Imagine being lost on a deserted island with no hope of being discovered with only a volleyball named Wilson to keep you company.  There’s a reason pirates used marooning as a form of torture.  It’s a miserable existence (if you can call it that) that usually doesn’t end so well.  But yet that’s what becomes of most corporate knowledge.  It’s left on various file servers across the enterprise with little hope of discovery or rescue (aka. reuse).

In my last post entitled Strategic Reuse Process, we looked at an overall framework for analyzing how information flows through an organization and the hurdles encountered on its way to reuse.  But how does an artifact go from Publication to Discovery (see here for definition)?  In this post I want to dig a little deeper and discuss the first hurdle on our way to reuse, Findability.

find-a-bil-ity n
a.  The quality of begin locatable or navigable
b.  The degree to which a particular object is easy to discover or locate.
c.  The degree to which a system or environment supports navigation and retrieval

Peter Morville from Ambient Findability

All of the definitions above work equally well for what I am going to discuss in this post, mainly how can we describe the factors that influence the findability of information assets within the context of an enterprise.

Since we already have a working definition of findability let’s turn our attention to building a classification system to help us sort out some of the things that impact findability.  I believe that findability has two dimensions (at least) that effect our ability to locate information.  First is the degree of sharing that an object experiences and secondly is the external data associated with it over time.  The degree of sharing is quite self-explanatory so let’s look next at what we mean by external data or what I’m calling applied semantics.

Applied Semantics

Applied Semantics deals with the relationship between various signs and symbols and what can be inferred from them related to the actual artifact they represent (whew!).  Now that that nasty bit is out of the way what does it mean.  In this case I believe that the quality and quantity of external meta data that describes the original publication produces a better chance of discovery which leads to a possibility for reuse.

There are many many bits of external data that can point to an artifact and I have only just scratched the surface by defining the following five classifications:

Unclassified

This represents information that has essentially little or no external classifications applied to it.  Random documents strewn across a file system with only the author’s memory or luck as the only means for discovery are a good example.  This represents the vast majority of knowledge in the enterprise.

Cataloged

Here there has been at least some attempt made to establish external data related to an artifact.  It could be as simple as a document filing system or as elaborate as a fixed hierarchy of topics in which documents can exist.  The internals of the publication may not be readily apparent but you have some idea about what it contains from the category in which it was cataloged.

Indexed

This is where search engines come in.  They can pick apart a document and index its internals and provide an external reference to it based on the content of the document.  In theory this should work great however in practice this often fails to turn up anything of significant benefit without other external data to use in conjunction with the artifact’s content.  For instance Google relies on the number of links that point to a specific page as well as the page’s content for its PageRank algorithm.

User Applied Metadata

These are user generated data points that impart meaning on an existing publication.  They can represent tags, ISDN numbers, author name, comments, etc.  Each of these provides invaluable information that helps consumers find and use content from providers.

Solution Patterns

This represents a usage context for a particular artifact.  Some patterns of usage will be discernible from the User Applied Metadata but Solution Patterns formalize this into a language that describes when and how artifacts can be applied and under what conditions they succeed and fail in usage.

Findability Categories

Now that we have a vocabulary that helps us understand the nuances of findability classification let’s apply them to a matrix so that we can categorize artifact findability.

Missing Link

This is where most information and knowledge lives within an enterprise.  Its focus is on the individual and small teams where communication and knowledge exchange is easiest.  Examples that typify this category are personal file repositories, file shares, email inboxes, and in our developer focused example Subversion repos.  Vast amounts of corporate knowledge are stored herein but due to the lack of associated external attributes and sharing this is often as far as this knowledge ever gets.  Findability in this category is very low given that the information’s very existence is only known to a few individuals.

Paradise Lost

I gave this category the name Paradise Lost because that seems to be to be just what it is… a paradise of knowledge lost because the sharing attribute is so low.  This is where those ultra productive teams and individuals live who have developed systems to find and share knowledge and experiences but only with small groups who happen to have knowledge of the knowledge base’s existence.  Having worked in large companies for many years I can attest to the fact that some groups do an outstanding job of building knowledge bases that are tremendous assets and include features like tagging systems and user defined meta-data that help the lucky few drill into a wealth of information quickly.  However the usefulness of this is limited because few people know about it or the process for using it.  Such a shame.

Star Search

Besides the Missing Link this may be the most common category of Findability in the enterprise.  This category represents all those well intentioned projects that seek to develop a corporate knowledge base by implementing a technology solution (aka. search).  Search may seem like a great idea but at its core search is a technology solution that lacks context for relevance.  Even Google realized that when they created the PageRank algorithm that combined basic search functionality with the popularity of the artifact for added relevance.

The Matrix

The Matrix (sorry for the name but I couldn’t come up with anything better at the moment) is the best of both worlds.  It has a high degree of sharing combined with user generated meta-data and topped off with usage semantics that help organizations unlock the hidden knowledge within their corridors.  This is where communities add tremendous value in helping to detect and apply metadata to publication artifacts.

What About Communities?

If there is one thing we haven’t really discussed in this post it’s the topic of communities and their relevance to findability. Communities exist so that its members can pursue a shared goal or interest. In this context communities are invaluable in their ability to find and disseminate relevant knowledge to others in the community. Active communities can and do enhance the findability of topical artifacts, and given the right tools, and provide invaluable metadata to help establish the relevancy of corporate knowledge to specific situations. In a word they are “priceless”.

So Where Are You?

I’m curious to get your feedback on whether or not you think this framework is on or off track in helping us understand findability within an enterprise. This is one of those areas in technology discussions where opinions are like … (oops better not go there). Everyone seems to have some theory on information management and how knowledge gets created and disseminated but I’d like to hear your practical examples of how you increased the Findability of assets in your company.

Community managers have a tough job. They deal with lots of different stakeholders trying to find that elusive “middle ground”. They incessantly cheer on community activities and push adoption of collaboration best practices; but when it comes to validating their position through tangible and quantifiable metrics it can sometimes seem daunting. Is the best measure user participation? How about community size? Each of these seem like great things, and they are, but typically organizations don’t have a lot of tolerance for soft measures that don’t directly impact the “bottom-line”.

Recently I have been working to identify ways in which organizational performance gains can be tied to community activities. Since my current position involves helping large organizations increase performance from their development teams, I started first by looking at something that may seem far removed from community, knowledge reuse.

Why reuse?  The reason I chose to build my case around reuse is that the potential for productivity gains is huge. Let’s do some simple math to illustrate the point. Let’s say a development organization has 1000 developers employed. The industry average indicates that a single developer will write somewhere in the neighborhood of 3200 lines of code per year. That’s 3.2 million lines of code! At an industry cost per line of code of $27 (taken from Applied Software Measurement by Caper Jones) that’s approximately $86 million in software development costs per year!! Wow! If we can replace just a fraction of that development effort with reusable components and establish a process for interweaving reusable assets into all software projects we can save an organization millions of dollars per year.

In this post let’s first look at the process of reuse and in later posts I’ll follow up with some specific suggestions for creating an effective reuse program.

Reuse Process

Reuse has five specific phases with hurdles between each phase that impedes progress to the next stage. Overcoming these obstacles will be key to the long-term success of your reuse efforts.

Publication

During this phase knowledge is converted into something that is explicit and consumable by others. This phase represents the transfer of one person’s understanding, education, and wisdom into a tangible good. The publication format can be nearly anything – a blog, wiki, software artifact, anything that is consumable by another person.

Publication events are of very low value unless they can clear the first hurdle for reuse, Findability. Findability describes how readily available information is to other users in an enterprise. Enterprise strategies to increase findability include document repositories, index and search, push notifications, and categorization and taxonomy. Increasing the findability of assets requires a solid understanding of knowledge asset usage and user behavior.

Discovery

The Discovery phase begins when another user in the organization tries to find an answer to a problem relevant to them. During this phase the output of the publication event is found and analyzed for relevance against a new problem. This can be done via search, browsing, or by someone sharing a document via email. This is a particularly important phase because without discovery the publication event will go unused and is of very low value to the overall organization.

Understanding

During this phase information has been found but may not be fully understood by the consumer. This phase is a critical component of the Reuse Process because it promotes and encourages questioning and full understanding of the material.

Collaboration tools are essential during this phase of the process. The requisite for any collaboration tool is that a question and answer can take place to facilitate understanding between parties. To better disseminate information and to make it more accessible to others in the future, public exchanges should be used when possible. Communication channels like phone, IM, and email are great mechanisms that enable questioning and understanding but also limit the consumption of this “give and take” process to a very few parties. This sometimes is sought after behavior but in many cases the Reuse Process would be more effective if the discussions where held in public forums that are fully searchable and have meta-data such as comments and reviews that can be associated with the artifact.

Extension

The next phase of the Reuse Process is the Extension phase. In this phase we are applying the knowledge, wisdom, and education that was distilled in the original artifact into scenarios that we own and are a part of. In this way knowledge has been transferred to us from someone else and used in, perhaps, totally new ways. The context of the original information may only tangentially apply to these new scenarios, if at all. The idea being that because of someone’s published work we have been able to grow our personal knowledge base and now have the ability to extend a concept into a new area.

A great example of the extension of knowledge into new areas was the seminal work by Christopher Alexander “A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction”. In this book Alexander makes the case for developing construction practices based on the fundamental notion that harmonious patterns have existed in architecture for centuries and that these patterns should be reused if they add value and harmony. This work was later applied to computer science by several researchers, most notably Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides and a new field in computer science was formed with the same basic tenets applied to computer science as Alexander had originally written about. This example clearly demonstrates the Extension principal (although on the extreme perhaps) that allows knowledge designed for one audience and context to be discovered, discussed, and transformed into another entirely different area of study.

Integration

The last phase is the Integration or Reintegration phase where changes that impact the original artifact are integrated back to improve the original. Integrations can take on several different forms from comments and ratings on a document to bug fixes or functionality enhancements for a software artifact.

The key to integration is to understand the need and desire of others to contribute and to provide the support and infrastructure that allows community and organizational knowledge to flow back into the original artifact.

Conclusion

As development teams organize more and more around driving value to the end customer via Agile methodologies, I see reuse as an area that could be overlooked easily without a unifying process. Project teams become focused on delivering their user stories and forget the bigger picture of component reuse because a) it was not budgeted for the sprint or b) no teams are working horizontally across the various project teams to discover reuse artifact candidates. But this post has gone on for long enough. I’ll post again soon and ferret out some of these issues.

My Twitter relationships may lack the depth of trust that I have in the “Friend” model (in some cases of Facebook, LinkedIn, or email but they’re still relationships that I’ve come to value and that provide me with a sense of community.

How this happened surprised me.  I had sporadically used Twitter for about a year, but wasn’t finding it very useful until I started using the search feature of Twitter to discover people that I shared a common interest with.  I’ve talked about this in the past, but in a nutshell to get an action (or Twitter usage, in my case) requires the following…

• Find people that share a common interest, motivation, or problem.  This commonality is the building blocks of relationships (aka community).
• When relationships form around a shared interest excitement is generated from the freshness of new ideas and finding people that share your passion.
• Excited users are users that take action, and in my case that was Twitter usage.

In essence by discovering people that shared my common interest for open source, community, and collaboration I discovered pockets of  users that shared my passion, and by ‘Following’ these people and interacting with them I developed new relationships that drove my adoption and usage of Twitter.

It then dawned on me that Twitter wasn’t about micro-communication it was about Macro-Community and bringing people together around the things that matter most to them, in essence, a ginormous community organizer.

I must admit, I’m excited at the opportunity for Community that Twitter has created.

More Reading

Community Building Success Factors
Finding the Value in Twitter

Trust

Trust is not something you can ask for; it’s earned through actions and competence and it defines relationships between people, governments, communities, and businesses.  The text book definition of trust is “…reliance on the integrity, ability, or character of a person or entity”.  The key word being “reliance”.  You rely on someone or something because you have a history of past experiences by which you can infer future experiences.  Without these past experiences, people have no way to place you within their trust metric. They resort to lumping you in with “the rest” or basing it on any reputation you may have.

So trust and reputation are important – you get that.  But what can you do to enhance your reputation and gain a community’s trust?  I’m glad you asked.  Here are several things to consider in your next exchange with your community.

Stand and Deliver

This may be the most important thing of all to keep in mind when building trust, and here’s why … “people trust people who get things done”. Actions always speak louder than words.  If you say you’re going to do something and never quite get around to it, your reputation will suffer and hence the community’s trust in you.  You don’t typically see the choice projects going to under-performers at work, of course not.  That’s because their managers don’t trust them to create results.  They go to the people who can “stand and deliver” results.  That needs to be you!

This is actually a “two-parter”.  Not only should you deliver results, but you need to deliver the right results and update others on your progress. This requires learning to prioritize the most important tasks in your community and making sure that action and results are being produced.  Not only will the community see that you’re working on important tasks but you’ll also gain reputation because you’re delivering on what you said you’d do.

Get Real

Don’t let your community become a billboard of marketing messages from your sponsors.  These types of one-way communications send users running for the hills.  Being genuine, open and authentic in all community dealings is what you should strive for and what you should expect from others.  Being open and honest about why decisions are made, who influences those decisions and why, and apologizing unequivocally when things go wrong will take you far in life and in community relations.

One thing that is becoming clear as we explore the uncharted waters of the Social Web is that open and honest dialogs build trust.  As I’ve mentioned before, community members want to be a part of something – let them.  Don’t expect to build a vibrant community if all you’re doing is attracting “fans” to your site.  Fans are just that – fans.  You should be thinking about how you can convert fans to contributors and you do that through openness, authenticity, and dialogue.  Embrace conversation and discussion in your community and let the community’s input guide you.  Make it clear that contribution from everyone is heard, valued and respected.  Which leads to the next thing to remember which is …

R-E-S-P-E-C-T (just a little bit)

Do you remember that song sung by Aretha Franklin (maybe I just dated myself:( )?  Well, all she wanted was a little respect and when she didn’t get it … guess what … she left.  Treat your community members with the same regard and esteem you’d like them to show you and others in your community.  Set the example.  One simple rule we all learned as kids says it all… “Treat others as you’d like to be treated yourself”.  Build your community’s principals around that simple concept and you’ll do just fine.  Remember that each interaction with your community is from a human being who wants and deserves to be treated fairly and with civility (until proven otherwise ).

Give Credit Where Credit is Due

This one can sometimes get overlooked in all the hustle and bustle of today when we’re trying to keep up with email, forums, posts, action items, and meetings.  Sometimes we forget that we’re not the only ones who are working our butts off to get things done.  Make sure you take a minute everyday to give credit where it is due.  In Collaboration Project Success in 5 Simple Steps, I discussed how a fear of criticism effects collaboration project participants adversely.  The opposite also holds true.  When people are praised for their efforts and contributions, it becomes addictive.  They begin to crave it and will act accordingly to get it.  Think about it like this.  When was the last time someone gave you a genuine and authentic compliment and you didn’t want to try to please them even more.  You can’t, because its never happened.  Subconsciously we all crave praise and reward; that’s what make it such an effective tool for building trust.  If your community is quick to praise and slow to criticize, others will find it welcoming and enjoy spending time there.

These are just some of the actions you can take to build trust and reputation for your community efforts.  I’m sure there are many others.  One book I highly recommend on the subject is The Speed of Trust by Stephen Covey.  It’s a remarkable book that goes into great detail about the why, when, where, and how of trust in everything we do.  Read it.

Related Reading

Community Building Success Factors
What They Don’t Teach Community Managers
What Really Matters?
Collaboration Project Success in 5 Simple Steps

Books

The Speed of Trust by Stephen Covey
Wikinomics by Don Tapscott
The Secret Language of Leadership by Stephen Denning

I distinctly remember my first experience with Twitter when I noticed someone casually mentioning they were “putting lipstick on at a redlight”.  My first thought was “this is totally worthless”.  My how times have changed.  Not only has the growth of Twitter been off the charts (1382% to be exact), but I’ve actually started using Twitter on a regular basis and find it extremely helpful and useful in my job.

Twitter can be tough to understand at first and there’s good reason for it; its a different communication model than most are used to.  How many times have you gone out on the street and starting talking to yourself and hoped that someone else would stop and listen?  Not many I’m guessing, but that’s more or less what Twitter allows you to do.  You say your piece and if someone’s there to hear great, if not, oh well.

On the surface this just seems silly (at least to me it did), however what you notice over time is that this model is very useful for discovering and developing new relationships if you use some basic principals to help you get started.  Using Twitter has helped me find Thought Leaders in different subject areas, kept me better informed about hot topics, and helped me develop a peer network with similar interests.  All this from a messaging system with a 140 character limit.  Wow!

How It Works?

Even though I’ve had an account on Twitter since 2007 I have only recently started using it in earnest and what a difference it’s made.  My blog traffic is up 50% over the last couple of months and I contribute much of the increase to my participation in Twitter.  What I think really helped me see the value in Twitter were #hashtags and retweets.  Hashtags are tags applied to a message with a prepended # marker (ie. #community, #opensource, #management).  These can be searched and allow you to find relevant subjects across all the Twitter postings.  Hashtags have enabled me to find pockets of information that I didn’t know existed by searching for a particular #term.  Retweets (RT) are when a user pushes a post from someone they follow into their network of followers.  Thereby giving their stamp of approval on the material.

I recently wrote a post entitled What Really Matters? which discussed the overabundance of information and our current lack of tools to help sift through that information.  Believe it or not Twitter is helping me sift through the voluminous amount of data that gets delivered to me daily.  While I don’t think it’s quite what I had in mind in my post, it is a  good start.  In the post I discuss how RSS Feeds have become too time consuming to manage and keep current with without some form of relevancy.  Twitter adds relevancy to the mix through the concept of retweeting (RT).  I’d guesstimate that about ~15-25% of the tweets I receive are article links with summaries.  Many of these articles are retweets.  When someone RTs an article, it usually means they’ve found it to be interesting and informative, and want to share it with their followers.  This means someone else has already reviewed the article for me and is telling me I should check it out.  Instant relevance.

All of this is well and good but how can you use Twitter to help you stay informed or build relationships with new people? …

Tip 1: Find People That Share Your Passion

Now, just following random people is not going to get you the kind of relevant material or people you’ll want to connect with, but that’s where #hashtags come in.  When I began to use Twitter in earnest, the first thing I did was to search for hashtags of interest to me.  Tags like #opensource, #collaboration, #e20, #linux, etc.  I then reviewed the tweets of people using these hashtags to find the most interesting Tweeters and followed them.  After a few weeks of this I’d assembled a list of people that were providing me with high quality information.  The bonus is that about 20-30% of these people follow me back.  So not only do I have access to a higher quality of info than my RSS Feeds, but I also have begun to establish a group of followers that I send messages to.

Tip 2: Be Authentic and Contribute

So getting back to my original question “have you ever gone into the street and talked to yourself?”, the answer in most cases is “no” (well maybe, but don’t tell anyone).  But from what I’ve just outlined it seems to work as long as you’re willing to listen first and be authentic with the community.  I think this is the key to making Twitter useful, even though the model for Twitter is individually blasting messages out.   It really only works when you are participating in the Twitter community in a genuine and useful way. If you constantly post messages about your product or company, or that you’re applying lipstick while at a red light, you’re unlikely to see any success on Twitter (unless of course you are a company that’s trying to keep customers informed).  You are ‘noise’ and will be treated as such.  However, if you are posting useful information and retweeting good stuff you’ll have far greater success because you’ll build trust amongst your followers.  I’m not suggesting that you can’t post information about products or companies, just that if that’s all you post you will quickly alienate your followers.  Twitter users are looking for people to follow, not marketing departments.  I think a good rule of thumb is that you shouldn’t have over 20% of your posts directly related to a single product or company.

Tip 3: Use Hashtags

“What about using #hashtags?” you ask.  Just as I found people to follow via #hashtags, you should use #hashtags with your outgoing messages so that others can find you.  Hashtags are a great way to quickly identify users who share common interests with you.  If you’ve written a cool blog post with some tips for community managers , tag it with #community.  This way other Twitter users interested in that topic can find you.  Note that these #hashtags sometimes change so you should do a quick search to make sure the tag is still relevant before using it in a post.

Another benefit of hashtags is that there are automated processes (bots) associated with some tags so that if you use the #hashtag it will be retweeted to other groups of users.  A few that I’m aware of are #linux, #techcrunch and #opensource.  If you use one of these tags your post will get pushed into a much larger network.  BEWARE you don’t want to abuse this privilege, in fact there are rumblings that Twitter will soon ban this practice so it may not be around much longer.

Tip 4:  Get Help

If you’re trying to figure Twitter out for your company and you’re new to social media, find the people around you who understand it.  This will probably not be your SVP of Marketing, but instead a younger, more connected member of the staff.  I can’t tell you how many times I wandered onto the Twitter homepage of a senior marketing professional and seen nothing useful at all.  All their tweets are about their company or products, that is, if they have any at all.  This is not how you embrace the Twitter community.

Find your experienced users and have them help you define a plan.  You may even want to empower them to help with your company’s branding through Twitter and other social media outlets.  They’ll at least be able to tell you what to do, and more importantly what NOT TO DO.

Tip 5:  Open Up and Let People In

This particular tip is aimed at companies trying to use Twitter to promote their products or services and doesn’t apply just to Twitter.  The salad days of product management traveling to large customers to get feedback for the next iteration of the product roadmap are over.  If you want to have people embrace and extend your brand, you have to listen and stop spewing marketing diarrhea from your orifices.  We are long past the days when people build a marginally good product, put tons of money into a marketing campaign, and see great results.  Word of mouth is just too fast to make this model viable any longer.  Current data shows that 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations, whereas only 14% trust advertisers.  If you think you can market your way out of a crummy product today you have no idea just how wrong you are.

Twitter and other similar social media tools are your salvation.  You can actually find, and converse with the most important people you can imagine – your users.  Not just the CIO but real users.  I know what you’re thinking, “But the CIO is the one that makes all the decisions”.  You and I both know that this model is quickly dying too.  CIOs that implement crappy technology find the door pretty quickly today.  Users are the ones that hold the real power and that’s because they’re the ones that converse.  Conversation is the key to Web 2.0, Web 3.0, and Web 4.0.  If you’re not conversing with your users, you’re dead!

Hope this helps.  I’ve found great value in Twitter and other social outlets since my initial reluctance.  My advice to you is to dive in, be AUTHENTIC, and try to learn.  If you’re not afraid to be honest and help other people along the way, you’ll do just fine .

P.S., I’m at @emcconne if you’d like to follow along