For the first time in history, the world has access to a vast, multilingual information pool of billions of web pages, documents, videos, photos, images, chat, maps, blogs, books, theses, articles, abstracts, news, translations and much more.
This pool has become an indispensible source of knowledge for all of us. Google’s 40-plus search tools, Applications and products enable people world-wide to access and organise this pool around virtually any context to create instantaneous, customised knowledge.
What kinds of knowledge do we need during a typical working day? There are two broad types:
Before we act, we need-
- Knowledge for understanding and deciding – when, where, why, who and what (When should I apply? Where is the office located? Why am I not eligible? Who is this person? What does this tool do? How is this stock performing? How much does this cost?): this is knowledge about Topics.
Once we understand and decide to take action, we need-
- Knowledge for doing (How do I write a contract or a proposal? Prepare a budget? Hire or fire someone? Run an marketing campaign? Calculate my refund? Place an order?): this is knowledge about Tasks.
A single Google search can deliver topic knowledge instantaneously.
However, in situations where people need to know how to perform tasks, Google’s tools and Applications are less complete. Tasks and processes are usually created to meet specific legal, regulatory, compliance or quality standards, and must be quite structured. That is, step-by-step instructions for action, rather than a simple dissertation. gStepOne extends the Google toolset to provide this structure.
With gStepOne anyone can map their “How-To” task knowledge the way they want it done and integrate the relevant Google knowledge base elements and tools to create task wizards that people can use to produce consistent, compliant, real-world outcomes.
The gStepOne – Google Apps combination enables anyone to:
- Capture organisational “know-how” and make it available to everyone for multiple re-use.
- Support users through each step in a business process via a Wizard, automatically accessing the relevant Google applications, tools and supporting information to enable the user to perform the task.
- Empower anyone in an organisation to perform any process as accurately and efficiently as the process expert, without the expert being there.
- Create a tangible knowledge asset (a library of Wizards) that can be managed like any other business asset.
gStepOne not only bridges the Task Knowledge gap in Google Apps, it unites and configures the disparate components of the Google toolset into a cogent whole, on a task by task basis. Using gStepOne is like conducting an orchestra: the elements remain the same, but the outcome varies depending on how they are combined.
gStepOne Team
