Cutting back on email

By Nick Hortovanyi

There are a lot of people I know that are bombarded with email and for many of them it has become one of those dreaded daily chores. It is even worse when left unchecked for a period of time. I've heard a new term that aptly describes this phenomenon as "Email Jail".

Luis Suarez, a Social Software Evangelist from IBM, has been actively experimenting on "Giving up on Work e-mail". His status report for Week 4 makes for a very interesting read. I've been communicating with him through twitter on this subject and he still receives email but then actively encourages conversation through other means and tools.

About a year ago,  I wrote about email, in a blog entry titled "Email that's what I use to talk to my Grandfather" inferring that the newer generations entering the workforce, or indeed currently working in it, expect more modern tools for communicating then just emails. Invariable, they use other tools to communicate to their friends and associates but revert to email to communicate to their older relatives. A year on I've seen a steady rise in the usage of sites like facebook from within the confines of the corporate work environment. Some organisations have embraced these off-premise communication means and some have blocked them. But for both, email is an issue. The availability of which now has a critical impact on daily operations.

We actively use Lotus Sametime for our daily work, Alex has written up a blog entry on his experiences with it. This enables us to minimise our email usage, to really offline communication (Offline Sametime would be good IBM) or to information that we need to send external to other organisations. Everybody I show Sametime to, is impressed with it as we can also share screens (take control of other screens), use white boards and quickly capture screen shots and snippets in a conversation to expand meaning.

Now we are also experimenting with a wiki server for public and offline "walled garden" communication and it is open to others, who register, to collaborate on content with us. More on this later in another blog entry, as I see this as being an ongoing exercise.

For us, we lose productivity if our Lotus Sametime services is not available, thus it would be more critical for us to have that facility operational than email.

So if you are stuck in "Email Jail" the first step is to acknowledge it and the second step is to find other means to communicate. Even picking the phone up can be an escape (we'd prefer to use a VOIP service like Skype over traditional  landlines).

Walled communities can lead to "know how" knowledge in Portals

By Nick Hortovanyi

Early generation portals, are characterised by their brochure like nature in a one way communication with the audience. The audience, normally regardless of their interests is presented with the same content. There is some divergence based on a funnel process to more specific content but this may take a number of  interactions and reading of pages with a great chance of losing the person before they reach the desired content, if indeed that content exists.

However, a major issue can be that there is little implicit knowledge (described by Michael Polanyi) in this content relating to the activity that the person reading it, is trying to achieve. This "know how" knowledge is in general transfered between individuals, through interaction that takes into account the context of not only the environment at hand, but the activity.

This is fine when everyone is located in the same geographic place, but with todays distributed workforces this rarely happens. And this phenomenon  is somewhat compounded with composite business structures. That is when a number of organisations through an ecosystem are engaging to complete an activity. Ideally all persons engaged in this activity, would be located on the same floor, in the same building but this rarely happens.

I mentioned previously that "A portal is not a replacement for "know-how" knowledge.", by this I was talking about the early generation portals that are one way in their communication of content, this content is normally explicit knowledge, in that it is easy to communicate. What's missing, is that tacit knowledge!

But to achieve this through a portal you need to know who the person is that is looking at the content, they can no longer be anonymous. They need to be an identity, a known person, on that portal that can be repeatably authenticated. So now that they have an identity they can become part of a community, where their identity can engage with others.

This is a more costly exercise though then generation one portals and requires an investment to proceed.

The combination of collaborative technology, eg presence awareness and advanced personalisation, as well as recommendation engines, with the ability for all to write or communicate their own content and ideas, can improve the satisfaction of the engagement of not only your staff, but of your trading partners. Improving the intimacy of the engagement through a walled community, establishes trust with those players as it is showing the extent of the flow of the knowledge that has been given in faith.

Is your portal a generation one portal? If so, how do you view the value of more advanced generation portals to the enabling of future innovation in and around your organisation?

Do you have walled communities to improve the implicit knowledge in your portal?

Projecting your organisation through portals

By Nick Hortovanyi

It happened to me again, I was talking to someone seeking information about their products and services. With me being the person that I am, the questions that I ask soon go past the current technical knowledge of the person I am talking to. So at this stage, I'm directed to their portal.

This means another login, url etc to remember. 

What I'd love to see from these guys is the ability to consume their content such that I can bring it into my portal, and place it where I want it. WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portals) is one way of achieving this through consumption through a secure service of a remote portlet.

So reading this, one could argue that the content should be open and free.

However, the business community at large, is not at the same level of appreciation in my view about the benefits of openly sharing information, as say the IT community. One way of describing a more restricted community is as a gated community, where members of that community need be known and authorized to access the content.

Corporate cave and blogging

By Nick Hortovanyi

Do people have an "Internet Personality" and a "Corporate Personality"?

Certain people that I talk to would love to blog about some of the subjects that I have done in the past. They them selves are hesitant to blog about some subjects on the internet because of their current perceived sense of what is considered acceptable by the corporation or organisation that they are currently employed in.

One could argue that this pervasive sense of foreboding is analogies to an explorer with in a corporate cave. According to wikipedia, "a cave is a natural underground void large enough for a human to enter. Some people suggest that the term 'cave' should only apply to cavities that have some part which does not receive daylight". hmmm, at least in corporations they have Windows on their desktops.  Reading further on wikipedia it states 'Caves are found throughout the world, but only a portion of them have been explored and doumented by cavers'. So these people blogging at the moment, from within a corporation, I would argue are corporate cave explorers.

What better way to start documenting an organisation then by allowing people to blog and seeking confirmation of the validity of the entries by gaining comment from the community at large that your organisation interacts with. This wealth of information that will be gained and validated quicker by allowing conservations to extend past the normal boundaries of an enterprise will result in innovation and qualified organisational change that benefits your extended organisational community. However, persons in a more senior position will need to help facilitate persons to acquire a sense of confidence to overcome the foreboding and close the gap between their "Internet Personality" and their "Corporate Personality".

Corporations will need to trust their cavers and give them the tools, confidence, trust (they are not going to release secrets) and commitment to succeed.