• medias sociaux dans le management de projet : trop d’une bonne chose ?

  “Les professionnels en gestion de projet savent que l’objectif numéro 1 est de terminer le projet dans les temps et dans le budget. Le plus grand défi dans cette quête est de gérer l’inattendu qui arrive forcément au cours d’un cycle de projet. Organiser le chaos est une grande qualité pour un chef de projet.

  C’est pourquoi plusieurs grands chefs de projets ont une approche prudente de l’intégration des médias sociaux dans leurs choix d’outils pour gérer les projets. Alors que les meilleures pratiques de gestion de projets influencent le plus la réussite des projets, les outils choisis sont également importants. Plusieurs chefs de projets se demandent si l’introduction des médias sociaux dans les meilleures pratiques structurées ajouterait une couche de chaos dans le processus qui ne serait pas la bienvenue.”

  tags: project projectmanagement budget time socialmedia distributedteams

  • Mais une grande partie de ces déploiements ont été commencés par des employés sans avoir eu l’autorisation préalable de la direction, ce qui a engendré un certain chaos dans les règles de sécurité pour les DSI avant de pouvoir reprendre le contrôle.
  • Le flux de connaissances non structurées et spontanées généré par les outils sociaux est une bonne chose en soi; ils donnent la possibilité au chef de projet de recevoir des critiques constructives sur les projets et aussi d’identifier les problèmes et les accomplissements.
  • Mais trop de bonnes choses peut être dangereux.  La gestion de projet est ancrée dans les règles et procédures; or les médias sociaux n’aiment pas les règles.
  • La distribution de document et les  processus de révisions sont aussi nécessaires pour une bonne gestion de projets, ce qui ne correspond pas au modèle des médias sociaux.
  • La clé est de dompter le manque de structure des médias sociaux et leurs tendances parfois chaotiques pour tirer profit de leurs avantages.
  • Les médias sociaux peuvent offrir des outils excellents pour communiquer certains types d’informations, comme le statut d’un projet via Twitter ou RSS, pour tenir au courant tous les collaborateurs des informations pertinentes.
  • Les médias sociaux peuvent également aider à unir les différentes équipes projets, qui deviennent de plus virtuelles et dispersées  géographiquement.
  • Les médias sociaux conçus pour les entreprises offrent une base de connaissance inattendue pour la gestion de projets. Ces outils exploitent les conversations et les données non structurées qui ne sont pas capturées dans le flux des données de la gestion de projets.
  • Les médias sociaux, de par leur nature, aiment croître organiquement. Tandis que cette expansion pourraient causer des problèmes dans une équipe projet sans supervision, leur effet viral peut offrir un moyen d’incorporer des experts externes
  • s’ils sont contrôlés et implémentés correctement, les médias sociaux peuvent doper la communication et collaboration au cours de tout le cycle du projet.

• Le Figaro – Vie de l’entreprise : Au travail, ne vous forcez pas à sourire

  “Cette enquête menée auprès de conducteurs de bus montre que ceux qui se contraignent à être aimables voient leur humeur peu à peu se détériorer en même temps qu’ils tendent à se désinvestir de leur tâche. Elle confirme les conclusions d’études précédemment menées sur le sujet. «Les employés qui expriment leurs vrais sentiments jouissent d’une meilleure santé, ont un sentiment de réalisation personnelle plus fort et sont plus attachés à leur travail», “

  tags: humanresources smile behaviors attitude role openspace emotions

  • D’une manière générale, l’émotion demeure une denrée précieuse dans l’entreprise, de plus en plus appréciée des managers. Si l’enthousiasme ou la joie sont évidemment stimulantes, certaines émotions jugées négatives, telles la colère, possèdent aussi certaines vertus.
  • Mais curieusement, alors même que nombre de managers prônent un usage raisonné de l’émotion au travail, la prolifération des open-spaces tend au contraire à l’en bannir ! «L’open-space, adopté par près de 60% des grandes et moyennes entreprises, est un véritable «tue-l’émotion». Il créé des comportements factices, des attitudes de façade»

• The Opposite is “Antisocial”

  “Some people think that “social computing” in the workplace is a camel’s-nose concession to frivolity. They hear “social” and think they’re hearing the opposite of “business” (as in, “it’s a social occasion”) or the opposite of “significant” (as in, “just a social acquaintance”). They’re wrong.

  The opposite of “social” is “antisocial” – and it’s time to replace antisocial IT with something that knows how to behave like a useful and valued colleague.”

  tags: social antisocial IT business recreational pathofleastresistance socialcomputing

  • When a person is said to be antisocial, it means we’ll get grudging and disagreeable responses to our requests. It means we can’t hope for thoughtful notice of facts or events that might be important to us. It means little ability, or inclination, to start or maintain a conversation based on current events or shared interests. These are exactly the characteristics of old-model IT.

  • We need something better: something that tells us when something has happened that there’s reason to think would interest us
  • We’ve gotten accustomed to workplace tools that align with a static organization chart, limited to a simple hierarchy, instead of understanding that every person can contribute multiple skills and perspectives to multiple and dynamically changing groups.
  • We need tools that make work content an accompaniment to a conversation, instead of the other way around, with version coherence maintained as the path of least resistance by the tool –
  • a third generation of communications, based on 1) connecting people in real time; 2) smart and geographically-aware mobile devices; and 3) ubiquitous and cheap bandwidth.”
  • We don’t have to party together to be appropriately (and strategically) social.

• IBM’s Strategy to Manufacture Social Networking Surprises

  “The increased potential for generating surprise is a crucial difference between the kind of technology that most of us rely on every day and the sort that has arisen in the era of Web 2.0 and social networking. The more surprises a technology can produce, the greater its potential value. A few examples explain why this is true and may spark some thinking about how to increase the surprise factor in your business.”

  tags: IBM socialnetworking enterprisesocialsoftware activitystream socialbusiness collaboration ERP CRM businessapplications

  • Contrast this with most of the business tools we use. There is almost zero potential for surprise in most of our environments. Our email inboxes are about the only place we can truly be surprised by something. In most other business applications, we get answers to questions that we have asked.
  • The goal of enabling every business application to generate surprises is the main driver behind IBM’s creation of an ecosystem to support activity streams.
  • The Activity Streams Project is being implemented in two ways: by extending the Atom Syndication format and by adding a JSON-based format to the Open Social 2.0 standards.
  • The standard defines verbs that describe what people have done (join, post, mark as favorite, etc.) and objects (article, bookmark, person, comment, photo, etc.) that may be acted upon by actors .
  • IBM is using the activity stream standards to create applications that can aggregate activity streams from many different sources. The idea is that applications of all kinds, from ERP to CRM to collaboration systems to HR and so on will all be able to post important events and information to the news feed.
  • Imagine such messages as “John Doe changed sales opportunity for WidgetCo to 50 percent down from 80 percent” or “Ian Farquharson notified Supply Chain Manager that Shipment X to Key Customer is delayed.”
  • there will be native activity stream applications on mobile devices and tablets that will communicate with a cloud-based service that does the aggregation and helps figure out which activity streams are important to you.
  • In addition to simple notification, the activity streams data could also include payloads of information that could be used by the device or the cloud-based service to perform activity
  • The ultimate goal for IBM is not only to show that this suite of applications can be more valuable through integration of news feeds created from activity streams, but to also to act as a conduit so that the rest of the applications and sources of information used in a business can have their value amplified by social networking mechanisms.
  • Their job is to show that this interconnected collection of applications is going to become the center of integration, a collaborative dial tone for business applications.
  • If they can get SAP, Oracle, and all the other business application vendors to play along and integrate their technologies into their suite, end users could be treated to powerful surprises.
  • The other players at the enterprise level, entrants such as Jive Software, Salesforce.com’s Chatter, Cisco’s Quad, Google Buzz, and others have offerings that have a smaller functional footprint.

• Quand les réseaux sociaux servent à former des équipes de travail

  “« Alors que de plus en plus d’entreprises incitent leurs employés à recommander des candidats dans leur programme de recrutement, l’intérêt de former des équipes en utilisant les réseaux sociaux est devenu évident», expliquent une équipe de chercheurs de Yahoo! et Google. Dans une étude, ils proposent donc une méthode pour identifier au sein d’un réseau les meilleurs éléments pouvant former une équipe regroupant les compétences nécessaires à la réalisation d’un projet donné. “

  tags: humanresources staffing competences socialnetworking socialnetworks teambuilding projectteams

  • Pour cela, ils se sont intéressés au graphique représentant un réseau social de professionnels.  Dans celui-ci, chaque individu est un nœud du réseau et les connexions entre les nœuds du réseau représentent les liens entre les différents individus.
  • u. Les chercheurs ont ensuite développé un algorithme permettant de calculer la meilleure combinaison d’individus en fonction de critères prédéfinis (nombre de personne constituant l’équipe et compétences à réunir), le tout en assurant un maximum de cohésion dans l’équipe.
  • Les chercheurs reconnaissent cependant que leur solution est encore imparfaite pour deux raisons. La première, c’est qu’elle part du principe qu’un individu est soit compétent dans un domaine, soit incompétent, sans parvenir à prendre en compte un degré de connaissance plus subti
  • Par ailleurs, la valeur d’une équipe dépend aussi d’éléments plus complexes comme le contexte culturel, la personnalité ou tout simplement la capacité de chacun à s’intégrer au sein d’une équipe.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Transparent Office: Companies aren’t communities

  “Companies aren’t communities. They aren’t forums.

  Companies are companies.

  Of course company life has a community aspect, but a lot of social software folks seem to forget that there’s a lot more to a company than community. They treat companies as if they were consumer communities or forums that all just happen to have their paychecks signed by the same person.

  Why does the difference matter? The answer is in the numbers. Online communities and forums typically attract very small audiences relative to the total target population: Less than 1% adoption is typical, and 5% adoption would be a grand-slam. That’s fine for the consumer web, but those numbers inside the enterprise aren’t exactly a ringing endorsement.”

  tags: enterprise2.0 communities adoption flows workflows democracy socialbusiness

  • I’ve been saying for a few years now that companies achieve adoption and business value when they place social software in the flow of work. The tools achieve real benefit when people do their jobs–not their evenings-and-weekends jobs, but their actual “day” jobs in social software
  • That’s when it becomes woven into the fabric of a company’s business processes. Adoption is almost a foregone conclusion, because that’s where you do your work. Business impact is demonstrable because business processes are measurable.
  • In communities, there is no flow of work. That’s because most people don’t come to communities to do work. They come to get support help, to swap tips, to praise, to complain, to socialize. Even those people who come for professional reasons are casual, sporadic visitors. The only person who really works there day-in-day-out is the forum/community manager.
  • There are three groups of people who cling to the “company as community” concept: the “kumbayeros” who wish that companies were as open and democratic as communities, public community managers whose consumer-facing experience has shaped the way they view all online social interaction, and community software vendors who are looking to repurpose their consumer-oriented products for the internal market.
  • As Milton Friedman famously said, “The business of business is business.” Social software fails when it tries to turn businesses into communities. It succeeds when it turns businesses into better businesses.

• Becoming A Social Business

  “It’s not something that will happen overnight. It certainly won’t happen in a kickoff meeting. And without a total organizational commitment to being customer first, building trust, and setting the company on a path where the idea of connecting with customers in real-time is embraced, it’s not likely something that will ever happen. And for some industries that may be okay, it’s still way too early to tell.

  But for those companies looking for some guidance and a framework, I’ve broken the social business evolution process into four stages: Birth, Childhood, Adolescence, and Adulthood.”

  tags: socialbusiness engagement customer identity goals policies procedures maturity culture

  • Becoming a social business is begun by defining what “Being Social” and “Open” means to your organization.

    The first and probably most significant realization one needs to make in this evolution process is that there is no single definition of “being a social business.” Every business should (read will) have their own definition and move at their own pace in getting there.

  • Assess your existing culture.
    How far off is your existing culture with what you defined in the “birth” stage? Chart the path ahead.
  • Learn the ropes.
    While assessing your culture and working to gain buy-in (this could easily take months), begin surveying the social landscape and start participating where your customers, competitors, and colleagues can be found on the social web.
  • Be social internally.
    Too many companies today are assigning social media to marketing and forgetting about it. It’s almost like it is being done to appease the marketing manager who keeps talking about it.
  • Pick one functional area of the business and go all in.
    Whether it be marketing, customer support, HR … we learn by doing. S
  • Create policies and procedures to define control and practices.
    One of the biggest misconceptions about becoming a social business is that being social means losing “control.” Quite the contrary, the best run open, social businesses are just the opposite.Exceptionally well run businesses with defined ways of doing things.

• The (Social) Road Ahead For Unified Communications, Video & Mobility

  ” Until now, the Enterprise 2.0 conference has been the primary community gathering for those interested in collaboration, communities, and social networking. While I have been a long-time advocate of the Enterprise 2.0 event, I am also enthusiastic about the topic covered at Enterprise Connect. An in-depth conversation regarding the synergies between Enterprise 2.0 with unified communications, video, and mobility is long overdue.”

  tags: enterprise2.0 collaboration unifiedcommunications video mobility quad cisco

  • However, our beliefs regarding how social tools can help organizations should not be constrained to asynchronous work. The industry has created an unfortunate perception that there is a divide between Enterprise 2.0 and synchronous work.
  • Micro-blogging and activity streams are examples of a near-time user experience for social tools that have synergies with unified communications. We can easily imagine how presence and click-to-(call / IM / conference) can be added to these experiences so we can immediately connect with someone. We can also imagine how a micro-blogging hashtag (e.g., #ciscocollab) might provide a great way to make “group chat” within a web conferencing event more public. And there’s more – the Instant Messaging “buddy list” is treated as a private list of colleagues we are following.
  • While Quad itself is not a unified communications or video solution, it represents a compelling framework for integrating and delivering those capabilities as part of an enterprise collaboration platform. Not only does Quad contain the expected features found in other social platforms on the market that focus on asynchronous interaction, it has been designed from the ground-up to include video and unified communications as a core architectural service.
  • We should not be heading down the same path as we’ve done so many times before and create additional technology silos. What attendees will learn at Enterprise Connect is how Cisco Quad enables them to bring unified communications, video, collaboration, and Enterprise 2.0 initiatives together within a common architectural framework that leverages existing investments and emerging IT standards (e.g., OpenSocial)

• Three Lessons Watson Taught Us to Improve Customer Service

  “It took IBM 25 scientists and four years to program the computer to understand the language used in jeopardy, select and store the necessary knowledge (if could not be connected to the Internet, federal regulations — ever seen the movie “Quiz Show”), and have it learn the rules and regulations of the game – in addition to train it to play the game. Four years, 25 language scientists.

  The problem to be solved is far larger than your customer service implementation, right? Right? Well, this is where the lessons learned come in – if you take the time to analyze the results…”

  tags: ibm watson language customerservice constrains learning

  • Chose the knowledge you need to use wisely, and be very, very good at keeping that number small and manageable; trim unnecessary and add necessary swiftly.  It is far worse to not find the one you need that to have 119,999 you don’t.
  • Now, think about the many decisions you as a human would have to make if you were playing Jeopardy, and the speed at which you would have to execute those actions.  If you could simplify the process, reduce the number of steps, and focus on the core of what you are doing you’d be far ahead of the game.  You can do this with your customer service setup: simplify the process, make sure that both customers and agents can get to THE answer faster and easier.
  •  Learning from the successes and failures of your solution, whether automatically or not, is what is going to make your certainty increase, the right answers show up more often, and your knowledge base remain simple and effective.  Virtually everywhere you read about Watson it says how he learned from playing, and it became better the more it learned.

• Gary Hamel: Inventing Management 2.0

  “To create organizations that are fit for the future, we need to dramatically retool the management systems and processes that govern . . .

  * How strategies get created
  * How opportunities get identified
  * How decisions get made
  * How resources get allocated
  * How activities get coordinated
  * How power gets exercised
  * How teams get built
  * How tasks and talent get matched up
  * How performance gets measured
  * How rewards get shared”

  tags: management2.0 management resourceallocation opportunities decisionmaking talents tasks performance measurement strategy

  • Management 1.0 was built to encourage reliability, predictability, discipline, alignment and control. These will always be important organizational virtues, but in most industries, getting better at these things won’t yield much of an upside
  • But even that is starting to change: Around the world, “ordinary” managers of all sorts are starting to resist their captors. Most of these renegades aren’t HR directors, CFOs or even EVPs. Yet they are experimenting boldly with new ways of motivating, organizing, compensating and goal setting. They are reaching out to peers, taking risks, and running small-scale pilots.  They are acting first and asking permission later. Even more remarkable is the scope of their aspirations. They are not just hoping to become better leaders; they are hoping to build better organizations.  They are the harbingers of Management 2.0.

• Watson d’IBM : après le jeu, place au business

  “IBM a donc brillamment relevé le défi de battre les champions du jeu télévisé américain Jeopardy avec un système informatique. Watson, c’est son nom donné en souvenir de deux prestigieux Pdg qui ont marqué la vie de la compagnie pendant plusieurs décennies, s’est largement imposé face à ses adversaires. Fort de ce succès médiatique, Big Blue peut désormais envisager de nombreuses applications commerciales ? Il a déjà conclu un partenariat avec les départements médecine des universités Columbia et du Maryland pour développer une solution de diagnostic médical.”

  tags: ibm watson healthcare naturallanguageprocessing contentanalytics analytics language decisionmaking

  • Avec des moyens informatiques avancés et des applications d’Analytics, nous pouvons injecter de l’intelligence dans les systèmes utilisés dans les entreprises ou dans les villes. »
  • Le supercalculateur Watson constitué de milliers de serveurs haut de gamme, absorbe le contenu de dizaines de millions de documents incluant des ouvrages aussi variés que des dictionnaires, des encyclopédies, des thésaurus, des encyclopédies, des taxonomies… Pour jouer à Jeopardy, Watson n’est pas relié à Internet et utilise seulement le contenu stocké sur ses propres disques durs.
  • . Mais alors que Deep Blue constituait une énorme réalisation dans l’application de la puissance informatique brute à un jeu bien défini et limité informatiquement, Watson relève un défi plus complexe infiniment ouvert et surpasse les limites bien définies de formules mathématiques d’un jeu tel que les échecs. Watson est capable d’opérer dans l’ambiguïté, le domaine hautement contextuel, presque sans limite du langage et du savoir humain.
  • Après avoir fait la démonstration des capacités de compréhension d’analyse et de jugement de son système, IBM va désormais se lancer dans la confection de système d’aide à la décision dans différentes spécialités. IBM a annoncé un partenariat avec la société Nuance Communications (spécialisée dans la reconnaissance du langage naturel) et les écoles de médecine des universités de Columbia et du Maryland pour développer un système d’aide au diagnostic et au choix du traitement.
  • IBM serait aussi en discussion à un distributeur de produits d’électronique grands publics pour développer une version de Watson lui permettant d’interagir avec les consommateurs sur de très nombreux sujets comme les décisions d’achats ou le support technique

• The Many Faces of Enterprise 2.0

  tags: enteprise2.0 socialbusiness infographics

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• Enterprise activity stream – email conversations with externals staying threaded in the stream

  “Imagine an enterprise version of friendfeed as your social network/microblogging/activity stream eg. Socialcast

  Firstly, let’s get this out of the way…when having a discussion, and you need to write an extended reply, you don’t need to use email as the enterprise activity stream allows more than 140 characters…which is good as this doesn’t split up the conversation.

  Now imagine if an enterprise activity stream allowed you to follow your email client (of course no-one else could do this for privacy reasons).”

  tags: microblogging activitystream email stream collaboration tasks

  • look at that a conversation thread where each element may have happened on different products.
  • Same when replying to an Outlook email from the enterprise activity stream ie. when in the enterprise activity stream you send a reply to Outlook and it can also be made public in the activity stream
  • This way your co-workers know what is happening on your leg of the task ie. you don’t have to tell them (report back to base), or narrate your work…in this instance, there is no such thing as an “update”, as they “observing” you work in the open.
  • But what if you were in Outlook and sent the supplier an email and also chose for it to post in the enterprise activity stream as well….or perhaps you are in the enterprise activity stream and choose to create an email which becomes a post as well (or create an email which becomes a comment within a post)…this is sending the Outlook email from within the microblogging app itself so it instantly becomes a post or a comment.
  • Voila, your co-workers know exactly what stage you are at. They don’t have to ask you how you are going with the supplier, they already know, as you cross-posted the email you sent the supplier as a comment under the task post in the stream…this didn’t have to happen after the fact, this cross-posting can happen at the time you are sending the email (keeping in mind the email can be sent from Outlook or from within the stream).

• Process Integration : putting Social into the Business flow

  “Anyway, this post aims to discuss the issue of Process Integration using Social software as this looks like a great opportunity for both parties. Solving the Business Process Management equation thanks to Social Software agillity on one hand and putting Enterprise 2.0 into the flow of business processes.”

  tags: socialbusiness BPM PLM CRM SCM SOA socialmessaging flows processes businessprocess

  • I’ve attended BPM training in 2007 where the expert could not name a successful implementation of an Enterprise Service Bus (the backbone component of SOA). He conceded that the solution is not worth considering unless your target is above 500 users. Below that limit, you won’t get your money back.
  • Beyond Social BPM, with the likes of IBM acquiring Lombardi solution to offer such solution in the cloud (BlueWorks Live), we now see and a move towards Enterprise Social Messaging.
  • TIBCO the expert of Enterprise Application Integration has launched tibbr which allow to mix people, projects and systems activity streams on a micro-blogging platform.
  • Both tools aims to answer critical questions : how can we leverage social software best practices to streamline business processes ? And how can we integrate these tools into the daily routine of knowledge workers in order to contribute and generate business value ?

• I saw the future of analytics last night, and that future was fast.

  ” I saw the future of analytics last night, and that future was fast.

  How fast?
  Fast enough for Watson to jump ahead by a few thousand dollars, before Brad Rutter (and the audience) caught their breath and finally caught up.

  “

  tags: ibm watson analytics machines humans innovation ideas

  • Watson doesn’t “know” anything – at least not in the same way that we know things. But we can feed it raw data from our own vast stores of knowledge and experience.
  • With every advance in technology comes a corresponding advance in our own capabilities. Watson can reveal insights about our business and our world that we can’t arrive at on our own
  • We’ve already outsourced long division, spelling and much of our highway navigation to machines. Now we’ll look to them more and more to dig through mountains of data and come up with answers for us. This should free us up to do what remains uniquely human, at least for now: generating fresh ideas.

• Social CRM Changes the Definition of Customer Relationship Management

  “Social CRM, he said, is a philosophy and a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes and social characteristics. It is designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. “

  tags: socialcrm crm customer listening sales customerservice marketing

  • “CRM is no longer just a model for managing customers, but one of customer engagement,
  • Social CRM is the company’s programmatic response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation
  • ales, marketing, customer service, operational, transactional and customer databases should underpin CRM while social applications extend that functionality.
  • To his mind, CRM is typically an internal-facing system providing employees the information they need about a customer, whereas Social CRM is fundamentally an external-facing system where employees engage with customers, but also where customers engage with each other.
  • o some people, social CRM is nothing more than talking to customers on Facebook and Twitter. While that might be a crucial part of it — go where your customers are — social CRM is much more than that.
  • If a business doesn’t provide a place for customers to exchange their views, the internet provides plenty of other sites for them to do it

• What is possible: how the social enterprise drives differentiation

  “One of the additional perspectives that I am focusing on more these days, and I am finding resonates strongly with large organizations, is building flexibility. It has become a truism that in our turbulent times, the more flexible the organization, the more able it is to succeed. A process-bound organization is by definition not flexible. One that functions by tapping the most relevant resources and social connections is able to adapt and respond to circumstances and condtions.

  A related issue is the ability to gather and respond to feedback. “

  tags: competitive marketplace talents socialnetworks

  • A company needs to be engaged in external social media in order to pick up relevant signals from the marketplace, but it also needs to use internal social media to interpret these and facilitate rapid response. Few companies are yet good at integrating the internal and external social media initiatives.
  • Finding talented people, attracting them to a company that is dynamic and responsive, and fully engaging them in the strategy and meaning of the organization are all strongly supported by the effective implementation of the social enterprise
  • These and other points come back to what needs to be the real focus of building the social enterprise: creating an organization that does better than its competitors in a way that feeds on itself and cannot be replicated

• Why LinkedIn is More Valuable than Facebook

  “Investors started the year excited, then disappointed, about the potential of a Facebook IPO and a $50B valuation. But fortunately, the upcoming LinkedIn IPO and its $2B valuation gives them an opportunity to get in the game and cash in on the much talked-about “social network” trend.

  The LinkedIn IPO is indeed exciting, but if you are an executive, you should spend more than just your money on LinkedIn – you should spend time understanding how the social network works, and how its model can help you build better applications for your organization.”

  tags: linkedin facebook IPO valuation socialnetworks data privacy analytics time value

  • While Facebook’s drive towards advertising dollars might justify the importance of the ‘time in app’ metric (you might have noticed Facebook’s recent advertising addition to your photos?) – LinkedIn focuses on productivity for its members (LinkedIn makes money via ads, but member services and enterprise hiring services are also part of its business model). 
  • Don’t be drawn to the overly satisfying measurement of “time in app” unless your business model is driven by ads; your company gets more value by optimizing your employees’ time.
  • Facebook is not particularly regarded for its ability to give its members value back on their own data.  While it’s very easy to get data into Facebook, it’s very difficult to get data out and in a meaningful way.
  • Beyond suggesting new friends, Facebook does little to share back with the community the incredible insights it gathers about its users.
  • The LinkedIn Analytics team has been hard at work understanding your data trail, and they are not shy to share these analytics with you.  My favorites include LinkedIn’s  “Signal,” “Career Explorer,” “InMaps” or “Skills” which launched most recently.
  • Your organization is sitting on latent data that, if used, can return incredible value to your employees and bottom line.  Think through the data your applications hold and the tasks that could be automated or suggested.  Take
  • As I argued in my recent keynote at Predictive Analytics World, our world is becoming more analytical.  And in this regard, LinkedIn is light years ahead of Facebook. 

• The connected company

  “Surprisingly short, it turns out. In a recent talk, John Hagel pointed out that the average life expectancy of a company in the S&P 500 has dropped precipitously, from 75 years (in 1937) to 15 years in a more recent study. Why is the life expectancy of a company so low? And why is it dropping?”

  tags: organization lifeexpectency productivity ecosystem identity listening connections socialbusinessdesign socialbusiness culture

  • It’s time to think about what companies really are, and to design with that in mind. Companies are not so much machines as complex, dynamic, growing systems. As they get larger, acquiring smaller companies, entering into joint ventures and partnerships, and expanding overseas, they become “systems of systems” that rival nation-states in scale and reach.
  • Ecosystems: Long-lived companies were decentralized. They tolerated “eccentric activities at the margins.”
  • Strong identity: Although the organization was loosely controlled, long-lived companies were connected by a strong, shared culture
  • Active listening: Long-lived companies had their eyes and ears focused on the world around them and were constantly seeking opportunitie
  • As the number of employees grows, the profit per employee shrinks. It’s a game of diminishing returns. Efficiencies of scale are balanced out by the burdens of bureaucracy. Divisions become silos, disconnected from each other. Overhead costs increase with size. The resulting need for control, and the inability to achieve it at a reasonable cost, is what eventually kills a business.
  • You can’t control a complex system, but you can manage its growth, and there are a lot of things you can do that will position it for success. Here are a few of those emerging practices that signal excellence in design by connection:
  • Before you can start your path to the connected company, you need to understand the culture (or cultures) that are already there, so you can look for ways to enhance and strengthen that shared identity.
  • As you initiate social programs, think of them as if you are designing a city street. A successful street is filled with people. The last thing you want is a whole bunch of large, urban areas with no people in them. In a city, big, open, empty spaces feel unsafe and unloved. So start small.
  • Again, think of the city street: every business or building has an owner. The sidewalks have owners – typically every business at street level “polices” their stretch of sidewalk.
  • s you build your social business, make sure that every single person has a place where they can put, and see, their stuff: their projects, the links they want to get back to, the documents they have created, their role, qualifications, expertise and so on.
  • As you design for connection, think about how you might create those unexpected, but delightful, surprises. Every time someone visits an online space, there’s a chance to offer them something new
  • Design by connection is not a top-down activity so much as bottom-up. Complex systems just don’t work that way. In a complex system, you need to pay attention to small things and make little adjustments along the way.

• “Le management à la française doit accepter la société en réseau(x)” | News – Portail de l’intelligence économique

  “Nicolas Moinet, Directeur du Master Intelligence Economique et Communication Stratégique de l’ICOMTEC, présente dans un article du Monde sa vision du management “à la française”, et revient sur le bouleversement introduit par les technologies de l’information et de la communication dans la gestion des entreprises.

  “Le management “à la française” est encore trop marqué par sa vision taylorienne du travail et il doit accepter les grandes ruptures induites par les technologies de l’information et de la communication.”

  tags: management socialnetworks networks culture intangible

  • la globalisation devant nous conduire à cesser de penser en binaire dès lors qu’elle nous fait entrer dans une économie de la relation (les liens permanents et fluctuants d’une pensée complexe) ;
  • les nouvelles technologies de l’information et de la communication (ntic) faisant éclater les unités de temps, de territoire, de fonction, de direction qui avaient structuré notre histoire et elles en redessinent la signification ;
  • une rupture quantitative basée sur une abondance qui, d’une part, permet de moins en moins à l’individu de faire des choix de type « info-comparatifs » l’obligeant à faire confiance et à déléguer cette responsabilité à un tiers
  • nous fait sortir chaque jour davantage d’une logique industrielle de la production pour passer à une logique de la solution, de l’usage et de la pertinence
  • rupture qualitative due à une économie de l’immatériel dont le fonctionnement est à l’opposé de celui de l’économie matérielle (qualitatif versus quantitatif),

• SharePoint: The World’s Most Impersonal Network – SharePoint Expert Blog

  “What we value most about social networks isn’t the number of friends, invites, reconnects, or diversions from the dullness of rote tasks. It’s more basic that that.

  It’s that we know where they stand — they’re either vibrant and flowing or they die. There are no static forms of social media. They’re either teeming with news and gossip or they lose their social life.

  Not true in our ECM fortresses. Our firewalled networks have a forced look to them. The implicit agreement that we honor our employment contracts by showering our intranets with the nuggets from our C:\ stretches boundaries few are willing to cross — if your ancestoral home is architected in SharePoint.”

  tags: sharepoint ECM socialnetworking socialnetworks enterprisesocialsoftware

  • The same software company that made personal computing possible would be responsible for the world’s most impersonal network. That’s because the actual interest stories are buried in the haste of a lumbering, kludgy, one-way conversation labeled “document uploads to SharePoint.”

  • But the actual reasons behind why this disembodied document leads a double-life on the SharePoint server seems more relevant to the sleuth-work of knowledge forensics than …

    * to the details that divulge the context of the material
    * to the larger objective it served in the life of the project
    * to the deliberations of the team that drafted it.

  • Without it all documents are equal before the eyes of SharePoint and that’s an injustice to our users. That’s the kind of equality guaranteed to bring little understanding, participation, and even less personality to the world’s most impersonal network.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• La notation se répand dans les réseaux sociaux d’entreprise

  “2011 devrait voir se multiplier les systèmes de notation des utilisateurs et de leurs contributions sur les réseaux sociaux. Une évolution qui pose des problèmes, notamment éthiques, en entreprise”

  tags: enterprisesocialsoftware notation evaluation ethic management

  • devrait aussi voir se développer différents systèmes. Ceux permettant d’interfacer les applications aux applications métiers. Mais également les systèmes de « badges » ou de « scores », qui visent à noter l’utilisateur en fonction de la quantité et de la qualité de ses contributions. Même si pour ce genre d’exercice, les critères restent « opaques », d’après le cabinet
  • inspirés de ceux qui sont intégrés à des outils de géolocalisation grand public comme Foursquare – « posent de nouvelles questions éthiques en entreprise » et « devront être discutés avec les partenaires sociaux », relève Arnaud Rayrole. En effet, « certains risquent de penser qu’il y a un lien entre leur badge [notation] sur le réseau social et leur évaluation professionnelle », signale-t-il…

• Social CRM Helps Airlines Weather Winter Storms

  “The wintry weather across the nation is showcasing that perhaps no sector has had to learn more about social CRM on the fly than the airlines industry. What happens when a storm hits a region and the customer service phone lines jam up for Delta, United, Southwest, and other airlines? Customers log onto Facebook and Twitter and demand answers about their flight reservations and rebookings.”

  tags: socialcrm airlines customercare customerservice

  • Susan Elliott, spokesperson for Atlanta-based Delta Airlines, told ClickZ that her brand employs a team of nine agents on Twitter to handle customers looking for help. Delta tested a pilot program on the micro-blogging site late in 2009 that “lasted all of two weeks,” she said, before launching it full-blown because of its CRM value.
  • This particular type of customer service channel is unique, and we don’t have all the answers. We just continue to work, and the social consumer community will help us ultimately shape what this tool looks like.”
  • Additionally, social CRM poses new questions for brands. For instance, what’s the best way to sync up Facebook and Twitter initiatives? And, should firms recruit and hire social media-savvy people from outside the company, or ask their telephone reps – already doing live chat and e-mail in many cases – to learn Facebook and Twitter CRM, too?

• Social Networks: Cautious Engineers and Collaboration-Focused Suppliers

  “Despite the possibilities for collaboration, a Design News survey reveals engineers are avoiding social networks due to concerns around security and irrelevant information overload.”

  tags: socialnetworks intelectualproperty engineer security informationoverload relevance collaboration CAD plm socialproductdevelopment

  • So why can’t technology that’s popular ona personal level find traction for professional use among product developmentspecialists? Survey results revealed engineers’ chief concern to be fear ofexposing critical company intellectual property (IP), with 58.5 percent of respondents citing security as their primary hesitation. Loss of productivity was a worry for 40.1percent of respondents, while 29.3 percent said company policy precluded themfrom frequenting social networking sites on the job.
  • Beyond any one primary concern, however,the majority of survey respondents said existing social networks just weren’thelpful enough in terms of delivering access to relevant content or connectingthem to knowledgeable domain experts in their particular field or area ofengineering interest. Even joining engineering-specific groups on LinkedIn orFacebook resulted in a whole lot of noise and useless chatter, respondentsreported, as opposed to serving up focused, practical solutions to real-worldengineering problems. “
  • Czarapata says at this point, he has more luck withtraditional engineering forums where people concentrate on solving a particularengineering problem, trade tips, and help troubleshoot engineering software orpost specific results on what they’re doing, including insight into what wentright and what went wrong.
  • While social network usage ranked highestfor knowledge sharing, as a resource for tapping into customer requirements(62.7 percent) and as a vehicle for networking (63.3 percent), only slightlymore than a third (34.3 percent) of survey respondents said they wereinterested in the technology as a platform for collaborative engineering
  • While engineering experts admit most generic social networksare not really tuned for product development, they maintain that socialtechnologies folded into next-generation design tools like CAD and PLM canfoster a more streamlined and effective social product development experienceby granting engineers access to information and resources that they require ona real-time basis.
  • PTC, which coined the term “social product development” several years back, is just starting to put thatconcept to the test.
  • PTC officials say. In addition,by putting the social networking capabilities in the context of the productdevelopment materials managed by Windchill, users are not bombarded by streamsof irrelevant status updates, but rather kept in the loop on the specificresources, design changes and project milestones that are highly relevant towhat they are working on at the time
  • “The biggest use case is definitely forcollaboration,” he says. “When you think about the job engineers do, it’sproblem solving and iteration that you do as an individual every once and awhile, but more frequently as a team. Engineers will benefit from social mediaalmost more than anyone else in a company

• “What is Content Analytics?, Alex”

  ““The technology behind Watson represents the future of data management and analytics. In the real world, this technology will help us uncover insights in everything from traffic to healthcare.”

  - John Cohn, IBM Fellow, IBM Systems and Technology Group

  How can the same technology used to play Jeopardy! give you better business insight?”

  tags: IBM watson insights questionanswering machine contentanalytics analytics languageware naturallanguageprocessing healthcare customersatisfaction customerservice

  • By combining advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) and DeepQA automatic question answering technology, Watson represents the future of content and data management, analytics, and systems design.  IBM Watson leverages core content analysis, along with a number of other advanced technologies, to arrive at a single, precise answer within a very short period of time.
  • Amazingly, Watson works like the human brain to analyze the content of a Jeopardy! question.  First, it tries to understand the question to determine what is being asked.  In doing so, it first needs to analyze the natural language text.  Next, it tries to find reasoned answers, by analyzing a wide variety of disparate content mostly in the form of natural language documents.  Finally, Watson assesses and determines the relative likelihood that the answers found, are correct based on a confidence rating.
  • I am not talking about search here.  This is far beyond what search tools can do.  A recent Forrester report, Take Control Of Your Content, states that 45% of the US workforce spends three or more hours a week just searching for information
  • Natural Language Processing (NLP) can be leveraged in any situation where text is involved. Besides answering questions, it can help improve enterprise search results or even develop an understanding of the insight hidden in the content itsel
  • The same core NLP technology used in Watson is available now to deliver business value today by unlocking the insights trapped in the massive amounts of unstructured information in the many systems and formats you have today.  Understanding the content, context and value of this unstructured information presents an enormous opportunity for your business. 
  • companies like Hertz can drive new marketing campaigns or modify their products and services to meet the demands of their customers. “Hertz gathers an amazing amount of customer insight daily, including thousands of comments from web surveys, emails and text messages. We wanted to leverage this insight at both the strategic level and the local level to drive operational improvements

• Giving employees the feeling of choice when you’re still pulling the strings

  “Most managers and leaders have the unenviable task of trying to get other people to adopt particular goals. Companies have agendas, and employees need to support those agendas if the company is to succeed. However, if you want your employees to live up to their full potential, it’s not enough that they do what you tell them to.”

  tags: management humanresources motivation goals autonomy empowerment

  • Autonomy is particularly critical when it comes to creating and maintaining intrinsic motivation. But in the workplace, goals have to be assigned. What’s a manager to do?
  • Explain why the  goal they’ve been assigned has value.
  • Allow your employees to decide how they will reach the goal.
  • Invite your employee to make decisions about peripheral aspects of the task.

• Trust is a Must | Accenture

  tags: trust accenture management

• Réseaux sociaux d’entreprise et management

  “ConnectCollaborateContribute. C’est à la fois le slogan et la vocation de réseau social d’entreprise d’Alcatel-Lucent : Engage. Stéphane Lapeyrade, Communication manager en explique le fonctionnement et les objectifs, lors de son intervention à Media Aces.
  Engage compte 41000 inscrits, 2000 groupes, 10 000 utilisateurs actifs et 2000 contributeurs par semaine… Des chiffres qui donnent le tournis. D’autant que le réseau social interne est un nouveau-né : tout juste créé en 2010. La clé du succès ? La liberté. La liberté donnée, à chaque collaborateur, de créer un groupe, sur le réseau social interne de l’entreprise. Libre encore, à chacun dans l’entreprise d’y souscrire et d’y contribuer.”

  tags: socialnetworking alcatellucent casestudies socialbusiness enterprise2.0 silos management trust engagement

  • A commencer par l’édition d’un profil personnalisé. Comme sur Facebook, Viadeo ou Linkedin. Seules les cordonnées (mail, teléphone,…) proviennent de l’annuaire de l’entreprise. Pour le reste, chacun renseigne son profil à sa guise : description, parcours, expertise, centres d’intérêts professionnels… ou non. Chacun choisit la ou les photos qu’il souhaite associer à son profil, y compris des photos personnelles.
  • Les salariés américains n’hésitent pas à publier des photos relatives à leurs hobbies
  • Plus étonnant encore, les groupes ne sont pas limités à un usage strictement professionnel. Certains groupes se créent sur des thématiques fédératrices et personnelles, comme la photo ou la cuisine,… Oui, c’est étonnant mais permis. Voire encouragé
  • Seconde clé de cette réussite : l’implication du management. En particulier celle de Ben Verwayyen, le nouveau directeur général d’Alcatel-Lucent (depuis 2008). Intervenant actif sur Engage, le DG donne le ton et incite, de fait, les salariés à intervenir, créer et prendre la parole. Son blog interne est d’ailleurs ouvert à tous les commentaires.
  • Les débuts ont été timides. Les premiers group owners (créateurs et adminstrateurs d’un groupe) et leurs premiers membres hésitaient un peu à intervenir, et plus encore à sortir du langage mainstream et ultra-positif des échanges convenus que l’on connaît en entreprise… Mais très vite, voyant que la liberté de parole et de ton étaient implicitement et explicitement autorisée par le DG lui-même, Les échanges se sont faits plus authentiques
  • les chiffres sont là : en moins d’un an, sur les 73000 salairés du groupe, 41000 se sont spontanément inscrits sur le réseau social de l’entreprise
  • Stéphane Lapeyrade souligne l’attention particulière qu’il porte à la mesure des usages du réseau : le ciblage des groupes, les éventuels doublons, la possible surcharge d’information, le risque de fracture numérique… Et peut-être même la constitution de nouveaux silos.
  • A l’évidence, Ben Verwayyen l’a très bien compris. Et mis en oeuvre. en passant d’un management  Command and Control à un management Trust and Engage.

• AT&T Helps Internal Leaders Engage Their Employees Through Social Brainstorming

  “At the IBM Lotusphere and Social Business Industry Symposium conferences, I talked to Blair Klein, Executive Director of Emerging Communications, at AT&T and Mark Glyshaw, her team’s Principal Technical Architect about their internal Enterprise 2.0 network called tSpace and their social brainstorming tool, tStorm, implemented internally in 3Q2010″

  tags: socialnetworking at&t casestudies socialbrainstorming innovation tStorms culture leadership trust decisionmaking

  • Ms. Klein described a scenario of how an executive in the Small Business unit began with blogging to develop a regular communiqué with their organization and created a following both within their group and across the organization. They use a tStorm social brainstorm activity to continue the conversation beyond their team meetings and all-hands calls. This town hall model leads to greater engagement with their employees and relevance to the wider organization.
  • This model works in particular because the leader has taken the time to transfer her conversation from the traditional conference call mode into an online social environment.
  • This takes culture transformation in the work behavior of employees, which takes keep the drumbeat of “this is the new way to work with me.”
  • What is interesting about AT&T’s tStorm is that this is easy to deploy rapidly for any executive who wants to sponsor a discussion for their organization.
  • For the leader this means that you will need to participate directly—not have an assistant do it—to develop the belief and trust in employees that you are earnest in working this way.
  • It is not about making decisions democratically unless that is your leadership style, but about being open to feedback—a sign of a leader people want to follow.
  • To date, they have had well over 500 new ideas suggested, with 50 currently being implemented.
  • They have nearly 5 million lookups on the corporate directory per month. That shows employees are keenly interested in finding each other. As a whole, this paints a picture of an organization that is moving towards greater agility, developing employee relationships and engagement, and helping their leaders use the power of collective intelligence to solve their pressing needs.

• Business or Pleasure? – why not both: Gamification – yet another one-size-fits-all?

  “Gamification is the use of game play mechanics for non-game applications (also known as “funware”), particularly consumer-oriented web and mobile sites, in order to encourage people to adopt the applications. It also strives to encourage users to engage in desired behaviors in connection with the applications. Gamification works by making technology more engaging, and by encouraging desired behaviors, taking advantage of humans’ psychological predisposition to engage in gaming. The technique can encourage people to perform chores that they ordinarily consider boring, such as completing surveys, shopping, or reading web sites “

  tags: gamification gaming rewards humanresources timemanagement time

  • The thing is, each of us values our own time differently. Some people just love to work 16 hours a day, 6 days a week, some like to hang out and do nothing – and all the usual shades of grey in between. Some people have enormous amounts of knowledge to share, others just love to hear themselves talking (bis). What’s in it for them? Truth is, it depends – per person
  • We have the salary system, where we try to reward equally and measure employee input, and compensate that with employer input: money. Does that work? After a while, the system ends up keeping employees just not dissatisfied enough
  • What do people do that feel disappointed with the traditional reward system? They try to take back some of their investment – time. Show up late, leave early, have long lunches, meetings, or toilet visits, whatever: they take what they think is rightfully theirs
  • you invest time, which you value at something. You expect something back, a result, that will give you some level of satisfaction. Of course your satisfaction will increase and diminish over time, so the result should change along with it. If you look at reasons why employees leave the company, you get a nice view:
  • Young employees (in their twenties) don’t like to spend much time on travel or company events. They want it fast and find it hard enough as it is to discipline themselves into an 8-hour working day. After a few years, personal and work development, daily work and reward come into the picture. After 5 years, reward and personal development have become the main reason for exit.
  • can you guide that with a few simple generic gaming rules? Really – I don’t think so. Look at yourself: what motivates you know, what did 5 years ago, and what did 10 years ago?

• Can Social Media fix bad customer service?

  “Social media monitoring and response will never replace a traditional customer service organization. The two can only complement each other. If either side are lacking in commitment the customer experience will suffer. Due to the prevalence of social networking and its adoption by customers of almost any company, customer service will probably always continue to have need for a public extension of its heretofore “private” (that is, between the customer and the company) existence. But a shiny social media presence is nothing without a solid customer service organization behind it.”

  tags: socialmedia customerservice socialcrm monitoring organization

• 7 critical aspects of Tibbr’s big step forward for enterprise social software

  “Earlier this week I gave the opening keynote at the Sydney launch of Tibbr, the new social enterprise offering from TIBCO. I hope to have the video of my presentation up before long.

  Before the event I summarized some of the very positive commentary on Tibbr since the San Francisco launch two weeks ago.

  It’s now time to offer my own thoughts. Here is what I think is most interesting and important about Tibbr.”

  tags: socialbusiness enterprise2.0 tibbr tibco integration activitystream expertslocation expertise filtering enterprisesocialsoftware

  • Tibbr at its heart is very simple – you can follow the activity streams from individuals, discussion on particular subjects, and from applications. Bringing these all together in one interface means that all activity across the organization relevant to the individual can be brought together in one easy-to-use interface.
  • This is critical, because the reality is that most social software suites today are an overlay to core enterprise applications – they enable conversations and collaborative work but don’t link in a meaningful way to core systems such as CRM or ERP systems. Tibbr is from the outset linked to all applications, drawing on the 140 technology and application adaptors that TIBCO has developed. An open SDK is available for companies who have in-house applications that they want to integrate with.
  • llowing people to follow subjects immediately surfaces those who are interested in a particular topic, and from there it is fairly easy to identify who has expertise and is highly regarded in the group
  • Work and personal stream integration.
    Tibbr allows staff to pull in their personal streams such as Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr into the . This has to be approved by the corporate administrator as something they wish to allow. However given the blurring of work and personal boundaries for many professionals (not least that they want to build relationships with people they do business with) means that many organizations will choose to allow this.
  • Part of the solution is in training people in how to use social media well. I know many masters of Twitter and other consumer social tools. However many others start the wrong way, get frustrated, and sometimes give up. Knowing how to select who to follow and manage multiple streams is a skill set that is yet to be learned by many corporate staff. Those skills need to be complemented by automated filters.

• Lotusphere 2011: Social Business Here Comes IBM

  “What that means for IBM in 2011 is that this year they’ve decided to fully embrace social business – and to not only eat their own dogfood but to breed their own dogs. That’s the level of their commitment. (BTW, IBMer Jen Okimoto, whose tweets are her own saw me tweet this and returned a nicer image -”Prefer to think of it as we drink our own wine, and we’re creating/mentoring our own vintners and wine lovers.” You’re all welcome to invent your own imagery here. Heh. Heh.). Their level of commitment is astounding and potentially game changing.

  Why?

  Because a $100 billion company is driving all their resources into transforming their company into a social business. They aren’t just selling it, they’re doing it and evangelizing it and marshalling whatever they have to so that it will be globally hugged.

  “

  tags: IBM enterprise2.0 socialbusiness enterprisesocialsoftware software vendors socialcrm humanresources operations ls11 lotusphere2011 jam innovation innovationjam sales marketing communication

  • What were the results? They had nearly 160,000 people from 104 countries and 67 companies generate an initial idea pool of 46,000 ideas.  They narrowed it down, had a smaller jam to discuss the ideas that they came up with and then chose 10 of them which IBM invested that $100 million in. But, then again, that’s not nearly as monumental as their complete embrace of social business as a company.
  • He said, “consumers have unprecedented power over your brand. Social businesses embrace this.”
  • hey have to cede control of the business ecosystem to the customer.
  • .  For example, its not just having the wikis up and running for collaboration around a project, but also having the activity streams that can be responded to in real time or nearly so; having the intellectual property exposed so that project success can be enhanced – rather than having it the property of a virtual lockbox; having the social and HR profiles interconnected so that not only can you find the right resources at the right time, but will also know who in the chain of command that likely still exists – social business or not, an SVP will still be an SVP – can free up that resource for the project; getting the legal department’s acquiescence to the collaboration within and potentially, outside, the company
  • What it really can be is an ecosystem in motion with an enormous range of possible results related to innovation and ideation among many others. In this case, however, IBM prefers to see it as an improvement in operational efficiencies.  Which, among other things, it is.
  • Social business has a cultural impact, and impact on morale; an effect not as much on how people generally interact, but more specifically, on how they work.  It also brings the outside world into the space behind the firewall to the extent that the company becoming a social business empowers its employees to be part of their corporate business efforts
  • The way that IBM is handling its transformation internally is through a program that they call Social Business – one that is designed to bring every one of IBM’s 400,000 employees up to speed on the use of social tools and with some form of empowerment depending on what they do. They expect that in 2011, about 50,000 of those will be where they need to be for IBM to truly continue its transformation.
  • Finally, how IBM was able to provide a semi-accurate depiction (not definition) of Social CRM and still remain in the dark about Social CRM – despite their recognition of the market, the idea and the customers responsible for creating the need for social business.
  • But there is also a major difference between a sales driven culture and a customer centric one – one which goes to the core of why sales has been the bastard child of Social CRM, even though it drove traditional CRM
  • So sales efforts are based on the most effective way to close that deal.  What THAT means is that the optimal “social” activity for a sales person is to draw on the collective intelligence of his fellow employees to help him figure out what needs to be done to close the deal.
  • I have to presume that this is why sales isn’t listed as a part of the entry point that marketing and customer service are – because IBM is defining them as the customer-facing components of Social Business – though I have to say, since IBM is so focused on collaboration as the core of Social Business, its actually somewhat inconsistent that it doesn’t appear as one of the entry point pillars anywhere.
  • Mike Rhodin identified customer service and marketing as one of the 3 most important “entry points” for social business. What that means is that these customer-facing activities are where the impact of social business can be the greatest because of how they are structured.
  • IBM emphasized its focus on this core concept – trust is foundation for the types of relationships that you build with customers and social business is the means you have to engage those customers and build that trusted relationship through the new forms of communication available for their and your use
  • The problem that consistently cropped up in their vision, their messaging and their offerings is that despite putting this what was apparently an accidental SCRM message out there as one of the social business entry points, the IBM powers-that-be really don’t have much of a sense of what Social CRM is or how it integrates with social business or what tools comprise the technology or solution to enable or implement i
  • The likely reason for that is not only are they trying to sculpt a new 1IBM corporate culture, but also a way of selling social business as an enterprise vendor, so they are trying to define a “Social CRM solution” on the sales side. That’s pretty much the way that everyone who spoke with me about it talked about it – what social CRM solution will they provide to the public was the way that I heard it from nearly everyone.
  • However, the game changes for IBM with their SugarCRM partnership, which is, beyond their late 90s early 2000s Siebel practice, the first “pure” CRM play that IBM is making.  IBM senior management is well aware that a crucial component of social business – whether transforming the company or selling it, is Social CRM – an unavoidable component of a social business strategy and certainly a must have to a social business offering.
  • The reasons?  From the standpoint of IBM (since, to be fair, this is about IBM primarily), they are not incorporating a CRM application but a flexible CRM platform. They are partnering with a company that does understand Social CRM and has, in its recent releases (particularly 6.1) incorporated social elements that allow developers to create social functions and users to use social channels. They are also partnering with a company that has a hankering to go upstream and is starting to see more and more enterprise level business in their pipeline – something not the case in the past.
  • One BIG cautionary note though. When presented on the stage at Lotusphere, the calendaring and scheduling aspects related to SugarCRM were presented as if this was the package that SugarCRM was providing. That is a SEVERELY limiting message and the wrong one to send to the public and even to the rather techno-focused Lotus Notes crowd.  Don’t start by making SugarCRM out to be an addin to create a more robust Lotus Organizer-like PIM application – which is exactly how it came across.
  • In order to truly understand what is most important here, its not that IBM is turning Lotus from a development platform to a collaboration development platform to a social business vendor.  You HAVE to get out of that head. This is IBM as a Fortune 500 company making a transformation from a traditional business to a social business – and with that goes all the difficulties of a company that made roughly $100 billion in revenue on its 100th birthday (hope I can do that on my 100th) attempting to make this change will engender.

  • IBM’s messaging justifies their move in technological terms with three Is:

    • Instrumented: Smartphone shipments will outpace PCs by 2012.
    • Interconnected: Social networking now accounts for 22% of all online time.
    • Intelligent: The age of the zettabyte is upon us.
• That’s why IBM is reorganizing their business units, changing their corporate culture, empowering all their employees through the internal Social Business program, reorganizing some of their compensation schemas so that they fit the metrics, benchmarks, KPIs that meet the grade for a social business and evangelizing this approach at every opportunity to their employees, partners, suppliers, vendors, customers and the general public. Its why they are changing their messaging and verbal/physical cues to something more closely aligned to their Smarter Planet initiatives
• They need to make sure that the technology offerings – solution offerings for Social Business including Social CRM appear before 2011 is over
• Regardless of the holes, the raw spots, and the occasional skewed message, this is not only a commendable undertaking but an earth-shaking, ceiling-shattering one.  IBM is doing something unprecedented for a business here.
• While their competitors are not making the cultural transformation that IBM is nor do they think as long term, they still are building competitive products, services and tools. They too, understand that the world is dramatically changed.  They’re moving fast so IBM is in the position of a company that sees long, and has to move fast while its in the midst of a massive, dramatic and important transformation.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.