Business Intelligence | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

The death of serendipity ?

September 16, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : Serendipity is finding things without knowing they exist and without looking for them. On the web this phenomenon is embodies by the multiple links that makes us browse from an idea to another until we find something we would never have look for. However, the recent evolution of search engines and social networking sites can be seen as a real threat : by proposing results filtered according to people’s social profile, they segment the web and may threaten idea spreading and discovery. By relying on proximity and popularity, these tools are bringing us away from relevance. The problem will even be more critical in an enterprise context. To limit the amount of information on a relevance bases without building invisible social filters and barriers, efforts have to be made on context and correlation.

Serendipity is the ability to find something while ignoring its existence, without looking for it. We all experienced it at least once on the web : searching for something, finding a resultt and then, from one link to another, finding something which existence was unexpected until then. Serendipity relies on both the human factor and trust.

Human factor because these links that make us discover new things are made by people. Trust because depending on what we know of a person we’ll give more or less credit to what he/she says and the sources being suggested. Of course, it’s a long term mechanisms because reputation needs time to form, so does trust. This as also some things in common with curation.

Today,, the way we’re looking for information on the web is evolving. To be more precise, that’s the way information is proposed to us that’s changing. With the masses of information that search engines or social networking platforms like Facebook have about us, our contacts,habits, the results that are pushed to us are filtered to correspond to what we are. Among the masses or information that will match my search, those that come from people that are similar to me, those that will please me will be prioritized. If you wonder why, for the same search, Google gives different results to you and your friends, now you know why. The same logic applies to what appears on your Facebook homepage and what does not.

The more this logic is becoming mainstream, the less one will have any chance to discover things that come from people who don’t think the same way or think of different things. What raises two problems to me

• First one if about being locked up into a trend, ignoring what’s being said elsewhere

• The second is to be unable to access to a wide part of the information available on a given topic.

Google (and the other of its kind), desiring to please me despite of me, are ignoring the difference between what would please me and what I would need to know;

This issue is not neutral at all for internal business purposes too.e.

Business awareness : the social signal without relationship

September 28, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : Everytime we talk about social media we focus on rich relationships and exchanges, conversations, community feeling, what are very heavy and complex things to make happen. That’s forgetting that there’s a lighter and at least as productive way to use social channels : a short, factual social signal that aims at informing hand helping people to visualize their environment without engaging too much. Social media can be awesome “business awareness” tools without needing strong interpersonnal relationships.

The assumption is easy to get : social tools bring more intensity and flexibility in the way people and information behave, get organizaed, interact and thats makes it easier to invent new way of collaborating within any organization or between a business and its ecosystem. Social networks that provide lots of tool to support interpersonal relationships has become the incarnation of these approaches to such an extent that they’re often shown as the solution to any problem.

But is the monolithic vision of social networking that comes with social media relevant.

1°) Does a social network need to be conversational

It started with a conversation I had with a friend about a general public tool on the web but it can also apply to enterprise tools. We were talking about foursquare and a friend told me : “why do you use foursquare ? xxxx is much better and more engaging”. My answer “Humm…I’m not convinced”. “Yes Bertrand, on foursquare people usually check in to say where they are while on XXXXX they say things, share their state of mind, share photos, have conversations”. “How to say…In fact I don’t care at all about all these things”.

Let me explain : what I like in such tools is that I can know who is where. Everything else ils superfluous and pollutes the signal. On Foursquqre I’m looking for location information and not digressions about moods or the state of mind of M. So-and-so. There are other channels for that.

These tools are “ambient awareness” tools : they have to send short and low signals (not aggressive or intrusive), coming from my ecosystem and too much information and conversation kills the signal, making it hard to hear.

That reminds me off the conversation I had years ago with Reid Hoffman about what he called “Business Intelligence for People”. Today, I’d rather say “business awarness” but the fact remains : being social does not always mean having lots of conversation and engaging a lot but receiving / sharing a clear and short signal in order to visualize / help others to visualize what is their informational context, what’s happening in their relational environment.

So there’s a wide part of the social activity that has not to be conversationnal, rich in terms of content and interaction, and where, in fact, interactions are rather the exception than the nom. What matters there is to improve people awareness about something (business in this case) with a a clear and not overloading signal.

2°) Do social networks need to be bijective and global ? No. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: ambient awareness, BI, business awareness, business intelligence, microblogging, signal, social computing, Social Networking, social signal, twitter

What social Media Lack ? Intelligence

September 10, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- the intelligence people share with the tools

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

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

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 : my predictions for 2009

December 18, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 3 Comments

Honestly I was not sure I would conform to the annual predictions tradition. Finally, since my 2008 edition was not that bad (shift from “social tools at people’s disposal” to the acknowledgement it needed inclusion in business process) and Susan kindly asks for it, I’ll try to do something interesing this year.

That said, I will divide my note in two parts. As any good “thoughtleader” sometimes mistake predictions for his own wishes, I’ll try to be lucid enough to clearly separate both and end my note with a few pious hopes.

Let’s start !

Linkedin : from social networking to business intelligence for people

December 5, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Last week I had the pleasure to be invited to have a chat with Reid Hoffman (Founder and Chairman), Jean-Luc Vaillant (CTO) and Kevin Eyres (Director for Europe) of linkedin who invited a few blogers in a nice Parisian Restaurant in order to talk about their service, its current affairs and its future.

I’d like to point three main things out : LinekIn is now available in French which has much more consequences than the sole translation, their vision of enterprise social networks and the way they position Linkedin about that, and to end, what is according to me this kind of service’s very nature and that Reid Hoffman perfectly understood, coining a new concept called BIP.

Linkedin now in French

At first sight I’m not sure this information may interest you. But the fact a social network platform supports many languages is not only about translation. It means that many contents in different langagues will coexist on the platform. Even if one choose to complete his profile in several languages, that will change nothing to the fact discussions, “answers” will still be available in only one. The language you’ll choose for your interface will impact the language of the information that will be brought to me on my home page and search results. Globally speaking, the question of multiple languages is not trival at all, even (most of all ?), on corporate platforms, within companies.

LinkedIn and enterprise social networks

Users exchange many informations on linkedIn, share their thoughts, give tips and tricks one to the other. Some companies would prefer such things to happen on a private space, with their employees only. Reid told me that was already possible with “company group” and that they were trying to improve that, while knowing the frontier between public and company-restricted spaces and informations is very sensible.

What lead me to my next question : what if tomorrow a company asks to link linkedIn profiles to existing employee’s profiles on their intranet, indeed have their own LinkedIn inside their firewall ?

To the first question Reid answered that was something that made sense and was sometimes asked for. On the other hand, it’s importanto to know which informations can pass in each direction. Filling a profile on the intranet starting from a linkedin profile doesn’t make many problems in terms of governance. Update a linkedin profile is much more tricky because some informations are confidential and can’t be posted on a public profile. This functionnalities will soon be available but the reflexion on whether it would be an import or a synchronization (full or partial) is still on its way.

On the second point the answer came from Kevin. The enterprise social network market is real but making things por employees inside the firewall is not the same job as providing a service to individuals for their own purposes. Different levers to make it adopted, different business models… That’s not that simple. We agreed on the fact that a “personal network” relies on links people create an validate together whereas internal social networks can’t work this way except if companies want to duplicate their org-chart. So, enterprise social networks have to make real interactions and “intelectual proximity” emerge, what’s quite something different. Kevin concluded : “we’re rather in a logic of building partnerships with those who have a true expertise on internal networks”. To be followed.

But one thing is sure : one major issues for services like linkedIn will be to bridge the gap from the “personal side of my business network” and my extended network, mixing my “personal professional network” and my internal professional network according to criterias, rules and a gouvernance that have still to be defined.

In my opinion it’s this ability to build partnerships with major players on the field of enterprise social software that will be decisive at the time when the market will be mature and there will be enough room for two or three players.

And tomorrow. Business Intelligence for People ?

What’s interesting for me in a profesional network ? Linking one to another and building this incredible spider’s web that makes I’m closer to many people than I thought and I’m able to do incredible and valuable things with them ? Yes…but that’s not enough. What’s really valuable for me ?

• Knowing who met who

• Knowing what’s happening to who

• Knowing who’s doing what

• Knowing which ressource, document, information, my contacts found valuable.

• Knowing who’s wondering what. And answer (if I can) in order to show I can help on such issues.

• Knowing I can ask my network a question.

• Identify who’s the person I’m looking for among my contacts and their own contacts…

• To be continued…

This goes far beyond links. Links are only channels that are followed by informations produced by my network. It’s up to me to make a good use of it. That’s the idea behind linkedIn’s new features and apps.

Reid Hoffman calls it “Business Intelligence for People” (BIP). Perhaps “Business Intelligence by People” or “Around People” or “About people” may be relevant too.

The concept is only at its early steps but I find it rich and promising in the contexte of a knowledge economy that mainly relies on people.

Wait and see…

Filed Under: Economy & New Models, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: BIP, business intelligence, enteprise social networks, knowledge-economy, linkedin, reid hoffman, social networks

Can we identify good managers by the way their team uses the net ?

October 1, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

A very common discourse within companies is : “our people waste their time on social networks and, more globally, on the web. We have to restrict access to it”.

If, when talking about social networks, it depends on the way people use them, so its important to grant access to what useful for business, I find it very damageable when companies come to restrict access to the whole web.

What are the motives for that ?

First comes security. I think it’s more a convenient motive than a relevant one and is an excuse for the next point I’ll mention. Second, it’s IT depts job to ensure security without blocking everything. Did we remove doors and windows from houses and offices in order to prevent to struggle against burglars ? No, because we need to go outside, to see what’s happening by the window,
The second point is abiut productivity. It’s a waste of time and people are not here to do that during work hours. But what does companies mean by “doing that” ?

How to link formal and informal within the enterprise : the “still” company

May 12, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Since intangible assets only create value when they support formal business process, enterprises don’t have to create an enterprise 2.0 organization relying on informal but a system allowing formal and structured activities to take advantage from what isn’t.

If we want to visualize that, the “still” metaphor seems very relevant to me.

Connecting formal and informal knowlegde to create business value.

March 4, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

If enterprise 2.0 is to develop informal networks and tacit knowledge formalization within the enterprise, there’s still one question to be answered : how does all the spent energy contributes to create business value ?

Actually, I consider it as a keypoint in every project I manage : the use of all this intangible patrimony for formal business needs has to be organized. Because value creation will always be something structured.

Saying that, I don’t think that the “spent energy” words are quite relevant. I think “recycled energy” would be better. In fact, social networks already exist but are not used except in a very small perimeter, tacit knowledge exists too but only at an individual scale, but there are not valuable at the organization scale.

Let go back to our purpose : using informal and tacit assets in a formal business context, whitout which everything that has to do with enterprise 2.0 is useless.

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