Copyright © 2009 by Common Sense Advisory, Inc. Crowdsourcing inside the Firewall Donald A. DePalma, Ph.D. Chief Research Officer Copyright © 2009 by Common Sense Advisory, Inc.

Theme of today’s presentation Long-term plans to harness and harvest corporate information must activate the multilingual intranet Social networking + employee-sourcing will complement machine translation Employee-supplemented linguistic activism could language into the corporate mainstream The goal: Harness corporate knowledge – wherever.

Copyright © 2009 by Common Sense Advisory, Inc. Translation and localization as practiced at global businesses: Employees left out in cold Global Business CustomersSuppliers Employees RegulatorsObserversCompetitors Legend

Copyright © 2009 by Common Sense Advisory, Inc. Documentation FAQ Updates Online Applications Global Single StaticVolatile Market Scope Volatility Printed Marketing Materials Instant Messaging Chat Support Catalog Changes CRM Business Intelligence Online Help Brochures Owner’s Guides Maintenance Guides Pocket Guides Training Materials Financial Information News Competitive Analyses

Copyright © 2009 by Common Sense Advisory, Inc. The easily measurable part of any company Net sales in Q1-09: €24.0B Operating profit of €312M Profit after tax of €243M International presence > 150 countries Number of employees: > 360,000 Units sold in Q1: 1.4M Market share 11% worldwide Sales of VW down 15%, Audi 17%, Škoda 39%, SEAT 43% 1

Copyright © 2009 by Common Sense Advisory, Inc. Harness the power of wetware to lower the language barrier and raise the Corporate IQ Goal: Benefit from the collective wisdom of a company Successful companies promote employee-driven innovation: – Research papers, research centers – % employees involved in R&D – Patent portfolio – Labs – Greenhouse investment But make sure that employees can participate in the exchange of knowledge, regardless of language

Copyright © 2009 by Common Sense Advisory, Inc. Language hobbles multinational corporations

Copyright © 2009 by Common Sense Advisory, Inc. Volkswagen empowers employees to collaborate remotely and multilingually 360,000 employees around the world Language Portal and terminology management An average employee receives 80 s a day. 70% of the employees in a large company in Germany can lose one hour every working day processing incomprehensible s. MT to process and provide gisting of articles and meeting notes in other languages

Copyright © 2009 by Common Sense Advisory, Inc. IBM efforts to raise its Corporate IQ globally 400,000 employees around the world Enormous amounts of employee-generated content W3 On Demand Network – annual operational savings of US$2B plus fostering collaboration across the company IBM publishes hundreds of articles per week for employees: – Some now being translated and distributed via MT – Employees can comment on or suggest alternate translations BluePedia internal wiki: – In English and German – Encyclopedia of general knowledge about IBM, co-authored by IBMers for IBMers. – Single, global co-authoring platform enables the development and implementation of a common worldwide vocabulary and easy recognition and identification of subject matter experts.’ – Being plugged into MT backbone with employee feedback

Copyright © 2009 by Common Sense Advisory, Inc. How a company can increase its Corporate IQ Leverage the insight and experiences that everyone has in their heads Combine that with the data at hand in desktops (physical and silicon), servers, etc. and in other forms Trawl the oceans of data that we know exist, but don’t necessarily access or understand Broaden the capture, search, and leverage to any language to eliminate the “existential paradox” of whether information exists

Copyright © 2009 by Common Sense Advisory, Inc. Enter “knowledge management” Knowledge management is the process through which organizations generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based assets. It involves codifying what employees, partners and customers know, and sharing that information among employees, departments and even with other companies in an effort to devise best practices.  In summary, identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences – jazyk by neměl záležitost 2

Copyright © 2009 by Common Sense Advisory, Inc. The challenge: Create a vibrant knowledge economy inside an organization Amalgamate communities of interest inside a company – workgroups, virtual teams, special projects Harvest value from information that flows freely among the individuals in these groups, and among the groups Major characteristics: – Manage knowledge as capital – Make distribution efficient and accessible – Make the means of producing knowledge widely available – Enable global scope  make sure knowledge flows into other corporate languages

Copyright © 2009 by Common Sense Advisory, Inc. Time to blow up typical knowledge silo economies Feudal economies: – Workers labor in isolated knowledge patches – It’s hard to capture what’s in their heads, hard to share (protectionism) Centralized: – Servers with applications like data warehousing centralize information – Hard to access, need to know – Unstructured data never captured except in disconnected CMS – Focus on Notes, Exchange, and other command-and-control servers Whether feudal or centralized, language is often left out of the knowledge equation Feudal Minimal exchange Centralized Exchange Domino Exchange Domino Structured access

Copyright © 2009 by Common Sense Advisory, Inc. Liberation technology for Corporate IQ: Social networking tools inside Enterprise 2.0 Collaborate: work on projects concurrently Search: locate other users or content Link: group similar users or content Author: write blogs, wikis, terminology Tag: provide metadata for any content Recommend: advise users or content Alert: Subscribe to feeds or flows Twitter: broadcast activities within development groups Challenge: Do all this, across all languages.

Copyright © 2009 by Common Sense Advisory, Inc. Compare and contrast with traditional business solutions for data access and intelligence Flexible and freeform tools: fewer or no barriers to authoring (good and bad), lower learning curve Network effect of freely available, widely distributed, broadly used tools over existing IP networks Social networking elements enable transparency of access, diversity of content and community, and open structures Top it off with machine translation: Pump massive amounts of internal content through MT engines, with employee-sourced post-editing

Copyright © 2009 by Common Sense Advisory, Inc. Which project first? Use the corporate collective to make high-value, employee-generated content available to all staff. Innovation and invention Usability design and engineering Knowledge base extension Translation of critical (and not-so-critical) materials Stuff that has yet to be thought of

Copyright © 2009 by Common Sense Advisory, Inc.

Summary: Harvesting employee labor in building out multilingual Corporate IQ Many employees are forced to operate in a language that is not up to their skill set Employees are a huge linguistic asset Machine translation provides project collaborators with a common ground for discussion, complemented by employee feedback Employees will be motivated by the Salary Continuation Program, loyalty, and recognition

Copyright © 2009 by Common Sense Advisory, Inc. Don DePalma commonsenseadvisory.com x 1001 Research: Blog: Insight for global market leaders Questions?