Eric D. Brown's Technology, Strategy, People & Projects

Foto Friday – Musckovy Duck

Eric D. Brown — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 14:00:25 +0000

I caught this Muscovy Duck at Bob Woodruff Park on Plano TX. Captured with Canon 7D and Canon 400mm 5.6 L on my Induro CT314 tripod.

I think this Muscovy Duck is living proof that ugly can be beautiful.

see more photos in my flickr photostream and on my website at photographyminute.com

This post was written by Eric D. Brown

About the Author Eric D. Brown is a Technology Consultant, Doctoral Student and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. In addition, Eric is an avid & passionate photographer who's work can be seen at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream. Read more about Eric...

Are you keeping your eyes open?

Eric D. Brown — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 01:21:39 +0000

Have you ever gotten so used to doing something that you stop thinking about how or why you’re doing it? BTW – this is another one of my ‘linear thinking‘ posts.

I’m sure there’s a scientific name for it but I’m too tired to look it up right now…sorry.

How many of you are stuck in a rut in your life and/or business and just doing the same thing over and over and over. Ever thought about why?

Maybe it’s because you haven’t been keeping your eyes open to see things changing.

Take this little story as an example…

A few weeks ago I’m driving to the local target. I decided to go a back way through neighborhoods rather than the main road. I get up to one of the main roads that I have to cross to get to the target and hit a red light.

This particular intersection is fairly new. In the past, you could only turn left or right at this intersection, but about three months ago a new road was opened that allowed you to go straight through this intersection.

I planned to go straight as it was a shorter route to get into the Target parking lot.

Now…this particular light is extremely long. It felt as if I sat there forever waiting for the light to turn. I also noticed that the car behind had their right turn blinker on. And the car behind them did too. Oh well…that’s the way life is right? Always stuck behind the guy going straight when you want to turn right.

While waiting I heard a horn honk. Sounded like it came from behind me.

So I rolled my window down…and heard the horn again as well as someone screaming and looked in my mirror and noticed it was the driver behind me.

He was yelling at me and honking his horn.

Can you believe that?

He was screaming at me.

Then…he opened his car door and started getting out. Wow.

OK then. I’m not going to be caught sitting in my car while some crazy dude is standing outside my window.

So I got out of my car. Probably not the safest thing to do but I did it.

He was walking toward my car screaming to me. He was saying “turn man turn”.

What? I’m going straight across I tell him. I also pointed at my blinker and politely said ‘do you see a blinker?’.

And…I may have yelled it. And…I may have said a few other choice words that can’t be repeated here. And I may have called him something that wasn’t polite. I may have also told him to get back in his car or he’d be getting into an ambulance in 3 minutes. Might have been bad of me to say…but, he started it

His response was “oh…you can go straight? I didn’t know that”.

While he was walking back to his car, he was apologizing and trying to ‘make nice’ with me while also saying “I’ve driven this road a couple times a day for two years and didn’t realize you could go straight.”

Lessons from this story?

Its an easy one.

That man, who almost got himself in some trouble, was so sure that he was right that he was willing to risk his health (and his life?) to get out of his car and scream at an unknown person in a car in front of him.

According to him, he’d been through that intersection multiple times over two years. He’d gotten so used to only being able to turn left or right that he’d failed to realize that a third option was now available to him and to all other drivers.

He’d gotten into a mindset and wasn’t able to see the changes taking place around him over the years.

Sound familiar?

How many businesses do you know today that are in this same mindset? What about your manager or leader? Have they allowed themselves to get so comfortable with their surroundings that they fail to notice the changes?

What about you? Are you keeping your eyes open for changes?

BTW – link below for anger management techniques for those of you (and perhaps me too) who get a little too angry

Complaint Box | Horns and Drivers (cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com)
Anger Management Techniques (lifescript.com)

This post was written by Eric D. Brown

CRM tools do not equal CRM

Eric D. Brown — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 14:00:56 +0000

: Image by holeymoon via Flickr

CRM tools do not equal CRM (yes…I know…I’ve said it twice…but it IS important).

For the geeks out there, let me spell it out for you too – CRM tools != CRM. Or perhaps if you know your FORTRAN 77 (I taught it for 3 years…ugh) – CRM tools .NE. CRM.

Ok…now that we’ve gotten that out there…let’s take a second to look at the world of CRM.

Customer Relationship Management – CRM

According to the all-knowing wikipedia, Customer Relationship Management is defined as:

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a broadly recognized, widely-implemented strategy for managing and nurturing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support

Emphasis mine.

To put it more succinctly, CRM is a strategy for managing the relationship with customers using technology to automate & organize the interactions. Love it.

I’m a big fan of CRM. I think the idea has helped many organizations build stronger relationships…and CRM tools have helped drive customers away too.

A tool is a tool

Imagine you’re a project manager. Is the whole of your job wrapped up in the tool you use to manage projects? Can anyone grab a copy of Microsoft project and start managing projects?

Sure…they can build gantt charts and make schedules…but Microsoft Project is not Project Management.

The same is true for any organization using CRM tools. Sure, the tools are available and anyone can use them…but just because you use them, doesn’t mean you are actually ‘doing’ CRM.

True CRM is wrapped around strategic thought. True CRM is looking at methods to truly connect with your customer(s). True CRM requires a ‘think; do’ mentality (i.e., think about it first, then do it).

I’m always amazed when I see an organization using CRM without having put any real thought into the tool and the context in which the tool is used.

Let’s look at an example.

Using CRM – A Good & Bad (and worst?) Example

I’ve recently looked into getting a loan to refinance my mortgage. Our current mortgage is a 30 year fixed mortgage with a 5.875% rate. Not bad…but with rates as low as 4.5% these days, it makes sense to look at refinancing at a lower rate…and perhaps move from a 30 year note (with ~23 years left on the note) to a 15 year note. At current rates, the move to a 15 year note would keep my payments basically equivalent.

So…I decided to see what type of rates I could get. I contacted three mortgage brokers via email and got three completely different responses.

Initial Response

Broker #1 responded quickly to my initial request in a very personal and direct manner. He told me what information he would need from me and what the process would look like. He also said he’d be calling me later in the day to chat.

Broker #2 also responded quickly via phone. I happened to be busy when he called so he got my voicemail. He left a message stating that he’d call me back. I then received an email stating the same but in a very ‘automatic email’ voice. And then 5 minutes later I received another call from him. And another email similar in vein to the first. I emailed him back and told him I’d prefer that he call me later in the day. I received an automated response that was exactly the same as the first email I received. More on Broker #2 in a moment.

Broker #3 didn’t respond to my email.

Follow Up

Broker #1 called me when he said he would. We talked about my situation and what I was trying to do and he told me he’d get some quotes to me via email later in the day. About 20 minutes after the call, I received a nice email from the broker thanking me for the time on the phone and reiterating what we spoke about. This email was obviously from a CRM tool but was personalized to me and our conversation.

Broker #2 called me later in the day and put the full force sales pitch on me. This guy is the guy you think about when you think of a salesman. You know the guy…he doesn’t listen, cuts you off and just generally makes an ass of himself. After 15 minutes of him telling me how good he is, he told me he’d get me a few quotes for new loan options.

Broker #3 never called.

Follow Through

I received the quotes from Broker #1 and Broker #2. They were basically the same in terms of rates. I told them both that I’d need a few days to look them over and think about what I wanted to do.

Broker #1 responded to my email with a “thanks…let me know how you want to proceed.”

Broker #2 responded to my email with another canned response.

Over the next 2 days, I received 3 emails and 2 phone calls from Broker #2. Each email was the same and the phone calls were received at the same time of the day.

I finally called Broker #3. BTW – some background on this broker….they are all over the airwaves in Dallas about being DFW’s #1 mortgage broker. When I called them….I got a person on the phone who couldn’t answer any of my questions, didn’t seem interested in talking to me and when I asked if I could use a system online to fill out any forms he said yes…he would email me the info. I received an email from him the following day with a PDF attached asking me to fill out the information and fax it back.

Outcome

Its been 2 weeks since that first email to the three brokers. I’ve decided not to do anything just yet (we are thinking about moving next year and it doesn’t make financial sense to spend the money to refinance right now).

Broker #1 took the news in stride and said ‘call me when you want me to help with the new mortgage’.

Broker #2 didn’t respond directly but continued to send me canned emails generated from his CRM tool. These emails tell me what a great service he offers, what low rates I can get and how much he values his customers.

Broker #3 just called me back. 4 phone calls in 4 hours. Yikes.

So…the point of my story?

Broker #1 used a CRM tool…but he had a strategy for using it. It was a tool to allow him to manage the relationship. He will get my business in the future. If you need a mortgage in Texas…definitely call Brian Palmer at Pinnacle Financial Group at 972-529-6845.

Broker #2 used a CRM tool…but he saw it more as an advertising and marketing tool to ‘blast’ his customers. He hasn’t figured out that CRM is concerned with the relationship.

Broker #3 is an idiot, obviously.

In Closing

CRM, like most other things in life, requires some thought be put into the approach. Just because you are using a CRM tool, doesn’t mean you are managing the customer relationship…it could just mean you are pissing off your potential customers.

Take a page from Broker #1′s playbook…figure out how you want to interact with your customers then implement a CRM strategy & platform to meet your needs.

Related articles by Zemanta

Social CRM: What Is It And Where Is It Going? [10 Links] (newcommbiz.com)
Making customers No. 1 (theglobeandmail.com)
The Action, Reaction, Management, Process (ARM) for Social CRM (jmorganmarketing.com)
CRM Software and how CRM Benefits Businesses (customer-relations.suite101.com)

This post was written by Eric D. Brown

Links for July 25 2010

Eric D. Brown — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 14:58:37 +0000

Transparency creates an information blizzard not an excuse, nor an absolution by Mark McDonald on The Gartner Blog Network
Quote: Transparency is a hot issue in halls of legislators and executive offices and something that everyone has to do. Increasing transparency is part of CEO strategies and investor commitments. Transparency is the solution to regulatory challenges. Transparency is something demanded by consumers ranging from support for free trade through to the ingredients in our food.
One Simple Thing that Will Improve Your Content Today by Susan Murphy on SuzeMuse
Quote: Every piece of content that exists in the world is a story. In order to create great content, you have to be able to find the story in everything you do. Then, you have to sit your butt in the chair and express it. Build stories and share. Build stories, and share.
The Phantom Sales Forecast – Failing at Customer Validation by Steve Blank
Quote: The implications of a phantom sales forecast meant something fundamental was broken. In talking to each of his salespeople, he discovered the sales team had no standardized sales process. Each was calling on different levels of an account and trying whatever seemed to work best. This was just a symptom of something deeper – while they thought they understood the target customer their initial hypotheses from Customer Discovery were wrong. But no one had told the CEO.
Working Hard to be Successful by C.C. Chapman
Quote: What is the point of this post? It is just to remind you that hard work is your best chance for success. Most of us who find any level of success are never satisfied and want the challenge of something new and we’ll work even harder to make it happen.
Life is 10% How You Make It and 90% How you Take It by Mark Suster on Both Sides of the Table
Quote: You can choose to be defeatist or to pull your socks up and try again – harder this time. Enjoy the journey and not just the destination otherwise even when you arrive you may not find the happiness you were looking for, as I suspect my $500 million friend has not (luckily for me he doesn’t read blogs! ). Read this book (“The Alchemist”) if you want a reminder about enjoying the journey. Or read the magnificent book “Eat, Pray, Love” and follow the Italian mentality of ”Il Bel Far Niente (The Joy of Doing Nothing)”. And remember, whatever adversity your facing – enjoy the journey. Life is 10% how you make it, 90% how you take it.
Outsource the Work, Not the Leadership by Susan Cramm on Harvard Business Review
Quote: Think outsourcing eases leadership burdens? Think again.
Find a Common Language by Becky Robinson on Mountain State University LeaderTalk
Quote: As a leader, it is important to take the time to know your audience so that you can communicate meaningfully with them. When you know people well, you can choose to relate to them in ways that they will understand and appreciate.
Startup Competitive Advantages that Work by Jason Cohen on a smart bear
Quote: Of course you can still battle it out in the marketplace, but you need something that can’t be duplicated, something they could never beat you on, then hang your hat on that and don’t look back. Don’t despair if you don’t have an unfair advantage yet. I didn’t either when I started Smart Bear! But I built toward having some, and eventually earned it.

This post was written by Eric D. Brown

Foto Friday – Great Horned Owl

Eric D. Brown — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:00:54 +0000

Here’s a Great Horned Owl from the visit to the Blackland Prairie Raptor Center’s First Saturday event. He looks frightened .

Captured with Canon 7D and Canon 400mm 5.6 L handheld.

see more photos in my flickr photostream and on my website at photographyminute.com

This post was written by Eric D. Brown

Open Source, The Enterprise and The Community

Eric D. Brown — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 15:11:56 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

Rackspace has just announced their open source cloud platform, OpenStack in collaboration with NASA.

While the open source world has been a viable area for quite some time, there seems to be a lot of talk these days of open-sourcing many things. Google has opened up Android, the Department of Homeland Security has just announced an open source intrusion detection engine, and more organizations are embracing open source platforms while also complaining about open source software overload.

Welcome to the open source world…whether you want to be a part of it or not….open source is here to stay.

Open Source

Take a second to jump over and read the definition of Open Source as defined by the Open Source Initiative. Lots of interesting stuff there: Access to source code. Redistribution rights. Technology-neutrality. Integrity of original code. Good stuff….if you can understand how to take advantage of it within the enterprise.

Open source has its roots in the ‘free software’ movement but the open source world of today is a far cry from that of the free software movement in the past. No longer is the main argument for free software….its moved into a more pragmatic argument of making software development a more open environment.

The open source world is an amazing one…and its an environment that many CIO’s and IT departments have tried to stay away from. I think its time to change that.

Open Source & The Enterprise

In the past, many people have argued against Open Source in the enterprise. Most of the arguments against the open source movement have been based around security concerns, support concerns and/or intellectual property issues.

While some of these concerns are valid, I think many organizations, CIO’s and IT departments have a pre-defined prejudice against the open source world. They see this world as nothing but a bunch of hackers giving things away for free.

Far from the truth….but even if it were the truth…what’s wrong with it? If I were working within an organization that had resource constraints (budget, people, etc), I’d have to look for ways to be more effective with the resources I do have.

Take a second to step back and rethink the open source world. Think about the people. Think about the willingness to give. Think about the community that exists out there. Think about the hundreds of people that are willing to give their time to develop a piece of functionality that could be beneficial to you.

Look at WordPress (also WordPress.com) as an example. Its one of the largest blogging / content platforms in the world with over 25 million people using the software to power their blogs. Its also an open source project with hundreds of volunteers contributing to the code base to extend features and functionality. The WordPress platform is used by individuals (it powers this blog) and Fortune 500 companies to run their blogs and content platforms….its even used by the Boy Scouts of America‘s to run the website for Boys’ Life magazine.

If you were looking for a content management platform and couldn’t spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars buying and implementing one, WordPress could be an ideal choice. So could other platforms like Drupal or Joomla among many others.

With these open source platforms, you’ve got thousands of people willing to give their time and effort to build more functionality (in the form of plugins and themes), most of which wouldn’t cost you a dime. If you did want to add some specialized functionality to your platform, there are thousands (or more) WordPress developers out there who can do some amazing things for very little money (think thousands of dollars versus hundreds of thousands for closed-source platforms).

But…what if you’ve already got money sunk into another system? What if you already have a fully built IT architecture based on Microsoft platforms….open source isn’t an option for you….or is it?

Open source is always an option….you’ve just got to change how you think about the open source approach.

Open Source, The Enterprise and The Community

Let’s say you are a .NET shop. Your entire IT architecture is built with Microsoft systems. You run windows as your web server, SQL Server for your database platforms, Sharepoint for collaboration and content management and you have zero interest in replacing any of these platforms.

When I talk about open source….you probably shrug your shoulders and say “not for us…we’re a .NET shop”. Well…you’d be wrong. Look at Umbraco for example….its a .NET open source CMS platform. Brilliant!

Open source isn’t implementing the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack…its an approach to your business.

You can still be a .NET shop and embrace the open source community.

So…now you argue that open source isn’t secure. Bollocks I say! (I’ve been waiting 4 years to use that on my blog).

Open source can be as secure as you want it to be. You define the entry- and exit-paths for open source software and data flow. Perhaps you setup an API that allows non-sensitive data to flow in or out. Perhaps you setup certain non-critical functions to allow open source software to be implemented.

There are lots of ways to argue against the “open source security” argument. The biggest argument is that security is as security does….you make your systems secure today with closed-source software…the same can be done with open source software too.

Open source platforms & software can bring a lot of value to an organization…you’ve just go to be willing to open your mind to open source. An open source approach & mindset can help in many ways. It can save you money…but it can also allow you to reach out to the community (either your internal community or an external community) for help.

The open source community could be a lifeline for non-profits and community groups. Imagine what an organization like the Red Cross, the Boy Scouts of America or The United Way could do if they embraced the open source movement and then embraced their community for help?

What about a for-profit company? Can you still ‘embrace your community”? Maybe…maybe not. You’ll have to figure out if you have a community first…but that shouldn’t stop you from embracing the open source community as a whole.

There are a lot of smart folks out there just itching to solve a new challenge…reach out and find them…you’d be surprised just how much you can do when you open not only your IT platforms but also your mind.

The open source approach is much more than a philosophical approach to software / hardware /IT….its an approach that allows you to embrace your community to help you move forward. You’ve already started embracing the community on the marketing side of the house to help ‘spread the word’….why not use that new-found good will and ask for help on the technical side of the house?

Join me next week for more on how non-profits can embrace their community (more specifically how one non-profit has not embraced theirs).

RackSpace issues a challenge to the cloud industry; goes open-source with OpenStack. (thenextweb.com)
Open Source Software: Less Feature-Rich Than Proprietary Competition? (ostatic.com)
Enterprise Architecture: From Incite comes Insight…: Why aren’t we seeing more adoption of open source in large enterprises? (duckdown.blogspot.com)
Rackspace Backs the Open Source Cloud (datacenterknowledge.com)
The truth about government and open source (zdnet.com)
Does Open Source Matter in the Cloud? (zdnet.com)

This post was written by Eric D. Brown

Mining for knowledge in a social word

Eric D. Brown — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 14:29:42 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

Last week I published a post titled Mining for Knowledge where I discussed some of the research that I’ve been doing in my doctorate program.

One of the favorite lines from the article, and one that resonated with a few others as well. The line was:

…converting tacit (i.e., internal) knowledge to explicit (i.e., external) knowledge is one of the most difficult things to do.

I’ve been thinking about this (and reading A LOT of articles, papers and books on the subject) and have come to the conclusion that trying to force someone to convert tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge is a wasted effort.

Why?

Can I truly convert 100% of my knowledge into the written form? Will the context of my knowledge be converted? Perhaps a good portion of my knowledge can be converted, but can my experiences, thoughts and believes that shaped that knowledge be converted? Can I ‘write down’ the knowledge that I have and truly make it meaningful to others? I don’t think (feel free to disagree here).

Does that mean that an organization should stop trying to gather an individual’s internal knowledge to add to overall organizational knowledge-base? Nope…. definitely not.

Rather than forcing a conversion from tacit to explicit (which is darn near impossible), are there ways to manage the internal knowledge of people? Managing that knowledge is a much easier process that converting that knowledge.

Knowledge is best internalized when wrapped in context

Nonaka and Takeuchi, the godfathers of Knowledge Management, argue in their book The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation (affiliate link) that tacit knowledge can be converted into explicit knowledge only through externalization and describes this process as being one of dialogue, discussion and reflection.

Basically, they’re saying that in order to share internal knowledge, you’ve got to start a dialogue with others. That’s why activities like storytelling, mentoring and other forms of social interaction can play a huge role in knowledge managment…they help to start and maintain dialogue and discussion on various topics. These activities help to provide context around knowledge, which helps a person internalize that knowledge and make it their own.

In my previous article I talked about ‘mining for knowledge’. I talked about using web 2.0 platforms to capture knowledge and to share knowledge. All good stuff (and still interesting to me) but I’m looking at other methods to make these platforms more social. Make dialog and discussion a more active portion of these tools.

If we can find ways to create dialogue and discussion within the enterprise, knowledge sharing would happen much more naturally. This is why I like the idea of Enterprise 2.0. While some people hate E2.0, I think there’s some real value there. Of course, E2.0 won’t solve world hunger and probably will never truly win over its detractors, there are many aspects to the idea that make sense.

What would it mean for an organization’s knowledge managements capabilities if a system could be implemented that found indexed the many disparate repositories of structured and unstructured data sources found throughout the enterprise and then provided that information in a socially aware platform that could wrap context around the indexed knowledge as well as provide a mechanism for dialogue, discussion and reflection? You’d have a platform that could capture and share explicit and tacit knowledge.

Anyone know of any companies with products in this space? I know SocialText is out there but I don’t think they have a platform as robust as the one above. SharePoint also has some aspects to this but not everything.

This post was written by Eric D. Brown

Links for July 18 2010

Eric D. Brown — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 15:30:39 +0000

Why compensation models work against innovation by Jeffrey Phillips on Innovate on Purpose
Quote: I honestly believe that if a firm seeks to become more “innovative” over time as a sustainable capability, it will have to address its compensation and evaluation programs to bring them into alignment with the responsibilities and work required for innovation to take root and grow.
Three Reasons Ideas Are Killer Social Objects for Enterprise 2.0 by Hutch Carpenter on theSpigit Blog
Quote: Social objects are the core of any social software. They define the experience, the basis for connecting people and knowledge, and the tangible benefits for companies.
Just Do Your Job by Lance Haun on Rehaul
Quote: I’ve advocated increasing your influence in an organization. You should always be looking to do that if you want to change things up and be a disturbance (the good kind). But that doesn’t always entail changing organizational structure or moving up to that seat at the table. Building influence is often more than just the title (though, in some organizations, the title is important). And no matter if your organization loves or hates titles, you’ve got to do your job before you gain respect in your company
Developing Strategy is Fun. Implementing It Is Work. | Small Business Trends
Quote: …developing creative new innovative strategy is fun, but most good strategies are sort of boring, particularly when you keep to them over the long term. Implementing strategy is work.
Pressure for Change by Michael Fauscette
Quote: Before we talk about change management and what that really means to a company I think it is useful to think about the reasons for change. Today’s companies and executives are under tremendous pressure from the economy, from customers, from new and unpredictable competitors and from their own employees. This pressure is directly related to an urgency created by each of these factors independently and intensified as the factors collide to create a new business environment.

This post was written by Eric D. Brown

Foto Friday: Mom & Baby Big Horn Sheep

Eric D. Brown — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 14:00:33 +0000

Another Big Horn Sheep & Baby from Zion National Park . I wish I hadn’t cut off the top of the baby. Captured wth Canon 7D and Canon 400mm 5.6 L.

see more photos in my flickr photostream and on my website at photographyminute.com

This post was written by Eric D. Brown

Mining for Knowledge

Eric D. Brown — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 14:45:01 +0000

In my doctoral research, I’ve been researching ways to improve knowledge capture and sharing methods, specifically within project teams but the ideas can be dissemenated around the organization.

One of the biggest issues I’ve found while working as a consultant is the amount of knowledge that I walk away with after a project is complete. Sure, I try to share this knowledge in every way possible but converting tacit (i.e., internal) knowledge to explicit (i.e., external) knowledge is one of the most difficult things to do.

Let’s assume though, that some portion of the knowledge that I hold in my head is converted into some form of writing at various periods throughout a consulting project. Where does that explicit knowledge live? In an email? In some document stored on a server? In a knowledge repository somewhere?

In the past, this problem has been attacked using centralized knowledge repository platforms. These systems require users to log in and ‘enter’ their knowledge into the system. Many of these platforms have been well built and some have been successfully used in organizations, but the success stories are far outweighed by the stories of KM repositories sitting idle and unused.

So…how can we get that tidbit of knowledge from my brain into some form of knowledge repository without me logging in and ‘entering’ it into the system?

Web 2.0 as knowledge repository

The use of Web 2.0 tools (blogs, IM, wikis, etc) has become ubiquitous.. If incorporated into a project environment, these tools might allow an easy and efficient method for capturing and sharing knowledge throughout project teams and project organizations.

The key to retrieving knowledge from tools is to make the user experience as seamless as possible. For example, an employee creates a blog on an organization’s intranet and then uses this blog to write different topics, some that pertain to her project and some that don’t.

Perhaps this employee is participating in two projects within the organization and she writes about topics that might be of interest to a portion of the organization and project team members. While she writes about interesting topics and at times, writes about her experiences on the projects that she’s worked on, perhaps her blog posts aren’t widely read. This employee has attempted to convert a portion of her tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge but few people on the project team or within the organization find this knowledge because its tucked away in the intranet site (which is rarely used anyway).

In the above scenario, knowledge was converted from tacit to explicit but few people are able to absorb this knowledge and make it their own (i.e., perform the conversion from explicit to tacit knowledge). What would happen if this knowledge were indexed, searched and shared with the rest of the project team in something akin to a project knowledge ‘journal’?

Since Web 2.0 platforms are ubiqutious, why can’t we use these tools as our knowledge repository? Employees and project team members are already using them…so can we find a way to ‘mine’ these platforms for knowledge?

Could a system be built that ‘mines’ these web 2.0 platforms along with other unstructured data (documents, email, etc) to ‘build’ a knowledge repository available to the entire organization?

Mining for Knowledge

I’m currently looking at ways to use text mining methods and techniques to mine for knowledge. Text mining looks to be a good approach to solving this problem because it allows for knowledge to be gathered without additional work by project team members.

There are other approaches that could be used for gathering knowledge from project team members, but all require additional work to input information. For example, a project team using a manual approach could ask team members to regularly update their blog and to ‘tag’ their posts with a special project tag or keyword so that a non-intelligent aggregation system (RSS, etc) could simply pull these tagged posts into a central repository. While this is a good approach, it relies on the end-user to tag their content correctly, accurately and in a timely manner. Tagging, and other categorization and taxonomic approaches, require the user to do something to allow their knowledge contribution to be categorized, indexed and found by aggregation systems and other users.

Using text-mining methods against pre-existing tools and platforms takes away the human fallibility issues found in current knowledge management repository platforms or by requiring a user to ‘tag’ a piece of content correctly as described above.

Using text-mining and other data mining approaches, I’m looking at ways to build semi-autonomous systems to index and organize both structured data and unstructured data pulled from blogs, email, IM, social networks, documents, spreadsheets and any other location / data sources. This system could aggregate knowledge found via text mining and social network analysis and build a project knowledge ‘repository’ that will contain all knowledge for any specific project. This repository will be searchable and will contain both manually curated content (e.g., content uploaded by project team members) and automatically curated / generated content based on text-mining and indexing techniques.

There are some major privacy issues here of course. How can you mine a users email and find the relevant knowledge without truly invading their privacy? Not sure you can but I’m looking at it.

Trust & Mined Knowledge

One key element of this new inter-connected world that we live in is trust. How can I trust that the information I read on a web page is worthwhile, honest and accurate? If I want to know something about organizational behavior do I read go read a Wikipedia article on the subject or do I go look through the Harvard Business School’s Organizational Behavior faculty pages and find publications written by the faculty there?

Which of these two sources of knowledge would you trust to be more accurate?

The same can be said of knowledge captured and shared within an organization. How do you know that the white paper on your new API is true? Is it because it was released? Is it because of the author(s) of the paper? What if you had a knowledge-base generated by an autonomous agent using text-mining techniques…how would you know to trust the information contained in it? Who wrote the content? Were did it come from?

This is where trust comes into play. If you could ‘see’ the qualifications of the author or authors of the knowledge base articles would you trust the content more? If I knew that the worlds leading authority on organizational behavior wrote the Wikipedia article on the subject, I’d tend to trust that article more.

This is another aspect of my research…building trust into the mined knowledge using social network analysis (SNA) methods & techniques. Using SNA techniques, can the background, profiles, connections and knowledge of the users within an organization be automatically (or semi-automatically) generated to provide some form for initial trust metric to show that mined knowledge can be trusted?

I don’t know if it can…but I’m looking into it

Next Steps?

So what are the next steps for me and this research?

I’m working on a research paper now that I hope will outline the research in more detail.

Lots of questions still exist and there is quite a bit of research left to do. I do believe I’m headed in the right direction as evidenced by an HBR video & Blog tilted How Knowledge Management Is Moving Away From the Repository as Goal which discusses a similar topic.

Look for more on this topic from me in the coming months.

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Tacit knowledge: you don’t know how much you know (newscientist.com)
John Tropea: conversation matters: The Incentive Question or Why People Share Knowledge – hypergogue (hypergogue.posterous.com)
Why We Share Information (forbes.com)
Knowledge Management and Collaboration Create Knowledge Sharing – Intelligence (baselinemag.com)
Problems of Shifting from KM to “Knowledge Sharing” (kmci.org)
How Knowledge Management Is Moving Away From the Repository as Goal (blogs.hbr.org)
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