Thank you to everyone that kept me going with this iteration, either with direct encouragement, your comments, are just being a nameless page view. Although I’ve always said (and still do) that I blog first-most for myself…your presence has kept me going when I would have otherwise have stopped.

To the extent I return to blogging, please look for me at raymondsims.com.

As of December 2008, the hosting bill is paid-up for two years, so this (now) ‘archive’  will be available for at least that long.

Best always,

Ray

Google Analytics charts

The spike in March is from my 43 Knowledge Management Definitions post, which since I stopped blogging has still seen 1300+ views, just slightly behind the more surprising favorite New Employee Orientation post. As I prepare to now walk away from this blog, it does give me some satisfaction that people are still visiting — as I’ve seen the same traffic in the past 5 months of absolutely no blogging, as I did in the previous 4 months pictured above. Hopefully I have left some small piece of enduring value behind. With this in mind, I’ll pay for another year of hosting to keep this site alive.

Well, there you have it. Now I feel I can otherwise sign-off.

As I mentioned in earlier posts this month and at the Boston KM Forum KM 2.0 symposium, I’ve been putting some time into reading Joseph Firestone and Mark McElroy‘s knowledge management writing. Highly recommended, although occasionally challenging reading. Seeing their Decision Execution Cycle, in Doing Knowledge Management (29 page PDF, Firestone and McElroy, 2004), and also in On Doing Knowledge Management, (Firestone, 2008), got me to thinking about other circular models that have seen. From page 6 in the first paper:

Perhaps the most well known circular model is the similar Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle (PDCA) from Walter Shewhart; frequently credited to W. Edwards Deming, who popularized its use. The American Society for Quality describes the cycle as:

1. Plan. Recognize an opportunity and plan a change.
2. Do. Test the change. Carry out a small-scale study.
3. Study. Review the test, analyze the results and identify what you’ve learned.
4. Act. Take action based on what you learned in the study step: If the change did not work, go through the cycle again with a different plan. If you were successful, incorporate what you learned from the test into wider changes. Use what you learned to plan new improvements, beginning the cycle again.

At the Boston KM Forum symposium, in his presentation, Dan Keldsen referenced another circular model, the Observe-Orient-Detect-Act (OODA) loop from John “40 second” Boyd, United States Air Force, as described by Vicki Bell in her 2003 article: A different battlefield, the same strategy: How the OODA Loop applies to business:

Lastly, Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell propose several circular models in their book Learning to Fly: Practical Knowledge Management from Leading and Learning Organizations. The first is a learning cycle represented as follows (p.21):

The second is double-loop model “relates learning processes, and the capture and transfer of knowledge to day-to-day business.” (p.33):

Now the work is to learn how to intentionally travel in, not just see, these circles.

For Further Reading:

• (added 22 June) The OODA Loop and Double-loop Learning and OODA, the DEC, and the KLC, Joe Firestone 16 and 18 June 2008

Related Post:

• Leadership and the Five Spiritual Faculties (another circular model)

• Without much thought, labeling one of my what 2.0 memes to me top-level categories this (with bullets under the heading being closer to things that help fuel emergence, contrast to examples of emergence),
• the number of mentions of emergence in AIIM’s Market IQ enterprise 2.0 report (31 per Adobe Search) and feeling that the examples given were fine, but somehow not the entire story.

So, once again I start an exploration with a brainstorm list, this time for the question “In the context of enterprise 2.0, what items potentially demonstrate emergent behavior?”…

1. Use cases for new collaboration and social software applications. I think back to my experience with wiki four+ years ago prior to having benefit of the seeds in wikipatterns.com. Then, we openly didn’t know what we were going to use the wiki for, but overtime, some “standard” use cases emerged. Now I see the same with some of the newer social software applications like Twitter, where not only use cases but syntax conventions (for @username and #hashtags) emerge.
2. Shifts in company culture, including towards more openness and more innovation
3. Shifts in the macro way that employees work
4. Organizational networks, including new ties facilitated by social software applications, shifting demographics, and changing culture
5. Folksonomy, emerging from content categories
6. Increased visibility to the most valuable content, derived both from explicit ratings and from behavior (e.g. tagging, subscriptions, linking, and page views)
7. Wiki page structures
8. Definitions and terminology, including definitions of web 2.0, enterprise 2.0, and knowledge management beyond the original coinage — see for example the enterprise 2.0 definition exchange documented in the AIIM report
9. Collective intelligence. I’m still sorting out in my own mind to what extent this term works for me, but I at least think it is better than AIIM’s “collective wisdom” — although the report also uses “collective intelligence”
10. Perhaps software applications, or at least mash-ups. Is it valid to claim emergence here? Although in a common-language sense they are emerging, it really isn’t emergence in the sense of complexity theory.

What did I miss? What are additional emergence examples that apply to enterprise 2.0?

Further Reading:

• Jim McGee’s The problem of emergence (published at FASTForward blog, October 2007), where he writes:
  

  The attraction of emergence is twofold. One is the realization that conventionally structured approaches have generally failed when tackling knowledge intensive problems. Knowledge work and knowledge workers don’t mesh well with the structuring techniques appropriate to industrial work. The second [attraction] is the perceived success of emergent approaches behind current Web 2.0 success stories on the Internet.

• Jordan Frank’s Pros and Cons of Emergence (also October 2007)
• Andrew McAfee’s Explaining my Fondness for Explicit Content (March 2008) that includes a nice discussion of implicit (derived) information per #6 in the above list
• Mike Gotta’s Enterprise 2.0: Culture Required? (April 2008)
• Kevin Kelly’s fascinating and well illustrated The Bottom is Not Enough (February 2008), where he writes:
  

  I have tried to temper my celebration of the bottom with my belief that the bottom is not enough for what we really want. To get to the best we need some top down intelligence, too. I have always claimed that nuanced view. And now that crowd-sourcing and social webs are all the rage, it’s worth repeating: the bottom is not enough. You need a bit of top-down as well.

  and

  What’s new is only this: never before have we been able to make systems with as much “hive” in it as we have recently made with the web. Until this era, technology was primarily all control, all design. Now it can contain both design and no-design, or hive-ness. In fact, this Web 2.0 business is chiefly the first step in exploring all the ways in which we can combine design and the hive in innumerable permutations.

• Wikipedia’s Emergence page
• del.icio.us emergence tag

Lots more yet for me to explore on this topic. Please leave a comment with your recommended resources.
Photo credit: Ann-Kathrin Rehse

Jack’s post, in turn, pointed to Shawn Callahan‘s Collaboration’s Resurgence, which provides historical context for what I was observing…both a legitimate increased need for collaboration, along with the unfortunate increased abuse of the word as if to mean any interaction involving more than one person.

For me, it isn’t collaboration unless we are working on a common deliverable or problem, all party’s inputs effect the result, and we have the opportunity and expectation to influence each other during the creative process. In this regard the use of blogs, Twitter, social bookmarking, RSS, and email are rarely truly collaborative. Even wiki, the most collaborative tool of the new lot, often reverts back to just self-publishing…not because of limited permissions, but because the page is published as if it were final and nobody cares or dares to edit it.

The AIIM Market IQ report on Enterprise 2.0, Figure 8, p.27, identifies “increase collaboration” as the respondents number one objective for enterprise 2.0. I wonder what those who answered in this fashion really meant and how they intend to use web 2.0 tools (beyond wiki, which I ‘get’) to accomplish collaboration? Perhaps what they really meant was increased visibility, interaction, connections, and shared meaning; i.e. an increase in social capital, which in turn can facilitate productive collaboration…including the old-fashioned kind of, for example, getting on the real or virtual white-board together to thrash out the next breakthrough idea.

Further Reading:

• Richard Watson’s Collaboration: I don’t believe in it that brings in the collaboration definition from Wikinomics
• Chris Fletcher’s What’s up with collaboration? noting an up-tick in the talk about collaboration, although this time in the postive.
• Elizabeth Marsh’s Collaboration, from the ground up that takes on some of the cultural aspects of collaboration

What I envision is a single application that provides a front-end for the actual sending applications. This “composer” would have check-boxes for “Who can see?”, where the selections would be something like:

• Project team ‘x’
• Company (i.e. intranet)
• Trusted partners and/or clients (i.e. extranet)
• Public (i.e. internet)

Additionally it would bring together Twitter, instant messaging, email(? not sure if I’d really want this), and blogging into closer to a single user interface…allowing the user to somehow select writing length (Twitter = short, blogging = long) and the immediacy of communication (instant messaging = instant, mailing lists = middle ground, blogging = most asynchronous) that then defines where this front-end “composer” application would ultimately feed.

Combine all this with one of the attempts now underway with inbound aggregation…all moving closer to a single “online conversation central” — both inbound and outbound, both behind the firewall and outside the firewall.

Related Post:

• Does Twitter Fill A Communication Void?
• PLE as Retreat versus Productivity Suite (where in the above imaginations I am actually going against the points in this post from a year ago– moving towards a single work/life/learning interface)

This started as just a Web 2.0 behavior and impact scan (trying to stay away from a tools focus); however, as I got further into this it began to blur into the 2.0 meme in general. More about that in the Further Reading below.

Same with my compilation of Knowledge Management definitions, this is not about creating yet another definition for Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, or 2.0 in general, but rather a sharing of my own process and result for getting my head around some of the existing content.

My five groupings ended up as follows:

It’s All About Me,

• User generated content
• Diversity –> the long tail
• Choice in software applications –> personal learning and work environments
• Tags –> folksonomy
• Personal brand
• Mass Career Customization (TM)
• Informal (self-directed, lifelong) learning

and My Networks.

• Connections
• Communities
• Ecosystems
• Interaction
• Sharing
• Collaboration
• Reputation and Trust

Side Observation: the first three bullets are a definition and two examples of networks, the next three are what is occurring within the network, and the last bullet (reputation and trust) are both outcomes and enablers of that doing.

It’s Open,

• Open Content
• Radical transparency
• Open Source
• Feedback
• Outward-focused

Emergent,

• Innovative
• Perpetual beta –> never complete and frequently changes
• Light weight
• Right-brain
• Complexity
• Leadership, contrast to management
• Fun and exciting

Fast…

(added 28 March)

• …to get up and running
• …and easy to use
• …to find and make connections with others
• …response to questions from social network
• …time to value
• …to appear and (sometimes also) fast to become irrelevant

and Always On.

• Global
• 24 x 7 x 365 1/4
• Mobile devices and upcoming ubiquitous wireless connectivity
• Software as a Service (SaaS) [oops, slipping into technology; but it is hard not to for this point]
• Virtual

Further Reading:

An historical classic and a sample of more recent writing across topics within the topic…

• The classic: Tim O’Reilly’s What is Web 2.0 (2005), which includes the frequently referenced meme map
• David Gurteen’s World 2.0 (March 2008)
• AIIM‘s Market IQ report: Enterprise 2.0: Agile, Emergent, and Integrated (March 2008)
• Meredith Farkas’ The essence of Library 2.0 (January 2008)
• John Connell’s Learning 2.0: The Power of Learning in a Networked World – part 1 (March 2008)

Related Posts:

• The yin and yang of 1.0 and 2.0 worlds
• Enterprise 2.0 Intranets – Atlassian and Avenue A | Razorfish

Photo Credits: Janelle Siegrist (makeup), José Luis Molina (network), Ann-Kathrin Rehse (rose bud), Steven (glass house), Samuel Herrman (car), Reed (at computer)

Since writing my first post regarding Twitter, I continue to refine my own usage pattern and think about “why Twitter?” — what is it exactly that makes it so addictive, or perhaps even so useful? Including within the enterprise?

First, I thought about communication alternatives: (with a loose attempt at some clustering within the list)

• Face-to-face, one-to-one, unscheduled — the “water cooler”
• Face-to-face, one-to-one or small group, scheduled (e.g. the typical physical meeting)
• Audio or web-conference, small group (e.g. for a virtual team meeting)
• Face-to-face, large group, scheduled (e.g. presentation or lecture)
• Virtual, large group, scheduled (e.g. webcast)
• Land line phone, one-to-one
• Mobile phone, one-to-one
• Voicemail, one-to-one
• Voicemail, broadcast, one-to-many
• Instant message, one-to-one
• Instant message, broadcast
• Micro-blog (e.g. Twitter)
• email
• Mailing list (e.g. listserver)
• Discussion functionality within collaborative workspace (e.g. SharePoint)
• Traditional blog
• Traditional print mass media (newspapers, magazines, white papers, journal articles, direct marketing, books, etc. — many variations, with various degrees of the parameters outlined below)
• Intra or inter-company print media (e.g. the design document, the marketing plan)
• Wikis
• Traditional web pages (static, or essentially static, internet or intranet)
• The good ol’ fashion snailmail letter

Next I thought about communication parameters (as with the previous list, I imagine that I’ve left off at least a few critical points…please use comments to suggest important additions):

• How much fidelity? (in the sense of the likelihood of the intended meaning being in-fact the meaning absorbed)
• To what degree personal or personalized?
• How formal or informal?
• Synchronous or asynchronous? With some shades in between, e.g. for text (SMS) and instant messaging, depending on the particular usage scenario.
• Mobility? (e.g. can I do it during a cab ride?)
• Supports non-verbal communication?
• Is there a potential network effect? (i.e. does the value likely increase as more join the communication?)
• Opportunity for feedback? (e.g. replies, or opportunities for questions and clarification)
• Likelihood of building new connections? (echo to network effect)
• Facilitates multi-tasking? (i.e. can it be done during a meeting or conference call? — the crackberry under the conference room table.)
• How much overhead? (i.e. is it quick to do? Natural and easy to learn?)
• How much information volume? (i.e. War and Peace at 1000+ pages, or?)
• Is there a recording, is there a way to review the communication later?

Applying these parameters to Twitter:

• Surprisingly the fidelity is pretty good. Unlike with email, with only 140 characters available, there isn’t a whole lot of room to get yourself in trouble. Plus, it is highly public, which also contributes to keeping the flaming down.
• Surprisingly personal via author pictures, personal information (e.g. “having dinner with my daughter”), and at some fashion personalized to my current of potential Followers (e.g. in the sense of “if you are Following me, then you might be interested in this link”)
• Very informal (in general, a good thing in my world view)
• Asynchronous, while still being fast-moving, e.g. for breaking news
• Highly mobile and cross-platform
• Gets a zero for non-verbal (hmm, a micro-video-blogging parallel to Twitter?)
• Has a network effect, both at scale of the application overall and for an individual’s Followers
• Limited opportunity for feedback, although does support “@ replies” and also via links handing off to blogs where more extensive feedback is possible
• Strong likelihood of building new connections. Your mileage might differ; however, I have “discovered” and started to connect with interesting people that to date I had missed via my blog and social networks.
• Facilitates multi-tasking? — yes, primarily due to the next point
• Twitter is quick and light-weight, low overhead
• Low information volume; however, high link density…leading to increased information volume
• Twitter is recorded in the sense of being able to search and find prior tweets (hmm, a good thing or bad?)

For now, I’ll leave it to the reader to pick other communication methods and compare. Still, even without the rigor of a full spreadsheet, I’ll go out on the limb and claim that Twitter (and other micro-blogging applications) do fill a unique niche untouched by other channels — a niche worth exploring within forward looking enterprises — while still very thankfully not being the be-all to communications.

Further Reading:

• Twitter Is The Tech Water Cooler, ReadWriteWeb, 19 March 2008
• What do I need Twitter for, anyway?, Andy Piper, 1 November 2007
• Enterprise Twitter, Curt Monash, 11 February 2008 (one of several entry points to this discussion)
• Making the Case for Twitter in the Enterprise, Ann All, 18 February 2008 (another entry point)
• Twitter- Can It Add Value In The Workplace?, Melina Murray, 21 February 2008 (a third entry point)
• More on Twitter and Why It is Good for You and Your Enterprise, Bill Ives, 13 September 2007 (a much earlier entry point with some still remaining unique points)
• Plus, the Further Reading in my earlier post regarding Twitter, 8 March 2008
• (added 30 March) Matt Moore’s 2×2 matrix that positions email, blogs, instant messaging, and Twitter. In a single 2×2 Matt captures at least 75% of what I was working through above. Nice.