March 2004 Archives

Found this presentation on using weblogs and RSS to discover useful information via Mark T's weblog. Interesting for a number of reasons, not least of which it's [like Mark] the first time I've seen Macromedia's Breeze used, and it looks ok - nice integration of voice and presentation, and unlike products like WebEx, there seems to be a lot of control over navigation.

Oh, the presentation. Yeah, good stuff, showing a possible usage scenario for 2 academic users who don't know each other, and yet end up helping each other through the use of weblogs, RSS and trackbacks. Be nice to move this into a more commercial context for those biz types that find it hard to project...

Jon Udell with a nice article on using weblogs to manage project communication.

If you're managing an IT project, you are by definition a communication hub. Running a project Weblog is a great way to collect, organize, and publish the documents and discussions that are the lifeblood of the project and to shape these raw materials into a coherent narrative. The serial nature of the Weblog helps you make it the project's newspaper of record. This kind of storytelling can become a powerful way to focus the attention of a group. The desire to listen to a compelling story and find out what happens next is a deep human instinct.

This is right on the money - I'm very tempted to setup a weblog for scope document and spec publication for a project I'm working on at the moment. Even if many of the other project participants aren't using aggregators, I think there is some value in doing this.

From the Journal of Social Structure: Structure in Personal Networks.

ABSTRACT: Most personal (egocentric) network studies describe networks using measures that are not structural, opting instead for attribute-based analyses that summarize the relationships of the respondent to network members. Those researchers that used structural measures have done so on networks of less than 10 members who represent the network core. Although much has been learned by focusing on attribute-based analyses of personal network data, the application of structural analyses that are traditionally used on whole (sociocentric) network data may prove fruitful. The utility of this approach becomes apparent when the sample of network members elicited is relatively large.

Forty-six respondents free-listed 60 network members and evaluated tie strength between all 1,770 unique pairs of members. Graph-based measures of cohesion and subgroups revealed variability in the personal network structure. Non-hierarchical clustering generated subgroups that were subsequently verified by respondents as meaningful. Further analysis of the correlation between subgroup types and overlap between subgroups demonstrates how the analysis of each network can be summarized across subjects. Four case studies are presented to illustrate the richness of the data and the value of contrasting individual matrix results to the norm as defined by all 45 subjects.

KEYWORDS: Personal network, Egocentric network, Social network structure.

Rethinking ROI: Managing Risk and Rewards in KM Initiatives - a very interesting article about measuring ROI. Unlike many other articles I've seen on the subject, this paper gives some measures that might prove useful within a consulting / professional services environment:

Measure What's Important to the Firm and Clients

I suggest that in setting goals for knowledge management projects, we should strive to relate initiatives as closely as possible to the firm’s core business model and to clients’ interests. We should not accept vague promises of revenue increases. Rather, we should use measures of success that immediately translate into benefits for the firm and clients. Fortunately, there are such measures.

The three measures that accomplish this best in my view are:

(1) Leverage
(2) Effective rate delivered to the client, and
(3) Profit component⁵

Leverage

There are may ways to measure leverage. Perhaps the simplest entails creating a ratio of partner hours to non-partner hours. You can add many subtleties to this calculation, but the net result is still to determine the effectiveness with which work in a particular group is moved to younger or less experienced lawyers.

At first blush, high leverage sounds like a bad deal for clients. However, in a well-managed firm, quite the contrary should be the case. If associates and young partners are well-trained and provided with tools that make it possible for them to accomplish expert work to high standards of quality and to do so sooner than is the case at peer firms, clients benefit by having a larger pool of talent available to do their work. They also benefit by getting a lower effective rate for the work they have done (because of the lower cost of younger lawyers).

Effective Rate

Effective rate is an average of all hours billed to a client. To calculate it, simply divide total fees by total hours on an engagement or for work done by a particular group across engagements. If you agree to a blended rate when serving a client and you do a good job of managing the engagement, then the effective rate ought not to be higher than the agreed blended rate.

Profit Component

When an engagement is concluded (and probably before), it makes some positive or negative contribution to the profits of a firm. Allocate that on a partner basis, or a matter basis or a group basis, and you have a profit component. (See Laws 2003). This can be roughly equivalent to calculating earnings per product or per business unit in a publicly held corporation. Doing it successfully requires the ability to allocate costs very precisely. For example, if you want to look at the profit component for a group of lawyers using a new knowledge management tool, you will have to track costs across all the matters on which they use the tool and then arrive at a profit component for the group. That can be difficult, both technically and culturally (firms have to decide whether they want to know profit components by group).

If a knowledge management product is accomplishing something useful, it should have a positive impact on at least one of the measures above

Good introductory CoP reading list.