Yesterday, I had the opportunity to present at the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco.

Dr. Thierry Barsalou was on the same panel. Thierry is Chief Information Officer at Ipsen. He is also in charge of the Competitive Intelligence at Ipsen. Ipsen is a global pharmaceutical company, with headquarters in Paris France.

Thierry and his team have implemented a very powerful internal Competitive Intelligence system based on Traction Software. Traction makes a tool that is part blog and part Wiki.

Thierry has had tremendous success, with truly substantial internal readership.

He provided some basic, and very useful, tips on how to achieve similar success.

• Start first with the business problem. Thierry’s object was simply to get better Competitive Intelligence. The CEO wanted the whole company to be aware of what their competitors where doing on a real time basis. Thierry and the CEO also wanted the whole team to be aware of all the latest changes in rules and regulations affecting the markets for the drugs they produce. In addition, the whole team needed to be kept up to date on the latest relevant medical research. Thierry and the CEO realized that they needed to tap the whole company as a source for this information. The information came from conferences, reports, personal contacts, and other unexpected sources. Clearly, it made sense to tap the whole team as an information gathering resource.
• Create a culture of sharing. In other words, foster a culture of reciprocal altruism.
• Create a contribution culture.
• Start slow; then let it grow. I hear this advice again and again for people setting up Web Office systems.
• Taxonomy was important. I’ve argued against an imposed taxonomy. Thierry does not agree. In Pharma, there is good reason for imposing a taxonomy. It is important to keep definitions consistent. I would still argue for a balanced approach, with some planned taxonomy and some method for the team to grow and evolve that taxonomy. However, clearly there are no hard and fast rules that apply universally to all web office deployments.
• Security and enterprise class features, such as an audit trail are critical components of their deployment. This is a challenge that I am struggling with in the deployment I am building for my firm.
• Integration into existing tools is critical. To ease the transition to Web Office, it is important to provide people with multiple ways of getting at information within the system. Thierry found that they needed to generate a summary Competitive Intelligence email that is sent out as a daily Digest. This drove people to the site.
• Thierry recommends Traction.

Speaking at the Gilbane conference was a great pleasure for me, and it was a excellent opportunity to meet some very interesting and capable people.