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

Shell All of That Knowledge, Please!

Can video make a difference in Knowledge Transfer? That’s one of the recent thought provoking questions that one of my favourite KM bloggers, Nick Milton, developed further in a lovely blog post he put together out there, sharing the story of a recent article in the New Scientist magazine about a study in Benin which described “how a team from the West Africa Rice Centre was attempting to transfer knowledge to women farmers in West Africa, on the topic of “how to parboil rice””. I am sure that if you have been involved with the fascinating world of narrative it would seem that the answer would be a rather affirmative Yes! Nick actually shares along a few reasons as to why it may well be a rather effective method for transferring knowledge across. And he is spot on with each and everyone of them! But does video really have a place within the corporate world to help facilitate open knowledge flows as well as encourage knowledge workers to connect and collaborate with one another? Yes, of course!

Specially, with senior knowledge workers. And the more mature that knowledge workforce is, the better it will be! For the last few years there has been a huge concern with that senior workforce sitting right in the middle; yes, what some folks have been calling all along, the baby boomers, mainly as they start to leave work and enjoy retirement … taking their precious, extensive and comprehensive experience, know-how and knowledge away with them. This is certainly a growing pain that very few businesses have been capable of addressing and fixing successfully and accordingly before it is just too late. And the clock is ticking… We don’t have much time left, before the vast majority of those baby boomers start retiring and move on to other things…

Thus what we can do, both as businesses and as knowledge workers, to try to capture some of that knowledge, realising that we would never be capable of capturing it all, and perhaps come to terms with the fact that only a fraction of what they know will remain behind? What can we do to provoke what my good friend Harold Jarche has coined as “Frictionless Learning” moving right into the direction of the wonderful world of Wirearchy that another good friend of mine, Jon Husband has been championing for years? Is there anything that video can do to help out?

Yes, there is! And big time! In my role as a social computing evangelist one gets involved in a good number of conversations with other fellow knowledge workers who keep coming up, time and time again, with one inhibitor after another, as the the main culprits that are slowing them down in their adoption of these social tools we keep evangelising on. Things like “I don’t have the time; I am busy”, “These social tools are too difficult to learn”, “I am already working on my email!”, “What’s the ROI of Social Media?”, “What’s in it for me? Do you have any best practices you could share?”, “I am a slow typist. Sorry”, “I won’t use these social tools, because no-one will read what I have to say”, “I don’t know what I can talk about and share with my peers”, etc. etc. I am sure we all have our favourite inhibitors that we all keep bumping into over and over again (Feel free to share your suggestions in the comments, by the way!). However, it’s important to notice how getting involved with social computing and social networking does not necessarily mean, nor involve, typing away behind a computer.

We should not forget that one of the biggest elements from social networking is the nifty introduction of rich media in the shape of podcasts or vodcasts, amongst several others. And it is in the latter case, i.e. the vodcasts, when video could be huge! And I mean HUGE!! Who, out there, doesn’t like being in front of a camera going through an interview that will get recorded and shared across at a later time? Who, out there, wouldn’t like to be sitting in a comfortable chair, enjoying a cup of coffee (or tea), perhaps even a lovely glass of wine, pretty relaxed, having the right ambiance, talking to another fellow colleague, sharing stories about whatever the topic that comes to mind, whether work or non-work related, and record them as the end result through video and publish it all to a larger audience at a later time? Who wouldn’t like that? Probably not many folks, right?; quite the opposite!

By using video and recording those interviews you right away eliminate the friction provoked by having to sit in front of a computer to type a whole bunch of text away and focus on remembering what you know, as if it weren’t hard enough already! Yet, we should not forget, nor underestimate, how poorly we, human beings, tend to be when trying to document our knowledge in paper. We are just awful at doing that effectively. We just can’t! However, the whole game changes when we need to talk. We are certainly not perfect either! But we do a much better job at it, specially if you feel you could talk faster than you could type.

So right there you have got the perfect use case for introducing video within your organisation, and while baby boomers can surely become your gateway into vodcasting the reality is that everyone can do it! Whether from your smartphone, or from your camera enabled PC / Mac, or whatever else (Very soon from your iPad v2, too!! Can you imagine what potential the iPad 2 has got just with Facetime and dual cameras? I just can’t wait for the first iPad App that would allow me to record such video conversations on the fly!), we have just got a unique opportunity to take advantage of rich media to try to capture some of that knowledge before it leaves us for good.

And perhaps we could illustrate that with a video clip. Actually, a very short video clip that Nick himself, once again, also shared in his rather insightful KM blog under the heading “Ask Learn Share, KM video from Shell“. The clip itself does last for a little bit over ONE minute, but yet, if I would ask you to deliver the same messages the video clip portraits, I can surely guarantee you that it would take much much longer. If not, judge for yourselves:

SHELL ASK LEARN SHARE from studionx on Vimeo.

We are visual animals, after all, and we get to learn, perhaps even while at work, much more effectively through images and visualisations than through text itself, as it is a much more natural way of engaging, connecting, reaching out and collaborating with fellow visual animals. Us humans. So next time someone throws out there on the table the question whether it is a good time now to introduce video in your overall knowledge sharing, collaboration and social computing strategy, think about it twice, because it could well be your next big massive breakthrough. Even all of the way to the top! Executives love being featured in videos! Ask them!

No longer an excuse to try to capture and retain some of that knowledge that’s just about to leave the workplace. Get busy while you can! And get those video cameras rolling!

Making Business Sense of Social Media and Social Networking – Is Blogging Dead?

Scott Monty has got a rather interesting and very insightful blog post where he comes to ponder how every year there are a bunch of people out there, coming from different places, who keep questioning whether blogging is dead or whether we are enjoying the last few days of that phenomenon that got started over 14 years ago. His article surely is a must-read, not only because it covers a good number of the entries which have been trying to kill blogging from as early as 2007, but also because of his conclusion, which is one of my favourites as well for a good number of subjects nowadays: it depends. Is blogging dead for you folks as well? Have you moved all of your conversations to social networking sites? When was the last time you created a blog post? Well, since it depends I will let you know what I think … No! Blogging is not dead! It wasn’t in 2007 and it won’t be in 2011, nor in 2015! At least, for yours truly. I still see lots of value on corporate blogging, whether internal or external, and I am happy to see I am not the only one either. Blogging is here to stay, whether some people like it or not. Get used to it. Move on…

And that’s a good thing! Where else would you be sharing lengthier ideas or thoughts that have been crossing your mind and that you would want to revisit again at some point in time? Where else are you going to host your own hard worked and earned content, ready to be shared across openly? What’s your own domain? How are you going to build a sustainable, stronger over time, endurable, reliable and effective personal brand? How are you going to keep up with your living, organic CV? Where else are you going to go when sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. etc. disappear into thin air? Because, you know, they eventually will disappear. How are you going to keep up with your informal learning activities, as well as that powerful Personal Knowledge Management tool you have built up, with lots of hard work and energy, over the course of the years? Where else are you going to host conversations of stuff that matters to you and your community where you would want to own it and facilitate it with your various social networks? Of course, in your personal business / corporate blog! Where else? Just think about it. Where else could you possibly go trying to answer all of those questions?

Yes, blogging still has got a place within today’s social networking tools landscape. Back in the day, May 2005, Hugh MacLeod put together a blog post under the suggestive heading of “the porous membrane: why corporate blogging works“; six years later, it’s still just as accurate as it was back then! If not more! Go and have a read of his explanation of why corporate blogging still has got a place today, in 2011. It will be worth your time, if you haven’t read it in the past. And if you have, go and read it, too! It will be a good refresher for those seasoned bloggers as well and a good reminder of why it’s worth while keeping up with your blogging activities.

Now, if you would need some research that you are on the right track with your blogging activities and you would want to convince others that they should still perhaps pay attention to blogs and get theirs going, you may want to have a look into a recent article I bumped into over at Forbes Blogs by Susan Adams under the title “Personal Blogging at Work Increases Productivity“, where she writes a beautiful blog entry where she quotes some recent research done by an associate professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, Anindya Ghose, and two colleagues from Carnegie Mellon, Param Vir Singh and Yan Huang, who claims that corporate blogging can certainly help increase knowledge workers’ productivity, specially, if it is facilitated to boost the generation of social capital to instigate the creation of trust, bonding and the building of stronger personal business relationships. Something that most of us, folks who have been blogging for a while already, would probably be capable of confirming in a split second, if you ask me, don’t you think?

Still, it’s a worth while reading article put together by Susan that would certainly help folks understand why if you don’t have a blog you may as well start pondering whether you should have one or not. Maybe you should. I guess, unless you try (Another brilliant piece by Euan Semple, by the way!), you would never know! Maybe it’s also a good time for you to bring back to life your own blog; yes, that one that’s been abandoned for a good number of weeks, perhaps months! Yes, that one that you keep thinking of coming back soon enough to resume the conversations. You know it is there, you know you need it, you know it’s time to put together some deeper thoughts out there for everyone to comment on, yet, it doesn’t happen. In most cases, because you may feel you have lost your blogging mojo over the course of time, or perhaps because you may not know what you will be talking about this time around. Well, how about if we can help you come back to blogging? Would you consider it? … Think about it for a minute … Ready? Let’s go!

I know there are lots and lots of wonderful resources out there that I could surely recommend you that would be worth while your time, like the superb Copyblogger from Brian Clark with amazingly inspiring articles like “The 7 Deadly Sins of Blogging” (Another worth while read for those folks out there who are keen on getting back into their blogging mood), or like the inexhaustible and always resourceful Chris Brogan (With some brilliant stuff as of late, like Blog Ideas Community Members), or I could point you into the ultimate resource for your daily blogging inspiration with Darren Rowse‘s ProBlogger, but I think you would probably already know about those. So I’m going to recommend something else, slightly different, if I may …

Last week, my IBM colleague and blogging extraordinaire, Sacha Chua was invited by the wonderful Paul Gillin to host a Tweet Chat event, as part of a series of live tweeting events that infoBOOM has been hosting for a few weeks already. This time around, of course, around the topic of blogging itself. Now, I do wish Twitter would have played nicely and allowed us to keep a history of the tweets shared across, but alas, you know Twitter, that didn’t happen; there isn’t a single trace of that conversation inside Twitter any longer. It is “gone”! See? Another reason to have a blog, if you would ask me! In fact, that’s what we have! Take a look into the delightful blog post that Sacha put together under the title “Questions and answers from #infoboomSC tweetchat on blogging“.

In that blog entry you will see an almost identical timeline of the original Tweet Chat event that Sacha hosted over the course of one hour. In that article you would see how Sacha covers all of the various different questions that people had around blogging and how she has shared extensive notes with plenty of hints and tips on how to get both personal and corporate blogging for yourself. Covering hot topics like finding time, finding inspiring topics to talk about, blogging techniques, lessons learned, finding ideas worth while sharing across, blogging tools, your blogging voice, blogging as a learning and knowledge sharing tool, etc. etc. Phew! A lot to cover in a single hour! Surely worth while reading though through it all the way; even if you are a seasoned blogger, I can tell you that you would learn a trick or two that you were not aware of from before on how to improve your own personal / business blogging.

And, finally, like I have recently blogged about over at “Making Business Sense of Social Media and Social Networking – Twitter For Business“, I would want to share with you folks one last very helpful resource that will surely inspire you quite a lot on rather revamp your dormant blog once again, or give you the final push to start your own from scratch. Yes, indeed, as part of that series of FREE education sessions that my good friend, and colleague, Chad Laws, has been organising along with Paul Gillin himself under the same theme I have just mentioned above, this week we had, yet again, another brilliant enablement session; this time around, of course, on the topic of “Starting and Maintaining a Blog“.

Over the course of nearly one hour, Paul shared with us plenty of his own experiences on what makes great blogging, whether internal or external; at the same time he has put together such a comprehensive list of hints and tips on pro-blogging that it would not be fair to name them all in this blog post, just like that, as I am sure I will be missing the odd one here and there. That’s why I encourage you all to have a look and download the slides for “Starting and Maintaining a Blog” and go through them yourself. I can certainly confirm each and every slide would be worth your time. Specially, if you are also looking for a good amount of blogging examples that Paul included as well in that slide deck.

But, if you can actually spare about one hour, I can suggest something else as well. Go and download the replay of this education session, that includes both audio and video, and get ready to be blown away by the huge amount of information and great insights on effective and efficient blogging that Paul shared over the course of that one hour. I tell you, whether you are new to blogging and not sure where to start, or whether you are a seasoned blogger (Like I guess I can consider myself after approaching, fast and furious, my 8th bloggiversary later on this year…), there will be something new out there in that recording and set of slides that you will be learning. I can guarantee you that! I got tons of new ideas to fine tune both my blogging style and voice and I surely plan to pick things up  and introduce a number of them over here, so that you can get to see them live and find out how they could work out for you, too.

For now though I am going to leave things as is and perhaps just encourage you all to go ahead and download the replay of the enablement session we had yesterday with Paul himself and, then, after watching it, I am sure you would be able to answer this question rather quick and very accurately: Is Blogging Dead?

… My answer: Not any time soon! Thus let’s all keep blogging!

Social Business Begins by Unleashing Your Business Talent

Over the last couple of days, two rather interesting, and noteworthy, articles over at Technology Review, written rather nicely by Erica Naone, have been making the rounds out there on Social Web around Enterprise 2.0 and the successful transformation of becoming a social business altogether and I thought I would spend a few minutes talking about them today, since both of them would serve me quite nicely to embark on a lovely trip down the memory lane by pointing you folks to “Experimenting on Themselves” and a glance into the not so distant future by referencing “Social Tools for Business“. One common theme around both of them: unleash, at long last!, the huge amount of hidden talent of your workforce by empowering them to make best use of social software tools!

That’s right! In “Experimenting on Themselves” Erica comes to describe one of my all time favourite programs inside IBM, which, in my opinion, has been much responsible for IBM’s breath-taking adoption of social software, technology and rampant innovation, over the course of the last 15 years! For those folks who may not have heard about it, I am referring to IBM’s Technology Adoption Program, a.k.a. TAP, that surely has served the good purpose of providing a test ground for innovators and early adopters to push the limits on their development and adoption efforts of new emerging technologies.

Going as far back as 1996 with the first iteration of BluePages (Check out this snapshot from 2000/2001 to get an idea of what it was like), or 1997 when VP Buddy first came about (The first corporate Instant Messaging client I relied on to get my job done!), to then move into Fringe in 2001 (Profiles), just as IBM Community Tools (a.k.a. ICT, and as part of the larger IBM WebAhead unit) came about as well, to be followed by the first instance of BlogCentral (Blogs – Back in November 2003), Dogear (Social Bookmarking - 2005 / 2006) and later Cattail (Personal File Sharing – 2007) one cannot be but truly inspired at the rampant innovation that has taken place inside IBM thanks to TAP. I am 100% certain that without this program itself IBM would not have even dreamed of getting exposed to social software tools so soon like we did, to the point where most of those loose components, or services, that today make up for the bundle known as Lotus Connections would not have probably even existed in the first place!

I am sure by now you may be wondering what was the main key success factor that influenced such a powerful experience with all of those innovations over the course of time tapping into multiple areas of common interest for those really smart innovators and passionate early adopters, right? Well, I can probably summarise it nicely as well with a single sentence that Erica mentions in one of her articles:: “[IBM's ability to let go and empower /] facilitate employees’ software experiments“, but perhaps this would be a bit more obvious seeing it with one of those experiments that my good friend, and fellow colleague, John Rooney described quite nicely under ”Experimenting on Themselves“:

“Rooney says, many companies struggle with finding an efficient way for employees to share files. When people use e-mail for this purpose, it’s often hard to tell which version of a file is the most recent, and duplicate files are stored all over the place. For years, IBM’s IT office had a file-sharing service in place, but hardly anyone used it. An employee reconceived the service, adding better social features. The new version caught on throughout the company and eventually led to a product that IBM offers to its customers“

That is a very inspiring, and dead on!, explanation of how Cattail came into existence a few years back, and how it then inspired the launch of the product service known as Lotus Connections Files shortly afterwards. That’s just what happens when you, as a business, allow your employees, your knowledge workers, to explore further ideas they have collaborated on with their peers and see where that experiment may take them; instead of hoarding their knowledge, instead of feeling trapped inside their own silos, instead of being burdened with endless paperwork and bureaucracy, instead of drowning their passion, their voice, their willingness to make a difference, businesses need to understand it’s about a good time now to unleash and free up those human batteries that my good friend Lee Bryant coined a little while ago and which I think is very descriptive of the new challenge that companies will face during the course of the next few years: how are you going to free up that talent to empower them to keep up with that accelerating innovation, specially, as you introduce the concept of co-creation with your customers and business partners?

Are you ready to engage? You may be thinking that this will surely be an exception, right? After all, IBM is an IT company, don’t you think? Well, 10 years ago that may well have been the case, but fast forward to 2011 and that’s no longer the case. It’s no longer an exception, but more a norm. A norm that will start becoming contagious from business to business, from customer to customer and so forth. Take a look into 3M. Better, have a look into this superb blog post that John Woodworth put together a while ago under the heading “Social Media Drives Creativity Inside The Enterprise” where he talks about how his work colleagues, spread around 17 different teams!, put together a rather inspiring and mind-blowing video clip to “surprise” their fellow 3M colleagues; and all of that without making much use of traditional communication tools, like email, but rather relying on social software tools instead.

You can watch the video over here or, alternatively, you could have a look into this Slideshare presentation that he put together just recently to deliver at IBM’s Lotusphere 2011 (#ls11) conference event in Orlando, FL, and which surely was one of my Top Highlights for Lotusphere 2011. Here is the embedded slide deck, so you would have an opportunity to play it right away; I can assure you it’s worth while going through every slide:

Another good example as well worth while mentioning is the one that Erica talks about under “Social Tools for Business“, where she covers some extensive commentary, from fellow IBM colleague Suzanne Livingston, on how Lotus Connections came about around 2007 “shaped by the company’s own experiences“. Read further on though on after that and on to that other example I just mentioned above, which in this case is BASF SE, The Chemical Company.

Have a look into the following excerpt quoting Cordelia Krooss, which I think reflects, very nicely, this whole concept of unleashing your hidden talent at the workplace to achieve a specific (business) goal (Another link to Slideshare referencing the presentation that CheeChin Liew and Keno Torfs did at Lotusphere 2011 as well, which would also count as one of my favourites from the entire event altogether!):

“[...] the company wanted to support the informal networks that arise within an organization, help employees share knowledge, and make it easier for the younger generation, which is comfortable with consumer social software, to fit in. “A lot of our work happens online via e-mail, which is not the ideal collaboration tool,” she says. That’s because using e-mail reinforces people’s tendency to communicate only with those they already know; it doesn’t facilitate getting feedback from unexpected sources, even if they might be helpful“

Rather inspiring, don’t you think? Specially, the aspect of facilitating serendipity. This is exactly why 10 years ago I would have admitted I was a rather lucky knowledge worker for being exposed to all of this “greatness” and amazing innovations provoked by piloting social software tools at an IT firm like IBM; but fast forward to today I think we are witnessing that unique opportunity where more and more businesses are coming to terms with the fact they didn’t know they had such an amazing hidden talent out there, awaiting to be unleashed, and yet they are now more than ready to engage and empower their knowledge workers to make a difference by facilitating things further on their eagerness to reach out, connect and collaborate with their peers on something magical, while making the most out of social software tools to make it happen.

Now who couldn’t resist embarking on such a liberating experience, as a business? Would you? I bet you wouldn’t! Neither would I, to be honest! There is just so much to gain, such a unique opportunity. We probably even cannot afford neglecting it nor ignoring it altogether. It’s already happening, so we may as well embrace it altogether! Free your knowledge workforce to do what they know best. Trust them, respect them, engage them, show them how they, too, can excel doing what they have been passionate about over the course of the years, but under the covers. Let them go free … and be ready to take innovation and co-creation into the next level! It’s just too late now to come back. It’s already there.