I am just back from the KM/ West 2009. Somehow I did not feel the energy and buzz I was expecting. The exhibition floor was reasonably busy, but it seemed at times that most people stopping by where looking for a contracting project or trying to sell some new search engine.

Enterprise 2.0 and all the enabling technologies and tools were still a big part of the exhibition and conference streams. I heard some interesting talks on communities, Share Point and “best practice” intranets… Some parallel meetings with customers confirmed an increasing interest in dashboards and visualizations on portals, intranets and extranets. Netvibes, which has been for a long time my preferred widget based personal home page (until I switched to iGoogle because for a while, I found loading my page was far too slow…) are positioning themselves with a new B2B offering . Our Dow Jones Executive Dashboard offering is also worth mentioning in that space. To know more, check our recent press release.

Unsurprisingly, Enterprise 2.0 has become pretty mainstream and “taken for granted”, and was an expected reference to each and every discussion on the various conference streams. A related theme which seems to be attracting a lot of energy is the concept of “communities of practice”. Finding experts, colleagues “who have done it before” or simply other professionals to bounce ideas off and collaborate with in my Enterprise or beyond, covering concepts of targeted expert sourcing and broad crowdsourcing .

I have just been listening to a recent interview (©McKinsey & Company, registration is free to listen to the interview or get a transcript of the interview) from McAfee (who was also a keynote speaker at KM) who speaks about….Web 2.0 and his new book Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools For Your Organization Toughest Challenges.

One of the “tough challenges” McAfee talks about is in fact the location of expertise across complex organizations and he gives the example of the US Intelligence Community, with a “huge sprawling bureaucracy of 16 federal agencies”, having successfully built simple Web 2.0 tools where people could share what they do and know. As McAfee points out, those tools can also be leveraged to share what you do not know, to locate expertise, find guidance, and avoid reinventing the wheel which tends to happen in large and decentralized organizations.

Another aspect related to intelligence communities worth mentioning is the entry of Generation Y into the workforce. I often reflect with customers and colleagues around Generation Y expectations and some new behaviors around creating, searching, finding and sharing information. Specifically, the fact that, for those young professionals, the most trusted and authoritative source of information is peer to peer networks and conversations is I think a profound shift for the business information world. It is a trend I really find fascinating and which increasingly we are looking at embracing in some of our future developments.

Brigitte Ricou-Bellan