Teblog

Eggs and baskets

Being away from here has given me a chance to focus intensely on launching a new magazine without too many distractions. We now have five issues under our belt and I have reaquainted myself with the rhythms of conventional publishing. I know where the peaks and troughs of effort lie and I can get back to a more normal and less distorted life in the troughs.

Creating, editing and writing for Blue & Green Tomorrow has been a lot of fun and a lot of hard work. And it couldn't have happened without Simon, Lori and Dominic (publisher, sub-editor and designer respectively) and, of course, our marvellous contributors. Other people take care of 'webifying' the magazine at blueandgreentomorrow.com. You can register (free) which gives you an account tab and access to digital copies of the magazine. Otherwise much of the content is publicly available under the various themed tabs.

Even through the mayhem of the launch, I've continued to do the occasional course on how to handle the media, often with my long-time partner in crime, Martin Banks. We used to call ourselves 'Press Here' but, when we both deviated out into analysis work, we sold the domain and renamed ourselves greybeards. One look at our photos will tell you why. I also run the odd writing skills workshop for business people.

And, now, here I am blogging again. Given the nature of the magazine, I suspect that I'll be blogging more about sustainability (could a word possibly sound more boring?) than about IT. But it's hard to keep me away from software. Talking of which, I now have an HTC Desire smartphone running Android, and jolly pleased I am too. That could be another running theme.

We'll see. But, as you can see from the title, I think that a deliberate spread of activities, providing I can do all of them well, will makes for a more balanced and fulfilling life than having all my eggs in one basket.

So, the last post turned out not to be The Last Post after all, just a pause while I gathered my wits.

See you again soon.

David

 

Moving on. Again. To helping people write and communicate

It's no secret that I've been helping people for many years (since 1975, actually) to communicate more effectively, either in print or face to face. In the early days it was all connected with IT and management skills training and, since 1988, it has been focused primarily on engaging with the media. Since 2003, I have helped several organisations put together or polish their written materials.

Although it's very nice to appear in print or online with a byline from a recognised publisher, it's less and less a motivation as time goes by. It seems that, rather than being the primary producer of words, I'd prefer to help other people through training, mentoring, editing, ghosting or whatever.

I think that thirty plus years of writing columns, features, analysis, blogs and the odd news piece, is not a bad basis for someone who wants to advise and help others. At least it's taught me to 'copy taste', focus, structure and polish, at the very least.

Although this seems a sudden departure, it's been building gradually over the past few years. Not least as I've recognised that many bloggers are better writers and better informed than many journalists and, of course, the opposite applies as well. The point is that 'the media' is changing and I'm not interested in trying to take sides. I owe the publishing world a lot. A second career, no less. (My first 14 years comprised the usual programmer - analyst - project manager - IT manager roles, although I did tuck in a few years of training there.)

If you think I'm mad, please tell me quickly. Before it's too late. Otherwise, my public writing will be in blogs, Tweets and the very occasional piece if I'm approached and I find the subject matter irresistible.

The last piece I wrote was about Guy Kewney who died last week. Two other pieces are in the CIO and IWR pipelines and will be published in due course. Guy's death knocked me sideways, despite the fact that I expected it. We weren't particularly close but we had known each other for thirty one years, and we weren't that dissimilar in age. Perhaps the jolt of his death caused my thoughts to crystallise, I don't know. It does seem very possible though.

So, thanks again Guy, you gave me good advice when I was starting out in my public-facing writing career. It seems somehow fitting that you should be instrumental in its ending.

More as it unfolds.

The business value of collaboration software

Originally published in CIO Online Feb 2009

At Lotus/IBM's recent Lotusphere the words 'business value' were repeatedly uttered by keynote presenters, but none really had time to expand, beyond talking in terms of 'efficiency'. CIO online went in search of answers that could help our readers in their assessment of collaboration initiatives.

The first and most obvious thing relates to culture. Not every organisation actually welcomes collaboration. It really does result in a flattening of hierarchies, the breaching of the silo walls and the by-passing of those who add no value. If you've been in the game long enough to remember the advent of email, you'll remember the fears of those middle managers who suddenly found themselves 'disintermediated'. So nothing really new, except that the kind of collaboration that is becoming increasingly popular has the potential to tie anyone directly to more or less anyone, regardless of internal or external boundaries.

Fortunately for the CIO, some systems are more manageable than others and, with the organisation's blessing, an approved collaboration system provides a measure of control without inhibiting the participants' legitimate actions. The alternative, to let anyone use whatever public systems take their fancy, is a recipe for inefficiency at best and trouble at worst. One thing that won't work is an outright ban. People who need to reach out will use this stuff anyway.

Many business folk fail to see the commercial benefits. Especially if they are used to seeing their kids using social software to superpoke their friends or share party pix. They might associate such software with frivolity and are afraid that their staff will use it just to waste time. In fact, within a business environment where full names and profiles are used, all posts are technically traceable and such abuse is fairly unlikely.

As the name implies, the whole point of social software is to help people find each other quickly and in a fashion most suited to the task at hand, while respecting the availability wishes of the participants. It's a wheel-oiling process on a grand scale. But what are the bottom line benefits?

Enter stage left, Luis Suarez, who’s part of a team which provides guidance to a 600-strong volunteer social software evangelist community within IBM. This work is additional to their day jobs. While it's easy to explain and enthuse about the elements - profiles, communities, wikis, blogs, bookmarks, activities, instant messaging, and so on - it's quite another to remember to build the business case.

IBM reckons it saves £12.9M in improved search productivity and reduced travel per year. And this figure is probably growing. To get this in context, here are some usage statistics for IBM's social software activities from October last year: 515,000 profiles are accessed 6.4 million times a week; 1,800 online communities contain over a million messages and have 147,000 members; over 25,000 wikis are used by over 320,000 readers; 260,000 blog posts have been made and these have over 30,000 tags; 580,000 bookmarks have been stored by 20,000 users - these have over 1.4M tags; 50,000 activities (think of them as projects) have 425,000 entries and 80,000 users; and over four million instant messages are exchanged daily. That represents one heck of a lot of shared knowledge. IBM is something of a special case. Its sheer size pretty much guarantees that whatever resources staffers want, people or information, they'll be able to find it when they want it. But a company doesn't have to be that big to get similar advantages.

Suarez sat down with me to hammer through some of the main value-related benefits. Here are just six of them:

1) Find: people, places, information - quickly by using profiles, and other people's tags and bookmarks as accelerants.

2) Validate: people especially. What have they posted? What do others make of them? You could arrive at a shortlist for a project team much more quickly and at greatly reduced cost than before.

3) Direct dialogue: with customers (and suppliers), internal and external. This eliminates filtering and politics and leads to more rapid understanding. It could mean fixing things that have gone wrong or identifying new product and service opportunities.

4) Capture information: from people as they're working or reviewing online material. This could prove especially valuable if faced with staff churn or retirements.

5) Connections: spread internal innovation widely and rapidly - bad ideas don't get traction but good ones do.

6) Communities: increase staff morale and retention through a sense of belonging and recognition.

Every one of those has a business value. It may not be easy to calculate, and the effort may not be worth it. But it does require the organisation to have an open, collaborative and trusting culture. Without that, it can never work. But with it, social software can transform the way we collaborate and share information.

Knowledge Management: why not?

I will get back to 'proper' blogging soon. Honest. It's just been a bit mad round these parts as I've put my new life together. It's going well, I might add, but the blogging has been neglected. Another week or two should do the trick.

However, thanks to Computing, CIO and Information World Review, a few of my pieces have popped up in the last few days, all of them connected in some way to Knowledge Management. And, yes, I know that's a contradiction in terms. But put 'social' and KM together and magic starts to happen.

The three articles are:

Social tools take KM to a new level (Computing]

IT accumulates data but Web 2 shares knowledge (IWR)

Board level energy saving and environmental issues (CIO)

None of the titles is mine, of course. (They have sub-editors to dream these things up.)

The first was my response to a request to prepare a 'definitive guide to Knowledge Management'. The second was a column in which I postulate a kind of lifecycle of knowledge/information. And the third was created by plundering the business/CIO related threads in the recent IBM Eco-Efficiency Jam - another example of social/KM in action. It happily blended my two primary interests: human and environmental IT.

Happy reading. See you back here soon, I hope.