What’s up Doc??

Posted on March 12, 2013 by Ari

Well, frankly everything.  Healthcare is ripe for unprecedented levels of disruption.  Costs are out of control and frankly obscured from the patient even with advances in new technologies costs continue to escalate.  Meanwhile the gap between doctor and patient continues to widen as patients seek alternate means to understand and manage their healthcare to where to have their care administered.  At the same time, an explosion of data from genomic information to sensor based heath and wellness should allow for a transition from population style medicine to individualized care but changes are slow to take place.  Why? In part, because of regulation, embedded process, incentives that don’t align with holistic patient care, cultural barriers, etc.

Recently I was asked to speak at the HIMSS Physicians IT Symposium.  I enjoy meeting with CMIO’s who are interested in understanding this shift and how to implement change within their practice, hospital, health systems etc..  There is a confusing array of healthcare IT reform initiatives underway including Meaningful Use, Accountable Care, ICD-10, etc.  Several of the discussions focused on the development and challenges associated with digitizing medical records and developing an EMR platform.  Clem McDonald who is arguable the grandfather of the modern day EMR discussed the trials and tribulations he went through as he and his team tried to create increasing levels of digitization in a very analog world.  At one point he showed a somewhat wacky font his team developed to try and replicate a physician’s script.

Eric Toppol in his book the “Creative Destruction of Medicine” argues that there will be several transformative forces that will shape medicine in the coming years including the digitization of the patient.  I think this will issue in a profound shift in how care is delivered including a greater push to early diagnosis and preventative care.  It was startling for me to see the number of unneeded procedures, infections that were brought about inside the hospital setting and incurred costs.  Anything that can be done to prevent this has to be beneficial.  We will see more individuals analyzing not only their activity to understand its affect on health and wellness but also their genetic makeup to understand predisposition to various conditions.  This could usher in a wave of preventative care

I believe one of the most transformative forces will be the healthcare consumer especially the next generation of consumer.   Patient communities, mobile apps, crowdsourcing and gamification are slowly working their way into healthcare.  One of the most profound and possibly disruptive is Patient Communities.  The incentive system for physicians is based on numbers not holistic care, so patients have been finding an outlet within these social networks that are geared around health and wellness.  When it comes to life changing chronic conditions, patients are increasingly going online for the empathy and support that might be lacking in a clinical environment.  In these communities, they are finding people who are going through similar experiences.  Value is being delivered in the form of caring and understanding, which leads to greater levels of trust.  Greater levels of trust leads to more transparency and sharing of information.  Greater sharing leads to better targeting and tighter ties between members with commonality i.e. more data.  These communities have matured from sites of caring and empathy to stores of incredibly valuable information for multiple stakeholders in the healthcare community.  Cure Together, Organized Wisdom, and “Patients Like Me” are all taking this model and putting their own unique differentiation onto it. Patients Like Me initially focused on ALS but have branched out to other life changing conditions – MS, Cancer, Transplant Patients, etc.  I was showing Physicians in our MMM program (Master’s in Medical Management) a patient’s profile in ALS.  The patient was charting the effect of Baclofen, a drug used to treat spastic movement disorders.  The amount of data disclosed and open is frankly shocking.  This patient is tracking a variety of factors including exercise, diet, sleep, and other metrics to help monitor and assess their condition.

With all of the different permeations and variability between patients, this becomes a matching exercise and the more information the greater value patients receive from these communities.  Imagine a match.com for patient compatibility.  You can contrast this with Electronic Medical Records (EMR), which are being mandated by Meaningful Use legislation.  The difficulty is transferring records from paper to digital format, getting them up to date and ensuring data integrity.  Generally this information is spread over multiple sites and is incomplete.  Physician’s only have what the patient is willing to share or has the wherewithal to share with them.  Oftentimes, a patient will not disclose critical pieces of information.  In part, since a visit to a clinic can be intimidating and when diagnosed with a chronic condition well that information sometimes takes a backseat to struggling to cope with the news.  In contrast, the social sharing of information is vibrant, rich and dynamic which could assist the physician in treatment.  I think this partnership between patient, physician and community has a lot of potential to solving the EMR data input dilemma.  This represents a huge cultural shift and also a leap of faith in that the value to the patient and society will surmount any of the possible legalities and privacy concerns.  Other industries have already started innovating along this path.  Healthcare should look to them for an understanding of how they can do the same…

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Shall we play a game?

Posted on February 11, 2013 by Ari

How about Global Thermonuclear War? Remember the movie WarGames?  It featured a very young Matthew Broderick who inadvertently hacks into a military supercomputer to try and play some games.  He accidentally triggers a military simulation that causes all sort of confusion at NORAD on what is real and what is fake (simulated).  One of my favorite movies, not just because Broderick’s character’s last name was Lightman, but it was one of the first movies I remember featuring a hacker, computer based learning, and the disruption associated with automation especially with maintaining command of our missile silos.

There are some interesting parallels for what is now occurring within corporations.  The term “gamification” is being thrown around a lot.  It’s one of those misused buzzwords used to describe applying gaming principles to business processes.

PwC was kind enough to listen to my ranting on this subject and even publish some of my thoughts in the their latest tech forecast.  I admit I came off sounding like a bit of a curmudgeon, after all who doesn’t love playing games, but if we rush into this shiny new space without addressing legacy issues nothing will be achieved with any lasting impact.  There is also a mind shift that needs to be overcome.  Some folks believe work is work, its not supposed to be fun.   You might agree or not, but I think we should all acknowledge that work should be meaningful and fulfilling.

My basic complaint was that we inundate corporations with new technologies and hyped up buzzwords and gloss over the central issue, which is that today’s employees are simple disengaged.  Gallop recently performed a study where they found that 2/3 of workers are disengaged at work.  They found this represents a cumulative $300B in lost productivity.  Whether you agree with their methodology or not, this is still a tough nut to crack.  After all, in most organizations, there is a heavy build up of processes on top of processes with little understanding of why. A game might help (or not), but in under to sustain engagement and turn around the notion of work as a chore that you have to do to get a paycheck, we might need to rethink how work gets conducted, how employee are incentivized, and how embedded processes can be streamlined or even ripped out of the equation.

Jane McGonigal and the folks at the Institute for the Future have done some interesting research on the positive psychological factors/motivators around game play including joy, contentment, relief, and excitement. I can imagine these are ideals that managers would love in describing their employee’s response to their work environment.  Also, Self Determination Theory (SDT), which researchers have identified as a key component of game play, helps instill key psychological needs –autonomy, competence and relatedness.  If games can help provide these key qualities and work is non-fulfilling than why not simply “gamify” work.  Well as I mentioned before it’s not a one to one mapping.

Like the confusion from war games, gaming without careful thought through will lead to mis-understanding within organizations.  Why are we doing this?  Is it part of my responsibilities?  How do we measure outcomes?  I think there are areas of work and a particular audience that might lend well to a game.  On boarding for one.  When you bring on new employees and there is natural collegiality between groups, you might be able to develop a game around finding resources especially within a large organization.  In fact, this is what the smart folks at SCVNGR have done.  However, not addressing legacy issues to create a fertile area for game play and not understanding adoption patterns within organizations will lead to retracting not advancing.  Congratulations, you are now the mayor of TPS cover sheets….

Posted in Culture, Enterprise 2.0, Gamification | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Electrical, Appliances, Millwork, Community Analysis?

Posted on February 2, 2013 by Ari

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to come out to Lowes HQ and speak at their Social Business Symposium.  It has been great getting to know the company from an internal business perspective.  Like many others, I know the company very well from a consumption perspective since I spend about every weekend there asking inane questions on everything from wiring to plumbing.  I was impressed how a traditional large retail oriented company can transition to a social business.  Lowes has varieties of internal communities both personal and business.  There is a belief that by developing any connections between employees there will be stronger ties.  Stronger ties leads to knowledge transfer, culture development, more engaged employees, perhaps even greater retention.  It’s an interesting transition in the corporate world where executives are beginning to understand that the value of personal social networks can be replicated within a business setting however it cannot be 100% focused on advancing the corporation.  There needs to be an understanding of the employee from a holistic perspective not simply as a cog in a large machine.  These activities are not simply a waste of time but help develop a culture of sharing.  It was mentioned that within one of their communities focused on gaming, connections were made from different groups where these folks would not connect within a business-centered community.  This leads to a myriad of benefits that, I believe, outweigh the risks and can lead to greater engagement/ interaction with stakeholders outside the company.  It’s a testament to their effort to have Robert Niblock (CEO) stop in and provide his support for their work and the benefits of developing a social enterprise.

When I go to these events, most of the speakers discuss social business, social learning, etc.  They had one speaker, however, that was markedly different.  Victoria Labalme is a professional speaker and a classically trained actress.  She even studied under Marcel Marceau.  She discussed the importance of listening; she mimed on stage; she even performed a skit to demonstrate how our insanely crazy busy lives are not allowing us to connect with our through line. The through line is an acting term meaning the thread that links a character’s action to their motivations.  In this context, Victoria was trying to get the audience to discover their through line.  In part to help weed out all the noise and focus on what is important.  Victoria’s talk was different, hard to conceptualize and made me feel a little uncomfortable but that’s exactly what was needed.  I have been to so many of these events that I know the script.  Throwing a curve ball is good, understanding different experiences is good, getting uncomfortable is good….

As I tell my students when I teach innovation, getting out of you comfort zone is exactly what you need.  Complacency is bad.   Recently, I was quoted saying “complacency = death”.  If we are not rethinking our processes and measuring our decisions continuously than we are falling behind and not maturing as people and corporations.  Also, bringing in different experiences and viewpoints in my experience accelerates innovation (at least ideation).  Lastly, pride and purpose need to re-infused into the work environment.  We don’t live to work, we work to live.  Developing a social business, focusing on employees and not processes, providing tighter connectedness between different groups, and getting a little uncomfortable is a good recipe for developing culture and as I mentioned before culture trumps strategy….

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Member of the Tribe…

Posted on November 30, 2012 by Ari

It was great to have Rachel Happe from TheCR  and Francois Gossieaux from Human 1.0  in class last month.  Rachel and TheCR are on the forefront in advancing the community manager profession and the social executive through a community of knowledge sharing.  Their community management model provides an organizational social assessment and practical steps to help advance social awareness.  Francois is a recognized thought leader on the culture and the impact of tribes on organizations He takes an anthropological approach to understanding human behavior and how that manifests itself into organizational culture.  BTW, Francois new book, “The Hyper Social Organization” is highly recommended

I love having guest presenters in class.  For one, it gives the students another perspective from leading practitioners as well as a sounding board to help them with challenging client-based issues.   Secondly, it gives them a break.  Let’s face it after 9 weeks of hearing me drone on about anything, students could use a break…

As Rachel and Francois were chatting, I was thinking about the notion of Communities.  I ask all my students a fairly simply question – “Is this class a community? “ and I get a different response every time.  Variance largely depends on the makeup of the class – graduate students, IT executives, physicians, etc.  Then we go through an exercise in what being a part of a community implies, how do we define, segment and socialize the notion of community.  Then we get into some more functional exercises of what you can measure to a) reinforce the initial notion of community b) understand whether our community is successful (along pre-defined success metrics) and c) look for ways to optimize community based interactions.  This is all done to get them primed to tackle very large community oriented questions within their class projects.

I find it interesting that my generation largely still defines our status and sense of place in an organization by belonging to a corporation, a department, and/or a functional group.  You just need to walk into most defense contractors to see how this is reinforced from what it says on your B-card to your clearance to whom you interact with on a daily basis.  As I go out and speak with different organizations, I am seeing more folks re-think this concept.

There is a renewed focus on worker identity both online and within organizations. I also see more emphasis on teams, communities and tribes within organizations – this as a good thing.  Instead of simply functional classifications, belonging to one of these groups incorporates and conveys a set of beliefs, convictions and shared goals. Instead of being defined by the corporation, employees attach themselves to the shared value/culture of the work community.  The corporation acts to help foster this interaction.  Some of the most successful companies have spent considerable attention to understanding and promoting culture in the workplace.  As Maslow tells us, the need to belong is an essential emotional need and smaller groups create a heightened level of belonging reinforcing tighter bonds.  When I speak with my students about careers, they are eager to carve out there identity, be a part of something and become a “go to” resource (knowledge leader).  With that said, I am seeing former students leave well paying corporate roles to join companies with a well-defined culture focused on communities and connectedness.  We need to examine culture and communities and how it helps to drive collaboration and innovation.  Having an understanding of what type of social community works for a specific situation is critical.  Teams might imply competition while communities can imply shared intent.  In addition, if you subscribe to the idea that everything is measurable, we can assess the output (benefit) associated with spending time and effort on fostering the development of communities.  This will help with the justification and further accelerate a community or tribal based culture.  I think this is key to innovation, social software adoption, attracting next generation of worker, maintaining a competitive advantage, etc…  How about you?

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SXSM – South by So Much…

Posted on June 24, 2012 by Ari

As I was weeding through all the SXSW panels for 2013, I realized the last time I blogged was before SXSW in March.  Yikes, that’s pathetic.  So, my vow for the new year (school year that is) is to blog more regularly.  I will start with finishing my post from SXSW back in March.

I got a chance to head out to SXSW this year with a bunch of colleagues and students from Carnegie Mellon.  The one theme I noticed (IMHO) was that Social stopped being an entity, in of itself, and started to be woven into the fabric of management processes for industries and companies.  For example in Health 2.0, combining an understanding of social analytics within healthcare can provide greater understanding of patient needs and possibly better patient outcomes.  I think this is “healthy” evolution in the space so we get away from the minutia around PR exploits and understand how to harness community interactions and dynamics to achieve more relevant outcomes.

SXSW is always an enriching experience but holy cow it’s exhausting.  I noticed that many of the panels and sessions, which have exploded in variety and number, have taken on a distinctly practical component focusing on tacit knowledge sharing, that’s good.  The issue I experienced was that sessions I happened to be interested in were never co-located, so it became a lesson in expeditious planning and opportunity cost.  As opposed to CES, which was confined to the Las Vegas Convention Center and, I believe, had a larger attendance, SXSW takes place across downtown Austin.   So if you wanted to see a panel say at the ATT conference center, close to UT Austin, and you’re at the convention center, you better plan it out carefully otherwise don’t bother since you won’t get in.  With all the apps available, I was surprised there was not one that provided real time updates on session attendance.  I think this would be more valuable than an app that lets you know about other users that might be nearby.

Carnegie Mellon had a fairly sizable presence with faculty, students and staff.   We put on an event that included a panel on big data analytics.  It was an interesting discussion around how the exhaust of information from social interactions is resulting in an explosion of unstructured information providing new insights to corporation but also the development of new market opportunities e.g just look at the development of computational journalism.  The problem is that social data along with open data, structured data, mobile data, sensor data, etc. (you get the point..) is really difficult to  aggregate, understand, filter and obtain actionable intelligence.

I normally don’t go into the exhibit area and try to concentrate on one to one networking but I did wander in partially out of necessity.  When you are continually texting, checking in, accessing the official SXSW app, mapping your location, etc. you can drain down your cell battery pretty quick, go figure.  So, on the advice of a colleague, I went in to pick up a Mophie, which in my mind was a lifesaver.  Highly recommended..

One of the more interesting panels I attended was not about technology at all but around the idea of serendipity and how inconsequential events can collide to create fortuitous innovation.   The panel hosted by Rawn Shah from IBM was well thought out, attended and it was a nice change of pace to focus on the benefit of personal interactions not just social or technological, but people connecting with people.

I don’t know if SXSW is getting too “big for its britches” but within interactive, there seems to be several sub-conferences that can spin out focusing on different industries –entertainment, education, social innovation, etc or even components of the social space – analytics, security, privacy, etc.  Recently, I started going to the E2.0 conference which is a smaller conference focusing on social within the enterprise and it was tremendously valuable for me.  However, if you are going to go to one conference that bring all the elements of social together, SXSW still remains a must attend event, which is one of the reasons I will keep going with my mophie fully charged, running like a madman from one session to another….

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Confessions of a digital narcissist….

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Ari

I am a digital narcissist. There, I admitted it.  Perhaps, we all have a little bit of narcissism in us.  Not the bad kind, where ego and attention are a character flaw involving vanity, selfishness, arrogance, entitlement, etc.  I’m talking more about the healthier sort of narcissism where we crave some amount of recognition for our work, our contribution to society, or even our ability to entertain our social circles.  In a sense, it is the opposite of insecurity.  You can trust me on this one. You are reading about a guy who dealt with insecurity issues his entire life.  So, it feels good to have your post commented on, see your quote and name in a story, get an “atta boy” or “atta girl” for something you did that added value, whatever it might be.  To be recognized by your peers as a knowledge leader is a means for you to shoo away those insecure feelings at least for the time being.

Andy Warhol coined the phrase that in the future, we will all be world famous for 15 minutes, which was later truncated to indicate that everyone gets 15 minutes of fame, but what does “fame” mean.  Is it constrained to your social circle, group or team, organization, neighborhood association or is it something larger like a society, a region, perhaps the entire world?  Many of us will never attain the latter, books will not be written about us nor movies depicting our life.  However, recognition is still critical.  In fact, it factors into Maslow’s hierarchy of needs where the 4th tier deals with self-esteem.  As my colleague, Jesse Schell described in his lecture on “The Pleasure Principle” one of the reasons why games work focuses on Self Determination Theory (SDT).  SDT argues that Autonomy, Competence and Relatedness are required to foster high quality motivation and engagement for activities.  OK, so you have self-esteem and competence as 2 critical needs for motivated healthy individuals.

Unfortunately, this does not translate well into the enterprise.  We often see silos of data, closely guarded information, and collaboration relegated to channels like e-mail not over open platforms.  Why?  Knowledge, especially at the ideation stage, is hard to operationalize and measure.  From an employee perspective, it’s viewed as putting yourself out there especially for reproach.  In addition, sometime the payback is not in line with the risk.  One reason for this might be that it’s hard to track the flow of knowledge and the contributions within an organization.  Knowledge management systems are phasing out and being replace with more socially oriented software.  However in order for these tools to be effective we need to take a look at the culture of sharing within the organization and identify the motivational factors and incentive structure.  If your incentive structure is not aligned with your employee’s expectations than knowledge sharing breaks down.

So how can you “attribute” value creation back to the multitude of folks that worked on a project or even all the way back to the person(s) who first voiced the idea?  What should their incentives look like?  Recognition, monetary incentive, promotion, name on a plaque, new significant title?  I think some smart folks should develop a system that tracks knowledge across an organization real-time, in a visual fashion so that anyone can quickly understand it.  It would attribute value back to the source(s) and weigh contribution accordingly.  It would also show how knowledge evolves and morphs associated with connection points and different skillsets.  Users view their particular dashboard to understand where their idea/contribution lies in the innovation funnel and allows them the potential to jump back into the discussion.  I think this would be a powerful motivator to accelerate sharing and advance collaboration within the enterprise.  Now if only I could find some smart students to help me build it, hmmmm???

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Step up, sign in, move on….

Posted on February 24, 2012 by Ari

A few weeks ago in Measuring Social class, we discussed the idea of social advocacy.  Specifically, what are the ramifications associated with the spread of messaging and the increasing ease of gathering supporters around a cause using social channels.  Of course, there are the large-scale movements like the Arab Spring or #Occupywallstreet, but we chose some more recent events.  We looked at the recent uproar over SOPA/PIPA and how it was presented online and the use of change.org to draw attention to unfair labor practices when Target had it’s employees begin work at 11 PM thanksgiving day last year to get ready for Black Friday.  SOPA/PIPA has been debated to death, at this point, and in my mind it was just bad legislation and represented big media using their lobbying power to deliver a set of controls that were simply untenable.  Their thinking was rooted back in an antiquated means of media distribution and monetization rooted in an analog world and had little comprehension of how users become aware of, consume and share digital media.  The net denizens revolted in a large semi-organized fashion but the class was not entirely sure if everyone was aware of the issues.  There was a great piece by Stacey Higginbotham on this topic in GigaOm.  Piracy and digital media rights were overshadowed by heavy-handed practices that threatened to have the right to shut down several cherished sites that rely on user-generated content.  When banners were placed on sites to get folks to understand the issues, there was little action but when sites went dark that’s when the preverbal “you know what” hit the fan and people came out en mass.  Personally, I’m glad the proposed legislation was turned down but the debate still lives on and we will see many different manifestations of similar regulations as big media attempts to implement controls.  If you’re interested, Yochai Benkler from the Harvard’s Berkman Center had a phenomenal post on this subject

The change.org movement was fascinating in that they managed to achieve significant uptake for their protest in a short amount of time.  With close to 200K people signing a protest against Target’s policy, that represents significant leverage a company simply cannot ignore.  I recall canvassing door to door in my impressionable youth for some public interest group around conservation and the sheer futility of it.  The amount of energy and time expended to achieve a few signatures has been replaced by digital mechanisms to create awareness for a cause, share it your social circle, accelerate it across networks and hopefully manage to scale it in an efficient and timely manner.  The problem that the class brought up was around social advocacy fatigue.  There is simply too much to become aware of, understand the issues and lend support.  Now that the means are apparent and easy, causes to lend support to are coming from everywhere so you need to be diligent associated with what you are going to lend your time and effort to.  But it would be good to understand levels of commitment.  I tried finding some framework for identifying this (i.e. did some quick web searches) put came up short.  So I thought I would see if I could try and devise something:

  1. Awareness – understanding that an issue/cause exists
  2. Communicate – telling others in your social circle either virtually or IRL (in real life) that this is an issue to know about.
  3. Sign up – lending your name to a cause says something about your level of commitment
  4. Encourage – reaching out and letting your friends know that you have lent your name to a cause begins the generation of message spread.  Of course this is easier to do now in the age of social connections than it was back when I was going door-to-door
  5. Donate – put your money where your mouth is, this is important step, to use another over-used euphemism – now you have skin in the game
  6. Create – spending time to develop a protest gives you a new role- organizer there are multiple levels depending on whether it’s a virtual protest using a channel like change.org or a real world protest using social channels as a communication mechanism.  This might be short term, localized effort or could involve a large level of commitment if the cause becomes global.  Case in point is the One Million Voices against FARC that David Kirkpatrick chronicled in “The Facebook Effect”
  7. Lobby – getting a politician to understand the issues, the communities point of view and representing them to enact change take time, energy and leverage
  8. Protest – This is also relative to how you might protest but the we took a look at the folks from Occupywallstreet that weighed the opportunity cost and decided that the cause was important to them.  We discussed folks that potentially risk incarceration, harm even death to come out in support of their beliefs
  9. All in – We defined this as the point where it becomes all-consuming until there is some sort of amicable resolution but the battle wages on and on.  You just need to look to folks like Bill McKibbon from 350.org to understand how protesting an issue like climate change can turn into an all-consuming passion.  And more power to him, this dedication to a belief system is incredibly impressive

What are you’re thoughts, did I miss anything?  The big question in my mind is what happens after change occurs – legislation get passed or dropped; money gets raised; situations get rectified, etc.  Do people continue to monitor the situation? When another opportunity presents itself, are they more or less likely to get engaged and at what level?  I would be interested in measuring commitment from average social users after frequent exposure.  If and when another legislation or action begins, will there be increased levels of social advocacy or will awareness need to be “regenerated”?  Is attention span diminishing due to a continuous barrage of campaigns using social channels? As social advocacy presents itself at an increasing rate, will citizens become immune to attempts to persuade them to get involved?  Or perhaps worse yet will they simply sign up not knowing the issues but doing something as a routine practice?  Sounds like some potentially interesting research….

 

Posted in Advocacy, Social Media Class | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

How did this crowd get in my office?

Posted on November 23, 2011 by Ari

A few weeks ago in our Measuring Social class, we had a panel exploring issues around crowdsourcing.  This was just a terrific panel.  It had a lot to do with the panelists who participated which included:

Crowdsouring or drawing on the wisdom from a dispersed community has been around for a long time, it’s just no one thought to put a nice wrapper around it until Jeff Howe coined the term.  I use a quote from the famed economist Friedrich Hayek in one of my lectures. He said the following in 1945, (yes 1945!):

“The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is … a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality”

Pretty astonishing the clarity of insight into what companies are now just beginning to discover.  There are plenty of examples to see how this was used in practice, for example the Chicago Tribune building (did not know that one).  One of the panelists, Peter, provides some great examples of these “crowdsourced” initiatives in his blog post “Crowdsourcing isn’t new only the word is”

The general sense from the panelists was that crowdsouring is similar to where ecommerce was back in the late 1990s; everyone knew it was going to be important but most are struggling with how to harness collective wisdom and implement successful initiatives. From my point of view, I find it fascinating that this practice is not limited to a niche market with narrowly defined interests, but rather there are a plethora of examples of both large and small companies/organizations/communities in different industries attempting to harness crowds for a wide variety of uses.

crowdSPRING and Quirky are great examples of small companies that have taped into a need to work with creative folks around design and product development.  P&G is a well known company with 24 brands that have over a billion in net annual sales.  They have successfully leveraged crowds to help in the co-creation of new products through their open connect initiative.  I always find it interesting that a large company like P&G can latch onto this concept early, create top down leverage, aggregate a large motivated community and especially work out all the IP hurdles.   But they are not the only large company focused on harnessing collective wisdom; examples are plentiful from Starbucks “MyIdea” to IBM’s “IdeaJam” to Intuit’s “Brainstorm”.  Even Government agencies such as NASA and DARPA are experimenting with crowdsourcing initiatives.  During the panel, we discussed some interesting trends around crowdsourcing including:

  • Vetting the crowd or leaving it open
  • Commoditized (repetitive) tasks vs. creative tasks
  • Price erosion for similar services
  • Greater prevalence of crowdsourcing platforms, such as Mturk and associated implications
  • Gamification, Monetization and/or Peer Recognition as a motivator to participate
  • Subjective vs objective tasks
  •  Ability to scale platforms/initiatives effectively
  • Limits on what can or should be “crowdsourced”

Each of these issues would be interesting to explore in their own right (perhaps a source of future posts…) but if I piqued your interest, catch the replay of the panel online.

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Drowning in social data, better find a statistician….

Posted on July 7, 2011 by Ari

Two weeks ago, I had an opportunity to co-host a virtual roundtable with The Center for CIO Leadership founded by IBM.  The topic focused on social data and the challenges/ opportunities for CIOs.  To prepare for the roundtable, we put together a laundry list of issues from enabling enterprise 2.0 initiatives to security around storage/transferring data.  Since we only had one hour, we decided to focus on key issues involving data driven decision-making, success metrics and resource needs.  We began with a discussion of the challenge this new data source presents and how CIOs can leverage it for insight across the organization.  We also spent some time on the demands put on the CIO and staff to incorporate social data into existing processes from business intelligence to customer segmentation. One of the takeaways was that the different characteristics of this data (i.e. unstructured, voluminous, readily available) as well as how its generated, collected, stored and integrated will require new skillsets and perhaps even a different orientation to the traditional IT role.  So, what might be important skillsets for this next generation of data analyst?  I thought I would take a crack and put together some ideas….

Curiosity – The adage “you don’t know what you don’t know” is very appropriate when mining, analyzing and integrating social data. When I was a graduate student developing my thesis, experimentation was essential to develop unique findings.  This needs to be enabled and even encouraged within a corporate setting to find how this data can add value to different strategic initiatives.

Comprehensive mentality – Collect everything (within reason) since you never know what might be important for a future campaign or initiative.  However, keeping track of what data is collected, where it is stored and how to access it is key.  Data does have a finite shelf life and data sitting unused in a silo adds no value.

Global mindset while acting locally – Social data can be used to target market segments but there are always gaps in defining a complete understanding of customers (habits, trends, history).  Accessing data from individual campaigns, communities of interest, social platforms is useful; but only if implemented strategically. What is important, how do you build a holistic view, what are the ethical implication, how do you ensure proper adherence to security? These all need to be included in the mix…

Bridge builder – Increasingly, social data is used throughout the enterprise.  However, is it focused on brand awareness, internal collaboration and innovation, engagement with active online communities etc.?  These are all markedly different strategies, impacting various departments and warranting their own set of success metrics.

Statistical orientation – This attribute fits in with experimentation.  There are many different analysis tools for the social space, however sometimes you need to resort to good old fashioned sampling of data to find out whether there is statistically significant correlation.  We use several applications in my class at Carnegie Mellon but often need to resort to collecting data and doing analysis using primary research methods.

Rapid iteration mindset – Sometimes ideas need to be “thrown over the wall” to see what resonates, pulled back in, optimized and redelivered.  This is common in the consumer social space as new platforms try to find a balance between value, member concerns, resource limitations and speed to market.  How can this be fostered but tempered for a corporate setting?  Perhaps using an internal community as a test bed?

Investigative reporting – Think about what a good reporter needs to do – retell a story, verify facts, corroborate sources, etc.  The same thing hold true for social analysts.  Data is simply qualitative or quantitative variables.  It is up to the person analyzing it to be able to explain what is important within the data orally and visually.

Right brain orientation – I think tapping into creative thinking is also important.  All this information is ineffective unless it can be communicated.  In my class, I bring in Dan Byorski who is faculty at the school of design @ CMU to discuss communicating  data form and function as well as meaning visually. Dealing with complex data is difficult.  Communicating its importance to different groups is equally challenging.

Community instead of process driven – Don’t get me wrong, processes are important but unlike other data stores that fit nicely into processes, social data is continuously evolving.  Imagine an ERP system that relies on a common database, which has been defined and clearly articulated.  Now think about a campaign around social listening where variables can change readily based on new external inputs.  Think of it as a shift from taxonomy (process) to folksonomy (dynamic and largely derived from the community.)  You have to adjust your analysis accordingly.

What are your thoughts?  Are there other characteristics that need to be included in the mix?  Will we see the development of a competency center across the enterprise focusing on social data?

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Stop asking the same bleeping questions…

Posted on April 27, 2011 by Ari

Recently, I had some service done on my Prius, BTW: if there was ever a car company and model embracing the social space, it has to be the Toyota Prius.  Their new campaign is designed around crowdsourcing innovation using components from the car.  Basically teams are breaking down the car and using various components (solar sun roof, brake system, hybrid synergy drive, etc.) to re-configure them around unique innovations.  I think this is brilliant and has interesting implication as you can see with our local ambassadors of innovation, DeepLocal - (but more about that later).

I had a fairly standard service completed.  Lost my smartkey, so they had to order and reprogram a new one.  Apparently, this is more involved than it seems.  You cannot just order one from eBay, jailbreak it and program it yourself, much to my dismay.  Well, I’m sure there are ways mere consumers can do it but that’s beyond my limited capacities.  You need to order it from Toyota and have your dealership program it with specialized equipment.  It went smoothly enough after I made this realization and then I was confronted with the after service survey.  Not by one or even two but by three different groups.  Yes, the dealership wanted to know about my experience but so did Toyota Finance (I’m leasing the car) as well as Toyota Parts.  In fact one of them kept calling almost every night right around the time I was putting my kids to bed.  Finally, I answered the call and it was the same bleeping questions as the other surveys.  In fact they were all pretty much similar i.e. how satisfied were you with the service and if not, what could we have done differently.  Some were more involved and drawn out asking round about questions that basically wanted the same fundamental information.

This annoyed me to no end but I understand the justification.  In our hyper connected, real time, socially engaged world, organizations more than ever want to reconnect with consumers to assess customer experience, collect data and improve satisfaction ratios.  But this was not the way to do it.  One of the aspects we discuss continually in my social analysis class is sharing of data, collaboration across geographies, departments, skill sets, demographics, etc.  This seems simple enough.  Why couldn’t these three groups collaborate on a simple survey?  Why can’t my survey answers be available somewhere in the cloud where I can grant access for other to view them – sort of like profile portability which is still not available despite lots of work in this area (yet, another blog post).

Organizations need to understand that consumers are not a point in time, an incident that occurred or a piece of data that needs to be recorded.  Along with the trend toward consumerism, there needs to be a holistic view of customers, which in this rudimentary example includes the fact that I have already answered the survey and willingly provided the necessary information.  I spoke about this in one of my first blog posts entitled “Little Help Over Here” Unfortunately this will only occur when companies realize that there is value in sharing data much like all of us who are involved with and get value from online social communities.  However, with legacy systems and policies around data collection and distribution as well as security and privacy concerns, I don’t think this will change quickly.  But I would love to see one day a company ask me after conducting a survey would you mind if we shared your responses with X, Y and Z?

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