The geniuses at MIT are at it again, and are busy developing technology that will make the term “cloud cognition” immediately obvious.  

What if you could learn the time by looking at your wrist?  What if you could pick up a book in a store and see the latest Amazon rating and comments displayed on the cover?  What if you looked at your airline boarding pass, and saw the latest delay and gate information displayed on it?

What if every surface was your personal screen, displaying information about objects and people in your view?

What if?

For more information, check out the group formerly known as “ambient intelligence” here.

President Obama today announced the selection of Mr. Vivek Kundra to be the nation’s Chief Information Officer. Back in January of 2009, I had the honor of touring Vivek Kundra’s operation while he was the Chief Technology Officer for Washington, D.C.  Several things struck me about the arrangements – a small cubicle farm in the center of the room, with interactive screens on the walls depicting various real-time data about technology projects.  In the corner office, a briefing room where managers, stakeholders, and contractors would gather to determine the fate of poorly performing projects.  The cubicle farm contained his “market” (technology) analysts, who constantly monitored the health of the technology projects under the purview of the CTO office.

This itself was impressive, but what struck me most was his definition of “poorly performing.”

When he arrived in the position, he was handed thick paper reports that indicated the progress for each project against classic PMBOK metrics.  These are the lifeblood for information technology system integrators, based on a deep belief that adhering to efficient and learned processes will result in the best client value.  Systems engineering steps are carefully detailed and documented, and Mr. Kundra was invited to review these paper volumes as the tool for overseeing a multi-million dollar IT portfolio.

I need to be careful here, lest I appear  dubious concerning the value offered by the Software Engineering Institute, Project Management Institute, etc.  Not withstanding these noble and enduring “best practice” endeavors, Mr. Kundra made a critical decision that, in my opinion, made all the difference.  Rather than tracking his contractors’ fealty to accepted practice, he developed metrics that reflected client value.  These included high-level schedule metrics, as would be expected, but also such things as micro-polling to determine stakeholder ‘happiness.’  

I have noticed in some commercial firms the tendency to believe adhering to “industry practices” is akin to “delivering value.”  Often, I would see projects that made the internal process group happy – but which were failures in the client’s eyes.  Alternatively, some of the projects that were highly rated by the client were often those that failed to have a completed checklist of some sort – a failure that would earn it high-level negative attention.  Project managers were left wondering why they spent hours documenting processes that were not related to client value or happiness.  

Kundra’s D.C. team established a manageable set of tracking metrics and displayed them on the interactive screens.  At any given time, you could see how various projects were faring – and drill down to the data elements that provided the “score.”  In addition, his staff developed RSS feeds regarding online content/news relevant to these projects, and this became Mr. Kundra’s morning newspaper.

With a focus on client value, and an awareness of various perspectives, Mr. Kundra was able to increase visibility and improve management of an elusive concept in the world of IT:  solutions that work.  He did this, I am convinced, by throwing the book away.  By not allowing his office to get distracted tracking processes, but instead focusing on outcome metrics – metrics that matter.

Public service announcement:  On June 12, 2009 broadcast analog television signals in the U.S. will cease as the spectrum is repurposed and television signals go all digital.  This poses a major disruption to some people.  

The rest of us are flabbergasted, nay,  gobsmacked to learn that this poses a major disruption to some people.  Who are these people who aren’t using cable/satellite feeds?  Nevertheless, these folk will require assistance to successfully make the switch from analog to digital.  We need to be gentle with the late adopters, and aware of the less-advantaged.

Likewise, some people require assistance to understand the advent of social media.  This morning I was alerted to a most unfortunate example.

In “the case against enterprise micro-blogging” we find the following:

As a consistent Twitter user, I’ve the found the service to be a valuable marketing tool as well as an entertaining pastime for my friends and I to shoot one-liners at each other.

Off the bat, this gentleman uses Twitter for marketing and jokes.   For some reason, he then decides to try it among his team of five, one can only guess he needed to market them and tell better jokes.

My recent short-lived experience showed me that enterprise micro-blogging provides minimal benefits to the organization. If our group had been much larger and we wanted to do some kind of short announcements, it might prove useful, though hardly compelling.

So large teams communicate through “some kind of short announcements?”  That’s the value seen beyond marketing and jokes?  What if you wanted to pose a question and didn’t know who may have the answer?

When it comes to business, you don’t want to read between the lines as you do in your personal Twitter-verse. Even with enterprise email overload, and a never ending-supply of documents flying back and forth, at least you have the ability to state and substantiate a point.

And here we have it.   If the purpose of communication in the enterprise is to “state and substantiate a point,” yes, I expect micro-blogging will not be your weapon of choice.  However, if you want to be able to get a sense about what your colleagues are facing, if you want to open a stream of awareness across your team for a relatively low transaction cost, if you want to enable swarm intelligence in your enterprise – you may want to disregard the “advice” in this gentleman’s article.  You will notice the comments to the CNET piece are fairly scathing.

I managed a small team for a mid-sized firm for eight years.  Beginning in 2000, I enforced the use of instant messaging (IM) and e-mail across the team as we grew from three to (at one point) twenty-two souls.  When I had a question to pose, I selected from among my list and began chatting.  As I did, I learned which people were available and responsive and began to – unconsciously and unfortunately – call upon them more often.  The people who were perhaps not as attentive to my insistent IMs were not called on as much as others.  

While we did also engage in chat rooms (and actual rooms) on occasion, I never successfuly got the entire team to engage on IM once we exceeded five or so members.  Instead of analyzing this, I fell back on the natural tendency towards hierarchy and power laws within social networks and unwittingly began to alienate the people I was treating as “lesser” members.  In doing this, I missed out on business value and the opportunity to enable contributions from across my team on an equal basis.  Much later, I heard casual comments to a “clique” within my team, but by then I had already shaped behaviors by my communications style.  Who knows what contributions were missed, as team members declined to volunteer their knowledge?

Using micro-blogging, I am learning to appreciate fragments and ideas from across thousands of voices.  If I had micro-blogging for my team back then, I may have posed questions and listened to the “small cloud” rather than calling on the “best and brightest.”  In doing so, I may have led an even more successful team as we would have been able to make use of all the voices to address the team’s challenges and opportunities.  I still have a smaller network of people I engage on a more frequent basis, but I can hear also and talk with people on the fringe of my network.  More importantly, I can hear people who are simply talking about things about which I care who are not remotely in my network/culture/continent.  

Even for smaller teams, we move from point-to-point communications, which (sometimes arrogantly) presupposes you know who has “the answer,” to discovery.  In fact, presuming you know who has your answer can be very limiting.  Likewise, presuming you know precisely the right question to ask in all circumstances helps you to thwart serendipity.  Have you memorized the resumes of your colleagues?  Do you know how to unlock all the potentially useful information that flows across their interpersonal networks?  

Social media, quite simply, is opening my mind to new tactics for team management.  To consign it to the dustbin because you cannot control the message  is extraordinarily short-sighted, and misses the value proposition of social media, inside and outside the “enterprise.”