Yahoo just launched a blogging service for small businesses based on MT. It will be interesting to know how it will fit in the toolbox and how all this will be seamlessly integrated.
December 2005 Archives
Note that blogs at IBM are part of a bigger collaboration platform which includes forums and user groups as well.
Note that blogs at IBM are part of a bigger collaboration platform which includes forums and user groups as well.
During the Les Blogs 2.0 conference today -which I did not attend- there was a smackdown between Mena Trott (Founder of Six Apart) and Ben Metcalfe (Project leader at the BBC) which you can dowload here. Apparently Ben was using the backchannel to badmouth the speakers; Loïc Le Meur, as chief moderator of the IRC, showed it on screen; and Mena went ballistic. Miss Rogue (or whatever her real name is) wrote a very insightful post about it.
It is always interesting to witness an outburst of violence generated by conflicting egos. Mena was on stage, as the founder of an outstanding start-up company. She thus was exposed and was careful about what she said to an audience of clients, prospects or investors. Ben was in the audience, as one of the many bloggers present. He wanted some attention and thus was playing wise guy on the backchannel discussion. The communication bandwidth between them was bound to be small, and Loïc made it visible by showing it on screen. Loïc knew what he was doing by the way. Hence the clash.
This shows that some people attending the Les Blogs 2.0 conference may have deluded themselves into thinking that they still were part of an elite of early practitioners of a emerging phenomenon as it was only two years ago. But blogging has become a mainstream practice like writing or speaking. This sense of belonging to a community of pioneers we felt as early bloggers two years ago is gone. The original blogging community -as a community of practice- which really existed when I started blogging has split into sub-communities with very different perspectives, and very little issues in common. What fascinates me is blogging with respect to collaborative leadership, i.e. how blogs are used within the strategic scope of learning and intelligence gathering. I am quite bored with the debates about blogs vs. the press, blogs and marketing, or blogs in politics.
It also makes me wonder about the rationale behind this conference. Was it really a meeting of like-minded practitioners coming to learn from one another, or was it really a big celebration party where attendees can meet young, successful, and sometimes attractive people and socialize with them around cocktails and petits-fours? People come to conferences to build their social network. For this network to be truly useful and actionable, it must be based on trust, and thus be made of competent and benevolent people. When both competence and benevolence are high, conversations really become interesting. On the other hand, if you invite brilliant speakers, bad listeners, business leaders, rookies, ugly people, top models etc. all at the same time, it's more like a party. And from my experience, when you allow your friends to bring their friends to your party, people tend not to behave too well.
Whether this event is to be reported in the Economist or in Gala is still to be debated, but in any case, I believe Loïc has been successful in making attendees feel special, and he deserves the credit for that.
Social Networks Research Report - An excellent report by Wildbit
[thanks Fabrice]
From Miss Rogue about the LesBlogs2.0 event taking place as I write:
I think we may be close to breaking the record in this room for the number of people having a backend conversation around the conversation without even having a conversation at all.No more classrooms. School's out [grin]
From Philippe Borremans, coming back from the online information conference in London:
From a corporate point of view it is all about trusting your employees and creating (or having them create - even better) corporate blogging/podcasting guidelines. Yes you have to protect confidential information, yes you have to make sure intellectual property is respected but not by cutting the internet connection or issuing them a warning that if they blog they get fired. It simply doesn't work... Chances are that some of them already blog about their work anyway.True, but this question of control cannot be dismissed as irrelevant or reduced to a simple issue of confidentiality. Substantial harm can be done to people and companies by slandering, revealing stuff that should remain private or just not being careful enough with posts which can be misinterpreted. There is definitely a control issue here. I would argue however that this control issue is not about censorship, but really about making sure that:
1- every post can be tracked back to an identified individual and not to an anonymous IP address. Today, I could easily create a blog under a fake name and spread rumors about people or companies I don't like and damage reputations. For sure this is already happening in the blogosphere.
2- access rights can be attributed to each post so that the responsibility of a possible information leakage can be clearly attributed either to the author of the post or to the blogging service provider.
We talked a lot about this when we worked on our KM Charter. It will certainly become key for blogging services in the future to avoid ugly lawsuits.
[Update: Look at Rebecca's latest post. Faking identities is really where the issue lies]
Richard McDermott was at the Ark Conference and told us that he was opening a consulting office in London, because he expects business around communities of practice to grow more in Europe than in the US. Sadly, it looks like he doesn't have a blog, which amazes me.
Before we left he asked us the following three questions, and these are my three answers:
Question 1: Is more knowledge always better? Are we better off with too much information than with just the information we need?
I would argue that, once again, this boils down to trust. If you are close to people you trust, i.e. people with great competence on a specific topic and proven benevolence towards you, then you can, and probably should, count on them to keep you posted about what is really important for you in their domain of expertise. One of the key characteristics of communities with respect to information management is precisely that they are quite effective at filtering out relevant information and vectorizing it to the right people.
On the other hand, handing over to the upper levels of a hierarchy or marcom departments the role of filtering out information for the lower levels so that they don't waste time is not only humiliating but foolish. It doesn't work. Employees only pay attention to trustworthy information, and the only trustworthy information that communication departments circulate inside a big organization are good news about contracts signed with customers. Period.
Regarding information sharing, management intervention should exclusively focus on two courses of actions
1- promote and encourage information sharing on a wide scale
2- enforce information management rules to avoid leakage of critical information
Question 2: Is more connectivity better? Are we better off being extremely well connected?
I guess that the human mind sets the limits of the connectivity we can afford. It is physically impossible to know more than a few thousand people, and it looks like we cannot have ongoing relationships with more than 150 people (Dunbar's number) at any given time of our lives. So I guess that we all need to be very selective in the way we choose our connections, and review regularly our social network to adapt it to our activities of the moment.
In a business setting, it is probably advisable to keep connections alive with people who are themselves well connected to other communities we don't know too well.
Question 3:How do we deepen our expertise?
Honestly, I didn't get that question ;-)
Just came back from the Ark Group conference on the topic of "Exploiting communities, social networking and social media", where I came as speaker to talk about how my company is gradually building a quite complete learning system based on the corporate university and communities of practice (download my presentation here).
If I were to give the main lesson learned for me, I would say that the days of big corporate KM programs are gone. There is no more money for corporate KM programs, which are by and large considered by top managers as "nice to have" but not essential. Today, knowledge management has been delegated to line managers. Corporate support to KM initiatives has shifted from developing and deploying large IT infrastructures and collaborative portals to management education, consulting and much simpler and focused collaborative IT systems.
Business models for KM are changing. We are moving away from monolithic enterprise systems and towards a collection of smart, simple and focused social applications that interact with one another. As Beat Knechtli, Knowledge manager of ABB sees it, we should no longer talking about knowledge management, but much more simply about good management and thus educate managers to the power of knowledge sharing in the 21st century (see Beat's face down the list here)
