I’ve seen the future and (part of) it’s Qbengo

In the past I’ve written quite a bit about expertise location and knowledge mapping. Expertise location is about supporting people to find people with certain expertise they’re looking for. In larger and multi-nationals organizations this is a big issue. One aspect about expertise location is also finding out where the person is. This can be a static location (e.g. the person works in room 3, building 4). This is difficult enough, but it can be done as I wrote some time ago.

However, the workforce is more mobile than ever. Less and less employees have a fixed space they’re working in daily. They work in several rooms in an office during the week, they work from home, in the car, etc. Supporting expertise location in this context is even harder. In theory it can be done. I wrote about this as well. But I never saw a company actually connect the dots and make it work. Until recently.

I had the pleasure to visit Qbengo. Qbengo is currently focused on connecting people at larger conferences. You’ve been there: a large conference with many booths. You have specific questions and would like to have them answered, but finding your way to the right person and/or booth, is hard. Furthermore, you don’t want to walk by all the booths, because that takes too much of your time.

Qbengo has developed technology to support this process. They can quickly map out a conference location: the conference rooms, lunch area, booths, etc. By downloading there app you get access to these conference maps. But you can also register and connect with people and vendors there. When you set up a meeting with Qbengo you are subsequently helped to find that person or booth with turn-by-turn navigation inside the conference location. The cool thing is this also works in 3D. And this was exactly one of the issues I pointed to some time ago. For (expertise) maps inside organizations to work, you would need 3D-mapping technology, because most offices are multi-layered.

Qbengo is a start-up and a start-up needs focus. But you can easily see where I think they should and could go, right? Yep, expertise location for organizations. They have all the elements to make this work. This is (part of) our future and I think this is very exciting.

A Google Glas intranet?

Most people know the history of the intranet. And if you’re older you will have experienced its history. Many organization that have had an intranet for years are looking for ways towards a modern and future-ready intranet. But what is the future of the intranet? Many intranet experts and organizations are thinking about this question. Are we eventually going to be apply to wear the intranet?

From intranet to social intranet 

There’s lots of talk about using social media within organizations. In short this is also called the ‘social intranet’. The intention is to have an intranet that is more than most are used to: news, procedures, who-is-who and the restaurant menu. A ‘social intranet’ should make us forget the old intranet. The old intranet that often hardly supports the way employees do their daily work. 

From intranet to digital workplace 

For this reason the new intranet is also called the ‘digital workplace’ more and more. A new name to help us forget the old intranet and sell the intranet as an essential tool to support work. It stresses that fact that the intranet can be relevant to help knowledge workers get things done. Looking at the definitions of the digital workplace, it is intended to be a bit more than the ‘social intranet’. The digital workplace wants to be the place where a knowledge worker can do his/her work. Therefore it must also connect to and support the business processes (and related tools). (Of course this can also be done when it’s called a ‘social intranet’...)

From intranet to mobile intranet 

If the new intranet should truly support workers, it should also support him/her everywhere work is done. Therefore the logical step for the new intranet is to also become mobile. The knowledge worker needs access to the intranet everywhere he/she is getting things done. Slowly organizations are thinking about how to do this. 

But what comes after this? I want to share two of the steps I see. 

Location-based intranet 

When the intranet gets mobile access there will be a new demand for push-information. We have come to find push-informatie without context irritating. But when information is filtered based on your location, it could be useful. Services like Foursquare, Google Fieldtrip and Google Now give us glimpses into this future. In the same way this could be useful within organizations by providing information about nearby experts when you’re looking for help or which protocols apply to the part of the organization you’re walking around in. Furthermore location information added to messages employees are publishing also provided meaning and context. Posting a message in a factory can give it a totally different meaning, than posting it from a car on your way to work. 

Google Glass intranet 

One step further can relate to projects like Google Glass. Google Glass is trying to make finding and consuming relevant information and publishing it easier. You don’t have to carry your smart phone in your hand; information is projected right into your eyes so you can consume that information and publish and save content with easy gestures. Imagine the access to your intranet being like Google Glass. Everywhere you are you’ll have direct access to (the right internal) information. During meetings, on your way to meeting, when you bump into someone you planned to ask something, working on a document or product/service. The intranet is less and less something you go to, but something you wear. You don’t have to look for information, it will search for you depending on what you’re looking at and wear you are. 

What do you see as next-steps for the intranet? Do the above mentioned steps make sense? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

By the way, inspired by Dave Gray's work, I made the little drawings for this post by myself!

[This post was also published in Dutch on the Frankwatching blog.]

Another step towards internal maps

Outdoor maps are great. Google is doing a wonderful job with Maps. But what about indoor maps? I've been tracking posts about this topic for some time. And just recently Google announced it's taking Google Maps indoors. Here's a short video about his initiative:

I think this will have huge implications for companies as well. Just think about adding maps to your internal intranet employee directory.

Social technologies are extending organizations

McKinsey has been following the social business movement for some time now. And they're following to see if it can live up to the expectations. Recently they published the results of their 5th annual survey under 4200 global executives. The polled them how their organizations use social tools.

The finding of the report are interesting. There's clear progress: social tools are being used more and more and in more effective ways. When adopted across the networked enterprise and integrated in work processes of employees, clear benefits are seen. There's a boost in financial performance and market share, which relates to the results of previous surveys. However not many companies are fully networked, meaning they are internally and externally networked.

One of the most interesting things I read in the report was the fact that executives believe if organizational barriers to social tools diminish, they could transform the core business processes. This is a big statement as most business processes are formal and supported by heavy and expensive IT-systems. Exhibit 8 give you an idea of the processes that will/can be changed. This does not imply social tools are good for all business processes. Exhibit 7 should which business processes have the best fit with social tools. As you see, social tools are mostly used to scan the external environment.


The survey mentioned that 72% of the organizations have at least one social technology inhouse. And 40% have a social networking and blogging platform.

Of course we all want to know what the affordances of social business are. According to this report they are:

1. increasing speed to access knowledge
2. reducing communication costs
3. increasing speed to access internal experts

Another interesting finding is the fact that it is easier to loose benefits of social tools than to gain them. Implementing social tools is hard work and requires continuous effort.

Successful Intranet Search by Martin White @intranetfocus #intra11

Search has been a hot topic in the intranet space for a long time. Why can’t I find what I’m looking for inside the company, just like with Google on the Internet. Martin White’s breakout at the Intranet Conference (Congres Intranet) was about this topic and want to help us improve intranet search.

White started out by asking which search engine we used. A long list of search platforms is mentioned, ranging from open source search technology to Sharepoint search. Not many participants have the same engine.
This illustrates one of the points White wanted to make. Search isn’t easy. It not easy on the internet, and it’s hard on the intranet as well. He shows how different the search results are. This is not helpful for users and it makes search unnessissararily complex. This is one of the reasons user go for the easiest route on the internet: just use Google.

However inside companies one often cannot easily choose this route . On the internet you mostly know what you are looking for. It’s there. And the search engine helps you refind it. And most users are just happy with the results that the search engine provides anyway.

In this context it is surprising to see that most organizations don’t have a person responsible for search. About 3 of the 70 in the audience could say they are the owner of search. All have a search engine, but nobody’s responsible for improving search based on user requirements.

Low quality search results are hardly ever due to the search technology itself. The source of the problems is the organization around search and the fact that there is no budget reserved to improve search results.

So how do we improve search? White advises us to focus on what employees can’t find. Don’t focus on ‘hits’ (which is defined by White as: How Idiots Track Success). Focus on stories users tell about their search experiences.
Make sure you have a good search team. It should consist of the following people: an IT specialist, someone who researches the search logs, someone from business and a search manager. So you need 4 people to make search successful. Nobody in the audience could say they have such a team.

At the end of the breakout someone asked: Should we stop improving the search engine and start supporting people search? If we find the person, he/she will point us to the right information. White agrees with this approach. But someone else said: What to do when someone has left the company? Don’t we need search then? Yes, we do, says White. That’s why we need to focus on getting intranet search right.

Martin White also gave a keynote talk about mobile intranet. I’ll blog about that soon!

LinkedIn Skills

Looked at LinkedIn Skills. Interesting extension to Linkedin. Although it isn't really new functionality. All users could already fill in the expertise they (think they) have based on their work experience. To me this is one of the limitations of LinkedIn. Isn't it much more interesting to hear what others think of you? What expertise do they think you have? Who is the go-to person when you need someone with skill x? LinkedIn Skills basically only says: I think I'm the person you're looking for.

Re: Expertise Location by @mikegotta

Michael Gotta of Cisco wrote an interesting post some time ago about "Expertise Location: Don't Forget Process & Cultural Factors". He relates to the fact that Enterprise 2.0 is often sold by saying that social tools help find experts in the organization more easily. However what's the assumption underlying this?

The general assumption includes two primary ways of identifying "experts". The first method assumes that employee use of social tools (e.g., blogs, wikis, micro-blogging, communities) and social applications (e.g., ideation), enables their talent and business insight to be more visible and therefore more discoverable by co-workers. The second method revolves around the employee profile created as part of an enterprise social network site. It is assumed that employees will readily create and maintain rich profiles where they willingly share information about their job history, interests, hobbies, education, and areas of expertise. Rich employee profiles create another means for colleagues in need of assistance to search and connect to the right person - or access customized expertise location applications that leverag profile data to find the right resource anywhere in the organization. In both cases, the notion of "transparency" makes it easier for people in need of assistance to connect with the relevant expert.

I agree with these assumptions. I also agree with the fact that if employees use social tools they could be more easily found in the organization and/or seen as expert on a certain topic.
Gotta goes on to say expertise location has been around for some time and also points to Cisco's own solution for expertise location, Cisco Pulse. As far as I understand this tool automatically goes through company data and it's creators and builds an expertise map, giving users the opportunity to use the results to find experts in the organization.
Gotta closes his post with his main point by stressing expertise location is more than rolling out a tool in an organization. We have to pay attention to process and cultural factors as well. For instance, scarcity of information and resources. Or: accessibility of certain information due to security reasons. Privacy is also an issue. Is an employee's email box open for the whole company? And, to mention one more, culture. Is there an open culture in which employees want to share and post about their work?

Good points! But I want to go back to the assumption. It is assumed that employees use social tools. But do they? Yep, some, maybe lots will. But what happens if they don't? Are they then not an expert on one or more topic? The answer is simple: this can't be true. Of course, it does say a lot about employees who post about their work. Apparently they are open about what they know or need to know. And they're probably (more) willing to share.
Furthermore, is it possible to share all our knowledge. For instance, a programmer builds a new tool. In most companies he would have to write a report on the new tools. He'll probably also say in which language he wrote the code. But he'll never say: Hey, I'm an expert on that language. That's for others to decide.

So, we need to take a look how experts are really grown and found in organizations. How do you find the person you need in your organization? I've been writing quite a bit about this, so I'll keep it short here. Finding experts has to do with who you know. People refer to each other based on their experience with each other. Based on knowing each other you can say: this guy or girl is really good at ... This also has to do with how open or closed someone is. Someone can formally be an expert on a topic, but if he/she never has time to talk with you then he/she are not the one to go to. If you look at how people refer to each other in real-life you can also see they relate to expertise that can hardly be written down and captured by (social) tools. This all relates perfectly to Dave Snowden's KM principles, by the way.

Can this be supported by technology? I think so. At least for a larger part than the automated solutions I've seen so far. And Guruscan is the only company I know of that does this well.
To be clear: I'm not saying we shouldn't go for social tools or automated knowledge mapping in organizations. They are very helpful and can support more knowledge and communication process than ever before. But don't think you've solved the expertise location problem by using them...
I hope this helps. All feedback is welcome!

An implicit expertise network / IBM´s Expert Network on Slideshare

Luis Suarez recently pointed me to this. IBM set up an Expert Network on Slideshare, giving us a way to see all the slides produced by IBM-ers. Adam Christensen has a post explaining why this was done.

This got me thinking. I think this is a smart move.  Isn’t this a great way to implicitly show the expertise of IBM-ers? Of course LinkedIn tries to do the same, the other way around. You set up your profile. And you can connect Slideshare to your profile. Problem is, nobody says that profile is correct. And clicking through to the proof (e.g. your presentations) is not that easy. Furthermore you can´t see if that person is the only expert in that organization or the organization as a whole has expertise in a certain area.

I think if you’re looking for someone from IBM to help you out, the Expert Network on Slideshare will get you to the right man/woman much more quickly. What do you think of this move? And do you think such a network in Slideshare is a better expertise locator than LinkedIn? I´d love to hear your thoughts!

Social networking with Sharepoint 2010 @ ABB Global #epem

Next speaker: Stein-Ivar Aarsaether, ABB Global Web Management.

ABB is a global leader in power and automation technologies. 117000 employees. ABB has a long history (founded in 1883 after lots of mergers).

ABB’s intranet is a traditional CMS-intranet, based on Lotus Notes. In 2002 they were one of the top-ten intranets of the year (Nielsen).

Problems they have:

• Hard to find information and services you’re looking for
• Difficult to keep content updated
• Lack of collaboration tools

They organized an ABB Intranet Conference in 2007. In 2009 they decided to go with Sharepoint 2010. In 2010 they launched the 1^st version. Every couple of months they launch a new version.

ABB uses Google Search.

A new section in their intranet (based on SP 2010) allows employees to follow feeds of other employees (like Twitter). But it could be more interactive, like Facebook. For instance if you comment on someone’s feed he/she doesn’t see that… Commenting on activity stream in SP is not out-of-the-box.

ABB finds it hard to live up to the user expectations based on external experiences (internet).

Customizing SP is a lot of work, but the end result was good. Make clear distinctions what you customize and what not. And don’t expect SP to meet all your requirements.

ABB finds that Sharepoint governance should be multifaceted. Different governance for taxonomy, branding, information architecture, team roles, etc.

ABB finds that Sharepoint governance should be multifaceted. Different governance for taxonomy, branding, information architecture, team roles, etc.

They have governance for:

• Ordering new team spaces
• For pricing (free)
• For cleaning up unused spaces
• For ensuring the desired level of ‘brand building’

Plans they have are:

• federated search (based on FAST)
• move outside the firewall
• further integration

Location for Business: 3D Required

Location-based web services are hot these days. Even though the amount of people is limited, but growing rapidly. I enjoy using and experimenting with Foursquare. Currently I can't give you many examples of how location-based services have helped me (except for the fact that I'm Mayor of six places and I was awarded some cool badges...). But I'm sure I will be able to soon. I think it's just interesting to use follow this area and see how others are using it to generate business.

For companies I think there are many ways it can be useful. For one location-based services can be used as a people finder. And if you relate interests/expertise to those people, it's also an expertise finder. At least you could know where to find a person with/without a certain expertise. Current location-based applications will give you a 2D map telling you where to find that person.

One thing I hope will happen is that location services will also be available in 3D (Layar with Foursquare is a good start). Most companies have multi-floor buildings. Being able to see if the person you're looking for is on the first or second floor is helpful if not crucial. I'm curious when the first service will pop up that can do this. Or did I miss something and are there already applications doing this?

Have a nice weekend!

Is Your Organization a Process or a Network?

Is your organization a process (several operational steps to get things done) or a network (smart knowledge workers connecting to get things done)? Or is it both?

As an information architect I'm often confronted with this question. Usually not explicitly, but in a more implicit way. From an information process perspective you hear people talking about structured and unstructured information processes, for instance. I've shared my thinking about this topic in the past and I'm working on a longer post about this subject (to be published soon). I thought I'd start with something different. Three pictures to show the different views on organizations and how they relate. I'd love to hear you thoughts about these pictures.

What I see is managers and business process specialists look at organizations in this way:

So, the organization is put together as discrete, operational steps moving packets of information (the gray boxes) forward. (Loops back into the organization exist but are not in the picture).

Most employees see the organization in a different way. They see the organization as a network of people that have certain information or knowledge helping them get things done. Employees find the operational steps OK for very operational tasks, like time registration, but not for their core (knowledge) tasks. This could look like this:

I understand both approaches. Depending on how you look at (part of) an organization you see clearly defined steps or a chaotic network.

So my conviction is both are true. Both approaches exist in practice. If so, the pictures above should be combined. It could look something like this:

The interesting thing is the amount of time and money being invested in these approaches. Generally speaking you see lots of time and money being pumped into improving the first approach. Aligning and reengineering business processes, rolling out an ERP system, etc. The other approach is usually just there. It seems to be taken for granted. It's supported by email and more and more by platforms like Sharepoint. Some companies are also pushing social media into this space. In any case it is seen as infrastructure and investments are low.

This is strange to me because the largest part of the organization is organized as a community and network. People with a certain passion and expertise connect and collaborate to get work done. Of course there are operational processes in companies. And if they can be automated, we should do this quickly. However the amount of time and money being put into these operational improvements is, to me, disproportional to the amount of time being spent by knowledge workers on non-operational work.

Do you agree? Do you see both of these views in the company you work for? And do you take them as they are: related to each other? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Intranet in 2020 #intra10

4th keynote at Intranet 2010 by Peter Hinssen.
Will intranets be around in the future? 4 fundamentals:

• content (old, put stuff somewhere)
• intelligence
• knowledge
• collaboration (newer, share things)

The trash bin is not used a lot in IT.
We are drowning in information but are starved of knowledge - John Naisbitt. Is information still of strategic value?
Paperless office
Consumerization of IT. Leading to new behavior wrt information.
Information behavior is key. It's moving quicker than hardware development.
Digital is the new normal. We are half-way there. Let's take this to the limit.
It's not information overload, but it's filter failure. Show me your folders and I will tell you who you work for.
The depth of information will go to infinity. The price of information will go to 0. Privacy, we will live in a fish-bowl society.
Patience is also going to 0. Users don't want to fill things out again and again. And the internet will be real-time.
Now reflect on this, what does this mean for intranet (teams).
The new rules:

• zero tolerance for digital failure (Gmail down for 3 hours... Big problem, even on CNN. It had been up for 8 years...)
• Constantly better isn't necessary. Good enough is enough. Refer to Skype and mp3 and Blueray and netbook. But it may not break. Speed is more important than perfection.
• Total accountability. No more hiding. No complete control. Refers to Xobni.

Rethink your intranet using these rules.
Information behavior changes faster than information systems!!
Think about lifecycles of information.
Think about metadata (find things back, refers to Lakoff).
Where do you solve it? Don't focus on the display, but also on the warehouse.
Information doesn't work anymore. Not structured, unstructured, etc etc. It doesn't improve the quality of information.
Make the jump from information to intelligence. Relevance, types of content, reach of information and quality of content. An enterprise portal is not the solution, even though the CEO will buy into this.
But position your portal. How is it positioned, bottom up-top down, personalization, information architecture, etc. Refer to explorelimits.com.
It's very simple. Intranets are change processes. It's about information attitude, the future of the organization. Be proactive!

Award Winning Intranets of 2009 #intra10

3rd keynote at Intranet 2010 by James Robertson of Step Two Designs.

Innovation = originality + impact. Uncovering great ideas and approaches to intranet, so you can steal them (ethically of course).

James tells how the Intranet Innovation Award is set up. Jane McConnell is one of the judges. She should be one of next year's keynote at Intranet 2011.

CRS Australia is the Platinium award winner:

• seamless connection with SAP (human friendly interface so tasks get done, webforms etc) > done with one technical person

AEP (USA) Idea system:

• $8 million of concrete savings, $2 million in first month
• first offline organization, then support via platform
• organize around problems (a specific question!)
• specific target: min. of $1.7 million dollars of saving
• None of the generated ideas are anonymous (same for Océ). Anonymous posts are allowed but not published. They are sent to team.

Next example, Russian firm (CHTPZ). Integrates intranet with mobile. Lots of staff doesn't sit at desk. So push info to the staff and to the tools/devices they use.

Next award is for IDEO. Core: connecting people with people as richly as you can. They can fire off complex queries for people with certain expertise in a certain area. They applied their design research to their intranet.

Prophet (USA), Online performance measurement on the intranet. Improve and simplify the process. It saves them a lot of time.

Plus much more on the Step Two Design webpage. Contributions close on April 23.

ROI of Enterprise Microblogging

As you know Océ is experimenting with enterprise microblogging. And things are going very well. The number of users is still growing and the number of posts is too.

There's lots of debate about the ROI of social media. Recently I was asked if we try to calculate the ROI of our microblogging initiative for instance. This is what I replied:

We didn't do ROI calculations yet and don't know if we want to. Anyway users like Yammer for many reasons:

• sharing interesting stuff publicly,
• others like to be informed in this way (social search),
• use Yammer as pulse of the company,
• asking questions and getting answers from colleagues all over the world is great (people solve issues much quicker this way. It saved a colleague two weeks of her time!),
• less email more yams,
• implicit expertfinder,
• etc.

Hope this helps.

What Do Twitter Lists Mean to Me and for Business?

What do Twitter Lists mean? I think it will take a while to find out. Jeremiah Owyang points to recruiting: When hiring see on how many Lists they are mentioned. Debbie Weil calls Lists "the new measure of cool". Denis Hancock of Wikinomics also relates Lists to popularity, but wonders if popularity relates more to the number of people that follow your lists or the number of lists you're on. And Robert Scoble shares how Lists have changed the way he follows tweets.

I'm happy we have lists. One of the reasons people were using Tweetdeck, Brizzly and the like had to do with the fact that Twitter.com had no functionality to group the people you follow. And what these groups meant to us was clear. They were our own private groups in Tweetdeck and Brizzly.

Of course there were sites that helped people find tweeps related to certain topics. For instance Wefollow. However in Wefollow you could say which list you wanted to belong too. The amount of followers and people you follow made up your number on the list.

But what do Twitter Lists mean? My first idea was to change my groups in Tweetdeck and Brizzly into private Twitter Lists. So I did. But why would I keep them private? To show I don't read all the tweets of the people I follow? To show I read some tweets more closely than others? But everybody does, so why should I be ashamed of that? So, I opened up. All my old groups are now Lists.

But what do these lists mean? Well, I just hinted one meaning. I have three groups (at the moment) with tweeps that I follow closely. Following Luis Suarez's terminology I labeled them 'villages'. In this way I also want to make a statement: I follow these groups closely but there is no difference in importance or closeness between these groups. Maybe there will be in the future.

Lists have another meaning to me as well. How many Lists are you on? What does it do to you when you're on someone's Lists? Well, I feel flattered. And it encourages me. It also gives me a notion of what the List owner thinks of me. It tells me a bit about what expertise they think I have. (The weird thing about my List label 'village' is that I don't send that signal to the people on my list. It just tells them they are close to me and I follow them closely. Maybe this is a reason to change the label term in the future?)

But what do Twitter Lists mean to companies? Should companies build their own lists? And what does it mean for a company to be on a list? It would be interesting to see if the amount of Lists a company is on correlates with revenues or turn-over. Do you think this will correlate? What do you think Lists will mean for enterprises? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Tags van Technorati: business,technology,knowledge mapping,expertise location,micro blogging

Finding Experts in Your Organization

Some very interesting posts about Enterprise 2.0 tools and Expertise Location have been published recently. Let's start with the last one I read first.

Prof. Andrew McAfee has a great post about where he finds enterprise 2.0 tools are of most use. In short he says these tools are be used to reach out and connect to people we have weak ties with, potential ties or no ties at all. He's not saying they can't be used to support strong ties. They simply do and can. But when asked what gap e2.0 tools fill, it's firstly not the support of those strong ties.

This is very interesting. And I agree with his conclusion. We're seeing this in practice too in the company I work for. The surprise it gives people when they connect to people inside or outside the organization they've never met before!

McAfee's conclusions also relates to work done knowledge mapping and expertise location. And to a book I read some time ago: Cross & Parker, 'The hidden power of social networks'. It would be interesting to see if we could extend Dunbar's number. Then Dunbar relates to the number of strong ties we can maintain, <fill in name of number> number relates to the number of weak ties, etc. I'll get back to Dunbar below in this post.

Then the Wall Street Journal had an interesting post titled 'Who knows what?' It also addressed how companies can improve expert finding. The authors of the article point solely to social computing tools to help employees find experts in the organization in a quicker, more effective way.

This is definitely a way to go. But it also requires employees to use social computing tools and make their knowledge explicit. We know how hard this is, and it's sometimes not feasible at all. I blogged about this topic and the different strategies to expert finding several times in the past. Ross Dawson points to the WSJ post as well, and has written quite a bit about this topic.

Now back to Dunbar. Seth Godin had a nice (short - as always!) post about Dunbar's number. Stowe Boyd replied back that Godin doesn't get Dunbar's number. Godin says: Dunbar's number is the law. Our social networks are limited to around 150 people. We can only know about 150 people very well and maintain strong ties with them. This was the fact before the Internet and it still is. Boyd says: Not true. This is not what Dunbar meant and the Internet is proving that Dunbar's number needs to be updated. Mike Speiser over at GigaOM also thinks along this line.

I'm not really sure if the difference between Godin and Boyd is that big. Godin is not saying we can't have 'weak' or 'possible' ties. But the limitation to 'strong ties' is around 150. I agree with Godin this is something we need to keep in mind when we work for large companies, but also when we populate our social tools with way more than 150 friends. Keeping ties strong with more than 150 people is hard. Some can do it, but most can't.

I'd love to hear what you thing about expert finding in organizations. And do you think Dunbar's number needs to be updated or is not applicable to the Internet?

Tags van Technorati: social networking,dunbar,communication,social media,enterprise 2.0,expertise location

Presentation #kmnl 2009 by Rene Jansen

Rene Jansen gave the second presentation at KM Made in Holland. Here's his presentation (in Dutch):

Kennismanagement met Winkwaves Kenniscafe

View more documents from Rene Jansen.

Some personal notes:

Winkwaves (gestart in 2005) is Rene's company. Their fascination is how people live together and collaborate in knowledge intensive organizations.

And how "untapped potential of technology can contribute when organization have more than one coffee machine".

Tells about Winkwave's Knowledge Cafés.

The different roles in social media: Tippers, Storytellers, self-advertisers, Archivers, Promotors, Reactors, Connectors, lurkers, one day flies.

They use persona research: segmentation based on goals, attitude and behavior.

Points to the Soft systems methodology (Peter Checkland): start with looking at the way people really work/live.

Social media can only do the following: make content visible and support many-to-many conversations. Sheet 15 is very interesting in this context!

Gives explanation of what they did for the intranet site of D66 (Dutch political party). Button 'Thank you/Like' most used feature of knowledge café.

Also tells about how they see dynamic profiling and expert finding. Based on what they see how people interact.

Tags van Technorati: knowledge management,social networking

Searching inside Companies

Working for a large company can be tricky sometimes. Definitely when it comes to meeting a colleague you don't know. You only know his or her name and the meeting room.

Of course most companies have who-is-who databases with a picture of the colleague you're meeting (Yellow Pages). So now you can do some facial pattern recognition besides looking for the meeting room.

Can't this be done in a better way? Micello seems to have asked this too. They want to be the Google Maps of the inside of buildings. So Google Maps helps you find the address. Micello takes it from there and helps you find the location you're looking for after you went in the front door. For example: you're looking for a store in a shopping mall. Google Maps will take you to the mall. Micello will take you to the shop in the mall.

Now extend this to companies. Search (in general) in enterprises is usually not very well implemented. This also goes for finding locations insides companies. Micello could help solve this issue. It could map the inside of the company.

And take this idea one step further. What if you linked this application to Sharepoint or (internal) Twitter? Then you could project information on Micello like: where are the experts in a certain areas located, where do they meet, where do colleagues write about a certain topic, etc. All of a sudden you're not only search for the location (of a colleague); you're looking for people that could help you solve certain problems or work with you on a topic.

I think Micello has an promising proposition. I do hope it will be integrated in Google Maps or so someday. Because, as most knowledge workers, I don't want yet another tool to keep an eye on.

Tags van Technorati: search,expertise location,social networking

Approaches to Expertise Location

Just commented on an interesting by Ross Dawson on "Expertise Location: linking social networks and text mining".

I agree that using "intelligent text mining" is an interesting approach to expertise location in companies (and on the internet). We experimented with this some time ago in the company I work for with interesting results. This experiment was set up because - as we all experience - employees fill in their Yellow Page profile, but don't keep them up to date. (In our company 10% filled in their profile and 3% of that 10% kept it up-to-date...) Relating the filled-in profile to mining could trigger employees to keep it up to date. And it could also (partially) fill in their profile.
We also combined this with a more social approach, which is now being capitalized in Guruscan. Because using mining to find and define expertise limits you to what's in databases. And when we write reports about a tool, for instance, we don't mention we're very good at PERL programming. Maybe the report shortly mentioned the tool has been programmed in PERL, but that doesn't say much about the level of expertise. So, this social layer collects the tacit stuff. It's a necessary layer and it's also closet to real expert networks.

We've published quite a bit on our work. Here are two references:
- Samuel Driessen, Willem-Olaf Huijsen, Marjan Grootveld, “A framework for evaluating knowledge-mapping tools”, Journal of Knowledge Management, 2007, Vol. 11, Iss. 2, page 109-117.
- Willem-Olaf Huijsen, Samuël J. Driessen, Dion Slijp, "ExpertFinder: Collaborative Expertise Localization", I-Media 2007.

Tags van Technorati: knowledge mapping,knowledge management,expertise location