Entreprise 2.0 at Pfizer

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Now that I've left Pfizer, I am glad to congratulate my friend Ben Gardner for an excellent slide show. Ben and colleagues (Paul, Mark, Jason, Simon, Scott, etc.) have made a difference at Pfizer by demonstrating how collaboration could really move Pfizer on the path of unforeseen innovation. They relentlessly applied to themselves the values of collective intelligence: open mind, trusting peer environment, constant juggling of innovativeideas, unleashed passion, hard work and fun.

What I like about this slide presentation is that it presents a panel of technologies that has converged towards a coherent collaborative environment over the past two years. One of the first tools was Pfizerpedia, a geek's wiki whose use has been expanded to project description and reporting, profile management, meeting handling, etc. Another team started with a collective blog (DIGWWW) which gained readership in a lot of circles at Pfizer. RSS aggregation, tagging and social network analysis followed. Each technology brought a new dimension to the benefit of corporate collaboration.

In my view, there are two challenges that remain to overcome:

• bring consistency to the installed toolset to avoid duplication of functionality and foster content interoperation (through a consistent meta data layer)
• work to change people's culture towards recognising those who dedicate time and effort to sharing their knowledge and skills.

I had a wonderful time with you guys! I am glad to see that Entreprise 2.0 is alive and well in your hands!

In France, link aggregators are held responsible for content!

So, in Martinez vs Fuzz, the suitor won the first leg. Fuzz's webmaster Eric Dupin has been condemned to a fee of 1,000 Euros for relaying a link that infringed Mr Martinez's privacy. What to make of it?

Well, it clarifies the notion of responsibility for web publishers: they are responsible for all content that can be found on their sites, including indirect content, i.e. links to content maintained on other sites. Or does it really? It seems to define a sort of holistic responsibility: what if the content is a link to a site that contains a link to incriminated content? Would that qualify as litigeous content? For instance, could tinyurl.com be held responsible for providing a short url to replace one subject to sueing?

The second aspect which has not been considered in this regrettable affair is the intent of web publisher. Was it or not to do harm by publishing squander? In this paarticular case I know it was not, because, as an aggregator of content provided by users, Eric did not know everything that was published on his site.

The third aspect is about what harm was actually done to the plaintiff? To my knowledge, very little, apart from putting on the news front the name of an actor that a lot of people did not know. Furthermore, France2.fr reported that Mr Martinez's lawyer refuted the rumor in a statement right after the publication of the judgement condemning Eric. Why wasn't that statement made in the first place prior to any sueing? Why didn't Mr Martinez or his lawyer contacted Eric for a settlement outside the court again prior to sueing? Was there a hidden agenda (like earning a bit of easy money...)?

We will watch the upcoming developments of this unfortunate affair, which has the potential to harm free speech on the web in the French blogosphere durably.

Stay tuned.

Internet as a Gold Mine for serial law suiters!

Recommandé par des Influenceurs

I cannot remain silent when some people threaten to undermine freedom of information on the Internet. The story so far: Eric, Press-Citron (Lemon Squeezing) blogger whom I follow regularly, also publishes a web site that contains RSS links that are compiled in an automated way.

He is being sued, because one link happened to connect to a dubious rumor implicating a not so famous French actor. So Eric has to defend the fact that he relayed some rumor, although he did not write the incriminated content.

Now we discover that that person is systematically suing web site owners who helped propagate the rumor. All web sites? Not by far, since neither Google, nor Yahoo! and other big integrators are sued...

The blogsphere in France is mobilised to support fellow Eric against Internet predators who seem to think that systematic suing could get them some easy money.

Cheer up, Eric. We support you!

PS: Latest news: the verdict will be known on March 26th.

Assessing Human Capital in the Entreprise

In these first days of the new year, I feel like I've started to climb an unfamiliar mountain. The path is narrow and looks unsafe, but the vista that is revealed to me as I make my way up, step by step, is gorgeous and full of nice surprises.
What is this mountain? It's the personal challenge that I've decided to meet to establish myself as an independent consultant in Collaboration and Social Network Analysis.

So, where am I on the journey?
As I am preparing to leave my current company at the end of the month, I've been contacting colleagues who are potentially interested in using the ONA approach in some of their client departments. So there is a (small) chance that this company becomes my first client. In addition, I am in contact with my former boss who is now at the head of an informatics group in a pharmaceutical company on the West Coast. Here again, there are active talks that could lead to positive outcomes.
These contacts are extremely valuable, whether they lead to work or not, as they prompt me to refine my offer and clarify the approach that I am offering to conduct Organizational Network Analyses.

ONA is one of the tools to assess Human Capital
Human Capital is the value creating potential of the entreprise. It relies on how the actors, who make the entreprise thrive, interact with one another while juggling with the following organizational constructs:

• Values that enable constructive human interactions
  As a primary example, I would mention Strategic Thinking which helps determine the courses of actions that will help align everyone's efforts in a common direction. There is also the fundamental value of Respect for People which is a keystone of any human interaction. The third value is the promotion of knowledge sharing as an instrument of power, as opposed to knowledge retention, which is so widespread in many companies.
• Obligations and Constraints
  Human Capital can often be hindered or inhibited by the set of internal constraints and duties that are grown off sheer organizational complexity. The first one comes from the hierarchical organization, that can sometimes be mixed with a dose of matrix reporting. Other self imposed constraints are the business objectives, which are necessary and a good thing when they directly support a well established and understood strategy., but can be translated into sets of unaligned individual goals. Another big constraint on organizations is the time sinks represented by rigid bureaucracy, including governance, corporate policies, meetings and email overload.

Faced with the organization's sluggishness and the values that give a framework of how to cope with its complexity, the Human Capital can be assessed by the responses of individuals and groups:

• Their behaviours
  regarding how to do their day to day jobs, how they interact informally with one another (social networking), what time they can afford to spend on improving the way they do things (innovation) and how they develop themselves.
  
• Rewards and recognition
  This is the feedback loop that can re-enforce or undermine any effort towards a more collaborative environment. What are the behaviours that are really rewarded? Is it global thinking, team focus, knowledge sharing and personal contribution to improve the level of cooperation, or is it exacerbated competition, hero mindset, power by information silos?

Organizational Network Analysis focuses on the collaborative behaviours within the entreprise. Its results have the potential to reveal the dynamic results of the set of obligations, constraints, values, rewards and recognition that form the culture of the entreprise. It will give clues about what could be changed to enhance people's contribution to the welfare of the entreprise, thus helping to improve Human Capital.

I will dive into how ONA's can be conducted as I take you along in my exciting journey up the mountain!

Link: A mind map of Human Capital Assessment

Photo: Jura (France) - August 2007 - Patrice Chollet

2007: Transition and Discovery

It's been two weeks without a post. Much too long regarding my own commitment to the task. So what happened? We've gone back to France for the season's break and visited parents and family, which means some travel (about 800 miles in all), leisurely activities and very little time on-line. This is no excuse, of course.

I've also been busy attending a one-day Consultant Marketing seminar organized by ITG, an umbrella company which offers haven to independent consultants who do not wish to be swamped by all the administrative tasks required when one starts his or her own business. Such companies will deal with all invoicing, insurance, pension, tax duties while consultants can devote their time to do what they like most to do: develop their business, nurture their network, land contracts. I have some contacts who could lead me to find my first mission as a free-lance consultant. If this happens soon, I'll seek to strike a deal with such a company.

So what about the earlier part of 2007?
The big events have run around the reorganization of the business and my struggle to find a suitable position in the Knowledge Management domain at my company. This has not worked out, but at the same time, I've found this to be a great opportunity to put my professional life in perspective and ask myself what is it I really want to do for the rest of my active life (probably about 10 years). So, I've decided that it was worth pursuing what I am passionate about, helping people and companies work better in a cooperative environment.

As a consequence, we have planned to move back to France during the first quarter of 2008 and establish this new business of mine there. It will fulfill a long time desire of ours to get back to our friends and family.

2007 has been notable also with my realising how social networking is at the heart of most human activities these days and especially for the knowledge worker that I am. So I have taken every opportunity to connect or reconnect with all the people I know or once worked with and I have started to make new on-line friends in France. This latter part worked amazingly well: I was able to find like-minded people who had just started a discussion group (La nouvelle énergie du business - the new business energy) and we've been busy planning for further development of the group in the new year.

The values promoted by that group are:

• Take responsibility for your own life
• Cooperation is at the heart of personal fulfillment and societal achievement
• Be generous - Give without thinking about retribution
• Open your mind to trusting others
• Stand by your word to earn others' trust

I have made these values mine and hope to live up to them in 2008.

Dear reader, I hope you had an enriching year and that the coming one will bring you what you most desire. And I hope that some day we will find opportunities to help each other.

Explorations in TiddlyWiki land

I'm been enthralled by TiddlyWiki this past week or so. The more I dig into it, the more opportunities I find.

In my quest for the ultimate personal note taking applications I looked at various solutions, from the classical Office documents that are not flexible in terms of tagging pieces of content and organising a notebook like a diary.

At my work facility, we are using OneNote: it's got the versatility of adding pages easily in a set of hierarchical sections, sub-sections, pages and sub-pages. It can embed entire documents as well or link to them. But, with all its power, OneNote requires to be installed on all the computers that I am using for me to open my Notebook at various place at work and at home. I am a bit daunted by the complexity of of the whole OneNote application and have misgivings about its being around for a long time.

The next cool application I've been using is Web On a Stick (WOS), which is really a full blown web server running Apache and major open source applications, such as Drupal, Workdpress and MediaWiki to name a few. I've been using the latter extensively to record my thoughts, references and plans in a non-linear way. I found it very useful, also I am missing a Wisiwig interface, which I'm told exists as a plugin. I have not taken the time to install it though.

Now comes TiddlyWiki. I tried it a few months back and at the time simply did not get it. I did not know where to start with it, how to customise it to my liking and how it could be quickly put to work as a notebook. So last week, I came back to it on a whim, and this time it clicked. I was able to start using it as a daily journal and to record thoughts, things to do, now or later. And I have seen amazing applications of TiddlyWiki: whole web sites, GTD (Getting Things Done) documents, etc.

So what's to TiddlyWiki?
I like the fact that it's self-contained. I mean that the whole thing is in a single HTML document, which is fairly portable: all you need is a web browser on a machine which can run Linux, MacOs or even Windows ;-). Next, it's great to capture non-linear thinking, like going back to projects over time, and it help make all the links that one needs to retrieve things very quickly.

The basic concept is to encapsulate pieces of content (text, scripts, macros, pictures, links, podcasts or videos) in "tiddler" that you can tag (or have the system tag them for you), with a wiki style editor.

Then the interface, lets you organise your content, i.e. tiddler in a number of ways, having them appear or disapear at will on the page.

Gone is the tedious folder hierarchy, if you can name what you're looking for, you can retrieve it.
Last goodie for now: there is a dynamic and enthusiastic community of developers out there to make you life easier, including Jeremy Ruston , the creator of TiddlyWiki, Eric Shulman of ELS Design Studios, and many others.

Check it out!

Links of interest:
The TiddlyWiki Vault - thanks to Dave and Blanca Gifford
TiddlyWiki review by tifrap
Can't Live Without It, TiddlyWiki by Cynthia Russell

My Web2.0 Virtual Office

After reading this great post by Eric Dupin on "My life without software and with barely a computer" (sorry, the original text is in French), it came to me that it may be of interest to describe my personal productivity environment.

I've been using Windows, in various versions this past 18 years from 3.1 to XP in my work environment. Coming from the Apple IIe and Mac world in the pioneering years (1983 to 1989), the move was wrenching at the time, much like driving a Ford model T, after years of enjoying a classy Porsche 911. But, by work necessity, I tried to make the best of the IBM PC/Windows environment.

With the advent of the web, I recently took the decision to explore tools that would free me from the ever increasing race towards more cycle-hungry operating systems and thick desktop applications and would enable me to potentially work from any computer, wherever I am connected.

Although, my journey of discovery is far from being complete, here is were I am at this point. First, I decided to have a go at Linux as an alternative to Windows. So I erased the latter on a Thinkpad T22 that I bought about 5 years ago and installed PCLinuxOS, a distro that compares well with the likes of Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse etc. It's been fairly painless to install, although I had a bit of a struggle with the Broadcom wireless network card.

So, on this laptop, that I upgraded to 512Mb of RAM from the initial 256Mb, I am happy surfing the net with Firefox. I use Google Reader to check my suscribed feeds and I tag websites and resources of interest using del.icio.us. Google Notebook is a nice complement that helps me clip information of interest, categorize it and add notes on the fly.

Open Office seems to be a valid replacement for MS Office, although I have not completed the conversion yet. I think the next step is going to be about finding online replacements of these desktop productivity tools. The big advantages that I see in moving in that direction are:

• Storing files on a remote location enables the ability to share them with my friends and co-workers
• I can reference them in blogs or websites with their URL
• I don't need to think about backing them up, although having a copy somewhere is always a good idea

I am also a big user of mind mapping software. I like MindManager in Windows and I've tried FreeMind, an open source software which is OK for basic mind mapping in Linux. Recently, a friend indicated comapping, a mind mapping application that is completely hosted on the web and allows for co-editing of mind maps in real time and remotely. It's an impressive tool, with all needed conversion capabilities from and to freemind and MindManager. We intend to use it to record minutes of our teleconferences live.

Another area of growing interest for me is social networking, mainly through Linkedin and Viadeo. I find that in addition, I have a need for a contact manager to make sure that I follow up with my network contacts in a timely way. I've chosen Highrise, by 37signals, the providers of Basecamp, the project management tool of fame. It provides me with the necessary functionality to log my contact history, details and tasks. It's a great resource, even with the basic free license.

Lastly, I am addicted to Getting Things Done and use Todoist, a neat online facility with good flexibility and Gmail integration (which I haven't gotten around to testing so far).

What productivity applications have you found on the web that you particularly like?

Interesting link:
Linux and Open Source Blog (from which the picture above comes - thanks)

Post update at 18:03:
Check this article on CIO Magazine: Windows vs. Linux vs. OS X