John Ambrose - Skillsoft: Using Social Media to Support Knowledge Management

Steve

Hi, this is Steve Hunt with People Performance Radio. This week we spoke with John Ambrose, who's the Senior Vice President of Strategy and Corporate Development for Skillsoft, which is a company that provides knowledge and learning information for organizations to increase workforce productivity, and what John talked about was two things: one, he talked about the current state of the art for getting information that's going to help employees in their jobs very rapidly and effectively, but that's the first part of his podcast, but the second that I think people will find particularly interesting is talking about where he sees this going in terms of leveraging social media like Twitter and Facebook, and some of the ideas around, how can you leverage these tools that, in a way now people view just as a way to maintain social relationships, as a way to really get you valuable information to help you be more effective in your job, so some really interesting insights from a guy who's right there on the leading edge of social media and technology. So let's listen to John Ambrose this week on People Performance Radio.

Hi, this is Steve Hunt with People Performance Radio. This week we're talking with John Ambrose, who's the Senior Vice President of Strategy and Corporate Development for Skillsoft. John, welcome to the show.

John

Hello Steve, thanks for having me.

Steve

So can you tell us a little bit about what your background is, and what you do with Skillsoft?

John

Absolutely. Well, going way back in terms of background, I've got a masters degree in journalism from Columbia University, so at the very least I'm qualified as a member of a profession that's probably been deeply impacted by what's going on in Web 2.0, but my professional career has been in software marketing, and at Skillsoft I'm focused on strategy and corporate development for the company, and I've been doing that for the last two years. Prior to that, I was co-founder and wrote the original business plan for Books24x7, and led that company for six years after it was acquired by Skillsoft, so a lot of time in the information space.

Steve

So when you look at what Skillsoft does, and the role of technology, how does that technology impact workforce productivity —fundamentally, what is it that you're enabling organizations and employees to do that increases their performance?

John

What we're trying to do is provide a multi-model or multi-threaded approach to learning, to help individuals learn the way they learn best. That means some people may be on a learning mission to find a very quick answer to solve a problem; other people may be trying to acquire completely a new skill or achieve a certification; so it's about really delivering a wide spectrum of training modalities or training types, whether it's video or text on screen, or simulations, courses, etc, and we provide that to companies all over the world.

Steve

It's interesting, going back to your journalism, because I've heard journalism described as information sharing, and that sounds like what you guys do is this idea of sharing information, but I remember seeing somebody talking years ago, when the internet was first taking off, saying the big challenge we're going to face, and I think we're all living it now, is there's too much information, and trying to find what's the information that's relevant, so I imagine that's got to be a big focus of your technology is not just sharing information, but helping people find the right information at the right time. Can you talk a little bit about how you're approaching that challenge, and some of the things that you're seeing happening in that area?

John

Well, you're absolutely right, Steve, the challenge today is not information per se, but information in context, and being able to find it, and we have over the years invested in building a search technology that's really designed to analyze structure of information, and use that in its algorithms to bring the user the most precise answer, based on the quest that they're on. We've patented the technology, and it sits at the heart of the platforms that we have, the Books24x7 platform, and Skillsoft's learning management system, etc, but a learner doesn't necessarily want to scroll through a long course catalog to try to find the right course, or to sift through a long list of books or videos —they want to be able use search, it's a very natural way of locating information, and it's central to what we do today. The one aspect that takes that further is that, when you find information, the information is in context, so we're not just pulling out a snippet of information and giving it to you, you always have context around it, so if you wanted to go ahead or go back, that's always just a click away.

Steve

Can you give me an example? —so for example, if I am an employee and suddenly I've been asked to work on a project, somebody says, "Hey, I want you to do a due diligence for an acquisition", and I'm like, "A due what? —what in the world is that?" —how might your technology help me with that sort of a situation?

John

That's a great example, you can come in, you can go right to a search box, type in the words "due diligence", you'd get a long list of results back that would span maybe courses on how to do an acquisition, or what are the steps of due diligence; you could see a video from an M & A experts, maybe a video from Geoffrey Innults or a CPO of a company that's very acquisitive; you could find books from Harvard Business School Press and from other great publishers that will take you to detailed sections, chapter six is ideal on what is due diligence, it will take you right to that. So it's giving you this right tapestry of information that's all highly contextual and relevant to what you're looking for, and then allowing the user then to filter the search or refine the search and drill down, and take advantage of whatever of these assets are most compelling for them.

Steve

So in a way, I don't know if that's a good analogy, but it's almost like a tailored version of a Google search, but it's focusing on materials that have been screened already to be of a certain quality, and of course when you get to those materials, I assume with the licensing you don't have to pay additional money to read these books and to get these videos, they're just at your fingertips?

John

Yeah, I'd say it's a mash up of the Google search engine applied to the best bookstore you could ever imagine, the biggest Barnes & Noble you know, the best college bookstore, all mashed up, as well as a great wealth of video content and simulation, it's all this content mashed up, but the search engine is really, because the domain of information that we're searching is narrowed to the professional disciplines, the search results tend to be extremely relevant and much more highly focused and targeted than what you would find in your typical Google search that gives you back three million results, and you've got time to get through the first two pages, then you find nothing that's on target. So it's really designed around productivity, getting people to answers quickly, and in fact, Steve, you'll appreciate this —we like to say that, Google's business model is to keep people on the site as long as possible, because the more ads they serve up, the more revenue; we say that the faster we get rid of someone, the better we've done our job, because they've come, they've found their answer, and they're going back to work and applying that information.

Steve

That's a great comparison, I really like the way you've put that. Now one of the things, John, that we were talking about a few weeks ago, when we were at a conference together, and I have to say John had a big influence on my personal view of Twitter, which although I do tweet occasionally, I've always, when it first came out, said: "Why in the world would I care what other people are eating for lunch?", which surprisingly some of the tweets you get, you're like, "Why do you think I'd be interested in this?" But you made a point about that as a knowledge sharing tool that really changed my perception of it, has it yet changed my behavior? —it's certainly changed my perception. Can you talk a little bit, to switch gears to, we talked about this sort of search engine which I think is the current state, but maybe where we're going as a next evolution, which is the social media and the Twitter as an effective information sharing tool —can you talk a little bit about where you see that going?

John

Certainly, well Twitter, for those who haven't followed it, and it's hard not to, it's been everywhere, it's about 14 million members right now and it's growing, depending on whose numbers you look at, between 600 and 800% a year, it's got an amazing take rate. Interestingly enough, demographically it's appealing more towards the sort of 35 to 50 year olds, as opposed to the Millennials, but it's just a great mix of people that you see on there, and I think Twitter does itself an amazing disservice by having that initial page saying, "What are you doing now?", because you're right, people don't want to know what you're eating for breakfast necessarily.

What I find Twitter useful for is really, I use it as a bookmarking tool, as a way of finding interesting articles that I never would have discovered on my own, because people that I'm aligned with, or that I follow, I follow for a reason, and they're looking at social media, they're looking at Web 2.0, and they find things and they surface them and I see them, I can bookmark them and I can find them later.

But I can give you one personal experience I had with Twitter, Steve: I was driving along one night and heard an interview on NPR, Ky Risdall was talking with Padmasree Warrior, who's the Chief Technology Officer at Cisco, and she talked about how she was tweeting, and Ky asked her, "Well, is there any real business use in this?", and she said, "Well yeah actually, I was at a conference and I presented this visual chart on a topic that was relevant to Cisco, and I got the chart from somebody on Twitter." So I sent a tweet to Padmasree, and I wasn't sure that I would ever here from her, she's got 350,000 followers, and within two hours I had a note back because I asked her, what was the tool she used and she wrote back and said, "Well, I didn't really use the tool, but one of my followers did and here's his name", and he was copied on that tweet, so he immediately replied within a few minutes, and said "Oh, I used a product called Wurtle", so I went to Wurtle and I created my own visual tag cloud, and actually used it in a presentation that I did, along with this example.

Steve

Wow, so really it's almost like, you were talking earlier about your current product, which is a very tailored search engine that has very relevant information that's been pre-screened, and you can say, Twitter, if you configure and use it the right way, almost becomes the same thing, only instead of searching information, you're searching on people?

John

That's right, and I think that that's a direction that is where I see learning heading. In the sea of information, one of the ways to filter and find the most relevant information is through search technology, and that can take you so far, but by bringing people into the mix, and leveraging other people's expertise, both in their ability to share information with you as well as your ability to locate relevant experts, is I think going to be the next step in the convergence of learning and Web 2.0 technologies in new enterprise.

Steve

So this area seems like it's changing so quickly, some of these things are coming out with this new information that's useful, some of it is very fad-driven, I think, as well, things come up and they disappear; if I'm a director of knowledge management or director of learning within an organization and I want to make greater leverage of knowledge sharing, I want to increase it within my company and people are asking me about social media, social network —what would you recommend they do? How can you wrap your head around this stuff without getting overwhelmed by it?

John

Well I think step one is to immerse yourself in the tools, I mean LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter —if you have experienced those three, in particular what I would call "the big three", you really need to do that, because you shouldn't draw a conclusion from a passing experience with any one of these tools, and LinkedIn is almost the de facto necessary tool for staying connected with professional colleagues, and it's a great way to do that, especially in the type of workforce we have where people are changing jobs and companies more frequently than ever before. Facebook is great for connecting with family members and basically publishing an autobiography of your life, and opening it up to others, and Twitter is somewhat harder for people to get their heads around, but if you make the effort to follow people that are in areas of interest that you have, you can be drawn into this flow and stream of information, and really get caught up in it, and start to see the power of that, but I don't think that it's, if your role is to implement a Web 2.0 strategy within a company, I don't think you can do that successfully without first experiencing some of these tools first hand.

Steve

That's great advice, getting in there and playing around with them. I guess a couple of questions, are there places that have like a primer, so if you get onto Facebook, is there like an intro there, or on the sites? —do they have good tutorials of how to use this most effectively? Or with Twitter, you just gave an example to say, there's a way to use it very effectively, there's also a way to use it very ineffectively —are there any places or any things you've seen where people kind of say, "Look —this is the best way to use this tool?"

John

Yeah, I would say that YouTube is always a great source, you can actually go to YouTube and search on Twitter tips, or Facebook, and you'll get a mix of a lot of different types of information, of videos, some somewhat humorous, and maybe a bit sarcastic about some of these technologies, but some very useful tips as well for how to get value out of them.

There's also on Twitter, which like Google has a very minimalist UI, there is a search box, and you can type a search on Twitter tips, and you'll see tweets from a lot of people with links to articles and videos and even podcasts that can help you get started, and learn to stretch the tool. It's deceptively simple, and as you use it more and more, you begin to unfold some of the capabilities of Twitter and put it to more practical use.

Steve

It's funny, so using the knowledge sharing tool itself to find that information out, how to use the knowledge sharing tool.

My last question to sort of wrap up, and this is probably something a lot of people struggle with, I sort of joke, I have a hard enough time keeping up with my real physical relationships, let alone maintaining virtual relationships —what is a realistic amount of time, if somebody's going to effectively leverage some of these tools —how much time do you actually have to spend sitting down in front, writing tweets, keeping up with LinkedIn, doing Facebook notes —do people need to shift their work priorities to say, if you're going to use these tools, you've got to devote some time to it. How much time do you think people actually need to devote to it? How do you keep it from becoming a time sink?

John

Yeah, well I think it will be different for everyone, and I'm sure that before long we'll see Twitters Anonymous out there, because some of these tools can be addictive, but I think for me personally, I have a fairly regular habit now of checking in the morning, I'll eat my breakfast, checking the news, checking Twitter, and checking Facebook, and Twitter in some ways has become a source of news for me, it's a way I keep up on the latest headlines, and uncovering new things, and then at night I typically will spend half an hour or so just catching up at the end of the day. I haven't mixed it in throughout the day in any big way, although if I'm researching a topic on social media, I will use Twitter, and I also do monitor our brands for our company through Twitter, and that's another way, going back to your earlier question, Steve —if anybody wants to see a practical side of Twitter, use the search box to search on your company's brand, and see what people in the Twitterverse are commenting on, and that could be eye-opening in itself.

Steve

Well hey, John, thank you, such a very interesting conversation, you've definitely inspired me to once more jump back in, I sort of play around with these and then I stop, then I go back and play around, so you've given me some really good ideas, hopefully our listeners as well. A last question —will we be able to put your Twitter address on our pocast site, so people can tweet you if they have additional questions?

John

Absolutely, it's John J Ambrose, and the J is just initial J for a middle name, but yeah, you can find me on Twitter, and I'd be happy to connect with your followers.

Steve

Great, well John, thank you so much for appearing on People Performance Radio.

John

Great, well thank you for having me, and it was a real pleasure.

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