Portals and KM

SpringCM Moves Beyond Content Management

SpringCM Cloud provides an robust enterprise content management platform. It was founded in 2005 by some industry veterans who wanted to go beyond traditional on-premise content management. They have done this and more as I learned when I recently spoke with CEO Christopher Junker and Dick Dosen about their new capabilities.

The cloud is transforming many software apps. First, of all it eliminates the need for end users to deal with software.  You just use it.  This makes ii way faster and cheaper to get started.  If the software is intuitive then you can also bypass IT. This possibility were brought to the attention of the business user through the consumer apps they have grown accustomed to. Christopher referred to this as the consumerization of IT and it has far reaching effects.

SpringCM is built to take advantage of all of these transformative capabilities within cloud applications. It is designed so the average business user can create process aligned content management use cases. It is these process aligned content management apps that allow Spring CM to go beyond traditional content management in function, as well as ease of implementation.

Spring CM refers to this capability as dynamic adaptive case management. It is a good term as it allows customers to drive more consistent content management processes, enhance team productivity and increase management visibility by giving them the ability to more efficiently and quickly organize people, tasks and content around document-intensive, collaborative business processes. That is a lot of words but basically it allows you to build the content components of work support around the way you work and avoid confirming to the limitations of a software package. SpringCM also provides templates to ease the task of creating custom work support tools. Below you can see a sample case management dashboard.

To facilitate the use of the case management approach, SpringCM has implemented a checklist model.  They did some research on the best approach and I agree with their selection. It does not attempt to dumb down the job. Checklists are used by experts. They do not tell you how to do things but help you remember all the things that need to be done.  Here is a sample checklist in use.

They also added an activity stream. I think this is a transformative feature for content management and collaboration tools as you can easily see what is going on in an area of interest. There are auto-generated updates based on user activity and you can also manually add updates Twitter-style. Below is a sample checklist with a related activity stream.

Since it a Web-based API you can create you own interface so users are not aware they are operating within SpringCM. This places your content in a better context for your specific work tasks. You can also integrate with other applications such as SharePoint and Salesforce.com.  For example, this allows you to overcome some of the limitations of SharePoint while still using your investment in it. You can place content from SharePoint within SpringCM for more functionality and then put it back into SharePoint once your work is done.

SpringCM has also invested in support for mobile apps including iPad compatibility.  This enables organizations to put content to work for executives and knowledge workers on the go so they can get work done where and when it needs to be. Mobile content management will only increase over the next few years. Below is a sample iPad interface.

I really like what they are doing and wish I had these capabilities when I was hand building content intense process aligned applications in the 1990s.  They need a new term as Spring M goes way beyond what we think of as content management to enable some of the visions within enterprise 2.0.

 

 

Participate in the North American Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises Nominations

Telos is now accepting nominations for the 10th annual North American Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) study. The MAKE research program seeks to identify “those North American headquartered organizations (for-profit, non-profit and public sector) that are using knowledge-driven strategies to out-perform their peers by above average growth in intellectual capital and wealth creation (in the case of the public sector, increased societal capital and stakeholder value).” You can complete the nomination form by visiting the Teleos website and clicking on 'MAKE' in the left-hand navigation box and then clicking on 'MAKE Nominations'.

A list of the organizations nominated to date is found on the Telos web page. By participating in this study, you automatically will receive the 2011 North American MAKE Executive Summary by e-mail. Nominations close on June 30, 2011. This is great award. I used to attend the award sessions in the late 90sand it nice to see it still going strong. Here are the 2010 MAKE winners. 

 

Knowledge Management in 2011: New APQC Book

The subtitle of The New Edge in Knowledge is How Knowledge Management is Changing the Way We do Business. Knowledge management is becoming one of the longest running shows in business and Carla O’Dell and Cindy Hubert of APQC have been there from the beginning.

The book begins with a foreword by another of the KM All-stars, Larry Prusak.  He notes a 1995 conference at UC Berkeley and offers some of the main principles of knowledge management that were articulated at the time:

“Knowledge is a fixed pool, a collection of resources that can be measured and used by standard management practices.”

“Technology is the key tool to unlock the value of this resource,. The more technology the better.”

Now before you jump all over these old school ideas that gave KM a bad name, Larry does it for you. He notes that these principles were not suitable for working with an intangible such as knowledge. He adds that despite this KM did not die and is experiencing a resurgence. I would agree on both counts.

He modifies the principle as follows:

“Knowledge is better understood as a flow. It is highly dynamic, nonlinear, and difficult to measure or even manage.”

“Although technology surely has its place, working with knowledge is primarily a human activity…”

Carla and Cindy pick up on this and note several new trends that have increased the potential for knowledge management such as enterprise 2.0 tools and the increased reach of the digital world in the work place, including mobile access.

Now there are those that use knowledge management as a whipping boy in describing the benefits of enterprise 2.0. There are also those that prefer to show how enterprise 2.0 helps achieve some of the promise of knowledge management.  Clara and Cindy are in the latter group and I belong there as well. I think it is the more constructive approach. This promise is what first attracted me to the Web 2.0 tools seven years ago.

The book provides a comprehensive version of how best to implement knowledge management in 2011. It begins with an updated framework to guide program design initiatives and goes on to cover developing a value proposition. It then offers a variety of approaches to chose from and examples of successful ones. There is a chapter devoted to the new enterprise 2.0 tools and how they impact approaches. These tools are explored further as they go into detail on social networking. Following chapters cover governance, culture, and metrics. Four in-depth case studies conclude the book.

If you want a guide to implementing knowledge management in 2011, this is a good book for you. 

 

How Data Drives Effective Decision Making

The New York Times ran a story, When There’s No Such Thing as Too Much Information, by Steve Lohr, that covered some of the value of using data to help with business decisions.  The article began with the challenge and opportunity provided by the massive about of information we have today. If organizations are not swamped by the sheer volume, there is a lot of value to be gleamed from smart analysis of the content.

The article then focused on research conducted by new research led by Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Brynjolfsson and his colleagues, Lorin Hitt, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and Heekyung Kim, a graduate student at M.I.T., looked at 179 large companies. They found that those that adopted “data-driven decision making” achieved productivity rates 5 to 6 percent higher than could be explained by other factors, including how much the companies invested in technology.

The Times article noted that Thomas H. Davenport, my former colleague and a professor of information technology and management at Babson College, made that point in his most recent book, with Jeanne G. Harris and Robert Morison,  Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results.

The drive to help companies find meaningful patterns in the vast amounts of content has created a fast-growing business intelligence (BI) industry. Major technology companies – IBM, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft — have collectively spent more than $25 billion buying up specialist companies in the field.

The Times quotes David Grossman, a technology analyst at Stifel Nicolaus, “The biggest change facing corporations is the explosion of data. The best business is in helping customers analyze and manage all that data.”

We are very pleased to se these research findings and commentary as making sense of content overload and finding patterns within it is the goal of the Darwin Awareness Engine™. 

 

My Notes from the 2011 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium: Enterprise Analytics = Business Values

Here are more of my notes from the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium: Enterprise Analytics = Business Values. Participants included: Moderator: Michael S. Hopkins, Editor-in-chief, MIT Sloan Management Review, panel: Rock Gnatovich,
SVP & COO, Spotfire, TIBCO Software Inc., Brad Peterson, CIO, Charles Schwab, Sid Probstein, CTO, Attivio, and Renée Romano Nocker, Director of Technology Product Marketing, SAS.

Michael said that in 2009 more digital information was produced than in all of past history – so much to look at. They are doing a survey on uses of data at the Sloan Management Review. He asked a survey question – imagine an organization transformed to effectively use data. How close to this ideal is your organization on a scale of 1 – 10? Also where is management in general on this? He asked the panel first. 

Rock answered in terms of level of satisfaction of some of their customers.  He said that business users are finding traditional BI tools too hard to use. However, some of their customers are using their tool, Spotfire, real time and would rate it 8.5.

Brad said that at eBay, his prior employer, all the IT solutions did not work at first because of the scale but it has been solved and now many of the employees have left to bring this knowledge elsewhere. He would give eBay an 8. Data mining was big for them but it was new at their scale. At Charles Schwab he would say a 6. In financial services you need to be very precise with customer data. They want to go to social and mobile next. What they need to do is drive marketing growth more.

Sid said that at Attivio he would say they are at a 7. They are a young company and not globally dispersed so some data collection is not hard. Michael asked about the business world at large and Sid said it is likely at a 5. It is hard to get data into the funnel. Sid said that the interest in unstructured data has grown in the past two years. Renee said that since coming to SAS she is seeing more of what is possible so she world rate the overall business world at a 3 or 4.

Michael said in their over 3000 responses to the survey so far the average is about 4.5. These numbers are likely high because of a company pride issue. Thought leaders would say a 1 or 1.2 and there is great room for growth.  When asked what are the obstacles the answer is not data. The big obstacle lack of understanding how to use the data to solve problems and embed data into business processes.

Michael asked about the biggest misconception about using data. Renee said when business leaders hear analytics there is a focus on reporting and measurement. She sees the value in predicting, not looking back. She sees there is a lack of education in the value proposition on using prediction to make changes in anticipation.

Michael asked if they have seen improvements in the ability to make changes based on data. Sid said there are now offices to manage the data so there is ownership. Analytics are about optimization and changing pain points, not looking backward.  Companies need to do more experimenting.

Michael asked Brad about what obstacles he has seen as he is the one non-vendor on the panel. Brad said that much of senior management is not data oriented. He was trained in the value of data at MIT. We need more senior management to get it.

Rock said there is a sense that only a few people can do analytics in an organization. The IT organization has not been responding fast enough so people bypass it. His firm’s client base has a lot of people who do not trust the data they are given and want to work on data itself.

Brad said that at eBay they had to be able to sell anything ever built. So they could not put in place highly structured data gathering. They had to adapt. You have to give up on too much organization or the business will not adapt. Renee agreed that being open is good in many cases but you still need structure in others. IT people get excited when they are using innovative analytics to help drive decisions in their company.

There was a question from audience about being creative and not getting a mess. What is the right balance of empowerment without chaos. Rock said Excel, for example, allows you to do anything you want but you cannot share it as no one else will know what you did.  You need a combination of guided workflow and free form.

Another question: Some people need to simply have the forms filled in and others are hungry for more data. What is the thing to move companies from a 4 to an 8 on the scale. Renee said it is the skills on how to pick the important parts of data to look at. It is the analytic skills more than the technical skill. Sid agreed that expertise is an issue but also infrastructure requirements and the corporate need for short-term results that limits investment. Companies do not want to make the investment. Brad said the you need to get funds from marketing budgets as this is where the value will go. Rock said it is a combination of technology and methods. He agrees it is a skill gap in the analytic space. Also, the need to not have to organize everything opens up for innovation.

Audience: I heard this morning that BI is not widely adapted and is still hard to use.  How to get this adaption.  Sid said you need to get wider use for BI tools. You need to shift from complex reporting to Google style simplicity. We would applaud this at Darwin Ecosystem as that is one of our design goals. Sid added that you need the consumer model of simplicity to increase usage

An audience member said he has to sell BI within the organization. He asked for any practical ideas to sell senior management.  Rock said you have to create a virtual environment where people can bring their data.  You then need to allow for socialization as people trust other people more than data.  Renee said you need good communicators. They went out and found problems that need data to solve them. Then you do pilots on these to demonstrate value. Brad said give business people an iPad with the BI tool on it and they will love it and show it to others.

 

 

My Notes from the 2011 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium: Collective Intelligence and Social Networks

Here are more of my notes from the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium: Collective Intelligence and Social Networks, Participants included: Moderator: Brian P. Watson,
Director of Business Outreach, Workforce Opportunity Services, panel: Adam Boyden,
President, Conduit, Robert J. Laubacher,
Associate Director and Research Scientist, MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, Dr. Andrew McAfee,
Principal Research Scientist, MIT, and Rob Stefanic,
VP & CIO, Sensata.

Brian’s organization provides education for Vets and high school kids in need. Adam’s firm allows companies to build online apps. Sensata is a manufacturer of control devices for aerospace, autos, and other devices.

Brian asked Rob L. about the biggest trends he sees in collective intelligence.  Rob noted that collective intelligence preceded people. Today, the issue is Internet enabled collective intelligence.  What is new is this tool has only been around for decade and there are many more opportunities moving forward. Most often Web based collective intelligence takes the form of external connections through such tasks as crowd sourcing.  There is beginning to be an understanding of how this works.  Now there are companies that build communities to generate collective intelligence.  He used the term “crowd computing.”

Andy picked up on Rob’s lead. We do not need to prove that this collective intelligence works. We know it does now. It generates interesting data in an unstructured form. You can gain great insights from this. He referred to Erik Brynjolfsson’s work in the morning panel (see 2011 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium Notes: Academic Keynote Panel).  So he asked why are more companies not doing this?  He explained that companies have been cautious. There is a deep reluctance to give up control. We have a mindset from the industrial revolution about control and structured workflow.

Brian wondered about the motivation for this. Part of the reluctance is a lack of understanding of what it is.  Another trend was to slot it into knowledge management. While that is part of it, knowledge management is not the whole story by any means. Brian asked Rob S. what was happening in his organization as the one CIO on the panel. He said he first got a lot of cautious concerns from legal about liability. However, they have moved past this now. They are doing crowd sourcing.  They are also looking at external and internal information in their auto group to look at patterns and make predicts.

Brian asked more about why the adoption has been slow. On one end, some managers are just doing it because their boss asked them to do it. Then people get involved to their surprise but felt no one was listening and abandoned it.  On the other end, some companies have gotten away from simply listening to the intuition of the top guys and letting the data help drive decisions. These companies can be very effective. It is the difference between medicine men and modern doctors.

Brian said that a top guy might read an airline magazine on Web 2.0 and demand one. This feeds into the blind movement approach described above. Rob S. said that they turned things over to the data guys in his firm. They were also driven by a business value rather than simply “checking the box” for participation. Andy said that simply saying here is the new best way will not work.

Adam said that often it is the marketing guys and the IT guys that first get involved and they do not like each other. They have different goals. The marketing guys want it now. The IT guys see all this unstructured data and chaos.  There needs to be a common ground and understanding here to overcome these differences.

Rob S. said that pattern analysis is a big shift in how they look at data. This is a cultural change that needs to take place. They need to move from looking backward to looking forward.

One audience member asked about how to overcome noise and avoid collective stupidity when you open up conversations. Adam offered an example from the game world. There is a large and noisy audience in the online game world that often chants garbage. However, one company enables everyone to feel loved. Make sure you listen to the good stuff and implement it. To the others say you offered good stuff but we are not doing it now. Andy said you should just exile the bad behaviors if you are within a business.  Rob L. said they are trying to measure the intelligence of groups. If groups take turns they are smarter.  Women are better at this so if groups have more women they are often better. 

How do you handle all the different collection of resources? Andy said the bad approach is to act like a librarian and manage these resources. Andy said the good way is simply have an open ended Q & A mechanism that is open to all and it will self-organize. A rating system really helps as people like recognition. Perhaps this is the American Idol approach.

How do you promote executive sponsorship and generate adoption?  Rob S. said you have to overcome the cultural issues first. Especially if there is a need to avoid asking questions because you are supposed to already have the answers.  Andy said that the outside world is helping here because of the success of Web 2.0. Also “weak ties” are very valuable and now these tools support the connections with weak ties. 

 

2011 MAKE Nominations Open Until May 31

They are now accepting nominations for the 14th annual Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) study. Nominations close on May 31, 2011. I have written about them before, including last year’s MAKE winners. As I mentioned before, this brings back memories. The Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) award has been around for some time. Back when I was with a large consulting company and involved in our knowledge management practice, I spoke at the awards meetings in London several times.  These were the days of better travel funding and the relatively early days of KM. I am pleased that this award is still around and still relevant. 

You can complete the nomination form by visiting the Teleos website - http://www.knowledgebusiness.com - and clicking on 'MAKE' in the left-hand navigation box and then clicking on 'MAKE Nominations'. I suggest you nominate more organizations to enrich the event. A list of the organizations nominated to date is found on their web page.

 

Moving to a Multi-Vendor Approach to Handling Today’s More Complex Content Management Requirements.

Here is an interesting report I received from Forrester, Plan your ECM Strategy For Business, Persuasive, Transactional, And Foundational Needs by Stephen Powers and Alan Weintraub with Matthew Brown and Anjali Yakkundi. They note that enterprises are now struggling under increasing volumes of varying types of content (aka multi-channel information overload).

In the past firms have taken a product-specific approach to their enterprise content management (ECM) strategies: “document management for office docs, web content management for online content, records management for corporate records, and so on.” Now the reports argues when “developing a content strategy, they should consider persuasive, transactional, and foundational content functionality to support specific business use cases.”  They suggest taking a content centric approach rather than a tool centric approach to handle this complexity. This makes sense to me.

They discuss three types of content: transactional, business, and persuasive. Transactional content often originates outside the enterprise from customers and partners. It often relies on complex workflows or business process management to drive processes. Formats include scanned e-forms, faxes, print streams from back-office applications, and electronic records.

Business content starts within the enterprise and is part of workers daily tasks. Business content includes office documents, presentations, spreadsheets, e-forms, web content, and mobile content. Persuasive content may originate from many sources. There are many use cases including: “multichannel marketing, lead generation, eCommerce, customer self-service, in-store kiosks, and partner extranets.” Here tools such as web content management come into play.

The authors provide a useful framework that shows how foundational issues go across these three content types. They the look at how the different tool types fit into this matrix. They conclude that you need to remain flexible as you handle the increasing complexity of content types today. I found it a useful way to think beyond traditional approaches to content management that were operating when I helped implement these systems a few years back. 

 

Nielsen Norman Group Names Best Intranets for 2010

Nielsen Norman Group has announced winners in their 11^th annual contest for best intranets for 2010. In the announcement Usability expert Jakob Nielsen was quoted, “If there’s anything that has been overused, abused and hyped almost beyond the level of cliché, it’s ‘knowledge management.’ It might therefore be better to say that the winners in this year’s intranet design contest were very strong in ‘managing knowledge’ on their intranets. Employees are the ultimate knowledge resource, and the winning intranets provided features to transform their behavior into manageable knowledge. In particular, organizations used social networking—a natural inside the enterprise—to give employees practical and simple ways to communicate with one another and even change the way work is done at the organization.”

So if read this correctly knowledge management was mostly useless until social networking came along.  While the introduction of social networking and other social applications has grealty increased the potential of knowledge management in my opinion, I would hardly say that KM was simply a cliché before their advent.  You can set up siloed document repositories as a strawman for bad KM but when it is aligned with business processes I have seen a lot of value over the past 15 years. Having said this I do like the strong support for enterprise 2.0 concepts in this current report.

It is ironic that such weight is placed on social networking since social media was seen somewhat skeptically by the same group when the 2006 winners for best intranets were announced. The 2006 summary said that the winners “took a pragmatic approach to many hyped “Web 2.0″ techniques.” It also said. “Several winners have weblogs this year, but the blogs are restrained, emphasizing useful information instead of “what I did on my last date.” This is an anachronistic straw man as business blogs had been around for several years, getting high marks from Fortune, Business Week, and Harvard Business Review as early as 2005. Blog on.

The 2010 winners are described in detail in Nielsen Norman Group’s 433-page report entitled “Intranet Design Annual 2011: The Year’s 10 Best Intranets,” co-authored by Amy Schade, Jakob Nielsen and Nielsen Norman Group researcher Patty Caya. The report is available for download from the Nielsen Norman Group website. In alphabetical order, the 2011 world's 10 best intranets are:

AMP Limited (Australia), a wealth management company

Bennett Jones LLP (Canada), one of Canada's largest law firms

Bouygues Telecom (France), a telecom, mobile, fixed, TV, and Internet communications services company

Credit Suisse AG (Switzerland), a global financial services company

Duke Energy (US), an electrical power holding company

Habitat for Humanity International (US), a non-profit, non-denominational Christian housing ministry

Heineken International (The Netherlands), a leading brewer and owner and manager of a portfolio of beer brands

KT (Republic of Korea), an information, communications, and technology company

Mota-Engil Engenharia e Construção, S.A. (Portugal), a leading construction enterprise

Verizon Communications (US), a provider of wired and wireless broadband and communications services to US consumers, as well as of global business networking, data, and managed solutions to enterprises worldwide

There were no repeats from 2006 when Verizon competitor, Comcast, was named along with Volvo, DaimlerChrysler (nsme at the time), Microsoft, and others.

 

 

Hyper-Social Summit – Creating Successful Online Communities – Part Three

This is the third part of my notes from the Hyper-Social Summit sponsored by the Human 1.0 Network.  It is based on research conducted by Francois Gossieaux of the Human 1.0 Network and Ed Moran, Director of Innovation at Deloitte. I will highlight some of the key findings that were presented. Their book, The Hyper-Social Organization, covers this research in more detail.

There was a wide range of companies involved in the study: 22% had revenues over 1 billion and 32% had revenues under a million. The smallest group was  the 500 million to 1 billion revenue group which accounted for only 2% of the sample.  Within the sample 56% were considered B2B, 23% B2C, 9% were nonprofits and 2% were government.

There was also a range of experience with 14% having communities up for more than three years and 24% less than 6 months and fairly even representation in between. The size ranged from 26% less than 100 members to 11% with over 50,000 members.

Francois pointed out that the dynamics of pilot will be different than a large scale implementation so be careful with pilot results –  53% did pilot and 47% did not. A community can be successful either way. Many piloted their external communities internally so the results might not be relevant on many levels.

There was a wide range of objectives for the communities: 50% served marketing research, 46% were PR related, 45% had branding objectives, 43% provided thought leadership, 39% supported reputation management, 32% provided customer support, 28% provided lead generation, and the same number supported knowledge management.

Marketing was by far the most function engaged in the development of a community with participation in 79% of the communities. Next, was IT at 37% and sales at 36%, followed by knowledge management at 22% and legal at 17%. Similar results occurred for community management with 53% marketing, PR and community development at 11%.

These results suggest a strong external focus and that was the case with %*% externally focused, 10% internally, and 28% hybrid.  Within the external and hybrid communities 81% were customers focused, 49% were prospect focused, and 37% were partner focused. 

There was often a mismatch between goals and implementation. There can be too much marketing focus when non-marketing goals have been generated. Related to this finding, there have been too many programs around products rather than audience.

The objectives considered most successful were: generate more word-of-mouth 40%, increase brand awareness 27%, increase customer loyalty 25%, bring outside ideas into the organization 24%, and improve customer support quality 23%.  The least successful was to increase sales at 22% of the respondents. At the same this was the leading measured used for success at 38% followed by increase leads at 33% and generate awareness at 28%.

Success factors included: ability to connect with like minded people 50% and ability to help others 45%. The findings stressed the importance of social factors for success and secondary importance of other incentives.

The biggest obstacles were getting people to engage 66%, getting people to come back 42%, and attracting people 42%. The number of active people varies as to whether you can rely on user-generated content. Only 25% deployed external people to develop content and 65% did have internal people develop content.  A big factor is the level of passion. However, a community should still have some professional generated content to seed it and direct it.

The investment were mostly modest with 68% spending less than $50,000 a year on the community and 16% between 50 and 200k. Most community were managed by employees 84% and only 8% out sourced. The investment in management was also modest as 51% have less than one FTE and 16% deploy 1 FTE.  Looking ahead, 50% plan to increase investment and 45% stated than the level of investment will stay the same.  Looking at what types of investments will increase they found that 85% will increase time, and 68% will increase funding.  In addition, 68% will invest in content development and 58% will increase their marketing efforts for the community.

These trends indicate that companies do perceive they are getting value from the communities as only 5% plan to decrease investment. However, communities are still primarily driven by marketing goals and some are really marketing programs with little social components or focus. There is often a disconnect between objectives and success factors. The companies are missing the value that can be derived from strong leadership as only 45% indentified leaders within the community.

While there is some success, there is a lot of room for improvement by injecting a greater social focus into the communities.  This is very consistent with then theme of the event. It is the human much more than the technical that will make a community work.  Communities will be a major component of company’s success going forward. The winners will realize that these are human networks and act in this framework. 

 

Hyper-Social Summit – Creating Successful Online Communities – Part Two

This is the second part of my notes from the Hyper-Social Summit sponsored by the Human 1.0 Network.  It is based on research conducted by Francois Gossieaux of the Human 1.0 Network and Ed Moran, Director of Innovation at Deloitte. Their book, The Hyper-Social Organization, covers this research in more detail.

Francois led the event. He went over several factors that characterize successful companies on the social side. First, they are aware of the needs of the communities within their market, Francois referred to these communities as the tribes. He noted that there are many small business communities on the Web and this is an opportunity for marketing effects if done right. The focus needs to be on the people and not on the product.

Successful companies also do not use social media as a channel.  People often buy without looking at company material. They listen to others (because of reciprocity issue) so it is better to use the Web as a listening channel. 

Successful companies don’t just talk about themselves. They want to engage in conversations especially where buying decisions are made. They treat the people in these communities like press and give them special access to information.

Successful companies also create content that travels well so that people want to share it. This often involves tips on how to use the product for an activity that uses the product.

Successful companies have stopped thinking about company or product centricity. It is about your customers. They need to be in the center. Francois gave the great example of a Europe scissors company. It created a community around scrapbook people (not about their product) but about application of their product. It attracted a huge following of dedicated people.  

Successful companies embrace the messiness of social aspects. They do not exercise too much control. One example is Best Buy. They wanted to enter the high-end music business. They found out who has passion for music in their company and asked them to help with online communities around these instruments. It did matter what area within Best Buy they came from.

Successful companies turn a business process into social process. This is not just putting social tools in place but looking at the human characteristics of reciprocity and fairness, You need to get people to help each other even if it is not their job. You need to allow people to engage in their passion. It will increase the passion and engagement for your product.

A customer acquired through word of mouth is twice as loyal as one acquired through traditional marketing.  When Francois and Ed looked within organizations, they found social aspects in almost every process except legal and finance.

Here are a number of things to think about to implement social aspects to your business. First, bring down the walls. Let the wall around company dissolve. Let internal and external communities and people work together. Then do not build new walls.  Fix the divide between customer touch points in your organization. Make sure they are all on the same page. Your relationship with your s customers is only as good as they last contact they had with your company.

Be sure to not simply do the same thing again. For example, there is a new way of buying so traditional CRM is not relevant. Now buying process is more social so you need more social CRM.

Also, make sure the CIO and CMO are good friends. Think culture before tools. Become the customer advocate and not the product advocate. Establish trust as new business currency.

I liked these words of wisdom and it helped me better think though how I might reach the market for a software firm I am connected with. Now that the focus is more on the people and the community than on the company and the product, smaller companies have a more even playing field. It is not so much the size of the company as they size of the community. Smaller firms can go after the communities and the Web is another big equalizer.

In the third and last part of this series, I will cover a number of the research statistics that Ed and Francois collected in their research. 

 

Hyper-Social Summit – Creating Successful Online Communities – Part One

I had the pleasure of attending an extremely useful meeting recently on a very snowy day in Cambridge, Mass. But then most days are snowy this winter. Here are my notes from the Hyper-Social Summit sponsored by the Human 1.0 Network.  It is based on research conducted by Francois Gossieaux cofounder of the Human 1.0 Network and Ed Moran, Director of Product Innovation at Deloitte’s Global technology, Media, and Telecommunications Group. Their book, The Hyper-Social Organization, covers this research in more detail.  Ed got snowed out in NYC and could not co-led so Francois led the event.

Francois began with some highlights from their research. I liked his comments that bad practices in online communities are enjoying rapid adoption.  For example, the SAP social network provided financial rewards for individual participation. This resulted in bad behavior, as people got competitive over the money.  When they switched to an aggregated reward that was donated to charity, the bad behavior went away. However, participation remained.

We need to look at the human issues in online communities rather than just the tools and this need has suggested the name Human 1.0 for the network that Francois and others are developing.  Reciprocity is a key issue and a basic human reflex. If you act without reciprocity it can hurt the community so humans have developed a sense of fairness. There has been a lot of research to support. Fairness is even more important than transparency. 

People can use a social framework or market framework to evaluate a situation. Key is getting people to use a social framework because it leads them to develop better connections and act more fairly. Sometimes money gets in the way of this fairness as in the SAP example.  

We tell people what we think they want to hear. This causes people to give market research false answers. For example, Jet Blue asked their passengers if they wanted healthy snacks. People said yes, as they thought was the correct response. However, very few people actually selected the healthy snacks. Now I know from personal experience that the majority of JetBlue snacks are not healthy. I am currently on my way to Lotusphere via JetBlue as I edit these notes and just finished a bag of potato chips, cashews, and a diet coke. They were some of the healthier choices.

We also love status. This works well with communities but we need to be creative on this and allow for a refresh of the status ranking. People get disinterested if they feel they have no chance for status.

We have a herding instinct. We go where the crowds are located. We follow them. I experienced an example when I was briefly acting as a sidewalk artist in Copenhagen in the 60s. If I was working on my chalk drawing people would stop as they liked activity. If a few stopped then others would also stop so there was a multiplier effect. If I just sat there few would stop, they went were the crowds were forming.   We also tend to have loyalty built in so if a product is okay we tend to stay with it.

In the second part of my notes I will cover some of the traits and activities of companies who are successful with online communities. 

 

Further Reflections on Dave Snowden’s Resilient Organization

Last November I attended the KM World 2010 the keynote session, The Resilient Organization led by Dave Snowden, Founder & CTO - Cognitive Edge. Here are my session notes. There were a number of things that Dave said that strike at some of the principles behind the Darwin Awareness Engine™. I wanted to reflect on those touch points in this post as we enter the new year.

First - 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.

We developed the Darwin interface to be very simple to use. It only takes a few minutes to understand how to make use of the data visualizations. However, it works best under the hands of a master who really knows the content, can select the right feeds and make hypotheses to test through following feeds, Rob Paterson’s work with KETC is a great example (see KETC TV Social Media Experience Part Four: How Does Darwin Help Clarify Complex Issues?)

Second – Dave noted that 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.

We designed both the Scan Cloud™ and the Buzz Tape™ for quick scanning (see below) only you to check out a vast amount of data quickly and rill down where you find interesting things. Anomalies show up.

Third - Dave said that 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. We are the opposite of semantic technology. If you let the content self organize there is no external framework like Google Page Rank to game or approach through legitimate methods. There is no SEO or even spam as it would serve no value. We allow the visualization of connections between content related to a particular theme to reveal new relationships and help with the discovery and awareness of trends, both anticipated and unanticipated.

Rather than taking a linear, deterministic approach to finding content through seeking repeatable patterns on the Web with an external framework like page rank as done by Google, we use Correlation Rank™ to find non-repeatable patterns in Web content that come and go in real time. Rather than using an external framework, we look for self-organizing patterns within the content itself.

Fourth - Dave noted that 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 General Patton did this in World War Two. We use provide the bits of content so the human mind can decide on how to put them together. Darwin Correlation Rank™ does not offer a precise answer, but it reveals a movement or trend as it occurs

Fifth - Dave stated that 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. 

You can download a podcast and slides of Dave's KM World talk at the Cognitive Edge site.  

 

Top 50 Knowledge Management Blogs

Here is a useful list of knowledge management blogs to start the year. It includes three categories: general knowledge management, Web 2.0 and content management, and collaboration. The list from Biz-gasm offers a brief description of each listing so they took some time to get to know the sources. All the ones I know on the list are excellent and I learned a few new ones to check out. Of course, there are other great ones relevant to KM that are missing such as Euan Semple, Gautam Ghosh, Megan Murray, Samuel Driessen, Bertrand Duperrin, and Mary Abraham but this is a nice start.

Many of the blogs on the list are included as content sources for the Darwin Edition on Enterprise Social Media since that target content also covers knowledge management. I learned a few new ones that I added to the content sources. The Darwin Editions provide a way to efficiently monitor the conversations within a target set of content. 

The 2010 Global Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) Winners

The winners of the 13th annual Global Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) study have been announced by Telos. This brings back memories. The Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) award has been around for some time. Back when I was with a large consulting company and involved in our knowledge management practice, I spoke at the awards meetings in London several times.  These were the days of better travel funding and the relatively early days of KM. I am pleased that this award is still around and still relevant.

For the first time, Google has been named the overall Global MAKE Winner. Knowledge-driven organizations significantly out-perform their competitors. For the ten-year period 2000-2009, the Total Return to Shareholders for the publicly-traded 2010 Global MAKE Winners was 11% - nearly 3 times that of the Fortune 500 company median.

The Winners of the 2010 Global MAKE study, conducted by Teleos in association with The KNOW Network, are (in alphabetical order):

- Accenture

- Apple

- Ernst & Young

- Fluor

- General Electric

- Google

- HP

- IBM

- Infosys Technologies

- McKinsey & Company

- Microsoft

- MindTree

- PwC

- Royal Dutch Shell

- Samsung

- Schlumberger

- Siemens

- Tata Group

- Telefonica

- Wipro Technologies

A panel of Global Fortune 500 senior executives and knowledge management/intellectual capital experts selected the 2010 Global MAKE Winners. The panel rated organizations against the MAKE framework of eight key knowledge performance dimensions which are the visible drivers of competitive advantage. The 2010 Global MAKE Winners have been recognized as leaders in:

- creating a corporate knowledge-driven culture

- developing knowledge workers through senior management leadership

- innovation

- maximizing enterprise intellectual capital

- creating an environment for collaborative knowledge sharing

- organizational learning

- delivering value based on customer/stakeholder knowledge

- transforming enterprise knowledge into shareholder/stakeholder value

An even more select group of organizations form the 2010 Global hall of Fame. These 26 organizations have been Global MAKE Finalists in each of the past five annual studies: Accenture, Apple, ConocoPhillips, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, Fluor, General Electric, Google, Honda, HP, IBM, Infosys Technologies, McKinsey & Company, Microsoft, Nokia, Oracle, Petrobras, POSCO, PwC, Royal Dutch Shell, Samsung, Schlumberger, Siemens, Tata Group, Toyota and Wipro Technologies. Congratulations to each of them. 

 

BroadVision Offers a “Social Business Cloud” Through its Enterprise 2.0 Platform - Clearvale

Since its inception in 1993, at the start of the first wave of internet-based businesses, BroadVision has gone through a series of transitions. It began by helping companies do business on the Web and in the late 90s they were one of the firms to bring personalization to ecommerce. The firm survived the dotcom bust of the early 2000s but came out smaller. I recently spoke with their CMO, Giovanni Rodriguez, to get an update on their current efforts.

CEO, Pehong Chenwisely decided to bet on the viability of the native cloud. BroadVision then built a cloud based collaboration platform to provide social networking for the enterprise. Their offering, sometimes referred to as “Ning for the enterprise”, is built with the goal of not requiring heavy involvement from enterprise IT to set up. A future goal is to create a “network of networks”, where companies and individuals can discover new business partners, providers, and clients through transparency across networks.

Clearvale is the name for their collaboration platform and it was launched in May 2010. It contains many of the features found within the enterprise 2.0 concept such as communities, profile pages, blogs, wikis, networks, forums, RSS, and twitter integration, whichcan be customized through drag and drop editing. Here is a sample screen:

In November, they introduced Clearvale PaasPort, which enables companies to host their own installation of the Clearvale enterprise social networking solution. PaasPort hosts can sell Clearvale solutions, as well as premium services, to their own customers. Clearvale PaasPort is a platform-as-a-service solution provided to customers, who can deliver BroadVision Clearvale as part of a large package of services, or as a more specialized solution. One of the initial clients for this service is Softbank Telecom in Japan, which will provide integrated email, IM and voice through this capability. This unified communication will occur through a social network allowing you to store and save voice messages. I see great potential here.

Another major aspect of the new BroadVision Clearvale platform that I especially like is MyStreams, a personalized data stream management and filtering system. MyStreams integrates a wide variety of data streams into one easy-to-use interface. While this includes data from within the Clearvale network -- such as updates to wikis, blogs and forums -- it is also built to include external data streams, such as email, voicemail, social media, IM, as well as streams from consumer social networks. All of these data streams are integrated into MyStreams and can be accessed and managed without ever having to exit Clearvale. MyStreams also allows users to easily share specific data with other users. It generates an RSS feed and allows for filtering along with aggregation. Below is a sample screen:

Overcoming content silos is one of the necessary efforts with enterprise 2.0. We run the risk of creating new silos with unconnected wikis, blogs, forums, etc. A number of firms are looking at micro-blogging status updates that run across applications as one way to avoid this problem. MyStreams goes beyond basic micro-blogging and serves this cross-application aggregation function along with other capabilities.

I like these steps as they extend current capabilities in cross channel communication integration and exploit some of the potential that comes with making these channels; including voice, into data objects. 

 

The Rise of Internal Knowledge Markets

A new article in the Sloan Review by Hind Benbya and Marshall Van Alstyne, How to Find Answers Within Your Company, covered the rise of internal knowledge markets. They define these markets as “protected environments where users trade their knowledge via price mechanisms.” They note that “while these markets have existed in different forms for years, their use to facilitate knowledge transfer inside organizations is relatively new.” Early adopters include: Infosys, Siemens, McKinsey & Co. and Eli Lilly.  These firms appear to have demonstrated an increased value for internal knowledge markets for managing information flows over traditional top-down centralized knowledge-management solutions.

Market forces can differ when regulating knowledge. This article provides guidelines on how to design, launch and sustain internal knowledge markets. An internal knowledge market is further defined as a forum within an organization that matches knowledge seekers with knowledge sources. This system is more dynamic and provides just-in-time guidance rather than the centralized codification of best practices.

I can see this but then I always found these centralized knowledge management repositories to be ineffective. The only old school (pre-enterprise 2.) knowledge management efforts that I found to be effective were more nimble process-aligned systems. In these case both guidance and expertise was aligned with process steps. This was more fluid and better matched to business value.

These internal knowledge markets represent a third approach.  The authors note that they are not for everyone and require organizational scale to be effective.  They more explicitly build in incentives to participate. They quote David Ritter, CTO of InnoCentive, a supplier of knowledge markets - incentives need to take three forms — spendable currency, recognition for expertise and the opportunity to have a positive impact.  However, if you do not set the pricing mechanism right you can flood the market with poor quality content as HP and Siemens found out.

I wish that my former firms had such systems, as I really like to share knowledge, even when there is little reward. The authors raised another point that I saw first hand. When colleagues are also competitors, individuals may hoard information for personal advantage. This was especially true when employees were ranked against each other in performance reviews. Instead rewards based on quality of contribution can promote information sharing. In this case anyone who passes a certain milestone is rewarded. Coworkers can help each other so collaborative knowledge trading helps teams succeed. I like this approach much better.

Knowledge markets appear to require a lot of economic fine tuning but they are rewarding positive behavior. If they are done right I think these markets can have a positive impact on organizational culture, in general.  However, there is risk and participants can manipulate markets to their own ends leading to a negative impact on culture. This is where the fine tuning comes in to avoid gaming the system.  I think there is a lot of potential here but it will not be easy. 

 

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. 

 

 

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 [email protected]. 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.

 

 

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. 

 

The AIIM 2010 State of the ECM Industry Report Looks at Social Media

AIIM has been producing a state of the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) industry report for a number of years. The 2010 version was recently released. This annual report is based on over 700 responses from users across all industry sectors and sizes, and at all stages of ECM planning and adoption. There are great deal of useful findings related to ECM and I recommend looking at the complete report that can be downloaded form their site.

In this post I will mostly look at their social media findings. They found regarding social media and Enterprise 2.0, 29% of respondents view internal E2.0 as “imperative” or “significant” to their organization’s business goals, citing knowledge sharing, team collaboration and project coordination as the main drivers.  I was hoping for broader penetration but their audience seems to be at all stages of ECM use so these numbers may go beyond any biases that come  just looking at early adopters or vendors’ cherry picking of active users to see how the market as a whole is looking at enterprise 2.0.

They also found that 21% of respondents regard use of external social media as “imperative” or “significant” particularly as a marketing tool for publicity, and for customer feedback. I might have thought that external use would get higher results than internal but I am actually pleased to see the relative higher rating for internal use. That was what first got me interested in the possibilities of social media for business.

They found that staff access to Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and Instant Messaging is barred in 45% of organizations.  This actually makes the numbers above look good. Their audience certainly includes a lot of overly protective firms so the overall results are certainly not biased with too many early adopters.

In addition, instant messages, Twitter posts and blog posts are not archived in 80% of the organizations using them. This represents a real lost opportunity, as there is a lot of great data about the conversations within an enterprise waiting for discovery in these social media.

The study found that 59% agree that social networking will make a dramatic change to business life in the next few years.  This is interesting given the much lower rates of adoption in the audience. However, 56% are inclined to see Twitter as a timewaster rather than “an important rapid-feedback tool”.  I guess many are part of the 45% companies than ban Twitter. 

Finally, the report states 60% find it easier to locate “knowledge” on the Web than on internal systems. I used to ask this question when I spoke on social media and knowledge management and I never found a single audience member who said it was easier to find content within their organization than on the Web. I guess my audiences were biased.  The same number, 60% of new ECM users, listed  “content chaos” as the trigger for adopting ECM so there is alignment of these results. It is an interesting report and worth looking at.

Content chaos is something that the Darwin Awareness Engine™ is designed to address. It can look into the content within most ECM systems to provide an understanding of the emerging trends that are occurring within the system.

 

 

Inmagic Presto 3.5 Expands Its Collaboration Capabilities

Inmagic is a Boston based company that provides Presto, a comprehensive knowledge management and collaboration application. I covered them before (see Inmagic Offers Social Knowledge Networks with Presto 3.3). Recently, I spoke again with Phil Green, CTO, and Mike Cassettari, VP of Marketing, about their latest moves with the release of Presto 3.5. Presto enables business users to create and manage KnowledgeNets™, Social Knowledge Networks (SKN) that are tied to a specific business objective.

I mentioned to Phil and Mike that I really like that Presto is designed to support task focused collaboration.  When I was involved with the early days of knowledge management I never saw a successful implementation that was not aligned with business processes. I think KM lost some of its promise when it strayed from this goal and became more general content repositories. With enterprise 2.0, we have also sometimes lost the business task focus, especially as tools for the consumer Web are applied within the enterprise.

The new release of Presto provides enhanced functionality that includes discussion forums, which facilitate topic-specific collaboration, extended single sign-on (SSO), which authenticates third-party applications, and improved overall performance optimization for large enterprises. There is also increased metrics with the Integrated Report Writer.  You can set up reports to see such social metrics as top contributors, content ratings, etc. A sample report screen is shown below.

The discussion forums connect collaboration activities (e.g.: commenting, rating, tagging) to a specific process or topic, (e.g.: proposal development, sales enablement, competitive analysis), and retain discussion details, unlike email.  Much of the important conversations within an enterprise get lost in email so this allows for a transparent archive to make this valuable content accessible.  You can post a comment, create a reply, and tag it for easier access. Below is a sample forum screen.

The enhanced security comes through what they term “Social Security” through extended SSO. It provides striated levels of access to information based on user authorization and privileges, creating cohesive security across KnowledgeNet repositories.

There is also improved search performance for large organizations with substantial repositories (>1M records), and ingestion performance is improved for enhanced data loading. Content can come in immediately and then the metadata is added in background processing. Enhanced content relations establish a one-to-one or one-to-many relationship between Presto objects (e.g.: a contract may reference and link to multiple P.O.’s).  This allows for easier content curation.

After reviewing the new capabilities within Presto 3.5, we looked at a client case example, HRPA, a Canadian HR association. Inmagic has found a great acceptance in associations and this case makes it clear why.  HRPA wanted to provide greater service to its members through enhanced access to content so they set up a Resource Centre enabled through Presto. They also wanted to create a greater sense of community. Both goals are being accomplished as they have empowered users to be more actively engaged in gaining content and deciding what content is provided. HRPA was receiving massive email requests for content and operating in a reactive mode. Now they can make this content accessible through the Resource Centre, making the process more efficient for both the association staff and the members.  You can see the Centre below.

HRPA staff monitors requests and adds the most common ones to the content repository.  They can also offer fee-based customer research generating more revenue.  Now they are looking at organizing forums around practice areas and launching subject matter expert blogs.  The Centre was launched in September and the members have seen very excited about the new developments.

I like the improvements with Presto 3.5, especially the ones that address the social side of content management.  With enterprise 2.0 we are seeing an increasing integration of collaboration and content management capabilities. Presto 3.5 is a great example of this trend.

 

 

 

KM World and Enterprise Search Summit 2010 Coming to Washington DC on Nov. 15 - 18

KM World and Enterprise Search Summit 2010 are around the corner. It is one of the longest running shows in the business event world.  It is both a testament to the long running nature of knowledge management and the value these combined events bring to that movement and enterprise IT in general.  I am looking forward to attending this event as i did last year. It will be held at the Renaissance Washington DC hotel. There is another great line up of speakers. I will be writing about many of the session on this blog.

I am also pleased to be speaking on Facilitating Content Discovery Using Chaos Theory as part of theKnowledge Showcase. My session is from 12:30 to 12:45 on Thursday. They are taking place at the KM Corner in the conference Showcase, these presentations cover a range of topics & subject areas. Here is the session description.

“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.”

 

 

 

Darwin Awareness Engine™ Named a 2010 KM World Promise Award Finalist

I am very pleased to mention that the Darwin Awareness Engine™ was named a finalist for the KM promise award sponsored by KM World.  The winner will be announced in the November/December Issue of KMWorld with distribution at the 2010 KMWorld and Enterprise Search Summit in Washington DC which will occur November 16-18.  I will also be speaking on Facilitating Content Discovery Using Chaos Theory as part of the Knowledge Showcase. My session is from 12:30 to 12:45 on Thursday, November 18.

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 very honored to be named as a finalist for this award.

 

The Social Enterprise: Next Practices in Social Networks and Media

Here is an interesting meeting with some of my favorite speakers. The Social Enterprise:
Next Practices in Social Networks and Media occurs in Dallas on October 8. Karl Wiig,
Chairman and CEO
Knowledge Research Initiative and Adriaan Jooste,
Chief Knowledge Officer
 Deloitte Financial Advisory Services start off with The Social Enterprise:
A Conversation.

Then Robin Hanson,
Chief Scientist at Consensus Point discusses Collective Intelligence: 
Leading Enterprise Knowledge Markets. Next Larry Proctor,
Researcher at IBM covers The Social Enterprise: 
Identifying Communities. After the morning break Valdis Krebs at orgnet.com discusses Organizational Network Analysis: 
Introduction to Enterprise Social Network Analysis using InFlow 3.1.

The after lunch Valdis comes back to cover Organizational Network Analysis: 
Optimizing Enterprise Networks.  The Nancy Dixon talks about Conversation:
The Core Knowledge Transfer Technology. In conclusion Nancy, Adriaan, Valdis, Larry and Karl engage in a panel on Social Enterprise Leadership:
Harnessing Social Media and Networks.

Traditional Intranets are so Nineteenth Century

Oscar Berg posted a useful piece on why traditional intranets fail today's knowledge workers that I want to bring to your attention. I heard about it through Twitter and Marcia Conner. Oscar starts with some useful stats on the increasing amount of knowledge-based work. He writes that a study by The Work Foundation estimated our workforce has 30 per cent in jobs with high knowledge content, 30 per cent in jobs with some knowledge content, and 40 per cent in jobs with less knowledge content. I think the numbers are higher for knowledge work but this is still a lot.

Oscar notes that knowledge work is less predictable and repeatable than traditional industry work. Move over Fred Taylor. He adds that the structure of knowledge work typically emerges as the work progresses. I would add that it is very context dependent and this argues against the concept of best practices, at least the static kind.  This makes it hard to know in advance what knowledge you need.  This means that you need to place control over knowledge access in the hands of the worker and not the system. It argues against scripted solutions.

Most traditional intranets do not provide the flexibility for knowledge access that knowledge workers require.  As Oscar writes, “most of today’s intranets primarily consist of pre-produced information resources which are intended to serve information needs which can be anticipated in advance. They aim to serve people who perform predefined and repeatable tasks.” This is so nineteenth century.

Now in the twenty first century we have the potential to address these needs through a social intranet (aka enterprise 2.0).  This is more than a simply adding collaboration tools. As Oscar writes, “It equips everyone with the tools that allows them to participate, contribute, attract, discover, find and connect with each other to exchange information and knowledge and/or collaborate.”  Ahem.

I have just given you the highlights. Hopefully this is enough to make you want to read Oscar’s complete passage.

 

 

Portals Not Going Away?

Remember portals? I have heard about a number of cases where enterprise 2.0 collaboration systems have replaced portals. One firm even replaced their portal with Facebook and got a lot of PR for it. Is this a trend? I do not mean the Facbook part, just the E20 part.

Perhaps but a recent Forrester report, Portal Servers Refuse To Go Quietly, by Tim Waters found that portals are still popular in many circles. As the report summary cited, “portal server technologies continue to be widely deployed by enterprises. Although leading vendors are evolving portal servers into broad content and collaboration platforms, the core portal services — aggregation “on the glass” and user authorization for access control and personalization — remain the leading use cases. Newer alternatives, including open source platforms and mashups, are gaining ground.”

So portals may remain popular but they need to look over their c shoulders as the report also recommended that, “knowledge management teams should carefully evaluate their needs to determine if a portal server layer is appropriate.”  

Drawing for a survey taken in North America and Europe, Q4 2009, they found that 20% of the firms surveyed planned to expand or upgrade existing portal server implementations, 26% had already implemented and were not expanding while 15% planned to implement over the next year or longer.   

There were some concerns. Many users suffered from the complexity and the extensive customization effort. I have seen many of these drawn out portal implementations first hand.  They can be the darling of the solutions integrators looking for big time projects with ever expanding budgets.  The report offers a number of instances of similar outcomes. It also said that the majority of the users they interviewed were surprised by the amount of customization required.  I am not surprised at this finding as I have rarely seen a portal project come in on budget or time.

Downsized budgets can be an obstacle for new portal efforts.  The report found that many firms indicated that the move toward Lean and Agile development practices has encouraged them to reevaluate the rule of heavy handed portal servers. The report encourages knowledge management and IT people to be aware of the other options available. 

Booz Allen Extends its Enterprise 2.0 Collaborative Platform

A few months ago I wrote a series of posts on the innovative and award winning approach Booz Allen is taking to enhance enterprise collaboration and engagement (see Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: The Series).  Recently, I spoke again with Walton Smith, the Program Manager for Booz Allen's information sharing efforts and the lead for the Government 2.0 client practice. Walton said that the first version of Hello, the collaboration platform, covered the exchange and archiving of tacit knowledge. Now they wanted to expand it to incorporate document management in an integrated and collaborative manner.

Booz Allen selected SharePoint for the document management application as 90% of their clients used it and they already had an enterprise license.  To extend the collaborative capabilities they made use of a number of third party tools including MindTouch and some other open source offerings. MindTouch was added as the wiki platform because of its ability to scale and the flexibility to rapidly develop mashups and social applications. It could also be easily integrated into the overall Hello skin.

The new version of Hello includes a front end dashboard built on the iGoogle model.  Users can configure it to meet their individual requirements. The third new feature is the capability to support projects. In the prior version of Hello everything was open. Now you can put in security levels to create private subsets of the conversation to support a project team.  They also have added FAST for enterprise search as it provides a federated search across applications. The search results bring back related people and documents at the same time. These are all great next steps to make the collaboration platform more robust and serve a broader array of needs within the enterprise. Here is a sample screen.

We also discussed their micro-blogging efforts (which plan to be installed in the near future). Walton likes micro-blogging for circulating content because of its speed.  Busy managers and consultants often do not have time to write a blog post or make a wiki entry and email is too limited. However, they can quickly push information and ideas around the firm through micro-blogging. He finds that it also levels the playing field for information exchange. Messages more quickly move up and down the organizational levels as anyone can put a message into the micro-blogging system and anyone can respond. The traditional filters of company hierarchies can be put aside, furthering the speed of communication.  At the same time private groups can be easily set up for conversations within levels as needed.

In addition to supporting individual exchanges, micro-blogging can become the vehicle for virtual group discussions. For example, Booz Allen has held several forums through micro-blogging. In this case senior executives make themselves available for questions at an agreed upon time. Employees can follow the discussion thread and make contributions.  This provides a new sense of connection, as well as updates on where the firm is going which is especially valuable for a global organization of 23,000 people operating in almost every time zone. Even if people cannot participate, these forums are archived and accessible at any time.  We have seen these group dialogues on Twitter. Moving them inside the trusted environment of the enterprise can further open up the conversation.

Walton related another use case as micro-blogging can serve as an ambient alert system that tracks events within the enterprise.  There was an issue around a new smart phone roll out.  The IT people responsible for this began to see concerns on the micro-blogging system long before the volume of help tickets rose to alert status.  They were able to quickly address the issue through the micro-blogging system and other channels, indicate they were aware of it, and add that a fix was on its way. The speed of detection that micro-blogging offered turned what could have been a black eye for the IT people into an example of proactive responsiveness.

Walton sees micro-blogging as a means to stay in touch with the pulse of the enterprise. This can be oversight of a tactical issue like the smart phone effort or more strategic topics such as what are people hearing from clients in the field or what are the main concerns of employees. Many of the enterprise micro-blogging tools have recognized this potential and have implemented metrics and dashboards to aggregate messages for more comprehensive monitoring.

The system recently received another award, this time from CIO Magazine. The award citation noted that “Booz Allen Hamilton wanted a "deliberately fun" way to increase collaboration among its 23,000 worldwide staffers, especially those who might feel isolated while working at client sites. Its solution: Hello, a suite of tools including blogs, forums and wikis that make it easier for employees to find staff with specific expertise, and to mine and enlarge the consultancy's knowledge base. The system serves the company's goal of finding ways its employees can "work together differently" and has also added to the bottom line: While Booz Allen doesn't sell Hello, it has leveraged its experience with the system to develop customized Enterprise 2.0 solutions for clients.”

I continue to be impressed with what Booz Allen is doing in the enterprise 2.0 space and enjoyed Walton’s presentation at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston.  

 

Nominations for Annual Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) Study Open Until April 30

It seems like this award has been around for some time. I was surprised to see that this is only the thirteenth award, taking it back to 1998. I was involved in the first several awards for my employer at the time and gave presentations in London at a very nice conference.

They are now accepting nominations for the 13th annual Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) study. The MAKE research program seeks to identify those organizations (for-profit, non-profit and public sector) which are using knowledge-driven strategies to out-perform their peers by above average growth in intellectual capital and wealth creation (in the case of the public sector, increased societal capital and stakeholder value).

You can also complete the nomination form by visiting the Teleos website and clicking on 'MAKE' in the left-hand navigation box and then clicking on 'MAKE Nominations'. 

A list of the organizations nominated to date is found on the following web page. Nominations close on April 30, 2010.

If you are part of an eligible organization I would recommend that you apply.  Unfortunately, my organization of one does not qualify. 

Take the Prescient Digital Media 2010 Global Intranet Study

Prescient Digital Media is conducting another global intranet survey. The preliminary results (400 respondents) and data of the Intranet 2.0 Global Survey 2010 reveal that 49% of organizations have employee or executive blogs on their corporate intranet. However, the biggest blogging challenge for these organizations and is getting people to participate.

Prescient Digital Media is preparing a comprehensive report on the topic, based in part on the findings collected from the survey. The survey takes approximately 6-8 minutes to complete. The more people who take the survey, the better the results. Ensure you get a free copy of the full Intranet 2.0 Global Study Report and analysis by spending 6-8 minutes taking the Intranet 2.0 Global Survey 2010. It is available to take until April 23.

Still Cleaning Out the Company’s Digital Dump?

The more things change, the more they stay the same is a worn out phrase, I cringe to repeat here but then I see posts like from BusienssWeek: Is Your Company's Intranet a Digital Landfill?  Now this is a fine post with some excellent points.  But it was well over a dozen years ago that we saw the same thing as intranets were introduced. The ease of use crated a proliferation of trash and treasure. The same suggestions for creating an intranet strategy were offered (see below).  Is anyone listening?

The article did point out that things are just getting worse and provided these stats: “In 2009, the world produced about 750 exabytes (EB) of information. To put this into context, one exabyte is the equivalent of one followed by 18 zeros of bytes. In 2010, by some estimates, the world will produce 1,250 EB of information.” I heard that in 2008, in part because of the advent of more user generated content through social media that more information was created that in the prior history of content.  This may become an annual event.

Social media is invading the enterprise so there will be even more to take to the dump.  Used right social media and its transparency provide huge benefits.  But without a strategy the deluge gets stronger.  Here is what the 5 step program Corporate Executive Board recommends to address the issue (in their words)

1. Clearly state the outcome your company needs to achieve through its intranet.

2. Select a short set of metrics that reflect that outcome.

3. Review the group of people and processes that govern your intranet. Make sure an information architect plays a leading role and that processes support an agreed-on information architecture.

4. Identify the most common employee information needs that are unmet in your organization and look for technologies you have available on your intranet that will meet these needs.

5. Look for commonalities across the user population that may serve as personas for different kinds of use.

It is a pay some attention now or a be sorry later situation.

 

 

 

Early Strategies Provides Useful Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Research

Cecile Demailly at the French consulting firm, Early Strategies, recently completed an interesting study of enterprise 2.0 adoption that I learned about through Twitter. The report titled, Toward Enterprise 2.0: Making the Change in the Corporation, is based on an online survey conducted between November 2009 and January 2010. The participants included a primary set of people involved in enterprise 2.0 deployment, and a secondary audience of well-informed users of enterprise 2.0 applications and projects. The majority of participants were European with 18 percent from the US. The report stated that they mostly belong to CIO/IT (38%), followed by HR (16%), Communications (12%) and Marketing (12%).

A number of themes for successful enterprise 2.0 adoptions emerged from the data.  Like many others, the respondents indicated that, “though technology is important, it is not about technology.”  The report went on to state that, “moving toward enterprise 2.0 is not a standalone game; it has to serve the overall corporate vision. The transformation has to plant its roots into the organization’s culture and strategy.”  The report used Schein’s organizational culture model, and the Early Strategies’ Enterprise 2.0 maturity model.  It segmented the transformational requirements into three levels.

At the organizational level transformation must support a strategic vision.  This could be a broad goal such as being a pioneer in the area or a more focused one such as moving toward more corporate social responsibility. At individual level, the transformation has to help with the daily work.  The broad goals of the organization may not be top of mind for the employees who have to undergo a change in the way they work and/or the tools they use.  Getting the job done better and more efficiently will be the main driver for them. At management level, an enterprise 2.0 transformation needs to help create a different and more accurate and up-to-date management model.  I believe that the transparency built into enterprise 2.0 tools and practices can certainly address this management goal if used properly.

I think this is a useful approach and these three levels need to be working in harmony for the general health of the company, as well as any enterprise 2.0 adoption efforts.  The report also states that the benefits on all three levels need to be communicated widely during the adoption process.  So far these results are consistent with most management and technology transformations. The report goes on to offer some new insights that may be more specific to enterprise 2.0.

First, it stated, “although there are complex impacts on management, it is important to note that by simply participating, managers transfer their status into the new paradigm; while not participating creates a real discrepancy.” I would agree as the nature of transparent tools changes to course of work. I know of one firm that had its first project come in under budget when they adopted enterprise 2.0 management tools. They attributed this to the transparency as everyone could see what has happening at all times in the process so accountability was clear and continuous improvements were made (see Changing Organization Behavior at XM Radio through Enterprise 2.0). 

Next, the report stated, “Middle management appears to be the organization layer where adoption is the slower, or most difficult, for all types of organizations and at all stages.” Now this has frequently happen in organizations going back to the Roman army but it remains an issue to address. Booz Allen spent the majority of its change management efforts on this level as it moved to an enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform.

The third point was, “Networking tools (rich directory, profiles, microblogging, forums, tagging, …) may be deployed just before collaboration tools (wikis, groups, …), or together, rather than the other way around or not being prioritized.” Some of the vendors have recognized this and are prompting their networking tools as a “Trojan horse” before getting into the more complex process of aligning collaboration platforms to work processes. These networking tools can show quick returns and provide a means for viral marketing of these benefits. 

The report suggests that, “communicating externally about the internal change may help to change the mindsets internally.” This is an interesting idea. Those that have been successful in enterprise 2.0 are by definition early adopters who often like to promote their efforts in the external world.  This external promotion will indicate the importance of the transformation, as well as potentially provide more pride within the workplace.

Finally, it added that it helps when “new educational modes: mentoring and collaborative learning, structured or unstructured, when the community takes care of improving each one’s participation.”  I have always found that collaborative peer learning produces the best results. Enterprise 2.0 tools now allow for this peer learning to be more effective. For example, I have seen several instances where switching to blogs in the learning platform dramatically increased results.

I think these are all excellent points. There is much more in the thirty eight page report as I have just touched on a few highlights. It is available at the Early Strategies web site.

 

Jane McConnell’s Global Intranet Trends 2010 Report

Jane McConnell is an intranet strategy consultant based in France who has worked with intranets since 1998. She recently published her fourth annual Intranet trends survey and report. Data was collected from nearly 300 organizations worldwide between June and September 2009. Organizations range from under 5,000 to over 100,000 employees. The five major trends for the future of intranets covered in the 2010 report are summarized below.

 The intranet is starting to become the entry point into the “workplace web” - the collection of resources and information needed by staff. This includes applications, intranet sites, specialized portals, team spaces, collaboration spaces and so on. This was the original vision for many intranets but rarely realized. The current evolution is from a fragmented workplace web to a hybrid one and finally to the end goal, a unified workplace web. In the “unified” workplace web, the intranet or enterprise portal is the front door to the organization’s information, business and collaborative resources and places. There is a ways to go as today only 15 percent of the survey participants have achieved a “unified workplace web”.

  Team-orientation is rising as firms are starting to bring collaboration spaces inside the intranet. Today, the vast majority of organizations already have team places but they are usually not considered part of the intranet. These places sometimes become mini silos. Now as the way of working becomes more collaborative and enterprise 2.0 concepts spread, this is beginning to change.

A more people-focused approach is being adopted. In the past the intranet has traditionally been a place where organizations provides content for employees to read and use. Communication was primarily top-down. This is changing with the introduction of social media. I have found that advanced organizations are recognizing the need to be more people oriented. That was the case with the Booz Allen work where profiles are the foundation for their collaborative system.

Intranets are also becoming more real-time through chat, micro-blogging, and other tools. In addition, intranets are also becoming place independent as anytime, anywhere access grows through mobile devices and home access.

These are only some of the highlights. I certainly agree with these trends. You can see the complete report at Jane’s Net Strategy site. 

2009 Global Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) Winners

This brings back memories. The Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) award has been around for some time. Back when I was with a large consulting company and involved in our knowledge management practice, I spoke at the awards meetings in London several times.  These were the days of better travel funding and the relatively early days of KM. I am pleased that this award is still around and still relevant.

For the first time, Apple was named the overall Global MAKE Winner. North America took top honors with 7 Winners, followed by Asia (5 Winners) and Europe (3 Winners). Teleos in association with The KNOW Network conducts this award. There were also 5 'Global' Winners whose organizational structures reflect the 21st global knowledge economy.

A panel of experts made the picks based on these criteria:

- creating an enterprise knowledge-driven culture

- developing knowledge workers through senior management leadership

- developing and delivering knowledge-based products/services/solutions

- maximizing enterprise intellectual capital

- creating an environment for collaborative knowledge sharing

- creating a learning organization

- delivering value based on stakeholder knowledge

- transforming enterprise knowledge into shareholder/stakeholder value

The 2009 winners include some long time winners and some major companies that you would not associate wit KM in the 90s. 

Nielsen 2010 Report on Ten Best Intranets: Becoming More Social and Mobile

The 2010 version of the well-respected annual report on intranets by Jakob Nielsen was recently released and I was pleased to receive a review copy.  Jacob said that, Many winners offered sophisticated social networking features and several created separate mobile designs optimized for smart phones." The report said that employees increasingly expect "anytime, anyplace" access, and companies are starting to evaluate what that means specifically for their employees.  Two of the winners created special mobile-specific sites with reduced content and applications; another built a dedicated intranet application optimized for its preferred platform, the iPhone, its preferred mobile platform. The report recommends that companies follow this approach and created specific sites optimized for mobile users.

Given the rise of social computing within the enterprise it is nice to see this reflected in the winners. The social computing features in this year's winning intranets focused on two levels of interaction:  “providing the opportunity for employees to get to know one another as individuals and offering workgroup support that encourages work-related connections. Users on winning sites could create profiles, share content and even share bookmarks to their favorite sites.”  There were many opportunities for employee-generated content and many examples of increased transparency. Sounds like enterprise 2.0 to me.  

There was also a lot of emphasis on change management, user involvement in design, and the internal marketing of the new social features on the intranets. Several winners engaged a wider range of stakeholders in early communication that continued throughout the design process. As designs became more defined, some teams fielded special early-access programs that let smaller groups of people use the new design before it was rolled out to everybody. These are all best practices that have been discussed on this blog so it is good to see them in practice in successful efforts.

This is an interesting contrast to their 2007 report that stated that year’s winners “took a pragmatic approach to many hyped “Web 2.0″ techniques.” This careful approach appears to pay off as enterprise 2.0 features are now much more widespread and have keep up with times.  However, it is interesting that there are few repeat winners.

The complete 449-page report provides numerous illustrations of current trends. It is co-authored by Amy Schade, Jakob Nielsen and researcher Patty Caya. The report remains very useful for anyone wanting to keep up with what is happening at big firm intranets.

Forrester Discusses Barriers to Intranet Use and Suggestions to Get Better

Forrester recently released a report on What’s Holding Back Your Intranet? by Tim Waters with Matthew Brown and Sara Burnes. They were kind to share a copy with me. They found that 93% of employee respondents said they use an intranet or company portal (Forrester uses the terms interchangeably) at least weekly, and more than half reported daily use. However, they found that these intranets were mostly accessed for basic functions such as company directory, benefits information, and payroll. Access to collaborative tools, what some might called an enterprise 2.0 capability was ranked fourteenth. 

At the same time studies have shown that a highly functional intranet can provide great value. A 2009 study at BT found that every £1 invested in the intranet produced £20 in exploited value. This certainly is consistent with my experience implementing such system in the late 90s. Despite this firms are underutilizing their intranets. They found several reasons. 

First these intranets are hard to use. Where is an AJAX interface when we need it? In fact, Forrester reports, “Most enterprises at least try to offer usable online experiences to their prospects and customers — but continue to inflict user-hostile internal systems upon their employees.” Nothing like a cobbler’s children syndrome. 

They also found that there are few incentives to change established work habits that night increase productive usage. Since It is often in charge of the intranet they think in terms of IT-centric intranet teams such as reduced storage costs rather that helping workers do their job better. IT is not usually measured on this. Most current intranets also do not reflect and support the specific roles and responsibilities of their users. The one size fits all approach is consistent with an IT centric intranet as it is easier and cheaper to maintain. 

Forrester wrote that the “symptoms of an ailing intranet are not hard to recognize: poor adoption, irritated users, failed tasks, and ingenious (but unproductive) workarounds in order to avoid the intranet altogether.” I have seen this over and over again as I interview people who moved to social media and away from their intranets. Serena even replaced their intranet with Facebook. Océ is moving massive amounts of information off their intranet. 

Forrester suggests that improving the intranet starts with taking the users’ perspective. I could not agree more. They offer a number of useful suggestions in the report, including a set of criteria to review your current intranet

Collaboration Seen as Top Driver of Enterprise Content Management Investments

I recently received a review copy of the Forrester report on 2010 ECM investment projections. Stephen Powers and his team surveyed 170 knowledge managers with decision-making roles in enterprise content management about their plans for the coming year. The team found that 72% of respondents said their organizations plan to increase ECM use or the number of ECM deployments in the next 12 months, while only 4% of organizations plan to scale back ECM use or number of deployments.

It is good to see that organizations will continue a steady investment in ECM. More interesting from the enterprise 2.0 perspective, 61% cited content sharing as the most important driver for investment in ECM. Other top drivers include compliance (51%), improved search (45%). This makes sense and fits the enterprise 2.0 paradigm of transparency and collaboration.  It also reflects the continued concern over regulation and associated compliance and search certainly plays a large role in compliance.  I have seen much progress made in the search space and the enhancement of enterprise collaboration suites so these investments are becoming more attractive. The report suggested than the role of collaboration will only increase.

The report when on to say that while enterprises desire an end-to-end ECM suite that covers all content needs, in actuality they continue to have multiple ECM point products and/or suites in place. More than half have over 3 vendors in place. The report predicted than there will be more ECM integrations to compensate for the hybrid environments.

Return on investment (ROI) remains an issue as a majority of firms can’t prove ROI. This may make approval for ECM investments more difficult. However, these investments continue to improve knowledge worker productivity, at least in terms of output, as the amount of content enterprises produce continues to increase.

There is much more in the report and you can find it at the Forrester site. 

Reminder on Our KM Forum Session This Week

Thierry Hubert and I will speak at the December 17 meeting of Boston’s KM Forum.  We will discuss:Deliver Us from Web 2.0 Content Chaos: Activity, Attraction and Personal Knowledge Create the Awareness Engine™.  Here is the session description.

The presentation will share with the audience a practical application of chaos theory for creating knowledge focal points from the chaotic mess of content resources distributed across the Web. Using a couple of examples, one from the Internet where socially generated content is exploding, and one from the enterprise where social tools are also contributing their own content bloat, We will discuss the ideas that are driving a new product idea at Darwin Ecosystem. The examples will illustrate how activity can make information more discoverable, and easier to explore through various visualization techniques. These techniques open the door for more self-discovery through intuitive recognition of patterns. They will help the explorer to find relationships among content objects and people that would not have been found using traditional search methods.

We hope to see you there. It will be from 4 to 6 PM at the Microsoft offices, 201 Jones Road, Waltham, MA. Here is the announcement post on the KM Forum blog with directions. Here is more about Darwin Ecosystem and how it works. 

Our Upcoming Session at Boston KM Forum on Chaos Theory and Information Discovery

Thierry Hubert and I will speak at the December 17 meeting of Boston’s KM Forum.  We will discuss: Deliver Us from Web 2.0 Content Chaos: Activity, Attraction and Personal Knowledge Create the Awareness Engine™.  Here is the session description.

The presentation will share with the audience a practical application of chaos theory for creating knowledge focal points from the chaotic mess of content resources distributed across the Web. Using a couple of examples, one from the Internet where socially generated content is exploding, and one from the enterprise where social tools are also contributing their own content bloat, We will discuss the ideas that are driving a new product idea at Darwin Ecosystem. The examples will illustrate how activity can make information more discoverable, and easier to explore through various visualization techniques. These techniques open the door for more self-discovery through intuitive recognition of patterns. They will help the explorer to find relationships among content objects and people that would not have been found using traditional search methods.

We hope to see you there. It will be from 4 to 6 PM at the Microsoft offices, 201 Jones Road, Waltham, MA. Here is the announcement post on the KM Forum blog with directions. Here is more about Darwin Ecosystem and how it works. 

Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Océ

I conducted a series on interviews over the past two months on how Océ Is implementing enterprise 2.0. Océ is a leading international provider of digital document management technology and services. Most interviews were with Samuel Driessen, Information Architect at Océ. I spoke about their SharePoint efforts with Jan van Veen, Manager Internal Communications, in Corporate Communications and Tom Dombret, the technical team lead on the SharePoint effort. I spoke with Samuel and Peter Kruizinga about their social bookmarking experiences. This post provides a summary of some key points and links to each of the five posts.

Samuel’s responsibilities include both the information architecture for structured information in applications such as PLMS and SAP and the unstructured information in places such as email and knowledge management programs.

I really like this dual architectural role for both structured and unstructured information. It makes so much sense to have these two information sources under the same architectural leadership. The approach is to define information architecture principles and then convey these principles to management and employees so they will see the logic behind the approach. This is move away from rigid top-down rules. The implementation details will change faster than the principles and managers and employees will be able to make intelligent decisions aligned with the principles.

This granting mangers and employees the right to make decisions is reflected in all of their enterprise 2.0 work and is consistent with the principles of enterprise 2.0. Samuel also provides guidance on the capabilities of each medium so users can make intelligent decisions. I think their effortts serve as a good model for others.

Creating Information Architecture at Océ in the Age of Enterprise 2.0

Lessons Learned from Implementing Social Bookmarking at Océ

Implementing Enterprise Micro-messaging with Yammer at Océ

Lessons Learned from the Océ SharePoint Implementation

Implementing Wikis in the Age of Enterprise 2.0 at Océ

Great KM Cluster Meeting in Dallas on September 24

My friend Adriaan Jooste is hosting an interesting KM Cluster meeting in Dallas this week on September 24. The DFW Value Network and KM Cluster will be held in Irving, Texas, 10 minutes from DFW Airport.

The speakers include Adriaan covering KM Economics: What NOT to do in an Economic Downturn. Adraain is the Chief Knowledge Officer 
 Deloitte Financial Advisory Services LLP. Karl Wiig, 
Chairman and CEO
Knowledge Research Initiative, will speak on: Knowledge Futures: What can organizations and countries do to increase their knowledge competency right now? Nancy Dixon will discuss “Conversation: 
The Core Knowledge Transfer Technology.” Wilbur Swan, Co-founder
Contact Networks, and Deborah Roth Grabein, 
Chief Marketing Officer at Andrews and Kurth, will discuss, Enterprise Social Capital: 
Mastering employee contacts while optimizing privacy .

I have heard Adriaan, Nancy, and Karl before and they are all great speakers. I recommend this is you can attend.

Open Text Adds Social Media, More Web 2.0 Features, and SAP Integration

Open Text is a relatively old player in the enterprise content management and collaboration space. It recently announced Open Text Web Solutions 10, the latest release of Open Text╒s Web Content Management (WCM) software. The new release allows ?organizations to intelligently manage and deliver a broad set of corporate information to users over the Web, and features extensive usability upgrades, a new technology foundation, and deeper and more comprehensive integration with the Open Text ECM Suite and the SAP NetWeaver¿ Portal component.? They also offer Open Text Social Media that brings together many of the current social tools such as blog, micro-blogs, wikis, communities, profiles, and social search

I was especially interested in this as I was involved in an Open Text based knowledge management implementation at a major telecom provider in 1995. It was very poplar and spread across several divisions in the organization. Ironically, while working with a different firm, I came back to evaluate it in 2002 as part of a plan to upgrade the software. The knowledge management system remained quite popular, despite the aging software platform. We were able to look at instances were call center people sued the system versus times that they did not. Those who used the system performed significantly better on a whole array of metrics such as cross-selling success and reduction in repeat calls.

Now it is 2009 and social media is entering the enterprise. It is nice to see Open text keeping up with the times. As the note the role of web content management has expanded from a place to store and publish external-facing content to a helping support organizational business goals in such areas as sales and customer support. It is more deeply embedded in work processes. So Open Text is bringing in a ?full Web 2.0 user interface to both the people editing content within the company and to the consumers of this content.?

Not only are they brining in social media components, but they are also offering tighter integration with legacy applications such as SAP. This will better support their work process integration. The new release allows editors to combine dynamic content from social media, the Open Text ECM Suite and rich media applications and reuse it across many target systems, including the SAP NetWeaver Portal. In addition because it is based on the Microsoft .Net technology, Open Text 10 offers support for Microsoft SQL 2008 and Microsoft Windows Server 2008.

Other enhancements in Open Text Web Solutions 10 include a new search integration API, extended tagging support, creation of memorable URLs, and dynamic aggregation of personal content in newsfeeds. Its editor now uses RIA technology to provide more Web 2.0 capabilities. All of these enhancements are bringing it into the current times.

Prescient Digital Media Study Finds Social Media Becoming More Mainstream on Corporate Intranet

Toby Ward recently sent me a copy of the Intranet Global Survey that I participated in. Toby is the CEO of Prescient Digital Media. The headlight quote was encouraging, “Employees want to work for progressive and innovative organizations, and expect 2.0 environments from employers of choice.” The study included input from 561 organizations of all sizes from across the globe and the results reveal rapid adoption of social media on the corporate intranet in the past year.

The breakdown of specific types of social media on intranets include: 47% have wikis (10% have no plans or interest), 45% have blogs (11% have no plans or interest, 46% have discussion forums (9% have no plans or interest), 37% have RSS (12% have no plans or interest), 23% have podcasts (30% have no plans or interest), and 19% have social networking (20% with no plans or interest. I am not sure which is better the high numbers who have already adopted or the low numbers with no plans or interests. The study concluded that an organization without Intranet 2.0 tools, or plans to use them, risks being out-flanked by their competition.

Many of these initiatives have been accomplished on low budgets, 46% have spent $10,000 or less, 35% have spent between $10,000 and $100,00; and 19% have spent $100,000 or more. However, remember these numbers come from organizations of all sizes. The sample found that 61% have more than 1,000 employees; 32% have 6,000 or more employees; 39% have less than 1000 employees. So many of the large organizations have still managed to implement with a small financial investment to date.

Of those organizations that have not implemented Intranet 2.0 tools, lack of a business case (30%), executive support (33%), and IT support (31%) and internal policy concerns (27%) are the top barriers. The study adds that business cases do not need to always have hard ROI and other dollar-driven targets, but a clear need must be established.

The use of intranet 2.0 is relatively new as only 15% of the firm shave had them over 2 years and 355 have had them less than a year. The study concluded that few organizations have had these tools long enough to perfect their use or achieve critical-mass acceptance. At the same time, firms have spent relatively little time evaluating tools as almost half have spent than less that three months at this tasks.

The major uses cases for intranet 2.0 tool include: employee collaboration (77%), knowledge management (71%) employee engagement (53%), and executive communications (35%). This is useful information for those who see enterprise 2.0, in part, as a realization of the promise of knowledge management and as adding better collaboration to a firm’s capabilities. On the other end, cost control (14%) and cost savings (19%) are a low priority for most organizations in adopting intranet 2.0 capabilities.

Despite the common wisdom that executive involvement greatly aids adoption, the study found relatively little executive involvement as 57% of executives have never contributed content or have done so infrequently (less than once per month) and only 11% of organizations have executives that contribute content on a daily basis.

There is much more and you should look at the report. You can get a free summary or purchase all the details. I think the findings are very supportive of the concept of enterprise 2.0 as a reality and, at the same time. Show some of the things that need to be done to increased adoption.

Yakabod Offers Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Best Practices

Yakabod has been providing knowledge management solutions since 2003, primarily for the US intelligence community to date. Their flagship product is the Yakabox™ Knowledge Network that I reviewed earlier on the AppGap (see Yakabod Provides Robust Knowledge Management with a Social Side). Like a number of enterprise 2.0 providers, they realize that many of the issues for a successful adoption of their offering are not technical and they have broadened their offerings to include adoption support. I recently spoke with Yakabod CEO Scott Ryser and Ian Bramson, Director National Intelligence Engagements about their experiences helping clients with adoption issues and the services they provide for this effort.

Scott said that their developers are able handle any technical issues for their clients relatively easily. The harder tasks come with the change management and other people related concerns. They have set up an adoption services group to support these efforts and Ian is part of this group. A significant part of the change management effort is to enable a shift in the collaboration mentality. Since a lot of their work is in the intelligence community, they have had to encourage users to share their work before it is finished so others can comment on it and gain insights in a timely manner.

Ian said they offer two principal types of services: organization culture readiness and implementation effectiveness. The culture readiness involves a variety of methods including interviews, surveys, focus groups, and working on site with their users for direct observation of the work environment. This is the type of anthropology I used to enjoy in my past life doing large-scale knowledge management implementations. They started doing this informally but it has now become a formal part of their offering with a developing set of methods and measurements. It is offered to the client as part of step one along with a pilot of their tool set.

Scott said their knowledge management tools work best when wrapped around a business process, and there needs to be a lot of personal contact to properly integrate the tools with the process. I could not agree more. In fifteen years I never saw a successful KM effort that did not do this. The culture assessment looks at such issues as the structure of the organization, the nature of the hierarchy, the empowerment of employees, the presence of a mentoring system, physical and virtual work environment, and the promotion and reward system.

They share their results in an honest and through manner with the client, no matter how sensitive, and try to get commitment to address any issues that might be obstacles to a successful implementation. They focus more on raising awareness and getting commitment to change than producing the change. Scott said that the organizations can best change themselves, if they understand their issues and have the determination to address them. Ian said there is a saying in the government that you “speak truth to power and let power decide.” Scott mentioned that they are at the beginning of this effort but they are collecting data. Once they have enough instances, they will be able to offer predictive statistics on what is essential for a successful implementation.

One of the issues they address is the collaboration dynamics in the organization. Are there opportunities for unstructured exchanges during business processes or is everything planned and structured? What is the speed of collaboration? How fast can people connect and what are the obstacles? Are there tools in place to support this collaboration? What are the information silos in the organization?

Another issue is the power of inertia. How fast can the organization change? Are they always re-organizing so employees feel that can ignore change? Are there frequent changes in leadership so employees feel they can wait out efforts? Are the employees savvy in social technology?

They also look at the implementation profile for the particular effort. Is the organization ready for this initiative? Is there executive support? Is there a sense of urgency? What are the consequences of not doing anything? What is the leadership strength of the sponsor? What is the financial commitment? How good is the fit of the solution with the need? Do the targeted business processes allow for knowledge sharing? How relevant is the process to the mission of the organization? Do the targeted processes go across the organization (the broader the better)?

Another key area is what they call “winning the middle.” They realize that you need middle management support for the initiative to be successful. This is especially important with enterprise 2.0 efforts as they often allow information to more easily go directly from workers to senior management, bypassing the filter of middle management. They look at the role of middle management in deciding on the effort, as well as their support. How does success of the effort fit into middle managers’ accountability areas? How does it affect their advancement?

A final area we discussed was the adoption strategy. It looks at such issues as the presence of a project-related coaching plan for executives and middle managers. Do people understand the nature of the required change? Is there a user advocacy process? Can the plan adapt?

Scott and Ian said that they take the assessment results and fold them into the implementation planning process. They create a dashboard using the Yakabox that looks at the key issues raised in the assessment. They allow for a constant comment stream from users to make feedback transparent to everyone. They give the senior executives a direct view into the thoughts of the users. I like the fact that they are using their own tool to aid the implementation. This gets people familiar with the tool, as well as demonstrates its value.

Yakabod also provides customer advocates (Yakabod staff working directly with end users) to enable feedback and to provide assessments of progress on the change management issues. They also train their replacements by recruiting customer employees to address these issues.

Scott said that while they’ve been delivering services for a long time, they are just at the beginning of formalizing this offering. They realize that they have a lot to learn and will be refining their methods as they go along. I like this attitude. It will make them more successful in both the short term and the long term. This is an exemplary effort and I am grateful that Yakabod is willing to share their practices with us. I plan to check in after a while to see what else they have learned.