Getting rid of unproductive shadow organizations

August 30, 2011 By 1 Comment

Summary : enterprises will have to improve their organizational and management. Projects, pilots, initiatives are multiplying to experiment, learn, understand. But what is the right duration for sandbox ? The common answer is that it should take the time it needs but there’s a risk that’s growing with time. Many projects do nothing but creating shadow organizations inside enterprises, organizations that sometimes compete the one with the other and often with the official one. In the end, no one wins in such zero-sum games when they last too longs : enterprise see their immediate performance decreasing, projects fail at delivering their promise and employees lose their motivation. It’s essential that, at a given moment, enterprises align themselves with the projects they launched if they don’t want to loose everything.
If there’s a consensus on the fact today’s organization are far from being efficient and that things aren’t improving over time,  it does not go further. To some extent, we can say there’s a convergence on the future model but not on the way to get to it. Top-down, bottom-up, both, in an interventionist or optional way, evolution or revolution model… It would seem that all roads lead to Roma…let’s hope that’s true. But it seem logic : on people-centric project (people as a matter, a lever and a target) it’s impossible to overlook the past, culture etc..

To make it short, “push organizations” are dying, welcome to “pull” ones. Consequence : the largest part of what we call management is to make it difficult for people to work (these are not my words but Peter Drucker’s one…and I fully subscribe to that). This leads to the need of reversing the pyramids and to do it in an efficient and productive way. It reminds me of an anecdote taken from Vineet Nayar’s experience. At the beginning he set up the first elements of an organization designed to serve those who actually create value, then he realized the limits of his approach. Everything that was being implemented was applying and relying on the existing model, systems and processes, designed to be top-down. Hence a new approach aiming at building, step by step, a new coherent model aligned with its goals instead of a poultice on a wooden leg.

Now, let’s have a quick look at many enterprise 2.0 or social business projects. In how many cases did they come with process re-engineering ? With a reflexion on how to trace how value is created ? On how things and people are measured, evaluated, assessed ? Of course, that’s still a young and emerging matter. But, as I recently heard from two people that can be considered as convinced people, advocates, project ambassadors : “it’s been young and emerging for such a long time that it’s getting old now !”, “Ok for chaotic experimentations but we’ve been trying so many things in so many ways in so many directions for 5 years and the people ‘above’ haven’t understand that it’s time to blow the end of game whistle and make things square”, “Honestly, I’m about to give up the fight…I’ve been knocked about too many times for no benefits…and they still don’t get the thing”.

What were they talking about ? They were saying that these projects were generating new structures and way of working that go against the official organization compete with it and, even experimentations that compete the one with the other. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Tomorrow’s enterprise as a galley ?

August 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I won’t teach anything to anyone by saying that, to make someone understand a concept that’s very new to him, an analogy with something known is often the best way to deliver the message. Note that this means is often an easy way for the “pupil” to help a too passionate teacher to keep his feet on the ground. Of course, we need an analogy that “talks” to the person either because he or she knows the subject well or because that’s about something that’s common to everybody.

The other day I happened to have a discussion with a couple of person and a new angle appeared in the discussion on “social” and things like that. It’s only worth what it’s worth but, after all, it’s summer, holidays so we can take the liberty of giving free reins to our imagination.

Let’s take the example of a galley. You know, a boat with people rowing, other shouting at them and one who rule. Let’s try to imagine what a galley 2.0 would look like.

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Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Community management is like cholesterol

July 26, 2011 By 1 Comment

Summary :we’re still fare from being done with discussions on enterprise community management. More complex to implement that it seemed, this kind of system did not always keep its promises and results range from the best to the worse to such an extent that some start to wonder if it’s really worth. Among poorly managed plans and doubts on the very role of community managers, many organizations are still in a state of uncertainty. In the end it’s all about the project and operational alignment. There are two kind of community management systems : those that are the consequence of a project and integrate communities into the operating modes and those who are the result of the attention paid to the existence of communities without any will to leverage them to create value (or only with words). When community management has no other reason to exist that the existence of communities it becomes useless. When it’s the result of an ambition to turn the community potential into an asset that can be leveraged, it can lead to awesome results.

There are still a lot of discussions and questionings on internal community management. After the “everything is a community” era that caused the rise of armies of community managers and the “community manager : bullshit of the year” era that logically came after when the limits of the system were reached as well as those of its implementation by, at best, idealists or, at worse, sorcerer’s apprentices, organizations seem to be lost.

Community management logics are an undisputable potential for organizations when wisely used but are not the solution to every problem and, despite of their apparent simplicity, need a lot of specific skills. This explain that after the times of overexpectations came the time of disappointment.

First, we have to distinguish between discussions related to community management and community managers. If community management approaches are necessary, lots of questions remains about community managers, their role and profile. There’s no doubt community managers will stay for long to manage external communities, things are different when talking about internal communities.

As a matter of fact it’s logical to think that, in a couple of years, community management skills will be part of everyone’s toolbox and there will be no more need for specific people. I fully subscribe to this point of view. But, unlike some people, I won’t pretend that managers will become community managers or, at least, not in an exclusive way. If it’s an unavoidable evolution of managers skills, methods and way of doing their job, it’s far from being enough. Managers have to set objectives, have also have a right to give orders and have to be able take disciplinary actions, what is not a part of a community manager role. They’ll have to combine both dimensions, what won’t be easy at all.

Then we have to keep in mind that there is no consensus on the level at which community managers should operate. A wide range of situations exists, from the senior manager in charge of managing a global system to the recently graduated person in charge of having the field and making some noise. The consequence is that there were lots of attempts to formalize different responsibility levels, with community managers, social media directors etc… Another big mistake was made in France where “management” was often translated into animation what causes that, with the same job title, lots of different profiles can be found.

That said, let’s come back to the concern that worries many organizations because of the varying results that can be observed here and there : is community management worth, are benefits worth the effort, or should organizations let communities live, die (and even not come to life) by themselves ?

The answer can be summed up in one analogy : community management is the corporate cholesterol.

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Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Enterprise social networks are not (only) corporate communication tools

July 19, 2011 By 5 Comments

Summary: social networks are great communication tools and that’s why many organization try to find them a place in their intranet landscape. This is sometimes confusing because they are not communication tools in the usual corporate meaning, do not support the same kinds of interactions and even not always the same people. In the end, communication teams feel uncomfortable, lost between the potential of the tool and their own stakes, a field where no compromise can be made. The solution is to be found in the articulation of the User Generated Content sphere and the corporate message one because, if mixing both can cause confusion and infefficacy, combining them allow interesting synergies within what is an intranet 2.0 that addresses without any compromises the needs of all stakeholders.

I’d like to say a few words about what seems to be one of the biggest misunderstandings about enterprise social networks : their part in the corporate communication field. Since social networks are communication tools and, as such, are often managed by the communication department, there are at least two reasons for organizations to try to use this pipe for their corporate communication. What is not always successful and causes headaches.

Let’s make some things clear before starting :

• Social networks are tool allowing communication, or rather exchanges, between employees. Ok, any CEO can have his blog on the network but it’s  to have a more human voice and a less formal way of delivering his message and does not prevent the organization to keep a more formal way of doing things. The farer someone is from the top of the pyramid, the weaker the tie is between the media the person use and her position. Social networks are media for people and spread their voice regardless to their position. Proof : anyone can move to a new position and keep his media, even the CEO…

• Corporate communication is, by definition, a top-down activity that aims at evenly delivering the same message to a given population. What does not preclude to be able to start a discussion…or not.

In short, one is E2E (employee to employee) while the other is B2E (Business to employee). In the first case, people are speaking for themselves, in the other the enterprise is speaking, sometimes through someone’s voice. Even when someone speaks in the same of the enterprise because of his position, he gets the right to speak not from who he his but from the position he his while, on enterprise social networks people have the right to speak because they are employees.

Of course, corporate communication needs to become more human and conversational to improve engagement, to explain things, to get feedback… and so what ? The one does not preclude the other at all.

[Read more...]

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

Communities and selfishnesses gatherings

July 4, 2011 By 1 Comment

Summary : while it’s quite hard for enterprises to enter the good olds forums where fans have passionate conversations, they’re still very uncomfortable with the communities they try to agregate on the “modern web”, being uncertain about what to do or give to create a real engagement. In fact, all the problem is in the word “aggregate”. On many new media, and especially on Facebook, what is supposed to be gatherings of communities is rather aggregations of selfishnesses. Consequently, understanding what these “groups” are expecting is key to serve those so-called communities : communication, special offers and services. If you’re looking for belonging, engagement and passion, rather go elsewhere…where enterprises are hardly allowed in.

The web did not wait to become 2.0 to host communities. People who shared common interests or purposes used to gather, most often on forums, to share and discuss. Even if there were moderators and people who talk more than others, we can say that everybody was talking with everybody. And even when there was a “central person”, he or she was a member of the community and not a representative of a company.

What changed these last years is that enterprises tried to gather their own communities or into dedicated spaces on public platforms (facebook etc..). What did the forum become ? They’re still alive and organizations seldom have the right behaviors to be allowed in. That’s why they try to grab the leadership on other spaces. I also heard the funnu story of a large company who managed to deal with experts forums talking about their projects before realizing that those experts were more experts than the ones they had inside. In the end they reversed the process and asked those external experts feed them with thoughts and information instead of making the brand enter the forum.

So, let’s talk about these communities, most of all those hosted on Facebook. A closer look makes us realize one things : people have few conversations the ones with the others but talk a lot to the leading enterprise. In fact…the enterprise talks a lot and sometimes gets reactions, sometimes is being called out but there’s nearly no discussions between members. What may lead to the idea that members or fans are not there to meet together but to be with the brand to get personal benefits. It’s not of community of people but a gathering of individuals that want two ways but personal conversations with the brand.

Truth is cruel : those who love a brand or a product are still gathering but elsewhere, sometimes on old forums and prefer not be invaded by the brand.

There’s a notable exception : in B2B, many vendors managed to gather real communities on more or less private spaces but not on public platform, and managed to have real valuable conversations with their customers and users.

So, what are those groups that are brands want to manage of facebook ? The answer is key because it will help to find out how to deal with them in order to make the most of them, create a win-win relationship. They are gatherings of people who are obviously waiting for three things : information, special offers and service. So rather than communities, these groups are aggregations of selfishnesses that need to be fed and served because they will seldom help one another. Help happens elsewhere. Proof is how these groups behave in case of a crises : while in a real community people are helping each other until no one is in trouble anymore, here, people join the group because they have a problem and leave it once fixed (most of time by the company, by other members), without paying attention to other who may still need help. (Yes…people can become fans because they’re unhappy with a brand). And the success of the brand does not matter either to them, their only interest being their personal satisfaction.

People have long thought that the person in charge of such a system had to bring live to communities, stimulate conversations… Not at all. He has to bring information, send gifts and foot the bill when there’s a crisis. Less appealing…but better be lucid when it comes to build a system that works. Organizations need both communication and service professionals.

And what about Twitter ? Neither community space nor group…it’s a place of its own kind. But it may be the less non-community space on the web : no structured communities but lots of open conversation on any topic, and anyone is free to join. It may also be the place where the entry barrier to discussion is the lowest for organizations who want to join the conversations on them, provided they behave the right way.

Bottom line for any organizations ? If you want to play an active role in the system, have a service driven approach. If you don’t mind being more passive, create something appealing and let people do what want with. If nothing happens the problem may not be your approach but you product…(no media can improve bad products…) Of course, both can be done at the same time

Filed Under: Customer Relationship & Marketing, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Employees first ! Supporting those who really create value.

June 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : “Reverse the pyramid”…other words may be used to scare less but it’s concern shared by many organization. It’s, in some ways, necessary to face the increasing complexity of the world that surrounds us but it’s also the obsessive fear of many organizations and managers used to the command and control model and not willing to go out of their zone of their comfort zone to improve what’s happening in the value zone. Value zone ?  As a matter of fact that’s because value is created at the field employee level that the command chain should turn into a service one. But, beyond exhortations that are easy way to drive change while being surprise it doesn’t work it’s a hard work that consists of reversing flow, redesigning some processes and transfering responsabilities that has to be done. That’s was was made at the Indian compant HCL and the story is told by Vineet Nayar, HCL CEO, in his book, Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down. Here are my takes.

One year ago, in July 2010, I read attentively and bookmarked this blog post by Gary Hamel where he was telling the incredible management experience that people just lived at HCL, an Idian IT service company. Spurred on by its CEO, Vineet Nayar, they seemed to be on the right way to meet a goal that look unreachable for many : reversing the pyramid to make the organization more successful.

Here’s what I highlighted at that time :

– Transparent Financial Data. Vineet realized it’s hard to feel empowered if your manager has a lot of data you don’t. With this in mind, HCLT’s IT team created a simple widget that gave every employee a detailed set of financial metrics for their own team and other teams across the company.

– U&I. Early on, Vineet and his leadership team set up an online forum and encouraged employees to ask tough questions and offer honest feedback. Nothing was censored on the “U&I” site; every post, however virulent, was displayed for the entire company to see.

– Service Level Agreements. Powerful corporate departments, like HR and finance, often seem more interested in enforcing blanket policies than in making life easier for employees. When Vineet would ask front line employees, “What have the enabling functions done to help you create value in the value zone?”

-Today, HCLT employees are able to rate the performance of any manager whose decisions impact their work lives, and to do so anonymously. These ratings are published online and can be viewed by anyone who has submitted a review.

- As the CEO, Vineet was being asked to weigh in on hundreds of unit-level plans each year. Recognizing the limits to his time and personal expertise, Vineet challenged his colleagues to develop an online, peer-based evaluation process. The solution: MyBlueprint. In 2009, three hundred managers posted their business plans, or “blueprints,” online. Each document was accompanied by an audio presentation. More than 8,000 employees were then invited to jump in and review the plans.

- Three years after launching this concept, 20% of HCLT’s revenue is coming from initiatives launched in these communities of interest.”

Today, Vineet Nayar tells us more in a book called Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down. Rather than summarizing a book that’s very easy to read, I’m going to highlight what seem to me being the key points of his approach and share a couple of comments. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Books I read, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Lessons on the hard job of designing communities in the organization

June 14, 2011 By 4 Comments

Summary : If communities have a real value for organizations, there are still few certainties about their positioning and management. Out of the work flow by definition, communities only create an indirect value for organizations, hence the fact there’s been a lot of efforts to bring them as close to the flow as possible in order to make them a produce a concrete and tangible value. Whether it lead to turn work groups into communities or give communities so much structure that they lose their agility and become a burden for the organization, many tactics reached their limits as it happened recently at CISCO that dismantled a system that what considered exemplary until then. The key question is to ascertain the maximum organizational acceptable effort to make the community work and setting up mechanisms that make the reuse of the intangible capital almost automatic into dy to day business activities.

 

Most people now consider as an established fact that communities fill a gap in terms of knowledge exchange and capitalization and collaboration. On the other hand, things as still very unclear when it comes to determine their positioning.

If we rely on the most basic and shared definition of a community, it’s a group of people willing to share and discuss a topic outside of any hierarchical or structured process. A community may have, of course, a global and permanent objective (ex : capitalizing and sharing best practices on a given topic) but no specific deadline (ex : deliver such or such thing, solve such problem before a given date). Even if the community may be encouraged to behave this way, members won’t have to comply with what can’t be more than a suggestion that has nothing to do with their job definition and appointments.

A fundamentalist approach to communities inside the organization would be to say “let those who make sense and really exist live, remove what prevent them from being active” and, most of all, “don’t think you’ll generate on-demand communities even if the topic looks legitimate to you”. The topic of a community can only be suggested and, in the end, it belongs to employees. communities can be facilitated, lightly managed but never imposed.

Most organizations are not comfortable with this approach. If followed, it will concern at best 10% of employees who want to participate and contribute in addition to their assigned work. As a matter of fact, since participation can’t be imposed, organization can’t rely on the community as they use to do with formal teams that must deliver what’s requested on time. They will produce, at their own pace, ideas, knowledge the organization will be able to use once available. The community has the control of its agenda or, rather, the organization can’t impose any agenda. There’s nothing bad here if we rely on the “fundamentalist” definition : the community creates intangible assets that have to be reused in day to day activities to create value, at its own pace. (Remember  strategy maps…)

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Salesforce ignores communities…and that’s ok !

May 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : when talking about customers, collaboration, web and anything social or 2.0, it’s impossible to avoid communities. Whether made of clients or employees, they are the answer to any issue and no one can have asocial/2.0 discourse without mentioning them. This approach, applied to customer service, has often been hard to implement because of the uncertain behavior of customers communities as well as the gap between the platforms used by customers to share their concerns and those used by those who have to deal with their issues. That said, we have to pay attention to what Salesforce said (or did  not…) at Cloudforce 2011 : communities have no place in the corporate discourse, the approach is more structured and cases seem to be the missing link that will fill the gap between structured systems (CRM…) and communities.

In early April I attended Cloudforce 2011 in Paris. At the beginning, my major interest was about multichannel customer service management without flow breaking (to make it simpler : how to receive / intercept any message from a customer, from any media -twitter, facebook etc…-, solve the problem, in a agile and collaborative way if possible, and answer to the customer on the same channel he used without having to switch from one tool to another). I saw interesting things….but, in the end, another thing caught my attention.

I heard lots of things on “social”, customers, collaboration but nothing on communities. I think it’s the first time in such a event that the C word is not overmentioned. Let’s try to understand why (and why it’s good).

- I’ll write about that later but, as I already said here and here, that’s not because your customers are on the web and are talking to you that they are a community. Most of all, when it’s about service because the fact customers are gathered does not change anything to the fact it’s all about individual issues and that people only care about their own problem and not the other’s.

- dealing with such cases, internally, is not about communities either but about adhoc collaborative structures, would it be a permanent experts team or the temporary gathering of people to deal with a case. Identifying those people through a network and finding information in communities does not change anything : it’s a kind of workgroup with a defined goal even if it’s not designed to last after the problem has been solved. Making it work is more about management than community management.

Besides that, Salesforce also showed groups that were not related to customer case management…but very quickly. The reason, in my opinion, is quite easy to understand. What they call “groups” is what others call communities and their viability highly depends on people’s will. Participation on cases is easier to generate and sustain and its result easier to get and value for organizations.

What else ? That confirms several things :

- participation is always easier in the flow than over the flow and tangible benefits are easier to assess in the first case.

- it’s easier to  catch the attention of businesses when putting 2.0 activities around the flow rather than shutting oneself way with community management discourses that only have an indirect benefit and which mechanics are hard to implement.

- between structured logics like CRM and unstructured logics like networks and communities, there is a grey zone that’s still poorly addressed and would make a lot of sense : case management. Sure that this topic will become hotter and hotter in the next months.

 

Filed Under: Customer Relationship & Marketing, Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

In Social Business, Businesses are the Care Bears

May 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : Either externally with customers or internally with employees, one the pillars of any “social” or “2.0″ project is people’s need for more closeness, even intimacy with the enterprise and between themselves. This is the reason why organizations started focusing on engagement, social networks and communities. But is this lever so relevant ? It seems that even if communities have a role to play, organizations and customers don’t agree on the role each of them should have inside and even of the legitimacy of a brand joining customer communities. Ditto for employees who seem to have more desire for efficient work tools than for approaches aiming at bringing them closer one to another. In the end, people seem to be more pragmatic and realistic than businesses. A call for these latter to move toward more operational and pragmatic approaches ?

Among postulates that underlie many social or 2.0 approaches, one is so ubiquitous that seems to be taken for granted by everybody. According to this postulate people, either outside the organization (when they ar customers) or inside (when they are employees) have an irrepressible desire to strengthen their ties with business, to tell them things, to feel valued, to “be a part of something” that will bring them together. Businesses, that are “by definition”, aloof, malicious and inhuman, have to listen to this cry from the heart, facilitate and join communities where attention, passion and even love between participants will make amazing things happen.

We could have believed that businesses with their cold and rational logic would have stepped away and stand their ground…but they did not. They dove into the social world, often in a ungainly way, dreaming of internal and external communities, of being as one with passionate and engaged people in a win-win relationship. With uncertain results.

Some weeks ago, an IBM study dropped a bombshell. It shows that, even if businesses need to be closer to their customers, they don’t understand what customers are expecting.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Customer Relationship & Marketing, Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Organizations don’t (only) need builders

May 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : it’s a shared assumption that enterprises need doers. But, pushed to its limit, these logics do not always mean improvement but, paradoxically, stagnation if not regression. As a matter of fact, “doing” and “building” often means adding things to what exists without taking time to unravel it even when it goes against what has to be implemented. It has a well known consequence : a pile of orders, rules and contradictory processes that cause the opposite of what’s expected : lost, employees do anything but what they’re expected to, don’t take initiatives because they always go against an existing rule or, on the contrary, make failure to respect the rules the new rule. Before building, instead of adding, organizations need people who clean things up. Tomorrow’s organizations are organizations that remove things more than they add.

I recently wrote a post on the myth of “superman manager” that was a barrier to any significant evolution of this role. My intent, in this post, is to go further in the reflection. Behind all that, there’s the idea according to which the only people that matter are the “doers”. At first sight that seems obvious. But it highly depends on what we mean by “doing”.

I won’t elaborate once more on the fact that, for many, “doing” means acting in a visible way and micro-managing.

“Doing” also means leaving one’s trace, one’s mark. And that’s not only an individual issue but also a collective one because the whole organization is acting the same may. Managers’ job being to make things work, they try to take the necessary steps. At the organization level, all the managing body is heading in the same direction : taking steps to solve problems and move forward.

That’s where things often go wrong.

Is something doing wrong ? No problem, a new layer of tools, procedures and rules is implemented. Should things dysfunction a little time later ? The same method will be applied. Organizations have been piling layers of tools and rules supposed to make the organization more efficient for decades. Each time with the satisfaction of having done things well for those who have “built” the solution. In fact they often added their own repair patch to the patches others added before them.

At the moment enterprises are making a move toward enterprise 2.0 or social business there’s no doubt they’ll use the same old good methods. New tools and rules that will make sure that the right usage (because it’s all about usage) will be adopted.

So employees will have to sort tools and arbitrate between 15 layers of procedures that prescribe them 15 different behaviors in a given context. The result is often farcical situations where, having to comply with many conflicting obligations, employees do not respect any of them.

For example, I’m often asked “how to be sure this community will work”. My answer is often miles away from the expected one that establishes community managers as the saviours as dying community systems. Sticking to a very strict definition of what a community is, I’m convinced that a facilitation system may help when things makes sense but can’t make miracles. In other words :

• If the community really exists, it will work by its own. A little facilitation can improve things to some extent.

• If the community exists but is not alive, there’s no reason to add systems that will make people go against the systemic and corporate rules, even against their own interest. In this case, the solution is not to add anything new but remove the barriers tha prevent people to make a move from intention to action.

• If the community does not exist there’s no reason to set up a system that will create it. What has to be created is the interest toward a topic, the “community feeling” will follow and we’ll end in one of the two above mentioned cases.

To state things in a more simple way : what prevents new models from working and from solving today’s problems is what has been implemented to solve yesterday’s problems and seldom makes sense today. Examples are more than numerous.

So, lets have a quick tour :

[Read more...]

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