Cesar Brea's Weblog

Bill Ives formerly ran Accenture’s Knowledge Management/ Portals Practice.  In this post he explores blogs as the “missing link” for the traditionally (and unfortunately) disconnected worlds of KM and eLearning inside companies.  Drawing on his experiences at Accenture and with his clients, he describes organizational and technical barriers to integration of these two capabilities, and mentions .LRN/OpenACS as an example of promising technologies that pre-integrate these capabilities to help overcome these obstacles.

I’m giving a talk titled “Social Networking Solutions for the Enterprise” on May 20, 2004, at a meeting of the Boston chapter of the American Marketing Association.  The objective will be to provide marketing executives with a way to evaluate which if any solution is right for their organizations.  Although I’m not directly involved with the business at this point, I’ll draw on my experiences as a sponsor, user, and vendor, as well as provide a survey of the progress that’s been reported, to inform the discussion.

Post-script:

Bill Ives referred me to an article in eWeek by David Coursey titled, “No Business in Social Networking”.  The article is down on the prospects for the public social networking services like LinkedIn as business propositions.  I agree with this point of view, and have made the point in the past that it’s the affinity among members of a network, not the size of the network, that really matters.   LinkedIn seems to have realized this, somewhat belatedly.  This morning I got the following email from the service:

“Dear Cesar,

As more professionals are actively adopting LinkedIn, you may have noticed that you are also getting more emails from people inviting you to be their connection.

While this is the easiest way to build your network and a testament to your reputation as a professional, we recommend you only accept invitations from people you know and who you are willing and able to recommend to other professionals you know.

To prioritize your inbox and reduce the number of invitation messages you receive, you now have the option of limiting incoming invitations to those coming from people who you already have in your address book.

Turn on invitation blocking…”

Of course this begs the question of how they would know the contents of my address book, since I’m loath to let that be sucked up into a public service.  Those who have seem to regret having done so…

We’ve seen this movie before.  Remember B2B exchanges?  Most public ones failed, because they failed to achieve liquidity sufficient to drive purchasing volume they could take a little slice from to make a living.  The ones that survived were the private exchanges, consortia of members with lots of incentives (both carrots and sticks) to participate.  The companies that made money were the supply chain software and service firms (i2, Ariba, FreeMarkets) that sold jeans to the miners.  I think once the right models get worked out, we’ll see the same thing here, if on a smaller (post-boom) scale.