• The new iPhone software has a Find my iPhone capability. Kevin, Ryan, and Mark used the tool to track down Kevin’s stolen iPhone, confront the fellow who’d walked off with it, and get it back. Read Kevin’s tale of Brickworld and intrigue here.
• Lancaster, PA has a civilian non-profit group monitoring its security cams. Members control the cameras and call police if they see something suspicious.

(Slashdot carried both these stories last week.)

The issue is control and self-determination — having the systems savvy to make effective decisions for ourselves — both at home and in our messages to our elected officials.

Simson Garfinkel provides an excellent analysis of modern privacy trade-offs in this month’s MIT Technology Review Privacy Requires Security, Not Abstinence: Protecting an inalienable right in the age of Facebook.

What happens if somebody impersonating you calls up a company and demands access to your data?

If Google or Yahoo were storefronts, they would ask to see a state-issued ID card….

It turns out that we essentially have the technology to solve this problem in the digital world as well. Yet the solutions that have been developed aren’t politically tenable–not only because of perceived costs but also, ironically, because of perceived privacy concerns.

I understand these fears, but I think they are misplaced. When someone can wreak havoc by misappropriating your personal data, privacy is threatened far more by the lack of a reliable online identification system than it would be by the introduction of one. And it is likely that it would cost society far more money to live with poor security than to address it.

I believe that we will be unable to protect online privacy without a strong electronic identity system that’s free to use and backed by the governments of the world–a true passport for online access….

Simson’s article raises both concerns and opportunities for control. The issues are complex, but they should become part of all of our general education requirements. We all need to understand the technology risks and opportunities, and make proactive decisions about the role we will play. These decisions relate to our personal lives and how we manage the data our organizations control. At each step we can either live with the defaults (often someone else’s proactive choice) or make educated decisions.

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I was surprised by how physical the process is, versus my high tech expectations. Yes, they have access to radar and a huge portion of the work involves radio communication with the pilots going in and out of the airport. But they also make heavy use of those big windows and a unique physical tracking system.

They track planes by type, tail number, and request for inbound or outbound route — by writing the information on plastic “pucks” with a grease pencil, and then physically sorting that puck onto the taxi and runway slots. We weren’t allowed to take pictures, so I’m showing a similar process below using wooden blocks.

When I asked about the process, using the plastic pucks versus keeping track on a computer, I was told that sometimes “elegant is best.” Great point! The solution is elegant in that the physical blocks trigger sensemaking (in my words) more than a screen version might. They can push a puck slightly out of its track to highlight that more action is necessary. All the members of the team can immediately step in to provide relief given their common understanding of the system. Elegant, green (no need for power or paper), easily visible to all in the room — good for team visualization.

Beautiful approach to a complex problem. Sometimes systems savvy means using elegant, but less high tech systems. Comments appreciated describing other examples.

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My elder niece came home from pre-school one day talking very seriously about making “good choices.”  Apparently a little boy in her class had not been making good choices and was sent to a different room.

Making good choices becomes more difficult the more choices you have.  I’m struggling with making good choices about my own knowledge sharing.  I generally share my knowledge via (in order of formality and timeliness): Twitter, Business Exchange, this blog, class, and my academic publishing (pdf of my vita).  Each of these channels ties me to a different network.  The networks overlap to a small degree.

Below I present five dimensions to help my clients (and me) make good choices about sharing knowledge with their networks.  This is another topic related to how we all are becoming systems designers — we all need to make good choices about how we share our knowledge so that we get the knowledge to the people who need it, when they need it, in a form they can use, and in a way that doesn’t overburden them.  These are decisions based on technology, organizational practice, and people: part of TOP Management.

Formality and timeliness are two dimensions I’ve already mentioned.  For example, I don’t tend to post to Twitter about past research unless some new and hopefully interesting thought strikes me.  On the other hand, I don’t necessarily expect academic readers to be interested in this week’s current event given that the article won’t be out for over a year.  To do otherwise would be to ignore my audience’s perspective.

Content interest is another dimension to consider as you share your knowledge.  I assume that my networks are interested in gaining benefit from managing technology and organizational practice, and innovation more broadly, or they wouldn’t be following me on my Twitter/Business Exchange/blog/class/academic networks.  That said, I do toss in a sailing or golf reference from time to time because it provides context about who I am.  I like knowing a few details about my own knowledge providers gives me background for interpreting their content.  It also gives us more of a social connection if we have the chance to meet face to face.  Kind of like the beer effect without the beer.

I’m told that detail and depth are issues I should consider as I share knowledge.  References (e.g., Barley, 1986; Weick 1979), as part of the sentence are not as interesting to most people as they are to academics.  (Really, they are interesting to us!)  Each of my channels provides the opportunity for more and less detail and depth — either by technological limitation (e.g., Twitter and 140 characters), human preference (e.g., my blog audience’s interest), or organizational requirement (e.g., the APA Style Manual).

Signaling is my final dimension, so far.  Signaling is how you let your networks know that there has been a new contribution.  Some of the technologies have their own signaling capabilities.  A few examples:

• Twitter: Network members can decide whether they want email or SMS notification of new posts from specific network members.
• Business Exchange: Network members can follow specific topics or specific people.  Business Exchange then summarizes new activity on the user’s homepage.
• Blogs: Network members can opt in to to automatically receive new contributions via RSS reader or email.

Ideally, some contributions on one network will be of interest to members of other networks.  Often I post announcements of new blog posts to Twitter, my LinkedIn account (the short message area on the bottom left), and my Facebook account. I give enough information so the people on that network will know if it’s worth it to click through or not.  My blog is also tied to LinkedIn’s Blog Link and NetworkedBlogs on Facebook.  As long as these networks have limited joint membership, this crossover signaling is ok.  The more interconnected your networks become, the more careful you have to be about duplication.  Duplication is akin to spam.

We all have multiple opportunities to provide original knowledge contributions (a blog post, and comment to a blog) and/or to share valuable links. I’ve provided these dimensions:

• Formality
• Timeliness
• Content
• Detail/depth
• Signaling

Do you have other dimensions that will help us all make good choices?

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One tidbit you can use in your next conference call:  Put on your wireless headset (go get one…), tape pictures of people (doesn’t have to be the actual participants) onto chairs in your office/conference room, and speak to the people on the call as if they were there with you.

Big “a ha!” for me is that this is yet another reason to avoid what I call casual videoconferencing.  Sure, if you have access to Telepresence or Halo, use it.  You can do everything but share your lunch with that quality of video.  But, if it’s just a webcam, you’re better off avoiding the tyranny of your chair.  Stand up! Engage with your colleague or client just as if they were there with you.  Putting the picture in the chair lets you focus your attention in a way that will transfer from your mind to your voice.  Excellent example of making a combined technology-organization-people (TOP) work design.  Wish I’d thought of it….

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Universities are getting on-board (and I hope high schools are as well — do you have any links to share?). Atwater, Kannan, & Stephens published a 2008 study of the extent that Business Schools teach “systemic thinking.” While the definitions varied, the majority of the top 63 graduate schools of business were teaching aspects systemic thinking, and 74% of the respondents agreed that the topic was essential in graduate education.

How do we teach systems design skills to people without a technical systems design background?

A simple translation of the basics of systems analysis provides a start. I’ve translated Hoffer, George, and Valacich’s information systems analysis concepts to a more general work systems form with the acronym: BUILDER. The idea is that the first skill you need is how to map where you hope to go with your systems design, and the context that you must deal with to get there.

• Business objectives: These are the basic motivations for what you’re trying to do. You may not think of them as “business objectives,” but it will certainly help you get organizational support if you do. For more personal systems design, just ask, what do I hope to gain from this new tool (e.g., iPhone upgrade) or practice (e.g., telecommuting)?
• Universe: Context and history are valuable both so you can learn from past efforts, and to help you begin to understand the other stakeholders’ interests. Understanding these interests are critical to any future “negotiated implementation.”
• Information needs: Who needs what information, and in what form? For example, in team performance, Transactive memory: Knowing who knows what, who needs what information, and how to coordinate given that knowledge is a key predictor of success.
• Laws: Policies, required procedures, regulations, and the like are an important backdrop to any design. Perhaps you don’t want these to limit your initial thinking, but they ultimately have to be considered, even if just to attempt to change them. For example, financial firms may have federal regulations regarding the archiving of communication. In those settings you must conform to regulations even in the use of social media.
• Dynamics: The time frame and sequencing of stakeholder interactions and build order (Do I have to delete an existing application before I can install the new one?) are the basics of this aspect of the mapping. For any major information technology design it should have “full backup” as a first step.
• Events: By what milestones should the design and implementation be judged? How will you know if you are progressing in the way you hoped? What metrics can you use to track the process.  Tracking is critical as otherwise you can’t know if you need to make adjustments.
• Reach: What is the magnitude of this project in terms of people, money, number of other systems touched? Reach also helps you consider the ROI. How much investment in the process is wise or supported given the reach?

I see BUILDER as providing a set of mapping topics to prepare for the design process. I look forward to taking the next steps: What is design thinking in the context of work systems design? What do all of us need to know? How do we evaluate our TOP (Technology - Organization - People) design skills?  Do we need everyone on the team to have these skills, or is it enough if just one of us does?

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In prior posts I’ve talked about the value of video: Ease of use and the value of the content are critical. Ease of use refers to both gathering and consuming the video. Gathering is helped by these new lightweight easy-to-use cameras. Consumption — finding what you need to know — is more difficult but where there is pain it is likely someone will try and reduce it. Autotranscription, tagging, and video search are some avenues. (Thanks in advance for comments providing links to good tools.)

The value of personal video is an open question. Do we as individuals know what will be valuable? Do our organizations understand the kind of video it is important to support? Just as we are given the opportunity to be “accidental systems designers” by the possibilities of our technologies, now we are being given the opportunity to be “accidental” producers, directors, talent, and videographers.

Research focused on more formal multimedia content may be applicable. Kai H. Lim and Izak Benbasat have the following result:

Multimedia facilitates the retention and subsequent recall of explanative information but not of descriptive information. Explanative information is organized facts connected by their underlying functional relationships. Descriptive information consists of isolated facts without an explanation of the relationships between these facts. The ability to retain and recall explanative information, in turn, leads to a greater ability to make correct inferences about new organizational situations.

(Interesting eyetracking study on text versus multimedia.)

What about videochat? Seesmic, for example, provides a Twitter-like stream of video communication. How might that provide knowledge management value in organizations? What does video add? What do we add when we communicate via video? My brother just looks and sounds like my brother when we video chat. His daughters grab their latest stuffed animal, piece of art, sing….

The Flip camera is out now. The new iPhone arrives June 19th. How will you contribute to your organization’s knowledge base given these new tools?

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Google Blogoscoped provides a nice review, but the basics:

• Your search is presented in spreadsheet form: Items matching the search are presented in the first column, some other columns may automatically appear (I did a search of “Management Journals” — image, description, ISSN, telephone, publisher were automatically added)
• You can add different columns (e.g., I added rank and peer reviewed)
• You can delete results that don’t fit and then ask for more instances to be added
• Each column provides a link to its source, and the confidence around its value

Google Squared gives us the opportunity to either blindly collect a spreadsheet of information, or to carefully craft searches that help us create new insights.

I haven’t had a chance to play with Wolfram Alpha.  How do you think it compares in terms of pushing for our own deep and active thinking?

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1. Update organizational practices and technology resources to enable seamless collaboration — strive for a platform approach rather than one focused on piecemeal applications. Collaboration is good for all of us, and expected by Gen Y. Use their expectations as an opportunity to provide stronger support for all your employees and their work.

2. Use information security as a strategic force — open up what you can and practice strong security where you must. Gen Y is also known as the Facebook Generation. Constant updates, tracking of friends, collaborating on documents via wikis are all part of communication and collaboration. Organizations that build walls around data and interaction are not getting all the value they can from their workforce. Even the U.S. government is getting in the swing of this with their providing public access to government collected data. Data.gov went live May 21, 2009. Critical to this approach is mentoring employees who don’t have the depth of experience to understand the value of intellectual property and the legal implications of corporate communication.

3. Provide feedback directly from tasks. Especially for people with high self esteem, feedback that comes directly from the work (versus from a supervisor) provides greater job satisfaction. Much of modern work is tracked or trackable. Use this capability to provide the feedback that Gen Y employees seem to crave, and that motivation scholars have said is part of solid job design. (At the same time, think about the cycles of feedback — in some environments too frequent feedback can detract from better long term strategies.)

4. Emphasize the best practices of employee development to both managers and individual contributors. Goal setting-based performance management that is tied to projects rather than artificial calendar dates provides the roadmap to career success than many Gen Y employees have come to expect from their relatively structured college educations. The discipline of goal-setting also pushes managers to think carefully about how best to use their human resources. The popular belief is that Gen Y expects more responsibility earlier than most organizations are set up to provide. Use their energy to consider whether more work can be done by fewer, more focused employees.

5. Focus on networks — theirs and yours. Socially networked Gen Y employees bring with them an army of support. Use it. This is an “always on” resource that can benefit your firm (but requires that you have instilled a clear understanding of the security issues noted above). If your networked employees leave the company, keep them in your network. Consulting companies like Ernst & Young have had alumni programs for a long time. Facebook is full of corporate alumni groups set up by the alums themselves. The members of those groups intuitively understand what research (pdf) has shown: networking is good for both your career and current job satisfaction. From the organization’s perspective, these extended networks provide, at a minimum, recruiting assistance and possibilities of partnering with organizations where you already have someone who knows your company.

That’s my top 5. I have a few more but suspect you have examples better than my #6. I hope you will share these in the comments below.

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Yes, we know people have false identities on Facebook, but a non-disclosed false identity in a classroom setting is a breach of trust. The Leavey School of Business honor code (Santa Clara University — my institution) would not allow such behavior from students, and I expect the faculty handbook would give it a thumbs down as well. Highlights:

• Be honest
• Demonstrate self-respect and respect for others
• Demonstrate respect for the law and University policies, procedures, and standards

Why do I care? As a faculty member, I need my students to take my communication with them at face value. Our class management tools (Angel in my case) allow tracking of participation and all discussion boards are open to all in the class — including me. If I pose a question to generate comment, my name is attached and I generally set up the course site to not allow anonymous participation. Anonymity is honored when I do state that a quiz/poll will be anonymous. All faculty and class interaction will be affected if some faculty breach the faculty/student psychological contract by being deceptive.

There have been cases of using ringers/confederates in research on on-line collaboration (one example). These studies were vetted by the University’s Internal Review Board (peer committee tasked with monitoring the safe and ethical conduct of research) and the participants were fully debriefed in accordance with IRB guidelines. I am also not troubled by use of disclosed phantom students (from the Chronicle article: Joe Bag O’Donuts).

As I said in my last post, understanding the dimensions of privacy is part of developing our systems savvy. The use of false identity is a violation of privacy in that you are not being given true information on which to base the disclosures you decide to make. My expectation for class interaction is that I am dealing with the actual person unless notified otherwise. Note to my students: that’s our contract.

Business collaborators should be similarly clear with the identity contract. My understanding (I’m not a lawyer), is that your company owns the information transmitted on a company computer and/or over the company network and that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy. That said, companies are also covered by complex sets of privacy laws covering state, federal, and international boundaries. Some companies have specific policies covering impersonation (Marathon Consulting’s) — and all should. Build your systems savvy — be aware, be informed.

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Prof. Kanter notes:

Has the culture already changed so much that people don’t care about privacy any more? Has being on public display all the time made exhibitionism (teenage style) and self-directed exposure of personal information (social network website style) preferable to privacy?

I don’t think so, and I think personal privacy could become not just a problem but a business opportunity - a technology frontier. Clever innovators will find new ways to block access or screen contacts or make people invisible. Now that our pictures can be snapped by cell phones, someone will invent a way to beam the light back on that phone if you don’t want to be in a photo. Suddenly privacy could become as cool to the kids as lack of it is now. They will retreat behind their electronic invisibility shields to get out of fights or shun a blind date. They will use their pinkie ring scramblers to erase digital records of embarrassing photos on Facebook that they don’t want college admissions officers to see. And then they will understand why privacy is something to cherish and protect, even if everyone can know everything about anyone in the digital age.

In the U.S., we have a Federal holiday this Monday. How many of you are automatically updating your “friends” with your whereabouts? I’m looking for sailboat crew for Monday and could benefit from knowing who’s in town before sending an email. If I just broadcast asking for crew, I end up taking my friends’ time by their feeling obligated to tell me they are out of town, or apologizing for not replying promptly because they were out of town. Easier if I just contacted the subset of folks actually in the area.

But I don’t broadcast my whereabouts, so I can’t really expect my friends to broadcast theirs. I do use Loopt when I’m on the road, but only connected to two family members. I also use TripIt, though again, just with family members.

The number of travel related social tools like TripIt is growing. Rod of DigitalNomads provides a clear description of the value of TripIt and Dopplr for business and networking purposes. He focuses on the ideas of knowing who’s in what city.

Yesterday, Nick Wingfield gave us Sharing Where You Are When You Care to Share. His focus was on more micro location awareness and privacy as he reviewed another tool: Glympse.

There’s a tendency in the Twitter era for people to share copious details of their lives with online pals. One way to do that is through new mobile-phone services that let people share their physical locations using the tracking technology inside modern cellphones.

While these location-sharing services have some interesting possibilities, they also raise some disturbing implications for privacy — or maybe it just seems that way if, like me, you’re over 35 years old. Lately I’ve been testing a cellphone location-sharing service [Glymspe] that I found simple, useful and non-creepy enough that I can imagine people thirtysomething and older using it.

Nick’s perspective seems similar to Michael Calore’s Epicenter post Gmail’s New ‘Add Location’ Feature Is Too Honest. We need more and more expertise to maintain control of how our information is shared.

The good news for now is that Prof. Kanter is right, at least I still have a door to close and the need for privacy management should ultimately be addressed by the market. But if that’s the case, where do I get that pinkie ring scrambler she mentions?
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For more on location sharing, please also see Lew McCreary’s What was Privacy (cited in Prof. Kanter’s post) and my prior posts (under the Location category).

I continue in my quest to find peer-reviewed research on location awareness/privacy and modern technology. While “computer monitoring” was a hot topic in the 80s and early 90s, we seem to have given up our concern — at least as far as peer-reviewed research has yet to show (maybe these papers are in the publication pipeline and will break free soon).

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