The Big Three American auto companies are in turmoil. And they did it to themselves.

President Obama said, “The pain being felt in places that rely on our auto industry is not the fault of our workers, who labor tirelessly and desperately want to see their companies succeed. And it is not the fault of all the families and communities that supported manufacturing plants throughout the generations. Rather, it is a failure of leadership – from Washington to Detroit – that led our auto companies to this point.”

Certainly the economy has complicated the auto-makers lives. But their troubles began long before the start of the current recession. And it begs the question; “What could Detroit have done differently to avoid such a precipitous decline?” More importantly, “Are they doing the right thing now to improve their business in the future?”.

The key, as in any business, is a focus on customers. What do they want? What do they care about in an automobile? What do they not like and is Detroit fixing it?

The voice of the customer can be heard, loud and clear – if Detroit made the effort. Everyday customers weigh in on the internet in the focus of chat rooms, blogs, and auto review sites. In fact they do so at a phenomenal rate. The trick is to read enough or process enough of their thoughts and opinions to make sense of it all.

The semantic technology at Expert System can do the processing – at a speed and with accuracy that rivals human readers. Here is what we found.

Of the Big 3 Ford looks like it is in relatively good shape. We collected and measured customer sentiment on an overall brand level between Ford and Chrysler. That chart is below. It shows that both companies maintained an even impression in the minds of consumers until very recently. By nearly the 4th quarter of 2008 did desire for the Chrysler brand begin to dip significantly below that of Ford. Why?

Average Brand Sentiment Ford vs. Chrysler

The answer lies in looking at the different features and identifying where problems lie – from the perspective of the customer. Every car lie within a brand will have a range of opinions about their merits or pitfalls.

Most car models have a range of likes and dislikes across their features from very poor to excellent. This would be expected. This range of opinion is shown below for all features of the Chrysler brand.

Opinion on all Chrysler Features

But once you dive into the features – acceleration, brakes, engines, exterior, fuel consumption, interior, price, seats, speed and test drive – a big difference emerges. As shown in the next two graphs a predominance of a poor rating on brakes and engines shows itself.

If Chrysler had listened to what customers had been saying for over 2½ years it would seem they would have had time to fix the problem and prevented the decline in it overall brand image at the close of 2008. How hard would it have been to add larger more functional breaks, and at what cost? Granted engines might be a harder engineering trick but isn’t that the main reason Chrysler is now getting into bed with Fiat – for their engines? So it seems President Obama is right when he says the problems rest with management.

GM - The Right Mix of Brands?

In the last several days we have learned that GM will add Pontiac to the list of brands it will shed in addition to Saab, Saturn and Hummer. That will leave Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet and GMC. Certainly there are financial, contractual and technology reasons to reduce the brand mix in this way but is that what customers want? And should the voice of the customer be paramount in any restructuring decision? Let’s take a look.

Customer Sentiment GMC vs. Pontiac

In the minds of customers’ Pontiac edges out GMC in the excellent and good categories. Perhaps not by much but it does seem odd GM would abandon a brand that has a higher impression in the mind of those who are prepared to part with their money.

Customer Sentiment GMC vs Saab

While smaller in volume terms the comparison is even starker when it comes to Saab. If we compared Chevrolet to Saab the differences shrink but not by much. Customers clearly love their Saab more than they love the other brands GM has elected to keep. It’s as if the local jewellery store decided to sell off all its diamonds so they could keep selling gem stones. They make more money now but have less of a chance to make money later. It doesn’t seem like a recipe for long term health.

Who Has a Say?

The Office of Public Liaison in the new Obama is promising to listen to citizens as it considers policy direction, legislation and otherwise brings the people to Washington rather than bringing Washington to the people. The most concrete of these proposals is to allow a 5 day comment period by citizens via the internet before the President signs any legislation. Even now anyone can offer an opinion directly to the President here. You can contribute up to 500 characters. That is roughly 40 words.

The windows are open in the White House and a new breeze of open, inclusiveness is blowing right in. This is certainly a change over the previous 8 years when the White House was shut tight, the air inside growing staler by the day. But I wonder if the administration is prepared for the hurricane force winds that could result?

If you ask for comments on pending legislation how many comments will the White House get? There are some hints from around the blogosphere. Go to Technorati and ask for a count of the word “bailout” over the last 6 months. The chart below is what you get.

The peak of over 14,000 blog posts was around the passage of the first muti-billion bank bailout in the early Fall. An estimate of the average around this spike looks to be roughly 6,000 posts per day. As the debate and finalization of the ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) and second half of the bank bailout money is finalized you can be sure the number will spike again. But let’s be conservative and assume 1/3 of the average would like to comment directly to the White House on the ARRA over the 5 day period promised. That would be 10,000 comments President Obama says he will consider before signing the legislation. The current estimate of US bloggers is 22.6 million so 10,000 comments may only be a drop in the bucket.

Short of a small army of readers how will Valerie Jarrett and her staff understand this “wisdom of the crowd” input? We do know that President Obama has hired some tech vets to lead this kind of effort.

Chief among these is a former Google product manager Katie Jacobs Stanton who will be the new President’s “director of citizen participation” come March. It is not just a coincidence that Ms. Stanton was in charge of Google Moderator.

A quick look at this tool reveals the ability for anyone to post a question (or I suppose a comment) and then have others vote for its importance relative to all the other questions posted. Looking through the questions posted around the Presidential debates is another estimate I can find that might look like what the White House will experience. The breakdown of topics, questions asked, votes recorded and citizens participating look like the table below.

Ok here is the rub. No matter how you count what can be expected from citizens participating in the new administration technology beyond posting and voting is going to be needed. It’s not clear on Google Monitor if the categories were decided before the questions came in or after everyone posted. In any case I took the top vote getting comments from each of these categories and analyzed them again using our semantic technology to see what categories come out. I could find 90 categories in total across all those who commented. The top categories (more than 1% of the total) were the following;

That’s easily more than twice what Google Moderator can bucket things into. The point is that true participation means more than a simple tally. It should mean listening, really listening to the context, the nuances, and the breadth of what citizen’s experience in their daily lives and what they expect from their government. Volume is only the first problem for citizen participation. The bigger issue is, as the intelligence community who is familiar with these problems puts it, finding dots, connecting dots and understanding dots.

I believe semantics to be a core technology that can not only process the volume of what the White House is about to experience but can also trick out the full picture of true citizen participation. It will not do President Obama any good promise to listen to his most important constituency and latter be accused of lending a dull ear to the process. There is great promise in having the breadth and range of American opinion directly influence the highest office in the land. Everyone can see technology is the key to extending our democratic reach to every living room and kitchen table in the land. The peril is in not applying enough or the right technology resulting in enough citizens feeling as though they were not sufficiently heard. That would do democracy harm indeed.

“If Hewlett Packard knew what Hewlett Packard knows, we would be three times more profitable.”

It’s fun (and also a bit alarming) to realize how this statement made some years ago by Lew Platt (CEO of HP in the Nineties) is still current and more effective than most recent definitions of what Knowledge Management is supposed to be.

In the business world, the KM concept has undergone so many transformations, and it’s been associated to with so many killer applications (content management,  data-information management, e-learning,  portals,  contents access via Intranet… ) that we can compare it to a phoenix: it seems to be dying, but then it re-emerges from its own ashes, mutates, and becomes powerful again.

Beyond names and definitions, the only certainty is the issue for which KM was created. We are flooded with an enormous  quantities of potentially interesting data that we are not able to use, and therefore controlling what we have and what we know is becoming more and more difficult.