I’m back blogging after many months of keeping silent, for good and bad reasons.
This week-end, I finally had the opportunity to sit relaxed and rested and think again to what had kept me so busy in real life and so silent in digital life.
That questionning was triggered by two similar and consecutive requests: trainees of the compaby coming to me to identify their topics for their final paper, but more fundamentaly trying to get a sense of their action and see how to position themselves soon on the marketplace. One is interested in recruitment and wants to enquire more about the role of social networks. Another is interested in professional training but is scratching is head on the role of online communities, tablets, and gaming.
To both I gave a simple and similar answer: the digitization of recruitment/training.
My rationale was that instead of opposing classical ways of recruiting or training, it was probably more interesting and future-proof to look into how the Internet and Digital were impacting, complementing, revamping classical practices.
I was illustrating my point with examples of the time I was with the National Library Board in Singapore: service redesign and crowdsourcing of content digitization.
As this blog shows, I’m passionate about Enterprise 2.0 aka Enterprise Social Business as Jeff Dachis and his crew have renamed it.
When you take a step back, Enterprise 2.0 is all about the digitization of the corporation:
- How Internet impacts the way people collaborate – key words being enterprise social networks, empowerment, mobility, nomadism
- How Internet impacts the way corporations engage with their customers – key works being social media, ecommerce, big data, crowdsourcing, last mile, 3D printing
- How Internet impacts the way corporations engage with their partners – key words being extended enterprise
Behind are questions around business models and industrial models.
That’s for the enterprise, but the Internet impacts potentially everything and has a powerful disintermediating effect that shuffles the cards: identity, education, information, justice, democracy, diplomacy, commons, currency, piracy, healthcare, and more. When you look at who’s successful lately – as a country, as a corporation or an entrepreneur, as an employee – most of the time it’s those who have been anticipating the digitization of their world. They have been building competitive advantage attracting talents or training themselves, changing their industrial models and enriching their business models. Those who haven’t, by lack of understanding or comfort with the past, run into troubles or survive with subsidies.
Obviously, it takes more than that to be more successful. Yet, I firmly believe that the way we make sense of the world impacts the way we cope with and thrive in it.
Inquiring into the digitization of our world is a powerful way to make sense out of all the changes that most of us hardly understand, fear and try preventing. Try it and let me know!
I am at the junction of management, technology & culture, to maximize knowledge work & make organizations more competitive. I'm passionate about knowledge management, communities of practice, enterprise social computing (aka enterprise 2.0) and corporate governance in a knowledge economy. I fancy designing collaboration and knowledge sharing related digital tools. I am currently the Director, Collaborative Development at the Ops Division of L'Oreal and based in Paris. I was previously in Singapore and Hyderabad as Director Asia at Revevol, an international cloud computing broker specialised in Google Enterprise products and related services, Associate Director of the Digital Division of the National Library Board of Singapore and before a consultant at Headshift, a social business design consultancy now part of the Dachis Group. I have been working on international network and community management, designing and implementing CRM, reporting and community tools. I have given some lectures around KM at EM Lyon, a European leading Management School, and talks at both KM Singapore and KM Asia. I participated in the we are smarter than me initiative as chapter moderator. I have been a member of the Executive Committee of the Information & Knowledge Management Society of Singapore (IKMS) for two years. I graduated a PhD in Management, while working in a full-time position and with the kind support of Claude Roche (France Telecom, previously at ENST), Jean-Claude Moisdon (CGS Mines) and Philippe Lorino (ESSEC). When not working, I can be found back-packing mostly in Latin America and Asia. The shift from muscle sweat to brain juice as the main factor of performance creates some fundamental changes in the way management is to be taught and practised. Topics like knowledge management (KM), communities of practice (CoP), enterprise social computing (Enterprise 2.0) are the ones that participate in crafting the new required management practices. But they only are one part of the solution. Topics like measurement and metrics, behaviours and authority, representation and organisation of the group also have to be questioned and rejuvenated. This blog is about all this and we can summarise this as 'managing in a knowledge economy'. It displays ideas of my own and not the ones of my employers, past and present.