S-Y-N-C-ing Content Supply to Knowledge Demand

I like to place the fact base right up front:

Like most info-mavens I live part-time in the practical world and the other half in my theoretical head. The mental benefit of getting paid for what comes naturally is that I get to put my theories to the test every day.

Five days a week (give or take an at-home office email marathon) I labor in the circles of a system that tests some assumptions I hold about people find, store, and most importantly act on the lessons they draw from the information in there. This learning is not the 9-5 reality of some firewalled online university. It's not garden variety intranets for dummy corporations.

It's not even the harbor of last refuge for sleep-deprived, travel-logged thought leaders and efficiency experts. For them it's about their piecing together where they need to be to cinch a deal, eliminate a problem, maybe buy an argument, dispel a doubt, or even rationalize away the reasons for taking no action.

I'm guessing that at least half their education is about confirming what they already know or apprising them of what others experience. Either way at its roots the most expansive online search expedition is really about reduction. Best case it's about making problems disappear. Worst case it's unpacking those issues into manageable chunks. Either way it's setting an expectation to follow (and perhaps lead by).

For them it's not about a system or a document or a tag or a search option. It's not about the pissing contest that ensues whenever an esprit of egos clash on what to call something. If there is any awareness of my system that's a negative:

"I can't get on KM."
"I can't find XX document from YY project."

Any obstacle between the system user and their reason for learning is at the to-do list of any knowledge planner. Now it's not just the problem our users are addressing. The problem becomes the system itself. This is by far the less welcome of the two problems. It was not invited. There's a reason that "crashing" applies to system failures and uninvited guests.

We've invited the reason for using the system. Now where to seat the system error? To my mind and experience the best way to eliminate this obstacle is to stop treating the system as an "it" and more as a process. It is not a destination but a journey. Learning is not a noun. It is a verb.

The way we've tried to achieve this is presented in the following reference model that I call Search Yield Network Contribute (S-Y-N-C). This addresses information as a process by which we can anticipate the supply and demand patterns reflected in the system's provision and usage. Any planner worth their supply chain, trading, or econometric mettle can tease the numbers from the cyclical interplays of these better-known systems we dance with every day as investors, producers, and consumers. SYNC appropriates that thinking to the interdependencies of intranet travel where the rule of all roads lead to the same dead-end:

Supply = Content Surplus
Demand = Knowledge Deficit

How do we close that gap? Some overlooked SharePoint feature? Gift cards? New, improved nomenclature? Triple nada.

Nothing gums up the works more than a dump yard of bloated ZIP folders. Nothing focuses an intranet faster than how people spend their information surplus once they can process how past outputs connect to their next steps.

Information by itself hangs itself. What folks do with it is intrinsically fascinating. That's both the motivation and method behind S-Y-N-C.

Treating information as a verb and not a noun clarifies what our users are looking for (the "S" or Search cycle of S-Y-N-C) and what they intend to do with it (the "Y" or yield in defining the usage patterns or outcomes fueled by those search results. On the supply side again it's action predicates, not subject nouns that inform the build efforts of knowledge planners. We've reduced the description of our corpus from thousands of unwinnable arguments about what our content is into three potential use cases:

* Learn
* Sell
* Do

Nothing clarifies a taxonomy like appending an a verb to a thing. This is foundational not only to the network architecture ("N" in S-Y-N-C) but to where and how your information suppliers contribute their IP (locking up the "C" in S-Y-N-C). Here the factor of storage location is key to honoring a second success factor of the reference model -- that users on the demand side should focus on usefulness to the exclusion of all supply side distractions -- particularly storage location. This notion of location neutrality can only work on the demand side if our information suppliers honor the location sensitivities of our governance structure. Location -- it should mean everything to suppliers and absolutely nothing to users.

Here's what I mean: say I need the latest, greatest outputs about some long-established frameworks that were recently retooled to meet the exacting and unique requirements of a new and potentially lucrative client? If the IP is in its place I can filter the supply by my demand criteria -- what other clients have we done this for, who did the work and when, and how was it presented in the context of those projects?

If supply is in S-Y-N-C with demand then I Joe User should not have to enter a single keyword or mind-reading mantra about what my intentions are with the work in question.

More on the clarifying power of verbs in a future post.

S-Y-N-C-ing Content Supply to Knowledge Demand

I like to place the fact base right up front:

Like most info-mavens I live part-time in the practical world and the other half in my theoretical head. The mental benefit of getting paid for what comes naturally is that I get to put my theories to the test every day.

Five days a week (give or take an at-home office email marathon) I labor in the circles of a system that tests some assumptions I hold about people find, store, and most importantly act on the lessons they draw from the information in there. This learning is not the 9-5 reality of some firewalled online university. It's not garden variety intranets for dummy corporations.

It's not even the harbor of last refuge for sleep-deprived, travel-logged thought leaders and efficiency experts. For them it's about their piecing together where they need to be to cinch a deal, eliminate a problem, maybe buy an argument, dispel a doubt, or even rationalize away the reasons for taking no action.

I'm guessing that at least half their education is about confirming what they already know or apprising them of what others experience. Either way at its roots the most expansive online search expedition is really about reduction. Best case it's about making problems disappear. Worst case it's unpacking those issues into manageable chunks. Either way it's setting an expectation to follow (and perhaps lead by).

For them it's not about a system or a document or a tag or a search option. It's not about the pissing contest that ensues whenever an esprit of egos clash on what to call something. If there is any awareness of my system that's a negative:

"I can't get on KM."
"I can't find XX document from YY project."

Any obstacle between the system user and their reason for learning is at the to-do list of any knowledge planner. Now it's not just the problem our users are addressing. The problem becomes the system itself. This is by far the less welcome of the two problems. It was not invited. There's a reason that "crashing" applies to system failures and uninvited guests.

We've invited the reason for using the system. Now where to seat the system error? To my mind and experience the best way to eliminate this obstacle is to stop treating the system as an "it" and more as a process. It is not a destination but a journey. Learning is not a noun. It is a verb.

The way we've tried to achieve this is presented in the following reference model that I call Search Yield Network Contribute (S-Y-N-C). This addresses information as a process by which we can anticipate the supply and demand patterns reflected in the system's provision and usage. Any planner worth their supply chain, trading, or econometric mettle can tease the numbers from the cyclical interplays of these better-known systems we dance with every day as investors, producers, and consumers. SYNC appropriates that thinking to the interdependencies of intranet travel where the rule of all roads lead to the same dead-end:

Supply = Content Surplus
Demand = Knowledge Deficit

How do we close that gap? Some overlooked SharePoint feature? Gift cards? New, improved nomenclature? Triple nada.

Nothing gums up the works more than a dump yard of bloated ZIP folders. Nothing focuses an intranet faster than how people spend their information surplus once they can process how past outputs connect to their next steps.

Information by itself hangs itself. What folks do with it is intrinsically fascinating. That's both the motivation and method behind S-Y-N-C.

Treating information as a verb and not a noun clarifies what our users are looking for (the "S" or Search cycle of S-Y-N-C) and what they intend to do with it (the "Y" or yield in defining the usage patterns or outcomes fueled by those search results. On the supply side again it's action predicates, not subject nouns that inform the build efforts of knowledge planners. We've reduced the description of our corpus from thousands of unwinnable arguments about what our content is into three potential use cases:

* Learn
* Sell
* Do

Nothing clarifies a taxonomy like appending an a verb to a thing. This is foundational not only to the network architecture ("N" in S-Y-N-C) but to where and how your information suppliers contribute their IP (locking up the "C" in S-Y-N-C). Here the factor of storage location is key to honoring a second success factor of the reference model -- that users on the demand side should focus on usefulness to the exclusion of all supply side distractions -- particularly storage location. This notion of location neutrality can only work on the demand side if our information suppliers honor the location sensitivities of our governance structure. Location -- it should mean everything to suppliers and absolutely nothing to users.

Here's what I mean: say I need the latest, greatest outputs about some long-established frameworks that were recently retooled to meet the exacting and unique requirements of a new and potentially lucrative client? If the IP is in its place I can filter the supply by my demand criteria -- what other clients have we done this for, who did the work and when, and how was it presented in the context of those projects?

If supply is in S-Y-N-C with demand then I Joe User should not have to enter a single keyword or mind-reading mantra about what my intentions are with the work in question.

More on the clarifying power of verbs in a future post.

A Dispatch About (among other things) the Documentarian Ken Burns Starring a Panel of Baseball Fan Historians (as blogged by me)

Last Friday a panel including Mr. Burns, Doris Goodwin Kearns and the one Hall-of-famer, Peter Gammons gathered at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government for a discussion on baseball as a narrative tradition. The field boxes and bleachers were both packed to the rafters and the caliber of Q&A from the gallery was top-notch -- hence the memorable comments and conjectures here:

Probably the sharpest focus emerging from a concentrated list of topics came to rest on the relationship between self-absorption and self-delusion. The larger-than-life epic biographies were playing out in over sized cinematic narcissism or as Gammons described as the Story of Alex Rodriguez, starring A-rod, as portrayed by Sir Alex himself. Gammons said that the kind of "frailty" he associated with the role once reserved for Cal Ripkin. But once he witnessed the hyperventalations and the breaking sweats emerge from his steroids confessional with A-Rod, he sought the authentic and credible council of former manager Joe. That combination of self-worship and self-delusion summed up two people Torre had come to know in his career: A-rod and Roger Clemens. The case of Clemens made all the more plausible by Roger's genuine declaration he had broken no laws. That level of deception insured that the ensuing "performance" was the media's -- not his.

Yes it turns out that Clemens' ego is more commanding than even his fastball. Not that he can't snap Piazza's bat like a match stick. But was that the actor or the drama or the 'roids playing to the gallery? Doris delivered a media critique by her former boss LBJ as another showcase of the delusional hall of mirrors around larger-than-life figures. When she called the President on spinning yarns at the expense of accuracy he saw the greater evil in the curse of verbatim evidence: "Those reporters only want to know the pattern of the wallpaper -- not how good the lovemaking was in the room (where this history) happened."

No mention of self-absorption is entirely documented without my own footnoted lapses. They were reinforced by Ken Burns' year marker of 1985 as the last time he had set foot in the Kennedy School of Government to preview his film on the life of Huey Long. That resonated with my recounting to my wife the night before that I respected Burns professionally to the same degree that I personally distaste him leading from a weekend visit to his home in Walpole, NH that same year. I remember the expectant thrill of sharing our common love of an alma mater (Hampshire College), the documentary tradition, and American history -- footnote: my final project at Hampshire was a documentary on the 1939, 1964, and as-yet still conceivable 1989 New York Worlds Fairs. Instead the weekend was about the reason we had received the invitation in the first place.

That would be my first wife Liz Dubelman who shared the additional honor of actually winning professional recognition (a student Emmy) for her own final Hampshire Div. III (senior thesis) before moving onto the crew of 9 1/2 Weeks in the spring of '84. I don't remember much about the visit except that Ken split his own firewood and that he advised Liz (my fiance at the time) to drop me as a hindrance to her fuller potential. Other than love and admiration, I had nothing else to bring to the narrative he'd written for Liz. In retrospect he was probably right. Either way, Liz had the best post-nuptial eulogy: "Not bad for a starter marriage."

The bruised egos of little people elites also crash-landed across Ms. Kearns Goodwin who made almost as many mentions of her hometown (Rockville Centre) as her home team Dodgers. It was those two footnotes that had prompted by lifelong chum's dad to seek out her endorsement for his autobiography -- a tall life tale that included moonlighting as the only weekly review tabloid ever to cover the Mets and Yankees. What made Playball all the more legion in the pantheon of New York sports media is that the labor (and investment) was all love. And the investor labored by day in the rival Newsday sports department. There were few if any other contributors to Paul Ballot's enterprise except a prolific, snot-nosed pre-teen Yankee diehard from Jersey named Keith Olbermann who became the paper's de facto proofreader from his vigilant place in the letters to the editor column. Anyway Doris Kearns Goodwin had never heard of Paul Ballot and Paul never heard back from Doris.

So, leaving the ego crumbles to the clay pigeons...

The most delicious scoring by my count was Gammons' description of the new CitiField as a "modern Ebbets Field for pitchers." It was prompted by a question about whether the New York Mets (or "Metropolitans" as Ken presented in his fact base) deserved the legacy-bearing mantle for carrying the most historic moment in baseball history 59 years ago today when Jackie Robinson debuted with the Dodgers. Gammons mentioned the Fred Wilpon connection to Sandy Koufax but I don't buy it. Sandy might have been Bar Mitzvahed in his 1955 Topps card but he was lionized out in LA -- not Flatbush. Ex-Dodger diehard Doris mentioned the Mets as the anti-Yankees. But then she went on to say that Met fans hate the Yankees and not the reverse (not true by my count)!

Perhaps the best bridge from the Dodgers to Mets is not the BQE New Calvary Road underpass but Gil Hodges and his no drama stewardship of the '69 miracle. The torch carrier motif was compounded by his own holy week death 37 years ago at the age of 47 -- Holy smokes, Gil.

Ken said that the most frequent criticism he got for his Nine Innings documentary was the omissions of specific players -- not what actually ended up in the final cut. There was a particular fixation with Harmon Killebrew. Who knew? And the final cut now has two extra innings slated for a run next fall on PBS. Could Rod Carew winning a batting title with 0 home runs in 1972 be far behind?

Gammons provided the statistical gem of the session in defense of MLB's reluctance to embrace the salary cap. He posited 20 different teams that had won the World Series in the past 30 years -- compared to less than half in the NFL, 15 in the NBA and a mere 11 in the NHL. He also spent a good deal of microphone time lobbying on behalf of current baseball owners who he believes conveys a baseball ethos that transcends steroids, bond issues for new ballparks and free agency. I'm referring to an otherwise downplayed gesture by Tigers owner Mike Ilitch to underwrite billboards at Comerica Park not only for the "GM fountain" which they cannot afford but to introduce the corporate emblems of Ford and Chrysler: "This would simply never happen in the NFL or NBA."

Another baseball distinction noted by Burns was the uneven media treatment of steroids, ranging from yesterday's buried transactions (NFL) to page one scandal (MLB). It struck me as pollyannish to compare fielding next generation questions about why +700 home runs and +300 career victories would fail to qualify those record-holders for Hall status. What about +4000 hits? That's not even about performance enhancement! Hopefully the historians of 2020 will see Bonds, Clemens, Rose, Sosa, Palmero, McGwire, etal. as matinee anomalies. After all gravity defying web-gems are a routine staple of Baseball Tonight. And any one of them surpasses the legendary grandeur of Mays robbing Wertz or Agee fleecing Blair and Hendricks.

Just the same the venomous addictions of professional athletes don't rank on the same scale of innocense debunkery and true reality series revelations as the stork, Santa or the Peterson Kekick wife swap for that matter. Another regrettable aspect of the modern game that didn't yield the level of consternation or perspective I was hoping for was not the financialization of baseball but the individualization of the game. True, Gammons made a passing and disparaging reference to rotisserie leagues but am I really the only ancient nostalgia buff in befuddlement and misery when they can't find a single pre-season rag on the newsstand that handicaps teams ahead of player and pitcher position ratings?

Finally, someone asked the panel for their favorite fictious baseball depictions. Bull Durham was mentioned as emphatically as Field of Dreams was ignored. Maybe the reverse would have held if the host had been a conservative bastion? Doris put in a plug for Don Delillo's pulse on the game's rhythms. How about that? A non-baseball historian putting in a plug for a non-baseball writer's baseball writings?

A Dispatch About (among other things) the Documentarian Ken Burns Starring a Panel of Baseball Fan Historians (as blogged by me)

Last Friday a panel including Mr. Burns, Doris Goodwin Kearns and the one Hall-of-famer, Peter Gammons gathered at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government for a discussion on baseball as a narrative tradition. The field boxes and bleachers were both packed to the rafters and the caliber of Q&A from the gallery was top-notch -- hence the memorable comments and conjectures here:

Probably the sharpest focus emerging from a concentrated list of topics came to rest on the relationship between self-absorption and self-delusion. The larger-than-life epic biographies were playing out in over sized cinematic narcissism or as Gammons described as the Story of Alex Rodriguez, starring A-rod, as portrayed by Sir Alex himself. Gammons said that the kind of "frailty" he associated with the role once reserved for Cal Ripkin. But once he witnessed the hyperventalations and the breaking sweats emerge from his steroids confessional with A-Rod, he sought the authentic and credible council of former manager Joe. That combination of self-worship and self-delusion summed up two people Torre had come to know in his career: A-rod and Roger Clemens. The case of Clemens made all the more plausible by Roger's genuine declaration he had broken no laws. That level of deception insured that the ensuing "performance" was the media's -- not his.

Yes it turns out that Clemens' ego is more commanding than even his fastball. Not that he can't snap Piazza's bat like a match stick. But was that the actor or the drama or the 'roids playing to the gallery? Doris delivered a media critique by her former boss LBJ as another showcase of the delusional hall of mirrors around larger-than-life figures. When she called the President on spinning yarns at the expense of accuracy he saw the greater evil in the curse of verbatim evidence: "Those reporters only want to know the pattern of the wallpaper -- not how good the lovemaking was in the room (where this history) happened."

No mention of self-absorption is entirely documented without my own footnoted lapses. They were reinforced by Ken Burns' year marker of 1985 as the last time he had set foot in the Kennedy School of Government to preview his film on the life of Huey Long. That resonated with my recounting to my wife the night before that I respected Burns professionally to the same degree that I personally distaste him leading from a weekend visit to his home in Walpole, NH that same year. I remember the expectant thrill of sharing our common love of an alma mater (Hampshire College), the documentary tradition, and American history -- footnote: my final project at Hampshire was a documentary on the 1939, 1964, and as-yet still conceivable 1989 New York Worlds Fairs. Instead the weekend was about the reason we had received the invitation in the first place.

That would be my first wife Liz Dubelman who shared the additional honor of actually winning professional recognition (a student Emmy) for her own final Hampshire Div. III (senior thesis) before moving onto the crew of 9 1/2 Weeks in the spring of '84. I don't remember much about the visit except that Ken split his own firewood and that he advised Liz (my fiance at the time) to drop me as a hindrance to her fuller potential. Other than love and admiration, I had nothing else to bring to the narrative he'd written for Liz. In retrospect he was probably right. Either way, Liz had the best post-nuptial eulogy: "Not bad for a starter marriage."

The bruised egos of little people elites also crash-landed across Ms. Kearns Goodwin who made almost as many mentions of her hometown (Rockville Centre) as her home team Dodgers. It was those two footnotes that had prompted by lifelong chum's dad to seek out her endorsement for his autobiography -- a tall life tale that included moonlighting as the only weekly review tabloid ever to cover the Mets and Yankees. What made Playball all the more legion in the pantheon of New York sports media is that the labor (and investment) was all love. And the investor labored by day in the rival Newsday sports department. There were few if any other contributors to Paul Ballot's enterprise except a prolific, snot-nosed pre-teen Yankee diehard from Jersey named Keith Olbermann who became the paper's de facto proofreader from his vigilant place in the letters to the editor column. Anyway Doris Kearns Goodwin had never heard of Paul Ballot and Paul never heard back from Doris.

So, leaving the ego crumbles to the clay pigeons...

The most delicious scoring by my count was Gammons' description of the new CitiField as a "modern Ebbets Field for pitchers." It was prompted by a question about whether the New York Mets (or "Metropolitans" as Ken presented in his fact base) deserved the legacy-bearing mantle for carrying the most historic moment in baseball history 59 years ago today when Jackie Robinson debuted with the Dodgers. Gammons mentioned the Fred Wilpon connection to Sandy Koufax but I don't buy it. Sandy might have been Bar Mitzvahed in his 1955 Topps card but he was lionized out in LA -- not Flatbush. Ex-Dodger diehard Doris mentioned the Mets as the anti-Yankees. But then she went on to say that Met fans hate the Yankees and not the reverse (not true by my count)!

Perhaps the best bridge from the Dodgers to Mets is not the BQE New Calvary Road underpass but Gil Hodges and his no drama stewardship of the '69 miracle. The torch carrier motif was compounded by his own holy week death 37 years ago at the age of 47 -- Holy smokes, Gil.

Ken said that the most frequent criticism he got for his Nine Innings documentary was the omissions of specific players -- not what actually ended up in the final cut. There was a particular fixation with Harmon Killebrew. Who knew? And the final cut now has two extra innings slated for a run next fall on PBS. Could Rod Carew winning a batting title with 0 home runs in 1972 be far behind?

Gammons provided the statistical gem of the session in defense of MLB's reluctance to embrace the salary cap. He posited 20 different teams that had won the World Series in the past 30 years -- compared to less than half in the NFL, 15 in the NBA and a mere 11 in the NHL. He also spent a good deal of microphone time lobbying on behalf of current baseball owners who he believes conveys a baseball ethos that transcends steroids, bond issues for new ballparks and free agency. I'm referring to an otherwise downplayed gesture by Tigers owner Mike Ilitch to underwrite billboards at Comerica Park not only for the "GM fountain" which they cannot afford but to introduce the corporate emblems of Ford and Chrysler: "This would simply never happen in the NFL or NBA."

Another baseball distinction noted by Burns was the uneven media treatment of steroids, ranging from yesterday's buried transactions (NFL) to page one scandal (MLB). It struck me as pollyannish to compare fielding next generation questions about why +700 home runs and +300 career victories would fail to qualify those record-holders for Hall status. What about +4000 hits? That's not even about performance enhancement! Hopefully the historians of 2020 will see Bonds, Clemens, Rose, Sosa, Palmero, McGwire, etal. as matinee anomalies. After all gravity defying web-gems are a routine staple of Baseball Tonight. And any one of them surpasses the legendary grandeur of Mays robbing Wertz or Agee fleecing Blair and Hendricks.

Just the same the venomous addictions of professional athletes don't rank on the same scale of innocense debunkery and true reality series revelations as the stork, Santa or the Peterson Kekick wife swap for that matter. Another regrettable aspect of the modern game that didn't yield the level of consternation or perspective I was hoping for was not the financialization of baseball but the individualization of the game. True, Gammons made a passing and disparaging reference to rotisserie leagues but am I really the only ancient nostalgia buff in befuddlement and misery when they can't find a single pre-season rag on the newsstand that handicaps teams ahead of player and pitcher position ratings?

Finally, someone asked the panel for their favorite fictious baseball depictions. Bull Durham was mentioned as emphatically as Field of Dreams was ignored. Maybe the reverse would have held if the host had been a conservative bastion? Doris put in a plug for Don Delillo's pulse on the game's rhythms. How about that? A non-baseball historian putting in a plug for a non-baseball writer's baseball writings?

Boston KM Forum: Virtual Teams

At yesterday's Boston KM Forum on virtual teams NetAge CEO Jessica Lipnack had a snappy comeback for the built-in bias of the newest wrinkle in what has KM done for me lately: Can we measure ROI on virtual teams? Her response? "Do we ROI face-to-face?" Her point besides the implicit one that this is a fundamentally off-balance, curveball question is that face-to-face is romanticized and that many of us have purely virtual, deep and caring relationships.

She and her husband Jeff Stamps also related an ongoing consulting engagement with the U.S. Army through Fort Leavenworth with their Battle Command Knowledge System teams (BCKS). She mentioned the audacious leap forward in the learning curve to support today's tight deployment schedules. The biggest visible leap? Lieutenant General Bill Caldwell's notion (now carrying the day) that all commanders need to blog in order to graduate from the program.

WBUR's New Production Media manager Ken George told us about Wordpress is content management system for Onpoint -- a major bump up in quality and dial down on production costs. They've been using Twitter to trigger tweet-ups at the station: "Anonymity is not your friend" is the lesson drawn from adding authenticity to engaged listeners of the station. Ken's convinced that fostering community is the key to preventing BUR from becoming disintermediated or marginalized like other traditional media. What I'm not convinced is that BUR is all that forthcoming or genuine about sharing the aggregate responses they get from the community -- let alone responding to a popular will or common interest defined by these outreach efforts. Case in point: we learned here that last week's pledge drive was actually met.

We also learned that the social media team would love to "ditch" the legacy BU database for "something that works in 2009." It's a complex issue involving multiple departments and the twittering profiles just may force it to happen in a manageable time frame (my conclusion, not Ken's).

Kate Pugh asked an excellent question about forum facilitation and whether it might be possible to introduce the skill-sets of the NPR talk hosts, perhaps in a social media milieu or even a more formal channel. Ken didn't think those skills overlapped much due to vast differences in the message volume. I get this from the operational side. But from a community-building perspective I couldn't disagree more. Would I double my donation so I could hear Tom Ashbrook ruminate about facilitation. Absolutely!

IBM Product Manager Suzanne Minassian (tekmoda.com) shared that she's a graduate of the Bentley Usability MBA Program . Suzanne guided us through the evolution of bleeding edge social media inside the firewall -- that's a seven term oxymoron in most organizations but certainly not IBM. Increased skills was the biggest internal payback in the justification for investing in social software. To Jessica's earlier ROI point again the question here is more revelatory than the finding itself.

Reduced travel, voicemail traffic and time savings per week based on self-guided problem-solving were all factored into the internal business case for social media. One inside tele-rep claimed that her client prospects increased significantly by embedding activity templates modeled after her own process flows in her intranet profile. From a usability perspective Suzanne evangelized about the "happy hour" ambiance delivered through an effort called Beehive, a more photo-based and feedback-driven version of the original template profiles developed 4-5 years back.

KMA's SharePoint Usability Consultant Sadie Van Buren talked about personal use of social networking tools and the slippery in-betweens of consuming and producing social media. Sadie referenced the Forrester framework for levels of engagement between active and passive users. She uses screen shots as illustrations in her documenting SharePoint issues that she reproduces and solves. Gratitude compels Sadie to post her own use cases.

"Build your network of other people like yourself who can help you" was the conclusion drawn from a story Sadie told. She demonstrated the real and lasting value found in assisting a fellow usability expert named Sue Hanley whose reputation preceded her but whose postscript includes looking to Sadie for guidance in solving some business issue that soon ensued after their first virtual meeting. We did devolve into one SharePoint digression where Sadie revealed her secret recipe for convincing risk-averse enterprises to adopt internal wikis. The secret is to introduce wiki-shy clients to "a multiple set of easy-to-edit webpages."

Dave Wallace walked us through some of the misfiring and lessons drawn from 'n kaboom rise and dive-bomb ash 'n crash of ZoomInfo. Dave also posted a predictability market postulation for using social tools for handicapping next probable headlines behind virtual team-building.

Finally the most off-agenda development of the day was the emergence of Larry "it's-broken-until-I-fix-it" Chait. Besides his credentials as the former CKO of ADL and co-founder of the Boston KM forum I had no idea that lurking below his what-me-tweet and who-has-time-to-blog skepticism Larry is a one-man geek squad: witness, some workarounds with his latest ASUS laptop that would have never occurred to me. I'm the guy who sends the machine back when the lights don't come on.

Co-founded Lynda Moulton has published a reading list here.

Boston KM Forum: Virtual Teams

At yesterday's Boston KM Forum on virtual teams NetAge CEO Jessica Lipnack had a snappy comeback for the built-in bias of the newest wrinkle in what has KM done for me lately: Can we measure ROI on virtual teams? Her response? "Do we ROI face-to-face?" Her point besides the implicit one that this is a fundamentally off-balance, curveball question is that face-to-face is romanticized and that many of us have purely virtual, deep and caring relationships.

She and her husband Jeff Stamps also related an ongoing consulting engagement with the U.S. Army through Fort Leavenworth with their Battle Command Knowledge System teams (BCKS). She mentioned the audacious leap forward in the learning curve to support today's tight deployment schedules. The biggest visible leap? Lieutenant General Bill Caldwell's notion (now carrying the day) that all commanders need to blog in order to graduate from the program.

WBUR's New Production Media manager Ken George told us about Wordpress is content management system for Onpoint -- a major bump up in quality and dial down on production costs. They've been using Twitter to trigger tweet-ups at the station: "Anonymity is not your friend" is the lesson drawn from adding authenticity to engaged listeners of the station. Ken's convinced that fostering community is the key to preventing BUR from becoming disintermediated or marginalized like other traditional media. What I'm not convinced is that BUR is all that forthcoming or genuine about sharing the aggregate responses they get from the community -- let alone responding to a popular will or common interest defined by these outreach efforts. Case in point: we learned here that last week's pledge drive was actually met.

We also learned that the social media team would love to "ditch" the legacy BU database for "something that works in 2009." It's a complex issue involving multiple departments and the twittering profiles just may force it to happen in a manageable time frame (my conclusion, not Ken's).

Kate Pugh asked an excellent question about forum facilitation and whether it might be possible to introduce the skill-sets of the NPR talk hosts, perhaps in a social media milieu or even a more formal channel. Ken didn't think those skills overlapped much due to vast differences in the message volume. I get this from the operational side. But from a community-building perspective I couldn't disagree more. Would I double my donation so I could hear Tom Ashbrook ruminate about facilitation. Absolutely!

IBM Product Manager Suzanne Minassian (tekmoda.com) shared that she's a graduate of the Bentley Usability MBA Program . Suzanne guided us through the evolution of bleeding edge social media inside the firewall -- that's a seven term oxymoron in most organizations but certainly not IBM. Increased skills was the biggest internal payback in the justification for investing in social software. To Jessica's earlier ROI point again the question here is more revelatory than the finding itself.

Reduced travel, voicemail traffic and time savings per week based on self-guided problem-solving were all factored into the internal business case for social media. One inside tele-rep claimed that her client prospects increased significantly by embedding activity templates modeled after her own process flows in her intranet profile. From a usability perspective Suzanne evangelized about the "happy hour" ambiance delivered through an effort called Beehive, a more photo-based and feedback-driven version of the original template profiles developed 4-5 years back.

KMA's SharePoint Usability Consultant Sadie Van Buren talked about personal use of social networking tools and the slippery in-betweens of consuming and producing social media. Sadie referenced the Forrester framework for levels of engagement between active and passive users. She uses screen shots as illustrations in her documenting SharePoint issues that she reproduces and solves. Gratitude compels Sadie to post her own use cases.

"Build your network of other people like yourself who can help you" was the conclusion drawn from a story Sadie told. She demonstrated the real and lasting value found in assisting a fellow usability expert named Sue Hanley whose reputation preceded her but whose postscript includes looking to Sadie for guidance in solving some business issue that soon ensued after their first virtual meeting. We did devolve into one SharePoint digression where Sadie revealed her secret recipe for convincing risk-averse enterprises to adopt internal wikis. The secret is to introduce wiki-shy clients to "a multiple set of easy-to-edit webpages."

Dave Wallace walked us through some of the misfiring and lessons drawn from 'n kaboom rise and dive-bomb ash 'n crash of ZoomInfo. Dave also posted a predictability market postulation for using social tools for handicapping next probable headlines behind virtual team-building.

Finally the most off-agenda development of the day was the emergence of Larry "it's-broken-until-I-fix-it" Chait. Besides his credentials as the former CKO of ADL and co-founder of the Boston KM forum I had no idea that lurking below his what-me-tweet and who-has-time-to-blog skepticism Larry is a one-man geek squad: witness, some workarounds with his latest ASUS laptop that would have never occurred to me. I'm the guy who sends the machine back when the lights don't come on.

Co-founded Lynda Moulton has published a reading list here.