Teblog

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.

Values-based messaging tackles the green gulf

Abraham Maslow's 'Hierarchy of Needs' was one of the first models that helped me make sense of life and our individual journeys through it. That was in 1975. Little did I know that an even better understanding, from Dr Clare W Graves, had been published just the year before. In its new 'Cracking the Green Code' report, Ecoalign applied Dr Graves' research to what it calls 'the green gap' - the gulf that exists between stated beliefs and environmental actions. Fortunately, the theory is more useful than that, because it can be applied in any situation where mental resistance is high and desired behaviour is low.
All manner of people and institutions are banging the green drum in the hope that they'll induce mass behavioural change. But it's not working very well. "Al Gore", the Ecoalign report says, "did a terrific job of demonstrating the horrible hell that humans will create..." but goes on to say, "Unfortunately, he spent far less time creating an inspired, credible, vision for our collective future."
Somehow the green issue has to be turned around so that, according to the report, "it occurs to target audiences as an exciting opportunity to further their own pre-existing life goals and aspirations'. And this is where Dr Graves comes in. He spent 40 years researching, then mapping, the human psyche in a way that still makes sense even as our behaviours evolve. He identified eight levels of thinking that operate in the world today. At the moment, in North America, four of these levels predominate. They are: Absolutistic, Individualistic, Humanistic and Systemic. A fifth, Holistic, is currently emerging. By understanding each of these, you understand the majority of the developed world. The others are included in the Ecoalign report.
Here's an overview of the four mentioned:

Absolutistic (20% of US)
Life theme: Sacrifice self now to receive future reward
Core values: Discipline, authority and purpose
Goal: Find peace and meaning in this world by denying impulses and upholding moral laws
Perception-shaping metaphor: Life is a test
Key messaging tactic: Call to duty

Individualistic (30% of US)
Life theme: Express self for what self desires, but in a calculated fashion so as to avoid bringing down the wrath of important others
Core values: Accomplishment, power, profit
Goal: Achieve success and influence in this life by strategically manipulating desired outcomes
Perception-shaping metaphor: Life is a game. The world is a machine.
Key messaging tactic: Call to action

Humanistic (30% of US)
Life theme: Sacrifice self now in order to gain acceptance now
Core values: Equality, honesty, relatedness
Goal: To find happiness in this life, in this moment, by relating deeply to other humans
Perception-shaping metaphor: Humans are a family
Key messaging tactic: Call to imagine. Call to compassion.

Systemic (10-15% of US)
Life theme: Express self for what self desires and others need, but never at the expense of others, and in a manner that all life can continue to exist
Core values: Integrity, competence, sustainability
Goal: To restore vitality and balance to a world torn asunder
Perception-shaping metaphor: Life is a system
Key messaging tactic: Call to innovate. Call to service.

From the above, you can no doubt start to slot people you know, or know of, into the different categories. It's little wonder, then, that blanket exhortations don't get us very far. Whatever we're trying to push, whether it's green IT, social computing or electric cars, we need to be able to segment our audience effectively and appeal to the appropriate inner drivers.
The report goes on to explain how it tested the theories by mapping expected values of a group of individuals against actual values by showing them some utility industry video vignettes. While this is unlikely to be central to readers of this blog, it does serve to set the research into a real world context.
But a lot of the report is about the 'what' you need to do, rather than the 'how'. But then this is probably what Ecoalign and the report's author, John Marshall Roberts, are on this earth for: to help with that bit. This in no way diminishes the insights it gives to the ways in which the people around us might be thinking and to how we might adjust our approaches to better match their internal realities.

If you're interested, this blog post by Christopher C. Cowan and Natasha Todorovic throws more light on the works of Graves and Maslow

Align green and business strategy, or fail

Call me an idiot if you like, but I fell for one of the oldest tricks in the book this morning. A few weeks ago, a colleague forwarded what looked like an interesting invitation from Infor to watch some webinars. My response was to wonder to my colleague why Infor hadn't written to me directly since it knew me. But all this was forgotten as I finally got round to doing something about it.

Here are the opening few lines of the invite:

We invite you to learn more about Green Initiatives

Two thought provoking webinars, sponsored by CFO Europe and Infor, available to view now

CFO Europe and Infor recently sponsored two webinars addressing green issues: "Green Strategy and the CFO: At the Crossroads between Profitability and Sustainability" and "Environmental Performance Management: How CFOs Contribute to the Green Strategy".

I'd taken a briefing from one of the speakers in January and thought this was a chance to catch up. All was going swimmingly until I noticed a spelling mistake on one of the slides, the very mistake I'd pointed out in the January meeting. Then it dawned on me, the 'recent' webinar was no such thing. It was recorded last November.

Oh well. In for a penny, as they say...

If you're interested in nailing the business drivers for green initiatives and you're fairly new to the subject, you'll get some value out of watching the webinars. There's a little bit of subtle selling but, in the main, the speakers play with a straight bat. (I didn't watch the second, but I assume the quality is similar to the first.)

A key learning is that organisations which treat their green, or sustainability, strategy as somehow separate to their business strategy are probably setting themselves up to fail on both counts. The two need to be integrated for the best overall results. In fact, we're really talking about integrating corporate social responsibility (CSR) which should incorporate green strategies.

The CFO was chosen as the focus because they are the custodians of corporate information. They own the budget, they have influence in all departments, and so on. They are well placed to provide or withhold funding according to the likely impact on the balance sheet of any investments, green or otherwise.

When the audience (at the original webinar) was asked what practical impact green awareness had on their organisations, most identified 'process improvement' as the major impact. This suggests that existing processes were improved rather than 'rip and replace' major investments made. Very few - around three percent - identified 'cost cutting' as a benefit, a fact that astonished the speakers. They couldn't see how reducing energy use could fail to cut costs. One of the speakers suggested that the 'either/or' polling mechanism might have been the cause of the surprise.

When it comes to implementing an environmental strategy, the key is to link it to organisational objectives - financial returns or benefit to stakeholders, for example. Gross margin could link to energy use or market share to customer perception.

Failure is usually either the result of lack of funding or lack of communication. If the funding is tied to specific actions which result in future success then it will be, itself, sustainable. Effective communication to employees and stakeholders needs no expansion here.

The audience was asked to vote on barriers to success. Way out ahead of all others (at 63 percent) was 'other competing priorities', which simply reinforces the need for linking investments to organisational goals. One of the speakers warned about starting too many key initiatives. Twenty to thirty would be plenty. Definitely not hundreds - this is the sort of thing that results from attempting to implement every 'good idea', rather than filtering out all but the most impactful.

Legislation is coming, it's still a bit muddly, but this will change the business case because, although voluntary in the early stages, it will eventually impact the bottom line, for better or for worse. This is expected to bite within four years.

The one thing that always bothers me about these presentations is that the supply chain is largely ignored when it comes to the question of equipment replacement. One of the speakers mentioned first year write downs of certain conforming equipment purchases: a fine incentive to invest in green equipment. But no-one ever seems to address the embedded environmental footprint of the new equipment and that of disposal of the old. It seems to me that, by using the business as the boundary of environmental calculations, totally wrong decisions can be made in the context of the planet as a whole.

Or am I missing something?

Salesforce/Twitter: genuine help or fake sincerity?

Interesting that Marc Benioff (boss of Salesforce.com) should choose to announce the addition of Twitter to its Service Cloud on Monday. Why? Because it won't be available until the summer. Part of me suspects that the reason was simply because Twitter is a very hot topic today and it might be tepid by June. The official reason, I think, is that the deal with Twitter had just been inked.

The news might have passed me by had we (Freeform Dynamics) not received an official announcement from the company. The covering letter said, "...enabling companies to search, monitor and join conversations taking place on Twitter..." Without being a Salesforce.com expert, I was worried that a whole bunch of sales types or, worse, machines would start trying to insert themselves into Twitter conversations.

In fact, the pitch is somewhat more genuine than that. It suggests that organisations can monitor Twitter (a free addition to the $995/month 'Service Cloud' which already provides access to a number of online services such as Google Search and FaceBook) for mentions and, when they relate to problems, do something about them. That something will end up as either a comment to the Tweeter with a link to a solution to their problem or, if lots of people have the same problem, a general announcement-type Tweet. (Or maybe a bunch of direct messages - I don't know if the Service Cloud can do that. Nothing, apart from the tedium, to stop the help desk people doing it though.)

All sounds pretty reasonable, right? Back there in Salesforce.com land, the client organisation will have a whacking great database of customers, prospects, queries and answers. Each can be clothed instantly with relevant Tweet threads. I quite often appeal for help online. If someone were to help me, and I said "hooray, it worked!" or similar, then this thread would be collected for future reference by support staff. A bit cheeky perhaps, but quite understandable. It expands the company's own knowledge base at little extra cost.

Getting a bit more sinister, it would be possible for a sales person with access to the Service Cloud to hoover up personal information about a prospect before making a call. ("Sorry to hear about your recent illness. How are you feeling now?") These things aren't impossible today, but because it's built right into the Salesforce system, it is actually quite powerful. A tremendous aid to fake sincerity.

And this is the point, isn't it? If the service is used for the genuine benefit of the customer, then people will welcome it. If, however, it's used to exploit the Tweeting public, then the backlash will be swift and unstoppable.

But who will the backlash be aimed at? Twitter for allowing access? The Salesforce customer for abusing the system? Or Salesforce itself for providing the Service Cloud?"

Any thoughts on that, Twitter?

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.

CA sets out its sustainability stall

Imagine my joy when a 3.1MB pdf from CA landed on my digital desk. When I realised the filename was sustainability-report.pdf,  I got interested. As a fairly avid supporter of sustainability (I won't bore you just now, but you might want to look here and here) I thought, "Great, CA is another vendor which is taking this environmental stuff seriously." Either that, or I had to brace myself for a big bucket of greenwash.

At first glance, I was disappointed. It starts off as a conventional report about the company and doesn't give environmental sustainability a proper look-in until page 50. I thought this odd, but then remembered that sustainability is not just about the environment. If you can't sustain your business, then you can't do much for the people in it, its customers, the community or the wider world. Or, as the report summarises, "sustainability incorporates environmental responsibility, economic prosperity and social accountability."

The details of the report matter little here (you can read it yourself). Suffice it to say that CA is looking at its own business and it has taken some actions, reported some of its behaviour to the Carbon Disclosure Project and others and is planning further actions. It is also applying what it learns to the development of products and services for its customers which will start to become available in the spring.

This is the first time that CA has 'come clean' on sustainability issues. Unlike many other companies that have been banging the environmental drum for a while now, it was either watching and waiting or it couldn't see the point of publicising its fifty or so existing environmental initiatives. Then, just over a year ago, it decided to create an overarching sustainability strategy for the company world-wide. The report is the first major public evidence of the journey the company has taken, although the subject did get a couple of airings at CA World in November.

(At this point, a small confession. As a journalist, I was conditioned to be primarily interested in new and different stuff. In this previous life, I would have been tempted to ignore CA for being so late to the sustainability party. Now, in my life as an analyst, I realise that everyone turns up to any particular party at a different time. This doesn't make them less welcome. Lesson learned.)

So, back to CA. Perhaps because it arrived at the need for a cohesive sustainability strategy later than others, it has been able to take a more holistic approach than most. Steve Boston, VP of sustainability strategy, explained to Freeform Dynamics that his primary consideration was to "protect and nurture all resources needed to stay in business." This covers: environment - air, water, power for the data centre, and so on; social - the people needed to build, sell and buy; and economic - top line, bottom line and governance. Only after taking care of the business can global citizenship be addressed.

We talked about Al Gore - big tick for raising awareness, big cross for the nebulousness of the climate change challenge, which makes CEOs and CIOs feel relatively powerless. A tick for carbon trading and a cross for carbon taxes. Steve Boston has spent a year closely engaged in the subject and has emerged with some clear ideas of what he thinks will work in the business world and what will not.

CA starts its thinking in its traditional area, the data centre, but don't expect it to stop there. The goal will be to create automated management systems that can react in real time to current conditions. In September, it introduced a solution internally called CA Green Governance, "to help prioritize our sustainability initiatives, keep projects on track and monitor risk, compliance, cost, timelines and measurement." It's early days for the company, but its intention is to refine the product in the light of the company's own experiences then make it a customer offering. You'll find details on page 60 of the report.

While the company's individual green initiatives detailed in the report are interesting in themselves, the more important aspect of the CA story is that it is focusing on sustainability in the round. While the drivers for its own actions and its planned products and services are strictly commercial, the benefits are intended to accrue to both the business and to the wider environment.

Greening the data centre

In the process of digging around the 'greening' of data centres (no, don't laugh), I ran into the boss of Migration Solutions, one Alex Rabbetts. By a weird coincidence, his Surrey office is more or less exactly on the spot where my computer department was in the early seventies, when I first started taking 'sustainability' seriously.

In those days, I was inspired by E F Schumacher's "Small is Beautiful" book. I was further motivated by the country's oil supply shortages, not to mention the fact that my company made stuff from hydrocarbons. And then, to put the tin hat on it, Ted Heath forced us into a three-day working week.

It made me dream of a better world in which we consumed less and thought more about our environmental impact. I embarked on a journey which, due to a number of side-tracks, took 29 years to bring me to a meaningful destination, environment-wise: involvement in a huge sustainability project, primarily with the Science Museum.

During the past fifteen months, I've been applying this experience to the IT world through my work with analyst firm, Freeform Dynamics. We knew from the start that IT was both a contributor to environmental damage and an enabler of savings elsewhere. We also knew from our research that companies are not turned on by doing green things for their own sake. They are primarily interested in money, appearances and regulation.

Alex Rabbetts not only came to the same conclusions himself, but he added an environmental assessment service to his data centre building, consultancy and operations company. If you have a data centre of less than ten thousand square feet, his firm will conduct a fixed price assessment for £2,500, an amount he would "normally" expect a client to recover in three or four weeks. The assessment looks at 120 different factors which have an environmental impact.

He knows that no data centre can be green, but most of them can be greener.

Unlike hardware vendors, whose natural instinct is to get you to replace kit, Migration Solutions is independent of vested interests (apart from its own) and can usually find plenty of improvements without touching the hardware. The company looks at the whole environment, including things like noise, light and waste, as well as power. It triages its findings into things which can be done for nothing, things which require a bit of expenditure and things which can wait until the next refurb'.

He takes into account regulations, both current and upcoming and warns that companies with over, say, 50 racks* could be pushed into the arms of the government's upcoming Carbon Reduction Commitment legislation. Initially, this will apply to any company on half-hour metering that uses more than 6,000MWh of electricity per annum.

DEFRA's website currently claims that companies spending more than £1M on electricity could find themselves subject to this regulation. Both Rabetts and I remember the figure being £500,000 just a few weeks ago. And a quick Google of '500,000 crc site:www.defra.gov.uk' brings up bunch of pages with the old number on it.

It very much looks as if the government has taken the pétard of fluctuating energy prices and hoisted itself with it. Either that or it realised that, at £500,000, its catchment would overwhelm the regulatory system.

But, whether you're liable or not, it might be worth taking a look at Migration Solutions' service. It is pragmatically focused on environmental principles with the by-products of potentially saving money, looking good and being prepared for regulations when they head your way.

*My calculations went something like this:

Assume a rack is 5KWh
Double it to 10KWh for cooling and other infrastructure energy costs
Now multiply by 24 then by 365 to give an annual 87.6MWh
Approximately 68.5 racks would put you in reach of the CRC regulations

I said 50 because your organisation is bound to have non-IT energy bills too.

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?

Sidestep formal structures for effective change

Many companies like to think they understand all about business processes and change management. They spend fortunes on consultancy, design, structures, processes, training, roll out and management, then wonder why they don't get the results they expected. So they have another go...

Well, maybe things aren't quite that bad, but I bet you can think of plenty of examples of 'change initiatives' that just don't get the buy-in of the grass-roots people who are supposed to implement them. Part of the problem is that they quite often try to appeal to reason. They use PowerPoints with lots of bullet points to try to hook the intellect and forget the emotional dimension. Maybe they think there's no room for emotion in their business.

But why do people go to work generally? Especially so-called 'white collar' workers. It's for the satisfaction of doing a job well and for recognition and this doesn't just mean in the pay packet. Not a good motivator at the best of times.

Part of the problem is that we've become accustomed to treating business as a mechanistic process. And a predictable one at that. Do this, force it through these process pipes, and consistent results will pop out the other end. In truth, many of the most important business processes are chaotic. Think of sales and marketing, for example. Untidy real life gets in the way. Reality has little to do with the org chart and formal processes and much more to do with endless workarounds and informal communications.

Yes, of course some processes or workflows do what they're supposed to. Regulations have to be followed and suchlike. But these are a bit like the unconscious processes of the human body. We can walk down the street while we pump blood, breathe and digest our food. But our attention is on the interesting conversation with the person walking with us.

So it is in business, the interesting stuff and the stuff that is likely to do the business most good in the future is probably the stuff that lies outside the fundamental formal systems of the organisation.

Leandro Herrero has written a most interesting book on how organisations can bring about change by acknowledging that all is not what it seems in the body corporate. He alights on the fact that, alongside the 'organigramme', lives a communication network in which all employees and business partners participate to a greater or lesser degree. Some people are highly connected, others only slightly. These are the strong ties and weak ties beloved of social network analysts. His book is called Viral Change.

It investigates how these social networks can be put to work to bring about transformational change in double quick time - months rather than years - and without any of the complexity of traditional change programmes. Apart from the acknowledgement and exploitation of social networks, the book is heavy on behavioural psychology. In fact, for anyone interested, it contains a 16-page PhD psychology course, which is then summarised in a couple of pages at the end of the chapter.

As someone who's spent several years deep in the social network world and a further thirty plus years as a behavioural psychology advocate, the book resonated rather well with me. But the point that Herrero makes is that behaviour can be observed. It is unequivocal. Bring about behavioural change and the culture will change as a consequence. And you don't need more than five defined behaviour changes to bring about massive transformation. The trick is, of course, in finding and defining those which are most appropriate.

Diving off slightly to one side for a second, why did the iPod catch on the way it did? Apart from it being a neat piece of kit, don't you think the white headphones and leads had something to do with it? People were curious, they enquired, they copied, it became a fashion. But Steve Jobs didn't directed this take up to the nth degree. Apple seeded opinion formers and influencers and let the network do the rest. So why should influence spread any differently in organisations?

Why not seed the movers and shakers - the people who are well connected and, therefore almost certainly respected too - with what needs to be achieved and let them start infecting their closest connections. Then as they and their behaviour change, others will notice and, if they respect or admire the folks who are adopting new ways, they will copy too. Especially if adoption is periodically recognised or reinforced, to use the vernacular. Before you know it, you have an epidemic on your hands and change has permeated. It becomes the norm.

Of course, this is a gross simplification of a 400-page book. But the book does strip away a lot of nonsense associated with traditional expensive and long-winded change management programmes. And, yes, the author is undoubtedly pushing the services of his company, The Chalfont Project. You won't agree with many of the things he suggests, but then you're probably not expected to. If he infects you with the fundamental principles, it's up to you to figure out how to make it work in your world.

The book is a useful catalyst to exploiting the power of social networking and behavioural psychology to accelerate needed change in organisations.

If you're happy to provide your details you can download a free eight page overview of the approach from Herrero's website.

Even if this piece has irritated you, I think it's worth a look. You never know what you might be missing.