I think serendipity is part of what underlies Metcalfe’s Law and a big part of the explanation for Eric Raymond’s insight that ‘given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.’ Knowledge workers and their organizations should be doing everything possible to increase opportunities for serendipity. This means searching broadly for information, narrating work so that others can become aware of it, asking questions to the biggest possible audience without presupposing who might have the answers, and generally contributing to and drawing from the biggest possible digital commons. This is what Enterprise 2.0 should be all about.
Following up on my earlier post on good things to look for in people when you are hiring – Recruit the internet-savvy – I picked up on some useful notes whilst at TechCrunch‘s GeeknRolla on recruiting into startups, which I think are useful for pretty much any organisation. I also think it’s interesting to think how public services can learn from the culture of startup businesses, including around recruitment.
The talk was by Pete Smith from Songkick, which is a service that lets you track all sorts of information about your favourite live music acts, such as upcoming concerts, videos and recordings.
Here’s the notes:
Hiring is a top challenge for a startup and getting it wrong can serious affect momentum
Always be hiring
Better not to hire though, rather than to compromise on talent and drive
Very inefficient to hire from outside your network – plan for this
Grow your network as it’s the best way to hire good people
Have a hiring roadmap, build it into other choices: buildings, perks, and the tech you use
Risk taking in hiring comes later in a startup’s life, not early on
Vet applications ruthlessly before even meeting people
Spend as much time growing your network as you do looking at ‘non-network’ candidates
Hiring devs – use coding exercises then phone interview, then tech interview, then a ‘pairing session’ (not sure what that is)
Everyone you hire initially is vital to establishing the culture of your startup
How to recover from hiring errors: make sure you leave things on a good note. Don’t let people leave under a cloud. Make decision quickly but manage the exit – don’t let it drag on. Better to leave work undone than allow the wrong people to keep going.
These thoughts chime in with some activity coming out of the IDeA with regard to talent management, recruit and workforce planning. In the current financial climate, there is a lot of talk of cuts and redundancies which has the potential to be incredibly damaging.
I honestly believe that local authorities could make massive improvements to their efficiency and levels of service if they recruited better, and made better use of the talent they already have. I consider myself to be a great example of the failings of local government workforce management. Some of the things that are important, I think, are:
To get people to do a good job, they need a good job to do
Innovators and the enthusiastic should not be treated as troublemakers or weirdos, but be treasured and made to feel special
Staff should be trusted. If you genuinely can’t trust all of them, give the good ones leeway
Give people the tools they need to be able to do their job well
Value things like curiosity, generosity, cooperation and openness
Allow the good people in your organisation to find each other
Have proper systems and processes in place for inventive people to be able to suggest and progress good ideas
The IDeA are also organising an event in Birmingham on 19th May, called ‘Designing a fit for the future organisation‘. I’m going, because it sounds pretty interesting. Hope to see others there.
Quite a few people – at least those that read this blog and others like it – are comfortable with the idea of mashups, the activity of taking data from one source, and combining it with one or more others to create something useful and interesting.
Often this happens on maps, but of course it doesn’t have to.
One potential application of this sort of technology which doesn’t get discussed much, certainly in the public services context, is enterprise mashups, in other words applying these techniques within the organisation, behind the firewall. So, taking a set of data or statistics from one department and mashing it up with another.
I’d read about enterprise mashups before, but the idea didn’t really catch on until I saw Bill Ive’s post about JackBe, a vendor providing a platform for organisations to do this stuff. Here’s a video giving an example of how JackBe can be used:
I certainly remember my days as a Business Analyst at a county council where I spent days taking information from one source and having to reformat it to make it play nicely with another, usually in Excel. Having a tool like this available would have made life much easier.
Here’s a whitepaper explaining all this in more detail (PDF warning).
(Obviously, there are other providers of enterprise mashup platforms and not just JackBe, it’s just that I wasn’t looking at their websites when I was writing this post.)
I wrote about the Transformed by You project, run jointly between Kent and Medway Councils, here. By all accounts it was a great event, and thanks to the great social reporting efforts of David Wilcox, we can all get a feel for how it went.
The evaluation of the process has been published openly, and makes for an interesting read:
Great that this stuff is being shared out in the open! You can follow further progress on the project, and innovation generally in Kent, on the iNews blog.
Innovation in government is a topic that I’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking about recently. More soon, when I get round to it.
Following up on my earlier post on good things to look for in people when you are hiring –