Knowledge Management 2.0

Ways to think about Legal KM strategy

2011-01-06T11:03:00.000-05:00

In thinking about the areas you may want to address in a Lawe Firm's Knowledge Management strategy, here is one segmentation that I came up with that may help you.

1. Content (or Know What)
This may include Research, e-Discovery, Court Filings, Rulings, Declarative Knowledge

2. Processes (or Know How)
This may include forms, templates, process tutorials, training and development

3. Relationships (or Know Who)
This may include firm expertise, CRM data about existing clients, etc.

Putting in place solutions for each of these area should probably be a part of your strategy. And each may have its own set of solutions. This of this as the basis "Knowledge Management Foundation" for your firm or practice.

A more advanced approach for each area could then extend this to thinking about including Business Intelligence and ways to glean insights and make your practice more efficient.

Under Category 1, examples of this would be adding Insights about market or legislative news. Not just publishing out the news or new rulings, but allowing attornies to add commentary around the news.

Under Category 2, adding real-time collaboration about work product creation could be one example of improving existing processes. Automated contract systems that dynamically add appropriate clauses and phrases depending on the situation versus just a standard template could be a way to take contract or letter creation to the next level.

Under Category 3, mining your CRM data to help attornies discover who knows who. This could be used for enhancing an existing relationship or facilitating new business development can connecting attornies with attornies in other practice areas who potentially already have connections to a particular client or prospect.

There are lots of areas to focus knowledge management on in a legal practice. There was just one approach to breakout the various areas. It doesn't mean you need to focus on all these areas, but it does give you a way to think about all the potential focus area and then prioritize your initiatives and resources from there.

How does your law firm or practice think of the core focus areas for KM?

Legal KM - storing legal advice

2010-12-02T10:54:00.000-05:00

The challenge of storing Legal Advice?

Many Legal departments and law firms have the challenge of how to share legal advice obtained through research around one particular Matter, and make it available for re-use by other attornies.

The biggest issue here is two-fold.

1. First, the format of the content. Much of the content is initially gathered through e-mails back and forth between inside and outside counsel, or research performed and not captured anywhere. Either way, the result can be a long string of e-mails - very hard to consume for a reader unfamiliar with the matter without some background and context, or nothing is captured at all.

2. Second, is the billable user base. The same problem that existed in my days at PricewaterhouseCoopers. You cannot build in process to capture content and expect billable personnel like Consultants or Attornies to do it, unlesss you can make it part of their normal business processes (or required) or if you make it billable back to the issue client as part of the admin of the engagement at the time. In absence of doing this, no attorny is going to be able to spend alot of time reformatting content or codifying legal advice gathered on a particular matter.

One solution is just capturing anything and everything; e-mails, e-mail threads, files, etc. Easy enough to mail-into a database or wiki and make searchable, but still incrdibly difficult to consume.

Has anyone done anything with Legal Advice?

Any suggestions on how your firm may have solved for this?

Sharing Confidential Content - The Need to Sanitize?

2010-08-26T18:30:00.000-04:00

In relationship businesses like Financial Services, Management Consulting and Law, there is often a need to safeguard the identity of clients to the other parts of your company; where someone else may be working with a competitor as an example. The challenge becomes...

How to share when you can't share everything?

Many companies follow some type of sanitization practice; a way to mask out the names of companies, financials, and other information used in presentations and proposals that could be used by others to assess who the client is or was.

This process is time consuming for the submitter and creates a barrier for open and easy sharing, or creates a workload for Knowledge Managers and content editors. It becomes useful therefore to think about alternative approaches and which may work best for your organization.

Some models to think about are:

A. Review then Post
This model requires santization of sensitive information prior to publishing. As mentioned above, it creates a higher bar for submission or work for your Knowledge Managers and creates an artificial delay in getting content published in real-time.

B. Post then Review
This alternative model is a way to support the un-sanitized publishing of content to a more restricted audience at first and then establishing a post-publishing review process by Knowledge Managers to identify content that is appropriate for more broadly sharing - once a sanitized version is obtained. This model, some argue makes ti too easily to post content to a restricted audience with no incentive for broader sharing. The benefits of this approach however is that it gives your Knowledge Managers and editors more "pushed" content to work with; without having to solicit it, and from there, they can focus their efforts on review and escalation of access versus hunting down content.

Ways to think about levels of sharing under this model could include:
Deal Team Sharing ==> Industry or Group Level Sharing ==> Broad Sharing

Confidentiality and legal requirements will tend to increase as entitlement access is opened up moving from left to right above. Publishing and collect of content will be easier on the left.

C. Who Has What Content versus Content Sharing
A third model which can work hand in hand with the models above, or as an alternative, is where the content is very sensitive, eliminate the need to sanitize by moving from a content sharing model to a model where you just share who has the content.

The analogy would be a Gartner Group or Forrester Research executive summary. A brief abstract is used to give an idea of the strategic value of the content without sharing the details. Contact information is then provided to the author if you want to get the full version.

With this model, a senior banker or practice manager can relay they have implemented a unique solution in a specific industry for a client with this type of issue without relaying the details of the clients name or deal specific. They are not sharing the content, but simply marketing the knowledge they have. Once contacted, they can vet if it is appropriate to share the content with the requestor on a case-by-case basis. The disadvantage of this approach is that authors may get inundated with requests they then need to service. The advantage however is the ability to share what they know without the effort required for making the content itself broadly available.

Sharing "who has what" can be equally as effective as sharing the content itself.

KM for Investment Banking

2010-08-05T17:34:00.000-04:00

The challenge for Knowledge Management is what initiatives to focus on? Choice of initiatives distinguishes the successful KM organizations from the unsuccessful. Ideally, you want to avoid focusing on the softer "fluffier" initiatives like building a more "sharing friendly" culture or developing content repositories for shating with no core business objective in mind.

Focus on measurable initatives that impact the direction and growth of your business. These all don't need to be the most complex or expensive initiatives either. Many of the most impactful initiatives can be quite simple as long as impacting some aspect that advances a core goal of the business; identifies new customers, closes sales faster or delivers higher quality product.

In Investing Banking or other engagement-related businesses, think about what impacts the Deal Life Cycle; what processes and content areneeded at each stage of the Deal Life Cycle.

The Deal Life Cycle can be categorized into 3 main buckets:

A. Relationship Development
Relationship Development activities involve helping to develop new client relationships or extend existing relationships. Ways to facilitate development include tools and content to enhance prospecting, knowing who else in your organization has previously or is still currently working with a prospect, learning "who knows who" at your prospect - which can include employees or board members of existing clients, implementing ways to communicate more real-time with customers using Web 2.0, etc.

B. Selling
Selling activities involve senior bankers or practice managers crafting solutions to met the needs of their clients. Selling can be facilitated by assisting with product and solution selection, sharing of thought leadership content and best practices from prior engagements, facilitating innovation, helping identify cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, etc.

C. Delivery
Delivery activities involve producing the work product to close the sale or deliver the final solution. Delivery can be facilitated making its production more efficient, improving its quality or speeding up the time to market. Activities to facilitate delivery might include offering access to re-usable content such as credentials and qualifications, slide libraries, offering tools to collaborate with other team members more efficiently, providing ways to connect with others in the company who may have worked on similar solutions before, etc.

What would you rename "Knowledge Management"?

2010-07-30T08:11:00.000-04:00

In response to Art Schlussel's question in the LinkedIN Knowledge Management Experts form: "If the term "KM" could get a do-over what would you call the discipline?"

Response:
I might call it very simply "Business Transformation".

The greatest challenge for me with Knowledge Management has always been that the easy part is coming up with a million things you can do in the space. The hard part is selecting the types of targeted initiatives that can have a meaningful impact on the business. While searchable content repositories are useful, there is clearly higher ROI on KM initiatives that impact new business discovery, client delivery and time to market, and identifying cross-selling opportunities.

When Web 2.0 came along, it suffered from the same challenge as KM. There's lots of things you can do in the space, but the different between companies successful at it versus those not, tends to be in the types of initiatives targeted and the execution. For Web 2.0, as an example, you could deploy a wiki or blog platform as a grassroots effort and see where it goes in 2-3 years, or alternatively, identify existing processes and informal networks in your organization that already exist, and use web 2.0 technology to enhance and facilitiate those processes and networks.

You'll note, I have stayed away from the world "information" in my name above, because I do not think KM is all about information or content. Tacit knowledge is as important as explicit knowledge, and while it is possible to try to codify tacit knowledge, probabyl the best way to leverage it is developing reference knowledge in your organization around "who knows who" and "who knows what", and getting people to the right resources quickly. For this reason, I think the Talent Management aspect of KM is important - and it's as much about finding people as it is explicit content.

Lastly, for KM to be really successful, I believe KM platforms should not be stand-alone. I recall an old APQC Conference where the discussion lead to "how you create 'slack' time" in your organization for workers to use your KM tools. Well, in a billable law or consulting firm there is no such thing as 'slack time', but regardless, having to go someplace else outside your daily processes to find KM-related information seems to create work versus efficiency. Another key underpinning of KM success is a very tight integration of KM content and tools into existing business process; deliverying the knowledge that is needed in a contextual, real-time way, and making processes more efficient or tranforming them (aka BPR).

Thus, for me, it's all about managing content, people and processes in a way to improve operating efficiency or drive revenue growth. And at least for now, "Business Transformation" is the best I can come up with - though BPR or IBT would work as well.

What do you think?

See here for rest of thread and other responses.

Innovative Idea Sharing

2010-07-21T10:18:00.000-04:00

A very cool new tool for sharing ideas in the enterprise. Historically, suggestion boxes have been less than successful, since there in no incentive to submit, little method for vetting ideas and recognition is often lacking.

Knowledge Managers have often debated how to incent knowledge sharing. Should the corporation build in performance or financial incentives for those sharing content? Or responding to inquiries?

MyIdeaShare.com takes the idea of the suggestion box to the next level. By integrating idea sharing into a gaming environment in the form of a stock market or exchange model, a grassroots concensus can be built around new ideas and less valuable ideas can be 'sold' - losing value. In addition, submitters with a portfolio of really good ideas can be easily recognized for their contribution.

Check it out at myideashare.com. I would be curious to know what you think?

Facebook versus LinkedIn

2010-06-14T09:28:00.000-04:00

An interesting McKinsey Quarterly article:
When Job Seekers Invade Facebook

I would be interested in hearing other people's views of how they compare Facebook versus LinkedIn.

More typically Facebook is about personal networks and sharing information with friends (and less about finding new friends as with MySpace). LinkedIn is more about professional business networking; connecting with new business acquintenances, job networking, etc.

Do you see a business application for Facebook in the near future?
What are the ramifications (example, need for separating personal info from business info)?
Given LinkedIn has more of a business tenor, what role can it play in the enterprise?

Your thoughts?

Where to focus online networking in the Enterprise?

2010-06-06T10:23:00.000-04:00

According to a colleague, there are probably three categories for online communities:
1) Facilitated groups
2) Existing real-world groups
3) Ad-hoc, non-facilitated groups

(Actually two since #2 is a sub-set of #1.) So the question becomes, where best to focus online networking efforts as organizations attempt to migrate social networking into the Enterprise?

Two approaches could be as follows.

1. Ad-hoc, non-facilitated groups
One approach is to deploy a platform for networking with discussion forums, and see where a need organically takes hold. There is a mindset in the Web 2.0 camp that says "you don't have to identify communities, they will identify themselves if provided the appropriate platform." The question here is what will be the topic of those communities and how effective will they be are innvoation and collaboration that will be truly meaningful the the organization. Letting people to connect and then seeing where it goes of course could be a good way to initially introduce the technology.

2. Facilitated groups (including extending existing real-world groups and existing informal networks)
A second approach is to establish a taxonomy by which to organize online networking forums. The taxonomy could be focused on specific products, clients or processes with the goal of cutting across existing organizational structures. One way to help pre-define where some of these targeted networks should focus is to identify the informal networks that already exist in your organization. For example, an informal network might be a a go-to-person or group that is called for specific expertise. Or a person that is organizational positioned to be aware of cross divisional opportunities. (It have been shown that more information today flows through informal networks in organizations than formal organizational structures.)

From the informal networks that already exist, the next step would be to determine which connections can benefit most and provide the most value to the firm by being enabled and formalized.

Lastly, and most important, success will depend on identifying facilitators or network leaders to help guide topics and monitor content. This is much of the same lesson I learned when observing huindreds of collaborative forums being deployed in the early days of Lotus Notes at PricewaterhouseCoopers. The ones that succeeded had strong purpose, leaders and support, fostered or leveraged an existing trusted community, and generated value creation for both members and the firm at large.

Potential areas where online networking in the Enterprise should focus includes:
Generating revenue
- Improving cross-selling
- Product innovation
- One Firm Approach to Clients
Boosting productivity
- Improving the allocation of resources
- Eliminating inefficiencies
Career Development
- Mentoring
- Mobility
- Diversity networks

Overall, there is clearly a place for both ad-hoc, emergent networks, and more structured targeted ones. For me, I would rather see an organization have 3 or 4 really well targeted onlie networking that can measurably impact operating efficiences, cost savings or revenue generation versus hundreds of networking groups; with many focused on less impactful business topics such places to eat or the latest sports news. May be here is one of those fundamental differences between Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. In Web 2.0 it's currently all about connecting - with the purpose and vale of such connections yet to be seen or measured. In the Enterprise, driving efficiencies and revenue should be the primary objective - which unfortunately may require a bit more structure and targeting of how online networking technology is deployed and where and how it is topically focused.

From the McKinsey Quarterly article "Mapping the value of employee collaboration":
"Targeted action is dramatically more effective than promoting connectivity indiscriminately, which typically burdens already-overloaded employees and yields network diseconomies. A more informed network perspective helps companies to identify the few critical points where improved connectivity creates economic value by cutting through business unit and functional silos, physical distance, organizational hierarchies, and a scarcity of expertise."

Establishing a Successful KM Strategy

2010-05-25T14:54:00.000-04:00

A successful Knowledge Management Strategy should:

Support the overall business strategy
Support core value creation processes
Focus on where value can be created internally in the Business and externally for Customers
Prioritize KM initiatives based on ROI, where possible
Produce measurable results
Embed KM initiatives into existing business processes vs. creating new stand-alone processes

What do you think are elements of a successful KM strategy?

Web 2.0 versus KM

2010-05-04T11:40:00.000-04:00

There was a great debate at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston last year around whether Web 2.0 is really anything new and how much of an impact it will eventually have on organizations as it is adapted and introduced into the Enterprise.

Tom Davenport, one of the mainstay luminaries of Knowledge Management and author of many books on the topic, took the more doubtful or questioning position on the impact that Web 2.0 will have on the Enterprise. Harvard professor Andrew McAfee, who helped coined the term 'Enterprise 2.0', took the more protagonist position. Watch for yourself:
http://www.veodia.com/portal_scroller2.php?portal=1043&user=pargandhi

Here is an example of some of Tom's comments:
http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/davenport/200703/why_enterprise_20_wont_transfo.html

And some of Andrews:
http://blog.hbs.edu/faculty/amcafee/index.php/faculty_amcafee_v3/watching_the_film_of_the_fight/

There are a number of arguments. One is about whether Enterprise 2.0 will democratize the organization; raising the voice and power of the employee versus the top-down hierarchical organization. I personally am not sure this should be or needs to be a goal of Web 2.0 in the Enterprise. The more basic question is whether Web 2.0 technologies will improve the way employees in the organization publish, distribute, share and re-use knowledge?

The answer is of course YES.

Yuo have to laugh however at all the Web 2.0 evangelists out there that naively think Web 2.0 is really anything new? The answer is NO. The concepts of distributed publishing (blogs), collaboration (wikis), online networking (personal web pages, corporate online directories) and personalized news feeds (RSS) have been around since the mid-90's and early days of the internet. All these concepts were successful tools that could be enabled in any Knowledge Management strategy back in the day (and I'm aging myself here). While at Coopers & Lybrand and then PricewaterhouseCoopers, I helped deploy hundreds of collaborative discussion forums via Lotus Notes, and later Lotus Domino on the web. These were asynchronous discussion forums that would allow for all sorts of free-form discussions and collaboration to take place online. Lotus Notes also enabled personalized online published and workflow around that publishing effortlessly, in a way that Microsoft in 2007 has still yet to enable. Of course, beyond Lotus, there were many other web tools and sites available as well to do similar things. Remember eGroups or Delphi Forums (collaborative spaces) or Geocities (personal webpages\sites a decade prior to MySpace)!

For the most part however, I think the main reason Web 2.0 seems so new is that the current generation of young Generation X'ers are seeing this technology for the first time in the broader consumer-based sites like MySpace and Facebook. Sure, of course, there is some new stuff in Web 2.0 too. The viral way social networking sites have been positioned and are taking off, and the ease of Mashups in creating new applications on the fly.

So back to Tom and Andrew's debate. Will Web 2.0 technologies significantly revolution the way knowledge is shared within organizations? The answer is a definitive MAYBE. This is the same issue faced by all of us 10 years ago as we looked to deploy successful Knowledge Management programs in the enterprise. Some will be very successful. And others will not be.

At Enterprise 2.0, I could not help the deja vu of the type of questions being asked from what was asked in the 90's around Knowledge Management.

What does it take to make Web 2.0 successful in the Enterprise?
What types of methods can be used to foster use of Web 2.0 applications?
How is senior management buy-in obtained?
How do you define the value provided by these initiatives?
For what purposes should you target a Wikis, Blog or Collaborative Forum?

And the answers are all the same.

A successful Enterprise 2.0 strategy, just like a Knowledge Management strategy of the 90's, needs to be focused on the business objectives of the enterprise. Wikis and networking needs to be focused on topics and purposes related to business processes or products. There needs to be evangelists or super-users that foster use of the technology and monitor the content. There needs to be leadership and cultural changes that support use of the technology. In some cases, training around it.

If you look at Case Studies of many of the successful Web 2.0 implementations today (successful as defined by not just being used, but by providing value to the organization), they deployed the technology with a specific purpose or focus in mind; sharing information across globally dispersed groups, across industry groups or organizational boundaries; exposing product experts to a broader audience; etc.

Unsuccessful Web 2.0 implementation, just like their KM counterparts, are those than lacked purpose. That put the technology out there in the hopes it would be used and find it's own purpose. The "build it and they will come" approach. One of the main challenges that knowledge management had in the 90's is the same that Web 2.0 has today in translating to Enterprise 2.0; how to avoid "implementing technology for technology's sake."

Many knowledge management initiatives fail when the initiatives selected have longer-term payback, drive soft changes like "trying to create an information sharing culture" and are not that measurable in terms of ROI or tie into revenue. The knowledge management initatives that most often succeed have shorter-term payback with measurable results like improved productivity, cost savings or revenue generation.

As in KM, two approaches to follow are:

1. Define pointed Web 2.0 solutions within the Enterprise where the technology can make an impact to networking, relationships, expertise sharing or finding, improving business processes, etc.

2. Define a top-down strategy for the Enterprise; where core business objectives are identified, KM goals defined for each of those objectives, and then the "right" technology selected to facilitate each of those goals.

You can always deploy a blog or wikis technology in the organization, and see where it goes. But in absence of a direction or purpose, you will most likely just be giving your employees a "cool new tool" to have fun with and may delay the timeframe for extracting meaningful value by a couple of years.

How does Web 2.0 impact the enterprise?

2010-04-22T01:44:00.000-04:00

Web 2.0 tools include unstructured content capture tools like Wikis and Blogs, content distribution tools like RSS Feeds, easy to change user interfaces to help drive personalization, and user-driven application integration services such as Mashups. Web 2.0 tools primarily empower end-users (just like Lotus Notes did in the 90's) to more easily create web-based content, personalized their web experience in terms of content search and delivery and facilitate social networking through more open content sharing.

Enterprise 2.0 is the application of Web 2.0 tools in the corporate or enterprise space. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_2.0

Through the appropriate application of Web 2.0 tools in the enterprise, end-user personalization, content acquisition, distribution and collaboration can be empowered. Strategically, there really isn't anything new here. Fundamentally, organizations need to continue to focus on the same thing that Knowledge Management has always focused on; driving real business goals through knowledge sharing, process improvement and relationship management.

Web 2.0 tools should become part of the tools looked at to implement an organization's Knowledge Management strategy and more easily enable it. Application developers should become aware of these new tools, like any others, as they develop new applications. While implementing Web 2.0 tools in the enterprise should not be an end goal unto itself, may be more than anything, Web 2.0 is driving companies to think about, once again, the impact that knowledge sharing and collaboration can have.

The role of Search in KM

2010-04-04T11:34:00.000-04:00

Search and retrieval of content into itself should not be a primary goal of Knowledge Management initiatives. Seach and retrieval of content is only relevant in the context of the business processes they are supporting.

Similarly, relevancy scoring of search results is important, but the challenge becomes how should relevancy be measured? As a baseline, relevancy can be gauged based on how well search terms are matched to the particular content of a web page or document. A more evolved model however would be incorporating business use cases into the relevancy score and deriving a relevancy score that incorporates knowledge of the business purpose or process that the search is being performed to support.

How can they same search against the same set of web pages or documents yield different search result relevancies? Knowledge of what the person has previously searched on or queries letting the user specify in greater detail their particular purposes might be methods for better identifying the purpose of a particular search beyond just the search terms entered.

Goals of Knowledge Management

2010-03-10T10:55:00.000-05:00

Goals of Knowledge Management should include:

* identifying new market opportunities (globally, new industry niches, cross-selling existing products)

* responding to opportunities more quickly

* increasing time to market with products and services

* improving the way information-based products are delivered; including collaboration between a company and its customers

* improving the way client relationships are managed

* creating new information-based products

* increasing the revenue yield on products; either reducing costs to expand margins or adding new sources of value

* making operational processes for efficient

* optimizing placement and utilization of existing talent pool

* strengthening existing talent pool (growing competencies, exposing existing competencies, exposing tacit knowledge, leveraging relationships, fostering innovation, etc.)

What do you think some of the goals of Knowledge Management should be?

Goals of a Knowledge Management program

2010-03-04T01:39:00.000-05:00

Examples of goals on a Knowledge Management program could include:

* Foster Cross-Selling
* Grow Revenue
* Increase Productivity
* Retain Intellectual Capital
* Grow Intellectual Capital

Each of these goals could be potentially addressed through initiatives that focus on:
1. Content and Knowledge Sharing or KNOW WHAT
2. Business Processes or KNOW HOW
3. Relationship Management both internally and externally or KNOW WHO

Fundamentally, a broad thinking Knowledge Management program should encompass or work closely with all of the following areas:
1. Content Management
2. Learning & Development
3. Talent Management

Where KM Belongs in the Organization?

2010-02-12T07:31:00.000-05:00

There are many ways to organize the KM function in and organization. There is no 'right' way but there are clear pros and cons to each.

1. Enterprise or Divisional. Enterprise KM leaders are best position to identify cross-divisional synergies and rationalize what initiatives should take place at the corporate versus business unit level. Divisional KM leaders are best positioned to understand the specific business and its processes to identify ways to drive revenue or create efficiencies.

Divisional lead models may make most sense when the business units of a company are diverse.

2. Business versus Technology.
Whether at the enterprise or divisional levels, KM initiatives led by the business are well positioned to support the core goals of the business as well as consider other typically KM success factors; leadership sponsorship, culture issues, business process integration, etc.

KM initiatives driven by Technology need to take extra measures to ensure business support and adoption, and avoid the common pitchfall of deploying a cool new technology or system for technology's sake versus focusing the mission around core strategic business drivers. The latter is the same risk of deploying Web 2.0 technologies without a business mission in mind.

Organizational Models for Sponsoring KM Initiatives

2010-02-01T11:39:00.000-05:00

There are four basic models for how Knowledge Management initatives are typically sponsored or driven in different organizations:

1. IT-Driven, Bottom-Up initiatives can be found in organizations when there is not a formal KM strategy for the firm, but some really good ideas bubble out of the IT organization. The challenge with bottom-up, grassroots initiatives however can often be obtaining proper funding; not only for development, but for business side activities such as training, marketing and content maintenance once the initiative is made operational.

2. IT-Driven, Top-Down initiatives can be found in visionary IT departments out of the CIO's office or areas responsible for corporate infrastructure or desktop productivity. One of the primary challenges with this model is to ensure that initiatives are aligned with business objectives. Often times, IT-driven firmwide initiatives can easily become large R&D efforts focused on rolling on out cool new collaborative or content management technologies without full consideration for how the new technology with facilitate core business strategy and objectives.

3. Business-Driven, Bottom-Up initiatives can be found within specific Business Departments when there is a very specific need that can be addressed through better knowledge capture and re-use. These initiatives are almost always very well aligned with the business objectives of the department. With these types of initiatives, it is often good to spend some additional time on due diligence to ensure that similar technology or initiatives have not been implemented elsewhere that can be easily re-used, and to find a way post-implementation to let other areas of the organization know about what has been put in place for possible leverage in other areas with similar needs.

4. Business-Driven, Top-Down initiatives are found in organizations with a well-formed KM department. This model is typically the best model whereby KM initiatives are most always aligned with business strategy and objectives. Unlike the risks of IT-driven models, the chances of deploying a new cool technology for technologies sake is minimized. In addition, the problems of localized duplication that can arise with Business-Driven, Bottom-Up models is avoided. Business-Driven, Top-Down KM programs can holistically look at both firmwide business strategy and departmental objectives to identify initiatives with the most firmwide impact.

From an implementation perspective, this model is often best positioned as well to examine both existing local initiatives to determine which initiatives can be expanded to a firmwide level and avoid the pitfalls of deploying new cool technologies for technologies sake.

This model while common to the top consulting firms like Deloitte and E&Y is found less frequently in other industries. Firmwide, top-down KM programs typically require a vision and commitment from senior management; without which one of the other three models is much more likely.

Making content capture successful

2010-01-22T04:21:00.000-05:00

Different organizations have tried various knowledge capture incentives, including making content submission manditory and incorporating rewards into performance measurement plans. More successful approaches typically include incorporating knowledge capture into exiting business processes.

For example, when a consulting engagement ends, a Standard Operating Process for the firm is for the consultant to submit the proposal that won the business for that engagement or altenratively, write up a post-mortem of the engagement with lessons learned.

Similarly, in investment banking, at the end of a new deal, the bank analyst could have a standard procedure to submit the appropriate deal documents that represent the unique strategies or learnings that made the particular deal a success.

Prioritizing Knowledge Management Initiatives

2010-01-06T12:44:00.000-05:00

Prioritizing KM Initiatives

They are many types of different Knowledge Management (KM) Initiatives. One of the greatest KM challenges is identifying the appropriate KM initiatives for your organization. I recall visiting the World Bank back in the late 1990's when they were just starting a formal KM program. They had a laundry list of hundreds initiatives, and didn't know where to start first.

Knowledge Management initiatives can fall into one of the following broad categories:

Knowledge capture and dissemination
Business Process Improvement
Continuous Learning
Product and Service Development

Find below a detailed list of potential areas where Knowledge Management initiatives can focus:

Identifying, qualifying, synthesizing knowledge
Storing or mapping knowledge for re-use
Embedding “knowledge re-use” into business processes
Leveraging existing customer relationships, e.g. identifying cross-selling opportunities from other business units
Leveraging customer contacts and individual networks
Identifying ways to shorten the sales cycle
Automating content re-use to quicken RFP responses
Capturing information on firm expertise
Developing processes to leverage firm expertise
Ensuring new opportunities get routed to the right people
Ensuring the right people can be identified for specific opportunities
Identifying ways to shorten time to market
Improving delivery of products & services
Fostering product & service innovation
Developing new information-based products & services
Improving customer collaboration for product development, delivery and post-engagement
Collecting customer feedback
Leveraging customer experiences and “best practices” from sales
Publicizing successes
Creating a knowledge sharing culture
Sharing information on products, services, and resources
Developing individual and team expertise
Providing continuous learning
Delivering structured knowledge for training, answering need to know and innovative solution development
Fostering collaboration
Facilitating research & development
Fostering KM Thought Leadership
Managing intellectual property (e.g. patents)

With so many areas of potential focus, it is important to prioritize KM Initiatives based on:

Impact on the business strategy & objectives
Return on Investment
Implementation time
Measurability of results

Since Knowledge Management should be part of core value generation, not just a cost center, it is really important to prioritize KM initiatives based on ROI. It is also important a few early on initiatives that are not resource intensive. Creating a few early "wins" is a great way to establish longer-term support and adoption of KM programs. It can also be a good way to obtain resources later on when needed for larger, more complex initiatives.

Product Management Goals

2009-12-14T12:40:00.000-05:00

Product Management Goals

Ensuring the “right” set of product features to retain customers and grow sales
Getting products and services to market faster
Ensuring high product quality
Supporting sales to both existing and new customers Generating products to break into new markets

Overall goal = Grow Revenue!

Role of Product Management

Defining Product Strategy and Vision
Performing Competitor Analysis
Positioning Product in Marketplace
Managing New Product Releases
Supporting Sales and Customer Service
Providing Product Expertise for Sales

Product Management Support for Sales

1. Create a Feedback Channel for Sales into Product Management

Establish e-mail or form process
Provide visibility into fixes and enhancement ideas submitted

2. Provide View into Product Roadmap

Provide summary of long-term roadmap with timeframes for use with prospects
Provide view of timing of new features, including priority rationalization
Publish known product issues

3. Provide Sales Support Tools and Collateral

Work with Marketing to generate positioning presentations for each Product Line
Provide positioning content; including value propositions, positioning versus competitors, pricing and sales qualifiers
Develop Sales collateral
Develop easy-to-use demos

4. Provide SME to help with sales calls, trade shows, etc.

Is "Slack Time" Needed for Successful KM?

2009-12-10T10:51:00.000-05:00

While attending an APQC conference years ago, I recall the term "slack time" raised as a requirement for successful KM initiatives. The concept was you need to build in time for employees to stop they normal day-to-day operational tasks to use your Knowledge Management application. Being from Coopers & Lybrand LLP, an hourly billable consulting firm, I cringed at the concept. Clearly, the folks introducing this concept were not froom a consulting or law firm that is billable to customers.

The concept of "slack time" infers that you are building stove piped KM applications not connected to day-to-day business processes. Doing this, as a company, you will inevitably encountered a series of additional challenges around incentizing usage. In thinking about how to avoid the need for "slack time" the answer we arrived at we fairly simple - though rarely followed. KM applications needed to be tightly integrated with the day-to-day business processes of the employee. The employee should not have to stop what they are doing to find time for KM, or leave one application and go to another. And KM initiatives should not introduce new time consuking tasks. In fact, if you take the concept of business process integration one step further, KM initiatives should actually be defined and designed to support specific components of already existing business processes.

Existing business processes (and in some cases re-engineered, improved processes) should be the starting point for identifying which KM initiatives to focus on. KM initatives should support, facilitiate and improve specific components of your company's business processes; whether those processes are finding sales leads, finding network contacts within your company to the prospect, identifying products to cross and upsell to customers, quickly compiling a best practices proposal to respond to an RFP, putting together an experienced engagement team, or delivering products and services. If you map our all your core business processes that drive revenue, this should be the road map for where all your KM initiatives plug into the business and integrate with specific processes along the way from customer acquisition to delivering products and services.

How does site "stickness" translate in the Knowledge Management space?

2009-11-18T11:14:00.000-05:00

There are two threads that sort of come together in the KM world. Think about the different between Google and Yahoo! Google relies much more on a syndication model of distributing advertisements through AdSense using their network of partner sites. Yahoo! however still needs to focus on driving users to their site and retaining them there as long as possible.

In the KM world of internal corporate KM initiatives, which model would you prefer?

Historically, KM initiatives has looked for ways to motive employees to come to a central site. Motivating usage is a huge KM topic. As KM initiatives evolve, it makes complete sense for them to look more towards a Google model of syndication. Why? Because syndication will allow employees to leverage KM applications more effortlessly as part of their existing business processes. See: http://alanbaren.blogspot.com/2005/12/is-slack-time-needed-for-successful-km.html

Leveraging web services to create portlets that integrate with other corporate applications is one way to think about syndication in the KM space. In what ways should KM initiatives think about integration leveraging portlets?
* Allow content contribution from other applications in the company; ideally during the authoring process.
* Allow content searches to be driven from other applications where information needs are required within the appropriate business workflow
* Allow content to be served up into other applications on request
* Allow content to be automatically served up to other applications contextually depending on what other content is being accessed

With tight integration into other corporate applications, the issues of "slack time" and "motivating usage" go away.

Successful KM Initiatives

2009-10-01T09:28:00.000-04:00

The two most important successful factors for a Knowledge Management initiative are having a measurable return on investment, and being integrated with existing business processes to ensure effortless usage.

What do you think are important measures for a success KM initiative?

Skills for Knowledge Management Leaders

2009-09-15T14:33:00.000-04:00

Five core areas of skills should typically be sought in leaders charged with implementing or managing a Knowledge Management Program.

Most CKOs or KM Directors are typically either business practitioners with strong industry subject-matter expertise, or KM practitioners. In the former case where you have a subject-matter expert with little KM experience, the intricacies of establishing a KM Strategy and prioritizing the "right" KM initiatives can often be a difficult learning curve. Selecting the wrong KM initatives early on is one of the surest roads to KM failure. Selecting large resource-intensive efforts, or ones with poor measurability can leave reduce support for future initiatives.

In the latter case where you have a KM practitioner with little subject-matter expertise, learning the current business processes, goals and challenges becomes the primary learning curve. And one that is not insurmountable, especially if subject-matter experts are brought in as Knowledge Managers in support of specific lines of business.

In the ideal world, CKOs or KM Directors should have as many of the required skills below as possible. The five core areas of required skills should include:

1. Knowledge Management Experience
2. Learning Industry Experience
3. Technology Project Management
4. Matrix Management Skills
5. Industry Subject Matter Expertise

Knowledge Management Experience

In-depth understanding of KM principles
Knowledge of how to establish an aligned KM strategy
Experience prioritizing KM initiatives
Experience leveraging existing KM solutions and technologies
Experience successfully implementing new KM initiatives
Familiar with KM best practices and other corporate implementations
Industry thought leader in the KM space
Experience in community building, collaboration, workflow and change management

Learning Industry Experience

Experience with continuous learning solutions
Experience with various learning modalities and when to apply them; classroom, e-learning, synchronous web casting
Understanding on how KM and Learning integrate

Technology Project Management

Experience in technology project management
Experience translating business requirements into technical functional specifications
Experience as a liaison between the business and technology
Experience indirectly managing shared technology resources
Experience with various enterprise and web technologies
Experience in rolling out new technology solutions to the business

Matrix Management Skills

Comfortable in a matrix reporting environment
Skilled at enabling cross-functional teams
Skilled at consensus building and establishing business owner buy-in from multiple stakeholders
Service orientation from both an internal and external perspective

Industry Subject-Matter Expertise

Knowledge of the core business(es) KM is supporting
Knowledge of the strategy and goals of the business
In-depth knowledge of existing business processes and challenges
Familiarity with the industry including competition, market opportunities, etc.
Knowledge of the key stakeholders and influencers of the business(es)

Interesting Knowledge Management articles

2009-09-04T10:45:00.000-04:00

Integrating Knowledge Management in Organizational Business Processes (Jrnl. of KM, April 2005) http://www.kmnetwork.com/RealTime.pdf

Why Knowledge Management Systems Fail? (KM Handbook, 2004)
http://www.brint.org/WhyKMSFail.htm

Excerpts coming....

Product Management 101: Bug Creep

2009-08-12T17:22:00.000-04:00

One of the biggest challenges for any Product Manager is figuring out how best to balance the features list for your next product release. There are always strategic features required to stay competitive with other products in the marketplace and move the product forward in its long-term vision. There are always tactic features required by specific customers or to win deals from specific prospects. And there are always bug fixes for items left out of the last development cycle or discovered from product use in the field.

It is always a challenge for Product Managers to balance the strategic and tactic features in defining a new feature set for development. Bug fixes tend to always get the lowest priority and resources. Often times, only the most important or highest severity bug fixes are addressed. As a result, Product Management departments can often find themselves with growing numbers of unaddressed bugs that get carried over from one release to the next. Examples of these lower level bug fixes must be typos, improved error messaging, GUI improvements, etc.

At some point however even the lowest level bugs need to be address in order to maintain product quality. Product quality inevitably leads to lower support costs and greater customer satisfaction. Here are a couple of guidelines to help.

1. Automate Severity Escalation Based on Time
Apply a stadard set of severities to your bug fixes to help you prioritize which ones to address first, but also add a TIME component. The longer a lower level bug stays open, it's severity should increase. Making both core severity and time open as two dimensions of a particular bugs utlimate severity will ensure that lower level bugs are they stay open longer will move up in severity and eventually be addressed.

A suggested policy might be: increase the severity of all bugs up one severity level for every 90 days they stay open.

2. Categorize Bugs Based on Functionality
Another way to avoid the common mistake of managing bug lists solely by Severity is to categorize bugs by major areas of functionality. This lets your Development Team view all bugs associated with a major component of functionality regardless of the severity. This way, as top priority bugs are addressed, lower level bugs impacting the code base being worked on can also be addressed "while the patient is open". Your development team should decide what areas of code need to be modified based on top severity bugs, but while there, also addressed lower level bugs impacting the same code base. This results is a much more efficient maintenance process for your Development Team, and at the same time, begins to wittle down your bug list without waiting for Severity escalation.

Interesting APQC Resources

2009-08-12T12:26:00.000-04:00

APQC - KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IN A GLOBAL ECONOMY

APQC'S 12TH ANNUAL KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT CONFERENCE AND TRAINING (May 7 - 11, 2007)

The Four-Step Knowledge Management Discipline

2009-07-02T09:40:00.000-04:00

The Four-Step Knowledge Management Discipline

http://www.wisdomsource.com/tf/wisdomsource.asp?a=267

Is Googling someone, ethical?

2007-06-22T17:41:00.000-04:00

I recently Googled someone I was going to be meeting for the first time. I wanted to learn more about them....their work interest, experiences, what they had authored, etc. It's amazing what you can find when you good someone else's name. For me, I found everything from quotes in news articles, press releases from old jobs, to comments posted in a lawn care forum on Scotts.com. I'm glad I wasn't involved in any medical or personal forum postings, cause those would have probably come up as well.

I also Googled my wife. I didn't find as much on her, but did find two people with the same name all doing interesting things; one was a recent book author and the other recently rennovated an historical tavern into a restaurant and B&B in Pennsylvannia.

When I Googled the person I was meeting, I found a patent of theirs. It was really interesting, but I wondered if I should discuss it with them or not. So the question occurred to me....is it ethical to 'Google' someone? Clearly, the information that gets returned from Googling someone is clearly in the public domain, but how much like or not like is it from doing a background check on them? Maybe ethical is not the term....as much as is it in good 'etiquette?'

I don't know the answer, but I do know it certainly got me looking at what people find if they Google me. That raised the idea. What a great new product for Google to come up with; a way to tell who's been Googling you? They do capture search terms, the trick would be captured who did the search. It would be pretty neat to know however who has been checking up on your recently; employers, friends and loved ones, and maybe new business contacts.

The Exit Interview

2007-06-04T06:19:00.000-04:00

The Exit Interview has to be one of the more bizarre corporate practices. Typically, when an employee decides to leave a company, they will get called into talk to an HR representative or someone else in Senior Management on their last day of employment. It's the companies last ditched attempt to finally learn what went wrong; "why are you leaving?", "what could we have done differently to have retained you?", "any suggestions for the company?"

Many employees dream of their Exit Interview, and of all the things they will finally say that they couldn't say while they were employed. It's such a shame, because you have to think many of those thoughts and suggestions have some value to the company; to be either acted on, thought about, recognized or simply explained away and eliminated as open issues.

It's quite the irony for a company to have an interest in an employee's thoughts and suggestions on their last day of employment versus taking an active interest all along. During their Exit Interview, employees need to ask themselves, "how much does the company really care about my thoughts and ideas, and taking action on them"?

If you have never been asked similar questions throughout the course of your employment, the answer is probably "not much!"

Top Product Management Goals

2007-05-02T06:24:00.000-04:00

Product Management is a function of six degrees of separation towards one goal: to drive revenue.

The ultimate Product Management goal should be to drive revenue by:

1. Getting products and services to market faster; faster as defined by faster than the competition; faster as in better positioned to close new sales .

2. Ensuring products and services are of high quality; avoiding unnecessary customer support costs and driving improvement customer satisfaction, better referrals and in the end, more sales.

3. Ensuring new product and service features are the ones most needed by customers and prospects; huge time and effort can be spend on the wrong feature sets; there can be huge development efforts resulting in little value or opposingly, "bells and whistles" ...if the right ones, that can generate signficant value. Feature set selection should be driven by ROI; how many customers will be retained or sold as result of the features; potential revenue versus size and cost of development effort.

4. Ensuring new product and service features help sales; know the competition intimately, differentiate and better - not match - what is already out there.

5. Developing new products and services to expand existing markets and reach new ones ; looking beyond the current product set and markets; new revenue opportunities.

6. Working with Marketing to train sales, sales support and customer service on new product features and upcoming product roadmaps; the better everyone in the company can 'speak the product' the better it can be positioned and sold to prospects.

CEO Tip - Talk to the Trenches

2007-04-03T06:07:00.000-04:00

One of the things that has always amazed me is how little Management Teams of smaller companies seems to interact with employees, when they have the greatest opportunity to do so. I have seen this time and time again. When I used to work for Bankers Trust Company, at that time, a 10-12,000 person company, they had frequent events like "Breakfast with the CEO" that anyone could sign up for and an e-mail address where you could send any idea (positive or negative) to the executive office.

I joined a young start-up in the Boston area a few years back. I met the Management Team at around 5 employees, and joined the company after their next round of funding at about 55 employees. I recall one week earlier on that the CEO actually walked around the office asking "hey, how are you doing" to folks. After that week, for the next 2 years, the Management Team pretty much isolated themselves behind closed doors. They claimed to have an "open door policy" and yes, the offices were all open cubicles, but use of employee intellectual capital as input into management decisions was completely missing. Yes, as an employee you could always go over and suggest an idea, but you were rarely asked to sit down, discuss it, or where told it was 'good idea' or 'bad idea' and why?

At Dun & Bradstreet, the former CEO, Alan Loren, used to eat all his lunches in the main employee cafeteria. A great idea, but the funny part about it, rarely did anyone ever sit down and join him. It had to be obvious to him after a while that he most often he ate alone, and that the onous was on him to invite people to join him ... if indeed his goal was to mingle with employees. He had such a great opportunity to learn about the company, how people felt about it and drive open communications. I'm truly not sure the value in just "being seen" with no interaction.

I am a true believer that the 'best ideas in a company come from the trenches'. It's the Sales team that's closest to customers and prospects. Customer Service that's hearing all the product\service problems. Marketing and Product Management that's most in tune with competitive offerings and ideas for strategic product direction. Technology and other Operational Areas that see internal issues with processes or office productivity.

Many companies perform "People Surveys", but Management Teams have to be kidding themselves if they think employees are being open and honest in their answers. I recall once suggesting to the Management Team of a small startup to include an open text field in their People Survey for comments\suggestions. The response I got was that it would be problematic sine the data captured would be quantitative and enable itself to be consolidated into summary statistics. My response was "Information can't hurt!" You'll have it. You don't need to look at it. But if you want to look at it, and heavens forbid, act on any of it, you'll atleast have the feedback.
When the People Survey at my existing company is completed, no one ever sees the results, talks about them nor sees a list of "here the things were are going to implement or change as a result of the survey". Like many People Surveys, the results go into a big black hole, or alternatively the results alone are presented with no accompanying initiatives.

I did a market survey a few years back of VCs to market test a new business idea. The idea was a 3rd party managed survey of employees driven by the Board, not Management. Surprizingly, few VCs were interested and rested their faith in the Management Teams hired and their quarterly board reports. I guess that works fine, but it becomes incumbent upon the Board them to ask Management the right questions:

1. What areas of the company need more or less hiring?
2. What is the general morale and tenor of employees? Any important motivational, benefit or cultural issues that should be addressed to optimize retension?
3. Who is the company desired upward mobility or additional career pathing?
4. What is Customer Service seeing at key product\service complaints? How are we addressing them?
5. What is Sales seeing as the key barriers to closing sales\converting customers? What are we doing to address those issues?
6. What is Marketing seeing in how competitors are marketing like products?
7. What is Product seeing in terms of product feedback from customers, or feature direction products require for success?
8. What things can be done to improve company productivity?

It amazes me that Boards don't attempt to learn how their investments are really being managed, and leave it to Management to present their view of the status of the company.....typically limited to financial discussions. It amazes me that Management Team don't regularly still down with employees to a. see how they are doing, and b. hear their ideas for revenue opportunities and productivity improvement. Knowing how employees are doing can greatly help adjust career pathing, improve morale and productivity, or understand early on endemic problems. Looking for everyone to get involved in ideas for revenue growth or productivity improvement generates a sense of corporate ownership and community, and "suggestions for improvement".....what a great attribute to include in performance measures.

I understand why doing this may be more difficult in larger companies, but clearly any Manager can do this with their teams well. In smaller companies, there's simply no excuse for the CEO and Senior Management to not be in touch with their employees. Job satisfaction and fulfillment comes from involvement. Greater productivity comes from involvement. Higher employee retension comes from involvement.

I sat back and tried to understand the reasons why President and CEOs of small companies don't do this more. To be fair, it could be a number of reasons. Maybe, some CEOs are stretched too thin. Maybe, they feel the company is their responsibility, their 'baby' and therefore, all the key ideas and deicsion need to come from top down. Maybe, it's an arrogance they know best. Or maybe, and possibly sadly, its a desire to act like a "big company" CEO and not mingle with the masses. Who knows. It certainly should be a cost or time issue; with some creative thinking, there are lots of ways to empower employees with a sense of being able to contribute:

Monthly breakfast with the CEO
Simply being more visible on the floor of the office
Making a habit of sitting down and talking with employees in various departments
Including employers in various departmental meeting
Developing a revenue\productivty idea goal as part of performance appraisals
Occasional contests around "how to improve ...."

There is also a skill as a CEO or Senior Management Team members around collecting employee feedback. On several occassions while working with an Executive Vice Chairman of Coopers & Lybrand, I would suggest ideas. Sometimes, they would internalize those ideas, keep the source of the idea confidential, and then direct their management team to resolve the issue. I allows enjoyed seeing my ideas come to fruition that way, even though I wasn't openly being given credit. On other occassions, however, the Vice Chairman would indicate "Alan has suggested ....". Since the Management they were directly suggestions towards were Senior Partners, it almost made me cringe when my feedback was used this way since it seemed I was creating issues or pointing out problems in the Senior Partners' organizations.

At a recent small company I worked for, the CEO believed they had an open door policy, yet no employee would dare just stop by to present an idea. Once when a conversation was started with me, I made some suggestions. Within the hour after the talk, the entire conversation was presented to my manager. Even though I didn't initiate contact with my CEO and the advice was solicited from me, my manager still perceived it as negative. Maybe Manager was simply worried about what the feedback would mean to them in terms of any additional work or potential negative perceptions from their CEO. In the end of the day, it's the trusted environment throughout the organization and a common desire for success that allows feedback to be shared across the organization at all levels; openly and honestly in a positive way without worry about its implications.

For open and honest feedback to be freely given by employees, there has to be a trusted environment created, and a process of handling feedback that avoids all negative connotations with Managers. There are three ways to do this. First, all information can be acted on and its source can be kept confidential. Second, when feedback and potential resolutions are discussed with Managers, it needs to be done in a non-hostile way. "Hi, I understand this is an area we might be able to improve. Let's all sit down and discuss it.", not "I just learned you're really screwing up this area of your department. Now fix it!" As long as all results and actions taken on feedback is positive, an open and trusted environment will be developed with employees. Third, create an environment and incentive program that drives feedback and employee involvement between Managers and their teams with information flowing up to the CEO. This way, the CEO can be seekin feedback, but direct Managers responsible for generating the open relationships with their employees to collect it.

Bottom line, CEOs from large and small companies alike, need either directly or through their Management teams find ways to get in touch with the feedback and ideas from the trenches. No one says all feedback needs to be acted on, but it may highlight potential problems in the marketplace or internal operations much faster than letting those issues fester, it may highlight some critical employee career, benefit or cultural issues that need to be addressed, and who know's, there may be an occassional new idea that can generate significant new revenue for the company. One things for sure, the information and insights that can be potentially gained can be invaluable and the benefit to employees of feeling involved in the direction of their company - as part of the team - will provide boundless motivation and productivity.

Making search sites\portals "sticky"

2007-03-07T00:34:00.000-05:00

As in my previous post regarding the strategic differences between Google and Yahoo!, all sites in the advertising space (direct or syndicated) need to find ways to keep visitors on their sites longer....creating multiple opportunities for advertising targeting.

Services that keep users coming back serve a similar purpose.

The best ones that come to mind are:
Classfied Ads
Personals
Job Boards
Dating Services
Real Estate

Basically anything where you need to post and return to find updates, or need to keep coming back and looking up new information like a Job Board.

True to form, tonight I saw a TV ad showcasing Yahoo! Real Estate and their partnership with Prudential Real Estate. People looking for houses will keep coming back to see what's new. It also create a niche target audience as well.

What's Next for E-Learning?

2007-02-20T11:18:00.000-05:00

What does E-Learning and KM convergence mean?

Well traditionally, learning and development activities are considered to be one component of a Knowledge Management (KM) strategy. KM also addresses capturing and sharing tactic information (the expertise people already have), improving the company's operational business processes by bringing the right information to bear on a task at the right time, finding new ways to drive revenue or grow client capital, and identifying new knowledge-based products and services.

The learning component of KM is focused on developing what employees know; both industry subject-matter expertise and professional development skills. There are numerous ways to deliver learning to employees from classroom training, online learning or self-paced media (books, videos and audios). In the online learning space, content can be delivered synchronously via webcasts (using products like Centra, Placeware, Webex or NetMeeting) or asychronously via structured online learning courses.

In the asychronous space, there have traditionally been two types of content; off the shelf and customized. The off-the-shelf content consists of software libraries of various canned titles, everything ranging from Customer Service training, Sales Training, Negotiation Skills, Project Management to Time Management in the soft skills space to a wide range of certification courses from Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco and others in the technology training space. It is possible to find industry-specific online courses out there as well; certain skills around the Real Estate business, HIPAA for the healthcare field or licensing courses for Financial Services. All of these "canned" courses meet certain basic needs. Off-the-shelf learning can train on certain topics, and sometimes get more targeted and focused, but cannot address the content of highest value to KM and an organization as a whole. That content is the customized content at addresss company-specific, proprietary business, processes or systems.

Customized e-learning courses are needed to deliver company-specific content. Two challenges with company-specific content is:
a. Acquiring the content
b. Developing the course of delivery mechanism

A method for rapid and affordable method for creation of custom courses is needed.

For e-learning, you can think of a spectrum; from very well-defined, structured courses that are adaptive in nature to just pure presentations or file sharing. While for learning professionals, the first is ideal. It is often expensive to creative and more importantly, very hard to keep updated with fresh content.

Just enabling file sharing however, loses the benefits of adaptiveness, testing and tracking.

I believe however there is an intermediate model in the middle of the spectrum. A model that can be enabled with some of the newed rapid learning tools like Adobe's Breeze product and others: http://www.bersin.com/research/app_sim_overview.asp

For more on Rapid Learning:
http://www.learningcircuits.org/2005/jan2005/archibald.htm
http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/handbook/rapidelearning.html

With these tools, standard content like Powerpoint presentations can be easily wrapped with security and test questions to become learning objects. In some cases, audio and video can be added as well, the same way you would in recording a syncronous Placeware or Webex session.

As a result, you can create learning objects with proprietary content much more easily. Imagine recording materials from your New Hire Orientation Program for future re-use, or when returning from a trade-show, posting the presentation with the salient take-aways embedded in test questions. Some of the adaptive complexities may be lost or harder to reproduce with this type of learning object, but the content will be able to be much more pointed on your company's own businesses, processes and systems, and more readily changed and kept up-to-date.

iPod Futures

2007-01-22T10:27:00.000-05:00

Some future ideas for iPods:

1. Ability to play videos

2. Adapter to take photos; great screen to see subject, capture photo. The trick then is adding the ability to download photos from an iPod to a PC.

3. Ability to share playlists with other iPod users. Lists could allow play in either a limited play number mode or as just partial songs. Either way, this would allow for a viral marketing approach so users with a "shared playlist" could then log into iTunes, and choice which songs they would then want to buy.

4. Ability to buy songs wirelessly to the iPod and sync up wirelessly. Not sure why this is taking so long to get there. Apple needs to fend off the latest wave of MP3 phones coming to market.

Business Models 101 - Lending Tree

2006-06-23T00:37:00.000-04:00

LendingTree

I used LendingTree when we shopped for a mortgage for our new home. I put in my zip code for area, and that I only wanted to see 30-year fixed mortgage options. I got 4 options back from different lenders. Three of which were variable rate options. (I guess the options you ask for are either not used in their search criteria, or they had trouble finding 4 fixed rate mortgage lenders!)

The 4th lender I was interested in learning more. I took their name, went to their website, and looked up their published rates and contact information. I'm don't see why I needed to response through LendingTree at all after getting the information from them. Of course, they do offer incentives like $200 HomeDepot certificates and other benefits for letting them know you found a mortgage through them, but that seems like an ad-hoc way of ensuring you are finding a mortgage through them when I assume referral fees are the lion share of their revenue.

Of course lendors might ask you how you learned about them. But I'm guessing for lendors they would rather have you contact them directly versus through a broker. Maybe lendors also pay LendingTree for the opportunity to response to inquiries. I'm not sure.

Regardless, I continue to struggle to understand LendingTree's business model. Being a transactional imtermediary is a model I understand. So is being a sales lead referrer. There just just doesn't seem to be anything in LendingTree's model to ensure customer referrals are being tracked back to LendingTree.

For those of you looking for mortgages, I would recommend BankRate.com. Great information on various lendors and rates for your area. Just be sure to call up lendors of interest to clarify their rates. Sometimes published rates don't always clearly state if the rates listed are with or without points. A little leg work can result in really finding a great deal.

What's Missing? MapQuest

2006-01-27T00:42:00.000-05:00

Let's face it...MapQuest has created an invaluable indispensable service. It's actually hard to remember the days when you always needed to ask someone for directions. Now, you can simply say "don't worry I'll just MapQuest it". The time saved in conversations alone in not giving directions over the phone makes us all more productive in terms of the time freed up for other activities.

What would I like to see? Sure, a 'Reverse Directions' button like Google Maps has. But more interestly, the ability to input mid-points. Currently, you have Starting Point and End Point addresses you can specify, but what if I know I wanted to go through this particular town on the way, or ensure my route hit Rt. 280 vs. 78? Adding a mid-Point location option would be a great enhancement for MapQuest. Just make sure to down go from New York to Philly by way of Boston!

What's Missing? Monster.com

2006-01-17T02:36:00.000-05:00

Monster.com

Ever submit a job posting response through Monster? You now get a FULL PAGE advertisement in the middle of your resume submission. At the very bottom of the ad page is the little "Next, No Thank You" button. Monster has to win the award for forgoing usability in favor of where there revenue is coming from.

Think about it....you are submitted your resume for a job. Do you really think anyone is going to stop, and fill out some promotion or advertising form in the middle of that process. I would get it a little bit if the ad came up once the resume submission was complete. But really who is going to stop the submission of their resume for a job to answer an ad. I'm not sure who is more lost here, Monster product designers or the company's willing to pay for this completely ineffective placement?

I would love to see there statistics on how many click-throughs they get from these ads...or better yet, how many of these click throughs ae intentional? I bet a good portion of people filling out these ads do so because they are misguided in thinking it is the next required step to respond to a job posting.

What's missing? Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz

2006-01-17T00:48:00.000-05:00

When I lived in Acton, Massachusetts, our house was located about 30 miles from Logan airport, 30 miles from Worchester, and maybe an hours drivc from Providence. I sometimes had an Departing Airport preference, but not always. Sometimes flights out of Logan were booked or too expensive, and I wanted to see what my options were if I drove to another airport.

Ever try to do this with Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, Priceline, CheapTickets for any of the other travel sites out there? Good luck. You can't. You need to pick one Departing Airport and one Designation Airport. Now to add to that confusion, imagine if you were visiting relatives in Boca Raton, Florida and could fly into either Fort Lauderdale or West Plam Beach. That means you would have to run separate searches for flights from...

Logan to West Palm
Logan to Ft. Lauderdale
Worchester to West Palm
Worchester to Ft. Lauderdale
Providence to West Palm
Providence to Ft. Lauderdale

Forget having flexibility in the dates and times you can travel. Two hours later...try comparing those individual search results to each other?

All I want to see is the ability to specific an optional mileage range for both my Departing and Designation airport locations; "show me all airports within 20 miles". Not a difficult search feature to add, but how much easier would that make it when your preferences are flexible.

Ok, maybe the problem is just a Boston thing. I only wish. We now live in the New York area. Newark, Laguardia, JFK, Tetterboro, Morrisontown, ...

The Next Frontier for Google and Yahoo!

2005-12-06T06:52:00.000-05:00

Google and Yahoo! each make the lion share of their revenue through advertising placed on their website and other sites publishing their content and ads.

For Google, they generated $1.4 billion (that's billion with a "B") for just the 2nd quarter. That included $737 million from their own properties and $630 million from other sites publishing their ads. See http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3522061 or http://investor.google.com/releases/2005Q2.html. For Yahoo!, last quarter they generated $716 million in advertising revenue and another $158 million in fees. See http://webwereld.nl/articles/36397

According to Majestic Research, in the month of June 2005, Google had 80 million and Yahoo! has 118 million unique U.S. visitors. The most interesting thing about these numbers are if you look at Google announcements, they often use the term "visitors". Yahoo! on the other hand is more likely to use the term "users". Why? Become each of these companies that consumers so typically think of as 'search engines' are radically different business models. And visitors to - or users of - these sites spend their time very differently.

For Google, it's about user accessing their search engine and seeing ad placements. For Yahoo!, it's the same, but Yahoo! is deeper when it comes to "stickier" services. For example, Yahoo! has chat, instant messaging, and e-mail users. As very well outlined in this Marketing VOX article, Google has just begun to develop its e-mail service GMail, and doesn't have IM or chat yet. As a result, visitors to Yahoo spend a lot more time in e-mail (42%) and IM (22%) compared to search. 88% of Google visitors accessed its search vs. 55% of Yahoo users using search. But here's the challenge, especially for Google: Google users with GMail spend double the time using GMail than searching. So what does this mean for the direction of both companies?

1. Services Beyond Search. For Google, it means they need to develop "stickier" services and then leverage those services for ad placement. Chat, maybe IM, a Career\job board (perfect for an acquisition). Dating services. Real Estate services. Classifieds. Stickier services will lead to users doing more functions on the site, spending more time and increasing the window for ad targeting....as well as service fees.

Note: IM may work for personal connections. Yahoo has lost significant IM traffic to MSN, which is most likely in the business vs. consumer space. Businesses are starting to use IM more and more as an internal way to communicate versus e-mail.

Already Google has started buying services like Meetroduction (http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3525986) earlier this year. As both companies add new services, it is also important to think beyond just "cool tools" for consumers, and how such tools could be bundled into business applications or processes. Meetroduction is a perfect example. It's a cool tool. Let's you see pictures and basically IM associated with locals. Nothing real new here. Now embedding a tool like that in some specific services like a Dating service, Business networking tool, etc, would make it more than just a "cool" tool.

2. Community, Community, Community. Yahoo! has done a good job through Games, Chat and IM to make Yahoo a place people come to meet other people. For connecting with friends and family; for socializing; for business. Google needs to think of similar yet new ways of doing the same, and both companies need to think about ways t enhance the connectivity experience. A Google or Yahoo-branded IP phone service would be a great service extension
for either company! (Yahoo did just buy Dialpad -- a VoIP service). Tying VoIP into a home phone appliance versus just for PC chatting would be a good additional extension.

3. Business Services. Both Google and Yahoo! have done very little to develop the space of business solutions. Companies continue to struggle to manage their internal and external information, for document sharing, information dissemination, industry-based learning, news, etc. Google and Yahoo! are the experts at codifying content and serving it up based on relevancy. Offering corporate search services modified for the business world (less ad vs. services revenue, customized data taxonomies, centralized configurations, self-publishing) is one of many ways these companies can expand their expertise into the business solutions space. Beyond search, there are also a number of knowledge management tools that could be offer;
from expert directories, networking tools, research tools, etc. anything that's information to people, or people to people, they can be facilitators for by providing some unique solutions. It may also open up a whole new world of B2B ad dollars for them!

4. New Advertising Models. Already, we are seeing Google and Yahoo! innovate to create new services. Google Local and Yahoo! Local are beginning to be leveraged for selling ads into local markets (http://news.alamode.com/05/0505a2.htm ). This is especially important to
attract the ad revenue of SMB who are not going to advertise nationally.

For better quality advertising, and better rates, Google and Yahoo need to know more about their users. To profile them better and get more granular.

Yahoo! is further down this path with stickier services and user profiles, but the information captured needs to be more robust and expand on personal interest to business functionals, roles and interests as well. Knowing who is visiting their site will be critical to new revenue streams for both companies.

Google is starting to offer web-site specific advertising (http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3500021) and Yahoo is also experimenting with ads placed based on page content (http://www.adweek.com/aw/iq_interactive/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000966760), such as Google's already existing AdSense product. However, if
user-specific information is obtained and a method such as Sign on is encouraged for certain services, advertising can go to a whole new place by following users; "persistent advertising". Advertising coming to the user, regardless of where they browse or search. And if users can control what kind of ads they want to see, they won't mind it since with the right controls at the user profile leve, it's more "pull" than "push" advertising.

I love kayaking, skiing, am interested in social political topics and have business interests around internet business models and e-commerce, and if I can specify those, and which of those I want news, advertising, promotions to come to me, I'm driving that process. And advertisers should want to pay more since I'm saying "this is soemthing I specifically care about"; making my potential conversion rate higher.

Once Google and Yahoo! can capture both personal interest and business data around their users - not just in aggregate - but to drive Sign on, both consumer-focused and business-focused advertising to specific users.

Other content and advertising distribution platforms should also be considered. Handheld. Wireless. Car. TV. Digital billboards.

Great business ideas - Konfabulator

2005-11-24T23:12:00.000-05:00

Yahoo is buying Konfabulator, a 3-person company that makes mini-apps or 'widgets' that pull in specific data from various sources. Buried in the story is the potential for some great business ideas.
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/050725/yahoo_konfabulator.html
There is mention of a 3rd party developed widget that is being worked on to track apartment vacanies in some cities. Great idea!

They also talked about a widget that can monitor local traffic. This is something probably every business person would like to have on their desktop to check out prior to leaving work at the end of the day for their rush hour drive home.

Getting this feed into car mapping systems and Onstar would be ideal as well. Now, use satelitte survelliance to monitor open parking spaces in New York City, feed that into OnStar, and you really got something.

Existing Konfabulator Widgets include everything from desktop:
Search bars
Mail monitors
RSS news readers
City webcams
Traffic radar
Weather updates
System tools
WiFi monitor
Lotto results
Sports scores
Auction watchers
Shipping trackers
Event countdowns
Audio and media controls
Radio tuners
Currency converters

Great new product: Motorola ROKR

2005-11-12T13:31:00.000-05:00

This is a fantastic idea from Apple, Motorola and Cingular.
http://www.apple.com/itunes/mobile/

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/sep/07rokr.html

People don't want to carry around both their iPod and cell phone, and most everyone has a cell phone whereas they don't necessarily have an iPod. Key for competitive phone manufacturers, like Nokia, will be to hook up with Apple on a licensing deal quickly otherwise their phones will lose a significant competitive advantage.

Next steps for Apple:

1. Figure out how to snyc up iTunes with the Motorola ROKR via wireless; ideally WiFi or broadband access, not just Bluetooth at home.

2. Figure out a user-friendly interface for iTunes to allow wireless store browsing, purchasing and downloading directly from the cell phone.

Bad advertisements

2005-08-06T12:36:00.000-04:00

Have you ever seen the Progressive Insurance commerical? "We may not be the least expensive, but with all that information out there, we'll help you make the right choice."

Kind of like saying "we're not great, but we should get points for trying!"

Advertisements: The best and worst

2005-08-04T11:19:00.000-04:00

Worst Ads:

1. CITIGROUP: Tonight I saw the ad from Citigroup on identity theft with the man in the chair talking with a female voice. First of all, I've never understood the value of a bank promoting identity theft protection. The max liability is $50 for credit cards. Second, ok, the ads are cute...the first 2 or 3 times, but they've been running for what seems over a year now. No new creative thoughts? No new services other than identity theft? http://daryld.com/citi-ads/outfit/
http://www.citibank.com/us/cards/cardserv/advice/commercial.htm

All the more ironic that Citi would want those ads on given their July lost of over 3.9 million customer data files
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8119720/
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2005/citigroup_data.html
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/MellodyHobson/story?id=824699&page=1

For TV stations, sure great to have the ad revenue from Citi, but guess what, I change the channel everytime those identity theft commercials come on. I've seen them all already 50 times.

Citigroup more recently came out with another campaign for their "Thank you" rewards program. In one ad, where a fat women is mistaken as pregnant and the offender breaks the tension with a "thank you". In the second ad, a couple in a restaurant get excited that the fiance says 'thank you' to the question 'are we every going to get married'. Why? To show the power of the word "thank you" as part of Citi's Thank You Rewards Program. Boy, quite the stretch in that ad agency's creative room. http://slate.msn.com/id/2104623/

I guess once that bombed, Citigroup had to fall back once again to their existing identity theft ads. After all, they'll protect your card number from being stolen or mis-used, as long as it's not one of the 3.9 million customer data files they lost.
Ad Agency: Fallon North America in Minnesota
Citigroup Marketing Exec: Brad Jakeman, Director of Global Advertising

2. BURGER KING: Another ad agency or marketing exec that should be taken out of their misery is Burger King. Three tradegic ads in a row. First, a Dad akes up in bed with a masked Burger King figure next to him.

Next, two people dressed as chickens against each other in a fighting ring. Relationship to food? Wanting to go to Burger King? Got me.
http://southflorida.bizjournals.com/southflorida/stories/2004/10/18/daily39.html

Then third, lastest masked dancing chicken rock star.
The ads are not cool, certainly do nothing to entice you about the food, and to be honest, are down out right freaky. If you want your kids to have bad dreams for a few weeks, just sit them down and let them watch Burger King ads. Hold the pickel, hold the lettuce...forget it, keep those, just hold the terrible ads!

The Spot: It's morning. Birds are chirping. A man wakes up in his bed … and discovers he's not alone! Next to him on the mattress there is some sort of royal personage: a king, clad in burgundy robes and a crown. But the king's head appears to be made of plastic and is perhaps three times too large for his body. He hands the stunned man a breakfast sandwich. They laugh together.
View ad here: http://img.slate.msn.com/media/50/041011_WakeUpWithTheKing_100k.asf
More about the King in Bed ad: http://slate.msn.com/id/2107697/
More about the Fighting Chickens ad: http://southflorida.bizjournals.com/southflorida/stories/2004/10/18/daily39.html
Ad Agency: Crispin Porter + Bogusky http://www.cpbmiami.com
Burger King Marketing Exec: Russ Klein, Chief Global Marketing Officer
http://www.bk.com/CompanyInfo/bk_corporation/executive_team/klein.aspx

3. Progressive Insurance
As a worst ad runner up, it's got to be Progressive Insurance. For a mildly bad ad, not annoying, just ineffective. But it does get me to laugh at least..."come to ProgressiveDirect, we may not be the lowest price, but we'll tell you who is...even if it's not us." Well, a charitable marketing effort for their competitors. You gotta love it!

Best Ads:
4. JPMorganChase: Unlike Citigroup and Burger King, JPMorganChase's recent ad campaign is amazing. Each new ad better than the next. The first is to the tune of The Mary-Tyler Moore Show and shows the day-in-the-life of a female business professional, and the multiple users for her Chase banking services; the ATM card for depositing her first paycheck, online banking to see it deposited, her credit card to pay for dinner and about 3-4 other users for Chase services throughout the day. Fun, uplifting, show the diverse services Chase offers and how they make one's life easier...not just identity theft. Chase's ad agency and their marketing staff clearly "get it!"

They following this ad up with a 2nd ad with a mother waiting for her daughter to come home for a visit. The daughter says "she's too busy at work". She tells her daughter she has her credit card to use to buy a ticket home if she changes her mind. Of course, the daughter changes her mind, and attempts to surprize her mother with a visit. Her mother finds out by seeing the charge hit her online banking account, and instead throws a surprize welcome home reception for her daughter.

Again, the services of their charge car, and online banking. And the value they both provide in every day life. Fun, entertaining, something we all can relate too. (No masked King in your bed here!)
Ad Agency: Unknown
Chase Marketing Exec: Unknown

5. I'm not sure who these ads are, but I believe it could also be Citigroup. If so they get the best and worst award. Those instant reward ads are great. The teenager trying to mountain bike with no bike; "you can't wait for your rewards!", or the guy in the gym, jogging one lap around then weighing himself every time; "you can't wait for your rewards!" I'll have to note who's ads these are next time I see them.

Comment with your best and worst suggestions.