Hi everyone. I would really appreciate some feedback on the following idea.
Hi everyone. I would really appreciate some feedback on the following idea.
TL;DR
I want to create a SaaS system to enable users capture dependencies between people and "things" in large organizations. This network is used to provide targeted notifications when something that affects the user changes. It also serves as a discovery tool for what's going on in the organization.
TL;DR
In most medium to large organizations, keeping up to date with strategies, projects, systems, policies, people and their dependencies is a nightmare.
From experience I know that, in big companies, a lot of project time is spent just understanding the landscape. People are most often the best source of this information because most documentation captured using tools like Confluence or SharePoint are out of date before long.
My product idea is to create a system where people can quickly capture the existence of a "topic". This could be any of the above mentioned items. They can then capture dependencies on other topics (e.g. "Project A" touches "System B" which depends on "System C") as well as links to stakeholders (e.g. developers, project managers, etc.).
This will create a network of people and topics/things and their dependencies.
Users can then post updates on topics and the system will notify other users of changes that affect them (based on the dependency network). The idea is that people extract day to day value from keeping the network up to date because it helps keep them up to date with changes that affect them.
This should also reduce the "all hands" emails that get sent regarding system/policy changes (which no one reads).
The network can then also serve as a discovery tool to understand the actual structure of people and "things" in an organization (e.g. projects, systems, etc.).
I'm thinking about initially targeting roles like operations managers, project managers and IT managers/architects because I think they are most exposed to the pains I'm trying to solve.
Apologies for the long post but I would really like to get some feedback on whether you folks think this is viable.
Any thoughts?
#idea-validation
#saas
It sounds great. I like these organizational knowledge systems, but existing solutions seem to devolve into the category of SharePoint sites.
The challenge with these types of initiatives in big orgs is that many people don't care about keeping it up to date. It needs to either be mandated or so deeply integrated that it's effectively required. Having worked for a large company (in manufacturing), the systems that worked were very integrated in daily processes (change-control systems, MES, ERP).
It seems to me that you'll need a strategy for deep integration, or some way (like you said) of delivering so much value that it keeps a critical mass of people involved (like Wikipedia).
The difference between Wikipedia and organizational knowledge management systems is that much of the knowledge in orgs is inherently localized. I don't know what accounting works on (and shouldn't need to). But that means that someone with enough organizational knowledge from accounting needs to be involved in the system.
I think there's definitely room for improvement over the state of the art here, with some challenging social problems to solve!
Best of luck!
I thought the same thing when I read the pitch as well. At my last workplace, we attempted to have a knowledge base on Confluence (a wiki style tool), but always ran into the problem that not everyone would update it or use it. As a result, you could never fully trust what you found there to be correct, so it provided clues at best and complete misguidance at worst.
Another thing to note is that the proposed tool sounds like a "nice to have" rather than a "need to have", which will make it a tough sell.
I will say I like the idea of having it automatically integrate with other tools. That would be game changer. It would be less effort to maintain, and more importantly the information it provided would be up to date and complete so you could actually use it.
Thanks for the feedback and the encouragement!
You're right in that getting people to continuously engage and update the system is a big challenge.
I'm busy reading Hooked by Nir Eyal (https://www.amazon.com/Hooked-How-Build-Habit-Forming-Products-ebook/dp/B00LMGLXTS) to help me figure out how to create habit-forming hooks in the system to keep people engaged.
I'm hoping that a combination of the following will do the trick:
I'm still exploring further ideas in this space.
My idea is to produce an MVP that requires manual input but to eventually make add-ons available for receiving updates from other systems, e.g. Microsoft Teams, Git, Jira, etc.
This may be a way to keep the network updated and will provide a way to create different subscription tiers and/or generate revenue from customers opting into specific add-ons.
Thanks again for your input. I really appreciate it.
So how do you see adoption taking place? Do you see it as an enterprise system (high-touch sales, long lead times, big contracts)?
Git, Jira, & Teams have more of a consumer sales model and can be adopted incrementally by small teams, because the value that they provide is measurable at the small team level. Can you think of ways to make this software incrementally adoptable, so that the whole org (or at least the gatekeeper) doesn't need to be convinced upfront of the value?
I'm aiming at a consumer sales model. I think there is enough value at a team/department level for it to get traction and then grow from there.
I'm thinking about different models to assist with this, e.g.:
Non-paying users can view their "neighborhood" but can only explore deeper, contribute and customize their notification feed once they upgrade.
I'm hoping that this is enough of a hook to get people to upgrade.
From my experience getting started and working at Microsoft, I can totally see the benefit of such a system. Understanding the organization, finding relevant information was especially difficult for newly on boarded people.
On the other hand, there were many resources and tools that are supposed to help. And some were super valuable.
One of the most valuable one is definitely the active directory, which allows to navigate the complete organizational structure: all people and their directs as well as their managers.
For the information part, I worry that it gets super complex and noisy as well as outdated if managed by hand.
I wonder if some cluster or other machine learning approaches could help with that.
At least at ms, it wasn’t the problem that there is no information. I would say it is more a problem that there is too much data and of unknown relevance or outdated.
Hi Madamo, thanks for the input.
I've been playing around with a number of ideas on how to get the network going quickly and using AD as a source was one of those ideas. I discarded the idea, mostly because AD is such a mess in most places I've been exposed to. It may well be that I've dismissed this too early due to bias with my own experience.
One of my concerns with ongoing automatic updates to the network is that the network becomes irrelevant due to low-value updates. I'm betting more on a Wikipedia-like model to keep the noise to signal ratio low.
Something that may be valuable is periodically prompting people to verify that information in the network is accurate and up to date. Sort of like the Google Maps model (hope this makes sense)
Actually, I implemented something similar just for software engineering and technical teams at Microsoft. There, I used the information that comes from the code repositories. The interesting aspect using that information is that it is up to date AND represents the actual work relationships, not just the hierarchies on paper. No manual input needed.
This makes sense as often two people from different teams and with different managers will work closely together on features and it’s not obvious from the management structures but super apparent from the code and checkins. Such information is super valuable for organization.
This comment was deleted 7 years ago
Thanks!