I’m delighted to take a new posi­tion within Schlum­berger: I’m coor­di­nat­ing our cor­po­rate IT Inno­va­tion efforts, with an empha­sis on knowl­edge man­age­ment (stop laugh­ing, this is not your father’s KM, I’ll look at the most inno­v­a­tive stuff here). Also relo­cat­ing to Paris from London.

We struc­ture this activ­ity in a pretty stan­dard way, and I won’t go into the details here. I do want to say how I am approach­ing this role, how­ever. In one word: I’m think­ing of myself as a kind of VC.

I have to invest a lim­ited fund of money and resources in a series of deals, and max­i­mize the returns to our lim­ited part­ners. That’s how I see my job, and to me that’s a VC job:

• VC firm = IT Inno­va­tion team
• Fund = our investable bud­get + the tech­ni­cal skills (inter­nal or out­sourced) we need in order to make our invest­ments work
• Lim­ited part­ners = stake­hold­ers hav­ing a say in where we invest and judg­ing our returns — in terms of increased cor­po­rate performance
• VCs main activ­ity is sourc­ing, eval­u­at­ing, ana­lyz­ing deals and antic­i­pat­ing the future mar­ket and tech­no­log­i­cal shifts = the same, only to add our cor­po­rate strat­egy layer

Very appeal­ing and stim­u­lat­ing. I will work as a VC to source some deals where I’ve a ratio­nale and look for a com­pany to invest in. This isn’t work­ing with estab­lished ven­dors, you have to work with early-stage start-ups and work more as a part­ner­ship than a vendor-client rela­tion­ship. As a VC, my main job will be to screen these oppor­tu­ni­ties, and deter­mine which will yield the higher return. As a VC, I will have to stay up to date with the new start-ups, new trends, new mar­ket con­text. I could go on and on here.

True, the activ­ity is half-partner and half-analyst, and you also have to take into account the inter­nal con­text to deter­mine the antic­i­pated ROI. Some (par­tic­u­larly the VCs!) might say this is all bull­shit. But seri­ously, the more I am look­ing at it, the more it seems to be a VC activ­ity. Eval­u­at­ing the small com­pa­nies you are work­ing with is essen­tial, you oper­ate with very lean man­age­ment fees (aka our over­head bud­get), you need to go for the higher ROI, not invest to soon (tim­ing is every­thing), etc.

You also are the eyes of your lim­ited part­ners “out there”, and they rely on you to stay plugged in the mar­ket­place, and most impor­tantly, to antic­i­pate the next dynam­ics and shifts that will occur and keep play­ing in advance of them. You need to be aware of the short-term con­text, because the pace of change is daunt­ing, but you’re in a fun­da­men­tally long-term play. You need a deep under­stand­ing of the global con­text and the major shifts that are cur­rently under way in order, for exam­ple, to take advan­tage of peer pro­duc­tion eco­nom­ics in cor­po­rate knowl­edge management.

The only dif­fer­ence I see is that we, inside an orga­ni­za­tion, actu­ally have to make these deals — the inno­va­tions we’re bring­ing in from the out­side — work. So add to the mix a good slice of man­age­ment con­sult­ing (strate­gic man­age­ment, change man­age­ment, yadayada…).

We can actu­ally push the metaphor fur­ther and say that, in today’s orga­ni­za­tions, you won’t go any­where with the tra­di­tional change man­age­ment tech­niques. We need to be inspired by the likes of Seth Godin when plan­ning for change man­age­ment. We need to sell, lit­er­ally, as if we were an early-stage start-up sell­ing a dis­rup­tive prod­uct, and using these very same techniques.

The amounts we are invest­ing and the risks we are tak­ing are of a dif­fer­ent order of mag­ni­tude than real VCs of course. But the dynam­ics are the same. I want to change the way orga­ni­za­tions are oper­at­ing, using the lat­est tech­nolo­gies to improve their per­for­mance. Boost­ing the effi­ciency of a com­pany like SLB is not a minor task, and it will have real-world con­se­quences.