My recent post on Ze Frank on Web 0.2 continues my exploration of the topic of information use with regard to web users and the conversational nature of technologies that support peer to peer discussion, collaboration, and multimedia publishing. As you may know, the ideas about society, culture and the impact of these supporting collaborative technologies are cemented for me in the cluetrain and validated when the blogosphere and social software universe are viewed as information ecologies But what is missing is the literature examining the culture and behavior of enterprise users in these new technology-supported, social network environments.

In response to my post about Web 0.2, a colleague asked,

Does anyone address the question of the distinction between the public user/consumer and the organizational user/consumer? Speifically I mean that users of the "Internet" have desires and they have nothing to lose by freely expressing those desires whiteand pushing for tools to fulfill them. Whereas in the corporate environment there are politics, secrecy/info hording issues, and other factors that may cause "Intranet" users to silence, suppress or censor their desires, leaving us unsure what is really wanted. Or am I making up this distinction?

No. To my knowledge, no one makes that distinction in the literature or blogs that I've read. When we talk about Internet users, we're talking about the public and for the majority of the time we're talking about young , middle to upper class consumers who are active users of ecommerce and social software sites. They are the ones playing with social networking, creating, editing and publishing multimedia -- having conversations using the traditional language of the designer. Consumers are becoming prosumers because they have the means and time. They take risks in breaking rules because they don't know them. They publicize their lives on Flickr, MySpace and YouTube, eschewing privacy because they're being raised in an era of blogs and reality TV. But the main point is they are conversing openly and without fear.

But the corporate environment is obviously different, especially with regard to large enterprises. We don't appear to have as consistent a picture of the corporate intranet user and their behaviors as we do of the prosumer. But my colleague's impression of Intranet users, while insular with regard to its picture of a large enterprise user, is most likely valid. The constraints of a cultural and political environment might affect this type of users' ability or desire to converse in these new media languages and engage in a culture of collaboration, open conversation and risk. I think the degree to which a corporate Intranet user will risk engaging in these behaviors is also dependent on the corporate cultural (e.g. an open culture like that implied at Google vs. that at an older, large enterprise) and on the influence of an employees participation in the more open, collaborative culture of the public Internet. A flickr and MySpace user who happens to work at a huge corporation might be more inclined to act against a cultural norm that's characterized by witholding knowledge rather than sharing it.

I haven't come across any references to published literature researching environmental influences of corporate users yet. But then, I don't spend any time searching deeply on that topic either, e.g. in journal databases. It's a good question. One that I hope to begin exploring. In the meantime, I'm going to ping a few colleagues to see if they can point to any research in this area which might be found, I think, in ethnographic study and incidental findings based on user surveys.

Update: Articles on this topic provided by colleagues

I received some great feedback from colleagues, which I've listed below. Also, see the references added in the comments at the bottom of the page. I will be skimming this literature in the coming days and report back on how they relate to my questions, most importantly this one:

When describing the difference in behavior between the risk taking and openness of the public Internet Prosumer vs. the corporate intranet user are methods discussed that make the evolution of the behavior of the business user more like the prosumer?

1) Lilia Effimova blogged the following.

Work of Dirk Stenmark on intranets (I referred to his paper earlier in knowledge vs. information discussion):

• Stenmark, D. (2005). "How intranets differ from the web: organisational culture's effect on technology (PDF)". Proceedings of ECIS2005, Regensburg, Germany, 26-28 May 2005.

I could also imagine relevant things in the work of Jonathan Grudin - one of his interests is in corporate adoption of "internet technologies". This one should be on the topic:

• Messaging and Formality: Will IM Follow in the Footsteps of Email? (MS Word) T. Lovejoy and J. Grudin, 2003. Proc. INTERACT 2003, 817-820. (PDF)

2) Nick Kings provided an article about the Ben Schneiderman's model for trying to describe differences in behaviour. Schneiderman's book, "Leonardo's Laptop" is available on Amazon. Nick touches upon it in a paper he submitted to a workshop on semantic tagging.

3) Abe Crystal offered references from ASIS&T Digital Library.

• Informational environments: Organizational contexts of online information use. Roberta Lamb, John Leslie King, Rob Kling.
• Maintaining knowledge management systems: A strategic imperative. Kevin C. Desouza, Yukika Awazu.
• INTRANET USERS? INFORMATION-SEEKING BEHAVIOUR: AN ANALYSIS OF LONGITUDINAL SEARCH LOG DATA. Dick Stenmark and Taline Jadaan. ASIS&T Annual Meeting - 2006 (ASIS&T 2006). Austin, Texas, November 3-9, 2006
• A Perfect Storm for Intranet Search: How One Company Navigates. Moderator: J. Gregory Moxness, IT Fellow, CTO Missile Systems, Raytheon

4) Boris Mann offered a related link on the topic of incenting collaboration. The topic references game theory, karma and corporate communities.

• Komment Karma -- "Private and Small World is game proof as there is no benefit in gaming it. (Except inside corporate communities. Workaround there is to ration the Karma so that it gets spent wisely)."

5) Stacy Surla offered this paper:

• Onomi: Social Bookmarking on a Corporate Intranet. (PDF)

6) James Robertson reminded me of their paper:

• When intranet discussion forums work

7) A colleague suggested that I look at the Sociology literature and work by Lee Sproul. He also told me to go back and re-read Shirky and Englebart on related topics.

• Social software as a term. Clay Shirky. Many 2 Many
• Social Software and the Politics of Groups. Clay Shirky.
• Re-Place-ing Space: The Roles of Place and Space in Collaborative Systems. Steve Harrison and Paul Dourish.
• Process, Work Practices & Social Software. Mike Gotta.

Baseline has a feature story exposing bits about How Google works and what we can learn from them. Most of the story focusses on the unique infrastructure Google has been building to support its expanding needs. But most interesting to me is the small bit that takes a lok Inside Google's Enterprise. The article refers to Page and Brin's pronouncement in their IPO that the company is not conventional and doesn't intend to become so. And this appears to be true judging by the way they run the company internally. They won't follow the pattern of what's been done to run businesses in the past if they can find a better way themselves.

This is exactly the attitude that has slowly been building up a revolution inside the ranks at enterprises large and small. Knowledge workers, fed up with the way things are have turned away from conventional software to manage they way the work in favor of better, simpler applications that get out of their way and let them get on with with it.

The article talks about how Google uses a simple system that manages project information using relatively unstructured email as the interface. The system mails employees every week asking what they worked on the week prior and what they plan to work on during the current week. The response is parsed, fed and indexed into a searchable system that is open to the enterprise so that anyone else can track other employees projects that they are interested in. They call it "living out loud".

What they're doing is creating an open system that matches an open knowledge sharing ecology. That openness allows for the "cross pollenation" of ideas. Even better, it provides opportunity for the one thing that is driving nearly every aspect of the innovative web today -- open conversation. They're creating a system that better ensures sustainability because it works with an existing, accepted process -- communicating through email. This removes barriers to use because email is easy. The unstructured nature of the format also means that it can evolve with the needs of the system on the back end. The computer works harder so that the knowledge worker can just dash off a note and get on with their work.

Wow, right? That's revolutionary thinking, and it's so simple on the user-facing end that you hardly have any excuse for not participating. And opportunists that exploit the system by mining and tracking with it will benefit from it immensely. This is the evolving face of knowledge management. The idea of telling the technology to get out of the way so we can do work is what's driving the enterprise blog and wiki revolution. We all need to publish, share and collaborate, but we want to do it as simply and effortlessly as possible. Google embodies that idea completely inside and out.

I had the opportunity to go to An Event Apart in NYC this week. In addition to meeting some very cool people and get schooled on some areas I haven't been aware of (e.g. Tantek's microformats pres) I also got to experience Ze Frank's Web 0.2 presentation, which was described as "a personal, down-in-the-trenches view of how the technology revolution impacts the way we communicate with a mass audience."

Take aways:

• Conversations resist top-down control
• Users/Consumers want to have a conversation with designers/developers by conversing with prosumer tools and media that were previously only in the professional's domain
• They will show you what's interesting
• Designers/Developers are facilitators of the the conversation
• Web 0.2 gives designer/developer an amazing amount of data to start using in the conversation

His observations are partly drawn from all the literature about the bottom-up evolution of conversations, viral phenomenon and the web itself. It's not new, but it's a very profound reminder he provides by showing us that the most interesting developments are user/consumer driven, e.g. MySpace and YouTube. This is where the conversation gets interesting because the mass of consumer use drives the medium and affects it in terms of economics and sustainability.

It's the same idea, really, as Nardi and O'Day's in their Information Ecology thesis. I keep returning to this over and over every few months. The idea just seems to keep getting validated. The analogy of sustainable biological ecologies seems to apply to so many different information ecologies, whether it's in describing media consumers and their internet publishing/use ecology or the information ecology of enterprise knowledge workers. Sustainability comes from organic growth and localized need or desire.

In any case, the message from Ze for embracing this is the same message many of us have adopted for evangelizing the use of the new wave of grass-roots-oriented enterprise software. He referred to Tim O'Reilly's "What is Web 2.0" article in order to give this advice, which I believe paraphrases O'Reilly.

Create architectures that encourage participation and conversation and build value as a side effect of the ordinary use of an application. From the passive to active to interactive.

Excellent stuff. I'm off to finally read that O'Reilly article. I've put it off because it seemed so long, but I see that I can't ignore it.

The frustration I expressed at working in a bureaucrazy turned into outright anger today and then into cunning and finally enlightenment. The source of my frustration had to do with a cultural problem I face. The corporate behemoth I work for is stratified with middle managers who work for an upper management whose message is supposed to be upholding company values. Here's one that touches me, personally: We have "a deep respect for the contributions of each person to the success of the team". OK. There's a message from management that probably took someone weeks to get approval for. It sounds nice to me, but so what does this mean? Well, here's the more complete message:

We believe a diversity of people and ideas is a business imperative, and that diversity must be aggressively sought and nurtured. We recognize excellence in each other, and we listen to and value each other's ideas and opinions. No person is alone in his or her pursuit of an objective; we are a team. We are honest and candid in all our dealings with customers, shareholders, suppliers, partners, the communities in which we work and live, and with each other. We encourage constructive contention and confront issues with mutual respect. We treat everyone with dignity and respect. We pro-actively communicate and share information with colleagues throughout the business. We support behavior consistent with our values and speak up when we see behavior that is inconsistent with them.

Right. This all sounds well and good to me. But as they say, "Money talks and bullshit walks." OK, so I'm leaving out major details about the source of my frustration and cynicism. Let me fill in the details.

Being a believer in the ideas expressed in the ClueTrain Manifesto Manifesto and being close to the design and implementation of a web site that serves a large community, I wanted to get more immersed in the conversations that customers were having (or not being able to have) with my organization. Specifically, I wanted a public place (maybe a forum or maybe a knowledge base) where people could express their frustrations and happiness with our information systems, services or our organization as a whole. I wanted to add this as a functionality on our web site that was prominently visible. How about a link that reads something along the lines of, "How are we doing?" and let's people type their frustrations or kudos away. OK, so I made the mistake of saying more. I said, how about utilizing that system feature we have to publish them on the site in bulletin board or guestbook fashion? That's where my inquiry immediately became dung, ready to be pushed aside into that circular file better known as the trash bin.

We backed and forthed about how we would/could never allow personal flames, questions about how our pricing model works, etc. appear on the site. It would never happen. Why not? I asked. Why can't we let people air them out and address them in the open. I'm naive I guess, or idealistic. But remember, that my information systems are inside the firewall -- my customers are employees. We won't get spam. You can't even get into the site without logging in with your company ID, so people's names are are always attached to their comments. Yes, the majority of questions will be specific requests, e.g. "How do I find this Pyramid Report". That's not a bad thing. If a lot of people are asking the same questions -- if patterns of information seeking problems emerge -- then we have some clues about where to focus some attention. The point is to watch for patterns of information seeking behavior and see where users are having trouble and where we can improve. In surveys we've given (we do them every year) people have always given us feedback about what they like and don't like, what we should improve. Someone has suggested to me that this kind of genuine feedback might make up 1% of what we get. To me that's acceptable. That 1% would be as valuable as the rest of the questions about finding specific items. The point is to surface the conversations. To let people know that a human being is here to respond to their questions out in the open. That we're accountable for the product we produce and that we care about helping them use it.

In the end, I lost the battle and was told to go pursue the person who gets feedback/problem email from the site and consider turning that into an FAQ. I gave up and agreed.

I initiated my email to the nice colleague that is the gateway for this stuff. Then I went to talk to my sysadmin about getting copied on the emails and responses. I found out that years ago, a database was created to capture these conversations. At the time he proposed that this database could somehow be used so that our staff could use it to track feedback and questions and find answers without having to research them each time. Wow. That's what I recommended a few years ago too in relation to a different system created for tracking research requests. Both of our pleas were shot down by the powers that be, for whatever reason. Well, actually, I could probably guess the reason. It's probably because our management lives in fear of being too visible as a cost center and spends more time protecting itself than enabling its people to find ways to improve its products and services.

Now, I know that to some, I may sound a little too idealistic and borderline naive when it comes to corporate politics. I know that my management works hard to protect our organization because the value of information services is hard to quantify to upper management. Our impact on the bottom line is hard to value in numbers because what we provide is information that people use to turn into knowledge. Indirectly this affects productivity, creation, and at some point, dollars. But if some people in your upper management don't get that -- and it's hard to know who gets what when upper management is constantly changing -- then you're in the position of constantly having to justify your existence. That's a scary position to be in day to day and is the ugly reality for my managers, I know. But as a colleague told me today, unfortunately the only way to change things for yourself -- to get around the cultural patterns and politics existent in this entrenched management -- is probably to leave the company. Why, I even left the company and came back during one of these periods.

Maybe she's right to some extent. But I think there is another way. You can affect change globally by acting locally, through experience and through one on one interactions. I believe that, anyway. And today I found that there are progbably other ways you can serve your users as well without having to navigate your political bureaucracy -- without seeking approval. What's that saying? "To ask permission is to seek denial". You can fly under the radar. So that's where I am today. I've found this massive database of user feedback -- some of which may be relevant, some of which may be trivial -- but all are direct interactions with people who have come to us mainly in moments of frustration. They've come to us when they have spent time seeking but haven't found. Wow. That's great data to have. So now I'm going to start watching patterns and sifting backwards through the records ... under the radar. Is this guerrilla IA? Am I undermining management by doing this? I'm doing what every good IA should be doing -- finding ways to understand my users and believing that their voices are really damned important to listen to and can/should potentially be surfaced in many contexts. And by this I mean that they don't need to only exist in your deliverables -- user research, personas, etc. -- but that their voices can/should exist for others like them to hear. For now, I'm going to be using them for guiding some redesign discussions, but I really wish all of their voices could be exposed out in front for all to see. In some way, I hope that I will be able to speak for them in these discussions.