Enterprise 2.0 people-centric ? Are you really sure ?

January 4, 2011 By 4 Comments

Summary : one of the biggest claimed contribution of enterprise 2.0 is people-centricity. But, apart from having a rich profile telling who people are and the capacity to publish information without information and sign it with their name, what does this people-centricity mean for people ? According to the principle that says the system only lives by the contents that are published, it seems that, even unconsciously, people are asked to serve the system and not the inverse. In fact, users are “promoted” to a content producer without any consideration for their ability and capacity to reuse and make the most of the shared contents. If we want the system to become really people centric we need more than this : new practices to acquire and the freedom of putting them at work. Any 2.0 approach that does not come with an empowerment project will remain content-centric, not people-centric.


One of the key elements of the proposition of value of enterprise 2.0 is to be people-centric instead of being document, processus or anything else centric. The quite clear idea behind this is to say that, if people are the organization biggest asset in the knowledge economy, the whole system has to be structured around them to serve them instead of enslaving them and monopolizing their time and attention for tasks that don’t creat any value to the detriment of those that do.

It applies to a wide and impressive range of situations : useless emails or email discussions unable to support a long and structured conversation, loss of information and knowledge that force people to waste to find them a big amount of time that won’t be available to use them, to much time used to process “internal spam”…

Centering any logic on the user means sparing him with tedious tasks so he’ll focus on those he’s irreplaceable at.

A user-centric approach would mean providing them with what they need and, most of all, teaching them to use it. Too many employees manage to find the right ideas, the good practices or information and have no means to use them. This kind of situation is often caused by lack of empowerment, when people have the right competences to implement things or to lack of support when they don’t have the competences and are looking for someone to rely on.

And what is the main line of many adoption strategy ? Make your employees contribute. Make them generate contents !

For most employees, it just does make no sense because they have the impression to be told to serve a machine they have to feed without expecting anything in return. It’s a little bit like telling a train driver that the specificity of the new “driver centric locomotive” they’ll drive is that…they’ll have to put coal into the boiler themselves.

At this point, enterprise 2.0 is not people-centric (even if there are noticeable exceptions) but content centric….and the quantity of content is often the way success is measured regardless to what contents are (re)used for.

But this is not an irreversible situation if we consider content generation as a primer But users need to know the following steps that will make them feeling like starting the content machine.

A user-centric system should :

• Guarantee users that the information and people they need will be present, identifiable and mobilisable in the system.

In other words, if we want people to get involved we’ll need more that a system used by only 10% of employees. It implies a systematic sharing of some information (to be put in the flow, with all the consequences in terms of job description, evaluation etc…)

This can partly automated. An action in a given tool  can generate an element and event in an activity stream without asking people to double-enter the same content, what is something they’ll never do. Example : a salesperson enter data in the CRM should be able to enter the quantitative and “narrative” data in the same interface, one going to the CRM and the other to the social platform with a link  between both. Synergies and integration are key here.

Mobilisable… here again we’ll face management/HR issues. Make oneself available may make sense for many employees. It may also make sense for the organization if employees are evaluated and rewarded according to a global optimum vs a local maximum (ex : being incited to generate a value of 10 for oneself instead of helping a colleague to generate 30.)

• Empower employees to help them reuse what they’ll get

Even if they have the impression or the certainty to find what they need, employees need to know how to (re)use it. Change the way they do things, implement a new solution to a problem is something they need to learn and has to be secured. It’s about empowerment, trust, letting go… Without these elements, information is not usable so it has no value. So contributing is useless.

• Optimize the information flow

It’s nothing but a tool logic and the good news is that it’s coming, at least from some clear-sighted vendors. “Pushing” the right sources, suggesting the right contacts to users depending on their activities, history, improves the signal/noise ration and improves the perceived value of the tool and the social approach for employees.

Building anything people-centric in the organization is allowing anyone to mobilize the right resources and information and use it to face their day-to-day problems. What I called “service oriented organization” (or SOO) two years ago shares some points with adaptive case management that will surely be a major trend in the upcoming months….and not only to provide people with a rich profile linked to their contributions in which they’ll say they love fishing or to encourage them to write tons on contents to possibly win an internal Pulitzer prize !

PS : One question  came to my mind while writing this post. In your opinion, is there any difference between people-centricity and user-centricity ?

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

Are employees content producers ? No !

June 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment

How many times did we hear the famous “content is king”, pushed as the pillar of a new world where social media is predominant. Consequence : the future belongs to those (people and businesses) who’ll produce the more content. A contrario, who won’t produce content won’t exist in this world. After all, why not…

By definition, a contents is defined regarding to a container so it’s logical to assume that the container is the raison d’etre of the whole what, in fact, makes no sense once you understand that content should be interoperable and volatile to be reused, shared, far beyond the orignal container.

But content is not self-generating so it’s important to have it generated by people. What sometimes troubles me is that this looks very much like “there are new containers, so let’s fill them”. In this approach, the value, the interest of any content is that it fills one or many containers and has few to do with its intrinsic value. I’m not even saying that it may favor noise and quantity agains quality.

Things become more complicated when it comes to the workplace. I have to admit that I nearly fall off my chair whenever I hear recommandations like “you must encourage your employees to produce contents”, “to stimulate your social network’s activity, don’t forget to generate contents”. This is often understood like “there are new spaces…now your job is to fill them” or “on top of the amount of work and responsability you already have as a manager, don’t forget to find things to say every day”. Hearing such words makes manager run away to avoid what they understand as a nonsense, a new improductive and useless burden they have to deal with.

Communication is a part of any management word. Besides that, we should be cautious when the world of communication invites itself (or is imported) in the workplace without paying any attention to the goals of the people it should apply to : produce and deliver results.

Employees are not paid to publish things on online media (social or not) unless they have a marketing or communication position. They are paid to produce and, to achieve this, have to exchange and share information. To be successful, they may need more relevant practices and the right tool to support it. Saying that, the approach to “content” dramatically changes.

People emit and share information out of necessity, not because they have a container to fill (what also makes them fear the “blank page”). They must say to themselves “I have such need so I need to communicate in such way” and not “what will I find to publish to please them today, get rid of this burden, and go back to my real work”.

Be caution of not applying to employees the same punishment as Sisyphus and turn the intranet into a Danaide’s barrel.

Employees are not and should not be content producers. They are people with a job to do and, even if communication is a part of everybody’s job, it should happen because of a given context and the added value of communicating, not because there are spaces to fill.

PS : to explain the business process approach to enterprise 2.0 during the last enterprise 2.0 conference, many people relied on the content/context articulation. A sign ?

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

7 web 2.0 words to use cautiously with real managers

November 25, 2009 By 4 Comments

Even if enterprise 2.0 has its source in web 2.0, everybody now recognize that what we can see and use on the web needs to be tidied up to enter the workplace. One of the stumbling blocks can be found in language : sometimes even if two people agree on the content, the form can make them not understand each other. That’s why, sometimes, the enterprise 2.0 subject was not taken seriously by the (serious) people who needed to be convinced.

In fact it was one of the conclusions of the discussions that followed the last enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston : the enterprise 2.0 world had to learn the enterprise language and not the reverse. The confirmation was given in this post by someone from Booz Allen Hamilton (which internal 2.0 platform is a true success) : “In the end I’m not concerned with what we call it. I’ve got work to do.”

Anyway, here are some magic words our web experience makes us use (even unconsciously) too often in enterprise oriented discussions and that make our interlocutor look at us with doubtful and surprised eyes (really…you never had this feeling ?). Either because the words that are used are not relevant in a business context or because they make him uncomfortable.

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

Web does not turn employees into content producers. Job description does.

September 3, 2009 By 1 Comment

As time goes by, it’s becoming obvious that whae created a gap that prevented web 2.0 logics to be implemented within businesses is a an incredible number of web facts that can’t be transposed in the business world. So, internal practitioners use to fight against many mtyths they have to kill before they can start serious things. It’s a real challenge because, caught between unjustified constraints and excessive expectations, internal leaders have to manage unbaked projects where they’re asked to focus on “non issues”, neglecting strategical ones that are supposed to disappear by miracle.

We often read that employees are machines that generate contents, an assumption that’s used as a core belief to build a new kind of organization, more collaborative, more efficient. Why ? Because as the web turned customers into producers, this is supposed to change the way people behave at work.

As social tools begin to shape workers’ expectations for how they get things done, it raises expectations for how they collaborate and communicate and participate in content development,” said Nielsen Norman Group user-experience specialist Patty Caya. “The social Web has turned consumers into producers and this will impact how they work.” (source ici)

I have no doubt it’s a major trend that will impact the future. But let’s be clear and honnest, companies are operating in today’s context and have to deal with it to carry on. So that’ a belief that has to be taken very cautiously.

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Enterprise 2.0 and the myth of content generation

January 31, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Web 2.0 is fueled by user generated content (UGC) ans, logically, it should be the same within companies. It’s obvious : when connecting people to information and connectiing people through information is a driving principle, it’s easy to undersand that the existence of a published and shared information is the key to the new form of interactions companies want to make emerge.

Here’s for the “expert” side. Because, on the enterprise side things are not that simple. I’m not talking about creating and using contents, I’ talking about the concept of content itself.

It’s said that employees generate lots of contents. That’s true. That they will generate more and more contents. That’s true too. That they must be encouraged to generate and share even more contents. Why not. That companies have to imagine all this amount of information to understand how it’s important to switch to cloude computing. Certainly but..

Contents are like discussions : they are words companies may not understand and that may worry many managers.

It’s a misunderstanding that has to be vanished because the substance remains true. Two apects have to be taken into consideration : formulation and organization.

Let’s put ourselves one second in a manager’s shoes. Everyday he’s asked to do the impossible, he feels light fighting against a non-reactive machine and employees that are overwhelmed by work. Imagine what he may think when someone tells him about the “incredible chance that all the contents his staff will generate represents”. He will answer that his staff is not here to generate and spread contents but to work. If the example of internet is used to convince him, he will have the impression that his department will be turned into a leisure center. That’s one of the examples that show that web 2.0 logics have to be translated when it comes to import them into the enterprise.

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Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Intranets and digital workplace, Knowledge & Information management, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,