July 31, 2007
Trademark 2.0: New Book
Hardly an information technology book or magazine can be picked up that does not mention the focus to achieve enterprise effectiveness or share information in a manner that allows the organization to react in an effective manner across the entire supply chain. The result of these efforts to lower the costs and gain a competitive advantage within the supply chain has lead to a much more diverse community of individual suppliers. This transformation from hierarchal controlling structures to distributed flat organizations has created what Dan Pink calls the Free Agent Nation. The reality is that free agents may not come from next door but rather the next country. Employees need to adapt by creating unique value propositions that are captured with their Trademark.
This book will discuss several dimensions of building a personal Trademark. Unlike other books on this subject, this book will focus on the “How” an individual can move from local labor to global talent in the new world defined as Enterprise 2.0. Enterprise 2.0 commonly refers to organizations that operate under an open communication model where interaction and communication is encouraged from the top down. Enterprises are accomplishing this feat by not only addressing the technology requirements of Web 2.0 but the social and organizational changes required to sustain a competitive advantage.
Subject
The domain of the book is the creation, development, and ongoing utilization of a personal Trademark. Wikipedia defines a Trademark as follows:
A trademark is a distinctive sign of some kind which is used by a business to uniquely identify itself and its products and services to consumers, and to distinguish the business and its products or services from those of other businesses. A trademark is a type of industrial property which is distinct from other forms of intellectual property. Conventionally, a trademark comprises a name, word, phrase, logo, symbol, design, image, or a combination of these elements. There is also a range of non-conventional trademarks comprising marks which do not fall into these standard categories.The choice of the Trademark over the conventional term branding is by design. Information workers think of themselves as members of a trade. A trade is a long term progression where skills, competencies, and experiences come together to create subject matter expertise. The new world of business is built around ambiguity, collaboration, networks, distributed leadership, loosely coupled processes, and a dispersed workforce. For many in the industry, the transformation has been overnight and the majority of us are not prepared to handle a world without hierarchal structures. The Trademark is a physical representation of who you are as opposed to the concepts of branding which are more metaphysical. Much of this book will focus on the physical creation of informational elements that define a brand or brand position. Generally speaking, information workers are more receptive to the hard elements of a Trademark versus the emotional elements of a brand. Historically, trademarks have been associated with professions like the pharmacist’s mortar and pestle, the anvil for the blacksmith, the red and white pole for a barber or the wooden Indian statue for tobacco stores. These symbols represented something about the profession and those that practiced it.
In the 2.0 environment, these physical trademarks have been replaced by more meta-physical ones such as logo, slogans, and reputation. Still, like every organization, we must learn to build both the physical and meta-physical trademarks in order to compete in the next 25 years. This book is designed to give the information worker an overview of personal branding and provide a process for the creation of their physical Trademark in a 2.0 world.
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Posted by Todd at 11:54 AM
July 21, 2006
Knowing When to Let Go!
Whenever I look at a collaborative environment, it becomes real clear if an information architect or someone with a little bit of training has been involved. Information has neither context nor logical flow of assimilation. Spaghetti IA is more like it. However, when we do get involved and establish a solid roadmap and game plan for the content, we need to know when to leave and let nature take its course. Here are a few signs that we, as information architects or metadata architects have stayed too long:
1. The number of modifications made to the environment comes to a slow halt. Once the IA is established then content begins to flow into the system by the various contributors and very little adjustments are required. In fact, adjustments could actually create negative impacts to the project.
2. The phone stops ringing. What we do is not rocket science and with the new collaborative solutions we can simply be educators where the business users do the actual information architecture. Defining fields, domain, and visual structures have been automated and if no one is calling for help, move on.
3. The Tipping Point has been reached. When a collaborative site has an abundant amount of information or users then we should be careful to make adjustments. For example, suppose we have a document library where adding the modified date field would produce some value for reporting. However, if the environment has 1,000 documents, are you going to ask the end user to back and update the field or implement on a go forward basis. More importantly, businesses operate on cycles and if the cycle is producing content don’t slow it down, let it flow.
4. We are at80%. We as architects seek perfection while the business wants progress. If we just had one more day we could add some much more value to the knowledge store. No, let the business run when they are satisfied.
The bottom line, there is an art to letting go and allowing the seeds you planted to grow.
Posted by Todd at 5:42 PM
May 16, 2006
When 1 = 400; Dell Math
Wow, I can hardly imagine the supple chain of a single Dell computer. I recently came across the fact that a single Dell computer may integrate as many as 400 suppliers from design to delivery. From Texas to Malaysia, the electronic world is indeed integrated. Who says the Electronic Business to Business Integration is not here yet.
Posted by Todd at 11:07 AM
May 12, 2006
Collaboration Insight
Just got through Don Tapscott’s Rethinking Information Technology and Competitive Advantage part 2. This part focused on the collaborative nature of both business and its use of technology. This paper can be found on Don’s website or through a quick search. The basic premise is that with the interconnected world, there is a new era of collaboration happening that is clearing redefining what is means to have a competitive advantage or how to get one.
Collaboration is the new foundation of competitiveness. Normally the term collaboration conjures up images of office workers interacting effectively together. True, knowledge is the ability to take effective action. The exchange of knowledge among people allows them to communicate complex ideas and to collaborate in creating value. But the concept is changing. By collaboration we mean the increasing richness of means by which objects (things, people and firms) can work together enhanced by the medium of the Internet.
The paper continues to examine the impact as well as provide insight on the how. The world and business is changing and publication such as this reinforce the ideas and sheds light on he we can not only get involved but be on the forefront.
Posted by Todd at 11:58 AM
October 24, 2005
ICKM Conference
This week I am off to the second International Conference on Knowledge Management (ICKM2005) will be held at the ASIS&T Annual Meeting in the Westin Charlotte, North Carolina on October 27-28, 2005. The conference will bring together academics, researchers, developers, practitioners, and users in the areas of knowledge management and information processing. It will serve as a platform for networking, exchange of research ideas, practical applications and best practices.
My session will focus on the Knowledge Organization and it looks like some really great papers that are expanding the body of knowledge. My plan is to provide a 10 minute overview and then allow the presenters to deliver their content. Hopefully, we will get lots of questions and interaction since these academic conferences tend to be on the dry side.
Published Papers
Interaction Histories in Complex Information Retrieval Task Management: Results from the Evaluation of Two Search History Systems by Anita Komlodi
Citation Classification and Its Applications by Selcuk Aya, Carl Lagoze, and Thorsten Joachims
Making the Knowledge-Driven Enterprise Manageable with Semantic Technologies and Faceted Classification by Philip C. Murray
Integrating Consumer Taxonomies Within the Enterprise Metadata Environment by R. Todd Stephens
Posted by Todd at 2:48 AM | Comments (2)
August 22, 2005
A Beautiful Mind Revisited
One of my favorite scenes in the movie A Beautiful Mind is where the main actors are in a bar when four beautiful young ladies walk in and the gentlemen discuss their strategy. The eureka moment in Dr. Nash’s research arrives as he realizes that if all of them go after the blond they will all walk away alone. However, if none of them go after the blond they will remain friends and well you get the idea. Nash reasons, they'll devastate one another's chances while letting other, slightly less desirable, women get away. "Adam Smith needs revision!" he declares triumphantly. To his baffled classmates, he explains: Adam Smith said the best result comes from everyone in the group doing what's best for himself, right? Adam Smith was wrong! The message: Sometimes it is better to cooperate! (Yes, most folks know that Adam Smith understood the cooperative environment, but that does not make a good movie.
For the sake of argument, let us assume that the story is true and bring it to the High-Performance Work Place. Adam Smith would say that each individual should act in their own best interest and build a set of high performing skills. These skills would reflect professional, academic, corporate, and even entrepreneur dimensions of the individuals personal goals and objectives. Now, would Dr. Nash say that high performance individuals may not make a high performance work place and in fact may be counter productive in doing so? In other words, a high performing group may not be made up of a group of high performing individuals. More thoughts later…
Posted by Todd at 1:32 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 4, 2005
Collaboration Success or Failure
Today, most organizations are implementing some form collaborative applications. These applications include shared documents, shared content management, groupware, corporate blogs, etc. What factors impact the success and failure of these efforts? More importantly, are these factors correlated? While I have not performed an extensive research program, I can draw on a couple of years of experience.
Failure will be related to the infrastructure. More specifically, the capacity and performance of the application will dictate the failure. Assuming the system selected has the basic business functions required, failure will occur when the system destroys the trust by not excelling in the operations and infrastructure areas. However, successful applications built over a solid infrastructure does not guarantee success. In fact, a solid infrastructure is only important when the need is not fulfilled.
Success is much more related to the client support and the business community acceptance of the technology. Therefore success in collaboration is related to the training, engagement processes, branding, best practices, user manuals, communities of practice, communications, and providing customer service.
So where does the vast majority of funding in this area go toward? You guessed it, the software, hardware, vendor relationships, capacity, etc. More importantly try to find a best practice document, vendor user guide, or a research firm review of the implementation of collaborative applications, you will find a rather large vacuum. Our community is obviously more concerned with collaborative failure than collaborative success.
Posted by Todd at 6:06 PM | Comments (1)