Engineering of Communications

Communities are built on communications. With stunning advances in communications technology and inexpensive, powerful, and reliable platforms readily available, the art of communications also needs to be matured and implemented. Many workers and business fall into a model of Personal Information Managers (e.g. MS Outlook) and the MS Office trinity of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. An opportunity exists to develop business communications capabilities through governance and engineering.

Worker Communications Spaces

Service and Knowledge workers both require communications platforms that are holistic.

Today many companies struggle to break free from the autonomy of the personal computer revolution.

• Personal Computer
  • Outlook (Email, Calendar, Tasks)
  • Office (Word/Excel/Powerpoint)
  • Enterprise Platforms (Ticketing, CRM)
• Meetings

The combination of MS Office style artifacts (.doc, .xls, .ppt) and email based communications typically results in a corporate communications environment with no governance or provenance of information, and an inability to sharpen corporate business and technical knowledge.

Enhanced communications technologies can now be adopted to support collaboration within and across work groups.

• Content Versioning
• Controlled Vocabularies for Knowledge Classification
• Governance of Information Objects

Discover

Talk to your workforce at all staff levels.

• What applications do they open desktop in the morning and regularly throughout the day?
• Where do the staff enter, store, and retrieve their knowledge work?
  • Personal Mail (e.g. Outlook) messages
  • MS Office Artifacts: Word/Excel/PowerPoint
  • Customer Relationship Mgmt
• How are status of open issues tracked collectively?
• Where are processes and procedures located for reference?
• How are processes and procedures updated?
• How is staff notified of changes to existing proceses and procedures?
• Ask about their version control. Do they use URLs?

• Ask them if they would keep a online Work Journal. Document their responses. What do they feel provides them journalling of their activites?

• Ask them about their Alerts.
  • Do they use RSS/ATOM/email?

• Ask them what web sites and applications they visit daily to aid them in their job function?

• What business platforms are they expected to monitor? (tickets, shipping, etc). Why do they monitor it.

• How can they contribute knowledge to the common knowledge base?
  • Do they have discussion forums?
  • Do they have an Open Access and Open Edit knowledge base?

SOA platform design calls for componentization and integration of features through loose coupling. This provides for platform independance and better maps to the muddle of IT requirements that that is the IT needs of an organization.

Organize

Organizing phases require care to not try to achieve too much with “waterfall” efforts. Start by recognizing how existing platform and adoption can be improved by removal of existing barriers to adoption. At the outset, set some long and medium term objectives, but also be sure to implement some immediate high impact efforts to build momentum and establish credibility.

Typical knowledge workers can become exhausted with technologies and platforms and already suffer from information overload. Initial improvements to information channels should aim to reduce information anxiety and address outstanding lack of adoption of collaborative components.

Recognize the MANY places where intellectual assets are created and stored throughout the organization. Assess the extent of existing use of Windows file shares shares, and personal storage (local drives, mailstores) as corporate knowledge repositories.

Example:

Educate

Successful development of collaborative components involves early and continuous interaction with key user communities. The goal is to attain improvements to information management practices to help drive business profitability. To achieve this you must define and implement the correct governance models. Minor changes in governance can have significant impacts on system popularity and user adoption.

Often, considerable improvements can be yielded from existing business platforms through usability and notification improvements. Business metrics should be put in place to encourage positive and sustainable information management practices. Adoption of new components and platforms should be considered within the context of the existing business platforms and workflows. Continue to identify key areas for incremental collaboration improvements and augmentation during the education phase.

Education of user community involves traditional leader-led events, on-line “just in time” knowledge reference, as well as feedback to early adopters and laggarts on value, quality, and impact of captured knowledge.

A primary objective of the open edit and contribution platform is to capture the daily knowledge the workforce uses to do their job. Encourage staff to journal their activities for themselves and their peers. High-value articles should be promoted from Open Edit into the Publish workflow and Knowledge Catalog.

Provide examples of how to use the collaborative platform to solve business problems within or across departments.

Provide the staff with forums to discuss the platform improvements and issues encountered.

Adapt

Pay careful attention to the feedback received from the staff. Initial implementations should expect considerable tuning of the Knowledge Catalog and Controlled Vocabularies.

The Knowledge Catalog should be extended top inventory all Knowledge Assets, not just those residing within the collaborative platform, or the corporate walls. Cataloging should extend to external assets (such as Vendor and other internet based manuals and procedures).

Provide methods (tools, processes) to rapidly augment and prune the Controlled Vocabularies.

Identify improvements that can be made to alerting and reporting:

• Monitoring of Collaborative Platforms through custom logging.
• Generate Notifications for contributors and managers using Digests and Feeds (RSS/ATOM)

Utilize agile software development techniques to enable rapid release cycles.

Evolve

Identify high value capabilities to drive early adoption, such as:

• Create Personal Journal Pages
• Include Knowledge Base URLs in CMDB and support tickets.

Promote platform adoption through internal campaigns.

• Identify and document creative and effective uses of collaborative platform in solving business challenges.
• Recognize key contributors.
• Publish contribution and access statistics.

Continuous improvement and iterative development is key to keeping IT components and platforms on target and successful. Capture opportunities identified and feed them back into the Discover phase at the next collaborative project cycle.