Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog

KM and Attention Management: Wine and Aspirin?

Blogger: Craig Roth

Hola!  I'm just back from our conference in Barcelona.  It went very well and I got to meet many interesting customers from a broad spectrum of international companies and agencies.   And if that wasn't enough fun, the sangria and architecture walks would have made up for it.

One interaction that sticks in my mind is a question I got during the Q&A after my session on Enterprise Attention Management.  I spoke after two Enterprise 2.0 presentations that talked about wikis, blogs, social software, and personal web pages.

The question I got (which I'll paraphrase a bit) was "First you tell me about all these new mechanisms for content creation with Web 2.0, then talk to me about attention overload?  Do you guys plan these presentations together?"

It does seem a bit contradictory at first: two presentations on how to publish more content through new channels and then a presentation on how we have to deal with so much new content.  It's like selling bad wine on Saturday and aspirin on Sunday - you're creating your own demand!

Well, it's not quite so clear cut.  First, my papers and presentations are on Enterprise Attention Management, not information overload.  Information overload is a driver, but if I was to stop there I'd just be joining a chorus of people complaining about something with no solution.  Enterprise Attention Management is the study of the processes and technologies used by information workers to determine which information and messages will be read, allocated time, and acted upon.  And EAM is what I was really talking about.

I don't believe in muzzling anyone as a way to deal with information overload.  From a creation point of view, anyone should create what they want and exercise constraints due to common courtesy and policy.  Enterprises need to spend more time on giving information workers the tools they need to pull important messages forward and push unimportant messages back.  It is the gold nuggets of information that will be created that are of value, despite the amount of silt that they are in.  To continue the gold prospecting anaology, the proportion of gold nuggets to silt has decreased and will decrease over time.  But with proper discovery techniques, those nuggets can be of great value.  That one time that an engineer decides to blog about a problem they solved may save a huge hassle in a few years, long after they have left the company.  Until it is needed, that information isn't harming anyone if your disk storage costs are reasonably low and discovery and attention shielding capabilities are up to the task.

Two Upcoming SharePoint Workshops

Blogger: Craig Roth

I just wanted to give a heads-up that there are two more of our SharePoint Strategy workshops coming up.  The full-day workshop is called "SharePoint and Office 2007: New Enterprise Collaboration/Content Opportunities and Risks".

You've got your choice of two lovely locales: Scottsdale, Arizona on October 4th and Barcelona, Spain on October 22nd (as part of Catalyst Europe).

For those that might be aware of the workshop from the instances we taught in San Francisco (at the Catalyst conference) and in Boston, I'm happy to say that for the next round we've added a 30 minute module on SharePoint Planning and Deployment that gives an overview on SharePoint governance, deployment pre-work (with a handy checklist), deploying SharePoint in the enterprise, and adoption of SharePoint in the enterprise (what we've found organizations that are successful or unsuccessful with SharePoint have in common).

So the agenda now is as follows:

• SharePoint introduction
• Communication/collaboration/content market dynamics
• SharePoint analysis (this is the beefiest part of course, with 142 slides)
• SharePoint and overall market projections
• Planning and deployment
• Conclusions

I hope to see you there! 

Three Key Technologies for Enterprise Attention Management

Blogger: Craig Roth, Service Director

When I spoke at the Catalyst conference I mentioned 3 technologies that I consider to be the most important for enterprise attention management. I wanted to take this opportunity to elaborate a little bit.

By “most important” I mean they offer the greatest opportunity to improve the attentional characteristics of enterprises since they have experienced recent advances in their capabilities that many organizations have not taken advantage of yet. Therefore they can contribute significantly to improving an organization’s ability to improve the efficiency and decision making quality of its information workers.

They are:

• XML Syndication: Sam Weber of KnowNow spoke on RSS right after my EAM presentation and made it clear how RSS was developed as a response to the information overload problem that EAM addresses. In my EAM model, RSS is a textbook example of an attentional technology for pulling desired information forward. This technology is here today, so overloaded organizations have no basis on which to throw their hands up and say nothing can be done.
• Presence: I see presence as being an important opportunity for three reasons. First, getting information workers to honestly and accurately use their presence indicators can help sigificantly with interruptions, on which I’ve written before (see an assembly of my interruption science entries here). Second, if one adds a discretionary function on top of presence that can make it message aware (not just am I unavailable to receive a message, but am I unavailable to receive a specific message from a given sender at that time), it could represent a major leap forward in enterprise attention management. That’s a big “if”. It requires someone to build the rules on top of the presence engine (probably not part of the presence engine itself, even in “rich presence” incarnations). And it could run afowl of all the problems associated with rules (e.g.,false positives).
• Search: While search has been around a long time, there has been a lot of forward movement recently on enterprise search, which can now aggregate search across many more content and data sources as well as include social searching capabilities. Improvements in search, particularly when used as saved searches, can help pull information forward that would otherwise be lost in the noise.

Postscript From Catalyst 2007

Blogger: Mike Gotta, Principal Analyst

Catalyst was incredibly busy for all of us in the Collaboration and Content Strategies  (CCS) service. The customer interaction and overall conference excitement makes Catalyst a very different experience for both attendees and analysts alike. I've tried to aggregate and summarize the dialogs I had with clients over the course of the week (including ad-hoc conversations in the hospitality suites as well as meetings scheduled during the event). The priorities of the people I talked to were:

• Revisiting strategic plans for collaboration
• Best use of user segmentation models
• Applying social software to "connect the dots"
• Getting started with unified communications

Collaboration Strategy Update

Some clients I talked to are in the midst of revisiting and/or updating their strategic plans for collaboration technologies. Given major releases from both IBM and Microsoft, organizations are taking the opportunity to revisit past assumptions and re-sync with business needs. A timely presentation on this topic came from one of our clients. I consistently heard positive feedback on a presentation delivered by Craig Williams of Capital One Financial regarding how his organization approached development of a comprehensive collaboration strategy.

Purely from a technology perspective, Microsoft's Office SharePoint 2007 was a dominant topic for discussion. I also was asked three times about the collaboration value of Second Life.

Issues related to social software seem to throwing a "monkey wrench" into the strategic planning process for some clients. People were debating the business case for social software (e.g., blogs, wikis) versus traditional tools. Others were debating whether they should wait for larger vendors to deliver such capabilities or to go with more specialized vendors. This lead to some interesting back-and-forth regarding the best options to support business requirements when such action requires use of specialized ("best of breed") vendors vs. using tools from larger vendors that are delivering mediocre solutions vs. the integration and infrastructure complexity arising from too many vendors or immature products.

The launch of Lotus Connections seemed to have caused some people to pause for a moment. A couple of organizations I talked to had been constructing their own internal employee profile system but are contrasting the traditional "white pages" concept with consumer tools like Facebook as well as what IBM and others are offering. 

Some of the people I talked to had not "circled around" to revisit the collaboration market for some time. I discussed the emergence of blogs, wikis, tagging (i.e., social bookmark systems), XML syndication (i.e., RSS) and social networking tools and the impact such tools are having on the collaboration landscape. My general advice was: while the scale/scope of technologies included within a strategic planning effort for collaboration has increased, the shift to prioritize organizational dynamics is critical to the overall success of any social computing or collaboration effort.

User Segmentation Models

Organizations used to segment users based on some common definitions: clerical, transactional, structured task worker, information worker, and knowledge worker. There seems to be more interest in approaching such segmentation models by role, by activity or by "pattern" (a "brainstorming" pattern implemented via tools X and Y). We tend to put people into some type of caste system and that really diminishes our capability to think out-of-the-box regarding how workers interact and network regardless of job description, process role or work activity. Classification schemes are helpful as a means to help create a shared context for how certain technologies can be applied but we need to be careful to not place people into a box that inhibits them from participating. Some of the most innovative ideas might come from people assigned the label of "structured task worker" where business or IT strategists might have inadvertently focused on "knowledge workers" for such creativity.

Connecting The Dots With Social Software

Some conversations I had with attendees involved the use of blogs, tagging and social networking strategies to help "connect the dots" between different "tribes" within an organization. These clients appeared to be more receptive to "designing systems that accommodated serendipity". What I appreciated from these conversations was the notion that getting collaboration right is less about focusing on form/function and more about designing user environments that support certain contexts and choreography across participants. Form/function doesn't go away, but we seem to be improving on our understanding regarding the role that emergence and complexity has on business activities and work practices.

Getting Started With Unified Communications

Unified Communications is a daunting endeavor for many clients. The consistent issues I heard were anchored around: how to get started, putting the program together, the technology manifest and managing through vendor agendas. Clients seemed receptive to the idea that unified communications requires some type of program management approach. There will be multiple projects spanning multiple years warranting some type of governance and stewardship over time. It did seem that the more popular "drop zones" into UC are unified messaging and VoIP/IP telephony projects. The Bank of America presentation delivered on Friday of the conference was a good "best practice" example of merging collaboration and communication trends into a unified strategy.