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New Feature: File Uploading & Indexing

Does your corporate knowledge also reside in documents?  

CorpQNA now supports uploading files for questions, answers, topics, and FAQ descriptions.  You can upload multiple files as needed.

CorpQNA will index the text contents of PDF, Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, & PowerPoint), RTF, XML, text files, and others, allowing you to find these files from the search function.

    Try it out.  It's available now on CorpQNA.com

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Social Knowledge

Collaboration is an integral part of a business.  Without collaboration, nothing gets done.  There have been a lot of great tools that have made collaboration at work easier, and replaced a lot of functions that used to be done by email; Enterprise Social Networks like Yammer and Jive and Group Chat tools like HipChat and Flowdock.

But collaboration is not knowledge.  

Collaboration helps you move faster.  But now, you need to move smarter.  Now that we're collaborating more, we can get things done faster.  But do we know if we are doing the right things?  

The artifacts of collaboration (chat logs, news feeds, documents, bug lists, project cards, etc) are invaluable during a project, but mostly disposable.   Once you are done with the project that has required them to be created, you almost never look at them again.  

And yet, there is a lot of knowledge that is buried in those documents and logs.  Wouldn't it be great if you could extract and organize all those artifacts into useful knowledge?  

You need to reference decisions you've made, and question and answers that your team has discovered previously, so that you don't have to start over each time.

Don't undo the progress you've already made by forgetting what you've learned.

Imagine a place that lets your company learn about problems that have already been solved, and then help you decide how to solve new problems.    A tool that integrates with the tools that you already use.  One where meetings get shorter and to the point.

Stay tuned for Social Knowledge - the next phase of the Social Enterprise.

Want to learn more?  Join CorpQNA now so you can be one of the first to bring Social Knowledge to work.

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Embed FAQs into Sharepoint and Websites with CorpQNA

CorpQNA just got more useful. You can now create FAQs into CorpQNA and securely embed them into your blog, sharepoint or website.

Here's an example of an embedded FAQ created in CorpQNA

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The cognitive burden of sending a single email

Sending emails is a Bayesian calculation, in which you attempt to predict a response to your message based on prior knowledge of the recipients, and a mental model of the message.

Whether you know it or not, you automatically create a mental model that takes into account various classifiers - topic, medium, time of day, length of communication, and a slew of other external factors.  

You run your classifiers through your model, and predict each recipient's response.

Your predictions determine whether you can send the message, or whether you need to modify it.

You can change some of the classifiers such as message topic, content, recipients, length of communication, etc.  

Then, you run your model again, or continuously, until you are satisfied with the predicted outcome.

If the computational burden is too high, or you don't have enough prior data to make a good prediction, or the intended result is unlikely, communication is discouraged.

The best communicators have a sophisticated mental model, and lots of prior learnings, to ensure that the predicted result matches their intentions.

What questions do you ask yourself, before you send an email?

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Reinventing FAQs

The CorpQNA FAQ

We've reinvented FAQs as a collaborative tool for work.

What is a FAQ?

A FAQ is a list of Frequently Asked Questions.

Why would I use a FAQ instead of email or a shared document?

FAQs are quicker to read because they are focused on important questions.

How are CorpQNA FAQs different?

Crowdsource your Q&A

Create lists of questions on any topic.

Solicit answers from coworkers

Share a FAQ, or just a question

Stay more organized

We already have FAQs at work. Can I import it into CorpQNA?

Your old FAQ is out of date. CorpQNA FAQs are dynamic and current.

Easily copy and paste any FAQ and instantly make it more useful.

What are some examples of FAQs?

Individual Q&A - Questions you get asked all the time

New Employee Handbook

Departmental Q&A

Meeting or Event Agendas

Product or Technical Guides

What do I do next?

Create a FAQ

Take a new Feature Tour

Visit CorpQNA

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4 quick tips about asking questions in email

Make sure the subject line is in the form of a question (just like Jeopardy!)

Include any supporting details in the body of the email

Send it only to people who can answer your question.

Thank the person who answers it

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Asking a question that is designed to solicit a good answer can be difficult.  This 11 year old document from Eric Raymond can help.

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What's the vacation schedule at your company?

CorpQNA lets you ask and answer questions like this at work.

In this blog entry, we're going to walk you through the process of asking a question using CorpQNA.

Step 1 - Think of a question

Here are some examples - you can be as specific or general as you want:

"Can I bring pets to the office?"

"What is the vacation schedule for 2013?"

"How do I file an expense report?"

Step 2 - Enter details about the question

Including specific information helps you get a quicker answer and eliminates back-and-forth conversations.

Step 3 - Choose out who to ask

Pick the most appropriate group from all the groups at your company.

Step 4 - Share the question with your Yammer network.

The more people that see your question, the more likely you'll get it answered.  Post a quick message and we'll share your question with the appropriate group in Yammer.

That's it.

Go ahead and ask a question now

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Dysfunctional communication

This is the first article in a series about internal company communications.

A modern, distributed organization needs to spend extraordinary amounts of time learning to communicate and collaborate. 

Recognize any of these dysfunctional behaviors in your company?

You ask a question via email, and a detailed answer comes back, but not to the question you asked.

You receive an email containing a "wall of text" from a coworker, explaining some question, but nobody knows what the question is, and doesn't engage, even if there is a real problem.

All substantial conversations have to happen "offline", because any online discussions lead to disruptive battles.

Many questions route through individuals who know everything, inside and out.

Poor communications are a slow motion disaster

Poor communications cause employees to get frustrated, argue and waste time.  They can't solve problems on their own, no one will help, and they don't even know what, who, or how to ask for help.  They will slow down your business, cause you to misdeliver on  promises, and drop morale.  It's a slow motion disaster that can wreck your momentum.

We can't all be together.

People are not good at communicating without feedback.  It is not a natural skill to communicate to large groups, or communicate to people in distant locations, or who have a different viewpoint than we do.  People listen better when they see you, or hear your voice.  To communicate effectively, it is best when we are face to face, in the same room.  

We communicate better in person.  But, in a modern, connected organization, this is not possible, most of the time.  People work at different times, in different places, in different cultures, on different areas.

Problems arise when you communicate in new ways

Communicating to large groups, over time and over distance can lead to problems:

You communicate to a large group, but don't get replies for hours, days or even weeks.

You use an alias to send to a large group, so you aren't even thinking about who you are addressing or how they might respond. 

You communicate with people that you barely know, or don't know at all.

Your style of communication does not match with theirs, and they misinterpret what you are saying, or are otherwise confused.

A modern, distributed organization needs to spend extraordinary amounts of time learning to communicate and collaborate.   

In the next entry in this series, we'll discuss 5 questions you can ask to help you improve internal company communications.

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Expectation is the root of all heartache

A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.