November 2007 Archives

Yesterday, together with my colleague Ricardo Sueiras of PwC UK, we had a demo of Connectbeam the entreprise social bookmarking appliance. Connectbeam is an enterprise social networking tool using shared bookmarks and tags as a way to connect people. Basically it connects people who use the same content, on the grounds that it is likely that they have similar activities or interests, and will benefit from knowing each other.

Connectbeam raises a few IP questions as usual with respect to who owns what, the company or me. But still, it looks like a great knowledge sharing solution for the corporate world. We still are in a world where corporate people do write short blackberry e-mails and client deliverables, but do not publish what they know in the form of blog posts or wiki pages. It will change some day, and maybe suddenly, but not now, at least not in this country (France). So building and managing links across people and content - which is what KM is really about - should work much better if it's based on the current demand-oriented and quite selfish behaviors of the average corporate employee. As such, social bookmarking tools such as Connectbeam could be seen as the stepping stone to the cultural change we all want to see taking place.

In the open world, collaboration tools work when people get hooked and sometimes even addicted to a new experience that's real fun (and incidentally useful). But users also get turned off easily, and they move on to something else, because we're talking about very elementary forms of collaboration anyway. In companies, where people have built a common and quite sophisticated collaboration culture over time to get things done, they usually work when they are transparent add-ons or replacements to current tools for mainstream employees, which is what social bookmarking could be as an add-on to search and people directories. I don't believe too much in the power of bottom-up approaches whereby underground tools used by rogue insiders gradually become mainstream, and I still haven't found a single company, at least in my country, where employees are actually encouraged to innovate and to experiment new ways of doing business unless there is a clear business case of cost reduction.

More about Connectbeam hereunder:

As my friend Dominique Turcq said during his introductory speech to Dan Tapscott's talk in Paris two weeks ago:

In the networked economy, God is the details

One of my colleagues here at PwC gave me a good illustration of this yesterday.
He was speaking about a specific online Q&A forum at Cisco. It appears that when someone asks a question on this technical forum, only the first answer is made visible to all the participants. The following answers or comments are only visible to the person who asked the question in the first place.
Yeah. Great. So what?
Well there are several benefits to that. First, the forum is no longer cluttered and clogged by long threaded discussions and it can be used more easily by all as a FAQ system. Second, it encourages quick answers from people who want to increase their visibility and reputation. Third, it fosters quality, because people will think twice before posting nonsense.
Funny how little details can result in completely different behavioral patterns. It's the butterfly effect again.

from Cyril:

in my view, Enterprise 2.0 will become the new all purpose marketing term to replace Knowledge Management. This much is unavoidable, the vendors will see to that.

I agree with that although I don't like the idea of a passing fad. The phrase "Enterprise 2.0" is too catchy, and thus will vanish like "Knowledge Management". But before the business world understands that we are merely talking about management in a massively connected world, will there be a need for another catchy phrase?

From Cory Doctorow in Boing-Boing about France's new copyright law proposal requiring ISPs to police their clients:

For the first time in either Europe or North America, Big Content will be able to offload the tiresome and expensive work of copyright enforcement to ISPs and the commission called for by the law. (...) As a result, the procedure by which French people lose their right to communicate online will be automatic, faceless and instantaneous. The process by which they protest their innocence and get the right to communicate back will be slow, bureaucratic, and manual.

Are we preparing a breach in the independence of justice? How about asking for the banks to monitor the use of funds by their clients and close their accounts whenever the use of funds is deemed unlawful, like bribery for example?

It seems that the question of locating experts in a big organization is still at the top of knowledge management agendas, and I keep on hearing about projects to merge the content of several people directories developed over time.

I think we should put this into a broader perspective of people databases. For me, there are five different types of people databases used in major organizations:

• 1- The private Rolodexes, which are essentially vcards on our PDAs, which are used to connect to colleagues, customers and friends by phone, IM, e-mail etc.


• 2- The public social networking platforms such as LinkedIn or Facebook, which are increasingly used as expert locators too. We just cannot ignore them because they are the most likely to be regularly updated, like blogs, and people are more and more using external tools to seach for internal people (external blogs at Microsoft are used by Microsoft people as expertise location tools inside the company). Many employees of large organizations are already registered on those systems, especially young people. These are mainly used to discover people and to connect to people we don't know yet through people we know, and customers too!


• 3- The firmwide expert locators, a.k.a. "yellow pages". These categorize people according to a firm-specific taxonomy of expertise. They are used for profiling and thus as a gateway to the firm's internal web-based services (e.g. subscriptions). They can also be used as repositories of CVs and bios to be used in client proposals for services.


• 4- The network specific directories: Each time a practice network is created in a major organization, a new directory is (should be) created because members of this network need to present their expertise according to a network-specific taxonomy. These directories are used for urgent requests for assistance and expertise using IM.


• 5- The HR databases, where confidential information is stored like previous work engagements in other companies, or performance evaluations. They are used for career planning.

So the question is no so much to merge the databases than to adopt a format that allows editing and syndicating people contents regardless of the underlying database. As such, I think it would make more strategic sense for large organizations to work on an XML/web services framework that would make this possible. Once this framework is standardized, then it can be imposed on the various expert locator projects of the company without having to merge databases. I think companies should be spending far more time on interfaces and standards, thereby leaving it to IT people - and increasingly employees themselves!- to develop widgets to mash up information coming from those various databases.