E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

Searching Kills Employee Productivity – Are We Actually Searching for the Right Thing After All?

Just recently Toby Ward, over at Intranet Blog, created a weblog post that I found particularly interesting since I have been facing some of the different issues put together by him on how knowledge workers actually get to search for information on their companies’ Intranets, and the Internet in general, and although I may not have a final solution for it I certainly think it would actually be the first few steps on the right direction. The weblog post is titled Searching Kills Employee Productivity and in it he gets to comment on a Center for Media Research survey: Hot Topics: 2001 vs. 2005: Research Study Reveals Dramatic Changes Among Information Consumers. Overall Toby gets to share some thought-provoking information details about how as time has gone through knowledge workers spend more and more time searching for information in order to do their jobs. Lots of people seem to believe that this wasted time is almost, in all cases, due to the search engines themselves not being able to keep up with the information accumulated but Toby has got an interesting point where he indicates that it may actually be the seekers of information the ones who may be doing things wrong all along.

I just couldn’t help but agree with him about this, even though I still do not think that it is totally an issue from the knowledge workers perspective alone. I feel it is still a little bit of a combination of two different factors: the tools, i.e. the search engines, and the knowledge workers themselves. That obsession to be able to build up the best search engine to crawl as much information as possible is something that perhaps puts us in a position where we may be far too much dependent on the tools themselves as opposed to something else. Knowledge workers, obviously, end up becoming too dependent as well on those search engines and as such they would tend to get sloppy on what I feel is also another key aspect that from my perspective would certainly help people save plenty of time when searching through their Intranets for information.

And that is the capability of adapting search engines to search and locate not only that piece of knowledge or information but also the people behind that piece of information. Indeed, the experts. Certainly by having a search engine that combines both searched results of information and experts we will actually be able to fix the too much time spent issue that the survey is highlighting from the perspective where the seekers would have access not only to the information they may be looking for, but also easy access to the experts behind those knowledge sources. So, in short, those search engines would allow you to get the best of both worlds in a seamless way and in a very short time.

Take, for instance, the example of Fringe Contacts, IBM’s people portal interface, where you would be able to search not only for the information you may be asking for, through the usage of keywords or tags, but also you would be able to search for those experts who have been tagged with those keywords. As such, under the same user interface, you would be able to have access to both the Intellectual Capital and the experts behind it. And with a single click a whole bunch of other resources available to you that would be related to the people you may find in those results.

Thus as you can see we may seem to have become a bit sloppier in the way we handle information and search for it, but we do have the solution to this problem as well, which is bringing some more balance between the sources of information and the experts behind them. Looking for that balanced approach for an Intranet search is something that every business should strive for, because at the end of the end, and in most cases, you may be able to learn more from the experts than the information they themselves may have spreaded around already. Like Dave Snowden would say "We always know more than we can tell and we will always tell more than we can write down". It will be up to us, whether we would want to spend hours and hours and hours finding the right information or just focus where we should be focusing: on finding those experts that will take us to the information.

Tags: Search Engines, Search 2.0, Knowledge Worker, Intranet Search, Intranet, Knowledge Sharing, Knowledge Management, KM, Content Management, Expertise Location, Expertise Locators, Fringe Contacts, IBM.

Lost! Where Did Our Knowledge Go? – And How Social Software Can Help Bring It Back!

Here is another worth while reading article from CollaborationLoop, this time by David Goldes, that I am sure plenty of folks over here would be really interested in, specially if you are one of them. Yes, a baby boomer. The article itself is titled Lost! Where Did Our Knowledge Go? and it basically comes to discuss how over the next couple of years plenty of businesses will be challenged with the unprecedented vacuum that baby boomers would be leaving in those same companies when they all start retiring. In the past I have been weblogging myself about this particular effect and how different companies would need to start re-evaluating their Knowledge Management strategies, if they haven’t done so already, in order to try to capture all that tacit knowledge that is floating around in people’s heads and still to be documented before they all start flocking away into their well deserved retirement. And along those same lines it looks like both David and Sachin Anand have made some very interesting points on why companies would need to react now:

"The greatest problem that the Baby Boomer retirement situation presents is the amount of knowledge that is at risk of being lost.  80% of an organization’s critical knowledge is held in the heads of its employees, with only 20% being formally documented, meaning that companies will witness the majority of their knowledge and know-how walk out the door with their retiring employees."

This is just so accurate ! I am sure that plenty of us have been exposed to some of this. I am sure we all know plenty of people who advocate that all of their knowledge is well stored, and managed, in rather their own personal computers or in people’s heads. Plenty of different efforts have been put together indeed to try to switch this ongoing trend for far too long but over time it seems like it may not have been that successful. So what can we do to address or fix this?

"[...] Right now is the time to begin the restructuring and rethinking of knowledge continuity management in the workplace.  Many authors in this field currently discuss the need to retain the Baby Boomer labor force for as long as possible, through practices such as part-time hiring and outside consulting.  Unfortunately, delaying the process of retirement is only a short-term answer to a long-term problem.  Instead, knowledge retention through advanced knowledge worker tools and technology will be the long-term answer."

"[...] By increasing communication, improving document management, and enhancing information retrieval, CBE’s provide companies with a digital knowledge retention system.  Eliminating reliance on tacit knowledge is the first step towards avoiding a knowledge continuity crisis."

Spot on! I just couldn’t have agreed more with David’s comments in this particular respect and why I still feel, like back then, that social software and Web 2.0 tools could be of great help to address some of these concerns. In the past, plenty of different tools have been put in place to try to store all that explicit knowledge coming through as Intellectual Capital. However, there wasn’t much more emphasis on tacit knowledge related tools and we may be witnessing right now a new and fresh wave of new KM and collaborative tools where the main focus is in the tacit exchange of knowledge and not otherwise. We may be witnessing now the right time to embrace social software in such a way that baby boomers would still feel quite comfortable with making use of very user friendly tools to share what they know but much more importantly a set of tools that would help all knowledge workers get involved in different conversations and continue that knowledge transfer that other tools in the past have failed to provide.

So to the initial comments on Lost! Where Did Our Knowledge Go? we may just be witnessing that it may not have gone too far away from where we are now if we get to embrace and adopt those social software tools (i.e. Weblogs, wikis, social bookmarks, tagging, podcasts, RSS / Atom feeds, etc. etc.) that would make knowledge sharing much easier than ever before. In most cases with plenty of them where knowledge is just one or two clicks away from everyone else to enjoy that knowledge shared.

Tags: Baby Boomer, Knowledge Management, KM, Collaboration, Social Software, Social Networking, Web 2.0, CollaborationLoop, Wikis, Weblogs, Podcasts, Tagging, RSS

Business Blog Study – A Study on the Impact of Corporate Weblogs

Late last week I got an e-mail from Ingo Haupt where he was actually pointing me to a study he is actually conducting around the subject of Corporate Weblogs or Business Weblogs and in it he was actually asking me for 10 minutes of my time to go ahead and fill in a survey he has recently put up together over at Business Blog Study where with it he is hoping to be able to build up some interesting and significant data that would help him evaluate the impact of corporate weblogs within the organisations and much more specifically the impact in the interactions with customers. Here is a quick write-up from the survey’s homepage:

"Hello my name is Ingo Haupt, I am a business student at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. Within the framework of my degree dissertation at the chair of marketing of Professor Dr. Frank Huber at Johannes Gutenberg University, I am conducting a research project about business blogs / corporate blogs as a consumer relationship instrument. For further information please have a look at my personal weblog, where I document the progress of my study.

A large number of completed survey questionnaires are the basis for a successful evaluation. Therefore, your participation on this research would be of high value for this project.

Answering the survey questions will take approximately 10 minutes.
Please try to answer every question. There are no wrong or right answers, only your personal opinion is important. Sometimes it can seem like the questions are repetitive, however the questions are not identical just similar to allow different perspectives.

As a matter of course all information will be treated strictly confidential. The survey results will be published anonymously, so no conclusions on the statements will be possible."

So I thought I would go ahead and spend those 10 minutes and provide some further input to help add up into the accuracy of the overall study. Having been weblogging for over 2.5 years over time I have grown to feel curious about this type of studies as they always provide some interesting results on the impact of the so-call Web 2.0 or social software like weblogs within the corporation and it looks like this time around it is slightly different because it puts together the other side of the equation: i.e. the customers. So you get to pick up your favourite business blog(s), then you rate it and the data gets collected and analysed later. And once the study is finished the results would be shared with everyone else and, hopefully, we would be able to reuse them.

If you feel you would want to contribute as well to the work that Ingo has been putting together on this particular survey you would be able to find it over here and at the same time once the results are made available I will go ahead and share some further insights about them. Thus, stay tuned!

Oh, and while you are going through the survey you would enter a draw for 3 shopping coupons for Amazon worth 25 US$ each. Just to get you in the mood

Tags: Business Blogging, Corporate Blogs, Enterprise Blogging, Enterprise 2.0, Metablogging, Knowledge Management, KM, Social Software, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Ingo Haupt