Recently in Business models Category

I had a really interesting discussion last Friday with someone I cannot name, and who is working for a French global company I cannot name either. After many failed attempts for the last ten years to establish a good knowledge management practice in that company, its top management apparently came to the conclusion that it was probably not in the company’s DNA, and therefore that maybe the company should consider a completely different approach and maybe “outsource its KM”.

Now that is a very interesting thought, and I think a very powerful one. If companies cannot develop a culture of knowledge sharing and innovation, it’s primarily because they are having a hard time measuring the benefits. All metrics of intangibles –and KM in particular- are shaky, and the most promising ones, based on network analysis (VNA) still have a long way to go before they become generally accepted practices.

In the meantime, organizing a knowledge market might be the best way to go. Let’s imagine what it would look like…

In Five High-Tech Failures from the New Scientist, Justin Mullins questions the future of Facebook:

(...)That looks suspiciously as if Facebook has begun to put the needs of its advertisers before the needs of its users. A dangerous sign and one that users should ignore at their peril.

In the same article, other social networking sites like Match or Secondlife are presented as endangered as well.

The problem with social networking services is that you do not control a social network, which can behave in highly unpredictible ways according to the theory of complex systems, especially if the strategic intent of its originator is not clear. For me, no human society, whether in the real world or in the virtual world, can survive without some form of visible leadership, i.e. someone who symbolizes what the brand stands for. I don't know about Facebook, and I honestly do not understand where it is going. But for Wikipedia, there is a big risk remaining faceless. In France, Wikipedia is said to be in the hands of the far left of the political spectrum, and manipulating content accordingly. It might be true or not, but if nobody stands up against this accusation, it might prevail in the end. Perception is reality.

Look at companies. "We bring good things to life" was Jack Welsh's strategic intent. "Innovation at work" is Jack Immelt's. Both stategic intents are associated with the GE brand, but each one has a different face. It's the same for countries. Sarkozy's strategic intent is different for Chirac's, but the brand is still France.

Why do the leaders of social networks keep on hiding behind their brand? Probably because they don't want to close any doors during the hype period, but there is a high risk of loosing everything if they don't take the money and run early enough.

I had a very interesting discussion yesterday with Olivier Réaud from inPrincipo consulting. We were arguing over the valuation of intangibles, and Olivier came with this very simple idea that tangible assets eventually boil down to money, and intangible assets to brands.
This triggered a connection with a discussion I had with Lee Bryant in London last november. We were discussing business models -how to make money with online social networks and communities- trying to move away from the consulting fees model or the software licensing model. Networks and communities do have a tendency to live a life of their own that may eventually diverge from the original intent of their sponsors, which happens quite often. My thought at that time was that the media/publishing industry offered a clue. Publishing a collaborative web site created by a community looks like publishing a book written by some author. Money should come primarily from royalties of derived products or services.
That's where the brand comes in. Let's imagine you build an online user group community on behalf of your company who pays for the associated costs. Let's imagine it worked nicely, but that community members are focusing on topics of little interest for the company, or that the focus of the sponsoring company has moved elsewhere, which comes back to the same. What do you do? One is to let it die. Another is to keep investing: Find new sponsors and build the brand. In the end, you may not own much in terms of tangible assets. But what you may end up owning is the brand itself and the trust attached to it. And that can be traded quite nicely if the brand is as famous as YouTube or Coca-Cola.

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?

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)