The Workplace Blog

Proprietary content management systems cause access, maintenance and management problems, resulting from the lack of a single source/standard for repository interactions. So what’s the solution? JSR170, a content repository API, provides a common programmatic interface that stops architecture, data source, and protocol from being obstacles to common versioning, transactions, and locks.

Though JSR170 doesn’t solve all enterprise content management problems, standardization and portable content
repositories reduce complexity and cost. Read the white paper (PDF) by Ram Sarma and Krishnanand Kuruppath to understand how.

The Harvard Business Review has published its list of breakthrough ideas for 2007. Two ideas in particular caught our eye. We couldn’t agree more with them.

An Emerging Hotbed of User-Centered Innovation
In an array of industries, producer-centered innovation is being eclipsed by user-centered innovation—the dreaming up, development, prototyping, and even production of new products by consumers. These users aren’t just voicing their needs to companies that are willing to listen; they’re inventing and often building what they want.

Act Globally, Think Locally
Companies are usually told to “think globally and act locally.” But thanks to their own global information systems and the Internet, knowledge from faraway places can be acquired relatively easily and cheaply. This means that firms have to discover and quickly incorporate good ideas from these diverse sources before their rivals do.

Read the others on the HBR website and tell us what you think.

For the first time in several years, I am not going to recommend buying the Neilson Norman Top Ten Intranets Report. Jacob Nielsen and his team have done a lot of good for intranet design and the usability profession too. I have a lot of personal respect for Jacob Neilson as well but I think this report can be better. Just by reading his 10 Best Intranets of 2007 alertbox, you will see why I have gotten turned off. Here are a few of the reasons.

I struggle with the methodology and some of the conclusions drawn in the report. As a PhD with a commendable track record of publications behind him, I would have thought that Jacob Neilson and his team would be more careful about some of the statements made. Apparently, because the buyers are mostly from the business world, the authors don’t feel that intellectual rigour is necessary. And for most people maybe it isn’t. But since the Nielsen Norman Group prides itself on its academic credentials, I had hoped for more from them.
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The red light zones are places on the fringe of an organization where most of the innovation takes place. These are zones that aren’t officially sanctioned and they survive through a combination of stealth, compromise and accommodation. They are on the edge of acceptable organizational behaviour. In many companies, they’re treated as an organizational necessity. Scholars have rarely paid to red light zones though increasingly more are researching the phenomena (Google Claude Ciborra and Chrisje Brants for more information).
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At Avenue A | Razorfish we bridge the consumer and the enterprise worlds so we’re always making a conscious effort to learn and leverage from each side. It brings new ideas to the table and greater value to our clients. With that in mind, check out this analytics report published by our digital marketing team. This report answers 14 questions every marketer and Web site owner should ask in order to get better results from Web analytics. The report is free but registration is required.

We all believe that when employees leave a company they take some knowledge with them. Tacit knowledge that finds no physical form and cannot be held by the company. However a research article titled, “Learning from Those Who Left: The Reverse Transfer of Knowledge through Mobility Ties” by Lori Rosenkopf and Rafael Corredoira proves otherwise.

They analzyed employee turnover at semiconductor companies in the United States and discovered that when an employee left it often resulted in deep, mutually beneficial knowledge relationships being formed between the company and place that the employee had joined. This is because social networks that transcend companies allow the employees left behind to gain access to the knowledge generated at their colleague’s new company.

Read CIO magazine’s take on it and find out more about Lori Rosenkopf’s research.

Jacob Nielson has written a rebuttal to Apple’s study that proclaims that larger monitor sizes contribute to greater producitivity in the workplace. In his response Jacob makes some important points regarding productivity measurement.

First among them is that instead of measuring operations (like time it takes to copy and paste between excel cells) one should measure tasks like how long does it take to complete a budget. He also discusses that even measuring the productivity of a specific task is not enough because often that task maybe conducted rarely and therefore may not be a good “task sample.” He encourages testers to look at all the tasks on your intranet at once.

Jacob Nielson is controversial and always has been. However, I feel this particular article is important in how cuts through research created to sell larger monitors and emphasizes that for research to be of value it has be centered in task accomplishment by real people. Well done!

Every leading organization has an intranet or at least some type of shared electronic database to which employees are encouraged to post and discuss. But for the most part, we’ve seen that employees are quite unwilling to contribute to these shared resources. This was one of the factors that doomed the knowledge management movement of the early 1990s.

Customized and personalized portals a decade later were then supposed to resolve the knowledge management issue. But they failed as witnessed by the much discussed “empty portal” syndrome. Several factors contributed to this among them was that employers focused too much on the technical implementations while ignoring the sociological and organizational cultural factors.

Now in 2006, we’re all talking about web 2.0, wikis and blogs and how personal, user driven, bottom up knowledge management is going to make all the difference in the world. Maybe it will, who knows. But I’m not betting that it is going to revolutionalize knowledge management and an employee’s willingness to contribute information to an intranet or a shared database.

Recently, I came across some research by Leo W. Jeffres and Guowei Jian of Cleveland State University that addressed some of the challenges in getting employees to publish to shared resources. The paper introduces a three dimensional conceptual framework to explain employees’ willingness to to contribute to shared electronic databases.

The paper emphasizes that the three dimensions - utilitarian(cost-benefit analysis), normative (identification) and collaborative(collaboration) are equally important. It emphasizes that individual and collective interests are often fundamentally at odds and fundamentally incompatible. As a result, rational employees prefer to “free ride” to minimize their personal cost.

However, the paper also highlights that while employees typically act out of self interest in a utilitarian fashion, the amount they identify philosophically with the organization and their past experiences in collaboration (rewarding versus getting no personal gain) play an important role in their future willingness to collaborate. So look around your office. Issues like office morale and compensation at the team versus individual level, may affect how collaborative employees are - on the intranet or elsewhere.

In the intranet domain we often talk about why we need to establish virtual communities. These conversations sometimes use a loose definition of communities. In an effort to further the discourse, below is a definition of communities and how they differ from networks.

This comes from Barry Wellman at the University of Toronto who says, ” Communities are networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support, information, a sense of belonging and social identity.” In contrast to this, as Manuel Castells has explained in The Internet Galaxy, networks are built by the choices and strategies of social actors, be it individuals, families or social groups.

Organizations have networks formed by people, groups and departments in support of specific business ends. Depending upon their importance to themselves or the organization as a whole, these networks are nutured and supported either proactively or passively. In contrast to this, communities are less about choices and strategies and more about interpersonal ties that provide social benefits more than business ones.

And that’s exactly why, virtual communities in many organizations fail. Employers and intranet designers pay too much attention to the business objectives and ignore the importance of creating the shared values that are needed for a social organization. Online communities whether internal or those centered around customers can be of incredible help to companies. But for them to succeed it is important to give them time to evolve in a sociological sense.

We talk about collaboration extensively and emphasize its importance. This McKinsey Quarterly article “Mapping the value of employee collaboration” (paid content) sheds light on why exactly and how a company may benefit from collaboration. It highlights companies that are mapping their networks of relationships and are analyzing the economic costs and benefits that key interactions create. The goal - to identify value creating interventions which in simpler terms means to guide the collaborations to be value creating for the organization.