E2conf | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

Enterprise 2.0 : who spends one’s time reading a dictionnary forgets his bank statement

November 16, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 2 Comments

Summary : the Enterprise 2.0 Conference that took place last week in Santa Clara leaves those who followed it from a distance with a strange impression. While we could expect, with the increasing maturity, a real breakthrough on value creation models, we end with a petty squabbling about enterprise 2.0 and social business. What brings, one more time, the focus on what enterprise 2.0 is, is not, its limits…at the risk of desperating enterprises that don’t see any change in the problem they’re facing meanwhile and would like to be told how to improve things instead of being offerd to join the dreams of the ones or the others. In the end, the debate is meaningful not because of its content…but because of what’s not in : value creation and ROI are still missing.

I followed the last Enterprise 2.0 conference from a distance, mostly on twitter. In general I’m often good at feeling what the hot topics will be but this time I have to admit I did not see what was coming at all. I would have bet that things woul dhave followed the same path as in Franckfurt but the debate focused on two points (at least according to what I read…assuming there may be a difference between what happened and what attendees wanted to highlight) :

• still a strong focus on communities (to such an extent I thought it was the Community Management Conference). I’ll share my views about this in a next post but, in my opinion, even if that’s a key element of the system, it’s not the only one and seems to be over-dealt with regarding to the rest. It’s impossible to claim addressing organization challenges on a global scale while focusing on dynamics that, by definintion, rely on employees willingness, out of work flows and which final impact on performance, even if potentially impressive, is still unpredictable.

• a new “enterprise 2.0 vs social business” debate. Is the first dead and being replaced by the second ? Is an heretic group trying to grab the power at St McAfee’s church ?

I was really surprised by the extent this second point reached, seeming to be the biggest point of concern. I first thought I had nothing to say about it but, finally, I realized that it was important not because of the arguments used…but because of what was not mentioned. By the way, a good occasion for those who still wonder what enterprise 2.0 is to make their own opinion.

Enterprise 2.0 conference : a strategic agenda for 2010-2011

June 18, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 15 Comments

Before going deeper into some points I mentioned on my first post on the conference, I’d like to sum some things up about the last two days and the conclusion of the event.

The conference was, in my opinion, doing in a peaceful way, with good and useful contents but nothing really impressive. The cause may be the fast spreading of best practices and adoption methodologies (mostly thanks to the Council) that increased the number of successful projects while making them all look a little bit alike. This is quite a good thing : we can’t be deceived to see that success is becoming more and more the norm and less an excpetion. So, no spectacular new case but many interesting things from a qualitive standpoint, like MITRE or Sony that are a good evidences of the more and more bluring nature of the organization borders.

I wanted to focus on sessions about “measure and value”. The result was a mixed feeling. Many interesting and insightful things but I felt there were many hesitations : the often used “over the flow” approach needs some time to deliver operational results while a “in the flow / business process” driven one, even if more “technical” and hard to implement, may bring some measurable things faster.

Then came what is, my opinion, the major teachings of this event. We had to wait for the very last session to get it. People were ask to list the issues they would have liked to be more addressed in the conference. The result was eloquent :

- integration with business processes

- metrics

- local culture issues

In my opinion these points have been, for many reasons, overlooked too often for years, but they can’t be swept aside anymore if we want to, first, demonstrate that enterprise 2.0 is a major improvement to organizational models and not only a “nice to have” and, second, address the most reluctant and mistrustful businesses that only pay attention to rational approaches.

I’ve been writing and focusing a lot on these issues for the last twelve months what makes me say that the fact these three issues come together is not a coincidence.

- enteprises create value through business processes, so overlooking them is the best way not to impact value creation. I don’t mean all these processes are efficient or useful and that a cleaning session is not needed. Anyway, this issue must be dealt with as a priority.

- when the goal is to improve a business process, it’s not difficult to find the right indicators since they are those that apply to the process in question. THat said, it’s obvious that new ones can also be introduced and some irrelevant one removed.

- multination companies realize that they can’t use the same adoption model in every country and have to customize it according to local cultures. Most of all, the adoption council that gathers many organizations from all around the world, alerted the enterprise 2.0 ecosystem on that. Seen from my european and french viewpoint, cultural and business process issues are tied. When it comes to address less open but sceptical and change averse cultures, involving people who fear overexposing themselves and engaging too much, the best way to bring both organizations and people to adopt new behaviors and tools is to take them by their lowest common denominator, that is reassuring and less sensitive on a human point of view. This point of entry is business processes.

In short, it’s about adding to adoption strategies (a word I’ve often found restrictive) that often focus on affect, enthusiasm and not enough on delivery, the sense and alignment that are key to any successful transformation.

These three issues are the pillars of the work that has to be done in the upcoming month in order to build comprehensive corporate strategies and this message is a strong signal for those who are starting their social media journey and only see it under an informal viewpoint, disconnected from day to day operations.

Lots of work to do. But lot of promising things for organizations too.

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: adoption, business process, culture, e2conf, Enterprise 2.0

My first takes on Enterprise 2.0 conference

June 16, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 4 Comments

Here are my first takes after one day of workshop about adoption best practices and one of conference. That’s a quick overview and I’ll take time to go deeper into it once I’m back in Paris. To be as clear as possible I’ll tackle the topic taking three view points : vision, methodology and cases.

1°) Vision

It seems that enterprise 2.0 is now at the crossroads. On the one hand the well known discourse on social media adoption within the workplace, the “it’s about people” and, on the other hand, a vague feeling of emptyness as if something was missing. It’s like after having pushed the 100% human, informal, unstructured thing to its limit, people (finally ?) realize that the model had its limits or that it was possible to go further and have a discours and a value propostion that fit more “real” companies expectations. By “real” I mean those who have not one many visionnaries on their board, not a passionate and talented project manager and not a culture that’s open to change.

Two meaningful things have to be mentioned. SAP came to talk about “connecting people to processes” and one of the teachings from the session led by Oliver Marks and Dennis Howlett is that content and context have to be embeded into business processes and that that is the current missing link in enterpise 2.0. While Howlett is oftened said being “on the enterprise 2.0 borderline” and tend to have a sceptical discourse, there are evidences his pragmatism brings a needed pragmatism and common sense in the field of dreams.

If I consider this regarding to my the speech I gave last week in Milan on “bringing conversations into proceses to get the most out of your human capital) I think we are facing a major issue that, if not dealt with, will bring back enterprise 2.0 to the category of the nice ideas that seldom worked because of lack of realism.

Second point : the internal/external barrier is collapsing : organizations think in terms of ecosystem and marketplace and considering the inside and the outside of the company as watertight bubbles is not possible anymore. But I already mentioned that here. Anyway, there’s a point really worht being mentioned : nobody talks about intranets anymore. A sign ?

Conclusion : enterprise 2.0 is at the end of a stage and is taking a breath before going into the next one. Definitively a tipping point. If we don’t want this transition moment to become a boring trip that leads to the cemetary we’ll have to put our hands deep in business processes and admit one thing : the in-the-flow approach is the one to start with when addressing average organizations. If this move is understood, enterprise 2.0 may be skyrocketing very soon.

2°) Method

That’s the logic consequence of what’s above. After the “community and passion” period, a more rational approach seems to be emerging, more business process oriented. Moreover, during the excellent adoption council workshop, Schneider Electric was very clear : “meet users and solve their pains tackling business processes”. Compared to CSC, last year’s rockstar, an interesting evolution can be seen. CSC had a “business problem solving approach” that makes them impressively successful compared to those who only had a “connect, socialize and wait” approach. Schneider is going one step further, tackling business processes. Let them manage their project and look how it’s doing in one year.

On the other hand more attention is becoming to be paid to European HR and legal issues that were often overlooked in the past and are the reason why our organizations started a little bit slower.

3°) Cases

This conference is definitively consistant. Except the confirmations of last years successes (CSC for instance) I did not see this year (at the time I’m writing…we’re only at the beginning) the case that would have made me fall down of my chair. That’s normal : since many adoption best practices are known and have been gathered and consolidated, many cases now look alike and, to some extent, banalisation is a proof of success. On the other hand I’m looking forward to seing more advanced business process driven methodologies and the results they brought (next year ?). I think that enterprise 2.0 hav mostly been experienced by convinced organizations till then and that we now need a model for the rational-sceptic ones. What’s funny is that these new methodologies may look like what’s currently being done in Europe where we quickly had to deal with such organizations and had to adapt consequently.

What if the next enterprise 2.0 rockstars would be european ? French, Italian, German ? I would only be half surprised. After a very slow start that is usual in our contries and the very long work that has to be made beforehand considering legal, hr and cultural issues, I’m sure many “nice” things will emerge soon.

Besides that, a very competent person in the enterprise 2.0 field told me :”maybe you’re right, we lack concrete business results measurement”. Me : “I’m sure these results are often there, but sometimes we don’t measure the right things or refuse to implement relevant new indicators“. If any project aims at improving the performance of a business process, you only have to measure its delivery, what is concrete and understandable by any business. If the 2.0 approach is applied to something that has nothing to do with value creation, then things get really complicated.

To be continued