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Data Management, Social Networking, and Real-Time Knowledge Empowerment


Three recent conferences highlight the vast differences in not only how data is being managed but also how businesses are spending vast amounts of time, energy and money to gather, process, report and gain a return on their data investment. The three conferences have entirely different focuses and approaches, but all seek the same goal of making better sense from the data. What’s intriguing is the different ways that different types of organizations address the challenge.

The Lab Informatics (LI09) conference held in October in San Francisco, Calif. brought together some of the finest minds in the industry, from both the business and consulting sides to discuss data management from capture and analysis to storage and reporting. Critical issues such as regulatory compliance, system validation and audit preparation were reviewed in depth during deep 45 minutes presentations. LI09 concentrated on pharmaceutical, biotech, and drug discovery applications, providing case studies for successfully navigating the pitfalls and roadblocks that Lab Managers face. Knowledge Management, often a rather elusive afterthought, was touched on but the main focus was on optimizing data capture and management, rather than trying to make sense of it all.

The second conference, KM World 2009, was held in November in San Jose, Calif. A large conference with three concurrent sessions over the course of three days, KM World addressed a wide range of knowledge management (KM) topics, ranging from strategy to technology to available tools, processes and practices. Data management was not addressed, nor were regulatory, compliance or validation issues. Instead, the focus was on the very beginning of the process where strategies are conceived and on the very end once all the data has been collected.

The third conference, the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) 2009 Annual Meeting. was held in December, also in San Francisco. A huge convention, similar to Pittcon in the breadth and depth of the papers submitted, AGU09 has, unlike Pittcon, significantly increased the number of papers on Informatics. But the Informatics being examined cover a wide range and the methodology for addressing data analysis does not enjoy an industry standard.

These three entirely different conferences all sought the same thing: better understanding, analysis and dissemination of data in order to leverage the knowledge contained therein. The end game, knowledge management, was addressed during LI09 and examined in detail throughout KM World.

Better Knowledge Sharing

Interestingly, a number of presentations at KM World addressed social networking and how it can be applied to knowledge management within the enterprise. Many organizations are implementing a business version of FaceBook for their employees in the latest gambit to leverage the corporate knowledge bank. If your company is not implementing such a system, the pundits at the conference were definite that you should.

The reason is simple: social networking enables the enterprise to share knowledge better. “Most learning happens informally on the job,” said Gordon Vala-Webb, the Knowledge Management guru for PriceWaterhouseCooper’s (PWC) Canadian operations. “Particularly through networking. So if you can speed this learning process, your company can be more effective.”

He pointed out that business networking is very different from social networking. In most organizations, teams are assembled from particular business units and that membership in the team is not voluntary. With social networks, membership is voluntary and it is anonymous. With the business environment however there is no anonymity—every one knows who you are and what you do, so there is an element of trust that exists as a result because there are ramifications to negative postings.

Further, most business communications take place via email. Unfortunately email is only sent to a few people and the attachments and emails are not available for everyone to search if they are seeking a particular piece of information. “It is just not the way people network at work,” Vala-Webb pointed out. “Email is not searchable or browseable by many people, so it is not the best social media tool.”

Social Networking in the Business Environment

This type of online social networking is irrelevant in a small firm where everyone knows everyone else already. However, in a large organization where most of the employees do not know each other, a shared messaging solution can address social networking needs within the organization, according to Vala-Webb. “It’s very similar to email but the messages are accessible to everyone. And,” he adds, “it is also important to provide a profile of each person—including a photo, message threads, colleagues, groups, etc.—in order for the networking to deliver most value.“

So how does this work in the real world? Erik Johnson, General Manager for cubeless, a division of Sabre, points out that the key value to social networking in the business environment is that it brings in different people’s perspectives—something that can’t be gained from information in a book or on the Internet. A message sent throughout the organization can leverage those perspectives to get a well-rounded answers to challenges and issues that an employee is working on. Johnson cited a McKinsey report which states that 75 percent of intellectual property is locked into emails and attachments. He also cited an IDC report which said that 30 percent of an average employee’s time is spent looking for information. “If that person’s salary is $60K per year, then it is costing the organization $18K per year for information searches—and we’re only talking one employee.”

The point that Vala-Webb, Johnson and others made is that social networking engages employees, and an engaged employee is a more productive one. Yet, while a business social network can be set up, it is still voluntary and only effective when it is used by the majority of employees. “You need to make the network compelling,” Johnson emphasized.

Johnson provided an example in which a Sabre sales team was preparing to make a pitch to the Vatican and needed a translator who spoke fluent Italian. Before they hired an outsider, the sales team sent a query through SabreTown, Sabre’s in-house social networking solution, and discovered that a man in another business unit on the floor above theirs had lived in Rome for many years and was not only able to act as their translator, but because he was an employee and very familiar with the products was key for winning the sale. Furthermore, he was delighted to be involved in a team outside his normal job responsibilities.

So it’s not necessarily product knowledge or the next great invention for the company that a KM social network would deliver, but the ability to leverage the personal knowledge or expertise that every person has outside of the job requirements but which can provide a richer employee experience and deeper corporate capability.

Risks of Social Networking

There is definitely an element of risk involved when social networking is brought into the business environment. According to Dave Pollard, author of How to Save the World Blog, the risks inherent in social networking include both internal risks and external risks, and cover everything from financial to environmental risks.

Pollard tempered his message by stressing that along with risks there are opportunities, and that most opportunities involve some kind of risk. Unfortunately, Pollard stated, there is generally not a lot of data available regarding the risks a particular organization might face. “This information tends to be subjective or hard to substantiate,” he added.

Vala-Webb expanded on the issues surrounding risks of social networking in the business arena by listing the negatives involved, including:

• lost productivity
• security
• Intellectual Property (IP) leakage
• reputation
• privacy/confidentiality
• records management
• regulatory requirements
• costs, including hard and soft costs

He pointed out that one of the highest risks involved with social networking is when proprietary information becomes public knowledge. Yet this is happening right now via company emails and not just through social networking.

All of these risks are manageable according to Vala-Webb and have been solved by PWC, but not without laying down a flexible strategy that can adapt to change. “The key is not to go outside the system,” Johnson added.

KM as an Outcome

John Trigg, a noted KM Expert in the Informatics arena, pointed out at the LI09 conference that “KM is not a solution in a box. It’s an outcome. You can not implement it.”

This goes back to the old adage “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.” Even if the business emphasizes the importance of participating in a social messaging or social networking solution, and even if the top managers post videos on that network stressing the importance of involvement, the speakers at the KM World conference admitted that not all employees will participate.

Having said that, such social networking solutions are in their infancy and no doubt will continue to evolve as consumer networking solutions also continue to evolve.

The Funding Conundrum

While the Informatics papers at AGU09 were many, the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to manage the data was not covered in depth. In fact, GIS is a loose term that covers any type of information system and not a specific standardized system such as a LIMS. While GIS are used by the laboratory in the same way that a LIMS is used, the expectations for a GIS are very different. According to Wikipedia, “GIS software encompasses a broad range of applications, all of which involve the use of some combination of digital maps and georeferenced data.” ESRI’s ArcMap was the most frequently referenced commercial solution in the presentations, but it is designed for specific geophysical applications.

Commercial LIMS are being used for geotechnical applications, just not often. A case study by the LIMS/Letter highlighted the LIMS implementation by the New Hampshire Department of Transportation (NHDOT) in their Concord, NH transportation materials laboratory for management of sample materials used in and taken from construction projects around the state. But this implementation is uncommon in the geotech industry.

Instead many of the labs build their own systems each time for each project. The reason for this approach is the way that projects are funded, since most are dependent upon government grants. These grants stress new projects and new data to be collected, not the migration of collected data so that each project stands alone. The long term management of the collected data (while sometimes specified) is not typically a priority and easily disregarded downstream. For instance, astrophysics laboratories that are dependant upon NASA grants for funding space projects pitch a new data acquisition and management system with each proposal. They build on what they have learned but do not rely on commercial solutions to meet their needs.

In addition, a significant number of the labs within the sphere of the AGU’s influence still use spreadsheets and paper notebooks, partially because there is no money to migrate existing data to an electronic format and partially because of the funding conundrum. These labs run lean and mean, coercing aging equipment into continued functionality. Yet, the labs and their projects must cope with a huge volume of specialized data that—as part of the grant—almost always must be provided to the public in a user-friendly format.

Thus, this returns to the possibility of social networking as a new tool for AGU member societies to leverage because it can provide a quantum leap in technology to better enable companies to address the public information access requirement. The situation is reminiscent of Norway when that country leaped past the limitations of landlines and embraced cell phone technology. The economies of scale will be too great to resist once the geophysical arena discovers how to leverage social networking for their programs.

Summary

The growing popularity of social networking begets another final question to consider. What will be the point of going to a conference if you can get the information online and if you can meet your peers in a virtual environment?

Data management can certainly be done without leaving the office; the information needed to define and drive the program is already being delivered to the desktop. Knowledge management appears to be embracing the benefits of social networking, which can also accomplished without leaving the office or lab environment.

Unfortunately, while electronic solutions enable people to perform more tasks in less time, information retrieval requirements have also increased so that people are now spending 30 percent of their time doing it as mentioned above. If so much of the information we need is still locked away in emails, in silos, in someone’s mind, then the most efficient way is the one that involves sitting down one-on-one or one-with-many and brainstorming individually or as a team. Watching another person’s facial expression, hearing the muttered aside that generates a new insight, seeing what catches someone’s attention and what doesn’t—these are all components of real-time knowledge empowerment. Taking the time to network with peers in the conference environment, to attend relevant presentations, to quickly get up to speed on the latest research without wading through email messages or wandering around the Internet, still enables a person to capture vast amounts of knowledge efficiently in an environment unmatched by any other resource.