KnowledgeForward

I don’t normally indulge in fiction writing in this blog, but maybe just once wouldn’t hurt. Besides, it’s not really fiction – it’s just a tongue-in-cheek way of describing what I see as the past generations and future generations of enterprise virtual worlds. I won’t go so far as to say these are definite predictions, but simply a description of a likely path (well, all except that last paragraph) for how large organizations will make serious use of virtual worlds.

So, how did it happen? The rise of the virtual worlds and their colonization by the Enterprise and everything that happened afterwards?

Well, no one knows exactly when the virtual worlds began. It was about 2006 when the adults began to notice that their teenagers would go into their rooms and disappear for hours at end. They would emerge only for food, squinting in the full light of the kitchen, and mumbling about “avatars”, “griefing”, “furries”, and “rezzing.” College students had disappeared too, but everyone just thought they were at class. Little did the adults know, but the virtual worlds were being built and populated from portals in their own homes.

Some of these adults worked in the Enterprise – large organizations and corporations where they attended meetings, designed products for customers, and tested out ideas. They wore woolly uniforms and had a confusing array of titles, although most of the ones with computers were called “infoworkers.” During 2006, some of them took a look at the virtual worlds through their telescopes, located at the end of hallways of fuzzy cubes at the top of their well lit, climate-controlled buildings in suburban office parks. What they saw was strange creatures – cat-men, flying faeries, naked inhabitants. There were people bumping repeatedly into walls or flying into buildings while others stood still for hours at a time typing on invisible keyboards. The infoworkers of the Enterprise thought the world they were viewing was bizarre and of no use to them, so they decided to stay away. Besides, they had work to do attending meetings, designing products, and testing ideas.

But by the end of 2006 the Enterprise had sent the first wave of intrepid colonists to the virtual worlds. It was a small number and conditions were harsh for the colonists. They didn’t know a lot about their environment and encountered griefers at every turn. They mostly came from high tech companies or those with youth-oriented brands. They came from IBM, Cisco, Sun, Intel, Reebok, American Apparel, Adidas, Toyota. The high tech companies sent evangelists back to the real world, telling about the wondrous things they had seen and done in the Enterprise virtual worlds.

Back in their fuzzy cubes and breakout session rooms, the infoworkers listened intently and the evangelists finally got them to go back to their telescopes and look at the virtual worlds again. They saw something that amazed them. They looked at the virtual worlds and saw their customers. Then they looked a little more and saw their competitors there too, sometimes talking to their customers. That was all they needed to see, so in 2007 the second wave of colonization began.

Oddly enough, as the second wave of colonists was traveling to the virtual worlds - virtual construction engineers and brand consultants in tow - they noticed some colonists from the first wave passing them on the way back. A few of them, from American Apparel and Wells Fargo, had already decided to pack up and leave. Some complained that the worlds were empty wastelands without a colonist in sight. Starwood was towing an entire hotel called Aloft with them. They seemed happy though, saying their time on the virtual world helped them design their hotel. Wells Fargo, towing Stagecoach Island behind them, was just traveling to another virtual world rather than heading back to Earth. The climate on the world they first colonized was too wild and unforgiving, but they had heard of tamer environs farther away and were off to colonize other worlds.

Some of the virtual world programmers went underground and decided to work on creating infrastructure that many worlds, each to meet different needs, could be built off of. Being able to control their environment and what the people in it could do made the Enterprises feel more confident that the risks involved were not too great, so they colonized new places where the virtual worlds, not just the islands and buildings in it, were built to their specifications.

With more controlled environments available by 2009, a third wave of colonization began. The Enterprise sent many of its best and most creative infoworkers – programmers, designers, and even marketing product managers. The term “resident” gave way to “visitor”, because the virtual people were there to visit, not stay, just like on websites.

As the customized virtual worlds could be created and owned by the Enterprise, they created worlds much like the secure websites they created for partners back home. Rather than everything being public like in the old virtual worlds, these could be controlled and only accessible by visitors the Enterprise wanted there. But putting private information in the virtual worlds caused the Enterprise security forces to become nervous. So, in 2010 a shipload of lawyers arrived. “Who invited them?” asked some of the frightened programmers. But the leaders of the infoworkers stood up and said “We did! Playing around and experimenting is fine, but if we are going to make this mission critical and confidential, we need them to make this world safe for the Enterprise.” And with that, the lawyers drew their pens and fired termination clauses, retribution clauses, service level agreements, latency warranties, confidentiality clauses, information privacy warranties, and hosted service warranties. Terms like “furries” and “rezzing” gave way to discussions of “code escrow” and “bonding.”

In 2012 standards came down from Earth and permeated the wild frontier of the virtual worlds. It became easier for colonists (now called residents after living there so long) to bring their belongings with them when moving to another world. There were more laws to regulate business transactions (but thankfully not taxes until 2015 as a last grab for revenue before an election).

By 2014 the virtual worlds had become accepted and even boring. Infoworkers who had decided long ago that they shouldn’t show up to work in a bunny costume determined it was probably inappropriate (even though possible) on their enterprise virtual worlds too, except on Halloween. In fact, they no longer felt like a wild frontier, but just another place for the Enterprise to use when needed. They didn’t replace much of what the Enterprise did in their fuzzy cubes. When the enterprise felt a virtual world was the best way of collaborating while attending meetings, designing products for customers, and testing out ideas, they visited them. When they felt other, more archaic communication and collaboration mechanisms were better, they used the old mechanisms. The portals, which were awkward at first, became better as virtual browser technology improved and standardized. In fact, virtual browsers and web browsers combined in 2016 as the separation between virtual content and web content became meaningless. Now they colonized in force.

That’s right about the time a band of real aliens happened upon the Earth. They found everyone – the teenagers and the adult workers – sitting around their portals to the virtual worlds and decided they could invade and be done before lunchtime. All the adults, now weak from a lack of physical exercise and blinded by the sun, were now no match for the aliens who took over the Earth, had a quick snack, and continued along their way.

The end.

With all the talk about technologies associated with Web 2.0 and social software such as wikis, blogs, and ratings systems it sometimes helps to take a step back to remember how it is the underlying concept of social software, not just the technologies often associated with it, that is important. And that concept can be applied even without fancy new technology.

The most hip, Web 2.0-anointed technologies can be used in ways that have nothing to do with social software. For example, a blog mechanism could be set up by an organization to allow a single executive an easier way to post announcements with the commenting feature turned off. This would not be social software.

And the other side of the coin is that old technologies can be used to build social software even though they don’t have ready-made components to build in or a fancy meme. For an example of building social software without Web 2.0, I’d like to introduce you to a circa 1990 OS/2 1.3 system called the Cost Tracker.

The Cost Tracker is the first system I ever wrote as a full-time corporate programmer. I was working at a large financial services company during the days when mainframe costs were the largest portion of the IT budget and expensive CPU time made every runaway process and abend a hit to the bottom line. Once a month IT would receive an inch thick printout (green bar paper, holes on the side, fixed space font of course) with all the mainframe jobs that ran, their CPU and DASD (disk) usage, cost, and 15 more columns of stats. The stack would be divided up into sections for each manager and circulated through inbaskets for perusal.

I worked in a central IT unit tasked with executive information systems and internal IT systems. My task was to replace that paper-based system with an easily accessible, graphical system that would make it easier to see the costs, compare actual to planned expenditures, and locate the root cause of costly overruns.

The system I developed looked like this:

Note: This is just a mock-up of the system. The data is all faked, but similar to what was there.

For the longest time, I was most proud of the left half of the screen. It was an early example of a drill-down system business intelligence system which allowed the data to be rolled up to the highest level (departments) and then the user could drill down by clicking on bars or pie slices to drill into more and more detail (each manager in a department, each system for a manager, etc.) until you got a raw spreadsheet-like window with a narrow, manageable slice of the 10,000 rows of raw data. Plan is shown with slashed bars and anything over plan is in red. Now you’d use a BI system or maybe fancy spreadsheet to do this. But that wasn’t an option in 1990. I got to write all the charting routines from scratch in C and had a blast doing it. I even got to speak on drill-down systems and linked lists as a guest lecturer at Indiana University.

But now I’m most impressed with the right half. This is just an edit window where anyone could enter comments that were attached to the specific graph on the left side so that anyone who drilled to that node or looked at historical data would always have the explanation right there for reference. I wish I remember whose idea it was to do that - maybe mine, maybe my manager’s or CIO’s. The tendency, even today, would be to consider this a number crunching problem and the system would be “done” when it allowed you to drill into the data.

To think up this design required lifting one’s head up from what seems like a quantitative system to understand the social process that went along with the numbers. And that social process went like this: In the old paper-based system, when the numbers came out the managers would dig in first to find out how they did that month and prepare explanations if there were any major cost overruns. Then the directors would look at the numbers and ask managers that were over plan what happened. Then the CIO would do the same of the directors. These conversations were highly inefficient, taking place over team meetings or through email, at different times of the month, and without a good way to track explanations over time.

Going beyond analyzing the intricacies of the raw job-level cost data I pulled down from the mainframe to understanding this social process allowed the system to bind the quantitative and the social together. The simple addition of an edit window for each node in the data allowed explanations to be stored in a common form, ready and accessible by directors and the CIO, and available over time in a way that conversations and email could never be.

I see this now as a good example of how social software does not relate to fancy Web 2.0 product categories, but is the powerful idea that understanding and building social processes into software greatly improves the value of these systems by acknowledging and enhancing the interpersonal nature of modern business.

Case studies were all the rage when I was getting my MBA.  They still are.  Which is great - they are valuable tools for developing intuition, analyzing information, making difficult decisions under uncertainty, and developing social IQ by working in groups.

I recently sat down with a vendor that has updated the old Harvard Business Review case study format by offering online simulations for universities (and executive education).  The information is now accessed online and presented in Excel and adds the extra dimension of being able to pour through a larger number of realistic charts, graphs, and financial reports in Excel and PowerPoint - real tools they’ll use when they graduate.  Rather than a single dump of information and decision point, these simulations run over time with many decision points and involve collaboration as well as competition.  I was quite impressed compared to the old photocopied case studies I used.

But the case studies and the simulations still lay out neat and tidy chunks of information on which to make decisions.  Granted, the information is often incomplete, which is part of the challenge.  But most real-life decision makers would kill to have the information they need so neatly packaged and trimmed for their consumption.  Where are the twenty useless reports that surround every useful one?  Where are the five versions of the report that make finding the single point of truth so elusive?  Why is the information in one handy report instead of spread among three different reports with mismatched categorization and metadata?  I won’t even get into the social element of trying to find the information that is being purposely hidden or twisted by co-workers with incentives to provide inaccurate information.

I’m not just joking about how screwed up the average corporation is.  Information overload is a fact of life in even the best of organizations, making attention management an essential discipline if one desires to be an effective information worker and good managerial decision maker.  Therefore, an additional form of simulation that exercises decision making under an information surplus would be useful for students and even executives to deal with. This is not to say the existing case studies and simulations need to have random noise added to make them more difficult. When working out, it’s good to isolate a muscle group and existing products do that. I’m just saying there’s a new muscle group that could use some examination and exercise: attention management. Learning how to separate the wheat from the chaff when sorting through information is getting tougher as new information channels are introduced and end user publishing causes an exponential increase in content. I believe that business educational institutions do not prepare students to cope with decision making and stream processing (not being given an explicit decision point but noticing a pattern of news or trigger that compels a prudent manager to seize the initiative and proactively take action) in an information overload environment.  Adding this skill to the case study repertoire would provide them a useful skill that crosses all potential industries and disciplines the business graduate is likely to enter.

Here are some ideas for a case study for students (or executive skills class) that exercise attention management skills.  Picture a simulation that runs for eight weeks, the data is accessed online, and the author guarantees the “truth” is there hidden amongst a great deal of noise.

• Dashboard creation:  This case study exercises the ability to select which information to pay attention to from a universe of quantitative and qualitative options.  Have the deliverable of the simulation be creation of a dashboard.  The dashboard can contain exactly 6 charts on it, selected from dozens of reports and near limitless ways to slice the data.  Students can play with different dashboards for the first 4 weeks, but from then on can only look at the information on the dashboard they’ve selected and make decisions off it.  At the end, teams compare the dashboards they selected and the decisions the dashboards led them to take. 
• Stream processing: Simulate a changing situation with potential “red alert” situation (it could be like a stock market with one sector ready to go boom or bust) and allow the students to select up to 3 triggers to set.  After the triggers are selected, the students run blind until their triggers are hit.
• Social networking:  Let the users negotiate a social network by allowing them, one each turn, to send one of a set of canned emails or instant messages to various simulated employees up and down the line that enable them to piece together the situation much in the way that “Clue” does (”The problem is the District Sales Manager in the Great Lakes region with a candlestick …”)
• KPI selection: This case study concentrates on exercising the ability to prioritize the most important quantitative information from a universe of reports.  After a few turns to watch a slew of numbers and reports and what they mean to the business, the students select their 6 key performance indicators and then see who can make the best decisions and the environment changes based on the information they have pre-selected to analyze.

Those are just a few examples to try to make this more concrete.  The real value is gained after the simulation is over and students talk about how they tried to pull important information forward and push unimportant information to the background, how their dashboards and networks worked for them, and what they’d do differently next time.  I don’t design case studies and am sure someone who does could do a better job, but they give an idea of the types of skills that I’d like to see an MBA grad having as they enter a real-life large organization.

I wanted to mention that we are doing another SharePoint workshop on April 1st and 2nd in Boston.  You can find all the details (and register) on the website. 

This time around we have two separate workshops (you can register for either or both).  The day one workshop is much like the old workshop, but without the implementation-related material which means more time for the capabilities.  The day two workshop is now a full day of infrastructure planning and governance.

I’ll be there along with Karen Hobert and special guests Guy Creese, Peter O’Kelly, Larry Cannell, and Mike Gotta (”scheduled to appear” as they used to say as a caveat in corny promos).  This is a great place to get unbiased advice about SharePoint.  Burton Group does not do implementation, vendor-sponsored research, or vendor-sponsored workshops.  So these workshops include a lot of information about what SharePoint doesn’t do well, where the pitfalls are, and how it stacks up to products from other vendors.

Day One: Understanding Microsoft SharePoint v3/2007 in Context

This workshop provides a strategic, enterprise-level assessment of SharePoint’s capabilities and implications. It is designed for organizations seeking to determine if, when, and to what extent SharePoint should play a role in their collaboration and content infrastructure.

Day Two: Microsoft SharePoint Infrastructure Planning and Governance

The 2007 release of SharePoint offers an important opportunity for implementers of earlier SharePoint releases to re-evaluate their often tactical, disorganized, and organic SharePoint environments, and to approach collaboration and content management design, governance, and deployment from a strategic, enterprise point of view.

I have had a productive day today.  I’ve had some difficult material that I’ve been trying to convey in a clear and organized manner for the new SharePoint workshop we’re putting together. But it really came together this morning and I got a lot of work done, including breaking through some stumbling blocks that had me stumped earlier this week. 

Frankly, I didn’t even think about why I was so productive today until this afternoon, when I got this email from our IT department: “As you are most likely aware, we have suffered from a prolonged outage of our Exchange Server … ”

The real kicker was the part at the end that said “We understand that a prolonged outage such as this has a profound impact on everyone’s productivity.”

Indeed!  The prolonged email outage did have a profound impact on my productivity … it made me more productive!  You see, my work on the workshop involves syncing information from a number of sources, reorganizing a lot of material, and creatively thinking of new material.  It’s a lot to keep in my head, mentally shuffle around to envision the information from different angles, and wait for sparks of creativity or insight.  As it turns out I had no meetings scheduled for this morning either, so without the distraction of email “toasts” popping up and no emails the couple of times I checked, my mind stayed focused on my task which yielded dividends for me. 

Coincidence?  Possibly, but my productivity spurt started at about 5pm last night and lasted a few hours, then continued this morning, which is exactly when the email system was down.  It may not be the entire reason, but I do feel it was a contributing factor.  I was doing exactly the type of information work (mentally juggling lots of information for the purpose of organizing, synthesizing, and sparking creativity) that interruption scientists say is negatively impacted by distractions and interruptions. 

Of course, I’m happy that email is working again.  There are a number of tasks that needed to be shuffled along and they would suffer damage if the outage had continued.  And not all my work is of a type that requires long-term focus.  I do apologize to a few clients who were trying to contact me and got a slower response than usual.  Now my challenge is to finish my work while the email system is back and working.

At the 2008 SharePoint Conference Bill Gates said that the SharePoint business has now surpassed $1B in sales and 100M licenses sold. While I believe those numbers are overstated (Michael Sampson does a good job of explaining the difference between sold seats and bundled licenses and a platform play), my own ongoing conversations with our clients confirms great interest in SharePoint, even among those who are already dedicated to other platforms.  Why such interest?  Is it, as Mr. Gates says, “the result of the great combination of collaboration and information management capabilities it delivers”?

I’ve been digging a bit deeper into why people at these clients are so interested in SharePoint.  I find it interesting how many of them already have products in house that do what they want Sharepoint to do.  This includes collaboration products like Lotus Notes or eRoom, content management products like EMC Documentum or Interwoven TeamSite, or portal products like IBM WebSphere Portal Server or BEA Aqualogic Interaction.  So why do they still want SharePoint?

The general answer these clients give me is that the products they currently use are overly complex (often limiting the departments that can use them to those with budgets for IT support) and often so expensive to license that only users with high levels of need get access and training for them.

To a certain extent, the excitement about SharePoint has really been a reflection of disillusionment with existing collaboration, content management, and portal products.  The people that are interested in SharePoint - despite already having incumbent alternatives - see at first glance a product that may finally provide easy-to-use, inexpensive, web-based collaborative solutions.  But that doesn’t guarantee they won’t be just as disillusioned with SharePoint once they get into it.  SharePoint is still new and it will take another year or more before we start collecting enough data points on enterprise-class installations to tell if SharePoint is the real deal.  “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence”, and there are often more consultants, developers, support staff, and 3rd party add-on vendors grazing on the SharePoint side of the fence than expected. 

An article by Jared Sandberg in the Wall St. Journal (2/19/08 p. B1, Cubicle Culture, “A Modern Conundrum: When Work’s Invisible, So Are Its Satisfactions”) described how people have lost the feeling of accomplishment they get from finishing concrete tasks (picture the old crafts like woodworking) and instead hop from spreadsheet to PowerPoint with vague results. 

I found this interesting and connected to my enterprise attention management research, so I followed this article to the accompanying forum to read what people were commenting about this.  The initial burst of responses piled the scorn upon information work with comments such as “Ah yes, there’s nothing quite like surveying one’s cubicle littered with crumpled styrofoam coffee cups and partially emptied cans of Mountain Dew, and reflecting upon the joys of a really well put-together spreadsheet” and “a large silent majority will continue to grind the day away going through the motions of getting something done.”

Then the responses started changing to acknowledge the other side of the coin, that the old days weren’t as golden as they might seem today (back breaking labor, smoke-belching conditions, etc.), there is joy to team accomplishments, some fault lies with management for constantly changing tasks and not describing why a task is important, and some fault lies with ourselves for not looking for completion where it does exist.  Also, one has to look further down the line to see the results of one’s work (i.e., “I do take some satisfaction that every time anyone uses a credit card or gets cash out of an ATM they run a tiny bit of my code”).

Of course, I couldn’t help but throw my $.02 in as well.  My own comments were as follows:

I agree entirely that the nature of information work and collaboration has diminished the pure sense of accomplishment that one used to get from concrete, individually-owned tasks.  A McKinsey study from 2006 demonstrated how modern business is moving to a majority of work being tacit in nature (undefined; no pre-defined process) as opposed to transformational (creating goods out of raw materials) or transactional (following strict processes).

The point about “surrogate measures” is especially key as a coping mechanism.  I believe email is a common surrogate measure.  In http://knowledgeforward.wordpress.com/2007/09/20/email-interruptions-as-avoidance-mechanism-for-cognitive-dissonance/  I wrote that “I have noticed that I often feel the urge to check email when I feel stuck or bogged down in a long-running project I’m doing or complex piece of work.  I think that our need to accomplish tasks - to get things done - is challenged by the increase in information work with undefined goals and processes and that email is being used like a drug to get a hit of accomplishment when one feels he is spinning his wheels. ”

Still, I would not make the leap (as some commenters here do) of saying that because my individual contribution is difficult to measure and the tasks are tacit that the work is therefore meaningless.  There are some meaningless jobs, but it’s not automatic given this criteria.  If eliminating one’s job or company would result in a better situation for all involved, then I’d say it falls into the “better off without it” category.

I just had a good conversation with a reporter from the New York Times regarding why people choose not to update their technology and my blog posting on “More People Pick Their Religion Than Their Browser?“.  I’m not sure how much of it will wind up in print, so I’ll relate here what I said.

First, it’s a fact that even though vendors come out with a new release doesn’t mean that everyone automatically upgrades.  For example, 0.14% of browsers are still Netscape (not Mozilla/Firefox - I actually mean the old Netscape).  That may not sound like much, but given the number of browsers out there it actually adds up to a real number.  And since these stats are based on hits on websites, it does mean they are actually in use and not just sitting dormant on an old PC somewhere.

The reporter asked a good question, which is whether the people that are slow to update their software are good for the industry.  I gave a resounding “yes”.  These stodgy users force vendors to give compelling reasons to upgrade or else they won’t do it.  And the reasons have to be good enough to make up for their strong bias towards sticking with what has worked in the past.  When their PCs finally bite the dust and they need to buy a new one, that’s when they’ll get new software.  Good for them.

Of course, software as a service (SaaS) promises to change this whole dynamic.  Since the vendors make money from ongoing subscriptions rather than on periodic upgrades, they no longer have an incentive to make changes just to get a revenue bump.  But the other side of that coin is that SaaS vendors might have more incentive to skate by with whatever they can as long as it doesn’t cause a mass exodus of users.  Also, many enterprise users are uncomfortable with software that can change incrementally and frequently because of the burden it places on training and help desks that have to support users.  End-user SaaS is still new so it’s yet to be determined how these pros and cons will play out in the enterprise.