On converting ideas into configurable platforms.

Software engineers are lazy. Specifically, they despise solving the same problem more than once. This laziness has led to many of the innovations we have seen over the last half century. When properly channeled, laziness drives software engineers to create flexible tools which can be adapted to many purposes.

I founded Knowledge Architecture without understanding we would become a product company. It quickly became clear to us that we were encountering similar problems which could best be solved with configurable products, not one-off consulting. We channeled the passions, creativity, and resources of the company into building a platform of software tools. Driven by the insights of our clients, prospects, partners, and competitors, our tools continue to improve every quarter.

I spent the first ten years of my career with three companies. The first was a technology consulting firm, the subsequent two were architecture firms. As I moved into leadership roles, I began to do more public speaking, first internally, and eventually at industry conferences and roundtables. I also wrote a little bit. But beyond working at the Gap in high school, I never had a sales position, certainly not a marketing position.

All that changed when I started our company. I read and read and read the stories of founders and books on entrepreneurship. I am eternally grateful to Jason Fried, Guy Kawasaki, and Steve Blank for sharing their insights and philosophies towards starting and growing businesses, which I tried on like clothing, keeping the pieces that fit, modifying the bits that were almost right, and gradually developing my own style.

What I find interesting about Jason, Guy, and Steve, is that they approach marketing in the same way that they approach developing software — in a word, lazy. Like the lazy software engineer, the lazy marketer wants to solve a problem once and move on, getting the maximum leverage out of their ideas by making them into configurable platforms, not wasting their energies on one-off presentations, or articles, or books. Let me give you an example.

Over the last two years, we have built over 20 intranets for architects and engineers on Synthesis, our social intranet platform. Our team quickly began to recognize patterns in the way that intranets evolve over time. For example, most firms tend to seed their intranets with content like benefits, employee handbooks, policies and procedures, and graphic standards. From there, they begin to use their intranet for internal communications, to share firm news, people and project updates, softball scores, or pictures from community service projects. Over time we have found that intranets become resources for finding experts, connecting communities of practice, and even driving thought leadership content by bubbling up insights from projects.

We struggled for a long time to codify these observations, which were trapped deep in the gray matter of intuition and experience, into a tool we could use in practice with clients. By chance, I attended a presentation three months ago by Christine Brack of ZweigWhite. She re-introduced me to the Capabilities Maturity Model framework, which was just the armature we needed to structure our thinking on intranets. Our Intranet Maturity Model is below.

Here’s where the lazy software engineer/marketer part of me kicked in. I began testing our Intranet Maturity Model in sales calls. A typical sales call for me starts with introductions and a review of a prospect’s current intranet. Then we walk through the Intranet Maturity Model and apply it to their organization. Our prospective clients get a window into how we think, a chance to reflect on their current accomplishments, and a model for thinking about their aspirations. This allows us a shared vocabulary. Beyond sales, I have used the Intranet Maturity Model in marketing. It has been the centerpiece of several conference presentations this spring, and here it is again, in a blog post. Converting ideas into configurable platforms indeed.

Through practice, the Intranet Maturity Model continues to evolve. For example, several clients have suggested that while the model is useful when applied to an overall intranet, it is even more useful when applied to specific sections of an intranet. So while intranet sections on offices and departments might only have aspirations of evolving to a Level 2 in the framework, intranet sections on market sectors or services usually have aspirations of Level 5.

We also continue to improve the Intranet Maturity Model through feedback we get from question and answer sections of marketing presentations and workshops, which further solidifies my belief that practice tools should be able to be repurposed as marketing and sales tools, and vice versa. By carrying ideas through practice, marketing, and sales we continue to sharpen and polish them, in a way that they would not be if they remained siloed in any one of those areas.

This is a classic case of integrated knowledge management and thought leadership — taking unstructured, tacit knowledge and converting it into structured, explicit knowledge in the form of a tool, which can be used repeatedly by multiple members of the firm for a variety of purposes.

So when Bob Buday asks, do thought leadership marketing and knowledge management relate?, my answer is emphatically yes. They not only relate, they are inextricably linked.