Dina Mehta: Knowledge Management

Moving on - New Blog

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 06:56:59 GMT

This is my last post on this blog. Radio Userland has served me well since I started blogging in 2003. I will post more details on the transition, at my new blog - for now I just wanted to make this announcement, and provide the new url and feeds.

New Blog URL - http://dinamehta.com/
Subscribe via RSS 2.0 - http://dinamehta.com/feed/
Subscribe via Atom - http://dinamehta.com/feed/atom/
Comments feed - http://dinamehta.com/comments/feed/

The new blog will also be called Conversations with Dina - it's just a new blogging platform - but the same old blog! I do hope you continue reading and feeding it.

My old blog will be archived at its old url (http://radio.weblogs.com/0121664/) and I will keep the archives going. Stuart, who has worked out the platform for Conversations with Dina on Wordpress has done some neato hacks - one that I love a lot is that the search function will not just search the new blog archives, but also my old Radio blog archives. And he has managed to transfer some of my posts over too. That's so cool!!! Lots more needs doing there ... and that will emerge I'm sure.

ROI on Blogging - Enterprise 2.0

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 07:25:08 GMT

Jon Husband of Wirearchy and Lee Bryant of Headshift, have recently put in a lot of thought on Enterprise 2.0 ...

"Will we see more written about what will probably come to be called Management 2.0 ? No doubt. Will there be massive struggles with this new set of conditions and ongoing resistance to coming to terms with these dynamics ? No doubt. Will resisting and ignoring and denying work? Maybe for the short term, but these new conditions are not going away ... and I posit that the issues engendered by linked interconnected bottom-up activities will necessitate significant amount of unlearning and re-learning, notably in the enterprise setting." Jon Husband

And Lee, building on Euan and Dion Hinchcliffe's recent posts on Enterprise 2.0 writes:

On the technical level, the integration challenges are non-trivial:

identity / Single Sign On (SSO);

internal application integration;

legislative obligations for data retention, privacy and audit; and,

availability.

But the integration of people, practise and (dare I say) process is even harder, with challenges such as:

devolving responsibility and promoting a DIY culture;

encouraging people to grow their own internal and external networks;

stimulating conversation and debate by overcoming fear of exposure; and,

for many people, simply overcoming the idea that any form of online communication beyond email is "not part of their job."

Related to these, is this neat post by Hugh Macleod on Corporate Blogging calling for "humanification" and "smarter conversations". And Britt Blaser, always sharp, talks about the People Law trumping the Power Law - I see this relevant to the conversation as well, as enterprise needs to realize the value in People Power.

I'd like to add another dimension to this conversation, which was triggered by presentations and comments I heard at the IAMAI Digital Marketing Summit last week in Mumbai. All pointing to the fact that there is immense potential for web 2.0 or social media (call it by whatever name you wish) in Marketing. In particular, I liked what Ajit Balakrishnan of Rediff had to say - here's the gist ... I may have missed a few words:

"Bloggers are our new gatekeepers of information. Journalists are hesitant to write up stories, unless bloggers are already talking about it. We get real news from the bloggers -- everything else is a press release. Smart marketers need them"

Rajiv Dhingra, who it was a pleasure to meet, summarizes the summit:

"The conclusion was similar to all the previous discussions and in fact this is to be noted - Marketers are now asking other media and medium what is the ROI!

...and thus concluded the IAMAI Digital Media Conference 2007.

I wish there were more marketers and especially FMCG product brand managers who had attended this conference because it’s the offline world which needs to know that it is time to start switching online."

It's encouraging to hear marketers talk of blogs and social networking and building communities online, however, like Rajiv, I heard many unspoken doubts on Return On Investment (ROI) from such engagements. Its a question I raised at the summit. Is the industry doing anything to develop metrics to measure impact? Are they talking to bloggers about it? Simple answer - NO.

I know ROI is an obsession with marketers, and we would fail in our jobs as consultants in this area, if we did not address them. We've done the first part of our jobs by getting the words 'blog' and 'online communities' into the lexicon of marketers. They have some sense of what these can do. We can talk of benefits of corporate blogging, evangelism, influence on brand perceptions, using these tools to empower your customers to become your marketers. We can hold their hands on how to set these up for their companies. There's been some good thinking by Charlene Li at Forrester in October 2006 on ROI of blogging.

But do we have a model in place yet? Are we giving them more tangible, quantifiable metrics, the equivalent of or alternatives to GRPs and cost-per-clicks? Are we doing enough, in the area of showing them ways to manage risks involved ? How are we helping them 'market' social media internally to their VPs and CEOs who often tend to be older, more rigid, more in fear of giving up control.

Leaps of faith aren't always easy to achieve from organizations without any estimation of how it can affect bottomline. Bottom-up or top-down, as much as we want 'them' to speak our language, 'we' need to speak their's too. I was chatting with Veer and Rajiv at the summit, and I do believe it is time to get bloggers and advertisers/marketers together into a discussion on how this can come about. This isn't just an India issue, I know many of my blog buddies in other parts of the world are grappling with these concerns too.

Any takers? Suggestions?

Update: [link via Dave Winer - Nicholas Carr talks about two studies that provide some data on adoption of six prominent Web 2.0 tools - blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, social networking, and content tagging. "Although Forrester didn't break out adoption rates by tool, it did say that CIOs saw relatively high business value in RSS, wikis, and tagging and relatively low value in social networking and blogging." Read more at Nicholas Carr's blog.]

Blog Housekeeping

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 07:49:43 GMT

I finally got around to doing some housekeeping on my blog. Have edited the categories and links - am hoping they will render alright. The nice thing is each of them acts as a separate blog - so readers can subscribe separately to specific categories that interest you!

Here they are - links and RSS feeds :

Weblog Home : (all categories) subscribe

Blogs & Blogging : subscribe

Indian Culture : subscribe

Bridging The Divide - Rural India : subscribe

Business Opportunities : subscribe

Pop!Tech 2005 : subscribe

Creativity : subscribe

Ethnography : subscribe

Qualitative Research Perspectives : subscribe

Social Tools in Disasters : subscribe

Internet & Computing : subscribe

Knowledge Management : subscribe

Voice of the World : subscribe

Random Views : subscribe

Skype & VOIP : subscribe

Social Tools and Social Media : subscribe

Telephony : subscribe

Usability & Design : subscribe

Youth Rap & Insights : subscribe

Test

Sat, 15 Oct 2005 04:03:57 GMT

Testing ... i think my blog is back :).

Sat, 11 Jun 2005 11:32:33 GMT

Reboot 7 - Social Tagging - Lee Bryant

Lee Bryant from Headshift Moments is talking about Social Tagging. Am really enjoying his presentation. He shares how he implemented Social Tagging for BBC News. Bookmarked and tagged stories of interest. Overcomes a limiting culture - fits the reboot/remixing culture - I tag and bookmark stories in my own way. Another example of local aggregation of news, blogs, links, photos, govt info for a small group in Brixton. Objective was to build up a body of content over the where surfacing themes and issues derived from linkages derived from text analysis. 18,000 keyword stems emerged.

A thrid application - perspective on Mental Health - one of the issues was to define the taxonomy - but that wouldn't work as it would be imposing a top-down view on the community. So, combined top-down data with bottoms-up tagging. Lesbian and gay groups started adopting tags early - themes emerging - a drive towards negotiating shared meaning in a vast field.

Social Tags Tomorrow - Lee suggests we need to humanise the enterprise by escaping the deadzone of taxonomies. Instead, use aggregation for search, shared tags and bookmarks for structured language, weblogs as sense-making networks and wikis as action spaces. Benefit for users - they wont need to mess with messy CMS systems that dont work.

As a commenter at the session said, social tagging could well bypass really expensive market research projects! My question to Lee was how do you get companies to accept and buy-in to this bottom-up approach, when it really means relinquishing control. Lee's advice - point out what isn't working, show them how they can build on top of what they have.

I'd love to discuss this some more - Ton has much to add here too.

Fri, 04 Mar 2005 01:16:04 GMT

Global Knowledge Review February Issue

The February issue of the Global Knowledge Review is out. Every issue has one article published online - this month its one i wrote called Get that smile from the heart. I'd touched upon the issue of Client Delight in a post last year, and fleshed it out with some more thinking for the article. Here's an excerpt where i draw the difference between customer satisfaction and delight.

While such programs deliver on expectations, customers today 'expect' far more from them. Service organizations try and out-do each other vying to send the most innovative New Year card - this year with a bottle of champagne attached, for instance. Copycat marketing programs with high budgets do the same. Does that delight you? Unfortunately, these gestures though bigger, aren't always better. If you are a high value customer, more often than not, you are the 20% for a whole host of service providers. These gestures have become hygiene factors, offered to all in that group, they aren't impromptu, they've lost their element of surprise, and aren't unexpected anymore. Cynical customers see through these and don't want to pay to sustain them. And sometimes, they'd rather not see the plastic smile.

We see the mushrooming of several small boutique service organizations. The genesis is in individuals breaking away from larger groups and starting their own boutiques. They can do this because they carry clients with them. Is it simply because of their skills? What is it? The promise is always the same - more expertise, lower overheads, talk to me without the layers. De-layering requires empowerment. In large service businesses, this is always more difficult as the labor is often low cost low wage, and there is high turnover. Still it is that 'X' factor that makes for delight, and binds the client to the provider.

Drawing a difference between customer satisfaction and delight, these actions and gestures might bring the company high scores on customer satisfaction. Take the case of any large five star hotel chain – you are satisfied when you get the fruit basket in your room, you love the chocolate left on your bed, you smile back at the staff when they greet you with smiles. However, service with a smile is now so over-baked at least in this part of the world. Its what's expected from any hotel today. And everyone does it.

Does it bring about delight? Gain loyalty? Shouldn't we be working towards a new interpretation of delight that builds loyalty, which works from within, which tugs at the heart and not the mind. Each customer has a mental model about what to expect from a service provider based on his or her experiences and delight can come from a really simple deviation from the expectations around the experience. For instance, when you are accustomed to being greeted by a frowning stewardess on your flight, a simple greeting without a frown can actually redefine your experience and hence your expectations in the future.

Delight to me is joy, it is heartfelt, it is love, it is a high. Its that little extra that makes you smile with the knowledge that you have made the right choice, a little reminder every so often that makes for stickiness. Something that conveys to you that you are special to us - and not just another client that will get the annual New Year card or be on our mailing list. Something that in a very personalized way, differentiates you from other clients or in the least, leaves you with that perception.

More subtly, delight makes you my brand ambassador, by telling stories and infecting others with your experiences. And mind you, without any monetary incentive. These stories are the commitment, they are the reward from the exchange, they bring a smile from the heart.

Delight is about flow, it's a customer virus that stems from stories and experiences. The contrast is the bad experience; we all know they are told many more times. Are you setting up your customer satisfaction and delight programme as an insurance policy or is the thrust on creating growth?

Delight is also about networking these experiences, about employees getting to hear them back, a feedback loop. This is the stimulus, it is the training ground. It is what makes the entrepreneur so effective. How can you make them easy to emulate and how transfer good stories - what are the strategies, what is the sharing approach?

There are lots of interesting articles in the February issue, on knowledge mapping (Denham at his eloquent self), the ubiquity of storytelling, on the social life of KM tools, on why traditional KM systems fail to succeed in Indian organisations, on knowledge risk. Check them out!

Tue, 02 Nov 2004 14:10:39 GMT

Virtual Global Teams

Fast Company Now points to a study on Global Teams. Here's Ross Mayfield's take on the post - Productivity in far-flung teams :

"University of North Carolina professor of information and technology management Arvind Malhotra studied 54 global virtual teams in 31 companies, from Intel to Royal Dutch Shell, with a suprising finding:

These virtual teams, largely composed of people who have never met, were not only productive but also more innovative than "face-to-face teams."
"They make decisions faster with more input from others and develop policies that are implemented worldwide with fewer problems than conventional teams," said Malhotra.

His research also dispells myths of virtual teams:

Myth: Far-flung teams are deployed to save money on travel. Truth: High-performing global teams are measured on faster, better responses to rapidly changing environments.

Myth: Far-flung teams require hands-off leadership.
Truth: These teams require communication-intensive leaders. These team leaders check in on each of their members frequently, mentor them, and establish and communicate team norms.

Myth: Global team leaders don't deal directly with diversity.
Truth: Far-flung team leaders handle diversity purposefully, recognizing it early in the team's life cycle and leveraging it throughout the team's life cycle.

Myth: Face-to-face meetings are required early in a far-flung team's life cycle to build trust.
Truth: Global teams build trust through a planned team communication strategy and frequent in-process, team-tuning sessions mostly without ever meeting.

Myth: Given the restrictions of time and space differences, far-flung teams are best served by allocating one task to every member.
Truth: Far-flung teams build trust and simulate intellectual growth by pairing diverse members into subteams that perform highly interdependent tasks."

This is consistent with our experience that working virtually is simply more productive and innovative."

This is good to read as I find myself working increasingly in global teams. In my experience, success is not driven only because of time and cost efficiencies, nor is it simply driven by tasks performed. It comes from the ability to embrace diversities making for better innovation, it depends upon how the team/s are set up to motivate each other and build upon interdependencies, it relies on the collective power of the team. And finally on trust that allows the team to manage the uncertainty and complexity of virtual collaboration.

I found a paper that discusses Communication and trust in global virtual teams - and explores whether trust can exist in global virtual teams; how trust might be developed in a team and what communication behaviors might facilitate trust in global virtual teams.

Although the paper highlights the importance of social communication on building trust and therefore efficiencies in virtual teams, it is an old paper based on research done over 6 years ago. I wonder how that might have changed today with social software. What does social software mean in the context of where we work and how we work ? How will our workplaces and social interactions metamorphosize (is this a word?) and transform with adoption of such tools ? What frameworks can we use to examine the differences in the nature of trust, modes of communication and workspaces across different types of virtual teams ?

Tue, 12 Oct 2004 05:49:51 GMT

Blogexperimenting

I've been terribly tied up organizing my trip to the US (Connecticut, Boston, New York and possibly Maine) and to London. Its a short trip this time - 2 weeks in the US and 4 days in London.

I leave tonight with a somewhat fluid itinerary - meetings with clients on ethnography, qualitative research .... AND .... i have some of them interested in some blog prototypes we are developing. I'm terribly excited about the possibility that one of the companies has shown interest in experimenting with internal blogging on projects. Some of the thoughts we're going with are around the use of blogs/wikis for research and innovations, benefits, why its a unique opportunity to adopt these practices in long-term research projects that span different countries, and what we expect to gain from the experiment.

All this accompanied by personal stories and lots of learnings and examples of blogging, fotoblogs, moblogs, wikis, social networks. Will share more later .... as it evolves. Any thoughts on this ..... appreciated !

Meanwhile, apologies to people i need to get back to on stuff - apologies Rob, apologies Bill, apologies David ...... for not getting back on articles and our discussions .... i keep thinking of the issues we have been talking about - and will respond in time !

Fri, 24 Sep 2004 05:00:13 GMT

Link Bytes

Some links, comments and articles that i've read with interest recently :

It's Not Just Usability - Joel Spolsky: Over the next decade, I expect that software companies will hire people trained as anthropologists and ethnographers to work on social interface design. Instead of building usability labs, they’ll go out into the field and write ethnographies. And hopefully, we’ll figure out the new principles of social interface design. It’s going to be fascinating… as fun as user interface design was in the 1980s… so stay tuned.

User Experience Resource Collection. Just bookmark it! [elearningpost]
Blogging for Books : "The format of the book review is 30 years out of date," he says, where blogging offers the opportunity to discuss not only the book, but the context and process of its creation. It also puts the book's creator out in front of his or her work, a notion that may not sit well with authors who value their privacy.
Chicago Tribune, via textually.org : IMing Revolution Suggests Broader Social Implications : This generation is one of multitaskers who believe they can and are getting more things done simultaneously. It's hard to believe that multitaskers can do all those tasks well, as anybody who has driven behind someone on a cell phone will tell you. But that issue aside, maybe we are slowly wiring future generations in a new way. Maybe 40 years from now, we'll drive and yak as easily as we walk and chew gum today. Maybe we're turning ourselves into what our newest cell phones are: portable units capable of communicating in multiple formats. .... [The Shifted Librarian]
Jeremy Zawodny asks: "People ask about Yahoo offering web services, but I'm not sure what services a user or developer would want. In other words, if I was going to make a big stink about it, I'm not sure what I'd choose to target first. Search? Bookmarks? Finance? Messenger? Sports? There's a lot of potential and a lot to choose from. So that's the point of this post. For the sake of my curiosity, what web services would you like to see Yahoo offer? Not things that'd be cool but you'd never use, but the ones that'd actually be useful. What web services would you like to see Yahoo offer? Not things that'd be cool but you'd never use, but the ones that'd actually be useful." Lots of goodies in the comments.
Flemming writes about Marxism, Open Source and New Economy : A free market is good. For people to participate in a free market, they need to be free to choose, and they need some kind of tools that allow them to have something valuable to give to others. The internet and open source have opened up a bunch of areas, creating new free markets. Now we need better communication tools, to allow larger numbers of people to coordinate their actions. We initially need ways of capitalizing such networks of people. And then we need more technologies virtualized and made free. And eventually the centralized capitalist bureaucracies will go the way of their communist cousins, and crumple under their own weight, because they can't compete with well-organized free people. Will take some work, but it is probably inevitable.
Getting the blogroll links out of Technorati. Something that bugs me every time I use Technorati is the way the listings get clogged up with blogroll links. I wouldn't mind so much but they're usually the same links over and over again. What i'd like is for those links to be displayed separately. I have in mind some kind of reverse blogroll box down the right hand side with the remaining entries listed pretty much as they are now. [Curiouser and curiouser!]
Tom Peters takes on corporate cluelessness. Tom Peters: Idiots! Ahh, it's nice to see that Tom has put up an RSS feed. [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
Richard Macmanus On Collaboration.: Today I had a meeting with a large multinational content and document management vendor (who shall remain nameless). I was struck by how many times they used the word "collaboration" to describe their current software. Collaboration is also a trendy word in the world of social software. But the difference is that social software folks use collaboration in the bottom-up sense - using weblogs, wikis and other new web technologies to empower the users.
Rob Paterson on Why Change is so difficult - The Story of the Fosbury Flop : Imagine we are back in the late 1960's and you are a high jump coach trying to convince an elite jumper to switch to the Flop. "You must be joking - I go over backwards! I will break my neck!" It took 10 years for the Flop to be adopted and then it was only the kids coming up who had nothing to lose who adopted it. Why if the Flop could deliver another foot of height was it so long in being adopted? This surely is the same issue that we face today as some of us talk about inserting conversation into organizations.
Julian points to a neat series by Amy Gahran who has started documenting patterns of blog posts. 3 of 7 posted so far.
Lilia shares her experience at AOIR 0.5 : Workshop on Qualitative Research : The discussion was floating around several themes: field boundaries, ethics, researcher role and methods and tools for data collection, analysis and representation, so I'll try to put my bits and pieces that way as well.

Fri, 06 Aug 2004 07:05:19 GMT

Technology, Community, Identity

I've had technology-community-identity on my mind for a while. Technology as the enabler and facilitator, community as a safe environment which encourages information flows and relationships, and persona or identity as that which becomes a part of my DNA as a result, and mirrors who i am.

Some of the linkages i see around me - this is just a starting point :

youth tribes/communities with distinctive lingo, rites of passage, rituals and values built around shared technology like IM, texting, etc
blogs, community and a sense of belongingness resulting in tacit or more overt membership in various communities with shared affinities
new forms of identity - how often have you been called or called yourself a 'blogger', a 'Ryzer' - i know i have been called these often - and they are some of my sources of identity today. Orkut-ian ? Ecadem-ician ? Tribe-r ? LinkedIn-er ? Flick'r-er? Zerodegrees-er ? - perhaps SNS providers should put some thought into naming their services in order to lend themselves to easy identity - afterall they're supposed to be about community and networking - and its a much stronger statement of belonging and identity to be able to say 'i'm a Ryzer', than to say 'i'm on Ryze'

What are the benefits of these linkages - perhaps the most obvious is that you feel a sense of belonging, ownership and pride in the community you belong to. And you begin to get addicted to the give and take.

Marketers would benefit so much from building such communities around their products and brands. MTV club, Skypers, iPod-ers, XBox-ers, eBay-ers, Amazon-ers, communities built around lifestyle brands or even insurance for that matter. For marketers, there could be so many benefits - apart from their customers feeling this sense of ownership towards the product or brand (and we know how useful that is in building loyalty), these communities could provide feedback chains, testing grounds for innovations, referral systems, and so much more.

Would love to hear about the linkages you see between technology, community and identity. And how communities around technology could be beneficial to you.

Fri, 06 Aug 2004 04:34:04 GMT

My blog's under scrutiny (2)

I just discovered this through a visitor's log - Maish uses my blog as an example in his feature 'Knowledge Sharing for SMEs using Weblogs', at the iKMS blog. He calls blogs the 'silent killer application of the decade' and lists out characteristics of my blog, benefits to my blog community, benefits to readers at large, and benefits to me as the blogger. And then makes the case for business blogs and blogs in Knowledge Management and Project Management.

Nice Maish :). This is the second instance i have noticed that someone's done an analysis of my blog :)

More pressure to get back to regular blogging !!!

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 18:15:43 GMT

Conversations Nurture Innovation

Joyce Wycoff, in her Heads Up on Organizational Innovation Weblog shares parts of an interview with John Seely Brown, former head of Xerox's Palo Alto Research centre :

"John Seely Brown, who calls himself Chief of Confusion, in an interview with Innovation@Work talks about managing innovation. His definition of innovation is the activities that follow invention, what he calls the "path to the sea from invention." We don’t agree with his definition but it’s always wise to learn from this thought leader. So, he states that you cannot "manage" invention, but you can nurture it. You can, however, manage the implementation of the invention.

How does he suggest nurturing invention?

His answer is based on his years at Xerox PARC managing some of the most creative (inventive) people around. PARC did a great job of nurturing invention but a pretty poor job of commercializing their ideas. So, JSB’s guidance on nurturing invention springs from a very successful source.

And the answer is ... conversations! Creating an environment where "serendipitous types of conversations" occur, a place where people from various disciplines bump into each other and start talking about possibilities. At PARC this space included wall-to-ceiling white boards, coffee pots and ways to capture the stuff on the white boards so that it would go to the individual work stations.

JSB reframed the question of how to manage invention to, "How do you enable really interesting conversations, how do you support those conversations, capture those conversations and find ways to keep the conversation going across multiple points of view." [link via Innovation Weblog]

I immediately thought of 'social software' in this context - weblogs as playgrounds that nurture "serendipitious types of conversations"? Wikis as whiteboards ? Coffee pots as spaces around which informal and personal interactions occur, like those enabled by IM tools coupled with presence tools like VOIP and cam ? And around which social networks can form ? Content Management Systems that enable flow ?

Sat, 03 Jul 2004 21:23:29 GMT

KM and Flow

Sleepless in Mumbai, i was compelled to exploring Flow and KnowledgeWorkshop, having read an article at Infoworld and being drawn to the names, as I'm particularly partial to the term "flow" in the context of Knowledge Management !

Quoting from the article :

".... includes gathering, authoring, organizing and publishing content. "Through the [Flow] authoring environment, users can access the Internet, bring in RSS feeds, use contextual capabilities, and publish content as e-mail," Conrad said. "Flow provides collaborative content and knowledge management at the client level. For example, Flow allows workgroups or individual users to repurpose a Weblog posting or a news feed for an internal project, or allows groups to collaborate on content to be published to the Internet. Flow's peer-to-peer collaboration engine supports shared spaces so multiple users can edit, organize, and use the same content. "

"Also approaching KM from the user's perspective, Learning Management Solutions last week introduced its company and its KnowledgeWorkshop software. The software allows users to create personally relevant associations and connections between information drawn from a variety of sources, including Web pages, e-mail, documents, PowerPoint slides, databases, and spreadsheets. These connections form an information map, called a knowledge base, that is packed down into a single XML file that can be e-mailed or exchange online, said Graham Glynn, CEO of Learning Management Solutions. "A lot of enterprise KM systems are not working because the individual person is not invested in the effort. They need to have a personal payback to managing their own information," Glynn said. Giving end-users ownership to content and knowledge is key, according to Glynn. To that end, KnowledgeWorkshop allows users to create their knowledge bases, organize them to their liking, and decide which parts are shared with others, he said."

Having browsed through their websites - there are guided tours and free trial offers (Flow works on Macs) - i feel they could be pretty neat spaces for collaborative work, by encouraging users to be in greater control of how they use these systems.

But i missed (or did i not see them given the late hour?) not seeing any tools to :

indicate presence - for instance, telling us who's available, who's logged in and therefore present, who i can ping for a query, and ensuring that a response is received
encourage real-time, 'live' conversations - where voice applications, small cam shows, conferencing facilities would be useful.

Both essential to encouraging flow, in a knowledge environment that is social where in a recent piece, Denham Grey makes the point, "documentation alone does not = knowledge".

Tue, 08 Jun 2004 08:04:53 GMT

Weblogs in learning experiences

"Masters of Design.

All articles from this month's fantastic issue of FastCompany are now online. The feature article, Masters of Design, looks at how and why design matters." [elearningpost]

Read too Maish's take on 'How to use weblogs to create engaging learning experiences' where he outlines a design method that incorporates three attributes of weblogs - 1) personal point of view, 2) chronological nature and 3) byte-sized posts. He concludes by saying :

"In conclusion, I would like to stress that the informal and engaging attributes of the weblog format can be used even in the light of tightly scheduled and highly focused training situations. The simple alternatives outlined in this paper can liberate us from the tyranny of product-oriented delivery and help us build continuous, engaging and memorable learning experiences"

Thu, 27 May 2004 04:47:09 GMT

Corporate Blogging - Blogs as Paths in Open Spaces

One more way of looking at blogging in organisations ...

"Blogging Paths in the Grass - Will Pate.

Jon Strande was blogging the other day about how Slonian corporate structures divorce employees from each other and customers. He told this litle story that sparked some thinking about one of my favorite subjects these days, organizational blogging.

An architect once designed a cluster of buildings. When asked by the landscape crew where to pave the sidewalks, he told them to plant grass between all the buildings, wait a year, then, after the occupants had worn the most useful paths, the architect told the landscape crew to pave the pathways that the occupants had created.

In an organization blogs can operate much the same way. They become open spaces where people can create their own path. Discussions emerge and the lines wear deeper into the solid ground, creating meaningful relationships built on common interests."

Tue, 25 May 2004 19:47:42 GMT

Corporate Blogging - Blog the Blog !

Couldn't resist breaking my blogging go-slow thats accompanying a short break from work, for this ....

Corporate blogging makes the comics

"This comic strip by Harvey Schwadron predates Bill Gates' public endorsement of corporate blogging as a smart way to communicate with customers by several days."

Thu, 06 May 2004 11:21:34 GMT

The Power Of Conversation

Talking Point .... communicating from an organisational point of view.... the power of storytelling and conversations !

"....Humans create, reinforce, and disseminate knowledge through -- guess what? -- conversations," says Bill Isaacs, founder of Dialogos, a consulting firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts that practices the art of organizational problem solving by fostering careful, in-depth conversation. "It's something we forgot, and it turns out to be at the very center of the new economy. Companies that perform better in the marketplace are the ones that do a better job of conducting these conversations," adds Isaacs, who is also the author of "Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together: A Pioneering Approach to Communicating in Business and in Life" (Doubleday, 1999)....."

"........Managers and executives have always known that important decisions are made through casual talk, rather than at formal boardroom presentations. For that matter, employees instinctively know that organizations have two distinct communication networks: the formal and the informal. And they know to rely on the informal part -- the rumor mill, for example -- when they're trying to find out what's really happening. What is new, however, is the argument that informal conversation should assume a more formal status; that it should be promoted as a key component of an organization's business model -- that companies should actively assume the role of talk-show host.

In fact, some companies have already begun experimenting with the notion of informal conversation -- among them, the design firm IDEO Product Development, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, and the Home Depot, an Atlanta-based hardware chain with stores in more than 800 North American cities. Together, their success stories serve as a guide for running your own company talk show -- and for getting the kind of ratings you need to keep your show on the air."

Sun, 02 May 2004 13:09:27 GMT

Corporate Blogging - Blog as Your Front Porch (2)

Ok - this is getting to be fun. Ton picks up Brandon Wirtz's metaphor of the Front Porch as an effective elevator pitch for corporate blogging and wonders ....

"Now, here in the Netherlands front porches would take way too much space, so we do without them. But the cultural icon is recognizable to me, watching American tv shows. I'm wondering what metaphor we should have to change this eloquent pitch into, for different cultural realms. Sidewalks for busy cities? Spending the first few hours of the evening out by the fountain on the market square? The corner café? These are all western examples, but how about India for instance?"

Thinking of a suitable Indian metaphor here. And sharing some of my thought processes.

We have the traditional 'aangan' - its a courtyard - usually an inner courtyard - a more 'feminine' domain - with women offering prayer to 'tulsi' (basil) there - cleaning vegetables, doing shared chores, tending children who are playing, catching up on gossip etc. Men don't really hang out there - unless they're old and retired.

Men prefer the 'chauraha' or the village square - sitting together under a large banyan tree, smoking beedis and hookahs, discussing current affairs, events, politics and philosophy.

Hmmm ... perhaps not quite the right metaphor !

Then there's the verandah - 'barandah' in Hindi, 'otla' in Gujarati. The outer space of the home where you can watch the world go by. This could be an outer room of the house, or an open space running around the house, or an outer courtyard.

From a large city, urban point of view - i have been thinking - there perhaps is no concept of a front porch anymore. We invite people into our living rooms freely, our main doors open into our living rooms, in many places you will find main doors are kept open during the day and neighbours come in and out freely. Maybe, in some ways, our living rooms are our front porches.

The problem is with thinking of a metaphor that is all encompassing and takes care of the diversity across India. Clubs and lounges for the senior executives, coffee shops for kids, 'kitty' party venues for women ? I don't really know. These seem more like hang-outs than 'front porches'.

Can anyone help me come up with a good metaphor for India ? And for other cultures around the world ?

Would love to hear your thoughts !

Mon, 26 Apr 2004 04:21:31 GMT

Virtual Mobile Office

Asia embraces the Virtual Office, an article that depicts how the SARS epidemic gave birth to the Virtual Office, and a boost for computer sales in the region. And once having sampled it, companies are embracing this corporate culture of mobility.

Some excerpts :

".... And thanks to the broad range of technologies now available, the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) last year and the financial savings that tele-working can mean, an increasing number of Asian businesses have embraced the concept of the virtual office."

" ... Using text messaging by mobile phone, e-mail, online chat and Internet voice conferencing, he says he has been able to smoothly manage an operation with dozens of employees in two cities in the Southern Philippines. “Nothing compares to being there,” he said, “but if you've trained people well at what they need to do, the system works.” As the owner of a medium-size business, Go chose a system that costs next to nothing to operate. After investing in new PCs for his offices, mobile phones for himself and senior executives, and a laptop, he uses inexpensive or free software to do things that once only big-spending multinationals could. Instead of spending thousands of dollars on long distance calls, Go uses the Skype.com voice-over-Internet system to speak to employees in the office. Through its website, Skype gives away a stripped-down version of the program at no cost."

".....As a Cisco Systems white paper put it: “Building a mobile environment has less to do with installing technology than with creating a corporate culture around mobility.” – International Herald Tribune"

Fri, 23 Apr 2004 04:20:18 GMT

Interesting Links

Sharing a list of what's caught my interest - a reading list of sorts for me !

* StoryatWork. [link via Maish]. A wonderful collection of articles and resources there on Storytelling.

* Logic from Chaos? - efforts to create a "chaotic computer"

* YouThink! [via WorldChanging]

* Blogging in Schools - Parts 1 & 2 [via elearnspace]

* Small Pieces Loosely Joined - Kids version [David Weinberger]

* Getting Close to the Customer - Quantitative vs Qualitative Approaches [via Dial.Log - an interesting discovery today - and another example of corporate blogging]

* Ethnography - User Research Analysis [via Commoncraft via peterme]

* Implicit Structure and the Dynamics of Blogspace and more papers from HP Information Dynamics Lab [via Lilia]

* At first glance, a tongue-in-cheek take on research information into blogs from the PR world

* Dave Pollard's series on A Prescription for Business Innovation- parts one and two are up.

Thu, 22 Apr 2004 18:29:13 GMT

Moblogging Opportunities for Research Teams

Annotated Pictures form an integral part of any ethnographic study. And i see huge potential for Moblogging or Photoblogs as a form of sharing, exchanging ideas and reporting - especially when you have a large team like we do on this study.

Stuart and i are experimenting with a prototype for a Project Blog on Movable Type. Remotely, as we are worlds apart - he set up the templates for me and gave me instructions via Skype.

Here's a screen shot - this is a dummy really to protect Client confidentiality :

On the left panel we have navigator links -

* project stages - initial site visit, detailed ethnographies, prototyping, follow-up interviews etc

* site names - a list of all sites for the study with site names

* other links - conference call scheduling, formal client feedback, correspondence, project specifications (templates for observations, reporting, interview guides, project objectives etc), cribs and reading notes and links

* researcher names with links to each

* archiving by day and month

On the right side - the calender recent posts and recent comments highlights.

With project stage for each site by researcher as navigational categories, we built the ability to have all of this in one space (as opposed to sending individual reports weekly over 5 months asynchronously), and to sort by several layers - eg. if you want to read all work done by one of the researchers just clink on the link with the researcher's name. Likewise, you can view all activities around Site A for the research. And with comments enabled you could get feedback that is synchronous. And set up announcements and schedules too. And expand our shared learning through reading notes and links.

This screen shot shows how each post would appear - each post would have author, date, and links to the categories it fit into. Eg. title of post - Interview with Admin head, author - dina mehta, categories - Site A; Conceptual Prototypes Visit. And comments enabled to encourage feedback that is synchronous, in real-time and shared by all so learning takes place in this collaborative framework.

Now compare this with more traditional ways of reporting in such studies. Weekly reports from each of the ethnographer teams, downloading pictures onto our machines, encrypting all of this and either sending each by email or uploading onto an ftp server. And each report and picture gets slotted in different folders. As also all our correspondence. Which takes up huge amounts of time. Is asynchronous and not in real time. And doesn't give us the 'gestalt' of learnings on the study in one space. Just not efficient.

Add to this, Musiclogging (thanks Seb, Marc for bringing this to my notice) and Audioblogging. And then, combined with the Online Presence Spiral, it could be something really special.

I think it would be pretty awesome if we could develop this type of approach for using with clients - it has emerged as a result of the recent study i am conducting - and i thought i'd share it here so we can improve upon it. I'm fairly convinced that the benefits can be huge - especially when you think of multi-client projects or studies spread across several locations.

What do you feel ?

Sun, 28 Mar 2004 07:24:04 GMT

Corporate Blogging - Elevator Pitch Anyone ?

Judith is running a contest at the socialsoftwareweblog, inspired by a conversation with Rob :

"Today I was talking to Robert Paterson, a well-respected member of my weblogging cohort, who lives on Prince Edward Island. We were conversing about attempting to explain the benefits of weblogging to our non-blogging friends, acquaintances, and business clients, and receiving blank stares in return for our efforts. [BTW, Robert has a great blog post on this today — Sex Education and a 6 year old.]

As we were discussing this dilemna, we came up with the idea of holding an ‘Elevator Pitch Competition’ [extremely concise presentation delivered to potential clients — not lasting more than a minute, or a short elevator ride] to describe the potential benefits of corporate weblogging. I have included related links to two current articles on creating an effective ‘Elevator Pitch’ below.

There will be simple rules: One entry per author, entry between 50 - 110 words.

We will have an international panel of respected webloggers to judge the entries, and will publish the winning entry here on the Social Software weblog and also, potentially, on the weblogs of the esteemed panel of judges."

It would be lovely to get fresh views on the subject - there's been a lot of talk about finding this elevator pitch - give it a shot - and look out for updates, rules, tips, announcements and incentives coming up at the blog.

Sun, 28 Mar 2004 05:50:48 GMT

Virtual Presence - making it real

Dave Pollard asks the question - WHY HAVEN'T WE DEVELOPED 'WORK-AROUNDS' FOR BLOGGING'S LIMITATIONS :

"To me, the greatest limitation is blogs' lack of integration and 'transitionability' with other communication tools. Why haven't we developed generally-accepted work-arounds that allow us to transition from blog comments to e-mail threads, IM, telephony, wikis and other tools, and back again? Have we become so used to being led around the nose by the functionality (and lack thereof) of communication tools that we've lost our imagination and social will to develop means to jump to better tools when the one we're working isn't optimal? Skype was one of the Top Technologies of the Year in Business 2.0's list, and it's wonderful, and free, so why isn't everyone using it to extend the relationships they develop on blogs? And why are webcams still ridiculed, when everyone agrees facial expresssion and bosy language add immensely to communication, and we now have the high-speed bandwidth (well, 47% of us have anyway per a recent study) to accommodate multi-media conversations? Why do so few people take up my (and others', from what they tell me) invitations to call them, Skype them, IM them, to allow the iteration (back-and-forth) that is the essence of true conversation? And why, when we do make that transition, and meet someone who's become a 'friend' through our blogs, is the first meeting or conversation in aother medium so awkward, even jarring?"

Interesting question .. something i've been working on for a while now. Its also a question that people like Ton and Stuart have been thinking about. Sometimes in the context of blogs, at other times when discussing social networks and still others when re-looking at KM systems. Ton, in a comment at one of my posts writes :

"What strikes me most in your sketch is the combination of the wish to 'flow', to come as close to physical presence over time/geographical/cultural distance as possible, with joining a whole spectrum of different media. The latter is the key to the whole thing, media mix, is my guess. Every now and then, when I talk about blogging, someone says "yeah but blogging can't beat ... " or "isn't fit to " etc. Thing is it doesn't need to, as long as I can use a whole range of media alongside eachother.

One or two days ago I skyped with Stuart. While we talked we looked at my blog, I send him links through the chatbox, we edited a page in my Wiki, and visited several websites together. Just as you would in a f2f conversation, pick a book from the shelf and read a passage from it, point to or leaf through a stack of papers on the desk, and jointly doodle on the whiteboard, referring to a presentation poster hanging in the corridor.

Being able to combine media, and let information migrate between them easily and effortlessly. The question would be if this is at all KM, or more communication science. I don't care really.

Would we be able, through the elegant combination of media, to reduce the hindering effects that technology mediation introduces into person(s) to person(s) communication. Or are there mediation aspects that actually improve the richness of communication above that in a f2f setting? This to me is an intriguing question. Can we make virtual presence feel real? "

Jon Udell in an interesting article on The Social Enterprise says :

"Computer-mediated communication is the lifeblood of social software. When we use e-mail, instant messaging, Weblogs, and wikis, we’re potentially free to interact with anyone, anywhere, anytime. But there’s a trade off. Our social protocols map poorly to TCP/IP. Whether the goal is to help individuals create and share knowledge or to enrich the relationship networks that support sales, collaboration, and recruiting, the various kinds of enterprise social software aim to restore some of the context that’s lost when we move our interaction into the virtual realm. In networked environments, everything we do can be monitored. Absent the natural cues that establish social context — it’s hard to see groups form at the water cooler or hear voices in the hallway through e-mail or IM — social software systems ask us to strike a bargain. If individuals agree to work transparently, they (and their employers) can know more, do more, and sell more....

And ends with this :

"Are we entering a brave new world or is cyberspace catching up to the way things work in meatspace? The answer to both questions is yes."

All of these are related and important questions - questions relating to Presence - questions not merely restricted to blogs but that can be extended to all forms of 'virtual' communication in groups, communities and organisations that engender flow.

Following links from Sebastian Fiedler's blog, i discovered more interesting stuff in this area - Jon Husband says :

"Building relationships and workable connections that create something - that takes time, frayed nerves, affinity, dialogue, sharing ... of visions, or values or desires. We have to find ways that are less "flat" of getting to know each other online, And, probably the only way to get there is by learning what "presence" is online and how we will each individually use it or respond to it or manipulate it "

And a wonderful paper titled, At The Heart of it All - The Concept of Presence [link via Therese Ornberg]

Back to Dave's post, as i read it, i really wanted to pick up the phone and chat with him right then. And then, add Ton and Stuart to the conversation as well, as we have been talking about issues of integrating multimedia into blogs and other collaborative spaces. And have an impromptu group discussion there and then.

Some of us have 'skype me' buttons at our main pages.- Stuart has gone one step further into building a Skyperoll and is running a prototype - a SkypeBlog - that attempts to bring bloggers and skypers together so conversations are accelerated.

I wonder if it would be a good idea to have that button and an IM equivalent at the bottom of each of our blog posts. In the bar that has comments and permalinks. Along with presence indicators - so the reader would know if i'm available to chat or talk. Not sure whether existing blog software providers allow it - i'm pretty sure Radio doesn't yet.

Fri, 26 Mar 2004 14:47:00 GMT

Village of Creative Warriors

My friend Avi has updated his Ryze page - a neat creative idea and a wonderful underlying theme - of building a village of creative warriors - a non-hierarchical work environment and society - an interconnected, interdependent unit.

Here's the beginning ... read more at his page :

"The year...2004 A.D. The world is occupied by neo-Romans. All? Not quite!

A village inhabited by indomitable Gauls is holding out, strong as ever, against the invader. Life is not easy for the Roman legionaries stationed in the fortified camps of Adnauseam, Delirium, Hierarchium and Opprobrium...The Romans, it’s said, gave the world civilization. Among the benefits, it passed on were systems, structures...and hierarchies...as the winning concepts of human operation.

The world, ever since, has had not much scope for warriors! No longer were there Uptoantix, Justforkix, Polyphonix...there was only posts. Now one was a legionnaire, Centurian, Legatus, Tribunus, General etc...and man swapped individuality for posts!

The Garrison tents have given way to factory floors...and factory floors made way to cubicles. In these Modern Times, people were told to be better nut twisters and button pushers...specialists!........................"

It was easy to spot me in his list of creative warriors :):) - he calls me Blogqualitatrix - the dream chaser, who leads the charge of dream chasers !

Fri, 12 Mar 2004 19:16:34 GMT

IM in the Workplace

The Shifted Librarian calls this the 'Most Depressing Moment of the CIL Conference.'

"Mary Lee Kennedy is offering her "Top Tech Trends," and instant messaging is one of them. She asked how many of the hundreds of people in the room use IM for work purposes, and six (maybe seven) hands went up. If you take away Aaron, Michael, Bob, and me, that leaves two hands. Two freaking hands from people at a tech conference who use IM for work!!!!!!"

Rick Klau who's recently joined SocialText as head of Business Development comments :

"Jenny - I totally understand your frustration. I recently left a mid-sized software company - people who definitely get it. Yet only two of us in the entire company (of more than 100 employees) used IM.

Now I'm at a company of 7, and not only do they all use IM, but we have an always-on IRC channel to which any of us can raise a virtual hand to ask questions. The difference is staggering: less e-mail, quicker turn-around on time-sensitive issues, and a steeper learning curve (i.e., meaning that I'm up to speed faster) by observing the conversations around me without being included in endless e-mail threads that don't apply.

At some point others will figure this out, right?

Right?!"

I certainly hope so !

You do have encrypted enterprise IM available - so i don't buy the argument that its not secure.

I do feel the new generation of employees will bring it into the workplace.

Some companies are already listening ! They want presence indicators, they want quick, real-time communication. Combine traditional IM with Skype-like voice quality and you might have a winner.