Gary Vaughan's Collaboration Times

"How to Manage Social Media" Presentations

My thanks to Joel Sarfati, Director of 40 Plus of Greater Washington D.C. and Professor Ray Kimball of Montgomery College's TechLeap Program for inviting me to give presentations on "How to Manage Social Media for Busy Professionals" last week.  Both events had great audiences, and I appreciated the vigorous question-and-answer sessions.

Two slide decks share my "system" for organizing various social media tools (LinkedIn, Twitter, TypePad Blog, Govloop and BlogTalkRadio) in pursuit of my professional career development and networking goals in the IT field.  I also discuss and demo the use of Facebook, Skype, YouTube, Delicious bookmarking, and Hootsuite.  I manage all these social media apps through a mix of hotmail alerts (esp. for discussion group postings), cross-site postings, and a Tweetdeck dashboard.  A centerpiece of my approach is to use LinkedIn as my main home page (see my profile), with links to other tools.  LinkedIn is also a repository for key work samples and presentations on Box, an integrated document-sharing application.

The main goal in using these tools is to establish a "living professional presence" on the Web, which is nurtured by occasional BlogTalkRadio interviews with D.C. area SharePoint, open source and other IT experts; narrative blog posts and discussion entries; and more frequent, short Twitter messages.  It is helpful to think of this as a "marketing" exercise in two senses:  first, one is marketing one's skills and capabilities on the web; second, one is tapping market intelligence on new technology trends, career opportunities and resources. 

I assume basically three roles in the personal professional application of social media:  (a) as a publisher of content, whether sharing a resume, presentation, or a narrative blog post; (b) as a reader or consumer of others' content; and (c) as a participant interacting with peers via group discussions, status updates, and tweets.  In my experience, the key to successfully applying this system is tight management of the sites or data streams that one monitors and interacts with.  Ideally, I try to track my Twitter stream and discussion groups daily for about an hour (with a family break on weekends!), plus the option of monitoring this traffic while commuting or otherwise "on the go" via 4G Smart phone.

The presentations contain real examples in applying these tools, explore how to measure social media "traffic", and assess security, privacy and other issues.  Also discussed is the need to build a social media presence on a solid prior foundation of traditional personal networking, clear job goals, and a detailed resume.  Another concept that may be useful in shaping both your personal and online presence is that of "branding."  In closing, the slide decks list a number of articles, how-to examples, books and other resources to help expand your use of social media for professional development, plus a few tips on how to get started.

I have enjoyed populating and experimenting with this social media system over the past year, and hope that these presentation decks will be of general interest, not only to IT specialists, but to any professionals who hope to harness social media for career development:

• 40 Plus Presentation (longer, and with more narrative detail)
• TechLeap Presentation (shorter, with more focus on tool demos)

  Please address any comments or questions to me either via LinkedIn messages, or via Twitter @glvaughan.

The Case for Choosing Open Source Collaboration Technology

Tomorrow, Friday, May 20 at 8:00 A.M. Eastern Time I will be interviewing Kurt Voelker, CTO with ForumOne, a digital communications firm based in Alexandria, Virginia on my Web Radio show 'Collaboration TechTalk."  The topic will be "The Case for Choosing Open Source Collaboration Technology."

ForumOne provides internet strategy, online community and collaboration, user experience and design, and innovative website development for non-profits in health, education, the environment, and international development.

In our interview we will explore what circumstances make a compelling case for an organization to adopt collaboration technology in whole or in part.  What are the costs and benefits in using open source vs. proprietary collaboration technology?  What are some specific tools that ForumOne recommends - e.g. Drupal Commons and Open Atrium -  and how do they "stack up" to widely known vendor apps such as SharePoint in terms of power, useability and support?  Finally, Kurt will highlight upcoming ForumOne events and web resources that listeners might find useful to learn more about this topic.

Hope some of you can join us!  Details for accessing the program (either live or as a later podcast) at this BlogTalkRadio announcement link, or listeners welcome to send me questions via Twitter @glvaughan.

 

Knowledge Work as "Beyond Management"

Is traditional management dead?  Is measurement a “hangover from the industrial era”?  Does knowledge work require a more flexible and “touchy feely” paradigm for organizational effectiveness? 

These are some of the questions that Dr. Mark Addleson, Associate Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University posed in his opening presentation at the Knowledge Management Institute’s KM Café in Arlington, Virginia last February 16 (it has taken me that long to post this fascinating talk!).  These are also some of the themes he will be exploring in a forthcoming book.

Definitions and Context: 

Dr. Addleson contrasted factory work (repetitive, mindless…based on the old Frederick Taylor “scientific” management models) with knowledge work which resists strict organization.  In essence, knowledge work and management “don’t mix” – hence, knowledge workers need to organize themselves.  In the early 1990s, KM tended to focus on harnessing tacit knowledge, and early champions such as Peter Drucker viewed KM as a management approach.  Such a management focus is characterized by the “5 D’s:  data, deadlines, deliverables, dollars and directives.”  Yet this KM view is too confining since “knowledge work can’t be managed…it is not compatible with structures, rules, systems.”  Today’s KM approaches tend to be “little K and big M”, with too much of a focus on outcomes and deliverables (as in international development), and a consequent  tendency to be dysfunctional.

In Addleson’s view, we need to focus not on the “doughnut” of typical management elements, but on the “hole” of people, relationships and insight…i.e. how KM work gets done in practice.  While traditional management is a “view from the top”, the key KM question is not “what” but “where” is knowledge work done.  It is  “what people do when they interact, talk to one another, and share knowledge to accomplish something together.”  It involves “give and take…and people making meaning together…and making sense of uncertain situations.”

From this more dynamic perspective,  work is “creative, emergent, messy” and it depends on “attitudes, emotions, feeling, values, beliefs and relationships’ (hence its  touchy-feely character!).  Knowledge worker skills consist of varied “stakeholders “ negotiating, meaning, and organizing to determine roles, responsibilities, places, dates, etc.  One good example of this KM approach is the flexible  Agile Software Development Manifesto.  Another example is how Wikipedia (or Facebook) came into being and has thrived.

Questions and Issues?

While a provocative and fresh look at whither KM, especially in the midst of the rapidly evolving social media scene, I was intrigued by the following questions… (some of which were discussed with attendees at the KMI KM Café):

 

1. Given Dr. Addleson’s KM prescription, is traditional project management dead?  Belying my own PMP background, I think not.  Rather the new fluid tools and workspaces often seem to cry out at some point for more formal structure, deliverables, and accountability – all of which sound to me like more traditional management concepts.
2. Is SharePoint by nature a more conservative enterprise management tool (Big M in the above context) vs. other more agile open source and other light-weight collaboration and content management apps (e.g. Google Apps, Wikipedia)?  My own sense is that enterprises should think about tapping both formal and informal info-sharing tools and structures.  SharePoint 2010, in fact, builds in a lot more social media into its new enterprise application.

And some other questions which I am still pondering…

1. How does one set the new boundaries between managers and knowledge workers, and between formal and informal information systems?
2. What social media and other technologies might best support evolution to this more flexible knowledge worker model?
3. Given the rigidities of our current organizations, what are some practical next steps in better supporting knowledge work?

PTO's New Online Patent Review

A March 5 article in the Washington Post reports on the Patent and Trade Office's (PTO) new pilot project to use a wiki-like online system for rating new patent applications.  This is a fascinating application of this technology, and it will be interesting to see how this public/private sector experiment evolves.