Innovation at Google - a day in the life | Knowledge Management

This was a fantastic webinar from KMWorld and Google:

Innovation @ Google: A Day In The Life

On March 11, 2008, Naveen Viswanatha, Sales Engineer at Google Enterprise gave a really great presentation. 

My notes from the presentation: 

• Broad background of Google and Google Enterprise, touting customer base, etc.
• Internet Evolution - from information to distribution & communitaction to network & platform.
• Chronology of how Google evolved with the internet - timeline with their many online products.
• “Innovation is at the core of Google’s competiveness.” 
• 70-20-10 Rule - i.e. Google splits its business focus: 70% focus on core business (Search, Ads, Apps); 20% on things with strong potential (blogger, Picassa, News, Pack); 10% Wild and Crazy (offline adds, wifi, transit).   
• How Google hires people - the hiring process is “painfull.” (See Fast Company article: “Our hiring process is legendary”
• Google has a relatively flat management structure. 
• Internal tool called “Snippets” (a nag email: what did you work on last week? - what are you working on this week?) - so you can track your work.  AND it is a knowledge-base tool because everyone else can search all other snippets and get information on what they may be working on. 
• Google Ideas database - post and review ideas within Google - people can comment on and vet out the ideas.  The ideas might turn into an actual project.  [plus, it records the things that are Google's intellectual property] - it uses the “wisdom of the crowds” philosophy.
• Innovation is a collaborative process at Google -  ”Innovation = Discovery + Collaboration (+ Fun)” 
• First day at Google is “like drinking from a firehose”
• Any questions - go to “Moma” - Google’s internal knowledge base - search of their key knowledge areas. 
• Can look for experts within the company - Google expert search within Moma - lots of an individual’s information is searchable (including resumes, which they encourage people to keep up to date).   
• Search results within Moma - you can take notes in the search results (of the things that you are searching) - uses Google Docs [I used Google Docs to take notes for this blog post] - and you can publish the notes — it publishes it out to the people you want (they use gMail, chat, Goolge Calendar - can overlay colleague’s calendars on top of your own so that you can schedule meetings, etc.). 
• Regarding the notes - others can make changes to your notes (which you created in Google Docs) in real time - you can see the changes on your screen. 
• It’s all about the “…ability to find and leverage collective wisdom of the organization…” 
• How are experts are established?  Expert databases are hard to keep upto date.  So they leverage the things that people do already: resumes, blogs, wikis, Snippets, Moma, etc.
• Are these tools avaiable to the public?  Yes and no.  Search is the key enabler to tap into the repositories that are already in use at your organization (touting Google Search Appliance). 

The event is archived: here  

I really encourage people to check this out.  Especially those who are new to KM.  This presentation gave a glimpse into Google as a company and it shows off some great ways that any organization can approach KM. 

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms

A Business Case for Enterprise Search

On February 12, 2008, KMWorld and Vivisimo presented a webcast called Making and Airtight Business Case for Enterprise Search.  The speakers were Jim Murphy of AMR Research and Rebecca Thompson of Vivisimo. 

Murphy discussed: redefining enterprise search, business case challenges, aligning enterprise search with business priorities, and choosing the best approach.  

Not just search, but NSR (navigation, search, and retrieval): Focusing not only on search, Murphy discussed the importance of navigation and how it is used hand in hand with search.  He also cited the importance of the ability of systems to crawl various sources of information and extract it. 

From a business case perspective, both process efficiency and customer loyalty / satisfaction were important to the respondents of his research.  The important business issues within the enterprise were customer service and support, and worker productivity. 

Thompson, of Vivisimo, discussed some case studies in the manufacturing and pharmacuetical industries and for government. 

She focused on increasing employee efficiency through search, enabling collaboration among workers, and giving employees access to the information they need (but don’t necessarily realize that they need). 

Thompson described how Vivisimo’s system can search across all types of data sources, like document management systems, portals (including SharePoint), image documents, file shares and servers, intranets and internet sites.  One of the case studies saw an daily increase in searches from 15 to 2,000.  

There was nice screenshot that showed Vivisimo’s signature clustered results, and a tabbed result list, which gives the user the option to display all results, or grouped results (by people, intranet, internet, the DMS, SharePoint, and the network). 

Finally, there was a discussion of the www.USA.gov website, which is powered by Vivisimo.  The site has noted a decrease in citizen support phone calls. 

The demo will be archived at KMWorld for 90 days.  Check it out here. 

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms

How to Write a Business Case | Knowledge Management

Nina Platt at Strategic Librarian has a nice primer on Writing a Business Case.  It’s helpful for librarians and KM folks, too. 

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management for Lawyers and Law Firms