Part 3: What’s in the workflow is what gets used

Note: this is the third blog in a series reviewing each of the 6 pieces of the McKinsey Article “Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work.”

McKinsey’s third recommendations is “Participatory technologies have the highest chance of success when incorporated into a user’s daily workflow. ” Of all of the recommendations delivered in this report, this one I believe is the most important, yet most often overlooked recommendations that one can give regarding the implementation of Web 2.0 in the workplace. Web 2.0 in the enterprise already suffers from a stigma: “it’s not real work”. And, quite frankly, people have enough work to do without adding wiki contributions and writing blogs to the equation.  If you are going to deploy new tools (at least successfully), it is crucial that they be connected back to “real work” and not just added to the pile.

The Stigma

While most new tools have the difficult task of having to prove their worth over the tools that they replace, Web 2.0 tools in the enterprise have the added weight of being associated with the tools on the open Internet, knowing only horror stories and that these tools are largely by employees’ children. When you add this stigma to the fact that it’s just seen as another thing to do in a long busy day, it’s hard to escape the illusion that Web 2.0 is just a new way to distract employees from their job.

It’s about replacing processes

In order to fully realize the value of Web 2.0 tools in the workplace, people have to use the new tools to actually do their work. If you just impose the wiki as another duty, adoption’s going to be low. This is the classic problem for knowledge management platforms: It’s easy enough to contribute, but it still requires people to do extra work, so you get less than ideal adoption.

This means during the roll out, the benefits of a wiki need to be communicated to the workforce: How can it help them do their job significantly better and/or faster? How can social bookmarking help reduce email and improve people’s access to information?  How is wiki collaboration better than collaborating via email?  While the previous recommendation stated that organizations should let users decide the best way to use the new tools, organizations will need to communicate the realm of the possible to the potential audiences. The goal should be to inspire users to change the way they do their jobs.

Are people already rewarded for collaboration?

One of the most interesting and debated topics in my line of work is how to reward people for collaboration and/or participation in Web 2.0 efforts. This topic is worth books in itself (and many, many individual posts that perhaps I will write in the future…), but I want to explore whether this whole problem could be avoided. This is crazy, you say: you have to incentivize workers in order to actually get them to collaborate or use Web 2.0 technology. Or you have to write it into their performance objectives.

Or do you? My theory, I submit to you, is that this is unnecessary. Why? Because collaboration is a means, not an end.

Craziness?

You have to incentivize collaboration and participation in Web 2.0 in order to get people to play, right? NSFMF! There’s gotta be a benefit in collaboration that is self-evident to the people participating. Blogging, using a wiki, or social bookmarking may be inherently public/crowd-sourcing activities; but participation by good will is not sustainable. There has to be a return on investment. This is why collaboration by mandate often doesn’t work well, because people see it as “another duty as assigned” and more work, rather than part of their actual job.

Perhaps think of it this way: prior to Web 2.0 technologies, did you really write into your performance reviews that you drafted products in Microsoft Word or worked with your colleagues via email, instant, messaging, and face-to-face meetings? Not so much. Likewise, a communications professional shouldn’t get rewarded for blogging; he should get rewarded for communicating. An intelligence analyst shouldn’t rewarded for making wiki edits; she should get rewarded for high quality intelligence analysis. Collaboration and Web 2.0 are just two ways that help her get to a higher level analysis. Collaboration is a skill, like writing, research, and presenting: it’s to be developed and honed.

The Ends Justify the Means

Take a moment to think about why you work with others. Ideally, it’s not to check a box. It’s to search for new ideas, get sanity checks, and find different points of view on my work and thoughts (or provide such services out of reciprocity or sense of mission). I do these things because I want to produce something that’s better than I could do alone. No matter how smart I [may think I] am, I’m not smarter than my network. Let’s face it, nobody’s smarter than all of their network. Isn’t that the whole point of this Web 2.0 thing?

Collaboration is an input. It is one of many. At the end of the day, people in knowledge work are rewarded (in a perfect world) for the quality outputs. The point of this entry is not to say that collaboration shouldn’t be rewarded: it’s that collaboration is already rewarded. It’s rewarded because the final output should be that much better if you’ve collaborated with outside peers.*

*Granted, this is of course dependent on having managers who are able to account for said improvement in quality of output…

Social Media and Knowledge Management

I’ve been thinking about social media in terms of knowledge management as of late (a common theme when discussing Web 2.0 in a business/organizational setting). In a seemingly only tangentially note, I awoke yesterday morning and this was one of the first Tweets that I saw from @RichardDennison:

“Social media is people telling their stories” – Steve Crescenzo (@crescenzo)

My response was “I like that characterization of social media. I would also say that social media is about adding context”. Seeing Richard’s quote helped me think in a different way about what knowledge management looks like leveraging Web 2.0 technologies.

I think what distinguishes Web 2.0 technologies from traditional hosted knowledge management repositories is that Web 2.0 platforms over a greater window into process. In other words, Web 2.0 offers context, while KM repositories generally only store finished products.

Knowledge Management as a Byproduct

The advantage of working in a web 2.0 environment is that knowledge management comes at no additional cost. However, “working in a web 2.0 environment” is a difficult concept: in an ideal case, this actually requires transferring processes out of closed channels like email, Word, PowerPoint, etc (i.e. comfort applications) into the web environment. If you build your knowledge in the wiki, you can trace a product from the earliest stages to “finished” product.

Conversely, traditional repositories depend on users taking the additional step of submitting finished products for approval and inclusion in an officially vetted database. These products will exist with perhaps only a paragraph of context and a line of contact information (though probably the information of someone 2-3 working levels above the individual who actually produced the product).

An Example: Wikipedia and Knowledge Management

As a bit of a concrete example–that may require only a bit of imagination–we can take a look at the Luc Bourdon article on Wikipedia. Imagine that this article is a finished product sitting in a KM database: it’s a Word document probably accompanied by the opening paragraph as context/summary.

Now, let’s take a look at what we learn because this product is NOT actually in a KM database. You get the same content: that same finished product that can be read in a hurry if you don’t care (or don’t have time to care) about the process. However, there’s just so much more available. For example, I can see how this article started. I can also see it on landmark dates, like the day that Bourdon tragically died. And I can see what’s changed in the month of March. On top of all this, I can also see what was addressed during the Wikipedia Featured Article process by taking a look at the discussion page.

The takeaway

Asking a guy who’s a year away from retirement to sit in front of a computer entering his knowledge into a wiki is not an optimal solution (though apparently does work sometimes). Building products in a wiki is a fantastic way to capture institutional knowledge and a great amount of context around it. Web 2.0 tools–not just wikis of course–are a fantastic tool that allows knowledge capture, public thinking, and tracking the evolution of ideas over time when the work is done in public.