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Finger on the Pulse
If you use the web at all, you've probably taken at least one on-line survey. Today's survey tools are friendly, powerful
and reasonably priced. So if you have a community of users, and want to know more about them, consider adding a survey component to your communications program. It can help establish what your audience
wants or needs, and also tell you whether people are listening. A few guidelines, based on our experience:
- Keep them short. The more information you try to collect in one sitting, the less likely you are to get quality data. If you annoy
people, they may actually feed you bad information. The same principle applies to frequency -- don't use surveys too often.
- Keep them simple. Ask questions that lead to clear answers. If you ask "Was the presentation the right length?" and
someone answers "No," what have you learned? Was it too long, or too short?
- Keep them light. You're asking people to give you their time, as well as their ideas. Appreciate that they're doing you a favor
and try to make the experience as entertaining and effortless as possible.
- Keep them honest. Most survey tools let you share the results with the participants, and unless there's something confidential
going on, that's a good idea. It's not much, but it's a small kind of thank you.
In
preparing this article, we spent some time experimenting with survey software, and built a quick demo with SurveyMonkey. This isn't an
endorsement of any particular product, but it's worth noting that SurveyMonkey includes on its Pricing page links to the web sites of all its competitors. So even if you want to look at a selection of
products, their site is still a good place to start. That is one confident company.
If you'd like help picking a survey tool, or designing a survey, drop us a note. And we'd love it if you'd take
our white paper survey, too.
The Information Work Productivity Council
Through K Street's association with the KMPro, we were able to attend the first general session of the Information Work Productivity Council, held last week at
the Grand Hyatt in New York City. The IWPC is studying the productivity (and profitability) of information work; its goal is to develop new measures of productivity that are relevant to the way we work
now, shifting the focus from "outputs" to "outcomes." That was a recurring theme throughout the one-day conference, and one with which we're long familiar. It was a key idea in The Information Paradox, the book published by DMR Consulting in the days when we
were just dipping our toes into the KM waters.
The IWPC's industry sponsors are Accenture, Cisco, HP, Intel, Microsoft, SAP and Xerox. The speakers included folks like Tom Davenport and others who are working in this space. It was an interesting day, and it was nice to hear research results that validated our own experience. It was also a tad frustrating, since it's clear that progress toward a more knowledge-aware business environment is very slow indeed.
We don’t need no stinkin’ metrics...
At the IWPC Forum last week, Cisco VP Mohsen Moazami spoke about his company's highly accurate, highly dynamic real-time information systems. Thanks to these systems, Cisco recognized it was about to miss a quarterly revenue forecast (for the first time in its history). Within hours, it was able to implement a "screeching halt" in hiring. Because they had the metrics, and because they trusted them, management was able to turn the company on a dime, and get through the IT collapse with a single round of layoffs. The kind of insights offered by real, trustworthy metrics mean better decisions, better products, faster response times and more rapid innovation.
However, Moazami also included a graphic that spoke to management styles, in which decision-making ranged from "Gut Feel" at one end to "Networked Intelligence" on the other.
Sadly, there are many companies where good metrics would be useless, because their culture is not measurement oriented. They don't make decisions based on detailed analysis, but on personal intuition,
organizational relationships and time-honored traditions.
The uncertain return on investment has always been an obstacle to effective KM. Generally, the ROI has to be taken on faith. That's not
just because the benefits are hard to measure (which they are). It's also because few companies have historical data where you'd expect to see KM benefits appear. Innovation? Employee Connectedness?
Re-use? Since there's no baseline, it's impossible to show an improvement. The truth is, there's no baseline because these are things management didn't think worth measuring.
It's a classic
Catch-22; it's also a reason why some firms succeed with KM, while others do not.
Earthlight Studio On-Line
One of our newest clients had a very simple plan -- he wanted to sell his stained glass
on-line.
He didn't have a business name at the time, and wasn't sure what would be involved. But he did have a lot of experience making stained glass and the desire to find more customers for his
custom work. The product is fragile, but light, and could theoretically be shipped anywhere in the world. Why not go global? We helped him work through some options around names and brands, and designed
a simple virtual showroom.
Earthlight Studio is now open for business. Take a look, and if you see something you like, ask about the special K Street discount. There really isn't any such thing, but it never hurts to ask.
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