Semantic Webs Improve Collective Intelligence

The Semantic Web is a web of data. There is a lot of data we all use every day, but it is not part of the web. I can see my bank statements on the web, and my photographs, and I can see my appointments in a calendar. But can I see my photos in a calendar to see what I was doing when I took them? Can I see bank statement lines in a calendar?

Why not? Because we don't have a web of data. Because data is controlled in large financial institutions, healthcare firms, etc. by a legacy of software applications, and each application keeps it to itself.

The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, whereas the original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents. It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing.

The Big Idea – Collective Intelligence

Semantically intelligent facilitators and assistants can improve the use of knowledge explicitly held in corporate knowledge bases, and also the knowledge held in employees' minds.

Relevancy: No World Borders' team has spent years in database, object technology, process mapping, and knoweldge base development. Our name is based on the concept of sharing information more globally, or "borderlessly" to facilitate improved knowledge, transactions, client satisfaction, and value creation. The increasingly common language for the Semantic Web is RSS. Imagine a world where knowledge feeds, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) were available in a dashboard to you from all relevant sources. But the sources didn't get developed over a decade of legacy systems integration. Instead, imagine that they were both existing, known sources and instantly discoverable new sources.

 

You can see the adoption of sementic web concepts in social networks such as Twine. Benefits of Twine include:

• Sharing more productively. Safely share information and knowledge, and collaborate around common interests, activities and goals. Twine claims to help you better leverage and contribute to the collective intelligence of your network. Use Twine to share more productively with friends, colleagues, groups and teams.
  
• Getting more organized. Twine provides one place to tie everything together: emails, bookmarks, documents, RSS feeds, contacts, photos, videos, product info, data records, and more. And, because Twine actually understands the meaning of any information you add in, it helps you organize all your stuff automatically. Finally, you can search and browse everything and everyone you know, about anything, in one convenient place.
  
• Find and be found. You are like a snowflake – you are totally one-of-a-kind. Twine recognizes what makes you special: your unique interests, personality, knowledge and relationships, to help you find and discover things, and be found by others, more relevantly.
  

Case Study

(Source: www.w3.org)

General Description

Any geographically dispersed company with many different products encounters difficulties when people attempt to work together and share information. Information access is impeded because independent systems and data stores have been built over time to satisfy local needs. Better competitive advantage results when the time to market and level of information sharing among stakeholders proceeds rapidly, especially in a company with a global span of customers, employees, and suppliers. This requires easy access to logically organized information, contextually relevant information, and locating subject experts. The Semantic Web offers the possibility to share information in context, at less cost in terms of delivering information content, with user interfaces to access important company information, and based on software delivery systems that can exploit reusable software architectures that are adaptable to future requirements.

Semantic Web technologies can be linked to Boeing's network-centric operations. They will enable the interoperability necessary for network-centric operations. A transition in our use of computing technologies from electronic tools to semantically intelligent facilitators and assistants can improve the use of knowledge explicitly held in corporate knowledge bases, and also the knowledge held in employees' minds.

Business to Business

Global e-business with Semantic Web middleware enables platform interoperability and electronic information exchange between employees, customers, partners, and suppliers. Semantically enhanced Web Services create vendor-neutral formats for process and product information not now readily available to those wanting access to information and practices during state-of-the-art aerospace design, manufacturing and product support. A common, integrated framework of systems will facilitate network-centric logistics in B2B operations.

Supply Chain Management

Business process integration at Boeing can be facilitated through the use of semantic tools. These tools help to create and disseminate a common language of terms used in the industry, within the company, and by skill base. Semantically enhanced supply chain management enables faster time to market by increasing the linkages between engineering drawings, CAD models, materials lists, and manufacturing planning. More efficient and rapid supply chain management will allow Boeing to respond more rapidly to customer requirements in products and services.

Product Development

Automated extraction of metadata from documents allows them to be rapidly classified by semantic reasoning engines. Because Semantic Web technologies allow the context of documents to be described, they can be used to help improve search results. This assures that searches will be improved by semantically enhanced metadata management, faceted classification, and bridgeable thesauri and taxonomies. At the same time, semantic technologies help maintain the appropriate level of security and privacy, and can be isolate government-regulated information by appropriately tagging and protecting a given document that is sensitive to export control.

Schema Mapping

The fixed schema approach that is traditionally used in data management is not amenable to quick changes. By transforming Boeing data management to Semantic Web technologies, semantic tagging for data management becomes practical and attainable. One example comprises transitioning product standards resources from document-centric to data-centric forms. This will allow users to access product and process standards information in the context of their task at hand.

Common Language

Different technical nomenclatures are used by different groups across the company, such as designers, manufactures, planners, and suppliers. Semantic Web technologies can be help capture and model the vocabularies of each of the different groups, and to develop a higher-level schema to span the various technical languages used by different groups. A higher order model can 1) identify the range of variation for each nomenclature element across document sets, and 2) reconcile terminology variation into an operationally acceptable language for each underlying concept.

Benefits of using Semantic Webs at Boeing

• Reduced cycle time in airplane program development.
  
• Reduced cycle time in customer service and product support.
  
• Reduced transaction costs.
  
• Support for global design and business activities.
  
• Improved access to content regardless of location or format, allowing for business to be conducted anywhere.
  
• Flexible infrastructure adaptable to unseen future needs.
  

No World Borders Expanding Facilities Management Practice

Benefits of No World Borders Consulting Practice - Integrated Workplace Management Systems (IWMS) See our recent research blog post on this topic.

• Experience - Our team completed facilities management projects representing over 28 million square feet of office and retail space for financial services, healthcare, government, and higher education clients – on time and on buget.

• Agility – we respond quickly and do not have the overhead and burdensome structure of bigger consulting firms, but we have the ability to deliver large projects globally.

• Unified view - Consolidate process and data stored in applications that support facilities, real estate, physical assets and their associated services in one platform to create a comprehensive solution for complex facilities needs that gives you a complete view of your organization.

• Plan, manage, evaluate and improve the workplace. We help you ensure that your workplace is fully operational, highly productive, safe and healthy through regularly scheduled maintenance coupled with efficient repairs and problem resolution.

• Plan, develop and execute all of your projects in the most time- and cost-effective way, keeping close tabs on contracts, risks, ongoing work, changes and costs.

• Ensure that your organization's property investments are synchronized with strategic objectives and that your real estate team can respond rapidly to changing business needs.

• Helps you stay in control of your property portfolio and reduce workplace costs by accurately tracking occupancy, projects, utilization and changes in your locations, organizations, people and assets.

• No World Borders can enable you to deploy an IWMS to manage the entire facilities lifecycle and handles integration to existing legacy applications.

• We have expertise helping commercial and federal clients integrate their legacy systems stand alone excel, access db, Microsoft project and HR, Financials, cafm, cmms and more icluding most leading ERP Systems. ERP integratione experience includes PeopleSoft, MRI, Peachtree, JD Edwards, SAP and other leading systems.

Paul Sloane on Innovation

Paul Sloane speaks about innovation. Paul is an advisor to our firm and founder of Destination-Innovation a consultancy that helps organizations improve innovation.

His workshops provide practical techniques to improve leadership and innovation. Clients include American Express, British Telecom, Cendant, Lloyds of London, Motorola, Shell and 3M.

Managing Virtual Teams & The Soccer ("Futbol") Generation

Some companies like Nokia are much better than others at managing virtual teams. At Nokia, they are up to 120 people in size and are much more complex than previously imagined. Finland is a tiny country that had to access markets outside its boundaries, so being virtual is something that Nokia grew up with. When people move into a virtual team, they have met and have prior working history. Also, Nokia is a technology company that helps in virtual management.

Young members of virtual teams have some important attributes, and have been described as members of "...the myspace generation..." meaning that they enjoy casual collaboration. Also, in the U.S. the growth of soccer has contributed to the current generation of new workers having grown up since Kindergarten playing soccer or other team sports. Team orientation and learning is more important culturally to this group. Also, very importantly, soccer (better known as futbol outside the U.S.) is a global sport. American children who used to play American football and baseball have been injected with an understanding of different cultures, names of players, and teams playing on global satellite broadcasts that the prior generation did not experience. So, they are much more apt to seek ways to make a difference and be involved globally than just nationally.

A new survey by Vistage, an organization for CEOs of small and mid-size businesses, found that 31% of the more than 2,000 CEO surveyed listed staffing as their greatest challenge. (Economic uncertainty was second at 21%.) Later in the survey, 45% of the CEOs say that they’ve installed technology that lets employees work remotely. What’s the connection? When asked why they’ve invested in this technology, the most popular answer — 27% — was that it helped them retain staff.

“You have to use technology to attract and retain the best workers,” Vistage CEO Rafael Pastor tells the Business Technology Blog. That’s partly because the generation now entering the workforce is so technically inclined. If a small company is going to be in the running for the best and the brightest of these young workers, it has to be supportive of the way they want to work – which includes using the latest tech.

Not surprisingly, the Vistage survey found that 46% of the CEOs say they’re changing their management style to adapt to the needs of these young workers. Additionally, 30% say that they’re using or planning to use new media like MySpace and blogs in order to market their businesses.

No World Borders has experience managing virtual teams for outsourced projects, including software development and call center processes and management.

Preventing Corporate Antibodies from Killing Innovation

Corporations have antibodies that attempt to kill innovation. Six Sigma for example can take defects out, but it can be counter to the very culture that innovators seek. Companies need to protect ideas and insulate them from too many metrics early in the innovation cycle. Recognizing the difference between measurement and corporate self-assessment is important.

Design thinking vs. analytical thinking can help. Analytical thinking, which most of us were taught in school focuses on “why not?” It helps to disprove ideas as valid. Design thinking is iterative and allows for testing, trial and error. Companies also need to provide processes that aren’t cookbooks but rather that provide frameworks to help thinking without too much rigidity. Managing risk is important too. A tolerance for risk is important. All of the things that companies have done to create quality and efficiency often remove the room for innovation. Small teams are key as well. Some would say that re-creating AT&T Bell Labs doesn't work anymore. Companies have to move too fast. On the other hand, four years from seminal idea to commercial success isn't very long. Setting proper hurdle rates for ROI is key.

Cisco fosters “mass collaboration” to help it realize innovation goals and harvest its investment in acquired assets. Focusing your framework to leverage the input from people, and having the right leadership programs are also important. Drawing in partners and customers to facilitate innovation and open source models will also facilitate innovation. Recognizing the innovators and the people who are better at execution is also important.

The Wall Street Journal recently published videos on the topic which provide inspiration.

Managing innovation is one of the most daunting challenges that businesses face. Not only do they need to come up with new ideas, but they also need to foster a culture that encourages and rewards innovation. Otherwise, they risk being overtaken by their competitors. No World Borders can help you build the right framework for innovation. We'll gladly discuss setting a meeting with you to discuss our growth strategies and innovation techniques.

Efficient Real Estate - Workplace Management

While no one person invented lean, no one is given more credit than Taiichi Ohno, father of the Toyota Production System. Many lean students would want nothing more than to spend a day with Taiichi Ohno walking through their plant. Real estate and related plant and material is typically the most valuable tangible asset companies have.

The workplace has experienced dramatic changes in the last ten years. Worker mobility enabled by network and wireless technology has revolutionized work styles and workplace culture that require new system support tools and services. Global terrorism has radically increased focus on disaster recovery and business continuity to the extent that workplace resiliency is no longer an option. The intense focus on business compliance, specifically via the requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley, demands new levels of transparency and data integrity relative to workplace processes and costs. And the "green revolution" centers on workplace sustainability, particularly relating to energy efficiency, and long-term sustainability of enterprise buildings and workplace environments. These trends coupled with a continued drive toward workplace cost containment, worker productivity and asset efficiency have now risen to the senior executive agenda, demanding new levels of sophistication, precision and excellence in the management of workplace assets, services and processes.

Integrated Workplace Management Systems (IWMS) and the Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) markets altered considerably over the last two years. The IWMS market experienced rapid growth and is expected to grow at 10 percent a year, according to Gartner Group. The EAM market landscape has had a face lift; virtually every EAM vendor has been acquired in the past two years, but none of them have been consolidated, so there are still just as many as before. In addition, these two areas have grown somewhat closer together, as more assets are becoming IT-enabled.

The IWMS market focuses on enterprise-level software applications that integrate four key areas: project management, real estate portfolio and lease management, space management, and maintenance management. The software typically operates from a single database and offers work flow tools, executive dashboards, and pre-defined and customized reporting capabilities for multiple sites. Most of these applications can inter-operate with other enterprise applications, such as ERP, supply chain management and human capital management via Web service technologies.

EAM offerings, a subset of ERP systems, evolved from computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) and primarily center around materials and maintenance management functionality. These offerings tend to be simpler in scope than traditional CMMS offerings and focus on single-site deployments. Functionality also focuses on planning and execution.

According to Gartner, IWMS covers things like real estate, space utilization, leasing, rental, and some areas of facilities management. Companies investigating IWMS should consider those firms in the upper right quadrant of Gartner’s charts. No World Borders helps clients discern the leaders that fit for your firm, and provide consultation services to help select, implement, and facilitate the change processes to optimize your ability to capitalize on the investment in an IWMS.

Advertising agencies are buying technology firms

Advertising agencies are buying technology firms, and technology companies are buying ad firms. The cost of the technology firms in particular are rising. Much of that money is bypassing the established global ad networks and instead going to tech companies. By selling millions of short online ads, Google Inc. will this year generate more revenue than WPP or Omnicom Group Inc., the biggest ad groups, according to analyst forecasts^[1].

Traditional media companies are fully realizing now that if they can’t grow their online businesses organically, they had better use their balance sheets to buy in. No World Borders investment banking practice is helping firms in online media and marketing find the right fit with strategic partners and secure liquidity events for their companies. See our Thought Leadership, Growth Strategies, and Investment Banking practices information.

^[1] Source: Wall Street Journal, September 6, 2007.

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From Red Herring: Yahoo to Buy Blue Lithium

“Yahoo on Tuesday said it agreed to acquire ad network BlueLithium for about $300 million in cash, a move that will help the Internet giant sell advertising across a greater number of web sites. The acquisition was expected to help boost Yahoo’s effort to develop a third-party advertising network, helping the Internet company better compete with rivals such as Google and Microsoft.”

The continued consolidation in ad networks and the portals to those networks underscores the importance of developing and continuously reviewing your online presence and strategy. www.noworldborders.com can help. Contact us for more thoughts on this subject.

Management Approaches to Organizational Complexity - 7S

Often, our clients who want to change their company strategy or business process are left asking how "do-able" this is at some point.

The 7S Framework, originally used by McKinsey, is a framework that is used to solve organizational problems and strategy implementation.

The framework consists of the following elements:

1. Strategy
2. Structure
3. Systems
4. Staff
5. Skills
6. Style
7. Superordinate Goals (Shared value)

Strategy Implementation

The value of the 7S framework is that it can be used for "judging the organizational do-ability of strategies." When new strategies are being implemented, the manager should examine and coordinate these seven elements, such that all elements can work together instead of being a burden of strategy implementation.

References

1. Waterman Jr., Robert H., Peters, Thomas J., and Julien R. Phillips. 1980. "STRUCTURE IS NOT ORGANIZATION." Business Horizons 23, no. 3: 14.
2. Waterman Jr., Robert H. 1982. "The Seven Elements of Strategic Fit." Journal of Business Strategy 2, no. 3: 69.