Everyone has a favorite story about a large organization that has made an incredibly stupid mistake, and perhaps more than once. Corporations (more so than people) are forgetful – they tend to drop the ball more often because, unlike humans, they lack contiguous memory. Without such a memory system, businesses lack the ability to create and sustain meme’s; a synthetic evolutionary process that allows knowledge to persist across generations of employees. Imagine how frustrating your life would be if you had to start each day without the benefit of recollecting mistakes and lessons learned from the past. Businesses must operate with precisely this ailment. Ironically, and sometimes a great disadvantage to the enterprise, its customers and the press do have persistent memories.

Corporate amnesia is very costly; the loss of knowledge through attrition, retirement, job-switching, and internal role churn contributes to perhaps trillions of dollars in mistakes, re-training, and drag on corporate performance every year. People often associate corporate amnesia with the departure of senior or long-standing staff members, but there's another, more pervasive, source of organizational memory leak; a fundamental failure to capture existing artifacts and data in a way that can be easily persisted, found, and shared.

Eliminating corporate amnesia is no small task but there are ways to create knowledge meme’s that can sustain enterprise memory. Even a slightly less forgetful organization will enjoy operational benefits and reap large dividends, or avoid costly missteps. MyST Technology Partners co-founder F. Andy Seidl suggests -

“Corporate amnesia, in its most common form, is an ailment resulting from the cumulative effect of numerous, seemingly insignificant, day-to-day forgetting events, each of which represents a small KM failure. The cure, of course, is numerous, seemingly insignificant, day-to-day remembering events.”

Bottom-Up Meme’s

For the last 20 years or so, enterprise knowledge management (KM) initiatives have been fundamentally designed as top-down models. The approach and methodology for capturing information is typically rigid; discrete database applications represent the primary method of information capture. Free-form capture philosophies started to emerge when CIOs and CKOs noticed an increased reliance on tools such as instant messaging, Wiki’s, and blogs within their organizations. In many cases, some without authority, knowledge workers have determined that these tools help them get things done more efficiently.

Notwithstanding the security, management, and maintenance issues associated with these applications, IT organizations have warmed to their use and adoption in official capacities. Blogging inward is a term that was first coined by InfoWorld’s CTO in 2003 (Chad Dickerson). But one aspect of this trend is clear even to the most rigid IT leaders – unlike top-down KM systems, employees actually want to use these tools for knowledge work. Not surprising, iPhone is another good example of a tool that employees want to use to get things done.

Streamlining Knowledge Capture

To be effective, a successful KM initiative starts with an undeniable requirement – capturing information must be as frictionless as possible. The more fluid the process, the more likely it will be utilized. There must also be benefits (or incentives) that encourage sustained and consistent capture of information.

Imagine you’re sitting in a conference room helping your marketing team work through the process of redefining a portion of your web site. The team agrees on a particular diagram that was painstakingly crafted on a whiteboard during a three hour brainstorming session. It’s now time to implement the strategy. You need to transpose the information on the whiteboard and put it some place where it can be found, reviewed, and shared.

Evernote Has an App For That

You quickly raise your iPhone, snap a picture, and submit it (along with some keywords and description) to your brain-in-the-sky. The whiteboard diagram image is now synchronized to your desktop PC, and your Mac notebook. Furthermore, you can search for it, but not just the tags and description you added when capturing the image; you can search for words in the image – literally, the words written on the whiteboard are as findable as the words attached to the image artifact. Evernote makes this possible.

Searching for words and phrases within images changes the KM game – it transforms the nature of knowledge artifacts. Previously constrained to typed [character] text, artifacts that were previously ruled out as useful information objects in knowledge resources, can now be embraced. Snapshots of hand-written notes, pictures with embedded captions, advertisements from a magazine, charts, diagrams, mind-maps – pretty much anything you can observe - they can all be ruled in as core KM resources.

Everlasting Memories

While Evernote provides some game-changing technology for a bottom-up KM approach, the business requirements and methodologies for effective deployment in widespread corporate environments are not entirely obvious or even possible. But there are some simple approaches that can be used to leverage Evernote for enterprise use today. The key objective is to create sustainable benefits that lead to a reduction in corporate forgetfulness. With that in mind, these fundamental enterprise requirements emerge:

1. Certain captured artifacts must be aggregated and shared within the organization and in a security context.
2. Shared artifacts must be presented with annotations in a form that supports conversations about the artifacts.
3. Presented artifacts must be universally findable in a security context.

Aggregating and Sharing

At a personal level (even for enterprise workers), lots of artifacts are collected on a day-to-day basis, but few need to be shared. We can think about this process somewhat like a triage work flow – collection, organization, and utilization of stuff leads to conclusions, ideas, and concrete decisions. Without question, the collection end of the funnel is far wider than the sharing end. But the shared items must exist in a security context for two reasons – (i) confidential requirements, and (ii) not all workers should see everything – the distraction level would be counterproductive.

Carlos Caballero writes…

“I have also found that  there is a corner of my way of working … and that is the corner where private note-taking overlaps with online collaboration. When I tally the time I spend working on the computer, I realize that a major chunk of my time is spent clipping, gathering, writing, annotating, organizing content by myself, on my desktop, privately, even when the content I clip, gather, write, annotate and organize comes from the web, email, wikis, etc. and is, in most cases destined to become part of a collaboration.”

Much has been written about the KM value of enterprise mashups, and while Evernote items are [presently] unable to participate in secure mashup feeds, it’s possible to leverage them in synthesizing processes that expose them as knowledge artifacts.

Presenting

Shared artifacts are more valuable when annotated with thoughts, arguments, and insights. Effective tools for this include Wiki’s and blogs that are configured for security contexts at the information object level. While Evernote includes the ability to add tags, links, and text descriptions to artifacts, the presentation architecture doesn’t readily support an enterprise-level security model.

Findability

At the far end of the KM spectrum is findability – wherever your Evernote artifacts flow to, they (and their annotations) must be able to be found easily to realize sustained benefit. Blog platforms typically include search solutions, but they are weak as well. Ideally, the combination of a publishing platform that supports item-level security contexts as well as full text indexing is available. Furthermore, automatic tags integration with a tag cloud or Topic Cloud™ will enhance .

It’s possible to chip away at these requirements with a variety of web services that provide collaborative sharing and relatively useful security models. With Evernote’s item import and export features it’s quite simple to set up a sharing system with products such as Box.net, an enterprise-grade document sharing and collaboration service. Evernote also provides the ability to create and manage multiple databases of artifacts and folders. Using this feature, you can create and share whole collections of items across networks.

However, it’s important to embrace Evernote for what it does best – collecting, persisting, and organizing artifacts that can serve as the foundation for building new knowledge resources in the enterprise. And it does this so well that iPhone users will want to use Evernote to create a tipping point – more remembering events than forgetting events.

If you'd like to explore ways that your company can get a better handle on social media, web services for internal and external advantage, give us a call at 415-683-6126, or drop me a note. We offer extensive social media management and strategy consulting and day-to-day services to expand search visibility inside and outside your organization.