Seradigm: Knowledge Management

I’m an early adopter. I started Christchurch’s first web design company in 1995. I’m onto my 3rd iPhone. But when I first saw Twitter I didn’t get it. I thought it was stupid. Now I couldn’t live without it.

During the 80s and early-mid 90s advances in computer software and networking were largely the domain of the business sector. Business got the best tools first, because they were expensive. Since the late 90s however, it’s the consumer sector that has driven innovation in software tools that connect people.

Why else would it be that it’s easier to find content on the web than documents within the corporate firewall? Why else is it that it’s easier to find and connect with people on Facebook than it is to find the right people to talk to if you’re working inside a large organisation? This is because the development of those tools has happened at Internet scale and speed, far outstripping the ability of commercial enterprise software providers to keep up (both in terms of innovation, and in time to market). New tools get tested by millions of real users, in real time. Everything on the Web is in beta (well, at least until Google recently took Gmail out of beta).

Users’ expectations are now set by Google for search, Twitter for microblogging, and Facebook for social networking. Users in corporates have to wait (often a long time) for their organisations to implement the technologies they can use for free on the Web.

As a term ‘social computing’ could conceptually include everything from email, to document collaboration, to blogging, to wikis, to social network services. For the purposes of this blog post however, I’ll restrict its scope to just talking about social network like services. Blogs and wikis are often referred to as ‘Web 2.0′ technologies, and I’ll leave them there, outside of this discussion. Blogs and wikis are starting to see reasonable adoption in large organisations, even though there is a long way to go. Enterprise use of social networking style tools however is only in its very early stages. I’m picking though that it will be a major trend.

There’s the need here to distinguish between four kinds of uses of social networking tools by organisations:

1. Outward market research – using tools such as Facebook, Twitter and the business services and analytics springing up around these in order to find out what the general public is saying about your organisation/brand/products
2. Outward customer engagement – using Facebook, Twitter and other such tools to actively engage in conversations with your customers (by having a Facebook fan page, a Twitter account for your company etc)
3. Outward employee professional networking - staff using tools like LinkedIn and Plaxo to communicate with their professional networks to ask questions, get help, or recruit new employees
4. Inward communication/collaboration - using microblogging, social networking and similar tools inside your organisation to facilitate staff communicating with each other (as distinct from with customers)

People like Jenny Williams from Ideagarden have fantastic insights into the first two, including some insightful horror stories in her brilliant talk at the Alfresco Asia Pacific conference. While I’m intrigued by marketing and customer engagement, it’s not my area of expertise, and the third use is fairly well understood, so in this post I focus on the fourth use, inward communication/collaboration.

The tools that have been used in collaboration and sharing of information in the last decade include email, discussion forums, intranets, document management systems, collaborative workspaces, and instant messaging. All of these have their strengths and weaknesses. They are useful, but often fail to achieve what they set out to from a knowledge sharing perspective. This is caused, I argue, by the fact that their boundaries and structures are defined by the managerial, functional, or project structures in organisations, not on the way that humans evolved to communicate. Humans evolved communicating in relationships and networks of mutual trust, using narrative to convey and create meaning. It’s how our brains are wired.

Social computing emulates this, using explicitly defined trust relationships between participants. The ‘friend’ relationship in Facebook, and the follow/follower relationships in Twitter allow us to control who hears and sees what we have to say. It’s non hierarchical and the links are controlled by each individual, not by managers or a top down imposed corporate structure.

The promise of social computing applied to inward communication may well overcome many of the failings of knowledge management initiatives. It will do this by making it easier to find out who knows what, who’s doing what, and who’s working with whom. It shifts knowledge sharing from a ‘collect and codify just in case’ paradigm, to a ‘connect and communicate just in time’ one. Knowledge is captured naturally as a part of work, rather than forcibly through management edict.

I have a client, a NZ University, who’s recently rolled out Yammer. Yammer is a cloud computing based service for in-company social computing. It uses the organisation’s email domain as the filter to keep each company’s social network restricted to that company. It provides Facebook style profiles and Twitter style microblogging. In my client’s case, it took off like wildfire, as staff invited their colleagues. Where the organisation has had to use top down change management to get staff to adopt things like document management, and the intranet, this system promoted itself. Yammer seems intent on further integrating into the enterprise, with their release of an Outlook plugin.

Ning, SocialCast, and SocialText Signals are other examples of cloud solutions that let you set up your own social networks. Cloud based solutions will be interesting to some organisations, others I think we’ll see implement social computing behind their firewall. It wouldn’t surprise me if Sharepoint 2010 includes more of this type of functionality. Vendors like ConnectBeam and products like Lotus Connections, SocialText Signals Social Software Appliance and Vignette Social Media are already providing this.

Young people now entering the workforce have spent their teen and university years using social networking tools to relate to each other and manage their lives. They will want access to the same kind of tools in the workplace.

So, my prediction, enterprise social computing is going to be big in NZ, in the 2010/11 timeframe.

Acknowledgements of ideas that influenced this post:

• Jenny Williams for her thinking on the comparison of KM to Social Computing (slide 33 in this presentation)
• Dave Snowden for his many recent podcasts about social computing

This is the third in a set of posts on NZ information management trends:

1. OpenSource ECM
2. CMIS will save us
3. Enterprise Social Networking
4. Doing Sharepoint wrong, and right
5. Structured Data
6. Toes in the mist

Next up, Sharepoint.

As an independent consultant I’ve always worked hard to be technology agnostic. This means understanding (and to the extent that I can, using) the full range of operating systems, desktop and server software platforms, stacks, and development tools and languages. It also means mixing and mingling with people from different parts of the IT landscape, including free software advocates, Microsoft evangelists, and everyone in between.

I use Linux, Windows and MacOS on a daily basis, and for the last 10 years have been watching with interest the philosophical and commercial battle between opensource and proprietary software. About three years ago however, I started wondering whether the next big battle wouldn’t be between Microsoft and Linux, but rather it would be between Microsoft and Google.

It first started being described as ‘Application Service Providers’, then ‘Software as a Service’, and it finally seems to have settled on ‘Cloud Computing’. ASPs had promise, but in terms of infrastructure and middleware provision seem to have suffered in part from lack of initial scale to get the required cost benefits. SaaS has had some successes, such as Salesforce.com and others.

What’s made me really realise that the space has changed from an idea to a business reality is not the media, the reporting, or the fact that ‘Cloud Computing’ on Google Trends has almost overtaken SaaS. It’s the people, and the business names.

I’m seeing a third set of people emerge, they’re not OpenSource stallwarts, or Microsofties, they’re Cloud junkies. They’re embracing Google Apps, Amazon’s S3 and EC2, and to a lesser extent, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace and others. They’re starting businesses in New Zealand with names like Cloudbreak, Waveadept and Memia Cloud Services Architecture. They’re advocating, promoting, and selling Cloud based solutions. They’re starting to address and answer questions about sovereignty of data, privacy, security, disaster recovery, service level agreements and contracts with cloud providers, and total cost of ownership calculations.

In New Zealand we’ve seen these companies helping Auckland University put 50,000 students on Gmail, and NZPost moving 2,100 staff to Google Apps.

I recently went to an event in Wellington hosted by Cloudbreak and Waveadept.  There were a couple of telling quotes from Google staff:

“Is email [provisioning] core to your business, I hope not because if so you’re in competition with me” (and implicitly, you’re going to lose…)

“Microsoft Office is like Photoshop, every business should have a couple of copies”

I don’t agree or disagree with these statements, but they are telling. They signal a potential shift from the way we’ve been using information technology over the last ten years.

Is cloud computing just an obvious next step after the server virtualisation movement we’ve seen in the last five years? Will organisations move everything to the cloud? Or will they maintain a mix of proprietary/opensource solutions hosted behind the corporate firewall, and couple that with some Cloud based services.

There are some obvious benefits to cloud computing:

• Reduction in risk of data loss/security breaches due to people losing their laptops or thumbdrives while travelling
• Cost take out, i.e. switching from a mixed fixed cost (capex) + variable cost (opex), to a purely variable cost model
• It gets rid of the challenges of building out your own overcrowded server rooms/data centres
• Improved functionality rolled out in real time, without having to go through painful upgrade cycles
• Reduced time to value in implementation of new services

There are also some real risks and concerns about:

• Performance and reliability over Internet connections and the (limited) bandwidth we have in & out of NZ
• Sovereignty of data (data sitting under different jurisdictions and laws)
• Control over the data, and restricting others from using it inappropriately
• Risk of the cloud computing provider holding the data going out of business
• The implications for staffing levels in IT departments

The SSC recently released a set of guidelines about Government Use of Offshore Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Service Providers to help agencies make good decisions about venturing into the cloud computing realm.

On the small business front, I have a friend who’s started a niche online business providing parent-teacher interview scheduling services for schools. It’s being adopted at a much faster rate than he’d imagined. Although he has expertise in providing web hosting services himself, he’s now very glad he decided to build it in Google App Engine, as it’ll scale to meet the increasing demand in a ‘pay as you go’ fashion.

While the way it will play out is still a little misty, it’s clear cloud computing is going to have a major impact, and I predict we’ll see a lot more startup companies with cloud based metaphors in their names.

In closing, I’m reminded of the ever prescient Mark Andresson, founder of the Netscape browser. In 1999 he started a company called Loudcloud to provide managed Internet services. It was a bit before its time, but even so evolved into a successful business that HP acquired for $1.6B…