Do we work the same way with providers and with colleagues ?

June 18, 2009 By Leave a Comment

The answer is obviously not. And not only because this is not the same kind of contracts. It’s because businesses still act according to the model that makes them consider their employees on one side and the others on the other side. And in the middle…they build walls. They proctect from the outside although value is not created on one or the other side of the wall alone but by people, from both companies, sitting on the top of the wall. Externals can’t access the tools that are used to collaborate inside et interactions between insiders and suppliers are much harder than between colleagues (even if, even in this case, it’s often far from being easy).

A few months ago I was wondering if the future of businesses was to manage an ecosystem of partners and outsource many competences.A phenomenon that won’t be driven by circumstances but by an organizational vision (which limits can easily be found)

I’m reading here that self employement will dramatically increase in the US in the ten next years. If this prediction is true, businesses will have to learn how to work efficiently with a growing number of external people, getting rid of irrelevant barriers.

Changes have to be undertaken, both in business and management practices (consider the others as a part of ours) and tools (platforms that allow both formal and informal interactions, open to external people). How many companies do open their internal collaboration spaces to their providers ? And, even when they do, what kind of interactions do they make possible ?

Working with providers as if they were one’s own employees is not only a self-fulfilling concept. It has noticeable implications which may soon become vital.

écosystème, collaboration, entreprise, externalisation, knowledgeworkers, outils-collaboratif, prestataires, réseaux, travailleurs indépendantss, travailleurs-du-savoir,interactions

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

Using wikis as a coaching tool

November 28, 2006 By Leave a Comment

wikipediaI’ve already writen someting about blogs as a self development tool, now this is wiki as a coaching tool [fr]. You can also find things in English here.

It’s a very interesting concept because it :

- it favors the adoption of a new tool

- it suggests the idea that there people can find a new way for an easy collaboration

- it allows concerned people to organize their collaboration by themselves.

- it allwos a quick evaluation by the particpants who can easily see they quickly came to an interesting result.

- it favors the emergence of a culture of exchange in the organization.

We now have feed back[fr] on a coaching session based on “wikipedia raid”.

So what happened (translation of the post in short)

  • Context :
    • a group of people who’ve been working together for 3 days, who are easy the ones whith the others
    • they know and they are used to goup efficiency techniques and tools
  • The exercise :
    • You have 2H30 to organize yourselves in groups
    • You have tho produce and publish on Wikipedia a “quite perfect” article on a defined subject.

At the beginning the group was hesitating :

  • Emergence of subgroups
  • Discussions, disagreements
  • Isolated initiatives

Then the group started producing

  • a series of short posts
  • that were independant but linkable
  • and that he aggregated in a 3 web pages document

At the end they provided quite a good entry on wikipedia on a subject that have nearly been treated before.

The group was satisfied because they successed in the allowed time and the result is public and published on wikipedia.

The observation of group member’s behaviours, attitudes and discussions about regulation was also very interesting.

I see two interesting points:

- evolution of team practices

- getting used with a new kind of tools.

I also had a comment from the consultant that made this session : people didn’t know anything about wikis before, they liked it and they suggested to use it at work. But IT department doesn’t like this kind of proposal at all ;-)

Filed Under: Intranets and digital workplace, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , ,

ICC’06 meeting

October 26, 2006 By Leave a Comment

intranetLast week I attended ICC (french acronym for Innovation, Competitiveness, Knowledge) meeting in Paris. Here are my feelings based on conferences I attended and products I saw.

1°) 2.0 is going mainstream. It’s not fashionable anymore, it’s a real big trend. Beside pure players, software majors such as IBM Lotus or Microsoft are now joining the list of those who say that intranets are going 2.0 too.

2°) An evolution of the concept of information. Information is not something you stock anymore but it’s a flow you have to catch. So don’t ask “how to stock it” but “how to mobilize it”. On consequence is the concept of PKM (personnal knowledge management): everyone is reponsible for the good use of information, and in the other hand it’s the sum of all individual uses that brings added value to collective use.

3°) Duality between collaborating with and collaborating on. What’s supposed to be the central point of collaboration? The individual that produces information or the produced information? Is that the frontier between 1.0 and 2.0? I don’t think so. And both are necessary because they don’t have the same purpose. You can’t structure an organinization without any process or document, you can’t be innovative or reactive neglecting informal information and exchanges between people.
4°) We have to bring information back in the center of the organization. According to IBM, in 2010, half new products or services ideas will come from outside the organization. The stake will be to catch peripheral flows, and transform them in business inside the organization. That matches the duality I mentionned before: there is a structuring information at the center of the organization and an informal and unstructured one all around, at the border, sometimes inside, sometimes outside, that gives agility and innovation. Managers have to find a way to catch this last one that is forgotten by all the workflows.

5°) The individual and the group: what’s valuable is not to focus on individual, neither on the group but on the individual IN the group. The organization’s wealth is the individual because he generates information and reflexion, but what gives added value to what he generates is the confrontation with other people’s ideas, what new uses those people can make of one’s ideas.

As a conclusion the consciousness now exists that’s there a big part of usefull information that’s not used nor is capitalized. Beside the information that structures organization we have to find a way to catch the informal information, promote it and tranform into something useful and valuable.

Filed Under: Innovation, Intranets and digital workplace, Management & HR, Software & Tools Tagged With: , , , , , ,

When blueKiwi meets HR problematics

October 23, 2006 By Leave a Comment

blueKiwiIf you’re staying in France next week and want to see how an collaborative intranet 2.0 can help you to manage your HR problematics, you can attend the conference that will take place at the Microsoft Technology Center Microsoft Technology (Salle Everest, 148 rue de l’université 75007 Paris) on tuesday october 31st from 5 to 7 PM.

After a quick show of HR 2.0′s stakes, you’ll be shown a presentation of blueKiwi and will be able to talk with companies that already use bK (Dassault Systems in this case).

For this time we chose to focus on HR but “bK” as we call it can do very much more for your organization.

If you’re interested please register here.

Disclaimer: I’m now working for blueKiwi.

Filed Under: Intranets and digital workplace, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , ,

Collaboration or office automation application 2.0?

October 18, 2006 By Leave a Comment

intranetLast week I attended a Microsoft prensatation about “collaborative work optimization and information organization” based on their new SharePoint and Office packages.

Hearing concepts and premises I was satisfied Microsoft was going the 2.0 way. In fact I had some doubts after they started their “people ready” campaign, because at this time we didn’t know anything about the solutions that will embody the concept.

So, saying people are the main company’s wealth, Microsoft was to provide tools that allow people to create value the easiest way. And they did it. In fact their new solution allows to share everything and use what others have published, modify and embetter it with versionning abilities. Sharepoint also permits people to have their own publication space on the intranet, such as blog or wikis.

I do agree with them when they say people have to find in the company what they’re used to find outside such as IM, blogs, collaborative tools (like google docs for example ;-) ) and I’m happy such a software editors shows doubtfull people in which way things are now going.

On the other hand I’m not convinced on two points.

First about personnal information publishing. What’s important is not to make people publish things on the intranet, it’s to use what’s published to build things, to innovate and capitalize all the brainstormings that are born from exchanges. That’s, according to me, the difference between sharing and collaboration, between giving what you have and making things together. Furthermore I’m not sure it will help companies to win their big challenge: make collaboration be a lever of innovation. To do so you don’t have only to share documents but also thought, ideas, and confront them.
Second, I’m affraid their wrong when they say (I’d rather say when the Microsoft sales manager that made the presentation says) that there’s no need to provide a specific help to make people adopt the practices that will make the success of those new applications because they’re already comfortable with all that, considering everyone now use blogs, wikis, IM, web 2.0 services. Althought I’d like it to be true I’m affraid they’re too optimistic. Only a part of the population is familiar with that. And young newcomers in companies are not enough to make things change. They can help but as they will still be a minority for a few years, we have to work with everybody to make new practices appear. What is more we can’t left “1.0″ people aside a major evolution that will change the way we work together and the way we use web services. I’m convinced those tools need change management to be fully efficient.
As a conclusion I consider this new offer as a very important step on the road of collaboration. But only a step as its more dedicated to share rather than to collaborate. This step is necessary  to go further but not enough to build a real collaborative organization. It’s rather a Google docs like and seems to be still document centric and not people centric enough. But they’re going in the right direction…too slowly but in the right direction.

Filed Under: Intranets and digital workplace, Management & HR Tagged With: , , ,

About collaboration-driven intranets and enterprise information portals

August 10, 2006 By 1 Comment

intranetA few of my first thought inspired by the Razorfish report on intranets bet practices. It concerns the distinction made beetween two kind of intranets according to the intanet maturity framework. According to the report information portals are a steph higher than collaboration-driven intranets. Althought I admit (and claim) that such portals are a step in the good direction for better intranets, I think the situation will change with the emergent web 2.0 intranets (aka social intranets or intranets 2.0).

The adoption of user friendly tools as blog or even wiki (even if commun wiki interfaces seems not to be user friendly enough for most employees) will bring people to publish more information than before, to have more discussions. As a consequence, intranets will support more and more content and.

I consider as a key factor of success of such intranets the ability for anyone to track what’s said on such or such subjects not depending on the author…so they need to have the information they need delivered (enven by push) in order to know it exists et eventually start a discussion with the author. Starting from that I think that information portals are the key of success for collaborative-driven intranets (in their 2.0 sense) because they include powerful search engines and deliver a panoramic view of the published information. Moreover the highly level of customization may help build individuals portals for employees according to their favorite topics, as for such or such departement that wants a specific entry on the intranet with service issues. People of the HR doesn’t need the same front datas as people from financial or marketing for example.

So, in my opinion, the portal is not the next step but must be included in the collaborative intranet to make it adopted, then efficient. An opinion confirmed by the deployement of a blog-based collaborative intranet in a french major company, a project I worked on. Users expectation quickly concerned the portal’s evolution which was key (as they mentionned) in their user experience.

We have to become aware that taking too much time to find information (and even not notice when a pertinent information is published) is a waste a time, it impacts ROI and can even make the project fail because its utility will appear clearly. If you also consider people have to change their behaviors to become really collaborative, which is a big effort for most of them (what is evident in their everyday life seems counter-cultural when they’re at the office) I think we can’t afford not to consider this point. They make efforts so we have to down every barrier in order they don’t give up.

Another opinion?

Filed Under: Intranets and digital workplace Tagged With: , , ,

Best Practices in Corporate Intranets

August 10, 2006 By 3 Comments

intranetThat’s the title of an Avenue A/Razorfish report (you can dowload it here for free) I found more than interesting. There’s so much to say about this report that I will only focus on one two things I’m directly concerned with due to my activity, even if I may come back on the report later and analyze more deeply such or such part of it.

First thing I found interesting is the concept of Intranet Maturity Framewor that helps classify intranets in a few categories, the step from one category to another depending on maturation of tools and needs in the company. I found this model very clear in the perspective of an anlysis based on a “where are we, where do we want to to go, are we ready for that, what to we need to go the next step” reflexion.

I also agree with the part concerning collaborative intranets. I think that web 2.0 tools (or social web tools) will bring them to a real reborn, making them a place for people, information sharing and, so doing, a place for also managing the human side of the company (for example see what I wrote there).

I really liked the way the report gives not only best practices but helps to guide in an intranet problematic with such questions as:

- were are we

- what’s our maturity

- what’s the next step

- are we ready

- what to we need to make next step a success

There’s a lot to say about this report and, since I’m on vacation, I only had a quick look at it and will come back later on the report to see more details about such or such thing.

For french reading people, I wrote a little more about it here…enjoy!

Filed Under: Intranets and digital workplace, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , ,

About transparency in decision-making

August 1, 2006 By Leave a Comment

corporate communicationI often say that transparency is very important in decision making. Because it gives sense to the decision it’s key in improving membership, trust toward managers and organization, and it makes people more implicated as long as they’ve been implicated in the process. A good approach to solve part of HR problematics.

This post is mainly inspired by a former post by Elizabeth Albrycht that I bookmarked weeks ago.

There are two parts in decision’s transparency:

- toward the outside: it’s very important for customers and (above all) investors. The US context is slightly different from ours since they have to deal with a specific legislation (Sarbanes-Oxley) that force companies to be more transparent on anything that can have a financial impact (that’s to say nearly everything ;-) ). Despite this we, european, must keep eyes open wide because such a legislation may be voted in our countries and, above all, that in case of a coming-together beetween Euronext and the NYSE  our companies  will surely have to take Sarbanes-Oxley in consideration. This is a very important point in a middle term strategy.

- toward the inside: no more to say than that I said in my introduction or what you can find in Elyzabeth’s post. I just want to mention that (few) companies are now getting involved in this (heretic?) way of doing things. Wikis and blogs are empowering transparency in some companies by making it public and sometimes collaborative. A good example I know very  well (because I am involved in as an external consultant) is the deployement of blueKiwi as a beta project at Dassault Systemes Sales France, the project becoming now mainstream. Proximity, explaintions, discussions, co-construction…that what it actually brought to the company and we’re far from having discovered all the potential of this “peopleware” tool.

It will take time to make things change but I’m sure things will go this way. It’s our role to make managers understand what they can win in so doing. It’s not about communication but about management and the need you have to count upon motivated and implicated employees…and to bring a touch of collective intelligence in your company.

Filed Under: Innovation, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , ,