Wiki your sales playbook!

Did you ever had the feeling that the sales playbook that marketing or product management was sending to the field, didn't really provided what you needed? All the nice graphs, competitive positioning, the wonders of your technology...they didn't really made it?
And then, you have a smart sales guy and you ask him, how do you position your company when you compete against "x,y,z" and you feel the "aha, that's it"?

Why don't use wikis to have your sales force contribute to the sales playbook?

Apart from the novelty of the technologies, the fact that you can benefit from collective editing for a document like a sales playbook, makes a lot of sense. The people who will actually be using it, can contribute with their own examples, customer quotes, reflections on how to sell and compete,...It can be collectively filtered in a process that will distill the best in a much better way than any product manager can do alone.

I like this because it's a very good example of how using basic technologies a company can start optimizing information intensive business process that have been thought as hierarchical, when in reality can benefit a lot if one looks at them as collaborative.

Just test it: create a wiki and give your sales forces the ability to contribute. Wait and see the results. You'll be impressed.

FT.com / Technology / Digital Business

FT.com / Technology / Digital Business

In it's latest Digital Business Special Report, Financial Times runs a very interesting index that ranks the best corporate web sites in the world, according to the methodology of Bowen Cragg. The index requires paid subscription to FT, but can be downloaded from here.

This special report made me remember the old days of the Internet era. And this idea came to my mind: what if you tried to implement today all the ideas and business plans (ok, only the reasonable ones) that exploded in those days? The assumptions that were used then were over-optimistic and were assuming that they would be achieved much earlier than expected: penetration of bandwidth, number of users, investment in online publicity,...However, most of them are real today.

The other idea that came to my mind is this obsession I have with attention management: everything the methodology tries to measure is how the website maximizes your ROA (Return On Attention) by ensuring that with the minimum effort and number of clicks you get what you need.

And finally, I was interested in seeing how much Web 2.0 techniques and principles have been adopted in corporate sites. According to this index, not much. I believe this is one of the things that will change significantly in future versions of this index. As companies discover how to use the power of the communities that can be created around their websites (customers, shareholders, employee candidates,...) the adoption of web 2.0 methods will grow.

The McKinsey Quarterly: The new metrics of corporate performance: Profit per employee

The McKinsey Quarterly: The new metrics of corporate performance: Profit per employee

This is a very interesting attempt to connect two worlds: the financial measurement with the work of information/knowledge workers.

If we agree that in advanced economies the majority of the work is performed by workers who contribute with their intellectual capital, it makes sense to then measure their contribution to the P&L of the company.

There are some very clear illustrations in this article that show how different companies compete today. And some interesting questions that emerge. For example, two companies making $1b revenue/year, one with $100k profit/employee and another one $220k profit/employee for sure are having very different strategies. Can two companies in the same sector have so different strategies and both survive? Yes, because in one case they lead by productivity and in the other case they lead by the size of workforce.

I tend to think there is a direct correlation between profit per employee and the degree and intensity of knowledge work performed by the employees. In other words, companies with lower profit/employee will probably rely less on their employees knowledge and more on the company process and automation.

Again, the topic of productivity arises. How is Information Management affecting productivity of high and low profit per employee companies? I'll need to ask the folks from McKinsey one of these days...

Measuring the Immeasurable

Measuring the Immeasurable
Is it productive to investing in IT? And how much? This topic has generated a lot of literature from academics and researchers, and still there is no good answer to it. One tends to think that if it didn't, then why would it happen. Simply said I think not only that it brings productivity; I think that IT investment today is inevitable.

However, the important thing in my view is a bit different: if everybody else is doing it, are you going to get any competitive advantage by investing in IT? And here's where I think that we need a more profound distinction between Information and Technology.

"If it can be automated, it will". This is a very real fact. Hence, as technology advances and allows the automatization of more areas of productive work, the adoption of technology will continue.

However, it is in areas where people needs access to information and interacting with other people where the question gets more interesting. Here, IT does not replace; it augments capabilities of workers. In those cases, the secret sauce is in deeper elements. If your business is not easily automatizable, then your competitive advantage will surely rely on innovation: how fast you innovate and how fast you propagate that innovation to your employees and customers. The way you do this is related to the IT you use of course. But it is much more related to the way you structure and use your information.

A good study to be conducted by the Institute for Innovation and Information Productivity would be to compare how different practices on Information Architecture impact corporate productivity. Is there an impact on corporate productivity of the adoption of standard metadata models inside corporations? Can you improve corporate performance by adopting ECM platforms?

OK, let me know if I can help!

Information Architects wanted

An ongoing theme for debate that I'm finding these days is the need of Information Architects within large corporations. If you follow some of the analysts of the IT industry, you will see this mentioned more and more.

What is an Information Architect? If you ask 3 different people, you can find 4 answers. But here's a simple way of looking at it: It is a person that knows how to organize information inside a company so it makes sense and is usable by all users.

This may sound trivial, but as anyone with some experience dealing with IT in large organizations can tell you, it's not. Anyone who has tried to implement a corporate intranet or portal has struggled with the basic difficulties of the problem: the same information has different meanings to different people in the organization. Some people like to see all information organized by customer name; some others by product line; then there is the discussion about the level of detail you use. There is always a trade off between ease of use and completeness.

Seriously looking at the information architecture of your company can be scary: if people are not talking the same language, chances are your systems are not either. The job of the information architect is to make sure that they do. Not an easy task.

I do believe that we need to think more closely about the way companies organize their information. I think this is a crucial part of the sustainable responsiveness and adaptability of corporations. I think however that the debate about information architects is far from easy and poses some fundamental questions to every organization:
- centralized or decentralized rights to structure and organize information?
- manual or automated processes for adding meta data?
- structured and unstructured data reconciliation or separate worlds?

As I've mentioned before I believe the best way to approach this issue is driven by a business purpose. And customer service is a very good candidate: start thinking about ways to improve customer service and you very quickly come to the conclusion that managing information about your customers in a more efficient way can have huge impacts on customer satisfaction. For example it can avoid that experience we all know, of being asked the same question by different people while they pass you to one another on the phone trying to solve your problem.

I can't see how an information architect can design a way to better use information without realy thinking on a business use. However I do see organizations doing e-Government and e-Banking that have made great progress in making all their information talk in an integrated way. And one sees in these cases a progressive merge of Business Intelligence and CRM with Enterprise Content Management and search. Something that makes a lot of sense.

ATM_Meeting_230207

ATM_Meeting_230207

Although with some delay, I want to comment about the latest AIIM Europe Advisory Trade Member Meeting in London. John Mancini has blogged about it here.

I was asked to suggest three hiden 3 key “sleeper” issues I see in this market that you don’t think most people are focusing on. Here's my selection:

1- Customer service is one of the most difficult tasks in today’s business environment. Everyone is following a multi-channel strategy and wants to have a 360º view of the customer. The fact is, it’s extremely difficult to solve this problem: a customer has an integral view of his interactions with a company (bank, utilities, insurance,…). However, it is very hard to ensure that the company employees have that same integral perspective of the customer. I believe that we’ll see a trend to optimize customer service by ensuring an integral management of all unstructured information related to customers. This will have two dimensions:
a. Building a single unified infrastructure that ensures data integrity, including customer correspondence, marketing, customer reports from business applications, sales interactions, phones to call center,…consolidating internal systems, ensuring data integrity.
b. Moving more information to the customer online in self-service mode including access to historical data and archives

I think this will have an impact in two fundamental issues: (i) semantic reconciliation of existing systems and applications, and (ii) building of information architectures and SOA-interoperability of ECM systems.
Other areas will follow like product information, but customer service is the most relevant one.

2- Content analytics or text analytics. We are entering an era in which the need to analyze the use that our organization does of content is critical. The growth in volume inevitably brings the need for some kind of selection mechanism in the value of our content. As an example, companies today cannot answer trivial questions like:
a. which searches in our website produce no results? (that question is giving you a lot more information than the ones that get results). Or,
b. how do you define the relevance of information for different groups (some social tagging mechanisms can help here…). These should be based on user interactions, explicit rankings or tagging
c. pure, basic analytics on your content: who uses what, how long, what is not used,…, is still very difficult to achieve.

In essence, I think we will start to see a trend to associate value or relevance to the corporate information based on usage patterns and some form of social interaction. I think we will start to see combinations of BI techniques applied to content use and content interactions

3- Security. This one is pretty simple and straight-forward. The application of DRM or IRM techniques inside enterprise will grow. Data security, traceability and privacy concepts applied to documents and emails will become much more common place than they are today.