December 2004 Archives

Interesting article on blogging for marketing in MarketingMag of New Zealand [thanks Adrine]. The article refers to Ben McConnell's book "Creating Customer Evangelists". It also tells the story of the now famous Raging Cow boycott epitomizing the failure of marketing blogs set up by blind marketing managers who still view the internet as a new form of broadcasting, haven't heard about Cluetrain Manifesto and consider blogging as a futile teenager activity. Helloooo?

Authenticity is by no means needed just for blogs; it’s now essential for all forms of marketing. It’s just that, by their very personal nature, blogs accentuate the need for authenticity (...)
Marketers would do well to encourage a company’s product development leaders, customer service managers or ceos to start blogging. Encourage conversations. Create more transparency. Give up message control, for control in the age of relationships is futile. (...)
“I've heard some people complain they can’t monetize their blog. That’s a short-sighted approach; a blog is more like investing in R&D with customers and prospects.”
That’s where the real opportunities lie in blogging – not so much in getting your message across but in building dialogue with customers.

Amen.

Blogging is like standing in your underpants says Rogier Brussee through Andy.
Indeed, it can be quite dangerous to blog about the things you do for the company that pays you. On the other hand, it can also be quite dangerous if you don't. Exchanging ideas with your peers can be a big money saver, and keeping a log of the things you do and say can come in handy in legal fights about IP. There are times when you have to stand in your underpants anyway. Disclosing is a sign of love. You have to dis-clothe yourself (ha!ha! French humor) to have children. People started to dress up when they became scared of each other (see the book of Genesis).

Undoubtedly, the future lies in multiple blogs under one single editor: one per community of trust (company, friends, community of practice...) It appears unlikely to me that we will continue to blog to the entire world about our thoughts when it becomes easier to attach access rights metadata for every single post, thus allowing us to target our messages, as we do with Instant Messenging.

Incidentally, this will help reduce the amount of spam in our weblog comments. (By the way, I wonder how you guys deal with this. I am having more and more of those, around 50 per day. They don't seem to care about never being published anyway...)

You must try Serence KlipFolio to manage your RSS feeds.

At last a product that allows users to monitor RSS feeds from small "klips" and develop alerts without the need for an aggregator. This might come in handy to introduce RSS feeds to technophobes who don't want to change the way they work. It only takes a very small share of their desktop real estate. And klips can be configured with javascript...

Great stuff.

A city is not a tree from Christopher Alexander is really an inspiring paper for all people designing social spaces, whether in the physical world or in the cyberworld. It support my claim that Personal KM tools and Enterprise KM tools are born from two very different business models.

Christopher focuses on cities, i.e. physical living spaces of large communities of human beings. But I think the same reasoning applies to other human communities of the cyberworld. It also applies to those large communities that are both physical and virtual like global companies.

Christopher starts by defining two social structures the "semilattice", and the "tree"

The semilattice axiom goes like this: A collection of sets forms a semilattice if and only if, when two overlapping sets belong to the collection, the set of elements common to both also belongs to the collection.

The tree axiom states: A collection of sets forms a tree if and only if, for any two sets that belong to the collection either one is wholly contained in the other, or else they are wholly disjoint.

I other words, a semilattice looks like this and a tree looks like that. He then argues that modern societies form an open social structure that is a semilattice, not a tree.

In a traditional society, if we ask a man to name his best friends and then ask each of these in turn to name their best friends, they will all name each other so that they form a closed group. A village is made up of a number of separate closed groups of this kind.

But today's social structure is utterly different. If we ask a man to name his friends and then ask them in turn to name their friends, they will all name different people, very likely unknown to the first person; these people would again name others, and so on outwards. There are virtually no closed groups of people in modern society. The reality of today's social structure is thick with overlap - the systems of friends and acquaintances form a semilattice, not a tree

He then observes that all artificial cities designed from scratch by urban designers and planners like Brasilia or Chandigahr reproduce a tree structure

because the mind's first function is to reduce the ambiguity and overlap in a confusing situation and because, to this end, it is endowed with a basic intolerance for ambiguity - that structures like the city, which do require overlapping sets within them, are nevertheless persistently conceived as trees.

The conclusion of the paper is ominous:

When we think in terms of trees we are trading the humanity and richness of the living city for a conceptual simplicity which benefits only designers, planners, administrators and developers. Every time a piece of a city is torn out, and a tree made to replace the semilattice that was there before, the city takes a further step toward dissociation.

In any organized object, extreme compartmentalization and the dissociation of internal elements are the first signs of coming destruction. (...)

For the human mind, the tree is the easiest vehicle for complex thoughts. But the city is not, cannot and must not be a tree. The city is a receptacle for life. If the receptacle severs the overlap of the strands of life within it, because it is a tree, it will be like a bowl full of razor blades on edge, ready to cut up whatever is entrusted to it. In such a receptacle life will be cut to pieces. If we make cities which are trees, they will cut our life within to pieces.

[through Lilia, again. Thanks, Lilia. By the way, if you finally decide to come to visit Paris, let me know ahead of time]

After wondering for three years about the business model of KM, let me summarize where I’m at. I can think of five different archetypes:

Knowledge-oriented Operating System – Windows and Linux are based on a document-centric desktop metaphor of files and folders, which is becoming more and more inappropriate as the amount of information we must process each day skyrockets. Thus, we are gradually moving toward a community-centric feed/author metaphor. The associated client software on our PCs, PDA’s and phones will thus evolve accordingly (see for example theHaystack project at MIT). The associate business model is Software Licensing, epitomized by Microsoft. There will be one major change, though. Most innovations are likely to be born in the Open Source world, and industrialized and packaged later in a commercial software product if they prove to be successful.

Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) – Banks have been the first commercial organizations to charge for money transactions, which are nothing more than data safely moved from one account to another. Other companies like eBay, AOL, (and to a lesser extent Amazon too) are doing in fact very similar things, and « social networking » companies like SixApart (Typepad), Meet-up and LinkedIn as well. Most collaboration tools belong to this Personal KM segment, because collaboration spaces are now created directly by the people who need it, without a complex workflow process. PKM companies focus on the user experience. They charge their clients for information distribution, processing, exchange and storage. They command a fee not so much for the service itself than for the quality of the service. As an illustration, e-mail is almost free, but spam-free, virus-free and malware-free e-mail is not. Mastering ID and authentification (like i-names) is going to be key here.

Enterprise Knowledge Management – Governance bodies –states, corporate staff, corporate boards, administrations, NGOs etc. – need to be able to monitor and control the flow of information that flow in and out of the communities under their authority, so as to enforce common laws and rules, to protect their « citizens » against external threats, and to take pro-active strategic action on their behalf. Typically, companies like Autonomy, Verity, Business Objects are typically in this ball game, and the business model is a combination of license fees and services. It seems to me however that mixing Enterprise KM and Personal KM in a packaged offering, which a lot of « collaborative software » companies do, is a dangerous strategy. Not only is there a high risk of being spread too thin with a one-size-fits-all, rigid (and thus stupid) software, but the users and the governance bodies are orthogonal and often have conflicting interests. Users want ease of use, innnovation, immediate value. They have a small buying power and a big viral marketing power. Large organizations want control, processes, security and have a large buying power, but rarely generate worldwide standards. Companies specializing in Enterprise KM should thus focus on their crown jewels, business intelligence, and interfaces (aka connectors) to selected PKM tools that can easily be integrated in the overall framework.

Learning and Change – « Knowledge Management » and « Managing in the knowledge age » really mean the same thing. KM is about new social pratices and tools to integrate collective learning in our daily work, which introduces a paradigm shift in the very concept of work. This shift cannot happen overnight, and it involves a lot of ongoing education, training, coaching, facilitation and consulting services at all levels of the organization. This is the role of the « corporate university » which can be externalized to some extent. In the US, APQC is a good example of this business model, and the late IKO as well. Somewhat surprisingly however, universities and business schools only provide a very narrow spectrum of the required services, because they usually take care of just one constituency, the management, and only in off-site settings.

Intelligence services – This is to take care of the many cases when knowledge flows must be kept confidential or even secret. Operations must then be executed by a trusted third party to minimize risks. Typical example is a take-over or other forms of corporate warfare that we see developing throughout the world especially with respect to tech firms. This is typically the business model of management consultants, investment banks and specialized consulting companies like Kroll. This might explain why there are less and less junior consultants and more and more senior consultants in those firms.

I just read a remarkable article from Michael Gilbert, Marius Leibold, and Gilbert Probst called "Five styles of Customer Knowledge Management and how smart companies put them into action". Customer Knowledge Management is about "gaining, sharing and expanding knowledge of (inside) the customer: Individual or group experiences in applications, competitor behavior, possible future solutions, etc."

It raises an interesting question:

Why do many customer-driven companies not access the knowledge of their customers directly?

Indeed, companies are so used to indirect methods such as market research that they even have a hard time implementing KM systems geared at sharing the customer knowledge that salespeople have. But some do go beyond that, and really engage into meaningful conversations with their customers to:
- co-produce knowledge ("prosumerism") e.g. IKEA
- learn together ("Team-based co-learning" e.g. Amazon
- innovate ("Mutual Innovation") e.g. Silicon Graphics
- engage them in the creation process ("creation communities) e.g. Microsoft (beta releases)
- co-create future business together ("Joint Intellectual Property") e.g. Skandia

CKM can provide a significant competitive advantage to companies, but there are stumbling blocks that the authors of the article describe in details. What strikes me is the level of mutual trust needed to make this CKM approach work. This goes far beyond customer focus. It's more like customer respect

The minute you systematize something, you suck the life out of it…nobody asks questions any more – questions such as ‘why is it done this way?’ ‘Has the world changed in the interim?’ ‘Can it be done better now?’

Paul Burdick - AES

KM lies in the human practice. It is about finding good ways of doing things. Quality lies in the organizational process. It is about deploying good ways of doing things.

Oftentimes, managers think they know and subordinates don't, so they bet on processes to "deploy" their thoughts. I only know of one company where the two apparently meet: Toyota. On Toyota's production system, processes are systematically analyzed and documented down to the individual human practice. Every single change in the human practice of car assembly is systematically tested and experimented before it becomes industrialized in a process. And if the process turns out to be wrong, the line is stopped so that people can immediately investigate the cause and correct it or return to a previous "safe" process.

As John Seely Brown puts it:"It's like a ballet". And the manufacturing machine turns into a form of art.

I just had the priviledge to attend a meeting with Alain Bensoussan, the famous parisian lawyer and IP guru, together with other French KM specialists. Chloe Torres of the Alain Bensoussan law firm called the meeting so that we could work together on a «KM Charter», which could be proposed to French organizations as a governance framework ruling the knowledge sharing behaviors of their employees.

This was a very interesting and passionate conversation. Alain Bensoussan took the viewpoint of a particularly touchy and control-oriented top manager –or maybe he was just being a little provocative to push the debate ;-)-. According to him, the starting point is that «knowledge belongs to the company». If I understood correctly, this means that a recruited employee should specifically state the different aspects of the experience he brings to the company within the knowledge domain he was hired for and then relinquish all rights to the knowledge developed thereafter in this domain, whether explicit or not (a.k.a. «background information» in joint ventures). If the employee happens to leave the company to work elsewhere, he can be exposed to legal action if he is found to be using any form of knowledge acquired in the previous company, whether explicit or tacit.

Whew ! Now that’s what I call a hard line ! And I was really frightened to learn that French law is apparently leaning toward this industrial age conception of corporate knowledge.

Nevertheless, the conversation was really interesting. I made two points that were important for me:

1- Indeed, all written (digital) information residing in the company’s archives belongs to the company. Hence, when an employee uses the company’s information management systems at work, all content he produces or contributes to belongs to the company, and can be claimed against the employee if it is found to be reused by him outside the company. However, it is also customary to say that knowledge is the only asset whose value grows by being shared. Thus, an employee should indeed be expected to share his knowledge within the company, and should be punished for hoarding information relevant to the company’s operations. Jack Welch was clear about this at GE, when he argued that employees were not paid to have good ideas, but to share them. So, I would argue that a former employee can indeed be sued for using company knowledge for his own benefit, but only if knowledge retention is demonstrated.

2- When a new employee is hired, he brings along two things with him: his working power and his former experience. The first commands a salary to compensate for the services he provides to the company. The second is more like an investment: the employee expects to see his personal knowledge grow so his market value increases on the job market. He cashes in on his investment with salary increases or when he is recruited by another company for a higher salary. Now if the expected return on this investment is reduced by the management in the form of non-disclosure, non-competing and non-whatever agreements, I would argue that it needs to be compensated in other ways. The best for me would be in the form of company shares, to encourage the employee’s loyalty to the company.

Reflecting on this meeting on my way home, I was wondering why so many managers still view «knowledge» as something that can exist outside of the person. Corporate «knowledge bases» are nothing more than a record of past history in written form, which will never more than the emerging part of the knowledge iceberg. More importantly, I believe that these same control-driven managers are making a tremendous error of judgment that could eventually kill their companies if they keep on working on how to keep the «company knowledge» in a safe place rather than growing it.

To grow knowledge, you must be prepared NOT to control it. Because people only truly share what they know with their trusted peers, it is a total waste of time for upper management to try and put it under control. As soon as a top manager enters a room where peers are gathered to try and solve a problem, the conversation stops. The former peers scatter like chicken, each one trying to attract the manager's attention and appear as the leader of the group. It is known for a fact that the most valuable corporate knowledge grows on the field of practice, together with partners and customers. Now whose knowledge is that? The company's? What company?

Knowledge sharing does not happen outside communities. Hoarding information can indeed destroy value and hinder the development of the company, but sharing too much information too. It's all a matter of identifying the relevant communities of trust. A typical employee belongs to several of those, some of which are accessible to his management (e.g. competitive intelligence), and some of which are not (e.g. Java programming). Control freaks will have to learn to get over it.

On a practical note, this has quite simple implications. Let's ask ourselves what happens when an employee leaves a company to develop his ideas in another one. Well, if it is proven that he withheld information from his former employer to do that, he should be sued. But if he had this great idea and shared it in the company, but nobody cared (happens all the time!), is there a good reason why he shouldn't be allowed to leave and maybe start a company with this idea?

In the end, it might well be that the best interest for both parties is to have every employee keep written logs –one per community- of everything they do. The employee can then use the blog records to prove that he did not withhold information from the company. If he cannot, well, too bad for him.