Thoughts, Ideas, Opinions ... » From data to wisdom, or from static files to live conversations

It was good not to have to think about work stuff during vacations… but what I could not help thinking about was Webjam. Without the pressure of the daily email backlog though, it was easier to step back and I ended-up fine-tuning the answer to a simple question: what were we trying to achieve, was that inspiring for both our clients and employees, was that simply doable.

Looking back at the type of discussions we had with clients about stakeholder engagement, I like to think that we are trying to solve, or more modestly trying to contribute to solve, a very interesting issue : how conversations build knowledge and how knowledge fuel conversations. What has indeed struck me as we work on corporate social networks is the shift from database-centric knowledge to people centric knowledge : what used to be the most important was the ability to find very easily all documents about any topic; what our clients are discovering is that it is much more important to facilitate the discovery of conversations about any topics : while it is necessary to have at your fingertips the last market survey to decide whether to launch a new product for example, what is much more helpful is to have access to various live conversations and work groups about this, usually ranked, with indeed some documents as Appendices. From a conceptual point of view the ability to access libraries of conversations speed up the graduation from Data to Information to then Knowledge and finally Wisdom, the so-called DIKW hierarchy, pioneered by Jonathan Hey.

In short, what drives the workflow is the conversation, not the file, it is the people, not the database. This has huge implication on the document and content management industry as what they are becoming are “appendices” to conversations; on the other side, stirring internal conversations within a company to foster knowledge sharing and innovation takes the center stage. In addition, making sure employees stay engaged in large companies will have to borrow from CRM tactics, especially to get the initial community to take-off.

Some might find it a bit ambitious but I find it very exciting to be tackling on behalf of our clients very hot issues about human interaction: how knowledge is created and transferred, what type of connections between people should be fostered to accelerate that process, and how to make the whole circle self-sustainable.