The Corporate Librarian

This session had a panel of four - William Hayes (Director, Library Services, Biogen Idec), Todd Berkowitz (Director, Marketing, NewsGator Technology), Elise Bunsey (Ernst & Young LLP’s Center for Business Knowledge) and Peter Smith (Director, Insight and Text Mining, Dow Jones Company).

Todd set the stage for the rest of the group - too much information, no prioritization, etc. etc.. Did make a good point about mobility of workers (not deskbound). Enterprise RSS = combination of internally- and externally-generated content with a centralized manager.

RSS is not actionable, doesn’t require a lot of time, can be delivered anywhere, users control subscriptions.

William talked about how Biogen uses RSS to get information to sales reps.

• Aggregated and filtered newsfeeds (Pubmed searches, Google News, email project updates, table of contents feeds, conference feeds) to Rheumatology marketing group. Ran RSS sources through a variety of filters and text-mining tools, in some cases going back to websites, then remaining sources brought back into aggregator. Managed to reduce items looked at by 1/3rd.
• Distribution of newsletters via manual review and tagging of RSS items into email document. Clipping feature of NewsGator and some customization used to grab items and include them in newsletter, using just a few clicks.
• Education of intranet team on Newsgator tools and RSS advantages for information delivery. Built a light-weight Drupal blog for items not already in a feed (like DIALOG search results), emails go through procmail and a Perl script and get send to the blog.

Sources: public news feeds, internal news, recurring searches, table of contents, newsletters, announcements, intranet site monitoring, web page updates, wiki site monitoring, project updates, blog monitoring.

Can identify what people have actually looked at.

Distribution targets: RSS readers (desktop and web), intranet portal, mobile phone clients, screensavers and email clients.

Questions:

• Issues with copyright? (Can only hold some content for 30/60 days, more a licensing matter - you can choose how long you keep articles for)

Elise and Peter talked about how Ernst & Young is using text mining and visualization tools. and how the Center for Business Knowledge included dashboards (built using Factiva Insight) in community of practice portals so that practitioners could easily view changes or relationships.

Challenge: Mapping industry themes and media coverage of clients/prospects to E&Y’s service portfolio.

Approach: Customize Factiva Insight (communications/media industry solution) to meet E&Y’s needs.

E&Y was able to map issues against services and build heat maps plotting the relative usefulness of those services against clients or prospects, as well as revealing common phrases coming up in industry searches as well as discovery of related unknown phrases (up and coming issues - if 5% increase in volume, gets visualized).

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I attended this talk by Ajay Gandhi of BEA Systems because I was curious what BEA’s take was, as an enterprise infrastructure software company.

• The changing nature of modern work (ad hoc, collaborative, etc. etc., much of time spent looking for information or expertise)
• Why Web 2.0 matters
• Enterprise social computing
• Impact on the enterprise

The gist of his talk was that people want the advantages of consumer Web 2.0 applications, with the security and control (e.g., ability to restrict viewing of information based on roles) of enterprise applications.

Conveniently enough, BEA has some applications which fit this need

AquaLogic Pages lets people combine blogs, websites and wikis, AquaLogic Pathways combines social search, social bookmarking and tagging and AquaLogic Ensemble lets IT developers build mash-ups.

More I cannot say without lapsing into sarcasm and unnecessary harshness, I’m afraid. I admit to being unduly influenced by the repeated reference to corporate librarians as obstacles.

For more info, see BEA’s website on Enterprise Social Computing or their blog/demos at en.terpri.se.

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Brad Allen, the founder and CTO (Chief Technology Officer) of Siderean Software presented on the point navigation systems he’s been seeing. Search is no longer sufficient for findability - people don’t know what’s available.

New requirements: A shared unified view of the scope of available information (blogs, databases, document management systems, wikis, web, etc.), ability to zero in quickly on relevant information, ability to find and follow relationships (document –> author –> organization —> areas organization is researching), sharing and organizations of findings with others (creating social context for information access and discovery).

Navigation itself is fundamentally social.

Evolution from search (querying bag of words) –> faceted navigation (slicing and dicing homogeneous objects guided by trees of concepts) –> relational navigation (navigating through a network of related heterogeneous objects).

Meaning comes from relationships which are identified by metadata. The Semantic Web (finally in sight) is a web of metadata.

• Use the URI, XML namespaces to stitch disparate information into a unified information architecture.
• Make relationships formally explicit using standard vocabularies.

Historic transition in cataloging and resource discovery - emerging standards in bibliographical data.

Taxonomies - provide navigational glue binding disparate information objects by facets using a standard ontology (SKOS). Other facets come from asset, relational and usage metadata (using other ontologies - DC, FRBR). Allow for zeroing in on and pivoting across information resources.

Case studies using Siderean software: Oracle, Environmental Health News, unnamed pharmaeutical company, NASA JPL, unnamed financial services company, unnamed news organization.

Folksonomies can make taxonomies more responsive and taxonomies can make folksonomies more responsible, both can be represented using the same ontology (SKOS) and be tagged in editorial workflow.

Questions/comments:

• What does ability to combine intranet and internet sources mean for the future? (Difference between consumer and corporate is blurring)
• People are more interested in going outside the organization for expertise rather than inside, according to studies.
• RDF triple stores start falling over at 100 million mark or so from what he’s seen (Siderean technology can handle 30 billion. Key is distribution of work, URI used to hand off to another repository.).

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Ann Marcus of Collaborative Strategies and Dave Hersh, the CEO of Jive Software presented on this.

I’ll just note the points of interest to me:

(from Amy’s talk)

The shift is from 1.0 (KM/Web 1.0, about publishing, 1995-2000) to 2.0 (Web 2.0, about interaction, 1998-200 to community (Enterprise 2.0/KM 2.0, 2004-??).

Technology is highly modularized and flexible, interactive ensembles which address problems where they live.

“The more you give away, the more value you can get back”

Dion Hinchcliffe’s blog has a graphic on the mashup spectrum from emergent ad hoc self-service to structured delegated creation

(from Dave’s talk)

Presented 6 spectra to consider in terms of tailoring your approach (authoritarian to democratic, high/low alignment between business and IT, high/low collaboration, etc.)

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I changed my mind at the last minute and decided to attend Steve Barth and Richard Marrs‘ session, intrigued by the notion of drawing on cognitive psychology and complexity science for better faster decision-making.

Perception and cognition - the basic cycle for individuals and organizations both is sense –> respond –> change. Degrees of adaptation (learning, innovation) and intention (strategy). Average human can process 11 million bits per second, but is only consciously aware of 16 bits per second. Sense- and decision-making happen at a much higher bandwidth than we realize (before we are consciously aware).

• Working definitions
• Intuition - Knowing or sensing without the use of a conscious rational process (immediate cognition). Tacit knowledge (see below). Often more efficient than proactivity.
• Expertise - Skillfulnes by virtue of possessing special knowledge
• Cognition - Acquisition of knowledge by the use of reasoning, intuition or perception
• Culture - Evolving collective assumptions that evolve as people solve internal and external problems.
• Four kinds of knowledge - explicit (codified), tacit (unarticulated knowledge of an individual), implicit (embedded in the group or community), ambient (information which has meaning as soon as you can apprehend it)
• Education + experience = expertise
• Expertise + information = pattern recognition
• Maintaining bandwidth depends on context (language, experience, culture, exformation), trust in yourself, others and power/authority and both context and trust must be built in advanced.

Space and time

• Networks are egocentric (personal), navigated (proximate) and contextual (purposeful). An infinite network is useless for resolving specific problems.
• Must be built in advanced but can’t be defined in advance
• Collaborative innovation network is self-motivated, but shares a collective vision and a goal. It develops around a core group over time which is tightly-linked.
• Knowledge tenses - past (tacit, implicit, explicit), present (inquiry & discovery), future (possible/plausible/probable).
• Pace layers of civilization: nature –> culture –> governance –> infrastructure –> commerce –> fashion and art (Stewart Brand). Fast layers innovate, slow layers stabilize, influence between layers, opportunities are where layers meet.

Truth and beauty

• Knowledge as justified true belief (Max Boisot)
• Possible (options, doesn’t violate laws of physics), probable (objective data convincing to others), plausible (subjective, narrative coherence, if only to the individual)
• Possible (belief) –> Evidence –> Probable –> Actual (through analysis). Managerial mindset. Traditional organizations.
• Possible (belief) –> Intuition –> Plausible (true) –> Actual (through innovation). Entpreneurial mindset. Radical innovation.

Knowledge managers have to identify future concepts which are plausible or probable. Strategy lives in the future (as opposed to tactics and day-to-day operations). However, intuition plays a role in all of these.

• Cone of uncertainty - uncertainty expands the farther out you look.
• Important to be the first one to get it right, take advantage of ambiguity and uncertainty.

Innovation != invention

Adoption velocity S-curve: from innovators –> early adopters –> early majority –> late majority –> laggards. Importance of intuition and collaboration is in those early phases.

Figure out what you need to know and what you think you know, what you know you don’t know, who knows or could know it, what you don’t know you know, what you don’t know you don’t know, what you know and who knows it

Skills and tools:

• Formal and informal networks
• Identification and mapping of purposeful teams and networks so you can stimulate them, facilitate processes, design teams for cognitive diversity and compatible differences, support with infrastructure for knowledge generation (not just capture/archiving)

Implications for KM

• Facilitate present and future
• Differentials in thinking and cognitive diversity
• Manage for intuition and future tense knowledge (ahead of the curve, not on or behind it)

Q&A/Comments:

• How would you start a KM program? (With basic productivity tools to create space, communications tools)
• Issues with entrepreneurial approach in traditional organizations (Change the rules and raise bandwidth between people to deal with intuition more)
• David Snowden thinks strategy is about real-time experimentation in the present, not future-tense. Entrepreneurs who see the world in a different way is not the same as intuition. Key is to introduce different types of evidence.

I gave them my business card so they can email a revised version of the presentation with a reading list, Steve has his own blog and will be guest-blogging on David Snowden’s blog.

Readings:

• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
• Coolhunting: Chasing Down the Next Big Thing

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Cindy Gordon, the CEO of Helix Commerce International Inc. and the founder of 2BeVirtual.com and John Jainschigg, Director, CMP Metaverse gave this presentation. They were preceded by Hugh McKellar, editor of KMWorld, who gave Jan Schultes (sp?) an award as well as Bruce Molloy, the CEO of Connotate.

John has explored Second Life for about 18 months. He opened with a presentation of images from Second Life, Yahoo! Avatars and other virtual worlds in PowerPoint to a blaring soundtrack. Then Cindy took over.

The presentation outlined the history of virtual worlds, business’ evolving strategies in virtual worlds and business implications.

Interesting use of terminology - social media platforms as the current wave, not social networking services.

“Virtual worlds are online environments that let us apply the technology and psychology of multiplayer online games to business.”

About 1% of the audience regularly plays MMOGs, about 3% have Second Life accounts. Nobody deployed virtual worlds for their business.

Escalation of children-oriented virtual worlds - various services (Club Penguin, Habbo Hotel, Whyville) - we’re socializing a generation in avatars and personas.

Over $1 billion projected to be invested in virtual worlds by year-end, rapidly-growing ecosystem.

Benefits:

• Promotes profound attention
• Enables rapid learning
• Strong retention
• Builds community and trust
• Spontaneous generation of culture
• Creation of a new B2B economy

Main players - Second Life (average age of users is 32, 56% male, 55K peak concurrency and 1.5 million users, about 40K users have a positive cashflow), There, Kaneva, Entropia, Active Worlds, Areae.

Helix/CMP launching Second Life global branding research report in January.

John takes over:

Interesting term - “flat web” - yet Metaverse is not just “the 3D Web”

1st Phase - Primacy of the Build (simplistic automated interaction, minimal human presence, traffic viewed in web terms, metrics as an afterthought, no ROI)

2nd Phase -Crowd Sourcing and Involvement (more gamelike automated interaction, increased human presence, user anonymity troublesome, traffic still viewed in web terms, metrics emerging, ROI resolving somewhat).

• Weather Channel Island cited as a success - 4-island build emphasizing extreme sports.
• Pontiac Motorati - lots to do all the time, free land for residents, connection with blog networks, promotion of avatar personalities, strong web presence. However, metrics are minimal.
• Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) - unique sims offering news and events in a social setting, heavy use of RSS feeds with novel displays, live music, contests, art exhibitions. See their goal as bridging Australian and SL cultures.
• CSI: NY led to 175,000 people engaging with the asset so far, vastly simplified interface for SL.

3rd Phase - Era of Engagement (business recruitment/B2B events/sales/social commerce, web integration with inworld tools for identity transfer, secuity, metrics, human presence paramount, user anonymity less troublesome, shift from traffic to audience qualification/attention/interaction/dwelling, smart metrics solutions hard to find, ROI increasingly straightforward)

Challenges:

• Finding a qualified professional audience
• Registering them
• De-anonymizing inworld interactions
• Producing compelling events at real-world scales
• Extending virtual events to a larger web audience
• Implementing definitive metrics and analytics
• Nurturing and maintaining professional communities

CMP Metaverse 6-day Life 2.0 summit series inworld with CMP media properties leveraged for initial audience development and attendee identity double-confirmed through a promotion and registration system. CMP created a hosted metrics system and proprietary sensor array based on hyperspectral imaging technology (hours of attendance, sessions attended, booths visited, media viewed, web pages, notecards, document download links etc. offered). Every interaction and movement with 4-second precision cross-referenced with registration data for every attendee. Fall summit saw 1000 inworld (peak concurrency 140) with global audience, C-level execs and software architects attending, sponsored content. Dwell times for top 500 attendees were 15 hours, for top 25 attendees were 26 hours. 279 Platinum Leads, 190 Gold Leads.

No infrastructure, travel costs, physical logistics and 100% green.

Thursday 8:30 PM EST inworld event.

My quick thoughts:

• In some sense, isn’t avatar portability for businesses reducing actual engagement in/with any given virtual world?
• How will business demands (non-anonymity, standardization but also tying to the ‘outside Web’) change virtual worlds?
• How will differing broadband penetration rates affect the potential of virtual worlds?
• Given Nick Carr’s analysis of power consumption, how green is this really?

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David Gurteen had an interesting approach to this session - he ‘planted some ideas’ with a very brief presentation then asked us to get together and discuss what we thought, then come back together and we’d exchange thoughts. So far, it’s been the most engaging session.

He cited Alfie Kohn on the subject of rewards, which Kohn is down on, saying:

• Rewards punish (i.e., telling someone “You will get X for doing Y” is functionally equivalent to saying “Do X or you won’t get Y”)
• Rewards rupture relations (destroy cooperation in favor of competition, people won’t ask for help if they need it)
• Rewards ignore reasons (i.e., danger of people gaming the system, adherence to ill-considered metrics, promote single solution)
• Rewards deter risk-taking (Why take a chance on a different approach if it could mean not getting a reward?)
• Rewards undermine interest (don’t feel work is freely chosen and directed, ‘they’re bribing me to do something I don’t want to do’)

He then gave differing opinions on what works in place of rewards:

• Pay well and fairly (Kohn)
• “It’s your job, do it” (Buckman)
• Give access and freedom of decision (John Holt)
• Change understanding (Anthony de Mello)

Various things came out during the split into groups to discuss “How do we make people do things?” (specifically in a knowledge management context).

• The notion of emotional rewards (satisfaction of a job well done, feeling of accomplishment, pride in being an expert).
• Is the growing volume of information discouraging people from sharing? (David’s take was this was really saying it wasn’t a priority for them, and the question was how to raise the priority of it)
• Perhaps a change in atittude is required.
• Following up on this, a gentleman from Boeing said that Boeing had found the number 1 way to get experts to share their knowledge was if they were sure it would be applied correctly (trust issue).
• Peer recognition.
• If an organization is transparent, peoples’ contributions become obvious to the rest of the organization and they are recognized.

I met several cool people I’ll have to see about staying in touch with, including Eric Mack, Jay Cross and Stacie Jordan from my former employer (who’s speaking at a session on Thursday).

UPDATE: I’ve added some info to this entry from the original talk, since the slides were in the collected presentations we got. Additions are in bold.

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Rather than bore you with a lot of bullet points, I’ll point you to Dave Pollard’s presentation.

OK, just a few clarifying bullet points:

• InFlow is a social network mapping tool
• Dodgeball sends messages to people you’ve expressed an interest in meeting via mobile phones if you’re in proximity.
• nTAG lets attendees of conferences know what interests they have in common, based on profiles filed out previously.

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Richard McDermott presented just a few slides and gave us 9 questions to consider. He talked about content (the computerization thereof), increased connectivity and growing complexity as making people feel overwhelmed by a flood of information beyond their control. One point in connection (ha!) with this was that he saw increased connectivity as enabling virtual meetings by the truckload, which favored presentation over collaboration.

His questions were grouped into 5 questions for individuals and 4 for the organization - I present them below, individual questions first.

1. What if we batched work by attention required and managed interruptions?
2. What if we selectively applied our full attention?
3. What if we used less information (when we knew what we were doing)?
4. What if we looked for precedents rather than best practices?
5. What if we connected with different worlds?
6. What if organizations created pressure to share and learn?
7. What if organizations got someone to ‘mind the store’ (and the dimensions of the store were defined), in terms of information management. That is, hiring a knowledge steward so people could get on with thinking about how to do their work better and smarter.
8. What if organizations integrated thinking into work (he gave the example of offering frameworks and guidelines, without being dictatorial about it)
9. What if organizations deepened their expertise?

Questions 3 and 4 really speak to the compulsion to research and research, collecting more and more data and succumbing to “analysis paralysis.”

I’m struck by the resonance of Questions 1 and 2 with Linda Stone’s thoughts on continuous partial attention (and Stowe Boyd’s rather different take).

In general, Richard’s questions were oriented towards getting people and organizations to be more thoughtful and mindful rather than valorizing speed and quantity of information. I still have some questions - does his approach sufficiently encourage innovation beyond the general “What if we connected with different worlds?” (i.e., look outside your industry) which would seem to contradict “What if we looked for precedents rather than best practices?” I also wonder about the ‘pressure to share and learn’ - does this mean Bob Buckman’s “Knowledge sharing is your job, do it?”

This was my second-favorite session - he didn’t have all the answers, he just asked us some questions and left us to figure out what we thought.

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Hubert Saint-Onge presented on the growing importance of collaborative networks and how we can facilitate them in the enterprise. The key takeaways I got from his presentation:

• Our goal is to manage the evolution of collaborative organizations with a free flow of capabilities and knowledge.
• Collaborative networks can function in a complementary fashion to hierarchies.

• Hierarchies are useful for strategic direction, checks and balances and resource allocation, networks for ambiguous situations and optimal use of capabilities (which seemed to be either skills or knowledge or both, it was never defined).

• Leadership must build interdependence between functions (how this should be done was never explained), encourage a high-trust climate and a shared perspective on customers and the organization’s strategy. Indirect control, managing through commitment.
• Organizations have traditionally been built for predictability, need both predictability and emergent orientation.
• The tension between the local level (which sees what’s going on now, in the field) and the strategic level (which can plan for the longer-term) is valuable.

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