BLOGS, wikis, twitter - you must have seen these words appearing more frequently in the mainstream media as these social computing tools become more pervasive. But are organisations here also testing out these social computing tools?
Patrick Lambe, CEO of Straits Knowledge, a consulting firm specialising in innovation and knowledge learning, told BT via email that organisations it has worked with in Singapore are still in the experimentation stage, mostly with blogs and wikis.
Join the party: Mr Snowden (above) advises companies to 'embrace' social computing, while Mr Lambe cautions that its 'undisciplined and unpurposeful use' will hit productivity. And Mr Chee says social computing is becoming an increasingly important way to be responsive to a client.
This was similarly noted by Dave Snowden, founder and chief scientific officer of Cognitive Edge Pte Ltd. 'We can see increasing corporate use of wikis and, to a lesser extent, blogs, largely within the normal boundaries and practices of knowledge management,' he said.
Cognitive Edge was previously the Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity, a centre spun off from IBM in July 2005.
'The natural uses of these tools change significantly when they are brought inside the firewall,' said Mr Lambe, who is also the president of the Institute of Knowledge Management Singapore.
Software giant IBM along with companies like Sun Microsystems and Microsoft have started on the social computing path - rolling out blogs or wikis.
'Much of their strength in the Internet comes from the openness, diversity and sheer scale of participation on the Worldwide Web. That scale and diversity doesn't exist inside the enterprise, and usually not on the corporate intranet.' What results is that these tools are then used for very specialised purposes such as using team blogs to keep everyone up to date in a project, or using wikis to collaboratively develop draft policy papers or update client information after a visit.
Better collaboration
'In many cases, corporate intranet teams quite rightly see these tools as ways to get more participation going in intranets of static content. The style encouraged by these tools is more informal, so it's much easier to contribute comments and information, and it supports better and easier collaboration,' added Mr Lambe.
As a result, he also predicts that these tools can help reduce the number of emails. 'Email currently carries many more types of collaboration content than it was ever designed for.'
Social computing tools have also been used by organisations to collaborate with external parties and partners. Mr Lambe cites the example where his firm uses secure Web-based blogging and wiki tools to manage projects with clients.
Software giant IBM along with companies such as Microsoft and Sun Microsystems have all started on the social computing path - rolling out blogs or wikis, internally and externally.
'Corporations should be interested in social computing technologies because these technologies deal with people. Businesses need to be responsive to their clients, because otherwise their clients will go elsewhere. Social computing is not the only way to be responsive to a client, of course, but it's an important way, and its importance is growing,' noted Martin Chee, general manager of IBM Singapore's software group.
However, Mr Snowden noted that while there are companies using social computing tools, 'very few companies are adopting the philosophy of social computing'.
In fact, some companies are trying to control these technologies. 'I came across someone the other day who said that employees should be licensed to blog. And we have just seen the US Army attempt to shut down blogs,' he said.
'All of these top-down control moves, however well-intentioned, fail to understand the true nature of social computing. It is a bottom-up, spontaneous form of sharing. The controls are the normal ethical controls that you place on people's conversations with friends after work.
'Above all, social computing tools are personal ones. One of the things you find when you blog is that there is a degree of intimacy, of sharing required to participate, and the medium encourages you to do so. 'The one piece of advice I would give is: embrace it. It's going to happen whether you like it or not and at least if you provide the environment, you have some knowledge of what is going on,' said Mr Snowden.
Promising technologies
Said Mr Lambe: 'Podcasting and screencasting hold a lot of promise from the knowledge management point of view, because there are now lots of good examples around of how to create short, pithy 'knowledge nuggets' capturing key learnings from a project, or the experience of a seasoned employee in an entertaining and accessible way.'
A screencast is a digital movie of a computer screen, with accompanying audio narration that describes what is going on, on the screen. 'In the old days, companies used to have departments that would create presentation transparencies for executives whenever they needed to make a presentation. Then we got Powerpoint, and gradually everybody learned how to construct passable presentations. Now the same thing is happening with learning content. In the old days, you needed instructional designers and production crews to make it. Now, anybody can make it - and they are doing so. Pretty soon this is going to move inside the enterprise,' predicted Mr Lambe.
Mr Snowden said: 'I think we are only just starting with blogs and wikis. The most important developments here are fairly trivial but important - that is the increasing sophistication of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) tools for editing blogs.
'The major area which I think is neglected, although it is where my company is working, is the whole field of tagging and access to social computing material. At the moment excessive reliance is placed on language tags, semantic web, etc. This sort of thing has been good enough for some time but it is starting to creak at the seams.
'It is also based on a set of assumptions about language which form the basis for much computing work but have little grounding in science. I think, and am betting my own future on it, that the major new developments will be in symbiotic search (human-computer parallel processing) and retrieval mechanisms,' said Mr Snowden.
It certainly has not been all good with these new social computing tools, Mr Lambe noted. 'There is a big debate right now about whether social technologies contribute to, or detract from, knowledge worker productivity. Some argue that it takes time away from 'real' work, and that the use of these tools tends to be distracting more than they add value.'
He cited the example of email, where it first supported increased productivity with the speeding up of internal and external communications. 'However, without any systematic discipline around the use and management of email, it now also has the effect of actively undermining productivity in a number of ways: in fragmenting communications, in making it more difficult to capture and manage business records in the longer term; in mixing up formal and informal business communications, announcements, shared documents, conversations, etc, all in the same medium; and in its sheer volume.
'Undisciplined and unpurposeful use will likely undermine productivity. These tools do provide greater visibility of knowledge and information activity, support better understanding, and aid faster access to knowledge and information resources; but only if they are used in a way that is tuned to the host organisation's work patterns and needs,' said Mr Lambe.
Mr Snowden agreed. 'Where you get abuse, it's generally something in the overall culture of the organisation and the tools are just abused in the same way as other tools and practices have been. You need some ethical guidelines and you need some mentoring and, ideally, self or peer regulation.' However, he stressed that 'a low-level safety net is more than enough'.
Social computing will evolve in 'totally unexpected ways', said Mr Lambe. 'People are very good at doing unexpected things with new tools, especially social tools. When Bell invented the telephone, he intended it to be a way of communicating performances such as concerts to distant listeners. It ended up being primarily a conversation and relationship building tool in its first incarnation, and when it became mobile, evolved new functions around coordination of activities, social relationships and sharing media content.'
Significant frictions
However, he does expect that there will be 'significant frictions' within enterprises adopting these tools. 'There will be resistance and there will also be cases of things going wrong, as there are in any emerging technology - for example, where information security is compromised or where important collections of content are lost or difficult to maintain.
'But it will be like email. By the end of the decade, it will not be possible to resist - the use of these tools will be so taken for granted in the wider population that not using them in the enterprise will seem completely nonsensical,' said Mr Lambe.
Mr Snowden hesitated to predict the future of social computing, but did say that social computing will be 'endemic'. 'I do think the orthodoxies around use of language will be shattered and I am also convinced that social computing will not look the same in ten years as it does now.
'But the bottom-up use of technology, simple intuitive tools, people choosing what to do and how to do it within and without the firewalls and without IT control - that's easy to predict.'
