I don’t use Twitter to tell the world about my day, my feelings, my quotidian vexations and triumphs, traffic conditions, the song that I’m listening to at the moment, etc. And I don’t really want to start. I’ve been told by credible sources, however, that the more you give with Twitter the more you get, and it’s a possibility I want to explore. It’s clear that it wouldn’t take much effort to tweet more; it just hasn’t been clear yet to me what more I should be tweeting about.

And then I remembered that one of my favorite things to do with a group of people, whether or not I know them well, is to ask a question and get everyone to answer it in turn. I always learn a lot, both about the topic and the folk involved, and the exercise usually sparks some lively conversations. People’s explanations for their answers are very often as interesting, if not more so, than the answers themselves. And very often answers lead to good follow-on questions, and the interplay can go on for a while.

I’ve used Twitter a few times already to ask questions, and have been greatly impressed with both the quality and quantity of answers. I was going to have my first TV appearance last Friday (so as not to jinx it I’ll wait until the segment is officially scheduled to air before saying anything more) and, in a panic, asked the Twitterverse for tips on how to avoid screwing it up. I got a lot of valuable advice back very quickly, and tried to incorporate it (I did not, however, follow Lewis Shepherd’s advice to swear up a storm like the Sex Pistols did in 1976 ).

So I’m combining my penchant for asking questions with my desire to learn more about Twitter, yielding a tremendously exciting new initiative called "andyasks". I’ll tweet at least one question a day, and people can reply with their answers. In best E2.0 style, the community that forms atop andyasks, and in fact atop each separate question, will be self-organizing. I also it want to be freeform, and so am putting no ground rules or guidelines in place up front; we’ll see if there’s a need for them over time.

If you’re interested in participating, simply follow me –  "@amcafee" –  on Twitter and reply to questions if and whenever you feel like it.

I also want to learn more about hashtags, the lightweight add-on to Twitter that lets us categorize our tweets. So I’ll tag all of my questions with the #andyasks hashtag, and ask all respondents to do the same (participants in andyasks will also need to follow the Twitter user "hashtags" ). This will let everyone track all questions and responses over time by typing "andyasks" into the search box at hashtags.org . If there’s a better way to organize this initiative, please leave a comment and let us know –  as I said, I’m still largely a Twitter newbie, and am eager to be educated.

I have no clear idea what I’ll ask about over time. I’ll try to make andyasks questions varied, and of broad interest. I know that they’ll reflect my interests, which include good writing of all kinds, movies, modern American culture (OK, pop culture), the arts of living well, baseball, technology, and whatever catches my eye in the paper and online.

I imagine that most questions will be lighthearted; there’s more than enough somber material floating around the ether these days. And there will rarely if ever be right vs. wrong answers. This is not intended to be a trivia contest (in the age of Google, how much sport would there be in an online trivia contest?).

I hope you’ll find andyasks to be fun and engaging, and I hope you’ll frequently take the few seconds required to fire off an answer. Leave a comment here if you have any questions or feedback about it.

Many of the comments on my previous two posts pointed out problems with the approach I advocated, which was to measure each knowledge worker’s relative levels of activity/contribution along with the popularity of their contributions. I can boil a lot of the excellent points raised to three archetypal objections, phrased here as questions:

If you measure activity, aren’t you just going to get activity?  Yes!  This is exactly the point! The objection is that activity does not always lead to desirable results, and that it’s possible to have large amounts of unproductive activity. And it is. But all the evidence I’ve seen indicates that thriving ESSPs yield useful stuff. They get questions answered. They serve as large and dynamic knowledge repositories. They help people find each other and stay close. They transmit good ideas . They harness collective intelligence. And they work in concert with the goals of the organization, not at cross purposes.
So the basic goal is pretty simple: to encourage more activity in these environments.  It’s only a small leap of faith, I find, to believe that activity will yield results.  And the activity doesn’t have to totally self-directed. Instead, the organization’s leaders can guide Enterprise 2.0 by signaling and stressing where they want people to focus their contributions. In this economic environment, a focus on cost cutting (and survival) seems like a good idea.

Why not measure instead what we’re really interested in –  innovativeness, productivity, service levels, etc.?  For one thing, they can be hard to measure. For another, few companies would think to measure receptionists based on their contributions to innovativeness or R&D scientists based on their contributions to customer service. But these kinds of contributions can and do occur on ESSPs. So I advocate measuring and evaluating people based on their contributions to E2.0, and have some faith that E2.0 helps with innovation, productivity, service, etc.. And let people themselves figure out how they want to contribute, participate, and be helpful to each other, and let their abilities to do these things become clear over time, instead of assuming that their place on the org chart completely specifies their areas of expertise, or dictates how they should be spending all their time. Believe instead that expertise is emergent (I hope this phrase becomes a bumper sticker).
One other problem with measuring high level outcomes like innovativeness and productivity is that they’re typically measured at the level of the group or the entire enterprise. This gives rise to the free rider problem –  the fact that some people don’t pull their weight and instead count on others to do the work. With group-level outcome measures it’s hard to detect and deter free riding. With individual-level measures, in contrast, it’s easy to see who’s not pulling their weight.

Wouldn’t some people treat ESSP contribution as a chore, doing the minimum necessary, and with minimal thoughtfulness?  Yes, and so what? This would be a problem if others in the organization (the people of good will) came to believe that this approach of least possible effort –  call it the ‘phoning it in’ strategy — worked as well as a more conscientious approach. If that were the case, more and more people over time would start phoning it in. But if people see instead that sincere effort is rewarded, and those who phone it in get treated as if they’re phoning it in, then it’ll be perceived as a losing strategy and avoided.
Another worry is that the poor content generated by the phoning it in strategy will clutter up the Intranet or Extranet, obscuring the good stuff and making it harder for people to navigate, search, etc.  But think how much clutter there is on the Internet, and how little it impedes us. Thanks to Googleish link-based search, tagging, rating resources like Technorati, Digg, and Yelp, and many other such mechanisms of emergence, the cream rises to the top on the Internet. We can find what we’re looking for, navigate efficiently, and pretty accurately assess quality. The whole point of E2.0 is to make Intranets a lot more like the Internet in this regard –  to make it a place where there’s a lot of content, and where the bad or irrelevant does not get in our way of finding the good and relevant.

So I hear the objections and am trying hard not to dismiss them out of hand, but they don’t yet dissuade me from advocating an individual-level multidimensional E2.0 measurement program. What do you think? Am I leaving out or misrepresenting any of the main objections? Are my answers to the archetypal objections above wrong, naive, incomplete, or otherwise bad? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

Update: a podcast of the interview is available here. And let me make one immediate clarification:  I might have given the impression in the interview that the DNI actually created or launched Intellipedia and the Intelligence Community’s other 2.0 tools, but this was not the case. These tools started from grass-roots efforts within the community. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has officially blessed or approved them (I’m not sure what the right term is here) but did not initiate them.

But I also really like how Rao highlights that successive generations of technology to support group work and knowledge creation are not all the same, or essentially interchangeable. Instead, these different waves of technology reflect differing assumptions about the right, or smart, or best ways to go about these tasks. As I wrote earlier, "It’s not about the technology" is often a dangerous and incorrect oversimplification, and nowhere is this the case more clearly than with tools for group work and knowledge creation.

To make this point, Rao uses Marshall McLuhan’s famous quote that "the medium is the message."  I also like Mitch Kapor’s insight that "Architecture is politics." You will get different politics, different dynamics, different levels and types of participation, and different results and benefits from different architectures of participation. And I’m with Rao that the newest architectures are the best ones we’ve come up with yet.  Do you agree? And how ‘real’ is the war between KM and SM?  Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

The precise job description is not yet clear, but how could it be? Technology’s role in American society is boundaryless and constantly increasing, so delineating the CTO’s role is going to be hard. Is it confined to information and communications technology, or should also include other blossoming flields like energy and life sciences? And is the mission to make policy, to allocate resources via something like a venture capital fund, to take control of large portions of the federal government’s IT spending and personnel, and/or to to be an advocate for enlightened use of technology in both the private and public sectors?

Good arguments can be made for any of these roles, and I hope that the US CTO is given a broad charter. But the office could still be an extremely valuable and important one even if it has a narrow mission. Let’s say that this is the case, and that the position comes with only a small staff and budget. The fear then is that it would descend into irrelevance because it would have no real authority or clout, and would be at best a bully pulpit.

Maybe. But I can think of at least three ways in which the office of the US CTO could do critical work even if it doesn’t control vast resources (these activities, of course, are highly complementary and would feed off each other):

Increasing transparency and accountability. There are many ways to use technology to make the work of the federal government more open and visible to the people. The city of Washington, DC is a leader in this area, having made over 200 data feeds about the municipal government available for download and mashup.
My father’s political hero was Harry Truman. I thought this was just Midwestern pride until I read David McCullough’s biography and learned about the Truman Committee to investigate fraud, corruption, inefficiency, and abuse among military contractors during World War II. The committee, which started as Truman himself driving around the country in his Dodge to bases under construction, is acknowledged by the Senate’s web site as "one of the most productive investigating committees in [our] entire history." This same page also fesses up, though, that congressional leaders assured President Roosevelt that the committee would not be able to cause much trouble because it had a budget of only $15,000. Give ‘em Hell Harry found a way to make that money work hard, to the massive benefit of our country. Imagine what he could have done with a bit of modern technology.

Launching small projects with big impact. ‘Small’ here means inexpensive, at least in comparison to the federal governments overall IT spending, which exceeded $60 billion in 2005. As the Obama campaign well knows, the technologies of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 can deliver benefits that are hugely disproportionate to their cost.
My favorite example of this within government so far is the deployment by the Directorate of National Intelligence of a powerful suite of 2.0 tools across all sixteen federal intelligence agencies. When the DNI was established many people felt that it wouldn’t be anything more than ‘a thin new layer of bureaucracy,’ which hardly sounds like what our country needs as it faces new enemies. The pessimism was both deep and broad; as Amy Zegart of UCLA said, " "I think it’s pretty telling that both Bob Gates and John Negroponte prefer jobs trying to bail us out of Iraq to the job of trying to fix U.S. intelligence." And while it’s certainly true that Intellipedia and its sister technologies have not done anything close to fixing US Intelligence, it’s also true that, as a report from the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Knowledge Lab observed, "Intellipedia has the potential to change the nature of intelligence analysts’ work." The budget for all of the DNI’s 2.0 technologies has been described to me as ’rounding error’ when compared to the IT budget of any single intelligence agency. I am fully confident that there are many, many more opportunities within government to get huge bang for a judiciously spent IT buck.

Surfacing and sharing best practices. The examples of Intellipedia and the DC government show that there are plenty of good ideas and successful projects out there. A national CTO would add great value by simply highlighting them, showing how and why they work so well, distilling lessons learned and mistakes to be avoided, sharing this knowledge as widely as possible, and generally acting as a technology Johnny Appleseed for the country.
The more I learn about technology and how it’s put into use, the more struck I am by the wide spread in both approaches and results. Highlighting this fact and helping to spread the word about how to get the most from technology are noble pursuits. At Harvard Business School we teach primarily via the case study, and I’ve written, read, and taught enough of them to appreciate just how powerful they can be. The best technology case studies show people both what’s possible and how to get there, and they take away a naysayer’s ability to say "That’s all fine in theory, but it’ll never work in practice." Case studies show what actually has worked in practice, and provide concrete examples that people can read, discuss, and take back to their own jobs. A national library of best (and worst?) practice technology cases, maintained by the office of the CTO and used to educate and evangelize, would be a wonderful resource. 

America and the Obama administration face no shortage of challenges and opportunities. Because technology can help with so many of them, a national CTO could also be a great help to the country. Just writing about the office makes me excited about its potential. I think I’ll go over to change.gov and submit an application…

According to American, "Customers with PriorityAccess privileges will be invited to board first or board at any time through their exclusive PriorityAAccess lane, which allows them to bypass lines after general boarding has begun." The new configuration seems to be pretty uniform; I’ve seen it at every airport I’ve flown out of over the past month, which is more than a couple.

The new configuration also seems to be uniformly ignored. My fellow travelers and I have continued to line up and board just as we always do, except now we use two narrow lanes instead of one broad one. I haven’t yet seen us fliers make any effort to sort ourselves into the ‘right’ lane, and I certainly haven’t seen anyone voluntarily take themselves out of the lane reserved for the elites and rejoin the general boarding hoi polloi.

More importantly, I also haven’t seen American’s gate agents make any effort to sort us properly. I’ve heard them make announcements about the two lanes, but that’s as far as it’s gone. I haven’t seen anyone walk the lanes to explain what’s going on and check boarding passes, and I definitely haven’t seen them turn anyone away once they reach the head of the line and hand over their boarding pass. I can only imagine what would happen if a gate agent said to someone about to board ‘Sorry, sir, you’ve been in the wrong lane. You’ll have to join the general boarding line. At the back."

It struck me at some point over the past month that I was witnessing an excellent example of why so many business improvement efforts fail: it’s not that they’re not good ideas, it’s that their not easy enough to enforce. American’s PriorityAAccess boarding procedure is a straightforward case of what used to be called ‘business process reengineering,’ and it’s also a microcosm of why reengineering so often failed. It’s one thing for a small group of smart people to study an existing process and figure out a way to execute it better. It’s quite another to then deploy that new-and-improved process broadly –  across many business units, geographies, and/or interdependent groups.

As the example of AA’s new boarding process indicates, reengineering often runs aground not because customers or other external constituencies are unwilling to go along, but because employees are. Airline gate agents have plenty to do as a flight boards; is it realistic to expect them to also wrangle uneducated (and, in many cases, unwilling) fliers into the right lines all throughout the boarding process? PriorityAAccess boarding requires either that all of us travelers self-police, which seems extremely unlikely, or that American’s gate agents work diligently to enforce the new process. So far, playing enforcer here seems to be pretty low on their list of proirities. This doesn’t mean that they’re lazy or obstinate, just that they’re busy and stretched thin as it is, and I don’t see where the slack required to let them play enforcer is supposed to come from.

Which brings us (you knew this was coming, right?) to information technology. One of modern IT’s most underappreciated roles is as an enforcer of process discipline. Today’s enterprise systems make sure that complex, multi-step processes –  ones that involve employees, customers, suppliers, and other groups — are executed the same way time after time, location after location, with few or no exceptions. I just attained Platinum status on AA (a dubious achievement), which means that I can now request upgrades 72 hours in advance. I can’t sweet-talk the AA website to try to get my request in 75 hours in advance, and I’m pretty sure that if I call up the airline and try to sweet-talk the customer service rep I’ll get politely told that there’s just no way. The airline’s systems are configured to start accepting such requests no sooner than 72 hours in advance, and getting around this configuration is difficult, if not impossible, for me.

Today, the parts of a business process that are executed with the assistance of IT are the easiest ones to control, monitor, and enforce. They’re also the easiest ones to reengineer with confidence, a point Erik Brynjolfsson and I highlighted in our recent Harvard Business Review article about IT’s competitive impact (posts on this topic are here and here).

Processes that are technology-free, meanwhile, can be maddeningly difficult and slow to improve. IT-free reengineering is not impossible –  I’ve seen Southwest, for example, successfully make major changes to its boarding process, and I’ve also seen other airlines start to refuse people boarding before their group number has been called — but it’s definitely hard, often much harder than clever process architects foresee.

An old Chinese saying about the power of regional bureaucrats holds that "The mountains are high, and the Emperor is far away." If remote locations, for whatever reason, don’t want to follow new orders from a central authority, there have historically been few good tools available to enforce compliance. In the era of the Internet and enterprise IT, the situation is very different. Some types of new order can be embedded in information technology so that they’re faithfully followed. Orders from headquarters that can’t be backed up with technology, meanwhile, diffuse slowly and with low fidelity, as the example of PriorityAAcesss boarding so far shows.

As technology touches more and more aspects of our working lives and business processes, the percentage of IT-free processes like PriorityAAccess should continue to decrease. As someone who wants things to run smoothly, I welcome this development. Do you? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

p.s. Happy Election Day!

p.p.s. I asked my MBA students last spring how many of them had read Hammer and Champy’s incredibly popular 1992 book Reengineering The Corporation. None of them had even heard of it. I felt old.