An anecdote of social messaging as the killer app

Wicklin is one of the experts on statistical software development at SAS Institute. Prior to creating the Hub, SAS already had other collaboration systems in place, such as SharePoint, and implemented wikis and blogs on its intranet for knowledge sharing. But the Hub caught Wicklin’s attention in a way those other tools never had.

“I guess the difference between the Hub and all those others is that I use the Hub, and I didn’t really use the others,” Wicklin said. Internal blogs were a fine vehicle for “a select few” within the organization who committed to maintaining them, and wikis could be useful for finding specific information, but the Hub couldn’t be beat for browsing through short messages from people across the organization, in search of the “serendipitous moment” of finding something he hadn’t been looking for (but still found useful) from someone he never would have connected with otherwise, he said.

We first reported on SAS’s implementation of Socialcast in April, when it was fairly new. The company did an informal launch of the software in January 2011 and had more than 1,000 users within a month. By the end of the year, the Hub had nearly 8,000 users out of the company’s 12,000 employees. The adoption is even greater than it might sound from that, given that the total employee count includes people like landscapers and food service workers, who don’t use a computer to do their jobs. In divisions like research and development, use of the Hub is nearly universal.

SAS internal communication manager Becky Graebe said the Hub is delivering on the goal of providing new ways for employees to connect and collaborate. “People ask me, ‘Do you think this is cutting down on email?’ Well, I’m not measuring that right now. Our intent was to get people communicating more, not less. We’re a knowledge-based organization, so this is focused on knowledge sharing. We’re trying to get knowledge out of the minds of our employees, out onto the table where it can be talked about.”

- David F. Carr

As you might expect of a technology company, SAS already has plenty of Web-based collaboration in place, including internal wikis and about 600 intranet blogs. What it saw in Socialcast was the opportunity to spark conversations that link to all those other resources.

“Seeing the way communication was growing outside the company at a very rapid rate with social media, we asked, how do we bring some of that inside?” Lee said. “So we said, let’s bring a Facebook application inside the company—and that’s exactly what we did.”

- David F. Carr

NOTES

Something related I posted on Google yesterday is are social messaging and activity streams enough. We know they are the sweet spot in sense-making, ease of use and that primal social connection. But after the fact we need to curate this stuff before it falls into obscurity (ie. knowledge manage the knowledge flow). Wiki’s are a good tool for curation, as are blogs to describe what’s been happening…or you could move from social messaging to a blog or forum for extended discussion.

Yes social messaging can occur in group spaces, so this is a start of having this stuff in the right topic ballpark. But still tools like forums are really good after the fact if you want to browse by date or view a title index.

So blog, wikis, forums, are great content tools to share and do work; but for quick no frills one-click participation, you can’t go past social messaging in its appeal and effectiveness…and of course if that blog post or wiki edit ain’t appearing as a feed item in the activity stream, does it exist.

In the end social messaging and the activity stream is sustained as a killer app as it’s where we hang out, it’s where we already are. This is why email is so successful, and why blogs, forums, etc. did not replace this feeling. Now social messaging/activity streams are here as the real alternative to the inbox experience.

What are your thoughts on social messaging/activity stream apps like Yammer (now have wikis) and Socialcast. The both have group spaces. But are they getting by without blogs and forums. Not in the flow sense, but in consolidating this for easy re-use or findability.

Not blogs, not wikis, not Sharepoint(!) - but the allowing of serendipity!

A paradox for employees today is that they really need to connect with and collaborate more with more people, and strengthen their personal networks if they are to deliver better results and strengthen our their positions. One problem they are facing when doing this is that most current incentive models do not reward employees helping their colleagues, unless there is a direct and measurable return on their contributions. Another problem is that many organizations fail at making the contributions that employees do outside of their own team visible, and thus if fails to recognize them. These problems put people in a kind of deadlock position. During uncertain times, most people will simply do what becomes visible and recognized by those who evaluate them, their managers. They will most likely also most be asked or commended by their managers to do so, because their managers are in a similar position as they will be judged by their managers on the visible contributions from the team they are managing (and so it goes on, all the way to the top).

Thanks to @johnt for the pointer to this.

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — Amazon.com, the books-to-diapers-to-machetes Internet superstore, is a perfect snapshot of the American Dream, circa 2011.

It grows by the hour, fueled by a relentless optimism that has made America America. First it sold books. Then it realized that buying printed words in bulk, sorting and shipping them was a transferable skill. It has since applied it to anything you could want.

In 2011, for example, I have bought the following from Amazon: a hard drive, an electric shaver, a Bluetooth headset, a coffee machine and some filters, a multivoltage adapter, four light bulbs, a rubber raft (don’t ask), a chalkboard eraser, an ice cream maker, a flash drive, roller-ball pen replacements, a wireless router, a music speaker, a pair of jeans and a shoe rack — and, oh yeah, some books. (Disclosure: A book and a long-form article I have written are sold on Amazon.)

Buying these things the traditional way would have meant driving around to many different stores and paying as much as twice the price for certain items. What’s more, Amazon knows me. It’s like family. It knows where I live, what I like, my credit card number. (Which, come to think of it, makes it closer than family.)

In a moment rife with talk of American decline, my Amazon experiences provide fleeting mood boosts. They remind me that, for now at least, this remains the most innovative society on earth.

And then my bubble burst.

Thanks to a methodical and haunting piece of journalism in The Morning Call, a newspaper published in Allentown, Pennsylvania, I now know why the boxes reach me so fast and the prices are so low. And what the story revealed about Amazon could be said of the country, too: that on the road to high and glorious things, it somehow let go of decency.

The newspaper interviewed 20 people who worked in an Amazon warehouse in the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania. They described, and the newspaper verified, temperatures of more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit, or 37 degrees Celsius, in the warehouse, causing several employees to faint and fall ill and the company to maintain ambulances outside. Employees were hounded to “make rate,” meaning to pick or pack 120, 125, 150 pieces an hour, the rates rising with tenure. Tenure, though, wasn’t long, because the work force was largely temps from an agency. Permanent jobs were a mirage that seldom came. And so workers toiled even when injured to avoid being fired. A woman who left to have breast cancer surgery returned a week later to find that her job had been “terminated.”

The image of one man stuck with me. He was a temp in his 50s, one of the older “pickers” in his group, charged with fishing items out of storage bins and delivering them to the packers who box shipments. He walked at least 13 miles, or 20 kilometers, a day across the warehouse floor, by his estimate.

His assigned rate was 120 items an hour, or one item every 30 seconds. But it was hard to move fast enough between one row and the next, and hard for him to read the titles on certain items in the lowest bins. The man would get on his hands and knees to rummage through the lowest bins, and sometimes found it easier to crawl across the warehouse to the next bin rather than stand and dip again. He estimated plunging onto his hands and knees 250 to 300 times a day. After seven months, he, too, was terminated.

In a statement this week, Amazon acknowledged the complaints and said that it was working to address them, including by installing air-conditioners.

The prevailing American story line right now is seething anger at politicians: that they’re corrupt, or heartless, or socialist, or dumb. But the Amazon story, and many other recent developments, suggest that the problem is significantly deeper.

Far beyond official Washington, we would seem to be witnessing a fraying of the bonds of empathy, decency, common purpose. It is becoming a country in which people more than disagree. They fail to see each other. They think in types about others, and assume the worst of types not their own.

It takes some effort these days to remember that the United States is still one nation.

It doesn’t feel like one nation when a company like Amazon, with such resources to its name, treats vulnerable people so badly just because it can. Or when members of a presidential debate audience cheer for a hypothetical 30-year-old man to die because he lacks health insurance. Or when schoolteachers in Chicago cling to their union perks and resist an effort to lengthen the hours of instruction for children that the system is failing. Or when an activist publicly labels the U.S. military, recently made safe for open homosexuals, a “San Francisco military.” Or when most of the television pundits go on with prefabricated scripts to eviscerate their rivals, instead of doing us the honor of actually thinking.

The more I travel, the more I observe that Americans are becoming foreigners to each other. People in Texas speak of people in New York the way certain Sunnis speak of Shiites, and vice versa in New York. Many liberals I know take for granted that anyone conservative is either racist or under-informed. People who run companies like Amazon operate as though it never it occurred to them that it could have been them crawling through the aisles. And the people who run labor unions possess little empathy for how difficult and risky and remarkable it is to build something like Amazon.

What is creeping into the culture is simple dehumanization, a failure to imagine the lives others lead. Fellow citizens become caricatures. People retreat into their own safe realms. And decency, that great American virtue, falls away.

Join an online conversation at http://anand.ly

- do you buy much from Amazon?

A hundred and fifty years ago, adults were incensed about child labor. Low-wage kids were taking jobs away from hard-working adults.

Sure, there was some moral outrage at seven-year olds losing fingers and being abused at work, but the economic rationale was paramount. Factory owners insisted that losing child workers would be catastrophic to their industries and fought hard to keep the kids at work--they said they couldn't afford to hire adults. It wasn't until 1918 that nationwide compulsory education was in place.

Part of the rationale to sell this major transformation to industrialists was that educated kids would actually become more compliant and productive workers. Our current system of teaching kids to sit in straight rows and obey instructions isn't a coincidence--it was an investment in our economic future. The plan: trade short-term child labor wages for longer-term productivity by giving kids a head start in doing what they're told.

Large-scale education was never about teaching kids or creating scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system.

Of course, it worked. Several generations of productive, fully employed workers followed. But now?

Nobel-prize winning economist Michael Spence makes this really clear: there are tradable jobs (making things that could be made somewhere else, like building cars, designing chairs and answering the phone) and non-tradable jobs (like mowing the lawn or cooking burgers). Is there any question that the first kind of job is worth keeping in our economy?

Alas, Spence reports that from 1990 to 2008, the US economy added only 600,000 tradable jobs.

If you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do, they will find someone cheaper than you to do it. And yet our schools are churning out kids who are stuck looking for jobs where the boss tells them exactly what to do.

Do you see the disconnect here? Every year, we churn out millions of of workers who are trained to do 1925 labor.

The bargain (take kids out of work so we can teach them to become better factory workers) has set us on a race to the bottom. Some argue we ought to become the cheaper, easier country for sourcing cheap, compliant workers who do what they're told. We will lose that race whether we win it or not. The bottom is not a good place to be, even if you're capable of getting there.

As we get ready for the 93rd year of universal public education, here’s the question every parent and taxpayer needs to wrestle with: Are we going to applaud, push or even permit our schools (including most of the private ones) to continue the safe but ultimately doomed strategy of churning out predictable, testable and mediocre factory-workers?

As long as we embrace (or even accept) standardized testing, fear of science, little attempt at teaching leadership and most of all, the bureaucratic imperative to turn education into a factory itself, we’re in big trouble.

The post-industrial revolution is here. Do you care enough to teach your kids to take advantage of it?

as usual, a thoughtful piece from Seth Godin

new shiny standardised IT-dominated factory processes fail to absorb the variety of customer demand; in other words it becomes hard for customers to get what they want. When customers can't get what they want they return, especially for public services about which they have no choice, until they do get what they want. I call this 'Failure Demand' (demand caused by a failure to do something or do something right for the customer). It represents a massive cost, failure demand can run as high as 80% of all customer demand in industrialised shared services projects, locking in costs for many years

Distributed software development can be productive

This doesn’t mean that all outsourcing of software development is uneconomic. As Jeff goes on to explain in that video, a Dutch firm, Xebia, has successfully grown hyper-productive teams using Scrum that are geographically distributed.

But Xebia’s teams, some in The Netherlands and some in India, are set up in a counter-intuitive way: instead of having complete teams in each country, each team is split between the two places, with half its members in The Netherlands and half in India. The dispersed teams were at least as productive as colocated teams and sometimes more productive than the teams located wholly in the Netherlands.

Apparently splitting the teams geographically forced more conversations among the team about what the client really wanted. Being forced to explain to the developers in India each day what the client wanted helped everyone get clearer and so the teams as a whole tend to become more productive

so co-location isn't always the best answer - with good management.

Does internal social media/software work? Seems to be working for IBM/ Hat tip to @elsua for the pointer from http://www.elsua.net/2011/08/09/ibms-trip-to-become-a-socially-integrated-ent...

In that period of soul-searching that typically follows any instance of social upheaval, we shall no doubt hear many explanations for the events that overtook the streets of Britain last week. One which will surely elbow its way to the front is the notion that, in some ill-defined sense, the disaffected youth of this country have been denied any "hope".

What hope is that, precisely? Is it the hope that, despite having set one's face against the acquisition of even the most elementary formal qualifications in literacy and numeracy, or of basic English language or personal skills, one should be able to find an employer who will offer one employment in preference to buying a fork-lift or taking on a migrant?

Even as late as the 1980s the relative prices of capital and labour in the UK favoured those with low skills and a willingness to work, over expensive machines. That factor-price ratio has now changed, probably for ever. Globalisation, technological advances and a downward rigidity in the wage that is deemed "acceptable" in the UK mean that the mass-produced merchandise that so appeals to street thieves can no longer be produced economically in this country. The relatively low-skill jobs that are involved in such manufacturing are the preserve of people who are willing to work for less than their counterparts in the UK, and to do so more reliably. The future of UK manufacturing will increasingly lie in goods and services embodying training and skills.

Those who wish to have any hope at all should first be clear about their aspirations.

R Rothschild, Emeritus Professor of Economics, Lancaster

Excellent letter from the father of a friend of mine.

Einstein apparently said. “Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler”.

He would probably have said “Never use a tool you do not understand”.

From experience, most stories I’ve seen use the “As a… I want…” format with “So that…” added to improve their appeal to business investors. A bit like lip stick on a pig.

Consider these “So that” examples from a super duper tip top team I know…

• “So that I can start using the system”
• “So that I can cover my arse”
• “So that there is less risk to manual error”

The problem with “As a… I want” format is that business value is an afterthought. However, it is a dangerous after thought. Seeing it there leads the business to think that some thought has been put into value when the reality is it has not been.

A subtle but more insidious problem with the format is that the user is the starting point. This means that the target solution starts by assuming certain roles will perform certain functions. Often a project will result in responsibilities being re-distributed to different roles. This situation needs to be handled with care and delicacy. By stating who will perform which roles, you may be signalling to a user group that they are losing or gaining new responsibilities… both of which may be unpopular.

Although I do not use the formats, I prefer “In order to… As a… I need” which places business value up front as the primary concern. Check out Antony Marcano’s blog post for more detail.

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Which way do you do stories? Is it just about shared understanding? - see: http://practicalagility.blogspot.com/2011/07/whither-requirements.html