Taxonomy and Perception Shifts

“By applying a new label to an old category - calling untouchables Harijan, God’s people - and including himself among them, Gandhi brought fifty to sixty million souls from the ragged margins of the soceity into the body of the revolution…He effected a nationwide shift in perception of social realities.”

Quoted from Code Name God by Mani Bhaumik.
Lambe cites the caste system in India as an example of hierarchy in his book Organising Knowledge Fig 2.1, but the above is an example the how when a hierarchy is broken can lead to a mass movement.

So my 2 readers
Is your taxonomy inclusive of yourself (not when you are an exernal consultant but belong to the same organizational context) or your own purposes
and does your organization’s taxonomy shift individual perceptions at least to a scale whence you can effect a beneficial change?

Ideation by Forced Association

I had this great opportunity to see an ideation in action facilitated by Prakasan and Satish. The idea was to get as many ideas as possible for a gift product to one of our clients. The technique applied was “Forced Association” between technologies and the gifting opportunity.

This triggered a further thought while I was browsing the Franchising Magazine looking for business opportunities. The idea is to break human life into several phases from infant to elderly with specific phases like school going by bands of grades, young mothers, teen, working bachelor etc and then force associate these with the franchising business areas that may be education, clothing, food etc and get as many as ideas possible to uncover feasible, profitable, business opportunities.

I think I will do this myself and post my ideas.

I am told there are many more techniques like SCAMPER that can be applied to such ideation facilitation. Here is an excellent resource from the Millers to do such facilitations. http://www.innovationstyles.com/pdfs/IdeaGenerationTechniques.pdf

1. When I was a scriber?

On a why and how to innovate decision making session

Why on Innovation
Basically stemming from value creation possibilities like
1. Will this keep me ahead of the competition
2. Which in turn means where does the next $X B business going to come from?
3. What % of the next $1B can we get by applying innovation?

Navneet’s question and collected responses on what is customer value is here.

The innovation agenda for the organizaton that people usually come up with are in the following lines
1. To be able to engage with the the value network to innovate in business, technology, and our services,
2. To create free flowing networks
3. To engage customers in the innovation process
4. To be able to validate the opportunities
5. To create a robust innovation engine/eco system (well a host of other words to pick from) with a better engagement and buy in from stake holders and practitioners.

Innovation process should allow a practitioner
1. to see overlap areas within and problem and present opportunity
2. to create a knowledge base comparable or more than the customer

Next comes the how part of the innovation where issues relating to
1. Coordination at team, practice and organization levels
2. Creating the enabling conditions that are aligned to creativity, getting a grasp on the systematic innovation techniques and understanding the open innovation models

This is where KM fits in not on focusing on refining or optimization but enabling creation of lesser optimal but disruptive innovations

The need for innovation arises in a problem situation, and focus has to be on what bothers practitioners and where to hit? The context.
So argument will be that at the problem context one does not have a tool box for innovation or a process in mind

Get your pitch ready before you talk about innovation next time.

Collaboration IT Projects

Arun Ram account manager from Satyam proposed to use the following package for better account level knowledge management at a Kamp done at MindTree.
Problems he tries to address are prevalent in most IT services companies

1. Acquire and Ramp up on Customer specific application knowledge
2. Capturing customer context experience/Who is Who/What exchanges lead to easy problem resolutions/may be even innovation
3. Of course the so called culture creation for better knowledge dissemination

• Elgg profile discovery and social networking
• MU WordPress - at associate level
• Planet - Aggregate blog in different areas
• Moodle - Learning Management at account level
• Twiki - Collaboration and Learning

I have not heard back from Arun or others who attended his session about the effectiveness of the solution pack.

But I feel the most relevant question is how to make people realise they have these problems and much more which can be solved by better KM.

Innovation in the Indian Auto Sector

My friend Sajeev made this original statement while dodging Bangalore traffic yesterday

“There are only 2 types of innovation happening in the Indian Auto industry, one how to make the largest vehicle on 3 wheels, the other how to make the smallest vehicle on 4 wheels”

wiki in action

Last Thursday when we went on a day camping, I witnessed a real wiki in action for collaboration.

When everyone is declaring “Internet based collaboration could change the way we do business”. This one is a real eye opener, white boards do change the way people are collaborating and do business. Context and simplicity is what makes people collaborate at work and not the fancy features. Bottom line if you ever had to write a manual on how to use your system to collaborate then you will end up finding less takers.

A Knowledge Cafe

A Knowledge Cafe at KAMP.

24 Nov 2007, Evening, 3 tables and one added a little later and not much participation from that table.

Started by posing the following open question
“What comes in the way of idea generation?”

My table Padhma, Prakasan, Navneet and myself came out with the following thought pieces, each were of course explained within a particular context.
Each table generated many such thoughts and followed it through till it was articulated well.

1. My ideas has never been looked at
2. Organization is not open to the idea that is being generated
3. Need for a variety of experience
From Experience - Thought - Idea - Expression or articulation of the idea
4. Lack of Diversity / In bred group
5. The very definition of an idea itself
6. Complacent or Not looking beyond
7. Experience to connect to different contexts and creating an idea; multiple such connections to get ideas
8. Problem to get ideas
9. Organization safety
10. There is no percieved value in the idea
11 Unable to get out of current context to value the idea

Next is each table presenting 2 of the best ideas from all that was generated.

And while presenting the contexts were remove and presented to the other group.
Presented below are all the ideas that came out from the 3 tables including ours.

1. The status quo is killing the idea or the idea is percieved as disruptive and the associated resistance
2. Person involved in generating the idea is emotionally attached to it and wants to take it to implementation himself
3. There is limited success of ideas in the past which is stopping me now
4. Lack of diversity
5. Ability to connect contexts
6. The teams or employees are not pushed to the wall to generate ideas

Next is each team is asked to present 2 ideas that could solve the issues listed above

1. Focussed intervention to actually apply and learn techniques that will generate ideas
2. Push forcefully to other context and enable contextual thinking

Semantic Web

Some technology and concepts gathered during BCB5.

Harish shared and gave direction to the discussion.

Freebase, an “open, shared database of the world’s knowledge” developed by Metaweb Technologies, Inc.

http://openid.net/
is unified digital identity

http://wiki.dbpedia.org/OnlineAccess for querying in SPARQL the sematic assets on wikipedia.

Possibility of ontology describing atleast part of natural language

Tracing back in history

1. unicode -> xml -> rdf -> OWL
2. data seperated from presentation
3. that will be tagged
4. now using microformats
5. to allow for natural language subject predicate based queries

Ideas as of 31/1/2007

1. As there are n th order derivatives for a time varying function:

Can we assert that actions do have their effect on subsequent actions, it will be 1 first order if its influence is limited to the following action, second order if it affects the subsequent action’s following action and so on. Thus provided we identify the variables in actions and have derivatives on those variables we should be able to predict the outcome.

Refer Taylor Equation

2. Prana Thinking:

Along the lines of deBono’s 6 thinking hats will it make sense to translate the Pranamayakosha into equivalent modes of thinking. Prana, apana, udanan, samana, vyana.

Refer APMB, and http://www.edwdebono.com/

Ideas as of November 2006

1. To ease creation of a enterprise orkut from enterprise email interface (to add custom communities and add people as and when a email arrives or a contact is known from other sources) This works in conjunction with existing communities and will add to the connectability/identifiability without being member of any formal comunity.
2. To formalise a risk management system with the base in bugzilla but with added functions on avoidablity and attend by date