Are we sure people prefer openness rather than constraints ?

August 12, 2010 By 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.

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

Need to take users by the hand ? Remember they only have two !

July 13, 2010 By Leave a Comment

It does not matter things are seen from the people or technology point of view, since we all know that people seldom embrace new things keeping their eyes shut and without questionning (even more in the workplace) we all understand that users have to be taken by the hand and accompanied. On the other hand, the failure of many strategies aiming at doing so show that many change programs do not know where to find the hand or have a wrong idea about its location.

It means that beyond the myth of multitasking, employees focus on two things and that all their attention goes there. It’s not a matter of lack of goodwill but they can’t do more if they want to do things well and keep their concentration. So any other issue is seen as peripheral, and dealing with it will force employees either to make it superficially or to stop doing something important, come back to it later and make up the delay later. Nothing pleasant at all.

Every day, people have one hand in their email client and the other in their structured activities (call it process, workflow…) and the tools that help them to manage and deal with these activities. The first is their principal means of communication, the only that even if it’s not properly used, keep them in touch with everyone. The second is the reason why they have been hired, what they are evaluated on, what they have to do (and do it well) before thinking of doing anything else.

That can help us to draw some conclusions in terms of change management. Since, in order to grab a hand we have to know where it is, it’s impossible to do anything without taking into account the email and its place in employees workaday life or the relationship between the new things and the structured activities. Any other angle won’t impact employees and will fail. Then, we’ll have to explain how to put their hands elsewhere won’t prevent them from doing what they used to do before, what is essential to their job.

Any other approach would be like telling a driver “take you hands off the wheel” without telling him that, on top of being enabled to do much more things, he’ll be provided by something that will at least help him to drive better than with a steering wheel.

It also has consequences on technology for both companies that try to implement social software and vendors who provide solutions to these companies. There is an incredible number on players on this market despite it has reached a consolidation phase and each of them is pushing a different approach, focusing on a specific kind of social activity to seduce buyers. The truth is there are only two valid approaches and not one more. The rest is only marketing blah-blah and even if the verbiage may sound seducing, it never survives to the confrontation with real business.

No solution can be sustainably adopted on a large scale in any organization if it doesn’t meet at least one of the following requirements (both is better) :

- high integration in email clients. It can come in different ways, from the most simple one (alerts / notifications) to the most accomplished (widget in the client, shared data and services)

- integration with tools that are used for structured activities (CRM, ERP, BPM…even ECM). Interactions and conversations often come from the need to solve a business problem…guess where these problems emerge and are identified ?

Many lines can be taken in front of employees, many tools can be proposed. The truth is much simple : who does not tackle one of these points of entry is saying things that make no sense for employees, adds problems without bringing any solution.

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

Enterprise 2.0 conference : a strategic agenda for 2010-2011

June 18, 2010 By 15 Comments

Before going deeper into some points I mentioned on my first post on the conference, I’d like to sum some things up about the last two days and the conclusion of the event.

The conference was, in my opinion, doing in a peaceful way, with good and useful contents but nothing really impressive. The cause may be the fast spreading of best practices and adoption methodologies (mostly thanks to the Council) that increased the number of successful projects while making them all look a little bit alike. This is quite a good thing : we can’t be deceived to see that success is becoming more and more the norm and less an excpetion. So, no spectacular new case but many interesting things from a qualitive standpoint, like MITRE or Sony that are a good evidences of the more and more bluring nature of the organization borders.

I wanted to focus on sessions about “measure and value”. The result was a mixed feeling. Many interesting and insightful things but I felt there were many hesitations : the often used “over the flow” approach needs some time to deliver operational results while a “in the flow / business process” driven one, even if more “technical” and hard to implement, may bring some measurable things faster.

Then came what is, my opinion, the major teachings of this event. We had to wait for the very last session to get it. People were ask to list the issues they would have liked to be more addressed in the conference. The result was eloquent :

- integration with business processes

- metrics

- local culture issues

In my opinion these points have been, for many reasons, overlooked too often for years, but they can’t be swept aside anymore if we want to, first, demonstrate that enterprise 2.0 is a major improvement to organizational models and not only a “nice to have” and, second, address the most reluctant and mistrustful businesses that only pay attention to rational approaches.

I’ve been writing and focusing a lot on these issues for the last twelve months what makes me say that the fact these three issues come together is not a  coincidence.

- enteprises create value through business processes, so overlooking them is the best way not to impact value creation. I don’t mean all these processes are efficient or useful and that a cleaning session is not needed. Anyway, this issue must be dealt with as a priority.

- when the goal is to improve a business process, it’s not difficult to find the right indicators since they are those that apply to the process in question. THat said, it’s obvious that new ones can also be introduced and some irrelevant one removed.

- multination companies realize that they can’t use the same adoption model in every country and have to customize it according to local cultures. Most of all, the adoption council that gathers many organizations from all around the world, alerted the enterprise 2.0 ecosystem on that. Seen from my european and french viewpoint, cultural and business process issues are tied. When it comes to address less open but sceptical and change averse cultures, involving people who fear overexposing themselves and engaging too much, the best way to bring both organizations and people to adopt new behaviors and tools is to take them by their lowest common denominator, that is reassuring and less sensitive on a human point of view. This point of entry is business processes.

In short, it’s about adding to adoption strategies (a word I’ve often found restrictive) that often focus on affect, enthusiasm and not enough on delivery, the sense and alignment that are key to any successful transformation.

These three issues are the pillars of the work that has to be done in the upcoming month in order to build comprehensive corporate strategies and this message is a strong signal for those who are starting their social media journey and only see it under an informal viewpoint, disconnected from day to day operations.

Lots of work to do. But lot of promising things for organizations too.

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

My first takes on Enterprise 2.0 conference

June 16, 2010 By 4 Comments

Here are my first takes after one day of workshop about adoption best practices and one of conference. That’s a quick overview and I’ll take time to go deeper into it once I’m back in Paris. To be as clear as possible I’ll tackle the topic taking three view points : vision, methodology and cases.

1°) Vision

It seems that enterprise 2.0 is now at the crossroads. On the one hand the well known discourse on social media adoption within the workplace, the “it’s about people” and, on the other hand, a vague feeling of emptyness as if something was missing. It’s  like after having pushed the 100% human, informal, unstructured thing to its limit, people (finally ?) realize that the model had its limits or that it was possible to go further and have a discours and a value propostion that fit more “real” companies expectations. By “real” I mean those who have not one many visionnaries on their board, not a passionate and talented project manager and not a culture that’s open to change.

Two meaningful things have to be mentioned. SAP came to talk about “connecting people to processes” and one of the teachings from the session led by Oliver Marks and Dennis Howlett is that content and context have to be embeded into business processes and that that is the current missing link in enterpise 2.0. While Howlett is oftened said being “on the enterprise 2.0 borderline” and tend to have a sceptical discourse, there are evidences his pragmatism brings a needed pragmatism and common sense in the field of dreams.

If I consider this regarding to my the speech I gave last week in Milan on “bringing conversations into proceses to get the most out of your human capital) I think we are facing a major issue that, if not dealt with, will bring back enterprise 2.0 to the category of the nice ideas that seldom worked because of lack of realism.

Second point : the internal/external barrier is collapsing : organizations think in terms of ecosystem and marketplace and considering the inside and the outside of the company as watertight bubbles is not possible anymore. But I already mentioned that here. Anyway, there’s a point really worht being mentioned : nobody talks about intranets anymore. A sign ?

Conclusion : enterprise 2.0 is at the end of a stage and is taking a breath before going into the next one. Definitively a tipping point. If we don’t want this transition moment to become a boring trip that leads to the cemetary we’ll have to put  our hands deep in business processes and admit one thing : the in-the-flow approach is the one to start with when addressing average organizations. If this move is understood, enterprise 2.0 may be skyrocketing very soon.

2°) Method

That’s the logic consequence of what’s above. After the “community and passion” period, a more rational approach seems to be emerging, more business process oriented. Moreover, during the excellent adoption council workshop, Schneider Electric was very clear : “meet users and solve their pains tackling business processes”. Compared to CSC, last year’s rockstar, an interesting evolution can be seen. CSC had a “business problem solving approach” that makes them impressively successful compared to those who only had a “connect, socialize and wait” approach. Schneider is going one step further, tackling business processes. Let them manage their project and look how it’s doing in one year.

On the other hand more attention is becoming to be paid to European HR and legal issues that were often overlooked in the past and are the reason why our organizations started a little bit slower.

3°) Cases

This conference is definitively consistant. Except the confirmations of last years successes (CSC for instance) I did not see this year (at the time I’m writing…we’re only at the beginning) the case that would have made me fall down of my chair. That’s normal : since many adoption best practices are known and have been gathered and consolidated, many cases now look alike and, to some extent, banalisation is a proof of success. On the other hand I’m looking forward to seing more advanced business process driven methodologies and the results they brought (next year ?). I think that enterprise 2.0 hav mostly been experienced by convinced organizations till then and that we now need a model for the rational-sceptic ones. What’s funny is that these new methodologies may look like what’s currently being done in Europe where we quickly had to deal with such organizations and had to adapt consequently.

What if the next enterprise 2.0 rockstars would be european ? French, Italian, German ? I would only be half surprised. After a very slow start that is usual in our contries and the very long work that has to be made beforehand considering legal, hr and cultural issues, I’m sure many “nice” things will emerge soon.

Besides that, a very competent person in the enterprise 2.0 field told me :”maybe you’re right, we lack concrete business results measurement”. Me : “I’m sure these results are often there, but sometimes we don’t measure the right things or refuse to implement relevant new indicators“. If any project aims at improving the performance of a business process, you only have to measure its delivery, what is concrete and understandable by any business. If the 2.0 approach is applied to something that has nothing to do with value creation, then things get really complicated.

To be continued

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

Enterprise 2.0 adoption : it’s about comfort

June 1, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Times are changing. After having spend years discussing the “what and why”, the enterprise 2.0 world is now focusing on the “how” what is quite a good thing. So we discuss a lot adoption strategies, a wording I’m not comfortable with but that will be used in this blog because I have nothing better to suggest.

The challenge is both simple and complex at the same time. It’s about bringing new ways to collaborate in the workplace, positionning and articulating them with what’s existing, while taking the software side into consideration. Generally, we know where we start from (even if I often recommend a deep audit to avoid the biases caused by the misrepresentation people may have of the way their own business is doing) and with a good methodology and good advisors it’s not hard to know where to do. But finding the right way to get there is not the easiest part of the work.

One may be tempted to directly bring employees from the point A to the point B by selling him the approach in a nice-looking gift box. We now know that it seldom works and employee are blamed for refusing change. In my opinion it’s a too easy shortcut because it relies on the assumption that people go from A to B simply by pressing a on-off switch whereas it’s about travelling through a road. And when it comes to make a long trip in a foreign and unknown land, we’re not all created equal.

When we talk about a starting point, we don’t only mean the current practices in the workplace (that are not even unform but are often aligned by dumbing down) but also personal practices.That’s an important point because a part of the issue is related to social media which is the first significant example of adoption of general public tools in the enterprise world. But we also know that people won’t adopt at work at work behaviors they don’t have in their own private life. So it’s important to know what is their actual state of adoption before going further. Do they use such or such tool ? Are they passive ? Active ? Connectors ? Only readers ? It really matter even if these practices will have to be professionalized. This has to be assessed at both individual and collective levels because we’re talking about collective practices. If 2% employees are heavy users and 98% refuse to have a Facebook account, even if the 2% are a real opportunity, the 90% are the limitating factor. Encouraging the firsts won’t be of any use if the others don’t make any progress.

In order to make the 98% make some progress we can wait for the “practice leaders” to help them. It may take some time, leaders can discourage. That’s a good idea but maybe some facilitation is needed. And to go further we need to go beyond the way they master tools and their capacity to adopt new behaviors. We need to care about their comfort !

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

What do employees need to turn 2.0 ?

May 27, 2010 By 2 Comments

The paradox of enterprise 2.0 is that even when businesses manage to go on their fear of the unknown and decide to embrace this new paradigm, they are often not followed by their employees even if they bring a solution to their problems with solutions that are supposed to make their work easier.

Everybody now understands that employees need mor than tools and communication campaigns to adopt new practices and behaviors even if that would be beneficial to them. Even saying “do whatever you want, we trust you” doesn’t work”.

Here’s a little checklist of customer’s expectations.

• What are the expected outcomes ? What am I supposed to “produce” on these tools, and what is expected from the groups / communities I’m a part of.

• What are the limits to my responsability ? To what extent am I autonomous, beyond which point should I ask for permission or refrain from doing anything.

• Is it a part of the job I’m paid to do ? Will my manager or any person paying me with his budget consider my activity as wasted time ? Will they blame me for participating or reward me ?

• What’s my exposure ? How to control it ? What kind of information am I supposed to share ? Facts or opinions that engage me ? Can I set my own limit ? Who can access what ? And what will the information I share be used for ?

• Show me first and then I’ll follow.

• Before asking to me to any new thing, show me how all that can help me to do what I’m already doing today, how it makes it simpler and easier.

• Don’t scatter my attention. I already have so much to do so don’t distract me with pointless information and issues that have no added value according to my objectives and daily tasks.

• Don’t break my “personal workflow”. I don’t have time to play with 3 applications, aggregate information, forward it, copy/past. In this case I’ll focus on the tool that is not the best but that can do a little bit of anything, even not in an efficient way, without having to switch between several apps. (email ?)

• Don’t add but remove. For 50 years, the response to any new issue was a new layer of solution (tools, rules, practices), These layers have been piling up for decades and we’ve reached such a point that they slow me down and are sometimes contradictory the one with the other. Instead of adding new layers, remove those that are actual burdens, doesn’t make any sense anymore and are useless.

• Don’t bring me into one more experiment. I’m not a guinea-pig and the time I’m investing penalizes me in my real work and is even bad for my image and reputiation. I’m ready to learn, to explore, provided it won’t be shut down in 6 months and it will help me in my day-to-day word.

• How information will be used ? Reused ? It will help me to know what to share.

• Teach me, show me how to articulate the structured and unstructured part of my work, the formal and informal ones. And I hope tools take this need for articulation into account because I don’t want to play the human connector.

• Teach me how to seamlessly integrate it in my daily work and how to translate it into a simple, scripte, reassuring routine I’ll follow without thinking about it.

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

Setting up a pilot is not only a matter of sizing

May 18, 2010 By 1 Comment

Andrew McAfee recently raised the question Michael Idinopulos discussed some months ago :  is the concept of “pilot” relevant to enterprise 2.0 and should we drop it. Some (excellents) thoughts can also be found on Emanuele Quintarelli‘s blog.

In fact the cause of the discussions comes from some assumptions that are not always true :

1°) Pilot applies to over-the-flow activities

2°) The only thing that makes a pilot different from a mainstream project is the number of participants

In this case where reaching a critical mass is…critical, limitating the number of participants is an heresy that is equivalent to shooting oneself in the feet at the beginning of the projet. If something as to be limitated, rather limit the duration than the size (what was brilliantly done at CSC for instance).

That said, thninking that the underlying question with pilots is only about sizing may be a bit hasty.

1°) The question of a preliminary phase

Before going further, what matters is to know if a preliminary phase is needed before scaling up the project. Obviously the answer is yes : businesses need to be sure they can manage things and get some kind of benefits on a smaller scale before applying a new concept to the whole organization.

So the issue is not there but in what this phase is made of. Starting with its goal.

2°) What goal ?

I won’t elaborate too much since I already tackled this issue a few weeks ago. It’s important to know whether this phase aims at taming new approaches that will be implemented on a larger scale anyway or at assessing if the new approaches have to be implemented or not. The stake is not trivial : it’s hard to involve employees in something that can be shut down anywhen, with no certainty about its durability.

3°) What name ?

As strange as it may seem, the way this phase is called is not neutral. On the user side first (pilot = be sure we won’t give up…but may seem a little bit top down / experimentation : you are guinea-pigs, we don’t promise anything) but also on the business side, some namings making it easier to get the “strategic project” label and the exectuive sponsorship that comes with.

Maybe some have found the “magical name” that reconcile both needs.

4°) What kind of social experience ?

Maybe that’s where things should start. Deploying enterprise 2.0 logics and tolls is not about doing something uniform. As I mentioned in the past, there is “social for communities” and “social for teams“. In other words, gathering an undefined population around some topics and optimizing the “organic” functioning (departments, teams…) of an organization are two complementary but different logics. I won’t elaborate on the management and leadership differences between both and the difference bewteen conversations and interactions, what matters is that in the one case a critical mass is needed and in the other a deeper work on alignment and integration in workaday practices and actions is  key. In short, that’s one more case where distinguishing between in the flow and over the flow matters, and that’s a part of the pre-rpject analysis that’s too often overlooked.

The truth is that both approaches have to articulate and live together in the organization, so it should be the same in a pilot. In the other hand, according to the goals (it’s possible to experiment many social experiences at the same time) businesses should now that some experiences have a defined and limited number of participants by definition and some others need a critical mass.

So the matter is neither sizing nor “pilot or not pilot” : it’s about knowing what is aimed at, what the organization is trying to validate, assess, learn…and the rest will naturally come.

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

Will Adam Smith drive businesses in the future ? I’m doubtful…

May 11, 2010 By 4 Comments

We often say that implementing enterprise 2.0 is useless if it’s done in an 1.0. Said like this, even if “we” understand what it means, it’s still hard to get for many people.

That refers to enterprise models named according as two eras of the internet : one named 1.0 and the other 2.0. In practical terms it’s about opposing a top-down and directive model an emerging relying on the existence of an “invisible hand” that, in the same way as Adam’s Smith theory in economics, would make people personal actions and choices contribute to a collective purpose without the need of organizing anything.

Anyway, it’s an opposition between an out-of-breath dirigist model and harrowing one that means for businesses “it’s critical to your survival but you don’t have to do anything…just trust your employees and let them do what they decide to do”. In the same way that the economical word realized that Adam’s Smith’s invisible hand needed some guidance, the same conclusion is imposing upon businesses that can’t rely on serendipity to ensure their sustainability and success.

Here’s a quick comparison of “1.0″, “2.0″ and “2.0 rationalized” adoption principles.

1.02.0Rationalized 2.0
Command and controlLet people doset up goals, build a framework, give guidance and let people do
Adoption is order-drivenAdoption is driven by desireAdoption is driven by sense
Everythings has to be scriptedPeople are free to make decision and actA light script helps people being reassured and then they grow bold and become more autonomous
Only what can be used immediately and provide immediate benefits is allowedAnything may be useful one dayNeed to articulate in the flow and over the flow activities, give each a framework a timeframe
Everything is verticalEverything is horizontal and networkedHorizontal and vertical articulate, verticality is a responsability and decision making model, horizontality is a model for getting things done
Focus on the organic structure (team, departments...)Focus on communitiesOrganic and communities articulate.
What is not expressly authorized is prohibitedPeople should respect the "etiquette". Nothing is mandatory.Everything that's out of a defined framework is subject to validation, the rest is authorized is possible. The "Don't be stupid" rule applies.

Generally speaking it seems obvious that Serendipity and the Invisible hand, even if they can bring many benefits to excessively rigid organizations, aren’t viable business or organizational models alone.

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

Social media and ricocheting benefits difficulties

April 13, 2010 By Leave a Comment

To convince peope to start using social media in the workplace it’s important to demonstrate quick personal benefits. And that’s not alsways that easy

Let’s consider profiles for instance. What’s my interest in filling in a rich profile where I’ll share many informations about me and know that the more socially active I’ll be the more this profile will refine according to my readings, my activities, the tags I use etc ? I’ll help who needs someone like me to find me, of course, but that’s not what we can call a direct personal benefit. Of course, if others do the same, I’ll be able to find my “saviors” and that’s an actual beneif. But the lofgic that will make make me fill in my profile hoping that it will gave others the idea to do the same is so nebulous that the average user may not understand the direct benefit. More, since as anyone I’m more than very busy, I don’t have time for such a thing. So I’ll update my profile later…maybe…

Since microblogging is becoming a trendy tropic, its “quick and direct” benefit is also being questioned. One may be “give others visibility on what I’m doing to avoid answering endlessly to the same questions”. Ok…the benefit seems more direct…but we can go one step further.

In a team, other often makes decision that have consequences for us. They overestimate our availability, decide to take an action without knowing if it’s coherent with what we’re doing etc… and, at the end, we have to explain, do things we didn’t plan or want,  keep up appearnaces. Well used with scenarios that fit the needs of teamwork, microblogging help others to make better decisions and, most of all, avoid us suffering from the impact of decisions made regardless of the context.

Does the fact that information sharing through social media produces a benefit that’s not direct but ricocheting inspire you anything special regarding to social media adoption ? Is it something that’s been neglected or underestimated ?

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

My takes on the Enterprise 2.0 Forum : Enterprise 2.0 and the end of social washing

March 23, 2010 By 9 Comments

Capture d’écran 2010-01-23 à 00.12.50I’d like to take a few minutes to share with you my takes about the last  Enterprise 2.0 Forum that took place in Paris on march 17th et 18 th. First, a few words about the context.

I was looking for a professional event about enterprise 2.0 in Paris. Why do I mean by “professional” ? I’m fed up with the usual 40 min “show flat” presentations which conclusion is “it’s really awesome but I can’t do this in my company” and where we have the vague impression that insteat of getting answers to our problems we’re being sold a little piece of dream that comes with a big piece of software. In brief, attendees leave with shining stars in they eyes but realize, when the time to wake up comes, that it does not help them to achieve anything. I don’t even mention the events where we gather among experts, gurus, convinced practictionners to share certainties and common places before we realize that those we’re supposed to help weren’t in the room.

I came to the last Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Frankfurt with this idea in mind and, there, two things surprised me in a positive way. First, the format, that favors exchanges instead of one way talks (exchanges with the speaker but also among attendees) and, second, the fact that sponsors, even present around the event and the conference room were not allowed on stage to turn case studies into disguised sales speeches. So I we had the idea to bring this format to Paris, with a modest ambition regarding to the time we had : demonstrate it was possible in a local an french context and provide attendees not with discourses but with a strong added value. I think we did it and can already promise you there will be a second edition next year and than having 12 months instead of 2 to organize it will allow us to make things even better ans maybe bigger.

Last thing before delivering my takes. We usually judge this kind of event regarding to the quality of speeches (and of the buffet if you’re french). That’s not enough in the format we chose because it relies on an active participation from attendees (what implies to keep an “human size” to favor discussions). If I got many positives feedbacks, it’s also mainly because of the audience that asked the right questions and started vibrant discussions. When a conference room is crowed with people that have to het things done in their company, the debate easily reaches a higher level.

After the form, the substance. Here are my conclusions in a few points

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