A Model For Open Work Media

Over at Work Talk Reports, I’ve written a short introduction to a big idea that I call Open Work. I use the term ‘work media’ to refer to the enterprise social networking tools that are being rapidly adopted in business these days, but I think the basic premises for those tools are too limiting and limited.

Stowe Boyd, A Model For Open Work Media

I am deep into a number of writing projects, including a report on the state of work media tools (aka enterprise social networking), but a set of ideas keep coming forward in my thinking, so I decided to take a moment to capture them.

The short form of these ideas is this: the work media tools we are using today cover only a small part of the ambit of activities that make up our work.

The longer version? Work media tools are designed to handle a small set of use cases that are oriented toward collaborative activities, such as sharing documents, assigning tasks, and core business functions, like sales and customer support. These tools take a great deal for granted, and have built-in fundamental premises about the closed nature of today’s work, so that a broad range of activities that we are actually involved in every day are either managed only in part, or managed outside of these tools altogether.

A simple example has to do with project work. Today’s tools are geared toward managing a project once it has been defined, and once the various team members have been identified. A work context is defined, people are invited, and work commences. But these leaves aside all the work that preceded the project, such as cost estimates, negotiations with freelancers, proposals to the client, and so on.

Yes, it is true that these other activities could have been managed as independent and earlier projects themselves, and that is, in a sense, my point. But in general, much of that earlier coordinative effort — especially negotiation — is unmanaged, or managed via email or other interactions.

And the largest gap in the orientation of today’s work media tools is that they are almost completely closed: they are organized so that only people that are invited to participate in well-defined projects can gain access at all. With very few exceptions, nothing created or managed within these tools can be shared with the outside world, or even between other users of the various systems.

Go read the complete article at Work Talk Reports.

Tympathy: Getting Into a Shared Tempo At Work

Had a fascinating talk yesterday with Deb Louison Lavoy as a part of my work on a new book, The Business Of Social Business (I hope to be done in June).  Deb mentioned a term that she’d read in a David Brooks column, of all places. He reels off a bunch of terms that he thinks are critical skills for the new world we are entering (I leave the others for other posts, perhaps). One was not like the others, in that he attempts to repurpose a term that is in common everyday use, but cast into a new meaning: sympathy.

The New Humanism - David Brooks via NYTimes.com

Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.

First, I think that we do need a term to represent the ability to share a tempo with others. I think it *is* a key skill, or trait.

However, I don’t think it is easy to extend the meaning of existing and commonly used terms, and to basically shoulder aside their established meanings.

So I am proposing tympathy for this purpose (‘tym’ for time (sort of), and ‘pathy’ for sensing). (Note that I considered and rejected ‘tempothy’.)

Tympathetic people can naturally get into a groove with an established group, they find the natural rhythms of cooperation, and seem to sense the right time to ask a question, offer some insight, or shift course. And when this scales up to those connected in some shared activity, coordination feels frictionless, and collaboration seems less strained.

Effective groups will move toward a shared pace, either organically, or by following the tempo of a leader, or because of the explicit actions of some sort of metronome. They are also attuned to the tempo of the larger work context in which their work is embedded.

Work media tools — like Yammer, Chatter, IBM Connections, Podio, and Jive — are being rapidly adopted in the work context for a wide variety of reasons, but one major benefit is that they lay down a beat for people to build their work tempo around: they engender tympathy, which we all want.

My sense is that the very best work media solutions will support a polyrhythmic work environment. They will work at different tempos for different layers of work, ranging from the fast twitch pace of posting updates on today’s to do list, to the slower, deeper cycles in the business, like long-range strategic planning.

I also believe that organizations that are moving toward greater autonomy and distributed leadership will put a high premium on tympathy as an personal attribute. My bet is that tympathy has been important forever, but we just didn’t have a name for it and it has gone unexamined in the workplace.

Social Networks Will Kill Email?

Skimming a Forbes Insights report, and this popped out:

The @Work State Of Mind Project via Forbes Insights (download here):

Social networks are important for conducting business. About two in three respondents (67%) said that such work-related networks play a significant role in business, and 56% said that personal social networks influence their determinations. But business- related networks are clearly more important than ones more focused on personal life. “Highly focused tablet/smartphone apps with closed social media built in will replace email,” says Warren N. Bimblick, senior vice president of strategy and business development for Penton Media.

First, I followed Bimblick on Twitter (@wbimblick).

Then I thought about this prognosis. One of the aspects of email that has made it universal is that anyone can can send anyone else a message given their email address. It’s open at a fundamental level.

A social network like Twitter is both open and closed: anyone can mention me — send a public message — but only those that I follow can send me a private message (a direct message in Twitterspeak). This is a powerfully subtle aspect of Twitter: the only means for the unfollowed to reach me is through public discourse.

I think there is a place for a Twitter client that fronts as an email client too, as a transitional stepping stone away from inbound email, and also to deal with the reality that not everything worth being said can be compressed into 140 characters (see Liquid Email). I wonder if Twitter is going to build this, or not?

The Future Impact of Social Networking - Tom Standage

Agent Of Change, the future of technology disruption in business, Economist Intelligence Unit


Tom Standage is the digital editor of The Economist and the author of several books on the history of technology. He is currently working on a new book on the history of the idea of social media, from Roman times to the Internet.

Q: What technology do you think will have the biggest impact on business in the coming decade?

Standage: The really big one is the impact of social networking on the enterprise. This has been entirely a consumer phenomenon, but we’re now seeing start-ups like Yammer and Chatter. They are taking the benefits and the approach of social media and applying them in companies. I think that’s going to be a very big change.

Q: Why will social networks be so important for companies?

Standage: People who are entering the workforce now think that this is how software works. Some managers talk about Facebook and other [social] networks as being time wasters, but in fact the opposite is true. This is the way that software is increasingly going to look, and that will impact on the way companies are run, because when you have a general discussion about things on a Facebook “wall”, you tend to get much less email and much less wasted time.

It also becomes much easier to find experts on particular subjects, to expose expertise within your company. Very often people turn out to be very good at something even though it’s not part of their job description. When you ask a general question, such as “Does anyone know if we’ve ever done a contract on this?”, the people who reply basically self- organise. You can see who the useful people are, and people within the company start to be perceived according to their willingness
to co-operate and their utility to others. That matters much more than what their job description is.

Q: What about outside the company?

Standage: The missing link is the use of social media
by companies to deal with their suppliers 
and customers. This will take a while, but 
the opportunity for people to engage with their suppliers and their customers in this way will be enormous. You can imagine how companies will be able to collaborate much more effectively. We’ve seen a few small examples of specific collaboration spaces—for a particular project, for instance—whose participants come from all sorts of different companies. We will start to see more of this type of thing.

I agree that the world of business will be radically reshaped by the impact of work media: social network-based communication tools for the enterprise. But I wish Standage was backing that up with something more substantial than new entrants to the workforce wanting to use something like Facebook, or finding experts.

That’s why I think it is important to look at cognitive science, and make the case for using software that works the way our minds work. Or the tangible benefits of working out loud.

One Million Podio Apps Installed

A great milestone for work media vendor Podio: its users have installed one million Podio apps.

Podio supports the creation of data-oriented ‘apps’, such as a customer database, which can support business processes. Podio also supports an app store where thousands of predefined apps can be reused.

I think this is a sign of the growing maturation of social tools in the enterprise, as well as the acceptance of Podio’s quite unique approach to creating and sharing business process-oriented apps.

Twitter Acquires Posterous

Saw the announcement that Posterous has been acquired by Twitter (↬ h/t infoneert)— which doesn’t have very much other information, aside from the ominous statement that directions for moving to other services will be posted soon — and I immediately thought Twitter’s weakest link: direct messaging. DMing in Twitter is pathological, it’s so bad. And especially the lack of group private messaging.

So, imagine Twitter using Posterous as a way to support group private messaging, since Posterous does that today.

Several questions if they go that way:

1. Will this new sort of private messaging be limited to 140 characters? (I bet they will be, at least the day that Twitter decides to relax that limitation everywhere.)
2. Will group private messaging require defining a group, or will they be ad hoc? Will it be possible to invite users to a group after the fact, and catch up on historical updates there? (That’s how Posterous works now, more or less like a private blog.)

It’s easy to see how Twitter could use a solution like Posterous as a way to move into the business market, allowing businesses to coordinate work internally on Twitter. This could make Twitter the most fundamental of work media tools. About time, guys.