All posts by Richard Gayle

Science

Stop them from choking

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golf by chispita_666
The Tiger Woods Effect:
[Via The Frontal Cortex]

Success is intimidating. When we compete against someone who’s supposed to be better than us, we start to get nervous, and then we start to worry, and then we start to make stupid mistakes. That, at least, is the lesson of a new working paper by Jennifer Brown, a professor at the Kellogg school.

Brown demonstrated this psychological flaw by analyzing data from every player in every PGA tournament from 1999 to 2006. The reason she chose golf is that Tiger Woods is an undisputed superstar, the most intimidating competitor in modern sports. (In 2007, Golf Digest noted that Woods finished with 19.62 points in the World Golf Ranking, more than twice as many as his closest rival. This meant that “he had enough points to be both No. 1 and No. 2.”) Brown also notes that “golf is an excellent setting in which to examine tournament theory and superstars in rank-order events, since effort relates relatively directly to scores and performance measures are not confounded by team dynamics.” In other words, every golfer golfs alone.

Despite the individualistic nature of the sport, the presence of Woods in the tournament had a powerful effect. Interestingly, Brown found that playing against Woods resulted in significantly decreased performance. When the superstar entered a tournament, every other golfer took, on average, 0.8 more strokes. This effect was even more pronounced when Woods was playing well. Based on this data, Brown calculated that the superstar effect boosted Woods’ PGA earnings by nearly five million dollars.

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One of the things I have seen in great athletes I have known is, for want of a better term, a lack of self-awareness. They just do, They don’t think about it too much.

For example, they did not worry as much about striking out as I did. I had a talented bat, which allowed me to get a bat on almost anything. But I was not disciplined enough. If I had two strikes I would go after anything, anywhere because I did not want to strike out. I’d rather ground out by hitting a bad pitch than allow a called third strike. I was more worried about the humiliation of that one event than the larger strategic aspects.

I hated losing and would replay all the parts where if only I had done something different, then the result would have been a win. This was not something I really saw with the really great players. They just moved on, seemingly riding the vagaries of the sport with a wonderful adeptness I envied.

So it is nice to see that at the highest levels, when they really are competing with physical peers, the numbers indicate that they feel the same way. They think too much.

Now, another part of this is that once in a group of peers, such as the PGA, most people eventually find a relative plateau of effort and worry. That is, the pressure of the tour selects for golfers that can at least deal with the pressure of the Tour itself. And many golfers, week to week, do not have to really directly compete with Woods. They are in the middle, competing with the other golfers that they are used to seeing in the middle also. Familiarity means not too many worries, So they are not too worried and are not thinking too much to hurt their chances.

They find their own level and can be successful there.

It is when they have an extraordinary week, where they now move up into the elite group where overthinking can cause a problem. And, in some ways, being able to move away from the overthinking might allow them to stay in that elite group.

This sort of worry happens in many facets of life. The worry about our position, whether we are really good enough. It happens almost anytime we enter a truly novel situation.

I saw this first hand when I entered CalTech. The entire Freshman year was entirely pass/fail. Every class. Not only did this allow people to experiment and try a lot of different classes but it also provided a modicum of time to find your level without having to directly compete with others for GPA.

It removed a lot of pressure and worry. Most students had never had to think about studying in High School. They just did it. Like great athletes.

Now they were competing with other peers in ways that were completely novel and worrisome. By removing the pressure of grades, CalTech sought to ameliorate these worries. Not all the way but it was one less thing. We were less likely to choke and more likely to calm down as the novelty wore off.

So, in that first year I found a balance. I saw that there were guys that never seemed to do any homework, yet got better scores than me (Yes, they still had grades on tests, essays and such. It just did not matter for the GPA). I found that no matter how hard I studied, I just was not going to pass them. And that was fine. I saw where I fell by doing the work I was capable of.

I recognized that I was not going to be one of the elites at CalTech. And I could be okay with that. Giving us that first year to find our place in the crowd was one of the most significant things CalTech did.

And then, being a smart guy, I figured out ways to take classes that played to my strengths, used the knowledge I gained to raise my GPA every year, so that I was able to graduate with honors.

But having that break the first year permitted me to gather myself in ways that being dumped directly into competition with other might have broken me. Like a golfer who finds that there is a particular course that plays to their strengths.

It is a lesson I have held my whole life. So many organizations are designed to break people, taking only those who survive and making them the leaders, champions, etc. But that is so wasteful because there are so many others who, if given a break, a chance to find their own level, could perform quite well.

One of my advisors once said he purposefully created an environment of competition between those who work in his lab ‘The cream will rise to the top.’ Well, the cream will always rise but the process makes it curdled, And you waste so much that could have been so useful. Too many people dropped out of graduate programs, ones who could have been very good scientists, simply because the system worked by breaking its members.

It was designed to cast out those who ‘choked’. CalTech’s approach was to support everyone until they could figure out where they needed to be. Just like the middling golfers. They might not win very often but they provide some really exciting golf. Because they really are very, very good when compared to the rest of us.

We need better processes in scientific education so that more than only the elite make it through. Just as not every lawyer needs to plead in front of a jury, not every graduate student needs to get a job in academia. There are so many places where a well-trained scientist is needed.

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Open Access, Science, Web 2.0

Make it a pub

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[Crossposted at A Man with a PhD]

pub by gailf548
Participation Value and Shelf-Life for Journal Articles:
[Via The Scholarly Kitchen]

Discussion forums built around academic journal articles haven’t seen much usage from readers. Lessons learned from the behavior of sports fans may provide some insight into the reasons why.

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The scientific discussions that many researchers have found the most productive are often those sitting around a table in a informal setting, like a pub. These discussions are often wide-ranging and very open. They often produce really innovative ideas, which get replicated on cocktail napkins.

Some of the best ideas in scientific history can be found on such paper napkins. Simply allowing comments on a paper does not in any way replicate this sort of social interaction. But there already online approaches that do. We call them blogs.

Check out the scientific discussions at RealClimate, ResearchBlogging or even Pharyngula. Often the scientific discussions replicate what is seen in real life, with lots of open discussion about relevant scientific information.

If journals want to create participatory regions in their sites, they might do well to mimic these sorts of approaches. David Croty at Cold Spring Harbor has such a site. Although it has not reached the popularity of RealClimate, it is a nice beginning.

I would think that research associations, with an already large audience of members, would have an easier time creating such a blog, one that starts by discussing specific papers but is open to a wide ranging, semi-directed conversation.

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Open Access, Web 2.0

Staying up to date with twitter services

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Part 1: What are Twitter Lists?:
[Via Pistachio Consulting Inc.]

This is Part 1 of a 3-part series cross-posted from adelemcalear.com

lists-header

WHAT IS IT?

Back on September 30th, Twitter announced on their blog that they would be launching their new Lists feature to a small group of users to beta test. Lists allow Twitter users to organize the people they follow into groups. By segmenting your following list into groups, you can then filter tweets from your main stream and just view the tweets originating from a selected list. You can also subscribe to other people’s lists.

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Twitter is a social medium that has varying uses for different people. But it is obvious that it has some use for almost everyone.

When they introduce a new service, like lists, it is useful then to get up to speed quickly. This nice little series discusses the new Lists feature of Twitter. It helps prov ide some important insights into the potentials of lists and their drawbacks.

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General, Knowledge Creation, Science

Innovation on the cheap

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innovate by jordigraells>

Why Great Innovators Spend Less Than Good Ones

[Via HarvardBusiness.org]

A story last week about the Obama administration committing more than $3 billion to smart grid initiatives caught my eye. It wasn’t really an unusual story. It seems like every day features a slew of stories where leaders commit billions to new geographies, technologies, or acquisitions to demonstrate how serious they are about innovation and growth.

Here’s the thing — these kinds of commitments paradoxically can make it harder for organizations to achieve their aim. In other words, the very act of making a serious financial commitment to solve a problem can make it harder to solve the problem.

Why can large commitments hamstring innovation?

First, they lead people to chase the known rather than the unknown. After all, if you are going to spend a large chunk of change, you better be sure it is going to be going after a large market. Otherwise it is next to impossible to justify the investment. But most growth comes from creating what doesn’t exist, not getting a piece of what already does. It’s no better to rely on projections for tomorrow’s growth markets, because they are notoriously flawed.

Big commitments also lead people to frame problems in technological terms. Innovators spend resources on path-breaking technologies that hold the tantalizing promise of transformation. But as my colleagues Mark Johnson and Josh Suskewicz have shown, the true path to transformation almost always comes from developing a distinct business model.

Finally, large investments lead innovators to shut off “emergent signals.” When you spend a lot, you lock in fixed assets that make it hard to dramatically shift strategy. What, for example, could Motorola do after it invested billions to launch dozens of satellites to support its Iridium service only to learn there just wasn’t a market for it? Painfully little. Early commitments predetermined the venture’s path, and when it turned out the first strategy was wrong — as it almost always is — the big commitment acted as an anchor that inhibited iteration.

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One problem of too much money is that bad ideas get funding also. In fact, there are often many more incremental plans than revolutionary ones. They soak up a lot of time and money.

Plus they create the “We have to spend this money” rather than “Where are we going to get the money to spend?”

Innovations often result in things that save money. But they are often riskier to start with. So how to recognize them and get them the money they need, but not too much?

Encouraging people to work on ‘back burner’ projects in order to demonstrate the usefulness of the approach is one way. Careful vetting can help determine whether it can be moved to the front burner or not.

Part of any innovator’s dilemma is balancing the innovative spirit with sufficient funding to nurture that spirit, without overwhelming the innovator with the debit of too much cash.

Knowledge Creation, Open Access, Science, Web 2.0

Updated: Short answers to simple questions

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fail by Nima Badiey

NIH Funds a Social Network for Scientists — Is It Likely to Succeed?

[Via The Scholarly Kitchen]

The NIH spends $12.2 million funding a social network for scientists. Is this any more likely to succeed than all the other recent failures?

[More]

Fuller discussion:

In order to find an approach that works, researchers often have to fail a lot. That is a good thing. The faster we fail, the faster we find what works. So I am glad the NIH is funding this. While it may have little to be excited about right now, it may get us to a tool that will be useful.

As David mentions, the people quoted in the article seem to have an unusual idea of how researchers find collaborators.

A careful review of the literature to find a collaborator who has a history of publishing quality results in a field is “haphazard”, whereas placing a want-ad, or collaborating with one’s online chat buddies, is systematic? Yikes.

We have PubMed, which allows us to rapidly identify others working on research areas important to us. In many cases, we can go to RePORT to find out what government grants they are receiving.

The NIH site, as described, also fails to recognize that researchers will only do this if it helps their workflow or provides them a tool that they have no other way to use. Facebook is really a place for people to make online connections with others, people one would have no other way to actually find.

But we can already find many of the people we would need to connect to. What will a scientific Facebook have that would make it worthwhile?

Most social networking tools initially provide something of great usefulness to the individual. Bookmarking services, like CiteULike, allow you to access/sync your references from any computer. Once someone begins using it for this purpose, the added uses from social networking (such as finding other sites using the bookmarks of others) becomes apparent.

For researchers to use such an online resource, it has to provide them new tools. Approaches, like the ones being used by Mendeley or Connotea, make managing references and papers easier. Dealing with papers and references can be a little tricky, making a good reference manager very useful.

Now, I use a specific application to accomplish this, which allows me to also insert references into papers, as well as keep track of new papers that are published. Having something similar online, allowing me access from any computer, might be useful, especially if it allowed access from anywhere, such as my iPhone while at a conference.

If enough people were using such an online application then there could be added Web 2.0 approaches that could then be used to enhance the tools. Perhaps this would supercharge the careful reviews that David mentions, allowing us to find things or people that we could not do otherwise.

There are still a lot of caveats in there, because I am not really convinced yet that having all my references online really helps me. So the Web 2.0 aspects do not really matter much.

People may have altruistic urges, the need to help the group. But researchers do not take up these tools because they want to help the scientific community. They take them up because they help the researcher get work done.

Nothing mentioned about the NIH site indicates that it has anything that I currently lack.

Show me how an online social networking tool will get my work done faster/better, in ways that I can not accomplish now. Those will be the sites that succeed.


[UPDATE: Here is post with more detail on the possibilities.]

Open Access, Science, Web 2.0

A very big challenge for biopharma

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Loose coupling and biopharma:
[Via business|bytes|genes|molecules]

A few days ago, via the typical following of links that is typical of a good search and browse section on the interwebs, I chanced upon a discussion about a presentation given by Justin Gehtland at RailsConf. The talk was entitled Small Things, Loosely Joined, Written Fast and that title has been stuck in my head ever since. Funnily enough, what was in my head was not software, and web architectures, cause today, I consider that particular approach almost essential to building good applications and scalable infrastructures, and most people in the community seem to understand that (not sure about scientific programmers though). What I started thinking about was if that particular philosophy could be extended to the biopharma industry.

Without making direct analogies, but without suspending too much disbelief, one can imagine a world where drug development is not done in today’s model, but via a system consisting of a number of loosely coupled components that come together to combine cutting edge research and products (drugs) in a model that scales better and does a better, more efficient job of building and sustaining those products. One of the tenets of the loose coupling approach to scalable software and hardware is minimizing the risk of failure that is often a problem with more tightly coupled systems and in many ways the current blockbuster model is very much one where risk is not minimized and one failure along the path can result in the loss of millions of dollars. I have said in the past that by placing multiple smart bets, distributed collaborations and novel mechanisms (like a knowledge and technology exchange), we can reboot the biopharma industry, reducing costs and developer better drugs more efficiently. I don’t want to trivialize the challenge, the numerous ways in which the process can go wrong, and the vagaries of biology, but resiliency is a key design goal of high scale systems, and is one we need to build into the drug development process, one where the system chooses new paths when the original ones are blocked.

How could we build such a network model? I know folks like Stephen Friend have their ideas. Mine are ill formed, but data commons, distributed collaborations, and IP exchanges are a key component especially in an age where developing a drug is going to be a complex mix of disciplines, complex data sets and continuous pharmacavigilance. I can’t help but point to Matt Wood’s Into the Wonderful which does point to some of those concepts albeit from a computational perspective

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Designing great and awesome tools for researchers to use will be critical for successful drug development. But there also has to be a cultural change in the researchers themselves and the organizations they inhabit.

One is that the tools have to work the way scientists need them to, not what works well for developers. This is actually pretty easy now and many tools are really starting to reflect the world views of researchers in biotech, who, more times that expected, are somewhat technophobic.

This leads to the second area- researchers often need active facilitation in order to take up these sorts of tools. They need someone they trust to actually help convince them why they should change their workflows. Most will not just try something new unless they can see clear benefits.

Finally, the last thing is better training for collaborative projects. Most of our higher education efforts for training researchers makes them less collaborative. They are taught to get publications for themselves in order to gain tenure. Plus, with the competition seen in science, letting others know about your work before publication can often be harmful Large labs with many people often can quickly catch up to a smaller lab and its work.

Like in the business world, being first to accomplish something can be overtaken by a larger organization. So, many researchers are trained to keep things close to the vest until they have drained as much reputation as possible form the work.

But many of the difficult problems today can not be solved by even a large lab. It can require a huge effort by multiple collaborators. Thus, there is a movement towards figuring out how to deal with this and assign credit.

Nature just published a paper by the Polymath Project, an open science approach to the discovery of an important math problem. They addressed the problem of authorship and reputation:

The process raises questions about authorship: it is difficult to set a hard-and-fast bar for authorship without causing contention or discouraging participation. What credit should be given to contributors with just a single insightful contribution, or to a contributor who is prolific but not insightful? As a provisional solution, the project is signing papers with a group pseudonym, ‘DHJ Polymath’, and a link to the full working record. One advantage of Polymath-style collaborations is that because all contributions are out in the open, it is transparent what any given person contributed. If it is necessary to assess the achievements of a Polymath contributor, then this may be done primarily through letters of recommendation, as is done already in particle physics, where papers can have hundreds of authors.

We need to come up with better ways to design useful metrics for those that contribute to such large projects. Researchers need to know they will get credit for their work. As we do this, we need to also help train them for better collaborative work, because that is probably what most of them will be doing.

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Open Access, Web 2.0

Changing social rules

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10 Golden Rules of Social Media:
[Via Nonprofit Online News]

Yes, the title is linkbait, but I like it anyway. Aliza Sherman has been doing this almost as long as I have and her digestion of 20 plus years of experience into 10 Golden Rules of Social Media are utterly simple and powerful. They could easily be a checklist for any social media project or campaign: (1) Respect the Spirit of the ‘Net. (2) Listen. (3) Add Value. (4) Respond. (5) Do Good Things. (6) Share the Wealth. (7) Give Kudos. (8) Don’t Spam. (9) Be Real. (10) Collaborate.

In fact, it makes me think that I ought to see if I could build some research around this list. Unfortunately, the most important one (indeed the one that leads to all the other nine, as far as I’m concerned) is a challenging one to test. “Respect the spirit of the Net.” I have a solid idea of what that means and oddly, I think it’s a large part of what people pay me for. But could I build an instrument for it? I’m not so sure.

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One thing the Internet is doing is requiring us to change and adapt social interactions, to create rules that work in the new environment. Society does this in order to control behavior so that the interactions are the most productive.

We see this in many of our day-to-day interactions. It is found in how line cheats are frowned upon, how we decide who goes first through a door, how we move to the right when going up some stairs. There are many social rules that we use to function smoothly.

Now not everyone follows all the rules but the rest of us sure notice when they are broken. I would guess that much of the road range seen is due to the apparent breaking of social rules that may not actually be appropriate when in the car.

The Internet is also a new social environment and we are creating social rules just like anywhere else. These 10 rules of social media are a good start. They all help enhance what makes the web so powerful. As we gain more experience with this new social setting, we will do w better job of training each other how to behave.

Not that trolls and spam will disappear but, just as we do with someone who to break some of our current social rules, we will do a better job of isolating and ignoring their behavior so it does not do as much damage.

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Open Access, Web 2.0

Mashing up

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200910202344.jpg by foodistablog

One of the great things about openness and transparency is the ability for people to mash together various things to suit themselves. So, look at this:

Listening to: Death of an Interior Decorator from the album “Transatlanticism” by Death Cab For Cutie.

I added that with a single click in ecto, the blog editing software I use to create and publish posts. Ecto has a nice add-on that grabs the info from the song I am listening to and puts it in the post. I can set up templates with formatting so it has the links, etc. But the original template created Google search links. I simply remade the template so it links to iTunes.

I’m doing the same thing with Twitterfeed. This has allowed me to push blog posts from my different blogs (Spreading Science, Path to Sustainable and A Man with a PhD). Now I’m seeing if I can push posts to my Facebook account.

So, a simple posting can also copy the post to both Twitter ad Facebook. It looks like I do a lot but it all comes from simply clicking one button. That is what open APIs and other aspects of the web allow us to do.

It all makes it easier for the right people to get the right information at the right time.

Science

Red flags of understanding

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red flag by Luke Hoagland

Five Red Flags to Watch Out For in a Biotech, From Dendreon Co-Founder Chris Henney

[Via Xconomy ]

henneyc1 Luke Timmerman wrote:

Yesterday, we provided a rundown of the six hallmarks of a successful biotech company, according to Christopher Henney, the biotech pioneer who co-founded three of Seattle’s top biotechs—Immunex, Icos, and Dendreon. He made his remarks to an audience of about 100 investing professionals at the CFA Society meeting on Oct. 8 in Seattle.

Today, we follow up with the five red flags Henney advised investors to watch for when they evaluate biotech investments. Here’s what he singled out as warning signs:

—Top management without a scientific background. It’s not impossible for a biotech to succeed with a non-scientist at the helm, Henney said, but a smart investor must ask this non-scientific manager where the science comes from at the company. “The good answer would be, ‘It comes from my team of wonderful scientists who I recruited.’” A bad answer would be something like, “It comes from my scientific advisory board, which has two Nobel Laureates.” Henney added, “If you need to make an appointment to meet the guy who’s bringing you your science, then you don’t have much of a business.”

Henney wanted to make sure he wasn’t making a broadside attack against all non-scientific managers. One of his favorite biotech CEOs isn’t a scientist, but he adds, “You wouldn’t know it from talking to him.”

—No worries. An investor should ask what the management loses sleep over. “If they say, ‘I sleep like a baby,’ that’s a big red flag,” Henney said. All companies have their problems, and top management had better know them inside out.

—Hard-to-understand science. Ask the management to explain the science of their product in detail. “If they say something like the science is hard to explain, they can’t really explain it to you, that’s a big red flag.”

—Geographic remoteness. This provides some insight into Henney’s thinking on why two of the companies for whom he serves as chairman—Oncothyreon and AVI Biopharma—recently moved their headquarters from Edmonton, Canada, and Portland, OR, respectively, to the Seattle area. “You need a quorum of players,” Henney said. “You need access to talent, you need to be able to recruit people.” Seattle has more talent than the other places, and an ability to recruit more people, he said.

—Too many VCs. The board should be loaded with people that have experience running companies. “You shouldn’t have a board full of venture capitalists,” Henney said.

—Family members in key roles. “These aren’t family businesses. If you see a board dominated by siblings, or a couple of siblings in key management roles, I’d run, not walk.”

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I have always had a soft spot in my heart for Chris Henney. Those of us at Immunex in the early days all have our hilarious Chris stories, often involving his confusion with our very weird phone system.

But when I first started at Immunex, it took a month to get our house closed. Because of the situation, I ended up staying in a fairly cheap hotel out in Issaquah (perhaps 15 miles away from downtown Seattle). This was an unexpected expense of moving and caused a little bit of hardship paying for before my first paychecks arrived.

So I talked with Chris and he got Immunex to pay for some of the cost as part of my moving expenses. It told me a lot about the culture at the company when a newly hired scientist could walk up to one of the founders and ask for money. And get it.

Most of his red flags deal with the inability to communicate the scientific reasons for the existence of the company. No science in the management’s background, no worries and nonsensical science all indicate a fatal lack of understanding.

If you do not understand the fundamental science in a deep way, you can not tell the story. An inability to tell the story in a way that resonates will make it impossible to shake some money loose.

This is not about hype, which is a snake-oil salesman’s approach to selling anything. In fact, hype indicates a total misunderstanding of the science because most biotechs are founded more on hope and strong egos than anything really solid. That is, often the company must begin development of the science for commercialization before the complete knowledge of the system is extant.

This means that the path to a commercial product will be littered with false starts and the company’s management had better understand the science enough to surmount these roadblocks.

I’m now going to tell a story. Perhaps some of the details may be a little off but it does illustrate why having a deep understanding of the science can be so important.

For example, Immunex, in large part, was started based on the hope that a molecule called interleukin-2 would be very important for medical protocols. See, IL-2 was also known as T-cell Growth factor and had been shown by some of Henney and Gillis’ work, to be absolutely required for the growth of T-cells in culture.

Now, T-cells are incredibly important in fighting off a whole slew of diseases, including cancer. So being able to manipulate T-cell levels seems like it would be a very good thing to be able to do. So, let’s clone IL-2 and produce it in large amounts. The we can sell it a s a therapeutic for a wide range of illnesses.

Turns out the IL-2 is not as useful as originally hoped. Not to say it does not have important uses, even commercial ones. But at the time, it seems like a critical molecule, one that would be core to our repertoire of tools.

Yet, when mice are bred which have no functional IL-2, they actually appear relatively normal. That is, the lack of any IL-2 is not fatal to the mice. There are some interesting immunological irregularities that have led to some interesting observations. But IL-2 is not absolutely required for a viable mouse. The mouse and its immune system find some other way to deal with T-cells.

Luckily for Immunex, our founders, and the scientists they recruited, had a deep understanding of the science and this allowed us to delve quite quickly into other aspects of the immune system as we worked on IL-2. For the same technologies that could clone IL-2 could be used to clone a wide range of immunoregulatory proteins.

By the time it could be shown that IL-2, while an important molecule, would not be the huge commercial product originally envisioned, we had a handful of other proteins cloned which presented even greater possible riches than IL-2. This deep understanding of the science eventually led to Enbrel.

Thus, a critical reason to have a deep understanding of the science is that no research venture, especially commercial ones, goes according to plan. But, if you understand the science, you can often be adaptable enough to find a successful solution.

Those that do not fundamentally understand the science will just be stuck when the inevitable roadblock appears. Then everyone, including the investors, are just stuck.


Knowledge Creation, Web 2.0

Reducing the barriers to effective intranet use

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wall by Giuseppe Bognanni
Barriers to Intranet Use from Forrester:
[Via The FASTForward Blog]

Forrester recently released a report on What’s Holding Back Your Intranet? They were nice to share a copy with me. They found that 93% of employee respondents said they use an intranet or company portal (Forrester uses the terms interchangeably) at least weekly, and more than half reported daily use. However, they found that these intranets were mostly accessed for basic functions such as company directory, benefits information, and payroll. Access to collaborative tools, what some might called an enterprise 2.0 capability was ranked fourteenth.

At the same time studies have shown that a highly functional intranet can provide great value. A 2009 study at BT found that every £1 invested in the intranet produced £20 in exploited value. This certainly is consistent with my experience implementing such system in the late 90s. Despite this firms are underutilizing their intranets. They found several reasons.

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Why don’t employees use an intranet? Particularly if it can return twenty times on its investment?

One of the reasons is that the intranet is simply not geared to what the employees want and need. A lot of effort is often spent on optimizing an external website but little is often spent on doing the same for an internal site.

Then there is this:

Most current intranets also do not reflect and support the specific roles and responsibilities of their users. The one size fits all approach is consistent with an IT centric intranet as it is easier and cheaper to maintain.

Too often IT buys an application that promises a strong and collaborative intranet. But this one size fits all makes it very hard to provide something that works in the culture of the organization. That is why I like Open Source approaches. The open nature of the software not only means that it can often stay current with fast moving trends (something a proprietary solution can often be far behind in implementing) but it also provides a much easier opportunity for internal employees or external consultants to craft a solution that works best.

However, the major barrier is simply that few people see why they should change their workflow to adopt new online approaches. The online approaches are optimized for IT, not the employees. And no one really works to facilitate adoption of new approaches.

That is something I constantly harp on when I work with organizations. Few people use social media because it is good for the community. They use it because it helps them personally. Someone needs to actually show them how Enterprise 2.0 will change their personal workflow. Then people will start really using it.

And then the emergent properties of Web 2.0 – that it enhances normal human interactions in ways to really leverage group workflow – will become visible.

All these things will happen eventually. But part of the way to increase the rate of diffusion of change in a company is to decrease the time it takes to adopt new approaches. This is just one example.

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