How to link formal and informal within the enterprise : the “still” company

Since intangible assets only create value when they support formal business process, enterprises don’t have to create an enterprise 2.0 organization relying on informal but a system allowing formal and structured activities to take advantage from what isn’t.

If we want to visualize that, the “still” metaphor seems very relevant to me.

[Read more...]

Conversations and the emergence of unsuspected knowledge

A large part of companies’ knowledge is not available for all for the only reason people are not conscious of the importance of some details of their experience and that, since others don’t know what these people know, they don’t think of asking them anything…

Hence the importance of not organising knowledge capture on the only base of “forms people have to fill” and pay attention to what can capture conversations which are the only way to make emerge “what we don’t know people know and they dont measure the importance”.

That reminds of this famous Donald Rumsfeld’s sentence. It made me laugh at this time, but perharps it has more sense than I though (even if he didn’t did it in purpose…)

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know.

There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know.

But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.

Connecting formal and informal knowlegde to create business value.

If enterprise 2.0 is to develop informal networks and tacit knowledge formalization within the enterprise, there’s still one question to be answered : how does all the spent energy contributes to create business value ?

Actually, I consider it as a keypoint in every project I manage : the use of all this intangible patrimony for formal business needs has to be organized. Because value creation will always be something structured.

Saying that, I don’t think that the “spent energy” words are quite relevant. I think “recycled energy” would be better. In fact, social networks already exist but are not used except in a very small perimeter, tacit knowledge exists too but only at an individual scale, but there are not valuable at the organization scale.

Let go back to our purpose : using informal and tacit assets in a formal business context, whitout which everything that has to do with enterprise 2.0 is useless.

[Read more...]