• Curation in the Enterprise: Actionable information

  In Steve Rosenbaum’s Curation Nation, Esther Dyson quotes Bill Gates as saying “The future of search is verbs”. Esther goes on to say that nobody really looks for something per se, they look for things in order to do something.

  Action.

  When Marc Benioff elucidates his vision for the Social Enterprise, he stresses the importance of having information you can act on. So for the last few months I’ve been spending time thinking about what makes information actionable, and whether the social enterprise helps or hinders in this regard.

  tags: action information actionability accuracy timeliness comprehensibility context curation enterprise2.0 socialbusiness

  • In Steve Rosenbaum’s Curation Nation, Esther Dyson quotes Bill Gates as saying “The future of search is verbs”. Esther goes on to say that nobody really looks for something per se, they look for things in order to do something.

     

    Action.

     

    When Marc Benioff elucidates his vision for the Social Enterprise, he stresses the importance of having information you can act on. So for the last few months I’ve been spending time thinking about what makes information actionable, and whether the social enterprise helps or hinders in this regard.

  • For information to be actionable, it must have at least four characteristics:

     

    It must be accurate, and verifiably so
     It must be timely
     It must be comprehensive
     It must be comprehensible

  • First, because of the transparency implicit in the social enterprise, we get Linus’s Law in operation: given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. So
  • This power is further amplified by the existence of a second phenomenon, the multidisciplinary team. Social enterprises are fundamentally non-hierarchical in practice, given that everyone and everything is a node on the network
  • Besides, the very concept of everything in the network being a node increases substitutability. You no longer have to wait because someone in the serial process is busy or on vacation or something, the social enterprise has no time for all that.
  • Consequently it is more likely that the information is generated by a domain expert, close to the action as it were. If the original information was not actually generated by the domain expert, it is reasonably likely that he or she will annotate the info, comment on it, tag it, augment it in some way.
  • , the social enterprise is built with a deep understanding of entitlements and permissions; as long as you have the right to see it, you can get to the source information, the order in question, the compan profile, the complaint, whatever. So the context of the information is carried with the content. You can drill down as needed, or see the summary.
  • The social enterprise is therefore designed to provide more accurate, verifiable information, faster and more effectively when compared with the traditional enterprise, easier to understand, more complete and in context.

• The Social Contract in a Social Business | A Smarter Planet Blog

  “Now businesses and organizations are seeking to adapt to the Social Web and incorporate this big switch in human behavior and cultural habits into their operations and strategies. At IBM — and consultancies such as Dachis and Altimeter — this new stratagem is often referred to as “social business.” It entails more than just business use of social software and networks for external purposes such as marketing. In the fuller view, social business is about re-shaping organizations to become more collaborative, communal and capable in fostering human relationships. Not surprisingly, such a new frontier is right in the wheelhouse of the strategy & transformation consulting services offered by Global Business Services (GBS), the part of IBM I work in.”

  tags: socialbusiness informationsharing socialcontract relationship culture management casestudies IBM trust

  • our relationships (with colleagues and customers) are forged on trust, a shared sense of purpose and a willingness to share and build on each other’s ideas. In this sense I think you could say that a social business strives to be a much more human (and humane) kind of entity.
  • On this score, my informal social contract with IBM is pretty great — I’m not just able to devote time and energy to strategic sharing and innovating in social media, I am generally recognized and rewarded for leading by these examples.
  • In my view, more people, in more kinds of companies and in a wider range of roles, need this kind of clear charter. Social computing skills and best practices should no longer be limited to “evangelists” or enthusiasts, but should become an integral facet of professional business leadership. 
  • By social contract, I don’t mean a formal agreement or legal document, but a more explicit understanding between organizations and their people (or at least across teams, departments and peers)… something more defined as official policy, doctrine or value.
  • (IBM developed one of the most emulated corporate Social Computing Guidelines, but it is centered on giving IBMers direction on how to delve responsibly in external social media and networking. It doesn’t really establish sharing and collaboration as part of every IBMer’s role or responsibility.) IBMers and workers elsewhere should know how they are expected to share their knowledge and expertise; in return, workers should be clear on how businesses and organizations will measure and reward that behavior.
  • If organizations want to become more innovative and productive by encouraging and rewarding their workforce to share, collaborate and build collective intelligence they must do more than grant permission for people to build relationships and share their experience inside and outside the organization. They must bake incentives for this new way of working into their policies, management systems and training programs.
  • Right now, many businesses don’t have the kind of social (business) contract with workers they need, and may even be discouraging sharing. Some companies forbid or restrict external social sharing, largely because they don’t have the systems, controls or guidelines to make these efforts constructive rather than the productivity drain they may perceive them to be.
  • Some people might cringe, or be fearful, of this kind of personal openness or institutional data mining. I embrace it because I expect that the data I share (and over which which I have lots of privacy controls) will enhance my reputation and IBM’s ability to evaluate my contributions.  As a knowledge worker in a very large, complex, global organization, I want my work and effort as a social business activist to be empirical and transparent, not just anecdotal, or based solely on the subjective opinions of managers or peers, (as much as I may enjoy working and collaborating with so many of them).

• Finding the right person within your organization

  “Understanding who knows what inside today’s modern organizations can be an exercise in frustration, especially when you’re trying to get things accomplished in tight timelines. Social software that delivers insight into the community can help by making it easier to find the right person. SAP’s Scott Lawley explores how, by leveraging community connections and interactions, a series of expertise dimensions can be measured, computed, and put to good use to improve collaboration.”

  tags: expertise experts expertslocation salespeople communities connections information

  • Sales, however, has a different story. The sales organization is rewarded for selling. Period. Sales reps are generally held accountable for deals closed and revenue targets on a quarterly and annual basis. In this case, online communities do not provide a solution.
  • But at the end of the day, the sales rep still will not use the online communities. Why? Because online communities as they are today do not help sales reps close more deals.
  • This summarizes nice and neatly into two use cases and one constraint: deliver a set of mobile applications that enables sales reps to find experts and get answers to questions
  • To answer this we must first understand what is an expert.
  • The first thing that became apparent was the realizations that there is no absolute expert, and that there are numerous dimensions that qualify the level of expertise. From our research we identified the following variables used to identify experts within our organization:
  • These seven dimensions are each calculated by topic relative to the total community population, and a final expert score can is computed based on a weighting of these variables. This in turn becomes a topic expert matrix and is updated continuously.
  • Data sources feeding all of this include numerous internal and external systems, such as CRM, HR, address book, project DB, community platforms, blogs, forums, wikis, sales management DBs, Twitter, LinkedIn, and etc. See
  • The end-user application is a mobile application tailored to finding people. All expert dimensions are filterable by the sales rep.
  • Finding the right person within the organization is a tough challenge. Leveraging community connections and interactions, a series of expertise dimensions can be measured and computed. Providing access to this information via a mobile device helps enable sales reps to find the right person within the organization to help close deals.

• Intranet strategy needs leaders not managers

  When I run workshops on intranets, I sometimes put down cards on the floor labelled “HR”, “IT”, “Communications” etc. and ask people to stand on the card that reflects who sponsors their intranet. Typically there are clusters around Communications and IT, one on “Knowledge Management” and a few people that end up playing Twister trying to straddle multiple cards. Others merely sigh and shuffle over to the ‘Nobody’ card.

  tags: intranet intranetmanagement intranetteam leadership sponsorship

  • When I run workshops on intranets, I sometimes put down cards on the floor labelled “HR”, “IT”, “Communications” etc. and ask people to stand on the card that reflects who sponsors their intranet. Typically there are clusters around Communications and IT, one on “Knowledge Management” and a few people that end up playing Twister trying to straddle multiple cards. Others merely sigh and shuffle over to the ‘Nobody’ card.
  • When we discuss what makes a good sponsor, people talk about enthusiasm, understanding and promoting the vision of the intranet, rather than just giving funding. That, for me, is the crucial difference between a real sponsor and someone senior that happens to have the intranet in their portfolio.
  • There’s nothing wrong with ROI being a component of the decision-making process, but if it is the only process then all that comes out of it is money, not support

• Conversation Agent: Become a Relevant Filter

  “The tech world is just getting started with its own full launch – a love affair complete with predictions, trends, and already a roster of tools and services.”

  tags: search discovery filters filtering conversations socialnetwork content ethic opencommunication communication

  • 
  • People are spending more time in social networks – and getting stuff done there, too. Which means that many of the activities that used to happen in mall stores, while on the phone with friends possibly, or through just solitary search, are now happening as a social experience.
  • There’s a crop of other, some quite specialized, sites that plan to capitalize on the strong signals and filters currently offered in social networks to help people talk about the items they find, either ask their friends or even perfect strangers how they look with a new outfit, what they should buy, even create public visual displays or carts to share.
  • This is where you come in to work on how information is displayed, aggregated, filtered, and then analyzed so that it’s more digestible — and helps people share it with their friends.

  • For relevance to be part of the conversation, both are predicted upon three considerations:

     

    (1.) Ethics in data collection — full disclosure is the new transparency

     

    (2.) Open communication — as business is a process, so two-way communication or conversation is the lubricant that fosters ownership, and commerce

     

    (3.) Clear language — say what you mean, illustrate with stories, eliminate jargon, adopt the words of your community

• Endeca Provides Dynamic Business Intelligence

  “One of the issues I have with many BI tools is that you have to set up what you are looking for before you start and thus miss the opportunity to find relationships beyond the anticipated. Endeca is tackling this issue in several ways. First, it allows for a greater dialog between business analysts and IT as BI applications are set up so that a more iterative process can occur and unanticipated questions can emerge through this dialog. Second, the actual applications can supply suggestions to the user through unanticipated facets to further explore their topics of interest. I recently spoke with Endeca’s Chief Strategist, Paul Sonderegger, to understand what they are offering and will cover these issues and others in more detail here.”

  tags: BI bigdata problemsolving

  • They created an application that provides answers for aircraft technicians. The application pulls together content from a vast diversity of sources to answer questions that cannot be anticipated in advance.
  • First diverse data is brought together. Then it is made available to people with business expertise and not simply the technical experts.  Finally, the tool is made to adapt to a constantly changing set of requirements. You can create comprehensive data visualization
  • Paul talked about how their client, Toyota Motor Sales (MTS), USA, was able to use Latitude to better respond to their crisis over the massive product recall. They could find where the pedal assemblies were installed, a data point they had not known in advance needed tracking, and tie together such critical data sources such as customer claims and government agency reports.  They were better able to answer the many customer questions that continued to arise as the situation unfolded.

• Social Media Handbook 2011

  tags: usarmy army casestudies socialmedia guidelines policies handbook

• Putting Social Business To Work

  “A great post yesterday by Laurie Buczek brought home for me a key issue that I’ve been pondering lately, namely how surprisingly disconnected some social business efforts end up becoming. We know many of the reasons this happens: Not-invented here, political fiefdoms, integration challenges, the tendency of many applications to turn into silos easily, etc. However, social media in the enterprise is about connecting deeply to those around us to improve the way we work. It’s certainly not about isolation, yet that sometimes becomes the state of affairs. How we organize for social business determines much of our success, as emergent as the process is”

  tags: socialbusiness enterprise2.0 work workflows collaboration process

  • I should be clear that it’s not social business as a concept that’s the problem here. It’s that social must be connected to the day-to-day work that takes place. Unfortunately, most work today is done through existing systems that aren’t very social.
  • But more likely we have to manually copy information from the systems of record in order to collaborate on it. Even more likely, the social business environment just becomes a parallel silo that’s not connected to the business and is used for light conversation and status updates instead of meaningful, high value line of business activities.
  • 
  • Instead we need to wrap our businesses in social in a more ambient and deeply connected manner. To work, this must be more than for example merely adding threaded conversations to our systems of record. It’s about weaving collaboration into everything we do, efficiently and simply.

• The Big Failure of Enterprise 2.0 Social Business

  ” However, enterprises with several years of Enterprise 2.0 efforts under their belt have failed to reach the tipping point and cross into mainstream adoption of social collaboration . Coincidentally, Dion Hinchcliffe recently noted in The Path to Co-Creating a Social Business, the existence of the fissure with older collaborative channels on one side and the option to voluntarily engage socially on the other. I believe this is a sign post that we must pay attention to and make adjustments or social business could fall deeply into the rabbit hole where knowledge management (KM) efforts of past, already reside. “

  tags: enterprise2.0 socialbusiness workflows collaboration culture changemanagement

  • I left the Enterprise 2.0 program not because I lost passion for social collaboration, but because I realized that the effort had plateaued.  The initiative has achieved quite a bit, but my vision & strategy still hasn’t been fully reached.
  • At the beginning, I clearly outlined integration as one of three foundational pillars for our strategy.  Unfortunately, various forces created challenges in this space. Social collaboration applications have been immature in this area for years
  • We deployed just another tool amongst a minefield of other collaborative tools – without integration.   To make it even harder, we underinvested in transition change management.
  • Believe me, tops down support & culture change are two of the largest hurdles social business must conquer for long-term success.
  • s evidenced by the IBM journey, I believe it will be rare that culture change will be one of the first things accomplished or changed in a short period of time.  Culture will change as a result of the pervasive use of social tools.  Lack of cultural change is not social business’s biggest failure.  The biggest failure is the lack of workflow integration to drive culture change.
  • When asked why they don’t use the internal platform, one responder stated,“Bottom line, we’ve had a social community internally (for a while) and it doesn’t feel natural.”  Translation: It isn’t in their workflow.
  • If you don’t provide the “easy button” with integrated tools that are “just there” in your workflow, adoption will not cross the chasm.  Culture will not change.  Enterprise 2.0 social business becomes the bad sequel to Knowledge Management.
  • Your intranet should be one in the same with your social platform. 
  • Rid yourself of multiple employee profiles.  One employee = one integrated profile. 

• La solution à la crise ? L’économie systémique

  “Seule une économie en rupture avec celle qui existe nous sortira de la crise chronique dans laquelle l’humanité s’est empêtrée. Au terme de vingt ans de recherche sur les mécanismes systémiques appliqués aux entités sociales, dont plus de dix ans d’expérimentation en entreprises, il est démontré qu’il existe une autre façon de faire du business et de créer de la richesse. (*)”

  tags: economy systemic systems value wealth wealthcreation growth socialresponsability adaptivegrowth

  • - Le fonctionnement des écosystèmes sociaux est identique à celui des écosystèmes biologiques : recherche permanente d’efficience (moindre effort), équilibre prédation/coopération, croissance adaptative, intégration

     

    - Une entité acquière sa dimension intégrée grâce à l’action simultanée de cinq fonctions systémiques liées par une mécanique systémique invariante

     

    - Dès qu’un système est constitué, il ne peut que croître ou disparaître

     

    - La croissance d’un système est de nature adaptative

     

    - Un système ne prospère que lorsqu’il s’intègre de manière win-win dans son éco-système 

  • La réparation systémique, c’est-à-dire le rétablissement d’une économie sur des bases systémiques, est possible. Ces connaissances nouvelles sur le fonctionnement interne des systèmes, ainsi que sur leur interaction avec leur éco-système, offrent en effet la possibilité d’un véritable changement de paradigme, même si elles sont sophistiquées et qu’elles requièrent un véritable changement de pensée. En effet, si la pensée linéaire occidentale s’intéresse aux mêmes « objets » sociaux que la pensée systémique, ce sont les liens fonctionnels qui unissent ces objets les uns aux autres qui constituent le fondement de cette dernière. C’est en cela que cette pensée du lien constitue une véritable référence nouvelle.

  •  

    Comme chacun sait, il existe à l’heure actuelle deux économies parallèles : une économie des marchés et l’économie dite réelle, qui elle, est bien une économie de marché.

  • L’économie réelle a pour raison d’être de créer de la richesse : elle transforme de la matière (dont l’« idée ») en biens matériels ou immatériels. Par la mise en relation de ces biens (objets ou services) avec un marché, et selon un mécanisme typiquement systémique d’offre et de demande, cette économie assure la croissance des territoires et de leur habitants. Cette économie repose sur l’intelligence entrepreneuriale propre à l’humain, ainsi que sur l’intelligence et l’huile de coude de ceux que l’on appelle ‘travailleurs’. Bien évidemment, sa croissance repose sur la capacité des entreprises à proposer une offre en phase avec les demandes (besoins ou désirs) de leur marché.
  • Leur besoin en financement est bien moindre, mais avec des ROI mieux sécurisés et accélérés. Les conditions de croissance adaptative étant rétablies par la mise en résonnance des créneaux les plus réactifs et des intelligences internes, la stratégie de croissance est établie sur des bases rationnalisées. L’investissement n’a plus un rôle compensatoire.
  • Leur intégration dans leur écosystème se fait sur des bases bien plus matures : recherche du win-win. De par sa rapidité, c’est probablement l’un des aspects les plus surprenant du travail de systémisation. Les liens aux investisseurs, banques, fournisseurs et, évidemment aux clients sont rétablis sur des bases plus justes et certainement plus fructueuses.
  • La gouvernance de ces entreprises évolue rapidement également. Les fondamentaux systémiques étant rétablis, les responsabilités des uns et des autres sont redistribuées de manière plus rationnelle. Notons que l’approche systémique requière que chaque personne impliquée dans l’entreprise soit entièrement responsable du poste qu’elle occupe. Cela vaut également pour le dirigeant. Dans cette logique de travail, il n’est pas concevable qu’un individu – dirigeant ou actionnaire majoritaire- puisse bloquer pour une raison ou une autre l’évolution de l’entreprise systémisée Il y va de la préservation du bien social que celle-ci constitue.
  • Que nous montre cette expérience ? Tout d’abord, elle montre que la recherche d’une croissance adaptative est possible et payante ! Elle montre également que le fait de réparer un élément du système (entreprise) influe directement et positivement sur l’éco-système (autres acteurs). Enfin, elle montre que la systémisation d’une entreprise entraine une maturation (salutaire) des liens sociaux
  • Il nous faut donc créer un éco-système alternatif, capable de côtoyer le marché financier, tout en produisant les richesses (matérielles et sociétales) nécessaires à assurer une qualité de vie pour le plus grand nombre.
  • La première est d’établir une masse critique d’entreprises de croissance adaptative sur chaque territoire afin de ré-enrichir ceux-ci : rétablir un éco-système sain dans les pays riches qui se paupérisent, et établir une modalité de développement responsable dans les territoires émergents avant que les erreurs du passé ne soient répétées.
  • La seconde exigence est d’instaurer un mécanisme win-win de financement de la croissance adaptative des entreprises de manière à ce que tous les acteurs de l’écosystème profitent de cette croissance : dirigeants, entreprises (bien social) et investisseurs (ou prêteurs).

• 6 Companies With Awesome Employee Perks

  “When job candidates are considering a position, they often compare the benefits and perks package. We’ve all heard about the Googleplex and its gourmet food, dry cleaning and Razr scooters made available to Googlers. But you don’t have to be a search giant to offer admirable perks. In fact, it may even be more cost-effective to offer goods and services instead of cold hard cash, since the latter is taxed twice. The key to great perks is to make them exciting and keep them on-brand. Below, you’ll find how six brands — from small startups to larger companies — reward their employees and maintain happy and efficient workers”

  tags: hr wellbeing perks

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

• Competitive Advantage through Business Model Design and Innovation

  “These are the slides Alex Osterwalder used for an executive workshop in Mexico on the topic of “Competitive Advantage through Business Model Design and Innovation””

  tags: competitiveadvantage businessmodel businessmodelinnovation innovationeconomics

• Twitter users want customer service

  ““Airline companies are sending a lot of tweets. They sent over 25,000 in July alone, but users only tweet at these companies for a few reasons. Largely, users want customer service — 86.2 percent of users follow airlines for that reason. Only .02 percent want a social conversation and only 1.6 percent tweet about airline food and entertainment.””

  tags: twitter customerservice socialcrm customercare airlines

• The Invisibility Cloak of HR

  “I was mulling over this when I was invited by Hindustan Times to speak at Dialogues on the topic: ‘Are employees invisible to the HR? Rethinking tomorrow’s organization!’

  I could not disagree more, I thought. I strongly believe that employees can never be invisible to human resource professionals. They are, in fact, the very raison de être of HR.
  But I also could not help thinking: Perhaps it is time for HR to become invisible.”

  tags: humanresources generationy behaviors culture management linemanagers middlemanagement

  • I believe that it is high time that line managers assumed responsibility for their team members to become the interface between the employee and the organization. HR, in turn, should step aside and wear the “invisibility cloak”.
  • In other words, I am not suggesting that the HR become inconsequential. Instead, that is stands as a shadow, providing invisible support to the line manager.
  • As I understand it, the problem is related to the fact that, with nearly 50 per cent of the world population under 25 years of age, we are seeing an increasing number of Gen Y employees in our workforces. On the other hand, our organizational structures represent another era.
  • en Y cannot operate under strait jacketed hierarchies. Trying to fit Gen Y into autocratic structures is like fitting square pegs into round holes.
  • Generation Y works well in communities of mutual interest and passion. Yet, organizations are still stuck in traditional autocratic hierarchies.
  • I truly believe that the next wave of business transformation rests on behavioural change. And as we build tomorrow’s organization we need to deconstruct the increasing complexity – or “dehumanization” – of the HR function.
  • What is needed is a new culture. As businesses aggressively chase stretch targets to overcome the recent slowdown, it is critical to build an environment that is conducive. We need to rethink archaic structures so that the human is once again seen as taking the centre seat at the heart of business.

• Audits of HR and L&D are inadequate and illogical |

  “HR and learning and development (L&D) have come in for some serious criticism over the years, in terms of value for money. If I felt they needed defending I would suggest that managing people in organisations is a much more complex affair than most operational managers realise or are prepared to admit. Certainly HR administration can become very costly if not managed well.”

  tags: humanresources learning intangibleassets knowledge accountability audit

  • Trying to apply these principles in a world where ‘intangibles’ are now accepted as having a significant, albeit indeterminate, value is proving to be a real auditing challenge.
  • Unfortunately many accountants have not been trained in the setting of non-financial objectives and are used to defining objectives in qualitative rather than quantitative terms, e.g. the best xxx, the biggest yyy, more effective zzz, etc.
  • It can take several cycles of the planning process before the setting of quantitative objectives becomes the accepted norm. 
  • Auditing bodies, such as the UK’s National Audit Office, still try to shoehorn HR ‘auditing’ into their traditional methods by measuring what they can, activity and inputs, rather than what matters – value added.
  • This inevitably produces meaningless numbers such as ‘the number of HR people per 100 FTE’s’, ‘the number of training days per year’ or ‘the average cost of training’. 
  • If spending = commitment then why not seek 100% commitment by spending 100% of employee time on training?
  • This leads them to develop at once both a fallacious and contradictory view of HR and L&D – as a ‘necessary evil’ cost that is also a positive sign of commitment: they cannot be both at the same time.

• Liferay & Alfresco: Delivering Enterprise Content Through a Portal

  tags: alfresco liferay information content contentmanagement CMS portal opensource

• Device Ubiquity at Work and Play: Are We Ready?

  “Interesting stat in The Telegraph about how employees are more productive if they use their own gadgets:

  According to a YouGov survey, businesses who let employees use their own technology see productivity increases of up to 30 per cent.

  That makes it more important than ever that technology is as good for the home as it is for the office – with 45 per cent of businesses already allowing employees to use their own computer equipment, the number of reasons to put up with poor kit are diminishing. […] in 50 per cent of cases, a personal device offers greater functionality or flexibility than the one provided by the employer.”

  tags: productivity technology BYOT BYOD devices tablets governance IT

  • Single purpose devices for work vs. play are starting to make less sense as well.  But for CIOs, deciding whether to relinquish control of devices has more to it than just ignoring Dell or Apple’s sales call.
  • Consumer device proliferation has far exceeded the pace of enterprise software design for the most part and so, expect the opposite problem where its our software that can’t handle our hardware. Using our personal hardware is really going to expose how terrible our interfaces are in the enterpris

  • This is far more critical. Historically, enterprise software has focused on a) Executive benefit and b) Manager benefit. This translated to: Get the right input forms and workflows in place with a database at the backend so you can control execution and monitor progress.

     

    But we’ve ignored a third wheel and that’s helping employees, customers and partners get-work-done, by focusing on their needs.

  • In many cases, the get-work-done factor for employee/customer/partner hasn’t really been addressed in a meaningful way. That comes from a) re-thinking the process or activity from the end users perspective, b) a more balanced approach to catering to the needs of managers, executives and end users and c) leveraging state of the art hardware and software design innovation to make it happen.
  • And I can tell you that increasingly, customers expect get-work-done facilities not only from stand alone social software vendors or start ups. But because the benefit comes from so much more than just collaboration or ‘social’, customers expect to see it from their CRM and HR and even ERP vendors.
  • This third wheel in the enterprise software stack that delivers on the get-work-done promise is going to be the most compelling benefit that your organizations realize as you democratize the value of your technology investments beyond just the bean counters, LOB heads and line managers, and on to the do-ers. 

• Portals and KM: Forrester on Enterprise Search Trends

  Here is a new report on 2011 enterprise search trends from Forrester, Enterprise Search: Six Key Trends to Watch by Leslie Owens with Stephen Powers and Anjali Yakkundi. The report indicates that despite the fact that only 10% of IT leaders will upgrade or expand their information access implementations this year, search experts are optimistic about their ability to deliver search solutions that are both usable and useful.”

  tags: search knowledgemanagement searchengines UI businessprocess process

  • Search managers will initiate business conversations, not gather requirements
  • IT will apply search to reveal aggregate workplace patterns.
  • Business leaders will dictate the scope of search. Business should have a role in all IT issues
  • Quality content will be the focus, not additional metadata.
  • Knowledge workers will demand transparency and democratization of the search experience
  • The enterprise search UI will no longer resemble the consumer Web. Enterprise search will be embedded in business processes rather than in a standalone white box.

• Service 2020 megatrends for the decade ahead

  tags: service customer customerservice innovation technology

• What does an intranet strategy look like?

  “Sometimes there are postings on intranet discussion forums where people say “I’ve been asked to write an intranet strategy and was hoping I could have a look at somebody else’s”.

  To me that’s a little like saying “I’m planning to have a really enjoyable holiday and was hoping I could come on yours”. Although seeing what somebody else does can be useful to get ideas, it is unlikely to be a good fit to your particular requirements. “

  tags: intranet strategy vision foals measurement implementation

  • 1. Vision or Purpose: What is the intranet for? 

     

    This innocuous-looking question can be hard to answer, but if you can get all your stakeholders to agree on this, then it stops an intranet programme being pulled in multiple directions. 

     

    Many strategies seem to state the blandly obvious, such as “To help Grotco communicate, collaborate and work more effectively”. The acid test is: given two otherwise equal options, does the vision guide you on which route to take?

  • 2. Goals : What are the 4-5 main things that the intranet will do in the future?

     

    This is where the intranet strategy should take a lead from an organisations’ strategy. So if your organisation aims to improve customer satisfaction, then a strong goal would show how the intranet could play a part in that: finding experts to solve problems, better tracking of issues to resolution or providing more accurate information to sales teams, for example.

     

    Some goals may be more inward-looking, such as ensuring 99% of employees can access the intranet. These are worth tracking, but won’t excite anyone, and may be better under “Implementation” (see below)

  • 3. Measures: What indicates that goals are being met? 

     

    It is tempting to tie intranet measures to whatever your analytics tool will tell you. ‘Hits’ can be useful, but only if your strategy says what questions you want the data to answer.  For a full picture, measure both inputs to the process (e.g. how many sales people use the information on the intranet) and the outcomes that matte

  • 4. Implementation: What will change in the next 1-3 years?

• Et si on parlait d’un nouveau style de travail?

  “Une récente étude publiée par Gist a permis de souligner l’évolution des styles de travail, de par l’impact des nouvelles technologies dans notre quotidien.

  Sur cette infographie, sont présentées les différentes caractéristiques des styles de travail d’hier et d’aujourd’hui.”

  tags: management hr workmodels behaviors infographics

  • 

• Save Our Inboxes! Adopt the Email Charter!

  “We’re drowning in email. And the many hours we spend on it are generating ever more work for our friends and colleagues. (Here’s why.) We can reverse this spiral only by mutual agreement. Hence this Charter… “

  tags: email charter policy

• Intranet Remains Poor Stepchild Of Corporate Websites – The BrainYard – InformationWeek

  “Enterprises are adopting social tools like blogs and wikis for use inside their companies, but having a social media style home page for the corporate intranet is still rare, according to a study.

  In other words, vendors like Jive Software and Socialtext still have a lot of work to do to convince companies that a Facebook-like experience is the right way to support corporate communication and collaboration.”

  tags: intranet intranet2.0 socialintranet socialsoftware

  • -companies with cultures like that are not going to embrace social media and social networking behind the firewall.”
  • Other companies may also want to project a more task-focused personality to their intranets, as opposed to one focused on open discussion

  • – 75% have intranet blogs and 26% have them enterprise-wide.

    – 65% have intranet discussion forums; 26% enterprise-wide.

    – 61% have intranet wikis; 19% enterprise-wide.

    – 63% have intranet instant messaging; 44% enterprise-wide.

    – 43% have intranet social networking; 19% enterprise-wide.

  • In contrast, only 3% reported using Jive, while Socialcast and Socialtext were down at 1%. Lotus Connections (now known as IBM Connections) was cited by 9% of those surveyed.
  • One thing holding back more ambitious use of enterprise social networking is money, Ward said. “The intranet remains the poor stepchild of the corporate website.” While companies often invest millions in a public website, 38% of survey respondents estimated that less than $10,000 had been spent on their current intranet implementations

• The Manager’s New Role

  “In the workplace, a similar transition is taking place with the widespread adoption of information technology. Managers are increasingly taking a back seat as information providers. From the moment employees sign up, organizations direct them to company intranets to understand different aspects of the job, the organization, clients, company policies, and often, the performance development program and its measurement metrics. “

  tags: management managers

  • For the first time, perhaps, managers find themselves overshadowed by the net’s omnipresence in answering questions about the what and how. Their authority as information-providers is eroding quickly, putting to rest that once-key role
  • At a recent meeting with young managers, I asked them what value they felt they added to teams. These smart people recognized the change in their roles. Instead of being controllers or hoarders of knowledge, they viewed themselves as collaborators or mentors, trusted for their experience — not their gigabytes of memory.
  • By transferring the ownership of change to team members and assuming the crucial role of empowering the value creators, a manager could end up earning more respect as the navigator who guides the ship to the port of success.

• How to Sustain Front Line Process Improvement Activities

  “Even though it’s what keeps companies operationally in shape, front-line process improvement is hard to sustain. Why? Consider the story of Technicolor.”

  tags: process casestudies technicolor improvement lean attrition engagement

  • each Technicolor employee had a target of suggesting two process improvements per month. That sounded like a great way to keep a process improvement program going
  • But there wasn’t much activity until six months later when Mike Karol, vice president of operations, told his managers to make it their responsibility.
  • In addition, the firm’s new employee orientation program incorporated Lean and the Technicolor Improvement Process, the moniker of the suggestion system.
  • Three years later, the number was 20,000. Clearly, the Technicolor Improvement Process was critical to getting employees engaged in improving their work.
  • It made their jobs better, reduced costs, and improved customer satisfaction. Two deeper benefits were even more important: The organization got in the habit of improvement and employee satisfaction went way up. Technicolor had followed the proven path to highly committed, motivated, and productive employees who loved to come to work. Attrition declined, saving on retraining.
  • After 2006 it reduced its attention and energy on the front-line improvement. It might have been due to getting over the hump of the technology transition from VHS to DVD. Or perhaps it was because key advocates like Chuck Yorke left
  • The front line always has lots of ideas for improving their work. The critical ingredient for sustaining attention on improvement is managers. A firm depends on managers taking the time to ask front-line employees for their ideas and helping them make the changes they sugges
  • And managers need to wander around the workplace and ask workers what they can do for them to make their job better. At Technicolor the front-line people loved it, but only a few of the managers felt it was theirs. Many of the managers did it because Mike Kolar had them do it and felt it was extra work.
  • Therefore, whether front-line improvement sticks depends on what else is competing for managers’ scarce time
  • Managers were raised as individual contributors, where they added value by solving problems themselves. Most stood out by doing things better and faster than their peers, commanding and controlling, not by coaching and helping others to solve problems.
  • The natural tendency in the long term is for improvement activities to lose out to the day-to-day pressure for delivering work. To maintain their attention, managers must see the savings and efficiencies that the improvements provide

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• The Angry Birds Guide to Can’t Fail Social Business Adoption

  tags: socialbusiness adoption enterprise2.0

• Enterprise 2.0: The Future Digital Workplace Makes Work Flow

  “Enterprise portals over the last decade have been less than successful in making knowledge work flow smoothly. The future digital workplace could do a much better job of accomplishing this task if these key elements are put into place.”

  tags: portals digitalworkplace

  • Unfortunately, few enterprise portal initiatives started out with an ambition to really understand the characteristics of knowledge work, how it gets done and how it can be done in a better way
  • Make it possible to switch between tasks and resume interrupted tasks.
  • Provide simple ways to keep and organize information which you might need at a later stage.
  • Provide ways to quickly locate and access the expertise you need to complete a task,
  • Make it possible to perform and continue a task from anywhere using any device —
  • Provide traceability that allows you to know who provided a piece of information and when,
  • utomatically signal if you have something that can contribute to making someone else’s work flow smoother, and vice versa.
  • Automatically signal when it is your time to contribute
  • Automatically suggest likely actions to perform based on your own and other people’s previous actions.
  • The technologies needed to make this happen are available today. Unfortunately, many organizations still think in terms of platforms and will continue to throw platforms at their employees.

• 15 Ways to Identify Social Business Transformation

  “As many enterprise companies today begin to demonstrate “social business” behaviors, they will start experiencing various levels of culture change with the people of the organization, process and technology. The following are 15 indicators of social business transformation. It’s important to realize that while some of these behaviors are dependent on each other, they are mutually exclusive and not necessarily in chronological order.”

  tags: socialbusiness enterprise2.0 transformation change changemanagement people process

• Senior manager blogs: a paradox in the “now” era?

  So, is it really a question of time? Or is it a communication problem? The biggest paradox of a blog is that it is supposed to be the “voice” of the blogger, yet we are dealing with the written word.

  In spite of the apparent informality of a blog, when you are CEO or a high level manager in an organization, it matters what you say and how you say it. People will pay close attention to the words used. Yet, blogs require a personal, spontaneous style in order to be credible to readers.”

  tags: internalblogs blogs internalcommunication employeeblogs CEO CxO topmanagement

  • Most of their direct “output” has been invisible to most employees. Today, in the world of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, there’s an expectation for a new style of communication. One that is direct, informal and open.
  • At that point, many senior managers were unable to “express themselves” on these channels.
  • At the same time scrutiny of what organizational leaders say and do is increasing.
  • people in positions of responsibility must weigh their words carefully when they “speak” – on paper, in email or anywhere else.  At the same time we expect them to communicate with with employees in a natural, spontaneous voice with messages that have not been carefully crafted by a speech writer.

• Beyond Engagement – part 1: Organisational Health

  ” I’ve been posting quite a lot about engagement recently, for example on my attendance (1,2) and presentation at an event with the UK government supported Employee Engagement Taskforce.

  I do support the concept of engagement and am cheered by the impact the taskforce is having. But I do have some concerns. “

  tags: humanresources engagement

  • Engagement is too manipulative an idea – it’s a one-way, controlling sort of approach in which an employee has to give more to an employer without an obvious return.
  • The language is wrong. Engagement is a flat, non-engaging sort of term. We need to speak more in terms of things which really resonate with peopl
  • It’s only part of the bigger concept of human capital and the even larger one of organisational capability.

• Social Business from the Inside Out: 4 Change-Enabling Reasons to Get Social From Your Intranet

  “Your organization’s intranet is the network of digital systems that reinforce the organization’s structure, processes and culture. Changing these systems to become more social (aka Socializing the Intranet) will help to make the organization’s structure, processes and culture more social.

  Socializing your intranet is a great way to introduce significant organizational change, because intranets are broad-based, protected, visible and core to who your organization is. “

  tags: intranet intranet2.0 socialintranet socialization change changemanagement

  • 1. Socializing your Intranet demonstrates a company-wide commitment to new social behaviors and systems, making it easier for members to choose to change.
  • 1. Socializing your Intranet demonstrates a company-wide commitment to new social behaviors and systems, making it easier for members to choose to change.
  • 1. Socializing your Intranet demonstrates a company-wide commitment to new social behaviors and systems, making it easier for members to choose to change.
  • 2. Socializing your Intranet creates an opportunity for every member to get involved at the same time, making it easier for everyone to learn, share and support each other’s changes.
  • 3. Socializing your Intranet creates a protected space for learning how to be social with each other, making it easier to learn without punishment.
  • 4. Socializing your Intranet creates a rich display and constant reinforcement of “who” your organization is, making it easier to create ‘new’ social behaviors that are authenticity.

• Le lean management peut-il transformer la DSI (et l’entreprise) ?

  “Si toutes ces méthodes peinent à obtenir des résultats significatifs et durables – quelle grande DSI peut aujourd’hui se targuer d’être le chouchou du COMEX pour ses réussites ? C’est bien que ces pré-requis ne sont que très rarement remplis. Alors pourquoi se focaliser sur des techniques innovantes, les X management, plutôt que sur le fond de la toile : la confiance qui permet l’autonomie, le respect d’un pacte social qui désinhibe le changement, et le sens qui fonde l’action ?”

  tags: management leanmanagement lean trust ITdepartment sense sensemaking

  • La confiance. Les économistes et les psychologues sont formels, la confiance est un facteur de productivité d’ordre 1, et pire, les mesures incitatives ou coercitives destinées à mobiliser les troupes sont en réalité sans effets sur leur performance
  • Nous segmentons le flux de valeur en de multiples départements et intervenants, de la maîtrise d’ouvrage à l’exploitation. Alors qu’au fond quel frein nous empêche de déléguer à des équipes produit la totalité d’un service à l’utilisateur,
  • Lorsque l’on réclame des gains de productivité par l’amélioration continue, il devrait se produire pour chacun l’érosion de son propre job. Car moins de gaspillage = mon de temps pour réaliser la même tâche, que l’on soit manager ou opérationnel. Mis bout à bout, ces gains finissent par supprimer des postes entiers
  • . Les rares entreprises qui ont stabilisé une démarche d’amélioration continue ont de ce fait toutes une forme de pacte social « supprimez votre job, vous êtes promus »
  • Enfin le sens. Se lever le matin et donner de soi pour « fournir un accès à l’information au plus grand nombre » (Google) ou pour « donner accès aux services financiers aux plus pauvres » (Grameen Bank), est une chose. Se lever pour « maximiser le profit par client sur le segment jeune » est un peu plus difficil
  • Dans une dynamique de changement, ne suivez donc pas ceux qui diront « nous allons faire du lean », mais suivez ceux qui diront « nous voulons /tel but/, et nous permettrons votre autonomie pour l’atteindre ». Ça change tout.

• Strategic software vs non-strategic software

  “Let’s look at some characteristics that could help to discern the difference between non-strategic business software and potentially strategic business software:”

  tags: software strategy vendors

  • Non-strategic:

     

    • First vendor question: “What is your problem, how can we help you?”
    • Focus on “how you do things”, i.e. on efficiency, bettering the status quo.
    • Product names almost always includes the term “manage”: Control, preside over, govern, rule, command, oversee, administer, organize, conduct, handle. Again no new ways, there is no effectiveness in the term manage, it’s all about more control of the “how” we did what we did yesterday, and the day before – tweak the status quo but never challenge it.
    • A second strain of non-strategic software uses the moniker “productivity”. Pure efficiency again, all well and good to do things faster, but there’s not a whiff of flexibility in regards of the strategic “what you do”.
    • First vendor question: “What is your strategy?” or “what are you doing and why?” as in “what value are you to deliver, to what customer, and how are you to be different?”.
    • Focus is on “what you do”, i.e. on effectiveness and what can be done differently.
    • Product names? Hard to say as there are none out there, but I would venture that it would include process, run, operate – and hopefully no “management”.
  • In other words, all current business/enterprise software is non-strategic in the real sense.
  • This has it’s natural causes – finding the root cause for dissatisfaction might not be a nice thing to face, or even risk having to face – bad management, no-good strategy, that kind of awkward “truths”. Any decision maker would shudder at the thought. So more fun, more food, lower price, bonus, more of anything nice is the way out
  • It offers more efficiency but not better products, more control of the status quo, but no new ways to do things.
  • Software where each vendor offer should start out by challenging the client’s strategies, software where each component is designed for a single purpose; to enable a good strategy.

• The ROI of Enterprise 2.0 and the Value of Intangible Assets

  “The problem with this is that there will never be an ROI from an emergent collaboration technology precisely because technology is just that…technology. We are talking about tools that enable us to collaborate and do “things.” “

  tags: collaboration enterprise2.0 socialbusiness ROI activities technology

  • The ROI or the value comes from the activity and from the actual collaboration, not from the technologies themselves.
  •  We use our emergent collaboration platform, find the best people to connect with, build the product, and finally develop a working revenue model.  Now that the product has been developed and is generating revenue how to we attribute a certain portion of that revenue to our ability to find the right people to work with on that project?

• The Secret To Accenture’s Social Business Adoption Success

  “There are a few sensations in life that manage to thrust us into action, or provoke us to work without a motive. Sensations so powerful that we fall victim to a form of altruistic amnesia. We’re driven by its hidden motivational forces and we forget the benefits are for someone else. In short, neither lack of advantage nor lack of compensation deter us.”

  tags: casestudies accenture gamification adoption sociabusiness enterprise2.0 emotions rewards sharepoint profiles collaboration newsgator

  • SharePoint 2010 platform with NewsGator add in for Social
  • Yammer for microblogging
  • 115,000 employees have filled out profiles
  • Accenture’s social business initiative also includes a broad based video strategy. Starting with Cisco’s Telepresence at the high-end and desktop video at the low end.
  • Crawford and his team quickly realized that the key to higher adoption of SharePoint starts with user profiles. They found a direct correlation between the number of customized user profiles, and the amount of internal collaboration.
  • Crawford began to organize ‘complete your profile’ contests and publishing stats on the percentage of the company that actually did. Soon however, Crawford realized that the profile page can only tell a small fraction of an employee’s story. The rest of the story lies in learning the details of an employee’s expertise and knowledge.
  • “We started an internal recognition program to encourage our employees to contribute to SharePoint,” Crawford said, “We look and we measure how people are contributing, how they are connecting, and how they are communicating, and score them on their activities.”
  • , the solution must still provide meaningful value in isolation with or without a gaming dynamic.
  • but the novelty fades away if the user experience is unpleasant, no one is using it, or the employee can not find the information they are seeking.
  • His team deals badges to Accenture’s employees for accomplishing various tasks or to specify how long they’ve worked at Accenture. “That’s proven popular because a lot of people enjoying see it (on their profiles),”
  • There are three primary principles, he submits, in order to maximize gamification effectiveness: sufficient motivation, the ability to carry out the activity, and a well timed trigger. He continues by suggesting the most crucial aspect of these three factors is that they must all converge at the same time. Anything less, and the gamification impact is degraded.
  • They’ve created an environment where points and badges are the social currency that rewards and compels employees to contribute to SharePoint.
  • But however you start, and as Crawford advises, the architects of the site should know their users’ goals. 
  • So If your social business solution is experiencing low adoption, I’ll wager you have not created the right environment with the right incentives

• Taking Merger Integration All the Way to the Knowledge Bank

  “All is fair in love, football, and mergers and acquisitions. In fact if corporations were afforded the same rights of family law as free speech, the divorce rate among agrieved merger partners could easily surpass the current American divorce rate of 45-50%.”

  tags: merger m&a knowledge ECM IP processes knowledgeworkers talent

  • There’s never been a super bowl team that charged the field thinking: We’ll figure this out as we go along and see what happens.” But that’s exactly the default setting for post merger knowledge integration. Counting revenue performance against operational costs often means counting out the talent equation.
  • Storing and displaying documents can be copied by the most casual of imitators. It’s the stuff flying in through the back door  that reveals the context around the problem-solving. Those are the dimensions lacking in any post merger IP assessment. Does Newco understand how Oldco solves problems? Perhaps not. But those process specifics that map IP to account success are essential for new revenue streams to materialize, let alone for the continued delivery of established offerings and core, brandable assets.

• L’ère du management paradoxal

  “Mais, peut-on vouloir créer et gérer l’intelligence collective si on a peur de produire du désordre, de l’anarchie ? Depuis 10 ans que je travaille sur le sujet, j’ai toujours considéré que le simple fait de poser cette question était une forme de résistance au changement et que répondre à cette question était une perte de temps. Je pense aujourd’hui que je me suis trompé et, par ce billet, je vais donc réparer mon erreur.”

  tags: collectiveintelligence change fear management paradoxicalmanagement organization paradoxicalorganization order disorder

  • « Une entreprise dans laquelle il n’y a pas d’ordre est incapable de survivre mais une entreprise sans désordre est incapable d’évoluer »
  • Qu’est-ce que le chaos ? Très simple : le chaos, c’est vous ! C’est l’individu dans sa capacité à créer du mouvement, à innover, à prendre des initiatives … bref à faire bouger les choses. A la question, faut-il avoir peur du chaos ? Je répondrais donc : avez-vous peur de vous ?
  • Pour être performante, une entreprise doit organiser le « chaos » pour contre-balancer les effets pervers d’une entreprise trop centré sur l’ordre et qui perd donc de facto son agilité.

• « La conformité du RSE à la loi Informatique et Libertés est très rarement prise en compte. »

  “La loi Informatique et Libertés s’applique-t-elle aux RSE ?

  Les règles d’or de la loi qui, je le rappelle, n’est pas franco-française mais est une transposition d’une directive européenne, s’appliquent à un RSE comme à tout traitement de données à caractère personnel.”

  tags: legal enterprisesocialnetworking socialnetworks enterprisesocialsoftware socialsoftware

  • Si l’entreprise dispose d’un CIL, un correspondant Informatique et Libertés, il est fortement recommandé au responsable du RSE de se rapprocher de lui dès le début du projet,
  • Les entreprises devraient réfléchir à la conformité Informatique et Libertés de leur RSE dès maintenant et en se projetant à deux ans. Notre groupe de travail dédié aux RSE a recueilli de nombreux témoignages montrant que les entreprises soit n’ont pas conscience, soit sous-estiment ces enjeux.
  • Prenons tout simplement la finalité du RSE : parfois elle n’est pas indiquée, l’entreprise voulant observer comment les utilisateurs vont s’en emparer et quels usages ils vont imaginer.
  • On peut évoquer par exemple le risque dit du “portrait chinois”, où l’on demande au salarié de se présenter. Avec des informations trop personnelles indiquées sur un profil à la Facebook, on pourrait aboutir à des cas de discrimination, de stigmatisation ou de harcèlement
  • Enfin, certains envisagent déjà le jour où, le RSE étant devenu obligatoire au sein de l’entreprise, un salarié utilisera le journal de connexion pour revendiquer le paiement d’heures supplémentaires. 
  • Un bon CIL est un facilitateur

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