SAST Wingees

Blogs, Wikis, Forums, Email – the differences – Part 2

You may have read my previous post on blogs,wikis,forums inviting comments. I got some great inputs from Arun , Ranjith, Mahesh Kumar and Vamsi. I used their inputs and my own views on the topic to classify blogs, forums, wikis and email from a KM perspective across various attributes summarized in the picture below:

Mind you, this classification is entirely based upon using these techniques behind the firewall. Inside my company, blogging is a rage as of now and because of the encouragement it offers for the reading mindset, it has become a great way for disseminating information/knowledge on a variety of subjects.

People actually come to the blogs to read stuff which is much different from any centralized KM system I have seen so far. Most KM systems would fall under the purpose driven mindset and hence ability to disseminate knowledge is lower unless it fits the purpose being fulfilled.

Another important aspect that Arun touched upon is Search. With today’s Enterprise Search technologies – Google Appliance, Microsoft Sharepoint, IBM Omnifind (it is now available as a free download co-branded with Yahoo), SAP Search Appliance, Oracle Search etc, Searching inside the firewall has become a very important application. Blogging does require a lot of effort to sustain but in an enterprise context, with a sufficient number of bloggers someone somewhere is always writing some thing, so the system generates a lot of traffic because there is always something new to read thereby fueling the reading mindset to come back for more.

I think the other attributes are somewhat self-explanatory. Overall, Blogs, Wikis and Forums complement each other very well and are an excellent fit for any modern KM strategy. I have also included Email just to show how poor it is from a KM viewpoint. Do the readers agree with my ratings? Are there other attributes that you would like to see?

Flashback:
1. Thanks to Google – the WIMP interface is dead. A post that i did a while ago explaining why Search is becoming important. It attracted the attention of Nick Carr, Sadagopan and the Zoho team.
2. Why the WIMP interface is dead. A follow on post that explains in a more in depth fashion why Search is important.

Key insight from the Indian cricket team’s flame out from the world cup 2007

Lots of articles have been written on this topic and in the Sunday edition of the Hindu newspaper over 25 letters were published citing one reason after another for the debacle. I’m sure the desi blogosphere is agog with activity as well. I’m at Boston, MA since last night. My dear friend Sreedhar Narayanan picked me up from the Logan airport and we started driving towards his home in Shrewsbury. It was an hour long drive and since cricket is on top of everyone’s minds, we started discussing the Indian team. We went over the reasons:
1. Is it passion? I’m of the view that for us to succeed significantly in anything we need passion. But the whole of India is so passionate about cricket and the Indian team is especially passionate. 2. Is it too much money? This is the single most often cited reason by the people who wrote to the Hindu newspaper – too many endorsement deals and other money chasing the players and they lost their interest in playing cricket. This can’t be true as well. The amount of money that the sportspersons in the USA make, be it basketball, baseball, ice hockey, american football etc, is ungodly. The money these people will make in a year will put the entire career earnings of Indian players to shame. But the kind of games these people play are also similarly great. 3. Lack of killer instinct? This is another oft cited reason by everyone. Not true. Even in the last world cup the Indian team reached the finals after beating Pakistan. That game with Pakistan is arguably India’s finals considering the sheer mental pressure. If we don’t have the killer instinct who does? 4. Lack of teamwork? Yes, there are a few players about whom one could say they chase personal glory than team glory. But this is again incorrect. We have done well so many times as a team that this couldn’t be the reason. 5. Lack of talent? The Indian team has such brilliant stars like Tendulkar, Sehwag, Dravid, Ganguly and others that on paper it is arguably amongst the most talented teams. 6. Inability to play under pressure?
See point no.3 above. We definitely have played well under more pressure than most teams experience. In fact, as Greg Chappell says the Indian team is under undue pressure every time they play regardless of whether it is a world cup match. This is because the unrealistic expectations of 1.2B people are riding on the match. At this point, we ran out of reasons and we didn’t have a clear reason. Sreedhar mentioned inconsistency. We play well on some occasions and on some others we don’t. But what is the reason behind this inconsistency? We started discussing and Sreedhar finally hit the nail on its head – work ethic and I concurred. Work ethic is a quantity I would say is severely lacking in India (Sukumar *entering protective flame suit*). If you look at the Australian team or the Americans in general it is the work ethic that shines through. You come in day after day work hard, do your best. This is something that we as a country have not learnt and it is the singular thing that is standing in the way of India achieving the greatness it so much deserves. The Indian team is the finest example of this lacuna. One of my relatives works in Hyundai’s Chennai factory and he told me about the Korean work ethic. You have to come in at 8am no matter what. No grandmother is sick, bus breakdowns, milkman was late type of excuses. Get your heads down and work. I’m told that the Chinese have this work ethic (I’m yet to visit that great country). In America, where I worked for over 10 years, I saw people coming in at a consistent time, worked hard to the best of their abilities. Yes, they take breaks but not 1 hour lunch breaks, half hour coffee breaks, half hour breakfast breaks, afternoon snack breaks etc. It takes a great attitude to come in everyday without fail and do your work to the best of your abilities. We on the other hand are somewhat satisfied if we just stayed in the office for 12 hours without regard to what is getting accomplished in reality. Sreedhar was quoting Ricky Ponting that he would practice enough to hit the stumps from anywhere atleast 50percent of the time. It takes that kind of practice day after day to make wins happen. Unless we as a country develop that type of work ethic, our dreams of dominating the world will remain just that – dreams. Is there hope? I have worked in Mumbai for over 2 years and I have seen this work ethic in Mumbai. In pouring rain the city goes to work. The dabbawalas in Mumbai get better than 6 sigma quality. Chennai is getting there but not yet like Mumbai. Bangalore I don’t have experience in. Let’s hope we can imbue this work ethic every where and beat the world.

Blogs, Wikis, Discussion Forums, Email, RSS Feed Reader – the differences – part 1

In my view, all the web 2.0 techniques are a tremendous help in any KM strategy. A colleague recently asked me the difference between discussion forums and blogs.  I expanded the question to include rss feed readers, email and wikis. We rolled out an internal blogs initiative and within 7 months it has reached 1million page views per month (covered by Economic Times’s Corporate Dossier supplement on Friday Mar 16, 2007). We also have discussion forums which are quite popular as well but not nearly as popular as the Blogs. We have Wikis as well but they are even less popular than the forums. I have been thinking about the differences in popularity and wanted to see if I could provide some theory behind this and I would welcome thoughts from readers. Let us first consider the blogs vs. Forums question and then extrapolate that to the others. Here is how I see this: When you access a forum, you’re going to it to see if there are any questions you could answer or to see if someone has answered a question you have posted or simply to post another question that you have. You rarely go to the forum just to read all the questions and answers. Whereas when you goto the blogging system, you actually go with the mindset of reading the blogs and since no one is a very prolific poster, you goto the blogs to post many number of times less than you are going there to read. Due to this reason, the page views increases and because every blogger can track their own page views, it gives the feedback to the blogger that his/her posts are being liked. In addition some of the readers post comments which further increases  the blogger’s morale and leads them to post more. This whole thing is a virtuous cycle contributing to increasing number of page views and posts. Of course, not so good bloggers don’t receive that much page views or comments and slowly stop blogging. From a KM perspective this facet of going to the blogs with a reading mindset is an enormous advantage. What do you see as the other differences between blogs and discussion forums?

References:

1. Rod Boothby explains insightfully, why email is not that useful compared to blogs/wikis and how you can link them up both to create more value.

The tang missing from the Tangerine

After nearly 3 weeks, went out for dinner last night to the well-known Tangerine Restaurant at Murray’s Gate Road which is near the Lifestyle Home center in Alwarpet – billed as the exclusive Continental cuisine restaurant. I ordered Bruschetta for the starter course and Priya Raju ordered a pasta salad. The bruschetta came with a soggy piece of garlic bread. Bruschetta is typically served with a garlic bread that is crusty not soggy. The tomato toppings and spices seemed quite authentic Italian though. Priya’s salad was pretty bad. For the main course i ordered Vegetarin Shaslik (vegetarian sizzler served on a bed of rice as described in the menu card). It came up with a miserable looking jacket potato the size of an amla (gooseberry). Jacket potatoes are typically the large sized potatoes. They also had some oozy sour cream on it to make the whole thing unappetizing. Priy Raju ordered stir fried vegetables which was not any good either. I could not have the sizzlers with rice, so i ordered some naan bread. They redeemed themselves a bit with fresh-off-the-oven naan bread which was extremely good. Then i ordered their famous “death by chocolate” for dessert. This was really divine. You must have this dessert if you go to this restaurant. They truly redeemed themselves with this dessert. Otherwise i would have been totally dissappointed. The ambience and decor were very good. They also had a band playing, in the corner,  some popular pop tunes including the Beatles. The service was okay. Overall, they need to get a better chef. References:
1. Chenthil of Chennai Metroblogs covers the Tangerine in his inimitable style.

Skip prodigal talent, praise the effort

First an apology – it is almost 2 weeks since i posted anything on my blog. I have had a brutal schedule for the past 2 weeks, no time to even check the comments on my blog. Sorry if you commented and i didn’t respond.
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I had linked to this insightful article – the myth of prodigy a while ago. It is a great article, but at that time it seemed that it was simply trying to deconstruct prodigies.  But the key idea i took note of was that Mozart’s genius is more hard work than pure talent which i am sure he had aplenty as well. 2 weeks ago Sujatha Manivasagam sent me the link to this brilliant article titled “How not to talk to your kids” by Po Branson.  It is a long 5 page article but the key insight is this:

For the past ten years, psychologist Carol Dweck and
her team at Columbia (she’s now at Stanford) studied the effect of
praise on students in a dozen New York schools. Her seminal work—a
series of experiments on 400 fifth-graders—paints the picture most
clearly.

Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade
classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of the
classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of
puzzles—puzzles easy enough that all the children would do fairly well.
Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his
score, then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly divided into
groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, “You must be smart at this.” Other students were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.”

Why just a single line of praise? “We wanted to see how sensitive children were,” Dweck explained. “We had a hunch that one line might be enough to see an effect.”

Then the students were given a choice of test for the second round. One
choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but the
researchers told the kids that they’d learn a lot from attempting the
puzzles. The other choice, Dweck’s team explained, was an easy test,
just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent
chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The “smart” kids took the cop-out.

The last line is the clincher – the kids praised for their effort work harder and the kids praised for smarts take it easy. So you can see how the kids identified as prodigies lose their motivation and in the long run may not live up to their promise. I don’t have to give you examples of  prodigies that have fallen by the wayside. The other aspect that is key is to understand how expertise is gained. Po Branson doesn’t give adequate attention to this. I had covered this topic in my post a while ago titled “what is that makes an expert, an expert“.  You can see from that post that it is practice with ongoing feedback that is the key to expertise. Why is feedback, or in this context, praise so important? We have covered that in the ABC Theory post earlier. Praise is the Positive Immediate Consequence (PIC) that the brain likes so much. In sum, try to spot talent in your child if you can, but focus more on praising the effort than talent. Once in a while you do need to praise talent to show that there is something innate, but focus more on  giving constant feedback and praise for the effort. On the other hand, don’t despair if your child does not have prodigal talent, maybe s/he is a late bloomer genius as David Galenson has shown. Happy parenting!