Enterprise-social-software | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

Social Networking for Business : a collaboration engineering guide in the 2.0 era

February 18, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 3 Comments

If you read this blog it may be because the new approaches to collaboration and among them social networks interest you. You surely get their potential. You surely understand that deploying a tool, put passion and energy in your projet and pray is not the best way to make things work and achieve tangible results too.

A first sight, social networks are very easy : people, interactions, relationships, a hudge potential of value and, at the end, incredible and unexpected results. Unfortunately, for many reasons I won’t list here, what happens on the web does not happen within organizations in the same way.

Experience teaches us that there are many kind of social networks depending on their goal and context. That means specificities in terms of leadership, policies, operation, leverage. Each of these elements is itself defined as being a function of many other factors. A successful social network is a complex alchemy of knowledge of the purpose, interaction models, culture, incentives, communication, tools… What seems simple at the beginning actually supposes to articulate a myriad of things that have to be adjusted with fineness.

Success is not a matter of luck : it’s the consequence of a sharp analysis and, as a good wine, of a subtle assembly that needs both a deep knowledge and some “how tos”. If you want to learn what makes a successful social networks without neglecting any parameter, Social Networking for Business has been writen especially for you.

The author, Rawn Shah, is one of the best experts at IBM and the book is the result of many years of practice in a very “socially” active company and a deep understanding of the whole social networking field.

Thinking that any book could provide us with a magic stick that would make us successful is illusory. On the other hand it can gives us the strings, the indicators to use to build our own logic that fits our own context. Knowing that, Rawn’s book is particularly precise and has a rare deepness of analyze. No part of the question that’s been overlooked and we get a wonderful breakdown and keys for understanding these logics. More, the book is easy to read, clear, understandable, and concise. Once you read it, if you miss any detail to elaborate your own project, arguing that you didn’t know won’t be possible anymore.

I already mentionned Andrew McAfee’s book a couple of weeks ago. To understand the difference between both, let’s say that if social networks were travels, McAfee tels us that traveling is enriching, beneficial, that many already did it in many fashions and that we have a lot to learn from their experience. Rawn, as for him, explains us how to pilot the plane and everything we have to master beforme taking the pilot’s seat.

Those who find McAfee’s too generalist may find their graal here. As for me, I had the conformation of many things I used to think and learned some other things that will add to my toolbox.

Social Networking for Business: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs is a must read for anybody seriously thinking of implementing social networks for business purposes.

To end, I’d like to thank Rawn for having offered me one of the first copies of his book the last time we met as well as Luis Suarez who made the connection and without whom I would have missed the best book about business social networks I’ve read till then.

Feel free to come back, comment and share your feedback once you read the book I’m sure many interesting discussions may start from this book.

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Intranets and digital workplace, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: collaboration, Communities, Enterprise 2.0, enterprise social networks, enterprise-social-software, rawn shah, social networks

The factory, the beach and the Bermuda Triangle. Or the challenges of integration

January 21, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

In the comments following this great piece by Hutch Carpenter about 2010 trends, someone relevantly drawn our attention on the importance of integration. I agree and would like to sum up some ideas about all the integration challenges which are much wider than we can usually think.

Notice : when talking about integration we usually think about software integration. That’s of course a key dimension. But I also pay much attention to the human side integration, what I call behaviors and practices integrations. Any reason to that ? Asking people to collaborate and change behaviors and practices according to whether they are in real life or online, according to the tool they use, may make them become schizophrenic and, even worse, push them to reject what they’re proposed or use it poorly. In my opinion this dimension gains more and more importance as the space for communication and exchange tools become as important as the one for process tools.

I can see three challenges for integration (the two dimensions of integration being highly intermingled).

What future for enterprise social networks ?

December 18, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Social networks are often the key part of every “2.0″ internal projects ? Why ? Because when the purspose is not to find people or informations anymore but to link people through information and information through people, that’s the essential link between tacit and informal knowledge, those who have it and those who need it.

Social networks may come in different forms :

- declarative : every user declarates his networks as he does on Facebook or Linkedin. It’s not very relevant, in my opinion, since refusing a connection request from a connectophile manager may not be very appreciated in the corporate world and such practices may only lead to duplicate the organization chart. More, criterias that may be professional at first sight but that will always have a part of personal and uncounscious discrimination may put the actuality and quality of connections in question. Last, because no one can think of all his weak ties and, even more, formalizating them can be counter-cultural regarding to corporate culture : considering those who will wonder if they will dare asking and those who’ll wonder if they should accept, the game may be very difficult.

- fact-based : the network, but maybe shoul I say “professional nearness sphere”, is not declared by users but analyzed through their activity on social spaces. Who read whom ? Who shares the same topics ? All these things can easily be found by analysing what people do in their flow, the tags they use, their profile.. In my opinion this may is more relevant and helps to identify the “real” networks, according to actual interactions and topics of internet. Since it does not rely on people’s arbitray power it’s more objective and there are few risks of favoritism, diplomacy and popularity competition.

Since networks are fed by social acitivity, they are tied to the applications that supports this activity. Most of times, they are a part of these applications. THe social component of people’s activities not being able to take place anywhere else thatn on specific applications, each vendor built a social network layer above its social application and native social networks vendors added sharing and publication functionalities.

This the enterprise social software landscape as it is today. But how long will it last ?

Voilà le paysage du réseau social d’entreprise tel qu’il se présente aujourd’hui. Mais pour combien de temps encore ?

Enteprise 2.0 : what to expect in 2010 ? The year of “uncrokment”.

December 15, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 3 Comments

A quick look at my predictions for 2009 makes me say that I was not so far from truth even if it took time for things to shift. In my opinion, the tipping point between 2008 and 2009 was the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston and things accelerated at the San Francisco Conference and then at the E2.0 Summit in Frankfurt. By the way, it makes me say that, to whom wonders if conferences of this kind are still relevant since we can discuss all year long, the right answer that they formalize the way trends are evolving.

This said, here’s what I see as the majors trends for 2010 and my intuition tells me that the key dates will still be the same. I’ll consider 3 different levels : concep, implementation and tools in this order. As a matter of fact, if the way one implements things depends of what the concepts means to him, I thing that companies will more and more chose their tools depending on their implementation strategy instead of building strategies constrained by what a given tool is good or bad at depending on its conception.

The concept : enterprise 2.0 as a new layer

Before wondering how to do something, having a clear vision of what this something is matters. The least we could say is that the end of 2009 was very rich in terms of experience and thoughts. Is it about making people use new tools for the sake of making them used ? Is it about (over)connecting people, relying on the assumption that their deep nature will make them naturally develop a community feeling and change their business practices and behaviors ? Obviously both one and the other failed.

Less idealistic but more pragmatic, enterprise 2.0 appears more and more as a productivity tool. In a world “1.0″, individual and collective productivity used to rely on specialization, tailoring tasks at an individual level, rigid processes and fight against any kind of deviation. In such a system the value is…in the system and its conception. In a world “2.0″ characterized by an intensive use of knowledge, value isn’t only in processes anymore but in knowledge and people who have it. So, doing one’s work, delivering results, becomes not only a matter of respecting the process but also a matter of accessing information and people that are out of the process. To do so, people need tools and practices that won’t necessarily replace what exists but add to it.

A few weeks ago I wrote :

Enterprise 2.0 is a set of tools and practices aiming at increasing the scope of the human and informational capital that’s accessible and usable in order to execute everyday’s processes and workflows and deliver the expected work in the assigned time limit. It’s not build outside or in replacement for workflows and business processes but around them.

It still need to be refined but the trend is here. Companies are here to produce things and we can’t neglect this structuring dimension. So enterprise 2.0 is nothing but a new layer that helps to maximize the use resources that are poorly exploited at this time. It’s a layer made of practices and tools that help anyone to access and engage what and whom is needed to achieve his goals. That brings us back to the concept of systems, Service Oriented Organization and Wirearchy.

So the central issue becomes the articulation between existing things and novelty. I’ll discuss that in the next point. For those who got interested in the recent enterprise 2.0 schism discussion, it’s, in my opinion, the victory of the druckerian model.

Maybe 2010 will be one of the last years of the word “enterprise 2.0″. Knowing that it’s a new layer that helps businesses to achieve their primary goal, that articulation is central, we’re obvious talking about “enterprise” without versioning number and how it will do “old things” in a new context. Enterprise 2.0 has no value outside of enterprise and thinking it out of this whole will bring nothing concrete.

Last consequence : the rupture with the world of web 2.0 which logics and vocabulary are the opposite of what companies are. The web will still be source of inspiration and will open the way. But, for the rest, web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 are two really different worlds and each of them will have its own life. Two worlds that inspire one another but that can’t copy. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business Tagged With: activity-specific social software, bpm, bpm 2.0, business process, community management, Enterprise 2.0, enterprise-social-software, implementiation, management, on the flow, over the flow, processes, social-software, socio-collaborative management, workflows

Social networks are the quintessence of enterprise web 2.0

February 27, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

The issue has been emerging for years but it’s now a hard trend : companies don’t consider internal use of web 2.0 as a prospective subject and started to work on its implementation. The network logic and the question of knowing how to implement it is now on CEO”s agendas. All the same, people in charge often can’t make head nor tail of it.
In the first years, the equation was as simple as web 2.0 = Blogs + wikis. No sooner companies understand what they could do with these tools that they were told about social bookmarking. Then RSS. Then microblogging. And now social networks.

So many new things that common people in common businesses may get lost, don’t you think ?

In fact the point is not to make a choice between all these tools but to make a rational use of many of them, each having its purpose, in an unified context. Continously switching from one to another is out of question : employees must have everything at their disposal at the same time and in one interface, without having to care about how they communicare together. Another point is that IT depts can’t afford building bridges between a multitude of tools that evolve independantly, depending on the will of each vendor. I don’t even mention the real risk of overlap as solutions become more mature and expand their scope.

In this logic, the emergence of social networks as the main issue doesn’t have to be understood as “one more tool” but, on the contrary, as the integration of what’s above in a consistant approach.

How do good enterprise 2.0 idea perish

February 17, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

No comment. A good way to understand how old habits (sometimes) prevent good ideas to turn into successful projects.

enterprise 2.0, enterprise-social-software, idées, Innovation, intranet, management-des-idées, social-software

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Intranets and digital workplace, Web & Usages Tagged With: Enterprise 2.0, enterprise-social-software, ideas, ideas-management, Innovation, intranet, social-software

Is there a 2.0 way to draw an org-chart ?

February 11, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 2 Comments

When talking about enterprise 2.0, something we offer hear is “sounds interesting but our company is not designed to work this way”. Understand : we decide to do something and we “push” it, don’t even think of allowing a bottom-up flow to exist in this context. Of course, that causes gaps, the company isn’t able to meet clients and employee’s needs right away, many realignments being necessary while the exchanges that would makes it easier are not facilitated at all. In a colorful language, companies use the existing pipes, hoping all pieces will fit together at the end.

That’s why I suggested to think about a Service Oriented Organization, which starting point is not the top of of the pyramid but the goals the organization has to achieve. Don’t forget that the purpose of any company is not to keep people busy or give to what already exist a reason to live but to meet the market’s expectations, even if it means to change what already exist.

Now let’s play a little game.

Is multitasking dangerous or a myth ?

January 23, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Multitasking is a big issue for both people and organization. It’s the (presumed and made essential) ability for someone to do many things at the same time. The social media phenomenon and the increasing number of information flows people are exposed to are making this concern more and more central.

I’m afraid that, behing th multitasking question, hides a fundamental and dangerous erreur that may make us lose sight of what matters.

Human beings are not fully multitask. We can fully do ony one thing at the same time and it will last for years even if I can admit that in a few centurys our skills will surely imprve. Even Digital Natives are not more multitask than others.

Being multitask and being able to switch from one thing to another are often mistaken. New generations (but many other too) can quickly shuttle between two tasks, what is sometimes seen as being multitask. These people are able to transfer attention and energer between two things, what does not mean they adress them jointly.

But we also have to assume that, when attention is continuously transfered from one point to another, it loses intensity and the more multitask people are the more errors can be found in the tasks they achieve. If you need to be convinced, please read this note .

Some may find it disappointing since because they used to see in multitasking the response to many concerns about productivity. But it’s not that bad : the impacts of multitasking would not all be positive. I already mentioned the risk of an higher failure rate. But there’s also another point : the impossibility to respect due dates. Imagine three tasks, A, B and C, whose duration is 10 (minutes, hour, days… ).

If they are carried out in a raw, the first will be achieved at H+10, the second at H+20, the third at H+30. Now imagine they are carried out in a fragmentary way, on a 5 minutes slot base. The result will look like that :

I didn’t even take into account the time needed to re-focus on each task. Maybe it can make it possible to finish a task earlier but, on a global scale, it doesn’t help people to save any time.

People are overwhelmed by signals and information that force them to try to multitask. At the end, it only lowers their productivity although communication tools are supposed to help them improve it. That is not becaue a message is received that it’s treated, and everyone has his own prioriies. But, obviously, those who send messages and those who conceive the tools that carry them, seem not to be paying any attention to that.

Being exposed to a lot of flows that condition their work, employees need to take leadership upon tools and to maser channels instead of being under a waterfall. By the way I like the analogy that consists of saying that a multi jet shower is something pleasant while being under a waterfall hurts.

The response to this issue has two sides

• The first is behavioral : employees have to learn how to turn flows off and achieve a task without being interrupted.

• The second is rather technical: tools employees are provided with must allow them to master flows and not to be their victims anymore. They must be able to priorize some, put some on hold, reroute some others and make things in order to ” if information is relevant it will find me…if not it will wait”. In brief, tools will have to make it possible for people to build their own information supply chain, whose timing, rate and content will be under their control, starting from a information marketplace, a kind of marshalling yard. A major issue for the software industry where social software will have to play its part.

Filed Under: Knowledge & Information management, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: Communication, enterprise-social-software, flows, information, knowledge, marketplaces, multitasking, productivity, social media, social-software, software, supply chain

Can enterprises organize themselves as markets

January 17, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 3 Comments

What’s a market ? It’s a place when offer meets demand.

Companies love markets because it’s the more efficient way to find outlets for their products and identify suppliers. It’s a competitiveness factor because of the outlets it provides and the optimization of costs that competition makes possible.

The “social” web is a market somehow. Contents can find an audience, ideas outlets, projects people who’ll make them become real, people partners, question answers. It’s because of this market that events as trivial as flashmobs happened, that some people had great carriers evolutions, that some companies where born. This huge self-organized space made possible things that would not have been in a classical, organized, regulated market, operation costs making it irrational the organization of niche micro-markets. It’s because it has no physical nor economic barriers that the web made all this possible : intermediation and transaction costs are near to zero.

There is another place that is full of ideas, projects, needs, competences, longings, question, which would gain a lot if the ones were able to meet the others within its walls : the enterprise.

Experience showed me this is definitively the place where exist the more questions and answers, and the place where we can be sure there are very few chances that the ones meet the others. Companies are traditionnally, on this point of view, the place for misses opportunities. It may sound surprising according to all the things companies do, to all their obvious successes, but when looking at what they don’t or painfully do and would make sense, it may makes us feel dizzy. A kind of vertigo that is proportional with the size of the enterprise. Are there any reason to that ? Of course : high transaction and intermediation costs and the fact companies don’t want to give intermediation up.

20+1 reasons not to launch an Enterprise Social Software project

January 6, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

Let’s be clear : I’m talking about the reasons not to launch a defined project because it’s born to fail. That does not mean that it’s the case for every project : more and more of them are born to be sucessful mainly because of the growing maturity of companies about social networks.

1°) Your interlocutor wants hierarchy driven rights : it’s imposssible for any users to have the same rights as his superiors and so on… At the end the average users barely have the right to read. And don’t even think of letting them write or comment ! This kind of solution is an intranet. And it already exists.

2°) Your interlocutor focuses on document sharing : web 2.0 technologie are more about exchanges, are more about flows than about stock. If he wants a shared directory let him know he already has it on his information system.

3°) 50% of the project team aren’t on Facebook, linkedIn or any social platform : it means that those who will be the go-betweens, those who’ll embody the project in front of end users have no experience of social networks tools and practices. Knowing how many invitations we can receive a day to join such or such platform, it’s not accidental : it’s the proof they refuse the concept.

4°) Your interlocutor wants publication workflows : no one is able to publish anything without getting authorization from his superior while one of the project’s purposes if to fluidify information. By doing that, managers are turned into marshalling yards, censors, publication comittee (chose the right answer) and the only sure you can be sure of is that it will have a negative impact on productivité.

5°) Your interlocutor needs a detailed schedule of behavioral changes : Humm…how to say it ? Human nature is irrational and unschedulable, most of all when interconnected.

6°) Your interlocutor targets people he’d like to make work together but who have no reason to do so : he’s trying to use technology to solve management issues and it won’t work.

7°) Your interlocutor has no power over users : so he has only pious hopes toward people whose “day to day life” he can’t impact. So he won’t be able to facilitate anything while these people have to face constraints he can’t do anything about.

8°) Your interlocutor doesn’t want people to change the way they work : it’ impossible to build new things without impacting old ones, above all if the purpose is to improve these old things.
9°) Your interlocutor’s purpose is to get a 2.0 platform : without taking care of what it would be used for. He forgot that necessicty is the mother of invention and that there are enough plants in offices for decorative purposes that there’s no need to add new ones on the intranet.

10°) Your interlocutor purppose is to make people collaborate and share information : “collaborate and share information”means nothing to his team. They need to be precisely told what they are expected to do. What is more, those words are only means : the real purposes are operational and neglecting them prevents from evaluatin the project. It even prevent the project to progress and receive any support because of its lack of sense.

11°) Your interlocutor will not play any role in the first projects : so he will go fishing for projects and say to someone who didn’t ask for anything “we are going to experiment on your team, for a purpose you didn’t idenfify and provide them with a tools that makes possible things you even cannot visualize. Worse, by recruited “designated volunteers” he may scupper the project by giving the impression of misappropriating resources.

12°) The team’s manager nickname is “Terminator” : and often answer to any idea or suggestion by “that’s bullshit”, “shut up and work”. His first contributions will surely make people feel like giving up.

13°) The project team has no idea of how contents will be used : producting contents that won’t be reused in people’s daily work is useless. An “idea box” that nobody reads won’t cause any innovation. An informational bubble disconnected from real business is useless and often dies on its own.

14°) Your interlocutor will start a change management project only if the pilot succeeds : it means “I will get involved and mobilize resources only if you bring me the proof we don’t need it”.

15°) Your interlocutor wants to test a tool : once he would have validated functionalities on a blank test, he won’t be able to demonstrate anything, any ROI, any benefits because the tool was not used for business purposes. Perhaps il will do reverse engeneering, saying “now we have a tool, let’s find it a purpose”. Back to 11°)

16°) Your interlocutor wants one to one conversations : he’s afraid that a conversation between two people could de followed by a third. He needs an email solution.

17°) Your interlocutor doesn’t have time : he wants things to work without taking any risk, without being seen as a change leader. Don’t expect his executive sponsorship.

18°) Your interlocutor doesn’t make the difference between leadership, expertise and hierarchy : he wants to be sure that the experts who will emerge will be the same as those who are considered as experts by the company and that a trainee will ot have better ideas than his boss.

19°) You interlocutor wants a one month pilot for ten people : at the end of which he won’t be able to prove anything due to lack to time and critical mass.

20°) Your interlocutor wants to wait untill the pilot ends to turn it into a business project : so he wants to makes his team work on trivial things that won’t mobilize people who are already very busy while people are waiting for solutions to make their job easier, more efficient.

And the last one

When you talk about the social side of the project, of people centrism, you’re answered : “oh ! stop ! be careful ! we are not here for any HR stuff”

A contrario, perharps it will help you to find success factors…