FOREWORD
Euan Semple was a rumour to me before he was a colleague. In the middle of the new millennium’s first decade, as I was trying to understand what if anything was really going on with this ‘Web 2.0’ meme and what if anything it might mean to organizations outside the tech sector, I started to hear about a bloke who had answers. And he had them not because he had conducted studies or invented cool new digital tools, but as a result of his work actually accomplishing the kinds of technology-enabled business improvements I thought might theoretically, one day, be possible.
Over time the rumours coalesced into a fuzzy but intriguing picture. While working at the BBC, Euan had become profoundly frustrated with the organization’s tools, processes, and approaches for gathering and sharing its own knowledge, whether in printed form or lodged in the heads of the people who worked there. He realized the sad truth of former HP CEO Lew Platt’s comment: “If only HP knew what HP knows, we’d be three times as productive.”
But instead of buying one more piece of KM or portal software or hosting one more conference, Euan had thrown out the playbook and started doing some weird things. Like putting in place a forum where people could ask any question they liked to the BBC as a whole, without much if any filtering or specifying where the question should ‘go’ to be answered. Like launching this capability with very little fanfare, instead of as much as possible. And like trusting that word ...
