Links for this week (weekly)

  • “Later this morning I am in San Francisco for the official launch of tibbr, TIBCO’s foray into the world of social networking for the enterprise. In typical TIBCO fashion this is something of a low key launch. If tibbr is deployed correctly, it could represent the way I have envisaged Enterprise 2.0.”

    tags: enterprise2.0 enterprisesocialsoftware enterprisesocialnetworks TIBCO tibbr email

    • It intelligently marries people, process and context, delivering information the way people want to consume. What do I mean?
    • You’ll find TIBCO in large enterprises where there is a need to integrate real time data across disparate applications and systems
    • It has tabs for events and people but more importantly it includes bi-directional feeds in and out of major applications like Salesforce.com, Oracle Expense Management and SAP CRM.  That means business processes can trigger events which are surfaced inside tibbr for action.
    • whether this means that users could use tibbr as an email replacement: “That’s possible,” he said. If correct then TIBCO is on to something because from what I saw, it is no longer necessary to jump from one application to another
    • In the hour TIBCO spent with me, I felt myself being drawn into what tibbr can offer and seeing use cases without having to worry whether the technology can deliver. Unlike other systems, I wasn’t left thinking that this is a solution looking for a problem.
  • “If you want to grow and delegate successfully, there’s no way you can function without them. Right?

    Wrong. When you hire people who do nothing but manage, you implicitly say to the rest of your employees, “Don’t worry about the coordination or structure of your work—all these concerns now belong to the manager.” When people don’t have to think about the totality of their work environment, because that’s now the manager’s job, they’re less engaged, less motivated and less efficient.”

    tags: management unmanagement reporting casestudies 37signals trust autonomy freedom humanresources

    • 1. Each employee gets a credit card and is told to use it wisely. No expense reports, no justifications, no haggling. They simply forward the receipts to a shared inbox in case of an audi
    • 2. We don’t count vacation or sick days. People who are working on things they care about are unlikely to game the system or take advantage of free-ranging liberties. We’ve found that we actually need to remind people to take vacation, not keep a tally of who takes too much.
    • We also let our teams manage each other. Every week, one employee gets to be manager and set the rough agenda, review others’ work, write a company status update, and generally be the go-to person for their colleague
    • Gone is the complaining about what management is forcing them to do, because rotating management gives them a clear perspective of both sides of the fence.
    • You might be thinking, “This is crazy—it would never work at my company.” And you may be right. But I think there’s a greater chance that it would work.
  • “We covered “The Business Value of Social Media and Enterprise 2.0” with an emphasis on HR process because of the audience. I want to share with you a bit of my thoughts from that session. I first set some context with the classic 2006 McKinsey report on IT spending most of their budgets on transactions but the real business value is in the interactions between people and this area has been underinvested”

    tags: enterprise2.0 humanresources HRprocesses processes socialmedia interactions transactions businessvalue recruitment engagement employeesengagement

    • A key is the alignment of these new tools with business process and tasks. We are also seeing more integration of capabilities within a single tool set.
    • I find these tools work best when aligned with business process and are not simply introduced as capabilities such as phones or email.
    • Recruitment: They are able to more effectively post vacancies with increased participation from internal candidates and volunteers.
    • Learning and development: A third of training courses for employees and volunteers are done online through social media.  There is a significant improvement in the percentage of finished courses versus started only.

    • Compensation and benefits: Now updated forms are shared more effectively. There is a single storage accessible from all location
    • HR Process:  They are now more effectively enabling and disabling users on the computer network.
    • Employee Engagement: There is increased interaction among locations, including and especially photos and videos. There is greater relationship building among patients and families.
  • “In John Hopson’s article Behavioral Game Design he shares the basic ways people react to different patterns of rewards. He ends the article with this: “Each contingency is an arrangement of time, activity, and reward, and there are an infinite number of ways these elements can be combined to produce the pattern of activity you want from your players.””

    tags: gamification rewards games gaming enterprise2.0 profile adoption

    • Add a “date field” for the updated date. Display “recently updated profiles” list on the profiles dashboard.
    • Add a “date field for the last viewed date. Display “recently viewed profiles” list on the profiles dashboard
    • Add a “int field” to store the count of profile views. Display “most viewed profiles” list on the profiles dashboard.
    • Display a limited “profile recently viewed by” list in member’s profile. The limit works with time, while the list surfaces activity.  This encourages connection
    • Display “recent activity stream with dates” in member’s profile.  This encourages activity across the platform
    • Add two “int fields” to store the profile point counts. Members should be awarded virtual cash for increasing the value of the Enterprise 2.0 Platform. 
  • “Gamification is the use of game play mechanics for non-game applications, in order to encourage people to adopt the applications. It also strives to encourage users to engage in desired behaviors in connection with the applications. “

    tags: software gamification enterprise2.0 maslow gaming

    • Gamification in Enterprise 2.0 is about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a theory in psychology, proposed by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation
  • “Firstly, we released a white paper by noted futurist and change agent Geoffrey Moore on Systems of Engagement and the Future of Enterprise IT. The report posed some challenging questions about the world of Systems of Record. It reflected on the ground that we have all been tilling for the ast 20 years and its connection (or some would speculate, lack thereof) to the new world of Systems of Engagement, aka Social Business aka Enterprise 2.0 (so as not to offend any of the legions of consultants who are currently battling over the right term).

    Secondly, I spent a good deal of time with a reporter from a major business publication who was interested in the rumors that a major bank (speculation was Bank of America or J.P. Morgan or Citigroup) was the next Wikileaks target. One of the issues we discussed was what this meant for the future of social media. Other than, of course, the obvious conclusion that one should be very suspect of anyone in your organization lip synching to Lady Gaga, who has the largest Twitter following in the world — 7,829,385 followers.”

    tags: socialmedia records systemsofrecord wikileaks governance information informationgovernance content contentmanagement legal policies

    • But all this social information and content is something that needs management and governance. I hate to even say this, for fear it may put me in the not cool part of the social crowd. Probably the adult version of the crowd I hung around in when I was an all-state bass clarinetist in high school.
    • But sooner or later, we are going to have to getting serious about how we want to manage social content. Because the tension to keep it all (to improve the knowledge base of the organization) vs. the tension to get rid of it all as quickly as possible (to keep the lawyers at bay) is going to escalate quickly. This content is valuable to the business. This content is most likely not a record in the ARMA sense (although some might be). But it is electronically stored information in the FRCP (Federal Rules of Civil Procedure) sense. And for organizations that do “social” well, there will be a hell of a lot of it.
    • Firstly, even though the Wikileaks cable fiasco really had nothing to do with social technologies and had everything to do with the usual caution that the weakest link in our security systems are our people, it will inevitably give ammunition to those ill disposed toward social technologies in the first place
    • Secondly, the courts are increasingly including outside-the-firewall social information in discovery requests. Per The Modern Archivist…”Courts have also found that social media and e-discovery are made for each other.
    • Thirdly, many organizations have policies relative to the old era of systems of record that would seem difficult if not impossible to extend into the era of social technologies. But they are doing so anyway.
    • Social technologies have the ability to transform organizations and make them smarter and more responsive. They can help organizations more quickly come up with answers to difficult questions. They create exponentially more and more varied and more informal information than our kludgy old email systems. The systems become smarter over time as the knowledge base builds. The business imperative of responsiveness and dexterity encourages us to retain this information.
    • This is all terrific until something occurs that unleashes the lawyers and the e-discovery requests. And then what? The approach of the courts hasn’t been that social content is new and different and needs to be treated differently because of the unique benefits it brings to the business and society
    • Let’s start thinking systematically about how we should manage and govern and retain all of this ephemeral content. Let’s start thinking about how our old system of records definitions need to change. Let’s start thinking about a different paradigm for managing information other than just extending the old paper definitions further and further into the world of electronic information. Let’s understand that there are risks in just winging it. Let’s get on with implementing social technologies, but responsibly.
  • tags: ibm informationoverload governance quality storage infrastructure lifecycle data datalyfecycle privacy security datagovernance

  • “Critical thinking calls for a persistent effort to examine any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the evidence that supports it and the further conclusions to which it tends. It also generally requires ability to recognize problems, to find workable means for meeting those problems, to gather and marshal pertinent information, to recognize unstated assumptions and values, to comprehend and use language with accuracy, clarity, and discrimination, to interpret data, to appraise evidence and evaluate arguments, to recognize the existence (or non-existence) of logical relationships between propositions, to draw warranted conclusions and generalizations, to put to test the conclusions and generalizations at which one arrives, to reconstruct one’s patterns of beliefs on the basis of wider experience, and to render accurate judgments about specific things and qualities in everyday life.”

    tags: criticalthinking problemsolving personalknowledgemanagement seek sense share sharing

    • but asking employees to engage in real critical thinking, and accepting the resulting actions, will not work unless there is a two-way flow of power and authority.
  • “La tendance est en effet de moins en moins à se contenter d’écouter. Les prestations de veille se complètent progressivement en intégrant des offres/fonctionnalités réactives ou de community management. Un métier encore jeune, en pleine explosion mais bien plus compliqué qu’il n’y paraît, et pas toujours bien compris. “

    tags: communitymanagement socialcrm watch ROI RONI risk employees curation storytelling e-reputation

    • Si on est à même d’identifier les plus grands fans et détracteurs (avec le sujet épineux de l’évaluation de l’influence ou de l’audience de ceux-ci) online, il y a matière à les traiter de manière spécifique tout au long de l’année
    • La création ou curation de contenus et le storytelling seront aussi des expertises clefs pour nourrir ces échanges… Certaines marques lancent même leur « social media room » comme Gatorade ou H&M
    • définit le SRM avec la formule suivante : SRM = CRM (Client) + PRM (Prospect) + Stratégie d’influence
    • Le serpent de mer de l’analyse du ROI est encore loin d’être réglé car même si cela fait sens de savoir ce qu’on dit de vous, le monitoring de l’e-reputation est d’abord un coût à court terme.
    • Un point à ne pas oublier en matière d’e-reputation est enfin la prise en compte du risque salarié. Les entreprises américaines sont déjà en avance en matière de formation et sensibilisation (via des social media guidelines par exemple) de leurs propres employés.
    • Avez-vous assez confiance dans vos collaborateurs, leurs langages, leurs comportements, leurs expertises ? « Les entreprises vont devoir rapidement redéfinir les limites des contextes où l’on peut/veut intervenir : il est désormais indispensable de savoir quel rôle on joue dans quel contexte, quelle figure on endosse dans quel milieu (figure privée, figure du consommateur, figure du citoyen, figure du salarié, figure du patron d’entreprise, etc.)
    • Et où trouver le juste milieu entre « personal branding »  qui profite aussi à l’employeur et autopromo incontrôlée au profit pure de l’employé. « Ces nouvelles questions risquent de révolutionner tout simplement le Droit
    • Enfin, une autre approche du social CRM est de réfléchir à concevoir sa propre communauté mais c’est une démarche à long terme et non sans péril en dehors du fait que toutes les marques ne sont pas forcément adaptées à cette approche.
  • “In 2011, Internet-based capabilities, including social networking, are no longer a “nice to have” at the Department of Defense. According to official documents, policies statements, and the example set by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, these capabilities can and do contribute to the missions of the Pentagon. Yes, loose tweets may sink fleets, as a read of the U.S. Navy social media handbook reminds sailors, but the opportunities appear to balance the risks.”

    tags: socialmedia governance policies casestudies departmentofdefense risk

    • As a result of these findings, it was determined that access to Internet-based capabilities is a critical functionality that must be preserved, despite some associated risks. Therefore, rather than restricting access to these capabilities, the NIPRNET must be configured and guidance integrated regarding the proper use of Internet-based capabilities into OPSEC education, training and awareness activities to allow safe use of them by all components.
    • the Pentagon will not ban social media. Instead, the DoD appears to be shifting to a posture where the use of social media, both in external and internal platforms, will be integrated into the work of all service members, aka “components.
    • To whit, the U.S. Army’s social media handbook, released to the public yesterday, is embedded below. The handbook earned quick approval from Jeremiah Owyang, one of the world’s top social media consultants, who called it excellent.
  • “Comment fédérer les salariés de son entreprise autour de sa marque employeur? autrement dit, comment faire en sorte qu’un maximum de salariés soient des ambassadeurs de la marque en question ?”

    tags: hr employerbrand socialnetworks engagement

    • En parallèle, il ne faut pas oublier que la marque employeur ne s’arrête pas aux réseaux sociaux. Tous les médias ou moyens de communication sont utilisés par les salariés pour parler de leur entreprise.
    • Lorsque les objectifs sont clairs, que les leviers sont identifiés, il est important de faire en sorte que le discours associé ne soit pas compris de travers ou totalement dénigré. C’est pour cette raison, que la première étape est de travailler sur la politique des Ressources Humaines de l’entreprise
    • Tout cela pour en arriver où? au point essentiel, qu’il est primordial que la politique RH doit être clairement définie, communiquée, comprise et acquise par tous pour être sûr qu’un maximum de salariés deviennent les meilleurs ambassadeurs de la marque employeur de l’entreprise.

    • Comme évoqué plus haut, chaque RH doit connaitre parfaitement la politque RH. Il doit savoir dire en quoi cette politique RH sert l’intérêt de l’entreprise, des managers et des salariés et surtout il doit être capable de la transmettre à tous. Pour ce faire, il faut donc que les RH deviennent les premiers ambassadeurs de la marque employeur en interne.
  • “Transformer une entreprise industrielle centenaire de 130 000 collaborateurs requiert de la méthode et du temps. Il existait déjà des initiatives 2.0 (blogs, wikis…) chez Renault, mais c’est en 2009 que le constructeur automobile a commencé à formaliser une démarche 2.0 globale qui se concrétise par la mise en place d’un réseau social d’entreprise, basé sur Sharepoint.

    Pour initier son programme de transformation, Renault s’est appuyé sur des communautés pilote. Elles ont expérimenté de nouvelles façons de travailler et ont servi à valider les scénarios d’usage qui avaient été imaginés.”

    tags: renault casestudies communities governance ROI communitymanagement changemanagement

    • « Contrairement à d’autres entreprises qui ont multiplié les communautés, Renault a adopté une approche qualitative avec une structuration et un fort accompagnement »,
    • « Le challenge pour l’entreprise consiste à susciter des initiatives, à ne pas freiner celles qui sont en cours, tout en évitant une forme d’anarchie avec des réseaux sociaux enchevêtrés »,
    • Des règles de gouvernance, de conduite du changement et de communication communes ont été établies. Elles sont le résultat de la synthèse de deux tendances antagonistes : le laisser-faire demandé par une partie des équipes terrain et le besoin de contrôler et d’accompagner le mouvement par l’équipe en charge de la transformation.
    • Pour chacune des communautés, le constructeur a mis en place des indicateurs techniques et d’usage, ces derniers étant spécifiques à chaque communauté. Mais la finalité business, clairement affirmée, a été définie par le numéro 2 de Renault, Patrick Pélata, sponsor du projet. Les objectifs consistent à vendre plus et mieux, à réduire les stocks, à simplifier l’organisation, et à structurer les filières d’expertise.
  • “Vous vous souvenez sans doute de la présentation que Marta Kagan avait rédigé il y a 2 ans, une nouvelle édition est en ligne et met en perspective les chiffres clefs des médias et réseaux sociaux, à lire!”

    tags: socialmedia statistics usage use

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

What is a social intranet or an intranet 2.0 ?

Summary : Everybody’s talking about social intranets or intranet 2.0 but none have a clear idea of what it can look like. Between the myth of intranets being replaced by social networks and traditional owners of the intranet fearing the end of the top-down model, ideological and functional debates may last for long. A social intranet does not mean that social networks will assume the whole power but that the elements of a traditional intranet, information, people and business applications, will be socialized. It’s not about adding new tools but generalizing new services and functionalities across all the components of the intranet. And, at last and even before all, it’s a work tool that’s here to serve a corporate vision. Changing the intranet is useless unless work, internal and external relationships as well as the related behaviors and positions are revisited.

Many organizations are rethinking (or thinking or rethinking) their good old intranet that is obviously affected by the weight of years and wonder how to integrate the famous “2.0 layer” in what is supposed to be a social intranet (or intranet 2.0). But, even if the word are in every mouth it does not mean that the idea of what it exactly mean is clear. There are many options depending on the maturity of the owner of the project, the realistic nature of the roadmap he’s assigned, and the change tolerance of the organization. Depending on the context, some of these options will be more or less relevant.

In the previous paragraph I mentioned the “social layer”, what states that the 2.0 side is a new dimension of the intranet and not an isolated bubble. So, it’s not about building an intranet on the one side and a social network on the other side. Why ? For 90% of employees, using a social network at work is not a reflex and it the network is not close to the center of gravity of their work environment, there are lots of chances no one will use it. Moreover, social activities need stimulation and stimulation often comes from a corporate information, a business related data…in fact from sources that are usually on the traditional intranet.

I suggest that such an intranet relies on some pillars that are. :

Socializing information

What I mean by socializing information can  take one many forms :

- allowing users to choose the sections of the intranet he wants to read in particular and display them on his home page or a dedicated page.

- allowing users to share any content of the intranet with colleagues (via their internal “twitter”, in a community etc…) with respect of rights and authorizations. (But let’s be honnest = today, even without such tools, secret information circulates by email).

- allowing users to share external content and bring them in the internal flow, and let rating and curation mechanisms make it climb to the head of the organization or spread horizontally.

- allwing users to react to any content either where it’s published or by pushing it to a blog or a community to start a conversation.

- allowing users to promote any content by rating it, approving it (“like”) to make it more visible on the homepage or share it through one’s activity stream.

- allowing any corporate department to deploy on-demand microsites (with predefined templates) what makes corporate communication more granular and close to employees.

It’s the least any enterprise can do, most of all because it’s in the scope of the traditional top-down communication that will not disappear but needs serious improvements to become more user-centric and interactive.

Socializing people

Sharing, reacting, discussing and collaborating are good things…but knowing with whom is even more important. Of course, there are people we know and who’ll quickly join our “network”, but there are also all those we don’t know today but we will need one day. So, before telling users to connect and do things together we should make it easier for them to find and identify one another.

Everything starts with a rich profile like those we can find on any social network. It will made of official information from the traditional IT systems (position, hierarchical belonging, competencies…), employees being free not to display all of it, but also of information provided by its owner (past experiences, topics of interest) and even bu his colleagues (endorsements, tags…). Of course, the owner validates anything others want to put on his profile. Last, the profile also includes employee’s social activities : communities, blogs, wikis updates, shared bookmarks…

This information constitute a stream other users can subscribe to to follow the activities of one person in the same way they can follow a specific section of the intranet or the corporate communication. Anyone can choose what appears in his one’s own stream.

This rich profile should not compete with the official directory : it’s the directory. To be more precise, it’s were the directory is accessible to users. (Note to IT people : don’t forget to choose solutions that can sync with several directories at the same time : it’s very useful when there’s not a single directory and it shows a unified view of all your directories even if your standardization project is late…)

[Read more...]

Social media and customer service : don’t make exceptions become mainstream

Summary : when an enterprise invests in social media to improve its customer service it may think that a good indicator of success would be the amount of interactions that will happen on this channel. That’s a mistake : the social channel aiming at dealing with exceptions, making it process generic requests overloads it without bringing any added value. It’s important not to try to attract all customer requests on this channel but, on the contrary, to distribute the requests in order the social channel will only process the few percent for which it’s irreplaceable compared to a more conventional way of doing things.

In some of my previous posts I talked about the use of social media for customer relationship, most of all to mention that it’s more a management, process and one-to-one relationships between the enterprise and the customer than a community clap-trap. Since I recently dealt with the system bandwidth issue, I’d like to digg a little further to warn against a failing that is very foreseeable.

As you have certainly understood, using social media to improve customer service makes the whole organization move in order to face the demand and not be overwhelmed. The logical consequence, once all these efforts and investments have been done, is to make them as profitable as possible. So it implies to drive as much customers and interactions on the social media platforms that are used. Wrong. It will lead the system to failure and will seriously annoy customers.

Before specifically dealing with social media, we need to understand the difference between what need an human intervention and what doesn’t. Human are essential when the situation so exceptional and complex that an automated processing won’t work or when the customer is not able to initiate this processing by himself. Knowing that, compared to an automated system, human are not scalable, they have to focus on what they’re unique at. Typically the two ends of the Gauss Curve, the center needing an automated processing that may be launched by the customer itself (on web sites, online forms, voice systems…). Example ; no human should have to fill a form that the customer could fill by himself if he could access it.

So, human should be kept for what can’t be automated and customers that are not able to use the tools they’re given. Then, many channels exist depending on the context of the customer, his prefered devices, the fact he’s in a mobility situation. So there’s a wide range of tools that goes from the traditional call center to social media (both being complementary and not alternative). Why is it important ? Because everything that does not need an human processing and lands on an human channel saturates it and prevents it from dealing with what it should.

Maybe you guess where my thoughts are heading… [Read more...]

Picture of the week #28 : It’s not the hat that makes the man, it’s the head that wears it

It’s not the hat that makes the man, it’s the head that wears it

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.

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Links for this week (weekly)

  • “One of my earlier posts posed the question Who’s on Your Team? to highlight the importance of social networking to establishing team identity and enhancing knowledge sharing across distributed, multidisciplinary teams. Its focus was on the importance of social software applications in the Enterprise to the ability of distributed project team members to recognize who is on their team at any point in time, and who isn’t. Organizational analysts refer to the challenge of establishing team identity as a boundary definition problem for teams, when members are spread across large distances whether geographic or cultural in nature.”

    tags: collaboration sociallearning boundaries distributedteams distributedwork sharing awareness ambiantawareness

    • Mortensen and Hinds surveyed twenty-four product development teams, finding that, on average, only 75% of the employees on any given distributed team agreed on who is, and who is not, a member of their product development team.
    • For example, my previous post implied that social software tools in the Enterprise, such as awareness/sharing tools (Yammer, Chatter, etc.), or collaboration tools (Wikis, blogs, discussion forums, etc.) assumed that increased information sharing would decrease such boundary definition problems among distributed teams
    • In other words, lack of an agreement on who is a member of a distributed team does not present a problem that needs solving in order to manage performance. The awareness that differences exist about who is on distributed teams, and recommendations on how to manage those differences, point to the focus needed on collaboration from management.
    • Collaboration isn’t just about people sharing information to achieve common goals. Collaboration is about people working with other people to achieve common goals and create value.
    • Even though goal-orientation is a big part of collaborating, collaboration requires more to achieve goals effectively. It requires shared experience.
  • “Trend: Activity streams will continue to be a much hyped capability within social platforms. However resulting “stream glut”, interoperability, and security-related issues will threaten benefits unless better user experience design, filtering, standardization, permission models, and back-end analytics are applied. “

    tags: activitystream filtering informationoverload visibility

    • The concept overall is compelling – activity streams allow applications to publish events that are captured by aggregators that serialize the items into a sequence of posts
    • Activity streams also have an interesting intersect with identity. Depending on how someone sets up publishing of their own personal activity stream, the meta data shared about themselves creates a sense of presence enabling others to be aware of their actions.
    • The idea is that we can improve both productivity and collaboration needs by making events more visible and allowing people to take action more effectively (sometimes collectively) based on that level of event transparency (especially when compared to how people rely on their e-mail inbox for much of this type of group notification and work coordination).
    • Of course, you can “follow” people and applications but the more you follow, the closer you move to the original state of too much information flowing by. People end up spending a fair about of time scrolling up and down searching for things they might have missed. Depending on the way activities are aggregated, there may be limits as to how much information is actually kept around to enable historical review.
    • The answer some will argue is better filtering – a more advanced way to organize and view an activity stream. By creating virtualized views, or specific streams, we can reduce the “noise” and enable people to watch the activities that are most relevant to them.
    • Activity streams will also need to respect the permission models associated with the event being signaled from a publisher.
    • There is also the possibility that activity streams will be collected in some type of store within the system aggregating events from various publishers. This scenario reinforces the need for security coordination with source system since the data within the activity stream item might need to have access controls similar to those of the “system of record”.
    • If there is a key take-away from this post, it’s that everything mentioned above reinforces the need for interoperability and standardization. Without both, there will be isolated aggregators embedded within multiple enterprise platforms (portals, collaboration, social) with no effective way for organizations to federate events across these activity stream silos.
  • “BYOT : Bring Your Own Technology (Tools). Cette expression est utilisée en anglais pour définir une démarche innovante, qui commence, tout doucement, à se diffuser : les salariés d’une entreprise arrivent au bureau avec leurs propres outils, PC portables, smartphones ou tablettes.”

    tags: IT consumerization tools BYOT AVOP

    • Dans une démarche AVOP, un salarié peut venir au bureau avec un outil qui lui appartient et l’utiliser pour tout ou partie de ses activités professionnelles.
    • Les principes AVOP sont simples :

      - On fait confiance aux utilisateurs pour choisir les outils qui correspondent le mieux à leurs attentes.

      - Ils utilisent les mêmes outils dans leurs activités professionnelles et personnelles.

      - Les outils sont achetés, assurés et maintenus par les collaborateurs.

      - L’entreprise participe au financement de ces outils

    • Le salarié prend plus soin de ses outils personnels que de ceux de l’entreprise. Toutes les entreprises savent bien que les voitures de fonction ont plus de bosses que celles des salariés !
    • L’entreprise réduit fortement ses investissements en informatique ; on passe d’un budget CAPEX (investissements) à un budget OPEX (Opérations).
    • Le mythique TCO, Total Cost of Ownership, d’un poste de travail est immédiatement réduit. La majorité des cabinets d’étude, tels que le Gartner, estime que le TCO annuel d’un poste de travail est compris entre 3 000 et 4000 €.

      Chez Revevol le TCO d’un PC est de 600 € (50 €x12) ; en passant de 3600 à 600 €, Revevol économise 3000 € par personne et par an !

    • Sur ce thème important, le pragmatisme s’impose : sécurité du poste de travail, sécurité des applications, sécurité des réseaux … pour chacun de ces challenges, il est possible de trouver des réponses raisonnables qui permettent de «ne pas interdire» une démarche AVOP.
  • “Dans un récent article, nous nous sommes fait l’écho d’une étude sur les différences générationnelles entre matière d’Internet et de T.I.C.

    Pour prolonger cette étude, vous trouverez ci-dessous une infographie qui permet de visualiser les différences d’usages entre générations.”

    tags: generationy usages internet web onlineactivities socialnetworks Instantmessaging

  • “Dans la vidéo suivante, le prof. R. Junco et quelques-uns de ses étudiant-e-s partagent leur avis sur l’expérience menée par cet enseignant concernant l’utilisation de twitter en classe.”

    tags: twitter learning education teaching engagement students

    • Parmi les résultats de cette expérience, menée avec deux groupes soit un groupe utilisant twitter et un groupe de contrôle, il faut noter la variété des utilisations de Twitter, le sentiment des étudiant-e-s d’être plus à l’aise dans l’échange de leurs idées via Twitter qu’en classe de manière habituelle, la disparition des frontières entre les «clans» et un meilleur taux d’implication des étudiant-e-s ayant utilisés Twitter par rapport aux étudiant-e-s du groupe de contrôle ainsi qu’au final de meilleures notes académiques.
  • “Ideally, developing a strategy should be exciting: strategy making is about creating a future for your organization, and engaging your people in that process. But all too often, the budget-planning monster weighs an organization down with endless inputs and bureaucracy and rules. The monster does not create coherence. It does not create energy. It does not excite people. No wonder companies have trouble inventing new products, services, and futures.”

    tags: strategy budgets planning

    • “Everything has to be a strategy in order to get noticed,” he told me. “You practically need a strategy for visiting the restroom.”
    • It was as if “strategy” was synonymous with a long-drawn-out, badly managed budgeting process.
    • Reframe strategy as a story. Strategy is not about streamlining or improving present operations or organizational structures. It is not about a budget, a yearly plan, or solving a specific problem. It is a compelling story about discovering the firm’s unrealized possibilities.
    • Every leader has two jobs: to run the operation as it exists today, and to rethink the organization so that it can survive and thrive into the future.
    • When the two activities are conflated, the strong, data-driven budgeting process can overwhelm the more fragile (but equally important) strategy-making process.
    • The strategy-making system should focus on building the company’s “argument” — its reason for being, its value statement, its goals and ambitions for the future.
    • The budgeting system, by contrast, should be built around key performance indicators with shorter time horizons.
    • Too often, the very people who should be charting the future get so sucked into the operational quagmire that they have no time to think about where the firm should be going. I
  • “I’m beginning to wonder what function middle managers and line managers perform these days. Can these functions be replaced entirely by new Enterprise 2.0 roles and systems? Is something going to fall between the cracks in a rush to remove these roles? Is the traditional Middle Manager heading towards obsolescence? “

    tags: management middlemanagement jobdescription leadership managers projectmanagers

    • Part of the problem is that while we move towards implementation of E2.0, and introduce change in roles that support it, we have yet to strongly define some of the job characteristics and functions
    • Another crucial function of a line manager is in managing the team’s budget. While it may require input from their team, trying to manage a budget and make such decisions as a group often leads to disaster.
    • On the other hand, there are functions of a line manager that can be supported via technology and organizational work culture, obviating the need for strong skills in this area by any single role
  • tags: IT organizationalintelligence crm BI socialnetworking intranet knowledgemanagement commandandcontrol bpm intelligence decisionmaking weaksignals learning innovation

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

Employees engagement through social media : is it an illusion ?

Summary : Employees engagement is a very trendy topic ans, as usual, social networking dynamics are seens as the miraculous solution to make it happen. The problem is, in fact, deeper : between in-trompe-l’oeil projects (implementing a social network to avoid looking into real issues), mistrust cultural reflexes towards organizations and people who can be more or less extrovert, tools are not a magic wand. Enterprises need to focus on employees’ expectations (most of all in terms of HR), find a way to address people who have a rational approach of their professional engagement and, most of all, should keep in mind that the activity of their social platform is not the only barometer of employees engagement.

The concept of engagement is central in lots of thoughts and arguments about enterprise 2.0 or enterprise social networks. The reason is easy to understand : engaged employees are more concerned, less willing to leave the job and are more likely to give their best to help their employer and colleagues to be successful. Of course, everything that can bring employees closer to their enterprise and build stronger ties among them is good…hence the irruption of social media and social networks in the debate.

Really ?

It sounds like one more magic wand trick. “Engage your employees by using social media”. Of course, they had no visibility on their future, are asked to accept lower salaries that what they could expect (yes sir…you know…that’s the crisis), are asked to do always more for less, not to expect any raise in reward because the reward is to keep their job, are prevented to use most of networking sites, were hired because of their ability to propos, innovate, lead and, on their first day at work, were told to shut up and follow the party line, are afraid that their employer does not care about their future employability in a fast changing world….and a Facebook-like will change everything. Being able to connect the one with another will make them forget everything,  help them to sleep better at night and not fear the future. Being (potentially) connected will increase their motivation.

Seriously. Do you think that any social tool will change anything ? [Read more...]

Picture of the week #27 : If you step back too far, your vision doesn’t become global…

If you step back too far, your vision doesn’t become global, it’s blurred

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.

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Links for this week (weekly)

  • “The technology revolution has brought us a lot—dramatic improvement in what we know about customers and how we interact with them, markedly better information for making decisions, the ability to work through virtual teams scattered around the globe. But its unseen legacy might be something much more fundamental: It has changed the very nature of how people work. One consequence seems clear: The classic job of the middle manager will soon disappear.

    tags: management middlemanagement technology generationy mentoring coaching

    • Now technology itself has become the great general manager. It can monitor performance closely, provide instant feed back, even create reports and presentations. Moreover, skilled teams are increasingly self-managed. That leaves people with general management skills in a very vulnerable position. In the past their networks and abilities were built up in one company—but as tenure with a single company decreases, people lose the opportunity to develop deep knowledge that other firms might value. Plus, thanks to the internet and search engines, everyone now knows or can know something about everything. There is little competitive advantage in being a jack-of-all-trades when your main competitor might be Wikipedia.
    • Attitudes toward management have also changed. As my research makes clear, Gen Y workers see no value in reporting to someone who simply keeps track of what they do, when much of that can be done by themselves, their peers, or a machine. What they do value is mentoring and coaching from someone they respect. Someone, in other words, who is a master—not a general manager.
    • If you’re a middle manager now, you aren’t doomed to early retirement. But you must be prepared to make two crucial investments. The first is in acquiring and building knowledge or competencies that are valuable and rare—what I would call your “signatur
    • The second investment is in developing new areas of proficiency, or moving into adjacencies, throughout your working life.
    • My research suggests that advocacy, social and micro entrepreneurship, the life and health sciences, energy conservation, creativity and innovation, and coaching will be highly prized in the decades ahead.
  • “Brennan starts by saying that business is going through a transformation and top-down leadership no longer works well for companies. But he believes that too many of his managers still operate in a “command-and-control reflex.” “

    tags: management topdown commandandcontrol hierachy humanresources hiring autonomy delegation

    • good at holding subordinates accountable but bad at setting clear expectations. When subordinates aren’t sure what the boss really wants to accomplish
    • Most managers, he says, can’t help but see collaboration as a kind of threat to their territory, and they raise a variety of “defense mechanisms” to thwart it.
    • To discourage the command-and-control reflex, Brennan puts a lot of energy into hiring. He looks for people who are open-minded and aware of their own foibles. Those are the ones more likely to encourage autonomy and collaboration even at the cost of control.
    • An accumulating body of evidence, from social science experiments to middle manager testimonies, suggests that high levels of inequality discourage cooperation and initiative on the ground
    • Corporate profits are also quite healthy, disproving critics who said that competition was getting so intense that bureaucratic organizations would soon disappear. Most companies have no compelling need to change, even in the face of a new generation of technology-native employees demanding autonomy.
  • “A development of my ideas in presentation format. This was a really useful exercise and it has helped me draw out some of the ideas and to identify areas to work on and make more robust. The project is one I’d like to make concrete, working with a team to solidify the ideas and to ground them in standard business practice. Areas that need developing are legion but there needs to be more work on the external / marketing aspects to draw the elements together.”

    tags: socialbusiness socialbusinessscorecard metrics ROI measurement

  • “Questions are the basis of all creativity.
    Questions are the basis of all connection.
    Questions are the basis of all understanding.

    The challenge is creating a question-friendly environment.

    Although you have little (or no) control over the people in the environment, you do have (some) control over the environment itself.”

    tags: questioning questions management trust creativity problemsolving discussions conversations debate

    • Here’s how:
      —Think verbs, not nouns.
      —Think dialogue, not debate.
      —Think searching, not snooping.
      —Think curious, not judgmental.
      —Think insinuating, not imposing.
      —Think harmonizing, not manipulating.
    • It’s about the process:
      —Thinking
      —Challenging
      —Encouraging of diverse viewpoints
      —Admitting that there are multiple solutions to every problem
    • La place du HR Community Manager se situe dans l’accompagnement des équipes, le fait de s’assurer que les messages ou décisions prises sont bien comprises, de proposer la création ou l’officialisation de communautés internes à la RH pour favoriser le travail en équipe, en projet…
    • toute l’équipe RH se doit d’être ambassadeur de la marque RH en interne. Le HR Community Manager est là pour les accompagner, pour renforcer certains messages, pour diffuser l’offre de service RH auprès des équipes RH et auprès des clients internes de la RH, pour faire connaître toutes les actions menées par la DRH.
    • a communication vers l’externe est donc essentielle, et les médias sociaux sont le nouvel eldorado des équipes RH et dirigeantes qui ont envie de faire savoir au monde entier que l’entreprise pour laquelle ils travaillent est “THE PLACE TO BE”.
  • “For any new business tool or technology, gaining a core of early adopters is both exciting and dangerous–if it only stays within an echo-chamber of early adopters. To become a business priority, it needs to grow beyond this group, become commonplace and create value for the organization. The question in the title may sound like a self-contradictory, but I have good reason to ask.”

    tags: soicialnetworking socialbusiness productivity adoption maturity SNA bottlenecks

    • That is an important point: work still needs to be enjoyable for people to stay engaged. But, once you grow beyond an initial group, any concept or technology becomes so common that it looses it high-shine luster. What is important is to distinguish common from productive.
    • . You need a basic understanding of level of dependencies and where they lie before you can get into the deeper question of how these dependencies reflect your organizational needs, processes, and strategy
    • Social network analysis may not and need not be a perfect mapping to show value. Even simple explorations can help identify basic issues such as bottlenecks and isolated groups.
  • “Community management is indeed a critical role in any fledgling social or adaptive business. Monitoring keywords provides us with invaluable insights that reveal the sentiment, volume and reach of activity within our markets. Identifying, tracking, and engaging customers and stakeholders helps us cultivate rewarding communities measured by loyalty and advocacy. Listening to conversations provides us with an opportunity to feel what people are saying and the experiences they’re sharing. If we pay attention, we can surface the ideas and touchpoints that gives us purpose and provide us with opportunities to earn relevance.

    Over the years, the role of the community manager has evolved. What started as a gateway to surfacing the conversations related to brands in the emerging conversational landscape, evolved into something far more sophisticated. And, we’re just getting started.”

    tags: communitymanagement adaptivecasemanagement adaptivebusiness conversations socialswitchboard collaboration commandcenters socialcrm dell gatorade feedback customerfeedback

    • This new obligation only intensified as social media moved from digital outliers to the mainstream. Now, some of the socially vulnerable brands in the world require a mission control not unlike what we envision when we hear those two words, “mission control.” The difference is that this new infrastructure is designed to ensure positive brand experiences as well as the impact of real-time brand democracy.
    • We are now moving from the era of community management to fully fledged command centers.
    • Dell is years into designing both a social and adaptive business. With the recent launch of its Social Media Listening Command Center, customers officially become part of Dell’s value proposition.
    • In December 2010, CEO Michael Dell and CMO Karen Quintos officially launched the company’s Command Center as the operational hub for listening and engagement across all social media, globally. Dell made its name in social media by responding to customer problems.
    • According to Dell, the Social Media Listening Command Center tracks on average more than 22,000 daily topic posts related to Dell, as well as the mentions of Dell on Twitter that have a reach greater than the circulation of the top 12 daily newspapers in the United States.

    • More importantly, it’s about learning and changing based on repeat feedback.
    • Before we can collaborate externally, we have to collaborate within. This is also about efficiency and cooperation where it hasn’t really existed before. We are now creating feedback loops wherever touchpoints and intelligence are active and brewing.
  • “L’année 2011 s’annonce prometteuse pour Intelligence Lorraine, portail de l’intelligence économique régionale. Il vient de lancer, lundi 10 janvier, un bulletin de veille gratuit à destination des PME et de leurs salariés. Ce bulletin hebdomadaire, distribué chaque lundi par mail, regroupe les principales informations de la semaine écoulée ayant trait à la vie économique en Lorraine. Rien d’extraordinaire, pourrait-on penser, si ce n’est que c’est la première brique d’une stratégie ambitieuse dont l’objectif, à terme, est de fédérer un réseau social d’expertises multisectorielles au service de l’intelligence économique des PME lorraines.”

    tags: intelligencelorraine economicintelligence watch curation socialnetworks casestudies feedburner googlereader

    • Google Reader permet ensuite de sélectionner parmi ces flux tous les articles intéressants et de construire un flux personnalisé qui sera diffusé à tous les adhérents au bulletin veille via FeedBurner, un outil également gratuit de gestion de flux RSS.
    •  La première étape est d’abord de diffuser notre bulletin de veille en ciblant tous ceux qui ont besoin d’être informés sur l’économie régionale, particulièrement ceux qui n’ont pas vraiment le temps d’organiser une vieille systématique, comme c’est le cas de nombre de décideurs au sein des PME
    • Dans un second temps, il s’agira de regrouper tous ceux qui y trouvent un intérêt pour les inciter à participer à la réalisation de ce bulletin afin de le transformer en outil de veille collaborative.
    • La troisième étape consistera à constituer un réseau social régional d’expertises pour améliorer la connaissance du territoire et de ses enjeux économiques par le plus grand nombre de PME, améliorer la circulation et le partage des informations et identifier les opportunités pour aider au développement des entreprises.

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

Are curators the missing thing in enterprise 2.0 approaches ?

Summary :in a few weeks, a new concept burst into the web : the curator. It can be defined as filter and broadcaster for qualified and targeted information. Is it a new fad or a key element of a successful approach. With hindsight it seems that it’s the perfect complement to community managers when the latter makes no sense, one targeting actual communities, the other those who want informations without interactions as well as those who need to be stimulated to interact. The curator may be the person who feeds “social skeptics” as well as community discussions or community managers themselves when they need expert contents to do their job.

Sometimes, there are themes that emerge from who knows where and find themselves at the heart of the discussions. That’s how what what supposed to be an insignificant on twitter with Anthony Poncier and Benoit Faverial ended in a real debate that lasted long at night with Xavier Bartholome, Vincent Berthelot and Mark Tamis. In this post I’ll try to sum up what was said.

Why talking about curators here ?

Because, in my opinion, it’s one of the most important levers to successfully achieve 2.0, social (use the words you prefer) projects within the organization.

What is a curator ?

As for any emerging concept we need to be very cautious when trying to define what anything is. We can say that curators are people who process, rate, contextualize, enrich and broadcast information.

Here’s the diagram shared by Anthony.

There’s something I like a lot with the concept of curator and what it refers to. Like curators in museums, they do not transform the primary matter but understand it, explain it, expose it in a context that increases its value. We can consider that their contribution is rather about meta-data and meta-information.

What’s the difference with KM ?

At first sight I can see three major differences with KM : feeds, maturity and the exclusive nature of the role.

• Curators are not processing information to tidy it up but to broadcast it. KMer ended in a container filling role while curators are rather broadcasters. So, curators are more “filters and pumps” than meticulous archivists.

• KMers don’t address the same level of information as curators. KMers deal with mature, validated and consolidated information while curators are more focused on emergence and weak signals.

• Kmers were, in some ways, knowledge depositories, a mandatory agent any knowledge related thing had to go through. Curators act rather by subsidiarity : anyone can do one’s own sourcing and filtering job without dealing with curators. But, for those who don’t want, don’t know how to, can’t, the curator is here to make things easier.

That’s a watch work isn’t it ?

Yes, there are lots of similarities. The difference is that curators are not necessarily “institutionalized” and depends on a less structured, managed and constrained approach. On the other hand, curators may work at a narrower level and be in a more instantaneous logic when watch often needs time to finally reach employees.

To be also taken into account :

• Brokerage. Curators directly transmit information to employees while watchers make it through a complex and  nebulous intermediary called enterprise or organization which has its rules and constraints that make the system less reactive.

• Scope : watchers watch what’s happening out of the enterprise while curators are also dealing with internal information. So they’re the possible missing link between internal social and community activities and conversations that only interest those who participate and those who need the information that can be found here but don’t have the time or will to find it…or are even convinced that these activities are useless and don’t believe in social approaches.

Curators can even be seen as those who facilitate a P2P watch system in complement to an heavier and institutionalized one. [Read more...]

Picture of the week #26 : Between Possible and impossible : two letters and a state of mind

Between Possible and impossible : two letters and a state of mind

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.

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