Book launch: The Emergence of the Relationship Economy

I’ve been working with Scott Allen, Jay Deragon, Carter Smith and Margaret Orem on a new book: The Emergence of the Relationship Economy. I’m the author of chapter nine — The Cultural Factors. And today the book was officially launched.

This new book explores the factors of relationships: how our networked marketplace turns out to be a profoundly social one that can only be enlarged and improved by relationships; and how social computing has turned the web into The Human Network.

M

“To Gov 2.0 or not to Gov 2.0″ — that is the question

Marcus Browne of ZDNet Australia is suggesting that “Governments are expected to increasingly use social networking and other Web 2.0 innovations as a means of fostering greater participation and dialogue with their citizens, as well as encouraging more effective intra-government communication.”

We saw some of this movement late last year when Gary Nairn announced that he would use blogs to engage citizens in policy discussion:

“…blogs are another means for government to seek feedback from citizens on major programs or topics of interest to Australians … blogs could speed up consultation and enable the government and other citizens to analyze and debate issues in reasonable detail.”

Unfortunately, we’re yet to see any real action on this in the government sphere, and I’m starting to wonder whether or not the social computing evolution actually suited to government departments.

In an analysis of cultural issues affecting the adoption, and behaviour of use, of social computing tools, recent studies indicate that cultures who have highly complex hierarchical structures (i.e. high on Hofstede’s Power Distance index) are less likely to use tools like wikis and blogs.

Anecdotally, I can say that while social networking tools work well within team environments for collaboration, my experience has been that they work less well between teams in government organisations simply due to the bureaucracy typical of high Power Distance organisations. Generally, this form of hierarchy reinforcement manifests as good old red tape — quality assurance, sign-off, formal approval, and even physical signatures on paper, before information can change hands. I’ve even been witness to this between the functional branches within an organisation with similar processes mandated between government departments.

These problems with adoption can be seen in the large numbers of government departments, and even private organisations like Channel 7, Telstra, Credit Suisse, and Goldman Sachs, who’ve simply blanket banned their employees from using social computing tools, believing that they’re time wasters, not business tools. Toby Ward of CorporateWebsite.com suggests this reaction is because most organizations fear applications like Facebook and even loathe them.

“About half of the medium to large-sized organisations (it’s even higher in Government and Financial Services) forbid and block employees from using it”.

A recent survey of 1,200 global HR professionals — conducted by content security specialists Clearswift — supports this observation. 79 percent said their company was completely blocking access to social networking sites. This behaviour, Clearswift revealed, was due to a lack of understanding of social computing tools, with some respondents indicating that they had not even heard the term Web 2.0 before.

Strangely enough, fear and knowledge have a well-researched and well-documented social psychological dimension (Reizler, 1944 [1]; Rotter, 1966 [2]; Levenson, 1973 [3]; and others). Clear parallels can be drawn from the reaction of banning due to ignorance of the nature of social computing tools to the concepts of “learned helplessness” and “locus of control” — that is, “there’s nothing I can do so I will just ban it”. These studies clearly tell us that with education comes an increase in the perception of control and a reduction in fear.

Obviously, then, education is a key factor to adoption — that there are clear advantages for organisations, government or otherwise, for the use of these tools, and that they can be made safe and secure. The proof is in companies like Serena Software who are adopting public social sites like Facebook as their corporate intranet — ultimately because of the lack of flexibility of use and findability of information inherent in traditional intranets that many organisations also share.

Luis Suarez, knowledge management specialist for IBM, suggests that supporting knowledge work is a good way to proceed:

We should go instead for those just-in-time education snippets that knowledge workers would require and let them figure them out by themselves. They will eventually do it and succeed. The social aspect of the tools would eventually do their work quite nicely.

M

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[1]. Riezler, K. (1944) The Social Psychology of Fear. The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 49, No. 6 (May, 1944), pp. 489-498

[2]. Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychological Monographs, 80, whole issue.

[3]. Levenson, H. (1973). Multidimensional locus of control in psychiatric patients. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 41, 397-404.

Learning from the long-tail — the real story behind KM

It used to be that if I wanted something special, something that wasn’t in great demand by the consumer machine, that it would normally be impossible for me to find at the store. But not any more.

The web has grown so much that it’s now viable for businesses to make things they know only a small proportion of people will want — and when you’re in reach of consumers across the whole planet it makes perfect business sense. This is the long-tail.

And how do people find these ‘hard to find’ things in the long-tail? Well, they use modern search engines, but more recently, people find things through other people. People leave comments, blog about things, take photos of them, tag them, and share their finds with others. It’s this social layer that Web 2.0 has given us that now allows us to share what we find very easily. Time poor? Got no time to waste trying to find something in the mess of the web? Social computing tools, as Maria Murphy reminds us, help us get the job done.

But what if I’m an employee, not a consumer, looking for some quirky piece of information in the organisation somewhere?

In ages past, people used to sit around the fire in their bearskins and tell stories about the best place to hunt or the best place to find the juiciest berries. More recently we’ve had big machines that store lots of information, unfortunately, finding things inside it is often very hard. This is where KM comes in handy — that is, KM the discipline and not some self-proclaimed KM-system from the 90s.

Giving real knowledge management to an organisation is like giving Web 2.0 and social computing to the long tail.

When KM legends like Drucker and Snowden talk about Knowledge Management, it’s not about systems. Snowden has even blogged that an over-emphasis on technology has probably killed of KM in some areas. They talk of understanding the ways in which people share knowledge and information and giving organisations a helping hand so that people can point other people in to the juiciest bits of information — whether its inside someone’s head or on the company intranet.

There are, of course, some tools organisations can borrow from Web 2.0 that helps to make the task easy. Many people are crying out for these tools because they use them at home to share stuff with their friends and families and just expect now to be able to do the same at work. But be smart about it — it’s one thing to throw a wiki or a blog at an organisation, but it’s another to understand when one is appropriate and how to implement it successfully. Again, knowledge management has the answers.

So what are you doing for the long-tail inside your organisation?

M