Headshift: Smarter, Simpler, Social

The French paradox of Internet and its impact on social computing and enterprise 2.0

May 22, 2007 :: by olivier 2 responses  

I've just been through an official report of a French Commission on the Intangible Economy that my friends at DocForum recently pointed out.

Among various elements addressed on the knowledge economy is what I would call the "French paradox of Internet": French people as individuals are key users of the social web but poor users when it comes to organisations.

This fact is pretty well known by those who, in France, have a keen interest in implementing social tools in organisations.

It is not rare to attend conferences with speakers presenting the divide between home and office environments by a plethora of tools and services on one side and an amazing void on the other.

The report quotes various surveys showing that French people have a massive use of internet compared with Americans and some other Europeans: 60% of French internauts visited a blog in May 2006 vs. 40% of US Americans and 33% of British internauts; the average time spent on reading majors French blogs was 60 minutes vs. 12 minutes for US blogs ...
This report also displays successful French start-ups such as Meetic, Netvibes and Exalead.
It finally highlights the dramatic delay in adopting those tools by small and middle sized companies and its impact on economic growth.

To make it short: this report is very French.
- It shows a biased way of the situation.
Comparing the average time spent on reading major blogs hides the fact that the number of "major" blogs in the US is not comparable to their French counterparts. The French blogosphere is vastly composed of teenager's blogs where content is poor (to remain polite). Relevant sources of information still use traditional ways on the web (news articles, press releases). For instance, my personal consumption of blogs is made of 90% of US blogs and French ones are only a ridiculous percentage of the remaining sources.
- It takes pride for some national champions but does not report all unsuccessful start-ups, most of them due to a lack of financing.
- It underlines the weaknesses of small and middle sized companies but have no word for the very similar situation blue chips are in.

Reality is very different
- Web is only one part of the change, mobile is very strong (much stronger than in the US).
- The weaknesses of SMEs are structural: the average size of a French SME is way smaller than the British, German or Scandinavian ones. As a result, those companies usually have minor resources, sometimes less competencies and possibly less needs to go for advanced IT systems to run their operations.
- The situation within big organisations is limited by heavy, proprietary and binding IT systems inherited from the past, extra-long decision making processes that makes agility a wish not a fact and last but not least by cultural habits and sometimes fears.

More precisely:
- French people are said to be Cartesians but in fact they are Newtonians. Engineers and Administration Senior officials constitute the majority of senior management in blue chips. Culturally they enjoy very rationale environments where things are perfect on plans. The very nature of social computing in organisations, i.e. free-lancers initiating bottom-up approaches based on local experiments and progressive diffusion, usually nor are welcome, nor are encouraged.
- French Senior management is computer literate to a very limited extend (which is good news for PAs :-)). As a consequence, they have the budget but they don't have the keen understanding of the benefits and opportunities of IT and social web. Result is that they regard web 2.0 users as people who loose their time and dedication to the company instead of supporting them to be an internal source of innovation.
- Knowledge management still is understood as capturing, formalising and archiving knowledge. Communities of practices are poorly regarded and knowledge sharing is rarely addressed. No surprise that social computing has difficulty in finding its way.
- In France, successful web 2.0 tools are individualistic tools. Yes, blogs are a killer app (Thank you Loïc Le Meur for evangelising that well!) and wikipedia is a success but what about social bookmarking, professional social networks and social tagging? Reality shows that people have difficulties in figuring how those tools can play a role in groups. In a recent conversion with a French executive I faced an enormous amount of surprise when I explained that Wiki actually is a powerful technology to build an Intranet or can drastically simplify the process of writing and validating a note with her PA. People also have difficulties in understanding the shift in behaviours the social web requires: Viadeo, a French social network similar to LinkedIn, is populated by group (named "hub") leaders that persist in doing top-down mass-mailing for their own benefit instead of favouring a flat community perspective.

However the situation is not that problematic:
- This is not the only country where such obstacles pave the way.
- The tradition in France is that we are used to take ages to make a step but when it happens it is a big one.
- The education of potential uses in groups along with existing successful cases studies (from abroad) display good results. People show interest, are happy to see new horizons in their own environment: sense-making is fundamental.
- The weakness of social computing in French organisations also is a weakness of social computing itself. Those technologies, due to the business models chosen by start-ups, have primarily targeted individuals. Loads of people in the Silicon Valley have built amazing technologies for companies but find no interest in addressing the B2B market because they have to get as many consumers as they can on a limited time-length to satisfy their VCs.
- Silicon based style technology companies who address B2B markets have a specific way of approaching clients that simply does not work on this side of the world. The reason why we spend so much time doing business in restaurants in France is that we socialise. It's been ages we have understood that "markets are conversations" and that hard-selling via Webex is pointless for the long term. The key is to enter into client's processes with him (co-design) and find specific ways to accommodate the old with the new, to complement existing processes, not destroy and replace them bluntly.

So it may happen that French people miss the train on creating businesses around 2.0 as the report suggests but the French social computing market is probably a promising one.

What do you think?

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