Having run a number of social media workshops for UK Local Government over the past few months, I will be focusing specifically on how social media and social networking (Web 2.0) can support the development of personal learning – ‘Knowledge Management’ at the forthcoming TFPL training event on 24th March 2010 – open to both public and private sector organisations.

There has been considerable interest in this training so I’m anticipating that there may be a few more courses shceduled in the coming year.

Details of the training below:

introduction:

There is a growing recognition but not yet a consensus about integrating Web 2.0 technologies into an organisation’s workflows and business processes. There is a desire to develop more effective knowledge sharing and a culture of collaboration amongst staff, but little recognition of what this means in terms of organisational change. Successful organisations need to be agile and able to adapt to an increasingly volatile environment. They are more likely to achieve this where conversations can flow and opportunities exist for collaboration and co-creation. In essence, we all need to be collaboration ’superstars’. The problem is, collaboration is a skill and set of practices that rarely gets taught. It’s something we may learn on the job in a hit or miss fashion. Some people are natural at it. Others struggle to understand it.

This one day course provides a practical and detailed introduction to Web 2.0 tools and techniques that will support more effective collaboration and knowledge sharing, and will give greater confidence to staff that may be on the periphery of the socio-technology changes that are becoming increasingly prevalent in both their professional and private lives.

outcomes:

• An understanding of social networks and social media and the overlap between personal and professional identities.
• An understanding of the barriers to knowledge sharing and collaboration and how these can be overcome.
• Creation of a personalised social computing toolkit to support on-going learning and development in collaborative tools and techniques.

programme:

• Social networks, privacy, digital orientations and the increasing overlap between personal and business networking.
• Risk and rewards in on-line engagement and collaboration.
• What does effective collaboration look like and what skills are needed to be an effective collaborator?
• Micro-blogging (e.g. Twitter) and its role as a business tool.
• Social Media Game – a fun game which introduces delegates to the various social media tools, how they can be used to solve real business problems, and the pros and cons of the deployment of these tools.
• The power of social bookmarking for knowledge sharing and collaboration.
• A practical introduction to Web 2.0 collaboration tools, including Google Apps, Blogs and Wikis.
• A practical introduction to social networks and social media, including Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr and Slideshare.
• Tools and techniques for developing and fostering successful communities of practice.
• Building a personalised collaboration toolkit.

Please contact me or TFPL if you are interested in attending a future course, or having a tailored training event for your organisation.

No to IE6

I’ve often wondered why there isn’t more of a groundswell of discontent amongst users who have no other choice but to use Internet Explorer version 6 (IE6) as their interface to the web world. I’m thinking primarily of public sector workers who probably had this installed on their PCs several years ago along with the perfunctory use of Sharepoint.  I have to assume that in most cases they don’t know what they are missing with Social Web enabled browsers such as Firefox or Chrome.  Maybe there are some (a minority?) who do use alternative or more up to date browsers on their home PCs and laptops who do feel the frustration of stepping back in time whenever they enter their workplace, but I don’t think they have yet organised themselves into a sufficiently powerful lobbying group that will create the conditions for change.

Thanks to the efforts of Tom Watson MP, at least the issue has been given some focus in central government, subsequent to a series of parliamentary questions he raised requesting information about plans to upgrade from IE6. The underlying reason for the requests was that IE6 is not only less secure than later versions of the browser, but it limits or prevents staff making effective use of social media. Tom quite rightly thought that this was a potential staff productivity issue.  It’s slightly paradoxical that the one department who should be most worried about security is the only department that has no plans for upgrading.

MOD sticks with insecure browser: According to parliamentary written answers received by Labour MP Tom Watson, the majority of departments still require staff to use IE6. Most have plans to upgrade to the more secure IE7, and some to IE8, but the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has no plans to change.

But where is the voice of Local Government?  Who is lobbying for change in local councils? It’s all very quiet over at the LGA, “the voice of the local government sector” to quote from their website.  Maybe they don’t see this as cost-saving measure, which is perhaps understandable if you take the short term (some may argue ‘myopic’) view.  I’m assuming here that reluctance to upgrade from IE6 is likely to be because of cost; most internal websites (e.g. intranets) within Gov/Local Gov will have been tailored to work with the IE6 browser, and since IE6 did not follow W3C standards (Microsoft deciding at the time that they were above following any standard other than their own), any other browser type (Firefox, Opera, Safari etc.) would not render the content correctly. They (Microsoft) have since seen the error of their ways and have fallen into line with globally agreed standards when they released IE7 and IE8. The problem will be making changes to all of the legacy websites to work correctly with a new browser version.

From this perspective yes, there is a cost, but what appears to have been forgotten is that any new web services or enhancements to existing websites have to be made backwards compatible to IE6. I can speak with a bit of authority here because I’ve been involved with the development of the IDEA Communities of Practice platform over the past 5 years. I know for a fact that for every change and enhancement to the website, around 15-20% of the cost goes into making it work with IE6. I estimate this to have cost almost £100k over the 5 years. If we took these same figures, i.e. 15-20% of website development costs going into ensuring compatibility with IE6, multiplied by the 400 or so local authority websites (and not even counting the fire services, the police and other agency websites) we end up with a pretty significant cost.  I’m not quite sure how this squares with the LGA’s priority for 2009/100 of “Efficiency and value for money”.

But don’t take my word for it. Perhaps this article from Craig Grannell sums the issue up more succinctly than I can, abstract below:

Craig Grannell asks designers and developers if it’s finally time to take IE6 behind the shed and shoot it.

Many argue that IE6 hinders development, due to the number of hacks required to get sites working in it. Opera web evangelist Bruce Lawson goes further, squarely blaming IE6 for “hindering the development of the web”, due to its lack of support for advanced CSS and XHTML. Many in the industry tell such tales: horror stories of a third of a site’s development time taken up by dealing with IE6; major display issues requiring a partial site rebuild, despite everything looking fine in all other browsers; elements randomly disappearing entirely due to the ‘hasLayout’ bug. “If anything, things will get worse, since we’re now battling three versions: 6, 7 and 8,” says Tom Muller of Kleber. “They all display content slightly differently and we regularly work up a site in Firefox or Safari, only to spend a day figuring out why our valid, semantic code doesn’t render correctly in Internet Explorer.”

But aside from cost, there is the other issue I alluded to at the start of this article, i.e. productivity of staff.  We’re increasingly recognising the power of social media tools and the social web to connect people with similar interests; to improve collaboration and knowledge sharing; to get a better understanding of what people think about gov/local gov services and how they can be improved.  We need to give staff working in the public sector access to the same tools and facilities that ordinary citizens are using to connect, share and collaborate.  Doing nothing is not an option, and is likely to make the gap between technologies that are available a private user and what is available to a public sector worker even greater.  Fore example:

YouTube to stop IE6 support: YouTube will no longer support Internet Explorer 6, TechRadar can confirm, with Google beginning to roll out warnings to those accessing the video site that they should update to a better browser.

Google Docs, Google sites dropping support for IE6

And I’m sure we’re going to be seeing a lot of similar announcements in the coming year.

So, what do we do about it (if we’re passionate enough about the topic)?

1. I’d like to see a similar survey to that instigated by Tom Watson for central government, but this time getting information on council plans for upgrading from IE6. However, I assume this may have to be through the Freedom of Information route, since I’m not aware if or how a parliamentary question would solicit this information – unless CLG were obliged to supply it on behalf of all local councils in England and Wales.
2. In anticipation of cost being the main barrier for most councils, I’d like to see a policy agreed whereby staff could use an alternative browser for accessing social media websites and as a general productivity tool, whilst still using IE6 for accessing internally-dependent websites, thus circumnavigating the issues of cost. If necessary, and to accommodate the natural desire of IT departments to lock down all installed software, staff or their department could make the business case for having Firefox installed and then IT enable this as a Group Policy.
3. I’d  be interested to know where SOCITM stood on this issue, and whether they felt passionate enough about it to be a catalyst for change. After all, they are representing the IT managers. I have in fact written to them recently to solicit their views on all of this.

Other than this, I can only encourage those who are directly affected by their company’s/organisation’s reluctance to recognise this as an important issue to be tackled this year, to lobby their managers for change, and to join together in making more a of a noise. Maybe a bit of crowd-sourcing in the Social Web!

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!

I’m looking for to attending the Online Information Conference next week, which runs from 1-3 December at the Olympia. The schedule for the three days can be found on the Online Information website. There are some great speakers lined up, including Charlene Li, co-author of Groundswell, who will be doing a keynote presentation on Thursday 3rd December.

Of particular interest to me is the Track 2 (Social Web ) Keynote session on the 3rd December  on:

WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED ABOUT SOCIAL BUSINESS DESIGN

- which I’ll be moderating. The keynote presentation for this session will be given by Lee Bryant, co-founder of Headshift. I’ve been a keen follower of Lee for some time, and look forward to his perceptive analysis of how business is adapting to the social web. A brief synopsis of this track session as follows:

The application of social tools and social networking within business is all too often regarded as a purely technical exercise, where simply installing new software can solve business problems. In fact, the really interesting lessons of this new era of social business tools are about the affordances, behaviours and new ways of working that social networking makes possible. This session will look at some of the areas in which key concepts such as information flows, ambient awareness, networked productivity and cheap, easy collaboration are impacting on business processes and business design in various sectors and industries.

Learning points:

1. The basics of network-centric information management
2. How to identify business processes ripe for change
3. How to get started with social business design projects

We also have some great presentation and case studies from:

Mike Ellis, Solutions Architect, Eduserv, UK
Lisa Price, Website Communications Manager, Eduserv, UK
Lorna Ferguson, Associate Director of Knowledge Management, KPMG LLP, UK
Ceri Hughes, Director of Knowledge Management, KMPG LLP, UK

I’m anticipating that this will be a very well attended session and feel very privileged to be sharing a platform with those who are pioneering collaborative and knowledge sharing solutions through the social web. Organisations and people are still finding their way through a fairly confusing ‘Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0′ landscape, which appears to be bounded and stifled by anachronistic 20th century working practices, rules and protocols. I believe this session will offer some insight into where we are heading in building 21st century working practices and the role that technology will have in supporting these changes.

I hope to see some of my friends, colleagues and blog/twitter followers at the event. But for anyone reading this who will be at the event, please do come and say hello.