I have high ambitions for the way that I will be reporting on what I see, hear and do. I read this excellent guide for conference bloggers which has inspired me to try to liveblog all the sessions that I am attending (or at least have a post up a few minutes after the session has finished. I will also be experimenting with two new pieces of hardware: a Livescribe Echo and Kokak Playtouch. I have zero experience with either of these things, so no guarantees for any decent results.
The conference itself is different from the ones I visit usually. It does have a track about the transformation of the way we work, innovate and learn (see: the non-learning professionals already know that working is becoming the same thing as learning!), but the focus in a broader sense is on how digital technologies are affecting society.
Check out the programme and let me know if there is anything you would like me to enquire more about.
Arjen Vrielink and I write a monthly series titled: Parallax. We both agree on a title for the post and on some other arbitrary restrictions to induce our creative process. Nowadays IT is as ubiquitous in a working environment as water, electricity and a toilet. Unfortunately, this is why many managers interpret IT as a utility and often see it as a liability. For this post we studied 3 organograms which popped up after a Google search and describe in 500 words what is (probably) wrong or right with them in terms of the role and place of the IT department. You can read Arjen’s post with the same title here.
Peter Hinssen has written a book titled Business/IT Fusion. In it, he attacks the current focus on aligning IT and the business and proposes to truly integrate IT into the business: a fusion. In his introduction he writes:
So, cost reduction in IT typically enhances the stereotype of IT being a commoditized, non-differentiating function. [..] Alignment is like a slow-acting poison that initially shows no signs of having a negative effect, but which paralyzes an IT organization by inducting servant like behavior.
His website shows the transformation that he is advocating:
Because the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer, the business enterprise has two -and only two – basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.
I am a strong believer in IT as one of the drivers of innovation. Hinssen references a 2005 Harvard Business Review article by Nolan and McFarlan, Information Technology and the Board of Directors, in which they publish a IT strategic impact grid:
IT Strategic Impact Grid (click to Enlarge)
If you believe that IT should be playing on the offensive side of the grid, then this should be reflected in your organizational structure. So let’s look at the following three randomly chosen organograms and see whether the organizations consider themselves to be in factory mode, support mode, turnaround mode or strategic mode and whether they show signs of fusion. One way of doing this is to try and see whether there is a separate IT branch or not and whether IT and business processes are in the same box.
IT seems to reside under the Chief Knowledge Officer (who reports into the director of Operations). An online course seems to need development, instructional design and learning technology (each has their own manager) and it seems pretty clear that technology is part of the core operations. This organization probably considers itself to be in strategic mode (makes sense for an online college!).
Next ONGC India, an Oil and Natural Gas Corporation:
Organogram ONGC India (Click to enlarge)
This one is a bit of mystery to me. There is a chief “Infocom” who reports into a role that is called “…To be filled…”. I imagine that this company will have multiple IT perspectives. The director of Tech & Field Services will have to steer a lot of technology and will be well integrated with the business. The infocom chief will likely have a much harder time playing in the offensive space.
This is very traditional organogram. There does not seem to be a high level IT role (no CIO). There are two layers of organization between the Marketing & IT manager (one of the most important roles if we agree with Drucker and the CEO). I wouldn’t be surprised if this organization would consider itself in support mode.
My main conclusion from this exercise is that an organizational diagram is not a good indicator for the role that IT plays in a business. I do not seem to be able to parse these diagrams in such a way that I can really understand how IT is seen in the company. Is that my lack of competence? I do now realize I need to do some more thinking in this area.
Looking at your own organization, what mode do you seem to be operating in?
Bits of Freedom is doing important work (and are effective in the way they do their job). I am therefore honoured to ocassionally field some of their speaker requests. Today I presented at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam on Privacy and the Internet and had some good talks with the students afterwards.
I am not sure the slides make a lot of sense without the audio, but if you augment them with a visit to some of the links in this bundle, then you might understand a bit better in which ways the Internet’s permance, replicability, scale and searchability (thank you danah) should affect the way we think about privacy going forward.
I have just finished writing a small proposal to the rest of my team. I thought it would be interesting to share here:
Introduction
We work in a virtual team. Even though there aren’t many of us, we often have few ideas about what the other people in our team are working on, which people they have met recently and what they are struggling with. The time difference between our main offices make our occasional feelings of being disconnected worse.
This “Narrating Your Work” experiment is an attempt to help overcome these problems.
If you are interested in some background reading, you should probably start with Luis Suarez’ blog post about narrating your work (”it’s all about the easiest way of keeping up with, and nurturing, your working relationships by constantly improving your social capital skills”) and then follow his links to Dave Winer, ambient intimacy and declarative living.
The experiment
“Narrating Your Work” should really be approached as an experiment. When it was first suggested, some people showed some hesitation or worries. We just don’t know whether and how it will work yet. The best way to find out is by trying. In Dutch: “niet geschoten, altijd mis”.
The experiment will have a clear-cut start and will last for two months. After running the experiment we will do a small survey to see what people thought of it: Did it deliver any benefits? If any to whom? Was it a lot of work to write updates? Did it create too much reading to do? Do we want to continue with narrating our work? Etc.
Three ways of participating
It needs to be clear who is participating in the experiment. If you decide to join, you commit to doing one of the following three things (you are allowed to switch between them and you will be “policed”):
Constant flow of updates: Every time you meet somebody who is not in the team, every time you create a new document or every time you do something that is different from just answering your emails, you will write a very short status update to say what you are doing or what you have done. This will create a true “activity stream” around the things you do at work.
Daily updates: At the end of your day you give a one paragraph recap of what you have done, again focusing on the people you have met, the places you have visited or the things you have created.
Weekly updates: On Friday afternoon or on Monday morning you write an update about the week that has just passed. To give this update some structure, it is suggested that you write about two things that went very well, two things that went less well and two things that are worrying to you (or at least will require attention in the next week).
The first option requires the most guts, whereas the last option requires the most diligence: it is not easy to take the time every week to look back at what happened over the last five working days. Are you the type of person who likes to clean the dishes as the day progresses, or are you the type who likes to leave them till there is nothing clean left? Choosing one of the first two options (rather than the third) will give the experiment the greatest chance of success.
Participation only requires the commitment for writing the updates. You are not expected to read all updates of the others, although you might very well be tempted!
How to do it: making it work
To make the work updates easily accessible we will use Yammer. You can do this in two ways:
You can post the work update with the tag #nywlob to your followers. People will see this message when they are following you, when they are watching the company feed or when they follow the nywlob topic.
If you don’t feel comfortable posting publicly to the whole company (or want to say something that needs to stay in the team) then you can post in an unlisted and private group. People will only see this message if they are members of the group and we will only let people in who work in the HRIT LoB and have agreed to join the experiment. Posting in this group will limit your chances of serendipity, so the first method is preferred.
When you are posting an update, please think about the people who might be reading it, so:
When you refer to a person that is already on Yammer, use the @mention technique to turn their name into a link (and notify them of you mentioning them)
If you refer to a person outside of Shell, link to their public LinkedIn profile.
If you mention any document or web page, make sure to add the link to the document so that people can take a look at it.
I am very interested in any comments you might have. Does anybody have any experience with this?
Arjen Vrielink and I write a monthly series titled: Parallax. We both agree on a title for the post and on some other arbitrary restrictions to induce our creative process. Some people would consider Facebook a threat to the open Internet (e.g. Tim Berners-Lee), whereas other people see it as a key tool for promoting democracy in this world (e.g. Wael Ghonim). We decided to each argue both sides of the argument (300 words “for” and 300 words “against”) and then poll our readers to see which argument they find more persuasive. You can read Arjen’s post with the same title here.
Facebook or no Facebook?
For a couple of months now my pragmatic side has been battling with my principled conscience. The matter of contention: whether to keep my Facebook account.
Why I will delete my Facebook account
There are three main problems with Facebook:
It creates a silo-ed version of the web . A big reason why the web works is the way you can link to other pages on the web: you don’t need anybody’s permission. The Berners-Lee video that I linked to earlier gives some great arguments about why this is important. Facebook is a closed silo from this perspective, creating an alternative network that does not have the same characteristics as the Internet. For some young people around me, the web (if not computing) is nearly synonymous with Facebook: they hardly leave the Facebook browser tab. If they do, it is usually to buy something. I am sure that soon you will be able to do that from Facebook too (e.g. Did you know that you can get somebody a Amazon gift certificate to be given to them on their Facebook wall on their birthday which they have registered with Facebook?)
The social graph is too important to be under the governance of a single commercial US-based company . Knowing how you are connected to other people can lead to powerful applications (see below). In fact, the social experiences that this allows are so important that we would be crazy to accept that all this relational data is in the hands of a company that can do with it whatever they want and might even be forced to share this data with the US government. There is no easy way to migrate this social graph into another system and Facebook displays a very proprietary attitude to it. What would happen if Facebook was forced to stop doing business or would decide to start charging people for their services?
Their sphere of influence is not transparent and ever-increasing . Facebook is all over the web now. What news site does not have a “Like” button? If you have a Facebook account and you don’t log out after you have used it, then Facebook is able to see the URLs of the pages you are reading, even if you don’t ever click on the like button. Your attention is mined and commercialized by Facebook. Even if you have very restrictive privacy settings your data will be still be given to any third party app that has managed to seduce one of your many Facebook friends. More and more sites are cropping up that will only allow you to log in using the Facebook login mechanism making it harder to use multiple identities the net. Facebook is becoming so pervasive on the net, that it requires tools like Disconnect or Abine’s TACO to make sure you are staying out of their clutches. Does this feel like a positive development in the way that you can use the web?
Why I will not delete my Facebook account
There are a couple of good reasons for me to keep a Facebook account:
They are past the tipping point . The network effect has come into play. Why should you be on Facebook? Because it is the one and only (global) place where everybody else is! Two years ago I organized a reunion of the very first class I mentored as a teacher. It took weeks of searching using all kinds of media before we got about 50% of the class together. This year we are doing another reunion: within a week we found 95% of the class on Facebook. Facebook facilitates this so-called ambient intimacy with people that you don’t regularly see or talk to, but still want to stay in touch with. What other means of communications has transaction costs that are this low?
They deliver an incredibly innovative service. Facebook deserves a lot of credit for the ideas that they have implemented and for the pace at which they keep innovating their mind-blowingly large scale service. They were the first company that decided to create a web platform for which third parties could write applications, they were the first to see and deliver on the true power of the social graph (turning it inside-out) and they have been creative in the way that they appropriate and add to ideas about activity streams, sharing in groups and even privacy controls (what other web service gives you that level of control over what you want to share?). For somebody like me, fascinated if not captivated by technology and looking through an innovation lens, there is an immense amount over ever-changing functionality to explore.
Having a centralized social graph leads to powerful applications. The first time I realized this was when I played Bejeweled on my iPhone. It allowed me to connect to my Facebook account and suddenly I wasn’t playing against other people at Internet scale (how can anyone score 20.000 points?!), but I was engaged in battles with family, friends and colleagues. Soon there will be a time where every piece of content we consume (books, news, magazines, videos, podcast) will be enriched by this meta-layer of your friends opinions. I call this the social contextualization of content. Facebook’s integration with Pandora was one of the first examples of how this will work. This meta-layer assumes a persistent social graph: you don’t want to keep finding your different groups of relations again and again do you?
[polldaddy poll=4696600]
Anyway, for me it is clear: I don’t want to be a part of Facebook’s success and would prefer it if we all would be using a differently architected solution in the near future. Fully decentralized and distributed systems are in the making everywhere (e.g. Diaspora, Pagekite, StatusNet, Unhosted and Buddycloud) and I will invest some time to explore those further. As I also personally get very little value out of Facebook, it is not hard to act principled in this case: I will be deleting my account.
Update on 10-11-2012: As I still don’t have a Facebook account I’ve deciced to change the title of this post.
