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The First 100 Days: How Good Was it For You?

February 5, 2015



by Rooven Pakkiri - Consultant and Author, Decision Sourcing


Try to remember your first few months at the company you now work for or for a company where you worked for a period of time. Like most of us, you would probably have had to endure a series of standardised induction programmes, the content of which you would seldom re-visit and quickly forget. Nothing or very little in those induction courses would have equipped you for the reality of making your way in the company and getting to know the people you really needed or wanted to know.

The truth is that for most of us, our personal progress in a company is an arduous one. And the bigger the company the more arduous it is. In fact until recently it has been something of a long winded and often frustrating process of trial and error. I often joke with clients that during the 7 years that I worked for a large Corporate Bank in the city of London (UK),  I wasted large chunks of my life and energy ‘doing lunch’ with the wrong people (who promised me much but delivered little).

Let’s look at this situation from the point of view of senior management. If our most ambitious employees are wasting hours of their (and possibly our) time trying to make the right connections in the company to get things done better and to advance themselves; then the company is losing out here. Not just in terms of worker productivity but also in terms of worker motivation and buy-in.

In the 1980’s studies of office workers in large companies found that cigarette smokers had the best internal networks. They knew precisely who to talk to get things done. This was because they would congregate with fellow smokers from other departments on a daily basis in designated smoking areas. And so as a result they quickly learned all the really important aspects of the company and its people; vital information that would never be included in an induction programme.  More importantly, they acquired this knowledge from trusted sources.
Today, with the advent of Social Business technology (which largely mirrors the experience people are having in their private lives with Social Networks) it is possible to create those smokers enclaves if you will but at scale and in a 24/7, location independent, secure environment without any of the social stigma or health issues.

Back to the Future: now rewind the clock and imagine your first 100 days at your company playing out like this. Before you physically begin working for your company you are provided with a web address, user name and password to a company community called ‘100 days’. This community is a friendly but structured place where all employees can log into during their first 100 days at the company. The community managers for this community are made up of representatives from across the company, HR, Legal, Transport, IT , the department where you are starting works (say Sales) but also the department where you might hope one day to work (say Marketing).  The members of this community are all the employees of the company during their first 100 days.

After their specific 100 days, they leave this community BUT any of their thoughts, interactions and comments remain in the community. In addition so does their profile. Now this is powerful stuff, because you are now able (from the comfort of your own home) to quickly begin to create a map and plan of action for yourself before you first set step inside the company doors. You can see who the players are what their specific skills are and you can view the content they have created. So for example, you can see a presentation from a fellow salesperson that has been liked and downloaded by many people working in your area of the business. And from their comments you can begin to develop a more sophisticated approach in terms of who to make an effort to get to know. Better still, because you have had a chance to evaluate some of their work before you interact with them, you will be better placed to make a good first impression.

On the practical side of things, housekeeping if you will, from the 100 days community you will be able to see how others got themselves on the payroll, or sorted out company pension options, or maternity leave etc. You do not need to waste your and company time chasing people for answers to these questions. In many cases someone who joined before you has asked the very question you had in mind and someone in authority has answered it. And if there is a gap in the collaboration knowledge, then of course you are free to ask the question yourself and the community is obliged to provide an answer.

Let us not forget that the biggest winners in terms of Social Business are not the employees (although this is a win-win proposition) it is in fact senior management. The faster they can on-board staff in a meaningful way: defined as speed to optimum productivity the more successful the company will be. And the faster they can spot talent (which is what this technology if properly deployed and adopted delivers) the faster the company will grow.

 

 

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New Year's Resolutions - Knowledge Management Edition

January 6, 2015

    Guest Blog by Zach Wahl of Enterprise Knowledge LLC

If you’re like many, at this time of year, you’re tossing the last of the fruit cake, sweeping the pine needles, and shelving the holiday decorations for  Of course, it’s also that time of year to begin making resolutions for the year to come.  At Enterprise Knowledge, we’re proud to have helped many organizations achieve their Knowledge and Information Management (KIM) project goals over the last year.  As your organization is making its own New Year’s resolutions for the year to come, keep these common New Year’s Resolutions and KM success stories in mind.

• Meet Someone New – As KM concepts have matured, we’ve gone from simply capturing, managing, and sharing knowledge and have added the additional facet of human expertise and interaction into the equation.  Well-designed knowledge and information management systems allow people to quickly and intuitively share and find the information they need; they can also allow people to discover and connect with experts.  For instance, in 2014 for a global manufacturing firm we designed a knowledge base that housed a range of content as well as profiles of identified experts within the organization.  Users of the system are able to employ faceted navigation to find both the content as well experts within the organization based on topics, types, regions, and functional area.  Moreover, users are able to “traverse” content in order to find the owners/creators of the content they found the most valuable.  As a result, connections are being made and this global organization is making better use of their collective expertise around the world.

• Get Organized – At EK, one of our areas of focus is taxonomy design.  Taxonomy design is all about organizing and categorizing information in order that it is easier to find and manage.  In 2014 alone we helped over two dozen organizations through our Taxonomy Design Workshops and proven methodology.  A well-designed and well-implemented taxonomy will help organizations better use and reuse their information, and will also help users discover information they didn’t know existed that will be able to benefit them and save time.  As a result, organizations and their users are more efficient, more successful, and more connected.

• Lose Weight – As KIM technologies have proliferated, it is unfortunately common, especially in larger organizations, for multiple overlapping systems and technologies to weigh down the organization with administrative burden, license costs, and confused or distracted end users.  SharePoint is a common example in many organizations, where lack of system and content governance has resulted in runaway sites that duplicate effort and compete for users.  We also see completely separate systems that effectively do the same thing competing within a single enterprise.  For instance, in 2014, EK worked with a large Federal agency to conduct an enterprise analysis of their content and document management processes and technologies.  We found that different parts of the organization were running eight distinct but similar document management technologies.  We developed the business case to justify the consolidation of design, content, processes, and technology into a single system.  The return on investment (ROI) for this effort is in the millions of dollars.

• Learn Something New – Any successful KIM initiative will help you and your end users learn something new.  We’ve already established the myriad ways KIM projects and systems can support the improved findability, use, and reuse of information, the sharing and capture of knowledge, and the identification and connection to experts.  In our experience though, the journey itself is part of the learning process.  Well-run KIM initiatives will not only yield the desired end product, they will yield an improved understanding of the organization as a whole, and a view towards additional ways the organization can improve their knowledge and information management practices and standards.  Our discovery and design workshop methodologies are all about helping organizations better understand their processes, their people, and their technologies.

• Clear the Clutter – One of the common challenges many organizations face within their knowledge systems is information bloat.  When we perform content reviews and analyses on existing information systems, we find a mass of information that is out-of-date, inaccurate, duplicate, or just plain useless.  For instance, for one recent services organization we were asked to help them clean up and migrate their content from their legacy systems to the new system we’d helped them design.  We leveraged both manual and semi-automated means of analyzing the content.  Of the roughly 650,000 documents held within their legacy systems, we found that 20% was duplicative, 20% was outdated, and 30% hadn’t been accessed by anyone over the last two years.  We focused on migrating the remaining 200,000 or so documents and ensuring they were properly tagged and managed over the long-term.  This “cleansing” alone vastly improved user satisfaction and trust within the system.  It also vastly improved the overall findability of the information within the system.

Whatever your organization’s New Year’s resolutions might be, we wish you the best in the year to come.  And, of course, if you need a little help achieving those resolutions, we look forward to hearing from you.

 

 

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