The Business Of Collaboration 3 comments

Some Background

The last few years can be described as the age of social business and collaboration. The demands and expectations of today’s knowledge workers have been shaped by the plethora of social networks and social media tools. Communicating and sharing information has never been easier.  Staying connected with news and status updates from friends, family, or at work is real-time and no longer constrained to an office PC.  This has coincided with the business realisation that a greater degree of interaction with customers, whether consumers or businesses, makes for a higher degree of customer retention.

Ironically, in many cases, workplace policy and technology constraints have meant that staff resorts to using the technology they have brought with them in their pockets or handbags in order to remain connected with their networks.  The ubiquity of mobile devices and ease of use of many web services means that almost anyone can originate or contribute to digital content, and information is increasingly consumed on the move. Recent analysis from Nielson shows that we spend 110 billion minutes on social networks and blog sites per month, or 22 per cent of all time is spent on-line. And the expectation now is that the tools that people use at work should be as easy and fun to use as the ones they use in their personal life.

But is this tsunami of data and information making us all better informed? How do we overcome information overload and ensure the relevance and utility of the information we consume? Can we provide environments that tap into the collective intelligence of groups or knowledge domains that match our specific needs?

And so the scene was set for the “Business of Collaboration” event hosted by PFI Knowledge Solutions (PFIKS) on 8^th November 2011. PFIKS are one of the leading vendors of  “Enterprise Social Software” systems with their open sources, open standards Intelligus platform.

What is Enterprise Social Software?

Enterprise Social Software (ESS) is the next generation of platforms that are built to manage high volumes of collaborative engagement and conversations among distributed teams, project groups or communities of practice. They build on the conceptual ideas of popular social networking platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn, but with a host of enterprise-ready features to make them secure, private, collaborative and business integration-friendly.

As many organisations have discovered, implementing a technology solution by itself rarely results in more effective collaboration and knowledge sharing.  Sustainable implementation of ESS requires:

1. Understanding of how and why successful knowledge-sharing communities and networks perform.

2. A system that implicitly acknowledges the constraints (time, process) and motivations (reciprocity, reward) that individuals experience within such networks.

3. A blended approach where technology seamlessly supports the behavioural characteristics that will encourage users to self-organize, collaborate and co-create.

But what about the investment in ICT systems that organisations have made over the past decade?

The good news is that it’s not a matter of ripping out legacy systems, but extending what you have, adding new capabilities and integrating new applications and services.

Delegates at the event included representatives from private and public sectors, large organisations and SME’s, all with a common purpose: to get a better understanding of this “social business ecosystem” and how the blend of technology, people and processes can be effectively combined to support more fluid knowledge flows, drive collaboration initiatives and open up opportunities for innovation.

One of the delegates, David Wilcox, Social Reporter working with the Big Lottery Fund posted this excellent blog about the event.

All of the slide presentations from the event are available from the Intelligus website, including my own. However, I wanted to elaborate on some of the points I made in my  presentation. Hopefully you can follow these points with reference to the embedded slide presentation below, or from Slideshare.

The Presentation

Slides 1-4

What is the question that connects the images?

Collaboration pre-supposes that we have someone to collaborate with – in this example the person on the other side of the seesaw. The seesaw will only work with the collaboration of the people involved, in this instance, the child at each end of the seesaw.

Knowledge sharing makes no assumptions about collaboration; it’s possible to share knowledge with people we don’t know, e.g. by posting something to an on-line forum, or writing a blog about something we have seen or read or experienced. We may not know who is going to read our missive, or what value they may place on it. The posting might lead to some form of collaboration with the readers/consumers, but that is not necessarily the primary purpose for knowledge sharing.

Most of us are happy to collaborate and share ideas with the people we know (i.e. the definition of “collaboration”).

Slides 5-7

But what about the huge untapped resources and expertise that we don’t know about? We may get to hear about people in this “unknown world” via recommendations or word of mouth, but how do we connect and engage with them? How can we know what we don’t know? How do we find the answers to our questions in this “unknown world”?

If nothing else, this is where the power of social networks comes to the fore. We have the tools and technology to be able to “crowd-source” our questions. Social media tools such as Twitter or Quora make it easy to post queries to a largely anonymous network of people in the hope that someone will have the answer or the appropriate knowledge and experience we are seeking. By engaging and connecting with the people that respond we can grow our personal network, often referred to as our “Social Graph”.

Better still if the system or network we have joined can suggest contacts for us, based on what it knows about us, either explicitly (our digital identity and personal profile), or implicitly (our digital footprint, i.e. our ‘likes’, the people we have connected with and the on-line places we have visited).

Slides 8 – 10 

Social networks have proliferated over the past 4 or 5 years. Some have been more successful than others. Remember that even a blog can be a form of social network, and we now have over 200 billion of these (yes, more than the population of the planet!)

New users can be intimidated by large/mature social networks which have lots of users and content, and where engagement and conversations protocols have been established.

Slides 12-13

But are we beginning to see the onset of “social network fatigue”? Each new social network adds to the internet background noise. Search engines have never really delivered on the promise of relevant information, and many of us resort to serendipitous discovery of key information and conversations – it’s a bit ad hoc, where knowledge discovery is more by accident than design.

Slide 14

So, the signal to noise ratio is pretty poor at the moment and the ever-increasing volume of information hitting the Internet is likely to make it even worse.

Slides 15-16

It’s a strange paradox that now we have the capability of easily creating new websites and blogs without the need for any programing skills, what we really want now is one place to view and interact with all of this information. A recent (September 2011) audit of LinkedIn illustrates the problem:

• 26 Alumni groups
• 32 Corporate groups
• 20 Conference groups
• 132 Networking groups
• 16 Nonprofit groups
• 196 Professional groups

A total of 422 groups. How do you know which group(s) to join to be sure of getting the best answer to your questions? Maybe ‘all of them’ is the answer!

(Information sourced from blogs by Nick Milton and Ian Wooler)

Slide 18

If we want relevant information to come to us, we have to

1. tell the system something about ourselves (our digital identity and profile),
2. enable access to the sources of information that might be useful and
3. spend some time identifying and validating the sources we like and trust. We can’t leave everything to technology – what you get out is proportional to what you put in!

This is clearly where the likes of Facebook (groups, Timeline) and Google+ (Circles, Sparks) are heading, but neither has yet achieved a ‘simple’ way of doing it.

Slides 19-21

Most of us will be more concerned with what the information is and whether we can trust it rather than where it is. So, do we have to worry about the “where” if we can develop some form of interoperability between systems and networks? RSS/Atom feeds and tagging are only part of the answer. We need a system that can extract meaning from the data (e.g. entity extraction) that will enable ontologies to be created and terms to be categorised for faceted search and discovery.

Slides 22-24

Entity abstraction, aggregation and categorisation.  If our profile is up to date, the Enterprise Social Software system should be able to locate, aggregate and categorise the information that we would find relevant and useful by matching terms against our profile data (who we are, where we work, what we’re interested in, etc.). Precision can be further improved by monitoring our ‘digital footprint’, i.e. the knowledge/information assets that we have ‘liked’, recommended or downloaded.  If we layer on top of this the aggregated behaviour patterns of all the users, we can leverage the opportunities provided by “collective intelligence” to identify “good’ content.

Products/vendors such as Amazon do this all of the time, using explicit data (the user bought an item) and implicit (users who bought this items also looked at these items). Tracking of a user’s progress through a website is not rocket science and is a fundamental part of any web analytics software. Inject a bit of entity extraction and you start to establish the foundations of a system that can begin to ‘intelligently’ connect information with people and people with people.

Slides 25-26

‘Liking’, ‘+1’ or ‘tweeting’ not only enables sharing of information, it can be fed into ‘trending engines’ that will aggregate and categorise the crowd-sourced data to show hot topics and trends. Again, the technology is well established, but little use is made of it in many Enterprise 2.0 systems. How nice it would be if, for example, your job entailed commissioning adult social care services and you could see the trending conversations on adult social care on your Enterprise 2.0 dashboard. This feature is built into the Intelligus platform using a combination of the open source application Carrot2 and the proprietary PFIKS matching engine.

Slide 27

All of the prior discussion refers to an environment (social media, social networks) that are already in place, and for technologies, systems and applications that are currently being delivered in Intelligus and some of the other leading Enterprise Social Software systems. But what of the future? Where is all of this taking us?

Slides 29-32

I will conclude with a few words about the growing importance of ‘Apps’. With apologies to those who don’t know who Peter Kaye is and his oft-repeated reference to Garlic Bread being the future! Maybe do a quick search on YouTube and all will be revealed!

Slide 33

As usual, Dilbert is pretty much attuned to what is happening in the business world. I would argue that most organisations haven’t yet grasped the full impact of the App market, and may view this as being the exclusive domain of the on-line gamers. In fact, (IMHO) it is shaping up to be one of the most disruptive technologies to appear since the start of the social media wave.

Slide 34

The trends reinforce the view that apps are becoming ubiquitous in how we work and play. Note that all of these apps are developed for mobile devices.

Slides 35-40

As I have noted on the slide, the key attributes of an Enterprise App Store are:

• Empowers the user for self-service
• Easy to use conduit of software, services and data
• Model widely understood by developers and consumers of software
• Recognition that one size doesn’t fit all (e.g. the lobotomised corporate PC)
• Life-cycles for apps potentially short: discarded when no longer useful/relevant
• Enterprise App Stores will provide a trusted source of business-ready apps that can be delivered to a rapidly changing work environment.
• The end device is less important than the application. The mantra is now “develop for mobile, but consider the PC”, and not the other way around.

Finally, and in summary, the key ‘take-aways’ from this presentation:

1. More people suffering “Social Network Fatigue” – desire for one place to do business,
2. Enterprise Social Software (ESS) solutions must integrate with legacy systems and business processes.
3. ESS must add value – more fluid knowledge flows, decision support etc.
4. Mashups and Enterprise App Stores will become increasingly important for business agility
5. Develop for mobile, think PC, not other way around!

Of course these are just my opinions. I’m happy to receive critical comment and corrections to any incorrect assumptions or poorly constructed arguments I may have made!

 

Communities of Practice: a strategy for more effective collaboration 2 comments

Acting as a public administrator, it was my privilege to arrange and facilitate a meeting this morning between a delegation from the Government of Singapore and some of the ‘expert’ Community of Practice Facilitators from the local government Community of Practice platform. My thanks to Etienne Wenger for making the original connections with the Singapore Government, and to Adrian Barker (Policy & Performance CoP – 3913 members), Neil Rimmer (Productivity and Efficiency Exchange CoP – 2513 members) and Michael Norton (Facilitator’s CoP – 528 members) for their input and presentations.

The delegation was from the Public Service of the 21^st Century Office (PS21 Office) and was led by the Government of Singapore’s Permanent Secretary, Ms  Lim Soo Hoon. The purpose of the visit was to share knowledge about building sustainable learning and sharing networks in the public sector, and we used the learning experience gained over the past 5 years in establishing the LGID Communities of Practice platform as the largest and most successful professional network in the UK, with over 96,000 users and more than 1,500 CoPs.

During the course of what turned out to be a highly interactive session, I was reminded of so many useful lessons as to what makes a successful CoP, in terms of user engagement, establishing and sustaining a culture of sharing and trust, and building a knowledge ecology that encourages cross-organisation, cross-agency and cross-regional collaboration. Though I’ve been involved (and in all humility – I started it all off!) with the local government CoP strategy since 2005, there is no better learning experience that hearing from practitioners who have been at the sharp end in building and nurturing their communities, and having a real understanding of the skills and effort involved in facilitating a CoP.  They know what works and what doesn’t, but if there was one common denominator, it was that successful CoPs invariably have active and engaged facilitators (sometime also referred to as community managers or community moderators).

I’m not at liberty to post all of the presentations used at meeting (except my own – see below), I thought it might be useful to summarise all of the key lessons for establishing and sustaining successful CoPs, as follows:

Facilitation – what is it?

• Facilitator’s engage and connect community members by encouraging participation, facilitating and seeding discussions, and by keeping events and community activities engaging and vibrant.
• Guiding a group to use its knowledge, skills and potential to achieve its goals.
• Helping by making the processes easier. It’s about guiding rather than directing.
• Looking at the process rather than context – how you do something rather than what you do.
• Making it easier for the group to get to their agreed destination.
• Striking a balance between ‘the group’ and ‘the task’.

Factors influencing success:

• Forums, blogs, events, library.  Wiki less so.
• Good quality, active facilitation: making it useful; concise, informed, informative; and giving community members  ‘room to breathe.’
• Day to day content; monthly update summarising key content + alerts; one-offs (e.g. on-line conferences)
• Size – critical mass.  Confidence that someone will respond.
• Face to face element
• Honesty and trust (who else is listening in?)
• Keep on topic (urgent, immediate, wide interest, range)
• Openness, honesty, trust (who else is listening in)
• Technology – ease of use, facilities, integrated elements (e.g. wiki draws on discussions)
• An art.  Non-linear: results don’t automatically match your efforts.  A few small things can make a big difference.
• Presentation at regional and local events
• Promotion through other online channels (website pages and bulletins)
• Links with social media channels, e.g. having a Twitter account
• Organised regular ‘Hot’ and Warmseat’ events to stimulate interest
• Use of regular polls to assess member opinions

Lesson Learnt:

• You need trained and dedicated community facilitation
• On-line events take at least as much organisational resource as traditional – but save time, money and the planet!
• Need to constantly engage members with interesting and new content
• Membership rises whenever we promote events – it keeps their interest fresh
• Use social media channels for promotion for the new on-line generation
• Lots of work needed to engage older, traditional generation.
• We are social beings who thrive from human interaction; technology is just an enabler.
• Don’t be over-prescriptive; give the community a range of collaborative tools and let them decide which ones they want to use and how to use them.
• Don’t assume everyone understands how to use social media tools.
• Identify and look after your (power) contributors.
• Identify and look after your facilitators – they are quite often the difference between successful and unsuccessful communities.
• Condition your managers for failure – not every CoP is going to be successful.
• Most senior managers still don’t get it!
• Command and control will hamper the development of a community.

So, once again – my grateful thanks to all of the contributors to this morning’s meeting, both the presenters and the members of the Singapore delegation.  I wish the PS21 Office every success in establishing their own collaboration and knowledge sharing networks, and can assure them that there is plenty of help, advice and support available from the growing global CoP environments.




Building and Nurturing On-Line Communities – Batteries Not Included 11 comments

Much has been written about best practice for developing and nurturing on-line communities , such as Communities of Practice (CoP), and the accepted wisdom is that technology by itself -  no matter how good – will NOT deliver vibrant and successful communities. ‘Build it and they won’t come’ should be the mantra, as Google Wave so amply demonstrated (and I know this was not an on-line community in its purest sense before I get flamed!).

I’ve previously tried to illustrate this using  the analogy of baking a cake, where the cake’s ingredients e.g. sugar, butter, flour, eggs,  milk are the component parts of an on-line community. To bake a really good cake you need all of these ingredients – missing out any one of them can result in something which either looks or tastes nothing like a cake.

Similarly missing out one of the ingredients in an on-line community will lead to potential failure of the community. Clearly some ingredients will be key – e.g. technology is going to be pretty important if it’s an on-line community! Members/users are important because they ARE the community. But let’s not forget the other ingredients, such as the community facilitator (also variously known as the community manager, steward or moderator) the business sponsor, the subject matter experts, the mentors, the librarians etc. Some of these roles may be combined, but  the functions they perform are distinct.   For now, I want concentrate on the role and function of the community facilitator, for I would argue that this role is the difference between the success and failure of an on-line community (and especially a CoP) – and I have the empirical evidence to prove it!

For any prior readers of this blog you will know I had (and still have) a key role in the development of the local government on-line community platform. Currently over 65,000 registered users and 1,300 CoPs.  Using various metrics available on the platform, I can clearly see the correlation between a successful community and the capability of the facilitator. If this role is so important to the health of the community, what skills and attributes are needed to be a successful facilitator? I’m still not entirely sure, though I do know it’s not a case of just providing some training – though this does help.  It’s more about personality; enthusiasm; willingness to share; being sensitive to the community environment; and energy….lots and lots of energy. Not the sort of things you can learn or teach using a pedagogical approach. I recall co-hosting a community facilitator’s story-telling session using the excellent Anecdote story-telling  guidelines. We got ten or so of the LG Improvement and Development (previously IDeA) exemplar community facilitators together to share their experience of what worked so that we could perhaps identify some key lessons that could be shared with all the other community facilitators. One recurrent theme was how hard they worked at making the community successful.  There was nothing really unique or special that they were doing, other than putting energy and enthusiasm into their role. They believed in the goals for their community and worked at helping the community achieve them.

So, coming back to my original theme – what makes a successful on-line community? The community facilitator is the answer, and though it’s clear we need some useful technology to support an on-line environment, that alone will not deliver success.  If you will excuse me for switching metaphors, an on-line community (CoP) without a good facilitator is like have having a battery-driven toy without the batteries – and hence the title of this blog. This concept is supported  by the accompanying slides, developed for a recent IBM webinar hosted and arranged by my good friend and colleague Luis Suarez (@elsua)   – and available for download from Slideshare.

To conclude – a brief story about a recent response to a proposal I received from a large government body who wanted a cost effective solution to improving knowledge sharing for their dispersed staff. There was  a limited budget, and I identified a fairly low-cost collaborative technology solution that was well within the available budget. However, I also included a dependency on having a community facilitator/manager to ensure the success of this nascent community. Unfortunately the cost of the community facilitator/manager was more than twice the cost of the technology, and consequently the solution was starting to look expensive and unlikely to be accepted and implemented by the client.  Yes, I could have just quoted the cost of the technology and then left them to get on with it, but then again, I’m not a technology vendor and I don’t believe in perpetuating the myth that technology delivers successful on-line communities. It would have been like leaving them with a battery-driven product but not telling them that the batteries were not included!

I hope the slides are useful for anyone involved in bulding and sustaining on-line communities – and if you happen to be a community facilitator, you have my utmost respect!

EDO International Congress 2010 No comments yet

I had the privilege if being invited to present at the EDO 2010 International Congress in Barcelona at the Centre for Legal Studies and Specialized Training on 12, 13, 14 May 2010. The conference theme was “New training strategies for oganisations” and I did a session on ‘Cultivating Knowledge Through Communities of Practice”.  The slides I used are available for download from Slideshare and embedded in this post.

My sincere thanks to Jesús Martinez Marin and the organiser for the exceptional hospitality I received.

The following is taken from the EDO website and has been translated from Spanish to English.

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More than 350 experts and specialists in the subject mostly from Spain and America have actively participated in the five international conferences, the ten symposia and four tables of communications, analyzing and discussing the more than 75 selected contributions. The general conclusions:

1. The current society considers the knowledge and training of workers as strategic elements of organizations. Thus, intellectual capital has become one of the main resources that are available to institutions to achieve their ends.
2. The organization is an association of persons, governed by a set of rules, to be able to create, develop and disseminate new knowledge to increase its innovative capacity and competitive. Therefore, knowledge management should focus its attention on the possibility that members of the organization share the greatest number of sources of information and collaborate in the creation of new knowledge.
3. Knowledge management promotes organizations create intelligent, able to transform information into knowledge through collective learning processes. Included in this connection to distinguish between “managing” and “stacking” the knowledge of the organization between the various technological supports.
4. Organizations need to understand and manage the existing knowledge or which may be created from an impulsive reflective practice of co-construction of knowledge. The co-construction of knowledge involves not only a dynamic work that is scheduled and help to move from the informal knowledge to formal knowledge, but also requires experience in which you want to work.
5. The organizations have expressed new forms of living on the virtual network, which becomes an essential tool for the exchange of information, knowledge and experiences. The virtual communities of practice are considered in this connection, a good practice that encourages learning and promotes the integration of informal learning, in line with a change of training model.
6. Collaborative work is successful when it occurs among peers, there is a mutual commitment, the organization is flexible and e-moderator exercises its role effectively. It’s about the content and learning processes that take place in virtual communities of practice, being the Information Technology and Communication (ICT) are just a tool that helps make communication more effective.
7. Organizational learning theories agree on the existence of certain internal and external factors that facilitate or hinder learning. Such factors include, among others, collaborative culture, leadership, collaborative and / or the existence of a flexible structure. Change does not preclude the assumption of error, nor problem-solving and competent incompetence.
8. The self has a high attitude component. Thus, self-learning experiences and networking are built among all participating members with the community and in the context of uncertainty. Is stressed in this connection the words of M. Benedetti: “When we thought we had all the answers, they changed the questions.”
9. The importance of identifying informal learning has increased in recent years. In fact, there are already systems and methodologies, European and Spanish level, certifying skills acquired on the job. It is envisaged, therefore, other ways to access traditional knowledge related to the formal processes established.
10. The creation and management of knowledge in the educational system implies a paradigm shift which includes the participation and experimentation of new scenarios by inducing agents of change. In this regard, there is talk of optimal conditions for their development as transformational leadership and sparse, teamwork, collaborative culture and flexible structure, if and when they occur simultaneously and seamlessly.
11. It stresses the need to create models in the education system, combining knowledge management and quality management, address the objectives of the education system and teacher not only in itself.
12. Managing knowledge is synonymous with a continuous cyclical process of identification, modification, use and evaluation of that knowledge. The EFQM model or similar can help this by emphasizing its usefulness as a tool for self-evaluation. Barcelona, June 2010 contributions and specific conclusions can be analyzed in the book of Acts of Congress to which reference is: Gairín, J. (Ed.) (2010): New training strategies for the organizations. Madrid: Wolters Kluwer Education. à Review available in: http://edo.uab.es/PDF/FichasActividades/Formacion/Pub_CIEDO.pdf

Conclusions: http://edo.uab.cat/JornadasEDO2010/

Video




Discovering the value of Social Networks and Communities of Practice 4 comments

There has been much written about measuring the value of online communities such as Social Networks or Communities of Practice.  However, most pundits tend to think of measuring value from a purely financial perspective, i.e. the Return on Investment (ROI).  Clearly this is an important factor, but it’s not the only factor that should be considered. Surprisingly few organisations consider the value that is being created by having better informed and more knowledgeable staff, or the potential value of getting closer to customers and local communities. These latter factors are quite difficult to measure in terms of ROI, and will normally take more than one business cycle (e.g. a financial year) before any meaningful financial measures can be made. Unfortunately – and especially in today’s financial climate – organisations plan around 1 or 2 year business years, whereas online communities will not usually be time-limited, and very rarely be driven by finance and budgets. Allowing for the relatively small cost of bandwidth and technology, conversations are – for the most part – deemed to be free.

I was pleased to see that Matt Rhodes over at Freshnetworks did refer to non-financial ROI, though I would have liked to have seen more emphasis on the value that is generated for the members of these online communities, rather than the usual social media impact measures (numbers of page hits, numbers of conversations etc.) – important as these are, and adequately illustrated in the accompanying presentation.

I have taken a slightly different approach to the issue of how the value of online communities is measured, giving more emphasis to the discovery of value rather than the dispassionate assembly of a series of metrics – financial or otherwise. I should also add that the perspective is on public sector communities since this is where I’ve been primarily engaged over the past few years. The main points are covered in a presentation I gave to the Public Health Information Network Conference earlier this year and reproduced below:

1. We need to distinguish between cost and value.

I used the humble nutmeg to illustrate this point. Weight for weight more valuable than gold in 17th century Europe. The spice was held to have powerful medicinal properties. It rocketed in price when physicians in Elizabethan London claimed that their nutmeg pomanders were the only certain cure for the plague. So, cost was very high, but the value? Well, despite the assertions of the medical experts of the day, it certainly didn’t cure the plague!

The point is reinforced by the following quotations:

I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things.
Benjamin Franklin 1706-1790.

A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.

Oscar Wilde 1854 – 1900.

2.  We are more likely to find and create value from the communities we choose for ourselves than the communities we are compelled to join.

I have argued that one of the key characteristics of a Community of Practice is the fact that the members are self-selected, i.e. they are there because they want to be there and not because they have to be there. They may select to become members because they share the same interests, passions and goals as the other members. A successful CoP will create value for the members – either collectively in terms of working towards a common goal or objective, or personally, e.g. through self-development or sharing knowledge.

3. We are re-discovering networks and communities and through them, re-learning how to have conversations.

It’s sad fact that 20^th century working practices and pressures of modern life have led to a sense of personal isolation. Mass production, prescriptive and repetitive tasks and limited social opportunities in the workplace have created a workforce conditioned to think and act as a corporate entity, limiting individual aspirations and creative thought.  The opportunities for sharing information and knowledge have been gradually eroded over the past 50 years; social clubs have closed; people don’t have the time (or money) to regularly socialise after work; we are increasingly driven by task-oriented emails.

What is sometimes forgotten is that professional communities, where good and notable practice is shared amongst fellow artisans, are still flourishing today in the form of Worshipful Companies (over 800 in London alone), with most having existed for many hundreds of years. Communities of Practice are not new; they’ve just discovered they can exist in a virtual world. The key issue for many people though, is learning how to have on-line conversations.  The following points from one of the slides are worth re-iterating:

• We don’t know what we don’t know
• People don’t learn from content – they learn from other people.
• We don’t know the value of knowledge until it is shared
• We need to find where the conversations are happening….and join in!

And…

Dialogue is NOT:

• Discussion, deliberation, negotiation
• Committee, team, task or working group
• Majority wins, minority dominance, groupthink

Dialogue IS:

• Free-flowing exchange of ideas among equals
• All ideas are solicited and are considered
• Best ideas rise to the top

4. ROI doesn’t just mean ‘Return on Investment’

I’ve taken the liberty of using something I once heard Euan Semple say: “Keep the I small and the R will look after itself”. I think this is a good mantra because anyone worth their salt in the Social Media/Social Web world knows that implementing a social media strategy doesn’t have to cost a fortune. The days of multi-million pound corporate websites is fast diminishing, and anyone with this amount of money to spend is going to be quite rightly questioned on ROI – and they better make sure they have the answers.

I’ve given some alternative definitions for ROI, such as:

• Return on Influence
• Return on Interaction
• Return on Impact

These are the things which should be measured for value, and add a different dimension to the traditional financial measures.

5. Recognise that value to the organisation is different from value to the individual.

There is an over-emphasis on measuring value of online communities from the organisational perspective. I’ve given a (financial) example in the slides, using cost savings of online conferences as an example.  However, it is important to remember that there is also a value to the individual in being a member of an online community, and this aspect often goes unrecognised (and unmeasured). The value or benefit to a community member is quite difficult to measure (the member may not be able to articulate or recognise what knowledge they have gained from the community) and any outcomes may not be easily aligned with corporate goals (e.g. job satisfaction). It is nevertheless important to consider this dimension in any overall value measurement. Qualitative metrics can provide some answers, but it’s also useful to examine quantitative data to gain a better understanding of the community itself, e.g.:

• Number of community members
• Number of contributions
• Number of contributors
• Number of inactive users

Having a Social Network Analysis (SNA) application is even better, since this can reveal who the key ‘nodes’ are in the community chatter. It’s a useful discipline to consider what would happen to the online community if these community members decided to leave the community. Dependency on one or two ‘power’ contributors should be recognised as a risk.

The presentation concludes with a number of lessons learnt from the IDeA CoP platform , which has now been active (and by all measures, successful) for over 3 years. It’s always useful to have a distilled list of “do’s” and “don’ts”, herewith reproduced:

Do…

• ..identify and look after your facilitators – they are quite often the difference between successful and unsuccessful communities
• ..let users drive their own experimentation and use of tools.
• ..target and support areas that have a clear desire and need.
• ..build trust and relationships face to face where possible.
• ..condition your managers for failure – not every CoP is going to be successful.
• ..use online conferences and ‘Hot Seats’ to build membership growth and encourage conversations.

Don’t…

• ..think you can force people to collaborate
• ..assume everyone understands how to use  Web2.0/social media tools.
• ..assume everyone knows how to contribute.
• ..worry about the ‘lurkers’.
• ..let command, control or hierarchy hamper or kill your community
• ..set unrealistic targets

I hope this has been helpful to anyone involved with social networks or communities of practice, and particularly those who need to show that their online communities are delivering value. Just remember there is more to ROI than finance!




100 Ways To Wreck Organisational Learning No comments yet

I’ve always thought that one of the best ways of getting a message across is to use reverse psychology, i.e. by accentuating the negatives you can highlight patterns of  irrational behaviour. This  make us realise that as rational human beings we would never do these things and we then start to think more deeply about the opposite of what we’re being told – which we’re more likely to remember.

Nick Milton over at Knoco Stories has refined this process into a fine art, with 100 ways on how to wreck organisational learning. It’s a great list of behavioural patterns, and I wonder how many people as they read through this list will admit to themselves that they are doing exactly these things, and how irrational this behaviour is if they believe they are contributing to a learning and sharing culture. I think this is a really powerful message, and have reproduced Nick’s full list below:

If you follow any of the advice in the list below, you will hinder lesson learning.

If you follow all of the advice, you need never learn a lesson again!

1. Learn only from mistakes. Why learn from success? You know you’ll never repeat it! And if you learn only from mistakes, you will associate “Lesson learning” with failure, with error, and with awkward conversations with management, which will be enough to tarnish the concept forever.

2. Don’t schedule lesson capture as part of the work cycle, just react to events in an ad hoc manner. That way you can miss many of the key lessons from projects that delivered as expected. After all, nobody minds if progress reporting or budget management is ad hoc, so why would they mind about lesson learning?

3. If you schedule the lessons capture late enough in a project, the project team will have disbanded and you won’t have to do it at all.

4. If you do have to schedule lesson capture, then don’t use an established process for this, and don’t give people any guidance on how to do it. It’s much more fun if they have to make it up for themselves.

5. For significant projects involving a large number of people, allow no more than half an hour, once a year, for lessons capture. Any more than this would just mean getting into detail.

6. If the five questions of the after action review are OK for learning from a short task, then surely they are OK for learning from a complex multi-million dollar ten-year project as well. Why complicate your learning?

7. If you are holding a lessons-capture meeting for a project, and there is a similar project is starting up soon, then you need to ensure that nobody from the similar project is invited to the meeting. They would get too excited, and so spoil the atmosphere of calm disinterested detachment.

8. Ideally, allow people to identify lessons themselves, rather than discussing them through dialogue or at a meeting. That way you will be sure to stay at the superficial level, and never capture the “deep lessons”.

9. This will definitely be the case if you give them no guidance or template; just a blank sheet of paper to fill in.

10. Don’t involve the whole team in lessons capture. In fact, why involve any of the team? The project manager or team leader can identify the lessons, and that way you can be sure to get a one sided view of things.

11. Avoid the use of a facilitator for lessons capture meetings. They would only end up challenging the team, and asking awkward questions, which would make it very difficult to avoid getting at the truth

12. At the lessons capture meeting, allow random conversation. It’s much more fun to let conversation wander rather than homing in on specific learning points.

13. If you have to interject with questions, ask closed questions in order to get minimal answers.

14. Whatever you do, don’t ask any questions about what should be done in the future. Stick with talking about the past, it’s much safer.

15. Combine your lesson capture processes with personal performance assessment, and assignment of praise and blame. This will really cause people to clam up.

16. Don’t base your lessons capture on solid performance data. Why analyse facts, when it’s much more fun to collect opinions?

17. Don’t relate your learning review to the original objectives and deliverables of the project. It’s much more fun to reinvent history.

18. Root cause analysis is just too difficult and too awkward. Stick with the superficial high level things, and you will get your meeting over with much more quickly.

19. Don’t assign any roles and responsibilities for lessons identification and capture. It’s much better if everybody thinks it somebody else’s job.

20. If you’re collecting lessons from an individual, don’t brief them in advance. Surprise them, it’s much more fun.

21. Also don’t do any preparation yourself, to familiarise yourself with the interviewee; you’ll find out about them during the interview so why bother to brief yourself beforehand.

22. Don’t record the interview. I’m sure you can write fast enough to document everything.

23. And if you have to record, don’t have a backup recorder, because those things never fail and batteries never go flat.

24. One sheet of A4 paper should be big enough to write notes a 2 hour interview.

25. Let the interviewee ramble as much as he/she likes; you can catch up on some sleep.

26. Don’t follow up on the interview by requesting additional material; they may have mentioned some crucial documents but nobody else will want to read them.

27. Evaluations and assessments should never be systematic or objective, but constructed from ad hoc opinion. I mean, who’s going to take any notice of them anyway?

28. Once you’ve collected the evaluation data, feel free to make value judgments, but avoid learning points at all costs. If the team learns enough from your evaluation to be successful, they may never need evaluations in future and you will be out of a job.

29. Don’t separate out unique single lessons; combine all your lessons from one project into a single document. That will make it really hard for people to find them in future.

30. Document your lessons at the back of individual project reports. That way people can’t find them without reading the reports from every single project.

31. And if you can hide them on the library shelf, even better.

32. Make your lessons as generic as possible. Aim For motherhood statements. Everybody loves these – they sound so wise, but teach you so little.

33. Use fuzzy phrases like “do it better” or “do it earlier” rather than actually giving specific advice. The reader of the lesson will be thoroughly confused.

34. Don’t give lessons any consistent structure, it makes them too easy to follow.

35. Lessons should be supplied devoid of context, making it an exciting intellectual exercise for the reader to see whether it’s applicable to him or her.

36. Unless, of course, it is a very simple lesson that can be explained in a diagram a photograph, or a few lines of text. In this case, you may want to write a 50-page article.

37. In fact the best way to record lessons is as bullet point phrases. Aim for three words or less. A lesson such as “Improved contracting process” is so terse and economical, it’s almost like a haiku or a Zen koan. Something to meditate on.

38. Alternatively, instead of lessons, why not just write a little history of what happened with no moral, no conclusion, and no learning points? Leave it up to the reader to try to guess what they should do as a result

39. Even better, just tell a pointless story with no message. People will enjoy listening, and go away none the wiser.

40. When writing your lessons, it’s best not to have a particular reader in mind. It may be an engineering lesson, but perhaps an Archbishop or a ballet dancer may want to read it one day, so avoid using engineering language, and avoid explaining it in ways that an engineer can follow.

41. In fact, it’s best to make your lessons as difficult to follow as possible. If people spent all their time learning from your lessons, you would deprive them of the excitement of having to make the mistakes all over again.

42. Don’t write down the originator of the lesson, the date of the event, or the value of the lesson. That would just make it far too easy for people to know which lessons were important and recent, and who to go to for more information.

43. If a picture tells 1000 words, then why not just write 1000 words rather than attaching a picture to your lesson?

44. Never under any circumstances set up a system of quality assurance for identified lessons; this would put the “garbage in garbage out” principle at grave risk.

45. Never assign actions to lessons, it spoils the chance for the organisation to learn the lessons all over again. And again. And again. Actions just lead to change, change leads to improvement, and improvements threaten our comfortable mediocrity.

46. If there are any actions, they should only ever be of one sort; “circulate this lesson for information”. Certainly don’t require anybody to change anything.

47. You can avoid having to change things if you don’t make anybody accountable for the actions.

48. You can postpone change indefinitely if the actions have no closure date.

49. Any actions should be assigned by the most junior person present, especially if they are difficult or contentious actions. This will make them much easier to ignore, and much harder for people to treat them seriously.

50. You can avoid much of the risk of learning if your organization has no process owners for the major processes. If nobody owns any of the processes, then nobody can change them, and they will stay as inefficient as they have always been.

51. If there are process owners, then keep their job description as vague as possible and make sure it includes nothing about updating or improving the processes, as this would give them far too much work to do.

52. Process owners should have no expertise in the topic, should not be members of any community of practice, and should have no technical authority.

53. As a process matures, it’s important to keep the same process owner. It makes sense for completely mature processes to be owned by research and development, seeing as they probably invented them in the first place.

54. If you can disengage the process owner from the lessons learning cycle, then with any luck they will never be notified of the lessons in the first place. Certainly avoid any workflow which might push lessons (and work) their way.

55. See if you can avoid a validation step for lessons. I am sure every suggested change is equally valid, and if you spend enough time on trivia, the important lessons may be lost.

56. Avoid Management of Change procedures as well. Live dangerously – change your processes on a whim, and hang the consequence.

57. All process documents should be given equal weight. See if people can work out for themselves whether they are a mandatory company standard, or somebody’s bright idea.

58. Much fun can be had in choosing how to document a process or best practice. Simple principles like giving the reader all of the detail all at once, with no logical structure, with no context or high level summary, in dense text, with no pictures, audio or video, can create masterpieces of incomprehensibility.

59. Then store your process guides and best practices somewhere that the user will not find them. Give them misleading names, and hide them in an obscure branch of the folder structure on a remote file server. After all, everybody likes a game of hide and seek, especially when they are urgently searching for useful lessons.

60. Don’t date your documents – let people try and guess which is the most recent version.

61. Don’t tell anybody when processes have been updated, this would spoil the surprise.

62. If you have a blog at work, this is a great way of telling people about your holiday, and sharing the latest jokes. It would be far too boring to use it for sharing lessons and process updates.

63. The same is true for newsletters. They should only be used for staff announcements, and pictures from the Christmas party.

64. The training department have got their own budgets and their own staff – let them work out what has changed and what hasn’t. It’s not your job to make sure that training reflects the most recent lessons.

65. It’s best to avoid any review of lessons at the start of a piece of work. Just jump straight in and make it up as you go along. You will need the time later on, for coping with all the repeat mistakes that you will inevitably make.

66. A company lessons database is a complete waste of money. Why spend 10 minutes searching a database at your desk, when you could spend a leisurely 2 hours in the library (and still not find the lessons that you know are there somewhere).

67. If you are forced to invest in a database, then certainly don’t spend any time developing a taxonomy. Just file the lessons any way you want. Filing them by the last letter of the project managers surname is quite an interesting approach.

68. The lessons input form for the database should be just one single text box, to allow the maximum of free form creativity, and to eliminate any opportunities for tiresome sorting and searching.

69. In fact, why not eliminate the functionalities for sorting and searching?

70. And don’t introduce any push functionality, as it would embarrass the process owner to be notified of new lessons.

71. A knowledge library is a very bad idea, making it far too easy for people to find things. In my day we had to search through piles of reports to find everything, why should kids nowadays have it any easier? So no portals please.

72. And no search either, thank you very much.

73. As for wikis, I can see no reason why anybody should be allowed to comment on documents, processes or best practices. You lot out there should be applying the processes, not commenting on them, so just get on with your work.

74. Having completely sabotaged the formal lesson learning system, we really don’t want people to run any risk of identifying lessons informally. Therefore all attempts at setting of communities of practice should be avoided.

75. Any communities to do exist should not be provided with any way of finding each other, of asking questions, of storing knowledge, or of meeting or discussing anything. Give them the bare minimum of tools.

76. The community leader role should be given to the most autocratic technical expert. He or she can be relied upon to rule the community with an iron fist.

77. Choose communities to cover topics which nobody identifies with. Choose topics which people do rarely, and don’t like doing. An Income Tax Return community of practice, for example, will be inactive for most of the year and then spend a
couple of weeks complaining and grumbling together.

78. It’s best if your communities are very small. Big communities are too useful and contain too much knowledge. 20 people should be your upper limit.

79. If you can disempower your community, so much the better. There is no risk in them sharing lessons with each other, if they are not empowered to use the lessons they find.

80. Try and avoid giving your project staff the opportunity to learn from others at the start of their project. Processes such as peer assist give a project an unfair advantage, and should be discouraged.

81. If, by some mistake, a peer assist is scheduled, then make sure its objectives are unclear, that its focus is on criticism and critique, that it is attended only by managers who are senior enough to be scary, and that you have no facilitator.

82. Similarly avoid giving your project staff the opportunity to pass lessons on to subsequent projects. Processes such as baton passing and knowledge handover are also unfair, giving the subsequent projects a much greater chance of succeeding. Why should they be given an advantage? Why shouldn’t they start from a position of ignorance just like the rest of us had to? Failure is good for you.

83. You can clamp down on ad hoc learning by careful design of your surroundings. Give people individual offices, it gives them a great excuse not to interact.

84. Remove any communal areas. People can drink coffee at their desks, with door securely shut.

85. Remove any yellow pages, telephone directories, or any other temptation for people to call others and ask for their lessons.

86. Clampdown on any online conversation or social software. People are not paid to talk to each other, they are paid to sit there and work, so make sure they have no distractions.

87. There is a lot you can do to discourage lesson learning with the help of senior management. They can start by making their expectations for lesson learning very unclear. If nobody is clear what they should be doing, then most of the time they will do nothing.

88. You can set the expectation for lesson-learning too high, or too low. For example, ask a busy project to spend half an hour every day discussing and identifying lessons. Alternatively, require your most major projects to identify lessons only at the end of the project, no matter how many years they take.

89. Even if a senior management have set expectations, they can undermine these by not taking them seriously. Make sure they allow projects to continue without having done required learning, or allow projects to close without having identified their lessons.

90. Ask them to set priorities that over-rule lesson learning. People will soon realise a Retrospect is not valued, if it is consistently postponed to make room for another slide presentation to the chairman’s sister.

91. If senior managers are required to take part in any lesson identification meeting or process, ask them to decline.

92. There should be no clear chains of accountability for learning, neither within the business delivery organisation, nor within the supporting functions. This would just make it too easy for people to know what to do.

93. Never describe your learning system in simple terms. Don’t call it “learning lessons”, call it “quasi-experiential pedagogy”. Call it “knowledge gardening”. Call it “Enterprise 3.5”. Confuse people! They love a good buzzword!

94. If there is a central support team for lesson learning, disband it immediately. If nobody supports learning, they will gradually fade away over time.

95. As well as disbanding the support team, cancel any training for lesson identification and learning. We can’t have people who are actually skilled in the technologies and processes, just in case they manage to sneak a lesson through the system.

96. In fact, don’t have any training or awareness or roll-out for your learning approach. People will finder it harder to get value if they don’t understand the complete learning cycle.

97. Don’t monitor or measure learning activities. If it’s not measured, it can’t be managed, and if people know they are not monitored, they will take short cuts, or avoid learning entirely.

98. Even if you do monitor and measure, then for heaven’s sake don’t link this to any performance management incentives, or to any rewards for recognition. If people know they can avoid lesson-learning activity with no penalty, they spend their time doing other things they are actually rewarded for.

99. Learning metrics need to be kept secret. If senior management saw them, the people who aren’t complying with the learning expectations might get embarrassed.

100. If you want to reward people, then reward them for putting lessons into the lessons database. Pay them for each lesson. That way they will know that lesson learning is not part of normal paid work, but has to be incentivised separately. Also you will swamp the database with poor quality lessons, and when the reward is eventually removed, lessons identification will stop completely.

So, how well did you score on this list!

Knowledge Hub – part 1 7 comments

This is the first opportunity I’ve had to write anything about the Knowledge Hub (Khub) Advisory Group meeting that took place last week (17^th September) in London, though a number of my colleagues have been pretty active in the blogosphere and twitterverse on the topic. In particular I found Ingrid Khoeler’s post pretty much spot on and wondered if indeed if I had anything more to say on the topic. Well, clearly yes, because I’ve started this post!

Maybe I should start by giving some background to this project. I think the story starts in summer 2005 when I was contracted by the Improvement & Development Agency (IDeA) to develop a three year knowledge management strategy. Though it’s only 4 years ago, much has changed on the KM landscape since then, not least of which is the development of Web 2.0 tools and techniques to support knowledge sharing. However, I distinctly recall that this was deemed a high risk strategy when I raised the concept of developing a Web 2.0 platform that would support communities of practice (CoPs) working in local government, and switching emphasis from publishing (i.e. broadcasting) information on cases studies and best practice to connecting people who have the same goals or same issues, such that they can collectively solve problems and share learning with other practitioners working in the sector. I should also add that the term “Web 2.0″ was not even invented when we started this programme; it is accredited to Tim O’Reilly who used the term for the first time later that year.

Winding the clock forward 4 years it is easy to forget how incredibly difficult it was to get this project off the ground and in particular getting to a point where there were sufficient number of users and communities to ensure the strategy was self-sustaining. With over 35,000 users and more than 900 CoPs, I think we’ve achieved this, and the CoP platform has gone on to win a number of industry awards for encouraging team working and knowledge sharing in local government. However it will come as no surprise to KM professionals working in this space to know that the technology was the easiest bit; establishing trusted communities and developing new ways of working is where the real effort was required.

I was almost caught by surprise when I was asked “what next?”when the anniversary of the 3-year strategy came around in 2008. I struggled with this question for some time, and spent an uncomfortable winter of 2008/9 coming up with a strategy for the next 3 years. However, I did eventually present a strategy paper to the IDeA KM Steering Group in February 2009 which described the idea of a Knowledge Hub. The concept is largely based on personal experience as a KM practitioner in trying to keep up to date with new ideas and good practice. This entailed belonging to many different professional networks, both on-line and off-line, active use of social bookmarking and development of many different types of lenses and filters, such as RSS feed aggregators and personalised dashboards – in order to make some sense of the growing mass of information that was available. In essence, picking out the conversations that add value from the background noise.

Reflecting on the tools and techniques I used, I realised that though the “Web 2.0″ landscape has made it far easier to connect with people and share knowledge, it has also created its own complexities. I don’t think a day goes by where I don’t get invited to join another social network. Standards such as Open Social do help in creating the links between the community platforms that adopt this standard, but we’re still a long way from having one ubiquitous standard that all vendors are happy to support, and maybe this is utopia.

In developing the next 3 years strategy it was also helpful to look at what had worked and what hadn’t with the IDeA CoP platform. Interestingly (and this is where I often wish I’d taken a degree in anthropology or sociology) most communities were being set up as private spaces, and there was little evidence of inter-community knowledge sharing. It was as if we’d created a platform which encouraged silos of knowledge to develop. And, with the exception of the IDeA-sponsored CoPs, it was very difficult to solicit information on how successful these closed and private CoPs were in achieving their goals. This has been partly addressed by having a “Community Hub”, an enhancement to the CoP platform that went live in October 2008 which encourages CoP members to publish what they are doing in a common community space visible to all users of the platform.

So, we come to the “Knowledge Hub”. What is it? How will it overcome silo’d knowledge repositories? How will it help users to connect and share knowledge more effectively? How will it help to improve local government services? Quite simply, it will support more effective decision making by making it far easier for users to filter, share and access the information that is most relevant to them, using personal profile data and activity streams to improve relevance. We’re all familiar with commercial websites such as Amazon which give us information about ‘customers who purchased this also purchased….’, and reviews from customers on how good/bad a product is, so why not reuse and adapt these techniques for professional networking platforms? Again, Amazon were doing this long before the term Web 2.0 was bandied around, yet they are one of the best exponents of Web2.0 technology to engage with and better understand their customers. So, we’re not really doing anything new with the Knowledge Hub, other than applying these tools and techniques to a professional network of local government staff.

The Khub will support social computing and adopt open standards that enable connections to be made between personal and professional networks.

It will be a vantage point and visualisation tool, providing “heat maps” showing emerging trends and ideas. It will have a serendipity engine which enables new topics and ‘hot’ conversations to bubble up to the top.

Content sources will include Twitter feeds, e.g. from local councils, Blogs, RSS feeds from council websites and other public, private and third sector organisations involved in public services. It will have access to publicly available datasets and enable mashups between different data sources to be created for value-added services. For example, overlaying data on knife crime with socio-demographic data, displayed against Google Maps to indicate hot spots or where local authority initiatives have had most impact.

It will be an open platform where APIs can be used for developing value-added services. Widgets and plug-ins can be developed for users to easily customise and personalise their interface to the system, e.g. using iGoogle,  Netvibes or iPhones.

It will support benchmarking and data visualisation tools that enable councils to compare and contrast services in order to identify lines of inquiry that may lead to greater efficiency savings (see post by Ingrid on the Efficiency Exchange).

It’s also a big, bold and ambitious project with many stakeholders, and particularly the department for Communities and Local Government (CLG) who are funding the project.

It is therefore extremely important that we have an empowered and “expert” Advisory Group, drawn from a cohort of freelance and independent social innovators who are currently delivering collaborative solutions to the public sector, together with stakeholders from central government and social media early adopters working in councils and local communities. The Group will help shape the project over the coming months, and help in identifying the training and support that may be needed in local authorities in order to ensure its success.

As I mentioned earlier, this is a 3-year strategy, but at least now the journey is now underway!

Check out the slides below to get a better perspective of what this all about or contact me if you need any more information. See also Dave Briggs post on The Partnerships and Places Library prototype – which is one of the discreet projects that will feed into the development of the Knowledge Hub. There’s a lot happening out there!

If you want to follow the conversations around this topic, then sign-in or join the FriendFeed ‘room’.




Communities of Practice: Conversations to Collaboration 10 comments

I’ve was pleased to be invited to do a keynote presentation at the NHS eSpace Coordinators conference earlier this month.  I wanted to emphasise the importance of the Coordinator’s role in building trust within a Community of Practice (CoP), and as a catalyst for turning conversations into active collaboration.  I should note that I’m more familiar the term ‘Community Facilitator’, for this role, and have used the term ‘facilitator’ and ‘coordinator’ to mean the same thing, i.e. the person or people who support, manage and guide the CoP members in achieving their goals. Perhaps a better description for this role is ‘community cultivators’,  since it is they who provide the conditions for the CoP to grow and flourish.

I can’t over-emphasise enough the importance of this role and the people who perform it. The difference between a vibrant and successful CoP and one that meanders aimlessly with little or no contributions is down to the facilitator (or coordinator, moderator, cultivator). Members of the CoP have been sufficiently motivated to join the CoP; it is up to the facilitator to inspire the members to connect, collaborate and co-create.  I tip my hat to all of those who do this successfully, and quite often without due recognition or reward. Something I hope will change as more and more organisations are turning to this way of working and have realised that technology alone does not provide a successful learning and sharing environment.

I’d be interested to hear from anyone who is willing to share examples of how active facilitation (e.g. guided learning) has helped their CoP, and/or what makes a successful Facilitator.

The slides are available for download from Slideshare, and reproduced below:




Web 2.0 in Local Government 1 comment

How and why should local authorities and Government be planning to exploit the collaborative features of Web 2.0? This article was originally published in IT Adviser late last year.

Web 2 in Local Government


Using Web 2.0 for connecting and collaborating across local government No comments yet

Ingrid Koehler over at the Policy and Performance blog writes about how Web 2.0 is being used to support improvement initiatives in the local government sector, and in particular the positioning of (virtual) communities of practice for engaging with staff across the sector. This point is also emphasised by John Hayes, Director of Services at the IDeA.

A tangible example of the power of Web 2.0 for networking, collaboration and consultation will be evident in the forthcoming Customer Insight Online Conference, scheduled to run from 10th to 20th June 2008. What is an online conference? To quote:

An online conference, just like a ‘real life’ conference, is about getting people together to discuss a common interest and learn from each other. There are speakers, participants, panelists and discussions. It just takes place in an online platform and over a longer period of time, allowing people to dip in and out.

It’s greener – saving all that travel and paper, less expensive and many people find it more convenient and easier to engage with. The proceedings of this conference will be distilled into a learning report for practitioners and policy makers.

There will be a wealth of useful learning and an opportunity to chat with a range of colleagues through the medium of online discussion, video, photos and more. You do not have to be a technical wizard to join in. The conference platform is easy to use and throughout the two week period, we will send you regular round-ups to support your engagement and help you direct your own participation for maximum benefit.

If this is of interest to you, you’ll need to sign up for the event using the online registration form on the Communities of Practice website.