Encouraging Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing

According to McKinsey,  knowledge workers are an expensive asset, typically earning a wage premium that ranges from 55 percent to 75 percent over the pay of task workers who perform more basic production and transaction tasks. The nature of the collaborative work performed by these knowledge workers ranges from high levels of abstract thinking on the part of scientists to day-to-day improved decision-making and problem solving.

A big challenge is measuring the productivity of knowledge workers, these measures are at best difficult to quantify in traditional terms where as for production workers, productivity can be easily measured in terms of units of output and for transaction workers they can be measured in terms of operations per hour etc. But for knowledge workers, the degree of collaboration productivity depends on the quality and quantity of knowledge and document sharing that happens.

Having spent a significant amount of time and money investing in a system to help knowledge workers by enabling collaboration, document & knowledge sharing, how do you actually get people to use it and continue to use it beyond the honeymoon period? Not everyone is a natural collaborator, this can be either deliberate or just a natural feature of someone’s personality.

This is a BIG issue and there is no real easy answer, I don’t claim to have a silver bullet, but, the approach I suggest might give you some ideas.

I suggest adopting a two-pronged approach which aims to encourage someone to collaborate and discourage them from withholding. This approach is very straightforward, but the trick is how to find an effective way of encouraging and discouraging a typical information worker so that they become (and remain) effective collaborators.

One approach I like is to adopt tactics that both give and take, for example in order to encourage someone you should give them something they want or value and/or take away from them something they don’t want, conversely, in order to discourage someone you should give them something they don’t want or take away something they do want and value. Now this seems a bit harsh but as a strategy and if implemented in the right way, it can be effective.

So here is an example to illustrate my point:

Scenario: A document library has been setup using new technology (such as SharePoint) in order to store project related document, best practices, advice, lessons learned etc, The goal for this document library is to help people avoid re-inventing the wheel and to improve the efficiency and quality of projects by re-using what has been proven to work well in other projects.

The system has been in place for 3 months and after the initial “hype of expectation” (honeymoon!), hardly any new documents are being uploaded and the usage statistics suggest that many users who should be contributing and using the shared resources have reverted back to the old ways of “hoarding” information. As a result of this, projects are starting to suffer again from not re-using what is already known in the organisation and people get frustrated (or give up) trying to find in-house examples of best practice.

Challenge 1: How should you motivate people to contribute project collateral so that others can use it. Using the Encourage/Discourage/GIVE/TAKE strategy mentioned above, you might want to structure some approaches as follows:

• Encourage –GIVE
  • Give recognition to those that contribute (name the top contributors)
  • Find a way to give regular contributors status amongst peers
  • Give recognition to actual content shared (use some form or rating system good –> excellent)
  • Give small but tangible reward (small gifts, extra time off work etc)
• Encourage – TAKE
  • Remove any obstacles to use, i.e. make sure the systems are as easy and effortless as possible to collaborate and share documents
  • Remove the need to positively take action, i.e. make it the default that public documents are shared automatically unless you override and mark content as private
• Discourage-GIVE
  • Ask people to document (in a monthly status report) reasons for not collaborating
  • Give non contributors the additional job responsibility or reviewing other peoples content
• Discourage-TAKE
  • Remove unfiltered internet access (block certain public networking sites)

There are many others tactics apart from the examples I have listed above, hopefully you get the idea.

Facilitating a NIMM Self Assessment

Diagnose BEFORE you Prescribe

The ultimate goal of the NIMM self assessment process is to get a common consensus on how things really are today. The people involved in self assessing (the target team) will start to form opinions individually and then as a team about what the current NIMM maturity level is, some will also start to think of how maturity can be improved.

It is recommended that someone lead the self assessment process, taking the role of a self assessment facilitator. This should be someone not directly involved in the capability being assessed, and ideally someone from the senior management team who will be a stakeholder in driving maturity improvement (the CIO should get involved in some of these self assessment sessions).

In summary, there are three phases of a self assessment:

1. Open questions — These questions allow the target team to talk openly and freely about their current capability and ways of working.

The advantage of these types of questions is that they pose no boundary for the first part of the self assessment; these kinds of questions should help the target team explore and probe how they currently do things from many different angles.

2. Control questions — With these questions, the facilitator starts to guide the self assessment towards a conclusion on the current NIMM maturity level. During this phase, ideas will start to surface on possible ways to improve maturity (write these down!).

3. Confirmation questions — These questions aim to establish agreement or consensus amongst the target team on the current NIMM maturity level along with ideas for initiatives that will improve maturity.

As one well respected CIO said to me, “The key benefit of this self assessment tool is not so much the endpoint that you reach but the journey you have to undertake to get there.”

Good luck self assessing.

NHS CIO Network Group on Linkedin

I have created a CIO Network group in Linkedin. The purpose of this group is to help connect those people responsible for Health Informatics across the NHS. This group is aimed at CIOs, IT Directors and Associate Directors etc. This group is not intended to replace any of the existing internal communications mechanisms, hopefully members of this group will find it a useful tool for connecting with their peers.

If you work for the NHS in a CIO capacity, please take a look. Thanks.

Here is the link to the group http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2074660

IT Infrastructure – Roadmap or Strategy

I am taking a slightly different approach in communicating Infrastructure Strategy to CIOs that I am working with. I am taking the view that most people can work out for themselves what their desired technology/IT “end state” should be (ideally in the same place as the business want to be!). The challenge is identifying sensible routes or roadmaps to this end state from where you currently are, with the “landmarks” to look out for along the way. So, Virtualisation, Unified Communications, Cloud Computing,  Mobile/Fixed Convergence, Innovation Management, ITIL V3 etc are “landmarks” along the way to realising the Infrastructure Strategy and enabling the Business Strategy.

 … I have use this in a number of presentations recently and it seemed to go down well with the audience (CIOs/IT Directors), seems to be more intuitive and resonates with the reality of being a CIO today.

 So for me an Infrastructure Strategy is usefull but may not go far enough, a Strategy Roadmap while still being “strategic” (ie the what and why) can be more pragmatic if it suggests good (and perhaps highlights some bad) routes to take.