Social Computing and Technology

I have been reading a lot about Social Computing. And I am trying to experiment with it too. Though, trying is the closest I get to it. For some strange reason (or maybe its too much to ask for ...), the formidable Social Computing challenge is being made more formidable by technology.

I was trying to setup my account on Technorati, and that is quite a simple task. As they say ... The Devil lies in the Details. There is a mind-boggling array of tools all arrayed out there for you to us. Needless to say, these are not meant for an ignoramus like you. Yours truly ... A technological dinosaur!

I will definitely write more about it. As you know, Social Computing is something I am very interested in, and if you dont know (I dont think you would), I would like to see some simplification. So a nincompoop like me could "compute socially". Theres a lot of stuff there ... Ping, and a huge Developer Centre. Of course, there would be a school of thought that would believe that a lot of this stuff that is more cutting edge than anything else, and one cant expect cutting edge technology to be user friendly, but it has to become that, if it wants any scope of becoming mainstream. At least, thats what my Corporate Strategy Prof. told in Class! :-)

Telling Stories

I came across a small, though nice write-up about the impact Storytelling can have in the organizational context. This is at the homepage of the SIO SIG (thats Storytelling In Organizations Special Interest Group ... ever wondered why all such abbreviations are always exactly 3 letters long, not a letter more, not a letter less? I have a theory about that, but more about that later).

This is available here. One statement that caught the eye ...

Stories supply facts with meaning, and value propositions with illustrations.

As Peter Senge talks about in The Fifth Discipline, everyone has a mental model which is an aggregation of a lifetime of experiences. What this implies is that anything new we learn is filtered through this model, and we end up trying to relate the new learning to the existing nodes in this mental model.

And this is where the value of stories comes. Stories are told, and they run in that part of the context which is shared between different members of the audience, and which is at the same time shared with the storyteller. This context is the mental models of the members of the audience. Which is what gives the story the power of bringing meaning along with the facts (actually, both of the reinforce each other in the story). Take the example of Jokes. How many times have we not understood a joke because the context of the joke is alien to us? The same logic is applicable to the story.

No can do

I had written about the places I wanted to eat at, while in Bangalore. I am sorry, folks, but you will have to wait (if at all you are reading, but if I still have your attention, I am sure you are reading) for that.

Blame IIM-C. And, my Operations Management exam this weekend. Sunday, to be precise. And, after the 41.67% in Corporate Strategy (I am sure I should have gotten more, except that the majority of the class was somewhere in the 20s and 30s!), I would like much rather hit the Book, and slog it out ... Which means no gallavanting around the place. Just being a good boy, staying put in the Guest House, and Studying! Cheers ...

Technology disintermediation

Abhijit (a friend and ex-colleague), was telling me a little incident ... Something I found funny ...

He was flying from London to Delhi, en route to Calcutta (or Kolkata, if you must, though, I still prefer Calcutta!). He reached the shores of India (aka Indira Gandhi International Airport, but not his luggage). Not for a few days, at any rate.

In the meantime, it seems that he was following up with British Airways about the luggage, and for some reason (dont even ask me to fathom what the reson could have been), the folks at Heathrow were not updating systems (dont believe in them, I suppose?), and as a result, nobody had a clue about the luggage until it actually reached Delhi, and even then, there was a delay in updating the system. And here lies the nub.

Having talked to, and shouted at, the the BA luggage-handling folks in Delhi, he asked hem to inform him moment they hear from his luggage. They said they would, and they did, too ... Only thing, before they called him, he had actually checked on their website that the luggage had come.

Moral of the Story:

Abhijit knew about British Airways luggage before British Airways itself.

Point to ponder: Technology can disintermediate (as it is already doing, and I am sure this post is not telling you anything new, but I just thought that I would pen (or is it keyboard) my thoughts!).

Hospitality and Money

There are a few recent incidents which got me thinking. Hospitality ... a la South Asia. And, this prompted me to write on this subject.

Different societies and different cultures have different outlooks to guests. These could vary from the American way (do they really have to come??), to the South Asian way, of Atithi Devo Bhava (Guest be God) ...

What I feel, this cultural difference shows. Very clearly visible in the hospitality and hospitality related businesses (travel, tourism, aviation, customer service ...).

The overriding impression I get in the Occident (I think the word is still valid, Pax Americana and Thomas Friedman notwithstanding) that the hospitality sector is not into it for serving the customer. Rather, they are in it with both eyeballs on your Wallet.

While nobody is in it for charity, because of this cultural difference, the differences in behaviour become quite glaring, and the warmth you would find in a hotel, or an airline in India, or Sri Lanka (I am yet to travel to Pakistan, but from what I heard, they are far warmer), to my mind, remains unmatched.

And I would think this would have implications for the BPO sector. Barring the narrow mindset of "losing American/British jobs to the Indians", I think culturally, the Indian BPO industry is far better placed than their counterparts in other parts of the world to handle outsourced, customer-facing processes, especially for processes which are with handling irate customers.

Adoption

My friend Sunil has raised a question which has vexed a lot of people, so I dont think it would be wise for me to say that I have an answer. But I think the question needs to be elaborated.

In Hindi, and most other languages in India, there is the story of the Kuen ka Mendhak, or Koopomonduk (depending on which part of the country you come from, and these two are only examples ...). Translated, the Frog of the Well. This is the frog who spent his entire life in the well, and believed that all there is to the world is the well. There was no way he could even begin to fathom the river, and the freedom it could bring to him. And, when asked to come out of the well and live in the river, he was petrified.

So, the question Sunil raises boils down to one of getting the frog to come out of the well. I think its basically a question of telling the frog that theres a beautiful world out there.

Push (from the Boss) may be the simple way out, but I dont think its very sustainable. In the long run, this would require more effort, because we are not generating the desire to collaborate. One possibility is to develop a "sales campaign" based on actual user experience, some kind of poster-boys for KM. This, if course, requires that a start be made somewhere. And I don't think that is as difficult as it seems.

No, this is not instant success. The process of adoption would be slow, but definitely something which will sustain.

Blog on Blogs

I had quite an illuminative discussion with Sunil (a co-Knowledge Manager, and a football fanatic. Chelsea, i think), about why people dont blog. Its 6:30 pm on a Friday evening, and we are discussing this. Any which way, I need to go home and study. Have an Exam this Sunday ... Corporate Strategy!

Two things that we agreed upon:

1. Its too much effort.
2. Its not comfortable.

I would think the comfort factor with blogging is the larger factor behind adoption, just as it is for any new technology. Once we can isolate this, can we work towards addressing this? How? One thought that comes to mind: Training. Will it help? How do we train people to blog? And does that last sentence even make sense?

Aggregators, and other such things

For some reason, I am aggregators dont go together. Somehow, I could not figure out google reader. Maybe its just me. But somehow, it never showed me the things I had subscribed for. Somehow, I would only get to see some strange feeds, which I didnt have the foggiest about where they came from.

Today, Sireesh (he is a co-Knowledge Manager), suggested newsgator and somehow, I have been able to figure out what this is about!

Next stop ... Atom!

Social Networks and Accountability

Quite a few of the folks out there would have seen the quirks of corporate firewalls. Whenever you are blocked from checking out a particular site (and I am not talking about objectionable content here ... one could argue that what is objectionable to one may not be objectionable to another, but I would argue that in an Office environment, we would definitely need to go by the lowest common multiplier), you are coming up against the debate on the trade-off between networking (which is not necessarily a bad thing), and accountability. And I am not talking about corporate accountability, but rather, about individual accountability to society.

The question is simple ... How do we ensure accountability to adhere to socially acceptable standards in the domain of social networking. Luis Suarez had written about this on one of his posts on ITToolbox which you could read here.

One way of looking at the problem is that social networks tend to be self-correcting, in that members would typically ensure that undesirable behaviour is discouraged to the point that it would slowly and surely be stamped out. The concern, however, is that by then quite a bit of damage has been done.

Organizations could address this in either a reactive or a proactive mode. There may, in fact, be merit to the thought that the rules of engagement for social networking (in the workplace, and here, by workplace I dont just mean the Office, but the working community), should be no different from professional networking. This is because end of the day, when talking about the applicability of Social Computing in the Knowledge Management space, we are talking about that point where social networking and professional networking converge.

Bangalore next week

Something I have been trying to figure out for a long time ... There are people who can eat, and then eat, and then eat some more, and are still thin as a reed, while me ... I can grow fat listening to someone in the next room talking about Food!

I am off to Bangalore next week, and I am looking forward to Dinner at Hotel Empire ... The Mutton Kurma, and the Parotta they make up is delicious ... So is the Fish Curry and Rice at Koshy's ... Though, I think their Fish 'n'Chips is avoidable. Which is crazy, because the place is called Koshy's Fish 'n' Chips ... So their signature Dish seems to have gone ...