A look at what I’ve been up to over the last 9-12 months through the lens of my friends …

Ever wonder what an Information Architect (aka IA) actually does?

David Karemaker had a great poster presentation at IA Summit 2008 in which he used personas to illustrate some of the roles IA undertake.

The Facilitator: Create a shared understanding of the problem at hand, and work towards a solution from there.

The Expert: Analyse the situation and come up with an efficient solution that supports the goals of the organisation and the users

The Designer: You can analyse the past, but you have to design for the future

The Advocate: You should intentionally design relevant and fair systems

This is, of course, not to say that other professions don’t undertake these sorts of roles, or that these are the only roles IAs perform, but it’s a great way of communicating to new clients or those outside the professions about “this is who we are“.

M

UPDATE: Tried to make this post less of a rant *LOL*

Eric Reiss made a great comment during his presentation on effective E-Service at IA Summit 2008. He suggested that while it’s a wonderful thing that we’re celebrating our profession by formalising post-graduate courses on Information Architecture, we should never forget that there are other people, and other professions, who know more about information architecture than we do. This was something echoed by Andrew Hinton in his most-excellent closing plenary for the conference.

According to Andrew, Information Architecture emerged as a community of practice from intersections between other disciplines like Library Science and Cognitive Psychology and for a long time, there was a lot of grey and a lot of uncertainty about what IA was and who IAs were.

The profession of Information Architecture has come a long way since those days and information architecture activities are now held as a vital piece of a system’s design. This doesn’t mean, though, that as far as designing great user-experiences, or in helping to make information understandable by classifying it and structuring it, that we know everything about IA — because we don’t. And I couldn’t agree more — there are bound to be other disciplines and practices that have other pieces of the holy grail of perfect design.

Business Analysis is also going through change and evolving into a discipline of its own. As such, Business Analysts from all sorts of different communities of practice and other disciplines are finding themselves in uncertain territory as it grows to accommodate the intersections between practices. We’re certainly not all from engineering or systems design, some of us come from scientific method and research analysis disciplines. Some may suggest that this evolution brings uncertainty to the market about what being a BA is really about, but its all part of the dynamics of an evolving and changing community of practice.

What we’re seeing, though, is that some BA associations are attempting to standardise and fix in time what what a BA is, what a BA does. Their efforts have generally culminated in an attempt to define these issues (maybe even prescribe it?) in their publications:

“Discover the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge® (BABOK®), the accepted standard for the BA profession … the collection of knowledge within the profession of Business Analysis and reflects current generally accepted practices … defined and enhanced by the Business Analysis professionals who apply it in their daily work role … [describing] the tasks and skills necessary to be effective”

It’s great that, for Business Analysts (the role), we’re developing material for BA the discipline. But this is only one view of the BA. To suggest that people will be tested on this view and then be called BAs in order to differentiate those who are not ‘certified’ is a little dangerous. It suggests that those with different ideas on BA activities are not true BAs. From my readings on the history of the Christian Church, there are many parallels between this idea and the Reformation in England centuries ago.

If communities of practice are emergent, self-organising, then the nature of business analysis (the role, the activity, the discipline, the community and even the title) will change over time as it learns from other disciplines and amalgamates new ideas into its own. People will naturally come to business analysis from other disciplines and backgrounds and help to shape it over time. To suggest that, like the French language, this natural process can be controlled and defined in order to bring ‘clarity to the market’ is rather naive.

So why not give the artefacts that help shape the discipline over to the BA Community? Why not put the BABOK into a Wiki and suggest that the BA Community contribute the wisdom of its crowd? It may be because of control and/or money, because, ultimately there is much to be had in certification programs and courses from a community hungry to see itself legitimised against others like Project Management.

M

My first presentation to my first IA Summit is now over — a presentation on semantic analysis.

In linguistics, semantics is the subfield that is devoted to the study of meaning, as inherent at the levels of words, phrases, and sentences. In the presentation, I suggest that by analysing content from its semantic perspective, you can gain a much richer understanding of your content and the business logic that goes into creating it.

If you want to create a taxonomy, a comprehensive index of ‘things’ for help files and FAQs, understand, map and infer the user-behaviour that creates content, then semantic analysis is the tool for you.

If you were at IA Summit, and had any questions arising from the presentation, please feel free to post a comment below. The entire speaker’s notes for the presentation can be found on my slideshare site.

M

After receiving some encouragement from John Allsopp, I’m presenting at Web Directions this year on the topic of knowledge management and social computing.

For many people, knowledge management is an IT system that sits somewhere and gobbles up documents. Some vendors claim that their Records Management System or their Document Management System will do all your knowledge management, and for us KM practitioners this focus away from people and to systems has led to nothing but trouble for a decade.

Knowledge management is, first and foremost, about people. It’s not about software. It’s about storytelling, having a coffee and sharing war stories, about getting together after a difficult project and doing “lessons learned”, and even about watching a video to learn techniques from other sporting teams. If you can get your people together to share the important bits inside their heads then you can ensure you’ve got ways to equip people with the information they need do successfully do their jobs in an information-demanding world.

The people-centric part is why the boom in social computing tools out of the Web 2.0-sphere is so exciting. In the modern world, people just don’t have lots of time to get together and chat, so a system that supports the way people tend to share information, that is, in a social-way, is vital.

Want to learn more? Come see me at Web Directions Government on 19-20 May at Old Parliament House, Canberra Australia.
M

A few years ago I would have been surprised if anyone in government knew what on earth IA was. At my recent “Intranets in Government” seminar, nearly all those attending knew what information architecture was, what it was for, and knew you needed it.

Bad information architecture is one of the core reasons intranets (or any other website for that matter) don’t work. When your staff throw up their hands like the robot from Lost in Space and say “I can’t find anything” it’s usually because the information architecture just isn’t a good fit for the information you’ve got, or for the users who want to consume it.

Intranets don’t meet our expectations because many sites are structurally poorly designed and just plain hard to use [1].

One of the tricks to getting intranets to work, as we discussed in the seminar, is to have an effective information architecture — that is (amongst other things) a good:

• classification scheme for your content – one that works for content producers as well as for those who are going to want to find the information
• site structure — one that allows users to quickly find information
• page skeleton – with good visual flow of information and consistent placing of widgets, like navigation, breadcrumbs, branding, etc, on each of the pages throughout the entire site

As the AGIMO Better Practice Guidelines say:

IA is the foundation of good website design. It is about planning where information and services will be located on the site in the most convenient and logical way for users. Effective IA helps ensure that sites meet [both] business and user needs.

If you’re intranet isn’t working for you, then it’s time to get thee to an IA!

M

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[1]. Head, A.J (2003) Why research intranets fail. Business & Finance Division Bulletin • Number 123. Spring 2003

I’ve been fortunate enough to have been involved in a few publishing projects throughout my career. I’ve created a new page that lists these publications to give you the opportunity to purchase a copy for yourself and read and learn about things from the psychological to the webby.

There were lots of disappointed faces when at the recent MacWorld 08 Keynote address, when Steve Jobs presented yet another skinny notebook to the market, and not a stylish, functional, tablet PC. I was also disappointed.

It seems, though, that Asus are actually working with Apple to build one.

Is the Tablet PC market too small for Apple to actually release this any time soon? I’d buy one, but that’s only because I have a Tablet (a Toshiba R400) and don’t ever see that I would go back to normal computing again. Tablet PCs are only worth about 1.4% of the global computer market, which is probably why Apple is standing back for the moment. But when projections in mid 2005 suggested that Tablets PCs could be worth $5 USD billion by 2009, I wonder why Apple doesn’t give it the same good ol’ try they did with their iPod and iPhone products?

M

Gary Hayes of Personalize Media has written an interesting piece on Web 3.0. He suggests that the web is becoming a more immersive environment in which real-time collaboration and communication is becoming more and more important.

We’re just starting to see that now with Web 2.0 — pushing the boundaries of information sharing from being physical, centralised and controlled by organisations, to decentralised, collaborative and controlled by consumers, and now more often in virtual-spaces.

For the evolution of the web, it means a move from an interactive platform to one that is immersive, semantic and intelligent:

• Web 1.0 - unidirectional and “push”. E.g. traditional brochureware-style websites
• Web 2.0 - interactive - “push” + “pull”. E.g. Social computing websites like MySpace, Wikipedia, and Facebook
• Web 3.0 - immersive. E.g. 3D Virtual Worlds and ubiquitous computing
• Web 4.0+ - semantic world with intelligent agents and adaptive information

The real benefits to users are just starting to emerge, with online spaces to work and share information, technology that truly supports information anytime and anyplace. Society is also witnessing the emergence of digital natives who are born ‘technology aware’ and expect to be able to use the same technology they take for granted in their social lives in the work environment. The resultant evolution of society and machine may be an online environment for Web 3.0+ not too dissimilar to that imagined by Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell — immersive, pervasive, virtual and ubiquitous.

M

I was privileged enough to sit in on a seminar recently by Annie Rowland-Campbell, a researcher from FujiXerox. She’s been doing research into semantic technologies and preparing the way for organisations to move beyond Web 2.0.

Annie’s research suggests that the web will become more and more immersive in the coming years — something we’re starting to see with applications like Second Life and games like World of Warcraft. To provide users with a more immersive and information rich experience, systems will ultimately need to better understand an individual’s context.

Context will help provide systems with the ability to intuit what people want (and what they also might need) and serve it up to them without users having to search and browse and differentiate what information is of value to them (and what is not of value). This understanding of context will be based largely on an understanding of who a user is, and what their personal needs are. And this technology to deliver this experience is actually not far away. In fact, the capability exists today through ontologies and semantic technologies.

Without semantic technologies driving the web, we can only produce context through direct points of integration with information. We can tag, categorise, and add other pieces of metadata directly into documents and link databases together where we identify that information has connections. Unfortunately, this traditional information technology approach requires meanings and relationships to be predefined and “hard wired” into data formats and the application program code at design time. This means that when something changes (which it always does in the human-centric world) the systems involved need to be changed in order to interoperate in a new way — a lengthy, messy, and manually intensive process.

Semantic technologies, though, are “meaning-centred”. They encode relationships, meaning, and context separately from data and content files, and separately from the application. This separation of layers allows systems to provide context that can change and adapt as the world around which information exists changes — exactly what is needed for the truly immersive, context-driven experiences required by Web 3.0 and Web 4.0. It could potentially even allow systems to ‘learn’ based on their own experiences of the changes in context. But how can we start to deliver context?

Topic Maps can provide the ontological layer required to describe context in addition to the metadata and data layers.

Utilising a Topic Map as the point of integration between systems will decrease the number of integration points required to deliver context. In this example, introducing an ontological layer decreases the number of points of integration from 24 to just 6.

It’s an interesting paradigm shift for Service Oriented Architecture models and database designs because it allows context to be added and data adapted to an evolving- rather than a static-world because its generally only the relationships between pieces of information that change, not the information itself (assuming that change in information is largely a factor of time, so new pieces of information only result in new versions).

A Topic Map used in this space enables machines, as well as people to understand, share and reason with information when its called upon. With this approach, adding, changing and implementing new relationships or interconnecting programs in a different way can be just as simple as changing the external model that these systems share.

Given a question, query, or report request, the ontology layer can access topics, concepts, associations that span a vast number of sources. It’s an approach:

• that has already gained traction in Finland (which is no surprise to me given that Northern Europe is where Topic Maps (ISO/IEC 13250:2000) were born). Here the ontology layers are being used to provide context and points of interchange where standards and language differ between EU countries.

• that is employed by Reuters in their Calais system to provide reporting capability based on context. Theirs is the reporting equivalent of “do you want fries with that?” and “…you may also be interested in…”

• that is being developed by the German government in partnership with SAP and Siemens in a project worth around €440m

As the web moves more toward immersive environments and intelligent agents, this approach is exactly what businesses need to begin to adopt in order to meet future system design needs, the needs and expectations of their users, and survive the evolution of Web 2.0 into Web 3.0 and beyond.

M

Maria Murphy has published an article in the Business Analyst Times on the role vs. discipline definition debate currently occurring in the BA-space. It’s a thought provoking piece motivated in part by my comments on Jesse James Garrett’s IA Recon essay.

As someone who has recently been walking in BA-shoes, I’ve had many discussions with Maria on the issue of certification, standardisation, role, discipline and community. Various groups like IIBA are now popping up and suggesting that they will bring clarity to the market if only you join them, get certified as a BA, and adhere to their view of what a business analyst is and does. I’m wondering whether steak knives comes with the package.

So long as the discussion continues as a healthy debate and not a means for arbitrarily defining business analysts by one organisation’s “body of knowledge” (because BAs are certainly more than just their BABOK) it will continue to challenge the way BAs think about what they do, who they are, and how they can communicate it to others. Maria puts the whole debate into perspective when she says, simply, don’t box me in:

“In short, as a business analyst I do lots of things. Don’t put me in a box or label me and don’t predefine what I do … it limits the possibilities for my involvement to add value within projects, between projects, across programs and across the enterprise.”

Perhaps, in the end, it’s not about resolving the grey, but communicating what we business analysts do know about ‘this is who we are’.

M

IA Summit 2008 is fast approaching. I seem to be one of only a few Australian IAs presenting this year and my topic is on Semantic Analysis.

I see that James Robertson of Step Two Designs will be presenting on intranets, and I think Donna Maurer is going to do a workshop or two.

My presentation on this topic last year at Oz-IA was well-received, with Patrick Kennedy reporting:

“Matthew had an almost Zen-like quality, which made for a great presentation style—engaging the audience well and ensuring we didn’t get lost as he introduced us to the world of linguistics and semantic analysis.

This was a fascinating exploration of analysis of the language in content in order to allow a more useful information architecture. The UPA conference touched on this idea this year, but Matthew put his audience at ease and gave us some really good insights. I went away thinking this type of analysis might be something I could realistically use. Quite often, the level of granularity at which we deal with content is actually fairly high—for example, a page, paragraph, or heading. However, by understanding the structure of the very language that makes up the content—for example, subject, verb, or object—you can perform a much deeper analysis.”

This time around, though, my presentation will have a stronger Lego theme to it. I’ve even pulled out my polo t-shirt with the Lego logo on the back … it should be a lot of fun.

Wish me luck!

M

I was fiddling around with OneNote 2007 today and stumbled across the function ‘Send to > Blog’

If you briefly saw a very strange and jumbled post it was the result of my playing with this feature. Now having messed around with this discovery, it seems that OneNote, via Word 2007, does indeed play nicely with XMLRPC and WordPress hosting.

Once you’ve finished writing a piece in OneNote, just select Send To > Blog.

OneNote will then open Word for you to polish up the document. If you’ve just used OneNote’s inking pen to do this (which I normally am using given I have a Tablet PC), then this process converts your handwriting to text (and it does a pretty good job at it too, assuming that your handwriting is at least legible).

Just as an aside, I think it is most strange that Word’s dictionary doesn’t recognise the word Blog, even though it’s written in the toolbar

Once in Word, you can then publish directly to your WordPress hosted blog site. It just asks you for the address, name, password etc.

You can publish the content as a draft, or as a complete publication.

Amazingly enough, you can even open existing posts in order to edit and update them!

You might need to tweak the image links in WordPress if you’ve put pictures into the document from Word. And I did find that some of the paragraph formatting was weird, but largely it worked a treat, even allowing you to identify the category for the post.

For someone like me who is often on the road, this is a great feature Microsoft have added to this product. I can now manage all my posts on my tablet rather than feeling their sort of at arms length inside WordPress.

Moblogging? Here I come!

M

Trust. It was the same base issue back in 2006 when Yahoo took over Flickr. Users didn’t know whether they trusted Yahoo with their photos. Today, Flickr fans are banding together again to fend off Microsoft.

“I’m not a Microsoft hater,” said Flickr user Christopher Bosum. “I just don’t like the fact that there might be just another Internet monopolist.”

“This is what happens when Microsoft tries to take over not just a company but also a community”, said Stephen Shankland of CNET.

As I’ve blogged before — the factor of trust must be given consideration by those companies entering the world of Web 2.0. This is a highly social medium and so requires trust to be established. This can be achieved through:

• open, horizontal communication;

• engaging the community and providing methods for interaction so that reputation can be established; and

• establishing methods for identification to achieve identity between and within members and their groups.

I don’t trust Microsoft with my photos. I’m not sure I trust Yahoo! either, but their hands-off approach to the Flickr community has at least shown they’re serious about leaving the community to look after itself and the Flickr guys to look after the interests of the Flickr community.

… obviously Microsoft has got a lot of work ahead of them.

M

Stephen Collins has written an interesting commentary on iterative IT project methodologies with an interesting and heated discussion following.

In my experience, the approach Stephen talks about has a lot of advantages over traditional methods of handing systems design and development. While traditional approaches can lack innovation and be slow to progress change, an iterative approach can reduce risk by being more responsive to change and result in quicker time to launch. Dominic Campbell even suggests that the eternal beta should be embraced, iterating and improving system design once released to users.

I was recently involved in a project where we used an iterative design and analysis phase. It certainly worked better than some of the slower-moving approaches I’ve been involved with before — it freed the team to try new things and new approaches to difficult problems see if they worked. If they worked, then they were handed over to the developers. If they didn’t work, they were discarded with minimal time lost.

Of importance throughout this process, though, was a user-centred design methodology. So as to not overwhelm users, we only exposed them to things that were improvements to what they had seen earlier, or things that would directly affect them and their work. We showed them storyboards and prototypes (both wireframes and high-fidelity HTML mockups) and involved them in helping to improve the concepts. This was great for change management as it helped to set expectations about what they were getting and how it would look and feel. It also meant, given they were involved in design, they had greater ownership of the final product. And once they were happy with what ever iteration we had collectively come up with (in this design phase and not in production), we then folded it into the development cycle.

Ultimately, this meant that we could really only move as fast as users could consume new information. The result, though, was a final product was tailored to their wants and needs and not the whims of developers who want to try out something new on an ignorant public.

M

I was recently asked to help with a systems implementation. This system was no small beast by any means. The organisation wanted a complete system, with one business module, but also wanted the scope of the underlying system to cover up to some 23 business program, each with their own separate business logic.

I’m sure that some developers would faint at this suggestion — that you could have a modular approach to data and business logic management without directly handling the ontological relationships between data entities!

Strangely enough, I had read some information on Lars Marius Garshol’s blog a few months ago that gave me the idea for using topic maps for identity management and had an idea — what if you use a topic map to handle ALL the relationships between databases and entities …. yes … all of them??!

Conceptually, I found the idea very interesting. Ultimately, it would mean that you could add and remove system modules without adversely affecting other modules because all you would need to do is handle the associated ontological and semantic relationships stored in one area — the topic map layer: an approach called Semantic Technology

This was also my first go at looking at enterprise systems architectural concepts (with a little help from my colleague and friend “Billy”) for a service oriented architecture. I have a feeling that these two disciplines could learn a lot from each other

M

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

What is it about terminology that makes some people roar and others cringe? While the literature has a lot to say about the problems of knowledge sharing between groups when language is different [1], there are some obvious obstacles to sharing knowledge in the same language when the terms, or even the style of language to describe information, differs between groups.

In the medical field, the National E-Health Transition Authority in Australia (NEHTA) is currently developing a taxonomy of terms, and an ontology to support it, to fully articulate the relationships between the chemical composition of a drug and its medicinal use all the way down to how it is represented as a product on the shelf. This set of terms is supposed to help systems “efficiently exchange data and improve how important clinical and administrative information is communicated between healthcare professionals”.

This initiative would be a great step forward if only this dictionary of terms actually represented the way that doctors prescribe medicines, the way that pharmacists in Australia dispense medicines, and the way in which companies label and market their products. Of course there are also other taxonomies around the world that also try to do the same thing, and some of them are more successful than others. The hard thing is to apply their use outside of community that uses them.

When I was recently doing some IA work in the area of health I think I found about half a dozen or so of these so called “standards”. I also found that a number of business-teams working in the same organisation each with unique terms of their own used to describe these same things. If it were just an issue of Eskimos having a zillion words for ice it probably would have been OK, but rarely did each term carry any additional meaning. You can imagine the pain caused when it came to developing a shared business system, not to mention the problems associated with creating documentation, with each team demanding specification documents with their own terms reflected and refusing to sign-off on them until this was achieved.

How can you manage terms and definitions when there’s no agreement of a one-size-fits-all approach, especially when your goal is to achieve a one-size-fits-all approach?

Topic maps are a good way to manage this chaos. For these teams I created a wiki powered by a topic map engine, allowing the members of each team to collaborate to describe the terms they used. I then coopted bribed persuaded asked subject matter experts to create the relationships between terms and across those teams. Where one team used, for example, the term “tom-r-toe” and another “tom-aye-toe”, the topic map allowed for the existence of both terms, and their definitions as agreed by those teams, and included a relationship between them that indicated they were actually the “same term”. Other relationships, like “equal term”, “equivalent term”, “parent term”, “child term”, even collections of terms, were also captured. A module in the topic maps engine even allowed for the capture of which terms were used in what documents and included an glossary of terms as an output just to make each team happy. There was even some talk of the topic map being used provide team-preferred terms within the business systems interface.

Having “one taxonomy to rule them all” isn’t always necessary when communicating knowledge across teams. Language might be a barrier, but if you can articulate and capture the relationships between terms, then you’ve got a translation matrix that will assist with and ease the burden of knowledge transfer, and can help with challenge of creating awareness of differences and similarities in intra-office communication.

M

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[1]. Preece, J. (2004) Etiquette and trust drive online communities of
practice. Journal of Universal Computer Science, 10(3), 294-302.

… sorry but I couldn’t help myself …

M

I’ve posted my first article on the AppGap titled “A barrel of monkeys” — a look at trust and online collaboration.

The AppGap is a new blog from the people who brought you Corante and the FASTforward Blog on the future of work and how new tools are addressing age-old challenges of organisation, collaboration, and innovation. But it is also an idea: that there remains a gap between the toolset that exists and what’s needed.

I’m quite honoured to be writing along side of great thinkers like Shiv Singh, Jenny Ambrozek, Patti Anklam, Russell Shaw, and James P. Ware, and hope to make a significant contribution to the community’s thought leadership.

I’m still in the process of working out (in my head) where my thoughts will end up — here or there — but I’m hoping that you’ll just subscribe to both lists anyways.

M

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.

So Shawn wants me to define knowledge workers?

One school of thought tries to define knowledge work based on the role. The thinking seems to be: “I’m a knowledge worker; therefore, whatever I do is knowledge work.” Definitions based upon this premise tend to creep naturally toward broadness. Because the activities that correspond to the role can vary so greatly from organisation to organisation, the definition of the role (and thus the activity) grows larger and larger.

The opposing approach is to define the role based on the activity. Whatever knowledge work is, an knowledge worker is the person who does it. These definitions tend to creep naturally toward narrowness. In order to speak meaningfully about the issues surrounding knowledge work and their solutions, we must define the scope of those problems in very concrete ways. When this definition (intended for the activity) is applied to the role, it creates for some the fear of being ‘boxed in’, trapped in a role so narrowly defined that many of the elements essential to the success of any given knowledge work are outside the control or influence of the knowledge worker. Ultimately, it leads to the result that Shawn suggests, with people saying “Our salespeople are knowledge workers but our gas fitters are not”.

The yearning for clarity of a concept by defining it is not something new. Many disciplines have gone through this agony. I actually stole borrowed reframed these words from Jesse James Garrett’s IA Recon essay. Some years ago, Information Architects were attempting to define what they did and ultimately got no where. Business Analysts are going through the same argument of definition right now. What then was Garrett’s solution to definition? Let me again, reframe his words:

Knowledge work is an activity that can be practised by people in a wide variety of roles. Knowledge work can be designed to achieve a wide variety of goals, not just information retrieval. The single most important factor in the success of knowledge work is the skill of the knowledge worker. This skill is applied through a combination of experienced professional judgement, thoughtful consideration of research findings, and disciplined creativity. This skill can be developed and applied by specialist knowledge workers and non-specialists alike.

Only by being honest with ourselves about what makes knowledge work valuable can we convince others of that value. Only by being generous with our knowledge can we reap all of its benefits. And only by creating a culture in which these principles are fully embraced can we foster the growth of our field, and ensure our continued success.

M

Today a colleague asked me, “what is the relationship between the prototypes and the process maps?”

Process maps are an excellent articulation of the functional requirements of an IT system. Together with process notes that elaborate on the inputs and outputs they can be a powerful indication of what people do when they do their work and, therefore, what a system needs to do to support that work.

All too often, though, analysts jump into discussions with the data analysts, systems developers and designers, to create functional- and non-functional specifications and data models … but what about the people who’ll use the system? Is the discussion with them now complete?

On a recent project I worked on, we actually had no large tomes of functional and non-functional requirements, nor use-cases. Instead, we just used process maps and prototypes, and involved the users in their development. We held weekly workshops with the users to help us come closer and closer to understanding how people currently worked, how they wanted to work, how we could improve their processes and how we could develop a system that would support their wants and needs. With each pass we improved our process maps and notes and iterated our prototypes that articulated how the system would support the people using it.

Our first pass was at a rather high-level, creating storyboards to illustrate the flow of action and information. This helped us understand where:

• there were gaps in process
• the flow of processes weren’t logical, and
• systems could help people get the job done

On subsequent peels of this proverbial onion, we developed more detailed prototypes, starting with wireframes and finishing with high-fidelity interactive HTML prototypes that brought the functional requirements to life and demonstrated the non-functional requirements of accessibility, usability, and navigability.

This combination of process maps and prototypes proved very powerful — a match made in heaven. Rather than hand system users tomes of specifications they would not read, we were able to involve them in the evolution of artefacts they could see, understand, relate to, and immediately give feedback on. They could easily say “no we don’t do it that way” and “no, we don’t want to do it that way” (which they often did) so that we could develop a system that would support them in the way they wanted their work to be supported — user-centred design in action. And because we used an agile methodology, and iterated our prototypes, we could come back to them the next week with improvements to our prototypes and demonstrate that understanding. We could then take these improvements to the developers and show the intent of the system, show them how the users wanted it to work.

This way of working has obvious benefits for change management — the end result is a system with no surprises because its users have participated in its development. This approach also means you create artefacts that people will actually use and can be easily referenced by the developers to see the ‘how’ of the system as well as its ‘what’.

… try it some time. It works.

M

Back in my university days, learning psychology, we were taught a very important lesson about labels, and the pigeonholing that can occur as a result — because when a psychologist says someone is diagnosed with a mental illness, like schizophrenia, he uses the term to communicate something to other clinicians so they can communicate with patients and their loved ones. Unfortunately, the nuances of meaning are lost and even misunderstood when used outside the profession [1].

I find misunderstandings quite typical of terms created for use taxonomies. Taxonomies carry with them the implicit assumption that the terms created are for specific uses, primarily the communication of specific meaning within a specific community of practice. When used outside the group, the term can loose all meaning.

Loss of meaning is the real problem behind Shawn Callahan’s post on knowledge workers. He suggests that the term is now misused, and carries with it a sense of superiority of knowledge work over other types of work:

“Sadly, when we use the term ‘knowledge worker‘ today we are often unfairly saying one type of job is superior than another. It’s a dark undercurrent and tacitly becomes a basis for discrimination — ‘Our salespeople are knowledge workers but our gas fitters are not.’”

Shawn doesn’t articulate who ‘we’ are, but as a KM practitioner, I know what this term means. I know that many of my colleagues, like Jack Vinson, have argued and debated at length in the past about what this term means so as to better understand and support the associated activities of this sort of worker and his work. Furthermore, the majority of those who have, and continue to use, the term “knowledge worker”, from the likes of Coulson-Thomas, to Drucker, Nomikos, and others, broadly agree that there is a form of work which we might meaningfully categorise as “knowledge work” [2].

This is not to say, though, that arriving at a single and universal definition for the term ‘knowledge worker’ is the goal. Ultimately, the term ‘knowledge work’ and the