© Hypatia Consulting 2010

You’re welcome to reproduce this material providing full acknowledgement and links to the original source are cited.   And please let me know.

It may come as a surprise to learn that ADDIE isn’t the unique domain of the instructional designer. Analysis-Design-Development-Implementation-Evaluation are the key phases of problem-solving approaches in numerous disciplines, including marketing, engineering, IT, and architecture. ADDIE looks, smells, and quite possibly tastes like project management fundamentals.

While ADDIE isn’t rocket science, it helps put rocket science to work.

Contrary to some recent reports, ADDIE isn’t dead (unless you mistake it for the late protagonist of the same name in William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying). Buried within the ADDIE acronym is a knot of intermingled requirements of Faulkner-esque complexity that demands a similar level of perseverance, emotional resilience, and tolerance of ambiguity required by a reader of some of his novels. It’s not easy, but it’s rewarding when you see it through.

ADDIE isn’t a recipe. It involves people with agendas trying to get things done or not done or getting something else done or trying to look busy. Working successfully with ADDIE requires a significant commitment to interpersonal communication and political gaming. That’s not a comforting prospect to many people. But denying it means denying some fundamental realities of working with people.

So a tool claiming to support the use of ADDIE, or something strongly resembling it, effectively within and without organizational boundaries is an attractive proposition to those involved in managing training-related projects.

Description
EStudio’s SamePage is sometimes referred to as a wiki platform but offers a suite of what are essentially project management tools that will support ADDIE-related activities, from the empirical to the ephemeral, bundled in an online portal. The inventory includes:

Common workspace to share files, with some tracking and version control features
Task tracker to assign work, monitor progress, support project reporting, and check status against a Gantt chart. It’s not exactly MS Project, but it has some use.
Shared contacts list that is permissions-based so different users can have contacts filtered according to need. The list accepts imports from a variety of common contacts formats.
Vaults, permission-based access to particular directories and files and backup repository
E-Manager (there had to be an “e” something), the administration function to customize the skin of your SamePage and control the access of an apparently limitless number of users
Collaboration tools, more commonly known as threaded discussion boards, live chat, slide shows, and surveys
Reception, a customized splash page that can give users an update on any changes, news, new tasks assigned, or just look pretty
There’s nothing particularly new here. Most of these functions are readily available individually from other sources, and often better looking, better functioning, and free.

Why bother with SamePage?

The name implies the value proposition. Without once mentioning the term “Web 2.0″ (for which the vendors are to be congratulated), eStudio’s SamePage lets you share these tools to work collaboratively with others, from wherever you can find a web connection.

Moreover, SamePage offers you many of the benefits of an intranet without having to buy, install, configure, test, maintain, and upgrade one. This is its real advantage: providing small-to-medium organizations with a scalable ready-made project management infrastructure. This makes it attractive to rapidly growing enterprises working across client boundaries or across the world.

Some of the other benefits are somewhat clumsily framed. EStudio will be “happy to train you at NO CHARGE [their capitals] and will assist you in organizing your eStudio for maximum efficiency. Help is always just a FREE phone call away.” They don’t need to shout and it’s not free. It’s bundled in the monthly charge. But at least it’s not charged at a per-minute rate.

What does come free is the opportunity to try SamePage for 30 days–enough time to put it through its paces and see how well you can live with it.

The interface is anodyne. (See Figures 1 and 2.) Reception has a lot of information, but its column-based blockish layout could use the hand of a decent graphic artist and HMI designer. Pastel hues, sans serif text, and the column layout are a bit dull (not unlike the screen you’re reading now). Most of the interface is word-based, where it could use images and more nuanced layout more effectively. If you’re used to Windows 7 or Mac OS X, you’ll find it looks dated.

Figure 1 SamePage basic interface

There’s a strong element of caveat emptor with SamePage and any of its competitors. A bundled, externally hosted service comes with significant risks: it’s not your domain, not your servers, not your waft of computer cloud vapor. The longevity of SamePage is open to question, despite being around for at least 10 years in various incarnations. Your correspondent has experienced the demise of consecutive providers of similar services over the lifetime of one project. This didn’t do much for the client’s faith in our IT infrastructure.

Figure 2 SamePage interface in use

So does SamePage offer value for money? If you’re a start up or rapidly growing firm without access to a robust corporate intranet, then the answer is probably yes.

SamePage eStudio 7 cost US $50 per month and includes 150 MB of group file storage, one FTP with 50 MB of storage, and one TaskTracker project module, allowing you to manage one project only but with an unlimited number of users.

This may be fine for a dedicated team on a small ADDIE project or one-person firm servicing an external client but not much use for a small-to-medium size enterprise or larger concern. The group file storage of 150 MB is on the small side, particularly if your deliverables involve video or high-resolution images.

EStudio Pro costs US $100 per month and includes 250 MB of group file storage, three FTP with 50 MB of storage each, 10 TaskTracker project modules–enough to manage 10 projects simultaneously and an unlimited number of users. This offers a more realistic scope for the small-to-medium business.

EStudio Extreme and eStudio Fortress offer more of everything for undisclosed sums. These appear to be customizable packages so they could work for a busy design department handling multiple projects within one or across multiple client organizations.

But bear in mind, if you just want to share documents, Google docs does some of this stuff with more storage for nothing. Whatever your opinion of the brand, Google isn’t going away in a hurry. If document sharing is your real need, SamePage’s US $50 for 150 MB of online storage is not going to attract your custom.

Recommendation

SamePage delivers what it promises. You’ll find the same functionality to support ADDIE-related work elsewhere. It’s good for start-ups or rapidly growing firms without access to a decent intranet as long as you’re not sharing video or other memory-hungry media.

Gregory Evans

© Hypatia Consulting 2010

First published in Training Media Review, June 2010.  You’re welcome to reproduce this material providing full acknowledgement and links to the original source are cited.

Recently, I was offered some consulting work advising small and medium businesses on their business strategy and workforce capability needs, as part of the Victorian Government’s Skills for Work program.

However, I knocked the work back on ethical grounds.  A critical flaw in the otherwise well-intentioned program is that the service providers don’t get paid 40% of their fee unless at least half of the business’s workforce enroll in accredited training – meaning it’s tied to a higher education or vocational education qualification, regardless of its relevance.

This creates an alarming balance of consequences.

It will not be uncommon to find that there will be many businesses participating in the program who:

• have significant issues affecting their performance that are not related to training.

• simply don’t have training requirements for 50% of their workforce.

Alternatively, if training needs exist, accredited training is hardly likely to be the ideal solution in many cases.  Development activities that do not involve accredited training may be far more effective solutions – these may include coaching, micro-skilling in specific areas, participation in a community of practice, etc.

As such, the payment structure will result in consultants encouraging business participants to enroll in training which may be either a waste of time and resources (their own and the State’s), or a far from ideal solution to their needs.  This starts to look like third party forcing – a practice prohibited under the Trade Practices Act – Specialists must get at least 50%  of the workforce into accredited training or they don’t get paid.

Moreover, as the Specialist has no control over whether or not the workforce enrolls, the incentive seems further flawed.

As a management consultant, approaching a SME knowing that, regardless of their needs, I’m going to do everything I can to get at least 50% of their workforce enrolled in accredited training which they may well not need, is an untenable proposition – I would find it unethical and embarrassing on a personal and professional level.

Gregory Evans

© Hypatia Consulting 2009

You’re welcome to reproduce this material providing full acknowledgement and links to the original source are cited.

Burud and Tumolo have assembled a formidable tidal wave of credible evidence for recognition of three critical elements shaping change in western workforces – the rise of human capital, the shift to a knowledge society, and the rise of the dual-focus worker whose attention is divided between work and home.

Leveraging the New Human Capital cogently analyses the effects of these forces on organisational behaviour and business strategy, and provides advice on how to capitalise on them.  Just as the nature of work and workers is changing, our understanding of how we work, and how to manage others and ourselves needs to change accordingly.  Five key strategies for better managing human capital are advocated: choosing to invest in people; adopting new beliefs about what helps and hinders people’s performance; redesigning organisational culture; transforming management practices and the integrated coordination of beliefs, culture and practice. While this list of strategies has the risk of reading like a litany of hollow management consulting jargon, the strategies are, refreshingly, carefully analysed, explained and illustrated from a strong business strategy perspective.

The dual focus worker is continually trading off the demands of work and home. People juggling the demands of parenthood or elder care cannot put work first.   Organisations that recognise that their members have a life outside work and can accommodate a blurring of the boundaries between work and home are well positioned to compete in current and future marketplaces.  Burud and Tumolo make a powerful case for the primacy of understanding and supporting the needs of people within organisations.  The bottom line benefits of a loyal workforce who believes their employer recognises the factors that affect their work performance and is able to provide appropriate support are clearly demonstrated in case studies of numerous organisations.

The book takes issue with a range of 20th Century Western world assumptions about the nature of work, with some insightful analysis on assumptions about the separation of work and home life.  There are some memorable lines about the latter – “If business is a purely rational and competitive activity, then it is the opposite of home, which is the place of emotions, where people care”. They comment on the self-perpetuating reinforcement of old leadership patterns – “Leaders are identified early in careers by willingness to sacrifice other aspects of their lives for the organization,  – often without understanding the consequences of the choices they make.  It is hard to manage well what you do not understand”.

In many cases, it’s nothing you haven’t heard before from a variety of different sources and disciplines, but the interdependence between the three forces and the strategies for managing them has rarely been recognised so compellingly.

The glue that holds the five strategies together appears to draw significant inspiration from Heskett, Sasser and Schlesinger’s Service Profit Chain.  In the simplest terms, the chain demonstrates the symbiotic relationship between sustainable profits, satisfied customers, and excellent service provided by satisfied employees.  Employee satisfaction results from empowered, skilled people who find meaning in their work, whose work and home life demands are acknowledged and supported.  Burud and Tuomolo go to considerable lengths to spell out what’s required to satisfy dual-focus knowledge workers, and how satisfying them, in turn, leads to improved organisational performance.  The authors’ conclusions and recommendations are not speculative or reliant on theory alone – they are robustly data driven.

The book is ostensibly written for business managers who have the capacity to influence market strategy.  This is not to discount the significant benefits it offers HR and HRD practitioners, but it is unusual in that it offers senior people without an HR background an accessible introduction to the powerful effects of effective human capital management.  The corollary of this is that it provides HR and HRD practitioners with arguments and evidence to influence the strategic decision makers in their organisations.

The book’s structure is innovative and effective – a worthwhile balance of analysis and prescription.  The underlying instructional strategy of the book is to introduce the concepts with plenty of concrete examples, demonstrate the relationship between them and back up claims with plenty of evidence.  Key themes are introduced with “guest essays” by high profile thinkers in complementary fields – Peter Senge, Elizabeth Moss Kanter and others make interesting cameo appearances.  Detailed case studies on four exemplar organizations are included.  Appendices of much of the key sources included, which provides the reader with an invaluable reference toolkit.  You can skim and you can dig deep.  The book is well written in a concise, measured style, which may help to ease the more sceptical reader into consideration of some of their more provoking recommendations.

The book’s occasional failings include not meeting the test of providing actionable advice particularly well – exactly how one goes about implementing the strategies is not always clear.  For example, the section titled “A Process to Find Human Capital Elements” on page 82 advises us to “Identify human capital elements by the extent to which the organization’s work objectives depend on knowledge and/or relationships”, which is not really elaborated upon, leaving the reader without specific expertise in this field none the wiser.  However, this fuzziness is does not prevail, and the text is packed with provoking case studies, good ideas, broad directions and a lot of inspiration, which help to illustrate the authors’ recommendations.

While the effects of globalisation permeate the text, the book clearly addresses the US business environment, and draws strongly from it and the relevant US research base.  Readers from the rest of the world will need to filter the evidence and findings to better relate them to their own cultures and markets.

Burud and Tumolo are to be congratulated on producing a compelling and robust analysis of the current world of work in the Western world.  It’s rare to find such a combination of excellent strategic analysis coupled with an insightful understanding of organisational behaviour.  Ultimately, the book’s messages are not unlike advice on good parenting: treat people well, recognise the relationships between work and home life, cater to people’s varying talents and needs, invest in their development and reap the rewards on levels that go beyond the annual balance sheet.

Recommendation
Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in influencing business strategy effectively.

Gregory Evans

© Hypatia Consulting 2009

You’re welcome to reproduce this material providing full acknowledgement and links to the original source are cited.

Project management has been the lifeblood of engineering and manufacturing organisations for years.  More recently, the value of effective project management is being recognised by other industries.  Banking, finance, health, defence and other sectors are finding significant benefits in establishing standardised project management governance, tools and processes.  It’s easy to demonstrate the benefits on paper – organisational leaders can assess the relative payoffs of potential projects, risks are managed appropriately, resources are used efficiently, and progress towards goals is easily assessed.

In practice, implementing a project management program across a large organization is a huge task.  Introducing effective project management requires a lot more than acquiring a methodology, a few systems and a bunch of training.  It typically requires a significant change not just in skills and knowledge, but also in culture – a transformation of how the organisation makes sense of its work and its resources.  It’s easy to demonstrate its value to engineers – another very different matter to get buy in from marketers, bankers, or human resources people.

Englund, Graham and Dinsmore recognise this challenge.  At face value, their book is about establishing a project management infrastructure.  But its real focus is on organisational transformation – hence the sub-title – “A Manager’s Guide to Leading Organisational Change”.  Structuring the book around a three-part organisational change model that appears to be derived from Kurt Lewin’s work, the authors spend Part One discussing the challenges of organisational change, and address program office start up issues including creating appropriate incentives for change and building coalitions to drive it. The components and operations of the project office are described, and possible visions, strategies and communication plans are explored.  Case studies illustrate the successful application of the principles espoused.

Part two deals with implementing and managing the change, and draws heavily on case studies to demonstrate how project offices can be established rapidly in volatile environments.  There are many useful checklists, anecdotes and diagrams to add value to the text.

Part three addresses the consolidation – the “refreezing”, to use their term, of the changes established.  It discusses why change initiatives sometimes fail, and provides some simple action planning templates in an appendix.

The authors draw from rich project office experience in many industries, across many countries, and use their accumulated knowledge to give the text considerable credibility.  However, they tend to come across as project management experts who have some experience with organisational change, rather than change management professionals.  As such, a reader with experience in a variety of change models may find their faith in a single approach a little monotheistic.  At times, the advocacy of a single, linear change model, and belief that project management will solve numerous organisational issues, seems like a hammer in search of a nail.  However, this seems less likely to be naivety than the likelihood that the target audience is not intended to be experienced organisational development practitioners.

It is pleasing to see pages devoted to the importance reading how power works in an organization and the critical need to understand and work with the politics of the organisation.  The book covers with this and many other essential aspects of managing change effectively.

Creating the Project Office is easy to read – written with obvious enthusiasm for the subject and peppered with interesting anecdotes.  While is a tendency to become discursive, the content is often genuinely interesting.  The frequent use of literary anecdotes, from Dante to classical mythology is a pleasant change from the usual dry business language of many project management books.  It’s also refreshing to see case studies from Canadian and Australian organisations, in addition to the US focus.  The myriad of attributes and disciplines required to execute projects are well illustrated, although the competencies to implement a project office aren’t directly articulated, other than an example of project leader competencies from 3M on page 228.

While there are some handy checklists, Creating the Project Office is not a toolbox.  Don’t buy the book expecting practical tools and techniques.  It doesn’t teach project management – nor does it aim to, but it also doesn’t equip the reader with the competencies for implementing a project office either. Covering a very wide territory, it provides an informative road map for the establishment and operation of a project office, rather than step-by-step instructions.

There’s also something mildly fatiguing from a procession of case studies that deal with successes.  If we accept that we learn from most from failure – more stories of program office problems could be useful.  It’s a lot harder to anticipate risks and deal with contingencies, without learning about what can go wrong.

The indexing is curiously light, given that this is a book rich with content.  This is a substantial book of nearly 300 pages – a time-pressed reader could make use of improved indexing and perhaps some more detailed road signs in the contents page.

Recommendation: Creating the Project Office is an excellent source of inspiration to anyone considering implementing a project management program across his or her organisation, and is a valuable companion to any project management methodology.  But like any map, it shows the way, but doesn’t provide the means of travelling it.

Gregory Evans

© Hypatia Consulting 2009

You’re welcome to reproduce this material providing full acknowledgement and links to the original source are cited.

This really sounds like Parenting 101 (which isn’t altogether surprising when you consider some of the things a leader needs to do), and the list isn’t exhaustive, but the key features of effective reward and recognition systems include:

1. Positive reinforcement has to occur daily
   If the organisation gets things done with negative reinforcement day-to-day (such as threats, pressures, embarrassments), no amount of time or money spent on reward and recognition will get the desired results.   Negative reinforcement achieves the minimum acceptable results only.  If all you need is compliance, and behaving unpleasantly towards people is your thing, then you can stop reading now. If you need more than compliance, read on.
2. The reward and recognition must be earned
   There must be a direct relationship between individual performance and the reward and recognition.  One of the real problems with team recognition is that everyone gets them whether they contribute equally or not.  This is not usually a problem for the poor performers, but it causes considerable concern for the top performers over a period of time.   There’s nothing like a perception of inequity between peers to create performance issues.
3. Don’t limit the number of potential winners
   Good recognition systems allow for an unlimited number of winners – the business needs everyone to perform better than the competition.  Restricting this creates less incentive for cooperation among employees.  If the difference between the best performer and second place is measured in one percent, the difference is not significant, and failing to reward good performance by others that is nearly as good as the best performer can be very costly to the organisation.
4. The recognition must have personal value
   The dollar value of the recognition is unimportant as long as the form of recognition is meaningful to the performer.  If the recognition creates a positive memory of some accomplishment, the amount of money spent of recognition is irrelevant.  The t-shirt, coffee mug or key chain will be valuable only if it is combined with, or reminds the person of, an accomplishment which makes the performer proud.   Telling the performers they should be proud does not make them proud.
5. The delay between the behaviour and the reward and recognition must be minimised
   Because the most effective reinforcement is immediate, some event that has reinforcing value must occur as close as possible to the valued behaviour or performance.  Points that are related to an incentive can help to bridge this gap.  The points must be accompanied with visible reinforcement, such as obvious acknowledgement by management, to have motivational value.
6. The presentation of the incentive should be preceded by a celebration
   This doesn’t have to be a big deal (unless it does).  It’s simply means providing an opportunity for performers to relive the accomplishment. The participants, not the management, should be allowed to recount the things they did to meet the goal.  In this way, the incentive creates and anchors a memory of an accomplishment, and, as such, is more valuable than just a speech from a manager.
7. Money is not the best incentive
   It really isn’t.  Paradoxically, money as an incentive generates a relatively poor return on investment.  So don’t make it the main incentive.  Even though most people, in most circumstances, like money, it provides limited reinforcement for the cost.  Money is soon spent, and the memory of it soon fades, whereas other tangible rewards are kept longer and act as a constant reminder of some accomplishment.  If celebrated appropriately, the behaviours involved in producing the results will be remembered long after the memory of cash has faded away.

Like bad training, they don’t address the real performance issue.

Most reward and recognition schemes mean well, but have consequences that often have at best a neutral, and frequently detrimental, effect on morale and performance.  Like bad training, bad reward and recognition doesn’t address the real performance issue, and in many cases, contributes to the performance issue.

While people’s behaviour in the workplace usually depends on the consequences involved, most reward and recognition systems fail to provide appropriate consequences, and therefore rarely add much value to a business.  Alarmingly, they often have the opposite effect.  Many inadvertently punish or demotivate the people who management would really like to see improve.  There is very little evidence to support the idea that most reward and recognition systems provide a motivational, morale or bottom-line benefit.
However, when properly designed and implemented, reward and recognition systems can have positive benefits for the business.

This article introduces the importance of understanding behaviour and its consequences when trying to change employee’s behaviour.  Future postings will address:
•    The key features of effective reward and recognition systems
•    Common problems with popular reward and recognition systems, and how to fix them.

Behaviour and consequences

Essentially, behaviour is a function of its consequences.

The behaviour of people is the only way anything is accomplished in business. If managers don’t understand how to apply consequences to influence behaviour correctly, they are almost certainly decreasing some behaviours that they want, and increasing others that they don’t want.

The role of managers is not to find fault or place blame, but to understand why people are behaving the way they are, and modify the consequences to promote the behaviour they need.  Effective reward and recognition systems can help to do this.

The more immediate the consequences for behaviour, the better they are for changing behaviour. Performance is what happens every day in the workplace, not just at the end of the reporting period.  Immediate consequences are powerful – even if they aren’t good for us in the long term.  For example, we may want to lose weight, but it’s more immediately enjoyable to have another serve of ice cream.
Therefore consequences that cause people to do their best everyday must occur everyday. However, most businesses spend more time, energy and money providing consequences that occur when employees get sick or retire, than on the ones that occur every day.  Money can help change performance to some extent, but it will not maximise performance on its own.  Only effective and frequent positive reinforcement can do that.

Studies have shown that positive reinforcement maximises performance, while negative reinforcement (criticism, threats, punishment) gets a level of performance that is just enough to get by.  So negative reinforcement works well when all we need is compliance or minimum performance.  But don’t expect it to buy any favours from the workforce.

Positive reinforcement occurs every time a behaviour produces a favourable change in the environment for the performer.  Whether it’s getting desert because you ate your vegetables, or being permitted to work on an interesting side project when all run-of-the-mill tasks have been completed, immediate positive reinforcement pays dividends.

Web 2.0? There’s another one? How did I miss that? Oh, you mean collaborative web stuff that is getting easier to do.

Web 2.0 is a precise title for a boundary-less something that seems more like a cloud of concepts. It seems to have as much to do with culture as IT. According to Brian Solis of the blog bub.blicio.us, Web 2.0 “is driven by the social economy and the social capital that defines the new landscape.”

OK. I suspect this roughly translates as it’s good for connecting, sharing, networking, and generally interacting with a self-consciously cool cultural overlay.

WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH WEB 2.0?


The ability to connect with, share, and develop knowledge implies a huge potential for supporting learning and development. So what’s in it for learning and development people, other than helping them appear hip?

While I lack deep insight into the hazy but frenetic world of Web 2.0, I find I’ve been using it for developing learning materials for some time, in the shape of online collaboration toolkits. These include public and enterprise wikis, NearTime, the now defunct SmartBoards, and aspects of iMac.

All have varying degrees of usefulness for sharing information and collaborating with others on the web, and all vary in cost, from free-of-charge to over US$100 per month and with user interfaces that range from tolerable to near impossible for the non-tech user.

Now MindTouch, an open-source software developer based in San Diego offers MindTouch Deki, a hosted or downloadable toolkit to create, share, combine, and juggle in almost any way content from the web or enterprise applications through an attractive what-you-see-is-what-you-get wiki interface.

Have I lost you yet? Hang in there. The concepts aren’t hard, but the language is a real barrier to training types who aren’t steeped in online argot.

Wikis, blogs, and social networking software are the most visible features of the Web 2.0 landscape and are handy knowledge management and collaboration tools for learning and development people. They enable teams and their members to collaborate on work stored in a central location, share and update knowledge, debate and develop.

COMING TO GRIPS WITH MINDTOUCH DEKI


If you’re going to hire a juggler, better see her juggle, so I set the controls of my browser for the heart of MindTouch’s website and sought out MindTouch Deki. No money changed hands because, in its simplest form, it’s free.

To avoid having to deal with installation issues, I chose to use the version that was hosted on MindTouch’s own server. Within minutes, I was writing content and combining web-based applications in the attractive lime, tangerine, and mint user interface.

Bear in mind I can barely edit basic HTML or the XML code used in many wikis so the what-you-see-is-what-you-get editing was impressive and refreshing. Controls are easy to understand and response time is swift. A document is easy to create and is visible to colleagues, who were able to edit and comment on it immediately.

This is only the surface of the MindTouch Deki, the pleasing and articulate outer skin concealing powerful and innovative IT beneath: the “orchestration engines” called “Dream” (conjures mental pictures of huge, steam-powered pipe organs). MindTouch’s marketing isn’t afraid of mixing metaphors. Anyway, it sounds cool.

Far from being a subconscious realm (although this user is happy to remain blissfully unaware of how it actually works, as long as it works), Dream allows the combination of all manner of content and applications from all manner of sources or “mashups”–a term borrowed from music.

This is really where MindTouch Deki shows it’s more than just a pretty face. In its full-featured version, the wiki front end and Dream enable users to gather enterprise systems, web-services, and Web 2.0 applications from the web or behind an enterprise’s firewall.

The result is a virtual decoupagé of systems on one page. Until recently, producing this aggregation would have involved a massive systems integration effort (and expense) across organizational data silos, posing significant risks to IT governance and the likelihood of ending up with a nice interface overlaying a chaotic mass of legacy systems. In other words, classic lipstick on a pig. Instead, systems can be mashed together in Dream and viewed through MindTouch Deki’s browser-based interface in minutes, without compromising IT integrity.

The free version has limited functionality but still gives you your own private wiki, where you can mash up Google maps, feeds, calendars and spreadsheets, images from Flikr, stock data from Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and numerous other information providers.

The interface also has an extensive menu of generic commands that can be used to import and manipulate information from other sources, which has tremendous potential for learning developers working in small organizations or small parts of big organizations.

USES FOR LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT PRACTITIONERS


Possible uses for MindTouch Deki’s free version of interest to learning and development practitioners include:

Supporting communities of practice. The friendly wiki front end and easy editing and commenting functions are far friendlier than other freeware like Wikimedia.

Performance support tools that aggregate topical information from a range of sources in one dashboard space.

A central repository for work in progress, allowing multiple users to access, view, comment on, and update files.

Project management with project tools, reports, and other information.

Fostering discussion or debate from users anywhere in the world.

Collaborative authoring.

Personal blogging and experimentation.

Supporting action learning.

The full-featured and supported enterprise versions of MindTouch Deki allow nonprogrammers to combine systems to create performance support and knowledge management tools that work like screen-based dashboards.

For example, a sales team could use it to create a prospect management tool by including elements such as prospective customers drawn from a database, maps from Google showing their locations, relevant information from the customer relationship management system, Linked in searches to see if you have a connection there, a Google search on customer names for background, local news for the area, the customer’s stock price, and so on.

A skilled programmer is required to create a page template, but once that’s in place, nonprogrammers have great flexibility at their fingertips to draw together and manipulate information sources.

GETTING HELP


Help for the freeware is available through MindTouch Deki’s comprehensive Wik.is wiki, which includes FAQs, user manuals, and tutorials. A range of in-house videos are useful starting points for understanding the software’s capabilities, but be ready with the pause and replay buttons because they cover a lot of ground very quickly and are dense with Web 2.0 patois.

Money starts to figure in the equation if you need assistance beyond online help, or you want the full-featured version that can integrate enterprise-specific systems. MindTouch-managed hosting with full features and bundled dedicated support begins with annual fees ranging from $1,199 to $19,995, depending on features and support required.

MindTouch’s business model cleverly creates an interested base of users through free use of its excellent open source software and earns a return on its investment by being the natural owner of the intellectual capital required to provide user support and customization.

Makes me wonder what the barriers to competition are, other than a learning curve, which can’t be all that steep for the legions of IT-literate Web 2.0 hipsters to climb. Or perhaps it’s more of a barrier than it appears. It will be interesting to watch.

VALUE FOR MONEY


So, does it offer value for money? Absolutely. Some defibrillatingly expensive competitors confine an enterprise to a proprietary software solution, and web-hosted collaboration services make you pay a still pricey monthly fee for an externally hosted collaboration tool with cumbersome interfaces.

MindTouch Deki software is innovative, attractive to look at, and easy to use for the non-IT learning and development practitioner. The enterprise version is still exceptional value when compared to the opportunity cost of alternative software integration methods.

RECOMMENDATION

 MindTouch Deki is an excellent product, even as freeware. Highly recommended for anyone developing learning materials, managing projects, or creating performance support tools. And a relatively painless way of immersing a toe in the world of Web 2.0.

© Hypatia Consulting 2008

You’re welcome to reproduce this material providing full acknowledgement and links to the original source are cited.

There are thousands of training providers in numerous market segments, claiming to add value to your business. But can they deliver what they say?

Regardless of whether it’s training in leadership, systems or sales, or business coaching and similar personal development services, the following questions can help to cut through the promotional hype. This list is by no means exhaustive:

© Hypatia Consulting 2008

You’re welcome to reproduce this material providing full acknowledgement and links to the original source are provided.

© Hypatia Consulting 2008

You’re welcome to reproduce this material providing full acknowledgement and links to the original source are provided.