Adoption | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

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

January 10, 2012 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 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.

Enterprise 2.0 does not tolerate halve measures

November 29, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : many organizations have undertaken a transformation process. Each one is moving forward at its own rate, according to its ambitions and fears, to what seems possible and what they don’t want to tackle. But for what results ? As we may fear, a recent McKinsey study shows that such programs don’t tolerate half measures.. As a matter of fact, organizations that tackle organization issues and business processes make much more out of their projet than those who stay with the soft, community based and out of the flow of work approach. Even worse, the latter not only don’t progress but slowly regress as lack of sense, of alignment and coherence discourage even the more engaged zealots.

I’ve been observing many organizations on they journey to new forms of organization, no matter if it’s called enterprise 2.0 or social business, and the least I can say is that some of my early convictions are being reinforced day after day. Don’t worry, this is not about any outstanding disruptive concept or awesome discovery, but only common sense that can apply to any project. But, on the other hand, the only outstanding thing about this is the fact lots have believed and made others believe that so basic principles would not apply here for such a long time. A little but like if Boeing or Airbus started designing a new aircraft saying “for this one we’ll consider that gravity does not exist”.

In other words

1°) It’s easy to start with small shiny projects and end with a nice end result even it if means to make things more attractive that they actually are.

2°) Counting on passion and keen interest help doing this easily. But the further you’ll want to go, with a greater ambition and and wider scope, the more a rational approach focusing on operation efficiency will be needed.

3°) If we compare the progress curve with a hill to climb, a time comes when passion and interest aren’t enough. Even if they can conceal the lack of work on sense and alignment at the very beginning, adoption logics show their limits one day or the other. Something more is needed to climb the last mile.

3°) Talking about sense and alignment means making this new operating model logical, understood, coherent in the context of work. Making it structural. This can’t be done without rethinking management practices and making business processes evolve, what’s been a taboo for a long time even if things are slowly changing.

4°) Making a break in the middle of the journey is not possible. No one can say “I’m going to this point but not further…I don’t want to handle such or such kind of issues”. At this point the comparison with a hill is quite relevant : who stops on the middle of the way does not stay immobile but regresses. As a matter of fact, even the more engaged zealots are returning back on earth, tired of swimming against the current, adoption behaviors that go against the very nature of their organization and even against their own interest. So they end in letting things go.

In short, one can install any software, fall into the community illusion, thinking that making people participate in addition to their work in above the the flow communities will be enough. If nothing is done to proceed to the newt next, interest and motivation will decrease because of lack of coherence, direct benefits.

I’m even ready to bet that many of yesterday and today’s so-called successes will be only souvenirs in one or two years. When the community bubble, disconnected from the reality of operations will burst, when programs relying only one people’s willingness and passion will fail and, with them, window-dressing projects.

Guess what ? It’s more or less the conclusions of a recent McKinsey study. What does it say ?

Social Business should become structural

November 1, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : there is no change without people and social business or 2.0 projects are not exceptions. WIthout a good sponsor and passionate advocates, failure is often at the end of the road. But people change, come and go, and old systems often come back to life once the bright leaders are assigned to another mission. At a certain moment, projects must be able to survive the people who initiated and lead them to become perennial. It needs to implement the social model in the deepest layers of the organizational model, what prevents from having two models fighting together in the same organization. As long as social is not more than a surface phenomenon tacked on a structure that is not, there will be few chances to demonstrate wide-scale benefits and secure the future of the project. There is not one “normal” enterprise and a social or 2.0 one working on the edge. There’s a one and only enterprise that needs clear and strong leading principles as well as common foundations for all employees.

I recently wrote on the risk of not turning the social potential released by enterprise 2.0 and social business into structural capital, the danger of projects stacked on top on the official organization or playing against it and, most generally, on the unproductive and even counter-productive nature of changining without changing. This post follows the same logic and speaks in favor of making social business or enterprise 2.0 projects structural ones.

First, I’d like to make clear what I need by “structural”. It’s about implementing social and 2.0 ways or doing things and behaviors in the deepest layers of the organizational models, creating common foundations shared by all on how to manage people, behave, process information and live with others. Foundations that should be mandatory and non negotiable. A kink of “here we work this way and not in any other”.

Of course, that’s a middle/long term goal. At the beginning, hesitating, proceeding by trial and error is logical. But having this goal in mind from the very beginning is essential and, as Roma was not built in one day, it will take a long time to get there. The risk of not doing ? Either not making the most out of social projects or see them decline over time.

Why ?

First, it’s just a matter a logic. If something is good and beneficial it should be applied to the whole organization. If it has a negative or even neutral impact, it’s better to do nothing and save resources for more worthy things. Second because no one need to be a genius to understand that an organization where some people work in one way and some in another have many chances to loose on both sides.

Let’s make a simple analogy. Let’s consider a sport…basketball for example. There are rules that makes that it’s impossible for some players to play with their feet while other are playing with their hands, that makes that some things are allowed and other prohibited. Then inside a team, there are strategies and systems that apply to all players to make the collective effort productive (the whole having to respect the above mentioned rules). If half of the players don’t respect the rules and/or does not apply the team systems it’s easy to understand how messy things may get. That’s the same in business.

These rules apply to all and, when people move, rules and systems are still applied (with more or less talent…but the basics stay and are shared by everyone). That’s also a lesson that lots of 2.0 project teaches us.

Enterprise social networking : the difference between voluntary participation and optional membership

March 22, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : If participation in social networks can only be voluntary, only voluntary people should access the network. Is this assumption, on which many adoption programs are based on, relevant ? It’s the result of a mix-up between the network and its community part, between membership and participation. It creates a frontier between those who want to try and others, a frontier that limits the spreading of the “social phenomenon” and the related benefits. If, for most workers, the network is not something obvious, it may come to them instead of waiting for people to come to the network. Interest comes from passive exposure and not from concealing to non-members. A real enterprise 2.0 or social intranet implies that everybody is a member, can browse and read, that the network is a part of the IS, that profiles have a pivotal role. What does not prevent participation from relying on people’s goodwill.

Most of times, when an assessment is made on an internal social network project, we can hear “xxxx employees decided to join”. As a matter of fact, since participation can’t be mandatory, volunteers are asked to register. So it’s logical that only a part of them can be found on the network. So, for instance, we can have 80 000 employees who can access the intranet and 6,7,8 000 that decided to also access the social network. Is that an impressive victory ? If we consider that it’s only a first step on a global roll-out program it may be, but if we consider that’s the way things should work I don’t believe in such approaches (except for very specific cases.

Of course, participation in a social network can’t be made mandatory. But this assumption deserves further explanation. Social networks are often mixed-up with communities. Participation in communities can’t be mandatory and depend on people’s goodwill. But sometimes work groups are turned into communities and, in this case, the answer is different. But things are different for the network as such, what is nothing but having a profile (they can fill in or not) and be able to connect to others, follow them, get in touch with them, follow the activity of blogs, communities, wikis etc…

The truth is critical mass is key to a successful project.

The network will spontaneously attract those who are born networkers. Some bystanders will also follow them. At then end it’s about 10% of employees. Bystanders will slowly move away (except the few that will “get” the social thing). So the network will live on volunteers, some will give up because the system will bring them back to the party line but, at the end, this small group of people will be the center of gravity of the social platform. Provided they don’t get out of breath.

This way of doing things has nothing to do with transforming work or the organization. Those who want will do things differently…and that’s all. It will only happen among them because they won’t be numerous enough to make the whole organization move with them. That’s another example of the “social bubble” syndrome that can even be painful for participants that work in a way with some people and in another way with the rest of the organization.

We can bet that some will want to join them over time. But it won’t happen if they have to reason to try, to find a personal benefit and feel like keeping the “social way”. What can bring them there ? They may think they’ll be able to find, at a given moment, the answer to a problem or the person that will be able to help. If only 10% are on the network there are many chances the others will think that it’s not worth, that there are few chances what they need will be there.

Confusing mandatory participation with mandatory membership has obviously a negative impact. That’s not because no one can be forced to participate that not everybody could access the network. There are many reasons to that :

Enterprise 2.0 : who’s the good sponsor for your project ?

February 2, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : you need high level sponsor to start what is a processus that will deeply transform your organization. Hierarchical position and budget are not enough : the sponsor should be able to carry and embody the project, show by the example and, most of all, have courage.

No one questions anymore the fact that any enterprise 2.0 or social anything project needs a strong internal sponsorship. It’s essential when a project that was born under the radar wants to become mainstream as well as when a top-down enterprise wide project needs to meet end-users. So it’s important that a top executive takes the lead to be sure that things will work. In fact, that’s not enough : we often can see projects with high-levels sponsors failing.

So, what should a good sponsor look like ?

1°) He’s a high-level person

Despite of his good-will, a local manager will only be able to achieve local projects. He will even suffer from it his superiors don’t agree and he won’t be able to use all the levers he would need. At a given moment his project will stay local or he’ll have to find a real sponsor to help, provided that, meanwhile, his initiative did not cause him too many enmities. In most of the cases, the right, good sponsor is a C level person or a director of something. But, as we’ll see, that’s not enough.

In fact, to know to what extent the project can spread, you just have to rely on the “highest common hierarchical superior” rule.

2°) He’s not necessarily the person who had the idea

Such people may have many other things to deal with and, most of the times, they don’t know what is now possible and may have a poor understanding of some issues or opportunities (generation matter). On the other hand they have a macro vision of the situation and of the corporate strategy. If they understand that such a project may be a catalyst to execute the strategy, they quickly support it.

3°) He embodies the project

Being a top executive and understanding the benefits of enterprise 2.0 is not enough. The person in question has to embody the change. Once he understands that such a project may help him, saying “I’m ok, do it and come back when it’s done” is not enough. He has to understand the levers, the message, understand it, make it his and carry it. If it’s not natural for him, workshop sessions will be needed to help him. Maybe he’ll need an “expert” close to him.

4°) He shows by the example

Advocating new behaviors, new ways of doing things is nice but doing things in this new way is better ! Saying “yes, it’s essential but I won’t myself play the game, that’s not my thing, not my generation things” means you have nearly 100% to fail. The sponsor discusses corporate issues on his blog, listen to what employees say and answers them. He walks the talk. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: adoption, courage, Enterprise 2.0, leadership, management, sponsor, sponsorship

Enterprise 2.0 people-centric ? Are you really sure ?

January 4, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 4 Comments

Summary : one of the biggest claimed contribution of enterprise 2.0 is people-centricity. But, apart from having a rich profile telling who people are and the capacity to publish information without information and sign it with their name, what does this people-centricity mean for people ? According to the principle that says the system only lives by the contents that are published, it seems that, even unconsciously, people are asked to serve the system and not the inverse. In fact, users are “promoted” to a content producer without any consideration for their ability and capacity to reuse and make the most of the shared contents. If we want the system to become really people centric we need more than this : new practices to acquire and the freedom of putting them at work. Any 2.0 approach that does not come with an empowerment project will remain content-centric, not people-centric.

One of the key elements of the proposition of value of enterprise 2.0 is to be people-centric instead of being document, processus or anything else centric. The quite clear idea behind this is to say that, if people are the organization biggest asset in the knowledge economy, the whole system has to be structured around them to serve them instead of enslaving them and monopolizing their time and attention for tasks that don’t creat any value to the detriment of those that do.

It applies to a wide and impressive range of situations : useless emails or email discussions unable to support a long and structured conversation, loss of information and knowledge that force people to waste to find them a big amount of time that won’t be available to use them, to much time used to process “internal spam”…

Centering any logic on the user means sparing him with tedious tasks so he’ll focus on those he’s irreplaceable at.

A user-centric approach would mean providing them with what they need and, most of all, teaching them to use it. Too many employees manage to find the right ideas, the good practices or information and have no means to use them. This kind of situation is often caused by lack of empowerment, when people have the right competences to implement things or to lack of support when they don’t have the competences and are looking for someone to rely on.

And what is the main line of many adoption strategy ? Make your employees contribute. Make them generate contents !

For most employees, it just does make no sense because they have the impression to be told to serve a machine they have to feed without expecting anything in return. It’s a little bit like telling a train driver that the specificity of the new “driver centric locomotive” they’ll drive is that…they’ll have to put coal into the boiler themselves.

At this point, enterprise 2.0 is not people-centric (even if there are noticeable exceptions) but content centric….and the quantity of content is often the way success is measured regardless to what contents are (re)used for.

But this is not an irreversible situation if we consider content generation as a primer But users need to know the following steps that will make them feeling like starting the content machine.

A user-centric system should :

• Guarantee users that the information and people they need will be present, identifiable and mobilisable in the system.

In other words, if we want people to get involved we’ll need more that a system used by only 10% of employees. It implies a systematic sharing of some information (to be put in the flow, with all the consequences in terms of job description, evaluation etc…)

This can partly automated. An action in a given tool can generate an element and event in an activity stream without asking people to double-enter the same content, what is something they’ll never do. Example : a salesperson enter data in the CRM should be able to enter the quantitative and “narrative” data in the same interface, one going to the CRM and the other to the social platform with a link between both. Synergies and integration are key here.

Mobilisable… here again we’ll face management/HR issues. Make oneself available may make sense for many employees. It may also make sense for the organization if employees are evaluated and rewarded according to a global optimum vs a local maximum (ex : being incited to generate a value of 10 for oneself instead of helping a colleague to generate 30.)

• Empower employees to help them reuse what they’ll get

Even if they have the impression or the certainty to find what they need, employees need to know how to (re)use it. Change the way they do things, implement a new solution to a problem is something they need to learn and has to be secured. It’s about empowerment, trust, letting go… Without these elements, information is not usable so it has no value. So contributing is useless.

• Optimize the information flow

It’s nothing but a tool logic and the good news is that it’s coming, at least from some clear-sighted vendors. “Pushing” the right sources, suggesting the right contacts to users depending on their activities, history, improves the signal/noise ration and improves the perceived value of the tool and the social approach for employees.

Building anything people-centric in the organization is allowing anyone to mobilize the right resources and information and use it to face their day-to-day problems. What I called “service oriented organization” (or SOO) two years ago shares some points with adaptive case management that will surely be a major trend in the upcoming months….and not only to provide people with a rich profile linked to their contributions in which they’ll say they love fishing or to encourage them to write tons on contents to possibly win an internal Pulitzer prize !

PS : One question came to my mind while writing this post. In your opinion, is there any difference between people-centricity and user-centricity ?

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: adoption, contents, empowerment, Enterprise 2.0, Human resources, management, people-centric, people-centricity, rich profile

What’s new in the world of intranets ? The “Global Intranet Trends for 2011″ is out !

December 3, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

Like every year at the same period of the year, lots of practitioners are waiting for Jane McConnell’s “Global Intranet Trend” to be issued. The 2011 edition is out. Here’s what we can learn from it in a few lines :

• 5 main trends :

- the intranet is the front door of a “workplace web”. It’s not only a communication tool that serves the enterprise but a set of work tools for employees.

- It’s becoming more collaborative (even if the road is still long…)

- It’s becoming “real time” because of social networking or microblogging tools (used by more than 20% organizations either on a global scale on in pilot phase).

- It’s becoming mobile : more and more employees can access it from outside of the office and on mobile devices.

• Growing impact of social networks

Only 20% organizations that use social media try to measure the generated value and 50% plan to do so in the future. Those that measure see improvements in information sharing, faster decisions and problem solving, a decrease in the volume of emails, and the emergence of previously unrecognized experts.

But the road is long : 4 years are needed for a full adoption. Moreover (but is it surprising ?) senior managers are not setting an example.

• 2 challenges for 2011

- establish an appropriate governance that will deal with bot collaboration, the intranet and the “social” dimension while involving all stakeholders at the highest level since it’s a cross organization global project.

- facilitate the “social” dimension that raises new questions on communication and collaboration strategies and turn all the mobilized energies into a clear business value.

Reading the report suggest that we’ve reached a tipping point. But the gap between leaders and the others shows that there’s still a lot of work to be done.

It’s clear that the intranet is still (too much ?) seen as a communication tool and even if the vision of a workplace place is getting stronger, there’s too little maturity in value measurement. Because strategies and governance models are still unclear ?

Anyways, this survey says a lot about the state of the art and the main tends, relying on many focuses on tools, usages, change practices with a systematic comparison between leaders and followers. 90 very rich pages that sum up a research that’s been conducted with 440 organizations.

I’ll focus on some key learnings in future posts.

Meanwhile, you can download an “executive snapshot’ or buy it here.

Enjoy your reading !

Filed Under: Intranets and digital workplace Tagged With: adoption, Communication, global intranet trends, intranet, intranet 2.0, microbloggin, social networks

Fun at work or fun in work ?

August 19, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

Résumé : albeit the funny side of social media is often used as an argument for adoption, we have to admit that even if organization prefer to have happy employees they ae not ready to pay to make them have fun at work. Either we consider that’s regrettable form of schizophrenia or the consequence of a culture that dates from another century, facts are facts. So fun should only be the happy side effect of something else above all…be free. Used in the workplace, social media offer possibilities like nothing beforme : more than creating funny spaces and times in the workplace, they allow to make fun a part of people’s work, making it at the same time a consequence, a lever,and a part of a continuous improvement logic that interest and reassure organizations.

Amongst the issues that inspire me contradictory feelings about enterprise 2.0, fun at work is not the least.

There’s a belief shared by everybody in the workplace : employees who enjoy what they do are more efficient and it has a positive impact on work atmosphre. One of the best way to make it happen is, to some extent, to make work more fun. In the same way, everybody knows the value of a good atmosphere in the workplace. Note the difference between both : in one case we talk about the nature of work, in the other the context where it takes place : some people may hate they job but love their company, colleagues and the overall context (despite it never lasts for a long time).

A part of enterprise 2.0 value proposal is to bring fun, some even saying that in such a context the intranet looks like a big party were all employees gather. I fully suscribe to this point of view but, at the same time, I’m very uncomfortable with it

- because I experienced it (and still doing), I can tell it changes the way you interact with others, it improves relationships and, even if I consider my internal social network as a business too, I prefer to connect to it when I open my computing rather than openning my mailbox (in addition to the fact it’s a more efficient tool too…).

- no organization would refuse to make their employees happier.

- there’s a lot of organizations (even a majority ?) where the concept of fun at work is not seen as being compatible with work. It means that employees are wasting their time and would be more productive if they didn’t have fun or that they are not busy enough. Anyway, in such organizations, most of employees don’t want managers to think they’re having fun (and managers don’t want their superiors to think they’re having fun too even if they’d like…all are human being and share the same DNA). Maybe it’s a pity but the fact is things are more complicated that we would like them to be.

- most companies would be ready to invest to make their employees happy. None to make them have fun at work. I’m not saying that no one understands how it matters, but it’s impossible to come with this argument alone in front of any executive to get fundings for such a project.

- to some extent, even if the “productivity” side of enterprise 2.0 is seducing, many organizations may fear its “funny side”, only for self-esteem and image reasons. So that’s an argument that has to be used very cautiously.

So…how to do ? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: adoption, change, change-management, culture, fun, games, Human resources, intranet, serious games, social media

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.

Are we sure people prefer openness rather than constraints ?

August 12, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 20 Comments

One of these last years most important trend that is lasting enought to be more than a fashion, is the switch from a closed and constrained world to an open and flexible one.

- from proprietary and closes information systems to open ones

- from a communication model where those who can speak and those who must listen are defined in advance.

- from a rigid and structured working model to an adhoc one

- from a top down management model based on command and control to a model that’s rather based on support and facilitation.

According to many specialists these are major aspirations that are the consequence a of societal change. 40 years after “prohibiting was prohibited”, now imposing is prohibited.

There are two reasons to switch from one mode to the other. The first is nearly philosophic and political, the other is more rational and has to do with the limits and advantages of each model in today’s economy. But businesses are more likely to prefer the old one and they don’t care at all about the philosophical discourse and, most of all, in retrospect, assumption according to which employees are expecting such a change in the workplace can be questioned. Are we actually facing new aspirations or only choices made by default ?

Whoever has already experimented this kind of switch in the workplace has to admit it’s much more difficult than expected and that either the expectations were overestimated or employees are afraid to turn what they ask for into action. Managers are afraid to lose control, employees fear their new autonomy.

If employees ask for flexibility and autonomy, they also want structure and sense, a guiding principle to rely on. In short, if they want more freedom on the “how”, they want to be reassured about “what”, “what for” and “when”. Business processes were in many discussions at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, and these two topics are very close :it‘s the articulation of the informal layer with structured activities that leads sense and alignment.

Isn’t it paradoxical that to get rid of one constraint people need to grab hold of it ? No if we take a different standpoint. Do people, internauts, employees look from freedom and openness or are they looking for the reassuring comfort of systems and methods that give them few autonomy ?

In restrospect, if we put integrists of all kind aside, those who hate constraints and authority and those for refuse to take any responsability, what’s left ? Average people don’t care about this debate, they’re not looking for either openness or constraints, they only want things that work.

- open information systems because they’re fed up being locked in systems that does not work and don’t provide them with the information they need

- open work models because the rigid ones prevent them for achieving their objectives.

People do not challenge closed and constrained approaches when they work, reassure them and lead to the expected results. The question comes when these models do not work anymore.

We seldom mention that but their are rigid models that work and employees do not question them because the can do their work without having to accomplish miracles everyday.

Autonomy and freedom in the workspace seem to be less a quest than stopgap solutions to what does not work. At end end it’s quite the same but not totally.

In the workplace, some things have to be known before trying to implement any open system ;

- people won’t buy it it it does not replace / complement, a closed system that does not work. If the actuel system works, support will be poor.

- people need a framework, guiding principles, even when it’s about autonomy. When can they take intiatives, to what extent, when to switch back to the “nomal” system. There’s a need for a system of graduated constraints instead of the manichean “process vs no control”.

“Open” is not an expectation in itself but the solution to a problem. So don’t forget to tell what problem and explain the relationship between the problem and the solution to make people adopt it.

At the end this is a paradoxical situation : employees reject rigid systems that does not work and worry when the new systems are not rigid enough.