Euan Semple responded to my last post with his trademark blend of acuity and courtesy, and I’m glad to see that he thinks we’re violently agreeing; I do, too. His former colleague at the BBC John Howard also responded via a comment to my post, which is worth reproducing:
Andrew I think your worries over walled gardens are over cautious. These sorts of tools (if you choose the right ones!) all produce RSS and are driven through a browser. Data no longer sits in a database hidden behind an opaque data access layer, it’s available as RSS and URLs, and can be linked too. To really make this stuff fly in an organisation you need an aggregation tool to close the loop.
Howard’s comment highlights an excellent question: what’s the real problem if some E2.0 environments are mutually inaccessible walled gardens? If, for example, I’m a member of three distinct corporate wikis, each of which is accessible only to its members? If I work in sales, which has set up an internal ‘blogosphere’ open only to the sales staff, and also for the North American division, which has done the same thing? After all, as Howard points out, my RSS reader will let me know when anything of interest has changed in any of these environments, and my browser will let me skip among them with no effort at all. So how big a deal is it that these environments are walled gardens?
The only honest answer is that we don’t really know yet, and maybe this kind of technology Balkanization will turn out to be no big deal within enterprises. But I can think of two reasons why it might be a problem, or at least sub-optimal. First, if employees can’t search, link, and tag across all Intranet content, then emergence — the appearance of high-level patterns and structure as the result of many low-level interactions — is limited.
On the Internet if we can see it we can link to it, and that link is useful to everyone thanks to the PageRank algorithm and its cousins. It’s the same with tagging, thanks to Del.icio.us. These low level interactions give rise to an elaborate and emergent Web-wide structure. People realize how important these structuring interactions are, as evidenced by the recent controversy over Wikipedia’s decision to make its internal links ‘no follow.’
If an Intranet consists largely of mutually inaccessible E2.0 environments, how does the cream of the content rise to the top? How does any employee know where the best stuff is? Even if the Intranet’s search capabilities were advanced enough to keep track of all employees’ access rights and show them results from all the content they were allowed to see, and only that content, the quality of these results would still be impaired. It would be impaired because there are by definition fewer low-level interactions (links, tags, etc.) across several walled gardens than within a single one; the whole point of the wall is to keep such interactions from happening. So I don’t see how a Balkanized Intranet can display as much emergence as a single E2.0 platform can. Is this a big deal? We’ll have to stay tuned.
The second reason that walled gardens are sub-optimal has to do with an phenomenon that my colleague Karim Lakhani calls ‘broadcast search.’ This is simply the process of asking the world to help you find a solution to your problem. It’s an old technique; the English government used broadcast search early in the 18th century to solve the problem of finding a ship’s longitude at sea. Parliament offered the equivalent of about $12 million to anyone who could ‘find longitude.’ The prize was eventually won not by a famed astronomer or scientist of the day, but by the self-taught Yorkshire clockmaker John Harrison.1
As this example illustrates, it’s advantageous to broadcast your search as broadly as possible, because you don’t know in advance who’s got the relevant knowledge to help you solve your problem. So assuming there are no confidentiality issues, why would you post your problem only on the lab wiki when you could post it company-wide?
And why wouldn’t you do it as visibly as possible so that others could benefit from the knowledge generated? My students this semester have started using our course wiki to ask and answer tech questions. So far, these range from somewhat geeky — how do I keep a bot from harvesting email addresses from websites I maintain — to the fairly basic — what is RSS, and how do I use it? So far, every one of them has been answered quickly and well. What’s more, now everyone who cares to look knows what RSS is and where to download a reader. So a ‘normal’ search process for answering this question would have made one person smarter; the broadcast search process made as many as 80 people smarter.
None of the above, of course, implies that there are no good reasons to have a walled garden. Sometimes a team wants to collaborate in private, for very good reasons. JP Rangaswami, when he was the CIO of DrKW, put in place what I thought was a very smart policy: he deployed a single, public, bank-wide E2.0 environment, then built private environments by request. This probably isn’t the universally optimal policy, but it does illustrate that there are ways to address the tensions between the benefits of commonality and the desire for privacy.
How else is this tension being managed? How is your organization grappling with the issues of E2.0 Balkanization and walled gardens?
1Dava Sobel‘s wonderful book Longitude tells the story of Parliament’s broadcast search and Harrison’s improbable solution. Harrison’s original timepieces have been restored and are on display and running in the National Maritime Museum outside London in Greenwich. Many readers of this blog will be enthralled by them. In addition to being fundamentally important pieces of technology, they are also beautiful.
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So assuming there are no confidentiality issues, why would you post your problem only on the lab wiki when you could post it company-wide?
Using your lab example, here’s one fictionalized and somewhat dramatic answer:
For E2.0 to truly deliver, first you need a culture that believes everyone could have something meaningful to offer to everyone else’s problems, regardless of functional area or discipline.
As a final note, consider a wiki for solving problems that does enjoy company-wide accessibility. However, its target audience is just one discipline, so its existence is not communicated company-wide. “Silently walled garden” perhaps?
Andrew,
I agree that the balance between walled/open is an important one. I think it is more important, however, to treat the introduction of E2.0 in an organisation as the art of the possible. It would be far better, for example, to move a single department substantially away from email and onto blogs and wikis, than to shoot for an enterprise-wide wiki which then failed because not enough people could see its relevance, or because too many were afraid to expose themselves to such a ‘wide audience’. Today the department, tomorrow the enterprise!
The network effect is paradoxical. Increasing the the number of contributors increases the network’s information content while simultaneously increasing noise.
I think your class wiki is working so well because you have in effect created a community around the questions you address. Such a web site, if open to public viewing, contributes to the world wide community in your topics.
So, I wonder if the solution is walled gardens of contributors who expose what they are doing to public view and public aggregation. That seems to be the default now in web communities that exist in the wild.
Another issue, raised implicitly by Andy above, is the extent that people want to immerse themselves in the web. Navigating web communities and search is something you pick up through practice. People whose work is not directly web-related tend to be far back on this learning curve and have to exert a lot more effort for the incremental benefits that are valuable to those of skilled in navigating the web. Therefore, contributing to such a resource just seems of little value.
Andrew, yet again I think we’re closer than we appear
I started posting a comment, but it turned into more of a post so it’s on my blog.
I can see two additional issues with corporate “walled gardens.”
First, companies start out with a smaller population of potential participants. Anyone can link to anything on the WWW but, behind the firewall, you have a reduced population to generate network effects. Reducing the pool of participants even further with potentially incompatible tools will just make sharing a bit harder.
Second, if three different internal “communities” have three different tools, and I want to participate in all three, do I have to learn three different approaches, and will this increased complexity be just enough to reduce participation by people who may not be as highly motivated as I?
I don’t think that having RSS feeds available and managed by an aggregator is a perfect substitution, although it helps. Just teaching people about RSS can be a challenge. And what happens when different approaches are used for feeds (e.g., RSS vs. ATOM) and tagging (one word versus multiword tags)?
I know, taken by themselves these are not big deals but, when you are trying to introduce an approach that facilitates communication, even minor speedbumps can turn into roadblocks.
If you can access three “distinct” corporate wikis (as per your example) than they are not distinct. By definition, each wiki will allow the creation of links to the other wikis. You will get one big wiki that is hosted on three separate URLs. If only mutually exclusive access is given to users of those wikis, than RSS and browsers are of no use to close the gap. Am I missing something?
As I see it, the biggest question is of attention allocation. In order for broadcast search to be effective, you need many (all?) people to browse through all published searches. When does the collective time expenditure by employees on blogs wikis and the like reduce productivity to an unacceptable level? How do we optimize attention expenditure of E2.0 vs. “traditional” work (I recognize the fact that there are places where those two overlap)? I’d love to have answers to those questionsÂ…
There are some interesting nuggets here. Questions over attention, access and engagement. Firstly I have no axe to grind with corporate wide solutions, indeed this is the approach we took at the BBC. All the tools we put in were made available to every member of staff if they wished. However I don’t believe that this makes a blind bit of difference to the walled garden problem. There is no substantial difference between running a closed wiki in a department and running a closed wiki space in a corporate system. We didn’t solve the aggregation problem at the time because there were no web based solutions that provided authenticated RSS reading at that time, plus a load of other issues I won’t go into now. But even so, public weblogs and wikis were spidered and returned as part of the search system we had. Private spaces? Well if you were a member or needed access you either knew already or discovered through your colleagues.
Itamar, as for attention allocation, I feel strongly that this fits into the normal run of business. In my experience, people didn’t get side-tracked from their day job, they used their normal coffee, water-cooler, smoke break(!), waiting for edits to render, moments to dip into the Q&A going on in our discussion system to catch Andrews ‘Broadcast Searches’. One of the most heated debates in our system came when someone accused all the other users of ‘not doing their jobs because they were always in the discussion forums’. This led to a spate of people adding their current activities to their postings, which revealed that they fitted their posting around their normal work. Remember also the lurkers to writers ratio that seems pretty common across all these sorts of systems, in my experience it seemed to hold true inside the organisation too. When it came to blogs and wikis, people are much more selective and will build their own information footpaths, optimising their own attention, either because they find a useful resource that helps them with their work, or because they find an interesting individual who writes about the business in a revealing way.
Andrew, I so wish you had trackback enabled
John, thanks for clarifying this to me. I had a gut feeling that information workers should/will adapt to the attention allocation issue during the run of business but wondered how one might explain it to managers in order to get support for implementing E2.0 in the first place. Your input is valuable to me.
Would you say that organizations that have a large investment in customer care can benefit from E2.0 in the same way? I tend to think of several thousand Customer Service Representatives as an army of zombies that has a huge collective IQ that is very hard to tap. These guys are usually fed information with a spoon and their time expenditure is closely monitored. And yet they own a lot of knowledge regarding what customers want, how customers feel, what’s working vs. what’s not working etc.
I can envision a CSR adding clarifications on a corporate wiki after finding out answers for a customer. I find it hard to envision anyone letting that same CSR editorial access to the knowledge management system in the first place.
I’m wondering if and when managers will take the leap and implement E2.0 technologies for CSRs, bank clerks and others and whether accountability will help them make this decision (seeing as accountability is possible thanks to strong authentication within the corporate network). It’s interesting to think that accountability can be a powerful tool for implementing E2.0 considering that it has a much smaller role in the proliferation of Web 2.0, though one is an offshoot of the other.
I’m slightly off topic, so I think I’ll stop here.
I honstly thought the idea was that the workers (I’ll include Management)were connected socially, so it’s OK to have several small wikis, loosely joined. If everyone one has the power to invite others because they know the relevance of that person to the wiki’s purpose, however they first connected one to one, what’s the beef? I think this is how you avoid long tailed, pedestrian trafficed wikis, and maintain gardened gardens.
Just to play devils advocate here, We recently set up a department wide wiki, and a few other wikis for other departments. The reason for doing it this way is because people naturally have a predisposition for nurturing their own ‘babies’. Our dept’s wiki thrives because we’re all actively involved and care about its success, for the benefit of our group. The other departments wikis aren’t used, for whatever reason, i dont know. What i do know is that our wiki is just large enough to be useful and not too large that it cannot be conquered. Sometimes you have to take small steps, especially when each individual may only care about the success of him / herself, and not necessarily the benefit of the company as a whole. I suppose its why were capitalists and not communists.
You ask…”why would you post your problem only on the lab wiki when you could post it company-wide”?
I think my very post illustrates why not. Who am i? what are my credentials?
Legal and medical topics on the internet illustrate this point. Yes, maybe John Doe knows why im hacking up blood or what my rights are during an illegal search, but wouldn’t i be more likely to find the answer I’m looking for by questioning just doctors or just lawyers?
Sort of reminds me of dealing with my father-in-law. hes an “expert” on everything. sometimes i just prefer my doctors diagnosis instead of his.
I agree with John Howard comment..what he trying to tell in his comment is such a valid point according to me..
Hey there, I agree too!
Rina
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Great post. i do agree with your ideas.
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