Links for this week (weekly)

• Autonomy or Compliance? Navigating the Balance

  How do you enable people to take the initiative to make needed creative decisions in their work with the equally important discipline needed to follow standard procedures?

  tags: autonomy compliance decision decisionmaking creativity procedures

  • How do you enable people to take the initiative to make needed creative decisions in their work with the equally important discipline needed to follow standard procedures?
  • As a manager, you’re supposed to follow the standards, and if something doesn’t work, you change the standards. At Shell we have standards, but they only go so far. We have far more discretion to do the right thing for customers. I’d rather own Exxon stock than Shell stock, but I could never work there.”
  • W. Edwards Deming, the father of quality, said “A bad process will beat a good person every time,
  • Fujio Cho, a former president of Toyota, famously said, “We get brilliant results from average people managing brilliant processes, while our competitors get average or worse results from brilliant people managing broken processes.”
  • Standard procedures which rely on the scientific method are essential to creating a controlled and stable basis for continuous process improvement.
  • On the other hand, the right person armed with the right means can use individual initiative to break the rules of standard procedures for the right reasons creating better results
  • The balance between autonomy and compliance is shifting perhaps most radically and visibly in healthcare. Whatever the balance has been, it is moving now toward more standardization, driven in large part by the need for more collaboration.
  • The question lurking behind these examples: is this distinction of individual discretion versus standard procedures helpful in seeing choices and trade-offs more clearly in the way work is executed, or does this “either/or” thinking obscure reality?
  • The temptation for leaders, who are driven to appear decisive, is to choose one way or the other prematurely. This may lead to temporary success at a hidden cos

• L’organisation apprenante: un phénomène souvent décrit, mais rarement observé (2)

  “W. Edwards Deming savait que les facteurs systémiques sont responsables de plus de problèmes d’organisation, et par conséquent de plus de potentiel de développement, que les performances individuelles. Le rôle des dirigeants devrait être de gérer le système, et non pas les fonctions individuelles. Le véritable frein au changement systémique – pour devenir une organisation apprenante, par exemple – se trouve dans le type de management «commandement et contrôle ». C’est en cela que le troisième principe du travail en réseaux, le pouvoir partagé, est un obstacle majeur à franchir en vue de devenir une organisation qui apprend. La narration du travail et la transparence sont faciles en comparaison avec la question du partage du pouvoir. Mais c’est dans l’apprentissage que les organisations doivent être performantes afin de pouvoir survivre et prospérer.”

  tags: system learning learningorganisation knowledge personalknowledgemanagement

  • 1) L’apprentissage n’est pas quelque chose à obtenir. Les individus ont besoin de prendre le contrôle de leur apprentissage dans un monde où ils sont simultanément connectés, mobiles et globaux
  • 2) La seule connaissance que l’on puisse gérer est la nôtre. Selon moi, la gestion des connaissances devrait consister à soutenir le PKM (personal knowledge management) dans les réseaux, avec une approche partagée, et non pas centralisée.
  • 3) L’apprentissage sur le lieu de travail est bien plus que la formation officielle. Beaucoup de choses relativement simples et relativement peu coûteuses peuvent être faites pour soutenir l’apprentissage sur le lieu de travai
  • 4) Lorsque nous supprimons les frontières artificielles, nous faisons place à l’innovation.
  • 5) L’apprentissage est partout. A l’ère des réseaux, l’apprentissage et le travail sont interdépendants.

  • D’après mon expérience, ces trois indicateurs dénotent une véritable organisation de l’apprentissage:

     

    ▪ Les individus, à tous les niveaux, racontent leur travail dans un environnement transparent

     

    â–ª La routine quotidienne aide au social learning

     

    ▪ Du temps est mis à disposition pour la réflexion et l’échange.

• How to Thrive in Social Media’s Gift Economy

  “The concept of gift economies has been used to explain open source software and the Burning Man festival. But it also provides insight into what works — and doesn’t work — with social media, and what brands can do to be more successful in the online arena.

  To understand a gift economy, consider the example of moving into a new apartment. When friends help you move, you express your appreciation by providing pizza and beer — really good pizza and beer. When you hire professional movers, you pay with money. Offer your friends money instead of pizza and beer, and they are likely to be offended. Offer to pay the movers in pizza and beer, and they won’t unload the truck. Your friends are operating in a gift economy; the movers in a market economy.
  While both market and gift economies are systems of exchange, they differ in three fundamental ways. “

  tags: gifteconomy currency socialcurrency socialmedia

  • 1) Context: Transaction or Relationship
     In a market economy, the focus is on transactions. In a gift economy, the focus is on relationships.
  •  2) Currency: Financial or Social
     In a market economy, people use money as a medium of exchange — a financial currency. In a gift economy, people use social currencies. The purpose of a social currency is not to execute a transaction, but to express a relationship.
  • 3) Status: Earned or Bought
     A tell-tale sign of a gift economy is that status is earned, rather than bought.
  • Social media are fundamentally gift economies. People are there to cultivate relationships, not conduct transactions. They exchange social currencies, not financial currencies. And status is earned not bough
  • To put these principles into practice, put yourself in the position of your customer and ask yourself the following questions:
    ʉۢ What rituals, traditions, or social conventions involve your product?
    ʉۢ What do people talk about, share or exchange in these activities?
    ʉۢ How might the experience be enhanced with something better or different?

• SAP: Using Social Media for Building, Selling and Supporting

  “SAP has run its online community network for nearly ten years. Now, says Mark Yolton, senior vice president of SAP Communities & Social Media, it’s also using social media for “outside-in” market insight and as a mechanism to immediately tell the world about its new products.”

  tags: sap socialmedia casestudies sales support customersupport communities innovation problemsolving sentimentanalysis engagement pull marketing productmanagement

  • “Even with a company as complex as SAP, with 60,000 employees around the world, we really only do three basic things,” says Yolton. “We build solutions, we sell solutions, and then we support our customers to be successful in using those solutions.
  • It’s a very robust community, with a great deal of activity. We see about 1.2 million unique visitors every month. Hundreds of millions of pages are viewed every year. There are 4,000 discussion forum posts every single day, 365 days a year, and about 15 blogs every day, 365 days a year, from any of the 3 million members
  • Part of this involves encouraging the members of the community to share more of their pain and their solutions and their ideas and their insights with other community members.
  • So, we provide a platform. We host a community, and our customers are able to ask each other questions directly and get direct answers from us and from each other.
  • Our partners participate, too. Many of our systems integrator partners are engaged in our communities, sharing best practices with those customers directly.
  • We have something called Idea Place. It’s like Dell Idea Storm or My Starbucks Idea, an online forum where our customers can suggest new features and functionality around one of our products or solutions.
  • As a result, our product managers get a prioritized list of customer-driven feature requests. With that information,
  • Idea Place became the way that we made this scalable. In essence, what we said was, “okay, put all your comments in here. Suggestions for a feature or a product capability, put them in here. Then build on each other’s ideas and then tell us the relative importance by voting them up or down.
  • Instead of getting 1,000 ideas that are all weighted the same, we can get 1,000 ideas and choose to implement the top 10 or the top 50 or the top 100 ideas. T
  • The product managers are involved from the very beginning on these things. We won’t even open a new product space to accept comments and voting until the product manager agrees that he or she is going to watch this area and is going to implement a certain number of the ideas.
  • our partners and even our competitors can see those ideas as well. Perhaps SAP will choose do to the top 100 — well, then our partners can choose to do the next 100, and develop a more niche solution, where it wouldn’t make economic sense for SAP to develop the solution, but it would make economic sense for a partner to do so
  • I worry very little about our competition seeing customer suggestions. I believe that the massive benefits of open and collaborative innovation far outweigh the minimal risks
  • Now on very broad topics we also have developed some sentiment analysis tools. I think in some cases the tools are so high level, and they’re looking for so much, that it really takes full time people to watch the tools.
  • One is called “shift from push to pull marketing.” The idea there is to move from a marketing organization that does negative things that marketing and advertising are infamous for doing, like pushing information at people, interrupting their lives, sort of imposing our will and our agenda and our timeframe on others.
  • moving from that push model to a pull model, which means being there when our customers are ready to engage with us.
  • Instead of holding a megaphone up to our mouth, we should be holding the megaphone up to our ears with the little end toward our ears and the big end facing out to our marketplace, listening to what they need from us
  • The other one is “humanize the brand.” Today, many of the people who use our solutions will say, “SAP helps my company run better.” That’s great. That’s a wonderful first step, but it doesn’t mean anything to the individual.
  • In our community of nearly three million individuals, there is a specific group, probably the top 100th of one percent of this community, that we call SAP Mentors. They’re nominated by other community members because they’re professional in the way that they engage. T
  • Just about every day of the year we have something happening where SAP is meeting with customers in some large forum. How can we use social media before, during and after those events to make them richer, so that the event itself is more successful from the point of planning, then once people get there, and so it can be shared,
  • ? How can product development use social as a finger on the pulse of the market, a way to keep up-to-speed on the competition, and to spot emerging trends in technology? How can HR attract the best and brightest to SAP through social? What about procurement, or customer technical support, or other organizations who might use social media as a business tool?
  • Really, we’re thinking about how social media can be applied throughout our company, in every department and division, and in every geography and country, and by every line of business within SAP

• Our new place to complain about the boss: Everywhere

  “Complaining about the boss is a time-honored tradition. But management experts and analysts are beginning to argue that social media is intensifying this dissatisfaction (or at least shining a brighter light on it), which is affecting how some managers lead.

  A recent survey of 1,013 American office workers by Wakefield Research revealed the two qualities that vex employees the most about their managers: 37% said that bosses who steal employees ideas are the most frustrating, while 33% said the bosses who think they know it all took the prize.

  Nathan Richter, lead pollster on the Wakefield Research study, said that in a world where most everything these days is shared online, “We want the credit when we share ideas with our boss.” So, in a socially networked world, what exactly must bosses do differently?”

  tags: humanresources satisfaction socialmedia management managers socialnetworks

  • The manager needs to become “the spokesperson for the team,” Geisler says. Through social, the manager has to become a cheerleader and PR agent for the team, touting their accomplishments and detailing their individual achievements.
  • The most perceptive managers “follow” their staff on Facebook and Twitter to understand the concerns of customers and employees on the front line.
  • “Managers must think about how their one-on-one employee relations can spread through networks,”
  • Employees can bounce ideas off of friends and even recruit them too. Employees should also extend their networks beyond their friends who think like them and reach out to people who are creative in different ways.
  • Social networks can also help to break barriers between different departments at firms,
  • In the old days, an employee would never consider entering the executive suite to talk with the CEO; now employees send CEOs Facebook (FB) messages and respond to their Tweets.
  • At Sonicbids, a Boston-based company with 40 full-time employees and six managers that connects bands to music promoters, consumer brands and fans, CEO Panos Panay has turned every employee into a “brand ambassador.
  • “We’re all the eyes, ears and mouthpieces for the company, and we have conversations about what we’re seeing, hearing and talking about to better inform our business.”

  •  

    Going forward, more executives will need to adapt their management style to accommodate social as the C-suite controls their company’s brand even less than they did before,

• Negotiating between chaos and project deadlines | Harold Jarche

  “It seems that chaos abounds on the Internet, with a flood of ideas and nobody really knows what is causation and what is correlation. However, there may be something to be learned here, hence the value of disparate social networks. Communities of practice have the openness and flexibility to deal with complex problems as people can share freely but are in a constrained problem space, so that over time we can share more than what we say or write down. Meanwhile, getting work done inside the organization has to be further constrained, and focused on projects where we can see the relationships between cause and effect.”

  tags: knowledgework projectmanagement resilience

  • For the knowledge worker, and for networked organizations, the challenge is in negotiating, and understanding, all three spaces. It is necessary to know where failure is optimal (early) and how to mediate knowledge from the chaotic edge to the work bench. Work needs to be simultaneously informal & structured and balanced between both goals & opportunities. Constantly negotiated boundaries (as Dave says, it’s like raising teenagers) can help organizations become more resilient. Identifying the boundaries is a good start.

• SAP Makes the Case: Examples of a Gamified Enterprise

  “In my last post, I highlighted how SAP has been leading the way in enterprise gamification since 2010. Today, my goal is to share with you examples of how we are using gamification to drive our customer and employee behavior.

  As we are still in a very early stage with gamification in the enterprise, regard them as inspiration for your own approaches. After each example there is a link with more detailed information, including screenshots of the applications. Enough said, let’s dive in:”

  tags: casestudies sap gamification humanresources training hcm marketing branding collaboration innovation

  • SAP Vampire Hunt is a fun mobile application that allows employees to hunt “energy suckers.
  • The SAP Community Network is SAP’s professional community, where SAP customers, partners and employees share information, ask and answer questions, and create FAQs for the several hundred topic areas. The interactions reward the more than two million members with points and badges
  • SAP Roadwarrior is a sales negotiation simulation that supports SAP sales representatives to stay up-to-date with the newest products and services around SAP’s mobile technologies and applications.
  • What if companies regarded employees with the eyes of venture capitalists? We listen to their pitch, look at their “business model”, and estimate their future? And in return employees look at venture capitalists if they not only invest in us, but also help us connect and with guidance? This is the idea behind the Venture Capital Model of Talent Management, where a hiring manager “invests” in a new employee and helps building up the value of this resource by connecting, training and mentoring him or her.
  • The mobile application Paul the Octopus (available on the iTunes-store) – named after the famous octopus from Sea Life Center in Germany that predicted with 100% accuracy the outcome of the past soccer world cup games – engages users by asking the to predict which team in the UEFA Champions League will win the upcoming matches.
  • The SAP Knowledge Quest was a scavenger hunt that was played at the SAP TechEd in Las Vegas in 2011. Nearly nine hundred of the more than six thousand attendees formed teams and collected points by visiting booths, finding clues and answering questions and doing all types of silly things for a chance to win some grand prizes
  • Overcoming status, cultural, or ideological biases is important in coming to (fact-based) decisions.  To avoid having the highest ranking person in the room dominating the decision finding process, or the strive for group harmony influence the prioritization of product features, or letting political ideology purposely ignore facts is what innovation games help to overcome by moving the elephant out of the room.

• Rethinking the Marketing Organization

  “The digital economy and rapid growth of emerging markets are transforming the consumer products industry, and companies must make the best possible use of their limited resources to meet these new demands. It’s time to rethink the traditional organization model for marketing in order to meet today’s strategic challenges and cost pressures more effectively. What’s needed is a leaner, more agile structure that can adapt more quickly to an increasingly dynamic, fast-paced world. “

  tags: marketing digitaleconomy strategy organization processes priorities management

  • This can lead to micromanagement and can limit the development and exposure of junior people. Since most teams work in independent brand silos, cross-pollination of ideas is limited, and teams often reinvent the wheel instead of drawing on existing knowledge or reusing previous work.
  • Final decision rights are often far removed from the people on the frontlines running the day-to-day business, and approvals may require multiple sign-offs
  • Few mechanisms are in place to ensure that projects are prioritized across brand teams in a way that drives forward the overall portfolio strategy.
  • One of the most visible problems that comes from this lack of strategic prioritization is the creation of hundreds of unrelated projects that do little to drive business results or competitive advantage in the marketplace.
  • To fund higher-value investments in advertising and innovation, teams must reduce costs by shedding management layers and unnecessary complexity.
  • Set and communicate strategic priorities. The CEO and CMO must clearly communicate the marketing strategy and priorities to all levels of the organization.
  • Delayer the organization. The traditional marketing structure has too many management layers between the brand and portfolio levels—and these added layers tend to increase cost and complexity rather than value.
  • Dynamically deploy resources. To ensure that resources are allocated to the highest-priority work, they must be deployed and redeployed on a dynamic basis wherever they can add the greatest value across the portfolio.
  • Streamline processes. Convoluted work flows and unnecessary tasks can be a costly drain on resources and productivity. One marketing organization spent enormous amounts of time gathering data for the sales and operations planning process to improve forecast accuracy.
  • Ruthlessly prioritize work. As noted earlier, marketing projects have a tendency to proliferate, and most add little value.
  • Define clear responsibilities. Given the layers of management, multiple decision rights, and the sometimes overlapping roles of specialists and brand managers in traditional organization structures, it is important to clarify the roles of brand managers, ABMs, and marketing specialist
  • Success in this new environment requires an ability to move away from being a specialized, niche player in a stable, predictable role. It requires a willingness to learn a much broader set of marketing skills, develop a wider range of organizational relationships, and stay flexible in adapting to the changing needs of the business.
  • But companies also must manage their people differently. This means defining clear career paths for every employee, setting up robust development programs, and making functional rotation a core element of professional growth. One consumer-products company has made “people planning” an integral part of its ongoing brand-planning process
  • Finally, new performance metrics and incentives can underscore what is important and encourage new behaviors, while making it clear that underperformance will no longer be tolerated.

• Realizing the Value of People Management

  “In the wake of the financial crisis, departmental budgets have increasingly been allocated on the basis of return on investment. For HR departments, quantifying the economic value of people management is a tricky proposition. Yet now is not the time for companies to skimp on their people expenditures. With the pressures of globalization, the growing scarcity of talent, and an employer-employee relationship frayed by persistent economic pressures, companies today—more than ever—must regard their human capital as an asset worthy of continual investment.

  There’s yet another compelling reason to remain committed to investing in people: companies that do so enjoy better economic performance. Those that excel in leadership development, talent management, and performance management, for example, experience substantially higher revenue growth and profit margins. For the companies that keep dedicating capital to their human capital, what is the nature of this connection? What are they doing right?”

  tags: hcm peoplemanagement humanresources productivity value performance

• Big Data, Social, Mobile, Cloud and… Case Management?

  “These days, it seems that business and IT conversations just about everywhere are revolving around that same 4 themes – Big Data, social collaboration, mobile applications and cloud computing. These IT megatrends are in the forefront of the minds of IT executives and solution providers alike. And, if you aren’t thinking about them, you should be. These megatrends are shaping the way business and IT think and operate, and are also affecting the future of case management solutions. Before we dive into how these megatrends are influencing case management, let’s first discuss what the megatrends are and how they are impacting both business and IT.”

  tags: acm casemanagement bigdata mobile cloud socialbusiness enterprise2.0

  • Big Data is about more than just managing large volumes of data (i.e., terabytes and petabytes) – it’s also concerned with managing the velocity and variety of data that exists today and will continue to grow exponentially in the future
  • Mining social media networks for data around customers’ likes and dislikes is a huge opportunity. Successful organizations are starting to leverage this information to really listen to their customers and engage with them in a more appropriate and interactive way
  • The consumerization of IT also has a huge impact on IT organizations and affects how consumers expect to interact with you.. Interacting with customers through mobile devices is no longer a “nice-to-have, ” it’s a “need-to-have
  • Dynamic case management solutions come into play when organizations are looking for a solution to support mission-critical, case-like business processes. In these instances, the knowledge worker needs the flexibility to manage and adapt to the unique requirements of each case from initiation to close.
  • Data means nothing unless the knowledge worker can see the information when they actually perform a task.
  • Social media is not going anywhere. Incorporating social media information into the case and collaborating with both internal employees and external customers and partners is an essential element in resolving the case

• Why Social BPM will sink as the Social Enterprise fire rises

  “the Social BPM ‘phenomenon’ was ill conceived and little more than social tools tagged onto BPMS. The promise of more connected and socialised business change didn’t really take off and I blame BPM itself because it didn’t know what to really do with it for one, and the fact that change must involve people in the first place means it’s already a social event.”

  tags: socialbpm socialenterprise socialbusiness adaptiveness

  • Who are the brokers of information ? In reality it’s not data owners but individuals within the organisation that people go to.
  • How dense are the informal groups that people operate within ? I’m not talking about business divisions and formalised hierarchies,
  • They’re all pointers to how Social Enterprise tools and methodologies can really create an adaptive organisation. When I read ‘organisation’ I think of ‘organic’ in the context of Social, not ‘organised’
  • I’ve yet to see much in the way of newer adaptive BPM and Change methodologies being talked about for changing a stalwart hierarchical business model into a dynamic and socially aware enterprise,
  • I’ve seen a few really good presentations discussing the discovery of organic team building using social tools but then fall short when they launch into functional discussions.

• Enterprise Social: Better Communication – But Communication About What?

  “Enterprise social platforms deliver better communication – but communication about what?” Mike asks. ”They don’t hear about or post system-generated business events in real-time. They don’t track collaboration in the context of an auditable business process. They are no better than e-mail at enforcing business rules, ensuring quality task completion, and measuring process improvement. Where’s the highly touted social advantage?”

  tags: socialbusiness productivity enterprise2.0 context collaboration communication

  • “Enterprise social platforms deliver better communication – but communication about what?” Mike asks. â€They don’t hear about or post system-generated business events in real-time. They don’t track collaboration in the context of an auditable business process. They are no better than e-mail at enforcing business rules, ensuring quality task completion, and measuring process improvement. Where’s the highly touted social advantage?”
  • The Social and Mobile revolution in enterprise technology holds the key to solving many crucial problems faced by business and IT – provided it is approached and incorporated in the right way. Otherwise, it will simply create new silos, add to application sprawl, increase the IT cost structure and deliver limited business value.
  • Most enterprise social platforms are productivity killers because they are disconnected from work. They are yet another siloed platform, cut off from broad enterprise processes, systems and data. They are simply a new channel for water-cooler talk

• Beyond ‘Engagement’ in the Social Media | Business 2 Community

  “A new buzzword is hovering over the social media universe. It has been repeated mantra-like so many times (and one wonders whether with or without full awareness of its far-reaching implications) that ‘engagement‘ has ceased to be a means to an end in the eyes of many and surprisingly become the ‘raison d’être’ of every social media (and according to some unsuspecting commentators and bloggers, personal branding) strategy. Posts and articles on how to improve engagement in social media ecosystems proliferate – Mike Stenger‘s recent (and otherwise helpful) take on Google + being an excellent example – and social media strategists busy themselves with techniques and tactics to drive up their engagement metrics.”

  tags: socialmedia engagement personalbranding metrics value ROI

  • Engagement, we are told, is the new ROI (return on investment) of social media and any strategy that is not producing it in large quantities is faulty and failing in its objectives.
  • How they come to miraculously know what those objectives specifically are remains a mystery to me. One suspects that they don’t, since most organizations and people who engage in the social media seek primarily to sell more, attract clients, offer customers an alternative communication channel and (especially in the case of personal branders) find suitable employment and improve their career prospects
  • Engagement’ and its metrics (RTs, number of ‘likes’, comments and others) are useful to test the impact our online initiatives are having in certain contexts, but turning them into the cornerstones of our strategies is a costly mistake that may make us waste valuable time and resources while our attention is diverted from more sensible and rewarding foci.
  • add value with quality work that truly helps people – whether you have the chance of ‘engaging’ with them or not – and contributes to their success. Nothing else truly matters.

• 7 Ways Sentiment Is Hard To Decipher

  “Online comments don’t fall neatly into “positive” and “negative” buckets. There’s a range of consumer sentiment that challenges even the most sophisticated natural language processing technologies. At last month’s Sentiment Analysis Symposium, Catherine van Zuylen, VP of products at Attensity, a social analytics software vendor, provided this list of difficult comment-analysis problems: “

  tags: sentimentanalysis scoring sentiment

  • False negatives:
  • Relative sentiment
  • Compound sentiment:
  • Conditional sentiment:
  • Scoring sentiment
  • Sentiment modifiers
  • International sentiment:

• The Power of Human Capital Analytics

  “The Digital Transformation of People Management, a recent Oxford Economics research paper, dropped a bomb: only 31 percent of HR departments surveyed provide key analytics across the enterprise to support and drive the business forward (this figure drops to an alarming 24 percent for firms in highly developed economies).

  In yet another survey, Analytics: The New Path to Value, an MIT Sloan Management Review, the authors (Steve Lavalle, Michael S. Hopkins, Eric Lesser, et. al.) claim the challenges over the next two years are to innovate in order to achieve competitive advantage.”

  tags: humanresources analytics decisionmaking hcm humancapitalanalytics BI bigdata socialanalytics

  • Given that employees are often a main cost driver (yes, I know they should be seen as an investment, but let’s keep this free from verbiage) and provide roughly 80 percent of a company’s value, they could provide the needed strategic differentiation—which is why people management is getting more and more strategic.
  • Grabbing unstructured information around employees, applying some predictive intelligence, and showing the risk of important talents leaving your company is a piece of cake in today’s technological world; so is breaking long-term plans into executable components to support day-to-day processes for line managers and HR professionals overseeing your company’s workforce. However, to do so requires analytics.
  • People managers are unable to handle the big data issues out there, because they don’t have the 24/7 technical capability

  • One of the biggest professional services companies around uses data in its HR systems (everything from employee resumes to alumni applications) in conjunction with data in its CRM systems to answer sales questions such as:

     

    • What employees have worked with a potential customer before?
    • Which consultants are currently working with the customer?
    • What former employees now work for customers?
    • What former project pitches were successful and why?

  • Current technology also allows you to leverage social media analytics to understand “what your company knows,” giving you insight into:

     

    • What your employees are talking about
    • Whether your salaries comparable to the market
    • Where you can find the talent of tomorrow
    • How you can foster cross-departmental collaboration and leverage potential skills
    • What the likelihood is of talent leaving your company
    • Who the best-networked people are in your company – who the thought leaders are, maybe even outside their role

• Beware of the Dark Process

  Dark processes (aka shadow processes) exist in many companies and are demonized by many. A dark process is an unoffical process used to deliver results and not visible to management. The process folks are claiming that dark processes need to go away for companies to be successful with process efforts. I, for one, believe they will always be with us because there are so many forces that are there to generate them. I also believe that my understanding the forces that generate them, will give us insight to reduce them where it counts.

  tags: processes darkprocesses change behaviors variations

  • The variations are really needed in some cases when it comes to local laws and customs. There are lists of sources of variations. The ability to deal with these variations should be built-in, but not every variation can be anticipated. There is a false belief that every process can boiled down a “best practice”. 
  • Until IT comes up with the next revision, dark processes emerge to fill the gap.
  • Sometimes dark processes emerge because businesses just have to deal with changes. They might appear to exceptions to the “in force process”, but sometimes there are emerging changes that have not been dealt with yet. T
  • To deal with a changing world, they invent dark processes to avoid change or just to cope with their own world
  • Even when a flexible technology, method and attitude pervades, folks are not encouraged to think incremental improvement. Dark processes that are really working can stay in the dark without some encouragement.
  • Dark processes are here to stay. Let’s not fear them, but reduce the number of opportunities to create and feed them for no good reason.

• A Revolution In Production

  “Processes that manage themselves. Products that tell machines what to do next: the next industrial revolution will open up completely new possibilities for the manufacturing industry.

  A new type of production is about to turn the industrial world on its head. In fact, such is its potential impact that industry experts are already talking about the next industrial revolution, calling it Industry 4.0. Central to this revolution are cyber-physical production systems that synergize conventional production technology and IT, allowing machines and products to communicate with each other in the Internet of Things.”

  tags: production industry industrialerevolution internetofthings productivity flexibility fle

  • Through “embedded systems”, products in the production process will one day be able to actively tell machines what processing steps to perform next.

  •  

    The aim of Industry 4.0 is to increase flexibility and productivity. As such, manufacturers will be able to produce customer-specific components fast, cost-effectively, and in small quantities – while automated processes will simultaneously ensure that individual component parts are re-ordered and that the order remains fully transparent within the company

• Why Less is More in Teams

  “The earliest known attempt to investigate the relation between team size and productivity dates back about a hundred years to the now famous experiments by French engineer, Maximilien Ringelmann. In a set of simple rope pulling experiments he discovered that, in what is now known as the Ringelmann Effect, people’s efforts quickly diminish as team size increases. Eight people, he found, didn’t even pull as hard as four individuals. He rationalized the decay in effort by suggesting it was difficult for team members to coordinate effort, and left it at that. “

  tags: size team productivity teamsize ringelmann transparency management coordination

  • . It didn’t seem to matter whether people were part of a larger team or simply thought they were part of a larger team — they worked less hard.
  • Ingham and his colleagues had demonstrated that loss of effort could not be explained by lack of coordination
  • the research shows that people tend to prefer teams of four or, at most, five members. Anything lower than four was felt to be too small to be effective, whereas teams larger than five became ineffective.
  • One option is to divide up a complex task into manageable bits,

  • .

      

    A second option is to generate a sense of urgency. As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, the key to effective teamwork is surprisingly straightforward: Provided that people are capable, all one needs to do is to give them something to care about more than themselves. The

  • A third option is to make weaker team members feel disproportionately responsible for the team underperformin
  • A fourth option is to provide greater transparency by opening up your feedback mechanism.

• Social CRM et transformation de l’entrerprise

  “Cela fait quelques années que je m’intéresse au Social CRM, et dès le début, comme l’indique encore ma bio sur Twitter, j’ai été enthousiasmé par le potentiel du Social CRM comme agent de changement organisationnel. Mon niveau d’intérêt a encore grandi depuis, bien que des nuages noirs s’accumulent sur le sujet (comme le fait que beaucoup pensent que le Social CRM ne se limite qu’à Social Média + CRM).

  Pourquoi je suis persuadé que c’est excitant ? Parce que cela va générer beaucoup de points de données qui peuvent être utilisés pour motiver et diriger nos entreprises. Pour ce faire, il faut convertir ces points de données en données exploitables, pas seulement ce que les groupes de clients et d’acheteurs potentiels attendent de nous mais également ce qu’ils attendent de l’écosystème dans sa globalité, concurrents compris. Cela exige des compétences nouvelles ou mise à jour pour rendre nos entreprises plus souples et proactives. Et cela implique que la peur du changement s’éclipse au profit de la création de valeur avec le client.”

  tags: socialcrm data bigdata acm

  • Pourquoi je suis persuadé que c’est excitant ? Parce que cela va générer beaucoup de points de données qui peuvent être utilisés pour motiver et diriger nos entreprises. Pour ce faire, il faut convertir ces points de données en données exploitables, pas seulement ce que les groupes de clients et d’acheteurs potentiels attendent de nous mais également ce qu’ils attendent de l’écosystème dans sa globalité, concurrents compris.
  • • Etablir un sentiment d’urgence
    • Former une coalition solide et
    • Créer une perspective
    • Communiquer cette perspective
    • Encourager les individus à agir selon cette perspective
    • Prévoir des victoires à court terme
    • Renforcer les améliorations et à être à l’origine de plus de changement
    • Institutionnaliser les nouvelles approches
  • Sans rentrer dans les détails de chaque étape, je crois que le Social CRM est un coup de fouet pour la première étape, c’est-à-dire le sens de l’urgence que l’on créé par la prise de conscience des besoins du client et de ses attentes (et transférer les données à l’entreprise)
  • Les relations avec le social client ajoutent de la tension sur les process et les procédures établis alors que la nature du travail s’avère moins prévisibles et que davantage d’agilité est requise. L’ACM appuie un système où la souplesse et l’agilité permettent aux professionnels de prendre des décisions et de mener à bien des missions avec des résultats souhaités à la fois par les clients et l’entreprise.
  • Les efforts réalisés de manière dissociée peuvent être profitables à un département mais sans un effort de coordination les résultats seront sub-optimaux.

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