Brian PrenticeI had an interesting conversation with Lee Bryant of HeadShift yesterday. They’re a professional services organization focusing on the deployment of social software solutions.
Something that I found to be particularly noteworthy was that only 20% of their consultants are technology-related. The other 80% are actually trained in sociology and anthropology. The blend of their staff skill sets are driven from two factors. First, from HeadShift’s experience, training and development departments are the driving force behind many corporate social software projects. These people don’t think in the context of technology and product – they think in the context of human behaviour.
Second – and I hope we all know this by now – the challenge with social software is not sourcing and deployment but uptake and momentum. Sociological and anthropological skills are much more valuable in figuring out how to address those challenges.
So, IT departments take note. If you’re becoming serious about adopting social software you’re going to have to get serious about tapping into a more diverse set of skills then is commonly found in most organizations like your own.
Category: Cool Ideas & Those That Have Them Tags:
2 responses so far ↓
1 Alasdair Munn October 22, 2008 at 6:35 am
I like this post. This is something we at tcg have built our agency on and is the cornerstone of our processes. Great technology is vital, yet without buy in, understanding and participation it is great technology for technologists.
The purpose of social software (loosely) is to leverage technology to make the enterprise run smoother. It is about participation, integration, collaboration, analytics and informed decision making. How can a technologist build to this brief if he or she lacks the understanding of who their audience is, what their goals are and an insight into their learning styles, attitudes, goals, aspirations, prejudices etc?
The more readily this is understood, the better for people involved in social software.
2 Laurent Pacalin October 27, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Brian:
I’d like to share a fascinating Clean Tech application developed by Rebeca Hwang, a friend and Stanford PhD student, as well as the Judging Chair for the California Clean Tech Open.
Rebeca’s objective was to use her technical know-how in water treatment technology and her research in quantitative theory of social networks to improve water quality in the slums of Buenos Aires. The water in Buenos Aires’ sprawling slums carries birth-defect-causing nitrates and arsenic in amounts up to 10 times what is considered safe. Because of the lack of government resources, communities have formed water cooperatives to help provide clean water to their constituents. Unfortunately, many of these co-ops are small and not always well managed so water treatment and delivery services lack funding. Moreover, while it is cost-efficient to treat water for 100,000 households, these co-ops have only an average of 2,000 houses each and are therefore rarely profitable.
Rebeca Hwang believed that this considerable challenge could be addressed by applying social networks analysis to map out the relationships between decision-makers at water cooperatives. The idea is that the identification of patterns can pinpoint an organization’s strengths and weaknesses, and in turn, may help that organization to improve its efficiency and effectiveness. The characterization of the structure of these 480 water cooperatives – servicing 700,000 households – is a massive undertaking. One that requires, through extensive surveys, the tagging of the co-ops by service type and managerial style, both formal and informal. Rebeca used open-source software programs like Pajek and Ucinet to analyze and convert the raw data into meaningful information. Also, she anticipated that using another program like NetDraw to visualize the intensity of the relationships between the different constituents would reveal some key problem areas.
The expected outcome of this “social network analysis” project is to formulate specific ways to improve the profitability of the cooperatives while increasing the volume of clean water produced.
I believe that innovative approaches, like this one, that leverage existing technologies and apply social network analysis theory can provide a significant boost toward improving people’s daily life while maximizing the use of natural resources. Such project does not require huge investment or new technology. It empowers local communities and enables greater sustainability.
Laurent Pacalin
Co-Founder California Clean Tech Open
CMO Fair Isaac