In the Enterprise 2.0 presentation I’ve given a few times recently I present my bullseye model of E2.0′s benefits and stress that emergent social software platforms are valuable in different ways at each of the four rings of the bullseye — strongly-tied groups of coworkers, weakly-tied ones, potential ties, and no ties.
These days, after drawing the inner 3 rings of the bullseye but before discussing tools like social networking software (SNS) and a corporate blogosphere, I make two points. First, that weak ties are highly valuable, as is the process of converting a potential tie (either strong or weak) into an actual one. So anything that helps a person stay on top of their network of weak ties or convert potential ties should also be quite valuable.
Second, that prior to the 2.0 era (yes, that’s a silly phrase, but not a meaningless one) there were really no good technologies to help at the 2nd and 3rd rings of the bullseye. In other words, there were no effective digital tools for helping a knowledge worker stay on top of and/or exploit her networks of weak ties, or to indicate potentially valuable ties to her. I then go on to discuss the value of SNS for weak ties, and of a blogosphere for potential ones.
At some point this past week, though, I wondered if I was overstating the case. I wondered if in fact there were effective older technologies for weak and potential ties, ones that I had overlooked or forgotten about.
My students didn’t come up with many. I presented the bullseye model to my MBA students this past semester and asked them what technologies, if any, were available at the second and third rings at the companies where they worked before heading off to business school.
More than a few of them had worked as analysts at large consultancies and banks; they said that they used blast emails, listservs, and group instant messaging to ping their networks of loose ties with questions like"Has anyone sized the Eastern European 3G market?" or "how many public medical device manufacturers are there, and which of them are outperforming the market?"
They reported varying levels of success and satisfaction with this method, and also pointed out a few of its shortcomings. Emails are often perceived as intrusions and ignored, and instant messages are typically fleeting. More fundamentally, though, these are both only technologies for broadcasting what you don’t know, rather than what you do. Ideal tools for weak and potential ties would do both; they’d let people display their knowledge, experience, and expertise in a searchable form, and they’d allow people to ask questions of each other.
Beyond email and IM, my students weren’t able to come up with other technologies for weak and potential ties (And is it worth even mentioning corporate newsletters, whether digital or paper? These ‘official’ publications have been part of most organizations I’ve worked in, and have been heartily ignored by most people.). They certainly brought up face-to-face methods like conferences, but we were largely left scratching our heads in class about pre-2.0 digital tools at the 2nd and 3rd rings of the bullseye.
So I’m honestly wondering if I’m missing something, and I’d like to use this blog post to broadcast a question:
Prior to the advent of 2.0 tools like SNS, blogs, and wikis, did effective technologies exist for keeping up to date with a wide network of weak ties, or for finding potentially valuable ties? If so, what were they? How did they work? Were they home-grown or commercial? How heavily were they used, and by whom?
Please leave a comment and let us know. I’d love some reassurance that I’m not kidding myself about the novelty of the Enterprise 2.0 toolkit for weak and potential ties.
{ 23 comments… read them below or add one }
Well, I think you may be at least partially right in assuming that no *dedicated* solution existed prior to the arrival of web 2.0 technologies. But people have long been quite accustomed to looking for information by relying on weak ties. And they did so by using the old fashioned telephone and business cards. In fact, the combination of the two continues to be quite effective in retrieving hard-to-find information, I think. Social and professional gatherings are of course another important ingredient. In the marine insurance sector for example underwriters consider their business a matter of “intelligence”. They call up their “sources” all over the world to get timely and reliable information about a prospective new customer. So these underwriters are quite adept at maintaining an extensive “intelligence network”, they are well aware of the role of weak ties, even though they don’t call them that way, and they have been gathering information in this way for decades.
From 1982 through 2000, I was a police officer in New York State. We had, and still exists, a statewide secure communications system to send and receive messages from law enforcement and other criminal justice agencies. Through this system, called the New York State Police Information Network or NYSPIN, we could also communicate with local, state, and federal agencies throughout the country, and with Interpol. I think the relationship between an officer in one agency and the many thousands of other members of this network qualifies as “weak ties”.
NYSPIN provided the opportunity to ask general, ping-like messages (e.g. whatÂ’s happening in the concealable weapons domain?), but it also is a conduit to share knowledge. Message could be addressed to a single agency, or groups of agencies by region or type. If an investigation or incident influenced a police best practice, we could blast a message to that effect.
The only one that comes to mind for me is in the Lotus collaborative technologies. The Lotus Notes family of products, including a knowledge management platform that was out around 2000 or so, included capabilities for seeking out knowledge within a braodly defined realm which could include 2nd and 3rd tiers. At that time, blogs and wikis were not on my radar screen. There were numerous customers for that platform, and I knew of a law firm and of course IBM.
________________________
John Reiling, PMP
Project Management Training Online
During the late nineties, there were several vendors in the expertise location business (Tacit, AskMe, Kamoon, IBM Lotus Discovery Server, ExpertUniverse, Participate) that analyzed e-mail, documents and other information to identify expertise and then broker connections between requestors and subject matter experts. This could be an example of latent ties.
Contact Networks is a vendor that conceptually does similar things but the focus is relationship connections vs. expertise. This could fall into the latent or weak tie question depending on how one wants to define those terms. Spoke Software when it first came out circa 2002 included a strength of relationship engine that also discovered hidden relationships.
Expertise location vendors were popular in the late nineties and vendors like Contact Networks and Spoke followed afterwards – both examples are pre-Web 2.0 / E2.0.
Search vendors like Verity and Entopia also made attempts to play in the expertise arena. Entopia was moving into the social networking field before they disappeared off the market without a trace.
Community vendors like Tomoye had some capability for people to connect with each other through profiles, forums and such but that type of weak/latent tie was not really automated but the result of community interaction between members themselves. These vendors (Tomoye, Opentext, Communispace, etc) are also pre Web 2.0/E2.0.
You also had the SNA tools but those were perhaps isolated situations used within consulting engagements.
Something I used occasionally, but not very effectively, was searching the company’s document database to try to find authors of documents of a particular expertise to which I could target a question. More typical was the broadcast email or posting to an internal newsgroup, none of which worked very often.
Exactly, Franco. In “old technology” it was called having relationships with people. You learned who was well-connected to important networks, who kept on top of important news, who knew where to find the relevant information.
Honestly, I sometimes find it a bit odd that we often attempt to separate knowledge from the people who have that knowledge. Yes, a lot of stuff can be captured in repositories. That’s a good thing. But for much of it, it’s still useful to have an actual conversation with a Real Person (TM) in order to make the most progress.
Thank you for the extremely information post professor.
I would like to add, in addition to what the earlier commenter has very effectively said, the fact that the informal office communication system or what we know as the “grapevine” was (and still is !) a very efficient tool for managing weak ties in an organization.
In addition to the earlier marine insurance sector, I would like to add the example of Indian Public Sector Units (or what we know as PSUs) In PSUs, there exist a large system of “weak ties” They are managed by informal office discussions – lunchroom, coffee table, “stopping by at the desk” and of course their “sources”.
I would agree with the above that they have perhaps been aware of the existence of weak ties (perhaps not the formal definition but the nature of them) and continue to manage them effectively.
Thank You.
While they didnt even come close, there have been tools which could have been used with a certain amount of success. One of the organizations i have worked with, we used mail lists very effectively. So, for example, there would be a mailing list of all consultants globally, and this was a highly active way to connect with folks across the world, based on the areas one is working on. It also helped a great deal in getting introduced to people who could potentially help you, even though they might not be on your “network”.
Tacit [ http://www.tacit.com ] has been around since 1997 in the “expertise matching” realm. The founder worked at Lotus until 1991. They are now marketing themselves as Enterprise 2.0, but they were on this game pretty early.
I’m sure many larger and geographically dispersed organizations have had behind-the-firewall forums or electronic bulletin board systems in place from the ’90s onward that could help to connect the second and third rings.
Of course, most forum communities tend to quickly become strongly tied to a point that can be off-putting to casual users.
Lotus notes is about all that comes to mind for me as well. The thing is that as you mentioned, people seem to ignore memos or newsletters. Another issue is the size of the circle we are talking about here. I think if you have too many people involved it becomes chaotic. I think that by having much smaller groups with a hierarchy where there is someone to speak for each small group at a meeting with others in his or her stature that there could be more accomplished. Otherwise there are only notations made and comments which never really get solved by someone that is reporting them lower on the chain.
LetÂ’s go further back than just the 1990Â’s. As stated by many people, your strong ties were geographical bound. If I was a blacksmith in Dodge City then my ties were defined by my local connections with people that I interacted with. This would include the sheriff, banker, pastor, and the owner of the general store. Who were the weak ties? How about the traveling sales person trying to sell some medical miracle? How about the Wild Bill? Weak ties were passed through stories or tails from your strong ties. Since your mobility and communication methods were limited, your strong ties dominated your world. One can argue that technology enables more weak ties but this has always been the case. When the automobile or train emerged your strong and weak ties did what? Clearly, the weak ties went up while your strong ties went down. How about today with the advent of even more technology? My strong ties shrink in number while my weak ones have grown exponentially. Case in point, look at mine or anyone elseÂ’s LinkedIn, FaceBook, or blogrole? My LinkedIn is up to 350 people, many of which I know but only a few I would ask to borrow money. (or what ever criteria one would use to measure a strong tie). The point is that technology has enabled ties since the beginning of time.
Hi Andrew
The Roger Horchow case used in Malcolm Galdwell’s Tipping Point is a good example of maintaining a large number of weak ties before 2.0 era. Horchow maintained a list of 1600 weak ties contacts built up over many years and he would keep in contact through personal Birthday cards. ThatÂ’s alot of mail to send every year! Today maintaining links is much easier but can loose it personal touch with so much 2.0 automation available to so many.
Looking forward to Boston in a couple of weeks and hopefully catch up with you there.
Nick Barker
As I see how much the business environment has changed due to the web 2.0 technologies, I can’t help wondering if a 3.0 version will appear anytime soon, and how would that manifest to improve even more the business development…
Forums is what sprang to my mind also. There have been web-based forums in fairly widespread use since the late ’90s on the Web. There were also the Usenet newsgroups, which got consolidated into a web-based archive and managed by, I think, Yahoo! for a while. All these preceded the invention of the term Web 2.0, I think.
One computer technology example that hasn’t been cited yet is the software source code version control systems that many organizations have in place (and have had for many years). In large code bases, it is entirely possible that the developers / maintainers are working in a different locations, yet the metadata from the systems (user names and check-in comments) form both the content and context for (occasional or frequent) collaboration.
One weakness of this example is that this metadata ceases to perform the role or facilitating weak links once the software developers move to different projects.
i! I am a Japanese. Though I looked for English study in various ways, I commented because contents were interesting. I was able to enjoy it very much. In addition, I come to look. Please keep it for us. Thank you!
At McKinsey in the late 90s, connecting knowledge across a Firm of weak ties was a big deal. Internal Practices existed across all sorts of industries and functions and countries. A directory could quickly point you to internal experts in any of them. Firm culture was strong on quick callbacks when somebody wanted to tap your expertise, even if you never met them.
Lotus Notes was a big part of knowledge sharing. Almost every client engagement ends in a sanitized (i.e. no confidential info or client names) internal practice document to capture learnings from the project (they factor into getting elected partner). Those documents (almost always Powerpoint) went in indexed Lotus Notes databases. By searching the databases, you might not find the specific knowledge you need, but from the document authors you could almost certainly find the internal experts you need to talk to.
What was missing was the frequency of small bits of info in blogs, as well as the editability and commentability of wikis. But most of the SNS capability was there.
I agree that forum and Lotus Notes software are not new, and often supported use of weak and potential ties – in the relatively small number of organizations that drank deeply of that kool aid.
But I think you’re right that the E2.0 world represents something new under the sun. Only with the advent of the (nearly) ubiquitous and universal web has it been possible to use digital technology to extendour opportunities to establish new connections outside an IT silo and maintain them without physical travel, one-on-one networking, or traditional publication.
In the past I met often made new and serendipitous connections though direct referrals from existing colleagues, going to conferences, customer meetings, traveling to other offices, or reading papers and journals (primarily for research).
I think Enterprise 2.0 is significant because it supports new patterns of connection that: 1) extend far beyond traditional boundaries; 2) provide near-real time electronic connections that can be established by serendipitous discovery; 3) reinforce the value of old fashioned and irreplaceable face to face connections by letting people keep in touch with their extended network without creating undue work for either the sender or receiver.
Your bullseye model makes it easy to see that some strongly connected groups are intentional and not necessarily emergent – it’s no surprise that GM has groups who collaborate on designing a new car. However the relationships among groups and the weak and potential ties that connect individuals certainly meet your emergent criteria.
I particularly like how your rings make it easy to talk about connection strength and connection discovery as well as connection patterns. Here‘s an example.
I saw quite a bit of success with creative use of forums in the early 90′s, some of which were more effective than current technology because there was less noise to compete with.
And don’t forget the importance of user groups, customer forums and conferences. They’ve long served as a means to extract, and share, key information within specific industries/vertical markets — uniting people in 2nd and 3rd bullseye networks quite effectively and helping to grow/introduce new contacts to the network.
Michael Schultz
President, Message Infusion
http://www.messageinfusion.com
What seems to be missing is the consideration of non-digital forms for updating weak ties and drawing in potential ones. Business cards, as mentioned before, were certainly used a lot for getting your contact info initially to someone, but it seems that the question is how did businesses update contacts or prospects with new information?
Most businesses had to rely on memos for inner office communication and direct mail for outer office communication. Post-it notes seemed to be common form of passing along memos within the office. Letterheads were also used, and still seem to be used quite a bit, to send letters updating business ties of new changes within the firm. Handwritten notes inside of note cards still are used to send individuals pieces of information, such as in the real estate business.
Before the digital age, letters and other printed forms of communication were the only way to keep in contact across a large firm and with prospective clients. And although Web 2.0 certainly has made communication a lot easier, too many businesses are relying solely on their blogs or SNS to keep in touch with weak ties, making their connections with some of those ties even weaker. Even today, a variety of communication methods is still very necessary and vital to keeping or strengthening lose ties.
I have been working for the past 35 years and have witnessed the advent of the computer introduction is some major industries. Prior to this introduction the methods used for communication to the work force and issuing of latest standards were paper (mass circlation of letters) and newsletters/project briefings. As time progressed there was the introduction of bullet boards which gave a common forum for the distribution of information to all users that have access to the systems. Additionally earlier systems provided very simple versions of emails which were really no more than notes. On some earlier dec based systems electronic notice boards were to provide communication and indstruction to the users.
Hope this helps
I have been working for the past 35 years and have witnessed the advent of the computer introduction is some major industries. Prior to this introduction the methods used for communication to the work force and issuing of latest standards were paper (mass circlation of letters) and newsletters/project briefings. As time progressed there was the introduction of bullet boards which gave a common forum for the distribution of information to all users that have access to the systems. Additionally earlier systems provided very simple versions of emails which were really no more than notes. On some earlier dec based systems electronic notice boards were to provide communication and indstruction to the users.
Hope this helps