Human-capital | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

Borrowing profitability from the future ?

December 1, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : in the knowledge economy economy era, investing on human capital development is key but stays marginal because of short term profitability logics. But does this vision actually creates value ? Locally, for the enterprise, it seems so. But globally speaking the question is worth being asked because the related costs does not disappear but are shifted to the society or the future of the enterprise what, in fine, backfires in a long term perspective since it’s becoming harder to pay the debt caused by decisions made in the past. As cycles shorten, it may lead to a dead-end.

A couple of days ago, a started reading again The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business by Umair Haque.This book was already brilliant when it was issued even if it more comfortable to think that the author was exaggerating too much, that his predictions would never happen. Less than one year after, the least we can say is that he was right.

Many concepts and ideas developed in the book look innovating, disruptive…too much according to some even if the news tell us the contrary. A better explanation would be to say theiy’re thought-provoking. Among these ideas, there’s the one according to which enterprises have been borrowing their benefits while shifting costs to others for decades and that, one day, the debt becomes so big that the whole system jams.

Practically speaking it means that profitability is often overestimated because enterprises don’t assume all their costs that are shifted to the society of the future of the organization. Environmental costs, training costs…many of these things are known under the name of corporate social responsibility. If the whole costs was taken into account we would see that lots of enterprises are not socially profitable. Le system works until the day when shifted costs became so big that society can’t deal with them. And it backfires on the enterprise.

Social Business and triple bottom line experts (not the social business used to rebrand enterprise 2.0, the real Social Business) will find here some concepts they know quite well and that I’ll sum up using the words of Antoine Riboud when he was leading Danone : enterprise responsibility does not stop at the enterprise’s doors and making one’s ecosystem poorer to become oneself richer will cause one’s failure because it kills future markets.

I don’t claim I’m able to have such a deep thinking as Haque but, by thinking about these things again and again to assess how relevant they were, I ended asking myself a couple of questions.

Investing in people ? Are you kidding ?

September 28, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 2 Comments

Summary : the knowledge economy rely on people as an efficiency and growth driver. That’s a given. To ensure the competitiveness of businesses in the future, new operating models, frameworks and practices will be needed. That’s understood but not easy to implement. Investing in human and the frameworks that will ensure that the best use will be me made of their skills in the production process is a nonsense, most of all regarding to business and accounting indicators that were designed for other value creation models and lead businesses in the wrong direction. Knowledge accumulation and sharing, collaboration, frameworks based on trust which is essential in this context makes no sense regarding to rules that need change if we want to build a suitable environment that will favor business and employees’ development.

In a previous post, I mentioned that an economy relying on the intensive use of knowledge was, before all, a system relying on accumulation.

- knowledge accumulation : before being reused, knowledge should be shared, so made accessible so be formalized. In other words, if we take the example of an enterprise social platform supporting the way work is done, it will take time before a critical mass of knowledge can be found in the platform to make anyone found a reason to go there to take what they need and even bring their own knowledge.

- trust accumulation : trust is at the center of collaboration frameworks as well as of work models relying on knowledge sharing and exchange. But it can’t be ordered and only come over time, as people interact more and more the one with the other. Trust applies to lots of things : relationships between peers, with one’s manager and subordinates, with the enterprise as a cultural entity, trust in the tools one has to use, trust in the organization and work model. When anyone does not trust one of this elements, the whole system collapses.

- reputation accumulation : reputation is a kind of accelerator for trust because it says a priori that someone is legitimate, skilled, nice to work with, based on peers’ experience, before one starts to investigate to know if one is worth being trusted. It’s not the solution to everything but helps things to start and even accelerates them. But, like reputation, it takes time to build one’s internal reputation on any professional matter.

Let me add one more thing. Such a system also relies on combining. Combining knowledges, expertise and ideas that need to be continuously combined and re-combined to make decisions and solve problems in complex contexts that need a multidisciplinary and transverse approach. Since all these resources are embodied, are stored in people’s brain, it’s also about combining people and their work in an adhoc way, out of static and rigid structures.

Accumulation is nothing new. It was already there in the industrial economy we’re about to leave. It was about the accumulation of tangible capital. The cost for businesses was impressive but they were able to rely on rules that made it easier to follow the economic revolution that was on its way. Amortization with one this rules. Smoothing costs made investment possible. It’s only an accounting trick that made the spending acceptable on the balance sheet, keeping it nice-looking while lot of money was spent to prepare for the future even if the final cost was strictly the same. The only purpose was to make things acceptable without preventing businesses to invest for their future.

That’s the same with combining. When a department buys a machine they won’t use alone, their is a mechanism that makes sharing acceptable : the allocative key. Here again it does not chance anything to the price but makes resource sharing acceptable.

The economy we’re entering, usually called the knowledge economy, needs, to create value, an intensive use of intangible capital made of people, knowledge, relation or social capital that is key to agile and continuously evolving work. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Economy & New Models, Knowledge & Information management, Management & HR Tagged With: accounting, allocative key, amortization, collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, human-capital, knowledge, knowledge-economy, learning, management control, reputation, sharing, social business, trust

Putting conversation into processes

July 20, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 4 Comments

Summary : nowadays, people need to continuously solve problems to execute business processes. To do so they need a quick and easy assess to knowledge. But knowledge needs stimulis to be expressed, what seldom happes out of conversational logics. Traditional processes need to be enriched with a social layer. On top of that, business processes are the smallest common denominator upon which an enterprise 2.0 dynamic can start without having to deal too much with cultural issues because it brings a focus to what makes sense for anyone : solving actual issues they face while they tried to achieve what they are evaluated on.

There are many ways to deal with the articulation of enterprise 2.0 dynamics with business processes. Here’s the presentation I made at the Enterprise 2.0 Forum in Milan in June.

Putting conversations into processes

View more presentations from Bertrand Duperrin.

And here are some explainations… [Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: business process, Enterprise 2.0, Human resources, human-capital, process, social computing, Social Networking, social routine

Enterprise 2.0 and HR : an incredible waste ?

July 1, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 6 Comments

When I started to pay attention to the unavoidable evolution of HR and the new tools at their disposal in 2005 I would never have thought that I 5 years later I would think, write and say what I’m currently doing. Anyway, it quickly became obvious that it was a HR issue and nobody but HR could take the leadership on it. It was 5 years ago.

At the last Enterprise 2.0 Forum in Paris, while the successful cases were following one another without any mention of the HR department (except for Danone), Anthony Poncier asked “the question” many people were expecting : “Where are HR people in all these projects ?”. Silence. I can understand that it was not a key issue for our two foreign speakers who were operating in a more liberal and less “socially-touchy” context. But what about the others ?

As far as I can remember, HR seldom take the leadership on enterprise 2.0 projects. I’m talking about leadership,not about being a sleeping member of any task force or any makeshift job without the ambition of becoming the first step of a wider change program. Note that’s not only a french issue : the same question was on many lips at the last Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston and was discussed on twitter. Answer : for HR people it’ only a tech issue that has nothing to do with their job…

I think anybody can understand that

- Enterprise 2.0 implies deep thoughts on work, its nature, it’s attributes…

- it can be leverage to improve both organizational and personal development

- it’s about social skills, leadership, knowledge, expertises, competences

Whether it’s considered as a risk or an opportunity, HR people have things to day and do about that. In the worse case to protect themselves and lock things, in the best case to understand and become a change leader and not appear as the usual spoilsport anymore.

After many discussions with HR people and experts, and even if I don’t think we should generalize too fast :

- when somebody else takes the leadership, they are not very impatient to get HR on board.

- when HR people are asked to take the leadership, they often answer they don’t consider the E2.0 issue as a priority. Let’s be clear : I’m not talking about HR staff lacking motivation or interest, but only pointing at the fact their directors don’t make it a priority while it’s become one at a higher level.

Here’s what the discuscussion I had with some HR experts on twitter looked like

- I can’t believe they are watching the train without trying to jump in. Incredible !

- Without them the train won’t go too far

- Anyway, the train has already left. Without the HR.

- C-Level people put E20 on their agenda. What will they say if the HR department did not anticipate ?

- People and organization development will be assigned to another dept, even an adhoc one, and HR people will be left with only administrative tasks.

- This would be hard

- It’s already happening

-….

I would not want to be alarmist but that’s both a pity and dangerous :

- that’s a pity to see HR people not trying to get involved in such projects because they are both legitimate and indispensable.

- managing such projects without the help of HR people may backfire on the project either because of political vengance (if they were kept appart) or by lack of competences when it comes to make decisions on some sensitive and legal issues.

It would be really be a terrible waste…

What’s surprising is that the “social thing” is taken seriously by HR people…for recruitment and employer brand management. But nothing on internal issues…

I hope HR depts are not crowded with marketing people and did not gave up human capital and organization development to focus on administrative stuff. I don’t even want to think that’s true. But we need evidences…and quickly !

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: Enterprise 2.0, Human resources, human-capital

How to understand and position enterprise 2.0 in the real enterprise

December 1, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 3 Comments

It’s time to sum up all the thoughts I had these last months. I tried to start from both the concerns expressed by C level managers asking for a global vision and ground managers who needed a “hands on” vision because they don’t have time to waste to try to understand such nebulous things. Having to focus on day to day delivery and short term objectives, many see such a fallen-from-the-sky (and on their head) gift as a source of misunderstanding and discomfort.

These concerns are not surprising at all : what is it, what does it bring, how does it work, how to position it and integrate it in the organization as it is today… Talking about a new discipline, lots of things were learnt from early adopters who worked on a “try / fail / improve” model and, in so doing, helped to build a knowledge and know-how corpus. As a matter of fact this corpus was build upon failed and successfull implementations that helped to refine some presupposition that were prevailing at their beginning. The whole helped “followers” to benefit from these experiences.

But we still have to be aware that that’s not by saying “that’s that, that’s not that, one must, one must not” that things will improve. Businesses need to undersand the path that lead to these conclusions to make them theirs, and we all know what happens when one content himself with copying a result without understanding what reasonning often leads to : lack of self-confidence, fear of the unknown, defensive attitude….then failure.

Rather than proposing an attractive future at the end of a vague road, let’s start from what actually exist to build the future. This will also help to explain the “why”, relying on what can be learnt from past experiences.

Even in downturns, human capital has to be protected

February 19, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Because they didn’t have the time (or the will) to make the structural decisions that would help to face a downturn, companies often react by acting on the easiest adjustment variables :

• Cuts in bugets

• investments putt offs

• employees lay offs.

It makes it possible to attend to the most urgent things first even if I think it only defers what’s unavoidable. The focus is on cost and not on revenue, and costs can’t be endlessly cut except if you want to turn a company into an emplty shell. Any cut expenditure won’t be able to be cut again the next quarter or the next year because it won’t exist anymore.

I’m one on those who think that the goal of any enterprise is to make money and that thinking only in terms of expenses only makes it possible for directors to act like firemen. But it’s easier to cut costs instead of trying to find an innovative way to drive incomes.

Whatever, this kind of policy also have dramatically bad effects for the future.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Management & HR, strategy Tagged With: crisis, downturn, expertises, growth, human-capital, kpmg, lay offs, network, talent

Enterprise 2.0 : the CISCO case

January 9, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 20 Comments

You must have noticed how many posts have been published about Cisco these late days. The US giant seems to be the first example of global enterprise 2.0 or, at least, to be the first to meet such a recognition for its success. Many things have been writen about that and it will be easy for you to find informations.

In order to understand more globally what happended at Cisco I found an interesting speech Cisco’s CEO, John Chambers, made on the 15th of october at the MIT.

What can we draw from thay ?

Enterprise 2.0 and Human Capital Management to support strategy

June 5, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

As we saw in a previous post, since human, information and organization capital support all the processes that create value, the question we have to answer is whether all these things we put in this “big bag” called enterprise 2.0 can help developing this pool of value. Or to make it clearer : in which way a company can rely on enterprise 2.0 to achieve its goals.

I’ll start with a warning : when saying enterprise 2.0 I’m talking in a broad sens, which also includes management practices and culture in addition to the tools. I don’t believe in the tool-centric definition that reduces a company to the tools it uses and forget its rules, its people, its culture, its history.

I’ll also add that what I say is “how can enteprise 2.0 help” : in no way I’d think that enteprise 2.0 would be self-sufficient. What we’re talking about must be used together with many existing things.

So let’s start our first step : human capital.

Reaching strategic goals : intangible assets matter. The Strategy maps approach to Enterprise 2.0

May 28, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

As I said in a previous post, there’s one and only one way to know whether something is worth or not : whether it supports the enteprise’s strategy, whether not. In the first case it’s worth being done, in the second it’s worth being forgotten. In concrete termes, that mean the only question in the enterprise 2.0 debate should be to explore if, and in which way, it can support strategy.

As enterprise 2.0 aims at taking the most of intagible assets, we have to wonder if those assets are really useful or if they’re just “nice to manage”, and if what we put in this big bag called enterprise 2.0 can really help to harness them. This will be the purpose of a coming series of posts.

The problem with intangible things is that even if we feel they are very important, i’s hard to mathematically quantify their contibution. We know they help to create value without being able to say how and how much. Because of that, when it’s time to make a decision about investment, this area is often left aside.

Since I needed a starting point, my first though took me to the balanced scorecard. Without any prejudice, just because ar first sight I felt there were some possibilities there.

My first thought were confirmed : even if it’s reaaly interesting and powerful, it’s often partially applied, and our balanced scorecard becomes unbalanced due to the priority given to the financial side.

Norton and Kaplan must have come to the same conclusions since they improved their system with the concept of Strategy Maps. Unfortunately most companies focus on the original concept expressed in 1992. Strategy maps dates from 2001 and obviously too few companies really paid attention to what was really important with that.

Instead of presenting different perspectives and hope an equal importance will be given to each, strategy maps show the correlation between all the perspectives in the purpose to support strategy. And the result is meaningful

Of course it’s only a framework that has to be adapted to each particular case but we have things to learn from that.

For example we can see that organization capital, information capital and human capital are the base of every formal business process which contribution in value creation we know how to measure. This sound obvious but shown like that it makes things clear. Without the appropriate clture it’s impossible to support any strategy. It’s the same for key competences, information, management methods etc.

In 60% cases, enterprises have the right strategy but they fail to support it. Perhaps because fundamentals are neglected.

In the coming posts we’ll talk about those differents aspects, what they mean, how to measure them, how to value them. And once we’ve finished we’ll be able to say whether enterprise 2.0 can help, in its technical and organizational side.

Some elements to begin :

• Value creation is indirect : intangible assets don’t create value by themselves, but through their use in business process.

• Value is contextual : the value of intangible assets depends on their alignment with strategy

• Value is potential : if business process don’t use those assets, their value remain potential and can’t be fully realized.

• Assets are bundled : intangible assets have to be use in conjuction with tangible assets.

For those who want to go furher I recommend you to read the excellent “Strategy Maps“.

Filed Under: Economy & New Models, Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, strategy Tagged With: balanced scorecard, bsc, Enterprise 2.0, human-capital, information capital, intangible assets, kaplan, knowledge-economy, norton, organization, organization capital, strategy, strategy maps

What’s the next big thing in HCM ? From Human Capital Assessment to Realization

April 7, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

It’s a question I asked to myself after having read this note from Thomas Otter who was wondering what will be the next innovation in HCM Software.

Even if everything can be improved, I think that “administrative” systemes won’t experience a real revolution. In the other hand I think the pure “Human Capital” side is very promising.

Even if human capital assessment systems have been existing for years, I’m not sure they fully reach their goals. This inspires me two things.

When talking of assessment we also mean assessment context : and the perpetual assessment doesn’t exist so things are always biased. More, we only assess what we want to assess and we may neglect some aspects of one’s capital. In the other hand, as stakes are more and more about tacite and ability to work into human networks, we have to assume these kind of things are far from being captured and harnessed by the existing systels.

At last, we often talk about control and assessment systems, but hardly never of systems facilitating human capital realization.

Then, what if the next innovation in tools was not about tools but about their usages. Not because of the processing capacity of tools but because of their ability to help people to fully realize their capital in a networked in tacit context.

Perhaps, in certain cases, it’s worth a glance at Enterprise Social Software.

But since everything has to be measured (at least at then end), perhaps it will be possible to rely on these tools to assess, to evaluate. Social graph is a first track. Semantic may also help to mesure the alignment (or gap) between the corporate message and the way it’s received, between enteprise’s priorities and day to day job reality, between one’s job description and his real skills, expectations, or daily tasks.

In short, perharps looking at the development and realization side before considering control and assessment would be a good idea.

Filed Under: Management & HR, Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: enterprise-social-software, HCM, Human resources, human-capital, semantic, social graph

Enterprise 2.0 and HR : an incredible waste ?

Even in downturns, human capital has to be protected

Enterprise 2.0 and Human Capital Management to support strategy

Reaching strategic goals : intangible assets matter. The Strategy maps approach to Enterprise 2.0

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