Enterprise 2.0 : is there a French specificity ?

I will soon be a part of a chat within the context of the upcomming enterprise 2.0 summit.The focus will be on national specificities regarding to enterprise 2.0 adoption. Intuitively we know that things should be done differently whether you have to deal with, american, french, german, italian people.. But, concretely, what does it mean ? How does it impact the projects, their success, failure ? And does it have any impact at all ?

That’s what we’ll discuss in the chat. Since one is always limited by his own knowledge and experience, I’d like to have as many feedbacks and thoughts and that’s why I’d like you to share your opinion with me. It will be interesting to gather opinions from foreign people to have external point of views and benefit from their insights about what they experience in their own country.

Some takes in a jumbe (personal thoughts and things heard) :

- be careful about clichés : the same problems happen everywhere…it’s only a matter of intensituy

- french companies are very rigid and hierarchical. Is it that true ?

- there is less engagement and corporate culture is weaker here, what prevents us from succeeding in participative dynamics. A strong distrust culture toward employers ?

- since french people are less respectful toward rules, they are used to do their own informal cooking to counterbalance the hierarchical weight. They’re happy like that and don’t want the enterprise to join them in the kitchen.

- french businesses are very “politic”. Even is something has a good impact on business, their are lots of power games and personal (ego ?) issues at stake. (But isn’t it the same in all large businesses in the world ?)

- french companies are overcautious, always making small steps, what does not help to demonstrate the value of something that needs a critical mass of people (pilots’ size seems to be dramatically different here and in the US for instance).

- we are impervious to the “try and see” culture.

- the word “social” makes execs feel sick

- we have a social culture that makes people aware of anything employees driven mass phenomenon.

- we are very wise and let others experiment on our behalf.

What do you think ? Does it match your own experience ? And how are things doing in your own country ?

entreprise 2.0,france,culture,adoption,changement

Which governance for your internal communities ?

For many enterprises, knowing how to manage their social spaces (ie: create an join their internal communities) is still a hot topic. The debate may seem trivial but it conditions the success of many projects, first in terms of adoption and then in terms of benefits.

Two main trends can be identified : the first is to consider that social spaces’ management must belong to the “corporate power”, the send is to trust employees, assuming they know more than anyone what they need. Maybe, once again, truth is in the middle.

Some things we have to be aware of :

- corporate authorities are certainly the most relevant people to create and manage spaces that are the carbon copy of the organization, of its org chart.

- corporate authorities are (most of times) incapable of identifying communities or groups that correspond to ponctual and/or local needs and that are not the carbon copy of the formal structure.

- employees are the one who are best at knowing why and when they need such working spaces.

- too many spaces kill spaces : if everyone as the ability to create any kind of social space whenever he wants, without any form of control, there are many chances to see redundant spaces that brings confusion and harm efficiency and productivity.

- culture matters : some companies won’t allow spaces that are not directly linked to work, some will allow any kind of group or community, assuming that whatever their purpose / topic is, they will foster stronger links between people at least, what is a good thing anyway.

Knowing this, there is no unversal solution but something acceptable would be :

- let the corporate authorities manage organizational structure based communities (departments, services etc…)

- self service spaces for any other need, with a possible validation workflow depending on people’s maturity…and trust. Validation may be delegated to local management or power users. If the tool that is used does not allow this…it’s a real gap.

- Anyway, regularly “clean” the spaces to avoid redundancy that prevent people to find what they need (and confuse them when they want to share something).

These are only simple rules but they may help to avoid many pre-project prevarications.

I also advise you to read this note by John Tropea if you want deeper insights on this kind of issue.

Links for this week (weekly)

  • In order to capture the enterprise markets, some of the vendors are shifting towards a Private SaaS approach.

    This brings into focus the very definition of Private SaaS itself. I would like to offer the following simple definition but it is bound to get many pundits worked up.

    tags: saas, privatesaas, cloudcomputing, privatecloud

  • Online work team environments do not and cannot have this level of complexity or work would not get done in the manner that those paying for it would like. The work may be complicated but there are rules, boundaries and processes. Work groups need managers who can direct activities in order to achieve goals. This type of work is collaborative.

    tags: workgroups, communities, processes, rules, collaboration, cooperation, complexity, networks, communitymanagement

  • Three Opportunities For Companies To Evolve Customer Support
    This isn’t just about rise of social tools, in fact, customers have had bad experiences before. The difference? Their voices were just limited to those they could tell in physical proximity. Rather than think of this as a threat, companies should see this as three distinct opportunities:

    tags: socialcrm, customersupport, customers, socialsupport

  • “Enterprise 2.0 is about applications where business value is determined through the contributions of participants.”

    tags: enterprise2.0, definition, businessvalue, contribution, participation

  • In my experience the word “social” has always presented problems in the enterprise. Management exposed to the philosophies of 2.0 thinking, aren’t keen to encourage socializing in the enterprise, but are very willing to improve working. I saw a similar post by Chris Yeh on this theme. Also, we had a good chat internally in the Council about the meme wars, and members expressed their frustration in a wholesale change to the labeling of the sector. It will cause practical disruption and well as introduce confusion at a time when many in the organization were just starting to “get it.”

    tags: enterprise2.0, socialization, work, adoption

  • tags: enterprise2.0, strategy, SWOT, projectmanagement

  • Though the theme of today’s meeting is “Is Social CRM for Real?”, I suspect that many of the people at today’s meeting will actually be thinking “What exactly is Social CRM and what does it mean to me?” Of course this question has been asked and answered in a number of blog posts by various members of the SCRM community, but the perspective of the IT department has been largely ignored. So in preparation for today’s meeting I thought I’d take a pass at trying to explain what Social CRM means from an IT department perspective.

    tags: socialcrm, IT, ITdepartment, reengineering, socialmedia, crm, customerengagement, enterprise2.0, customers, saas

    • From a business systems point of view, becoming a socially-driven business requires that you re-think and re-engineer your business systems and processes in order to take advantage of Web-based social tools, technologies, and concepts.
    • With Enterprise 2.0 tools the asset being leveraged is employees. With Social CRM the asset being leveraged is the customer.
    • For Social CRM that means the Web. Whether you call it SaaS, On Demand, vendor-managed appliances, or Cloud Computing, you should expect that the tools and technologies for enabling SCRM will be available exclusively on these deployment platforms
  • A nice updated slideshow of Adidas’ Christian Kuhna on their implementation approaches and lessons learned.

    tags: adidas, socialsoftware, enterprise2.0, communication, internalcommunication, casestudies, socialmedia, implementation

  • tags: socialmedia, governance, policy

  • In this installment of our Social CRM Blog Series, we’ll be turning from “Why” you should be looking at Social CRM to “How” you should think about it for your own organization. For that purpose, Helpstream developed a concept to help visualize this process—we call the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle:

    tags: socialcrm, customers, customerservice, sales, marketing, leadgeneration, awareness

    • Listening is an essential skill for every business function, and Social CRM gives you an unprecedented opportunity to hear what’s being said—both within your own customer community and throughout the broader Web through social monitoring tools
    • Getting the word out is always high on the marketing agenda—Social CRM is a helpful vehicle for doing this. Word-of-mouth begins with your customers. It is important to make sure your marketing is delivering the right words to the right mouths;
    • Find a role for other Influencers and interested parties to play in your community. Invite them to join your conversations. Make sure you have discussions and content available that will appeal to those audiences. A proper social platform will give you all the tools you need to create a personalized experience that differs for customers, prospects, influencers and even competitors and naysayers—now you can minimize the downside and maximize the upsides
    • Once you’ve got leads visiting your community, it’s time to look for opportunities to close. A properly configured Social CRM system and platform will have afforded you the ability to nurture the leads until they’re ready to be sold to.
    • Aside from awareness, sales benefits from the three “R”s that communities can readily offer:  references, referrals and repeat business.
  • Enterprise 2.0 (and Web 2.0 in general) is a great example of technology increasing the efficiency of the consumption of a resource. By being social we are creating more efficient and useful filters and information sharing capabilities. Whether it is expertise location on an internal social network or the ease with which we can share family photos, we have more efficient ways than ever to interact with large groups of people.

    tags: resources, attention, enterprise2.0, connections, socialnetworks, socialcomputing, socialnetworking

    • We need to stop designing tools and platforms which are simply meant to allow people to connect, share and collaborate more. In doing this we are being incredibly irresponsible with the resource we value most
    • It is only by creating more efficient ways for workers to do the job they are expected to do that we can create the space and time they need in order to create emergent outcomes.
  • Social IT leadership is leadership that is exercised through the organization’s internal social media (Enterprise 2.0) and used to spread visions, provide feedback, develop and communicate organizational culture, and motivate knowledge workers for knowledge sharing and to work together across organizational structures. The leadership has a social and relational character, and use social mechanisms to help in the execution.

    tags: IT, socialleadership, leadership, socialsoftware, behaviors

    • A Social IT leaders’ most important function will be to facilitate common knowledge created and open network among the employees. This implies a shift of the information’s power center, which previously has been within the management, to the employees. This will require a change of culture, for both the employees and the managers in an implementation phas
    • Knowledge on how to develop networks and engages to knowledge creation will be a key competence. Moreover, the leader must be conscious of own behavior on the sites. By using the platform the leader will be able to consciously exercise a leadership that encourages, engages, involves, and not least creates knowledge among the employees

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

Is Saas the future of your corporate IT ?

This is one more question that haunts many people’s night. More serioulsy, if it doesn’t make people stay awakened all nights long, it creates debates and brings some confusion that doesn’t help businesses to move forward. As a matter of fact deploying any solution is not that easy when one still have many infrastructure related concerns.

So, let’s try to get cleared idead about what’s going on.

Which debate ?

To make it short,  while companies have been used to host their information system on their own infrastructure are facing the emergence of an alternative solution, called Software as a Service, that makes possible to deliver applications through the internet, using services that are not hosted by its IT dept anymore but by external providers. The debate could be simple (I manage everything by myself vs I let others dealing with the issues and I pay for for service) but there are security and privacy concerns that are not trivial. Concerns that are legitimate even if, sometimes, the answer is simple, in a world where old habits have a very heavy weight.

[Read more...]

People Centric Organizations ? Not that sure…

One of the most common thing we can hear about enterprise 2.0 is that “it’s about people”. Even if it delivers a meaningful meassage, it brings more questions than it solves, leaving enterprises into doubt, if not in fear. I’m not even sure that everybody agree on what it means at the end. “It’s about people” is a bit like the “enterprise 2.0″ word : vague enough to gather many people, not defined enough to provide a framework for action.

What businesses may undersand is “power to people”, “people matter more than organization”. At the end they see a real threat to essential concepts such as organization/objectives/discipline/work. I think it’s a huge misunderstanding : it’s not about the cult of the “individual kingé” but about optimizing the way it’s used as a resource. That does not prevent from having an human vision of business, to value and give consideration to people, to help them develop and improve. But the main objective, let’s be honnest, is to make people give their best, to be sure that no talent or expertise is left unemployed. That’s the macro level. (Those who want to know more about the “union risk” must refer to this post by Oliver Young).

At the micro level, it’s considering people as the engines of the organization. And their knowledge and social capital as the fuel. A new kind a fuel that can’t be stocked, replaced or substitutable and which combustion is uncertain. By “uncertain”, I mean that it delivers energy when it wants, and decide of its energetic power according to its current mood and state of mind. That’s a big change, considering the times when companies owned the engine or the fuel. That’s the reason why things like motivation, sense, engagement, are more important than ever. So, “it’s about people” means that people are the factor that limit any change or transformation project. More, it’s a factor no company can’t do without. Even of some understand than once things are implemented, they’ll be able to take the most of everyone, it’s also important to understand that working on the human parameter is key to achieve anything, how great and fantastic social media tools can be. Culture, that is a point that many try to dispose of because of lack of courage, remains essential.

Then comes “User Generated Content”. Many businesses fear generating monsters, that’s to say the uncontrable popularity of employees trying to overpromote their own status, what would go against the seeked efficiency. With hindsight, experience shows that people are not the entry point to new practices but are only the fuel. Except for CxOs or recognized experts, people don’t focus on other people as such but because they are relevant from a business viewpoint. And that changes many things. A good example is Google wave: it’s the subject that aggregates people, that determines who has to be involved into a wave. That’s the same of every social tool : it’s all about outputs and people only exist through their ability to contribute to a given output. This shows the limits of personal branding strategies in the workplace. Anyway, what has to be understood is that it’s not a “people vs process debate”, on the contrary it’s about taking the most of people while following processes.

People are engines, essential, and deserve all our attention. But, at the end, in a corporate 2.0 context, they are not central points round which everything revolve but only exist through their ability to bring an added value. The “It’s about people” word is not absolute but has to be contextualized according to the expected outputs.

Even powered by people more than ever, enterprises are still objective driven productive organizations. We all should remind this.

capital informationnel, capital social, engagement, Entreprise 2.0, Management, medias sociaux, motivation, people-centrism, personal branding, process, Ressources Humaines, sens, social-media, syndicats, ugc

Sometimes you need a community manager. Sometimes a manager is enough…

Among the the fundamental and trendy issues about enterprise 2.0, it’s impossible not to mention this one : what does making a community work and live takes ? According to many enterprises, that’s what make their “enterprise 2.0″ projects succeed or fail. As short and simple it is, this question brings two strategic issues about which going astray is easy for people who always choose the easiest way or are abused by those who tell them they only have to jump on the bandwagon while things have to be meticulously prepared prior to anything.

First, we’re talking about making a community live, animating, emceeing it. Whatever the verb we us it, the purpose is clear : bringing life and energy to something that don’t have it. And when one try to answer objectively “why is there no life in the community”, in 90% case the answer is : people are not interested, they have no interest, it does not make any sense for sense. So the purpose of emceeing is make people understand that the community matters and to “put some oxygen into the bowl”, hoping one or two fished will start dancing. If not, the only solution is to change members and bring people for whom it really makes sense. This is difficult for many reasons : companies want to mobilize people they identified rather than those who would really like to be involved, so building a community that is not built upon the org-chart or (worse) that is made of exernal people is conceptually impossible.

Second, we’re taling about communities. Communities are places where practices, knowledge, informaiton are exchanged and has not to be confused with workgroups which are operational entities. A human entity can be both at the same time, but most of times, inside organizations, it’s one or the other. Groups know that they have to do, to deliver, and that’s why they exist. Groups exist because they have operational purposes. Communities exchange to learn, groups exchange to execute (even if there a learning dimension in the background routine). The group is a manager’s reponsability, the manager being responsible for objective’s achievement. Communties can be handled by external people who is an expert, a skilled communicator while groups only react to hierarchical hierarchy (even if expertise matters in the background).

Do you guess where I’m driving at ?

[Read more...]

Links for this week (weekly)

  • tags: communities, communitymanagement, onlinecommunities, communitybuilding

  • Social software provides an answer to the ‘why’ question. It is a means of giving people what they want in terms of their traditional knowledge management activities, in a way that also benefits the firm.

    tags: socialmedia, knowledgemanagement, contribution, networks, socialnetworks

  • Those trying to read the tea leaves about Enterprise 2.0 these days can see that the software at least has arrived in a bare majority of companies, even if it’s just Facebook or Twitter across the firewall. Genuine adoption and meaningful integration into business processes has certainly happened in a number of organizations, but is still the edge case today rather than the rule. That’s not to say the current case studies aren’t reporting gains, they generally are. But the message here is that many enterprises are now actively in full contact with the social computing world, whether they want to or not, and now it’s time to understand how to deal with the benefits and issues.

    tags: enterprise2.0, adoption, socialcomputing, framework, bestpractices, communitymanagement, costs, trust, risk, bottomup, topdown, control

  • If the ongoing social networking revolution has you scratching your head and asking, “Why do people spend time on this?” and “How can my company benefit from the social network revolution?” you’ve got a lot in common with Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski

    tags: socialnetworks, usages, socialmedia, socialstrategy, strategy, networks, offlinenetworks, marketing

    • “Online social networks are most useful when they address real failures in the operation of offline networks,” says Piskorski.
    • Corporate marketers by and large struggle with how to use social networking sites to reach potential customers, says Piskorski, who advises companies on this subject. The problem is that execs think of online social networks as social media and treat it as another channel to get people to click through to a site.
    • “To be successful, you need to shift your mindset from social media to social strategy,”
    • I see (businesses) saying, ‘Let’s talk to people on Twitter or let’s have a Facebook page or let’s advertise.’ And these are good first steps but they are nowhere close to a social strategy
  • tags: socialbusiness, socialbusinessstratregy, strategy, socialcrm, customers, clients, innovation, marketing, alignment, operations

  • L’assureur américain Chubb Group of Insurance correspondait sans aucun doute, récemment, à cette lugubre description. Voici quelques mois, cependant, le groupe s’est lancé dans une nouvelle expérience, raconte le magazine Rick & Insurance, visant à insuffler durablement un esprit d’innovation dans toutes les strates de l’organisation.

    tags: chubb, innovation, crowdsourcing, openinnovation

    • Trente jour après l’installation de la plate-forme en ligne, l’assureur avait récolté 607 idées.
      « Certaines de ces idées tenaient sur un email de trois paragraphes, rapporte l’article de R&I. D’autres idées étaient bien plus longuement développées. Elles renvoyaient à des documents annotés des commentaires. Nous en sommes sûr: beaucoup de ces idées vivotaient depuis de nombreuses années dans le cerveau de certains employés. Ils voulaient les soumettre mais ils n’avait personne pour les entendre et nul par où les exprimer. Elles étaient perdues… »
    • « Je sais que je peux partir d’une graine d’idée et, en trois mois, bâtir tout un business plan. Et je dispose des fonds pour soutenir la mise en oeuvre. De la sorte, je suis armé pour devancer n’importe qui« , précise Jon Bidwell, Chief Innovation Officer de Chubb Group of Insurance, à R&I.
  • During our Insight Event last week, Steve Perry (Head of Knowledge and Business Development Systems) discussed Freshfields’ new social intranet and the changing shape of business processes in the firm through the use of social tools. These are my notes from Steve’s talk along with his presentation.

    tags: socialintranet, intranet2.0

  • During our Insight Event last week, Sam Dimond (Director of Knowledge Systems) outlined his thoughts on how to get started with social tools, drawing from his experience of the adoption of blogs and wikis in Clifford Chance.

    tags: enterprise2.0, cliffordchance, adoption, implementation, email, collaboration, wiki

  • Significant changes are taking place in management and especially project management today. We hear that organizations, like the New York Times, Tribune Co., Ernst & Young switched from the so-called top-down management style to bottom-up management. Others, including some of the world’s biggest corporations, such as Toyota and IBM, implemented bottom-up management style elements in some of their departments. The popularity of the bottom-up approach to management is growing. In spite of this fact, the discussions about the two major approaches are still hot. Why have organizations become so anxious about changing their management style? If we compare the two management approaches, the answer to this question will be clear.

    tags: projectmanagement, topdown, bottomup, management, project, participation, collaboration, enterprise2.0, projectmanagement2.0, collectiveintelligence

    • . Team members are invited to participate in every step of the management process. The decision on a course of action is taken by the whole team. Bottom-up style allows managers to communicate goals and value, e.g. through milestone planning. Then team members are encouraged to develop personal to-do lists with the steps necessary to reach the milestones on their own.
    • These methods include are Enterprise 2.0 technologies – wikis, blogs, social networks, collaboration tools, etc. They come into organizations and change the original way of executing projects. They turn traditional project management into Project Management 2.0 and bring new patterns of collaboration, which are based on collective intelligence. Collective intelligence is a collection of valuable knowledge from different fields that each project team member is an expert in. This knowledge is now successfully collected and shared shared in a flexible, collaborative environment brought by second-generation project management software. The project manager is the one to conduct the work of his team and choose the right direction for the project development, based on the information received from the individual employees.
  • This is the third in a series of interviews with Samuel Driessen, Information Architect at Océ, about their Enterprise 2.0 implementation and adoption experiences.

    tags: océ, implementation, informationarchitecture, information, informationmanagement, structuredinformation, unstructuredinformation, integration

    • The information architecture is the glue that bonds business and IT components and it looks at both structured and unstructured information. The unstructured information can give context to the structured information.
    • In the past Océ could clearly distinguish the tools R&D and Manufacturing & Logistics (M&L) use. Only when data was transferred from R&D tools to M&L tools a joint responsibility existed. However, this led to silos and inefficiency. Now M&L needs more access, commitment and collaboration from R&D to be able to organize M&L in such a way to reduce such factors as lead time. There is a common product cycle management tool to help with this.
  • Why do some companies succeed at transformation while others fail? Is it the methods they choose, such as lean manufacturing, Six Sigma and business process reengineering? Maybe it’s that old bugaboo, a lack of “leadership commitment.” If so, then why has no one come up with a way to measure, predict or replicate the critical factors that make transformations succeed?

    tags: change, transformation, leadership, complexity, people, ATKearney

  • Your oldest and youngest talent cohorts demand many of the same things in a workplace—and have the numbers to get their way.

    tags: generationy, babyboomers

    • More important, Boomers and Gen
      Ys are together redefining what constitutes a great place to work. As we
      will show, they tend to share many attitudes and behaviors that set them
      apart from other generations. These shared preferences constitute a new
      center of gravity for human resources management.
  • tags: digitaldistraction, distraction, attention, socialmedia

  • Sometimes even the best researchers forget that the answer you get depends entirely on who you ask. A new Forrester survey of 2,000 information workers has revealed that despite the hype, it’s not Gen Y that’s getting business to adopt collaborative technology. Gen X, those who are 30-43, are the ones leading the charge for social computing.

    tags: humanresources, generationx, generationy, adoption, influence, socialmedia

    • Forrester’s analysis is that despite their different view of technology, Gen Y, Millennials, or whatever you want to call those 29 and under, don’t yet have the clout within organizations to make real change.
    • Even if Gen Y was significantly better at using social software, it wouldn’t matter at this point. Obviously younger employees will increase their stature within organizations as the years pass. But the idea of Millennials at the vanguard of innovation in the enterprise is a myth
  • In my talks with innovation leaders on this, the issues evolve around the funnel system and stage-gate like models; how to identify the ideas and get them from one stage to the next. Another key issue is how you organize for this. It is my experience that companies often make a couple of mistakes on this. They are:

    tags: innovation, processes, openinnovation, ideas, ideasmanagement

    • 1. Too much focus on internal sources
    • 2. Too much focus on ideas and too little on processes and people
    • 3. No filtering process in place
    • 4. Processes are too complex
  • Le modèle du KWC (Knowledge Workers Community) propose 4 phases dans le cycle de vie d’une communauté. Cela signifie, dans le cas d’une communauté de connaissance ou d’une communauté d’intérêt, qu’il ne suffit absolument pas de créer un outil et d’auto-déclarer une communauté, mais bien d’organiser des rencontres pour aller vers une phase de formalisation, qui elle même repose sur des échanges

    tags: communities, KWN, knowledgeworkers, communitiesofinterest

    • Là ou la communauté de pratique va concevoir la veille (étape 3) comme une phase intermédiaire (phase 3) au service de la constitution de communauté, dans la communauté marketing la veille est  l’objet de la communauté.
    • Là ou la communauté de pratique va concevoir la veille (étape 3) comme une phase intermédiaire (phase 3) au service de la constitution de communauté, dans la communauté marketing la veille est  l’objet de la communauté.
    • Là ou la communauté de pratique va concevoir la veille (étape 3) comme une phase intermédiaire (phase 3) au service de la constitution de communauté, dans la communauté marketing la veille est  l’objet de la communauté.
    • Là ou la communauté de pratique va concevoir la veille (étape 3) comme une phase intermédiaire (phase 3) au service de la constitution de communauté, dans la communauté marketing la veille est  l’objet de la communauté.
    • Là ou la communauté de pratique va concevoir la veille (étape 3) comme une phase intermédiaire (phase 3) au service de la constitution de communauté, dans la communauté marketing la veille est  l’objet de la communauté.
    • Là ou la communauté de pratique va concevoir la veille (étape 3) comme une phase intermédiaire (phase 3) au service de la constitution de communauté, dans la communauté marketing la veille est  l’objet de la communauté.
    • Là ou la communauté de pratique va concevoir la veille (étape 3) comme une phase intermédiaire (phase 3) au service de la constitution de communauté, dans la communauté marketing la veille est  l’objet de la communauté.

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

What makes the value of shared information ?

As I often say, we often complain about software while the problem is the way we use it. It’s the reason why many people consider that the largest part of spam they receive at word comes from their colleagues, their hierarchy.

That’s why I liked this Dilbert strip about information sharing. We can also conclude that a link is nothing without the added value brought by its analysis. We may wonder, in our networked world, what makes the value of all the links we create between people and information or between people and informations.

Dilbert.com

Personal branding is not about self promotion but collective intelligence

It’s incredible to see how the subject became fashionable in a few months (anyway in France) and how many experts suddenly emerged on the subjec. As  Vincent Berthelot [fr] I was rather taken aback about what it was all about but, at the end, I came to a quick conclusion:

- if everyone is transparent and shows what he/she really is, it can be a good thing.

- in the same way, personal branding must come with an ongoing improvement approach : “how to improve in order to be what I want to show”. By the way, it’s the same for any corporate/product branding logic.

- if we want the system to work, everyone has to respect the rules, what means admit than X or Y is better than me and should receive more attention than me. I don’t think it’s possible, for the only reason that human are human and the human nature is what it is…most of all when a job or a contract are at stake.

- hence the unavoidable drift toward a classical self-marketing approach, driven by the bottom but that “honnest” people will have to follow not be had by less competent but more crafty people.

- and, as a conclusion, as said in this famous slideshow, “If your product sucks, social media won’t fix it”. It also applies to people.

That’s how I sup up my neophytic thoughts on the subject. But, thanks to a long talk with Olivier Zara [fr] a few month ago I understand there’s a huge potential here, provided people can make the difference between gimmick practices that will discredit the concept and the “good practices” that will be collectively beneficial. I’m not only talking about the general public web but also about things that may take place within organizations.

In fact, it’s, one more time, a matter of switching from a push logic to a pull one.

[Read more...]

Enteprise 2.0 : real benefits for whom makes efforts

McKinsey recently issued a new report in the line of what they already published these last months. It’s about the benefits enterprises can take from enterprise 2.0. After having focused on what makes successs possible, McKinsey is now starting to evaluate concrete beenetids. As often, I’d say that those who are closely following the “E2.0 state of the art” won’t learn anyting new here but will the the confirmatin of what manyt experts already wrote on this subject. The main interest, once again, is the McKinsey label that will help internal evangelists to convince skeptical managers.

I let you read the report, there is nothing to add to it. Just let me bring a few insights.

- some enterprises see significant benefits. That’s an essential point without which all our arguments are pointless.

- enteprises that see the more tangible benefits are located…in India, then in North América, Europe and Asia being left behind. I don’t know India at all but this ranking is the evidence that culture really matters in adoption and change processes.

- the most obvious benefits are about access to knowledge and experts. This seems to be consistent with process socialization and problem solving as a routine

- benefits are more easy to emerge in companies that generate more $ 1 billion revenue. Certainly because large businesses are those that developed the more structural inertial throughout decades, so the place where there are the most wasted or unemployed resources. Another explaination coild be that large businesses often explore new things long before small and medium ones, so they begin to see benefits first.

- in order to see benefits, social media have to be fully integrated into worklows and people’s daily activities. I would not like to be seen as endlessly repeating the same things, but I’m convincend that this point is largely neglected. Enterprise 2.0 is not about bringing conversations into the digital workplace without any link with daily tasks and activities but to focus on these activities. Implementing such a project without asking the question of rethinking what people are doing in their daily routine, to bring some existing information flows to new medias is a guarantee of failure (or of no success). Neglecting this point causes situations when community managers push information, hoping someone will read it, waiting for (rare) reactions to come, wondering why conversations don’t start. This is very far away employees’ actual situation, who have nothing to do with conversational communities that don’t help them in their day to day job. 75% companies who see tangible benefits integrated social medias in people’s “day to day work”. Don’t try to find anywhere else what is the difference between success and failure (or maybe we don’t have the same defintion for success).

- making executive use social media tools is essential. Logical since we’re talkong about daily business tools. There are fields where community managers can’t replace those who have an operational legitimacy. If have more insights on this subject, which I’ll share in a future post.

- 2.0 projects go beyond the enterprise’s walls. There is no internal or external logic anymore but a an “extended company” scope from the start : employees, partners, clients are concerned. That confirms the social CRM trend and a new scope for stakeholders.

- to my surprise, innovation is not one the domains where significant benefits were seen, even if it has been one the enterprise 2.0 discourse’s cornerstone from the start. Do we have to make the conclusion that the 2.0 approach is not relevant to innovation, that open innovation logics are very hard to implement because of their internal impact ? Maybe non-specialized approaches, tools and adoption methodologies are not enough ?

- this report left me unsatisfied. Ok there are tangible benefits, but we may expect to know more, how do they materialize, how they are measured…

To  be continued…