Enterprise 2.0 does not tolerate halve measures

November 29, 2011 By 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 ?

[Read more...]

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Engaging is not delivering

November 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : tomorrow’s enterprises will be conversational and will need engagement from employees and customers. But engagement useless if not turned into concrete actions, if customers are note made actionable as parts of new social processes. Building engagement and conversations logics out of processes allowing to make the most of what is nothing more than an intention will lead to nothing except flashes in the pan.

Engagement has become a very trendy word. Either employees or customers should be engaged. But why ? Without engagement, what makes people feeling more concerned by enterprise or brand-focused collective challenges and dynamics, beyond their own assignments and objectives, it’s hard to find the fuel sustaining value co-creation systems that are the founding of tomorrow’s organizations.

So, everything is done to engage and the social tools universe plays its part in the movement. In fact, the social world is pretty much ahead because he’s one of the reason why engagement came back on the front scene these last years. On the employees’ side, I’ve already shared what I thought about it : no one should think that the use of any social platform by employees will replace a voluntaristic HR policy. It can be a part of it but nothing more.

So, let’s talk about the customer. Today’s tools make some things much more easier than they were in the pas. It’s easy to track signals and conversations about the enterprise, become proactive, join and response. That’s true that there’s no conversation without engagement, but customers can be engaged even if the enterprise chose not to invest this field : exemplarity in behaviors and product quality make it possible…social only being a substitute.

A second myth is also around. The one according to which, once the message has ben tracked, the sentiment analyzed and the conversation engaged…the job is done. I can’t count how many offers rely on this assumption : listen to your communities, engage…and it’s done. That’s a fallacy for at least two reasons. The first is that it’s not about communities but individual cases (even if gathered in community spaces…the nature of the container does not change the nature of the content) but since I’ve already dealt with this issue in previous posts there’s no time to waste on that. The second reason relates to the belief everything can be solved this way.

First, engaging the customer in a conversation does not mean engaging the customer with the brand. Facing a lamentable level of quality, conversation can make things less painful but some situations can’t be saved. And there’s no reason to blame the community manager : “if your product sucks, social media can’t change anything about it. Second, even when engaged, what is rather about a state of mind, internauts are useless for the enterprise. I used the word internaut in purpose because :

- “community member ” seldom is the reality

-  customer ? nothing tells the people involved in the conversations are customers. Most of times they are not.

- prospect ? any internaut is a potential prospect but they can help the enterprise without becoming customers (crowdsourcing, social marketing).

The internaut has to be activated within a process of any kind (marketing, r&d, services, sales…) to make engagement drive value. Having conversation without solving a problem is useless. Having conversations without trying to guess for what purposes the internaut can be actioned is useless. Having conversations that don’t help to “score” the internaut and don’t come with social processes related to innovation, customer service, marketing et… is useless because it does not turn the social potential into tangible business value.

Some may retort that value is not all, that image and reputation matter, that it’s all about soft things. Ok. But give me only one reason to improve one’s image or reputation if not leverage it for more “concrete” purposes.

In the logic of moving from CRM to Social CRM, there’s a point that’s often overlooked : the concept of customer management that disappeared behind conversations while the latter come to complete it, not to replace it. Moreover, to do things well, it would be better to forget the concept of customer and talk about Social Stakeholder Management because in such “value chain 2.0″ approaches it’s possible to contribute to value creation without being a customer. In fact, it sounds reasonable to say that at least 50% that may jump in the wagon are not customers. What does not prevent them from being stakeholders.

So it’s essential to go back to basics and put conversations and engagement in the wider perspective of new value creation models, of value chain. If not the risk of endless chatting without value is real.

PS : I advise you to read  this post by Marc Fidelman on social CRM with similar conclusions.

 

 

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Better collaboration does not mean better results for the organization

February 8, 2011 By 1 Comment

Summary : when we try to explain the new way of collaborating that’s expected in the workplace, it often looks like a lot of flows and interactions that has to form around every employee. But that’s overlooking one essential point : context. If interactions flows around employees, employees are organized around a production flow that aims at turning a request into a solution or answer. That’s the difference between collaboration to meet one’s goals and collaborating to create value. That’s essential because it makes us put individual actions into perspective and measure their usefulness and added value not in relation to the person performing them but to their contribution to the production flow, even if intangible and made of information. Conclusion : the value of any collaborative system does not rely on generic approaches but has to target the weakest link of the chain. The latter is not only weak because of the lack of collaboration tools but also because of organizational constraints that are peculiar to him.

Let’s take a few minutes to wonder about the sense, the goal of one’s activity in the workplace. We collaborate, exchange, solve problems (more or less efficiently)…but it’s only the micro part of a wider system. We tend to focus on individuals who “should” and “need to” without paying attention to their context.

At the beginning there’s an input, a request. It cames in the form of a simple question, a request to get a deliverable, a problem to solve. This input needs an output in return, that may be an answer, an operating model, a methodology to apply. If we have a closer look it appears that the whole organization is working this way, the input being either ‘can our product do such thing”, “how to fix this machine”, “what communication plan for our new product”, “designing our new intranet” or “how to hire someone with such or such skills”. It comes from someone who can be called customer, who can be either internal or external.

What does happen when this input is sent ? There are two possible situations : either it exists a methodology/process/procedure to manage the input or not.

In the first case we have a linear intangible flow with defined steps (creation, problem solving, design, validation etc…). Each of these tasks needs specific actions that themselves need information, knowledge, experience, expertise that that the owner of the task seldom have. If he can identify the right information/resource, he’ll use it to create/design/decide as fast and good as possible. If not he’ll do with what he has and push the work to the next person in the chain and so on until the final deliverable is issued, what is the output. Behind something that looks linear we have, in fact, a something that quite different and looks like a network even if, officially, things are supposed to be linear.

In the second case, the person that receives the input has to manage to find the way to process the input before starting to work. So he immediately falls into a network logic that, in the end, looks like the result of the previous case with on difference : there was no predifined role.

Let’s call “flow” the processus that ensures the transformation of the input into output (solution, answer), should it be linear or not. What is the major and most legitimate concern for any business ? (note that even if the matter that is transformed and the role of humain being has evolved, the problem has been the same for ages).

Improve both the output (that impacts created value and revenue) and its pace (productivity). Not more not less. But that’s already a lot.

Now, let’s find what’s needed to meet this goal. [Read more...]

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Enterprise 2.0 in 2011 : value or denial of reality ?

December 14, 2010 By 7 Comments

Summary : what will happen in the Enterprise 2.0 world in 2011. Making predictions is very difficult because many things will depend on what enterprise 2.0 wants to become. After 5 years of experimentations, thoughts, discussions, there’s enough maturity on methodologies, limits, improvements to be made that we should say the big change is on its way. But the road is long from words to actions and many things will depend on enterprise 2.0′s ability to get out of kind of denial of enterprise. Accept to frankly talk about value, put hands into complex and sensitive mechanisms that drives production and execution, forget the idealistic and angelic vision of a dreamt organization driven by passion, openness and nice intentions wlll be key in 2011. What’s at stake : moving forward or losing credibility.

Before trying to guess what the enterprise 2.0 world will look like in 2011, let’s start summing up what has happened since 2006 and what the situation looks like today.

In 2006 Andrew McAfee came to the conclusion that the use of social software could support new ways of working. Nothing more, nothing less. That’s what he called “tech-enabled organization”. These new ways of working being made desirable and even necessary by the evolution of the economy and value creation models, lots of people tried to implement the above mentioned tools. Often without success. Then came the conclusion that (for those who did not get it before…) tools were nothing but enablers (the “tech-enabled” thing in McAfee’s writings is too often overlooked) and that organization, management, people and even culture were parts of the equation.

With time and after lots of experimentations and reflection, it became obvious that the structure of work and organization had to be tackled (read my 2009 and 2010 predictions) to make the change possible and be sure it would improve value creation. What led to a consensus on the need to tackle business processes both for alignment and value creation matters. It was quite a logic conclusion for anyone knowing the deep mechanisms that drives operations and value creations but was light-years away from the dominant doctrine that was nearly exclusively focused on building communities above (and out of) the flow of work. The idea was not to favor the one or the other but to articulate both to meet organization needs and create synergies between unstructured cross-organization exchange dynamics and structured and vertical operation ones.

Meanwhile, tools improved a lot in terms of richness, integration capabilities etc.

Let’s sum-up :

• awareness that we have to tackle the organization mechanisms and machinery

• awareness that we have to articule on the flow and above the flow dynamics.

• awareness that we have to go beyond community dynamics

• existence of a lot of valuable knowledge and sets of practices about community management. Let’s be honest ; we have “best practices”, heaps of methodology, lots of cases and the tools to support the whole (Cf: the incredible work of the Community Roundtable). More and more people are now able to build and manage successful communities and what gives the opposite feeling is that too many businesses try to turn into communities what is not communities (hence the need to do beyond…)

• we have good social software tools.

So everything is alright and enterprise 2.0 won’t experience any issue in 2011. Things are going well, we’re on a straight highway and success is ahead. Problem : it seems we take pleasure driving with he hand brake on.

[Read more...]

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Enterprise 2.0 : who spends one’s time reading a dictionnary forgets his bank statement

November 16, 2010 By 2 Comments

Summary : the Enterprise 2.0 Conference that took place last week in Santa Clara leaves those who followed it from a distance with a strange impression. While we could expect, with the increasing maturity, a real breakthrough on value creation models, we end with a petty squabbling about enterprise 2.0 and social business. What brings, one more time, the focus on what enterprise 2.0 is, is not, its limits…at the risk of desperating enterprises that don’t see any change in the problem they’re facing meanwhile and would like to be told how to improve things instead of being offerd to join the dreams of the ones or the others. In the end, the debate is meaningful not because of its content…but because of what’s not in : value creation and ROI are still missing.

I followed the last Enterprise 2.0 conference from a distance, mostly on twitter. In general I’m often good at feeling what the hot topics will be but this time I have to admit I did not see what was coming at all. I would have bet that things woul dhave followed the same path as in Franckfurt but the debate focused on two points (at least according to what I read…assuming there may be a difference between what happened and what attendees wanted to highlight) :

• still a strong focus on communities (to such an extent I thought it was the Community Management Conference). I’ll share my views about this in a next post but, in my opinion, even if that’s a key element of the system, it’s not the only one and seems to be over-dealt with regarding to the rest. It’s impossible to claim addressing organization challenges on a global scale while focusing on dynamics that, by definintion, rely on employees willingness, out of work flows and which final impact on performance, even if potentially impressive, is still unpredictable.

• a new “enterprise 2.0 vs social business” debate. Is the first dead and being replaced by the second ? Is an heretic group trying to grab the power at St McAfee’s church ?

I was really surprised by the extent this second point reached, seeming to be the biggest point of concern. I first thought I had nothing to say about it but, finally, I realized that it was important not because of the arguments used…but because of what was not mentioned. By the way, a good occasion for those who still wonder what enterprise 2.0 is to make their own opinion.

[Read more...]

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My takes on the Enterprise 2.0 Summit

November 2, 2010 By 2 Comments

As you may certainly know, I was I Franckfurt last week to attend the Enterprise 2.0 Summit. Like last year I found this edition very dense and highmy qualitative. Many things have already been written since thursday so I’ll only highlight a few points a found essential.

1°) It’s all about the format

Even when you have very interesting cases, it all depends in the way they’re presented. The format that forces the speaker to be very factual in 20 minutes before answering the audience during the next 20 minutes makes things very operational. Enterprise 2.0 has been around for a couple of years now and, in my opinion, the time of inspirational discourses saying “believe of die”, “have the faith” is over. Attendees are expecting facts, numbers and the ability to discuss with the speaker in order to raise the points that really interest them and don’t want show homes and fireworks. Since nearly all the attendees were practitionners, we had the opportunity to  listen to very valuable conversations, much more than when speakers at talking to the echochamber.

There were also expert sessions that were more about stragegy but, once again, no soliloquies. Each keynoted ended with a panel and a discussion with the audience. The best way to make sure tha expert talks benefit to the audience.

2°) Europe loosings its hand-ups and finding its way

We often consider that european businesses are more cautious than others when it comes to experimenting new things and more shy when it comes to talk about their initiatives. It seems that times are changing. With Océ, Renault, BMW, Deutshe Telecom, BASF among others, I saw the best case gathering I’ve ever seen. Most of all we we told all the mechanisms of their projects, had insider views and avoided the syndrom of many presentations when, at the end, we tell ourselves “What a great case ! But…in fact,  what did they do, how, and what were the results ?”. During the discussion that followed my session on cultural boundaries, Lee Bryant said that it was high time that european businesses use their difference as a lever and forget the usual reflex that consists in saying “it works in the US so it won’t work here”. I think that it’s the way things are going, considering the way the cases were presented : technical, explaining the whys and the hows. Much more rational than inspirational what is also a demonstration of how they were conceived and implemented with a focus on sense and value rather than engagement and passion.

Still in my session discussion, Lee said that european organization must stop having a defensive attitude toward “imported” concepts. That’s what’s happening. I say enterprises happy to have met their european peers and saying “finally we’re on the right way and, unlike what we could think, we’re not left behind at all”.

Toujours dans la discussion qui a suivi ma session, Lee Bryant disait qu’il fallait cesser d’être sur la défensive systématique face à des concepts “importés”. C’est ce qui est en train de se passer je pense. J’ai vu des entreprises heureuses d’avoir du rencontrer leurs pairs européens et repartir en se disant “finalement on est sur la bonne voie, et on est loin d’être en retard comme on le pensait”.

3°) More processes, less community management

It confirms what I wrote after the last Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston and even reinforces it. In Boston some raised the question of tackling business processes but there were still some doubts about how relevant it was to enterprise 2.0. In Franckfurt it was a no-brainer. The need for tying any project to business processes was obvious for anybody. And the workshop I conducted on business processes and enterprise 2.0 was full in a few minutes so I had to refuse people. Does it mean that community management is not seen as being outdated ?

Not at all. It was mentionned in every case and in many keynotes but as a part of a global system, not less, not more. But one thing is sure : it was not the first concern of conference attendees who were more intereted in project design, its mechanisms, the way to deliver concrete and measurable benefits. I can’t remember having heard many questions on this subject and Bjorn Negelmann,  recognized after the conference that attendees did not even consider it a a future skill set.

In my opinions, both have to articulate. But there’s been an historical focus on community management that made people forgot about the other part of the issue and, most of all, employees need to start from what they know to move toward new models.

I’ll elaborate more on my workshop in a future post but you can already refer to this old post and read Samuel Driessen’s notes.

[Read more...]

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Being done with the enterprise 2.0 value discussion

October 19, 2010 By 1 Comment

Summary : many still wonder what new tools will bring to their organization and still have trouble visualizing the benefits. The reason is simple ; they imagine these tools in their current organization while it’s difficult to see their contribution out of a new way of working. Organizations built rules to accomodate to the constraints of existing tools. If these constraints are removed by new tools, organizations have to built new rules that will replace the current ones.

I recently found this post on the value (or lack of) of a new technology. It applies to new technologies in a general way, applying it to social software is very instructive.

First, let’s try to answer a few simple questions.

1°) What’s the main power of this technology

It makes information sharing easier and more efficient as well as enterprise-wide discussions related to business issues, the whole taking place out of organization and application silos. It allows anybody to identify, mobilize, put together all the information, data, expertises and people on a scale that was impossible before because of the above mentioned silos. So it allows, in fine, to provide employees with what they need to be efficient in what is called the “knowledge economy”.

2°) What are the limitations this technology is removing

The difficulty sharing unstructured data, identify information and people out of a silo.

3°) What rules were built to accomodate these limitations ?

In the context of a given business process, organizations started with the assumption the information needed for delivery and decision making was not findable. So they built operation models that rely on preset rules aiming at minimizing exceptions even it it meant to deliver an acceptable result in any situation but never something adapted to a very specific need. Assuming this, knowing that people will never have to look out of the process, the time allocated to informal-out-of-process-and-silos-collaboration was considered as wasted time…what impacted the way people were measured.

List to be continued…

4°) What rules should be implemented now  ?

I won’t elaborate that much on this point because it’s specific to any situation and many contextual elements are needed to give an answer that applies to a specific business, industry, business process. But it may look like “service oriented organizations“, social routines,articulating structured and unstructured work activities, rethinking quality…

Taht’s only the starting point of a deeper investigation that has to be conducted within a given organization. Anyway, conclusions are the same than those I made about the ROI of enterprise 2.0.

- technology has no value by itslelf

- technology should allow to to things that couldn’t be done before

- rules were set to accomote the limits of previous technogies. The new technology has no value is old rules are not replaced with new ones adapted to the new potential that can now be harnessed.

In one sentence : rules have been set to accomodate constraints. If any technology removes constraints, rules have to be changed or the technology will be useless.

To end, when organization wonder “how to think” their social network or any social media project, they should wonder what rules have to be removed and what should replace them. Designing such projects without thinking a new way of working is removing all the value of the project from its beginning. It’s also the evidence that, to convince an IT dept,  a value co-construction process has to be implemented with business people because it’s simply not their role to care about how business is done.

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Enterprise 2.0 and ROI : forget the “whether” and focus on the “how”.

September 14, 2010 By 2 Comments

Summary : even if the concep of ROI, in its traditional sense, hardly hardly works for enterprise 2.0, overlooking the question of tangible benefits tha should be expected is impossible. But the reasonnings on this issue suffer from a noticeable bias : technology is assessed in the current context while it needs organizational and management changes to deliver its effects. So there are few chances to have a solid demonstration if the focus is kept on the existence of ROI without a joint reflexion on how to make it happen.

The ROI of Enterprise 2.0 is interesting because it’s at the same time unavoidable and a problem that’s impossible to solve without rethinking the whole paradigm of value creation.

First, I’d like state something. I’m using the word ROI because it’s the one we all use to discuss this point while I think that “measurable improvement” would be more relevant.

Then, I’ll start with a metaphor. If a logical and rational thinking makes us deduct that an engine is the best solution to make a car move and that, despite your car has one that works, your car don’t move when you accelerate, it may mean two things. The first is that ou forgot to shift the gear box on the right position, the second is that it’s not connected to the transmission. Instead to trying to fix the engine or throwing it away, what needs a fix is the transmission.

Then let’s talk about ROA (return on assets). The number is well known but John Hagel recently reminded it to us : it has dropped to 25% of what it was in 1965 while people’s productivity has been skyrocketting in the meanwhile. Conclusion : that’s not employees that don’t pedal fast enough but the organization that struggles at turning their effort into value. So the solution is not to blame employees and put even more pressure on them but to rethink the way work is organized and people are managed.

Now, have a look at new ways of doing things and the tools that support them. Anyone with few objectivity understands that the easier it is for employees to access resources and expertises in a fluid way that helps to save time, the quicker problem solving and the better made decisions made will be. But since this system is hardly systematizable, organizations keep their old way of doying things. What means telling the cyclist to pedal harder and harder while the chain is broken.

So the true question about ROI is not to know if it exists but how to turn a potential into actual benefits. This is not about social media or behaviors (even if it will play a part) but about “plumbing”.

That’s exactly what I wrote a couple of years ago about strategy maps and intangible assets :

• Value creation is indirect : intangible assets don’t create value by themselves, but through their use in business process.

• Value is contextual : the value of intangible assets depends on their alignment with strategy

• Value is potential : if business process don’t use those assets, their value remain potential and can’t be fully realized.

• Assets are bundled : intangible assets have to be use in conjuction with tangible assets.

So it’s logacally difficult if not impossible to demonstrate any kind of benefit and, most all all, to measure them, if the question of alignment has not been tackled and if processes have not been designed or fixed to actually rely more on intangible assets.

Organizations have to forget the old principle according to which tools ahave an endogenous value : the value of social tools is exogenous and can’t be delivered if tools are not used in the context of adapted processes.

So there are chances we keep on discussing the ROI of Enterprise 2.0 again and again for years if the focus is kept on “whether” it exists instead of “how to deliver it”. Even people who are convinced and don’t care about the “if” shoud care of the ‘how” that ensures that processes will be able to turn the potential into tangible benefits.

As my good friend Luis Suarez rencently wrote, we should learn to work smarter, not harder. Lett me add : provided we avoid to pedal better but in emptiness.

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Engage with customers. And then ?

August 23, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Summary : It’s obvious that the use of social media within companies and between companies and customers are not compartmentalized but complementary disciplines. If the “internal” company is more and more trying to get in touch with customers, the world of marketing struggles to make his way toward internal departments. As communication is becoming service, initiatives that target customers can’t be separated from those that aim at reversing communication flows inside the organization, redefining roles  and realigning the whole organization with the needs of employees who are directrly in touch with customers. To demonstrate its value, social and community makerting will have to replace “push” with “pull” not only in its interactions withn customoers but also in the way the whole organization works.

Even if the external/marketing/communication part has never been my prefered one, it has become obvious that it’s impossible to dissociate the evolution of work from what’s happening outside the corporate walls. First, because no company creates value on its own et a high level of internal performance is useless when a business is not as efficient with its external partners and clients that it is internally (theory of the limiting factor or bottlneck…as you prefer), second because the internal shift from push to pull logically leads to consider customers.

The time when 2.0 was either about marketing or collaboration but not both at the same time is over. Yet, the concept of enterprise 2.0 evolved overtime and everybdoy finds logical to include all external stakeholders into it, what is confirmed by the rise of social crm. But even if enterprise 2.0 is heading down toward customers, marketing struggles to head up toward internal activities.

I recently found this interesting deck about the failure of social media initiatives. It tells us that

- there’s a lack of strategy (81%) and most marketers don’t undestand the value of interactions…and how all these things work.

- consequently, businesses invest more on technology than on people and relationships.

Why Social Media Project<s Fail?! – A European Perspective
View more presentations from BSI.

I’d like to go a little bit further and sum it up in one sentence : when marketing and communication people use social media to communicate better and differently, there are two possibilities:

- either they (or their company) don’t get it and that doesn’t work.

- Or they understand how to make a good use of social media and…they deceive their customers.

[Read more...]

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Enterprise 2.0 and processes : what are we talking about ? (and why…)

July 27, 2010 By 11 Comments

Summary : the business process issue recently burst into the enterprise 2.0 world. Sacrilege for some, pragmatic approach without which no value will be created for others, it seems we’ve reach a tipping point. But what are we really talking about ? It’s not about turning unstructured activities into processes but to make it serve processes without distorting it. Then, if we define process as a set of tasks that gives structures to production, it’s important not to mistake what processes applied to some kind of activities should be with what businesses have been used to do for decades. It’s about production as it should be and not as it is today. That said, knowing why this approach is emerging matters too. There are many reasons to that and they are inequally worth but it does not matter : even if many things have to be done out of the process field, this issue will have to be tackled one day or the other. It does not matter anyone wants to change them, keep them unchanged or break them down : they can’t be overlooked.

Big agitation in the small enterprise 2.0 word : since some people at the last Enterprise 2.0 conference suggested that business processes had to be taken into account this topic has become very trendy. Salutary brainwave for those who see there the evidence that enterprise 2.0 is not a funny gadget disconnected from reality and unable to deliver any measurable benefit, crime of lese-majesty for those who see a horde of hungry wolves entering a house full of little red riding hoods.

Cela fait plus d’un an que je milite en faveur de cette approche (ou en tout cas de ne pas refuser de l’aborder et être dans le deni permanent) et je ne vais donc pas me priver de commenter la chose.

What are we talking about ? (Or the story of a big misunderstanding)

The word process is so scaring for some that they run away as soon as they hear it without even listening to the rest of the sentence. It’s not about turning informal and unstructured dynamics into carve-ups but making sure all the energy goes in the right direction. As I said earlier, serendipity is a very limited model for value creation and I find legitimate that businesses want channel what looks like chaos to them. As Rex Lee brillantly wrote recently :

Enterprise 1.0, would suggest that only specialized, trained individuals with the resources knew how to find pearls (i.e. where to dive, specialized equipment, knowledge on how to abstract the pearl from the shelled mollusk, etc.)

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Enterprise 2.0 suggests that we can simplify and remove some of the “specialization” barriers to enable more people to search for pearls.
Enterprise 2.1 would suggest that rather than “serendipitously” finding pearls, that we coordinate our efforts to actually create pearl farms.

The purpose of any business is to create value and to do so it tries to optimize its production. Nothing shoking here. So sets of tasks are defined in order to make things more predictable, manageable and cost efficient. It often ends with a very rigid result and that often is the main point of friction.

In a manufacturing world, where production flows are tangible and can be normalized, rigidity is well adapated, exceptions to the rule being very rare. In a world where people work on knowledge, continuously solve problems, exceptions are the new normality and rigidity only works in a few cases. [Read more...]

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