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Here is a topic for the holiday season. I have been covering the plight of traditional media for some time on this blog. As Editor and Publisher reports, merchandising has been an afterthought at newspapers. But now with shrinking revenues that are attempting to get creative. Within the US you can get model airplanes, wine, hippie-era concert posters, antique maps, wood from the Titanic and even a broader range outside the US.
The post points out that, “the British national paper the Guardian, for instance, offers cottage rentals, duvets, CD players, plant seeds and dozens of other gift items. It has an entire "Guardian Fashion Store" offering shoes, suits and pajamas. The Telegraph in London makes about a quarter of its profit selling things, notes Jeff Jarvis, "They are the leading retailer of clothes hangers in the U.K.”
This even applies to traditional old guard papers as both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have started wine businesses. Editor and Publisher quotes Alice Ting, executive director of brand development at the NYT. "Like a lot of newspapers, we were looking to expand into different verticals," she says. "If you think of the newspaper, we report on dining and food and home and health, so we've always looked at whether there was a way to extend the brand into those areas." She adds that research showed Times readers had a "very strong affinity toward wine consumption and spending on wine," The New York Times Wine Club, offers members a selection of wines at two price levels, $90 or $180 per six-bottle shipment. Here is the New York Times Wine Club site.
I think this is a natural area to build a community to create greater engagement with the Times. The new Darwin Editions™ could help here as the breaking news on the topics that interest the community could be presented through a focused edition in the same way that The Engine Mine uses the Darwin Awareness Engine™ to create its energy sector news site.
According to Reuters, the New York Times also recently introduced a film club. This service was created for “an audience passionate about movies,” according to the press release and you have to pay $100 a year to join. Here is another good placement for a Darwin Edition looking at what is going on in the movie industry.
Currently the Times offerings are advertised only in its printed newspaper or on its affiliated Web sites. These targeted Darwin Editions could provide a means to reach a specific audience.
For those who want to support a brand or simply better understand the thought leaders in a field, Traackr provides a comprehensive, yet very easy to use, tool set. I recently spoke with Derek Skaletsky and Courtney Vaught about their offering. Traackr enables you to discover the top 25 influencers in a topic of your choice. It is designed to primarily support PR efforts. It offers additional features to better enable interaction with these influencers once they are discovered, as well as the ability to monitor what they say about your areas or interest, including your brand.
Once you define the characteristics of your list, Traackr scans the social web to identify the most influential and most relevant people online and dynamically generates your Authority List. Each Authority List includes detailed profiles for each influencer with contact information, influence score, recent posts, an online identity card, and complete performance data. They look at channels such as blogs, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook (when data publicly available).
Traackr provide three scores to hone in on a person’s influence:
Reach - Ability to generate views based on audience size
Resonance - Ability to spark conversations based on such measures as retweets comments, and links
Relevance - Ability to cover specific topic/market based on relevance to your selected keywords
Traackr has set up a sample A-List on PR 2.0 so you see how the list works. There is comprehensive detail on the social media behavior of each person listed. The results change on a weekly basis and I noticed that people do move up and down, and in and out. I found myself on it a few times and was number 22 this last time I looked. I used their list when I was working on setting up some lists for my firm. You can also star people so they stay on the list even if their ranking metrics drops. Here is the list with the first five shown.
The Influencer Profiles have been split into separate tabs for easier navigation. All the recent, relevant posts from that Influencer are in the first tab and their full online footprint is in a second tab. Here is the footprint of the top person on the list above.
What I especially liked was the way you set the lists up. Traackr demonstrated this but also let me set up my own list so I could see how it worked. You can use up to 50 key words and the Traackr staff provides guidance on this activity. I had initially selected about seven key words and they gave me good feedback on how to expand it.
You first test a key word and then generate examples of it on the Web. This allowed me to see which ones remained on topic. I was looking for enterprise social media experts. I found that the term “social enterprise” was too general as it found socially conscious enterprises, as well as those using social media. They also have a feature that rates your key words from broad to niche. Ones that are too broad are not useful. I was able to work through options and came up with an initial 21 key word phrases that passed the tests. You rank order the key words to determine their relative weight. It was a useful process as I was forced to think through what I was really looking for. Here is the key word list I generated for a list on enterprise social media.
Here is my list on enterprise social media based on the above keywords. I was somewhat surprised to find myself ranked highly but I really did not game the system for this. I am not sure that you can game it. I found many people that I already know and respected and others that were new to me. Some were Twitter friends whose blogs I was less familiar with. I will continue to monitor the list as it changes weekly.
Since the Traackr tool is designed to help marketing and PR professionals in both agencies and within an enterprise there are other features to augment the A-List. When you login to your account, you will land on your Account Dashboard. The Dashboard offers a summary of the activity in your account as well as a quick look at any New Influencers appearing on any of your lists.
You can export any of your Traackr A-List as a JSON data feed which will allow you to plug your influencer data into any other application of your choosing. You also have the ability to "subscribe" to any of your Influencer Monitors via an RSS feed that you can plug into any standard RSS reader. This will allow you to feed all of the posts from your Monitor into your reader.
You can also monitor the presence of terms such as your brand or a topic of interested in the writings of the top influencers. You also have other task support features such as notes and to-dos associated with individuals on the list. As someone involved in the marketing of a software product I can certainly see the usefulness of this tool set.
Here are some photos of the a few of the many food shops in Bologna, Italy, taken in late October. They were all tempting. It is known as one of the food centers of the country. I ma sure they were really busy leading up to today.
Here is another in my series on micro-landscapes. The red and white seem seasonal but that was not my intention at the time. This is a 16" x 20" acrylic painting of the edge of a white napkin on a red table cloth. Below the final image you can see the work in progress and the setting I used to construct the painting.
I have been listening to Albert Rivera’s new CD – Inner Peace with great enjoyment. He was kind to send me a copy. I wrote about a prior work (see Albert Rivera’s new CD – Hope and Faith). I first leaned about Albert and his music through my blog, writing about the Litchfield Jazz Festival. Albert was the Assistant Musical Director there and he contacted me after I did a post on the event. He was kind enough to send me this new CD with no obligation to review it but since I think is a very nice set, I want to mention this work.
There is a nice variety with ballads (While You Were Gone, The First Time We Said Hello, Inner Peace) and more progressive works (Keeping A Balance, From All Angles, Excalibur, It Always Comes Back To This). Bronx based Rivera provides a meaningful Remembrance (9/11 Tribute). It is a set that I can listen to many times and provides a nice background as I work on my blog now.
In this work the personnel include: Albert Rivera (Saxophones), Luques Curtis (Bass), Zaccai Curtis (Piano), Nick Roseboro (Trumpet), Jean Caze (Trumpet), Nathan Jolley (Drums), John Iannuzzi (Drums), Beck Burger (Hammond B3), Mark Whitfield (Guitar). I highly recommend it. You can buy it at his site, Albert Rivera.
Here are three great lunches in Emilia-Romagna. The first is in Bologna at Osteria dell'Orsa. There are several varieties of the local bread which is quite different from the traditional Italian bread we see in the US. Then a selection of pork meats and some gorgonzola gnocchi, and cream based turkey dish. You can click on a picture to enlarge it.
The next lunch is in Modena. You see carbonara with and without cheese.
The third lunch is in Reggio-Emilia and consists of Tortellini Bolognese. You can see the location, the meal and the view.
In Carpi we ate dinner at the excellent Cafe Carducci. We started two types of pasta: butternut squash filled tortelli and tagiatelli with mushrooms. This was followed by oven roast rabbit, with fried potatoes, and grilled vegetables you selected your self. In m this case eggplant, red peppers, and sun dried tomatoes. Finally there were three types of chocolate desert. It was the best meal on the trip.
Good things continue to happen to us. After winning the 2010 KM Promise Award last week at KM World, this week Darwin Ecosystem was listed as one of the EContent 100 in the December issue of EContent Magazine. This is a great honor, especially as we look at the great firms on the list such as Adobe, Alfresco, Amazon, Apple, Atlassian, and Attivio. And these are just some of the firms starting with A. Others include Coveo, EMC, Google, IBM, Inmagic, Microsoft, MindTouch, Newsgator, Oracle, Socialtext, Traction, Twitter, and Yammer.
The introduction to the list reported that, “this year our judging team was tougher than ever before. Few (if any) incumbents were kept on through mindshare and momentum alone; every company was held up to scrutiny in terms of innovation and meeting customer needs. It was a challenging year for voting—as it has been for the companies that made this list through their hard work, customer focus, and continued responsiveness to the changing digital content landscape. The need to leverage tools to effectively maximize the value of digital content has never been greater. Like the creation of this list, the process is a tough one, but it’s well worth it.” We are very honored to be included.
Here is the EContent 100 judging team. Members include: Robert J. Boeri, Paula J. Hane, Jarrod Gingras, Michelle Manafy, Ron Miller, Marydee Ojala, Steve Sieck, Steve Smith, and Martin White. You can find more about them at the EContent site.
The EContent 100 categories are: Content Commerce, Content Creation, Production & Digital Publishing, Content Management, Fee-Based Info Services, Mobile Content, and Search Technologies. We are part of the search technologies. Here is the description for this group: “There’s a lot more to searching than the G-word. Through algorithms, bots, spiders, e-discovery, business intelligence, metatext, and more, people are using more than single-keyword searches to find more targeted information on the web or behind the firewall.”
We do not see the Darwin Awareness Engine™ and Correlation Rank™ as a replacement for traditional search engines like Google. We see it as a complement. It is an awareness or discovery engine not a traditional 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. The Darwin Awareness Engine looks at targeted content. We are making several Darwin Editions™ on specific topics available for free. Here is an explanation of Darwin Editions with links the available ones. Hope you can give it a try.
I was recently in Washington DC for the KM World 2010 and Enterprise Search Summit 2010. I still get excited to walk around our capital and enjoyed looking at the buildings and taking in a few museums while there. Growing up in New Orleans I am partial to Southern food so I looked for this offering in DC. Below are my findings. The first three I tried and found excellent.
Acadiana captures the spirit of Louisiana where I grew up. Chef Jeff Tunks states, "Acadiana is a contemporary interpretation of a Louisiana Fish House, blending well with our three other restaurants (DC Coast, TenPenh, and Ceiba) that focus on the finest of coastal delicacies." The site adds “The dishes represent various cooking techniques from the colorful ethnic areas spanning southern Louisiana, serving up the rich and complex flavors - the roux, the rémoulades, the bisques, and the étouffées for which the region is known and savored.” I would agree. I had a great duck with grits preceded by a strong gumbo for dinner. The next day I had an excellent shrimp po-boy for lunch. 901 New York Avenue, NW (202)408-8848
Art and Soul has two-time James Beard-Award winning Chef Art Smith as chef/owner. This place serves modern, regional cuisine with southern accents, He was the former private chef to Oprah. We had the fried chicken with mash potatoes and giblet gravy and the fried catfish (see below). Both were excellent. 415 New Jersey Ave. NW (202) 393 7777.
Georgia Brown’s offer low-country cuisine from Charlestown. Their web site describes the food, “the Powhatan Indians showed the settlers how to dehull and soak corn, then grind it into what Southerners came to know as hominy grits. The Africans, the French Huguenots and the Sephardic Jews from Portugal and Spain influenced the cooking with foods from their homeland.” It was wonderful. We had fried green tomatoes, gumbo, and key lime pie and chocolate cake for desert. These were included with corn bread and biscuits with honey favored butter. (see below) 950 15th Street, NW
(between I and K Streets, NW) (202) 393-4499
Ooh's & Aah's was recommended by Stan Garfield. When it comes to food when Stan talks, you listen. 1005 U St NW (between N 10th St & N 11th St) (202) 667 7142
This is the fourth in a five part series covering the efforts of the PBS affiliate in St. Louis, KETC, to align social media and traditional television. I am interviewing Rob Paterson who is part of the team supporting the KETC efforts.
Bill: How is the Darwin Awareness Engine™ being used to help with the KETC social media immigration project?
Rob: One of the things that I am doing is looking at what is being said and done related to immigration in the wider world. What I have found incredibly helpful about Darwin is the uncovering of emerging trends and gaining clarity on the issues. Immigration is a complex issue and you cannot start out with an understanding. You can have beliefs but not real understanding. Nor can you in any complex situation.
The value of Darwin is that on a daily basis it starts to reveal patterns of content on the Web. It could be immigration but it could be anything. What I am finding is that by spending an hour or two on Darwin a day looking at what is happening with immigration through a series of filters that allow me to inspect various parts, I can begin to see the patterns. I look at employment issues. I look at the food system. I look at the refuges. I look at the politics. I am looking at all the components, all the different facets.
What I have discovered is that I now actually have a very good picture of the issues. I have a synthesized overview of what this complex issue and how the bits have interact with each other. It has led me to the following conclusion. The main metaphor that we all use for immigration is fortress America. You are either in or out. There may be a small door in or a large one but it does not matter what the motivations are for getting in. All that matters is whether the wall is up or down. Is the door open or shut and this is how the debate is conducted.
What I have learned as a result of using Darwin is a different metaphor. Immigration is more like a human body. There is a porous nature. It has portals and most importantly, it has an immune system. The things that want to get in have their own life cycle. This works differently than a fortress. For example, if you live in West Africa and you do not want to get malaria there are a number of things you can do. You can sleep under a net. You can spray with DDT. Or you can take a preventive pill. So there are a number of things you can do that you have control over. You can control how the disease gets to you or you can control the disease if you get it. This sense of control is missing in the debate on immigration.
Now there are all these people from Mexico here. Using Darwin there is a picture that starts to accumulate as to why are they coming which more important for the debate than how they got in. The answer was NAFTA. It allowed cheap American food into Mexico and this has destroyed the Mexican agricultural economy. All the people that used to work in it come to America for survival. Ironically they now work in the American food industry that killed their old jobs in their home country. I was never able to see this before.
Bill: How did Darwin enable you to see this?
Rob: Darwin showed me all these impressions and relationships every day. The human brain is a pattern seeker. Darwin gives me chunky patterns. I had made some bets on the issues so I looked at things like jobs, food, and economy. Like any scientist I had some hunches. Then by presenting me the data in a patterned way it allowed me to chunk the data. I could see the comparisons and this picture began to emerge.
I see that the economy has become central. I see that the number one worry is that they are taking our jobs. However, the best and brightest immigrants are our best chance at creating new jobs. We have to reinvent the economy. The refugee issue is entirely different. They are here. We have to work on assimilation. However, the rhetoric never talks about this and it sees the issue as one dimensional. For example, the best and brightest are subject to the same Visa requirements as the Mexican lettuce picker. It does not make any sense.
Darwin helps me unpack the complexity by showing me these patterns. Now I see that the food system is an area that you could work on to improve the push pull issue and the drive to come here illegally. The best and the brightest is an area we can work on to improve the prospects for everyone. But you have to separate them out from the broad term of immigration.
This is where Darwin can help to clarify the components of a complex issue. Any tool can help you deal with simple issues but you need a tool like Darwin to deal with complex issues because complex issues can only be seen clearly in their emergent form. Immigration is a complex problem that has been treated by the media and politicians as a simple one.
Bill: I am familiar with Darwin’s ability to help you see emerging themes. Can you take it down another level of detail as to exactly how you used it to come to these conclusions. Let’s discuss the concrete and tactical steps.
Rob: What Darwin enables you to do is to see a pattern. To see a pattern you must be ready to see it so you must have a hypothesis on any topic that is complex. Darwin enables me to set up the feeds to reach deeply into the various components of my hypothesis. So step one there is a hypothesis, Step two set up feeds to reach deeply into its components to test the hypothesis.
Then, as step three, Darwin presents me with layers of results every day based on these feeds. Now I can adjust the feeds, which I do give me more refinement. I can break down simple ideas such as the economy into components such as food services. As I start to see patterns I can adjust the feeds to give me even more information. Then by looking daily at the incoming data I can start to make sense of it. It happens over time. After six weeks I started to have some real breakthroughs.
Bill: I am taking a brief break from the conversation with Rob to show you the Darwin interface and explain some of its components. Below is a sample screen form the KETC instance of Darwin. The black banner running like a stock ticker near the top provides results from the Buzz Tape™. The topics that have gained accelerated attention in the target content sources are displayed in real time. You can click on a topic to make it the focus of the Scan Could™ shown below the images. This Scan Cloud provides the 100 most correlated themes with the topic of interest, the attracter in Chaos Theory terms.
As you mouse over the themes the other themes related to the particular theme are highlighted so you can see relationships as shown in the close up of the Scan Cloud™ below. If you select a topic, the content that related that theme with the main topic of interest is displayed in the right column. If you click on one of these content titles, you go directly to actual content on the Web. This scanning allows you to quickly see relationships between content discover patterns before you look into the actual content.
You can see a close up of the right column that provides links to the content below.
Clicking on one of the titles in the right column will take you to an actual site such as the one shown below.
Below is a close up of the buzz tape.
Now we will return to the conversation with Rob.
Bill: Can you summarize how Darwin has helped with this first phase of the immigration project?
Rob: We use Darwin to test our ideas in the larger ecosystem. Darwin is a new kind of search engine. Old search is like fly fishing - one fly for one fish in a known pool. Darwin is like a series of nets in the ocean currents - depending on where you set them and how fine the mesh is - you will find all sorts of fish that you never knew about! I use it to look at the broad set of issues within the immigration debate. If you are following this topic - you know how the public debate is all about labels - the border - illegals - DREAM Act - racists - etc. Traditional searching here just gets me the same old stuff. With Darwin I have been able to "set my nets" more deeply and broadly. I have been able to "see" the underlying deeper patterns. I have discovered what I think are the forces behind what we see on the surface.
Conventional search will only allow you to "see" what you ask for or expect. The world is not a simple but is a complex system. Complexity can only be understood by "seeing" the underlying patterns. These patterns are not visible to the simple observer or observation.
Your simple observation is that the Sun moves around the Earth. Once you see the patterns, you can act upon them because they are bound by rules. The Copernican view of the universe empowered the early world navigators. They could use the pattern of the universe to make consistent decisions that would tell them where they were.
With Darwin I am now able to see a number of patterns that drive immigration that could enable people to make predictable decisions that would then enable predictable outcomes. This same concept applies to most issues and markets today as we now live in a complex and interconnected world. Nothing is simple any more.
Every problem that a business or a government faces today is complex because there are so many variables interacting with each other. Finding a solution is impossible unless you use the rules of complexity. If you take a simple approach you must fail. In complex situations there are patterns and they repeat. If you look closely you will start to see the patterns and this is where Darwin helps.
Google is simple search. You have to know what you are looking for in advance. To find the underlying patterns you have to put out broader nets and see what comes in and discover the relationships between variables. Regardless of whether you are the CEO of a large company or running small business, you are living in a complex hyper connected world. You cannot know what is going on by simple observation. You will fall off the end of the world.
There are three steps to using Darwin to deal with complexity. First you need an hypothesis that certain things are going to be important. Even if this turns out wrong you need a starting point. Then you create attractors and build feeds around these topics. Next you start looking over several weeks. You adjust the feeds. Sometimes you need to expand your net and sometimes you need to make it smaller. If you keep doing this, patterns will emerge. Your brain will make new connections to uncover these patterns and refine them.
Bill: Thanks Rob. In our next conversation we will look at your next steps and the role that Darwin can play in this effort.
KETC, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) St. Louis station has been conducting a series of projects integrating social media with traditional broadcast television. This integration of old and new media is a topic we have frequently covered here and KETC is doing some of the most innovative work in this space. They began with a project on preserving World War Two stories from local vets. A second effort supported those caught in the mortgage crisis.
Now they are using social media to help facilitate more rational conversations on immigration issues. We are very pleased that they are using the Darwin Awareness Engine™ as part of this third project. I recently spoke with Rob Paterson who is participating in this effort and is the lead person in their use of Darwin. This post is the first in a five part series covering our conversations.
Here is screen shot of the KETC instance of Darwin. It will be explained and covered in more detail in part four of this series.
Bill: Rob can you provide some background on the KETC social media project? What are its objectives? What has resulted so far?
Rob: KETC is the public television station in St. Louis. Since Jack Galmiche took over as President four years ago, his mission is to find a new model for a public television station in America. Like others, he understands that the old financial model for public television cannot continue to be successful. The old model worked on the premise that that public TV has quality content that you cannot get elsewhere. You have to adhere to our broadcast schedule and if you like what we bring you will support us financially with donations.
This old model will not work going forward as you can get great content for free anytime you want from many sources. While there is still a legacy group of supporters, this dwindling group will not take any TV or radio station securely forward into the future.
So the question becomes if we cannot rely on the old base of support, what will become the new base? Over the past four years Jack and his team have been working on a hypothesis that social media can help reach and sustain a new base of support to augment the old one. The current project on immigration is the end result of a series of experiments using social media to expand the base of support. The hypothesis goes on to say that public television should be in a great position to become the safe place where the community can interact with itself on issues that it cares about since public television is so trusted.
The first time we did this we used a very safe topic around the Ken Burns series on World War Two. As this series was being aired we went out to the local community through social media and other means, We said that there are many veterans in our community and you may or may not have shared your personal stories with your family. Ken Burns is providing the stories of some vets. We are going to provide an easy means for you to share your own stories of the war that can be recorded forever. We will provide a way for these stories to be shared.
This effort around World War Two stories went really well. We found a way to enable people to use the Web to share their memories. We discovered a way to engage a community around a topic. In this case, an important one, but also a safe one. No one was going to object to us having grandpa tell his war stories. One of the great examples occurred when one vet came to the station and asked to see Jack. He gave Jack his war medals. He said that he had never told his war stories before and for the first time he felt safe enough to do it. He wanted to tell then before he died. We were all moved by this experience and felt we had learned something.
Bill: This is a topic that is very near to me as my father was a World War Two vet who as a commando, often operated behind the Japanese lines. He was reluctant to tell more that general overviews of much of what he experienced but I know that it had a profound effect on him. He gave his medals, not of disrespect, but more out of modesty, to me incorporate into my childhood reenactments of World War Two. This was a favorite play topic for us in the 50s.
Rob: We are the same age and we did this also.
Bill: This occurred in the raised cemeteries of New Orleans that we pretended were urban battlefields. There are many friends my age who also report their father’s reluctance to take about the war. So what do you see that occurred that enabled these men in your community to share their experiences? How did social media play into this?
Rob: There was definitely a social media component. We had a dedicated Web site. We had a way of getting content to us and then we would put it up. We ran something like an antiques road show where people came in and told their stores and we recorded them. We found that the grandchildren started to ask their grandparents to tell these stories. For many men and, in some cases, women, once they saw others telling their stories and it was safe, they felt comfortable doing it themselves. They also realized that this might be their last chance. We have now set up a permanent memorial of all these stories so they will live on through the Web.
Bill: So, if I am hearing your correctly social media was used in two ways. First, to make people more aware of what you were doing. Second, to share the content once it was collected.
Rob: Yes and we had never done anything like this before. The Web had simply been the place to find out the schedule for TV shows or asking for donations. This was the first time we had a two-way interaction with the community through the Web. We asked for stuff and we got stuff back.
Bill: So what did you learn from this first step that you applied to the next step?
Rob: We learned how to start to work together. The tools are free and easy to use. The underlying story was a breakdown of the silos. To work well on the Web you have to have all the parts of the organization working well together. So we had cross department meetings to get the work done. We had producers, marketing, outreach people, and our one person Web department. These cross department meetings had not occurred. As we moved forward this integration was a big deal and key enabler.
Here are late October photographs from Castellarano, a beautiful small town south of Modena, Emilia-Romanga, Italy. There is core part of the city that dates from the Middle Ages. You can click on a picture to enlarge it.
Here are late October photographs from Carpi, a beautiful small town outside Modena, Emilia-Romanga, Italy. You can click on a picture to enlarge it.
For some time I have thought that for enterprise software to be successful it needs to be aligned with business processes. This was my experience with knowledge management in the 90s and early 2000s. With the arrival of some of the new enterprise 2.0 tools from the consumer market, this business process focus has been, at times, lacking. Now some tools are moving to more tightly align themselves with business processes. Jama is a great example as they are providing a collaboration platform that is focused on supporting one business process, product development.
I spoke with John Simpson, the Vice President of Marketing, about Jama Software and their new capability, the Review Center. Jama is a provider of collaborative requirements management software optimized for managing product innovation. It recently announced the availability of the Review Center module along with its new version of Jama Contour. As John said, “It is collaboration with a purpose.”
The Jama Review Center provides teams with a fast and agile way to review requirements to gain consensus with stakeholders. It provides visibility into the decisions made during the product planning and development process. It captures all the relevant feedback in one place instead of siloed in email attachments and multiple applications. It allows project teams the control to discuss, review and approve requirements with their stakeholders in real-time within a private and completely secure Web-based solution. Current users include several Fortune 500 companies and government agencies such as the US intelligence community.
Since collaborative features are starting to creep into project management software, I asked John about how they see the difference between project management and product management and how this is reflected in Jama. John said that project management software is usually for when you have already decided what to do and are in the execution stage. It has scope, scheduling, and budget components and is usually more tactical.
Product management generally covers a broader scope and involves more frontend work defining the vision and requirements for the product. It is often more strategic. There is market and opportunity analysis that can include listening to customers via direct communications or conversation on the Web. There is gaining feedback from many stakeholders, both inside and outside the enterprise, and consensus building on the vision. One of the key challenges
The new Review Center in Jama Contour follows a series of steps in the product planning and development process to help teams to agree to the scope and stay in sync on the specifications as new requests come in or as changes occur during development. First, you initiate a review. The leader, typically the product manager or business analyst within the team, selects requirements for feedback on and invites people to participate. Approval authority is assigned to key team members so they can electronically sign-off on the requirements they approve. You can see team members and approvers in the sample screen within this process as shown below.
The next step is to gather feedback from all the relevant stakeholders. The project team members begin to input their feedback on the individual requirements. They check off the items as they review them. Approvers mark when requirements need more work, and they vote for the requirements they consider high priority. This occurs in a common workspace so the process and actions are transparent to all who need to know. A sample feedback screen is shown below.
The third phase involves monitoring progress. The leader tracks progress and views team statistics to focus on the requirements with most feedback, questions and issues. A sample monitoring screen is shown below.
Now the team can incorporate feedback into the product design and development effort. When changes are made to individual requirements a new revision is sent out. The changes are automatically updated in the project within Contour. Then, the reviewers are automatically notified of the new revision and asked to approve the change. Changes are made by the leader rather than have a more general wiki-like free for all. However, the changes are aligned with the comments that drove them. I like this. As you can see in the screen below, the related comments are shown in the right side column and highlighted.
Electronic signatures are gathered from the designated approvers and recorded. The product development process can continue to iterate through as many of these cycles as necessary.
I have just touched on some of the capabilities at each step but I think you can get the general idea. I really like the vision to apply the enterprise 2.0 approach to specific business processes and I think that Jama has done a great job. I was involved about ten years ago in creating a product development portal for a major UK consumer products company. I wish I had the capabilities of Jama in those days. The application of collaboration to business process has come a long way since then.
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