David Goldstein's Weblog

Will Web 2.0 Lead to the End of Traditional Knowledge Management Systems?

I went to a talk last month titled, "Web 2.0 and Implications for IT Leadership" given by Abbie Lundberg, Editor in Chief of CIO Magazine.  The talk was sponsored by the Boston Chapter of the Society for Information Management.  Abbie did a great job summarizing how business will be using Web 2.0 technologies to improve collaboration and knowledge sharing.  She demonstrated many of these technologies.  One of them, Slideshare--think of it as YouTube for Powerpoint presentations, I found really interesting.

She made one comment that got me thinking.  She said that Web 2.0 technologies would lead to the demise of traditional knowledge management systems.  She thought that wikis, blogs, and social networking applications like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook would be the way that the next generation of workers would track down information and share knowledge.  These technologies are easy to use and widely accepted by the next generation of workers. 

Abbie emphasized that traditional KM systems have a low adoption rate.  It is very difficult to get managers to update a system with key documents and information about completed projects or with information on their background and skills.  KM systems are often viewed as an additional burden and therefore neglected when time is short.

While I agree with all these points, I do not agree with Abbie's conclusion.  The same technology trends that caused the development of Web 2.0 tools also make it easier for managers to use traditional KM systems.  Consider the KMA proposal library:

When SharePoint 2007 came out, KMA updated its internal portal and included a document library that contains all our client proposals.  In the past, these documents were stored on my local drive or the local drive of the manager responsible for the proposal.  We then emailed the proposal around for feedback.  Now we use the document management features of SharePoint and Word to easily edit and get feedback on proposals.  We've eliminated all the emailing of proposals between consultants.  In general, the process of writing and reviewing a proposal is significantly easier.

As a by-product of this process change, we have a repository of proposals that we can use as a reference for future interactions with a client or as a basis for future proposals for similar projects.  The incremental effort to tag these proposals for easy retrieval is minimal.  We even linked the proposals to client and opportunity information in our CRM system.

There was still a fair amount of effort required to insure that consultants posted all their proposals and properly tagged them.  However, they quickly came to realize that the benefits of this simple KM system were more than worth the extra effort.

At KMA, we use a combination of Web 2.0 technologies--wikis, blogs, my sites--and traditional KM systems--proposal libraries, marketing slide libraries, project team sites.  We're still experimenting with the right mix of these tools and learning where wikis are best used, for example.  Based on what we've learned so far, I strongly feel that a mix of traditional KM systems and Web 2.0 technologies will lead to the greatest improvement in knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Finding an Expert Can Be Tough

In the spring 2008 issue of Sloan Management Review, there is a "Knowledge Management" column worth reading.  The column is titled, "The World Might Be Small, but Not for Everyone."  The author summarizes an academic study on the problems of finding experts within organizations.

The academic researchers asked employees at a large multi-national strategy consulting firm to identify internal experts in four specific areas (transfer pricing, asset productivity, enterprise resource planning and advertising strategy).  If they did not know an expert, they were to identify a colleague who might know the expert.  These colleagues were then contacted until the 'search chain' was complete.

In most cases, the consultants were not able to directly identify an expert.  In some cases the search chains went through three or more people before the expert was identified.  The search chains were longer for newer employees, employees at the periphery of organization's social network and for female employees.  One reason that the search chains were relatively long is that consultants often asked colleagues who were similar to them, rather than those who might be more likely to know who the expert was.

The ability to find an expert quickly can be the difference between making and losing a client engagement or between having a satisfied or a dissatisfied customer.  I have been in several discussions with CIOs, knowledge management experts, and line managers who viewed expert finding as important to their organization's success.

In the column, the author did not address the role of technology in supporting expert finding.  Some of our customers are investing in technologies that make it easier for employees to self-identify their areas of expertise.  We have used SharePoint 'My Sites' and SharePoint-based internal 'Facebook' applications to help our customers more effectively identify experts.

An alternative to self-identifying experts, is to extract data from an HR or ERP system to determine expertise.  For example, you can look at the projects that the employees worked on and the training that they completed to infer their expertise.

While technology alone will not allow employees to find experts all the time, It can compliment the employee's social network and make it easier for them to find an expert.   

Words of Business Wisdom from Atul Gawande

I promise that I'm close to finished blogging about what managers can learn from M.D.s.  At the end of Atul Gawande's book Complications, he provided five ideas that could make you a positive deviant--someone who can make a 'worthy difference' as a doctor.  Here they are with my take on their implications for managers:

1. Count something--It's critical, and often not too difficult to track your performance or the performance of your organization.  At KMA, we use a simple set of measures--utilization, backlog, pipeline--to see how we're doing.  These are great leading indicators of the performance of the business.  When I want to learn more about a specific aspect of the business.  I often start by counting.  How many new customers did we add this year?  What percentage of our business came from new customers?  What is the average revenue from new customers?  These numbers help us adjust our sales strategy.  Do we focus on larger customers? repeat sales?
2. Write something--Writing is a great way to formalize your thoughts.  It could be an email, a presentation or a white paper.  It helps me communicate with our consultants and our customers.  This blog is a great exercise.  I wish I could be more disciplined!
3. Change--If your business involves technology, change is a must.  I try my best to keep on top of technology changes, business changes (less important), and market changes.  Listening for these changes and reacting to them is critical to our ongoing success.
4. Don't complain--This is more a personal  than a business suggestion.  My parents called it kvetching and no one liked it then and no one likes it now.
5. Ask an unscripted question--This is great for a doctor interacting with a patient to establish rapport.  I'm going to try this more in my interactions with clients and colleagues.

I don't think these are great insights.  They are more common sense.  I found them useful and I hope you will as well.

More Business Lessons from M.D.s

I seem to learn more about business from books written by doctors than from those written by management practitioners.  Last year I blogged about How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman.  I just finished another great business read by a Boston-area M.D.--Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande.  The focus is on how to make medicine better through process improvement.  Some of Gawande's essays explored:

• how to get doctors and nurses to wash their hands to reduce infections
• how military doctors have significantly reduced battlefield fatalities by tracking and improving performance
• how our malpractice systems hurts performance
• how the medical reimbursement system affects outcomes
• how measuring newborn's health (the Apgar scale) led to treatment and outcomes.

Overall he described how systematic measurement and analysis has and can do more for improving health than new medical equipment, gene therapy or the latest wonder drugs.

My favorite essay described the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and its role in measuring and reporting on the 117 centers in the US that treat CF patients.  The foundation publishes key patient outcome measures for each center (e.g., average lung function and average BMI of patients).  The data allow patient's families to asses the quality of individual centers.  More important, they provide each center with a benchmark and improvement goals. 

The CF Foundation has been collecting this data for years, but has only starting publishing it on the web since December 2006.  Publishing the data has led to one expected and one surprising outcome:

• all centers have made significant progress in improving these indicators (not surprising)
• the centers in the top quartile were improving the fastest (very surprising, at least to me).

It seems to me that the best centers knew how to learn and improve better than the average centers.  That's what made them the best.

This is a great lesson for organizations.  You need to measure key indicators and you need to focus on learning--learning how to do your job better and learning how to improve business processes.

As a company, I think KMA is very focused on learning.  We can, however, improve our internal measurement systems.  We just put in place an automated time reporting system.  Our plan is to use this to more easily generate key measures to better track individual, project and company performance.  Better (the book) reinforced the need for these changes.

 

Google in the Enterprise--A Microsoft Partner's Perspective

At the November Boston SIM  monthly meeting, Paul Souza of Google spoke about their strategy for selling to enterprise customers.  Paul recently joined Google to head its enterprise business in New England.  The talk was excellent and there were many insightful questions from the corporate IT managers and consultants in attendance.

As a Microsoft partner, I was very interested in understanding how this formidable Microsoft competitor was going to market.  Specifically, I was interested in Google's strategy for search, software as a service, and its overall sales approach.

For enterprise search,  Google sells variations on its appliance.  A stand-alone search server that can be hooked into the corporate network to index and search documents, web content, and corporate data bases.  It's main selling point is ease-of-use and the well-known Google search web interface.

The Google search screenshot that Paul showed looked a lot like the Microsoft enterprise search screenshots that I have seen.  Search on Intel and you can easily access the Intel record in your company's CRM system, information on your company's account manager for Intel, and documents and web pages that mention Intel.

I asked Paul if Google's search had all the features of high-end search engines like Autonomy.  He said that they had features that Google's engineers thought were important, based on Google's expertise in search.  They are selling their deep search knowledge gained from internet search to grow their enterprise search business.  A strategy that makes a great deal of sense.

Google is making a strong push into applications.  They are using a software as a service model and have a web-based word processor, spreadsheet, presentation and email program.  They sell this as a suite for $50 per user per year.

The applications do not have the features of their Microsoft counterparts.  Paul commented that they are not targeting power users.  Rather they are focusing on the 20% of the features that are used 80% of the time.  He noted that for many casual users of office suites, Google's apps are a lower cost alternative.  Paul was asked about off-line use and noted that this will be coming in the near future.

Paul also noted that the "Google cloud" provides a reliable home for the apps.  He touted Google's investment in servers and the benefits of not having to worry about upgrades with the software as a service model.

Google seems to be aggressively building its enterprise team.  Paul noted that it has grown significantly since he came on board less than one year ago.  I think he was the first. and still might be the only sales person for Google in New England.  He noted that he has no need to make cold calls and that he relies just has to process in-bound calls from local enterprise prospects.

It will be very interesting to watch the search and application battle between Microsoft and Google over the coming years.  At KMA, we have been very focused on building our expertise in Microsoft's enterprise search product.  We have also been very impressed with its capabilities.  Enterprise search is a critical technology for both companies.

I am also interested in seeing the in-roads web-based applications make into office productivity tools.  I know Microsoft is focusing a great deal of R&D in this area.  It wonder what, if any, role partners will play in supporting this business.

The Growth of the PMO

Many organizations with whom we are working are investing in Project Management Offices (PMOs), in project management tools, and in training certification for their project managers.  This trend has increased significantly over the last year or two.

I attended a seminar today at Babson College, sponsored by the Center for Information Management Studies (CIMS) titled "Project Management Tool Shed."  There were excellent talks by Jon Smith of Keane and James Hagan of Liberty Mutual that described their respective efforts at putting tools and processes in place to systematize project management.  There were around 100 attendees. mostly project managers from larger Boston-based firms.

I started thinking about why many organizations are investing heavily in project management tools and processes.  I came up with a few relevant trends:

1. A growth in the diversity of the IT function.  IT projects now include ERP systems, custom applications, document management systems, data warehouses.
2. Outsourcing has added to the complexity of managing IT projects.  Organizations often have to coordinate internal developers, local contractors and off-shore resources to complete large projects.
3. The available technology has matured.  Jon Smith from Keane described his organization's use of Microsoft's Project Server, SharePoint and PerformancePoint along with a mix of third party and homegrown tools.  These tools handle a variety of tasks from risk assessment to time tracking.

The growth of PMOs has affected KMA in two main ways.  First, it has put pressure on us to systematize our project management processes.  In addition, we have seen some opportunities to support PMOs and project management improvement efforts in our clients.  We have worked with them to customize SharePoint to better organize project-related data and to help them automate their homegrown project tracking systems.

I am excited about the growth in project management skills both within consulting firms and within our clients.  It should make it easier for us to deliver our services on-time and on-budget and for our clients to realize more value from our work and from their internal efforts.

Next SIM Consultant Roundtable Meeting

I wanted to put another quick plug for the Consultant Roundtable.  We are a group of Boston area IT consultants who meet four times per year to share insights and to network.  The group is sponsored by the Boston Chapter of the Society for Information Management (SIM).  The upcoming meeting will take place in Waltham on November 11.

The topic of the meeting will be:  “Building and Refining Your Business Strategy?”  We will discuss how our organizations:

• identify technology and business trends that affect our strategy
• assess the competitive landscape
• determine which types of partner and supplier relationships to pursue and
• focus our sales efforts on specific industries and company types.

The meeting is open to SIM members and invited guests.  I am the facilitator for the group.  If you'd like more information, please let me know.

Our meetings are typically attended by 8-12 local consultants--a mix of independent consultants and managers from both small and large firms.

I wanted to put another quick plug for the Consultant Roundtable.  We are a group of Boston area IT consultants who meet four times per year to share insights and to network.  The group is sponsored by the Boston Chapter of the Society for Information Management (SIM).  The upcoming meeting will take place in Waltham on November 11.

The topic of the meeting will be:  “Building and Refining Your Business Strategy?”  We will discuss how our organizations:

The meeting is open to SIM members and invited guests.  I am the facilitator for the group.  If you'd like more information, please let me know.

The FedEx Cup and the Myth of Getting it Right the First Time

The FedEx Cup has an important lesson for IT managers and consultants.  When we design and build a system that causes fundamental changes in the way people work, it's really hard to get it right the first time.

The FedEx Cup is a series of four golf tournaments open only to the top golfers.  It serves as a playoff.  The goal was to add some excitement to the end of the golf season, after the four "Majors" are over.  PGA Tour golfers complained that the season was too long and many skipped events in September, October and November.

The result was great for golf fans.  For four weeks in a row, we were able to watch the best golfers play head-to-head, with a large prize pool at stake.

Many of the top golfers who competed in the events complained.  They said:

• four weeks in a row of tournaments was too much for them
• the course for the final event was in bad shape due to drought and high temperatures in Atlanta
• the $10 million prize was a deposit to a retirement account, rather than cash stacked up like on Poker events
• the players were not sufficiently consulted and the design was handed to them by Tim Finchem the PGA Tour Commissioner.

The players' complaints reminded me of complaints I have heard from users after a new information system is introduced.  I have heard:

• the features are not right
• you never really understood how I work
• you didn't involve me enough in the design process

The lesson for the PGA Tour and for IT managers it that it's hard to get people's feedback in the design process and it's hard to get it right the first time.  Stewart Cink, a tour player active in the Tour Policy Board, said,

As far as being left out of the process, I think that a lot of players were asked.  Just about everybody was given an opportunity. We had player meetings. We had abysmal attendance at player meetings.

We in IT have the same problem.  It's hard to get busy users to take time from their day-to-day activities to provide feedback on a proposed system, even if the system will have a major impact on their work.  Even if they have time, it's hard to engage them in discussions that lead to valuable insights.

The bottom line for me is that it is often easier to build something that's close to right, get feedback from users, and then refine it.  I'm sure that Commissioner Finchem has received lots of high quality feedback from players and the FedEx Cup will be even better next year.

For IT professionals, it is important for us to educate our customers (internal and external) that there are good reasons for not getting it right the first time.  We might want to spend less time on initial design, build something quickly, get feedback and then refine.

Unintended Consequences of Information: Lessons from Shotlink

I spend the Labor Day weekend as a volunteer at The Deutsche Bank Championship--the PGA Tour golf tournament that took place just outside of Boston.  I operated the Shotlink system and learned some lessons about the value of real-time information and the unintended consequences of information systems.

Shotlink is a laser-based system that tracks the location of every golf shot made by every player at PGA tour events.  There are operators near fairways and greens to record the location where the ball stops after each shot the golfer takes.

I operated a fairway laser.  My Palm Pilot told me the names and clothing worn by each golfer on the tee.  I watched the tee shot and pointed my laser at it when it stopped rolling.  The Palm and laser were connected.  After recording the shot, the Palm displayed both distance from the tee and distance to the hole.  I reviewed this data and pressed enter in the Palm.  The data were then uploaded to the central Shotlink computer.  Someone reviewed all the incoming data and it was then available for the broadcasters and over the internet.  If I could not see the tee shot with the laser, I could enter its coordinates directly into the Palm.  A similar, but more accurate system, was used greenside to measure each chip and putt.

The system is used extensively by TV broadcasters to provide information on individual golfers and on overall performance at specific holes.  For example, they would tell you that tee shots that landed in the left rough were more likely to lead to bogies on the hole that day.

The system also got me more involved with the fans and got the fans more involved with the tournament.  This was a very positive and most likely unintended consequence of the Shotlink system.

Fans often came up to ask me, "What's the longest drive today?"  or "How long was that drive?"  The Shotlink data got them more involved in the tournament.  It kept their interest as they waited on a hole for their favorite golfer (Tiger Woods) to appear.  As the crowds got larger, they even started guessing the lengths of the tee shots.

On Sunday, I worked on the 17th hole.  There was a scoreboard across from my location.  After I lasered a tee shot, the distance to the hole, appeared with the players picture on the scoreboard.  This was also a great way to get the crowd involved in the tournament.

I have always been interested in how systems are used.  They are often used in ways that are very different than the system designers would have expected.  This is true for the knowledge management and business intelligence solutions that KMA designs as well as for Shotlink.

Errors Consultants (and Doctors) Make--Part 2

Search satisficing is another cognitive error that doctors make, according to Dr. Jerome Groopman (How Doctor's Think).  Doctors can stop searching for a diagnosis when they find something and miss the full extent of the problem.  He quotes a colleague who said, "Finding something may be satisfactory, but not finding everything is suboptimal."  One problem on an X-ray or MRI might only be a partial explanation for the symptoms suffered by the patient.

IT consultants also must guard against search satisficing.  As we gather requirements from our clients or prospects, we can jump to a conclusion, based on the initial information the client provides.

I recently met with a mid-sized strategy consulting firm that wanted advice on implementing a knowledge management system.  The prospect discussed the company's need to more easily find proposals, deliverables, and interview guides from previous engagements to use with new clients.  My first reaction was to suggest a SharePoint implementation with templated team sites for each engagement.  If I had stopped there, I would have been guilty of search satisficing.

I kept probing, however, and found that the company had a long list of contacts that they used for primary research.  We needed to consider how to integrate the contact data base with the team sites to come up with a viable solution.

Groopman advocates that doctors should ask themselves "whether there is more to be found beyond what was seen on the plain x-rays or MRI scans." Further, he suggests that patients ask their doctors, "Is it possible that I have more than one problem?"

IT consultants too must keep probing customers to understand the full scope of their needs.  Clients can help too by asking about the limitations of the solutions that the consultant is proposing.  It is beneficial for both the consultant and the client for these needs to be surfaced as early and as completely as possible.