Copyright © 2009 by Common Sense Advisory, Inc. Crowdsourcing inside the Firewall Donald A....

Copyright © 2009 by Common Sense Advisory, Inc.

Crowdsourcing inside the Firewall

Donald A. DePalma, Ph.D.Chief Research Officer



Theme of today’s presentation

• Long-term plans to harness and harvest corporate information must activate the multilingual intranet

• Social networking + employee-sourcing will complement machine translation

• Employee-supplemented linguistic activism could language into the corporate mainstream

• The goal: Harness corporate knowledge – wherever.


Translation and localization as practiced at global businesses: Employees left out in cold

Legend


Documentation

FAQ Updates

Online Applications

Global

SingleStatic Volatile

Mar

ket S

cope

Volatility

Printed Marketing Materials Instant Messaging

Chat Support

Catalog Changes

E-Mail

CRMBusiness

Intelligence

Online Help

Brochures

Owner’s Guides

Maintenance Guides

Pocket Guides

Training Materials

Financial Information

NewsCompetitive Analyses


The easily measurable part of any company

• Net sales in Q1-09: €24.0B• Operating profit of €312M• Profit after tax of €243M• International presence > 150 countries• Number of employees: > 360,000• Units sold in Q1: 1.4M• Market share 11% worldwide• Sales of VW down 15%, Audi 17%, Škoda 39%, SEAT 43%

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Harness the power of wetware to lower the language barrier and raise the Corporate IQ

• Goal: Benefit from the collective wisdom of a company

• Successful companies promote employee-driven innovation:– Research papers, research centers– % employees involved in R&D– Patent portfolio– Labs– Greenhouse investment

• But make sure that employees can participate in the exchange of knowledge, regardless of language


Language hobbles multinational corporations


Volkswagen empowers employees to collaborate remotely and multilingually

• 360,000 employees around the world• Language Portal and terminology management• An average employee receives 80 e-mails a day. • 70% of the employees in a large company in

Germany can lose one hour every working day processing incomprehensible e-mails.

• MT to process e-mail and provide gisting of articles and meeting notes in other languages


IBM efforts to raise its Corporate IQ globally

• 400,000 employees around the world• Enormous amounts of employee-generated content• W3 On Demand Network – annual operational savings of US$2B plus fostering

collaboration across the company• IBM publishes hundreds of articles per week for employees:

– Some now being translated and distributed via MT– Employees can comment on or suggest alternate translations

• BluePedia internal wiki:– In English and German– Encyclopedia of general knowledge about IBM, co-authored by IBMers for

IBMers.– Single, global co-authoring platform enables the development and

implementation of a common worldwide vocabulary and easy recognition and identification of subject matter experts.’

– Being plugged into MT backbone with employee feedback


How a company can increase its Corporate IQ

• Leverage the insight and experiences that everyone has in their heads

• Combine that with the data at hand in desktops (physical and silicon), servers, etc. and in other forms

• Trawl the oceans of data that we know exist, but don’t necessarily access or understand

• Broaden the capture, search, and leverage to any language to eliminate the “existential paradox” of whether information exists


Enter “knowledge management”

• Knowledge management is the process through which organizations generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based assets.

• It involves codifying what employees, partners and customers know, and sharing that information among employees, departments and even with other companies in an effort to devise best practices.

In summary, identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences – jazyk by neměl záležitost

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The challenge: Create a vibrant knowledge economy inside an organization

• Amalgamate communities of interest inside a company – workgroups, virtual teams, special projects

• Harvest value from information that flows freely among the individuals in these groups, and among the groups

• Major characteristics:– Manage knowledge as capital– Make distribution efficient and accessible– Make the means of producing knowledge widely available– Enable global scope make sure knowledge flows into

other corporate languages


Time to blow up typical knowledge silo economies• Feudal economies:

– Workers labor in isolated knowledge patches

– It’s hard to capture what’s in their heads, hard to share (protectionism)

• Centralized:– Servers with applications like data

warehousing centralize information– Hard to access, need to know– Unstructured data never captured except in

disconnected CMS– Focus on Notes, Exchange, and other

command-and-control servers• Whether feudal or centralized, language is

often left out of the knowledge equation

Feudal

Minimal exchange

Centralized

ExchangeDomino

ExchangeDomino

Structured access


Liberation technology for Corporate IQ: Social networking tools inside Enterprise 2.0

• Collaborate: work on projects concurrently• Search: locate other users or content• Link: group similar users or content• Author: write blogs, wikis, terminology• Tag: provide metadata for any content• Recommend: advise users or content• Alert: Subscribe to feeds or flows• Twitter: broadcast activities within development

groups

Challenge: Do all this, across all languages.


Compare and contrast with traditional business solutions for data access and intelligence

• Flexible and freeform tools: fewer or no barriers to authoring (good and bad), lower learning curve

• Network effect of freely available, widely distributed, broadly used tools over existing IP networks

• Social networking elements enable transparency of access, diversity of content and community, and open structures

• Top it off with machine translation: Pump massive amounts of internal content through MT engines, with employee-sourced post-editing


Which project first? Which project first? Use the corporate collective to make high-value, Use the corporate collective to make high-value,

employee-generated content available to all staff.employee-generated content available to all staff.

•Innovation and invention•Usability design and

engineering•Knowledge base extension•Translation of critical (and not-so-critical) materials•Stuff that has yet to be thought of


Summary: Harvesting employee labor in building out multilingual Corporate IQ

• Many employees are forced to operate in a language that is not up to their skill set

• Employees are a huge linguistic asset• Machine translation provides project collaborators

with a common ground for discussion, complemented by employee feedback

• Employees will be motivated by the Salary Continuation Program, loyalty, and recognition


Don DePalmadon @ commonsenseadvisory.com+1.978.275.0500 x 1001

• Research: www.commonsenseadvisory.com• Blog: www.globalwatchtower.com

Insight for global market leaders

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Copyright © 2009 by Common Sense Advisory, Inc. Crowdsourcing inside the Firewall Donald A....

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