I thought this presentation was both alarming and compelling.  

Yves Noble told us about how Capgemini (a global IT services provider) is moving from its EDRMS to a more interactive and people oriented system.

Here’s the alarming bits:

·        In the 8 years or so that their EDRMS had been in place they’d experienced a 20% year-on-year decline in usage

·        The average age of documents was 3.5 years

·        Their EDRMS was generally considered to be complex and confusing

So, they had a simple idea – to copy what works on the intranet.

They chose open source technologies based purely on cost.  With 80,000 employees in 30 countries the cost of proprietary software was too high.  Interestingly, in their high level evaluation sheet open source had many more marks against it than the two proprietary tools they considered.  In particular, they identified clear risks around available expertise, vendors, internal skill base; and deployment.  However, despite these negatives the dollar imperative was too strong to ignore.

Their solution comprised:

·        Drupal – for CMS

·        phpbb – for forums

·        Mediawiki – for wikis

·        Google search – for search

They also have links with their other tools including the regional portals and the corporate communications portal so this is probably not the ‘one solution to rule them all’ but is an interesting start. 

Note: this is early days so while there are good indicators of success in the short term, it is hard to predict the medium to long term impact. 

They have developed no training, suggesting to users that they just dive in.  For some of the tricks and quirks users themselves have created a ‘how to’ wiki.

Lessons:

·        People love getting rid of institutional control

·        Users are creating content in unexpected ways

·        Community moderators are taking their roles seriously

·        Auto-administration is not a dream – people are voluntarily alerting and cleaning up the parts that are not right

·        Moving from email to instant messenger and collaborative tools

·        Easy to deploy

·        Simple, intuitive, fast, cheap

Challenges:

·        Transparency is a concern as is IP protection and security

·        Redefining and/or requiring the role of Knowledge Manager

·        Measuring the actual impact

·        The generation factor

·        Push back from IT over the lack of vendor support

·        RSS savvy users are not so common

·        People getting used to switching from document folders to tags and folksonomies

·        Getting connected with the outside world and involving clients

Dave Pollard’s paper focused on how KM is (and should be shifting) from a discipline that requires very structured tools and technologies to one that is more fluid.

The slide deck is here: www.slideshare.net/davepollard

I found his discussion of the Gen Millennial fascinating.  This generation, used to using instant messenger and texting, has a focus on conversation not on content.  This can lead to ‘true enough’ thinking where an answer doesn’t necessarily have to be well researched or grounded in fact but rather if it is validated by enough of my peers it can be true enough and hence sufficient.

Oddly enough this echoes the book I’ve been reading while travelling lately: True Enough by Farhad Manjoo. I’m not quite through it yet.  The point he makes that has really struck me so far is that through the internet we gravitate to the opinions that reflect or support our own.  In the face of many voices, saying the things that I intuitively agree with, my own position is reinforced regardless of objective fact.  A little scary and perfectly human.

This keynote was based on John’s book ‘Innovation Nation’.  He argues less that America is in crisis around innovation but more that it is becoming the boiled frog (‘boiled frog’ is the Charles Handy metaphor for situations that worsen gradually so that you don’t realise you’re in trouble it’s all over – the frog is boiled and hence dead).

While John was talking about America the points seemed to be applicable to New Zealand.  Innovation blossoms in diversity hence multi-disciplinary approaches to innovation are often what are needed for success.  This means that if you are an innovative country or company you will need different actors at different parts of the value chain e.g. sales, technology, design etc.

It is possible for countries to focus on just one part of the value chain and get extremely good at delivering that element. So, the good news for NZ is that scale is not necessarily an indicator of success but rather that knowing and focusing on the area of the value chain we want to be good at is important. 

In a global economy to even be a contender what is needed are talent, resources and infrastructure.  John points to the nations who are both buying and acquiring talent.  In one year, China graduated 600,000 engineers and scientists, compared to America’s 70,000.   In addition, China is also seducing top scientists to work there.

Countries are adopting diverse strategies for innovation.  The suggestion is that America’s future lies in being a systems integrator.  In pulling together the design, technology and business inputs from the global supermarket for innovation talent. 

So, for NZ the message is:

·        Have we and should we make the decision to be an innovation economy?

·        Are there particular parts of the innovation value chain that we should be concentrating on?

·        What are we doing about talent, resources and infrastructure?

So for the company I work for I think the message is:

·        That we do a lot of innovation (relative to our size) and yet we don’t really work our way through the value chain in anything other than a random serendipitous way depending upon individual interests, time and priorities.

·        That we need to think, for any innovation endeavour, about whether we have all the multi-disciplinary elements that we need.

·        Are there opportunities for us, on a very small scale, to use the global supermarket?

A couple of people have asked me recently where I get my stories from hence this post. This post gives some insights into how to find and create stories that can be used in business, training or presenting.

Why tell stories?  I think the most compelling reason is that they are fun.  Human beings are hardwired to enjoy stories.  Walk into a classroom of 5 year olds at story time and you’ll see what I mean.  Stories help people to learn while at the same time removing the pressure of learning.  When people know they’re being told a story they often just relax - and that’s when they’re most able to pick up the messages.

It often appears easier to tell other peoples’ stories.  They feel more legitimate and they expose us less.  But I’ve found that people respond best to authenticity and the most compelling stories are often the personal ones.

So, the key to story for me (and I’m just a beginner on this) was actually recognising that I had some.  I started small with one or two stories and have started to build them up.  The easiest place to start is with what Doug Stevenson calls vignettes in his book Never Be Boring Again.  These are short two or three minute pieces designed to illustrate a particular point.  Often, I’ll use several of them in one talk.  These can be practiced and can be applied to more than one situation.  I now have a shorthand word or phrase for these so I can just jot down “the GRiT story” or whatever and I know what the story is and what its point is.

I’m still getting the hang of longer pieces.  A great longer piece I’ve come across is Malcolm Gladwell’s speech on Precociousness where a narrative about running starts his talk.

I find longer pieces really good in eliciting emotions.  In the case of Gladwell’s talk the emotion elicited is curiosity which is good place for an audience to be if they’re about to listen to 45 minutes of someone talking.  I’ll often “bookend” these.  So, I’ve got a couple of stories that I use (one is mine and the other isn’t) where I open a paper with them (and use them to introduce the paper) and then close the paper with them (by using the story to illustrate the key point).  In storytelling parlance these are called “loops”.  The masters, like Billy Connelly, are so accomplished at this that they use what is called “nested loops”.  With nested loops the story opens then leads to another and then leads to another and then they are all closed in reverse order.  Watch a Billy Connelly DVD or hear him perform live to see an expert in action.

So, back to finding stories.  Each of us has a narrative - a number of unique and special things that have happened to us but that have universal meaning.  Some time of quiet reflection will help you to find these.  Or if you want a more structured approach, Jamie Smart’s technique is a good one.  This works best in pairs but you could do it on your own with pen and paper:  

1.  Ask yourself the question “How did you come to be here?” Here could be reading this blog, in this room, at this point in your career, in this town etc… 
2. Answer the question
3. Ask “How did you come to …” picking up on the key point in your first answer. 
4. Go 10 questions deep looking for 10 discrete situations
5. Find out about each situation
6. What stories can you construct about each?  What messages are there that could be applicable.  Think about the point of each of the 10 and how they could be used with an audience.
7. Pick out the two or three that you enjoy the most and work those up
8. Aim for the vignette first

Have fun!

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.