September 2005 Archives

Case study: Macromedia Blogs by John Cass is a must read. It explains the blogging strategy of Macromedia and why it is such a success. The rule of thumb under which Macromedia employees are allowed to blog is simple and useful benchmark:

• Only those employees who have something useful to contribute -- with relevant and quality content in terms of product information -- blog


• It's okay to personalize, but only about as much as their employees would in a face-to-face meeting; employee bloggers stick to product info;


• Product managers ask for feedback on products and request suggestions from customers;


• If Macromedia cannot implement a product suggestion, then they explain why


• The company actively watches online conversations about Macromedia, and when they see something that solicits a response, a Macromedia employee responds

I knew before about those 50 or so Macromedia employees blogging, but I didn't know that they had been syndicated on an aggregator together with 400 customer blogs. This blog aggregator is really phenomenal

Macromedia developed a type of category called smart categories. Smart categories index the posts, analyze the posts for keywords appearing on the page, and -- based on the conversation -- put the post into a smart category. The smart category feature can also exclude off topic posts, not including content, or contain other language Macromedia wanted to exclude. Macromedia maintained the existing regular categories for community continuity, but positioned the smart categories higher up the left hand navigation on the blog aggregator page.
In the latest version of the blog aggregator, Macromedia's traffic has risen dramatically. Most traffic to the aggregator does not come from search traffic, but blogger direct traffic from links and RSS readers pointing to the aggregator.

Go and check the RSS feeds, and especially the subscription menu using the smart categories. This is really brilliant. A new paradigm in corporate communication, undoubtedly.

Corporate Blogging looks like a hot topic these days, and whenever the discussion starts about blog in a company, it nearly always starts with the debate about whether it should be internal (intranet) or external (public).

Lilia advocates public weblogs, even for internal KM purposes, because this is what obviously makes most sense to foster knowledge creation and innovation. But the private audience weblog is needed because some conversations should remain within a private setting.

Take competitive intelligence. Take R&D project logs. It would make a lot of sense for my employer if I could blog about something I learned today about a pending reorg at one of our competitors. But I would need to make sure that my post can only be read by members of a closed community of employees of my company + some other outside experts recognized as allies by the management of my company.

Some day there will be metadata defining access permissions on everyevery blog post. This post I am just writing would obviously be public. The next one, explaining something I just learned about Siemens or GE, would be restricted to my company's Competitive Intelligence community unless it is false information I want to spread, in which case I would make it available only to foes. And the last one, announcing that my appartment in Paris will be available for rent last week of July, would be restricted to people within one degree of separation from me on LinkedIn...

Blogging is inviting people to a conversation with you. In some cases, you want to be selective. And this is where the notion of community becomes key.

Why Knowledge Management is so important from Dave Pollard is really an interesting post. I fully agree with Dave's conclusion that "the current de-emphasizing of Knowledge Management is a tragic mistake". I have been wondering in the last two years why so many interesting KM initiatives of the late 90's finally ended up nowhere, in spite of evidence that they did create substantial value for the firm. Dave gives a few reasons why business leaders and KM leaders have such a hard time understanding each other. Though I don't really buy the short term vs. long term argument - Some KM initiatives indeed show very short-term results in terms of new capabilities and new business - I fully agree with his claim that the "vertical" view of the industrial age firm according to which managers think and decide whereas employees execute and give feedback is the major cultural obstacle

Business leaders are accustomed to knowledge being transferred top-down (instruction and formal training programs) and information for decision-making being polled from the front lines (...)Business leaders see their leadership role as critical to the organization's success; their frame of understanding is hierarchical -- they tend to believe that knowledge and value increases with experience and that rewards should go disproportionately to identified superstars and up-and-coming leadership candidates. KM leaders see contribution to organizational success as more egalitarian, and are more likely to believe (as Drucker says) that almost every employee today knows how to do his/her particular job better than anyone else (including the boss) -- they may see large wage and reward disparities as demotivating and unwarranted.

What is frightening is to find so many similarities between our large industrial multi-layered organizations and the former Soviet Union, which proved totally incapable of modernizing itself and eventually collapsed. In one of his books I read a few years ago, Mikhaïl Gorbatchev wrote that one of his big mistake was to try to introduce elections in the communist party for some key positions at the local level, instead of assigning them from the top down. He didn't anticipate such a high level of resistance to change. According to him, the reason is that the type of people who win elections and those who succeed in a bureaucracy are from two different worlds.

Maybe what is happening in big organizations is more or less the same. Why would business leaders want to introduce powerful networks and communities inside their organizations if all end up challenging the "normal" way of doing business that made them successful in the first place? I now tend to think that KM methods and tools will first be experienced at the personal level (phase 1), then in small companies and within alliances of small companies (phase 2) and then in large companies when they start loosing business to small companies (phase 3).

Browsing through a couple of old papers, I just bumped into an interesting presentation about KM by Antoine Said of SFR, and the slide herewith really was an eye-opener. It shows what the actual perception of "Knowledge Management" is in big companies: a bunch of methods and tools to make the company more effective, and very similar in its operating modes to TQM or BPR. No big change here, but just a normal evolution of the way we work because of a normal evolution of the business environment.

This to me is the big misunderstanding. I've been through TQM and BPR, and they are basically about making the organization more productive. We're still in the industrial age here. We're talking about processes, engineering and mechanics. This doesn't imply any real change in the way we do business.

KM -real KM I mean- is about practices, creativity, and social networks. It is based on a new vision of the enterprise of the same order of magnitude as the new vision of the armed forces after Sept. 11. We're talking about a new way of doing business centered on social networks which has tremendous implications on management thinking.

Hence, the phrase "Knowledge Management" should be avoided by any means in business environments. There is too much confusion behind.

Still working on my book. This is SOOOO hard...