Archive for October, 2008
by Joe McKendrick
October 24, 2008 at 11:25 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, KM, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter, Web 2.0, Wikis, Wisdom of Crowds
How do you ‘can’ a Jedi master? How do you store the collective learnings of the organization? Why did we win that sale? What have we built somewhere else before? What did that design look like? We can take a relational database, slice it, dice it, and cut it, rotate those cubes, and do data mining. But in the end, the difference is what really animates an organization is a human being.”
These are questions put forth in an interview I had several years ago with Allan Frank, chief technology officer for AnswerThink Consulting Group Atlanta and formerly national partner-in-charge of enabling technologies for KPMG Peat Marwick LLP. As Allan so aptly put it, knowledge management has always been a confounding issue for organizations seeking to better digitize, if you will, their collective knowledge. All too often, huge pieces of that collective learning have walked out the door to other organizations or to retirement.
Now, of course, we see social networking as a way to organically capture an assemble that collective knowledge, both within and outside the enterprise walls. But how is the more informal, almost free-for-all social networking approach meshing with more formal efforts to capture and leverage knowledge?
Xerox researcher Venkatesh G. Rao, said that the emerging tension between social media and knowledge management is a “generational war,” with younger participants opting for Web 2.0-ish approaches, versus the command-and-control nature of knowledge management systems.
However, in a post responding to Venkatesh’s observation, Tony Baer called the idea of generational war, at least here, as “hogwash.” As Tony observes, Web 2.0 isn’t wasted on the young: “Twittering, Facebook et al tend to hit more of a younger demographic, but use of Web 2.0 tools is definitely not restricted to people under 30.”
In fact, social media is being embraced with a lot of gusto by end users of all generations. “There have been many of us around for years who have always contributed “folk” knowledge, but until recently lacked the tools to share it.”
There are distinct differences between conventional knowledge management approaches as we’ve known them and social media, however. Tony points to parallels with the software development world. “Conventional knowledge management is more of a waterfall process [one department hands off work to another], whereas social media tends to be more agile [working collaboratively, real-time].” In other words, conventional knowledge management systems have been top-down mega-projects, versus the more grassroots, democratic nature of social media.
As Tony puts it. the rise of social networking introduces a new dimension to the art and science of knowledge management:
“The question is whether you do so in a carefully organized top down fashion or instead encourage a culture of more informal or organic knowledge sharing. There’s no single silver bullet that works, but what’s always disturbed us have been those top-down enterprise knowledge management projects that to us appeared as little more than make work for highly paid enterprise consultants…. Along came Web 2.0 and social media which provided new technologies for the grassroots to simply not wait for some project manager to start a harvesting session which is then converted into retrievable assets from some application requiring significant custom coding. Instead, the notion of Wikis, blogs, microblogs, chats, forums and so on is to use the right tool for the purpose as the purpose arises. Some call it fun. We’ve thought of the new social media as the next generation Knowledge Management.”
by Jim McGee
October 23, 2008 at 8:46 pm · Filed under
Book Review
The Innovator’s Guide to Growth: Putting Disruptive Innovation to Work, Anthony, Scott D. et.al.
The Innovator’s Guide to Growth is the newest installment in a series of books articulating and explicating Prof. Clay Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation. This hands on guide packages some of the insights developed as an outgrowth of the consulting work of Innosight, LLC, the consulting firm founded by Christensen to pursue the practical insights from his research at the Harvard Business School. If innovation is part of your current or prospective job description, this needs to be on your shelf (after you’ve read it, of course).
Christensen’s theories of disruptive innovation appeared first with the publication of The Innovator’s Dilemma in 1997. During the worst excesses of the dotcom boom, every start up business plan including an obligatory head nod to Christensen and an assertion that their business model was truly disruptive. Who doesn’t want to be innovative; ideally disruptively so. Christensen and his colleagues have continued to develop his theories in The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth, Seeing What’s Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change, and now The Innovator’s Guide to Growth.
Christensen distinguishes two forms of innovation — sustaining and disruptive — not in terms of their technological features but in terms of their relationship to markets. The distinction in summarized in the following diagram reproduced from The Innovator’s Guide to Growth.
In essence, Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation flows from recognizing that the pace of technology improvement is generally more rapid than the capacity of users in the market to take advantage of those improvements. This differential is what open possibilities for differing approaches to innovation.
In this market oriented theory of innovation, there are three paths available to organizations interested in articulating potentially disruptive strategies. The first is to identify and target "nonconsumers;" potential consumers for whom existing technologies fail to meet their particular needs. The second is to identify existing customers where existing technologies are more technology than they needs. The final is to investigate potential consumers in terms of what Christensen’s theory describes as "jobs to be done" as a path to defining new products and services to perform these jobs. I must confess that I still find this path the least well articulated aspect of this theory.
Throughout this book, the authors start by recapping the essentials of Christensen’s theoretical arguments and proceed to develop the next level of operational detail it takes to transform strategic insights into execution details. If you’re an organization seeking to develop its own disruptive strategy, the authors here have worked out many of the next level questions and identified the supporting analyses and design steps you would need to answer and complete. The authors are clearly competent and talented consultants who are willing to share how they manage and do their work. Their hope, of course, is that many of you will conclude that you need their help to do the work. What is nice here, is that they are confident enough in their abilities that they are quite thorough in what they share. This volume is not a teaser; it’s complete and coherent. You could pretty much take the book as a recipe and use it to develop your project plans. On the other hand, the plans by themselves won’t guarantee that you can assemble a team with the necessary qualifications to execute the plan successfully.
The other thing that this book does quite nicely is identify the kinds of organizational support structures and processes that you would want to put in place to institutionalize systematic disruptive innovation.
Christensen and his colleagues are continuing to build a rich, systematic, theory of disruptive innovation. With roots in academic research, they are freely sharing their insights and their methods. The Innovator’s Guide to Growth is a solid workbook that will let you develop your own skill at doing disruptive innovation. Of course, the plan by itself won’t eliminate the need to gain the experience for yourself. But it’s a lot better strategy than to have to work everything out from scratch on your own.
by Bill Ives
October 23, 2008 at 5:21 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
I recently saw a great YouTube video, Jeff Han’s Multi-Touch Sensing, thanks to my friend Thierry Hubert at Wikigazette. Jeff showed a computer display that senses multiple touch points. So you can use all your fingers and others can join in. So you can take two sides of a photo to expand it in two directions at the same time, as Jeff showed. You can also have more than one person working.
He said that there is no reason that people should conform to computer interfaces, but rather the computer should conform to people, like the use of all your fingers. This should be a big plus for data visualization as Jeff suggested. He also went to NASA World Wind and showed how the interface seems to be transparent as you just work with the maps with both hands to move around and go in and out.
I was amazed when I saw the Apple Lisa visual interface in the very early 80s while doing some work for Apple. This seems to have the potential to have a far greater impact to change the way we interact with computers.
by Rob Paterson
October 21, 2008 at 3:47 pm · Filed under
KETC, Measurement
Back in May, we started to think about how a TV Station could help its city cope with the then emerging mortgage crisis. Thanks to CPB, we at KETC got our chance to test our ideas that we could.
The test is over and the results are in. A major part of the project was measurement. We knew that emotion and anecdote – powerful as it is – would not be enough.
How do we measure media? In most cases on air we can get a sense of who is watching. On the web we know exactly who is watching. As we started the experiment to see if a Public TV station could help a community help itself we had to know more – we had to know if what we did – on air, on the web, in person and by measuring itself (Remember in Quantum the act of measurement affects the measured) had an impact.
Would what we did activate action?
Would what we did change perceptions?
Would what we did have a result in improving the health of our community?
Might acting as a social catalyst be the higher goal and role for public media?
Well dear readers, the research is in – yes to all of the above.
A huge thank you to Professor Dhavan Shah and his wonderful team at the University of Wisconsin
One of the points that we measured was the number of calls that the United Way got from people seeking help timed against our on air pieces. Here you can see a massive bump directly related to what we did.
There is more – we found that the act of measuring/surveying had also a huge impact
What do these numbers mean? Are they good, OK or mediocre?
I have shared with you just the highlights – we have a lot more information that tells us that not only were we able to shift beliefs, motivate reaching out and action but also increase support for the station.
It is going to be fascinating to see what happens as this work spreads more broadly in the public TV and Radio world.
It’s one thing to bring good content and information to the public. It is another to be able to help activate the public to take back power and control into their lives.
I feel that we are on the edge of a breakthrough – the networked world is finding its place and its organization
by Rob Paterson
October 20, 2008 at 6:46 am · Filed under
Social Media
This weekend the big news was General Powell’s endorsement of Senator Obama – how did most of us watch this – on the web.
Katie Couric’s interview with Governor Palin was the Rubicon moment that showed most of us that the Governor was not up to the job. How did most of us watch it - on the web.
Paradoxically it has been SNL and Jon Stewart that have made a major impact on the election. They have deepened the insights of the conventional news sources. Most of us have watched Tina Fey and Jon – on the web.
The system has noticed.
Until maybe 2 months ago, all conventional news outlets have seen the web as a useful add on. Now, it is clear that the web is THE place to put up the key content. The air merely markets the web – the web is the primary source, where people virally spread your content and so where the conversation begins.
It’s also where the producer can track with precision who watches. As the recession deepens, what advertising there will be will demand this precision. Only the web can deliver this.
Expect a major re-alignment.
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