Designing social tools for the intranet

Have we forgotten about the design of social tools for the intranet?

Microblogging, blog, wiki, discussion forum and instant messaging; Facebook, Delicious, Flickr and LinkedIn. They were all designed in the internet space to engineer certain social behaviours that encourages people to share, learn, collaborate and connect. With their popularity and success, organisations start to wonder how they could capitalise it for their internal environment. Hence, we start to see the growth of social intranets over these recent years; and many are not doing well.

Some observations inform me of the following macro issues:

• Many organisations are presumptuous on the benefits that could replicate within their firewalls 
• They know the tools but have little idea how to implement one
• They went on to implement quite a few and staff start to get confused
• Intranet teams underestimated the effort required to drive adoption for each tool
• There is a lack of examination in the elements of social tools for application in work

At the individual level, there are issues around fears, uncertainties and doubts (FUDs)

• Is it really OK to blog?
• Is it safe to put authoritative content in a wiki?
• Will I look dumb to post this question?
• Is it another gimmick that will die off?
• Is the organisation forgiving if I make mistakes in my advice?
• Wouldn't it be better for me to connect outside where there are more and readily available practitioners?
• Wouldn't it be better for me to share externally to develop my social influence?
• Wouldn't it make more sense to share my social life in facebook?
• ... and the list goes on

These issues have led me to think about the fundamentals of designing social tools for the intranet and we can use 2 guiding principles to help us stay focused.

• Staff want to get quality work done quickly
• Any tool will do, as long as it works well

Get quality work done quickly

Management wants positive outcomes and the employee wants to get the job done. For the intranet to earn its place in an organisation, it must help employees do their work better. Hence, social tools must primarily enhance work and anything more than this is a bonus. There are 2 compelling reasons for this statement:

• Most people will socialise on sites like Facebook and GooglePlus rather than the intranet. Even if people do socialise on the intranet, the effects organisations hope for are marginalised by these popular internet social networking sites.
• The workplace is where people want to work (more than socialise), and we should capitalise on the intranet for staff to do just that. Introducing social tools with unclear intentions on how they support work will receive less fanfare from staff.

Here is a document collaboration example of how things could look when we use social features to enhance work.

Click on image to enlarge

Designing the tool that works!
I hear on many occasions that intranet teams want to get rid of corporate email systems, as if they are causing some serious evil. But they fail to realise that replacing emails with less effective intranets are double the evil. Yes, email aren't good for many things. But people are so used to email that they are now sub-conscious in overcoming it's flaws. Moreover, we have innate abilities to see patterns well and we can cognitively group messages just by glancing at them. For some time now, email applications have allowed us to view messages in meaningful collections  Email messages are easy to compose and can reach the intended recipients with very little effort. There is no surprise that email remains the ubiquitous choice for messaging and collaboration.

Thus when we design social tools for the intranet, we have to convince ourselves that our intranet is more superior if we want to dismiss some of email's usages. This is not possible without the close examination of social tools and features.

Social computing tools are nothing but a collection of features. When organisations are successful with Yammer, WordPress, Confluence or any other available tools, it's not the product that helped them succeed, but rather the configuration of distinct features that support their business activities in a coherent and efficient manner. (And of course the importance of change management efforts which we see emphasised throughout the intranet blogosphere). When we extract all these desirable features, we get a feature set that enable us to formulate social tools that are suited for an organisation's purpose. If this turns out to be Yammer, Wordpress or..., then good for you because you'll save on the implementation effort. But, it may not.

Facebook wall is a great example. Would you call it a blog post, a tweet or a discussion? No. But can you resonate some of its features with popular social tools - Yes.

A simple framework for starting Communities of Practice

To start a CoP: make it simple and compelling.

Pre-requisites

But first, consider at least 2 things before starting one:

• There's a group of people who are in the practice, although they may not know each other
• There's a good reason for them to come together

On some occasions, legitimacy to participate in community activities is a key consideration. One such example is the accountability of work hours. When such issues are pertinent, the community needs to have a sponsor. But the sponsor should stay out of community activities to encourage peer sharing - something pretty tough to keep them out when they are funding.

A group of people

Organisations that see CoPs as tools for developing capabilities are right. However, there must be enough people in the practice so that they can socialise their knowledge and personal artifacts.

A company has trained 250 technical professionals on cloud computing over a 2-day course for the last 6 months. However, there wasn't enough cloud computing projects for them to hone their skills. Since they are not in the practice, the value of coming together is low. Their managers and themselves would rather invest in learning that's necessary for their work.

A good reason

This is what touches their intrinsic motivation to congregate.

An organisation was trying to start a Sales CoP for its Sales Managers, who are organised by industry business units. They sell services and solutions that are offered by specialised Line of Business (LOB) units. When the sales community first tried to start, it didn't gain any traction as both the community leader and the members didn't see a good reason for them to come together. "Why should I share customer insights which are not relevant to the rest?", "Why should I share my penetration strategies when I'm not sure if others will share", "Will they be interested in my customer relationship stories"; and I think you'd agree with me that it's not in sales folks' DNA to share knowledge openly.

So what can make these skeptical Sales Managers come together?

To sell services, these Sales Managers have depended on occasional one-direction briefings from LOB units and access to some brief service offering documents. With limited knowledge, some Sales Managers weren't confident to sell services, and they often delay an opportunity for a second meeting that involved the LOB specialist. As such, some Sales Managers found a compelling need to have 2-way dialogue with LOB units to equip them with the knowledge to sell services. And after each sharing, the LOB specialist can make us of the online community space to update Sales Managers on trends, value propositions and stories.

A simple framework

There are many resources out there that show us a systematic process of starting a CoP. My experience points to an approach that requires us to do as little as possible before the first community gathering. It involves 3 steps:

1. Identify the reasons that would bring practitioners together.
2. Design community activities that would help the community meet the objectives.
3. Design an online community space to support these activities.

Reasons that would bring practitioners together

If there's a leader identified for the community, invite the leader in this conversation. It'll be good that the leader can bring along one or two more members at this stage that'll form the core group. If a leader doesn't assist, then a central function such as the KM team needs to initiate conversations with practitioners who are preferably from diverse job profiles. My experience points to a greater elicitation of insights if we go on a one-to-one interview. Once we identify reasons that would bond practitioners, get feedback from the next practitioner that we'll meet. This would help us identify compelling reasons versus skeptical ones. During these interviews, we'll be able to identify practitioners who exhibit higher interest levels, and we can invite them in a planning session for the first CoP kickoff meeting.

Community activities

We craft community activities to help build relationships, create a basis for meaningful interaction among community members, and for us to realise the community objectives. For instance, an IT developers community who've identified code sharing as an objective, may perhaps bring along code artifacts, tell why they are sharing them and contribute them in a single workshop; we call this barn raising. This creates a spike in content, generates enough examples for future contributors, and helps the core team identify any issues during the process. In order to create trust in sharing codes and using codes, we can design networking activities to help members open up and know each other better.

Online community space

Digital habitats is a book dedicated to this topic. When members are not meeting face-to-face, community members depend on technology to participate remotely in community activities. A configuration is the design of tools and features to support an activity. For example, members communication may be done through a Blog, with an email notification feature turned on for every new post and comment. We need someone who can steward the use of technology in a community, so that the members can get clear guidance on how to use the tools.

Resources

• Patrick Lambe: Starting Communities of Practice (41 mins video)
  
  


• Etienne Wenger: Cultivating Communities of Practice, a 1-page start-up guide (pdf)
• Shawn Callahan: Staring a Communities of Practice - fostering relationships

Life as an iKMS Exco Member

I shared my 3-year life story as an executive committee member of the iKMS at the Leadership Dialogue today. I hope this sharing will better prepare the next exco when members appoint them in the coming February AGM.

November 2007 – I was approached by Patrick Lambe who was then the iKMS President to join the executive committee. I hesitated the offer mainly due to the uncertainty of what lies ahead upon accepting this role. His assurance of my expertise fit to redesign the iKMS website had me co-opted as an Exco member shortly after.

At that time, there was already a team formed to look after the website project. Requirements were specified and the IT vendor appointed. I remember the 2 meetings we attended at the Straits Knowledge office contained good discussions to clarify our requirements. It seemed like we can look forward to the design phase when the vendor went MIA. We wrote to the vendor and called him several times on his mobile and office with no avail. We fell short of visiting him personally at the office. It felt painful that the sunken investment could not be recovered. It was probably the demoralisation led by the incident that has put the project on hold for a period of time. Being the newest member of the team, I wasn't sure if the protocol was right for me to re-instate the project. I was also concern that the inertia needed to re-instate the project would be overwhelming and WIIFM to do it. So we kept quite about it for around 5 months.

I can't quite remember how it happened, but we somehow started to discuss about the website project again. I had the opportunity to touch up the requirements based on our discussions with the last vendor. We also turned to evaluate Joomla, an open source content management platform that has a strong developer community. The intention for Joomla was to keep the second project cost low and squeeze it within the original budget. We posted up the RFP again and invited 3 vendors for a shortlisting interview at the SSC office. During the process of identifying vendors for the interview, I took special care to invite vendors that were suggested by other members first, and to leave the vendor whom I knew to the last. We were relieved that the quote by our preferred vendor fell within the original budget allocated for the project.

Dramatic incidents just seemed to befall this project. Halfway through development, the software developer ran off with the codes for reasons that we still don’t know. The web graphics designer quited and the job was passed to another designer. The design techniques were back in early 90's, primarily using tables for the placement of page elements. For those of you who are familiar with web projects, re-designing the web graphics design professionally after the developer has build codes based on it mean a major re-work. As much as I didn't want to, I spent many sessions at Starbucks with the newly assigned developer to overhaul the technical aspects of the design. On some occasions, it was inevitable for me to tip-toe out of office. As we progress, I realised that Joomla was rich in features, too rich - and as a result made the website more and more unusable as we progress to the development of other modules. It was around this time that I felt that the rest of the team members had subtly disappeared. I felt lonely and a little helpless. I felt that I did a bad job. Investments had been made for the detailed requirements analysis and I felt trapped between continuing the project or to look for alternatives. I felt tired and wondered how I could get myself out of this rut. The worst of these is to fulfill the promise of delivering a website at KM Singapore 2008, which we did - a pretty unusable website.

I was very disgruntled. There was no progress to Phase II of the project. The developer faced difficulties finding matching plug-ins and it was too much effort to develop them. Show stopper - we are stuck. The best thing we could do is to negotiate compensation from the vendor and terminate the contract. As you may guess, the project halted again.

It then occurred to me that there could be potential SAAS solutions out there that will meet most of our needs. I kept my finger crossed and started my research. To my delight, I came across such a solution and took to flight an immediate trial account and did a little POC. I discussed the results with some of the web team members, and new web team members. They were supportive of the idea. Setting up and configuring was such a breeze and it supported all our BAU activities such as events registration, membership management, communications and etc. I was so ready and excited with another of my team mate to share this during the Feb 2010 AGM. However, I was slammed by some of the ex-team members to leave out the intended collaboration and information organisation aspects of the website. My team mate was then exploring other options for collaboration. We have to live with the criticism and proceed with the website roll-out after the joined agreement made by the members at the AGM. The new website was launched in May 2010, 3 months after the AGM.

I was nominated the VP of iKMS during the Feb 2010 AGM with the support of my fellow member, who felt that my silent dedication had earned me the right to assume this position. I wouldn't deny that the idea of being a VP felt very good, it felt like I've achieved some kind of professional recognition. But at the same time, I need to be accountable for the website operations, iKMS knowledge resources and SIGs development. Well Mr. VP, you're also suppose to look into e-conversion of iKMS publications, think of ways to handle the surplus of hardcopy publications and make sure resources are being published whenever they are made available. Around 2 months left before the next AGM and as my day job challenges me, I carry with me a mental burden that the chances of getting these done in time are slim.

As if this was not enough, I lead a collaborative effort with CSC to nurture the intranet SIG, and hopefully future SIGs to come. The intranet SIG is something I wish to handover once we've identified a suitable leader. The collaboration was necessary - because if there were 2 similar SIGs, the members’ base would be almost the same. It would also require more effort from either side to produce quality activities and content for the members. I have not regretted this collaboration because CSC has been very objective in advancing the intranet practice, and it has been fulfilling. iKMS provides the online SIG platform, has the network to invite experts, and CSC has the expertise to nurture CoPs. But this collaboration also brings to the table issues surrounding the exclusion of our private sector members and inclusion of SIG members who are not iKMS members. We have to look into these issues soon.

The one thing that I cherish in iKMS is the opportunity to identify and make really good friends. The ability to serve a cause that I'm deeply passionate about is really satisfying; something that I shall not talk too much about or else it'll lose its effect. I urge you to be a contributing member of iKMS, but only if you could put the development of the iKM practice and the members before yourself. And when you do, try to stay committed to your responsibilities, and look for a successor quickly the moment you can't. I do not say this as a role model, but as a recovery from my foolishness.

Making common content work on the intranet

The intranet comprises broadly of corporate and business common content. Corporate content are stuff such as backoffice processes, policies, templates, news, corporate events and employee benefits. Business content are stuff such as standard contract clauses, services & solutions offerings, project references, document deliverable templates, delivery samples and methodologies.

Regardless of the category, 5 things need to happen for an intranet to be a trusted place for staff to get common content. Common content needs to be:

• available as soon as they are
• at the right place
  
• well-written
• accurate, current and comprehensive
• rid of Redundant, Obsolete and Trivial (ROT) content

Before I expand these points, I have to confess that I have problems with the terms Business Owner, Content Owner and Content Custodian. I meant for them to be the business representative who is responsible for sharing their content on the intranet. What would you call this person?

Available as soon as they are
We should aim to publish common content before any formal communication sessions. For instance, updating a process write-up and uploading new templates on the intranet before conducting training. The intranet team needs to proactively identify and cooperate with business owners to write and publish content. It's different from publishing content when they eventually become available.

Business owners seldom initiate content publishing. The pyramid below is a reflection on how much business owners depend on the intranet.

The intranet team has less to worry for business owners who position the intranet as necessary for communicating content. On the contrary, the challenge is real for staff who treat the intranet as supplementary or remain obscure to it. Business owners in the supplementary category will publish their content on the intranet nevertheless, but the speed in which they do so is worrying because staff who needs the content will have spend time looking for them before they are eventually published. This can discredit the intranet for not being able to keep up with the pace of the business and make staff distrust the intranet. For staff in the obscure category, it'll probably never come to mind that they can use the intranet for publishing - this is the most worrying.

How can we establish touch-points with these worrisome business owners? How do we discover them as they appear with new initiatives or changes? To help the intranet harvest common content and stay relevant with the business, here are some things that can be done:

• Participate in Senior Management meetings so that the intranet team can identify new initiatives and content
• Stay in touch with business owners to learn about the progress of their initiatives
  
• Participate in progress update meetings of strategic workgroups

The idea is for the intranet team to spread their wings as far as possible to cover grounds where common content can emerge.

At the right place
Staff expect to find common content when they go to the intranet. Hhmm... isn't this obvious? Yes, but things can go wrong if we leave it to chance. We must take preventive actions:

• The content staff expect is genuinely not there - Apart from content owners, all staff members need to know that the intranet is the place for common content and not email. The intranet team should also work with the IT department to control the use of mass email addresses, perhaps limiting their use only for emergencies.
  
• The content is there but it's hard to find - It's an information architecture concern for content to be findable. Always perform findability tests with 2 or 3 staff members and fine-tune the labels or categories applied to the content. Simply show the test participants the homepage and ask them where they would navigate to find the content if they were to complete an associated task.
  
• The content is there but it's hard to find it again - When content gets massive on an intranet, we need to balance between increasing the core navigation taxonomy versus learnability. We should try hard to preserve the core navigation taxonomy because that gives the intranet its stability. If staff members can find the content in their second or third attempt and subsequently find them again, then we say that the location of the content can be learned and give it a pass.

A well-researched information architecture design supports content scalability. However, there's only so much we can do at that point in time. When the intranet navigation starts to break due to the evolution of the business or the scope of the intranet, it's time to consider an intranet redesign.

Well-written
Well-written content encompass the following characteristics:

• Rich in domain knowledge (but don't mistake this for lengthy essays!): The person with the best knowledge must be sought to provide the content, or at least review them.
  
• Styled appropriately for the content medium: Writing for the Web, MS Word document, MS powerpoint, and graphic illustrations and etc requires different skillsets because the way we consume content on these mediums are different.
  
• Perfect in language: "Our organisation core values will ensures successful deliveries of you projects"... an instant turnoff, you know what I mean! Get someone who is good in language skills to proof read content.
• Exudes the brand of the organisation: This is especially true for external facing business content, occasionally corporate content are written in this way too for employee brand alignment.

To obtain guidance and consistency in writing, intranet style guides are usually produced.

Accurate, current and comprehensive
Staff members can sense content that is not accurate, current or comprehensive. This feeling will have viral effects on the rest of the common content. However, it's much safer for this group who can sense that these content are not usable than for those who go ahead and use them.

Here's what we can do to keep content accurate, current and comprehensive:

• Engage the business owner who is the custodian of the information to write it.
• Schedule periodic reviews with the custodian to review the content. Depending on the nature of the content, some may have predefined expiry dates, some need periodic reviews and some are pretty evergreen. Let the content custodian understand the various configurations and agree on a review period. Yes, this means you need a content inventory for the intranet to keep tabs on the expiry period of content. To make this an efficient process for the intranet team, we can define fixed review schedules and register new content for the next review so that they'll subsequently flow into the normal review cycle. If you have the luxury of tools, you can automate the review schedule and workflow.
  
• Let content custodian know that they are responsible for the quality of the content and the implications of not updating them in time. Sharing stories relating to disinformation may be useful. This would encourage them to initiate updates when changes are needed.
• Provide a feedback section on every intranet page. Sometimes, business owners don't know what content they need to provide until someone asks for it.
• Include the names of the business owners on each page. When staff can't find information on a page, seeing the name of the business owner helps them seek information directly from the source. The business owner can also learn about the missing content and provide incremental updates on the page.
  

Rid of Redundant, Obsolete and Trivial (ROT) content
We remove weeds from soil so that plants can be free of external competition for nutrients. And weeds typically flourish much faster than plants. Weeds are analogous to ROT content. They are a distraction to what staff really need, and consumes energy to process and un-process them. During the periodic review, content custodians must be told to identify ROT content and remove them. ROT content could exist within web pages and documents, or it could apply to an entire web page or document. All references made to these ROT content should be redirected or removed. Investing in a broken link checker here is a good idea, rather than to rely on human memory or maintaining a manual inventory of link references.

Summary
The illustration summarises the points that have been mentioned so far. It has been logically sequence to content discovery, production and maintenance. I'm suggesting for the Content Strategist and Technical Writer from the intranet team to carry out these activities.
If we are serious about keeping pace with new/changing content and to produce quality content, the Content Strategist and Technical Writer are not secondary but necessary. We can think of the Content Strategist as the hunter and the Technical Writer as the chef. I'll recommend that these 2 roles be filled by different qualified people, so that we'll be able to keep pace with the content generated from new business initiaitives.

Conclusion
A large part of any intranets is common content. While an intranet doesn't thrive simply with quality common content, but it will certainly fail when it doesn't.

We can learn from the company Enbridge, winner of the Intranet Design Annual 2010, which emphasises on editorial workflow to ensure content quality; for example, each page has a named content owner to guard against stale information. We should take proper care of content quality and supply, and never assume discovery, production and maintenance of content to happen on its own.

Related resources

• Jane McConnell: When "global & local" becomes "common & specific"
• Mark Morrell: How to get quality content
• James Robertson: Strategies for improving and maintaining intranet content
• Sean Nicholson: Is It Time For Your Intranets Annual Performance Review?
• Jeffrey MacIntyre: Content Strategy - A community exploration of an emerging field of practice
  
• Quality web content: Writing guidelines for web content managers and authors
• Web Style Guide
  
• Yahoo style guide
  

Weed out the Performance Management System

We are living in an era of carrots and sticks, dictating us to do well based on the KPIs set by ourselves, KPIs that are binded to the performance management system. As a result, KMers lethargically join the bandwagon to implement KPIs so that KM efforts will be a legitimate purchase of our colleagues' time. There are reasons why we felt the negative vibes of KPIs and I did some reflection myself to discuss their impact on KM here. I've also proposed an alternative model to replace the traditional performance management system.

KPIs don't work
We've seen that it's difficult to introduce KM KPIs to people who are already 100% utilised. If they have that 5-10% set aside for KM, how significant is that to their overall rating for them to invest in KM? Not much.

The other danger of KPIs has to do with the restrictive and inflexible nature of it. We typically set KPIs in the beginning of the work year and give it a date for completion. Sometimes, we are given a chance to review the KPIs in the mid-year but still that's around 180 days. Unless the market competitors can all come to a consensus not to introduce anything new and fancy during the year, setting KPIs isn't a real issue. But it doesn't happen. For KM to be valuable to an organisation, it needs to adapt it's initiatives to remain relevant to the advancement of the business. "Can you tell me how the intranet redesign is going to help in our new initiative?", "Why taxonomy and collaboration matters?", "Why aren't we leveraging on KM principles to develop capabilities in our new strategic initiative", asked the Senior Management.

The third destructive force of KPIs has to do with the ubiquitous resignation season. The season starts after individuals' performance are assessed and bonus awarded, a milestone which employees are longing for for the past year. In these seasons, we see dips in the organisation's capabilities as experts take their leave.

What works
The solution proposed here does not suggest how else we should be creative about setting KPIs, but to forget about the practice altogether. A successful KM program cultivates the environment for sharing, learning and collaborating to take place and flourish: Good soil, healthy plants. We can't do things to plants to make them grow healthily just like we can't do things to people to make them share and learn effectively. For a KM program to be healthy, we need to weed out the KPI practice and cultivate good soil.

The bad Bell Curve
When we talk about KPIs and performance management systems, we synonymously relate it to the bell curve. So let's first take a look at the controversial bell curve, and why it's so bad. No matter how well an employee performs, he has to fall in one of the zones. If an employee is in the A or B zone, it means good money, prospects and joy. The opposite applies when he is in the D or E zone. There's a mixture of feelings for employees in the C zone as they are made up of those who thought they should be in the A/B zone, the D/E zone, and the C zone. The bell curve represents an unequal division of benefits, even when everyone puts in their best. Someone who puts in his best and lands up in the D/E zone produces an instant demoralisation consequence. If he's angry about it, he leaves the organisation. If he's sad about it, he may carry that feeling for the next year. People in the A/B zone are not that fortunate too, as they carry the stress of defending their performance. And mind us, there's a weak correlation between defending good performance versus producing a valuable outcome. To illustrate this point, getting an A in studies doesn't necessarily mean that I'm well learned, it may just mean that I've became good in getting A's.

Strategy based on Satisfaction
I'm proposing an alternate strategy based on paying people adequately and getting the issue of money off the table so that they can concentrate on stuff that matters, including knowledge sharing and learning. We know what it means by adequate because they've stated that in their salary expectation. But I also encourage for us to pay them slightly more so that they are indeed well-compensated, especially for talents we want to retain. This notion is seconded by Nobel Prize winner George Akerlof who said:

Higher wages could actually reduce a company's cost

And the pocket where we find this money to pay people more: the A/B performance bonus of course. But to be fair, such a model restrains variability to the bonus which companies can give depending on their overall performance, which may impose a risk of exceeding the salary budget. So we should allow for variability, by first setting a baseline salary budget that a company is comfortable with and then allowing a variable component to mitigate the harm caused by poor company performance. I like the idea of entrusting the rights of this variable component to every employee. This takes place when a company emerged profitable at the end of a financial year. It works by the company announcing a fixed dollar value that would be given to each employee for rewarding their peers whom they thought deserved it.

There are many benefits to this strategy:

1. Whatever an employee gets from his peers is a closer reflection of his performance.
2. Saves the organisation tons of resources compared to the bell curve system.
3. Helps employees work on stuff that matters, stuff which they are capable of.
4. Makes (almost) everyone happier.
5. Creates a positive environment of equality and connectedness among employees.

Conclusion
The hardest obstacle in adopting a new strategy for compensation is not in the complexity of implementation, but a change in management thinking. This new approach is actually practiced very often in our day-to-day life. For instance, we want to clear our bills as soon as we get our salary and clear our work before we go on a vacation. Get it out of the way, so that we can make room for KM and any other stuff that matters.

Forming organic online communities on the intranet: #hashtag everything!

Hashtags in Twitter
Twitter has popularised the use of #hashtags as a way to aggregate relevant tweets together. #hashtag is a special kind of tag because people learn about them before using them. For example, if I want to apply a hashtag for information architecture, I will lookup Twubs, a hashtag directory to see if I should be using "information_architecture", "information-architecture", "#ia" or some other hashtags, based on the original intention of the hashtag, the popularity of the hashtag, the quality of information represented by the hashtag and the type of people I want to reach. This is unlike tags, which is a typical summary of content using keywords that mean something to the originator. #hastags have this powerful self-organising ability. It is this inherent ability of #hashtags that allows us to build communities organically. This is nothing new, it was the intention of #hashtags in Twitter.

Hashtag everything!
Here's something new: what if we extend this ability to #hashtag everything. Our discussion topics, wiki articles, blog posts, events, personal profiles, video, images, documents and etc

We essentially harvest content and people to create online communities organically

Mission impossible in the www
Well, it's going to be a tall order to make this happen in the www. Firstly, #hashtags works if there is one place to do one thing. #hastags work in Twitter because it is the de facto place to tweet, making the use of #hashtags in twitter scalable and plausible. Wikipedia is the de facto place to write wiki articles but unfortunately there's no #hastags implementation. This brings us to the second problem, that #hashtags is not a standard. So even if #hashtags are implemented in Wikipedia, the same #hashtags used in Twitter make no sense to Wikipedia without integration. If we aren't convince that #hashtag everything on the www is almost impossible, start considering the video, image, document, blog, discussion, networking... tools that are residing all over the place.

Yes, hashtag everything on the intranet
If it's not possible to #hashtag everything on the www to build online communities, let's shift our attention to the intranet. On an intranet, we have a defined set of audience and we have control over the way the intranet is designed. Employees come to the intranet because there are no other place to find the information and do the things that are offered by it. Given this advantage, we can potentially make this happen. We can setup just one instance of a tool each - one "Twitter", one blog, one wiki, one document repository, one discussion forum and etc to achieve economies of scale with #hashtags. Next, we'll have to show staff members the concept of #hastags and how easy it would be for them to contribute and participate. Once these are done, we need to pay some attention to information security and groupings.

Take care of information security and groupings
We have to make it easy for each staff member to define their networks. Each staff member may define several networks of their immedate colleagues, project teams, communities and etc. How defining these networks are made easy is another discussion altogether so we'll just assume that it can be done neatly with the advancement of UX. With the networks defined, it's just a matter of selecting which networks we want to share our contributions with.

Conclusion
This idea was inspired by a recent project to connect around 120,000 staff members on a social intranet. Traditionally, we've been trying to create online communities by first creating a space for them. The problem with this approach is that we have to figure out who the potential community members are and the community's configuration (matchmaking community activities and the appropriate tools and features required), and then have a core community team to drive it's success. For a participant, he has to figure out what relevant communities are available and then decide on which want to join. This problem applies to both small and large organisations, with the magnitute escalating depending on their size. #hastagging everything is a relook at how online communities can be formed without being distracted by the traditional process of setting one up.

Personalisation also becomes easy just by means of subscribing to #hashtags that we care about.

But it'll take time before this idea gets popularised. We'll need time to digest this idea, refine it and then wish for technology innovation to happen. It's a big idea and we'll therefore need a big heart for this.

Just because physical communities are set up this way, it doesn't mean that online communities have to.

Adoption and Engagement

The success of most KM initiatives depends on the participation level of staff members, and we know that the people element in KM takes high priority. Yet KM teams often focus their attention vastly on the operational aspects of their initiative and pay less emphasis to adoption and engagement strategies. Marketing campaigns and trainings are common for building awareness and developing skills, but they are not sufficient for the uptake and sustainability of a KM initiative. To succeed in an initiative, we need insights on the issues that work against adoption and engagement, and deliver strategies that have high impact and probability of success.

So what's adoption and engagement...
Adoption is ingrained in an organisation when people say "We need to do it". This can happen when management formalise a process, implement a policy or when a work task is dependent on the other. Adoption strategies are absolutely necessary in the early stages of a KM initiative when staff members are weary about its effectiveness and their desired behaviour. For example, "Are there people who will be responding to my questions in this new intranet?". In this case, an adoption strategy may mandate all discussions to take place on the intranet instead of the email. This example demonstrates the use of a KM policy to drive desired behaviours. It instills confidence in staff members that their questions are going to be answered because that is the place to do it.

When someone is engaged, we hear them saying "I can see why I should do it". An engagement strategy should help develop the intrinsic motivation for participation. For example, inviting experts to provide response to questions and ideas can help staff members see the value of participating on the intranet, and in turn encourage them to use the intranet for the same reason in future. We should work towards engagement because engaged people want to do things, as compared to adoption where people have to do things.

Concerns
There are mainly 2 sets of concerns that we need to tackle with regards to adoption and engagement:

1. FUD - Which stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. The term is first coined by Gene Amdahl as a disinformation technique to dissuade customers from switching to another competitor's product. Drawing inspiration from this, FUDs are reflected as a major cause of adoption issues. FUDs are significant in the small talks that take place in employees - sometimes at a fraction of a second - that dissuade them from adopting a new KM initiative.
   



2. Motivation - The lack of motivation is a major cause of engagement issues. For this, we can look at Daniel Pink's video where he talks about the problem with rewards and leads us to Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose as the drivers of personal motivation.
   
   
   

Adoption and Engagement workshop
A workshop is a good way to start the adoption and engagement process. It is best attended by a group of KM Activists or a task force, who have a vested interest in the success of the KM initiative. This workshop can take a day to complete and the aim is for people who are on the ground to think about:

• What would prevent people from participating in the initiative
• Why would people participate
• What ideas we could generate to improve the current situation
  
• How we can work on the selected ideas

Step 1 - Set the context
Provide an introduction to the participants. Tell them about:

• The objective of the workshop
• Motivation and FUDs so that they'll have a framework for reflection during the workshop
  
• Why giving extrinsic rewards is such a bad idea in KM. I find this short interview with David Gurteen summarises the harm imposed by rewards
  
  
  
  

Step 2 - Identify factors of non-participation
Ask each participant to write down the top 3 reasons why their colleagues would not participate in the initiative. Ask them to write each reason on a yellow post-it note with their initials on it.

Step 3 - Identify factors of participation
Repeat the process on pink post-it notes for the top 3 reasons why their colleagues would participate in the initiative.

Step 4 - Develop themes
Run an affinity diagram exercise to associate reasons of non-participation with reasons for participation. Label each group with a theme. MindTools shared about the Affinity Diagram method.

Step 5 - Brainstorm ideas
For new KM initiatives, we can make an assumption that the yellow post-it notes reflect the current state, and the pink post-it notes contains the desired outcomes that we are targeting. So this step requires us to brainstorm the various ideas that would transit us from the current state to the desired outcomes.

Ideas that are generated might apply to other themes. Duplication is fine and it may mean that the idea has a higher impact on adoption and engagement.

Step 6 - Prioristise ideas
After the participants have exhausted their ideas, it's time to prioritise them. I find this matrix useful in prioritising a laundry list of ideas. The recommended group size of this activity is 6 pax.

1. Hand each participant a hardcopy list with the s/no and ideas pre-filled in.
   
2. Tell them to score from a scale of 1 - 5 for both probability and impact, with 1 being the lowest score and 5 being the highest.
3. With all the participants coming together, go through their individual score for probability and impact for each idea. Come to a consensus for each of the scoring.
   
4. Tabulate the final score for each idea and shortlist the top 3 ideas.
   
5. Invite the participants to make a qualitative assessment and confirmation for the top 3 ideas.
   

Step 7 - Define the action plan
The next step is to translate the shortlisted ideas into concrete action plans that will result in the intended outcomes. I would start small here by focusing on one idea that the participants would want to work on. Try to keep the project team size small, so that we could simplify coordination and reserve the rest of the members to work on other ideas in future.

Conclusion
Adoption and engagement don't just happen, it requires thoughtful cultivation. This means adoption and engagement strategies require genuine investment and we should assess their inclusion for every KM initiative. Because at the end of the day, we shouldn't just be contented with delivering outputs, but rather, we should be celebrating positive outcomes.

CoP business case template

At certain point in time, organisations planning to cultivate Communities of Practice (CoP) need to put up a business case to justify the relevance and investment to the management.

Here is a simple CoP business case template for reference. I'm looking forward to your comments to further improve this template.

Project Sponsorship
(Enter the name and title of the project sponsor)

Business Objectives
(Introduce the community and the expected changes that creating a community will make to the business and members)
Pointers:

• What the community will be used for (helping, stewarding knowledge, impart best practices, innovation, improve a specific practice, build relationships, motivation, communications, professional development…)
• What changes will this community bring about

Community approach
(State the high level activities that the community will take to achieve the desired changes)
Pointers:

• Pay attention to activities that will cater to practice improvements; and ALSO
• Pay attention to regular activities that will sustain the interest of the community. A CoP is different from a task force or project team. Members will have different needs at various times and they’ll need to leverage on the community for guidance. A community that neglects this aspect and focus just on specific practice improvements risks poor adoption from members.

Business impact
(State the business impact that will be brought about by the CoP)
Pointers:

• State the impact that will be brought about by both practice related changes/improvements and regular ongoing activities.
• Focus on the outcomes, benefits and beneficiaries.

Critical Success Factors (Enablers)
(List the critical success factors for this community to be successful)
Pointers:

• Identify issues that the organisation and the members are passionate about
• Properly scoped community such that we can bring in new ideas and new members, but narrow enough that most members will be interested in the topics discussed
• Regular interaction and relationship building activities among members
• Strong community leadership
• …

Probability for success (High, Medium, Low)
(List a fair probability of success and why)

Other notes and issues
(List any other supporting notes that can help make the case)

Making choices

I'm likely to be embarking on a project soon to look at services we can provide to support learning for various forms of communities. There are 3 fundamental and important questions that have been bothering me with regards to the scope of services:

1. What type of services would appeal to the masses?
2. How many services should we offer?
   
3. How do we make it easy for the masses to decide on the suitable services?

In short, it's about how I should be developing choices and how to make it pleasant for consumers to make those choices.

I came across 2 talks on TED that provided me some leads to answer these questions. The first talk was from Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce and the second was from Barry Schwatz on the paradox of choice. In a nutshell, Malcom's points out the importance of having variability in choices and Barry's point is that too much variability can be a bad thing.

The perfect choice vs perfect choices
Malcolm pointed out that the quest for the perfect sauce is wrong. Rather, we should be going for perfect sauces. Howard Moskowitz, a psychophysicist, made 45 varieties of spaghetti sauce to cover every possible conceivable way of varying the sauce; from the level of sweetness, garlic, tartness, tomatoes-ness and visible solids. After getting a truck load of people to sample 10 types of sauces each, Howard found out that all Americans generally fall into 3 preference groups. They generally liked the plain, the spicy and the chunky sauces. The findings on the liking for chunky sauce was revolutionary because there was no chunky spaghetti sauce in the market at that time when 1/3 of the Americans would want it. For that, Prego made 600 million dollars over the next 10 years from chunky spaghetti sauce. This is why there are at least 7 types of vinegars, 14 different kinds of mustard, 71 kinds of olive oils and 36 types of Ragu sauces (LOL) today. Howard loves to say "The mind knows not what the tongue wants!"

Malcolm then went on to conclude with 4 points:

1. Experimentation (tasting) helps us to realise the desires that we cannot explain.
2. Horizontal segmentation. Different kinds of sauces suits different kinds of people. This fundamentally democratised the way we think about taste.
   
3. The shift to variability. What we thought would make people happy was to provide them with the culturally authentic and universal tomato sauce. But there has since been a shift towards the understanding of variability.
4. Embracing diversity. That in embracing diversity in human beings, we will find a surer way to providing happiness.

With these, here comes Barry with his views which I thought were counter arguments to Malcolm's to some extend.

Barry started by saying that the official dogma of the west has been to maximise welfare. To maximise welfare we have to maximise freedom. And by maximising choices we get greater freedom. However, he argues that more choices have not make us freer, but more paralysed, not happier but more dissatisfied. He gave several examples.

Problems with freedom of choice
In the case of a patient who is about to receive treatments, the doctor would practice patient autonomy; that is, explaining the options available and the risks associated with those options, and then insist that the patient decide for himself. This essentially shifts the burden of decision making from someone who knows something to somebody who knows much less or nothing.

When it comes to working, we now have the freedom to decide when, where and how to do it. With a smart phone which gives us online access to our emails, we are reminded again and again on our ability to work. This thought alone affects the quality of our leisure and family time even though we have chosen not to work.

Problems with abundant choices
Abundant choices produces paralysis rather than liberation. With many options to choose from, people find it difficult to choose at all. He gave an example of 50 over retirement financial plans offered by a company and the results is that many employees forgo evaluation and took up the default plan. This came as a result of employees being over zealous and cautious in making that critical decision that they end up spending the next day, and then the next and so on to try to identify that perfect choice.

Effects of making that choice
Even if we manage to overcome paralysis and make a choice, we normally end up less satisfied than we would be if we have fewer options to choose from. Barry cited 4 consequences:

1. Regret. If the results of our choice does not match our initial expectations, it's easy to imagine that we should have made another choice. The perception of a better alternative induces regret in the decision we make, and the regret subtracts away from the satisfaction of our choice even though it was a good decision.
2. Opportunity cost. Attractive features present in other options are going to be seen as opportunity cost. They too subtract the satisfaction we'll get from the choice we made.
3. Escalation of expectations. All the available choices make our expectations go up, as compared to having only one item to choose from. In the past when there was only one type of jeans, we made do with it and it eventually got more comfortable over time. But with the present day variety of jeans, we tend to feel that there is a perfect pair of jeans out there.
   
4. Self-blame. In the past when the one type of jeans weren't that nice to wear, it was the world's fault. But with the present day variety of jeans, picking a less satisfactory pair of jeans becomes our fault, because we tend to think that we could have done better with the available options out there.

So what have we learn from these opposing proponents? Here's my take and I welcome further comments from you:

1. Limiting the number of choices. I've no idea of a perfect number. But we know that too many is no good and not having choices is a bad thing. I guess it's a combination of time taken to evaluate an option times the number of options available. Choosing jeans is much easier than choosing a retirement financial plan, and this relatively means we can have more types of jeans than financial plans. Limiting choices to a few helps reduce the satisfaction issues.
   
2. Horizontal segmentation research. It's important for providers to develop the varieties based on segmentation. Constant testing and fine tuning of those options would be tedious but essential.
   
3. Disconnect between providers and consumers. In the case of the 36 types of Ragu sauces, Howard effectively did a horizontal segmentation. But the person standing in front of the 36 Ragu sauces in a supermarket may not have any idea which segmentation they belong to, and to aggravate matters the supermarket staff may not have cluster the sauces according to the intended segmentation. We cannot assume similarity in mental models between providers and consumers. We need a simple way to present the categories of sauces to help people adapt to the way providers think. If the providers have done their homework, it should be easy for the consumers to relate.
   
4. Experimentation. This has been prevalent in the IT industry where trial versions of software is available for experimentation. Fitting jeans and tasting spaghetti sauce are experiments too. This perhaps is the best way to help people make informed choices. But there are also situations where experimentation is not possible, like in the case of surgical procedures.
5. Expert advice. This is crucial in helping people who know nuts, don't have much time to learn or when the stake of the choice is high. Experts can help single out the common or popular choices and even help clients recommend the ideal choice based on their needs/profile.
6. Bundling. Bundling helps to combine the benefits of various choices and makes selection easier since we have a reduction of choices. The responsibility of making a choice is shared between the provider and the consumer since the consumer can now say, "It's not purely my choice, it was bundled in that way!". Of course the availability of itemised choices can co-exist in another purchase category for people who can or prefer to pick ala carte items.
   

Recipe for a successful KM team

It's a human tendency that we take care of things that matters to us, and we pay attention to things that help keep them in good condition. For example, we pay attention to our mobile phone casing for our mobile phones, and we pay attention to our shoes if we do a lot of walking. But do organisations pay attention to the KM team for improving business performance? I hope the answer is Yes. However, I've seen circumstances that cause KM teams to underperform:

• Not the core business - The KM team is often a support function to the core business and may not fall within the active radar screen of the senior management. i.e. don't really matter since the KM function is not the direct contributors of the organisations KPI.
  
• Inadequate resourcing - Trying to rollout too many or huge initiatives with too little resources resulting in delay of KM initiatives. When a KM team member has to juggle himself between projects or submerge himself in one part of a huge project which he fronts alone, momentum is broken and stakeholders get disengaged. It then takes unaccounted effort to re-establish the work, build rapport and trust.
  
• Poor planning for the post-implementation - In many cases, the focus were given to implementation and less emphasis for the operation. Just as one of my pass KM program manager puts it, "We have created a huge dinosaur, now we have to feed it" - too late I suppose.
• Lack of measurements - Without proper measurements and feedback to the organisation on the effectiveness of KM makes the KM team unpopular over time. "What is this KM team doing? Are they required?". Engagement with stakeholders become a problem as they question the value of KM.
• Too future-oriented - Why spend too much on building the infrastructure for the future when there are already immediate pains today. When we are too future-oriented, we end up doing things that don't relate to people's current issues and thus don't really make sense to people who need to prioritise their work. For example, Knowledge Base may be a good idea for issue resolution but updating skills profile in a staff directory is a much faster way to connect people to the right expertise.
• KM team members - KM is a wide domain with varied practices. Team members who work in silo give up learning opportunities which will make them less effective and outdated.
  

And what can we learn from these observations in making KM teams successful?

• Strong support - A KM team needs strong senior management support. A KM program is an investment and so is the team. Don't start a KM program unless the organisation is truly serious about it.
• Buffer time, allow experimentation - As we probably know by now that KM best practices are hardly repeatable. KM team members need the additional bandwidth to explore and design their initiatives. They need time to exchange and validate ideas with those who've been there and makes sense of new territories with those in the same practice. I would argue that each type of KM initiative for every organisation has its unique challenges. This means that it's a good idea to start small, test the ideas, refine them and even be prepared to scrap them.
• Resourcing KM operations - Governance for the operations of each initiative is essential and the timing to start planning for it is just as crucial. Think about users adoption and engagement, the makeup and recruitment of members needed to sustain and rejuvenate the initiative, support from the KM team, budgeting and work processes during implementation. Without proper governance, the present KM team will be consumed by the post-implementation duties.
• Communicate successes - Measure before and measure after. Establish baseline for the state before the implementation and measure the effectiveness after the implementation. Shout about successes - don't be shy about it. This helps to build credibility for the team.
• One of us - Take care of the present pains. It's crucial that people in the organisation regard the KM team members as one of them. Doing big picture things which takes too long to realise demotivates participation. Not to forget that some initiatives need a period of constant participation before the benefits will be realised. To keep KM team members relevant to their colleagues, make sure that KM team members are up-to-date with what people are doing. Do at least one project that addresses current pains at any point in time.
• The right KM team - The right attributes and attitudes of a team member is more important than the KM skills, experience, relationships and artifacts that he possess. The KM domain is constantly evolving. A competent team member will be one that constantly keeps up, leverage new opportunities, unlearn old practices and master new ones, validate ideas, form new relationships and demonstrates curiosity as an everyday affair. As a change agent within the company, he must be courageous, demonstrate perseverance, engage with staff members and facilitate discussions. In short, a KM team member must possess the drive for self-improvement and solve problems. Skills can be picked up, experience can be accumulated, relationships can be established and artifacts can be collected; but attributes and attitudes are ingrained. There are many ways to achieve KM goals and objectives just as there are many ways to get to a location, thus it's worthwhile to bend the initiative to capitalise on the team member's strength once we've found them.

KM is a demanding job. It's not a place for the weak-hearted or someone who's looking for a 9 to 6 job. The team needs to work cohesively to cultivate a spirit of our KPI and not my KPI. Thinking only about the success of the KM program without thinking about the success of the team is the beginning of failure in itself.