Shift Happened - Part 2: Small Apps Loosely Joined

What are Small Apps Loosely Joined?

There has been a large shift in how many people work today and part of that is in the tools that they use to get work done. This shift in work patterns mirrors the shift that many had in their personal lives around social interactions and productivity.

Late one night many years ago (long before the iPhone), a group of us were talking about web and mobile and opportunities to work in a variety of similar tools that were all interconnected. The mash-up culture was a year or two behind us with Paul Radamacher’s first map mashup HousingMaps and the salient understanding that surfaced from that was the ability to have different interfaces for different needs and uses that could work as a workflow, or even similar interfaces for different personal needs of the users. We talked about Twitter and its heavy reliance on third-party developers to build web and mobile apps and services on top of its services and the Twitter API (the application programming interface, which is a standard data and interaction layer that sits behind the scenes bring data back and forth between the service). This approach allowed anybody to build an interface for seeing and interacting with Twitter or create an interface that provided greater ease of use for tasks. With tongue in-cheek (paraphrasing David Weinberger’s “Small Pieces Loosely Joined”), I said this model was small apps loosely joined.

What joined these apps together was a common data layer that fits a standard data model (or, as is common in APIs, a data model that self describes). The Twitter model allowed people to interact with the service through a mobile app with full functionality of the Twitter site, or to see many different Twitter lists in something like TweetDeck, or monitor and respond through different accounts in something like HootSuite, while tracking follows and drops in other monitoring services.

This same idea is more prevalent now across our mobile devices and the apps and services that they connect to and use. Not only are today’s mobile apps and services interacting with the APIs on the internet, but they are working with standard file formats on the backend and apps that meet the needs of users’ context and workflows. Some of the common app and service types that people have been shifting to the small apps loosely joined model are: Calendar, email, photos, text / documents, and to do lists / reminders (a closer look at these follows).

Who is Doing This?

The small apps loosely joined concept is nothing new in the technical geek and productivity nerd community (as part of both tribes, i use the words geek and nerd lovingly), as well as for early adopters. These uses and patterns with small apps loosely joined started surfacing around ten years on the web and mobile devices, all interconnected to the internet.

We understand innovation and broad adoption can take quite some time, roughly 10 years for innovations and new ideas to take hold broadly. We are about 10 years into this way of working and interacting with information and applications, so it was not exactly a surprise to hear research (done in-house to better understand the mobile market) that 60 to 70 percent of military members and their families surveyed use more than one app for a task types. They used calendars, email, and weather as examples. I checked with others who do surveys of employees inside organizations if they were looking at the question and found that they were. Their responses were also in the 60 to 70 percent range for calendar, to do, and text apps on mobile devices.

So, while this small app loosely joined focus and obsession within technology and productivity communities has been more than a decade old, it is something that is now rather mainstream. Over the last five years or so, when I am traveling or in a dank gym for club basketball, I often ask people next to me what apps and services they like the most on the mobile devices that is in their hand. Their answers often surface apps related to tasks and workflows for a data type (calendar, document, etc.) and the person would qualify how and in which circumstances they use it. Quite often, the app did one or two things really well that others didn’t cover or did not do well in their perspective.

Why are People doing this?

There are a lot of reasons why people started embracing small apps loosely joined. The primary driver has been mobility and looking for small mobile or tablet apps that do a specific, needed task. Mobile and tablet uses often have quite different contexts for use, including a mix of creation and consumption, but the affordances and agency in these apps is a driver too. Having applications work across platforms is helpful, but it is more essential to have open file formats and standards that work with apps that can pick up the file and provide use on another device with the constraints and augmented capability mobile and tablets provide.

There are additional relevant benefits of the file formats and standards working across devices. The ability to easily share files with others with whom you are working or communicating is a great benefit, as the platform doesn’t matter, just the ability to grab an app (often inexpensive and sometimes free) to read and modify the file is key. Being able to easily share files leads to always having needed files accessible, as they can be kept of an internet directory (the kids, okay grown-ups, call this cloud storage).

The last benefit that is driving people to the world of small apps loosely joined is the value of non-proprietary files, which isn’t as hippy and give-it-to-the-man as it sounds–it’s really about ensuring that the files will work on any device with an application that handles that type of object. Having to keep two or three versions of the same software around so one can work across file differences, or open files in a different version of the software so it can be saved down into an older version, is silliness we can leave in the inefficient old days. Many of the file structures that are based on around text, including calendars, can be opened in any text application and read and edited there.

Where are People Doing This?

Most people (particularly outside the geeks) started down this path when smartphones and the modern class of tablets entered their lives. They looked for ways to replicate how they worked on laptops and desktops, but often the same apps weren’t there and they had to improvise. Word of mouth also spread ideas and options for getting things done. But, often people go exploring small, focused apps that are inexpensive or free to see what they do. The small targeted apps, often in the “does one thing well” class of app or small app that is does a few things simply and easily, have filled made it easy to try quite a few different apps to find something that works. People often find a few apps that fit into a workflow that targets a few small tasks to get things done while standing in line, stuck in traffic, or sitting at your desk waiting for one’s computer to finish updating and reboot.

As a result, often people find that this small focused app model helps them do the things they need to do, and it can be more efficient than digging around large cumbersome software. Often this can be more efficient as the person is not digging around large cumbersome software. Once this becomes a habit or a way of working on mobile, the expectation is that it should also work on the desktop / laptop as well. People look for similar apps and services that fit their more efficient workflows that started on their “devices that are too small and limited to do any real work on” and want that same type of focussed application where they “do their real work”.

This change is also being driven by more than just shifts in devices–people are trying apps and services in their personal life to help manage their schedules or work simultaneously with club or event organizers crafting an email or newsletter. Our personal lives used to trail our work lives as far as technology and services
augmenting what we do, but now what we’re doing in our personal lives has greatly surpassed the capabilities of many of our work offerings.

The Types of Apps that Often Fit the Bill

The starting place for many people who try a variety of apps on their mobile and tablet devices are weather, text, and calendar. We don’t modify weather apps as they are mostly just a display of provided content, but there are much variety among the offerings, such as <give a good, standard example> and DarkSky, which offers micro-location weather with how many minutes until precipitation starts or stops.

Text apps

Text apps is where many start seeing the concept and value of small apps loosely joined. People want something more than just simple notes application to jot ideas and sync them to other devices. They want to be able to read and do a little editing of text that they or others started writing on their “work” devices, all while standing in line or during other available moments that permeate our day. Soon this “little bit of editing” seems like it isn’t all that bad to do and they start picking up things they started writing elsewhere and knock out more on their mobile device or tablet. Or, they have an idea when they are not near their “work” device and start jotting a few notes in a text app, and soon it has turned into a couple or few paragraphs. The accessibility and convenience of these capabilities has switched on a lightbulb. Talking and comparing notes with friends and colleagues, they find there are apps that are not just simple text, but can add annotations for structure (headers and outlines), hooks for style (bold and italics), and more. This often leads to learning that some apps have more robust writing tools (dictionary, thesaurus, writing analytics, etc.). Those who write with a workflow of first getting ideas out of their head and then working with them to hone them are often most prone to the small apps loosely joined way of doing things. But, others also like the ease of just getting words and ideas out in one app, then editing elsewhere by just opening another app and grabbing the same text file from a cloud sync service or sharing between apps directly. These text apps, particularly when those that are markdown friendly, can take that initial text and turn it into a styled PDF, a Word doc, HTML to post, RTF (rich text format), or more.

Calendar apps

Calendars are another gateway drug, er application type, that leads to embracing the small apps loosely joined way of doing things. The calendar files are a set file type that is easy to move from app to app (except when working across platforms that have proprietary hooks that break compatibility). Smartphones and tables all come with calendar apps, but they rarely fit the full range of needs. Some people want a calendar to have a certain look or layout format that helps them see and evaluate their day, and there is an abundance of options on all platforms for visual display. But, the real gems are the small apps that shine with certain tasks like Fantastical does on Apple products with its natural language parsing that turns spoken words into an almost always bang-on calendar entry.

Other calendar apps start adding other intelligence and agency (applications doing things on our behalf to ease our work). Donna (rest her digital soul) was a favorite of mine for evaluating time between events and different modes of transport and calculating time to leave based on weather and traffic conditions (and if you were really stuck in a jam, it offered to help you get Uber). Donna was a gem for the space between meetings, but was an incredible help with coordinating kid pick-up and leave times related to their various events. Other apps that are helpful agents are Tempo (it came out of the same SRI lab as Siri), which is one of the fullest featured and most helpful calendar apps around. Tempo monitors your mail not only for events, but pulls the relevant emails, documents, location and contact information, and relevant transportation needs into one simple calendar entry–and all you had to do was place it on your calendar or say yes to an event invite. Tempo offers the ability to send an “I’m running late” notification to those with whom you are meeting, as well as the expected arrival time.

One the the interesting things about calendars in the small apps loosely joined set is that most of these class of apps do something else–they augment and clean-up the calendar entry. Say I open Tempo and it doesn’t recognize the location that is in the calendar entry - say it only has Ray’s Pizza in NYC (oh, you too have gone down this crazy path of meeting somebody at Ray’s Pizza in NYC only to later realize (not soon enough) that there are more than one and nearly a billion permutations of Ray’s, Ray’s Original, Original Ray’s, etc.)… so Tempo offers suggestions to sort out the exact location and then enters the address in the calendar file’s location field. Bingo! We have clarity, but not only does your calendar have clarity within Tempo, but in all other calendar apps that read that event file. Not only does Tempo do this, but other apps may also do this. We learn quickly the apps that don’t play well with others and hoard the clean up information (Mynd app has done this in the past, but it seems to be more friendly after its last update). Additionally, some apps give you the option as to which mapping and directions app you would like the calendar to open when you are actually on your way.

Email apps

One of the things that mobile and tablets reinforce is how painful email is in our lives (on both the work and personal sides). Being able to live in email and work with it easily in some managed way from a mobile device or tablet is critical. The small apps loosely joined concept really takes hold with email for many people. Some tools work as easy, light triage, such as Mailbox, to quickly filter through your email based on importance and time-relative needs. Also, some tools that manage attachments in email (or, more appropriately, files that would have been attachments, such as Hightail (formerly YouSendIt), which stores files and documents for your email to link to securely. The only requirement for most of the email apps is the email account must run on IMAP, which is pretty much the norm these days.

Photo apps

The quality of photos has improved drastically on many mobile devices and even tablets. This along with the adage, “the best camera is the one you have with you” (and most people always have their phone with them), has led to the reality that a lot of photos get taken on mobile devices and tablets. The photos are a common file type and there is an abundance of apps that can take a photo and modify it to improve its quality, add filters to change the look, add text, or turn into something that looks a lot like a watercolor painting. The photos can also be scanned and OCRed, as well as uploaded as a document and later searchable (as many do in Evernote.

Standards and Access

The key to many of the apps loosely joined use types mentioned (and the many not covered here) is that the files passed among apps follow a set or ad hoc standard. Text files that use Markdown (or Multi-Markdown that extends the capabilities to add footnote, tables, and more) are all human readable, but also any text app can read them and edit them. The file sizes are small, which is incredibly important for mobile devices and tablets in limited mobile bandwidth locations (be that Manhattan at 5:15 on any weekday or the outer suburbs of Accra).

Access to the files is the other important characteristic of small apps loosely joined. Working between apps may not require internet access, but working between devices that are not in bluetooth range, or sharing files to collaborate requires data access (most often through the internet). Small file size, which those of us working with mobile a long time know is still an essential for actually getting things done reliably.

Common Use Traits

These apps have a core set of functionality that stem from the capabilities of:

• Viewing
• Creating
• Honing
• Agency
• Features / functionality augmentation

Viewing is a common characteristic of all the apps, but the ability to create is where the real difference in these apps start to have real value for people using these apps and working in a small apps loosely joined workflow. The small apps can also provide the ability to hone what has been done in another app or on another device. This honing may be editing or adding data or an element to improve use. Agents that look out for us and do work we would be having to do is quite helpful, particularly when they are getting to the near bulletproof reliability some are approaching these days. The features and functionality augmentation in apps really helps when working with light apps that are focused and easy to use. Adding grammar checks and tools that can improve our work or creations, much like we would at a laptop or desktop, have shifted many people to this small apps loosely joined life.

App Traits

There are a few core traits in these apps. First off, as mentioned, they work on open document types that are are commonly used as actual or de facto standards.

Another trait is the apps are light (a few features and functionality sets), focus on simplicity, and are easy to use. Mobile devices do not have the screen space for complicated or complex interfaces, and, in reality, given where and how these devices are used, the user’s full attention is not on the app or device. Good mobile and tablet designers and developers understand this limitation very well and understand just how far they can push the limited human constraints that come into play when interacting with the apps.

The last related trait is that the apps are focused. When listening to how people use and interact with their devices and apps, it is interesting how they understand and parse functionality that fits their needs across apps. With calendaring, some people love Fanstastical’s UI for display of the day’s and upcoming events, while other people love how easy it is to input information and create events from a chunk of copied, typed, or spoken text (and getting it right). It was interesting talking with other Donna calendar app users as many of us would open Donna to get just travel-related information and / or honing the address, then close it and open another calendar app for its different functionality. The apps do a few certain things really well and those that live in the small apps loosely joined workflow are quite fine with that.

Wrap-up

The small apps loosely joined workflow and expectation has moved from mobile devices to the laptop / desktop world. The small apps that were just on mobile devices are showing up on the more fully powered devices. The output created from these apps have supporting services on the web that can augment this practice much further. Many who work in small apps loosely joined have learned to like the focused task and mindfulness of that targeted approach–they get things done far more efficiently and are more productive more of the time, and, as a result, they can often get more uninterrupted time to focus on living life beyond devices and apps. The goal going in was just to get things done on the device I have with me, but it is not a bad benefit for those whom value it.

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Shift Happened Series

• Part 1: More Productive Not Using Productivity Tools
• Part 2: Small Apps Loosely Joined
  
• Part 3: Capturing Decisions in Social
• Part 4: The One Social Way (Or not) to Doing Social Really Well in Enterprise

Shift Happened - Part 1: More Productive Not Using Productivity Tools

Over the past six months or so, I’ve been increasingly hearing from IT leaders in organizations who have been surprised by a shift in how people work digitally. The work patterns related to this shift are far from new and, in fact, are well over a decade old.

Nonetheless, some have been surprised by who, why, and how broadly and rapidly the change is happening. Those caught by surprise are often in IT departments, and they are surprised by the changing work patterns of sales, teleworkers, and others in the field and away from the office. Looking at these shifts in detail, how those who are surprised by these shifts came to be surprised isn’t so surprising.

Productivity Happened

Over the past 3 to 4 years, there has been a shift in how people work. Advancements in mobile devices and applications is part of it, but the prevalence of touch tablets has been a large contributor to the change. The light weight and ability use them for much of users’ daily work makes tablets a relatively good choice for those working on the road or away from the office. Initially, many thought that not having Microsoft Office was going to be a hinderance for tablet use, but that has not been the case.

But, the same time touch tablets were becoming a largely viable option, how and where information and knowledge work was happening shifted too. Work was increasingly happening in online services where text and data was entered into an online service, often one with collaborative or social functionality. The daily report was no longer a document completed in Word and then uploaded; it is now text that is entered in a service that connects colleagues and team members who do follow-on work with that input. The conversations happens around the information and the content shared initially can be edited, commented on, and linked to externally.

Those in the field may not be online all the time, but they are collecting notes and information throughout their day, often doing so in small, lightweight, text-focused apps. The small writing apps often have Markdown as their means to add structure (structure replaced style), including headers, bold, italics, bullets, links (to web pages, online spreadsheets, images, or other). Markdown isn’t new and many of the online services people are using have handled Markdown text for years. Up to this point, Markdown had mostly been in the geek domain, but now sales folks, admins, field workers, and other traditionally non-tech-centric workers are using it as well.

Frequent users say that the 6 to 8 regular Markdown annotations (such as heading levels, bold, italics, links, and pull quotes) were quick and easy to learn. MS Word has nearly 200 functions in its ribbons these days, but many people use only 15 to 20 of those, and most often use 6 to 10, for which they use keystrokes. Yes, the common 6 to 10 most used and easily found Word functions map to those provided within Markdown. Many text apps have buttons for Markdown for user convenience.

This shift to simplified text focus (that doesn’t require Microsoft Word) has delivered quite a few benefits. The first is that it is incredibly easy to share contents and files with anybody, as there are no “I have the wrong version of Word” or “I copied it into my document and my document is now a mess” problems. The files sizes are also lightweight and easy to email or upload, even in environments with network bandwidth constraints. Most of their work is going to be copied into text boxes in an online system anyway, or, if folks are working in a Word Document, it will likely be parsed and turned into plain text, rich text, or HTML (things Markdown-related tools easily output as alternate options).

But, of all these small benefits, the largest is the increase in productivity. Many of those working in this manner, mostly because they were on devices that didn’t have Microsoft Word, found they were “far more productive outside their old productivity tools.” Nearly every person I have talked with who has watched this shift happen has uttered this statement or something very similar about productivity. Workers are no longer battling their tools (Office / Word), but are simply producing.

Shift Sneaks Up When You are Headsdown Building Past Models

Without exception, every person in IT who has tracked me down to have this discussion (with the aim of finding out if they are alone and how to start thinking about it), is coming out of a very long SharePoint implementation. They were heads down on their (initially) 2 to 4 month Sharepoint project, that ended up being an order of magnitude longer, more expensive, and larger in scale and scope than expected, so they didn’t see this shift happening.

Often, these folks in IT were pointed in my direction by someone in a different division within the organization who I talked with or worked with on collaborative and social working projects to support their needs. These systems and services provide the text boxes into which their workers were pasting text from their tablet text-writing apps. Their work and work models shifted drastically while IT was heavily focused on a solution that wasn’t solving needs for large portions of the organization.

IT really wasn’t aware of this shift until they went to renew their Microsoft Office licenses and were being moved to Office 365, which seemed like it was going to meet the online working needs of the systems they had been asked to deliver years back. What IT was not expecting was that 25% to 40% (or, as I have been hearing over the past couple weeks, 60%) of their workers, many of whom are working out in the field or virtually, refuse to go back to using Office (often voicing this refusal loudly and strongly). IT found they had paid for seats that wouldn’t be used, an incredibly expensive proposition. Office 365 can be justifiable to many when it is being used, but to sit unused is another story. The senior IT folks have been saying their percentage of workers shifting to this new (Office-free) model is going up by 2% each month, as means of working more easily and efficiently in other ways spreads (e.g. 25% in April 2013 to 27% in May 2013).

More Productive Not Using Productivity Tools

This big shift relates to the fact that traditional productivity tools weren’t based on efficient productivity. Most standard productivity tools grew from a paper-based model and world moved to the digital world. As work has largely changed from passing documents around to posting and working on content in more open collaborative and group environments that align with what our modern work has became, the model of a “doc” disappeared. The document as an object was the focus of the “system of record,” but now, in a “systems of engagement” model, focus is on the milestones met and status marker activities in the online collaborative, collective, and team (including group / community / network) interaction systems.

Tools that got in the way of productivity and didn’t meet needs as people began to work more interactively in digital-focused and digital-appropriate environments are no longer the default tools of choice. We are working a little more like humans interact naturally and having technology adapt to these ways of working, rather than making humans learn a lot about how to adapt to traditional technology to do their work.

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Shift Happened Series

• Part 1: More Productive Not Using Productivity Tools
• Part 2: Small Apps Loosely Joined
  
• Part 3: Capturing Decisions in Social
• Part 4: The One Social Way (Or not) to Doing Social Really Well in Enterprise

Broken Decade Precedes It Works Decade

I had long forgotten this Carl Steadman response to Michael Sippy's "Just One Question - What do you want for Christmas", but the response from 1997 is fantastic and frames the 1990s as the broken decade. (I'll wait for you to go read it)

I'm not so sure that Carl's broken decade got better in the first half of the 2000 decade, but it really started to. We are much farther along now. Our consumer world started to improve quite a bit and slowly business systems and services are slowly improving. The initial part of Carl's rant focusses on the number of steps to get something going. Once it is working the steps are still clunky.

Carl gets in a great rant about time and how broken it was in the 90s within technology (calendaring and syncing is still a beast and likely to for a bit longer - you understand the problem sets and pain points if you have ever tried to build syncing). With calendaring and its related activities we now have Tempo, which is freakishly close to the next step scenario I used in many of the Come to Me Web presentations and Personal InfoCloud presentations from 2003 through 2007 (I've been getting requests to represent them as this is what more and more developers and designers are dealing with today and need to have a better foundation to think through them). There was an internal Yahoo presentation (and follow on day of deep discussions and conversations) with a version of the Personal InfoCloud and Come to me Web flow that is nearly identical to the Tempo app video scenario and ones spelled out in Robert Scoble's interview with Tempo CEO, which is utterly awesome that it is getting built out some 10 years later (we had the technology and tools to do this in 2004 and beyond).

Carl's rant gets worn away over time though consumer devices, services, and applications. The refocus on ease of use and particularly the use through mobile, which requires a very different way of thinking and considering things. It thinking through design, the dependancies, and real user needs (all while keeping in mind the attention issues, screen size, networking, and device limitations). The past couple years mobile finally caught on with mainstream users and people doing real work on the mobile and tablets - Box 40% mobile access of files stored there over the last couple years. Many other business vendors have had mobile use rates of their services from mobile over the past two years. When talking to users they opt for mobile solutions over their full enterprise tools as they are much easier to use, which quickly translates into getting more work done. As Bernd Christiansen of Citrix stated in an onstage interview the employee's most productive part of the day is often the walk from their car to the front door of the office working on their mobile devices.

This world is not fully better and fully easy to use from the days of Carl's rant, but it is getting better. We still have quite a ways to go.

Microsoft and the Plan for Yammer?

So, mid-day Friday the Wall Street Journal confirmed that Yammer agrees to sell to Microsoft. This doesn’t mean the deal is announced nor done, and even if that happens it isn’t over until it is over (as Yogi Berra says).

There have been a lot of people asking why all of this is important and why so many people are abuzz about Microsoft and Yammer. This is big, as one of the big four business software vendors (Microsoft, IBM, SAP, and Oracle, a.k.a. MISO) is taking a big step to take social seriously (IBM has already been incredibly serious about this for years with its Lotus Connections platform and has long lead with innovation to move to the next level). Microsoft has done a great job marketing capabilities for social in the enterprise with Sharepoint. But the delivery and execution on that with Sharepoint by itself has left many customers frustrated and looking to augment or replace it with other solutions. The Yammer focus means Microsoft knows it needs deeper understanding and breath of its social offerings.

Social means many things and they all must be held together at once to do things really well. Social is collective, conversational, and collaborative (as in real collaboration not the meaning-drained buzzword use). Social needs to flow into processes, tasks and teams, sales and marketing support, organization wide communication, innovation, and nearly a hundred or more valuable uses inside organizations. Businesses need much better human to human interactions, workspaces, and forums for doing work than email or other solutions have afforded in the past.

Some items of interest have surfaced by some tech journalists as they look at the Microsoft and Yammer potential deal. Many learning of the rumor and news of Yammer and Microsoft assumed Sharepoint (I certainly did), which makes some sense as it is a big gap. In the TechCrunch interview, Nitin Bharia leaves Microsoft and talks about Sharepoint and Yammer, there is a lot of potential insight from the perspective of someone who “may” have deep understanding of what is going on and the intentions of Microsoft with what they will do with Yammer.

First, Nitin provides the statement, “Microsoft didn’t do a very good job of building enterprise social networking. Sharepoint has built-in capabilities no where near Facebook quality.” This is not the first disclosure publicly that Microsoft still has a lot of work to do if it wants to provide a great social offering in its swiss army knife toolkit that is Sharepoint.

The ReadWriteWeb article about Microsoft and Yammer brings up the John Barrett admission,

“SharePoint began adding social media capabilities with the release of SharePoint 2010, but in April Jon Barrett, Microsoft Australia’s solution specialist of business productivity, told Australia’s Image and Data Manager that “the improved new social media features in Wave 15 would not match the richness of solutions such as Newsgator Social Sites.” (Wave 15 is the internal Microsoft code name for the SharePoint 2013 release.)”

What Will Microsoft Do with Yammer?

Nitin has hunches with what Microsoft may do with Yammer, which include leaving Yammer as a stand alone product as it has done with Skype, which could be really interesting and be good for Microsoft and Yammer as they intertwingle over time. Matt Weinberger of Services Angle has his different angle, “Combine [Yammer] with Microsoft infrastructure, Microsoft Office 365 cloud productivity, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and the synergies start to become apparent.”

These are different viable takes on what may be of value for Microsoft and its road map. But, one thing is clear Microsoft is signaling the understanding how broad and difficult social is when trying to bring it to mainstream people which are the 80% of enterprise employees and customers. Social software is difficult and it seems like Microsoft is getting beyond the idea that it is much more than bolt together features and functionality done by engineers.

Holistic Social Software for Organizations

If you spend time inside organizations as the person responsible for managing social platforms you realize there are a lot of facets to social and how it is woven into the organization. This focus is a really helpful view as it quickly leads to the reality there are many pieces needed to give a good platform for social. There is no one vendor winning, as flexibility and adaptability are needed to meet these varied needs for tools and interactive components across many different personality types, roles, and tactical needs in the organization.

Many of these people have also lived through the increasing frustration with content management systems (CMS) that tried to win by building one solution that in the end was a muddled mediocre unusable pile of bloat. Many organizations have been moving off these CMS to social platforms to replace their intranets and having much more success with that than any CMS has been able to muster in the last 10 to 15 years.

Social software for the organization must take the other path in the fork in the road.

Related:

• Microsoft and Yammer

Microsoft and Yammer?

Yesterday's news of the rumor that Microsoft is about to purchase Yammer surfaced and Bloomberg was able to get confirmations there were talks happening. This one seemed a little odd last evening as the rumor broke, but then the ambient signals that myself and others had been seeing with Yammer made sense in that light. Companies start acting differently, often quite off the norm, and don’t really explain why. Yammer has had that in spades lately. The other reasons besides being bought are: IPO; workforce needs (turn over, need to hire, massive wave of new hires, etc.); or large new customer(s) taking a lot of focus.

Does the Purchase Makes Sense

Talking with others who live and breath in this space, Microsoft buying Yammer wasn’t the first company many of us had on our potentials list. Microsoft has had a difficult time with Sharepoint social components (a similar problem to Oracle’s social offerings) in that the bolt together social elements take a lot of understanding and depth to get right and there is much more than bolting things together. Any company purchasing Sharepoint in the last 18 months to 2 years that has done their due diligence knows they need to find something better for the social software components than what Sharepoint offers. Too many dead ends, too much of it isn’t used.

For inside the organization there are many great options that are much easier to put into place than the social Sharepoint components, and they all plug into Sharepoint nicely. Sorting out which of the options takes a lot of understanding and depth, much of it missing from the consulting and analyst space as it is the nuances that make huge differences.

Vendors the past 4 to 5 years in the social business / Enterprise 2.0 space have had a relatively easy time selling against Sharepoint. In the last couple years social business service/platform vendors saw a shift. Sharepoint was not whom they were competing against, as it wasn’t being taken seriously by buyers who did their homework. The platform they were hands down pitching their services against and most often winning agianst was Yammer.

Yammer with its freemium model has made huge inroads, mostly through the back door. Most companies were slow to provide a good offerings and are still not providing authorized services for internal uses to their employees. This slow approach is easy to fix, just set up Yammer and you are off and running, which is great for employees, but a huge liability if it isn’t owned by the organization.

Yammer has serious traction with its claimed 200,000 companies using it (well, people in those companies using it). Yammer claims 3 million paid customers, which while a great sum for revenues, when measured against 200,000 and estimating 100 people in each company (a conservative average) you get 20 million people and only 3 million have licenses. Not an impressive conversion rate, and the multiplier is conservative. This is tough to take to Wall Street to go IPO with.

How on target is the conversion rate? When the competing vendors, nearly hands down, mention Yammer as their top competitor and they can win most of the head-to-head customers in that match-up, there is a conversion problem. Yammer shows the need, sells the value, but there are gaps in their offerings that cause them to not convert. In talking to customers who have been through that process the reasons are diverse, which make it difficult to close those gaps. The common two reasons mentioned are: 1) The value of what is paid for and what is given away for free; and 2) Some of the components are a bit buggy or don’t perfectly fit the needs.

Yammer use educates the customers for free and helped them identify needs and gaps they need to focus on when getting down to purchasing. This is a downside of large freemium models. The customers gain understanding and think, “Yes, this is good, but we want better in these areas.”

So, Microsoft and Yammer?

Microsoft has a large problematic gap to fill with Sharepoint in the social slice of their offering (Sharepoint does many things well, social is not something that fits that description other than Team Sites, but groupware for teams has been honed and iterated for 20 years, they should get that right). Yammer does the social software slice rather well, but has issues with conversion to paid customers. Microsoft is a selling machine, particularly with Sharepoint.

This sounds like a match that makes more sense. I still don’t think Yammer is the optimal fit for Sharepoint. Services like Newsgator for inside the firewall is usually a first stop for organizations needing social that works and can be deployed far more easily. I hear customers often say Microsoft suggested they use Newsgator or give it a shot.

What Impact to Other Vendors?

Many vendors should be just fine with this Yammer and Microsoft marriage if it happens. The ones with trouble would be the one’s who focus on the Sharepoint ecosystem and live off it, like Newsgator and Telligent (a more outside the org social platform strength than inside).

Other vendors that don’t rely on Sharepoint but integrate still will likely keep winning business and have very happy customers. Social is very broad and while most analysts and consultants look at features and checking them off, that is only a small slice of what to look for to get success with a service or tool. The interaction design, how it works with mobile, how easily does it integrate with other services, and many other considerations are where the key differentiation comes from.

I know many organizations with very successful social software offerings for their employees with relatively high use rates of the services, but they are using 2 or 3 different platforms that various segments of their organization use. Different cultures and personality types in the organization drift to certain offerings and not others. Organizations who are moving to the “one solution” model really struggle. Yes, there are downsides like getting everybody talking, but there are ways around that as well.

The common story I’ve heard the last couple years is the organization is going to standardize their social offering to employees on Sharepoint. The organization also had 5 to 15% of their people using an unauthorized Yammer instance. Once Sharepoint social components were rolled out they weren’t that usable and employees pointed to the much more usable Yammer and in 2 months the Yammer use doubled. Nearly all the companies know at this point they need to find a better option than Sharepoint. Now we may have Yammer and Sharepoint under one roof, or maybe not (still in talks).

Related:

• Microsoft and the Plan for Yammer?

Beyond Simple Social Presentation

We have been here before.

Where we are with social tools in organizations has been done before and not overly well. But, where we are today is a place we have been twice before in my working career. We had groupware and knowledge management tools in this same spot. Similar promise and similar success both right here.

Where are we?

We are at the inflection point in social software where we need to get beyond the simple social mindset. The groupware and knowledge management waves of social software were damaged at this same point and lost. There are many reasons for this, but one of the biggest issues and one we are facing now is the ever difficult task of designing tools that embrace how complicated and complex social interactions are with humans as social beings and how that gets more complicated and complex as it scales.

On May 30th (2012) I gave an updated version of my Beyond Simple Social talk at a Salesforce.com sponsored UX Lecture Series (slides down below and Uday Gajendar's great live blog of the talk). The talk sold out quickly and was filled with not only Salesforce.com UX people, but people from other vendors and companies and it was user experience people, product managers, engineers, and customers managing various platforms and services. One thing that seems to have been the common thread is the how do we build social tools to broader user base and that meet that easy to use interface on top of ever increasing complicated and complex systems and services.

This simplicity in the interface is the great advantage the current wave of social software has had, the tools mostly get out of the way, or far more so than in the past. The tools are usable and relatively easy to use, up to a point.

What the talk focusses on is seeing the breadth, depth, and interwoven complexities of the social elements that each have depth and their own focal points as distinct items or lenses. The talk uses the getting beyond simple social as a gateway to the 40+ social lenses I have been building upon and use in my work with customers of social tools as well as vendors to help optimize the use and experience of the tools to meet needs and help remove hinderances to use.

The last six to nine months the group of people in roles I see most often running into the short falls of social tools in organizations are those in UX roles (interaction design, information architecture, usability, user interface design, and the rare social interaction designers). Why? They are the ones that get called upon to fix the tools or service as there are many complaints it is unusable. They are the ones whose pants catch on fire when things do not go as expected. They are the ones who get called in to “make it work”, but often they can only do so much with a tool or service that was not a good match or was bolt together solution bought under the premise it can be assembled to do everything. If you want to find the reality of how things work, find the UX people to see how gamification is working (or most often has made a mess of formerly functional communities in organizations), various tools are capable of being made usable, which services are easy to optimize for use, and how adaptable a service is across an organization with a broad collection of user types.

But, it is also the UX folks and those whom they report to that are finding what is needed to think through social software problems is not robust enough nor flexible enough to help them see the problems and work through them. The social understandings and complexities are often missing from their toolsets and rarely exist anywhere else in the organization, unless it is a firm with social science chops in-house for some reason.

As a whole the industry around these social tools needs to understand it is at a precipice (some organizations and vendors grasp this really well) of this first stage of social that previous waves have not been able to get beyond. But, once understanding where we are the real work, the freaking hard work begins and we need to be able to see differently, more focussed than we have in the past, and be able to intermix these focussed views to understand what we are really dealing with so we can make it to stage two, three, four, and beyond.

This is the reasoning I have been focusing on the social lenses and those using some of them has been able to see differently and beyond the problems to solutions to try and iterate or more to others. Seeing Dave Gray’s Connected Company book progress helps me know there is value, as he is the only person to have gone through the full set of social lenses, to which the connected company was part of the outcome.

Dave Gray’s writing around Connected Company and JP Rangaswami’s writings on this blog (particularly lately again) about the new collaboration are fantastic and are on their way to happening. Yet, we need to ensure the tools and services that enable them are there and usable for all.

Related Posts

• Urban Planning to Social Business: Social that Scales

• Getting Beyond Simple Social

• Social Scaling and Maturity

Beyond Simple Social - Presented at Salesforce

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Thomas Vander Wal

Presenting "Beyond Simple Social" In SF May 30th

I am presenting "Beyond Simple Social" at Salesforce in San Francisco on Wednesday, May 30. Please join us - Eventbright free ticket.

Interfaces for social software are simple. But designing, developing and managing social platforms is not.

I will present some of the lenses he uses to help companies increase user adoption and engagement by better understanding the complexities around social software.

Urban Planning to Social Business: Social that Scales

Overview

In November of 2011 Gordon Ross and I presented What Urban Planning Can Teach Us About Social Business Design at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara (the presentation is loaded at the end of this post). I was excited about the presentation as it was a great opportunity to place the foundations of understanding social at scale into the Enterprise 2.0 / social business community (Stewart Mader and I have done this in the past as part of the One Year Club presentations).

A background of a masters in public policy 16 plus years ago gave me a great foundation for understanding social at scale through analytics and analysis, but also it primed me for all the “for fun” reading I did after graduation in urban planning and taking it to nice depths that professional tomes offered to get solid understandings. In 2004 I met up with a small group of designers and developers who were swimming in the flow of social software and found one of the very common traits across the group was many years of reading the same urban planning, urban theory, and and architecture books, which gave them a leg up on understanding how humans interact at scale. Until that point I hadn’t drawn the line connecting urban planning and the designing, developing and managing collaboration and social software services beginning in 1996. The presentation begins to tap into that understanding and where has grown to.

Gordon's did a great job with a write-up of his portion of the presentation, in his ThoughtFarmer blog post E2Conf Santa Clara 2011 – What Urban Planning Can Teach Social Business Design. This is my portion of the write-up, or the a part of the slides from 53 to 72. I’ve written before about Social Scaling and Maturity as well as Dave Snowden's Complexity Framework Cynefin, so I am starting beyond those related portions I haven't written about before.

Social Scaling

When considering social systems of any type it is important to understand what scale of social system you are dealing with. There are many decades of studying human social interactions at various scales and most of this focus has been using the lens of the city. Social software scaling and maturity captures a high level view of how it progresses, but this was influenced in part by how human settlements grow and their traits. The progression takes from small settlements with a few people, families, and businesses or farms labelled hamlets, up through villages, towns, and to cities.

Hamlets

Hamlets are small clusters of people in a location. The order of interactions between people is driven by need for protection, human social interactions, sharing or pooling resources, and common connections to the world that is farther away. There is little central infrastructure to begin with other than some paths that have emerged through use, likely a common natural resource that is shared (water, food source, etc.), and often a central place to meet (even if it is somebody's barn or other shelter large enough to have this collection of people to gather. The leaderships is most often ad hoc and is a person whom is comfortable gathering people, asking questions, and resolving issues.

In hamlets everybody knows everybody else very well. There is no hiding and what one person does may impact others directly. Social interactions are all rather simple.

Villages

The village is a larger collection of people gathered in a place. Villages have some infrastructure developing for roads, sanitation, distribution of resources (water, food, etc.), and often have a designated meeting place that is set aside for that purpose. There is a more formalized leadership framework, sometimes just by name but often by roles performed as well, whom people turn to for protection, resolving differences, and helping with making decisions about infrastructure related needs. Most people know of each other, but may not know everybody well.

This familiarity often keeps the common social model focussed on cooperation to get things done at the village wide scale. Often things can still be serendipitous as word of mouth networks still function well. Often the social interactions are still simple, but they are moving to being complicated.

Towns

Towns are the next step up in scale for human settlements. Towns have grown far beyond the first hamlet and have infrastructure needs that have become formalized and have the need for people to have roles related to servicing those infrastructure needs. Infrastructure for the town’s own needs may include: Roads; Sanitation; Health; Schooling; Protective services (fire and policing); Communication; Zoning and planning; etc. There is a formal central leadership role that has its own support system as well as responsibility to ensure the other infrastructure and support roles are functioning well.

The human social interactions have grown beyond the ability to know everybody. There is often a common central communication function that is central to the town for news. The ability to find others who can provide services or help is more difficult and word of networks do not work optimally to find resources and often do not work reliably at all. The ideal of cooperation is not longer the only social interaction model as competition and variations between cooperation and competition are in existence as commerce and friendly rivalries are used to optimize services and goods provided. These variations of governance, civic interaction, and social philosophies all move beyond the ability to function on the simple cooperation model.

The social model is complicated in that it takes a mix of cooperation and coordination for changes, but also to keep things running well.

Cities

Cities are the largest scale for local human settlements (there are megacities and other variations of scale beyond, but the differences are not as large as these and start getting into massive complexity and interdependencies). Cities require common infrastructure that is rather well maintained (well-maintained varies wildly depending where you are in the globe). Not only do cities have all of the central infrastructure resources and role, but they often have their own infrastructures and internally growing support roles. For example there is a fire department with many fire houses and their own jurisdictions with a central office and many roles there to fill in the gaps to ensure things get done and work as they should.

The human social interactions often scale to where people believe they may not be seen (well seen by those whom they know or know them) and are not familiar to many others around them. More granular distinctions are used to help people connect and have belonging and familiar social interactions. Cities require coordination for many social interactions at scale to take place and see things happen. Cooperation happens at the very small social scale, but often runs up against competition for resources and access from neighboring subsections of the city that drive it to coordination as the scaled social interaction model.

Cities function in complex social models. Gone is the regular ease of change with no impact on others. The ideal of cooperation is lost as there many different influences and pressures of the needs of other individuals and more often the needs and movement of groups that inhabit as well as run the city collide as their goals collide and conflict, even when trying to service the same purpose or goal.

Urban Planning at Scale

Differing urban scales have very different needs and realities around infrastructure, roles, social interaction design patterns and models that work or are needed. The small hamlet is often a focus, but the hamlet and its rather simple elements starts to become a limited model from which to view things with just a few hundred people. In cities this starts breaking at the one to two block boundaries. The village stage of growth and density, which kicks in with a few hundred people up to a the low thousands is often a good model to consider as a starting place (when considering social scaling for organizations the few hundred bounds hold up, if people are all in one location, but as soon as one or more additional locations are introduced the model looks a lot like the next step up to village with the complications that are introduced with the non-unified culture, multiple experiences and needs.

Urban Planning at Village Scale: Santana Row

Jumping in to the village perspective on social scaling, a good neat and clean view is that of Santana Row in San Jose, California. Santana Row is a 3 by 5 block grid of new urbanism mixed use and walkable planning (one of many of efforts by Federated Realty). It is a highly designed community that is an oasis or aberrant outlier in the whole of San Jose city, depending on one’s perspective. As stated by Gordon Ross' wife, “it is a great place to walk around if you drive there”.

Santana Row heavily proscribed design of space and use focusses the ground floors of the 3 to 5 story building to stores and restaurants and the upper floors for office and living space. It could be viewed as quasi-self supporting (lacking industrial and agricultural elements) for the roughly 1,000 people who live/work there. This village has a strong central management that proscribes use, design, and development of what happens in the bounds of the 3 by 5 grid bounds. It is not designed for emergence other than varying occupants of the spaces, which can be somewhat flexible, but it is largely held with in the already defined bounds.

As more natural social environs can grow, morph, and be emergent at, within, and beyond its initial bounds this planned village is less emergent and flexible. Use is constrained, for good or bad, by the heavily designed space. It is a social space that has set infrastructure, use, and size constraints that keep the development functioning with the same of similar vibe and experience across time.

Urban Planning at City Scale: San Francisco

If we take a quick drive up North of San Jose to San Francisco we can see social at a very different scale. San Francisco is home to 750 to 800 Santana Row by size and population. The map of San Francisco neighborhoods
(found at Justinsomina site) allows for some comparison with Santana Row. But, in a city the bounds between neighborhoods and sub-neighborhoods are drastically emergent and flexible over time. Even neighborhoods change drastically over time, just as the Hayes Valley neighborhood (a sub-neighborhood of the Haight) did after the 1989 earthquake and particularly after the freeway that bisected the neighborhood came down.

But, lets look at the center of this map and still at the Haight as a focus. The Haight as it is framed in this map is likely to contain 8 to 10 distinct neighborhoods with in it. Each of these neighborhood has its own feel and vibe as well as its own norms of acceptable business and behavior. The cultures of these neighborhoods can be vastly different, even as they abut other bounding neighborhoods.

The Haight contains the relatively famous Upper Haight, also known as the Haight Ashbury neighborhood that tries to keep its hippy culture mixed with the gentrified “painted lady” Victorian homes (some converted to multi-unit properties). Tie-dye and 60s hippy values are still at the forefront of this neighborhood’s feel and ethos.

Just down the hill from the Haight Ashbury is Lower Haight which is a mix of counter culture shops and establishments that mix with housing developments and through the 90s was known as the anarchist section of the Haight. There are no chain stores and there is a edge that is nearly tangible.

Heading up toward the Sutro Tower from the Haight Ashbury on Cole Street we are in Cole Valley, which is more family focussed than the Haight Ashbury and Cole Street has a mix of artisanal shops, restaurants, and bars. The family feel and more upscale offerings and comfortable places to hang out give it a different culture and values that what is found on Haight Street that it abuts just a few blocks away.

From Cole Valley we can head up Parnassus to the edge of the Inner Sunset neighborhood that houses UCSF Medical Center and a family and professional resident focussed neighborhood. The storefronts, restaurants, and living spaces all reflect this need and environment.

Small Neighborhoods Interwingled

What all of this gets to is a neighborhood framed in San Francisco with 15,000 to 100,000 people can have many smaller very divergent neighborhoods with in it. These neighborhoods have distinct culture, feel, and norms from what is proper activity and commerce for the sub-classification that may only be a few blocks by a few blocks. There are no firm borders and the boundaries are very fluid and intermix and intertwingle with ease. We know Cole Valley and the Haight Ashbury and Lower Haight are very different neighborhoods with interleaving boundaries and often with sub-neighborhoods emerging between them our of nothing.

All of this is emergent and at least complicated, but very much is a vivid description of complexity expressed and at play in the real world. The emergent and adaptive nature of cities, often with a very light hand of guidance (but in cases of Detroit and its massive contraction of population a more heavy hand can be a benefit). But, this reality helps us greatly understand the need for better understanding of human social environments at scale. We know that what works in one neighborhood will often not work in another neighborhood with out adapting it. Some neighborhoods in cities have strong neighborhood associations (some of these small active forces can change the whole of a city - see Harvey Milk (if you have time watch Milk) to get a better grasp of this at work).

As seen in the framing of physical spaces and the needs of the scaling social organization and infrastructure needed to support social scaling there are a wide variety of roles, support systems, different tools and disciplines (police, sanitation/waste, fire, health, property, finance, etc.), and central management roles for understanding as well as providing sane growth and adapting. In the time since 1996 when I started managing digital communities professionally, I started realizing and framing different social roles that were needed or at play and now have 20 I have framed and consider when dealing with social platforms and environments (see slide #64 in the presentation for the list of 20).

Social Business Software is Stuck at Simple

Given this realization that we have a variety of social scaling realities from out frame of looking at cities and other scale of human aggregation and organization in physical space, we can use the same lens to look at our own digital social environments. Most of our tools for social interaction and collaboration at best have two social roles, user and admin/community manager. The tools and ease of capabilities just are not there in many tools to help organizations using the tools beyond these simple roles.

Our tools are stuck at the Santana Row stage and are not easily emergent, adoptive, nor scale easily to more expansive realities. If the tool fits for one segment of the organization it is rolled out for more, whether or not their interest, needs, culture, or personality fits with in the designed constraints of a digital Santana Row. Our tools and services need to take the next step up to moving beyond the hamlet and village mentality of small, single focussed considerations.

A question that is always asked of me is what is the magic number for where these tools break and there is a need. The answer lies in understanding the essential variables: Cultural deviation, size, and location. If your organization has tight cultural norms and is rather unified in its view a simple social model can go rather far. Along this front how your organization handles when things do not go optimally (also state when things fail). The tighter the organization the greater a single or limited variance platform will take you. If you organization is rather accepting of things not going right and can turn problems into powerful lessons learned a single platform can scale. If the organization broadly doesn’t have good failure tolerance the scale of the service will be more limited, unless there are small comfortable spaces where ideas can be shared, vetted and honed before taking them broader. If the organization has no consistent way for dealing with failure or less than optimal outcomes a single simple platform will not go very far at all.

The size of your organization is another important variable. The larger the organization the greater the need for an adaptive multi-role and use services or collection of services. Few organizations can get away with a single approach with more than 3,000 to 5,000 people. There are some organizations that over time can get a very simple service to work across 15,000 or more. But, most often the tools start showing difficulty in the mid to upper 100s.

The last element is location. If your organization is all in one location or in very close proximity the ability for a simple tool to work at higher numbers of people using it is better, if the culture is consistent. Once you have more than one location things get more difficult as culture, norms, constraints, and other elements that impact use and consistency get strained. Think if a 400 unit high rise apartment building and the relative cohesion of community within that building, but another building next to it of the same or similar size can be quite different.

Social Scale Models

Another framing to think about this is simple social is two simple blocks resting next to each other sharing a side. The interaction point is just one common boundary and this simple difference is rather easy to maintain and interact along.

The complicated social model is a grid. The grid is working to balance the needs of needs around four different sides and how to balance the needs all around. The grid can be broken down in to rather straight forward interactions at the intersections of on the various sides, as long as those with whom they are interacting are staying relatively consistent.

Lastly, the complex is a fractal model that is always moving and the interactions are constantly shifting and each of the bounds are heading in a different direction and putting pressure and influence on those boundary elements it touches and interacts.

Next Steps

Where we often get with social tools and services inside organizations are a need for something beyond what we have. For a very long time social software has been framed through the lenses of understanding of social at scale. The common metaphors and framing echo some of the human social interactions used in the world around us that do not have mediated interfaces and services as the means of interacting.

Our tools and services need take the next step to getting beyond the simple social models were working in and around. The understanding of these next steps and there real existence can and will help shape how are tools can grow to meet our needs of social at scale and understand what is missing and needed to help people interact and be more efficient in their worklife. The individuals can get more out of this, but so with the organizations.

We have had 20 years or more of social software and collaborative tools now in its 3rd generation of services (KM, groupware, and now Enterprise 2.0/social business based on Web 2.0 principles) that we have dealt with and are living with. We have abandoned previous attempts as far less than optimal because the tools got in the way of how humans are social and did not allow for social scaling well. This current cycle has one hell of a lot of hope tied into is as the tools do a much better job of getting out of the way. Our next step is to start getting this still hopeful practice to embrace the understandings of social scaling.

Are you up for it? I am.

What Urban Planning Can Teach Us About Social Business Design

View more presentations from Thomas Vander Wal

Getting Beyond Simple Social

“Social is hard!” is something I hear repeatedly by most of my clients and those I talk to. It is one of the issues I continually run across in my work with organizations trying to better understand social software and collaboration tools for their organization as well as helping vendors better understand their gaps and how to close them as social scales.

I have my “40 Plus Social Lenses” that I use to set foundations and understandings to better see issues, gaps, and understand the potential ways forward. Everything requires testing and rarely does the good solution work everywhere as there are no best practices, because what we are working with is humans and how they are social. Humans and how we interact is not simple, we are not simple social creatures.

In January I quickly cobbled together a presentation for the UX Camp DC (a Washington DC User Experience community BarCamp) that I quickly titled “Getting Beyond Simple Social”, which I used as a frame for why most organizations are stuck with social (it is embedded at the end of this). Most organizations are stuck as they came to social thinking there are just a handful of things to understand and this social stuff is simple. I had a meeting with the senior partner at a huge global consulting firm who only wanted to know the best tool and if I could just boil down the 40+ Social Lenses to 2 or 3 as 40 is a bit tough (not only did the meeting end in my head at that point, but so did much of my respect for that firm), I explained to the end users and customers social needs to be simple, but in reality it is very complicated and complex and somebody has to work through that, which is what people hire consultants to work through for them and guide them through.

So, I cobbled together a few items from the 40 social lenses that I have presented prior, but included 2 new slides of things. The first is “Getting to Mainstream” (slides 4 through 8) and “5 Beginning Social Questions”.

Getting to Mainstream

Much of my work is helping organizations with social inside their firewall, which means bringing it to mainstream. In my years of working with social and collaboration services and platforms (since 1996) the tools haven't really changed much, other than now the tools get out of the way much more (in the 90s the answer to improving the tools was adding form fields, which is rarely ever the right answer, our technology has moved beyond that, we should too). But, the following are the reality setting steps I take with organizations and that took me years to grasp.

Inside the firewall the goal for social is ultimately 100 percent of the employees and/or partners. The measuring stick is often email, which is ubiquitous and a very familiar tool for everybody in the organization. Email is social and is something that everybody understands and has their face in at some point during the day. Many look at what is happening in social web services and seeing ease of communication and interaction, often in the open, which solves some of the pain points that are tied to email and email is everywhere.

What is lacking in the 100 percent goal is the understanding that email often took 5 years in most organizations to reach roughly 100 percent adoption and use. Having lived through the inception of email in a few organizations and then talking with friends about their organizations where they worked or consulted, the 5 year threshold was fairly normal. I don't know anybody who was actually measuring this broadly in their organization (Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization is a great book that will get you close to this as it walks through adoption and use patterns of email in companies).

Focus on Social

The focus is often on social by those looking for a solution uses the viewpoint of social web. But, much of what they see and have explained is not mainstream usage, but usage by early adopters and innovators (in the framing terms of Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm which uses a modified version of the Technology Adoption Lifecycle). The downside of much of the understanding around social through the view of early adopters or innovations, from their own perspective or others watching, is that is far from mainstream. The personality types and traits of this roughly 5 to 10 percent of the population are quite different from the norms of more mainstream users who follow later. Much of the understandings of the clicksperts who followed the trends and tried to make sense of things (often labeling themselves “social media gurus”) failed to grasp they were trying to explain the edges as the norm.

One of the most telling examples of this is from Twitter who explained 40 percent of our active users simply sign in to listen to what's happening in their world..

Understanding How the 90 Percent are Social

If we are going to focus on social for everybody we need to understand how the 90 percent who are not innovators and early adopters are social. Most people do not interact the way social is described by the clicksperts, social media gurus, or most of what is written up in Mashable (I spend so much time undoing what is written in Mashable as “understanding” - this was the impetus for my coming to grips with Popular - Thinking about it, which also applies to so many other things).

As we saw with email in the 1990s, social tools can reach the 100 percent. The BBCs wiki usage passed 100 percent adoption after 5 years of use. It takes time for adoption to happen, but it also takes guidance and modifying tools for use by mainstream. Euan Semple, who started and guided the BBC initiative as their head of knowledge management as a fantastic book out now, Organizations Don't Tweet, People Do: A Manager's Guide to the Social Web, if you want a good understanding from somebody else who has been living this.

5 Beginning Social Questions

Where I started getting to the reality of social and collaboration in 1996 I was managing a private Compuserve forum for 3,000 lawyers for a legal trade organization. I was continually running into issues pertaining to social problems. Having a solid academic background in social sciences with organizational communication and communication theory undergrad and public policy for grad school looking at human social interactions, particularly at social scale scale was something I had training for and experience with. But, having a mediated interface through a whole new perspective to think through.

I quickly realized there were a high level set of 5 questions I was continually coming back to so to try and solve some of the issues I was seeing with use and non-use of the service (I also spent a lot of time with the Compuserve product people talking about issues and means to resolve them). The 5 questions I asked started with trying to resolve, “Is it:…”

• The person
• How humans are social
• Cultural influences - or cross cultural issues
• Organizational constraints
• Problems with the tools / service

Never was the problem just one of these elements, but it was a mix of two or more of the elements. On very rare occasions it was just the person, but like many things where there is one instance there will often be more. These 5 simple beginning social questions get intermingled and tangled very quickly and are just the tip of the iceberg for all things social software that would follow for me.

The Person

The person is often the most common place to point with there is a problem or issue with social software. If it is seemingly a one-off problem keep good track of what it is, as quite often you are looking at social software's equivalent “patient zero” (also known in epidemiology as the index case) and understanding that one person's problems and issues as much as possible will help sorting out the real issues then if and what could or should be done to resolve the issues.

The downside with focussing on just the individual is everybody is different with their make up is different and has different experiences, has different cultural inflections, is a different personality type, has a different social role, as a different work role, and many other variables that influence who they are and their social interaction needs. Many of these variable or elements can be clustered with others with similar traits so that we are not dealing with an “every snowflake is different” syndrome, but need to at the core of it understand why every person (snowflake is different).

How Humans are Social

Understanding with some broad and unfocussed grasp of human sociality we need to look at if the problem at hand or the need in front of us is viewed from how humans are social. When we think in this perspective it is best not to use an innovator or early adopter perspective as they do things that are out of the norm (think of Mark Zuckerbergs egregious claim that people want to be openly social and nothing can be farther from the truth for most of human social experience, most humans normally are not wired to share everything openly and looking at those of us who are broken should not be mistaken for the norm). Thinking of how humans at scale or broadly generalized are social can help is a helpful perspective, but knowing what the real norm is, or the norm is for the relative cultures is helpful.

Cultural Influences - Cross Cultural Clash

How humans are social is often problematic as the norms we consider do not really translate well across cultures and particularly inside organizations. We do know that people with interact with others in smaller more comfortable venues, but who is included nor not included in the conversation or even simple sharing of things doesn't universally translate. I have twice run across people who have been working to solve lack of use of collaborative platforms that are shared between US/UK portion of the company and their Japanese counterpart. The core problem is in the forum groups the US and UK employees will share more openly and freely if their managers are not part of the discussion and do not have access to the group, but in Japan not having your manager in the discussion is seen as highly disrespectful and is something that employees should never do.

Not only does culture come from global cultural differences, but understanding an organizations culture is also essential as many times the organization has its own ingrained ways of handling things and its culture is broadly adopted through learning or other less formal enculturation patterns. Understanding what happens in the organization when something goes wrong is often a really good pulse point. Having the depth of understanding from change management professionals is helpful for sorting through an organization's baseline culture and the possibilities for modification to that existing perspective.

How and organization is managed and controlled is really helpful to understand as it often is echoed in how social software and collaboration tools are used and adopted. How malleable that corporate culture is will be very important to grasp at the stage of tool selection, because each tool and platform has its unspoken social interaction model that it echoes. Getting the wrong interaction model mapped to an organization's culture that runs counter to that organizations broad culture you will have issues. It is also important to keep in mind most organizations have many subcultures, which often makes one social interaction model difficult for adoption and optimal use.

Organization Constraints

Every organization not only has its own cultural fingerprint, but it is often constrained by external pressures, particularly if it is a publicly traded company, an organization in a heavily regulated industry, or has a lot of oversight as governmental and NGOs have with their public view and those that gave and review their charter. The external oversight along with rules and regulations as to what can be said, who can see it, who shouldn't see it, and formal record keeping all play an important role in use, as well as tool selection and its implementation.

This is also often intermingles with cross-cultural issues of roles in organizations as some, by their role (legal, HR, mergers and acquisitions, etc.) are far more restrictive and not prone to sharing or cooperation outside the bounds of their small trusted and approved collaborators working within their known bounds of permissions and sharing. Where as those in marketing roles are often far more comfortable interacting more openly and broadly and are willing to cooperate, but you take the sales slice of that marketing and you hit people who are heavily competitive and often have personality types prone not to share and are also rewarded and encouraged to be competitive (often with the mindset, you share with me as much as you want, but I'm am still competing heavily and sharing is not in my best interest at all - yes, heavily stereotypical and often for a reason).

Is it the Tool or Service

The medium that all of this social interaction takes place to get the work down plays a tremendous role in what works and doesn't work. As I pointed out recently in Social Reticence of a Click things as simple as a star to favorite things (as the only option for one of three different social intentions) can lead to serious problems (serious if getting fired is serious)). Most (I have yet to find one that actually grasps this, but I am open to being surprised) of the analyst firms out there have simple check boxes that do a tremendous dis-service to social software and collaboration services as the things that actually matter and are needed to be understood are not included in any of the check box mindset understandings of the world. The magic quadrant and other farcical measures don't help understand what is needed to make good choices and this often leads organizations to purchase the wrong tools for their needs.

Often the tools get in the way from our optimal interactions as many of the elements that are important to grasp as put forward above (as simply and thinly as they have been conveyed) were not grasped in the consideration, selection, purchasing, nor implementation and honing of the service. Far too often the tools have been created outside of the depth of understanding of human social interactions and implemented by IT whom, as was brilliantly broad brush stated by Maciej Ceglowski of Pinboard, is as relevant to do the work as having a Mormon bartender (having spent much of my professional life within IT and dealing with social this is as apt a metaphor as any).

The tool is often one of the pain points, as most do not embrace human social needs as they run counter to how humans are social. But, the tools is not always the part to blame.

It is A Mix

As it is with many things, it is not the individual pieces of this 5 part question looking to find a simple answer, but it is almost always a mix of some, if not all of these five elements. Our poorly thought through understanding that social is simple quickly hits reality that we must get beyond simple social understandings to understand how it is complicate and complex to we can move beyond. Looking at these five elements knowing which ones play what roles as part of the foundation of the problem set is essential, but having good data and understanding is needed, but also a solid understanding in of this panoply of intertwingled elements and how to best make an adaptive service that meets the needs of the people who have been waiting for a long time for a good social and collaborative service that meets their needs of business as it takes a larger step to better interactions in the work environment. Yes, most don't know they have been waiting, but most know the tools they have been strapped to in the past and often currently are not anything that they should be and often the tools and services are not really usable and IT spent money to create a problem rather than taking large strides to solve it. It is time to get beyond that, but doing so takes moving beyond the model of simple social.

Getting Beyond Simple Social

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Cooperation, Coordination, and Competition

There has been a lot of discussion of late in the social media circles about cooperation and how all social tools and services and their managers need to embrace that model. What is really clear is they have never run or tried to run social environments at any scale that have a broad representation of a population.

In reality there are at least three interactive community types that show up in representative populations, like those you get in a town or a city, or an organization’s internal social platforms. The three interactive community types are: 1) Cooperation; 2) Coordination, and 3) Competition. These three all work in tension with each other. In smaller social settings you will likely run into cooperation and it can work swimmingly. But, the reason that it works so well is there are likely not differences of opinion, different, motivations, and counter purposed goals.

As any social setting grows in size the cohesion and common interests (homogeneity) are diluted with other inters and motivations, just as a hamlet grows into a village, they ease of cooperation moves into the dire need for coordination. As we move to towns or cities, or larger organizations with more than a few hundred people or across more than one location coordination is needed. Cooperation is often quite easy with small groups, but even getting more than two or three small groups to work easily coordination is needed as the ease, and often the pure ability, of cooperation is gone and there needs to be concerted effort and guidance applied through coordination. There can be coordination through agreement as much as their can be coordination through difference. The skills needed for those polar realities are different, but the ability to listen, negotiate, mitigate, and coerce is needed.

The underlying tension is related to competition, which run very strong in certain personality types, but also in various industries. The social interaction designs for competitive personalities are very different from cooperative or those who are comfortable in coordinated models. But, nearly all populations have some representation (small or large) of people (or organizations) who are highly competitive. Thinking that in a social environment, unless it is small and focussed, our community or social interactions are going to be purely cooperative is a bit naive and crazy (or a great way to go crazy quickly).

It really takes understanding humans social interactions at scale and working in them for a few years to see the realities. Humans are as diverse as they are similar and there is no generalizing how humans behave with out understanding the variety of social types (personality, social interactions, social roles, organizational types, and work role types among others). Talk with any organization of any size (above a few hundred people or even one hundred people with more than one location) and you see the difficulties of finding one solution and one way forward.

Social Reticence of a Click

A few years back I was talking about problems many people having problems with social interaction elements in their work social platforms (where it really clicked were many early adopter types who have used social web tools for many many years running into issues). The problems related to activities they thought were private were showing up in the public stream. People were finding that their own understanding of many social interaction patterns and use of features had many, and often unknowable, variations that made their intent for an action often broadly misunderstood.

As I have talked about this over the past four years or so at in client projects, presentations, and workshops there seems to continually be problems of interpretation. This isn’t really surprising that problems of misinterpretation occur as most understanding around activity and actions have meaning constructed by and within the culture the actions take place.

Problems of Favorites

One of the design elements from social web services that made its way into many social work platforms is the simple star for favorites. It is simple and innocuous it means the person favorites something. But, in many social web platforms it isn’t or was not easy to see these actions publicly. The act of clicking the star on Twitter often only was seen by the person who clicked on it and it put the favorited item in their collection.

The Twitter favorite star is now more problematic as it is now broadcasted and the person who has had an item favorited gets notification (if they so choose, and it is on by default). Looking at other people’s favorites has for years been public and likely has been from the day it was added. The reality is it required RSS or using a service that notified you when somebody (and who it was) favorited an item. Not having the favorites be easily found nor broadcasted created an easy environment for people to create their own social meaning of what the favorite does and means, much like the over all broadly correctly answerable questions, “what is Twitter and how are you supposed to use it”.

Meaning of actions is often a social construction by the community that uses a service. But, it also can have many sub-communities creating alternate and conflicting meanings and understandings. Where it really gets fun is when the service’s desired or stated meaning, “Clicking the star means you like it and put it in your favorites” directly next to the star or as a tool tip (hover notice), often is the second social understanding and the communities using the service opt for their own explanations and understanding of meaning.

Since Twitter made the notifications of favorites public, it has caused considerable concern and problems for many who had never considered their favorites to be public. The act and collection of their favorite items was theirs, not the domain of others.

Source of the Reticence of a Click

The problem isn’t germane to Twitter or any other service it is rather broad. It is one of the big reasons why use of social platforms inside organizations can take a while to get adoption going. Why things are stuck is unclear meaning. People are getting easily stuck with the lack of clarity around:

• What a interactive element on any of the pages does
• How broadly is the action shared (public or private or something between)
• What does the action mean
• Who is the action really interpreted

Three of these four need to be clarified much more clearly in services. Sadly, many services are people who do not understand the limited adoption and even more limited use of the services they are echoing the interactions from. All of this keeps people guessing, and not wanting to get it wrong they opt not to try seemingly simple features and functionality.

Why is Something So Simple So Hard to Grasp?

The action of clicking a star to favorite something is easy. Just as easy as clicking a “Like” button, which also has the same problems.

What happens after that simple click is where things get really goofy. These simple social services have stayed simple, but how people use them and how people think of the actions they take is far more diverse and complicated. There are four meanings that can be individually be construed by the clicking of the favorite star:

• One can favorite something so others can see it is one of their favorite items
• A person can click the star to note they have seen this and approve
• One can mean I have read this and is sharing that publicly
• A person can hold on to some thing for later review and doesn’t mean like or dislike nor approve

This variety of meaning is very common. The problem is that one button is used for many purposes as the service is simple with a simple uncluttered interface that doesn’t have options for alternate meanings, say an anchor to hold on to something, and a “+1” for things that are approved of or liked, which the star for a personal favorite for one’s own purposes can stand on its own.

What Could Go Wrong?

This is all just simple silly social software, what could possibly go wrong. For some of us it was clear that things could get muddled and muddy from the beginning. But, what could go wrong rather often has gone wrong, some with more problematic consequences than anticipated. Often these community and sub-community derived understandings lead to poor understanding and miscommunication through assumption. But, lacking functionality or means to account for the variety of meaning people intend socially or personally this will continue (see clearly labelled and hinted meanings above for reality of how social meaning works with only one option available).

In the past couple years the stories I would hear from my work or speaking engagements grew more dire. Until I talked with one company that had an employee fired things got so confused. But, not long after that first story another company had nearly the same thing happen, while other organizations have similar issues with out the dire outcomes.

In both cases a person saw something float through their internal microblogging service and it piqued their interest. They looked at what had been shared and saw problems, but were swamped with existing tasks and heavy workload so they added the favorite star to put it in their own collection and come back to it in a couple weeks to provide the needed insight and feedback. In both instances their companies rarely moved quickly on anything, as ideas would floated and draft white papers go around, with about a month or more for feedback. But, the social platforms had made the floating of ideas and getting feedback go much more quickly. Those who had floated the idea saw the person has put a “star of approval” on the idea and since many of the people who they wanted feedback from or approval from has responded with feedback or approval they started acting on the plans within weeks not the month plus that things normally took.

In both cases the people who had critical feedback related to gaps or large problems they saw in the proposal or white paper responded when they saw or heard actions were taking place based on those ideas. Both spoke up that they had critical information to provide, but people had been hired or received notification their job was changing and contracts for resources has started to be signed. Upper management was furious as the change had already started to happen in days with commitments behind them. Upper management liked the idea of being more nimble and agile so to move more quickly. But, this was not an “oops” situation it was one that somebody needed to be let go and somebody was let go in both instances.

Resolution?

The problem is not the the tools were use nor how quickly things happened and commitments made. The problem is the clarity of meaning and intent was lost because the actions and activities that have divergent meanings were packed into one design element. Understanding from a design and engineering perspective what people not only want to do, but actually do and mean by that action is essential. Our work tool have long been over due for cleaning up and focus on use so that they become more simple. But, good design and understanding that goes into it, or needs to go into it, can be short cut. Copying a service and its interactions without understanding the social interaction design and meaning of actions, be it intent or by social construct is essential.

It is best to start with a solid platform, which may require bringing in somebody to help frame what that is in context to the needs as well as the social and technical environments you have.

Social Relevance in KM

Last week Luis Suarez posted a fantastic piece KM, Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business: One and The Same, which was not only dead on, but also brought to the forefront many discussions I have been having over the past  few years. The discussions revolve around depth of understanding the social tools inside organizations and the troubles many organizations run into about 6 months to 18 months in (I’ve had many long discussions with Stewart Mader about this, which he calls the One Year Club). This One Year Club continually triggers organizations to consider what tools and practices around them and deeply question if they made the correct choices. Often they selected tools based on initial interaction patterns with the tools and how the tools and services are considered in popular circles and memes.

Luis piece triggers these discussions as I have been coming back to some of my knowledge management (KM) foundations laid in the late 90s. By then I had a few years dealing with social software in organizations running into the usual headaches and questions around, “is it people, humans being social, the organization, and/or the tools interwoven into all of this that are the crux of the problem” needed to be asked with every bump and hurdle. When touching on KM I was finding solid thinking on not only information management issues (that echoed under graduate work in my major of organizational communication and communication theory, but also social networking and social interactions that were the underpinnings of my masters degree in public policy), but the intersection of how humans are social and how they communicate.

In 2007 I had the fortune to speak at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference on the subject of folksonomy and I found a good connection with people in organizations trying social software deployments and running into the same issues I had in the mid-90s. Those who were speaking and presenting who were laying out solid methods for thinking through the issues and the potential path(s) forward had one similarity, they had a KM background. I also was finding similar with some vendors who grasped the complexity of the issues around information, people, social interactions, and organizations. Here too, many of them had backgrounds in KM either having built KM tools that didn’t work optimally (KM tools in the late 90s to mid-00s were miserable piles of technology that rarely enabled people to easily get what they knew out of their wonderful minds and into a system to share it with others - having been responsible for more than a few flavors of these beasts they all were far from easy and kept people from sharing easily - it wasn't KM that was bad it was the tools). But, finding this pocket of people I who grasped the difficulties around tools, humans being social, and business felt like home, a little bit more like home than the pure Web 2.0 slice of social tools, as it required dealing with mainstream as well as early adopters (who comprised much of the Web 2.0 fan base then).

You may notice I didn't mention consultants in that mix for Enterprise 2.0 in 2007, I didn't as most (a rare few exceptions) really didn't have deep understanding, nor seems to want it, as they were trying to figure out how to get a jump on this new term and potential pond of money around a buzzword. In 2007 the people in companies trying to do things had the best understanding of needs, problems, and potential way forward with the vendors following rather close behind.

KM, Really?

The core of this understanding and seeing potential and problems at hand was a foundation in KM. You ask, “Why is that important?” One of the things happening in the mid to late 90s in organizations along with this increasing buzz around KM as another buzz around the promise of e-groups and e-collaboration. These “e” tools (far from being an “E ticket” to anything) were often put under the purview of KM people as these tools not only were aimed helping people work together in a digital environment, but they were key to a key aim of KM, getting the tacit knowledge people have out of their minds and in shared making it explicit so it can be found and used by others. This core tenet of KM was one of the key gems that was going to solve the organization’s problems, but the problem was the tools were not up to the task. This gap around the tools (which got increasingly worse as the tech solution was not to ease use and map to how people were social and interact, but was to make more complex and structured interfaces (more form fields and hurdles)) lead nearly everybody working with this social tools to have the common headache around is it the people, how people are social (culture), business, and/or tools that are the problem.

This became an valuable experience of trying to sort out what is and where are the problems that are holding the social and KM solutions back from achieving their potential. One of the things that came out of it was a rather robust understanding of how people in organizations are social (or are not) and how important the existing culture is to tool selection and development of practices. Not only is culture valuable, but the need for different interfaces for different uses of the tools as well as breaking down the wide variety of different social interaction needs for different phases and stages of information sharing, use, and reuse.

KM World 2009

In 2009 I was asked if I would be one of the keynote presenters for KM World 2009, I was honored and felt a bit out of my depth at first as this was KM, which I still held a deep regard for the practices and foundations that were put in place more than a decade back. I was humbled as the two other keynote presenters were Andrew McCaffe and Charlene Li. Much of my presentation focussed on lessons learned from the One Year Club and problems that seem common from social software use in organizations, which I was fearing a bit would dampen the hope and promise and way forward presentations that McCaffee and Li provided. But, having spent a fair amount of time talking and listening to attendees, I was realizing that there are many in the KM community running into these issues today, but many that have been dealing with these issues going back to the 90s. There is depth in the KM community that has long been there and many in the KM community are still sharing their incredible depth and experience bringing the whole community forward that wishes to come a long. As I presented many of the stumbling blocks I have seen companies hit and try to work through, as well as “did we choose the right tool for our organization, needs, and culture?” I saw near ubiquitous waves of head nods across the whole of the conference. The attendees are not just new to social tools, but know enough about the hype memes to have been bitten by them or run across them enough to look for ways forward.

This last year I was back at KMWorld, which also co-hosts the Taxonomy Bootcamp (which I keynoted this past 2010), Enterprise Search Summit" (I did a workshop on Enterprise Social Search this past year and will be keynoting the conference in May in NYC this year(2011)), and SharePoint Symposium where I found the offerings for organizations considering and using social tools inside the organization to be incredibly robust, with presenters and workshops by some of the best and most experienced in the industry (oddly they have never been at Enterprise 2.0 Conference, that really must get fixed). The sessions I sat in on were getting to the heart of real problems and people were sharing years of experience and pointing out the “it depends” questions and how to work through them (in my opinion there is no better aid than that). But, also heard people talking in depth about tools, their gaps, and where good fits for them may be. I also spent time talking with vendors who were finding the attendees to be incredibly well informed and asking solid questions that showed they understood not only their organizations well, but the type of tools that would fit their organization’s culture and needs. A couple of the vendors said this is a rare occurrence at other conferences.

There is a There There in KM

What KM World highlighted for me was there is and long has been a core and deep value that exists in KM. The depth of understanding that has been building and iterating over 15 or more years of experience learned (often the hard way), deep long research, and tackling the hard problems by going deep has incredible value. This value is deeply needed in other communities. As I pointed out in my last post, Social Scaling and Maturity social software in the organization starts out simple and relatively easy, but that changes quite a bit as it gets used.

There isn't a KM 2.0 as there is no need for it. The practices of KM have iterated and matured deeply and wonderfully and not that social software for organizations have started getting out of the way to allow people to get what they know out of their minds and share it more broadly, as has always been the aim of KM, we could start seeing real progress. Understanding the needs around the organization, culture, practice needs, and the tools that can best map to these needs, as well as more easily enable people to be social as humans are social can only give a nice spark to that promise and long vibrant vision.