Mobile Technology - Impact

Mobile phones are going to lead to large-scale destruction. That's what's in store. Someone is going to invent an App to predict the exact date very soon. It'll be a free download. People will brag about it too.

Maybe we should all be happy for the world, as it now has an obvious opportunity to renew itself. 2012 is done.

Sample this. These days, people go around taking pictures of those in distress/jaws of death rather than putting their phones away to save them. Advertisements proudly declare that we must stop interacting with people as they may not respect us and we must instead shift our focus to mobile phones as they, however, are sure to respect us.Advertisements also unequivocally suggest that we must not think twice about taking selfies and posting them as it may inspire people in our lives.

As if it was not enough for businesses to be obsessed with numerical evidence to prove their worth, we now have toddlers, teenagers and oldies hanging on to the number of likes to measure their self-worth.

Tidbits

There is surely a STRONG link between childhood memories & happiness as an adult. Re-experiencing things that once gave you comfort perhaps reconnects the nodes in your brain to bring you deja vu Happiness.

(Think of that nice song you heard plenty of times as a kid. The walk you had with Grandma in your village. The movie you watched with cousins and laughed your head off. I am sure this is the case even with the not-so-nice memories. Childhood experiences are so so critical.)

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We must invent a body sensor+audio device that'll boom out a context-sensitive quote or two when one begins to get angry. :-)

Imagine: You are about to scream at someone because they are slow on the uptake and this device immediately says in a deep and strong voice "Be kind to everyone - Dalai Lama" or something to that effect.

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What fills the huge gap between education and attitude or behavior? The gap that we rarely fill......! Inspiration, introspection, insight AND extreme effort! Sigh. E.x.t.r.e.m.e E.f.f.o.r.t indeed.

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Life sometimes delivers gifts that seem wonderful until you spot the hidden price tag that it has forgotten to remove......and your attention shifts elsewhere. ;-) 

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Simplicity is not how easy it is for the TECHIES to IMPLEMENT the solution! It is how easy it is for the USER to understand and USE the solution! A TV may have a million circuits embedded inside it, but at the end of the day, the knobs outside must be just enough and easy to operate. 

Mobile-Mania

(C) Bill Watterson - Calvin and Hobbes

This...is exactly why it is dangerous to rely on mobile phones for building nascent relationships. The imagined accountability of the person being called tends to infinity. Even amongst well-established relationships, if the people involved are unreasonable, highly demanding, psychologically challenged (unable to understand others' priorities, pressures, preferences etc) or paranoid, it leads to more misunderstandings than it leads to the strengthening of bonds. Not to forget, the icing on the cake of confusion are network issues, incorrect service provider messages, the mysterious reachability question, audio break-downs, over-reliance on the tone of the voice and no visibility of expressions and gestures. Ha ha ha. Did someone say we are better connected after the mass adoption of mobile phones? Tsk. Tsk. :-)

Experts and Wikipedia

It is hard to resist the urge to share something that is one or more of the following. Isn't it? 

• Inspiring
• Thought-provoking
• Humorous
• Positive/optimistic/hopeful 
• Paradoxical 

In other words, one feels extremely compelled to share things that fall into one or more of these categories.  It is harder to resist the urge if you love to write and enjoy, like the Master would say, spreading sweetness and light.

I was reading a thought-provoking article on Wikipedia and how it has changed the way we perceive knowledge creation and generation, wherein Marshall McLuhan is quoted as saying that technology can alter cognition (and to think we've been fond of saying 'Technology is only the enabler, folks').

Here are some extracts that I liked.

".....The place where an idea could be owned by a single person. One of McLuhan's genius insights was his understanding of how the shift from an oral culture to one based on print gave rise to our modern notion of the individual as the originaator and owner of particular ideas."

McLuhan foresaw. "If the printing press empowered the individual, the digital world empowers collaboration."

McLuhan's chief insights centered around the idea that technology strongly affects not only the content of culture, but the mind that creates and consumes that culture. He maintained that technology alters cognition itself, all the way down to its deepest, most elemental processes.

"It is not only our material environment that is transformed by our machinery. We take our technology into the deepest recesses of our souls. Our view of reality, our structures of meaning, our sense of identity—all are touched and transformed by the technologies which we have allowed to mediate between ourselves and our world. We create machines in our own image and they, in turn, recreate us in theirs"

In a traditional encyclopedia, experts write articles that are permanently encased in authoritative editions. The writing and editing goes on behind the scenes, effectively hiding the process that produces the published article. [...] Jaron focuses on the "finished piece," ie. the latest version of a Wikipedia article. In fact what is most illuminative is the back-and-forth that occurs between a topic's many author/editors. I think there is a lot to be learned by studying the points of dissent. [...]

Technology for Society

Ashoka: Innovators for the Public are hosting Tech 4 Society, a conference exploring technology, invention and social change, in Hyderabad, India, in February 2010. Find out more about the conference here. This blog post is an entry in their competition to find the official blogger to travel to and cover the event.

This is a rare post because it is on a subject, regarding which I have negligible exposure, experience and expertise. But there, nevertheless, are other strong forces that make me want to write. Interest, intrigue, inclination and introspection. I’m embarking on this post with the intention of being a part of Ashoka-Lemelson Technology for Society Event. But it is also true that I may have anyway written on this topic sooner or later. In fact, I hope this happens to be the first step towards a series of enlightened posts on this topic. So, what is the topic?

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The intersection of Social Change, Invention and Technology! Doesn’t that show signs of an interesting merry-go-round? If Social Change + Invention + Technology is not equal to a Revolution, I don’t know what a revolution is all about. When I started pondering about this, I picked up a sheet of paper and wrote these terms down in three overlapping circles and stared at them for a while and felt overwhelmed; the intersecting area in the middle of the three circles, I realized, is extremely wide, deep and expansive in reality. I am not sure how effective this effort will be given my unfamiliarity with, and the sheer density of, the topic, but here I go, equipped with nothing more than a few reliable facts and some random introspective thoughts. I hope to make the right connections and hear a few resounding clicks.

One of the more important questions in the context of this topic would perhaps be “Why and how does such a revolution start?” I think the heart of the idea lies in the desperate need for a social change. And, I dare say, it starts with an emotional response to a social challenge rather than a commercial ambition. Another dimension would be the technical wherewithal at the disposal of the source of this emotion. The third important aspect would be the energy put into, and the methods leveraged on for, building awareness (a word that scores over marketing in this context) and increasing the reach (of services). Someone with a passion for making a positive difference to the society and a flair for technology or even just technological possibilities is undoubtedly the hero/heroine we are looking for. One look at the NGOs around the world, entities like Ashoka and socially conscious individuals would give us a lot of reasons to be happy about. The focus on Social Entrepreneurship in top-notch B-Schools is also an important turning point. More often than not, the idea flashes at the intersection of technology and a need of the society. Someone who spots and empathizes with (or experiences) a social challenge and draws a connection between it and a technological concept might discover where the two meet. It could be a flash or a consequence of repeated introspection or discussions (with relevant people).

In Business Week’s recent list of most intriguing start-ups (wherein technology plays a critical role), I noticed that most of the ideas could be roughly classified based on what inspires them – Entertainment (games, music etc) Environment (alternative energy sources etc), and, arguably, Empathy (health, education). In my view, social entrepreneurship is associated with the last. It would be wonderful to see such start-ups cover more areas related to education, agriculture, health, infrastructure, governance, and poverty alleviation in the case of developing countries.

Most revolutionary ideas for social change piggyback on mobile technology, techno-scientific instruments and the Internet. I think the impact lies in the radical changes that technology brings to the way we communicate, create and run communities and provide - virtual - services. Technology is just the enabler, but it drastically changes the scale, speed and cost at which we do things. It signifies doing more with less. Arguably, the quality of governance goes up as well. In order to fully leverage on these aspects for social change, the IT ministry and the government need to play a role. We need to have the ideas converted into project plans, advised by knowledgeable and passionate communities. Teams should be given the freedom for implementation but held accountable. Projects should be piloted and then scaled up after observing the initial impact and benefits.

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As I wrote this post, I recalled that I’d voted for “Help social entrepreneurs drive change” in the Google 10^100 Project many weeks ago. This, I might claim, is my only, however absurd, claim to fame in this context. But I seriously hope to walk the talk and contribute in other ways.

I’d like to dedicate this post to Zephyr who is a brilliant embodiment of the above said topic. Zephyr is the author of Freedom’s Way (a highly inspiring book) and is currently leveraging on technology to help individuals and organizations find their true potential via tools such as Meta-Analysis and Vision Driver. As he so beautifully puts it on his blog, he focuses on "Marrying World Wisdoms, Profound Thinking, and the Latest Insights in Science to the Unique Opportunities of Modern Living". Also, it is a great time to dedicate such a post to Zephyr as it was, coincidentally, his birthday yesterday! :-)

ReTALE

I watched an interesting program on the Retail industry – specifically on innovations in Supermarkets – on the History Channel last week and found it to be fascinating. I think I missed the first part of the program and only managed to see the last 15-20 minutes of it but even that was so very exciting to watch.

There was talk about how supermarket owners once noticed customers struggling with their baskets when picking up items from the shelves after which someone invented the supermarket trolleys (the inspiration was a folding chair whose seat was replaced with a steel carrier). What surprised me was that it apparently took no less than 10 years for the trolley to then evolve into some of the versions we see today! Latter versions of the trolley had flexible backs in order to allow for another trolley to be rolled into it when being piled up. Then, they thought of double carriers, child carriers, trolley locks etc. With recent technological developments, some supermarkets are experimenting with electronic devices that fit into the trolleys and help customers a) locate the shelves that the products they want to buy are on b) scan their products on the fly and calculate their total purchase as they pick up their items thus saving a lot of time at the cash counter c) scan and even compare the stuff that they pick up with standard products etc

It is predicted that with the advancement of RFID technology, all the customer will have to do is walk out of the shop through a panel that automatically scans all the products in the bag and the customer’s credit card and deducts the amount owed by her! Wow! Imagine that!

One more aspect of supermarkets that the program covered was the design of the layout and the placement of products based on buyer psychology. (I’d earlier read about this in my marketing books.) Extremely intriguing stuff! Fresh fruits are placed right in front so they add to the colour of the place, the perishables that people are bound to purchase often are right at the back of the shop as that means people will have to walk through the aisles and may end up buying more than what they planned for (I don’t like such manipulation though), in-supermarket bakeries are encouraged as they lend aroma to the place and make people linger on while munching cakes and cookies etc.

Methinks every damn (routine) thing on earth can be made more exciting than it seems to be at first, provided we believe in and genuinely focus on improving the customer-experience and get the creative juices flowing! :-) Inspires me to ponder over improving some of the routine stuff I am involved in….

Note: Just realized that I'd made a whole bunch of mistakes in this post. Why was I in such a hurry to post it? Anyway, I've corrected all of them now. (Detects instead of deducts, later instead of latter....pshaw!)

KM in 2 Minutes...

Here's a simple and light product that includes most of the stuff that organizations might be interested in from the knowledge management and collaboration perspective. Noodle.

- Intranet pages and announcements
- Ability to create new pages and portlets
- User profiles and an associated social networking dimension (What are you working on, expertise etc)
- Blogs
- Wikis
- Calendar
- Discussion forums
- Folders and files
- Notifications

Gaps - RSS? Security? Roles? Content management based on taxonomy?

I am not so much of an expert when it comes to software evaluation and comparison. Looking at too many products that are designed with a similar purpose in mind sometimes makes me wonder whether it all, eventually, boils down to user experience (which in turn depends on so many factors), the price and politics more than anything else. The product road map is rarely clear to the makers of the product themselves. Of course, that's why marketing strategies and the style of selling make a world of difference.

Anyway, here's what I think. This one's a cool product for the smaller organizations!

Digital Grapevine

Here comes micro-Blogging within the enterprise.

PS: And I'd said....

The Power of PPTs

Thinking about Power Point Presentations this morning. I know of people who love it more than you could possibly imagine and others who abhor them so much that they might even walk off from discussions in which people make use of them.

I, personally, have enjoyed occasions when I was able to get creative with PPTs. (Excuse me.....if you belong to the second school of thought). For me, it was the closest I could possibly come to making an official movie of sorts, however crude it happened to be. The joy of using creative and powerful themes, colours, images, charts, messages, metaphors, one-liners, take-aways etc was always there for me. I honestly think PPTs can be very interesting provided you let your creative juices flow.

And I am happy to see a clear trend in that direction. While people used to stick to plain text and bullet points earlier on....now, they have begun to mostly experiment with backgrounds, themes, images, short and meaningful phrases, humorous one-liners and the like. But here's what it implies to me from the perspective of KM. While the old way of making PPTs served the purpose of asynchronous knowlege sharing to a reasonable extent (with notes, links and comments), the current style of PPTs, arguably, are best shared face to face. This does not mean that they cannot be shared offline. All it means is that it will not suffice to let readers run through just the slides....you need to capture the audio bites - the voice over - as well. Coming down to brass tacks, it simply means that we need truly enormous and efficient storage and retrieval infrastructure (and mechanisms).

The Battle between Products and Processes

Ever since I read the book Business Process Re-engineering and many other interesting articles on business processes, way back in college, I've been a strong believer in the concept of tweaking products to meet business process needs rather than tweaking processes to meet the product design and requirements. I've passionately argued against deploying products without a thought for existing organizational processes and sometimes even flicked a few specks of dust from my sleeves during these arguments ;-). So far so good, Nimmy. But a recent experience makes me re-look at my beliefs.

It's not been hard for me to understand that if you're talking about a really 'good' product (brilliant because of the minds behind it or something that has had time on its side and has evolved into a very mature version), then the organization deploying it must definitely consider studying and comparing the ways of the product with its own. If the organization has been a laggard in the innovation and improvement of its processes, it truly doesn't make sense to stick to them and say that the product must be turned upside down to meet the former's requirements.

Without rambling on aimlessly, here's what I think organizations could do to avoid this "business process ego" trap! If the fear is that of being brainwashed by the product features, why plunge into it without appropriate preparation? A few days of unbiased brainstorming, introspection and analysis of the existing set of processes and what they lack in, before considering products for deployment may do the trick! Post this exercise, When you actually look at the product and its features, you are ready to accept and admit its brilliance (if any) and are prepared to stoutly refuse to accept some of its features as not apt for the organization and the way it works.

Web 3.0

An excellent article that indicates what the future may be like - discovered by MT. Thanks for passing it on, MT! It quite answers my so-far unasked and latent question (er...maybe I did think aloud about this on Twitter?) on what things may be like a few years down the line. The article points to what the future of the Internet (and Intranets) is going to be like......how we are likely to discover information and knowledge as we ride the Internet and Web 2.0 wave. Doesn't come out of the blue...we all have heard before about intelligent searches and sophisticated collaboration mechanisms....but nothing like an article that pins it down to a few names and descriptions.

PS: I find the usage of the signal-to-noise metaphor - for describing the state of affairs on the WWW - to be appealing :-)

See This!

Discovered this via Jack. Nothing earth shattering or mind boggling....but nice. Especially if one is a visually oriented person! This is what I got on keying in some of my interests.

Google Sites

I wondered.....many a time......
And, well, I just heard about this....the Google KM ball has begun to roll..........wonder what else it will gather around it as it moves along....and wonder how fast it is going to roll....and wonder what it will destroy on the way....and...so forth...

PS: I'd said "one year from now" in March last year and check out the timing of the Google Sites release....no....no...please....don't fall at my feet.

KM - People, Process or Tech?

I have been quite silent in the online KM forums – that I am a so-called part of - for sometime now, due to reasons I don’t have to waste your time going into. This is probably the beginning of a phase where I may get active again or maybe not…depending on how much time I want to spend thinking and listening versus talking.

Anyways, I found some time to answer this question on Linked In.

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I think the answers that we have here are all thought-provoking and nice ones to consider. Based on my experiences so far, I'd have definitely chosen People....but I love the answers that point towards Processes too. Having said that, let me add that I've seen most people slip through the cracks in processes somehow or the other. It's difficult to design a perfect process. And people will always find a way out if they don't like or believe in what they're being asked to do. Anyway, here's how I look at the three –

http://nirmala-km.blogspot.com/2007/05/body-mind-soul.html

Let me just add one more dimension to this discussion. I think you ought to decide what to focus on after studying the context - the business environment in your organization, the focus areas for your KM plan and so forth. For example, if you're in a conventional organization that isn't too tech savvy, then you need to focus on technology in order to make people feel more comfortable with your KM tools...

MOSS 2007 - Mostakes!

MOSS' take on potential Mostakes while implementing MOSS... :)
Worth paying attention...

To BEA or not to BEA? ;)

For those of you who haven't yet discovered the new suite of KM-Collaboration-Enterprise 2.0 products from
BEA, here is some dough and some links. I spent some time and went through the overview of the three products positioned in this category and found them to be interesting if not exhaustive. These three products belong to BEA's AcquaLogic basket and are called Pages, Ensemble and Pathways respectively.

Pages is perhaps the equivalent of MS Sharepoint TeamSites...but to be fair to BEA, Pages seems to be better in terms of its user-friendliness and some other additional options. pages has ready-to-use blog and wiki features. Ensemble is somewhat like a portal for the developer community and goes beyond the basics in allowing for quick mashups as well.

Pathways is a typical combination of web 2.0 features like tags, tag clouds, bookmarking and search. BEA claims that the Search is excellent but - of course - only user experience can help validate that. Additionally, BEA talks about a particular style of calculating the Search Rank as a new concept/approach that they've introduced. BEA allows free trials....so it must be possible to experience these products and compare them with other products.

Will they beat the others - MS/IBM/EMC - to it? Will Google come out with a nice suite of products (positioned under the KM umbrella) that replicates the corresponding Internet versions? Will there ever be an almost perfect KM-Collaboration product in the KM landscape? What about components for Social Networking, Idea Generation, Brainstorming etc? I don't have any answers as of now....but here are the links...

Pages Ensemble Pathways

Update: Here's a good article that compares BEA's offerings with IBM Lotus and a couple of other similar products from startups.

New KM Tools...

CIO mentions three tools that could go into an organization's KM tools kitty. As expected, the focus on web 2.0 tools and the search for something more intuitive in the world of KM - in the recent past - has led to the entrepreneurial KM crowd developing tools based on social network analysis, blogging and web-based work-spaces & intelligent tagging (the following three....in the order mentioned).

Tacit Software’s Illumio: Web-based information broker matches end user information requests with users in the company who might know the answer. Standard search tools (Google’s or Microsoft’s) help make it work with a minimum of fuss for end users.

iUpload’s Customer Conversation System: Blogging platform helps enterprise customers bring knowledge to light via grassroots participation. Includes enterprise security, workflow and regulatory compliance tools.

Koral: Web-based document collaboration and sharing tool also categorizes documents automatically. Notifies users of updates and new documents published by authors or topics to which they’ve "subscribed."

Note: This was published last year. I've been clearing some of my old feeds and 'am randomly barging into blogs for all sorts of KM posts...so sorry if I end up posting stuff I should have ideally posted many months ago! :-

Want to be/Have you been hit with a Blunt Instrument?

Just glanced through the latest HBR-South Asia magazine (Dec 2007) and saw something thought-provoking - but not so pleasing - on KM. A survey amongst business executives about Management Tools has yielded some expected (and some surprising) results. HBR has explored the perception of various Management tools in terms of usage and satisfaction. The scale moves from Rudimentary Tools to Speciality Tools (X axis) to denote Low to High Satisfaction and Rudimentary Tools to Blunt Instruments (Y axis) to denote Low to High Usage. Power Tools fall on the RHS Top Corner (High Usage and Satisfaction).

Guess where KM falls? (Yes, KM has thankfully been categorized as a Management Tool. One war won, eh?!) No, not under Rudimentary Tools....at least not any longer. It is perceived to be a Blunt Instrument and a classic one at that - one that is used widely but doesn't score too much on satisfaction. In HBR's square, it lies a bit to the left of the middle of the square and closer to the top of it. (I'd suggest you see the magazine if my write-up hasn't helped you visualize where the 'KM point' lies ;)) The article points out that KM technology is too complex for it to provide satisfying results. What's a bit annoying for me is that Collaborative Innovation and Corporate Blogs are plotted as separate tools and not apparently considered to be part of KM. But both these are plotted as Rudimentary Tools (Low Usage and Satisfaction!) and fall behind "KM" as HBR sees it.

The Power Tools include Strategic Planning, Customer Segmentation, CRM etc. Speciality Tools include M&A.

The intriguing part is - Why is KM high on Usage despite being low on Satisfaction? Apart from being good/bad news for KM evangelists (depending on the way you look at it and what you predict for the future), maybe this proves that KM is seen as logically essential and therefore something to be implemented irrespective of whether the outcome is tangible and/or visible.

What do you think?

PS: This issue of HBR has something on Storytelling as well...will have to read it some time!

Knowledge Management Tools/Applications

Hari said...

Hello Nimmy,

I am currently concerned with the 'technology' face of KM. I am working on the conceptualization of the parts that will make up the pieces of this technology puzzle. What systems do you think make up a good KM solution?

My view

a. A decent content management system

b. A decent document management system

c. A good eLearning system.

d. An integrated search amongst all of the other systems.

e. A portal application to incorporate all of the above as one integrated system and give a 'seamless' interface to the end user.

f. Probably a basic employee directory / corporate yellow pages sort of application.

Anything else you can add /remove?

Hari

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Hari,

For a person who has been working on KM for more than 8 years, answering this question ought to be an easy and simple matter. So, forgive me for the seemingly unreasonable delay. It’s been hectic because I’ve just dived into a phase of major transition. It will continue to be this way for one more month. I am hoping that I find the time to post a few things, however silly, on my blog to keep it alive. I ought to thank you for giving me an option to post something good (read on KM) and give my readers the feeling there is at least an ounce of sanity in me (I guess my posts on most of the other topics leave no room for confusion about my original/real state of mind). OK. Now, let me get straight to the answer.

Excellent list you have here. Nothing to be removed in my perception. But here are some things that could be added to your list to make it more exhaustive. Before you run through the list, let me also tell you that I don’t believe the approach should be to stuff a KM system with all the applications and tools that could possibly be added. The approach should be to build only those applications that are required to meet the immediate business objectives and challenges to start with. This not only makes the whole thing easier to handle but also gives one the room to customize the applications that are built later so as to be integrated into the existing ones. The point to be noted is that the integration requirements of the various applications will, more often than not, be unclear in the beginning. With that caveat, here’s the rest of the stuff in my list of KM tools/applications…

- Blogs for individuals, SMEs, senior managers
- Wikis for project teams, communities
- Workspaces and meeting spaces for teams
- Tips and Tricks database; and FAQs based on the tips and tricks
- Knowledge maps to depict the ladder of knowledge based on domains/functions/technology
- Concept maps or mind maps for knowledge generation
- Reusable components repository
- Best practices and lessons learned repository
- Instant messaging for knowledge exchange
- White boards for collective thinking
- Idea management system

Further, I’d suggest that you categorize this into different themes based on the business environment you are in. Makes it easy for you to focus on something in particular – march towards a specific business benefit.

Hope this helps. And yes, if not for the genuine reasons that prevented me from blogging, I ought to be ashamed of the delay in responding to your query. :)

Groovey

Check out this presentation on Groove. I’ve been a fan of Groove ever since the time it was available as a beta download – I guess this was some time in 2001/2. Can’t wait to experience it live, as part of a truly collaborative team, in conjunction with MOSS.