An internal social network replaces nothing but improves the existing

August 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : A social network ? Yes but to replace what ? How many times did we hear this question at the time this kind of tools was entering the corporate workspace. Considering social networks as something that will replace existing tools often lead some misuses, for things it was not designed for. As a matter of fact, enterprise social networks were more designed to make up for lacks than for improvement. Marketing approaches did not help either since saying “xxxx is dead, let’s throw everything away” was so easy. An interesting approach is to separate the social aspect from the network tool in our thoughts. The network is a tool that completes the existing, social is a conceptual and functional approach that improves the existing and creates synergies between all the tools, the resources that use them and the resources they handle.

This is a periodical question that comes like season. What ? The obsession, of wondering what part of the information system will be made obsolete and replaced by an internal social network.

Let’s sum up. We had “will ESNs replace the intranet ?”, “Will ESNs kill the email ?”. “Will ESNs replace the corporate directory ?”. “Will ECM be replaced by conversation ?”. “Will ESNs replace collaboration tools ?”. And what was the final conclusion ? “Yes…but no. ESNs are a part of a wider system that needs us to rethink the way we interact with others, with information, the notion of collaboration”. Since it appeared that adding a tool did not solve anything without having a more global approach, the the discussion moved to….replacing another tool. And so on…

As a matter of fact :

• ESNs to replace the intranet ? Except for those who have a simplistic vision of intranets or a SMB without very specific needs, ESNs only conver a part of the needs.

• ESNs to replace email ? Without a deep thinking on the way information is consumed, acted on, on the way exchanges are organized on a global scale, on the way we analyze, process and prioritize it, thinking that a social network will replace email and solve the information overload is nothing but illusory. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Management & HR, Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Enterprise social network : a famous stranger

May 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : enterprise social networks are the future of corporate IT, a tool overwhelmingly supported by employees because it will save them from email and favor the adoption of more efficient work practices. Sure ? Outside of  a circle of initiated (that is growing everyday), except for people who are in charge of such programs in their organization, the words “social network” and “enterprise” seldom come together in many employees’ mind. And, when it happens, it’s more about Facebook and brand management than work efficiency. The reason ? Few people have tried to understand what it’s all about, personal usages are hard to transcribe in a work context to articulate a clear value proposition and the ubiquitous image of Facebook is a real burden.

I had recently the opportunity of talking with a small group of people who had one thing in common : their title started with either “chief” or “director”. Suddenly, one said the magic word : “social network”. All but one had an opinion, a question, something to share about this topic. Nothing surprising since social network has become a very trendy topics in organizations over the years.

And then…crash ! The star of the conversation quickly became facebook and the focus came on information leaks, lower productivity etc., to the surprise of the person who launched the conversation and thought it was obvious that everybody around the table knew this kind of thing. Obviously they didn’t. Surprisingly I was expecting this kind of reaction.

Enterprise social networks are a paradoxical topic. Of course, you, who read this blog, are well informed about that. Of course, you, who are in charge of deploying such a thing in your organization, know what an ESN is. Now, ask the question around you, to your friends, family etc.. I’m sure you’ll get lots of ideas, opinions or concerns about “enterprise and social networks”. But nothing “enterprise social networks”.

We have to admit that, outside of a circle of initiated people, social networks are seen as an entertaining tool, sometimes as a tool for marketing and communication. This article from French newspaper speaks for itself. It says that CHROs get social networks better and better. And what do they say to illustrate their thoughts ? Recruitment, employer brand, image and general public social networks. And yet HR should have many things to say on the potential (and risks) of internal social networks….

ESNs are far from having “killed their father” (Facebook…even if many ESN solutions were already existing when FB became mainstream and open to all).

Ok, anyone who talks with “real people” out of the echo chamber already knows that. But knowing the causes to deal with the issue more efficiently can be worth.

[Read more...]

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

Enterprise 2.0 in 2011 : value or denial of reality ?

December 14, 2010 By 7 Comments

Summary : what will happen in the Enterprise 2.0 world in 2011. Making predictions is very difficult because many things will depend on what enterprise 2.0 wants to become. After 5 years of experimentations, thoughts, discussions, there’s enough maturity on methodologies, limits, improvements to be made that we should say the big change is on its way. But the road is long from words to actions and many things will depend on enterprise 2.0′s ability to get out of kind of denial of enterprise. Accept to frankly talk about value, put hands into complex and sensitive mechanisms that drives production and execution, forget the idealistic and angelic vision of a dreamt organization driven by passion, openness and nice intentions wlll be key in 2011. What’s at stake : moving forward or losing credibility.

Before trying to guess what the enterprise 2.0 world will look like in 2011, let’s start summing up what has happened since 2006 and what the situation looks like today.

In 2006 Andrew McAfee came to the conclusion that the use of social software could support new ways of working. Nothing more, nothing less. That’s what he called “tech-enabled organization”. These new ways of working being made desirable and even necessary by the evolution of the economy and value creation models, lots of people tried to implement the above mentioned tools. Often without success. Then came the conclusion that (for those who did not get it before…) tools were nothing but enablers (the “tech-enabled” thing in McAfee’s writings is too often overlooked) and that organization, management, people and even culture were parts of the equation.

With time and after lots of experimentations and reflection, it became obvious that the structure of work and organization had to be tackled (read my 2009 and 2010 predictions) to make the change possible and be sure it would improve value creation. What led to a consensus on the need to tackle business processes both for alignment and value creation matters. It was quite a logic conclusion for anyone knowing the deep mechanisms that drives operations and value creations but was light-years away from the dominant doctrine that was nearly exclusively focused on building communities above (and out of) the flow of work. The idea was not to favor the one or the other but to articulate both to meet organization needs and create synergies between unstructured cross-organization exchange dynamics and structured and vertical operation ones.

Meanwhile, tools improved a lot in terms of richness, integration capabilities etc.

Let’s sum-up :

• awareness that we have to tackle the organization mechanisms and machinery

• awareness that we have to articule on the flow and above the flow dynamics.

• awareness that we have to go beyond community dynamics

• existence of a lot of valuable knowledge and sets of practices about community management. Let’s be honest ; we have “best practices”, heaps of methodology, lots of cases and the tools to support the whole (Cf: the incredible work of the Community Roundtable). More and more people are now able to build and manage successful communities and what gives the opposite feeling is that too many businesses try to turn into communities what is not communities (hence the need to do beyond…)

• we have good social software tools.

So everything is alright and enterprise 2.0 won’t experience any issue in 2011. Things are going well, we’re on a straight highway and success is ahead. Problem : it seems we take pleasure driving with he hand brake on.

[Read more...]

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

And the best enterprise social network platform on the market is…

November 5, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Summary : at a given moment in any enterprise 2.0 project, a choice has to be made about the tools that will be used. And,, the “specialist” is often asked the same question : “Tell me what’s the best tool on the market”. That’s a tough question regarding to the number of parameters to take into account and, in fact, there’s no “best tool on the market” but rather “tools that fit the most a given context. However, with hindsight and as organization’s maturity is increasing, the criterias that are used to define such a tool are evolving. For a perenial, scalable and coherent project that will avoid the “social bubble syndrome, I came to the conclusion that businesses should  qualify an environment and application services rather than an application as such.

I can’t remember how many times I was asked what social platform to chose, what was the “best one” in my opinion. That’s a question I’ve never been able to answer.

First, because it’s impossible to suggest a tool regardless to its purpose. Do you want a tool to screw or hammer ? Both a hammer and a screwdriver are excellent tools to do DIY but if the objective is not known there’s a real risk of suggesting to buy a hammer while there’s a screw issue.

Then, because many factors hav to be taken into account. Its functional richness, its ergonomy (very subjective), how easy it is to implement it quickly, the need or aversion for Saas, its ability to integrate with existing tools, its coherence with the prevailing technologies in the organization…not mentionning a lot of factors that may sound surprising but may be essential in a given context. Depending on the need, each of these points will weight differently what will lead the organization to make a choice that will be theirs.

Last, because it will always be a matter of compromise rather than a matter of choice. Anyone who have ever tried to conduct an exhaustive researche on social tools or, like me, has to know and work with a lot of platforms will tell you the same thing : there’s no perfect tool on the market and even if some are marking themselves out, a given need will make us chose a tool that we would never have considered as a possible first choice before. Even worse : by dint of trying more and more platforms, we are often disappointed with the one that’s chosen, whatever its name is. Everyting being a matter of compromise, we chose the one that is 70%, 80%, 90% like the “ideal tool” as we could dream it but does not exist. And we spend our time saying “xxx software does it better”…knowing that if we have chosen xxx software we would have regreted something from yyyy soft that was the other option.

What’s wrong with compromises is that, by chosing something that averagely meets all the needs, you can end with something that specifically meet no need at all and see all business departments launch pirate projects and go to find an alternative platform for their own needs.

So my answer used to be “try to fing the tools that fits your needs the best and avoid tools that are so neutral that despite they won’t raise any issue they won’t solve anything either”. And once done “learn to love what you have since you can’t have what you love”. Far from being satisfying.

I don’t even mention the cases when businesses have to chose two tools because any couldn’t do the job alone.

Now I’ve refined my criterias. [Read more...]

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

Being done with the enterprise 2.0 value discussion

October 19, 2010 By 1 Comment

Summary : many still wonder what new tools will bring to their organization and still have trouble visualizing the benefits. The reason is simple ; they imagine these tools in their current organization while it’s difficult to see their contribution out of a new way of working. Organizations built rules to accomodate to the constraints of existing tools. If these constraints are removed by new tools, organizations have to built new rules that will replace the current ones.

I recently found this post on the value (or lack of) of a new technology. It applies to new technologies in a general way, applying it to social software is very instructive.

First, let’s try to answer a few simple questions.

1°) What’s the main power of this technology

It makes information sharing easier and more efficient as well as enterprise-wide discussions related to business issues, the whole taking place out of organization and application silos. It allows anybody to identify, mobilize, put together all the information, data, expertises and people on a scale that was impossible before because of the above mentioned silos. So it allows, in fine, to provide employees with what they need to be efficient in what is called the “knowledge economy”.

2°) What are the limitations this technology is removing

The difficulty sharing unstructured data, identify information and people out of a silo.

3°) What rules were built to accomodate these limitations ?

In the context of a given business process, organizations started with the assumption the information needed for delivery and decision making was not findable. So they built operation models that rely on preset rules aiming at minimizing exceptions even it it meant to deliver an acceptable result in any situation but never something adapted to a very specific need. Assuming this, knowing that people will never have to look out of the process, the time allocated to informal-out-of-process-and-silos-collaboration was considered as wasted time…what impacted the way people were measured.

List to be continued…

4°) What rules should be implemented now  ?

I won’t elaborate that much on this point because it’s specific to any situation and many contextual elements are needed to give an answer that applies to a specific business, industry, business process. But it may look like “service oriented organizations“, social routines,articulating structured and unstructured work activities, rethinking quality…

Taht’s only the starting point of a deeper investigation that has to be conducted within a given organization. Anyway, conclusions are the same than those I made about the ROI of enterprise 2.0.

- technology has no value by itslelf

- technology should allow to to things that couldn’t be done before

- rules were set to accomote the limits of previous technogies. The new technology has no value is old rules are not replaced with new ones adapted to the new potential that can now be harnessed.

In one sentence : rules have been set to accomodate constraints. If any technology removes constraints, rules have to be changed or the technology will be useless.

To end, when organization wonder “how to think” their social network or any social media project, they should wonder what rules have to be removed and what should replace them. Designing such projects without thinking a new way of working is removing all the value of the project from its beginning. It’s also the evidence that, to convince an IT dept,  a value co-construction process has to be implemented with business people because it’s simply not their role to care about how business is done.

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

Employees are not middleware

October 5, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Summary : the reason why employees balk at using many of the tools they’re provided with is because they are asked to articulate different ways of working and type of informations together and bridge the gaps between application silos. Not only all of them don’t have the required skills to do that, to understand how and why they should articulate things together but, moreover, they don’t have the time to bridge between tool. For a long time they’ve been asked to do a kind of middleware job. In the future, organizations won’t avoid the cost of a deeper tool integration in order to replace people’s time that’s not scalable by a technological layer that is. That’s also true for enterprise social software.

The less we can say is that organizations have been investing a lot to make employees more productive by making their tasks easier to perform but employees really balk at using the tools that are supposed to make their life easier. At the beginning many thought that it will be different with enterprise social software because it’s made of tool that people use and appreciate in their personal lives. But, at the end, the conclusion is still the same : an incredible portfolio that can help to face nearly all situations…but very few adoption.

Let’s try to think as the average employee. In front of him, on his screen : an email client, a portal, a document management system, one or two activity specific application (ERP, CRM…), a social network, an instant messaging client… Enough to do everything and solve all his needs and channels for every kind of interaction : structured, unstructured, synchronous, asynchronous, within a defined project group, within open topic-centric communities…

The truth is that organization made a bet. They bet people intuitively know how to articulate these logics and tools and behave as information smugglers.

- articulate logics : work with structured activity centric tools and go to find relevant information to make decisions in a social network for instance.

- articulate tools : use a CRM, then find some information in the social network, then in the ECM, come back to the CRM then use the portal… Aggregate all the informations about someone from the official directory, his activities on the social network, his contribution to wikis etc…to be sure this is the right person to contact to solve a business problem.

- being information smugglers : a discussion in a tool may help to generate an information in another, an information here may be the cause of a conversation there.. To make the system work, information has to move from one tool to another. A report from the CRM to share in a group space, a discussion inside a community to link to an action in the CRM… In the best case people copy and past, in the worse they make screen shots…and end doing nothing because it makes them waste too much time. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Software is business by nature, information social by purpose

August 6, 2010 By Leave a Comment

At the first times of the coming of 2.0 tools in the workplace, they used to be conscientiously locked into secured experimental bubbles in order to tame them in a safe context. This kind of approach showed its limits and its counter-productive nature.

- the tools in questions were isolated from traditional applications (directories, workflows, business tools) they didn’t communicate and exchange with. Yet the proper of these tools was to improve discussions and information sharing. None of these are spontaneous and most of times they are caused by a situation, a context, a stimulation. What makes a situation, a context “happen” in the workplace ? Elements coming from business tools. Consequence : discussion was kept away from what caused it, problem solving from what constitutes the problem. Result : no participation.

- consequence of the previous point : the utilization of these tools was not integrated in user’s work flow. Since a tool is not linked to business systems, the usages and interactions it supports is not linked to business either. Moreover, it was a key lessons from many experimentations : the tool didn’t have to impact people’s day to day job, bring any change or confusion.What a paradoxical situation for many users : since discussions, sharing, exchange are parts of knowledge workers work flow, everything was done to make social software be used for anything but that.

So, integration and unification of both work and information flows are indissociable.

Slowly, reasion is taking the upper hand and the importance of integrating social software in the existing application landscape and in employee’s work flow is now understood by most people. A better integration of social applications with business applications is needed and that’s good.

But isn’t there something that sounds strange ? That means that, first, the value proposal and the positionning of these tools was not clear for all players and, second, that no lesson was learnt of many years of trial and errors : building bridges means than there is no understanding that we’re talking about one sole things.

Saying that social and business have to be more integrated shows that the first is not seen as being a part of the second yet. It means that they are still thought separately.

So it seems surprising :

- that many players in these field consider they are social before being business and are too focused on their own beliefs to understand business needs and constraints. Social is a means that is there to serve the business and not an end business has to give a reason to exist.

- that many companies still think that “social” is complementary since it’s a part of the very nature of business, most of all at times when communication, in all its forms, is key to execute many process. But, to some extent, it’s less serious than the previous point that, once fixed, will stop confusing the way businesses understand these things.

A product is “business” or is not. There’s no room for “almots” or “yes but”. Any information is not social or business. It’s business or not and has to be able to be the subject of “social” actions. Moreover we can wonder if the strongest barrier to social software adoption is the fact we tried to socialize people inside new tools instead of making it possible for them to “socialize” information wherever it is without having to launch any new tool that adds the impressive list of already existing one and forces them to split their attention to take one more information source into account while what stimulates information production inside the tool is always outside the tool and can be found anywhere, in any other business application.

sParadoxically, Social software will be a major and adopted trend the day when there will always be business applications in the workplace and social will be a transparent layer nobody will even notice. Articulting social with business, building bridges may be a a good first step but in order to create value for and with users one more step will be needed : fusion.

PS : I purposely use quotes when I say “social” or “socialization”, admitting that I’m using comfortable buzzwords that gives senses without having to say what it exactly means. Maybe explaining, and even debunking, the S word is necesary. Let’s say that, applied to information, it means the ability to share it, push it out of its original container and interact on / around it out of any organized and planned approach. Applied to people it would mean enabling them to identify, connect to and interact with / on people out of any beforehand defined system.

enterprise-social-software, intégration, logiciel d’entreprise, social software, social media

Filed Under: Management & HR, Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , ,

Need to take users by the hand ? Remember they only have two !

July 13, 2010 By Leave a Comment

It does not matter things are seen from the people or technology point of view, since we all know that people seldom embrace new things keeping their eyes shut and without questionning (even more in the workplace) we all understand that users have to be taken by the hand and accompanied. On the other hand, the failure of many strategies aiming at doing so show that many change programs do not know where to find the hand or have a wrong idea about its location.

It means that beyond the myth of multitasking, employees focus on two things and that all their attention goes there. It’s not a matter of lack of goodwill but they can’t do more if they want to do things well and keep their concentration. So any other issue is seen as peripheral, and dealing with it will force employees either to make it superficially or to stop doing something important, come back to it later and make up the delay later. Nothing pleasant at all.

Every day, people have one hand in their email client and the other in their structured activities (call it process, workflow…) and the tools that help them to manage and deal with these activities. The first is their principal means of communication, the only that even if it’s not properly used, keep them in touch with everyone. The second is the reason why they have been hired, what they are evaluated on, what they have to do (and do it well) before thinking of doing anything else.

That can help us to draw some conclusions in terms of change management. Since, in order to grab a hand we have to know where it is, it’s impossible to do anything without taking into account the email and its place in employees workaday life or the relationship between the new things and the structured activities. Any other angle won’t impact employees and will fail. Then, we’ll have to explain how to put their hands elsewhere won’t prevent them from doing what they used to do before, what is essential to their job.

Any other approach would be like telling a driver “take you hands off the wheel” without telling him that, on top of being enabled to do much more things, he’ll be provided by something that will at least help him to drive better than with a steering wheel.

It also has consequences on technology for both companies that try to implement social software and vendors who provide solutions to these companies. There is an incredible number on players on this market despite it has reached a consolidation phase and each of them is pushing a different approach, focusing on a specific kind of social activity to seduce buyers. The truth is there are only two valid approaches and not one more. The rest is only marketing blah-blah and even if the verbiage may sound seducing, it never survives to the confrontation with real business.

No solution can be sustainably adopted on a large scale in any organization if it doesn’t meet at least one of the following requirements (both is better) :

- high integration in email clients. It can come in different ways, from the most simple one (alerts / notifications) to the most accomplished (widget in the client, shared data and services)

- integration with tools that are used for structured activities (CRM, ERP, BPM…even ECM). Interactions and conversations often come from the need to solve a business problem…guess where these problems emerge and are identified ?

Many lines can be taken in front of employees, many tools can be proposed. The truth is much simple : who does not tackle one of these points of entry is saying things that make no sense for employees, adds problems without bringing any solution.

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

Do we need a social CRM Magic Quadrant ?

July 9, 2010 By 41 Comments

Gartner recently published a new Magic Quadrant about Social CRM (than can be downloaded at Jive with registration). I have no special thought about the content right now but I think the very idea of this specific quadrant can be questioned.

At the time when all the discourses converge on saying that, even if it’s not exactly the same thing, Enterprise 2.0 and Social CRM approaches need to be thought jointly in a consistant fashion because they feed one another, it may seem surprising that a Social CRM Magic Quadrant comes in addition to the already existing enterprise 2.0 one.

Anyway, it reflects the state of the market : some solutions are focused on internal collaboration, others makes the bridge with external communities and media and, even if some vendors may want to specialize on a niche, I guess that in a near future, being credible on both fields will be mandatory for any player. But, right now, it’s clear that except for some vendors (that were not all eligible for the quadrant), the photography of the market looks more like if there was two distinct markets.

We have to keep in mind that, as a market builder, Garder just justified the strategy that has been chosen by some players of the Enterprise Social Software market such as Jive or blueKiwi that are beginning to embrace the analytics side of CRM and brings a social layer to it as well as CRM players that are trying to get the social fiber. As a matter of fact, the fact that the two leaders, Jive and Lithiym, are so close to the center of the Quadrant demonstrates that the processus of integrating the two worlds is only at its beginning and that the road will be very long.

Anyway the trend is here : the Sony case that was shown in Boston and the discussions that took place in Both Boston and Milan in june during two major conferences show that businesses are beginning to deal with both approaches at the same time in a structured and joint approach and are expecting vendors and consultants to give them adequate answers.

What bothers me a little bit is when I try to think as if I were the client. The latter thinks in terms of global stratgey and separating the two markers may makes him split his reflection and build application silos instead of opening the channels and fluidy interactions across the corporate membrane. Even if relevant in some ways, adopting this standpoint is like looking with vendor’s eyes and neglecting actual customer needs.

So, how can an enterprise that is thinking, beyond tool, of new effective ways to create value, deal with these quadrants ? Superimpose both and eliminate vendors that are one-market-only players ? Why not.

Maybe analysts can help by changing their switching their prism. Even if their job is to help businesses to choose the right technology, they should understand that technology is pointless out of a value driven approach that does not exist in the analysis. Maybe offering a “Value creation in open ecosystems” would provide customers with a more relevant viewpoint. I agree it may be quite hard to design but when one’s mission is to build and light up markets, being aligned with changing market drivers is mandatory.

But maybe such reports are made to help vendors and not customers…

Filed Under: Customer Relationship & Marketing, Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Software & Tools Tagged With: , , ,

What’s new at Lotus ? Coherence, openness and value

February 19, 2010 By Leave a Comment

connections-logoI rencently had the chance to attend Lotusphere in order to gauge the feeling of what what happening at IBM/Lotus. I took some time to write this post because I was not sure of the point of view I had to take.

It was obvious that “I saw tools doing this and this” was not relevant. In the enterprise 2.0 solutions arena I don’t think this is the point. There are many tools that help to create communities, wikis, social networks, twitter-likes… So when you are IBM (or Microsoft) you must have everything in your portfolio while smaller competitors may focus on only one part of the E2.0 offer. Notice that the latters tend to enrich their offer what makes  products  looking more and more similar with the risk of including a very good application into a suite that is not as good.

In short, if you’re looking for a product benchmark I think there are enough things writen on the web. In my opinion the point is elsewhere. Being able to make bricks coherent, being able to provide user with a coherent experience in various contexts, find one’s place in the workday workflow. And, last but not least : demonstrate that the needs of organizations are understood and that a clear and relevant vision of the future exists.

Let’s see how things are doing.

[Read more...]

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