Public sector outsourcing has three intractable problems

I have worked on both sides of public outsourcing over several years and have spoken about it many times but I have never written about it before. It is an issue that never goes away so I am finally going to put my thought on record.

Public sector outsourcing has three intractable problems:

1. The motivation of the two parties are different
2. It leaks money out of the process
3. The balance is always in favour of the supplier.

I'll start with a familiar story. President John F. Kennedy was visiting NASA headquarters for the first time in 1961. While touring the facility, he introduced himself to a janitor who was mopping the floor and asked him what he did at NASA. “I’m helping put a man on the moon!”

In Management Consultant speak that demonstrates a Shared Vision or a Golden Thread running from the top to bottom of the organisation, and it was probably called One NASA at some point.

Now let us look at how outsourcing changes that story.

Motivation

When the janitor works for an outsourcing company his motivation changes. His priority, and what he gets paid for, is making money for his new employer, the outsourcing company.

This means doing as little work as possible while still meeting the contract. It means cleaning less thoroughly, using cheaper materials, using cheaper and less skilled labour, and even falsifying records to claim for work not done.

Leaks

The outsourcing company makes a profit from the contract which it uses to pay shareholders etc. This money which leaks from the process is no longer being used to clean NASA premises, or to do anything else for NASA, it has gone.

Balance

Somebody like NASA outsources a service like cleaning infrequently, say once every three years. In contrast, the outsource provider may negotiate hundreds of similar contracts a year.

That imbalance in experience always favours the outsource provider and leads to contracts that can come back to bite, like the famous examples of charging a small fortune to do a simple job ike change a light bulb.

Why I hate working with Microsoft Word

Like a lot of people, especially those who style ourselves as consultants, Microsoft Office is my main tool and while I would not claim to be an expert in it I have been singing it heavily since the very early 1990s with Office v1.0 which included Word v1.1. While I use OpenOffice out of choice at home I have been using Office ever since wherever I have worked.

Twenty five years of serious use and I am still frequently confused and frustrated by the quirks in Word that makes it do things that are so weird that I find it hard to believe that they were intended yet they are so obvious that if they are bugs then surely they would have been found and fixed many years ago.

I have said many times that I defy anybody to use numbered and/or bulleted lists and to get the result that they expected and I came foul of my own rule this morning.

I had pasted some text (keep text only) from one document to another. I then added the headings (1.6, 1.6.1 and 1.6.2) using the styles from the target document. So far so good.

Then I wanted to restore the numbered lists that had been imported as text, i.e. the "1", "a" etc. were included within the text rather than in the formatting. I wanted to use the numbered list formatting for the obvious reasons, to be consistent with the rest of the document and to make modifying the list easy.

So I selected the relevant text and pressed the numbered list button on the toolbar.

The numbering worked much as I hoped but in creating the numbered list Word also decided to modify the styles of my headings! Headings 1.6 and 1.6.1 were both indented and by different amounts. The paragraph mark on the normal line above the 1.6 heading shows where they were and should have been left.

Checking the style confirmed that it was the style that had been changed (so the changes were made to the whole document) rather than just the settings to those paragraphs.

I have absolutely no idea why Word chose to do that and this is a typical example of the frustrations that I have with working with Microsoft Office. It's simply not up to the job.

Accelerating change at Gurteen Knowledge Cafe with cultureQs

I had missed a Gurteen Knowledge Cafe or two thanks to my poor organisation and work commitments (I really must give up work soon!) so I was even keener than usual to get to this one. I even cut my holiday in York short to do so. The main attraction was that this was a Gurteen Knowledge Cafe, and all that means (i.e. process and people), with the secondary attraction that it was about Change Management.

One of the possibly over-simplistic statements that I often repeat is that the technology is the easy part and the difficult bit is the people. Change Management is often overlooked, especially by IT companies. I work for an IT company.

Being on holiday meant that I was travelling there from home instead of the London office only a mile away. I had had a quiet morning, walking very few steps, so I decided to leave the Waterloo train at Clapham Junction and to walk up to Westminster Business School from there. It was only 8km.

The walk was pretty uneventful, i.e. dull, apart from the Serpentine Pavilion that I took a quick detour into as I walked through Hyde Park. Despite having little to look at the walk was a success in that I got lots of steps in (around 10k) and was able to catch up on lots of podcasts.

This Gurteen Knowledge Cafe was slightly different in that we did not swap tables or form a circle at the end but it was essentially the same in that we had a facilitator, Eric Lynn, introduce the subject and then we carried on the conversation at our tables before summarising as a group at the end.

Eric introduced us to his invention, cultureQs, which he had developed over a number of years as a way of accelerating cultural change by getting people to share things about themselves. The game like format produced a neutral environment in which to ask and discuss some difficult topics.

I'll call cultureQs a game just because it is a short easy word and it looks like a game. In practice it is a technique with a tool.

Eric started by showing us his idea of the seven components of culture, e.g. ethnic, beliefs and organisation. I was surprised to see that he had age and gender in there but not class. Perhaps that is an English thing, but I doubt it.

After a brief introduction to the game we were left to play it on our tables. We had four people on ours only two of whom, Conrad and myself, knew each other beforehand.

The point of cultureQs is that the game format decides which questions to ask. We moved around the board using a die, as in Ludo or Snakes and Ladders, and the places we landed on determined which question was asked. The person whose go it was answered the question first and then the other three of us did.

There was lots of agreement on the first question about good managers, and so we learned little from this. There was less agreement on how to work with business partners and I was the odd one out here as my company has a very formal approach to this, partially dictated by fairness and anti-bribery legislation.

I felt that some of the questions were too formulaic, like answering a Prince2 exam. and others were on generic topics, like equal rights, and so did not reveal much about us as people.

I wondered why the questions were set as a game when they could, for example, have been asked randomly just by shuffling the pack and each person taking the next card. I also wondered what the point of the game was, i.e. how it ended. I was able to ask Eric this in the group session at the end and he said that the game format with the board gave the players a focus and that the game had no end, it would just be stopped after a set period of time, around 70 minutes, but being a game meant that the players stepped into game mode and were more prepared to answer the questions.

We decided that the point was to get us to find our more about each other and that the blue rootQs were best for those so we ignored the board and the die and just answered those instead.

The other tables liked the game more than we did which may have been due to the way that we worked as a group or to the questions that came up in the short time that we played the game.

As a way of learning about people, I was reminded of two questions that Robert Elms asks his Listed Londoners, You have a day off, what do you do? and Where would you take a visitor? If I was setting the questions then I would include these two.

I was not convinced by the implementation of cultureQs but I could see the merit of asking these sorts of questions when getting teams to try and understand each other better and of asking them in a controlled manner in a neutral space. It is also fair to point out that I played the game for about half an hour in an artificial situation (we were not colleagues who had to work together), that the game was developed over several years of use with clients and has been used hundreds of times since being published.

The Gurteen Knowledge Cafe again proved itself to be a good way to explore these ideas and it was also good to catch up with some Gurteen regulars (e.g. Keith, Conrad, Sally-Ann and Noeleen) as well as meeting some new people too. It was another good evening spent stimulating new ideas with interesting people, and that is what Gurteen Knowledge Cafes are all about.

Exploring Open Data at the Gurteen Knowledge Cafe

Gurteen Knowledge Cafés do not come along that often and when they do it is often at short notice and I sometimes find that I have already booked something for that evening, even though I usually book my theatre at fairly short notice too. When I can get to one then I do because I always find them stimulating, which is what happens when you get a room full of bright enthusiastic people together and hit them with a conversation stick.

The theme of this event was Transparency and Open Data, a hot topic indeed. Making it hotter was having it hosted by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) who were at the forefront of opening up government (our?) data for wider use.

As usual the evening started off with some casual networking and then some more formal speed-networking before we sat down to hear the speakers kick-off the discussions.

The usual caveat; what follows is a mixture of what various people said and what I wrote at the time modified by my further thoughts when writing this up. None of the comments are attributable to anybody and all the errors are mine.

The website Data.gov.uk lists all of the government data sets. There were 2,4000 of them! Data was being opened to improve transparency, enable internal improvement within the government and to boost the economy. A value of £1.8bn had been put on this but I remain very sceptical on that.

A big issue with sharing data is understanding how it is structured and what the values actually mean. For example, is a postcode one item of data or two and does a gender value of "0" mean male, female or unknown? There are data standards in some areas to let organisations co-operate, e.g. banks on sending payments, but there are few of these examples and they cover quite narrow and very specific fields.

Another big issue is the accuracy of the data. I have not had proper data on the 371 bus times for months with my two nearest stops not included in the feed.

This issues of what the data means and how accurate it is brings us back again to that all important topic of Information Literacy. Open Data is only useful if it is understood properly and is accurate.

Open Data has many passionate advocates and great claims are made for it but the success stories are few and relatively minor. Things that have worked reasonably well include maps, transport routes and timetables, and data from the financial markets.

The government's approach is to throw its data out there in the expectation that somebody will want to use it but this is a shotgun approach and most of the data misses. A better approach might be to let potential users approach government bodies and ask for the data that they want to use.

For example, I would be very interested in a simple way of accessing planning data across local authorities (within just one authority would do for a start!). It is incredibly hard to find out simple information like how old a building is and how tall it is.

Personal data is another important issue and this has two sides to it, e.g. the doctor and the patient where one needs information about the other in order to help them.

The various table discussions and the large circle discussion that closed the evening where interesting and stimulating and I was an active participant in both (no surprises there then). It felt a little as if we were going around some old circles at time and while the conversations were fun I am not sure that I got much new out of them.

At some point in the evening I wrote "Knowledge is Beautiful" and that seems like a good note to end on.

Exploring Gamification at the Gurteen Knowledge Cafe

The word "gamification" has got a lot of use in recent years as a term to describe a set of tools that encourage different behaviours. It is much like "nudge" in the respect. But despite this heavy use it was still very much a mystery to me so I jumped at the chance to attend a Gurteen Knowledge Cafe on the subject.

This was held at the Westminster Business School which was both very convenient for me, it is just by Baker Street station, and a very hood place for the session thanks to the large square room that we were in.

There were, as usual, many new faces there among the many regulars and it was good to have the initial speed-networking session to talk to some of them.

Our guide for the evening was Andrzej Marczewski. His day-job was Internal Web Manager for Capgemini UK and gamification was a passion that he was developing both inside and outside of that role.

Andrzej kicked-off the discussions which we then continued in small groups at our tables, where we moved around a couple of times to cross-fertilise our ideas, and then as a group when we came back together in a circle. What follows is me trying to make sense of the sessions rather than a report of what happened. There is no chronology and no attribution.

The main strand of gamification is to bring elements from games in to the real-world to encourage specific behaviours. It is about making work slightly less horrible.

A simple example of this is a app like FourSquare which uses a league table, badges and mayorships to encourage people to use it to check-in to places using the app.

This gave me an immediate problem as I am a fairly heavy FourSquare user but I am not interested in any of those gaming elements. I use it to tell me when I was last at a venue and how many times I have been there.

Other popular websites/apps that use simple game elements include Klout (ranking), TripAdvisor (contributor level), Twitter (number of followers) and Google (web stats).

Another game element that we discussed was instant feedback and I had a problem with this too. This, and other elements, were not limited to games. For example, an airplane's cockpit is full of devices that give instant feedback. So to claim this as gamification seemed to be stretching the definition.

Similarly missions are a game feature but they also exist in real-life as tasks and projects. The same is true of progress bars.

A slightly less well-defined element of gaming is its informality where it is possible to learn the game by trying things out, often without any instructions, and with no serious consequences from losing. In contrast, business procedures tend to be well documented and the outcome is expected to be right first time. Perhaps it is work if I tell you to do it but a game if you decide to do it yourself.

The flip-side of gamification is gaming where people exploit weaknesses in the new rules. An example of this could be to post lots of trivial entries to a knowledge store when people are rewarded for the number of entries posted. Incentives distort behaviour, and this is a problem.

A contextual measure, e.g. peer feedback on the articles, would be harder to game but would also be much harder to collect fairly and the cost of doing this could be more than any benefits achieved by adding gamification in the first place.

If a game has a winner then it has many more losers. People could be put off playing the game if, for example, it was obvious that they were never going to get anywhere near the top of the leaderboard.

It is easy to find success stories for gamification, publications like HBR survive on their success stories, but the failures are out there too. It is just that nobody is shouting out about them too much. One that was mentioned was the endorsement system introduced by LinkedIn which nobody had a good word for.

Exhibitions often have games for children, to keep them occupied while their parents do the serious work of viewing the exhibition, but why not make this a game for adults too?

What was missing for me from the discussion was any remotely firm definition of what a game is or what the elements of a game are that can be used in gamification. It seemed to me that gamification thrived on this ambiguity by being able to find something game-like in any success story. That may be good for the people in Team Gamification but of little use to the rest of us trying to learn from the example.

The wider field of design, as discussed at the BCS recently, seemed to cover all of gamificaction and more. Design uses a whole series of tools and techniques to try and modify behaviour and does not care whether any of these originated in, or are also used in, games.

I left the discussion probably more cynical about gamification than when I started and that was because it was a good discussion that had allowed me to explore, test and define my scepticism.

TFPL Connect: Supporting the Hillsborough Independent Panel

TFPL Connect events are always quick to fill and so I am always quick to get by booking request in. I was especially keen to attend this one as it covered a ground-breaking real-world example.

The topic was the Information Management work behind the Hillsborough Independent Panel who issued their report on the disaster in September 2012. Our guide was Jan Parry who led their IM work.

To help us understand the context of the work that the panel was asked to Jan gave us a summary of the history of the Hillsborough incident and the responses to it.

Not surprisingly the Hillsborough story was quiet harrowing and there was a very solemn mood in the room. It almost seemed disrespectful to take note. What was clear was that some obvious mistakes were made before, during and after the incident. The famous decision to open the gates may have been one of the bigger errors but it was by no means the big only one in a depressingly long list.

The Hillsborough Independent Panel was established by the Labour Government in January 2010 to "oversee the release of documents related to the 1989 Hillsborough football disaster". It was not the panel's role to recommend or judge but to provide the information so that others could.

Collecting the information was a Herculean task involving many agencies including more than one Police Force, health services, coroners, football authorities, local councils and, of course, the families.

The panel knew that there was a lot of documentation from the previous enquiries and they managed to uncover a lot more, even rescuing some from a skip.

The next task was to catalogue each piece so that it could be put in the appropriate places in the story. This enabled the story to be presented by time, by place, by organisation, by victim etc.

All of these documents were scanned and the originals returned. They were then redacted where necessary and published, or disclosed in the terminology of the Panel. There are over 300,000 documents on the Panel's website.

The discovery, cataloguing and disclosure of the documents was a worthy endeavour and I would like to see this approach adopted in other investigations, e.g. Jimmy Savile, Howard Shipman or Bloody Sunday. This neutral approach to getting to the truth reminded me of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission established by South Africa which has been copied by other post-conflict countries.

The Panel had relied heavily on the goodwill of all of the agencies involved to provide the documents required and any future similar investigation would probably require a change in the law to force compliance.

The Panel also came up with recommendations on how agencies like the police and coroners should keep their records.

Despite the cause of the inquiry, hearing about the working of the Panel was an interesting and positive experience. The careful and dispassionate examination and ordering of the documents was a major achievement.

Jan Parry told the story clearly and fully making this an exceptional talk, and not just for Information Management professionals.

After the talk there was the usual networking eased with wine. I found plenty of people to talk to and plenty of things to talk about and was one of the last to leave.

TFPL Connect events are (usually) very good and this one was one of the very best. It was a most satisfactory evening on all counts.

Useful BCS talk on Differentiation by Design

It is ironic that working away from London for much of the last few years has kept me away from many of my Continuing Professional Development (CPD) activities and I had not been to a British Computer Society (BCS) talk since the one on Data Quality in May 2011.

I returned this time to hear about Differentiation by Design - The art and science of a great user experience from Dug Falby of Avanade.

Dug started by asking a few questions to find out who is audience was an what they wanted. It always helps to meet expectations to know what they are. Not too surprisingly, most of the people there were techies and were looking for something on the science of User Interface design.

We got some science immediately with a formula:
Adoption = Alignment x Value / Context (of use)

The function of the thing being designed is important but it is just a basic requirement. Softer things like beauty, emotion and meaning all matter. Ask any iPhone user why they bought one to see this.

Dug showed a clip of the famous case where a set of stairs was changed in to a keyboard to encourage people to use that rather than the escalator next to it. This is a good example of how good design led to behavioural change.

A good design starts with understanding what behaviour change we are trying to create. Dug gave quick descriptions of tools available to make these changes, e.g. Social Proof, Curiosity, Pattern Recognition, Peak-End Results, Recognition over Recall, Gifting, Delighters and Anchoring & Adjustment. Some of these tools also come under the category of Gamification which has had much publicity in recent years though it still seems to be much more of an art than a science.

An example of Recognition over Recall is Google's prompts for search terms where it tries to recognise what you are looking for based on what you and others have searched for previously.

Anchoring & Adjustment is about setting expectations (anchor) and then moving from this (adjustment). We did an exercise on this where we had to guess the value of two objects and on the card we had to put our answers on we also had to write down a price given to us individually. Overall, those that had to write the higher prices guessed higher values for the objects.

A more common example of this is a restaurant wine lists where more people by a wine that is around the third least expensive. Knowing this, restaurants compose their lists accordingly, e.g. by putting higher priced wines on that they do not expect to sell many of but it makes the rest of us feel as though we have not been that extravagant when we have paid £30 for a bottle.

In response to a question at the end, Dug said that the Business Analysis tool Use Case (which shows which tasks each set of user will want to perform) is insufficient as it misses Context (see formula above). It is not enough to know what task the user wishes to perform, the design also needs to take account of their motivation and mood. For example, do they care if the job is done well or not?

In the networking session after the talk and Q&A I had a quick word with Dug to follow up on some of this. I was interested in designing for two customers, e.g. a supermarket is designed for the shoppers' benefit in that it is easy to navigate, find the things that they want and to pay for them, but it is also designed for the supermarket's benefit by encouraging shoppers to buy more things and more profitable things.

This conversation leads to the Dark Side of confusing food labels and special offers that prove to be more expensive than the basic price. Here the good design is wholly in the supermarket's favour at the expense of shoppers.

The networking session was fuelled by the usual generous selection of sandwiches and wine. For some reason the BCS still advertise this part of the evening with a picture of me searching for the vegetarian option.

The session was not quite what I expected as I thought we were going to get something specific on, for example, fonts, buttons, colours and dialogue flows. I suspect that most of the techies there were hoping for something like this too.

As an aside, this gives me an excuse to reprint one of my favourite cartoons on design. (Sadly the Stuff That Happens blog is no longer available and I had to pull the picture from another site).

However, what we got was more about behaviour and motivation and so was perfect for a Business Consultant like myself.

I found it to be an informative, entertaining and provocative session and that is exactly the sort of thing that I like.

It helped that Dug had a lot of experience of the subject and was able to pepper his talk with real-world examples to help to make his point. I would much rather hear about how things did work in the past than how people anticipate they will work in the future.

Design is a vital component of every business solution, whether it involves IT or not, and this was a useful introduction to that fuzzy realm.

Conversational Leadership at the Gurteen Knowledge Cafe

This was most unusual Gurteen Knowledge Cafe with David Gurteen leeding a discusion on how the ideas behind the Gurteen Knowedge Cafe could be expanded in to something that David called Conversational Leadership.

We were gathered in the Westminster Business School as guests of Gurteen regular Keith Patrick. We had been there before and it was a good place to be.

It was billed as come at 6 for a 6:30 start. I took an unusual route, via Richmond and Willesden Junction, and still managed to arrive just a minute or two after 6. At first I thought that I had got the timings wrong as there were already twenty or so people there. I was not the only keen one then.

We kicked off at 6:30 as planned with David as our facilitator. He then broke two of his own conventions by not starting with a speed-networking session and then talking for longer than the recommended maximum. But these were conventions rather than rules and no serious harm was done.

David explained that he had been running his Knowledge Cafes for 12 years. He had started them as a response to the death-by-powerpoint style of conference sessions with the aim of making the dialogue between presenter and audience more conversational.

Conversations are the natural way to share knowledge and a lot of conversational tools are used within Knowledge Management, e.g. anecdote circles and after action reviews. In other formats we should change the agenda to allow time for reflection, conversation and question.

Conversational Leadership was the synthesis of all the lessons David had learnt from his many conversations about conversations. He defined this as, "Conversational Leadership is a style of working where everyone in an organization, especially managers, understand the transformative power of conversation and take a conversational approach to the way that they work and interact with people."

Conversations are necessary and are used widely but are not managed very well. For example, there is often too much talking at and not enough talking with.

David closed by putting this question to the group, How do we each bring conversations into our work?

We then followed the usual Knowledge Cafe of discussing the question in small groups (4 to 6 typically) in three rounds to cross-fertilise ideas and then coming together in one large circle for a final round-up of ideas.

What follows is my notes from the four sessions refined by some reflection since then.

I had an attempt to differentiate conversations from other dialogues a few years ago and I think that my musings on conversations then are still valid. What is needed now is to dig in to the central box to understand conversations better.

The term "conversation" covers a wide range of activities. Some have specific objectives (e.g. project review) while some are much looser (e.g. catch-up). Some are to exchange information while others are to build connections and networks. Some conversations are arranged (meetings etc.) but others are unplanned (meet at the coffee point).

There are times when conversations are not the answer. For example, the best way to get across simple information to a lot of people is via a presentation, or even the less personal email.

The conversational style suggests a dialogue between equals and so they are less likely to work in, say, a manager/employee relationship. Even if the manager wants to be open and conversational the employee is likely to be wary of being too open because of the possible consequences.

Conversations need a place. We enjoy conversations, we have them in the pub etc. for their own value. Physical conversations are still far more effective than electronic ones, which is why we still use them.

If a conversation has a clear objective then it needs some management to get there. These management tools include artefacts (e.g. agenda) and roles (e.g. chairman and recorder).

Managing participation to ensure that everybody has the opportunity to contribute and that nobody dominates or deflects the conversation is a separate matter and applies to all conversation types, though to varying extents. For example, in a project review the only topic should be the project and it is important to ensure that everybody has the opportunity to raise any issues whereas the subjects covered in a pub conversation are unpredictable and it does not matter if somebody chooses not to say very much.

Some of the things that I need to do to improve my work conversations are to go in to our Kings Place office once a week to find some colleagues to chat to and to identify a circle of people that I should keep in regular contact with.

There is a 2x2 matrix on conversations inside me trying to get out but I am not yet sure what the axes are. On the short-list are things like clarity of purpose and structure. In the middle I want to put some conversation types, such as meeting, speed-dating, workshop, gossip, catch-up, morning payers and wash-up. I think what I need to do is to identify all of the types of conversation there are and then tease out the differences between them.

This was another excellent Gurteen Knowledge Cafe. It confirmed that conversations are key and I am interested to see where David goes with his idea of Conversational Leadership to make more of them.

LIKE 52: Content Strategy

It is a sign of a good event that I do not get to write it up until a few days, weeks or even months afterwards. A good concert I can describe immediately but an event that gets me thinking takes longer as I need time to let the new thoughts organise themselves/

That is why on 28 March I am writing up LIKE52 which happened on 27 February (that's the date I've posted it under).

The subject of the event was Content Strategy and as everything we write is "content" it is a useful area to have a strategy on. Other people thought so too and the meeting was packed.

We were back in the The Queens Arms in Warwick Way by Victoria where we had been in November. If this is to be LIKE's new home for a while then that suits me fine as living in south-west London I am a lot closer to Victoria than I am to Farringdon. Location apart, the new venue was much like the previous ones, a cosy room above a trendy pub.

Our guide for the evening was Lauren Pope of Brilliant Noise. She came well prepared with a presentation and exercises for us to do. She also tried some innovative technology to broadcast her presentation to our phones and tablets but the pub's wi-fi was not up to the task and we had to abandon that plan. The room was small enough for that not to matter.

Lauren took us through their framework for developing a Content Strategy. There was nothing particularly new in this approach but it looked sensible enough and pieces did fit well together.

The best part of the session was the way that Lauren gave a brief explanation of each step and then gave us an exercise to work on in small groups. We then discussed what we had done with the whole room.

This was a very effective way to embed and extend the learning.

As usual I tried to juggle participating in the discussions, taking notes and tweeting (though a search for #LIKE52 tweets suggests that I failed at the later) and then I played around with the notes as I wrote them up to give them structure and to add further thoughts.

I had a range of examples in mind as I did the exercises and these were the various small organisations that I have some content responsibilities for (usually maintaining their websites).

Purpose. This is a bit like a mission statement and explains simply what the organisation is trying to achieve with its content. It needs to be urgent and specific.

My example, the Kingston upon Thames Society wants its name/brand to be better known to encourage membership.

Principles. These are the rules of the game. The Government has ten including start with needs, do less, do the hard worked to make it simple, sharing is more important than control.

Mine were we have no secrets and members get more than the public.

Principles are good but how do you get people to follow them?

Platforms. These are the authoring tools, e.g. CMS, used to create the content and the publishing tools used to make it available.

In my examples the CMS is defined for each website and I use Twitter and Facebook to promote the content. I also issue press releases to the local newspaper.

Processes. Robust processes are needed to create, publish and evaluate content. They need to include archive and destruction as well.

In my case I have got a simple list of actions for publishing content which, for example, has me write the full version of the story for my personal blog, an edited and less opinionated version for the members' newsletter and a summary of this for our website. New entries on the website are announced on Twitter and Facebook.

People. This is the usual step of matching the process steps to the organisation so that everybody knows what their responsibilities are.

In my case the people part is easy, I am the webmaster and somebody else writes the newsletter.

Performance. This is about measuring success and is harder than it looks. Simple measures, such as Shares and Likes, are easy to count but are easy to distort and do not link directly to the original purpose defined in the first step.

Forrester's Engagement Framework is one way that this can be addressed but it still lacks the link between the Content Strategy and business outcomes. This is not surprising as advertising has always had the same problem.

In my case I am happy to use the simplest metrics, page visits etc., and to hope that these are an indicator of the impact of my content.

Summary. It was an excellent session and my brief notes do not do it justice.

Close. Then the food came and we moved to the next stage of the evening with more conversations and, in my case at least, more drinks to go with my meal. I managed to move around a little to catch-up with some people and also to congratulate Lauren on her presentation.

LIKE 52 was Classic LIKE with great content and motivated people.

My CV as a word cloud

I had generated a word cloud from my CV using Wordle before and I thought that it would be interesting to do so again to see if the changes that I had made to it, particularly the addition of my recent projects, would make much difference. It did.

The work that I do does not vary that much between assignments but the job titles that I am given do, and so I am pleased to see that the new Wordle shouts out "Business Consultant". It is also clear that I usually work in projects.

What is missing is my interest in Knowledge Management. That is because I do most of that that out of hours with the likes of LIKE, TFPL and Gurteen and so it is not in my CV which just covers what I am paid to do in the office. I must work on that.

TFPL Connect: What a difference a web makes

I had various reasons for wanting to go to this TFPL Connect meeting.

I had missed some TFPL Connect events for various reasons, the subject matter interested me and the speaker Dame Wendy Hall and I studied Maths at Southampton University around the same time, we were not in the same year but I think we overlapped.

At first I was wait-listed, as were lots of other people, but I was saved when the high demand caused TFPL to move the event to a bigger venue so that more people, people like me, could attend.

We were in the Grand Connaught Rooms which made it an easy walk for me down from Kings Cross. That's my excuse for being the first person there. That also meant that I was the first to tuck in to the sparkling wine and nibbles that I was not expecting to see until after the talk.

The pre-talk drinks included the usual networking and I spoke to several people that I knew. Some of them claimed that this was their first TFPL event, this surprised me as I had known them for so long and I had assumed that everybody in the LIKE and Gurteen circles also went to TFPL events.

After the small talk we were politely ushered in to the conference room for the main talk.

Wendy Hall took us through a brief history of the internet, which has only had a brief history. She spent a bit of time, understandably on the start of the story. Understandably because she has worked with Tim Berners-Lee for some years (not quite from the beginning) and understandably because getting the initial architecture right was key to its rapid adoption and growth.

For the mid-life of the internet, Wendy used this familiar chart and teased out some key points from it, especially the relationships between the developments.

For example, Google could only exist once there were sufficient pages on the internet and enough people reading them to warrant a search engine and for there to be enough links between the pages for their algorithm to work. Similarly the (relatively) recent rise of applications like Facebook and Twitter has needed the increased bandwidth and mobile capabilities.

The growth in the internet is now driven by individuals. It is ordinary people who are uploading photos, swapping links and writing comments.

Wendy then told us something about her current work and her expectations for the future.

The next step is linked data, rather than linked pages and while corporates led on publishing documents it is government agencies that are leading on open data.

In the UK, these initiatives are spearheaded by the Open Data Institute founded by, that man again, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, also of Southampton University. I saw him talk on the semantic web at the Royal Society and was not convinced then. I'm still not convinced.

Massive Open On-line Courses (MOOCS) have the possibility to reform education by making good quality courses widely available at low cost.

Wendy would like to build a Web Observatory to explore and map the web. We have built it but we do not know much about how it behaves.

Wendy spoke for the best part of an hour and then took several questions. It was a good talk and the questions took us in to some interesting areas of speculation, such as what might happen with the increasing amount of personal data that is being collected on us all.

I would have preferred to have spent more time talking about the future but the background is important and not everybody there had lived through it.

After the talk there was more networking and more drinks to go with it, possibly more than was strictly necessary, and some very nice canapés too. I spoke to lots of people including several that I had not met before. As always, these conversations were an important part of the evening.

Having been the first to arrive I was among the last to leave which is proof enough of how much I loved the event.

TFPL has gone though several changes in the years that I have known them, including three owners and more offices than that, but they have kept the KM community that started, for me, with the Bath Club going all that time. Long may they do so.

LIKE 50: The Business Case for Collaboration

LIKE meetings have had a few homes in the organisation's short life and in November it moved again, this time to The Queen's Arms in Victoria. This was chosen to be convenient for our speaker, Jacob Morgan author of The Collaborative Organisation, who was a keynote speaker at the Online Information 2013 conference that was happening nearby.

The venue may have been different but everything else about the evening was the same, which meant that it was another good evening. I was sat at the risotto table at one end of the room with a good view of my fellow diners and the speaker.

LIKE meetings are always interactive, though the means of interaction varies, and Jacob kept to this rule by asking us for examples and questions as he told us his story arguing the case for collaboration at work. This was familiar territory for most LIKErs but Jacob introduced some new perspectives which kept the familiar fresh and interesting.

As usual, I tried to keep notes of what the speaker said, comments made by other people and my own thoughts. I was also trying to tweet some of the highlights and to take some photos of the event. And they say men cannot multi-task.

This is what I captured during our conversation on conversations.

The Millennials bring new ways of working into companies.

Older staff are leaving taking their knowledge with them.

Networks now break outside of the company which used to be the natural boundary of employees' interactions. Now it is often as easy to communicate with somebody in another company as in your own.

The Work/Life balance rules changed. The company used to set the rules, now employees do, e.g. deciding on when and where to work.

Work is still structured in some ways, e.g. need to check work emails etc.

Some organisation just don't get it, e.g. banning Facebook at work. Millennials would rather earn less and and work the way that they want to than work for dinosaur companies. The balance of power has shifted towards employees with the right skills.

Zombie workers is an issue. Companies make employees work at home to save accommodation costs and then leave them alone. They become disengaged employees with little loyalty to the company.

Paying for education is not an obvious benefit especially if the job is boring. Job security is a myth, so why do a boring job? Portfolio working is a new option.

Big companies are relatively new phenomenon (created by industrialisation and globalisation) and are inherently inefficient and/or leaderless, e.g. a leader cannot possibly direct 200k people.

Yammer works as a business tool but is not a social network. Face to a Face is still is important.

It may have been familiar territory but it was fertile territory and it produced some new insights, particularly with respect to the diminishing role of companies.

LIKE 45: Strictly Open

LIKE (London Information and Knowledge Exchange) always has interesting talks so my simple rule of thumb is to go to all that I can get to and not to worry too much what the actual subject.

And that's how I found myself at a talk on open data in academic research, which I found interesting.

We had three guides to take us through the topic, Ross Mounce of the Open Knowledge Foundation, Velichka Dimitrova, OpenEconomics coordinator, and John Murtagh a Project Officer whoo is Training in Data Management at the University of East London. Together they gave us a broad and consistent view of the subject.

As always I struggled to mix paying attention with taking notes and tweeting, so what follows is somewhat chaotic and I've applied some post-event clean-ups and analysis to try and make sense of it all. The mistakes are mine, not the speakers'.


Publishers have a monopoly on the academic papers they publish, irrespective of academics' wishes.

Academic material is non substitutable, there is only one source.

Research literature has a wider use beyond academia but they have no access to it. This is a block on further research and, hence, progress.

A lot of research is publicly funded but then hidden behind pay walls. Downloaded PDFs are not allowed to be mined electronically.

There is a basic conflict of interest at the heart of this debate; profit (for publishers etc.) v shared knowledge leading to new discoveries. Open Data helps us to stand on the shoulder of giants.

Need to share research data to understand/challenge the research, hence the new topic of Research Data Management.

Access to the data is required but it must also be controlled, i.e. used properly.

Need access to the publish data alongside the article that comes to conclusions from it. The data and data collection are separately citable. The data may even be more valuable than the report summarising it and the collection of data is a skill in its own right.

Data are information, and librarians know how to manage information.

My summary of the summary is that we have been used to KM being at the top of a Data > Information > Knowledge pyramid and that means that the importance of Data has sometimes been overlooked.

After the talks LIKE does what it always does and the conversations continued over food and drinks as the social element of the evening came to the fore.

Collaboration at the Gurteen Knowledge Cafe

The Gurteen Knowledge Community returned to the Westminster Business School to discuss collaboration.

This was my second time there and that last was with Gurteen too. Unfortunately that was a few years BB (Before Blog) so I do not know exactly when that was or what we discussed.

I do remember enough of the venue though to notice some of the changes that had been made in the intervening years. This time we were in a large room of the main reception area with glass wall on two sides. That made us very visible and apparently that had taken some getting used to by some of the staff but I have worked in open plan offices for many years so the visibility did not matter to me.

Our host for the evening was Gurteen Cafe stalwart Keith Patrick, as it had been the last time that we were there.

Keith opened by saying a little about Westminster University and I was surprised to hear that it was celebrating its 175th birthday.

We were then given our topic for the evening - collaboration.

Keith made the point that in recent years new technologies have brought us more tools to collaborate with but these had not made collaboration more natural or more common.

We were asked to consider how we could encourage collaboration, and to do this with our own organisations in mind rather than treating this as an academic exercise.

As is usual at Gurteen Cafes, we discussed this in small groups of 4 to 6 people for about fifteen minutes or so then we moved tables to mix the conversations for another fifteen minutes and then swapped again to mix some more for a further fifteen minutes. This cross-fertilisation of ideas by moving people around is a key element of the evenings and is instrumental to their success.

These are some of the notes that I took during these conversations.

The new technologies can be useful but they are not a prerequisite. Old technologies can work too, e.g. email. We should use what is available and what people are comfortable with.

Whatever tools we use we need to be prepared to seed and moderate conversations until momentum builds and the conversations become self-sustaining.

Two motivators for collaboration are learning and boasting.

There needs to be a purpose for collaboration and this needs to be understood by everybody in the conversation. This could be as simple and specific as saying what information is required (e.g. examples of good practise) or as broad as a framework for contribution explaining the scope of the conversations and the rules that apply, e.g. it must be work related and behaviour must be professional.

One approach is to create a place to share, e.g. a group of experts. There is prestige of being seen to be an expert.

It is not always down to the facilitator, we could all Invite people to participate, e.g. by asking, "Why don't you blog?", or by asking questions to get somebody to answer.

Must be realistic about what you can achieve, even with a lot of pushing not everybody will join in.

If collaboration is seen as an important part of corporate culture then companies should explain the ground rules during recruitment.

Should also be prepare to criticise bad behaviour, e.g. knowledge hoarding, use sticks as well as carrots.

Seeking is as important as sharing, receive as well as give.

We make sharing and collaboration decisions all the time, but we do not always recognise them as such.

The value of sharing can come from the connections that are made. Connections make conversations that build trust.

Collaboration is a selfish activity. All parties have personal motivations for asking for and giving information.Why are we all collaborating at the Knowledge Cafe tonight?

Sharing is the same as learning. It helps us to understand what we know.

We must be a really nice group of people. Almost all our ideas for encouraging collaboration are carrots, there are few sticks.

In a slight change from the usual we collected our ideas on post-it-notes which we then clustered on one of the walls. I am not sure that this step added much value from the table conversations but most people seemed to get involved in this so I may have been in a minority in thinking this.

The evening ended with a whole group session where we exchanged our main learnings from the evening. This part was facilitated by David himself.

That ended the Cafe as such though a few of us went to the Wetherspoons across the road to have some more conversations, they are addictive.

This was another highly interesting Gurteen Knowledge Cafe and it managed to shed some new light on an old topic. There were real lessons learnt that each of us could take back to our organisations.

LIKE 42: How to do an Elevator Pitch

The prospect of an evening discussing Elevator Pitches did not really appeal to me that much but it had been some months since I had managed to get to a LIKE meeting that I made the effort anyway.

It proved to be a very wise decision.

Our guide for the evening was Suzanne Wheatley of Sue Hill Recruitment. And a good guide she was too as she took us on a well-prepared journey. She is standing at the right end of the bar while we are all sat eagerly at our tables.

One of the philosophies behind LIKE is that the sessions are interactive and Suzanne's session was more interactive than most. She peppered her talk with activities for us to do that reinforced the points she was making.

There are two parts to the Elevator Pitch, the message and the messenger. Both must be right to make the required impact.

The message should contain one decent fact and one insightful question. It should be something simple and something memorable. The messenger needs to convey the message well and to inspire confidence.

You are more important than your ideas so presentation really matters. Start with a good handshake and positive eye-contact, but do that without being oppressive. That was our first exercise of the evening and we practised handshaking and maintaining eye-contact. I think that I lost the staring competition.

Next we considered our voices. This means being conscious of the volume, length and pace. We may have a lot to say but if we say too much too quickly then the main message will get lost.

In particular, we need to pause to allow time for the words to sink in.

Our exercise for this was tongue-twisters which are easy to say if you get the pace right but which breakdown if we try to say them too quickly and sound dull if we say them too slowly. It is not an easy balancing act and practise helps.

The message needs to be concise and compelling. Think about the objective? Are you selling you, the bid, the company? How do you/your company solve problems/provide value? What is the key point? What do you want to happen next?

Be excited about your main message. If you are not excited then you cannot expect your target to be.

End with a question with a yes/no answer so that you have to get a definitive response, e.g. Can I call you next week to arrange a meeting?

For our final exercise we had to invent an elevator situation and write a pitch for it. Mine was meeting our new CEO and this is what I came up with. "Hi, I'm Matthew Rees. I am in the Business Consulting division currently working on the Weymouth Water account. They are spending $10m on a new customer billing system. I have 15 years experience of implementing billing systems in utilities and telcos world-wide. Is there a role for me on this project?"

The pitch is far from ideal, and that is part of the point. It shows that you need to spend time and effort in getting them right.

Suzanne's session was excellent. It delivered good information and real value while engaging us totally in the experience.

After the formalities came the food, drink and conversations that make LIKE sessions so enjoyable. I lingered for another couple of hours just mixing and being sociable. It was a great evening, and a useful one too.

Utility Industry Achievement Awards 2012

It is about ten years since i last went to a Utility Week Dinner and then I got the dress code completely wrong.

The last one came on the back of a two day conference (normal business dress) and I assumed that the dinner would be black tie so that is all that I packed. I then discovered that we would have free reign over all the amusements at the end of Brighton Pier for which neither suit was appropriate so I made an emergency trip to Next to buy some casual clothing.

This time it was a traditional formal dinner in one of the many Park Lane hotels that specialise in large events like this.

The "black tie" bit worried me a little as while I have thirty or forty bow ties they are mostly floral ones from Liberty.

I assumed that I had a plain black tie but when I came to dress I discovered that was not the case. I settled for the nearest that I have, which is also one of my very favourites, and that is the grey on black Crash design hand-made by Cyberoptix in Detroit.

The evening started with a drinks reception and I was careful to only drink three glasses of bubbly.

We were then called to dinner and finding the table was something of a challenge as tables filled the enormous ballroom and spread out to the mezzanine floor above. There were over 1,300 people there!

Dinner was excellent and was served with great efficiency, if not always strict adherence to the silver-service code, e.g. give from the left, take from the right. I can forgive them for that though as the closeness of the tables meant that it was hard to manoeuvre between them.

Dinner over we had a short cabaret from Siren an energetic all-female string quartet who entertained well enough with some classic tunes played over a loud backing track. They also tried to be a little sultry but were less successful at this.

Then came the awards themselves with Miles Jupp doing the compère role. He made it clear that he know little about utilities or their achievements and managed to be very funny in doing so.

A steady stream of people fought their way to the stage to collect their awards and have their photos taken as proof.

I headed home not long after the awards finished, as I had my alarm set for an early start for Cardiff the next day, but the event was scheduled to run until 2am. Perhaps another year.

TFPL Connect International 2012

The last TFPL Connect event in another good year gave us a personal perspective on the changing balance of power in communication and information delivery.

But first we had an introduction from TFPL supremo Darron Chapman which gave us his view of some current trends. He also reminded us that we lost Angela Abell earlier in the year. She was a regular at TFPL events and I spoke to her many times.

Our guide for the main part of the evening was Jonathan Charles, former BBC reporter and now Director of Communications at the EBRD.

His main message was to compare and contrast his two roles and to explain how in both he tried to be a trusted source of the truth.

What follows is a mix of his comments and my reactions to them.

There used to be very few sources but they were all reliable in 1987 (25 years ago). The only people who provided the news were qualified journalists working for reputable organisations.

Now information is faster and there is more of it, more sources, but reliability is less.

In the news we are reading the first draft of history, but it will change over time when it, and its implications, is understood better. Nobody in Spain has forgotten which side people were on during the Franco regime.

The digital revolution needs trusted guides - such as the BBC. Corporate communications now better funded than journalism and is placed to fill this role, if the job is done properly.

We were shown a video of work done by the EBRD in Slovakia. I felt that we were only being told part of the story, in particular the children looked very white.

Is it really a more complex world than 25 years ago or do we just understand more about the complexity?

Can you only be trusted by being safe? By that I mean sticking to facts that are easily verifiable and lack a complex context. What is the truth about Syria?

Are the BBC really to be trusted? There have been many times when I have found it to be outrageously biased in favour of "the establishment".

Information is always seen through the somebody's biased eyes. Perhaps we should be honest and recognised our own biases, rather looking fr an absolute truth that does not exist? Are trusted guides just myths?

I think we can trust guides by making allowances for their bias when this is obvious but the BBC pretends not to have one.

As usual at TFPL Connect the main session was followed by an long networking session slightly charmed with wine and nibbles. A good group of people go to TFPL Connect and the conversations always flow widely and easily. That is why I go whenever I can.

Passion at the Gurteen Knowledge Cafe

There is so much to like about Gurteen Knowledge Cafes and that includes the different locations that it takes you to.

Our hosts for this evening was Regent's College which is a private university occupying a cosy corned of Regents Park. We were there to take advantage of their wooden floor in the main hall.

After some very welcome refreshments and the usual introductions, including the traditional speed-networking, we were set on our way by Alida Acosta.

In quite a long talk without notes or a presentation, Alida explored the role of emotion and intellect in decision making. The emotional part includes our accumulated experience to date and that is always with us and is always changing.

The tango was used as a metaphor, hence the need for a wooden floor. The Tango was invented in Argentina as a way for people to communicate when they had no common language. To dance the Tango properly you need the intellect to learn the mechanics of the steps and also the passion and confidence to let the music take you.

Given the question of passion in our working lives we formed in to groups of around six to have the conversations that define what these events are about.

As usual, with an open question to answer our conversations went all over the place and I tried to make sense of this in my notes when I was not too busy listening and talking.

We questioned whether the split between intellect and emotion was real or artificial.

I once heard that we make major decisions, like buying a house, with our hearts and then try to justify it with our heads, e.g. we tell ourselves that it is close to good schools. We seem to feel guilty that we let our hearts rules our heads.

We are generally reluctant to show, or share, emotion at work and when we do we seem to find it easier to share a gripe (e.g. bad weather) than success. The later seems a little too much like boasting.

Success is not a zero-sum gain, if we win then several other people lose.

Some people have real passion in their work, e.g. the teacher in our first group. I would stop (paid) work tomorrow if I could afford it whereas my father, also a teacher, worked for as long as he could on in to his seventies.

After three rounds of group discussion we reformed in to a large circle for a final Tango demonstration and some closing comments.

This took us in to the use of passion as a corporate imperative. Someone mentioned a job advertisement that asked for people who were passionate about clean streets. This use of the word risks devaluing it, in much the same way that "team" is now meaningless.

It struck me then that we are asked by corporates to be passionate but they do not feed that passion, if we do well they give us money which has no passion in it at all. I said that it annoyed me that theatres do the same, they keep asking me to join their supporters groups and the first thing they offer is cheaper tickets when my passion is for theatre, not cheap tickets, and the way to feed that passion is to give me access to the creatives.

Then we went to the pub.

The passions were in full flow and I had some more fantastic conversations across a range of topics and with a range of people, none of whom I knew particularly well beforehand.

I headed for home around 11pm, some five hours after the event started, still buzzing and totally invigorated.

And that's the magic of a Gurteen Knowledge Cafe and why passion was such an appropriate topic.

Gurteen Knowledge Cafe on behavioural metaphors

You can always rely on a Gurteen Knowledge Cafe for sparkling conversations and this one was no exception.

Our conversation leader for the evening was Arthur Shelley founder of The Organizational Zoo and designer of metaphors that it uses.

Arthur bounced around the room as he introduced the topic and led us through a couple of exercises. The energy was infectious and there was a buzz all evening.

The Organizational Zoo looks at behaviours that can be used in conversations and looks at how those behaviours can work together or against each other.

To avoid the personal aspect of analysing behaviour, e.g. "Colin is too aggressive", it uses animal metaphors, hence the zoo. There are twenty six animals each with a set of positives and negatives; it's a little like playing top trumps.

These are described in a set of cards and it is these that we played with in our exercises.

In the first each table had to identify five animals that they thought were positive (e.g. owl) and those that are negative (e.g. piranha).

Having forced a consensus on each table we then went to see what a mess the other tables had made.

Not surprisingly, given the question and the homogeneity of the group, there was a great deal of commonality, e.g. we all liked owls and eagles, but there were some differences and it was interesting to see these.

Having learnt the ropes in the first exercise we were given something harder to do.

We had to invent a scenario and then find four animals that exhibited behaviours that were core/expected to the objective, desired/accepted, tolerated and rejected. That is four animals in each of the four categories.

We picked the scenario running a Gurteen Knowledge Cafe but other teams were more imaginative and picked things like robbing a bank.

This task was a lot more difficult as we started to think more about how the team would work together, i.e. we could tolerate some negative behaviours that could provoke conversations at the Cafe without being disruptive. In the end we found very few behaviours that were rejected and that is my real experience of the Cafes, which suggests that the model was working.

As before we moved around to look at other tables where similar discussions had been held about balancing teams and the extent to which any behaviours were completely rejected.

Of course there was more to the evening than I have summarised here and the room was rich with conversations as we all got totally immersed in the lesson, participation and sharing.

Also of course, the conversations continued in a nearby pub until the call of the last reasonable train home gradually pulled us all away.

The Organizational Zoo offers another way of looking at behavioural styles that sits nicely alongside things like Myers-Briggs and has the advantage of using easily understandable and neutral metaphors. And a metaphor is a glorious thing.

LIKE Ideas 2012 The Business of Social Media

The London Information and Knowledge Exchange (LIKE) has quickly become an enduring success and so they thought that they would try stepping up from the monthly meetings above a pub to a full half-day conference.

The monthly meetings are excellent, and I go to as many as I can, but they are limited by the size of the room and the time available for an evening event. A conference answers both problems.

Such is the reputation of LIKE that it was quickly booked. Many of the people, like myself, taking the time and money from our own pockets rather than trying to convince our employers to contribute.

The setting for the conference was The Old Sessions House on the opposite side of Clerkenwell Green from the pub where the monthly meetings are held.

I arrived in good time for a bit of pre-session mingling over coffee and biscuits (you are allowed to eat biscuits at conferences whatever diet you are on) and I was quickly in to conversations with some familiar faces.

Jennifer then rang the bell to summon us up to the conference room where I was delighted to see that the conference literature was provided in a cotton shoulder bag.

Opening the session was Bertie Bosredon of Breast Cancer Care (BCC).

And what a strong start this was.

Bertie told us the story of social media adoption at BCC. It's clearly a story that he has told many times before as he told it with great fluidity.

It was an extremely rich talk too explaining along the way how his grandmother uses Skype, how BCC's social media champion of the week gets to look after their mascot Twevor, and how BCC, inspired by their staff, have used all the main media social media platforms to good effect.

It was an exciting and inspiring talk that covered an awful lot of territory in a short time and it really got the conference buzzing. The best part was that this was a case study showing what BCC have already achieved with social media rather than their plans for what they hope to achieve or, even worse, a consultant's view of what an organisation like BCC could achieve.

It was the ideal start to the conference.

Next up was LIKE regular Noeleen Schenk who looked at the role of social media in academic research.

This is complicated not just by the usual problem of social media in deciding which of the many tools to use but also by the need to ensure the quality of the information gathered and the copyright of the published research.

Noeleen took us through the research lifecycle and identified social media tools that can be used at each stage.

Even if we are not researchers, we all fall in to the research lifecycle somewhere and so this was a useful session.

James Mullan of Field Fisher Waterhouse then gave us another case study, this time looking more at the technologies used.

Some of this had an all too familiar ring to it with SharePoint 2010, Confluence, Jive, Yammer and Pulse.

We also adopted SharePoint and then added Confluence because the SharePoint wiki is poor and have since taken on Yammer and, more recently, Jive, because SharePoint does not really do the conversational side of social media.

James then went on to describe their approach to social media adoption which starts with an understanding of their users and what they want to achieve and what they are comfortable with. For example, they are very busy, use email as their main means of communication and know how to use Outlook.

A more worrying view came from Simon Halberstam and Andrew Solomon of Kingsley Napley who reminded us of some of the legal implications that can arise from using social media.

As usual there were some horror stories and these were balanced with some simple sound advice, such as having a clear social media policy that explains to employees what the cannot and cannot say on external sites.

There were also some cautionary words for employers on their use of social media to screen recruits and in using friendly bloggers to promote your products or services without revealing their connection to you.

I was reassured to hear that having called several Conservative politicians some very string things on Twitter that fair comment, i.e. an opinion honestly held and based
upon facts, is a sound defence.

Our final speaker was Steve Dale who speaks with authority as he has been hands-on in Knowledge Management for as long as I have known him, which is quite a few years.

Like the opener, this also came across as a story often told, all be it with differences each time, and was all the better for that.

It was another quick sprint over a lot of ground some of it less familiar to me.

I learnt most about digital curation (e.g. Storify) and aggregation (e.g. bottlen.se), which is saying something when you consider how active I am in digital social media.

It was an excellent talk and a superb way to end the formal session.

It was a wonderful afternoon where I learnt a lot and picked up quite a few ideas of things to explore in more detail later. By any measure the conference was a complete success.

And then it got better.

We drifted downstairs for a drink reception where the conversations flowed as much as the wine.

The energy levels were amazing and that is very unusual after sitting through five conference speeches. That's a testament to all of them.

Drinked, we then walked a little down the road to be fed.

The conversations continued unabated by the transfer and the hours slipped past until I realised that it was 11pm and I really ought to think about going home.

The Like Ideas conference was an incredible amount of fun and a wonderful learning event, I do not recall when I have ever left a training event on such a high. Probably not since the IBM Consulting course that I did fifteen years ago.

There will be another LIKE Ideas conference next year and I'll be going (gods willing). I might even help to organise it, but don't let that put you off.