It begins with a little unimportant event. I was at Washington Ronald Reagan airport, having a Delta flight to Boston.

Being a Air France platinium, I used to have access to the lounge in the US, Delta being a member of sky team. I therefore thought that I could step in, even with my french card.

The lady at the entrance swipes my card, and the computer refuses the access. The reason being that I must be either on an international flight, or on a domestic flight connecting the same day to an international flight. Rules have changed since last time I flew on a US domestic flight, at that time they would let me in the lounge.

As I did not know, I started being angry, telling them that the rules are in contradiction with the french web site, eventually asking to see the manager. An old lady arrives.

The lady swipes the card, looks at the computer, and says “sorry sir, you cannot access”. Nothing new.

Then happens a series of “funny” exchanges.

“Your computer is in contradiction with Airfrance” say I

“I do not care” says the lady, “I follow what my computer says”

“If you follow the computer, what is your added value” I ask

“Sir, I must follow the computer”

“If you say this, it means that you have no intelligence, no sensitivity. You just repeat what the computer says, you then are a machine”

“Sir, I am not a machine”

“Then let me in”

“No Sir”

“So, you prefer to follow the machine rather than making a customer happy ?”

“I want to make all my customer happy”

“So let me in”

“No Sir, I am sorry”

“You are not sorry, you just pretend; your words sound fake”

“Sir I am sorry”

Etc… I was suddendly even not sure she was the manager, she may have been a comedian just hired to manage situation with angry french customer !

Of course, this poor lady was a machine. But it was not her fault, I can even imagine she was not happy to react the way she had to. I realized she had a hierarchy above her who priviledge the rules rather than customer satisfaction, and that she had to strictly obey the rules. Even worst, she could have been trapped by her manager into a double bind : “make your customer happy, but follow the rules”. But I was also thinking how employees at Apple store have much more liberty to manage customer relationship.

The industrial world has rationalized the production, by creating assembly lines, where everyone had to follow the process, and follow the rules, period.

Then came the age of knowledge workers. But the traditional managment applied the same method, whether you are a knowledge worker or not. And it leads to such situations. Everybody who needs to talk with with the hotline of telecommunication operator, an airline, a bank, knows it : customer service is just awfull, inhuman, based on process, machine. This is not normal at the age of the Internet

What should Delta, or any big corporate do ? Undo strict complicated rules. Keep simple ones : “everybody who has a gold or platinium may enter the lounge”. Period. And give the local knowledge worker the ability and the tools to manage any situation. Give them freedom to think, and act. Treat them as human, not as machines.

What sort of tools do those knowledge worker need ? Any information sharing tool, all the one that Internet provides. By doing so, local worker have the capacity to regulate the flux of people in the lounge. How ? Simple. Everyone in a lounge is waiting for an airplane, and Delta know this very accurately. So let the workers, and also the customers, have the information about the estimated amount of people in the lounge every 15 minutes, for the next three hours. Let the customer even regulate themself, in peer to peer mode.

By imposing its employees to just follow the rules, Delta is staying in an old type economy, the one of the XIXth century world. Consequence is that they make their employees unhappy, and therefore their customer who face them unhappy as well.

By changing its internal governance, by allowing them to take more local decision, based on accurate information managment tools, Delta would then really be in the 2.0 world.

Corporate companies need a huge amount of energy to do this. But they must.

By the way, I humbly suggest Delta to think about this :

The working program at Hadopi labs has now started. A first draft of the working groups has been presented to the members of the college, and work is going on. The program will be published soon, albeit in french.

This is for the official side of Hadopi. Now, there is still a lot of reluctance for many people to participate officially in the labs, for various reason : ideological (Hadopi is the enemy to be killed), practical (people must register), efficiency (it is useless procedure). As I mentioned in my previous post, there is a strong difference between the fast reactivity of the community outside Hadopi, and the slowness of the internal processes.

Therefore, my friend Bruno and I have set-up a parallel system, the 1x4x.

How does this work ?

It is inspired by mystarbuck and Dell Ideastrom, two famous early e-voting system.

Anyone who wants to contribute may go on the pool site, and propose an idea. The registration process is easy by design. And people can not only propose an idea, but also vote on other people’s idea.

The expert will regularly watch the ideas, extract the interesting ones, and introduce them into their own work. It may happen that an idea is cross labs, therefore leading to a cross lab projects.

We hope that, with this system more neutral than direct participation, the community, including strong opponents, will be able to express itself in a more simple manner and its voice will be included in the labs work.

The pool is now open, you may participate !

The information system of any enterprise is generally a closed system. This is not necessarily for fear of intrusion, or malicious, but because the basic philosophy of the industrial world is that there is life in the company, and a life outside of the company, and that the boundary between the two should be simple: as closed as possible, with only few crossing points well monitored. This was the birth of IBM who, in 1912, invented the time clock, some sort of prehistorical information system. On a temporal vision also, the logic was based on schedule, which allows a temporal barrier between an inside and an outside.

The world has obviously changed. All usual boundaries, between inside and outside the company, between private and professional sphere, have soared. On the temporal plane, nobody is really concerned with the duration as a measure of value creation, except employees who work in shifts. The ability of companies to restrain as much as possible their information systems, from firewalls to banning social networks through the blocking of any video (worse than the Chinese government …), sends employees working from home, where they have much better IT equipment and condition than at work.

Information systems, traditionally closed, were impacted by the open philosophy of Internet. It took several years before companies started making public up part of their information system. I remember the revolution when UPS decided to open its intranet on the web.

In 2010, it would be suicidal for a B2C company not have a website which, at least, offers information and can perform transactions. But this not enough, and I think enterprises should open APIs, which are programming interfaces, of their information system.

Let us observe what is happening in the world of politics. The movement of the Open Data is born from the desire of some politician to publicly open government data, or rather, to use the excellent statement of Nicholas Gruen’s report delivered to the Australian government, to move from a logic where “the government protects its data, except if he wants to publish them”, to a logic in which “the government opens its data, unless there is a compelling reason not to do so.” Thus the U.S. government has opened its data portal; it was also the first decision of Cameron when he was elected, leading to the UK portal, followed by many countries or jurisdictions. Even the Russian government has opened a portal making public the expenses of his administration.

When government open their data, they are delivered in several formats, from simple pdf documents to excel spreadsheets. Publishing data is interesting, but making them useful is even better. The logic has been to go from opening the data to opening programming interfaces that allow programmers to build applications interacting with information systems.

The principle is the following: let us imagine a municipality who opens the APIs of its information system. Then, to start the process, it creates a public competition, rewarding the best applications using these APIs. The community is motivated to create such applications. The city has multiple interest in doing so: it focuses on its core business, which is to manage the city; it does not have do develop a lot of applications, since they are made elsewhere, the taxpayer’s money is better spent, and services are becoming very numerous.  A set of municipalities moreover decided to standardize these programming interfaces, giving rise to Open311, site where you can see the list of applications developed by third parties.

The business world should learn from this movement. Consider Home Depot. They have developped an interesting iphone app. These applications costed money, and forced Home Depot to create an app, which far from their core business. Now imagine that Home Depot decides to open its APIs. There will be for sure programmers, amongst the community of customer, who will develop applications user oriented, because they are customers themselves. People can invent usage that Home Depot had never thought of, and, as a consequence, increase usage, and buy more to Home Depot.

Another example: would banks open their APIs, the community could develop innovative applications, to better manage their accounts, conduct transactions, etc. from within the application. The bankers would benefit more flux, and customer would have a greater diversity of services.

Is this utopian? This is what Amazon is already doing with the Amazon Web services, some of them accessing directly the ordering part of the Information system, and the Amazon widgets that allow anyone to put a little part of Amazon on its site. It is also the latest innovation from paypal, paypalX, a set of open APIs associated with an economic model of revenue sharing. One might think of other applications in the automotive world or all industries, or all services.

The Internet world is an open one based on cooperation, collective intelligence, and value being in the flux more than the stock. Opening the APIs is, for companies, a good way to understand where value lies and how to exploit it intelligently. I remain convinced that the first one who will do so will have a competitive advantage. Following what I wrote in 2008, the concept would be “Business as a platform”, to follow ”Government as a platform“, as coined Tim O’Reilly. The french writer Auguste Detoeuf, in ” A propos de Barenton O.L., confiseur”, wrote in 1936 : “it is not your patents, but your speed of execution, which will protect you from the competition“. Opening the APIs would certainly be good way to improve speed of execution. Corporate companies should consider crowdsourcing not as a ressource, but as a partnership.

Louis Monier is french (I happened to meet him), living in the Silicon Valley, and is well known for being the creator of Altavista.

He then moved to ebay, and Google.

And he just created Qwiki.

What is Qwiki? from Qwiki on Vimeo.

At first glance, Qwiki is supposed to be your talking personal assistant. A sort of modern Dobby, who would be at your “info” service, and would search and tell you everything about any given topic. A synthetic visual & talking information system,

But not only. Everybody can set-up his own qwik, and create use cases. Some are displayed on their web site, still unaccessible.

So, Qwiki looks like a sort of combination of services such as liveplasma, pearltrees, paper.li, all those systems which somehow help you to create the synthesis of a whole bunch of information. Each owner of Pearltrees must order and arrange himself, but paper.li does it for you, based on your tweets and hastags. Qwiki could be a multimodal combination of both.

However, here is the disruption : story telling. Everybody knows that the best way to learn is by having fun. One way to do this is serious games. The other is to hear stories. This is how we all learned when we were young, we all remember the little red riding hood, who, by the way, is interesting only because of the existence of the big bad wolf… I recently met a CEO who had posted a 4 minutes video of him talking about his company, and who then received a lot of people wanting to work for him only because they liked the video. None of them had read the content of his web site…

So, if Qwiki is good enough to tell beautiful stories instead of sending links or sentences, then this service will be a killer one.

Now, back to two intellectual questions :

• what sources will Qwiki search for ? Wikipedia is named, but what about youtube, dailymotion, twitter, google, blogs, the entire web, etc…
• Is it a sharing tool, or only a personal tool accessible through many devices. How will I share my Qwiki with others ??? On which platforms?

And a last comment : I wish Qwiki to become a beautiful story !

I registered as an alpha user. I shall test.

Second Life has recently generated a lot of buzz. It all starts with a post on their web site : restructuring. More precisely, 30% of employees are fired, and their Singapore office closes.

I have seen many analysis of this, talking about too much business orientation, or a step back to B2C.

It is a serious issue for all people who, like me, believe in the business of virtual worlds. We need to remind the history of Second Life. At first, Linden Lab was created by Philippe Rosedale with the aim to build a software that would be sold. Second Life was created as a showcase, a proof of concept of the capacity of the platform. However, Philippe is more and more interested in the social aspect of Second Life, to a point that he may have forgotten the business issue. Not a good thing to do when you have Mitch Kapor, Pierre Omidyar, and Jeff Bezos at your board. Well, facebook is in the same mood, but facebook is over 400M accounts, while Second Life is around 16M, which is low, even though the peer to peer transactions amount for 567MUS$ in 2009, a very nice result in my view. So Philippe was replaced by Mark Kingdon, who decided to go back to the basics, and create an enterprise solution. Well, he created two enterprise solutions : the first one is just owning islands in the main grid, with specific features such as more flexible avatar naming, the second one, “second life enterprise beta”, being beyond the firewall.

This is, in my view, the main issue: it is not possible for a company to have both a B2C offering, and a B2B one. Amongst all issues, two are huge. The first one is about culture; sales process are not the same, sales people are not the same, pitch are not the same, eventualy it means having two different teams, which is costly. Let us remember the excellent words from crossing the chasm: “better have three customers who talk together than ten who don’t”. The second issue is about product roadmap; obviously, the requierment from a social network are not the same as the one from companies, specially the corporate ones. This leads to tension on the product. Moreover, social networks are not that much the friends of CIOs… Consequences are dramatic: the residents are more and more disapointed by SL; the B2B inworld offer seems to offer a low level of reactivity (friends of mine talk about many weeks before having an answer), and Second Life enterprise beta business model, 55k$ per year for 16 islands but only 8 simultaneous, looks outrageous, specially compared to other collaborative tools.

What is emerging now looks like a willingness from resident to step back from SL. For those close to the original spirit of Rosedale, opensim seems a good candidate. However, remains a big problem: what about all assets inworld? Everybody has in mind the closure of metaplace, and the resulting loss of assets. Maybe this is why VenueGen has offered to migrate enterprise assets into its own world?

Shall we assist to a Second life crash ?

Whether it happens or not, I still believe in virtual worlds. This excellent post made after Thinkbalm decision to widen its scope (we must all thank Thinkbalm for their constant support to Virtual Worlds), shows many positive coming aspects. In the hype curve, Virtual Worlds are clearly at the Trough of Disillusionment. Time is now on for technology to show its real potential.

What are the positiv aspects?

• The most important is the vgov initiative, lauched by US administration, whose aim is to manage virtual worlds for all US administrations. The Internet exist mostly because of the important role played by US administration, the same story may happen with Virtual Worlds. Four platforms have been selected : Web.alive; Forterra (acquired by SAIC); teleplace; and Vastpark, a very innovative opensource platform. Second Life has not been slected.
• Education already makes a huge use of virtual worlds. The special issue of the journal of virtual worlds research shows interesting results.
• Healthcare sector is also a place where virtual worlds have had big success, in SL, but not only. A study performed by doctors showed the great advantage of virtual world as a training tool.
• The enterprises are more and more interested in serious games. I can’t imagine serious games without a virtual world. With this respect, the openness of the technology becomes a key success factor…
• Tradeshows, conferences, are more and more moving to virtual worlds, with big success. Not only cost of travel is lowered, but the quality of interaction is superior to 2D tools, as shows IBM case study. Robots have now their virtual conference; and even wine producers go for it !
• On the social side, Kids and teens are massively in virtual worlds. Almost 400 millions users in the range 8-15 years old are in virtual worlds, comparable to the number of facebook users, but who has a larger scope in terms of age.

I would like to add a personal touch. Many times, I have met people very reluctant to the internet, people who did not understand the importance of social networks, forum, for whom the web was no more than an online content tool. I was always able to change their perception by showing them machinimas realized in corporate situations. Their reaction was always the same : “at last I understand what it is all about”. Well, let us be honest : facebook interface is amongst the most complicated we can imagine. At least, a 3D interface is easy to understand.

The immersive web is now entering a time of obvious concrete realizations. On the technological side, tools are diversified, some close to games or social networks, some close to corporate intranet tools. The biggest improvment is their availability through the browser. I It is now obvious thet the browser is the entry point to the Internet, and 3D plugins are the preferred solution to clients download. WebGL norm, when available, will be a huge step.

Virtual worlds are now entering their mature phase, and we shall all thank SL to have shown its potential value.

Yesterday I was at a conference with Frédéric Lippi, one of the two managers of Lippi, the 300-employee company that moved to an Enterprise 2.0 model, as I described here.

Amongst the managerial decisions they took, was one to abandon any individual incentives. What Frédéric said is, “You can’t tell people to work in a collaborative way, and give them individual incentives; there is a contradiction in there”.

Some people reacted in the audience, (Frédéric confessed that some people even considered him Marxist), saying that this was too radical, and that there were surely some be cases where individual incentives were appropriate. When I asked them for examples, one mentioned rewards for traders, but for obvious reasons everybody said that it was not a good example…

Then someone said “sales people”. I still believe than even sales people should no longer have individual incentives.

I am working with big French retailers. Retail culture is based on internal competition, and each company love to compare every month which store did better than another, like “oh, Marseille came before Rennes this month, great job!”. But it may happen in some future that they abandon this…

The shift in approach actually comes via the Internet. When e-commerce web sites were first opened, they were considered as another store, and were compared as such. There were many drawbacks to this, let me quote two.

The first one is pricing.

It is usual that each store is responsible for its pricing policy; the same product can have, therefore, different prices according to the city the shop is located. But then, how to price the product on a web site?

The second one is that the Internet is the enemy of sales people, because the web site is a competitor to sale in store.

Unfortunately for them, more and more customers do a lot of online research before buying in the shop. It is shocking to then hear a sales person saying bad things about the Internet.

Then came this practice: any online transaction allocates the money to a physical store.

One interesting result is that, suddenly, the Internet becomes the salesperson’s friend, and sales people become more open to customers who surf on the web.

So, the web site becomes a friend. Then, why not another store from the same brand?

Customers are more and more mobile, and what they see is a brand, not a store. It may happen than a person shops in a store for heavy products, and asks to pick-up in another one. If sales people are individually incentivised, they will lose out.

The Internet is reshaping enterprises into a collaborative mode. I bet that individual incentives will vanish, because it will become counter-productive to achieving sales.

Interestingly, I found a video which explains this even better.

Many things has been said about wikipedia, good ones, and bad ones. The fight is huge, between those who still believe in content written by experts, and those who say that the quality of wikipedia is at the same level as any other encyclopedia. The comparison made by Nature between wikipedia and encyclopaedia Brittanica, which said that levels were equivalent, has not calmed down the battle between pros and cons of the user generated model of wikipedia.

Many other interesting analysis can be made about wikipedia. It is not true that anyone can contribute: there are teams of people, who are usually experts in one field, who control any change on many articles, and prevent a lot of changes to happen. Wikipedia is not a place where everyone is free to do whatever he wants. There is a strong, albeit secret, governance.

However, wikipedia is a very innovative encyclopeadia, not because it is user generated content, but for at least four other reasons.

The first innovation in wikipedia is the “view history” tab (link is on the article about wikipedia). All changes made to an article are kept. This tab allows not only to see how many changes were performed, and when, but also to compare two different versions of the article. It also allows to roll back to a previous version of an article, a very interesting feature if any deliquency activity was performed on any article. But the innovation is there: it is possible to understand the history of the article.

The second innovation is another very important tab : “discussion“. Very often, specially in any collaborative work, shared intentions are not obvious. There always a need for a space where people can discuss about the result, before taking any decision. This is the place where it can be done. It id also the place where apprentice writers should start, before changing the core article itself.

The third innovation is about meta sentences, to be found at the beginning or inside any article, such as : “This article does not cite any references or sources.”, “Please help improve this article by expanding it“, “This article may require copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone or spelling“, or, much more fundamental “The neutrality of this article is disputed“.

The fourth one is about different languages. On most articles, on the left side, one can find the same article in other wikipedia. It is not a translation, it is the same topic. The first side effect is that wikipedia can be used as a tranlation tool. I was doing a conference in front of Italian people, and I had to explain the long tail principle. I started from the entry in the English wikipedia, and fortunatly Italian was on the the languages, and by clicking on the link, I was able to explain what long tail was in Italian.

As of june 2009, there are 272 different wikipedia. It is the very first time in mankind that regional, or local languages have their own encyclopaedia in their own language which is not a translation from an occidental one. I think we see only the beginning of the impact it may have on local cultures.

Wikipedia is an encyclopeadia where the history and the creation process of any article is visible, where articles contain information about their quality, which is available in 272 languages.

There lays its innovation.

In my previous post, I briefly introduced how the Internet, by empowering peer to peer mode amongst customers, forced enterprises to reconfigure themselves, in a more cooperative manner. Now, once an enterprise is willing to move to 2.0, how can it be done ?

There have been many attempts to transform enterprises into horizontal mode. Quality circles, matrix model, lean management, etc. When looking at them, they may have brought slight improvement, but no major disruption. For most of them, they were used by people who had little understanding of the importance of technology. The general idea was that technology would follow business restructuration rather than playing a major role. Worst, none of them seem to have seen the impact Internet could have on enterprise restructuring.

However, even when considering the technology, and the major role played by the Internet, there are always many ideas that flows around. As an example, marketing must change its habit to do market studies, and should see what happens in blog, forums, twitter, social networks, etc. As pointed out nicely by Moore in “Crossing the chasm”, it is better to have less customers who talk together than many customers who are not exchanging.

Whenever an enterprise sees its customer exchanging, the value of it is big. As another example, sells people must go in the Internet, and meet their customers online, not only in real life. Working for Renault, I realized in a forum that one top car dealer was in a discussion forum about the brand, and was exchanging a lot with the brand’s customers, instead of waiting for them to come in his physical place. I think he should have been appointed as sales director !

A comment I often hear from CEOs is “there is so many things happening, how can I catch them ?” Well, in order to better track what happens on the Internet, everybody in the company should watch, and post whatever he or she sees. Only the network can interact efficiently with the network.

But all those are just tricks, ideas, which need to be ordered.

I consider an innovative process as a systemic relationship between three major components: structure, tools, and behaviour. By structure, I mean how an enterprise is configured: who reports to whom, what are the information and control flows, how decisions are taken, etc. By tools, I mean all information management tools: emails, intranet, ERP, repository, etc. By behaviour, I mean all the human aspects of an enterprise: fear, enthusiasms, desire, hate, etc. Any attempt to move one of those three aspects, and letting the other untouched, has lead to a failure.

The Lippi case is an interesting illustration of how to do. Lippi is a 300 employees French company which does industrial fences (France loves fences..). Amongst their customers, they have airports, industrial zones, etc.  To make the story short, Lippi decided to work on three axis:

• Lippi created a web school, and all employees without any exclusive were proposed to follow training. Courses were all about digital world, ranging from how to set-up a blog till digital video processing.
• Internet tools were used inside the company, on top of them an internal twitter, which acted as the information backbone of the company.
• The top manager decided to reconfigure the company, by taking some very disruptive decisions : traditional control was abandoned; middle management role was shifted to medium term thinking, and to support their employees when they had troubles;  organizational chart became fuzzy, but sociogram becomes stronger.

The outputs are interesting. Employees became more involved in the life of the company. A worker decided to bring his own movie camera to shot how fences were assembled, and posted them on youtube. Others decided to create a wiki. Pressure of middle management was replaced by pressure of the peers. On twitter, a delivery problem was solved in 20 minutes, without the customer even noticing there was an issue. Employees set-up a blog, which contains both nice or funny information about everyday’s life of people, and business information, such as the contracts Lippi signed with various airports. Well, this is so much human.

In 1996, I created the innovation tripod :

With this idea that all three components must be globally considered, in a systemic manner.

Lippi did it, and came the following scheme. They are really pioneers.

That the Internet impacts business is now obvious. The Internet is, by essence, a total disruption to the usual governance of traditional corporate companies, business, universities, and even politics. To say it in a few words: there was the CEO, the Professor, the Expert, the Manager, God, and everybody was happily listening to the speech going down. The horizontal flow of information between people was badly considered, if not disallowed. The generation pre WWII did not permit children to speak when eating at the table. Even now, there are schools who prevent students to talk together; same as those corporate companies who block the access to facebook, or to any other social network.

Then came the Internet. We tend to forget that at its very beginning, in the 70s, Internet was genuinely in peer to peer mode. I could access the content of someone who could access my content. Every computer had an IP address, and amongst the very first services, were email in 1972, and usenet, the ancestor of modern bulletin boards, in 1981. Interestingly, the web, which was such a powerful invention that most people confuse the Internet and the Web, was a regression to the foundation of the Internet, because it reintroduced a client-server architecture. Many companies do consider their web site only as a way to deliver content, thus making it close to a television model. Funnily, the only category of services which are in the genuine type are the one many government try to hunt down, like napster, emule, edonkey, etc. Skype is another example of such service, and the viability of its business model has deeply impacted traditional telecommunication operators.

It is not that the Internet has invented peer to peer. Horizontal relation were always an important and efficient way of communicating. Resistance movements had, obviously, a weaker hierarchy, and were mostly functioning in peer to peer mode. In terms of commerce, it is well known that buyers tend to more listen their friends than the sales person. The huge impact of the Internet was to amplify this social form to an extent where we can easily say that it is the main social relationship people are wanting now. Facebook, by reaching 400 million users, at the time I write this article, is the third country world-wide, after China and India, but before the US…

So we are facing two extreme governance models :

There is no judgement so far, between one model or the other. Both have advantages, both have drawbacks, and, as usual, it is a pure matter of context to decide which one is the best.

However, what is happening is more subtle:

1. customers are in network mode. The are part of forum, social networks; they exchange lots of information, they are in the “usage” layer, they are smart, and the real innovator emerge amongst them, or, to put it in a more business oriented manner, the Internet allows to see which are the best customer to work with.
2. enterprise’s boundaries became porous. Not only because any customer can access to IT system through web site, but also because any employee is much more well equipped at home than at work: he has a PC or Mac brand new, he can surf where he wants without any firewall, he can go onto youtube, dailymotion, vimeo or any video site, and, much worst, by surfing on blogs, forum twitter, etc. he can see his enterprise from outside; he can see what people say about it, and then he feels the contradiction between what corporate communication says, and what he experiences…
3. The enterprise remains in hierarchical mode, with silos, departments not talking each other, based on a competitive model.

This combination of a hierarchical enterprise, with porous boundaries, and networked customers, is not sustainable. The silo model is slower than the network model, it does not allow information to circulate freely; employees are not encouraged to work in a collaborative manner. Customers, on their side, see one brand, want more fluidity in their relationship, are not interested in internal wars. As an example: when a customer buys a product on a web site, or even in a physical shop, and want to return it in another physical shop, he does not understand why this may not be possible.

The Internet is bringing tension on this matter, but positive tension. How it is solved (or dissolved) depends upon many factor, but we can express two extremse : in some big corporate groups, employees who are close to customer are going to network mode, whether it is official by introducing social networking tools inside the company, or totally uncontrolled by hierarchy, who suddenly discovers that few thousand employees have opened subgroups in facebook, linkedin, or any social network. Another extreme is a little enterprise who has the capacity to change itself, by reshaping the enterprise around processes, training people to digital tools, and introducing Web2.0 tools to support information backbone. In any case, middle management is the layer which does suffer the most.

Enterprises should no longer deny this aspect. They should really move to another governance, more networked, where middle management role shifts from controls to support. This is not an easy task. But enterprises who do not switch may be one day in dire straits.

Australia is a very interesting country, when it is about the Internet. On the bad side, there are forces wishing to filter the content in a strong manner; there is no flat fee illimited Internet access. On the good side, they are quite ahead in terms of virtual worlds, and, above all, they are quite advanced in terms of government 2.0

In June 2009, the government launched a government 2.0 task force, which published a report 22nd december 2009. The philosophy was very interesting: recommendation were to work on three different lines: Opendata access to administration, use at most web2.0 tools to communicate with citizen, and change the culture of administration employees, to a more collaborative mode.

On the 3rd of may 2010, which means only three months later, the Australian Governement officially reacted to this report, the document being produced under creative common license!

The analysis of the answer is very much encouraging. It start with :

The Australian Government is committed to the principles of openness and transparency in Government, and a Declaration of Open Government is an important affirmation of leadership in these principles. A Declaration, in conjunction with the Australian Government’s proposed reforms to the Freedom of Information Act 1982, will also assist in driving a pro-disclosure culture across government. Accordingly, the Australian Government will draft a Declaration of Open Government for presentation to the Parliament, and through it, to the Australian people.

On the 13 recommendations, only 1 was deferred, 1 was noted, and the other one were agreed, with or without modification. One of them will be the creation of a central portal site, data.gov.au, to follow.

This may seem not enough, but Australia, like US, is fast moving in terms of government 2.0. Congratulation !

I wish France would do the same !!!