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:
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Broad background of Google and Google Enterprise, touting customer base, etc.
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Internet Evolution - from information to distribution & communitaction to network & platform.
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Chronology of how Google evolved with the internet - timeline with their many online products.
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“Innovation is at the core of Google’s competiveness.”
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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).
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How Google hires people - the hiring process is “painfull.” (See Fast Company article: “Our hiring process is legendary”
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Google has a relatively flat management structure.
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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.
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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.
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Innovation is a collaborative process at Google - ”Innovation = Discovery + Collaboration (+ Fun)”
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First day at Google is “like drinking from a firehose”
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Any questions - go to “Moma” - Google’s internal knowledge base - search of their key knowledge areas.
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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).
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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.).
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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.
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It’s all about the “…ability to find and leverage collective wisdom of the organization…”
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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.
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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.
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