Before Monday July 6th, did you know that Google and Microsoft had services for storing health records? Thanks to an article in the Times and some related hysteria in other media, just about the whole country discovered that, "David Cameron was going to replace the bloated and expensive NHS computer system with a free one from Google. Or maybe Microsoft."
Except, of course, someone got hold of the wrong end of the stick. Let's face it, whatever we think of the NHS and its evolving computer system, it's not going to be replaced by a packaged service from anyone. Never mind that Google and Microsoft (and maybe BUPA) are supposedly the front runners.
No-one likes overspends on computer projects. And the NHS one due for delivery in 2014 - four years late and at a cost of £12.4bn - presents a wonderful target for the Tories. This seems to have been what caused all the excitement. From £14.2bn to 'free' at the stroke of a pen. Wow!
Who on earth thinks that commercial organisations like Google, Microsoft or BUPA will do anything for free? And who but the most naive will think that moving shedloads of detailed health records from one system to another is going to happen without horrendous cost and risk?
Still, it was a great headline and it, rather unexpectedly, put 'Google Health' in the frame. Whether involved or not, Rachel Whetstone, Google's Vice President, Public Policy and Communications, must be feeling jolly pleased with the outcome. (Incidentally, she's married to Steve Hilton, one of David Cameron's closest advisors. She dropped out of politics after a spell as Michael Howard's chief of staff during his failed election campaign. Oops, wrong horse.)
So what's the reality? The Google (Health) and Microsoft (HealthVault) systems both manage personal health records, or PHRs. They provide somewhere to create, store and share your personal health information and allow you to find related infomation, engage with health professionals and manage your medications. Both put the user in control of content and both are free to the user. This has little to do with the £14.2bn NHS system. At best it would take care of one element of it, the so-called 'Spine' Care Record Service (CRS) but with less information and more restricted access. Medical professionals need access to all manner of detailed information if they're to do their jobs properly and they're simply not going to get that from the personally-filtered subset of a person's medical information that the PHRs represent.
What's on offer smacks of a, "let's get to know your medical issues so we can fire appropriate ads at you". If not, one has to ask what the commercial motivations of Microsoft and Google are. Maybe it's to flog extra services: "Monitor your blood pressure, madam?" or "Remind you to take your pills, sir?"
With the baby boomers reaching retirement age, the market for health-related products and services is exploding. An increasing proportion are computer literate and have their own PCs and internet connections. And nothing is on their minds more than their health. (Okay, maybe their grandchildren and their pets.)
But let's not get carried away by recent newspaper reports. This is not David Cameron single-handedly demolishing the NHS IT budget. Sure, we'd love to enter what the Tories call a "post bureaucratic age", but let's start by getting rid of all the deeply intrusive information that the government already stores about us first.
The IT or, to give it it's full name, the ICT industry has led a pretty charmed life. After being a participant for over forty three years, it amazes me that it still manages to buck trends; from ever more power at ever lower prices to the potential ability to steer the planet and its occupants from environmental disaster.
At least, that's the hope and the intention of the green IT industry. Manufacturers are gleefully chomping out and selling more and more ICT equipment, while claiming that the environmental savings accruing from its use will mightily offset the environmental harm caused by its manufacture, operation and the disposal of whatever it's replacing.
Of course, IT isn't the only game in town. Cleantech industries are working hard on coming up with new things (with their embedded environmental harm) to reduce our overall environmental impact. It's paradoxical and uncomfortable, but it seems we have to do some more harm in order to do even more good.
One company that has an interesting environmental programme is BT Global Services. It also wants to be seen as "the IT provider of choice". It plans to do this by raising the level at which it consults with businesses by using sustainability as a lens. It has the IT in the form of data centres, software and services. And it has the C, because its core business is communications.
Global Services has posted some ghastly results recently and is in the middle of a restructuring. Perhaps it sees 'sustainability' as an opportunity to improve matters for itself and for the environment.
Anyway, if pretty charts are anything to go by, its Sustainability Practice has a comprehensive approach to helping its customers build sustainable organisations. Like many large companies (IBM, Cisco, CA and HP are just four examples), it has drawn heavily on its own experience to formulate its guidance for customers. For example, an early step in the process is a carbon assessment. This focuses on people, power and procurement.
People commute and travel on business and they use laptops, personal printers and mobile devices, for example. Power is used in office devices and data centre equipment, as well as heating, lighting and cooling. Procurement includes third party services, hosted equipment, print services, transport and so on. These three elements are analysed according to the three 'Scopes' of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. (Scope I is the direct burning of fossil fuels. Scope II is electricity and the carbon created in using it. Scope III is indirect activity such as staff commuting.)
When you look at it this way, it seems obvious, but that's the deceptive thing about a simple framework.
Of course BT has a range of service offerings to match sustainability needs. And, as you might expect, substituting travel with communications looms large. And 'Homeshoring' is offered as a solution for UK contact centres. (With dog-cancelling microphones, perhaps?) The data centre hosting story is the usual one of greater carbon efficiency than a DIY approach.
The individual elements of the BT story aren't particularly original, but its telephony and networking pedigree hint at good service and security levels. It has many years of implementing sustainability initiatives with resulting business benefits. The savings it boasts sound huge, but these have to be considered in the context of BT's size (£21.4bn turnover last year). It saves £37m per year in travel costs and it saved £238m in one year through conferencing. It also reports a 20 percent productivity improvement from flexible working arrangements.
BT has spent years trying to muscle in on IT's turf. Now the industry really is ICT, perhaps this is the best chance it has. And, with the inevitable build up to December's Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, now seems to be a very good time for BTGS to set out its sustainability stall.
As you know, most of us are facing financial difficulties and some of us are becoming concerned about our environmental impacts. Or we may actually find ourselves being pushed in that direction by customer pressure or legislation.
We still like the idea of jetting round the world, or even driving round the country, in order to meet our suppliers, customers and work colleagues. But, faced with the aforementioned issues, we're increasingly turning to online meetings and events. And, for many, the experience falls short of expectations.
Of the whole panoply of virtual engagements from webinars to telepresence, one type probably sticks out as the most likely to disappoint and that's the virtual exhibition and conference. And this is probably because we all know what a physical event should be like, so we expect the same or something very similar with the online version.
This is a mistake.
They are not the same and each has its strengths and weaknesses. To ignore this, when planning to present, exhibit or visit, is to invite disappointment.
We are all familiar with the physical event, so perhaps it's best to focus here on the good and the bad of the virtual. You may have your own views in which case we'd love to hear them.
Primarily, a virtual event (subject to some technical and localisation caveats) is available to all, anywhere in the world. And it involves no travel or accommodation expenses. It will still, of course, take up some of the delegate's time, but they can generally choose when they want to visit. (The events usually remain online for a while after the initial event closes.) If you visit in real-time, you can probably participate in live Q&As, for example, but you may put a higher value on personal convenience. Because of the social networking tools wrapped round a virtual event, you will still be able to reach out to speakers, exhibitors and fellow delegates as long as the event site remains live.
Exhibitors and speakers also benefit from lower costs, although these are mostly staffing, travel and accommodation savings during the event itself. They still need to prepare and adapt their approach to suit the online world. Making a recorded 90-minute PowerPoint presentation available online is really not taking advantage of the new medium or, indeed, the attention span of an online visitor. Remember that, just as with the web, escape for the visitor is just a mouse click away. In theory, a virtual event should be able to pull together a high calibre of speaker or panellist because of the smaller impact on their time. They would probably be happier to do shorter presentations too if they don't have to travel thousands of miles for their appearances.
A hierarchical approach to exhibit materials would make sense. Exhibitors could offer a cascade of presentations from short and sweet down to whatever depth they feel is appropriate. And back this up with a menu of downloadable materials such as case studies, product/service information and white papers. This is similar to real life, except that shelf space is infinite, different languages can be accommodated and the materials can include podcasts and movies as well as documents and links to web pages. This self-service approach has the advantage for the delegates that they don't have to run the gauntlet of the sales team in order to lay their mitts on the collateral. They'll come back soon enough if they're interested. And, because they've prequalified themselves, their value is much higher than that of the average booth visitor at a physical event.
From the organisers' and exhibitors' perspective, they can collect an incredible amount of detailed business intelligence during the event. All the conversations a company has with its visitors and who downloaded what collateral could be captured. At a more anonymous level, all the visits, engagements and downloads made by delegates show the organiser which parts of the event are working well and which are not.
At real events, 'networking' is probably claimed as the number one payoff for the delegates. And it's true that this physical, "look 'em in the eye and shake their hand", contact is missing from online. This is an incredibly important facet of our everyday lives but, if you can't afford the time or money to participate in an important event, then a virtual equivalent might be better than no event at all. Having said that, in some respects the virtual event is better because of the ability to check out companies and individuals through the event directories and make appointments to meet them virtually. It is also theoretically possible to stimulate serendipitous meetings by having lounge areas for people to virtually mingle, backed up by on-the-fly created chat rooms if they need privacy. This does, however, miss all those body language cues which tell us whether we want to make contact or not. But some things things we're just going to have to do without if we're concerned about our budgets, our time and the environment.
Yesterday at Cisco's C-Scape analyst briefing, we were treated to a presentation by one James Ferguson. And what a treat that was. Cisco chose wisely. He was a good speaker, passionate about his subject (telemedicine, which he prefers to call telehealth) and a medical practitioner to boot. It was a real person talking about real things, not some propellor-head from technoland or, worse, a marketeer. This background, of course, made him a devastatingly effective salesman, and it wasn't until the Q&A that some of my (Scotch?) mist of enthusiasm started to clear.
His pitch was essentially simple. Because the coverage of the Aberdeen-based Scottish Centre for Telehealth (SCT) includes highlands, islands and oil-rigs, it faces some rather unusual problems. Popping into the local hospital is hardly convenient. And doctors can't easily get to where they're needed. Not always in time, anyway. So SCT's been working on getting diagnoses done remotely in order to a) help people to get the right treatment locally and b) to identify those who need hands-on professional treatment urgently. The filtering questions are: "Is this time dependent?" (urgent), "Is it experience dependent?" (need an expert) and "Is it facilities dependent?" (need particular facilities).
We saw people sticking their tongues out and waggling their tonsils in kiosks while remote experts tried to figure out what's wrong. Apparently ninety percent of diagnoses can be done by looking at someone, listening to their chest and looking in their ears, noses and down their throats. It's a slightly dehumanising way of doing medicine: in the same way that we all like to meet in person rather than through a computer screen or over the phone. The truth is, when you're ill and you're far away from help, anything is better than nothing at all.
Ferguson was not afraid to mention the dangers of turfing up at hospital. He'd rather sit on a telepresence or videoconference consultation than face God-knows-what in person. And patients eliminate the risk of catching hospital-borne infections if they don't have to go near the place.
The benefits are piling up.
The downside, of course, is that this stuff has to be paid for and the bandwidth has to be there. On payment, Cisco has a cash mountain so this, presumably, is why it's happy to consider spreading payments over time, essentially turning the customer's capital expenditure into operating expenditure. It can still recognise its own revenue at point-of-sale. Although it's a different issue, we're also seeing gradual acceptance this pay-as-you-go approach in the various kinds of cloud-based services.
The harder part of the equation is the communications infrastructure. Covering highlands, islands and oil-rigs with high quality broadband connections is a political and economic challenge, given the relatively sparse populations. Oil rigs have, apparently, been trialling a satellite-based facility called OPTESS. And some of the ground-based services have been using ISDN but, of course, the higher the bandwidth and the further the reach, the more services can be provided remotely.
Ferguson pointed out that medicine is now so good at patching us up when we get a major illness, we keep on living only to get more and more illnesses, until we end up with some chronic condition. All of this puts increasing demands on an already overstretched health service much of which, in theory at least, could be alleviated with some kind of home monitoring and self-treatment service, escalating to the professionals as and when needed.
But that's to get ahead of ourselves. Right now, the SCT has run trials inside hospitals running telehealth 'kiosks' in parallel with conventional assessments, in order to compare the quality of results. (It has a clever way of eliminating bias.) It is extending this facility to multiple hospitals and has started home monitoring trials. All of which are testing the principles of telehealth and capturing feedback from users on the experience.
As with so many things in the computer world, the big question is whether it will be able to scale. And that depends largely on either an appropriate infrastructure or a system which can adapt successfully to lower bandwidth connections.
Any company that makes life easy for its customers gets my vote. And one company that tries hard to achieve this is Citrix Online. It is driven by a desire to simplify the previously complex. It also likes to undercut the prices of its major competitors.
Right now it has a free service in beta, called GoView which lets anyone create a screencast (voice and screen recording). Since the most popular screencast programs are desktop products, its traditional pricing model - a monthly fee - must have presented a bit of a challenge. So its solution was to go for an ad'-supported model. At the moment all the advertisements are for the company's other services and they don't in any way interfere with your own screencast creations.
True, it lacks the sophistication of Techsmith's Camtasia or Blueberry Software's FlashBack products, for example, but this is largely its point. It's good enough for the majority of existing and potential screencasters. A few clicks and your movie ends up online and you have a URL to share. If you prefer the extra control a desktop application gives you, you might want to check out Techsmith's Jing - a mini-Camtasia and screen capture program or FlashBack Express. Both are free, although the licence terms for Express appear to contradict this.
Returning to the GoView service, once the desktop element is downloaded, a couple of clicks start a three second countdown. Anything you then do on the screen or speak into the microphone gets streamed to the Citrix Online server. When finished, you can edit out the bad bits of the end result, add captions if you want, then share the URL with others. As Aleksandr in comparethemeerkat.com would say, "Seemplz."
GoView is currently in beta and some simple improvements could be made, such as being able to select an area of the screen for recording, rather than the whole screen. But the whole point of a public beta is that the developers get tons of feedback like this quickly and more or less for free. I, and many others, have probably spent hours buggering about with the software and the service. This gives the company a fairly massive free testing resource. The other point of a beta approach is that the service provider is more or less forgiven for flaws. It's how Twitter got so successful. Its 'fail whale' almost became a friend in the early days of the service. I had issues with sound and screen size on Vista at first, but it worked a charm on XP. Once underway, GoView seemed pretty robust.
I think the key to the Citrix approach, and that of many other disrupters, is that it realises that part the world needs sophisticated software and services, but a much larger chunk actually craves a simpler life and lower costs. Professional screencasters will still want 'proper' products which let them massage and publish the outputs in various ways. But regular end users who just want to just grab what they're doing on the screen, twiddle with it a bit, then send it off will be perfectly happy with a simple service which automatically stores the recording online and gives the user a URL which they can share via email, blogs, tweets or whatever. Jing, by the way, comes awfully close in this respect.
GoView is just one of Citrix Online's recent crop of disruptive services. It is taking a pop at the lucrative online education market with a new GoToTraining service. Its fairly new HiDefConferencing offers voice conferencing which can mix up to 500 PSTN and IP participants together. As with its GoToMeeting and other GoTo products, the terms for both services are based on unlimited usage per licence. This is the computing equivalent of one of those 'all you can eat' buffet lunches so beloved of certain ethnic restaurants.
While I don't care much for concentrating on single companies, it has to be said that Citrix Online is a bit of a one-off. It's a successful business which relies on simplicity and an absence of financial surprises for its customers. The first appeals to end users and the second to everyone.
Not a bad recipe at all.
A couple of weeks ago, Wiley asked if I'd like a review copy of Dan Bricklin's 'Bricklin on Technology' book. Normally, I'd say "not on your Nelly" because I know what a chore book reviewing can be. However, I was at the West Coast Computer Faire in March 1980 when Bricklin collected his first award for VisiCalc - the pioneering spreadsheet for the PC. I was also a fairly avid user of his 'Demo' program a few years later. Even though I don't think we met, (unless it was in Zaragoza a couple of years ago), I felt connected, not least because I also developed and published PC software for many years, but without his degree of visibility or success.
When the book arrived, I winced because it's more or less 500 pages long. Unless you're a commuter or you don't get much sleep, how do you find time to read that much?
Anyway, the book was enjoyable at a couple of levels and a disappointment at another. Enjoyable because it peeled off and examined the layers of thinking that went into various products and issues. Bricklin leaves no stone unturned in his pursuit of insight. The transcript of an 85-minute interview with wiki inventor Ward Cunningham is a classic in this respect. (It was 37 pages.) I'd rather Bricklin had identified and pulled out the key elements but then, I suspect, this would have been an editorial step too far for him. He would have had to impose his own interpretations on the conversation, rather than laying it out in full in front of his audience.
You will get insight if you read this book. Insight into what brought us to where we are and a few glimmers into how we might get to where we're going.
The other enjoyable bit for me, which you won't all share, is that I've met (albeit fleetingly) many of the people mentioned in the book, worked with many of the products and written about many of the issues. Bricklin and I even started programming at the same time - early 1966, and we've both tried to take the user perspective in our work. The book triggered many long-dormant memories and reawakened many old feelings, especially in the late 70's/early 80's as we all groped our way through the chaos of the emerging microcomputer/PC business. This is not really a reason for buying the book because Bricklin's chosen subjects seem, in the main, to be serendipitous. A comprehensive history book it is not, although it is a useful addition to the history of the IT world of the late 20th century.
The book is a compilation of old blog posts, essays and transcripts of recordings, loosely arranged around topics which Bricklin finds important, all topped and tailed with narrative from the perspective of 2007/8. As he says in the conclusion, "On any topic you can explore deeply and find nuance", which more or less sets the tone for the book. He does dig deep, he records faithfully and, at times you want him to make his point more quickly. But maybe that's not what he's trying to do. Perhaps he's trying to help the reader understand the nuances, so that they can move forward with their own thinking. I don't know.
Most of his topics have some resonance today, although much of the writing has been overtaken by events or absorbed into the mainstream. The chapters will give you a clue: What Will People Pay For?; The Recording Industry and Copying; Leveraging the Crowd; Cooperation; Blogging and Podcasting; What Tools We Should Be Developing?; Tablet and Gestural Computing; The long term; Historical Information about the PC; Interview with the Inventor of the Wiki; and VisiCalc. It's a ramble round the industry and round the inside of Bricklin's head. His invention of VisiCalc gave him a passport to go where he likes when he likes and meet who he likes. And that's what he's done and, in this book, shared it with us.
My approach, if you're thinking of buying it, would be to say "I'm getting a good 300-page book, I'll just need to pick which 300 of the 500 pages are of most relevance to me." It's a bit like his approach to software - give the user the tools and let them choose how best to use them.
Amazon is selling it in the UK for £10.99
Now here's an idea that makes sense: a follow up to the Copenhagen Climate Conference in December. Or, to be more accurate, a series of follow ups, none of which requires much travel. A company called G2Events is putting on a series of three online conferences which include exhibit booths, presentations (from organisations small and large), telepresence-basd panel discussions, meeting rooms and downloadable materials. Called Sustainability Virtual Summits, it is entirely digital - totally in keeping with its name.
Each event has specific focus areas in order to maximise the chance of a meaningful exchange of views. The first, in February, will concentrate on virtualisation and dematerialisation and how ICT can get its own act together (my words, not the organiser's). The second, in May, concentrates on smart motor systems and smart logistics. The third, in August, looks at smart buildings, smart grids and water and sanitation. Each event concentrates on the role of ICT in delivering sustainability benefits.
Why should we have mini-summits following the big one in Copenhagen? Well, to be blunt, you can only achieve so much at these big events. If the delegates agree on a post-Kyoto protocol and all get their pictures taken looking pleased with themselves, (preferably while standing next to Barack Obama) then that's about it. The real work takes place in all the organisations that are obliged to live up to the greenhouse gas promises that eventually get made.
The truth, though, is that we're in disarray. For example, last week I looked at ten different carbon calculators. They gave ten different results. (Choose one and stick with it if you want to monitor your progress.) But wouldn't it be better if we could all agree on some standards? This is one of the reasons these follow up events have been brought into existence. Participants get a chance to review and discuss these and many other sustainability-related issues.
Each 'conference' will be a day long, covering three time zones. After the initial three days, the live debate will continue for 30 days. After that, all the material from the whole event will be left online for a further 90 days. In theory, this could become a substantial resource for anyone seeking a genuine understanding of the issues around ICT and sustainability. It would be nice to think that some global understanding will emerge. If positions polarise, at least everyone can see what's going on and know where further effort needs to be applied. Hopefully a lot of bonding will take place among movers and shakers around the world.
The trick will be to get the right people to attend. As anyone who's visited Second Life will attest, that experience can be quite unpleasant. The virtual summits promise to be very different. They are photo-realistic for a start. A little bit of downloading takes place before you get into the conference so, presumably, a lot of the rendering is done inside your own computer. A company called Design Reactor takes care of the technical aspects and, looking at some event work it did for Hewlett Packard, the omens are good. You can also see a dummy of the Sustainability Summit site here.
Although this is a commercial activity, its heart seems to be in the right place. It is independent. It has some good sponsoring organisations. Exhibitor booths don't cost very much. It's going for a smallish audience - around 5,000 quality visitors drawn from CSR/sustainability execs, c-level, data centre managers, supply chain, product development, finance and marketing. It seems like a good event to drop in on during the 30 day 'discussion period'. I'm guessing that this where the fun will begin. It's also where people with implementation experience will be able to contribute their insights.
Fed up with 'cloud' yet? You ain't seen nuthin'. It's not going to go away. But, with a bit of luck, it's going to start falling into place.
When Microsoft announced its 'Software Plus Services', many people, including me, scoffed. We assumed that this was just a way of preserving its profitable fat client software business while nicking whatever advantage it could from cloud-delivered services.
Microsoft has sunk its Office hooks deep into the corporate marketplace. But that won't surprise you. For better or for worse, people actually like using the same applications as their colleagues inside and outside the organisation and, in enterprises, the most popular ones are from Microsoft.
It doesn't matter how hard competitors try, the compatibility just isn't there. And, with products like Word, useful capabilities like Track Changes are just not portable. The wiki brigade will point out the nonsense of Track Changes and argue that a single workspace with multiple authors and a proper version history makes so much more sense. And in a pure academic sense, they're right. But, in the main, wiki products are lightweight and alien compared with the richness and ubiquity of Word.
What many organisations really need is concurrent editing of single instances of Microsoft documents. Some companies are working on such things, but that's tomorrow. They will have to climb the curve of evangelist, early adopter and early majority before they get anywhere near mainstream acceptance. By which time, who knows?, maybe Microsoft will have extended Word into a Microsoft-hosted wiki-like environment.
But Word is only an example of what's going on. Plenty of other applications deliver tremendous capability at the desktop and their online cousins less. A long time ago an industry pioneer called Adam Osborne used to claim that, "adequacy is sufficient, everything else is irrelevant." He probably said it in order to foist a portable computer with a five-inch screen on an unsuspecting world. But, for many, especially in the lower reaches of the market, his observation is true. There, OpenOffice, Google Docs and other products/services will continue to steal desktop business from Microsoft.
But, despite claims to the contrary, we're not about to experience a cloud revolution. The world isn't going to suddenly put all its eggs in the cloud basket. We're going to see a wide range of engagements with cloud. We've seen the start with SalesForce.com - a massively popular niche application which can be tapped into from anywhere. The same goes for email, online storage and credit card payment services. These are all cloud-based and require little thought to implement. They sit well with existing business processes.
Other cloud services act as an extension of the IT department, providing physical expansion (and contraction) without wrecking budgets and causing chaos in the data centre. As we move forward and we think of entrusting more of our IT to the cloud, we will need to tread carefully, lest we create hard-to-manage interdependencies between service providers. Nothing new in priniciple, but this is our own business we're entrusting to outsiders. SLAs and responsibilities need to be nailed down carefully.
It seems pretty obvious now that cloud services will sit alongside existing applications and services and be called upon when they provide genuine incremental value. But this wasn't so obvious a little while ago when the evangelists were screaming 'cloud is the future' and Microsoft, in what looked like a rearguard action to save its traditional business, was arguing that 'software plus services' is the future.
It sticks in my craw to say it, but I think Microsoft got it dead right.
Say 'knowledge management' to most people in our business and watch the curl of their lips. It seems to be a 'given' that KM is dead. The usual reason given is that knowledge sits between our ears, so how the heck can it be managed? Even those who are prepared to stretch the definition a little bit into 'information' are still inclined to question the value of the stored information. I mean, what information is readily given up and what's its half-life anyway?
A few months ago, I stumbled across a US/Indian IT services company called MindTree. It has a Chief Knowledge Officer called Raj Datta. Expecting the worst, I spoke to him and was somewhat astonished to learn that he has taken a lifecycle approach to knowledge management. He recognises that it does live between people's ears. But he also recognises that it can be shared through social tools. The result is an organisation which spends a lot of time, energy and money on the most important bit of knowledge management, its creation in the first place.
Staff are introduced to many thinking and idea generation tools - from De Bono's Six Thinking Hats to mind-mapping. Through workshops and discussion groups, they can learn about many thinking concepts, developing their minds and their ability to innovate. Without creation, knowledge/information capture is merely ossifying the past.
Staff, called 'Minds' incidentally, are then given a wide choice of social and collaboration tools, from blogs through wikis to discussion groups, and more. They are also given a physical workplace which encourages planned and serendipitous encounters.
The astonishing thing about this company is that it was implementing these ideas and blending them with its traditional KM/content management systems while most companies were still trying to figure out the relevance of social networking. MindTree turns out to have been something of a pioneer.
By joining the dots and ensuring that the complete knowledge lifecycle is supported: from inception, to storage, to sharing, to reuse, it provides the KM world an intelligent and holistic way forward.
A long time ago, when I was a wage slave in a computer company, I figured out two things.
1) People will always be around and therefore I should work in a field that involved communication and people. (Teaching and writing became important parts of my life subsequently.)
2) I should, as much as possible, do things once and get paid lots of times. (I subsequently entered the publishing world - magazines first, then software.)
These activities have, to varying degrees, determined the trajectory of my life for the past 33 years. And a jolly fine life it's been, thank you for asking.
But, somewhere along the way, things changed. I found myself giving more and more of my stuff away. I (wrongly) bombed the price of my niche software too far. I found myself cheerfully handing out information and opportunity leads to others. At some point I moved from hoarding and dribbling out my knowledge in exchange for largish sums of money to giving away more and receiving something else in return, friendships and business relationships based on trust and transparency.
I'm not totally stupid, I realise I have to sell something and that something tends to be what's between my ears, my native talents or what I can lay my hands on and package more skilfully than others. It makes for a good life in which all the bits join up rather harmoniously. People, fortunately, know about me and are happy to pay me when they think they can get some value out of me.
I was prompted to write this by a tiny, three-minute, interview conducted in a noisy restaurant by one Suw Charman. She, incidentally, was partly responsible - along with Adriana Lukas and Jackie Danicki - for acting as midwives as I entered the world of blogging at the end of 2004. Her interview was with JP Rangaswami, a man who is a paragon of knowledge sharing. He gets hardly any sleep so has a ton of time to do his job (a very important one at BT), to keep up, to engage with all the 'greats' of the social computing world, and to reflect very deeply on our world, much of which ends up in his blog.
To paraphrase the (short) interview, he pointed out that capturing and keeping knowledge is part of the incentive system in many organisations. But the new generations coming through (and the more enlightened of the older generations) have a more sharing attitude. The core question is: do people want to share? And, by implication, he believes the the answer is, increasingly, "yes". It shows in his behaviour. The benefits show in his reach and influence. And little of this could have happened without him deciding to reach out and share.
And, as I've written many times before, inside an organisation, the benefits are potentially huge. Rangaswami believes that the decision (should we implement social software?) that organisations need to make is akin to deciding whether or not a company should have a telephone exchange. In time, it will become obvious. Like email and mobile phones before, it will take a while to bite (he thinks the transition could be ten years or more) but it will happen without question.