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.