Leveraging Networks and Social Software for Mission Success

Corporate and federal leaders are learning that traditional, hierarchical organizational (org) charts are no longer accurate depictions of how and by whom work gets done in modern institutions. They worked well in an era when output was mostly characterized by a linear, step-by-step process and accurately reflected work flow. However, in todays environment, where information, both tacit and explicit, is not only part of the production process, but also the end-product, the traditional hierarchical org chart breaks down in describing how work gets done and, most important, cannot answer the questions, Who knows what? and Where do I go for information?

Most organizations have work or socially based networks of employees. The arrival of social softwareInternet applications that link people together formally or informallyhas dramatically altered the way information is shared and how knowledge is created in an organization. Those applications fundamentally complement networks: they enhance existing networks and can facilitate the rapid formation of new ones around a task or organization-wide initiative.

Social software helps make organizational networks virtually explicit and provides an environment for tacitly existing networks to create linkages and share information. Thus, social software applications are becoming a critical component in managing the modern knowledgebased organizationthey enable information sharing and the creation of knowledge that can greatly enhance mission success. Organizations that do not embrace and understand the power of networks will likely fail to compete in business or fall short of achieving their mission objectives.

Background

Despite the exponential growth in social networks, federal-sector organizations have been slow to understand this phenomenon and tap its potential. Notable exceptions where government has successfully adopted and implemented such technologies include the Director of National Intelligences Office of Analytic Transformation and Technology, which last year deployed A-Spacea common collaborative workspace for all analysts from across the intelligence community (IC). ASpace went online on the governments classified Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System September 22, 2008. This system is accessible from common workstations around the globe and across multiple agencies.

A-Space stores information and allows one to search for and retrieve both classified and unclassified analytic information and enables Web-based messaging and collaborationregardless of organizational affiliation. This innovative approach is unprecedented in the IC, which has also begun using micro-blogs like Twitter to disseminate critical information on events such as the recent swine flu outbreak. More recently, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced its own use of Web 2.0 tools such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

Despite these examples of successful social media implementations, few federal organizations have embraced social networking tools and technologies to link communities of practice and interest. To many federal leaders, these networks and new technologies represent a potential threat to established command and control, normalized operating systems, and sound security practices. Social networks can be chaotic, yet creative; they often promulgate variance in ideas and approaches,outcomes that traditional hierarchies seek to eliminate. Given the relative newness of social networking technologies combined with the cultural barriers and bureaucratic mistrust of these open systems, solutions on how best to leverage these technologies to enhance institutional performance are still in their infancy. In an effort to contribute to the development of such solutions, we focus on how such networks could provide an exciting opportunity to dynamically assess contributions, grasp organizational sentiment, and identify key human capital assets.

In many organizations where network enablers, such as wikis, blogs, or social software, are not used, effective sponsorship of such tools would require a total shift in the traditional corporate culture. Large bureaucracies rooted in the industrial age were designed around linear production processes and minimal variance. Every event or circumstance had an associated process, policy, and regulation. Such organizations by their very nature were uniquely adept at stifling innovative thought or out-of-the-box ideasthe very concepts that networks promote as solutions to future challenges. As a result, these organizations were not able to spontaneously make the institutional culture shift inherent in leveraging a networks approach, which involves a change in perspective from turf to teams, hoarding to sharing, ownership to access, and, most important, competition to collaboration. For true collaboration to occur, leaders must establish an environment that is based on mutual trust. This trust must be pervasive: individuals must believe in the subject matter expertise of their peers as well as their judgment in keeping with the ideology and vision of the organization.

In todays federal workplace, Web 2.0 tools and technologies are increasingly seen as vital for attracting and retaining young and talented members of the workforce. Demographically, these Net Gen employeeswho now constitute the majority of new federal hireshave been raised in an environment where technology was an integral part of their culture. Wikis, blogs, and micro-blogs (such as Twitter) are rapidly building communities of practice and interest that serve a common purpose. Furthermore, such software is increasing the velocity of knowledge sharing to near real time. The software further presents new avenues for creativity and communication with family and friends, and with fellow practitioners and coworkers. (Table 1 lists some of the primary characteristics of social software.) Conversely, not adopting network-enabling software could pose a recruitment and retention challenge for organizations that seek to hire these workers.

Collecting, Structuring, and Interpreting Network Data

The most valuable institutional knowledge has always been tacit (not explicitly codified anywhere), and employees take this knowledge with them when they exit. Few federal organizations have implemented systems to tap this tacit knowledge in order to solicit contributions across mission lines and retain the knowledge if a worker leaves. Social softwarewhether instant messages, wikis, blogs, or other social networking enablersis proving to be valuable in providing a bridge for tacit information to become explicit institutional knowledge. Yet, understanding, analyzing, capturing, and digesting what is shared daily within such an environment can be challenging. While the implementation of social software tools is a first, important step in this tacit-to-explicit knowledge process, the next step requires advanced tools and methods to digest and help structure this massive amount of data, including those that sit on top of the social software collecting and structuring the data in a meaningful way. In computer parlance, the massive amount of data generated by social software need a metadata layer, one that describes the data generated by the virtual networks created by social software.

Social networking technology presents a unique opportunity to acquire feedback about an organizations operations and challenges, while concurrently providing a tool for improving managerial decisions. Implementing social networking software within an organization requires vast amounts of data on the information possessed by its workers as well as who shares data with whom. It further requires catalyzing the formation of communities of practice within an organization, thus enabling de facto groups to form around a common purpose and mission.

The organization can then observe and gather the data from these networks to gain a better understanding of how the organization truly works and how it could better manage knowledge and its workforce. These virtual networks could also provide a valuable repository of knowledge for the modern organization that allows tacit knowledge to become explicit and subsequently leveraged by current and future workers.

Thus, intersecting analytic methods with a networks perspective would generate valuable information, which could improve decision making, enhance organizational performance, and increase the ability of the organization to accomplish its mission (Figure 1). As such, social software is key to enabling the analysis of corporate and institutional networks.

For example, an organization could establish an internal wiki site, an online Web page that enables any user to edit, modify, or add content. These sites are becoming very popular as an internal means of managing organizational knowledge and information. Although the sites enable communities of practice to officially link and share knowledge, they can change daily, depending on the dynamism of the topics. Given this potential for dynamic changes, and the adding and editing of text, high-level managers may find it difficult to track the changes and judge the quality and substance of content that is added, edited, and deleted from the network. Thus, the challenge with these data is that the content is relatively unstructuredthe open-endedness of text contributions can be difficult to classify and summarize. However, cutting-edge algorithmic tools, such as text-miners or intelligent agent searches, have the potential to sift through vast amounts of data to yield the underlying synoptic structure and present diagnostics on the activity in the networks. Also, monitoring additions and deletions to wikis, adjusting them for quality, and then generating reports about the changes could also be a valuable way to identify key contributors and knowledge generators within the networks of an organization.

How would a federal manager make sense of the seeming chaos of an organizations internal instant messages and blogs? Mining the information from those messages and blogs could reveal the mood or general concerns of an organizations workforce, such as specific hot topics or issues for that day or week. Thedata could also be used to determine opinions and serve as a basis for feedback about what workers really think about an initiative, essentially taking a real-time pulse of the organizational workforce. The tools could further operate constantly, updating and returning summary information throughout the week, and the results could be part of a managers desktop in the form of a dashboard display.

Many organizations focus on measuring their activities rather than the outcomes of those activities. They also focus on their capabilities, rather than the application of the capabilities and their subsequent results. By implementing social software and then analyzing and reporting on network content, an organization could gain intelligence on internal operations, whether it is capturing opinions and ratings, identifying where expertise resides, or observing who is using capabilities to achieve positive outcomes and results.

Conclusions

Viewing an institution from the perspective of networks is a key component of successfully managing modern, mission-driven organizations. The traditional hierarchical view of an organization fails to capture how information and knowledge are created and used in executing the organizations objectives. The network approach has the potential to more deeply inform decision making and outcomes. Moreover, the advent of social software tools embraces and complements the network view of an organization. Social software helps make existing networks explicit while creating avenues for forming new networks around mission exigencies and crowd-sourcing, thus creating shared solutions to difficult challenges. Furthermore, social software will only increase in importance in helping organizations maintain and manage their domains of knowledge and information. When networks are enabled and flourish, their value to all users and to the organization increases as well. That increase in value is typically nonlinear, where some additions yield more than proportionate values to the organization (Figure 2).

However, just looking at relationships within a network without also analyzing the actors who constitute the network can limit understanding of institutional processes. This situation results in the necessity to gather information and incorporate data that focus on the actors (workers). Thus, the actor characteristics are an important element in understanding networks in an organization. For example, understanding actor capabilities and personalities in an organization with strictly defined processes is essential because there may be less room to improvise to overcome problems--bottlenecks can be highly restrictive.

Tools that allow for continuous, dynamic analysis and reporting on network information (such as summary information from an organizational wiki) are also important in making the day-to-day decisions of managers. Such information could also have a role in organizational status assessments that allow managers to ask this question: What is the state of my organization today?

Combining the networks perspective with social software applications promises new and exciting prospects for managing modern organizations to accomplish their missions. Moreover, embracing this perspective could minimize the risk of having organizational network conversation driven to unsponsored sites or, worse, risk attrition associated with the flight of employees to employers offering Web 2.0 tools.