Roviyas

Enterprise Social Learning Needs Porous Walls

I was at DevLearn 2010 last week - I had a great time presenting and I learned from some true masters. Conferences like this are a great experience in terms of actually meeting people in your personal learning network and getting to know them first hand. While talking to a lot of industry colleagues out there, asking them questions and answering some of their questions I wondered why I was doing this. Why was anyone doing this? Dont all our companies have their own walled gardens of knowledge? Arent they walled for a reason? Was I doing the right thing by sharing information? Was everyone else doing the right thing? These questions led me to think that theres perhaps a few fundamental realities that were missing with the whole enterprise social learning practice. I briefly spoke about this to Charles Jennings after Jane Harts wonderful session outlining the state of learning in the workplace today, and heres what I had to suggest to him.

People are Already Sharing Out There

Were born with the fundamental desire to share and learn from peers. Were also a lazy race of animals. We like to get the best possible results from the smallest effort we can invest. So when we need results developers ask questions on stackoverflow, learning professionals go to lrnchat and everyone of us goes to Google. When possible, we share ideas at conferences than in team meetings. In fact, I know quite a few people who wait months to come to a conference so they can find solutions to their problems. The truth is that if a problem has more eyeballs looking, then it has a greater chance of finding a solution. Thats a mathematical fact, not just because of the sheer numbers, but also because of the huge power of diversity. The empirical evidence is stacked in favour of sharing more openly, yet organisations choose to hide information behind a firewall. The few times that people look inside their organisation for learning, is when the knowledge is specific and proprietary to the firm. Given that most firms are not the only ones that operate in their space, these instances are far and few in between. This explains the low uptake of enterprise intranets.

Parallel Social Universes need Common Sense Aggregation

"Peoples time is a zero sum game." - Mark Oelhert, Defense Acquisition University

The drive to mimic social software in the enterprise is a well intentioned one. Having said this, I believe its a mistake to create parallel social universes in the enterprise. For example, a lot of enterprise 2.0 implementations see a blogging, social networking and microblogging system behind the firewall. Now theres nothing wrong in setting up this infrastructure as long as it leverages existing contributions on the public internet. What happens instead, is that organisations put up this social infrastructure and then expect employees to start blogging, tweeting and networking within the firewall. Again, if someones already doing this on the big broad internet, theres no incentive for them to contribute on the puny intranet. Think about it -- why would a blogger with an established following of 3000 readers, put in a new effort to blog internally where at the most a 100 people are likely to read her blog? And why would she risk putting her ideas on a platform where her identity is likely to die the day she leaves? Now you can coerce your employees into contributing to your enterprise social infrastructure, but that takes autonomy out of the motivation game. On the other hand, if we could harness the contributions people already make to the web - their blogs, their twitter feed, their delicious bookmarks; we not only leverage the collective intelligence of our workforce, we provide people with recognition for their individuality.

Porous Walls are the Way for the Future
The open source economy makes for an interesting way to tame complexity. When an organisation open sources software, theres not just an interesting business reason behind it, but also a few interesting technical reasons. Think about free development capacity for your software. How about a few new features added for no extra cost? Well yeah, youll discard 90 contributions to get the 10 quality commits, but free work is free work! How about having people find and fix your bugs for free? This is an extended team, at little or no cost. Now of course, most organisations choose to keep some software proprietary to maintain a strategic advantage, and thats the reason that organisations are likely to keep some knowledge proprietary as well. This said, the vast majority of discussions on company forums are hardly about proprietary knowledge.

Just as we would open source software, isnt there a case for us to open up discussions and knowledge sharing beyond our firewall, limiting only confidential discussions to be within the company? Like open source, this has its practical benefits and then, early movers have a strong branding advantage just like early movers in the open source space. As walls of the enterprise social network start to become porous this is likely to drive two way knowledge traffic for our organisations. Some of this traffic is likely to come from people we dont even employ! We need to think about the potential of such an approach and before we start to obsess over risk, we need to understand that this is an existing phenomenon. Whether we choose to facilitate it or not, this is already happening. I dont disagree that this requires a fair degree of social media education for our people, but I believe this is an effort well worth our time.

---

My conversation with Charles Jennings ended on the note that I see a Stage 6 on the Internet Time Alliances workplace learning diagram. Its a step beyond working collaboratively and co-creating in a workscape. Its about transcending organisational boundaries and embracing a state of porous walls. In my view it is a state of the world thats more in tune with reality. People are already sharing their expertise in the wide open. We can choose to be blind to that and fight the web in a battle we cant win. Or we can be pragmatic and exploit this intellect.

What do you think? Am I going bonkers? Id love to hear what you think of my hopes for the future of workplace learning. Dont be bashful and leave your comments here -- its been a while since I heard from you.

Available link for download

Elearning Guild Webinar 101 Social Media in e Learning Ur Doin It Right

Third webinar for the day. I m now attending the Elearning Guild webinar on Social Media in e-Learning: Ur Doin It Right

The speakers are:

Mark Oehlert, Defense Acquisition University
Koreen Olbrish,Tandem Learning

Heres the guilds intro to the session:

"Organizations looking for ways to capitalize on the potential of social media, and wanting to leverage it for learning, often dont know where to start, or how other companies have successfully incorporated social media for learning.

Participants in this session will learn how companies large and small have integrated social media into their e-Learning initiatives, and how that has changed the way people work and learn. Participants will get great case-study examples of successful social media integrations for learning. They will also gain exposure to the lessons learned from these integrations, and specific instructions on how to get started in their own organizations."

Mark is a well known social media and gaming expert in industry circles and Koreens blog about virtual worlds, games, simulations and everything about learning experiences is one that I follow regularly. I trust what these people say -- so this session should be worthwhile. Lets see what comes out.

Mark starts off with some stage setting/ intros - well I know you guys! You dont know me, but oh well! And damn, I get logged off! So what social media tools do people use?

• 54% Twitter
• 77% Facebook
• 3% Myspace
• 22% Delicious
• 14% Google Wave
• 14% Flickr
• 50% Youtube
• 3% Ning

Ok the webinar is a bit slow right now, but I guess itll pick up pace soon.

So what are the big ideas?

• What we would do if we had a blank slate? - We seem to be really wrapped up in legacy issues of restrictions etc. We need to think about the problems were trying to solve, figure the right solution and then work backwards from there.
• Correctly estimating the impact of technology - our fascination for technology alone needs to be more pragmatic. So dropping the hype and opening our eyes to the transformative effect of technologies is a good step.
  
• We vs Me - Whats the dollar value of not letting social media in the organisation?
  
• Culture & Change Management: Its not about the technology its about culture, its about managing the change. You need to balance the fear, control and trust factors in the entire game.
  
• Transmission loss: How will we improve the efficiency of the organisation and also your own learning organisation?
  
• Think big. Start small. Move fast. -- Hmm not sure I agree with start small. Ask Andrew Mcafee.
  

Case Study #1: The Wind Turbine Company

The company wanted to create a performance support network for a dispersed population of turbine techies. So they used Yammer to create a secure network to share information in real-time. Now they save 3-5 million savings in terms of turbines staying up. So they reduced the Transmission Loss. Ah! Thats a good case study!

Case Study #2: #Lrnchat

About 26% of the respondents in the survey havent participated in #lrnchat. Having been someone who kept track of all the #lrnchat tweets because I cant participate that early in the morning, I know #lrnchat can be really useful. I know its a really, really useful and a persistent communications channel. So at a really low cost, you now have a very powerful community that continuously collaborates usefully.

Case Study #3 Tandem Learning

Tandem - Koreens company is a small organisation that needed to share and collaborate on multiple client projects with nationally dispersed employees. So they use multiple social media tools, Base Camp, Yammer, etc to allow visibility and access to relevant data and allow real-time client-focussed updates.

Now their projects are trackable anywhere, anytime! Theyre able to share client requirements in real-time as well. Koreen, you should try Mingle! Ill be happy to give you a tour and youll never go back to Basecamp. Koreen also mentions Rypple as a way to get feedback from your peers. Im going to look this up - thanks Koreen! Someone mentioned this amazing visualisation tool for Twitter. Heres Marks map from the tool.

Case Study #4 Defense Acquisition University

Marks organisation - more than 10,000 people! So this thing does scale, as you can see. So the DAU is a large corporate university within Department of Defense. They needed to know new channels to reach their customer base and internal faculty. They have wikis, blogs, Yammer and several other platforms internally.

As a consequence, internal micro blogging capability is being used by almost half of the staff/ faculty with no outreach at all. Content owners are bloggin and the community contributes to the knowledge base. The cool thing with tools like Yammer is that since people can use it for free you can go ahead and make the business case when it gains momentum. Thats where tools like Social Text and Cyn.in win because they have a free, low entry barrier start. I now understand the point about starting small - Mark isnt talking about creating walled gardens. Hes talking about starting with no ego and no huge fanfare.

Case Study #5 Boston College

Boston College is a traditional resident college was being pushed by student expectations to incorporate more 2.0 tools into the classroom experience to make things more engaging. Theyve deployed an enterprise class social media suite (SocialText!) and as an outcome they now have relevant news feeds, have the ability to extend classroom experiences beyond the class and engage with additional writing and learning experiences. The cool thing with social media is that the experience of education never has to stop. People can maintain connection with their universities, their classmates, future students, faculty even after their university experience is long over. The possibilities from here are immense. People can learn from each other by critiquing, helping each other.

I love these case studies -- we havent quantified the value of this stuff too much, but this is great starting evidence for CLOs to sit up and take notice. Good stuff guys!

So the starting line is - Think big, start small, move fast. Mark I now understand. We need to get over the human issues - the IT issues are easier to solve. I agree - good webinar.

Available link for download