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Business Solutions

WORKING OUT LOUD: THE RACE TO KNOW

WHAT YOUR ENTERPRISE KNOWS

NAOMI SOUZA enough to just hire talented professionals and let them
Director of Presence and Assets do their work—the organization needs to know and share
RealFoundations what everyone is working on, how they’re doing their
work and what they’ve learned. Others in the enterprise
could use that information to excel in their own work and
“WORKING OUT LOUD” DESCRIBES new ways of bring- make the company more successful.
ing social collaboration and narration techniques into the
workplace. It can be defined with a simple formula: WOL Working out loud lets people:
= Observable Work + Narrating Your Work. “Observable • Quickly find answers to questions—they have easy
Work’” means putting work in a place where others can access to knowledgeable colleagues and valuable infor-
have the benefit of seeing and potentially engaging with mation that the organization has captured.
it to inform their own work. “Narrating Your Work” means
providing context for the observable work so others can • Read fewer emails—they’re continually communicating
determine its applicability to their own projects. and sharing through other newer and more collaborative
technologies, creating threads that capture historical and
The Business Case for Working Out Loud ongoing conversations, e.g., Teams, Yammer, Slack, etc.
The business case for WOL is strong and gaining veloc- • Forge strong and highly productive professional relation-
ity every day in a world of exponential data proliferation. ships—via these newer technologies, they can simply
Currently, an astounding 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are connect, in real time, with colleagues anywhere in the
produced every day, according to Domo, a computer soft- world who have similar professional interests and/or
ware company that specializes in business intelligence relevant knowledge.
and data visualization. The pace is only accelerating as
the Internet of Things continues to grow. By 2020, 1.7 MB • Attend fewer meetings—they can mine historical conver-
of data will be created every second for every person on sations for information and perspective in order to make
the planet, Domo predicts. quicker, well-informed decisions, reducing the need for
verbal discussions either in-person or remotely via video
Complicating matters further, more than 90 percent of or voice call.
data at this point is in the form of emails, text messages, • Work whenever and wherever—they’re able to access
images, videos, conversations, online meetings, calls, cloud-hosted technologies 24/7 regardless of their loca-
graphics, presentations, stories, etc. This is contextual tion and time zone to create, process, access and act
data—versus tabular or structured data recorded in a upon information.
table or database. Leaders at companies of all sizes rely
on contextual data to make key business decisions so • Establish personal brand recognition—they can show-
this information really needs to reside someplace that’s case what they know whenever they want to do so.
organized and easily accessible. WOL enables this. Of • Have greater transparency into their organization’s
course, the larger a company is, the more important it is work—everyone can participate by sharing information
to work out loud because the organization presumably is and ideas.
producing more data containing actionable intelligence.
Companies that figure out how to find and leverage both
WOL also can help capture the knowledge inside the their contextual data and what employees know will be
heads of team members wherever they’re located and more successful than those that do not. Companies
whatever their role within the organization. It’s not perform better when they know what they know and can

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RC19 EDGE Spring All but Covers - final - 19APR.indd 60 4/19/19 3:17 PM