The Role of Informal Learning in the New Workplace

In a world where knowledge has become increasingly perishable, people learn best through a combination of having the right knowledge in the right context with the right people. Knowing the right people to ask the right question has more power than knowing all the answers. The process of managing informal learning in an organization is commonly achieved through the deployment of Social Learning solutions. Nurturing and harnessing informal learning enables organizations to surround their people with structured and unstructured learning experiences so they can easily access what they need to learn and what they want to learn.

The workplace is, more often than not, now a place of shifting needs and responsibilities rather than a hierarchy set of jobs with interchangeable people to fill a structured set of job titles. Saba Social Learning is built to adapt to the changing nature of work.

Tag it, share it, discuss it, bookmark it, contribute it, add classmates to the group: the social experience of learning is flexible and boundless. Combined with the strength of formal learning, these experiences engage learners and accelerate how fast people learn. Further Saba Social Learning’s “always on” experience reinforces how learners change behavior and put learning into practice.

Increasing sales velocity though Enterprise Social Networks: FICO

At the interface of main street and Wall Street, FICO (previously known as Fair Isaac) caters both to consumers and businesses and delivers a wide range of predictive analytic solutions. The company generates more than half of its B2B leads from digital marketing through a very deliberate use of social networks both, private and public.

The main reason social networking is so important to FICO is that it enables both prospects and customers to educate and inform themselves by communicating with other similarly minded people in a safe and semi-structured environment, in their own language, 24/7. My strategy was to build FICO’s own private enterprise social network, decisions.fico.com, and to use public social networks like YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/user/FICOTechTalk#p/u, LinkedIn and Twitter to attract potential participants. This strategy, coupled with a user interface focused on maximizing positive user experience, has been very successful. In a very short period of time, we’ve managed to attract thousands and thousands of professionals to join FICO’s online-community the world over.

This project is a real-life example of how to put cloud computing to work to enable and facilitate customer engagement: By inviting our customers to become our most valuable collaborators with regard to defining new product requirements and other enhancements to our services.

FICO’s private enterprise social network, decisions.fico.com, was launched in a matter of weeks. It uses Salesforce Ideas and Lithium Customer Community applications. It integrates with Six Apart’s Typepad, Amazon EC2 and Sharepoint. The vision that lead to this strategy sprang from the marketing team working in very close collaboration with the CIO. The bulk of the implementation for this cloud-based composite application was outsourced to Salesforce’s partner, Reside.

The community is open to everybody using or evaluating FICO technology and services such as Chief Risk Officers, business analysts, developers and many others. Demos, free trials, and best practices are all a click away. Expanding he FICO community from the physical world to the digital world has been a very worthwhile investment! And, let’s not forget that for the customer‘s experience to be successful, the interaction must be multi-channel and consistent both on-line and in-person.

Consumer empowerment and FICO scores

Understanding FICO scores is critical for Consumers who want to take back control of their credit. Indeed, FICO scores are now used not only by lenders when purchasing a car, buying or refinancing a house but also by more and more employers as a measure of character and financial responsibility! In the Forbes video below with Quentin Hardy, I share where to get help to keep your FICO scores up so that you can get the best possible deal on your mortgage and the job you want.

Creative Capitalism vs. Compassionate Capitalism

I thought that it'd be interesting to compare and contrast two concepts of capitalism as promoted by Bill Gates (Creative Capitalism) and by Marc Benioff (Compassionate Capitalism).

So, I read Marc Benioff book articulating his vision for Compassionate Capitalism and listened to Bill Gates'speach touting Creative Capitalism in Davos. I found both visions similar, very inspiring and necessary to unleash the "forces of good" onto our planet!

The following video will provide you with a starting point:

Salesforce's Tour de Force

On Jan. 17, I attended Salesforce’s Tour de Force at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The two keynote speakers were Marc Benioff and Marc Andreessen. The event was billed as an unprecedented meeting of the minds of the two Marcs sharing their vision for the future of on-demand platforms.

It was a very good event, well organized and high-energy as one would have expected! However, it was focused on the launched of Force.com, the platform -as-a-service, that had been announced at Dreamforce last September. This was a bit of a disappointment as I had been expecting the announcement of a partnership between Ning and Salesforce.com. As I have written before (see Ultimate Networks, Jan. 1, 2008) I believe that social networks could significantly benefits B2B processes. Instead, Marc Andreessen squarely positioned Ning as a consumer centric social network platform. I had misread the tea leaves…

But not to despair, there is a Los Angeles company that provides what seems to be quite an interesting offering to build customer communities – http://www.thinkpassenger.com/ – Passenger combines social networking, collaboration and analytics technologies in a single platform. Passenger’s vision is to change the way companies collaborate with their customers, stakeholders and peers across social, geographic and organizational boundaries.

It certainly is a tall order but most definitely transformational and worth a try!

Social Networks and Water Purification in Buenos Aires

In a previous post (Ultimate Networks, Jan. 8, 2008) I wrote about the role of social networks in B2B environments. Today I’d like to comment on a fascinating Clean Tech application developed by Rebeca Hwang, a friend and Stanford PhD student, as well as the Judging Chair for the California Clean Tech Open (Social Networks, Pizza and Clean Tech, Dec. 14, 2007).

Rebeca’s objective is to use her technical know-how in water treatment technology and her research in quantitative theory of social networks to improve water quality in the slums of Buenos Aires. The water in Buenos Aires’ sprawling slums carries birth-defect-causing nitrates and arsenic in amounts up to 10 times what is considered safe. Because of the lack of government resources, communities have formed water cooperatives to help provide clean water to their constituents. Unfortunately, many of these co-ops are small and not always well managed so water treatment and delivery services lack funding. Moreover, while it is cost-efficient to treat water for 100,000 households, these co-ops have only an average of 2,000 houses each and are therefore rarely profitable.

Rebeca Hwang believes that this considerable challenge can be addressed by applying social networks analysis to map out the relationships between decision-makers at water cooperatives. The idea is that the identification of patterns can pinpoint an organization’s strengths and weaknesses, and in turn, may help that organization to improve its efficiency and effectiveness.
The characterization of the structure of these 480 water cooperatives - servicing 700,000 households - is a massive undertaking. One that requires, through extensive surveys, the tagging of the co-ops by service type and managerial style, both formal and informal. Rebeca is using open-source software programs like Pajek and Ucinet to analyze and convert the raw data into meaningful information. Also, she anticipates that using another program like NetDraw to visualize the intensity of the relationships between the different constituents will reveal some key problem areas. Interviews will complement the study and bring qualitative color to the motivations and approaches of decision makers that may be influencing the various co-op operations but that are not formally represented in their structures.

The expected outcome of this “social network analysis” project is to formulate specific ways to improve the profitability of the cooperatives while increasing the volume of clean water produced.

I believe that innovative approaches, like this one, that leverage existing technologies and apply social network analysis theory can provide a significant boost toward improving people’s daily life while maximizing the use of natural resources. Such project does not require huge investment or new technology. It empowers local communities and enables greater sustainability. Please drop me a line if you know of other interesting clean tech social applications.