Zoho Discussions Brings Community Function

September 30, 2009 at 3:53 am · Filed under Web 2.0

I have been writing about a number of community platforms recently. So I was interested to see Zoho Discussions. It allows businesses and organizations to create internal and external communities. A number of communities see customer service as a prime use case. This is also the situation with Zoho Discussions. Zoho points out that organizations can improve their support experience through customer support forums, conduct customer research and get insights on preferences with product idea boards, and create intranet discussion forums for internal conversations.

Raju Vegesna, the Zoho evangelist I have spoken to several times said that with Zoho Discussions organizations can, ”create a natural spot where customers gather to exchange ideas and experiences, support each other and provide feedback to the company. For example, Zoho Discussions has been powering our own Community site, forums.zoho.com, that we use to stay in close contact with customers, partners and our own teams. So, we’ve seen how effective this form of interaction can be.” This fits with my recent suggested definition of enterprise 2.0 as applications where business value is determined through the contributions of participants.

Zoho Discussions provides familiar social networking features such as profiles, integrated chat, private messages among users, user labels and more. Content stored in communities created with Zoho Discussions can be found through the integrated advanced search, custom organization as well as RSS/Secure RSS subscription options and SEO.

Zoho Discussions allows businesses to remain in control of their brand and the user experience they provide to customers through custom URLs, branding options and elements, customizable look and feel, even including full rebranding (white labeling) options.  The topic administration allows community moderators to manage the lifecycle of posts and discussions. For example, depending on the topics enabled, community users will be able to vote on an idea or select the most popular solution for a problem.

Zoho Discussions provides a WYSIWYG editor, threaded conversations, drafts, previews and more. Administration features provide fine grained access controls, auto spam, community-marked content, and user management.

I think this is a nice addition to the Zoho family of tools. A video tour of Zoho Discussions is available.

Notable + Quotable: Data center security, government as a platform, and a blueprint for highly organized collaboration

September 29, 2009 at 9:58 am · Filed under Notable + Quotable

Is intimate personal information a toxic asset in cloud datacenters?
On Radar, Professor Carl Hewitt shows the advantages and disadvantages of government regulation in data center security, and presents other options for this issue. “This is a future that we expect most readers would find distasteful. There is an alternative: A client cloud is a local cloud controlled by a client, e.g., a family cloud might consist of the cell phones, computers, security cameras, home entertainment centers, Wi-Fi access points, etc. of a family. Semantic Integration could be performed in clients’ clouds so that clients by default store their information in cloud datacenters in a way that it can be decrypted only by using a client’s secret key.”

How Tim O’Reilly Aims to Change Government
Marshall Kirkpatrick features a technologist’s crusade to make government more responsive to citizens, how he’s going about it and what he’s learned. “Technologist Tim O’Reilly is spending time in Washington, and bringing Washington officials to San Francisco, to do something different – perhaps something more realistic. O’Reilly is trying to help government become a platform for innovation. A “government as platform” would supply raw digital data and other forms of support for private sector innovators to build on top of.”

When Collaboration is Literally Life or Death…
On ZDNet, Oliver Marks lauds the US military’s use of collaboration tools in a highly secure and organized manner that private companies can emulate. “Industrial strength strategic planning of collaboration environments will definitely separate the weakly organized from the ultra connected and clued up and is a key differentiator in modern business.”

Cloud computing: YOUR data – right?
ComMetrics cites recent events like Amazon’s remote deletion on Kindles as another reason to clearly define cloud data ownership. “Bottomline: Storing data using cloud computing (like Google Chrome OS does) means there is no local storage, so nothing can be owned, only rented. The only way around this problem is to download data and images to one’s PC.”

Rural broadband = more jobs, better salaries
Matthew Lasar features a report by the US Department of Agriculture Rural counties that says although broadband has proven to be economically beneficial, there persists a wide gap in high-speed Internet penetration in the countryside and in urban areas. “Only 41 percent of rural households had broadband access in 2008, the USDA says, as opposed to 55 percent nationally. And adoption rates still lag behind cities, with a “marked difference” between urban and rural use. Only 70 percent of rural households with access to broadband embraced it in 2007, the report says, as opposed to 84 percent of city dwellers.”

Killing Email: How and Why I Ditched My Inbox
Leo Babauta details his experiments on phasing out his email and keeping his dependence on it to a minimum on Zen Habits. “Q: Why so extreme? Why not just filter and check email less often? A: I’ve tried a number of tactics with email, including extreme filtering. For awhile I set up a special email address for friends and family and close colleagues, and everything else was shunted into a special folder to be read less frequently. It still took up too much of my time. I don’t check email as often as most people, but it was still a chore I have been enjoying less and less. So I decided to try something different.”

Work Smarter, Not Harder Tip: Fill Your Days with Sand, Not rocks
Jeannie Chan of Brazen Careerist ponders about what enables her to be good at multitasking. “It allows me to be completely focused at the task at hand. Whenever I have worked on mega-tasks, I would get fatigue mentally quicker. I would get distracted easier, probably because I wasn’t able to see the end of the tunnel. With a lack of focus, I would just simply not get as much done… Also, with a to-do list of tiny tasks, I would never feel like I was unaccomplished at the end of the day. I would always be able to cross off something!”

License Plates for the Internet? Digital Security for Personal Identity
Neville Pattinson floats the idea of a countrywide digital identity credential on Digital Nomads. “This is a big idea that could solve a lot of problems. In the best case, this would take the form of a digital identity credential issued by a single government agency. Other industries, such as banking, payment and healthcare, could potentially use the ID as a way to secure identity, online access and Web-based transactions. Much as Social Security numbers and Drivers Licenses did until cyber-crime made them as unreliable as ID credentials.”

Busting the myths of multitasking

September 28, 2009 at 7:31 am · Filed under productivity

There have been many studies conducted on the subject of multitasking. In this fast-paced world, it has become too widespread a phenomenon to ignore for businesses and other purposes. Of course, we don’t really do tasks simultaneously so much as switch our focus rapidly. While it has been shown to actually decrease productivity, a group of researchers at Stanford University were curious as to whether those that tend to mutitask heavily are somehow better at switching their focus. Their paper entitled “Cognitive control in media multitaskers” was published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science.

The researchers made a survey of media consumption habits, asking respondents about their tendencies to mutitask listening to music, watching tv, working on the computer, using the phone, and others. Based on their answers, the respondents were grouped into heavy, average, and light mutitaskers. Discarding the in-betweens and focusing on the two extreme groups, the remaining participants were given further hands-on tests to determine their level of attention and cognitive control.

The result was that the heavy multitaskers did much worse than the light multitaskers. The former was more prone to distractions while the latter was better at maintaining focus. Surprisingly, despite their tendency to multitask often, the heavy group were in fact slower in changing task types than the light group. However, the researchers were quick to point out that this “may be a difference in orientation rather than a deficit”, and that multitasking could still have benefits in areas not covered by this particular study.

“With the diffusion of larger computing screens supporting multiple windows and browsers, chat, and SMS, and portable media coupled with social and work expectations of immediate responsiveness, media multitasking is quickly becoming ubiquitous. These changes are placing new demands on cognitive processing, and especially on attention allocation. If the growth of multitasking across individuals leads to or encourages the emergence of a qualitatively different, breadth-biased profile of cognitive control, then the norm of multiple input streams will have significant consequences for learning, persuasion, and other media effects. If, however, these differences in cognitive control abilities and strategies stem from stable individual differences, many individuals will be increasingly unable to cope with the changing media environment. The determination of cause and effect and the implications of these differing strategies for other types of information processing are critical issues for understanding cognition n the 21st century,” the study concluded.

Government 2.0 marches on with a new app store

September 28, 2009 at 7:31 am · Filed under government 2.0

As the US Federal Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra has a challenging task – push innovation while bringing down IT spending in government. Currently working on a $75 billion annual budget, the CIO would like to trim it down in response to the economy without sacrificing quality of service. One of his pet projects is the promotion of cloud computing, and recently he announced the launching of the online storefront to Apps.gov as a logical step forward.

It’s a one-stop shop for federal agencies that would like see the cloud-based alternatives out there, both free and otherwise. Apps.gov offers four categories of interest: Business Apps, Productivity Apps, Social Media Apps, and Cloud IT Services. This storefront is being run by the General Services Administration in support of the Federal Cloud Computing Initiative.

In his speech at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, Kundra underscored the importance of implementing a smarter and more responsive IT strategy for the government. According to the NY Times, the launch was well-attended by cloud computing vendors and government agencies. Google co-founder Sergei Brin was upbeat, pointing out that by using these services themselves, government officials will gain a better understanding of how they work, which should translate into better policies and a healthier industry.

Despite his optimism, Vivek Kundra knows that this is only the start, with many issues left to tackle. “Federal agencies and departments encounter many difficulties in deploying new IT services and products. Procurement processes can be confusing and time-consuming. Security procedures are complex, costly, lengthy and duplicative across agencies. Our policies lag behind new trends, causing unnecessary restrictions on the use of new technology. Past practices too often resulted in inefficient use of purchased IT capabilities across the federal government. We are dedicated to addressing these barriers and to improving the way government leverages new technology.”

For more on this initiative, read his blog post or visit Apps.gov.

RightNow Enhances Cloud Monitor and Graphical Workflow Design Capabilities

September 25, 2009 at 7:32 pm · Filed under Web 2.0

I have written about RightNow several times as they keep coming up with interesting enhancements and use cases (see: RightNow Provides Web Social Monitoring and Analytics with Latest Release and More on the Obama Campaign’s Use of the Web with RightNow). I recently spoke with them again on their August 09 release. It has a couple of things I was interested in as they reflect two very different parts of my own work, past and present.

First, we discussed the new graphical workflow capabilities. This is workflow for contact center agents support, not general workflow applications. They have been building capability in this area for some time.  They have both guided assistance for agents and complete agent scripting.

Now they have added a graphical, easy-to-use business process designer that allows managers to quickly create new business process flows with drag and drop design functionality. You can link multiple scripts and workflows together to guide agents through complex customer interactions. You can also automate tasks in the background, such as updating contacts and incidents, to help keep interactions efficient. Here is a sample screen for the graphical workflow.

This is a very useful enhancement that ties together these contact center workflow capabilities by allowing the business managers to directly create them without IT support.  I shared that I am very confident in the ability of these contact center support systems to provide value based on my prior experience with old school versions in the 1990s and early 2000s. With one major telecom we were able to show that users of the system have better performance metrics on every indicator.  Now with these tools, I imagine the benefits will only increase. One of the big differences from the early tools, besides the increased functionality, is this ability to put the creation of new workflows in the hands of the business managers who best know what should be implemented.

Next, we discussed enhancements to Cloud Monitor.  As I mentioned in my last post, Cloud Monitor was introduced in their May 09 release. There are many web monitoring tools available and I am connected to two of them.  The difference here is that Cloud Monitor is connected to the RightNow platform to benefit from other capabilities within the overall platform and enhance the ability to make a comprehensive response to what is discovered through a variety of channels. For example, you can switch from Twitter to a live web chat when you need more than 140 characters.

Now they added three new capabilities to Cloud Monitor. The Key Contributors function allows companies to automatically identify social influencers on Twitter, those with frequent tweets and a broad base of followers. This feature helps companies identify advocates, as well as detractors. Then the SmartSense Trend provides insight into how customers feel about a company, brand or product. SmartSense Trend lets organizations look at comments on Twitter and sort by emotion, search terms, and time. It can be applied to the key contributors. Here is a sample screen from the Cloud Monitor Analytics with smartsense key contributors.

The third enhancement, Cloud Links Analytics, is focused on supporting marketing campaigns. It offers analysis of Cloud Links, the links to social network sites (like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Flickr) that can be included in personalized surveys and outbound emails. With Cloud Links Analytics, organizations can see the number of click-throughs and unique views for each individual link. It is like Google Analytics, except focused on the action within the RightNow system.  These three enhancements make great sense.

Last, we discussed now RightNow is using Twitter and its own tools to enhance its Twitter efforts.  Their business development people monitor their clients and prospects through Twitter and Cloud Monitor as a business intelligence activity. This enables to have more knowledgeable conversations and better time their out reach. Their own customer service people use the tools in a similar way as their customers, to understand the service needs of clients and offer help.  It is good to see them using their own tools. I saw recently saw that 20% of tweets are brand related, according to one study, so there is great opportunity here.

Implementing SharePoint at Océ

September 24, 2009 at 3:45 pm · Filed under Web 2.0

This is the fourth in a series of interviews with Océ, about their Enterprise 2.0 implementation and adoption experiences. Océ is a leading international provider of digital document management technology and services. Earlier, I wrote out their micro-messaging, wiki experiences, and enterprise information architecture. Prior interviews have been with Samuel Driessen, Information Architect at Océ. For this post I spoke about their SharePoint efforts with Jan van Veen, Manager Internal Communications, in Corporate Communications and Tom Dombret, the technical team lead on the SharePoint effort.

The effort began as an IT initiative when the new CIO determined that SharePoint should be the enterprise standard for collaboration in order to provide a common and more robust platform. However, it was recognized that the SharePoint implementation needed to be a combined IT and business effort to be successful. Jan mentioned that with SharePoint they were able to fill the gap between publication and collaboration. Their intranet served as the main publication platform but it had no collaboration capabilities. Their existing collaboration tool had limitations, was not intuitive, and had few users.

Jan said this was only the second project at Océ in which Corporate Communications was involved at Steering Committee level in an IT effort and he was pleased to participate. Océ had already been looking at SharePoint. They did some reference site visits to other Dutch firms that had already implemented it.  The main lessons learn was to not simply view the implementation as an IT effort, business users needed to be involved.

A small pilot had already been started at the local level when the decision was made to make SharePoint the enterprise standard.  Tom and Jan said they decided to expand this effort to the corporate level.  Jan was a pilot user as a group was set up in Corporate Communications, one of the pilot groups with not just a local scope, but a corporate scope. They began with about 10 groups and limited the total number to 15 so they could properly serve them. They wanted to be able to learn from each group’s experience and not get overwhelmed with support needs.

The purchasing department was one of the most successful pilot groups.  They first looked at their information needs before designed the site. The site then provided global access to important documents for every user, like contracts and allowed for proper version control. They made careful use of metadata. Another success factor was the elimination of all other collaboration platforms.

Océ also limited the functional scope of SharePoint to simply its collaboration capabilities. This provided more control and reduced possible confusion.  They consider this a success factor. They set up two templates: one for departments and one for projects.  They determined that departments and projects would have different needs. I would certainly agree. Groups could customize these templates but the templates provided a common starting point. This is another good move.

Océ used the out of the box SharePoint functionality. On their site visits, the other firms suggested this approach. Customization can make things overly complex and difficult if they need to do a re-install.

This implementation was done during the current economic downturn and this timing had two consequences. First, they did not immediately give all 23000 employees a license.  Potential users had to apply and provide a business reason. Tom said that this was actually a blessing as it allowed them to focus on the high potential users and properly serve the smaller number.  Second, it limited their use of outside consultants. They did use consultants for a short period of time and benefited from this.

Jan and Tom feel the implementation was successful because they proceeded slowly and carefully. They worked with each group to help them align the site with their business needs and continued to exchange ideas with users. The benefit went both ways as they learned from each group.

As I have discussed in other posts in this series, Océ is implementing a number of enterprise 2.0 tools. If a group approached them wanting a particular tool, they would first look to understand the business drivers and then pick a tool that supported these needs.  They would not automatically go with the requested tool.  They are educating users on the capabilities of each tool and this is appreciated. They are also educating users on the difference between publication and collaboration. Jan wrote a blog post on the lack of training to be a knowledge worker. Technical and manufacturing roles receive training and often have to be certified. The equivalent does not exist for knowledge workers so they are trying to fill this gap.

As they expand the number of SharePoint sites, they want each group to have a local knowledgeable user to help them. They also want to put one SharePoint site outside the firewall to collaborate with business partners such as suppliers and re-sellers.  In addition, they want to explore setting up individual sites through the MySite functionality. This should provide greater efficiency for individual information management.

They plan to move about 80% of the existing content on their intranet into more collaborative spaces such as SharePoint and their wiki.  This will give them better integration of publication and collaboration.  I think the Océ approach represents a best practice example of how to get started with SharePoint. I will be interested to learn how it continues.

The 2nd KM: Little KM

September 24, 2009 at 10:11 am · Filed under KM

In my first post on Three KMs, I outlined what I see as the “big KM” – the one that has budget, visibility, and is accountable to the organization (often with tangible ROI targets required).

I’d like to turn now to what I call “Little KM,” which I characterize as the quiet application of KM methods to business problems in a way that just makes sense. (You can also think about this as applying a “little KM perspective” to classic business activities.) In  little KM, the identified need for knowledge sharing maps to one or two of the KM methods, tools, or approaches. Any part of an organization may apply a KM practice to design and intervention in support of an immediate opportunity or problem.

The following list of practices, often applied without the code word “KM” (and sometimes described as “stealth” KM),  is based on having met or worked with people who specialize in these practices. I am sure that as you think about this concept, you will identify many more such practices.

Learning before, during, and after

Experiential knowledge is that which is not easily captured in classic “lessons learned” session. Practices for bringing experiential knowledge into a community include Peer Assists, Learning While Doing, and After Action Reviews (all beautifully described in Learning to Fly).

Outside (but near) the knowledge management community doing amazing work on Emergent Learning, Marilyn Darling has worked with corporate executives to apply after action reviews in a way that guides their future strategic action.

In a similar vein, Ken Bruss (who introduced me to the term “stealth KM” five years ago at a Boston KM Forum), has been integrating these learning practices into managing new product development processes.

Communities of practice.

Knowledge continuity and retention.

Knowledge mapping

Organizational network analysis

Applying methods of social network analysis (SNA) to business problems is still an emerging practice for many large organizations; it’s often referred to organizational network analysis (ONA) — my preferred term.

The vanguard of organizational practitioners (corporate and government) participate in Rob Cross’s Network Roundtable at the University of Virginia, a user community that supports the use of and research in network analysis. Much of Rob’s early research has its roots in knowledge management (he was a consulting practitioner at the Institute for Knowledge Management), but is now articulated solely in business terms, aimed at solving problems of organizational and personal performance.

Applied as a knowledge management intervention, ONA can reveal the paths along which knowledge flows in an organization.

Collaboration.
Collaboration as a business priority has been increasing ground over the past 10 years, especially as the platforms (IBM, Microsoft, OpenText, and so on) matured. While some of these were used for their content management or project management capabilities, the leadership mandate was often phrased as “we need to collaborate more.”

As collaboration inside the organization was seen as important, organizations are now understanding that collaboration with customers and partners is vital.

Why Think about Little KM?

My thinking about little KM has changed as I’ve shifted from a corporate mindset to a small business and nonprofit mindset. Knowledge management is fairly well entrenched in large organizations, and each of the little KM practices figure into those Big KM programs.

I am also aware of the ongoing conversations about whether KM is dead, whether we should stop using the term KM, and so on. So it makes sense to talk about specific practices under the rubric of KM and work inside organizations applying these practices as need arises.

What’s important to remember, however, is that we could not have little KM if we didn’t have Big KM as a source of thought leaders and practitioners who have worked over the past 10 or more years to hone these practices in collaboration with others (As I like to say, “Knowledge management people share, relentlessly.) .

Next up: Personal KM