Connected Knowledge

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Lew Platt once famously quipped “If only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times more efficient.”  This is the perennial problem of the hidden expert. Most of the real “know-how” in an organization floats around in the form of tacit knowledge. That is, information that is not formally captured or recorded.   Usually, when you encounter some problem in your business or need a piece of information that you can’t quite lay our hands on, you will have a nagging suspicion that somebody somewhere in the organization has already solved the problem or already has the answer.  More often than not you’re right, but because it is not documented in a knowledge-base somewhere (or more likely it is but you can’t find the article) you end up reinventing the wheel. This is not only frustrating, its costly.  IDC once estimated that this “knowledge work deficit” costs Fortune 500 companies over $12 billion annually.

In the fifteen or so years since Platt made his observation, the challenge of keeping track of what your staff knows and what they are really capable of has become considerably more complex.  Organizations are more geographically dispersed than ever before and the trend is toward more virtual offices and transient teams.  This is generally a good thing in terms of productivity and employee satisfaction but it can make expertise management extremely difficult. 

Attempts to  translate the knowledge and expertise of highly skilled people into some external form, say a knowledge-base article or tip-sheet, generally fail. This was in fact the primary cause of the downfall of most KM vendors throughout the late 90s. Not only is it nearly impossible to boil down years of experience into an easily digestible form, there are significant disincentives for the individual possessing the knowledge to do so.   The obstacle usually cited is the time and effort required,  but the real reason is that we still haven’t gotten past the scarcity view of knowledge and information.  The expert has something of value (knowledge) that others do not and if that resource is turned into a commodity that can be accessed and used independent of the expert (ie putting it into an anonymous knowledge-base or some such) they have diminished the value of that resource (its now available to everyone) as well as their own value (the expert no longer needs to be consulted).  For many reasons, this is a false argument and attitudes are starting to change as web 2.0 technologies and attitudes become more common.  But many organizations are still caught up in a knowledge hording culture.  There is still a prevailing attitude, reinforced by the current economy, that being the only one that knows how to do something means job security. 

A key to overcoming this unfortunate state of affairs is to focus on the individual as a source of knowledge rather than attempting to externalize, codify and document the knowledge itself. This has the double benefit of keeping the information current and incentivizing the expert to share.  The more people that come to me for information and assistance, the more I’m perceived as a key player in the organization.  Most people also enjoy being considered an expert.  Never underestimate the importance of ego in driving knowledge sharing. 

Staff lead seminars, tutorials, brown bag talks and formal mentoring relationships will go a long way to changing attitudes toward information sharing and will lay the foundation of a collaborative culture.  But before these activities can begin, you need to know what you know (or more accurately what your people know).  You may be able to kick start things based on your own knowledge of people in the organization or by leading a tutorial yourself, but to sustain any program of focused knowledge sharing, you need to undertake a more formal inventory.  My next post will discuss different approaches to conducting an expertise inventory and what to do with the results.  Until then.

I am very fond of Venn Diagrams.  These simple, overlapping circles  succinctly capture the heart of collaboration.  When disparate but complimentary domains are brought together, something wonderful can emerge from the overlap that would not otherwise exist.  Finding the sweet spot were the right elements are brought together in the right balance is the true art of fostering collaboration.   Of course, an organization must have a culture that values, supports and rewards collaboration before this can happen. Yet even with such a culture in place, opportunities are often missed.  This happens when people who would otherwise benefit from working together cannot answer three simple questions. Who knows what? Who knows whom? What language do they speak?

The larger an organization gets, the more difficult it becomes to answer these questions.  An HR system may have resumes and CVs on file, but those documents are usually out of date and were likely tailored to fit a job posting rather than to reflect actual skills and interests.  If the knowledge you need lies outside of your department, or worse outside of your company altogether, connecting with the right person is difficult even if you can identify them.  Finally, if the planets align and the right people with the right expertise do manage to connect, will they be able to share information?  Will all parties use the same terminology to refer to the same thing?  Will their databases and web services be able to share information in a meaningful way?  Unless and until each of these areas is addressed, an organization will never reach its full collaboration and innovation potential.

These questions are nothing new and  have in fact been at the heart of knowledge management efforts for decades.  Attempts to answer them have yielded mixed results, usually because they are focused on a single area, technology or technique.   The phone directory might get  revised. The biography section of the company website may get a facelift. A new knowledgebase might be created.  These efforts, while admirable, are Band-Aids that do not move an organization forward in any substantive way. Even more ambitious KM initiatives generally end-up becoming siloed projects that fail to address the need for a comprehensive approach to building and sustaining collaboration.  A multipronged, integrated approach is required. Three key disciplines, when used in concert, can provide the framework and mechanisms to realize the full potential of the collaborative enterprise.

• Expertise Discovery
• Social and Organizational Network Analysis
• Semantic Information

Over the course of the next few blog posts, I will address each of these areas and how they contribute to the collaborative enterprise. These are each mature disciplines in and of themselves, but only rarely are they brought together to find that elusive “sweet spot” that maximizes collaboration and innovation.  There are a few examples, such as NASA’s POPS (People, Organizations, Projects, Skills) is probably the best example to date of bringing these techniques together, but others are emerging.  I’ll look at several over the next couple of weeks.

NASA’s People, Organizations, Projects, Skills

Communication, collaboration and transparency are often trumpeted as core values of the “progressive enterprise”. The rise of the corporate intranet and the increasing sophistication of many workplace-web environments is a good indication that we may be making progress toward actually realizing these values. Many executives seem to finally understand that enabling their staff to find and share information is key to an efficient and productive workplace. Over the past few years, budget and staffing levels have increased an average of 27% in organizations with vibrant intranets.  According to the Neilson Norman Group, the average size of a dedicated intranet team for a mid-sized organization with a highly functional intranet is now 14 people.  The companies making these investments have realized enormous ROI both in terms of productivity and employee satisfaction.

Unfortunately, the economic upheavals of the past two years have derailed much of this progress. I recently conducted a survey of the employees of a large organization that defunded support for their intranet as a result of the economic crisis.  This was an illuminating snapshot of corporate priorities and its consequences.  While the organization felt it could not justify expenditures on its internal web, it increased funding of its outward facing web. As a result, they have made dramatic progress on improving the usability of the web for their customers while their workplace-web has degenerated to the point of being unusable.

Out of 508 people only 3 said they could find

what they need on the corporate intranet.

Of the 508 people who responded to my survey, three said they could always find what they needed on the company intranet.  That’s not 3%. That is three people.  26% of respondents said that they have given up on looking for information on their intranet or only use it as a last resort.  An additional 20% said they rarely or never find what they need.  When a user is able to find relevant information among the 88,000 pages of content, it generally proved to be out-of-date, conflicting with other information on the intranet or just flat out wrong.  One of the main causes of this is the difficulty users have in publishing information.  27% of respondents claimed that their departments are unable to add or edit content on the intranet.  This proved to be more than just an annoyance.  Because this organization had placed its emphasis on its outward facing web, including deploying a new content management system that simplified publishing, sensitive information that belonged behind the firewall ended up being posted for all the world to see. 

This trend is likely to be self-reinforcing.  As with so many other companies, this organization was forced to make dramatic reductions in its workforce.  Among the first to go were its experienced webmasters.  This may have seemed to be a reasonable action since with the new content management system, advanced web skills were no longer required to maintain the company’s many websites.  Unfortunately, the intranet does not run on the new content management system.  As a result of the layoffs, there is no one left who knows how to publish internal content.  It seems inevitable that the intranet will continue to deteriorate.

Annual cost of time spent performing common tasks

in a company with 10,000 intranet users:

So what is the moral of this?  Is there an actual cost to poor intranet findability and functionality?  According to usability guru Jakob Nielsen there is.  And its big.  In a study of 27 Intranets, Nielson found that employees of a company with a poorly designed and supported intranet spend about 43 hours a year performing 18 common intranet tasks.  Assuming a labor cost of $30/hr this translates to $12.9 Million per year for a company with 10,000 intranet users.  That cost drops to $9.9 Million for a company with average usability and again to $7.5 Million for companies with a “good” intranet.  This amounts to a significant savings.  As Nielson puts it:

Thus, a company with poor intranet usability would save $3 million per year if it improved its intranet usability to an average level. And a company with average intranet usability would save $2.4 million per year if it improved its intranet to the usability level found in the best 25%.

Nielson goes on to point out that these numbers only estimate the productivity gains from the common intranet tasks they tested. In addition, “most companies have their own special, mission-critical intranet tasks that by definition can’t be tested across organizations, but which usually have much more impact on overall employee performance than do the common intranet tasks.” It would follow then, that most organizations would actually realize a larger return on their investment than demonstrated by the most common tasks.

The past couple of years have been difficult for most organizations and knee-jerk cost saving actions are understandable, but short-sighted.  While engaging customers and clients is essential to any organization, without supporting the information needs of staff, no one will be able to respond to the needs of those customers and clients.  Such fuzzy savings as productivity gains rarely win out over line-items cost reductions such as reducing headcount.  But when headcount has already been reduced, enabling the survivors to do their jobs more effectively through access to information is the only reasonable response.  Without adequate support of internal knowledge sharing environments, such as a well crafted and supported intranet, “communication, collaboration and transparency” are likely to slip into the waste bin of empty slogans.

The Fourth International Conference on Advances in Semantic Processing

SEMAPRO 2010

October 25 – 30, 2010 – Florence, Italy

Since its inauguration in 2007, SEMAPRO has emerged as the leading forum for discussion of semantic technology research. I’m thrilled that OHSU is a technical co-sponsor of this year’s conference and that I have the opportunity to help shape the program.  SEMAPRO 2010 is co-located with NexTech 2010 and will be held Florence, Italy October 25-30.  The call for papers is now available and final submissions are due May 20, 2010.  The conference has a broad scope and potential topics include, but certainly are not limited to:

• Basics on semantics
• Ontology fundamentals for semantic processing
• Semantic technologies 
• Semantic Deep Web
• Semantic reasoning
• Semantic content searching
• Hypertext and hypermedia semantic
• Semantic voice-video-speech (VVS) searching
• Semantic multimedia
• Semantic social media
• Semantic networking
• Domain-oriented semantic applications
• Economics and governance of semantics technologies
• Semantic applications/platforms/tools

These topics can be discussed in terms of concepts, state of the art, research, standards, implementations, running experiments, applications, and industrial case studies. Authors are invited to submit complete unpublished papers, which are not under review in any other conference or journal.  All tracks are open to both research and industry contributions. Please do not hesitate to contact me or any of the other program chairs if you have any questions.

SEMAPRO 2010 Call for Papers

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Book Review: 
Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business

David Siegel
Portfolio Hardcover, 2010
ISBN-10: 1591842778, ISBM-13: 978-1591842774

As one of those people still bitter that personal jet-packs have yet to materialize, I am always a bit skeptical of breathless depictions of the future.  David Siegel’s new book, Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business definitely falls into this category, but in this case his predictions are likely to come true.  In fact, as he repeatedly asserts, many of them already have.  Ironically, much of my cynicism about rosy-eyed predictions of the World of Tomorrow is rooted in the promise of the Semantic Web as first articulated by Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila in a 2001 article in Scientific American.  In that article Lee and his W3C compatriots painted the future of the web as “an environment where software agents roaming from page to page can readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users.”  This vision has never really materialized, but to a large degree  the semantic web has.  It is just emerging in a different form and with a different emphasis.  Rather than focusing on autonomous software-agents just shy of becoming self-aware, the semantic web is all about linked-data.

Linked Data is about using the Web to connect related data that wasn’t previously linked, or using the Web to lower the barriers to linking data currently linked using other methods. More specifically, Wikipedia defines Linked Data as "a term used to describe a recommended best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge on the Semantic Web using URIs and RDF."

–linkeddata.org

This is the manifestation of the Semantic Web Siegel is so excited about.   He takes a broad definition of the Semantic Web focusing mainly on the importance of shared metadata (ontologies aren’t discussed in any depth until chapter 12) and illustrates with business applications, both current and potential. Each chapter enthuses about the possibilities inherent in ubiquitous, structured and meaningfully tagged information.  His prose is often a bit too evangelical for my taste. You often come across sentences like, “As you learn about new game changing technologies, keep looking for the management mind shift you’ll need to go bravely into the world of pull.” And his scenarios often have a gee-whiz flavor similar to the agent-oriented predictions of Berners-Lee’s decade old vision.

In the semantic future, information lives online, waiting to be pulled through your device-mesh.  If you’re watching a movie at home and have to go to the airport, you’ll log into the display in the waiting lounge or on the airplane, and the movie will automatically continue where you left off. Your music or favorite news station will start playing as soon as you get into your rental car, you’ve logged into your personal data locker and now the rental car (including mirror and seat adjustments) is tuned to your personal ontology.  In fact, all your preferences will live online, and your preferences will replace many of the products you own today.

The notion of a “personal data locker” is a good example of how Siegel’s exuberance is actually pretty well grounded.  Though he doesn’t discuss it explicitly, Personal Health Records such as Microsoft’s HealthVault and Google Health are already in place with much of the functionality Siegel predicts.  (see my post from last year on Personal Health Records) In some cases, Siegel gets things wrong, as with his discussion of the Health Insurance Privacy and Accountability Act (HIPAA) but overall he does an excellent job of presenting the current state and direction of these technologies.  Just as important, he connects them to concrete business problems without jargon that may intimidate (or bore) non-technical readers. 

Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business is what I usually classify as an airplane read; a nice business-related title that can be read easily on a flight from Portland to New York.  It is written at the level of a Discovery Channel documentary and is quite engaging.  Imagine someone at a cocktail party, (after maybe one glass of wine more than is strictly prudent)  explaining to an intelligent but not technologically savvy guest what the semantic web is and why it matters.  This book is not going to give you the depth of information available in other titles such as Allemang and Hendler’s excellent Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist, but it is not intended to.  The vast majority of business readers do not need, nor want, to know the nitty-gritty details of OWL, RDFS and SPARQL.  They do need to know how semantic technologies as a whole are shaping the web and business in an information intensive world.  In that context, Siegel’s book succeeds admirably.