Information | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

Managing attention : a key challenge for the future of businesses

April 22, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

I’ve been willing to tackle this topic for a long time and seing Julien le Nestour‘s presentation at the last Enterprise 2.0 forum made me feel it was high time to put my thoughts in words.

Facing an increasing amount of information and considering the time we need to peruse, process, generate it, time is a key factor. In fact, even ignoring information takes time. But, on the other hand, I’m convinced that the assertion that we’ve reached a point of no return, that we don’t have time anymore to deal with more information is wrong. We don’t have a time problem but a prioritisation one. The point is not to have less accessible information but a better qualification of the information that’s pushed to us (the rest being accessible,findable in case of need) and a better hierarchisation to be able to handle what matters first.

These prioritisation and hierarchisation issues matter even more now that many enterprises and vendors realize that providing users with a unified collaboration context (ie the “unique customized home page” or “unique activity stream”) will be a major issue in the upcoming months. In the general public web we already saw a first attempt with Google Wave : a service with a really impressive potential that was quickly deserted by those who were supposed to be its power users, those who had to centralize a large amount of information feeds in an unique interface and for whom prioritisation and hierarchisation were the missing feature. On the business side and according to what I saw at Lotusphere, Lotus Notes is also heading this way and I bet that the success of this new approach will highly depend on how the product will handle these issues. If it doesn’t…

So we have to identify some objective criterias for prioritisation. To make it simple, we can say that prioritisation depends on the value created while handling the information. For instance, spending one hour to answer a colleague who needs some information to handle a strategic activity or task is more important than spending one hour to read emails (or anything else) that are nothing but “for your information” emssages.

The same logics applies when trying to introduce a new tool in a context where the ROI is known for being very hard to get. So, Julien showed us of Schlumberger used another indicator called ROA (Return on attention) that helps to evaluate how a new tool is worth according to the value of the time of the user, the number of occurence of a given task and its criticality in a given use case (ok…I simplified it a lot). This allows not only to easily justify a new tool according to its benefits compared to the current situation but also to take into account the importance of things like ergonomics in an arbitration thats supposed to be economical. As a matter of fact, maybe the best enterprise social software platform on the market has a blog feature but if the interface is so boor that the time people will spend to understand and use it will not be justified by the benefit in return, it’s better to take a tool that’s less “prestigious” but that will be easily used by anybody.

There’s also one more layer of complexity. Prioritisation is not only a matter of individual arbitration but a collective dynamic. I prioritize according to my own benefits and objectives, the anyone who sends me information prioritizes according to is own objectives. What can be strategic for one may be trivial for the other. So it’s important to have some “nice behaviors policies” (think about the other, wonder what is necessary…) and some arbitration mechanisms (when should I help, when should I say no…)

All these questions have to be tackled when tools are implemented, in the change management process and, beforehand, by vendors who won’t be able any longer to afford building bottlenecks and let users sort them out. These bottlenecks are a key issue in enterprise performance and have to be tackled in a systemic and coherent way by tools, business practices, management and organization.

Since real time seems to be a very trendy topic now, understanding its limits according to prioritisation issues may be quite useful.

I’ll conclude quoting Julien Le Nestour : attention is now a key resource, it’s scarce and constrained so its use have to be optimized in priority, even before funding.

Filed Under: Knowledge & Information management, Management & HR Tagged With: activity stream, attention, bottlenecks, information, information overload, management, performance, Return on attention, ROA, time, time management, value

Hey ! I’m your ERP and I’m talking to you !

January 19, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

I’d like to share some thoughts about what our work environment may look like in a close future if what I think being two main trends manage to reach maturity.

The first is “ambient awareness”. a word I find more relevant than microblogging which is only its embodying in terms of toosls. That’s the ability to continuously capture weak signals from one’s environment in order not to behave like an isolated player but as a player into an ecosystem, allowing to make the actions of both one and the other more coherent.

The other is “activity-specific social application” or social software 2.0.That’s a new kind of enterprise social application that do not put the social activities out of peoples workaday work (over the flow) but enrich the process tools they are built around (and are often a component) (in the flow).

Il s’agit d’un nouveau genre d’applications “sociales” d’entreprise qui ne positionnent plus la dite dimension sociale hors du travail quotidien du collaborateur mais viennent enrichir les outils de process autour desquels ils sont construits (et dont ils sont souvent une composante).

Before all I’ll start with an assumption : people always try (and will always) to automate everything that can be automated. That’s the human nature and, most of all, the organizations nature. The rise of people-centric theories is rather the acknowledgement that not everything can be automated today that a real will to focus more on people and give them more recognition.

The power of enterprise 2.0 tools is that they give people the ability to make every kind of information accessible, either in a proactive way or by answering to a question, a stimulation. This allows to run problem solving and ongoing improvement processes that integrate the workaday flow and improve the reactivity and quality of everyone’s work while building a hudge mass of searchable, usable and improvable information. The contribution of microblogging is to bring a real time dimension that is the perfect complement to traditional asynchronous web 2.0 tools.

One of the best use of these new tools and practices is “bottle in the sea”. The famous “who knows ? Who has any information about ?”. Notice that there are also implicit bottles, those we don’t throw consciously and that are in every status update, despite of us. For instance when we say “going to meet such prospect”, we don’t expect anything back. But someone can answer “I know them well / I already worked on similar cases / etc…”. In brief, a status update can also be seen as an implicit question, adressing the sphere of the “unknown unknown” that sounded quite funny in Rumsfeld’s mouth but that is not so far from our concerns.

The efficiency of the practice relies on another assumption : someone will read, answer, or push my message to someone who’ll be able to answer. This implies that the information exists, and that its owner and / or a “connector” is available in a synchronous fashion when I send my own message. Possible on the web because of its wide scope, more difficult in an organization simply because there are fewer potential answerers.

Information can be of twi kinds. It can be either formal and tacit, so it can only be shared and told by its owner (except if the owner already formalized it on any social space), or structured, codified and classified in one of the many information systems that crowd the organization. In this case, if search is too tedious, or if I ignore the very existence of the tools that may help me, I need one of my peers to direct me to this information which existence and location he knows.

Maybe you see what I’m coming to : if information is in my colleague’s head, they have to be available, but if it’s elsewhere how not to loose the opportunity to find it if the “connector” is not avaiblable, can’t read my message ?

Web does not turn employees into content producers. Job description does.

September 3, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

As time goes by, it’s becoming obvious that whae created a gap that prevented web 2.0 logics to be implemented within businesses is a an incredible number of web facts that can’t be transposed in the business world. So, internal practitioners use to fight against many mtyths they have to kill before they can start serious things. It’s a real challenge because, caught between unjustified constraints and excessive expectations, internal leaders have to manage unbaked projects where they’re asked to focus on “non issues”, neglecting strategical ones that are supposed to disappear by miracle.

We often read that employees are machines that generate contents, an assumption that’s used as a core belief to build a new kind of organization, more collaborative, more efficient. Why ? Because as the web turned customers into producers, this is supposed to change the way people behave at work.

As social tools begin to shape workers’ expectations for how they get things done, it raises expectations for how they collaborate and communicate and participate in content development,” said Nielsen Norman Group user-experience specialist Patty Caya. “The social Web has turned consumers into producers and this will impact how they work.” (source ici)

I have no doubt it’s a major trend that will impact the future. But let’s be clear and honnest, companies are operating in today’s context and have to deal with it to carry on. So that’ a belief that has to be taken very cautiously.

Are contents social by nature or by need ?

August 18, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Web 2.0, aka “social web” and its corporate avatar known as enterprise 2.0 were built upon the following assumption : within a given groupe, information should be shared and discussions should be public because no one knows who may improve the work of another person, to bring a solution. So it’s more effieient letting people take a stand where and when they find they may bring some added value rather than pushing information to many people, flooding those who are not concerned and often forgetting those who may help. Moreover, pushing informations means that the right person is a part of our contacts, someone we know. An assumption that is often wrong.

The concept of “group” or “perimeter” is very important : it’s not about sharing every information with everybody, but within a defined area, depending on the situation. For example, one can publish on a blog (public), a group of friends on facebook, a business community on linkedin….and it should be the same with corporate tools : team members, everybody, department members…

We are forced to admit that not everybody is comfortable with this approach. First, because many of us have been taught to retain information for years and consider colleagues and information sharing as a threat and not as an opportunity. Second because it’s humain to fear the others’ look one one’s work, above all when it’s still in progress. That brings a strange paradox because that’s when we need the most other people’s opinion and help (work in progress, need to solve a problem) that we dare to share our concerns and work the less.

This may be partly solved on an organizational side. It can be decides that such kind of information has to be shared, it’s in the workflow and that’s the way everybody has to do. Of course, it would start with non-sensitive infomations that’s not hard to share for anyone, and the scope of the shared information will be widened step by step as people realize that’s not that hard or armful. Even if not everything is possible with a carrot and stick policy, it may help to start the initial move.

But that does not solve everything : a part of the problem is linked to individual (and collective) beliefs that can’t be changed just because one decided. Waiting for the Gen Y wave to come with its ultraconnectivity and its inborn knowledge of sharing best practices, we have to deal with the old habits of all the people that are more than…30 yo.

This is important for many resaons : it impacts both the human side of the change project and the design of the tools that will be used to share information.

Do we have to think we must align with a logic that implies that nearly everything is supposed to be shared out by nature ? Or with a logic that implies that everything has to be seen from an individual point of view (all I do is for me, for my own purpose), with the ability, when one feels the need, to make a private information become public, within a defined group of people, what is surely more reassuring for many people ? If, at the end, the result should be the same, the logic that leads to it is quite different.

In brief, is it simpler to start with an individual approach and make people slowly push the walls of their walled garden or to start by throwing them in a world where everything is shared by nature. Obvioulsy neither change management nor the design of the tools will be the same in each case.

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, information, intranet 2.0, sharing, social computing, social media

Real time web is not a cure-all (and twitter won’t kill blogs)

July 10, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 2 Comments

We can hear that microblogging is killing blogging and that, globally speaking, the future of web is real time. An hasty discourse I don’t subscribe to. It does not seem to me that a trend is replacing another but that they are complementary.

This applies to the general public web but also to the corporate web.

This complementary nature can be explained by postionning a given message according to two axis : consistency and temporality.

Consistency

No long demonstration is needed to explain that it’s hard to deliver a message and a consistent information in 140 characters. If all the information had to comply with the 140 chars rule, we would be informed of many thing without really knowing anything. In the other hand it’s hard to fill out a blog post when the message is short, terse. In this case, the title is often meaningfull alone and the body of the message brings nothing new. That’s what made a part of the blogosphere switch to the twittosphere. Not beacause one is better than the other but because its format fits more with the needs of most of people (remember that pure “creators” on social medias are only a few per cent).

Temporality

Some messages are here to stay and make their place in the worldwide informational inheritance. Some others only have an instant value and won’t deliver it if they don’t spread quickly. When one writes blog post, he aims at his regular audience, but indexation by search engines gives the post a kind of permanence. Then the long tail makes its job. Even of the indexation of the messages on twitter improves, its archives only have a few interest. If a message is missed, there are many chances it won’t be of any interest one day later : either the information will become valueless or it will become available for everydoby through more conventional channels. In the worst case, if something has a real value, it will keep on resonating (being retwitted) long enough in order it will still be able to be caught a few days later.

So a two speed web is emerging. Consistent messages that have to remain and deliver a complex message, and short and instant messages on a faster track.

It’s easy to realize how real time can reach its limits while traditionnal blogging does not have the needed reactivity in some circumstances. The complementarity between both allows to cover the full range of needs.

Some may say some messages meet both conditions. That’s why many people use twitter to mention blog posts. What reminds us the need for articulating both.

Filed Under: Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: blogging, blogs, Communication, consistency, information, internet, microblogging, real time, real time web, social computing, Social Networking, temporality, twitter, web

When does the value of a “social object” have to be measured ?

June 2, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

Let’s be clear, I’m talking about value, not about ROI (although the one is a part of the other) and about “social objects” in the large sense of the word : everything that can exist on a social platform, when using social software. It may be a content, an information specially generated, an information shared from elsewhere, a mark given to any contribution, the contribution to a collaborative work…but also the time taken to do so, the attention mobilized while the person may have had something else to do at this time etc…

Behind the everlasting discussions about ROI stands, before all, the question of the value. Does what is done have value, and what value ? In which ways an information and the time needed to publish it can have any value ? You’ll notice that it turns the ROI question not into something about tools and contents but into something wider made of tools, contents, resources and …the context in which the information is used.

That is a point that is often forgotten : it’s the context that determines values, it’s its limiting factor, more than the intrinsic value of the information itself. An insignificant information may be very valuable at a given moment for a given person even though thousands people will have nothing to do with it. On the other hand, a capital information have no value if nobody uses it. It takes us back to a reflection I’ve had a long time ago about strategy maps : intangibles have no intrinsic value but their value depends on how it’s used.

Talking about an enterprise context, let’s make it clear that “value” means the ability to turn information into money.

So the point, not that trivial, is to know when value has to be measured.

Some advice not to fear internet in the workplace

April 9, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

You are scared that your employees stop working and spend their days surfing on the net ? A too easy shortcut based on the assumption that people inevitably lose their time when they are on the net. An assumption that may also be true. In fact, the issue is about two questions :

The first is to know if your staff need internet or not, what amounts to wonder if it can be a business tool or if it’s only a leisure tool.

In the case the answer to the first question is positive, the second question will be about usages. Nearly everybody agree that net surfing is like cholesterol : there is the “good surf” ” and the “bad surf”, the one who serves the company and the one that makes you waste your time.

Here again, there’s no “magic formula” but we can figure a few things out with a few common sense.

Social Media needs a better signal to noise ratio : discovering Microplaza

March 6, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Information is key for efficient business operations. The way it circulates must be facilitated and fluidified? Everything may be very valuable at a given moment for a given person while being useless for anybody else. Identifying week signals is critical but it implies to increase the amount of information that circulates through the enterprise. People can’t manage more than a given quantity of information but we know that if we want everyone to find what’s needed, more and more information will have to circulate.

Companies are not comfortable with this paradox : the need for making more and more information coming from many people accessible while protecting people from information overload and delivering a clear signal about “what matters”. Knowing that “what matters” depends on the people. So it’s not a surprise that for many businesses, even if they understand there’s a real potential, social media is seen as a source of confusion and information overload.

I often say that, in order to improve things, two main lines have to be explored at the same time

• a human line : trust your environment to filter. Knowing that people you are professionally close to share your concerns, the information filtered by your network is often relevant.

• a software line : tools have to identify “strong weak signals” from the informational hubbub.

Of course, we’re only at the beginning but we can see emerging initiatives that prefigure what things may look like tomorrow. To illustrate my words, let’s have a look at Microplaza.

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.

Managing attention : a key challenge for the future of businesses

Web does not turn employees into content producers. Job description does.

Some advice not to fear internet in the workplace

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