Weblog
Dec 7, 10:07 pm: Embracing technology can stop rogue uses
This paragraph in a recent CIO.com blurb caught my attention:
But there is another market for Google Apps: A growing number of information workers, frustrated by traditional corporate IT systems, have flocked to the consumer version of Google Apps covertly (forming their own “Shadow IT” department). When this happens, Jones notes, companies can put themselves at risk of breaking compliance rules.“The covert use of Google Apps is almost becoming ubiquitous,” he says. “Companies can try to shut it down, but the reality is the business users will go on using it,” he says. “The implications if you don’t do this in a controlled way are huge.”
Web-based apps are hard to shut down. Sure, you can make it difficult for your users to go there but they are hard to shut down. People do, after all, have home computers.
It’s the same with thinking about blog policies or flickr use. Forbidding it or sticking your head in the sand is just going to mean that people are going to use it without your knowledge and without guidance. And that might end up being very bad for your organization.
So maybe you don’t adopt a particular technology, Google Docs or flickr or WordPress, but maybe you do tell people how and when to use it and then let them. That means that you can really explain why maybe using Google Docs to share membership data via the spreadsheet application. Or why you have to be careful about not getting the faces of your constituency in those flickr photos.
Does anyone have any policies like this to share? Policies that aren’t about full-scale organization wide adoption or blessing but about providing boundaries?
tagged: enterprise, adoption, shadowit, net2, nptech
Mar 15, 03:30 am: Speed geek your own staff meeting
I work at a place with 150 folks and I can barely pay attention to what my own work group is doing before I find that brain is filled.
That’s why I love it when we speed geek. Basically, a handful of projects set up stations, the rest of us count off into groups equal in number the stations, and then we rotate through, 10 minutes at each station, and we get a rapid fire update on bunch of projects. I always leave these staff meetings with a bunch of scribbles on a note card and I ideas for connecting with my co-workers.
So, here’s my question: how we replicate this with a piece of internal tech? Or is it replicate? I get that a huge part of the value comes from listening to the questions that folks in my group ask; I learn a lot about what they are concerned with and what their perspectives are.
I’m thinking more about this as now find ourselves spread out across a San Francisco block in three different buildings and multiple floors.
What have other people used to make sure their growing and spreading organizations stay in touch?
tagged: nptech, organizational, development, growth, intranet
Nov 15, 03:10 pm: How much have you spent on your best projects and your best team members?
I’ve been trying to figure out where my time is going. The things I think are most important are sitting on my desk undone and I’m spending a huge amount of time triaging issues. The issues range from stuck projects, to budget questions, to employee issues — both past and present. And I’m spending no time, no time at all, looking at the things and people that are working and investing in them working better.
Sure, I have a great conversations with the good staff members. I track the good projects so that details about them can slide into press releases or collateral or staff meetings. But I’m not really investing in either one of them.
It’s a dynamic that has to change. Even if I can’t quite figure out how.
tagged: management, investment, organizationaldevelopment, positive, reward
Oct 16, 03:21 pm: Participation requires more than tools
David Wilcox at Designing for Civil Society has a terrific post up called Participation as culture not tools … though new ones help. it’s a reminder that checking off the item that reads “Did I use tools that allow people to participate” does not actually guarantee either participation or a feeling of inclusion. Participation, David writes, is about changing the culture. His first two points are worth quoting in full:
- Successful participation is more about developing a culture, than using a set of tools. That applies to democracy, workplace collaboration, citizen engagement in public programmes, user-involvement in product and service design, and anything where doing things together is important.
- The main barriers to effective participation lie both in personal attitudes and institutions, and mainly revolve around desires for power and control. The institutional barriers are embedded in hierarchical systems, the personal ones in beliefs that we only succeed by competing. Changing these and getting things done is doubly challenging.
And that change to institutions and to our own perceptions of how we interact with those around us are tough. We are used to sitting back and yelling at the TV or the speaker or the newspaper. We are becoming used to writing out our side of things on a weblog. We aren’t used to building things together. So, on both levels, the level of an institutions or society building the platform for participation and of people participating with it, using it, changing it and, eventually, taking charge of tools — be they technological tools or conversations — that help define the ways that we can influence, change and come together. On both those levels, it’s hard work.
tagged: participation,, civicengagement,, web2.0,, change,, net2
Sep 22, 04:37 pm: Wiki as a management tool
I use wikis for collaboration. I’m a big fan of writeboards and use them as a standalone way to quickly share ideas with others. I also use them as a piece of project management within basecamp.
We have an internal wiki set-up using MediaWiki and play around on various and sundry wiki and wiki-like spaces on the web.
I’ve discovered, particularly internally, wiki’s are great management tools.
A few days ago, I wrote about providing opoprtunities for initiative. One of those opportunities, if you are a medium to large organization is an internal wiki.
Put one up, get some documents on it. Use it for all the good collaborative reasons that you should be using a wiki as a knowledge management tool.*
And then click on the history tab. Look at the users who have made changes to pages. Particularly uses that didn’t have to. Find those people and cultivate them. Let them know you see their contribution to the organization.
As a manager, I find that I often spend far to much time with the staff members that are having a hard time and not nearly enough with the staff that are really working hard to contribute and doing so successfully and, sometimes, beyond the direct scope of their job.
Why? Because it’s hard to see those people. Using social tools and then looking at their adoption can be one way to find them.
*I know, I know. Assumption alert. More on why I think it’s a good idea after I’ve had a chance to dig into research.
tagged: collaboration, management, behavior, excellence
Sep 19, 02:26 pm: Four customer service stories
Three good and one not so much.
- A couple of weeks ago, I bought a new to me car. It needed a new windshield and the replacement was part of the deal. When I took the car in, I told them about a problem with the glove box. They jumped on fixing it. When I picked the car up, the guy at the desk said, “Yeah, the pollen filter looked pretty dirty so we changed it.” I was all prepped to get mad the sort of what-do-you-mean_I-didn’t-ask-for-that-how-much-will-it-cost kind of thing. When I realized they weren’t charging me. For any of the work. And when I started the car, the tank of gas was full. When I got home, there was a message from the car salesman making sure everything was fine. I want to wear a sandwich board and stand on the street for these people: Vallejo Volkswagen.
- This morning I got a message from the fine folks at Laughing Squid — the folks with whom I host my sadly neglected personal site. They’ve upped the bandwidth quotas and disk space for all their plans. No extra fees. They say, “This is just one more way for us to say thanks for hosting with Laughing Squid.” I’m going to be busy with the sandwich board.
- Yesterday, I was at a meeting that included Tara Hunt of Citizen Agency. She took copious notes. And then sent them to all the meeting participants. Not just the regular follow-up-and-here’s-what-you-promised-to-do message but a message that I can just dump into my planner so that I have a good record of the conversation. Above and beyond what I’d expect. Hell, I’m not even her client and I feel like I just got a gift of great service.
And the not so much…
- We took the old Aztek (yes, yes I did buy one of those and no we haven’t used the camping package but who can resist a car that comes with an air mattress. As a feature!) to a new mechanic. They did a very expensive tuneup — $600 for a bunch of maintenance work but nothing that was actually wrong with the car. Expensive but okay. You have those kinds of tuneups. Over the weekend we drove the car about 5 miles and then, whammo!, Monday morning it wouldn’t start. Jump? It wouldn’t start. My partner called and they calmly informed us they’d charge us for towing and their $100+ an hour labor fee would start as soon as the car pulled into the garage. Really? No benefit of the doubt. It’s their tow truck and their business. No, let’s bring it and figure out what went wrong and then we can talk about money. We ended up having to pay for a new battery but left with a horrible taste in our mouths.
It’s really not that tough to give things that are unexpected. Work small gifts — a phone call, something extra and good follow up note — into your day. I know I don’t do it often enough though. But I’m going to start. And I’m going to start trying to figure out how to institutionalize it.
tagged: customerservice, management
Sep 18, 04:15 pm: Providing opportunities for initiative
From my perspective, one of the biggest benefits of the big bucket o’ web 2.0 tools is ability to set up a situation in which people can act with initiative around their passions. Flattening of the world, to some folks.
I’ve pointed, before, to the domestic violence tag on flickr. People can share what they care about.
Lately, I’ve been trying to figure out how that works inside an organization. That is, how can you set up an organizational system that allows people to have initiative? That provides a clear path for people to bring their ideas and enough context to make those ideas relevant and do-able?
We have an internal wiki, for example. And I regularly cruise it to find people who updated pages that were outside of their work group. To my mind, those are folks who are taking initiative and who are sharing. Often with little credit.
But, of course, tools aren’t enough. What else do you do, in a medium or large organization, to provide an opportunity for individuals?
I have more questions than answers. And I welcome any thoughts or resources. What do you have?
tagged: organizationaldevelopment, management, mentoring, initiative, development
Aug 22, 06:12 pm: Building the infrastructure of partnership
Web 2.0 is about transparency. Not the kind of transparency where you spend a lot of time telling people what you are doing. I think the transparency of web 2.0 is something a little different:
- APIs let you define the ways in which you will partner with people (I’ve written about this before );
- XML allows you to transfer all kinds of data back and forth. One of the easy ways to think about this is using RSS feeds. Putting out an RSS feed in a given format (headlines, headlines + excerpts, or the whole shooting match), when combined with a license, tell people how they can republish your content; and,
- User-centered development: which just means putting something out there, listening to what your users say about it and watching how they use it and then making the next round a response to that.
This is a kind of transparency that goes beyond saying that you’re sharing your information. It really is putting your money where your mouth is.
In, BizDev 2.0, flickr founder Caterina Fake writes about what this means to business:
Several companies — probably more than a dozen — have approached us to provide printing services for Flickr users, and while we were unable to respond to most of them, given the number of similar requests and other things eating up our time, one company, QOOP, just went ahead and applied for a Commercial API key, which was approved almost immediately, and built a fully-fleshed out service. Then after the fact, business development on our side got in touch, worked out a deal — and the site was built and taking orders while their competitors were still waiting for us to return their emails. QOOP even patrols the discussions on the Flickr boards about their product, and responds and makes adjustments based on what they read there. Now that’s customer service, and BizDev 2.0.
Nonrprofits spend a lot of time defining the deal. What are we doing? How are we going to work together? What are we willing to share with each other? In truth, we can all spend some time thinking about this and then coding it into our public presentation — into our website, into any tools that we may offer, into our general stance. We can move from lamenting the fact that foundation expect us to partner without paying for the hardwork of partnership and we can build the infrastructure of partnership.
tagged: bizdev2.0, web2.0, net2, partnership, customer_service, transparency, infrastructure
Aug 18, 03:52 pm: Should you let your employees blog?
That’s the question that came up when I did the Collaboration 2.0 talk at the Alliance.
Let.
Really? Let.
I get the question but “let” is way too late. Your employees are blogging. You might not know it. It might be to a closed network but they are blogging. And you can say they shouldn’t. Or you can make your organization as transparent as possible to people that work there. So that when they do blog, they are engaged and they get it right.
Everyone — everyone! — is on your communications team. Hell, everyone is your communications director.
tagged: blogging, change, organizations, nptech, net2
May 25, 03:47 am: Jason Fried continues Getting Real
In an interview with Khoi Vinh, Jason Fried answers more questions about “Getting Real’:https://gettingreal.37signals.com/. For me, though, the money quote is in Vinh’s intro:
This plan first, build later approach is an effective way to win over clients and colleagues and convince stakeholders that everything will be done very carefully, and everyone will have his or her say in the matter. And yet, for all its benefits and for all the successful projects it’s produced, it’s rarely as satisfying as the projects on which I labored alone at a much smaller scale to produce a result with which I had a much more intimate connection.
tagged: gettingreal, 37signals, interview, jasonfried
