Thursday, November 22, 2007

KM World, San Jose, 2007

I had the chance to get out to San Jose in October and attend the now very large and impressive KM world held over four days in the San Jose convention center.

While in San Jose I was lucky enough to run into a number of very interesting speakers including David Snowden, Ted Graham and Charles Armstrong.

David Snowden of Cognitive Edge is a leading light in the field of cognitive science. His two keynotes were perhaps the most inspiring and stimulating professional presentations I have seen in years and, delivered in a deadpan take-no-prisoners style, he kept his audience thinking furiously for 90 minutes while he expounded broadly and authoritatively on a vast area of cognitive expertise that covered things as diverse as classification systems, Australian Aboriginals and the London water utilities.

The thread of continuity woven into all of this was the current state of understanding how people learn things.

In terms of KM this is important because on reflection we can probably all agree that KM per se does not actually have a foundation theory of learning upon which it is based and on further reflection, we can see what an obvious deficiency this is for the field.

The ideas presented in these Key Notes went a long way to helping understand this missing component. Primed by the host to be provocative, Professor Snowden most certainly was. I simply could not write fast enough while also trying to listen and understand what was being said.

If you get the chance to hear him then you must not miss it.

Ted Graham is a McKinsey consultant currently but he was in San Jose presenting on work done for his previous employer (a large publishing company) including the development of their Intranet and the lessons learned that came from it.

The thing that struck me most about Ted’s presentation is how the publishing company measured the success of their Intranet: it was success not based on how many times a benefits form was downloaded or how much time was saved by posting Yankees tickets for sale, not even in the value of having a standardized people finder, no, they measured success by how much the site got people talking to each other. Just as simple as that.

This had me thinking because it is a fact that while we schedule our professional interactions with a degree of physical-presence agnosticism, we also recognize that there is no substitute for sitting down with a person in the same room and talking to them face to face.

Promoting this particular type of interaction was the thing this Intranet’s success was measured by. I thought that was a revelatory approach though it took me a while to appreciate it.

Charles Armstrong, founder and CEO of Trampoline Systems in the UK gave a fascinating talk about how to track complex relationships within groups of people and the path that his company is taking to develop tools to do this.

I had coffee with Charles later and his former career as Ethnographer (I had to look that up) had resulted in his needing better tools for the purpose and so Trampoline was born. What seemed like a small opportunity in a niche market had grown substantially as it became clear there were a great many organizations focusing on the same sorts of fundamental questions but within the organizational structures of business.

The main principle at work here seems to be that if we accept the premise that the more people connect and leverage their social networks, the more efficiently they can get their jobs done, and by extension, promote the objectives of their job and thus organization, then we can also see that mapping these connections will provide a valuable insight into how an organization is performing at any time and might provide key insights to when it is not.

This is not such a new concept of course and there is legacy research going back several decades on the topic. What is new is the development of rules-based mapping tools that can create compelling graphical models of these relationships in all their complexity.

Additionally, as a growing amount of interconnectivity is via email, the opportunity now exists to use email traffic measured between individuals, departments and organizations, and loosely classified by subject, as an indicative proxy for how all these entities relate to, and interact with each other.

Email is one of the data sources that Trampoline has been using when working with clients to create the data points for network mapping. We saw a number of examples of how the tools represent data in an easily understood manner and also how the output of these tools can lead to some very interesting inferences about how well an organization is connecting within it's constituent parts.

I expect we will be hearing more about these sorts of tools and how they may become organizational management decision support tools just as data warehouses once spawned a suite of tools catering to management decision support.

The move to mainstream business acceptance will have arrived when these tools show up in Businessweek as 'must haves' for the proactive COO.

This seems to be a great example of how data, and very raw data at that (emails) can be turned into Knowledge by the application of the right perspective, new tools and an increased demand for a measurable way to manage organizational efficiency.

Thursday, November 15, 2007

Email 2.0

We leave a stream of digital evidence behind us all day and every day in both our professional and personal lives. Email is the most ubiquitous source of this and so from an organizational mapping perspective it is a logical choice for harvest when it comes to tools like those developed by Trampoline systems and others for mapping networks.

However, this is a very forensic view of the world and, while really useful in fact-gathering and analysis, misses the extraordinary possibilities that arise when we move some additional smarts into the basic email client for real time analysis.

Here are some thoughts that have occured to me as I process the daily email load, thoughts about how email should work given how much better we have made everything else.

Right click on any email would tell you (in some easy to visualize way) what thread this mail was from; who else was on it; what threads had spawned from it; which spawned threads had ended and which were still active; where in the thread this particular email was and what your current status on this thread was; are you remiss in replying, by one cycle, by two etc etc.

In another view, a click on your inbox would show you every open thread you had, which ones were open longest and were most urgent.

This would have the additional value of being also able to actively alert you (if you so choose) to open threads, possibly auto categorized by priority based on your current projects. This last determined by a simple subject matter analysis algorithm always active on your inbox.

Further to this thought, when the email client had figured out the likely content matter of the message it could possibly discern if there open tasks or questions in the email that pertain to you.

This in turn would allow it to build an Action Items list that would contain things like "Important Invitations I have not responded to", "Questions from key people I have not responded to" and follow up items from yesterday's project meeting needing action today.

It would also allow you to create connections between threads manually so you could create a working messaging tree for a project which would in turn mesh with a social network tree.

How and when this sort of thing will come into being is uncertain but, the subject is a very interesting one as we seek to establish more ways to understand how our virtual connections with others operate.

This would in my view be Email 2.0