cazh1

Sorting with Sound

Jim MacLennan — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 00:31:48 +0000

via Geek.com -- yes, I subscribe to stuff like this in my RSS reader …

www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8g-iYGHpEA

I thought this was interesting on two levels …

The Engineering student within appreciates the differences in sorting techniques (although I think I could speed up that bubble sort …)
I also think these videos provide a simple illustration of the power of multi-media information sharing; the audio helps the animated “description” of the sorting techniques

www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXAjiDQbPSw

I freely admit to be a bubble-sort bigot, as I never truly understood the heapsort algorithm. But think how this combination visualization / audio tool helps illustrate the concept; I’d love to see an interactive tool that lets me step through the sort and see the loops and the “stack” of values.

Another important power of effective visualizations -- they get your audience thinking in new and different ways as well!

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Post tags: 02 Art, 03 Science, algorithms, coder, communicating complexity, Elegant, interesting stuff, multi-media information sharing, programming, sort, sound, stack, subtlety, Technical communication, video, visualization, YouTube

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A Little Too Literal (or, How to Teach Innovation)

Jim MacLennan — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 02:04:03 +0000

Spoiler alert: It can’t be taught …

What are you, somebody's lawyer? - Jim Dempsey, ca. 1984

One of the questions I get – and I’m getting this a lot lately – is how to get people to think more analytically, less literally. We need folks to stop focusing on the mechanical task of manipulating reports with Excel just to compute some answers. How about learning to use Excel, Access, and whatever native query / data download tools are available – to pull some data from the system, just to take a look? How about playing with the data, maybe stumbling upon some trends and identifying some real opportunities?

Ah, but that’s not what you asked for … It’s like working with a bunch of lawyers, taking shelter behind literal interpretations, following the letter (rather than the spirit) of the “law”.

I think that people are not always incented to ask questions, but to provide answers. Yes, differentiating between the two is a bit of a gray area, but when I’m “just too busy to think about that”, and I feel I have more work to do then fits the time available, the focus will always be on getting a result. Not necessarily the result or the best result, but just a result. If you ask for a metric, I will give you the metric; I won’t ask the next question.

I’ve asked folks to eliminate steps in a workflow [process]. Their solution was to reduce the number of steps in the workflow by combining multiple tasks into a single step.

Hey, I successfully answered your question – I went from 10 steps to 8.

Unfortunately, you didn’t reduce the actual work being done – and you destroyed my ability to analyze the time sinks in the process, because I’ve lost granularity. (But I eliminated a step, just like you asked…)

How Do You Teach Intellectual Curiosity and Innovation?

Actually, I don’t think you can.

No, I’m not defeatist – I think that there are ways to address this challenge. But to me, traits like innovation, imagination, a sense of adventure, the willingness to try and fail, really can’t be taught.

You don’t have to; it’s already in everyone’s psyche, you just have to tease it out of ‘em. There are the classics (Establish an Environment of Innovation, Give ‘em Permission to Fail, Establish Audacious Goals, etc.) – but you also have to lead by example. Try some little things: rearrange your office, change seats in your standing meetings, buy your team lunch (or beers). And try some big things: learn how to automate Excel or Access (beyond recorded macros), develop some SharePoint sites (and figure out how to hack it with javascript).

But most of all, as you prod, push, pull, and otherwise exhort your team to new ways of thinking – keep an eagle eye out for any little bit of progress in their thinking, a glimmer of off-the-wall innovation – and call it out. We were all kids once, but corporate America kind of beats it out folks. You have to celebrate the little things, as people get their sea legs and the natural impulses take over.

Innovation can’t be taught – you just have to remind folks how fun it can be, how good they can be.

(image from Andy C. / Wikimedia Commons)

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Post tags: analytics, Data, imagination, innovation, Intellectual Curiousity, Knowledge Management, metric, Possibilities, query

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The Magic In the Middle

Jim MacLennan — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 02:58:49 +0000

I don’t know where I first heard that phrase, or what it originally meant, but I have been using it a lot in the last few weeks …

Consider the entire user population for any web site or application. You can generalize all user populations into three Pareto-inspired groups …

Top 20% – The folks who “get it”, and have the brains, the interest, and the desire to fully understand the system / tool / report / whatever, and get the most benefit out of it. In Pareto terms, the 20% that get 80% of the value.
Bottom 20% – The “hopeless”; those that just don’t get the concept (and need constant handholding), have no interest in using the app (at best, they will have someone do it for them), and no desire to expand their horizons and learn something new. In Pareto terms, the 20% that cause 80% of the problems.
Middle 60% – aka “everybody else”. This is the group of users that could get value out of the project, process / program, but need more handholding, guided learning, and/or managerial promises (/threats) to commit to learning how to use and apply this new tool.

Click for the original ...

I call this last group “the magic in the middle”; this is the user group you need to win over to ensure success for the project. In corporate IT, most projects would be considered a failure if they only got 20% of their target audience to realize the promised value – then again, no one expects 100% success, especially with the bottom 20% of folks that will Just Never Get It. So, the make or break “target market” for training and retention is the “magic in the middle” – the folks who need a reasonable level of documentation and training to get things to work.

Note that “magic” refers to the fact that what really differentiates success – that core region of 60% – is the make-or-break group that takes the extra effort. It’s not good enough that your top finance folks understand the new reporting and analytics system – the middling folks that need more handholding and examples are the ones you need to focus on. It’s not good enough that your top project managers understand the new methodology – the journeyman PMs that have more tech background than change management and communication skills need guidance and templates and checklists to make sure the minimal I’s are dotted and T’s are crossed.

Interesting Observation …

This is one of the core reasons why analogies between corporate IT and consumer IT often fail. How many times have people in the business asked IT for projects as flexible, ubiquitous, user friendly, and high quality as Flickr, Basecamp, and gMail? Or tried to address internal communication and collaboration challenges with tools like Facebook, Twitter, and Google Groups? Why do folks look at highly target-marketed sites / communities of practice, and cynically wonder why internal IT can’t turn over project requests with the same level of speed and quality?

One key reason – those sites only need to go after the Top 5% group of focused, engaged, and technically able potential consumers – because the internet is so big, there is plenty of money to be made from such a small percentage of the total user population. Unfortunately for corporate IT, it is not OK to implement systems that are effective only for 20% of the target user community – expectations are more like 50-80% of the user population needs to be reasonably glib in the system to be judged effective.

… but What Does It Mean?

Corporate IT is forced to go after the “middle” group – the 60 percent of the user base who needs a lot more TLC to understand and be effective in the tools and systems we provide.

However, I call it “magic” for a reason. You can leverage a lot of value once you realize that “the magic is in the middle”:

Training: When you understand the low-end expectations for end-user competence, you can target your training material at that level – and no lower.
Testing for 100% of all cases is exhausting and time consuming, a real drain on resources. However, only testing the basics (the Top 20%) won’t require a lot of rigor, for the error checks are simplistic and the level of scrutiny is much higher. If you want to do an acceptable amount of decent quality testing, your test cases should involve “the magic in the middle”.
Vendors: Bringing them in for a demo? Salesmen typically target business scenarios that are the “low hanging fruit” (in the Top 20%), and it’s easy to understand when the software can’t handle the “worst case scenario” (the Bottom 20%); get the sales team to demo something from “a typical Day In the Life” (the Middle 60%)

The Top 20% group is the easiest to service, the Bottom 20% is the easiest to ignore. The magic is in the middle, and success here separates the excellent from the also-rans in corporate IT.

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Post tags: Cognition, Education, FaceBook, Google, LinkedIn, Social Networks, Twitter

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What Really Motivates Us? Insights for your Tech Team

Jim MacLennan — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 02:59:13 +0000

Over the last month or so, a large number of authors in my RSS reader called attention to Dan Pink’s ‘Drive’ video …

Props to Cool Infographics (home of the Caffeine Poster!) with the post that introduced me to the video. Key insight from Randy Krum: is this a video? A well done presentation? Or another innovative infographic?
Global Nerdy (a site with style and substance – content does not match the title!) calls out that this idea has direct applicability to work in software development – really, any systems design, development, and/or implementation work.
TechDirt draws a connection between the message of the video and Shirky’s ideas around cognitive surplus – and how current incentive structures drive down creative output.
Aggregated Intelligence, Lifehacker, and Anecdote just linked to the video, no deep insights – just more votes on the relevance of this video!
And leave it to Coding Horror to pull the deepest insights (and the best post title). Atwood is a great writer, and draws a great straight line from the video’s call for a driving vision, to specific examples from his experience in building Stack Overflow.

With so many brilliant minds pointing me in this direction, I had to watch it – and yes, I was impressed by the presentation style and the content. It struck all the same chords that were called out above – and got me to stretch my presentation style a bit.

I hold quarterly meetings with my groups in IT, designed to continually invigorate and reinforce communications up, down, and across the business and IT organizations. And – free lunch for all, plus a chance to regularly hone my presentation style, and try out new things.

I have long been loathe to demonstrate software or do any sort of “live” presentation in front of a crowd – the silence can be deafening when Murphy strikes. But I like the message of the video – the style and length just fit nicely with the general themes I was covering this past quarter. So I took the chance and embedded the link in a PowerPoint slide, and ended my slides with the video. What did I learn?

Always test the internet connection beforehand – make sure there are no unfortunate proxy logins to get past
Do NOT rely on the speakers in your laptop (I had to scramble for some external speakers – thanks, Andy!)
Never underestimate the ability of a technical audience for introversion, insight – and outspoken feedback!

I did get some nice responses from my team – not in the group setting, but a couple of folks came to me afterwards, marvelling about how they had been thinking about the same ideas recently. A double win – new presentation tool, and new insights into the creativity and openness of my team!

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Post tags: YouTube

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Defining Business Benefits: Hard and Soft

Jim MacLennan — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 03:09:27 +0000

All projects should have a clear objective, a practical plan,
and an understanding of the costs and benefits to get the thing done.

Easy to say, but a lot of project teams struggle to crisply and clearly define specific business benefits. One way to move the process forward would be to have a clear understanding of the types of business benefits you might claim.

Hard benefits come from firm commitments to make measurable differences in the amount of revenue generated or savings realized. When claiming hard benefits, the business manager will actually increase their revenue budget (or reduce their expense budget) because of the impact of this project.

Real, measurable “Top Line”: volume / revenue growth
- “I will be able to sell 10% more …”
- “Market share will grow 2% …”
- “This new product line will generate 5MM pounds incremental sales …”

Real, measurable “Bottom Line”: cost reduction, FTE reduction (people)
- “I will cut 10% of my use of electricity …”
- “I will eliminate two FTEs [positions] …”

Your guess is as good as mine ...

Soft benefits come from the strong belief of the business manager that the benefits will be there – but they may be hesistant to make changes to their budget. The hesitation may be there because there is some risk of attaining the benefits from other factors; or, the savings are based on unsubstantiated estimates (ie. “educated guesses”, aka onager heuristics). When claiming soft benefits, the business manager may not necessarily increase their revenue budget (or reduce their expense budget), hedging against other factors.

An important type of soft benefits is Cost Avoidance; a project that automates a manual process could allow the company to increase the number of transactions processed without adding incremental headcount. You haven’t reduced the operating budget, but you have enabled more productivity without additional cost – this is cost avoidance, and it is an important soft benefit.

Benefits that are subject to risk could be dealt with by making them soft benefits; if the manager is confident of the magnitude of the savings (”… this will cut 20% off the cost …”) but not of the likelihood of the savings (”… if everything goes our way …”), then you should call the total amount a soft benefit.

Anticipated “Top Line”: volume / revenue growth
- “I will be able to sell 10% more, as long as …”
- “Market share should grow …”
- “This new product line gives us a leg up on 5MM pounds incremental sales …”

Anticipated “Bottom Line”: cost reduction, FTE reduction (people)
- “I will cut 10% of my use of electricity …”
- “I will eliminate two FTEs [positions] …”

Anticipated “Bottom Line”: cost avoidance
- “… this will allow me to process three times the volume …”
- “… this will eliminate downtime …”

Productivity – Many systems projects involve automating manual processes and/or streamlining overly complex processes. Productivity is increased when it takes less time for fewer people to generate more work and more results.

Productivity benefits are quantified as a reduction in the total number of effort-hours per month required to perform a task. We often speak in terms of full time equivalents, or FTEs; to keep the math simple, one FTE is about 2000 hours of work per year.

Productivity is a soft benefit because we do not always remove people from the work force when implementing productivity improvements. Typically, the aim of any automation is to free people up to do other process management or analytical tasks. Note, however, that you can turn productivity into a hard benefit by reducing either overtime or headcount.

Note also that it is difficult to establish a common and fair hourly rate for a worker, due to many factors (including job type and geographical wage rates). For this reason, it is sufficient to express productivity in terms of labor hours saved.

Next: Marching down the P&L and the Balance Sheet

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Theory of Constraints in IT: Keeping Busy, but Adding No Value?

Jim MacLennan — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 00:59:21 +0000

Lean manufacturing in IT?

A good conversation this week with some IT folks, talking about how Lean principles apply to IT work.

The specific topic was the Theory of Constraints, and the example used was optimization of a production line. To fully optimize the whole line, it’s entirely probable that we will be underutilizing a specific workstation. If we optimize every workstation (point optimization), we will build up WIP inventory at the slower points – therefore generating waste.

For people on your IT team, “building up inventory” translates to working on portions of low-priority, creating “next steps” work that appears on the next person’s To-Do list – work that the other folks just can’t get to.

The trick is to understand that it’s okay for any one resource to be underutilized. One workstation stands idle, but overall output is optimized with the least amount of waste. The problem is that for most people, it’s very hard to allow yourself to be idle. It just doesn’t seem right; time is precious, and you don’t want to appear expendable.

So how do Lean operations deal with the idle time? By cross-training operators to work different positions on the line, increasing capacity at the constraints. Heck, they can perform cycle counts, train on new operations, even grab a broom and clean up – as long as they aren’t generating waste.

For IT staff in non-constrained areas, this might translate to:

crosstraining to understand other technologies, especially for those areas that are resource constrained – so you can pick up the to-do slack for technical areas that are doing too much
experimenting and learning new technologies, for future projects
answering help desk calls and performing support tasks to keep business operation humming

The danger, of course, is that the work we generate to fill in this “slack time” time can sometimes becomes a “priority”, that has to be finished before the real work. If you can monitor this, and get good supporting work done while waiting for the constrained tasks in your projects, you can truly optimize IT work in a Lean way.

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Calculating the Business Benefit of Effective Training Material (4 of 4)

Jim MacLennan — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 01:36:40 +0000

In previous notes, I’ve written about the importance of training and, by extension, effective training material. It’s a common requirement in many organizations …

Click for the original ...

… well, actually more of a “nice to have”, am I right?

Truly effective training material is difficult to create (at least, to create material that does the job), and difficult to share. Solid, effective training material is easy to recognize – it typically falls in to the “I’ll know it when I see it” category – and the inherent value seems obvious to most; how come so many businesses trim their training budgets and underemphasize these all-important deliverables for their projects?

Part of the problem may be the difficulty in identifying a tangible business benefit. Most projects are subject to some cost-justification pressures, and when hard-dollar business benefits are tough to identify, the project costs must be cut. Unfortunately, this typically sees cuts in time and resources for full system test, training material and knowledge transfer.

Yes, you heard me – “testing the system” can be treated as a “feature” that I choose to omit from a given release …

Show Me the Money

But is it really that difficult to identify real business benefit? Let’s walk through this little thought exercise …

The best way to train someone is to dedicate a knowledgeable person with them, and walk them through the various tasks / operations step by step, one by one.
To replicate that level of TLC, a typical project requirement would be two hours of dedicated trainer time per end user.
Factor in travel time and other things, and you will probably get at most 3 people trained per day per trainer.

So, for an end-user base of 100 people and two trainers, figure on chewing up a solid month of calendar time, and devoting two trainers to a grueling schedule. And, for many companies, there will be some travel involved – that will just stretch everything out.

An excellent way to slash the time required would be to spend a good, solid week of one person’s time to create some training material. Step by step instructions, samples, screen prints, video walk-throughs – you can do a lot with 40 effort hours. At this point, you can ask all 100 people to take this two-hour, self-directed training class some time over the next week.

You’ve cut out all travel expense …
… no need to take two employees off the line for two months to train
… and you’ve slashed time to deliver in half (at least).

Note that I am not counting all sorts of miscellaneous costs like travel, paper, lunches for the classroom … nor am I counting the value of having ready access to the training material for follow-up training.

I know I can tweak the math by doing this stuff in a classroom setting, and spend 10 days (not 100) of the trainers’ time, teaching class sizes of 10 students each. However, that is not a fair comparison, because the time, attention, and immediate feedback that each student receives would not compare to a well–structured, well-written training piece. In addition, the well-written document can be called upon on-demand over the following months, when the original trainers are back on their regular jobs, and the expected / normal level of staff turnover occurs.

Now, since there is such a great payback in this story, it’s absolutely worthwhile to get very good / effective in creating / structuring really effective training material. The cost is typically reasonable, and the training material keeps giving and giving …

Golly, those Business Benefits are hard to define …

Interested in more methods for calculating business benefits? I am putting together a tool and a method for getting to the business benefits for any project – let me know if you are interested!

Previously …

A “New” Critical Requirement for Business Projects
As we continue the deep dive into questions like “how do I get information required to run my business?”, we inevitably get to training …

Capturing Knowledge, and Making in ‘Findable’
If the training material is difficult to locate, and people can’t find it to use it – it might as well not exist.

Capturing Knowledge, and Making in ‘Transferable’
If a knowledgeable trainer is not available, and the training material does not “stand on it’s own” – it might as well not exist.

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Capturing Knowledge, and Making in ‘Transferable’ (3 of 4)

Jim MacLennan — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 15:22:32 +0000

Classroom teaching doesn't scale ...

We’ve talked about the importance of training material, and ways to make it “findable”. The next level of “active laziness” is to build material that doesn’t require the Subject Matter Expert’s presence to be effective. Need to train 100 people in 10 states – all within one week? You need to move past PowerPoint, and learn to create teaching material that is “transferable”.

Learn From Experience (ie. Copy What Works)

The first attributes that all documentors must develop are large amounts of humility, empathy, curiosity, and a willingness to try new things.

Experiment – Many in IT are downloading software, spinning up home servers, and buying all sorts of gadgets and software for home, personal, and business use. Especially with consumer goods, there is a significant amount of design expertise in the construction of the training manuals and on-line help – you should know, because you have been using them!
Curiosity – Have you ever thought about how these products, systems, applications, and processes are put together to make them easy to use? And, when required, just the right amount of documentation is provided? After you are done with that new video game, ponder a moment how the publisher has successfully made the software easy to use. And don’t stop there – examples of effective communication to modify behavior are all around us (directional signs, aisles and lanes in amusement parks, food packaging). Take time to deconstruct how these communications are “put together”.
Empathy – While observing things, take the next step back, and watch how other people are interacting with the same thing. Can you see how the product designer adds arrows, call-outs, and colors to keep people from making the same mistake as the last guy did? Don’t limit your thinking to your own style of working with stuff – anticipate what other folks might be thinking.
Humility – Some time after leaving college, I got over my delusions of center, and started noticing how so may ideas are just riffs on stuff that has preceded it. Sure, the true artists among us are creating the wild and new, and yes, I have a certain amount of pride of authorship in all that I do. However, I’m never above stealing a better idea or method; when I am documenting or training stuff, the objective is transfer the knowledge to lots of people.

In addition, a little bit of laziness helps. You really need to get all 100 people up to speed, but you should not allow for (or rely on) personal training sessions to get the job done. Wouldn’t it be easier to just write it once, and have everybody read the manual and get to work? This needs to be your goal – write it, distribute it, forget it. The hard working folks that decide “extra TLC” means hand-holding all of their end users through the new process will burn tons of time and energy doing truly repetitive work; personal attention doesn’t scale.

With those thoughts in mind, here are some methods and tools that will help …

Templates – Capturing Best Practices for Documentation

I like copying previous work, but I don’t like to copy previous documents – I will only see the thought that went into that particular piece of training material. With a document “template”, I can lay out a fairly generic outline, and add instructions, notes, things to think about, and step-by-step instructions. I have previously written about my generic project charter; each time I tee up a new project, I don’t have to remember what has worked in previous project charters, I just iterate on a proven model. (Note: If I get enough requests, I will publish the generic version, complete with instructions and sample text).

The key for any template like this is that it is a document that has been proven to work – to effectively communicate what I need. The real power is that it is a compendium of “best practices” – each time I use it, I add refinements and/or more examples of effective text to the template, so my next charter will be more “brilliant” (and, easier to construct) than the last.

Note – don’t confuse this with MS Office Document Templates. I love the idea, but in all of the companies I have worked with and for in the past, very few Office users understand how to use Document Templates.

HyperText – Oh, How the Mind Wanders

Of course, with electronic help (like blogs, wikis, and even the classic Windows Help System), hypertext is a powerful way to add in-context supporting information. Need to provide an abbreviation or expound a bit on a supporting concept? Hypertext – “hot links” to supporting details – are a great help. As a Reader, you know how this stuff works – now, as a Writer, you need to understand how to construct these connections. This also takes a hefty dose of Empathy – you need to get into the mind of your audience, anticipating the problems and/or questions they may have – and add a bit of HTML to take them where they [might] want to go.

Hypertext has certain analogs in the printed paper world – like an index in the back of a book, or the call-outs and margin asides that are featured in so many … for Dummies books.

Anticipate Multiple Consumption Methods

CSS allows us to separate presentation from content – this let’s me focus on the content and not worry about how it will be consumed. Fine – but you must reverse that focus as well, and pay just as much attention on the multiple ways that potential trainees will want to consume this stuff. I’m not just talking about creating multiple delivery mechanisms; you also need to think about how your training material will lay on paper, in a browser, on a projected screen … on a smartphone … through a translator …

You also need to think about letting folks know that this knowledge exists, and how to keep informed when updates and additions exist. One of the nice native features of SharePoint is the ability for users to subscribe to eMail alerts or RSS feeds. Of course, you must assume that folks are subscribing, so any and all changes to the applications, business process, or training material have to be documented, and then a change notice sent out.

Sneaky Tactics to Assure Scalability

Especially with new systems, new processes, and new consumption methods, I like to invest face-time with some early adopters. It’s like beta-testing software – a reasonably small number of representative users are given more TLC than should be necessary, because you need to validate your assumptions about the effectiveness of the training material. To be sure – you should really say nothing, offer little help – in the end, the training material needs to stand on it’s own.

Still, you will probably not get it 100% right – so embed a two-way, feedback-enabled sensibility in your training documentation, by adding contact information. If nothing else, it will act as a security blanket for your end users – and, if you put your cell phone number there, added incentive to make the training material extra-effective (so you don’t have to take the calls).

Previously …

Capturing Knowledge, and Making in ‘Findable’
If the training material is difficult to locate, and people can’t find it to use it – it might as well not exist.

Next …

Calculating the Business Benefit of Effective Training Material
So where is the business benefit? How can I go from “obvious idea” to tangible business ROI?

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The Sandpit

Jim MacLennan — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 01:24:05 +0000

(via GNC, thanks for this one!)

A bit of artistic inspiration; a visually stunning film, combining time-lapse and tilt-shift photography.

Click the picture to see the video ...

For the intellectually and technically curious – more information here.
For the artist and the observationally curious – tai chi under the freeway? Nice.

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Post tags: 01 Inspiration, 02 Art, cityscape, tilt-shift, time lapse, urban, video

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Capturing Knowledge, and Making in ‘Findable’ (2 of 4)

Jim MacLennan — Wed, 26 May 2010 04:21:11 +0000

Dr. Livingstone, I Presume?

Previously, I talked about the critical importance of capturing knowledge, and capturing it effectively. Let’s assume, for now, that the organization has bought off on the idea that capturing this information is worth doing – and, that they are doing it well. Let’s also assume that all of our content is stashed on a reasonably capable intranet platform (or accessible shared network folders), and we have a reasonably capable enterprise search engine (such as Google or MS Enterprise Search). Are we there yet?

Almost – as long as the “stuff” we have out there is actually “findable” in the proper context; when someone is searching for answers, they need to find the Best Document for the Job. Alternatively – when folks are looking for the report that shows “Daily Sales with Projected Month-End Totals”, I really want them to find this report (labeled Daily Sales Projected), and not that report (labeled Monthly Projected Sales) – terse titles that fit nicely on the page header don’t provide much guidance.

Why the concern for “findable” documents? Well – have you looked at a result set from a typical internal document repository? It’s never as nice as the demo …

Google as a Design Pattern

Over the years, I’ve seen CMS platforms, document management systems, and well-intentioned database architects look at documents as objects that need attributes to be indexed. MS Word has been doing it for years – in Office 2007, click the Office Button and go to Prepare, Properties. See the Keywords and Category properties? Remnants from an era where (I think) database designers felt the quickest way to find a document was to text scan a finite list of words in a set “field” (SELECT * WHERE LOWER(Keywords) LIKE %daily sales%). Scale this up over a large number of documents and a scattered set of authors, and we encountered Problems. We also got proposed Solutions like Taxonomies, Document Approvals and all sorts of bureaucracy.

Then came new ideas like full text search & AltaVista, then page-rank & Google. On the public internet, we are able to instantly access the right document in seconds, often entering rather obtuse search terms. True, there is indexing science and a bit of crowd-sourced brilliance in the search results, but also consider SEO – Search Engine Optimization, or documents (web pages) that work very hard to be found. This is text-based Darwinism, the Invisible Hand of the knowledge market – and it’s a bit of natural competitiveness that can be brought into the corporate intranet to drive knowledge capture and sharing to greater levels.

First things first – let’s approach the problem from the “consumers” viewpoint …

“Findability” as a Requirement

Google has defined the expectations of all computer users; we expect searches to return results instantaneously, and show the best answer to our question on the first or second page. I don’t have to understand how the Internet [knowledge base] is structured, or “candidate” material [similar reports or documents] is organized – I expect that the best answer can be found using Google, and need only learn how to enter a variety of simple search phrases to suss out the best content.

How can your team learn from Google’s example? First, we need to define guidelines for all project deliverables – guidelines that will make them search-engine friendly.

Word-processor documents are wordy by nature, and will do fine in search engines as long as they are written reasonably well. Authors should not try to impress with witty turns of phrase – unless they provide a simple, succinct Executive Summary that uses language common to your organization
Slide decks (PowerPoint etc.) have words, and are often overly wordy, but often are not built with well constructed sentences. Consider adding a decent amount of explanatory text in the Speaker Notes.
Diagrams and spreadsheets, images and drawings may contain some searchable text, but this is typically terse and not always helpful. An excellent strategy would be to create a short, explanatory document for each file – or a single document that describes the various non-text project deliverables in reasonable detail – enough description such that they will turn up in a search query.
Static reports, queries and “cubes”, and custom transactions (SAPanese for “custom programs”) should also be findable – often, this is exactly the stuff folks are looking for (How do I report daily sales by product category …). Of course, search engines typically don’t index source code – so treat these objects like spreadsheets, and create short, descriptive, search-engine-friendly summary documents that identify these useful reports – and tell folks how to find them (menu options, transaction codes, required security access, and how-to instructions).

A forward-thinking project manager will add “findability documentation” to the list of final deliverables, along with the design specifications, training material, and testing documentation. But how to encourage effective “findability” – especially when techs don’t like to document stuff? Back to Google for some guidance …

Reuse as a Success Measure

Google has defined ground rules for content providers; the basic mechanisms of full-text search and page rank rules are used to make our content “rise to the top” (the science of SEO). However, note the engine that drives this competition for top spot on the Google results … I get paid.

Why does Google work? Content creators want to be found, people get rewarded when they get found. So much so, there is an industry and an ever-changing set of best practices built around Search Engine Optimization – driving my content above the din and getting the attention of those all-important eyeballs.

To take advantage of this in a corporate setting, consider a reward system for people when their knowledge gets reused, like royalties or click-through impressions. Granted, this is counterintuitive for most organizations; on the Internet, your reward comes when people use your program / read your page. You get no reward for creating the page, only when people use the tool, download the app, consume the content. In corporate America, it is reversed – people get rewarded when the process documentation is complete, success is achieved when the project is done. People may develop skills in making documents and presentations look good, but there is no market pressure or feedback mechanism to make this communication / knowledge transfer more effective.

This might take some creativity – publish traffic reports and download counts on the intranet for some immediate positive feedback. Consider putting targets for content created and content re-used for your teams annual performance objectives. Remember, recognition is often more important than monetary rewards – but those don’t hurt either!

Previously …

Next …

Capturing Knowledge, and Making in ‘Transferable’
If a knowledgeable trainer is not available, and the training material does not “stand on it’s own” – it might as well not exist.

Calculating the Business Benefit of Effective Training Material
So where is the business benefit? How can I go from “obvious idea” to tangible business ROI?

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© Jim MacLennan for cazh1, 2010. | Permalink | 3 comments |
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