The enterprise and the web

Finally, many current debates are about the enterprises’ ability to understand, master and harness the web, internally. This may seem trivial because purely technological and being about competences that are much lighter that those IT depts have been using for decades. But, at the end, it’s more complicated that it seems.

As a matter of fact :

• It’s about making enterprises assimilate  somethings external, which is not something culturally easy. More, it has an impact on the competences that have to be gathered.

• For the first time, it’s about assimilating something coming from the general public whereas enterprises used to be leaders in technological change, adopting things years before it becomes available and affordable for common people.

• The assimilation, that was technological at the beginning, became  about new usages. But enterprises don’t know the word usages : they have methods, processes, norms. The only fact something can change, even a small detail, causes a self-defences reaction. Considering there is also a behavioral impact, it’s easy to understand how difficult things are even if many people are overestimating the upcoming changes. Even if it will help businesses to be aligned with their economic and competitive context, the shift is not easy.

So, here’s how, in less than a decade, things went from face-lifting interfaces to an human and organizational project.

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Do we work the same way with providers and with colleagues ?

The answer is obviously not. And not only because this is not the same kind of contracts. It’s because businesses still act according to the model that makes them consider their employees on one side and the others on the other side. And in the middle…they build walls. They proctect from the outside although value is not created on one or the other side of the wall alone but by people, from both companies, sitting on the top of the wall. Externals can’t access the tools that are used to collaborate inside et interactions between insiders and suppliers are much harder than between colleagues (even if, even in this case, it’s often far from being easy).

A few months ago I was wondering if the future of businesses was to manage an ecosystem of partners and outsource many competences.A phenomenon that won’t be driven by circumstances but by an organizational vision (which limits can easily be found)

I’m reading here that self employement will dramatically increase in the US in the ten next years. If this prediction is true, businesses will have to learn how to work efficiently with a growing number of external people, getting rid of irrelevant barriers.

Changes have to be undertaken, both in business and management practices (consider the others as a part of ours) and tools (platforms that allow both formal and informal interactions, open to external people). How many companies do open their internal collaboration spaces to their providers ? And, even when they do, what kind of interactions do they make possible ?

Working with providers as if they were one’s own employees is not only a self-fulfilling concept. It has noticeable implications which may soon become vital.

écosystème, collaboration, entreprise, externalisation, knowledgeworkers, outils-collaboratif, prestataires, réseaux, travailleurs indépendantss, travailleurs-du-savoir,interactions

I’m a bottleneck…but I try to improve

I wrote “I”…as I could I written “us”, “you”… a little story that’s, of course, imaginary. Any similarity whith any existing situation or people is accidental.

Finally, I did it well. Slowly, step by step, I climbed up the company’s hierarchy and took more and more responsabilities.

Today, I’m managing a large team. I’m responsible for my team’s results so I take care of everyhting and do my best to keep everything under control. Nothing is done without my approval. And nothing can happen if I’m not informed. As time went by I become a little less directive, more mature. I know that giving orders and setting objectives is not enough. So I’m trying to do make myself avaible to help my staff, to help them to carry on.

I also have many internal responsabilities. On many strategic fields, nothing is done without consulting me. I’m involved in many internal think tanks, advisory groups. The company does nothing until such a group has spent a long time thinking about what has to be done and how.

I don’t even mention the relations with key clients and partners, which is my exclusive domain.

That’s not easy everyday. The people I’m in contact with are as busy as me. It’s very hard to find a moment to discuss together, to make the decisions that break deadlocks. And this can’t be done by email. It’s even worth with internal meetings, because we have to deal with the schedules of sometimes ten or fifteen very busy people. What a pity : most of times, only five are really active, the other being a part of the decorum. Sometimes I’m one of the five. Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing there. A short report would be enough, just to let me know what has been said and decided.

In short : I’m responsible and essential. Nothing can be done without me. So you can imagine how much money my company makes thanks to me.

Humm… I have to admit that sometimes I’m doubtful.

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3 web 2.0 tools enterprises must consider

I often touch on the need for professionaling web 2.0′s tools and usages in order to make them consistent in a corporate context. But we also have to keep in mind that there are some tools and usages that exist on the general public web that businesses haven’t considered yet and that they should bring inside their firewall.

Why three tools ? Because I didn’t find more. Even if I more addicted to the Harvard Business Review than to Techcrunch, it seems to me that as regards tools the essentials are behind us. Some cobble things up, make improveent, build mashups but no new logic comes and bring something really new in the extensive catalog that already exists. I was really looking for some new logics and not for an nth copy of something that already exists.

If you look at web 2.0 tools, very few are those that businesses have not try to implement for internal purposes yet (which does not mean they successfully managed to do so). Blogs : done. Wikis : done too. Social Networs k : they are learning. FlickR and YouTube like ? Done. Google Docs : done. Bookmarking : done. Then come some new services that are nothing but mashups. Let’s end the list.

3°) Silentale

I’ve put silentale on the third step of the podium because it’s not available yet so I rely on the promise that was made at the last LeWeb08 conference when won a special award from the public. The ability to gather and funnel all your conversations, exchanges, wherever they take place is an interesting productivity booster. This is a part of the “personal information supply chain” I’ve already developed here. A part of the corporate plumbing.

2°) Dopplr

To be honnest, Iwould  never have thought of mentionning  Dopplr here if I hadn’t have a conversation with a friend weeks ago. He works for a company that has subsidiaries all over the world and which teams are send…all over the world too. Experts can be in a local headquarter or send to join temps in a place near you, in the jungle or in the middle of the ocean. “Sometimes we can be 10 at the same time in NYC, each one coming from a different country….plus our NYC team. But it can also happen in the middle of nowhere without any of us knowing others people from the company are there. So we’d like to use Dopplr but, considering our industry, we can’t rely on a public platform. A prive dopplr would do the job”. What may seem of a secondary importance for sedentary businesses may be essential for those where mobility is the norm. And not only for human reasons…

1°) Seesmic.

Here is the big winner, coming in an easy first. It take a long time for businesses to recognize the business value of asynchronous and public conversations between the members of their staff. Video seems to be gadget for many of them. But the video asynchronous public conversations, instead of cumulating all the barriers bring a sudden ray of light as its ROI is obvious. Perhaps it’s also because of the current context.

Imagine that you need your sales team to be more efficient (I know…nobody cares about that today ;-) ). They are asked to qualify their leads better, to react in an adapted way to each situation…. The solution has a name : training. But how can an expert trainer work with people all over the world knowing that it’s just not possible to put him on a plane every morning !

A case can be imaginated. Everyone is asked to register his sales speech when he can. The trainer can see them one by one, make corrections showing what to improve, the the sales person start again… It’s more efficient than a videoconference because it does not disturb people’s own agendas, it allow corrections, it allow to teach by the example and, most of all, conversations can made accessible for all so that a real expertise library is available on the intranet with cases, real examples, corrections etc…

Only a blind person would not see the ROI here. And it’s only a quick and dirty example.

Ok…maybe none of these players are interested in this kind of market.

And you ? Do you see others ?

Enterprises far beyond enterprise 2.0

A few weeks ago I amused myself proposing a few tracks on what enterprise 2.0 may be in 2009. But I think pushing the reflection beyond would be worth : enterprise 2.0 is only a side of a much complex reality that is enterprise and will be of any use only in a global framework. Since enterprise, and economy in general, can be defined as the place where more and more numerous interactions melts, believing it can be improved by only cosmetic improvements. Evry initiative that’s not aligned with a macro vision that will take all these considerations into account won’t bring anything worthy.

So, let’s put ourselves in the main player’s place.

• The top management

The less we can say is that top management is very worried. Because of the downturn, CEOs are trying to protect the organization. It’s hard to find more revenue so, in order to preserve the result they want costs to be cut. Or spendings, which is not the same thing. In the other hand they know that if they keep on cutting costs, they will soon be unable to make any cent go in the bank so they try to find how to make work more efficient, to work on costs instead of expenses. And, finally, the idea of business networks comes to the surface. But how to make it happen ?

On the other hand, this crises is about something deeper that worries them a lot. Always promising more has its limits and now it seems that these limits have been reached.  Do they have to stop promising the moon since they know organization’s performance have its limit and trying to balance it with financial performance leads to the situation we now know ? Do we have reached the limits of a system and is this crisis the consequence of a management model failure. Do we have to reinvent the way we do business ?

In brief, an increasing demand for more responsability and sustainability in management, that is not so far from a tendency that brings many companies to think their development together with their human ecosystem’s in order not to ruin their tomorrow’s markets.

Many issues that have a lot in common and that, without forseeing the answers that will be given, will have to be taken into account this year.

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Will 2.0 learn the enterprise ?

As I wrote in a previous post, all the required conditions are gathered for serious things to begin. Most of times, when a new phenomenon emerges, it goes through the following steps : ecstasy and disorganised intiatives even if brings no benefits, rejection because nothing good has been done at the previous step and then wise and efficient use.

Knowing that one of the economic downturn positive effect, in an enterprise 2.0 perspective, is that it means the end of the first step and will dramatically reduce the length of the second one. As a matter of mact, as I wrote here, companies will have to focus on efficiency and business and do what’s needed regardless to how it’s called.

Maybe some people will found it disappointing but I’ve always noticed that the more interesting contributions on enterprise 2.0 were not from the 2.0 world but from business, organization, management or HR professionals, although there are some excpetions. Nothing but logic because, by definition, the ones are trying to find a room for tools where the others try to improve the way organizations work and, one day, consider some tools may be useful to support their approach. Happily, both always meet at the end.

Now, where is all the stuff bringing us ?

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What 2007′enterprise is. Introduction

Basically enterprise in 2007 is the same that it was in 1950. It’s a group of people and means united for a shared purpose. So nothing has changed since. It’s reassuring. There are still products, equipment, customers and competitors. Looking at things this way we can say nothing has changed since 1920. What brought success in 1920, 1930….1950 may still work tomorrow.

Perharps it’s too simple. Indeed, and everybody will agree with that, the enterprise has changed a lot since then. I’d rather say it has adapted, sometimes inconsciouly. But adpating is not changing and comes a time where mico-adjustments are not enough anymore. I’ll only mention the views that are now being expressed at IBM or Ford : reinvent how the enterprise operates, reinvent the way you consider people inside the organization, reinvent its business model. When a car manufacturer says he has to change his model it’s like a century of absolute certainties that is collapsing.

It’s very important to understand this change in context if we want to make enterprises evolve to something more accurate and relevant considering today’s and toworrow world.

A quick tour of those changes is coming in the next notes….

To be continued…