Portals and KM

The Power Of Business Storytelling - Firing up the Imagination

In his useful post, Why Storytelling is the Ultimate Weapon, Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal, states that science backs up the long-held belief that story is the most powerful means of communicating a message. He refers to a new business storytelling book, Tell to Win, by Peter Guber.  I have written about storytelling a lot on this blog (see Storytelling and Knowledge Management: A Serial in Six Parts).  See also Howard Gardner’s book on Changing Minds about great leaders always have a story. As Jean Luc Godard said “Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form.”

The post offers some new input. It seems that researchers are looking into the power of stories. The results have consistently shown that our attitudes, fears, hopes, and values are strongly influenced by stories. Fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than writing that is specifically designed to persuade through argument and evidence. I guess Godard could have told them that but it is nice to see some data to back it up.

Gruber argues that people are more moved by stories that dense PowerPoint slides for example. Here I greatly agree and know some other research to back it up. I was involved with a research group that looked at stories told verbally and stories shown with illustrations. They found that there were much higher scores of aspects of imagination from the auditory only slides when the participants were debriefed.  This is not to say illustrations do not have their use but save then for things like pictures, charts, etc.

I always see good speakers stop using the slides when they start the story. This is a practice I always try to follow. I will often put together a slide show for a presentation. Then I go through and see where to put the stories and keep the stories away from the slides so the audience is not focusing on the slides but on my words and their imagination. 

 

The Weather Gets Social

Checking the weather on the Web is one of my most common uses of the internet.  Now I find it is becoming more social. This is a good thing.  Adweek, noted in, The Weather Channel Launches Redesigned Site, that they are adding new social features.  They have always said that everyone talks about the weather so this makes sense. Cameron Clayton, of the Weather Channel said to Adweek, "If you think about it, one of the only topics of conversation to endure since we all lived in caves is the weather."

Their relaunch gives the viewer a more “personalized local and weather experience with an emphasis on the social nature of weather.” There are now new widgets that allow visitors to share their opinions on the current weather, which is then analyzed to track sentiment along with local and national trends for viewers. Weather.com also now features multiple ways to engage in weather conversation over the various social networks. 

While tweets about the weather may seem common place and boring if the weather is boring. But what if it is not? I recently wrote about research on what makes a tweet be retweeted. These researchers concluded, “The research suggests that it doesn't fully matter who you are or how many connections you have, but what you're saying relative to the existing conversation is what really matters in spreading knowledge online.”  So I concluded, that if you want to reach a lot of people write about what they are interested in at the moment, which could be the weather. The Weather Channel got over 54 million unique visitors in March. I was one of the tem. Adding social capabilities should only up that number. 

 

Will Most People will Make Purchases via Phones by 2020?

The answer is yes according to some recent studies reported by Doug Gross on CNN, Experts: Most people will make purchases via phones by 2020. He reported that nearly two out of three respondents to a (65%) Pew Internet & American Life Project survey that most people will have fully adopted the "mobile wallet" as their day-to-day means of paying by 2020. This leaves 45% as doubters.  Doug added that, “in a December report from comScore, 38% of smart phone owners had used their phones to make a purchase of some kind.”

There are obvious security questions but the article that smart phone technology is no less secure than the current credit card technology. In some ways it might be more secure it does not leave a physical paper trail.  I was recently overseas for a while and turned off my smart phone so I would not getting any calls from the US that might be expensive. I missed the ability to play music and share pictures. I am sure there must be a way to use the phone for these non-telephone purposes while the telephone part is turned off.

I can see the utility of this as my smart phone has reduced the number of other device that I have to carry around. However, I do not think it will ever replace a wallet just as credit cards have not replaced cash. It will likely cut into credit card use but not replace it. Just as there are cash only signs at stores, there maybe cash and card only signs depending on how they handle the service fees to merchants. It will be interesting to see what happens. 2020 is not that far away.

 

Making Work Fun Pays Off

This post is consistent with last week's on repecting your employees. I recently read an excellent HBR article, Free Your Frontline Workers to Innovate, by Jeffrey Rayport. He discussed the freedom that companies like Trader Joe’s give to their employees to be themselves and interact in fun ways with their customers. He concluded with three rules for getting employees to innovate. “You have to explicitly free your frontline workers to innovate. You have to recognize and reward such innovation. And you have to make the work seem as fun as working at Trader Joe's.”

I can remember many situations that took this view and the firms were rewarded and then there were many others who took the opposite view and got little productivity from their workforce. On the positive side, I was involved in building a knowledge management system for a logistics company. Our client manager wanted us to be happy. First, of all he, he actively participated in a very positive way. We would also go out to lunch with us on occasion and even to a blues bar at night a few times.  He knew we were all on the road and away from home so he said to only be on site three days, that way he can focus on his other work on the other two and we can be productive at home doing aspects of the project. When he heard we were interested in playing basketball after work, he drove us by a court and loaned us one of his son’s basketballs. We all wanted to do great work for this guy. The project won a CIO Magazine 100 award for innovation and was written up over 20 times in trade journals.

In contrast, another firm treated consultants as second class citizens who worked in the basement. We always had to take the first flight out on Monday morning and the last one on Thursday night. They were most interested in getting their hours from us. I could go on. But this work had many overruns and met with little success. It was not because my team did anything less and half of it were the same people as the top example. It was simply the atmosphere of the entire place and the lack of positive direction from the top that spread through the organization. 

 

Beach Painting from North Coast of Samos Island, Greece

Here is a 16" x 20" acrylic paining of a beach on the north coast of Samos Island, Greece.

Painting of Local lemons, Samos Island Greece

Here is a 16" x 20" acryclic painting of lemons I was given by a local friend in Samos Island. 

 

Aligning Motivation for Social Business: Lessons from a KM Effort

Adoption, engagement, aligning motivation of the participants area constant theme is discussions about social business (aka enterprise 2.0). Here is an example of audience participation led to successful engagement with a knowledge management effort from the last decade that, I think, offers some useful ideas for this decade.

A major telecom was faced with increasing competition and needed to cut costs and attempt to improve customer service. Their first time call resolutions were below industry standards, driving up costs and driving down customer satisfaction. Being forced to search through multiple databases, the reps had trouble finding answers to customer questions. They had to develop the skills of entertaining the customer on the phone while searching for answers at the same time. Something needed to change.

A knowledge management system was implemented that simplified access to content. Users were very involved to the initial design and its refinement. They were asked to name the obstacles that interfered with success on the call center measures and the knowledge system was designed to address these. I found this to be a requirement for success.

One of the interesting aspects of this story was a little different was the alignment of an additional motivation system with current practices. The strongest motivation remains alignment with the business strategy and key business processes. In the end, the reps would not continue to use the system if it did not help their performance. But how to get them started, especially with a workforce that was used to extra incentives?

Rather than invent a new incentive system, we asked about what was in place. There were two systems currently in use. One was successful and the other not. The unsuccessful one was designed to encourage suggestions for improvement but it took too long to provide the status and feedback on these suggestions. It was underused.

The successful one was simple and required a very rapid response to each employee’s input. It was designed to promote and reward great customer service. There were different levels of extraordinary service and different reward levels, from lunch with your supervisor to a chance to win a vacation.

So we aligned with this one. It was especially easy as the knowledge management system was designed to improve customer service. So examples of using the new knowledge management system to provide extraordinary customer service. along with ways to improve the KM system, were added to the existing incentive program. The people who ran the incentive program liked this addition as it expanded the coverage of their program. The reps liked it because the reward program was already well known and popular.

The KM program proved successful in pilot and was expanded. The motivation system was just one of a number of factors but it helped get things started right.

 

 

One Account of the Birth of the Term Knowledge Management

This year will be the 16^th annual KM World in Washington DC, on October 17-19. I plan to be there. I attended the first three and will have been to last 6 or so, I lost count.

The term knowledge management has been around for much longer. There are various tales on how the term got started. Here is one. Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak, provide an interesting story about the birth of the term “knowledge management” in their new book, What’s the Big Idea? It seems they were having tea in the spring of 1992 at the Boston Athenaeum, near their Center for Business Innovation office. They frequently adjourned to the Athenaeum, an old Boston private library used by Emerson and Alcott, to discuss their projects. They were working on a research project to look at how organizations could use information as a strategic advantage. Not happy with the term “information,” they discussed the issue over tea.

“While munching a tasty lemon square, Tom argued, ‘We should really be focused on higher value forms of information.’ Finally, Larry looked up and asked. ‘Don’t we really mean knowledge?”

As they say, the rest is history. In the book, Tom and Larry point out that while in some ways the long term success of knowledge management is still to be determined, it has out lasted many other “big ideas” and there are signs that its take up is increasing. They state that knowledge management appears to be headed toward pervasive adoption by organizations. Knowledge management has certainly had it sups and downs in the market but my own experience with clients and talking with analysts supports their conclusion.

 

Search vs Discovery – Finding Useful Content

Search and discovery are both useful ways to find useful content. Everyone knows about search. Google is my home page. It has opened up the Web to the world. As Romain Goday wrote in Search vs Discovery (Or A New Approach to Information Consumption), “Search has boomed in the last decade, more than 130 billion searches were conducted during 2010.”

While search provides an answer to a question you already know. “Discovery” provides awareness to things you might not have anticipated in areas that interest you. While still at an early stage, there is a new breed of tools, content discovery engines, that are gaining traction to complement search engines. They do not replace search they provide another line of inquiry into what is happening on the Web.

Discovery goes beyond search as it can help you uncover meaningful content without having to formulate a question.  It can provide ongoing monitoring of an area of interest and report back variances in information patterns. It operates in real-time and does not have to wait for popularity to drive content forward. This is approach taken by the Darwin Awareness Engine™, one of the new breed of content discovery tools. 

 

Process Aligned Knowledge Management and Other Trends

Here is an article in KM World, The knowledge movement: trends and opportunities, that begins with tag line, “The true success of KM is when it disappears, meaning that KM processes are embedded in workflow.”  That won my attention immediately as I have felt this for the last 20 years. Has it been that long since I first did what we “learned” was knowledge management? I will take it one step further. I have never seen a successful knowledge management effort that was not process aligned. 

This article covers the KM movement in India but it is relevant for anywhere. It covers the initial meeting of the Pune K-Community and the author, Madanmohan Rao, covers 12 trends from the session. I will not go into all of them but mention a few that I especially liked and you can view the rest through the link above.

The first one was “Mature KM initiatives address not only internal collaboration but also external collaboration.” As I have written before this is why I like the term social business used by IBM rather than enterprise 2.0. You need to align both internal and external knowledge efforts rather they are through social media or other means. Many companies have recognized the value of involved customers and external business partners in their business decision, rather it be comprehensive crowd sourcing or simple incremental improvements to a specific product. Madanmohan lists Procter & Gamble and Nike as good examples.

Another trend is “Social media are playing an increasing role as knowledge narrative, and mobile cloud is a key trend in workflow infrastructure.”  I feel social media has transformed KM in a very positive way. The first time I saw a blog I saw it as a new way to do KM.  You collect knowledge in the process of doing work so the issue for KM shifts from collection to curation. Of course mobile is huge and will transform many things from how you purchase products to knowledge capture and sharing.

It was also noted that, “gamification is a growing practice in KM, such as coding contests and competitions for best personal KM (MySite) at Unisys, as well as a best paper contest to showcase thought leadership in a field.” Gaming incentives have been around for some time. They just have more tools and the social aspects have increased their visibility and impact.

Then there was my favorite, “the true success of KM is when it "disappears," meaning that KM processes are embedded in workflow.” The author mentioned that 90 percent of the knowledge contributions in Wipro happen as part of the normal workflow and are not created via additional activities. This is where social media is a great enabler. But it does not put KM professionals out of a job as they will be needed to design and upgrade such workflow tools which is was my introduction to knowledge management in the early 90s.

Take a look at the other trends. It is a useful article.

 

Bing Moves Past Google on the Social Side of Search

I have been writing a bit about the invasion of social capabilities into all online tools. Fairly soon this will no longer be news. I remember in 2004 bloggers were excited every time some big shot started blogging. Now that is a yawer.  Now we are reading about how the Weather Channel is going social and how LinkedIn value dramatically increased after it introduced social features. Of course social business is the big headline in enterprise tools but social search appears to be still in its infancy

Now the MIT Technology Review writes about: With New Look, Bing Gets More Organized, Social. They announce that Bing will transform its interface a layout in three separate panes featuring traditional text results, results from specific information sources and services, and results related to your social-network friends. Sounds a little like Tweetdeck meets search.

I have heard from some Bing executives a while back that they were going to make the search tool more social and they seem to have pulled it off. Now we will see how it affects Google's 66.4 percent lead over Bing’s 15.3 percent of U.S. search queries in March, according to comScore.

The MIT articles also notes that the new capabilities will go beyond the new interface. For example, Bing will now suggest friends who might be knowledgeable about a specific topic by considering their listed "likes" on Facebook. A feed will also let you see and respond to your friends' Facebook updates and questions. And users will be able to ask their Facebook friends questions via Bing.

There is the rule proposed by Andy McAfee and others that the new tool needs to be ten times better than the current one people use. We will see if all this social stuff meets the 10x rule.

 

 

Painting of a Boat at Rest in Pythagoria Harbor, Samos Island Greece

Here is the second painting of boat at anchor in Pythagoria Harbor, Samos Island, Greece. It is a 16" x 20" acrylic. 

Painting of View from Pythagorio, Samos Island, Greece

Here is a 16 x 20 inch painting of the sea as viewed from the harbor at Pythagorio on Dsamos Isalnd, Greece. it was my first landscape from the trip. More to follow. 

 

harmon.ie Goes Mobile, Bringing SharePoint to the iPad

I have written about harmon.ie several times. See for example - Harmon.ie Provides Social Email to Help Drive Enterprise Collaboration Adoption. Their tools focus on increasing user adoption of collaboration tools include bringing central components of SharePoint into both Outlook and Lotus Notes. Now they have moved a step further gone mobile and unveiling the capbility to bring Microsoft SharePoint document collaboration and social interactions to the iPad – “harmon.ie for iPad, greatly extending then reach of collaboration capabilities for the enterprise. 

This makes a lot of sense as so far, more than 67 million iPads have been sold. According to Apple, 94 percent and 74 percent of Fortune 500 and global 500 companies are respectively testing or deploying iPads. For the iPad to realize its potential it must have the ability to bring in enterprise apps such as SharePoint. This is a good starting point as 78 percent of enterprises already use SharePoint, according to Forrester. To accomplish this harmon/ie has provided a secure, consistent enterprise iOS application for SharePoint users on-the-go.

Now business users can work on a presentation from their desktop, drag-and-drop it to SharePoint, and send a link to colleagues using harmon.ie in Microsoft Outlook or IBM Lotus Notes. Then, as they go on the road and can still see document updates from colleagues using their iPad. They can access the latest version of the document, edit it from wherever they are and share it with the team when they are back online. The team will receive a real-time update once the revised document is uploaded.

There is both a free version and low cost version with full features available through iTunes.  This is exactly they type of capability that is needed to make iPads a truly enterprise platform. 

 

Gautam Ghosh: India's Social Media Thought Leader

There was a recent article in Forbes about my long time virtual friend, Gautam Ghosh. Titled, Social Media Thought Leader: India's Gautam Ghosh by Shel Isreal, it goes into many of the great things Gautum has done over the years in this space. Before I get into details about the article, I want to note Gautum is a great practitioner of the golden rule of social media: reciprocity.

Shel notes all the achievements that Gautum was accomplished including being on every short list of top social media influencers globally despite being in a country that has been slow to pick up on social media compared to many others. Shel also notes that, “in 2005, Ghosh achieved the dubious distinction of being the first person on the Asian continent to speak to me via social media. While it was a thrill for me, by then his blog had already connected him with people in about a dozen English-speaking countries.”

I was actually one of those as I interviewed him in 2004 for my book on business blogging along with his country companion, Dina Metha. By then Ghosh’s blog, now called Talent and Social Business was voted as the third most popular in India. He generously notes our conversation for my book in his conversation with Shel. Every since then we have stayed in touch. Gautum was always quick to notice anything I did and responded which naturally motivated me to do the same.

Currently, Gautum has joined the head of Microsoft India to become involved in BraveNewTalent, a London-based community platform service firm that is growing rapidly on a global scale attracting a stellar list of clients including L’Oreal, IBM, McAfee and Starbucks. Shel quotes Gautum, “BraveNewTalent hosts communities where people and organizations share knowledge and experiences, organized by professional topics and serves clients as a social media hub – bringing in content from other sources like Twitter, blogs or YouTube.”

Ghosh predicts that the new professional classification of social recruiting, emerging in the enterprise will follow the same migrations that marketing and communications professionals are following today. This is a move from transactions to relationships and trust. He also notes that forward thinking companies will be “engaging talent communities and giving to the community before they think of getting returns.” I could not agree more. The use of communities is on the rise in every space and I see recruiting as no exception.  There is more in the article so I encourage you to read the whole article. 

 

AppFusions Integrates iRise® Visualization with Atlassian JIRA, Confluence

I have known about AppFusions for some time and respect the vision of their leader Ellen Feaheny. I spoke with Ellen at the most recent Lotusphere and they have been working on a number of integration tools. Recently AppFusions announced a partnership with iRise^®, a provider of enterprise visualization solutions to allow for simulations of Atlassian JIRA and Confluence to speed enterprise software development.

I have been familiar with the power of software visualizations for some time and have interviewed a number of venders in this space. It can be a transformative breakthrough for both software development and the creation of related training. iRise visualization gives users the ability to create visual prototypes of new software projects that look and act just like the real thing, before a single line of code is written. The technology lets stakeholders and target users “kick the tires” on new applications, including mobile apps, and give feedback while it’s still easy and less costly to make changes.

iRise Simulations for Confluence

With iRise for Confluence users can embed iRise visualizations directly within Confluence pages, enabling others to interact with and comment on live, working simulations without leaving the page. Through live simulations, vague textual use case descriptions are strengthened and quickly understood, saving endless hours of design time and confusion between engineering and product teams. Here Is a video on how it works.

iRise Simulations for JIRA

With iRise for Confluence users can easily link to and preview working iRise visualizations from any JIRA issue. Associating JIRA tasks with simulations naturally speeds development. There is no faster way to understand an “agile story” or use case than through a live simulation. Here is a video on this integration.

The demands that stem from the exploding use of such mobile platforms such as the iPhone and the iPad in business—often referred to as "the consumerization of IT" have put many organizations under intense pressure to create business applications for stakeholders who expect to take their apps with them wherever they go, and who are quickly irritated by even small usability flaws. iRise’s patented software visualization technology helps companies and government agencies meet these raised expectations of elegant design and ease of use. I think that this type or visualization or simulation is a capability that has come at the right time to help unlock what might have been a huge cost and time bottleneck for IT.

 

 

The Social Organization According to Gartner

Here is a book that I recently put at the top of my business reading list thanks to a suggestion by my Merced Group partner, Catherine Shinners. She posted an excellent review, Social Business for Executives. As she opens her review with the comment, “Understanding how to derive repeatable business value from collaborative community is an important senior management skill to master.” There is more and more evidence coming out about the value of social business. Many of you are familiar with the McKinsey studies that provided concrete quantified benefits (see for example, How social technologies are extending the organization).

Here is a book that gets senior managers ready for the next evolution in business: The social organization. The basic premise of the book is “being a social organization goes beyond experimenting with social media technology tools—the "provide and pray" approach. In fact, it's not about the technology at all.” The Social Organization: How to Use Social Media to Tap the Collective Genius of your Customers and Employees, is published by Harvard Business Review Press and written by Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. McDonald of Gartner.

Now I would say there is a little bit of technology to consider (see for example - Maybe Enterprise 2.0 Is About the Technology – but this title was more provocative that meant to be taken literally. I do agree with the need to focus on the business side if you want to be successful (see for example, Putting Social Media to Work).

As Catherine notes this book is indeed about putting social business to work in larger enterprises. She quotes the authors, mass collaboration, in their definition "is a large, diverse group of people pursuing a mutual purpose that creates value..yet...who act independently to contribute open and complementary information" and thereby becomes a "collaboration community that enlists the interests, knowledge, talent and experience of everyone along its value chain to create results that exceed those possible using traditional process and small-group collaboration"

Senior management engagement and leadership is essential to make this work. First, she notes that senior management is essential for “ensuring that a community is mobilized around a business relevant purpose.”  This is the key starting point that is often missing when new technology is implemented. She also notes that senior management is required for “bringing the results of the collaboration community into relevant business processes.” I have never seen a successful knowledge management for that was not business process aligned and this is even more important with social business (see for example, Integrating the Interactions with the Transactions).

Catherine reviews the very interesting case of CEMEX, the Mexican producer of concrete that was already creating huge profits through advanced use of technology in their business processes in the early 2000s. I had occasion to do a small bit of work with them during this pre-social business era and was very impressed. It is not surprising that they picked up on mass collaboration. You can see Catherine’s blog post for the case and the six basic principles for a successful cycle of mass collaboration.

 

 

 

Standing Old School Management on its Head

In the age of social business and collaboration it is generally accepted by those who think seriously about management in the 21^st century that top down micro-managing is a useless relic of the industrial age. It is nice to see another study confirming this. Lindsay Korizak, reports on a useful study by Bill McCleave in: Getting Back to Management Basics: Communicating, Listening and Trusting.

As she wrote, “in a recent survey of distributors and manufacturers by Bill McCleave, three characteristics kept appearing as critical to good management: communication, listening and the ability to delegate (aka macro-managing vs. micro-managing).” Yet I hear constantly from friends that their bosses are still doing the old micro-managing thing. And they are not happy as a result to no surprise.

She added that McCleave quoted Gordon Bethune in his book From Worst to First: “Your real job as a boss … is to let people do their jobs. It’s to assemble the right team, set the big picture direction, communicate that and then get out of the way.”  But so many managers cannot get out of the way. To me this shows a lack of respect for the capabilities and judgment of employees. It is also a very inefficient way to run a business.

Social collaboration tools can help here as they allow managers to see what is going on without stepping on the toes of their employees. The transparency means they can keep watch while staying out of the way. I hope that more managers realize this. It will lead to a more happy and productive workforce.

 

 

Images of Kambos, Marathokambos, and Ormos, Samos Island Greece

These three villages are close to each other on the western end of the the island in the region of Marathokambos on Samos Island. I first went to Kambos on the way to nature perserve on the western end of the island (see next post). I had an excellent lunch of fried calamari, fried potatoes at The Ballad of Bill and Salome Restaurant. You can see from the link that they have a Web site. The owner spoke excellent English and gave me some tips on where to go. He said there are few Amercian vistiors on this part of the island, only Northern Europeans. Last year he had only three US families. I highly recommend this places so maybe some of you will go there. The pictures are in order of my visits. 

On the way back from the west coast, I drove up to Marathokambos, which is the regional center. It has great views of the sea. It is also known for the fireworks they set off at midnight the Saturday before Easter. Other towns do it but Marathokambos is known for the biggest noise makers. While up there I saw the port of Ormous so I drove down on my way back. It is a quiet fisging village. There are a lot of harbor side tavernas but none were open yet as the season has not started. It looks like a great place to go for lunch during the May - September season. 

                                                                

 

Painting of a Boat at Anchor Pythagoria Harbor, Samos Island Greece

Here is a 16" x 20" acryclic painting of a fishing boat tied to the pier at Pythagoria, Samos Island Greece.