Recently in Enterprise2.0 Category

Reading Legacy of Ashes - The History of the CIA. The author, Tim Weiner, argues that, in the 1950s,  the CIA was so focused on clandestine operations ("doing") as opposed to intelligence gathering ("knowing") that they sent hundreds of agents to a certain death, unaware that soviet agents had infiltrated local CIA offices and that the KGB knew everything about their plans.

Funny to see the eery parallel with companies, where management ("doing") always has the upper hand, and expertise ("knowing") is often downplayed, with consequences that might not be as awful, but still terrible.

My company just published a survey about the expectations of generation Y regarding work. To summarize:

1. Millennials expect to work overseas - Millennials expect job mobility and want the opportunity to experience overseas assignments.


2. Sustainability and climate change - Today's recruits will choose employers who have corporate social responsibility (CSR) values that reflect their own.


3. Technology and the ability to network - Millennials view technology as key to socializing and networking and believe it will change the way they work.


4. Work place flexibility - Only a small percentage of millennials expect flexibilities such as working at home and outside regular office hours.


5. Sharing personal information - Millennials are comfortable about giving employers greater access to their personal information in the interests of personal and business security.


6. Millennial views on portfolio careers - The idea of employees job hopping in a portfolio working arrangement is not likely to become a reality for millennials.


7. Employee loyalty - Millennials express loyalty to the organization they work for, but by no means are they willing to commit to blind loyalty.


8. Training and development - Training and development is the benefit the millennials value most highly--particularly coaching and mentoring.


9. Retirement - Millennials have accepted the idea that neither the state nor the employer will fund their retirement.


10. Thoughts on 2020 - Millennials envision a world where China, India and Russia will have more economic influence than the US and Europe and believe that companies will be more influential than governments by 2020.

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.

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

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,

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.

Excellent presentation from the shed (who is this guy?) showing the growing gap between the web experience at home and at work. I would just add my two cents worth on this document. The collaborative tools of companies will always lag behind those of individuals, and nobody should be surprised by this. However, big companies should be concerned if they don't fund a small team in charge of gradually changing the culture from individual action to mass collaboration through pilot projects using those tools;

Bain recently issued a report on the top 25 management tools for 2007. Here's the list:

• 1. Balanced Scorecard


• 2. Benchmarking


• 3. Business Process Reengineering


• 4. Collaborative Innovation


• 5. Consumer Ethnography


• 6. Core Competencies


• 7. Corporate Blogs


• 8. Customer Relationship Management


• 9. Customer Segmentation


• 10. Growth Strategy Tools


• 11. Knowledge Management


• 12. Lean Operations


• 13. Loyalty Management Tools


• 14. Mergers and Acquisitions


• 15. Mission and Vision Statements


• 16. Offshoring


• 17. Outsourcing


• 18. RFID


• 19. Scenario and Contingency Planning


• 20. Shared Service Centers


• 21. Six Sigma


• 22. Strategic Alliances


• 23. Strategic Planning


• 24. Supply Chain Management


• 25. Total Quality Management

[thanks successful-consultants]

Hereunder a few extracts from Global news, business news, management thinking, expert opinions, latest research - World Business, where Sam Palmisano, CEO of IBM defines the large company of today as the globally integrated enterprise.

The corporate model that is emerging today looks very different. It shapes its strategy, management and operations in a truly global way. It locates operations and functions anywhere in the world - based on the right cost, the right skills and the right business environment - and integrates those operations 'horizontally'. (...) A globally integrated enterprise is radically different from the multinational corporation it will replace. As I've suggested here, its success will depend not just on its economic logic, but on the development of new ways to access and develop expertise; new approaches to policy, ownership and collaboration; and a global economic and societal environment that strengthens trust. Of all the issues facing leaders in business, government, academia and beyond, I believe this last to be the most fundamental. (...) At IBM, we've set off down the path of empowering and enabling our people to make decisions and to act based on their own judgment. We have been working to lower the centre of gravity of the company, as I like to put it - that is, to trust IBMers and to push decision-making authority out and down.(...) Indeed, I believe it is shared values that must form the foundation for a trust-based enterprise in a radically more fluid and democratised world. Being much more open, collaborative and trusting is, at times, messy, uncontrollable and uncertain.