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5 Reasons Why Activity Streams Will Save You From Information Overload
« I think they are probably one of the most fundamental, critical and relevant 2.0 capabilities that any company can turn into, if they would want to dive into the fascinating world of Enterprise Social Computing, and start seeing the business value right away. It probably cannot get any easier than that. In my own experience, next to my blog(s), they are the most significant component from the 2.0 world that have managed to help me live, rather successfully, “A World Without Email” for the last 4 years and counting€¦ Now, do I feel overloaded because of them? Do I feel they are heading the same way our Inbox has been heading for the last few years? Absolutely not! Quite the opposite. It’s been, all along, if I can say so, quite a liberating experience so far altogether! And here is why. »
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Activity Streams permeate throughout transparency and openness: Therefore helping reduce the amount of noise you are exposed to, while interacting with others. Call it ambient intimacy, declarative living or, my all time favourite, “narrate your work“, Activity Streams will help, over time, reduce the amount of transactions and frictions you will be exposed to, provoking that opportunity for knowledge workers to be on top of the knowledge flow thanks to that openness, clarity and transparency of what’s happening around you
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They help you, greatly, be done with the obsession to read AND respond to everything: Eventually, teaching us all how we need to start letting things go. J
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They facilitate serendipity and Informal Learning: When was the last time that you associated those two crucial concepts to your Inbox and the emails you receive? Probably, not that often, right? Yet, in the world of Activity Streams both serendipitous knowledge discoveries and informal learning, a.k.a. social learning, are fully immersed, rich experiences that one cannot avoid, but fully embrace when bumping into them time and time again
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- They help flatten organisations and traditionally hierarchical structures
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They inspire an open knowledge sharing culture: Where “Knowledge SHARED *is* power” is the new mantra that percolates into the corporate world as we know it today, resulting in a much more dynamic, agile, understanding, public, clearer and innovative corporate environment where knowledge is no longer hoarded, but shared across openly.
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Is Web Surfing Distracting Your Workers?
« A number of studies have suggested that US workers waste between one and two hours a day web surfing, costing their companies billions in lost productivity. In response, some employers have banned private Internet use at the office, a practice that might come back to bite them in other ways, according to new research. »
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studies show that people asked to resist temptation in anticipation of reward become less productive and make more mistakes in their current tasks.
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For Piovesan, the findings have clear implications for how employers should design their office environments. If they are not able to completely remove certain temptations such as cutting access to the Internet, companies should enact policies that minimize the distraction on employees.
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« There are many companies that are prohibiting the private Internet use during official hours, » says Piovesan. « It means employees are delaying gratification until the end of the day€”and that means they are spending energy to control themselves. If this theory is correct, it means they should be less productive. »
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« Organizations must have process and policy in place to deal with detractors (individuals and groups) rather than using a blanket approach based on the wisdom of the crowd €“ or lack thereof. And confidence that control is best shared in carefully measured cases. »
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It’s dangerous to rely on blanket statements from the early days of social media to today’s social business operating environment.
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The future is podular
« One of the most difficult challenges companies face today is how to be more flexible and adaptive in a dynamic, volatile business environment. How do you build a company that can identify and capitalize on opportunities, navigate around risks and other challenges, and respond quickly to changes in the environment? How do you embed that kind of agility into the DNA of your company?
The answer is to distribute control in such a way that decisions can be made as quickly and as close to customers as possible. There is no way for people to respond and adapt quickly if they have to get permission before they can do anything. »
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If you want an adaptive company, you will need to unleash the creative forces in your organization, so people have the freedom to deliver value to customers and respond to their needs more dynamically. One way to do this is by enabling small, autonomous units that can act and react quickly and easily, without fear of disrupting other business activities €“ pods.
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A pod is a small, autonomous unit that is enabled and empowered to deliver the things that customers value.
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The goal of podular design is to reduce interdependency by enabling autonomous pods to focus on clear outcomes that deliver value to customers. Pods can coordinate with each other via clear cultural, behavioral and technical standards.
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A podular system is like a net. It distributes the work load across a wider area by allowing each pod to focus on goals rather than steps or stages. If one strand breaks, the system can still carry the load.
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In a podular system, the burden of creativity and intelligence is on the people in the pod. In a pod, your focus is on solving problems and delivering value rather than executing previously-defined steps. You can no longer pull the levers, move the dials and say you did your job, even though the customer didn’t get what they wanted. Giving the customer what they want is your job.
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The important thing is that the values and rules are understood and the behavior is consistent with them.
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When pods are autonomous, they can try new things without worrying about a “ripple effect” that will disrupt the activities of other units. They can adopt new tools and practices quickly, without having to ask permission.
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In a podular system however, each pod can make adjustments without disrupting its neighbors, and even when a pod fails, there is enough redundancy in the system that those services can most likely be found elsewhere.
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This means that when it’s time to scale up a particular service, a pod that has, for example, seven people, can reproduce itself by dividing into two pods which can bring on new members with minimal growing pains.
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For a podular system to work, cultural and technical standards are imperative. This means that a pod’s autonomy does not extend to choices in shared standards and protocols.
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But to truly enable the pods, backbones should be as lightweight as possible.
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The bet you are making with a podular strategy is that the increase in value to customers, paired with increased resiliency in your operations, will more than offset the increases in costs.
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« Theres a flurry of social this & social that in the IT market space and marketing machines are running over speed. So much so that Geoffrey Moore & Stowe Boyd too debate on what to call the term Social Business Systems – Systems of Engagement or Work Media. I guess the marketeers would like Work Media while the technologists might love the Systems of Engagement. Either one works for me, but I have been struggling with yet another term – Social BPM. »
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SBPM enables social actors to collaborate on modeling, executing & optimizing structured and unstructured business processes.
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A social actor, in basic terms, is a conscious, thinking, individual who has the capacity to shape their world in a variety of ways by reflecting on their situation and the choices available to them at any given time.
And this is a huge head shift. Not easy to convince the BPMS configurators, near darn impossible to explain to the compliance & regulations folks
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Just like the Systems of Record allowed the centralization of business decisions (global view to the higher above from the central offices), Systems of Engagement can allow decentralization of decision making by taking it to the front line. Consistency & flexibility, both together.
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3 Must Read Articles on Management for Anyone Involved in Enterprise 2.0 or Social Business
« Gartner Research VP Mike Rollings is calling for an end to Taylorism as a management doctrine. « Humans have become cogs in business machinery pursuing efficiency, » he writes. If you think that sounds radical, last year Wall Street Journal editor Allan Murray wrote a piece titled « The End of Management » decrying hierarchy, bureaucracy and encouraging business leaders to embrace change. «
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Serious Play: The Business of Social Currency
« Like many other platforms, including popular networks such as Facebook, Empire Avenue caters to human psychological factors and uses game techniques to reward participation and encourage a participant to willingly « give up » what is truly valuable in business–data. So why would someone want to give up data? Facebook knows the answer to this question: social currency. »
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Social currency is shared information that encourages further social encounters. It’s not a new concept, but the social web increases its prevalence.
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As someone who has taken a deep dive in several social networks (I joined Twitter in 2007) and observes both the gaming and currency aspects of them, I do believe these dynamics will influence the business world as it becomes more connected.
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Not everyone enjoys competition, but competitive environments often generate more participation, and friendly competition can lead to positive results.
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Features that encourage participants to play are often effective ways to increase participation and engagement.
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A system that keeps count of your accomplishments typically acts as the primary reward for an individual who chooses to continue to participate
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dives deep into topics and scores individuals or companies against those topics indicating a status tied to influence in a specific topic or category. For businesses, this can be valuable in knowing who’s who in regards to the topics you care about.
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However, your customers, employees, and even business partners are likely spending scores of hours on their social network of choice trading in some type of social currency, even if they don’t know it.
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Why social business is different – Part 1: Reusing stored collaboration
« As managers and executives increasingly look at the potential of social software to improve collaboration and connectedness amongst their workers, I’ve been seeing the same old questions arise in a newer, more senior audience. Namely, why are social business tools really different from the communication tools that are already in the hands of their workforce today? «
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the real question is if we can successfully, broadly, and repeatably transplant the success of consumer social networks into our workplaces, for business objectives.
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In the end, we are the most familiar with the business tools that we use on a daily basis. Thus most of us are all too familiar with the drudgery of in-person meetings and phone conversations, or worse, the endless teleconferences or e-mail most of us have to endure as the seemingly necessary tax of collaboration.
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Right now most of us use social tools as a shorthand form of older types of traditional communication.
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Rather, where it gets interesting is the part where communication and collaboration is much more efficient and long-lasting in most types of social media
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Because social communication is both openly participative and open-ended, it allows us to store collaboration openly on the network (internal or external or an organization as needed) indefinitely so that it may continue to provide value to the organization
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Stored collaboration can be reused beyond the initial collaboration to teach, inform, train, orient, and retain knowledge for an unlimited time €” months and years afterward €” instead of expiring unseen and with little value in e-mail accounts, phone calls, and elsewhere
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In Social CRM, customer conversations and support issues never quite end but are refined and involved as new participants discover the original discussion, add to it, and assist each other.
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On a social intranet, a project or a business process lives forever, initially as a place to get the work done but then as a never ending blueprint for future such work, or an ongoing post-mortem, or even a place for others to extract best practices or gather lessons learned
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Also, to make sure we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, I should be clear that real-time collaboration is still useful in some scenarios, but it is stored collaboration that’s truly strategically invaluable
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La DSI face à la « consumerisation » de l’informatique
« Mais depuis 2 ans la pression monte pour ces responsables d’infrastructures avec la « consumerisation » de l’informatique (tiré de l’anglais consommateur – Meaculpa à l’Académie). Elle leur rappelle au quotidien que les progrès de l’informatique en terme d’équipements sont tirés par le marché grand public. Leur champ de compétence s’est aussi élargi ces dernières années avec le rattachement de la téléphonie à la DSI ce qui fait sens sur le plan des infrastructures de réseaux convergentes. Mais cette nouvelle compétence est arrivée avec la responsabilité de fournir des postes téléphoniques fixes et mobiles aux utilisateurs, un domaine qui n’échappe pas non plus au phénomène de « consumérisation ». »
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Alors que leur environnement est en train de se transformer radicalement, les éditeurs cherchent à les convaincre de poursuivre leur route avec la virtualisation des postes de travail. En gros, on met tout dans le Cloud, les logins, les applications, la bureautique, et on y accède depuis n’importe où et n’importe quel terminal.
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C’est surtout rassurant pour les DSI car le cap du paquebot infrastructure n’a pas trop à dévier. Mais est-on sûr que cela répond aux besoins des utilisateurs et qu’ils vont adhérer à la démarche ?
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Depuis des lustres dans la Silicon Valley les développeurs peuvent venir avec leur propre machine et la connecter au réseau de l’entreprise. C’est la condition pour garder les meilleurs et éviter l’éternel débat Mac, PC ou Alienware. Cette tendance dite BYOD – Bring Your Own Device (amène ton propre équipement) est finalement plus un choix social et RH qu’un choix d’infrastructure.
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On touche ici le point de la segmentation des usages pour fournir les équipements aux salariés. Le monde dont on vient c’est un peu comme si on demandait à tous les cadres du siège de mettre un casque et des chaussures de sécurité parce que peut être qu’une fois dans l’année ils vont aller visiter une usine.
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La virtualisation qui va certainement verrouiller une technologie unique pour au moins 5 ans, dans un monde qui change tous les 18 mois, serait une réponse à l’évolution des besoins profonds des utilisateurs et à la complexification a tous les niveaux (équipement, OS, application, réseau) de l’accès au système d’information…
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Car si les utilisateurs n’adhèrent pas à la démarche, ne nous leurrons pas, ils vont avec l’aide de l’informatique grand public, construire le système d’information dont ils ont besoin et ce sera une mauvaise nouvelle pour la gouvernance des entreprises.
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« n a workplace requiring creative solutions to complex problems, learning and working must be integrated. We need to actually implement the notion of the often-quoted term “continuous learning” Today, learning really is the work. »
Découvrez le livre que nous avons co-écrit avec 7 autres experts avec pleins de retours d'expérience pour aider managers et dirigeants