Putting conversation into processes

July 20, 2010 By 4 Comments

Summary : nowadays, people need to continuously solve problems to execute business processes. To do so they need a quick and easy assess to knowledge. But knowledge needs stimulis to be expressed, what seldom happes out of conversational logics. Traditional processes need to be enriched with a social layer. On top of that, business processes are the smallest common denominator upon which an enterprise 2.0 dynamic can start without having to deal too much with cultural issues because it brings a focus to what makes sense for anyone : solving actual issues they face while they tried to achieve what they are evaluated on.

There are many ways to deal with the articulation of enterprise 2.0 dynamics with business processes. Here’s the presentation I made at the Enterprise 2.0 Forum in Milan in June.

Putting conversations into processes

And here are some explainations… [Read more...]

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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.

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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.

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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

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How to understand and position enterprise 2.0 in the real enterprise

December 1, 2009 By 3 Comments

It’s time to sum up all the thoughts I had these last months. I tried to start from both the concerns expressed by C level managers asking for a global vision and ground managers who needed a “hands on” vision because they don’t have time to waste to try to understand such nebulous things. Having to focus on day to day delivery and short term objectives, many see such a fallen-from-the-sky (and on their head) gift as a source of misunderstanding and discomfort.

These concerns are not surprising at all : what is it, what does it bring, how does it work, how to position it and integrate it in the organization as it is today… Talking about a new discipline, lots of things were learnt from early adopters who worked on a “try / fail / improve” model and, in so doing, helped to build a knowledge and know-how corpus. As a matter of fact this corpus was build upon failed and successfull implementations that helped to refine some presupposition that were prevailing at their beginning. The whole helped “followers” to benefit from these experiences.

But we still have to be aware that that’s not by saying “that’s that, that’s not that, one must, one must not” that things will improve. Businesses need to undersand the path that lead to these conclusions to make them theirs, and we all know what happens when one content himself with copying a result without understanding what reasonning often leads to  : lack of self-confidence, fear of the unknown, defensive attitude….then failure.

Rather than proposing an attractive future at the end of a vague road, let’s start from what actually exist to build the future. This will also help to explain the “why”, relying on what can be learnt from past experiences.

[Read more...]

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

November 3, 2009 By 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 ?

[Read more...]

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The twilight of enterprise 2.0 and the emergence of process socialization

July 7, 2009 By 10 Comments

The last Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston sounded the knell of many illusions. It won’t be a surprise for anyone, we’ve been talking about that for months and feeling it was coming. First, the beginning of a move of enterprise 2.0 toward the real enterprise, then a try to integrate the social phenomenon in the existing production models in order to give it the place it desserves instead of trying to justify its existence using tricks that won’t fool people for long. Recently,  Andrew McAfee,  Tom Davenport and Dion Hinchcliffe wrote about complementarity, articulation, reconciliation with the existing.

The vision of enterprise 2.0 as a a big fair between colleagues where everybody would embrace one another and sing in unison is gone. No, your company will never become an annex of Woodstock. Many understood that very quickly, some needed more time. Don’t worry, you don’t have to feel ashamed, it’s a little bit like Santa Claus. We all used to believe he really existed, and one day we understood he didn’t. But that doesn’t mean people stopped giving and receiving gifts. (Ok…if you are a 40+ manager and still believe in Santa Claus, there is possibly a problem).

So we have the choice between two solutions : keep on believing in Santa Claus or try to understand how companies like such as Booz Allen Hamilton , Lockheed Martin and many others to join Cisco in the club of those who successfully managed to deploy and adopt social software.  .

[Read more...]

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Enterprise 2.0 as a part of the Global Enterprise

May 12, 2009 By 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 ?

[Read more...]

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Enterprise 2.0 : my predictions for 2009

December 18, 2008 By 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 !

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