I spent much of my childhood and youth in an unusual household, on the 4th floor of a block of flats in central/south Calcutta. Surrounded by books, and by people who’d actually read the books. Full of life, from about 5am to around 1am, and sometimes in between. Populated by around 10 “residents” (including me, my 4 siblings and my parents), and on average another half-dozen “guests” (who sometimes spent more time there than some of the residents). It was not unusual to have two dozen people there of an evening, in what was meant to be 1500 square foot of 2-bedroomed flat.

Wonderful times.

There’d always be something going on. Duplicate bridge in this corner; chess there; carroms in the next room; an intense game of scrabble; a guitar being strummed pensively; late 60s-early 70s music playing in the background, the odd game of cards. Even table-tennis, played on an amalgam of wooden desks with a line of books serving as the net.

If you didn’t feel like “playing” something, then you could just join in the conversation. Or conversations. Usually covering the simple stuff: religion, politics, sport, food and relationships. A classic adda. [Incidentally, I was delighted to find out that the OED now has an entry for adda]. And if you didn’t fancy that, then you could just kibitz, or stay in the corner where trivia questions were being lobbed across the room like water balloons.

In such surroundings you would expect a few odd things to be taken as normal. Doing the Times crossword was one of them; for most of my childhood, we took two copies of the Statesman; for a short period, we took three. My father would not countenance waking up without the day’s virgin Times crossword to complete.

It was a strange house, a literary house. People would wander about spouting poetry from Herrick to Coleridge, Burns to Ogden Nash, trade quotations from Shakespeare and Shaw, sayings from Wilde and PG Wodehouse, Churchill and Caryl Brahms.

Some managed to go placidly amidst the noise and haste, reading whatever took their fancy. Not just fiction and nonfiction, but reference books as well. Of which we had a goodly many. They included, amongst others,  Chambers’ 20th Century Dictionary. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.  Hobson-Jobson.

And Fowler’s Modern English Usage, a personal favourite. (My thanks to Skoob Books for discovering and sharing the rare photo of Henry Watson Fowler).

Which brings me to the point of this post.

One of my favourite sections of Modern English Usage, Fowler’s magnum opus, reads as follows:

respective(ly). Delight in these words is a wide-spread but depraved taste; like soldiers and policemen, they have work to do, but, when the work is not there, the less we see of them the better; of ten sentences in which they occur, nine would be improved by their removal. The evil is considerable enough to justify an examination at some length; examples may be sorted into six groups: A, in which the words give information needed by sensible readers; B, in which they give information that may be needed by fools; C, in which they say again what is said elsewhere; D, in which they say nothing intelligible; E, in which they are used wrongly for some other word; & F, in which they give a positively wrong sense.

The article then goes on to detail each of these six “uses”. Here’s what Fowler has to say about type B, “foolproof uses”:

The particular fool for whose benefit each respective(ly) is inserted will be defined in brackets. Final statements are expected to be made today by Mr Bonar Law & Mr Millerand in the House of Commons & the Chamber of Deputies respectively (r. takes care of the reader who does not know which gentleman or which Parliament is British, or who may imagine both gentlemen talking in both Parliaments). /The Socialist aim in forcing a debate was to compel the different groups to define their respective attitudes (the reader who may expect a group to define another group’s attitude). /It is very far from certain that any of the names now canvassed in Wall Street will secure the nomination at the respective Republican and Democratic Conventions (the reader who may think that Republicans and Democrats hold several united conventions)./ We have not the smallest doubt that this is what will actually happen, & we may discuss the situation on the footing that the respective fates of these two Bills will be as predicted (the reader who has read the prediction without sufficient attention to remember that it is double).

Foolproof uses. What a delightful turn of phrase.

You know something? I wish someone would write something similar on topics like shared, public and open, particularly when it comes to analysing costs.

How many degrees in rocket science does it take to be able to figure out that something shared will cost the sharers less than if each had that something in a not-shared state?

How clever does one have to be in order to figure out that building walls and doors and locks is more expensive than not building them?

What level of IQ does a person need to assess that something available to all is likely to be cheaper than something exclusive?

Making things private and closed and exclusive comes at a cost.

A cost that is considerably higher than that associated with making things public and open and shared.

There will always be reasons to make things private. But that is not the default.

There will always be reasons to make things closed. But that is not the default.

There will always be reasons to make things exclusive. But that is not the default.

People need to understand the waste involved in making things private, closed, exclusive when they don’t need to be so. More on this later.

Prologue

Given the depth and nature of conversations on this subject, I think I’d better let this one run for a while. Many of you have commented in different ways, by writing in, by talking to me, by commenting on this blog, or on Facebook or Twitter, or even by writing blog posts and pointing me towards them. Thank you everyone, I really appreciate it. It helps me learn, it is one of the reasons I write here.

[For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, this is now the third post in an emergent series on Social Objects In The Enterprise. The first two can be found here and here.]

Foundations

Amongst the links, tweets and comments there were some posts and documents worth sharing with all.

For example, Todd Barnard pointed me towards the original post by Jyri Engestrom on Social Objects; I realised that while I referred to him repeatedly, I didn’t actually share the link, an absolute must-read. So thank you Todd. Similarly, while the terms “systems of engagement” and “systems of record” may be quite common now, Geoff Moore wrote extensively about them a month or so ago, in a paper entitled Systems Of Engagement and the Future of Enterprise IT. My thanks to John Mancini of AIIM for alerting me to this.

There are many influences for the rest of this post, key amongst them being Esther Dyson (who’s often mentored me without always knowing she’s doing it), Hugh Macleod (who introduced me to the work of Jyri Engestrom), John Seely Brown (for making me think about how information flows and how organisations really learn), Steven Johnson (for bringing “emergence” into my understanding), Howard Rheingold, Stewart Brand and Amy Jo Kim (for helping me gain some perspective on virtual communities), John Hagel (who, with JSB and with Lang Davison, continues to influence me about flow, non-linearity and patterns) and Clay Shirky (who keeps making sure I think hard about what’s happening in the firm, and in the world at large, by foisting “rules” upon me that give me a fresh and worthwhile insight. I am still working through the implications of cognitive surplus in the enterprise).

The ideas I’ve inherited as a result of spending time with many of the people named above, and by reading what they’ve written, have all tended to be absorbed in a framework whose foundation was laid by The Cluetrain Four: Doc Searls, David Weinberger, Chris Locke and Rick Levine. Tom Malone’s The Future of Work and Ricardo Semler’s Maverick were early influences as well; Sean Park, an erstwhile colleague at Dresdner Kleinwort, helped me enormously as well, particularly with the discussions we’ve had over the years about Carlota Perez’s work.

Why am I sharing all this and making this post sound a bit like an introduction to a book? Because I think people learn by “getting inside other people’s heads”. Because I think that in future, quite a lot of organisational learning will take place this way, as the cost of discovering roots and catalysts and influences, of sharing them and of being able to augment them, reduces sharply.

Some more links

This is almost a bibliography in reverse; what I’m doing here is linking to a few earlier posts of mine you may find useful in making sense of the rest of this post:

• Building society for the 21st century
• About this blog
• Twitter: A submarine in the ocean of the web
• Facebook: the new new telco
• The Maker Generation in the enterprise
• The Facebookisation of the Enterprise
• Of Push and Pull
• Facebook and the Enterprise: Part 5: Knowledge Management
• Facebook and the Enterprise: Part 1
• Why we share: A sideways look

Some of them date back over five years; none of them is essential reading for you to absorb the rest of this post; but for those of you who’re interested, I believe it will help you.

The role of social objects in the enterprise

(a) Assumptions

There are some core assumptions underlying my writing all this, I think it’s worth laying them out. First, that what passes for work in most enterprises is knowledge work. Second, that there is a war for talent when it comes to hiring knowledge workers. Third, that enterprises are changing from being hierarchies of customers and products to networks of relationships and capabilities, that human and social capital are gaining in prominence. Fourth, that the way we work is also changing, from stocks to flows, from the static to the dynamic, from the linear to the non-linear. Fifth, that there’s a new generation in the workplace, with newer still to come, born after the internet, trained in the web, equipped with always-on ubiquitous tools that can read and write text and sound and image and film.

And finally, we’re in a global social, political and economic environment that we’ve never really experienced before, where the pace of change is vast, and where knowing what to do isn’t a simple thing. An environment where the spectrum and continuum of enterprise is undergoing radical change, with some heading towards the hyperglobal low-touch model, some towards the hyperlocal high-touch variant, and where the in-betweeners, the “nationals”, don’t know what to do: they’re stuck in the same place countries and governments are, seeking to figure out their role in the new global structures.

(b) Rationale

Against the backdrop of those assumptions, it is not difficult to put forward an argument about the need to move from process-based thinking to to pattern–based thinking, with greater reliance on immediate information, with more emphasis on data-driven and event-driven activity.

In this context, it’s worth taking a look at this post by Thierry de Baillon on Moving Beyond Work as Usual in A Complex World, along with a post he refers to, Venessa Miemis’s Essential Skills for 21st Century Survival: Part 1: Pattern Recognition. [My thanks to John Hagel for bringing the de Baillon post to my attention, and for reminding me of the Pattern Recognition post by Venessa Miemis].

We have to start thinking about social objects in the enterprise as having two primary purposes: to collect patterns, via the metadata generated around the social object; and to collect pattern recognisers, via the communities built around the social object.

Chris Locke, when I first met him over a decade ago, spent time explaining to me the importance of “organic gardening”, a catchall for the role played by interests other than work in building community amongst the people at work. What he said resonated with me, particularly with what I’d learnt from phenomena like the WELL.

People who congregate electronically around digital social objects form relationships with each other as a result of that congregation; there are birds-of-a-feather-like effects, the bringing together of people with similar interests, though not necessarily similar views on those interests.

These people who are brought together tend to avoid the herd-instinct problem primarily because of this, the tendency to congregate around interests rather than views on the interests. Politics rather than the red-or-blue of party politics. Football rather than the red-or-blue of Manchester or Liverpool. Religion rather than the red-or-blue of Catholic or Protestant. Technology rather than the red-or-blue of Google or Microsoft.

Because they come together with a commonality of interest but a diversity of views, the likelihood of Linus’s Law increases: Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. So when such people collaborate, the quality of collaboration tends to be high.

Then, when you bring in the Clay Shirky concept of “cognitive surplus”, the potential for radical change in the enterprise emerges. People working together to correct the raw data and information bases that underpin the technical infrastructure of the firm, the extended enterprise, the market, the economy.

Social objects will also themselves become repositories of metadata related to relationships and information flows and collaborative activity, increasing the amount of information available about the actors and activities, and thereby reducing the likelihood of friction and tension between collaborators a la Gregory Benford’s Law :  passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.

My next post will be about examples of social objects in the enterprise. In the meantime, please keep the comments coming.

 

Note: This is a follow-up from yesterday’s post.

A quick recap of what I said yesterday.

Businesses are morphing from customer-product hierarchies to relationship-capability networks. This is placing intense pressure on enterprise systems bases, which have traditionally kept the Fort Knox-like “systems of record” distinct and separate from the somewhat more promiscuous “systems of engagement”.

Systems of record often dealt with private objects, hard to access, secure, confidential: unpublished trading figures from an accounting system, for example. Systems of engagement, on the other hand, often dealt with public objects, usually accessed via the web: a link to a blog post recommended by someone in your network, for example.

Systems of record were perceived to be secure and confidential in comparison to systems of engagement; however, as extracts from systems of record were usually embedded in documents, spreadsheets and presentations, and then sent as e-mail attachments, the true level of security is questionable. Witness what Bradley Manning did.

Systems of engagement are perceived to be open and “insecure”; yet, learning from the facebook model, it can be argued that the granular nature of the security of access is actually of a far higher order than that afforded to the systems-of-engagement-information-accessed-via-email-attachments.

So that was yesterday, in a tenth of the space. Today I thought I’d spend more time actually thinking about the social objects themselves rather than the systems environment inhabited by them. First, some principles:

• An object becomes social only when it is shared; it is the sharing that makes the object social, not the object per se.
• A social object creates value not for itself but for the community in which it is shared.
• The process by which value is created is by the community interacting with the object, leaving comments, classifications, tags, notes, notations, corrections, observations, links, questions and even answers.
• If a social object falls in a forest and there’s no one to record and comment on its passage, it doesn’t make a sound.
• Social objects get cocooned in metadata, the who-what-when-how-much that describes frequency of access, the population doing the accessing, number of edits, when and how carried out and by whom, relative popularity, links, tags and so on.
• By inspecting the metadata we learn about ourselves and about the organisation(s)

While we’ve spoken about collaboration and teamwork for decades, the truth is that most corporate cultures are still not really about sharing. Which makes the very concept of an enterprise social object had to imagine. This is exacerbated by the continuing existence of blame cultures, which contribute to the fear of transparency and the pushback against sharing. It goes against human nature to help arm those who would attack you.

The tools we’ve had in the past have also militated against sharing; if e-mail, attachments and repositories are all we could come up with, we should all pack up and go home.

One of the benefits of consumerisation is that the enterprise can watch and learn from the actions, behaviours and tools of the consumer prior to implementing equivalent systems in the enterprise.

Which is why we should keep looking at facebook, at twitter, at the iPhone, at iTunes, at YouTube, at Flickr, every time we want to learn about what to do in the enterprise.

If we do that, we will learn more about the nature of social objects in the enterprise than we would any other way.

Next post, I shall look at social object metadata, information flows and a little more closely at the objects themselves, all in an enterprise context.

In the meantime, please keep the comments coming; I hope you find what I write useful in return.

 

Origins of “social objects”

Nearly four years ago, Jyri Engestrom introduced us to the concept of social objects, and Hugh Macleod built on that theme, and what they said really resonated with me. As a result, I’ve been writing about social objects for a while, as you can see here from three years ago here, or more recently here and, only three months ago, here.

During that time, there’d been something gnawing away at me, driven largely by my gaining an increasing understanding of what consumerisation really means and implies. And what’s been gnawing away at me is this: are there social objects in the enterprise? If so is there a difference between the behaviour and characteristics of social objects in the enterprise and in the world at large? And does any of this matter anyway?

It seemed to make sense that the answer to these questions would be found in a better understanding of the systems used to create, publish, enrich, comment on and even exchange the digital social objects, so that was what I did. I engaged as passionately as possible with each wave, played with them for a while, sought to define analogies for them within the enterprise, and then refined them further by publishing my views on this blog and learning from the comments. This was what I did with blogs and wikis to begin with, then with facebook, and then with twitter. More recently, since joining Salesforce, I’ve been able to look more deeply into some of these aspects, particularly as I immersed myself in Chatter.

Systems of Record

The first layer of learning was about the differences between the enterprise world and the consumer world when it came to some of these systems. The thinking goes something like this:

• For centuries firms were viewed as hierarchies of customers and products. Naturally, this view permeated into the way firms accounted for what they did; everything in a firm was recorded as relating to customers or products, under the broad headings of costs, revenues and overheads. More recently this perspective of the firm has changed: as Boston professor N. Venkatraman has been telling us for a decade, firms are now networks of relationships and capabilities. Human and social capital are therefore rising in prominence; the conventions and systems to recognise and value and account for them are, however, somewhat lacking.
• The first “systems” to be computerised, comprising the processes, records and conventions underpinning what people actually did, these systems related to the ledgers and books of record that were being automated. So what we did was to enshrine the centuries-old way of looking at firms as hierarchies of products and customers. The way cost and profit centres were set up, the codes used, the way things were aggregated, “rolled up”, everything we did was redolent of the original thesis: firms were hierarchies of products and customers.
• These first systems, over time, became the backbone of the firm, the “books and records” that were inspectable, auditable, audited and reported. As the years went by, people started calling them enterprise resource management or ERP systems.
• The 1980s and 1990s provided firms with two shocks. The first shock was a real hard one. They discovered they had “customers”. Life did not actually begin and end within the walls of the organisation they worked for and often revered. So firms began to think of customers as something more than account numbers, and tried not to show their irritation when these “customers” actually wanted some help or advice or attention. Retail outlets actually began to think of the space they used for administration, in contrast to the space they reserved for “customers”. Utility service providers such as banks and water companies and transportation providers and telcos began their painful paths towards recognising the very existence of the customer, a path they continue to be on.
• The second shock was not quite as hard, but it was a shock nevertheless. Firms discovered that they had “supply chains”, that vertical integration was no longer guaranteed, that they needed to partner with others, source from others, in order just to survive. [At this stage I shall resist the temptation to speak of the tremendous damage done to industry in general as everything in sight was “re-engineered”, an age of some truly appalling waste in the context of misguided and suboptimal reorganisations and outsourcing.]
• So during the decade between 1990 and 2000, the world of ERP had been joined by at least two more TLAs, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Supply Chain Management (SCM). [While I saw all three terms active in the mid-to-late 1980s, they were slow to come out of the gates from a computing perspective].
• This ERP-SCM-CRM world was just beginning to toodle along as the Web emerged and grew, and as a result a fourth classification emerged, that of e-commerce or e-biz or sometimes just “fulfilment”. And this whole shebang begat a slew of forks and joins and renames as they evolved, and billing, payments, complaints, enquiries and so on all took their place somewhere within that pantheon. Some went the way of CRM, others disappeared into the ERP camp, yet others wormed their way into e-commerce.
• And so the stage was set. These were the transactions of old, the full-grown equivalents of what started off as TP systems, laying out the books and records of the firm in all their glory. The Systems of Record were present, ready and accounted for.

Systems of Engagement

The second layer of learning dealt with the systems I’d become more familiar with over the past decade or so, in my post-Cluetrain state. [Note: I love The Cluetrain Manifesto, I think everyone who enjoys reading this blog should read that book at least once; I’m privileged to call the four authors my friends, and honoured to have been asked to submit a chapter to their 10th anniversary edition, now available in paperback as well.]

Cluetrain taught me many things, but three things stand out as the most important for me: one, that firms make money because their customers like what they stand for and what they do; two, that good firms have real, active relationships with their customers, they are in constant conversation with them, that the conversation is the way that values and needs and wants and aspirations and intentions are discovered and shared; and three, that for some reason firms keep forgetting this and morphing into command-and-control fortresses that “lock in” customers, “target” them and various other forms of corporate waterboarding.

Right now my thinking is somewhere along these lines:

• Systems of engagement make it easier for people to communicate with each other; the original telcos and post offices provided systems of engagement; as we added ways to communicate, these agencies had to change; Microsoft was the leading “system of engagement” provider for most of the last twenty-five years; facebook has now usurped their place.
• Initially, systems of engagement start very open and informal for a given communication medium: post, telegraph, telephone, email, IM, SMS, twitter, video calling. Then, as critical mass forms, many things change, search costs increase and the need for directories emerges. Classification systems enter the fray. Better search tools evolve.
• Each medium of communication comes with its own jargon, its short cuts, its conventions. Some of these fade away as a greater level of formality is afforded, others become a part of the furniture. [A friend and erstwhile colleague, Stu Berwick, used to remind me “It’s polite to be silent” when talking about chat. What I’ve learnt since is that this is true for most new communications techniques. When I began using email, you didn’t have to reply to every one. The same was true for chat, for SMS, for twitter. But now….]
• In a digital world, as the “system of engagement” matures, something else happens. The process of communication gets embedded with objects. Attachments to emails: documents, presentations, spreadsheets to begin with, all kinds of files later. Attachments to SMS: just pictures and sounds to begin with, soon video. Attachments to twitter: links to begin with, then photographs and sounds, now all of the above, usually presented as a shortened link.
• The internet changes the way systems of engagement work. All communication becomes at least two-way. Attachments disappear, to be replaced by everyone “looking” at the same object. The ability to comment on, enrich, amend, annotate is a powerful change agent, transforming the value of the embedded object. As a result, the tools change: digital social objects are editable, amendable, commentable, taggable. Archivable, searchable, findable. But in a new form, with a plethora of comments and other actions wrapped around the object.

The emerging role of social objects in the enterprise

We’re only just learning about these two layers, the systems of engagement and the systems of record. But one thing we know already, they’re fundamentally different. Systems of record tend to get built like Fort Knox: robust, imposing, unfriendly, hard to enter, hard to exit carrying anything at all, a place known and loved by very few, yet relied upon by many. Systems of engagement, on the other hand, are diametrically different: entry is available to all and sundry, there’s a level of openness in all interaction, the core behavioural style looks positively promiscuous in comparison to systems of record.

This fundamental difference, open versus closed, appears to permeate throughout what passes for social objects in each layer.

So when you look at “social” objects in the “systems of engagement” layer, at first sight they appear very anti-social indeed. Reports and enquiries generated by the systems of record are made available and accessible using the same rules as the systems of record themselves, Fort Knoxian security.

Appearances are deceptive. Because the way the reports and enquiries manifest themselves in systems of engagement is usually through e-mail and, more accurately, through e-mail attachments. Which are about as secure as …. well you all know the story of Cablegate.

As against this, the social objects that tend to manifest themselves in the systems of engagement are fundamentally social in character. Web urls are the most common, often shortened for convenience. The social objects pointed to are usually public in origin and availability. Most multimedia “attachments” are essentially uploads to public sites rather than mail-like attachments.

The problem space

These are very interesting times. The two layers of systems, the systems of record and the systems of convenience, are coming closer together, tectonic plates sliding gently across each other. No one has a problem with the anti-social objects that remain closed and private and confidential within the confines of the systems of record. No one has a problem with the social objects that remain open and web-based and public within the “unconfines” of the systems of engagement.

The problem is really to do with the export of private objects from the systems of record into the public space of the systems of engagement.

The first time we tried to do this, we exported the private objects either partially or completely into documents, presentations or spreadsheets, then proceeded to make them uncontrollably public by attaching them to e-mail. And look where that got us.

This time around, with tools like Chatter, the binding and orchestration between systems of record and systems of engagement is granular and controlled, down to individual data elements. Access security is much simpler to implement. And there is no confusion between what forms a social object and what doesn’t.

Outlook for social objects in the enterprise

Objects per se aren’t social; it’s the community around the object that makes it social. As long as enterprises are about communities, we will have social objects in the enterprise. As we  continue to morph from product-customer hierarchies to relationship-capability networks, as we continue to bring human and social capital to the fore, as we continue to engage with our customers and supply chain, the enterprise will be more and more about communities.

And communities need social objects. Real social objects, not inadvertently publicised private objects.

More later.