Tool Time

Martin Roulleaux Dugage & Tom Davenport both refer to the Bain Tools Survey. This survey is very useful & virtually unique - provided you take it for what it is. Which is basically what is perceived as "in" and "out" by various executives. Harsher souls than I would call it the business fad hit parade.

Newbies on the block Corporate Blogging (I want a corporate blog, just like that dude @ GM, I'm as important as he is goddammit!!!) & Consumer Anthropology (voyeurism given a satisfyingly scientific sheen) get mentions for the first time and demonstrate low levels of usage & satisfaction (everyone wants to beat up the newbies and take their dinner money).

Old war-horse Knowledge Management (I think it's something to do with intranets) rises to eighth place despite no one liking it much (KM = the Celine Dion of business?!?). Nearly 70% of organisations surveyed said they were doing some kind of KM activity. Apparently smaller firms were more satisfied than larger firms.

Which makes intuitive sense. Nearly eight years bitter experience have indicated to me that KM just doesn't scale very well. If you want to do KM properly in a 10,000 employee business, you actually have to find a much smaller group (say around 150 mark max) with a specific business problem and start there. Linking those groups of 150 with their different business problems is absolutely possible but really not something you'd want to rush into.

Looking forward to 2007, the main loser seems to be benchmarking. It seems that copying your classmate's work is going out of fashion (well, he was a bit "special" anyway, so no great loss there).