FAQ Section

A Brief on The Product And Service

 

The product, named Waykm, is a smart Dashboard or interface that harnesses IT to organize and drive the focused free flow of knowledge essential for success. It is inspired by the extraordinary success of the colonial administration system when there was no railway or telegraph. The implementation of Waykm requires adaptation of its universal framework to the enterprise. Flexibility permits changes post implementation for evolving the structure.

Dashboards to aid interactions for corporate decision making are common. However, personnel must self-organize, i.e., invest energy and time, to raise team ability. The support culture this requires is rare. It is believed IT simply cannot do better. Superior ability can propel even a failing company towards great performance, viz., excellence. The smart Dashboard leverages compelling means for communication to unite and focus personnel. IT is reliably harnessed to organize and drive perpetual collaboration. The culture to practice the team competencies that progress excellence is induced. This makes the smart Dashboard a breakthrough in the convergence of the great divide between technology and knowledge work.

Adwords have made Dashboards the battle ground of Web and proprietary technologies. Functionally, however, Dashboards have yet to satisfy the market's need for a reliable means to drive success. This is primarily because they only offer tools; the competencies for success must still be driven by personnel energy. The industry has yet to conceive that IT can serve as intelligent energy to organize and drive free flow of knowledge for greater team ability. Hence, the brief provides only an indication of the size of the latent market (see item 11).

The science governing the breakthrough is proven by guaranteed adoption and remarkable results in prototypes. They confirm the validity of the science of interactions, that powers the smart Dashboard, across the public and private sectors.

The stated conclusions on the impact of the smart Dashboard are founded on the celebrated works of acknowledged sages of history, established management gurus of the 20th century and observed facts of the knowledge marketplace.

 

The Validation of Waykm And Understanding Its Impact

Waykm provides each user a smart interface, powered by IT, to drive the daily interactions. It anticipates action one step at a time to assemble any knowledge process on an event and sets up the flow of knowledge in the pipeline established. Total adoption of Waykm prototypes by all manner of knowledge workers validates its business model to be a reliable practice (See Exhibits-1&2). Waykm's systematic recording of knowledge flows engage passion by making work, access to experts, and retrospective sense-making easy. Like a river's flow swept away the original Augean problem, the inquiry, advocacy, reflection, openness, team learning and system thinking generated by free flow sweep away the hurdles to superior thinking:

Adoption: The invested intelligence anticipates the next step, drives interactions in context and offers IT tools for ease of all teamwork. The mitigation of anxiety, discipline free working and release of energy make the system compelling;
Wishfulness: Dialogue reveals the thinking and emerges reality for superior judgments;
Pressure: The means to form opinion at ease creates time and fosters contemplation;
Moulds: The need definition, thought evolution and questioning promotes innovation;
Irresponsibility: The accountability and transparency progress good governance;
Discordance: Teamwork and trust is progressed by natural collaboration and feedback on each event. The free flow for inquiry, advocacy, openness, and reflection is distinct from simple knowledge sharing: it progresses constructive combination of intelligence.
Indifference: The ease of work, follow up, creation of time and energy, sharing of responsibility, and superior sense of reality raise willingness for greater commitment;
Inconsistency: A simple but effective process to deliver the above with measures on each event has the potential to induce a culture for excellence over time.

 


Important Q & A

1. What is so unique about the collaboration conducted by Waykm?
Collaboration as practiced by IT firmly places the onus of effectiveness on the volition of the participants. IT accepts discretion over adoption of its tools and sharing of Knowledge is unavoidable. It does not envision a change in this 'IT is a tool' paradigm since it believes unpredictability and discretion in Knowledge work make collaboration impossible to organize. The ineffectiveness of simple collaboration to progress enterprise success is well established. A pantheon of distinguished management gurus have concluded that free flow of knowledge is essential for success. Paper cum File based dialogue was used by successful systems of the past to overcome the problem of volition. The paper 101 on Waykm presents how Waykm drives dialogue with IT. It changes the IT paradigm for collaboration to 'IT is intelligent energy'.

The distinctive features of effective collaboration are: listening, understanding assumptions, seeing how one contributes to problems, perpetual conduct, a direction for thinking, facility to influence the direction, context, history, progress of consensus, follow-up, study of people and patterns, freedom to interact, and security, with means to access experts without the bother of organizing material. Waykm, with its norms to assemble interactions driven by IT, offers a successful language (infinite use of finite means) to deliver this complex requirement effortlessly and reliably on each event.

2. What differentiates Waykm from conventional IT in the means for collaboration?
IT adopts the conventional wisdom articulated by Drucker in 1991 that quality collaboration is impossible without the cooperation of the worker, and stops at the conclusion that a one-size-fit-all process is impossible. It confines itself to pure technology in dealing with collaboration, and does not seek ways to surmount the hurdle to creating a process. Waykm uses norms, derived from the evolution of teamwork, to assemble the repeatable actions that constitute all knowledge processes. This all-sizes-fit-one knowledge process delivers effortless coordination on events to lay a pipeline for communication. Waykm converts the exchange to the flow of knowledge in context. It converges technology with the flow of knowledge to rewrite the conventional wisdom.

3. How will Waykm break out from the report and monitor confines common to Dashboards for progress towards generating NEW insight?
Communication in context to share opinion, experience, and insights is a daily need for knowledge workers and not a choice or an act of volition, like reporting and monitoring are. Waykm is primarily a compelling means for the daily work and interaction of knowledge workers. Perpetual and effective collaboration is delivered as a by-product by the proven process of dialogue. Team intelligence gets unified irrespective of its distribution. The stimulation of thought and emergence of reality that follow generate insights.

4. What assures the total adoption of Waykm?
Waykm offers the most painless and compelling way of meeting the 24x7 need for communicating in context, irrespective of connectivity. The system does the required synchronization on connection. Besides, the system mitigates anxiety, and reduces the demand on energy by anticipating the next step. It addresses anxiety by disallowing actions that violate the norms, making strategic alerts possible, performing follow up efficiently, providing prompt reports and promoting consensus for sharing responsibility. Professionaly, Waykm satisfies the natural need to learn and know.

5. Is Waykm's potential to grow the market ten times not an exaggeration?
The enterprise goal is success. It is progressed by free flow of Knowledge for team learning. The inexhaustible and programmable energy of IT is ideally suited to replace the current total dependence on personnel. Item 1 above states why IT fails to be an alternative. The extent of the latent or unexploited market is reflected by the projection in item 11 below. The section The Validation of Waykm And Understanding Its Impact states why Waykm is uniquely qualified to open the market.

There is a precedent for the ten times growth potential. The use of IT tools was widespread before ERP came into being and transformed the market for structured systems. Waykm is the parallel of ERP for unstructured workflows.

6. Can Waykm really induce culture for the pursuit of excellence within months?
The observation on culture, if treated as a behavioral claim, appears rather tall since Tom Peters has noted in his In Search of Excellence (1982) that culture takes decades to establish. However, if accepted as the outcome of a process it is eminently feasible. Email illustrates this contention: it is a process for personal communication and establishes its own culture within weeks. Waykm is a compelling means for business communication. The satisfaction rendered assures its reliable adoption for conducting all interactions. It systematically captures the knowledge flows that take place across the enterprise and converts them into dialogue for perpetual effective collaboration 24x7. The following quote from Corporate Culture And Performance, NY: Free Press (1992), following the extensive work done by Kotter and Heskett, substantiates the statement that culture will be induced by Waykm:

"You get people to change how they do things: behavior, practices, and organization. And if you succeed in finding a new way of operating, it kind of seeps into and becomes the new culture."

7. What qualifies the breakthrough to be an innovation?
The breakthrough all-sizes-fit-one knowledge process that converts the IT paradigm for teamwork from 'IT is a tool' to 'IT is intelligent energy' was invented in 1993 and proven in operation by 1996. Its component technologies are search, presence sensing and connectivity, and replication. While web communication and search developed early, replication to support offline working is a recent introduction in Google Gears. The cheap and reliable availability of all the component technologies required to make the invention operative and universally available make it an attractive innovation now.

8. What is the significance of this innovation? The path to excellence is well documented but enterprises are unable to follow it for want of the required organizing and driving energy. Going enterprises need monumental energy and mobilization to switch over to a culture that assures the Way. Next, the time and energy must be assured to sustain the culture. Many subsidiary reasons have come into being because busy administrators are simply unable to service this primary need. It is presently believed only personnel can provide the energy required. The innovation harnesses the inexhaustible energy of IT to fulfill the need. The leadership of any enterprise can now seek to evoke desire among its personnel to apply their knowledge, and practice the competencies that unite their intelligence for achieving enterprise goals.

9. What is the scope of the paradigm change that anchors the innovation?
on the supply side replication replaces email to be a far more effective backbone for intra-enterprise communication. on the demand side it delivers a process to induce a knowledge based culture, which is the key to excellence and a vast latent market. The Knowledge Management concept developed the market for knowledge exchange with IT but failed to exploit it.

10. Has the innovation lost value with the passage of time since its invention?
The major milestones in the innovation of the all-sizes-fit-one knowledge process are:
- 1992: I invent the process following my development of the science of interacions.
- 1994: the first prototype, established in a government secretariat, proves the science with its compelling adoption of the means for work and interaction.
- 1996: the second prototype, established in a mission critical setting of the corporate world, delivers remarkable results within months.
- 1998: Professional opinion appreciates the invention but advises it is not an innovation.
- 1998-2001: The market is scrambling to catch up with email and the net.
- 2001-2003: Net meeting and Knowledge Management hog attention. Limitations emerge.
- 2003-2006: I articulate the 'IT is intelligent energy' concept with its ability to organize and drive knowledge work, and induce a culture for listening, sharing and learning.
- 2007-2008: E 2.0 is a failure too. Enterprises are willing to consider changes in their infrastructure for assured results.
- 2008:Web tech. is fast maturing to deliver the invention. The innovation is ready.


Replacing the dependence on personnel, for the competencies of business success, with reliable delivery of intelligent energy rewrites a culture that is over 2300 years old. The alternative had to mature in articulation as well as technical appeal. Both the supply and demand have now matured. See item 11. The 'sole solution' status imparts the innovation considerable value.

11. What are the implications of Waykm for the present and future market?
The present market is defined by adwords. The market is a major driver for the net economy but is perhaps in its early stages for enterprise data. The reason is that a means for capturing enterprise data has not yet established itself. Since all data capture must perforce be routed through the workspace, a Dashboard in this case, the Dashboard market has emerged as a battle ground for web and proprietary technologies. The smart Dashboard, with its total capture of enterprise wide knowledge exchange, should make a telling difference to the adword market revenues. The enterprise market has the potential to exceed the net market because of the possibility of a higher conversion factor.

The future is the knowledge market as governments and enterprises desperately need a means to cope with the rapid pace of change. The market is projected to grow at least ten times (see item 5 above) based on the following deduction of a latent market:

AMR Research projected ERP Systems spending at USD 67 billion for 2003. IDC projected Knowledge Management (KM) products and services at USD 13.4 billion for the same period. Taking the ratio of unstructured to structured transactions as 6:1 (with the internet a ratio of 9:1 has been assumed by major authors), even at one-third the cost, the true market for knowledge flow products and services at over USD 150 billion would be at the least ten times greater than the prevailing size.

12. Perspective

The knowledge assembly line of Waykm converges knowledge with IT in much the same way that Taylor's assembly line in conjunction with Quality Circles converged mechanical energy with human effort. The resulting exploitation of technology supported by an efficient feedback systems for delivery of a quantum increase in productivity is identical.

References

Drucker Peter, F. (1988). 'Coming of the new organization'. Harvard Business Review, Jan.-Feb., 1988. http://homepage.mac.com/bobembry/studio/biz/conceptual_resources/authors/peter_drucker/neworg.pdf

Exhibit 1: Satisfaction of Department of Atomic Energy



Exhibit 2: Satisfaction of Indian Hotels Ltd.