KM Australia Day 2 Update

The following is encouraged by the presentation of JEFF KELLY Director of Web Solutions, Web 2.0 University.

Jeff Kelly

“The world is messy and it’s only going to get messier as the web destroys rules and rule makers – you can either complain about the chaos and wish for the good old days of order, or you can start to understand why delirious disorder will make us all smarter”.

Review of book “Everything is Miscellaneous” by David Weinberger.

In traditional CMS (or intranet/website) solutions we would go through three phases:

• Gather information
• Organise information
• Publish information

This is a linear, centrally controlled model that assumes we can manually identify or ‘know’ where everything should go. This is no longer plausible, and it isolates the data from the workflow and authoring systems that end users work in – and they are the experts in where that data came from, what was done to it, and how might something more useful have been done with it.

Jeff recommends a new solution: abandon organisation!

Explanation: in the digital realm there is no need for traditional order if we describe the data appropriately at the time of capture – i.e. through the use of metadata. Once we have this metadata (and we make sure we capture everything), then we can search it – and ubiquitous, comprehensive, efficient, federated search is what we need. With good search we need to worry less about folder structures, filing, and email management, and more on getting things done quicker in a world within which there is more information year on year, and which changes faster each year.

Metadata can describe the structure and ‘spirit’ of the data, such as in applying a BCS (business classification scheme). Metadata descriptors might include tagging, syndication, RSS feeds, and extensions, all of which replace the previous model where the data is identified primarily by the name of the parent folder within which it resides. For instance, many folders might contain a document called ‘strategy’, but if we mix these strategy documents up, it becomes a problem to know in the future which document originated from which folder – you have to in fact open, read, and interpret each document to find this out. ‘Tagging’ in its many forms overcomes this, as the metadata can be displayed or searched from any location, enabling the document to keep its context and identity wherever it goes.

At the moment our organisation is manually discovering information (paper records, manually searching personal email systems and private network folders) and manually discovering information about information (producing reports). This results in discovery times that typically amount to hours, often many days, or occasionally not at all – some things are just never found, or only roughly guessed at.

This problem can at least be partly resolved by socializing information – if we know people who know where things are and how they work, it can shortcut our search and improve on relevance. This is where web 2.0 solutions can help out, by providing the social backbone to the organisation so that we simply know more things about more people. Then, as we track usage more (search terms, tags used, links etc), we can generate more metadata about the search process itself, leading to further efficiencies.

It’s worth looking into I think – the reality is that our traditional, manual, and inconsistently structured data is only going to prove to be increasingly inadequate in years to come.

 

KM Australia (day 1) Part 2

The afternoon session included a presentation by the Manager of Sales Engineering for Vignette, Carl Jones. Carl spoke to the subject of “Web 2.0 – it’s not just “Cool” anymore’.

Carl Jones presenting at KM Australia 2008

Carl hit on some very interesting points:

 

·         Web 2.0 should just not be a solution looking for a problem

·         it’s use should be tied to a program of business strategy

·         benefits must be demonstrated

·         it should logically move people from being just tactical to thinking strategically

 

An example he showed was of Virgin Mobile, whose web 2.0 program had been lacking direction. Carl showed how they linked a re-launch of their solution to focus on key business measures (such as ‘churn’ rate – how fast were customers departing to other networks?).

 

Virgin implemented a system of communication that identified near end-of-life customers, and invited them to resubscribe with special offers, customised communications (email and text), and presented them with sign-up credentials to a dedicated site (creating a community).

 

Another interesting example was that of NASA – who do not have customers, commercial interests in the everyday sense, or anything to sell. But as a large government agency what they do need is long term, massive future funding, and creating a community feeling among voters that what they do is cool, essential, and interesting makes it much harder for the treasury to drastically cut funding in the future.  Doing so would fly in the face of a large community of voters who could create sub-groups to backlash against such a decision. So NASA uses Web 2.0 solutions to offer enhanced search, a Google-enabled ‘picture of the day’, the NASA Kids Club, NASA TV, subscription services, and a link that explains “Discover how space exploration impacts your daily life”. For them, being seen to be useful is as useful as being useful itself!

 

Other good examples from Carl included the Sun newspaper – which offers comment options for stories appearing in print that day, links to Facebook sites, video feeds, online shopping, and ‘viral’ pics, videos, jokes, and stories. The result for them just from this campaign has been a full 1% sales increase in the daily paper edition  – a good achievement in the cut throat world of British tabloid journalism.

 

Another good illustration was in definitions of  ‘webs’, which helps overcome the problem people have in getting what Web 2.0 is about; as Carl noted:

 

·         web 1.0 was read only

·         web 2.0 is read/write

·         web 3.0 will be semantic… a problem yet to be addressed!

·          

The essential point is that Web 2.0 is a two-way street – we can give people content, and then we let them say something about it, or configure the way in which they receive the content in future. For commercial businesses this is how they work with customers to make money; for government organisations this is how we interact with stakeholders in our services, or how we ensure that the tax dollars we spend are seen to be of value.

 

A FINAL NICE QUOTE:

One of the speakers (I forget who) started off with a valid quote:

 

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result” (Benjamin Franklin).

 

I’m not sure what BF was speaking about, but it rings true for traditional one-way, read only web traffic: If it was so good, it would still be the only dissemination method out there, and everyone would be really satisfied with what it was delivering.

 

KM Australia (Day 1)

The first day of the 2008 KM Australia conference in Melbourne has been thought provoking and beneficial.

The conference is dealing with issues surrounding Web 2.0 technologies, and some great examples were given today of just what Web 2.0 is, and places it has been implemented effectively.

The first speaker was perhaps the best of the day: Hideo Yamazaki of the Nomura Research Centre who spoke on ‘Utilising Intranet-based Social Networks’. This is of particular interest, as I think that more social networking would be useful in my workplace, but the argument needs to be made of why/how it could be beneficial.

Hideo Yamazaki at KM Australia 2008

Hideo spoke of the “usefulness of the useless”. The ‘useless’ is the commonly perceived problem with social networking at work – that it is little more than staff wasting time on Facebook.

Yet in Japanese culture, much of that nation’s post-WWII industrial success stemmed from the culture of social inclusiveness that all companies encouraged in their employees. Hideo recounted  that companies maintained holiday facilities for the use of employees, company outings were common, and at company athletic meetings the employee’s families were encouraged to participate.

What this led to was an inclusive, human-centric culture that formed a wider community beyond just basic employee/boss/job relationships.

The benefit of staff interacting socially like this is that trust is built (“Oh, I saw on your profile that you like the same music I do… ”), and from trust grows emotionally-based knowledge sharing (the emotional component – liking someone – is vital, as we react much faster to emotional responses than logical ones, letting us share much more, much faster, and feel much better about it afterwards!).

Once this kind of sharing can permeate a business, it resolves common questions that staff often ask of the workplace:

• what is my workplace identity
• Why am I here?
• What is the role of myself in life and within this company? 

If social networking in the office can help resolve these esteem issues, then it can encourage staff members to begin actualizing themselves as professionals.

Hideo put this in an elegant way: there must be professional ‘communities of practice’, but this is best facilitated by first creating ‘communities of joy’.

I think if Web 2.0 technologies can do anything to accelerate this, then it is well worth giving a very good try-out.

I’ll post more from the conference later…

Our problems are easy by comparison

One of my favourite books is ‘Leadership’ by the former mayor of New York City Rudolph Giuliani.

I like it because it gives perspective to the job and the environment we work in (and like to complain about!), and also provides an insight in how to tackle any project-based or team environment.

Giuliani’s challenge from 1994 onwards was to run a city that experienced 2,245 murders each year, 10,000 serious crimes each week, 1,095 stabbings within the prison systems each year, and which 59% of people said they would move out of if they could.

So how did he, over a 6 year period, achieve the following?

• 67% reduction in murder rate
• 93% reduction in inmate-on-inmate violence
• 12 million more tourists each year
• New York was declared “the safest big city in America”

The book details his commitment to performance management, and counting things – anything that was relevant to the agency under review, and making those numbers public. With this combination he found that people work that much harder for better results, as they do not want their peers or the public seeing them in a bad light.

The chapter headings from his book also provide for a simple roadmap towards better achievement:

1. First Thing First
2. Prepare Relentlessly
3. Everyone’s Accountable, All of the Time
4. Surround Yourself With Great People
5. Reflect, Then Decide
6. Underpromise and Overdeliver
7. Develop And Communicate Strong Beliefs
8. Be Your Own Man
9. Loyalty: The Vital Virtue
10. Stand Up To Bullies
11. Study. Read. Learn Independently
12. Organize Around A Purpose

And don’t forget – at the end of achieving all he did he had to face the trauma of a serious battle with cancer and the 9/11 terrorist attacks while still in office.

By comparison our daily business problems are small and manageable, but by learning lessons such as these from people who have faced far worse and come through it successfully, we can take heart and move forward.