The folks at TSIA invited me to write a blog on what it is like starting a new company (www.dancinge.com). It’s got references to painkillers, vitamins and cold calls.

http://bit.ly/133uJxY

Bill and Adam have been blogging on the role of knowledge sharing practices (and the information in knowledge repositories) has in transforming support from reactive to proactive. We are bringing together principles from Knowledge Centered Support (KCS) and ITIL to suggest practices that can transform your approach to delighting your customers.

Part one is available at http://www.hdiconnect.com/blogs/servicemanagement/2013/04/myth-of-proactive-problem-management-part-1.aspx

Part 2 can be found at http://www.hdiconnect.com/blogs/servicemanagement/2013/04/myth-of-proactive-problem-management-part-2.aspx

We would love your thoughts!

Dancing E will be competing to win TSIA’s coveted Vision Award, with winners being determined by a live audience of industry practitioners along with a panel of expert judges. The theme of the competition is, “True vision is having the intelligent foresight to define a better, more productive future,” with categories including Commercial, Start-up, and Service Practitioner. We  are a finalist in the Start-up category.

“Introduced in 2010 and growing year over year, the TSIA Vision Awards recognize game-changing ideas in technology services that are beyond the cutting edge,” said J.B. Wood, president and CEO of TSIA. “Dancing E is not only an industry leader in its market space, but it continually demonstrates a compelling approach to driving technology services forward. We’re proud to recognize Dancing E as a Service Revolutions finalist for 2013.”

The competition will take place on May 8 at the Technology Services World (TSW) 2013 Best Practices conference in Santa Clara, California. Do come and vote for us if you think we are the best…

HDI is the premier professional association and certification body for the technical service and support industry. HDI serves a community of more than 120,000 technical service and support professionals. Phil was invited to serve on the Strategic Advisory Board of HDI. (He has also been a past Chairperson of the Strategic Advisory Board.)

http://www.cnbc.com/id/100633765

Lovely momentum. This is the startup that Adam, Bill and I are all co-founders of.

http://bit.ly/NCIDEAsemifinalist

This is a company that Adam Krob, Bill Stockton and I are all co-founders of  that aims to enable Knowledge. Sharing. For All.

http://www.dancinge.com/2013/04/01/dancinge-named-semi-finalist-for-charlotte-venture-challenge-award/

http://bit.ly/dancingeAdvisor

It is with great pleasure that I’d like to announce that Martin M. Coyne II has agreed to join us as a senior advisor to Dancing E. I first met Marty when he was elected a director  at Akamai in 2001, when we were still a small start up during some very challenging times. He has been on the Akamai board ever since, and Akamai just passed $1.4B in revenue in 2012.

Having someone with Marty’s deep and broad experience running multi-billion dollar businesses, and helping a company grow from start up to $1B plus in revenue is, as they say, priceless.

http://bit.ly/dancingeAdvisor

By Adam Krob

This week, I read Yahoo! announcement that work-at-home privileges were being revoked for its team members.  As a long-time work-at-home advocate (nearly 5 years of working from the study overlooking my garden), I was surprised.  I watched as the pundits weighed in about the policy, both for and against.  I came to the conclusion that this decision signals big challenges for Yahoo! in the not too distant future.  There are two reasons for my concern – first that the decision highlights the importance of the Yahoo! mother ship, and second that the decision shows a dangerous leaning toward activity-based metrics.

My first concern is Yahoo!’s express elevation of the work that goes on in Sunnyvale over work done elsewhere.  Whether intentional or not, Mayer’s decision to end work-at-home sends a message that the only important work is the work being done at headquarters.  At The Verghis Group, we call this the mother ship syndrome.

The long-term effects are two-fold.  The first is that the mother ship syndrome is demotivating to anyone who works outside the corporate headquarters.  If you work in Asia, Latin America, or Europe, you will begin to think that your contributions are less valued by the organization.  If you have to wait until 9am pacific time to green light a small project or make a personnel decision, your perceptions will be confirmed.  Top talent will stay just long enough to find another organization that values their contributions.  The second effect of the mother ship syndrome is the loss of key perspectives.  I have been working with a team of people for about a year.  This team is made up of people on four different continents and five different cities. If our team had restricted membership to people at any one of the locations, we would have lost key people with varied and important perspectives.  Our differences have made our team successful.  You don’t get as much difference in one location, not matter how appealing you make it.

My second concern with Mayer’s decision is the (reported) reason that she made it.  According to several reports, the key metric that led to ending work-at-home for Yahoo! team members was time on the virtual private network (VPN, a technology that allows computers outside a corporate firewall to work as if they were inside it, while keeping the data passed between computers private).  I find the time on the VPN metric troubling because it is prioritizing an activity over an outcome (perhaps customer adoption of a new Yahoo! service).  Looking at trends in activities like time on the VPN is fine, as long as it doesn’t become a key decision factor (as it appears to have in this case).  If the activity becomes more important than the outcome, the organization is headed for trouble.  If your team knows that time on the VPN is the most important goal, then developers are smart enough to game the system.  I am sure someone already has an automated process that generates VPN activity to simulate real work.  More problematic, though, is that the team loses touch with what is really important—the outcomes like profitability, customer satisfaction or team satisfaction.  Focusing on activities kills organizational alignment.

Yahoo!’s work-at-home policy change isn’t a small step, it is a big one.  Mayer and her team need to weigh the drawbacks with their positive intentions.

Blog by Adam Krob, Senior Advisor

There is an old saying (and a song by a 1980s hair band) in English – “once bitten, twice shy.”  Effectively, it means that if you do something that leads to a negative or painful outcome, then you are unlikely to do it again.  In the old saying, if you pet a dog that bites you, you are less likely to pet that dog again.

Most organizations start knowledge sharing because of a real pain that they want to eliminate.  For support organizations, that pain is the overwhelming volume of the same questions over and over again-questions that, most of the time, someone on the team has answered before.  Knowledge sharing addresses that pain by putting the knowledge of the entire team into a repository that the team and the customers can use to answer these repeating questions, before they become cases.  The words we use to describe knowledge sharing outcomes reflect the desire to avoid the repeating case bite.  We talk about “case avoidance” or “customer deflection” as our goals.

For most of organizations, even those who do knowledge sharing well, they stop here.  Knowledge sharing focuses on gathering knowledge as we answer customer questions, sharing it to prevent other cases from appearing.

I would argue that there is much more power in knowledge sharing.  In even the best practice of knowledge sharing (I believe that Knowledge Centered Support, KCS, is that best practice), the focus is on the case workflow as the primary means to find, improve, and create knowledge.  To go beyond just avoiding the pain of massively repeating cases to truly learning from our entire organization, our partners, and our customers, I suggest a two-step plan.

1. Identify other events that trigger a need for knowledge
2. Start to build a process that incorporates sharing, improving, and creating knowledge into that event

Where do you see an event that triggers a need for knowledge in your organization?  A new software release?  A government regulation change?  Training for new partners or
resellers?

How could you build knowledge sharing into the processes you use to address each one?

Want to pursue these ideas further?

• Take a look at my article – Breaking out of the B-loop, an article on how KCS practices can move forward to address these “need triggers”
• Join me for a deep dive on March 6, 2013 at 12:00pm eastern for Knowledge Capture where there is no Case, a deep-dive sponsored by the Consortium for Service
  Innovation
• Write to me at adam@verghisgroup.com

http://bit.ly/tsiajan2013verghisknowledge

Our friends at the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) published our article titled What Do 16th Century Incas, 18th Century Shipyards and 21st Century Professionals Have in Common? An Inability to Share Knowledge.

They tweeted it as a ‘must read’ article.

This marks the first mention of Dancing E as we get out of stealth mode…