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Managing Collaboration Effectively

Managing Collaboration Effectively. Nick Bleech, Jericho Forum Board of Management with help from Will Harwood, University of Kent and Wikipedia! Jericho Forum Annual Conference 22 April, 2008. A Jericho Forum ‘ Work in Progress ’. Introduction.

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Managing Collaboration Effectively

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  1. Managing Collaboration Effectively Nick Bleech, Jericho Forum Board of Management with help from Will Harwood, University of Kent and Wikipedia! Jericho Forum Annual Conference 22 April, 2008 A Jericho Forum ‘Work in Progress’

  2. Introduction • Collaboration: inter-working between people, between systems • Effective collaboration: advancing mutual objectives of the collaborators • Managing collaboration effectively: fostering and maintaining the conditions for effective collaboration (e.g. trust and security) • Collaboration-Oriented Architecture (COA)’s ‘repositories’: • COntrActs: capabilities - relationships - obligations • REPutations: business events - outcomes - performance/ satisfaction of the COntrAct • Collaboration viewed ‘memetically’

  3. Security without trust A B (request,claim,evidence) • e.g. • AwantsBto run a program P • Bonly wants to run programs that it believes are safe • request - run this program P • claim C - it complies with your ‘safety policy’ • evidence - proof of P obeys C (testing = partial proof)

  4. What is trust? • A ternary relation: AtrustsBfor action C • Trust is in the same category of concepts as knowledge and belief • To say I trust you is to assert a belief or knowledge about your actions. • Trust means that we believe a system maintains a property. • Trust involves Risk in that you are handing over control of your interests to another – it is used in place of evidence for behaviour.

  5. “System/Environment Trust” - in things/processes within which a trust relationship exists What is trust? “Interpersonal Trust” - based on perceived qualities of the person/ thing being trusted Transactional Trust Social Trust “Dispositional Distrust” - willingness generally to distrust Positive Incentives Negative Incentives Decision to Trust “Dispositional Trust” - willingness generally to trust Rational-Legal Traditional Charismatic Authority/Control Dependency

  6. What is trust? • The context for trust decisions • Who to trust - identity • Why to trust - entitlements, rights, permissions • Experience/reputation, beliefs, and verifiability • Security problems • What to disclose in order to achieve a desired trust decision (need to tell/ need to know)? • What not to disclose e.g. to preserve privacy/anonymity? • How to communicate and share knowledge in order to reach the trust decision? • How to capture and communicate experience to maintain trust?

  7. What is trust? • If your interests encapsulate my interests then I will trust you. • Encapsulation: The realisation of your interests necessarily leads to the realisation of my interests. • To trust you, I need to believe that both: • Your goals encapsulate my goals, and • You are capable of realising your goals (may invoke interpersonal and/or system/environment trust) • Trust is (should be) used when providing evidence is either not possible/feasible or very costly. • Trust is (should be) rational.

  8. (Federated) Security with Trust A B request result • Bilateral evidence/proofs of behaviour replaced by “identity proofs”, and “assertions” (claims) but trust in principals’ (agents’) behaviour still needed • AwantsBto do C • claims – I am A, I am B, A is permitted C at B, … • evidence • credentialsforA, B • delegation certificate for C is permitted forAatB

  9. ‘Traditional’ Trusted Third Party (TTP) A B Visa/MasterCard/… • Works well in financial setting • TTP is a Risk Absorber - really deferred trust

  10. Problem • Tension: • e-business network effect and power of ‘mass collaboration’ (unorganized collaboration) • Versus: the need to manage collaboration effectively • Mass collaboration models look attractive, but don’t seem to advance all parties’ objectives all of the time, e.g. trust and security • Existing TTP constructs are problematic: • Pooled liability, architectural inflexibility • “We don’t use a TTP in the ‘real world’, so why here, why now?” • What practices, structures and incentives need to be resolved?

  11. Why should I care? • Real-world problem: many joint ventures, risk sharing partnerships etc. prove difficult to manage • Concepts, models, guidance needed • Collaborations can (should) be of arbitrary span and depth, so what hope for ‘e-collaborations’? • Mass-collaboration gaining popularity in the e-world: • Social networking, wikis etc. • Social networks complement rather than replace more traditional forms of interaction and social mechanisms (see Clay Shirky: Here Comes Everybody, 2008). • So if we accept that trust and security are inherently multifaceted, social networks can’t provide all the trust and security we may ultimately need. • COA can help

  12. Genetic Viewpoint • Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene popularized (and advanced) the gene-centric view of evolution: ‘bodies are the gene’s way of making more genes’ • Fundamental concepts here are replicators and vehicles (survival machines) • Replicators include nucleic acids notably DNA, which composes genes (base-pair sequences) • Vehicles include people’s bodies, dogs and fruit flies

  13. Genes in Action • Kin selection

  14. Genes in Action • Kin selection

  15. Genes in Action • Kin selection

  16. Genes in Action • If a gene “knows” that another body contains a copy of itself then it gets equal benefit from helping the other body reproduce (inclusive fitness)

  17. Genes in Action • If a gene “knows” that another body contains a copy of itself then it gets equal benefit from helping the other body reproduce (inclusive fitness)

  18. Altruism among Selfish Genes • Dawkins established that mutual trust among gene-copies can evolve thus advancing the goal of inclusive fitness • Thus genes can pursue non-selfish survival strategies that still advance selfish (to the gene) goals • The way to see this is by considering iterated prisoners’ dilemmas

  19. Prisoners’ Dilemma B • Temptation • Reward • Punishment • Sucker Defect Co-operate Co-operate S,T R,R A T,S P,P Defect T > R > P > S Nash Equilibrium, worst mutual outcome, but most logical in absence of trust

  20. Iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma • Robert Axelrod demonstrated that when various strategies compete in repeated games of the PD, the ‘tit for tat’ strategy produces the best overall outcome: • A: if B cooperated last time, cooperate this time; otherwise defect • Hence parties that can’t otherwise communicate can do so through their actions, and past actions create a ‘shadow of the future’: basis for trust • Dawkins postulates that many genes preprogram this strategy to maximise survival • This also shows that interaction intensity tends to generate more trusting behaviour. • When thinking about trust and ‘trusting behaviour’, iterated PDs help to uncover rational incentives.

  21. Memetic Viewpoint • Dawkins extended the replicator/vehicle paradigm as a way to characterize evolutionary models of cultural information transfer • In this viewpoint, memes stand for ideas, concepts, patterns of thought etc. located in the memory • Memes may alternatively be thought of as observable cultural artifacts and behaviours • Some memeticists argue whether ideas are objectively observable within the memory • In semiotics, signs need to be communicated (copied) and interpreted: memes gloss over the interpretation bit!

  22. Memes in Action • Memes, like genes, are copied with variation and selection. Only some variants survive, so memes (and hence human cultures) evolve. • Unlike genetic (DNA) replication, meme replication has a high chance of inducing mutations. • Memes replicate by imitation, teaching and other methods, and compete for space in our memories and for a chance to be copied again. • Large groups of memes that are copied and passed on together are called co-adapted (mutually reinforcing) meme complexes, or memeplexes. E.g. religious ideas.

  23. Memes Schmemes • Is Memetics pseudo-science? • Advocates point to promising predictive capabilities • E.g. Jon Whitty’s Memetic model of Project Management (PM): essentially self-serving, evolving and designing organizations for its own purpose. • So PM is a memeplex comprising the stories, rules and norms of project practice and experience. • Organizations believe projects evolve a sense of purpose through their mission statements and explicit goals, but these are often organization’s political compromises • Similarly, projects are seen as superior problem-solving tools, but PM lore focuses mostly on why projects fail not why they succeed, which omits consideration of how else ‘success’ could be achieved.

  24. Collaboration as Memeplex? • Jon Whitty’s analysis of PM generates insights, so what about collaboration? • The ‘memetic’ viewpoint seeks to identify a collaboration as a memeplex, and the elements that COA defines/implies as memes • In COA, we associate collaborations with • COntrActs (a meme type) • REputations (another meme type) • Insight: view all three as ‘first class citizens’ • Insight: the architecture should foster ‘inclusive fitness’ of its memes.

  25. Towards Effective Collaboration • A standard component of corporate strategy is organizational design (OD) • As corporate strategy has evolved to embrace broader goals, social outcomes, and stakeholder values, OD has evolved too. • Contemporary trends include: • Reinventing hierarchies • Project-oriented OD • Networks (small-world networks, a.k.a. clusters) • Guilds (Eli Lilly example) • All these approaches seek to maximize effective collaboration

  26. New OD - strengths/weaknesses Type Strength Weakness Remarks

  27. COA’s first class citizens • Definition: in business terms a ‘repository’ is simply a persistent and dependable record of facts • COntrAct repository models ‘static’ bases for collaboration • REputation repository models ‘dynamic’ collaboration execution performance • Implementation expected to be via ‘repository as a service’ (RaaS), so capable of existing ‘in the cloud’ • In this model, the ‘TTP as intermediary’ vs. ‘we don’t do business through TTPs’ tension is transformed. • Tracking risk, reputation and the satisfaction of obligations goes ‘into the cloud’ • TTP (now a ‘RaaS provider’) does not transfer or absorb counterparty risk/ liability

  28. Benefits • Today, risk/reputation scores, audit trails etc., are: • After the fact, low-level, un-normalized • Duplicated across enterprise architectures • Bandwidth consuming if transmitted • Subvertable • In contrast, the repository model seeks to: • Unify this metadata • In a normalized fashion • Suitable for scalable multiparty access/update • With denormalization required only • a) as by-product of implementation constraints, or • b) where one party needs to place greater trust in a local copy of repository data than another.

  29. Implications • Memetic view of collaboration allows collaborations to become ‘first-class citizens’: informs business architecture • Viewed ‘memetically’: • A transaction is the vehicle for a COntrAct replicator • A business outcome (potentially, risk impact) is the vehicle for a REPutation replicator • This requires changes in both the ‘business mindset’ and architectural assumptions about: • Where to put security metadata e.g. ‘classifications’ sit within COntrActs as a view of risk appetite • Relationships between security metadata, other metadata and transactional information flows

  30. ‘Bottom Line’ • We postulate that • appropriate collaborative team OD, design of incentives for more-or-less altruistically motivated team members, and • architectural underpinning for team working (using COA) • …together maximise effective, e-enabled collaboration. • This requires validation. • COA foundations (inherently secure communications, endpoint security etc.,) are necessary building blocks before RaaS can be reliably implemented.

  31. Next Steps • ‘Managing Collaboration Effectively’ open discussion group • This Summer, probably at London Business School (LBS) - expressions of interest sought • OD implications of guild models • Collaboration as a tool for ‘wicked’ problem-solving • Collaboration effectiveness • COA development • Join Jericho Forum to participate!

  32. Q&A • Thanks! • Contact: n.bleech@opengroup.org

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