2008 October | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

Is web 2.0 dead or is business replacing buzzyness ?

October 29, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

You must have felt this agitation that went through the blogosphere these last day, but that was also relayed by traditional medias. Web 2.0 is dead. The rumor didn’t start from this note from Michael Arrington but since he’s got a bigger loudhailer than most of the population his voice carried farer. Then hundreds if not thousands of people predicted the end of web 2.0.

I can’t see anything particularly cleaver when some people say that when the economy’s going through hard times, the more fragile companies may come off badly. Among those companies there’s no need to have a second sight to guess all those that operates on an emerging market may be concerned, which is the case for web 2.0 startups…but not only. Not enough to convince me of real soothsayer abilities, nor to applause such perceptiveness, knowing it’s easy to ring the alarm when the city is burning just when you’ve been knowing fire raisers were at work for a long time. Those who were pushing for “everything 2.0″ even without sense or business model, prefering the “buzzyness model” could wonder about their past analysis. They themselves killed “their” web 2.0, turning it into a hudge holdall where they put everything and anything. But once smoke will be gone, many interesting things will remain, the only things that value creation can rely on, that makes it possible to build real business models. For this reason, I see these troubled times we’re experiencing as a salutary stabilization phase. I’ll end with a comparison with our late web 1.0. Even if some babies were thrown with the bathwater, companies that adresses a real need, that delivered a real valuable service, survived the crisis and are still alive.

In brief, I’d rather rank the “web 2.0 is dead” buzzword in the “who lives on noise can only survive making more noise” category.

So, what’s about Enterprise 2.0 ?

Links for 10/27/2008

October 27, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Enterprise3: Corporate Social Networks according to Robert Scoble

“I left behind a gig and a half of email when I left NEC – I couldn’t look at it, and they erased it. My former coworkers couldn’t use that knowledge. A collaborative toolset helps to get information out of email into the shared social space. Sharepoint and others are working on that problem. You see productivity benefits. Now people can see where you are going, make suggestions on who to call there.

tags: email, collaboration, knowledge, socialtools, socialmedia, productivity
Variation in Experience and Team Familiarity: Addressing the Knowledge Acquisition-Application Problem — HBS Working Knowledge

Team familiarity helps team members successfully locate knowledge within a group, share the knowledge they possess, and respond to the knowledge of others. While team familiarity may help all teams to better coordinate their actions, it may play a particularly important role for teams with individuals looking to apply knowledge from their varied experience. This possibility leads to the question that provides the foundation for this paper: Does team familiarity moderate the relationship between variation in experience and performance?

tags: teamfamiliarity, learning, knowledge, knowledgemanagement, knowledgeapplication, socialnetworking
JP Rangaswami on Sharing Acitivity in Businesses – The Social Enterprise

JP Rangaswami of BT Design went a little bit further in that direction, by outlining how social tools can usefully become part of our working practices – and even build on some of the existing ones.

Social tools enavble the communities within businesses to emerge. There are fewer figures of authority and it’s more a peer space than the traditional heirarchial business.

tags: socialtools, communication, productivity, generationy, statuses
- Young people today are going to come into the workplace used to pervasive. mobile communications and they’re not going to be impressed with the static, lock-down worsktations we have now.
  
  “They’re pre-trained not to think as stupidly as previous generations,” said JP.
- “If we make everything we say a data object, and we can share and move it around,” he says. “It becomes valuable.”
Enterprise Software: Focus on User Adoption, Not Features – ReadWriteWeb

According to a study done by the Sand Hill Group and Neochange, the most critical factor (70% listed it as number 1) for software success and return-on-investment is effective user adoption.

tags: adoption, ROI, socialsoftware
Expertise location: linking social networks and text mining – Trends in the Living Networks

SRI International based in Menlo Park, California, teamed up with military officers to build a new social analytics tool called iLink that generates models and helps streamline the process by which a specific expert in an online community can be found.

In simple terms, iLink is a machine learning-based system that models users and content in a social network and then points the user to relevant content.

…

The iLink system had several goals, including real-time learning by matching queries and communities users; adapting to user demands and directions, providing accuracy in message targeting and routing and, finally, dynamic user profile correction based on community behaviours and identification of community experts.

The learning in iLink occurs by watching a natural social network, and selecting effective strategies that emerge from the system as the members try to solve problems. The system continuously monitors the real social network and it is capable of drafting from the social network’s learning.

…

The iLink software uses artificial intelligence software and message routing technology to help the system learn about the online participants and move specific questions to those who are best equipped to answer them. The SRI scientists basically build a profile of each person in the community and the iLink system starts to learn about the movement of information around the community.

tags: expertise, socialnetworks, problemsolving, profile, intelligenttextmining, mining, talent, talentmanagement
Innovate on Purpose: The innovation paradox

The innovation paradox is that the more your firm pays attention to innovation, the less likely it will be to be successful at innovation. That’s because, like any other foreign organism, the culture and bureaucracy of your organization identifies an external intruder that has not aligned itself with the organization and function of the rest of the body, and tries to force the innovation program or capability to adopt the decision making processes, risk tolerances, timeframes, perspectives and “best practices” that are part and parcel of the rest of the organization.

tags: innovation, management, alignment, risk
- As a management team, kicking off an innovation project or program without the “bubble” in a traditional, conservative, risk averse organization is usually a recipe for failure. That
- To innovate, you’ve got to do things differently. This includes how you generate ideas and how you manage the ideas, as well as the way your innovation team works within the existing corporate framework. If your innovation team is forced to work within a culture and process that is not innovative, then your innovation team will not be innovative either.
Gérer en période de crise- La Jaune et la Rouge

tags: management, intangibleassets, strategy, crisis, cooperation, innovation, digitaleconomy
Zone Franche – blog de Gilles Martin: Voleurs de poules ?

Imaginer que ces “pillages” peuvent avoir pour origine des dysfonctionnements dans la gestion des talents de leur propre entreprise, que la récente fusion de leur équipe de consulting avec une SSII a peut être dégoûté certains, ce genre d’idées, on ne l’évoque pas. Haro sur le voleur de poules !!

tags: recruitment, retention, talentmanagement
Usages et technologies du web 2.0 en entreprise

Timothée Mervillon a réalisé un mémoire de fin d’études pour son master de Méthodes Informatiques Appliquées à la Gestion des Entreprises (MIAGE) intitulé : “Quelle valeur ajoutée en entreprise avec les technologies et usages du web 2.0″. Ce mémoire est une bonne synthèse du management de l’information et de l’utilisation des outils du web pour y parvenir. Outre le fait que ce mémoire fait une “bonne pub” à IBM, il permet surtout de mettre en valeur l’utilisation des médias sociaux en entreprise.

tags: enterprise2.0, socialcomputing, collaboration, web2.0, IBM

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

Filed Under: Recommended Bookmarks

Logic without good sense leads to catastroph

October 26, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Two weeks ago I attended a graduation ceremony. In such events I often find speeches boring, but this time I was really interested to ear the message that would be delivered to youn managers/entrepreneurs who will need to find their way in the business world in a time of crisis.

Finally I liked the way things were said, wih lucidity. I left with the title of a book I should buy and a very meaningful quotation : “logic without good sense leads to catastroph”.

What’s logic ? It’s what allows to draw certain consequences from established facts, most of times upon an experience based reasoning.

Good sense ? It’s what makes possible for people to realize that something obvious isn’t that obvious, that a good a priori choice will have negative effects, that avoiding complexity isn’t always a good thing. And that, sometimes, logic has its limits.

Logic is reassuring. It puts things into systems, into equations and gives us certainties about what the future will be. It’s consecrated bread for companies. We earned so much this year so if we do the same the same year we’ll earn as much money. A salesperson had such figures this year, so he’ll do at least the same next year. This way of doing things always worked…so it will work again. If an option matches such scoring criterias it will increase our performance…

Good sense tells us logic does not always work. Examples : the 100m world record is improved by 1/10 second every year. Logic tells us one day people will run the 100m in zero seconds and will break the sound barrier. Good sense tells us it’s impossible. Logic tells us a salesperson car improve his performance by 10% a year. Good sense tells us one day he’ll reach a ceiling unless you are ready to assume one people would be, one day, able to generate the equivalent of French GDP by selling peanuts at the corner of the street.

Logic, when applied to performace, makes us want to brings everything back to a linear function. So companies make promises and built models based on that. Good senses makes us say performance is rather a curve which asymptotic character is often forgotten. It tends with more and more difficulties to something but never reaches it. Do you remember when you studied functions limits in methematics class.

The two functions seem to coincide during a long time, during decades. Sometimes the performance curve can even be better than what’s expected. But the day comes then they cross each other, split. And what happen then ? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: crisis, economy, Entrepreneurship, finance, Human resources, logic, management, networks, organization, people-centric, performance

Links for 10/22/2008

October 22, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Get Rid of the Performance Review! – WSJ.com

tags: no_tag
- Another bogus element is the idea that pay is a function of performance, and that the words being spoken in a performance review will affect pay. But usually they don’t. I believe pay is primarily determined by market forces, with most jobs placed in a pay range prior to an employee’s hiring.
- Most performance reviews are staged as “objective” commentary, as if any two supervisors would reach the same conclusions about the merits and faults of the subordinate. But consider the well-observed fact that when people switch bosses, they often receive sharply different evaluations from the new bosses to whom they now report.
- Worse, bosses apply the same rating scale to people with different functions. They don’t redo the checklist for every different activity. As a result, bosses reduce their global sentiments to a set of metrics that captures the unique qualities of neither the person nor the job.
- The No. 1 reason for that reluctance is that employees want to turn to somebody who understands their distinctive talents and way of thinking, or knows them sufficiently well to appreciate the reasons behind the unique ways they are driven to operate.
- That’s because the performance review is so one-sided, giving the boss all the power. The boss in the performance review thinks of himself or herself as the evaluator, and doesn’t engage in teamwork with the subordinate. It isn’t, “How are we going to work together as a team?” It’s, “How are you performing for me?” It’s not our joint performance that’s at issue. It’s the employee’s performance that’s a problem.
- Instead of stimulating corporate effectiveness, they lead to just-in-case and cover-your-behind activities that reduce the amount of time that could be put to productive use. Instead of promoting directness, honesty and candor, they stimulate inauthentic conversations in which people cast self-interested pursuits as essential company activities.
- Keep in mind, of course, that improvement is each individual’s own responsibility. You can only make yourself better. The best you can do for others is to develop a trusting relationship where they can ask for feedback and help when they see the need and feel sufficiently valued to take it. Getting rid of the performance review is a necessary, and affirming, step in that direction.
Bob Sutton: Sam Culbert in the Wall Street Journal: Get Rid of the Performance Review!

Although an entire industry of consultants, HR professionals, and software firms seem bent on devoting more and more time and money to performance evaluations, all the energy devoted to these things over the years have done little to change Sam’s observation about the difference between the promise and the problems:

tags: humanressources, performance, performancereview, designthinking, evaluation
- Sam’s article is also in the spirit of design thinking, as in many cases, after people have spent years trying to perfect some procedure, gadget, or feature that they — usually mindlessly — accept as something they cannot do without and then a breakthrough happens when some clever person (often someone who isn’t an expert in the field) comes along and removes it or unwittingly goes forward and succeeds without it. Then everyone realizes that they never needed it at all.
- Creative people, often unwittingly, often have a huge impact by removing things that everyone assumes are essential.
The AppGap » » Intranets are not just intranets anymore: Work 2.0, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 commentary and reviews: apps, tools and practices

I spent the better part of yesterday locked in a brainstorming room with a client and my team as we discussed what a next generation intranet should look like. I was struck by how little some business assumptions have changed in the last few years. We forget these assumptions as we strategize, design and build next generation intranets. Here are a few of those assumptions.

tags: intranet, collaboration, communication, organization
Why the Financial Crisis is (Mostly) Good News for Gen Y – Tammy Erickson

And here’s the irony. Despite a slowdown in immediate career opportunities, the current financial crisis is likely to reinforce the overall happy, fortuitous economic life of Generation Y.

tags: crisis, jobmarket, employment, generationy
- And unlike Boomers, who are racing to build up a nest egg before retirement hits and in many cases trying to make up for a life of limited savings, Y’s have no such time pressure. The key job challenge for Y’s in this job market will be to find the challenging opportunities for learning that they crave. In many ways, their greater financial flexibility may give them an advantage over older generations for some of the interesting opportunities.

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

Filed Under: Recommended Bookmarks

Network or proximity ? Where’s the value for businesses ?

October 21, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Social networks seem to be used to fit nearly any case, regardless to the fact their value come from the context. As an example, my newtorks on facebook and linkedin have nothing in common, links are built upon different criterias, in different contexts. Knowing than Mr. so-and-so is one of my contacts on one or the oher may help to understand the nature of our relationships. But in each case there’s a commonb point : one asked the other to validate we were contacts and the other agreed according to his own criterias. Materializing this relation built a link.

But the link can be created differently. Not only according to relations but objects. Dopplr uses travels as objects. Lastfm songs. FlickR pictures as I mentioned here. What creates the link is not the fact people know each others but an object

Not let’s imagine we’re in an enterprise context.

What’s the personal link related network within an enterprise ? People start by adding the ones they work with every day. Then they accept their superiors because refusing would be diplomatically hard. Then, followin the same logic, they link their subordinates. Then across the organization because we use to have coffee breaks together or use the same bus lie. Whatever : the only fact we have the same employer is enough to link one another. So we may have two kinds of result : either people reproduce the organization chart or eveyone is linked to every other. I do not use the “friend” or “relationship” in purpose.

What the interest for the employees ? None : the corporate directory would give him the same result. For the company ? None too : organizations know their orghanization chart and their employees directory (although….). Whatever. The general public web model does not operate in a corporate context.

So, what’s the solution ?

Special Enterprise 2.0 event in Paris on Nov. 13. Join us !

October 17, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

You all know my creeds : tools must be made to improve the way people work, companies must improve their agility by working as networks (and even more in these difficult times…) etc. ect. and this vision seems to be shared by many people who often ask me how to put it into action.

Many of my readers often ask me questions in order to know more about blueKiwi, what we are doing, what we are planning to do…

Some also often tell me I’m lucky to meet high level specialists, to be able to talk with them and share our thoughts “in real life”

Well, I think you’ll be happy to know that your expectations about these three points may be fulfilled in nothing more than one evening.

Links for 10/17/2008

October 17, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Cisco’s Chambers sees collaboration fueling productivity gains; Web 2.0 as new enterprise engine? | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

The difference this time around: In the mid-90s those productivity gains were based on big enterprise resource planning rollouts that could wreck a company. Today, Chambers is talking implementations of Web 2.0 tools and collaboration.

tags: CISCO, web2.0, ROI, collaboration, strategy, IT, businessstrategy, enterprise2.0, telepresence, productivity
- And there’s a payoff. Chambers said that collaboration tools and Cisco’s Telepresence technology saved the company $150 million a year in travel expenses.
- “For the first time collaborative IT will be so intertwined with the business strategy you won’t know the difference between the two,” he said.
- Chambers noted cloud computing will become a mesh of interconnected networks. Cloud computing “is just another evolution of the Internet.” On software as a service, Cisco said WebEx use internally is up 2,500 percent with discussion forums and blogging has also increased dramatically
Les étudiants de l’ESC de Lille peuvent utiliser les services de Google à l’école ET à la médiathèque

tags: google, cloudcomputing, esclille, library
Content Matters

“You have to think about your employees as your most important and valuable asset.”

Business analytics / business intelligence leader SAS is an incredible success story that owes its success to many factors, not the least of which is its employees:

tags: SAS, web2.0, enterprise2.0, blogs, wikis, humancapital, culture, generationy, assets, intangibleassets
- Employee tools at SAS:
  
  • SAS Wide Web (intranet in multiple languages)
  • Using SharePoint 2007 (MOSS)
  • Employee Blogs
  • Employee Wikis
  • SAS Video portal (executive updates, podcasts, webcasts, town hall meetings)
  • Two sound stages at SAS working every day
- Four Critical Dimensions (Insight into change):
  1- Human Capital
  2- Knowledge Processes
  3- Culture
  4- Infrastructure
- What’s next?
  
  • “The data explosion – what are its sources and how can organizations cope?”
  • “Is your organization ready for Generation Y?”
  • “How are companies leveraging unstructured data?”
  • “Is it technology or attitude?”
  • “Web 3.0?” (speed and latency independent of the platform)
Networking de crise : Tout sur le Reseau en recherche d’emploi et en poste

La crise offre la possibilité d’apporter, plus que jamais, votre aide à ceux qui risquent de subir ses effets de plein fouet. Le Réseau va sans doute avoir besoin de vous. Soyez présent car ce dernier n’oublie pas et il se souviendra de ce que vous avez fait pour lui.

tags: networking, socialnetworking, socialnetworks, crisis
Email Hell

E-mail overload is the leading cause of preventable productivity loss in organizations today. Basex Research recently estimated that businesses lose $650 billion annually in productivity due to unnecessary e-mail interruptions. And the average number of corporate e-mails sent and received per person per day are expected to reach over 228 by 2010.

The fundamental problem of this otherwise great technology is largely behavioral, and new practices and technologies are arising to solve it.

tags: email, informationoverload, behaviors, collaborativetools, socialsoftware, businessprocess
- A major contributor to e-mail overload is broken business processes.
  When an environment changes, business processes fail to adapt, and this
  causes exceptions.

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

Filed Under: Recommended Bookmarks

Who’s looking for a magik stick on the clouds only gets showers

October 16, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Sometimes some of my readers, rather than letting a comment or leaving with their doubts, send me questions by email. And among the questions, one comes so often that it desserves a public answer.

Generaly the mail looks that that

“Dear Bertrand

I’m very interesting in all that’s being said about enteprise and web 2.0. As a matter of fact, lack of information sharing, email overload, the fact good ideas never come to the surface are situations we experience everyday and we have to fix them for our company’s wealth. It’s obvious we have to learn to work a little bit differently.

On the other hand it’s hard for me to understand how all these tools, this “cloud computing”, will make my people work differently.

Perhaps you could give me some pieces of advice.

Regards.

xxxxxx”.

First I could start explaining the difference between tools and cloud computing, the second being rather a way to deliver the tools, or saying that enteprises are not the web that…

But what’s important is not there.

Techno populists come to power at Unilever, GE…and in your company ?

October 15, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

I discovered the term “techno-populist” while reading this businessweek article. This expression, originally due to Forrester, designates people who flout their company’s IT policies in order to use in their professional lives the tools they use in their private life.

Wendy wakes joined Unilever when she was 27. Within the marketing department she quickly experienced the consequences of a very strict IT policy. And the young recruits she works with finds it even harder. As Business week writes, for people born after 1985, the discovering of the corporate world is a real technological shock. Unlike what our generation experienced when the enterprise was a kind of eldorado where we could use state of the art tools and computers we could not have even dreamt of, we have to recognize that the corporate world looks rather like Jurassic Park compared to what I can use in my private life (globally speaking, because I’m very happy with what my company provides me).

The you woman didn’t give up and wrote to her CIO, explaining to which extent people may be more efficient with general public, less prehistoric, and free tools. Six months later she was offered a new job : spreading the use of these tools within unilever.

Unilever now wishes to give its employees more “digital freedom”, allow connection from outside the firewall, use their own PCs provided some security rules are respected. With an identified goal : an increase in productivity and lower costs. Even when they’re not free, the tools in question have pricing models that have nothing to do with what companies have used to know till now.

Links for 10/13/2008

October 13, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Réduire les budgets RH peut nuire gravement

Toutefois en phase de crise comme celle que nous vivons actuellement, il faut avoir une approche différenciée pour chacun des deux volets de la fonction RH que sont la Gestion Administrative des Ressources Humaines (enregistrements, déclarations, paie,…) et la Gestion des Talents (recruter, impliquer, développer). Ne pas faire la différence pourrait nuire gravement à votre entreprise.

tags: humanressources, talentmanagement, recruitment, retention
The FASTForward Blog » In uncertain times, Enterprise 2.0 takes the stage: Enterprise 2.0 Blog: News, Coverage, and Commentary

For many people the positioning of Enterprise 2.0 as a cost reduction engine is not new. Complexity reduction, efficiency increases and fast response times have been the cornerstone of many Enterprise Social Software pitches in the last 5 years.

tags: enteprise2.0, costs, productivity, socialmedia, socialsoftware, growth
- “The interconnections and interactions between people spark great value, but the more costly traditional tools have missed out on this great reservoir of of value, but the newer lower cost solutions offer these gems up wonderfully with a little coaxing.”
- The promise of bringing social tools into organizations has never been about complicating worker productivity. It centers on allowing individuals to act more independently and to make smarter decisions more easily.”
- In many cases, enthusiasm for this technology has outpaced reliable case studies and visible progress, but that progress has become more remarkable in 2008,

Filed Under: Recommended Bookmarks

Links for 10/27/2008

Logic without good sense leads to catastroph

Links for 10/22/2008

Links for 10/17/2008

Links for 10/13/2008

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