June 2004 Archives

I was talking this morning with some people from the Pan-Europe organization in France and we were wondering how we could attract more attention on Knowledge Management from politicians and corporate leaders. The problem is that sharing knowledge is usually perceived by those guys as being extremely important, but not urgent. And everybody knows that only urgent matters are actually taken care of.

We scratched our heads for a while to try to find an "urgent issue" underlying KM, and finally came with this idea of "loss of knowledge" ("perte de savoir" sounds better in French), which characterizes Europe today, mainly from the combination of three factors: Brain drain, unemployment and ageing population.

We decided to go for it and use this as our hook. We think (hope) that our leaders will at least agree to the statement that we in Europe are loosing our knowledge and must do something about it, rather than listen to our ballyhooed smart talk about the need for Europe to be more innovative.

I just attended EBG's conference on weblogs and their use in the corporate world. Loïc Le Meur was there, among others, and presented a couple of interesting things (Main ideas conveyed can be found on his French weblog on a post called "Les blogs et leurs applications en entreprise et pour les médias")

I learned that:
- Disney employees have started bloging and that 250 Disney blogs were now up and running. They actually came from a grassroots initiative from people on the field until the management realized that they could no longer be ignored. Weblog posts at Disney are now compared to "public e-mails", which makes a lot of sense from a communication standpoint (don't rock the boat too much...). Ross writes more about this.
- The number of weblogs worldwide grew from 5 million to 10 million today in just one year. Wow!
- Nokia now offers direct links to downloads through standard RSS feeds;
- The reaction of uninformed corporate staff (the majority) to the weblog phenomenon is usually quite primitive: This is an ugly web site / We cannot accept loss of control on content published / We'll put our lawyers on this.

Loïc knows a lot about blogging technology, so this was indeed a very good meeting. On the "we'll-do-better-next-time" side, Loïc's presentation sounded too much like a sales pitch. Some sales people just can't help selling, and don't seem to realize how it can turn people off.

In a previous post, I tried to figure out how blogging networks and communities of practice relate to one another. This post has attracted quite a lot of attention thanks to Lilia and the KnowledgeBoard. This time, I am trying to establish a link between social networking and blogging. But this one is just a starting point.

I just came back from a full day event at ENSAM in Paris where students presented their project reports before going on holiday. This was organized by Marc de Fouchecour, a KM pundit in France, and professor at ENSAM. Event/Course - PROJETS KM ENSAM

I was truly impressed by the quality of their work, and amazed to realize that many of them actually "get it" as we thought and experimented at Schneider Electric. As Marc put it (approximate quote):

As a professor of Knowledge Management, I have always tried to keep up with the latest developments worldwide so as to maintain a leading edge over my students. For the first time this year, I did not succeed. Networking is much more natural to students than to teachers, and too much has been going on lately with respect to collaboration technology.

This seems to indicate that KM is more a socio-political movement than a academic discipline.

I just thought of a translation for "Knowledge Management" in French that would sound better than the horrible "gestion des connaissances". I would use the two words "Enseignement & Renseignement". Enseignement means education in the teaching sense, and renseignement means advice or intelligence in the military sense of the word.

The fact that the two words differ by only one letter, and that they have very different yet complementary meanings, female and male, yin and yang etc. makes me feel good about it ;)

In "The origins of Culture", his latest book:

The origin of knowledge is also the origin of order, i.e. of symbolic classification

Imitation and learning cannot be separated

I finally found the time to upload my ppt presentation made in Lisbon on June 1. for the KnowledgeBoard SIG meeting.
It's called "Web-based collaborative spaces - lessons learned at Schneider Electric" and you can download it here. Caution! It's a 2meg file.

It's a shame we didn't have time to discuss it in details, because I had a lot more to say than I actually did on those slides.

As an example, page 12 presents a person as a collection of identities, each one being tied to a community of some sort and embodied by a name (or a pseudonym), an e-mail address and a web site. As a KM professional, my identity is represented by this "mopsos" weblog, and the associated e-mail address which I only use with other KM professionals; as a Schneider employee, I have KM pages on the company Intranet, and a corporate e-mail address; as French citizen I have a "wanadoo" e-mail address provided by France Telecom, which I use for every "official" form of communication; I have a hotmail address I use for all people I don't trust and who ask for my e-mail address etc. At the end of the day, I am a collection of identities, and I behave according to the rules of the associated community each time I use this identity. And I should be the only one able to make the connection between those different identities. I find this rather new (?) concept of identity extremely powerful for the design of future collaborative tools. Etienne Wenger suggests that identity will be the major issue of human societies in the 21st century. I am not sure of what he actually means by this, but it certainly resonates with ideas presented in those slides.

Hideo Yamazaki, CKO of Nomura Research Institute, wrote a very interesting article in the KM Review, also published on the Knowledge Board called Knowledge Communities in Japan: A Case Study - 10 Mar 2004. The paragraph on anonymity struck me:

Another feature is that in some top-level companies, knowledge communities are operational on an employee-nick-name basis (knowledge exchange based on handle name). Actually, this trend is a big surprise even to me, though I was born and raised in Japan. Use of multiple identities such as handle-name on internet had been considered incompatible with Japanese traditional culture for a long time.
However, it is being gradually accepted in business community that the use of a nickname enables employees to exchange knowledge more easily, irrespective of organizational hierarchy. Interestingly, use of nickname revived altruism, another Japanese tradition of collectivism, in the new form.

On second thought, this only holds in the world of business decisions, and not necessarily in the world of business advice. I usually can detect whether a new idea is relevant and worth applying to my current job, even if I know nothing about its origin. I trust the organisation (brand name) that sits behind this idea to do its job as a filter of bad ideas.

In Japan, the sense of belonging to an organization is strong, and the employee trusts the company he or she works with much more than we do here in the West. An idea "brought to you by Mitsubishi Electric", even an anonymous one, is worth considering.

Maybe this could work here as well, at least in companies with a very strong and positive brand name, where employees take pride in being part of the gang, like in a fraternity. Back in 1982, at Dassault Aviation, at a time when Marcel Dassault was still alive, I can say that this would probably have worked, because we were very proud of our company, and we trusted it to hire good people.

Also, Angela Nobre was referring yesterday during the KnowledgeBoard SIG leader meeting in Lisbon to the GemEva experience at Gemplus where a virtual character, GemEva, could be called upon by assistants for any question regarding administrative issues. Behind this character was a hot line rotating organization staffed by a community of assistants. In that case, the pseudonym is shared and represents (embodies) the entire community.

Interesting...