Picture of the week #47 : The first impressions are always right, especially when they are bad

The first impressions are always right, especially when they are bad

 

 

 

Illustration from the book “The Golden Rules for Success“.

Get the iPhone or Ipad App.

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.

Links for this week (weekly)

  • “One of the questions that comes up all-too-frequently when discussing social collaboration in the enterprise these days is the (still) infamous ROI question. Sometimes this is because the various manifestations of Enterprise 2.0 and social intranets haven’t gone past the “we’d better start adopting or we’ll be in the stone ages” stage that e-mail or traditional intranets themselves reached well over a decade ago.”

    tags: socialbusiness ROI enterprise2.0 collaboration functions roles workplace socialworkspace culture behaviors work intelligence socialbusinessintelligence

    • What’s often missing now is the clarity around how a newly social enterprise actually looks and what the functions and roles are.
    • In this new socially engaged workplace there are several strategic changes, primarily cultural and behavioral ones, but some minor structural ones as well. Many organizations will make these changes organically and eventually end up with an environment that looks like the one above,
    • 1. Social networks amongst workers. The formal social capital of the Facebook era is moving into the workplace. The connections you have — and with whom — determines your sphere of influence and ability to get things done as much, if not more, than the traditional grapevine of old.
    • 2. Observable work. Just like people are narrating their lives to their friends and family today via consumer social media, this same process is what employees are beginning to do in their daily work.
    • 3. Insights and analysis. The logical outcome of having the intranet contain the entire narrative of your organization and who contributed to it is becoming clearer by the day. Currently, rapidly improving analytics of social media is leading the industry directly to towards effective access to something increasingly known as social business intelligence.
  • “Most intranet search delivers lamentably poor results. Time and time again, I hear staff plead: “Why can’t we just get Google?” But buying Google-or any other search engine for that matter-will not solve the problem.

    There are three reasons why Google works so well, and two of them have absolutely nothing to do with technology. Certainly, Google is a great technology. It is well designed, fast, robust.”

    tags: intranet search contentmanagement content linking

    • The next time you search with Google, pause for a moment and observe the first 10 results. No matter what you have searched for you can be pretty much guaranteed that every one of those first 10 results wanted to get found.
    • Not alone did they want to get found, they worked hard to get found. They created web content in a way that maximizes its chances of getting into the first page of search results. Most intranet content doesn’t want to get found.
    • What it says is that the intranet is being treated as a document management system. It is a place where you store content; a data warehouse. Authors don’t have time to think about linking content to other relevant content.
    •  

      Linking is a key way modern search engines use to understand what content is important and what content is not important. Basically, the more content gets linked to the more important it is.

  • “”L’IT, un facteur de stress dans l’Entreprise?” est le thème d’une conférence organisée le 8 Juin par le club de DSI, CIONet France. Ce fut l’occasion l’espace d’une soirée d’écouter Yves Lasfargue, directeur de l’OBERGO, spécialiste du management des TIC et du travail, co-auteur du livre “Qualité de vie et santé au travail” et de prendre conscience de l’ampleur de ce phénomène de société.”

    tags: IT stress competences workspace email pressure infobesity informationoverload

    • Quand on associe les mots stress et informatique on pense tout de suite aux emails. Et par association à l’infobésité à laquelle on est de plus en plus soumis notamment dans les communications asynchrones qui ne gèrent pas la disponibilité de la cible, ni sa charge de traitement.
      • Mais l’infobésité ou la capacité à savoir gérer la surabondance d’informations n’est pas le seul facteur de stress. Une dizaine de facteurs liés à la société numérique ont été identifiés par Yves Lasfargues!

         

        Est-ce que les salariés savent gérer :

         

           
        1. les changements permanents,
        2. la numérisation et l’abstraction,
        3. les informations de plus en plus écrites,
        4. l’interactivité et l’instantanéité,
        5. la surabondance d’information,
        6. la logique contractuelle,
        7. le temps et l’urgence
        8. l’espace et le travail à distance,
        9. la vulnérabilité et la cybercriminalité,
        10. la traçabilité et la transparence
    • Loin d’être cantonnées à l’entreprise, ces pressions se transmettent selon les chaînes de valeur : de l’utilisateur aux informaticien de la production, des chefs de projets aux développeurs, de l’entreprise au sous-traitant.
    • Pas beaucoup de réponses à cette conférence mais au moins la prise de conscience qu’il faut commencer a se poser des questions et changer des choses. L’informatique ne peut plus simplement déployer ses outils sans intégrer l’utilisateur
  • “Travailler n’importe quand, n’importe où, pour une meilleure gestion du temps et un plus grand équilibre entre vie professionnelle et vie privée ? C’est le pari du « New World of Work », un modèle qui bouleverse l’équilibre des relations au travail. Et qui annonce le job 2.0 : ultra-flexible, sans bureau, dans une entreprise collaborative.”

    tags: workspace mobility remotework networking flexibility IT Intranet culture management casestudies getronics trust responsibility CSC workplace openspace

    • Six ans plus tard, Getronics donne l’exemple. « Grâce à des outils collaboratifs, nous avons largement développé la flexibilité », explique Yvon Fischer. Une flexibilité du poste de travail permettant aux populations nomades, comme aux mères de famille, de travailler à distance. 
    • « Cette nouvelle organisation du travail repose notamment sur la confiance et la responsabilité. Avec comme challenge, une réduction des coûts et une augmentation de la performance. »
    • Les résultats de cette politique ne sont toutefois pas totalement renversants : aujourd’hui, les collaborateurs de Getronics restent, en moyenne, deux jours par mois chez eux pour travailler. En contrepartie, le collaborateur doit remplir quelques obligations : être joignable entre 8 h et 19 h ou, en cas d’absence derrière son PC, indiquer dans Office Communicator où il se trouve.
    • Les nouveaux bureaux se veulent plus un lieu de rencontres qu’un lieu de travail. Pour favoriser le travail en équipe. Et puis, c’est un environnement de travail agréable. Ce qui est toujours important pour la motivation. »
    • CSC, acteur mondial dans le conseil, l’intégration de solutions d’entreprises et l’externalisation. Son slogan ? Freedom works beter. Elle incite donc également ses 450 collaborateurs à jouer la carte de la mobilité et du télétravail, tout en mettant à disposition des locaux adaptés.
    • Les collaborateurs n’ont plus de poste de travail fixe, ce qui permet d’utiliser les différents types de bureaux en fonction des tâches à effectuer. Par ailleurs, l’accent est mis sur une utilisation encore plus économe du papier et sur un recours plus important à l’informatique », explique Tom Auwers.
    • Le dynamic office permet une utilisation plus rationnelle de l’espace disponible. Pourtant, ces nouveaux bureaux sont décrits par certains employés comme des « poulaillers silencieux », un univers qui génère le blues.
    • Laurent Taskin, professeur en Management des Organisations à la Louvain School of Management (FUCaM) et à l’Institut des sciences du travail (UCL), insiste sur le fait que de tels bouleversements de l’espace de travail s’appliquent essentiellement à des métiers où la mobilité est inhérente au job (activités de conseil, commerciales, etc.)
    • Si le lieu de travail se limite à devenir un lieu de convivialité, on peut interroger la responsabilité de l’employeur. « Il devient, dès lors, incapable de proposer un endroit de travail, pourtant important et structurant », poursuit Laurent Taskin. Dans ces rares cas, ce concept d’organisation du travail flexible, qui offre un nouveau lieu de socialisation, constitue une réelle innovation
    • Les salariés sont d’ailleurs souvent en avance technologiquement, par rapport à leur employeur. Ils sont habitués à interagir d’une autre façon, et en recourant à d’autres outils. Le NWOW repose donc sur l’individualisation de la société, avec de meilleurs aménagements du temps et de l’espace, de vrais accents sur la flexibilité et un meilleur échange de la connaissance. »

       

    • Mais on assiste à des discours paradoxaux : la plupart veulent mettre en place des outils collaboratifs, alors que leurs managers en sont encore à une approche de type command & control. Il ne faut donc pas s’étonner du fait que le NWOW suscite des résistances. Dans les structures rigides, le pouvoir des managers est lié aux connaissances dont ils disposent et à la manière dont ils distillent l’information. Or, désormais, ce ne sont plus les connaissances qui donnent du pouvoir, mais le fait de partager des connaissances. Il s’agit d’une profonde remise en cause du fonctionnement des entreprises. »
    • « Le manager, ou plutôt le people manager, sera avant tout un animateur de communautés au travail, non plus dans un positionnement hiérarchique, mais sur un mode participatif et relationnel. Sa responsabilité sera de développer le talent de ses collaborateurs, de veiller à ce que les projets s’articulent bien, de mettre les bonnes personnes en relation au bon moment, de sorte qu’il y ait des frottements à toutes les intersections de l’entreprise. Il sera le garant d’une véritable culture du réseau de l’organisation. Les outils collaboratifs viendront seulement apporter une valeur ajoutée supplémentaire, au service de cette culture. »
  • “There is no shortage of extremely successful companies with business models that critically depend upon a high degree of customer proximity and the ability to generate detailed insights into customers’ needs, wants and behaviors – those buying habits and attitudes pivotal in shaping and directing the whole organization. In other words, companies that are customer centric. Yet, there are also many successful companies that don’t go out of their way for customer proximity. By looking at companies that operate on both ends of the spectrum, it becomes clear that customer centricity is not a virtue.”

    tags: customer customercentricity segmentation pricing

    • These are just a few examples. And there are many other companies whose success is based on customer centricity, most of which would be well advised to continue their successful strategy of customer focus.
    • Ironically, it is often because of their customer focus that firms choose to become less customer focused, at least in certain market segments. Dow Corning has a proud tradition of active customer engagement, and management sees the company not only as a supplier of chemicals but an active partner in solving its customers’ problems. About 10 years ago, the company realized that many of their customers did not want this level of attention but, instead, preferred a better price
    • Customer centricity is not a generic virtue to which company managements should aspire. It’s a strategic choice!

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

Employees first ! Supporting those who really create value.

Summary : “Reverse the pyramid”…other words may be used to scare less but it’s concern shared by many organization. It’s, in some ways, necessary to face the increasing complexity of the world that surrounds us but it’s also the obsessive fear of many organizations and managers used to the command and control model and not willing to go out of their zone of their comfort zone to improve what’s happening in the value zone. Value zone ?  As a matter of fact that’s because value is created at the field employee level that the command chain should turn into a service one. But, beyond exhortations that are easy way to drive change while being surprise it doesn’t work it’s a hard work that consists of reversing flow, redesigning some processes and transfering responsabilities that has to be done. That’s was was made at the Indian compant HCL and the story is told by Vineet Nayar, HCL CEO, in his book, Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down. Here are my takes.

One year ago, in July 2010, I read attentively and bookmarked this blog post by Gary Hamel where he was telling the incredible management experience that people just lived at HCL, an Idian IT service company. Spurred on by its CEO, Vineet Nayar, they seemed to be on the right way to meet a goal that look unreachable for many : reversing the pyramid to make the organization more successful.

Here’s what I highlighted at that time :

Transparent Financial Data. Vineet realized it’s hard to feel empowered if your manager has a lot of data you don’t. With this in mind, HCLT’s IT team created a simple widget that gave every employee a detailed set of financial metrics for their own team and other teams across the company.

U&I. Early on, Vineet and his leadership team set up an online forum and encouraged employees to ask tough questions and offer honest feedback. Nothing was censored on the “U&I” site; every post, however virulent, was displayed for the entire company to see.

Service Level Agreements. Powerful corporate departments, like HR and finance, often seem more interested in enforcing blanket policies than in making life easier for employees. When Vineet would ask front line employees, “What have the enabling functions done to help you create value in the value zone?”

-Today, HCLT employees are able to rate the performance of any manager whose decisions impact their work lives, and to do so anonymously. These ratings are published online and can be viewed by anyone who has submitted a review.

- As the CEO, Vineet was being asked to weigh in on hundreds of unit-level plans each year. Recognizing the limits to his time and personal expertise, Vineet challenged his colleagues to develop an online, peer-based evaluation process. The solution: MyBlueprint. In 2009, three hundred managers posted their business plans, or “blueprints,” online. Each document was accompanied by an audio presentation. More than 8,000 employees were then invited to jump in and review the plans.

- Three years after launching this concept, 20% of HCLT’s revenue is coming from initiatives launched in these communities of interest.”

Today, Vineet Nayar tells us more in a book called Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down. Rather than summarizing a book that’s very easy to read, I’m going to highlight what seem to me being the key points of his approach and share a couple of comments. [Read more...]

Picture of the week #46 : Resentiment is like drinking poison and waiting…

Resentiment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die

 

 

Illustration from the book “The Golden Rules for Success“.

Get the iPhone or Ipad App.

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.

Links for this week (weekly)

  • “Almost 90% of companies use some form of social networking, whether it’s an internal blog, an online forum, a wiki, or a hybrid platform such as Microsoft SharePoint, the InformationWeek Analytics Social Networking in the Enterprise Survey shows. However, a paltry 10% consider that effort a success. And we know one of the big reasons.

    Only 26% of our survey respondents have direct email integration with their social systems. In other words, companies expect employees to break away from their email, check the “social” system, collaborate, and then go back to their email. Fuggedaboutit.”

    tags: collaboration email socialnetworking integration training search unifiedsearch

    • Hundreds of apps, platforms, and devices are designed to help us work together better. They all promise to make us more productive. Yet almost none of these tools plugs easily into the others.
    • Email remains the dominant form of enterprise communications: 100% market acceptance, 100% user acceptance. Period.
    • Modern email systems provide a manageable and centralized point for four of the six integration requirements — contacts, calendars, tasks, and actual messages. However, enterprise IT teams stink at exploiting email’s potential beyond the in-box, and they pretend that personal folders and to-do lists, as well as lightly shared calendars, pass for a rich collaborative environment. We’re missing a tremendous opportunity.
    • Sound like a monster custom coding job? Not really. The best way to accomplish this integration is to leverage some rules-based logic at the server or gateway, similar to the conventional transaction logging used for compliance. Delivery into the application itself can be done via SMTP or whatever API the vendor provides.
    • If you’ve ditched your Exchange email service and internal CRM and headed for the cloud, you may be in for a nasty surprise. Both Google and Salesforce have nice options to sync with individual email clients, including Outlook. But we’ve seen them bomb for companies running both sync options at once on an Outlook client. Plus, neither Salesforce nor Google offers a way to integrate its respective talk and chat apps.
    • setting up an email alert of social networking activity isn’t enough. In fact, it may even make matters worse to generate a generic message that says something like, “Bill Jones commented on your product idea. Click here.” That’s not integration, it’s noise. If the details of Bill’s message were there, and you could reply to and comment on those messages right from your in-box, that would be integration.
    • It should be easy to figure out what users want most from collaboration, but unfortunately, IT doesn’t always make the effort. We’ve made our case that connecting collaboration tools, with email at the center, is vital. But two other needs are high on the list. One is enabling universal search of the information generated in these collaborative apps. The other is formal training in how best to use collaborative apps. Neither area tends to get IT leaders fired up.
    • However, we don’t necessarily have the choice to say “no.” As people accept new communication methods, businesses must adapt to stay competitive. Attempting to standardize on a single platform means making the fatal assumption that one vendor can provide and connect all needed channels, or that it’s even possible to connect all relevant platforms. By focusing on email as a core starting point, companies can build on email’s success to help create a cohesive plan for rolling in the rest of the communications suite.
  • “Le 28 et 29 mai, s’est tenue à Mountain View la première édition de la conférence Quantified Self (QS) (que l’on pourrait traduire littéralement par “la quantification de soi” pour parler “de la capture, de l’analyse et du partage de ses données personnelles”, comme l’explique Emmanuel Gadenne). InternetActu propose un compte rendu des différents ateliers.”

    tags: attention quantifiedself productivity data measurement privacy

    • L’internet n’est pas une pièce calme, explique Matthew Trentacoste. Pour favoriser sa concentration en ligne, il a utilisé et construit des outils qui l’aident à se concentrer dans les environnements en ligne.
    • Cet exemple donna lieu à une discussion sur ce qu’est l’attention (la résistance à la distraction pour Matt), mais d’autres participants mire l’accent sur la productivité en faisant notamment référence à l’expérience optimale, au flow de Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Wikipédia)
    • Naveen Selvadurai de Foursquare suggéra que nous pourrions manquer l’essentiel en cherchant trop à optimiser notre attention
    • Ces différents exemples montrent bien que l’enjeu du QS n’est pas seulement dans la mesure, mais repose bien dans l’amélioration de l’existant. La mesure a un but, même si celui-ci n’est pas toujours avoué.
    • Sur son blog, Mary Hodder s’étonnait qu’il y ait peu de sensibilisation à la protection des données personnelles durant les conférences du QS. Il lui a semblé implicite ”que nous (innovateurs, sociétés, porteurs de projets…) pouvons prendre des données et les utiliser pour faire tout ce que nous voulons“.
    • Pour Mary Holder, il est d’autant plus important de laisser l’utilisateur décider de l’utilisation qui peut être faite de ses données que celles-ci sont, bien souvent dans le domaine du QS, très personnelles.
    • On voit apparaitre de plus en plus de capteurs dans notre environnement physique. Il n’y a pas que nos personnes qui sont quantifiées, ”le monde est quantifié !
  • “Après avoir courtisé leurs dirigeants, leurs actionnaires, leurs clients et même l’opinion, voilà que les entreprises s’intéressent à leurs employés. Il faut dire que de récentes affaires, comme celles de Renault ou France Telecom ont montré les ravages de la démoralisation des troupes. Vingt ans de pression actionnariale, de changements technologiques et d’évolutions sociologiques, conclus par une crise majeure, ont eu raison de la fiction d’une entreprise heureuse dans un environnement sain.”

    tags: management change employees employeesatisfaction employeesengagement engagement autonomy selforganization responsability decision decisionmaking

    • En janvier dernier, le gourou du management Michael Porter avait lancé un pavé dans la mare avec son concept de « valeur partagée », sous-entendu partagée aussi avec les salariés et le milieu environnant, et pas seulement entre actionnaires, dirigeants et client
    • Ce serait exagéré : nombre de réflexions qui sortent aujourd’hui sont travaillées depuis des années par les adeptes de la responsabilité sociale d’entreprise. Et Christian Nibourel, le patron d’Accenture France, rappelle qu’en 1954, Peter Drucker affirmait déjà que « les seuls facteurs qui font progresser une entreprise sont les hommes, de l’ouvrier au directeur, leur capacité d’innovation et la façon dont ils organisent leurs relations de travail ».
    • Je ne fais pas cela pour faire plaisir, assure Vineet Nayar, mais parce que je suis convaincu que c’est la meilleure façon d’accélérer la croissance et les profits. En quatre ans, le nombre de nos clients a quintuplé, le taux de départs volontaires a chuté de moitié, notre chiffre d’affaires et notre résultat d’exploitation a triplé !
    • érapie du changement continu en quatre étapes : se regarder sans concession pour créer le besoin de changement, restaurer la confiance et la transparence absolue des décisions, renverser la pyramide pour mettre la priorité sur les employés en contact avec les clients et, enfin, redéfinir les pouvoirs du PDG pour transférer le maximum de responsabilité et de décision le plus près possible de la base.
    • D’abord parce que les patrons constatent les limites du système existant où les décisions, souvent contradictoires, sont poussées du sommet vers la base.
    • Par ailleurs, nous entrons dans un monde à la fois plus incertain et plus complexe, ce qui demande de la flexibilité, pour changer rapidement de cap, et du collectif, pour identifier le plus vite possible les erreurs et les opportunités.
  • “Q: What is an intranet?

    A: An internal website that helps employees get stuff done.

    That’s it. Simple, clear, everyday language. That’s what an intranet is and that’s all you’ll ever need to say to explain an intranet to most employees (or your retired uncle when he asks what you’re doing for work these days).”

    tags: inranet internel collaboration content communication activity culture digitalworkplace

      • James Robertson, perhaps the world’s foremost authority on intranets, says that intranets have 5 purposes:

         

        • Content (e.g. policy documents)
        • Communication (e.g. corporate news)
        • Activity (e.g. expense form)
        • Collaboration (e.g. project wiki)
        • Culture (e.g. noon hour jogging club)

         

    • let’s keep it simple and straightforward. An intranet is an internal website that helps employees get stuff done.
    • An intranet is a place. You can go there and when you get there you know you’ve arrived. An intranet can be social or not and can include lots of different integrated applications. But it’s still a place (as much as something on the web can be a place).
  • L’un des critères les plus souvent cité comme source de succès d’une approche de l’entreprise 2.0 est un style de management adapté et plus particulièrement des comportements de leadership. Si l’on parle souvent du middle management, on n’explore pas assez le top management qui, pour autant est souvent mis en avant. Il doit avant tout être engagé et comprendre que cette l’approche 2.0 le touche directement notamment en conduisant à une meilleure efficience de l’organisation, en permettant aussi de capitaliser sur les connaissances d’expertise, d’identifier des bonnes pratiques, voire procure des sources d’innovation venant directement de ceux qui sont proche du terrain. Dans certain cas elle est aussi une source de management de proximité. “

    tags: management topmanagement engagement change enterprise2.0 responsability

    • - Son rôle : il doit initier la démarche ou du moins la permettre et surtout la supporter, l’encourager, la sponsoriser. Cela signifie de ne pas la restreindre, ne pas la limiter et bien comprendre les tenants, les bénéfices et les modes de coordination associés afin de les plébisciter. En contre partie il doit accepter de ne pas tout contrôler comme par exemple sur les thèmes abordés par les collaborateurs ou sur lequel répond à un problème ou lequel est le plus actif.
    • - Son implication : est-ce que cela veut dire que tous les membres du top management doivent tenir un blog ? doivent-ils être rôle modèle dans l’utilisation du réseau social, s’y exprimer régulièrement, faire partie de communautés? Je ne le pense pas.
    • - Ce rôle dans l’avenir. Est-ce que si toutes les organisations se transforment en entreprise 2.0, le rôle du top management est voué à disparaître? Est-ce que si l’on favorise la responsabilisation des collaborateurs et que l’on promeut les communautés la notion de dirigeant n’est plus appropriée ? Je ne le pense pas et je ne l’encourage pas non plus.
    • A vrai dire, et peut-être dans un excès de naïveté, je pense qu’un top management intelligent a tout intérêt à tirer profit de cette intelligence collaborative qui ne remet pas en cause son pouvoir mais nourrit plutôt l’avenir de l’entreprise. 
  • “However, in the last decade, a few industry observers have noted seemingly diminishing returns on the strategic value of technology to drive additional business value. In fact, towards the turn of the millennium, debates raged on whether IT had become just another commodity (or not) while the the gap continued to grow between companies applying IT well in terms of business performance and those who weren’t.”

    tags: systemsofengagement systemsofrecord IT knowledgework

    • It’s safe to say that most firms would go out of business without the data within and automated capabilities of their systems of record. But systems of record are increasingly 1) becoming commoditized by SaaS and the cloud and 2) most organizations have reached the carrying capacity of the approach: There’s very little left to store and automate that isn’t already. So where are new business gains to be had?
    • Systems of record have matured to the point where there’s only a little strategic advantage to having your own unique capability. Instead, the discussion on strategic technology has shifted to the other 40% of what businesses in industrialized nations do: Knowledge work.
    • A corresponding change came when technology innovation and rate of change in the marketplace began to outpace what most organizations could adapt to. This has led to the aforementioned generational shifts in focus, and in certain early instances industry disruption, in the way we apply technology to business problems.
    • this week Gartner reported thatwithin five years we expect that community peer-to-peer support projects will supplement or replace Tier 1 contact center support in more than 40 percent of top 1,000 companies with a contact center.” Social systems of engagement have already become the primary way that we communicate in our personal lives and this is also happening for businesses
    • In recent conversations around how IT is changing, it’s been clear that this is part of a larger trend, part of it the move from push to pull systems, part of the move from the center to the edge, but all of it shows how networks and simple, freeform, emergent tools can enable much bigger results than the transactional systems of old. If you are investing in strategic new technologies today to drive your business forward,
  • “The big challenge before Dinesh: Build a social intranet for a company of dispersed and highly intellectual software developers and consultants where several past intranet efforts had failed.

    tags: intranet intranet2.0 socialintranet casestudies Thoughworks gamification knowledgesharing culture adoption

    • The Q&A application took off like wildfire once launched, quickly gaining hundreds of thousands of questions and answers. According to Dinesh, “The amount of learning when conceptualizing was phenomenal.”  Dinesh felt the success was due in large part to the gaming principles used to spur on adoption
    • “When starting a project like this it’s helpful to have a somewhat external perspective. You need to keep your eyes and ears open to pick up every possible cue from the culture. An understanding of these types of cultural cues feeds into how you run your change management and your communications campaign when designing a new intranet or system.”
    •  It started to dawn on Dinesh that a competitive environment wouldn’t be the silver bullet at ThoughtWorks that it had been at TCS.
    • Competition on the new social intranet “might have negative effects not just on the system, but on the organization’s culture.” In a high trust environment, competition could actually hurt the very positive aspects of organizational culture that the social intranet needed to capitalize upon
    • They wouldn’t force employees to give up behaviors that resonated with their deeply held professional identities, but instead implemented software that allowed employees to interact with intranet discussions completely via email. Without this email integration, Dinesh would have forced employees to make a decision between using email or using the new social intranet.
    • At TCS, Dinesh learned how to design gamification to get specific results around knowledge sharing. But gamification will not provide good results if it’s not a good cultural fit.
  • “Dans un précédent billet, j’ai décrit quelques caractéristiques des projets complexes. J’aimerais revenir ici sur la question “que doit-on connaître d’un système pour pouvoir l’influencer dans la direction souhaitée”, et pour cela je m’oserai à une nouvelle éloge de l’ignorance en management.”

    tags: system knowledge complexity knowledgemanagement decisionmaking management chaostheory

    • Qu’en est-il pour une ou un chef de projet, resp. pour toute personne en position de cadre? Le savoir est-il toujours utile pour exercer le métier de décideur? “Savoir, c’est pouvoir” – est-ce toujours vrai en management?
    • Quand nous sommes confrontés à des systèmes complexes – et en fait dans la création tout est complexe car tout est en éternelle interdépendance, mais nous ne le voyons pas ou ne voulons pas le voir – notre entendement, habitué à gérer les systèmes compliqués, est dépassé. Il y a trop: trop de données, trop d’incertitudes, trop d’interactions, bref, trop d’information à traiter par l’entendement qui très vite sera dépassé, ce qui générera un cortège de réactions émotionnelles négatives, de nature anxiogène.
    • Il n’existe pas de point de vue privilégié dans un système complexe.
    • Pour avoir une représentation du réel qui ressemble le plus au réel, il convient de multiplier et mettre en commun les points de vue: c’est le sens du travail en équipe, en réseau et même de l’intelligence collective.
    • Les systèmes compliqués peuvent être entièrement compris (c’est-à-dire ultimativement analysés de manière à ce que leur fonctionnement puisse être reproduit), dès lors qu’on y met l’effort nécessaire: la compréhension d’un système compliqué est proportionnelle à l’énergie investie dans l’analyse. Dans les systèmes complexes par contre, chercher à augmenter le savoir par l’analyse ne permet pas forcément de mieux les comprendre
      • Ce qu’on ne sait pas (“unk unks“) est susceptible d’avoir plus d’influence sur le système que ce que l’on sait (théorie du chaos):
    • Esprit d’ignorance” peut signifier écarter ma conception ego-centrée du réel pour laisser la place au réel tel qu’il est.
  • “Thus, many businesses now realize they’ve lost intellectual control over a seemingly galactic number of social media projects and that there is too much duplication, inconsistency, and poor coordination between them. As a result, organizations are seeking ways to consolidate, optimize, and bring focus to their social media efforts. What’s emerging is something that for lack of a better term I’ll call a Social Business Unit. It’s actual name varies in organizations and might just be a group inside Corporate Communications or it could be a full-out, dedicated Social Business Unit that’s been created as a new organizational entity.”

    tags: socialmedia businessunit competitiveassessment sociallistening analytics BI businessintelligence facilitation communitymanagement

    • Now, I should be clear that top-down hierarchy and central control is not the name of the game for a Social Business Unit. In fact quite the contrary, and I’ve previously explored why this is with push vs. pull management models and CoIT. Instead, the Social Business Unit is much more of a facilitator that enables local success by providing needed guidance, best practices, coordination, and occasionally actual resources such as community management and social listening.
    • Competitive Assessment. Most organizations track and respond to their peers and industry players and this is no different with Social Business
    • Social Listening. While most organizations focus excessively on the big-name ecosystems like Facebook and Twitter, there are actually hundreds of relevant social networks today and many online communities — especially vertical ones related to your business — that must be tracked in order to get a picture of what’s happening in the marketplace that affects your organization
    • Analytics & Business Intelligence. This is about making sense of the continuous stream of business-relevant knowledge coming out of the social media universe. It’s also about having insight vs. just having data.
    • Engagement Processes. Social media is much more than just listening or analyzing. Companies now must engage in the conversations that matter to them and they must do it in scale. Ignoring the customer is no longer an option, nor are uncoordinated, inconsistent, or duplicate responses from your company. The Social Business Unit can provide a lightweight and effective routing service for new business, support, innovation and other conversations, both to internal efforts as well as coordination between them.
    • Capability Acquisition. Building a Social Business Unit takes time and usually has several phases as lessons are learned and the ideal set of resources, responsibilities, and processes are defined.
  • “But the smartphone revolution of the last three years has changed how mobile workers operate. Instead of IT departments being able to force a particular set of mobile solutions on the workforce, employees now expect to be able to use the smartphones — and increasingly, iPads — they bought for personal use.”

    tags: BYOD IT security devices costs costsavings mobility mobilephones appstore

    • Managing devices. IT departments need to make sure their management tools can do things like enforce strong passwords and wipe data from lost devices.
    • Access to apps. Big enterprise software vendors like SAP are betting big on mobile access, but it’s a work in progress: not all important corporate apps are easily accessible from mobile devices today. 
    • For custom corporate apps, creating a browser-based interface is the easiest solution, but with differing levels of Web standards support in each mobile browser, Web apps may not work the same way on all mobile platforms. That means corporate developers may need to create native clients for the big mobile platforms — at least iOS and Android.
    • One relatively new idea that’s gaining traction is an “enterprise app store” — an internal Web page that offers a single download point for all the corporate apps employees need, as well as a selection of popular third-party apps that have a reasonable work purpose
    • Management practices. Reimbursing employees for a portion of their mobile devices and wireless plans is common practice, but companies may also want to consider reimbursing work-related app purchases.
  • tags: intranet socialnetwork enterprisesocialnetworks casestudies lyonnaisedeseaux

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

Lessons on the hard job of designing communities in the organization

Summary : If communities have a real value for organizations, there are still few certainties about their positioning and management. Out of the work flow by definition, communities only create an indirect value for organizations, hence the fact there’s been a lot of efforts to bring them as close to the flow as possible in order to make them a produce a concrete and tangible value. Whether it lead to turn work groups into communities or give communities so much structure that they lose their agility and become a burden for the organization, many tactics reached their limits as it happened recently at CISCO that dismantled a system that what considered exemplary until then. The key question is to ascertain the maximum organizational acceptable effort to make the community work and setting up mechanisms that make the reuse of the intangible capital almost automatic into dy to day business activities.

 

Most people now consider as an established fact that communities fill a gap in terms of knowledge exchange and capitalization and collaboration. On the other hand, things as still very unclear when it comes to determine their positioning.

If we rely on the most basic and shared definition of a community, it’s a group of people willing to share and discuss a topic outside of any hierarchical or structured process. A community may have, of course, a global and permanent objective (ex : capitalizing and sharing best practices on a given topic) but no specific deadline (ex : deliver such or such thing, solve such problem before a given date). Even if the community may be encouraged to behave this way, members won’t have to comply with what can’t be more than a suggestion that has nothing to do with their job definition and appointments.

A fundamentalist approach to communities inside the organization would be to say “let those who make sense and really exist live, remove what prevent them from being active” and, most of all, “don’t think you’ll generate on-demand communities even if the topic looks legitimate to you”. The topic of a community can only be suggested and, in the end, it belongs to employees. communities can be facilitated, lightly managed but never imposed.

Most organizations are not comfortable with this approach. If followed, it will concern at best 10% of employees who want to participate and contribute in addition to their assigned work. As a matter of fact, since participation can’t be imposed, organization can’t rely on the community as they use to do with formal teams that must deliver what’s requested on time. They will produce, at their own pace, ideas, knowledge the organization will be able to use once available. The community has the control of its agenda or, rather, the organization can’t impose any agenda. There’s nothing bad here if we rely on the “fundamentalist” definition : the community creates intangible assets that have to be reused in day to day activities to create value, at its own pace. (Remember  strategy maps…)

[Read more...]

Links for this week (weekly)

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

Picture of the week #45 : None of us is as smart as all of us

None of us is as smart as all of us

 

Illustration from the book “The Golden Rules for Success“.

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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.

Links for this week (weekly)

  • “In this post, I want to step back a bit and ask a more existential question: should you even be using SharePoint 2010 for your collaboration platform in the first place?

    To answer this, we need first to compare SharePoint to the other options out there for enterprise collaboration, i.e., best-of-breed, purpose-built social computing platforms, like Jive, Lotus Connections or Socialtext. Then, we need to look at what kind of collaboration you’re planning on doing, because that’s really what should drive your decision to use a given tool.

    tags: sharepoint enterprisesocialsoftware collaboration capability

    • But leaving aside what you might or might not need, the fact is, most purpose-built social computing platforms provide a good portion of these (in different combinations depending on product), while SharePoint 2010 addresses only about 75% of the capabilities presented in this stack, as Figure 3 shows.
  • “celui-ci est un retour d’expérience de la mise en oeuvre de la solution Jive au sein d’une vénérable institution hexagonale : Saint Gobain.

    Bart Schutte est Directeur Web et Architecture à la DSI de Saint-Gobain. Il est celui qui pilote la mise en oeuvre du Réseau social d’Entreprise (RSE) au sein de ce groupe. Son retour d’expérience, en particulier sur la partie adoption a été des plus éclairants.

    Saint-Gobain n’est pas exactement une start-up. Il s’agit d’une vénérable organisation fondée sous Louis XIV, comportant près de 200,000 employés et générant plus de 40 Milliards d’Euros de chiffre d’affaire. La réussite de la mise en oeuvre des RSE dans une telle entreprise française a nécessairement de grandes choses à nous apprendre …”

    tags: casestudies SaintGobain adoption enterprisesocialsoftware collaboration

    • Le but de St Gobain en déployant cette solution : avoir une solution alignée sur la Stratégie, créant de la valeur mesurable, déployée sur une plateforme de Système d’Information robuste et satisfaisant les employés.
    • permettre aux équipes distribuées de travailler plus efficacement, faciliter les prises contacts entre les employés et faciliter le partage d’information pour être plus innovant, rapide et davantage orienté service.
    • 1-  L’identification de nouveaux marchés pour des produits existants. En reliant des personnes de contextes différents, des propositions de nouvelles utilisations et de nouveaux positionnements de produits ont spontanément apparu et ont offerts des opportunités rémunératrices à des entités du groupe
    • 2- La réduction du Time To Market à travers un exemple d’échange de bonnes pratiques entre usines du groupe.  En suggérant et créant des connections qui n’existaient pas avant grâce à son moteur de recherches, Jive a permis de partager des bonnes pratiques et, ce faisant, de réduire significativement des coûts et durées de développement de produit.
    •  

      4- Un des points essentiels : une amélioration de la satisfaction des employés.

    • Sa première erreur, qu’il recommande à tous d’éviter, a été de vouloir définir un ensemble exhaustif des besoins pour chacun des utilisateurs potentiels de la plateforme.
    • Aussi Bart recommande vivement de migrer toute une fonction en une fois (exemple : une ligne de produit avec la R&D, le support, le marketing, les sales etc … ). Il déconseille naturellement de migrer par équipes, ce qui ne ferait que perpétuer les silos hermétiques.
  • “If you’re the type to meticulously file your emails in various folders in your client, stop, says a new study from IBM Research. By analyzing 345 users’ 85,000 episodes of digging through old emails in search of the one they needed, researchers discovered that those who did no email organizing at all found them faster than those who filed them in folders.”

    tags: organization email productivity information search threading superthreading

  • “Quantification — describing reality with numbers — is a trend that seems only to be accelerating. From digital technology to business and financial models, we interact with the world by means of quantification.

    While we all interact with the world through more-or-less inflexible models, mathematics contributes to this lack of flexibility because it is seemingly precise and objective”

    tags: predictions quantification predictabiliy

    • Statistical models are all based on the notion of randomness, but no one can really understand randomness.
    • Because they are logically consistent, mathematical models screen out ambiguity. Ambiguity is real, but business and financial models have little to no room for it. Ambiguity arises whenever there are two (or more) courses of action that are equally important yet conflict with one another.
    • Putting a situation into numbers enforces the belief that things are linear and events are necessarily comparable
    • Any system that involves human behavior, like economics or finance, is inherently self-referential.
  • “Almost all companies organize people in a hierarchy, and then run well known managerial processes (planning, budgeting, staffing, measuring, etc) with it. We have all seen so many hierarchical org charts — sprawling boxes of letters and arrows arranged in inverted pyramids — and have been through so many budget, planning, and problem solving meetings, that we take all of this as a given, as if it had existed forever. In fact, it hasn’t. “

    tags: hierarchy organization networks management

    • The hierarchical organization that we see today was invented in the last century, and it is an incredible invention. It can direct and coordinate the actions of thousands of people making and selling thousands of products or services across thousands of miles, and do so effectively, efficiently, and profitably, week after week after week
    • But 20th-century, capital “H” Hierarchy (a sort of hardware) and the managerial processes that run on it (a sort of software) do not handle transformation well. And in a world with an ever-increasing rate of change, it is impossible to thrive without timely transformations.
    • In a sense, the crowning accomplishment of the Hierarchy and its management processes is the enterprise on autopilot, everyone ideally situated as a cog whirring on a steady, unthinking and predictable machine.
    • All of this has led me to believe that the successful organization of the future will have two organizational structures: a Hierarchy, and a more teaming, egalitarian, and adaptive Network.
    • My idea of the Network is a system of teams with representatives from all divisions and all levels, who leave formal titles at the door to participate in a decidedly anti-hierarchical forum. As the environment changes in various ways, this system senses and responds to it, and in turn creates more and more teams with volunteers to address the discrete parts of a larger change.
    • To clarify, I am not talking about a cross-unit “task force” or a new “initiative” built into this year’s plans. I am talking about a whole new system that is much bigger, more powerful and involves far more people.
  • “Il y a quelque temps, je m’interrogeais sur la nature des intranets 2.0. Même si cette définition peut paraître fourre-tout (les plus diplomates la disent « fédératrice« ), nous en savons un peu plus sur l’évolution naturelle des intranets. Ceci notamment grâce à la récente publication par l’Observatoire de l’intranet des résultats d’une enquête menée cette année : Observatoire intranet 2011 – Contribution, collaboration, conversation.”

    tags: intranet2.0 socialintranet intranet teamwork governance

      • L’Observatoire de l’intranet nous livre avec cette enquête cinq tendances pour 2011 :

         

           
        1. Une dynamique collaborative bien installée (des espaces collaboratifs déployés sur 60% des intranets et 25 % supplémentaires prévus pour l’année prochaine) ;
        2. Un RSE qui prend progressivement sa place (avec deux fonctions-clés : profils riches et outils présentiels) ;
        3. Des usages en mobilité qui se développent (3/4 des intranets proposent un accès distant) ;
        4. La volonté d’appliquer une gouvernance stratégique (la DG est impliquée dans la moitié des cas et la copropriété se développe) ;
        5. La gestion des connaissances qui est en retrait (peu de projets de cartographie des connaissances, des gestionnaires peu ou pas valorisés).
      •  

           
        1. L’intranet devient la porte d’entrée du bureau web des collaborateurs ;
        2. Les intranets sont plus centrés sur les équipes (notamment grâce aux espaces collaboratifs et aux fonctions de gestion de projet) ;
        3. La transformation en des plateformes de communication en temps-réel (par le biais d’outils de microblog ou de la messagerie instantanée) ;
        4. La montée en puissance des usages en mobilité (pas spécialement depuis un terminal mobile, mais en dehors du bureau) ;
        5. Les intranets deviennent des vecteurs d’expression individuels pour les collaborateurs (grâce aux outils de publication et de sociabilisation).

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

Information should go from tool to tool. End users shouldn’t.

Summary : Even if there are lots of discussions on new ways of working and the tools that will make it possible, very little attention is paid to the matter that’s being worked and the reason why it’s worked. Employees, who need to gather knowledge, information and people from many tools, still don’t have any melting pot to do their work. As a matter of fact and contrary to the usual way of looking at it, tools and people need to articulate and follow each other around the matter employees are working on rather than scattering the matter between tools. The problematic people are working on is unchanging while the rest varies. What matters is to organize the mobility of objects in the context of work rather than the mobility of employees around tools.

When discussing the way people work (or should work), we use to focus on the organization of work (usages and management), tools (collaborative, participative etc…) but seldom pay any attention to the objects people work on. Thinking that work is all and only about adopting new tools and practices may be too simplistic if no one cares about what needs to be handled, gathers, put together, transformed in the context of work. These things may be of so many different kind that I’ll use the very generic word of “object” to call them. This word also seems very relevant in the context of a concept that is more and more talked about and is really key to understand what employees need to get their work done : “social objects”.

To get their work done, people need to find, enrich, improve, modify, put together, alone or in a collaborative may, “objects” as various as a “case”, a person, a file, a feedback, a procedure etc…in fact nearly any form of information available in the organization, This is one more evidence of the changing nature of work that is more and more about putting knowledge and people together and in context.

The biggest issue in change programs is not always to make people work this way. In fact they’re already doing so,  juggling with many tools and the information they contain, trying to be the middleware between all these things. The problem is that they’re given new tools that are supposed to fill some shortcomings but no attention is paid to how to pu all these new tools and info together. So the amount of useful and usable information can endlessly increase while users are still unable to make the most of it. And the reason is quite simple to get : users are equipped to handle objects in the context of the tool that “owns” them and not in the context of their work. [Read more...]