Intellectual Capital | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

Enterprise 2.0 : my predictions for 2009

Honestly I was not sure I would conform to the annual predictions tradition. Finally, since my 2008 edition was not that bad (shift from “social tools at people’s disposal” to the acknowledgement it needed inclusion in business process) and Susan kindly asks for it, I’ll try to do something interesing this year.

That said, I will divide my note in two parts. As any good “thoughtleader” sometimes mistake predictions for his own wishes, I’ll try to be lucid enough to clearly separate both and end my note with a few pious hopes.

Let’s start !

Today, many opinions converge to admit two things :

• companies need to be more and and more reactive in order to run their traditionnal activities in a more and more complexe context, where foreseeability is very uncertain and where sharp competences and complex competences assembling are needed in a short range of time. Something like “special forces forces for special taks”, running in parallel with traditionnal activities which are companies common background operations.

• in order to match this need, adequate expertises and competences are needed.

We have no choice but to admit that high levels of performance are reached in legay and “institutionnalized” activities and the money that has been invested to improve many business processes often provided a ROI. Competencewise, we also have to admit they are really present within organizations. But, for what’s about building efficient adhoc self-organized teams, even if the need is identified it gets harder and harder to be successfull since more and more situations requires this way of doing things.

One reason is that what we call intellectual capital, if present, is not easily accessible and its owners can barely be identified. To improve things, experience and knowledge should be “findable” and “findability” can only come from putting it all in words because it’s (and will remain for years) the more efficient way of indexing and finding datas in an online network, the so-called online network being the only commons space shared by all employees in scattered companies. So people would be able to search the experience and, if they can’t find what they’re looking for, identify referent people they could contact and ask.

All this is nothing more than a matter of information and readiness.

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