Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

Thoughts on management, HR, social networks…and enterprise 2.0

" The most successful companies are those that think jointly technological change, work design and the changes in internal social relationships.” Antoine Riboud.
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Is information sharing a visceral need or a lucky good practice ?

July 29th, 2010 · Social Networking, social computing

This is the rest of my Milanese conversation with Mark Masterson. By dint of digressing on Yers we came to tacke the so-called sociability of employees. The idea was to go beyond the idealistic common place according to which “everyone wants to share, to open, to connect and those who refuse to go this way are naughty people” and try to have a more objective standpoint in an enterprise context.

First easy answer : “it depends”. Of course, between those who overshare and those who withdraw into themselves there is a wide range of behaviors due to a tangle of complex factors.

Then : “it’s (as usual) a matter of culture”. Everybody nows agree that in some countries people want a clear separation between their professional and private life and what to belongs to one has not to be known in the other.

Then again : “what makes us say that people share information on the web after all ?”. They share statuses, emotions. They answer their contact, give them some help. Does it mean being “social”, obliging and is it enough to make us deduce that people want to be connected and bring something to their fellow contacts ? No.

If we look at what’s happening on the web, the act of sharing information is rather about “I am” than “I give”. “I am at such place (and you aren’t)”, “I want to talk about my experience”, “I have something to say (most of all I want to be heard”. At the end, sharing looks much more like self-promotion that a will to help and share that seem to be only means to a personal strategy. It’s a little bit like people (some politicians for instance) that are very active on the field for 10 minutes and stop at the minute the TV cameras leave. Should we regret it ? In my opion no, if egos contribute to a common good then Adam Smith was right. But we have to admit this is rather show-off than deliberate sharing.

Quoting a good friend I’d say : that’s ego-altruism.

What does it mean in the workplace ?

[Read more →]

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Enterprise 2.0 and processes : what are we talking about ? (and why…)

July 27th, 2010 · Organization & Management, enterprise 2.0, social computing

Summary : the business process issue recently burst into the enterprise 2.0 world. Sacrilege for some, pragmatic approach without which no value will be created for others, it seems we’ve reach a tipping point. But what are we really talking about ? It’s not about turning unstructured activities into processes but to make it serve processes without distorting it. Then, if we define process as a set of tasks that gives structures to production, it’s important not to mistake what processes applied to some kind of activities should be with what businesses have been used to do for decades. It’s about production as it should be and not as it is today. That said, knowing why this approach is emerging matters too. There are many reasons to that and they are inequally worth but it does not matter : even if many things have to be done out of the process field, this issue will have to be tackled one day or the other. It does not matter anyone wants to change them, keep them unchanged or break them down : they can’t be overlooked.

Big agitation in the small enterprise 2.0 word : since some people at the last Enterprise 2.0 conference suggested that business processes had to be taken into account this topic has become very trendy. Salutary brainwave for those who see there the evidence that enterprise 2.0 is not a funny gadget disconnected from reality and unable to deliver any measurable benefit, crime of lese-majesty for those who see a horde of hungry wolves entering a house full of little red riding hoods.

Cela fait plus d’un an que je milite en faveur de cette approche (ou en tout cas de ne pas refuser de l’aborder et être dans le deni permanent) et je ne vais donc pas me priver de commenter la chose.

What are we talking about ? (Or the story of a big misunderstanding)

The word process is so scaring for some that they run away as soon as they hear it without even listening to the rest of the sentence. It’s not about turning informal and unstructured dynamics into carve-ups but making sure all the energy goes in the right direction. As I said earlier, serendipity is a very limited model for value creation and I find legitimate that businesses want channel what looks like chaos to them. As Rex Lee brillantly wrote recently :

Enterprise 1.0, would suggest that only specialized, trained individuals with the resources knew how to find pearls (i.e. where to dive, specialized equipment, knowledge on how to abstract the pearl from the shelled mollusk, etc.)

.
Enterprise 2.0 suggests that we can simplify and remove some of the “specialization” barriers to enable more people to search for pearls.

Enterprise 2.1 would suggest that rather than “serendipitously” finding pearls, that we coordinate our efforts to actually create pearl farms.

The purpose of any business is to create value and to do so it tries to optimize its production. Nothing shoking here. So sets of tasks are defined in order to make things more predictable, manageable and cost efficient. It often ends with a very rigid result and that often is the main point of friction.

In a manufacturing world, where production flows are tangible and can be normalized, rigidity is well adapated, exceptions to the rule being very rare. In a world where people work on knowledge, continuously solve problems, exceptions are the new normality and rigidity only works in a few cases. [Read more →]

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Picture of the week #3 : The secret of my success…

July 26th, 2010 · Picture of the week

The secret of my success ? At an early age, I discovered I was not God

Illustration from “The Golden Rules for Success“.

Thanks to Thierry d’Auzers for this excellent book, the rights of use and Dimitri Tolstoï for the pictures.

Offer yourself The Golden rules for Success.

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Links for this week (weekly)

July 25th, 2010 · Recommended Bookmarks

  • tags: communities engagement members socialnetworks enterprise2.0 adoption methodology

  • “Overview: Launching and getting up and running is only half the battle when it comes to CoPs. CoP pundits are constantly advocating new social technologies, new processes, and new metrics. But for a CoP (and its members) to thrive requires embracing a few simple organizational change ideas, and making them concrete, authentic, and fun. The “Sustainable Communities Critical Success Factors” do just that. A sustainable Community of Practice (CoP) demonstrates measurable value to both the organization and CoP participants contributing relevant knowledge, and nourishing lasting and productive relationships. Any CoP, by definition, convenes to cross organizational boundaries, to build a shared body of knowledge, and to network. But a sustainable CoP comes together with a shared sense of passion and applies that to practical outputs. While most COPs fade, sustainable CoPs endure:

    * Members express a spirit of volunteerism that beyond their personal objectives and “WIIFM”;
    * CoP “working groups” generate relevant products that integrate diverse insights; and
    * CoP outcomes show up in corporate metrics, and, ultimately CoP ideas influence corporate planning. “

    tags: community communities communitiesofpractices leadership facilitation role metrics onboarding measurement recognition

    • Image:Sustainable Communities: Top 10 CSFs for Keeping the Faith
    • 1. Regular Real-time Meeting
    • 2. Role/Charter-Clarity:
    • 3. Leadership and Facilitation:
    • 4. Practitioner-Led:
    • 5. Establish Rapport Explicitly:
    • 6. Ground Rules:
    • 7. New Member On-boarding:
    • 8. Measure and Continuously Improve:
    • 9. Use Technology Effectively:
    • 10. Get Recognition/Give Recognition:
  • “C’est le groupe des enfants du cours préparatoire qui, expérimentation après expérimentation, dépasse avec constance les trois autres groupes d’adultes bardés de diplômes de l’enseignement supérieur.”

    tags: problemsolving marshmallowchallenge orientation planning execution observation learning learningbydoing

    • Diapositive5
    • C’est parce que les adultes ont été “formatés” pour conceptualiser la résolution de problème. A force d’insister sur le fait de réfléchir avant d’agir, ils ont intériorisé l’idée de trouver la solution d’un point de vue théorique avant de mettre les mains dans le cambouis. Pour eux, la séquence type de résolution du problème, c’est OPEO, soit, ORIENTATION -> PLANIFICATION -> EXECUTION -> OBSERVATION.
    • Les enfants, en revanche, suivent une approche plus intuitive et résolument empirique. Après une courte phase d’ORIENTATION, ils vont très vite mettre la main à la pâte pour tester les interconnections entre les spaghettis, le scotch et le marshmallow à poser au sommet de la structure. Pendant que leurs concurrents d’âge mûr feront une boucle complète OPEO,
    • . Leur aptitude à réaliser des boucles extrêmement rapides d’action / rétro-action leur offrira le moyen de parfaire leur apprentissage chemin faisant. C’est le fameux “learning by doing” des Américains.
  • “How are you addressing the risk of employees posting something “stupid” on a community like promising a customer something they cannot deliver or something along those lines?

    I need examples asap for a preso to the exec team by the end of the week. Would love to hear from you.”

    tags: communities communitymanagement risk mitigation governance policies community

    • Prevention begins with good policies. Make sure you have the right social media policies in place to begin with.
    • Make sure you have a good community management governance structure.  You do need to have a governance model
    • Make sure your community managers and the SME’s understand their role in the governance model and are trained well for what’s expected of them. Your brand depends upon it.
    • Make sure you have an escalation path to deal with an issue when it arises.
  • “The “Measuring the Value of Social Software” white paper focuses on helping organizations answer the question:

    How can we determine if our social software initiatives are successful and are providing the anticipated return on technology investment?

    This white paper looks at how to measure the effectiveness and value of a social software initiative, what tools are available to capture key metrics, and what to take into consideration when establishing a measurement approach. “

    tags: ibm socialnetworks measurement activity ROI framework vitality capability value businessvalue KPI KVI

  • “That’s a lot like the use of enterprise 2.0 social software systems today. Older generations have an ingrained urge to avoid collaborating, having spent their lives being trained to hoard and control information. Their thick, almost-impermeable skin takes effort, time, encouragement and environmental change to break through. It isn’t by chance that the need for greater collaboration is a regular theme in management meetings everywhere.

    On the other hand, social software comes naturally to the millennial generation, born between the late 1970s and 2000 and raised in the Internet age. In a few years, according to Jeanne Meister and Karie Willyerd, the authors of The 2020 Workplace, millennials will be about half of the world’s working age adults”

    tags: collaboration generationdivide millenials generationy generationx babyboomers mentoring

    • Millennials work with large networks. They swap contexts frequently and rapidly during a typical day and use multiple modes of communication. They feel free to ask their managers and peers for candid opinions so they can improve their work. They seek social proof, some visible indication, that others are buying into an idea or activity. They see everyone in their organization as equal partners to collaborate with.
    • When you’re new to an organization, your relationship networks are usually limited and have little built-in trust. Millennials who converse freely with their friends socially are often told at work to stay strictly work-focused. This can limit the depth of their conversations and keep them from developing trust and extensive networks.
  • “Communication is the process by which this constantly evolving knowledge is applied on data and information to a decisionable end. This process will generate insights on how to take advantage of the information you have gathered”

    tags: communication work decisionmaking knowledge tacitknowledge

  • “Knowledge work is often a completely different story. While the information used us input to an activity or process is likely to be found in the left part of the Long Tail power graph, the information needed for a knowledge work activity is likely to be found in the long tail. There you have information resources which are used infrequently or maybe even once. The information which is needed varies from time to time, from situation to situation. Not only the actual information varies; often the type and structure of the information resource varies too. This makes it virtually impossible to define a reusable information resource in advance before it is needed.”

    tags: intranet knowledgeworkers knowledgework longtail socialintranet

    • The social intranet is not just about adding a layer of social collaboration tools; it is a platform that combines the powers of push with the powers of pull to supply anyone who participates and contributes within an extended enterprise with the information, knowledge and connections they need to make the right decisions and act to fulfill their objectives.
    • the previously dominating “less is more” paradigm is being replaced by a “more is more” paradigm. A social intranet must necessarily be designed for information abundance.
    • because as Clay Shirky argues the problem is not the amount of information but rather that the filters we have fail to sort it properly for us. We need to get the filters in place instead of blaming and demonizing (“Tsunami of data”, “firehose of information” etc) information supply and arguing that the only way to solve this “problem” is to limit supply.
    • We must have ways that “automagically” attract useful information and connections to us.
    • Needless to say, the push-based production model used for most intranets will still have an important role to play – but only as a component within a social intranet. It will continue to serve the most common, stable and predictable information needs.
    • This is because the long tail of information supports the core of a knowledge-intensive modern business: the knowledge work.
  • “This got me thinking why can business processes and Enterprise 2.0 software be designed to make them “fun” and engaging?

    There are lots of research that talks about how mixing work and play is the key to innovation. “

    tags: hr games foursquare engagement rewards recognition play

    • Amy talks about how five principles of game mechanics (collecting, points, feedback, exchanges and customization) can be combined with three trends of social media (accessibility, recombination, syndication) to design fun yet functional software applications.
  • “today we’re going to continue with change management by focusing on the cultural and organizational shifts that took place (and are still taking place) within Intuit to make Enterprise 2.0 successful.”

    tags: enterprise2.0 casestudies INTUIT culture organization change changemanagement innovation

    • Every quarter that CEO goes onto Intuit tv (an internal video platform) and answers questions live from employees instead of emailing them.  This allows the employees to actually participate in real time.  Employees now have the ability to comment on anything that’s going on within Intuit, including things that the CEO says
    • As a result, there is now someone in every business unit that is being tasked with innovation; an innovation leader.  This innovation leader participates in a company wide community sharing insights and accelerating the migration of best practices but they don’t actually own the innovation within the business units. 
    • Business leaders adopted and changed the way they were operating.  They were now taking a portfolio approach of small teams moving quickly as opposed to focusing on a centralized project with a larger team. 

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

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About the young and their so-called connectiveness

July 22nd, 2010 · Social Networking, society

While attending the last  Enterprise 2.0 Forum in Milan, I had the pleasure to see Mark Masterson again and have an interesting talk during a cofee break

He was telling me he heard something very challenging at a panel. Here’s what it was about :

“Are we sure that Yers are connected and networkers to this extent (and it also applies to the following generations) become they grew up in a digital world when internet was a common thing that determined thir behaviors ? Or is it a pernicious effect of a society that is risk averse ? When we were 8, 10, 15, we were able to meet our friends outside, go out for an afternoon or after the school without hearing anything from our parents except “be careful and don’t be late for diner”. Today, with all these kidnapping or paedophilia things, the young are confined at home par parents that are more anxious than ours were and see in Facebook, MSN etc.. the only means to escape from this lock up. They are not connected or networkers by nature but because it’s the only answer they find to face their lack of freedom of move and a world that is overcontrolled by their parents. So it’s the consequence of the reaction to an unfortunate external constraint due to safety reasons”.

Mark told me “I don’t know if this guy is right or wrong but it must make us wonder about some of our assumptions. When I look around me and compare with when I was young, it seems that he’s right”.

And the conversation went on…

- we are both interested in these media and use them a lot so it’s an evidence it’s possible to come to it in a “natural” way, regardless of any generation factor.

- if we have had internet, Facebook, MSN… when we were young and, at the same time, the opportunity to join our friends outside, what would have our choice been ? Obviously, we were quite sure than we would have prefered one hour “outside” with friends rather than one our in front of our computer.

So, even if now that we are 30 and something we use social networks a lot, even if we were interested a lot in computers when we were young, its not sure that we would have used the net as a socializing space if we had the opportunity to do so.

So let’s try to push the reasonning a little bit further. Many “over connected” people seldom have the same behaviros at work, that personal usages seldom bring professional ones and that people even don’t want it to happen.

One explaination could be that as social networking is seen as a way out to lack of freedom embodies by parental authority, it may be logical that it can’t happen under another kind of authority, the corporate one. In short, social networking would be a discharging practice that has to take place out of any kind of regulation or authority, should it be parental or coporate.

At the end it’s another side of the cultural side of social networking. Corporate culture, of course, but local culture too. Generally speaking, it makes us question the relationship between people and the enterprise in a given local and social context. Is the workplace a place for self development or a place for constraints and slavery ? Depending on the answer, could we deduct people appetition for enterprise social networking ?

Phew…. And you ? What do you think about it ?

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Putting conversation into processes

July 20th, 2010 · Human resources, Social Networking, enterprise 2.0, social computing

Summary : nowadays, people need to continuously solve problems to execute business processes. To do so they need a quick and easy assess to knowledge. But knowledge needs stimulis to be expressed, what seldom happes out of conversational logics. Traditional processes need to be enriched with a social layer. On top of that, business processes are the smallest common denominator upon which an enterprise 2.0 dynamic can start without having to deal too much with cultural issues because it brings a focus to what makes sense for anyone : solving actual issues they face while they tried to achieve what they are evaluated on.

There are many ways to deal with the articulation of enterprise 2.0 dynamics with business processes. Here’s the presentation I made at the Enterprise 2.0 Forum in Milan in June.

And here are some explainations… [Read more →]

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Picture of the week #2 :

July 19th, 2010 · Picture of the week

Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion

Illustration from “The Golden Rules for Success“.

Thanks to Thierry d’Auzers for this excellent book, the rights of use and Dimitri Tolstoï for the pictures.

Offer the Golden Rules for Success as a business gift.

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Links for this week (weekly)

July 18th, 2010 · Recommended Bookmarks

  • “. Everybody knows there are downsides to management-as-usual, but are they any alternatives? We can dream about organizations where employees eagerly challenge their superiors, where honesty trumps deference and where the pyramid has been turned upside down—but then again, we can also dream about world peace and cold fusion.”

    tags: democracy management accountability HCL management2.0 evaluation

    • Transparent Financial Data. Vineet realized it’s hard to feel empowered if your manager has a lot of data you don’t. With this in mind, HCLT’s IT team created a simple widget that gave every employee a detailed set of financial metrics for their own team and other teams across the company.
    • U&I. Early on, Vineet and his leadership team set up an online forum and encouraged employees to ask tough questions and offer honest feedback. Nothing was censored on the “U&I” site; every post, however virulent, was displayed for the entire company to see
    • Service Level Agreements. Powerful corporate departments, like HR and finance, often seem more interested in enforcing blanket policies than in making life easier for employees. When Vineet would ask front line employees, “What have the enabling functions done to help you create value in the value zone?”
    • Today, HCLT employees are able to rate the performance of any manager whose decisions impact their work lives, and to do so anonymously. These ratings are published online and can be viewed by anyone who has submitted a review.
    • As the CEO, Vineet was being asked to weigh in on hundreds of unit-level plans each year. Recognizing the limits to his time and personal expertise, Vineet challenged his colleagues to develop an online, peer-based evaluation process. The solution: MyBlueprint. In 2009, three hundred managers posted their business plans, or “blueprints,” online. Each document was accompanied by an audio presentation. More than 8,000 employees were then invited to jump in and review the plans
    • Employee First Councils. The goal here was to help employees connect with team members who shared similar interests and passions. Supported by a web-based platform, the new initiative rapidly spawned a host of communities around cultural, recreational and job-related issues
    • Three years after launching this concept, 20% of HCLT’s revenue is coming from initiatives launched in these communities of interest.”
    • “We all believe that democracies are good and totalitarian systems are bad, and yet we tolerate dictatorships within our companies, even though the people at the top don’t have enough information to know what needs to be done. At HCLT, we have been trying to democratize our company.”

  • Employee engagement is more than just the current HR ‘buzzword’; it is essential. In order for organizations to meet and surpass organizational objectives, employees must be engaged. Research has proven that wholly engaged employees exhibit,

    § Higher self-motivation.
    § Confidence to express new ideas.
    § Higher productivity.
    § Higher levels of customer approval and service quality.
    § Reliability.
    § Organizational loyalty; less employee turnover.
    § Lower absenteeism.”

    tags: humanresources engagement

  • tags: competencies enterprise2.0

  • “But today, a lot of process occurs inside of people’s heads, their computers and networks of computers spread across a building or across the globe. This kind of process can be harder to see and measure. The information gap begins from the initial investment, which is generally not tracked, all the way through to the end result. This lack of information keeps process off the radar of many critical stakeholders from Boards of Directors to investors and even, sometimes, a management team. Many knowledge processes, therefore, are done on an ad hoc basis with people reinventing the wheel every day, day after day, year after year.”

    tags: knowledgeworkers processes

    • It is important to note that knowledge processes and physical production processes are intersecting with greater frequency. This is because many of the marginal gains from manufacturing are now coming through automation of information or through adjustments to a process designed by employees who work on it.
    • Why do we call process a “superpower?” Because it is the most scalable forms of knowledge capital. Anytime that you capture the “best practices” of your organization in an automated process, you are making every employee smarter when they come to work in the morning. They do not have to think about how to solve the simple problems—because the solution is already built into the system
  • “The reality, however, is that most organizations today have more than one chain of command, and to be successful you need to navigate between them. “

    tags: chainofcommand multiarchy hierarchy matrix projectteams

    • The first type is the professional multiarchy in which different professional groups have parallel hierarchies with little or no connection at the top of the organization.
    • The second type of multiarchy is the matrix, which is present to some degree in most businesses. The matrix is a crisscross of business units and functions (portrayed as verticals and horizontals).
    • The third type of multiarchy is the temporary project team. In these situations people are “loaned” from their home organization and report to a project manager for a period of time
  • “Relativement discrets en 2009, les réseaux sociaux internes explosent dans les organisations publiques et privées. Bouygues, le CEA, Danone, Veolia Environnement ou encore Ubisoft débordent de projets. “

    tags: socialnetworking casestudies enterprise2.0 socialnetworks

  • “Understand what capabilities you need: “Provide a scorecard… look at the interaction that need to be supported… Look at the types of processes supported… Review personalities in your organization.”

    Assess what capabilities you already have: “Look at the skills in your organization… Make sure you put governance around BPM. You want to provide the framework, best practices and guidance.”

    Identify the steps to get started with social BPM: “Don’t try to roll out social everybody, but look at where to start…. Look at your first project, look at the results, and expand social throughout the enterprise.

    Look at your environment and how you can embrace social: “It may not be all of the patterns, but look at the pattern and identify the one that makes sense for you.”

    Educate the business: “The biggest challenge we see with social BPM, is the term social isn’t necessarily a business process-oriented term. At the end of the day, all of your processes will be impacted buy some way by social. We need to start looking at how the two worlds come together.””

    tags: socialbpm bpm businessprocess

  • “Un peu pour le fun mais pas seulement cette petite matrice de positionnement (j’en ai d’autres en magasin…). Chaque projet RH 2.0 a son contexte et l’influence du DRH est majeure. Il conviendra de prendre en compte sa “position” pour adapter sur le fond et la forme son ambition et surtout son approche.”

    tags: hr HRofficer enterprise2.0 hr2.0 strategy matrix

  • “The convergence of content stores, portal frameworks, combined with powerful context-aware publishing systems and social interactions, is pushing traditional ECM, WCM, Portal, and E2.0 vendors to rely upon a new generation of integrated “Composite Content Platforms” (also called “Content–enabled Enterprise Portals” or “Content Application Servers”).”

    tags: content contentplatforms ECM socialmedia integration interoperability identity CMS API REST collaboration

    • The Rise of Composite Content Platforms - Contentation Re-considered
    • 8. Social and Collaboration Services
      One of the recent goals of any composite content platforms is to let developers rapidly socialize their applications. Most so-called E2.0 software employ a top-down approach focused on the added value of adopting an enterprise social network that mimic Facebook rather than promoting the integration of social as a service.
    • Trend #1: The cloud as your main distributed content and data store
    • Trend #2: Distributed RESTful Services
      The ever-growing Internet bandwidth, improved security on cloud computing, together with the generalization of distributed RESTful APIs, should lead more and more software vendors to focus on specific niches and offer specialized services on the cloud which could be easily integrated back into your custom solutions.
    • Trend #3: Rapid assembly of content-rich applications

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

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Need to take users by the hand ? Remember they only have two !

July 13th, 2010 · Social Networking, enterprise 2.0, social computing

It does not matter things are seen from the people or technology point of view, since we all know that people seldom embrace new things keeping their eyes shut and without questionning (even more in the workplace) we all understand that users have to be taken by the hand and accompanied. On the other hand, the failure of many strategies aiming at doing so show that many change programs do not know where to find the hand or have a wrong idea about its location.

It means that beyond the myth of multitasking, employees focus on two things and that all their attention goes there. It’s not a matter of lack of goodwill but they can’t do more if they want to do things well and keep their concentration. So any other issue is seen as peripheral, and dealing with it will force employees either to make it superficially or to stop doing something important, come back to it later and make up the delay later. Nothing pleasant at all.

Every day, people have one hand in their email client and the other in their structured activities (call it process, workflow…) and the tools that help them to manage and deal with these activities. The first is their principal means of communication, the only that even if it’s not properly used, keep them in touch with everyone. The second is the reason why they have been hired, what they are evaluated on, what they have to do (and do it well) before thinking of doing anything else.

That can help us to draw some conclusions in terms of change management. Since, in order to grab a hand we have to know where it is, it’s impossible to do anything without taking into account the email and its place in employees workaday life or the relationship between the new things and the structured activities. Any other angle won’t impact employees and will fail. Then, we’ll have to explain how to put their hands elsewhere won’t prevent them from doing what they used to do before, what is essential to their job.

Any other approach would be like telling a driver “take you hands off the wheel” without telling him that, on top of being enabled to do much more things, he’ll be provided by something that will at least help him to drive better than with a steering wheel.

It also has consequences on technology for both companies that try to implement social software and vendors who provide solutions to these companies. There is an incredible number on players on this market despite it has reached a consolidation phase and each of them is pushing a different approach, focusing on a specific kind of social activity to seduce buyers. The truth is there are only two valid approaches and not one more. The rest is only marketing blah-blah and even if the verbiage may sound seducing, it never survives to the confrontation with real business.

No solution can be sustainably adopted on a large scale in any organization if it doesn’t meet at least one of the following requirements (both is better) :

- high integration in email clients. It can come in different ways, from the most simple one (alerts / notifications) to the most accomplished (widget in the client, shared data and services)

- integration with tools that are used for structured activities (CRM, ERP, BPM…even ECM). Interactions and conversations often come from the need to solve a business problem…guess where these problems emerge and are identified ?

Many lines can be taken in front of employees, many tools can be proposed. The truth is much simple : who does not tackle one of these points of entry is saying things that make no sense for employees, adds problems without bringing any solution.

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Community management and processes by the example

July 12th, 2010 · Social Networking, social computing, social crm

Some weeks ago I promised to illustrate my “community management and processus” post with a fictitious but credible example. So, here it comes…

Jack and John are community managers (or, at least, in charge on figuring things out on social media on behalf of their employer). Both are working for an airline (what was a trendy and volcanic topic at the time I thought about the case). Jack is working at AirShy and Paul at AirSocial.

AirShy knows things have to be done one on Twitter, Facebook and all these new medias but is not comfortable with that. The company is used to keeping everything under control, to avoid any kind of risk. On the other hand, people at AirSocial think that if they don’t dive into the pool they have no chance to learn how to swim.

So AirShy decided to occupy the field in the only purpose to have a presence. They asked to someone who likes these new media to deal with this work : Jack. he reports to the communication department but could have reported to any department that would have taken the leadership on this subject.

At AirSocial, people wondered what these medias could be used for. Half of the answer was in que question : things are worth when they allow to serve the customer in a better way. So how could they serve their customers better with new medias ? Deliver information to eveyone, but also to people with individual concerns. That means the company should engage in conversations…about what, with what tone, to what extent ? And what should not be tackled ? Confidential issues of course ! But also what people don’t want to read in such channels. The communication department is in charge but they quickly realized that they had in their hands a pipe that can be used by anyone in the company. Even if it’s still quite vague they decided to start and learn from their own experience. John is told to deal with these media, on the operational side.

At first sight, Jack has less constraints than John. There’s no doubt he’ll achieve better results. Not that sure…

[Read more →]

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