Helping the experts and stopping the email chatter
Just think. If you write in public, it is both easier to find you AND when they do, the conversation can be at a higher level.
Luis Suarez has been doing his darnedest to kill off work-related email in favor of internal social software. He has been at it since February of 2007 - yes, two years! In recent weeks, he has seen less than 20 work emails - per week. A World Without Email - Year 2, Weeks 49 to 51 (EMail Is Where Knowledge Goes to Die).
While I am amazed at his steadfastness, there was something in his description of what he does instead to communicate with people. (He promises a longer article on all the things he does.) The thing that caught my attention has to do with the regular flow of questions and answers that he responds to as an expert in his field within his company.
Indeed, the good old Q&A that every single knowledge worker engages with time and time again during the course of the week and, in most cases, several times a day. As you can imagine, using micro-blogging/-sharing tools for Q&A already provides me with lots of advantages to help me reduce my email clutter even more.
I've thought about these things before, but the connection just rang home for me today when I saw Luis' article. Assuming the technology is there, people looking for help on a given topic should be able to find it - and the person who knows about it - easily. This means two things:
- Experts become more findable. If the expert writes in public on topics that they know well, then people can find her.
- Even better. If the expert records Q&A in public, not only can people find her, they can get answers to those questions that are common to many others. And for the uncommon questions, it gives a better starting point - and a new topic to post.
I don't think I appreciated the second aspect previously - or at least not in this context. Usually, the idea of having better conversation related to better personal conversations, rather than the expertise-level conversation. I mostly considered the first and thought about drawbacks about being too easily found (and disturbed). With this connection, it's no longer just about publicity, it is also about being able to have higher-level conversations when you are contacted. Doing regular Q&A out in the open (whether that's "open" to the company or to the world) leaves the expert free to focus on the more interesting conversations.
This idea has a lot of value, there is always a caveat. While writing in public is great for other people looking for help, there are times (and technology combinations), where writing in public makes it more difficult for the most common user of the expert's material: the expert herself. This is one of my personal frustrations with diverting my personal online attention away from this blog to other places, where it is more difficult to retrieve my (fabulous) words later on: Twitter, LinkedIn Answer, Ning, Facebook, etc. There is a great set of comments on exactly this topic from my friends Lilia Efimova and Doug Cornelius.
Note: Luis works for IBM - the technology is there (see the comments discussion). And for solo entrepreneurs or small businesses, we have had the technologies to make this work well for a long time. Unfortunately, there are a lot of organizations out there who do not have access to the tools that would enable this kind of work.
[Photo: "Lost and Found But Useless" by cacho_please]
5 Comment(s)
Luis-
I am not worried on the technology end. Many companies have only one mechanism to do Q&A: their email systems. Yes, really. They might have some of the other technology, but it's out of date or more likely there is no internal practice around using the tools well. And then there is the question of search...
That said, I would love the magic bullet out there that would aggregate everything I do online and place it in a context that makes sense.
Keep writing, friend.
Hi Jack! Thanks for the follow up comments! I agree with you that majority of knowledge workers still use email as their preferred Q&A system, mainly those folks who are mobile and don't have a constant connection to the Internet; but then again, not entirely sure it's the best and most efficient way of disseminating the information across, specially that info that can be searched.
Yes, we may have problems trying to find the information that we placed in multiple online resources, but, at least, we have got a choice; we can try. With email, only the recipient of those emails would be able to search those answers; and, only, if their hard disk hasn't crashed without a backup, or if they haven't left the company, in which case no-one would know of the existence of those Q&A in the first place...
Oh, well, I think I'd rather prefer to stick around with the alternative ;-) hehe And perhaps look forward to that universal aggregate of all of the things I leave behind out there on the open, collaborative Web ;-) hehe
I have no problem with using a more open mechanism than e-mail. My claim is that most companies have no clue what else to do, and the organization doesn't have a strong enough push to do something different. "e-mail works fine, why should I try."
It's a rather negative view, I know. And I am supposed to be a KM advocate. In those organizations that "get it," I think the opportunity is there.
Well, I am wondering whether it is really about "email works fine, why should I try" and perhaps more along the lines of don't try to break what's already working; thing is that email may not be working as effectively as we think it may. And we may not be that far off when companies couldn't probably afford any longer to stagnate and be left behind... for the sake of all of that young talent that is looking into innovative businesses who are driving far ahead than the rest just to grab their attention;
Say, perhaps, in 3 to 5 years, I doubt there would be many companies out there surviving on "just email, because it works"... Although time will tell ;-)
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Hi Jack! I have finally now had a chance to re-read your great blog post shared above and an opportunity to leave a comment as well.
You bring in some excellent points as to why it's so important to engage on Q&A sessions out there in the open; it provides just so much value, it's mind-blowing.
However, just because we are going through those Q&A sessions doesn't mean we haven't got challenges; we do, like you point out, with the various multiple resources available out there to share your answers, but do we really have those very same issues *behind* the firewall? In a corporate environment, and unless you have a direct 100% exposure to customers, there is a great chance you will be "living inside" and therefore that reduces, tremendously, the amount of choices available out there to engage in Q&A sessions. I bet for most businesses it's probably down to 1 or 2 or 3, which will make it rather easy to track them down, in my opinion.
The problem I am seeing and which I just can't wait for it to be addressed and fixed properly is the proliferation of the tools out there on the Internet that do very similar things, but don't want to work together because each and everyone of them feel they are "special". Yes, indeed, they are! All of them! They have managed to split the last communities of experts out there to the point where it becomes a mess. We need to fix that; and soon! Before we all start going crazy like you have detailed on the various places where you hang out, as an example.
I think that's where the challenge is, not in sharing answers to questions in open spaces, versus answer by email, for instance; and yes, I may be lucky I work for a company that does have the technology, but then again social software tools like http://vark.com/, for instance, clearly prove that *anyone* can have the technology nowadays. It's just a matter of whether you would want to engage or not ...