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.

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.

3°) Adopting one’s future instead of adopting social

We’ve been talking about “adoption” for ages. Even if I can understand it, it did not take much time to see the limits of such an approach. It’s like saying “that’s new, you may not see the interest but you have to love it and get used to live with it”. It sounds like having to deal with something exogenous. Adoption being about how not to reject a transplant.

There’s another approach, much about a wide and deep corporate project. What challenges for the next year ? How to create more value, more efficiently ? How to make resilience a part of the corporate DNA ? One thing leading to another, if enterprises start to design their organization accordingly, in terms of management models, processus, HR models etc… social won’t need to be adopted but it will grow and spread naturally. Do you want to design an enterprise adapted to its challenge and tool it accordingly or try to make new practices and tool fit in a mould that’s not designed for them and in which they make no sense ? Overlay or structural integration ?

In short, do you want to adopt the social approach or adopt your future, social being only a consequence. What I also mean is that there is not one social model that fits any organizations. It has to be designed to fit specific cultures, needs etc… Organizations that understand they’ll have to design a whole global model for their own purpose instead of copying what they can see elsewhere will be more likely to succeed in their transformation.

The answer to this question will take you on one or the other of the ways that will follow the fork I mentioned above. Enterprise projet or social project in the enterprise ?

4°) Integrating instead of adding

That’s a three dimensions challenge : on technology, organization and people.

These last years, many enterprises have ran many projects, most of time without much coherence, what lead to building stacks. Stacks of technology with no connection between them or with the previously existing ones. Stacks of rules and processes, often contradictory, while making things more simple was the best way to efficiently handle exceptions. Stacks of constraints, exhortation to adopt new behaviors depending on the context.

This lack of coherence weights on projects and does not help to make sense of anything. The consequence is known : less engagement and motivation over time, even unproductivity. Maybe cuts in budgets will have positive impacts. Rather than rushing ahead without properly addressing the problem, organizations will have to learn to make the most out of what thet have and is often wasted or under-utilized.

We’ve seen above, that instead of adding a social part to people’s work, organizations should invent a model that joints in a logical way both the structured and unstructured parts of work, formal and informal ones. It will be the same for technology since, as Bill Ives noticed, it seems that, instead of adding new technology layers, organizations seems to start investing on integrating the existing ones better.

Integration will take place on many fields :

• the organizational one, by replacing adoption by redefining and redesigning roles, tasks, activities and flow of work.

• the human one, by making HR policies more coherent (evaluation, reviews, goals, incentives, competencies location and management…)

• the technological one, by integration the business and social layer, with the help of new standards as we can see in the “social business framework”.

5°) Customer first ! But for how long ?

I hear more and more voices complaining on how social media budgets are allocated. There’s a lot of money available to look nice on Facebook but almost nothing in comparison to transform the organization in order to deliver as promised. Unfortunately we can see few signs that improving the organization through the human and organization will get more funds than social soliciting projects on Facebook or elsewhere. Looking nicer will still more important than executing better…but for how long ?

More time is needed to replace make-up programs with a comprehensive approach that will joint internal and external activities and consider that execution is at least as important as branding. But 2012 may be the turning point. Things may change as budgets shift and social business projects not considered as a part of the social media stuff anymore but as organizational projects that deserve their own (and well sized) funding.

Anyway, some organizations already get it well and will increase their advantage.

6°) The year of culture !

This will be discussed in some future posts but something is sure : no transformation happens without strong leadership and culture. When one lacks and the second is weak, we often see projects that aim  at changing without taking the risk of changing and the golden rule is “ohhhh, we can’t to this is our company”. 2012 will be the year of judgement since organizations will need to arbitrate under the constraint of smaller budgets. Only the projects relying on a strong leadership and culture will survive and move forward. Expect lots of breakage.  These projects will certainly come back later with a new approach but, unfortunately, their project won’t be about anticipation anymore but survival.

Conclusion

No one knows what choices will be made but organizations will have to make meaningful ones in 2012. I mentioned some possible logics here. Between the brave choices deserved by a real enterprise project and “no-choices ” caused by a poor understanding of what’s at stake, social business projects will diverge more and more. Last step before the final collapse of window-dressing ones and the generalization of the rational/pragmatic/business driven approach.

I also think that we’ll discuss a lot the “adopt social vs adopt your future” as it will become more and more obvious that social business is more about transforming the DNA than transplanting a new body.

In a very near future, connectivity will be a key factor of competitiveness. That’s obvious because it was ties businesses to a complex environment to feel its changes, its moves to react relevantly. Another point is that, since no one can know everything, everyone need to be able to get in touch with someone who knows to do a better work, solve problems, make decisions.

So the future of the connected organization is discussed a lot but that hides another reality : the connected employee. Of course, there won’t be connected organizations without connected employees. That’s obvious but help us to consider what’s been undertaken by lots of organizations with new eyes. Some tried to be highly connected with their external environment while disconnecting their employees. Others tried to improve their internal connectivityfirst. That was the starting point of many enterprise 2.0 or social business projects : employees need to be connected.

Yes but…connected to what ? If you’re trying to understand why many projects of this kind are still struggling at delivering tangible results, a part of the answers lies there.

- connecting employees with information : yes. It’s been done at two levels : social bookmarking (what is still a minor usage of internal social platforms) and exchanges within communities that is main objective of many projects.

- connecting employees with employees : that’s the role of social networks. But, to work, it needs that people can be identified through their contributions and up to date rich profiles.

That’s working but, in most cases, not very well. Of course there are exceptions but not enough to think that a new era has strated. After the novelty and euphoria phase that can make 80% of employees or more register on the social platforms that hosts these new usages, numbers can quickly decrease and, in the end, only a few percent will be active users and contributors. Not that high regarding to the investment. One of the reasons is obvious : considering the social platform as a bubble disconnected from the rest of the intranet is a first step to failure. The second reason is that even if people are socially addicted (what is not proven at all), even if they are willing to exchange and connect with their peers, employees are not internauts nor the ones they are at home.

The reason why employees are part of the organization seems to have been forgotten by everyone : contract of employment. Behind this piece of paper hides something that matters : people have a mission to accomplish, objectives to reach and the whole will impact the money they will earn and how and how fast they’ll progress in the organization. Even keeping their job or being fired. Maybe, for some, being social is something bigger than these little materialistic considerations. No matter the bottle since we have the social ecstasy… Really ?

As a matter of fact the conclusion is simple : organizations tried to connect employees to everything but never to their work. That what explains how reluctant employees were to jump on the social bandwagon and how hard it is to make social behaviors more systematic.

- even if, today, sharing and finding knowledge is a part of nearly everyone’s job, from a conceptual standpoint, when usages and implicit rules does not tolerate it, when the management sees it as a waste of time, people quickly step back to the centre of gravity of their work : produce, deliver, execute. Hence the fact they quickly give up tools that allow things that, despite very useful, have few room in their day to day work.

- even if organizations try to make social a natural, common, accepted and even required behavior, the fact social and business tools are poorly (if not) integrated makes things quite difficult.

- applying social to anything except production and delivery activities locked social into an unproductive silo.

So, what to do to find a kind of new balance ? Make both approaches make sense and ensure that one contributes to the other and is not a bubble isolated from reality.

- first by reconnecting people to their work…in their mindset and in the real world. We can hear here and there that social networks strengthen connections, reinforce membership feeling and that it’s good for engagement. Maybe. But if, on the other hand, nothing is done to make management more human and, sometimes, less violent, I’m not sure anything will improve.

- bringing social behaviors in the flow of work. Networking and having conversations to learn is a good thing. But implementing flexibility, agility, to produce, organize, coordinate is even better and few social projects address this need. That’s true that one takes less risk at optimizing what is not about work…

- bringing social content back to business information flows, in context, to it will help people to find solutions, and deliver a real added value without polluting their information flow.

As for the first point, we’re very far from the goal. But we can keep on dreaming. We’ll have to deal with the second, as soon as possible, if we don”t want to state once for all that what matters the least in social business is work. And we see more and more solutions that will help to deal with the third. Of course, that’s only software and it can’t change everything on its own but they may help organizations becoming more aware than social is also a way to deliver and produce.

Each solution has its own approach, deals with a large or small part of the issue but that’s a good start. Let’s mention (non exhaustive list…)

• Tibbr that was one of the first that offered to aggregate business and social information to make business contents become social objects people can act and collaborate on. Same idea at Jamespot with their Social Ready approach and more recently at  Salesforce

- the global collaboration hub as seen by IBM. Vulcan allow collaboration and interaction in context without having to switch from one tool to another nor flow disruption, whatever the origin and the nature of the information.

- a more task management driven approach for Asana and Azendoo.

When we talk about the future of enterprise, we often mention the need for getting rid of the rigidity of processes, autonomy, processes, making the system (organization and IT) serve people instead of making people serve the system. It need a very scarce resource to work : time. It also need trust and a strict definition of the limits of autonomy, understood by all. Without that, tomorrow’s enterprises won’t last under this form.

I often say that the largest part of employee’s activity is and will be more and more about exceptions handling and problem solving what supposes to have time for creativity, innovation; knowledge and practices exchanges etc.. In fact that’s only half true. That’s true when everything that could be automated has been (some things that could not be automated have been , in fact, automated but that’s not our point today). As long as everything needs no judgement and does not tolerate any exception has been modeled and given to the appropriate tools. This is the one and only condition to make people focus on what they excel at and are much better at than any software. If it’s not met, “essential routines” will require most of their time on tasks where their added value is poor and where they’ll be rather sources of errors.

That said we have to admit that the dawn of social tools in the workplace brought more confusion to things that were not easy to get. Before, it was very common for employees to capture data on many different tools. This the reason why lots of information where not captured or updated because doing so was both boring and time consuming. “Social” brought a new layer of troubles. In addition to capturing data in traditional business tools, employees had to switch to social tools to say “I’m doing this and need some help to solve that problem”, identify the right resources to progress. Reason why most people stick to the basic, well known, lowest common denominator of their work. Today we’re seeing a solution slowly emerging with the integration of social and business tools, the latter being able to send signals into the firsts, not participating into the conversation but becoming conversations starters. Globally speaking, the ability to easily, directly (even automatically) link an object (document, event generated by a business tool) to the conversations that relates to it will be essential.

If the first point misses, time lacks and energy goes (is wasted on ?) essential but repetitive tasks where the human factor has a poor added value. If the second misses, the new social layer will be more a burden than an opportunity.

Going further, we can even add that if these foundations are not perfected and solid, anything that will be added to move toward new organization models will generate more troubles than benefits.

It’s always easier to be agile and mobile when one’s feet are on a solid ground rather than a friable one.

After a first post on my first steps with Google +, it’s time to deal with the question that’s already in many people’s minds : can Google + become an enterprise tool. Let’s be clear : I’m not talking about using this tool for brands but as an internal work tool for employees. In other words : will Google Plus be a game changer the day it will be a part of Google’s enterprise apps pack ?

As a matter of fact, many see Google + as the missing link of Google’s enterprise off which still lacks a collaboration/social/conversation part. Until now, Google has always been very good at search, online office tools (which is a first level of collaboration but limited to documents) but has never been successful when trying to go further. Google sites despite being useful and powerful only meet a small part of people’s need and the “Wave” experiment…was only an experiment. Too early, too improvable, too powerful but too ununderstood…Wave was “too” too many things and Google decided to kill it instead of improving it. But it’s sure that they learnt a lot from Wave when they started working on Google +

Hence the reflex of positioning Google plus as Google’s Trojan on the enterprise social software market, on the enterprise social network part. But Google plus has nothing of an enterprise social network platform. It’s not a social network in the strict meaning of the word because it does not allow to validate the link between two people in an explicit way. You’re in my circle(s), I’m in yours but it doesn’t mean anything more. This is way even Twitter founder’s once said that Twitter was not a social network…even if it’s easier to consider it as such. It’s not either an enterprise social network because it’s functionalities are too light. Of course, integration with Google apps can solve a part of the problem but not the whole problem. Groups and communities also lack for an enterprise use.

As I recently wrote, I’d rather see Google plus as a replacement for email. From this perspective it has all the required capabilities and circles are perfect for such usages. As paradoxical as it may seem, this tool has everything needed to kill email, much more than social networks as they exist on the market have. So, Google Plus, while note being an enterprise social network would be the best tool to keep this promise ? Not exactly.

I already wrote on what I’m thinking of the utopia of replacing email with social networks.The matter is more about the need for an informational hub gathering all the signals sent to a given person, whatever the source and the channel are, and making it easy to process the signal in a unique interface (which will also allow intelligent filtering depending on context). Since I have not seen any other persuasive thing in this matter, the best example of what I mean here is the famous IBM’s project Vulcan which is supposed to land on the market very shortly.

Such a tool will not replace existing collaboration and communication tools (except the mail client, but mail as a channel will stay) but will bring them together in a more coherent system. In short it deals with the real problem that is not about tools but about how we consume information (find, read, process, act upon…).

So, believe it or not, this is the opening where I see Google Plus as a possible major solution and not on the enterprise social network one. The stake is strategic and there are few credible pretenders at this time. This is a great opportunity. But…

Such a system need a deep integration with all the existing tools. APIs are a first step but organizations need something sounder, a genuine framework that will make the Herculean work of integration easy. This is essential if we don’t want businesses to fear the effort, step back, and fail at making the most out of the potential of the vision. That’s what we recently saw coming at IBM with the Social Business Framework and the Social Business Toolkit.

So, in the end, the question is all about knowing if Google is able to offer enough integration capabilities for Plus in en enterprise context. SSO, LDAP, tools of any kind… If yes, Google Plus may be  killer app. If not…

In fact, wondering if “google is able” is not the right word. Google has the means to do whatever it found strategic. The question is elsewhere. From a technical perspective, it’s about exploring new fields that have nothing to do with a marketplace as the one that exists for Google Apps. From a usage perspective, it’s a field where Google has always been very uncomfortable, what is a matter of culture. Last, it’s will be an heavy and long work, that may not be reasonable for a company that drives 95% of its revenues from advertising. Or, maybe, they want this percentage to change. What leads us back to the question of the culture that’s needed to build such a vision and execute it.

The success of Google Plus in large companies will highly depend on the compatibility of Google’s culture and corporate IT one as well as with the social business one. Knowing that culture is one of the few things you can’t buy, let me be sceptic. And, if I’m wrong, the battle with IBM Vulcan will be fascinating, even if IBM is very ahead today, and may lead to very good things for end users. So bad for those who did not pay attention to this trend before.

Whatever the organizational structure is, top-down, networked, push, pull etc… there’s always a constant concern : optimizing the use of resources. Said in other words : “get the maximum by spending the minimum”, “prevent productive potential wasting”.

In this productivity driven view, people see time as being the limiting factor. That’s, right…at least in a system based on repetitive tasks and involving few knowledge if any. But this assumption becomes wrong in a knowledge economy where time is not a relevant productivity indicator at all because individual production is not linear or constant anymore. And not individual either by the way. In this context, the limiting factor is attention, which could be defined as qualified time, a subdivision of time. That’s the time dedicated to do/deal with/process something, being focused on it (by the way it would be interesting to start a discussion on what attention at work is….to find a less shoddy definition than this one).

So attention is the scarce resource which use has to be optimized.

But we know than nobody can be focused, attentive, 8 hours a day. A least not 8 hours in a row. That’s, in fact, a reason why the barrier between personal and professional time is blurring.

One of the best way to avoid productive time wasting is not to make sure everyone is checking in the office at the right time but to make work tools available when and where attention is maximal. Note that attention is not always the result of a voluntary action. Who did never have a brilliant idea about a business concerns at night, on vacation or during a week end…and lost it because he was not empowered to work or share it at the very moment when it came ? Moment when one’s mind shifted to a business focus unpurposely on a non dedicated time ?

Another way is to avoid disruptive elements that come and interrupt employees in an “attention phase”. These elements are well known : untimely email reception as well as any incoming signal that grab attention and force to refocus after : instant messaging, phone calls or social media. There’s an easy solution being used by many people : disconnecting from everything. But disconnection has risks : not being able to communicate with people who can help, not receiving the information that would help to solve a problem. The notion of context that helps filtering the available information and, most of all, the information being pushed at a given moment is essential and will play a key role in tomorrow’s business applications.

Then after, there’s the need to master the human factor. As a matter of fact, these signals don’t fall from the sky : they’re sent by people. That’s the paradox of the new coming forms of organizations. If each person makes the most of his ability to share, alert and mobilize others, the situation will look like a tragedy of the commons applied to attention. If each person makes the most of other’s attention in his own interest, the collective result will be horrendous because no one will have enough attention left to do his own work. This issue is fare from being the easier to solve.

Of course, specific education and training will be needed to make people aware of the attention paradigm and what a wise use of people’s attention means (using any communication channel is using others’ attention by the way). But is this a risk for weak signals and serendipity which are essential in agile, networked and “pull” organization ?

The result will surely be a mix of all these solutions…but is still unclear…and far.

Anyway, if organizations need to become (over ?) connected and communicative, they’ll need mechanisms that will prevent these skills from backfiring and avoid the paradoxical trap according to which when everyone makes the most of the system, the organization as a whole will suffer from it.

Serendipity is the ability to find something while ignoring its existence, without looking for it. We all experienced it at least once on the web : searching for something, finding a resultt and then, from one link to another, finding something which existence was unexpected until then. Serendipity relies on both the human factor and trust.

Human factor because these links that make us discover new things are made by people. Trust because depending on what we know of a person we’ll give more or less credit to what he/she says and the sources being suggested. Of course, it’s a long term mechanisms because reputation needs time to form, so does trust. This as also some things in common with curation.

Today,, the way we’re looking for information on the web is evolving. To be more precise, that’s the way information is proposed to us that’s changing. With the masses of information that search engines or social networking platforms like Facebook have about us, our contacts,habits, the results that are pushed to us are filtered to correspond to what we are. Among the masses or information that will match my search, those that come from people that are similar to me, those that will please me will be prioritized. If you wonder why, for the same search, Google gives different results to you and your friends, now you know why. The same logic applies to what appears on your Facebook homepage and what does not.

The more this logic is becoming mainstream, the less one will have any chance to discover things that come from people who don’t think the same way or think of different things. What raises two problems to me

• First one if about being locked up into a trend, ignoring what’s being said elsewhere

• The second is to be unable to access to a wide part of the information available on a given topic.

Google (and the other of its kind), desiring to please me despite of me, are ignoring the difference between what would please me and what I would need to know;

This issue is not neutral at all for internal business purposes too.e.

Businesses need serendipity to work because it’s what’s needed to make innovation and agility (no one can be agile without being able to detect unexpected opportunities) effective.

I already mentioned the need for filtering information according and relevance and context to make employees’ work  easier. I got a very relevant comment from one of my readers on the risk of too much filtering making people miss relevant information.

That also seem to be against cross collaboration, identifying people and information beyond silos. How to find people that are in other units, departments nd have other concerns but that, in a given situation, are those I need ?

Conflicting goals ? Seems so but that may not be true.

First, we can have a very simplistic approach and offer two search options. The first taking one’s social profile into account, the other doesn’t.

It’s also possible to improve search criteria. What is often called relevance today is often nothing but a mixture of proximity (the sender) and popularity (the message). Strictly speaking, this is not what I call relevance. Relevance relies on context and correlation between data rather than their popularity. And that changes everything. Let’s also mention priority : in a business context it’s sometimes impossible to process everything so people should need to focus on what matters first.

I think the discussion on the importance of search and social business intelligence for collective efficiency will last a long time.

This post is a synthesis of many discussions that followed what I wrote on the use of social platforms both for external communication and intranet purposes.

Such projects are often owned by a department that drives them. That’s the reason why many organizations start by wondering which department should own social media.

When one owns something, he uses it for his own purposes. There are many reasons to that. Most of all because one does not know anything about others’ needs, because some uses are counter-cultural to the DNA of a given department or because internal power games and politics makes it logical to keep one’s projects for oneself.

Consequence : a communication department that drives an internal social network struggle at making the most out of its collaborative potential. Sometimes because they don’t want but, most of times because it’s out of their competence field for obvious reasons. Replace communication with HR, IT, Innovation or business unit, the result is the same. It’s no use to blame the people in question because the situation is often caused by the lack of means and the irrelevance of some uses regarding to their mission and not by unwillingness. In fact, most of time you can hear them say “We’d like to but don’t know to”.

Whatever the owner, a social networks serves for communication, collaboration, innovation, expert location, talent management, supports some processes. If each of these needs rely on a different tool and project, there are lots of chances everything fails.

That’s the same for external facing projects. Marketing, communication, innovation, customer care etc…should be able to use the system, whatever the official owner is.

That’s why we can see more and more competing projects that, in the end, cause unproductivity and waste resources, those needed to drive them, to implement them and, last but not least, employee’s attention.

As one of my readers said, these are only channels, channels that can convey many kinds of signals, of flows. I usually use the pipe metaphor. One can own the pipe but it does not mean that it can be used to convey lots of things, for several purposes, from and to third part people.

Organization will have to embrace the culture of multiplexing. What’s multiplexing ? To make the story short, it’s about using one single wire to convey many different signals. The system was first used into aircrafts and is now very common in cars and lots of other things. The purpose is to use a single wire to convey signals for many devices, for different uses.

As said in Wikipedia :

In telecommunications and computer networks, multiplexing (also known as muxing) is a method by which multiple analog message signals or digital data streams are combined into one signal over a shared medium.

Applied to our matters, it means :

• Understanding that what I’m implementing will be used by other people for their own uses.

• Understanding I have to give up control on the use they’ll have

• Understanding that I need to teach them how to use my system for their own needs, accompany them, be a service provider for them

• Understanding that I have to involve them in my project from the early beginning, to understand all the needs and design things accordingly.

If things are done in another way, social networks will follow the same path as intranets in the past. Each unit or department will have his own one and users will have to manage by themselves waiting for the day someone wakes up and realizes that hundreds of projects will have to merge into one. Until then, many opportunities will be lost, resources wasted and failure will happen with no other cause than confusion, lack of critical mass and, in the end, lack of coherence and relevance for end users.

If some of our employees are members of at least two social platforms, if your working on a new rich directory disconnected from social networks, if your marketing department thinks that customer care has nothing to do on “their” twitter account or Facebook page, you’re facing the first symptoms of the absence of a culture of multiplexing.

In the end, as Wikipedia says

The aim is to share an expensive resource

It’s as simple as that.

This is a periodical question that comes like season. What ? The obsession, of wondering what part of the information system will be made obsolete and replaced by an internal social network.

Let’s sum up. We had “will ESNs replace the intranet ?”, “Will ESNs kill the email ?”. “Will ESNs replace the corporate directory ?”. “Will ECM be replaced by conversation ?”. “Will ESNs replace collaboration tools ?”. And what was the final conclusion ? “Yes…but no. ESNs are a part of a wider system that needs us to rethink the way we interact with others, with information, the notion of collaboration”. Since it appeared that adding a tool did not solve anything without having a more global approach, the the discussion moved to….replacing another tool. And so on…

As a matter of fact :

• ESNs to replace the intranet ? Except for those who have a simplistic vision of intranets or a SMB without very specific needs, ESNs only conver a part of the needs.

• ESNs to replace email ? Without a deep thinking on the way information is consumed, acted on, on the way exchanges are organized on a global scale, on the way we analyze, process and prioritize it, thinking that a social network will replace email and solve the information overload is nothing but illusory.

• ESNs to replace corporate directories ? The profile may be a very good way to display data from the directory in a richer context that is more relevant to users’ need (by the way, it’s the best way to start a project in many case, even before talking about communities, blogs etc..). But that’s only a new way to display thing, not a replacement.

• ESNs to replace ECM ? Believing that wide-scale conversations will replace everything is also a mistake. There are structural logics behind information and content management that have to stay. And what has been done before the social era has to be kept and made usable in the new context.

• ESNs to replace collaboration spaces ? Designed to manage unstructured content, ESNs as they exist on the market today quickly show their limits when it comes to needs that need to be more tightly managed and structured as well as complex projects. All the cases of communities that were nothing but redesigned spaces moved from one tool to another in order to say “yes ! we have communities” prove it seldom work and users often had reasons to complain about this move. Not because ESNs were not good tools, but because they were used for purposes they were not designed for.

In fact, ESNs are link creators. As such they only allow to manage unstructured information but this is the information that was lacking until then. Most of all it allows to locate and mobilize people in context, what is essential while the very nature of work asks employees to permanently find new combinations of people and information.

But that’s only the first step. The one were ESNs are viewed as tools only. Now, let’s think “social” as a functional layer that creates links between tools that are social by nature and the others. That ties structured and unstructured things. That brings people and information together in the context of a business case to make this famous combination possible, in the context of the case. Of course, it will need an integration effort, social intelligence functionalities to make choice and decision easier, to suggest solutions (people, content, information) to make this huge amount of resources an asset instead of a burden, and, at last, to think search as a global stake.

We should stop trying to make ESNs fit in an existing compartment where it won’t prove anything. Stop all the exhortations and peremptory discourses like “…..is dead”, stop thinking that everything is either black or white and that any new thing means throwing away what was there before.

Think global and remind that the weaknesses of what’s already there are not about how good they are at doing something but because it failed at making intangible assets usable in combinative approaches. That should also remind us that there’s still a missing link in the landscape : the melting pot that allows to handle and work intangible resources in a work context, this grey zone that exists between the data of a case, the resources needed to solve it and they mobilization in a work context : the case centric environment.

ESN tools as we know them are only the proof of the potential of social features in a restricted scope. Now, let’s think about using this potential within the whole IT sphere. In fact we should separate, in our thoughts, the words social and network.

The network, as a tool, a place in the corporate IT. It’s own place to complete the others tools and not to replace them. Social, as a functional concept has its place everywhere as a layer bridging everything together in a work context.

We all know that everything that has to do with work models transformation, collaborative practices, new value creation creations is a matter of anything but technology. Solution is to be found in HR, management, sense making rather than in lines of code. But, by endlessly repeating that technology comes second (or even third), we may miss some essential points.

The nature of work is evolving and requires new skills. In other words, it’s getting more and more about gathering resources together, put them in context and leverage them than than about delivering preset processes with predefined resources. To do so, employees need to handle “objects”. This is a vague word chosen in purpose : it refers to more or less entities like pieces of knowledge, information, data from a customer case or elements of context of a given case, people who own other relevant objects. In fact, rather than “while working”.

All these operations, this conceptual gathering of abstract entities is sometimes done by a single person but, most of times, in a collaborative or participative way.

An objective analysis of the situation as it can be observed in any organization any day makes us learn two lessons :

• Employees are generally uncomfortable with this kind of work.

One of the major issue for knowledge workers is that, even without considering management and organizational issues, they are not well-off at all to handle and gather abstract entities to deliver something concrete. Knowledge workers are not a concept : they are more and more numerous in the workplace and knowledge work is also a part of the work of people who perform tasks that are not knowledge work at first sight. On the other hand, that’s not because one becomes a knowledge worker when entering the workplace that he has the necessary skills . Very few employees have at least a part of the skills that will be essential in 2020 according to the University of Phoenix.

Blaming employees is useless, but acquiring those skills is a key stake at both an educational, training and self development level and seems totally underrated today.

• Making objects tangible makes things even more difficult.

To help employees, things have been done to materialize these objects, make them tangible, so users would be able to see them, work them etc.. That’s the role of information systems and lots of software. The least we can say it’s that the result is quite deceptive, to such an extent that the few people that are able to combine, articulate and work these objects in their head feel lost at the very moment they’re given tools supposed to make it easier. At first sight, we could thing that giving objects a visual representation should have helped employees, but it does not. Data from the problem, from the case, are “somewhere” (in a project management tool, CRM or anything else). Relevant information to handle and solve it are scattered in many tools, each of them being about a given kind of tool. As for non stored information (90% of the global amount), employees need to find the person who own them…and use another tool to do so. They need to locate expertise, most of time in the HR system, that are not supposed to be shared. To end, add that the exchanges, the conversations that tie all these things together, are in email boxes, instant messaging systems, collaborative spaces where not everyone is.

If it’s difficult for a many, if not most of users to combine information and perform this work “in their head”, tools makes things even more laborious because even if objects can be visualized, they can’t be physically combined on screens what prevent employees to have a global view of their work and what they need to get things done. How can we imagine that without adapted tools that can work jointly, that are easy to use, knowledge craftsmen (because it’s more about craft than industrial work) can do a good work ? While attention should be used to solve problems, it’s used to link the content of ten or even more windows.

As long as it won’t be possible to move from a tool centric environment (cases to be handled are divided into x tools) to a case centric one where the focus is on the case and the rest (objects, functionalities) aggregates, gathers and connects around, employee’s work will be needlessly complicated.

For used, pieces of information has to be gathered and displayed according to the relationship that exists between them in the context of a given case and not according to their type.

So the challenge has two sides : on the one hand the need for acquiring new skills, on the other the reinvention of the digital workspace. There is no way to choose between one or the other : both are mandatory.