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Thursday, August 29, 2002 |
eWeek. In a series of bombastic statements, Tom Siebel is gearing up to suck corporations down into the biggest money pit yet: a locked down universal application network. A new cannard he is using: ERM (employee relationship management). The only good way to connect employee is through a combination of K-Logs, digital dashboards, and composite web apps (all using Web Services behind the scenes). It's inexpensive, flexible, and able to scale to handle the most complex business needs. Tom's famous paraphrased quote on this: "As a CEO, I want to be able to tweak a knob or dial on the direction of the company and have every employee immediately adjust their workflow as a result." The problem is that he wants to sell this pipedream to America's companies. A knowledge economy doesn't resemble an ant colony. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
4:41:28 PM 
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Boxes and Arrows: The indie life: Talking with Louis Rosenfeld. Just about everyone who deals with information systems, even managing files on their own computer, knows a thing or two about information architecture. Perhaps an important way to broadly promote ourselves is to associate the frustrations of personal information management with solutions that emanate from this new field of information architecture. [Tomalak's Realm]
4:16:24 PM
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Klogging vs. SFA's.
I've been thinking about a new (at least I think it's new) area where klogging could take wing namely as a way of augmenting a Sales Force Automation (SFA) suite.
I've got a little experience here and in particular with some of the pitfalls of an SFA. For example an SFA will typically only work well if:
- Everyone who should be entering data does so
- In a timely fashion
- The data is good
- The data remains good
Where an SFA implementation is not working I think the reasons are often both psychological and technological.
On the one hand there are reps who do not want to share information. They will actively try to avoid or work around the SFA system where possible. The solutions to this problem are probably not technical in nature. Klogging has nothing to offer these people since their whole mindset is the opposite of a klogging mindset.
However I think there are also a lot of reps who, all things being equal, would use the system properly. So what stops them? I think it comes down to one or both of:
- They are not technically able to master the interface of the SFA
- The perceived benefits of the SFA to them (i.e. to their commission levels) do not justify the amount of work required of them to be good users.
And then I started to wonder whether a klogging system might not be able to help bridge this kind of gap.
Here's how it goes:
I think that a Radio based klog is, after the installation is over, very easy to use. Okay templates & categories can cause confusion, but neither are required to use Radio for klogging work. Company level IT people can do the installation and configuration. Every sales person I have met could handle posting to a klog.
Our rep would klog entries whenever they have contact with suspects, prospects or customers. They would do this instead of making entries in the SFA. One immediate benefit for the rep is that they can do this whilst disconnected (not many SFA systems seem to have a workable disconnected mode). A good example might be klogging the results of a meeting with a client whilst sat in the car outside the clients premises -- not having to wait to get home or back to the office.
Every activity that could go into the SFA could also be klogged and much more easily. Telephone calls, meetings, even emails could be copied & pasted from Outlook (Yes, don't look so horrified!). The k-log interface is so simple that I think you could achieve untypical levels of rep activity. klogging in this way would build up a considerable database of information about each contact. For a sales manager this begins to pay off immediately. By subscribing to the klog of each of their rep's they would immediately have great visibility into the current pipeline.
But what about the SFA? Okay imagine we have someone else working back at base who is also subscribed to the RSS feed of one or more of the rep's k-logs. Their job is to extract from those k-logs the information that the SFA needs to do it's job. With the correct metadata being applied to each k-log post this would be a pretty simple clerking task and could even be automated (I can imagine using "templated" posts to help with this). In addition the SFA should be linking back to the k-logs so as not to duplicate information unncessarily (this makes the k-logs more closely part of the CRM solution).
I guess what I'm suggesting is using klogging for effective data capture by the reps and to build the database of suspect/prospect knowledge. Then, as a separate step and done by someone else, updating the SFA as much as required to enable the overview & forecasting functionality that an SFA gives you.
Does anyone have any views about this idea? [Curiouser and curiouser!]
4:13:09 PM
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The BlogMD Initiative. Nice!What is the BlogMD Initiative? The BlogMD Initiative is a group of (hopefully) bright folks coming together to focus on the idea of metadata in the Blogosphere, and in particular, how we might create standards and new tools to make metadata easier to handle and more useful to both weblog authors and weblog readers. [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
4:12:36 PM
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Here is an interesting development. Recently, I have had business meetings with people that have weblogs. Usually, when you have a business meeting, there is a period of formality. There are introductions. You exchange business cards and personal histories. Basically, you spend the first 15 minutes trying to synch up.
The difference with people that have weblogs is:
1) We don't have to exchange business cards. They know where I am located on the Internet. I know where they are located on the Internet. My personal weblog has spam-free e-mail, and a link to instant messaging. There is a link to a bio page that provides some detail on who I am and what I have done.
2) By reading the weblog of the person I am about to meet with, I already know a lot about that person. Most importantly: I know how they think through reading their writings. There is probably no better way to supercharge a meeting than to read the weblog of the person you are about to meet with. It provides a strong basis of understanding necessary for high order interaction.
3) I can write up the results of the meeting on my weblog and share it with a wider audience. That provides feedback to the person you met with and shares the insight developed in the meeting with a wider audience.
I really didn't expect weblogs to change the way I met with people. This was a surprise. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
4:10:23 PM
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KM - what if?. Jim McGee has write on track with his response to 'we can't make people smarter'. Actually, what if we wanted to make people dumber! No jokes please. I blog to get my thoughts out of my head. I can assume that they'll be there for review in the future. So I've allowed myself to clear out some memory for new ideas. Effectively - I've freed up extra space in RAM..... hmmm - re-stating the obvious. [How do you know that?]
4:09:59 PM
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Weblogs are Critical to KM Success.
Jim McGee's post "Making people smarter isn't the point" got me thinking about a couple parallel threads going on in a number of blogs in the past week:
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Phil Windley points out that he has trouble pulling ideas out of people's heads, and I respond that you wouldn't always know which ideas to pull.
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Jim McGee responds to Matt and Lilia's posts that people who learn are getting smarter. He further suggests that smarter people = healthier organizations, and finally concludes tha the market will reward healthier organizations.
From this, I get a couple interesting deductions:
- Organizations should want their employees to get smarter. Smarter in this context means that they know more than they did the day before; it's not necessary that their knowledge be tied to their job. An employee who is learning is one who is challenged and engaged - and someone fitting that description is more likely to contribute to the organization's success.
- Employees learn by getting exposed to others in the organization. Simply knowing what others are doing - what problems they ran into, what they did about them - can go a long way to helping them see issues in a different light.
- Management's role is to encourage people to capture what they know - without making a distinction between information that's valuable and not valuable. Common sense should dictate whether the information should get captured or not.
- Employees can and should act as their own editor - to identify people who help them learn. These filters will be dynamic, but the goal is to simply identify people who can shed light on a particular topic.
- To be successful over the long haul, employees must be recognized for their contributions.
Finally, why I think weblogs are a key piece of the puzzle:
- Simple capturing of text. It's easy for anyone who participates to quickly jot down a few notes and instantly share them with others.
- Weblog applications facilitate distribution of information - not just on the web, but also in XML for easy aggregation in applications like Radio's aggregator, AmphetaDesk, NewsIsFree, FeedReader, and others.
- Complementary pieces of web technology - referral logs, statistics trackers, TrackBack - make it easy to see possible connections between related threads. In this way, individuals can make connections to related information - and possibly synthesize that into knowledge.
- Weblogs reduce the clutter in a user's inbox.
A few months ago we had an interesting dialogue about measurement. One important challenge left unresolved in this discussion is measurement. How do you measure the individual's contribution to the system? How do you measure the success of the initiative? Jim suggests that the ultimate measurement is reflected in the marketplace. I think there is some merit in this, but it's hardly the only measurement. (And Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma suggests that occasionally, healthy companies die from listening to customers. But that's a separate discussion.)
For me, much of this comes back to executive leadership. Little of what's described above will happen at a grass-roots level. If an individual isn't rewarded for what they do, there's little to no incentive to go out of their way to do it. If, on the other hand, a CEO makes it clear that the organization is committed to learning (both as a noun and a verb, by the way) - then a culture can grow around that. Executives must lead by example - not commandment. And CEOs need some evidence that this commitment will be rewarded in the marketplace - which brings us back to measurement.
In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins wrote that the truly great CEOs aren't the rock star types. They're the ones who quietly work in the background to make others smarter. They promote the organization, take credit for the failures and point the finger when there are successes. At the end of the day, that's what a good teacher does - and what learning is all about.
With their focus on distribution of information, identification of individual contributions, and sharing of credit, weblogs may very well be critical to the long-term success of any KM effort. [tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]
4:07:19 PM
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© Copyright 2002 Jim McGee.
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