Pantha Corporation

The CIO has a great article entitled "Taking A Systems View" on Intangible Management, written by Sue Bushell.

Some excerpts below but read it yourself; time well spent. I also encourage people to sign-up for the global cost to value taskforce as passive listeners or active participants if the topic of intangible management interests you.

"Talk about perverse consequences. BP sets out to slash 25 percent of its fixed costs and ends up killing 15 workers and injuring 180 others, in the worst industrial accident in the US in 15 years. Instead of counting its savings it finds itself having to sink $US1.6 billion into a legal defence fund, facing a congressional investigation and with some of its officers exposed to potential criminal sanctions."

"General Motors reviews the real impact of its IT cost-cutting initiatives, only to discover that all of its efforts have amounted to much ado about virtually nothing. CTO Tony Scott tells a CIO summit that not only had almost no money been saved, the effort had provoked perverse consequences that proved painfully expensive."

"Traditional business analysis, with its preoccupation with breaking everything down into its component parts and then studying the parts, is useful when dealing with machines," Parsons wrote in a 2000 paper called "Productivity Measurement in the Service Sector". "In the early days of the industrial age it was possibly convenient to adopt such an approach, but such thinking will mislead, often dangerously, when applied to today's complex conditions of existence."

"By December 11, 2007, he is confident the Global Cost to Value Taskforce (see "Going Global", page 48) will provide an agreed and tested method to let managers and executives quickly and easily financially estimate intangible benefits and value to create new ways to increase productivity, reduce costs and risks, and boost service, engagement, retention, profitability and shareholder value."

"One of the very interesting things is that productivity today is caused, from the Standards Institute perspective, by intangibles, and when we look at intangibles we're looking at activities to do with knowledge, collaboration and leverage," Standfield says. "So if we look at an organization and just basically say: 'Well, this particular organization has a certain number of staff; they're doing certain activities throughout the day, all of which can be broken up into those three different categories', basically we get a time fingerprint of the organization. Now from there what we do through the more than 40 international intangibles standards is to assess that fingerprint."

More to come on the taskforce and pilot-projects. As always, feel free to get in touch with us directly for discussions.

Posted by bjoern at 06:37 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Since October 2006 we are proud to have gone through the first level of certification (ii101) of Intangible Intelligence Analyst through the Standards Institute and under the rewarding mentorship of Dr. Ken Standfield.

This certification enhances our capabilities in project-management and process-analysis. It also allows us to expand into complementing areas such as risk-management. All next to the fact that we can now offer our services in ways never possible before; it literally opens up new doors of potential for us and our current & future clients. We are certain that it will convert into vast cost-savings and value creation for them through our support as Intangible Intelligence Analysts.

We have not had the chance to blog nor market our new capabilities since our certification as we have been focused on the creation our hosted knowledge-management solution transLucid. Expect us to communicate more about intangible management and its effects in the near-term future.

Why use Intangible Intelligence
"A study comparing market value to the book value of 3,500 U.S. companies over a period of two decades shows the dramatic upward rise in intangible value. In 1978, market value and book value were pretty much matched: book value was 95% of market value. Twenty years on, book value was just 28% of market value. Lev Baruch, an accounting professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, reckons that in the late 1990s businesses invested a staggering $1 trillion per year in intangible assets" (taken from The Hidden Value Of Intangibles).

Intangibles are usually invisible. International Intangible Standards make the invisible visible. They provide scientific and quantifiable answers how to measure - as in hard $ - as well as improve intangibles value and the chain of value creation. Resulting in cost reduction, time savings, productivity improvements, and risk reductions.

What it is
Intangible intelligence® applies international intangible standards through software to visually map operational reality - the costs, risks, productivity losses, efficiency, and effectiveness associated with the actual application of service resources (knowledge, collaboration, and process-engagement).

Intangible intelligence® maps visually show best practice gaps which are new sources of (1) cost reduction, (2) time savings, (3) productivity improvements, and (4) avoidable risk reductions.
When best practice gaps are reduced/removed employee stress, risk, and costs are decreased and productivity, results, and success increase. The central focus of intangible intelligence is therefore to "make life easier and less stressful for every employee" by identifying and removing best practice gaps using international intangible standards.

Areas of application
They are not surprisingly vast. In a next entry on intangible standards, I will focus on the standardized pilot projects to introduce intangible management into a company and create measurable financial improvements for a companies bottom-line. The potential results of a good management of intangibles using the international intangible standards are:

1. Improved customer service,
2. Enhanced employee satisfaction,
3. Increased expertise and knowledge,
4. Enhanced brand value, reputation, and corporate exposure,
5. Increased motivation, engagement, and relationship quality,
6. Improved knowledge quality levels,
7. Improved employee morale,
8. Improved quality
9. Enhanced leadership ability,
10. Enhanced management skills and quality,
11. Increased customer retention and satisfaction
12. Decrease in stress
13. Increased work-life balance, autonomy, and flexibility
14. Decreased “time to market”
15. Enhanced problem-solving and decision-making ability
16. Decrease in process overheads
17. The financial valuation of product/service benefits,
18. Increased competitive differentiation,
19. Increased market share and market growth rates,
20. Increased ability to identify changing customer tastes and preferences,
21. Reduced error rates and rework rates,
22. Improved data entry consistency and accuracy
23. Enhanced ability to identify and control risks,
24. Enhanced ability to lead competitors (instead of following),
25. Increased collaboration
26. Enhanced innovation ability
27. Increased reliability
28. Enhance in consistency
29. Increased product/service customization,
30. Enhanced ability to demonstrate social responsibility
31. Increase in goodwill

And most probably many others but this list should suffice to show the scope of an application of intangible standards in a company, supported by an Intangible Intelligence Analyst. As said, more to follow soon.

Posted by bjoern at 05:45 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

No comments. Just listen& watch:

Thanks JM !

Posted by the only a at 10:07 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Below, I would like to share some of the knowledge-management tools we use to organize, share and collaborate with others in our business and private life. The idea for this entry matured at the Net Generation event (organised by SlatteryIT).

Knowledge Management (KM), desktop tools and applications:
Some techniques and associated tools that we are using both in business and for private projects:

• Mind mapping . We have been mind-mapping for years now, for both business and private projects. A powerful technique that you can practice digitally thanks to a couple of handful applications. We adopted MindManager and NovaMind (both commercial). There are open source applications as well such as Freemind. Within a certain extent, PersonalBrain (see below) can also be used to create and use your mind maps on your desktop. Example of business usage: interviews, note-taking, auditing, brainstorming, business requirement gathering, etc.
  
• Concept mapping . A more sophisticated technique to articulate "concepts": conceptualize a process, storyboarding, etc. In software development you can use a concept map to make a flow chart. CMaps is an excellent and powerful free-ware application dedicated to concept mapping.
• PersonalBrain . A personal organizer tool with a great GUI sitting on your desktop . There is literally a "fan club" of Personal Brain users that have been sharing ideas and experiences for years now on a Yahoo Group. Actually, the story of Translucid (see below) began with this wonderful program. PersonalBrain™ features a dynamic visual interface of thoughts that contains it all—your files, Web pages and applications—all linked the way you think.

All the softwares listed above, are desktop applications; some include export function that allow you to share the resulting maps & content with others. However, the exporting solutions can be quite cumbersome. Not optimal for sustainable team collaboration.

KM collaboration & sharing tools:
Without going into the details, let's focus here on the collaboration tools that we have found the most helpful, used in corporate environment and at Theandb to work with remote teams. I will present as well translucid, the one that we develop through our open source venture Pantha software ltd.
Note that there are also enterprise & commercial suites that can be purchased to complement the softwares quoted previously, published by MindJet (for MindManager) and by TheBrain Corporation (for Personal Brain). But I won't discuss them here.

• Wiki: easy to use online publishing systems, to share knowledge within a team, a company or publicly (most popular example: wikipedia). We have used wikis since our time at Amazon.com where wikis were the natural way for anyone inside Amazon to produce documentation, how-tos, personal tips and so on (works well in a geeky culture). Your primary source of information to understand the companies jargon and know how to do "anything" with the Amazon systems. We introduced the usage of wikis to build the knowledge-base for projects & teams in several other companies. A problem with wikis can be that they grow organically and result in unstructured content that you can only really explore and retrieve through adequate search features. There are plenty of wiki softwares, open-source or not.  An open-source wiki that we recommend  is Twiki : very solid, lots of features, project-orientated, integrated work flows, etc. Amongst the commercial version of wikis one of the best actually is published by an Australian company (Atlassian): Confluence. Another popular one (in the US) is SocialText.
  
• Blog: well you are reading one right now! Most popular blog softwares: Movable Type, Wordpress. A success story with blogs we would like to share started 2 years ago. We introduced the concept of "project blogs". For each project, we initiated at our clients' company, we opened a blog where all the project communication was published. It happened to become a very popular and very helpful mean of communication. Useful in many different ways such as to enable stakeholders to comment on specifications, design (UI) choices, and other documentation.
  
• Translucid: "a light-weight publishing system geared in particular for users of knowledge-management desktop applications such as PersonalBrain, FreeMind and MindManager. It will free these users from their desktop environment and allow for a presentation of and collaboration on their content online, based on transLucid's powerful importing & exporting capabilities. With its easy to learn & use editing interface, it can power anything from knowledge-spaces to whole websites."  Translucid is an open source initiative from Pantha Software Ltd, which we founded. We are currently setting up a hosting solution for translucid: Translucidonline . Translucid can also be used as a light CMS to publish small-scale website easily (local Australian example: DPPP )
  

Sharing further resources and links:
When I started to focus on Knowledge Management , Social Network Analysis, and a couple of other areas related to my research at the time (2004) ; I created a dedicate knowledge base with PersonalBrain. Then decided to publish it using the ancestor of translucid (flashbrain) combined with a wiki system. The resources published in this so called "wikibrain" have not been refreshed for a while, but i believe most is still relevant today.
Among the many blogs and RSS feeds I am reading on a continuous basis, the one that consistently features outstanding content (on KM especially) is called "how to save the world" by David Pollard. I would like to highlight in particular one entry that I found very useful  in regards to the topic of this entry: Adding Meaning & Value to Information

Posted by the only a at 05:41 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)