In one of those cases in which there is a whole world of implications behind a seemingly small news item, an article in the Financial Times recently stated that banks are in danger of insider trading by sharing information inside the bank on credit derivatives. Trading in credit default swaps (which are essentially financial instruments that represent the credit risk of corporate borrowers) has always being done based on the privileged knowledge that banks have of their clients. Now banks are being told that if they want to trade these instruments, the parts of the bank that know their corporate debt clients well, can’t talk to the parts of the bank that trade these instruments. In the first instance, given that this development represents a broad, long-term trend to regulation on similar issues, this suggests that diversified financial institutions – which are based substantially on sharing knowledge between their operating divisions – may have far less justification for existence than in the past.
In the context of the issues addressed by the Collaboration in Financial Services Europe conference I am chairing in London this June, this has crystallized some of my thinking about the future of collaboration. In a nutshell… Every organization is experiencing the imperative of collaboration. To survive, we must enable information flows and collaborative work. At the same time, there are many ways in which we must disable communication and information flows, inside and outside the company. This is particularly pointed in financial services, with old and new regulations constraining who can share information, from investment banking and research, to lending and trading. However similar dynamics apply to companies in every industry in that they both have to actively share information, and also have constraints from intellectual property, privacy, regulation etc., in how they work both internally, as well as with suppliers, clients, and other external partners. This tension between encouraging and constraining collaboration and information flows will be central to the evolution of organizations over the next years and decades. More on the Collaboration in Financial Services conference soon – this will be drilling down into detail on some of the leading initiatives in collaboration the financial services sector in Europe – there are some very exciting developments.
Book Now Launched!
By Ross DawsonThe second edition of Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships is now out, with the Global Book Launch in New York in late June a big success, despite storms that evening. It will still take another couple of weeks before it’s in bookshops outside the US, but it’s available from online booksellers. Two free chapters are available from the book website. Chapter 1 provides the high-level treatment of the idea of knowledge-based relationships, and the critical new theme in the book of professional services leadership. Chapter 6 is entirely new to this edition, covering how to develop and implement key client programs. Further book launch events or workshops are scheduled or in planning in Sydney, London, Hong Kong, San Francisco and various other US cities in the fall – see my global schedule for details as these are finalized. Please let me know if you have any thoughts or feedback on the book, and in particular further examples of leading practice in the field – I’m very interested to hear from you.
Review of Collaboration in Financial Services Europe
By Ross DawsonA few weeks ago now I chaired the Collaboration in Financial Services Europe conference in London. The White Paper on How Collaborative Technologies are Transforming Financial Services is now available from my website. If you’re interested in the topic, the review of the original Collaboration in Financial Services conference in New York last September is also worth a look. Both in moving on nine months from the New York conference, and crossing the Atlantic, the shift in themes was striking. It was a great day, exploring in detail many of the fundamental issues the financial services industry faces in an economy increasingly centered on collaboration. The key sponsor of the Europe conference, Reuters, has played a significant role in the development of instant messaging in financial services since David Gurle left Microsoft to spearhead the company’s collaboration initiatives. Reuters has established interoperability with all the three public IM vendors. Now, companies like Facetime, Aconix, and IMLogic have provided the wraparounds to make public IM secure and compliant. At this point we can say that IM is pretty much a robust corporate tool, though the space will certainly evolve considerably in the next year or two. One of the most interesting aspects of Reuters’ positioning is its emphasis on chat and building communities. It wants its major financial institution clients to use chat as a primary medium for knowledge-sharing, and to create spaces that link buy-side and sell-side, for example for conversations around research issued by the firms. Intelligent agents will identify posts that are of particular interest to individuals, so they don’t need to trawl through everything themselves. In addition, they want IM to become embedded in workflow, for example automating trading and integrating into STP (straight-through processing). Another domain that was explored in detail at the conference was insurance. I moderated a panel with Christoph Harwood of Kinnect and Alex Letts of RI3K. Both are essentially new-breed B2B exchange for the insurance industry – Kinnect was set up by Lloyds of London for commercial risk, while RI3K is in the reinsurance space. Their challenges and progress over the last few years are great case studies for similar initiatives that can bring great benefits to an industry, but require collaboration between many players. Clifford Chance also presented on an advanced in-house system that provides partners and staff with a portal view of activity and communication around a particular client or matter, which is just being rolled out. As far as I’m aware, the system is more sophisticated than any of the investment banks have implemented for sharing information on complex transactions.
Whether to outsource….
By Ross DawsonEvery issue of Harvard Business Review includes a hypothetical case study, together with commentaries by leading practitioners on what they recommend in the situation. The case study in the July-August issue, written by Nitin Nohria, titled “Feed R&D – or Farm it Out?” is a very interesting examination of a company that is wondering whether to outsource part of its R&D to India. Issues raised include accessing best-of-breed and potential loss of intellectual property. Of the four very interesting commentaries, the most striking is written by Azim Premji, chairman of Wipro, one of India’s top three technology services companies. He is cautious on the merits of outsourcing in this case, spends most of his analysis on the internal dynamics of the company involved, how to support collaboration, and emphasizes the importance of providing strong contractual protection of IP.
Keep on Blogging!
By Ross DawsonIt’s once again been a while since I’ve blogged. For me and many others, blogging is one of those “important but not urgent” activities that often seem to slip off the agenda in the face of more pressing concerns. I will soon be relaunching this blog to make it more accessible and useful, so my resolve to blog regularly is firming. I do come across many interesting ideas in the course of my travels, so I’ll endeavor to share more of these than I have been. To this end, I’ll experiment with sometimes making shorter postings, with more links and less commentary. Part of my problem is that as soon as I start writing about a topic, there are so many related issues I want to touch on that it soon risks becomes a full treatise, so daunting I never even get started. Perhaps if I contain my enthusiasm, I’ll end up communicating more…
Dodgeball is acquired by Google
By Ross DawsonThe topic of the moment seems to be where Google is going, with many touting it as a Microsoft-killer. (See Robert Cringely’s recent article as an interesting take on this and broader issues…). Given my interests, it is particulary interesting to see that Google is buying Dodgeball. This very interesting social software company came out of a class run by Clay Shirky at New York University. Clay’s take on the deal is here. In short, Dodgeball is a mobile service that allows friends and friends of friends to meet up at bars and parties on the move, finding where the action is at any particular time. Google has already tried its hand in the social software space with Orkut. Now it is moving into the mobile social software (sometimes called MoSoSo) space, which is absolutely a step beyond its web-based core. On one level, Google clearly is not averse to picking up lots of interesting companies and ideas and seeing what happens with them, and Dodgeball is hardly a big acquisition for them. However if Google continues to develop these strands of its business, then its increasing propensity to social software and networks could represent the emergence of what may be something far beyond a glorified search engine
Encouraging and constraining collaboration
By Ross DawsonIn one of those cases in which there is a whole world of implications behind a seemingly small news item, an article in the Financial Times recently stated that banks are in danger of insider trading by sharing information inside the bank on credit derivatives. Trading in credit default swaps (which are essentially financial instruments that represent the credit risk of corporate borrowers) has always being done based on the privileged knowledge that banks have of their clients. Now banks are being told that if they want to trade these instruments, the parts of the bank that know their corporate debt clients well, can’t talk to the parts of the bank that trade these instruments. In the first instance, given that this development represents a broad, long-term trend to regulation on similar issues, this suggests that diversified financial institutions – which are based substantially on sharing knowledge between their operating divisions – may have far less justification for existence than in the past.
In the context of the issues addressed by the Collaboration in Financial Services Europe conference I am chairing in London this June, this has crystallized some of my thinking about the future of collaboration. In a nutshell… Every organization is experiencing the imperative of collaboration. To survive, we must enable information flows and collaborative work. At the same time, there are many ways in which we must disable communication and information flows, inside and outside the company. This is particularly pointed in financial services, with old and new regulations constraining who can share information, from investment banking and research, to lending and trading. However similar dynamics apply to companies in every industry in that they both have to actively share information, and also have constraints from intellectual property, privacy, regulation etc., in how they work both internally, as well as with suppliers, clients, and other external partners. This tension between encouraging and constraining collaboration and information flows will be central to the evolution of organizations over the next years and decades. More on the Collaboration in Financial Services conference soon – this will be drilling down into detail on some of the leading initiatives in collaboration the financial services sector in Europe – there are some very exciting developments.
Live conference blog continues…
By Ross DawsonContinuing the live conference blog…Valdis Krebs of Inflow talked about the many types of real-life networks that can be analyzed, including studying cow disease contagion by which cows tend to hang out together as they eat, and the vast array of companies that Apple has brought together to create the iPod. His colleague Eszter Hargittai has researched liberal and conservative blogs in the US, and found – unsurprisingly – that they are as deeply divided as the US population seems to be. I then ran a Living Networks Forum, in which I first presented the ideas of the living networks, how we participate in the emerging global brain, and how collaborative filtering is enabling us to access the most stimulating, top-of-mind information and ideas of our collective consciousness. We then used a live Wiki, so everyone in the audience could contribute to the screen what they wanted to discuss with others at the conference. This led onto us selecting four topics – finding expertise, collaboration, identity and mobility, and network science – that groups gathered to discuss, explore, and create valuable connections between people and ideas. This is being followed by a conversation (as I write) between Esther Dyson, Edward Vielmetti of SocialText on social networks, looking at Flickr, which allows us to share photos with our friends, and many other spaces. A key theme being discussed is the evolving nature of personal networks. Esther believes that the technology is reducing friction in our relationships with our friends. However it also reduces friction in our relationships with those who are not our friends, so we need to create new conventions to contain our online relationships. This is a critical aspect of how our identities will evolve as social software enables us to relate more richly with those we choose to.
Live impressions from MeshForum 2005
By Ross DawsonSome live impressions as I sit in the extremely interesting MeshForum 2005, blogging on the local WiFi network. Currently watching a video by the founder of the Yellow Arrow Project – an extremely cool global project that is a kind of collaborative filtering – people use yellow arrows to point out what’s worth looking at, and the arrows have codes that allow people to share their comments via mobile networks. Counts Media, the company behind the project, among many other interesting things does “mixed reality” gaming, which brings together real-life and online worlds. The conference kicked off with Dr Anna Nagurney, who works at UMass on Supernetworks, which is the science of how different types of networks relate at a higher level. An example is the choices that people make on telecommuting or physical commuting, that bring together both communication networks and transportation networks. These approaches are being applied across digital, transport, social, financial, migration and many other kinds of networks.
Blogging Goes Mainstream
By Ross DawsonWhen I wrote Living Networks in 2002, opening with a description of how Macromedia was using blogs to disseminate information, blogging was to many a curiosity. Today almost everyone has heard of it, and it truly has become mainstream. Business Development Institute is running a Blogging Goes Mainstream conference in New York on May 3, featuring Microsoft star blogger Robert Scoble as keynote. I’ll be running a session at the conference on blogging and knowledge management.
MeshForum in Chicago
By Ross DawsonAs part of the whole shift to recognizing networks as central to everything, MeshForum is shaping up as a fantastic conference in Chicago this May 1-4. Shannon Clark is the driving force behind this, and he and his colleagues have brought together a fabulous array of content including social, business and biological networks. I’ll be running a Living Networks Forum session at lunch on May 2, just before a session on social networks run by Esther Dyson