Mopsos

Many KM gurus I meet are surprised by the rather sudden and unexpected lack of interest for knowledge management as a consulting practice, especially in this country, where some of the former leading KM consulting firms are in deep trouble or out of business. It is stange indeed, when so many publications announce that the "knowledge revolution" is under way and that "victory will go to the smartest nations and countries" (Newsweek), which is precisely what KM strives to achieve.

Does this mean that we don't need KM consultants any more because KM has become a mainstream practice? Or rather, does this mean that the market has shifted elsewhere and that we should adapt? I think the latter of course.

My interpretation, though I am not in the consulting business, is that KM consulting has been undercut by the explosion of personal tools. When the market values of Google, YouTube or MySpace reach such obscene numbers, it means that a fundamental shift has taken place in KM and that "traditional" KM consultants and CKOs didn't see it coming, or like myself did not fully grasp the consequences. Only a few years back, a good KM consultant or a good CKO would focus on the knowledge life cycle of his client's organization, would perform a diagnosis about the existing silos and bottlenecks blocking the free flow of knowledge, and would derive recommendations on organization, processes and tools. She would then leave it to the management to implement those recommendations, according to the standard business model of consulting. The implicit model is that change would be initiated and controled from the top of the organization, and would unfold at the pace of any strategic change initiative.

I think there were two flaws in that model. First, it focused on content, be it documents (content management) or people (expert location), and failed to recognize the complex nature and extreme vitality of social networks booming everywhere on the web, where the focus lies in understanding the behavior of links rather than nodes. You cannot control a social network. You can only apply some form of magnetic field to it so that it orients itself in a certain way. But that's not Knowledge Management. It's Good Management. Second, it relied on entreprise tools, which are typically industrialized -i.e. mainstream- products under the control of IT departments, which are not paid to innovate but to control costs. CKOs went through the same hurddles. We gradually found ourselves lost in the middle of nowhere, with intern students on one side introducing blogs and wikis in the company from the ground up, and IT departments outsourcing entreprise collaboration tools to Accenture or IBM.

I tend to think that the days of KM Consultants and CKOs chartered to develop the practice of knowledge sharing in large organizations are gone. Why? Because it is happening in unplanned and self-organizing ways through social networking tools; because the world economy is booming, and companies don't suffer too much from the lack of innovation or the conflict of generations; because knowledge sharing has become a mass consumption market, and far quicker than anyone could imagine.

Does this mean that all is well and that we should move on to work on something else? I am not sure. The deadly issues of organizational silos that impede the circulation of knowledge and prevent innovation as well as the issue of intellectual property leaking out of the company due to bad information management are still a conundrum for most large organizations. And these can only be solved by KM approaches, which we could call Social (or Value?) Network Engineering for the sake of switching to another less loaded phrase. So there is still plenty of room for consultants. But the question becomes: Is the traditional consulting approach adapted to the complex nature of social networks? Probably not. A report giving strategic recommendations and actions to be taken to build a valuable social network in a company would be perceived as totally out of touch, and rightly so. If you want to sell a consulting mission in that sphere, you should be prepared to deliver a result, not a recommendation. A result is the achievement of a business objective through social networking. The business objective is materialized by indicators, and the social network is materialized by a physical and/or virtual space where the magnetic field of change will be applied.

This new form of consulting is necessarily experimental by nature and inspired by what the military NCW doctrine calls "Effects-Based Operations". It relies on three disciplines:

• 1. Strategy, which I would define as the ability to convert a vision into a clear intent. Being #1 or growing sales 20% is a vision. Acquiring company X or launching a new offering is an intent.


• 2. Mediation, which is the mastery of different forms of collaboration and associated facilitation, from online forums to large physical venues, as well as broadcasted communication.


• 3. Systems Integration, which is the ability to design, prototype, test and deploy very quickly whatever combination of IT application needed to support the collaboration patterns needed.

Headshift could be an example of such a modern KM consulting organization, and there are some equivalents of this within advanced innovation-driven companies like Infosys. The KM team of Solvay is not far away from this model (By the way, I would dream of managing such a team, so if you have any idea, let me know ;-)

Incidentally, the revenue model could be a combination of fees, subscriptions and derived revenues from intellectual property rights, which would make this form of consulting very exciting.

In all cases, the question remains: what painful business situations would require this form of consulting aiming at consolidating a social network around a new strategy? I can only think of a few power transfer situations like:

There are of course many other situations, like a new strategy, a company program, or a reorganization, when creating a new momentum is necessary, but I don't find much room for consulting there, because it's the very essence of management to build that momentum, and executives usually think that they can do it by themselves, even though the world has changed so much that this becomes questionable.

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