May 2013
2 posts
9 tags
The 'E' factor in technology adoption
When you are championing a new enabling technology, you are trying to convince a number of people that this is something they have in fact been waiting for – whether they know it or not. It requires an understanding of what the recipient needs to hear in order to get them interested and then to get them using a new software, application or program (I posted earlier on this in Why we need Heads,...
10 tags
How Blogging (about work) helped me to learn, grow...
There are more than 180 million blogs out there and I still see advice recommending people to set up a blog of their own - it’s good advice. When I set up my blog 12 months ago, I had doubts about if I could keep it up and if anyone would be interested in reading what I had to say, especially given the proliferation of bloggers. I set myself up on Tumblr, a very user friendly blogging...
March 2013
2 posts
21 tags
Enterprise Social Implementations
I was in Paris earlier this month, my second time in 10 years. It is a city that can’t fail to inspire philosophers and poets and move artists and romantics. The city has no shortage of perspectives, which would make for a photographer’s delight. More on this particular shot at the end of this post.
A few weeks ago, a young start-up entrepreneur who shares a mutual friend approached me...
13 tags
Social conversations - lean in, listen, engage
The rapid clip of connectivity technology has helped us seek more, know more, do more and be more. In a dash to reduce everything down to a perfect humming machine, we squeeze out efficiencies from routine tasks through workflow applications. In the pursuit of golden nuggets of knowledge distilled from our business transactions, we analyze large datasets with the help of algorithms. In the...
4 tags
School in the cloud has a lesson for everyone -...
My last post was on cultivating networked knowledge but my context was related to a business environment. Today I found out that Dr. Sugata Mitra won the TED prize for 2013 this week. I heard his brilliant TED talk on child driven education a couple of years ago, and found it to be a dramatic vision for what was possible in collaborative learning. This physicist turned educational...
February 2013
2 posts
11 tags
Cultivate networked knowledge
One of the best pieces of advice that I received from one of my mentors, was to read more and read different genres. She was referring to books, but the same principles apply in the world of networked knowledge. Managed knowledge, the one that you could neatly account for, curate and stuff in a box has been making room to accommodate networked knowledge, changing the ways of traditional Knowledge...
January 2013
2 posts
11 tags
Enterprise Collaboration – a mindset, not a...
Collaboration is a good thing, a sacred concept in today’s business world and hailed as a key multiplier for success. In an increasingly complex landscape, it counts as a business necessity especially in very large organizations that become silo-ed as a result of their size and structure. When trusted collaboration is missing, the ‘silo syndrome’ sets in, something that Eva Rosen calls out...
4 tags
Why we need Heads, Hearts and Hands for E2.0...
What makes the implementation of a social collaboration tool, an E2.0 tool different from say, the next generation ERP platform. Both implementations represent changes in workflows, but the former will create a structural change in workflows and the other a cultural change. The former can have a straightforward implementation and adoption as a technical tool and will be considered business...
December 2012
2 posts
16 tags
From Digital Habitats to Digital Hangouts in the...
In a Sloan Management Review article this year, Andrew McAfee cited an example of how Tata Consultancy Services used an internal social network as a tool to enable their employees to ask and answer questions. The company realized after a while that the people who showed up high on their Leaderboards sometimes worked in positions that had nothing to do with the questions they were answering –...
5 tags
Big Data - the next stop for Knowledge Management
Stories are just data with a soul. (Brené Brown)
Marissa Mayer (CEO, Yahoo) says Big Data is like watching the planet develop a nervous system. One of the cool Big Data projects that is going on right now has nothing to do with any specific company’s or industry’s datapoints. Instead it is a globally crowdsourced media project focusing on humanity’s new ability to collect and visualize vast...
November 2012
4 posts
12 tags
From crowdsourcing to crowdmarketing and from...
Are you part of crowd-anything? (Hint: we all are!)
Last summer, Seth Godin launched a Kickstarter project for his next book The Icarus Deception partly to make his point to the publishers and booksellers and partly to demonstrate the power of Kickstarter as an amplifier of ideas, and new avenue of crowdfunding for the creative types and the power of patrons who desire to be part of a tribe. Seth...
8 tags
Testing what you know and learning what you don't
‘Accumulate learning by study and understand what you learn by questioning’ - Cha’n Master Mingjiao
Most businesses expend considerable effort in establishing processes and procedures so that systems work in a certain way. However using discipline to take a fresh look on a periodic basis at what is in motion is equally important for businesses to keep fresh and on top of their game. The...
9 tags
When Sandy turned off the lights
The past few days have been dramatic enough to have been lifted from a movie script. Scenes of fallen trees uprooted, caved house roofs, strewn power lines, traffic lights running on generators, blocked road signs everywhere, people on foot waiting in lines for 4 hours for 4 gallons of gas, fuel pump fights and car drivers driving maniacally, ignoring the dangers of passing through non-functioning...
9 tags
Google - From search engine to digital marketing...
As if the aspiration to make all of the world’s information accessible and findable was not enough, Google is foraying into the world of original content as well. When Google’s ebook ZMOT, the Zero Moment of Truth was released last year, I was impressed by the brief but well presented overview of the modern and connected consumer’s psychology at play and what it meant for the traditional...
October 2012
2 posts
7 tags
Today's Value is Tomorrow's Commodity
When IBM Chairwoman and CEO, Ginni Rometty spoke about constant reinvention and ‘failing fast’ at this month’s Fortune Most Powerful Women conference, she also advised placing strategic beliefs above strategic plans. The texture of business has been dramatically affected within a short span due to the confluence of factors like easy and fast connectivity, open innovation, social platforms and...
16 tags
Reinventing Employee Comms in the Social Era
Progressive management scholars like Gary Hamel and Nilofer Merchant elevate contemporary thinking around management practices by being bold enough to introduce the human element back into the practice of management (Quants may still rule, but rightfully counterbalanced by Poets). These management thinkers and others like them don’t just do so to evoke a natural emotional response, they are...
September 2012
3 posts
11 tags
Turning a Battleship
One of the reasons I signed up for Professor Werbach’s Gamification course through Coursera (posted about it a few weeks ago) was to understand how/if game mechanics based on cognitive psychology could be embedded into an enterprise change management and adoption effort.
Change management follows the same principles as the disciplines of Marketing and Economics because it too involves...
10 tags
Spheres - social and others
Last week the Journal reported that companies were still slow to warm up to the Social Enterprise and in these economic times, CIOs are very careful about not spending on every new shiny object that comes their way. On the other hand, companies in the Social Enterprise space are relentless in their belief that it can make a dramatic difference. Salesforce.com even went as far as making a play...
6 tags
Game On!
Game on! That was the first email message I got from one of Coursera’s course leaders – Professor Kevin Werbach of the Wharton School. He’s teaching a free online course (the first one ever) on Gamification and I had signed up for it a few weeks ago.
Why did I sign up for a full certificate course when my day job keeps me very busy. Gamification has been a trending topic (posted earlier) since...
August 2012
5 posts
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write,...”
– Alvin Toffler
8 tags
Content is free, Context is not
If you are in the business of digital content (anywhere in the supply chain), chances are you find the current business environment full of possibilities. Whether it is research, thought leadership, analytics, user generated content, or original creative content, organizations are finding that information can be reused and repurposed in any number of ways. This flexibility allows for ongoing...
4 tags
The rules of the game haven’t changed (but we do...
When I introduced my children to the joys of Lego, I knew that it would be an easy (and tidy) way to encourage their creativity while forcing them to sit still long enough to assemble something that requires a focused mind – they would also ‘work together’ on a project. I was successful in what I had set to achieve. What I had underestimated by a far shot was how well they would play well with...
3 tags
Has the internet really flattened culture?
Circling back to Seven on Seven from my previous post, this is an interesting experiment which pairs artists and technologists for a day to come up with something new that marries their respective disciplines. My favorite artist-technologist pair at this year’s Seven on Seven, Aaron Swartz and Taryn Simon, tackled the challenge of exposing the lack of neutrality on the internet when it comes to...
July 2012
5 posts
7 tags
How (digitally) connected are you?
There are several opinions around and preferences for how ‘digitally connected’ people want or need to be. I have mixed feelings myself, but can attest to the benefits of a digital social network on a personal level. My mother had spent 40 years of her adult life in Kuwait, until recently retiring in a new country (to live closer to her children). She shuttles between the US and...
7 tags
Collaborative Consumption
Collaboration was definitely the theme that stood out for me no matter where I turned this week. From the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference to a Tech meetup to the much awaited first glimpse of Microsoft’s SharePoint 2013 (beta version out this week, so a limited preview of this). There were other themes too at the conference and meetup – the usual suspects – Gamification, Big Data, Design,...
“It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.”
– Coach John Wooden
9 tags
The (Bold) move towards tribes and ecosystems
Consumerisation is the trend in technology that first emerges in the consumer market and then spreads into business organizations. A great example is the burgeoning social web which is forcing increased awareness and use of enterprise collaboration tools (Facebook clones, LinkedIn clones, blogs, wikis, apps). In her book Get Bold, Sandy Carter (VP of Social Business Evangelism at IBM) defines a...
15 tags
Young still, but has potential : Personal Research...
In enterprises, content harvesting translates into an effort of collecting (usually manually) nuggets of information so they can be packaged into repositories of information that can be easily accessed, refreshed and used over and over again. By that token, content harvesting has become the end game of any knowledge management effort. The usefulness of such repositories is in direct proportion to...
June 2012
4 posts
12 tags
Social Networks in the Enterprise - Through the...
There are many ways to look at something, just like the popular ‘elephant and blind men’ parable reminds us. Of the many disruptive forces in business today, social business is worth observing closely and from different angles. Many business enterprises have tried their hand at some form of social business by now. The definition of social business stretches wide and is not limited in its use at...
6 tags
The Trifecta of Enterprise Intranets -...
Within large organizations, employees usually have the facility of digital enterprise tools to collaborate on projects (connect with content) and collaborate with each other (generate ideas and engage each other around a virtual water cooler that transcends borders and organizational boundaries). The former is usually around a structured collection of information and the latter around...
10 tags
Playgrounds of Learning
On the year’s last PTO meeting in my fourth grader’s school, we were proudly told that the school would be getting 24 new iPads as part of the annual school gift. A welcome gift and indicative of a change movement that is going on in many enterprises including the traditional temples of knowledge and learning, our schools. Apple had already jumped in the game with the iPad deployments but...
6 tags
Athena's Aegis
Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and strategy, was granted the Aegis by Zeus after she won a terrible battle with Pallas. This was a gift, a father’s blessing and protective intervention all rolled into one. She had won the battle unfairly, and in a way was handed the Aegis (a shield in the form of a goatskin cape) to protect her from others and to protect her from herself (even the...
May 2012
12 posts
8 tags
Knowledge : create-curate-consume
More and more people are transcending the role of consumers to becoming creators and curators of information (check out Steven Rosenbaum’s Curation Nation for a convincing argument). JP Rangaswami used an interesting analogy in his light-hearted TED talk @SXSWi (earlier this year), metaphorically comparing the cultivation, preparation and consumption of information to that of food to make a...
8 tags
The Cathederal and the Bazaar
Eric S. Raymond read his groundbreaking paper The Cathederal and the Bazaar (later referred to as CatB) on comparative software engineering methods at the Linux Kongress some 15 years ago, he probably didn’t imagine the cascading effect that his experimental idea would have. His essay explained how open source development was superior to closed network development. Raymond concluded that many...
6 tags
The Fading Edges of Knowledge
The modern networking of knowledge online has caused a fundamental shift in the nature of knowledge and the authority that we place on it when it is ‘published’. Traditionally credentialed and qualified people exercised strong editorial control over published matter. The covers of a book have normally marked the edges of a well-formed and researched hypothesis giving an author the liberty of the...
4 tags
Graphing Knowledge
Google replaced human indexing with digital discovery based on its powerful algorithm that ranked pages based on relevance to a search term. This concept of page rank in turn resulted in a taxonomy that created the idea of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and dramatically changed the face of online marketing within a matter of a few years.
Now with almost a quiet announcement, Google is again set...
4 tags
Missing one detail can cost you a ...
Dr. Atul Gawande’s book The Checklist Manifesto explains how in a complex world where many experts come together to manage different aspects of a project, having a checklist is essential to managing (if not eliminating) the damage that can be inflicted by elementary errors. A checklist, not to be misunderstood for a menial to-do list is highly recommended in the examples in his book which cover...
4 tags
A Big Ask
The favorite prefix of the decade seems to be ‘Big’ and if anyone can take on the challenge of indexing the web, they can justifiably use that prefix. Indexing the web and its users is a Big Data problem waiting to be solved. For instance, Google wants to find out the behavioral problems of 200 million users (users of its many applications) in real time, so it could enhance its applications...
4 tags
Learn another (business) language
A New York Times story published this week highlighted the growing interest in adult learning courses in foreign languages (in foreign lands). As a parent, I tell my kids they will have an advantage in life if they are multi-lingual (or at the least, fluently bi-lingual). The same applies to the world of business knowledge.
I use the language analogy because in an increasingly complex and...
“One of the dangers is the confusion of knowledge with “a higher form of...”
– Dave Snowden
9 tags
Patterns on your board - Checkmate!
In Chess, there is a specific ending called a Smothered Checkmate where the King is forced into a corner, unfortunately surrounded by his own pieces - the checkmate is delivered by the knight. For this move, the opponent will make ‘material sacrifice’ (deliberately lose some of its pieces, to gain overall advantage with the end goal in mind). This move reminds me of how some...
4 tags
Single answer or Gestalt
In his book A Whole New Mind, Dan Pink speaks to the merits of marrying left-brain thinking with right-brain thinking and how we need that to evolve in to the next phase of our cultural journey – from Industrial Age to Information Age to Conceptual Age. In a way it asks the question, is it better to arrive at a single answer (which is usually the result of left-brain dominated thinking) or diverge...
6 tags
Keys to Locked Knowledge – defense tactics or...
When companies unleash their best minds on research with an investment in funding and time, they are doing it with an eye on the future return on their investment. Pharmaceutical companies compute the return on their pipelines years in advance, knowing that only a few of their patents will actually reap the profits they desire. This patented or locked knowledge promises revenue streams down the...
5 tags
Doodling to distill Knowledge
What do you do when you are swimming in too many facts and need to explain the big picture. Simple – draw one. Dan Roam’s first book The Back of the Napkin (2009) was an international bestseller, it explained the concept of applying visual thinking to solve complex business problems. Now companies are taking the idea to empower their employees to doodle to explain complex concepts to colleagues...
April 2012
8 posts
5 tags
Big Blue tracking Big Data
Social media has become one of the engines of Big Data now that many are entering and navigating the cacophony of social networks. For many, social media has opened the doors to voice their opinions and in the process challenged many businesses to take another look at how they conduct business and gather consumer sentiment. IBM has invested in Business Intelligence tools that can analyze and score...
4 tags
Jugaad Innovation
The book Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth was published earlier this month, but this innovation model has been gathering steam for some time now because the author of the book Navi Rajdou has been blogging about his model and spreading the word. Perhaps another business fad - although the word Jugaad exists in colloquial Hindi and is used heavily both to...
5 tags
Story + Data + Design = Data Viz
One of the most delicious challenges we have today is one of seeing patterns in our Big Data. In recent years, the works of talented and seasoned Information Visualists like Edward Tufte have been surfaced again and the discipline of using good design elements to present a lot of data effectively has got its due attention. For many years, we got away with charts made pretty, but a recent interest...
8 tags
What I learned about learning
Inspired by the Khan Academy, tenured Stanford University Professor and Google Fellow, Sebastian Thurn opened up his course on Artificial Intelligence to the world free of charge (as an experiment). At a Digital Life Design conference this year, Professor Thurn explained how his regular class of 300 expanded to 160,000. The students who normally showed up for his class in person decided to take...
4 tags
Digital Assets and Life('s) Cycle
With an unprecedented number of people ‘creating’ online content and ‘sharing’ their lives online, there are vast amounts of personal digital assets being generated or user generated content (which will easily overtake, if it hasn’t done so already, traditional media content). There are a few businesses already who provide guidance on how to ‘manage’ your...
