Nikhil Hasija's Blog

The systemic removal of information asymmetry

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Information asymmetry: A situation when one party has more or superior information compared to another party or parties.

Remember when, in the not too distant past, you had no idea what your neighbor’s house cost? Or when you were scoping out an area, the only guide was a local real-estate agent? Today we have Zillow, which single-handedly when it launched removed information asymmetry from the real-estate market. This data used to be available with the County government but Zillow made it accessible to everyone via a seamless interface and then allowed people to add qualitative data on top resulting in price vectors and indicators (e.g. make me move).

Remember when we discovered restaurants by just walking in? or by asking friends? Today we have Yelp, which pretty much can tell you almost everything about a restaurant and user opinions about the food there. Next step is to take it further to answer the question “What’s good here?” and DishOnIt, which brings the wisdom of the crowds to the dish level helps one figure that out. So one can ask the question: Where can I find the best Chicken Tikka Masala in town? Or a Cheeseburger? (Disclosure: DishOnIt is my wife’s new startup).

Remember trying to research a camera and the only information available was the vendor or consumer reports? Today we take ratings and reviews on Amazon and other sites like epinions etc. for granted and they are significant forces in forming our purchase decisions. These ratings are ones that are authored by people like us and as the Edelman trust barometer (pg. 13) indicates, our comfort level with people like us is increasing. Meta point: we are engaging in discussions and formulating opinions and moreover we are seeking people who might fit the same profile as us.

Removing information asymmetry in itself is not social; it is the basis of social engagement or in other words the removal of information asymmetry and easy access of information allows people to converge, networks to form, new value propositions to come about and people to start the cycle of sharing their opinions, thoughts, ideas, experiences etc. The self-motivated sharing of ideas is the basis of social engagement and feeds the information asymmetry cycle and they both get inextricably linked as the value derived from free and open access to information forms new channels and new ways of doing business.

What general networks such as Facebook and Twitter allow, is discussion, posts etc. about any topic which leads to creation of an ad-hoc forum that lasts as long as the conversation is relevant and interesting and then disbands (ref: previous post on KM and Social) but the conversation archives and spin-offs of the conversation remain forever providing more knowledge than existed previously to everyone who seeks it. So while specialist sites would grow and thrive, the general networks will step in (i.e. Facebook groups) and become repositories of information on many topics which are too fragmented to have a destination of their own. However one thing is for certain that discourse on any topic is going to occur, so no business is immune.

The problem that still exists and needs to be addressed is the filtering, presentation and meaning extraction of the data that is being accumulated on these groups, sites etc. therefore in my opinion companies that promote transparency and help customers make personal decisions based on crowd-sourced information by helping them identify satisfied customers like them, trends that have affinity to their personal likes and dislikes will tend to do better than ones that do not.

So, is social bringing about information asymmetry? Or is information asymmetry creating the basis for the discourse to occur? Chicken or egg, doesn’t really matter as the omelet is going to be cooked regardless!

Many questions to ponder upon: What happens when our sole opinion source is people like us and information is easily available? Does it fuel the fading away of the middleman? Does Social speed this process up or does this process speed up social engagement? Are companies preparing for information asymmetry removal or fighting it?

Global Readiness tour for CRM 2011: First stop - Shanghai

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

I have just started the international portion of the Global Readiness tour for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 and the first stop – Shanghai. This is my second visit to Shanghai and I chose to arrive slightly early and got two days in town. I really like Shanghai, just walking around and soaking in the energetic vibe. It has some really nice areas and neighborhoods and is highly walk-able. My last trip was in 2004 and back then the street hawkers were trying to sell watches (any name brand you liked); now they have moved ahead with the times, and they have laminated cards with pictures of bags, suitcases, scarves etc.

The most amusing thing for me was how the second phrase after “You want to buy a watch?” was “You want iPhone?” and they are selling these so-called iPhone’s for 500 RMB (which is slightly less than 100 USD); however if you are an engadget reader you would know that this is the Meizu M80 which is a spitting image of the iPhone 4G. I asked if they had a Windows Phone 7, sadly they hadn’t heard of it yet but I am hoping same time next year our dear MS phone is being offered by these street hawkers.

I had a really nice dinner with my team-mates at a restaurant in Xin Tian Di: http://bit.ly/9YVKKS

My one and only acquisition from Shanghai – A pen laser with 2Km range.

I recall a conversation (various really that led to it) but one specific recently with a Dynamics...

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 12:33:00 -0700

I recall a conversation (various really that led to it) but one specific recently with a Dynamics CRM partner about over-sharing, corporate knowledge creation and management in context of what they were building. I drew a diagram on the white-board and that is the basis of this post. Rewind to the 90’s when Knowledge Management was top of mind and the biggest issue we were grappling was how to incentivize the creation of knowledge and the tools that would surface that knowledge at the most…

Knowledge Management and Social in the Enterprise

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:31:02 -0700

Rewind to the 90’s when Knowledge Management was top of mind and the biggest issue we were grappling was how to incentivize the creation of knowledge and the tools that would surface that knowledge at the most appropriate time.

Fast Forward to today: Incentive is no longer necessary, people are over-sharing, the question is are they sharing what is termed conversation or knowledge and this is where I will start splitting hairs.

The tools that facilitate over-sharing through your CRM (tools for ERP should arrive any day) tell you what is going on in the enterprise on the Corporate Telegraph. Posts like: a. “Jeremy just won an opportunity for 50 bicycles at Fabrikam” or b. “A new lead – Contoso for 200 gears was just created” or c. “Customer A is experiencing _____ issue with our product”. I chose these three examples because they represent Sales, Marketing (OK: result of a marketing campaign) and Service. The next thing I would like to analyze is the conversation(s) that might occur on these posts.

Meta points: We need to agree on a few of things first.

1. That these items have relevance that is time bound i.e. as time goes on they are not as interesting.

2. At some point in time, the conversation may become interesting, more people will converge on it, and then it will decay due to many different factors.

3. Corporate systems will all but forget about these conversations and they will be relegated in some database which will be deemed non-searchable due to the loose nature of the conversation.

Now let’s analyze (a) where Jeremy just won the opportunity (this is one of many but realistic outcome).

There could be 10-15 congratulations messages, depending on what this opportunity represents. There could be motivational messages like “on to the next one”. There could be humorous comments like “hope you didn’t have to give the farm away for it”… you get the picture, and it’s highly likely that there could be questions like “they are a tough customer – how did you do it”. I’ll stop here and move to the next one.

(b) where a new lead was just created.

“Wow. Marketing came through on this one”… “They usually go with our competitor, which campaign did they come through”

“I also had a customer with a similar issue and they did ______”

OK. So what’s happening here? Amongst this conversation, knowledge that can be re-used is being created, and this knowledge is actually being thrown away in most circumstances. The diagram below represents my experiences in this context (open to suggestions from KM experts to alter/improve).

In the diagram above a topic goes through phases, if it is deemed relevant to the organization, it gains traction and if there is enough interest, active conversation ensues. Once the conversation starts to subside, summarization or understanding occurs in a similar manner as did interest generation. There are various points in the conversation cycle where knowledge is created and even fine-tuned but this knowledge is simply thrown away in most systems today. Imagine if it could be harnessed, stored and automatically surfaced in areas where it was relevant. Add to that rating and ranking tools to ensure that only the right knowledge set is surfaced in the right places and I think it starts looking like a self-tuning crowd-sourced knowledge management system.

Why not just index everything and provide search capabilities then simply let the users search through pages and pages of this stuff. I don’t think that is the answer since users will have to re-live the discovery of the content over and over again.

In my opinion the answer lies in taking this conversation, cleansing it, extracting knowledge and then surfacing it up at a relevant point(s) i.e. when there is a new opportunity for the same or similar customer. In the case of customer service, a possibility could be putting it in the knowledge base.

While publishing to the organization telegraph is definitely a plus and involves the entire company in a conversation, the signal to noise ratio is very low since there is virtually no cost to share and the speed of conversation might leave parties who would be interested out of the conversation. Therefore in my mind the clear winner here will be one who can take this data and produce meaningful analysis that can be perused at a later date when the relevance of the conversation has long subsided.

Lately all I have been thinking about is Social and its application for businesses when it comes to...

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 12:40:17 -0700

Lately all I have been thinking about is Social and its application for businesses when it comes to customer relationship management. In the coming days I am going to be focused on writing about Social CRM and the business context. I will stay away from products because I first and foremost believe that this is about altering the strategy for engagement with the customer (the social customer) and tools/products will come after that. A rushed implementation without a coherent social strategy…

Going Social

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 08:15:54 -0700

Now to start thinking of some topics ;)

Duality

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 08:02:00 -0700

So I have just activated this blog on Tumblr and I am going to try it out for a while. My other blog nikhilhasija.org and this one nikhilhasija.com will have the same posts..

Why keep two blogs that have the same posts?

1. I want to see which platform works better for me.. i.e. make it really simple for me to blog, both short and long posts of my ideas and allow me to separate my personal posts from my professional ones.

2. I want to experiment which blogging platform is picked up by search engines faster. Tumblr is nikhilhasija.com. Typepad is nikhilhasija.org.

Let the discovery begin.