Saturday, May 30, 2015

The Taxonomy of Baker Hughes

An APQC report provided the follow details on the taxonomy of Baker Hughes. It looks good… but it's not the only case study.



Taxonomy Strategies apparently did some work for Baker Hughes. Specifically, it:

"Worked with five Baker Hughes divisions to develop a consensus around three common vocabularies to demonstrate the feasibility and value of an enterprise taxonomy. Recommendations were provided on how to integrate the taxonomy with the content management system, portal and search engine environments."

We don't have more details but we can guess based on the work they did with Halliburton:

"Taxonomy Strategies worked with Halliburton's knowledge management staff to consolidate multiple taxonomies that had been developed for separate product lines, and to integrate them into a content architecture to be implemented as part of a new content management system. An important result of the project was the recognition that the logistics (materials and equipment) and the marketing (energy and petroleum lifecycle) views needed to be reconciled and mapped to each other in order to solve the problem. Eleven taxonomy branches or facets were implemented as a result of the project: Product Groups; Tools; Oil, Gas and Chemicals; Organization; Challenges; Other Materials; Content Types; Locations; Health, Safety and Environment; Energy and Petroleum Lifecycle; and Business Processes."

"Currently, user communities are being trained to tag content using the new taxonomy and the new content management system. Legacy and new content will be tagged with values from the taxonomy before it is published to specialist portals, extranets, and www sites. The taxonomy data for each piece of content will then be available to build the search indexes and the personalization entitlements for each portal. New interfaces and search tools that can take advantage of the taxonomy beginning to be used by Halliburton are beginning to be prototyped and tested."

ConceptSearching also worked with Baker Hughes on its implementations of SharePoint 2010 and FAST. Specifically:

"Baker Hughes Oil Field Operations has selected conceptClassifier for SharePoint to provide the framework for their SharePoint 2010 Intranet. Baker Hughes, a top-tier oilfield service company with a century-long track record delivers solutions that help oil and gas operators make the most of their reservoirs will be using conceptClassifier for SharePoint to augment SharePoint 2010 and FAST Search to deliver a precise and rich content experience to users of its Intranet. Concept Searching products were chosen over a number of competitive offerings for their unique native integration with the SharePoint Term Store and their ability to tag content and apply action to that content based upon its meaning."

So we don't know, specifically, what Taxonomy Strategies did for Baker Hughes. But we can get a sense of what it did for Halliburton.




  • Halliburton basically put "anything that was important to anyone on the intranet. Although document control procedures had been used for hard copies, controls were typically not properly applied to electronic information."
  • "The gains made in sharing were lost in information quality, with many authors forgetting about their content altogether."
  • Problems with search precision
  • Metadata: content owner, author, review date, expiration date, taxonomy terms
  • The taxonomy facets:
    • Content type
      • Technical documents
        • Research notes
        • Data sheets
      • Sales and marketing docs
        • Advertisements
        • Case histories
        • Price lists
      • Business requirements
        • Proposals
    • Geographical location
    • Organizations
    • E&P Lifecycle
    • Business Process
    • Health Safety and Environment (HSE)
    • Customer challenges
      • Borehole challenges
      • Drilling challenges
      • Environmental challenges
      • Formation challenges
      • Maintenance challenges
      • Production challenges
      • Real time decisions
      • Reducing costs
      • Reserve-resource calculation
      • Reservoir challenges
      • Well control challenges
    • Product Groups
    • Product Names
    • Tools & Component
    • Oil, Gas, Chemicals and Lubricants
    • Other Materials and Equipment
    • General Subjects
  • Addition document management attributes:
    • Title
    • Description
    • Author
    • Content owner
    • Launch date
    • Review date
    • Expiration data
    • Security access control
  • They used "Collection Warrant" to build the taxonomy and reduce redundancy
  • Reusing SAP content for authority files
    • Faster initial development
    • Reduced confusion by using existing agreements
    • Lower maintenance cost
  • They used comparables from:
    • Petrotechnical Open Standards Consortium (POSC)
    • NASA taxonomy
  • And then there was a change management process.

APQC -- How smart leaders leverage their experts





  • N = 750+
  • Increasing employee competency is important



  • Three goals: turning mid-career to experts; getting novices to work independently; increasing speed of knowledge creation
  • "expert/nex'pert gap" -- Lockheed Martin
  • "Lumpiness" to talent pool due to hiring/lay-off cycles
  • Management can be induced to delay retirement, thus delaying the crisis






  • Strategies shaped by: nature of the knowledge, nature of the work, nature of the teams
  • "it has become a truism to say that the amount of content is exploding. Deere, MITRE, Nalco, Baker Hughes, and many others cited the challenge of dealing with an overwhelming amount of data and information, housed in multiple locations, and not tagged the same way."
  • Four kinds of Knowledge:



  • Technical teams present unique challenges:
    • Low tolerance for what is perceived as administrative
    • Rookies hesitate to bother senior experts with what may be trivial questions or nuisances
    • Work force expectations are changing

  • "Most organizations do not have enough expert trainers and mentors to bring nex'perts up to speed, nor do they have the years to wait for training and mentoring programs to achieve their full effect."






  • Lockheed Martin uses "Fellows" -- the top 1% of technical expert. Any program can request a Fellow for short-term consultation, technical/risk review, evaluate program direction, assist with problem solving. Employees can also directly tap Fellows.
  • Fellows collaborate via conferences and forums.
  • Standardization of processes with checklists, etc. is also valuable
  • NASA communities are led by a "technical fellow. Oversight responsibility includes:
    • Serving as technical experts
    • Chartering and leading teams
    • Serving as independent resources
    • Levying standards and specs
    • Conducting workshops and conferences to promote discipline awareness
    • Serving as stewards
    • Foster consistency is creation and maintenance of agency-level standards and specs
    • Leading working groups
    • Ensuring that lessons learned are identified and incorporated
    • Fostering participation in external initiatives
  • Expertise location is important
  • Best approach is profile-based experience combined with CoP, discussion forums, and collab sites. Import as much data as possible from HR and other systems
  • Knowledge Capture can be formal and top-down or it could be user-driven. Wipro, for example, lets users self-identify and then validates expertise based on responses.
  • There's some discussion of Kraft's MASK approach
  • "A rich collection of well-structured, easily accessible content helps less experienced people get up to speed and reduces the burden on experts to answer common questions."
  • Lockheed Martin encourages sharing of content "in the least restrictive environment possible"
  • Schlumberger makes extensive use of its special library
  • Using knowledge is a particular challenge. You need to get experts together to work on it.



  • LM Fellows attend a conference every 12-18 months and they can bring "rising technical talent" as their guests
  • Schlumberger brings HR and IT together:
    • Defined competencies for each position with assessment for identifying gaps
    • Knowledge case management system with live support
    • "Eureka" CoPs with bulletin boards, webinars, and F2F workshops
    • "Career Network Profiles" -- resumes to facilitate expertise location
    • "Tellus" program -- special library program with journals, librarians, etc.


Friday, May 29, 2015

KMworld 2014 -- Day 3

  • So these guys have something called the Knowledge Assessment Manual by Strategic Knowledge Solutions Inc. And they have some published papers.


  • So… there is a process for this kind of thing:


  • Stage 1: Understand
  • Stage 2: interviews and observations to understand current and future state, knowledge flow, etc.
  • Stage 3: identify knowledge gaps
  • Stage 4: select appropriate strategies




  • Key challenges: infrastructure, use of email, KM tools, creating a common operational picture, business process oversight, content management, collaboration tools, onboarding/job-transition, transfer of experience








  • All in all, not bad.

Delivering Global Business Value via Knowledge Collaboration by Guillaume (Schneider Electric) and Monney (Microsoft):
  • Big… 160000 people in 100+ countries.

  • Measuring business value is based on Return on Engagement (ROE)



  • Some interesting stats about the state of the union.
  • "A community is a group of people who, for a specific subset, share a specialty, craft, role, profession, passion, interest, concern, or a set of problems. Community members deepen their understanding of the subject by:
    • Interacting on an ongoing basis
    • Asking and answering questions
    • Sharing information
    • Reusing good ideas
    • Solving problems for one another
    • Developing new and better ways of doing things"



  • Metrics:
    • Adoption and participation: how many members participate, how many posts generated, which posts generated traffic/likes
    • Engagement and satisfaction: surveys -- how likely are you to recommend participation to another employee? Another survey: "I consider that my community is ACTIVE because it: provides value to me/job/business; allows me to learn from others; allows me to collaborate; allows me to get or provide support (on Likert agree/disagree scale)
    • Success stories
  • Community participation: build a charter that defines roles and responsibilities, establishes governance.
  • KSFs: support organization, structured community launch with charter, sponsor engagement, community size, endorsement, member behavior, activity frequency, time dedication, alignment with objectives and culture
  • Factors with no impact on success: age and seniority of members, category of the community, size of business, business unit, digital activity, total number of messages, tools used
  • Communication/education: goals for internal communities, how to participate, where to go for help.
  • Training materials by role; monthly webinars to share wins, challenges, and best practices.
  • Next few weeks: plan a roadmap
  • 6 months: initial community -- focused, motivated leader, clear list of members, business sponsor
  • Year: identify other areas and get a high level sponsor with scope, budget, and resources.
  • 2 years: long term sustainability program.



  • Knowledge loss matrix can be an important driver for some of this stuff:

  • Rate knowledge for each domain based on:
    • Rarity
    • Strategic breadth
    • Difficulty of acquiring
    • Difficulty of using
  • Lockheed Martin uses a "Knowledge Continuity" team. Each role (expert, nex'pert, practitioner) has duties. Projects are short: 60-120 hours for all participants.
  • Have formal tools (or genres) to navigate, filter, and customize.



  • Marketplace for defense-oriented innovations.
  • Moving from "Best Practices and Business Rules" to "Critical Thinking" to "Innovation"

Bickerstaff et al. of Accenture with Suddenly, Stories are Serious Business!
  • Cool. I often feel an affinity for corporate storytelling.
  • Seven types of story:




  • Books:
    • Steve Denning
      • Squirrel Inc.
      • The leader's guide to storytelling
      • The secret language of leadership
    • John Seely Brown et al. Storytelling in organizations.



  • We have to develop next generate experts.
  • Smarter networks and knowledge visualizing are important.



Kamran Khan of Search technologies on Improving Online Search Experience at the National Archives:
  • Search will slow as the collection and results set get bigger. For example, a search with 12,000,000 results will take 100 seconds!
  • Scaling stuff up is really hard and requires a brick-oriented distributed infrastructure




Thursday, May 28, 2015

Storytelling

I have an abiding interest in corporate storytelling. It came up in one of the Kmworld presentations (courtesy of Accenture) so I wanted to revisit it via HBR.

Storytelling that moves people: A conversation with screenwriting coach Robert McKee. HBR. June 2003.
  • "Too often, [managers] get lost in the accoutrements of companyspeak: PowerPoint slides, dry memos, and hyperbolic missives from the corporate communications department." 5
  • Book -- Story: substance, structure, style and the principles of screen-writing.
  • Unite the idea with a story and an emotion
  • "A story expresses how and why life changes. It begins with a situation in which life is relatively in balance… You expect it will go on that way. But then there's an event… that throws life out of balance… The story goes on to describe how, in an effort to restore balance, the protagonist's subjective expectations crash into an uncooperative objective reality."
  • "You create scenarios in your head of possible future events to try to anticipate the life of your company or your own personal life."
  • "You emphatically do not want to tell a beginning-to-end tale describing how results meet expectations. This is boring and banal. Instead, you want to display the struggle between expectation and reality in all its nastiness."
  • "We follow people in whom we believe. The best leaders I've dealt with -- producers and directors -- have come to terms with dark reality."
  • "The storyteller discovers a story by asking certain key questions.":
    • "What does my protagonist want in order to restore balance?"
    • "What is keeping the protagonist from achieving his or her desire?"
    • "How would my protagonist decide to act in order to achieve his or her desire in the face of these antagonistic forces?"
    • Is the telling honest?

  • It's all about oxytocin release.
  • More oxytocin = more engagement and willingness to help
  • To get more oxytocin:
    • Sustain attention by developing tension in the narrative
  • Start with a "compelling, human-scale story":
    • Why should people care about what you are proposing?
    • How will it make their lives better?
    • How will people feel when it's complete?
  • "people are more substantially motivated by their organization's transcendent purpose (how it improves lives) than by its transactional purpose (how it sells goods and services).
  • "enduring stories tend to share a dramatic arc in which a character struggles and eventually finds heretofore unknown abilities and uses these to triumph over adversity."

Carolyn O'Hara. How to tell a great story. HBR 2014.
  • Stories create "sticky memories"
  • Book: Winning the story wars by Sachs
  • Questions:
    • Who is my audience?
    • What is the message I want to communicate?
  • Mine your own experiences
  • Highlight struggle; keep it simple
  • Case study: introduce a (fake) nemesis or competitor

JD Schramm. A refresher on storytelling 101. HBR 2014.
  • The formula:
    • Parachute in to the story.
    • First and final words are important.
    • Take a Goldilocks approach to details -- not too much; not too little.
    • Focus on one audience member at a time.
    • Consider poetry and economy of words
    • Use silence
    • Know your AIM: audience, intent, and message

  • Commercials using Freytag's Pyramid are the most popular




  • Note that a three act structure is also quite popular for screenwriting, etc. From wikipedia:



Some other resources:

  • Book. The writer's journey: mythic structure for writers by Christopher Vogler.
  • Book. The hero with a thousand faces by Joseph Campbell.

Note that Vogler wrote a Disney memo called  A practical guide to the hero with a thousand faces.

  • The stages for the hero:
    • He is introduced in his ordinary world
    • Call to adventure
    • The hero is reluctant at first
    • The hero is encouraged by the wise old man or woman. The mentor gives advice and maybe a magical device. The mentor can only go so far and may give the hero a "kick n the pants"
    • Hero passes the first threshold. They are committed to the journey.
    • Hero encounters tests and helpers.
    • Hero reaches the innermost cave. The hero goes to a place -- often underground -- to find the object of the quest (Hell, dragon's lair, Chapel Perilous, Death Star, labyrinth, etc.).
    • Hero endures the supreme ordeal. They die (symbolically) and are reborn.
    • The hero seizes the sword.  Gets the swag, knowledge, reconciliation, or the woman.
    • The road back. Chase, etc. They aren't out of the woods yet.
    • Resurrection. Transformed into something new by the experience.
    • Return with the elixir. Treasure, experience, love, etc.
  • Character archetypes include:
    • Hero
    • Mentor
    • Threshold guardian
    • Herald
    • Shapeshifter: character that changes from the hero POV
    • Shadow: energy of the dark side
    • Ally
    • Trickster: energies of mischief and change

Training 2015/05/22 #021 -- Submission Academy -- Perfect arm bar, omoplata, RNC, etc.

Another day at the Submission Academy. I wanted to get a feel for some of the other instructors and I wasn't disappointed.

Perfect arm bar from guard

The first technique that we worked was the arm bar. It was a great follow on from Monday's triangle class.

  1. Start with guard. So you've got them in guard. Do what you can to break their posture with good grips, chipping their elbows out, etc. Basically, break them down.
  2. Choose a side. You can only attack one side so I generally go for the strong one: their right, my left.
  3. Control the arm. Attack one arm. Basically you want to get that arm vertically in line with your torso (like Lesnar's dagger tattoo). Control their wrist with your same side hand and control their bicep from the front with the far side hand. So, if I'm attacking their right arm I want to control the wrist with my left  hand and get my right hand onto their right bicep. Ideally, I want to use that hand to pull their elbow into by belly button.
  4. Put your foot on their hip. You will need to rotate to get the armlock so put your fit into their hip. In this case, I'm putting my left foot onto their right hip, or the same side as the controlled arm. You also want to keep your knee right close to their body because it will block them from pulling that arm free.
  5. Clamp down with your other foot. Push out with the foot lodged in their hip to rotate. Slide your other heel up their back and up to their armpit. Keep that foot flexed and really try to knock them down with it.
  6. Cross their face with your other leg. Now, move your foot from off their hip and get it around their head and across their face. Note that the further you knock them down, the easier this movement will be. You really need to use that other foot to position them properly.
  7. Finish. Flex your feet and don't cross them. Make sure that their thumb is pointed to the ceiling. Extend your hips to finish.
Arm bar to omoplata

They might pull their arm out of the armbar. In this case, go for the omoplata.
  1. Control the other hand. Don't let them pull that other hand out. Keep a hold of the wrist.
  2. Don't let them roll. Posture up and control their belt. Really get over their back to prevent them rolling.
  3. Control. Settle everything down to position them. You might have to triangle your legs. You might have to scooch to stretch them out. Just keep control.
  4. Finish. Lean forward to apply pressure.
Omoplata to triangle

Instead of trying to roll out of the omoplata, your partner might try to posture up and lift you.
  1. Follow them as they posture. Don't give up the leg hold.
  2. Hit the triangle. As they come up, swing your other leg into their neck to set up the triangle. Try to knock them down to get the angle. Grab your shin to control them and get position and then close the triangle. Note that if you set the arm bar up on your strong side you need to finish the triangle on your weak side!
RNC

We also did some work on taking the back. The first step was the basic RNC.
  1. Set up the seat belt. Your hooks are in and you've their back. Ideally, your strong arm is over their shoulder and around their neck. You've got a gable grip with your choking hand on top. If they strip your grip, your choking arm stays in place. 
  2. Tighten the choke. After they strip your grip, get your hand over their shoulder. Ideally, their trachea is in the notch of your elbow (although you could get a trachea crank!).
  3. Lock the hand ear-to-ear. Put your chin on that choking hand. Get ear to ear with your opponent to keep everything tight.
  4. Slide your other hand into place. Get that other hand behind their head. Slide it in like a tegatana. Don't put your hand in front of them or you will get armbarred!
  5. Slice off their head. Get a grip on your own bicep and the drive the bottom outside part of your hand into their neck.
RNC with the tucked chin

Sometimes they will tuck their chin into your choke.
  1. Set up the RNC. Do everything as before.
  2. Push back the head. As you slide your tegatana into place, make a detour. Push back their forehead so you can get your arm into the choke. 
  3. Finish. As before.
Rear collar choke

You might want to use the gi to choke your opponent.
  1. Set up the RNC. Again, everything as before. You've got a deep choke with the gable grip and your opponent pushes off your hand.
  2. Open the lapel. Use your non-choking or bottom hand. Flick the lapel open. Ideally, roll the lapel over so it makes a nice grip. 
  3. Get the choking thumb into the lapel. Use the hand of the choking arm to grab that rolled up lapel. Get your hand as deep as possible; push it right to the label. Ideally, use the hand of the non-choking arm to twist the lapel around.
  4. Grab the other side of the lapel. Use the non-choking arm. You don't have to grab very high.
  5. Tighten. You have a few options: pull your hands apart, push their body forward, or fall back. Or you can do all three by pinching your shoulder blades and pushing your chest forward.
Rear collar choke to bow-and-arrow

You might not be deep or tight enough to make this choke work. Transition to a bow-and-arrow.
  1. Set up the rear collar choke.
  2. Grab their pants. Use the hand of your non-choking/bottom arm to grab a pants cuff. 
  3. Rotate. Begin a rotation by pulling with both the choking and the control arms. 
  4. Get your leg over their shoulder. Put that bottom leg over their shoulder to secure everything. 
  5. Finish. Extend to get the tap. Note that you could also transition to an arm bar at this stage.

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