Activity Stream | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

From noise to situational intelligence

February 10, 2012 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 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.

Internal communication and social media : move the filter !

May 3, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : with the coming of social media in the workplace and the need for internal communication teams to let go and don’t care about what is not their responsibility, the question of information filtering is more important than ever. With the increase in the number of information sources and the need for communication team to fall back on their core duties, information has to be managed at the user lever on both a qualitative and quantitative standpoint. So filters will have to move : formerly set at the publishing level, it needs to move to the receiver level and rely on two pillars. A human one in order to make the concept of social filtering fully operative at a wide scale in the workplace (what is also a major issue in terms of training…). A technological one then because, until today, the social filter has not worked as expected and, moreover, the increase in volume of information will imply the use of intelligent tools to compensate for humans. Filtering is not about authorizing people to publish anymore but about filtering what they receive based on relevance in context.

Before, everything was clear : communication in the enterprise was the job of a dedicated communication department who decided what people needed to know and didn’t care about how employee reacted to this information. Today, this department is not the only source of information and any employee, team, unit will have its own voice.

Please notice that it’s a significant improvement. For what I can see, 2 or 3 years ago, most of the communication departments were more likely to fight against this uncontrolled form of information broadcasting while, today, most of them seem to have understood they need to share the power. That doesn’t mean they are very comfortable with this new challenge, what is is quite logical, but they’re now trying to find how to go with change rather than block it. Remember that it’s not obvious at all for a traditional BE2 team to support an E2E approach and that, instead of criticizing them, helping them to deal with this transformation is a more constructive approach.

It raises two questions : the first is about the place of the communication department on a socialized intranet and the second is about controlling the global information flow.

A zero-email organization ? Please be serious…

February 18, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 6 Comments

There’s not a person who’s not aware of the current limits of email and the fact it has become a factor that limits employees performance. But very few really try deal with this issue once and for all. Among those who dare we can mention Atos Origin that want to become an emai free organization in three years and switch to social networking solutions. Visionaries ? Fools ? Either one or the other depending on how this revolution will be thought. Migrating flows from one environment to the other won’t solve all the problems that employees face and can even generate more complexity. Rethinking the nature of email and the needs in terms of actions and interactions to rationalize it all makes more sense but will need a deep and ambitious work on IT architecture. Social networks won’t replace email in the workplace but they are a first step towards an intelligent social messaging that takes into account all the things employees need and make, finally, tool serve people instead of people serve tools.

A few weeks ago Atos Origin hit the frontline of many sites and blogs, announcing their plan to become an email-free organization in three years and make activities move to social networks. Such a declaration had at least a first positive effect : lots of people talked about it. Either enterprise social software zealots or skeptics who find the idea ridiculous paid attention to it. Now, let’s try to understand what moving from email is about with a little hindsight.

First thing : is it possible to live without email ?

I think so. If I have a look at my mailbox, there are less than 10 valuable emails (worth being read or needing an action from me) every day. Some people, in fact, already managed to get rid of email. My good friend Luis Suarez has been working on what he calls “email starvation” for three years without any downside in his work. I even guess his productivity increaded. Since he’s a remote worker for a very large organization we may think that doing so may be have been something very difficult for him. But he did it.

But we should not forget what lies behind such an impressive achievement :

- a tough personal discipline and enough abnegation to spend energy to educate customers and co-workers every day.

- an employer that provides him with the right tools to avoid the email curse and manage his internal and external information flows efficiently.

In my point of view the concept of flow is essential here. Moving away from email is not enough to decrease the amount of information to be dealt with. In fact, it will move to another place and be even more broken up. So the result would even look like a regression. We should stop thinking about email as a tool that’s used to send electronic mails but think about its new nature.

There are two different things here. First the information, second the signal that tells us the information is available. The first can be hosted anywhere depending on its nature. A social media but also a traditional business application. It can be shared or not, it’s possible to react to it or interact around it in a structured, capitalizable and intelligible way, privately, publicly or for a selected audience.

Then there’s the signal. It allows us to read the information, access it, process it in one click.

In comparison with what we know today, we have to change our paradigm :

- stop considering information regarding to its nature, where it was generated or stocked (mail, excel sheet, word document, CRM report) what causes application silos that make no sense. What qualifies information is its relevance, not its source. Today, we switch from a tool to another depending on the source.

- make any application able to generate a signal, all the signals being gathered in a single recipient. That’s not email as we knowi it but the new nature of email. It receives all signals that are sent to us, and its name does not matter.

- then, in the recipient, prioritize and filter information regarding to our criteria. Ideally, depending on these criteria and, possibility, on an intelligent analysis based on our history, we get a relevant and expurgated view of information. That improves the noise/signal ration. It also helps to distinguish the information that should be pushed to us from what has only to be accessible in case of need without bothering our instant flow.

- last, we have to make this information actionable in the recipient. Answer if it’s an email, share the content of the message in another app (for instance a CRM chart in a workgroup or community), act (approve a request in a workflow), answer (to a comment, something posted in a community). Il should all be possible without leaving the tool, breaking people flow of work, without asking employees to act as middleware.

- of course, the social tools used in this context can be used in secured bubbles with people who don’t belong to the enterprise.

Let’s go back to our “move from email to social networks” problematic. Social networks are a part of a new architecture of the information system that won’t kill email but will make it ready for the XXIst century, turning it into a social messaging or social signal system. But thinking that a migration of flows from one to another without a more global vision is at least unrealistic and can, at worse, lead to a catastrophe.

As a matter of fact it would be like misjudging all the traditional enterprise applications. It would also create a social bubble with no connection with flows of work and documents. The future of email is in an abstraction layer that socializes and standardizes the whole IS, regardless to the nature and the origin of each component.

Google wave has this in its DNA. Maybe this ambition will become a reality with Novell Pulse that relies on its technology. There are lots of things at IBM too as I saw during last Lotusphere. The “Social Business Framework” topped with “Project Vulcain” as a standardization layer seems to be going in the right direction.

We also have to mention Tibbr that looks very promising but which success will depend on whether organization will really want to integrate flows or not. Other ideas ?

One thing is sure : in three years we’ll learn a lot from Atos Origine experience. In any sense.

PS : this is the “tool” part of the vision. It’s obvious that it makes no sense without a usage driven approach that will transform the way work is done.

Filed Under: Management & HR, Software & Tools Tagged With: activity stream, Atos Origin, collaboration, email, enterprise social networks, flows, google wave, intgration, middleware, novell pulse, project vulcan, social business framework, social messaging, social networks, stream, tibbr

What social Media Lack ? Intelligence

September 10, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : the increasing quantity of information generated by social media and the need for dealing with all this information regardless to its source is a barrier to an effective use that relies on users ability to priorize, classify and organize things into a hierarchy. Because of that, only a little minority is not scared by the flows that flow on their screens. To make future information systems usable we need to embed a kind of intelligence in the product rather than relying on the ability of a few people to use the tools in order to channel the flows and highlight what matters to each user, the ultimate step being to build conversing tools. After having tried to use the 2.0 logic to improve BI, now it’s time to use BI to improve 2.0 tools.

One of the main barriers to the use of social media in the workplace and to the transformation of work is that users feel lost. Two points are hidden behind this vague concept :

- lack of context. I won’t elaborate this point because Sameer Patel wrote an excellent post about this issue. Originally about Google Wave it can, in fact, apply to a wide range of things.

- fear of the mass of information that’s generated, of not being able to deal with it and manage it.

I think most people agree on the first point (now just wait to see how it will be turned into actual features), so let’s talk about the second.

If you are familiar with these tools, would it be at home or at work, you know that quantity is not a problem and is rather an opportunity once you know how to filter and prioritize. It can be done technically with the right functiunalities or tools, humanly by relying on the social filter made of your network. Information is like water, what matters is not to have less but to regulate the flow.

Now try to imagine the average user (what means 90% of users), facing any kind of stream (twitter, friendfeed or Facebool) and how his face’s going pale. Of course, these users can be trained, of ourse as time goes by more and more users will be comfortable with information flows. But what matters is today, and today it’s rather complicated. Missing the latest hilarious video shared by one’s uncle is not prejudial but things are not the same in the workplace. Add to that the the fear of admitting in front of colleagues that one didn’t see such or such important information, and you understand why there is a real problem.

The value of social media in the workplace relies on intelligence on two aspects :

- the intelligence people share with the tools

- the intelligence they use to survive in the flow and separate the wheat from the chaff.

Today the more active users on enterprise social platforms are those who meet the second criteria, sometimes because they already do it in their personal use of the web, sometimes because they learn quickly. That poses two problems :

The end of Google Wave : both something logical and a half-truth

August 13, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : Google announced the end of Wave last week. Beyond the logical deception of those who adopted it and believed in it, many lessons can be learned from this project, most of all about the almost systematic failure of communications tools that don’t integrate with business contexts and processes. Anyway, maybe the deep nature of Wave was to be a software layer instead of a standalone product.

Google announced Wave was dead last week. According to their words :

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.

Since any downside has its upside, let’s try to find what can be learned from this adventure :

1°) Too good too early ?

Maybe Google was too early. That’s, in fact what Michael Arrington suggests and that’s surely a part of the explaination. That’s neither the first nor the last time such things happen and what happened to Apple in the late 80s/ early 90s should remind us that it can heppen to any company, that it may be harmful, but that it’s possible to recover from it.

2°) An half-cooked product

That’s the impression Wave made in the first times after its launching. Of course, it was continuously improved but it was too late to get the first deceived users back because they had other concerns than testing “one more tool” waiting for it to become usable. The worse thing in this story being that these users were supposed to be the power ones who should have lead the adoption. Fail.

On the other hand, Wave has been a very instructive experience because it demonstrates the limits of a powerful and rich stream : its lack of usability. I’m sure that many vendors that had similar things in project learned the lesson. We’ll discuss that in an upcoming post.

3°) Wrong positionning

Albeit powerful and rich, Wave was not, like Google Apps, Gmail and many other services, something anyone can master and understand quickly. To some extent it was rather an enterprise application, even if it doesn’t mean this positionning would have made things easier. Anyway, it was more a collaboration tool than a communication tool. On the web people communicate because they want and happen to collaborate by luck, in the workplace they collaborate by need and that may have made it easier to find the right early adoptions there.

Facebook is topping Google ? If I were an IT guy I would wonder why…

May 28, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 4 Comments

As you may have heard these last weeks, Facebook topped Google for the first time. Not in market value but in hits. Anecdote for some, beginning of a new era for others, many things have been said about that. On the other hand, it’s was a general public event and many may have thought that it had very few importance for the walled world of corporate IT and did not deserve more attention than a secondera phenomenon.

In this post I’ll try to measure the extent of the news and, then, wonder if it means anything special for corporate IT departments.

That’s “only” Google !

Let’s stick to the facts : Facebook got more connexions than Google and that’s all. It does not mean that “more than the half of all connections on the web took plage on Facebook”. Google is not the web and Facebook won’t become the web either even if that’s a goal that’s not hidden at all. This only fact is enough to dampen some kind of enthusiasm.

So let’s avoid conclusions such as “people don’t want to live outside of social networks anymore”, “Facebook is the web”, “Facebook will replace the web” etc.. It may become true one day but the existing numbers can’t make us draw such conclusions at this point.

Now imagine we’re at an IT department’s place.

Managing attention : a key challenge for the future of businesses

April 22, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

I’ve been willing to tackle this topic for a long time and seing Julien le Nestour‘s presentation at the last Enterprise 2.0 forum made me feel it was high time to put my thoughts in words.

Facing an increasing amount of information and considering the time we need to peruse, process, generate it, time is a key factor. In fact, even ignoring information takes time. But, on the other hand, I’m convinced that the assertion that we’ve reached a point of no return, that we don’t have time anymore to deal with more information is wrong. We don’t have a time problem but a prioritisation one. The point is not to have less accessible information but a better qualification of the information that’s pushed to us (the rest being accessible,findable in case of need) and a better hierarchisation to be able to handle what matters first.

These prioritisation and hierarchisation issues matter even more now that many enterprises and vendors realize that providing users with a unified collaboration context (ie the “unique customized home page” or “unique activity stream”) will be a major issue in the upcoming months. In the general public web we already saw a first attempt with Google Wave : a service with a really impressive potential that was quickly deserted by those who were supposed to be its power users, those who had to centralize a large amount of information feeds in an unique interface and for whom prioritisation and hierarchisation were the missing feature. On the business side and according to what I saw at Lotusphere, Lotus Notes is also heading this way and I bet that the success of this new approach will highly depend on how the product will handle these issues. If it doesn’t…

So we have to identify some objective criterias for prioritisation. To make it simple, we can say that prioritisation depends on the value created while handling the information. For instance, spending one hour to answer a colleague who needs some information to handle a strategic activity or task is more important than spending one hour to read emails (or anything else) that are nothing but “for your information” emssages.

The same logics applies when trying to introduce a new tool in a context where the ROI is known for being very hard to get. So, Julien showed us of Schlumberger used another indicator called ROA (Return on attention) that helps to evaluate how a new tool is worth according to the value of the time of the user, the number of occurence of a given task and its criticality in a given use case (ok…I simplified it a lot). This allows not only to easily justify a new tool according to its benefits compared to the current situation but also to take into account the importance of things like ergonomics in an arbitration thats supposed to be economical. As a matter of fact, maybe the best enterprise social software platform on the market has a blog feature but if the interface is so boor that the time people will spend to understand and use it will not be justified by the benefit in return, it’s better to take a tool that’s less “prestigious” but that will be easily used by anybody.

There’s also one more layer of complexity. Prioritisation is not only a matter of individual arbitration but a collective dynamic. I prioritize according to my own benefits and objectives, the anyone who sends me information prioritizes according to is own objectives. What can be strategic for one may be trivial for the other. So it’s important to have some “nice behaviors policies” (think about the other, wonder what is necessary…) and some arbitration mechanisms (when should I help, when should I say no…)

All these questions have to be tackled when tools are implemented, in the change management process and, beforehand, by vendors who won’t be able any longer to afford building bottlenecks and let users sort them out. These bottlenecks are a key issue in enterprise performance and have to be tackled in a systemic and coherent way by tools, business practices, management and organization.

Since real time seems to be a very trendy topic now, understanding its limits according to prioritisation issues may be quite useful.

I’ll conclude quoting Julien Le Nestour : attention is now a key resource, it’s scarce and constrained so its use have to be optimized in priority, even before funding.