November 2006 Archives

From David Snowden through Lilia Efimova:

My own view is that communities can evolve, but cannot be designed top down. Of course you can stimulate and direct evolution. However a CoP "Roll out" plan always gets me worried.

I think I do not totally agree on this one. It is true that the most vibrant communities were self-started and self-organized groups of people, but you cannot infer from this that active communities cannot be rolled out as project teams, especially in large organizations where the behavior of employees by and large depends on their position in the org chart. I know places where employees with brilliant ideas will not move unless given the order to. Do not underestimate the need of human beings to obey.

Dave's statement is correct: fostering the development of communities of practice is really a question of stimulating their starting conditions "[which] can be as simple as making the tools available, or providing some initial stimulation or sponsorship". But in many cases, especially in large vertical organizations, people are just not ready to adopt a view of their organization as a complex adaptive system. They can be really frightened to start networking with their peers, because that's not what the boss wants. So providing a safer and more familiar environment that looks more like a project team, with templates and checklists, can prove handy for community development. Yes it is paternalistic in some way, but it is a form of education, in the etymological sense: teaching people to fly on their own, to paraphrase Chris Collison.

I view my job at Schneider as very similar to this guy's on the deck of an aircraft carrier - called the "yellow dog" in the French Navy- I provide guidance and tools for communities to take off. Once they have, they are on their own. But before that, they follow some basic rules that will at least provide a minimum level of safety for them and for the company. Luckily, I also "fly" too, otherwise I would get bored.

Ross's Power Law of Participation is brilliant, because it explains how valuable metadata can be fed into any collaboration tool. It can be combined with Janet Salmons Collaborative Taxonomy of e-Learning , which is more on the right-hand side of Ross's curve, and goes into more detail about how collaboration activities take place. By the way, "collaborate" looks a little awkward in the list, because it's the only action that you cannot take alone and thus does not only depend on you. But maybe what Ross meant is "contribute".

from Dave Snowden in "whence goeth KM?"

Is KM dead? My view for about two years now is that it is on its last leg as a strategic movement (otherwise known as a fad) in management. We also have that infallible predictor that a fad cycle is coming to an end: government adopts it as industrial best practice.

I agree. KM is dead, and for the reasons mentioned by David:

• Knowledge Managers have insisted in representing knowledge as an object that could exist independently of human beings


• They became obsessed by technologies and quality processes that manipulated "knowledge" with rule-based workflows


• KM eventually became a set of techniques taught to students - and which left them with no job after certification

Too many mistakes, that are largely a consequence of the coalition of entreprise software vendors and top managers, both agreeing to trade snake oil and fake change whilst maintaining all existing power structures intact.

From Ross Dawson, blogging about the same topic:

In an article on The Future of Knowledge Management (...) I explained why I felt it was time to move on from knowledge management, at the time identifying five successors to the movement: social networks, collaboration, relevance, workflow, and knowledge-based relationships. Moving on, this year I have found a large proportion of my energy spent on the future of media and media strategy, closely linked to my work on social networks, both inside organizations and in technology-enabled social media.

Does that mean the party is over and that it's time to go back to real work? Definitely not. As a matter of fact, it's just the beginning. Hopefully, the acronym KM will stay around for a while before a new name crystallizes the strategic shift from capturing and storing "knowledge" and "sharing best practices" to social networking, network-centric management, collaborative leadership and effects-based operations. As Dave puts it:

(...) the objectives of KM theory and practice persist and will continue to be of great importance. They are clear, simple and important and can be summarised as follows:
1. To support effective decision making
2. To create the conditions for innovation

Exactly. But how CEOs will address the issue now that all CKOs are gone remains an open issue. Can it be left only to consultants?

in a recent post of Lilia where she writes about the personal vs. business dimensions of blogging, and attempts to position various blogs on a personal -> business scale on various dimensions. As she says:

From what I've seen so far most of the tensions around employee blogging are in the middle. A weblog purely on personal end is not likely to be very interesting for a company (I can't think of any business benefits or risks in that case ;). Something purely on business side I wouldn't call a weblog at all (biased by my own definition of a weblog), but in this case benefits and risks are defined by the way a company works.

This area of research is important to understand corporate blogging. It looks as if more than 80% of corporate blogs are really personal initiatives to communicate with the outside world, and not new forms of intranet spaces. I think the primary motivation of employees who blog is self-promotion, because they are proud of what they do in their company, and want to engage a conversation about it. As such, they favor an open conversation with the world, because it cannot be as casual inside the company, and the likelihood of engaging a real conversation is far lower. It is far easier to talk about your job with your human voice in the street with strangers than in a corporate seminar with colleagues. You may tend to be more critical about your bosses, but you will also tend to be more supportive of your company as a whole.

By the way, here's how my blog looks like:

I have been arguing many times about the need for a new form of governance of Informations Systems whereby new tools and forms of collaboration could be introduced in the enterprise from the ground up, rather than from the top down. Others have argued (Tom Stewart, John Maloney etc.) that the business world was moving away from the linear "value chain" model and more into the "value network" model epitomized by the movie industry.

Well, it seems that we have a good example of this. Intel's Press Release on SuiteTwo shows that Intel chose such a model to develop its enterprise collaboration solution.

Instead of developing an enterprise collaboration suite from scratch or from existing OpenSource code, Intel chose to bring together some of the "best of breed" Web 2.0 applications into a single offering:

• Movable Type (blogs)


• Socialtext (wikis)


• NewsGator (RSS aggregator)


• SimpleFeed (RSS Publishing and Analytics)


• SpikeSource (industrialization of Open Source software)

The distribution partners of SuiteTwo are: Dell, Nec, and Intel. Wow.

This is an interesting model. If it works, it will undoubtedly be a landmark and a milestone in the networked economy, because Intel really acts the same way as a movie producer starring Mena Trott, Ross Mayfield, J.B. Holston, Mark Carlson and Kim Polese (Talking about a movie cast!). Dell and Nec are acting as the distributors of the movie. The fact that the main actors have been knowing each other for a long time is likely to make the difference.

Question is: who will be the Steven Spielberg of SuiteTwo?

Using your Incompetence to Achieve Your Goals. So true. I feel both like Dilbert and, alas, like the pointy-haired boss too, though I have more often been in the first situation ;-)

I just bumped into Sermo's website, which at first sight looks like yet another community space for physicians. There is a slight difference though:

On Sermo, there is no cost to physicians to participate. In fact, Sermo also enables physicians to be financially rewarded for their astute observations and clinical insights. The source of the rewards is financial institutions who access a stream of fresh and actionable information on emerging trends and market-changing events in healthcare. A cash reserve is set-aside to compensate physicians for observations that are deemed highly relevant and valuable.

Now this is absolutely great. It's actually the publisher's business model that we discussed the other day with my friend Dominique Turcq. On the one hand, community members find value in sharing good practices to help them in their day to day job, whereas funding organizations are interested in derived content and data. This is an open market version of what we are doing in companies when we create communities of practice. In a company, communities recruit employees who believe it is valuable to network with their peers to find good answers to complex questions -they are right!. As such they treasure the real-time and tacit aspects of knowledge sharing. Top management, on the other hand funds communities because it wants knowledge to be captured and memorized to increase productivity and smoothen job transfers to younger generations. As such they are interested in the longer term and explicit outcomes of knowledge sharing.

Sermo has implemented a very original business model, and I wish them a lot of success. This is a brilliant idea.

[thanks Andrew]

In a New York Times article dated October 31. called "computing 2016: What won't be possible?"

But with the rise of the Internet, social networks and technology networks are becoming inextricably linked, so that behavior in social networks can be tracked on a scale never before possible.

“We’re really witnessing a revolution in measurement,” Dr. Kleinberg said.

The new social-and-technology networks that can be studied include e-mail patterns, buying recommendations on commercial Web sites like Amazon, messages and postings on community sites like MySpace and Facebook, and the diffusion of news, opinions, fads, urban myths, products and services over the Internet. Why do some online communities thrive, while others decline and perish? What forces or characteristics determine success? Can they be captured in a computing algorithm?

Social networking research promises a rich trove for marketers and politicians, as well as sociologists, economists, anthropologists, psychologists and educators.

For marketers, this is fascinating. Some day, when we are able to see buying patterns in real time through social network analysis, marketing will be performed the same way as a weather forecast. The implications in politics is also amazing. I wonder why so few global companies actually invest part of their marketing and R&D budget in trying to understand those things. BP looks like a weird exception.