KnowledgeForward

Michael Sampson pointed to an interesting article in the Venture Chronicles on The Future of RSS which hones in on a fault of RSS (or “opportunity” depending on if you’re a glass half-full kinda person).  According to Jeff Nolan:

Basically the entire RSS market has been built around a use mode of subscribe-then-read, and that is likely to continue as an exclusive model for many users or in parallel to other use modes. The weakness in this approach is that you only know what you know, as in you have know about a feed before you can subscribe to it… and I generally work off the approach that it’s far more likely that the best content on any keyword is not necessarily found in my OPML.

There are an increasing array of companies that are working on a next generation of feed consumption use model, built not around the explicit subscribing of feeds and chronological consumption of content. In order for RSS to get to the next level of mainstreaming we have to think in terms of behavioral filtering of content and discovery of new content sources based on explicit preferences or inferred preferences derived from behaviors.

I’ll second that.  While I think RSS can (although not always) be better than manual methods for reading through a lot of information, it’s not the silver bullet for attention management.  I often use it as an example of something that can fall out of an enterprise attention management gap analysis, but it’s just one example and piece of a much larger puzzle.

People can use RSS readers to narrow down their view of what news channels they will pay attention to and ignore the rest.  Even if someone follows 200 feeds, at some point that list will become stale.  While you’d probably notice something outside of your feed set due to the magic of linking (someone you follow must be smart enough to notice things outside your periphery, especially people that do link and quote-heavy blogs), at some point new centers of gravity can emerge that go unnoticed for too long.  It’s like picking your set of friends and then never going to parties to meet new ones.  Or just listening to music your friends recommend without ever listening to the radio to see if you’re missing anything. 

I like the idea of leveraging more of the EAM architecture by adding rules, filtering, profiles, and proactive discovery to the RSS model rather than using it “as-is”.  I hope lots of vendors and users start experimenting with this and working the kinks out (decreasing type I and type II errors) so that in five years or so even late adopting organizations can start benefiting from this technology.

A couple of questions came up in my EAM presentation on Monday night:

Q. It seems that the EAM conceptual architecture is all about the receivers and not the senders or messages.

A. First, I need to mention that by “Enterprise” I mean intra- and inter-enterprise.  In otherwords, it doesn’t apply to companies trying to grab the attention of consumers.  That issue has its own fields of study: advertising and marketing.  My intent here is not to help advertisers scream louder or to help create more pointed messages to surgically skewer personalized targets. I’m trying to help organizations improve the effectiveness of their own information workers by examining how to enable them with attentional technologies and capabilities to pull important messages closer and push less important messages further back.

That said, in reviewing my materials I have to agree that I spend more time talking about how to help receivers of messages than senders.  Most of my research in creating my EAM architecture and the questions I have received from larger enterprises are about the information worker trying to sort through information, handle their inbox, and deal with interruptions.  Outside of consumer advertising you just don’t see a lot of studies on the other side of the coin: how people send messages or store content.  I think this is because a decade ago we shifted from an age of information scarcity to information abundance, as my colleague Guy Creese has written and as is well catalogued in David Shenk’s book Data Smog.

Most of the technologies, capabilities, and processes used by creators of information to make their information easier to find are more in the knowledge management (and, more specifically information management) domain than EAM.  These include use of content metadata, versioning, aging policies, use of taxonomy and ontology, navigation, and content repository architectural design.

What I do talk about is how enterprises can provide an appropriate set of communication and collaboration mechanisms for senders, provide guidance to senders on which channels and workspaces to use and how to use them, and put monitoring in place to be alerted to explosive trends.

Q. If this is about what enterprises as a whole can do, how come my examples are about what individuals can do (for example, setting email rules)?

As I quoted from Gary Masada of Chevron in my posting on Cornering the Corner Office about Information Overload: “Technology can be an enabler that helps people do this.  But in the end an individual will have to do it.”

I am not recommending that CIOs and owners of attentional technologies figure out how to organize the time and workloads of their information workers or start setting up filters for them.  There’s a level of indirection here - the owners deploy technologies and processes that information workers can then use to help themselves.

For those of you in Chicago (who don’t plan to watch the Cubs-Reds game on May 5th) I wanted to let you know I’ll be speaking at the Technology Management Association of Chicago on Enterprise Attention Management in Arlington Heights, IL. Reception starts at 5pm, dinner at 6, and the presentation at 7. 

I’ve attached the description of my presentation below.  You can find out more and register at http://www.technologymanagementchicago.org/.

Enterprise Attention Management:  Addressing Info-Stress and Information Overload

May 5th, 2008

Each beneficial new communication and collaboration technology, from wikis to blogs, brings with it the burden of one more channel that information workers, already suffering from information overload, must pay attention to. This presentation describes how attention overload is afflicting businesses and how enterprises can create an Enterprise Attention Management (EAM) strategy encompassing technology, policy, and culture to improve the effectiveness and responsiveness of information workers.
Issues this presentation will address include:

• How attention fatigue is a gating factor for collaboration and communication projects.
• How “Attention Management” acts as a lens to understand and address these effects on information workers.

• How to define an EAM conceptual architecture to provide a unified view across attentional technologies.

Ever since I’ve had my radar up on attention management issues, I’ve noticed many interesting techniques that people use to manage their time and attention.  While I’m generally focused on how entire enterprises can address information overload (what I call Enterprise Attention Management), I’m always on the lookout for what individuals do to help manage their time as well (personal attention management).  For anyone looking for an executive level view of personal attention management, I’d recommend listening to the first few minutes of this Channel 9 interview with Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect at Microsoft

Ray was asked how he balances the need to span a vast spectrum of activities and the need to go deep as well.  He said (rough quotes here since I am not that skilled at transcription)

Attention management is biggest challenge of the role; the pace is fairly brutal.  At the beginning of the year I’ll plan out how many hours I want to spend in different categories: some for high level strategic things, time with product groups, and I realized you have to create whitespace because day-to-day interruptions cause you to thrash if you just deal with incoming issues.  You have to create time to think about what’s happening in the environment.

I create whitespace by going away - international travel, “think week”, and other ways.  The best way I’ve found to clear my mind is to go to a conference that’s off the beaten path or go somewhere with my wife that’s not technology related.

When I was coding I had a four hour rule that said don’t code unless you know you’ll have four hours of contiguous time because otherwise you’re just introducing more bugs.

It’s the life management equivalent.

An article in yesterday’s WSJ by Lee Gomes (4/16/08, page B1, You Can Enjoy a Book On a Mere Cellphone; (Hit Spacebar Now)) has a tidy summary of a statement that tends to make me cringe:

The biggest drawback to the experience involves the sheer proximity of the Internet and the constant temptation it provides for the aforementioned thumb to wander away from the realm of timeless literary art toward a cheap, quick-information fix in the form of email or blogs. This is one of the cultural problems of our time and I don’t have much to offer in the way of solutions, save to nag everyone about steely self-discipline.

While Mr. Gomes is referring specifically to the itch to check email or blogs, I’ve seen the entire attention management issue framed this way as well: that information overload and info-stress are like the weather in that everyone likes to talk about it but no one ever does anything about it.  Why waste much time talking about the dangers of our always-on, go-go culture if all you can do about it is nag people to buckle down and change their behavior?

I can understand that the average information worker feels that dealing with the overabundance and addictive nature of information (just as with food) is a matter of self-discipline.  But there are a handful of people in any organization that can take action to impact the productivity and stress of hundreds (sometimes thousands) of information workers.  I’m talking about CxOs and the IT owners, stakeholders, and champions of attentional technologies.  Cornering the folks in the corner office about Information Overload can pay dividends.

Enterprise Attention Management (EAM) pulls together the various puzzle pieces involved in the information overload issue and lays them out in a conceptual architecture that provides a view (a cross-section really) of the myriad technologies and processes involved.  Once laid out in this fashion, EAM can be applied to a specific organization’s situation.  For a demo of how this works, see my entry that applies the EAM to personal attention management and then think about doing that for the organization as a whole.

If you’re one of that handful of people I mentioned, you can take real action - actually do something about information overload for scores of people in your organization.  For example, if you’re the owner of the e-mail system, you can enable filtering rules, teach people how to use them, or place them on your list of evaluation points for an email product evaluation as your situation warrants.  If you’re a CEO or head of a large division you can lead by example in how you send out and accept communications (e.g., using appropriate channels, not accepting electronic interruptions during meetings, demanding full attention for short periods of focused collaboration).  If you’re in a position to roll out RSS technology you can accelerate its entry into the organization.  These are just a few examples.  Each is only a small piece of the puzzle, which is why the EAM conceptual architecture is important for laying out how all of these pieces interconnect.  And how they apply to each organization is different.  But only when they are laid out in the context of attention management can strategic direction become evident.

(Note: This is a cross-posting from the Collaboration and Content Strategies blog)

I’d recommend anyone interested in the cultural aspects of attention management to check out the special section in this weeks Economist.  In a bit of sociological research equaled only by Jane Goodall and her chimps, Andreas Kluth, San Francisco correspondent for the Economist, studies digital nomads and describes what makes them tick.  You can hear an interview with Mr. Kluth or check out the first article here, which has links for the rest in the series. Subscription may be required.

Hammers, guns, and Blackberrys are simply tools that surface the desires of the people that wield them, so the series correctly bypasses a discussion of the specific technologies used by digital nomads.  Instead he focuses on a wide array of topics about the culture of digital nomads, the work they do, and why they act as they do. 

The summary article at the start of the issue has a great description of the dangers of continuous availability and partial attention: “the old tyranny of place could become a new tyranny of time, as nomads who are “always on” all too often end up—mentally—anywhere but here (wherever here may be).”

About the prevalence of nomadic work among knowledge workers, he writes:

James Ware, a co-founder of the Work Design Collaborative, a small think-tank, says that nomadic work styles are fast becoming the norm for “knowledge workers”. His research shows that in America such people spend less than a third of their working time in traditional corporate offices, about a third in their home offices and the remaining third working from “third places” such as cafés, public libraries or parks.

The author differentiates nomadism from the archaic “telecommuting”:

Because it still tied workers to a place—the home office—telecommuting implicitly had people “cocooning at home five days a week”, he says. But people do not want that: instead, they want to mingle with others and to collaborate, though not necessarily under fluorescent lights in a cubicle farm an hour’s drive from their homes. The crucial difference between telecommuting and nomadism, he says, is that nomadism combines the autonomy of telecommuting with the mobility that allows a gregarious and flexible work style.

On how to make nomadic work work, he writes:

this requires “management by objectives rather than face time”. Not all workers thrive in such a culture; some prefer the structure of the traditional office. But “anyone who did well at college can work well this way,” he thinks. “The prof said ‘paper by Friday’ but didn’t care where you did it; it’s the same now.

I’ve posited some of my own theories about what drives email addiction, but the author quotes James Katz, a professor at Rutgers University, with another explanation:

This is, first, because of “random reinforcement”, the desultory pattern of rewards that comes with addictive behaviours such as gambling. A CrackBerry winnows through his e-mail throughout the day, knowing full well that most of it is chaff, but cannot help himself because of that occasional grain. The second reason, says Mr Katz, is that most people suffer from the illusion that more information always leads to better decisions, and there is always more information available on our phones and laptops.

On March 31st the WSJ ran an interview with Gary Masada, the CIO of Chevron, where he described information overload as the biggest challenge he faces (page R6, available here for subscribers only).  When the WSJ asked “What is the biggest challenge that you face as a CIO” he said:

Getting our arms around all the information we have.  We’re basically creating the Library of Congress every day or so, which makes finding a piece of information like finding a needle in a haystack.  Only that haystack is growing exponentially.

I’ve said many times before I think the media tends to focus too much on what individuals in a work environment can do about information overload (set aside time each day for emails, block out focused time, etc; see my personal attention management tips here) and doesn’t challenge the couple of folks in an organization that can really do something to make everyone else’s worklife easier and more productive.  These are the CEO, CIO, and IT owners of attentional technologies.

Well, hurrah for the WSJ that asked Chevron’s CIO “From a technical standpoint, what can you do to make this easier?”  Mr. Masada had a great answer:

Our challenge is to find the right search tools to help people find information.  Then there are some things we can do to make the haystack not grow so much.  We can put in place automatic-delete policies and rules that say if something is an important document you’ll retain it in a certain place and you have to tag it.  Technology can be an enabler that helps people do this.  But in the end an individual will have to do it.

Well, the focus on search is a bit narrow.  I think search is an important enabler, but there are many other parts to the puzzle as well (see my EAM conceptual architecture for a more complete picture).  But the rest are wise words to live by.  Some of the relief lies in helping to filter the information so that the amount of information doesn’t grow out of control.  While many have polarized views of technology’s role in alleviating information overload (either “the answer” or “irrelevant since it’s all cultural factors”), Mr. Masada has found the middle ground.  Good technology, applied properly, can be an enabler that allows changes that individual employees want to make or that are driven by changes in culture of the organization as a whole.  But in the end, it’s all up to people to make the change happen.

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 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.

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.