Part Five: The Viva Topics ‘Trail’

Topic Creation and Topic Surfacing

March 2021 | Insights From the CEO – Finally, the longest, most complex and likely most rewarding trail(s) in the Viva Trail System is Topics.

 

Where Do the Trails Go?

Topics is sort of a ‘super trail’. It is both a trail you can take to a collection of knowledge topics AND a whole network of trails, so that knowledge can find its way to you! We saw in the previous explorations that Connections and Learning are close siblings – each takes you to, and lets you search and favorite/arrange, existing content and resources.

Topics is a cousin to those two, and a cousin with added superpowers. Where Connections and Learning make it easier to get to existing content and resources, Topics uses a mass of existing material – our existing documents, sites and messages – to create something new: a ‘lake’, if we can extend the trail metaphor a bit more, of knowledge topics. Topics doesn’t create a new mountain or river, but it does create this new lake with the waters that are already there.

There are two part to the Topics service:

  • Topic Creation/Curation
    • The first step is to put AI to work, scanning as much of your existing documents, sites and messages (we set it loose across our entire tenant, so in our case that’s ~3 million documents) for it to bring back suggested topics. For each topic it will also suggest a description/definition, alternate names, experts within the firm who seem to know about it, documents, communities and sites that contain more information about the topic. (For further reference, it started finding a batch of Topics after 48 hours and has been running now for 30 days and has gotten through our entire document set). It continues to run, looking for new material from which topics might be mined and augmenting topics that have received human curation. This is superpower number one what makes Viva Topics so different from all of the document management efforts of the past, with their intensively human manual setup and maintenance. AI gives us a big head start. In our case, it would easily have taken 10,000 hours and a year (likely more!) to get the raw list of suggested Topics that AI developed (by itself!) in a matter of weeks.
    • The second step is human curation. Designated experts/curators work with the AI-suggested topics and refine them – adjust the description, add/edit alternate names, pin from the suggested, list the primary experts on the topic and edit/arrange documents, communities, teams and sites that provide deeper information about the topic. When all that is done, then they formally publish a topic to our tenant.
  • Topic Surfacing and Access
    • The second superpower. Now that a topic has been defined, refined and published in our enterprise, that Topic will find you wherever you are working in the ecosystem. It’s as though the topic is cutting a trail on the spot from the knowledge to bring the topic to you, right where you are. If there is a topic, such as BTR (Build-to-Rent), that has been defined (the first step), anytime you receive or send a message (in Teams, Yammer, Outlook) and anytime you read a page or post in SharePoint that has ‘BTR’ in it, then BTR will be highlighted. Hovering over the highlighted topic will then bring the Topic Card to you, right where you are. This card has a topic summary, as well as a way to click through to get the full detail – all without having to leave what you’re doing.
    • In addition to this instant topic delivery there will also be a Topic app in Teams. This is like a trail to the knowledge lake. In that app, I can search for and see topics that are being suggested to me based on what I’ve been doing and whom I’ve been interacting with. For those who have worked with Delve, this app appears to be Delve-like but with topics rather than documents.

Of the four, Topics is the one that will both require the most human effort to activate and will take the most lead-time before it can be ‘spun up’. In our case, the AI suggestion engine took about a month of elapsed time. We estimate that it will take daily, part-time work of a dozen or so internal knowledge experts/curators, and another month of elapsed time to refine and publish a core set of several thousand topics. We were quite early in getting the AI going to where we were watching its behavior and learning on a daily basis. We made an early decision to stop human curation and let the AI work on its own for several weeks. My guess is that as more information emerges about how the AI works in the real world, there will be guidance that would allow the human curation to work in parallel with ongoing AI processing.

 

When Will It Be Available?

Topics has been released in SharePoint at present (mid-March). SharePoint both houses the Topics Management experience (where experts/curators work) and shows the end-user Topic Cards experience in SharePoint Pages. Expansion to Teams, Yammer and Outlook for the end-user Topic Cards experience should be appearing this Spring and Summer.

Note: You should allow for both a fair amount of time and some concentrated curation effort to build your initial set of enterprise Topics. Once you make the decision to turn it on in your enterprise tenant, you should expect to let the AI run for several weeks as it plows through your documents, messages, Teams, Communities and Sites to develop Topic suggestions. Then you will need to dedicate some time from highly knowledgeable individuals to curate and augment AI suggestions.

 

What Will It Cost?

The additional license fee for the full Topics experience is $5/user/month. Note: This license fee needs to be paid not just for the knowledge managers and curators but for any individual for whom you want Topic Cards to be surfaced in their message and activity streams. For reference, in our enterprise we have licensed Topics for every user.

 

Additional Resources

 

Connect with Us

If you would like to continue this discussion on Microsoft Viva, contact us by email or +1 214 292 7000.

 

About the Author

Chris Shaida is an Enterprise Managing Consultant and Founder of RealFoundations. Mr. Shaida founded RealFoundations to provide a place where like-minded professionals can focus their deep industry and solution knowledge and passion to help improve the operations of our real estate industry and corporate real estate clients.

 

About RealFoundations

RealFoundations (RF) is the world’s foremost professional services firm focused solely on the real estate industry. Through our delivery of Management Consulting and Managed Services, we help companies that develop, own, operate, service or invest in real estate make better, more profitable decisions. We are proud partners to over 500 real estate companies around the globe, providing accelerated solutions that solve some of real estate’s most complex challenges. We Make Real Estate Run Better.