May 12, 2006
Rapid results without a rugby scrum
By Andrew Baxter
FT.com site; Jul 27, 2005
Scrums are big news at WildCard Systems – it has more than 35 of them in progress – but the Florida-based specialist in stored value cards has not gone rugby mad. Nor has Yahoo, the internet services company, which is running 15. Nor even conchango, an IT consultancy based in the UK, the home of the sport.
None of these three companies is looking for staff with legs like tree trunks, willing to crunch shoulder against shoulder in a melee of collapsing limbs and mud. Instead, they have all adopted Scrum, a process for developing software that breaks a project down into small chunks, each of which produces a tangible result, to be carried out by self-managing teams (see panel).
Traditional approaches to software development take too long to produce results, and by the time they are delivered, the customer's priorities and business conditions may have changed, says Ken Schwaber, a US software developer and industry consultant who co-developed Scrum in the early 1990s with fellow software expert Jeff Sutherland.
Worse still, people involved in the process hate coming to work every day and sitting in cubicles to be given w
Worse still, people involved in the process hate coming to work every day and sitting in cubicles to be given work and more work, he says.
Scrum is different, he says, as it "takes people out of cubicles and puts them in a room with whiteboards. They have to talk about a problem and address it as a team. If you come into a room where people are using Scrum, the key indicator is the noise level, because people are talking. If it's dead quiet, they're not using Scrum.
"The customers like it because they say 'Holy bananas, this kind of software development finally delivers results, and in one month'."
It is only recently that the debate over methodologies has had much relevance beyond the arcane, and often introverted world of software development. Rather like Linux and the open source software movement, Scrum became popular largely by word of mouth among software developers, gradually developing a following of admirers.
Now it is being targeted more systematically at chief executives of large companies that might benefit from using it. "We aim at CEOs because CIOs [chief information officers] are part of the problem, not the solution," says Mr Schwaber. "We are trying to directly connect the software developers with the customer, and CIOs are not too thrilled about being cut out of the action."
This initiative coincides with a growing feeling among some companies that traditional methods of software development are holding them back. "We felt the old methodologies had run their course and were not able to scale for us," says Tim Dorsey, senior vice-president of performance improvement at WildCard.
The company used the classic "waterfall" method of software development, where groups of people work on separate stages of several projects simultaneously, handing off to the next group in sequence over a period that could typically last 12 months. The methodology assumes that nothing has changed over that time, says Mr Dorsey. And with a lot of people working on different projects, "if someone drops a ball, it can affect five or six other projects." With Scrum's dedicated teams, that issue does not arise.
At Yahoo, Pete Deemer, vice-president of product development, is less critical of the traditional waterfall approaches – it can be cumbersome but also pretty quick, he says, crediting it with helping the company launch a range of innovative products. The company started using Scrum in February, but only as an alternative. "We're always looking for new ways of doing things," says Mr Deemer "and we're trying to figure out where it works best."
Mr Schwaber says 2,000 people are trained to run the Scrum process – so-called scrum-masters – but he has no idea how widespread its use is, and he is determined not to turn it into a product. "It's free," he says. "Once you commercialise it, all you think about is making money from it."
Instead, he spends much of his time helping companies implement Scrum – an important task because the process is hard to use, as Mr Schwaber is the first to admit. "We expect only about one-third of companies that try to use it will succeed," he says. "Those companies that do succeed with it are often those for whom technology is their lifeblood, and if they don't succeed with it, they risk going out of business."
One of the main challenges for companies adopting Scrum is how to deal with the huge cultural change involved in moving to an approach based on small teams, and the costs associated with that. "It's not cheap, you've got to change and retool the culture," says Mr Dorsey at WildCard. "The training costs are significant."
On top of this, companies need "a lot of really good leadership skills," according to Bob Schatz, chief development officer at Solstice Software, which makes software for enterprises to test their integration infrastructure. "Many people have a lot invested in the old way of doing things, and it becomes more about ego, but you have to drop that."
Mr Schatz says companies often make the mistake of treating a Scrum manual like a cookbook that will produce the right results if followed to the letter. "It doesn't work like that," he says. "You have to understand the principles and apply them as situations come up."
Some software developers, too, may prefer to work in cubicles, receiving orders from above. For these more introverted types, says Mr Schwaber, it helps to have an approach such as Scrum, with its clear rules for how people should work together, much as in football or rugby.
"There are people who say they want to be left alone," says Mr Dorsey. "But once they interact with the team, and are not pulled in five or six directions at the same time, they say 'This isn't that bad after all.'"
Copyright © Financial Times group
May 12, 2006 at 11:49 PM in Knowledge Management | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
October 04, 2004
Bots, Blogs and News Aggregators
Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant
http://virtualprivatelibrary.blogspot.com/BotsBlogs.pdf
Research white paper link compilation titled "Bots, Blogs and News Aggregators" is a 22 page research paper listing many resources both new and existing that will help anyone who is attempting to find information and knowledge research about bots, blogs and news aggregator tools currently available on the Internet. It is freely available as a .pdf file (1.42MB) at the above link from the Virtual Private Libraryâ„¢ and authored by Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. [Updated 09-22-04]
October 4, 2004 at 08:14 AM in Knowledge Management | Permalink | TrackBack (20) | Top of page | Blog Home
September 17, 2004
Intranet Roadmap
The Intranet RoadmapTM provides the first truly comphrehensive methodology that describes all the activities required to develop (or redevelop) an intranet.
Beyond just implementing software or redesigning the site, the Intranet Roadmap covers activities in five key streams:
strategy
design
content
change & communications
technology
This is a holistic approach to the management of an intranet project, ensuring that all the activities required for a successful launch (or relaunch) are addressed.
The Intranet Roadmap does more than just indicate what activities need to be conducted, it clearly shows the sequence of activities required, and the techniques that will help at every stage of the project.
The Intranet Roadmap is delivered in two forms:
full colour A1 wallchart
supporting 54 page booklet
The wallchart lists the key activities required in each of the project streams. It also highlights which activities (such as usability testing, affinity diagramming, personas and collaborative design) can be used to support individual activities.
The supporting booklet then provides an overview of every activity and technique listed on the Intranet Roadmap, as well as linking to further resources and information.
The combination of the wallchart and booklet will be invaluable for any team looking to develop or redevelop an intranet, and it will assist in both planning and reviewing the approach taken.
Using this best-practice intranet methodology will bring order to the complex and inter-related aspects that make up an intranet project.
The Intranet Roadmap has been produced by the consulting team at Step Two Designs, who are recognised as thought-leaders in the development and management of corporate intranets. It has been drawn from the practical experiences gained working with a wide range of both public and private sector clients.
September 17, 2004 at 09:01 PM in Knowledge Management | Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Top of page | Blog Home
stop wasting valuable time
Marakon Associates | our ideas & impact
Companies routinely squander their most precious resource--the time of their top executives. In the typical company, senior executives meet to discuss strategy for only three hours a month. And that time is poorly spent in diffuse discussions never even meant to result in any decision.
The price of misused executive time is high. Delayed strategic decisions lead to overlooked waste and high costs, harmful cost reductions, missed new product and business development opportunities, and poor long-term investments. But a few deceptively simple changes in the way top management teams set agendas and structure team meetings can make an enormous difference in their effectiveness.
Efficient companies use seven techniques to make the most of the time their top executives spend together. They keep strategy meetings separate from meetings focused on operations. They explore issues through written communications before they meet, so that meeting time is used solely for reaching decisions. In setting agendas, they rank the importance of each item according to its potential to create value for the company. They seek to get issues not only on, but also off, the agenda quickly, keeping to a clear implementation timetable. They make sure they have considered all viable alternatives before deciding a course of action. They use a common language and methodology for reaching decisions. And they insist that once a decision is made, they stick to it – that there be no more debate or mere grudging compliance.
Once leadership teams get the basics right, they can make more fundamental changes in the way they work together. Strategy making can be transformed from a series of fragmented and unproductive events into a streamlined, effective, and continuing management dialogue. In companies that have done this, management meetings aren’t a necessary evil; they’re a source of real competitive advantage.
To obtain a reprint of the full article, go to Harvard Business Review's Web site and click the "Add to cart" link.
September 17, 2004 at 01:44 PM in Knowledge Management | Permalink | TrackBack (2) | Top of page | Blog Home
September 16, 2004
Buckman Labs Is Nothing but Net
Fast Company | Buckman Labs Is Nothing but Net
From: Issue 03 | June/July 1996, Page 118 By: Glenn Rifkin Photographs by: Matthew Barnes
Buckman Labs makes chemicals -- but it sells knowledge. The challenge: invent a way for the global salesforce to spend more time with customers and share its brainpower
At the headquarters of Buckman Laboratories International in Memphis, Tennessee, knowledge is the stuff of legend. A favorite story goes like this: veteran Buckman sales rep Doug Yoder is making a presentation to a handful of engineers at a paper company that represents a $1 million order.
"At Buckman," he begins, "when you ask one person a question, you have the power of 1,200 employees behind you -- including our CEO, Bob Buckman." Eyes wander.
Yoder turns it up a notch. "Our added value is not only speed of response but also global solutions." The engineers fidget.
Yoder continues. "Our knowledge network is a pillar of our culture. And it's there to help you."
To make the point, he fires up his laptop, logs onto the Buckman knowledge sharing system -- K'Netix -- and poses a question to the appropriate technical forum.
The answer comes from Brazil -- and it's from Bob Buckman. He and Yoder spend the next 20 minutes online, addressing the paper company's specific concerns.
Yoder finally logs off. "When I say everyone at Buckman Laboratories accesses the forum, I mean everyone." The paper company engineers are impressed.
Buckman Laboratories, a $270 million company with 1,200 people in 80 countries, makes more than 1,000 different specialty chemicals in 8 factories around the world. But its real product is knowledge. Bigger companies in sexier industries are busy talking about knowledge, scrambling to hire chief knowledge officers, and wrestling with the computer technology to capture a corporate knowledge base. To Bob Buckman and his group of globe-trotting salespeople, that's old news: been there, done that, got the floppy.
Buckman and his people began treating knowledge as their most critical corporate asset in 1992. As a result, Buckman Labs has become a Mecca for other companies looking for "how-to" lessons in the art and science of knowledge management. Executives from AT& T, 3M , Champion International , International Paper Company, and USWest have made the pilgrimage to this small, privately held chemical company to look and learn. What they've seen is a company that is fast, global, and interactive, built on a system that is simple, powerful, and revolutionary.
"You can't really understand the transformation that has happened until you come in here," drawls Bob Buckman, the company's 58-year-old CEO and resident knowledge visionary. "I need a chalkboard."
In the conference room adjacent to his office there's a table, a chalkboard, and an easel, one of many that decorate the company's offices. Each bears a different saying. This one has a quote from Machiavelli: "There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things." Buckman goes to the chalkboard and starts scribbling furiously.
"The customer is most important," he barks, sounding more like a southern football coach giving a half-time chalk-talk than a CEO. He draws an inverted pyramid with the customer at the top. "We need to be effectively engaged on the front line, actively involved in satisfying the needs of our customers."
"We need to cut the umbilical cord," he continues -- a reference to the mainframe mentality that kept people tied to the office. Buckman rattles off the numbers. "If you work a 40-hour week, you're in the office less than 25% of your time. If you travel 40% of the workweek, you're in the office less than 15% of your time. And if you're a salesperson, you're in the office 0% of your time."
Part techno-visionary, part hard-nosed businessman, Bob Buckman poses the challenge of competition in the knowledge-intensive '90s: Close the gap with the customer. Stay in touch with each other. Bring all of the company's brainpower to bear in serving each customer. "The real questions are," says Buckman, "How do we stay connected? How do we share knowledge? How do we function anytime, anywhere -- no matter what?"
The Real Power of Knowledge
The answer that Bob Buckman came up with was the knowledge network -- K'Netix.
It came to him eight years ago, when he was flat on his back, confined to bed after rupturing his back. Unable to get up, unable even to sit up, Buckman propped a laptop computer on his belly and took dead aim on the real power of knowledge.
"Lying there thinking how isolated I was," says Buckman, recalling his two weeks in bed. "I got to thinking about what I wanted."
What he wanted was information, not just for himself but for all his people, a steady stream of information about products, markets, customers. And he wanted it to be easily accessible, easily shared. A relentless student of business and management writing, he had recently read a comment from Jan Carlzon, the former head of SAS, and it had struck a chord with him: "An individual without information cannot take responsibility; an individual who is given information cannot help but take responsibility."
"If you can't maximize the power of the individual, you haven't done anything," Buckman thought. "The basic philosophy is, How do we take this individual and make him bigger, give him power? How? Connect him to the world."
On his laptop, Buckman wrote his ideal knowledge transfer system:
It would make it possible for people to talk to each other directly, to minimize distortion.
It would give everyone access to the company's knowledge base.
It would allow each individual in the company to enter knowledge into the system.
It would be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
It would be easy to use.
It would communicate in whatever language is best for the user.
It would be updated automatically, capturing questions and answers as a future knowledge base.
Such a system, he realized, would mean a cultural transformation. It would mean turning the company upside down.
Which was precisely what he wanted to do -- and had wanted to do since 1961 when he'd joined the company his father had founded. With a degree in chemical engineering from Purdue University and an MBA from the University of Chicago , Buckman had long been fascinated by organizational dynamics and the potential for change that computers had created. And he'd chafed working under his father, Stanley, who epitomized the classic pyramid-style leader: he oversaw every decision, sales order, check, memo.
In 1978, at the age of 69, Stanley Buckman suffered a heart attack and died on his office couch, and the reins of control passed to Bob. "I knew I didn't want to do it his way," Buckman says. "Everything went through my father. The general managers of our different ventures had never even met each other. I thought, this is too much work."
His epiphany showed him the path to the future. "I realized that if I can give everybody complete access to information about the company, then I don't have to tell them what to do all the time," he says. "The organization starts moving forward on its own initiative." The knowledge network would become the organization.
But first he had to create the organization to manage the knowledge network. In March 1992, Buckman set up a Knowledge Transfer Department and appointed Victor Baillargeon, then a 34-year-old PhD in organic chemistry, to run it. For a company that was determined to break the rules, Baillargeon was the perfect choice: he had spent the previous year as Buckman's assistant, researching the concept of knowledge transfer, and was eager to put the theories to the test. And he was no member of the card-carrying information technology fraternity; he came to the job free of mainframe baggage.
Baillargeon's first hurdle was to build a network that was both ubiquitous and easy to access from around the world. With that in mind, Baillargeon suggested that the company put its entire worldwide network up on CompuServe, the public online service. CompuServe offered e-mail access to 35 public network services and the ability to create private bulletin boards for intracompany use. And all it took was a single phone call to connect.
Baillargeon engineered the move to CompuServe in just 30 days. Every Buckman salesperson was given an IBM ThinkPad 720 with a modem. For a total of $75,000 per month in access charges, all Buckman employees could make a single phone call that established a point-to-point link with headquarters and provided access to all of CompuServe's global information services. On that platform Baillargeon built K'Netix, the company's global knowledge transfer network, and established seven technical forums to organize the company's online conversations.
That was four years ago. Today Buckman and his team have a clearer line of sight than most into what it means to do business in the knowledge economy. In particular, four categories of lessons emerge from Bob Buckman's knowledge laboratory: the importance of customer engagement; how to encourage knowledge-sharing; the value of values; and how to think about measurements.
"Effectively Engage with the Customer"
It's one of Bob Buckman's most repeated phrases: effectively engaged on the front line -- a constant reminder that knowledge transfer at Buckman Labs is not an end in itself. The whole point is to deploy knowledge at the point of sale -- to win business and to serve the customer. To Buckman, it all can be reduced to a simple ratio: "The number of people in the organization working on the relationship with the customer, relative to the total organization, will determine the momentum of the organization," he says.
For that reason, the percentage of the company that is "effectively engaged with the customer" is data that Buckman tracks religiously. In 1979, before K'Netix was launched, it was a mere 16%. Today, it's about 50%. By the year 2000, Buckman says, it will be 80%. The message is simple: the front line and the bottom line have everything to do with each other.
Buckman competes in a variety of businesses, from pulp and paper processing and water treatment, which makes up 60% of its sales, to leather, agriculture, and personal care. Arrayed against it are companies three to five times its size: $700 million Betz Laboratories of Trevose, Pennsylvania, for example, or $1.2 billion Nalco of Naperville, Illinois. And the industry is consolidating as customers like International Paper Company, Sherwin-Williams, Chinet, and Citgo, pare down their list of vendors to just a few -- from whom they expect more.
Under these conditions, Buckman's commitment to knowledge takes on a new urgency. Salespeople must have the right answer for each customer -- and fast. K'Netix makes that an everyday occurrence, an exercise in speed, globality, and interactivity.
Take the case of Dennis Dalton, who is based in Singapore as managing director of all company activities in Asia. According to the K'Netix archives, Dalton sent out a call for help last January 3 at 12:05 p.m.: "We will be proposing a pitch-control program to an Indonesian pulp mill," he wrote. "I would appreciate an update on successful recent pitch-control strategies in your parts of the world."
The first response came three hours later, from Phil Hoekstra in Memphis, and included a suggestion of the specific Buckman chemical to use and a reference to a master's thesis on pitch control of tropical hardwoods, written by an Indonesian studying at North Carolina State University.
Fifty minutes later Michael Sund logged on from Canada and offered his experience in solving the pitch problem in British Columbia. Then Nils Hallberg chimed in with examples from Sweden; Wendy Biijker offered details from a New Zealand paper mill; Jos* Vallcorba gave two examples from Spain and France; Chip Hill in Memphis contributed scientific advice from the company's R & D team; Javier Del Rosal sent a detailed chemical formula and specific application directions from Mexico; and Lionel Hughes weighed in with two types of pitch-control programs in use in South Africa. In all, Dalton's request for help generated 11 replies from six countries, stimulated several "sidebar conversations" as participants followed-up on new knowledge they'd just learned -- and catapulted Dalton into position to secure a $6 million order from the Indonesian mill.
The customer focus of the knowledge system is built into the design of K'Netix. For some of Buckman's core customers, for example, there are private forums where the conversation is about only that customer and the advice is tailored to its needs. In addition, the Customer Information Center contains all available information about the company's customers, including internal memos, documents, and sales orders -- a complete file cabinet on each customer.
"We have to be so tuned into our customers that we anticipate what they need," says Buckman. "If an employee is not effectively engaged with the customer, why are they employed?"
Knowledge-Sharing Is Power
Over the years, people have taught themselves to hoard knowledge to achieve power," says Buckman. "We have to reverse that: the most powerful people are those who become a source of knowledge by sharing what they know." But four years ago, when Buckman Labs launched its K'Netix program, the big unanswered question was, Would people share their knowledge?
"There was a sense of hesitancy in the beginning," remembers Alison Tucker, 36, K'Netix forum manager. "There were people whose file cabinets were filled with everything they knew, and that was their source of power."
Ultimately, what emerged was a carrot-and-stick balance, mixing visible incentives with invisible pressure, and an organization-wide bias toward teamwork and knowledge reciprocity. As one carrot, Buckman organized a one-time event in Scottsdale, Arizona at a fashionable resort as a celebration to recognize the 150 best knowledge-sharers. Those selected received a new IBM ThinkPad 755, a leather computer bag, and listened to a presentation by Tom Peters. Within the company, the high-profile event -- dubbed "The 4th Wave" -- sparked a good deal of discussion, particularly among those who failed to make the cut. The event served its purpose: in the weeks afterward, participation on the K'Netix forums increased dramatically.
The stick component is a good deal more subtle but more pervasive: everyone in the company knows that Bob Buckman isn't just watching the knowledge net - he's constantly on it. Early in the life of K'Netix, Buckman laid out his expectations in a speech to his people. "Those of you who have something intelligent to say now have a forum in which to say it," he told them. "Those of you who will not or cannot contribute also become obvious. If you are not willing to contribute or participate, then you should understand that the many opportunities offered to you in the past will no longer be available."
Knowledge Builds Trust, Trust Builds Knowledge
For companies thinking about entering the knowledge economy, Bob Buckman emphasizes one lesson before all others: "What's happened here is 90% culture change. You need to change the way you relate to one another. If you can't do that, you won't succeed."
At the heart of knowledge-sharing, Buckman-style, is a commitment to the individual. Buckman's values represent a flip of the prevailing corporate mind-set, where the company comes first, and employees are fortunate to have jobs. The Buckman Code of Ethics, captured on a wallet-sized laminated card and passed out to every person in the company, stipulates a fundamentally different operating philosophy. The first proposition is "that the company is made up of individuals -- each of whom has different capabilities and potentials -- all of which are necessary to the success of the company."
The philosophy applies directly to the operation of K'Netix, where anything is discussible and anyone can participate. For example, one lengthy online discussion tackled the always-sensitive issue of compensation -- in this case, a special bonus award given each year to the salespeople who record the largest year-to-year percentage sales growth. For several weeks, salespeople from around the company traded opinions and argued directly with Buckman over what was unfair about the existing award and what a fairer system might look like.
What made that exchange work is the same thing that makes the larger knowledge transfer system work: the trust that exists in the company. "It has to do with the fuzzy-wuzzy stuff that's not easy to get your hands on," says Buckman. "But it boils down to this: Do you trust the people who give you the information?"
New Knowledge, New Metrics
In the emerging knowledge economy, the debate that's waiting to happen is all about measurement: Can you prove that all these knowledge management expenses finally contribute to the bottom line? Bob Buckman, who publicly discloses that he spends 3.75% of company revenues on the knowledge transfer system, dismisses the return-on-investment question out of hand. "I used to be a statistician," he says. "There are no absolutes. All you can do is increase the probability of success. If I can change the speed of our response to a customer from three weeks to six hours, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see the economic benefits."
According to Lou Breyley, a sales manager in Cincinnati, Ohio for Buckman's water treatment division, the economic proof of the system's value is in the contracts it helps the company win. "We might come in with less experience than a competitor," he says, "but we can show that we can tap into a worldwide resource where others can't. That's a competitive strength."
The water treatment division, for example, recently identified the ammonia industry as a growth target. Despite a lack of experience in the field, Buckman beat out seven competitors to win part of a contract that could be worth up to $6 million in new business. "The customer acknowledged that the network was a factor in our landing the deal," says Breyley.
While Bob Buckman rejects the standard financial metrics, there are a few measurements he does focus on in evaluating the performance of the knowledge network. The percentage of his workforce that is effectively engaged on the front line is one key figure. Another is education. The proposition is straightforward: if you want to compete on knowledge, you need to hire smart people. One proxy for evaluating smart people is college graduates. In 1979, only 39% of Buckman's people had college degrees. Today it's 72%.
From Bob Buckman's vantage point, it is impossible to put a dollar figure on the value of the knowledge network. It is simply fundamental to the way the company does business, intrinsic to its operation and embedded as an expression of the company's value system. Looking back, Buckman says that incorporating the knowledge transfer system into a corporate culture is at least a three-year process. "The first year they think you're crazy. The second year they start to see, and in the third year you get buy-in," says Buckman. "What you need is persistence. This whole thing is a journey."
Glenn Rifkin (grifkinb@aol.com) is a Boston-based business writer who contributes frequently to "The New York Times."
Additional reporting by Christina Novicki (cnovicki@fastcompany.com) and Susan Diesenhouse.
Bob Buckman and Buckman Labs can be reached at knetix@buckman.com or http://www.buckman.com/
September 16, 2004 at 07:42 AM in Knowledge Management | Permalink | TrackBack (12) | Top of page | Blog Home
April 03, 2004
The Strategic Value of Knowledge Management
destinationCRM.com: The Strategic Value of Knowledge Management
by Stratos Davlos
Monday, March 29, 2004
Knowledge Management (KM) is a poor name for a powerful concept. Names aside, what it stands for is the ability to easily and continuously capture, organize, and make available actionable know-how within an organization. When implemented with the right objectives, process clarification, and people incentives, it unleashes process efficiencies, business model flexibility, market insights, and customer loyalty.
Contact centers and customer service organizations provide some of the best examples of successful KM application. However, KM also has irrefutable value beyond the contact center.
To measure the value of KM beyond the contact center, let's first understand the value that KM brings in the contact center. The first-order benefits of KM in a contact center are measurable, improved agent productivity and reduced agent training time. The second-order benefits of KM are far more significant and strategic, and are mostly reaped by teams beyond the contact center. Here are some examples:
Customer loyalty: KM sharply reduces the need for escalation within a contact center. A large software company saw its technical support escalations drop by 13 percent after it implemented KM. While there is a direct cost benefit of reduced escalation, there is a more strategic impact on customer satisfaction, too. Not surprisingly, the same company saw an 8 percent increase in the "agent informed" score in customer surveys. As consumers we all remember positive service experiences, rare as they are, and reward providers of consistent, accurate service. This translates to repeat business and enduring customer loyalty for companies.
Service model flexibility: KM allows the company to capture the knowledge essential for best practice-based business operation and make it available to all employees and customers, as well as outsourced contact center agents. A large wireless provider implemented KM with the express purpose of reducing the cost of outsourced customer care. Having implemented KM, the provider was able to put out its customer care business to open bid, driving down the cost of its service operation by 20 percent. By eliminating the switching cost of domain knowledge from the equation, the client was able to achieve higher operating efficiencies. In another case, a financial services company deployed KM to accelerate the postmerger resource rationalization across two large customer care teams covering multiple products by empowering agents with service domain knowledge across products of the merged entities.
Market insight: Customer feedback is notoriously difficult to gather and authenticate. Focus groups tend to suffer from the "Hawthorne effect," and market research can be dangerously tilted by its very design and origin. The one place where customers really say what they think of your products and what they want from you is when they ask you for help. Customer service interactions, then, are the mother lode of market insight. Unfortunately, most customer interactions are captured in contact centers as "resolution codes." It is hard to derive trends from a dozen or so resolution codes. Knowledge-powered Web sites and contact centers enable the business to capture the customer's dialogue with your organization, which can be easily mined for churn and upsell points using the analytics capability of KM solutions, resulting in lower customer turnover and higher wallet share of individual customers.
Continuous improvement with learning KM solutions: Without KM, most companies suffer from the "Yoda" effect. Given a situation, there is always some "Yoda" in the company who can best address it. Unfortunately, the "Yoda" is not as easy to spot as in "Star Wars." A well-defined and enforced process to suggest, review, and capture knowledge is an invaluable strategic benefit of a KM system. This closed-loop process fuels continuous learning within the organization, that is hard to replicate by competitors.
While some of these strategic, enterprisewide benefits of KM may not be easy to measure at an operational level, they translate to unique competitive advantage in an environment of increasing product commoditization. Company leaders and senior managers need to keep this mind as they look for ways to increase the value of contact center interactions with customers.
About the Author
Stratos Davlos is the chief scientist and senior director of professional services, North America, at eGain Communications, which provides customer service software and services. Over the past 10 years Davlos has directed the development and implementation of eGain's knowledge management solutions for the contact center and Web self-service. Contact him at sdavlos@egain.com
April 3, 2004 at 11:42 PM in Knowledge Management | Permalink | TrackBack (8) | Top of page | Blog Home
March 01, 2004
The Semi-synchronous Groupware Problem
Good report on the nature of commmunicaton, and the some of the problems that knowledge managment sulkutions have to solve within an organisation or between them.
Stefano's Linotype ~ The Semi-synchronous Groupware Problem
The Semi-synchronous Groupware Problem
February 29, 2004 ~ 22:09
One of the reasons why I got this job at MIT was because I was familiar with distributed workgroups. The group is spread between the USA and the UK, which requires a very different mindset if we want to achieve any reasonable speed in operativity. So, I'm the workgroup infrastructure guy here, I bought a new development box and I'm going to install all the software we need for out group to operate.
I'm obviously cloning the groupware functionalities that theASF infrastructure is using, but I came across a problem that the ASF infrastructure still hasn't approached because it is hardly encountered: what if you need to (and you can!) be a little bit more synchronous?
March 1, 2004 at 07:28 PM in Knowledge Management | Permalink | TrackBack (2) | Top of page | Blog Home
February 28, 2004
Knowledge management revisited
This paragraph from Christian's new site pretty much defines what I believe Knowledge Management ought to represent today. Its much more than the traditional view of merely storing data in a convenient to locate fashion.
Its about the knowledge/ information being instantly available to the right people, at the right time, and in the right way.
The Samaritan-Web Project: In the beginning...
I believe there is an opportunity beyond these tools and websites to reach people. The underlying premise to my work is that people want to help people - but unless it is easy for people to find service opportunities, they won't necessarily seek them out. Existing tools are fine for people looking for opps, but I am interested in finding ways to make it more viral - using network science and collaboration technology to push knowledge of these service opportunities out to a broader audience.
February 28, 2004 at 10:25 PM in Knowledge Management | Permalink | TrackBack (11) | Top of page | Blog Home
Convergence
A new take on convergence. Christian's site suggests he is evangilist for levering software to better manage the complexity we face today, and thus achieve better results.
What he does well in this post is articulate the convergence required between PLM (product lifecycle management), SCM (software configuration management), and KM (knowledge management).
The Samaritan-Web Project: Convergence
For those of you who could not attend the PLM SIG event I moderated Thursday evening, we discussed the parallel if not converging paths of PLM (product lifecycle management), SCM (software configuration management), and KM (knowledge management) solutions, and the implications of the social software paradigm shift affecting how people connect online in non-business settings.
February 28, 2004 at 10:18 PM in Knowledge Management | Permalink | TrackBack (7) | Top of page | Blog Home
Knowledge management: A guide to resources on the Internet
ALA | Internet Resources: Knowledge Management
&RL News, February 2004
Vol. 65, No. 2
by Michael M. Smith
Knowledge Management (KM) is one of many important topics being addressed by companies in today’s complex business environment. KM has spawned a new legion of consultants, it has provided a new direction for many software companies, and it has given purpose to many technologies that previously appeared to be only expensive executive toys. However, KM is nothing new. It is a synthesis of many ideas which when brought together create an exciting new paradigm of research. KM is multidisciplinary and draws from communications theory, organizational dynamics, and information organization. KM incorporates the concepts of Senge’s Learning Organization, builds on the foundation of intellectual capital management, and draws from business intelligence practices.
The underlying goal of KM is to use the knowledge embedded in the organization to maximize the effectiveness and competitiveness of the concern. This goal appears much too simple to have spawned such a massive movement. However, the current business environment requires new practices to accomplish this fundamental goal.
There are many excellent resources on the Internet addressing the many aspects of KM. The resources listed below offer a wide variety of information on KM provided by academic/research organizations, information portals, consultants, and governmental and nonprofit organizations.
February 28, 2004 at 10:11 PM in Knowledge Management | Permalink | TrackBack (3) | Top of page | Blog Home
Transforming Data into Intelligence Enters New Era With Acxiom Customer Information Infrastructure
Transforming Data into Intelligence Enters New Era With Acxiom Customer Information Infrastructure
`The Unimaginable Can Now Be Imagined,' Company Leader Tells Executive Symposium
LITTLE ROCK, Ark.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 26, 2004--Advances in technology are finally allowing companies to transform data into the intelligence needed to drive better business decisions and build more valuable relationships with their customers, says Acxiom Company Leader Charles D. Morgan.
"Businesses have more data than ever, and that data will multiply in the years ahead, but realizing the power of that data has been limited," Morgan said. "Today, I can tell you that the impractical is now practical, and what was unimaginable can be imagined."
Acxiom's Customer Information Infrastructure (CII), a grid-based solution architecture, redefines how data is managed, Morgan said, enabling data analysis, modeling and applications at previously unachievable speed - and with a lowered cost.
With CII, data storage also is less expensive, allowing businesses to redirect those resources to more modeling and analysis for marketing effectiveness, he added. CII also provides duplicate storage for a failsafe environment.
Morgan's comments came in Orlando, Fla., at Connections 2004, Acxiom's annual symposium in which leading information technology and marketing executives and experts discuss trends and advances in customer data management.
"Imagine being able to rescore your entire prospect universe in seven hours rather than seven days at a lower cost per run. Imagine 10 years of promotion and transaction history rather than a simple snapshot in time. Imagine a full database update delivered as often as you want," Morgan said.
He said Acxiom, which began deploying grid-based computing more than two years ago, is itself realizing benefits of the technology, including advances of its own InfoBase® family of data products.
"The key is how we all adapt and use these changes to create an advantage in your business, and help you build valued relationships with your customers," Morgan said.
About Acxiom
Acxiom Corporation (Nasdaq:ACXM - News) integrates data, services and technology to create and deliver customer and information management solutions for many of the largest, most respected companies in the world. The core components of Acxiom's innovative solutions are Customer Data Integration (CDI) technology, data, database services, IT outsourcing, consulting and analytics, and privacy leadership. Founded in 1969, Acxiom is headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas, with locations throughout the United States and Europe, and in Australia and Japan. For more information, visit www.acxiom.com.
Acxiom and InfoBase are registered trademarks of Acxiom Corporation.
February 28, 2004 at 01:00 AM in Knowledge Management | Permalink | TrackBack (2) | Top of page | Blog Home
Emerald 2003 Usage Statistics Speak Volumes
Emerald statistics reveal the top five subject areas researched by its customers during 2003 were innovation, organization, knowledge management, as well as marketing and business intelligence. The article downloaded most often from the Emerald database was "From Marketing Mix to Relationship Marketing: Towards a Paradigm Shift in Marketing" by Christian Gronroos and published in Management Decision.
Emerald, the leading international management and information science publisher, released its 2003 usage statistics, which show more than 7 million articles were downloaded from its database, Emerald Fulltext. The number reflects an eleven percent increase over 2002 for the same 12 month period.
"We believe information professionals will find our statistics a critical tool for evaluating and planning their service subject coverage", said Gill Crawford, Head of Corporate Communications for Emerald. "The shear volume of downloads lends a high level of confidence that our usage statistics can spot trends and help our customers stay ahead of the curve."
The usage statistics are also valuable indicators for journal editors and members of the research community. Authors wishing to write articles for 2004 publication will benefit from focusing their efforts on innovation, organization, and knowledge management, as well as marketing and business intelligence topics. Researchers looking for areas to investigate will be well served to consider the hot topic areas to ensure their findings yield useful results with immediate insights.
Reflecting Emerald's international customer base, top usage came in from Malaysia, Australia and the UK, lending a global perspective to the statistics and subject interest areas.
The top-ranking article in the Emerald database for 2003 was "From Marketing Mix to Relationship Marketing: Towards a Paradigm Shift in Marketing" by Christian Gronroos. It was published in Management Decision, which ranked number one among all journals in 2003. The article can be viewed at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/10.1108/00251749410054774
February 28, 2004 at 12:47 AM in Knowledge Management | Permalink | TrackBack (6) | Top of page | Blog Home
Predictions for 2004: E-learning visionaries look to the future
E-learning visionaries look to the future
By Lisa Neal, Editor-In-Chief, eLearn Magazine
What directions will e-learning take in 2004? Will we still call it e-learning? Will there be more or fewer vendors, products, or—most importantly—jobs? Will subject matter experts develop courses instead of instructional designers? Will we all play games and discover along the way that we learned more than ever before—and had fun in the process? Read on for predictions from some of the most thoughtful and opinionated people in e-learning.
“The most central issues to e-Learning over the next year will be context management (context is queen!), learning integration (with systems, but also with work processes and content), and readiness. Increasingly, organizations will use contextual learning—much as the military does today—to ensure that they are ready to hire/deploy, change business models, respond to competitive threats, and enter new markets. By leveraging web services, learners will increasingly be untethered from the classroom and even the desktop, as learning becomes accessible though mobile devices.”—Elliott Masie, President and Founder, The MASIE Center, Saratoga Springs, NY
“In 2004 colleges and universities will finally stop thinking about using information technology (IT) and start thinking seriously about how IT can be used to improve student learning, increase student retention and serve students more cost effectively. IT will be viewed as a vital institutional investment rather than an operating expense.” —Carol A. Twigg, Executive Director, Center for Academic Transformation
“I see things coming together that have been operating separately, for example, knowledge management practices integrated with structured learning events such as courses; Web-based technology used in the classroom; formal and informal learning integrated in the same overall activity or course; and learning objects found or created by the learners themselves as the results of learning activities. Should any of these be called "e-learning" Or all of them? We need a new name for these sorts of synergies.” —Betty Collis, Shell Professor of Networked Learning, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
“2004 will bring a makeover for Training & Development. And, you might not recognize the new look! Three factors will change the face of traditional training and development: increased global competition, outsourcing and smart suites. The most visible of the three, smart suites, will integrate learning at the desktop with an employee’s other tools such as e-mail, calendaring, IM, and document management. In this environment informal learning is pumped-up and the line between learning and doing fades.” —Margaret Driscoll, IBM Global Services
“We will rediscover individual differences, such as visual processing, as an important instructional variable in the design of instruction. This will not be limited to Web-based learning, but learning and teaching in general. I predict that the education and training communities will begin to seriously use games to teach important skills and knowledge.” —Ray Perez, Office of Naval Research
“The looming problems of copyright and patent law will gain widespread attention in 2004. People will come to understand that we are really selling eTeaching and not eLearning (a misunderstanding that contributes greatly to our ongoing problems with ROI). The market may realize that products sold to academia and the corporate world SHOULD be different since they aim at different goals. More people will understand that there is a difference between gaming, game-based learning, and gaming technology. And companies will grow who realize that cultural change MUST accompany an "e" implementation for it to be successful.” —Mark Oehlert, Booz Allen Hamilton
“In 2004, information technologies will become even more critical to teaching and learning. Beyond basic literacy, digital literacy (the ability to articulate an information need and navigate electronic resources to find and use the information to satisfy that need) will become the single most important skill for both students and teachers. School library media specialists will play a key role in ensuring digital literacy is achieved within their schools.” —Ruth Small, Professor, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University
“There will be a dramatic fall off in the purchase, by K-12 schools, of laptop computers—don't even think about TabletPC's. This year, the lion's share of their purchasing dollars will flow into handheld computers for students. Handhelds are economically compelling and functionally appropriate—and educators are amazingly quickly seeing the logic in that statement.” —Cathie Norris, University of North Texas & Elliot Soloway, University of Michigan
“E-learning will replace and/or supplement school learning and e-learning will provide the social learning that forms the basis for a better life. The former will be based on the traditional e-learning system, while the latter will be based on experiences in both the virtual and the real worlds. Hence more use of ubiquitous computing technology will free students from the desktop and let them learn in a real situation with a portable device in hand.” —Masaaki Kurosu, Professor, National Institute of Multimedia Education, Japan
“The benefits of learning objects in courseware development will come into scrutiny. Particularly, the much publicized benefit of reusability through learning objects will be questioned, leading the discussion to the ill-defined concept of learning objects, which is convenient for talking about them but of little use for developing real-world courseware.” —Kinshuk, Associate Professor and Director, Advanced Learning Technology Research Centre, Massey University, New Zealand
“Learning objects will come to the fore in 2004, but not as cogs in a centrally packaged learning design. Learning objects—or, as some will start calling them, learning resources—will begin to reach their potential outside the mainstream. The demand, and therefore the production, of learning objects will increase dramatically for people who use informal learning—as much as 90 percent of learning, according to some estimates.” —Stephen Downes, National Research Council Canada
“Organizations and participants are no longer impressed with 'cool' technology. The delivery methodology has to provide more than cost savings with a pretty interface—the demand will now be for more collaborative and result-oriented technologies. Whether asynchronous or synchronous in nature, online events will become less of a presentation and more performance oriented. To achieve this, one hour stand-alone modules will start to take a secondary role to blended initiatives during which participants will need to be more active and contributive. This is the year true best practices will start to become apparent.” —Jennifer Hofmann, President, InSync Training, LLC
“Among ordinary organizations, I see more of the treading water seen in 2003. At the low end of e-learning, PowerPoint (used with Breeze and similar software) will become the most popular authoring tool, enabling subject-matter experts to design e-learning (and creating further employment challenges for instructional designers). At the high end of e-learning, designers are still digesting technological and business developments that proceed at a rate much faster than they can adopt them.” —Saul Carliner, Assistant Professor of Educational Technology, Concordia University
“In 2004, applications of e-learning or "collaborative learning" will go well beyond the initial uses for which the technology was originally conceived! We'll see greater adoption in senior levels of organizations for information tracking and reporting to gain insight into organizational capabilities and operational effectiveness. We'll also see greater adoption in higher education to bring activities such as mentoring, office hours, and parent-teacher conferencing to the Internet.” —Leon Navickas, Founder, Chairman of the Board and Chief Strategy Officer, Centra Software
“Over the next 12-18 months the end game will finally begin to come into view, as traditional learning structures give way to more powerful performance support integration. Personalized solutions will be seen as driving the bottom line with increased agility and competitive advantage and will attract the attention of the CEO and Board. Finally, third-world nations will begin to comprehend their own ‘leapfrog’ advantage inherent in national taxonomies and technology-enhanced on the job training supported by alternative learning models.” —Jonathon Levy, Senior Learning Strategist, The Monitor Company Group LP
“A woman twirled proudly in front of me. "Weightwatchers.com," she crowed. She did it online. Same was true for a friend contemplating a trip to Singapore. ‘What about SARS?’ Could my brother-in-law's career get a pick-me-up via financial planning courses online? He's favorably disposed. In 2004, more individuals will tend to their own needs, including learning, via the Web. In the past, organizations, credentials, and certification were the middlemen. While that will continue, we'll see people pursue their goals online, on their own.” —Allison Rossett, Professor of Educational Technology, San Diego State University
“New embryonic forms of online learning communities will emerge that support the dynamic forming and reforming of cliques as well as 'cocktail party' behavior. This will be much friendlier than threaded discussion groups and much less taxing on reading time than blogs. From this will emerge new study groups for students, creative knowledge exchange for teachers and researchers, and new business teaming opportunities.” —Richard Larson, Professor of Engineering Systems and Founder and Director, Learning International Networks Consortium (LINC), MIT
“As e-learning professionals in 2004, we must develop more effective evaluation strategies or risk irrelevance. Executives, deans, managers, directors, and, most importantly, learners are demanding “proof” that e-learning increases performance and changes behavior. To answer this demand, we must directly link e-learning objectives to measurable outcomes, metrics, and performance improvements.” —Karl M. Kapp, Assistant Director, Institute for Interactive Technologies, Bloomsburg University
“In 2004, the importance of online pedagogy and motivation will be reflected in online instructor training programs, research, and conference keynotes. In addition, open source courseware such as Moodle and the SAKAI Project will attract extensive attention. Finally, the huge growth in online certification programs, associate and master’s degrees, and blended learning will continue.” —Curt Bonk, Professor, Indiana University, and President, SurveyShare, Inc.
“We see 2004 as a year of polarization as the major virtual classroom providers (Centra, InterWise, LearnLinc, and Elluminate) back off from the Web conferencing market and refine existing and develop new classroom coordination features. We see this being driven by a host of new, more aggressively priced and less robust Web conferencing products entering a market where, currently, 80 percent of users use only 20 percent of Web conferencing features.” —David Collins, CEO, Internet University
“Rapid e-learning will become a red-hot market and companies will struggle to implement authoring processes for subject-matter experts. Blended Learning will continue to grow. The term ‘blended learning’ will evolve from instructor-led training with e-learning added to a mix of a wide variety of technologies and media. Live e-learning will mature and the market will continue to grow, with companies implementing these systems as part of their corporate infrastructure, not only as training-specific systems.” —Josh Bersin, Bersin & Associates
“Universities will now out-innovate corporations in the area of educational content. India will be to traditional e-learning content what Japan was to manufacturing, building more direct channels into U.S., in some cases competing directly with former partners. LCMS will collapse as a distinct concept and segment. Price wars in virtual classrooms will drive ubiquitousness through increasingly non-traditional alliances.” —Clark Aldrich, author of Simulations and the Future of Learning
“The convergence of e-learning and knowledge management technologies will continue in a much faster pace. There will be intensive focus on the content and quality of e-learning courses. Attention will be increasingly paid on the role of emotions and affective dimension of learning in e-learning designs. Much more effort will be spent on measuring ROI of e-learning (or figure out practical ways of measuring it) on behalf of organizations that use e-learning as an alternative or supplementary mode of training.” —Panagiotis Zaharias, ELTRUN, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece
“Last year, online colleges became more aggressive and effective at online advertising. As a result, many schools now get thousands of new student inquiries each month. In 2004, as these institutions compete for the same potential students, their focus will shift inward. Those that become most effective at prioritizing their inquiries and converting them to enrollments will thrive at the expense of the rest.” —C.J. DeSantis, President, eLearners.com, Inc.
“Consolidation will accelerate because customers are looking for industry-leading solutions from companies that can provide experience, expertise, and financial safety. Learning analytics will become a required component of any software selection; analytics can tie employee performance to business results and allow a company to optimize their training expenses by spending on the right training and by offering training that has the most impact. Integrated suites will become a requirement for organizations seeking a learning and performance solution, including LMS, LCMS, Knowledge Management, Authoring Tools, Virtual Classroom, Performance Management, and Analytics.” —Sanjay Dholakia, VP, Marketing and Business Development, Docent, Inc.
“Schools will invest in creating classroom environments that allow for true technology integration. The traditional whiteboard and five computers in the room will be replaced with electronic whiteboards that allow all students to participate wirelessly with the large image. Teachers will create group activities that engage, involve, and instantly assess students and do less slideshow presentations.” —Steve Brazier, Executive Vice President, Promethean, Inc.
“The learning industry has been through a period of significant technological innovation and way too much hype. With the recent economic downturn fresh in our minds, in 2004 we'll see learning organizations really searching for, and mastering, the use of proven strategies and technologies for designing, developing, and managing e-learning. The main goal of all this effort being, of course, to improve the quality, usability, and most importantly the effectiveness of the finished product.” —David Holcombe, President & CEO, The eLearning Guild
“Instructional design will become learning design, bringing innovation and creativity to online courses much like the best teachers do in the classroom. Online courses will provide layers of information to encourage exploration, use rewards, surprises, and humor to increase engagement and enjoyment, and support peer learning so that students learn together as well as from each other.” —Lisa Neal, Editor-in-Chief, eLearn Magazine
Pasted from
February 28, 2004 at 12:46 AM in Knowledge Management | Permalink | TrackBack (9) | Top of page | Blog Home
February 26, 2004
Dave Winer at Microsoft
Notes taken by "Better Living Through Software" on Dave Winers visit to Microsoft. Note comments on Sharepoint & RSS.
Better Living Through Software - Dave Winer at Microsoft
Today is Dave Winer's visit to Microsoft. I was able to get some time chatting with Dave, Scoble, Lili, Curtis, Dare, and Ned Friend about business models for aggregation, potential integration with other tools, and so on. Some of the ideas discussed were really eye-opening. I consider myself to have thought through these issues more deeply than most people, particularly things like semantic storage and knowledge interchange. However, it was clear that there are far more interesting possibilities than I have been thinking of, especially from the larger perspective.
Now, Dave is speaking to a fairly large crowd at MSR invited speakers series. Here are my notes:
First, a few people in the audience made comments about SharePoint which were a bit wrong. To set the record straight, SharePoint can produce RSS feeds, we have real life customers who do this, and some people internally have even run blogs on SharePoint. It's not the best RSS source, but there is absolutely nothing about SharePoint that makes it fundamentally incongruent with RSS. SharePoint is a collaboration server, and has features for hierarchy, full-text search, and chronologically-ordered posts.
No slides
Theme that blogs democratize news gathering; you can aggreagate small sources with big sources, and small sources can triangulate with big companies
Reporters personalize the story; blogs appear more honest, because bloggers admit to personal bias while journalists deny it
Now on to blogging impact on political campaigns. First, pointed out that blogs may have helped Dean to rise, but TV and papers very clearly decided to "end his candidacy", and they had the power to do so. So doesn't think blogs will get someone elected, however, thinks someone who happens to be a blogger will get elected, at least on local level very soon.
Thinks blogging can become a voter support system; people get more passionate about election cycles because they feel they are more involved, rather than just seeing it as a horse race; allow people to access varied perspectives. Expressed optimism that most voter "bad decisions" can be helped through better information.
Now on to impact of blogs on workgroups. Themes of "learning organization", thinks workgroups naturally have information stewards, who could act as information collectors, distributors, historians.
Q: how is this different from department web site: A: it's not
Q: How is this different from SharePoint? A: open formats
Q: Do you see trend toward structured blogs? A: Nothing preventing it other than tool support (to some extent categories might solve this, but question seemed to mention XML, shared schema, etc.)
comment: SharePoint doesn't need RSS, it's different. A: OK, not everything is a blog.
comment: Is it correct to say RSS is about chronological content? A: Yes, exactly, information accessed in three ways: chrono (blog), search (google), taxonomy (filesystem/sharepoint) -- RSS is just automated web browsing
Q: Blogs are niche, geek -- what tipping point to get widespread adoption? A: it already has widespread adoption; it's growing. Besides, Word Processor vendors didn't look for a "tipping point".
Q: Multimedia or Voice blogs? A: Hard to say; have tried it, it might catch on. No strong opinions yet.
Q: How do you expect a candidate to ever be honest? A: They *should* be honest; it's got to change, at least I hope so.
Q: We used to think of Internet as wide open, democratic; then big media moved in. How do you expect blogs to be any different? A: The big media should move in; they belong there too. But we have to be good, and make sure to keep access for the smaller voices. Blogging not a panacea.
Q: Do you see any need for group blogging? A: No; admits he's got different opinions than some people about this though. If I can subscribe to the individuals and make my own group, why do I need to have you make the group for me?
Q: I have 200 feeds, but 1000 seems the upper limit -- I lay awake at night scared I might miss a good feed. Seems the pattern of establishing 1:1 relationships has scale limits, and clusters or cliques form. A: Yes, the cliques just happen; that's life. Sometimes people can bridge between cliques, Glenn Reynolds example of bridging to warbloggers clique.
Q: Is LiveJournal really blogging? A: Well, it's not always "public", but yeah, it's blogging.
Q: Where do comments fit in? A: I don't do comments, because there are too many flames. Yeah, lots of people have comment boards, but comment boards are not necessary to be called a blog. Flames are fine; it comes with the territory when you write for public consumption, but I didn't feel like running them on my page.
Q: I've seen some crappy blogs; you said blogs are about unedited voice, but some people need editors. A: Yeah, sure. Editors have a place. Younger generation is good at writing.
Q: Are there better reputation models other than how often they get linked? A: John Perry Barlow never had a blog until a month or so ago. He rose quickly to the top of lists, because he is compelling. "Established" authorities like New York Times, maybe raise in authority through word of mouth. Not a software problem.
Q: What do you want IE to do? A: Two main things: 1) Make it easy to subscribe to a feed with a single click, regardless of users choice of aggregator. Needs browser support, cooperation of aggegator vendors. 2) Also make it easier to create posts from within browser, regardless of choice of blog server.
February 26, 2004 at 12:21 AM in Knowledge Management | Permalink | TrackBack (24) | Top of page | Blog Home
February 21, 2004
Traction Software gains ground on weblog front
12/15/2003 07:49 AM
By Elizabeth Dinan
Outside tech circles, blogs have a reputation of being just for self-indulgent geeks or young technophiles.
But Traction Software knows better. With financial backing from CIA-funded In-Q-Tel and a recent half-million dollar deal with the Department of Defense, the Providence company’s blogs are receiving military honors.
Traction president and co-founder Greg Lloyd describes his company’s weblog software as a layer over the web, collecting information from web-based sources and organizing it by time and linking by topic. Users can add text and customize it for limited access with permission/password-based log-on.
From a field of 120 applicants, Traction’s TeamPage software was selected by the DoD to manage U.S. Navy test and evaluation communications at Rhode Island’s Naval Undersea Warfare Center. The project is scheduled to run through 2008 with participation from the Marine Corps, the Army Night Vision Lab, the Defense Acquisition University, New York Police Department and Ford Motor Co.
Lloyd says the Navy was managing similar projects through e-mail but that using his “hyperlink journaling” technology via the $450,000 DoD deal will bring it all forward by creating “an instant, secure communications hub using the Internet that already connects program managers, project experts, contractors, sponsors and warfighters.”
Gilman Louie, president of In-Q-Tel, is quoted as saying his organization gave Traction funding for its ease of collecting, organizing and publishing blogs, and calls the product “a valuable tool among our growing portfolio of cutting-edge technologies that benefit enterprises like the CIA.”
The program has the capability of creating and managing weblogs for individuals or groups of like workers, or by specific project, all with specifically designated users who have specifically designated access. For example, some users will have access to weblogs about current project activities while being blocked from research and development discussions.
Access was the “critical” selling point for the DoD, Lloyd says.
“Some kinds of discussions are going to be privileged,” he says. “So we built a business model that pays attention to security and permissioning and how it fits into the IT structure.”
Founded in 1996 as Twisted Systems, Traction is also bringing the blog to commercial customers, including the Western States Information Network, a Department of Justice-funded program for which Traction built a private intranet to maintain a “notebook” for the 1,200 law enforcement members to share intelligence about criminals, including outlaw motorcycle gangs and drug traffickers.
Verizon technical employees use the enterprise blogging software to brainstorm new projects for market research and planning in addition to sharing competitive information. Another early adopter is a team of physicians using it as a round-the-clock operations blog via Blackberries “for a mobile view of everything happening in all of their clinics.”
Pricing starts at $5,000 per server. And with military, law enforcement and medical professionals as users, the blog is clearly going commercial.
February 21, 2004 at 03:29 PM in Knowledge Management | Permalink | TrackBack (11) | Top of page | Blog Home
Knowledge Management Overview
What Is KM?
The word knowledge can be defined as an understanding that is acquired through personal experience or the study of factual information. Knowledge Management is a concept in which an enterprise gathers, organizes, shares, and analyzes the knowledge of individuals and groups across the organization in ways that directly affect performance. It is about helping people communicate and share information. Knowledge Management envisions getting the right information, in the right context, to the right person, at the right time, for the right business purpose. [1]
Why is it Necessary?
Knowledge Management focuses on ways of sharing and storing knowledge, as a means of improving speed, efficiency, and competency of individuals within an enterprise, therefore increasing the profitability.
The purpose of KM is to gather, categorize, store and spread all knowledge that is needed to make the organization both grow and prosper. It is not as much a technology change as it is a cultural change, but technology is a primary enabler of KM practices. Until recent years, many companies have rewarded individual performance, encouraging some individuals to keep much of what they know to themselves. Under the Knowledge Management approach, the organization seeks to find ways to get individuals to share their knowledge with others so the entire organization will benefit.[2]
How it Works
Knowledge is collected from all existing sources including people, systems, databases, file cabinets and desktops. All knowledge of value is stored and categorized as data in an organized repository. This knowledge can be immediately conveyed to those people and systems that need it, whether it's through an enterprise portal, collaboration tool, or knowledge transfer process. The right knowledge will go to the right person or system at the right time. Current knowledge can be retrieved from the system's archives at any time in the future. As knowledge becomes obsolete or expires, that knowledge can automatically be removed from the system.[3]
Brief History of KM
With continuously emerging work roles, the unlocking of an enterprise's information to members at every level has become essential to ensure that each has the knowledge, skills and authority to be productive. These new work roles demand that every individual have access to the correct data and knowledge in order to make their own effective business decisions. With the rise of organizations seeking ways to manage their knowledge has come the desire to share strategies with peers.
The first conference in the United States that focused upon knowledge - beyond the theories of artificial intelligence - was entitled "Managing the Knowledge Asset into the 21st Century." It was convened by Digital Equipment Corporation and the Technology Transfer Society at Purdue University in 1987. The second conference on "Knowledge Productivity" was coordinated by Steelcase North America and EDS in April of 1992.[4] Since then, the management of knowledge has become crucial within and among organizations. There have been a number of conferences focusing on different perspectives, each year growing more inclusive, and comprehensive.
In just a few years knowledge management has:
attracted significant interest from many areas, including top companies and government agencies
prompted the release of several magazines devoted exclusively to knowledge management
become an initiative in between a third and half of Fortune 500 companies
delivered demonstrable benefits in a variety of situations
created market opportunities for suppliers, especially for software products and management consultancy
stimulated new ventures devoted to exchange and sale of knowledge.[5]
Market Leaders
Knowledge Management continues to demand the attention, time, and energy needed to develop a successful and profitable business. However, the KM process is highly complex, involving many stages and addressing many different needs. For this reason, no vendor currently provides a complete, comprehensive suite of products. The consensus is that the best knowledge management plan can only be implemented with a meld of different products, including software, and services.[6]
Top vendors of Knowledge Management software include Autonomy, IBM Lotus, Plumtree, Microsoft, Hummingbird, and Open Text.[7] Others include Sybase, Brio, Cognos, Tibco, SageMaker, SeeCommerce, Viador and Hyperion.
The Future of Knowledge Management
As KM shifts the emphasis from single-handed information to the formal and informal processes that use the information, new KM practices are more focused toward changing an organization's climate, as companies seek to find ways to identify the types of knowledge they have and what they need to prosper and grow.[2] One outcome from this new emphasis is the disclosure of just how important the document/content management function is. Another involves the evolution of enterprise portals bringing knowledge straight to the desktop, which has revolutionized effective business decision-making. Organizations must understand this shift to maintain an effective Knowledge Management discipline.
References
[1] Robert S. Seiner, "Knowledge Management: It's Not All About the Portal." The Data Administration Newsletter, November 2000
[2] http://acquire-data.com/White_Papers/knowledge_management.htm
[3] Tom Finneran, "A Component-Based Knowledge Management System." The Data Administration Newsletter, June 1999
[4] Debra M. Amidon, "The Momentum of Knowledge Management." ENTOVATION International
[5] David Skyrme, ENTOVATION International
[6] http://www.whatis.com
[7] http://www.idc.com
February 21, 2004 at 10:34 AM in Knowledge Management | Permalink | TrackBack (73) | Top of page | Blog Home
