(I've been meaning to do this for months - probably years, actually, but been too lazy/busy. When I upgraded my Radio Userland software recently, the WYSIWYG editing no longer worked. Lazy/busy won out yet again, but this time it was easier to move the blog.)
11:39:47 AM    
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Today's overused buzzword, innovation might be defined as the constant quest for "the next big thing," but is innovation always a good thing? Maybe not, if it's not placed right where it belongs, under the watchful eye of strategy. Michael Porter's Big Ideas article in Fast Company is a refreshing reminder, despite the fact that it was published in Feb. 2001. Here's a clip from the conclusion:

If people in the organization don't understand how a company is supposed to be different, how it creates value compared to its rivals, then how can they possibly make all of the myriad choices they have to make? Every salesman has to know the strategy -- otherwise, he won't know who to call on. Every engineer has to understand it, or she won't know what to build.

The best CEOs I know are teachers, and at the core of what they teach is strategy. They go out to employees, to suppliers, and to customers, and they repeat, "This is what we stand for, this is what we stand for." So everyone understands it. This is what leaders do. In great companies, strategy becomes a cause. That's because a strategy is about being different. So if you have a really great strategy, people are fired up: "We're not just another airline. We're bringing something new to the world."

7:04:29 PM    
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Are businesses figuring out yet how to manage information with blogs and RSS? "By Invitation Only" (CIO Magazine, Sept 1, 2006) gives us a peek at a few companies that are (IMHO) fooling around with it as an alternative to email and intranets. I'm betting that this is just the tip of the iceberg. It's tough to see what's happening on corporate intranets, where business blogs may be privately proliferating.

I found Mike Gotta's quote surprising in its lack of vision,

"We don't really know how we can use RSS for work purposes," says Mike Gotta, principal analyst at the research firm Burton Group. While pioneering CIOs are already exploring some possibilities, they're all guessing at this stage, he notes."

While CIOs may be just waking up to the potential power of RSS, Mike Gotta has been enlightening us on collaboration technologies long enough to see multiple uses in the enterprise. I have to assume that in this case, the reporter's translation was off base.

The problem is not a lack of vision (what could be in the future) nor a lack of application (what we can do now), but a lack of adoption. Busy CIOs are at the awareness stage, but  given the compelling need for relief from information overload in today's knowledge-driven businesses, expect them to move quickly along the adoption curve.

One approach is to start simply with RSS-driven status reporting. This application shifts an already mandated task to a technology that is more easily consumed, requiring minimal behavior changes and a straightforward measure of success. Rob Boothby has a great post on this topic, and suggests an even easier behavior change: use email and cc: the project blog. 

A manager would subscribe to the RSS feeds of each of his direct reports. The team lead for a short-term project would subscribe to categorized feeds of team members that pertain only to that project. An individual contributor might subscribe to his or her manager, coworkers, peers, and mentors in diverse parts of the company.

Management may attempt to control the flow of information so they can put their own spin on things, requesting group-based security to limit who can view their team's reports. Resist this request as much as possible, although compromise may be necessary for initial buy-in. In the long run, staff will adjust to the increased visibility of their reports, and an open communication channel will allow cross-fertilization of ideas throughout the company.

Beyond the internal usefulness, businesses that encourage intranet blogging can begin to mine the native talent looking for candidate external bloggers. The value proposition of carefully selected public bloggers is becoming more obvious as marketing objectives move beyond awareness towards engagement and relationship building activities.

What is your business doing with intranet-based blogs? What do you *wish* they were doing? Send me an email at collaborblabber@maximumspring.com

11:04:19 AM    
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Just how worried should organizations be about the potential "brain drain" as the workforce ages?

In Beating the Boomer Brain Drain Blues (CIO Magazine, 1/15/2006) Suzanna Patton highlights the use of knowledge management systems to combat the coming wave of baby boomer retirements. She quotes  David W. DeLong, author of Lost Knowledge: Confronting the Threat of an Aging Workforce: "Federal and state government, as well as industries such as aerospace, defense, energy and utilities, will be hit hard by the large-scale retirement of skilled workers. " Yes, the concerns are very real.

But things may not be as bad as they seem, if its true that "60 is the new 45". EJ Mundale explains (Healthday News, 8/30/2006) why organizations shouldn't count baby boomers out so quickly. Expect longer lifespans and healthier aging to change the age at which people stop contributing to the workforce, but don't relax yet!  The evidence shows a growing trend in older workers to find work that is meaningful and flexible. Will those gracefully aging Boomers stay with your organization?

Organizations must respond to the trend with an array of initiatives aimed at retaining older workers through their productive years, attracting new workers, and facilitating the transfer of knowledge between outgoing and incoming workers.

Moving beyond these survival tactics, leading organizations will look outside their own organization to incorporate external knowledge - from customers, partners, academia, and even competitors. Knowledge Management systems are an important part of the equation, but implemented alone, they will fail. As a living system, organizations can't must also update the processes, policies, and procedures as well as the corporate culture to support their overall objectives.

2:23:58 PM    
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"Until we show our people how collaboration and productivity tools can close more sales or help us meet more deadlines or build better products, they'll pay only lip service to this stuff." says Rob Preston, VP/Editor In Chief at InformationWeek.

Sounds simple, right? Consider the difficulties in calculating investment alone, which may include purchase price or licensing fees, installation and customization, and ongoing adminstration. So far, so good! You've deployed your collaboration tool... yet no one is using it. People don't want to make the effort to learn or use the new tools. Research shows that to get real value out of collaboration tools, you have to change your processes, and that takes additional investment. If you expect your users to adopt new processes, you'll also need to identify which processes they will drop, and overcome the natural human resistance to change.

Whether you use process reengineering or internal marketing to institute top-down process changes, or engage grass roots communities to accelerate bottom-up adoption, or some combination of both, you'll need to invest resources to succeed in technology adoption. Rebecca Wettermann, VP of research at Nucleus Research, considers the human aspects of technology adoption in another InformationWeek article.

So what happens when people attempt to follow Rob Preston's advice? Two possiblities are likely.

First, the "secret success-or-failure scenario" takes hold, and the results don't become public at all. It works this way: if the project is a success, they want to keep this valuable competitive knowledge a secret. If it's a failure, they want to keep this damaging competitive knowledge a secret.

On the other hand, if they do release the results of their fair analysis for a given situation, it doesn't translate to other environments. Arm-chair skeptics have a heyday and doubt is cast on the analysis itself and the company as a side affect.

If you were involved in a successful collaboration project, would you take Rob's advice? Does this mean collaboration requires a leap of faith?

4:13:51 PM    
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CIO magazine has an excerpt from a new book by Niall Sinclair, Stealth KM: Winning Knowledge Management Strategies for the Private Sector.  Two messages stand out from the usual what-is-KM paragraphs provided.

First, that story telling is alive and well in the corporate world. Stories are an incredibly powerful way to transfer knowledge by combining content, context, and emotion to provide deeper understanding and easier retrieval of information.

Second, that KM is also alive and well in the corporate world. Yep, we're doing it without using the term. Unfortunately that likely means we're not doing it as proficiently as we could be were we to make use of the field of knowledge that exists on the topic already. The author's advice is to go into "stealth mode" makes sense to me. Do the right thing for today's needs, but call it by whatever term your executives prefer so that it can be funded, supported, and effectively implemented.

I recently told a friend of mine that the term "knowledge management" was so "five years ago" as a buzz word, that it made sense that the government agency he works with had just started to look into it. When it came to sharing knowledge among workers, "KM" was the first buzzword to become the darling of the technology press, then "portals" were going to solve all our problems. Millions of dollars were spent based on these predictions, with very little to show for it. "Collaboration" was the next buzzword of choice... if we couldn't make people download their brains into a computer system, maybe we could just get them to talk to each other directly. Currently the "collaboration" frenzy has died down as well. What will the next version of this knowledge sharing concept be called? Maybe it won't have a name at all, but simply progress forward in stealth mode. But don't count on that one lasting, either.  Once we start seeing more "best practices" and less "lessons learned", you can be that someone will coin a new buzzword. Vendors simply can't make money off of stealth technology.

1:23:18 PM    
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