About my Magma consulting activities

Just being back from the ESPC 2014 edition (what a great city, a fantastic weather – how no to fall in love with Spain, really?) where thousands of presentation were given. In a nutshell, we had four great key notes, on Social and Sharepoint 2013, but not only. A special mention to RafalLukawiecki (Boticelli project) for his very well-prepared presentations, his hands-on approach on the BI side of the Sharepoint force and, last but certainly not least, his sense of humor. But what stroke me on during the four days we had is how few (to my knowledge, this must have been zero if I'm not mistaken) speakers proposed as subject an alternative client computer other than a recent Windows machine. Why not connecting a native Mac, Linux, older MS OS, tablets, Androïd phones to some Sharepoint or SQL instances? If I can understand that Microsoft wants to promote uniformity of their products and avoid diverse technologies, I believe however that this would bring a more concrete and...

Being attending a political discussion yesterday evening, I was surprised (and happy) to hear that some politician finally understand and do care about new technology in Belgium (and in Europe). It seems that the public sector - at large - is now discovering the virtues of new technologies (job creation, environmental friendly sector, inclusion of jobless people in a sector that is continuously looking for bright minds and new ideas etc.). And one of my concern (I blogged already about it) is the lack of real, ambitious programme for offering a European strategic alternative for data storage (on a cloud-based model) and the support for alternative US software providers (exception made for the German SAP ERP software). Why is that Europeans are not capable to bring to market Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Oracle giants? Where are Nokia, Ericsson, Linux today? And do we finally have a strategy to address the European market and propose a road forward? Interesting links t...

You can now test the new Lync technology (Unified communication product from Microsoft) in the Cloud. It's integrated in Office 365 and you can enrich online experiences without installing any package. Just follow this link right here!

If you're interested to get a fresh view on what's knowledge management, just watch this video. It's an interview of Larry Lucardie, CEO of Knowledge Values.

Looking for a knowledge management conference in Europe? Then, save the date for this yearly european conference. 12th European Conference on Knowledge Management - ECKM 2011 University of Passau, Germany 1-2 September 2011 Conference Chair: Prof. Dr. Franz Lehner, University of Passau, Germany Programme Chair: Prof. Dr. Klaus Bredl University of Augsburg, Germany The conference will be located almost exactly at the geographic centre of Europe. Passau is close to the metropolitan area of Munich. According to a statement attributed to Alexander von Humboldt, Passau is referred to as one of the seven most beautiful towns of the world. Passau is spectacularly located at the confluence of three rivers, one of them being the river Danube, the second longest river of Europe.

KPMG International has released an interesting paper on Web 2.0 technologies within the public sector...you can find the document on several KPMG web sites, like on the Belgian site (the official title is 'Dynamic technologies for smarter government' and is available in PDF format).

Did you know that you can access thousands of social science research papers and articles online? See the last stats we had from the SSRN eLibrary : Papers & Authors: Abstracts: 289,990 Full Text Papers: 240,676 Authors: 138,281 Papers Received in Last 6 months:27,36

As I already quoted on LinkedIn, I'm a surprised by the lack of public european initiative on cloud computing and secured cloud architecture within the european region. I'm really convinced that cloud architecture could boost the european ICT adoption (with offering cheap and secure data storage for european citizens) and make it cheaper for the weakest european countries. If you're not convinced that Europe is waiting too long to adopt any plan, check what happened last month in Washington on the Knowledge Management level....

I'm very pleased to see that the editor World Scientific Publishing Company announces a book about KM and communication for September 2010. Most of the time, we find a lot of books on ontologies, document management, KM strategies with IT connections, but I believe that the academic community does not emphasize enough the communication skills we need to practice KM every day. The complete title of the book will be 'Communication and knowledge transfer: theories and cases in Journalism, Public relations and advertising (series on innovation and knowledge management) and it's written by Seow Ting Lee and I-huei Cheng.

The data-information-knowledge-wisdom hierarchy seemed like a really great idea when it was first proposed. But its rapid acceptance was in fact a sign of how worried we were about the real value of the information systems we had built at such great expense. What looks like a logical progression is actually a desperate cry for help. Read the HBR article further here...

2nd Iranian Knowledge Management Conference 30 - 31 Jan 2010, Tehran, Iran KM Forum 10th Annual Conference 24 - 25 Feb 2010, Henley on Thames, United Kingdom 3rd Annual Global Learning Summit 03 - 05 Mar 2010, Singapore City, Singapore 5th Knowledge Management International Conference 25 - 27 May 2010, Terengganu, Malaysia KC UK 2010 15 - 16 Jun 2010, London, United Kingdom World Library and Information Congress 10 - 15 Aug 2010, Gothenburg, Sweden

I was googling this morning and tried to see what were the results for "knowledge management + Copenhagen"...and guess what? It returned a lot of KM initiatives that have been taken for preparing or explaining the role of managing the knowledge in a globalized economy. Who thought knowledge management was not a trendy activity anymore? See for example an initiative of the Copenhagen Business school or Climate-L projec t...

The Official Conference Blog on the KMWorld 2009 Conference & Expo (November 17-19, San Jose, CA. Coverage is already underway - check here often for in-depth news on keynote speakers, coverage of topic areas, show updates, meetups, entries from KM thought leaders, and anything else that surrounds this year's show! Last year’s KMWorld keynote speaker and information architecture expert, Peter Morville , pointed me to a d iscussion of search as a wayfinding system for websites. Author of the discussion, David Hatch, says web users are moving toward “search as being a standard, hard-wired, lizard brain reflex when confronted with moving through the vasty content spaces that are out there. The Googles have had no small impact on our wayfinding approaches. “ He also believes Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering would not agree. Jared is a speaker at KMWorld 2009 so it will be interesting to hear what he shares about making an intuitive interface design. Where is Europ...

Haven't heard about the DMF event at Tour & Taxis, in Brussels on October 22 ? Not registered yet ? Hope to see you there ! Digital First Marketing : The Belgian marketing event of the year! More than 2,000 marketing professionals are expected for this 4th edition of the Digital Marketing First exhibition in Tour & Taxis. On the agenda of this edition: 75 exhibitors, more than 50 workshops, 8 keynote speakers, the Emakina Academy… not to mention the presentation of the Mixx Awards in which more than 500 professionals will participate in an unforgettable evening. The audience is made up exclusively of interactive marketing and communication professionals. Entrance to the exhibition is free, but requires advance registration via this site .

FISHA - A framework for information Sharing and Alerting - is a collaborative project run by an EC consortium. The project addresses the issue of improving security awareness amongst home-users and SME's through the creation of a European information sharing and alerting system. The expected output of the project includes: an inventory of relevant existing initiatives targeting home-users and SMEs a requirement analysis and the specification of key components of the system a web portal prototype for information sharing and alerting a specification of the information sharing and alerting protocol a prototype software implementation roadmaps for the involvement of Member States, the European Commission, ENISA [European network and information security agency], academia and consumer protection experts in maintaining the system a communication plan for home-users and SMEs, to be published on the FISHA website For further info, check http://www.fisha-project.eu/

Have a look at the this new Brazilian Internet startup and some of the proposed features. The founders have as ambition to be a central connection point for the social life and social activities on the Internet, centralizing with one login screen a multiple social network access. Read further on the Blog of the  NYtimes !

Web2 From: Web2Expo , 21 hours ago Web2 View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: web2expoeu08 web2expo ) SlideShare Link

The same question is regularly posted on the net, with most of the time, KM people certifying that they are still active and innovative within the KM area, but ...this time, APQC releases the yearly question via Steve Denning (previous CKO at the World Bank and famous author of a story telling book). Check the discussion here online... My opinion is that as long that people are raising the finger to know if KM is still alive, it is a good sign of vitality. Plus, if you are still not convinced, check the number of publications that are foreseen in 2009 on Amazon - with a knowledge management title...amazing :-) My view is that we all started, very excited, in that new KM track, not really knowing how to structure the field - but, that in the meantime, a lot of research and progresses have been made. A lot of companies, that started some KM initiative in late nineties are now considering to grab the fruits of their investments. And all other organizations that stopped those projects ...

Finally, I took some days out of the office, with some free time for the family and an article...I bought a book about social networks (in French, from Pierre Mercklé, Sociologie des réseaux sociaux , Ed. La découverte) in order to try to establish a connection between the networks (and communities) and some Barak Obama elections strategy...This should be published in September in the Banking and Finance review magazine . PS: If you still don't know who is Barak Obama, I suggest you take a serious break ;-)