The jury is finally back and the verdict is not what anyone wants to hear—the information technology revolution has failed us. After spending untold $billions over the last two decades on computer hardware and software, knowledge workers today still spend 15-30% of their time looking for the information they need to do their work—and find what they are looking for less than half the time! Who could have possibly imagined at the end of the first decade of the 21st century that individuals would still be spending 10 weeks or more per year looking for the information they need at work and still not be able to find it? And this dismal result after installing an endless number of three-letter acronym systems: ERP, CRM, CMS, DAM, DMS, LMS, etc., etc.—not to mention the explosive adoption of the Internet, Google, and countless other tools for creating and finding enterprise content.
I’m told the definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. How many more $billions do we need to spend over how many more decades to realize something is seriously amiss here? When are we going to understand that a change in thinking and approach is needed to address the single biggest productivity challenge organizations face? Fortunately, the convergence of video, search, web 2.0 and social networking has resulted in the emergence of a trend that that is overcoming the limitations of traditional approaches and is reducing this enterprise productivity gap for a number for global companies—Collaborative Knowledge Sharing.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Friday, February 13, 2009
Biggest Threats to the Meetings Industry
I’m very focused right now on the corporate meeting/conference/event space because cutbacks in travel are forcing companies to rethink how they transfer knowledge—and the movement from in-person to “virtual,” or more likely a hybrid in-person/virtual approach is inevitable (as discussed in earlier posts). And that is bringing my company many new inquiries from existing customer and prospects.
That interest has prompeted me to subscribe to meeting industry publications like Meetings to see what the folks in that business are thinking. The February 2009 issue had a very interesting lead story, “2009 Meetings Market Trends Survey.” One of the questions that was asked was: “What do you think is the biggest threat to the meetings industry?” The top responses were predictable: the economy (62%) and airline issues (18%). But, curiously, one of the possible threat answers was “virtual meetings,” and it only received a 5% response from corporate responders to the survey.
The data are not explained, so it made me wonder whether meetings professionals simply do not think they will be impacted by the inevitable movement to virtual (online) or they recognize the trend but are not threatened by it because they actually see it as a useful tool. Unfortunately, I suspect the former—that they don’t see the relationship of “the economy” and “airline issues” to the fact that meetings of the future are going to have to include an online component due to the reduction in corporate travel.
The other thing I thought was curious about including “virtual meetings” as a response option was that the author of the survey actually thinks in those terms—that virtual/online is a threat vs. seeing it as a valuable and complementary tool. I understand that the folks who actually run the conference centers, hotels, and related services will be negatively impacted by the loss of in-person attendance, but meeting planners should be focused how to provide the most robust experience for both online and in-person attendees. That will include live and on-demand delivery of the conference content combined with a lively integration of social networking capabilities. And even conference center managers should be thinking about how they can get into the online game by offering those capabilities to supplement in-person events held at their facilities.
That interest has prompeted me to subscribe to meeting industry publications like Meetings to see what the folks in that business are thinking. The February 2009 issue had a very interesting lead story, “2009 Meetings Market Trends Survey.” One of the questions that was asked was: “What do you think is the biggest threat to the meetings industry?” The top responses were predictable: the economy (62%) and airline issues (18%). But, curiously, one of the possible threat answers was “virtual meetings,” and it only received a 5% response from corporate responders to the survey.
The data are not explained, so it made me wonder whether meetings professionals simply do not think they will be impacted by the inevitable movement to virtual (online) or they recognize the trend but are not threatened by it because they actually see it as a useful tool. Unfortunately, I suspect the former—that they don’t see the relationship of “the economy” and “airline issues” to the fact that meetings of the future are going to have to include an online component due to the reduction in corporate travel.
The other thing I thought was curious about including “virtual meetings” as a response option was that the author of the survey actually thinks in those terms—that virtual/online is a threat vs. seeing it as a valuable and complementary tool. I understand that the folks who actually run the conference centers, hotels, and related services will be negatively impacted by the loss of in-person attendance, but meeting planners should be focused how to provide the most robust experience for both online and in-person attendees. That will include live and on-demand delivery of the conference content combined with a lively integration of social networking capabilities. And even conference center managers should be thinking about how they can get into the online game by offering those capabilities to supplement in-person events held at their facilities.
Monday, February 09, 2009
Priority: Improving Sales Rep Access to Info
A recent study by CSO Insights, “Sales Performance Optimization, 2008 Survey Results & Analysis,” contains a treasure trove of information about improving sales, ranging from lead generation methods to the trends and issues with CRM systems. I found one table in that report particularly interesting and germane to what we do at Altus Learning Systems. When respondents were asked to state what their top priorities for sales improvement were for the coming year, the top mentioned item was not hard to predict: “enhancing lead generations programs,” with 36.4%. But what was less predictable and more interesting was the second most mentioned priority: “improving sales rep access to key information.” With 30.4%, information access ranked much more highly that some of the more usual suspects, like “revising our channel strategy” with only 18.6% and “implementing CRM tools” with 16.9%.
Reflecting on a the statistic from a previous blog post, I guess this finding should not be so surprising—when 15-30% of knowledge workers’ time is spent looking for the information they need to do their work, and they find it less than 50% of the time, this is a very large problem indeed. Few productivity problems rise to this level of magnitude and urgency—at least 10 weeks per year per sales person looking for the information they need and finding it less than half the time—you do the math for your company.
That is precisely why we at Altus Learning Systems have focused with laser-like precision on collaborative knowledge sharing—enabling people throughout the extended enterprise to share what they know and making it all searchable and accessible at the point of interest. And that is why we are fortunately seeing more and more companies making the transition for a reliance on formal eLearning (online training) to collaborative knowledge sharing with Altus—because people need easy access to whatever they need to know, whenever they need to know it, from whoever in the organization has it, on whatever electronic device they are using. Notice that “improving formal training for sales reps” was not on the priorities list, but “improving rep access to key information” ranked second.
Reflecting on a the statistic from a previous blog post, I guess this finding should not be so surprising—when 15-30% of knowledge workers’ time is spent looking for the information they need to do their work, and they find it less than 50% of the time, this is a very large problem indeed. Few productivity problems rise to this level of magnitude and urgency—at least 10 weeks per year per sales person looking for the information they need and finding it less than half the time—you do the math for your company.
That is precisely why we at Altus Learning Systems have focused with laser-like precision on collaborative knowledge sharing—enabling people throughout the extended enterprise to share what they know and making it all searchable and accessible at the point of interest. And that is why we are fortunately seeing more and more companies making the transition for a reliance on formal eLearning (online training) to collaborative knowledge sharing with Altus—because people need easy access to whatever they need to know, whenever they need to know it, from whoever in the organization has it, on whatever electronic device they are using. Notice that “improving formal training for sales reps” was not on the priorities list, but “improving rep access to key information” ranked second.
Virtual, Not Virtual Worlds
The natural inclination people have when applying a new technology to an old problem is to try to recreate or simulate the old experience. We certainly saw this years ago with the application of internetworking technologies to learning—the result was 'eLearning.' Because people previously had to attend 'training courses' in-person, eLearning tried to simulate that experience by creating online courses, making people register for those courses in learning management systems, taking tests, etc. That was all fine and dandy—but the much larger opportunity was and is that the web (and more recently web 2.0) unleashes the ability of people throughout the extended enterprise to collaboratively share their knowledge. The uber opportunity that the modern web opens up for learning is to enable everyone to have access to whatever anyone else knows, whenever and however they need to know it (what we at Altus call Collaborative Knowledge Sharing)—not simply to take training courses online.
This same 'paradigm transfer' problem is happening with corporate meetings, events, and conferences. The current economic downturn has forced companies to drastically reduce their costs, and the first thing to go has been travel—specifically, travel for internal meetings and attendance at in-person trainings and conferences. Since the no-travel mandate limits in-person attendance, companies are naturally thinking that they should conduct these meetings, conferences, and trainings 'virtually.' But that’s where the technology train jumps off the tracks—instead of simply thinking that such meetings need to be online vs. in-person, they leap to the conclusion that virtual means virtual worlds. If people can’t be present in person, the reasoning goes, then we need to simulate the in-person experience online via a virtual world environment. This leads to the thinking that participants have to represent their presence in the online meeting with an avatar and move through the conference center to find the room in which an interesting presentation is taking place, find a seat, sit down, and look at the screen in the 'auditorium.'
The tendency to leap to the virtual world conclusion, although natural, is mistaken. The reason that people have to physically move around in an in-person meeting is because they have to transport their physical bodies. But, when online we can go from one presentation to another presentation with two licks of the mouse—so, why recreate the most unpleasant aspects of in-person meetings online when we are completely free of that physical imperative?
The illogic of transferring the physical presence paradigm to the online experience is that hundreds of millions of people already watch video and network socially with each other every day online—and they don’t use avatars to do it. Think Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. ad finitum—none of the most popular social media tools in use today use virtual world technology, so why would we want to impose that awkward paradigm on business people who are attending knowledge sharing events online? Why not stream video like YouTube (live and on demand) and let people interact with the existing tools that they are already familiar with (without having to create yet one more personal profile)?
While companies are working furiously with virtual world vendors to try to simulate the physical meeting experience online, the real game-changing strategy will be to create a seamless environment for people who want to see video live and on demand, interact with each other using familiar tools, and collaboratively share their knowledge by taking full advantage of what today’s technologies are fully capable of. That’s why God invented mashups—take the best of the best applications, mash them with up as web services, and apply them in ways that truly enhance the user experience. Making my avatar go up and down the escalators to get to presentations held on different floors of the virtual Moscone Center is not the way to enhance my learning and networking experience.
This same 'paradigm transfer' problem is happening with corporate meetings, events, and conferences. The current economic downturn has forced companies to drastically reduce their costs, and the first thing to go has been travel—specifically, travel for internal meetings and attendance at in-person trainings and conferences. Since the no-travel mandate limits in-person attendance, companies are naturally thinking that they should conduct these meetings, conferences, and trainings 'virtually.' But that’s where the technology train jumps off the tracks—instead of simply thinking that such meetings need to be online vs. in-person, they leap to the conclusion that virtual means virtual worlds. If people can’t be present in person, the reasoning goes, then we need to simulate the in-person experience online via a virtual world environment. This leads to the thinking that participants have to represent their presence in the online meeting with an avatar and move through the conference center to find the room in which an interesting presentation is taking place, find a seat, sit down, and look at the screen in the 'auditorium.'
The tendency to leap to the virtual world conclusion, although natural, is mistaken. The reason that people have to physically move around in an in-person meeting is because they have to transport their physical bodies. But, when online we can go from one presentation to another presentation with two licks of the mouse—so, why recreate the most unpleasant aspects of in-person meetings online when we are completely free of that physical imperative?
The illogic of transferring the physical presence paradigm to the online experience is that hundreds of millions of people already watch video and network socially with each other every day online—and they don’t use avatars to do it. Think Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. ad finitum—none of the most popular social media tools in use today use virtual world technology, so why would we want to impose that awkward paradigm on business people who are attending knowledge sharing events online? Why not stream video like YouTube (live and on demand) and let people interact with the existing tools that they are already familiar with (without having to create yet one more personal profile)?
While companies are working furiously with virtual world vendors to try to simulate the physical meeting experience online, the real game-changing strategy will be to create a seamless environment for people who want to see video live and on demand, interact with each other using familiar tools, and collaboratively share their knowledge by taking full advantage of what today’s technologies are fully capable of. That’s why God invented mashups—take the best of the best applications, mash them with up as web services, and apply them in ways that truly enhance the user experience. Making my avatar go up and down the escalators to get to presentations held on different floors of the virtual Moscone Center is not the way to enhance my learning and networking experience.
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