18 April 2012 | 0 Comments
Enabling productivity in a way we won’t be able to live without: The Knowledge Cloud
Companies have always been a swamp of information: incompatible data piles, people and skills lost in the crowd, lack of collaboration, lowered productivity due to expertise gaps, fragmented systems – it’s typically a huge rancid mess. These are old problems made worse as the depth of the data grows and there have been many attempts to solve it. Just ask your friendly neighborhood Venture Capitalist about the “knowledge management” wave of the 90’s. Or ask any big company employee about the joys of using Sharepoint.
This is the swamp we are wading into. This is the swamp we are committed to cleaning up.
Our primary tool is a Knowledge Cloud.
Awhile back, every company needed a “Corporate Portal” to bring together all of their information stores into one interface (hat tip to Plumtree Software and Kirill Sheynkman for the history lesson.) That was the best solution at the time.
The problem was that this approach just put a common window into the swamp, it didn’t structure the data in a way that made it useful. Industry tried organizing everything in giant taxonomies, then folksonomies with user applied tags. It just didn’t work. The collective desk was no more organized than the average worker’s desk. People didn’t want to do the work – they wanted computers to do it. To be fair to the 90’s, the tools to do this structuring (the components of the big data stack we have now) were simply not available. Until recently they were insanely expensive science experiments.
A Knowledge Cloud combines three critical aspects:
1) People Data – rich, multi-faceted profiles that include internal and external data sources and reputation scores. This deep profile allows the Knowledge Cloud to provide Smart Routing, delivering personalized relevancy. It also makes people “findable” in more critical ways, with constant onboarding and reallocation becoming the norm.
2) Activity Streams – beyond static profile attributes, activity streams provide a flow of ongoing data. It’s one thing to claim something, it’s another thing to consistently do something. These keep the profile up to date automatically and provide new frontiers in human capital analytics.
3) Content – APIs combined with cloud storage and a big data stack allow for a “hub for spokes” model of content, where knowledge can be harvested and stored with its related activity stream, automatically tagging, categorizing, and contextualizing the information.
It’s early in this new evolution, but this is clearly the future. A Knowledge Cloud will become an absolutely critical piece of every organization, enabling productivity in a way we soon won’t be able to live without.
12 April 2012 | 0 Comments
New product feature: enhanced email lists
One of the hardest problems for social software is getting employees to take that first step and actually start using it. We have found that one of the biggest barrier’s to software adoption is that it normally requires change; employees have to stop using what works for them and start using a system that they are unsure of.
At Red Rover we are constantly working on ways to ensure that users can continue to use the systems they know and that work, while still reaping all the benefits of our Knowledge Cloud platform. Our most recent addition has been the ability to interact with Red Rover from an “email list”.
Email lists are one of the most ubiquitous social communication systems in organizations. Email lists allow employees to share knowledge by sending information as an email to one address. What has made email lists so powerful is that they do not require employees to change their workflow, everyone uses email all the time.
Of course, an email list does have disadvantages. For one, it mixes essential and non-essential information together in one place. It does not allow you to choose who in the list receives information and who doesn’t, the message is simply sent it to everyone. The history of the email list becomes tied to individual emails, making it hard for that information to be extracted. Until now.