Thierry Hubert's blog

I just don't get over the "over-the-top" glorification of Steve Jobs since his death.

2011-10-07T22:23:00.003-05:00

Sure he was a great personality in our industry, but come on no men is a single hero. For those who say "Now what are we going to do? What will happen to the future of computers?", I say get real, and when did you stop thinking?

Don't get me wrong I think that Steve was a genius. But enough already with this loss of hope for innovation being reported by the media. Let us reminber that it is not Steve Jobs, Motorola or Bill Gates came up with many ideas and we consider breakthroughs. Remember that the creators of Star Trek introduced the flip phone (communicator), the blue tooth head set (Uhura's communication head piece), The Next Generation had the Tablet, and I could go on. Most of us tech geeks dream of taking the sci-fi creations and making them reality. Alter all it is easier to sell when people have seen them before. I just can wait for the replicator (oh yeah Lotus Development Corporation had one of those for its Notes databases in the late 80s), the Holodeck, and of course my jet-pack.

So you see, there is no shortcoming of imagination and ideas buried in our pop culture. It is there for the picking by geeks and those with enough money to help them out. The rise of leaders often comes from the implicit desire of the many to see them explicitly expressed... often in the form of products. I always remind myself that the ultimate expression of knowledge is a product. Today our collective knowledge hides many tacit desires waiting to be realized.

Goodbye Steve

2011-10-05T23:35:00.002-05:00

Dear Steve,

I believe that your vision, enthusiasm and inspiring qualities have set a new standard for excellence in product design. Although you will be missed, the work and the expectation for innovation you have delivered will continue to advance our desires and shape the needs of human computing. I salute you and know that your immortality is secured in your legacy.

Have a great journey amongst the living knowing that the self in now amongst the many.

Thierry

Improving Awareness with Darwin Ecosystem

2011-09-30T17:02:00.003-05:00

If awareness is the ability for the observer to be conscious of events, then one would welcome as much information as possible to be on top of his/her game. Unfortunately we all know that this task is overwhelming, and this is why we too often depend on technology that tells us what we should know. We organize our information with taxonomy libraries, processes, assisted workflow, search engine, alerts and complex analytics to guide our decisions and actions. We embrace the power of Web 2.0 technology to improve our collaboration, and yet we very quickly transform spontaneous efforts into structured and streamlined communication flows to perform expected tasks.

Companies that use Web 2.0 collaborative platforms are very familiar with the dilemma of empowering free-form collaboration while overcoming the information overload it creates. The promise of information transparency and leveraging cross-organizational initiatives, have been weaken with the need to contain meaningful information through predictable and human network distribution channels.

What if gaining awareness through workflows, pushing and searching information was the product of a technical and cultural limitation?

What if information overload and transparency was no longer a threat to productivity, identifying opportunities and resources?

Darwin Ecosystem provides an answer to this limitation and growing problem. Instead of looking at the computer to infer meaning, Darwin’s Awareness Engine display information patterns and lets the user infer meaning. Hundreds or thousands of recent events are organically correlated to help the user understand what is happening without having to consume the content until the theme of interest has been selected. This provides rapid awareness and overcomes information overload. No deterministic algorithms, complex analytics or dependence of human/organizational networks are required.

Introducing a Wikileaks Awareness Edition using the Darwin Ecosystem’s technology.

2011-01-18T17:21:00.006-05:00

Darwin Awareness Engine™ helps users track Web and Enterprise 2.0 events, uncover emerging trends and gain faster understanding of complex issues.

To demonstrate the value of this new way to present time-sensitive and contextual information, we have dedicated a Darwin Edition to information relating to Wikileaks. In this edition, we present recent news, blogs and social media mentioning Wikileaks.

Darwin Awareness Engine presents the rising terms and related concepts emerging as events unfold from the Web’s collective reaction and participation with Wikileaks. Users can observe the emergence of topics of interest, and with a mouse-over and click, see the Web events that relate with the selection. This makes awareness and discovery much faster than managing alerts, search queries, or browsing through countless news/blogs/social web sites.

Darwin Awareness Engine is still in Beta. Try it at wikileaks.darwineco.com. Register, and let us know what you think.

Temporal Semantic Correlation

2011-01-12T18:58:00.001-05:00

Semantic technologies are evolving continuously in their intended use and approaches.
For example, Semantic Analysis - the process of inferring meaning from the analysis of language - has been used traditionally to deliver a comprehensive synthesis of a potentially large number of complex documents.

More recently the focus of semantic technologies has been on inferring measurements of sentiments and predictions from Web 2.0 sources. In 1999 Tim Berners-Lee introduced the concept of a Semantic Web, a set of tools and technologies that produce a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines.

These include the Resource Description Framework (RDF), notations such as RDF Schema (RDFS) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL), all of which are intended to provide a formal description of concepts, terms, and relationships within a given knowledge domain.

While these semantic technology models allow for machines to understand information, they require the constant review of underlying assumptions and conventions. With the explosion of unstructured and unpredictable Web events emerging from anyone and anywhere, current semantic technologies are increasingly unable to deliver meaning and are limited to niche applications.

A new model is emerging that offers a complementary way to structure, observe, and gather meaning from time-sensitive chaotic information: the Temporal Semantic Correlation Model.

At the core of Temporal Semantic Correlation are the principles of chaos theory. Its application enables the self-organization of enormous amounts of data that coexist and constantly collide.

The social dimension of Web 2.0’s information explosion has created an environment where information exists in a chaotic, loosely structured repository. The more such information is created over a period of time, the higher the chance to observe patterns that reveal emerging themes. This leads to the observation of unexpected and timely concepts made visible through temporal correlation.

Darwin Ecosystem has developed and employs the Temporal Semantic Correlation Model in the development of its “Awareness Engine”. According to this model, the user does not need ask the system a direct, precise question. Instead, the self-organization of information is paired with the user’s context, delivering an interactive representation capable of informing, the user about what is happening about matters to them within their current context.
The Temporal Semantic Correlation Model delivers an organic semantic representation of concepts correlated among events over time. The model representation does not require and does not depend upon semantic analysis computing. It leverages Semantic Web tools to improve concept disambiguation consistent with the ontology familiar to, or inferred by, the user. Darwin Awareness Engine positions the user’s interpretation as the only judge of relevance.

The visualization of Temporal Semantic Correlation delivers and improves awareness and facilitates serendipitous discoveries. By observing patterns emerging from correlated terms, the effort of targeting and understanding relevant information is greatly improved at a personal level.

Darwin Awareness Engine is resilient to the evolving, diverse and growing sources of information since it does not require the information to be analyzed tagged, organized or curated. Further refinement however, is possible by using tools and specialized taxonomies that yield increased relevance within an emerging and progressively specific framework of conceptual nuances.

In summary, the Temporal Semantic Correlation Model complements semantic technologies that have been built upon the basics of how we think a machine should mimic our cognitive processes in order to infer meaning.

It turns out that it is necessary to include a less mechanistic approach; one where the technology seeks only to present patterns and relevance inherent within the mass of chaotic data. By affording more resilient and easier semantic refinement, Darwin Awareness Engine extends the user’s ability to infer meaning and relevance within a personal context.

Since our own thinking about what is important is highly influenced by our need to solve rapidly, evolving complex problems, today’s semantic technologies have difficulty maintaining continual coherence within our personal context at any given time. The maintenance of necessary deterministic rules is an ever-increasing and resource-consuming effort.

In contrast, the Temporal Semantic Correlation Model is consistent with nature’s self-organizing capability. This is a departure from the complexity of making the machine the “decider” of what matters or the arbiter of value in context. The discovery of valuable information and consensus-building recommendations, in this complementary approach, is left to the talented human. The system supports the human and not the other way around.

HULU’s “Is this ad relevant to you?”

2010-10-01T19:00:00.004-05:00

OK this is one of my rant posts. You may have noticed that Hulu asks you the question: “Is this ad relevant you?” on top of their advertisement. Let’s understand this question and where it comes from.

Most of us (by “us” I mean professionals of build Web businesses) know that the #1 revenue making machine on the Web is on-line advertisement. We also know that the Holly Grail of this industry is to be the most relevant to viewers so that they will click as we cash-in on every click. We also know that there is a fine line between increased relevance and privacy. Thus when we want explicit relevance we ask for permission, or for the user to tell us more about themselves. Others like Google’s Gmail are more bold, they will actually use the content of your emails to push “relevant” ads your way.

Using the term “relevant” is the issue I have with Hulu. What it says is that their marketing and advertisement team have spent too much time talking about increasing relevance and have transposed an abstract term to their viewers. What does this question mean in the first place?: “Is this relevant to you?”, especially when the advertisers’ messages are about strengthening their brand in a repetitive manner. What is Hulu trying to do here? I think that they simply want numbers to report on their “increasing relevance” campaign for internal and executive validation. Or that they are dealing with an inexperience team who just learned the word “relevance” in the context of on-line advertising. If they come from the TV industry, the ladder is most probable.

I have asked many of my friends what they answer to Hulu’s question. All of them said: “I click on NO so that they’ll stop bothering me with these ads.”. Here you go Hulu... you can’t be asking the question to your users that you yourselves are incapable of answering. Then again you are dealing with the traditional TV advertisement industry, and you are not using technology to change the paradigm of what a relevant message should be. Until Hulu can actually innovate instead of transposing, I suggest that it infers relevance from the shows and type of subscriptions the viewers select. Because let’s face it, you just don’t ask if people find advertisement relevant... it is a tolerated evil for free entertainment, no more, no less.

Here are some questions Hulu may ask (I am being ironic ;-):
“Is this ad repetitive?”
“Is this ad entertaining to you?”
“Did you know this brand?”
... So what? Will Hulu stop showing us ads that we don’t care about? Of course not! So once again, just like TV, we are back to branding.

I also remember that when Hulu stared; they had lower budget ads with actual messages that made me discover new products and social missions. Perhaps that is more powerful and relevant to viewers who know already who Microsoft and Toyota are.

Also Hulu might learn a thing or two from Google who actually made it possible for a new smaller companies to afford to reach more people through relevance. Perhaps someone should tell the media companies that we watch our shows at anytime and that the concept of prime-time placement is IRRELEVANT ;-) Can Hulu be that messenger?

What this blog relevant to you? ;-)

The Facebook idea ownership...

2010-09-30T07:36:00.011-05:00

All of us who worked on social and collaborative computing in the 90s know very well that Facebook is not a technical innovation, but rather a success based on timing and a brilliantly selected seed-community. I worked for Lotus and IBM where I directed, in 1996, a team of engineers to develop my vision of on-line communities; InterCommunity. I presented it in 1998 at Comdex in Paris with France Telecom as our alliance partner. We were there already, and we were using Notes/Domino as the back-end to a Web community portal where people were invited by the community leader and its members. Unfortunately IBM closed the project in 2000 and re-used it for enterprise collaboration as IBM did not see a consumer market for InterCommunity (same old story ;-). Since it was IBM's intellectual property I could not exploit it once I left.

During my 20-year career, in social computing research and development, I have seen similar ideas emerge simultaneously unbeknownst to their creators. This is particularly true in the Web era where the mere exposure to new paradigms and ways to communicate offer a common framework for thinking about opportunities (at the same time and all over the world; now compute the likelihood of simultaneous eurekas) . Ideas rarely happen in isolation and we know that... they emerge from serendipitous convergence if exposure to clues and answers.

I have met brilliant creators of community-driven solutions. One in particular who was ahead of his time is Frederic Soussin. He created in 1996 a face-book like light-client application using early iterations of P2P principals with his product called Kanari (before Ray Ozzie's Groove). Others companies like Affinitiz created web-based community platforms (a few years before Facebook), but remain unknown to most of us.

So basically Mark Zuckerberg acted in a timely manner on an idea that was inspired by his time and existed in so many ways on the Web. But a small team of engineers at IBM knew that already 10 years before he started Facebook. He did not invent social networking, he put it on the map for all to enjoy... and for that my hat off to Mark.

In this age of unprecedented communication, the creation and ownership of a solution is just not as meaningful as its timely deployment. I wish that venture capitalists and large organizations with talent would get this instead of over-thinking the technology and creating dream-pipe sales forecast spreadsheets to appease the old guard. Many brilliant solutions remain under developed because the business world has not caught-up with the reality of fast business creation that are constantly threaten by the next idea. When you look at the big new players like Google,Facebook, Twitter... you realize that most of them just put it out there and did not have a real plan for success or any idea as to how it would succeed. Paradoxically investors want new ideas to have 5 year forecasts and tight business plans. I can't help to see the irony. So if you have a good idea, stop wasting time convincing the old guard and just put it out there! Then perhaps you will be noticed by the right audience; your users. Then the investors will come.

Thierry,
Former Director of Action Research for Lotus/IBM

Thinking about Device Interoperability for Apple

2010-07-22T10:47:00.003-05:00

I am a big fan of Apple products. I am somewhat disappointed that I am unable to pair my iPhone with my Mac. I had an old Ericsson phone that paired with my Mac for me to dial a number from my Mac's address book. This was very useful. I don't care about the Blue Tooth synch since I have Mobile.me and that the rich content does requires a cable at this time... but the ability to use the iPhone from applications to launch calls and track usage would be very useful.

I think that Apple should be able to better balance device interoperability by making programs and features (GPS, compass, accelerometer, touchscreen, gyroscopic sensor, applications) available across devices that can connect. Just imagine how applications could become more powerful, and how many developers would think of Apple being feature-ubiquitous instead of proprietary (and this whilst maintaining manufacturing control over new breeds of devices that can be fragmented into module-driven resources).

I will be thinking of some cool applications with this model in mind. I will be happy to share some ideas.

The digital paradox: more automation, less visibility

2010-06-03T06:59:00.004-05:00

The ability for any business to remain aware of external influences and its own internal initiatives in near-real-time is becoming critical for informed and accelerated decision-making. The time for executives and managers to wait for monthly and quarterly meetings be aware of emerging issues and trends is gone. In the age of ever-changing regulatory compliances for public safety, the environment, trading, privacy and immigration, organizations face more complexity and opportunities that require prompt and informed actions.

Organizations are facing unprecedented challenges in this new and changing economy. The need to adapt in order to maintain and grow their market share is required. Change’s lifecycle is near-real-time and and has become a business-as-usual practice. This, despite the digital era’s success in delivering automatization tools, the multiplication of electronically published content and dialogue amongst communities keeps on challenging the true value of predictable outcome supported by automation. It remains a growing challenge as many businesses have yet to recognize that automated processes are just small component of what systems are capturing. Capturing all that matters to your business, detect new trends before they hit you, align your resources with what is happening outside in the market place, is a task that requires human insight at every level of the organization.

Connecting the dots becomes essential in order to enrich the decision process. The connection are the critical resource that powers your business, whereas process automation ensures its operating stability... not its sustainability.

That's it I am removing myself from Face Book.

2010-05-23T14:21:00.004-05:00

Removing myself permanently from FB. After having spent my career building collaborative and social networking applications since the late 80s, I am now convinced that the current FB trend to violate privacy and provide access to our personal information to third parties is crossing the line. In fact I have always been cautious of privacy matters while working at Lotus, IBM and my start-ups.

In the early 2000s I was exploring ways to empower on-line communities without using the old paradigm of the centralized main-frame (what Google and FB have been doing on the Web). I will look at my old design notes and revive some of the ideas that could resolve the current trend of turning our private information into a commercial asset.

Alternatives exist but the old way of capitalizing on advertisement is a hard habit for them to let go. Until we find an alternative, you could can stay in touch with me via email or Linked-in. mail@thierry-hubert.com I will cancel my account June 1st.Adieu FB.

DARWIN’s Information Organic Network (ION)

2010-05-04T12:50:00.001-05:00

We are all familiar with the power of web-published information networks; the URL cross-referencing web pages through its authors. We are also familiar with social networks driven by the desire to include friends, families and colleagues to keep each other informed. Both models have created part of the incredible value we get from the Web. Google could not deliver its ranked results without cross-referenced URLs, andt Facebook or LinkedIn could not expend their business reach without the social networks they capture.
Theses models are making the internet an unavoidable necessity for all. However, both models depend on the content authors to create links to other content and be linked to from other pages, and for people to invite and be invited to join networks. Basically the networks are built from the deliberate actions by Web actors. Is there an other type of network? The semantic Web? Surely but it is a framework for organizing concepts. It too requires human interventions to be useful.

Perhaps there is an other type of network that escapes the control of human control; an organic network of information? DARWIN’s use of chaos theories looks at the information captured on the web as connected through human cognition. If the human cognition is the environment for information genesis, then human cognition is the only media capable of decrypting the patterns that emerge from an unstructured and chaotic generation of content. By human cognition, we mean the thoughts contained within the content itself, and not the actions of humans on the content after it has been created.

The concept may appear esoteric, but Edward Norton Lorenz’s work in the advent of super computers in the 70s proved that chaos mathematical models reveal observable patterns in weather. In a similar way DARWIN looks at chaotic information and human cognitive as the key ingredients capable of displaying the patterns that reveal the existence of an Information Organic Network. Unlike the web-page and social networks, this network does not require human intervention to be organized; it is self-organizing and therefore more representative of what is happening as it occurs. Such a network of information provides a neutral awareness about what is happening, as well as making serendipitous discoveries easier to observe by its user.

The content organizes itself rather than being organized by human intervention or external algorithms. This eliminates the possibility of spam or clever SEO manipulation. Darwin’s approach lets the connections within the content emerge. Darwin them visualizes these connections so a person can use their own cognitive abilities to determine what is important and explore what is relevant to them. Each person can make their own sense of the content on the Web, rather than have an external force organize it for them as Google does. Darwin simply distills what is happening in a way that allows for the individual human cognition to take over.

I am considering removing myself from Facebook.

2010-04-21T21:50:00.003-05:00

I am considering removing myself from Facebook in light of their new privacy settings and ability to keep and share information with 3rd party companies. My activity will be limited and will eventually end. As most of my friends and former Lotus/IBM colleagues know, when I researched on-line communities of interest from 1995 to 2001 and created InterCommunity (a pre-Facebook of the mid-90s that was too early), my main concern back then and now is still the same; privacy! I also believe that Facebook provides enough privacy control for its users. Nonetheless the issue remains that they have the information and not the users. Unless serious legislation is pass to protect our privacy, or that we finally use the internet for what it was meant to be instead of a next generation-mainframe, I fear that trust can't be given to Facebook, Google and other personal information custodians.

2 Local Blind Schools Face Off In Fencing

2010-03-29T20:00:00.001-05:00

Today I went to see an exceptional fencing event; A blind fencing competition where nine students from the Perkins School in Watertown and the Carroll Center in Newton fenced for the first competition of its kind. I spoke with most of the fencers and was amazed to see the passion and joy they get from a sport that would appear counter-intuitive given their condition. Quite to the contrary, I discussed blade pressure, sounds of the larger and smaller part of the blade and strategy by feeling the reaction of the opponent’s weapon when tapping it... basically all of the technics we expect our students to develop as second nature to become outstanding fencers. Needless to say that Cesar Morales, fencing coach, has the community’s utmost recognition for this initiative.

Monitoring and Measuring the Impact of Public Service Media Part Two: Addressing the Issues

2010-02-17T09:47:00.002-05:00

In the last post I raised some of the ways that Public Service Media can support community through the Web. In this post I look at how Darwin’s Awareness Engine™ can help. First, I will look at data mining and awareness. The Awareness Engine™ collects Web events from both formal and informal sources, and correlates them with multi-dimensions to show occurring emerging patterns. The basic interface provides the user with the benefits in the “Awareness and Discovery in Action” section. The accumulation of this information provides a rich corpus for advanced trend analysis over time. Special reports and alerts can be customized and developed as needed to meet different levels of monitoring and analysis. Public Service Media programs can benefit from the measuring and monitoring of the evolution of a theme over time or dimension:

1. tracking and measuring the impact of the Public Service Media programs’ actions in the community and/or the broader Web

2. creating alerts based on significant variations within the designated themes of interest and/or controversial spikes

3. advancing analytics for pattern recognition and prediction

With these benefits, the Public Service Media programs have better awareness of critical themes to improve and mitigate their interaction within the community and the Web. Furthermore it provides them with better planning for subsequent and follow-up programs, which become more target-specific and identifiable.

The Awareness Engine™ can also help empower community leaders. Similarly to the Public Service Media team, the community leader/s can gain greater awareness from the technology. This access can generate more relevant content, but also engage more community leaders to participate as a valuable resource towards their community thanks to the Public Service Media. A key benefit is that the elevation of awareness will generate more content from the community, thus leaving the PSM neutral in the emergence of community issues. Our next post will cover an example of how Darwin’s Awareness Engine™ can uncover community Web activity before it hits the mainstream press.

Monitoring and Measuring the Impact of Public Service Media Part One: Defining the Issues.

2010-02-15T19:59:00.004-05:00

A new breed of dialogue amongst communities is possible with the Internet and Public Service Media can play an important role documenting and supporting this effort. This dialogue can be intentionally coordinated for a known purpose or it can emerge out of a shared event or awareness. These new conversations range from known issues, to emerging and ephemeral bursts that can reach a tipping point capable of having a positive or negative effect for the concerned community in question, but also into other supporting or antagonistic actors or communities. The recent effort by the Latino community organized through a Web site to sanction Lou Dobbs is a good example that I will explore in more depth in a later post.

Considering that the information used by a community for support or dialogue can be found in different sources, it is important to understand the core issues and needs of this community when using Web technologies. Given that some of its members might be active information and support providers, one must be aware that the relevant content for this community can emerge from anywhere. As such, it is important, before interfering with the community’s use of their Social Web, to take a baseline measurement of the current pulse within the known sources and those that are far reaching but correlated

Darwin Ecosystem provides a Web Discovery and Awareness Engine™ that collects information from formal and informal sources, and displays the emergence of themes within the targeted content that relates to the topics of interest. This approach does not depend on the search engines’ popularly page ranking, thus, importantly, it can display in near-real-time the emergence of a Web movement from fresh information across multiple sources on one screen without scrolling through pages of results. It is also not subject to manipulation by search engine optimization (SEO) experts. Furthermore, trends can be analyzed from the collected information to observe the progress of a theme and its associated topics (monitoring the pulse through time and the impact of an event on a community’s topic of interest).

Darwin’s Discovery and Awareness Engine™ provides valuable real-time information about the technology savvy level of the community, and other sources addressing them directly, or even related topics unbeknownst to them. These sources display, with Darwin, the themes of interest where the program team can target its attention and discover opportunities for actions and/or further inquiries.

Awareness and discovery are cognitive and intimate processes that are best experienced by a user facing recognizable information that might validate his/her perception, or capture the attention when unexpected information is observed in a familiar context.

Public Service Media program can benefit from:

1. identifying key sources and Web-active community members

2. targeting investigative reporting

3. engaging communities in constructive interaction

4. observing the dynamics of leading theme over time

5. observing the impact of Public Service Media actions of the communities

With these benefits, the Public Service Media programs become a catalyst for community empowerment, thus accelerating a successful social integration whilst monitoring and mitigating the risk of extreme movements and stereotypes. In my next post I will look at some of the ways that the Darwin Awareness Engine™ can address these issues.

Where to begin about the iPAD?

2010-01-28T21:29:00.002-05:00

Where to begin about the iPAD? The name? the iPhone OS? ATT? No camera? Lack of interconnectivity? Storage? USB? Lack of ingenuity perhaps?... and the list goes on. I will not repeat what every one has said on the Web and the press. It is now very obvious that Apple disappointed its fan-base with a lack of vision and absence of revolutionary thinking. It seems they hey lost their magic on that one, and the hype that they created is now hurting them.

I am sure that they will recover. Now all the competitors are going to try to move quickly... and of course this is good for us and innovation. This time I am sure that the innovators were overrun by business people who had their fingers in iTunes’ store, ATT and new imaginative ways to perform consumer cashectomies. To add insult to injury, Apple saw the writing on the wall as every day we saw emerge what the users, experts and developers expected to make this a great breakthrough. The iPAD is an ideal case study of the failure to leverage Web communities to create a product that meets and exceeds expectations; this should go in the business book of what not to do in the age of information sharing. Apple lost over 4% when the market closed today.

Now let’s innovate Apollo13-style. What can, after all, I use this iPAD for? It’s a screen, it can be programmed, it can access data, it responds to my touch, it’s feels good to hold, and it is an oversized iPod. Now what? It’s all about the apps. Regardless of the eBooks, movies, pictures, email, games.... this iPAD opens a new world of applications for very specific and unexpected use. I think we will see more business applications come out of the iPAD than the iPhone simply because business applications are process-driven and need to show more screen real-estate than a phone. But it will not be so easy for organizations to think outside the box considering that today’s applications need to be ubiquitous to the enterprise standards. So who will use them? In my opinion it will be defined according to roles and functions instead of an homogeneous platform requirement (after all the data access is/should be supported by server services and not applications themselves; review your IT director’s compensation if that is not the case ;-). I can imagine CEOs and executives changing their reports and dashboards for iPAD applications that provide them with more mobile and instinctive interactions, medical personnel using the iPAD for charting instead of nurse-station or bedside computers, and many other specific uses that the iPhone was too small to do efficiently. I also see new opportunities for information consumption models that involve visual representation of shared and/or large amount of information that require more tactile interactions than retyping a search query or browsing pages and pages of results before discovering what matters to the user. . But, maybe I am being optimistic.

Yes I am disappointed by Apple’s iPAD limitations, but I am interested in the potential it offers for developers and innovators alike. Apple has proven time and again what it can do. That’s what it needs to remember today as the critics speak.

Interview by CI Expresso about my position on moving towards extended community dialogues.

2010-01-20T09:32:00.005-05:00

My apologies for this self-serving post ;-)

Thierry

PS: I will eventually translate it in english.

The Hostile Takeover of the Social Web: Ground for conquest!

2009-12-15T14:11:00.004-05:00

The Web is suppose to be just that; The Web. But today it looks like the Web is being redefined again by Web of Social Connectivities. This is subtle difference but a significant one and this is why:

The Web is foremost a physical architecture about distributed nodes that can be connected to each other directly through IP addresses. In this fundamental and original model, everyone can store information and access information stored on other nodes. Basically central storage is not required, and the information is controlled by its owner. But when search engines came about and crawled theses nodes to make a centralized index, a worrisome transformation occurred... information was copied, captured and ranked centrally. The search engines appeared as giant switchboards when in fact they copied everything and pointed out the sources of origin for us to access (you would be surprised at how many people don’t know that the Web is copied and stored by Google). We basically reverted to the mainframe model unbeknownst to us. And now come the Social Web where the connections about our private communities of interest are the next thing to be centralized and capitalized upon. Once again, as recently announced by Google, Bing, Facebook and Twitter our relationships and connections are being indexed and centralized to strengthen search at the expense of privacy.

Is this our only option to be connected and find information? The answer is “no”. In the late 90s and early 2000s many options where emerging that could have ensured privacy and leverage the Physical Web. Solutions like Groove, created by Ray Ozzie (also the creator of Lotus Notes), a peer-to-peer solution that only acted as an IP switchboard for content located on its users’ computers. Napster was also very successful at distributed file sharing but made the mistake to challenge record industry. Sun Microsystem has an open source peer-to-peer protocol called Jxta for developers to build such solutions. Many others who tried to build a Web of information routing that was true to the Physical Web have failed because they were disruptor to the mega-empires of centralized data and distribution channels that were emerging at the time. The record distribution industry was possibly the culprit of this mainframe vision tipping point (unbeknown to itself).

So if today you have not gone into your Facebook privacy settings and ensured that your web index is toggled off, your private information will be indexed by Google.

For some of my friends and colleagues who have been following my posts about privacy and my passion for organic peer-to-peer technology as the fightback model to centralized storage, now is the time to think about the creation of distributed indexes and routing technics that respect information ownership and permission sharing with its authors and communities.

The problem will get worst but the solution is within reach; that’s what is great about the Web. It will be adopted once people realize that their privacy and their networks are becoming a merchandise. Until then I will continue to promote alternatives that will evolve towards a truly distributed and privacy-friendly Web.

Is Google missing the mark with Google Wave?

2009-12-14T20:40:00.012-05:00

When I started to use Google Wave I was ecstatic about a communication-centric model for collaboration where applications could be pulled as needed. Considering that I was an early adopter of its predecessor Lotus Notes since 1988, I saw the immediate benefit for teams to reclaim communication-centric collaboration and escape (once again) the grip of process-driven collaboration and email. Google Wave appeared to further enhance the Lotus Notes paradigm by allowing applications to enter the communication flow.

From my perspective Google Wave is revolutionary. But alas Google Wave is a big disappointment to me. Not because of its features and poor gadget library, but simply because Google missed their market. Google Wave can be a real breakthrough for enterprises seeking to inject contextual key business processes in communication flows. This way teams could easily engage in collaboration and deliberation, and pull within the context of conversation business applications and structured actions that benefit the organization’s core processes, thus feeding executive and project manager dashboards as decisions are made. It could be the bridge that reduces the growing gap between structured and unstructured business information.

So why would it work in the enterprise and not the consumer market? As I have been trying to engage my community (business, friends and communities) in Google Wave, it became clear that the communication alternatives of email, social networks and micro blogging was too comfortable and overpowering for Google Wave.

I think that Marissa Mayer (Google ‘s Vice President, Search Products & User Experience) dropped the ball on this one. Basically she failed to study the user experience in the context of today’s known disruptors and distractors to Google Wave.

This is a case of a consumer market company not seeing that the enterprise was the low hanging fruit. I have to add that is refreshing... given that I have witnessed many missed opportunities by Lotus and IBM to bring solutions to the consumer market that were better suited for on-line communities than executives.

To paraphrase a great French thinker, “All applications are equal but not at the same time or place”.

MIT's excuse of a victory: DARPA's Red Balloons

2009-12-06T09:20:00.006-05:00

MIT acted as a broker to the DARPA project by dividing the winnings according to a race-reward-sharing model for anyone who delivered the coordinates to MIT. They acted more like HBS than MIT on this one. In my opinion this test demonstrates that the Web and social networks are not ready to rival institutions who can basically shortcut and inject themselves as brokers. Additionally, very little was learned or demonstrated as MIT hijacked to potential innovations that could have to emerged from the challenge. MIT won by bribing instead of innovating. MIT should not exhibit confidence in the victory. MIT's victory did not teach DARPA was that wars can be won by trade and economics; the history of conflicts have thought us that very well. I am disappointed in MIT's approach and feel for all who tried to use new technologies to discover new ways to gain awareness.

See CNN's MIT wins $40,000 prize in nationwide balloon-hunt contest.

Information Awareness and Discovery for Life Sciences and Pharmaceutical Companies

2009-12-03T14:24:00.004-05:00

Success for lIfe sciences and pharmaceutical companies is often associated with their ability to manage knowledge transition and information sharing. This is especially true as as they deal with the challenges of many recent mergers in the industry. The segregated systems where the departments’ collaborative efforts are stored represent a significant barrier to business continuation and leveraging knowledge. As system integration analysis and process streamlining efforts struggle to unify these systems, the companies are losing precious time to better manage their R&D, clinical trials, and manufacturing, all the while ensuring efficient CRO and CMO monitoring relationships.

Considering that these companies are knowledge intensive, it is critical for them to improve R&D productivity. However, the increasing complexity of information systems and the increasing amount of semi-structured collaborative technologies increases the level of information overload, growing work flow complexity, and knowledge isolation through diverse communication and storage tools.

These companies’ organizational models are in the perpetual struggle of managing rigorous processes and needing to be flexible and organic in their structure.
Mastering knowledge in a timely manner is key to their evolution and discovery processes. This is why Darwin Ecosystem takes a different approach to accelerating information consumption by breaking the silos of knowledge to allow for meaningful discovery. Our technology aggregates the information made accessible through simple syndication channels (RSS) and correlates it to deliver an awareness experience according to the user’s context of interest. This presentation, known as a Scan Cloud, immediately displays what is happening across the organization’s departments by outlining correlated clusters and dimension classes that make it easy to grasp what is happening and direct attention to the information of interest.

Darwin’s Awareness Engine is designed to evolve with the company and its users, and it can process new sources on demand, thus adding to your corpus of correlated information. There is no need for complex dashboards, strenuous process analysis and complex system integration. All that is required is to make the content available to the service as an RSS feed. Darwin’s Awareness Engine will correlate the content as it comes. The experience can also be enhanced by customizing the taxonomy according to the company’s cultures and context. Darwin provides an awareness of what is d going both inside and outside the organization so that emerging themes do not get lost in silos.

Webcom 09 - The Misplaced Fear of the Mainstream Media

2009-10-25T10:29:00.005-05:00

Permeating the Webcom 2.0 event was the discomfort and fear of mainstream media losing ground to the rise of social media.

The simple reality that information consumption is migrating into a Web dialogue leaves the mainstream media having to compete with what they label as unverified content, and thus accordingly, untrustworthy information. Again, a major perception shift from an industry that has a difficult time distinguishing between unverified written expressions and the wisdom of crowd. I often heard from many traditional media people attending such comments as: “How can people consume such rubbish and unverifiable comments?” “We are dedicated to verifying and delivering quality content that is far more reliable!”.

Formal content providers truly believe that without their controlled content people will have a distorted view of what matters and believe opinions over facts. From their perspective they are absolutely right! If people accept social media information as validated truth, we would have... well, isn’t this what we already have? The simple fact that opinions and discussions are transposed from the oral to the written form does not mean that it changes much regarding the risk of people being misinformed. People distort, fabricate and adopt their own points of view according to their social networks, whether it be physical or the Web. The battle is not one of formal versus informal, but one where formal content providers need to listen and engage in the dialogue.

I was also amused when I heard that mainstream media and large companies were questioning the value of social media and its content. These companies and traditional media spend fortunes on market trend analysis with voodoo-like rearview mirror reporting that only serves to give them an impact appreciation for what they did in order to improve the next campaign. The amusing part is that they have traditionally done this to measure opinions and perceptions to best attract customers, yet today they are worried about the volume of content created by the same people they have been trying to mind-probe through inference investigation. Can someone pinch me here?

The perception that has to change is not the one of the people (it is only a transposition for them), it is the one of the media companies who are far more feudal than the people, as they fear a loss of power. I believe that Thomas W. Malone’s 2004 The Future of Work a great tome on the transformation of business, is more meaningful today in the light of the traditional media companies’ challenge. But are traditional media companies capable of distributed deliberation and content creation with the emerging wisdom of crowds?

The ability to have a real-time written communication has changed the concept of readers and audiences. It is now a dialogue! And from that basis the media industry is transformed forever. Traditional media needs to rethink its relationship with its customers (yes customers as they are no longer passive). They need to focus on their core value of reliable information and take it to a new level that will preserve their integrity as their assumptions regarding the information life-cycles and distribution are changing. Some will understand that their business operating processes are the enemy and that they must create new ones.

Many media companies are becoming consumed by finding ways to become social destinations themselves than thinking about their core business value proposition and processes. These companies are taking the risk of becoming followers in the media revolution instead of becoming the leaders and champions of valued and verified information. In my opinion they are making a mistake as they are driven by following to catch-up instead of innovating and managing their own transformation.

A New Age of Communication-Centric Collaboration

2009-09-30T11:12:00.001-05:00

Twenty years ago Lotus Development Corporation released Lotus Notes. As one of the fortunate alpha tester and early adopters, Notes changed the way I relate to collective information and inspired my career in collaboration and social computing. Since then the platforms have changed but collaboration computing remains rooted in Ray Ozzie’s Lotus Notes vision. As an extension to Ray’s view of collaboration, I created in 1996 the first social network (InterCommunity) on the Lotus Domino platform (Web server) and delivered the first Web-based community social network upon which partners could build community applications (similar to FaceBook). The solutions we see on the Web today were understood and often existed in large enterprises as well as being available to a handful of early business Web communities throughout the ‘90s.

For the last 20 years I have also observed companies going through the painful transition of archaic email and file sharing to Wikis and collaboration solutions. The simple fact that collaboration is stuck in application silos is deeply rooted in the segregation of process and communication tools. When you think about it,communication and deliberation precede the formality of process, yet most information systems have it backwards and do not connect the two effectively (even if they have all the latest Web 2.0 tools). Frankly, other than Web protocols, the core usage challenges have not changed since 1989 despite the Web’s richer applications and social computing innovations; connectivity and open source is what made the difference thus far, not the applications themselves. As we are naturally motivated in transposing what we know over understanding the opportunities that a new environment offers, we often continue to make the same mistakes and build technologies to over-think what is natural; our innate ability to communicate and evolve.

But now Google shows us Google Wave. Not since my introduction to Lotus Notes twenty years ago have I been wowed with innovation in that space. Google Wave truly rethinks communication streams and collaboration as it should be with today’s connected world. Google did not reinvent the wheel, they just proved that it a sphere. It is perhaps too server centric for my taste, but it is just a matter of time before the model can be truly internet-based instead of mainframe-like. Nonetheless, Google Wave’s API does open new ways to incorporate content, applications and structure in the stream of human communication in real-time. Lotus Notes first version had some very basic features that made it possible to build solutions that promoted collaboration and content distribution, as well as access control, replication, forms, views, scripting language, mail and later Web standards. With these integrated basics developers created applications that exceeded Lotus‘ expectations. Google Wave’s core architecture has the building blocks, openness and a framework based on today’s Web computing reality that will allow the user and developer community to marvel us with their clever use of Google Wave. The communication-centric framework of Google Wave is simply brilliant and users will gradually embrace its many features as well as enrich their use through third-party plug-ins.

I have read the more skeptical and critical press on Google Wave. In my opinion they have short memory and grossly under estimate what Google is doing to the Web with this truly new paradigm. Facebook and other messaging technologies need to think about ways to connect and leverage Google Wave or they will be left in the dust by its user community. As to the critics who claim that the UI is too complex for every day users... I would like to add that if you survived and supported FaceBook’s user experience, Google Wave will not be a problem. This is not your father’s Web so get with the program and compute with passion and intelligence. We are about to discover new ways to have a return of investment for all the time we wasted promoting ourselves on the Web 2.0. Isn’t it time for something new?

I see Google Wave as new platform capable of creating a much needed movement to revive business opportunities and bring new players to the Web. I also feel fortunate that the Darwin Awareness Engine brings a solution to the information overload that Google Wave generates. If history repeats itself, Google Wave’s composition is destined to succeed.

Improving communication during work-awareness

2009-09-10T17:55:00.004-05:00

Recent surveys and research show that executives finally value social media favorably to improve relationships with customers and build their brand (“Social Media: Embracing the Opportunities, Averting the Risks” paper from Russell Herder). Paradoxically, these same executives fail to embrace these technologies within their organizations to improve productivity through better collaboration, idea sharing, faster initiative adoption and, of course, knowledge capitalization. The reason for this can be attributed to the many past failures of Knowledge Management (KM) and collaborative technologies that were assaulted by armies of consultants and system integrators over-thinking communication empowerment. Today we know that most KM initiatives have failed due to exaggerated efforts to harness tacit knowledge into explicit processes. Having spent most of my carrier in the space of KM, collaboration and social technologies since 1988, I can testify to how many times the Web 2.0 in the enterprise was adopted under different names; Groupware, Shareware, Communication Intranets and others...the bottom line is that they all aimed at improving communication during work-awareness.

Let me expend on work-awareness. Work-awareness in state of mind where the individual is focused on his/her activity and driven by accomplishing the task at hand. If a company is able to empower the individual with communication and information discovery tools, then the information being captured is likely to be rich in relevance and valued as a sharable asset for others. Many power-blogger and micro-bloggers (Twitter) practice this concept to make their knowledge valuable for personal gain and knowledge acquisition. This is an observable phenomenon that companies can use to improve capturing knowledge from their workforce as well as empowering them to share this knowledge to solve problems and improve productivity.

Now back to the bad rep of KM and earlier versions of the Web 2.0. KM, like the early efforts of artificial intelligence, is a noble cause rooted in predictability and measurements that can rival the best structure data analysis. The reality is that the data source is messy and very human. As such, emerging movements and personal interpretations are more meaningful than a well defined empirical dashboard. Basically it requires a human being to extract value from this corpus of unstructured data.

Most of my readers know I have been developing a Web 2.0 awareness technology (Darwin Development Corporation) for the last two years that can can extract relevance out of the chaos of unstructured communication. I was a keynote speaker at the Enterprise 2.O conference in Montreal, Canada last week. Since the conference, I have been exposed to many Canadian companies who are struggling with making sense of their communication platform as they are exploring the implementation of Web 2.0 solutions. After every demonstration of Darwin’s Awareness Engine these companies were amazed at the technology’s ability to aggregate and correlate meaningful information on one screen; one called it “The dashboard of our voices” and an other said “I can finally make sense of what is going on without endless meetings.” Needless to say, we are now discussing the best way to implement Darwin’s Awareness Engine in environments that have only emails, Lotus Notes/Domino, Sharepoint and others with proven Web 2.0 solutions. I look forward to harvesting what they have in their legacy communication tools to show them that the value of collaboration is not about the platform you choose (the standard now), but instead it is about the knowledge hidden and captured during work (the future).

Is your enterprise 2.0? (Montréal 8/24/09 Conference)

2009-09-01T18:29:00.003-05:00

I gave a presentation last week in Montreal at the Allar-Hervieu event; “Votre entreprise est-elle 2.0?”. Of course, it was in French and I was pleased that it attracted some of the more important Montreal-based public and private companies.

Over 75 executives, with extensive experience in the importance of collaborative computing and the emerging impact of Web 2.0 technologies, were present at the event. This was a breeze of fresh air as many such conferences are occupied by Web industry enthusiasts looking for networking opportunities and prospects. Not this time! This time the communication firm Allar-Hervieu of Montreal targeted the right audience with the right message.

The presentation was made by 3 speakers delivering a logical story-line that addressed the positioning and reality of the emergence of the Web 2.0 in the enterprise, the use of content-capturing technologies and the need for thoughtful communication plans through concrete examples. and lastly how this chaos of information can be best consume to help the enterprise measure the pulse of what is happening through organic correlation and emergence ranking in opposition to complex portals, popularity ranking and KM tools.

This event was our first open product demonstration. I used live examples relating to the audience's organizations... Hydro-Québec, H1N1 trends and Canadian news events. The Hydro-Québec live demonstration was particularly relevant since it outlined a current controversy about donations to private schools. Our technology was able to show the formal media perspective in contrast (and correlated) with social media citizen contributions. Additionally, we also noticed that the Hydro-Québec debate was clearly francophone-driven as a contrast of 1 to 10 was visible when tuning the linguistic preference.

This demonstration of correlated aggregation of emerging sources originating from the formal and informal demonstrated to the audience the potential for organizations to benefit from this technology within their intranet as well as linking them to the Web.

Silos 2.0; the new barrier to awareness.

2009-08-19T16:18:00.002-05:00

So we worked very hard to break-down the corporate silos created by divisions, cost centers, departments and business units in order to achieve a transparency that would improve awareness, thus productivity. This was the mission of the late 80s and 90s. Some will say this movement has been widely adopted across most companies that are mindful of the opening communication to their workforce and partners. Many have attributed the breakdown of the horizontal ivory towers to information technologies capable of improving communication and collaboration. Throughout my career in collaborative computing and knowledge management I have observed that the breakdown of those barriers did not primarily come from the deliberate intent to improve openness by management, but rather from renegade groups of individual seeking the right resources and information through any means possible; the networked PC, email, chats, groupware... Sounds familiar? Yes the Web 2.0 technologies are no different and the implementation of portals and collaborative software in enterprises have also created new silos of increasingly unshared knowledge. As if the natural order for an organization was doomed to isolate its knowledge in fear of loosing control. This tendency appears to be counteracted by the desire of the team to work together outside this constraint. The enterprise 2.0 witnesses the constant movement of the pendulum being drawn by managing-by-process versus the organic workforce. The reality is that we are increasingly evolving in iterative phases where the awareness of information is becoming more and more visible to the workforce. Without this awareness companies will find it increasingly difficult to innovate and respond in a timely manner to customers, events, competitors and rapid market movements. The Silos 2.0 is not about the technology but the unfortunate tendency to close the information to other teams. It is not because a company uses Web 2.0 technology that it is an Enterprise 2.0. Transposition is not a form of transformation!

Schmidt’s gone! we are supposed to be surprised?

2009-08-04T06:35:00.006-05:00

By now we all know that Eric Schmidt resigned from Apple because “someone” dropped the dime on Apple with the FCC about the iTunes App Store; This because Apple did not approve a Google Voice App! What I find ironic, and perhaps more evil, is that Google debates that the mobile Web should be as open as the Web because it creates a larger and more searchable mobile Web... this is hypocritical coming from a company who treats data differently than applications. Let’s not be naive here, Google’s goal is to capture all the information on the Web to better target advertisement at the expense of our privacy. Applications are just means to that end! From a market perception standpoint, Schmidt’s resignation is great for Google as people are going to question Apple’s business model and its Application approval process. I think that it is just a way for Google to push further its Phone by making the choice one of philosophy and not product. Evil and brilliantly executed by concourse of circumstances or design... nonetheless it is very interesting between-the-lines reading and observing its ripple effect.

Farewell to Walter Cronkite

2009-07-20T08:20:00.004-05:00

I had the good fortune to meet Walter Cronkite in Paris in 1996. It was during the early days of my work on virtual communities of interest and my strong conviction that communication technologies can be as damaging to social ecosystems, as transportation’s progress has been to the planet’s ecosystem. Our conversation started from that premiss with the statement that these disruptions are mainly caused by the acceleration of time and space through technologies. Walter Cronkite shared his view on how the western culture is being imposed into other cultures through the media. He quoted the The Islamic 1979 coup d'état (AKA: Iranian Revolution) as an example of rejection when western media exposed a life style that threaten Islamic traditions... (“Showing women free to act as they please, open social criticism and mini skirts on television was too much too soon.”) Can we measure an acceptable threshold according to different cultures? What makes change acceptable to one culture and not to the other? What “sociocides” are we committing? Will we have nostalgia about one people’s way of life?... As citizens of the Virtual Age we know that immaterial models have value. It is perhaps time for us to seek solutions and awareness about the next ecosystem to save; our rich and diverse cultures.

This meeting gave me material and strengthen my conviction about the risk associated with the speed of communication. A paradoxical awareness given the nature of my work! Meeting and discussing my work with Walter Cronkite was one of the highlights and inspiring moment of my life.

Micro Blog Streaming and Awareness

2009-06-24T15:05:00.002-05:00

Micro blogs (Twitter), social networks (Facebook) and rich media posts (Flckr and YouTube) give us the ability to receive streams of events as they occur in near real-time about unfolding events or just answer our curiosity needs to know what’s happening in our communities of interests. Events such as Obama’s rise to the presidency, and today the protest against the election in Iran, have been fueled and benefit from this Web movement. What was seen as an ingenious way for the Obama campaign to spread it’s message, is now seen as the instrument of free speech and media control disruption in Iran. When an event is that important, and being watched by so many, we can count on the news to leverage and filter these sources for most of us. The reality is that unless your are passionate about a given topic or your social network, you would not think of going to micro blogs to be informed about what is going on. And the reason is simple... Why would you waste your time reading through hundreds of insignificant and chronologically sorted posts from people you don’t know? Even Connan O’Brian, as the new host of the Tonight Show, now has a satirical skit about how meaningless celebrity Twitts are in contrast to the hype made about Twitter. Who really cares if Angelina Jolie Twits “I am having a terrible coffee in Malibou”? So why the hype and when does it matter? The hype is there because many media have learned to use Twitter to reach a larger audience at no cost... that is why every media talks about Twitter. This basically gave all the media a way to do what they could not do with phone text messages... so they promote Twitter every time they can! Now why does micro blogging matters? It matters because it is the voice of the people (although fading quickly thanks to those mega-media spammers). This is where an important distinction must be made; the voice of the people is not the same as the words of every one. This is why no one who values his/her free time will read the chronological stream of 140 characters statements from people waiting in line to buy the new iPhone or complain about Junior High’s principal.

Micro blogs are chaotic in nature and increase our information overload, unless someone who cares about a given topic, observes, searches, filters, selects and delivers the valuable nuggets for us to pay attention. To this day the micro blogging phenomena has been focusing on self-promotion, community awareness, and used for people-reporting. Now how do we make sense of the information overload we all love to create and share? In contrast from today’s iteration with micro-blogs, DARWIN a WikiGazette LLC awareness and discovery engine, take a different approach by acknowledging the chaotic nature of this information, and focusing its model on the emergence of correlated themes coming from all even-driven sources.

The Pulse 2.0 of Success

2009-06-05T16:28:00.002-05:00

Organizations of every size believe their vision for the future must lead their actions to be realized. To ensure that actions are aimed towards that end, the challenge of the executive team is about gaining the trust, leading the inspiration and ensuring that the vision will be adopted and acted upon. An experienced executive team will also ensure that the organization’s stakeholders express their vision and share its ownership. This provides for a better feasibility assessment and execution commitment.

Maintaining and reinventing a vision is a highly iterative process that shapes future outcomes. This process can be most effective when observing measurable results as early as possible in the vision’s life cycle. The results are often used to measure if the vision was correct or requires improvement. Nowadays this form of measurement provides leadership with a rear-view mirror decision-making perspective. In fact, when an organization measures sales, it is the outcome of coordinated collaborative efforts that have often occurred months before becoming a key indicator of success. Today management needs to have real-time visibility on the company’s vision adoption and actions that lead to the measured result. With the emergence of Web 2.0 collaboration tools, many teams and knowledge workers use chat rooms, blogs, wikis and other means to coordinate their activities and implement best practices aimed at reaching their common goal. Unfortunately, this information and knowledge is rarely observed as a measurement of the pulse of what is going on day-to-day. These tools remain segregated, ambiguous and lead to perishable or ignored content simply because they are too heterogeneous to provide measurements. Yet employees use them for deliberation, decision buy-in, delegation and strategic purposes.

We have a platform that provides an overview of pulse of different initiatives across the enterprise’s Web 2.0 collaboration.

Entre le cristal et la fumée - Henri Atlan (Between cristal and smoke)

2009-04-08T14:32:00.003-05:00

I am not sure that this book is available in English but it further strengthens my research in extending the Chaos Theory to consuming information using the interpretations of the human cognitive abilities when facing a collective corpus of multidimensional data. I am finding many parallel ways to explain the organization of what is alive with what I believe to be a similar model for chaotic information. Henri Atlan outlines many concepts of Neodarwinism and Costa de Beauregard’s views of thoughts and matter. With modern computing capabilities, I am more and more inclined to build and find support in experimenting with life-model algorithms. This is also supported by François Jacob work that brings stronger arguments for the models of physico-chemistry. I don’t how many of my friends and ex-colleagues share my passion for extracting/elevating order out of chaos through mathematics and human cognitive interaction with systems... for my old IBM/Lotus friends this is not a far stretch from KM and the COI work we did. I invite you to contact me and share your ideas with me. I will start to shift my focus from KM to Chaos Management as it offers much better information consumption in the age of information emerging from so many dimensions and levels of relative importance.

The value of computing and knowledge.

2009-02-08T18:02:00.004-05:00

In an effort to put a price on a new information consumption engine that I am building, I was asked to figure out what a license cost might look like. After nearly 20 years in the field of Knowledge Management I have been able to measure the value of systems that accelerate a known process through computation and workflow rules... but a system that actually acts as if it is thinking and produces unpredictable results is a different animal all together. I believe that we are starting to reach a new paradigm shift in computing where AI systems mining chaotic information start to look more like an expert than an expert system. I have been able to elevate chaotic information into structured knowledge that has value only to the cognitive process of the human recipient. A very similar process to the one we are engaged in when we discuss, discover and enrich our knowledge from others. From that premiss, I can only think that such a system should be valued and measured according to what it brings to those interacting with it. Basically it should be considered as valuable as co-workers. Perhaps this is a stretch today for most of us, but with IBM's research in human-like computing I can see the day when we will price these systems according to interaction benefits over measured ROIs.

Building a WEB2.0 Virtual Cortex

2008-11-17T16:20:00.002-05:00

For many decades science fiction writers have fantasized about human-machine neural implants. The ability for humans to control machines with their minds (a reality today with the use of brain signals to move a mouse and prosthetic limbs) pales in comparison with machines capable of transferring knowledge (as seen in the early “Start Trek” or, more recently, the movie “The Matrix”), or event tap into our cerebral cortex to store information or create fabricated realities (as explored in “The Matrix” or William Gibson’s ? “Johnny Mnemonic”. MIT and CalTech are actively researching these options as the technology to interface the human brain with machine is becoming a reality. It is only limited by technological advancement, time and our biological understanding of the brain’s functions.

One aspect that has escaped most futurists and science fictions authors is the existence of a non-human neuro-pathway repository that is built from chaotic human experiences (let’s call it a Virtual Cortex). This concept is not far fetched when we observe the evolution of the WEB2.0 where events are accessible through RSS feeds. If you look at every event as recordable, categorizable and connectable to other events that are captured in time or within similar dimensions (categories), you can easily draw a parallel with the human’s ability to capture and organize the events that occur in their respective lives.

My work with WikiGazette exploits this concept to create an Ontotropic* Web Discovery Engine.

I went to see Religilous last night!

2008-10-05T12:44:00.007-05:00

I went to see Religilous last night. I have to say that it was refreshing and it took me back to a time when it was OK to challenge religion and understand its role in the right time period (in school when I was 14! - JP Sartre, Albert Camus and Arthur Koestler; Granted! not part of the US curriculum, but still.). I have always be astonished that people in our century could still believe in religious anecdotal stories as if they were not figurative; and this across all religions. Which further proves the absurdity of religion in our increasingly unstable and self-annihilating capable age. I believe Bill Maher got it right in terms of demonstrating the absurdity and the dangers of blind faith. All of us recognize this, yet we put the blame on the other religious club; hence the problem. Like Bill Maher, I think that faith is a great thing to have when you are down; life can be quite absurd and you need to grab on something somehow. This being said one thing captured my attention in the movie; Thomas Jefferson’s view on religion. In fact Thomas Jefferson’s view on religion is pretty close to my own and the way our country’s relationship with religion should be. Funny that the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), and one of the most influential Founding Fathers saw religion as having negative impact on the prosperity of democracy. He went as far as reducing the bible the its essential moral compass aspect.

Extracted for WikiPedia: From his careful study of the Bible, Jefferson concluded that Jesus never claimed to be God. He therefore regarded much of the New Testament as "so much untruth, charlatanism and imposture". He described the "roguery of others of His disciples", and called them a "band of dupes and impostors", describing Paul as the "first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus", and wrote of "palpable interpolations and falsifications". He also described the Book of Revelation to be "merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams". While living in the White House, Jefferson began to piece together his own condensed version of the Gospel, omitting the virgin birth of Jesus, miracles attributed to Jesus, divinity and the resurrection of Jesus. Thus, primarily leaving only Jesus' moral philosophy, of which he approved. This compilation titled The LIFE AND MORALS OF JESUS OF NAZARETH Extracted Textually from the Gospels Greek, Latin, French, and English was published after his death and became known as the Jefferson Bible.

Like Jefferson I believe in the essential need to illustrate morality for people to be prepared with social tools. After all, Jean-Jacques Rousseau did as much as reconciling sate and morality with the “Social Contract” in 1762. Now why is it that these great men, who influenced independence from tyranny and democracy, are not put on a higher standing to guide our moral values? (Oh yah right! They were not appointed by God ;-)

This is the next challenge I would like to see Bill Maher take on as a second step that might inspire people to educate themselves and look at alternatives... if self-moral governance weighs too much for us, of course!

Enjoy the movie and don’t fear speaking out.

YEI 2008 Conference in Paris - Video

2008-07-24T16:07:00.003-05:00

I express my experience and challenge a near the halfway of this video.

Response to W. Malone and Mark Klein's Harnessing Collective Intelligence to Address GLobal Climate Change

2008-07-23T10:41:00.000-05:00

“Harnessing Collective Intelligence to Address Global Climate Change”

– Response by Thierry Hubert

As an early designer and adopter of collaborative technologies, from my days at PWC and Lotus/IBM, I have to express my enthusiasm and optimism when I read your article. The “Stories of a Possible Future” are very inspiring and offer a practical use of WEB 2.0 collaborative technologies that serve an initiated and dedicated community of users. I can’t help but make the parallel with the promise of breaking the enterprise vertical division through collaborative technologies with hope being that knowledge from one department would be visible in the other to improve responsiveness and productivity. Since then we have seen the emergence of runagate initiatives that move faster than the organization’s ability to absorb, thus creating an organic model for collaboration. These technologies and collaborative models are now available on the WEB. The reality is that they are not new. They have a greater reach and are initiated without governance. In reading the paper I found the scenarios compelling but still catering to a federated extended community. The social WEB2.0 social dimension and its interest in Global Warming through ideas and concerns do not appear to be captured and leveraged in this proposition. Furthermore, the elevation of scientific data to the common people for actionable use in terms of political pressure and awareness would require the Climate Collaboratorium’s actors be willing to extrapolate their finding in a consumable by the public. I also would like to understand a little more about rating information in such a complex corpus of information and simulation tools. The simple facts and highly rated information are not enough to have an impact when faced with socio-political challenges and interests. Scientists and reputable professors with empirical evidence and data are still challenged by opposition that serves to lower the reality being expressed. Throughout history evidence that conflicts with economic forces and the establishment are met with resistance. A collaborative Web can serve both sides and user ranking as a mean to elevate conflicting points-of-view. I would be very interested to see how a social conflict dimension could be made visible, as well as a physical constraint. Perhaps a consolidation of the WEB20 though contextual lenses, instead of popular ranking, with Climate Collaboratium would help bring awareness to the concerned and fragmented people and elevate the WEB20 contribution for research, ideas and social implementation feasibility.

In conclusion, this paper’s position was fascinating. It created more questions than answers and that is a good thing. It confirmed my interest and studying the need for contextual and multi-dimensional navigation and tagging. I look forward to more on harnessing collective intelligence beyond professional communities.

Pont Neuf Bis - Against a Strong Currency, a Positive Outlook by the French American Chamber of Commerce; New England Chapter.

2008-07-14T22:33:00.003-05:00

This is an article published about Pont Neuf Bis (my French product import business) published by the French American Chamber of Commerce.

WikiGazette - YEI 2008 Winner

2008-04-24T05:52:00.007-05:00

After many years of efforts and innovation in Knowledge Management we won recognition and are we being sponsored by the French government and institutions. We are now going to realize our objective of creating an Organic Relevance Service through "Delivering the Forest instead of fetching the trees"! More to come.... ..

Simply the largest oyster I have ever eaten

2008-02-24T18:56:00.003-05:00

Before my return to Boston after enjoying friends and family in Paris, I went to eat one of my favorites before my return to Boston; “le plateau de fruit de mer”. Here it is… simply the largest oyster I have ever eaten! A “creuse” from Normandy of gigantesque proportion and taste. I did not spoil it with lemon or mignonette… I hate it whole, and it is no more!

YEi 2008: four New England winners

2008-02-04T06:07:00.001-05:00

Four New England-based high-tech start-up projects are among the winners of the Young Entrepreneurs Initiative’s 2008 call for proposals.

Managed by the Office for Science and Technology of the French Embassy in the United States, the Young Entrepreneurs Initiative (YEi) helps US-based entrepreneurs set up business in France and leverage technical and financial resources in Europe and in the US. Successful candidates will benefit from organized business trips to France where they will meet key potential partners and will be able to validate the feasibility of their project.

France; Know-how appreciated by the top tier.

2007-11-13T20:10:00.000-05:00

I am finding that France’s role in a global economy has less to do with competing with the rest of the world, but instead it is about being the custodian of good taste, culture and quality. I was recently visiting the United Arab Emirates and noticed that the growing upper-class was seeking the quality than even today’s high profile vendors could not deliver as they increasingly depend on China and other emerging countries to meet their demand; hence scarifying their legendary quality.

Yes, big brands are making a fatal mistake in thinking that the pickiest customers are not noticing the decline of quality. So what grabs the attention and desire of these demanding customers? Uncompromised quality in materials and craftsmanship! And also, “make it unique”. The promises of one-to-one marketing and the Wikinomics’ “prosumer” have a place in the high-end consumer space. The question becomes; can France acknowledge that its tradition is in fact its future, that it’s investment in art and schooled craftsmanship is an asset that can equal its tourism, and that perhaps France’s role is to remain a traditional France. When we see the homogenization of cultures and products, the difference that France possesses in its DNA may very become the envy of other nations seeking cultural uniqueness. Perhaps France is the world’s luxury corner store and museum that reminds of greater times and nuances. I, for one, see this as an opportunity and I have decided to actively promote and leverage this cultural asset through the use of WEB 2.0 technologies and services that may help French artisans get global visibility and recognition for their art and sough out value.

More to come...

The French are not giving up on search visualization

2007-10-17T16:31:00.000-05:00

Here is an update for our KM community members; many of you have heard me talk about the early work of Trivium in search and discovery visualization. I have been contacting them over the years and asking them why they abandoned the core technology in favor of building an HR specific application. Obviously being early in the KM visualization game, they simply ran out of resources and they had to find a niche market to survive. Unfortunately for them another French company (Kartoo) has taken the lead in search visualization utility. You have to take a look at www.kartoo.com they are where Trivium should be today. I don’t know if they have common sources but the coincidence in Kartoo’s wizard and visual models are very close to what Trivium did with Kartograph for Lotus Notes in 1998. Let me know what you think of this utility (they have two others search utilities that offer different representations).

Enjoy!

Thierry

Has the time come to change the advertisement overload madness?

2007-08-20T10:42:00.000-05:00

Living in the US I can never stop to wonder why people still watch television shows that are interrupted every 10 minutes with endless pharmaceutical, car and self-promoting advertisement. I like a few shows, like “The Office”, but I choose to download it via iTunes and pay for it instead of being exposed to the advertisement. This is a wake-up call to the advertisers. Can you imagine how the business model for entertainment would change if the show creators did not depend on advertisement sponsors to be profitable? Since 1996 with InterCommunity, Instant Powers, WikiGazette and ANDoo I have been promoting the concept of contextual content to the right user and community; today’s’ advertiser’s Holy Grail. Well, we all know Google has embraced the model but they are also facing privacy issues and can’t have a direct line into my real interests and present context (at least I hope ;-(. They have to guess what I want with complex algorithms and mad mathematicians hidden somewhere on the Google campus. I believe that the next wave of contextual advertisement will be permission-based and user-centric. Our challenge, as technologists and system architects, is to find a lasting and ubiquitous model that does not reside on large servers, but instead where the consumer’s experience takes place. Let me know your thoughts on the subject.

Bill, what do you think?

The Human Interface team before becoming the Lotus Institute in 1994

2007-05-26T10:28:00.001-05:00

Following the Lotus 25th anniversary I was able to find our pre-acquisition team picture.

Memories!

Cory, ?ooops help?, Jim, Nicole, Bruce, Betsy, Bob
Thierry, George, Peter

(Paul not on the shot)

Lotus' 25th Party

2007-05-13T08:03:00.000-05:00

Last night I went to the Lotus 25th anniversary Party at the Cambridge Hyatt. The good old Lotus crowd with all the laughter, cheesy Lotus t-shirts and familiar faces were drinking and connecting. Once I entered the main hall where Mitch and Jim were giving their nostalgia and Lotus soul speeches I got a tap on the shoulder from Marla. It is at that moment that I felt like a Loti again and my first smile was one of good memories with a friend that smiled back with all the same memories without having to say a word! And that my friend is a reunion!

Lotus' 25th Party!

2007-05-08T13:32:00.000-05:00

See you there. I keep on bumping into ex-Loties talking about the event. Sounds like it will be a great one! I hope to see some of our EMEA friends.

Tampa, Florida - March. 1, 2007- LifeCare Technologies Inc. announced the appointment of Thierry Hubert as Chief Technology Officer.

2007-03-01T10:19:00.000-05:00

Mr. Hubert was Director of Knowledge Management, Process Innovation, Research and Development for IBM’s web-based collaborative solutions for government, telecommunication, healthcare, banking, pharmaceutical, manufacturing and communities of interest industries. Mr. Hubert is also an avid Web 2.0 advocate as a tool that can revolutionize business processes.

Blogs blogs and more blogs!

2006-12-14T23:42:00.000-05:00

Do you have the feeling all of us bloggers fit in two distinct groups? The MySpace kids who want to be seen and shine in front of their friends, and the passionate activists or professionals who publish to be noticed and get a job! All post information to self-promote and some go to extensive efforts to be linked everywhere just to be found on search engines beyond their little social networks. Despite this self-indulgence what we write has value, perhaps not on its own but collectively! A kind of collective voice or pulse that goes far beyond Google capturing our queries and behaviors to guess intent and trends. Are we also so eager to be noticed that we ignore that we are exposing our life to the world to see, evaluate, judge and discriminate against when we apply for a job? I have a friend in Montreal that posts the most absurd and often vulgar pictures on his blog. I told him that recruitment agencies and employers search the web more and more to profile the characters of their employees. Alas my friend ignores this new reality and continues to expose his poor sense of humor next to his picture and curriculum vitae. I guess the two groups referenced above do not mix well. This is why blogs offer a wealth of content to better understand what matters to us and what malaise is present in our society. So let’s blog-away on the Internet’s immaterial cloud but let’s remember that we are grounded on earth and that our actions on the web have more chances to be noticed and captured than a loud voice in the corner pub!

WEB 2.0: A Collective Conscientiousness Platform?

2006-12-05T15:33:00.000-05:00

I have been exploring the role that the WEB 2.0 can have as platform for the representation of Collective Conscientiousness. With blogs, wikipedia, wikinews, social networking, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube and other highly interactive and social network-enabled features, we are starting to see popular themes and sub-culture groups emerge to the mainstream. With the interaction between people’s interests and the need to express themselves (their lives) with these systems, we are providing our society with near-real-time awareness of what matters to people. I believe that we will be able to harness the commonality of the expressions found across these systems and be capable of viewing the expressions of the Collective Conscientiousness. I think that this awareness can influence actions towards the evolving Collective Conscientiousness that can be of use to market analysis, political campaigns and governance.

Please comment and let me know if this is a topic of interest and if you would like to join a focus group to further discuss and explore the possibilities of a visible collective conscientiousness.

My 1994 spark!

2006-12-01T20:56:00.000-05:00

Over the last ten years my friends and colleagues have asked me what was the spark that lead me into structuring collaboration and social network information. Here it is. I found the bar napkin!

Just before being acquired by Lotus in 1994, I was hired to help solve the problem of the collaboration breakdown emerging from too many Lotus Notes applications at Lotus, each with a different design and team practices confusing the users that belonged to many teams. It was then that I discussed the issue with Peter Rothstein, at a well-known bar by Lotus employees, and wrote this model on the bar napkin.

My idea was simple; if the information is the unpredictable variable, can the structure that wraps it be structured? I then proposed that information in context needed to be associated with four vectors that will be the foundation for organization, reporting and access. The assumption and vector analogy was particularly provocative when one or more vectors were left undefined, thus causing the information to be out of context. It is with this model in mind that I created TeamRoom, a standard template for collaboration where each team would define their terminology in these four dimensions (what we describe today as taxonomy and tagging). I later used the same inspiration to create a Contextual Navigator in InterCommunity in 1996. The object tags where used to assemble a portal designed to support collaboration and communication for communities of interest. The model was then recycled in IBM's Websphere in 1998.

Today I am still inspired by this initial model and continue to build solutions that leverage tag clouds with multiple dimensions. But to be completely honest the inspiration of the napkin came from my understanding of a brilliant product that died by 1990; Lotus Agenda. Thanks to Mitch Kapor!

Using the Wiki Method to Write a Business Book - by NPR

2006-11-30T15:53:00.000-05:00

The reported experiment is fascinating and opens many questions about accurate and accountability. Nonetheless, the phenomenon and capability is amongst us. It is changing the way we create, edit and publish. It is clear that new factors and innovations will help bring a new breed of regulation techniques that will perhaps resemble the eBay rating system. More to come!

The IT and Business Gap

2006-11-29T20:13:00.000-05:00

Today the topic came up again during a session with other analysts; the gap between IT and Business is widening as structure-free communication and collaboration software are becoming more accessible. Individuals are empowered and do not complain; individuals rarely need IT to build business applications as they are being replaced and poorly supported by communication-based informal processes. IT is focusing on the infrastructure and system support and finds itself in a more secure position by not being exposed to business application requests. IT can depend on brands and platforms with very little risk. This mutual comfort level creates a loss of knowledge capitalization and slows the vital on-going process improvement.

The time for business leaders and forward thinking technologists to shake the ivory tower (IT) being re-built has come again! (As it was the case in the late 80s and early 90s.) We can observe that some are taking this gap very seriously and involve a sort-of-middle-ware between IT and Business leaders; the expert in business process innovation and collaboration.

What the Big Companies Know about Loosing Information Context

2006-11-28T19:59:00.000-05:00

Computing is power. For businesses and other organizations, computing power can help turn data into information, and information into meaning.

Computing power must be focused. This means focus on serving, illuminating, and supporting the core processes—the fundamental, goal-oriented work of an organization. Actual deployment of computers, however, has been quite different for many small and medium-sized operations on the one hand, and for big organizations on the other. The reasons for this difference lie in what big companies know about organizing analytic resources for process action and impact. Since before the days of electronic computing, these companies have been forced by size and complexity to maintain a formal, continually monitored focus on process. As computers have become available and widespread, large companies have consistently applied to computer use their insights about process, and have achieved success by doing so.

By the time of the 1970s and 1980s almost all large corporations had adopted the large-capacity “mainframe” computer. Mainframes were and are operated within a firm as a centralized resource. Data records are routed to them and processed by them, and reports on the data are disbursed from them. Beginning to be widespread in the 1960s, mainframes have been a successful and powerful tool to record and to process data, and to generate reports for control and decision-making. They provide readings that update metrics for basic processes, and that inform about the status of competition and other outside forces affecting the organization.

The leaders and managers of corporations using mainframes looked with considerable ambivalence at the advent of the personal computer. Certainly, the new machines’ compact, flexible power was impressive. Their capacities for direct data entry, and for uploading to other machines, obviated entire rooms full of older technology, such as card punches and card readers, and reduced the numbers of staff required. But the very name, “personal computer”, warned of disruption and disorder. The mainframe-using organizations depended vitally on formal control of process and interpretation. Personal information management threatened the capability of the organization to be operated in agreed-upon ways for agreed-upon goals.

The large corporations dealt with this situation by embracing the computing power of PCs, while they networked the new machines and used them as special purpose terminals and workstations, with centralized data storage on existing mainframes or on servers. These adjustments were largely successful, and are still being followed:

Despite such adjustments, however, PC capabilities meant that originals or copies of many data resource elements could be stored and used in decentralized and even independent fashion. PCs presented business hazards, therefore, and the situation was not helped as individual employees did work outside the office on their own machines or on office portables, and as they sometimes uploaded, sometimes stored locally the analysis they produced.

Thus there was a sigh of relief among large companies when in 1995 IBM acquired the leading personal computer groupware product, Lotus Notes. Now, IBM was announcing effectively that information which had been moved to the peripheries of a corporation could be re-centralized.

Moreover, a powerful but economical solution was being provided. Companies could benefit from the flexible but process-defining and workgroup-oriented character of Notes, while they avoided the costs of commissioning expensive, special purpose workgroup systems. Finally, they could benefit from IBM’s own experience with centralizing the storage, the security, and the analysis of data resources.

Small and medium-sized companies, by contrast, often continued to lack a PC strategy for data regularity and integrity. Situations became common in which the only unifying applications were the PC operating system, the PC office suite, and email. In the absence of central control and of systematic software updating and security reinforcement, organizations were exposed to risk from hacking damage, through their PC operating systems and through PC office software, both designed originally for open communication.

As for email: it has come to be used in many smaller organizations as a defacto workgroup tool, but this adaptation of email has not provided the focus, the unified vision, and the security that formal workgroup systems have provided to their adopters. Email communication is vulnerable to individuals’ diffuse and varying ideas about process structure and needs. Finally, in an internet world in particular, common standards of email management offer especially low security while allowing for the introduction of incompatible material from downloaded programs and data.
Knowledge Energies stands ready to help small- and medium-sized organizations take the crucial first step by identifying organizational processes. Process needs for data and document storage and analysis can be identified, simultaneously with process identification and description.

Ephemeral Collaboration

2006-11-28T10:34:00.000-05:00

Electronic collaboration and communication systems are helping us share ideas, our knowledge and information. We work in this communication virtual world and get instant gratification from the empowerment it brings us; great!

Where do we save this information? Do we organize it and use it in our work? Do we share it with others? Do we want to access a conversation that took place somewhere else in our company? Did we forget that when we type information on a screen it is no more valuable than a spoken conversation unless it is saved? The convergence of informal information and collaborative application give us an unprecedented opportunity to capture the context and turn these conversations into assets that we can reuse. Unfortunately most of us do not have the time or motivation to share and organize our knowledge; we know what we know and that’s good enough. We’ll share it when asked. Nonetheless we do seek knowledge from others to better ourselves and complete our work. Some solution providers offer data mining tools that can sift through terabytes of information and extract themes. Others web complex semantic networks. Most do not address the information that travels in collaborative tools.

Over the years I have worked with companies who believed that work-related conversation contained valuable information and knowledge nuggets that needed to be captured. Thus, Knowledge Management solutions were addressing human, cultural and technology issues to solve the problem. Today many IT and business savvy business people refuse to entertain Knowledge Management solutions for fear of never-ending complexity and running after an impossible prize. A contradiction remains; what do we do with all this unstructured information? Many IT departments have resolved the problem by pushing the information to the extremity; the user! IT will ensure backup of emails and connectivity, but it only truly care about the well-understood transaction-base databases. Business people are not complaining. As a matter of fact they enjoy the empowerment of email, instant messaging, web-conferences, blogs, wikis and other cool tools to come. We can observe that the more people use these tools, the more people start to build their own informal process networks, thus lose and misplace valuable information of the company they work for. I remember visiting a major worldwide bio-pharmaceutical company’s head of marketing. She was showing me how she collected information from the field about demographics and sales. I was appalled to observe that a fortune-500 company used email to gather measurable information that was embedded in PowerPoint presentations. It took her more than 30 minutes to remember where she had saved these “reports”. She then had to hire an assistant to cut and paste the information to provide a consolidated report to management. This is a typical case of a manager not being supported by IT (or not wanting to be supported) using basic email technology to build her own chaotic and undocumented process to measure progress and set a worldwide action plan.

Unless companies become aware of this communication Trojan horse, many will find that similar informal and damaging processes exist in every division and tier of the organization. These tools are the identical from organization to organization. Just observe how new employees are more independent and make less demands on IT to solve business processes. The solution is not to limit the power of communication tools. Working on integrating them into core business processes and applications is the desired answer. Admittedly, the latest trends of action-based computing and taxonomy management are starting to offer hope and reduce the effort and complexity associated with traditional Knowledge Management. We believe that a near-seamless Integrated Collaboration approach offers less compromise for the user and for the company wanting to capitalize on the knowledge found in collaboration.

Report on the ICC 2006 in Paris

2006-10-30T15:46:00.000-05:00

Leave it to the french to analyze in depth the work and social challenges of electronic collaboration and the measurable efficiency gain one should expect as an outcome. How refreshing to have a non-technology centric approach to the challenge!

More than 1200 people attended the event organized by Mr. Richard Collin president of the International Center for Collective Efficiency (ICCE). The event’s highlights were the open sessions on new collaborative trends, a solution vendor exposition, and the “master classes” where fundamental productivity and management acceptance questions were raised and answered.

Additionally, Microsoft sponsored a theme book on “working differently through collective efficiency” in French “Petit Precis d’efficacite collective TOME #1 - Travailler Autrement”. This book was given free to everyone at the event. It contains survey results, large content visualization models and many positions by well-known french industry leaders and innovators. This book demonstrate again the ability for the french to dissect social concepts and illustrate them. Nonetheless, having been involved since 1988 in the Team Collaboration Application and Solution industry, I have to say that the themes and adoption challenges remain the same throughout the years.

The technology does evolve and we often think that it can make it easier to adopt and leverage it in a meaningful and measurable way; wrong... it remains a human issue! This event truly outlined this reality as speakers talked about the WEB 2.0, Wikis, social networks and management resistance to adopt these technologies already familiar to our children and homes. Although the names are different, the value proposition is too familiar to business managers who have already seen these technologies and used them since the early 90s with products such as Lotus Notes/Domino, MS Sharepoint, EMC’s eRoom & Documentum and other well established collaborative platforms. Perhaps a new name to the same problem might work this time?

In summary, the event presented many philosophical and academic points of vue. Case studies and measurable illustrations were sparse and much needed to answer the “fear of change” questions. Nonetheless, the exhibition hall contained technology jewels (in french) that demonstrated once again the ingenuity and engineering innovation that only a higher understanding of the issues can deliver. Companies such as Affinitiz have build superior and accessible solution that are perhaps as much as a year ahead of what we have in the US with 10% of the budget we typically sink into WEB 2.0 innovations.

Rocketboom Interview with Joanne Colan

2006-09-14T01:40:00.000-05:00

I interviewed Joanne Colan and asked her about podcasting and the corporate advantages and privacy issues associated with blogging. See for yourselves. (in French with subtitles)

Where Knowledge is Capitalized

2005-10-02T13:02:00.000-05:00

Too often the concept of Knowledge Management is associated with data accumulation and data mining. The reality is that the effort of knowing the organization’s processes and aligning them with the mission and strategies is key to successful Knowledge Management. Information needs to be captured in the context of work and people to become manageable and reusable as an asset. The accumulation of information does not create wealth; it is its day-to-day exploitation that gives it value.

1998 - The Fifth Provider Video at Lotus Sphere and Comdex PARIS 1998

1998-01-09T15:18:00.000-05:00

This takes me way back (1998). But some of you asked me about this video in light of the growing social network trend and the pioneering we did from 1996 to 2000 with Web Communities of Interest. I finally found it on an old ThinkPad. It is in preview quality, but it is the full clip that I made for Lotus Sphere and Comdex Paris 98 in EMEA.

The 5th Provider - Thierry Hubert Vision of Web e-Business from Thierry Hubert on Vimeo.