Off to the Microsoft SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas. See you there!

http://www.mssharepointconference.com/Pages/default.aspx

The September 8, 2008 BusinessWeek is covering IBM through a book extract from Stephen Baker's The Numerati (read it here).

I have to say that this article worries me if it is a trend in consulting. As I sit in the academic advisor offsite for the Institute for Innovation & Information Productivity (IIIP) this type of measurement for productivity is reflective of the over application of industrial age measurement techniques to knowledge economy work. I find it disconcerting that just because something can be measured, that it is seen as important. With all of the information available we tend to count before understanding the relationships between the data.

My biggest issue with the article the emphasis on productivity, not on adaptation and learning. If IBM is focusing on "automating management" then they may do well in the short term, but as the world changes, how will they adapt as they are straight-jacketed to a model of people based on what was important when the model was built?

I think an understanding of the world requires numbers, context and relationships (human and data), social context and processes - ignoring any of these aspects or attributes creates incomplete models and the more the concentration on pure data wins, the more constrained the view becomes. Now of course, some argue that anything can be reduced to a numerical model, but that implies the development of relationships - not just with data, but with time.

Organizations that want to remain adaptive need to go beyond the pure numbers, the counting of things, to the understanding of the relationships between numbers, between strategies and goals and perhaps more importantly, about the gaps between what is known and not known, and what can't be known. In a world focused just on productivity, we will see more-and-more efficiencies around things that may be less-and-less important, especially when the time dimension and the need for continuous learning are factored into the equations.

(By contrast see the 3M story, 3M: Struggle Between Efficiency and Creativity, also a famous cover story from BusinessWeek, about managing the balance between the constraints of Six Sigma and the drive for turning creativity into innovations).

ScienceDaily reports that Neanderthal's were just as efficient at creating stone tools as early Homo Sapiens (New Evidence Debunks 'Stupid' Neanderthal Myth). The problem is that using stone tool production as a proxy for intelligence isn't intelligent: it is misleading. Evolutionary survival is a complex interplay of factors, and obviously Neanderthal's were missing something, either physically or culturally, that caused their demise. As a hypothesis I will posit that it was a cultural issue rather than a physical one (there are arguments on both sides). If I am right, however, the ability to create stone tools was not the determining factor in survival and may not be the best indicator of overall intelligence. Some other innovation, cultural or mechanical, may have been the factor, or set of factors that allowed our ancestors to survive and eventually thrive.

We have the same issue today, often looking for proxies that equate to some directional indicator. The world is a messy place and proxies are hard to find. With computers we may eventually be able to model enough factors to made sense of many things, but we already know that modeling everything would require a computer the size of the universe - makes one really wonder what questions we were intended to answer, or, as David Gerrold's GOD (Graphic Omniscient Device) from When Harlie was One is designed to do, answer those questions, perhaps, that only humans can ask.

(If efficient production was all that mattered, all of our automobile manufacturers would be on near even footing, but we know efficient production isn't enough - brands, financial management, perception of value, etc. are more of a determination of success today than efficiency).

Leave it to Wired to catch the latest buzz: author Ken Thompson says we should learn from nature (bugs) how to manage. (read the Wired article What Your Boss Can Learn From Birds and Bees - Titled "What Bugs Can Teach Bosses in the print edition here).

I have to agree with Ken. I believe much of our work life is overly deconstructed to the point that when we put it back together we leave instinct lying on the floor with other recyclables.

I do have to disagree with the report a little, in that it says broadcast e-mail is good. As an information device, sure: managers like little bees twitching to send their signals. The problem though is that within corporations we have also disconnected the value proposition of the message from the need to transmit it, so we have everybody sending messages, most of them with one of three values: read me as soon as you can, don't read me if you don't want to and read me now or the world will come to an end. The ants and bees know what they want to communicate and it is critical to their survival. All of the e-mail we receive, and need to delete is not keyed to our survival, real or political. So lesson hear for managers: get in touch with your inner bee and only send out those one way tomes when they really matter.

Geese: divide and distribute knowledge. OK, duh. I tell people when I remember back to knowing almost everything about computers from TRS-80s to CPM to early MS-DOS, even Sinclair/Timex. Then the world got crazy. "Computer People" are now as specialized as doctors (yes, in ancient times, like the US Civil War, "surgeons" knew about as much as could be known). Many disciplines suffer or benefit from that fate. Here's a thought: let's save the expense of the November election and let Obama and McCain run the country together. We seem pretty divided down the middle still. Many countries have a dual leader role. Perhaps we can learn from the Geese.

And finally, worms. Hub people, networkers - derived from the way C. elegans uses its 302 and neurons. Good in theory, unless you also read NewScientist and read that hierarchies may actually be more resilient in the face of change, precisely because of their duplication - the network's downfall is the hub people, who, if taken out, collapse the network, whereas a hierarchy taken down is just replaced with a duplicate (read more in NewScientist: Why the demise of civilisation may be inevitable). The hierarchy may not be innovative, but it takes a licking and keeps on ticking.

Good thoughts Ken, even if the analysis, reported in Wired, may be a bit buggy.

I met with some customers from the UK today. I shared that I was on my way there on Tuesday, and was quickly asked: Which airline? - I said BA - and they said - Bring all carry ons. So I started looking. Talk about a terminal issue of lack of transparency and not turning a crisis into an opportunity. It appears that the new terminal 5 at Heathrow has misplaced and failed to deliver 19,000 (nineteen thousand! - it looks worse in writing) bags - read the Sky News report here.

Rework is expensive. Touching things once and moving them is efficient. Apologizing and taking responsibility without compensating customers: priceless and ridiculous.

I wonder if any passengers from Imperial Airways, British Overseas Airways, or British Caledonian are still looking for their bags. Perhaps this was a time travel thing and terminal 5 was the vortex for all the lost luggage in the history of BA. One could hope, because anything that  hinted at mismanagement and human error quickly becomes inexcusable.

BA should deliver the bags, each one accompanied by a personal note of apology, a voucher for a discounted airfare, and a claim form for expenses incurred during the time the bags were misplaced. Imagine the expenses incurred by people on vacation needing to resupply just to make their trip go from horrible to tolerable.

Why this won't happen. People don't have great choices at hubs. They either fly the air carrier available, or they stay home. It's hard to protest when you really want to go someplace, or need to, and the alternatives may be worse than the thing you are protesting. It's time for a bit more competition in the air, it just appears that time run backwards when it comes to progress on airline customer service.

I remember the days when airfare tried to attract passengers and keep them, not with promises that they inspected the plane or wouldn't lose your bags, but that the entire experience was actually an enjoyable adventure, and they were taking care of me all the way. Most of the time now, even with loyalty status, I feel like I'm just this side of a bus with a leaky roof that drips on my the entire trip - real story but for another time.

In the March 10 US News and World Report, Michelle Andrews talks about grading doctors online (online version here - a bit older than the article in the March 10, 2008 hardcopy) . WellPoint is teaming with Zagat, for instance. This is just the begriming of a phenomenon forged on the backside of resume references, Linkedin recommendations and ebay reputations.

Reputations. That's the next new thing. It isn't enough to have social networks, we will start creating reputations systems that reflect our opinions of others - and of things.  I think this will be the next phase of social networking. We will start rating people like we do the stuff on epinions.

It is inevitable that this will come. We will start rating everything, and eventually develop a universal way of managing reputation across systems. Reputation will even follow us to work. It will not be sufficient for employers to look at credit scores or web pages. They will dredge through all of the metadata the world creates about you.

In the case of doctors, this may keep them a on their toes, knowing patients will communicating directly about patient care. Restaurants already go through this, as do cars and computers. Well, even doctors do in big cities, where local magazines run their best healthcare issues complete with the best plastic surgeons or oncologists.

Start counting down though. Reputations systems will soon be embedded in everything. Just how good a friend are you? You are about to find out!

Are there limits to productivity? I was having a discussion with a number of Dutch companies recently and this topic came up. My belief is there is a limit to productivity, which means productivity is a limiting concept to proper description of economic success. If we only measure one dimension of a problem, we failure to understand the contributions to other factors.

In a discussion this morning, for instance, with an academic advisor of the IIIP, we discussed how about the same amount of time is spent today writing academic papers or creating presentations as was spent 20 years ago, but that the quality of the output is far superior. The raw productivity has not improvement, but the productivity of the overall process has improved, including the elimination of a number of steps, people, etc. that might have contributed in the past (like typists, layout, reproduction, graphic artists, etc.). Locally this improvement is staggering, but is the effect for the overall economy positive (which is a bit of a side question, but important to the displaced workers).

More pointed to the question about is how productive can one become before a law of diminishing returns kicks in. Does that one more revision of a presentation actually create equal return. Would it have been better to stop the revisions 3 hours ago and made contact with another customer, rather than spend 3 hours on a presentation that yields the same result in the end without the revisions. How do you know? - and how do we create the ability to sense when to turn from one task to another because we have done all we can on this one to achieve the desired result?

In the manufacturing world these weren't questions. The world was constrained on input and outputs. There was only so much that could be done with a given amount of time. Today we don't have the configuration constraints of a process. We have multiple converging processes whose relationships are unmapped, and therefore, outcomes and outputs are not known to be cumulative, complementary or conflicting. How do we manage is such a world, and does productivity take us far enough in understanding, or do we need to create a much more complex set of relationships that better define our desired outcomes?  I think that is what we need to do, but as the world becomes more complex, our desire for simplicity also increases, so are we at a crossroads where understanding the world will be something we just don't have time for?

Observers of the future ask people to adapt all the time. To face the subtlety of change, to suck it up and just find a way to fit into a new rhythm. Having just experienced a broken arm, I understand that change is not swift, and not at all about learning: change is about forgetting. You have to first forget you can't type with both hands before you can learn how to be efficient with one. You have to stopped mourning the loss before you can recognize the opportunity.

Change agents need to keep this in mind. Sometimes change should not be negotiated, but be rapid, dramatic and disruptive.

Years ago I helped move a team from a paper-based system to a computer system by locking up the paper. The complaint was the paper was much more accurate. I said if you spent as much attention to detail on the computer as you did the paper, it would be accurate too. Eventually the computer won, not just because it was as good as the paper, but because once it was as good as the paper it could do more.

This week I am trying to learn to do more with less.

So do you Wiki at work? This Wall Street Journal video touches the high level of the topic. What do you do to share knowledge - and if not share knowledge, what do you use a Wiki for?

Wikis at Work


Some think that wikis might be the answer for companies trying to find new ways to share information, with Don Clark, WSJ San Francisco deputy bureau chief and CNBCs Melissa Lee

Over at MarketingProfs Daily Fix Gewneth Dwyer posted a report on 37Signals founder Jason Fried and how he loathes interruptions. I'll let you read her piece (here) for context but let me say the following:

As I research my book, Management by Design, for Wiley, I am finding that there are no universal answers to questions things like one's affinity for interruptions. One of the problems with management gurus is they think what works for them is the answer for most people. They may be wrong.

Think about relationship building people - social people. They may get, as Fried calls it, "in the zone" with their contacts, but they may also flit from contact to contact just to keep in contact. They like that. It is the way they have wired themselves (I'll refrain from passing judgement on the nature vs. nurture question).

I am writing a section on how people think differently, perceive the world differently, driven by dozens of factors from religion to economics to demographics. For many people, interruptions are a bad thing. People, it seems, like Fried. But in the context of innovation, an interruption may be warranted to move one from a false path, to inject new information - perhaps just to get one to eat, which is necessary as the brain requires fuel to do its work. What we do, as I say perhaps too often, is see everything through the linear metaphor of the factory, through the industrial age haze that hides the emergent chaos and complexity of our information age simultaneity. In a networked world, interruptions are inevitable, and they are needed. They move traffic. They move ideas. They actually create innovation because of the tension between interruptions and linearity - between process and chaos.

I respect Jason Fried's view, that is the point of my book. If I was Mr. Fried's manager, I would coach his peers to leave him alone and let him work the way he works. Organizations need different kinds of workers to do different kinds of things, or lend a variety of perspectives.

Bottom line: If you don't mind interruptions, you aren't weird. If you don't like them, you fit into another category of normal. The best advice, and the kind I hope am writing, is about being tolerant of different perspectives. Innovation comes from diversity, and from tension and from using one's peripheral vision - and that means anticipating interruptions and learning how to take advantage of them when they appear.

When I first learned about physics, I remember reading that light came in packets, or quanta. As a kid, I remember my father's work coming in much the same way. It was discrete. It had a beginning and an end, and what was in between could be measured.

The loss of the work packet is a characteristic of modern work, or information work. Even if you have packets of things to do, the work itself, at the conceptual level, is a continuous wave function with peaks and valleys to be sure, but it is nearly impossible to tell when something starts or ends because of the close, often overlapping relationship of work.

In a factory, the company owned the means of production. My Dad would occasionally act as a contractor, but that was a rare occasion and didn't involve machines. He brought badly painted sheet metal cases home and stripped them in the backyard - an overtime effort I'm sure the EPA wouldn't condone today. But even that was a discrete act. When the pile of brightly miscolored metal cans was once again a glinty stainless silver, the work was done.

My Dad's career started to delve into the wave function later as he brought home computer work to do, calculations needed to turn strips of paper tape into programs for automated punch presses. And when I started at his company and ran serial lines to terminals across the company, I introduced entirely new ideas of work. From my office, and from my Dad's bosses office, we could see what was going on in the factory - without going into the factory.

But now, away from the churn and whir of machines, my work, from white papers to creating new non-profits, is continuous. Everything I read, even this blog, is related to the work. There is no time that I'm not connected in some way, mentally or physically to the work (via a keyboard of some sort). Because I work at Microsoft even the pleasure of my music listening on a Zune is connected to the work - an example of a consumer device that could be repurposed for work if the right bright IT guys integrate it into their corporate infrastructure to deliver training or messages from management.

I don't know too many people with work packets anymore, certainly not professionals. The clerk at the local drug store may be able to go home and forget about his or her work, leave that packet for some alternative universe with different definitions. For information workers though, the lines are too blur to allow for discontinuity - we never really break through the edges of one packet long enough to emerge in another one, so to the outside observer, we live in a wave, not a packet - and if you are looking for how today's work is different than the work of yesteryear, the loss of the packet may be the most profound indicator of change.

There is a significant problem with enterprise software according to Cynthia Retting in the MITSloan Management Review (read it here) and I agree with her. Let me just bottom line her stats: it is costing more and more to retain less and less new software.

Enterprise software locks in functionality. It is monolithic and like manufacturing factories who attract protectionist action by unions and local politicians, IT organizations protect their budgets and their usefulness and by virtue of this, and their often limited ability to react to changes in business or investments in new requirements, they attract the ire of management.

What can be done?

We aren't to the point, as I have written before, that distributed computing is making an impact on business computer yet. Well, not distributed computing in the computation sense - but distributed computing is in fact the solution to the problem of enterprise software. If we combine people with their machines and the software that run on them we have a distributed computing model. The data model is flexible, the ability to respond to unknowns is limited only by the imagination of the nodes (read people) and not the pre-programmed rules found in enterprise software. In other words, desktops, laptops, PDAs and SmartPhones the ideal supplement to the binding and boundaries of enterprise software.

Enterprise software is also limited by its process orientation. Now, after years of having the need for process driven into us by management consultants and other pundits, we think everything needs a process. We expose data and metrics about everything until many people spend more time thinking about reporting their work than actually working. What the distributed model of work also does is create an adaptive environment where people can engage with emergent "processes."

Organizations should not think about enterprise software in isolation. It is not, and never will be the solution to everything - it is the solution certain structured processes that, in reality, should have a low probably of need for rapid change. With the way the world and technology changes, it is likely that less-and-less of our information and our interactions will be facilitated through enterprise software, and more-and-more of it will be handled by ad hoc arrangements of communication, content and data created by end users to meet needs that fall outside the scope of enterprise software - the results of which may never find their way into enterprise systems.

I talk about scenarios all the time. They are based at a fundamental level on uncertainties. We base our enterprise software on certainty, but we know our business interactions are unpredictable - so why would we think that enterprise software could handle the plethora of unknowns that surround us?  What we need are systems that can adapt to the shift from uncertainty to certainty, and the ability to do that immediately when it is recognized - which means smart people with great tools are the answer to the navigation of the emergent businesses needs.

And when it comes to costs, consider the trade-off of distributed reaction rather than central control. People can use the software they already have to navigate change. Sure, that takes some power away from IT, but it also justifies infrastructure investments in ways the original architects could not imagine. The most cost effective way to manage change is to manage it at its source, and that source comes to your people and their tools well before it bubbles up to IT and becomes some kind of requirement that they may take months to react to.

Back in July, The Week magazine ran an article about dressing down at work. Only 38% of employers allow casual dress today, vs. 53% in 2002.

I give several customer facing presentations every week, and often look odd in slacks and button down with a sweater where others are wearing shorts and t-shirts. My opinion is that if you aren't customer facing, then what you wear is between you and your peers, and in hierarchical organizations, between you and your manager.

For talking to customers my best advice is dress like an advisor. That doesn't always mean a tie, but a sport coat and a nice shirt and professional slacks and well-polished shoes is a sign that you care about your appearance, and will more likely care not only about what the client or customer thinks, but will care about what you say about the client or customer to others.

I know some very smart people who advise others and have a very quirky sense of style. I have to say that my eclectic advisors are seen in a very different light than my "professional" advisors. I love to chat with people of all backgrounds, but when trying to build trust, dressing in the right way is important.

Even at trade shows, and I have been to hundreds, I think those organizations who step up the dress, also give more credibility to the booth or presentation. Wear button-downs that fit. Don't skimp on size (many XL or XXL shirts really aren't when purchased from a trade show supplier - get cloths for your people that fit). Polo shirts are OK for some things, but I would advise against them for the trade show floor. You don't know who you are meeting, and not every one is going to meet an executive, but they should feel like they are being respected, and that they are meeting a professional - and they only way they can tell on a crowded show floor is to start with appearance.

Why is this important to the future of work? Because dress is a reflection of the attitude of the workforce, and more and more people become professionals, their education should include how to dress well, not just how to think well. You can still assert your own style, and you should, but build up from the basics, rather than building down.

Here's a link to one of image architect Sandy Dumont's entries on this topic if you want to explore it more (click here).

YouTube, one of Google's holdings, is reported to be seeking depositions from entertainers (YouTube seeks to depose Stewart, Colbert).

My point of view is that YouTube will argue that it has become an essential marketing vehicle for shows like the Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Many clips are available on the Comedy Central website, but the best marketing these days is not the marketing directed by the organization that owns the property, but the viral marketing that comes from hundreds or thousands of individuals spreading the word about something they think is funny, intriguing or even disgusting.

I wouldn't know to reference Tay Zonday's Chocolate Rain (already fading into yesterday's news) had late night talk shows and other entertainment venues like VH1's Best Week Ever elevated it from web phenomenon to pop culture icon. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report would not be what they are if it hadn't been for web buzz. The deposition of entertainers is likely to explore their relationship with web audiences, which is clearly bi-directional. The web is now the source of much of the commentary for late night, for talk radio and for mainstream news channels. To create a wall between content on broadcast and content on the web is completely artifical, as bits beget bits and links beget links.

The work ahead is not the work of lawsuits that conclude if such a wall exists between air, cable and the net - the work ahead is the work of creating new business models that eliminate the need for archaic intellectual property laws. YouTube will test the new laws that focus on things like quickly removing protected material when requested. YouTube's relevance is its ability for its users to rapidly disseminate anything and everything to a global audience. If IP becomes an issue, and new busines models don't emerge, Google's investment may be less than fulfilling as its videophiles migrate to friendlier sites, sites more willing to fight for the inevitable new balance between buzz and bullion.

Short answer: staff doesn't trust it. Now the story:

My wife just had major surgery. She is recovering well. The hospital system, it seems, remains a bit anemic when it comes to back office technology.

I talked with over a dozen nurses and technicians. They were writing down blood pressure, temperature and oxygen levels on scraps of paper, then entering them on charts, then entering them on the computer. Some documents were scanned in, but the primary item log, the big bulky flip chart with all the paper hole-punched into it sat outside Janet's room keeping a constant vigil. It would crash. It was hard to search, but it would crash. When it came time to release her, she signed paper after paper, on the chart flip book, and the copies went immediately into the log. They may be scanned at some point, but there was nothing electronic about her release procedure. Even the multiple prescriptions were written out on four-up pages in chemical induced duplicate.

Why aren't computers more present? Well, first of all, they were everywhere, but they weren't primary. They improved legibility, the staff reported, but the big issue was technology trust. Power outage, system failure, you name it, they thought it, and they wanted paper because a paper record didn't rely on technology.

I think there is a lot we can do to make systems more reliable and more trusted. Here is a prescription:

• Light-weight operating systems that run on solid-state computers with built-in battery backup
• Built-in redundancy for data, perhaps critical patient items sent encrypted wirelessly to small solid state computers so even if the big systems go down, the last stuff entered is still available, and new data can be entered for hours before batteries become an issue
• Quick dump printers or solid state backup that lets staff feel that if they need to panic (e.g., the last recharge was the last recharge during a power outage) they can transfer everything to permanent memory (if we are worry about EMP then we probably have more to worry about than patient health records)
• Light tablet/slate PCs with really simple interfaces, and systems that create backup documents immediately. Transition from the paper by moving to computers and making paper a secondary output, rather than primary with the computer first. Put printers at each station and work patient routing by room. Hell, even put the paper in the book directly from the printer. How are could that be for HP?

If trust in technology is an issue, there is a brief prescription. No sci-fi, just practical stuff that requires an innovation of will rather than an invention of technology. We could do this now, its just a configuration issue, and if we can make the staff more productive, we can then start moving to the next level of backend systems by addressing insurance, pharmacy and other related information lags, including the patient healthcare record, which frankly, my wife has little clue about what it says today, vs. yesterday, and you know, she has every right to - we just don't have the will to let her receive a synchronized update to her Smartphone while I'm bringing the car around.

I have just finished Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows. I had to wait for my daughter Rachel to finish it.

I found the book a very satisfying conclusion to the Potter legacy, but I also found it, as a work of fiction, a rich environment from which an industry of writing may occur. Numerous back stories remain unfulfilled, and many many future lives are left to speculation - though the book does hint that nothing remarkable happens in the nearly twenty years hinted at in the books conclusion. Many works of fiction, however, are made from the unremarkable - just the lives of fiction's greatest characters can be entertaining to say the least, and instructive at their best.

When we look at the worlds of Star Trek, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and Dune, much writing has occurred outside the canon set forth by the creators of those worlds. Much writing can take place in the Potter world as well. That is the work of fiction writers - not only to create worlds and populate them, but to play riffs off of each other, to expand and extend. In Star Trek this worked well for awhile, in Dune less so, in Star Wars some of the fiction is pretty good, in Dune, the legacy leaves me greatly wanting for the depth the father failed to pass on to the son - and in Lord of the Rings, the ambiguousness of where father and son combine - but for the most part, a technical and scholarly continuation rather than one inspired by the works themselves.

Work itself is a topic of Rowling's books. Magic is a gift, but it creates a complete parallel world, complete in that rather than magic giving its possessors exception from the mundane naggings of the "muggle" world, Rowling gives her Wizards and Witches jobs, sports, family problems - even dysfunctional promotions. Take Sybill Trelawney, charges with teaching prophecies, when she herself has only made two of note, in as far as my reading took me, really didn't know that she had done it, or how it was accomplished. I thought of several talented programmers I knew over my career who were thrust into management because of technical insights which did not imbue them with the skills to manage people, nor the teaching ability to pass on their insights.

I look forward to seeing what becomes of the Potter franchise now that it is reportedly complete from Rowling's pen. Work's of fiction are often things that authors have little influence upon once they abandon their chargers to destiny. Much as Dumbledore learned from his charge Harry Potter.