I was just reading the latest edition of the McKinsey Quarterly and there’s a very interesting article entitled: “Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work.” Surprisingly to me, the author states:
“Web 2.0, the latest wave in corporate technology adoptions, could have a more far-reaching organizational impact than technologies adopted in the 1990s—such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management.”
I say surprising because declaring web 2.0 could have a more far-reaching organizational impact than ERP and CRM is amazing indeed. Imagine if you can the billions upon billions of dollars spent over the last few decades implmenting these behemoth systems by companies throughout the world—and Web 2.0 could be bigger? That is an startling endorsement from a pretty traditional source.
And why on earth would McKinsey think such a crazy thing? Because they rightly see “…Web 2.0 as a way of unlocking participation” and “…the underused human potential at companies as an immense ‘cognitive surplus’ and one that could be tapped by participatory tools.” That is exactly right, as I have (often) said before—all that corporate IP locked in the heads of people throughout every organization with no good way to access it and leverage it for wide-scale productivity improvement.
Not surprising is their finding that as many companies are unhappy with their web 2.0 experimental implementations as are happy. “Many of the dissenters cite impediments such as organizational structure, the inability of managers to understand the new levers of change, and a lack of understanding about how value is created using Web 2.0 tools.” In response, McKinsey outlines six "management imperatives for unlocking participation"--which are certainly all true, but are disappointingly uninsightful or at least mundane. Besides these six, as we will see in the next post, is the unmentioned and most critical imperative--and the one that underlies successful Collaborative Knowledge Sharing.
Thursday, March 05, 2009
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
Social Tagging Saves IBM $4.6 Million
I read a blog post on IBM developerWorks about how social tagging saved the company $millions. As background:
"The Enterprise Tagging Service in IBM aims to provide an alternative approach to helping people find information compared to traditional search engines... Social tagging allows people to add human semantics to keywords that they define that sometimes can amount to finding a resource faster based on what people think is relevant...IBM’s ETS cost $700k to develop and deploy across the worldwide intranet as a sidebar to a number of key web properties... Readers can tag any page with the widget, look up tags they contributed, find others who have used the same tag, and certainly find other relevant resources by that same tag."
And here's the best part:
"The ETS team instituted a survey to ask users how this tool helped them. What they found was amazing when you look at it in context: the average person saved 12 seconds, across the 286000+ searches performed through ETS each week. This sums up to 955 hours saved each week across the company. In terms of cost savings, it amounts to a rough estimate of $4.6 million a year, in terms of productivity gain."
It's great to see companies like IBM adopt tagging and other social media approaches to increase productivity--it shows that there is indeed hope that the enterprise will catch on! But, what is surprising is that they are so pleased with a 12 second improvement in searching--since the problem and opportunity is so much bigger than that. Remember from previous posts in this blog:
“IDC research indicates that knowledge workers spend 15-30% of their time seeking specific information and these searches are successful less than 50% of the time. For the Fortune 500, the cost of the fruitless searches represents between $60 and $85 billion in direct costs and twice that in opportunity costs.”
If we assume 20% as the average time people spend looking for info, that equates to one entire work day per week, or a whopping 10 weeks per person per year. That single 8-hour day multiplies out to 28,800 seconds per day, compared to the 12 seconds saved per search. If we assume that people on average make 20 searches today (I'm making this up, but it seems reasonable), each person would save a total of 4 entire minutes per day, or 20 minutes per week--which is 4.2% of the total time searching! I'm all for social tagging and I agree we should all include it in our arsenal--but it is clearly a very weak weapon to help us win the productivity war.
But, imagine if you could search knowledge down to the spoken word, access it at the exact point of interest, and have it all available in your favorite digital media formats (streaming, downloadable, mobile). And then imagine, after finding a knowledge nugget of interest, you could find the expert/author, see all of that person's work, ask the person a salient question, follow the person's future contributions, and be able to find, join and participate in the same communities of interest! Now that is a huge improvement--and that is the power of Collaborative Knoweldge Sharing.
"The Enterprise Tagging Service in IBM aims to provide an alternative approach to helping people find information compared to traditional search engines... Social tagging allows people to add human semantics to keywords that they define that sometimes can amount to finding a resource faster based on what people think is relevant...IBM’s ETS cost $700k to develop and deploy across the worldwide intranet as a sidebar to a number of key web properties... Readers can tag any page with the widget, look up tags they contributed, find others who have used the same tag, and certainly find other relevant resources by that same tag."
And here's the best part:
"The ETS team instituted a survey to ask users how this tool helped them. What they found was amazing when you look at it in context: the average person saved 12 seconds, across the 286000+ searches performed through ETS each week. This sums up to 955 hours saved each week across the company. In terms of cost savings, it amounts to a rough estimate of $4.6 million a year, in terms of productivity gain."
It's great to see companies like IBM adopt tagging and other social media approaches to increase productivity--it shows that there is indeed hope that the enterprise will catch on! But, what is surprising is that they are so pleased with a 12 second improvement in searching--since the problem and opportunity is so much bigger than that. Remember from previous posts in this blog:
“IDC research indicates that knowledge workers spend 15-30% of their time seeking specific information and these searches are successful less than 50% of the time. For the Fortune 500, the cost of the fruitless searches represents between $60 and $85 billion in direct costs and twice that in opportunity costs.”
If we assume 20% as the average time people spend looking for info, that equates to one entire work day per week, or a whopping 10 weeks per person per year. That single 8-hour day multiplies out to 28,800 seconds per day, compared to the 12 seconds saved per search. If we assume that people on average make 20 searches today (I'm making this up, but it seems reasonable), each person would save a total of 4 entire minutes per day, or 20 minutes per week--which is 4.2% of the total time searching! I'm all for social tagging and I agree we should all include it in our arsenal--but it is clearly a very weak weapon to help us win the productivity war.
But, imagine if you could search knowledge down to the spoken word, access it at the exact point of interest, and have it all available in your favorite digital media formats (streaming, downloadable, mobile). And then imagine, after finding a knowledge nugget of interest, you could find the expert/author, see all of that person's work, ask the person a salient question, follow the person's future contributions, and be able to find, join and participate in the same communities of interest! Now that is a huge improvement--and that is the power of Collaborative Knoweldge Sharing.
Tuesday, March 03, 2009
The New Learning Interactivity
Just in from our friends at learning research firm, Bersin & Associates is a blog post about eLearning becoming less interactive and more expert centric. I quote in part:
"A recent study, The Corporate Learning Factbook, showed that, with spending and staffing on the decline, today’s training organizations are developing courseware that is less interactive. Instead, more companies are now using "rapid e-learning" tools, software that converts PowerPoint documents to online learning materials. Rapid e-learning tools allow content to be created relatively quickly and easily (and cheaply), and also put power into the hands of SMEs to develop their own training and communications. Over the past several years, these tools have been an entry point for many organizations in adopting online training. Today, more organizations are turning to these tools due to resource constraints."
Yes, as we've been saying here at Altus Learning Systems for years (way before this economic meltdown!), the transfer of knowledge within organizations must become disintermediated--coming directly from experts to learners. But what is missing in the blog post's focus on "interactivity" is findability and accessibility--busy people care less about interacting with their learning maerials than they do about finding what they need to know quickly and being able to do directly to the point of interest. And the type of interactivity that people DO want to engage in is different than eLearning learning exercises--they want to be able to rate, comment, ask questions, find the expert, add their own user generated content, form communities of interest, etc. This is the new intereactivity that has been born out of people's experiences with web 2.0 and social networking.
"A recent study, The Corporate Learning Factbook, showed that, with spending and staffing on the decline, today’s training organizations are developing courseware that is less interactive. Instead, more companies are now using "rapid e-learning" tools, software that converts PowerPoint documents to online learning materials. Rapid e-learning tools allow content to be created relatively quickly and easily (and cheaply), and also put power into the hands of SMEs to develop their own training and communications. Over the past several years, these tools have been an entry point for many organizations in adopting online training. Today, more organizations are turning to these tools due to resource constraints."
Yes, as we've been saying here at Altus Learning Systems for years (way before this economic meltdown!), the transfer of knowledge within organizations must become disintermediated--coming directly from experts to learners. But what is missing in the blog post's focus on "interactivity" is findability and accessibility--busy people care less about interacting with their learning maerials than they do about finding what they need to know quickly and being able to do directly to the point of interest. And the type of interactivity that people DO want to engage in is different than eLearning learning exercises--they want to be able to rate, comment, ask questions, find the expert, add their own user generated content, form communities of interest, etc. This is the new intereactivity that has been born out of people's experiences with web 2.0 and social networking.
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