Dave Snowden, Cognitive Edge, started with, “System design is not a linear process” and today requires a co-evolutionary approach.

Key concepts:  everything is fragmented, pattern based decisions (associated with the concept of mess), complexity & constraint, distributed cognition (from fail safe to safe fail experimentaiton), natural numbers (5, 15, 150) (some of which Dave covered in last year’s keynote, it’s podcast is available.)

Existing methods: narrative based requirements, cross silo self-forming teams, managing emergence

Emergent methods: crews, coherence mapping

Project design — Cynefin, see Harvard Business Review article Nov 07 (which won an Academy of Management’s Award for the best article by practitioners — and article which Dave wrote with Mary Boone)

Dave recorded his talk today and will post a podcast on his site.

Tom Reamy is, to many of us, one of the authorities on taxonomies. He’s talking right now about the varieties of taxonomy/text analystics software available now, and how to choose which is best for your application & organization.   All the vendors are adding more text analytics. So…step number one is: how are you going to use the technology?  Text mining? business inteligence? cusomter intelligence? tfor facted navigation? keyword indexing? to browse the front end of the portal?

Evaluating Taxonomy Software:

• new, copy, rename, delee, merge
• scop notes
• spell check
• search
• names & identifiers
• versioning
• ease of use
• user documentation
• visualiztion — how does it show things?
• automatic taxonomy/node generation — Tom says it’s nonsense but can be used at different stages, especially to get suggestions within a node or for entity extraction
• entity extraction
• auto-catgorization (training sets, terms, rules, advanced - saved search queries) “near” sentence” “paragraph”
• boolean search that allows you to search for x near y, and “not”
• advanced features — sentiment analysis (for customer service to see what people are saying about them); facts, ontologies, semantic web, etc…..

Phew!  If you want taxonomy management only, you are probably in a small company with a specialized taxonomy - and the good news is that this type of software is quite affordable. But do check the upgrade path for this type of tool, just in case you need to grow the application.Advanced application platforms, sich as Attensity’s or Inxight’s, are for those appls that need to integrate search and content management or to integrate policy, procedures and distributed contributions.

Tom’s advice: forget score cards to evaluate & do a pilot project instead  — use yoru content, in your application to see HOW the tool really works— “think big, start small & win”

The “C” level problem — is that someone at the CEO, CFO, COO level has to approve this, & they won’t know a thing about it; all you can do is demonstrate the complexity in their language — tell them stories of the pain they recognize in the organization.

Key ingredient to evaluating:

• start with your own self knowledge - understand your content as much as you can, the technology already in place, and the business & information behaviours of the people that will be using the applications
• eliminate the unfit according to the list above — ask experts, look at reputation of vendors, make sure the tool matches your scope & your environment — narrow it to 3-4 vendors, bring them in, have them do demos with your content, have them all in on one day
• deep pilot — how well does it work with the semantics? this gives you a much better handle on making the decision between your top 2 vendors

A few months agoTheresa Regli of CMS Watch wrote a blogpost on whether taxonomies are dead or dying, or just hitting their stride. I thought this was a great question to address at the beginning of the Taxonomy BootCamp, and Theresa very kindly agreed to speak to the topic at 8:00 a.m. — & the audience was full. Wow.  The upshot is that Theresa feels taxonomies aren’t dying, but they are definitely being augmented by technologies, and, in some cases, aren’t necessary. As Theresa said, we need to have the confidence to admit when taxonomies aren’t required. And that is part of a process’ and a function’s maturation.

Theresa’s wit and fantastic speaking ability took this topic to new levels. She built on Seth Earley’s comment that taxonomies have a few mullets to deal with - or, preferably get rid of (mullets should definitely be eliminated!) Bob Boiko told Theresa that enterprise taxonomies are mullets that need to go; taxonomies with too great a scope are too difficult to manage & not useful —- taxonomies need to be targetted and focused.  Seth says the mullets are site maps, really deep hierarchies & huge manual tagging projects.  Theresa’s mullet is the notion that one classification fits all.

So what’s the new lifeblood of taxonomies?

• Application integration
• breaking huge corpuses of content into manageable pieces
• linguisitcs, context, purpose
• metadata for dynamic navigation & filtered searches
• taxonomists who say “technology is our friend”

Stay tuned — lots more to come…..

Just posted on the KMWorldblog about a session I listened to at KMWorld & Intranets 2008 describing NASA’s experiment with social networking.  Cool.

I’m delighted I’ve finally been able to hear and meet Jon Husband of wirearchy.com.  Jon is one of the few, very few, people working with organizations to help them evolve their organization structures to support the collaborative technologies and resulting work behaviours.  In most organizations there is this horrible disconnect between the hoopla about “working collaboratively” with “social networking tools” and the management practices, reporting relationships and performance expectations. As Husband says, the fundamentals about how we design work (& I add here, how organizations design themselves) hasn’t changed in 50 years. 50 years. Shesh. Organizations can talk the talk about “collaboration”, but to effectively implement collaborative tools and work behaviours they have to walk the walk of new organization structures, management practices and employment expectations and compensation.The hierarchical structure has been based on the belief that knowledge is arranged vertically. But this is no longer the case — now knowledge flows horizontally and chaotically (he didn’t use that term, but I think that’s an apt term — chaos isn’t necessarily a bad thing, after all — out of chaos can come new thinking.)

Ok, so what does this mean for organizations? Well, it means that they will work “ok” for the time being, but until this issue is really addressed, the true benefits of all these technologies and people working collaboratively will not be realized. Husband says he’s bored with this. Me too. He also says that this issue will be addressed during the next ten years. I agree. He also talked about the fact that organizations have to choose different structures depending on what they need to accomplish. Yep - I agree there too. Kind of a blended structure approach. One structure sure doesn’t fit all.

Husband also pointed to some other sources to explore on this topic, including Gary Hamel’s Future of Management , fredcavazza.net, Clay Shirky,  and Canadians Don Tapscott and Dave Pollard. (Jon is also from Canada. Great, eh?)  He
also referred to Malone’s Future of Work  which I’ve used many, many times. But Malone’s work is now 4 years old, and I’m not as travelled as Jon is, but I just don’t see the organizations evolving their structures. So…. the next ten years will be interesting. But if organizations don’t get on with the changes required to their structures and management, then it could be even MORE interesting.  I’m hoping to talk with Jon later today, and one of the issues I want to talk with him about is the impact of this on unionized environments — or maybe, to reframe that — the impact of the unionized environments on this…..

John Kao opened KMWorld & Intranets 2008 in San Jose this morning and drew lots of blog attention at the new KMWorldblog. Also check out comments from other bloggers at the conference.

I loved John’s definition of innovation: a set of capabilities that allows continuous realization of a desired future. Some of his quotes: “Innovation drives, and is an enabler of, transformation, giving it a goal or desired direction.” “Innovation blossoms in diverse settings.” “Innovation comes through conversations in different disciplines.” Scientists, designers, and many others are “actors in a value chain for innovation.” It’s the “business processes that take innovation from the lab into the business.” And I really look forward to his Harvard Business Review article coming out early in the new year on new business models using systems integrators — the systems integrator model for building new businesses — a “born global strategy” where parts of the organization are decentralized all over the world. “Units of action are decentralized from a global array of resources.” It will be a “fundamental transformation in the way ventures are formed.”

Thanks Google for reminding me that today is the first day of autumn, although here in California at KMWorld & Intranets 2008 it doesn’t really look like fall.  The workshops at the conference are now underway, Dave Snowden will lead a networking event this evening and our first keynote speaker, John Kao, will open the event in the morning.  To follow what’s happening at the conference join us at our new blog.

   I can’t believe that I’ve been talking about urgency in the context of change and transformation for over 20 years, and now leadership guru John Kotter has a new HBS book, A Sense of Urgency, out on the topic.  Here’s what it’s about.

“Most organizational change initiatives fail spectacularly (at worst) or deliver lukewarm results (at best). In his international bestseller Leading Change, John Kotter revealed why change is so hard, and provided an actionable, eight-step process for implementing successful transformations. The book became the change bible for managers worldwide. Now, in Urgency, Kotter shines the spotlight on the crucial first step in his framework: creating a sense of urgency by getting people to actually see and feel the need for change. Why focus on urgency? Without it, any change effort is doomed. Kotter reveals the insidious nature of complacency in all its forms and guises. In this exciting new book, Kotter explains: How to go beyond “the business case” for change to overcome the fear and anger that can suppress urgency; Ways to ensure that your actions and behaviors — not just your words — communicate the need for change; How to keep fanning the flames of urgency even after your transformation effort has scored some early successes. Written in Kotter’s signature no-nonsense style, this concise and authoritative guide helps you set the stage for leading a successful transformation in your company. “

After hearing Doris Kearns Goodwin speak a few years ago at an SLA conference, I was happy to see her piece, The Secrets of America’s Great Presidents, today in Parade magazine which comes with the Sunday Washington Post.  The author and presidential historian lists her top 10 qualities: the courage to stay strong, self-confidence, an ability to learn from errors, a willingness to change, emotial intelligence, self-control, a popular touch, a moral compass, a capacity to relax, and a gift for inspiring others.

I’m working away on my pet project & keen interest-area, Organization 2.0 — how organizations are evolving their structures, approaches, roles and  responsibilities (plus governance, accountabilities, etc.) to truly leverage collaborative 2.0 tools and technologies.  By the way,  some of you should be prepared since I’m about to embark on a series of interviews to see how organizations are coming along with this evolvement or if, in fact, you’re experiencing more “stalledment”….  And I come across a link to the “Chief Happiness Officer” , Alexander Kjerulf, who writes and speaks on the importance of happiness in the workplace.  This isn’t a new concept by any means, but it is one that most organizations try for a bit, particularly around the time of off-site meetings, team building and 360 appraisals, and then “get back to work!”  The first time I heard this concept was in the mid 1980’s when the VP I reported to at Imperial Oil Ltd. started to actually DO something about building and maintaining a “happy” work environment.

A “happy” work environment? The guffaws were loud and long. An “effective” work environment was the goal — maybe even a “motivating” work environment. But “happy?”  Good heavens — if you were aiming for happy you might get sleepy, and we already had enough dopey and grumpy.  But he was not deterred and those of us who worked there benefited from the incredible learnings of what it really takes to create and manage a happy work environment.  

Read the first post about the interview with Pret A Manger, one of the companies that hire happy people and train them, rather than highly-skilled people who aren’t happy and hope that they’ll be ‘motivated’. Yes, we need highly-skilled employees - no question. But if those highly-skilled people aren’t feeling good about what they are doing and why they are doing it, then the workplace becomes toxic, dysfunctional and collaboration and change are just a dream that won’t be a reality.

Speaking of change, Alexander’s next post looks at why those people who are happy with their work are more willing to engage in changes at work:

“1: Happy people get more ideas
In times of change, companies cannot rely on the old ways of doing business and thus need new ideas. Preferably lots of them. And a fascinating study by Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School shows that creativity is positively associated with joy and love and negatively associated with anger, fear, and anxiety. In other words, happy employees generate more ideas.

2: Happy people buy into new ideas.
It’s not enough to generate lots of ideas, you also need people to believe enough in them to actually want to implement them. Many managers work from a belief that change comes from dissatisfaction, pain and unhappiness, but psychological research proves them wrong. It turns out that what a business needs is optimists. Optimistic employees believe that change projects will pay off and are thus much more likely to commit. Unhappy, pessimistic employees only see all the ways a project can fail and often only go along on the surface – offering compliance rather than commitment.

3: Happy people implement new ideas.
And finally, once you have the ideas and people buy into them, you need to have the motivation to actually do something about it. And once again research shows that happy, satisfied employees are much more motivated. In fact, while managers must constantly work help dissatisfied employees find their motivation, happy employees motivate themselves. If you like the company you work for, you want the company to succeed - if you hate your workplace, you don’t give a damn.

In short, happy companies change willingly and effectively, while their unhappy competitors cling to business as usual and throw up massive resistance to all things new and uncertain.”

This isn’t just a feel-good blog; positivesharing.com  shares some excellent insights and research regarding positive, productive, “happy” workplaces.  And it is those qualities, much more than the networking and collaborative technologies, that will underpin the evolution to Org 2.0, 3.0, the future.