« Enterprise 2.0 » communication sociometry

This post is a follow-up of a previous post on my french blog. One long-standing goal of this blog is to come up with concepts and tools to better understand the efficiency of communication channels within the enterprise. Here I focus on the "Enterprise 2.0" trend, seen as the introduction of Web 2.0 tools which support "new" forms of collaboration and communication. I actually believe that using these tools increas

es the overall efficiency (as do most blog writers – see Six Ways to make Web2.0 work to get a summary of the "big picture"), my focus is on sociometry, that is how to measure and demonstrate this increased efficiency. The first part is an English summary of these eight "communication 2.0 forms". The second part is a more detailed analysis, proposed as a table.

Here is the list of eight « communication forms » which I have associated to a variety of "Enterprise 2.0" usages. As mentioned earlier, this is a "work in progress" … The need to categorize comes from the desire to model, measure and simulate. This list only focuses on "2.0 innovations" and does not include the more common form of computer-supported forms of communication such as email, videoconferencing, etc.

1. Concurrent Editing.
   This is simply the kind of communication supported by the co-edition of a shared document (which is often coupled with another form of communication). It is a distinctive feature associated with "Enterprise 2.0 », with the flagship example of the Wiki.
   
2. Targeted Broadcasting.
   Broadcasting (one-to-many) is an efficient technique for the broadcaster, but which may turn tiresome (and a waste of productive time) for the listener. With the support of "communities defined by a common interest", Web 2.0 tools bring the concept of targeted broadcasting.
   
3. Non-intrusive Synchronous Communication. Instant Messenging (IM) brings a number of distinctive features into one package: synchronous texting, presence, closed group of communication partners (so-called « buddies »). My intuition tells me that texting is not the specific feature of IM (shared for instance with SMS), but the combination of presence – sharing joinability information – and a closed group of participants, both of them making synchronous communication "less aggressive" for the receiving side. Joinability is a key concept when defining performance of communication (a topic that is covered with some depth in my book). The combination of text-based (which can be processed in a multi-tasking setup), joinability info and a closed communication network which prevents spamming, defines the concept of non-intrusive synchronous communication (which one may think of as an oxymoron).
   
4. Personal Context Synchronisation.
   This describes a « background » communication channel whose benefit (among others) is to eliminate the "transaction costs" of communication (the analogy with R. Coase's analysis is striking). We learn from sociology that a typical conversation follows a three-step pattern. The first is the introduction (with ritual questions such as "how are you" "what's up") that is necessary to "synchronize" both from a contextual and a biological perspective. It means both to establish a common frame of communication (context) and to synchronize the emotional states (with keys such as tone / rhythm / body posture / …). The second step is the exchange of information per se. The last is closure, another ritual step that is necessary for one of the participant to indicate to the other that it is time to move to other things. Removing the ritual step is seen as a lack of social skills and reduces the efficiency of the communication process (when repeated). Web 2.0 has introduced a number of micro-blogging tools (such as twitter). Sharing a continuous flow of micro-information creates a "sense of proximity" which makes "other form of communications" more efficient since introduction/closure become less necessary in an "always connected" world.
   
5. Targeted Stigmergy.
   Stigmergy is communicating through messages with messages left in a location for future visitors (what ants do). It can be thought of as localized asynchronous communication. The « virtual » version of the ants depositing pheromone is, for instance, the wall-to-wall communication in Facebook. Only those who go and visit the wall may read the messages, so, once again, the 2.0 equivalent adds the benefit of a "target": those who share a common interest in the owner of the "wall". A more advanced version of digital stigmergy is offered with geo-tagging (adding tags to the « real world » - see for instance Sekai camera) and with geo-proximity services (see Aka-aki).
   
6. Elective Asynchronous Communication.
   The novelty is in the « elective » (in the sense of Goethe), that is using a closed group where each recipient has explicitly accepted the sender into his "group". Elective email is a response against spam, and more generally a way to segment email usage along different communities. This is precisely why so many young Internet users moved away from email to use the Facebook equivalent (and NOT because asynchronous communication was "has-been"). We are back to a key idea which I have often developed in my blog: Web 1.0 communication tools make it too easy to burden the recipients with overload (saturate the "bandwidth").
   
7. Weak Links Weaving.
   This is a key benefit from 2.0 tools. Since the seminal work form Mark Granovetter, we separate links in social networks (such as the enterprise) into two categories: strong links (people that we see often, for geographical, organizational or functional reasons) and weak links (people that we see less often but who make a « second circle » which is key to information propagation). Strengthening the weak links is a way to promote efficient information propagation within the enterprise. It acts on two levels. First it reduces the length of the information diameter (a key topic of my other blog). This is actually a structural result, with equations that link the social net structure and the information propagation latency. Second, because weak links are « orthogonal » to enterprise organization, they prevent the usual « silo syndrome". They help different functions and different department better collaborate. The key equation associated to this seventh principle, which will require further investigation, may be formulated as follows: the efficiency gained from a better network of weak links is worth productive time that employees loose when they chat on Facebook or other similar tools (about non-company-business).
   
8. People-to-Function Communication.
   A major difficulty in large organization is that one does not know who to talk to, for a given business topic, unless you are « one of the elders » and you have grown your own support network. Web 2.0 tools, which are built on top of « communities » which share a common interest, support both direct and indirect communication. Direct/explicit means that you designate the recipient as a person. Indirect means that you talk to a person or a group defined implicitly (as a community). Being able, especially for a newcomer, to reach the proper recipients through their domain of interests is a key benefit of Web 2.0 tools, one that has been identified for a long time by the "knowledge management" crowd. One may notice that, if the email exchange graph was publicly displayed, it would be of great help to find out "who knows what" in the company (an idea which is being exploited already). A benefit of the 2.0 tools is precisely to offer, in a visual and manageable form, this type of interaction map.
   
   

The following two tables illustrate these eight forms along the following criteria/principles:

• Active principle: how to describe these communication forms using a few abstract qualifiers (synchronous/ asynchronous, N-to-M, immersive/multi-tasking, explicit designation of the receivers / implicit, …)
  
• 2.0 examples: a few common 2.0 tools that capture (at least partially) this form of communication
  
• Non-Web examples: I offer a more classical example to give a different insight
  
• Cure for : a list of known communication problems that are partially resolved here
  
• Sociometry: what could be measured to prove an increase in efficiency
  

As mentioned earlier, my goal is to dive into a more analytic study of these communication forms and see how they can be added to my enterprise efficiency model. However, the first step is to see if this list is complete or if I missed another aspect of 2.0 communications. Comments are welcome J

Sharing Knowledge and Organizational Learning

Actually, this is yet another extract, because I found out that it is also relevant to the topic of this blog, and because I want to be able to quote it in the future ...

On the management literature best-seller is P. Senge’s book The 5th Discipline, which I have quoted earlier. This great book focuses on the collective intelligence of an organization (and, by consequence, collective learning). This leads naturally to the concepts of collective skills and collective knowledge. Looking at analysis and thinking as collective activities is not as easy or simple as it sounds. This type of collective behavior emerges in companies as a response to the increasing demands and the increasing competition. A major part of his book is devoted to the analysis of systems and their complexity, which P. Senge considers to be the most significant issue of organizational (team) learning[1]. Sharing knowledge is a topic which is neither simple nor intuitive. There exists a wealth of dubious quotes or proverbs that claim that sharing knowledge is a way to get richer, that knowledge is the only wealth that is not lost when given away, and so on. In practice, sharing one’s knowledge is difficult (which is why one must learn to become a teacher), it is time-consuming (thus it is nothing but free) and it may yield to feel a loss of status to the one who is “sharing” away her knowledge. A necessary condition is to establish a culture that promote knowledge passing, both in the general sense (as a principle) and in a practical sense (so that the time which is spent is recognized and rewarded). The fame of “knowledge management” has declined over the years since it has been associated with heavy and costly projects, which came with new technologies that appeared overly complex. The “knowledge management” (KM) expression is used to designate both a process (which is our focus here) and a project. Ten years ago, projects to extract knowledge out of a group of specialists (through interviews to build a so-called “knowledge base”) were quite popular. They are still useful and relevant in a few specialized cases, but this approach is too heavy and too static to be applied in a continuous manner[2]. The next figure is an attempt – some readers may find it unduly abstract or complex – to represent the complex transformation which an enterprise must go through, as explained in this last section. There are two parts: the left part is a “traditional view” of the enterprise, the right is a newer vision centered on collective intelligence. The left part represents a traditional perspective on the employee, who is appreciated for his actions. We use a classical representation of knowledge as a process which transforms information into action (small rectangular box associated to each employee on the figure). In a traditional perspective, knowledge is a personal matter (even if some information is shared). The domain of the company is the coordination of individual actions into collective ones, which is represented, in Figure 6.3, with a dashed-line triangle. The “bubble” on top of the figure represents the “governance mode”, which is the “control-command” approach that we discussed earlier. The right part of the figure represents the result obtained when the transformation towards collective intelligence is achieved. The first difference with the previous situation is that knowledge is no longer an individual matter. A new part of collective knowledge (the grey rectangle in Figure 6.3) has appeared, which is precisely the field of knowledge management. Since the company is immersed into a constantly evolving world, this collective knowledge needs to be continuously revisited and updated. This continuous activity (circle arrow) is the knowledge management process’s goal. Let us notice that, when the surroundings change constantly, knowledge management and organizational learning become synonymous. The goal for companies is not simply to “know the right things” but to be able to “learn all the necessary things”. The second difference with the left part lies with the distributed management style (illustrated with the bubble). Top-down hierarchical command is replaced by a dual flow: a situation occurs that triggers a reaction, while a common goal influences the way situations are analyzed. The company goals are re-evaluated according to the situation changes. Moreover, they may be interpreted locally by “field managers” who enjoy more responsibilities. A distributed control emphasizes the interest of managing collective knowledge, which supports the coherence control that may no longer be enforced by a centralized and autocrat vision.

Figure 6.3: Collective Management of Knowledge and Learning

As far as the process of knowledge management within the enterprise is concerned, we may summarize the key principles as follows:

• Knowledge capitalization is mostly an internal communication process. This is why tools that support “practice communities” (cf. the previous discussion about blogs) are playing a key role.
• A global management of knowledge throughout the company is made necessary by the distribution of management and decision taking[3].
• Structuring collective knowledge is an emerging process, which is not directed towards goals, but, in the opposite direction, yields opportunities[4].

Managing knowledge may not be separated from skill management, nor, more generally, from human resource management. Managing skills require producing assessments, to draw skill maps and to articulate a growth strategy. In a way that complements the emergent process of knowledge management, skill management is better carried in a planned and top-town manner. Necessary skills may be bought, recruited or trained … All this takes time, on a multi-year scale. Skill management is an operational responsibility that devolves upon business divisions, but which requires the methodological assistance from the human resource division. This is not simply because skills are a person-related matter, but also because the time scale that is required to implement a strategy is too long for a purely operational perspective.

[1] Peter Senge makes a key difference between detail complexity (many sub-parts) and dynamic complexity (many steps for the associated processes). Chapters 6 and 7 provides with a clear illustration of what « system thinking » (a favorite expressions from this book) is. On the other hand, Chapter 12 deals with « team learning », which is precisely about organizational learning. To P. Senge, organizational learning is the fifth step of a maturity scale, which follows more classical maturity stage that are borrowed from total quality management.
[2] On this topic, see the previously quoted book from E. Awad et H. Ghaziri, Knowledge Management, which is very thorough, even though on the descriptive side. The reader will find there definitions for terms such as “information” and “knowledge”, as well as a complete taxonomy of knowledge, together with the associated extraction and capitalization processes.
[3] These ideas are brilliantly developed in L. Morris’s book, Managing the evolving corporation, which was introduced in the previous chapter. I especially recommend the fifth chapter which has been a key source for my own thinking. It explains the relationships between information, knowledge and decisions with much more detail than what is given here.
[4] About this fascinating but complex topic, one should read the book from F. Julien: “Treatises on Efficacy: Between Western and Chinese Thinking”. He starts with a brilliant comparison between strategic military thinking in Occident versus China. He then deals with the concept of efficiency and contrast our goal-directed strategies with « situation intelligence » which is the trademark of Chinese thinkers. A large number of fashionable theories, proposed in management books, about the « networked enterprise » may be analyzed and explained with this treasure of knowledge and erudition.

Organization and Information Flows

A last extract from my book, from the fourth chapter.

If organization is seen as an information transfer tool, it becomes obvious that both the « management system » (i.e., the hierarchical structure) and the «corporate meeting system » (i.e., the set of all planned meetings and committees) must be considered as one system. We shall take a closer look at the “corporate meeting system” in Section 4.5. The influence between the two is mutual: hierarchical management generates scheduled information sharing meetings (either as one-to-one or team meetings), committees are an alternate form of embodiment for decision and management power, as we just noticed. Using the meeting system to complement the hierarchical structure is much more flexible than a matrix organization, but one must be careful not to overuse it (cf. Section 4.5.1 as well as the next chapter) [1].

This chapter will present some key ideas about the relationship between organization and information flows, which may be gathered into three categories:

• A key feature of an enterprise organization is the information propagation latency (the time it takes for a piece of information to propagate). A major goal of organization re-engineering should be to produce a more reactive enterprise.
• A dual key notion is the “connectivity degree”, which we can define as the average length of the communication paths. A key principle from communication theory is that fidelity declines with the number of exchanges (i.e., intermediaries). A related goal for organizational architecture is to ensure the existence of short paths which may be used for high priority messages[2].
• Time is the most critical resource for information management. The act of communicating takes time. The duration may vary according to the channel that is used, the medium or the protocol, but communication is a process, not simply some information transfer. Many communication attempts fail when the receiving end simply does not have the time to process the information. An efficient organization must optimize global time management (share when possible, sort according to priorities, etc.).
  

An interesting consequence of this relationship between communication and enterprise organization is the impact of electronic communication channels (email, IM, …) on the enterprise management. The next chapter will focus on electronic tools such as email, intranets, phones, etc and their integration with the information system. A balance between face-to-face and electronic communication must be found, since electronic channels have their own advantages and limitations[3] (cf. Section 4.5).
The impact of internal communication on the enterprise operations and efficiency is, nevertheless, strongly dependent on the size of the company. Many of the issues that we raise in this chapter are of little significance for a 10-employees company. A very crude model would say that the work load (amount of time spent in activities) varies linearly with the number of employees, whereas coordination requires a share of the total time which is evolving in a quadratic manner. The same reasoning goes with process complexity: the coordination load grows faster than the simple number of tasks that need to be managed. A similar remark may be made about the opportunity, or the constraints, to share functions or resources within an organization. This sharing is only profitable if a critical mass is reached. The creation of a department associated with a special skill becomes relevant only when the coordination management load has reached a given threshold. Hence a major part of the dilemmas reported here only apply to large companies.
Speaking about company size is actually a gross simplification, since what matters is the size of the teams which are necessary to achieve the company’s goals and to operate the business processes. There are large enterprises which are heavily distributed, for instance according to geographical zones, or by projects (such as construction sites), for which operating teams remain rather small. On the other hand, service companies which reach a mass market often need to assign a large amount of its resources to each business process (that is, each process involves a fair amount of coordination between the different departments).
In this later context, coordination is often more time-consuming than processing the activity itself (the so-called “individual work”). That is to say, a “knowledge worker” spends more of her time passing information along in meetings than producing its own (information, or value addition). Such a behavior is often tagged with the French expression “bucket carrier” (a bucket carrier is someone whose role is limited to passing information around). Such an (implicit) criticism is partially unjust, since it is perfectly normal that a fair amount of time is spent transferring information in a large-scale project or a process (i.e., with a large number of participants). One way to reduce this coordination load is to reduce this number of participants through avoiding specialization (at least partially), which we shall discuss in the next section. Another approach is to optimize the management of information flows, especially through the corporate meeting system, which we shall discuss in section 4.5.1.
The issue of coordinating a large-scale team is made even more complex when dynamic variations occur. Load variations naturally create local over-capacity pockets. In a small structure, this over-capacity is resolved by capillarity: the under-utilized employee can find additional work in the same, local, environment. There is an implicit levelling of capacity by the needs. In a larger structure, on the other hand, there is a risk of “self-employment”: if over-capacity reaches a critical mass, it may generate its own activity. In some situation, this may turn into a “management” activity. Some employees focus on “improving” the work of others: they create models, scorecards, monitoring tools, etc. This translates into a “Brownian movement” around the enterprise main course. Projects become more complex, requirements grow richer, new avenues are explored.

[1] The time which is necessary to learn about one another and how to work together should not be underestimated. This crucial point is emphasized in the conclusion from B. Nardi’s article “Beyond Bandwidth: Dimensions of Connection in Interpersonal Communication », in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (2005), vol. 14, Springer. Here is a relevant quote: « The need for speed and cost saving encourages distributed work, necessitating mediated communication, and yet the clocks tick faster, the deadline grows shorter. The use of short term “virtual teams” and matrixed organizational schemes means workers have less time to get to know one another. We do not yet know the long term effects that attenuated social relations in the workplace may have, but there are certainly hidden costs involved.”
[2] This topic is explained brilliantly in M. Gladwell’s book “ The Tipping Point”. M. Gladwell’s book deals with « the propagation of contagious ideas » and the underlying social networks which are required for this propagation.
[3] This issue of information and communication technology may be placed in the context of transaction costs, as defined by Ronald Coase. The economy Nobel Prize, in his famous article “ The Nature of the Firm” reconstructs the enterprise concept from the « cost of transaction » principle. Transaction costs are smaller within a company, which creates a competitive advantage of internal collaboration as opposed to outsourcing. Information and communication technologies (ICT) have reduced these costs considerably, with consequences such as «networked company », outsourcing, « extended enterprise », etc. Optimizing these internal transaction costs through the better use of ICT is a major competitiveness issue.

A Plea in Favor of Regulation

Yet another extract from my book ... this short extract from the 5th chapter explains why shared common rules are necessary. This is especially important since if one does not agree with this point, the concept of "sociometry" is a hard sell !

Whenever the global optimum for a collective action is different from the combination of individually optimal strategies, the idea to regulate comes to mind. If we do not regulate, inefficient behaviors occur, which appear annoying for some other employees, as is explained by Andrew Petersen and is frequently observed today. It is so easy to send an email (and even easier to “carbon-copy” to some-one) that mail boxes are cluttered. The same remark applies to telephony: the additional ease of use brought by the mobile phone has increased the probability to fill a voice mailbox with long messages which are difficult to handle efficiently. It is not only a matter of balancing the time load between the sender and the receiver. It is a more global matter, because everyone behaves depending on the expected use of the communication channel. In a similar manner, it has become increasingly easy to produce rich multi-media documents. The result may easily be an “ecosystem” in which the total production exceeds the whole “reading capacity” of the enterprise[1]. Yet another illustration is the multiplication of meetings. The overload saturates everyone’s agenda, which means that there is less time to prepare the meetings, and less time to produce and circulate a summary report. This leads to a vicious circle: meetings have to be repeated a number of time because they were poorly prepared or because the decisions that were taken the first time were not properly executed.
To avoid these possible difficulties, a company must take a global approach and publish rules and guidelines that favor collective efficiency. Three types of rules come to mind:

1. Usage rules aim at improving the efficiency of communication channels. They are different for each tool and each channel. This category contains rules that balance sending with receiving, rules that create taxonomies of communication flows, control rules, etc.
2. Preference rules amongst communication channels, depending on the current situation. Making this type of preference ordering into a corporate standard (with some flexibility) is an efficiency improvement compared to an individual approach (we all use our own rules implicitly). This category also contains rules about interruptions and expected answering behaviors. These rules govern the uniformity and the predictability of response time. For instance, should one glance at her/his mail box every two hours, every day or every week? Is it acceptable to leave a meeting to take a phone call? If it your boss? If it comes from the CEO? There are no “good” answers to these questions. For instance, it is both possible to require phones to be made silent during meetings, or to tolerate a few interruptions when they are limited to exceptions (anyway, the first approach will generate the physical interruption of an assistant coming into the room if the CEO really wants to talk with you). What matters, what makes everyone more efficient is when the rules are known and when they are (more or less) the same for all[2].
3. Knowledge capitalization rules improve the reuse of information that is exchanged. These include, quite logically, filing, back-up and naming rules.

A careful compromise has to be found since too many rules defeat the purpose. Rules should be introduced very slowly and in a progressive manner. A large part of these rules should transform into common usage, into folklore. This is how the “rule set” may be enriched while remaining small.
Defining usage rules is a key principle to obtain the full efficiency of communication tool. This is even truer for the new generation of tools that will be mentioned in the remainder of this chapter. Instant messaging is a good example: There are many ways to use IM in a professional setting. One may use the presence indication to use IM to know when to make a phone call. One may use IM as a text channel (which opens the question of its position with respect to the SMS and email channels[3]). If everyone makes his own discovery of the tool and uses it according to his own intuition, there is a cumulative effect on all possible reasons to reject this technology. Some will fear that the presence indicator is a “big brother” device; other will complain about the loss of concentration caused by the interruption of the synchronous text messaging window, and so on.

[1] To illustrate this idea with a caricature, let us consider a group of one hundred managers where everyone sends his documents to each other. Even if we factor in the ability to read much faster than writing, this requires everyone to spend much more time to read than to write (10 times more), which is inefficient not to mention impossible. This is the situation that occurs when the principle of the « bulletin board » is abused.
[2] There are few quantitative studies available about the negative impact of interruptions. The best that I know about is referred to in the 10th chapter of PeopleWare from T. DeMarco & T. Lister. The university of London has published a fascinating study that shows that employees who are subjected to the constant interruption flow from phones and Blackberry-type devices loose the equivalent of 10 points from their ID ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4471607.stm)
[3] The use of different competing communication channels has been studies by anthropologists such as Timothy de Waal Melfyt from Brown University (cf. the BusinessWeek article from 6/5/ 2006). With the help of a network of field interviewers, he has discovered that teenagers have an optimized approach to using the whole set of channels. Email is used for serious conversations, IM is left to informal discussions and SMS is used to reach someone that you do not want to talk to. On might take this as a proof that there is no need for regulation and that an optimized usage always emerges. The difficulty arises from the long time that is necessary to stabilize efficient usage within the company. The teenager network case cannot be taken as model for the corporation because of their impressive collective learning speed (cf. next chapter).

Sociometry of Collaborative Desktop Use

This is a short extact of my book (the English version will be available soon) - Section 5.3 from Chapter 5. It introduces the topic of measuremment of desktop software. Since most of desktop software is geared towards collaborative work nowdays, it is a first contribution towards Enterprise Collaboration Sociometry.

This set of principles and goals, which start to shape what looks like an ambition, leads us once more to the measurement issue. Whether it is a question of individual or collective efficiency[1], defining performance indicators is not easy. However, even if they are far from perfect, measuring those indicators has many advantages. They provide some objectivity to the debate about the improvement or the stagnation of desktop tools. They support the evaluation of usage and empowerment of these tools. Last, they enable us to address the issue of – and most often the worries associated with – collective impact (i.e., how does the individual usage of a tool change the way we work together as a group). Andrew Petersen’s complaints in the case study may be seen as an illustration of negative consequences, from a collective point of view, of misguided individual practices.
The following table is a first contribution to this measurement topic. It suggests indicators which are clearly defined and independent from the tools (such as measuring the size of a Word™ or Powerpoint™ document).

1. Measuring Time
   
   Producing a Document: Daily time percentage spent to produce documents
   Electronic Mail: Time spent to read one’s emails
   Average waiting time of a message (before it is read)
   Meeting Attendance: Percentage of weekly time spent in scheduled meeting
   KM Contribution: Percentage of time spent to contribute to knowledge management
   
2. Measuring Result
   
   Producing a Document: Number of documents
   Total amount of characters produced in a month
   Electronic Mail: Total generated traffic (email size X number of receivers)
   Average size of incoming mailbox
   Meeting Attendance: Global volume (man.month) of meetings to which I participate
   KM Contribution: Number of KM contributions (documents, forums, …)
   
3. Measuring Collboration (collective dimension)
   
   Producing a Document: Reading rate of produced documents
   Average number of readers
   Electronic Mail: Average number of receivers
   Direct versus copy (cc) distribution
   Meeting Attendance: Average number of attendees
   Percentage of meetings that I call myself as the organizer
   KM Contribution: Average number of readers
   Average number of reuse / quotation per contribution
   

It is difficult to collect these metrics for the whole set of employees, on a continuous basis. On the other hand, it is possible to proceed with experiments or to hire an outside company to take measurements. This is very similar to the chrono-analysis studies that have been ordered in the industry for decades, either in a workshop or on construction site. The relentless search for improved efficiency makes me conjecture that, as part of this new phase of the service industry transformation, communication and information transformation activities will be monitored and analyzed more closely in the future.
There already exist a number of results that are directly relevant to understand how to increase global efficiency. For instance, we know a fair amount about reading, writing and listening speed, which may be measured using a words-per-minutes count. To keep things simples, an employee writes (when he produces a document on his desktop computer or when he writes a mail) at an average speed of 30 words per minutes. This is 5 times slower than when he speaks (speech speed varies considerably amongst individuals, but 150 words/minute is a proper order of magnitude[2]). This explains why it is more efficient, time-wise, to give a phone call than to send an email, as long as the receiving party is available.
On the other hand, from the receiving side, the same user may read approximately 300 words per minutes, using a quick reading approach but without mastering special reading skills. Besides, he may parse a document even faster (searching for keywords) to judge the interest of a document. Hence it is more pleasant and more efficient to browse through one’s email than one’s voice mail. Choosing and optimizing a communication channel is not simply a matter of throughput. The quality of the information exchange also depends on the ability to establish a “feedback look”, which enables the sender to modulate her or his message (the “bandwidth concept”) [3].

[1] The « sociometry » term is borrowed from J.-L. Moreno – cf. his book, Who Shall Survive: Foundations of Sociometry, Group Psychotherapy and Sociodramas – to emphasize the collective dimension. What we need to measure is the contribution to performance that is produced by the whole network, not simply how the individual efficiency is improved. We could equally qualify our fictional cases as “sociodramas”, with the meaning proposed by J.-L. Moreno (in the same book). The link with sociometry was already apparent in the previous chapter (and this will become even more evident with the second annex) since we tried to qualify the interaction networks within the company, such as the corporate meeting system.
[2] This is a simplified summary. There exists a fascinating literature about this topic. To find a more detailed summary with a bibliography, see: http://www.keller.com/articles/readingspeed.html.
[3] For further thoughts about this question, read « Beyond Bandwidth: Dimensions of Connection in Interpersonal Communication » from B. Nardi, in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (2005), vol. 14, Springer. The term « bandwidth » covers both the ability to transfer information as well as the handling of feedback. Feedback may be explicit (such as a two-way conversation, assuming a low latency) or implicit (weak signals that are contained in facial expressions or body language). This brilliant article deals with three relational aspects of communication: affinity, engagement and attention. It proposes a few suggestions about the use of technology as a communication support and emphasizes the importance of body language.

Welcome Message

This new blog is a place to collect thoughts and references about the sociometry of entreprise collaboration.

The starting point is the belief, shared by most, that the 21^st century enterprise is defined by the collaborative processes that it hosts. The efficiency of collaboration is, therefore, the most crucial challenge for most companies. Obviously, not all companies, there are still 20^th century tasks that need to be carried out. But "knowledge workers" who deliver services in a digital economy are clearly within this perimeter. The domain of this blog is the sociometry of this collaboration, that is, how it can be measured. Sociometry is a direct reference to the pioneering work of J.-L. Moreno.

The field of enterprise collaboration is undergoing a revolution because of electronic tools and the advent of IP networks which unify the three basic tasks of the knowledge worker: to search & process information, to communicate & produce new information, and to publish & share. This world of "collaboration over IP" is storming over companies, especially with the arrival of "digital natives" who are importing these collaboration patterns from their own private experience (at home).

Sociometry is needed because the only progress path is of continuous improvement. This is a more personal (and more arguable) statement: enterprise collaboration with modern technology is a difficult topic. I will return to this issue with future posts. Enterprise collaboration is interesting because this electronic revolution comes with its own problems. These are hard problems, which needs to be tackled with continuous improvements. Because human interaction and collaboration is so central to who we are, it is a difficult subject to discuss or study without passion or subjectivity.

Sociometry makes sense because a lot of relevant quantitative science is available. Today I will point out three relevant disciplines, but I am sure that there are others.

• CMC (computer mediated communication) – This subfield from psychology and sociology studies the way we may communicate using electronic tools. This is obviously enormously relevant. For instance, see what we know about reading/writing/typing speeds.
  
• Social Networks – The science of social networks has grown tremendously over the past 10 years. It brings researchers from diverse backgrounds, such as theoretical physics, sociology, biology or graph theory.
  
• Operations Research. – There are multiple ways in which OR is relevant to collaboration sociometry. The study of flows in network is an obvious example. But a much more important insight is that communicating takes time, hence the management of collaboration (and related information flows) is deeply related to time management. Insights from scheduling are especially relevant. My own background (I am an OR scientist and a member of ROADEF) makes me especially attuned to the time management dimension, but anyone who works in a modern company will understand the crucial importance of shared schedules.
  

These three are those that I have taken a deep interest in. The English version of my book should be available in a few months. I'll use this blog to make some of the relevant pages available online.

There are many kinds of blogs. Some blogs offer long and rich messages, some others are filled with short references to other places of interest on the Web. This is a blog of the second kind: I already author a blog of the first kind. Here my goal is three-folds:

• Collect pointers to existing resources on the web. This is the main goal, as there exists a wealth of relevant literature. I will only focus on resources that are related to collaboration, in the enterprise context (and especially anything that is related to business process execution) and that focus on the qualitative approach using metrics. This is already a very broad field (as defined by the intersection of these three constraints), focusing on two only would requires hundreds of people J
  
• Gather feedback, comments and suggestions from others who share this interest. Somehow, I have started to do this with my earlier blog, but writing in French limits the audience J
  
• Maintain an English version of some of my own work (cf. my research agenda). I will do this progressively, as I translate some of my work into scientific papers. For instance, this is what I am doing currently with my work on social networks.
  

Don't hesitate to leave comments or to email me directly if you know someone or something that is worth being mentioned. For instance, a very relevant Web site is Next Modernity.