Part III: Saving the company

How ordinary smart people will change the organization.

By Dave Pollard.

This concludes a three-part series on the failures of many organizations to recognize and capitalize on the value of human knowledge. Where those companies still don’t “get it,” the future is in the hands of ordinary smart people.

I have written before about what I call Personal Knowledge Management (PKM), which is an attempt to enable workers to do this more effectively.

My problem has been that PKM is impossible to sell to senior management, because they perceive no value to themselves.

I toyed with the idea of trying to sell it to front-line workers directly, perhaps by starting a magazine called Working Smarter.

The problem with this is that everyone is at a different stage in evolution toward PKM, and there are no standard answers or approaches — we each have to muddle this through for ourselves, based on our own “knowledge set” and information behaviors.

But perhaps if we outlined a future scenario of where this PKM trend is headed, we might be able to evolve an approach that would accommodate the needs of both individual workers and the organizations struggling to cope with this phenomenon.

To this end, let me start with a story of a young business analyst named Jon.

A composite workaround story
Jon spent the first week in his new job with Giant Co. trying to port all the information, contacts, subscriptions and software tools he had been using in his three previous jobs to his new company-supplied computer.

He was stymied at every turn. He was not allowed to put the tools he was familiar with onto his new computer because they were “not supported” by his new employer.

He was blocked by the security firewall from using Webmail in the office (“we consider this to be something employees would only use for personal non-business purposes”), even though all his business contacts and subscriptions were on it.

He was blocked from accessing YouTube (where many of the videos he had prepared for his previous employers, and some educational videos he referred to regularly, were stored).

He was blocked from using IM and Skype, so he was cut off from his global network of experts and colleagues who used IM and Skype exclusively for instant, free knowledge sharing, advice and quick lookups of useful research materials.

He was blocked from using Vyew, so instead of being able to call people outside the office for quick, free conferences with screen-sharing, he had to use the company’s expensive pay-per-use audio conferencing system (and everyone on the call had to be pre-authorized), and send a huge deck of screen captures by email to participants in advance.

He wasn’t permitted to work from home. When he worked on weekends from home, his Web access to his work email didn’t work properly, and because his co-workers didn’t use it, he was told it would be months before they would start trying to fix the problems with it.

After a long delay, he was approved for VPN, but only on his work computer, so he began lugging it home every day, only to discover that it degraded performance so much that even accessing email with it was agonizingly slow.

His boss dropped into Jon’s cubicle about six weeks after he had started work, and found Jon working away happily. But to the boss’ surprise, Jon had two computers sitting side-by-side on his desk.

Jon explained that his work computer was connected to the organization’s network, and he used it only to access messages and documents behind the firewall, which Jon would immediately forward to his personal email account, or (using a USB drive) quickly transfer over to his own machine.

All work was done on Jon’s own machine, which was connected to the Internet (and all Jon’s contacts, subscriptions and documents) by a wireless connection that Jon paid for personally.

Because all Jon’s outgoing emails came from his own machine, 90 percent of the email he was receiving from fellow employees was now being sent to his personal email address (most people didn’t notice or care that Jon’s ‘reply to’ email address on his messages wasn’t his company email address).

Ten of his co-workers at the company had followed his two-computer example, and were using IM rather than email for their communications. The boss asked whether it didn’t take a lot of time to transfer between the two machines, and Jon replied “Less and less all the time.”

Jon’s boss left the office unsure whether to praise Jon for his innovative workaround, or report him to IT to make sure Jon wasn’t exposing the company to security risks.

This is a composite of a number of real cases of young people working around dysfunctional information systems I have witnessed in the last two years. I expect it’s going to become more and more common.

Let’s suppose that, in 20 years, Jon’s information behavior becomes the norm. Eventually organizations will have to face the problem, and end the guerilla war that is brewing between the IT security people and Gen Y in a growing number of companies and institutions.

I think it is unlikely that most will be able to resolve the perceived security threats in such a way that they could allow the Jons of the world to do what they want inside the firewall.

What is more likely is that, just like the calculator and telephone, the laptop (soon to become even smaller and more powerful) will evolve to be a ubiquitous personal device that people will carry with them everywhere.

At that point having redundant computers (and phones) on everyone’s desk will become absurd, and IT security can start to focus on protecting confidential data from being accessed, rather than trying to lock down employees’ appliances.

At that point, the role of the rest of IT, and KM, will have to change completely. Here’s a scenario of how I think it might look:

OrgInfoFlows2
Major information flows in organizations, c. 2025?

In 2025, every individual in every organization uses his or her own personal computer for both personal and work applications. Almost all information is Web-based, with organizations’ proprietary information only accessible through authorization software.

Email has disappeared, replaced by a virtual presence application that includes instant messaging, screensharing, voice/videoconferencing, filesharing, calendaring, tasklists.

Employees maintain a “Company Sector” on their machines in which they put information that can be accessed 24/7 by other employees.

Most people also maintain a “Public Sector” on their machines in which they put information that can be accessed 24/7 or subscribed to by anyone in the world (this has replaced blogs and applications like Facebook), and Community Sectors in which they put information that can be accessed 24/7 by other members of that Community.

The aggregation of the Company Sectors of all employees of an organization replaces the corporate Intranet of past generations; it can be viewed by anyone in that organization.

The aggregation of the Community Sectors of all members of a particular community replaces the community tools (forums, wikis, etc.) of past generations; it can be viewed by anyone in that community.

The IT department is still responsible for maintaining security around the organization’s proprietary information, but very little content is left in this category. IT also checks that the information in employees machines’ Company Sectors is appropriate for sharing, and auto-replicating properly.

The KM department still manages the purchase of external information, though almost all information in 2025 is free; information producers have realized that their business model is to apply that information to specific customers’ business environment, in consulting assignments, rather than trying to sell publications.

Most of the mainstream media were nationalized after they went bankrupt using their traditional business models, and now operate as public services.

Most of what the KM department does now is trying to facilitate more effective conversations among people within the organization and with people outside the organization, including customers.

They facilitate many meetings that use the virtual presence application, especially those that involve more than five people.

That facilitation includes organizing the meeting, distributing advance materials, facilitating the discussion (conflict resolution, staying on schedule, etc.), and even recording, editing and publishing the meeting as appropriate.

They run courses in effective conversation, meeting and presentation skills.

In addition, the KM department conducts environmental scans and conducts research in areas the organization wants to focus on, and publishes and runs short video presentations on the results.

They also browse the content of the aggregate of the Company Sectors of all employees of the organization, notifying managers and employees of content that may be worthy of follow-up, and they assist employees to manage their subscriptions to people’s Public Sector content.

And, when the organization holds sessions and conferences on strategy, risk, innovation or customer relationships, the KM department is on hand to do advance and just-in-time research.