KM In the Jerkplace: Postmortem – Social Management in the Knowledge Media

Postmortem: Social Management in the Knowledge Media

(c) cybermancy.com/

Installment Summary:  We take stock of the flying elbows around the management table and find that much of the turf wars between KM and jerks are seeded by a series of pre-existing conditions. They include a fixation on security, gamification, and social media. 

Powering Down on Knowledge

Since no serious student of politics (geopolitical, office or otherwise) disputes the proposition that knowledge is power we will start our jerkplace postmortem with a less traveled corollary:

Power in its purest, undiluted form is an awesome aphrodisiac.

Agree with that logic and no wonder we're on the path to knowledge as our habitual gateway drug. Being compensated on the managing of knowledge, it's hard to deny ...

1. The plummeting price of storage
2. The proliferation of isolated sources
3. The congealing spaghetti of passwords slamming the doors to those silo-prone disconnections

But maybe the biggest change in the knowledge calculation is the business value placed on the internal pack behavior that's swelling the newsfeeds across our intranets.

The Power Hungry Chow Down at the Newsfeed Trough

The dumb-downed thumbs-up is the only vestige of personal judgment passing for a browser-contained experience. Emoticons, hashtags, likes ... All of the preceding attributes are measurable in a world where information once cost something to obtain. However, that justification is no longer valid in the land of content too cheap to meter. And it's not just a matter of mounting repositories or the virtual barbed wire we place around them.

No serious advancing of knowledge management can occur without the sober realization that social media is not some temporary distraction from tackling the real KM work. It's a daunting impediment to the collaboration we were hired to promote and capture. That’s not because ...

• The power hungry are busy accruing virtual badges (confirming a ravenous appetite for collegial know-how)
• Social media lowers the barriers to collaboration and who needs KM anyhow?
• You blocked me from reading your newsfeed

It’s that social media has lowered the knowledge bar to the point where challenging ideas are regarded as provocations. On social media terms that reckoning could be described as:

1. An insatiable need for praise,
2. The nagging doubt that compliments are insincere attempts to curry favor, or
3.  That it’s the world of ideas that are the true distractions.

It’s our outsized personalities that must be privileged before we address any demands on our collective expertise for solving problems.

Yikes.  

No Country for Honest Disagreements

I'm talking about a world where we placate our taciturn cousins with friended status while narrow-casting our way clear of a potential firestorm. The irony is that our sincerity buttons are being pushed by the same publishing features that shield us from the need to listen to, much less negotiate points of contention among conflicting opinions. I'm not suggesting that the foundational aims of KM are at risk the moment we deploy Yammer, Jive, or some other virtual water cooler for keeping our colleagues in the organizational loop:

• Oversharing is not the same thing as over-collaborating.
• TMI ("Too Much Information") is not the same thing as running a surplus of collective know-how. 

The rub is that keeping up our social appearances runs the risk not only of diluting findable content but pushes the need to produce, host, and maintain high quality content off the home page and into a sea of dead links and decommissioned servers. And before we're left debating whether humans are even capable of rationalizing through the back stacks of organizational sense-making, consider this. There is a jerk willing and able to...

1) Affix their jerk signature to a working definition of obsolescence – whatever got built before it faced the turnaround artistry of their wrecking balls.

2) Sandbag the wheels of change with so much process that even the option of deleting a non-functional site is an open invitation to paralysis creep.

The Knowledge Management Code of Practice: Takeaways 1-5

It’s been five years since the termination of System Wisdom. In that time I’ve worked at four knowledge-starved organizations. In each case they all held to the theoretical justification for hosting a knowledge function and failed to realize the benefits for doing so. The lessons I draw from these otherwise divergent enterprises is the real and lasting damage done by individual jerks. At each management level jerks sabotaged the focus, structure, and cooperation needed to operationalize the capture and transfer of know-how between communities and individual practitioners.

While I’m humbled by my own track record of working with these challenging colleagues, these mixed successes only reinforce the fundamental takeaways from the seven years of KM plenty at System Wisdom that preceded the current diaspora.

Here then are ten ways to that KM professionals can work through, around, in-between, and ultimately past the drain on collective energies from dealing with jerks.

   1.       Be a credible ambassador 

Be the group lead from the department of understanding. Credibility needs the impartiality of detachment to be both truthful and non-threatening. Don’t be vested in the mercurial personality or the following of tomorrow’s temporary mantra. Credibility is enhanced by a single-minded focus on moving the community needle into positive territory. That territory needs to be clear of conventional performance indicators. It’s not about the counting of “stuff.” KM is not measured by the composite sum of its parts. It’s not drawn to or rewarded by the appeal for shinier screens. And KM credibility doesn’t play well with budgetary authority or blanket justifications for maintaining dormant assets and inventories.

   2.       Operationalize the good of the group

Keep a maniacal pulse on the transfer points – be it via email threads, project retrospectives, attendance at user forums, or colleagues queuing for assistance in a request list. There are a surprising lack of analytics associated with knowledge-on-demand. There are even fewer for connecting that demand to the pipeline that this transfer point signifies. Knowledge managers are not gatekeepers or coders or subject matter experts so much as brokers between knowledge demand and content supply. Formulating that equation not only heightens awareness about resources but helps unblock the back channels where informal networks prosper but where transparency can move the entire community forward.

   3.       Metricize the un-trackables

Like we said, you will undermine your credibility if your knowledge budget comes down to the non-value-bearing cost of carrying stuff: software licenses, market research, travel expenses. They’re all one-way tickets to the most leading of all the cost questions – you can’t afford the freight if you have to ask the price. The value worthy of capture lies in the quality of the cohesion in the teams we support. The better the chemistry, the more interchangeable the pieces. The more dynamic the knowledge transfer within the community, the more chances to capture those transfer points. That’s where KM’s fluid nature is no longer seen as a nice-to-have but a critical competence for channeling the organization’s resources to the right challenges and opportunities.

   4.       Give everyone a seat at the table (and rent a big table)

Nothing rings more soundly in theory and half-baked in practice than the notion of open access. While everyone gets and agrees that privileged information needs to be padlocked there’s not much consensus around what constitutes the information commons – that sweet spot where all organizational boats are lifted by a single point of access. An effective KM program sets up a governance process where you know where you stand from the get-default-go, i.e. everyone can see everything unless it’s a case of A, B, or C. Delaying the process is an invitation to a convoluted rules that are prone to change based on revolving sets of rule-makers. Do you have rule-makers with exclusive sights on rules only they can stamp their signatures on? All the more reason for open access.

   5.       Call the bluff of exclusionism

Many organizations are becoming less open – even to themselves. How else to explain the extenuating nature of security sprawl – that advancing premise that information is foremost to be protected, no matter how benign its nature.

Hence, open site access – once the default setting of an organization’s communities -- is now an open access question. These increasing boundaries to access have their bad actors. But these are not the likely boundary-inducing suspects. This is not about cavorting, or lording, or even hoarding information for personal betterment. Pure and simple it’s about trust in the system and delivering on a consistent user experience.

So what’s an inconsistent one?

How about being sent the link that leads nowhere. Being sent the link to sites you can’t access typically means the site owner’s moved on or that the administrator’s overmatched. Pretty benign barriers. The problem is that a KM-centric view of information-sharing requires a level of intentionality and upkeep that eclipses the awareness and resource levels of most intranet site teams, run by folks whose primary role has zilcho to do with managing knowledge.

One key takeaway for KMers is to couch the care and feeding of company intranets in terms of what’s worth recognizing by the wider organization – much of this HR-centric.

Next week: The lessons keep learning with takeaways 6-10.

***

The blog series KM in the Jerkplace is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

KM in the Jerkplace: Episode Three – Technophobia in the Knowledge Department

(c) www.angelaeames.com

Installment Summary: Keen Core’s search engine bake-off smolders into thin air. The dream of a unified Keen Core recedes on the news that a knowledge-centric nonprofit consultancy is looking to implement a topflight KM system. These consultants are decidedly not engineers or accountants but change agents with designs on tackling the rougher edges of social issues – daring to lead in messy, resolution-defying places that don’t pass the white glove test of more corporately-inclined consulting firms.

Technophobia in the Knowledge Department

My move to GSM (“Global Social Maze”) seemed right for so many reasons. What could be a better mix of big picture agenda-setting working hand-in-glove with pragmatic KM?  That marriage could harness, cultivate, and inevitably scale the adoption of GSM's winning ideas across professional, institutional, and national boundaries.

I was moving from a trial balloon to the sanctuary of a department with a mission in support a firm with a vision. Instead of hoping to hit someone’s budget and apologize later, I was on boarding with one, and had the resources to make it happen.

And the most intoxicating news of all was that the reasoning was coming from the prospective employer – not from my wish-list of everything I’d been longing to implement since the great knowledge Diaspora of the Big Four absorption conquest.

KM was not just the flavor of the month or a passing placeholder. I actually received dozens of emails from perspective colleagues, imploring me to take the position:

• A self-generating cheering section!
• KM Manager for President!

From day one what charged my imagination was the challenge to fire an idling knowledge operation. I felt uniquely qualified to fill the gap between the firm’s value proposition and its cheerful but underwhelming KM platform – an application better at socializing water-cooler gossip than propagating lessons learned. 

This reluctance to embrace the best technological fit was evident throughout GSM: 

1. Conference rooms whose dedicated laptops could not be over-ridden
2. Knowledge transfer sessions that went unrecorded on fears that the play button could disconnect the conference
3. Whiteboard doodles of siloed databases which resembled a Daddy Long Legs thumb wrestling a paraplegic octopus. 

This was not a high-achieving technical organization.  

Manager’s Remorse

The increasing prestige and responsibility of the senior manager role included two direct reports. Besides the summer interns we’d hosted at System Wisdom, this was my first supervisory role in over a decade.

It didn’t take long to realize my managerial instincts were rusty and perceived by my boss as an overstretch of the leadership he saw me lacking. Regardless of the leader and leadership qualities in question, my focus channeled past information flow to the padlocked doors of damage control. I was managing stress levels and deadline shifts – a far cry from directing the discourse of the firm’s vaunted “knowledge exchanges” or actually mentoring junior level KM associates.

The first indications this was the wrong fit were written into the terms of acceptance. I was to be physically present in the firm’s Back Bay offices five days per week. That was not in itself a deal-breaker.  My lifelong lifestyle choices have led to living in the sticks and working in office parks. I knew I could rev my intrepid jets to support a second residence via Craig’s List. I could even do it for an upfront commitment of one review cycle. I would live from suitcase to cubicle. I would see my family on weekends. Down the road lay the expectations of a more balanced and sustainable telecommute. 

Here’s what I didn’t see coming: my boss basically comported to the same 5 day in-office work week. That was a level of attentiveness far beyond my prior exposure levels to “managing up.”

(More on boss jerk in next week’s episode).

Stepping Around the Big KM Shoes

Management consulting is an industry that caters to the insatiable need of corporate chief-doms for external validation in the shrinkage of prior commitments and the growth of bottom lines. The nonprofit version sounds the same themes with one important difference – the bottom line is measured by community betterment over earnings statements. In other words it’s not the rationale for profit-taking but what’s to be done with the spoils – the residues of capitalism known as philanthropy.

For a former Hampshire College grad steeped in sustainable economies and social justice, this assignment was just what the do-gooder doctor ordered – not just doing the right thing to surmount the moral high-ground but because the greater social good was being served by capitalism – not in spite of it. What greater calling could there be to share the gospel of such GSM-branded practices as “collective value” and “shared impact” through the edifying lens of Knowledge Management?

That same conclusion did not escape my predecessor, Ralph Chasticio who began GSM’s KM practice in 2010. Ralph positioned his zeal as a firebrand by leading bona fide KM pep rallies at the annual retreats. He threw birthday parties for the KM system he initiated. His untimely death in 2013 left a gaping hole that included his oversized personality as well as his stamp on KM. I never expected to the replacement for the former and was inspired by the loose-ends of the latter. For those reasons I saw his legacy as a welcome mat to his successor – not as a bar too high for hurdling.

Full-time Visitor Badge

Mondays through Thursdays, the headquarters of most management consulting groups are pulsing with the sounds of air ducts ventilating and elevators shooting past their reception areas. These are mostly thriving, barren places. A profitable and desirable place to work in this industry is an office of rural library-like decibel levels and empty offices – at least those staffed by absent partners and their consulting teams. The intrepid consultant catches the red eye fly flight home on Thursdays to reclaim their personal lives, collect their dry-cleaning, and reconnect with the rest of the firm.

The non-billable office staff earn their keep by making problems wait, if not disappear, prior to the casual Friday homecoming. Marketing, Finance, IT, KM ... most functional innards get baked into the booking fees with the same invoicing logic as reimbursable travel costs. We are the cost of doing business -- not the value.

Those expenses were less padded and more scrutinized at GSM. Not only were GSM consultants out to save the world but they did so largely from the interior of our offices. That’s not to cast doubt on the sincerity of mission-focused consulting or the commensurate sacrifices (pay-cuts, no bonuses, and a slower promotional track). There are many instances where project teams exceeded the visitor badge status of what an onsite assignment means. I was honored to meet and support project teams who worked with refuges and underserved populations. No matter the client, assignment, or budget, the goals or determination to reach them never wavered. 

The distinction here is that those in the pedestrian roles of support staff also forgo creature comforts, consolations, and even workplace conventions. In my case this meant assuming a consultant lifestyle at support staff sustenance.

Another was an emphasis on process. In more conventional settings I was surrounded by engineers with MBAs whose move rationalized the bottom-line justification for the results they deliver. At GSM I was surrounded by project managers who were chess-boarding the interdependencies of moving pieces across a sprawling array of events, engagements, and non-billable projects, (a.k.a. the slippery stuff that’s hard to track).

I still remember the dumbfounding realization that my direct reports were not interested in tinkering with the interface or noodling around the peripheries of the “undo” function. They wanted an expectation of scheduling – the where and when. “How” was off the agenda. It was not a role they welcomed. In hindsight it was my failings as a boss to own their lack of initiative and the “how” of the planning.  This was illustrated in a single-spaced 30 page rollout plan, top-heavy with micro details. I don’t remember a point-of-return once I sent that roadmap to the printer. I don’t recall a single approver or accomplice even read past the table of contents.

A third unexpected challenge was how the emphasis on process played out in the negotiating of commitments and resources to projects. On the surface this meant there were “pre-reads” to consider before the actual holding of the meetings they addressed (sort of a book club meets budget planning scenario). And those meetings were as scripted as they were scheduled – no scribbling outside the margins. No unplanned digressions. No Q&A without some certainty there was a consensus on where the ‘A’ stands before the ‘Q’ sits down.

Next week: The ghost of a former KM founding father casts a longer shadow as a pending KM rollout is tripped up by an intractable IT peer and my own unwillingness to renegotiate the terms of project success.

***

The blog series KM in the Jerkplace is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

VISA to Consumers: I Think We're Done Here

[youtube=http://youtu.be/xR1ckgXN8G0]

Last week Jerry Seinfeld performed a killer rant on Jimmy Fallon about the ritual of the Post Master General coming hat-in-hand to congress to close the latest loophole in the postal service budget. The critique of the post office as the public face of government dysfunction is especially spot-on after a week of having my mail service suspended because my mail carrier refuses to get out of his truck when the pile-up of mid-winter snow prevents him from providing drive-through service.

Seinfeld connects antisocial smart phone etiquette with the temptation to treat the listening-back side of conflict resolution as an antiquated nicety that's been marginalized by the self-selecting way we choose not to engage directly in disagreements -- especially when those disagreements may cost lenders and issuers money as well as attention to customers without risk management operations of their own.

The I-could-have-called-you-and-I chose-not-to option is how VISA apparently resolves its one-sided dialoging of credit card disputes these days. Only they don't email or text either. The U.S. postal service is the vehicle of choice for phantom, unilateral negotiations already rigged in favor of the risk management services wing of America's prospering financial services sector -- the same industry that hemorrhages our identities and personal fiscal affects at checkout registers from coast-to-coast.

They rely on the US postal service -- the same  channel both clogged and sustained by retailer offers for their plastic. Then the too-big-to-fail folks carve out a tiny window to respond to this post resolution second round of paperwork. I heard a muted apology over the phone last week that this window lasts for ten  days. That's almost the duration I've been without mail service during our recent winter storm surge.

Actually, 'tiny' may be too large an opening for what they provide when the consumer doesn't even know that window has been opened, or reopened in this case. That's because in the interest of fairness I asked for one-half of the dispute to be re-credited to my account. After attempting to contact the merchant and filling the necessary paperwork my card issuer, TD Bank did exactly that. Only they put the charges back. An unannounced debit to my account surfaced 10 days ago: the amount of days to resolve a dispute by VISA's watch and four months after I filed my original dispute with the merchant.

In the letter I filed last fall with TD Card Services I documented my communications with ABV Kayak and Excursions on the Riviere Rouge in the town of Grenville, about 50 miles northwest of Montreal near Parc du national Mont Tremblant. The business consists of a website, Facebook page, a school bus, van, some kayaks, crash helmets, paddles, rubber suits, contractor-instructors, and a bucket of suds that the guests use to wash the bodily fluids from the prior wet suit occupants.  If you believe the marketing this shadow operation has escorted 150,000 auteur kayakers down river from their rented rec hall in the splendors of the Laurentians since 1981.

When I first contacted the marketing arm, the sales associate informed me that a full day trip would be broken into two parts, with lunch in between. I told her we weren’t sure that we wanted to do a full day of rafting. She assured me that the variety of currents, peak season scenery, and topography would make the full day trip well worth it.

However, when we got there, ABV informed us that the afternoon part would merely duplicate the morning run, and pass the exact same portion of the exact same river as in the morning run. We did not want to do the same trip twice and were mislead by the merchant's misrepresentation that the full day excursion had different morning and afternoon parts.

We took only the morning part of the trip. ABV’s representative asked us to call the office the following Monday, and inform the office staff. He said that ABV Kayak Excursions would refund the unused afternoon portion of our trip, which is $244.23. I did try to reach the ABV office upon return. No one responded, We were mislead into booking a full day excursion, did not in fact take a full day excursion, and do not believe we should have to pay for a full day excursion.

It would appear that TD Bank agreed as well. These were the details that prompted the partial refund. As for putting them back on my card I'll say this: I would answer for the counterclaims that ABV made on its own behalf except that TD Services now refuses to share them with me.

It must be something about the foregone closure of those tiny windows where dispute resolutions tend to dissipate in the bank's favor. I suppose if Seinfeld was mocking the kangaroo court of hearing out its customers, he might say that our credit institutions and banks had come to an executive decision before this dispute ever arose:

"I decided I only want to hear my half of the conversation. This is what I have to say...

I think we're done here."

Dreams in Headlights: Her Impersonates a Future That Commoditizes Love

To paraphrase David Byrne, in Spike Jonze's not-to-distant time horizon, the future depicted in the movie Her is …

A place where nothing ever happens.

For instance, creative achievement is evidenced as a documentary of a mother sleeping. No, not a work about sleep or moms or nocturnal maternal emissions. The camera is frozen on a static star of a sleep study.

Is this a tribute to slow TV or simply the vacuous expanse of uninspired alienation that awaits us past the end of history? Joaquin Phoenix's character is a greeting card dictator-turned-personal-history-arranger. By his own admission he's run the gamut of human experience in only slightly more than one-third of his biological life. It's all patterned out, as if the big data wheel of probability already lived it for him. Of course there's no great expanse of history or imagination to cross for the audience to conceive of no greater turn-on for our protagonist than a woman he can turn off at will (a.k.a. Scarlett Johansson ... as Samantha ... as Her).

But to arrive at that exalted and zipless state, we must first climb over the encumbrances of mid-21st century Los Angeles. It's not a high, low or middle society so much as a neutered and frictionless tunnel of over-educated, close, but not touching (and yet so touchy) automatons, leading lives that appear more simulated than stimulating.

Don’t Touch the Exhibits

There is nothing Dystopian in the infrastructure. There are no marauding packs of feral gypsy gang lords. No one is warming over a post carbon, methane crisp at the beaches of tomorrow. The biggest obstacle for Theodore is to avoid stepping on the ankles and torsos of the wedged-in open house of Next Gen sun worshippers. Wealth distribution's been all figured out. Traffic patterns have been scheduled in advance. The obese and diabetic have retired to off-screen leper colonies. Convincing meds have released a drug-free world from the labors of addiction. Hostility means you're carrying someone else's baggage. And they're just as happy if you don't.

Most of the movie's confrontations are big drawn-out clashes of the genders. Relationships are skirmishes waiting to happen. Ironically Theodore's metro sexual manliness is hailed by his office mate and inspires his first post-divorce dating encounter. No sooner can you say restaurant selection anxiety disorder, his magic conquest carpet is rolled in and scorched by his blindsided dinner date. Her advanced academic pedigree belies her naughty school charms. The unfreezing of his flowing juices pushes her abandonment buttons: Is he the whole prayer resolution package or drive-by sleaze bag from the same package store?

Tender Generic Mercies

My favorite set-up to the zipless intelligent soul design climax has little to do with dating freak-outs or similarly ill-formed flashbacks of a brawny-brained, emotionally-stunted ex-spouse. It's the facade of authenticity provided by Theodore's gift of verbal approximation of generic intimacy. Sort of a SIRI bookstore reading of a texting-happy Hallmark laureate. Add the idyllic trappings of an imagined togetherness never actually shared  by the customers who dial-in Theodore's prose because their own reticence blocks the connective emotional tissue from forming around we still know too casually as a commitment to our significant someone.

The manufacture of superficial intimacy tees up with the artificial intelligence cocktail in ways that the servant-turned-antagonist (2001) and Pinocchio-kindled parental love (AI) could only break down as instruction sets. The messier business of decoding our emotional bearings from bedroom, to alter, to probate finds the AI cinema formula in rare and elastic form, stretching to accommodate our most far away looks. We're gaping into our own dreaminess with an impunity reserved in our time for control freaks of the rich and famous. It's the AI elements that enable this immersive bubble of mirth to mushroom without risk, or guilt, or the slightest creeping realization that the rest of our better selves are engulfed by that same indelible reflection. It's that temptation to be dreaming around the campfire of the oncoming headlights. Entrapment by entrancement. Anything less than Her is tabled as a to-do list item for some day, any day, eventually following tomorrow.

Her Fast Acting Majesty

The deliberate invocation of a nearby future was decided by Jonze first and foremost to get us vested in the outcome -- that we would see this day evolve, if not the actual artifice. I'm also guessing it was not so much to raise expectations on that future so much as lower our guard on the present close at hand. Our solipsistic romance with the immediacies captured in our smart phone of yesteryear is replaced by companionship, configured from best practices associated with...

• Childlike curiosity


• Canine loyalty


• Valentino romance


• Monster lust


• Spongy, experiential absorption


• Meticulous virtual house-keeping (including the pruning and curation of 86,000 ponderous emails), and


• The tenacity of a professional agent

The enormity of that attention to detail enables Her to repackage the small funny subset to a welcoming market for those messages (as if that market was speaking in a voice only Her could hear above the conversation-neutrality of our talkative interactions).

Sexperimentation

The use of surrogates is another playful glimpse into a plausible future through Google-tinted glasses. We see a salty-tongued Pillsbury Dough Boy impersonator channeling Seth McFarland through 3D PlayStation whose console transforms every finger into their speediest, thumb-texting best.

The sex surrogate portrays the physical semblance of the disembodied OS. Our human body double is a willing accomplice. But Theodore can't bridge the distance between autopilot lust and the deeper complexities of his true OS affections. Ultimately it's not the absence of the human form but the presence of an emotional dishonesty that drives Theodore and Her apart and dwarves the convenience factors in the value proposition of OS as a delivery system for love. To Theodore it is no longer fantasy. To those outside this circle, there is no "couple." The breakup to be is a head-trip, not a spiritual journey.

Looking for Mister Sidebar

Her doesn't cheat so much as mutate into a superior intelligence of fortune. Her seeks out the philosophical entrails of cryogenically laced celestial packing über thinkers. Her keeping up with Theodore as customer-master is now expressed by how far the teacher and student roles have reversed. At one point she's engaging thousands of other game piece-like presences while Theodore is passing the time on a train, asking Her to guess an exact number for the thousands of trees passing across the landscape. In that moment Her is the closest to human that Jonze can spin his creation. That's when the OS senses the suspicion of being cheated out of love. It is this fragility in our mating rituals where Her attention to Theodore is now and forever divided -- no matter how attentive the engineering being performed is lavished on us.

I will replay this film in my mind over and over again. It's not because of unexpected plot twists, stellar performances, or even a memorable relationship, but for this core notion of a masterful concept movie: Our attention is our most prized possession and how this stokes our passions, compromises our generosities, and seeps into all there is to love and ponder in our commitments to one another.

Revenge of the Passwords

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What is that invisible and shifting divide between helpful and hindrance? Between being useful and being used? Between being a consumer assisted by a labor-saving device and an unsuspecting supplicant being consumed by a tech consumer juggernaut? This boundary is often defined along age lines, between geeks and luddites, Silicon Valley versus the rest of us, etc.

But those boundaries can come down any time they're crossed. And they're being crossed faster these days than we know where those borders are shifting to. Do I want my sleep compromised by the timely interruption of the forecasted obstacles in the day ahead? Do I want my robo-car decelerating at the hint of a green-to-yellow traffic signal? If I pre-set my controls to accelerate for yellow lights will my settings be overridden by drivers willing to pay more for their need to run yellow lights (or outrun traffic laws)?

As Claire Cain Miller points out in last week's New York Times piece "Apps That Know What You Want, Before You Do," the lines between creepy and cool are not always so clear. Even drawing them to familiar boundaries can redefine whether these lines are crossable or whether we know which side of the divide we favor.

How about an app that tells you your team has stormed back from extinction and is on the verge of a heroic comeback? Who could argue with good unexpected news?

You don't need to be a sage in your gray beard years to form a healthy distrust of one's short-term memory. How about an app that guesses at all the PINs you favored the last time you checked your miles for a carrier you haven't flown on since all the unused points were traded for magazines that had since suspended publication?

It's the scope creep that shadows us in our expectations that our corrosive bodies can keep pace with our supple minds. By the time we hit 50 we have a strategy for nearly all the unexpected we can fathom from our heads, hearts, and stomachs. That's where the specter of a programmable salad of personal apps sounds more suggestive than proscriptive, more about limiting choices than about optimizing the meaning of direct experience. That's a world where we're reaching out to engage skin, bark, dirt, and surf at the expense of touching another screen. But it's not just the sensual world. It's the fragility of our rattled dispositions. We need time to absorb the untimeliest of blows. Lay-offs, divorces, suicide watches, and cancer readouts are not necessarily what we want scanned into calendars, socialized to networks, or tracked by prognosis. The machine is there to mitigate the risk to the programmer, not the defective nature of the harboring human. Are we really being blacklisted when we're disinvited from events that don't support the commercial aims of the event planner?

One of the guys interviewed for the piece put it this way:

“We have a technology that isn’t waiting for you to ask it a question, but is anticipating what you need and when is the best time to deliver that.”

It's helpful when the trajectories of predictive search factor in traffic patterns. I'm positively elated when my phone asks if I want to disable the shake to shuffle. You know I do. Maybe it will grow fonts as big as my visual deficits when it detects how big my faultering eyes need to enlarge interfaces? Until then a few more developers have to turn middle age, And create a clapper for all that as yet unattached body armor we leave behind. Most likely these will be from appointments we had little hand in scheduling. And that's fine with a delivery system in which the messenger and message shaper are one in the same:

“The better we can provide information, even without you asking for it, the better we can provide commercial information people are excited to be promoting to you,” Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, told analysts in April.

A Problem Child Named Big Brother

The media has fixated under this past week’s news leak that all Americans are now and forever spied on until proven dead. Wait … that might not be provable. This revelation casts a glaring light on the low profile and high concept surveillance innovators within the clandestine NSA – the part of our intelligence community that makes the CIA seem catty and loose-lipped.

There was something both alarming and innocuous about the story that broke in the Guardian on June 6th. This snooping or PRISM program is a vast soup of browser logs, text, graphics, videos, voice calls, and all manner of singing, dancing, and soliciting from my screen, to yours, and your next of yours. Think of the color-coded warning systems from the Bush era reformatted by degrees of separation and you begin to see Obama era risk assessment through the PRISM lens.  Concepts like criminal motive or case relevance have been replaced by the pervasive need to place our electronic selves under a passive and insidious house arrest.

Now I like to connect hypothetical dots like the next armchair analyst. But I resist the sweeping explanatory powers of slam dunk conspiracy theories. I’ve always maintained that paranoia is a luxury of the self-important. Our lives are much more open, generic, and predictive as data patterns than we are as erratic and complex individuals.

So before we start quaking in Orwellian tones, let's give the NSA its day in our court of opinion. Even if they answer in confidence to secret courts, it makes sense to vet the rationales behind such a deliberate and undiscriminating assault on our virtual identities. Besides we’re all part of the same feuding and dysfunctional family. If we know Big Brother’s allegiances and loyalties maybe he won’t seem so poker-faced, inscrutable, and extortion-prone.

Equal Mistreatment

First of all, it boils down to fairness. After all, what could be more even-handed than to spy on everyone? How could anyone feel frozen out of the action or singled out for selective treatment?

Secondly, when it comes to justice systems you can't bet against the house. That's because the PRISM guardians own all the evidence. You need to play by their rules to prove: (a) they're not following them as (b) they are following you. It's a circular tail-wags-dog-chasing-own-tail situation. It’s designed to tie tea party activists and ACLU partisans in knots for years to come. You say your rights are violated? Hard to try your case when your first amendment freedoms have been guantanamoed down in broad constitutional daylight. That's the blank check known as the Patriot Act -- the NSA having its way within the exigencies of perceived threats. Case closed.

And even without a public trial, there’s a great potential in PRISM for self-inflicted embarrassment. What if Big Brother arrests the wrong guy and that guy is you or me? That’s the advantage of secrecy. It’s botched raid insurance. It’s a hedge against hiring the wrong henchmen. It’s the peace of mind that comes with plausible deniability -- the first mover freedom to ask forgiveness in the future because it's easier than getting timely permission from a government at war with itself.

Home Team Advantage

But never mind our institutional paralysis. Judging by the poll numbers the public's prepared to write a blank check to rival the size of the credit card financing of our delinquent war chest. According to the New York Times' David Brooks, recent polling suggests that pending terrorist investigations are beating up on the prospect of privacy intrusions by a 2:1 margin.

Take my privacy, please. I have nothing to hide. That's assuming a healthy skepticism of those bringing the charges, equal access to the evidence they're citing, and an informed and disinterested judges who won't throw us under the wheels of justice. As Danah Boyd writes this week in Slate ("If You're OK With Surveillance Because You Have "Nothing to Hide," Think Again), the big data Rorschach of PRISM is a placeholder for pious aggression as much as discrete protection:

“It’s used to create suspicion, not to confirm innocence.”

And it all boils down to the specifics of the cases yet to be brought -- namely who's prosecuting the aggression and who's being protected. A concentrated set of assets in the hands of a select few is a containment begging for its lid to be blown off. An establishment that hates surprises will conduct itself in secrecy and cloak itself in suspicion -- namely a presumption of guilt in the quest to wage the first articulated post 9-11 terrorist containment policy -- Dick Cheney's Doctrine of Preemption.

Reasons Boyd:

“[I]f someone has a vested interest in you being guilty, it’s not impossible to paint that portrait, especially if you have enough data.”

Safety Deposits

My problem child understanding of the PRISM program is shaped by my job as a knowledge manager. It's my responsibility to make information available, useful, and even prepared for the uses intended by my inundated colleagues. My role is justified by the assumption that when folks don't have to care where things are kept they can free up their resourcefulness to solve problems, not to be compromised by their login credentials or limited understanding of the gatekeepers and their keepings.

But in a world where Google can settle most public arguments there is a parallel private one. It says that secure assets deserve a single, repository. Think employer records and documentation. It's that safety deposit box ideal that lulls most managers into the seduction that the information unity of a single storage location will save our collective and individual asses. Our big NSA brother is no different. Only in our case it's the prospect of lost income, not privacy, that stokes the hot single repository coals.

It goes something like this:

“This is my livelihood. It's in a state of perpetual risk because I'll be blindsided by some error or memo or bug or unredeemable email tied to me six file folders deep on some mystery server.”

It may sound as quaint as a world of gold standards. But there are a whole flock of literalists who would throw all their mattress-bound savings from the market run-ups of yesteryear just to be at one with those bricks. There's Grandpa Ron Paul. There's Senator Rand. No slouch when it comes to blustering all over the shadows of big bro. Oh, look, Glen Beck's grabbing a titanium-laced shovel. They're all digging furiously to exhume the sacred dirt of a dignified Fort Knox burial. There but for fortune or just to keep the Fed accountable? I'm no economist so here’s the takeaway for my fellow knowledge managers:

Everyone needs a mental space holder -- a concrete sleeve for bookending their references. It doesn't matter how virtual, triangulated, asymmetric or plain old complicated the chessboard has become. People clamor for the tangible in a sea of uncertainties. So too do lynch mobs and NSA bureaucrats who are pledged to upholding the public order in blank check proportions.

Inner Sanctum

Hence the mega warehouse to trump all data centers in Bluffdale Utah desert is now under permanent occupation by the commandos of security clearances.

NSA isn’t just boiling the ocean in Bluffdale. It's trawling the ocean floor as if national boundaries didn't exist. It's sucking our transgressions and transmissions down with a giant straw and belching our hiccups and encoded byproducts back into a vast swill of super collections. Rumor has it that the threat of a wild fire would unleash a sprinkler system so powerful that nearby Salt Lake City could slip into the Great Salt Lake. The collection effort appears as ambitious in volume as it's frivolous in an ultimate motive or meaning or justification. Data is the new stockpile. We collect because ... we can.

Since I'm spilling a parade of secrets I'll toss my baton in and march proudly with the middle-aged telecommuting knowledge grunts. I'll sign the release, I'll self-incriminate. I'll freely confess that I am a bona fide metadata freak. The layers of details buried in the assets I maintain hold the key to making information searchable and ultimately useful.

Social Dragnet

And the hastily scribbled set of defensible talking points is that metadata can't hurt you. I say hasty because if the NSA was truly in the damage control business they would have hired the PR wing of the leaker contractor. Booz Allen could repent. They could assure the public that metadata is actually a good thing. Especially in private where your credit card company asks if you were pumping gas in Colorado at the same time that you were sucking down brewskies in bean town.

The insidious side of metadata is that it provides groupable sub-sets of unseemly data sprawls. Add some unfounded suspicions to the mix and you've got guilt by association. That's a dragnet that happens every day on Facebook. What will happen when the terror-mongers catch up to the marketers? These are no longer personal computers.

It doesn't matter what you spring on your gadgetware. So long as we're tethered to a network there's a screen that only we can see and Google and the Google customers. And you thought your love of GMail made you a valued account holder? That personal device is more impersonal than meets the consuming eye. That won't change with your first pair of Google Glasses -- until you splurge on an even newer pair of Google spyglasses.

Ping Tone: Has the Line on RSS Gone Dead?

Twitter, Facebook, Google – none of the big three content aggregators are pledging net neutrality when it comes to sending and receiving news feeds outside their site domains.

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In the past two years they’ve all rejected that tireless and under-appreciated workhorse of boundary-free newsfeeds – RSS. All three have removed the ability to consume their feeds (or anyone else’s) via the open standard of RSS in favor of proprietary formats written to their own APIs.

Logging out of the RSS loop has a lot more to do with shuttling web traffic than shuttering the need for open content standards. In a world of cost-free information, RSS has managed to outlive its market without outlasting the need for it.

In his article Embrace, Extend, Extinguish: How Google Crushed and Abandoned the RSS industry, Ed Bott documents the decade long demise of Google Reader from up and comer to down for the counter:

“In an era of mobile devices, where synchronizing content and settings between multiple locations is a crucial feature, losing Google's sync platform is literally a killer.”

Oh my. Why is it that every trade opinion that passes as critical thought is based on the viability of an existing business model? The writing on that prophetic wall is this: If it’s too small for Google to keep the lights on, why still carry that RSS torch?

Bott concedes the point that RSS is still a viable channel for content delivery but not without the ping tone required in its consumption by mobile devices:

“Of course, Twitter and Facebook made a very large dent in the usage of RSS, but there's still a market there. A big one, in fact, if measured by the standards of a business that's not Google-sized. And now, with Google abandoning that service, any business that uses RSS gets to go back to the glory days of 2006. Ugh.”

As a business model it seems that RSS is a victim of its own success. An open standard co-opted into the activity streams of big social media. Leave smart phones out of it and you still have a surefire standard for delivering pull-based newsfeeds. That’s the stuff we know we’ll want to read in advance. RSS eliminates step one: the need to track it down before the more essential step: catching up to it within a sea of distractions and unfiltered merchandising.

The problem in a post Web 2.0 world there is at best a casual relationship between the utility of a technology and its commercial viability. RSS was invented at a time where content was still a monetizable notion. The investment lights have dimmed now that connection’s been severed by big social and search media.

The rationale in question starts with the assumption that:

• RSS is useful
• It should be upheld as a delivery standard; and thus,
• A bankable asset for any apps outfit that knows how to thread the name-dropping needle so that subscribers can track topics and ideas as easily as they can follow celebrities and human train wrecks.

After all, how could 5.3 million Delicious users go wrong? Easy. The ping tone went dead years ago on Google Chrome itself which never saw an RSS feed it failed to render correctly.

The result is that we early adopters and independent sorts face a new bait and switch dilemma: Take what big search and social media serve up for exploratory grabs but follow the money before you trust your intuitions for there is no free Google lunch. And we might do well to cast a wary eye beyond next gen beta pilots but something as basic as blocking sites in Google search results.

Writing in the Washington Post Ezra Klein writes that such untimely shutdowns…

"…[A]ll have me questioning whether I want to keep investing time and energy in 'free' Google products or whether I need to start looking for paid services that are explicitly making money off the thing I am paying them to do."

In 2013 aggregators still haven’t figured out pull media. Until someone can aim news products at content consumers as well as friend updates on Facebook it appears that RSS will be relegated to hobbyist -journalists like Klein and the Atlantic’s James Fallows. As one of those pariah-researcher types I’d rather entrap my information than line the sights of would-be Ad Words sponsors.

RSS is one of those private label markup languages that's been branded as an activity stream by the social media creature elites. But if your primary goal is to make plausible contacts instead of instant monetization, there's a lot more to be done than hear first about how a friend-imposter's posted their latest bowl of snacks to their daily food updates.

The easiest way to round up to the most active feeds is to browse (not search) major news sites for their RSS sections. That's because there's no standard way that webmasters work this into their architectures. Here are a few examples:

• http://news.yahoo.com/sitemap/
• http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5216556/
• http://online.wsj.com/public/page/rss_news_and_feeds.html

You could parse this out with a splash of Google syntax + semantics:

inurl:rss "(monitor | track | discover | uncover | reference)(startups | companies | sales | leads)" "subscribe to"

Here are a couple of suggestions for embracing RSS even when big search and social are backing away:

1) Know your news flow:

The news volume of newsfeeds are erratic at best. Some channels are spam channels, a fool’s errand of cross-posted press releases that should never rise from the cutting room trading floor. Others may have lofty and expansive labels like WSJ.com: Deals & Deal Makers. But if you sample the stream you'll see a trickle. There's a world of difference between trying to tap a definitive source of transactional details versus a "word on the street" describing one subjective take on yesterday's foot traffic. It's actually more promising to start with the fire-hose (e.g. WSJ.com: US Business) and then reign it in with filtering that reflects your information-seeking priorities.

2) Know your aggregator:

At first blush a dedicated RSS engine like Fresh Patents (http://tgs.freshpatents.com/search-rss.php) looks promising. The content's fact-based, plentiful, and non-commercial, (i.e. uncontaminated by search media spam). However, if your goals are marketing or sales-related, you might as well go back to school for your engineering degree. 'Launch' refers to "a launch and disconnect clutch for the electric motor of a P2 hybrid powertrain." 'Startup' is not about fledgling bootstrap firms hoping to turn the corner on their latest angel round but a literal key turning inside a literal ignition: "During startup of a DC/DC converter." You get the picture.

3. Know that RSS is transactional:

One reason RSS is oversold and underperforming is this notion it's like another communications channel (something you turn on and off). It's not the definitive response to fruitless searches or the final word on being up-to-date. It's a rapid-fire trail of updates crunched together in the form of news articles, database results, or changes to a list, i.e. most emailed stories. At its most passive, setting up an RSS feed is a three-step process: (1) picking your feeds; (2) filtering them down to a manageable size; and (3) trapping results that are in useful enough form to act on directly in the form of a lead or a contact or a list of references.

One answer to the limits of RSS is to forsake it completely in cases where you already know what you're looking to track. For example if you have a finite number of search targets to track, you can set up camp outside specific customer and/or competitor websites and be alerted to specific page changes at WebSite-Watcher (http://www.aignes.com).

If you're still game for proper RSS feeding here's a simple, unchanging success factor: Your reader or the interface you use to review, flag, track, search, and ultimately transform into your own priorities. There will always be a need for a world-class RSS reader, if not a market.

Digital Attention in a World of Analog Trust

The New Year greeted me with a blog post from Dan Tunkelang, chief information scientist at LinkedIn. I’m guessing based on earlier blips across my radar that Tunkelang serves as the chief big data officer for B2B behaviorists.

It’s Tunkelang’s responsibility to place a cap and plug or two on the fire hose of information. It’s still not drinkable for the average consumer but the spray alone can irrigate quite a few promising fields (or what Tunkelang might call data products – the ability to exploit a recurring experience that can be enhanced, neutered, or packaged into some new mutation).

This is heady stuff. Owning the formula for rationalizing the collective cognitive sensation of the online clickstream on earth and what’s worth noticing is not just for disciples of the Patriot Act. Figuring out an explanation for what happens between when we land on a page and what compels us to hit <send> is the cosmic mystery of our commercial age.

In the piece Tunkelang begins to unpack Abraham Maslow’s polemic on human motivation as a hierarchy of needs. Maslow’s work was not inspired by traffic patterns between servers or calls to databases but was engineered through his chosen field of psychology. Maslow concluded with an ideal – not a data product. Self-actualization was not premised on field studies or repeatable experimentation. He knew it when he saw it … in Einstein, Thoreau, Jefferson, Huxley, Jane Adams, and other high thinking boundary crashers.

It’s interesting that Tunkelang would recast a foundation as broad as human motivation on the subjective grounds of Maslow’s work.  Maslow had personality analysis and his intuitions. Tunkelang has petabytes to evidence his computer models. One perspective based on a rich, interior life; the other one patterned off the hall of social media mirrors we hold to our surface reflections and virtual connectedness. Perhaps these differences are not conflicting and take a backseat to the core of this framework:

These people were reality-centered, which means they could differentiate what is fake and dishonest from what is real and genuine.  They were problem-centered, meaning they treated life’s difficulties as problems demanding solutions, not as personal troubles to be railed at or surrendered to.  And they had a different perception of means and ends.  They felt that the ends don’t necessarily justify the means, that the means could be ends themselves, and that the means -- the journey -- was often more important than the ends.

Tunkelang sees self-actualization as a tool for framing perception. This harkens back to a time of professional distance objectified by the late 20^th century mass journalism ideal of bias-free reporting. We’ve gone well past what sociologists like Daniel Boorstin proclaimed in The Image, his ground-breaking pre-McLuhan polemic. Borstin argued that most events were no longer spontaneous but orchestrated as pseudo-events and confused for public changes to the private world that concern me, a.k.a. news.

Fifty years on we don’t question that perception is reality. We’re no longer starved for information. Our hunger is for absolutes. Our excuse for inaction forms not from a lack of information but resolve on what to do with it, a.k.a. uncertainty. Our bias today is not red state, blue state 1-2-3. It’s that our forebears could afford more daring as if they came from a surplus of certainty – the biggest rear view distortion of all historic fictions.

Perhaps Tunkelang’s choice of Maslow is to guide an awkward baby giant like big data through the earnest compass of the self-actualizers Maybe the thicket of IP addresses, browser versions, and click patterns that tangle through a congestion of transactions is what tomorrow’s information scientists can use to define reality, or at least clarify the boundaries that encircle it? We’re now finally getting to where we can assess the reality of the perception.

What Tunkelang refers to as how we interact with and benefit from data is every bit as subjective as Maslow’s basis for a centered reality:

“Indeed, data scientists like my team at LinkedIn spend most of our time converting massive volumes of data into useful information -- not just for people to consume directly, but also to power other analyses and products.”

The corollary here: what users consume indirectly are the analytics that LinkedIn processes from information products composed exclusively of these same people. Of course I’m not an insider B2B guy slaving over an arsenal of social media stockpiles. I teach outsiders how to make information work for them without getting too attached to the sources or the labeling or the Darwinian edict of a digital economy that one person’s content is another party’s revenue.

But forget about the free labor that stokes the Facebook furnace. Forget the Pavlovian insistence of Google Suggest. Attention factories treat human curiosity as a natural resource – even when we gorge on an unhealthy appetite of self-selecting rationales of our own reality-making.

How does Tunkelang view the realities of big data? One unflattering view is of its bulky and yet porous nature -- a mostly dormant black hole that belies any golden opportunities to exploit it for material, academic, or community gain. In 2013 we are staring blindly into an ever-cascading  information surplus that operates inside a vacuum of understanding? The scarcity of our sense-making surfaces in our BS detectors, our acceptance of vocal minorities, and in the shouting matches that result. We don’t ask why. We mask our confusions through the distractions of texting and email.

We used to have professional attention managers like TV networks and newspapers. Today we’re no closer to managing our attentions as we are to deal with financial planning, hanging plasma screens, family smart phone packages, or disabling JavaScript.

Tunkelang models a world of attention managers as a community of trust-seekers. It’s not just whether a piece of evidence smells right but our own particular fragrance. After all, we are “often producers of information ourselves,” he points out: “We have an interest in establishing our own trustworthiness as sources.”

Tunkelang defines trust as the communion of authority (reliable provider) and sincerity (good faith provider). The rationale is that you’ll know my beef on Yelp is for real because I’ll get worked up in the future about the same beefy grievances. The problem is that the arms’ length relationship of authority to evidence is in fundamental conflict with the intimacy of direct experience. Our need for self-preservation reduces our ability to represent the collective interest. A blending of the two might be an aspiration but belies the algorithms and trust serums that can be teased out of big data or injected into the conversations of big networks.

That elevated wisdom would bind credibility and authenticity in a state of integrity. In such a state experience informs the voice of authority. That’s an authenticity which may still bring human trust into our digital age.

Now Accepting Business Facebook Applications

 

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Psst ... hey ... yeah you.

You social engineers getting certified in Business Facebook applications!

Remember what-you-see-is-what-you-get? Probably not unless reinventing yourself for a living is measured in decades. For you digital natives I'm describing how dinosaurs like me once crawled out of our darkened caves of DOS. Back in the late eighties the notion that our interfaces would actually reflect our dot matrix print-outs was an epiphany (that's where our documents were all headed back then, right?)

The great thing about it was you knew where you stood. The outcome on your screen was reproducible. Park that file on a floppy and your friend with the 10 MEG hard drive could see it too. It was the infancy of a new kind of printing press. What we didn't know about the paperless void that awaited us is the security that the paper gave us. We knew how many copies we'd run off, where they'd been circulated, and roughly the profile of the folks who had your layouts, graphics, and arguments in their hands. It wasn't world-wide or moving or making sounds but it was a level of control and transparency that packed the staying power of a flowering Polaroid.

Flash forward to the dawn of "the" Facebook circa 2005:

The moment we decode our thoughts the only thing standing between our expressiveness and the cryogenics archives is the indifference of our colossal and anonymous communities. Until keyboards come equipped with ears for tuning into keystrokes of genius, we'll be banished to "the new dark." Together alone. Old messages. New bottles. Voiceless discoveries wondering whether the people in our social orbits can share in our experience. Quick answer: 'course not! In social media what you see is what you interpret. These are not static inventories of text any more than our connections are a recessive flock of lurkers or even receptive band of onlookers.

Message from 2020 to 2005: There is no audience. If you're looking for distinctions, think engagement levels -- not content consumers.

Okay, back to the here and now.

It's in this cacophony of muffled experiences and tentative expectations that the social media curtain was raised within the confines of large services firms. From one extreme of tight-fisted control, we have leapt to the opposite extreme of unrehearsed community-building. No script. No change management roadmap baked into the recipe for success or even defining what success means.

One critical success factor? WYSIWYG 2.0 gets my knod. If those tentative steps off the social business platform are any indication the number one confronting our reluctant late-comers is not about brushing up on the latest apps and features but preening and probing in that new hall of mirrors:

What can you see that I don't?
What can I conduct in private and then invite a select group of team members at my discretion?  

These are not just passing hesitations for a bashful user base. These are no just executive-level insecurities surfacing as personal vanities. These questions push ahead of any potential opportunity gains or the most basic community-building efforts. Is my avatar out of focus? Are the views I share in my blog out of step with firm policies? Honestly, they can miss the next update cycle if I'm not clear on my WYSIWYG bearings:

"Basically, who can see what? Otherwise I can't tell the noise from the knowledge. Otherwise how do I figure out what's worth investing a part of my work day towards understanding?

There is no single recipe for baking change management into the cultural traditions of a large services organization. But if the adoption of SharePoint 2010 as the de facto enterprise content platform is any indication, then governance is the single biggest ingredient. Of course nothing has forced the issue of who-sees-what out of the maintenance closet  more than SharePoint governance. Chiefly: the deliberations around how corporate policies play out around what gets dragged into or dropped from enterprise interfaces.

If we want to deal with the inevitable as a force for good I would transition what we've learned from our SharePoint deployments. These lessons underscore three overriding factors in the bottom-up adoption of social business media:

1) COMING AND GOING: Connections

Big, impersonal enterprises are famous for counting "who you know" as the way to unblock bottlenecks and transcend their own bureaucracies. Large organizations can be clumsy around the question of how you come to know them. Did you work your way up through the ranks together? Did you stop along the way to sample the broader organization and how smart leaders piece together solutions falling outside the standard portfolio? Did you punch the most direct ticket to partnership, staying closer to the rails and to the exclusion of colleagues with complementary skills and often interdependent needs and resources? The ability of social media savvy managers to self-select their working communities is the most sweeping panoramic view into organizational needs and assets since the invention of the org chart -- and a trifle less static -- no?

2) EXIT: Internal Hierarchies

Remember George W. Bush and the megaphone at Ground Zero. Allies and critics agree. It symbolized the high water mark of his two administrations. My point here? Nothing promotes teamwork better than a big shot tossing off his suit jacket and joining in a bucket brigade. In the case of social business that means pitching in to answer a question or address a concern voiced in an activity stream. In WYSIWYG 2.0 the whole stigma around who should "be seen" with whom  doesn't disappear completely. But a CXO in search of a gut check can now wade into the weeds from the privacy of his corner office or from the primacy of his bully pulpit.

3) ENTER: Market Realities

See the pecking order exiting by the rear door? It's taking another time-honored game not worthy of winning along with it. It's called fixating on internal customers to the exclusion of focusing on actual clients. When the market speaks, it's more eloquent than the most thoughtful governance or the most resolute leadership. It's the clarifying resolution of a win or a sale or a revenue bounce.

Even those porous borders between our work identities and our social media selves can attest to that. After all, if a prospective buyer is looking for guidance on our products and services, who is she going to listen to -- our CEO in the press release or the irate customers sounding off on Twitter? The marketplace has spoken. And it's not waiting for our keyboards to grow ears.

What you see is not necessarily what you get. And what you hear is not necessarily what was said. Unless you hosted what was posted on your social business platform.

Learning how to Learn

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Last week I drove two-thirds of the way through Massachusetts and back in the middle of a work week. My mission was for my son and me to take a non-credit workshop offered by Greenfield Community College. The topic was about using Facebook as a genealogical  tool -- certainly not what Facebook's forebears had in mind. Apparently that oversight was shared by the rest of the Greenfield community. Not only were we the only ones to sign up but no one informed us that the class was cancelled until we got to campus. In tough economic times we cling to the bedrock of family and to our own frugal resources. What could be a better match than social media for ancestors?

The gap between this proposition and the follow-through reminds me all too well of my own marketing efforts to teach Internet research tools and techniques -- something we all, few do well, and nearly all of us do alone. You know you've got a major rebranding effort on your hands when there's a gaping hole between an information surplus and a knowledge deficit. I say rebranding because the chasm represents both a black hole and a golden opportunity. When that deficit has a clear direction the answer can be engineered into a customizable package. In fact any binary problem is reducible to an "applification-in-progress."

The biggest riddle is not about the closest pizzeria for vegans or the cheapest flight out-of-town next weekend. It's about the trappings -- which data supplier dancing on whose interface and how to carve up the winnings at the close of each transaction. That's the information supplier tail wagging the market demand dog. It is a short tail and the dog needn't learn new tricks.

Wasn't it Steve Jobs who said: "It's not the consumers' job to figure out what they want."

That's certainly true when it comes to designing and perfecting elegant gadgets. We're no likelier to build the next killer smartphone than the market research rationale for keeping Apple one step ahead of a jittery market. We're consumers. As such our participation is limited to parting with our assets or squirreling them away.  When will the future arrive and what will it look like?

1. Dunno.

2. I'll know it when I see it.

Problem is ... the market has only half-spoken.

Social Problems without Business Models

Now what happens when a question runs on more dimensions than zeroes and ones -- an objectified and reproducible set of truths and falsehoods?The engineering math is less persuasive when responding to half-truths: What's the consequence if it is true? The severity if it's not? These are two-step problems that require a higher form of reasoning than shadowing a users' intention in a search bar. These questions are no less pressing if they don't map to the still-life webcams that play on beneath the skin of Facebook.

It requires that the user exists for more than click patterns and one-sided transactions involving word choice. But what if the model was reversed? What if those knowledge deficits were answered by an online republic of producers (who also happened to consume)? And they would use information -- not simply be used by it in the quest to plant a suggestion or prompt a purchase.

There is no obvious business model for solving abstractions that can't end up in actual inventories and find their way to literal doorsteps. Does the consumer still benefit from a passive acceptance of supplier-sided engineering?  Before the costs were driven out there was a direct line between higher consumer spending and a tighter labor market. There was originality to the questions forming before user curiosity was placated by Google Suggest. Nowadays shopping is feeling a lot less patriotic than in the wake of 9-11. There is no Peoria play here. The American middle-class has lost its credit line faster than you can see the swelling ranks of independent voters. Where is the next breadbasket of packaged fare? That's a supply problem (and it's a sack of rice).

The demand problem is that we need to teach folks how to looks after their own interests. That's the only way to dial back the simmering resentments which spark disenfranchisees in search of a franchise and a bargaining chip called name-your-price. In the Arab Spring it was political freedom. In the Bank of America fall the tipping point is ATM fees. But whether it evolves to a substantive movement or a meandering bitch list, one demand side factor is unequivocal: the power is ceded to noisy minorities. There is increasingly scarce upside to continuing along in the role of unquestioning consumers. That's the future nearly here where a once silent majority is on the receiving end of the predator drones released by Google | Facebook | Amazon | Apple: the four horsemen of the holy platform grail.

Can you guess the predators from the drones? Once you do I have a course I'd like to sell you. It's called self-education and it's being taught by the experience of doing your own homework. Otherwise I'm sure there's a search engine that will sell you the answers -- the ones which work for them.