Information-management | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

From noise to situational intelligence

February 10, 2012 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

Sumary : many users say that the problem that enterprise social platforms is the risk of infobesity and informational noise. Reality is more complex. As for infobesity, these platformes only collect information and have few impact on the fact people and systems generate more. The problem is more about how to distribute this information. Then comes things like activity streams and micro-blogging tools that raise another question : what’s necessary and what’s superfluous. In fact there’s a new context organizations and people are not very comfortable with. In a complex business world, it’s essentiel to feel signals to act and adapt permanently to external events that impact one. Feeling does not mean deep reading and understanding. Employees will have to learn to optimize their situational intelligence by making the most of the surrounding noise without being submerged by it.

On the one hand we see enterprises thinking about a more efficient way than email to organize information flows, exchanges, collaboration and information sharing. On the other hand the alternate solution also bring their own questions and fears.

As I recently said, after a large french company decided to ban internal emails :” that won’t decrease the amount of information that will only move to other places”. As a matter of fact it’s more about changing how one manage and deal with information flows than changing tools.

As a matter of fact, social software platforms will be more and more like “catch all”. As they improve in terms of functionalities, they will soon be able to catch anything any information produced, whatever its form or the software that produced it. Some think it may lead to infobesity but that’s not my opinion. Any information that need to be generated will be generated, the social platform only being the receiver, the container. We can even think that such platforms will help to prevent content replication across different systems.

The problem is not about information catching but information redistribution. From the user side, it means wondering what needs to be pushed to him and what should only be made available for whom searches it (improved by suggestion mechanisms to address the grey zone between both. Something bizarre since we are all deeply influenced by current approaches that, despite of the fact we’re submerged by too much pushed information, we still fear to miss something so we do nothing to clean up our information flows.

Two components of these new platforms raise questions : activity streams and micro-blogging tools that generate information flows in which many fear to drown themselves. What lead us to wonder if we need so much information and if it’s really useful.

Managing information and people is not the same thing

November 22, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : “accept as friend”, “add to your network”, “follow” are concepts that are more and more present in our personal and business lives. That does not come without human issues. One may be interested in the messages, information, signals shared by another person without having a good relationship with this person. Sometimes there’s even no relationship at all. The problem occurs more and for frequently in both the consumer web and enterprise tools where things are even more sensitive. Binding how one manages the information flows he receives and how he manages his relationships with others causes complex and complicated situations that are humanly uncomfortable for people. The solution is simple : splitting both. The good news is that it’s a very actual trend.

I recently wrote on the difference between signals and conversations. It’s not only about words : it’s about the whole approach for people, for the system as long as we admit that conversations is only one way among others to share and transmit information. It gets even more important if we consider that a given person may be more or less comfortable with one or the other and that one or the other will work better in a given context.

A similar issue applies to relationships, contacts, friends etc. Managing what I’ll call relationships is about to become a pain on the consumer web and raises many questions on enterprise internal tools tools.

I won’t mention the wording that can kill the system by itself. It’s the somehow political context of work there’s a big difference between adding someone as a friend or as a contact. Accepting or requesting such a request from one’s manager or staff member is a kind of political and diplomatic decision. It comes even more critical when one has to make such a request, to state a relationship, to see what someone shares or interact with this person. Add to that the sensed attitude of users saying they don’t have the time (and often not the know-how) to manage as many relationships even if they need to shortly interact with one or the other to get things done.

It all comes from the confusion between managing one’s information flows and managing one’s contacts. By mixing up diplomacy and efficiency, many social platforms, internal or consumer facing, did not help their users and made themselves touchy to use.

What social Media Lack ? Intelligence

September 10, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : the increasing quantity of information generated by social media and the need for dealing with all this information regardless to its source is a barrier to an effective use that relies on users ability to priorize, classify and organize things into a hierarchy. Because of that, only a little minority is not scared by the flows that flow on their screens. To make future information systems usable we need to embed a kind of intelligence in the product rather than relying on the ability of a few people to use the tools in order to channel the flows and highlight what matters to each user, the ultimate step being to build conversing tools. After having tried to use the 2.0 logic to improve BI, now it’s time to use BI to improve 2.0 tools.

One of the main barriers to the use of social media in the workplace and to the transformation of work is that users feel lost. Two points are hidden behind this vague concept :

- lack of context. I won’t elaborate this point because Sameer Patel wrote an excellent post about this issue. Originally about Google Wave it can, in fact, apply to a wide range of things.

- fear of the mass of information that’s generated, of not being able to deal with it and manage it.

I think most people agree on the first point (now just wait to see how it will be turned into actual features), so let’s talk about the second.

If you are familiar with these tools, would it be at home or at work, you know that quantity is not a problem and is rather an opportunity once you know how to filter and prioritize. It can be done technically with the right functiunalities or tools, humanly by relying on the social filter made of your network. Information is like water, what matters is not to have less but to regulate the flow.

Now try to imagine the average user (what means 90% of users), facing any kind of stream (twitter, friendfeed or Facebool) and how his face’s going pale. Of course, these users can be trained, of ourse as time goes by more and more users will be comfortable with information flows. But what matters is today, and today it’s rather complicated. Missing the latest hilarious video shared by one’s uncle is not prejudial but things are not the same in the workplace. Add to that the the fear of admitting in front of colleagues that one didn’t see such or such important information, and you understand why there is a real problem.

The value of social media in the workplace relies on intelligence on two aspects :

- the intelligence people share with the tools

- the intelligence they use to survive in the flow and separate the wheat from the chaff.

Today the more active users on enterprise social platforms are those who meet the second criteria, sometimes because they already do it in their personal use of the web, sometimes because they learn quickly. That poses two problems :

The art of managing information

February 19, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Just the once won’t hurt, I’d like to share with you an interview given by Tom Davenport to the french economic newspaper “Les Echos”.

Here’s what he recommends

stop thinking about plumbing (technology) and focus on water (information)
wonder why, although information management relies up to 5% on technology and 95% on pyschology (Tom Peters), companies dedicate less 1% of their budgets to human issues.
start by mapping information’s presence within the company (without waiting for Information Management Systems to be deployed)
break informatician’s leadership on information management
help archivists to master new information management jobs
follow the example of television and press in information sharing

I wouldn’t have say it better.

Something to add ?

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Intranets and digital workplace, Knowledge & Information management Tagged With: davenport, Enterprise 2.0, information-management, knowledge-management

Intranet stores information, intranet 2.0 remembers of you though process

March 29, 2007 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

It’s sometimes very hard to explain to people who aren’t especially 2.0 savvy what difference it makes to use 2.0 solutions on their intranet. And to make them understand there’s no competition but complementarity between both.

In fact, as we all know, intranets mainly stores informations (or datas for those who makes the difference). What’s on the intranet can be considered as facts as it’s been validated and , since it’s published, must be considered as some kind of undisputed truth.

But, in many cases, when we have to face a similar case, or want to improve what has been done, we don’t only need facts, we need to know how where those facts are coming from. Why did we build such a process, how did we come to the conclusion that in such case we must have such answer. Because context always change, applying the same reasonning may bring different solutions depending on outside factors. That’s why we need not only to have the solution,but to keep formalized the way we get to it.

Most of time, getting to a solution is an informal process, made of talks, choices, arbitrations…a very informal process that brings to a formal solution. But since we have the solution we often forget the past and months or years later, nobody can explain the “why” of choices, arbitrations, no trace of the amount of ideas that were suggested on a brainstorming… Of course because it’s an informal, process which content can’t be seized and capitalized.

In the era of knowledgeworking the “how and why we thought” is as important as the “what’s our conclusion”, it’s clearly valuable.

Intranet 2.0 is the place were those informal and social practices may take place, a virtual place for interactive relationship between distant people involved in a projet. An as things take place on the intranet, we can keep trace of them, and so doing learn from the past and be able to improve easily what’s been done before.

Filed Under: Intranets and digital workplace, Web & Usages Tagged With: information-management, intranet, intranet-2.0, social computing

Information provided to managers is useless

January 9, 2007 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

That’s the conclusion of an Accenture Report (via Toby Ward). It inspired me some conclusions.

We often focus on searching information. But before being searched, information has to be published. It’s not only a matter of how to find the right data, we also have to think about how information is published, validated and shared.

Published because one thing that refrain people from publishing information is that it takes too much time. Tools are heavy, sometimes your have to spend ten minutes filling a form and half a minute keybording the information. It’s such a waste of time that people often give up. It’s also very important when an information isn’t up to date. If I know the information in the intranet isn’t up to date anymore, if I know what to replace it with but if updating will divert me from my job too much time I won’t share the new information.

So we have to ensure tools are barriers to publication. But it’s not only a matter of tool. It’s also a matter of process.

If an information has to be validates by 3 or 5 people before being published you face two risks. The first is you’ll never have up-to-date information. The second is to overload people who have to validate and make their task more and more difficult. And, at the end, who will decide such or such information may be usefull to another part of the organization ? Who knows about everybody’s needs ? Only people who needs information, not people who dispatch it.

So we won’t solve this problem only with better search engines. We also need flexible publishing tools and process that make information sharing and collaboration easy, whith very few validation (even no validation).

Something like social publishing, tagging and bookmarking…

At this point a new question follows : how can we define the “right information” ?