Collaboration (Hansen): Part 5

This is a cross-post from my blog on the military Social Media tool milBook.

This will be the fifth (and last) part of an overview of the book Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results ©  2009 by Morten T. Hansen.  This post focuses on Chapter 6 Lever 3: Build Nimble Networks.

By way of review, leaders follow three steps to accomplish disciplined collaboration:

1. Evaluate Opportunities for Collaboration

2. Spot Barriers to Collaboration

3. Tailor Collaboration Solutions

The three levers used by leaders to tailor collaboration solutions are:

1. Unify People

2. Cultivate T-Shaped Management

3. Build Nimble Networks

Lever 3: Build Nimble Networks

Collaborative organizations run on networks, those informal working relationships among people that cut across formal lines of reporting. If the formal org chart shows how work is divided into pieces, networks reveal the informal organization- how people actually work together.

However, networks- or wrong ideas about them- often get in the way of disciplined collaboration. To better understand how networks can help collaboration, these myths must first be dispensed with:

- Networking is always a good thing: The idea that networking is necessarily a good thing can cause us to overlook the fact that networks can sometimes undermine performance.
- The more the merrier: Research shows that "the more, the merrier" does not necessarily yield the best results, at least not when it comes to networking in business, because networking is costly.
- Success goes to the socially gifted: Research shows that personal traits related to being socially gifted, such as being extroverts, do not determine whether people are effective networkers. Good networkers can be found everywhere. They can be introverts or extroverts, shy or gregarious, insecure or cocky.
- Networking is an art: People believe that networks belong to the realm of company life that cannot be pinned down, but recent advances in the social science of networks have changed that premise. With the help of this social science networks can not only be measured but also better managed.

For the leader demanding disciplined collaboration, the first thing to ask is "What are networks good for?" First, they help people identify opportunities- a technology, an idea, an expert, a collaboration partner. Second, networks help people capture value; people realize benefits from the resources they have identified.

These network benefits reduce barriers to collaboration. Networks reduce all four barriers outlined earlier, although to different degrees:

The not-invented-here barrier: Networks can help reduce a reluctance to communicate outside the organization, because people who interact with others tend to be more open to input from the outside world.
The search barrier: Networks can have a huge impact by helping people search better.
The hoarding barrier: Networks can help people overcome the hoarding barrier somewhat, because people are more willing to help those they know.
The transfer barrier: Good networks can lower transfer problems. Good relationships among colleagues help overcome the difficulty of passing along complicated knowledge people need to do their work.

Six Network Rules

Six network rules help people identify opportunities and capture value. Here are the four rules for identifying opportunities:

- Build outward, not inward
- Build diversity, not size
- Build weak ties, not strong ones
- Use bridges, not familiar faces

Here are two rules for capturing value:

- Swarm the target: do not go it alone
- Switch to strong ties; do not rely on weak ones

Pursuing the six network rules allows leaders to build nimble networks that are effective and do not waste people's time. Such networks follow the principle of disciplined collaboration. The rules help people identify opportunities and capture value from those opportunities. Leaders can apply these rules to their organizations; three steps help:

- Map the network
- Evaluate the network
- Tailor the intervention

Managing company networks has evolved from an art to a science: we know a lot about what makes networks work and how they can help disciplined collaboration. Networks are manageable: managers can collect network data, assess it based on network rules, and implement specific remedies. Leaders who pursue disciplined collaboration retire aimless networking luncheons and annual networking retreats and apply the six network rules in a scientific way.

I highly recommend this book for any KM professional or leader. The insights that Hansen puts forth should benefit any organization that implements them using the methods outlined.

Collaboration (Hansen): Part 4

This is a cross-post from my blog on the military Social Media tool milBook.


This will be the third part of an overview of the book Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results © 2009 by Morten T. Hansen. This post focuses on Chapter 4- Lever 1: Unify People and Chapter 5- Lever 2: Cultivate T-Shaped Management.

By way of review, leaders follow three steps to accomplish disciplined collaboration:

1. Evaluate Opportunities for Collaboration

2. Spot Barriers to Collaboration

3. Tailor Collaboration Solutions

The three levers used by leaders to tailor collaboration solutions are:


1. Unify People

2. Cultivate T-Shaped Management

3. Build Nimble Networks


Lever 1: Unify People

Hansen outlines three unification mechanisms:

1. Creating a unifying goal: In order to be a compelling unifying goal, it should meet 4 criteria:
- The goal must create a common fate
- The goal must be simple and concrete
- The goal must stir passion
- The goal must put competition on the outside

2. Inciting a core value of teamwork: Leaders need to give voice to the value of teamwork, put it in a values statement, and include it in a list of leadership competencies. But as they preach teamwork, they need to beware of three sins:
- Small teamwork kills collaboration
- Everybody do teamwork now (Except those of us at the top)
- Teamwork becomes the point of it all


3. Speaking a language of collaboration: The language a leader chooses matters a great deal in shaping behavior. They can use language as a powerful tool for cultivating collaboration.

There is a dark side to all of this. Unification runs the risk of absolving the individual of responsibility. To combat this danger, leaders practicing disciplined collaboration complement unification mechanisms with individual accountability mechanisms. They need to match unifying goals with individual goals, a value of teamwork with a value of individual responsibility, and the language of accountability. That's disciplined collaboration.

Lever 2: Cultivate T-Shaped Management

T-Shaped Management involves both delivering results in their own organization (the vertical part of the T) and deliver results by collaborating across the organization (the horizontal part of the T). They are willing to reach out to ask for input and also help others when asked. However, they are also disciplined enough to say "no" to collaboration when it doesn't produce value.

Two fundamental ways of growing the pool of T-shaped managers exist: selection and change. Some organizations don't believe that people can change, so they focus on selecting the personnel that exhibit T-Shaped behaviors. Others work on developing these attitudes.

Promote T-Shaped, Not Other Behaviors:
Disciplined collaboration requires that organizations promote people who practice T-shaped management, not others. Leaders must create a new mechanism that sets new criteria, collects data, evaluates performance, and rewards T-shaped management with promotions.

Pay for performance is a powerful lever, whether it is in the form of salary hikes, bonuses, or stock options, but it is plagued with problems. Two popular schemes often undermine cross-unit collaboration: -Unit Performance Only and Corporatewide Incentives. One produces sub-optimal results as each unit strives to maximize its own results, and the other can cause individuals to underperform as they feel their contribution to organizational performance does not matter. A good incentive, on the other hand, links money directly to collaboration. This can be done if data on collaboration is collected and can be evaluated (see above).

Transitioning an existing team to T-shaped behaviors requires dedication, and includes these four steps:
1. Fire laggards
2. Promote and recruit for T-shaped behaviors
3. Pay for T-shaped behaviors
4. Coach for T-shaped behaviors

These two levers have more to do with providing an incentive for people and organizations to practice disciplined collaboration. In a military context, the incentive (or directive) is there. The barrier that is more prevalent is the barrier to conducting effective collaboration. That will be addressed in the next post.

Collaboration (Hansen): Part 3

This is a cross-post from my blog on the military Social Media tool milBook.


This will be the third part of an overview of the book Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results © 2009 by Morten T. Hansen. This post focuses on Chapter 3: Spot the Four Barriers to Collaboration.

By way of review, leaders follow three steps to accomplish disciplined collaboration:

1. Evaluate Opportunities for Collaboration

2. Spot Barriers to Collaboration

3. Tailor Collaboration Solutions

Hansen explains that while people naturally tend to collaborate, decentralization can work against this. The essence of modern management is a decentralized system where there are clear lines of responsibility, a great deal of accountability, and rewards for those who perform. This system works well as it encourages good performance, but leaders become more focused on maximizing their unit, and disinterested in how the other units are performing. This creates a series of silos or fiefdoms and encourages sub-optimal solutions at an enterprise level. This paradigm is also present in the military.

The solution to this is not to change to a rigid centralized model- extreme centralization- but instead to come up with a better model. Hansen stresses that disciplined collaboration requires that organizations be decentralized and yet coordinated. To build this model, leaders must detect the barriers to collaboration and overcome them without sacrificing a decentralized structure.

There are Four Barriers to Collaboration:

1. The Not-Invented-Here Barrier

2. The Hoarding Barrier

3. The Search Barrier

4. The Transfer Barrier

Here are reasons each of these barriers happen:

1. The Not-Invented-Here Barrier
The not-invented-here barrier has four underlying reasons:

a. Insular Culture: People who work together closely they tend to restrict the influx of new viewpoints and reinforce their own beliefs. The more this happens, the more the group members turn inward and shut themselves off from the rest of the world.

b. Status Gap: If individuals think they are of a higher status than others, they will be less likely to reach out to collaborate with that group. Trying to collaborate with high-status groups is one of the last things a low-status group wants to do. These status gaps thus run both ways: high-status people don't want to sully their image of themselves, and low-status people do not want to let high-status people make them regret their circumstances. Both attitudes create a barrier to collaboration.

c. Self-Reliance: While some amount of self-reliance is important, the tendency to fix all of their own issues keeps people from reaching out for input. This usually comes from a deep-seated belief that people need to solve their problems on their own instead of asking for help. When this attitude crops up in a unit, chances are that the not-invented-here barrier will set in.

d. Fear of Revealing Shortcomings: Reaching out to someone and saying, "We're not doing well in this area and need help", can be interpreted by others as failure- "these guys are not very good". People generally fear exposing their weaknesses to others, especially to experts. This can be very pronounced in the military environment. In asking for input, people make themselves vulnerable and allow others to stand in judgment. As a result, people decide not to reach out at all, or only to people they know and trust (even if they are not the most knowledgeable). Fear of revealing shortcomings then becomes a barrier to collaboration.

2. The Hoarding Barrier
There are four reasons for the hoarding barrier:

a. Competition: Competition inside an organization undermines people's willingness to collaborate. When different parts of an organization perceive that they may be competing with others for resources, they are more likely to hoard information

b. Narrow Incentives: When individuals are rewarded only for how well they do their jobs, they tend to focus exclusively on their jobs. This incentive structure creates hoarding behaviors, because people pay attention to their own targets to the exclusion of helping people outside their unit.

c. Too Busy: As people are pressured to perform, and with operational tempo being what it is these days, they feel that they don't have the time to help others; reasonable requests for help are seen as burdens that could put them behind in their own work. So people are faced with a trade-off - to do their own work (but not help others), or to help others (but get less work done).

d. Fear of Losing Power: It is said "Knowledge is power" implying that a person is more powerful in an organization the more he or she knows about something and the less others know. So why share that knowledge with others and thereby make oneself less powerful and ultimately redundant? If people fear that they will become less powerful and less valuable to the organization by spreading their wisdom, they will be inclined to hoard it.

3. The Search Barrier
Search becomes a barrier for four reasons:

a. Company Size: The bigger the organization, the greater the search problems. The military is a very large and geographically dispersed organization with multiple networks, many units, posts, camps, and stations. Search is an ongoing issue. This spread of information across many different areas makes finding pertinent information in a timely manner a real challenge.

b. Physical Distance: The spread of physical distance is another factor in creating search issues. As mentioned above the military is a very physically distributed organization, and this inhibits the exchange of information. People prefer to interact with others who are close by. While networks have enabled remote knowledge sharing to an unprecedented degree, it is still inconvenient to look for knowledge and people in units far away.

c. Information Overload: The sheer volume of information made available by networks, databases, and knowledge management systems has created a condition where there is too much information and it is hard to sort the noise from the useful information. Information overload makes search harder because of information noise- the ratio of the total amount of information available to the amount of useful information. Information systems, including knowledge management systems, increase the noise ratio by making too much information available, and that complicates the search for the right
information or person.

d. Poverty of Networks: There is a myth in our society that we live in a small world. While this is sometimes true, there are still instances where there are many degrees of separation between people. That there is a small world should give us great comfort for search. But again, the world is not always small. In even fairly small global organizations there can be many degrees of separation, and that separation is not consistent from individual to individual. It may be a small world for a few well-connected people, but it's a big world for many others and that's a formidable barrier to search.

4. The Transfer Barrier
There are three reasons that transfer becomes a barrier:

a. Tacit Knowledge: This type of knowledge makes transfer hard. Tacit knowledge refers to information that is hard to articulate orally - in writing, in manuals, in equations, and in software code. Explicit knowledge on the other hand, can be easily articulated. Whereas equations and formulas can be written down and are explicit knowledge, how to effectively counsel a subordinate is more tacit knowledge. It is easier to collaborate when people deal in straightforward, well-documented, technical knowledge or clean and reliable environmental data. It is much harder to collaborate when people have to share novel technologies that are poorly understood, ambiguous situational data, or intuitions about what an enemy may be planning.

b. No Common Frame: People who do not know each other have no common frame- an understanding of each other's working habits, subtle ways of articulating something, a liking of each other, and an appreciation of each other's moods. Lack of a common frame might not seem like a big deal, but it is. Consider the flip side- situations where people who collaborate have a strong common frame. Have you considered why there are such long-lasting duos in sports, science, and music? These collaborations happen because there is a strong common frame. Without it, people become strangers in the sense of lacking a deep understanding of how to work well together.

c. Weak Ties: People find it hard to transfer knowledge when they don't know each other well (a weak tie). They need strong ties- relationships where people talk often and have a close working association. Weak ties create havoc when people need to transfer tacit knowledge. Hansen cites an example where weak ties caused teams of engineers to take over 30 percent longer to transfer information than those with strong ties. Weak ties are very common in the military due to the size and dispersion of the organization.

From Barriers to Solutions:
The first step in overcoming barriers is to accurately assess which ones occur in a situation. The second step is tailor management solutions to each barrier. These barriers may occur in different degrees from organization to organization. Hansen has a short subjective survey in the text that helps to identify which barriers exist for an organization, and to what extent. Once the barriers are known, then the tailored solution can be applied to overcome these barriers. Hansen has a barrier-to-solution map in the text that shows which of the three tailored solutions are most effective when applied to which barriers.

The three solutions:
1. Unify People: Craft a unifying goal, state a core value of teamwork, and use the leadership pulpit to signal collaboration.

2. Cultivate T-Shaped Management: Use recruitment, promotion, firing, and rewards to cultivate collaboration.

3. Build Nimble Networks: Encourage formation of the right kinds of cross-unit personal relationships to help search and reduce transfers problems.

These solutions will be addressed in more details in subsequent posts.

Collaboration (Hansen): Part 2

This is a cross-post from my blog on the military Social Media tool milBook.

This will be the second part of an overview of the book Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results © 2009 by Morten T. Hansen. This post focuses on Chapter 2: Know When to Collaborate, and When Not To.

By way of review, leaders follow three steps to accomplish disciplined collaboration:

1. Evaluate Opportunities for Collaboration

2. Spot Barriers to Collaboration

3. Tailor Collaboration Solutions

The following will deal with the first of the three steps - Evaluate Opportunities for Collaboration. There are three guidelines for being disciplined about when to collaborate:

- The first task is to understand the case for collaboration and appreciate how collaboration can increase performance.

- The second task is to evaluate the upside and to consider the potential for the organization overall.

- The final task is to understand when to say no to a collaboration effort - to articulate a rule or set of rules for when to go ahead, and when not to, at a project level.


The Case for Collaboration
There are three areas of potential upside in business: better innovation, better sales, and better operations. In a non-business context, Hansen suggests these could be thought of as new services, greater client satisfaction, and better-run organizations. I would add that in a military environment that these would be innovative ways to resolve issues or win battles, better situational awareness, and more efficient and effective organizations.

- Innovative ways to resolve issues or win battles: Hansen refers to this when he talks about recombining existing resources in order to create something new out of something old. The military example would be using existing units, capabilities, and environments but instead of using established doctrine an organization could find new ways to defeat an enemy or provide nation building support that hadn't previously been tried. Another component of this would be to disseminate the new best practice so that other units could utilize the new knowledge to positively affect their battlespace.

- Better Situational Awareness: This is a more standard reason for collaboration, and has been perfected over the last few years in different theaters of operations. Here collaboration allows the real-time flow of information between echelons of command, between geographically dispersed units, and from deployed units back to the supporting base. This collaboration allows commanders at all levels to see faster, react better, and to finish decisively.

- More Efficient and Effective Organizations: Better operations is what Hansen calls this phenomenon, in that collaboration is used to lower costs and improve efficiency and effectiveness. This would refer more specifically to the non-combat functions of units and activities as opposed to what was referred to above. This would also apply to collaboration of non-unit parts of the military such as the various agencies, schools, and related organizations that support the combat units.


What's the Upside of Collaboration?
A leader needs to be disciplined in evaluating the potential upside from collaboration. Hansen uses two ways to approach this evaluation:

- Overall Calibration: One way is to look across the entire organization and ask, "What is the potential for improvement in innovation, situational awareness, and efficiency/ effectiveness based on collaboration, assuming that we could do it well?" This quick assessment can produce a shared understanding of the upside. However, taking such a broad sweep overlooks differences within an organization. There might be different types of opportunities in different areas. This reality means you need a nuanced approach to evaluating the upside, as discussed next.

- The Collaboration Matrix: One way to gain a nuanced evaluation of your organization's upside is to use a collaboration matrix. The idea here is to divide the evaluation into pairs of units within the organization and systematically evaluating pair-by-pair where the opportunities for collaboration exist. Generally, when leaders use this approach they engage in a disciplined and fine-grained evaluation of where the upsides really exist and where they don't. Hansen provides a detailed example in the text (pages 36-38).

Another key to determining this upside is to make sure that the leaders doesn't overshoot or undershoot. This involves overstating or understating the benefits of collaboration to the organization. This can skew the overall evaluation one way or another and give an incorrect indication of whether collaboration is the right course of action.


When Do You Say "No!" to Collaboration?
Should you start a collaboration project or not? Leaders need a rule to help them decide when to collaborate and when to say, "No there is no business case. Let's not collaborate." This rule needs to be different from the usual go, no-go rule for projects. Leaders need to take into account two additional costs: opportunity costs and collaboration costs. People should launch a collaboration project only if the net value of collaboration is greater than the return minus both the opportunity costs and collaboration costs.

Hansen calls this net value the collaboration premium, and the principle can be expressed as a simple equation:

collaboration premium = return on project - opportunity costs - collaboration costs

Opportunity cost is the answer to the questions, "What else could we do with the time, effort, and resources going into the collaboration project?" There may be better uses of people's time and effort - projects with better returns altogether.

Collaboration costs refer to the cost of working across organizational boundaries, efforts to solve conflicts, and other costs associated with a collaboration project. There could also be a cost associated with collaboration technologies as well. Hansen has a detailed example of this computation on pages 41-44 of the text.

However, this computation may be very hard to quantify in a military context. There are no sales figures to refer to, and sometimes cost savings are difficult to identify. However, leaders must make some effort to subject a collaboration project to a collaboration premium test before giving it a go.

Leaders can drive collaboration costs down to nearly zero by tearing down barriers to collaboration. "Collaborate for Results" becomes much easier if people know how to collaborate. Spotting those barriers to collaboration will be the subject of the next post.

Collaboration (Hansen): Part 1

This is a cross-post from my blog on the military Social Media tool milBook.


This will be the first part of an overview of the book Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results © 2009 by Morten T. Hansen.

While there is usually an upside to collaboration in an organization, there are often traps that prevent collaboration from occurring. The organization cannot then realize these benefits. Here are a list of some of these traps:

Collaborating in Hostile Territory: Some organizations are not set up to collaborate, and collaboration projects soon hit a wall. It is no surprise that collaboration fails in in environments that are designed for the opposite practice- competition and independence.


Overcollaborating: There is also a tendency to overcollaborate. This manifests itself in too many meetings, and not enough results. Sometimes when leaders promote collaboration in their organizations, they get more than they bargained for; people often overdo it.


Overshooting the Potential Value: It is easy to get carried away by the belief that there are huge synergy benefits to be gained by collaborating, only to find out the benefits are actually quite small. Hansen quotes an analyst: "Synergy: big wind, loud thunder, no rain. It's great to talk about conceptually ... but at the end of the day it's minimal".


Underestimating the Costs: Often cost (and benefit) projections are based on incorrect assumptions. When it comes to collaboration, sometimes leaders hope things will go well but do not fully appreciate the costs of working across the organization and resolving conflict.


Misdiagnosing the Problem: Many leaders fall into the trap of misdiagnosing the reasons people don't collaborate. Leaders must understand which barriers to collaboration are at plan in their organization and which are not.


Implementing the Wrong Solution: The misdiagnosis trap is often followed by the wrong-solution trap. Many leaders assume that a solution- an IT system, an incentive system, a common goal - will promote collaboration in any circumstance. However, different barriers to collaboration require different solutions.

All these traps lead to bad collaboration- characterized by high friction and a poor focus on results. Leaders don't fall into these traps because they are not smart. Smart leaders fall into them because they don't have a framework that helps them clearly see the difference between good and bad collaboration.

The way to avoid these traps is this: Disciplined Collaboration can be summed up in one phrase: The leadership practice of properly assessing when to collaborate (and when not to) and instilling in people both the willingness and the ability to collaborate when required.

To accomplish disciplined collaboration, leaders follow these three steps:

1. Evaluate Opportunities for Collaboration: The key here is to determine the business value of collaboration, and whether this value outweighs the costs of collaboration. Leaders who pursue disciplined collaboration never lose sight of this dictum: collaboration is a means to an end, and that end is great performance. Leaders need to be rigorous in deciding whether to prioritize collaboration, in which areas to collaborate (innovation, customers, costs), ands which specific projects to pursue.

2. Spot Barriers to Collaboration: Once the decision is made to pursue collaboration, then the leader must answer the question "What are the barriers blocking people from collaborating well?" Disciplined collaboration targets these four barriers:
- The not-invented-here barrier (people are unwilling to reach out to others)
- The hoarding barrier (people are unwilling to provide help)
- The search barrier (people are not able to find what they are looking for)
- The transfer barrier (people are not able to work with people they don't know well)

3. Tailor Collaboration Solutions: When the barriers to collaboration are identified, a leader can now tailor solutions that overcome these barriers. Different barriers require different solutions. Motivational barriers require leaders pull levers to make people willing to collaborate while leaders pull ability levers to enable motivated people to collaborate across the organization. These levers fall into three general areas:
- Unification Lever - leaders craft compelling common goals, articulate the value of cross-organization teamwork, and send strong signals that lift people's sights beyond narrow interests and toward a common goal.
- People Lever - The solution is not to get people to necessarily to collaborate more, but instead to get the right people to collaborate on the right projects. Hansen uses the term "T-Shaped Management" to focus on those individuals that simultaneously focus on the performance of their unit (the vertical part of the T) and across boundaries (the horizontal part of the T). They are willing as well as able to collaborate when needed but disciplined enough to say no when it is wrong.
- Network Lever - This is where the leader build nimble interpersonal networks across the organization so individuals are more able to collaborate. Collaboration runs more on interpersonal networks and less through formal hierarchies. However, networks can get out of control, which is when people spend more time networking than getting things done. After all, the objective of disciplined collaboration is to engender great performance, and this great performance should enable the organization to achieve its goals.

Each of these steps will be the subject of subsequent posts.

Disciplined collaboration affords an opportunity for an organization to have performance from decentralized work and performance from collaborative work. This is opposed to the commonly held view that a collaborative enterprise is very centralized with information flows from the top of the pyramid to the bottom. Instead, disciplined collaboration maintains the benefit of decentralization - giving people the freedom to be entrepreneurs building something exceptional while being coordinated with the rest of the organization. Again, it is important for leaders to know when to conduct the collaboration projects that enable this, and when not to.

While Hansen's book deals with the business context for collaboration, there is much applicability to military organizations in these areas. Business value is sometimes hard to quantify in any organization, but with the military it can be much more subjective. The key here is that the leaders must understand what their organization's objectives are, and make sure to evaluate collaboration opportunities, identify barriers, and tailor solutions that best fit the group that they are responsible for. This is really much more of an art than a science, and requires discernment and a clear vision of the future.

There is a video of Hansen giving an overview of the book here.

milSuite: The Military Social Media Solution

This is a cross-post from my blog on the military Social Media tool milBook.

There was a press release on milSuite by the Program Executive Office Command, Control, and Communications (PEO C3T) on 29 December 2009. This post will provide a brief overview of the system, based on that press release.

milSuite enables military personnel (to include civilians and contractors) share ideas in online spaces set behind its firewalled network. “The milSuite application allows the professional ‘DOD’ community to share information amongst themselves that is only intended for the internal community,” said Justin Filler, deputy director of the MilTech Solutions Office, an Army organization.

It is composed of three components: milBook, milWiki, and milBlog. These applications are opening up safer avenues of communications among personnel. Previously, the department lacked a medium for employees to share official and sometimes sensitive information in a Social Networking context. “These technologies help those working on similar projects across ‘DoD’ to connect, share information, incubate new ideas, and help build the ‘DoD's’ body of knowledge and expertise, while generating organizational learning,” said Todd Miller, an Army contractor.

MilBook, which has reached 18,000 users since its inception in October 2009 is basically a military version of Facebook, and is based on the Jive Social Business Software (SBS) platform. MilBook provides several options for users who wish to share information with specific individuals. By creating discussion threads, they can exchange ideas among specific, self-created groups on topics such as Army policies. The information can either be restricted to that user or shared with the entire milBook community, Filler said. Regardless, it will always remain behind the firewall. "People across the DoD can find professional working groups on various programs and efforts and join within seconds,” Miller said. “MilBook not only connects people, it connects those people to military topics so that ideas and information are shared across the Armed Services." Presently, many of these discussions are held in e-mails, chats, wikis and blogs. However, milBook is the only tool in the department which can group these together. “Milbook fills that void that the ‘DOD-at-large’ doesn’t have,” Filler said. MilBook is also an effective tool for locating Soldiers who might have switched headquarters due to reassignment or for personnel who wish to obtain the knowledge of a subject matter expert.

Since its inception more than a year ago, the Army’s wiki or milWiki has surpassed more than 40,000 users, 10,000 pages, and 4,900 individual articles and is on target as a pilot effort to become a centralized point for updating Army field manual doctrine.  In June, the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center (CAC), at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., launched a test that allowed Soldiers and leaders to make real-time updates to the Army’s tactics, techniques and procedures (ATTP) via milWiki, which uses the MediaWiki platform.

“The purpose of the portal is to incorporate insights and lessons-learned from Soldiers and officers, based upon recent experiences in theater; but the goal is to ensure tactics, techniques and procedures remain relevant,” said Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, vice chief of staff of the Army, during his final remarks at the LandWarNet Conference held in August in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “A Soldier redeployed from Afghanistan, for example, could access the ATTP for site exploitation operations, make changes and add new material based on firsthand experiences in the country.” With the CAC effort, wikis could virtually turn the three-to-five-year process for staffing and updating field manuals into real time, where knowledge can be shared as soon as it is entered, according to CAC officials. By using these wikis, any individual with access to the manual can immediately update each of its sections. Seven field manuals were updated during the inception. Eventually, as many as 250 manuals will be available for comment, according to CAC officials.

The third portion of milSuite, known as milBlog, allows users to share news, photos, ideas and insight in real-time, with the capability to comment on one another’s feedback. This in in addition to the blogging capability in milBook.

MilSuite is assigned to the MilTech Solutions Office, a government organization of the Army’s Program Executive Office for Command, Control and Communications-Tactical (PEO C3T) working in partnership with Product Manager, Acquisition Business.

There has already been some articles in the press on milSuite based on this press release. Here is a quick rundown of some of the articles:

Federal Computer Week

Technology and Science on msnbc.com

Livescience

ZDNet

Take a look! I welcome your comments and questions.

Social Media

This is a cross-post from my blog on the military Social Media tool milBook. The purpose of this post is to provide a brief overview of Social Media.

Social media, online collaboration, and Knowledge Management are all interrelated, with Social Media the newest of the three. I researched several definitions of Social Media and Social Networking, and used them to derive my own definition:

Social networking is the practice of increasing the number of one's business and/or social contacts by making connections through individuals. Social media is the use of technology combined with this social interaction targeted at forming and enabling a potentially massive community of participants to productively collaborate. Social media technologies enable this collaboration and support tapping the power of the collective in ways previously unachievable, transforming people from content consumers into content producers. It's a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologue (one to many) into dialog (many to many).

In my research, I found a Gartner Blog by Anthony Bradley that outlined six core principles that underlie the value of social-media solutions, and, in combination, serve as the defining characteristics that set social media apart from other forms of communication and collaboration.

1. Participation
2. Collective
3. Transparency
4. Independence
5. Persistence
6. Emergence

Participation: Successful social-media solutions tap into the power of mass collaboration through user participation. The only way to achieve substantial benefits from social media is by mobilizing the community to contribute. You can’t capture the “wisdom of the crowds” if the crowds don’t participate.

Collective: Varied definitions and applications of the term “collective” abound and cover a wide spectrum of meanings. Here, as a core principle of social media, the use of the term “collective” is tightly aligned with its root origins “to collect.” With social media, participants “collect” around a unifying entity. People collect around the Facebook social graph to contribute their profile information. People collect on Wikipedia to add encyclopedia articles. People collect on YouTube to share videos. In these examples, as in all social media, people collect around the content to contribute rather than individually create the content and distribute it.

Transparency: With social media, it is not enough to collect participant contributions. A social-media solution also provides transparency in that participants are privy to each other’s participation. They get to see, use, reuse, augment, validate, critique and rate each other’s contributions. Without transparency, there is no participant collaboration on content. It is in this transparency that the community improves content, unifies information, self-governs, self-corrects, evolves, creates emergence and otherwise propels its own advancement.

Independence: The principle of independence means that any participant can contribute completely independent of any other participant. This is also called anytime, anyplace collaboration. Participants can collaborate no matter where they are or whoever else may be posting content at that time. Generally, there is no workflow or document check-in/check-out that can bottleneck collaboration and impact the scalability required for mass collaboration. No coordination between collaborators is required.

Persistence: With social media, the fruits of participant contributions are captured in a persistent state for others to view, share and augment. This is one of the more obvious principles. It differentiates social media from synchronous conversational interactions, where much of the information exchanged is either lost or captured, most often only in part, as an additional scribing activity.

Emergence: The emergence principle embodies the recognition that you can’t predict, model, design and control all human collaborative interactions and optimize them as you would a fixed business process. It is the recognition that one benefit of social media is as an environment for social structures to emerge. These structures may be latent or hidden organizational structures, expertise, work processes, content organization, information taxonomies, and more.

Here is a partial list of capabilities provided by Social Media technologies. Not all examples of Social Media have all of these capabilities, but a system must provide most of these to be considered a Social Media platform.

These capabilities are more oriented toward the individual users:

• Customizable Look/Feel
• Profile Information
• Networking (Connections, Friends, etc.)
• Activity Feeds
• Private/Direct Messaging
• File/Photo Upload Abilities
• Search

While these capabilities are more for interacting with other users:

• Blogs
• Wikis
• Discussion Forums
• Chat
• Calendars
• Tagging
• Groups (Open or Closed)
• Rating Systems

This is merely a quick overview of a large, complex, and rapidly changing subject area. There is a wealth of information out on the Web, and here is the list of sources I used to prepare this post:

Duct Tape Marketing

Social Media Vision

Social Networking Definition from Whatis.com
Wikipedia

WebProNews

And especially Anthony Bradley Gartner Blog cited above. The principles shown above are a summary of a Gartner published work: “The Six Core Principles of Social-Media-Based Collaboration” that is available to Gartner clients or for a fee.

This content is strictly my opinions on the subject. Please comment as you are so moved.

Knowledge Management

My New Years' resolution is to blog on a regular basis. I am going to start this adventure by blogging on the three specialties of my revived consulting business: Knowledge Management, Collaboration, and Social Media.

This will be a very general overview of Knowledge Management (KM). There is a multitude of sources on the topic, but I will use Harnessing Knowledge Dynamics: Principled Organizational Knowing and Learning (2005) by Mark Nissen as the basis for this posting. This is a cross-post from my blog on the military Social Media tool milBook.

There are many definitions of KM, and I studied several and derived my own: Knowledge Management is the art of creating, identifying, gathering, organizing, sharing, applying, and exploiting an organization's intellectual assets (knowledge in the form of insights and experiences) in order to enhance operational effectiveness, decision quality, and innovation across the enterprise. This knowledge can be either explicit (recorded) or tacit (personal know-how) and can be embodied in individuals or embedded in organizational processes or practice.

The key parts of this definition deal with the ideas that KM is an art that can enhance organizational effectiveness, and that the two types of knowledge (explicit and tacit) can reside in individuals, organizations, or practice (processes). Notice that this definition does not mention technology at all. While many Knowledge Management initiatives seem to focus on the enabling technology, the truth is that it takes a back seat to other parts of KM, namely People, Process, and Organization (Culture).

This diagram shows the four components of Knowledge Management as outlined by Nissen:

It also shows how balance and integration are an important part of the entire system.

Here is more on the components of Knowledge Management:

- People are the most important piece in the system. They create, share, apply, and exploit knowledge, and also can make or break any KM implementation. This is a critical focus for any KM practitioner.

- Process is also very important. This allows KM to become ingrained in business practices, and this allows for more consistent practice of KM so that the benefits are realized and the costs are reduced.

- Organization (Culture) provides a context for the practice of knowledge management to take place. The concept of a knowledge-based organization depends on nurturing a culture of collaboration so that the people and process can come together to realize the benefits of KM.

- Technology is the underlying platform that supports the other components of the system. While a lot of the energy seems to be tied up in the selection and employment of the IT KM solution, it cannot be stressed enough that technology is just an enabler, not the center of the KM implementation.

Above all, the benefits of Knowledge Management shown above must be identified, understood, and measured in order to justify the resources that are expended on the various components of the system. Operational effectiveness can be defined in many different ways in various contexts, but generally involves either getting more accomplished or reducing the effort and/or cost of ongoing operations. KM generally improves decision quality as improved information flow and knowledge dissemination enhances and compresses the decision cycle. Innovation is increased by KM in that the availability of existing knowledge allows for easier re-combining and creation of ideas that enable the innovation process.

This is meant to be only a brief overview of Knowledge Management, and does not reflect official Army doctrine or policy on the subject. I welcome your comments and questions.