Twitter and the Search Barrier

I am currently reading Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Benefits, a book by Morten T. Hansen of Harvard Business School. It is an interesting read so far: he has laid out some of the key benefits and risks to collaboration, a number of which are quite interesting and potentially useful. However, what I have found most interesting thus far is his take on the four most significant barriers to collaboration. His list:

1. The Not Invented Here Barrier: People not willing to seek input from others outside their unit;
2. The Hoarding Barrier: People not willing to provide information for others outside their unit;
3. The Search Barrier: People are not able to find people, expertise, or information easily, and;
4. The Transfer Barrier: People are not able to transfer complicated knowledge from one unit to another.

All of these points have some validity, and are definitely important and significant barriers to collaboration in the workplace; however, I want to spend some time with the third barrier, the search barrier.

As a side note, I have as yet not read how Hansen proposes to overcome said barriers; I’m only halfway through the book.

What is the Search Barrier?

According to Hansen, the search barrier is the inability of a company or organization to “know what it knows”. This can be due to a number of factors: company size, physical distance, information overload, and poverty of networks are the ones that Hansen cites. The search barrier is one of the most significant hurdles facing large organizations: think about all the expertise and experience that exist in most organizations, and how hard it really is to tap that knowledge (specifically the tacit knowledge). Basically, it’s too hard or too much work to search through your organization to find the support/input that you need; consequently, organizations are inefficient because they are continuously solving the same problems.

So what does this have to do with Twitter?

It's about finding the RIGHT person, not just people.

In the spirit of continuing to treat Twitter as a solution searching for a problem, I think that this is a very real business problem that can be greatly helped by microblogging. After all, this is one of the most appealing, at least for me, uses of Twitter on the open internet.

Twitter actually addresses many of the key problems cited by Hansen as components of the search barrier.

• Company size could be less of an issue, if only because the network of followers (a.k.a. the target audience) serves as the filter of information. So you aren’t searching all the units of an organization for an answer; you are asking people to serve as a filter and pass on information and/or people that they already know.

• It’s clear that microblogging helps with bridging distances. However, it’s also important to note that microblogging enables “weak ties“, allowing for people to maintain relationships that may become more important in the future.

• Though relatively counter-intuitive, microblogging can help with information overload, because your network serves as a collaborative filter. For the same reason, microblogging can help solve the problem of poverty of networks by making it easier to keep in touch with colleagues.

But microblogging is just a technology

In much contrast to the rest of this entry, I do want to emphasize that simply having the technical capability for microblogging does not ensure success: effective deployment also entails organizational and process challenges in order to achieve the desired results. Social media success is only sometimes about tools; most times it’s more about changing behaviors and inculcating more collaborative mindsets.

A Blog as a Resume

So I stumbled across this article –I think via Twitter–and have been meaning to dedicate some digital ink to it ever since. I think that this is a pretty great idea and, admittedly, is one of my reasons for blogging (albeit mostly to expand my own social network and do some personal thinking). I’m not saying that blogging is the answer to job search woes; however, I think the author makes some excellent points and does hit on some effective points.

Complementing Your Resume

I think the most important thing that a blog can do for a job search is as a complement to a resume. Let’s face it: you can only squeeze so much about yourself into a resume. What better way to complement that sheet of paper with a running log of original thought and commentary on issues that you are both knowledgeable and passionate about? It demonstrates dedication–and rightly so, as writing a blog is a lot of work, especially if you are doing a complete job with it. Even blogging two times per week is good for an additional few hours of work per work.

Raising Your Profile

I think that when paired with other social media tools such as LinkedIn or Twitter or Facebook, you can use a blog to network with other people in your field. Social media tools allow you to make connections to other similar people, even those who might find your skill set matches a need somewhere else. And more than that, given that most jobs are obtained through social networks rather than formal listings anyway. Blogs offer a good a mechanism for discussion and communication, and a good avenue for expanding one’s own network.

The Main Risk

Here’s where I think the author misses the boat on talking about blogs and searching for a job. To me, it’s not worth highlighting that it’s not a good thing to get into “You don’t want to get into political arguments, or include anything racy, or write about religion and politics”. I don’t say this because this is not an important topic; just that most people–especially those savvy enough to want a blog to share their thoughts–don’t need to be told that employers Google prospective employees. Frankly, having a blog can help you improve your “Google-ability” by returning your thoughts and work. (My Google search is covered, however, as a dude named Justin Frank pwns all my search results)

To me, the risk is that there is a distinct flavor of meritocracy in blogging. Put simply, blogs expose your thoughts, so it’s important that you blog about what you know. Exposing your thoughts on a topic should really only be done if you can effectively share ideas and insightful commentary. That being said, there’s a certain degree of confidence that comes along with blogging.

Facebook for the Enterprise

There’s been a lot of hype around social networking and social network analysis as of late.  Time magazine called “Facebook for Spies” (and again yesterday) one of it’s top 50 inventions for 2008.  A number of other organizations are focused on deploying internal social networking solutions, so that their employees can better keep up with their colleagues.  But the question that sometimes remains in the ether is why are companies doing this? As an aside, I sometimes wonder whether organizations understand why they are deploying social networking services, but that’s another issue.

What’s the Point?

To me, the reason for deploying social networking services is clear: Work is really not that different from “real life”.  Think about this (preferably with an open mind): Why do you use Facebook? I can’t speak for anybody else, but it’s a number of things for me:

• It’s a big address book with almost all of my friends in it
• It’s a great way to contact friends
• It lets me figure out what friends are doing with relatively minimal effort

I think these three reasons are the primary reasons that most people use Facebook, whether they realize it or not.  Now swap out the word “friends” for “colleagues”, and you have your reasons for corporate social networking services.

It’s about People

Social networking services, at least the good ones, are brilliant because they allow people to connect to people.  That’s one of the core principles for my job (the other two being connecting people to data and data to data), and ultimately, that’s the part of collaboration that most technical solutions miss: it’s telling that a Gartner conference on collaboration that I attended last year had the word “Portals” in it.  To me, there’s nothing less collaborative than a portal because it completely ignores the “people” aspect of collaboration.  Really? A common website makes a community of interest? Everyone uses Google as a portal to the web, but nobody surmises that all Internet users are really a community of interest.

The beauty of Facebook is that it is a technology that is completely built to facilitate interactions between people.  There’s not a whole lot more to it than that, at least to me.  Collaboration is about people.  It requires that you connect people, that people communicate, and that you can rally the necessary people behind a problem when the metaphorical balloon goes up.

The Right Tool for the Job

In my experience working with social media and collaboration tools, people often claim—perhaps fairly, perhaps not so—to be overwhelmed and confused by the tools available to get the job done. “First you wanted me to contribute to the knowledge management system, then you wanted me contribute to the wiki and start a team blog. Now you are asking me to participate in (insert x technology, platform, or initiative here).” Get it all the time. Without fail.

But to twist a phrase a bit, I’d prefer having enough tools in my toolbox to do a wide variety of tasks. You can’t really use a screwdriver to hammer a nail, nor can you use a saw to drill a hole. So why do we insist on thinking that just one collaboration tool is enough to fit every problem? Rather, it comes down to helping people understand how to select the proper tool or tools (yes it often takes more than one) to succeed. I think there are three key factors to question when considering collaboration venues:

Where’s your audience? Readers of this blog will know that I think that rallying participants is key to collaboration. But, you can’t organize a party without picking a venue that people can actually get to, right? Considering the proper environment is absolutely crucial for tool selection for this reason. Working in an eRoom on your corporate intranet doesn’t really work if you want to work with people outside of your organization who aren’t going to be able to get to the site.

What’s your goal? A second and equally important question when considering what collaboration tool to use is to determine what your goal is. Are you building a house or digging a hole? Are you drafting a document with 10 other people in 5 time zones or is your team creating a library for new hires? Different tools have different strengths, period.

How open can I be? Privacy and security are key concerns in this age; everyone knows that (though often people will hide unnecessarily…).  So for a lot of collaborative projects, there are real issues that need to be considered when selecting the venue. Just like the CIA isn’t going to collaborate on Wikipedia (that’s why there’s Intellipedia…), organizations have real reasons not to work in the open, even behind their own firewall. Personal Identifiable Information, legal concerns, etc are real and need to be considered when selecting a venue.

So What’s the Best Tool for the Job?
I think that equipped with these key questions to consider and a technology-agnostic approach to tool selection (come on, at least TRY to be objective) paired with a decent knowledge of the available tools, can help collaborators make informed decisions about where and how to collaborate.  Short of that, it’s just not possible to make a blanket recommendation: after all, you know what you do better than I ever could!