Portals and KM

Forrester's Bernoff and Schadler Provide Prescriptions for Empowered Employees

The new book, Empowered, by Forrester’s Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler, provides a path for companies to response to the newly empowered customers who operate in the Web 2.0 world and to take advantage of the opportunities this transformation offers. The sub title is: “unleash your employees, energize your customers, and transform your business.” That is the proper sequence although your employees need to first listen to their customers as an initial step.

The book introduces the term HEROs or highly empowered, resourceful employees. It is divided into two main sections: a description of what HEROs do and how management and technology can work in concert to create a HERO powered business. 

These empowered employees can provide innovation in both how customers are engaged and how increased engagement can occur within the enterprise. A great example of the latter occurs within Black and Decker. Instead of producing the usual dry, boredom through PowerPoint, sales training for the many products that Black & Decker offers, the head of sales training decided to empower the sales staff to create their own training. He gave many of them Flip cameras and some free video editing software, Windows Moviemaker.

Armed with these simple and inexpensive tools, the sales force started producing a stream of videos on the many Black and Decker products and the right way to position these products against the many competitors that Black and Decker faces. The sales training group serves as the central clearing house, does quality reviews, organizes, and provides the servers to host these videos. I have always found that the degree of relevance and engagement for both software and training is in direct proportion to the involvement of the audience. With the new tools, Black and Decker took it a step further and the audience responded.

The authors introduce the strategy of IDEA: “identify empowered customers, deliver groundswell customer service, empower them further with mobile information, and amplify their word of mouth.” The HEROs can support this process and examples are given.

They also take Gladwell’s Mavens and Connectors concept and apply these terms to the Web. Mavens are authorities and connectors are distributors of content. Sometimes the same person is both.  There are a lot of interesting stats offered. Mavens account for 80% of posts on products and services.  The most likely products to get online opinions are restaurants and books and the least likely are flowers and home décor.  Mavens and Connectors tends to be a bit younger on the average the most Web users. But the most important concept is that with the rise of peer influence, customers matter even more after the sale.

Zappos shoes is a well known example. They do not spend money on advertising but instead invest the money in excellent customer service and then use the IDEA process noted earlier for viral marketing by their fans. Zappos has become a well-known twitter success story by following these principles.

A key part of the IDEA process is to increase a company’s mobile presence and gain more control by offering useful apps and information to customers. I think the same thing applies to employees. Twenty two percent of online users make use of mobile devices and this segment is growing rapidly. In some places it may exceed laptop Web use.  Mobile devices and social software like Twitter lend themselves well to the quick responses and comments about products. A company needs to be part of this conversation whether it is between customers or between employees. 

With any new powerful channel there are also risks and the authors spend a lot of time on this topics with suggestions for mitigation and policy concepts. This is a place where management and IT need to combine. The goal is not to stop social media but assess, and manage the related risks. The biggest risk may be to not use it, as others will. They suggest creating a cross-functional advisory council to set strategy.

There is much more and this is a comprehensive guide on how to survive and prosper in the new “markets as conversations.”

 

My KM World 2010 and Enterprise Search Summit 2010 Notes: Complete Listing

Here is a listing of the series of session notes for KM World 2010 and Enterprise Search Summit 2010.  It was a great and it was tough to determine which sessions to record. I tried to pick a cross section of topics. I hope you find these notes useful. It was also nice to be in Washington and I will be posting on my restaurant experiences in an upcoming post.

Thomas Vander Wal: Designing Social Search in the Enterprise

Tom Stewart: The Wealth of Knowledge

Daniel Rasmus: The Evolution of Search

Stan Garfield: 10 Principles for Successful CoPs

James Robertson: Intranets in 2015

Seth Grimes: Search for Sentiment

Dave Snowden: The Resilient Organization

Peter Morvile: Search Patterns: Making Maps for Knowledge Discovery

Facilitating Content Discovery Using Chaos Theory

 

 

Images from Reggio-Emilia Italy

Here are some late October photos from Reggio-Emilia, another wonderful Emilia-Romangna city in Italy. 

                       

              

Images from Modena, Emilia-Romagna Italy

Here are some late October photos from Modena, another wonderful Emilia-Romangna city in Italy. 

                                  

 

My Favorite Tweets for November 2010

Here is another in a series of posts that provide access to my favorite tweets that contain links to useful information.  Some of these I did to link to things I found useful and others are RTs that I want to save for the same reason. Since Twitter archiving is an oxymoron, I am now going to post my favorite links for the month so they can be easily accessed later.

I spot tested the reduced shortened urls and they all should work. I hope this is also useful for you.  Let me know your favorite tweets for the month.

Also see the Darwineco favorite tweets.

State of Small Business Online Marketing Budgets http://on.mash.to/e48kzY via http://bit.ly/bkBSRf Nov 24

wise words from @robpatrob - Robin Dunbar Ends the Stupidity of Endless “Friends” http://bit.ly/eh4Kjl Nov 24

Making HR Software More Human http://bit.ly/fT4ote Nov 24

Top Ten Business Predictions for 2011 http://bit.ly/gDiop6 via http://bit.ly/bkBSRf Nov 23

Texas State Board of ED sets harsher rules on teachers' texting http://bit.ly/geSKdo Nov 23

100+ Upcoming Social Media & Tech Events http://on.mash.to/epNkDy Nov 23

New York Times Wall Street Journal launch wine businesses http://bit.ly/dW9jZM via @robpatrob Nov 23

IBM Case Manager In Depth by @skemsley http://bit.ly/ic3JUh via http://bit.ly/bkBSRf Nov 23

TSA Screening Protests Take To Social Media http://bit.ly/eOa27i via http://bit.ly/bkBSRf Nov 23

RT @lbenitez: Reading: Forrester says IBM is fabulous at Social Media http://pio.mu/fYNzQ8 Nov 23

E2.0: Enabling Digital Realities, Embracing Myths > great post by @rotkapchen + nice video http://bit.ly/fYUeGs Nov 22

Gartner: IT leaders, CIOs must focus on social media usage http://bit.ly/9gk7gh via http://bit.ly/bkBSRf Nov 21

Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction NYT http://nyti.ms/bs3sDa Nov 21

Whoa, Google, That’s A Pretty Big Security Hole http://tcrn.ch/bMVo7Y via http://bit.ly/bkBSRf Nov 21

Social Media and our Health – How AA is a 2.0 Organization by @robpatrob http://bit.ly/d7a7rO Nov 19

RT @rossdawson: Future of Online and Print: Needed - fundamental re-think http://bit.ly/aMAxAG by @brankobrkic (via Trevor Jones) Nov 11

via @tonykarrer eLearning Conferences 2011 http://ow.ly/38nlf Nov 11

CNet on #Cloud computing predictions for 2011 http://bit.ly/cUp52Z Nov 11

Businessweek on small companies using social media http://bit.ly/bXQ2Vn via @SBosm Nov 11

RT @rotkapchen: RT @oscarberg: Blogged: presentation from our seminar The Social Intranet http://goo.gl/fb/uKDTc Nov 10

Hospitals hiring social media managers http://bit.ly/d2Hw4Q Nov 9

Canada war stories a hit on social media http://bit.ly/90dMYn like KETC and @robpatrob http://bit.ly/9elerf Nov 9

@joemckendrick: Enterprise 2.0: CIOs Used to Ask ‘Why,’ Now They Demand to Know ‘When’ http://bit.ly/90ksEE Nov 8

Web Browsing Takes a Social Turn NYT http://nyti.ms/czwTMa Nov 8

RT @minassian: IBM Social Software improves collaboration at Bayer - http://bit.ly/bZtEZy Nov 7

RT @ConversationAge: Why PR is Misunderstood and Misapplied http://ow.ly/35PEm Nov 7

RT @johnjambrose: Why Social Media Is a Better Investment than SEO http://bit.ly/bvrYca (ProBlogger) RT @writer_sheri Nov 7

Dick Costolo: How Brands Are Tweeting via @psfk http://bit.ly/9dvl6c Nov 6

RT @traackr: RT @mashable "HOW TO: Calculate the ROI of Your Social Media Campaign" - http://on.mash.to/9arPvs Nov 5

6 Benefits of Building a Brand in the Blogosphere Age http://bit.ly/cDgp4v via @SBoSM > common sense but useful Nov 5

MIT on Startling Cost of Inefficient Collaboration http://bit.ly/dBhP12 Nov 5

Microsoft Study Finds Cloud Computing Is Good for the Environment http://bit.ly/a4o8bF Nov 5

RT @jonhusband: Federal Election Commission 2 yrs ago 97% of groups paying for election ads disclosed names of donors. This year only 32%. Nov 4

RT @rjfarr: Just released - social media guidelines for citizen engagement in B.C. http://bit.lhttp://bit.ly/d9pxYt  Nov 4

Social Media Increases “Face to Face Interaction” http://bit.ly/bEBGrg Nov 4

Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2011 http://bit.ly/9OykqQ Nov 4

RT @socialmedia2day: Five Key Ingredients for a Successful Corporate Blog http://goo.gl/fb/ahfqj #sm Nov 3

 

 

 

Happy Thanksgiving in the US

I hope that those celebrating Thanksgiving have a great day with their families.  I plan to do this myself. Here are some of my neighbors who are protected unlike some of their less fortunate cousins. 

              

My KM World 2010 and Enterprise Search Summit 2010 Notes: Peter Morville on Making Maps for Knowledge Discovery

Here is another in a series of session notes for KM World 2010 and Enterprise Search Summit 2010. I attended the keynote session, Search Patterns: Making Maps for Knowledge Discovery led by Peter Morville, President, Semantic Studios, & Author, Search Patterns, his book with a butterfly on the cover. We like this. Here is the session description:

“Search is among the most disruptive innovations of our time. It influences what we buy and where we go. It shapes how we learn and what we believe. It's also a radically multidisciplinary, creative challenge. In this talk, Peter Morville defines a pattern language for search and discovery that embraces user psychology and behavior, cross-channel information architecture, multisensory interaction, and emerging technology. He identifies design principles that apply across the categories of web, ecommerce, enterprise, desktop, mobile, social, and real time. And, he explains how futures methods and user experience deliverables can help us to create better search interfaces and applications today and invent the improbable discovery tools of tomorrow.”

Peter said that as he encounters intranets he often sees strange architecture with components simply added on in a random pattern. He also noted that browsing does not scale. Search is one of the most disruptive innovations of our time. It influences how we find stuff but also how we shop and many other things.

Search admin people often blame users for applying the wrong keywords when they cannot find things. This is the opposite of what should be done.  Search is an iterative and interactive process. What we find changes our approach if we are sensitive to our discoveries.  Search is a complex adaptive system if done right.

We also need to continue to remove the no longer useful information. Search is better when it looks at a smaller target. We need to involve the content creators so they make their content easier to find.

Making search better requires attention to detail. We need to design for incremental progress, as well as immediate response and predictability. We need to give users a sense of confidence in what happens as they engage with the system.

Search means many things to different people, as there are many forms of search. Mobile search often leads people to browsing to avoid too many keystrokes. This is the same with kiosks. However, browsing does not scale so more features need to be incorporated.

Peter has been inspired by the book, The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander, who studied the evolution of buildings. Peter created a search patterns library on the Web and this led to his book, Search Patterns. He found several patterns: thrashing, pearl growing, and narrowing. Thrashing is simply doing small changes but you can get struck by being too tied to your start. We need to be able to move people beyond this. Pearl growing is an expert technique of finding one great document and building from there. It is taught in library science.

Auto-complete is one technique to aid search. Yahoo has been advanced here. They look at prior behaviors as well as post search behavior. Another technique is putting the first content first. Google is a master here. It also succeeds with its speed.

Federated search is an interesting approach as it is both a solution and a symptom of things that need to be addressed. There needs to be tighter integration of different content types. He has been working on this issue at the Library of Congress. They are moving from a federated search model to an integrated search.

Faceted navigation allows people to search as they might do normally.  They can start and then narrow with facets.  You need to think about the right order of facets. This approach blurs browsing and searching as you can browse the facets. As an aside, the Darwin Awareness Engine™ Scan Cloud™ sets up a dynamically created facet field to browse or explore.

Peter showed a cartoon of a drunk searching for his keys on his iPhone. He added that this is actually a possibility. We said that we have seen amazing growth in the searchable Web. On an iPhone you can search by singing or sketching.  Soon you may be able to search by smell or taste.  Brainport helps blind people to see. Images are translated into senses that are sent to the tongue. After 24 hours, people began to realize that this is visual information.

We often do not have the vocabulary to discuss these new things.  Amazon Remembers allows you to take a photo of anything. It then tries to figure out what the object in the photo is and if can they can sell it to you.

There is a lot of cross media integration. Apple is a master of this with their iPods MacBooks, iPads, IPhones.  There is also a lot of transformation of changing products into services such as the Zipcar. I remember Forbes predicting this in 1990. He also showed the tweeting weight scale. I have seen this before and agree that it is too much information.  Service blueprints can show the touch points for a customer experience. Peter said these are good but he said they can be too service oriented and he offered a more mapping approach

Peter said that as an information architect he maps paths across physical, digital and cognitive spaces. In conclusion he said that search is an important part of knowledge management. It is a problem that is never solved and is part of the broader challenge of the user experience. It is very multi-dimensional. This was a great session. Here are my notes from his Enterprise Search Summit keynote in May. There was a lot of new information today. 

 

 

My KM World 2010 and Enterprise Search Summit 2010 Notes: Facilitating Content Discovery Using Chaos Theory

Here is another in a series of session notes for KM World 2010 and Enterprise Search Summit 2010. In this case it is the session I did - Facilitating Content Discovery Using Chaos Theory. Here is the session description. My notes follow. 

“The presentation provides a practical application of chaos theory for creating useful content focal points from the chaotic mess of content resources distributed across the web. Several examples will be provided, both from the internet, where socially generated content is exploding, and from the enterprise, where social tools are contributing to content bloat. The examples illustrate how activity can make information more discoverable and easier to explore through various visualization techniques.”

To set the stage let’s go back to the creation of the text we use to capture content. One of the greatest information technology inventions remains the phonetic alphabet. The Greeks came up with it in the early 8th century BC. The same twenty-four letters have been used to write the Greek language ever since. It is the first and oldest alphabet to note each vowel and consonant with a separate symbol.  This invention provided great flexibility and unprecedented accuracy of linking symbol to word and thus on to thought.  Now we moved from relying on informal communication through spoken conversations to formal documents enabling many breakthroughs.

One of the great flexibilities of the phonetic alphabet or text was the wide range of vehicles that can be used to convey text. Most of the technological advances since the work of the early Greeks have been on the vehicles to convey text, such as paper over clay or stone, and the means to produce these vehicles, such as the printing press, rather than the alphabet, itself.  Text remains king on the Web and the darling of search engines.

In the past, the effort to create text acted as a filter but a series of inventions such as the printing press cut into this difficulty reducing the barriers to creating formal context, generally for the good of most.

Now with Web 2.0 the barriers to creating permanent content through text have been mostly shattered. You still need a computer or a mobile phone or some other smart device and access to the Web.  But much of what is being added is closer to the informal conversations of the pre-text world, than the type of content normally taken to print.

The economist Charles Handy noted that with the knowledge economy that knowledge workers now own the means of production, their minds, unlike their industrial age counter parts. Tings will change. Well with content production the speakers and readers how have the means of production through the Web. This has both good and bad consequences. As Plato said in reaction to a possible over-reliance on documents, conversations can clarify intensions. On the plus side we have much more to look at. One the negative side we have much more to look at.

In 2008 more content was created through the Web than in the history of content. The same thing happened in 2009.  We are now in danger of being overwhelmed by content and sinking into chaos.

The first Web search engine was created in 1990 by computer science students at McGill University in Montreal.  It's searchable web site database was limited as it did not index the content.  It is in 1994 with WebCrawler and Lycos that full-text search appeared on the WWW.  

Google added a new and transformative dimension to search with it s page rank concept. Let the readers help determine what content has the highest value and also look at currency, along with relevance   This has become very useful. I use it every day and it is the default home page for my laptop. I primarily use Google when I know what I am looking for. For example, when I want to find the score of Wizards Celtics NBA game last night or the Web Site of the Boston Celtics or an article I heard about at this conference, I turn to Google. 

However, Google Page Rank was created before the explosion of Web content and has its limits. Sometimes those better at speaking Google’s language than the others on the topic are elevated above the real experts. This is a problem when you use an external framework. People learn how to game it for good and bad reasons. SEO and spam are unintended byproducts of Google.

We do not see Chaos Theory and Correlation Rank™ as a replacement for Google. We see it as a complement. It is an awareness or discovery engine not a search engine. Instead of looking for repeatable patterns, its looks for correlations between content to discover new relationships beyond what you where initially looking for.

If you use Correlation Rank to let the content self organize there is no external framework to game or approach through legitimate methods. There is no SEO or even spam as it would serve no value. 

If I want to find the stories I did not know to look for about a topic of interest, if Ito discover new things, if I want to see the breaking news in real time, the stories generating the most buzz, I turn to Correlation Rank. It does not offer a precise answer, but it reveals a movement or trend as it occurs.  I use Correlation Rank when I want to explore any area of interest in more depth and when I want to see real time alerts.

How is it visualized? Now if I go to Google I get a linear list of results rank ordered by its external framework. Google decides what is important for you. Through the Scan Cloud™ the Darwin Awareness Engine™ provides an overview of the 100 top themes related to your topic of interest visualized in a tag cloud type structure and allows you to explore the ones that appeal to you (see below). You become the decider. In this way we see it as very similar with many of the ideas that Dave Snowden discussed in his session that I posted on yesterday. 

Through the Buzz Tape™ you see topics of rising interest.  Then you can make one of these rising topics the focus of a new Scan Cloud.

 

 

My KM World 2010 and Enterprise Search Summit 2010 Notes: Dave Snowden on Resilient Organizations

Here is another in a series of session notes for KM World 2010 and Enterprise Search Summit 2010. I attended the keynote session, The Resilient Organization led by Dave Snowden, Founder & CTO -Cognitive Edge. Here is the session description.

“In trying to create robust and successful enterprises, organizations have traditionally attempted to eliminate uncertainty through techniques such as scenario planning, risk assessment, process control, and using such programs as Six Sigma. However, the level of uncertainty and the consequences of failure have continued to create major problems for governments and industry alike. This presentation takes a radical new approach to uncertainty and supplies strategies to absorb uncertainty rather than eliminate it, thus creating a resilient organization. Resilience involves the recognition that failure of some type is inevitable and that what matters is early detection of failure and rapid recovery.

Such approaches involve using modern technology to augment human sensor networks and distributed cognition (commonly but mistakenly referenced as crowd sourcing, or wisdom of crowds). Snowden looks at the basic principles and drivers of the shift from robustness to resilience and outlines new methods and tools to move strategy from a linear process developed and implemented over months to dynamic real type approaches with rapid adjustment of objectives, funding, and resources. He examines the way in which modern organizations are focusing on effectiveness, rather than efficiency, creating flexibility in organizational structures, and installing information systems that can support dynamic interaction. Using real-world examples and providing practical tips, Snowden emphasizes an ecological approach to creating resilient 21st-century enterprises.”

Just prior to the session Dave tweeted “finalising slides with an hour to go to keynote, debating how many shibboleths to savage.” So I was interested to learn his decision. He was fast and furious. Dave began by noting that the main reason for KM is to support decision making and this has not changed over the past 15 years.  Practical experience is necessary for wisdom.  You need both theory and practice. But unfortunately now too many people are looking for simplistic answers.  I would agree here.

Dave noted that most people can produce a decent meal through recipes and the right ingredients. A master chef can produce a great meal with whatever is your kitchen.  We need theory and not just recipes to blindly follow.

Often low probability events can have high impact, such as when the levees broke in New Orleans.  You need early detection of these possibilities and fast recovery. Counter terrorism is a good example.  I would add the BP oil spill to the list. You need to architect for resilience. He gave a great example of homes turning back to the 18^th century designs to survive floods in the UK.

The human brain scans a small percentage of the available data and makes quick decisions. The only people who look at all the data are autistic and they are overwhelmed but management theory adopts this autistic approach.  To react to the charging lion you cannot examine all the data before you react.

Despite what Chomsky said, there are no deep structures in language and so taxonomies are useful but limited.  We would certainly agree at Darwin since we let the content self-organize dynamically rather than impose an external structure.

The nature of the system determines how to organize it.  You need flexible boundaries.  He gave a great example of how to manage a children’s party through complexity theory. You create achievable goals and adapt to what happens. The only way to manage a complex system is to engage in it.

He went on to evolutionary theory. Within humans traits that develop accidently often prove useful. Culture can change DNA within a few generations. You want to set up serendipity. Many successful companies were happy accidents. They were outliers at the right time and seized the new opportunity. You need to be open to seeing these innovations. Context is king. In my own experience I have seen the desire of consulting companies to create recipes that new hires can deliver at high profit margins result in an ignorance of context and failure.

The worse movements are the ones with a single founder. KM did not have a single founder so that helped it. If you destroy variety in the system you destroy innovation. Six Sigma is an example of worst practice as it destroys morale and innovation.

Platitudes deserve derision. They only give comfort to the incompetent. Avoid recycled selective cases chosen in hindsight. You need to promote safe fail experiments.  Technology needs to be seen as cognitive augmentation.  Larry Prusack said intuition is just compressed experience. The human brain blends fragments in the face of challenge. He noted how Patton did this in World War Two.

Moore said that new ideas get traction until they threaten the dominant ideas.  Dave noted his own experience.  Companies that dominate a particular cycle have trouble moving to the next one. The same holds for countries or predators.  The next paradigm will always come.  We went from scientific management to systems dynamics (an engineering approach). We are now reaching the end of the systems dynamics era.  It was too rigid and focused on outcomes but can be blind to new stuff.  Now we are moving into the cognitive complexity era and a focus on impact rather than outcome. There are more evolutionary opportunities here.

He dumped on Myers Briggs brilliantly. I totally agree here and have always disliked it. It puts people into boxes based on discarded science but supplies a simplistic answer for those who need them.  We need to shift away from the categorization of individuals to understanding collective capability.  We need to move from scenario planning and linear process toward engaging everyone in continuous assessment. 

Too much transparency is the enemy of innovation as it destroys risk taking. We need to move away from annual budget planning to continuous asset allocation.  I have struggled through not much time wasted on large scale project planning so this strikes home to me.

The ability to create a network is key and not trying to hold power by having hierarchical authority.Hiedegger said that man acts as if he is the master of language when in fact language is the master of man.

We need to move from aggregation for people to allowing people to synthesize fragments. We need to allow for contextual blending of fragments. We need to put decision makers in direct contact with the raw data. This is our goal at Darwin.

Failure leads to learning faster than success. At the same time, self-organizing requires some constraints or you just get anarchy.   Social computing is what KM needed ten years ago. More to agree with here.

We need to distribute cognition but avoid the foolishness of crowds. Above all else we need to encourage messy coherence. Going form mess to order and mess to order in iterative fashion allows for adaption. Much to consider here. 

 

 

Images from Bologna Italy: Part Two

 Here are more images from Bologna, a wonderful city in Emilia-Romagna, Italy.  Next weekend more from the area. 

                          

Images from Bologna Italy: Part One

Here are some photos from Bologna, a wonderful city within Emilia-Romagna, Italy. They were taken in late October. 

                        

My KM World 2010 and Enterprise Search Summit 2010 Notes: Seth Grimes on Sentiment Search

Here is another in a series of session notes for KM World 2010 and Enterprise Search Summit 2010. I attended the session, Search for Sentiment led by Seth Grimes, Principal Consultant, Alta Plana Corporation. Here is the description:

“Correctly making sense of sentiment, opinion, and mood-subjective, attitudinal information-poses a special challenge for search, first in correctly indexing sentiment, then in understanding searcher intent in order to respond to search queries, and finally in presenting sentiment-search findings. In this session, Grimes will discuss applications and business benefits in areas including customer support and satisfaction, brand and reputation management, and marketing and product management. He will describe the characteristics of sentiment and opinion and outline technical approaches and challenges. He will provide examples of online sentiment analysis via the application of search technologies to attitudinal information found in traditional and social media. Grimes will also sketch a road map of likely future sentiment-search developments.”

Seth noted that sentiment analysis has been getting a lot of attention recently. Seth says his definition of enterprise search is very broad. For example, he considers Google Web search an enterprise tool because it provides a lot of value to enterprises. This makes sense.

He offered several assertions about sentiment. He first noted that when someone says it is a fact, you know it is an opinion. So he wants to be clear that these assertions are opinions. He feels that human communications are subjective and online facts and have business value. He then offer examples of facts and feelings.

He gave some examples of sentiment tools, beginning with: I Feel Fine.  It is a consumer Web tool that can be a toy. I have seen it before and agree. Then he moved to a business site that expresses opinions about travel experiences. 

Google search offers some sentiment information. This is one reason that sentiment is a search problem., because Google addresses it other search engines will also cover it.   Offering sentiment on things like travel is a decision support effort. Decision support needs to go beyond general-purpose search. For example, you need a summary of opinions.  Counting term hits does not meet the need. For example, BlogPulse does not give enough information to make decisions. It just shows mentions but you do not know why or what was said.

Seth said that sentiment analysis is the task of identifying positive and negative opinions, emotions, and evaluations. It turns attitudes into data. However, this definition is five years old and we need to go beyond positive or negative and decide what are the emotions involved.

Seth covered some tools he finds useful. The first was Jodange. It provides faceted search and the ability to do summaries. You can interact with the results. You also need to be able to assign positive and negative within components of a content segment such as a tweet.  There are often positive and negative views within the same statement, especially comparative ones.

You fall short with only doc-level analysis as there as there can be multiple sentiments in a single document. You fall short with only keyword-based analysis as you need semantic analysis. You fall short with only human only analysis as you need the power of machines to go through the vast amounts of data.  You fall short with only machine only analysis as you need the sensitivity of humans.  So you need a hybrid solution.

He showed some more examples of tools. SAS Social Media Analysis was the first and it offers social CRM. Clarabridge provides customer experience management.  Crimson Hexagon has a fine grained analysis of perceptions.  He showed an Crimson Hexagon example from Twitter political comments around the country where you can drill down by state and see the sentiment. Here is an early commentary I wrote (Essentials of Online Opinion Monitoring from Crimson Hexagon). 

Seth said that one of the trends in sentiment analysis is to go beyond polarity.  There is some academic work that is surfacing in business tools. LiveJournal offers degrees of happy, sad, and angry. This can be useful in call centers.

It seems that this is a niche in progress but some progress has been made.

 

 

 

My KM World 2010 and Enterprise Search Summit 2010 Notes: James Robertson on Intranets in 2015

Here is another in a series of session notes for KM World 2010 and Enterprise Search Summit 2010. I attended the session, Intranets in 2015 led by James Robertson, Managing Director - Step Two Designs. Here is the session description.

“How can we deliver great intranets if we don't know where we're heading? This powerful presentation outlines a vision for intranets in 2015, describing a day-in-the-life of how staff will work. Going beyond the technology aspects, this session explores the "enterprise experience" that we should be providing to staff and how to start delivering it today.”

James has been talking about intranets for a long time. He speaks with a lot of people about how to make then work. His site has over 250 articles that are available for free on his site. He does three new articles a month except for January.

Looking at today’s intranet issues can be better addressed by knowing what the future holds. He started with the first of two scenarios, a new employee, first day at work. First, she finds a desk and computer with an email waiting for her. It is from the intranet offering to help her get started. Someone in the audience said they wanted to work there.

She starts the intranet and finds a series of links on getting started.  There are videos from other staff on things they wish they learned on day one.  There are many induction tasks including updating her profile. She can add her own tasks. There is a space for collaborating. She can see the collaborative spaces and view the profiles of her team members.

There are product chats about the company’s various offerings, as well as competitors. At the end of the first day she has a good start on her new job. She has done some tasks and has an initial understanding of what is happening at the company and within its market.

In debriefing this scenario it was mentioned that much is happening behind the scenes. This is cool but there is a fine line between being cool and creapy, with too much “big brother.” James feels that intranets need to be proactive and take advantage of the information located around the enterprise.

James said that these features are not blue sky. Some of the features are already in place. For example, the Jansen-Cilag intranet allows people to manage their own IT assets (see ). The CRS Australia intranet has an inbox that collects to-dos for multiple areas. The IDEO intranet connects people to people.

Then James covered another scenario. The new employee is off to her first business meeting and has some downtime at the airport. She looks at the intranet and finds all the company’s products and many real time details around them: sales, customer satisfaction, etc..  Booking the trip was automated through the intranet. She saw the hotels for her pay grade and no others, restaurants with reviews, both by the company and outside on the Web, and information for joggers. The intranet noticed that this was her first trip so the company issues and policies are covered.

James said the important issue is the employee experience and not whether it is on the cloud or inside the firewall.  He said that there are some tough issues in these scenarios but they are achievable.  I would agree. James noted that eighty to ninety percent of the data exists so you just need to make it accessible and use it.

James offered some principles. First, content is not longer the center, people are. User centered design is the approach to use. I found this to be the case since the early 90s, if not before.  I found that the degree of success for a  project was directly related to how much the users were involved in the design and their needs were made the center of it.

Second – provide universal access, including mobile access for everyone. Enable access from home.

Third - create a seamless enterprise experience. Blur the line between systems. Make this capability a mandate for vendors.

Fourth – Offer end-to-end solutions. Focus on task completion and clarify and simplify.  The simplification can generate a lot of ROI.

Fifth – Integrate into the business

Sixth – Crossing boundaries – Break down silos and create awareness of what is going on in the enterprise, as well as outside. Enable a transparent organization.

James moved to what we can do now when budgets are tight, management is cautious, technology can be clunky. First, create your own design and future scenarios.  Design small but great solutions. Make sure you do something rather than just talk about possibilities. Remember intranet need to attractive, as well as functional.

It was very useful for him to close on some calls to action.

 

 

At KM World 2010 Today: The Darwin Awareness Engine™ Receives 2010 KM Promise Award

I am very pleased to announce that the Darwin Awareness Engine™ won the 2010 KM Promise Award today at KM World.  It is a great honor. Here is the description of the award from the KM World site.

“Many companies promise that their technology is the best knowledge management solution. One of the greatest challenges for organizations purchasing these technologies is to determine which of these companies will deliver on this promise. This award is given to the organization that is delivering this promise to its customers by providing innovative technology solutions for implementing and integrating knowledge management practices into their business processes. The award-winning organization demonstrates how it goes beyond simply delivering technology to working with clients to ensure that both the technology and knowledge processes are imbedded into the work processes. In other words, it helps organizations realize positive business results.”

We are in great company. Last year’s winner was Inmagic and the 2008 winner was Attivio.  Both are great companies that I have covered several times (for most recent see Inmagic Presto 3.5 Broadens Its Collaboration Capabilities and Attivio Aligns with Traction and Releases New Features). Here is a conversation I had this year with Probstein, Attivio CTO.

Here is a video of the award presentation made by Kurt Kragh Serenson of IntraTeam. 

 

KM World is a great event that is currently in its 14ht year. I remember going to the first three and many since then. I am now covering a number of this year’s sessions on this blog.  Here is a complete listing of my KM World 2009 Session Notes.

We have recently released a series of themed Darwin Editions™ powered by the Awareness Engine™ that focus on specific topics to better demonstrate its capabilities and as a service to our readers. These can each be accessed at no cost. You only have to go through a brief registration process and we promise you that no sales person will contact you as a result.  

Here are links to a series of posts going into more detail on the first three Darwin Editions and how to use them:

Darwin Awareness Engine™ Edition Series: Part One - Explanation and Instructions

Darwin Awareness Engine™ Edition Series: General News

Darwin Awareness Engine™ Edition Series: Social Media on the Web

Darwin Awareness Engine™ Edition Series: Social Media in the Enterprise

Darwin Awareness Engine™ Edition Series: Energy Sector News

We hope that you find these Darwin Editions useful and will certainly appreciate any feedback. Also look at Twortex, our business partner which offers a Twitter search tool using the Darwin Awareness Engine. Please contact us at feedback@DarwinEco.com. We will also be happy to discussion the various business options for a fully functional Darwin edition with all administration rights.  You can create your own Darwin Editions on the topics of your choice with the target content of your selection.  There are both individual and enterprise options. 

 

 

My KM World 2010 and Enterprise Search Summit 2010 Notes: Stan Garfield on Communities of Practice

Here is another in a series of session notes for KM World 2010 and Enterprise Search Summit 2010. I attended the session, 10 Principles for Successful CoPs.

This session was led by Stan Garfield, Community Evangelist, Consulting - Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited and Author, Implementing a Successful KM Programme. Stan created the SIKM community that has close to 500 members on a global basis. I have been a member for some time and there are some great discussions. Here is the session description. My notes follow.

“Based on his experience in creating, leading, and managing communities and communities programs, both inside and outside of organizations, Garfield defines and describes 10 principles for successful communities. He offers real-world examples and discusses tools while emphasizing key themes: Communities should be independent of organization structure; they are different from teams; are not sites, blogs or wikis; community leadership and membership should be voluntary; communities span boundaries; need a critical mass of members; start with as broad a scope as is reasonable; need to be actively nurtured; and more.”

Stan said that he was first in a professional community at Washington University School of Medicine in 1975. He was in the role of running community knowledge sharing sessions and there was no technology involved. This was new then. He found that communities work if people share a passion. He has been involved in many communities since then.

Here are the ten principles: One - Communities should be independent of organizational structure. They should be based on the content.

Two – Communities are different from organizations and teams.  People are assigned to a team. Communities are better with self–selection for joining and remaining.

Third – Communities are people and not tools. You should not start with tech features. A platform is not a community. Readers of the same blog are not a community but that might be a byproduct. 

Fourth – Communities should be voluntary. The passion of members should be what drives a community.  You should make the community appealing to get members and not assign them to it.

Fifth – Communities should span boundaries. They should not be for a particular group likes Sales or IT. There is a lot of cross-functional or cross-geography learning that would be missed then. Diverse views help communities.

Sixth – You should minimize redundancy in communities. Consolidation helps to avoid confusion by potential members. It also reduces the possibility of not getting a critical mass. Reducing redundancy also enables more cross-boundary sharing.

Seven - Communities need a critical amass. You need at least 50 and likely 100. Usually ten percent are very active so you can get sufficient level of activity with 100 people.

Eight – Avoid having too narrow of scope for the community. Too much focus can lead to not enough members. Stan advises people to start broad and narrow if necessary.  Or start as part of broader community and spin off if needed.

Nine – Communities need to be active. Community leaders need to do work, often in the “spare time” at their regular work. This means that the leader needs a passion for the topics so he or she will spend this extra time. There needs to be energy to get things going.

Ten – Use TARGETs to manage communities. TARGET includes: Types, activities, requirements, goals, expectations, and tools. Each of these issues needs to addressed and explained to prospective members.  Tools are necessary, but the least important component, so they are placed last.

I think these are a very useful set of things to consider. Stan covered more useful details faster than I can type. You can get all the details about these ten principles at Stan’s website.

 

 

 

My KM World 2010 and Enterprise Search Summit 2010 Notes: Tom Stewart Key Note

Here is the second in a series of session notes for KM World 2010 and Enterprise Search Summit 2010. I attended the keynote: The Wealth of Knowledge by Thomas A Stewart, Chief Marketing & Knowledge Officer - Booz & Company. Tom is the Former Editor & Managing Director, Harvard Business Review and I have read his work for some time. These notes are near time so please excuse typos. Here is the session description:  

“Our experienced author and practitioner shares winning strategies for developing and evolving knowledge-driven enterprises that are productive, innovative, and successful. Using real-world examples he illustrates how those strategies have worked in many different types of organizations. Stewart also looks into the future and suggests directions that knowledge-driven enterprises will engage in over the next few years.”

Tom started by pointing out the knowledge effort has been around for a while, running hot and cold like the Gartner hype curve. Investing in knowledge can still return great value. He began by looking at value in the knowledge economy.

He asked if the primary role of management is to address change or continuity. Change won, as did intellectual assets over physical assets.

Tom said that the knowledge economy stands on four pillars, First, knowledge is what we buy and sell. More of the money we spend now is on knowledge versus food, shelter, etc. Our smart phones have more knowledge than what was required to put a man on the moon.  He now has a smart stove. This has created new strategic options for companies. For example, how are we going to package knowledge? One option is to put it into things. You can also distil your knowledge and sell it as a product. The third option is black box services such as what consulting companies and law firms do.

The TV show Mad Men shows old style marketing. They gave away marketing strategy to get the physical ads. Now these are separate and the ad agency game has changed. Firms such as law firms need new business models.

Knowledge now defines our work and activities.  People need to ask what knowledge they need to do thier job. This is an opportunity for KM. This basic business case has limits. The first is that traditional organizations do not manage knowledge well and knowledge gets distorted in the communication process.  Networks can be a solution. There are three kinds: the network of our team, networks from the center of an organization to those on the edge (including customers and partners), and networks to connect those on the edge with each other.  Knowledge managers need to get these three networks under control.

Knowledge management needs to be able to handle fuzzy problems. When things are clear you provide best practices. When cause and effect is knowable you provide access to experts. When cause and effect are not known, you need to be able to take intelligent action within the chaos. This is where the most value from knowledge can be derived.

The third pressure on companies is the increasing globalization. First there was the globalization of markets, then production, now it is intellect. Now R&D budgets are being increasingly spent off shore. Distributed decision making only works when everyone understands the strategy and the knowledge to support it. Knowledge assets are what separate winners and losers. You need to be able identify your value to the market. Is it innovation, consistency, service, etc.? Does the sales force agree with management? This alignment is essential to compete.

The last pillar of knowledge economy is that return on knowledge should exceed that for other assets. This is how you create value. KM can accelerate this value creation.

Next, he addressed the rise of extreme competition. Everything is going faster. The customer expects 24/7 service. Customer power is growing. Pricing power is elusive. Traditional media has to compete against free products.  Finding these products is much easier. Adaptability is key and KM can address this issue.

Then he covered pursuing a capabilities-driven strategy. The first order is defining what an organization really is. What is the identity? How do we create value for our customers? What do need to do this? To who are we selling what? The problem comes when these answers do not align. Problems when companies get side tracked to go after other goals because they seem easy. Coherence pays off.  How can KM support this alignment? The answer will drive value in the 21^st century.

Key questions include: Have we earned the right to win? Can we articulate the capabilities that give us this right? Have we created coherence in our KM system? How can we create the needed synergy by creating coherence through the same knowledge base? Tom suggests that knowledge management’s role has increased and become more strategic in today’s marketplace. I would agree. 

 

 

KM World and Enterprise Search Summit 2010 Notes: Designing Social Search in the Enterprise

Here is the first in a series of session notes for KM World 2010 and Enterprise Search Summit 2010. I attended the workshop, Designing Social Search in the Enterprise. It was led by Thomas Vander Wal, Principal - InfoCloud Solutions, Inc, someone I have been following on Twitter for some time.  So I was very interested in both the topic and the presenter. Please excuse the typos as these notes were done realtime with a quick edit. Here is the session description.

“One of the biggest problem on today's websites and intranets is findability. Even as large companies have scaled up their investment in search and intranet development, one key ingredient is missing: the people. People are social, and people leverage social strategies to find information all the time-at work, with colleagues-to solve real problems. How do we add this social element into enterprise search systems? How do we know what to look for in search tools, services to add into the mix, and or design elements that will make an impact?

Our experienced designer frames these relevant models of social search and walks though how to think through the problems to get to a more optimal solution. This will also include the potential benefits as well as the pitfalls that come along with some popular solutions (as well as how to counteract those pitfalls). You will learn to think and design through the considerations to augment findability with social search within the enterprise. He will discuss the tools necessary to understand search design, the benefits of social search, and how to work though real world problem sets interactively in the session, so those in the session will come away with the ability to apply what is learned to their work environment.”

Thomas began by saying that he avoids fuzzy terms such as community, expert, collaboration, and trust, as they are hard to define.  So I guess I will not talk about building trust within communities to enable collaboration J.  I certainly agree that these terms can lead you down blind alleys. A Google search on any of the tem shows the broad range of interpretation they can generate. I especially agree about the term expert. I generally feel that anyone who calls themselves an expert, has indicated that they are not one.  

Enterprise search is problematic. It was an issue before social tools and has the potential to only get worse now with the new silos brought by some social tools. People cannot find stuff that they believe exists.  One reason is that search often lacks the feedback element. Thomas mentioned two researchers, Marti Hearst and Bynn Evans, that have worked in social search. Thomas said he used some of their framing in his session. He now went through several types of social search.

There are several types of social search – friend/colleague filtered social search. Yahoo MyWeb 2 was an example but it is no longer available. There is a problem with this approach since personal networks may be narrow.

Social ranking is another type of social search. Digg, StumbleUpon and delicious are examples. The problem is that segmentation can be difficult.

Multi-person and collaborative search is a third example. System that support shared screens, such as Google Wave, is an example.  The problem is that tools are limited. Google Wave is another tool that is no longer supported.

A fourth example is collective search such as Google News and Twitter trends. It can be used for exploratory search but the crowd is anonymous and cannot be filtered.  There are also issues around shared vocabulary. One issue that Thomas found is fear of embarrassment because you are exposing yourself by using it.

Another example is massive scale Q&A tools such as Quora. It can be useful for handling difficult search problems but the problem now is that tools are limited, especially inside the enterprise.

Thomas discussed ways to fill in the gaps in social search. He offered four types of InfoClouds. Personal InfoClouds addresse the intranet. He used this concept to cover attracting things to your screen so they are available as you work.  Then Thomas covered the concept of a Global InfoCloud, a larger set, but still within the enterprise. Then the External InfoCloud goes outside the enterprise. The Local InfoCloud completes coverage of the gaps. Information is often structured differently in specific locations such as a packy in Mass and party store in Michigan as a place to buy beer.  The Local InfoCoud can have many components such as colleagues, social software, and portals.

As you use the other InfoClouds, you place content in your personal InfoCloud. Looking back at my days within a large consulting firm I can see how these work together. My hard drive was my personal InfoCloud.  I looked to the other three for stuff to put in it, but I largely relied on personally stored content. The trouble was it was hard to search, as well as organize.

Thomas now looked at several tools, beginning with SocialCast.  It is an enterprise micro-blogging tool that I have covered a bit (see Socialcast Adds Sharepoint and Outlook Integration, New Features, and Enhanced Metrics). They have a new tool called Reach. It drops micro-blogging streams within work tools. I like this as aligning social tools with work processes is generally a critical success factor. You can also save conversations so enterprise search can find them, another good idea.

System One is another tool. It has a semantic engine that structures the information as you type. It can fill in the gaps and bring up related information. You can search as you work, It also finds relevant people based on your content.  Your entire document becomes you entire search engine. As you work, it searches and brings things up for your use.

The System One site says: “System One Radar tracks global information sources according to the context of your most important projects. Based on broadly definable Issue Portfolios it analyzes 80.000 news sources as well as Social Media, fully automated and in real-time, showing trends, backgrounds, relations, opportunities and risks. All visualized in a way that allows insight at a glance.” They have several tools and this is describing a Web version.

They also have a collaboration version. Here is its description: “System One Collaboration recombines the essentials of social software and semantic search in a highly integrated team productivity suite. Things that are being worked on are automatically related to all relevant resources within your company and beyond. System One Collaboration is browser based, works on mobile devices as well as on paper and is available as hosted or on-premise solution.”

James Robertson commented that these tools seem to attempting to make search support pervasive and come to your work. Thomas said that the trend is bringing these components to your existing tools so you do not have to learn new systems and they fit within your existing work processes.

Knowledge Plaza started as a social search engine and they added features over time (see my early review: Enterprise 2.0 Knowledge Sharing Platform from Knowledge Plaza). Thomas said he helped simplify their interface. It is a Web-based platform for enterprise search, social bookmarking, knowledge management, information brokerage and expert identification. It was developed by the Belgium based firm, Whatever. Nice name. There are facets, and you can search through other’s eyes.  You can easily package the results and share them but it does not easily integrate into enterprise search engines.

Thomas next covered reconfiguring search with social relevance. He began with Yahoo MyWeb2 which was a bookmarking tool like delicious. You could search on others bookmarks. Thomas found it very useful as people he knew where curating for him by their own curation activities. A down side was that he could not contextualize the people, especially when they discuss off topic topics.  Tagging could help here if people have the discipline to use tags. That is not a given. Some tools have auto-tagging that can help with this issue. Yahoo no longer seems to support MyWeb2. One reason is that Yahoo bought delicious.

Connectbeam is another example that unfortunately is not still around. I liked them (see Integrating Social Networking and Social Bookmarking with Enterprise Applications: Connectbeam). They believed that business networking begins around the sharing of ideas and information so they tightly integrated social bookmarking into their social networking platform. They also introduced the Connectbeam web services Application Programming Interface (API) that enables you to add full functionality of Connectbeam social software into your existing IT applications. Perhaps they were a bit ahead of their time.

Thomas next covered search across walled gardens. Enterprises create different levels of openness.  Search needs to take this into consideration and honor the layers of accessibility.  

Future search and follow results was the next topic. PubSub was an example of this but it is no longer around. You could get alerts on topics of interest for advanced business intelligence. Perhaps it was another company ahead of its time. 

Thomas next discussed the concept of social comfort. There are three components: social comfort with others, social comfort with tools (e.g. How far is the reach of my actions?) and social comfort with subject matter (where can I talk about certain topics?). These are issues to resolve as you use social tools. 

There was a lot of useful information and context in the session. Thomas has a depth of experience here. It seems that this is still a field that is a 'work in progress." Many of the initial tools are not around any more. Others are still being refined. One experimental tool in this space that I like is IBM Social Lens (see IBM’s Social Lens Provides Smart Content Filter).  I look forward to seeing what progress is conveyed in next year's session.

 

 

Initial Darwin Edition™ Series is Now Available

We have decided to provide a series of themed Darwin Editions™ powered by the Awareness Engine™ that focus on specific topics to better demonstrate its capabilities and as a service to our readers. These can each be accessed at no cost. You only have to go through a brief registration process and we promise you that no sales person will contact you as a result. 

The initial themes for our Darwin Editions include: general news (our original alpha), social media on the web, social media in the enterprise, US immigration news and discussions, and oil and gas industry news. The last two will be released over the next few weeks and the first three were made available last week (see links below). In this context we also point to our partner, Twortex, which uses aspects of the Darwin Awareness Engine to provide a free Twitter search tool.

 
Here are links to a series of posts going into more detail on the first three Darwin Editions and how to use them:

Darwin Awareness Engine™ Edition Series: Part One – Explanation and Instructions

Darwin Awareness Engine™ Edition Series: General News (500 sources)

Darwin Awareness Engine™ Edition Series: Social Media on the Web (over 160 sources)

Darwin Awareness Engine™ Edition Series: Social Media in the Enterprise (over 170 sources)

Darwin Awareness Engine™ Edition Series: Energy Sector News (over 100 resources)

These Darwin Editions provide a way to monitor the conversations within several focused areas. They offer many of the user capabilities that come with the complete Darwin Awareness Engine. Darwin looks at targeted content rather than spidering the whole Web. This targeted content approach provides greater control to select relevant content and can be focused within the Web or within the enterprise through such applications as SharePoint, Domino, and many of the other collaboration and content management platforms.  Determining and curating the target content is one of the administration function that come with the commercial versions. In this Darwin Edition series we have picked the content sources and will continue to refine them and add to the total sources.

The default view shows you what has happened in the target content sources in the last hour. You can expand it to the last two hours, 24 hours and even last 200 hours. You can also create "attractors" which are queries that allow you to look at how specific topics are being addressed within the target content. There are other options and you can find the features described in our instructions post. The color coding in the Scan Cloud represents different types of terms such as people, events, and organizations. They will be explained in the instructions and are an admin function. 

We also used the Traackr A-List for PR 2.0 for some of the social media in the web sources and a Traackr A-List for enterprise social media that we developed for some of the choices in that Darwin Edition. These lists of 25 top influencers use a group of keywords you define and update weekly so we continue to monitor them for possible new sources. 

We hope that you find these Darwin Editions useful and will certainly appreciate any feedback. Contact us at feedback@DarwinEco.com. We will also be happy to discussion the various business options for a fully functional Darwin edition with all administration rights.  You can create your own Darwin Editions on the topics of your choice with the target content of your selection.  There are both individual and enterprise options.

 

 

Traveling in Northern Vermont: Part Four

Here are more Fall photos form northern Vermont on a sunny day. 

                         

 

Traveling in Northern Vermont: Part Three

This is the third in a series on travels in northern Vermont. Now we are in the fall. 

                        

Twitter Comes to Google TV

Google TV has announced some of its partners and Twitter is on the list. According to the Twitter blog, Twitter on Google TV has most of the features and functionality in regaular Twitter. You can look through Tweets, @mentions, and favorites. When you click on a Tweet, you can reply, retweet, favorite, or share it. You see additional options depending on the content of the Tweet. For example, you can visit a URL or click a hashtag to search for it on Twitter.

If a user is mentioned, you can visit that user’s profile to see their Tweets or follow them. If there is a link to a photo or video, you can see a thumbnail version. Clicking the link will take you to the site so you can see a larger version of the photo or watch the video.

The search box provides access to trending topics and recent searches, so you can see popular topics and revisit past searches. Twitter for Google TV is preinstalled lets you share videos, web pages, pictures, and other content on the Web Twitter. You do this through the “Share” option and select Twitter. I think this is an essential feature so I am glad they enabled this.

We are pleased to see this development. You can now look at the trends in Twitter content through both the Darwin Awareness Engine™ and through our business partner, Twortex, which provides a Twitter content discovery tool using our technology and a variation of our content visualization methods.

This is part of the growing convergence of the Web and television. Forrester expects there will be 43 million internet-connected television sets in United States homes by 2015. Google TV also announced that several television networks and media companies, including HBO, the NBA, and CNBC would be its partners in offering Web content and programming to allow for on-demand viewing and apps built for TV.

NBC Universal said it will deploy CNBC Real-Time, which allows for stock-tracking on the screen alongside the live broadcast of CNBC business channel. The National Basketball Association created N.B.A. Game Time for following basketball news. So far the major networks, ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC, are absent from Google’s partner list.

 

 

Darwin Awareness Engine™ Covered in eContent Magazine

I have great respect for eContent Magazine and was very pleased to see the following coverage for the Darwin Awareness Engine™

“Darwin Ecosystem released the Darwin Awareness Engine, a product able to analyze complex underlying patterns in markets over time in addition to the events that have an impact on these markets. The Awareness Engine further allows organizations to create, test, and refine hypotheses regarding the driving forces behind market events, and compare and inform those hypotheses with conversations and data that appear on the web. This web data is presented in a Scan Cloud, which uses correlation between key words as its basis, as opposed to the relevance ranking of search engines. Darwin reports that the Darwin Awareness Engine disposes of the need for organizations to search for sources manually, which can be a time-consuming process.”

Michelle Manafy is the Editor of EContent magazine and the Intranets newsletter. Michelle is also Chair of the Enterprise Search Summits and Buying & Selling eContent Conferences. The call for Speakers for next May's Enterprise Search Summit is out. I went this year and found it to be a great conference. It was also our first conference to present the Darwin Awareness Engine. Here is a sample of notes from the May 2010 event. 

 

IBM’s Social Lens Provides Smart Content Filter

Here is a good idea and smart approach to content overload. In 2008 there was more content produced through the Web than the entire previous years. Then it was repeated again in 2009.  Search is a partial solution but Google’s approach was created before the huge explosion of content through social media and is subject to SEO manipulation.  We need to go beyond simply search to filter down content to find what interest us.

IBM has taken a novel approach through its experimental application, Social Lens. I recently attended a media session at IBM and got a demo of the Social Lens application among others (see 2010 Update on IBM Social Software Efforts: Part Two). The Center for Social Software has created and number of interesting apps. I recently followed up with Michael Muller and Elizabeth Daly for a more in-depth discuss of Social Lens.

Social Lens lets the user set the stage and then provides automated support that the user can continue to refine.  To set a lens, users first define people, resources, and communities that form their core interest area.  The application is currently operating with the IBM Lotus Connections environment but it appears that the concept could be applied in other contexts.  Here is a list of people.

Now that the user has set the foundation, Social Lens builds on this start by suggesting other people, resources, and communities that related to the original picks. These auto-generated selections form the second tier of content sources. The user can either promote them into the primary core of content sources or drop them altogether.  Here is a list of initial communities with an additional one.

Content from the primary core has a slightly higher ranking if the user decides to the narrow the lens. You can to cast a wide net and include all the selected sources or narrow down the focus to only get content from the primary core group.  You can also continue to fine tune the primary and secondary content sources.  Here is a sample social lens.

Content is delivered through a time ordered activity stream that shows the new stuff coming out of the selected group. You can see a sample activity stream below.

This is an experimental application and IBM has conducted research on its effectiveness. They compared the perceived “interestingness” of content served up through Social Lens with content from other sources, one that is a personalized filter and the other is a general one.  Social Lens scored higher on both interestingness and also on the “relatedness” of the second-tier auto-generated content.  It also generated a large amount of useful content that the user might not have been seen otherwise.

I really like what they are doing here. It offers the user a role and then makes use of what a computer can do best to amplify the user’s selections. Here is another description that appeared in the Technology Review. 

 

Traction Team Page 5.1 Integrates Project Management Capabilities

I have been covering Traction TeamPage for several years (for ex. Traction Announces New Integrated Micro-blogging and Solid Revenue Growth for 2008) and continue to respect their accomplishments. I recently spoke with Greg Lloyd about the newest release, Traction TeamPage 5.1.

Now that the enterprise 2.0 market is starting to mature a bit, I think one of the success factors for platforms will be the ability to align with business processes. I observed this with knowledge management. The only successful KM efforts that I saw were business process aligned. This is exactly the direction that Traction is taking with its last two releases. Now Traction is always been about supporting business, but it is now even more explicit with its current integration of project management capabilities.

At the beginning of the year they released TeamPage 5.0 with the new Proteus skin that provides faster performance and a cleaner interface using Google Web Toolkit user interface technology New features then were the inclusion of profiles, Twitter-style status updates, tag clouds,  and enhanced metrics. Now with the 5.1 Release they are adding action tracking, calendaring, milestones, and projects using the term “observable work.”

The action tracking concept is not old school project management with Gantt charts and resource allocation. It is allowing employees to manage their work tasks and make this management transparent to those who need to know. This is where the observable work comes it. I have seen considerable improvement in employee and team performance when their work becomes transparent to the right others. The spot light does wonders when applied correctly.

This is the action tracking part of project management for the regular employee, not the program management office. It brings this activity into the enterprise 2.0 world as every task is treated as an object for comments, RSS, and made searchable to those with the proper permissions. Traction has always had great granular security and this permission level technology is applied here, as well.  Below is a sample screen for action planning. In this case it is for their recent TUG 2010 user conference.

You can also get an overview of all milestones, goals with a date, as you can see below.

Taking it up a level, a project is a collection of tasks or actions and milestones. Here is a sample screen showing projects. You can drill down into the details.

There is also enhanced calendaring with automatic updates based on changes in tasks and milestones. Only the tasks, milestones and projects that fit your permission profile are displayed. A Traction TeamPage calendar can be referenced and included live in Outlook, Google calendar and others that support the iCal format.  You can subscribe to  a top-down view of all calendar items, or subscribe to a personal calendar view of just the item’s you’re responsible for.

Each person’s Team Page profile page shows everything that the profiled person is doing within your permission level, including work stream, status, projects and personal task calendar. It can also be auto-updated through changes within LDAP. Here is a sample profile page showing the various features. The tabs are configurable.

You can filter content by person or task. You can also change a note to a task to provide the ability to track it and increase its visibility.  Tasks can be treated like tags and added to any paragraph in any space within the system. I think that this complete collection of new capabilities builds on the strong platform already established to take it further into the ideal of enterprise 2.0.  Here the activities of an organization are accessible to those who need to know and this transparency operates at the task or action level. It will be interesting to see what they do next. 

 

The Cloud Moves Forward Privately

While cloud computing continues to increase it is interesting, but not surprising, that more firms are choosing private clouds than public ones. As reported in ComputerWorldUK, Gartner surveyed 1,587 CIOs and other senior IT decision makers about general IT spending trends, with 484 respondents providing answers relating to questions on cloud computing. The survey wnet across 40 countries, from April to July 2010, and found that 39 percent of respondents allocated some IT budget to the cloud.

ComputerWorld quoted Bob Igou, research director at Gartner, “One-third of the spending on cloud computing is a continuation from the previous budget year, a further third is incremental spending that is new to the budget, and 14 percent is spending that was diverted from a different budget category in the previous year,”

The Gartner analysts said that this investment trend shows a “shift towards the ‘utility’ approach for non-core services, and increased investment in core functionality, often closely aligned with competitive differentiation.” In addition some 43 percent of respondents expected an increase in spending for private cloud implementations designed for internal or restricted use of the enterprise compared to 32 percent looking at public cloud implementations. This later trends shows the flexibility of the cloud and a desire to combine utility with security.

The benefits and risks of using the cloud are well known: flexibility, agility, and cost savings versus security and control concerns. Building private clouds seems a logical approach. 

Traveling in Northern Vermont Part Two

Here is the second part of my series on traveling in Northern Vermont late in the summer.

                

National Geographic Offers Simply Beautiful Photographs

Here is one of latest in a long series of great photo books from National Geographic, Simply Beautiful Photographs by Annie Griffiths. I was pleased to receive a review copy. Annie selected images from all of the Society's core mission areas: exploration, wildlife, cultures, science, and nature. Each chapter covers a “specific aspect of what creates beauty in a photograph, whether light or color, or motion, and illuminates that quality in a splash of large-format images —most of which readers will be able to purchase as prints. Musings on visual beauty from scholars and poets enhance the experience.”  

This must have been a fun assignment given the rich depth of the National Geographic photo archives. It is certainly fun to look at what she came up with.  The chapters are: light, composition, moment, time. palette, and wonder.  Many of the photos span across two pages of the large format book. Among other things it shows the diversity of beauty with the world and the people who live in it.

I was especially drawn into the composition chapter as I am always mentally composing pictures as I walk around and this gave we some new ideas to consider. It begins appropriately with a quote from Henri Cartier-Bresson, the master of composition.  I loved the contrast of a single black muddy road through a white field of snow followed by a busy Asian marketplace. An image from Sam Abell follows with an archway of trees over a dirt drive. I have interviewed Sam before about his composition process. Later a large group of white pelicans navigate the curve in a dark river through a grassy march. A curving street in Lisbon provides a stage for a variety of people. The great images go on and on. Annie provides photo she took of a bicycle in front of a fruit stand in the rural UK.

The Moment chapter captures those fleeting instances that photography is unique in its ability to capture. Nuns play volleyball. A whale surfaces and a gorilla considers a leaf. The Time chapter shows image sin motion, often with a blur. The tango dancers surrounded by motion is a great example.

The Palette chapter shows images with a strong color sense, often in the same color, sometimes with contrasting colors. A lone red umbrella in a large green Japanese garden is a good example of this interplay. Another red umbrella is seen in a blur of snow in a largely black and white image of Chinese workers.

The Wonder chapter is true to its name with images that cause a close look such as a group of seemingly dancing humpback whales. An exploding volcano in Hawaii is followed by the northern lights in Canada.

This is a comprehensive collection of images that will not disappoint. It will draw you in for many viewing.

 

 

 

My Favorite Tweets for October 16 - 31 2010

Here is another in a series of posts that provide access to my favorite tweets that contain links to useful information.  Some of these I did to link to things I found useful and others are RTs that I want to save for the same reason. Since Twitter archiving is an oxymoron, I am now going to post my favorite links for the month so they can be easily accessed later. I will repeat this once or twice a month depending on volume. 

I spot tested the reduced shortened urls and they all should work. I hope this is also useful for you.  Let me know your favorite tweets for the month.

Also see the Darwineco favorite tweets.

excellent live-blogging from #e20s from member @driessen Check it: http://bit.ly/9UTksM  Oct 28th

Death of the Paper, Book and now .. Cable and TV as we know it http://bit.ly/dj7Pyc from @robpatrob Oct 27th

E2.0 Thinking: Steve Jobs http://bit.ly/bVcUHi > great read from @rotkapchen  Oct. 27

Avoiding Bad Trips in the Twitterverse http://bit.ly/aj1sCA Oct. 27

C-Suiters Out of Touch With Social Media http://bit.ly/drrdIz via @SBoSM Oct. 27

Post-PC World: Connected Devices & Continuous Services http://bit.ly/cpGfyY via @psfk  Oct. 27

RT @jonhusband: I like @jlipnack 's rebuttal of Malcolm Gladwell's recent piece about social media ... http://bit.ly/c0K0rP  Oct 26th

RT @dhinchcliffe: Apply Enterprise 2.0 to Business Processes to Reveal Its Value: http://bit.ly/bXVYjF #e20  Oct 20th

Honda’s Vision for Collaborative Innovation http://bit.ly/abZk9H  Oct 20th

RT @jbowles: RT @socialwebabcs Google Offers Fresh Guide to SEO Basics http://su.pr/1AiFMd  Oct 19th

social media browser wars coming up? via @SBoSM http://tcrn.ch/bdMBrw  Oct 19th

Sustaining Behavior Change: “Go on Green” http://bit.ly/bq5ztK another good read from @theforumcorp Oct 19

How to Integrate Learning and Work http://bit.ly/bYYRyq good read from @theforumcorp Oct 19

IBM exceeds 3Q Profit Estimates http://bit.ly/biaWyk Oct 19

a logical step for @Evernote and its additional $20 million -- address info. management needs for businesses | http://bit.ly/c585Za  Oct 19

RT @gyehuda: Blog post #e20 Three Forces That Drive Social Behavior http://ow.ly/19w4x5  Oct 19

RT @dhinchcliffe: 5 Location-Based Services for Enterprise: http://rww.to/diWXSk HT @eric_andersen  Oct 18th

Google Determined to Crack the Social Code NYT http://nyti.ms/co9UWO  Oct 18th

RT @VMaryAbraham: How to Avoid “Social Loafing” on Your Next Project http://bit.ly/bjbRjb #e20 #KMers  Oct 16th

 

Forrester Covers Top 15 Enterprise Technology Trends for 2011 To 2013

Forrester has released its research on top technology trends for enterprises to watch from 2011-2013 and I was pleased to get a review copy. Gene Leganza led the excellent research. As he wrote in the summary, “For this year’s list of top trends, we’ve used the same criteria — impact, newness, and complexity — but we’ve modified the categories, merged related topics, added five new trends, and updated all the entries with this year’s perspective.” The categories for this year are: “empowered” technologies, process-centric data and intelligence, agile and fit-to-purpose applications, and smart technology management.

In the survey respondents rated more than 40 technologies for impact to their organization in the next three years.  The top 6 were in order: Mobile devices and/or apps (73%), Collaboration/Web 2.0/social media (63%), Business intelligence (62%), Virtualized servers, storage, and/or networks (60%), Security related to wireless and mobile devices (54%), and Software-as-a-service (52%). The percentages are those who rated them strong impact. Supporters of Enterprise 2.0 should be happy with collaboration/Web 2.0/social media coming in at number two.

In addition to technologies they looked at trends and reported the 15 top rated ones. The top five are in order: next-gen BI takes shape, combining real-time access with pervasiveness, agility, and self-service; business rules processing and policy-based SOA move to the mainstream; SaaS and cloud-based platforms become standard; system management enables continued virtualization; and collaboration platforms become people-centric. These were all rated as very high impact. 

The fifth trend hits at the core of enterprise 2.0 and others are related in some manner. This trend is predicted to have a very high business impact leading to greater organizational responsiveness to business changes and a moderate IT impact as many of these technologies are integrated into precuts already in use.

The trends are divided into the categories listed above and I was most interested in the category of “empowered” technologies as it also addresses the concepts within enterprise 2.0.  I have a review copy of their book, Empowered, and will be writing about it here soon.  This book shows the “dramatic impact possible from combining Social Computing, mobile technologies, collaboration platforms, and cloud-based capabilities for rapid deployment of innovative new ideas.” Two of these trends are already mentioned above, SaaS and cloud-based platforms become standard and Collaboration platforms become people-centric.

I find a third trend, customer community platforms integrate with business apps, to be very important. It addresses the social side of business processes. Organizations can use these customer communities to support market research and product development and gain insights from their market for real competitive advantage. I have recently talked with a number of vendors who are working to support this trend. It is predicted that this trend will have a high business impact and low IT impact and I would agree. 

There is much more in the report as many other trends are covered and recommendations are made. I am just hitting some of the highlights as they relate to enterprise 2.0. It is a solid and useful work.

 

My Fast Forward Posts for October 2010

Here is the monthly listing of my Fast Forward blog posts. I find it helps me with an archive and hopefully is also useful to you. There is a separate category for these summaries in my right side column on this blog. There will be more in November.

2010 AIIM State of the ECM Industry Survey Looks at Social Media

Keeping Their Clouds to Themselves

Boston Fifth in Social Media City Rankings

Forrester on Top 15 Technology Trends Enterprise Architects Should Watch: 2011 To 2013

CNN Study States Social Media Top Channel for Sharing Content on the Web

IT Market Outlook Slows but Remains Positive

 

Cortex Offers Healthcare Providers with a Focused Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration Platform

The healthcare industry is one where increased knowledge sharing of best practices will benefit all involved.  This is certainly one way to drive health care costs down while improving service that any one should agree with. I recently spoke with David Beyer whose company, Cortex, is providing a collaboration solution targeted specifically at this need. David mentioned that since most healthcare competition is only at the local level, knowledge sharing of best practices at the national and global level is likely to occur.

There is a need for both increased documentation and sharing of best practices within institutions and across institutions. The initial release of Cortex addresses the first challenge and they will soon to expand their reach to serve the second challenge.  Their initial clients include hospitals and professional associations that serve the healthcare sector.

David gave me a tour of the system. There are five major components: recent activity, discover, share, discussions, and members.  Best practices are shared in two formats that are housed within the share tab. There are notes for quick entries and cases for more comprehensive examples. The cases are placed with a useful template. Each case provides the challenge, the solution, a summary, and links to similar cases. With both cases and notes you can add comments and attachments. Suggested tags are auto-generated through NLP and the contributor can also put in their own tags.  Here is a sample screen shot of a case.

 The recent activity tab leads you to a dashboard where auto-generated updates of user activity are displayed. You can see when new content or new comments are added and who did it.  The discover tab provides a search capability that looks at both the notes and cases, as well as the content within any attachments.  The discussion section offers threaded discussions to take useful dialogue out of the siloed spaghetti of email.  You can browse the members section to find expertise within the system. Here is a sample screen shot of the dashboard.

At the moment Cortex is set up to serve individual organizations. However, there are plans to provide a global capability to share across institutions. In this case you can look for expertise across institutions, as well as find new best practices.

I like the simplicity of the system and the intuitive interface. It is very focused and serves a real need. I look forward to see how it progresses. You can also get more context and interesting stories at their blog. 

 

My App Gap Posts for October 2010

Here are my AppGap posts for October. I am also writing in another Corante blog, FastForward (see right side bar for links), The AppGap posts began toward the end of January 2008.  Here, I am primarily doing product commentaries with a few other things thrown in. Below are the ones for October. There will be more in November.

Four Giants Go After Enterprise Email in the Cloud

Cortex Provides Focused Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration Platform for Healthcare Market

Acquia Provides Drupal Commons to Support Open Source Enterprise Collaboration

ContactNet Provides Enterprise Relationship Management

Jama Brings Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration to Product Requirements Management

IBM Social Software 2010 Review: Part One