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Document-oriented company in search for people

Currently, I’m working on a pitch for a new client where I’m brainstorming with the Headshift team on an overall strategy framework to see where the big gaps in the organization are in terms of collaboration and communication.

Given the requirements, I was trying out several models to map the client’s requirements with our Social Business Design framework. They always say that one image says more than a thousand words and that was proven once again during our exercise. When mapping all the information and doing voodoo-magic-level whiteboard drawing (I have a black belt in that!), a very interesting piece of information came up: the very-knowledge intensive and document-focused company has a bigger need for finding people instead of finding documents.

Is it surprising to learn that they actually have a much bigger gap in the area of human connections and expertise finding (people-oriented) rather than in the area of the traditional document-oriented knowledge management (KM)?

Traditional KM often failing to deliver value

During my “previous life” as a systems integrator, I’ve seen many Enterprise 2.0 / KM projects utterly fail because employees just got a piece of software pushed through their throat and got the message: “this is your new KM system, start uploading knowledge”.

Whilst being brilliant systems from a technical point of view, they often fail to live up expectations because people tend to upload knowledge to these systems just for the sake of doing so. That can be because they have to for their yearly review, because their manager forces them, because… for all the wrong reasons. This has the side effect that these “I’ll-store-it-once-so-they’ll-stop-complaining”-documents become quickly irrelevant. Your business changes with such a rapid speed that these documents become outdated by the time that they are entered in the system. So why even bother?

It would be too easy to just end this discussion here because for many types of knowledge, the time factor isn’t really that crucial. Some pieces of content are for instance best practices, project learning, strategic information, etc. that are perfectly valid for a longer period of time. The biggest problem doesn’t lay in the actual KM system itself, rather in the people that are dealing with it.

People’s ordinary interactions generating knowledge

I’ve seen it in so many organizations: people often don’t have time for properly uploading knowledge artifacts to a system and adding good meta-data. Even if people do occasionally take the time in doing so, they are usually not skilled enough in providing high-quality meta-data and applying taxonomy/folksonomy.

Even if we do manage to create a culture where people store their knowledge in documents and upload them to a KM system with the appropriate tags and meta-data, we’re still accessing only the small part of information that people bothered to write down. Many people don’t realize that the things we find very simple and straightforward are actually very precious and contribute tremendously to a company’s wisdom.

Take a very basic and rather “administrative” interaction like a meeting. If a company bothers to take meeting notes, they are often scribbled in a Word document and then emailed to all the people that attended or that have an interest in being updated. If you’re lucky someone adds it to the project space in SharePoint. With employees coming and going, and projects often lasting longer than many employees’ involvement, a lot of information gets continuously lost. Even more, the time needed to onboard someone on the project often takes a significant amount of time and effort.

I’m using the example of the meeting notes because when I joined Headshift last year, I quickly had to get familiar with some of our larger clients. To my big surprise every meeting note was stored as a wiki page in our company wiki, which gave me an incredible amount of information about the Headshift people involved over time, the client stakeholders involved, the decisions made, certain issues discussed, etc.

One meeting note might sound irrelevant, having hundreds of them at your disposal can give you often a far better view of a project or a client than a whole bunch of meticulously crafted “knowledge artifacts”.

Connecting the dots

So let me shortly recap what we’ve discussed so far:

• We tend to overvalue static documents and undervalue knowledge in people’s heads.
• Companies deploy technology platforms and employees’ limited participation is often driven by less-sustainable motivations.
• Traditional approach of KM focuses on the “important” knowledge artifacts and often ignores the vast amount of information that is generated during our daily work.

Linking this back to the client pitch I’m preparing: no, it’s not surprising that they have a big gap in the human-to-human interactions area. Their staff are under a lot of project pressure with little time to contribute knowledge to a KM system, they operate in an era where almost every week their own industry has reinvented itself, employees and contractors come and go and teams change on a frequent basis (because of the dynamic environment they are in). Most importantly? Their only asset is knowledge!

So this solution will need to mainly focus on:

• Capturing knowledge that is in the employees’ heads, as a happy byproduct of their daily job with very low intrusion in their existing workflows and without many extra steps or hurdles.
• Because time is money and people come and go, the on boarding of new employees or new project members needs to happen with as little impact on the project duration or impact on the other team members.
• Big focus on finding experts in a global organization operating in 25+ countries and hundreds of business units. Focus is not on the people you already know, but the ones you don’t know yet.

Sounds like a challenge? It sure is, but the kind of challenge we’re taking up every day at Headshift!

This post originally appeared on the Headshift blog.

Of course everything below is open for discussion, commenting, re-interpretation addition and/or questioning.  The number of use cases I had in mind as I drafted this were just too many to get down in a single blog post.  Hopefully though, through the discussion, more use cases and examples will come to light.

For now though…

Current Awareness

Most organisations try to keep abreast of the latest news and developments in their sector and it is especially pertinent to do so in the pharmaceutical industry, traditionally one of the most knowledge-hungry industries.  The appetite for data, information and knowledge in the industry comes as no surprise when you consider the vast sums of money involved.  Getting a $1bn drug to market just 1 month earlier means an extra $83m in revenue.  Factor in the advantage of being first-to-market or first-in-class and the timeliness of information retrieval and digestion comes sharply into focus.

When it comes to information flow, currently, RSS is king.  Whether it’s the library receiving and passing on competitor analysis, the in-house lawyer keeping up with the latest precedents or the researcher staying up-to-date with peer reviewed publications.  RSS offers a way to pipe information between individuals, groups and departments in a much less intrusive manner than emails.

Using a single example to extol the virtues of RSS will undoubtedly lead to RSS being undersold, but for this post I’m going to focus on re-purposing the platform discussed in Robin’s post.

Below is a simple flow diagram explaining how the Climate Pulse site aggregates content from across the web.  In this example content is pulled from sources such as blogs, Flickr, Twitter etc.  The important thing is that, whatever the source, there is a way of pulling information from it and into the platform, either by way of RSS or an API.

Step by step, here’s how the example above could apply to a research situation within pharma:

1. Find, Monitor and Aggregate – The sources included for aggregation would be systems such as internal document management systems, peer-reviewed journals, research data repositories and electronic laboratory notebooks.
2. Curate and Editorialise – The curation step could be used to highlight results for lead chemical compounds or series, knock-out false positives, highlight particularly important articles and organise competitor analysis.
3. Display and Participation – The display of information would serve as a project dashboard, available to all project members.  It would act as a jumping off point, from which colleagues could enter the sources of information directly.  It would also allow for commenting from the producers of data as well as therapeutic area leads.
4. Output – Since the platform can be built to be open the output can either be directed to groups or individuals or the audience can decide how to digest it. For instance the information for several projects can be aggregated into a therapeutic area view.  Alternatively the output can be pushed back into the data generating areas of the company as a prioritised to-do list.  And, if you are brave and prepared to challenge some pharmaceutical industry paradigms, you could even bridge the firewall and publish some information direct the external scientific world.
5. Disparate Participation – Widgets can be built which take information from and push information to the central information display allowing disparate groups to focus on the information in a manner most suitable to them.

Expertise Location

Most companies attempt to maintain a directory of all employees.  These directories are usually limited to a simple headshot, contact details, which department the colleague is in and other basic information.  At most they include a very simple “biography” entry and maybe an “expertise” section.

Inevitably, as the company changes structure and adapts to external stimuli, people move departments and change the focus of their professional specialism.  Classic corporate directories do not capture this well due to their inherent static nature.  Since social business technology is built around dynamic core principles they are much better suited to reflect the fluid structure of most modern companies.

Most, if not all of the leading social business platforms can:

• be linked in to Active Directory to produce an automated organisation chart;
• provide customisable profile pages that enable people to quickly and easily describe themselves through biography entries;
• provide an aggregation of a person’s activities throughout the system;
• use a person’s activity to suggest connections to similar people;
• index a person’s activities to use during searches for expertise;
• include some form of unstructured expertise discovery.

At a very basic level, the use of these, more social, profiles provides colleagues with a corporate directory.  On top of that, in an industry that thrives when cross-discipline teams work well together, these profiles supplement already existing knowledge networks by making use of the metadata involved in every comment, blog post, discussion, vote, poll answer and uploaded document.  This provides a dynamic and searchable database of colleagues, which can be used to discover a single expert in a company of thousands, which is something of a regular occurrence in pharma.

Collaborative Document Writing

People need easy and accessible ways to work together to turn information into actionable insight.  Very few knowledge-based industries escape from this fact, especially pharma.  The number and sheer volume of collaboratively authored documents in the pharmaceutical industry is phenomenal; from the research presentations to SOPs; from journal publications to regulatory submissions.

There are plenty of images and videos explaining the problems associated with the current workflows used to produce collaboratively authored documents .  My current favourite is an advert for IBM Connections showing how email proliferates when only a few people are involved (3mins 35secs).

Now transfer the workflow demonstrated in the video to something more akin to a research publication, something which is exponentially more complicated than a client pitch.  Checking facts, collating data, having each team member add their section takes many more emails than shown in the video.

This is where wiki-like functionality comes to the forefront.  This allows people to concurrently edit documents, comment on documents, version control their documents and publish them in a variety of formats.  Most enterprise wikis also allow for file attachments enabling authors to collect all the supporting documents in a single space and once a simple workflow is overlaid the wiki becomes a fantastic way to author, review and approve a document for publication.

For those who shy away from wikis, due to workflow, security or mark-up language concerns, with the release of Jive SBS4.0 we’ve seen a blurring between traditional office documents and a more wiki-like approach with their inline commenting.  For those instances where the source document has to be very tightly controlled this functionality enables a social layer to sit across the document.

Hopefully those three examples will be enough to start a discussion on how Social Business Design can be used behind the firewall of pharmaceutical companies.  There are definitely more exciting and challenging discussions to be had:

• how self-publication will alter the nature of scientific journals and the peer-review process
• the use of APIs and open data standards behind the firewall to aid cross-discipline sciences such as PKPD;
• crowd-sourcing the interpretation of complex data;
• publishing research data outside of the firewall;
• driving clinical trial recruitment for rare diseases through the use of social media;
• how the interaction of pharma companies with their audience is regulated by agencies such as the FDA (a very pertinent question following the FDA hearings on Social Media);

to name just a few, but I’ll save those for future posts.

This post originally appeared on the Headshift blog.