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?

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,

"Instead of the more static create/manage/publish flow that embodies most CMS, organizations need to embrace a more fluid capture/route/convert workflow

• Capture effectiveness: Tracking contributions by author as well as the value of those contributions


• Route efficiencies: : Measuring time in the workflow, speed of updates, time spent on connection


• Conversion success: Feedback from users and customers, ratings, comments
]]> http://www.mopsos.com/blog/archives/000408.html 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…

]]> http://www.mopsos.com/blog/archives/000407.html Last friday, I e-mailed some colleague in my company to ask her for some information. This morning, I got a reply telling me that I should ask another person, and she gave me the name.
I find this behavior typical of the industrial age organization, where people define themselves by the tasks they have been assigned to. Whatever falls outside is not to be taken care of. In a post-industrial networked culture, she would have forwarded the message to the right person, and copied me. The difference is subtle, but real.
]]> http://www.mopsos.com/blog/archives/000406.html 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.


]]> http://www.mopsos.com/blog/archives/000401.html From the presentation of Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps of Netage at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston last June:

Decide to network
Use every letter you write
Every conversation you have
Every meeting you attend
To express your fundamental beliefs and dreams
Affirm to others the vision of the world you want
Network through thought
Network through action
Network through love
Network through the spirit
You are the center of the world
You are a free, immensely powerful source
of life and goodness
Affirm it
Spread it
Radiate it
Think day and night about it
And you will see a miracle happen:
the greatness of your own life.
In a world of big powers, media, and monopolies
But of six billion individuals
Networking is the new freedom
the new democracy
a new form of happiness

ROBERT MULLER

Robert Muller is a former Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations and Chancellor Emeritus, UN University for Peace. He wrote this for Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps in honor of their first book, Networking (Doubleday, 1982).


]]> http://www.mopsos.com/blog/archives/000398.html 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:


]]> http://www.mopsos.com/blog/archives/000397.html 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.
]]> http://www.mopsos.com/blog/archives/000396.html 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?
]]> http://www.mopsos.com/blog/archives/000395.html 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?
]]> http://www.mopsos.com/blog/archives/000394.html 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.
]]> http://www.mopsos.com/blog/archives/000391.html I was asked today by a colleague of mine to define social capital. This is what I e-mailed back to him:

Social capital is the invisible stock of connections between people that makes collaboration possible. It basically measures trust and how people really care for one another. When members of a group know each other very well and share the same values, social capital is high. When they don't and have no shared awareness of the situation facing the group, the same words can mean very different things to them, and the trust level is low. Social capital and culture go hand in hand.

Social capital determines the behavior of groups facing change. High social capital means stong cohesion of the group, and thus a great capacity for incremental innovation and problem-solving, but it also means great resistance to change, unless change is decided within the group. Think about an R&D team of French engineers ;-) Low social capital means low cohesion of the group and a greater capacity to accept change imposed by the boss (the formal organization), but it also means low capacity for innovation and problem-solving. So building an innovative organization is also about beefing up its social capital.

Large groups of people, and big companies in particular, are best seen as collections of high social capital groups loosely joined together in a broader community of relatively low social capital. That's why the approach taken by Northrop-Gruman when they had to downsize the company was to identify the practices and expertise that they wanted to keep alive, and found out who in the company best embodied those practices as community leaders, or as subject matter experts. They focused their attention on those people and convinced them to stay with the company. Their plan was not about getting rid of older and/or low-level people, which usually happens in such circumstances.

This is related to our KM practice, because effective sharing of knowledge only takes places within groups with high social capital. That's why KM is primarily about building up links between people through various forms of collaboration. Hence the importance of project teams, communities of practice, web 2.0 tools, group collaboration methods, taxonomies, tagging etc.

It is also related to the case of [company name withheld], because social network analysis will tell them whether the change they want to implement will be easy or not, and what the outcome is likely to be. High social capital means hard to move, but as a block and with little loss of key capabilities. Low social capital means easy to move, but the people who will move to [name of place withheld] are likely to be the ones with no alternative, which can mean great loss of capabilities. So they might consider taking a close look at the people who matter, i.e. the icons of the organization's knowledge.

]]> http://www.mopsos.com/blog/archives/000390.html Visiting one more the Headshift site, I bumped into Round's Customer Centricity Indicator. So I took the test for my previous company.

I won't give the results, for obvious reasons. But I strongly encourage any business person to take the test. it tells the difference between corporate happy talk and what customer focus is really about. It really strikes a chord.

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