MIT  Sloan Management Review has just published an article on how IBM harnessed the ideas of its 150,000 employees and stakeholders to get its latest technologies to market.

Using bulletin boards and intranet pages, IBM opened discussion of innovation up to its entire global team. 

The findings of the research are that good ideas didn’t bubble up but rather that there was a huge number of ideas identified that then needed sifting and evaluating.  The authors identify the following lessons:

On the positive side:

·         Many people have important strategic ideas

·         Online conversation and sophisticated technology can provide a way for those ideas to impact on problems and generate value for a company

The limitations:

·         Few contributors built constructively on others comments in this online environment.

·         Analysts and managers were essential for taking the ideas generated and making them useful.

IBM’s Jam had a defined goal and process to help manage the movement of a brainstorming task from a real-time, real location exercise to one that took place 24/7 in an electronic environment. 

On Friday a friend sent me an email advertisement from a company purporting to be “a leading Knowledge Management consultancy within the local government sector”.

Their offer? – a Public Records Act Compliance Health Check to help local authorities prepare for the PRA audits.  They want to “assist you and to ensure you are on track for 2010 PRA audits”.

Hmmm…sounds reasonable?  Maybe even useful?

Well, yes but…..local authorities do not get audited under the Public Records Act. This kind of advertising by salespeople, consultants and vendors is irresponsible. 

I think local authorities should absolutely have a plan for good recordkeeping, which includes their requirements under the Act.  I don’t think that to get them there we should be misleading them, intentionally or unintentionally about these requirements.  This is simply not necessary.

Other PRA myths….

“XYZ system is compliant with the Public Records Act”

What exactly does this mean?  Are there detailed system requirements hidden in the PRA?  Of course not.  Until such point that there is a mandatory standard for systems, this statement is untrue.  Furthermore, systems are not compliant – organisations are.  If I buy a fully-featured system and install it on everyone’s desktop but no-one uses it have I achieved compliance?  I don’t think so. Systems can only support compliance.  If a vendor tells you their solution is compliant with the Public Records Act ask them to tell you how - and whether people in their current implementations are actually using it. 

“All emails must be kept”

This is a favourite of some of the sellers of email archiving solutions.  There are many emails that you would no more keep than you would the post-it left on your desk by a colleague suggesting a time for lunch.  It is not the format that is important it is the content.

“We will be audited in 2010”

As above, local authorities are not covered by the audit provisions of the PRA.  For public offices you may or may not be audited in 2010.   2010 is when audits start and, in time, there will be an audit timetable released.  You could have 18 months up your sleeve or you could have 18 months + 5 years.  What does this mean?  Well, now is a good time to start putting a plan together and acting on it so that you are on the journey.

Here’s another example of snake-oil salesmanship from a recent PC World Supplement:

“Unified communications means all forms of communication from a person - their phone calls, txts, emails and instant messages - are centrally stored.  This not only makes it easy to keep track but puts organisations like xxxxx in compliance with the Record Management Act, which comes into effect in 2010.”

How many errors can you spot in the above?  What other PRA myths have you come across?

I’ve been asked about 3 top pieces of advice for people new to records management.  Here’s my top three:

·        Don’t overcook things – there is a real temptation to feel daunted by how much there is to do and a related temptation to really overcook things.  Thinking about business benefit and business risks often provides a helpful cross-check

·        Make a plan – before diving in, make a plan and test this with peers, superiors, staff and trusted advisors.  This will also help you to set and manage expectations.

·        Communication and technical skills – you need to be able to talk with the business about their needs and you need to be able to talk to the I.T. team about what is possible.  Start looking for opportunities to practice and improve these skills.

A couple of months ago I wrote a post about why I’m no longer using Delicious.  Columnist Jeremy Wagstaff has a more detailed article on the demise of bookmarks and what has changed in recent years.

One of the first and simplest pieces of functionality that organisations put on their SharePoint sites is the ‘News’ bit. This allows people to contribute short items to a running list.  Here’s what is working and what is not working about this for us. 

A bit of context first: we use our SharePoint site for everything from document management, to time recording, to intellectual property development.  The only other application that people use as often is Outlook.

We used to email out important announcements and now they appear on our front page daily.  This seems to be working with people responding quickly to any simple procedures that are posted there.  For example, we all fly a lot – over winter we prefer people to take full flexi fares because airports are often closed at this time due to fog.  This got posted up and immediately was reflected in the fares that people were buying.  No dialogue just a change in behaviour. 

Where it is really working is in the communication of little snippets of news.  Previously we would have been clogging up email inboxes or, more often than not, simply not bothering to tell people what is going on.  We use the news to communicate:

·        Industry changes and announcements

·        Customer feedback

·        New assignments

·        Achievements of the team.

And the feedback is that people like reading these.

This is the good news.  It would be great to just stop the story here.  However, there is some less good news and that is about the level of contribution.  Should it matter that, in a team of 8: 65% of entries are contributed by one person; 30% by another; and 5% by a third?  Or maybe this is just about job role. Maybe this will evolve…let’s see.

I’ve not given an awful lot of thought to brand despite owning my own business for the past 4 years.  I suppose I’ve thought that brand is something you need if you are a tube of toothpaste but not if you are a professional services firm.

Reading ‘Buying In’ by Rob Walker made me realise that we do have a brand and that there are specific reasons why people choose our brand and not another brand.  The more authentic we are, and the more we act in congruence with this brand the more some people will be attracted to it and others repelled.  We need to be telling a story to ourselves and to others.

Most importantly we need to realise that we are not so much competing against other brands as against other demands on peoples’ attention.

So, ‘Buying In’ got me thinking about brand.  Other than that it didn’t do much for me.  After 2 days of reasonably solid reading I’ve got 1.5 very small pages of big notes.  I liked the stories but couldn’t really generate many new understandings or ideas.

I just came across this post by David Meerman Scott which is convincing in defence of social media in the workplace. 

The article also contains a link to an excellet set of social media guidelines from IBM.

It seems like the latest trend in enterprise content management (ECM) tenders is to ask for Web 2.0 functionality or collaboration functionality which is usually translated in the fine print into ‘blogs and wikis’.  So how useful are they really in a business setting? 

Clearly there are a range of possibilities – we could use them to have a conversation with customers, communities or amongst ourselves.  All of this sounds very credible.  I’m on the lookout for real examples of where this has succeeded and examples of where this has failed.  Do send me your stories.

On the flipside of this is that maybe they are yet another distraction.  In a world where most people are paid by ‘time served’ regardless of outcome (which is a topic for another day) do businesses want employees reading and posting to blogs when they should be working?  Visits to blogs drop dramatically over the weekends.  Is reading blogs a legitimate business activity or is it a substitute for action?  I read blogs while I eat breakfast before I start work.  Would it be appropriate for me to spend the first hour of my work day perusing blogs?  I subscribe to about 50 blogs and some of them are work related but not all of them.  What do you think?

Grant Margison developed a technique called ‘gridlock’ which he has used to great effect in many different situations.  It’s a method for dealing with opposing views in a way that extracts the best from each.  I have heard Grant talk about gridlock many times but didn’t realise, until recently, that I’d really only understood it on an intellectual level and not on a ‘doing’ level.

A couple of months ago I taught a change management course and, when I taught the gridlock component found myself really understanding it at a deep level – isn’t that often the way?  One has to teach something to truly learn it.

What was remarkable though was what happened afterwards.  In my work with several organisations around the country I found gridlocks springing up all over the place.  By being able to mentally put the opposing views ‘side by side’ in my head I built a clearer picture of what was going on and was better able to help the organisations deal with the issues.

In my information management work, here are some of the typical gridlocks that emerge:

Leadership

Getting Started

Autonomy versus centralisation

And the other remarkable realisation….I found gridlocks in my personal life as well.  Have you ever felt like “part of me wants to go to the gym but part of me thinks it would be better to just relax at home” or something similar?  Then you’re encountering an internal gridlock – two opposing views both with best intent but different means of getting there. 

The good news is that the first step in dealing with a gridlock is recognising that it exists – setting it up mentally.   The next step involves a simple but effective process.

I’m a devotee of Library Thing.  Library Thing is an online tool that allows you to catalogue your personal library and share it with others.  When I first joined Library Thing I spent a happy afternoon entering my books – yes, I know…. and now I just update my entries when new shipments arrive from Amazon. One of the great features is that when I type in a book title Library Thing will find the book for me (or a selection and allow me to select the one concerned) and then populate all the other information about it – including a picture of the cover.  This alleviates the boredom factor of having to painstakingly apply lots of metadata about one’s books.

I haven’t bothered to look at other peoples’ libraries but I have downloaded and installed the Wordpress widget which you can see in the bottom right hand menu.  This randomly circles through my library presenting 4-5 books.  Very cool – I feel this gives me some value from the time I spent putting the book titles in.  It’s always a great reminder of some of the gems sitting on my shelf that I might have forgotten about.