Activity Streams Meet the World of Manufacturing No comments yet

 Guest Blogger

Derek Singleton, ERP Market Analyst

These days, activity streams seem to be popping up everywhere in enterprise tech as vendors rush to add social features to their software. Twitter and Facebook-like streams are even starting to gain traction in manufacturing software. Two of the most prominent examples of vendors incorporating activity stream data into their manufacturing user interface (UI) are cloud enterprise resource planning vendors: Kenandy and NetSuite.

Incorporating activity stream data into manufacturing software UIs has important  implications for collaboration manufacturing environments. For instance, it enables rapid information sharing between sales teams and production teams to provide instant updates on things like purchase orders. However, I think the impact that activity streams can have on manufacturing software UIs is potentially much more interesting. Activity streams represent a radically new take on ERP Uis and have the potential to change the way users interact with their systems.

Activity Streams Create More Social Manufacturing UIs

One of the things I find interesting about activity streams in manufacturing software is that it alters the dynamic of how users interact with their software. Historically, manufacturing software has been a place where transactional information is simply input and calculations are run. For example, the bill of materials had to be entered and stored so that the material requirements planning application could run and produce reports.

While this is still largely the function of all manufacturing software, activity streams add a twist to the mix. They allow employees and supervisors to share analysis on the reports that are generated and the transactional information that’s input into the MRP ERP system. This offers users an opportunity to look at data and create an interactive conversation about what the data means and what action should given the results. It’s a more human way of interacting with ERP.

Three Further Innovations Activity Streams Can Spur

Beyond allowing users to enrich transactional data, I think that activity streams carry three other important implications for manufacturing software UIs. If incorporated, these features could help to further improve the way that manufacturers operate their shop floors. Activity streams could be use to:

1. Automate reminders that keep projects flowing. A key benefit of an activity stream is that it automatically updates subscribed users with the latest action taken. An activity stream could be used to update every employee on their current and future tasks, directly from the system. This would keep projects flowing while enabling employees to plan ahead for future projects.

2. Stream educational reminders along with tasks. Activity streams allow employees to engage in a virtual conversation about a particular topic. Through these conversations, employees inevitably share educational information. Manufacturing UIs should aggregate this information and attach the bits of wisdom to tasks that employees routinely have to perform. While many systems have wikis built into their software, a stream with this information attached proactively delivers the right information at the right time to the right individuals.

3. Aggregate the most pressing tasks for immediate action. A final benefit I see in activity streams is that it keeps employees abreast of the highest-priority action items. Manufacturing UIs could create an automatically generated list of the most important tasks to accomplish on the shop floor. For instance, an order may need to be completed and rushed to an important client prior to starting on a new purchase order. A manufacturing UI that can order tasks by importance would help manufacturers become more efficient.

This article is adapted from an article that originally appeared on Software Advice – a resource for manufacturing software. You can find the original article at: The Benefits of Activity Streams in Manufacturing UIs.

Maximising the power of collective knowledge 1 comment

Introduction

This is a summary of one of the breakout session I ran at the Cisco Public Services Summit, Oslo 9-11 December 2011.  It describes the role of Communities of Practice in supporting more effective collaboration and knowledge sharing between organisations working in the public sector. It notes the key lessons learnt from a 6-year journey, starting from the launch of the UK local government CoP platform in 2006 and how this led to an ambitious attempt to create a new kind of platform for online collaboration and data sharing – the Knowledge Hub.  The slides are embedded at the foot of this post, and also available at Slideshare.

Project Purpose

The main purpose of the project was to break down some of the silo’d work practices both within councils and across the public sector. Local councils were delivering the same set of services, but were not learning from each other about good/best practice. This was also the first time that communities of practice had been used within the public sector environment as a process and methodology for encouraging knowledge sharing and personal development.

I’ve made clear in the slides the difference between “Communities of Practice” (CoPs) and “Social Networks”. Put simply, CoPs operate from a sense of shared values and objectives. Social Networks support a far more personalised agenda, or in other words, its “we” as opposed to “me”.

The following points correspond to the slide presentation, and as noted previously, represent the lessons learnt from a 6-year journey.

Communities of Practice – Lessons Learnt

1. Don’t expect everyone to join in.

Command and control structures are alive and well, particularly in public sector organisations.  Joining a CoP where status and rank mean nothing, and where the free-flow of knowledge is encouraged can be a bit of a culture shock for some people.  By all means encourage colleagues and managers to join, but accept that collaboration and knowledge sharing doesn’t come easy to some people. Concentrate efforts instead on building trust between those who want to be there and create a safe haven for knowledge.

2. Community Facilitation is essential.

You need a community facilitator or moderator to provide cohesion and maintain direction for the CoP. Almost without exception, the most successful CoPs had a good and effective facilitator. Some of the roles and duties of a facilitator include:

1. Supporting sociability, relationship and trust building
2. Seeding and feeding discussion topics
3. Maintaining and sustaining the community ‘rhythm’.
4. Curating and signposting knowledge artefacts for capture and reuse
5. Helping to connect community members
6. Providing help with the CoP tools and facilities
7. Ensuring the community space is kept “tidy” and navigable
8. Reporting CoP activity – metrics, evaluations, newsletters
9. Monitoring success criteria and impact.

3.  Establish your KPIs.

Be clear about what your CoP is trying to achieve. Remember this is a “community” so engage with the members to agree purpose and intended outcomes.  Once the purpose and outcomes are agreed you can identify the metrics that will measure progress. Try to use a combination of qualitative and quantitative data for the metrics you measure.

When monitoring the metrics, remember that each CoP will have a particular rhythm or cycle. Some will be light on discussion and strong on shared document building and vice versa. Others will be ‘one-shot’ supporting a single challenge.  Not all communities will be a hive of activity; some will support its participants at a low level of interaction over a long period, others for short bursts around face-to-face-meetings or events.

Key lesson: Don’t rely on metrics to claim your community is successful; use metrics and indicators to understand your community better. 

4. ROI can be measured.

You can guarantee that someone, sometime, somewhere is going to ask about return on investment. I’d much prefer to consider the “I” in ROI as meaning “Impact”, but we live in a world where – for some – value can only be measured in terms of cash saved.  Be prepared for this and consider how ROI can be quantified. In the example for local government CoPs we identified cash savings for online (virtual) conferences compared to physical (face to face) conferences and found that on average £8000 can be saved for each on-line conference.  Online conferences have now become a fairly regular feature, so the potential savings continue to accrue.

5. Hotseats generate heat!

Hotseats are where you invite a recognised expert or illuminory to spend some time answering questions from the community. The event should be promoted and advertised in advance to generate interest, and the person invited into the hotseat can seed the discussions by issuing a statement or question (possibly controversial) prior to the hotseat starting. Questions and answers are posted in the forum. The event can generate a lot of interest and discussions within the community usually continue long after the hotseat has finished.

6.  Use stories to promote the benefits

Don’t just rely on newsletters, statistics or case studies to promote the benefits of the CoP. Bring it alive through stories and anecdotes from the community members. Publish, promote and reward these stories. There is no better endorsement for the success of a CoP than from the CoP members themselves.

Knowledge Hub

The final part of the session was devoted to the thinking behind the development of a “next generation” community of practice platform – the “Knowledge Hub”.  What problems were we trying to fix with this new platform?  Briefly stated these were:

• Over 80% of the CoPs had been set up as private spaces (gated access via the Facilitator as opposed to just being able to join).  In effect these were silo’d knowledge repositories. We wanted a system that would encourage more interaction between CoPs.
• There was lack of permeability with external (outside the firewall) conversations. We wanted a system that could easily integrate with external web services.
• We wanted to address the perennial issue of information overload, perhaps more accurately described as “filter failure”.  Using explicit data provided by the user in their on-line profile, e.g. where they work, their area of expertise, what groups they join, etc., filters could be established to improve the relevance of information received.
• In a similar way to the way that Amazon works, we wanted to track user behaviour (their digital footprint) in order to “push” relevant information – e.g. conversations, events, and documents to the users.
• We wanted active and guided navigation to help users find and access relevant knowledge.
• We wanted to tap into the emerging market for mashups and apps; providing users with the tools to combine and link data to create value-added apps for improving council services.
• We wanted to reduce development costs and open up the architecture to enable developers and entrepreneurs to create additional value. We would use open source software and adopt open standards (e.g. OAuth, OpenSocial, OpenGraph etc.).

However, as with all things public sector, the budget was radically scaled back early in 2011 and consequently not all of these features will be implemented. The cut-down version of the local government platform was launched 27 October 2011. (http://knowledgehub.local.gov.uk).

But the dream lives on. With support from PFI Knowledge Solutions (Knowledge Hub developers) a roadmap of future enhancements for their innovative Intelligus platform may eventually deliver all of the original requirements. More on this later; a matter of “watch this space”!

I’ll be happy to answer any questions about the Community of Practice project mentioned above, or the Intelligus platform that may realise the original vision for the Knowledge Hub.

Reflections: Online Information Conference 2011 4 comments

Pretty exhausting, incredibly insightful and hugely enjoyable: that would sum up my three days as Chairman of this year’s Online Information Conference 2011, held at the Olympia Conference Centre between 29^th November and 1^st December. The last time the event will be run at this venue, but more about that later.

It was impossible to be everywhere and hear all of the presentations, so my reflections are by necessity limited to what I personally heard, saw or facilitated. To provide some overall context, the conference provided a forum dedicated to learning, debate, professional development, technology reviews and assessments, expert discussion and case-study presentations on what I would broadly describe as the ‘Information Professions”. There were four themed tracks:

• Going mobile: Information and Knowledge on the move
• Social Media: Exploiting knowledge in networks
• Building a framework for the future of the information profession
• New frontiers in information management
• Search and Information Discovery

The conference opened with a keynote presentation from Craig Newmark on the topic “Effective Social Media: Past, Present and Future”.

Craig is possibly best known as the founder and inspiration behind Craigslist, the largest online local classifieds and community moderated forum service in the world. He modestly refers to himself as a “Customer Service Manager’ for Craigslist, which he himself describes as diminishing role. His time is increasingly devoted to his philanthropic efforts, as defined by the Craigslist Foundation (“….a connector to bring together nonprofit leaders, business, government, philanthropy and craigslist community members to take greater responsibility for where they live, play and work”), and the recently launched Craigconnects (“Using technology to give the voiceless a real voice, and the powerless real power”).

Craig covered quite a lot of ground in his presentation, from the earliest examples of “social media” as defined by Gutenberg, Luther and the role of the printing press in achieving massive social change, to today’s use of social media and the internet to engage with and connect people and groups with similar interests.

His focus is now very much on the nonprofits sector, where he spends about 60 hours of his working week. He referred to the scope and depth of the nonprofits sector as a “sea of help”, but pointed out that many of these people and organisations need help themselves in making more effective use of social media. He identifies Craigconnects as being a “hub”,  helping nonprofit organisations that have similar aims and objectives to connect and collaborate together. He also sees social media as a way of getting more people involved in legitimate nonprofits, and to maybe identify the fake nonprofits, i.e. those that spend most or all of their income on themselves.

Another key theme to emerge from Craig’s keynote was the issue of fact-checking in the news business.  Craig was keen to emphasise that he was not a journalist or an expert in the news industry, but felt that the disinvestment in investigative reporting and fact-checking had eroded the trust in news media. Craig was no doubt referring to the US press, but it seems to me there is some resonance on the issue of trust with the UK press, as reported via the Leveson inquiry . In fact, “trust” was a recurrent theme in both Craig’s keynote, and the keynote for the second day of the conference by Rachel Botsman (see later reference), and as Craig noted: “Trust was the new black”.

The key elements of the fact-checking debate is described in more detail in this article by Craig, recently published in the Huffington Post.  However, perhaps more memorable and particularly poignant is one of Craig’s remarks I noted from his keynote: “The press should be the immune system of democracy”.

A pre-conference podcast by Craig is available from the Online Information website.

Rachel Botsman was the keynote speaker on the second day of the conference. Rachel is a social innovator who writes, consults and speaks on the power of collaboration and sharing through current and emerging network technologies, including how it will transform business, consumerism and the way we live. She is the co-author with Roo Rogers of: What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. TIME magazine recently called Collaborative Consumption “One of the top 10 ideas that will change the world.”

Rachel is based in Australia and couldn’t be with us in London, so we had a 35-minute video that Rachel had produced especially for the conference, followed by 20 minutes of questions and answers via a live link-up with Rachel in Australia.

The keynote was broadly based on the book (a highly recommended read). It gives a stark perspective of western societies’ 40-year addiction to hyper-consumerism, and the impact this is having on people, society and the planet’s resources. The key question is whether we can continue as we are for the next 40 years or more, or whether we have to consider other economic models. I’m guessing that the broad vote is for the latter, which is why we’re witnessing the explosive growth of what Rachel refers to as “Collaborative Consumption”

Collaborative Consumption is the process of sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting and swapping, reinvented and massively scaled using internet and social network technologies. Rachel described three main systems:

Product Service Systems

Based on the idea of paying for usage of a product without needing to own the product outright.  Car sharing or bike sharing are typical examples. Witness the huge success of bike sharing schemes such as London’s Barclays Bike Hire.

Redistribution Markets

Redistribute used or pre-owned goods from where they are not needed to someone or somewhere where they are. Examples of this type of market  include Freecycle and Craigslist .

Collaborative Lifestyles

It’s not just physical goods that can be shared, swapped and bartered. People with similar interests are forming groups to share and exchange assets such as time, space, skills and money.  Examples include The Tuttle Club ,  The Cube and Landshare.

Rachel was keen to emphasise that these new and emerging peer to peer (P2P) models, utilising the power and reach of the internet and social networks to massively scale, can and will co-exist with the traditional business to consumer (B2C) services. Though there is evidence that some B2C corporates are adapting their services to deliver the same sort of flexibility offered by the P2P market. For example BMW’s recently announced car sharing scheme.

Rachel’s video included a few case studies of how “micro-entrepreneurs” are creating products and services by renting selling or trading “idling time” – i.e. the time that a product or service is not being used. This could be the car that sits on the driveway for 22 hours out of every 24, the spare room that only gets used when there are visitors, or that power-drill in the tool cupboard that has only been used for 3 minutes. Services such Airbnp (room renting), Zipcar (car renting) or TaskRabbit (paying for someone to do a chore) were all mentioned. Rachel had asked the founders of TaskRabbit what was the most requested task. The answer – perhaps unsurprisingly – was assembling IKEA furniture! So, if there are any budding IKEA experts reading this – get yourselves registered on TaskRabbit and start earning some extra money!

Inevitably the issue of “trust” came up, as in who would we trust to drive our car, or stay in our house? Evidence from the many P2P services that have sprung up over the past two years would indicate that broadly speaking, people are good and considerate and that there have been very few instances of theft or vandalism (though not to trivialise the impact this may have had on the victims). Rachel went on to say that we will increasingly come to rely on our “Reputation Capital”, as an indicator of trust when transacting products and services in this emerging (and potentially huge) P2P market.

Reputational Capital might typically be defined or influenced by our engagement with online and offline communities and marketplaces. As such (and as I noted in my closing remarks), we’re increasingly familiar with “social media”, “social networks” and “social business”, we now need to seriously consider “social reputation”, i.e. how we act and behave online. Our own Reputational Capital will be a valuable commodity that we all need to nurture and protect as we become increasingly reliant on the internet as a marketplace.

I’m not sure if Craig or Rachel will be reading this blog, but if they are, grateful thanks from me, the organising committee and the delegates for your excellent and inspiring keynotes.

In the interest of brevity, I will limit the remainder of my reflections on the overall three days of the conference to a few bullet points. These are based on my personal observations or comments from the delegates.

• There was a huge volume of “tweets” on Twitter – more than I’ve seen at any previous conference. The conference hashtag was #online11. Twitter was used by the conference delegates to share what they were hearing and seeing, and as a channel for raising questions to the presenter (there was a Twitter Moderator at all of the sessions to ensure any questions were picked up and answered).

• We wanted to encourage more interaction with and between delegates at this conference. There was a “speed networking” event, facilitated by FutureGov Consulting and utilising the Simpl.co website for submitting new ideas or offers of help. This didn’t quite go as planned, mainly because it was scheduled against too many other events. A lesson learnt for next time.

• Some great audience participation at the “Essential Competence – Demonstrating Value” session facilitated by Ian Wooler and Sandra Ward, where delegates were given real coins of the realm (pennies) to vote on a range of options for measuring the value of information and knowledge services. All of the coins were returned afterwards (clearly an honest crowd!).

• David Gurteen ran one of his eponymous Knowledge Café’s. It was well attended and we received some good feedback. Speaking to a few delegates afterwards I was just slightly surprised that none of them had previously attended a Knowledge Café – which is a fairly well-established process for encouraging conversations and networking. At least they will now be able to take this process back to their respective organisations. Some photos from the Knowledge Café.

• The was a lot of interest in the “Going Mobile” track. Maybe these statistics from a recent article in The Wall go some way to explaining this:
• 35% of UK mobile users access social networking sites on their phones (European average is 23%)
• Mobile social networking use in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK nearly doubled in the last year, with 55m mobile users accessing Facebook, Twitter, etc., in September alone.
• 26% of mobile social networking users reported receiving coupons, offers, or deals on their phones.
• Growth in the number of mobile users accessing social networks on a daily basis has surpassed the growth of total mobile social networking adoption
• 71% of the European mobile social networking audience, accessed Facebook via a mobile device in September—the largest mobile audience of any social network—and an increase of 54% in the past year.
•  47% of UK mobile users are using smartphones (European average is 40%)
• 45% of the UK mobile users are using apps, (European average 35%).

• There was a lot of interest in “Big Data” (part of the New Frontiers in Information Management Track). I moderated a number of these sessions, and came away with the impression that there is a lot of ‘activity at the coal-face’ in this field, but still relatively few examples of how business or user value is being created or delivered. For me, still on the hype curve, but some promising developments on the horizon.

• Digital content (presentations, video, audio) from the conference is gradually being uploaded to the Online Information website and a live stream at Wavecastpro – so keep an eye out for new content appearing.

I’ll just round this off by mentioning that next year Online Information will be moving to a new venue at ICC London at ExceL, scheduled for 4-6 December 2012. This offers state of the art conferencing facilities, a much improved delegate experience, and better integration between the conference and exhibition elements. Something to look forward to in 2012.

I hope those who that attended the conference found it as informative and exhilarating as I did – I await to see the feedback with some anticipation.

For anyone else, I hope this brief summary might give a taster of what it was all about, and perhaps you might be tempted to attend next year’s event.

Until next year – have a great Christmas and a happy New Year!

Stephen Dale

Chairman, Online Information Conference 2011.

The Business Of Collaboration 3 comments

Some Background

The last few years can be described as the age of social business and collaboration. The demands and expectations of today’s knowledge workers have been shaped by the plethora of social networks and social media tools. Communicating and sharing information has never been easier.  Staying connected with news and status updates from friends, family, or at work is real-time and no longer constrained to an office PC.  This has coincided with the business realisation that a greater degree of interaction with customers, whether consumers or businesses, makes for a higher degree of customer retention.

Ironically, in many cases, workplace policy and technology constraints have meant that staff resorts to using the technology they have brought with them in their pockets or handbags in order to remain connected with their networks.  The ubiquity of mobile devices and ease of use of many web services means that almost anyone can originate or contribute to digital content, and information is increasingly consumed on the move. Recent analysis from Nielson shows that we spend 110 billion minutes on social networks and blog sites per month, or 22 per cent of all time is spent on-line. And the expectation now is that the tools that people use at work should be as easy and fun to use as the ones they use in their personal life.

But is this tsunami of data and information making us all better informed? How do we overcome information overload and ensure the relevance and utility of the information we consume? Can we provide environments that tap into the collective intelligence of groups or knowledge domains that match our specific needs?

And so the scene was set for the “Business of Collaboration” event hosted by PFI Knowledge Solutions (PFIKS) on 8^th November 2011. PFIKS are one of the leading vendors of  “Enterprise Social Software” systems with their open sources, open standards Intelligus platform.

What is Enterprise Social Software?

Enterprise Social Software (ESS) is the next generation of platforms that are built to manage high volumes of collaborative engagement and conversations among distributed teams, project groups or communities of practice. They build on the conceptual ideas of popular social networking platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn, but with a host of enterprise-ready features to make them secure, private, collaborative and business integration-friendly.

As many organisations have discovered, implementing a technology solution by itself rarely results in more effective collaboration and knowledge sharing.  Sustainable implementation of ESS requires:

1. Understanding of how and why successful knowledge-sharing communities and networks perform.

2. A system that implicitly acknowledges the constraints (time, process) and motivations (reciprocity, reward) that individuals experience within such networks.

3. A blended approach where technology seamlessly supports the behavioural characteristics that will encourage users to self-organize, collaborate and co-create.

But what about the investment in ICT systems that organisations have made over the past decade?

The good news is that it’s not a matter of ripping out legacy systems, but extending what you have, adding new capabilities and integrating new applications and services.

Delegates at the event included representatives from private and public sectors, large organisations and SME’s, all with a common purpose: to get a better understanding of this “social business ecosystem” and how the blend of technology, people and processes can be effectively combined to support more fluid knowledge flows, drive collaboration initiatives and open up opportunities for innovation.

One of the delegates, David Wilcox, Social Reporter working with the Big Lottery Fund posted this excellent blog about the event.

All of the slide presentations from the event are available from the Intelligus website, including my own. However, I wanted to elaborate on some of the points I made in my  presentation. Hopefully you can follow these points with reference to the embedded slide presentation below, or from Slideshare.

The Presentation

Slides 1-4

What is the question that connects the images?

Collaboration pre-supposes that we have someone to collaborate with – in this example the person on the other side of the seesaw. The seesaw will only work with the collaboration of the people involved, in this instance, the child at each end of the seesaw.

Knowledge sharing makes no assumptions about collaboration; it’s possible to share knowledge with people we don’t know, e.g. by posting something to an on-line forum, or writing a blog about something we have seen or read or experienced. We may not know who is going to read our missive, or what value they may place on it. The posting might lead to some form of collaboration with the readers/consumers, but that is not necessarily the primary purpose for knowledge sharing.

Most of us are happy to collaborate and share ideas with the people we know (i.e. the definition of “collaboration”).

Slides 5-7

But what about the huge untapped resources and expertise that we don’t know about? We may get to hear about people in this “unknown world” via recommendations or word of mouth, but how do we connect and engage with them? How can we know what we don’t know? How do we find the answers to our questions in this “unknown world”?

If nothing else, this is where the power of social networks comes to the fore. We have the tools and technology to be able to “crowd-source” our questions. Social media tools such as Twitter or Quora make it easy to post queries to a largely anonymous network of people in the hope that someone will have the answer or the appropriate knowledge and experience we are seeking. By engaging and connecting with the people that respond we can grow our personal network, often referred to as our “Social Graph”.

Better still if the system or network we have joined can suggest contacts for us, based on what it knows about us, either explicitly (our digital identity and personal profile), or implicitly (our digital footprint, i.e. our ‘likes’, the people we have connected with and the on-line places we have visited).

Slides 8 – 10 

Social networks have proliferated over the past 4 or 5 years. Some have been more successful than others. Remember that even a blog can be a form of social network, and we now have over 200 billion of these (yes, more than the population of the planet!)

New users can be intimidated by large/mature social networks which have lots of users and content, and where engagement and conversations protocols have been established.

Slides 12-13

But are we beginning to see the onset of “social network fatigue”? Each new social network adds to the internet background noise. Search engines have never really delivered on the promise of relevant information, and many of us resort to serendipitous discovery of key information and conversations – it’s a bit ad hoc, where knowledge discovery is more by accident than design.

Slide 14

So, the signal to noise ratio is pretty poor at the moment and the ever-increasing volume of information hitting the Internet is likely to make it even worse.

Slides 15-16

It’s a strange paradox that now we have the capability of easily creating new websites and blogs without the need for any programing skills, what we really want now is one place to view and interact with all of this information. A recent (September 2011) audit of LinkedIn illustrates the problem:

• 26 Alumni groups
• 32 Corporate groups
• 20 Conference groups
• 132 Networking groups
• 16 Nonprofit groups
• 196 Professional groups

A total of 422 groups. How do you know which group(s) to join to be sure of getting the best answer to your questions? Maybe ‘all of them’ is the answer!

(Information sourced from blogs by Nick Milton and Ian Wooler)

Slide 18

If we want relevant information to come to us, we have to

1. tell the system something about ourselves (our digital identity and profile),
2. enable access to the sources of information that might be useful and
3. spend some time identifying and validating the sources we like and trust. We can’t leave everything to technology – what you get out is proportional to what you put in!

This is clearly where the likes of Facebook (groups, Timeline) and Google+ (Circles, Sparks) are heading, but neither has yet achieved a ‘simple’ way of doing it.

Slides 19-21

Most of us will be more concerned with what the information is and whether we can trust it rather than where it is. So, do we have to worry about the “where” if we can develop some form of interoperability between systems and networks? RSS/Atom feeds and tagging are only part of the answer. We need a system that can extract meaning from the data (e.g. entity extraction) that will enable ontologies to be created and terms to be categorised for faceted search and discovery.

Slides 22-24

Entity abstraction, aggregation and categorisation.  If our profile is up to date, the Enterprise Social Software system should be able to locate, aggregate and categorise the information that we would find relevant and useful by matching terms against our profile data (who we are, where we work, what we’re interested in, etc.). Precision can be further improved by monitoring our ‘digital footprint’, i.e. the knowledge/information assets that we have ‘liked’, recommended or downloaded.  If we layer on top of this the aggregated behaviour patterns of all the users, we can leverage the opportunities provided by “collective intelligence” to identify “good’ content.

Products/vendors such as Amazon do this all of the time, using explicit data (the user bought an item) and implicit (users who bought this items also looked at these items). Tracking of a user’s progress through a website is not rocket science and is a fundamental part of any web analytics software. Inject a bit of entity extraction and you start to establish the foundations of a system that can begin to ‘intelligently’ connect information with people and people with people.

Slides 25-26

‘Liking’, ‘+1’ or ‘tweeting’ not only enables sharing of information, it can be fed into ‘trending engines’ that will aggregate and categorise the crowd-sourced data to show hot topics and trends. Again, the technology is well established, but little use is made of it in many Enterprise 2.0 systems. How nice it would be if, for example, your job entailed commissioning adult social care services and you could see the trending conversations on adult social care on your Enterprise 2.0 dashboard. This feature is built into the Intelligus platform using a combination of the open source application Carrot2 and the proprietary PFIKS matching engine.

Slide 27

All of the prior discussion refers to an environment (social media, social networks) that are already in place, and for technologies, systems and applications that are currently being delivered in Intelligus and some of the other leading Enterprise Social Software systems. But what of the future? Where is all of this taking us?

Slides 29-32

I will conclude with a few words about the growing importance of ‘Apps’. With apologies to those who don’t know who Peter Kaye is and his oft-repeated reference to Garlic Bread being the future! Maybe do a quick search on YouTube and all will be revealed!

Slide 33

As usual, Dilbert is pretty much attuned to what is happening in the business world. I would argue that most organisations haven’t yet grasped the full impact of the App market, and may view this as being the exclusive domain of the on-line gamers. In fact, (IMHO) it is shaping up to be one of the most disruptive technologies to appear since the start of the social media wave.

Slide 34

The trends reinforce the view that apps are becoming ubiquitous in how we work and play. Note that all of these apps are developed for mobile devices.

Slides 35-40

As I have noted on the slide, the key attributes of an Enterprise App Store are:

• Empowers the user for self-service
• Easy to use conduit of software, services and data
• Model widely understood by developers and consumers of software
• Recognition that one size doesn’t fit all (e.g. the lobotomised corporate PC)
• Life-cycles for apps potentially short: discarded when no longer useful/relevant
• Enterprise App Stores will provide a trusted source of business-ready apps that can be delivered to a rapidly changing work environment.
• The end device is less important than the application. The mantra is now “develop for mobile, but consider the PC”, and not the other way around.

Finally, and in summary, the key ‘take-aways’ from this presentation:

1. More people suffering “Social Network Fatigue” – desire for one place to do business,
2. Enterprise Social Software (ESS) solutions must integrate with legacy systems and business processes.
3. ESS must add value – more fluid knowledge flows, decision support etc.
4. Mashups and Enterprise App Stores will become increasingly important for business agility
5. Develop for mobile, think PC, not other way around!

Of course these are just my opinions. I’m happy to receive critical comment and corrections to any incorrect assumptions or poorly constructed arguments I may have made!

Online Information Conference 2011 3 comments

I was pondering the imminence of this year’s this year’s Online Information Conference (29 Nov to 01 Dec) and was reminded of a quote by Abraham Lincoln: “The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time”.

Is it really almost a year since the last conference? Where has the time gone, and has life changed that much? We’ve seen the ‘Arab Spring’ and the riots in the UK; two sides of a coin that shows how social media can be exploited for both good and bad. We’ve also seen the rise and rise of mobile platforms and mobile apps; new digital publishing models that offer consumers a new experience when reading e-books or newspapers; the launch of (another)  new social networking service, this time  from Google (Google plus);… and so much more.

I hadn’t appreciated until taking on the role of Conference Chairman (this my second year) quite how challenging it would be to predict what impact the various technical, product and service innovations would have on the information profession. Add politics, policies and emerging standards into the mix and you begin to appreciate the difficulties in ensuring that we’re on topic for an event that gets planned many months in advance.

However, and with only a hint of bias, I think we (that is the Conference Committee) have got it pretty much spot-on for this year’s conference.

We have two internationally recognised keynote speakers in Craig Newmark and Rachel Bosman.

Craig will share what he has observed by government, not for profits, and NGOs using social media, as well as lessons learned from Craigslist. Called “The Wizard of the Local” by Time Magazine, Craig was named in its “Time 100”. He was named Person of the Year at the 9th Annual Webby Awards in 2005, and BusinessWeek named him one of the 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

Rachel is a social innovator who writes, consults and speaks on the power of collaboration and sharing through current and emerging network technologies, including how it will transform business, consumerism and the way we live. She is the author of: What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. TIME magazine recently called Collaborative Consumption “One of the top 10 ideas that will change the world.”

The 2011 conference will once again provide a forum dedicated to learning, debate, professional development, technology reviews and assessments, expert discussion as well as case-study presentations and the sharing of research results and opinion. The tracks at this year’s event will cover:

• Going mobile: Information and Knowledge on the move
• Social Media: Exploiting knowledge in networks
• Building a framework for the future of the information profession
• New frontiers in information management
• Search and Information Discovery

Just picking out a few of the highlights, we’ll be looking at the world of “Big Data”. Gartner Research predicts that data will grow 800 per cent over the next five years, with 80 per cent of it being unstructured. Unstructured information is Big Data. It’s that simple. We also have sessions that examine what the industry is doing with structured data, and particularly products, services and apps that use open and linked data.

I’m anticipating there will be a lot of interest this year on the “Going Mobile: Information and Knowledge on the move” track theme. Sales of mobile devices (phones, tablets etc.) are now outstripping the traditional desktop PC. With more and more mobile business apps being developed, breaking the shackles of the office environment is now a real option.

This year we will also be experimenting with a few activities to encourage more delegate engagement and interaction, with a Gurteen Knowledge Café, a business ‘speed dating’ activity facilitated by FutureGov, and maybe an on-line game or two.

However, it’s not possible to do justice to the depth and range of topics, presentations, expert insight and networking opportunities in this brief posting. You really need to be there to benefit from the full experience, and perhaps gain new perspectives on the information industry and the changing role of the information professional. Can you afford to miss it?

I hope to see you there. In the meantime, if you have a few minutes to spare, Richard Wallis from Talis did a podcast interview with me about this year’s event.

Stephen Dale

Chairman, Online Information Conference 2011

36 Knowledge Sharing Barriers No comments yet

I have developed a number of Knowledge Management (KM) strategies for various clients over the past 11 or so years, and was recently asked to revamp and update the KM strategy for a large public sector organization that had undergone a fairly radical restructure. Previous experience of working with public sector clients told me that no matter how radical the restructure; the basic hierarchical nature of the organization would remain (flattening of structures doesn’t come naturally to public sector organizations). And where you have several layers of hierarchy you also have the potential for mis-communication, silo’d working practices and generally poor knowledge sharing. In fact, nearly all of the conditions that would work in opposition to establishing an effective KM strategy.

Incidentally, for anyone put off by ‘KM jargon”, I should explain that the definition of ‘KM’ for the strategy I’m referring to is “organisational and personal learning and sharing”.

With these points in mind, I thought I would do a bit of research into the most common barriers to knowledge sharing, and actually include these in the final strategy paper. That way the business sponsor and senior managers tasked with implementing the KM strategy could audit their existing practices with a view to identifying and perhaps predicting the sources of resistance or ‘drag’ and plan accordingly. Remembering of course that KM is not something that you ‘do’ to people. You need to take the people in the organisation with you on this journey and for them to see the benefits of knowledge sharing for themselves.

The following is a list of 36 knowledge-sharing barriers, based on an academic paper by Andreas Riege (Riege, A. 2005. “Three-dozen knowledge-sharing barriers managers must consider.” Journal of Knowledge Management 9(3): 18-35)

The list gives some indication of the complexity of knowledge sharing as a value-creating organisational activity and is divided into three categories: individual, organisational and technological.

Individual knowledge sharing barriers

• general lack of time to share knowledge, and time to identify colleagues in need of specific knowledge;
• apprehension of fear that sharing may reduce or jeopardise people’s job security;
• low awareness and realisation of the value and benefit of possessed knowledge to others;
• dominance in sharing explicit over tacit knowledge such as know-how and experience that requires hands-on learning, observation, dialogue and interactive problem solving;
• use of strong hierarchy, position-based status, and formal power (“pull rank”);
• insufficient capture, evaluation, feedback, communication, and tolerance of past mistakes that would enhance individual and organisational learning effects;
• differences in experience levels;
• lack of contact time and interaction between knowledge sources and recipients;
• poor verbal/written communication and interpersonal skills;
• age differences;
• gender differences;
• lack of social network;
• differences in education levels;
• taking ownership of intellectual property due to fear of not receiving just recognition and accreditation from managers and colleagues;
• lack of trust in people because they misuse knowledge or take unjust credit for it;
• lack of trust in the accuracy and credibility of knowledge due to the source; and
• differences in national culture or ethnic background; and values and beliefs associated with it (language is part of this).

Organisational knowledge sharing barriers

• integration of KM strategy and sharing initiatives into the company’s goals and strategic approach is missing or unclear;
• lack of leadership and managerial direction in terms of clearly communicating the benefits and values of knowledge sharing practices;
• shortage of formal and informal spaces to share, reflect and generate (new) knowledge;
• lack of transparent rewards and recognition systems that would motivate people to share more of their knowledge;
• existing corporate culture does not provide sufficient support for sharing practices;
• deficiency of company resources that would provide adequate sharing opportunities;
• external competitiveness within business units or functional areas and between subsidiaries can be high (e.g. not invented here syndrome);
• communication and knowledge flows are restricted into certain directions (e.g. top-down);
• physical work environment and layout of work areas restrict effect sharing practices;
• internal competitiveness within business units, functional areas, and subsidiaries can be high;
• hierarchical organisation structure inhibits or slows down most sharing practices; and
• size of business units often is not small enough and unmanageable to enhance contact and facilitate ease of sharing.

Technological knowledge sharing barriers

• lack of integration of IT systems and processes impedes on the way people do things;
• lack of technical support (internal and external) and immediate maintenance of integrated IT systems obstructs work routines and communication flows;
• unrealistic expectations of employees as to what technology can do and cannot do;
• lack of compatibility between diverse IT systems and processes;
• mismatch between individuals’ need requirements and integrated IT systems and processes restrict sharing practices;
• reluctance to use IT systems due to lack of familiarity and experience with them;
• lack of training regarding employee familiarisation of new IT systems and processes;
• lack of communication and demonstration of all advantages of any new system over existing ones.

For anyone tasked with either developing or implementing a KM (knowledge sharing) strategy, a good starting point would be to use this list to audit the current practice and thereby determine where the most effort is required, and if possible, where the most value can be created (i.e. biggest bang for the buck).

I hope readers will find this post useful. I will be happy to answer any questions on developing and implementing knowledge sharing strategies.

Stephen Dale

Free Software Directory 2 comments

The Free Software Foundation’s new Free Software Directory, was officially re-launched earlier this week.

More than 6500 programs are listed in the newly updated directory, all of them free for any computer user to download, run and share. According to the Free Software Foundation, each entry is individually checked and tested so users will know that any program they come across in the directory will be truly free software, according to the group’s formal definition, with free documentation and without proprietary software requirements.

Programs that run on proprietary operating systems like Mac OS X and Windows are listed as well, but only if they run fully on GNU/Linux.

The new directory has been rebuilt using MediaWiki–the same software that powers Wikipedia. A set of extensions called Semantic MediaWiki add advanced search and presentation capabilities.

A great resource for anyone looking for open source alternatives to the paid-for proprietary offerings.

Social Media: Exploiting Knowledge In Networks No comments yet

There are still some places available on the “Exploiting Knowledge in Networks” training event next week, Tuesday 4th October.

The training focuses on use of Social Media tools to support Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) and self development. The following is brief synopsis of the training and what will be covered:

Introduction:

There is a desire to develop more effective knowledge sharing and a culture of collaboration in most organisations, but little recognition of what this means in terms of staff development and overcoming barriers to change. The enormous growth of social media tools and social/professional networks over the past few years has created new opportunities and new challenges for people and organisations who want to embrace this dynamic world of social interaction and fluid knowledge flows. However, It is not widely recognised that collaboration and knowledge sharing are skills and practices that rarely get taught. It’s something we may learn on the job in a hit or miss fashion. Some people are natural at it. Others struggle to understand it. 

This one day course provides a practical and detailed introduction to social media and social/professional networks that will enable delegates to have a greater understanding of their context for use and deployment within their organisation and for personal and professional development.

Outcomes:

• An understanding of social media tools and social networks, and their context for engagement and knowledge sharing
• An understanding of on-line privacy, reputational risk, and the dichotomy of personal and professional identities
• An understanding of the barriers to knowledge sharing and collaboration and how these can be overcome
• An understanding of the principles for creating a personalised social media toolkit to support on-going learning and collaboration

Programme:

• Overview of the social web
• Risks and rewards in the use of social media
• Creating and maintaining your personal profile
• Social media tools and their context for knowledge sharing
• Listening and observing; an introduction to aggregation, sentiment and tracking tools
• Developing your social network and making connections (includes Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+)
• Communities of Interest/Practice for personal and professional development
• Practical exercises and examples of Social Media in action

If you’d like to book a place on this training course, go to the TFPL website and click on the “book” link. If you’d like more information about the course then please contact me (e.g. use the comments facility in this blog).

If you can’t make the 4th October event, the course will be repeated on 6th March 2012 and 2nd October 2012.

The Role of the Facilitator in Building and Sustaining Communities of Practice 1 comment

I have the honour of being invited to present at the XIII Seminari Compartim L’e-moderador i altres nous agents de coneixement a les organitzacions on 21^st September 2011. The event is sponsored by Generaliti de Cataluña, centre d’Estudis Juridics, I Formacio Especialitzada.

This post is a brief preamble to my presentation.

Background

My experience of knowledge sharing in organizations stems mainly from my involvement in setting up Communities of Practice (CoPs) for UK local government. This was part of a broader Knowledge Management strategy that I was commissioned to deliver for the Improvement and Development Agency (now part of Local Government Group -LGG). An online collaboration platform was launched in 2006 to support self-organizing, virtual communities of local government and other public sector staff. The purpose was to improve public sector services by sharing knowledge and good practice.

Over the past 5 years, the community platform has grown to support over 1.500 CoPs, with more than 100,000 registered users.  This has lead to many service improvement initiatives, from more efficient procurement and project planning to more effective inter-agency collaboration in delivering front-line services, such as health and social care. It has also provided some useful information on the dynamics of social collaboration and community management, e.g. the factors that influence the success of a community.

What does a successful CoP look like?

Success will of course depend on the purpose of the community. Some CoPs have been set up as networks for learning and sharing; others have a defined output, e.g. developing new practice for adult social care.  It is clearly more difficult to establish success criteria for a CoP dedicated to knowledge sharing than it is for – say – a CoP that has a tangible output. Success for the former will rely on more subjective analysis than for the latter, where there will probably be more tangible evidence of an output, e.g. a policy document or case study.

However, rather than argue and debate the criteria for assessing the “success” of a CoP (or other organizational learning system), I’d prefer to consider how we monitor and assess the “health” of a CoP. For this approach I think we have to consider the analogy of a CoP to a living and breathing organism.

A healthy CoP will show clear signs of life; this can be assessed using various quantitative indicators, such as:

• Number of members
• Rate of growth of the community
• Number and frequency of documents uploaded.
• Number and frequency of documents read or downloaded.
• Number and frequency of new blog posts
• Number and frequency of forum posts
• Number and frequency of comments
• Number of page views per session
• Time spent on the CoP per browser session

…etc.

Not that any one of these indicators in isolation will indicate the good health of a CoP, but taken together they can give a general perspective of how vibrant and active the community is.

Continuing with the analogy of a living, breathing organism, different CoPs will have different metabolisms, some may be highly active; others may be fairly sedate. Understanding the community ‘rhythm’ is a key aspect of knowing when any intervention is required in order to maintain this rhythm.  Not all CoPs are going to be vibrant and active all of the time; there may be periods of relative inactivity as a natural part of the CoP lifecycle. But it’s important to know the difference between a CoP that is going through a regular period of inactivity and a CoP that is moribund.

A point to note: inactive CoPs may not necessarily be a cause for concern. One reason for inactivity could be that the CoP has served its purpose and its members have moved on. In which case the knowledge assets of the CoP need to be published and celebrated and the CoP either closed, or (with the agreement of the members) re-purposed to a new topic or outcome.

So, understanding the vital life-signs and metabolism of a CoP is a fundamental part of ensuring the continued good health of the CoP, and therefore more likely to achieve its goals.  And the key to the continued good health of a CoP is knowing how and when to intervene when one or more of the life-signs begins to falter.  Without wishing to labour my analogy of the living, breathing organism too much, it’s the equivalent of knowing when someone is not feeling too well and administering the appropriate medicine. [See concluding section for symptoms and potential cures for an ailing CoP.]

The Online Facilitator/e-Moderator

Where does the CoP facilitator or e-moderator come into all of this? Well, I mentioned earlier that over the 5 years since its inception, the Local Government CoP strategy has provided some useful information on the dynamics of social collaboration and community management. For example, there is clear evidence that the CoPs that have full or part-time facilitation/e-moderation are much more likely to succeed than those that rely entirely on self-organization, and/or where there are no clearly defined roles or responsibilities.

The most successful CoPs (and I should clarify here that I’m using “success’ to mean “in good health”) are those where there is more than one facilitator/e-moderator and where interventions by the facilitator/e-moderator are frequent and predictable.  This may take various forms, such as regular polls of the CoP members; regular e-bulletins or newsletters; a schedule of events (face to face or virtual); regular input to Forum posts and threads, seeding new conversations; back-channeling to make connections between members of the CoP; etc.

In other words, show me a good and effective CoP facilitator/e-moderator and I can show you – in all probability – a healthy and successful CoP (or similar organizational knowledge sharing community).

The Role and Responsibilities

I’ve often been asked “what makes a good community facilitator/e-moderator?” This is a difficult one, and I’m of the opinion that it is more of an art than a science. The technical administration functions of the role can be taught, but the good facilitators/e-moderators that I have met bring another dimension to the role, i.e. empathy with, and understanding of, human behaviours and personalities. Something that I suspect comes with experience rather than a pedagogical approach. What I do think is important is having some knowledge (not necessarily ‘expert’ status) and enthusiasm for the topic or theme of the CoP (also referred to as the ‘domain of knowledge’).  This will help where interventions are necessary, and the community members are more likely to appreciate the facilitator/e-moderator as one of their own.

There have been various papers and blogs published about the role and responsibilities of an online CoP facilitator or e-Moderator, but maybe the following diagram captures the essence of the role.

Facilitator Role

(click to enlarge)

(Diagram re-worked from an original by Dion Hinchcliffe)

Conclusion

In conclusion, and continuing with my theme of ‘health’ in relation to organizational knowledge systems, such as CoPs, the following is a summary of the symptoms and suggested interventions for an ailing CoP . This has been adapted from some original work by Patti Anklam, and informed by Michael Norton at Local Government Group (see Acknowledgements).

Community Health Checks

As mentioned earlier, the life cycle of a community will be subject to a particular rhythm, which can vary from CoP to CoP. Understanding this rhythm will help inform if and when specific interventions are necessary.

Participation can wane; the number of posts slow down; fewer people show up; only a few people are generating plans for the next activity. But not all lapses in content and contribution mean a community’s life is over. In many cases, some specific diagnosis and actions can reinvigorate a community.

Identifying the Symptoms

The “actions” in the table below are suggested primarily for community facilitators/e-moderators but in fact any CoP member can take the initiative to rejuvenate the community.

Reinvigoration

Community facilitation/e-moderation is about creating and sustaining relationships, not just the facilitators’/e-moderator’s relationships with the individual members, but the members’ relationships among themselves. Reinvigorating the community involves restoring “social capital” to the community in a way that motivates and encourages people to re-engage and commit. The table below lists some practical interventions – things you can do to alter the current dynamics – that can have a positive impact on the community.

Reinvigoration of Communities

Acknowledgements

• Patti Anklam:  http://www.pattianklam.com
• Michael Norton: http://mik0ton.wordpress.com/
• Dion Hinchcliffe: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hinchcliffe

Steve Dale
Director
Collabor8now Ltd

Exploiting Knowledge in Networks (training event) No comments yet

I’ll be running the above mentioned training course next week in Edinburgh for delegates from Scottish Government and the (Scottish) Improvement Service. The training has been commissioned through TFPL, and details of the event are on the TFPL training pages.

It is perhaps worth noting that – as far as I am aware – this is one of the few training events that focus on social media and social networks for ‘Personal Knowledge Management‘ as opposed to the many and varied events on social media for communications and marketing.  Yes, we’ll cover the elements of communications and marketing, but from the perspective of personal engagement strategies and managing relationships, rather than from a corporate perspective.

A definition of Personal knowledge management (PKM)

Refers to a collection of processes that an individual carries out to gather, classify, store, search, retrieve, and share knowledge in his/her daily activities and how these processes support work activities. It is a response to the idea that knowledge workers increasingly need to be responsible for their own growth and learning and represents a bottom-up approach to knowledge management, as opposed to more traditional, top-down KM . Source: Wikipedia

To quote myself from the course synopsis:

“…..It is not widely recognised that collaboration and knowledge sharing are skills and practices that rarely get taught. It’s something we may learn on the job in a hit or miss fashion. Some people are natural at it. Others struggle to understand it. This one day course provides a practical and detailed introduction to social media and social/professional networks that will enable delegates to have a greater understanding of their context for use and deployment within their organisation and for personal and professional development”

Specific topics covered in the training include:

• Overview of the social web
• Risks and rewards in the use of social media
• Creating and maintaining your personal profile
• Social media tools and their context for knowledge sharing
• Listening and observing; an introduction to aggregation, sentiment and tracking tools
• Developing your social network and managing relationships (includes Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+)
• Communities of Interest/Practice for personal and professional development
• Practical exercises and examples of Social Media in action
• Building a personalised collaboration toolkit

I have created a general web resource for material used on the training – which is a moving feast, given the rapidly changing environment – and maintain a Diigo social bookmarking group for collecting useful links to social media, social business and social networking resources (feel free to join and contribute !).

The course notes are proprietary, and hence not available from the social media toolkit link, but to give a visual flavour of the content I’ve run the notes through Wordle – which is the image shown at the start of this blog. Click to enlarge.

Please contact me if you are interested in the training or just need more information.