Mark Schneider's SharePoint Taxonomy and Governance Blog

Over Communication is the Best Strategy for Organizational Change

The human mind needs a consistent and continuous experience of the world to stay healthy.  So important is this need for "gestalt" that the brain has a built-in mechanism for filling in any gaps in our experience of the world.  If we lack information or continuity in our experience of the world we use our imagination to smooth over the gaps and create the details we need to stay sane.

Children begin life with a nearly total lack of information with which to interpret and navigate the world, so they rely very heavily on their imaginations.  As their brains self-program with experiential information about the world, their brains rely less and less on their imaginations to get through the day.  Eventually they will "mature" and put most of their toys away in favor of a more or less real-time experience of the world.

Even after they've grown most people still make use of their imaginations for entertainment, invention, and planning.  Einstein reportedly said that imagination is more important than intelligence.  It was Einstein's highly effective use of his own imagination that launched the modern scientific era.

So if your organization is undergoing a crisis (rapid and unplanned change) or planned organizational change, and you haven't communicated enough information to them, then they will necessarily engage their imaginations.  Some folks will have imaginations that create a positive view of the future and some will create a negative view of the future.  These imagined facts will take on a life of their own, and if repeated enough will become fact--self fulfilling prophecy.

Keep in mind that the use of imagination to fill in gaps in our understanding and knowledge is as human as breathing.  Their imaginations will rule the day in rumors and gossip matter how much you threaten, scold, ridicule or berate your employees.  Please keep in mind that they are not being naughty or evil, they are being human.

The ONLY remedy is to over-communicate facts, and if you don't have facts then clearly communicate that fact.  Here is how SharePoint can help:

• Set up a SharePoint site on the crisis or change topic your organization is currently facing.
• Post announcements that spell out relevant events.
• Have a senior executive blog about the issues, concerns and highlights of the change event
• Put as many documents as possible into the library on the site
• Set up a discussion board in which people can discuss and debate their concerns
• (One of My Favorites) - Put up a discussion board called "Rumor Central" and have people post any rumors or gossip they hear about the crisis into this list.  Most imaginary rumors and fears sound pretty funny when they are written down in broad daylight. 

But no matter what, remember that if you don't supply your employees with enough information they will engage their imaginations, guaranteed.  The only way out is to over-communicate.

Managing, Planning and Leading in the Cloud

How will you lead your business in the coming cloud of virtualized computing, storage and social environments?  Management by walking around is going to be tough since your organization is likely to become geographically decentralized due to advances in collaboration technology coupled with the increased cost of travel.  Leadership by example is going to be tough too in that folks aren't going to see you in action quite so much.  Teaching moments will have to be intentional and not accidental.

Here is what to focus on as we move into another wave of new and world-changing technologies:

1. Policies.  You are going to have to manage by policies, and those policies are going to have to be objective and measurable.  In the past we could all get away with having subjective policies because nobody, in fact, read them or paid attention to them in the slightest.  Policy based management was usually considered to be a convenient way to keep managers occupied and out of the worker's way.  In the coming cloud, your policies will be programmed right into your computing environment to govern how information is used and managed.  Policies will be the organizing principle for virtual information management.
2. Metadata and Taxonomy Organization.  You are going to have to track metadata about information being created and used in your organization.  The information is going to move freely between knowledge workers, governed only by the policies that you implement in your computing environment.  Metadata is going to be the only method of tracking and managing the pedigree and circulation of information in your organization.  In my humble opinion, metadata is NOT primarily about finding things.  Metadata is about traceability, quality control, audience management and security.  Metadata is not about location it is about context.
3. Processes and Interfaces.  You will need to manage the interface between processes, people and teams within your organization.  You aren't going to be in a position to micromanage how people do their jobs, nor should you try.  You will focus your management on inputs and outputs between people, processes and teams.
4. Technology Agnostic.  You will need to learn to think in technology agnostic terms.  Individual technologies will come and go.  Technology providers will need to be able to facilitate the combination of software and process building blocks to create hybrid systems.  It will be a mistake to simply choose Microsoft, Google, Oracle or Floyd's Software Emporium.
5. Measurable Objectives, KPIs and Dash Boards.  You will need to establish and track Key Process Indicators.  You will need to identify or create master-indicators which track the health and effectiveness of your organization.  An internal Dow Jones Industrial Average if you will.
6. Self-Managing Teams.  You will need to provide the capability for people and groups to self-form and self-manage teams in order to accomplish their tasks.
7. Document Centric.  You will need to develop a document-centric method for controlling security, distribution and workflow management.
8. Social Networking.  You will need to provide for informal social networking opportunities.  People are social animals and need the informal chat that is a common experience within a physical office complex.  One of the biggest hurdles in being a remote knowledge worker is a feeling of social isolation and being disconnected from the team.  Out of sight, out of mind.  You'll need to provide for and tolerate a certain amount of social networking among your various knowledge workers.

The interesting thing in all of this is that it seems to be the result of a very systematic evolution in our culture.  I don't think anyone is masterminding it--who could?  But it is interesting that young people entering the workforce find the idea of a decentralized and virtual culture of work to be not only natural but ideal.   Once again our culture has adapted the upcoming crop of young people to be perfectly adapted to the world we are entering.  The style of work, life and leadership discussed in this blog seems awkward and challenging to those of us older than 30.  To those just entering the workforce it seems perfectly natural.

All This SharePoint Stuff is Going to be Normal Pretty Soon

What do I mean by "normal pretty soon?"  I tend to be drawn to new technologies that really matter.  SharePoint is one, the Amazon Kindle is another, and there are a few more.  One of these days I'm going to write a blog on how to recognize technologies that matter, but that is for a different day.

A while back I was an e-Commerce Strategy Consultant.  I had the honor of architecting what was, I think, the first online banking mall.  Over 20 banking associations pooled their resources to create a common back end-end of banking utilities that could be easily branded for each of their organizations.  This was back when XML was more or less science fiction, and so I had a great deal of fun building a bank around it.  By the Grace of God I picked the right pony in the technology race and the bank worked very well.

At the time I often spoke on e-Commerce strategy topics to audiences of senior executives.  My favorite speech was given in front of a large number of bank presidents.  I told them to go home if they couldn't explain why they wanted online banking.  If there wasn't a clear business need, then save yourself 20 million dollars (at the time), save your career, and save your sanity and just go home.  This was a rather startling approach for them, but it turned out to be good advice.  I would guess about 25% of the room did, in fact, go home.  On the other hand, the remaining bankers were ready to step up and "git 'er done."

At the time it was very important, when selecting a LOB solution, to make sure that it was "e-commerce capable," or "e-commerce ready," or some other phrase that indicated that the manufacturer had a sincere desire to slap a web page on the application sometime "real soon."  I did a lt of speaking then too, and I explained to my audiences that in two years or so e-commerce would be absolutely normal.  The day would soon come when the customer wouldn't even have to ask if a tool was "e-commerce capable" because e-commerce would be a natural part of everyone's thinking.  Of course this met with a great deal of skepticism.

Now, once again, you are struggling to find applications that are "SharePoint Ready," or to find custom gizmos that will hook up your LOB systems to SharePoint, or to find a consultant who can work a little magic for you.

Remember that you heard this here first!  In a couple of years you won't even think about SharePoint.  you'll still need tools and training, but it will all be normal.  LOB apps will ship with BDC connectors and webpart interfaces.  It will all be normal.

SharePoint is the new Windows, or soon will be.  When Windows was a baby called 3.X, it was an application interface that installed on top of DOS.  Over time DOS's funcitonality was subsumed into Windows.  The same is happening now.  SharePoint installs on top of Windows, but over time the two will become one virtualized program environment.

Trust me that this is the direction things are heading toward.  I am not psychic, it is just that this isn't my first rodeo.  I was actually a client/server consultant back in the day.  the whole concept of client/server blew people's minds.  They didn't know whether to laugh or cry.  When was the last time you brought in a client server consultant?

What to do with the Network Store

It not a good business model to spin undifferentiated (and unusable) data at 7200 RPM for all eternity, no matter how cheap disk is.  Though this is obvious, the network store is a time honored institution around the world and will not easily be made obsolete.  I wonder how much useless, undifferentiated and duplicate information is quietly going round and round all over the world?  I need to buy stock in a drive manufacturer.

Will SharePoint replace the network store?  Man I hope not!  The whole concept of a network store is dysfunctional.  We don't want to replace it we want to render it unnecessary.  We want future generations to laugh at the very concept of a network compost heap of useless data.  Essentially the model is (in my opinion) to use SharePoint to house, manage and use live information.  When the information in SharePoint is either ready to retire or be archived, then it is best migrated to FileNet or Documentum (or similar technology).  If the taxonomy, metadata and process models for SharePoint are well thought-out and implemented, the metadata pedigree for the file can be used to populate the metadata model in the permanent storage environment.

So does SharePoint replace the network store?  NO!  The goal is to ultimately hunt down and eliminate anything that resembles a network store by rendering the entire concept obsolete.  Keep in mind this is not a "Mercury Capsule" project.  It may not even be an "Apollo Capsule" project.  It must be, however, the long term vision for data storage in your organization.

This is one of the reasons my Governance and Taxonomy Workshops are "technology agnostic."  The leadership and governance teams need to focus on the business goals and needs, without being distracted by the minutiae of what any particular technology can and can't do in actual practice.  Define the problem set, the business requirements, and let IT develop the solution set using whatever technologies they choose to standardize upon.

©Copyright Mark Ragar Schneider, 2009 All Rights Reserved

The Positive Role of Viruses in Cyberspace

Now don't get me wrong, I hate viruses with a passion.  Even though I was, and remain, fascinated with cyberlife I hate unauthorized viral intrusions.

Having been around in the good old days before the Internet was privatized, I miss the open and free environment that once represented cyberspace.  It was like living back in the 1950s (so I'm told) when people didn't usually bother to lock their doors.  In the original Internet (if there was such a thing), nobody locked their electronic doors either.

The law enforcement profiles for virus-writers reads very much like the profile for a Uni-bomber wannabe.  Disaffected, polite, keeps to self, shy, alienated, underachiever, higher IQ.  So the virus phenomena is definitely dysfunctional.  Like you, I have lost data and many weekend hours trying to recover from these malicious attacks.

On the other hand, I think there is an evolutionary purpose for the virus phenomena in cyberspace just like there is a purpose for biological viruses in realspace.

Before viral attacks (and I include all malware) became common, the Internet was homogeneous.  Homogeneous systems are prone to catastrophic failure.  By defending against viral attacks, the Internet is structured with defensive barriers much like the sealed compartments in a submarine.  In an open environment like the early Internet, a single threat could destroy the integrity of the whole system.  With compartmentalization, it is unlikely that a single attack (whether natural or man-made) would bring a significant portion of cyberspace to its knees.

I am a big proponent of standardization, but with standardization comes homogeneity and with homogeneity comes systemic vulnerability.  So standardization is very important, but so is variance across populations, even in cyberspace.

Back in the days of pandemic plague in the Middle Ages, everyone who was susceptible to a particular disease vector died.  This meant that the remaining population was very resistant to those threats.  The problem was that those plagues were attacking homogenic populations and so they managed to kill huge numbers of people very quickly.  The intemixing of people groups, increased travel and communication (and its accompanying exposure to a wider variety of disease vectors), and repeated pandemics actually produced (in my humble opinion) a genetic stock that was capable of ushering in social systems that covered large geographic areas.

So it is with software attacks and malware.  Had a modern software virus attack been let loose in the Internet of the early 1990s, it could have conceivably had the effect of an electronic pandemic.

©Copyright Mark Ragar Schneider, 2009 All Rights Reserved

Of Viruses and Clouds

Ages ago I was writing realtime process control software on a Tektronix 8540/8560 PDP-11 development system.  At the time I was pretty high on FORTH, which was a language originally developed to control astronomical radio telescopes.  FORTH had almost no overhead and functioned more like a meta-language than a language, i.e. you used it to shape and define your own language environment.  It was a language equivalent in concept to UNIX.

FORTH gave me amazing control of the guts and gizmos in the PDP-11 hardware.  I realized at one point that, after I was through commandeering the system, I could have my software keep part of it indefinitely.  I could then write self-replicating software that would "live" in the system resources I kept.  This was before I'd even heard of viruses, and I became obsessed with synthetic life.  FORTH was the ideal language for this and so I played.  It was a lot quieter than my prior efforts at generating music using Markov equations and fractals, so my then-wife considered it a move in the right direction.

Recently I asked myself a fundamental question-- "what is the most successful software concept in history?"   I think it would be safe to say that the most successful (in a Darwinian sense) software concept is the software virus, which first caught my interest so many years ago.  These simple little critters can be written and deployed almost anywhere.  They manage to survive numerous attacks to eradicate them when traditional technologies take great effort to keep operational.  They reproduce and move.  They are a royal pain in the nether regions.

So, it seems that future software might eventually become more virus-like.  Since the cloud is closer to viral than is a traditional deployment, I'm thinking that a viral concept may well be the next stage in software infrastructure evolution.

There is currently a bit of a debate on whether cloud architectures will endure.  Since they are the most virus-like, I think they stand a very good chance.

©Copyright Mark Ragar Schneider, 2009 All Rights Reserved

Support the Government but Wash Your Hands, a Parable...

A few years ago I was watching a presidential press conference.  At the time the press had been working hard to 'raise awareness' about potential biological warfare attacks.  One reporter asked the president what his administration was doing to protect the American People from pandemic.  Are there enough vaccines, is there a sufficiently robust contingency plan?

According to a few public health studies I've read over the years, over half the members of the press corps do not wash their hands after using the toilet.  Americans in general do not generally wash their hands after using a public restroom, and those that do wash their hands do not use good practice.

So, the most effective deterrent against pandemic would seem to be for the press corps to wash their own hands in an effective and purposeful manner.  What do they want the president to do, deploy the National Guard to enforce good bathroom procedures?

Don't get me wrong, it is very important for any modern government to have a well-thought-out plan for worst case scenarios, including engineered pandemics.  But as always, effective government begins and ends with personal responsibility.  You simply can't transfer the responsibility for your own actions to a central government.

This is a great analogy for collaborative vs. "top down" technical and business governance.  You need centralized strategic governance and policy management, but you also need to provide and support tactical freedom amongst the information workers you support. 

©Copyright Mark Ragar Schneider, 2009 All Rights Reserved

The World According to Sam

Even though he has been dead for several years, I still find myself thinking about my dog Sam.  Once in a lifetime a dog comes along that is more friend than pet.  These loyal and intelligent dogs form a unique and unspoken connection with their owners.  This bond between dog and owner is a remarkable thing that truly earns the dog the title "man's best friend."  Sammy just wasn't that kind of dog. Sammy enjoyed a homicidal mix of bull terrier, german shepherd and doberman ancestry, and he epitimized all that was uniquely wrong with each of those breeds. He was moody, disloyal and destructive.  Sammy really did prove that the whole dog could be far more unstable and psychotic than the sum of its breeds.  And like the idiot that I am I loved him dearly, although I slept with one eye open while he was stil alive. 

I bring him up in my blog post because despite his homicidal tendencies, Sammy taught me a great deal about managing centralized network data stores.  Really.  Sammy's basic life philosophy was pretty simple:  "If you see something on the floor then you should eat it.  After all, if it turns out to not be food then you can always barf it up in the living room." Without a Taxonomy and Governance Plan, your organization's only other option is to adopt the Sammy-like information management philosophy that states "If you have some random file then you should store it on the U drive.  If it turns out to be worthless then you can always just spin it around at 7200 RPM until the company ceases to exist.

 

 

© 2008, Mark Ragar Schneider, All Rights Reserved

When Taxonomies are Evil

Back in the early sixties my father was completing his electrical engineering degree at the University of Minnesota.  Being a family man, he also worked at the Lightening and Transients Research Institute (LTRI) in Minneapolis.  LTRI was the first organization to successfully “catch” and analyze a bolt of lightning.  LTRI was very popular in the aerospace industry as their research helped harden aircraft against lightening strikes and other forms of electrostatic discharge.  They were also instrumental in laying the technical foundation for systems that are hardened against nuclear EMP.

As a preschooler I knew that my dad could literally catch lightning in a bottle, so it is no wonder that I now consider all technical things possible.

During his summers, my dad worked on the RV Thunderbolt; a research ship based in Miami harbor.  So, we would make the long drive from Minneapolis to Coco Beach in our trusty Volkswagen Bug.  There were no car seats in the early sixties, and so I would wedge my little preschool body in the “boot” behind the rear seat.  Above me I could see the stars out of the little curved rear window, and would drift in and out of sleep watching the stars turn and pirouette in the night sky above me.

I don’t remember the circumstances, but one night our car broke down in a small town in the Deep South.  As we waited in the lobby of a service station for repairs to finish, I became thirsty and moved toward a dingy-looking drinking fountain.  A woman who was waiting for her own repairs rushed toward me in a panic and stopped me before I could take a sip.  I was startled and upset, but it was clear that she was trying to save me from something so I don’t think I cried.

She explained that I shouldn’t use drinking fountains with the word “C-O-L-O-R-E-D” printed over them because those drinking fountains were unsanitary.  She said only black people use those drinking fountains, although she used a different word than “black people.”  I was shocked; if the fountains were so unsanitary then why couldn’t the black people use the clean drinking fountain she pointed out to me. Wouldn't that solve everyone's problem? She patiently explained that the dirty drinking fountain was dirty precisely because the black people used it.  My world spun and shook as my little mind tried to cope with this bizarre concept.  I felt a horror, shock, rage that I still remember to this day. 

I looked at my parents and asked them if this was true.  I needed them to repair my world.  They were both very tight lipped and hustled me out of the situation.  I didn’t know it at the time but racial tensions were high and my parents were scared.  This was back in the day of “Mississippi Burning” and a drinking fountain was not always worth dying over.  They were progressive but they were not suicidal.

The truly shocking thing is that this happened here in the U.S.A. and during my lifetime.  The United States was reaching for the stars and just a few miles away prejudice and ignorance were keeping people oppressed just because of the family they were born into.  This wasn’t Nazi Germany, this was the United States.  This wasn’t ancient history, this was within my lifetime.

I really have no idea how the evil started, but somehow our nation created a “people taxonomy” where some people were arbitrarily moved out of the human category and moved into another category.  It didn’t really matter if the other category was less-than or separate but equal, once you put somebody in a category that is considered not-quite-human you wind up with oppression, suffering and death.

In relationships people tend to work with three major categories almost by instinct:  Resources, Environment, and People.

Some people move their pets into the people category and start to baby talk their dogs and cats.  On a farm animals are ultimately resources, and in a national park they are part of the environment.  Woe to the person who treats an environmental (protected) animal as a resource.  This is known as poaching.

When people become resources we can wind up with slavery or the holocaust.  When developed people look at subsistence cultures and try to “preserve their culture” at the expense of helping them, then we have reduced those people to being part of the environment.

In a marriage we fall in love with a person, over time we tend to think of our partners as resources, and may eventually treat them like scenery as the relationship spirals into failure.

So, when you are creating a “people taxonomy” for your organization, please make sure that everyone understands that you are not pigeon-holing them.

What Ultimately is Happening to the Banking Industry?

The Policy Taxonomy that governs the banking industry has been around for a very, very long time.  Why is it in crisis now?  I believe that the old banking taxonomy is obsolete and therefore no longer works in everyday practice.  Just as the discovery of extrasolar planets changed the astronomical taxonomy and removed Pluto from the "planet club," so the evolution of electronic information management and interoperability is ultimately rendering the old banking taxonomy obsolete.

As I've discussed in my blog, and more directly in my workshops, when the taxonomy becomes unstable then the organization must necessarily become unstable.  What might we expect if the taxonomy is changing in the banking industry?

1. Nationalization of the banking infrastructure.  Banks will no longer be willing or able to advance money through the Federal Reserve.  The Federal Reserve will become the clearing house for nnationalization of banking assets.  In other words, it will be the way that the government slowly brings the banking industry under control.

2. International Banking "Firewalls."  - I'm obviously not an economist but a computer scientist, so I think in terms of information systems.  All the nations are going to agree to a kind of banking architecture that is based on some kind of virtualization taxonomy, just like the computer industry is doing right now.

3. Consolidation of banking networks and processes.

4. A central clearing house for transactions (either real or virtual) that uses a meta-currency in order to calculate the differences between currencies.  Control of the meta-currency calculations will essentially influence the entire banking world.

5. We will see no obvious changes any time soon.  If the banking industry maintains the same taxonomy, at least for talking purposes, then folks won't notice that huge changes are occurring.  So, we can expect that the average citizen will not notice or recognize what will likely be a huge shift in control.

© 2008, Mark Ragar Schneider, All Rights Reserved