The most successful companies are those that think jointly technological change, work design and the changes in internal social relationships.” Antoine Riboud.
Illustration from the book “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.
Browse the previously published pictures of the week.
Meaningful metrics to quantify ROI for KM and Enterprise 2.0
“Recently some select firms have forgone the necessity to prove return on investment (ROI), for KM, portal and Enterprise 2.0. However for the vast majority, ROI justification remains a constant. In this session at the 2010 ILTA Conference, the panel examined the basics of metrics, how to measure productivity rather than busyness, how to measure engagement and concrete ways to measure portal and Enterprise 2.0 applications.
As a baseline understanding for this discussion, metrics are numbers to gauge progress, i.e. a quantifiable means to measure if there is a move from one point to another. Firms engage in this activity to evaluate success and decide what to fund.”
Atlassian’s Big Experiment with Performance Reviews <span class="“> – Annotated
“I’m happy to announce that we are undertaking a thorough, public trial of an alternative to the traditional performance review.
ratings pic.pptx.jpgDo you ever wonder if and how you could call a halt to your performance review process? Do you think traditional processes are marred by the distribution curve (and forced rankings), huge time investments and low impact on performance improvements? Maybe you agree that your processes have their faults, but you think that it’s not sensible to abolish performance appraisals altogether or replace them with coaching sessions.”
Employees Hold the Key to Innovation – WSJ.com <span class="“> – Annotated
“Innovation communities are a way of giving new shape and purpose to knowledge that your employees already possess. The detailed discussions that take place, led by senior managers, often represent a company’s most productive and economical engine for increased profits.”
How Millennials’ Sharing Habits Can Benefit Organizations <span class="“> – Annotated
“The Pew Internet and American Life Project recently asked a large group of experts if they thought Millennials would grow out of their currently strong penchant for online sharing and self-revelation. A strong majority of this group — 67% — said that this would not be the case, and that Generation Y would keep sharing as it aged.”
This Y Generation thing is nonsense <span class="“> – Annotated
“I don’t know how many times I’ve read alarmist material that says Gen Y, millennials or whatever they’re now called are going to change the workplace beyond recognition. It’s nonsense. “
Six Fundamental Shifts in the Way We Work <span class="“> – Annotated
“We thought we would kick off our new postings by summarizing some of the ideas from Pull that resonated the most in our many conversations from the last few months. from The Power of Pull.”
Thinking about your organization as a network <span class="“> – Annotated
“The Internet is ultimately about sharing knowledge, making connections and collaborating to put knowledge to work. This makes it the platform for much of what your organization will do in coming years. But the Internet is the exception to the rule as networks go. Most networks are smaller, with limited size and, usually, a specific purpose. Every organization today is itself a network that is made up of many smaller networks. This means that, without a doubt, you need to understand networks. “
IDC offers an impartial social business framework | ZDNet <span class="“> – Annotated
“The social business analyst team at IDC, led by Michael Fauscette, has stepped in to fill the need for an impartial framework, and currently offers its document as a free download. This image shows the IDC social business framework:”
The End of Management – WSJ.com <span class="“> – Annotated
“But can this great 20th century innovation survive and thrive in the 21st? Evidence suggests: Probably not. “Modern” management is nearing its existential moment.”
Web 2.0 en entreprise : les salariés ignorent les consignes de sécurité – Solutions-Logiciels.com
“Or mettre en œuvre une solution de sécurité flexible capable d’administrer les outils du Web 2.0 exige davantage de visibilité, ainsi qu’une plus large sensibilisation des utilisateurs et un contrôle granulaire des applications. Il s’agit à la fois d’un défi technologique et d’une question d’éducation des employés. » “
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Summary : one of the most frequent arguments used in favor of the implementation of an internal social network is productivity improvement through the ability to access and mobilize resources more easily. While that’s an undisputable truth at the individual level (and provided the tool is used by enough people), it does not mean that the company is made more productive : optimizing tasks and optimizing the chain of tasks that lead to the final deliverable, what is the only thing that counts, are not the same thing. So, companies will have to consider their whole production processus and identify their bottlenecks that prevent the chain from taking the most of local improvements.
One of the promises that usually come with a social network (and even with “anything 2.0″) is that some time will be saved. Since, in order to deliver the expected results, people and knowledges have to be put together in order to make progress along a processus, the more these resources are available and accessible, the faster problems are solved, solutions are found and the better decisions are.
So, here’s a very usual indicator : if any employee losts 38 minutes a day to find information, documents or people, if he can save 5, 10 or 15 minutes a day, it means x minutes a week, y minutes a year, what can easily be turned into money. By saving 5 minutes a day, your employees will make you save billions every year.
Hearing such a thing, and even if the promise is seducing and the logics credible, many managers feel there’s something wrong and they’re often right : 5 minutes saved every day, or even 30 may equal to…no saving for the company. But we must not throw the baby out with the bathwater : it’s possible to deliver the promise provided we focus on the right thing.
So imagine that an employee can save these much-touted 5 minutes a day ? Does it mean that he’ll be productive 1/2h more a week ? 5 minutes is the time for a coffee break and there are many chances he will use the time he saved for his own purpose. He may also use it to cool off, knowing that even unconsciously he’ll adapt his pace to deliver at the due date. So if he realizes he can save time on some tasks there are many chances that he’ll take advantage of that to slow down or start later. I don’t even mention the case when these five minutes are 20 times 15 seconds…
Of course that’s a positive thing for the organization if employees can cool off, take the time to discuss etc… But that’s not what they were expecting at the beginning..
In fact, the whole value proposal relies on the optimization of a given task : search (whatever people are looking for). Yet, search is only one task, even a sub-task, in a more global processus.
Finding the right information or the right person helps to achieve any assigned task faster. So they can start the next earlier and so on and, at the end of the week, they would be more productive. That’s good for their individual evaluation and they’ll even be rewarded. But what’s the benefit for the organization ? None. The organization may even lose by rewarding people for something that did not change anything.
Generally, people are a link in a much longer chain. The task one achieves is necessary for another to start his part of the work and so on. If the first does things faster but the one who have to carry on or the manager that has to validate are not able to react as fast, some time will be saved for one employee but nothing will change for the company because the overall performance of the whole processus won’t be improved and, at the end, the client (internal or external) won’t be served faster. The only consequence of one employee being more productive is more files, emails and to dos for the others. That increases the pressure on the othere, brings more confusion, make things more complicated because they have to re-priorize things continuoulsy and disperse. In the worst case they’ll try to increase theyr own pace to keep up the with other’s and make more mistakes.
Optimizing people’s work at an individual scale seldom brings the expected results if the processus is not rethought and limiting factors, bottlenecks are not dealed with. It implies individual needs and actions are seen as understood as a part of a longer process that is sometimes formalized, sometimes informal (so to be identified).
It reminds me of a situation I had to deal with a few years ago. A manager was complaining that, despite of all the many undertaken efforts, the productivity of his team was not improving. Of course, he was thinking that employees had to be blamed on for that while the whole staff was close to explode due to the impressive amount of work they had to do and the high level of pressure. At the end, it was made clear that, since the manager had to validate all the files his staff has worked on before pushing it to another team…he didn’t have enough time to deal with all his team was producing. All the efforts the make the team more productive were dashed because he didn’t paid attention to his own role in the processus.
So, it’s easy to understand that, once people’s day to day work has been explored with them and that some new practices that may make them more efficient, productive, have been identified, it’s important to think it as a part of a more global chain, to understand what one’s job serves (and whom), and look for bottlenecks. These bottlecks limit the overall performance of the chain and are often people at the center of a network (even informal), those most of the information has to go through. So they may be managers.
Then, each case has its own story, context and solution. Maybe the decision making process is not relevant, maybe an “a priori” validation is not necessary since corrections can be made afterwards when needed, maybe this part of the job can be handle by other people, maybe the only fact he can access his business tools while away from the office would be enough, maybe the “innovation board” does not meet often enough to deal with all the ideas that are submitted….
“Anything 2.0″ can make many things more fluid but won’t solve the bottlneck question that bridle “anyhting 2.0″ and prevent it from bringing significant performance improvements. Now it’s up to HR and managers to deal with that.
Finally it’s a very old debate that is much older than enterprise 2.0, it’s all about the pursuit of a local maximum vs. a global optimum.
Anyway, measuring any link of the chain is often misleading : what has to be optimized and measured is the whole chain.
Summary : It’s obvious that the use of social media within companies and between companies and customers are not compartmentalized but complementary disciplines. If the “internal” company is more and more trying to get in touch with customers, the world of marketing struggles to make his way toward internal departments. As communication is becoming service, initiatives that target customers can’t be separated from those that aim at reversing communication flows inside the organization, redefining roles and realigning the whole organization with the needs of employees who are directrly in touch with customers. To demonstrate its value, social and community makerting will have to replace “push” with “pull” not only in its interactions withn customoers but also in the way the whole organization works.
Even if the external/marketing/communication part has never been my prefered one, it has become obvious that it’s impossible to dissociate the evolution of work from what’s happening outside the corporate walls. First, because no company creates value on its own et a high level of internal performance is useless when a business is not as efficient with its external partners and clients that it is internally (theory of the limiting factor or bottlneck…as you prefer), second because the internal shift from push to pull logically leads to consider customers.
The time when 2.0 was either about marketing or collaboration but not both at the same time is over. Yet, the concept of enterprise 2.0 evolved overtime and everybdoy finds logical to include all external stakeholders into it, what is confirmed by the rise of social crm. But even if enterprise 2.0 is heading down toward customers, marketing struggles to head up toward internal activities.
I recently found this interesting deck about the failure of social media initiatives. It tells us that
- there’s a lack of strategy (81%) and most marketers don’t undestand the value of interactions…and how all these things work.
- consequently, businesses invest more on technology than on people and relationships.
I’d like to go a little bit further and sum it up in one sentence : when marketing and communication people use social media to communicate better and differently, there are two possibilities:
- either they (or their company) don’t get it and that doesn’t work.
- Or they understand how to make a good use of social media and…they deceive their customers.
Illustration from the book “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.
Browse the previously published pictures of the week.
Summary : Are we linving in a 140 characters world ? Not at all. 140 characters is only the signal that points at something bigger and without which no signal would exist.
Sometimes we need symbol to show how our world is changing, to what extent a tool is leaving its mark on an era even if this era is only a few months long. Today’s trendy tool being Twitter, it’s a commonly used reference to describe the world of instantaneousness, of spontaneity, of mobility we’re living in. As a consequence we’re asked to rethink our life, our work, how we communicate in order not to be outdated in a 140 characters world.
A word in 140 characters ? Why not. Time is speeding up, messages and thoughts are divided up. “Now” is more important than what lasts, reaction and context than content and capitalizing. When everything’s fast, the only way to understand the future is to have one’s two feet in the moving present, and information above 140 characters is useless since it will be outdated before having been used.
Sorry, but I don’t buy it.
If we take some time to look at twitter and how people use it, if we try to understand what we really find valuable, it appears that we’re facing :
- the expression in 140 characters of an information relying on a larger amount of previously acquired knowledge put into context.
- a summary of a larger content with a link to it.
When talking about information or knowledge, we must understand there’s a difference between substance and signal. We’ve been struggling to indentifying and mobilizing the right substance because of a lack of signal for decades but, now we have efficient tools to deliver signals, we must not focus on it and forget the sunstance and the fact we still need to create and improve it.
We communicate, stimulate, react in 140 characters but to do so we still need to think in more than 140 characters.
Our world is not and won’t be a 140 characters world and neither will enterprises. On the other hand these 140 characters will wake all our knowledge more easy to harness to decide, act and adapt faster. Forgetting that the signal needs something to feed it, something to point at may have detrimental consequences.
Résumé : albeit the funny side of social media is often used as an argument for adoption, we have to admit that even if organization prefer to have happy employees they ae not ready to pay to make them have fun at work. Either we consider that’s regrettable form of schizophrenia or the consequence of a culture that dates from another century, facts are facts. So fun should only be the happy side effect of something else above all…be free. Used in the workplace, social media offer possibilities like nothing beforme : more than creating funny spaces and times in the workplace, they allow to make fun a part of people’s work, making it at the same time a consequence, a lever,and a part of a continuous improvement logic that interest and reassure organizations.
Amongst the issues that inspire me contradictory feelings about enterprise 2.0, fun at work is not the least.
There’s a belief shared by everybody in the workplace : employees who enjoy what they do are more efficient and it has a positive impact on work atmosphre. One of the best way to make it happen is, to some extent, to make work more fun. In the same way, everybody knows the value of a good atmosphere in the workplace. Note the difference between both : in one case we talk about the nature of work, in the other the context where it takes place : some people may hate they job but love their company, colleagues and the overall context (despite it never lasts for a long time).
A part of enterprise 2.0 value proposal is to bring fun, some even saying that in such a context the intranet looks like a big party were all employees gather. I fully suscribe to this point of view but, at the same time, I’m very uncomfortable with it
- because I experienced it (and still doing), I can tell it changes the way you interact with others, it improves relationships and, even if I consider my internal social network as a business too, I prefer to connect to it when I open my computing rather than openning my mailbox (in addition to the fact it’s a more efficient tool too…).
- no organization would refuse to make their employees happier.
- there’s a lot of organizations (even a majority ?) where the concept of fun at work is not seen as being compatible with work. It means that employees are wasting their time and would be more productive if they didn’t have fun or that they are not busy enough. Anyway, in such organizations, most of employees don’t want managers to think they’re having fun (and managers don’t want their superiors to think they’re having fun too even if they’d like…all are human being and share the same DNA). Maybe it’s a pity but the fact is things are more complicated that we would like them to be.
- most companies would be ready to invest to make their employees happy. None to make them have fun at work. I’m not saying that no one understands how it matters, but it’s impossible to come with this argument alone in front of any executive to get fundings for such a project.
- to some extent, even if the “productivity” side of enterprise 2.0 is seducing, many organizations may fear its “funny side”, only for self-esteem and image reasons. So that’s an argument that has to be used very cautiously.
So…how to do ? [Read more...]
Illustration from the book “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.
Browse the previously published pictures of the week.
Retirees Help Keep Boeing’s Knowledge Base
“The company is approaching a critical juncture in its history: Half its work force here in the Puget Sound region will be eligible for retirement within the next decade. With an influx of largely younger employees, Boeing is searching for ways to retain its knowledge base before its experienced Machinists and engineers leave.
“My job title is tribal knowledge facilitator,” Spigler said with a laugh during an interview recently.
But that tribal knowledge really is the reason Boeing reached out to retirees still living in the region, said Joyce Whitehorn, a manufacturing and quality assurance manager who helped get the program going.
“These are people who have a proud legacy with the Boeing Co.,” she said.
Retirees such as Gandee and Spigler were at the pinnacle of Machinists’ knowledge when they left the company, making them ideal teachers of new employees, Whitehorn said.”
Six Counterintuitive Truths About Enterprise 2.0 Adoption <span class="“> – Annotated
“Ten years of knowledge sharing deployments convince me that the rules are different for E2.0. Transactional system benchmarks just don’t work, but we keep applying them to collaborative situations anyway. When you think about it, it doesn’t make sense.
Consider the “truths” for traditional back-office deployments: get everything right before you go live. Mandate a cutover date and turn off the old system. Calculate ROI by increases or decreases in anything tangible — widgets, hours, paperwork.”
Seven misconceptions about corporate social networking <span class="“> – Annotated
“While there are extreme competitive advantages to effectively deploying social media strategies to build communities around your enterprise, there is also no shortage of misconceptions,”
Ten tech-enabled business trends to watch <span class="“> – Annotated
“Two-and-a-half years ago, we described eight technology-enabled business trends that were profoundly reshaping strategy across a wide swath of industries.1 We showed how the combined effects of emerging Internet technologies, increased computing power, and fast, pervasive digital communications were spawning new ways to manage talent and assets as well as new thinking about organizational structures.”
The 2010 Social Business Landscape <span class="“> – Annotated
“To help with keeping up with the fast moving pace of Social Business, we’ve created a useful new model aimed at helping you stay up-to-date with the major moving parts of Social Business today. We define Social Business here as the distinct process of applying social media to meet business objectives.”
Is Social Intranet a Collaboration Solution? <span class="“> – Annotated
“Here’s a theme that’s been causing a lot of debate amongst my peers of late — is a social intranet the same thing as a social workplace and the same as social collaboration? Can one product or set of features meet the needs of all of these requirements?”
An intranet is (or should be) the digital embodiment of an organization’s purpose and resources. It should inform, empower and enable employees to understand the organization, its mission, and the resources and processes available to help them get their work done.
A good intranet is current, authoritative, relevant and inclusive. It keeps the organization as a whole informed, and gives employees both the map and the keys to the corporate assets.
How to incentivise knowledge sharing? <span class="“> – Annotated
“Every month I review the search terms that lead people to our Knoco website, just to see what people are searching for. A common search term that came up again this month, is “How to incentivise knowledge sharing”.
I thought it was worth a blog post on it’s own.
The simple answer is Don’t!”
Customer Enablement Technology « Social CRM ideas by Mark Tamis <span class="“> – Annotated
“The boundary between the technologies in the home and at the office is becoming less marked, but I still have the impression that the products developed are evolutionary rather than revolutionary – blogs, wikis, communities and so on with an ‘enterprise control’ layer – nothing disruptive as such. If you look at Gartner’s Magic Quadrants on the subject, you see that there are some big and a plethora of smaller actors (ripe for a round of consolidation?) with all of them having more or less the same feature set. So the question that arises in my opinion is where do we find inspiration for software innovation?”
Why Employees Are NOT Your Most Important Asset <span class="“> – Annotated
“lmost all companies have a sign on a wall stating something similar to “Our employees are our most important asset.” The wording may be slightly altered, and “asset”’ may be replaced with “resource,” but usually there is such a sign posted somewhere on the premises. Regardless of the exact wording, the intent is the same: the organization is trying to say that it values its employees and the sign is a visible indicator of that value or belief. “
Harold Jarche » Active sense-making <span class="“> – Annotated
“he sense-making part of the process requires action and it takes practice to be good at it. How to make sense of one’s experiences is up to the individual. Sense-making is an activity, a regular practice. It can be a simple as creating a list (Filtering) or as complicated as a thesis (Customization). People with better sense-making skills are able to create higher value information and when this is shared, they contribute to their networks. This strikes me as the core of collaborative knowledge work.”
Finding Expertise Inside the Organisation <span class="“> – Annotated
“We go in search of expertise, or the person with knowledge about a subject, for many reasons:
* to answer our work-related questions, whether large or small
* to determine who should be included on a work team
* to bring together a community of practice
* to improve our problem-solving
* to improve our decision-making
* to fill in gaps in our own knowledge
* when looking for a mentor
* to add to our knowledge management system
* to identify and fill gaps in expertise
* to determine what expertise can be leveraged for future opportunities.”
Social Learning Powered by E2.0 <span class="“> – Annotated
““Social learning allows humans to learn through a self-directed mechanism that involves finding, organizing and categorizing resources in a coherent manner for their personal learning needs. Resources include connecting with experts and communities; watching presentations and videos; listening to podcasts; reading articles, blogs, books, and documents; and observing others perform tasks.””
Collaborative Culture, or the Real Enterprise 2.0 <span class="“> – Annotated
“The “real” Enterprise 2.0 is not a technology or marketing plan, but the reinvention of the enterprise itself. It’s a rethinking of the structure, process, culture and even, in some cases, the very purpose of the enterprise.
With technology erasing barriers to participation and communication, we’re seeing a change in the nature of how we go about running an organization.”
There are 4 hallmarks of a collaborative team:
Entreprise 2.0: la gouvernance pour vaincre l’incompétence… <span class="“> – Annotated
“Quel est ce tabou dont on n’ose parler sur la place publique? Eh bien, je vous le donne en mille. C’est l’incompétence de plusieurs personnes qui travaillent dans les départements de Ti, l’obsession pour la sécurité de leurs gestionnaires et l’immobilisme général qu’ils imposent à l’entreprise.”
A Crisis of Management not Economics <span class="“> – Annotated
“As you may expect, I have a management lens through which I look at these things. I really think that it is significantly a management problem, more than an economic problem or financial problem. If you look at the sub-prime issue, there were two things that were indications of management gone wrong. One is the short-term nature in how people manage. So, write those mortgages as quick as you can, cash in and get the heck out which is a very short-term perspective with people who are mismanaging”
The five stages of Facebook grief <span class="“> – Annotated
“Teens are a “leading indicator” here. The rest of us will follow. Facebook users appear to follow a predictable pattern of evolution with their feelings about Facebook, and teenagers are just further along.
Here are the five stages of Facebook grief:”
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
(But the opinions expressed in this blog are only my own)
You can find the "original" french version of this blog here
