Social media use in the workplaces, for work purposes, is gathering steam.
Dan Woods: Why is it important to look beyond the collaborative dial tone and explore the opportunity for knowledge capture and process discovery?
Jeff Schick: There are people who know how to do things and people who need to know how to do things. Whether the activity is on-boarding an employee, submitting a patent, or creating a proposal to win business, we all benefit when we capture what we learned and expose as much as possible in repeatable patterns. Both the creators and users of knowledge are interested in such a process if it is easy enough to accomplish.The opportunities for efficiency and productivity are tremendous.
What are the preconditions for knowledge capture and process discovery in activity templates?
The starting point for most work is a search for people, IP, or some sort of knowledge. You don't have to start right away with the idea of creating repeatable business processes. The first goal is to use the collaborative dial tone to create a body of work. This means having a repository so staff can find people that may help them, identify intellectual property that may be applied to a problem, and search other bodies of knowledge collected in all sorts of ways.
The next step is prescribing work to others with knowledge attached. To do a certain task you may need to refer to a certain set of people, IP, and other knowledge. This is where the idea of the activity template is crucial. The template collects not only information but the steps involved in getting the work done and a description of what happens in those steps. If it is easy to capture information about the task and the steps, certain activity templates will grow into fully formed descriptions of processes, so staff do not have to re-invent the wheel and can do work more efficiently with higher quality.
Is the flexibility of the activity templates the key to its success? How do you handle degrees of freedom needed in processes?
Activity templates must be an invitation to further knowledge capture and sharing. It has to be easy to add your ideas to the template. That said, some templates will be more locked down than others. For on-boarding an employee the steps are likely not to change because one person decided he didn't like the process. But it should be possible for that person to make a comment that is shared with those in control of the process. For other processes that are not yet so clearly defined the template is a starting point, and every person who uses it can add the ideas they had while using the template.
What is the payoff?
The first payoff comes when someone uses a template to avoid a mistake or to do a better job than they could without it. This is how processes get more efficient. But the bigger payoff is the creation of an institutional memory and a playbook that expands and changes as the work of the company evolves to meet new challenges. Activity templates allow tribal knowledge to be captured so that turnover is less traumatic.
At IBM, we have an additional benefit because we offer many other products to the market. We are using activity templates in specialized areas so our customers can capture knowledge and processes about business intelligence or how to best deal with customer challenges in CRM applications.
What sort of organizational discipline is required?
It's really easy to describe the way social media and collaboration changes a company. Getting thousands of people to use these technologies is never automatic. At IBM we have thousands of communities formed around specific topics. For example, our community of Women in Europe has 23,000 members. Our external developerWorks community has 8 million.
The people in all these communities are sharing knowledge about what affects them and about how to get the job done. The activity template is a key repository for that knowledge along with the discussion forums, wikis, blogs, and micro-blogs. Everything is interconnected. To make it all work you have to have smart, motivated people, tools like Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr, and training. But your culture must be focused on capturing knowledge and sharing it. You must reward these activities.
What are the most common mistakes in attempting to capture knowledge and processes?
The key is to let the users determine what is important. The staff in charge of promoting use of the collaborative dial tone should not rush the process of creating activity templates and capturing knowledge. Wait until many people have started to comment on an activity and then introduce a template. Sometimes eager people attempt to force a template on an activity that is not appropriate.
Also, creating a collaborative dial tone and encouraging the use of activity templates is not a project. It must be embedded in the way that new staff are introduced into an organization's culture and must be reinforced by continuing training and outreach for continuous improvement.
Finally, the standard for usability must be high. The best consumer interfaces must be the model to follow, not other enterprise software applications.
Dan Woods is chief technology officer and editor of Evolved Technologist, a research firm focused on the needs of CTOs and CIOs. He consults for many of the companies he writes about. For more information, go to evolvedtechnologist.com.
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Cloning For The Cloud