Use Cases show more in-depth and “tangible/measurable” scenarios that you, as a practitioner of whatever practice or technology we’re discussing.

Behavior Changes, are frankly more important, because if nobody can drive a stick shift, it doesn’t really matter if the corporate Ferrarri is parked right out front with the keys in it. (That’s a personal example, incidentally – as I’ve not yet mastered a manual transmission, not that I have a Ferrari either.) Relating to Enterprise 2.0/Social Business, having the greatest Enterprise 2.0 system in the world will not do you any good if nobody knows or cares to use it.

What I’ve been honing in on, particularly in workshops intended to help the people in large or small organizations, in the last several years of Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business work, is how to get more people to take that first step into realizing that “doing it the new way” is not all that different from whatever they did before.

In some cases, I will literally hand participants a card that gives them a “License2Collaborate” or in an innovation context, a “License2Innovate” – which may seem simplistic and unnecessary, but being able to “unfreeze” people from the terror of learning a new technique or system, can be shockingly low-tech and easy.

Why make problems or solutions more complicated than they need to be?

Remember, What is Your Information Architected FOR?

If your Enterprise 2.0 or Social Business System is not architected for real users to participate and take advantage of the capabilities of the system… well, you have failed.

You’re not building a system to create a piece of art – but to have a system that will support your employees and the goals of the organization.

First example

E2.0 Behavior Change: Swapping Tools – Real to Digital

Goal:

Get the “non-evangelist” and early adopters to try any new system

Business Objective:

Show that the “new way” of working is just a pivot or step away from the “old way” – no big deal, so why not give a try?

Exercise:

Stage 1: Make a discussion “transparent” and visible.

Whether it’s the kick-off of a new project, or discussion around some problem area, capturing the details of the discussion and surfacing it visibly (not just audibly) makes it both real, and moves you out of the hazy area of having everyone in the room with their own perception of what’s being discussed.

How?

Have a stack of PostIt Notes, or in my office, we have wall-to-wall whiteboards (the walls are full-scale whiteboards covered with IdeaPaint – which is fantastic, and highly recommended), and note all of the ideas in a visible area.

Have people stand-up to do this exercise (which will make them more productive and get them engaged), and there are no excuses for not participating.

It’s everyone in and involved (which will happen naturally as individuals begin to take action – others will follow – it’s the wisdom of the herd to follow a leader), or stop the meeting and call it off. If you need to, use a facilitator to get the first few sessions running, but really, this isn’t rocket science, folks.

Get the ideas out and in the open, without criticism or discussion yet, and aim for 5-10 contributions from each person, with a time-limit of 3 minutes.

At the end of 3 minutes, you will have accomplished a few things:

1. You will have far more ideas than you normally get in any given meeting
2. You will have actually engaged the brains (which is unfortunately rare in many organizations) of everyone in the room, rather than allowing a single or small majority to talk over everyone in a typical meeting
3. You will have set the stage for teamwork – by getting everyone to participate, even if you haven’t yet worked “as a team” in a coordinated way, everyone has been present and visibly engaged, alongside others
4. By surfacing all of these thoughts of the individuals in the room, you will have helped everyone to find a context to what you’re trying to do. When everyone on a “team” is left to figure out the context on their own, it’s far too easy to only focus on “me” versus “us” – there is nothing to tie people to the common ground because that common ground is often never built by a team, it’s handed down from the top without context, or is never defined, period.

Stage 2: From Real to Digital

The next stage of the exercise after this, is to show how doing this in-person, with physical tools, is really no different from doing it online in whatever collaborative tool you happen to have.

If you do not yet have a tool officially bought and paid for, use an environment that has realtime capabilities to it, so everyone can see the screen filling up, such as Google Docs. You’re not looking for the “perfect toolkit” at this stage, remember, you are simply creating the stepping stones that allow people to unwind themselves from their old tools, to easily grasp and use (which is the key!) a new tool.

People are amazed – “Wow, It’s not that much different, and it’s actually very easy.” Why? Everyone can type, their typing is typically far better than their handwriting, the information is now captured digitally instead of as a temporary PostIt Note or scribble on the wall, and before you know it, people have been tricked into taking that first step of collaborating online.

Why It Works:

This works simply due to the fact of human psychology. While are tools are getting more sophisticated, our brains, and the psychology of decision making, will lead most people back to the comfortable and familiar ways of doing things.

You should expect that! Leverage it, in fact, and use that to your advantage.

I’ve been studying the social psychology behind Influence and Persuasion (See Dr. Robert Cialdini’s work of the last 35 years for more information) for the last 5 years, and applying that directly to enterprise work.

What I’ve been honing, and have now cut to a very concise impact, is creating an array of micro-actions that get people off of the brakes, and onto the gas.

Quick social psychology glimpse: Taking micro-actions triggers the “consistency” principle – which states that people are more likely to act in the future as they have acted in the past, and the size of those initial actions doesn’t particularly matter.

If you can’t get someone to budge from an initial position (the classic “can’t teach an old dog new tricks”), then obviously, it’s going to be difficult to get them to run all the way to an entirely new way of working.

As soon as you can get someone to take an initial step in the direction of using your new Enterprise 2.0 or Social Business System, you are beginning to create a new context that does not require that they throw away the “old way” entirely (which can trigger the fight or flight mechanism we all have), but simply turns them slightly in the right direction, with some guidance and reassurance.

Combine this with “social proof” (or consensus, as Dr Cialdini’s group now calls it) of other people in the organization doing these exact actions, and surviving, makes it again, that much less threatening, and more of the next logical, easy step in the right direction.

None of this, incidentally, required getting people to understand what RSS, XML, CSS, SaaS, or any of the other hyper-technical terms are.

Combine the psychological aspects I’ve been using with the understanding of maturity/readiness models, and individual problem solving and decision making skills – and it’s even more obvious than ever that most people should never need to know the details of what’s under your Social Business hood.

People have jobs to do – faster, better, cheaper, with less people than ever before.

Enable them to succeed, and make it easy to keep taking steps in the right direction, and you will be lightyears ahead of your competition.

Debating whether to call this Enterprise 2.0, or Social Business, or Enterprise Wikis, etc. – trust me, most people don’t care. For all of us in the “inner circle” – let’s discuss the subtleties when it’s appropriate, but I’d rather focus first on actually helping people Get Things Done (which is also built on consistency and micro-actions, incidentally).

Additional Research Context:

Every Enterprise 2.0 project (just like any other project) will have people who will have completely valid reasons for not wanting to use the system. While the approach I’ve described in this post (micro-actions for swapping tools) will not eliminate issues of putting in place a new way of work that is completely inappropriate, or that has chosen the wrong tool/toolkit for the job, or is downright user hostile – providing people with a way to take that first step, and then make it easy to continue to take steps into the new system, is the only way you are going to get large-scale adoption.

See the presentation of our research into 2.0 Adoption from the Enterprise 2.0 Keynote in late 2009, embedded below:

What have you done to introduce new tools or ways of working?

Have you tried a similar approach? A different approach?

Please comment below (anonymously if you feel you need to) and collaborate on getting people involved and unstuck. No more hand-wringing and whining about how people aren’t using the wonderful system you bought, built or duct-taped together – what are the steps you’ve taken to enable people to take their first steps?

I’ve been involved an interesting series of workshop engagements recently (mix of Enterprise 2.0 and Innovation) which made me stop and pause to think about what’s transpired to my own approach to work over the last few years.

I’m going to cover this in a two part series…

Try, Fail, Own, Learn… Part 1

Can’t Improve What You Won’t Acknowledge

An article in The Economist (“Fail Often, Fail Well“) and a Discussion in the Design Thinking group on LinkedIn collided for me recently.

The Design Thinking discussion came first – and to respect the privacy of the group, I won’t quote from the discussion with direct attribution.

The gist of the conversation was around an issue of the group members discussing, essentially  ”Why isn’t Design Thinking recognized and appreciated by more people?”

Part of the discussion was on the “brand name” of Design Thinking, and part of it around the lack of more widely accepted credentials, such a degrees, in Design Thinking vs. more traditional skills or roles such as Accounting, Law, Medicine, and the like.

One member described the frustration at being a “guiding force” type of manager within his organization, but frequently received no credit for providing a Design Thinking approach to getting things done in projects and meetings. My response to him focused on whether there were incentives, across members of a team …

Failure, Bias, Learning, Controversy

Nobody really wants to fail, but admitting that nothing is perfect, and explicitly addressing the fact that there is always room for improvement (sometimes dramatic improvement, as the ship might be sinking) has *real* implications for organizations. From The Economist article, one paragraph in particular that stood out for me, was:

A more tolerant attitude to failure can also help companies to avoid destruction. When Alan Mulally became boss of an ailing Ford Motor Company in 2006 one of the first things he did was demand that his executives own up to their failures. He asked managers to colour-code their progress reports—ranging from green for good to red for trouble. At one early meeting he expressed astonishment at being confronted by a sea of green, even though the company had lost several billion dollars in the previous year. Ford’s recovery began only when he got his managers to admit that things weren’t entirely green.

And which of the major American Automotive manufacturers both owned  up to their fragility in the 2008-2010 economy and also refused to take the easy way out and get bailed out?

That’s right, Ford Motor Company.

Turns out they did make a better, faster horse than the others in the game, eh?

One of the comments to The Economist article, from Tom Agan, a Managing Director at Nielsen Research, was:

According to a study we did at Nielsen across consumer packaged goods companies in the US, companies that learn from their innovation successes and failures by having standardized post mortems and a knowledge management system average between 60 and 100% more revenue from new products than those that do not. But only a relatively low percentage of companies take these high impact steps. The real challenge is overcoming the internal organization barriers that hinder learning. - Tom Agan

Well look at that, 60-100% more revenue from new products through Knowledge Management.

For those of you who wonder what good is “Knowledge Management?,” or who go on and on about  how “Knowledge Management is Dead” (or it was always broken, or Wikis are the One True Way, etc.) – let’s stop focusing on labels, trends, and details that don’t matter.

Call it whatever you want – but I’ll take real (and massive) results any day of the week over bickering about what term we should use.

No Blame? Less Pain

You either want to own your future, and do something about it, or you’re playing the blame game.

Or perhaps even worse, you’re a bump on a log, waiting for someone else to take responsibility.

If discussions in your business are focused on blaming the technology, the economy, competitors, minions, colleagues, bosses, executives, customers or anything other than yourself and the responsibilities you *could* take, if you were willing to face your problems and deal with them, my advice to you is two fold.

1. Wake-up and realize if nobody is willing to rock the boat to call attention to real problems and not the surface indicators, it’s only a matter of time before your organization is doomed. It’s time to beef up your personal social networking strategy to bail out and create a new position for yourself (and on a personal level, I’d be happy to help – LinkedIn has been a great resource for me since 2003/2004).
2. Decide to act on getting results and focusing on the jobs to be done, rather than blaming. As I told a potential employer a few years ago “I’m the kind of guy who sees a piece of trash on the floor and picks it up. Please, tell me now if this is the kind of environment that wants people to do what needs to get done, or only ‘does their job.’” (I didn’t end up taking the job, among other reasons, because the answer to that question was not what I was looking for.)

Get things done, fix problems, search for opportunities, and keep your improvement radar tuned so you can live to fight another day.

Where are you in your learning cycle?

Are you sitting things out, or:

1. Trying?
2. Failing?
3. Owning?
4. Learning?

It’s easy to do, because it’s the most obvious piece of the puzzle to point to – but that doesn’t mean it’s the best way to discuss the impacts of content management.

This is why, during the 13 years I spent at Delphi Group and Perot Systems, we talked constantly about BizTech – the Business of Technology. Heck, that’s why I created my personal blog 6-7 years ago, BizTechTalk.

It’s also why I co-founded Information Architected – it’s not about the architecture, it’s what you do with it. It’s not just the art of the architecture, but the function and final impact.

Or as I like to say…

What is Your Information Architected FOR?

Meanwhile, technicians and those who are already involved in the “secret language” of content managers bury people in the details of the features and mechanics, when what they really want to know is…

What will Content Management do for my company?

It’s not just about generic efficiency in handling or finding content – let’s get specific. Let’s get *very* specific.

I’ll be posting a number of Use Cases for ECM (Enterprise Content Management) and the related topics of Use Cases for Knowledge Management, Use Cases for Enterprise Search, and more, over the coming weeks, based on real-world work.

I hope you find this useful – and if you have other resources that you refer to, feel free to post in the comments, where to find those resources, and how you’ve used them, or what value you’ve received from them.

First example

ECM Use Case for Onboarding New Hires

Goal:

Increased efficiencies for new hires

Who:

Mid-size life insurance company

Business Objective:

Reduce staff-turnover, shorten new hire ramp-up time – to manage staff and training costs

Solution Scope:

Began as departmental solution (New Client Processing) as the Pilot, and into the field for regional offices to offload responsibilities locally for their client base. Formally documented processes with automation (workflow) and pre-defined templates for OCR/Imaging of paper documents, made the ramp up of new employees more focused on standardized documents, and moved exception-handling to dedicated groups at a smaller scale.

Business Impact:

This particular client experienced a 50% reduction in new hire ramp-up time (6 months to 3 months), due to consolidation of the number of systems they needed to use individually, and introduction of workflow in the “typical tasks” that their role required. Turnover of new staff in particular, decreased from 30% to 10%.

Additional Research Context: The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM): Estimates based on survey that 70 – 85% of total hiring costs come from the new hire ramp time before new employees are fully up to speed in their work.

Do you have metrics for ECM or KM Onboarding impacts?

If so, please comment below (anonymously if you feel you need to) – the mainstream event of content management is finally upon us, folks, but only if it’s made bloody obvious what the impact is.

In the concluding chapter of my book, Net Work, I focused on “The Leader’s Net Work.”  From reading about and talking to leaders of networks, I arrived at the following set of prescriptions:

• Network intentionally (high performers are those who pay attention to their personal networks)
• Practice network stewardship (you can’t manage a network, you can only manage its context)
• Leverage technology (see below)
• Build the capacity for net work (ensure that others become aware of and and develop skills)
• Use the network lens and net work tools to enhance the lives and contributions of individuals and the collective power of the network

These change, of course, each time I give a talk or think about leadership and networks. I’m currently working with Leadership for a New Era (a research initiative of The Leadership Learning Community) as well as other networks to explore more deeply this topic. My most recent thinking, part of a collaborative effort, was posted as a guest blog “How can we prepare leaders to work in a networked world?” on Beth Kanter’s site.

This included the very important notion of network literacy by which I mean “the language and tools [leaders] need to be able to discern and describe network activity, the insights they need to understand network structure, and an appreciation for the vital yet often subtle tasks of managing a network’s context.” I failed to acknowledge, in that post, that the insight into the need for literacy came from a grand brainstorming conversation with Grady McGonagil, whose recent work and research with the Bertelsmann Foundation was presented recently at an International Leadership Association webinar, Leadership Development in the US: Best-Practice Principles & Patterns.

- end article -

How are you managing leadership and network context?

• Wondering how to tap the brains in your organization?
• Tired of hoping that installing “social tools” will break down the cultural silos you know are cutting out value from your employees?
• Eager to learn how to run an entire Social/Organizational Network Analysis project yourself? Soup to Nuts – Process to Tools?

Take advantage of our 4-Hour Online and On-demand eLearning course, “Intro to Social/Organizational Network Analysis” created in partnership with Patti Anklam and Information Architected on our new learning platform, IAI University.

Intro to Social/Organizational Network Analysis is designed for people who want to understand how to systematically identify and map networks within their organization as well as those who want to learn about the tools and methods to map and analyze networks. This is a practice fundamental to effective collaboration, social networking, Web and Enterprise 2.0 strategy and Knowledge Management.

The course is presented by Patti Anklam, Principal Consultant at Net Work, and author of the best selling book “Net Work.”  She has consulted with hundreds of organizations around the world.

The “Intro to Social/Organizational Network Analysis“ course has four modules and includes a complete walk-thru of the ten steps in planning and running an Organizational Network Analysis project.

Register Now for “Intro to Social/Organizational Network Analysis”

Module 1: Introduction to Social/Organizational Network Analysis (SNA/ONA)

• Overview of SNA/ONA
• The Premise
• Evolution From Science to Practice
• Core Concepts and Terms
• Case Study: Ten Steps

Module 2: Network Patterns and Metrics

• Basic Principles and Patterns
• Structural and Centrality Metrics
• Roles

Module 3: Software Tools for Network Analysis

• The Basics of Inputs and Outputs
• Collecting Data Using Surveys
• Analysis Tools
• Available Resources

Module 4: Managing an ONA Project

• Managing the Project
• Organizational Preparation
• Working With the Results
• Critical Success Factors

Register Now for “Intro to Social/Organizational Network Analysis”

A former Digital/Compaq colleague, Bob Fleischer sent me a link to Jyri Engeström’s blog entry, Why some social network services work and others don’t — Or: the case for object-centered sociality, which provides an interesting perspective on what’s working and what’s not working in social network software and applications. He contrasts two views of social networks. The current perspective of networks as “maps of relationships among individuals” is what drives LinkedIn. But, he argues that LinkedIn misses the point by not making accessible the context for the link — usually an object.

He provides good background and references for the alternative view, “object-centered sociality.” Among the references are a gaggle of web sites that many have now adopted, although many more have still not, including Flickr and del.icio.us.

As I read Jyri’s well-written article, I immediately flashed on a key learning about collaboration software from a conference on GroupWare (some number of years ago). Intel chairman Andy Grove presented (remotely) from his office. Intel was launching a real-time collaboration product full of features that are now pretty standard — shared screens, co-editing of documents, video, presence. At the time, collaboration junkies were focusing on getting the video so that people could see each other talk over computers. His comment, “people don’t need to see each other. They are collaborating over something, and the key is to focus on enabling the ability to co-create [a document.]“

The above is of course paraphrase, but his assertion has stood me and many others well as a fundamental principle in designing the environments in which collaboration systems are deployed.

[Editor note: I constantly work to reframe people who are caught up in the current collaboration meme of the day to take a look at what is REAL set of collaboration scenarios they're looking to solve for. No single approach solves each problem, see presentation embedded below for more thoughts on that front. - Dan]

- end article -

Are you Using Organizational Network Analysis? No? How do you build a collaboration system that meets your business needs?

• Wondering how to tap the brains in your organization?
• Tired of hoping that installing “social tools” will break down the cultural silos you know are cutting out value from your employees?
• Eager to learn how to run an entire Social/Organizational Network Analysis project yourself? Soup to Nuts – Process to Tools?

Take advantage of our 4-Hour Online and On-demand eLearning course, “Intro to Social/Organizational Network Analysis” created in partnership with Patti Anklam and Information Architected on our new learning platform, IAI University.

Intro to Social/Organizational Network Analysis is designed for people who want to understand how to systematically identify and map networks within their organization as well as those who want to learn about the tools and methods to map and analyze networks. This is a practice fundamental to effective collaboration, social networking, Web and Enterprise 2.0 strategy and Knowledge Management.

The course is presented by Patti Anklam, Principal Consultant at Net Work, and author of the best selling book “Net Work.”  She has consulted with hundreds of organizations around the world.

The “Intro to Social/Organizational Network Analysis“ course has four modules and includes a complete walk-thru of the ten steps in planning and running an Organizational Network Analysis project.

Register Now for “Intro to Social/Organizational Network Analysis”

Module 1: Introduction to Social/Organizational Network Analysis (SNA/ONA)

• Overview of SNA/ONA
• The Premise
• Evolution From Science to Practice
• Core Concepts and Terms
• Case Study: Ten Steps

Module 2: Network Patterns and Metrics

• Basic Principles and Patterns
• Structural and Centrality Metrics
• Roles

Module 3: Software Tools for Network Analysis

• The Basics of Inputs and Outputs
• Collecting Data Using Surveys
• Analysis Tools
• Available Resources

Module 4: Managing an ONA Project

• Managing the Project
• Organizational Preparation
• Working With the Results
• Critical Success Factors

Register Now for “Intro to Social/Organizational Network Analysis”

I was doing fact checking when writing Net Work and wanted to confirm the timeline for the work on intellectual capital and knowledge management. I discovered a short history of the idea of intellectual and its evolution on Karl-Erik Sveiby’s web site. Two interesting tidbits:

• Fall 1990: Term “Intellectual Capital” coined in Stewart’s presence
• Jan 1991: Stewart publishes first “Brainpower” article in Fortune

In 1997, two books titled Intellectual Capital were published, one by the aforesaid Stewart (Thomas A.), and the other by Leif Edvinsson and Michael S. Malone. The latter is somewhat more academic, but it’s hard to compete with Tom Stewart’s witty, fact- and anecdote-based style.

Stewart, who became the editor of the Harvard Business Review in 2002, wrote his Intellectual Capital while at Fortune magazine, and The Wealth of Knowledge in 2003. Both books are classics and must-reads for those interested in the history of knowledge management.

Credit for the coinage of the term “knowledge management” rests with Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak. (Bill Ives did a nice post on the story they tell in their book, What’s the Big Idea? about their epiphany of hitting on the term.) Denham Grey has pointed out, however:

There is a good case to be made for Karl Wiig, Chris Locke and Debra Amidon being responsible for coining KM, perhaps as far back as 1985-1987. See timeline image for details.

(Editor note: Memes come from many places, the convergence that “pops” memes out into the open is what I like to call the “overnight sensation effect” – every overnight sensation takes at least 10-20 years to come to pass)

Naturally all these folks are connected, as are the memes of intellectual capital, knowledge management, and networks.

At the time of the 1991 Brainpower piece, the social/organizational network analysis work was just getting started by Valdis Krebs and colleagues, so it’s not there, but the article gave me the kind of goosebump you get when you realize the answer has been there all the time.

Stewart quotes Ted Smith from US West: “Managing knowledge as an asset spawns a whole new discipline.” The Xerox copier repairmen story is there, along with a prescient description of what we today call Human Capital Management — the mapping of a company’s intellectual assets with the strategic plan. The knowledge economy is summed up pithily in typical Stewart style:

The economic landscape of knowledge-intensive business can differ markedly from the familiar neoclassical world. “Buy land,” Will Rogers advised; “they ain’t makin’ any more of it.” But we make more knowledge every day… The greatest challenge for the manager of intellectual capital is to create an organization that can share the knowledge. Like money in a mattress,” says Hugh Macdonald, “intellectual capital is useless unless it moves. It’s no good having some guy who is very wise and sits alone in a room.” By finding wasy to make knowledge move, an organization can create a value network — not just a value chain.

Unfortunately, the archived version of the article doesn’t include charts or paragraphing, but it’s worth a read when you want to kick back and kick yourself for not getting it all sooner.

(Editor note: Have you gotten it all… yet? In a Knowledge-based world, can you afford NOT to?)

- end article -

Are you Using Organizational Network Analysis? No? What’s Keeping you from Unlocking the Value of your Employee Network?

• Wondering how to tap the brains in your organization?
• Tired of hoping that installing “social tools” will break down the cultural silos you know are cutting out value from your employees?
• Eager to learn how to run an entire Social/Organizational Network Analysis project yourself? Soup to Nuts – Process to Tools?

Take advantage of our 4-Hour Online and On-demand eLearning course, “Intro to Social/Organizational Network Analysis” created in partnership with Patti Anklam and Information Architected on our new learning platform, IAI University.

Intro to Social/Organizational Network Analysis is designed for people who want to understand how to systematically identify and map networks within their organization as well as those who want to learn about the tools and methods to map and analyze networks. This is a practice fundamental to effective collaboration, social networking, Web and Enterprise 2.0 strategy and Knowledge Management.

The course is presented by Patti Anklam, Principal Consultant at Net Work, and author of the best selling book “Net Work.”  She has consulted with hundreds of organizations around the world.

The “Intro to Social/Organizational Network Analysis“ course has four modules and includes a complete walk-thru of the ten steps in planning and running an Organizational Network Analysis project.

Register Now for “Intro to Social/Organizational Network Analysis”

Module 1: Introduction to Social/Organizational Network Analysis (SNA/ONA)

• Overview of SNA/ONA
• The Premise
• Evolution From Science to Practice
• Core Concepts and Terms
• Case Study: Ten Steps

Module 2: Network Patterns and Metrics

• Basic Principles and Patterns
• Structural and Centrality Metrics
• Roles

Module 3: Software Tools for Network Analysis

• The Basics of Inputs and Outputs
• Collecting Data Using Surveys
• Analysis Tools
• Available Resources

Module 4: Managing an ONA Project

• Managing the Project
• Organizational Preparation
• Working With the Results
• Critical Success Factors

Register Now for “Intro to Social/Organizational Network Analysis”

A knowledge management implementation, under any name, is, at best, only partially about technology.  This is particularly the case with initiatives that fall under the 2.0 umbrella. Definitions and discussion all too often focus on technology. The inclusion of a technology focus provides a direction, however, you must still define the business imperative behind your initiative. What are the business goals for the initiative and how will they be measured/justified?  I continue to be amazed at the number of KM initiatives (aka Enterprise 2.0), I encounter that fail initially for this very reason.  Indeed, my last client, a major financial institution in New York, had put in place an E 2.0 team and program over a year ago.  Despite the good intentions of business and technical staff, the program never came to fruition.  It took me less than a day to realize the root of this failure.  There was no consensus on what the purpose of the initiative was, the direction in which it would take them, its primary benefactors, and the goals it would achieve – beyond “make us more collaborative, smarter and more aware”.

So, as I look back on the lessons learned as a KM consultant and practitioner, I do believe there is much advice that can be offered. Here are 2 important lessons learned.

Lesson One: Clearly define the intended community and become intimate with its purpose and attitudes regarding knowledge sharing and innovation. Will the initiative allow users to function in a personalized manner, or be the foundation to building community and establishing common practices? Will knowledge production and sharing be viewed as a universal obligation or the domain of a few? Will the opinions and attitudes of some be drivers or magnets to the community? Is security necessary to regulate the community? Consider that the 2.0 Adoption Council, for example, is heavily policed. Admission requires passing the scrutiny of leader Susan Scrupski. This “exclusionary approach” seems to fly in the face of the mantra of E2.0 zealots, “open, transparent and user driven.” But Scrupski regulates community membership for good reason. Scrutiny of community can immediately determine if the practice is a case of Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0, which leads to, typically very different goals, objectives and approaches.  Some time ago I blogged about a Web 2.0 collaborative site, Sermo, that similarly policed admission and participation. The post is worth a (re)read – the community, eventually opened the doors to “outsiders”, but only under strict regulations that included obvious and clear identification of any and all content submitted by these “outsiders.”

Lesson Two: Take inventory of the knowledge sources the community uses/seeks, and those they do not use/seek. Challenge the validity of these assumptions and inclination. Identify each knowledge source as explicit or tacit.  Determine the best means to organize the collection of explicit knowledge and make it assessable.  Whatever approach is taken to collaboration and knowledge exchange, capture the knowledge in as much a facilitated fashion as possible and tag it appropriately. The value of the exchange will hopefully have a very long tail – well beyond the initial exchange. But remember knowledge captured but not findable is captured in vain. The goal should not just be to make it accessible however, but to shed light on its history, validity – its context. This is where understanding how community members place emphasis, faith and value on content is critical – aka context is critical.

Several months ago I was called into a company in the Boston area, Impassioned by the market promises of social collaboration inside the firewall. Using a popular (unnamed) product, they had a collaborative online community up and running in 15 days. But, this success quickly turned to failure when the user community abandoned it as quickly as they took it up.  The site lacked a clear objective, had a poorly defined audience (“everyone”) and mostly consisted of random content.  It was a technology success – but a business failure.

Despite the fire that has re-ignited KM, ala Web and Enterprise 2.0 initiatives, an effective KM initiative (no matter under what rubric it is brought in) requires the coordination of the cultural, technological, strategic and personal facets associated with a well-defined organization/community. The truth today is the same as it was 10 years ago: for knowledge to be managed it needs to be defined and quantified.

Information Architected Market Alert (IAM Alert):

Beyond Individual Innovators

Historically, Invention Machine’s Goldfire has been oriented towards providing an individually focused innovation “workbench” for the lone researcher or inventor. The offering combined (and continues to offer) advanced techniques and technologies such as semantic search capabilities, process modeling (typically in support of the assembled artifact of a product), knowledge mining, and knowledge re-use to decrease the amount of time it takes for individual engineers (much of the environment is modeled in support of physical rather than intellectual property inventions) or inventors/innovators to analyze a particular problem or set of problems, and uncover the ripest areas to go forth and solve the problem.

The offering has been and appears to remain one of the most advanced convergence of these technologies and techniques that we have seen in the innovation management space, and in many ways, is truly a solution with no direct, out of the box, commercial competition.

This is both a blessing and a curse, as markets are not typically made up of a company of one, but an ecosytem of competing products.

Innovation Market Maturity

As the company and it’s offerings have matured, and frankly, as the general awareness of innovation management has matured as well, there has been more of a push, alongside the rise of Enterprise 2.0 (meaning in most cases, collaboration) to support team-based or collaborative efforts at digitally supporting and scaling innovation capabilities.

With Goldfire 6.0, Invention Machine has added the collaboration-oriented ability to:

• Automatically identify and connect innovation workers with domain experts within their network
• Empower the community with precise “innovation intelligence” (similar to the “relationship intelligence” brought about by social network analysis and social computing I’d begun writing about in 2004 – see “Death of a Salesman? Birth of Relationship Intelligence” – now read over 4,000 times on Scribd) by leveraging undocumented expertise from problem-sharing dialogues, capturing and processing those discussions as reusable corporate assets.

From the managerial (top-down) aspect of Innovation Management, v6.0 provides:

• The ability to measure company-wide innovation initiatives and trends in real time.

With this third component, they have now begun to straddle three distinct layers – tools providing benefits to individuals (the original offering), to teams, and through to managers/executives.

Trend Watch

This offer is indicative of a two-part growing trend, collectively defined as “convergence”:

1. The convergence of tools to deliver value to individuals up through the executive suite (traditional enterprise software tends to focus on only one extreme or the other)
2. The convergence of process, information, content, knowledge and search techologies into a unified and pre-packaged business application (as opposed to a technology focused on a specific issue/problem)

Keep an eye open for areas where these trends are surfacing as business needs within your own organization, as this convergence is happening more and more, particularly as the realities of competition in the current economic environment continue to be challenging.

Combine those trends with the rising trend of innovation management maturity, and we’re (finally?) witnessing a triple convergence for business innovation.

Your Thoughts?

If you are a current or prospective user of Invention Machine, or any innovation management related solution, please weigh in with your feedback. Are current offerings serving your needs? Running ahead of where your organization is? Where your budget is? Just right? If not using Invention Machine’s Goldfire, but solving similar problems, what solution are you using?

How We Can Help

These trends, and solutions such as Invention Machine’s Goldfire 6.0, are an argument and opportunity for the explicit focus of our business practices and expertise, which is in creating strategies to provide for flexible information architectures and applications (technologies) that support the business architecture (roles, goals, people, processes, skills and culture) that, when combined, can deliver significantly greater value than a single business problem and isolated tool by itself. We call this an Innovation Architecture.

If we can be of help via our assessments, consulting or workshops, contact us now to schedule a private 30-minute executive briefing on how we can most effectively work together.

Schedule a private executive briefing now

But then this morning, serendipitously I heard a story on NPR about the dramatically changing world of television watching and the impact that is having on the services provided by Nielsen.  For decades Nielsen has had a monopoly on this market; reporting on the “popularity” of television programs based on eyeballs on TV sets at a particular time.  This data is extremely valuable because it provides potential advertisers with insight on how much a spot on a given program is worth, and to which audience. But television watching just isn’t what it used to be (echo newspapers and magazines).  Television content consumers have  alternative ways to access content (e.g.TiVo and Hulu) via alternative viewing devices that include smart phones and laptops, to name just a few.  (I know my kids are forever watching TV without the TV on.)

The viewing audience, including the way they view is changing. Nielsen customers (i.e. advertisers) are demanding that Nielsen keep pace and monitor these viewing habits. The television ad market is not dying – it is morphing and as a result is potentially more valuable.  Through ECM-based technologies,  it is possible to compile BI on multiple consumer habits, at unprecedented levels of granularity. In the case of television viewing, for example, not only what viewers are watching, but also when, where, what was skipped, re-played and shared.  As Nielsen’s president Steve Hasker put it. “”We’ll be able to tell what type of video they watch, what type of sites they go to, how they interact on those sites, what they buy on those sites, what types of news articles they’re reading.”

That is BI at a far lower and wider level of granularity than Nielson provides today.  Now think this new proposition through. Advertisers, using more ECM-based technology (e.g. e-publishing and DAM) advertisers can deliver more personalized and granular messages, in a timely manner – ads in context. Yes, once again, CONTEXT is king, and BI is the keys to the kingdom.

ECM is at the foundation of great new opportunities and challenges for organizations. I recently completed an article for Ron Miller in which I focus on the circle between ECM, KM and Innovation Management. This triumvirate will soon become a requisite to remaining competitive in virtually any  market. The article discusses this concept in some detail, more than here. Here, I draw attention to the tie between Innovation Management and ECM (in that order). In a phrase: get innovative with ECM.  As highlighted in this blog post, the integration of new content types and new means of content distribution and consumption, coupled with new approaches to BI creates amazing opportunities; truly personalized real-time publishing, contextual publishing and a constant loop of feed back (including web 2.0 emergence) that allows the content provider to continuously fine-tune the presentation and make-up of content.  The future for advertising and marketing is ripe with positive change, and ECM is at the foundation of this.

Last night I was wrapping up the weekend watching The Simpsons with my 2 daughters. Sure, occasionally there is a poignant message or two – usually lost on the kids. But in last nights episode there was a strong and important message directed right to every KM, ECM and E2.0 manager. Intentional or not – it was there and you did not have to think to deeply to catch it.

The Simpsons find themselves in Machu Pichu (don’t ask why – its not worth it). The narrator is explaining the significance of the site and states something along the lines of “This great civilization built a great wall around its people to protect it from the outside and keep their culture pure. But great walls also lock out knowledge, (Seriously that is the word he used.) and as a result the Incas were not adept at understanding the rest of the world or dealing with change. When the conquistadors appeared they were confused, ran and were destroyed.”

OK – you all got it right? “But great walls also lock out knowledge.” (Yes, the historical accuracy is off here – but the tie to ECM, KM and E2.0 – nonetheless poignant and worth reiterating.) “But great walls also lock out knowledge.” I spared my kids the thought that popped into my mind, “EXACTLY and that is the mission of every KM, ECM and Enterprise 2.0 manager”, to manage the BALANCE between security and collaboration. It is a topic I have spoken, written and blogged about many times. IAI published a primer on this very subject. I am currently in the process of working with Susan Scrupski, and members of The 2.0 Adoption Council on this very issue.

A group of the Council members who had to deal with strict privacy laws in Europe could have taken the “Machu Pichu” approach and erred on the side of security. But in the interest of collaboration to support agility and innovation, they worked a bit harder and used techniques and technologies to strike a clever balance between security and collaboration.  Sure – some of us may look at such approaches and say “D’oh”, or even “Duh”, but far too many have yet to really embrace this balancing act as the primary focus of long term success in the world of Knowledge Management, ECM and E2.0.

If you haven’t, I again invite you to read the primer on Content Security, and the 2.0 Adoption Council report when it is available next month.