Knowledge Infuser

Ban Facebook? How About The Bathroom? Bathroom Passes?

jason.averbook — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:33:55 GMT

As the CEO of Knowledge Infusion, I was at a client last week when the SVP of HR asked the difference between Facebook and Social Networking.

I was quick to explain that Facebook was a kind of Social Networking, and went to the networked computer to go to http://www.facebook.com. The message said: "Facebook cannot be accessed here at xxx because of network limitations."

Interesting I said. You are cut off from most of your employee population. A few interesting stats:

39% of 18 to 24 year-olds would consider leaving if they were not allowed to access sites like Facebook and YouTube
A further 21% indicated that they would feel ‘annoyed’ by such a ban
The problem is less acute with 25 to 65 year-olds, of whom just 16 per cent would consider leaving and 13 per cent would be annoyed

Use technology as an ally, not a negative. The world isnt going to change because HR isnt ready to govern a new type of communication that is all that new workers know. This is an important part of creating a Digital HR strategy, one of KI's fastest growing areas of business.

Take a read of the complete article here..

Do you ban employees time in the bathroom? Do they need a bathroom pass?

Another infusion of knowledge...

Books Aren't Dead - Think about future of this device and Knowledge Management

jason.averbook — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 03:14:34 GMT

Newsweek drills into detail on the latest from Jeff Bezos and Amazon called the Kindle.

Great quote : "Technology is anything that was invented after you were born"

A few highlights from article:

Some of those features have been available on previous e-book devices,
notably the Sony Reader. The Kindle's real breakthrough springs from a
feature that its predecessors never offered: wireless connectivity, via
a system called Whispernet. (It's based on the EVDO broadband service
offered by cell-phone carriers, allowing it to work anywhere, not just
Wi-Fi hotspots.) As a result, says Bezos, "This isn't a device, it's a
service."
"There's 550 years of technological development in the book, and it's
all designed to work with the four to five inches from the front of the
eye to the part of the brain that does the processing " says Hill, a boisterous man who wears a kilt to a
seafood restaurant in Seattle where he stages an impromptu lecture on
his theory. "This is a high-resolution scanning machine," he
says, pointing to the front of his head. "It scans five targets a
second, and moves between targets in only 20 milliseconds. And it does
this repeatedly for hours and hours and hours." He outlines the
centuries-long process of optimizing the book to accommodate this
physiological marvel: the form factor, leading, fonts, justification …
"We have to take the same care for the screen as we've taken for print."
"The possibility of interaction will redefine authorship," says Peter
Brantley, executive director of the Digital Library Federation, an
association of libraries and institutions. Unlike some
writing-in-public advocates, he doesn't spare the novelists. "Michael
Chabon will have to rethink how he writes for this medium," he says.
Brantley envisions wiki-style collaborations where the author, instead
of being the sole authority, is a "superuser," the lead wolf of a
creative pack. (Though it's hard to believe that lone storytellers
won't always be toiling away in some Starbucks with the Wi-Fi turned
off, emerging afterward with a narrative masterpiece.)
The answer is probably not, and that's why the Kindle matters. "This is
the most important thing we've ever done," says Jeff Bezos. "It's so
ambitious to take something as highly evolved as the book and improve
on it. And maybe even change the way people read." As long as the
batteries are charged.

Will this change paper based manual and documents forever? Probably not in the next ten years, but after that, I would bank on it. Will our kids still read textbooks in ten years? What will students think when they enter the workplace when they haven't looked at a book?

Once again, e-HR strategy in the 21st century is so important. Most aren't giving the User Interface, Portal, Social Networking, Mobile Device and Accessibility enough credit. Knowledge Infusion helped its first client launch an internal Facebook community last week with many more planned for the next few quarters. Going forward, it isnt the back office software that will drive success, it is the workforce facing tools.

Another infusion of knowledge...

Click here to read fascinating article

The end of the mass email blast - for some things

jason.averbook — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 13:26:45 GMT

At Knowledge Infusion we continually hear that rolling out software and processes through email blasts is a waste of time. The deployment portion of any HR, Human Capital Management and Talent Management technology initiative must be tied directly to the overall HR strategy of an organization.

Principal Consultant, Andy Gebavi has contributed a though provoking piece on social networking today and its impact on talent management. I see that Microsoft will be taking a 1.6 percent stake in FaceBook at the whopping price of 246 million dollars. This transaction values FaceBook at 15 billion dollars in today’s market. Not bad for a company that has yet to earn a profit. The value ascribed to FaceBook is based mostly on its use as a potential vehicle to push advertising to its 50 million (and growing) users.

This got me thinking about enterprise social networks in Talent Management.*One of the latest trends in talent management is vendors offering functionality *that will allow the creation of FaceBook style profiles for their employees. Our customers are using this functionality to make data-rich processes like succession planning, workforce planning, and internal talent searches much easier. New products are also emerging to capitalize on the social networking aspect of having employee profiles – Lotus Connections comes to mind. I worked with one customer recently who wants to use this functionality as part of their career development strategy by allowing employees to opt-in to mentoring and coaching networks.

There is still one missing piece in the enterprise social networking space though. The one aspect that drives the value of all consumer-focused social networking sites is advertising. I’m not talking about spam here folks. Many people often don’t realize they’re seeing advertising when they surf the web. They’ve either grown immune to it, or it’s presented in subtle ways (i.e. sponsored links in Google search results). One of advertising’s key goals is to influence consumer behavior. Why not use a similar concept to influence employee behavior? How far off can we be from having internal “advertising” pushed to employees based on the demographic data in their employee profiles or their internal surfing activities?

We already filter content on corporate intranets and portals based on the user’s roles and demographics. But think of the possibilities of pushing corporate “banner ads” - focused on specific employees based on business ctivities they perform; knowledge they have; or internal networks to which they belong. These “banner ads” could advertise almost anything such as the need for a specific skill set, services offered by a specific department, new training/development opportunities being offered, business process changes taking effect, or news about internal social networks. Folks, the days of the “email blast” as the main communication channel might nearing their end – for some things.

Another Infusion of Knowledge...