says what I have experienced. SharePoint is a silo builder, not buster. (Thanks to someone in my Twitter network for Tweeting the link and I’m sorry I did not note who this was!!)

In SharePoint 2007: Gateway Drug to Enterprise Social Tools :: Personal InfoCloud, Tom quotes one of his informants:

“We went from 5 silos in our organization to hundreds in a month after deploying SharePoint”. They continue, “There is great information being shared and flowing into the system, but we don’t know it exists, nor can we easily share it, nor do much of anything with that information.” I heard this from an organization about 2 years ago in a private meeting and have been hearing near similar statements since. This is completely counter to the Enterprise 2.0 hopes and wishes they had for SharePoint. They were of the mindset that open sharing & having the organization and individuals benefit from a social platform.

Clearly, the challenges of any platform is not just the platform, but how and WHY it was used. Driving from real needs, not simply IT convenience or standards alone. But there is something critical here that is missing from a social interaction perspective. Horizontality.

Without extensive customization (and addition of external functionality), SharePoint requires you to dive into an area, then back out of it before you dive into another area. It is built on a tree-branching model. To maximize the power of networked interaction, you need a networked architecture. If you are trying to reify and support a hierarchical reporting and accountability model based on the org chart, SharePoint fits like a glove.

Our mental models and values permeate the very coding of the software we use. When people say technology is value neutral, I say people have values and people build software, therefore the software carries the imprint of the designers’ values. SharePoint is a perfect example.

If you read the excellent comments to Tom’s post, there is some great insight as to what Sharepoint is good for and some ideas about how and why it stumbles in other areas. One of Tom’s own replies stands out for me:

There is a lot of understanding of how social tools should work and need to work in enterprise (deeply based on how people interact with others and with interfaces) that must go on top of the technology platform. I have deep interest in that story and that understanding, as it is one I rarely see inside enterprise, but I see with in the makers of the social tool products.

The point I hear over and over from those trying SharePoint to accomplish enterprise 2.0 functionality (open social interaction, ease of use, ease of working in the flow, sharing collectively, aggregating in context, and eventually getting to collaboration) is not the platform on its own to do this without very deep pockets for development. Lockheed and Wachovia are the only big deployments I know that went down this path..

From a global perspective, there are some additional challenges which I brought up during a live webcast (recording of Part1) and web discussion (on Ning) that Tony Karrer hosted on SharePoint a few weeks ago. (If you are interested in some on-the ground conversations about SharePoint, dig around the Ning site):

  • SharePoint is not low-bandwidth friendly. Between page load times and the need to navigate up and down, people in low bandwidth areas struggle with SharePoint.
  • SharePoint does not have many offline options for those who have intermittent connectivity, but the tie in with MS Office can offer some opportunities for work-arounds.
  • For global organizations, IT tends to make the software choice without a lot of insight about field conditions and social interaction/working patterns AND are often lured to use any software offered to them free as an NGO. The false economy is the customization costs eat up any savings and then some for these organizations.
  • Global NGOs often do not have the support team to help with implementation and roll out, leaders rarely use the software themselves, setting poor examples and middle managers have little incentive for creating the culture change to adopt the tool. This is NOT a SharePoint problem, but it is a factor that increases the failure rate.
  • The organizations that have successfully implemented SharePoint have good connectivity, robust IT and support teams and usually have a strong content management (file sharing) practice. Not network collaboration.

See also on SharePoint

And related, a Maise Center report on learning platform adoption which has some interesting parallels!

Creative Commons License photo credit: d.billy

DavidSibbet: Power And Love

As a follow up to my post on leadership in challenging times, I wanted to point to David Sibbet’s post, Power And Love: Is it Time for Bi-Lingual Leaders?

David shares some ideas of Adam Kahane about what he has seen as needed beyond the wonderful work he has been doing with scenario planning (which has also captured my attention recently about how it helps us generate innovation and possibiity.) David describes scenario planning as being “fundamentally about surfacing and refreshing the core stories that people tell about what is plausible and possible.”
 
David wrote: 

Adam reported that he’s working on what he found was missing from his initial work with scenarios, which is addressing the issues of power. Scenario work, as Adam experiences it, is really about bringing people back to sense of connection with each other and the larger whole – at core about releasing love into a system. But he has discovered, in spite of having extraordinary experiences of breakthrough in understanding and connection between people, that when the questions of power and resources then needed to be addressed the processes broke down. “It was as though the strong feelings of love and connection actually made the issue of power un-discussable.”

“My new book is basically unpacking a sentence that Martin Luther King wrote that points directly at this issue,” Adam said. King wrote:

“Power without love is reckless and abusive.
    Love without power is sentimental and anemic.”

loving car

“My thesis is that if we want to address complex social challenges we need to be be bi-lingual about both power and love,” Adam said.

Now that’s a lot of quoting people, quoting people, quoting a person. But the resonance across these three people reminds me that this is a powerful pattern. Love and power are a yin and yang of each other, and if we have learned anything about the world, is that there are always forces that both pull apart and complement each other at the same time. This is not only a core of leadership, but of facilitation, and collaboration. 

So how do we get it right?

CoP Series #9: Community Heartbeats

This is the nineth in a series of blog posts I wrote for Darren Sidnick late last year in the context of communities of practice as part of online learning initiatives. I am finally getting the rest of the series up.  Part 1, part 2, part 3,, part 4, part 5, part 6,  part 7 ,  part 8 , part 9 and  part 1o here!

Community Heartbeats – when synchronous interactions matter 

Online community learning is great in that it provides us the opportunity to learn anytime,and  anywhere we have connectivity. However, that is a pretty rosy view when we consider the competition a course or workshop has against everything else going on in our lives. Often the thought of “oh, I can do this anytime so I’ll do it later” leaves a course to be done in the wee hours of the night or on weekends when we really might like or need to be doing something else. A learner who stays away too long may begin to feel they have fallen too far behind, or isolated from their community. That’s where synchronous events can help. They can keep the heartbeat of a learning community going strong. For some, they create a sense of community, relationship and “realness” — voices and not just words on a screen.

What are synchronous events?
Synchronous online events are when some or all of the learners are online at the same time and interacting using tools such as Voice over IP (VoIP), telephone bridge lines, chat rooms, web meetings and instant messenger tools – even Twitter!. They can be discussion based, or can be a presentation by a guest or tutor combined with time for questions and answers. They can be large group or small group breakouts from the larger community. Some examples include:

  • Weekly online tutor “office hours.” Learners can log on and ask questions, get support and just check in. These could be mandatory or voluntary. I find that if you do one first that is “all hands” people can get a sense of the value of the office hours, then are more likely to participate in the future.
  • Presentations and guest speakers & lecturers. First of all, if you aren’t planning any interaction with the learners around lectures or presentations, don’t make them synchronous. Save the synchronous time for INTERACTION. Content can be provided on the web to be viewed at anyone’s convenience.  But if you can bring in a special guest, this is worth a fixed meeting time and it makes it — well – SPECIAL.  Keep in mind, this is not about pushing powerpoints. A good online presentation will mix presentation with interative activities – a good mix is 7 minutes of content, 7-10 of interaction. An hour is good, and 90 minutes should be the maximum. Include audio, text and visual elements. Some of us are not so good at just listening!
  • Small group meetings. Is there small group work? Encourage learners to set a time to meet each week. This builds full participation and helps reduce procrastination. They can meet in a web meeting room or even just on an instant messenger or Skype. Even a shared Twitter hashtag can create little moments of shared learning and support.

What frequency of online events is useful?
For new learners, it is helpful to have regular synchronous events until they have figured out their learning and participation rhythms. Virtual team expert Martha Maznevski likens it to the heartbeat of a runner. New runners’ hearts are still weak so they beat fast early on in their runs. But trained runners hearts beat slower. So experienced learning communities may not need to meet as often, unless meetings are their preferred mode of interaction.

How do we bridge between the synchronous and the asynchronous?
Synchronous meetings don’t work for everyone due to schedules, internet access and personal learning preferences. So we need to have strategies that bridge between the synchronous and asynchronous.

  • Post recordings, notes and artifacts of synchronous meetings. Make sure your learners know where they are and how to access them.
  • Follow up on synchronous action items in the asynchronous interaction spaces. Notes taken “live” in a web meeting can be shared right afterwards, with action items highlighted. If additional conversation is needed, continue in a discussion thread, blog or wiki area.
  • Prepare for upcoming synchronous meetings by involving the group in planning, again using the asynchronous tools you have at hand. You can even use scheduling tools like http://www.doodle.ch to pick a meeting time!

Finally, check in with the group as to how the “heartbeat” is going. Ask for feedback and use that to improve the meetings and the timing of the meetings. Each group is different and we can use iterative planning to make the most of that diversity, rather than stifle it with set plans.

Resources:

Leadership in Uncertain Times

It seems every conversation I have with someone here or overseas  starts with some comment about “these times we are in.” Moreso for my US colleagues, but the change in economic times is on everyone’s mind. I’m doing more work online and less on the road. Budgets for current projects are sticking pretty steady, but no one seems to know what tomorrow will bring. For us independents, this uncertainty is nothing new, but clearly the playing field has changed.

However, I am blessed that I don’t have to lay any one off. I read about closures and layoffs and friends are losing their jobs and it breaks my heart. I feel pretty powerless and am doubling my efforts to help others in my network find gigs. Relationships and networks matter now, more than ever.

But what are leaders of organizations to do when their budgets are slashed by 20, 30 and even 50%? I look at my State’s budget shortfall and know there are no easy paths. Difficult times call for leadership in many forms and at every level, both formal and informal.
When I read Dan Oestreich‘s Reflective Leadership in the Age of Layoffs, I said “aha!” I must share this with my husband who, as a middle manager, is fighting the budget and morale battle every day. Dan writes:

Most managers I know do not feel they’ve actually been given much guidance about how to proceed with cost cutting and, particularly, layoffs. As the first line of a recent Harvard Business Review article asks,“Why aren’t layoffs taught as a subject at business school?” I assume the reason is that the subject is both very complex and comes far too close to what it really means to lead, touching that sensitive cross-over point between personal values and professional conduct, a place where theory definitely has its limits.

Dan encourages us to slow down, to reflect, to ask questions that matter. This is good advice for any tough decision regardless of the economic environment.  Dan writes:

…in addition to the fact that the leaders all seemed pretty much adrift and self-enclosed, is their push to simply get together in a room, have some hurried discussion, and then decide what needs to happen. The role of reflection seemed to be bypassed in this rush to create the right strategy — and then, ipso facto, to know what to do. Surely, when the financial heat is turned up, there’s no time to waste, but this is also a time when alignment with real brand values — a topic that requires reflective leadership as a team and as individuals — is likely to be the most reliable long-term guide. Understanding and applying these values demands decisiveness founded on thorough and creative consideration, not some three hour “tall grass” meeting where competing self-interests have a field day, followed up by a briefing and hand-out from Human Resources.

It’s as if no one wants to ask the telling question, “Wait a minute, what was this place supposed to be about, anyway?”

I encourage you to read Dan’s article. It is fabulous from beginning to end and offers some practical advice about how to lead in a time of layoffs.  Then think about your strategy for decision making and leadership in uncertain times.  What are you doing?  What values are driving your decisions? How are you living those values in every step? How can we prepare ourselves to make these hard decisions? How do we account for our responsibility to others in our decisions?

For me, here are some of the things I’m doing with my clients. They are tiny, piddling things when compared to the scale of things in organizations.

  • Do we have to meet face to face at this moment in time, or can we save time, money and carbon into the environment and meet online and on the phone? Doing this with a recent client saved them a $600 ticket and 16 hours of my billable travel time. The final outcome of the work is not visible yet, but I think I delivered quality consulting in a way that was probably more flexible than if we had met face to face. (And I have more time with my family!)
  • Is some  one else doing something similar to what you have to do and can you do it together to share the costs (and benefits!)? Right now I have two pairs of clients who are cross fertilizing their work and sharing some things with each other. This is bliss for me and saves them time, money and they can focus on their own work more closely.
  • What can be deferred? What is most important and valuable now? I think this is the toughest one, because it is easy to become short sighted in tight times. Really asking ourselves the hard question about how we invest our time and resources is critical. We can’t forget about tomorrow as we consider today.
  • How much can I not spend to keep my costs down? Both in terms of my own business and with my clients? I tend to be thrifty (some say ‘cheap’) but it is easy to fritter money away on things that don’t really matter. It helps that I work at home, away from shops and places to eat out. When I do shop and eat out, I am trying to patronize businesses in my local neighborhood.

Related to this is a great piece by Peter and Trudy Johnson Lenz  on Six Habits of Highly Resilient Organizations .Here is a snippet of the habits. Do read the whole article! It makes me reflect on my own little one-person organization!

  1. Resilient organizations actively attend to their environments.
  2. Resilient organizations prepare themselves and their employees for disruptions.
  3. Resilient organizations build in flexibility.
  4. Resilient organizations strengthen and extend their communications networks – internally and externally.
  5. Resilient organizations encourage innovation and experimentation.
  6. Resilient organizations cultivate a culture with clearly shared purpose and values.

I don’t know what tomorrow will bring. I know our family is blessed and recognize so many are struggling. I’d love to hear your advice about how you are leading in difficult times… Again from Dan…

In troubled times, reflective leaders step back to witness…and to learn.

flowers

CoP Series #8: Content and Community

This is the eighth  in a series of blog posts I wrote for Darren Sidnick late last year. I am finally getting the rest of the series up.  Part 1, part 2, part 3,, part 4, part 5, part 6,  part 7 ,  part 8 , part 9 and  part 1o  are all here on the blog.

We have talked throughout this series on communities of practice about “content.” Well, what the heck is content, why is it important and how do we make the most of it – especially when there is a LOT of it. First the what and why, then one idea about how to work with volume.

What do we mean by “content?” 
We can mean many things. Books, papers, self-paced learning modules, resources, learner discussions, reflective logs/blogs, images, audio, video. All the “stuff” that carries both the subject matter information and the artifacts of our interactions to make meaning of those subjects. Today we can capture both the resources and the interaction artifacts. We can draw from a closed, defined set of resources, or tap into the larger set of resources on the world wide web. The content may be dynamic, changing and evolving so one set of static resources that works for todays course is outdated in six months. So content is never fully “done.” It is alive in our learning communities.

Why is content important? 
From a communities of practice perspective, it is important for two reasons. Content embodies or captures what we know about the domain (see Series 2: what-the-heck-is-a-domain-and-why-should-i-care?). 

Second, the creation of content during the learning process is a key part of that very process. In CoP terms, this is “reification.” Here is a bit from the upcoming book by Etienne Wenger, John Smith and I that talks about reification.

“Members of a community of practice need to interact with each other as well as produce and share artifacts such as documents, tools, and links to resources. Sharing artifacts without interacting can inhibit the ability to negotiate the meaning of what is being shared. Interacting without producing artifacts can limit the extent and impact of learning. Indeed, the theory of communities of practice views learning together as involving the interplay of two fundamental processes of meaning making: Members engage directly in activities, interactions, conversations, reflections, and other forms of personal participation in the learning of the community; members produce physical and conceptual artifacts—words, tools, concepts, methods, stories, documents, and other forms of reification—that reflect their shared experience and around which they organize their participation. (Literally, reification means “making into an object.”) Meaningful learning in a community requires both processes to be present. Sometimes one may dominate the other. They may not always be complementary to each other. The challenge of this polarity is how successfully communities cycle between the two.”

So not only do we have the content provide us a base resource or curriculum of the course, we have the content created by the members as part of their learning. As Etienne likes to tell us, the community becomes the curriculum. This is why content is important!

Members Creating Content
Over time, learners create content related to courses and their learning communities that may have value beyond the “course.” Learners may wish to track and organize their own content. Portfolios, particularly ones that are not bound up in a proprietary platform, allow this portability. There is also the value of the content to other learners and communities of practice. Contribution of articles, blog posts, links to external resources that learners or tutors have tagged can all enrich the content of what used to be viewed simply as a course, and is now an ongoing potential learning hub.

Bringing in New Content
Learning content is not a static element, particularly for topics that are deeply embedded in our rapidly change society. So a childcare course may need to have a “line of sight” to changing policy, or local trends. We need a means of identifying emerging and related content and weaving it back into the more traditional “course” is a newer role. This curation of content can be an organisationally drive or user generated aspect. Probably both. This is where technology and human beings combine to make a strong contribution. While we have human bees in platform, particularly in the community context mentioned “across courses” in the last blog post (see cop-series-7-roles-and-scalability/), we can use technology to scale human curation. Consider things like aggregated content pulled in by persistent searches and tags, Amazon style interests. The ability to use these tools to find and aggregate content can also be used to link people to that content. This could be organised by the instructors and/or the learners. In fact, it has been my experience that learners who find their own content tend to be more deeply engaged with it. Plus learning how to find and critique external content is a core skill in today’s world. So rather than be afraid of what “junk” students will find, equip them to be critical assessors of content and find the gold among the dross.

In the new Ufi learndirect Childcare portal pilot (reminder: this series was originally written for Darren who works at Ufi), learners can create “their learning plan” and can draw on learndirect content and bookmark and rate content. Through technology (Amazon style), there is also “suggested content” based on their interests/previous use.

Flicr CC image by Beth KanterOrganising and manage their own content
The mechanics of finding, labeling and sorting content have direct impact on the later findability and usability of that content. Does your learning and community software enable easy tagging of content so learners can find it on their own terms later? Do you organise external content so it can be aggregated into course domains? Let’s look at tagging as a specific example. Tagging is when a person associates some key words of their own choosing to a piece of digital content. This can be done outside of a learning platform using a social bookmarking tool like http://www.delicious.com, http://www.furl.com or http://www.connotea.org/ (the latter is specifically designed for research and education contexts). These allow a person to embed a bookmarking tool in their internet browser, and then when they want to tag something, they click a button in the browser and a pop up screen appears, and the person fills in the fields. If individual learners are tagging on their own, you can pull in their tags into your learning platform using the RSS feeds provided by most of these tagging services. This way the learner maintains control and ownership of their bookmarking, but the learning community benefits from the activity. This build longer term learning and finding capacity, rather than locking the content (and the learner’s access to it) inside the learning platform of your organization. (This is certainly applicable outside the area of learning communities too! See this great visual from Beth Kanter about the role of tags/content in the non profit technology community.)

Social Media Workshop Curriculum MateriaTags have another great application. They can be visualized as a “tag cloud” where each tag word shows up in a size related to the number of times it shows up in a list of tags. This gives a quick visual image of what is getting most attention from an individual in their tag cloud or, for tags associated across a group of learners, of the group itself. This visual “hook” can engage those who would otherwise skip reading a text listing of tags, engaging a different learning style. It has been very interesting to me to see how a tag cloud invites in browsing of content from people who would otherwise glaze over at a list of files or links. (By the way, if you like playing with any kind of word clouds, you may enjoy http://www.wordle.com!). Ufi learndirect’s new Childcare portal pilot utilises tag clouds as a vital element.

Now you might start getting worried about people tagging things “correctly.” Don’t worry. Tags represent the participants view. Yes there will be typos. Look for tools that allow you to fix that, but don’t fixate on the practice. You WANT people to tag, which is better than no tags. You may also want to introduce some key tags and use those as navigation points across key course content. You will see that others may actually follow your tagging conventions, so set some good examples at the start.

A final word on content
Yes, content is important. But if people don’t use it, interact with it and making meaning of it so they can apply it, it is not worth the electrons. When you design for content, make sure it is attached to people and their processes. Then you get the magic happening!

Resources/Photo credit: