Use of Weblogs for Competitive Intelligence

Greg Lloyd – President & Co-FounderTraction Software

Providence, Rhode Island USA grl@tractionsoftware.com

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Outline

• The World Wide Web is becoming a globally writable as well as readable medium - with weblogs, wikis, RSS syndication

• This fulfills a vision of hypertext that has evolved over fifty years

• Competitive Intelligence is an ideal weblog application, at the leading edge of a revolution in working communication for business

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A blog is a web page typically made up of short, frequently updated "posts" or items that are arranged chronologically like a what's new page or diary. They often include news feeds supplied using a related standard-based technology called RSS (RDF Site Summary or Rich Site Summary.)

Now, like instant messaging (IM), which has also begun its migration from the consumer market into the enterprise, the simple and inexpensive software used to create weblogs is finding its way into the workplace. …

"The brilliance of blogging is that it creates a system of URLs and archiving that is persistent - it doesn't go away," says Mr. Lawlor. "What is more, weblog software does it all for you.”

Business logs on to bloggingBy Paul Taylor Financial Times, March 2004

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Technorati Weblogs Aug 05

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Memex - As We May Think

Vannevar BushJuly 1945 Atlantic Monthly

A vision of a desktop device containing a microfilm research library and repository for trails of references and notes.

Captures the “momentarily important item” in a form that “will not fade”.

“The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record.”

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Early Hypertext Systems

Hypertext Editing SystemBrown Universityvan Dam, Nelson et al 1968

NLS / AugmentStanford Research InstituteEngelbart et al 1968

XanaduNelson et al

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Engelbart added a timeline

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Bring order into the time stream of Augmented Knowledge

workers

The World Wide Web

WWWCERNBerners-Lee et al 1990

Two elements:HTTP transport protocolHTML Markup language

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WWW is simple and scalable

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But easily broken

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1968 NLS (oN Line System). A Hypertext Journal for high performance teams

1992 Towards High Performance Organizations: A Strategic Role for Groupware

Douglas Engelbart 1992

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Dialog, External Intelligence, Knowledge Product

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Journal + Web = Traction

•Stable content•Paragraph addressable

•Built-in time order•Flexible viewspecs for assembly of content

•Web browser interface

•Web linkable•Easily authored•Each server creates a cluster of weblogs

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Weblogs create authored trails for general web

content

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Weblogs in protected domains support private as

well as public use

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Classic Weblog Enterprise WeblogOne per person One per group

My opinions about everything

Working communication

Everything visible Permissioned spaces

Standalone weblog Many spaces, scalable

Outside firewall Inside / across firewall

Talk to the world! Talk to stakeholders

One author Many authors

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Enterprise Weblog Designed for “Groups with a Goal”

• Backbone for Enterprise Working Communication– Group weblogs with many voices and one

purpose– Create Private as well as public spaces– Provide authenticated, encrypted access

based on global identity and local permission

• A hypertext work space– Make private comments on public content– Share files as well as articles (WebDAV)– Provides secure RSS and Search engine skins

• Organized by Importance, Group and Topic– Weblog spaces have permissions– Individuals see union of activity, based on

permissions

• Organized by Time– A way to come up to speed,

quickly– Context for every interaction – You can correlate many

timelines

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Competitive Intelligence Cycle

• Obtain CI request• Collect Necessary Information• Analyze and Synthesize Information

• Communicate Intelligence

The CI Cycle is an ideal match for Engelbart’s Model

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Pharmaceutical CI

Dark Blogs: The Use of Blogs in Business - Case Study 01 A European Pharmaceutical Group by Suw Charman, Corante Research, June 13, 2005

“The blog format lends itself particularly well to the type of material that we're producing,” said the CIO. “Competitive information is always very unstructured and comes in lots of different ways — through the internet, internal sources, and various other ways. Using blogs to organise the data is quite effective because it doesn't impose too rigid a structure where we need some inherent flexibility.” – quoted in Charman 2005

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RSS Feed

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European Pharma Study

• Six CI Weblogs– General CI News for entire company.All may read or comment, CI staff posts

– Four Therapeutic Area CI blogsFor experts, management, CI staff

– CI Editorial Board blogPrivate discussion and analysis

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European Pharma Summary

• Very good response due to “Best Practices”

• Automatically generated email digest was popular and effective:– Provides a company wide alerting service with one email per day

– Links to CI weblog encourage reading and commenting on new material

– RSS / Atom provide similar notification, but email “forms a bridge between old and new technologies”

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Best Practice Summary• The blog's aims were clear and precise and had been defined after

comprehensive examination of the problems• The project had the full support of the CEO and the Executive

Committee• There was a well constructed project plan, which included

consideration of high level issues such as structure, taxonomy and search requirements as well as day to day user requirements

• A clear, semi-open editorial process was defined• The open commenting system allows for dialogue with users with

existing systems and technologies created a more seamless user experience

• Read permission control means that potentially sensitive information can only be accessed only by those who need it

• A slow roll out to a focused user group ensured word of mouth evangelisation and gradual build up to hard launch

• Training has been kept simple and minimal, reducing barrier to entry for new users

• Integration with email allows users to access content that's important to them via a familiar application

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US Pharma Group

• Seven CI Weblogs– General CI NewsAll can read or comment, Moderated post

– Five Therapeutic AreasFor experts, management, CI Staff

– Executive CI blogFor executive management, CI Staff

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US Pharma Group Summary

• A quick, functional replacement for monthly CI reports circulated by email

• For readers the weblog provides: – Frequent updates without overload

– Quick response to questions or comments

– Contextualized information (explicit links)

• For CI analysts the weblog simplified gathering and analysis as well as distribution

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A Virtuous Pattern

Weblog technology is appropriate when deployment leads to:

• Less work for primary content contributors

• A more timely and easily assimilated work product

• Directed to an interested audience of stakeholders, including management

• With a range of private to public spaces for commentary and discussion

• Creating of a contemporaneous log of significant discoveries, events, decisions and results, for

• “bottom up knowledge management” as well as tracking of exceptions and working communication

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Before … After …

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Conclusion

• Weblogs handle working communication more effectively and securely than email

• The weblog + RSS model works exceptionally well for situational awareness, including timeline correlation from many sources

• The weblog + RSS model scales like the web to handle the largest enterprisesCapturing the “momentarily important item”

in a form that “will not fade”

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Roots References• NLS TELECONFERENCING FEATURES: The Journal, and Shared-S

creen Telephoning, Douglas C. Engelbart, Compcon 75 Digest, Sep 1975 pp 173-178 (AUGMENT,33076)

• Toward High-Performance Organizations: A Strategic Role for Groupware, Douglas C. Engelbart, Bootstrap Institute, June 1992 (AUGMENT,132811)

• Lost In The Archive: Vision, Artefact And Loss In The Evolution Of Hypertext, Belinda Barnet PhD Thesis, University of New South Wales, 2005

• Re-Place-ing Space: The Roles of Place and Space in Collaborative systems, Steve Harrison and Paul Dourish, Proceedings of CSCW '96

• Information Foraging, Peter Pirolli and Stuart K. Card, Psychological Review, 1999

• Social Software and the Politics of Groups, Clay Shirky, www.shirky.com, 3 March 2003

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Contact

Greg LloydPresident and Co-Foundergrl@tractionsoftware.com(401)-528-1145

Traction Software, Inc.245 Waterman StreetSuite 309Providence, RI 02906 USA

www.TractionSoftware.com

                               

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A different “Skin” can simultaneously give the same information to different readers in a totally different way

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Bill Gates on WeblogsMicrosoft CEO SummitMay 20, 2004

This (weblogs and RSS) is a very interesting thing, because whenever you want to send e-mail you always have to sit there and think who do I copy on this. There might be people who might be interested in it or might feel like if it gets forwarded to them they'll wonder why I didn't put their name on it. But, then again, I don't want to interrupt them or make them think this is some deeply profound thing that I'm saying, but they might want to know. And so, you have a tough time deciding how broadly to send it out. Then again, if you just put information on a Web site, then people don't know to come visit that Web site, and it's very painful to keep visiting somebody's Web site and it never changes. It's very typical that a lot of the Web sites you go to that are personal in nature just eventually go completely stale and you waste time looking at it. And so, what blogging and these notifications are about is that you make it very easy to write something that you can think of, like an e-mail, but it goes up onto a Web site. And then people who care about that get a little notification. And so, for example, if you care about dozens of people whenever they write about a certain topic, you can have that notification come into your Inbox and it will be in a different folder and so only when you're interested in browsing about that topic do you go in and follow those, and it doesn't interfere with your normal Inbox.

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Pharma Product Development Journal

Research and Research and DevelopmentDevelopment

Intelligence and Intelligence and StrategyStrategy

Marketing and Marketing and SalesSales

• Record progress from a researcher with an idea to a 1000+ person program team

• Document ideas, meetings, actions, decisions, specifications

• Define and track issues• Bring new team members up to

speed when stage-gates are passed

• Support the knotty communication process– Decrease mistakes– Increase time to market

• Full audit trail– Versions and label changes

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I don’t know what Silicon Valley will do when it runs out of

Doug’s Ideas - Alan Kay

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Solutions supporting high interactivity and high value, reusable content•Journal metaphor for publishing•Knowledge is expanded incrementally through use (think “Wikipedia”)•Primary use is enabling groups of individuals to work more effectively over time

email

Web Pages

RSS Feeds

Cell Phone

MS Office

Email

RSSFeed

Web Portal

Phone/PDA

EnterpriseSearch

Introducing the Enterprise Weblog

Traction TeamPageDemonstration

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Traction Spaces: What’s Different?

• Each space can be open to a group or kept private - handles internal, stakeholder or public audience

• Each post or comment is addressed to a selected audience• Each post in a space can be from a different author -

each space specifies who has what rights (read, write, comment, edit, erase)

• The original author of a post can have special rights• Traction maintains a full edit and action history for

review• Each space becomes its own place, with its own norms and

permissions• Your single sign on identity and permissions give you a

20,000 foot view across all spaces you are interested in and permitted to see, in context.

• Traction calls each space with its own membership, rules, labels and presentation options a Project