Fabulous KM Tool Or Bentham’s Panopticon?
Blogs and articles are full of accounts of workforce-led demands for social networking tools at work, often meeting management resistance. You don’t hear quite so much about social network analysis tools.
Dr Marie Puybaraud and I last year wrote an unpublished article, Knowledge Management And Enterprise Social Networking, after one of our Global Mobility Network meetings. We had invited someone to speak to us about a particular SNA and search technology. The technology lets businesses identify, monitor, measure and manage social networks, information flows and expertise. As information from a range of sources (including email, IM, wiki, blog, RSS, documents etc.) passes through the technology, it extracts connections and key themes. The technology then uses these to create social graphs, and information flows across the organization are presented as tag clouds.
Building Trust And Supporting Collaboration
Rather than speak about the software, our guest talked about the need to understand and influence organisational network structures and dynamics, and to create support systems and processes that facilitate collaboration throughout increasingly dispersed organisational structures. He pointed out that the main sources of innovation and new thinking within organisations are employees, business partners and clients. Surfacing connections among these people enables enterprises to manage knowledge effectively, harnessing and supporting collaboration and knowledge-sharing capability. As well as spotting where innovation occurs, the technology lets enterprises find talent and identify expertise. He concluded that connecting people to people in networks that exhibit trust and commitment requires a mix of technology, people factors, organisational commitment and employee support.
There’s The Problem Right There
And therein lies a huge problem, in my strong view. Open, trusting, transparent cultures? How many of them have you experienced? That level of monitoring could be seen as a version of Bentham’s Panopticon. Although the research is now quite old, there was a little publicised (in my view) ESRC-funded research project in the UK, The Future of Work, involving 22 universities and carried out over six years. One of the publications from that research was a book, Managing to Change?. The authors note that:
“One area where ICT is rapidly expanding management choices is in monitoring and control systems … monitoring information could connect with other parts of the HRM agenda, if it is made accessible and entrusted to employees for personal feedback and learning. This has certainly not happened yet and the trend towards control without participation is deeply disquieting.
If ICT-based control continues to be seen as a management prerogative, and the monitoring information is not shared with employees, then this is likely to become a divisive and damaging issue.”
On the other hand, the technology in the right hands and cultures creates amazing potential for nurturing knowledge and innovation.
Ambient Technologies
And it is not only who you speak to that can be monitored, it is where you go. Technologies that we wear, carry or are embedded within buildings and furniture are open to similar accusations of Big Brother-style surveillance. But again, sensing technologies can be deployed for ergonomic benefits. Marie, mentioned earlier, says in this Telegraph Business Club/ IBM Future Focus white paper:
“To save you getting backache the desk and chair could automatically adjust to suit your size and shape, either by measuring you on the spot, or because the system already knows your vital statistics. When you pick up the phone or touch the desk, your temperature and pulse could be monitored to check whether you’re getting hot or stressed.”
Sinister Or Seriously Useful?
What do you think?
Anne Marie,
This is a provocative post. Much like some of your posts earlier this spring, you raise issues about the potential dark side of so many new technologies and purportedly new ‘future of management’ concepts. Some may think that raising these issues is a downer– it probably is — and yet we do need to be aware that each of these technologies and initiatives can be used for nefarious purposes under the guise of ‘better management’.
Transparency is a case in point. Lots of conversation about how organizations need to become more transparent, and how transparency might reveal negative/not up to speed things within an organization… but what about the effects that transparency might have within the organization? Do I really want people to be able to track & quantify everything I do, as though these behaviors (in a knowledge producing org, especially) actually predict or explain what I know and what / how I come to understand?
For every conversation about transparency and how to get more of it, there should also be a conversation about trust and how to earn it– how the organization can earn it, not simply the individuals therein.
Keep on writing these thoughtful pieces, please.! cvh
Hi CV
Well, thank you for your kind comments. I was delighted to read your response (for which thank you) and very glad you find my musings to be thoughtful.
But, oh dear. Time to change the tone of my blog posts. I don’t mean to be negative. Like yourself, I am chasing authenticity. I am also trying to understand – not throw brickbats, which I suppose is how I may come across.
You ask:
“Do I really want people to be able to track & quantify everything I do, as though these behaviors (in a knowledge producing org, especially) actually predict or explain what I know and what / how I come to understand?”
What a good question. It seems to me that technologies and organisational systems are embedded within social and cultural contexts. The natures of technologies and systems (sinister or supportive) only become activated and functioning within that wider environment.
To answer your question on my own behalf. I would welcome close monitoring if I thought the monitoring was for my good and for the good of the business.
I think I wrote somewhere about Jim Balsillie, joint CEO of RIM (the company that make the Blackberry). I heard him in 2007 being interviewed by Malcolm Gladwell (you can hear the interview here: http://www.2017.uwaterloo.ca/balsillievid1.htm).
He said that business is like whitwater rafting. It is minute-by-minute, continuous optimisations, requiring constant monitoring and adjusting. And for this you need flows of information. He also said that the culture in RIM is open and trusting. It has to be so that everyone in the boat is pulling together to keep it upright and pointing in the right direction.
So that is for the good of the business. What about for my own good? With the caveat of an open and trusting culture, close monitoring could reveal who the knowledge superstars are. These people would then be given resources and support. Those struggling could also be identified and supported. Marie and I explored this is in our white paper – I will send you a copy if you are interested.
I am not in the first flush of youth. Having been around the block a few times, and having worked over the past 14 years with business – large, small, services, manufacturing, public and private sectors – I know that enterprises with open, trusting and authentic cultures are high-performing.
I also know there are a lot of enterprises that would benefit from letting go and trusting their people. The current economic turmoil is providing a great opportunity.
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