IBM Lotus Connections - A Video on Activity-based Computing

May 9, 2008 at 7:41 am · Filed under Reviews

Lotus Connections is the IBM enterprise 2.0 platform with a number of social media features: Profiles, Communities, Blogs, Dogear (social bookmarking), and Activities
to organize your work and integrate with your colleagues. The idea with Activities is to enable what IBM calls Activity Centric Collaboration. The goal is to organize work around the activities people do rather than the tools they use. This is a common theme in enterprise 2.0 tools. My first introduction to what we eventually called knowledge management was creating activity-based tools in Visual Basic in 1993. I have been encouraged to see this concept reach maturity with today’s tools. I was introduced to IBM’s approach to the concept in 2005 through a press briefing. It was called Unified Activity Management then. It was still experimental then. Now the concept is fully integrated into their enterprise 2.0 offering in a functional manner.

Here is the first in a series of demo videos on Connections. This video “focuses on the Activities service, and it goes into some of the new features we’re releasing in the next version of Activities! You can also use this and future videos as training tools on how to get started and learn to use new features.” This is a nice example of video blogs to combine dialog with pictures to provide a more comprehensive message. Thanks to Tomoaki Sawada for pointing out the video through our Facebook connection

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Knowledge Management 2020

May 7, 2008 at 9:11 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, KM, Scenarios, Web 2.0

Via Shawn Callahan this morning, a link to a scenario about the future of work by Dave Pollard. (These two apparently had a swell conversation in Melbourne this week.) In his post, Knowledge Management in 2020, Dave describes the work lives of two professional consultants at a global consultancy, “Omni,” and an entrepreneur who is an Omni client.

Omni’s business is focused on “personal productivity improvement, facilitation, cultural anthropology, and design and communication skills development services.” Managing the rich flow of information available via blogs and RSS feeds is core to Omni’s work; for itself and its clients, it digests, interprets, summarizes, and offers recommendations on the immeasurably large flow of raw information now available. Omni has “abandoned” their traditional website in favor of a its collection of blogs and interactive directory of people.

This is obviously a vision of the future of work for a small slice of the population, but it also triggers thinking about the importance of rediscovering (as Dave says) the value of information intermediaries, and this need will apply in many business and work scenarios. RSS was supposed to help us filter and customize, but Pollard supposes a legion of these intermediaries like the Omni professionals described in the scenario.

What a great conversation that must have been! Wish I’d been there. Now I wonder if future applications will allow us to enable eavesdropping via podcast…

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GroupSwim Moves Deeper into Enterprise Collaboration

May 7, 2008 at 8:33 am · Filed under Reviews

This week, I had a chance to talk again with Jason Rothbart, VP of Customer Success at GroupSwim. I have written about them before, see GroupSwim: Enhancing Online Enterprise Communities. Their initial focus was on consumer web communities to provide a better solution to mine the information in online forums. They began to move to enterprise solutions when we first talked as they supported communities inside and outside the firewall. Now they have taken a more significant step into Enterprise 2.0 with the enhanced ability to support file collaboration . As a result, they have divided their product line into two segments, GroupSwim Collaboration for internal collaboration and GroupSwim Forums for external customer forums.

Now you can now add files in three ways: by emailing them into the site, adding them to a discussion, or uploading them directly. Once the files are in the system, GroupSwim provides:

- Tagging and indexing for easy discovery using search
- Capability to managing multiple versions of the document
- Suggestions for related files and discussions based on what you are reading
- Previewing from the web so you don’t need to download in order to see what is there

These are all useful features for the business user. When a file is added, GroupSwim applies their underlying semantic analysis engine to auto-generate tags and complete the indexing. They also auto-generate the related files and discussions through the same engine. A page is generated for the file that includes:
• Document preview and search
• Upload new versions
• Start a related discussion(s)
• Review auto-generated tags and add more
• Identify top contributors to the file
• Browse related content

The screen shot below shows a sample file page. It begins with a description of the file, the previewed file is shown under that and related discussions below the previewed file. The many other actions are available on the right column.

Jason mentioned a high-tech company that started using GroupSwim as the shared collaboration site and knowledge base for their sales force. This client has a complex product and a geographically dispersed sales force. The head of sales was constantly answering the same questions. Now, there is common platform for handling these issues. It was so well received in sales that the rest of the firm is adopting GroupSwim for their internal collaboration and will be rolling out the external Forum product for their customers. This is a great example of an Enterprise 2.0 success story.

One of the GroupSwim’s core features is its semantic engine for understanding and conveying content relationships in a variety of ways. They enhanced their semantic search to automatically check spelling, stemming, and suggest terms to help broaden or narrow your search. Jason showed me an example of all the features. You can see a sample search screen below. Under the search field, you can see the suggestions for narrowing the search. The icon in front of the results glows green to represent content that has high traffic and importance. You can link to other content with the tags on the right side, as well as team members who are experts on the terms you are searching. GroupSwim correlates the tags, the people that post the content, and the group’s reaction to the content to automatically determine experts by topic.

I liked the screen layout and the simplicity of the system, as even I could grasp it quickly. Here is another great example of a tool that started on the consumer web and evolved into an enterprise application. There is more in store. They plan to offer a wiki capability soon. It will come with all the features described for file pages. A future thought is a decision page. You could certainly use their discussion pages for this now but this enhancement would be a new page type that is optimized to support a the decision-making process. It would include features such as reminders, time lines, and voting. I think it could be a very good next step to make GroupSwim even more useful within the enterprise. They have a GroupSwim blog, The Diving Board, to provide more details on current and next steps.

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Global tools for global workers

May 7, 2008 at 12:00 am · Filed under AppGap Tips, Web Commuting

The world just seems to be getting smaller and smaller.

I recently visited the USA for a conference and had to keep in touch with my work projects back home in Australia. The main problem, of course, were the time differences. To work effectively, I needed were a few tools to keep track of the different time zones back in Oz — Canberra (home), Melbourne and Adelaide — as well as the local times where I was staying as I travelled around — Miami, Florida, Anaheim and Honolulu.

Here’s the tools I used for roaming the globe:

• iTouch: Like it’s big brother, the iPhone, this MP3 player has the ability to add a number of different city times and includes an alarm to let you know when you’ve got appointments. It’s also good for flights with its fairly good music and video capabilities — especially good when you get stuck on long domestic flights without personal in-flight entertainment
• Google Calendar: A part of the Google Office suite, this Web 2.0 app is great at handling and keeping track of different time zones and the events and appointments that go with it. It kept the times as I needed them, but when I viewed my calendar as a widget through the iTouch, Google detected I was in Honolulu and change the time zones to Honolulu time
• Motorola Razr: It’s now an old phone, but it is quadband GSM, meaning with global roaming I can take it just about anywhere in the world. Global roaming tends to be very expensive, so I just bought a pre-paid SIM card from AT&T and a telephone card. It made the difference between $2 and 12 cents per minute calls from the USA to Australia. Obviously, the downside is the number of digits you need to enter before you actually get to listen to the person on the other end of the phone! I would have preferred to use Skype, but I wasn’t always confident that I would have internet access during the four weeks I was travelling.
• Dual time-zone watch: While it’s not uncommon, having a wrist watch that could display two time zones at the same time was incredibly valuable. I just changed one time to reflect the local time and at a glance I could also see what time it was back home in Canberra
• Toshiba R400 tablet PC: I’ve been using a tablet PC for about 6 months now and I’ve not picked up a paper notebook since. Weighing only 1.72kg (3 pounds 7 ounces … note that the Apple MacBook Air weighs 1.36kg or 3 pounds), and with all flavours of WiFi you could want, it’s the perfect travelling companion for those on the move who want to take all their stuff (paper and electronic) with them

It’s an array of tools that works very well for me. I might not have given up all my desktop software just yet — I still have a need for Microsoft Visio for creating workflow diagrams, Mindjet’s Mindmanager for creating mind mapping, and Axure’s RP for prototyping great user experience web app designs — but I can see that one day soon all I will need is an internet connection and I’ll be able to work from anywhere around the world.

What tools do you use?

M

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Technology and Management Innovation?

May 6, 2008 at 2:43 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Talent Management

Jon Husband’s April 26 post here asked:
 
“Will Enterprise 2.0 Drive Management Innovation?” 

Last year watching the buzz around Enterprise 2.0  in a blog post titled: “Enterprise 2.0 “Tips” Not Enough: wikiNOMICS, Chariots of Fire Velocity & Net Work” I wrote:

“…it occurred to me one could globally replace “KM” in most of the “Enterprise 2.0″ posts and you would see the same exchanges pioneers had striving to implement KM in organizations…”
 

Recently researching an article to be published in  Effective Executive Magazine’s June KM edition, I’ve had the privilege of an exchange with Robert H. Buckman whom Infoworld 2003 called “KM’s
 father figure”.  My interest in Buckman’s work grew reading his March 6 2007 post to the AOK Yahoo Group that included:

“Jerry, thank you for the kind words, but I never did try and manage knowledge. What I really tried to manage and nurture was a culture that would encourage and expand the flow of knowledge. It was because economic value could only be obtained in our environment when knowledge moved across the organization in response to a need.”  ~ Robert H. Buckman

We’ve folded every rich nugget of our recent Bob Buckman exchange into our article but suffice to say his focus remains as per the quote above on creating an organization that supports knowledge flow.  He told us:

“If you look at it from the standpoint of how much effort it takes to achieve and effect knowledge sharing across an organization, you will find that the technology piece is about 5 to 10 percent of the effort, changing the way work is done is the 90 to 95 percent of the effort. You can define the effort as time or as money, it still comes out about the same” ~ Robert H. Buckman

IBM’s just released CEO survey points to technology being a factor in causing change. Still as mentioned by 37% of CEO’s it ranked behind market forces and people skills, both 48%, as leading external change forces. 

 ~ Jenny Ambrozek

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Using Web 2.0 for Client Interaction and Satisfaction

May 5, 2008 at 7:50 am · Filed under AppGap Tips

Web 2.0 tools provide a convenient, fuss-free way to interact with your clients. You can utilize these tools to enhance traditional communication methods, giving your clients more options when it comes to receiving reports, documents, and general information. However, it’s not just communication options that are increased - the value of what you have to offer increases as well.

Client Support. By using instant messaging software and email, you’re giving your clients several ways to contact you digitally. If they prefer other means of contact such as phone or fax, you can use VoIP and efax solutions to cater to these needs without giving up the comfort and convenience that technology offers. If you use these communication tools hand in hand with outsourcing, you’ll be able to give your customers 24/7 client support which, based on my experience, they truly appreciate.

Now, 24/7 support isn’t a necessity unless you have clients coming from a wide variety of timezones. However, the point of offering client support is that whenever your clients have any questions or concerns, someone has to be there for them as soon as possible. The sooner they receive replies, the more confident they are about the money and time they’re investing in your product or service.

Real-time progress reports. You can use online collaboration tools or even a shareable to-do list to let your client view your progress on a certain project, anytime they want. Doing this also lessens the amount of two-way communication between you and your client. Instead of calling or emailing you asking about the status of your work, they can simply look up the status online and see for themselves - wasting less time for both you and them.

Getting feedback. You can use online questionnaires as client surveys so that they can give you feedback on your performance. Services like Survey Monkey and Response-O-Matic are examples of such tools.

Another way to get client feedback via Web 2.0 is through social network testimonials. If your company has a Facebook or LinkedIn page, encourage your clients to leave a recommendation or testimonial. You can do this at the end of the project, asking your client upfront that if they can take a few minutes to create a short testimonial for you, you’d really appreciate it. (However, make sure that you also return the favor and leave a testimonial for them as well.)

With these new tools at your disposal, there’s no excuse to leave a client high and dry - no matter how trivial or small their requests might be.

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Serena Announces New Initiatives to Take Mashups Further into the Enterprise

May 5, 2008 at 7:18 am · Filed under Reviews

Last week I caught up with Kyle Arteaga, VP, Corporate Communications at Serena Software. I have written about their efforts several times on the Fast Forward blog. Most recently, I covered an effort to make mashups more accessible, Serena Releases Free Pre-Packaged Mashups for Common Business Processes. This is my first Serena related post on AppGap and it covers two new additional efforts to make mashups more accessible.

First, Capgemini and Serena will offer clients a free boot camp with training on how to use mashups to address their everyday business problems like mashing together data and processes from Salesforce.com and SAP. Capgemini refers to this program as RAIN (short for RApid INnovation). Through this program, Capgemini’s RAIN engagement team will offer a one day training session to be conducted in Cupertino, Calif. to its clients, helping them take advantage of mashups and enterprise 2.0 to solve specific business issues using Serena’s Business Mashup tools. Andy Mulholland, the CTO of Capgemini is co-author of Mashup Corporations: The End of Business As Usual. He was recently quoted, “Companies need to become faster and more responsive to changes in the marketplace. This shift will only happen if the organization from the ground up adopts rapid innovation approaches and Web 2.0 technologies.” I can agree with this.

RAIN business analysts will then take the education process a further by creating a mashup for their client that addresses a specific problem for their enterprise. They then leave the new application for free, following the Lay’s potato model, “You can’t just have one.” I think this is a smart investment, as Capgemini will learn an extensive amount of information about the client while demonstrating the power of mashups. Both of these factors will make them a more valuable business partner for further work.

In their second move, Serena is launching a public Mashup Exchange where companies can buy and sell mashups. Using HiveLive technology in the Mashup Exchange, Serena will also able to create private MicroExchanges™ for companies as well where they can swap mashups with colleagues. For example, IT can help business users by publishing Mashup-enabled access to an internal SAP system in a secured, private MicroExchange. Companies can then choose to make their mashups available on the public exchange. Unlike some exchanges, Serena offers this platform to third party developers at no cost, allowing many niche providers entrance to a larger marketplace.

I found it interesting that Serena has found that some companies start their internal mashup exchanges at the division level. This allows for pilots with division specific data and more control over the process. In some cases, the mashup may stay at the division level to avoid irrelevant data or data that has a different vetting process. This will especially appeal to the many large enterprises have multiple CIOs. In other cases, the mashups may go enterprise wide once it is tested and refined at the division level. The flexibility is very useful here. In one example, a European military purchasing group has created mashups across their supply chain to help with the bidding process. At the same time they developed other mashups for internal use of sensitive information.

The guiding principle in the Mashup Exchange is similar to their Mashup Composer, where companies can use a visual design tool to build and test mashups without coding at no charge. They also made a set of pre-packaged mashups available for free beginning in Q4 07. Serena wants to lower the barrier to mashups use and provide a preferred platform for innovation in enterprise 2.0.

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It Takes A Long Time For Change To Happen Quickly

May 3, 2008 at 2:26 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Distributed Work, Economic Development, Enterprise 2.0, KM, Web 2.0

Taylorism changed a lot about the nature of work in North American and western Europe pretty quickly, all things told … but it still took thirty or forty years to emerge into its relatively full-blown effects.  At its heyday, the manufacturing might and effectiveness of the United States that Taylorism helped create enabled it (along with important agricultural and resources capabilities and growing financial clout) to become the world power economically over several decades at most. 

In an important sense, it was useful to his theories that 1) they helped respond to the massive spread of the Industrial Era’s requirements for growth in the first half of the 20th century, and 2) World Wars I and II came along in the late 1910’s and in the late 1930’s to provide a massive need for manufacturing.

30+ years elapsed from the publication of Principles of Scientific Management in 1911 to the codification of those principles into work design methodologies in the 1940’s and early 1950’s.  He and his theories get a bad rap today, but it seems clear that they were highly useful to the process of creating wealth by improving manufacturing processes and capabilities.

It seems banal to say that those theories are less effective today, but I am not sure that’s the case.  There have been no comprehensive theories and principles come along (yet) to replace them, notwithstanding a plethora of management books published since the mid-1980’s promising enhance organizational effectiveness … more often than not by combining Taylorist principles with developmental workarounds and adaptations.

The recent emergence of the field called Enterprise 2.0, and clarion calls for management innovation that have followed (see Gary Hamel, Andrew McAfee, Tom Davenport, Don Tapscott, Dave Snowden and many, many others) promises much potential disruption.  It also portends significant struggle as the forces of buttoned-and-battened-down efficiency derived from a manufacturing-focused era vie with the forces arising from networked flows of information in an era where economic value is derived from the construction and application of knowledge to product and service design and delivery (manufacturing happens in China now).

Via Wikipedia:

.

Taylor published his Principles of Scientific Management in 1911, which elucidated four core principles:

1. Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.

2. Scientifically select, train, and develop each employee rather than passively leaving them to train themselves.

3. Provide "Detailed instruction and supervision of each worker in the performance of that worker’s discrete task".

4. Divide work nearly equally between managers and workers, so that the managers apply scientific management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks

Management theory

Taylor thought that by analysing work, the "One Best Way" to do it would be found. He is most remembered for developing the time and motion study. He would break a job into its component parts and measure each to the hundredth of a minute.

[ Snip … ]

He was generally unsuccessful in getting his concepts applied and was dismissed from Bethlehem Steel. It was largely through the efforts of his disciples (most notably H.L. Gantt) that industry came to implement his ideas.

Managers and workers

Taylor had very precise ideas about how to introduce his system:

"It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone." (Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management, cited by Montgomery 1989:229, italics with Taylor)

Workers were supposed to be incapable of understanding what they were doing. According to Taylor this was true even for rather simple tasks.

"’I can say, without the slightest hesitation,’ Taylor told a congressional committee, ‘that the science of handling pig-iron is so great that the man who is … physically able to handle pig-iron and is sufficiently phlegmatic and stupid to choose this for his occupation is rarely able to comprehend

[The scope of] Taylor’s Influence - United States

• Carl Barth helped Taylor to develop speed-and-feed-calculating slide rules to a previously unknown level of usefulness. Similar aids are still used in machine shops today. Barth became an early consultant on scientific management and later taught at Harvard.
• H. L. Gantt developed the Gantt chart, a visual aid for scheduling tasks and displaying the flow of work.
• Harrington Emerson introduced scientific management to the railroad industry, and proposed the dichotomy of staff versus line employees, with the former advising the latter.
• Morris Cooke adapted scientific management to educational and municipal organizations.
• Hugo Münsterberg created industrial psychology.
• Lillian Gilbreth introduced psychology to management studies.
• Frank Gilbreth (husband of Lillian) discovered scientific management while working in the construction industry, eventually developing motion studies independently of Taylor. These logically complemented Taylor’s time studies, as time and motion are two sides of the efficiency improvement coin. The two fields eventually became time and motion study.
• Harvard University, one of the first American universities to offer a graduate degree in business management in 1908, based its first-year curriculum on Taylor’s scientific management.
• Harlow S. Person, as dean of Dartmouth’s Amos Tuck School of Administration and Finance, promoted the teaching of scientific management.
• James O. McKinsey, professor of accounting at the University of Chicago and founder of the consulting firm bearing his name, advocated budgets as a means of assuring accountability and of measuring performance.

I’ve long appreciated the aphorism that is the title of this post, and I think of it regularly when surfing and reading the latest insight from the many pundits and critics of the Web.  And today I am thinking about "the future of work".

It’s my assertion that the changes social computing will bring to knowledge work and knowledge-based workplaces may be even greater than the generally immature experiments that have taken hold today as early adopters play with tools that allow them to connect, create, converse, convulse, coopt, and carry on about all manner of things … including work issues, challenges and opportunities.

David Weinberger is a well-known expert on knowledge management and the hyperlinked web / organization.  He has from time to time written about how the digital infrastructure and the dynamics it fosters "cuts the slack out of interactions" (The Need For Leeway, October 2002) .  We need "slack" to reflect, to think, to imagine, to support the filling in and filling up of the connections we have made between people, information, task and problems.  And we need analysis and measurement, specialized skills, budgets, accountability and best practices to optimize work and eliminate what is clearly unnecessary, not useful and / or wasteful.

But efficiency is not and will not be the hallmark of human interaction, and human sociology in the modern workplace cannot forever take its architectural design principles for Taylorism.  As we watch Enterprise 2.0 emerge, I watch what seem to be regular waves of dots (widgets, applications, platforms, services and people in equal measure) joining together, using the Web, to meld efficiency and slack … the "both / and" so often cited as characteristic of this new environment.  A flow of questions, responses and pertinent information soldered together to provide a design, or a service, is not the same as carrying out efficient repeatable supervisable step-by-step tasks the result of which are combined with other sets of efficient repeatable supervisable step-by-step tasks to produce repeatable products or services (You can have any Model T you want, as long as it is black).

There’s an enormous amount of resistance, both intellectual and cultural, to acknowledging that maybe work cannot be designed and structured based on the principles that have been in place for more than three-quarters of a century now.  A lot of that has to do with what "management" still means to us (especially the incumbents of managerial roles).  It’s hard to give up power and control, especially when you are charged with making stuff happen and the budgets and performance management and compensation bonus schemes reinforce that charge. So, while it appears that the Internet, and thus the difficult-if-not-impossible-to-control flows of information, are here to stay, it also seems that about every 6 months or so there’s another wave of "this newfangled hyperlink stuff, personal publishing, connecting social-this-and-that is now officially over and it hasn’t yet changed the world".

Generally, I agree but with reservations.  Those reservations are that "we tend to overestimate the impacts in the short term because we overlook all the details of how things are done and the tenacious stickiness of peoples’ habits, and tend to underestimate the impacts in the longer term because we overlook or ignore the scope and depth of accumulated change" (not verbatim).

Today I found this snippet from Clay Shirky’s now-well-known Web 2.0 Expo keynote.

In my opinion he puts none too fine a point on the fact that the Internet seems to be with us to stay, and that it’s impacts will continue to accumulate.  Tomorrow’s workers won’t understand meetings, collaboration, supervision or accountability in the same way we do … all because of gin and that damned mouse.

.

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

… a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom.

[ Snip … ] 

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment.

Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?”

And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.

Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change.

Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

[ Snip … }

I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?

Well, the TV producer did not think this was going to be a big deal; she was not digging this line of thought. And her final question to me was essentially, "Isn’t this all just a fad?" You know, sort of the flagpole-sitting of the early early 21st century? It’s fun to go out and produce and share a little bit, but then people are going to eventually realize, "This isn’t as good as doing what I was doing before," and settle down.

And I made a spirited argument that no, this wasn’t the case, that this was in fact a big one-time shift, more analogous to the industrial revolution than to flagpole-sitting.

I was arguing that this isn’t the sort of thing society grows out of. It’s the sort of thing that society grows into.

But I’m not sure she believed me, in part because she didn’t want to believe me, but also in part because I didn’t have the right story yet. And now I do.

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BlogBridge Feed Libraries for Enterprise 2.0

May 2, 2008 at 9:06 am · Filed under Reviews

RSS has given employees and everyone else the ability to easily subscribe to the vast amount of information out on the Web. Now comes the question, what to subscribe to? What is cool? For the business user, the question becomes, what sources, sites and blogs, provide information useful to my business that I can rely on for quality content? BlogBridge Feed Libraries are designed to help companies provide guidance to their employees on where the useful content is located and then make it easy to subscribe to it.

BlogBridge provides Expert Guides to content in a variety of topics on its public site. Access to these sites is free just as the public version of the BlogBridge RSS Reader. It is the RSS reader I use. I have also created three of the expert guides on knowledge management blogs, enterprise 2.0 blogs, and enterprise 2.0 application provider blogs. There are many more useful ones on topics such as wine, entertainment, and many business topics, including much on technology. I subscribe to several of them. You can also take these lists and add you own and delete the ones you do not find helpful.

Now comes the Enterprise 2.0 part. Blogbridge also makes this service available for use within the enterprise. I spoke last week with Pito Salas, CEO at BlogBridge who said, “Here is a crucial point that many people will miss but is critical to understand the BlogBridge Feed Library: it is a piece of software that you can install on your own server, inside your firewall. It’s not the content of the library (the books,) it’s the software to organize the library (the building.).” The Blogbridge Feed Library provides a flexible web based structure to showcase Feeds, Reading Lists and Podcasts to people within the enterprise.

The BlogBridge Feed Libraries can be the ’web content directories’ where users can browse and search for recommendations of content to read with their RSS Aggregators. The experts within your firm can place in the Feed Library the blogs and other sites that they feel will best address the issues that employees face as they deal with the topic cover by the Feed Library. For example, one firm might have Feed Libraries on Marketing, Engineering, Human Resources and Manufacturing. Another might cover Biology, Medicine, Technology, Management, and Research. A bioresearch firm might have different libraries for subsets of Biology. It puts your experts in control of the recommendations for web reading. At the same time individuals can customize it with their own additions for their individual RSS feed lists.

As experts make changes in the recommended feeds, it is easy for users to update their libraries. There is a place for biographical information about librarians and there is a built in announcements blog where you can communicate with your clients. You can also completely change the look of the site to match your organizational web site. The libraries contain thumbnail images of each of the sites. Analytics are provided so you determine the most popular feeds with an automatic top 10 and top 100 listing. It can also be integrated with Google Analytics. The service is available as an on-demand service or you can host within your firewall. It is also available as an open source option for non-commercial users. Since this is an enterprise library, it can include blogs and sites within the enterprise, as well as those on the Web. These Feed Libraries are a useful way to help employees find the information resources they need to support their work and they offer the opportunity to bring the expertise of the firm to help guide their selections.

Below you can see a sample Feed Library. There is a description of the librarian. Within the library there are several sub groups. Clicking on any of the orange bars such as the first one, labled aviation accidents, reveals more feeds.

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Mind-mapping Techniques

May 1, 2008 at 3:47 pm · Filed under AppGap Tips

I had a friend who, during lectures, drew her impression of the topics as a form of note-taking. It could be a single coherent scene, or several disjointed objects. While this may appear strange to some, it just illustrates that there are people who tend to recall ideas better visually, as opposed to plain text outlines. In between these two schools of thought is a method called mind mapping.

Wikipedia defines mind mapping as “a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea.” Many claim that this method is effective in enhancing memory, organizational skills, presentations, planning, and other thought-related activities. If you feel that you need a little help in putting your thoughts to paper, it may well be worth a try. Here are some tips should you choose to do so:

1. Materials. Having the proper tools is essential to achieve optimum results. It’s best to use a large sheet of white paper (about 8”x11”) set on landscape orientation. This provides you with ample horizontal space to write on. You can use as many sheets as you need, pasted together, should one prove insufficient. For easier recall, I suggest you use different colored pens for each branch. Most importantly, bring a relaxed and focused mind before you start.

2. Central idea. Every mind map begins with a core. This contains the central idea around which all other branches should evolve. Arrange these branches of thought in a radial manner to avoid hierarchy, as all ideas here are treated equally. To reinforce this radial nature of mind maps, use thick lines for the branches nearer to the core, and thinner ones as you move out.

3. Visualize. Use pictures whenever possible to associate each node with a strong impression. For example, in financial analysis, you can use graphs, and in planning the concept for your house, you can use icons for the different rooms. If you are going to use keywords, it’s best to summarize the idea into a single word. Write them legibly in print, not in script.

4. Think out-of-the-box. Do not censor yourself when writing down on the mind map. Put as much on paper as ideas flow from you. The editing, if any, can be done later, but don’t interrupt yourself while collecting your thoughts. This may only let valuable pieces of insight escape. Chances are you will be the only one to read it in its raw version, so there’s no reason to aim for perfection.

5. Time pressure. T.S. Eliot once said, “When forced to work within a strict framework the imagination is taxed to its utmost – and will produce its richest ideas.” Set a definite timeframe to finish your mind map. This ensures that you stay focused on the task at hand. You will be surprised at how much you can accomplish in a matter of minutes.

6. Develop your own style. Now, after you’ve used these techniques several times to create your mind maps, you may opt to keep them or discard them as you wish. Mind mapping is an extremely personal way of communicating with your self (although it can also be used for group brainstorming, with a few modifications). Eventually, you must learn to develop your own techniques which will depend on your needs and preferences. The important thing is not to follow any rules, but to make rules that will work for you.

If using paper seems a bit too old-fashioned, there are several mind mapping software available for you to test. Among these are Mindjet’s MindManager, FreeMind, Pimki, WikkaWiki, and VUE, which are either available as freeware or have a free trial option. Have you used any of these before? How was your experience?

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