Joël Van Hoolandt — Fractional CTO | Magma Consulting

One or two pictures of the trip I made in NY last week; the idea was to explore any intiatives and business publications about competitive intelligence and knowledge management. I know the US event of the SCIP organisation will be held in Manhattan at the end of the month, but I'll probably attend the european sessions in October 06. A view of Manhattan (from the Empire State Building - Floor 86) For the ones that like Pop Art, here a famous picture (MoMA) Here left, a small market at Union Square. New Yorkers have still green on their tables ;-)

We arrived in Belgium this night, after seven days business (and leisure ;-) trip to big apple. A good weather, an excellent sightseeing, a lot of shopping and full of good readings about wining the knowledge game . I'll discuss later on what to understand under the expression. For now, I'll explain here a little bit more about the connections and the matrix symptom, still based on Haeckel his article. Matrix management consists of: the lines connecting roles in an organizational matrix are not informed by a systems design. Instead, they are lines of communication connecting people in different silos of authority. These lines almost always increase ambiguity about who is responsible for what. A 1998 study of multidivisional teams in a large multiproduct company quantified the opportunity cost of matrix conflict in terms of deals lost, not pursued, or not closed because of non competitive bids at more than $10 million, and the company had dozens of these teams in operation at an...

A system is a collection of elements that interact to produce an effect that cannot be produced by any subset of the elements. This interesting definition of what is a system guides Haeckel to define the synergy (the glue between the elements): Defining synergy as a result that is "more than the sum of the parts" is closer to the mark. This definition, for example, is what the corporate office of the General Electric Company (GE) achieves by lowering the cost of doing business for its subsidiaries. Because they are part of GE's portfolio, the subsidiaries benefit from the economies of scope that come from sharing the GE logo: GE's AAA investment rating, GE's worldwide telecommunications network, and GE's 'boundaryless' knowledge, to name some of the assets that are shared accross units. The result is that the units are more profitable as part of GE than they would be as separate entities, which means that GE's revenue and profit are more than the s...

What is interesting in Haeckel his article is the final conclusion he makes about sports and business: Moreover, agility - the ability to change directions rapidly - is not enough. The change must be appropriate to the situation, which is why an ability to size up the current situation earlier is fundamental to adaptiveness. How many managerial proponents of velocity, agility, and speed to market understand this distinction? In the next post, we will analyze what systemic answers and business design principles can be - and what's the relation with KM concepts.

These sports analogies capture an important insight for business leaders - the people who are responsible for creating the enterprise playbook and keeping everyone in the business on the same page. Having an employee like Marshall Faulk is a great advantage only if the business design leverages his skills. Knowing earlier without the ability and opportunity to act on that knowledge produces frustration, not success. [...] Moreover, agility - the ability to change directions rapidly - is not enough. The change must be appropriate to the situation, which is why an ability to size up the current situation earlier is fundamental to adaptiveness. How many managerial proponents of velocity, agility, and speed to market understand this distinction? Haeckel, IBM Systems journal, vol.42, n°3, 2003.

What's interesting to analyze is to see how a football pro learns: "He also knows, from hours and hours of watching miles of game tapes, the patterns and proclivities of defensive players. At a higher level, because of his pattern-recognizing ability to rapidly size up the implications of a given game situation, Faulk knows something much more important: he knows earlier than anyone else on the field the meaning of what is happening now. That is what enables him to play faster, rather than run faster."

Just to continue the comparison between sport reflexes and intellectual reasoning, let's read further Haecke's article. He continues to argue that patterns recognition is the secret of sport champions, extending the concept to business executives. "In business terms, Marshall Faulk is an excellent sense-and-respond decision-maker. His decisions are not analytical, or 'data driven', even though he spends an extraordinary amount of time studying films to extract the tendencies of opposing teams and coaches - what they are likely to do under a variety of game situations. As he watches the films, he is looking for and internalizing patterns. When he is given the ball, it is his pattern recognition capability, not his reasoning skill, that enables him to anticipate and respond to what is happening on the field. The patterns he recognizes are systems patterns, not activity sequences. The current relationships between the players, more than the current actions of them, in...