A funny way to assess a social business project

February 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Summary : become a social business….enterprise 2.0…social business…communities….as many phrases that are used every day with very little consensus  and may mean anything and its opposite depending on who listens. Even worse, these easy shortcuts often prevent people from wondering about the every nature of their projects and what lies behind. When reality starts to emerge its often too late to get the means, the sponsor and change the scope of things to be successful. What if we tried to tell what things are really about without using 2.0, communities, social or social network ?

It’s now clear that phrases like “enterprise 2.0″ or “social business” are used to describe many things that sometimes have very few in common, without having a clear idea of what really lies behind. From long term structuring projects to window dressing ones. Besides, most of the projects that fall into the first category were not “2.0″ or “Socbiz” at the time they are designed. Some even started years before the social and 2.0 vocable started to appear. They were tagged “2.0″ or “social” afterwards because of their results, the technology that was used, sometimes just to showcase them at conferences. Projects that fall into the second category are often called social from the very beginning of their design and often aim at making people use a technology the IT bought, to do like other companies or because some believed that “since 2.0 is the remedy to anything, let’s deploy a social network”. Most of times, people in charge of the first kind of projects took months or even years to make their project mature, to deal with cultural issues, redefine work, HR practices while those in charge of the second often won the right to lead a social project at a corporate lottery, with a goal poorly defined by people who did not get the social stuff better. What explains why they often run short of means to really move forward when they realize what’s really at stake.

In short, it’s really important for the people in charge to know what hides behind words. Important for them, but also for all their colleagues, providers, stakeholders who’ll be impacted and have to contribute in any way. Words have sense, sometimes not the same for everyone. Saying “I want to become a social business” or “I want to deploy a social network” has as many meanings that there are people who listen to the speaker.

For example, when I heard such things, I understand “Ensuring that, in my organization, anyone can access and mobilize the right resources to get things done and bring decision and problem solving as close to the problem as possible”. If the person saying that thinks “I want people to share ideas into communities” it’s clear that we’re facing a big gap.

All the words we use in order not to make ten-lines-long sentences (2.0 being used for “building the capability of…bla bla bla) ends up by being problematic when no one uses them to tell the same things. It comes with a double risk : no only the project is built on a total misunderstanding but also the person in charge only discovers what’s at stake overtime…too late to get the means he or she needs to be successful.

For that matter, I hear more and more vendors saying that when a prospect comes, saying “I want to become a social business” they feel more worried than happy. Same things with consultants being told “I wand to deploy a social network”.

So it’s important to be clear and explicit about what one really wants to achieve through these vague concepts.

The other day I was remembering an old TV quiz game that was famous a couple of years ago in France (in fact…rather decades). It was called “neither yes nor no”. The concept was quite simple : candidates were interviewed for several minutes, asked questions, and were not allowed to use the words “yes” or “not” when answering. It looks quite easy but let me tell you that “surviving” 2 minutes was exceptional. So an idea came to my mind : wouldn’t it be useful to play the same game, replacing “yes” or “not” with the social buzzwords : social, social business, enterprise 2.0, communities…

It would be very valuable for a couple of reasons :

• assess that there is a real, deep project and not something shiny based on the vague understanding of catch-all concepts

• if the project lacks legs, the game will force people to deeply think about what’s behind, refine, improve, ask the right questions and re-define things using concrete and practical concepts, with a clear understanding of the needed actions…the whole explained with words any business person can understand.

• make sure that the project will survive the death of buzzwords and the decline of fashions because it will be deeply rooted into the business.

Ready to play ?

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business Tagged With: , , ,

Social business : target blue collars and forget technology ?

February 16, 2012 By 1 Comment

Summary : there’s still a large gap between the social media promise and what’s really happening. A gap that’s getter smaller every day but so slowly that many people find it worrying. While large companies still struggle with dealing with their internal contradictions despite of massive investments and fail at mobilizing employees that are mostly white collars, we can see that smaller organizations are sometimes more successful even if mostly made of blue collars. A surprising paradox ? Not that sure. In fact its all about what one think the social promise is. While some focus on building communities and adopting software, some implemented pragmatic management practices, focused on production, delivery and decision making. These last ones often get better results in terms on impact on work as well as employees’ well-being.

When we talk about the need to make organization evolve there’s an easy shortcut that emerges quickly : it’s about qualified white collars spending most of their time in front of a computer. This shortcuts comes even more easily that, for lots of people, the transformation in question depends on the use of a certain category of software, what restricts the change program to a certain category of people. This assumption is broken into pieces as we can see to what extent things are complicated with this population and are forced to admit that tools makes absolutely no sense if not embedded in the “official way work is done”.

As we also have seen before, nothing works without a strong will of changing things as deep as possible. What leads us to ask again the question : “what’s en enterprise 2.0 or a social business”.

We know that it does not depend on the use of such or such software. Software can help but is not enough to tell if a given organization deserves the 2.0 or social label.

So we could have a deeper look at organization principles and flows of work. Bottom-up flows, empowerment, intrapreneurship approaches aiming at making the right resources available at the right place, at the right time to deliver what the customer is expecting, focus on delivering a product or service and less of validation/decision workflows. A collective efficiency approach relying on agile coordination and fluidity in exchanges and learning.

In this case it’s clear that, considering knowledge workers, software can play a major part in the transformation job. But what about other workers ? Don’t they face similar issues ? Don’t they need responsiveness, don’t they have to make better decisions, be better at exception handling, problem solving ?

Do they have to be the casualties of the social transformation ? Not. And, in fact, they are sometimes more advanced than we may think.

Let’s have a look a three cases.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

From noise to situational intelligence

February 10, 2012 By 1 Comment

Sumary : many users say that the problem that enterprise social platforms is the risk of infobesity and informational noise. Reality is more complex. As for infobesity, these platformes only collect information and have few impact on the fact people and systems generate more. The problem is more about how to distribute this information. Then comes things like activity streams and micro-blogging tools that raise another question : what’s necessary and what’s superfluous. In fact there’s a new context organizations and people are not very comfortable with. In a complex business world, it’s essentiel to feel signals to act and adapt permanently to external events that impact one. Feeling does not mean deep reading and understanding. Employees will have to learn to optimize their situational intelligence by making the most of the surrounding noise without being submerged by it.

On the one hand we see enterprises thinking about a more efficient way than email to organize information flows, exchanges, collaboration and information sharing. On the other hand the alternate solution also bring their own questions and fears.

As I recently said, after a large french company decided to ban internal emails :” that won’t decrease the amount of information that will only move to other places”. As a matter of fact it’s more about changing how one manage and deal with information flows than changing tools.

As a matter of fact, social software platforms will be more and more like “catch all”. As they improve in terms of functionalities, they will soon be able to catch anything any information produced, whatever its form or the software that produced it. Some think it may lead to infobesity but that’s not my opinion. Any information that need to be generated will be generated, the social platform only being the receiver, the container. We can even think that such platforms will help to prevent content replication across different systems.

The problem is not about information catching but information redistribution. From the user side, it means wondering what needs to be pushed to him and what should only be made available for whom searches it (improved by suggestion mechanisms to address the grey zone between both. Something bizarre since we are all deeply influenced by current approaches that, despite of the fact we’re submerged by too much pushed information, we still fear to miss something so we do nothing to clean up our information flows.

Two components of these new platforms raise questions : activity streams and micro-blogging tools that generate information flows in which many fear to drown themselves. What lead us to wonder if we need so much information and if it’s really useful.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Economy & New Models, Knowledge & Information management, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

The collective is not always the answer

February 2, 2012 By 1 Comment

Summary : one of the assumption on which many enterprise projects rely is that the collective is better than the sum of the individuals that composes it. This have been proven being right many times. But is it that simple ? In systems that struggle at jointing people and groups, in which people have more and more difficulties to see to see what is their contribution to a global purpose and what this purpose is, there are three obvious risks. The first is to built an organizations in which the collective makes no sense. The second is to use the collective to avoid facing individual issues, a way to blame others for one’s lacks. The third, on the enterprise side, is to believe that the social or 2.0 orgnanization will be the remedy for irrelevant processus no one dares changing.

 

More ideas can be found in ten heads than in a single one. 100 people are stronger than ten. Crowds are wiser than individuals. We are more efficient when we act together as a living organism than as a sum of individuals. As many facts and assumptions that make organizations think about 2.0 or social approaches of work. With some “magic words” raised as remedies to all diseases : “communities”, “network”, “ties”, “together”.

But do these approaches come without shortcomings ?

Implementing those approaches and the tools that support them often aim at improving collective dynamics through more efficient interactions between resources, bewteen those who have something to do and those who can help them to do better and faster. Gathering and exchanging seem to be the cornerstones of these approaches. But :

• Interacting is not producing : conversations, exchanges are preparatory to action but, in the end, there’s still one person that has to deliver something, make a decision, act. People co-innovate, co-design but action is still an individual issue. One may mention co-writing something with solutions like Google Docs as an exception. But, with a closer look, it appears that someone always have to “clean up” the document, align styles and ideas. Doing so helps a lot a the beginning but anyone who once had to do this cleaning job on a document written by 4 or 10 people can tell it’s like hell. The more basic unit of work, the task, is and will remain an individual issue if we adopt an execution driven point of view.

• many organizations trie to use the collective as a remedy for individual discipline, accountability, professionalism issues. If one does not behave as a professional when managing his tasks, its workload, gathering everyone won’t solve the problem. Things may even get worse because of unproductive interactions that won’t improve anything, no one having done the preparatory work needed to make group discussions productive.

• the focus is put where there problem isn’t, avoiding to tackle what’s core, and accountability moves from individuals to the group. “If I don’t do that, the community will”. SInce everybody thinks the same, the collective does not do anything. Remember that a community is nothing more than a gathering of individuals who may have their own priorities and agendas. When the community does something, it only means that one or some of its members have individually decided to move forward. So we thank the community while, in many cases, only one of its members should be thanked. Communities don’t move forward if, at least, one member does not decide to.

• but organizations are doing the same mistakes. “If we bring employees to communities, if we make them more social, they’ll make up for our crappy processes without us having to work on that”. On the contrary, these dynamics need strong processes to give people reasons and time to move toward the collective. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Is measuring online influence bad for customer service ?

January 30, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Summary : now that lots of tools exist to measure online influence (or whatever we think it is), businesses are perfectly tooled to target their messages and communication programs. Provided they get the notion of influence right. On the other hand there’s another trend that may be dangerous in the future : using a tool that’s adapted to one shot operations to systematically define the level of service and advantages a customer deserves. This may lead to decreasing the standard level of service and break the relationship with true loyal customers that will notice that his loyalty and financial contribution are less valued than the number of followers others may have.

Now that anyone can exist on the web, the worldwide network as become a wonderful platforms to measure one’s influence. And this concept has been brilliantly sold to internauts and businesses. The first need to become influent to exist, the second need to know who’s influent in their ecosystem. And guess what ? Agencies and vendors all have “the” solutions that will measure influence in an objective and undisputable way. Influent internauts will benefit from a kind of “recognition label” and businesses will be able to focus their efforts on those who deserve it (understand : serve influencers better).

Such an approach my distract businesses from what matters and lead them to failure.

Let’s start with influence. Influence on the web has been a very trendy topic for years but no objective definition of what an influencers is has really emerged. It’s not easy to do anything when no one know what it’s about. The upside is that anyone can use his own definition, what surely makes his solution unique. Is influence a matter auf audience size ? Everybody says no…but no one can neglect such an easy way to reach many people. But being listened is one thing, influencing is another. No credibility matters in the definition. But how to measure it ? Most of all, influence has to do with context : one can’t be credible on everything. A couple of example :

• Mary has tens of thousands followers on twitter. Influencer ? Yes for some, not for others that will say she’s “negatively followed”, because of our mistakes, hand people follow her to see ser fail.

• Robert has 200 followers? Influencer ? Surely not. But he’s a specialist of frog breeding in polluted urban environments. He’s very influent in his niche. But only when he talks about frogs.

• Kevin has thousands of followers and is very influent on digital marketing. All industry professionals recognize he’s in the top 10 list. But when he talks about restaurants, knowing his taste (or lack of) no one listens to him. Bad news for the famous 3 stars restaurant that offered him a free lunch, expecting a mention from Kevin.

So, we can use any criteria and even admit that one may be positively influent while negatively popular (people follow him to make fun…but they follow), one thing is sure, influence is vague and subjective.

But since there are a lot of services offering to measure influence on the web, businesses logically wonder what they could do with it.

What did we see these last months ? Events where anyone could go…provided their “Klout” was high enough (Klout is one of this tools supposed to assess how influent people are). Businesses also use such tools to prioritize customer service and even do “a little bit more” for some. Hotels are using similar tools to decide whether upgrading customers or not.

After all, there’s nothing bad here ? What can be reproached to a business favoring, among its customers, those who are the most listened to ? Those with the louder voice ? Nothing if we only consider it’s a communication operation. But, seen from the customer service side, they’re moving on a slippery ground.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Customer Relationship & Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Information leaks on social networks : that’s not the problem

January 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Summary : businesses see social networks as possible channels for information leaks caused by negligence. What is right. But their retort, that is mainly technological, does not solve anything because social networks are only one of the many channels that can make risks become true, not the cause of the risk. As a matter of fact the largest social network in the world is the street. If a global approach through awareness and accountability will help to deal with the whole risk, solutions that are being currently implemented are only window-dressing regarding to the many channels information can use to leak. Human issues can’t be solved by technology only and firewalls will never replace trust.

It’s obvious that information leaks is a sensitive point for businesses and the risk of employees being negligent on social networks has to be taken seriously. Hence the need for limiting this risk. Most of time the response relies on technology. That solves a part of the problem but is far from being enough.

As a matter of fact, prohibiting any connection to these sites or filtering outgoing information may limit the risk. But such an approach has weaknesses. It only works on corporate devices. At the moment people use their mobile or connect from home the risk is here gain. Making employees aware of the risks caused by their own behaviors is more useful because, in some ways, tools are only the vehicle behaviors use to make information flow. Adopting this approach helps dealing with some of the consequences but none of the causes.

The largest social network is not Facebook or Twitter but…the world, life, the street. And no technology will prevent anyone to do anything there except accountability. The good side of this approach is that, when it’s successful, it works with any device, anytime, anywhere.

We all have examples to tell. This group of coworkers of Bank xxxxxx having a drink and talking about their employer’s solvency, not being conscious everyone was listening to them. These two executives discussing their secret new corporate strategy at lunch. Everyone around appreciated. This group of employees of YYYYY vacationing together and discussing, around the pool, of lay-off program they were secretly working on. The problem that, even if they were on the middle of the Indian Ocean there were lots of french people in the hotel. One more thing. I would like to thank the sales rep of ZZZZ that were discussing their plan to sign with a customer in the plane….since I was meeting the same client a couple of years later my colleagues and I make the best possible use of it. I also think about all the people that can’t prevent from working in trains or planes, making it easy for anyone to see what’s on their beautiful HD screen.

Of course such things never happen. I’m even sure that in the above mentioned companies, social networks are filtered or blocked. Human issues won’t be solved by technology and firewalls will never replace trust.

 

 

Filed Under: Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , ,

No matter your organization is an elephant : it can dance too !

January 26, 2012 By 2 Comments

Summary : What makes a social business project successful ? To what extent question the existing and transform the culture ? Is success possible when top managers are not much concerned ? If we observe three major cases, there’ something obvious : the project was tied to an organizational change wanted by deeply involved CEOs. They become social business projects afterwards because they eventually used some new tools to support a years old approach. The example of IBM in the 90s shows that there are little limits to what’s possible and that arguments that “our culture doesn’t make it possible”, “that won’t work here” or “we’re too big to change” are not relevant.

Whatever the way we consider the problem, there is no example of an enterprise dramatically changing the way it operates without a strong leader deeply attached to a vision of business. Nothing new there since this has been proven right for decades even before words like enterprise 2.0 or social business became trendy.

Successful projects have a couple of things in common : a visionary CEO who is deeply involved, a goal at is not about social business and the courage to challenge the corporate culture. And those who fail ? Top executives that are not concerned and not very involved, projects aiming at implementing a social network and a moto looking like “don’t be rough with people, we’re not ready for that”.

Let’s have a look at a couple of cases.

Alcatel-Lucent. Whoever knew this enterprise 5 or 6 years ago should have been surprised when their project came under the highlights. If there were a place where such a thing could not have worked this should have been Alcatel-Lucent. Yes but…one day came Ben Verwayyen. We all know the story. First an email adress so employees could directly interact with him. Then an internal blog. Then, as his own approach was beginning to influence people in the organization, the need for a social network. All of this because his vision of business is made of words like transparency, accountability and that’s the way that he things a business should be run.

Danone. When a CEO (Antoine Riboud) states, in the early 80s, that “The most successful companies are those that think jointly technological change, work design and the changes in internal social relationships.” much is said. The rest is about sustaining a strong corporate culture. In th 2000s they started a program called “Networking attitude” to favor interactions, ideas exchange and problem solving. A program that was only about behaviors, management and the human side of the organization at a moment when web 2.0 and social networks did not exist. Technology will come years after and won’t be a break but a way to reinforce the corporate project.

Then IBM. Looking at the success of IBM, not as a vendor selling social business solutions but as a social business itself, is very instructive. But a large part of the lesson is missed if we don’t step back in time to learn from the Louis Gerstner era (1993-2002). I just reread the book he wrote about the time he spent at IBM (he also worked for American Express and Nabisco before), Who said elephants can’t dance. This book is very instructive for the very reason that, at this time, internet was not what it is today…and concepts like social networks or “anything 2.0″  where not even a dream. But, in some ways, Gerstner perfectly set the cornerstones that made social business possible ten years later.

This is a very important lesson for all those who think that “it’s not possible in our company”, “we’re too big to change” or “we don’t have to change…we’re the biggest, we’re the best”.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Books I read, Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

If it matters measure it. If it’s new build a new frame of reference.

January 19, 2012 By 1 Comment

Summary : When the world and the economy are transforming, the existing frames of references on which be base our thinking and decision making become obsolete. To adapat to their current and future context, organizations not only should have the vision of what they want to become but also implement it in their employees’ day do day work. Not superposing two opposite models in order to let change happen without daring changing the existing but replacing the one with the other. It only makes sense when employees are provided with tools and indicators that favor and reward actions that are aligned with the new model and not with the old one anymore. It also helps to measure the impact of change and measure how far they’ve been. That seldom happens in enterprise 2.0 projects because of a lack of reflexion on new frames of references. Fortunately, examples coming from other fields shows that when one really want to do things well and deep, change is possible and measurable.

A couple of weeks ago I was invited by Danone to talk about their social responsibility program, what made me learn a lot, believe it nor not, in terms of organizational transformation and had many things in common with enterprises 2.0 approaches. How possible is that ? Read what’s coming in the following lines.

Like many enterprises, Danone has understood that the environmental question will be key in its business. It’s already a cultural fact that is not new at all (remember that Antoine Riboud, Danone’s former CEO, used to say that the responsibility of the enterprise did not end at the facilities’ doors…30 years ago) and new an economic fact. There are many chances that, in a near future, carbon will be monetized, so managing it efficiently leads to a competitive advantage.

How did danone do ? First by stating it in its corporate values and project, long before it becomes a trendy topic. Anyone who has a few contacts with Danone knows that concepts such as double project ou triple bottom line are known by everyone and are a share concern. Such an approach need to be embodied and the discourse has to be turned into action. So Danone established a “Nature VP” so the environmental concern has currency at the very top of the organization. But, since Danone is a business and that there is an economic reality behind all that, that people need to change the way they understand and feel what added value means in such a context, they even established a Nature CFO. The logic is obvious : we’re entering a world when things that used to be secondary are becomming essential. So they need  to be integrated into the value calculation system so what was a cost in the previous vision becomes an investment and an opportunity in 2012.

So they invented “green Capex”, some very concretes things to implement to translate this vision and awareness into business. Looking for ROI on a 3 or 5 years scale to take time to learn and not give up too early. But there were no relevant indicators to do that. So they could have come to the conclusion that it was not measurable, what could have lead to the consequence we all know : the project would have become a dead body because no one would have been able to see its impact or one’s personal contribution through one’s decisions, not even the interest of changing one’s thinking and decision making model.

So Danone worked on designing new models allowing to measure the impact of their business in terms of carbon and its short and long term financial consequences. They experimented it on the field, tried to make the most of new data, made an empirical job then tried to model. The organization tried to measure what matters, since it matters. That’s as simple as that.

It also helped to make something else possible : reducing the carbon footprint is now a part of executive’s evaluation and reward system. So everyone, at his own level, in his business unit, in his field is concerned.

But they still were trying to make sense of it for more and more employees. It means that anyone should understand his own role, impact, contribution to the project. It also means that, when facing two possible choices, one making sense in the old paradigm and the other making sense in the new one, they people should make the right one without fearing to put their performance at risk and sacrifice their bonuses.

So Danone co-innovated with SAP to integrate this new model in their business tools, in their production management system. It was all about putting the new model at work in employees’ day to day lives, in the flow of work and avoid schizophrenia. No contradiction here anymore : there’s a single model, a single vision and not an ideal one set on the top of an old operation model that has nothing in common. All indicators, measurement tools, tools supporting processes takes it into account. SAP brought the technology and Danone its knowledge and IP.

Anything in common with enterprise 2.0 projects ?

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Don’t tell my mum I’m a community manager, she believes I play piano in a brothel

January 16, 2012 By 3 Comments

Summary : There’s a tendency to call “community manager” any person that communicates online for an enterprise…even it the activity has nothing to do with communities. This excessive use of a buzzword seems to start worrying applicants that want more precisions on the nature of the work and how it articulates with “real” operations. A search for sense and perennial positioning that also comes with the fear of seeing this title being a millstone around their neck, now and in the future

NB : the title of this post is inspired by a book written by the advertising leader Jacques Seguela at the time the advertizing industry was in its early days and did not look very credible. The title was ‘Don’t tell my mother I’m in advertising, she believes I play piano in a brothel”

In the last months I saw some contacts asking me things about the same concern. Enough for me to think that there must be something really important around. Each time the question was quite similar : “I’m about to get a new job, I’m close to the end of the recruitment process and we’re discussing the job description. I don’t know why but I’m very uncomfortable with this community manager thing. What do you think ?”.

The first idea that came to my mind is that they were lucky enough to be discussing with enterprises that were open minded enough to refine the job description and even the job title with the people on the short list regarding to their understanding of the challenges and opportunities. And that’s already a good point.

Now let’s focus on the core issue. It seems that more and more people fear that once the trend will be over, they’ll suffer from the buzzword nature of the community manager job. What makes them be very cautious about what the work is really about and wonder if having such an job mentioned in their CV will have a negative impact once fashion will be over.

The problem with community management is that it’s a position being held by people with very different profiles, from interns to experienced 40/50 years old people. Surprising ? Not at all because the title apply to many possibilities in terms of job description and experience. From the “young guy talking in the micro” to the experienced manager leading a global strategy. If I had a look at what real experts say, we can learn from the Community Roundtable that, in fact we have :

  1. Community specialists
  2. Community managers
  3. Community strategists

Let me add one more specie : customer service professionals who are being called community managers by anyone for the only reason they now operate online. I recently talked with one of them who told be with a bit of irritation. “I’m not a communication person and will never be. I’ve been put a ‘community manager’ sticker on at the time I began to use online tools. But if I’m a CM, the guy answering on the phone or the one solving clients’ problems in our shops is a CM too ! What I see is a dangerous shift toward a job that’s not mine, with goals that may be contradictory to mine. Maybe we have an online community…but what I see is thousands of individual cases to be solved”.

This diversity is poorly understood by enterprises that often think that’s all about the same thing. Not surprising that experienced people now start to make things clearer when they’re being offered such a job.

The people I was talking with were having, in my opinion, a very relevant questioning. In addition to the job (managing what ? A community ? A community strategy) they were also raising questions about the scope and goal.

- scope : will my job be an online only one or will I have to operate offline. If it’s about mobilizing an ecosystem of stakeholder, the online part should be a part of a global program aiming at doing much more than creating and managing communities.

- that leads us to the goal. Communities…but what for ? Communities or stakeholders ? What do we want to do with them ? For what shared value ?

What lead these person to conclude : “in fact I should position my job in a ecosystem, stakeholders and value approach. There are many kind of stakeholders to mobilize, in different ways, for different purposes. Online activities are only a part of the job and some actions will be 100% offline, others 100% online, some will be a mix depending on the target and the need. It the job is confined to online communities we will miss a huge part of the challenge and spend a lot of energy on it without even knowing why. I need to be vigilant on the job description and title. It will even be better than a buzzword title that means both everything and nothing and won’t help my partners and colleagues to understand my mission. It will make me more credible”.

Interesting thoughts on the very nature of professional community managers and their role in a logic that goes beyond fashion.

 

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Enterprise 2.0 and social business : what to expect in 2012 ?

January 10, 2012 By 1 Comment

Résumé : what will be the enterprise 2.0 / social business in 2012 ? It will highly depends on choices organizations will make to deal with the paradox of finding ways to go out of the crisis while not having much money to invest. 2012 will certainly be the year where window window-dressing projects and deeper corporate ones will diverge as well as those aiming at adding a community layer to the existing organization vs those aiming at reinventing the organizational structure and operation models. Should the world be perfect, we’ll see budgets shift from technology to organizational transformation, from adding new layers to integrating existing ones, community approaches becoming more operations-driven, social becoming more a transformation than transplanting an external body. In a non perfect world we’d see window-dressing projects surviving a little bit before the final collapse, because of approaches too disconnected from the enterprise world to deliver results and sustain long term engagement.

A new year is starting…with the usual prediction challenge. It does not matter if these predictions become true or not, that anticipation is confused with taking one’s dreams for granted : predictions are a part of the landscape and even those who don’t take them seriously expect them. So I’m trying to play the game one more time.

First, let’s be clear on what prediction means. Even if I’m happy with what I “predicted” these last years (understand “I was right”), don’t expect to find anything revolutionary in the next lines. What we usually call predictions is nothing more than common sense (or lack of). Predicting the iPhone en 1990 would have been a prediction. Prediction the need from bringing social into the flow of work in 2009 was only common sense. Rather stating the obvious.

What leads us to a very important point. As long as one is lucid and clearly understands that, even social or 2.0, the real point is enterprise and business, with all the constraints and context that comes with, it’s not that hard to identify where things will block and what concerns will arise. Finding how organizations will decide to respond is much harder. Anyway each one will respond in its own way depending on its culture, its culture, the courage of its executives when it will come to make strategic decisions. Because of all that, we’ll surely see much more diversity than before in social business approaches…

So, here are the trends I seen for 2012.

1°) Budget : from technology to organizational transformation

Before being about people or technology, that’s a matter of money. Technology, accompaniment, internal efforts… And we all know that in 2012 money will fall from the sky and anyone will be able to spend it on any shiny initiative. Or not. So it all depends of a strategic choice for enterprises facing crises : getting ready for the crash or finding the winning way out.

Finding the winning way out may mean many different things. One of them could be keeping the investments and even making more efforts because it’s “now or never”. Another could be of not changing the amount but the allocation. I recently mentioned a survey saying that HR seem to refocus on organizational transformation to the detriment of some other points. I read another one, about services budgets, saying something like “less software and integration, more on building new business and organizational models”.

The most meaningful choice will on whether to favor technology or its usages. It seems that the second may win or at least not being the least considered part of the job anymore. Such arbitrations will be key facts to understand 2012.

 

2°) A more operations-driven approach to social dynamics

Some of us have been discussing this point for years but it seems that things are becoming more mature now. In 2009, anyone talking about a social approach to business processes was considered as an heretic. Today things seem to be converging and enterprises are more ready to listen and understand to such discourses that make more sense for them. Or maybe the disciples of the “Care Bears Social Church” have given up and admit that the word process was not a blasphemy anymore.

So, the job is not about keeping the old organizational structure and adding a community layer on its top, out of the flow of work, but :

1°) Bringing  social into the flow of work even it means fixing the flow to make it agile and adaptable

2°) Jointing flows of work and out-of-the-flow community approaches to ensure all the efforts will contribute to value creation. If not, the final conclusion will come quickly : communities = unproductive silos…and once again we’ll have missed a great opportunity to improve things.

But being aware does not mean acting accordingly. Even if a consensus forms on such an approach, it will take time to implement it because it needs organizations to put their hands in the organizational mess and out of age processes. That’s what the “E20 = E1.0+communities” was designed to avoid. Unsuccessfully.

Depending on the choices made in each organizations, we’ll see forks forming in the the social business world. And, in my opinion, one of them is a dead end.

Behind this point lies something deeper…that’s my third point.

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Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Intranets and digital workplace, Management & HR, Software & Tools, strategy, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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