Presenter: Yves Noble, Head of KM at Capgemini (CG)

CG uses Open Source & Web 2.0 to share knowledge worldwide – global KM Platform

recognising people as the real knowledge assets, not documents

Adopting community-based networks

Taking a challenging approach to breaking down established barriers

Capgemini ?

86,000 people around the world … “knowledge” is what they do, everyday

Problems with old KM Solution ?

Plenty of good content, well-organized, well-structured – but people did not use it

20% year-over-year decline in use

Average age oif document in the system 3.5 years

7 years to refresh knowledge content (wow, papyrus grows faster than that)

Complex and confusing for non-experts

Many disconnects between tools, processes and the organisation

Costly infrastructure

How CG Started the Changeover

150+ interviews throughout the organisation

Massive adoption of community-based solutions occurring in the outside worldd (Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, etc. as examples)

THE CHALLENGE: Getting management to commit to a simple idea: Copy what works on the Internet

Took two years … 

CG’s KM Strategy

Public collaboration, everyone can contribute

Experts lead to content, content leads to experts

KM integrated into everyone’s job

Knowledge sharing

Technology Options

Lotus Notes Domino, or Sharepoint 2007, or Open Source ?

Functional req’ts, Development effort, product extensibility, available expertise

Vendor risk,

Internal skills,

Deployment risks

Learning Curve

Product usability

At first, Sharepoint was looking good

Then .. price negotiations began

decided on open Source:

Drupal (Main “site”, CMS)

phpBB (Bulletin board, forums)

MediaWiki (wiki capabilities)

Google (Enterprise) Search and Analytics

Overall Approach

2007 H2 – six months of development

3 major releases

2008 H1

End-user survey

Stabilisation

Migration of content

Four minor releases

2008 H2

Start of global deployment

Outsourcing (support) to India

Total number of “bugs” – 15; Total number of important “bugs” – 0

KM 2.0 Features

Tag clouds, expertise finder, forums, moderation, blogs, wikis, tags, rss feeds, communities, content management, personal space, user ratings, multiple languages, etc.

Communities are at the center of CG’s KM 2.0

Yves puts up a graphic re: Supporting Infastructure that I cannot read and cannot replicate whilst live-blogging.

KM 2.0 – Links with other corporate tools

Corporate communications portal

Customisable individual portals

Regional intranets

Instant messaging and screen sharing

Project collaboration applications / equipment

Speed and scope of adoption (official deployment has not yet started)

27,00 registered users 

900 communities

500 forums

500 wikis

250 blogs

.. and have not spent even $1.00 in “communications” thus far

No training

No user manual

“Here’s the URL”

“Oh, that’s great … and it works”

Lessons learned – Benefits

users are delighted to get rid of institutional control

Users are very creative in using wiki in unexpected ways

Private communities going public to get more visibility

Community moderators are taking it very seriously

Auto administration is not a dream

RSS feeds can be extremely powerful when used properly 

Progressive move from e-mail to IM and collaboration

Easy to deploy as long as the infrastructure can absorb the load

Simple, intuitive, fast, cheap ….

Lessons Learned

Transparency still a concern for top management

New role for the knowledgemanager

Measuring the actual impact

The generation factor

Push back from IT (lack of vendor support) 

Fully WYSIWYG tools

RSS savvy users are not so common

switching from document folders to tags and folksonomies

Getting connected with the outside world and involving clients

The Way Ahead

Everyone has a good idea on how it could be improved

The more syndrome (more demanding, more insistent, more impatient)

High expectations 

Managing change requests through on-line voting

Selling it to clients

People Are Eager To:

Connect with peers

Belong to a network

Share knowledge

Acquire on-line reputation

Collaborate co-workers

Tim Young, Founder & CEO of Socialcast

He say he will be talking about “dealing with” Gen Y in the worklplace

Framed in the languaeg of “generational warfare”.  The presentation uses stereotypical images to convey a brash, upstart, push-back, in-your-face attitude for this cohort … people who use Napster, facebook, MySpace, etc,

Shows image graffiti “MySpace is for Losers”

Characterizes Gen Y workers as synthesisers, they can pinpoint, seek and locate the specific expertise they need, and go to that expertise (bypassing all chains of command to do so).  This cohort is now bringing that dynamic into the organization .. or … Organization Structure = (NOT)  Communication Structure.

They are well versed in asynchronous communication … therefore more oriented towards breaking down organizational silos (this may be a logical non sequitur, but I know what he means .. do you ?).

From linear use of email to low-friction, lightweight micro-blogging – “learning to write about yourself in the third-person”.

Low-friction broadcast out, friends and peers consuming asynchronously when and how they wish  … he states that this means “Silos Are Evil” and that the growing presence of these capabilities and dynamics on the part of workers means that the holy grail of organizational effectiveness (breaking down silos of information) is within reach.

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Celeste Merryman, KM for Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC)

Projects with NASA and other high-end science-y organizations

Piloting Social Networking Inside NASA for Knowledge Sharing

Will share SN Pilot project at NASA

NASA one of the first and last “innovation strategies” created by the US Government

NASA 50 years old on October 1, 2008 – 120+ projects over the years.

Bush – To Mars & Beyond (The Constellation program – my editorial question: where will the Bush Administration get the money ?)

KM “pain points” for NASA

1. Geographically Dispersed (10 centers, 8 states; many other facilities)

2. Aging Workforce (Long-duration projects, average age 47, average tenure 17.9 years)

3. Mission Transition (4 year gap between programns)

She designed NASAsphere (Socializing, Innovating, Inventing) – “sphere” as in shape and circle of peers where one has influence of some sort.  NASAsphere grew from 78 to 295 in 60 days via colleague invites.

Benefits of NASAsphere

Accelerates communication and problem-solving, creates P2P communications capability

Captures for re-use individual knowledge worker know-how .. supports collective intelligence

Creates P2P communications in context, deepening understanding for decision-making

The Radar O’Reilly Effect

“Go Ask Radar” (knows how to get it for you … Radar contacts Sparky … “I need 5,000 roll of toilet paper, so I can get you some steaks”

NASAsphere is better (since, for example, many NASA people have lots of vacations).

“The network of a conversation spreads based on its topic rather than by person-to-person sharing”

How NASA used OSN for Business

Sharing “a day in the life” of a NASA scientist

Asking where to find critical information and data to support NASA tasks

Presenting and vetting odeas to NASA’s collective intelligence

Enhancing the employee directory with interests, facts and conversations

“Yes, NASA overcame the Radar O’Reilly effect”

Overall Pilot Experience

Easy To Use

Easy To Grow

Easy To Manage

Easy To Integrate

Suggestions

Set Epectations For Participants

Give participants a task

Allow them to invite work colleagues

Hot on the heels of Dave Snowden’s opening evening workshop on learning from failure and “worst practices”, here’s an example of using conference blogging to develop different themes and points of view with respect to the subject matter being presented.

Innovation is a hotly-debated (and for many somewhat intangible) concept that uses how-to’s and generalities interchangeably more often than not, and always generates more heat than light at the best of times.

Here’s Dave Snowden weighing in on this morning’s keynote by Peter Skarzynski.  I’m not sure whether I hope Dave will miss my session at 11h30 am or whether he will attend (if he does I’m sure I’ll learn where I am wrong, just misguided or a certified “fluffy bunny” ;-).

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You don’t innovate by copying

Dave Pollard’s up … his introduction covers his vast and deep professional background.

I’ve followed Dave’s thinking and writing for years now .. he promises to delve into the socio-dynamics of how people are sharing information and constructing and using knowledge.

His agenda covers a retrospective on where we’ve been, how Digital Natives (Dave uses an alternative term, Millenials) share and use information and work together, and then moves to a look at the ways we act in virtual worlds will evolve.

Dave is going over his KM 1.0 model (1994 – 2003), wherein the decisions taken about how to enable capturing and re-using information and knowledge just tended to confuse people and create “arguments” about who was responsible for what, and why.

As a result (he notes) the term “knowledge management” is in long-term decline .. the use of the term in Google has just recorded it’s fifth straight year of less search requests than the year before.

He introduces KM 2.0, a lot of which is about Personal Knowledge Management (Dave has written a great deal about this over the years), or the personalization of how one goes about their knowledge work (I have called this the “mass customization of knowledge work“).  He notes that communities of practice are being supplemented and / or replaced by “communities of passion” … communities which you join only if you care enough about an issue to get involved with it.

Other trends … visualisation of information, and most information put into the public (everything is there for everyone to see; unless constrained by legal or secrecy needs).

KM 2.0 – scan, publish, connect & canvas … Know-who, Connection, Context, Just -in-time

The big question – could Information professionals do this ?

Role of IP’s changing in 3 important ways

1. Improving personal productivity

- facilitiating to help people self-find, self-filter, self-publish, etc.

- teaching research skills

2. Improving Connection

- facilitation conversation 

- facilitating JIT Canvassing

3. Improving Context

- Storyteaching / recording

- Environmental scanning

- Sensemaking

Generation Millenium using IM, not email.  Dave tells the story of his conversation with Luis Suarez about reducing the use of email, resulting in Luis adopting a challenge to not use email whatsoever … which launched Luis into a “No email” policy.

Dave is now showing a screen shot of VYEW.com .. desktop videoconferencing (Simple Virtual Conferencing, Real Time Anywhere, 7 / 24 and Free).

Don’t pitch .. just show them how it works.

Generation Millennium:

Dave worked with a bunch of them in the Ontario Ministry of Health re: SARS … he worked with a group of people whose average age was 24 (and with the same restrictions on the use of “consumer” web applications.

Dave says he was shy when he started working (so was I, you COULD NOT afford to be assertive or 9 times out of 10 you’d be out of a job or on a shit list).  This generation is impatient, won’t wait for things, view search and research as the same thing, and will move on if they cannot work the way they want to, whioch is how they can be effective.

Important Limitations to Generation Millenium

1. Many of them will never “know” their employers’ business.

2. They thing research is the same as search (which Dave says is wrong).

Other Possibilities:

Blogs as courseware

The use of cultural anthropology

The use of simulations and scenarios

The use of proximity locators

The use of affinity detectors

Peer-to-Peer sharing of / in education

The use of mind-mapping

GPS / Google Mashups

Open Space Problem-solving

Virtual World Collaborations

From the keyboard and blog of Dave Snowden (Dave has a username and password for this blog but I think prefers (or is habituated) writing on the Cognitive Edge site.  All the better, of course, as that leads to wider distribution of interesting content.

Innovation Sherpa

From the keyboard of Jay Cross …

Dave Snowden kicked off KM World & Intranets in San Jose this evening with a exercise based on learning from KM’s failures.

We wrote PostIts describing the state of KM today. Then we built a time line of the things that got us there, going backward step-by-step. Telling a story backwards forces you to tell the truth. (Trying to tell a lie backwards produces cognitive overload.) With the backward logic chain in place, we went to work describing two alternative futures: KM heaven and KM hell, and assessing their antecedents in our time line.

Dave finds this sort of process superior to scenario planning, which limits your options, thereby increasing the risk of missing the future.

KM … Hmmmm 

Narrative assessments of the battlefield are 40%-60% richer than analytical assessments.

Stories of failures can be used to generate “worst case scenarios.” People learn more from avoiding failure than from affirming success. This is why Dave does not go along with Appreciative Inquiry: it’s all uppers.

Dave recounted a teaching story about creating an atmosphere for accidents at an oil company. The message: “Coffee kills.” Floor coffee safety officers patrolled the halls. People were forced to carry their coffee on two-handled trays. Ridiculous? Yes. But the rate of accidents from liquid nitrogen spills was cut in half.

Getting it wrong can be quite instructive. That’s why Dave detests “Sick Sigma.” All hail failure!

This was a great kick-off for the conference. Dave is a fantastic storyteller and wit. We left the room scratching our heads about the future.

Here we go.  KMWorld 2008 is kicking off tomorrow morning.

There’s a great roster of sessions and speakers this year, coming at a time of massive and rapid changes coming thick and fast to the knowledge -based workplace of this first decade  of the 21st century.  Web 2.0. Enterprise 2.0, SaaS, Cloud Computing, advances in algorithm-based contextual enterprise search, a growing understanding of social computing and the ways people share and exchange information to build effective and flexible responses on a dynamic basis to demanding customers and markets.

Last year at KMWorld 2007 several bloggers kicked out a few posts that helped highlight and spread awareness of some of the thought leaders on offer at this major conference.  This year we’re kicking it up a notch … we’ve asked a number of key contributors in the KM domain to offer up one or more blog posts, either on sessions they are attending or offering, or that offer a glimpse of an interesting session they’ve attended.

We’ve asked leading lights Dave Snowden and Dave Pollard to offer up some of their thoughts.  We’ve asked Jenny Ambrozek and Patti Anklam to weigh in.  Stuart Henshall will, we hope, bring his considerable blogging skills to bear in a couple of posts.  Learning maven and guru Jay Cross of the Internettime blog has agreed to weigh in, conference organizer Jane Dysart (also an active blogger in her own right) will pitch in, and I’m going to do my best to provide you with an over view of some of the interesting sessions I attend.

We also have a Twiiter account that these bloggers will use to “tweet” issues of interest and once Stuart helps us make sure we know how to use it correctly, we’ll have the Twitter channel Phweet-enabled so that people can connect and talk easily.

The conference opens up first thing tomorrow morning with a keynote speech by John Kao, the author of Innovation Nation and a serial innovator who is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s leading authority on the future of business. He will explore the intersection of innovation and transformation to help define the landscape for enterprise—and knowledge workers—in the years ahead.  John has a proven record of identifying circumstances long before they coalesce into trends and is a highly qualified voice to help us set a course for the next decade.  

You’re welcome to check on, give us feedback and ask questions – we will do our best to respond quickly in a useful way.