Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Alexander Wilms

Alexander Wilms — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:18 GMT

Shiv,
as a internal analyst with a big enterprise I also had to deal with this new buzzword. I am not that enthusiastic about it, especially if we look on an internal usage. The main principle about Web 2.0 is not the technology – AJAX did not fell from heavens but its elements have been around the block for a while. What is really new about Web 2.0 is the significance of the community and the “let others do the work” principle. If you take Wikipedia for example – it would not have been a success if not thousands of helpers would have created and maintained the content within. But Wikipedia cannot control the content – you yourself mentioned the GM example where the intended usage was turned around. For marketing reasons this might be a good thing to just create traffic – if you take the internal know-how repository of a company that defines certain methodologies or processes enabling everybody to change them at will might not be a good idea. A company might not want to share its internal knowledge for reasons of competition, not even within the whole company, and so the advantage of a very large group of contributors is gone. For the same reason external hosting of services might not be an option.
Web 2.0 services are sucessful because they also can be shared and even “hijacked” – Google Maps can be used by everybody because there is a welldefined interface. But as a company this service is out of your hands – what happens if Google decides to add advertisements to the maps?
Also Wikis and Blogs seem to be the hottest “must have” for a company. But how do you motivate your employees to contribute to a wiki? How do you prevent that they do not use blogs to reveal secrets? And do you really believe that the high ranking executives spent so much times on their blogs? I do believe that there are ghost writers already – so blogs will become just another channel of “official” communications.
Just do not get me wrong – I think that a lot of new and interesting ideas come with Web 2.0, but these ideas are not indended for an internal company environment. If you can disprove me I will be happy to change my views (and even think about implementing some of the suggested systems ;-))

Alexander Wilms — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 20:11:09 GMT

Interesting read. Even beeing “insiders” we need to spend large amounts of time to understand the business processes of our own departments.
Creating a new service or changing an existing service might be easy if you have to deal with simple business tasks (as the call center operation you descibed), but gets very difficult if business stuctures are unstructured or differ by location or country. In a simple case like the one described, with stable operational processes it might be sufficient to visit a department for some time to get a good understanding. But how do you handle a situation where you deal with departments in several countries, with different national legal regulations, different ways of “how we do it over here” and all the political issues that will come up when you start to change people’s workspace?
I am also wondering whether the sequential approach you descibe is the right way here? If business processes cannot be made transparent (despite thorough analysis) and you need the stakeholder’s “buy in”, a rapid approach with frequent feedback to and involvement of the stakeholders might be more appropriate.
What is your experience?

Alexander Wilms — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:51:30 GMT

We have been using Powerpoint for “Mockups” in web application design for a couple of years now and found it very useful. For all of our application elements like buttons, input boxes and even tables we have created pictures or other grouped elements which will allow also to enter text. So if we start designing a screen we just drag the elements on one slide that resembles a browser window. Changing a UI design until the user experience is sufficient is easy, even in direct cooperation with members of the functional project team.
We found that PowerPoint provides some advantages: the functional project teams can work on the design without help from IT and the stakeholders will understand that this is “only” Powerpoint (while a HTML mockup can create the impression that the application is already working). PowerPoint mockups can easily be shared while not every functional user might have a Visio licence. We even have expanded to concept to mockup toolkits for mobile devices and Notes applications.

Alexander Wilms — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 20:32:29 GMT

Imagine this beeing only the first part of the article – thats an impressive list of skills that a dream candidate should bring in. If you are not in the lucky situation of hiring a whole team of specialists you will always have to live with compromises.
One question though – does “hiring” relates to hiring a new person for an internal job or does hiring refer to hire a freelancer? I think there might be differences here – if I am hiring a freelancer I might focus on his ability, proven track record or work he/she has done before. Soft skills may be of minor importance. If I hire a person for a permanent position her/his soft skills or leadership abilities (motivation – Patrick is right here) might be of higher importance – he/she has to fit in the existing team. He or she needs to aquire new skills and “that is the way how its done here” anyway.
In my mind any professional in the field of UX needs to bring tons of patience and a quick mind, beeing able to understand what the customer really needs and to come up with some ideas that create additional value. And she or he must be able to admit that an idea was not so great after all and start afresh.
By the way – I’d liked Christophs statement about the most complex industrial design process – I’ll write that on my wall!

Alexander Wilms — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:37:12 GMT

All,
I’d like to thank you very much for your comments – seems that the idea of sharing knowledge does really work (but unfortunately we are not getting paid for it ;-))

Chris – you are very right in pointing out that it is very easy to provide a platform (like Google) while providing the content is much more cumbersome. Very often clients believe that once they have a 2.0 tool like a wiki or blog the tool will do the magic and create and maintain the content. You are also right in pointing out that monetary incentives will enable the creation of platforms and content. But there is again the issue – while currently in the “outside world” advertising seems to be the engine, corporations will need to find other ways to drive innovation in platforms and content as ads will not work for them.

Paolo – thanks for confirming that I am not alone ;-) Your contribution to this article leads me to the belief that the driving principles behind Web 2.0 do work. So once we are conscious of the processes and drivers behind them we can start to think about ways to support their evolution in a corporate environment.

Michael – your comment gives us hints how cooperation can be archieved, thanks for adding this here. I totally agree that self-interest is the driver for contribution, people will act if they can see their own benefit. And you also pointed out that there is not the one driver that will motivate people – as people are driven by their individual motives you have to find the “right recipe” for each of them. Your point about the value of individual knowledge and the loss a cooperation will face by loosing is pointing in the direction of a business case for collaboration initiatives – following this line we might be able to justify an investment in collaboration incentives.

Jamie – I am a bit hesitating about your idea of guidelines, but that is maybe due to the range of things covered by this term. I don’t think that there is a “guideline recipe” for success here – again we have to take the individual personal motivation and the different environments into account. What will work in a small consulting firm might not work in a large sales-driven organization (and vice versa). What will motivate a new-hire won’t probably motivate a senior consultant. Policy-like guidelines might not work either – you cannot “force” people to contribute. Best practice guidelines will definitely help to understand and to form the processes – I think that is what you meant? Having case-studies or scenarios describing what was done to promote cooperation in which environment and under which conditions, what worked and (maybe more important) what failed? Having a book full of best practices to start with would be a great help for anybody who needs to design a collaboration environment.

Alexander Wilms — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 21:08:32 GMT

Chris – reputation and popularity is a strong driver in “non-profit” communities. It definitely works for us, however we have earned our money during the day and do this as a leisure time activity. However if collaboration will compete against earning money this is a different picture. Reputation and popularity might still be valued, e.g. in a “community-like” corporate environment like a small consulting practice. In think that this will work as long as people will have a somehow personal relationship and are dependent on each others know-how. As Michael has pointed out – if you might need the help of others you will be willing to “donate” some of your time to help them. I think that the “tit for tat” strategy of game theory points in the same direction. This cooperation model however will cease to work when people can cheat successfully – the theory on this is known as the “tragedy of the commons” in economics. But you are right in pointing out that the source of motivation is an intrinsic one and we will need to stimulate this when we want to be successful.

Terry – well, just now its budget season again and funding is definitely an issue, especially when company policies will not allow to use open-source systems or require certain security measures. Include implementation costs, all non-IT related costs such as monetary reward schemes or additional manpower to create and maintain content and it will become a huge bill. An offer for an enterprise content management system will easily have a six to seven digit figure at the bottom, and if you want to reallocate this among your departments there will be lively discussions on their size of the share.
Thanks for your remark on sharing within the IT industry – that is a special industry that has it’s very own specific laws. Take the example of developers, who are actually artisans (in a positive way, with a strong emphasis on the syllable “art”) face value and senior craftsmanship still count a lot – so sharing is one way of promoting their skills. But what about an investment banker who just created a new investment scheme that will create him a lot of new contracts – would he share it just to be recognized as financial genius or rather prefer to generate as much revenue as possible before the copyists appear on the scene? As Chris pointed out – its all about money.

Alexander Wilms — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 21:08:53 GMT

Michael – instant messaging is a great communication tool, as is e-mail. Compared to e-mail IM is stronger as it supports discussion-like conversations, which are a classic way of sparking creativity. However I see some lacks in IM as a knowledge-sharing tool. It prevents people from talking directly to each other (sometimes I catch myself chatting to the person in the office next door instead of making the few steps over) which de-personalizes communication. Often it de-synchronizes discussion as the communication flow is disrupted – the more people in, the worse it gets. The greatest challenge I would see is the organization and presentation of the content – you wrote that all communication is archived and searchable. I just try to imagine myself searching for a very specific item and having to browse through a lot of “logfiles” of past conversations. Search is a very powerful method of retrieval, but it gets cumbersome if your goal is well defined – if you are looking for “deduction alternatives for assets in Germany” you will be happy to get a broad search result and many “hits”, however if you are searching for the “depreciation tables §255 HGB” you don’t want to browse conversations like “who took the comment book from the library”... So your IM archives may be a gold mine containing valuable grains of knowledge – question is how to unearth them.

Alexander Wilms — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:49:51 GMT

Chris, am I right in guessing that your company works as an advisor to agencies who in turn serve other clients? So for you building up and sharing know-how will, as you state, pay off in the end – it is an investment in building up relationships that hopefully will result in a contract. So it is rational for you to make this initial invest to harvest in later.
My scenario was based on a different situation – I am looking on this problem within one big company where IT is an internal service provider for “the business people” who use the knowledge-sharing systems, and from the perspective of IT who will be asked to implement those kind of Web 2.0 systems internally. My idea is that as the motivation factors that drive people to collaborate in the “external world” (like generating new business) are different inside the company the traditional approaches and reward models need an overhaul to be successful inside the company. Or did I misunderstood you?

Alexander Wilms — Wed, 07 May 2008 18:52:13 GMT

Paolo,
thanks for pointing out this link to the community. The line of argumentation sounds feasible, having technology first, then use it to create communities, and finally (hopefully) create value for the company. While the technology is available, the tricky part is to spark the community collaboration. Unfortunately Mr. Reiser does not give much advice how to do this – I think providing new “2.0” systems like mashups will spark interest and an initial hype, but keeping the interest up requires constant work and dedication – how do we motivate people to stay tuned and to use the systems? In his posting from March 19 he suggests that people are motivated by exploring and having fun with the “2.0” systems – which is a valid motive for a certain group of technically interested, young and highly educated people searching fun and personal self-expression, but in an enterprise we also have other people who might lack technical expertise or who might be afraid of “all the modern stuff”. So how do we motivate them?

Alexander Wilms — Wed, 07 May 2008 19:02:04 GMT

Some time ago Michael made a remark on the use of chat systems for collaboration. As they support discussion-like interaction they are well suited to support creative processes. An intelligent search technology could “mine” the bits of valuable knowledge out of the masses of daily chatter? A very interesting idea. Why not “mine” E-mail accounts too? I think there is some serious, even legal drawback to this – if I knew that somebody is “mining” my E-mail account I might get concerned about data privacy. Some of my stored E-mails might not be suitable to be mined or searched. That might be even worse with instant messaging content. Personally I use it very intensively, and many times to discuss things very informally with remote colleagues. If I knew that this content might be searched or mined I will stop to use IM for a lot of things.

Alexander Wilms — Wed, 07 May 2008 19:47:50 GMT

Interesting article – and it sparked a lot of discussions. I think that Daniel lined out an interesting approach for feature research – what are the most interesting features a site should address? Daniels examples clearly state out that he used this technique to elicit the functionality a new or redesigned site should provide, e.g. what are the most needed features on the cities website? If you ask the citizens you will elicit invididual needs but not get the overall picture – except if you ask a very large group of citizens.
This method of course can not give you any insights if it comes to non-functional or implicit requirements. Asking “power users” for those may even bias the requirements engineering process – they use the system every day and even will be able to use workarounds to circumvent non-usable functions. Also usability – for this you have to ask end users or conduct tests. So use different tools for different purposes.

Alexander Wilms — Wed, 07 May 2008 20:07:40 GMT

One other thought – I read the first articles now that companies now start to take countermeasures against the flood of business emails – like “mail-free fridays”. Colleagues of mine tell me that they start to ignore mails where they are on “cc” – they simply drown in mails where people have put them on “cc” just to be on the safe side, to document their doings, to avoid decisions or responsibility. Because sending an email is so easy people even send emails to “communicate” to colleagues sitting in the office next door.
Much of the “communication” that passes my mailbox each day is actually none – the latin word “communicare” translates to “get a common understanding”. A real act of communication only happens if the message that has been communicated creates a common understanding with all parties involved, the sender and recipient(s). So the sender who initiates the message must make sure that the recipients really understand the message – either by designing it in a way that will leave no doubt or open questions on the recipients side, or by confirming with the recipient that both understood the message in the same way. The latter is easy in a direct oral dialogue by evaluating the recipients body language or just asking. The former requires a lot of time and effort…

Alexander Wilms — Wed, 07 May 2008 20:15:27 GMT

Christina has suggested it – we also use Powerpoint very sucessfully. It is installed on most business users PC and they are used or trained to work with it. What you need to work with Powerpoint are defined UI standards. Then you simply create slides with your basic page layouts, and grouped elements that resembles your basic application elements like buttons, entry fields, tables etc. The user simply copies the elements, put them on the screen and changes the content like labels. Even functional users are able to do this. By creating a sequence of slides with slight changes you are even able to simulate user behaviour like field entries, and thereby validating process flows or UI usability.

Alexander Wilms — Wed, 07 May 2008 20:24:55 GMT

Had a nice experience myself – I recently got an IPod Touch and immediately was able to use it – the controls are familiar and triggering them directly instead of using a mouse pointer comes very naturally. A couple of weeks after I got this nice gadget I got my hands on one of these new eBooks. I immediately wanted to use my fingers on the screen to scroll the pages – and found out that this system still uses arrow keys. Word 2010 will still use elements that people can “touch” – like buttons and even menus, and a microphone to dictate the text. You will be able to manipulate the text directly on the screen (e.g. mark and select it) which comes more closely to the natural haptic use of our hands than a mouse :-)

Alexander Wilms — Mon, 26 May 2008 21:42:14 GMT

Margaret,
true enough – thats corporate culture. Internal competition can be a strong driver for a company and I have heard that this is good practice in many organizations. They even give the same task to several teams and let them compete. But the downfall is that this does not form a strong team spirit and zero collaboration. This kind of organization will be like a market – highly effective in yield, but always changing in structure. This kind of organization might work to deliver quick solutions, but no long term initiatives. The philosopher and sociologist Michel Focault has written a very interesting story on ITT under it’s CEO Harold Geneen – this must have been such an organization. It performed well in a stable environment, but was not able to develop long term strategies in a changing environment.
I think that such an organization will not be able to develop a strong team spirit – that might be the answer to your last sentence :-)