Toward smarter information systems

March 4, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : When we talk about working on information, we usually distinguish the work that’s been progressively dedicated to machines (mass processing of data according to pre-determined plans) and what remains the field for humans, a sharper and more qualitative approach to scattered and unstructured data. This second point lead organizations to organize accordingly, distinguishing between those who search, prepare and use these data. A dichotomy that has many chances to be questioned in a near futur as machines are getting able not only to explore unstructured data but also to understand questions and give answers.

When we have a look a the main components of any information system, we can see two poles coexisting :

• the “mechanical” one. It’s made of applications that replaced humans over time because they’re more efficient and reliable for some tasks, providing a substantial advantage both in termes of speed and quality, what means in terms of costs. They allow the mechanization of repetitive mass processing that need more calculations and processing power than intelligence and ability to react in front of unpredictable things.

• the “intelligence and knowledge” one. It’s made of applications that don’t replace humans but are supposed to multiply their intrinsic abilities that a machine does not have. Its about communication and collaboration technologies.

If we focus on the second point, it’s obvious that no machine can understand and treat unstructured data with the needed fineness. Should the need be about searching, using and make a decision relying on a huge mass of unstructured information without the existence of an history demonstrating what “a good decision is”.

On this part, the superiority of human versus the machines is about decision making. As for what’s about information search, it’s rather a burden but a necessary burden because even if the machine is powerful enough it’s unable to process a qualitative and contextual search on information.

But how long will that last ? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Knowledge & Information management, Management & HR, Software & Tools Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Many challenges and lots of progress to make for HR according to IBM

October 21, 2010 By Leave a Comment

IBM recently issued a study after having gathered insights from more than 700 Chief Human resources officers, titled “Working Beyond Borders”.. I let  you peruse this long and interesting document but here’s in a few lines some of my takes from it.

Let’s start with te conclusion. As we could expect, it confirms what many people have been knowing for years : in today’s economic context and makets, HR’s main challenge is to develop work “beyond the borders”. What does it mean ?

  • ability to work out of the enterprise silos and collaborate acrosse functions, departments, countries.
  • ability to work out of the enterprise boundaries with partners, clients
  • ability to work out of one’s own competence boundaries : mobilize expertises one don’t have and acquire new ones in a flexible and responsive way.
  • ability to mobilize out of one’s comfort and authority zone what implies to develop new forms of leadership.

These are creativity, agility and flexibility challenges that CHROs want to address in many ways

  • Develop creative leaders that will tackl challenges and opportunities in a new way that’s more adapted to our times. Kind of “intrapreneurs” able to react in an innovative way and engage people around them.
  • Develop speed and flexibility by simplifying processes and making employees more responsive.
  • Capitalize on collective intelligence by finding new ways to connect people

Even more interesting, one of the many illustrations of the study

It’s the evidence that while there are domains where CHROs find themselves efficient, some remain where about which they acknowledge not being effective although they will be critical in the future : fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing, developing leaders and developing workforce skills.

Now that that’s everybody know in what direction to head…the only thing to do is to work on that. The road seems very long but the amount of opportunities is more than worthy.

One more point to conclude :

I think there’s nothing to add. Just do it…

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

Enterprise 2.0 trainings are not useless

July 8, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Like any new topic, enterprise 2.0 comes with lots of myths. One of them dies hard : no training should be needed, if things are not simple enough to avoid training, rather give up. In fact it’s not that simple and, before all, we should wonder what kind of training we’re talking about.

The first idea that comes is “tool training”. Many say that if an enterprise tool needs more than five minutes to be understood, people won’t use it. Really ?

A difference has to be made between “basic” and “advanced” use. The first has to come intuitively, the second needs much more than five minutes and may, at the end, not concern more than a few users.

Why this 5 minutes thing ? In a perfect world I can understand that any tool, whatever its purpose is, should be as easy to use that no training would be needed. In this case we’re talking about social networkin tools, anything 2.0 or social but it should be the case for any application…starting with the settings of any OS than runs employees’ computers. But we also have to pay attention to what I call the “Excel case”.

We all know at least one “Excel Master”, someone able to design a tangle of spreadsheets that can do nearly anything and look like small personal ERPs. No one can say that mastering Excel to this extent is a simple and even pleasant things, but most of these people learned it by themselves. We can’t say either that it’s the kind of tool that makes people feeling like discovering or using it. But facts are here : people use it, a lot, well and every day more. Even those who are not savvy users are doing things with Excel because no one can’t avoid it in the workplace. Anyway, it takes more than five minutes for anyone to have at least a basic use of it, and it doesn’t prevent people from using it. The reason is simple.

Excel is useful. Excel helps to make in a fast and efficient way things that would take much more time and would be subjects to many errors if done otherwise. It’s often said that before having what we like, we have to like what we have and Excel is the perfect example. It does not matter people like it or not, it’s as indispensable as a screwdriver is to a carpenter. Vital.

[Read more...]

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

Talent is the bottom-up side of competence

December 24, 2008 By Leave a Comment

A friend of mine was making fun of the use of the word “talent” since he didn’t see in which way it was different from “ressource”, even if human. He was only seeing one more employer brand trick, a promise that only engages the one who hear it.

It’s true that HR marketing, as general marketing, likes to use new terms to value the people it talks to even if that doesn’t mean anything really changed in the workplace. But if we look into the subject, there is sometimes a true reflection behind all that and we can guess this will spread in the upcomming times.

[Read more...]

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

Collaborative enterprise project : Feedback Needed

November 26, 2008 By Leave a Comment

One of my contacts is progressing on the HR component of a corporate project. He lauched some projects, initiatives and would like to exchange about it with people with similar experciences in order to share best practices, idees and make headway together.

Here’s his request.

Hi,
I am managing a programme called Alstom collaborative Way. I’d like to get a dialogue about it. Today, tools exist for and success stories are already starting to come through.
Today the next steps is to manage organizational enablers and blockers and identify how to best capture the benefits of collaborative ways of working. So, feel free to suggest your answers and comments on how to do this.
Alstom is a leader in Power and Transport sector (76,000 people in 70 countries). The programme “Alstom Collaborative Way” aims to enhance employees’ collaborative ways of working by integrating in their practices the use of communities of practice, networks and collaborative information systems. Its goal is to provide means to facilitate, reward and favour the Search, Sharing and Connection between people and between data
The steps of the programme have been: First provide building blocks for a collaborative working environment* for Early adopters and Pilots (see above the 3 “building blocks”). Extract from this tangible proof of business value and take stock on needs for change in order to ensure organizational support of collaborative ways of working. Lastly, pull for the alignment of organizational policies and processes, culture, IT and people management tools.
Example component of the “collaborative working environment”
A policy that sets the Frame for governance and golden rules
A portfolio of IT collaborative tools (“Web 2.0.) such as: Blog, Wiki, Search engines, RSS, document-sharing solutions, Intenal Yellow pages.
Alstom University training content and assessment are aligned to ensure learning is also done through peer-to-peer coaching or exchange of knowledge and creates networking opportunities.
Toolkits to animate small and large meetings in a collaborative way (Open space, Fishbowl, best practice-Marketplace, Cafezhino, Knowledge café, 4-game brainstorming workshopTM).
Collaboration as part of our Competencies framework (basis for performance mgt, promotion, recruitme

You can contact him directly by email : slim.lambert (at) chq.alstom.com

But you can also discuss the topic here.

Filed Under: Economy & New Models, Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

SOO + Reuse = productivity

July 8, 2008 By Leave a Comment

In a former post I gave you my first thought about what I walled SOO or Service Oriented Organizaton. A recent post from Oscar Berg about SOA gave me more ideas about this.

According to him it’s important to focus on reuse which is the very basis of SOA. It is essentiel to isolate, prior to anything, which services have to be reused by others in order to make them become components on which other services will rely.

If I try to apply the same theory to organization, the fact is it’s impossible to know what will be reusable. So a system has to be set tup in order to isolate reusable knowledge and make it “solid knowledge” with a process that solidifies gaseous information. Which implies companies have to hire best practices hunters.

But there are also what I call “golden nuggets”, which are too specific or not strategic enough to be “solidified” but may still be useful for anyone, knowing information’s value is relative : what’s gold for some could be mud for others. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Economy & New Models, Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Knowledge & Information management, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Enterprise 2.0 and Human Capital Management to support strategy

June 5, 2008 By Leave a Comment

As we saw in a previous post, since human, information and organization capital support all the processes that create value, the question we have to answer is whether all these things we put in this “big bag” called enterprise 2.0 can help developing this pool of value. Or to make it clearer : in which way a company can rely on enterprise 2.0 to achieve its goals.

I’ll start with a warning : when saying enterprise 2.0 I’m talking in a broad sens, which also includes management practices and culture in addition to the tools. I don’t believe in the tool-centric definition that reduces a company to the tools it uses and forget its rules, its people, its culture, its history.

I’ll also add that what I say is “how can enteprise 2.0 help” : in no way I’d think that enteprise 2.0 would be self-sufficient. What we’re talking about must be used together with many existing things.

So let’s start our first step : human capital.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Knowledge & Information management, Management & HR, strategy, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Managing information will soon be a key competence

April 5, 2008 By 2 Comments

While informations is becoming more and more important in everyone’s day to day job, we always ear the same things : “too much information, not enough time, impossible to manage it”. This looks like a paradox as people don’t seem ready to embrace what is becoming more and more essential in most of us’ jobs. Yet, as mentioned in a recent UNESCO survey, we’ll have to learn to deal with that. Managing information is about not not remain a constraint anymore but to become a key competence.

What is it about ? The issue is clear : find, extract, evaluate, and make an efficient use of information. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Knowledge & Information management Tagged With: , , , , , ,