This guy is a corporate strategist - research driven corporate strategy, not just “thinking”.

His blog is called the “Positioning Game” which will maybe give you an idea.

Apart from some thought provoking speculations - and hey, maybe I have not said this before but thoughts are data, speculations can be mined and set to work as measurement and insight building tools - about corporate strategy in general, he does pick up on the role of blogging in thought leadership.

You really do need to check out his Sainsbury’s blog at if you are at all interested in retail.

He says

I am interested to learn the extent to which weblogs can be used to create thought-leadership and influence business behaviour.
I am interested in questions like:
o Can a blog like this one really influence the path of a company like Sainsbury’s and be of benefit to it?
o What is our role as bloggers in this process?
o How can we open this blog up so that others with an interest in Sainsbury’s can also comment? For example, we would like to hear from employees although I suspect this will need to be anonymous.

Ok, good ideas apart, I found a link from Max to k-collector from evectors.

Now THAT looks interesting.

To quote Max again

Weblogs for Corporate Knowledge Management

Weblogs seem to be finding commercial applications as marketing tools. The media are full of it and even I am guilty of writing on the subject.

Yet, I do not believe that marketing is the most important business application for weblogs. I believe that they may have a more important role to play in the development of Knowledge Management.

Organizational knowledge is traditionally derived from transactional systems and more recently with assistance from tools like Verity and Autonomy that scour company documents, sort their content, and catalog it into knowledge bases.

A limitation of most company documentation, however, is that it tends to be structured, formal and “objective”. Yet organizational psychologists have known for some time that the most powerful organizational knowledge is informal and lies within the heads, hearts, and relationships of company employees. It seldom finds its way into corporate knowledge-bases.

Enter weblogs.

Is there a chance that corporate employees might be willing to put down what they really thought or learned from their last project on a weblog?

According to Matt Mower whom I met while he was working for evectors, the answer is yes. Evectors believes that until the advent of the weblog, there was no easy way to capture informal information that would really add value to company knowledge-bases.

Evectors therefore developed a tool called k-collector which – among other things – is able to take content from weblogs, identify the key topics (you define the key topics) and feed them into the corporate knowledge base.

I believe that this application is at least as important as weblogs for marketing, and that we will hear a lot more about it in the coming years. Watch this space.

Corporate knowledge management - more specifically the way in which data analytics can crystallize “knowledge” and make it persist - is a special interest of mine. So is text mining.

So, I am going to have a look at evectors and k-collector.

I’ll let you know what I think.