Parisista

Tagging on the internet has allowed discovery of information from individual blog posts, to stories, to stock tickers, to photos, all of which has given rise to Folksonomy. Large corporations have Marketing departments spend millions of dollars in marketing material which never get shared with the sales department — event if they do, it’s after spending tonnes of money in building/buying some proprietary software to automate the process.

The reality is:
* Marketing is global, so are sales
* Marketing material is produced by different teams viz. marcom, product marketing, channel marketing, event people, etc. etc.
* Sales department sits in their own silo — esp. in large organization, Marketing material never reaches sales, even if it does, either it’s not timely or not in it’s entirety or maybe after spending thousands of dollars for a software to properly tag the proprietary meta-data
* Meta-data is a moving target — If a system is used for storing the attributes in an RDBMS — any change in meta-data either renders the content undiscoverable or leaves it with incorrect attributes.

Come tagging to the rescue, being flexible, tags can be defined on the go — however good idea to have some high-level tags; as in product names, business units, etc. The second level tags could be platforms, customer names, companies, etc. How the information can be exchanged? Marketing runs a blog with the single objective of exchanging information with sales (in this case say marketing collateral). Every post is tagged with the product the collateral belongs to, the second level tags being platform, industry vertical, target audience, etc. etc. Sales can receive this information by either subscribing to the feeds or by searching for the tags on the blogs. WordPress supports category level feeds.

Tags: Writable Intranet, Enterprise 2.0

Tagging on the internet has allowed discovery of information from individual blog posts, to stories, to stock tickers, to photos, all of which has given rise to Folksonomy. Large corporations have Marketing departments spend millions of dollars in marketing material which never get shared with the sales department — event if they do, it’s after spending tonnes of money in building/buying some proprietary software to automate the process.
The reality is:
* Marketing is global, so are sales
* Marketing material is produced by different teams viz. marcom, product marketing, channel marketing, event people, etc. etc.
* Sales department sits in their own silo — esp. in large organization, Marketing material never reaches sales, even if it does, either it’s not timely or not in it’s entirety or maybe after spending thousands of dollars for a software to properly tag the proprietary meta-data
* Meta-data is a moving target — If a system is used for storing the attributes in an RDBMS — any change in meta-data either renders the content undiscoverable or leaves it with incorrect attributes.
Come tagging to the rescue, being flexible, tags can be defined on the go — however good idea to have some high-level tags; as in product names, business units, etc. The second level tags could be platforms, customer names, companies, etc. How the information can be exchanged? Marketing runs a blog with the single objective of exchanging information with sales (in this case say marketing collateral). Every post is tagged with the product the collateral belongs to, the second level tags being platform, industry vertical, target audience, etc. etc. Sales can receive this information by either subscribing to the feeds or by searching for the tags on the blogs. WordPress supports category level feeds.
Tags: Writable Intranet, Enterprise 2.0

One of the biggest roadblocks in hiring process is (absence of) collaboration. Again, email and word documents are used for accepting resumes, screening, providing feedback and managing the queue, prioritization, etc. There are multiple parties involved for a single job opening viz. Hiring Manager, Recruiter, HR Manager, HR Specialist (the lady who schedules the interviews!), the interview team, Hiring Manager’s boss, etc.
All the parties involved use e-mail and word documents buried in e-mail to gather feedback and collect data points, which sucks big time. It’s a pain managing the approval process, why a candidate is good on resume, who was phone-screened and rejected/approved. This whole workflow is a mess in most large and small companies. There are vendors however who have software/services for automating this; some are focused on resume management, others are geared towards candidate management, while others specialize in managing the job descriptions. A good software costs at least $200K-$500K in TCO, including license fees, software costs, hardware costs, people costs, training, etc. On top of that, in my experience, HR is last in the queue to get IT support to create an infrastructure to manage the workflow.
What’s needed bare minimum is a collaboration tool for the Hiring Managers where they can track resumes, annotate them as needed and capture feedback from the interview team. I think the Writable Intranet in the form of Wikis could be a great platform. Here are some ideas:

1. Create a centralized Wiki run/managed by the HR department.
2. Each page on the Wiki corresponds to a an open position within an organization. As the pool of resumes comes in, the resumes are attached as a file and an entry is made as a section for each candidate. The interview team provides individual feedback by entering their feedback directly into the Wiki under the candidate’s section. Thus all the data gets collected in one single place and is visible to everybody
3. Security issues? The major thing is reducing visibilty to other people who are not part of the hiring process for a job; depends on the policy as well. Turning off “special pages” and features like “Random Pages” would prevent people from accidentally jumping onto a page.

Easy?