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08.13.09 Yakabod To Offer Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Support  By Bill IvesYakabod has been providing knowledge management solutions since 2003, primarily for the US intelligence community to date. Their flagship product is the Yakabox™ Knowledge Network that I reviewed earlier on the AppGap (see Yakabod Provides Robust Knowledge Management with a Social Side). Like a number of enterprise 2.0 providers, they realize that many of the issues for a successful adoption of their offering are not technical and they have broadened their offerings to include adoption support. I recently spoke with Yakabod CEO Scott Ryser and Ian Bramson, Director National Intelligence Engagements about their experiences helping clients with adoption issues and the services they provide for this effort. Scott said that their developers are able handle any technical issues for their clients relatively easily. The harder tasks come with the change management and other people related concerns. They have set up an adoption services group to support these efforts and Ian is part of this group. A significant part of the change management effort is to enable a shift in the collaboration mentality. Since a lot of their work is in the intelligence community, they have had to encourage users to share their work before it is finished so others can comment on it and gain insights in a timely manner. Ian said they offer two principal types of services: organization culture readiness and implementation effectiveness. The culture readiness involves a variety of methods including interviews, surveys, focus groups, and working on site with their users for direct observation of the work environment. This is the type of anthropology I used to enjoy in my past life doing large-scale knowledge management implementations. They started doing this informally but it has now become a formal part of their offering with a developing set of methods and measurements. It is offered to the client as part of step one along with a pilot of their tool set. Scott said their knowledge management tools work best when wrapped around a business process, and there needs to be a lot of personal contact to properly integrate the tools with the process. I could not agree more. In fifteen years I never saw a successful KM effort that did not do this. The culture assessment looks at such issues as the structure of the organization, the nature of the hierarchy, the empowerment of employees, the presence of a mentoring system, physical and virtual work environment, and the promotion and reward system.
They share their results in an honest and through manner with the client, no matter how sensitive, and try to get commitment to address any issues that might be obstacles to a successful implementation. They focus more on raising awareness and getting commitment to change than producing the change. Scott said that the organizations can best change themselves, if they understand their issues and have the determination to address them. Ian said there is a saying in the government that you "speak truth to power and let power decide." Scott mentioned that they are at the beginning of this effort but they are collecting data. Once they have enough instances, they will be able to offer predictive statistics on what is essential for a successful implementation. One of the issues they address is the collaboration dynamics in the organization. Are there opportunities for unstructured exchanges during business processes or is everything planned and structured? What is the speed of collaboration? How fast can people connect and what are the obstacles? Are there tools in place to support this collaboration? What are the information silos in the organization? Another issue is the power of inertia. How fast can the organization change? Are they always re-organizing so employees feel that can ignore change? Are there frequent changes in leadership so employees feel they can wait out efforts? Are the employees savvy in social technology? Continue reading this article. About the Author: Dr. Bill Ives is an independent consultant and writer who has worked with Fortune 100 companies in business uses of emerging technologies for over 20 years. For several years he led the Knowledge Management Practice for a large consulting firm.. Now he primarily helps companies with their business blogs. He is also the VP of Social Media and blogger for TVissimo, a new TV schedule search engine. Prior to consulting, Dr. Ives was a Research Associate at Harvard University exploring the effects of media on cognition. He obtained his Ph. D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Toronto. Bill can be reached at his blog: Portals and KM. He also writes for the FastForward blog and the AppGap blog. |
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