Let’s Talk Knowledge

Although we try to keep this blog focused on interesting or thought-provoking items impacting the Knowledge Management space, every once in a while we all need to toot our own horn, and this time I’ll do it because of how proud we are that Factiva.com has won the 2010 CODiE Award for Best Content Aggregation Service for the 2nd year in a row! Another DJ product, Dow Jones Investment Banker, also won for Best Online Professional Financial Information Service. It’s a big accomplishment for us, and we’re proud because it’s validation of the hard work we keep putting into making this the world’s best business news and reseach solution.

More importantly, however, it’s the continual feedback, inspiration and general prodding from our thousands of customers and million+ users that keeps us on the right track. Among the enhancements we’ve put into Factiva.com, just in the last year, include our new Concept Explorer, Discovery in Factiva Alerts, Dow Jones Idea Share, Factiva Workspaces, Factiva content podcasting, and automated translation for many sources (English to Spanish, French, Italian, German, Russian, Chinese–and those languages back to English).

It’s also a good reminder that, even though we have a lot of exciting new initiatives that have recently or soon will be coming down the pike, solutions like Factiva.com still play an important role in the knowledge management landscape.

Thanks again to all of our users!

- Ryan

ryanw Business Intelligence, Research Awards, Dow Jones, Factiva.com

As I mentioned previously, Twitter is becoming a more relevant source for competitive intelligence. Not necessarily as a standalone source, but a nice complement to traditional sources. One of the great things about Twitter is the number of third party tools that have been developed to help you get the most out of the service. In this post, I wanted to share some thoughts on how I use TweetDeck, one of my personal favorites, for CI.

Just to be clear, I’m not trying to give an all encompassing tutorial of TweetDeck. If you’d like one of those, there are plenty of good ones out there. What I am trying to do is give some insight on how the tool can help you filter the huge amount of content flowing through the Twitter service to get information that is relevant for your competitive intelligence purposes.

There are a couple of basics when it comes to using TweetDeck. First is the concept of columns. Columns are a way to get different views of the the information streaming from Twitter. There are a lot of ways to filter a TweetDeck column. As in my last post, I’ll break it down by three different categories: People, Companies, Topics/Products.

I’ll start with people. Following people on Twitter recently got easier with the advent of Lists. You can create a list in Twitter of the people that you want to follow. These of course can include executives from a company you’re tracking, people who often comment on a company or topic your tracking, etc. Once your Twitter lists are created, TweetDeck can quickly create a column based on one of them. You can also create a column in TweetDeck based on a search. With respect to people, you can simply search for the @ mention of the user (for example @marcbenioff). This will allow you to see the things people are saying to a particular person on Twitter, and a great way to understand what topics a person is discussing or directed towards that person by the masses on Twitter.

For companies the process is much the same as people. You can create a list in Twitter that follows the people, products, and company feeds associated with a particular company. For example a Twitter list for SalesForce might include @marcbenioff, @salesforce, @joywang (social media analyst that often comments on salesforces adoption of social media). You may also want to create a column that is based on a search, again using Salesforce as an example you may want to create a column based on hashtags and or keywords (“#salesforce OR salesforce”). This will get you all the other mentions of a company name.

The same process used for companies can be followed for products or topics. Find the people that often talk about a particular product or topic, as well as create a search for mentions of the product name or topic.

Once you have your columns created in TweetDeck, you can now start using some of the powerful tools and analytics that that are part of the solution. At the bottom of each column in TweetDeck there is a row of buttons. One of my favorites is the “Cloud” button. By clicking this, you can quickly get a cloud tag of the most popular things being mentioned in that column. That includes keywords, links, twitter usernames, and hashtags. Great way to do some high level analytics and get a quick picture of what you need to know about what is happening right now.

Next is the “Filter” tag. This will allow you to filter a column by text, time, source, or name. For example, we could filter the SalesForce product column by the word “performance”, allowing you to see anything related salesforce.com performance.

There are also options to mark everything in the column as seen, thereby cleaning up the column entirely, or just cleaning up the entries you have actually seen.

These are just some of the ways TweetDeck can help Twitter become a more useful tool for competitive intelligence. Just to reiterate, I think Twitter is a great part of any CI monitoring strategy. Especially with respect to the conversation that is currently happening around the people, companies, and products or topics you are following.

If you have any other helpful hints with respect to TweetDeck, please do share!

- Ken

kens Research, Social Media CI, Competitive Intelligence, TweetDeck, twitter

The analyst firm Outsell published an interesting report (you’ll find it here. Sorry about the paywall, but we in the premium content biz have to hang together …  ) this week on the narrowing of the technological generation gap in the enterprise. Interesting, because it indicates that the three generational groups we now see coexisting in the workplace (Millennials, Generation X & Baby Boomers) are now converging in their use of technology and level of information savvy. As the report notes, “It is [now] not safe to generalize about younger people vs. older people when it comes to information habits and preferences.”  Their analysis concludes, in other words, that most workers—regardless of age—are using capabilities like Web searching, information alerting, email and mobile solutions in about the same way.

I agree with Leigh Watson, the report’s author, that this is good news for enterprises, as it means that we can ease up on some of the handwringing we’ve all been going through lately about how to reconcile these seemingly disparate information technology users internally, and how those of us in the information solutions business can create products to meet all their needs. As the report concludes, the problem seems to be taking care of itself. Right?

Well, maybe partially, but I think there’s an aspect of this gap that still exists, and is even more important for us close, and that’s the different ways in which Millennials (who, as Brigitte noted a couple of weeks ago, are newly entering the workforce today) approach knowledge sharing as an integral part of both their personal and professional lives. Speaking broadly, this generation of users has tightly integrated social networks into their daily lives, and they’re often using those networks not only to socialize, but to gather knowledge. They do it through peer-to-peer sharing via a community rather than through a solo hunting and gathering activity—which can mean a diminished reliance on traditional research tools. Ken referred to this as ‘Social Intelligence’ when he wrote about it back in April.

It‘s an example of The Strength of Weak Ties, and how finding connections outside your own area best stimulates innovation. Leveraging large social networks of weak ties to share and collect information changes the way people gain knowledge. Rather than finding and synthesizing vast amounts of information, they collaborate with subject matter experts, and then validate and extend what they have already learned. This has profound implications for us information providers, who will need to find ways to integrate with and into the social networks, or perhaps more importantly, to leverage the underlying capabilities and standards developed by the networks, to maintain their presence in front of potential users.

It could also indicates a perhaps more profound change under way in user behavior that is an outcome of both the social networking and self-serve information markets. That is: a move away from the notion that research is an activity that is best built on lessons of the past, toward more of an in-the-moment activity that looks for similar experiences. With the immediacy of the internet to connect people who share similar questions or concerns, we could see researchers move away from the notion of finding someone who previously answered the question and instead finding someone who is also asking the same question. If this change takes hold and sticks around, research tools will be less valued than community tools, and will have to evolve themselves to support this need.

And that brings us back around to the technological generation gap. Although use of social networks by Baby Boomers has increased significantly in recent years, young people still have significantly higher rates of use. But even more important than the tool that social networks are, is the different way of managing information that they represent. Even if older generations of users like the Gen Xers (such as me) and Baby Boomers are closing the gap on the use of electronic information tools, it will be more interesting to see if we can close the gap in leveraging the actual networks behind those tools and make those weak ties work to our advantage in the enterprise.

I’m interested to hear your thoughts, so let me know if you’re seeing examples of how people are beginning to use those networks of weak ties in their business lives (the use of networks like LinkedIn to prospect for jobs during the downturn is one obvious example).

-Ryan

ryanw Information Management, Research, Social Media

I am just back from the KM/ West 2009. Somehow I did not feel the energy and buzz I was expecting. The exhibition floor was reasonably busy, but it seemed at times that most people stopping by where looking for a contracting project or trying to sell some new search engine.

Enterprise 2.0 and all the enabling technologies and tools were still a big part of the exhibition and conference streams. I heard some interesting talks on communities, Share Point and “best practice” intranets… Some parallel meetings with customers confirmed an increasing interest in dashboards and visualizations on portals, intranets and extranets. Netvibes, which has been for a long time my preferred widget based personal home page (until I switched to iGoogle because for a while, I found loading my page was far too slow…) are positioning themselves with a new B2B offering . Our Dow Jones Executive Dashboard offering is also worth mentioning in that space. To know more, check our recent press release.

Unsurprisingly, Enterprise 2.0 has become pretty mainstream and “taken for granted”, and was an expected reference to each and every discussion on the various conference streams. A related theme which seems to be attracting a lot of energy is the concept of “communities of practice”. Finding experts, colleagues “who have done it before” or simply other professionals to bounce ideas off and collaborate with in my Enterprise or beyond, covering concepts of targeted expert sourcing and broad crowdsourcing .

I have just been listening to a recent interview (©McKinsey & Company, registration is free to listen to the interview or get a transcript of the interview) from McAfee (who was also a keynote speaker at KM) who speaks about….Web 2.0 and his new book Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools For Your Organization Toughest Challenges.

One of the “tough challenges” McAfee talks about is in fact the location of expertise across complex organizations and he gives the example of the US Intelligence Community, with a “huge sprawling bureaucracy of 16 federal agencies”, having successfully built simple Web 2.0 tools where people could share what they do and know. As McAfee points out, those tools can also be leveraged to share what you do not know, to locate expertise, find guidance, and avoid reinventing the wheel which tends to happen in large and decentralized organizations.

Another aspect related to intelligence communities worth mentioning is the entry of Generation Y into the workforce. I often reflect with customers and colleagues around Generation Y expectations and some new behaviors around creating, searching, finding and sharing information. Specifically, the fact that, for those young professionals, the most trusted and authoritative source of information is peer to peer networks and conversations is I think a profound shift for the business information world. It is a trend I really find fascinating and which increasingly we are looking at embracing in some of our future developments.

Brigitte Ricou-Bellan

Brigitte Social Media Communities, Enterprise 2.0, Generation Y, Knowledge-Management

Using Twitter as a research tool for competitive intelligence has already become credible, and it is rapidly becoming crucial. Twitter is a great place to find unfiltered, unembargoed competitive intelligence. When I think about CI using Twitter, there are a three key areas to think about:

• People: Often you can find mid to senior level people from your competitors on twitter. You’d be amazed at some of the things they may tweet about their company or its products & services.
• Products: Great place to find information about weaknesses, strengths, potential new releases and features, etc.
• Companies: A lot of information on Twitter about companies in general. Watch for tweets about company direction and focus, customer service attitude, etc. A companies presence (or lack thereof) on Twitter will also often be an indicator of how they may be trying to use Social Media as part of their strategy overall.

There are actually quite a few tools that have been launched to help you monitor and analyze the twitter conversation around these things. I’ll actually try and list some of those in a separate blog post. In this post I will just focus on using the twitter.com interface to do that.

The Twitter Search functionality is the place to start. Here you can search the twitter stream for people, products, companies, or references to a specific topic. There are options to restrict your searches to those containing links, or those that have a positive or negative attitude. The hashtag concept is particularly powerful when following a particular product or topic. Simply put a ‘#’ symbol in front of the product name you are interested in. You can also save these searches for quick reference in the future. For example, I have a saved search for #factiva that I check daily, just to see what people are saying about one of Dow Jones’ products.

Once you’ve run a twitter search, you can start examining the results. You should start by checking the profiles of some of the people that have posted relevant results. You can find a lot of valuable information from these profile pages. First, you can get an indicator of credibility by the number of people following that individual. Second, you can see how much information you are likely to get by following that person, based on the number of tweets they have posted, as well as a quick scan of their recent posts for quality and relevance. You can also take a look at who that person is following. This may help you find other subject matter experts on a particular topic/product. Twitter has released a new feature called ‘Lists’ that makes this even easier. Twitter allows people to create lists of people they follow, thus creating a categorization mechanism. Check these lists to see if they have already done the hard work of identifying other relevant individuals to follow.

Once you have found the right people to follow, you can create your own lists, and start monitoring the tweets for relevant information. While Twitter may not be the most relevant source of CI, especially depending on the industry your in, it can be a great way to get otherwise hard to find nuggets of information. It certainly is one of the best ways to understand the conversation around your competition as well. I’ll try to write some posts in the future about the tools that are out there, which can greatly streamline the process of using Twitter for CI.

How are you using Twitter for CI? Any tips or best practices you’d like to share?

- Ken

Ken Sickles Research, Social Media Competitive Intelligence, Research, Social Media, twitter

As I mentioned in my previous post, there have been two observations I wanted to share with you based on the research I’ve been doing as of late. The first was the power of context. The second is the impact time has on the value of information. Perhaps more accurately stated, the impact time has on who gets value from information.

At Dow Jones we see this across our lines of business. Our ultra low latency products power machine based trading, our real time newswires power investors decision, our daily newsletters inform decision makers, and our 30+ year archive fuels business research. The same piece of content, based on its age, finds value in different places across the enterprise.

Based on what I’ve been seeing as of late, there is an opportunity to understand what types and sources of information are getting value “early” in your enterprise. In many cases, this same content will continue to have value over time throughout the rest of your business, even as the information becomes vintage. So in your next review of content needs in your company, try starting with the people who need information first, and let me know how similar you find the needs of the rest of the company.

- Ken

Ken Sickles Information Management, Research Information Management, Research

As you can see I haven’t been busy blogging as of late – that’s the bad news (if you like my posts that is). The good news is I have been busy researching and talking to researchers and knowledge workers around the globe. There have been a couple of trends I’ve seen across these conversations, and one of them is the power of context.

While their is no refuting the power of aggregating information, it really is just the start. Of course you have to be able to find the most relevant information, when you need it, and be able to get to it when you need it. But just having the information really isn’t enough. That information becomes valuable when it is put in context for the user.

Understanding the user’s workflow, and what they will be doing with it when they get it can unlock the real value. Let’s look at the example of a Partner at a consulting firm to explain what I mean. We can use information about the revenue performance of one of the Partner’s customers as an example. Having access to recent financial statements and articles regarding the revenue performance over the customer over the last three quarters is good. Having the actual numbers extracted from that content is even better. But then what? How will the Partner use that information?

If he or she is trying to close new business with the customer, they may also need to see how expenses have fared over the same time period, in order to understand if current financial performance may lessen the likelihood or size of any potential opportunity. If he or she is preparing a report or making a recommendation, they may need access to performance from the peers of their customer for comparison purposes.

Two activities focused on the same piece of information, but both with very different needs for the context around that information. So while understanding the Partner in the consulting firm often needs access to revenue information regarding their customers is valuable, understanding how they will use that information is priceless.

In my next post I’ll talk about the other trend that I have seen in my conversations – the effect time has on the value of information.

- Ken

Ken Sickles Business Intelligence, Information Management, Research context, Information Management, Research

In my first weeks as a solutions strategist I’ve been spending some time reviewing Idea Share, a new Dow Jones product designed to capture customer feedback. I’ve been involved with digital product management for some time now, and collecting customer feedback has always been a critical step in the lifecycle of any product. Customer feedback offers one of the best ways to spot untapped markets, common problems, and opportunities for new products and services. With the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies we now have new ways of not only collecting valuable feedback from the users of our products, but a means for them to collaborate. It’s critical to the long-term success of our products for us to provide quick, easy ways for our customers to tell us what’s on their mind and for us to get back to them. Idea Share is one way we are communicating with our users.

First, some background. Idea Share is a new site we launched several months ago with the goals of collecting customer feedback and a providing a new platform for knowledge sharing within Dow Jones. Idea Share is about facilitating the community that wants to make our products better. It is a forum for users to talk about our products; what’s working and what’s not. Better than an email or a message board, Idea Share allows customers to collaborate and vote on community feedback. The goal of this constant source of collaborative feedback is to make our products better and keep users coming back.

Because this communication loop is so valuable, I have been exploring ways to improve Idea Share. Some key areas for improvement I’ve identified are promotion and positioning. I’m looking at how we might remove existing barriers to entry and create additional entry points. In the next version of the product I would like to make it easier to provide feedback by creating clear “calls to action” at multiple product entry points including e-mail alerts, RSS feeds, and widgets. Unobtrusive hooks into Idea Share need to be created wherever our users are interacting with our products.

What we do after receiving feedback is another area I’m exploring with the team. Analyzing and acting on customer feedback is critical, but acknowledging the customer after they submit an idea or comment is also an important step in the process. Lack of acknowledgment can cause our customers to question the relevance of or worse, lose trust in the channel that they are using to share their feedback. A simple email thanking them for providing feedback can go a long way. Showcasing the best, recent and most popular ideas in new and engaging ways is another form of acknowledgment we are examining. Keeping the community engaged after they have communicated with us is one key to the success of the product.

Idea Share is an important step in opening up the communication channels between our customers and the Dow Jones’ teams responsible for moving a product forward. I will continue to look for ways to improve Idea Share and create new collaborative networks for facilitating communication with our customers.

I look forward to your feedback!

Ken Sickles Uncategorized

I have been doing a lot of market research and customer interviews as of late. Most of the work has been focused on providing role based information management tools for information consumers. There has been one common thread to the conversation: Simplicity.

I think there is a tendency on the behalf of people that design information solutions to try and jam as much relevant data as you can into the users workflow. I’m not sure why that is, maybe because we are accustomed to processing large volumes of data, maybe a desire to ensure we have a complete picture, maybe simply because we can. But it is clearly not what information consumers want. All they are looking for is *the* relevant data, not *all* of the relevant data.

I think it is easy for information professionals to lose sight of the importance of this subtle distinction. Information is our jobs, it’s what we do. But for end users it really is just a small (albeit incredibly important) part of their job. Probably one of the most valuable things we can do as information professionals is understand what the real needs of the end user are. This of course is easier said than done, because often users have difficulty describing their needs. In some cases they will also have trouble in defining them, and often cast too wide a net. Of course then after being given what they asked for, they will be overwhelmed, and in turn unsatisfied.

The best way for us to understand the information needs of users is to understand their role, their objective, and how it supports the operation of the company as a whole. Don’t ask “What information do you need?’, instead ask “Can you describe a typical day? What are the 3 primary objectives in your role? What are your top 3 challenges in meeting those objectives? What happens if you don’t get the information you need? “. Taking this sort of consultative approach will help you identify what an end user really needs, as opposed to what they ask for. It also has the benefit of helping you determine the value of the solution, and perhaps more importantly it can help the end user understand that as well. In many cases, it will also help you determine what sort of analysis that you can do on the users behalf (this is incredibly value because of the time savings you can provide).

Ultimately, once you identify the information needs, avoid the temptation to over-deliver. Deliver only what the user absolutely needs. Anything more will simply be a distraction.

- Ken

Ken Sickles Business Intelligence, Information Management, Research

I’ve been reading a lot of the conversations around the fate of the newspaper industry, and content in general. Of course many of them are centered on the fact that “content wants to be free”. I really don’t want to jump in the center of this debate (right now anyway), but I do want to talk about how this is relevant to those of us that do business research, or rely on information from external sources to make decisions.

The most important point to remember, as my father so often told me, there is no such thing as a free lunch. A post by Stan Schroeder on the Mashable blog actually got me thinking about this. Stan stated that Cost is not just price, but also the time to pay (and gave a great analogy about free donuts that made me go to Dunkin’ donuts). I think there is a third part of that equation, and that is the risk associated with the content.

Cost = Price + Time to Pay + Risk

So let me explain the equation. I think Price is obvious, how much direct out of pocket money is associated with the content. Time to Pay – how long does it take you to find and or access the content? Risk – how reliable and or accurate is the content.

First let me say I know people using information for business purposes care about this equation much more than those using information for general current awareness. For example, even if it takes me an hour to find out the latest Big Brother news, and it may not be accurate when I find it – I’m still not willing to pay for it. I essentially have nothing to lose (well, accept for any credibility I may have had by just admitting I watch Big Brother).

The attitude changes as soon as there is a potential for me to recognize a profit or loss from the use of that information. For example as a product manager, if I can quickly find high quality information on a market opportunity for a new product, I would gladly pay for it. First, I don’t have a lot of time to surf the vast sea of free content out there, find what is relevant, and put it into context. Second, I don’t want to use information that may be incorrect or even false, there is just too much risk associated with this decision.

I know many people today that are using and buying content for organizations are struggling with the justification of paying for content. End users have been inundated with the fact that content is free and ubiquitous, and that can be difficult to challenge. I’m hoping the above equation can help. I think in addition, knowing where and when the equation is relevant in your organization is important.

As I’ve mentioned before, it is important to align your Information Management purchases to strategic corporate initiatives, or high risk business functions (like supply chain management). When applying the equation to these types of initiatives it is very easy to see that the cost of paid-for content and tools is far less than the cost of free content.

Well, I’m off to get my “free” lunch. Of course I’m going I had to get up at 4:30 am, pay for a train ticket, and travel to and from New York City to get it, so maybe it wasn’t so free after all.

- Ken

Ken Sickles Information Management, Research business research platform, Information Management, ROI