• Schumpeter: The French way of work

  “In fact studies suggest that the problem with French employees is less that they are work-shy, than that they are poorly managed. According to a report on national competitiveness by the World Economic Forum, the French rank and file has a much stronger work ethic than American, British or Dutch employees. They find great satisfaction in their work, but register profound discontent with the way their firms are run.”

  tags: management france engagement disengagement elits hierarchy promotion humanresources grandesecoles meritocracy middlemanagement

  • Two-fifths of employees, according to a 2010 study by BVA, a polling firm, actively dislike their firm’s top managers.
  • Whereas two-thirds of American, British and German employees say they have friendly relations with their line manager, fewer than a third of French workers say the same. Many employees, in short, agree with Ms Maier, who recommends that chief executives be guillotined to the tune of “La Carmagnole”, a revolutionary song.
  • If French work attitudes are out of the ordinary, French management methods are also unusual. The vast majority of chief executives of big firms hail from one of a handful of grandes écoles, such
  • Although the grandes écoles are superbly meritocratic—candidates compete against each other in a series of gruelling exams—their dominance of corporate hierarchies makes workplaces much less so.
  • A study of seven leading economies by TNS Sofres in 2007 showed that France is unique in that middle management as well as the lower-level workforce is largely disengaged from their companies.
  • For those farther down the ladder, French companies are hierarchical, holding no truck with Anglo-Saxon notions of “empowerment”. And bosses are more distant than ever.
  • There are important exceptions. Danone, a food-products firm, is one. It has made a big effort to promote people solely on competence,
  • The 2006 merger of Alcatel, a French telecoms-equipment firm, and Lucent, an American one, created a less hierarchical group. Alcatel-Lucent even encourages teleworking, uncommon in France because it means trusting workers not to goof off.
  • French bosses badly need to follow in the footsteps of Danone and other modernisers. If they try and fail, then at least they can blame the workers.

• John Hagel on Social Technology Adoption | Collaborative Planning & Social Business

  “John Hagel III co-author of the book “The Power of Pull” was invited on stage for a discussion with Dr. Pehong Chen, CEO of BroadVision about how companies are (or are not) adopting of social technologies at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Santa Clara yesterday. I am a big fan of him and his latest book, so I took notes on how he sees companies resolving these difficulties.”

  tags: socialsoftware adoption enterprise2.0 socialbusiness changemanagement metrics

  • JH: Most companies are still trying to figure enterprise 2.0 / social business technology out.  They don’t know what it is about, nor how to adopt it.
  • JH: Companies are most successful when they realize that tech by itself will not achieve anything.  Instead, companies have to change the way that they work. 
  • Surveys of executives show that 2/3 of executives are resistant to the use of social technology.  More than 70% of employees as well.  Part of this is just the tendency to stick with the familiar.  Others resist because think it is added work.
  • Change management process is not a rational process.  Instead, it is a political process.  It is important to understand that it is about strengthening the allies, and neutralizing the enemies
  • We came up with the notion of “metrics that matter”.  Different metrics matter at different levels of the organization.
  • It is better to focus on operating metrics.
  • Ask an executive “where do people spend their time?”  60-70% of time is spent on exceptions, and this generally not very visible.  These are cases that have been thrown out of the automated system — and you have to resolve
  • What is social good for?  Finding the right people, finding the right information, and getting them to work together
  • The other advantage, often underestimated, is making the invisible visible.  Think about exceptions:  because they are manually handled, there are no records.  Executives can not tell you precisely how many exceptions they have. 
  • The big issue in knowledge management is that the knowledge that is most valuable is in people’s heads.  This means that the real job is about connecting people.
  • If the work style by nature is sharing, then everything is connected, and no additional work.  But how do you change your behavior?
  • Passionate people are more connected.  They instinctively reach out.  A passionate employee is twice as connected. These passionate employees are more likely to connect with social software.
  • In any business process that is automated, there are always exceptions that fall out of the normal processing.  As I mentioned before, social software is perfect for picking up those exceptions. 

• Être un prof numérique « Techniques innovantes pour l’enseignement supérieur

  tags: education education2.0 teaching

  • Mercredi, j’aurai la joie de participer à un séminaire à l’ENVSN, des e-formateurs du ministère des sports. Le titre officiel de mon intervention est «Concevoir et animer un environnement numérique d’apprentissage et/ou de formation», ce qui peut se résumer à  « être un prof numérique ».
  • 

• Does SharePoint Have Future As A Social Platform? – The BrainYard – InformationWeek

  “Analysts speaking at Enterprise 2.0 say Microsoft’s collaboration platform is more than a portal, but less than a social network.”

  tags: microsoft sharepoint socialnetwork enterprisesocialnetworks enterprisesocialsoftware vendors newsgator

  • When Wylie asked Koplowitz whether SharePoint was “just a portal,” his answer was an emphatic “no” because, although SharePoint includes a portal, it provides many other capabilities. Yet when asked if SharePoint was a social network, Koplowitz shook his head and said, “it’s a lot better portal than it is a social platform.”
  • SharePoint 2010 provides basic building blocks, including user profiles and activity stream updates, but transforming it into a satisfying corporate social network requires either a healthy dose of configuration and customization, or the addition of third-party software such as NewsGator Social Sites.
  • “They’ve built a decent platform for lightweight file-oriented collaboration,”
  • “But SharePoint only provides two of the 10 or 11 key applications enterprises are looking for” in a social platform, he said.
  • the pace of change in enterprise social networking might slow down, given that enterprises are already having trouble digesting the features that are available today. In that case, even “a slow-moving platform like SharePoint” might be able to catch up, Koplowitz said.
  • On the other hand, he would not recommend an organization with no previous SharePoint investment adopt the platform as the foundation for enterprise social networking–certainly not unless you want to take advantage of SharePoint’s other features.

• Paroles d’experts vs attentes clients : une étude exclusive

  “L’idée de cette étude est simplissime : les 5 attentes majeures exprimées systématiquement par les consommateurs (Facilitation, Transparence, Confiance, Humilité et l’émergente Prévenance) sont-elles parfaitement, partiellement ou faiblement intégrées par les experts de la relation client ?”

  tags: service customer customercare customerservice facilitation procedures processes personalization trust transparency

  • les 5 attentes majeures exprimées systématiquement par les consommateurs (Facilitation, Transparence, Confiance, Humilité et l’émergente Prévenance) sont-elles parfaitement, partiellement ou faiblement intégrées par les experts de la relation client ?
  • 33% des experts y font référence, et cela donne lieu à un discours bien alimenté autour des thématiques suivantes:
     

    • La capacité de l’entreprise à s’affranchir des procédures, à se rendre flexible. 
    • La nécessité de personnaliser au maximum la relation. 
    • La prise de conscience du besoin d’hyper réactivité du consommateur, et la façon d’y répondre. 
    • La capacité à se démener, à se ‘plier en quatre’ pour satisfaire la demande client.
• La référence au besoin de transparence des clients (attente consommateur d’une information objective, non-commerciale, non biaisée pour pouvoir faire ses choix de consommation en toute connaissance de cause, besoin grandissant de confirmations écrites des accords verbaux, transparence tarifaire, etc…) apparait de façon plus marginale (exprimée par moins de 10% des experts). 
• L’attente de confiance (consommateurs qui attendent des marques qu’elles leur fassent ‘a priori’ confiance, en évitant de remettre en cause leurs dires) est ,elle, quasiment absente du discours….
• Enfin, quatre experts (sur 100 !) seulement font référence au besoin de prévenance des consommateur
• Plus fondamentalement, les Entreprises ont un mal fou à s’ouvrir vers l’extérieur car elles ont souvent le sentiment de s’exposer.
• La faible intégration de l’attente de confiance relève aussi d’un phénomène culturel aussi. Les Entreprises françaises restent très suspicieuses à l’endroit de leurs clients.
• Les notions mises en avant jusqu’à 2008 (“communauté”, “proximité”…) se sont quasiment effacées des réponses…
   …pour laisser place à d’autres champs d’exploration : la “conversation”, ou le “multi canal”.  De même, le souci de “faire émerger la voix du client”, de “penser client” se substitue peu à peu à la nécessité de répondre aux ‘attentes, aux besoins des clients’, plus prégnante lors des interviews les plus anciennes.

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

• IBM’s Galactic Intranet Redesign & The Death of the Intranet

  “A team of more than 40 IBM consultants have undertaken a massive redesign of IBM’s web properties: a galactic redesign that includes both the external website and internal intranet.

  The core objective: a Single design system that converges the intranet (W3) and Internet standards, incorporates reusable design patterns and evolves the design system through collaboration.”

  tags: ibm casestudies intranet intranet2.0 socialintranet W3 collaboration corporatecommunication internalcommunication expertslocation

  • ntroduce IBM experts, innovators, collaborators across the web, both internally and externally (.com and external web)
  • The new design uses darker and more subdued colors in the masthead and footer but brighter colors and more readable fonts in the content space making it easier for you to focus on where the real action is happening on the page:  the content space!!,
  • The new design makes it incredibly easy for you to add and remove widgets from the page, to change the layout of the page, and even allows you to easily add and remove your own pages customizing each for the way YOU work
  • Dynamic delivery of merchandising and Expertise Locator services through our services
  • No longer is there a single information workplace. No longer are we bound by the strict confides of a firewalled digital destination. The way we work transcends the binary notions of ‘internal’ and ‘external’. The body of knowledge we access and to which we contribute is now globally distributed across individuals, communities and disciplines. And our communication is constant, immediate and ubiquitous.
  • As an organization, we must reconceive how to serve and empower a global workforce – professionally and culturally – in a way that enables everyone to achieve his or her full potential.
  • evolving from distinct toolkit to integrated service; from a walled garden to a mode of engagement. W3 can become the service through which digital citizens (users/employees) engage to make the world work better.
  • In the future, w3 will cease to be a separate destination for IBMers. Instead, it will seamlessly integrate into IBM.ocm and the Web, serving as the frame through which they relate to their colleagues, the enterprise, their clients and partner

• “Innovation et entreprise sont désormais étroitement corrélées”

  “Répondre aux demandes du marché nécessite un recours à une innovation permanente. Dans cette optique, faire de ses employés les premières sources d’innovation peut être intéressant. “

  tags: innovation performance crowdsourcing openinnovation casestudies tibco market rewards

  • . Par exemple, chez TIBCO, plus de 50% de nos revenus proviennent de produits qui n’existaient pas il y a de cela 5 ans. C’est bien simple, il faut innover en permanence
  • Il faut avoir plusieurs coups d’avance sur le marché, et cela passe par une innovation intégrée au process de fonctionnement de l’entreprise.
  • Il faut se dire tout simplement que l’innovation ne peut plus se contenter d’être un service spécifique au sein de l’entreprise, mais bien le fait de tous les employé
  • A mon sens, on ne pousse pas les employés à innover : l’argent ne fera pas naître l’idée. L’envie et l’acte doivent venir des employés eux-mêmes
  • Et pour en revenir à cette notion de récompense, celle-ci doit évidemment intervenir à la fin, mais comme moyen d’entretenir l’innovation, et non comme moyen de l’initier.

• Why Taylorism prevails in the knowledge economy (and what to do about it)

  “I have been blogging quite substantially about Lean Management lately and I have noticed a common purpose with Agile methodologies (which get me blogging 4 years ago) and Enterprise 2.0 (which has kept my blogging busy for the last 2 years) : they all address complexity and permanent change, the key characteristics of our business world. This is one of the key ideas of the great book by Yves Caseau Processus & Entrerprise 2.0 [FR].”

  tags: lean agility knowledgeeconomy organization management leanmanagement taylorism complexity behavioralsciences education middlemanagement

  • We use the latest technologies, we mention innovation in every other sentences and yet we lag behind manufacturing in terms of management innovation as they’ve successfully implemented Lean Management.
  • Right now, your company has 21st-century Internet-enabled business processes, mid-20th-century management processes, all built atop 19th-century management principles.
  • didn’t have management educational background and who innovated in management because they never were told what NOT to do during an MBA.
  • I’m not sure about MBA’s (we even have in France an Enterprise 2.0 Institute under the lead of Richard Collin). But for sure, these sciences are not taught in IT Universities as Laurent Bossavit noted.
  • If we want people on organisations to understand the complexity we are in, to be able to assess how appropriate Lean/Agile/Enterprise 2.0 are to tackle it and how inappropriate Taylorism is, we need to add Cognitive and Behavioural sciences in their curriculum and trainings.
  • Why would they spend their energy putting people in the best position to succeed, and losing all the credit they used to get from their team work ?
  • learning requires humility. Managers enjoying their status are not really subject to humility.
  • Middle Managers play a key role in the knowledge creation process. They synthetize the tacit knowledge of both front-line employees and senior executives, make it explicit, and incorporate it into new products and technologies
  • Taylorism prevails because Agile / Enterprise 2.0 don’t provide enough credibility and factual data regarding what  they’re bringing in terms of operational benefits
  • Do not (only) rely on “rah rah” rhetoric to sell the case of Agile/Enterprise 2.0. Provide regular scientifically measured set of data proving the value of these methodologies as Lean has been doing ever since it appeared.

• Social + Lean = Agile

  “In today’s increasingly dynamic business environment, organizations must continuously adapt to survive. Ironically, change management has become a major bottleneck. Inefficient offline reviews are disconnected from daily operations and unresponsive to evolving requirements. Organizations’ need a practical mechanism for managing controlled variance and change in-flight to break the logjam.”

  tags: lean leanmanagement agility collaboration social socialcollaboration flexibility changemanagement businessprocess IT context

  • The more flexible an organization’s systems infrastructure, the better it can support desired or necessary change
  • The last forty years of mainstream business computing brought tremendous efficiencies through standardization, but this was predicated on relatively static models of processes, data, and capabilities.
  • The modern systems infrastructure simply wasn’t designed to adapt.
  • Ironically, change management programs have become the chokepoint for Enterprise Agility, an inefficient rate-limiter.
  • This suggests a flexible collaboration layer that enables dynamic interoperability between people and data, capabilities and policies
  • Organizations must find ways to efficiently satisfy individual requirements [4]. This represents a phase change from the age of standardization to the age of specialization
  • The Enterprise needs a new form of Collaboration Architecture to engage people [6] with the latitude to improvise, while providing for transparency, governance and audit
  • Following a linear process regardless of circumstances is nonsensical. We can’t anticipate all scenarios; an unrelated chain of events can impact best laid plans.
  • Rather than focusing on standard procedures, people need the authority to flexibly meet corporate objectives. People need to be able to respond to the environment, to adjust plans to keep goals in sight.
  • he standardization of business processes removed human discretion, problem solving, and innovation.
  • Social needs to be integrated into process itself, it has to be able to direct the flow otherwise it is simply chatter that is ultimately still dependant on conventional change management schemes. Processes need to become 2-way conversations.
  • Enterprise Social Collaboration is not about liberation, it’s about optimizing work
  • In combination the two provide for an integrated feedback loop [11] where the system both responds in context and enables process participants, based on authority, to ‘negotiate’ system requirements for their circumstances. This new form of ‘integrated’ collaboration supports real-time alignment of all stakeholders around business goals.
  • While the Web introduced the notion of self-directed navigation of linked content, popular social sites facilitate distributed collaboration, and consumer apps have introduced the notion of context-awareness, there hasn’t been a unified approach to Information System Agility.
  • it is necessary to re-think information systems architecture. Using same old methods and expecting different results is what Einstein called the definition of insanity
  • We need software architecture to support a looser form of application design that is not just modular, but can be contextualized and adaptive.

• Gary Hamel on “Hacking Management 2.0″

  “Over the last decade, the Internet has had a profound impact on busi­ness. It has spawned a slew of new business models and has helped make operating models vastly more efficient. By contrast, the Web’s impact on management models has been relatively modest.”

  tags: management management2.0 web2.0 socialbusiness enterprise2.0 garyhamel knowledgeeconomy creativeeconomy

  • These include a rapidly accelerating pace of change, a growing swarm of uncon­ventional rivals, crumbling entry barriers, a rapid transi­tion from the “knowledge economy” to the “creative economy,” intensifying compe­tition for talent and a profusion of new stakeholder demands.
  • organizations will need to become far more adaptable, innovative, inspiring and accountable than they are right now. 
  • Before the Web, it was hard to imagine alternatives to manage­ment orthodoxy.  But the Internet has spawned a Cambrian explosion of new organizational life forms–where coordination occurs without centraliza­tion, where power is the product of contribution rather than posi­tion, where the wisdom of the many trumps the authority of the few, where novel viewpoints get amplified rather than squelched, where commu­nities form spontane­ously around shared interests, where opportuni­ties to “opt-in” blur the line between vocation and hobby, where titles and credentials count for less than value-added, where perfor­mance is judged by your peers, and where influence comes from sharing information, not from hoarding it.
  • And complex coordi­nation tasks, like those involved in the design of a new aircraft, still require a dense matrix of “strong ties” among critical contributors, rather than the “weak ties” that are typical of web-based communities
  • If we can find ways of trans­planting the Internet’s DNA into our organizations—the interwo­ven values of transparency, collaboration, meritocracy, open­ness, commu­nity and self-determination—we may have the chance, at last, to over­come the design limits of Management 1.0

• IBM Watson and the Future of Work

  “Watson is designed to augment (improve) our capacity to think through complex problems, ask the right questions, judge possible solutions and make informed confident decisions based on real-world data that exists within our own memory banks and beyond.”

  tags: watson IBM deepQA productivity problemsolving Apple Siri naturallanguageprocessing knowledgework knowledge search confidence healthcare financialservices callcenters

  • IBM Watson™ and Apple Siri™  are early signals of what might transform work and lifelong learning around software based personal assistants that push human beings to think more deeply and broadly about questions, answers and their personal confidence levels in making decisions.
  • 1) Natural Language Matters
     Watson is not alive.  It is not artificial intelligence.  But it can (better than any other system on Earth today) understand the nuanced elements of meaning created by natural language.
  • 2) Knowledge in a Box Matters
     The web revolutionized access to information, but has also led to a world with too much information — and at times –  too much inaccurate information.
  • Knowledge requires filters for transparency, authentication and accountability.  There is benefit to controlling information in a silo that is constantly updated.
  • Watson does not give you a list of websites, it gives you the answer(s).

  • Watson knows that it is not perfect.  IBM recognizes that technology cannot deliver certainty on demand.

     

    So Watson embraces uncertainty and is honest about its confidence level with each response.

  • Imagine a work environment where people are honest and transparent in their knowledge level – and confidence level to respond to a particular question!

• Turn around and face the market

  “Paying attention to customers seems like such a fundamental thing. So why do so many companies do it so poorly? How do companies lose touch with their customers, and lose their grip on the realities of the marketplace?”

  tags: customer growth opportunities strategy competition rigidity culture casestudies IBM Apple Sony Starbuck GE Kodak xerox customercentricity

  • Without question, customers are the single biggest factor in any company’s long-term growth and profitability. And yet, as companies grow, distractions multiply. Success can create such a dazzling array of opportunities that companies try to capitalize on too many of them, over-expanding and diluting their offering
  • Caught up in whirlwind growth, some companies become distracted by a landscape of opportunity and try to do everything just because they can.
  • “Obsessed with growth, we took our eye off operations and became distracted from the core of our business” says Howard Schultz, Starbucks CEO, in Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul.
  • While trying to do too many things can be a problem, a focus that’s too narrow can be equally problematic.
  • “They just could not seem to see that they were in the information business… Xerox had been infested by a bunch of spreadsheet experts who thought you could decide every product based on metrics. Unfortunately, creativity wasn’t on a metric.”
  • But history has shown over and over that you can’t protect your customers from new, disruptive innovations, and if you’re not willing to cannibalize your business then someone else will.
  • When a company is large and successful, its size can be its worst enemy, especially when it is so dominant that it lacks serious competition. A company culture that drove success in the early days can become overly codified, rigid and ritualistic over time.
  • Name a company you love, a company you are loyal to, a company you buy things from all the time, and you will inevitably find a company that’s connected to its customers; that knows who they are and what they care about.
  • But some things won’t change. Customers will always want great experiences, great service, convenience, selection, low prices and fast delivery.
  • When in doubt, don’t look inside your company for answers. Turn around and face the market. Get back in touch with your customers.
  • Why? In some cases they don’t understand how social networks will impact the business. They can’t see a clear path or understand the implications. In most companies, however, there are a few people who do understand. But bureaucracy, corporate culture, blind spots, fear and risk-avoidant behaviors stand in their way.

• Task-based work revisited

  “Technology does not determine social and organizational change, but it does create new opportunity spaces for social innovations like new employment forms. Partial employment for young unemployed people is becoming much easier than before, and truly global task-based work is becoming possible, perhaps for the first time in history.”

  tags: job work networkeconomy networkedconomy humancapital interdependance knowledgework tasks organization hierarchy

  • The opportunity today is in new relational forms that don’t mimic the governance models of industrial, hierarchical firms. We are already witnessing the rise of very large-scale efforts that create tremendous value in a very new way.
  • The production of information goods requires more human capital than financial capital. It is more about connecting with brains than connecting with money. And the good news is that you are not limited to the local supply. Work on information products does not need to be co-located. The architecture of work does not resemble a factory any more.
  • Our management and organizational thinking is derived from the era of tangible goods production and high-cost/low-quality communications.
  • Almost all economic theories make the same assumption: the employer – employee relationship makes work possible.
  • The other taken for granted assumption is that it is the independent employer/manager who exercises freedom of choice in choosing the goals and designing the rules that the members of the organization are to follow. The employees of the organization are not seen autonomous
  • In contrast to the above, digital work has brought about circumstances in which the employee in effect chooses the purpose of work, voluntarily selects the tasks, determines the modes and timing of engagement, and designs the outcomes. The worker here might be said to be largely independent of some other person’s management, but is in effect interdependent
  • The interdependent, task-based worker negotiates her work based on her own purposes, not the goals of somebody else, and chooses her fellow workers based on her network, not a given organization.
  • The organization is not a given hierarchy, but an ongoing process of organizing.
  • The factory logic of mass production forced people to come to where the work is. The crowdsourcing logic of mass communication makes it possible to distribute work to where the people are, no matter where on the globe they may be.
  • Knowledge work is not about jobs or job roles but about tasks.

• A new social contract for creative work

  “I’ve been saying for a while that simple and merely complicated work will continue to get automated and outsourced (read this post if you don’t believe it or look at this example of legal work getting automated). To keep a job in the creative economy (with core skills of Initiative, Creativity & Passion) one must become an indispensable linchpin in the organization.”

  tags: work job learningorganisation automation economy ROWE organizationchart networkdiagram humanresources socialcontract creativity creativework

  • “First we automated menial jobs, now we’re automating middle-class jobs. Unfortunately, we still demand that people have a job soon after becoming adults. This trend is going to be a big problem…”
  • I think more opportunities are being created than destroyed, but our institutions and our cultural mindset still are not ready for this change.
  • The indicators that the underlying nature of work and wealth generation have changed are everywhere.
  • • Abolish the organization chart and replace it with a network diagram (some new tech companies have done this).
    • Move away from counting hours, to a results only work environment (with distributed work, this is becoming more common).
    • Encourage outside work that doesn’t directly interfere with paid work, as it will strengthen the network (such as Google’s 20% time for engineers).
    • Provide options for workers to come and go and give them ways to stay connected when they’re not employed (like Ericsson’s Stay Connected Facebook group). Build an ecosystem, not a monolith.

• What Is Employee Turnover Costing You? Part 2

  “Employee turnover is a natural occurrence in the business world. But it can also be a costly one. As mentioned in previous posts, there are several areas that contribute to the high cost of employee turnover.

  Let’s look at where the first dollars are spent when an employee leaves and a company is suddenly faced with an empty position.”

  tags: turnover humanresources costs management productivity knowledge

  • The cost of knowledge, skills and contacts the employee leaving is taking with them. Depending on how long the person was in the position, the experience and networking gained are sure to be incredible resources, resources the organization will have to calculate as lost.
  • The cost of losing customers. The employee leaving may take their customers with them which results in a loss of profit. Or it could cost the company more to try and retain those customers

• Enterprise Tagging Service social software saves IBM $4.6 million a year

  “Measuring ROI on social software is an elusive topic, so it’s wonderful when I find projects that have managed to quantify it in some way. The following story focuses on a particular task, that of social tagging.

  The Enterprise Tagging Service in IBM aims to provide an alternative approach to helping people find information compared to traditional search engines. Search based on keyword analysis often relies on a taxonomy that is rigid due to the way the software performs its structural analysis of web pages, identifying and classifying the keywords. Social tagging allows people to add human semantics to keywords that they define that sometimes can amount to finding a resource faster based on what people think is relevant. “

  tags: casestudies IBM tagging ROI search

  • The ETS team instituted a survey to ask users howthis tool helped them. What they found was amazing when you look at itin context: the average person saved 12 seconds, across the 286000+searches performed through ETS each week. This sums up to 955 hourssaved each week across the company. In terms of cost savings, itamounts to a rough estimate of $4.6 million a year, in terms ofproductivity gain. The reusability of this page widget also resulted in$2.4 million in cost avoidance (reimplementing this for eachsite).
  • in other words, the knowledgedoes not get balkanized into separate tag systems, running in theclassic problem of information getting locked away in pockets in theorganization

• Understanding what “Adaptive” means

  “While Case Management has been a universally hot topic in the past year, there are various modifiers put in front of it: Advanced, Dynamic, and Adaptive. In this post I attempt to explain why “Adaptive” is the right concept and why that is so important.”

  tags: acm casemanagement dynamiccasemanagement advancedcasemanagement adaptivecasemanagement adaptiveness organization

  • Adaptiveness is not simply the capability to increase or decrease muscle size.  Instead it is more about the ability of the muscle to self-modify to fit the situation;
  • Homeostatis is the idea that an adaptive system responds to external changes in such as way as to keep certain aspects constant. 
  • We talk about a good ACM system facilitating what the professional wants (needs) to do.  Professionals play active roles in adapting the system to their needs.  We can think of this as being self-modification because there is no external software professional, or process analysts, needed: the professional can adapt the system anyway necessary to meet the constantly changing requirements. 
  • Human organizations are also naturally adaptive.  The day to day decisions are decentralized and delegated to front line workers.  Different divisions compete for scarce resources, and good management will shift resources as needed.
  • Adaptiveness presents a kind of homeostasis that allows an organization to keeps its character and form over the years even though people within the organization are constantly coming and going.
  • For case management to be successful, it needs to be adaptive.  It needs to be under the control of the case managers to be in a position to sense and respond to the situation.
  •   But “dynamic” means only that something “moves” and “changes”. The term dynamic tells you nothing about the agent causing the change.  An oppressive dictator can be dynamic, but never adaptive.

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

• L’entreprise adaptable : démocratique et 2.0 | Le Cercle Les Echos

  “Un livre vient de paraître sur une forme de démocratie dans l’entreprise : l’intra-entrepreneuriat. C’est l’occasion de faire le point sur ce qu’il convient d’entendre par “démocratie en entreprise”, une entreprise composée d’égaux, c’est-à-dire fonctionnant en pairs à pairs (peer-to-peer) et non de pères à fils (supérieurs à subordonnés).”

  tags: michelhervé casestudies groupehervé democracy enterprise2.0 intrapreneurship

  • C’est contractuel. Si le salarié est payé, c’est précisément pour obéir à des ordres auxquels il n’accepterait pas de se plier sans cette compensation.
  • Ce qu’il y a de commun à toutes ces tentatives, c’est la volonté de sortir du salariat pour libérer le travailleur, tant il semble y avoir incompatibilité entre salariat et autonomie. Or, le tour de force auquel s’essayent les auteurs du “pouvoir” au-delà du pouvoir, c’est de libérer le travail de toute domination de l’homme sur l’homme à l’intérieur même du salariat.
  • Rassembler des salariés qui soient en même temps leur propre chef, en une communauté d’intra-entrepreneurs coconstructeurs de leur entreprise, telle est l’ambition du modèle organisationnel proposé dans cet ouvrage.

• L’entreprise est-elle par nature non démocratique ?

  “Comment concilier le souci d’efficacité économique avec l’exigence de démocratie ? Comment se fait-il que nous acceptions d’être dirigés au travail d’une manière que nous refuserions au-dehors ? La démocratie a-t-elle sa place dans l’entreprise ? Est-ce une utopie ?”

  tags: enterprise democracy management trust mistrust conflict utopia semco groupehervé michelhervé

  • Chez l’une comme chez l’autre de ces démocraties entrepreneuriales, les chefs ne tiennent pas d’abord leur pouvoir de leur hiérarchie mais de leur base : ils peuvent être destitués si leur évaluation par leurs subordonnés s’avère défavorable.
  • le projet politique interne est indissociable de l’ambition économique : tant Ricardo Semler, le fondateur de Semco, que Michel Hervé, le fondateur du groupe Hervé, considèrent qu’un succès économique durable passe par la satisfaction des besoins politiques de leurs salariés, et que le premier d’entre eux étant l’autonomie, il faut par conséquent qu’ils puissent se gouverner eux-mêmes.
  • Raison pour laquelle leurs salariés se fixent leurs propres règles de fonctionnement ainsi que leurs objectifs professionnels, comme des adultes responsables.
  • la volonté de ne pas infantiliser leurs salariés, contrairement à ce qui se passe dans tant d’entreprises qui contrôlent par le menu les heures d’arrivée et de départ, la présence aux réunions, les allers-venues sur Internet, qui punissent en cas d’erreur ou de non suivi de la procédure, etc.
  • contrairement à une idée reçue, les hommes ne « sont », à proprement parler, ni bons ni méchants, ni naturellement altruistes (comme le croient les anarchistes) ni naturellement individualistes (comme le croient nombre de libéraux) : ils sont capables de l’un comme de l’autre, et c’est le milieu dans lequel ils évoluent qui les rend tels ou tels.
  • une organisation du travail fondée sur la confiance a priori verra se multiplier les salariés responsables, autonomes et proactifs, à la hauteur des espérances mises en eux.
  • La démocratie dans l’entreprise semble avoir de beaux jours devant elle : elle répond à une aspiration de plus en plus forte de la société, elle augmente le bien-être au travail, elle accroît l’engagement des salariés, elle « remet l’humain au centre », elle permet de générer de l’intelligence collective mieux qu’aucune autre organisation du travail
  • La vraie utopie est en réalité du côté des entreprises classiques, qui s’obstinent à croire que les hommes se motivent « au bâton et à la carotte »

• Managing without Managers

  In Brazil, where paternalism and the family business fiefdom still flourish, I am president of a manufacturing company that treats its 800 employees like responsible adults. Most of them –including factory workers – set their own working hours. All have access to the company books. The vast majority vote on many important corporate decisions. Everyone gets paid by the month, regardless of job description, and more than 150 of our management people set their own salaries and bonuses.

  tags: semco ricardosemler empowerment management autonomy participation decisionmaking

  • In Brazil, where paternalism and the family business fiefdom still flourish, I am president of a manufacturing company that treats its 800 employees like responsible adults. Most of them –including factory workers – set their own working hours. All have access to the company books. The vast majority vote on many important corporate decisions. Everyone gets paid by the month, regardless of job description, and more than 150 of our management people set their own salaries and bonuses.
  • Management associations, labor unions, and the press have repeatedly named us the best company in Brazil to work for. In fact, we no longer advertise jobs.  Word
  • Semco has three fundamental values on which we base some 30 management programs. These values – democracy, profit sharing, and information – work in a complicated circle, each dependent on the other two.
  • The first of Semco’s three values is democracy, or employee involvement. Clearly, workers who control their working conditions are going to be happier than workers who don’t.
  • We found four big obstacles to effective participatory management: size, hierarchy, lack of motivation, and ignorance.
  • it’s clear that several thousand people in one facility makes individual involvement an illusion.
  • there were too many managers in too many layers holding too many meetings. So we decided to break up the facility into three separate plants.
  • I don’t claim that size reduction alone accomplished all this, just that size reduction is essential for putting employees in touch with one another so they can co-ordinate their work
  • The organizational pyramid is the cause of much corporate evil, because the tip is too far from the base. Pyramids emphasize power, promote insecurity; distort communications, hobble interaction, and make it very difficult for the people who plan and the people who execute to move in the same direction.
  • One tiny, central circle contains the five people who integrate the company’s movements. These are the counselors I mentioned before. I’m one of them, and except for a couple of legal documents that call me president, counselor is the only title I use. A second, larger circle contains the heads of the eight divisions – we call them partners. Finally, a third, huge circle holds all the other employees.
  • The linchpins of the system are the co-ordinators, a group that includes everyone formerly called foreman, supervisor, manager, head, or chief. The only people who report to co-ordinators are associates. No co-ordinator reports to another co-ordinator – that feature of the system is what ensures the reduction in management layers.
  • Managers and the status and money they enjoy – in a word, hierarchy – are the single biggest obstacle to participatory management.
  • We insist on making important decision’s collegially, and certain decisions are made by a company-wide vote.
  • Employees also outvoted me on the acquisition of a company that I’m still sure we should have bought. But they felt we weren’t ready to digest it, and I lost the vote. In a case like that, the credibility of our management system is at stake. Employee involvement must be real, even when it makes management uneasy. Anyway, what is the future of an acquisition if the people who have to operate it don’t believe it’s workable?
  • We have other ways of combating hierarchy too. Most of our programs are based on the notion of giving employees control over their own lives. In a word, we hire adults, and then we treat them like adults.
  • One of my first moves when I took control of Semco was to abolish norms, manuals, rules, and regulations. Everyone knows you can’t run a large organization without regulations, but everyone also knows that most regulations are poppycock.
  • It’s also true that common sense requires just a touch of civil disobedience every time someone calls attention to something that’s not working
  • So we replaced all the nitpicking regulations with the rule of common sense and put our employees in the demanding position of using their own judgement.
  • No one checks expenses, so there is no way of knowing. The point is, we don’t care. If we can’t trust people with our money and their judgement, we sure as hell shouldn’t be sending them overseas to do business in our name.
  • We encourage – we practically insist on – job rotation every two to five years to prevent boredom.
  • By the same logic that governs our other employee programs, we have also eliminated time clocks. People come and go according to their own schedules
  • The union has never objected because the initiative came from the workers themselves. It was their idea.
  • When we introduced flexible hours, we decided to hold regular follow-up meetings to track problems and decide how to deal with abuses and production interruptions. That was years ago, and we haven’t yet held the first meeting
  • We form the groups, but they find their own leaders. That’s not a lack of structure that’s just a lack of structure imposed from above.
  • Everyone agrees that profits should belong to those who risk their capital, that entrepreneurial behavior deserves reward, that the creation of wealth should enrich the creator. Well, depending on how you define capital and risk, all these truisms can apply as much to workers as to shareholders.
  • Profit sharing won’t motivate employees if they see it as just another management gimmick, if the company makes it difficult for them to see how their own work is related to profits and to understand how those profits are divided.
  • In Semco’s case, each division has a separate profit-sharing program. Twice a year, we calculate 23% of after-tax profit on each division income statement and give a check to three employees who’ve been elected by the workers in their division. These three invest the money until the unit can meet and decide – by simple majority vote – what they want to do with it.
  • But nothing matters more than those vital statistics – short, frank, frequent reports on how the company is doing. Complete transparency. No hocus-pocus, no hanky-panky, no simplifications.
  • On the contrary, all Semco employees attend classes to learn how to read and understand the numbers, and it’s one of their unions that teach the course.
  • Many of our executives were alarmed by the decision to share monthly financial results with all employees
  • If executives are embarrassed by their salaries, that probably means they aren’t earning them.
  • In preparing budgets, we believe that the flexibility to change the budget continually is much more important than the detailed consistency of the initial numbers.
  • And that’s all there is to it. Participation gives people control of their work, profit sharing gives them a reason to do it better, information tells them what’s working and what isn’t.
  • So we don’t have systems or staff functions or analysts or anything like that. What we have are people who either sell or make, and there’s nothing in between
  • Everybody knows the price of the product. Everybody knows the cost. Everybody has the monthly balance sheet that says exactly what each of them makes, how much bronze is costing us, how much overtime we paid, all of it. And the employees know that 23% of the after-tax profit is theirs.
  • And because we’re so strict with the financial controls, we can be extremely lax about everything else. Employees can paint the walls any color they like. They can come to work whenever they decide. They can wear whatever clothing makes them comfortable. They can do whatever the hell they want. It’s up to them to see the connection between productivity and profit and to act on it.

• CIA establishes online worldwide intelligence data bank

  “The concept of information sharing by the CIA is considered an oxymoron by some, but the agency has become a leader in this area. The changes came after perceived failures related to 9/11 and the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction debacle.

  The CIA responded to those lapses by establishing an online data-sharing environment, the Worldwide Intelligence Review (WIRe). “

  tags: CIA informationsharing WIRE decisionmaking context security tagging casestudies

  • Our business is about information sharing. We’ve become a leader in information sharing. What good is a piece of data if the right people can’t use it to make an informed decision
  • One key focus for WIRe is to let users find data that they might not know exists. That has to be balanced with the need for security. Those opposing challenges are resolved by showing users names and headlines for reports, articles and other files, along with information on their security level. Sometimes users will see nothing more than an article number, other times they may see the first page of a document based on their security level.
  • Another major focal point is to provide links to other files that may help WIRe users connect the dots and
  • Knowledge is no longer seen as discrete; each piece is presented in context. We provide relationships we’ve discovered between files, and users can create tagging structures or other links that we didn’t make
  • . Now we lead the field, and people realize we do share information,

• Demain, la société de l’interaction et de la complexité, par Serge Soudoplatoff

  “l est traditionnel de cataloguer Internet dans la catégorie des médias. Après la radio, la télévision, les journaux, voici maintenant Internet. Même le grand McLuhan a écrit, avec une vision extraordinaire: «Nous allons passer d’une civilisation de médias chauds et de spectateurs froids à une civilisation de médias froids et de spectateurs chauds.» Et ce à une époque où Internet n’existait que sur le papier. L’expression actuelle de «médias sociaux» ne fait que renforcer cette idée.”

  tags: internet socialmedia interaction society interactionsociety web neutrality marketing massmarketing complexity knowledge

  • Même le grand McLuhan a écrit, avec une vision extraordinaire: «Nous allons passer d’une civilisation de médias chauds et de spectateurs froids à une civilisation de médias froids et de spectateurs chauds.» Et ce à une époque où Internet n’existait que sur le papier. L’expression actuelle de «médias sociaux» ne fait que renforcer cette idée.
  • Il y a trois niveaux de connaissance: la connaissance individuelle – quelqu’un sait qu’il y a un problème –, puis la connaissance collective – tout le monde sait qu’il y a un problème. Le problème d’Intel était de faire face à des milliers de clients qui, non seulement, savaient le problème, mais savaient que les autres clients savaient. C’est le troisième niveau, la connaissance globale: tout le monde sait que les autres savent qu’il y a un problème.
  • La neutralité est l’un des fondements d’Internet. Ceci est vrai au niveau technologique, puisque les protocoles de routage ne contiennent aucun algorithme différenciant un paquet d’un autre. Mais également au niveau philosophique, puisqu’en rejetant le choix ou le filtrage aux extrémités, Internet favorise plus une éthique qu’une morale
  • À l’inverse, le savoir-faire des médias traditionnels est de choisir un angle d’attaque,
  • Internet est une énorme construction systémique, un jeu de Lego, basée sur le réseau. Les médias traditionnels veulent tout réaliser et même décider de ce qui est bon pour le client
  • Nos journées sont remplies d’interactions, qui deviennent de plus en plus nombreuses. Il faut donc un outil pour gérer cette complexité croissante, et ce n’est pas par hasard qu’Internet s’impose.
  • Nous sommes maintenant entrés dans la société de l’interaction.

• Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software

  Some programs go beyond just finding documents with relevant terms at computer speeds. They can extract relevant concepts — like documents relevant to social protest in the Middle East — even in the absence of specific terms, and deduce patterns of behavior that would have eluded lawyers examining millions of documents.

  tags: law artificialintelligence discovery documents Technology automation job reasonning e-discovery

  • the studios examined six million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 million, much of it to pay for a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for months at high hourly rates.
  • Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, “e-discovery” software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000.
  • “From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,”
  • Computers are getting better at mimicking human reasoning — as viewers of “Jeopardy!” found out when they saw Watson beat its human opponents — and they are claiming work once done by people in high-paying professions.
  • New jobs, he says, are coming at the bottom of the economic pyramid, jobs in the middle are being lost to automation and outsourcing, and now job growth at the top is slowing because of automation.
  • “There is no reason to think that technology creates unemployment,” Professor Autor said. “Over the long run we find things for people to do. The harder question is, does changing technology always lead to better jobs? The answer is no.”
  • We’re at the beginning of a 10-year period where we’re going to transition from computers that can’t understand language to a point where computers can understand quite a bit about language.
  • The most basic linguistic approach uses specific search words to find and sort relevant documents
  • The sociological approach adds an inferential layer of analysis, mimicking the deductive powers of a human Sherlock Holme

• IBM Simulates 4.5 Percent of the Human Brain and Might Make You Obsolete by 2019

  “. Now IBM’s Blue Gene is trying to not just outperform, but simulate the whole damn human brain. It’s 4.5 percent of the way there.”

  tags: ibm brain humanbrain bluegene apple SIRI job contribution society

  • And it’s still on pace to finish the job of turning the human mind into a componentially-replicable thing by 2019
  • So you’ve got eight years to figure out a way to contribute to society that isn’t wholly reliant on your brain

• Reputation 2.0 : Un patron peut-il et doit-il bloguer librement ?

  “En septembre 2011, Jean-Bernard Levy, PDG du groupe français de communication et de divertissement Vivendi, s’est lancé dans l’aventure des réseaux sociaux en ouvrant un blog personnel. Bien qu’il soit oint de la bénédiction corporate de l’entreprise, l’initiative n’en est pas moins intéressante puisqu’aucun de ses homologues du CAC 40 n’a jamais accompli jusqu’à aujourd’hui la moindre incursion dans la blogosphère.”

  tags: blogging corporateblogging CEO corporatecommunication communication brand personalbranding

  • Révolu le temps d’un patron indéboulonnable que l’on pouvait uniquement contester en comité d’entreprise ou en déployant des banderoles sous les fenêtres de ses bureaux. Aujourd’hui, ce dernier peut se retrouver sous la mitraille numérique à l’instar des élus politiques et des journalistes de renom.
  • Je ne sais pas si le blog est le « nouveau mythe du web », comme l’a écrit dans Le Monde Luc Fayard ; mais ce dont je suis certain qu’il ne faut pas lui demander plus qu’il ne peut donner : le blog ne va pas révolutionner la démocratie, pas plus que les sites Internet d’ailleurs ; il constitue simplement un instrument de transmission des informations des opinions en concurrence ou/et en complément avec les autres médias, son avantage compétitif étant la simplicité et l’instantanéité
  • Néanmoins, à la différence de leurs homologues d’Outre-Atlantique, les patrons français n’ont guère manifesté jusqu’à présent un tropisme affirmé à l’égard des blogs. Dans l’Hexagone, difficile de trouver un équivalent à John Chambers, ancien PDG de Cisco ou Jonathan Schwartz, ancien PDG de Sun dont le blog était traduit en 11 langues et les billets guettés comme le lait sur le feu par la communauté geek.
  • l y a d’abord les freins de la culture managériale avec notamment la peur de la perte de contrôle du discours et le champ de mines juridique que les réseaux sociaux recèlent à leurs yeux.
  • Autre argument souvent brandi pour ne pas sauter le pas : l’adage « Time is money ». En d’autres termes, un blog est perçu comme chronophage dans son écriture et aléatoire dans son retour sur investissement.
  • Lorsque vous demanderez à votre propre patron d’écrire pour vos blogs d’entreprise (…), vous solderez ainsi définitivement la question du retour sur investissement car votre patron comprendra ainsi que les blogs d’entreprise permettent de faire des choses qui étaient impensables avant. En effet, quel autre moyen a-t-il à sa disposition qui lui permettre de partager sa vision stratégique avec le monde entier en appuyant simplement sur un bouton ?
  • Lorsque vous faites une recherche sur les moteurs, vous tombez invariablement sur les incontournables biographies officielles et … les commentaires plus ou moins acides d’observateurs du secteur sur leur gouvernance d’entreprise dans la presse et … les blogs. En revanche, on ne trouve nulle trace d’une expression émanant d’eux-mêmes hormis des interviews accordées çà et là dans les médias.
  • le blog constitue également pour un patron l’opportunité de clarifier ses prises de position, d’expliciter ses décisions, voire faire part de ses humeurs et/ou de ses combats. L’illustration la plus aboutie réside sans conteste dans le blog du célèbre patron de l’enseigne de distribution éponyme, Michel-Edouard Leclerc. On
  • Dans un autre registre mais tout aussi abouti en termes de contenu, on peut signaler le blog de Françoise Gri, présidente de Manpower France. Lancé en février 2009, celle qui mène la destinée de la fameuse entreprise de travail temporaire en France, mise également sur le principe d’un blog pour alimenter le débat sur les thématiques de l’emploi comme elle l’écrit en préambule du blog (7)
  • En ces temps où la réputation s’établit aussi sur des dimensions autres que l’excellence à manier les bilans financiers dans les roadshows pour analystes, cet espace de communication est un atout indéniable

• 3 étudiants sur 5 veulent de la mobilité et du télétravail [Zeclin d'oeil du 7-11-2011] | Zevillage

  tags: remotework employment students worklifebalance job humanresources mobility

  • 

• Forrester: Enterprise social barely out of the starting gate

  “From breaking down barriers to the free flow of information within the organization to communicating with customers (particularly coveted Gen Y), enterprise social media and other social tools are often hailed as a next-generation solution for improving the business bottom line. Tech sites, including WebWorkerDaily, often boost these technologies and track business interest in them, but how many workers are actually adopting them for use on the ground?”

  tags: enterprisesocialsoftware socialsoftware user adoption generationx generationy

  • The results: 28 percent of workers use social software at least monthly.
  • • They’re earlier adopters. “They have positive attitudes about the role of technology in their lives — more than two-thirds are technology optimists,” says the Forrester report.
    • They’re well paid. More than half make $60,000 a year or more.
    • They’re highly educated. “23 percent hold advanced degrees, and 49 percent are in management,” reports Forrester.
    • They’re pressed for time. “Software users work, on average, 2.41 hours longer than other employees during the workweek. They also spend 1.95 more hours, on average, working outside business hours than the rest of the workforce.”
    • They’re not all Gen Y. While a slightly more than a quarter (26 percent) are supposedly social-mad Gen Y, a larger percentage (35 percent) of users are from Gen X.

• 11 Ways To Explain Social Business Benefits

  “We start throwing language at people–words like blogs, wikis, microblogging, even the term social business itself. None of those things really matter. They’re tools and methods that enable us to do things that matter. “

  tags: socialbusiness benefits value enterprisesocialsoftware

  • 
  • People unfamiliar with the tools of this new social business space almost always react poorly to initial messages that focus on the tools and how they will “revolutionize” business. They freeze in their tracks, because they don’t understand the language and the technology. Often they’re people with years of expertise, who are knowledgeable about their work and aren’t accustomed to feeling uninformed.
  • Here are some approaches you can take to help people who are new to social tools understand them:

• Collaboratif : tout le monde est pour, mais…

  “Dans le monde des technologies de l’information, il n’existe peut-être pas de terme aussi galvaudé que celui de “collaboratif”. L’information doit nécessairement être (sous contrôle évidemment ) communiquée, diffusée, mise et traitée en commun, partagée tout au long de son cycle de vie. Elle doit pouvoir être traitée par plusieurs personnes interagissant chacun selon son rôle et ses compétences dans un objectif fixé. C’est sa capacité à circuler (rapidement et aisément) qui confère à l’information sa pertinence et son efficacité. Aussi, par définition, peut-on dire que tout système d’information vise à la collaboration. “

  tags: collaboration email unifiedcommunications unifiedcollaboration remotework management hierarchy

  • Ainsi, 51% des répondants n’utilisent  jamais les fonctions de messagerie unifiée. Près  de 40% des répondants utilisent de façon  ponctuelle (et non officielle) des solutions de  télétravail. Ils sont 22% à considérer que les  outils de travail collaboratif doivent rester  cantonnés à un usage en mode projet et ne pas être  généralisés à l’ensemble des collaborateurs de  l’entreprise. Enfin, moins de 10% des personnes  interrogées estiment que l’usage interne des mails  dans l’entreprise sera substitué par les réseaux  sociaux d’entreprise (RSE) : on est encore bien  loin de l’entreprise 2.0.
  • les réseaux  sociaux d’entreprise sont des solutions modernes  d’échange collaboratif (en mode relationnel ou  conversationnel) dans l’entreprise.  L’hétérogénéité de ces outils ne facilite pas un  usage fluide à tous les échelons de l’entreprise.
  • Les  entreprises soucieuses de mettre en pratique des  solutions de collaboration (et a fortiori d’e- collaboration) doivent être capables d’adapter  leur organisation du travail et de créer, surtout  si l’entreprise est fortement hiérarchisée, de la  transversalité dans leur mode de fonctionnement.
  • Il leur est de plus essentiel de déterminer, avant  tout choix d’outils, les objectifs et les  caractéristiques souhaitées d’un projet de  collaboration : pour quoi faire (partager des  applications ? des contenus ? un projet ? un  savoir ?), pour quel usage (métier ? bureautique ?  pilotage ?) qui est concerné (des collaborateurs  isolée ? un service ? une communauté d’intérêts  ou d’experts ?), etc.

• Employees Refusing to Use Clunky Enterprise Software

  ” Don’t look now, but many company employees are turning off their company-issued laptops and BlackBerrys. They prefer to use their personal devices—sleek, mobile and intuitive—rather than the company-sanctioned technologies perceived as outdated and hard to use. “

  tags: IT BYOD BYOT enterprisesoftware software iphone ipad CIO

  • tendency of managers—especially younger ones—to bypass the big enterprise systems by using spreadsheets and cloud-based apps to operate their business functions
  • The IFS study shows that there’s a disconnect between the way software behaves in employees’ personal lives and the way it behaves in corporate America.
  • Even more surprising, the survey shows that managers are less likely to take a job at a new company if they can’t use cloud-based apps and connect their personal devices to the new company’s enterprise systems.
  • There’s no way for the CIO to complain about adhering to IT policies when fellow C-suite executives are the first to request easier access.

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

• Gen X workers grumpy, profoundly unhappy

  “A new study, the product of three years of research based on the careers of about 3,000 Canadian knowledge workers, provides some surprising insights into the career ambitions of four generations of workers. Among the surprises: The dramatic unhappiness of Generation X employees, and the ongoing ambitions of the oldest group, dubbed “Matures.”"

  tags: generationx generationy work happiness millenials ambition matures worklifebalance workenvironment

  • Matures place little emphasis on work/life balance. “Balance” was ranked in the top ten for Millennials, GenXers and Boomers, but not for Matures.
  • Millennials and Matures are most ambitious. Only Millennials placed “advancement” in their top 10. It was somewhat important to Matures, but not to Boomers or Gen Xers.
  • Matures want to be challenged. They’re the only ones that placed “challenge” in their top 10.
  • Older workers are the most interested in learning. “Opportunities for continuous learning” was most important to Boomers and Matures. Those in Generation X were least likely to say this is essential.
  • Given that many workplaces have large numbers of GenXers and Millennials reporting up to Boomers and Matures, it seems there’s a built-in potential for conflict here.
  • Millennials are more focused on meeting individual and social needs through work
  • GenX place the most emphasis on balance and flexibility,
  • Boomers are most concerned about the work environment itself
  • Matures are more ambitious than stereotypes might lead you to believe

• Are Workers Too Productive?

  “There’s mounting evidence that Moore’s Law applies to commodity work — labor that can be produced by many different individuals with a minimal amount of training. It’s difficult to distinguish the output of one commodity worker from another, just as it is difficult to differentiate wheat grown on one farm from wheat grown on another. If Moore’s Law applies to commodity work, commodity workers are in big trouble.”

  tags: productivity work employment mooreslaw commodity commoditywork skills

  • Noyce maintained that the proper way to measure the industry’s productivity was to measure output not in dollars but in transistors per employee. By that measure, our productivity was growing at 40 percent per yea
  • I suspect that just as the number of transistors in an integrated circuit continues to grow at an exponential rate, commodity workers using computers and the Internet are increasing their productivity at an exponential rate.
  • If worker productivity is growing at an exponential rate and lots of new facilities are being built, we are at the point where commodity worker output can easily exceed the demand
  • The value of doing those commodity chores is dropping as well and so to maintain our current salary, we have to run faster as well

• Entreprise 2.0 et output management ?

  “Il n’y a plus un jour, une conférence, une note, qui ne se réfère à l’entreprise 2.0 et aux formidables changements que vont apporter les applications de partage et de collaboration, la maîtrise de la réalité augmentée, le cloud, etc..

  Au delà de l’enthousiasme, il faut « savoir raison garder » et nous méfier de notre capacité à nous émerveiller facilement et de notre candeur.”

  tags: enterprise2.0 output socialbusiness priorities informationoverload outputmanagement

  • Le modèle 2.0 est porteur de beaucoup de promesses, mais la réalité est qu’aujourd’hui peu d’entreprises l’ont mis en oeuvre et que beaucoup de questions restent ouvertes ou sont découvertes à l’occasion des phases de test en cours dans les organisations.
  • Notre réalité est plus simple à décrire bien que incroyablement plus compliquée à affronter : nous avons à gérer, à ingérer et à digérer trop d’information !
  • 
  • L’entreprise 2.0 joue avec « l‘instantanéité et la facilité d’accés à l’information » en y ajoutant la possibilité de participer activement à des processus jusqu’alors réservé aux ayants-droits !
  • L’output management n’a jamais cessé d’exister !
     C’est un domaine essentiel au service des organisations qui leur permet tout simplement de mettre en oeuvre une communication pertinente et de qualité avec les récipiendaires des contenus échangés.
  • Avec les technologies d’output management et une évaluation sérieuse de ses actifs en terme de contenus, l‘entreprise 2.0 valorise et pérennise (pour une période plus ou moins longue) son capital informationnel
  • L’output management permet la synthèse et la respiration dans l’exploitation et la compréhension des données (business intelligence) en étant au coeur de la stratégie de gouvernance de l’information

• Socializing the extended value chain

  “It’s probably since the very moment I started focusing my attention on Enterprise 2.0 that I wanted to understand how it might have worked a company where formal and informal exchanges supported each other, where communities were eventually integrated into processes, where knowledge assets could be accessed, used and constantly renewed through the participation of all the actors involved. Not so much a world entirely made of 2.0 but more one in which social is seen as a mean to accelerate the achievement of those same goals companies have always imposed to themselves.”

  tags: socialbusiness enterprise2.0 valuechain socialization socialsoftware enterprisesocialsoftware processes workflow

  • From a business, organizational, technological perspective, companies have particularly struggled to

     

    • Business: to frame social in a way that was understandable to senior management and could give business results
    • Adoption: to ensure the attainment of a critical mass of participation needed to achieve the return on investment
    • Technology: to reposition existing enterprise systems and services within the new paradigm
    • Strategy: to understand, from an organizational and a workflow point of view, how to put together communities for customers, communities for employees and partners, encoded processes
• here is no social business without business.
• Even socializing as a single process (such as Social CRM or Social Product Development) doesn’t necessarily contribute to an overall view of evolution of the extended chain value
• o socialize the business, you cannot start from social. You must first visualize the fundamental constructs on which each company is based
• Socializing a business then means socializing the basic constructs, namely the processes that make it possible for a company to run around the individuals that constitute it.
• 
• Isolated and above-the-flow communities (of employees or customers). This is often the starting point for any company that begins to experiment the participation of customers, employees and other stakeholders through communities born bottom-up or in any case not explicitly connected to existing workflows.
• Above-the-flow communities in support of a traditional process. The next step is to recognize the complementarity of processes and communities by enhancing an existing workflow (that remains unmodified) with social tools to capture exceptions to the process, not codified informal exchanges, the tacit knowledge needed to run the process.
• Socialized process. In order to ensure user adoption, traditional process and collaboration have to come together by providing a single place where work is performed.
• Integration of socialized processes. Dreamforce and the vision proposed by Salesforce are here to show that you can do much better than creating a myriad of siloed socialized processes. By providing a set of common services (collaboration to be used for evolving traditional applications, unified management of identities, a mechanism for integrated social and transactional business intelligence, activity streams as a layer to collect updates from every disparate system and makes them the social object of collaboration throughout the enterprise
• Blindly introducing additional communities and social networks within your company is not sufficient to increase social business maturity.

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

• Devenez un manager “bricoleur”

  “« En France, “la débrouille”, le fait de “faire avec” sont encore considérés comme des moments ponctuels, des accidents de parcours, qui, s’ils se répètent, risquent de mettre en péril la rigueur et la lisibilité du système. » Cette notion fait pourtant référence à des compétences fondamentalement positives dans les pays anglo-saxons, dans des domaines aussi variés que l’innovation, l’entrepreneuriat, des systèmes d’information… Le manager bricoleur est donc un profil précieux pour une entreprise,”

  tags: management makeshift connectivity creativity skills responsiveness versatility adaptability recognition reward resilience crisis

  • Le manager bricoleur est notamment capable d’associer les personnes en reconnaissant leur polyvalence, et ce pour un travail pour lequel elles n’ont pas forcément été embauchées
  • Il mêle ainsi la proximité (entretenir un rapport de familiarité avec son environnement), la connectivité (être capable d’associer telles et telles ressources), et la créativité (trouver des rapprochements ingénieux, imaginer des utilisations détournées).
  • Le chef d’entreprise bricoleur pourra par exemple mêler les connaissances de deux domaines visiblement distincts, ou encore assembler des équipes aux compétences hétéroclites pour lancer une nouvelle activité sans avoir nécessairement de plans clairs en tête, mais en privilégiant l’expérimentation par la pratique.
  • Dans une telle situation, le manager bricoleur développe une capacité de résilience, car il s’appuie sur un réseau d’individus et de ressources qu’il connaît très bien, lui donnant ainsi la confiance nécessaire à la réalisation de ses missions.
  • Ce bricolage permet également d’enrichir des rapports entre les équipes, souvent distendus dans les périodes difficiles.
  • Un manager bricoleur est une personne capable de faire beaucoup avec peu. Elle saura être polyvalente, souple, réactive, arranger et ajuster les choses avec peu de moyens. Bref, des talents utiles en temps de crise.

• Charte des médias sociaux en entreprise : l’oeil de l’avocat

  tags: legal socialmedia guidelines liability privacy privatelife CNIL unions IRP

• Darwin au secours du management

  “Pascal Picq, paléoanthropologue, a attiré l’attention de patrons, il y a une quinzaine d’années, alors qu’il intervenait à la radio pour parler d’adaptation -un maître mot en management. Aujourd’hui, le regard critique que jette ce maître de conférences au Collège de France sur l’univers de l’entreprise laisse à penser que la théorie de l’évolution (celle du changement, fondée sur des observations et des lois naturelles) pourrait éclairer d’un jour nouveau la sphère microéconomique. “

  tags: management adaptability PascalPicq failure darwinism reasoning innovation

  • l’entreprise, en France et en Europe continentale, s’est développée selon une conception typiquement lamarckienne. Autrement dit, selon un schéma vertical de croissance continue, d’amélioration des filières existantes, par secteur et sur la base d’une disponibilité sans limite des matières premières.
  • <!—-><!–I–>Le système de développement -mis en oeuvre par des ingénieurs aux raisonnements bien carrés (avec de grandes réussites à la clef, comme Airbus, le nucléaire, les télécommunications, etc.) -est aujourd’hui à bout de souffle depuis que le monde est passé d’une économie de « produits » à une autre, de « concepts ».
  • Ce qui s’inscrit dans le cadre d’une philosophie -darwinienne cette fois -d’adaptation au changement et sous-entend la mobilisation de tous les mécanismes de l’innovation,
  • Or, le darwinisme -mal compris et trop souvent caricaturé -n’est pas la loi du plus fort. C’est une philosophie de chercheur qui autorise l’essai et l’erreur et favorise l’innovation et de la diversité
  • l’essentiel du problème tournerait autour de ces « équipes gagnantes d’hier -celles précisément de tous ces anciens étudiants techniquement bien formés<!—-><!–I–> (d’où l’excellente productivité française, NDLR) – q<!—-><!–I–>  ui resteraient parées de la certitude objective de leur domination
  • Or, l’impératif pour réussir demain est de transformer les contraintes en sources d’innovation et surtout de désapprendre d’urgence les bonnes recettes du passé.

• Education et nouvelles technologies : y croire ou ne pas y croire ?

  “Matt Richtel a continué son enquête pour le New York Times sur le “pari éducatif high-tech”. Comme le montrait déjà le début de son enquête, ses derniers articles dessinent un fossé, une coupure assez radicale, entre ceux qui croient dans les vertus des technologies pour l’éducation et ceux qui n’y croient pas”

  tags: education technology cognitivetutor

  • Les logiciels éducatifs sont à l’éducation ce que les logiciels d’entraînement cérébral sont à la cognition : un vaste marché dont les fondements ne reposent sur aucun résultat démontré.
  • À Augusta, Shelly Allen a déclaré que son district n’a pas les moyens d’étudier l’efficacité formelle du Cognitive Tutor. Mais les professeurs qui l’utilisent ont vu que des élèves médiocres étaient en mesure de rejoindre des classes ordinaires
  • “L’enseignement est une expérience humaine” rappelle-t-il. “La technologie est une source de distraction quand nous avons besoin d’apprendre à écrire, à compter, à lire et à penser”.
  • “La technologie nous a aidés à apprendre, mais ce n’était pas le moyen de l’apprentissage. (…) Et puisque l’éducation des enfants consiste essentiellement à inculquer des valeurs et des habitudes, elle est peut-être la dernière zone à pouvoir bénéficier de la technologie.”

• Revolution in work within next decade?

  “Alison Maitland, a Senior Visiting Fellow at Cass Business School says that a revolution in work that will see many employees decide when, where and how they do their jobs could be as little as a decade away. “

  tags: work humanresources productivity flexibility ROWE workingenvironment workhours management leadership casestudies GAP

  • The book comes off the back of overwhelming evidence that employees are more productive if they have greater autonomy over where, when and how they work
  • This could see the traditional 9-5 working day disappear and be replaced with a model that rewards people by performance and results, rather than hours worked and presence in the office.
  • The first is that it requires leadership from the top of the organisation. You also need to treat it as a business strategy. Then you have to measure people on performance and output.
  • People are held accountable for what they achieve rather than how much time they spend on a project or where they work
  • A study of 24,000 IBM staff worldwide found that those with flexible working could work an extra 19 hours a week before experiencing the same levels of stress and health issues as those without it.
  • n the Netherlands, Microsoft has designed its building near Schiphol airport for a world in which work is independent of time and location. It’s primarily made up of different spaces for meeting, with just a few stations for concentrated work.

• Concentrez-vous !

  “Le “syndrome de déconcentration”, mal du XXIe siècle ? La multiplication des chaînes télévisées a habitué notre cerveau au zapping. Depuis, notre environnement quotidien est en ébullition. Internet et les e-mails, les téléphones portables puis les smartphones et les tablettes tactiles, sans compter les tweets, nous ont rendus peu à peu multitâches, surstimulés mais pas si fiers de l’être. “

  tags: interruption multitasking email gtd infobesity attention

  • J’ai 4 000 e-mails dans ma boîte. Certaines personnes m’en envoient alors qu’elles sont à 5 mètres, déplore David, qui travaille dans l’automobile. Je butine d’un sujet à l’autre et sous prétexte de partager un même espace, mes collègues m’interrompent sans cesse.
  • près de six salariés sur dix consacrent deux heures par jour à gérer leurs boîtes mail ; quatre sur dix reçoivent plus de 100 messages par jour ; près de sept sur dix disent vérifier leur messagerie toutes les heures mais le font toutes les cinq minutes ; 64 secondes sont nécessaires pour reprendre le fil de sa pensée après l’interruption par un message. Enfin, sept managers sur dix déclarent souffrir de surcharge informationnelle.
  • Disons que les jeunes peuvent plus aisément switcher, répond ce scientifique. Leur plasticité cérébrale leur permet de passer facilement d’un acte à un autre, en utilisant leurs cinq sens.”
  • “Nous possédons de plus en plus de canaux par lesquels des interruptions peuvent arriver. Les périodes de calme, de lenteur et de continuité se fractionnent”
  • Nous surstimulons ainsi notre attention dite réactionnelle, et atrophions notre capacité attentionnelle endogène, plus posée, nécessaire à la réflexion”,

• Economists See More Jobs for Machines, Not People

  “A faltering economy explains much of the job shortage in America, but advancing technology has sharply magnified the effect, more so than is generally understood, according to two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “

  tags: machines jobs skills employment unemployment computers Automation creativity

  • The authors are not the only ones recently to point to the job fallout from technology. In the current issue of the McKinsey Quarterly, W. Brian Arthur, an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, warns that technology is quickly taking over service jobs, following the waves of automation of farm and factory work.
  • John Maynard Keynes warned of a “new disease” that he termed “technological unemployment,” the inability of the economy to create new jobs faster than jobs were lost to automation.
  • Faster, cheaper computers and increasingly clever software, the authors say, are giving machines capabilities that were once thought to be distinctively human, like understanding speech, translating from one language to another and recognizing patterns
  • Productivity growth in the last decade, at more than 2.5 percent, they observe, is higher than the 1970s, 1980s and even edges out the 1990s. Still the economy, they write, did not add to its total job count,
  • Yet computers, the authors say, tend to be narrow and literal-minded, good at assigned tasks but at a loss when a solution requires intuition and creativity — human traits. A partnership, they assert, is the path to job creation in the future.
  • “the key to winning the race is not to compete against machines but to compete with machines.”

• Social Mythbusters

  tags: email sociabusiness enterprise2.0 pilot culture adoption

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

• Un peu plus détails sur Oracle Social Network

  “Le réseau social à la mode Oracle se dévoile un peu plus. Interopérabilité avec Fusion et d’autres applications, cloud et sur site, voici quelques éléments sur Oracle Social Network.”

  tags: Oracle OracleSocialNetwork enterprisesocialsoftware

  • es entreprises utilisent des outils de collaboration aujourd’hui de manière très cloisonnée ». Par exemple, une conversation peut débuter en messagrie instantanée et peut ensuite continuer en répondant à un mail ou être redirigée vers un document stocké dans un autre système.
  • « Il va être extrêmement difficile chronologiquement de comprendre comment une décision a été prise ou de partager le processus de prise de décision avec les autres» souligne le responsable et d’ajouter « OSN résout le problème en réunissant des communications en temps réel, le partage de contenu, l’intégration avec les autres applications d’entreprise, les flux d’activités et des outils de recherche
  • Petit bémol, OSN sera compatible uniquement avec les bases de données Oracle.

• Les réseaux sociaux : des outils d’évaluation des compétences

  “Un quart des cadres sondés par L’Atelier BNP Paribas seraient favorables à une évaluation de leurs compétences via les réseaux sociaux. La démarche permettrait d’évaluer des compétences que les cadres jugent insuffisamment prises en compte, du relationnel à l’animation ou encore l’implication dans la vie de l’entreprise. Une (r-)évolution, qui n’est certes pas imminente, mais certaine d’après les experts de L’Atelier.”

  tags: hr hr2.0 evaluation appraisals performancereview performanceappraisal socialnetworks enterprisesocialnetworks communication skills

  •  

      Une large proportion de cadres estime que certaines compétences ne sont pas prises en compte dans l’évaluation par l’entreprise : 29% font référence aux compétences relationnelles, 43% à la capacité à participer ou animer des communautés autour de leur domaine d’expertise et 45% à la capacité à participer à la vie de l’entreprise

  • Toutes les entreprises ont un site ; elles deviennent des media. Et les cadres jouent un rôle dans la chaîne de production media de l’entreprise, alors qu’ils ne sont pas des professionnels de la communication. De facto, ils participent à l’effort de communication de l’entreprise ».
  • les cadres sont 61% à se déclarer favorables à ce que leurs compétences soient jugées en fonction de ce qu’ils publient.
  • En revanche, 74% se déclarent défavorables à ce que soit évaluée leur capacité à s’exprimer sur les réseaux sociaux, professionnels ou grand publ
  • Même si le « participatif », qui englobe alors les compétences citées plus haut (relationnel, implication dans la vie de l’entreprise et animation de groupe d’expertise), n’est pas considéré comme un champ d’évaluation par les équipes RH, il existe bel et bien.
  • Pour une évaluation juste, il faut des standards, qui seront, d’après le DG de L’Atelier, imposés par Internet. « Internet a d’abord connecté des machines, dit-il. Puis le web a connecté des documents, et le web 2.0 des personnes. On peut imaginer que l’on tend vers le scoring de personnes. »

• Was Steve Jobs a Good Decision Maker?

  If you judge only by the product outcomes or by Apple’s market value, Jobs seems the best decision-maker in the history of consumer products.

  But of course, like every other human, his decisions weren’t all great.

  tags: stevejobs decisions decisionmaking hierarchy ideas taste guts problemsolving

  • What I do all day is meet with teams of people and work on ideas and solve problems to make new products, to make new marketing programs, whatever it is.
  • If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions and you have to, you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win, otherwise good people don’t stay.
  • If you’re the co-founder of a successful organization and your gut is as refined as Jobs’, you should use it often to make decisions. I’m guessing that combination is unlikely, so you might want to employ other decision methods.

• We’re looking at it all wrong: the intangible information gap

  “I have been really heartened to see more attention to the way that the intangible information gap skews investors’ understanding of what’s really going on in today’s knowledge-driven companies. This latest article comes on the heels of a Reuters piece last month calling for getting intangibles on the balance sheet.”

  tags: balancesheet accounting intangible intangibleassets accumulation

  • He responded by stating that our current accounting system doesn’t value “intangible capital accumulation” appropriately
  • Most certainly, intangible capital accumulations are “expensed,” not capitalized. Such accumulations increase productivity, foster more efficiency, and drive better financial money flows than are currently measured
  • Manifestly, if you are not measuring a company’s accumulation of “intangible capital” correctly, you are undervaluing corporate America
  • What Steve calls intangible capital accumulation, we call i-capex or intangible capital expenditure. That’s what it really is: investment in the infrastructure upon which the future earnings of a company will be produced. There’s nothing really intangible about it. It’s not bricks and mortar but it’s truly infrastructure.
  • We know that 80% of the value of the average company today is not represented on its balance sheet. 

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

• Lean and social

  “The concept of waste has lately been transferred from manufacturing to other practices such as product development. According to lean principles, when a development project is started, the goal is to complete it as rapidly as possible. In a sense, ongoing development projects are just like inventory sitting around in a factory. Design and prototypes are only valuable when (paying) customers are involved.”

  tags: LEAN waste processes customer customerinvolvement communication networks agility agilebusiness unpredictability conversations dynamicprocesses dynamicbusiness

  • People are used to lean thinking when it comes to technology and processes but it is still very rare to look at taking waste out of communication. Many managers still trivialize the power of conversation. They think that social interaction issues are soft compared to the hard issues of technology and process.
  • We still don’t understand that work is communication: we live and work in a network of conversations. Being lean means understanding that conversations are never neutral. They always affect the quality and pace of the outcome. Communication either accelerates or slows down. Communication either creates value or creates waste. Communication can create energy and inspiration or take energy away and reduce inspiration.
  • Many managers possess the skills that meet the challenges of static conditions. Those conditions are based on predictability and systems thinking, meaning that the crucial variables are known in advance. The main risk factor is then the accuracy of the predictions.

  • In dynamic business conditions the management practices described above are not only unhelpful but cause damage and create waste rather than value.

     

    If you cannot predict you have to invest in real-time learning and iterations instead of more predictions.

  • Success is based on speed of learning and responsiveness. Responsiveness is not possible if you are many handshakes away from the things that you should respond to. Learning is then based, not on teaching materials, but on conversations linking interdependent people.
  • We need to embrace change, unpredictability and complexity as inescapable constants in all product development. It is about being lean and social!

• The Five Key Trends of Enterprise 2.0 (Emergent Collaboration)

  Chess Media Group recently released “The State of Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration” report which collected survey responses from 234 executives and decision makers implementing these collaborative solutions in their workplace. The report covers things such as business drivers, ROI, types of tools that are being used, how budgets are being allocated, and how strategies are being developed. The report is completely free to download”

  tags: enterprise2.0 socialbusiness collaboration survey report strategy IT ROI value problemsolving measurement

  • Business managers and IT managers are beginning to work more closely together to co-own and co-sponsor emergent collaboration initiatives.
  • There is not a strong enough focus on developing an enterprise strategy before deploying a technology platform.
  •  However, most companies are not defining performance indicators to measure any type of success or progress.  Those that are defining them do not actually have a tracking or measurement system in place.  Without having a process evaluate results, it is impossible to see any type of tangible or intangible value or business benefit.
  • Solving a business problem or achieving an objective is just as good as being able to show a financial ROI.
  • A combination of both a structured and unstructured approach is the most successful and commonly used approach by organizations.

• Sondage L’Atelier – Ifop : les nouvelles formes d’engagement des salariés

  tags: survey engagement motivation

• Socialtext Continues its Focus on Workplace Integration

  “I have admired the capabilities within Socialtext for some time. It was one of the early enterprise 2.0 providers, well before the term was coined. They began with a wiki base and have added capability over time to build a comprehensive platform. A couple of years ago they added Socialtext Signals, one of the first enterprise micro-blogging tools. A wrote about them a year ago on this blog (see Socialtext Adds Micro-messaging and Goes Mobile). Recently, I spoke with their CEO, Eugene Lee, on their latest offerings.”

  tags: enterprisesocialsoftware socialtext socialsoftware enterprise2.0 socialbusiness integration CRM businessapplications process

  • The platforms that Socialtext can easily integrate with include SharePoint and Salesforce.com. These are good choices. In my view SharePoint, and other document management systems, should be treated like other enterprise applications of record in the same way as an ERP or CRM system is being treated. Socialtext can then help increase engagement with these systems
  • Now you can bring issues form the CRM tool into Socialtext to generate more engagement and more focus
  • I really like their focus on integration and their emphasis on connecting with work processes. It is great to see Socialtext continue to evolve in the right directions.

• In The Next Version – Jive World 2011 Recap

  “The Jive Apps ecosystem is win-win-win for Jive, their customers and business partners
  Jive will be offering a new Jive Cloud deployment model
  Lots of free things for Jive 5 customers, including Analytics Dashboard, the Jive Social Media Engagement application and 100 licenses of Jive for Outlook
  Lots of cool stuff on the future roadmap”

  tags: jive jiveworld2011 socialsoftware enterprisesocialsoftware

  • Tony announced a modification to Jive’s previous slogan of “The New Way To Work”, updating it to “The Only Way To Work”. He also introduce “Me to the power of We”, at which point I had enough of heard marketing slogans! My cynicism aside, the core of his talk was about the billions of dollars enterprises have spent over the last few decades creating silos of ERP, HCM, CRM, ECM (and other alphabet soup) systems, and how now is the time to transform those systems into ones where people are now the most important asset
  • Jive for Outlook brings social features to the tools that many people already use for work
  • external communities can authenticate with Jive using OAuth, providing a seamless experience.
  • Jive profiles will be able to pull in information from LinkedIn
  • Custom Streams: People will be able to create custom streams based on content, roles, tags and more, then share those streams with colleagues.
  • Free Analytics Dashboard: Jive’s acquisition of Proximal Labs provided them with an advanced analytics platform for monitoring the usage and interaction of people and pages inside Jive
  • Multi-communities: These will allow you to invite external people into your internal instances. They see a slimmed down UI that only shows the parts of the community that they have access to.
  • For the second key theme, “Turn Social Capital into business value”, David Gutelius (Chief Social Scientist) discussed how the combination of data + context = intelligence. For example, different people searching for the same term should not get back the same results. Instead, the person’s role, expertise and social graph should all factor into the information that is returned to them. David concluded by explaining that the future is not just about improving search, but instead improving ways that the system will know who/what to show you, even without you having to look for it.

• Workshop content: Creating results using social media – the HR perspective

  “Tomorrow is the Australian Human Resources Institute HR Technology conference. I will be MC for the conference day, and will also run a half-day workshop on Creating Results Using Social Media on the following day.

  I thought I would share the visual content we will be using during the workshop. As usual, the slides are not intended to be useful by themselves, but to provide supporting content for the activities and discussions of the session. “

  tags: humanresources humanresources2.0 socialmedia learning engagement presentation

• Aligning CEO Incentives with a Company’s Long-Term Agenda

  “Incentive programs are ubiquitous in corporations, but there are serious flaws in how they have been implemented, particularly for executives. For an incentive system to usefully support a firm’s long-term, society-focused agenda, companies need to lessen their reliance on financial rewards to motivate top management, strengthen share-ownership requirements and stock-vesting conditions for senior executives and board members, and change CEOs’ perception of compensation as a tool to “keep score” vis-à-vis their peers and bolster their own egos.”

  tags: incentives CEO longterm rewards

  • Given the limited effectiveness of economic incentives in bringing about desired behaviors, it goes without saying that all companies — but particularly those committed to creating value for society — should avoid focusing inordinately on monetary rewards to motivate their executives.
  • he also relied on “pride and recognition that come from being a good citizen and living up to the values of society” to drive the right behaviors. In fact, he emphasized that he didn’t want “pay to disturb motivation.”
  • To keep executives focused on long-term outcomes, some compensation committee chairmen and CEOs recommend that top executives be required to retain all shares purchased or awarded to them (except for the proportion needed to be sold to meet tax obligations arising from the shares’ vesting) until several years after their departure or retirement from the firm
  • CEOs who are sincere about putting their companies on a path to maximize value for society should measure their achievements through impact in that arena rather than through quantum of pay.

• Why You Should Question Your Culture

  Organizational culture powerfully influences a company’s performance — or at least we say so. I often hear executives reassure me that projects will get done because “we have an execution culture,” or that customers will be well taken care of because “we have a culture where the customer comes first.” At the same time, culture is also one of the great rationalizations for managerial shortcomings. Many times I’ve heard that a project was delayed because “we don’t make quick decisions around here,” which is the managerial equivalent of “the dog ate my homework.”

  tags: management culture rewards incentives informationsharing risk riskmanagement

  • Organizational culture powerfully influences a company’s performance — or at least we say so. I often hear executives reassure me that projects will get done because “we have an execution culture,” or that customers will be well taken care of because “we have a culture where the customer comes first.” At the same time, culture is also one of the great rationalizations for managerial shortcomings. Many times I’ve heard that a project was delayed because “we don’t make quick decisions around here,” which is the managerial equivalent of “the dog ate my homework.”
  • Any management team can assess its culture by asking these kinds of simple questions across a range of organizational behaviors. For example: To what extent do we reward individual vs. team results? To what extent do we share information broadly or parcel it out narrowly? To what extent do we encourage or discourage risk?

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

• The second economy

  “Digitization is creating a second economy that’s vast, automatic, and invisible—thereby bringing the biggest change since the Industrial Revolution.”

  tags: economy digitization neuralnetworks neuralsystem growth productivity networkedconomy

  • So we can say that another economy—a second economy—of all of these digitized business processes conversing, executing, and triggering further actions is silently forming alongside the physical economy.
  • If I were to look for adjectives to describe this second economy, I’d say it is vast, silent, connected, unseen, and autonomous (meaning that human beings may design it but are not directly involved in running it). It is remotely executing and global, always on, and endlessly configurable. It is concurrent—a great computer expression—which means that everything happens in parallel. It is self-configuring, meaning it constantly reconfigures itself on the fly, and increasingly it is also self-organizing, self-architecting, and self-healing.
  • Recall that in the digital conversations I was describing, something that occurs in the physical economy is sensed by the second economy—which then gives back an appropriate response
  • The second economy constitutes a neural layer for the physical economy
  • Productivity increasing, say, at 2.4 percent in a given year means either that the same number of people can produce 2.4 percent more output or that we can get the same output with 2.4 percent fewer people. Both of these are happening.
  • Physical jobs are disappearing into the second economy, and I believe this effect is dwarfing the much more publicized effect of jobs disappearing to places like India and China.
  • where there’s a need for human judgment and human interaction, we still have that. But the primary cause of all of the downsizing we’ve had since the mid-1990s is that a lot of human jobs are disappearing into the second economy. Not to reappear.
  • The second economy will certainly be the engine of growth and the provider of prosperity for the rest of this century and beyond, but it may not provide jobs, so there may be prosperity without full access for many. This suggests to me that the main challenge of the economy is shifting from producing prosperity to distributing prosperity.
  • With this digital transformation, this last repository of jobs is shrinking—fewer of us in the future may have white-collar business process jobs—and we face a problem.

  •  

     This second economy that is silently forming—vast, interconnected, and extraordinarily productive—is creating for us a new economic world. How we will fare in this world, how we will adapt to it, how we will profit from it and share its benefits, is very much up to us

• “Les réseaux sociaux d’entreprise sont un levier pour la DSI orientée services”

  “Comment gérer la mutation d’une DSI vers une organisation IT orientée services ? En amont de la Conférence 2011 de l’itSMF France qui a lieu le 29 novembre à Paris, voici quelques pistes de réponses. “

  tags: IT ITdepartment CIO SOO serviceorientedITgovernance enterprisesocialnetworks

  • ette mutation implique aussi de mettre en place une nouvelle gouvernance. La DSI doit en effet se restructurer pour fournir des services à l’utilisateur.
  • D’où l’importance de créer des communautés de pratiques, pas seulement technologiques mais aussi managériales et métiers. Cela passe notamment par la mise en place de réseaux sociaux d’entreprise transverses aux organisations, en rupture avec les structures pyramidales traditionnelles.
  • Plus globalement, le passage vers une organisation IT orientée services nécessite des compétences qui vont bien au-delà de celles de la DSI historique.
  • Elle doit s’ouvrir sur beaucoup d’autres compétences que l’ingénierie. On le voit aussi autour des débats sur le marketing de la DSI qui est également un axe important pour une DSI orientée services.
  • Au final, l’idée est d’aboutir à un processus industriel de création de composants fonctionnels, qui puissent être intégrés au catalogue de services IT de l’entreprise. Des composants qui pourront ensuite être assemblés pour concevoir un processus métier ou une application plus complexe,

• Oracle Social Network announced

  “During his keynote presentation today, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced Oracle Social Network, an enterprise collaboration and social networking tool for business.”

  tags: socialsoftware enterprisesocialsoftware socialnetwork Oracle OracleSocialNetwork collaboration sales marketing hr

  • Oracle Social Network is seamlessly integrated with Oracle Fusion Applications, business intelligence, and business processes allowing users to receive real-time information feeds from these systems and to collaborate and resolve business issues quickly and effectively, including updating applications and business processes from the Oracle Social Network.
  • Oracle Social Network helps salespeople to identify potential prospects, build effective teams, prepare convincing sales presentations, resolve issues with customer service and contracts, collaborate with partners on joint opportunities, and build lasting relationships with customers.
  • Oracle Social Network helps marketing teams to design more creative marketing campaigns, target the right customers and partners, and collaborate with sales teams to generate the highest quality leads.
  • Oracle Social Network helps human resources professionals and managers to collaborate on workforce planning and staffing, build effective compensation and benefits programs, set goals and objectives, and drive more effective talent management processes.
  • Oracle Social Network can be used by project managers and project teams to build effective project plans, collaborate on project tasks, resolve issues and change requests, and track and update project milestones.

• Ne vous méprenez pas sur le social business. Pas plus que sur l’entreprise 2.0

  “Le social business ne concerne ni la technologie ni la culture d’entreprise. Il s’agit plutôt d’un changement socio-politique historique plus dense, plus large et bien plus fascinant.

  Notre vision de la société, de la politique, des relations humaines, de la science, des gouvernements ainsi que des affaires change sont en train de changer. De nouvelles approches font surface. L’apprentissage et l’expression individuelle sont en plein boom. Les valeurs évoluent. Le leadership et l’économie également. Le changement lui-même se transforme : il s’accélère et devient la norme.”

  tags: socialbusiness enterprise2.0 culrure technologie commandandcontrol complexity management hierarchy

  • Par le passé la valeur entrepreneuriale venait du contrôle foncier, des ressources et des propriétés intellectuelles (procédés, technologies et brevets). Qu’est-ce qu’un social business ? Sa valeur se crée autour du cœur et de l’esprit des personnes qui y travaillent et des personnes qui achètent. La priorité qui prévaut n’est pas la structure ni les procédés mais plutôt l’approche qui lie les cœurs et les esprits.
  • Si l’idée derrière la Révolution industrielle était que tout rôle, tout procédé, toute activité était bien défini et contrôlé par l’encadrement d’une entreprise, le social business concentre l’employé et le client sur un objectif commun.
  • Dans ces nouvelles organisations que sont les réseaux de gens compétents possédant de grands outils de communication, le leadership apparaît comme plus important que la structure hiérarchique
  • La hiérarchie, les procédés et l’automatisation reprennent leur fonction initiale : comme des outils qui servent l’efficacité et les aptitudes humaines. Plutôt que le modèle du 20^ème siècle dans lequel les individus existent afin de faire tourner les procédés, nous sommes maintenant dans un système où les procédés nous soutiennent.
  • Pour réaliser convenablement une tâche, les gens doivent constamment scruter leur environnement, comprendre et inventer des solutions à des problèmes donnés. Le fonctionnement du Command and Control ne constitue pas la meilleure stratégie d’encouragement, surtout si la société se développe.
  • Votre équipe n’est pas efficace si elle n’est pas respectée et votre marché fera montre de plus de méfiance s’il se sent manipulé, amadoué ou lésé.
  • Un social business reconnaît que sa mission est le point de rencontre entre les sensibilités et l’esprit pour atteindre l’excellence. Le social business a pour politique de respecter les individus.
  • Le siècle des Lumières s’est caractérisé par une élite intellectuelle qui a saisi l’opportunité de façonner un monde meilleur. Cette période nous a donné les outils pour explorer le monde une nouvelle fois d’un point de vue rationnel et réductionniste en faisant appel à des principes scientifiques – les conséquences prévisibles de toute action – pour tout transformer, de la navigation à la technologie, en passant par la société elle-même.
  • Les Lumières version 2.0, dont nous pourrions dire que nous baignons dedans en ce moment-même, a été catalysé par la mécanique quantique (tu ne peux pas être une je-sais-tout, petite) et la théorie de la complexité ; les technologies des médias sociaux nous amène de l’âge de raison à l’âge de – l’émergence (?!?) – où nous allons commencer à comprendre que tant que nous ne pouvons pas prédire ou contrôler ce qui va se produire, nous pouvons tout de même naviguer dedans.
  • . Il est désormais possible de prendre un peu de recul et de réévaluer le rôle de la complexité humaine au sein de la société. Les Lumières 2.0 a pour conséquence l’Entreprise 2.0 qui accepte l’idée de la complexité et du comportement humains.

• Steve’s Seven Insights for 21st Century Capitalists

  “I looked through this excellent compendium of Jobs quotes and found seven lessons for people and companies looking to succeed as 21st century capitalists.”

  tags: capitalism finance CEO strategy vision

  • do you really want to spend your days slaving over work that fails to inspire, on stuff that fail to count, for reasons that fail to touch the soul of anyone
  • Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works.”
  • If your goal is rising head and shoulders above this twisting mass of mediocrity, then it’s not enough, anymore, to tack on another 99 features every month and call it “innovation.” Just do great work.
  • Great work doesn’t just require legions of beancounters, or armies of willing muscle — it requires the capacity to make cultural judgments: in a word, taste.
  • Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do
  • The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.”
  • it built an enterprise so solidly managed financially it might as well have been a fortress. Steve wasn’t in it to win the alarms-blaring jackpot — his goal was to create stuff that endured.
  • Steve’s goal in paying obsessive attention to all things Apple wasn’t merely to “listen” but to discern people’s wildest expectations, and then firmly take a quantum leap past them, instead of merely discovering the lowest-common-denominator of what people wanted most today, and then pandering to it

• MediasSociaux.fr > De l’urgence d’intégrer la sphère sociale dans votre relation clients

  tags: socialcrm crm martketing customerservice communication

  • les utilisateurs publient moins et se contentent de partager. De ce fait, les interactions sociales se concentrent sur les contenus les plus intéressants
  • la bataille de l’attention sur les médias sociaux est quasiment perdue d’avance
  • La manoeuvre de repli va alors être de jouer la transparence et la proximité, et sur ce point-là, les services marketing et communication ne sont pas forcément les mieux placés
  • Le Social CRM est une démarche qui vise à attendre la portée du CRM traditionnel pour s’intéresser aux conversations et interactions entre les internautes et la marque. L’objectif de cette démarche est d’interagir avec les clients et prospects et non les contrôler, d’établir une relation de confiance« .
  • • L’acquisition se fait au travers de contenus
    • La satisfaction est assurée par les réponses faites aux internautes
    • La fidélisation se fait au travers des discussions avec la communauté
  • 
  • Les moyens sont différents, mais les fonctions sont les mêmes.
  • les équipes du service client n’ont peut-être pas la même aisance sur les médias sociaux que les équipes marketing, par contre elles savent gérer de l’insatisfaction auprès des clients puisqu’elles le font au quotidien
  • mais dans la réalité, cette maturation est complexe à mettre en oeuvre, car il y a de gros enjeux internes (des transformations qui vont impacter les budgets et responsabilités), et car les plateformes techniques sont lourdes à bouger
  • De l’urgence d’intégrer la sphère sociale dans votre relation clients” href=”http://www.diigo.com/item/image/331x/y6gn”> De l’urgence d’intégrer la sphère sociale dans votre relation clients” />
  • Certes, cette vision idyllique est plus facile à décrire qu’à mettre en oeuvre, mais elle représente la vision-cible que les entreprises doivent avoir en ligne de mire.

• La fonction RH: appréhender la complexité du facteur humain

  “La fonction RH serait pervertie, au nom de la rentabilité elle aurait trahi ce dont elle porte le nom : l’humain. On risquerait bien des désillusions à s’y engager. Pourtant, aux jeunes qui s’engagent dans ce domaine, sept DRH rappellent que sans goût de l’humain il est préférable de choisir une autre voie. Et si le principal malentendu venait de l’idée que l’on se fait de l’humain ? “

  tags: humanresources humanresources2.0 administration

  • Ils étaient, comme les jeunes diplômés d’aujourd’hui, motivés par le contact humain. Or, « l’aspect le plus sous estimé par ces jeunes est la complexité de la relation humaine
  • Ce serait oublier qu’un DRH est le garant de l’application des textes et que la qualité du climat social passe aussi par leur respect.
  • « Un DRH doit s’occuper des textes autant que de l’humain, les textes s’imposent à nous et il est impossible d’y déroger
  • Pour Jean-Michel Bonavita, l’inflation normative est la plus grosse difficulté actuelle
  • Selon Jacques Froissant, les formations RH préparent bien aux aspects techniques classiques, peu à l’innovation permanente (l’informatique, les RH 2.0) et encore moins au management.

• CEOs Need Courage

  “Some years ago, the then-CEO of Air Products told me that it took his team two months to decide and plan layoffs, two weeks to do them, and two years to recover. When I asked why the company had done something that caused so much damage, the reply was that it was expected by Wall Street and his CEO peers. “

  tags: CEO courage management stocks longterm

  • As these examples illustrate, CEOs not only need a new set of beliefs, they need the courage of their convictions to act on those beliefs.
  • As former Procter & Gamble CEO A. G. Lafley has noted, the best time to gain market share is when your competitors are in retreat. And, as common sense suggests, if you want to earn exceptional returns, you can’t simply copy what everyone else is doing.
  • The best companies and the best leaders understand the real drivers of business success: a long-term perspective which focuses on customer and employee relationships as the sources of competitive advantage and an emphasis on values and ethics as guides to decision making
  • What separates these CEOs from the pack is not just a more sophisticated and empirically accurate understanding of individual behavior and the sources of organizational success but also the courage to implement these insights even when, or particularly when, they seem to defy conventional wisdom.

• How To Make Companies Think Long-Term

  “In my latest book, Fixing the Game: Bubbles, Crashes, and What Capitalism can Learn from the NFL, I wrote about the negative impact of executive stock-based compensation on corporate short-termism. Eliminating stock-based compensation would help reduce the incentive for executive leadership to focus on the short term. But there is a residual problem which has long frustrated me. The answer finally popped into my brain (funny how that works). As usual, the solution won’t be easy to pull off (but that has never stopped me).”

  tags: shortterm longterm compensation stocks

  • Worried that short-term-oriented arbitrageurs will put their company in play and short-term-oriented shareholders will gain majority or effective control of the company, ending their ability to steer the long-term trajectory of the company, they focus on making short-term decisions to protect their positions. The paradoxical result is that they never get around to taking those long-term-oriented decisions.
  • It follows that companies should value shareholders relative to both the volume of shares they hold and the length of time they have held their shares.
  • In order for the takeover to succeed, the longer-term shareholders would have to see the takeover being in their interest too.
  • This would enable the company management to focus to a great extent on the long term without threat of the short-term investors controlling its destiny. But it still maintains the discipline of long-term investors. If they aren’t satisfied, they can bring more voting power to bear than any risk arbitrageur.
  • A time-based voting system would cumulate the shares from the longest held shares to the shortest and determine the purchase price of the median share.

• TIBCO’s Tibbr: Inching Towards Great.

  “Few organizations providing enterprise social software have a process and integration DNA, as does TIBCO Software. The last of the independents in the enterprise integration game, TIBCO supports some of the most gnarly systems integration efforts at some of the best known organizations in the world. For these reasons, I went to TUCON 2011, TIBCO’s Annual Customer Conference to see what customers have to say about Tibbr, TIBCOs enterprise social software offering.”

  tags: tibbr tibco context collaboration businessprocess businessapplications bi crm socialsoftware enterprisesocialsoftware workflow

  • I’ve been writing about this since 2009 and increasingly, scores of examples exist that show tepid or even failed social/collaboration uptake at large organizations due to the fact that context around collaboration was just not apparent.
  • Tibbr has drawn on its integration heritage to ensure that meaningful events can be drawn in from an organizations BI, CRM and other Business Applications that provide the needed context that often invokes collaboration in the first place
  • TIBCO also has a clear appreciation for how much time the average employee spends in structured work-flow and process activities. By extension, it also aware of the white spaces that exist outside of that workflow, and the daily scramble to find people and information outside of those work-flows to effectively complete the a given business activity.
  • TIBCO just needs to ensure that on the ground, they stay focused on solving business tasks with the careful injection of collaboration where it makes sense.
  • But between product vision and associated product chops at one end, and community uptake at the last mile of execution sits the translation of the business benefit of collaboration that TIBCO needs to communicate and help its customers succeed with
  • Why do I hold TIBCO to a higher standard? Its because I truly believe that the world of integration, as we’ve known it, is going to be turned on its head over the next decade. It’s going to slowly move from today’s hard coded systems integration down in the bowels of the enterprise stack, to also include people integration at the last mile where instead of relying only on IT to perfectly integrate systems, we’re going to find that integrating and connecting people can be a more practical, cost efficient and fluid desig

• All Organizations Are Social, But Few Are Social Organizations

  “News flash: Organizations consist of people. How well an organization works depends on how its people interact and work together. Thus, every organization is “social.” But so what? How do we make use of this universal fact?

  Organizations work top down through social interactions structured around the organization chart, or hierarchy. And they work end to end structured around their business processes. These two dimensions — hierarchy and process — shape the way organizations see the world, its challenges and, more importantly, the portfolio of potential solutions to those challenges. There is nothing wrong with hierarchy or process. They are effective organizational approaches to managing complex operations. “

  tags: organization socialbusiness socialenterprise hierarchy orocess businessprocess collaboration culture commandandcontrol innovation

  • when people get things done by working in the so-called “white space” in the organizational structure, or by working across the “seams” of a business process. In their ways of working and connecting with each other, they do more than just what they are told top-down and more than what is defined as their job. This is the social dimension.
  • Every organization has a social dimension. The challenge is that the social dimension is not accurately reflected in either the organization’s hierarchy or its process flow.
  • But what if leaders could create a future where customers, associates and suppliers are no longer seen as objects in the system but as valued sources of innovation, ideas and energy?
  • Tapping into the collective wisdom of everyone creates a new source of competitive advantage, agility and future innovation.
  • A social organization is one that is able to address significant business challenges and opportunities through creating this “mass collaboration.”

• collaboration-personas-the-9-types-of-collaborators.jpg

  tags: collaboration personas collaborators

• Lyonnaise des Eaux innove en gestion documentaire avec IBM Lotus Domino – YouTube

  tags: casestudies knowledgemanagement knowledgemanagement2.0 documents lyonnaisedeseaux

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

• Serendipity Happens… to Deliver Million$

  “As the world turns… social, expect to be surprised by the fruits of serendipity. When large workforces embrace working socially, or as I love to call it – in “socialworking” mode, they discover new ways of solving problems and creating opportunities. Insights are revealed in the fluid web of connections and sharing. We’ve seen a dramatic mood swing toward all things social this year. Even the naysayers have been touting the benefits of working socially recently.

  I wanted to take the opportunity to highlight just one example of how working in a truly social organization delivers benefits that could never have been predicted in an executive conference room undergoing the scrutiny of a hard-core ROI analysis.”

  tags: socialbusiness enterprise2.0 serendipity casestudies Lowe IBMconnections businessprocess workflow problemsolving

  • Lowe’s on-boarded 100% of its employee base to its collaborative platform, IBM Connections last year.  That’s every executive, store manager, retail clerk, and stock boy on the payroll.  The entire Lowe’s workforce of 289,000 employees have access to Connections
  • fter exhausting other traditional sources, the employee then turned to the Connections platform and asked “out loud”* if anyone knew how she could get more inventory.  Funny thing happened.  Although everyone felt her pain on the inventory shortage, they started replicating her paint mold/tray demo in their stores. And guess what? Suddenly other stores were selling out of the paint trays too.  As interest in the thread and the display idea grew in popularity, sales skyrocketed.
  • When applied on an enterprise level, the unique display idea represented more than a million dollars in additional revenue
  • It was only after she circumvented the traditional sources and leveraged the power of pull within her employee base, did the company realize this unexpected windfall in revenue.   Not because she was able to order more inventory (her original ask), but because she shared her clever merchandising technique with the employee base creating demand for her idea far beyond her single store.
  •  Be sure not to overlook this important upside of working socially.  In other words, “Be careful what you don’t ask for, you just might get it.”

• Selling Is Not About Relationships

  “Ask any sales leader how selling has changed in the past decade, and you’ll hear a lot of answers but only one recurring theme: It’s a lot harder. Yet even in these difficult times, every sales organization has a few stellar performers. Who are these people? How can we bottle their magic?”

  tags: sales problemsolving relationship

  • Relationship Builders focus on developing strong personal and professional relationships and advocates across the customer organization. They are generous with their time, strive to meet customers’ every need, and work hard to resolve tensions in the commercial relationship.
  • • Challengers use their deep understanding of their customers’ business to push their thinking and take control of the sales conversation. They’re not afraid to share even potentially controversial views and are assertive — with both their customers and bosses.
  • We found that Challenger reps dominate the high-performer population, making up close to 40% of star reps in our study.
  • They focus the sales conversation not on features and benefits but on insight, bringing a unique (and typically provocative) perspective on the customer’s business
  • They have a finely tuned sense of individual customer objectives and value drivers and use this knowledge to effectively position their sales pitch to different types of customer stakeholders within the organization.
  • While not aggressive, they are certainly assertive. They are comfortable with tension and are unlikely to acquiesce to every customer demand.
  • At the end of the day, a conversation with a Relationship Builder is probably professional, even enjoyable, but it isn’t as effective because it doesn’t ultimately help customers make progress against their goals.
  • we find that Challengers absolutely dominate as selling gets more complex

• Instead Of Just Eliminating Jobs, Automation Could Usher In A More Fair Economy

  “As robots become smarter, they are replacing more and more jobs. Does that have to mean people are out of work? Or can it mean that people work better and safer? “

  tags: Automation robots jobs value labor production massproduction economy outsourcing

  • The history of our economy is ultimately a history of labor savings. Labor gets displaced from certain markets or sectors and re-distributed to others as innovation makes certain tasks obsolete. This is the march of history, from mechanized looms to mass production and modern automobile manufacturing. So while labor savings can be disruptive, it is also a core engine of technological progress. For those skeptics, the power of robots may well provide a humanizing touch to our economy. We can finally outsource work that doesn’t match our human potential and capabilities.

• Gamification, dashboards, search and enterprise failure

  “I see gamification, dashboards and search as signs of enterprise failure!

  There I said it, humbly.

  They all signify a lack of process frameworks that can run the processes. And just to clarify, industrial processes are not the only processes, all we do is a process as in “steps of activities with a goal”, and that should cover all that we do in organisations, in business, in enterprises. And for a process to happen, for flows to flow, one needs a framework, structured, flexible or manual. Just like water requires a riverbed or a pipeline. But if the framework is manual (bucket passing anyone? Monday morning meetings, budgets and reporting anyone?) then the creative value-creation work will suffer.”

  tags: gamification dashboards search valuecreation process BRP reward

  • The classic intrinsic rewards are “mastery, purpose and autonomy”. Basic, always worked, hugely powerful. But these three intrinsic rewards requires a flow- or process framework that can run the processes in the background, otherwise most of the effort will go into making the flow flow, non-value creation, and that kills all three with a vengeance.
  • And therein lies the issue, if there is no “automatic” process framework – and there is only manual frameworks for knowledge work today; meetings, hierarchies, budgets, reports – then the intrinsic rewards are hard to attain if at all.
  • Hence the claim that the need for extrinsic rewards as per most “gamification” efforts being a clear sign of no proper process framework, and hence of enterprise failure.
  • a dashboard only shows that it’s all manual and time and effort is wasted on making the flow flow. A proper process based system would have one button for the task at hand, and perhaps a few for reports/views and no need for a sorting desk, aka dashboard. A clear sign of lack of process framework and hence enterprise failure.

  • A proper process based system, or process framework would know what your task is and thus know what information to deliver you at the same time so search would be superfluous (not all the time of course, but mostly).

     

    So when I see search then I see a lack of proper process framework again.

• The myth of standardisation

  “After reading the ERP paradox by Kailash Awati, I had that “Oh yes” feeling of recognition: someone was hitting the nail right on the head here.
  Standardisation is a myth, especially when you go global. There are two simple reasons for that: customer demand and business supply”

  tags: standardization customer diversification

  • The answer is easy: the closer we come to the end consumer, the wilder the diversification gets

• Achieving Sustained Cost Reduction

  “When companies go through boom times, they quite naturally take their eyes off costs. But to maintain profits when revenue goes downhill, most CEOs call for cost cutting. The scalpel comes out, and while it’s necessary, it usually comes at a huge cost to employee morale.”

  tags: costs costsavings costreduction costcutting sixsigma businessprocess organization finance

  • Big rounds of layoffs demoralize employees, drive out critical expertise, and put the organization on a downward spiral. Going through the traumatic experience of seeing friends leave and fearing for their jobs, few remaining employees believe their hard work and strong performance will save them.
  • More insidiously, right sizing departmental silos usually doesn’t affect the cost structure permanently. Because the underlying work hasn’t gone away, the fat creeps back. The cost reductions last only until everyone goes back to their old ways in a few years.
  • Companies launch process improvement projects with hard financial targets. These projects get costs out, but a number of people have told me that when the project leaders (“Black Belts”) leave and move on to their next project, the costs creep back. The quoted financial savings from Six Sigma projects, while valid, aren’t having long-term effects on their cost structure.
  • To perennially keep costs down companies need to change the way that work is accomplished — the business processes of the organization. By continually focusing on improving the experiences that customers have with the organization, the quality of offerings, and the time it takes to bring them to market, they will get cost effectiveness as a byproduct
  • The financial spreadsheet has become the focal point of top management’s attention — so much so that CEOs now view the organization almost entirely through the lens of financial (and other) quantities, nearly oblivious to the concrete operations from which the financial results emerge

• The Time for Social Improvisation Is Over

  “An important theme in the articles and blogs I’ve been reading recently is that it’s time for social to grow up and leave childish things behind. Childish things like individual departments within an enterprise improvising ideas for social in an uncoordinated, decentralized fashion, with the nominal center for social (Customer or Public Relations) carrying the can when it all goes wrong.”

  tags: socialbusiness enterprise2.0 strategy silos ROI measurement socialanalytics influence

  •   

    The development of social analytics may not yet be mature, but it’s advanced enough that there’s a new buzzword for it: “socialytics.” The motivating theme across this emerging range of tools is that social should cease being based on intuition and guesswork. It’s possible, instead, to identify vectors of social activity which produce reliable ROI.

  • This is where “socialytics” come in, of course. As a baseline, it’s necessary to conceptualize success in social in more meaningful terms than merely reaching large numbers of customers and potential customers
  • In simple terms, the opinion-makers are the pundits whose voices are heard above the crowd and who have the ability to drive interest and — hopefully — sales. These individuals are desirable as brand advocates or merely as referrers — people who post influential reviews.
  • Many commercial social analytics platforms are now available. Good socialytics should be able to collect relevant data across the full range of social networks.

• Increase Your Company’s Productivity With Social Media

  “A growing number of companies talk about the benefits of adopting web 2.0 tools inside the organization, but the list is short for companies that are using them for increased business results.

  Unisys, the 138-year old tech firm, has quickly made “going social” part of its culture. Here’s how they did it, and how they’re using social media tools to become more agile, to share knowledge, and to increase the speed of innovation.”

  tags: socialbusiness enteprise2.0 productivity casestudies unisys strategy alignment technology pilot governance metrics implementation collaboration expertslocation

  •   

    One of the biggest barriers to social collaboration is a disconnect between aspirations to become collaborative and the reality of being a closed organization. Unisys CEO Ed Coleman addressed this through leading by example

  • Gloria Burke, Director of Knowledge Strategy & Governance, along with co-directors John Knab and Rajiv Prasad, launched Inside Unisys, a social network internal to the firm. Coleman began blogging and soon his senior executives encouraged their teams to do so as well. Employees are automatically alerted to blog postings and microblog postings on the newsfeeds on Inside Unisys. Over time, Unisys sales people began using Inside Unisys to share information about recent wins as well as share lessons in losses.
  • Creating a social knowledge-sharing environment is not the responsibility of one department. “People support what they help to build,” says Burke. “And, once it is built, they have a stake in its success.” She set up an advisory council with senior leaders from across the company — business units, HR, IT, legal, finance, marketing, and more — to create a shared vision on how “going social” would improve employee and organizational productivity.
  • So when Unisys launched “My Site” to allow employees to build their personal credentials and network of colleagues, they built a feature called “Ask Me About” that allows Unisys employees to locate experts across the organization by creating hashtags for their skills and key topics they want to collaborate on with other employees.
  • The key: start with innovators and early adopters and others will follow as they see experience the benefits of using social media in their work.
  • Social media literacy is fast becoming a necessary skill. Knowing what to share and how to share will be a critical skill for the 2020 workplac
  • • Strategy: Be sure there is buy-in and engagement from senior executives who are willing to lead by example.
    • Alignment: Get involvement from stakeholder groups across the company.
    • Technology: Determine the right mix of tools and technologies.
    • Pilot: Identify pilot groups like Unisys did with the sales team.
    • Governance: Establish guidelines for governance.
    • Communications: Develop a communications plan.
    • Metrics: Identify hard business metrics like increasing speed to innovation or speed for winning new business.
    • Implementation: Create process for enterprise wide implementation new skills needed for success like social media literacy.

• CEOs Need a New Set of Beliefs

  “In the past 25 years, CEOs of many major corporations have relied on a flawed set of beliefs to lead their organizations. This set has influenced them to place way too much emphasis on maximizing shareholder value and not enough on generating value for society. Today we are mired in the Great Recession, which was brought about by the near collapse of the financial system. This environment and the behavior produced by the prevailing set of beliefs to which CEOs subscribe have deepened a widespread public distrust of corporations and capitalism.

  In this blog post, I will offer a new set of beliefs, which can renew and restore faith in corporations and capitalism. “

  tags: CEO shareholdervalue value society strategy

  • Shareholders benefit most when CEOs and boards maximize value for society and act as agents of society rather than shareholders.
  • The market favorably receives projects with long-term payoffs, particularly those in research and development.
  • Purpose, meaning, and recognition are more powerful motivators than economic self-interest, and large external rewards can reduce intrinsic motivation.
  • Actions to address societal issues should be an integral part of strategy, and operations and should not be isolated as a separate activity under the heading of corporate social responsibility.

  •  The most successful CEOs, on balance, are those who are developed inside the company but manage to retain an outside perspective

• Social Business Moves to Workflow, Manufacturing, and Money

  “I receive e-mail frequently from PR people promoting the latest IT tools and new Web applications. These days a common thread I see is the addition of social features to software to make it easier for users to share information and collaborate with others. Personally, I believe it’s largely beneficial to 1) find ways to take advantage of the social graphs that users have been building in recent years, and 2) add the techniques and channels of the social world to make traditional software more effective and usable in general.”

  tags: socialbusiness enterprise2.0 socialgraph workflow manufactruing socialcapital socialBPM socialcurrency reputation

  • . So, while social impinging around the edges of enterprise applications is worth dealing with from a strategic perspective, it’s going to happen largely whether organizations plan for it or not. As such, it’s not likely to make a huge competitive or qualitative difference in the way most businesses perform. That is, unless they start the process of deliberate and strategic social business transformation,
  • 
  • Social business frequently focuses either on social engagement externally or internally on collaboration and social interaction between workers. This is a limiting view, but it’s also where most of the activity and uptake is today.
  • Metastorm now enables workers to engage in real collaborative process design, takes advantage of social profiles to locate needed expertise to plug workers into processes in essentially real-time, and has matching dashboards to provide BPM and social analytics
  • Putting social in the flow of work in highly process-intensive environments should lead to some interesting outcomes
  • I’ve had manufacturers and assembly line managers come up to me to say that social tools have been moving into their area of the business, but it’s mostly been horizontal tools or very focused niche solutions. We’re now seeing broader and more strategic use of social tools with the arrival of solutions such as the Kenandy social manufacturing platform,
  • One of the more interesting and visionary topics at the conference was the subject of social currency, the transformation of the very concept of money in social world where reputation, trust, and openness are prized much more than information control, the latter which is how the financial industry is mostly structured to leverage for gain today.
  • In fact, peer-to-peer monetary systems such as Bitcoin were a hot topic at Innotribe and for good reason, it represents a major shift of control in how banking, money transfer, and investment will work in the future.

• Entre DSI et directions métiers, le courant passe encore mal

  “Le constat de Karim Bahloul, directeur des études et de la recherche chez IDC, à Paris, n’est pas très brillant. Tout part d’une étude sur la question de la transformation visant notamment à comprendre comment les directions métiers et les DSI se comportent, ensemble. Pour mener cette étude, le cabinet a interrogé indépendamment 83 directeurs métiers et 83 DSI d’entreprises de plus de 1000 salariés. Résultats : «les DSI sont très techno-centriques, pas du tout centrées sur les désidératas des directions métiers.» Dès lors, la suite semble presque couler de source : les directions métiers affichent « des niveaux de satisfaction relativement faibles sur un certain nombre de points comme la réactivité de l’IT par rapport à leurs besoins,”

  tags: IT ITdepartment business

  • divisions IT «ont un historique, une latence, une organisation interne qui peuvent être un frein. Dans 60 à 65 % des entreprises, le niveau de satisfaction est relativement faible malgré une forte reconnaissance de la qualité de l’offre technologique de l’IT »
  • 75 à 85 % des budgets IT sont dépensés pour l’exploitation de l’existant. Seuls les 15 à 25 % restants sont consacrés au développement de nouvelles applications ou de projets innovants.»
  • Mais pour les deux tiers des entreprises qui les ont mis en place, les indicateurs de performance restent très liés à la technologie et peu intelligibles par des directions opérationnelles. Celles-ci commencent d’ailleurs à réagir.»
  • 39 % des directions métiers nous disent que la DSI s’est transformée ou se transforme en centre de services mais qu’il reste un décalage important.
  • «si les DSI veulent rester des acteurs incontournables, ils doivent penser métiers et se concentrer sur les utilisateurs. Avant la technologie.»

• Et si les filtres Internet dans les écoles envoyaient le mauvais signal ?

  “”Les gouvernements, les entreprises et les lieux citoyens s’adaptent à la réalité de l’omniprésence des nouveaux médias de communication et en tirent parti. Pourquoi l’école refuserait de prendre avantage des opportunités que ces moyens offrent ?”"

  tags: education socialnetworks filters

  •  

    C’est que les établissements scolaires bloquent plusieurs des sites Web utilisés par les jeunes pour interagir. Les responsables des réseaux informatiques considèrent qu’il vaut mieux interdire l’accès à ces sites prisés par les jeunes plutôt que de recréer à l’école un environnement semblable à celui que les jeunes rencontrent hors de l’école.

  • En créant à l’intérieur des murs d’un lycée ou d’un collège un milieu différent de celui dans lequel un adolescent évolue, on lui lance le défi d’apprendre à contourner ces barrières en plus de lui exprimer jusqu’à quel point on ne lui fait pas confiance dans sa capacité de discernement.
  • C’est parce que l’école est encore dans un mode où toute la connaissance doit passer par la tête d’un enseignant avant de transiter vers celle des élèves que ce mythe tient solidement dans les réunions administratives des décideurs scolaires.
  • De plus, si c’est vrai qu’il y a du contenu offensant à proscrire des salles de classe, l’éducation par la responsabilisation demeure le moyen le plus efficace, à moyen terme de s’assurer de remplir notre mission éducative.
  •  

    Les filtres Internet dans les écoles existeront-ils encore bien longtemps? L’école doit se demander où réside sa responsabilité… Continuer d’être un lieu où elle illustre que ce n’est qu’en apparence qu’elle montre «patte blanche» ou devenir cette institution où des éducateurs ont suffisamment d’ascendant sur les élèves pour briser ce mur «coupe-feu intergénérationnel»

• What happens when all my customers realise that they can complain on Twitter? @ NixonMcInnes: Social media goodness. Translated. Created. Delivered.

  “The rise of social media has meant that customer service has already undergone some scrutiny within most brands. Customers have a voice now and brands face a very public backlash if they don’t service their customers well.

  In fact this has been the driver for many brands to look at Twitter as a customer service medium in the first place, the argument being that if users are complaining online, it is better to engage and help them than leave them angry and vociferous.

  But what has happened in many cases is that brands have seen this as the end point, they don’t ask, “what next?”. Well guess what? Setting up a customer service account on Twitter is not the end, it’s just the beginning…”

  tags: twitter socialmedia customerservice customercare complaints

  • At the moment people are complaining on social media because they get better service than they do on existing channels.  Making the service they get on social media the same as the other channels is not a long-term solution!

     

    The rise of social media has led to demands for better customer service and businesses have to adjust to this and meet this demand across all channels.

• Integration and Connection To Work Are Central To Social Business Success

  “I believe there’s a real chance to address some long-standing social business challenges if we can work through and address these issues better than we have up until now.

  Unfortunately, any progress will require connecting some technology thinking with some business thinking, which is the quintessential oil and water of the information technology divide. However, I believe we can now do this better than we ever could in the recent past and that a major opportunity lies ahead.”

  tags: socialbusiness enterprise2.0 integration systemsofengagement systemsofrecord process

  • 1. The requirement to connect social software with systems of record, productivity applications, and the local intranet, etc. This puts social tools where the most important enterprise data is today, and;
  • 2. The need to move social tools into the flow of work. The isolation of social business platforms from the key operational activities of the organization is increasingly understood as a root cause of slower adoption and lower relevance.
  • Unfortunately, another cause of the low interest in recent social integration advances is because attempts at defining Enterprise 2.0 software standards and technologies have largely been a source of disappointment until recently.
  • 
  • While social integration and connecting social software to our work are NOT necessarily the same thing, primarily because you can connect social tools to some work processes without any integration, the fact is that much of the work we do today are in systems that are not connected to our social tools. This causes a myriad of problems in adoption and day-to-day use including manually copying data into our social environments, fragmented pictures of business processes that are otherwise narrated in social tools, yet the core context is separately stored in other systems entirely.
  • I now see good evidence that activity streams are becoming the hub of daily work; a consistent and centralized view of all communication and interaction. Therefore, social apps — and associated app stores to provide them — can enable line of business applications to contextually appear inside our activity streams, while embedding technologies are allowing us to project connected social experiences directly within our intranets, Web apps, other horizontal tools like ECM and DMS, and line of business applications like CRM, ERP, and so on.

  • Social apps – Wrap our existing business applications in a social envelope that allows them to live in and interact with us and our activity streams. This puts our fragmented systems of record into its full social context.

      

    Social embedding – Going to where the work is, social embedding allows us to put sharing, social notifications, and threaded conversations inside existing systems of record. Embedding is a technology that has long been proven on the Web and is similar to what the Facebook Like button has achieved, near ubiquity through simplicity. Many social tools use this technique today, but it must be internalized as an enterprise capability.

      

    Social integration – When a) wrapping enterprise software and placing it inside our social business platforms or b) embedding specific social experiences in our enterprise systems don’t cut it, the fall back option is traditional integration. This will often be more expensive and time-consuming but can be used when the first two won’t work for a given reason.

• Five Emergent Strategies for Improving Social Business Performance

  “Yet, though C-level involvement is one of the single most effective ways to gain approval for the needed resources, functional cohesion, and organizational priority, it’s also a good recipe for bottling up internal social media in a manner that ends up moving it through the traditional IT project machine. This oft-careworn process is usually a well-established — and largely well-intentioned — “sausage maker” for repeatably fielding new IT solutions in a linear and highly structured fashion (though it’s showing serious signs of age.)”

  tags: enterprise2.0 socialbusiness adoption emergence process participation integration systemsofengagement systemsofrecord

  • 
  • The nature of open-ended in this discussion is vital and nuanced. Social media finally thrived, most arguably through the rise of RSS, which created a sort of “Unix pipe” for the social world. This allowed the fragmented conversations of blogs to be perceived externally as single albeit decentralized conversations
  • As Enterprise 2.0 grows up, there’s a growing understanding that our old systems of record cannot remain isolated from our new systems of engagement.
  • I’ve been exploring the potential of connecting agile processes to social business recently because because of these issues, and because the two subjects have much in common. Both fields are major transitions in the way work is accomplished and have had significant headwind despite making real and sustained progress.
  • 1. Be liberal in accepting forms of participation. While many Enterprise 2.0 products or projects are actually disabling many types of rich media and embedded applications, I believe that is a serious mistake.
  • 2. Assume and support new modes of use. If a blog, wiki, or social network ends up becoming a vital part of a business process, be ready to support it to the level that part of the business requires.
  • 3. “New modes of use” means deep connection between all systems, all audiences. Do not proceed in your work that Enterprise 2.0 is about self-contained systems. Like the Web, it consists of deeply linked systems of systems. Sometimes this connection is by simple links, but increasingly it’s by direct integration of data.
  • 4. Enable social discovery. While many manifestations of social media, such as activity streams, naturally make on-the-fly discovery of knowledge and information easier, spontaneous, and even serendipitous, it’s not nearly enough by itself to enable widespread emergent reuse. I’ve argued for years that federated search across all enterprise social “silos” based on the same algorithms that drive the Web is one of the primary solutions to ensure the open work of Enterprise 2.0 is findable, reusable, and has high leverage
  • 5. Open your social data. Everything should be syndicated. Most social functionality should be wrapped in OpenSocial so it can be exported across the enterprise and embedded on the intranet and elsewhere. Your Enterprise 2.0 systems should have good, well supported APIs with good documentation.

• Connecting Employees to Social Media: New Possibilities

  “Recently I’ve been exploring the best ways for companies to establish their workers successfully in the use of social media, both internally and externally to their organizations. Driving adoption and effective uptake of social tools varies rather widely in how easy and quickly it is to for a given business to realize. For example, this process is the most challenging for regulated industries as I deconstructed at length on ZDNet this week. Yet it’s the same issue for all firms: How do we quickly and effectively deal with issues surrounding risk, control, and trust so that we can get to the good part and reap the rewards of social media engagement?”

  tags: socialmedia adoption guidelines policy governance

  • Social media policy is usually not perceived as an exciting topic, yet at this stage of the industry nothing could be further from the truth. It should now be considered a primary enabler as enterprises develop — or update — their social business strategies. Because of this perception, one of the more powerful and transformative tools in the social business arsenal will be left to languish unmodernized by many, making the organization do too much work, assume too much downside, and ignore important upsides.
  • 
  • But an infrequently revised and non-operational social media policy means that 1) most of the potential value that it could provide fails to be seized and 2) it misses a major opportunity to become a place to communicate, realize strategic vision, and enable on-the-ground change across the company in a surprisingly concrete way.
  • When it comes to the strategies that drive social business performance, we find that social media works best when its users are set free to create the collaborative patterns, structures, and processes they need to work together, inside, outside, or between companies. When they have a safety net that ensures they can act with confidence, the results will correspondingly improve.

  • Define

     

    The modern social media policy should be contained in a blog post, wiki page, or some other social artifact so it can be revised quickly and easily, as well as commented on and discussed

  • Communicate

     

    The social media policy should be communicated via training, clearly articulated goals and incentives (real-life examples of which I’ll explore as soon as possible), and executive outreach including leading through example

  • Verify

     

    When it comes to social media, the best way to reduce concerns about risk and liability while simultaneously ensuring safety and widespread participation is to trust, but verify. The latest social media compliance tools can be used to literally embody the social media policy as a real, participatory actor in the system, creating secure narrative logs for regulators and internal audit, while monitoring conversations, detecting policy violations quickly, and interceding automatically if necessary.

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

• How do you get to Management 2.0? Three lessons (from the M-Prize)

  “We announced the winners of the Management 2.0 Challenge (the first of three legs of the HBR/McKinsey M-Prize for Management Innovation) here last week. Those seven entries offer compelling evidence that the undergirding principles, social structures, and social technologies of the Web not only offer up winning business models, they are the building blocks of a new management model for making organizations more resilient, inventive, and engaging.

  Here are just three lessons from our management innovators about leveraging social technologies to create truly social organizations:”

  tags: management management2.0 M-Prize trust

  • Trust your people with the future of the company
    For all of the talk about empowering, involving, and engaging employees, why is it that so many organizations still tap into just a sliver of what individuals have to offer? According to Management 2.0 Challenge winner Jim Lavoie, it’s because too many leaders focus on what they can get out of their people rather than entrusting them with the future of the company.
  • James and Bobby Fishkin argue in their winning hack, The Deliberative Corporation, that it’s not enough to listen to the crowd, it’s crucial to equip it. The Fishkins have developed a powerfully practical approach—including balanced briefings, moderated discussions, and expert testimony—to taking the bias, politics, and knee-jerk emotions out of decision-making in order to get at “what the people would think if they were thinking.”
  • Maximize peer connections
    As important as it is for employees to feel heard and respected by their leaders, it’s the relationship between peers that generates the agility, inventiveness, and engagement at the heart of a truly social organization. A number of M-Prize finalists demonstrated the power of organizing around that principle—none more dramatically than Morning Star, a 40-year old food processing company founded on the belief that “the best human organizations are those in which people aren’t managed by others, but in which participants coordinate among themselves, managing their own relationships and commitments to others.”
  • the network of colleague relationships defines the org chart, rather than the other way around—and reveals the “natural” hierarchy of authority based on expertise and achievement; the drive for performance actually strengthens without traditional oversight; and everything happens more quickly and with less conflict.
  • Capitalize on the Obvious
    Sometimes the simplest lever can crack open the biggest opportunity for change. That’s what Kim Spinder learned when, as an employee for the Dutch ministry, she invented a hack to eliminate government red tape and replace bureaucracy with free-form, cross-agency collaboration. Her simple Web-based booking system, Deelstoel (“share chair” in Dutch), was designed to allow any Dutch government worker from any agency in any location to work at any other government office
  • Instead, says Spinder, she and her team just “capitalized on the obvious”—the need for change, the resources waiting to be tapped, and the basic human desire to contribute to positive change

• Assessing the Real Value of ‘Me’

  “My charter was to suggest a practical pathway for how HR can become a critical weapon in the arsenal of ‘compete to win in the 21st century’ planning and how the connected enterprise will play a role. As we got to the ‘great,-now-lets-talk-execution” part of this conversation, one of the issues we tackled together was what tomorrow’s Employee System of Record needs to look like if HR wants to become a meaningful player at the strategy table. “

  tags: humanresources strategy systemsofrecord hrperformance performance value findability

  • 

  • So I thought I’d abstract that discussion and bring it here.

     

    “I’m much more than what HR thinks of me, today”.

     

    The foundational ingredient to craft highly connected enterprises properly is two fold:

     

     
    1. The collaborative context that warrants a huddle in the first place, and
    2. Who the right players are to get the job done.
  • The single most important nut we need to crack first is the efficient ‘findability ’ of people.
  • Intelligence on who to reach out to is arguably the most powerful yet decrepit utility inside organizations today. At worst, its fragmented across multiple, difficult to use systems. Even for those organizations that are fortunate to not have multiple systems of employee records, the information regarding where the best minds hide and what they know is woefully incomplete, overtly guarded and not available at the point in time or location of decision making.
  • assessing the real value of ‘Me’ in the organization needs to be characterized by 4 dimensions that cover not just what HR estimates of me, but also be based directly on the merits of my work.
  • 
  • The value of this highly enriched data set on real employee value may well belong to HR as it always has, but the opportunity is much much larger than general purpose human capital insight

  • HR Performance

     

    You now have the opportunity to fold in important behavioral data such as degree of sharing, helping, engaging, contribution and involvement, giving HR a broader set of data points about the employees allegiance to the firm and dare I say, employee lifetime (with the company at least) value.

  • Line of Business Performance

     

    Todays customer is expecting us to break through organization silos and rally around their questions and other needs. In terms of business objectives alignment, measuring and dynamically optimizing how different functions come together to support say, field marketing, product launches, customer pitches or support inquiries now becomes much more efficient.

  • Financial Performance

     

    CFOs mostly learn about failing investments after the fact. In the flow analytics gleaned from collaboration also gives managers distinct insight into how projects are performing as they happen, if the resource mix is right, and again, who to keep, re-place, or remove, before its too late

  • Whilst we in the blogosphere bloviate about Social Business this and Enterprise 2.0 that, remember, this is all first and foremost about the smart identity access and leverage.

• The Evolution of CRM

  “In looking at different definitions with different perspectives and a business lens, the one above made the most sense to me. After 16 months, it was time to revisit a diagram created for “A Guide to Understanding Social CRM”. I will not go so far as to call my earlier work wrong, naïve is a better descriptor. The evolution diagram contained my thought process at that time. Without over using the concept, my own thinking has evolved.”

  tags: crm socialcrm data process relationship context interactions

  • For starters, the term ‘Social’ has become a blocker of progress. The attempted isolation of the social components from CRM do both concepts a disservice. The Social CRM discussion has pushed CRM into a bit of corner. How can a relationship exist without social elements?
  • • We do not need to evolve to SCRM, we simply need to evolve CRM
    • To say that Social CRM means everyone is a bit over simplistic
    • While we would like to believe it is all about customer defined processes, it is not that simple
    • To believe that customers can set their own hours is great in theory, but let’s be real.
    • It is not simply about the number of channels, rather when and how people use the channels
    • The transaction will never go away, it needs to become a stop along the journey, somewhere near the middle.
    • CRM does need to become outside in, but it does not need to become Social CRM in order to get there.

• 15 ways to engage users in building a new social intranet

  “ocial intranets have changed the rules of successfully launching an intranet. While in the past it was quite helpful to involve employees throughout the process, today it’s a virtual necessity.

  A social intranet becomes an online community space and employees need to feel a sense of involvement and ownership starting early in the project so they feel it really is their community.

  While many of the opportunities for engagement listed below are standard practice for building a good 1.0 intranet, each one represents an opportunity to build a sense of shared ownership and create a shared sense of excitment over the coming change.”

  tags: intranet intranet2.0 socialintranet intranetdesign

• The Social Enterprise – Welcome to the Era of Intrapreneurship!

  “There are plenty of blog posts out there that have covered very well the topic of “The Future of the Workplace” and the impact of social computing in helping shape up the business world to become a whole lot more open, engaged, transparent and nimble. However, there is one particular article out there that became one of my all time favourite ones around this very same topic, and more than anything else, because it describes, pretty well, how work has evolved with the emergence of the Social Web in the last few years. “

  tags: socialbusiness socialenterprise work workstyle intranpreneurship

  • The Era of Intrapreneurship. An era, where thanks to the Social Web, whether internal or external, or both!, knowledge workers, for the first time ever, are now in charged of their own productivity, of their own workflows and personal business relationships with others, of their own responsibility not only towards the work that needs to be done, but also towards the fellow peers they collaborate and share their knowledge with
  • It’s that social revolution and transformation that will help us all understand how critical it is for each and everyone of us having the right access not only to relevant information and content resources, but also access to the people behind it by nurturing and cultivating those relationships and networks on a regular basis in order to make better, smarter, more sensible and more informed decisions, regardless of wherever we may well be, whether in a physical office location, or while working from home, while travelling or while at a customer site
  • he workplace has been transformed into something so empowering as helping employees take a bit more co-responsibility of their own workflows, without having to wait for orders, or being told what they would need to do.

• The social business

  Almost all leadership concepts start with the assumption that a key role for the leader is to set direction. This usually means designing and communicating a vision and a set of goals. Traditionally the roles of vision and goals have been there to help people to understand the direction of the enterprise and how they can contribute to it.

  Today we need something more.

  tags: enterprise2.0 leadership vision management socialbusiness creativity intelligence knowledgeworkers

  • As almost all organizations are becoming increasingly diverse and network like, and as all boundaries are increasingly flexible, the notion of what brings people together becomes even more critical.
  • Creative individuals need both the independence and the interdependence to do their best work. A creative organization thrives on the tension that arises from widely different but complementary abilities and views working with one another.
  • In industrial management, individuals were taken for granted and had no choice or voice. The foundations of work relationships are still largely built on asymmetrical relationships between the employer and the employee, the manager and the worker. This antagonism already affects labor markets in developed countries: firms are finding it increasingly hard to hire good people. Younger people are more and more attracted to self-employment and entrepreneurial possibilities instead of joining a corporation.
  • The social business is very different from the industrial corporation. In order to be successful, the firm needs to listen and involve people in the same manner that we are today trying to do with one group – the customers.
  • Knowledge workers want to have a say in what they do in life; where and when they work and most importantly – why and with whom!

• “Nous établissons un dialogue permanent avec nos employés”

  “nterview avec Anand Pillai, Senior Vice President chez HCL Technologies. L’entreprise indienne de services IT a mis en place il y a cinq ans une méthode développée par son PDG et basée sur la valorisation et l’écoute des collaborateurs.”

  tags: hcl casestudies humanresources management engagement motivation empowerment productivity turnover

  • Après de nombreuses délibérations, nous avons conclu que c’était les employés et que nous devions les responsabiliser et les engager pour améliorer notre productivité.
  • Par exemple, un portail de discussions appelé “U&I” entre les employés et la direction a été ouvert. Ils peuvent y poster des questions, des commentaires sur n’importe quel sujet à propos de la compagnie. Nous avons aussi créé le “value portal” où les employés peuvent évoquer des solutions concernant des problèmes liés aux clients. Une équipe évalue alors la faisabilité de l’opération, et permet à l’employé ayant posté l’idée de mener des tests et de réunir d’autres collègues. Ce, quelle que soit sa position initiale dans la compagnie.
  • Nous avons amené beaucoup de transparence au sein de l’entreprise. Rien n’est confidentiel. Nous établissons un dialogue permanent avec nos employés pour comprendre ce qui les motive réellement. Résultat, nous avons calculé que la satisfaction et la productivité de nos employés sont passées de 30% à 70% depuis 5 ans
  • Nous nous sommes aperçus que les projets proposés par les employés étant tellement bons que nous en avons exécuté la plupart pour un total de 11 millions de dollars. En 2009, nous avons reçu le prix du meilleur employeur en Asie et en Inde par Aon Hewi
  • Les chiffres parlent d’eux-mêmes, nos revenus ont quadruplé en cinq ans et notre profit a été multiplié par trois.

• Drop Innovation from Your Vocabulary

  “Type “innovation” into hbr.org and you will get nearly 4,700 results. For many ills, innovation is seen as the panacea — management’s equivalent of motherhood and apple pie — and few would challenge its significance. Indeed, one recent news article described it as today’s equivalent of the Holy Grail, so to suggest dropping it from your company’s vocabulary may come as a shock. Many of you will see it as deeply heretical, particularly riding on the coattails of the recent posts extolling Steve Jobs’s innovative genius.”

  tags: innovation productivity convenience speed choice benefits security prices value valuecreation

  • The word “innovation” comes from the Latin word “novus” meaning new. Creating something new is the goal of most innovation initiatives, but new does not mean valuable
  • Once you start thinking in terms of increasing value to customers, numerous potential enhancements reveal themselves, creating a range of options that extend far beyond adding new features or extending performance on existing dimensions. At a high level, there are eight ways to create value for custome
  • Thinking in terms of creating value for customers rather than innovation ensures the focus is on customers rather than the company. Success requires starting with the desired end in mind, not the means of achieving it.
  • Innovation experts will argue that when done rationally and properly such traps are avoided. But as pointed out in my previous post, we have learned from behavioral economics that assuming rationality is irrational.
  • Over the past ten years, innovation has become an industry in itself. Innovation experts are the first to encourage businesses to be heretical and challenge the widespread assumptions of their industry. Perhaps it is now time to do the same with innovation?

• Don’t Confuse a Scorecard with a Scoreboard

  “I’ve always been a big believer in using results as the differentiator between success and failure. You either achieve your goals or you don’t. Energy, creativity, and activity are all good things — but they don’t create value unless results are achieved.

  Most organizations take the same stance. They put a great deal of emphasis on reporting and celebrating quarterly and yearly results — with the assumption that there is a huge upside to being perceived as a winning company. After all, positive results attract investors, raise stock prices, reinforce customers, draw talent, and more.

  But only athletic events produce clear winners and losers in the short-term — and most organizations are not actively engaged in those. In fact, in many cases, the immediate “results” are in reality unknown, ambiguous, or disconnected from current performance.”

  tags: performance results scorecard scoreboard longterm dialogue

  • This is not to say that we should abandon any of these ways of viewing organizational performance. Rather, we need to better understand how these numbers were achieved and what they are actually saying about a company’s long-term health. In other words, metrics are starting points for dialogue rather than conclusio
  • As individual managers we do not have the luxury of personal analysts, so we have to interpret the true meaning of results ourselves. But all too many managers avoid or ignore this part of their job — either because it takes too much time, is too difficult, or will lead to uncomfortable discussions. So instead they treat scorecards like scoreboards, with black and white numbers that they think tell the whole story.
  • Unfortunately without dialogue, interpretation, and reflection, numbers on a scorecard often lead to a distorted picture of performance — with too much, too little, or misplaced credit given for achievement.
  • Obviously, not every result requires deep analysis and interpretation. But without at least some amount of dialogue, we run the risk of misunderstanding what is really going on.

• Et si vous aimiez vraiment vos clients ? Inspirez-vous de la LoveTeam de Voyages-SNCF.com

  “Imaginez qu’une partie de votre salaire dépende de la satisfaction de vos clients. Si vos clients utilisent massivement votre site Web pour acheter vos produits et services, votre préoccupation sera alors de détecter les dysfonctionnements qu’ils rencontrent, et de les corriger le plus vite possible. Au-delà de cette amélioration continue de l’expérience client, vous souhaiterez aussi dialoguer avec vos clients et innover avec eux pour mieux répondre à leurs attentes. C’est la mission confiée à la LoveTeam de Voyages-SNCF.com que j’ai eu l’occasion de rencontrer.”

  tags: socialcrm customer customerrelationship casestudies SNCF Loveteam NPS customersatisfaction

  • La mise en place de ce type de dispositif suppose de faire de la satisfaction des clients un enjeux partagé par tous les collaborateurs de l’entreprise. En effet, les clients rencontrent toutes sortes de difficultés en ligne
  • La LoveTeam est ainsi née de la reconnaissance de l’importance de la satisfaction client, en complément du suivi des ventes. Et pour cela, il était nécessaire de combiner les efforts de trois métiers : la relation client, la technique et le marketing.
  • Sur le plan opérationnel, la LoveTeam est composée d’une équipe de volontaires s’appuyant sur des relais dégageant 30% de leur temps dans les directions métier concernées.
  • Cette équipe se réunit tous les lundi matin avec le DG et propose des arbitrages d’actions à mener, en s’appuyant sur un scoring suivant quatre grands axes : relation client, business (promesse client, résultat business), juridique, et technique. Les actions à mener peuvent couvrir la correction d’anomalies et de petites évolutions sur tous types de terminaux, et aussi l’alimentation des autres entités de l’entreprise avec les remontées client qui ne sont pas directement liées à l’expérience vécue sur le site.
  • 100 000 verbatim par mois sont analysés.
  • Les équipes opérationnelles sont alimentées en projets d’amélioration concrète, provenant directement d’idées proposées par les clients et répondant au mieux à leurs attentes
  • Tout d’abord, la mobilisation d’une équipe dédiée animée sous l’impulsion du DG est indispensable pour donner du rythme et pérenniser l’action.
  • Ensuite, la coordination permanente de la relation client, du business, et de la technologie, animée lors d’un comité hebdomadaire, assure l’ancrage opérationnel des décisions prises. Ancrage favorisé par une communication en interne des impacts d’un dysfonctionnement sous forme de métaphore, illustrée par des verbatim clients.

• The Myth of Performance Metrics

  “There’s a bogus belief that gets in the way of managers when they evaluate performance. That myth says that in order for an appraisal to be objective, assessors must have quantifiable metrics to support their assessment judgment.

  That’s just not true. What is a performance appraisal? The straightforward answer: A performance appraisal is a formal record of a manger’s opinion of the quality of an employee’s work.”

  tags: performance performanceappraisal metrics performancereview opinion humanresources management objectivity subjectivity

  • Writing a performance appraisal requires managers to be fair, unprejudiced, and objective. But the fairness requirement doesn’t mean that you’re restricted only to using quantitative, numerical metrics in making your assessment. Your opinions, feelings, and judgments are what the appraisal process demands.
  • In every other area of managerial activity, the ability to make good decisions in spite of limited and perhaps even conflicting data is what they get paid for. Only in the case of performance appraisal do we feel unnerved about the fact that examples, experience, and judgment — not quantitative and provable metrics — are used
  • as long as you can provide solid examples to back up your assessments and ratings, then your appraisal is objective, even if quantitative measures aren’t available.
  • And despite the myth that objectivity requires metrics, people generally want to know their supervisor’s opinion of their performance

• Do We Need Defined Work Hours?

  “Last week I asked if you were engaged in your work? Another post-Labor question is whether your job should have defined hours. This is the question asked by Mathew Ingram at Gigaom. Many people already do not have defined hours and I am one. However, I do not think there is a blanket answer. For example, many customer facing service jobs require either constant coverage or coverage during defined hours so the staff proving this coverage needs to be scheduled and coordinated. In addition, work that requires synchronous teamwork such as factory production lines need coordinated schedules.”

  tags: management humanresources workhours timemanagement productivity flexibility flexiblehours

  • . Hours used to be a way to determine productivity and for many jobs it is now results, not hours.
  • They place a focus on attendance rather than results.
  • I offer these examples to help make the case that for some types of work set hours are counter productive
  • The responsibility for making the transition to flexible hours lies with both workers and employees.

• 5 Things You Need To Know About (Social) CRM (Definitions) « Wim Rampen’s Blog

  I think trying to define something is a very good exercise to understand what you are dealing with or what you are trying to do it for. It also helps to communicate internally. And regardless of what many say, I don’t think there are enough definitions of (Social) CRM, at least not good ones.. But that is a personal opinion, not relevant to today’s post.

  tags: socialcrm process strategy philosophy mindset capability technology practices performance customer relationship

  • I think trying to define something is a very good exercise to understand what you are dealing with or what you are trying to do it for. It also helps to communicate internally. And regardless of what many say, I don’t think there are enough definitions of (Social) CRM, at least not good ones.. But that is a personal opinion, not relevant to today’s post.

  • Regardless of the definition you’ll read or try to tweak, it will be one that fits into the following 6 (valid and viable!) concepts of CRM:

     

     
    1. (Social) CRM as a process (or function)
    2. (Social) CRM as a strategy
    3. (Social) CRM as a philosophy (or mindset or logic)
    4. (Social) CRM as a (cap)ability
    5. (Social) CRM as a technology
    6. (Social) CRM as a practice (or as practices)

     

     

    OR, as a combination of all or some of the above concepts, in a non-alphabetical order.

  • CRM is more successful in highly commoditized industries, because there it provides a way to differentiate oneself from competition.. (yes.. CRM is what people mean they need when they say that Customer service must be a differentiator. They just don’t always realize it..)
  • CRM is at its best when it is supportive of a business strategy of differentiation and/or cost-leadership.
  • This is an important reality check.. Research shows as much as two thirds of your Customers do not really want a relationship with you.
  • And the worrying part is that it’s mostly the young and wealthy people who are not  interested in these relationships.
  • Most Customers are just connecting on-line with brands for the purpose of getting a perk or discount. They are not there for the engagement.

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