Teblog

Dan Bricklin (inventor of PC spreadsheet) on technology

A couple of weeks ago, Wiley asked if I'd like a review copy of Dan Bricklin's 'Bricklin on Technology' book. Normally, I'd say "not on your Nelly" because I know what a chore book reviewing can be. However, I was at the West Coast Computer Faire in March 1980 when Bricklin collected his first award for VisiCalc - the pioneering spreadsheet for the PC. I was also a fairly avid user of his 'Demo' program a few years later. Even though I don't think we met, (unless it was in Zaragoza a couple of years ago), I felt connected, not least because I also developed and published PC software for many years, but without his degree of visibility or success.
When the book arrived, I winced because it's more or less 500 pages long. Unless you're a commuter or you don't get much sleep, how do you find time to read that much?
Anyway, the book was enjoyable at a couple of levels and a disappointment at another. Enjoyable because it peeled off and examined the layers of thinking that went into various products and issues. Bricklin leaves no stone unturned in his pursuit of insight. The transcript of an 85-minute interview with wiki inventor Ward Cunningham is a classic in this respect. (It was 37 pages.) I'd rather Bricklin had identified and pulled out the key elements but then, I suspect, this would have been an editorial step too far for him. He would have had to impose his own interpretations on the conversation, rather than laying it out in full in front of his audience.
You will get insight if you read this book. Insight into what brought us to where we are and a few glimmers into how we might get to where we're going.
The other enjoyable bit for me, which you won't all share, is that I've met (albeit fleetingly) many of the people mentioned in the book, worked with many of the products and written about many of the issues. Bricklin and I even started programming at the same time - early 1966, and we've both tried to take the user perspective in our work. The book triggered many long-dormant memories and reawakened many old feelings, especially in the late 70's/early 80's as we all groped our way through the chaos of the emerging microcomputer/PC business. This is not really a reason for buying the book because Bricklin's chosen subjects seem, in the main, to be serendipitous. A comprehensive history book it is not, although it is a useful addition to the history of the IT world of the late 20th century.
The book is a compilation of old blog posts, essays and transcripts of recordings, loosely arranged around topics which Bricklin finds important, all topped and tailed with narrative from the perspective of 2007/8. As he says in the conclusion, "On any topic you can explore deeply and find nuance", which more or less sets the tone for the book. He does dig deep, he records faithfully and, at times you want him to make his point more quickly. But maybe that's not what he's trying to do. Perhaps he's trying to help the reader understand the nuances, so that they can move forward with their own thinking. I don't know.
Most of his topics have some resonance today, although much of the writing has been overtaken by events or absorbed into the mainstream. The chapters will give you a clue: What Will People Pay For?; The Recording Industry and Copying; Leveraging the Crowd; Cooperation; Blogging and Podcasting; What Tools We Should Be Developing?; Tablet and Gestural Computing; The long term; Historical Information about the PC; Interview with the Inventor of the Wiki; and VisiCalc. It's a ramble round the industry and round the inside of Bricklin's head. His invention of VisiCalc gave him a passport to go where he likes when he likes and meet who he likes. And that's what he's done and, in this book, shared it with us.
My approach, if you're thinking of buying it, would be to say "I'm getting a good 300-page book, I'll just need to pick which 300 of the 500 pages are of most relevance to me." It's a bit like his approach to software - give the user the tools and let them choose how best to use them.

Amazon is selling it in the UK for £10.99

Rumours of KM's death exaggerated

Say 'knowledge management' to most people in our business and watch the curl of their lips. It seems to be a 'given' that KM is dead. The usual reason given is that knowledge sits between our ears, so how the heck can it be managed? Even those who are prepared to stretch the definition a little bit into 'information' are still inclined to question the value of the stored information. I mean, what information is readily given up and what's its half-life anyway?
A few months ago, I stumbled across a US/Indian IT services company called MindTree. It has a Chief Knowledge Officer called Raj Datta. Expecting the worst, I spoke to him and was somewhat astonished to learn that he has taken a lifecycle approach to knowledge management. He recognises that it does live between people's ears. But he also recognises that it can be shared through social tools. The result is an organisation which spends a lot of time, energy and money on the most important bit of knowledge management, its creation in the first place.
Staff are introduced to many thinking and idea generation tools - from De Bono's Six Thinking Hats to mind-mapping. Through workshops and discussion groups, they can learn about many thinking concepts, developing their minds and their ability to innovate. Without creation, knowledge/information capture is merely ossifying the past.
Staff, called 'Minds' incidentally, are then given a wide choice of social and collaboration tools, from blogs through wikis to discussion groups, and more. They are also given a physical workplace which encourages planned and serendipitous encounters.
The astonishing thing about this company is that it was implementing these ideas and blending them with its traditional KM/content management systems while most companies were still trying to figure out the relevance of social networking. MindTree turns out to have been something of a pioneer.
By joining the dots and ensuring that the complete knowledge lifecycle is supported: from inception, to storage, to sharing, to reuse, it provides the KM world an intelligent and holistic way forward.

Hoard or share? Your call.

A long time ago, when I was a wage slave in a computer company, I figured out two things.

1) People will always be around and therefore I should work in a field that involved communication and people. (Teaching and writing became important parts of my life subsequently.)

2) I should, as much as possible, do things once and get paid lots of times. (I subsequently entered the publishing world - magazines first, then software.)

These activities have, to varying degrees, determined the trajectory of my life for the past 33 years. And a jolly fine life it's been, thank you for asking.

But, somewhere along the way, things changed. I found myself giving more and more of my stuff away. I (wrongly) bombed the price of my niche software too far. I found myself cheerfully handing out information and opportunity leads to others. At some point I moved from hoarding and dribbling out my knowledge in exchange for largish sums of money to giving away more and receiving something else in return, friendships and business relationships based on trust and transparency.

I'm not totally stupid, I realise I have to sell something and that something tends to be what's between my ears, my native talents or what I can lay my hands on and package more skilfully than others. It makes for a good life in which all the bits join up rather harmoniously. People, fortunately, know about me and are happy to pay me when they think they can get some value out of me.

I was prompted to write this by a tiny, three-minute, interview conducted in a noisy restaurant by one Suw Charman. She, incidentally, was partly responsible - along with Adriana Lukas and Jackie Danicki - for acting as midwives as I entered the world of blogging at the end of 2004. Her interview was with JP Rangaswami, a man who is a paragon of knowledge sharing. He gets hardly any sleep so has a ton of time to do his job (a very important one at BT), to keep up, to engage with all the 'greats' of the social computing world, and to reflect very deeply on our world, much of which ends up in his blog.

To paraphrase the (short) interview, he pointed out that capturing and keeping knowledge is part of the incentive system in many organisations. But the new generations coming through (and the more enlightened of the older generations) have a more sharing attitude. The core question is: do people want to share? And, by implication, he believes the the answer is, increasingly, "yes". It shows in his behaviour. The benefits show in his reach and influence. And little of this could have happened without him deciding to reach out and share.

And, as I've written many times before, inside an organisation, the benefits are potentially huge. Rangaswami believes that the decision (should we implement social software?) that organisations need to make  is akin to deciding whether or not a company should have a telephone exchange. In time, it will become obvious. Like email and mobile phones before, it will take a while to bite (he thinks the transition could be ten years or more) but it will happen without question.

The organisational social software paradox

Last week I reported on the shape of the enterprise social networking space with the help of Andrew McAfee's Berkmann Centre lunchtime presentation on the subject. This week I'll get a little closer to home and present you with a paradox you're going to have to resolve if you're thinking of introducing social networking into your organisation.

A few months ago, Freeform Dynamics and MWD joined forces to carry out research among 201 companies on the subject of collaborative computing. The respondents were roughly equally split between France, Germany and the UK. All organisations were at least 1000 employees and half of them were over 5000. Sixty percent of the respondents were IT-centric and forty percent business-centric. All had some responsibility for workforce communication and collaboration.

The research contained all manner of interesting stuff but, as promised last week, I'm going to take a couple of charts out which relate to risk. One of our questions centred around the unofficial use of collaboration software within the organisation. As you can see from the chart below, social software of the kind we were discussing last week has crept into most of these organisations to some degree. Over fifty percent of respondents report wide adoption while almost every organisation has at least some.

In the officially sanctioned figures (not shown), social media is in third place at a little under 25% but instant messaging remains bottom of the heap.

Now, I don't know if I'm being dim here, but if something is unsanctioned, it seems that people would need to get it in by stealth. This is easy enough to do with solo desktop software (if organisational desktop control is lax enough) but social media, by its very nature, needs more than one participant and a shared location in which participants can 'meet', either synchronously or asynchronously.

This being the case, it seems highly likely that at least a percentage of those interviewed must be using public services in order to achieve their social networking objectives. Some, of course, will have an in-house 'skunk works' server - rather as Euan Semple did when he was at the BBC - but this requires some degree of computer skill and, of course the authorisation of the IT department at least.

So, let's take a look at the second chart. This relates to the concerns of the respondents towards the use of public services for this sort of thing. Don't forget it includes the conferencing, communication and screen sharing applications mentioned in the first chart.

Security, compliance, user distraction and support overhead all rank reasonably highly when you aggregate 'major concern' and 'some concern'.

We clearly have a discrepancy between what people are doing and what their organisations would like them to be doing. No doubt the employees have their reasons for behaving in this contradictory way. I'd hazard a guess that they've found the perceived benefits outweigh the perceived risks. Within most organisations, I'd have thought it unlikely that people would adopt social software just so they can chat to their personal friends. (By the way, if you'd like to alarm yourself with a detailed run down of risks, take a look at this new report on Web 2.0 security from the European Network and Information Security Agency.)

I'll confess to a degree of bafflement and, if you are in one of these contradictory situations, I'd love to hear from you. Perhaps you can tell me whether things are as laissez faire as they appear or whether guidelines and controls have been put in place to minimise, or at least balance, risk. And, maybe, tell us how hard it is for your organisation to take social networking seriously and what efforts you're making to articulate the commercial benefits to the powers that be.

I look forward to hearing from you.

The knowledge worker and Enterprise 2.0

Always good to hear Andrew McAfee in action. He's the guy who coined the Enterprise 2.0 moniker a couple of years ago. He's an associate professor at Harvard Business School and, yesterday, he ran a lunchtime presentation and Q&A on "Enterprise 2.0: How Organizations are Exploiting Web 2.0 Technologies and Philosophies." The audience was a mix of students, faculty, journalists, analysts, bloggers, business folk and venture capitalists.

The subject matter was of particular interest to me this week, having already done a press interview, worked with some potential research clients/partners and prepared for a conference, all on a closely-related topic. It struck me as a good idea to listen in. Not least to get a reality check for my own thoughts. The tip-off, by the way, came through Elsua - an online pal who works for IBM - through Twitter, an increasingly popular web 2.0 micro-blogging tool.

The presentation, with minor adjustments, wasn't so different from what he was saying a couple of years ago. In fact, if this stuff is new to you, you will find value in his How to Hit the Enterprise 2.0 Bullseye blog post (November 2007). The bullseye in the headline means targeting the organisation but, in the body, it refers to his model of how a knowledge worker inside an organisation sees their connections to others. Because it focuses on people, it is immune to the shifts in technology. New applications can be added to and removed from the model without wrecking the basic insights it provides.

To keep it simple: at the heart are the people with whom we have strong ties - our colleagues, the people we work with, have lunch with and maybe socialise with; The next lots are those people we know - if we saw them in a pub we'd be happy to have a drink with them; beyond that, and this is where it gets interesting, are the people who would make potential colleagues, if only we knew about each other; and, finally, the outer ring contains the world of helpful people out there whose worlds are unlikely to collide with ours.

The strong tie group is unlikely to be the source of novel information or links to potential colleagues. They know each other too well. The weak ties are those most likely to lead us to new ideas and new opportunities. Enterprise 2.0 technologies don't cause these things to happen, but they can act as amplifiers of these natural processes. Wikis might be popular among strongly tied individuals while Twitter or Facebook might be used in both areas. The next ring cannot really be exploited without some Enterprise 2.0 technology, blogging in particular. McAfee talks about "narrating your work". Do this and with the help of regular search, tags or links from other sources it acts as a magnet to others who are interested in what you do.

The ring with no ties represents strangers. While having nothing to do with collaboration, it is a source of collective intelligence. McAfee ran us through some examples of prediction markets to show the usefulness of this ring. It boils down to aggregating the individuals' predictions of a particular outcome - presidential results, company performance, whatever. Closely linked to betting and not social at all. But remarkably accurate.

Sticking to the social part of the bullseye, McAfee said that the biggest fear of managers is that information would leak that shouldn't. He noted that email, photocopiers and USB sticks, among others, already provide plenty of ways to leak information. However social tools do increase the number of people who can see leaks, so the participative benefits of the Enterprise 2.0 world have to be weighed up against the risks of disclosure. Related to this, he mentioned that some companies 'close down' too much. Their use of social tools might be restricted to strong tie groups, foreclosing the possibility that someone else in the organisation might have something valuable to offer.

He claims to have begged organisations for horror stories relating to these technologies and says "the collection is empty". People inside organisations don't use this stuff to do nasty things. This is partly to do with the fact that they cannot participate anonymously and people already know how to behave.

I'm not sure that this is universally true, so next week I'll take a closer look at the risks and the remedies, especially when the outside world becomes part of the equation.

What if the lights go out?

We humans have a talent for getting other people and other things to do stuff for us. If we didn't, we'd all be out there scratching a living from the forests and fields and we'd have a pretty rudimentary existence. Would you care to forage or kill for the food on your table?

"A strange way to start an IT-focused blog," you might be thinking, but all will become clear. Yesterday I was listening to Clay Shirky talking about the wonders wrought by the advent of the internet. In particular, he was talking about the tremendous communication leap which has taken place in terms of how we communicate, cooperate, collaborate and act in concert as a result.

Previous communication systems have been predominantly one on one - telegraph, telephone, fax and so on - or they've been one to many, where 'one' has usually been a business: books, radio, television. Even the web started off that way. What's changed over the past few years is our willingness and ability to convene online. We don't need to be gathered together by an organisation - a company, a fan club, or whatever. We do it ourselves. And we're most likely to do it by coalescing around a topic of common interest.

Shirky mentioned the case of HSBC stopping its interest-free overdraft facility for graduates last year. It thought it had the power to do this. (One to many.) But it didn't account for a graduate starting a Facebook group delicately called "Stop The Great HSBC Graduate Rip-Off". Okay, I was kidding about the 'delicate'. Despite it being the summer holiday period, students and graduates joined the group in their thousands to discuss the issue and decide on actions that might need to be taken. Not least sharing information about how to move their accounts to other banks. Newspapers picked up on it. Physical demonstrations were planned in Facebook and HSBC backed off.

A piece of information about HSBC became a gathering point, a cooperation point and a collaborative action point. This sort of thing just couldn't have happened before. People were put together by bosses. Or they joined clubs organised by other people. They didn't self select and self organise, certainly not as quickly and as effectively and in such numbers.

Inside the business, the same thing's happening. People often find each other because of common interest and quite regardless of the hierarchy. If two people in two labs in two parts of the world are coincidentally researching the same materials, there's a good chance that they'll discover each other if there's a topic online around that material. Relationships will form which couldn't have come about through central direction.

As Shirky says, "Every URL is a latent community."

You see it a lot with environmental groups at the moment. A lot of coalescing is going on around different green topics. I see that fellow analyst Tom Raftery has started talking about the 'Tom' instead of the Tonne as a CO2 measure. In fact Gavin Starks has started a ning social network called megatom. It has 15 members as I write and it may be madly successful, or it may die. It cost very little to start. It's not like a conventional media title. If it flies, it flies. If it doesn't, it doesn't. This kind of exercise is being repeated thousands of times a day, all over the world. Some might say the lunatics are in charge of the asylum, but that's not true. Good ideas will gain traction, bad ones won't. Good contributors will gain influence, bad ones will be ignored.

With several UK power stations heading for the knacker's yard courtesy of EU rulings and with our excessive dependence on foreign energy supplies, we face the real prospect of power shortages. But this new world relies, more than anything else, on us each having a supply of electricity. Without it, the doorways to this parallel social universe will be slammed shut.

Am I being paranoid? Does it matter? I happen to think "no" and "yes" respectively. What about you?

Collaboration: the old way. Why not?

Just lately I've been wondering a lot about stimulating innovation inside companies. It was sparked off by a visit to the Imaginatik user conference in London. I was treated to a number of case studies in which customers saved themselves tens of millions of dollars by adopting Imaginatik's IdeaCentral approach to collaborative problem solving.

The companies were large - Walmart, Whirlpool and Pfizer, to name a few - who were saving tens of millions of dollars as a result. Imaginatik likes to promote a ten times ROI at every opportunity, which suggests that the cost of the software and services are probably beyond the reach of smaller businesses anyway.

So this got me wondering. Given that a lot of IdeaCentral is similar (on the surface at least) to social software, could cheaper and more generally available tools be used to similar effect? It is web-based. It has places to post your ideas, comment on other people's, add your profile, make contact, get notifications of updates, voting mechanisms, tagging, search and automatic discovery of similar ideas. Behind the scenes, the set-up and management software and a bunch of add-on modules contribute to this powerful software suite.

Could the bulk of this be done easily using social tools like blogs, wikis, Twitter and suchlike? I'm not sure. While I like these tools and am an active participant in the social computing world, I'm not sure that most people would be ready for an unstructured collection of tools. It would be simply too complicated for the average user to start blogging, commenting, tagging, voting and the like. The management tools are the other side of the coin. It would be difficult, but probably not impossible, to put together some kind system to keep track of everything that's going on.

I'm now going to suggest something retrograde which might have my social software pals throwing their hands up in horror. What about using a forum? It's simple to set up, simple to use and you can easily control membership. (I ran a public forum and the spam levels were absolutely ridiculous.) You can also keep the captured knowledge on your own system, usually in a MySQL database which makes for ready integration with other systems.

Users can start new topics, others can comment. They can search. They can be notified of comments. A good clue about value is whether a suggestion has comments. Because it's being implemented in a business context, so there's no personal or business advantage in flaming or being silly. Once an idea has collected a few comments, perhaps the management could move it up the list to give it more prominence. (Or maybe some forum software exists to do this automatically, I don't know.)

For smaller organisations, I would have thought that this would be an simple way to collaborate and it would be a pity if it were to be sidelined by the more shiny toys of recent years.

Of course, I could be talking through my hat. What do you think?

Social software and a troubled bank

Wachovia Bank is in the process of being largely gobbled up by Citigroup (Update 6 Oct: or completely consumed by Wells Fargo). It was losing money hand over fist already this year and the more recent firestorm in the financial world brought it to its knees. It will take a while to sort things out and, then, who knows what will happen in terms of consolidation and job losses?

Earlier this month, I was listening to the company's eBusiness Director extolling the virtues of its internal collaborative software suite, called Pulse. At the time, I wanted to write about it but, having checked the bank's financials, decided it could have disappeared within hours or days of the story being published. Slightly bad news for me, terrible news for the company. Anyway, here we are at a new beginning, and here's the tale...

Pete Fields is a grey-haired, smart (in both senses), business professional, the last sort of person you'd expect to see presenting at the Office 2.0 conference. He talked enthusiastically of the underpinning reasons for Pulse and surprised many at the conference by explaining that it was built atop Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). Like GE, mentioned in a recent post, Wachovia had decided on a DIY approach.

The primary drivers for Pulse were: 1) to enable staff to work more effectively across time and distance; 2) to better connect and engage employees; 3) to mitigate the impact of a maturing workforce; and, 4) to engage the generation Y worker. I bet there's a lot of 2) going on at the moment. And, I'd also guess that thoughts are currently quite far away from 4).

But, regardless of the current state of the company, Fields' insights are still interesting, not least the graph that showed the consequences of an ageing work population over the years 2000 to 2010. It showed clearly how the working population is increasing from the age of 45 and decreasing in the 35-44 bracket. The 55-64 age group is rising over 50 percent. And these people, plus the over 65s, will be leaving and taking their knowledge with them. (Assuming they can afford to.)

The diminuation of collective knowledge is one of the reasons so-called knowledge management (KM) became so popular, before people realised that the two words contradicted each other. Organisations thought they could use software to systematically squeeze knowledge out of people and file it away for future use. After many false starts, no-one would claim success. Lots of success with information but the stuff between people's ears was altogether more difficult. However, the advent of social computing (choose your own term) has brought the KM dream closer than it ever was when the knowledge managers were strutting their stuff.

Nowadays, if your organisation supports them, you can tap into wikis, blogs, bulletin boards, Q&A databases and the like. And if you're not happy, you can dive into the people pages and ping an expert. Within a short time you can get authoritative answers, in context and, because it's done electronically, the trail is saved for others. We all know there's a lot of nonsense 'out there' in the wider web but, in a corporate context, people don't file anonymously and they generally avoid posting inaccurate stuff that would reflect badly on them.

So, given the demographics, what did Wachovia do to capture knowledge without making people feel they were being exploited? It created an internal Wikipedia. Called Wachovia Wisdom and subtitled 'the encyclopedia by employees for employees', it struck the right note. It started, innocuously enough, as an acronym wiki. This wasn't the corporation squeezing you, it was you sharing what you knew with your colleagues. Smart move.

The project as a whole was never a skunk works. It was driven by business requirements and implemented in three phases. The first was establishing the platform, the second was about supporting team working and social capital and the third was about individuals.

To give a flavour of what's going on: the system supports 6000 web conferences a month, each one saving the company an estimated $214; several executives gave up five percent of their travel budget to the project; and, around 100,000 instant messaging sessions take place daily.

Of course, there's much more to the Wachovia implementation than this. You can watch Fields' Office 2.0 presentation online and you can download a slide deck (from an earlier conference)  that shows quite a bit of the system in action. You can even follow his personal progress on Twitter where he's, not surprisingly, petefields.

Office 2.0 unconference

Went to an unconference today. For those unfamiliar with the term, it's based on the assumption that the folks in the audience often know more than those on the platform. So why not invert the normal process and let the audience join in?

As you might expect, it wasn't an unqualified success because the usual mix of humanity was there. Shy people, knowledgeable people, egotistical people, idealists, evangelists and sheep. No names, no pack drill. But, given that the day started with a blank sheet, it ended up providing some useful and relevant insights to the attendees.

It cost next to nothing to attend ($50) but, of course, it did cost people's time. Given that the day included plenty of opportunity for networking and a drinks/nibbles party at the end, you'd have to be really hard-hearted to say it was a waste of time.

The event as a whole is called Office 2.0 and this is the third time it's run. Judging from peoples' interests at the unconference, 'Enterprise' was the highest ranked topic. "Thank goodness," thought I, because that's what I'd come for.

I learnt a bit, maybe a lot. One person was on the verge of buying a collaboration system when she was introduced to WordFrame. In fact, the vendor she was about to sign up with sent a review which happened, in passing, to mention this competitor. She made the necessary call and knew within a very short time that WordFrame far outstripped the alternative. And she knew this because she had prepared a massive specification of her requirements. And this is the point. These social software SaaS tools might appear to be low cost, but that's not a good reason to shirk on specifying what you need.

Another thing that came out of real experiences was that antipathy towards social tools is not a generational or an age thing. It is an attitudinal one. Again, this may seem obvious but, in all the yakking about millennials and generation Y, it's easy to lose sight of this fundamental truth.

When it comes to participation, the Jakob Nielsen rule applies. one percent of participants are heavy contributors, nine percent are intermittent and the remainder are lurkers. A lot of people try to crank up the contribution levels of the lurkers. But that's actually the last thing you want to do. Accept that people lurk. They will usually de-lurk when they have something of value to say.

Next week, I'll give a more complete debrief on the conference as a whole.

Putting email in its place

A very brave chap I know, called Luis Suarez, has dared to challenge his company's predilection for email. Email was used for everything. File sharing and editing, appointment bookings, conversations, seeking help, status reporting... Whatever the question, email was the answer. Everyone used it. It must be right.

Hmmm. Sometimes 'received wisdom' is absolutely not right. At least not for all circumstances. Have you tried group editing a Word document? It's fine in theory with the Track Changes and all. But it breaks down the moment more than two people are involved. And, even then, it breaks down unless responsibility is handed over with each exchange of the document.

This is why the wiki came about. It allows people to pitch in at their convenience and maintains a decent version history to boot. Word could still be used for final polishing but, for getting the content right, wikis take some beating. They also, it has to be said, take some getting used to for people with an email mentality.

We have become so used to the convenience of creating email - whack in a few cc's and a bcc just in case - we forget that it has a dark side. Unless you have very sophisticated filters, emails crave attention. They arrive, loaded with content which has to be scanned, at least.

Compare that with an instant message, a Twitter tweet or an RSS feed. They are all means of communicating. They're fairly unobtrusive, but they can lead to great value. They can be scanned quickly and only those that require attention be acted on. In a group setting, a chat group - such as those that can be set up in Skype - is ideal. First you can see if there's anyone around, then you might ask, "Hey, anyone know who's organising the Office 2.0 conference?" Someone would answer and all the others know they don't have to bother. Compare that with an email asking the same question. If there are nine in the group, that's potentially eight responses - and each of those would probably be cc'ed to the other seven.

Sure, email has its place, but it's a much smaller place than you'd imagine in group work. It's fine for one on one contact and for confidential exchanges, although not always. While writing this, I've heard from Luis via Skype and Twitter - little things - exchanges of information, planning a visit. Nothing much, not worth an email, but it helped us move two other discussions forward (one on debating behaviour, another on mind-mapping) at a minuscule time cost.

Of course, group collaboration isn't for everyone. It requires an openness, a transparency and a potential exposure that makes some exceedingly nervous. But group working, especially across disciplines and between insiders and outsiders (customer, suppliers) is becoming a vital part of business these days. The firewall isn't going to disappear, but it's certainly shimmering at the edges as insiders and outsiders exploit social media for mutual benefit.

I'm still troubled by the thought that I can't easily find stuff that I know is lying around somehere in all these different pools of information. But that's maybe a problem with the way my life is (dis)organised. And, anyway, I find that the change to my grey matter has so much more value than the actual stored words.

I have to take my hat off to Luis Suarez' achievements: during the past six months, he's dropped the number of emails per day from 30-45 per day to 22-30 per week. And he's achieved this within the confines of a large organisation. Okay, his job title is 'Knowledge Manager, Community Builder and Social Computing Evangelist' and he has a good reason for promoting these ideas. But he's not from some fluffy social computing startup. He works for IBM.