Bpm | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

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

July 13, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 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: adoption, bpm, business process, change, change-management, crm, Enterprise 2.0, enterprise-social-software, erp, social computing, Social Networking

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

December 15, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 3 Comments

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

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

The concept : enterprise 2.0 as a new layer

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

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

A few weeks ago I wrote :

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

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

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

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

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

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business Tagged With: activity-specific social software, bpm, bpm 2.0, business process, community management, Enterprise 2.0, enterprise-social-software, implementiation, management, on the flow, over the flow, processes, social-software, socio-collaborative management, workflows

You want your employees to be more “social” ? Rely on their selfishness

November 3, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Among all the projects that have a “2.0 label”, it’s possible to make a distinction between those that are mainly about social networkings and those that aim at bringing traditional office applications on the cloud. Each kind addresses specific needs and has its own barriers. In one case it’s about changing the way people work, in the other it’s about making them use their browser instead of their usual desktop application, what makes me say it’s more about Office 2.0 than enterprise 2.0. In both cases, getting over IT depts’ reluctance is everything but trivial, Office 2.0 seems to be less sensible on an adoption side since it does not impact people’s behaviors that much : they will still write docuemtns, fill spreadshits, but in another interface (but I’m not saying that’s easy !) I’ll also add that applications like Google Docs makes it possible to make giant steps in collaboration (or rather co-building…). All the people I’ve that who once worked on both kind of projects told me the same thing : “Office 2.0 is simpler (or less hard) than enterprise 2.0. But collaboration matters in Office 2.0 too, even if less developped than in Enterprise 2.0″. Understanding what that means may be of some importance.

Who would accept to make everything he writes on his word processor public ? No one. In the other hand, starting a work on one’s own and invite people to collaborate as and when needed because some help is needed, because it’s better to ask a specialist to write a specific part, because proof-reading is needed or because the manager needs to know how things are going on without getting a daily report makes a lot of sense. One starts on his own and widens the scope of the human, social and knowledge capital that is used he can’t do more, when he realizes he won’t be able to deliver on time or when he faces his limits. I think that enterprise 2.0 has a lot to learn from that, most of all on the adoption side. What drives collaboration is “me, the goals I’m assigned, my tasks, my issued”, and if we want to bring people to the logic that will make them help their colleagues, they first need to understand how this logic will serve them. Then for the same reasons they bring themselves to “invite” people on their Google Docs, they’ll initiate the famous conversations that are so important in the 2.0 culture.

That’s the evidence that, for 99% workers, things are not social by nature but by need. Everything starts with a (personal) taks, with (personal) limits that are faced and with the need of making all these things “social” in order to get out of the situation. Such a logic can lead to a systematic sharing not because people want to share but because they realize they have to. Conversely, any systematic sharing that would not be the result of this reasonning would be against people’s nature and causes apprehension.

What conclusions can we draw ?

IT interests : good news but too much compartmentalization

October 30, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

I recently came across this this chart about what IT departments are currently thinking about. What inspires me some thoughts.

First point, as mentioned in the post where I found this document, there’s nothing really new. Many of these issues have been discussed for years, some are more recent but even when names change, the topics themselves don’t.

Second point : cloud computing is on the top of the list. That’s the evidence, but did we need some more, that the topic is really a true current concern. But we have to be careful and don’t make numbers say what they don’t : being interested in something does not mean adopting it, it even may mean finding arguments to find it. As a friend of mine who works as a plane pilot, often says : “The reason why I’m interested in plane crashes is because I want to avoid them, not because I want to have one”. Behind, nothing emerges (I don’t consider the difference between 47% and 51% as significant).

Third point, the most interesting one in my opinion : the link between many of these topics. BI and BPM : don’t you think that one the the current challenges is to enrich BPM with BI ? Aren’t wikis, blogs etc.. and collaboration tools the two sides of one only thing ? By the way, to enrich BI, isn’t it necessary to harness the value contained into the unstructured information carried by blogs, wikis and social networks ? Good news : social networks come one rank behind. As for content management, isn’t it the formal alter ego of social medias ? Here again, two sides of one global issued.

So, at first sight, there’s a kind of coherence that is a good news. On the other side I’m afraid that all these issues may be thought independantly, without any articulation between one and another just when they must be thought jointly if we don’t want to see things that are complementary by nature confront each other. Keep in mind that operations are expecting such a coherent and integrated approach from the IT depts instead of technological projects isolated the one from the other which lack of coherence have negative impacts on adoption and value creation.

Filed Under: Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: BI, blogs, bpm, business intelligence, cloud computing, social networks, Software & Tools

Enterprise 2.0 as a part of the Global Enterprise

May 12, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 6 Comments

Many questioning about enterprise 2.0 these last weeks. How to make it work, how help companies to understand it, how to calculate the ROI ? So many questions that, at the end, can be summed up in only one : undestranding how these new logics can integrate into the existing and add to it. Without that, it’s obvious that either companies don’t dare either they will dare with overcautiousness and won’tbe able to get the most from their initiative, either will dare in a bad way and things will be counter-productives.

One consequence of this misunderstanding is that “2.0 projects” are isolated from the “real enterprise” in order to preven itself from any side effect of something that’s still not well understood (what proves once again how important it is to find answers to all these questions). So, what’s needed is to help companies to visualize things according to what they are today and according to their very nature.

First, the primary goal of any enterprise has to be identified. Easy : make money. Period. Of course we can discuss what can be done with that money and what can and cannot be done to make it, but it is the only undisputable goal.

What leads to an undisputable consequence : companies spend their time trying to organize themselves in order to produce as efficiently as possible. Becoming an enterprise 2.0 is not a goal for any enterprise and should not be. The only one is : improving the way things are done everyday, the way it produces.

But what does “production” really mean ?

Enterprise 2.0 (finally) moves toward Enterprise

April 14, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 5 Comments

An interesting and salutary move is being iniated in the small world of both web and enterprise 2.0. It’s about what I would call a “de-technologization” of the concept and, according to me, will take back enterprise 2.0 to a ground it should not have left : the enterprise as a productive organization that must deal with internal rules and constraints.

It slightly appeared in my old definition of enterprise 2.0 in 2007 and, particularly in my predictions for 2009. Now it seems that the time is coming. It’s the beginning of a major turn from the vision that considered that making web 2.0 tools used within companies was a goal by itself to the vision according to which they are only parts of a system.

This is confirmed by two posts I read these last days.

In this post, eminent Robert Scobble is realizing that, even if many brilliant people comment and analyze the tech side of web 2.0, they still miss the business side of things. According to me, the reality of business and its context are seldom taken into acocunt. If the goals and the needs are clear, a deep analysis of the context which is the only way to explain how to make things work for current businesses is still lacking. This was for the web 2.0 side.

On the enterprise 2.0 side, I noticed this post from Martin Koser about the the next Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Frankfurt, which brings many sensible things forward.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: bpm, Enterprise 2.0, soo, systemic, web-2.0

2.0 has to be aware of business orientation

November 25, 2007 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

In the “let’s make 2.0 a performance oriented tool instead of a nice concept”, some more ideas.

What are enteprise 2.0 specialists biggest challenges ? Overriding fear and have the tools adopted in order to demonstrate their added value.

Because by dint of hearig about agility, informal, off project spontaneous connexions between individuals, decision makers realize than, even if the concept seduces them and if they think it will lead to gains, it’s something that has nothing to do with the organization they’ve known for ages. Hence the conclusion : it’s the reverse so it’s the opposite…so it’s risky…so I’m affraid. In the following paragraphs we’ll see it’s rather about complémentarity and that [Read more...]