Recently in Enterprise2.0 Category

A great article in Information Week about the transformation of politics by the Internet (duh!)

...a bigger change over the long term was the crowning of the Internet as the king of all political media. It was the end of the era of television presidency that started with JFK, and the beginning of the Internet presidency.

A few interesting facts about the Obama campaign:

1. 3.2 million people donated to the campaign through the campaign Web site


2. YouTube users alone spent 14.5 million hours watching official Barack Obama campaign videos


3. Obama announced his selection for vice president over text message.


4. Google Maps mashups were used to help volunteers find local campaign resources and people to contact and try to persuade


5. A custom social networking site was created with the help of a Facebook co-founder to connect all volunteers


6. Obama's Facebook page reached 2.6 million supporters


7. The BarackObama Twitter account reached 123,000 followers


8. A campaign headquarters was founded in Second Life

The article concludes that this campaign could be used as a lesson for business, but I think it emphasizes brand management too much. It is pretty obvious that the Internet has become a key ressource to manage a brand name. I personally would focus more on the use of the Internet to drive change within global organizations. What if senior executives started to use the Internet in a similar way to drive the business and energize people? Isn't it time to realize that weasel words are history?

A new Forrester report predicts that enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies is going to increase dramatically. Over the next five years, that expenditure will grow at a compound annual rate of 43% This increase will include more spending on social networking tools, mashups, and RSS, with the end result being a market of $4.6 billion by the year 2013. Social networking tools will come as the first applications

So it looks like the time has finally come, five year later than what I anticipated. But will I have the guts to start a company again? In the US, probably, bu in France?

Excellent post on Library Clips about the reason why KM 1.0 has by and large failed to deliver and what KM 2.0 is about.

The traditional approach to KM, dubbed KM 1.0, is about "deploying" specific knowledge sharing tools to be used for extra "above-the-flow" tasks of capturing and sharing knowledge in the form of structured content. Since those tools are usually quite cumbersome to use, and are justified by potential reuse of content by others in the future, their use is mainly enforced by a culture of recognition and rewards for those who share, and/or sticks for those who don't.

Another approach, dubbed KM 2.0, and which could be called "in-the-flow" KM, is more "a way to do your work, and by default you have shared knowledge at the same time, without it having to be an explicit task". It aims at replacing e-mail and phone, not libraries, and it is enforced by a culture of experimentation of advanced technologies on practical cases.

Indeed, our enterprise discussions to promote KM should always navigate between these two extreme scenarios:

• devising knowledge sharing incentives to overcome the burden of cumbersome legacy KM technology,


• making KM transparent by hiding it behind existing business processes through leading edge technology,

and of course making trade-offs, because it will never be 100% one or the other.

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:

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?