Getting to Observable Work

We Can Work Smarter & More Effectively When We Can See What Our Colleagues Are Doing.

One of the concepts I think best conveys what many are trying to do with social media inside organizations, mostly large ones, is that of “working out loud” or “observable work”. The idea is that one’s efforts and day-to-day activities are conducted in such a way as anyone who wants to can find and see visible artifacts of that work.

There are numerous benefits to doing this. One way in which it is highly beneficial is it obviates the need for regular activity reporting. Where I used to work, a great deal of time was spent at the end of each month as employees gathered information and wrote up their reports on the activity they could recall or that they had been organized enough to make notes about.

Once they had done so, these reports went from the workers to first-level managers, who read, edited, consolidated, and passed the information up. This continued through the organizational hierarchy until it finally reached the President, where it had been re-written, re-organized, and (sometimes) thoroughly filtered to ensure bad news wasn’t included or was glossed over or minimized. Not the best way to do business, IMO. It was very stressful and quite time consuming.

A good friend and long-time blogger in the field of knowledge management and social media – Luis Suarez of IBM – recently summarized the most important issues he got from last month’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. Especially useful to enabling observable work, I think, is Alan Lepofsky‘s concept of social task management, which Luis discusses in an excellent post on CMS Wire. There’s lots of good info Luis offers there as well as some links to other stuff, including one to an excellent Slideshare presentation on Social Fatigue. Check it out yourself:

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/social-business/social-task-management-when-social-business-got-down-to-work-016309.php