Activity-specific Social Software | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

Adopting new practices in multiple contexts

March 4, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

Knowing that people have to face multiple contexts in their work, we have to make sure that new practices and tools are enablers in each situation. I do not write “social” or “2.0″ in purpose because these words are so tied to communities and social networks that we often forget that the underlying concepts may be helpul in many other cases. Moreover, even if they are dimensions that have to be developed in the workspace because they are nearly nonexistant at this time, they don’t apply to all work situations and does not meet all needs.

Enterprise 2.0 is a big bag full of interesting concepts but its downside is that people are often tempted to apply everything everywhere instead of applying only a part of it to some needs, depending on their relevance to the context. But that’s not because not everything is community that some logics may not be used separately, with less ambition. Doing this means starting from people’s needs and context instead of throwing them in an unknown world which sense is hard to perceive. As a matter of fact, the goal, that must not be overlooked, is to help people to be more efficient in their workaday tasks. Before being told what they could do with new tools and business practices, they’d rather be taught how, as a starting point, they could do better what they already know.

The factory, the beach and the Bermuda Triangle. Or the challenges of integration

January 21, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

In the comments following this great piece by Hutch Carpenter about 2010 trends, someone relevantly drawn our attention on the importance of integration. I agree and would like to sum up some ideas about all the integration challenges which are much wider than we can usually think.

Notice : when talking about integration we usually think about software integration. That’s of course a key dimension. But I also pay much attention to the human side integration, what I call behaviors and practices integrations. Any reason to that ? Asking people to collaborate and change behaviors and practices according to whether they are in real life or online, according to the tool they use, may make them become schizophrenic and, even worse, push them to reject what they’re proposed or use it poorly. In my opinion this dimension gains more and more importance as the space for communication and exchange tools become as important as the one for process tools.

I can see three challenges for integration (the two dimensions of integration being highly intermingled).

Hey ! I’m your ERP and I’m talking to you !

January 19, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

I’d like to share some thoughts about what our work environment may look like in a close future if what I think being two main trends manage to reach maturity.

The first is “ambient awareness”. a word I find more relevant than microblogging which is only its embodying in terms of toosls. That’s the ability to continuously capture weak signals from one’s environment in order not to behave like an isolated player but as a player into an ecosystem, allowing to make the actions of both one and the other more coherent.

The other is “activity-specific social application” or social software 2.0.That’s a new kind of enterprise social application that do not put the social activities out of peoples workaday work (over the flow) but enrich the process tools they are built around (and are often a component) (in the flow).

Il s’agit d’un nouveau genre d’applications “sociales” d’entreprise qui ne positionnent plus la dite dimension sociale hors du travail quotidien du collaborateur mais viennent enrichir les outils de process autour desquels ils sont construits (et dont ils sont souvent une composante).

Before all I’ll start with an assumption : people always try (and will always) to automate everything that can be automated. That’s the human nature and, most of all, the organizations nature. The rise of people-centric theories is rather the acknowledgement that not everything can be automated today that a real will to focus more on people and give them more recognition.

The power of enterprise 2.0 tools is that they give people the ability to make every kind of information accessible, either in a proactive way or by answering to a question, a stimulation. This allows to run problem solving and ongoing improvement processes that integrate the workaday flow and improve the reactivity and quality of everyone’s work while building a hudge mass of searchable, usable and improvable information. The contribution of microblogging is to bring a real time dimension that is the perfect complement to traditional asynchronous web 2.0 tools.

One of the best use of these new tools and practices is “bottle in the sea”. The famous “who knows ? Who has any information about ?”. Notice that there are also implicit bottles, those we don’t throw consciously and that are in every status update, despite of us. For instance when we say “going to meet such prospect”, we don’t expect anything back. But someone can answer “I know them well / I already worked on similar cases / etc…”. In brief, a status update can also be seen as an implicit question, adressing the sphere of the “unknown unknown” that sounded quite funny in Rumsfeld’s mouth but that is not so far from our concerns.

The efficiency of the practice relies on another assumption : someone will read, answer, or push my message to someone who’ll be able to answer. This implies that the information exists, and that its owner and / or a “connector” is available in a synchronous fashion when I send my own message. Possible on the web because of its wide scope, more difficult in an organization simply because there are fewer potential answerers.

Information can be of twi kinds. It can be either formal and tacit, so it can only be shared and told by its owner (except if the owner already formalized it on any social space), or structured, codified and classified in one of the many information systems that crowd the organization. In this case, if search is too tedious, or if I ignore the very existence of the tools that may help me, I need one of my peers to direct me to this information which existence and location he knows.

Maybe you see what I’m coming to : if information is in my colleague’s head, they have to be available, but if it’s elsewhere how not to loose the opportunity to find it if the “connector” is not avaiblable, can’t read my message ?

Enteprise 2.0 : what to expect in 2010 ? The year of “uncrokment”.

December 15, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 3 Comments

A quick look at my predictions for 2009 makes me say that I was not so far from truth even if it took time for things to shift. In my opinion, the tipping point between 2008 and 2009 was the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston and things accelerated at the San Francisco Conference and then at the E2.0 Summit in Frankfurt. By the way, it makes me say that, to whom wonders if conferences of this kind are still relevant since we can discuss all year long, the right answer that they formalize the way trends are evolving.

This said, here’s what I see as the majors trends for 2010 and my intuition tells me that the key dates will still be the same. I’ll consider 3 different levels : concep, implementation and tools in this order. As a matter of fact, if the way one implements things depends of what the concepts means to him, I thing that companies will more and more chose their tools depending on their implementation strategy instead of building strategies constrained by what a given tool is good or bad at depending on its conception.

The concept : enterprise 2.0 as a new layer

Before wondering how to do something, having a clear vision of what this something is matters. The least we could say is that the end of 2009 was very rich in terms of experience and thoughts. Is it about making people use new tools for the sake of making them used ? Is it about (over)connecting people, relying on the assumption that their deep nature will make them naturally develop a community feeling and change their business practices and behaviors ? Obviously both one and the other failed.

Less idealistic but more pragmatic, enterprise 2.0 appears more and more as a productivity tool. In a world “1.0″, individual and collective productivity used to rely on specialization, tailoring tasks at an individual level, rigid processes and fight against any kind of deviation. In such a system the value is…in the system and its conception. In a world “2.0″ characterized by an intensive use of knowledge, value isn’t only in processes anymore but in knowledge and people who have it. So, doing one’s work, delivering results, becomes not only a matter of respecting the process but also a matter of accessing information and people that are out of the process. To do so, people need tools and practices that won’t necessarily replace what exists but add to it.

A few weeks ago I wrote :

Enterprise 2.0 is a set of tools and practices aiming at increasing the scope of the human and informational capital that’s accessible and usable in order to execute everyday’s processes and workflows and deliver the expected work in the assigned time limit. It’s not build outside or in replacement for workflows and business processes but around them.

It still need to be refined but the trend is here. Companies are here to produce things and we can’t neglect this structuring dimension. So enterprise 2.0 is nothing but a new layer that helps to maximize the use resources that are poorly exploited at this time. It’s a layer made of practices and tools that help anyone to access and engage what and whom is needed to achieve his goals. That brings us back to the concept of systems, Service Oriented Organization and Wirearchy.

So the central issue becomes the articulation between existing things and novelty. I’ll discuss that in the next point. For those who got interested in the recent enterprise 2.0 schism discussion, it’s, in my opinion, the victory of the druckerian model.

Maybe 2010 will be one of the last years of the word “enterprise 2.0″. Knowing that it’s a new layer that helps businesses to achieve their primary goal, that articulation is central, we’re obvious talking about “enterprise” without versioning number and how it will do “old things” in a new context. Enterprise 2.0 has no value outside of enterprise and thinking it out of this whole will bring nothing concrete.

Last consequence : the rupture with the world of web 2.0 which logics and vocabulary are the opposite of what companies are. The web will still be source of inspiration and will open the way. But, for the rest, web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 are two really different worlds and each of them will have its own life. Two worlds that inspire one another but that can’t copy. [Read more...]