GigaOM » Knowledge Management

WikiOrgCharts crowdsources company relationships

Terri Griffith — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 02:28:47 +0000

Open innovation and partnership organizational strategies have blurred work boundaries and sharpened our need to understand who does what in a given company. WikiOrgCharts helps bring that information into focus. The cloud-based tool uses the power of crowdsourcing to populate org charts. More than fodder for headhunters, public org charts have become increasingly useful as more of our work is done in tight connection with associates outside of our organizations. And it can’t hurt to know who’s in charge of what while working on a personal job search.

WikiOrgCharts CEO Farhan Memon got the idea for the collaborative org chart while he was working at AOL . During his time there, his team had monthly meetings with external partners. Because they lacked insight into the partners’ knowledge and reporting structure, the AOL group struggled to figure out how best to work with the outside team. A colleague drafted an org chart of the other company, and Memon thought, “this org chart is good, but what I’d really like to do is work with colleagues to fill in the blanks and append information to the org chart.” Having a clearer picture of the roles and relationships makes it easier to know where the bottlenecks are, how decisions are made, and how to manage the underlying connections throughout the project, explained Memon.

Building a wikiorgchart is similar to creating an online family tree. (Memon says that they looked at genealogy websites for user interface inspiration.) You drag a person into position and then use linking lines to show the relationship between people. The privacy settings let you shift from the default of identified contributor to anonymous contributor. When members contribute people and relationships to the org charts, they gain the points they need to do their own searches. (The premium membership does not rely on points.) You can start your own profile by linking to your Facebook and LinkedIn pages. This quickly provides information about where you sit in your organization(s), and earns you more points for adding to your profile.

When it comes to getting your resume into the right hands, WikiOrgcharts has some advantages over LinkedIn . Search results on LinkedIn can be limited by a person’s position relative to your existing LinkedIn network and the type of account you have (free versus a variety of paid levels). WikiOrgCharts provides unlimited access to the available information — as long as you have accumulated enough points through participation, or, similar to LinkedIn, have a paid account.

Like Wikipedia, WikiOrgCharts is always growing, but the company has given the site a head start. Said Memon:

We built out the site using a number of different data sources, including social graph information, SEC data, and data from federal government employees. We’ve accumulated 9 million profiles. Our system automates some processes such as bucketing people from different companies, but we’re improving other processes such as sematic matching of companies.

Sensemaking, social intelligence, and the ability to connect are critical skills for modern work. WikiOrgCharts provides a tool to gather the data you need to begin those activities.

Images courtesy of WikiOrgCharts.

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Choosing a knowledge management tool

Thursday Bram — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 17:01:13 +0000

Sharing institutional knowledge can be a huge pitfall for many organizations. It’s easy enough to slap up a project management tool and start collaborating on the enterprise level, but if you need to make sure that different people in your organization have access to the knowledge that keeps your organization rolling along, arranging for some sort of sharing mechanism can be difficult. The process of doing so, of sharing information across multiple members of your organization, is known as knowledge management.

Choosing institutional knowledge tools

Picking the tool your organization uses for knowledge management can be complex. There are a variety of approaches to knowledge management that different tools take, from simply letting everyone add information to a shared database to a carefully curated and approved set of knowledge. It can be a question of what works with the tools you already use, what can manage the types of information you need to keep at hand, or even what is available to you. Two organizations told us what lead them to make their decisions.

Angela Carr, the VP of information technology for the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) works with AssociatioNet, a version of the Presto knowledge management application designed specifically for use by associations. She told us,

AUVSI’s vision is to be the focal point for information and updates on the unmanned systems global community. That means we want to be the preferred resource for information seekers: academia, researchers, scientists and the media. We chose AssociatioNet because of its ability to streamline the information gathering process and link this abundance of information with AUVSI member data. The system allows [us] to provide additional benefits to . . AUVSI member [companies] by showcasing the[m] alongside important research. In addition to features . . . that . . . improve staff and organization productivity, AssociatioNet provides a low cost of ownership, flexibility, ease-of-use and rapid deployment that differentiates it from other, more costly and cumbersome tools available.

Ken Carroll is the mentoring network administrator for URS Corporation, which uses Triple Creek to manage knowledge. He describes the choice:

URS [has a] wide scope of services and highly specialized talent, [so] intentional learning and knowledge transfer are strategic priorities. Triple Creek’s solution is dynamically aligning and matching our talent to the immediate learning needs across our organization. Progressive organizations like URS and Triple Creek create ah-ha moments at every turn. Our latest ah-ha moment is to pair Open Mentoring with our classroom training events bridging the gap between learning and execution. The ability to keep the group connected as they apply the learning concepts allows these peer groups to speed up learning by asking each other questions, collaboratively solving problems, and reinforce the concepts learned in the classroom. The partnership we have with Triple Creek is a competitive advantage for URS.

Institutional knowledge management is crucial to ensuring that businesses continue to thrive even if that one coder who’s the only guy that knows how the software was created or that one saleswoman who knows how to perfectly sell the main product leave the company. Across different companies that we’ve talked to, the main criteria for choosing a knowledge management tool are:

Ease of use. A knowledge management tool isn’t worth anything if you can’t get people to use it.
Specialized knowledge. In many industries, the types of knowledge that must be managed vary dramatically. Even something as small as the ability to upload video can make a world of difference for some industries.
Technical management. Setup can be a crucial issue, especially for companies without large IT departments. So can connecting a knowledge management tool to the other software an organization already uses.

How does your organization manage its institutional knowledge?

Image courtesy Flickr user cybershotking

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Build a Shared Knowledge Base from Your Inbox With GrexIt

Simon Mackie — Tue, 31 May 2011 21:03:13 +0000

One of the problems with conducting so much work communication via email is that a lot of useful conversation, information and knowledge ends up being locked away inside people’s inboxes, unavailable to the rest of the company. Even worse, if a person then leaves the company, that information may be lost forever. That’s the problem GrexIt is trying to solve with its new app, which is essentially a company-wide knowledge base for Google Apps that allows users to move specified discussions from their inboxes into a shared, searchable repository.

After a user has authorized GrexIt to access Google Apps, moving conversations into GrexIt is simply a matter of forwarding emails to the “add@grexit.com,” or if the user has the GrexIt browser extension installed (currently available for Chrome and Firefox, with Safari support on the way), hitting the “Add to GrexIt” button. Once conversations have been moved to GrexIt, they become available to everyone on the company domain. Users can also apply shared GrexIt labels (which work similarly to, but are separate from, Gmail labels) to conversations to make them easier to find later. Users with the browser extension can also search the repository from their Gmail sidebar.

GrexIt also has a couple of additional advanced features that make it a more useful enterprise tool. Firstly, admins can specify can specify “Fetch rules” that automatically pull certain emails into GrexIt. For example, a Fetch Rule could specify that all of the emails in a user’s inbox with the label “Invoices” are automatically moved into GrexIt (note that users are asked for their permission before any Fetch rules are applied). Admins can also set up “Access Rules” and restrict access to discussions with certain GrexIt labels to particular users, or groups of users.

Unfortunately, emails aren’t often written with the intention of being stored in a knowledge base for later recall, which may make the signal-to-noise ratio of the GrexIt repository pretty low, and specific information difficult to find. I can imagine that in a larger company the volume of material stored could potentially become difficult to manage. However, it’s still better than having no shared access to that information at all. While the signal-to-noise ratio in a GrexIt repository may be lower than on, say, a shared wiki, adding information to GrexIt is much easier than having to write out wiki content, so it’s more likely to be used by everyone in a company.

GrexIt is currently in private beta and free; you can request an invite at the website. When it’s released, it will be sold on the Google Apps Marketplace, likely for somewhere between $1 per user per month to $5 per user per month, according to co-founder Niraj Ranjan Rout. It currently only supports Google Apps, although Rout says that support for other email platforms is on the way. Note that the Firefox extension does not yet support Firefox 5 beta.

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Social Tools: Helping People Share What They Know

Murali Sitaram — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 20:00:12 +0000

Ever since Andrew McAfee coined the term “Enterprise 2.0” in 2006, organizations have been investigating ways that enterprise social software (ESS) can address gaps in how employees work together. But we’ve also come to realize that there is a greater context behind industry interest in ESS. Over the next 20 years, nearly 80 million people will retire; that’s nearly 10,000 baby boomers a day. This trend will likely lead to significant generational shifts in the workforce, and the potential for a tremendous loss in intellectual capital as senior staff depart. The trend will also challenge organizations to more rapidly on-board new hires. ESS, alongside an effective change management program, can help an organization address these knowledge transfer needs.

We need to get this right as an industry. There is an enormous amount of “know how” and business insight within the heads of our senior workers. At the same time, those entering the workforce will be expected to become proficient quickly. We need to create opportunities for people to connect, share, learn and collaborate as a natural way of working rather than repeating the “knowledge capture” mistakes of the past. That’s where ESS offers tremendous potential. By making work more observable and participation more visible, “knowledge transfer” becomes something that occurs as people interact and build relationships. Let’s look at two examples:

On-Boarding New Employees

In the “good old days”, organizations would hire employees and bring them into the office for training. During orientation, employees would forge bonds with co-workers that might last throughout their professional career. This process helped new recruits sense that they were part of a community. We don’t always do that today; we might never actually meet the people we work with every day. Virtual teams are the way work gets done in global organizations.

With ESS, we can’t recreate those exact physical experiences, but we can come close, and in some ways, provide more flexibility. With ESS, we can create a community and social networking site where employees can connect with each other in ways similar to consumer sites. However, within the enterprise, this interaction is more aligned with employee needs and interests. An enterprise collaboration platform should make it easier to: find subject matter experts (social profiles), add them to your network (social graph), follow their work (activity streams), and converse with them (microblogging). Senior staff does not have to think of this as “training” new hires. By making their actions more transparent (what communities they join, what videos they viewed, what content they bookmark), junior staff can “watch” how they conduct their work in a non-intrusive manner. Over time, this becomes a means of informal learning and new type of virtual apprenticeship for new hires. When senior staff does want to share information with new employees, ESS offers a frictionless way to share links to relevant knowledge sources, or share insightful commentary on a current task.

The participatory nature of ESS also enables new hires to create their own professional networks with senior colleagues or join established communities where senior staff share experiences and refine work practices. And as ESS becomes more integrated with unified communications and video, those interactions can become more real-time and visual, getting us closer to that orientation experience we had long ago.

Preserving a Personal Legacy

ESS capabilities can also help organizations address knowledge transfer concerns arising from likely retirement waves. As mentioned in the on-boarding scenario, use of ESS can make “work” more observable and self-documenting as employees blog, update wikis, “tweet”, and have their actions published into an activity stream. This type of natural osmosis enables the organization to focus less on the type of forced capture of “tacit knowledge” prevalent during knowledge management projects in the nineties. The benefits of observable work, however, need to be felt by employees. If senior workers do not see personal value from contributing in that manner, they might return to prior information hoarding practices. Effective leadership and change management practices are necessary to address cultural dynamics and help with community-building efforts. When culture and community come together, senior staff should view participation via ESS as the “norm” for the way employees connect, share, learn and collaborate.

Offering retirees a way to stay connected after retirement should be considered as another means for organizations to harness retiree’s business insight. There was a time when retirement meant that the employee disappeared from the workplace. Nowadays, that’s often not the case. Consumer sites like Facebook make it easy for retirees to keep in touch with former co-workers. Organizations are now exploring how ESS capabilities can be used in a more purposeful way to provide retirees with options to continue work in a limited capacity. It is not unheard of to have former workers return to the workplace as a consultant, subject matter expert, or even as a mentor. An enterprise collaboration platform with the right security integration can support these former employees as they participate selectively in various roles.

Gaining Adoption

Changing existing employee work patterns and behaviors is perhaps the greatest challenge for making ESS initiatives a success. Governance, change management and constant communication are essential elements of any transformation program. However there are some techniques strategists can employ to influence actual technology usage.

Make it personally valuable: Enabling employees to post, tag, bookmark and share information enables them to create their own personal learning environment and build relationships with peers based on similar interests. Adoption will not be driven directly by what processes they are involved in, or any other formal activity that directs their role. Instead, their use of ESS is influenced by their own goals – which might tie to career development, recognition of their expertise, or professional networking.
Make it a community effort: People often enjoy helping others and collectively co-creating something of value. Adoption can be facilitated by posing challenges for employees to overcome. For instance, inviting employees to participate in solving some of the more pressing issues facing the company (products, markets) or their department (customer service, data quality) can tap into the goodwill of employees to contribute.
Make it the new way of working: Over the years, companies have changed the means of production by deploying office productivity tools, or automating work activities by deploying various business applications such as CRM. Employees had to change the way they worked as the work itself changed in terms of its tooling. In some cases, we can change the work itself such that people blog instead of creating documents, or share information via wikis rather than email. As people become comfortable using tools for their daily routine, they can become more comfortable using the same tools to voluntarily participate in communities and professional networks.

Murali Sitaram is the Vice President and General Manager for Cisco’s Enterprise Collaboration Platform Group. He is responsible for driving the development of Cisco Quad, an enterprise social software platform that helps organizations deliver a social, mobile and virtual workspace to its employees.

Photo courtesy Flickr user Ed Yourdon

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Mapping Your Work Madness

Aliza Sherman — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:00:29 +0000

I’ve been curious about mind mapping and how it might help me with my work. I did a search on Web Worker Daily for references to mind mapping solutions to see what my fellow bloggers have said in the past to help me vet out the best software or site for my needs. That’s where I saw some mentions about bubbl.us, a Web-based “brainstorming” application.

Before I proceeded testing out an application, I wanted to have a better understanding of what mind mapping was all about so I went to Wikipedia for a definition:

A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. It is used to generate, visualize, structure and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing.

The more I read, the more I was excited to try mind mapping in some form because I certainly could use some help with organization, problem solving and decision making in my Web working business.

What I immediately liked about bubbl.us is that the moment I arrived at the site, all I had to do was click a big button that said “Start Brainstorming,” and I was presented with my first bubble ready for me to fill it in.

By hovering my cursor over the bubble, I was given pop up descriptions of each feature such as: click and drag to move the bubble, create a sibling bubble under same parent, create a new child bubble, select bubble color, even connect two bubbles with a directional line. For someone who gets hives from reading the manual, these bite-sized instructions available to me at any time as I built my map was like ambrosia.

The first map I made was for my company, Moonbow Productions, Inc. I wanted to get a sense of what services I offer to clients. This map took less than 10 minutes to produce.

The next map I made was to get a grip on the many “irons in the fire” or projects I have in progress. This map took me 20 minutes to produce.

The last map I made was a list of services I offer with the corresponding clients who are utilizing the various services. This map took me 10 minutes to produce.

In less than 40 minutes, I had three different ways of visualizing the work I do on a daily basis and a much clearer perspective of where I spend my time.

As usual, I’m only scratching the surface of the features of yet another Web app, but with this tiny scratch, I’ve really taken care of a big mind itch.

How Mind Mapping Can Help Web Work

Here are some of the ways might think of using mind mapping:

1. Visualize how your work is distributed. Where are the profit centers, and are you focusing most of your time and energy on those?

2. Identify loss leaders. Where are you spending time during your work day that isn’t having a direct impact on your bottom line?

3. Organize tasks. How can you group tasks together to be more efficient with the work you do each day?

4. Plan for expansion. If you are looking to grow your business, what areas should you augment? What areas could you pare down because they aren’t really paying the bills to make room for new things?

5. Diversify. Are you concentrating too much on a single area of Web work? What if that work dries up? What other areas can you branch into in order to have other options

If you are interested in learning more about the benefits of mind mapping, you might want to take a look at “The Mind Mapping Manifesto” by Chuck Frey or go to his blog The Mind Mapping Software Blog. Although his material seems very “salesy” at first, you can find some gems tucked in between the hard sales pitches.

“You’re a victim of ‘information overload,’” says Frey. “To survive, you need to sift through a mountain of information, ideas and knowledge, synthesize meaning from it and communicate it in reports, plans and other business reports.”

Don’t we all!

Are you mind mapping and if so, how are you doing it and what has it done for you?

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Re-map keys in XP or Vista with SharpKeys

Kevin C. Tofel — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 17:22:53 +0000

After all of my raving about the Asus Eee PC, it’s only fair to rant about my biggest gripe: the placement of the right-side Shift key. I could rag on the size of it too, but as we say in the world of mobile tech, life is full of compromises. Anyway, I was counting how many times I hit the up arrow key instead of the Shift key. I lost track somewhere around 847… or was it 848?I’ll be prying off both keys to give them the flip-flop and since I’m currently running Windows XP on the Eee, I figured I’ll have to some digging in the registry for the keys to work correctly in their new homes. Or… I could just use SharpKeys, a free key-mapping application for Windows XP and Vista. SharpKeys provides a simple GUI and does the heavy lifting on the registry for you.(via How-To Geek)Update: All iS RiGhT WiTh ThE WoRlD AGAin. Oops… I got carried away now that I’m hitting the right button… carry on.

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Vid-Biz: Joost, DirectTV, PMPs

Chris Albrecht — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 18:08:22 +0000

More Joost Content Deals; European Joosters get Turner’s TV (CNN, Adult Swim); Bollywood movies are coming to the P2P TV service via Eros Intl.; and Aniboom will launch a branded animation channel. (Turner: Rapid TV News; Eros: Variety; Aniboom: release)

Cable Trying to Catch up to Satellite HD Offerings; DirectTV fired the first salvo by saying it’ll have 100 HD channels by year’s end, now cable companies are fighting to overcome bandwidth constraints. (Wall Street Journal)

Video PMPs Shipments to Hit 130 Million; hunger for video will fuel the portable media player market, with shipments projected to exceed that number by 2011. (Parks Associates)

XillianTV and RayV Secure Funding; XillianTV raises $800,000 in seed money from Concept Ventures; RayV pulls in $8 million second round from Accel. (XillianTV: PaidContent); RayV: Globes)

BOO! CBS Interactive Launches Horror Spoof Series; How to Survive a Horror Movie riffs off old 1950s training films. (MediaWeek)

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Earthlink Launches VoIP

Om Malik — Tue, 05 Oct 2004 17:41:23 +0000

Chris Holland sent me an email informing me that Earthlink is getting into the VoIP business. (Press release!) To extend the benefits of its newest VoIP offering, EarthLink has partnered with other SIP providers to exchange calls. These partnerships give EarthLink Free Online Calling subscribers free VoIP access to anyone using SIP-based services, including SIPphone and Free World Dialup.

EarthLink just released their free online calling for members. What I like is that I can get voicemail sent to my earthlink e-mail address. That’s really cool and something Skype isn’t in the business of doing. And I’d venture to guess that as time goes by, we should see more convenient integration between voice calling and other earthlink services. This is really cool. Like any other EarthLink member, I’ve got 8 online accounts, out of which I haven’t been making any good use, but I’m thinking of handing out a couple of accounts to Mom, Dad, and Little Sis back in France, so they can more easily call me from their computers. WAY COOL. In other news, I’ve been meaning to try out the new Total Access for Mac that was just released a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been told there’s a nifty RSS News Reader bundled with it?

Earlier, the good old Speakeasy had launched its VoIP package. I don’t care for Speakeasy very much, but being an Earthlink customer in the past, I am pretty certain, it is going to be nice little package.

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