Communities-of-practices | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

Did web 2.0 kill communities ?

November 15, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : communities are a very trendy topic for enterprises. And yet it’s not a new matter at all. Communities form and live so easily on the net that enterprises thought they could do the same with their employees and clients…with mixed sucess. The purposely sustained impression that tools create communities while they only create the conditions to host them and marketing discourses according to which everything should be community got the better of years of work and researches on communities, leading organizations to many dead-ends. It’s high time to call these groups or spaces differently and manage them accordingly before the “2.0 madness” turn this powerful concept into a deprecated buzzword.

When I’m asked “how to create, manage and energize communities inside and outside my company” I often feel like answering this :

“There are communities that exist and don’t need you and those that don’t exist and aren’t worth wasting your time to make them live”

I have to admit that it’s simplistic and, in some ways, wrong.

• Communities need a shared interest, a shared goal and the will to interact together. At first sight, it only need the rigght people to be identified and provided with the means to exist and exchange as a community. Let’s admit that sometimes it works (as soon as means and tools that will help the community to live, exchange and exist as such are available, members find one another and the communty forms and structures itself), but sometimes not (the community exists in people minds but don’t form in a tangible way). That’s often caused by two factors : lack of trust towards the organization (sometimes these communities live outside or the organization, under the radar but refuse to become official and institutional) or management issues (is participation a part of people’s job or wasted time, even stolen information ?).

• Communities can be created ex-nihilo but awareness has to be raised before in order that the willingness to “do together’ emerge. Only then it will be time to tools things. Here again, before creating and managing a community, the first step is to creat the conditions that will make it exist.

In fact, in my opinion, communities can’t be created. But its success factor do. Then it can be managed, moderated, facilitated but it will always be impossible to make a community do what it doesn’t want to.

You’ll tell me that all that is obvious and you’ll be true. Communities are not a recent concern. We always knew that they would be very hard to build, that there must be barriers at the entry, that they need a lot of time etc… A tough work which principles have been clearly established by Etienne Wenger.So things were clear. But it seems to me that, these last years, the ‘community thing” become more and more confused and confusing for enterprises, what was recently confirmed by some researchers I talked with.

In one word : while organizations used to know where to head to even if it was difficult, now they’re totally lost. Consequence : they invest a lot a time and money and are often deceived. One reason to that : no one knows what a community is anymore.

Enterprise 2.0 is not only about communities

April 28, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Since social media have been making its first steps inside enterprises and the context of enterprise 2.0 has been emerging, everybody has been talking about communities. As a matter of fact there’s no better tools to facilitate exchanges within communities, a very orld concept that was given a new youth by this “social revolution”. But this focus on communities, sometimes, makes things more complicated than expected.

Whether they could be communities of practices, of interest, of knowledge, of purpose, communities are supposed to make information and knowledge sharing easier in order each of their members get the most of the other’s and, at the end, everyone gets more than what he gives. Obviously, it’s a key issue for many companies but it’s still hard for them to measure it’s real value. As a matter of fact, the value of intangible is a field where financiers have still a lot of work to do and the fact companies makes things more complicated by forgetting to align knowledge with action.

In an operational point of view, organizations, for which it’s already hard to put numbers on the value of their community and determine the ROI of what improves them (so they ask their providers to take care of that although it should be their own job), often make mistakes when they have to select the communities on which they will focus.

First, becaucse they still are not very talented at identifying the real communities et often mistake those they would like to exist and those that really exist and need help.

Second, because focusing on the traditonal concept of community they loose sight of another kind of group that need this kind of tools and is not a community in the strict sens of the word but that is often forced to conform to a norm that does not fit its needs. It’s about the people who need to work together, in many cases in an informal way since it’s a resort when formal structures reached their limits. The best example was what was done at GE where what prevailed was “the need for people to deliver a process“. You should also have a look at this comment by Chris Jonhson.

This kind of group doesn’t form, can’t be managed, don’t necessarily need the same tools functionnalities as a traditional community. It may be quite disturbing for companies because it implies they have to take into account the way people acutally work, admit they need more freedom in the way they get organized….but it’s surely more lucrative because it’s easy to measure the impact of these new practices on operational processes and then to answer the “ROI question”.

Enterprises may aim at exchanging knowledge to improve everyone’s expertise or “technical and utilitarian” information to get things done. These two approaches are sometimes complementary but are very different in the way they have to be addressed. Applying to one the recipes that work for the other makes things more complicated and may prevent companies to get the more obvious and expected benefits.

Communautés, communautés-de-pratiques, Entreprise 2.0, réseaux sociaux d’entreprise, réseaux sociaux professionnels, réseaux-sociaux, roi

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: business networks, Communities, communities-of-practices, Enterprise 2.0, enterprise social networks, ROI, social networks

Are communities accidental ?

March 12, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Communties are central for everyone who want to improve his organization : because it’s a performance lever, because it’s an integration factor, because it improves the use of informal knowledge and networls. It’s far from being a fad : even top managers such as Louis Schweitzer assume it.

The community nature of web 2.0 is praised and many try to implement it within the organization, conscious of what it brough to the general public.

So everybody want to build communities but importing the concept within companies appears to be harder than it seems. Sometimes it doesn’t work at all without consideration to the energy spent.

But, is building communities the right goal ? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: Communities, communities of interest, communities-of-practices

Re-empowering middle management

November 8, 2006 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

cdmmunity Companies have been experiencing big troubles with their middle management for years. The reason is quite simple: they had to do with a middle management which was disconnected from the field.

They now seem to have learned from that, adopting a new kind of management. As says Auchan (french leading supermarket chain) HR director, “it’s time to get out of a management based on contract, control and pressure to institute confidence, support and self discipline”.

I totally agree with that, as it also concerns the definiton of a manager. In a context where you have to manage distant teams, not being able to meet them and be by their side, controling them all day long, the manager is not a controler anymore but a community leader.

Empowering such a management is the recognition of the importance of communities of interest and communities of practices in the organization. The belief that you can manage to whole organization as a sole community is a nonsense and more and more companies are beginning to acknowledge it, reconsidering manager’s role and providing them with the tools they need to lead their communities.

New procedures, new social practices, community driven intranets…the new challenge is now the adoption of all that as, although change is seen as necessary, it’s a radical change in the way people are considered and empowered by the companies that hire them.

On the way to enterprise 2.0…?