2008 05 Web 2.0 Effects on Management

Added by Karen Huffman, last edited by Karen Huffman on Oct 16, 2008  (view change)

Web 2.0 Effects on Management

Article written by Christian Tomas, May 2008
Submitted for Master's of Information Management Class (INFM 612), College Park, MD, USA.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Setting the Stage

Karen Huffman stepped up to the podium at the National Press Club prepared to describe the concept of Web 2.0, its tools and how big a role it plays in her work as a knowledge manager of the National Geographic Society.

Huffman surveyed the crowd of law librarians and government professionals attending the 2008 Best Practices for Government Libraries LexisNexis program on April 2 in Washington, D.C. With the click of a button, Huffman began her PowerPoint presentation with the image of waves rolling into a shore. She asked the audience if it had at any point in their individual childhoods experienced catching a wave at the beach. The librarians and professionals each raised their hands and nodded in agreement.

With the abundance of blogs, wikis and social networking sites that have flourished across the Internet landscape, Huffman compared learning and immersing oneself in these Web 2.0 technologies to catching a proverbial wave. As Web 2.0 has emerged in the last four years, managers such as Huffman find ways to integrate its tools in their day-to-day activities and use the technologies to better serve the information needs of information workers and seekers.

Web 2.0 allows managers to encourage knowledge sharing and collaborating on projects beyond e-mail, market products and events without reaching deep into the pockets of an organization, provide employees a voice to give feedback and network beyond the workplace. At the same time, managers face the challenge of deciding how Web 2.0 will be used and if need be, monitored.

The Web 2.0 technologies and tools that continue to grab the attention of managers and information professionals alike include blogs, wikis and social networking sites. They challenge the ways knowledge workers communicate and access information.

According to Andrew McAfee, an associate professor with the Technology and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School, workers use communications in two categories. Channels such as e-mail and person-to-person instant messaging make up the first category and they allow workers to create and distribute digital information. Platforms, the second category, consist of intranets, corporate Web sites and information portals which are widely visible and its content generated or approved by a small group (McAfee, 2006, p. 22).

A survey conducted by Thomas Davenport, the president's chair in information technology and management at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., shows that although workers used channels more than platforms, workers weren't satisfied with the platforms available (McAfee, 2006, p. 22). The result can be attributed to workers naturally using channels, e-mail predominantly, to produce their work more than browsing the Intranet. Regarding the use of e-mail, Davenport's survey revealed the following: 26 percent of employees felt it was overused in their organizations, 21 percent felt overwhelmed by it and 15 percent felt that it actually diminished their productivity (Davenport, 2005).

The numbers reveal a trend in which workers and managers want to create and access knowledge beyond the current channels and platforms. Employees want to know who has worked on a similar project and what approaches were used, they want to know how other information centers or libraries market their success, they want to know who keyed the reorganization of a department and why. A new platform in the form of Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs and wikis has emerged to answer the needs of knowledge workers and seekers. This platform focuses on capturing the practices and output of knowledge workers, not just knowledge itself (McAfee, 2006, p. 23).

Because most companies' knowledge workers' practices and output can be hard or impossible locate, McAfee uses the term Enterprise 2.0 to describe the platform of Web 2.0 technologies that companies can purchase or build to make the practices and output of knowledge workers visible.

Blogs

Blogs can fill this role. A blog, short for Web log, is simply a home page in the form of a personal diary. It is organized by date entry and what makes it a valuable Web 2.0 tool is in its delivery, advertising and value as well as a technology called RSS (O'Reilly, 2005 p. 3). RSS allows Web participants to link to a page and subscribe to it with a notification delivered to the participant's e-mail inbox each time the page changes. Individual posts and responses to a blog will accumulate over time. When used in the company setting, McAfee asserts that blog entries, and its cumulative content, are part of a platform that is readable by anyone in the company. McAfee (2006) finds that "blogs are persistent and make an episode of knowledge work widely and permanently visible" (p. 23).

The LexisNexis Government Info Pro blog accomplishes this very feat of cumulating content and making knowledge and best practices visible. Developed as a resource for the government librarian, the blog is updated with LexisNexis program announcements, updates, search tips and informative posts on topics of interest to government librarians. The topics range from library trends, federal librarianship, state and local government topics and local and national library event information. Marie Kaddell, LexisNexis Information Professional Consultant, began the blog in March 2006 but devoted more time to posting 5 days a week in 2007, even producing a podcast on topics of information for government librarians. Kaddell attends many national conferences sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA), Special Libraries Association (SLA) and Military Librarians Workshop (MLW). She uses the Government Info Pro blog and podcasts to share what she has learned to many government librarians and information professionals who cannot attend the conferences.

"My goal is to blog on-the-floor experiences and program takeaways and to also share out what I learned on the podcasts, too," says Kaddell, who has been an official conference blogger for every conference she has attended since 2007. She plans to do so again this year.

The LexisNexis Government Info Pro blog also features left and right sidebars that include valuable links to tools and resources for librarians. They can subscribe to the Info Pro blog by clicking on an orange icon with an imbedded white fan. Kaddell describes her readership as very broad and compromises, corporations, public libraries, universities, courts, state and local governments, federal agencies and associations from around the globe.

"Many people subscribe via e-mail or feed reader as well as hitting the site. Additionally, there have been thousands of downloads of the podcast episodes. This is the kind of outreach that Web 2.0 provides," Kaddell says. "Another aspect of Web 2.0 that I really value is how personal it can be. You will notice that the blog has my stamp on it and that is because I developed it, maintain every inch of it, and write and/or edit the posts. Nobody from marketing or anyplace else in the company reads over my posts before they are published. Nobody created the layout for me. I did it all the way I wanted it to be. The blog is not an aspect of a company marketing plan but a personal conversation that I am having with each of you and it's fantastic to be able to create that personal relationship via the Web and podcast because, being only one person, I can't sit down regularly with every government librarian in the country as much as I might like to do so."

Toward the bottom of each personal entry, users can tag a specific blog using del.ici.ous, a Web site that lets members store all their bookmarks on the Web itself so they can be accessed from anywhere.

Social Bookmarking

Karen Huffman, the manager of Knowledge Initiatives for National Geographic's Libraries & Information Services, explained the power of del.ici.ous to her audience during her presentation titled, Web 2.0 in the Workplace and Beyond: Catching the Wave, at the National Press Club held on April 2, 2008. Huffman showed a slide with a del.ici.ous page and the results from the tag "2008LexisNexisLibraryWeek." Del.ici.ous displays how many other people applied the same tag to a page that Huffman did (47 other people saved the top result of LexisNexisWiki in her example), and what other tags they applied to the page (SLA, Information Professional, Library 2.0). The combination of these features allows users to search del.ici.ous by different users' tag collections (anonymous to the point that you can only see user names) or by looking at the universe of all tags. Other sites that aggregate a large set of content and then let users categorize the content through attaching tags include Flickr for photos and Technocrati for blogs (McAfee, 2006, p.25).

This kind of tagging used by del.ici.ous and Flickr is also known as folksonomy, a style of collaborative categorization of sites using freely chosen keywords or tags. Rather than use rigid categories, tags give users the chance to overlap the associations that the brain itself uses. For example, a Flickr photo of a puppy tagged both "puppy" and "cute" would allow users to retrieve what the user generates (O'Reilly, 2005, p. 2).

Blogs and Wikis in the Workplace

While blogs give people the chance to write individually, market or story tell for a broad audience, the wiki enables group authorship and can encourage collaboration when creating and editing content in the workplace. The wiki relies on people undoing and redoing each other's work. This context provides the backdrop to the contents of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. Despite the criticism that just about anyone can sign up as a registered user and create a new article in Wikipedia, and that anyone not registered can make a change to an existing article or undo anyone else's change, the accuracy and quality of information can be maintained. How? Senior members of the community make decisions by consensus. Negative comments by overly harsh and argumentative contributors can be corrected or removed with the click of the button by their peers. McAfee discovered that while the Wikipedia community is not perfect, it offers valuable insight into how authoring tools such as Wiki can be used in a company to deliver high-quality content. Once, few workers created content for the Intranet, but now with the help of wikis, knowledge workers can converge and constantly update each other's interlinked work (McAfee, 2006, p. 24).

Huffman likes the use of the wikis and blogs because she and her team can aggregate their ideas around a specific project. "We use it for project management," says Huffman, who is information architect, application developer and Web 2.0 integrator for the National Geographic's Corporate Intranet. Nielsen Norman Group selected it as one of the top 10 Intranets for 2007.

"We can report where we are in a certain project and look up the status of our different projects. We can access a page and update its status. This all happens in real-time and it works as long as people are committed to it," Huffman says.

When Huffman and her team first experimented with blogs and wikis at National Geographic, they did it to learn more about the Web 2.0 technologies and tools, to find out which would be advantageous as a research and information source. In her LexisNexis presentation, Huffman implored her audience to catch the right wave by knowing what technologies are out there, how they work and finding out which tools work best to serve the information needs of clients.

In her learn by doing approach, Huffman first purchased an external server to devote the necessary space for the Web 2.0 tools and to experiment with them. Now, Global Media Group hosts National Geographic's blogs, discussion forums and wiki applications. Huffman can spend less time to the back end of implementing Web 2.0 and more time to the front end by focusing on how and which Web 2.0 tools might benefit the staff.

Huffman and her team provide one-on-one training to National Geographic staff that request either a blog or wiki to be added to a new site. Huffman teaches one-on-one sessions and group wiki classes on an as needed basis. National Geographic is switching to another wiki application in May, Huffman will devote more time to showing the potential of the new wiki versus the older wiki (MediaWiki).

Despite using slightly different syntaxes, keystrokes and ways to include bullets, Huffman points out that once you learn one wiki, you can learn others. Huffman says that a wiki works like a content management system.

"If anyone makes a change to the content, you can always go back to an earlier version," Huffman says. "Same goes with a blog. If you understand the basic elements and what it is intended to do, it is to be a news-based, date driven content system that you can categorize information and add RSS feeds."

Huffman says that the overall impact of Web 2.0 in the workplace and management continues to evolve. The Web statistics at National Geographic, captured by Omniture SiteCatalyst, do not instantly reveal a jump in site visitors just because of the use of blogs, wikis or widgets. Rather, the site traffic is steady and the tools and technologies that make up the Web 2.0 platform add an element of depth and efficiency to retrieving information. So far, Huffman observes that employees like the streaming RSS feeds, which were incorporated into a redesign of National Geographic's Intranet and external Web sites. National Geographic employees can read the streaming news via RSS and select the news they want and get updated on it as opposed to spending time to register an account and sign into a newspaper Web site such as washingtonpost.com.

The blogs of the National Geographic Channel and its television programs such as Dog Whisperer, America's Port and Explorer provides examples of the standards in marketing upcoming features with streaming video embedded into an entry. The show's producers contribute to the blog and share behind the scenes stories and moments that make experiencing a certain show and even the site richer.

Huffman added Marie Kaddell's Government Info Pro blog to her Google Reader, which is another Web 2.0 tool for keeping track of favorite sites in one place. "I'm getting to where you're working and feel divided with your time that I find any way I can to digest things in little bits and chunks when multitasking," Huffman says.

Deborah Keller, an engineering librarian of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers produces a library blog and uses RSS push technologies to her users, which she describes as executives who spend much of their day answering e-mails and attending meetings. She sees the long-term payoff of producing a library blog, database or other content using RSS. In the short term, she and her staff can be patient by evaluating and looking at the results of the library's efforts (Keller, 2008).

"By using a blog structure as we generate information from and about the library, we are simultaneously making the information easier to retrieve over time and preserving it to be accessed in the future," Keller writes.

Conversations about Social Networking Tools

A conversation about Web 2.0 cannot be discussed without mentioning the social networking site such as Facebook and the impact it has had on managers and in the workplace. During Huffman's LexisNexis presentation at the National Press Club, she described the creation of a social networking site for National Geographic Geography Interns using ning.com. Interns can use the site to congregate and get to know one another beyond the workplace.

By definition, the social networking site is a place on the Internet where people meet in cyberspace, to chat, socialize, debate and network. Users create an account and their own online profile with biographical data, pictures, likes, dislikes and any other information they choose to post. The users can communicate with each other by voice, chat, instant message, video-conference and blogs, and the service typically provides a way for members to contact friends of other members (PCMag.com, 2008).

Human Resource professionals, such as Penny Davis of T-Mobile based in the United Kingdom, use social networking sites such as Facebook to tap into new talent pools, encourage collaboration among staff and build their employee brand (Personneltoday.com, 2008).

In the past year, Davis and her team helped new graduate recruits make the transition to the workforce. Davis told Personnel Today magazine on January 8, 2008, "We set up a group on Facebook in May for the 2007 intake so that they could network informally with each other and the T-mobile recruitment team before their September start date, enabling them to get to know each other and air concerns in a friendly supportive environment" (Personneltoday.com, 2008). The graduate recruits used Facebook with alacrity and organized living situations, discussed what to wear on the first day of work and where to park at T-Mobile's Hatfield headquarters. Davis recognizes that as a technology company, social networking sites fits into T-mobile's strategy and reflects their image as a forward-thinking employer. The success of the Facebook initiative in 2007 led to the creation of a similar group in 2008.

Huffman adds that social networking sites such as Facebook incorporate the very Web 2.0 technologies that promote collaborating through blogs and wikis and the ability to share video and audio outputs.

"Facebook is evolving," Huffman says. " You can add applications that decide your mood or typecast. You can post a note or status update. These application have the components of blogs and a bit of a workflow built in where you can pull in wikis from a blog and sharing information from videos to tags."

Developing Web 2.0 Challenges

Managers like Huffman and Davis who decide to incorporate Web 2.0 tools and create social networking sites for the workplace will discover that it costs nothing. One can create an account on Facebook, start a blog using Typepad.com or contribute to Wikipedia without having to pay for it. Managers will not have to cough up extra dollars to experiment with the technology itself, however they may pay for investing in the hardware that can maintain the technologies such as additional servers or computers.

The real challenge for managers, costs aside, is creating an incentive for workers to actively use Web 2.0 technologies and tools. So far, the Web 2.0 platform allows the opportunity for participants to be instant contributors via blogs, wikis and social networking sites. But the adoption process may be slow among workers, even if managers train and prod them about the benefits of the Web 2.0 platform.

McAfee sees two threats emerging for managers and technologists even if they initiate Enterprise 2.0 correctly. The first threat is that busy knowledge workers may not contribute to the new platform because of the way they use the Internet. McAfee (2006) finds that "most people who use the Internet today aren't bloggers, wikipedians or taggers. They don't help produce the platform--they just use it" (p. 27). The second threat is the unintended outcomes that may arise from the viewpoints of workers shared through blogs, wikis and other voice--giving technologies. Negative viewpoints may rattle the hierarchy and those in power of a company. Today, McAfee says that Intranets reflect one viewpoint--that of managements--and are not platforms for dissent or debate (McAfee, 2006, pp. 28).

The World Bank Group Enterprise Architecture team recently advertised its EA blog and asked workers to comment on whether the Bank should go forward with upgrading the current Microsoft Windows Operating System from XP to Vista. The EA team asked for feedback from employees and wanted to know if they preferred XP or Vista and why. At last check on May 1, 2008, only four people commented to this blog including me. I submitted a comment to the blog entry and the EA team sent me a message thanking me for my feedback. My comment would appear once the team approved it. Twenty-four hours later, my comment, generally siding with the upgrade to Vista provided that the operating system could support drivers for existing printers and scanners, appeared.

This is one way that management and or content managers of the Intranet can monitor feedback or submissions that may be deemed too inappropriate, but should not be used to suppress negative feelings or opinions.

McAfee (2006) describes a scenario in which Enterprise 2.0 technologies in the company setting can be shut down or limited based on the bosses who influence it as "they exert subtle and not-so subtle leverage over online content" (p. 28).

This was not the case in April 2007 at the World Bank Group when a scandal involving then president Paul Wolfowitz surfaced. Many blogs sprouted with comments to stories regarding the former Bank president's relationship with girlfriend Shaha Riza, who Wolfowitz allegedly promoted up the ranks and increased her salary to the point Riza made more than Condoleezza Rice at the State Department. The blogs and comments created within the Bank Intranet cumulated and grew each day. They featured opinions ranging from defending to dissenting Wolfowitz's actions. Some writers urged employees to leave Wolfowitz alone, others called for Wolfwitz's dismissal or resignation because the scandal was damaging the World Bank's credibility. The comments and opinions to the stories posted on the Internet were critical and some provided insight and commentary into the situation. If a comment to a blog or story used foul language it was appropriately removed and noted by the content management team.

The overall staff attitude toward Wolfowitz was resistant and negative since his appointment by President George W. Bush in 2005. The culture and environment may have affected how the World Bank Group's leaders and even Board of Directors used the Intranet. As it turned out, the Intranet was not shut down and links or stories with the cumulative content and opinions remained throughout the scandal. The World Bank Group allowed the technologies and tools to be used by the workers to voice their opinions. During the scandal, workers could not go a day without having to check or find out the latest with Wolfowitz. The pressure from staff and a formal investigation eventually led Wolfowitz to resign on June 30, 2007.

One scandal at a multilateral development bank, however, does not make the Web 2.0 platform an instant or recurring success. It may be the exception to the norm in a corporate setting. A lot remains to be seen as the Web 2.0 tools and technologies continue to evolve and are slowly implemented across companies or corporations. The tools can show managers how fast information can be shared, accessed and converged. Staff input and participation in blogs and wikis will go as leaders and managers go. And there will be some folks who choose not to use the Web 2.0 tools not just because they do not have time to use them, but that they also may not be important to their work and may not like them at all.

Evolutionary, Not Revolutionary, Process

"It's an evolutionary process," Huffman says. "Some people don't like it at all. On our dot com site, we have teams that don't want to use the applications. A lot of it is continuing to share our ideas and finding the right traction and tools."

Scott McArthur, a consultant in HR and change management at IT service company Atos Origin, sees value in blogs and wikis because they provide an invaluable medium for the HR department to publish information to employees and allow them to respond to it (Personneltoday.com, 2008). McArthur, who has blogged for over a year, says that he can tap into new areas of expertise and his network of HR professionals is about six times larger because of his blog.

"From my experience," McArthur told Personnel Today magazine. "No-one in HR can afford not to understand this technology.

When LexisNexis announced the results of a nationwide survey to provide insights into how information professionals are adding value to their organizations through technology and knowledge management, the company found that information professionals are very in tune with Web 2.0.
The findings, revealed on June 3, 2007, showed that four in 10 information professionals access Web logs at least weekly (39 percent) and more than a third (34 percent) access wikis (LexisNexis, 2007).

Thomas Davenport and Andrew McAfee, two business school academics, debated over the viability of Web 2.0 technologies in the business context on January 11, 2008 via Web cast. Davenport is a general skeptic of Web 2.0 technologies and the value of the software on its own. McAfee, on the other hand, believes in Web 2.0 era software and sees the impact that wikis and blogs could have in companies (Kanaracus, 2008).

Davenport criticized that an internal blog may not benefit all types of companies. He argued that installing one assumes that a firm's senior officials are actually interested in hearing from the rank-and-file (Kanaracus, 2008).

"I think that's why walk-around management was invented," Davenport says. "You're going to pay much more attention to the people you talk to than the words you get from someone's blog, sitting at you desk browsing around one night."

McAfee answered Davenport's by saying that he refused to argue that Enterprise 2.0 makes face-to-face discussion irrelevant (Kanaracus, 2008). "What it makes you able to do is keep tabs on a lot more of what is happening in an organization," McAfee says.

The two also clashed on the cultural barriers facing Web 2.0 adoption, more specifically in how company leaders may cede control over the flow and movement of business information as well as concerns over security.

During the Web cast debate, sponsored by enterprise company Fast Search & Transfer, McAfee said that companies who are willing and able to give up control receive positive more than negative outputs. With security, McAfee pointed out that the issue is hardly new and that the Xerox machine is a proven way of stealing secrets. McAfee also shared an anecdote from a senior human resources manager at one company who was worried about whether younger workers talked about business through their social-networking accounts. The firm completed a sweep through its user profiles and found an innocuous photograph of a training session in which dummy account numbers could be seen on the board. Davenport thought that the anecdotes from McAfee showed further evidence that the Web 2.0 tools are not a big breakthrough (Kanaracus, 2008).

Final Thoughts about Web 2.0

According to McAfee, while Enterprise 2.0 won't sweep away bureaucracy or the traditional hierarchy or structure, it improves how people collaborate and "the toolset to do it even better" (Kanaracus, 2008).

Blogs, wikis and social networking sites are technologies that fall under the platform of Web 2.0 (what McAfee dubs as Enterprise 2.0) to make the practices of knowledge practices and its outputs more visible.

Managers can use these tools to improve collaborative work as Huffman has implemented at National Geographic through the use of wikis. In the vein of the LexisNexis Government Info Pro, managers can use blogs to market its brand, future events and share best practices for research among government librarians and information professionals. Blogs give each person the opportunity to voice their opinions, give feedback and develop relationships and expand networks in a way that avoids clogging one's e-mail inbox.

While the impact of Web 2.0 may not be seen immediately, at the very least it is changing how vendors are building groupware and even social software. IBM has developed Lotus Connections, social software for business that features profiles, communities and blogs that allow businesses to execute more quickly through a dynamic network of coworkers, partners and customers.

"The Microsoft and Lotus Notes products are being driven by the products that the public are using and it's good they are finally catching up," says Huffman who has worked nearly 23 years at National Geographic, 10 of which have been in the Libraries. "You can affect what the vendors do and they are picking our minds. They want to know how you build products and which tools you use. In a year or two down the line, they've built in what you've been using into the enterprise. In a way, we can affect the change."

Huffman, who received an M.L.S. from the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland and a B.A. in Behavioral Social Sciences/Management from Maryland's University College, ended her PowerPoint presentation on April 2 at the National Press Club with a slide thanking her audience. The slide included a screen shot from Huffman's Facebook profile and a picture she had left for one of her friends on the social networking site. The picture showed a penguin about to clash two loud symbols on top of a polar bear sprawled across a bed of ice resting in peace. The black sans-serif text inside the picture read, "Do one brave thing today ... then run like hell!"

The picture symbolizes both the challenge and potential of Web 2.0 for knowledge managers and seekers in the workplace and beyond, the very theme of the LexisNexis Program organized by Marie Kaddell.

"I hope what I provide in total is a valuable information resource to government librarians," Kaddell says. "I have gotten lots of positive feedback on the value of the blog (and Best Practices) and many government librarians have written posts for the blog (the biggest statement of value I know). In fact, in 2007 more than 20 percent of posts came from government librarians and leaders in the community such as professional association chapter or division chairs."

More importantly, Kaddell believes that the success and value of Web 2.0 comes from the many forms of collaboration and the personal voice.
"It's an openness and a transparency that people seek in any relationship," Kaddell says. "Web 2.0 tools let you create that relationship instead of just a static presence. I can tell you that many librarians know me through the blog and podcast and as such it allows us to extend our professional network without really realizing we are doing it."

Both Kaddell and Huffman met at Baltimore Washington International airport this past year. Kaddell was in the zone, reading her book and listening to her iPod when she overheard words like wiki and blogs being thrown around by Huffman. Kaddell removed her ear buds and interrupted Huffman politely to introduce herself. Kaddell eventually asked Huffman to deliver a presentation about Web 2.0 for a LexisNexis Best Practices for Government Libraries program. Kaddell and Huffman are scheduled to teach a Web 2.0 Toolbox for Librarians CE class at SLA this summer.
"Part of what got me there is the power of the blog," Kaddell says. "So just don't think about feedback, think about reach and impact that ripples way beyond what you may ever hear back about."

It sounds like catching a wave, at the right place, at the right time.

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