Emanuele Quintarelli's Library tagged 2006 →  View Popular

Dr. Thierry Barsalou was on the same panel. Thierry is Chief Information Officer at Ipsen.
He is also in charge of the Competitive Intelligence at Ipsen. Ipsen is
a global pharmaceutical company, with headquarters in Paris France.

Thierry and his team have implemented a very powerful internal Competitive Intelligence system based on Traction Software. Traction makes a tool that is part blog and part Wiki.

Thierry has had tremendous success, with truly substantial internal readership.

He provided some basic, and very useful, tips on how to achieve similar success.

• Start first with the business problem. Thierry’s object was simply
  to get better Competitive Intelligence. The CEO wanted the whole
  company to be aware of what their competitors where doing on a real
  time basis. Thierry and the CEO also wanted the whole team to be aware
  of all the latest changes in rules and regulations affecting the
  markets for the drugs they produce. In addition, the whole team needed
  to be kept up to date on the latest relevant medical research. Thierry
  and the CEO realized that they needed to tap the whole company as a
  source for this information. The information came from conferences,
  reports, personal contacts, and other unexpected sources. Clearly, it
  made sense to tap the whole team as an information gathering resource.
• Create a culture of sharing. In other words, foster a culture of reciprocal altruism.
• Create a contribution culture.
• Start slow; then let it grow. I hear this advice again and again for people setting up Web Office systems.
• Taxonomy was important. I’ve argued against an imposed
  taxonomy. Thierry does not agree. In Pharma, there is good reason for
  imposing a taxonomy. It is important to keep definitions consistent. I
  would still argue for a balanced approach, with some planned taxonomy
  and some method for the team to grow and evolve that taxonomy. However,
  clearly there are no hard and fast rules that apply universally to all
  web office deployments.
• Security and enterprise class features, such as an audit
  trail are critical components of their deployment. This is a challenge
  that I am struggling with in the deployment I am building for my firm.
• Integration into existing tools is critical. To ease the
  transition to Web Office, it is important to provide people with
  multiple ways of getting at information within the system. Thierry
  found that they needed to generate a summary Competitive Intelligence
  email that is sent out as a daily Digest. This drove people to the site.
• Thierry recommends Traction.

I met yesterday with David Deal, Ray Velez, and Amy Vickers from Avenue A | Razorfish,
a 1000 person, $190 million interactive services firm headquartered in
Seattle.  AARF helps clients with digital marketing and advertising,
with their customer-facing websites, and also with their Intranets and
Extranets.  

1. Blogs - Not all useful information is structured
in documents.  As the internet model has shown, blogs can be an
effective means of communicating very specific detail in small bursts. 
From a KM perspective, they map well to executive messaging, practice
area thought leadership, project team diaries and even personal
profiling.  MOSS supports blog through the use of a blog template.  The
interface is simple and familiar.  Most importantly, the data is
searchable.

2. Wikis - Blogs are great for individual
contributions.  Wikis extend the notion of unstructured sharing by
allow a community to “build” something.  Participants can add detail or
create new sections.  Again, this is familiar territory for those who
have used wikis on the internet or through 3rd party commercial tools. 
Like blogs, MOSS supports wiki templates.  Again, simple and searchable.

3. RSS Enablement - RSS is a great way to aggregate
data from a source and give a quick snapshot.  Today, folks use RSS
feeds from news agencies and industry data sources to get a high level
view of top stories.  MOSS allows it content to be RSS enabled.  This
means it is easier to show aggregate corporate information in the same
fashion.  This is a powerful way to promote top stories to the
organization or communities.

4. Enterprise Search - It's great to collect the
data but if it goes unfound the system is useless.  MOSS offers a much
improved search engine for better access to the data stored in the
sources above as well as the traditional internal and external
sources.  Provided you have made the proper investment (in time) of
tagging your content, enterprise search can add tremendous value in
allowing employees to uncover and discover relevant corporate content.

5. Social Networking - This is probaly the least
known (yet potentially most powerful) new feature of MOSS.  Social
Networking has become a very popular term.  It's all about profiling
and find things or people based on those profiles.  MOSS has a
component called the Knowledge Network that helps employees build
personal profiles so the community can more easily find experts.  You
can get details at http://blogs.msdn.com/kn/.  This is a huge step from a KM perspective in terms of getting everyone involved in the KM effort.