Innovation | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

Trying to solve a business problem ? Don’t start with a social media plan !

November 23, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Résumé : even if maturity on social media is increasing, we still hear to many incantations like “if you dont’ use social media you’re gonna die”. Not only the systematic nature of the discourse, applied to any subject is irritating decising makers and is not a good thing for credibility, but it’s also misleading. Saying that social media are the only way to do anythigs leads to tool-centric strategies instead of problem-solving driven strategies. No tool will help to execute a plan that does not exist.

Clear-sighted as usual, Luis Suarez rencently wrote :”Dont’ start with the tools, they’re not your final destination”. I am sure that, unlike two years ago, everybody now understands this point of view and that even vendors, for whom it’s a very counter-natural and cultural point of view, now agree that their product is only a part of a global approach.

Yes but…

The small world of people convinced by social media still over-proselyte. The point is not about knowing whether they’re right or not but the manichean and systematic nature of the discourse. Consider any business issue. As soon as it becomes a little bit trendy, we can hear the “if you don’ use social media to….your enterprise will….”. What can be adapted to anything. “If you don’t use social media to innovare /engage / share / communicate, your enterprise will die / become obsolete / lose its customers…”. Maybe one day we’ll be advised to use social media to paint the office’s walls.

A discourse that raises questions in terms of credibility…and is even misleading because partly wrong.

A credibility issue first. Decision makers have been hearing this discourse for years, applied to any possible subject and its systematic nature is irritating them, and slowing losing its credibility. So, there’s no surprise they don’t listen anymore because they know what they’ll be told even before the gurus speak and the social media world is more and more looking like a sect where believers talk to believers.

Remember our childhood. And what our parents used to day to make us eat things we did notlike. “You should eat…. to grow up / not to fall ill / be good at school / not be feel tired”. Every time we felt a little ill or did not feel very weel, we could guess the answser prior to say anything. And, logically, it made use smile..but never changed anything.

Even worse : the discourse is wrong. Let’s repeat it again : Saying that if an enterprise does not use social media to innovate, engage or anything else it will face big problems is an intellectual swindle. You have an innovation / engagement issue, so install the right platform and wait… You may wait for a long time without seeing any change.

There organizations where everything is fine and employees are engaged, other that are innovative, other that are loved by their customers….and that don’t use social media. What does it mean ? It means that, before using social media to do anything, organizations have to decide to do this anythings, build a strategy and plan its execution. In many situations, social media will be a part of the system…but only a part. Organizations that are successful without social media today will come to it one day…but they have time because they already have actual strategies to address these issues and are not waiting for a magic tool to execute plans that have never been built for various reasons (that are not all respectable).

Social media will never help anyone to execute a plan that does not exist to serve a strategy that does not exist to reach a goal that is nothings more than a word that was expected to be self-achieving.

If you want to innovate, engage your employees, harness and capitalize on your knowlede….start by deciding to do so and build a real plan. Then choose the tools to support the plan. In some case you won’t need social media, in some others it will help you to deal with some barrieres and in some case it will help you to do much better. But if you start with the idea that you need social media to be successful, you’ll build a tool centric strategy instead of one that will help you to achieve your business goals because you’ll focus on how to make people use the tool instead of making the tool serve people that serve your strategy.

General Electric, for instance, had a problem solving system that have been working well for a long time “in real life”. Their internal platform only helped them to increase the bandwith of their system. They used social media to serve real plan. Their system gives sense to the tool that improves the way the system was working. But without the pre-existing problem solving approach, the tool is nothing.

Social media are catalysts, accelerators, tools that can makes things incredibly more efficent and simple. But they won’t support a plan that does not exist. Their use will never solve any issue by itself and won’t prevent businesses to face their actual problems.

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: engagement, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, involvement, organization, problem solving, social media, strategy

Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed…but not luckily

October 12, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : there’s a missing link in the enterprise 2.0 discourse that does not reassure organizations. They’re being asked an impressive effort to generate information, connect people, they’re being told all the benefits they can draw from that but are not explaine the mechanism that will turn this information potential into tangible results. The fact this link misses is certainly one of the reasons that explain why we still lack some matter in the ROI discussion. This transformation, that’s too often overlooked, will certainly be made possible by the implementation of organizational and management mechanisms as well as a redesign of some process.

If a chemist observes an organization through Lavoisier’s words, he would say that it’s impossible to get anything from such a system :

• Nothings is lost : wrong, organizations lose everything. They lose their non capitalized knowledge as people retire of resign. The NASA and Boeing have already painfully learned it, but not everyone has begun to prepare the future. Worse, they can’t even find what’s within their walls. A former CEO of HP used to say “if HP knew what HP knows we’d be three times more productive”. The problem still remains.

• Nothing is created : that’s the difference between business and chemistry : businesses creates, and innovates. In fact that’s theory. Practically talking they don’t create enough. Not enough innovation, not enough solutions to new problems (or not fast enough) : it’s hard to find how to solve a problem, without even mentioning how hard it is to implement any new solution.

• Everything is transformed : of course…provided organizations want it. Not only a reaction does not happen by luck, most of all in organizations where silos are built to prevent elements to mix together and where any reaction has to be kept under control. The taylorian legacy dies hard and the “silos and control” approach still rules, what causes few transformation except by luck or when a manager builds a clandestine laboratory.

Many organizations understands this is a critical stake and know they should favor transformation if they don’t want to be at risk in a near future. Favoring information capitalization and sharing, breaking down silos to create and innovate more and faster…that’s a current (or scheluded) program in many organizations and initiates call it “enterprise 2.0″.

But, to be honnest, most of them are still afraid of embracing this new paradigm, wonder if it’s really worth. They’re still waiting for an answer to this questions, some in terms of ROI calculation some others looking for the certainty that things will improve. Said in other words, they want to be sure the new potential they’ll built will be turned into tangible results. That’s a double edged issue because it both brings an answer to a strategic questions and force organizations to think about reinventing the way their employees actually work, their managers manage. But that’s the difference between an actual improvement and a façade change. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: articulation, Enterprise 2.0, immaterial assets, Innovation, intangible assets, knowledge, knowledge-management, problem solving, process, ROI, silos, social routine, value

What CRM is and what it should be

January 25, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 3 Comments

The good thing with acronyms is that they are easy to remember. Their weakness is that it’s easy to forget their meaning. Let’s consider CRM for instance, it means “Customer relationship management”. I repeat customer relationship management.

If we have a closer look, we are forced to admit that CRM has been lead astray to become, in the best case, a sales enablement tool and in the worse case a reporting tool to provide informations to sales managers without any benefits for the salespeople who have reluctance to update the data and often both this tedious task.

Don’t blame the tools. It’s the notion of customer relationship that’s been lead astray. Tools only followed the trend.

Enterprise 2.0′s weakness ? Decision

December 29, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 3 Comments

Let’s assume that, through a mix a community management and socio-collaborative management, businesses manage to make information and people for identifiable and accessible in order to facilitate and accelerate workaday execution, solve problems and invent tomorow’s products and operating models. Even if that sounds seducing, there’s something wrong in the reasonning.

All these dynamics and informations don’t create any value by themselves. That’s one of the reasons why, even if the value of such things is admitted by nearly everybody, there’s still something in decision-maker’s heads that prevent them from seing the tangible value behind.

All these things, this informal, organizational, human capital etc.. create nothing but a potential. A hudge potential though, but only a potential. This brings us back to what I wrote about strategy maps. All this things does not bring anything if not reused in structured and formalized operations. There are some ways to do so :

• Social routine that brings information reuse on the flow.

• Decision : that makes possible that something new is used or started.

I’d like to focus on this last point. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Recommended Bookmarks Tagged With: autonomy, conversations, decision, decision-making, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, organization, practices, processes, social software 2.0, social-software, workflows

A socialnomics Manifesto

October 12, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

I rencently mentioned the word “socialnomics“. Whatt’s the interest ? In an interconnected world (not only by the net…a world were everything can impact everything, it’s essential to understand the context to define the systems (enterprise, project, organization, management) we have to implement. So let’s try to summarize things.

- the world is full of stakeholders. You already knew for your shareholders, your employees. For your partners and clients too. Now even your non-clients are a part of the game, they all have expectations, they all thave things to say about your products, why they trust your or not, they can all be the cause of a mass reaction that may impact your business, either positively or negatively.

- stakeholders matter as much as shareholders : it becomes harder everyday to satisfy the ones while neglecting the others. Worse, sometimes you have to listen to the first to satisfy the second.

- value is a flow. It does not self generate in the till or when a contract is signed but though a flow (many people already got that) that has its source outside the company, go through it and ends outside.

- localization is obsolete. People recently start to understand that interactions between the enterprise and its stakeholders did not depend anymore on where each was physically located but have moved online. But “online” does not mean the corporate website anymore, it could be anywhere, depending on the blogs or social networks people use to read/use. Businesses can’t afford to wait for customers to join them, they have to join them where they are.

- the way business is done is at least as important for performance than operations. It’s a matter of values, of culture (what a company like Danone has identified and turned into a key asset years ago) but also (for how long ?) of ethics.

- The famous “to” in B2C, B2B…. and its “one way” connotationis being replaced by a bijective “with”.

- vertical hierarchy won’t disappear but articulates with an horizontal one. As a matter of fact the above mentioned flow does not advance by itself. It is fed by noise that has to be turned into information, then in decisions, then in actions that have to be monitored. It implies an horizontal decision making model in organizations that are structured for vertical decisions making only. So the organization has to be rethought in order not only to obey to “people from above” but also to “next door colleagues”.

- the value chain becomes social. Processes too.

- la chaine de valeur devient “sociale”, les processus également.

- in an information econmy, the only things that businesses can value is what the public can’t create alone, without them.

- what matters in communication (both internal or external is not how much information is pushed but the level of gained attention.

That won’t go without some challenges such as :

- implementboth the process and the “human factors” that will help to embed stakeholder’s creativity and knowledge into products, services, operations.

- manage employee’s schizophrenia. They are a part of the ecosystem, of the stakeholders, but often have radically opposite behaviors depending on whether they wear their corporate or their customer suit.

- rethink the enterprise, still as a production driven organization, but not as a push engine anymore, rather as the industrial element of the market to market loop.

- offer only products, information, services that mass collaboration between internauts can not produce.

- separate the wheat from the chaff in all the social noise and not go to the opposite extreme what would be like a “social submission” with inconsistent actions and unreadable

chaine de valeur, création de valeur, Innovation, Management, marketing, parties prenantes, social crm, socialisation, socialnomics, valeur, .

Filed Under: Innovation, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: Customer Relationship & Marketing, Innovation, management, marketing, socialization, socialnomics, stakeholders, strategy, value, value chain, value creation

With Social CRM, enterprise 2.0 goes out of the black box and marketing gains importance

October 5, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Many things have been told and invented in the 2.0 field since the word was coined in the internet world and become trendy in the business world. With more or less success. Sometimes it was great step in conceiving new models for operations, sometimes if was only a smoke cloud aiming at making people forget that the previous smoke cloud failed.

Internally (enterprise 2.0), we suffered a lot from the black box syndrome. First becaue projects were mainly internal while enterprise 2.0 is about ecosystems and both external and external stakeholders. Second because social activities were cut off from the operational reality, from the real business, preventing it from demontrating any business value.

Externally (web 2.0), we have to admit that things quickly turned into noise and smoke through clumsy use of social media by marketing departments that did not get what the chage was about and were trying to do business as usual. Of course, there were valuable things, mainly in the crowdsourcing field, with tangible benefits, but too few compared to all the mistakes that were made in the marketing field.

Sometimes, we can see the emergence of really sensible things. That’s the case with “social CRM“, which is, according to me, the best thing that happened in the 2.0 world these last months.

Why ?

Enteprise 2.0 : real benefits for whom makes efforts

September 15, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

McKinsey recently issued a new report in the line of what they already published these last months. It’s about the benefits enterprises can take from enterprise 2.0. After having focused on what makes successs possible, McKinsey is now starting to evaluate concrete beenetids. As often, I’d say that those who are closely following the “E2.0 state of the art” won’t learn anyting new here but will the the confirmatin of what manyt experts already wrote on this subject. The main interest, once again, is the McKinsey label that will help internal evangelists to convince skeptical managers.

I let you read the report, there is nothing to add to it. Just let me bring a few insights.

- some enterprises see significant benefits. That’s an essential point without which all our arguments are pointless.

- enteprises that see the more tangible benefits are located…in India, then in North América, Europe and Asia being left behind. I don’t know India at all but this ranking is the evidence that culture really matters in adoption and change processes.

- the most obvious benefits are about access to knowledge and experts. This seems to be consistent with process socialization and problem solving as a routine

- benefits are more easy to emerge in companies that generate more $ 1 billion revenue. Certainly because large businesses are those that developed the more structural inertial throughout decades, so the place where there are the most wasted or unemployed resources. Another explaination coild be that large businesses often explore new things long before small and medium ones, so they begin to see benefits first.

- in order to see benefits, social media have to be fully integrated into worklows and people’s daily activities. I would not like to be seen as endlessly repeating the same things, but I’m convincend that this point is largely neglected. Enterprise 2.0 is not about bringing conversations into the digital workplace without any link with daily tasks and activities but to focus on these activities. Implementing such a project without asking the question of rethinking what people are doing in their daily routine, to bring some existing information flows to new medias is a guarantee of failure (or of no success). Neglecting this point causes situations when community managers push information, hoping someone will read it, waiting for (rare) reactions to come, wondering why conversations don’t start. This is very far away employees’ actual situation, who have nothing to do with conversational communities that don’t help them in their day to day job. 75% companies who see tangible benefits integrated social medias in people’s “day to day work”. Don’t try to find anywhere else what is the difference between success and failure (or maybe we don’t have the same defintion for success).

- making executive use social media tools is essential. Logical since we’re talkong about daily business tools. There are fields where community managers can’t replace those who have an operational legitimacy. If have more insights on this subject, which I’ll share in a future post.

- 2.0 projects go beyond the enterprise’s walls. There is no internal or external logic anymore but a an “extended company” scope from the start : employees, partners, clients are concerned. That confirms the social CRM trend and a new scope for stakeholders.

- to my surprise, innovation is not one the domains where significant benefits were seen, even if it has been one the enterprise 2.0 discourse’s cornerstone from the start. Do we have to make the conclusion that the 2.0 approach is not relevant to innovation, that open innovation logics are very hard to implement because of their internal impact ? Maybe non-specialized approaches, tools and adoption methodologies are not enough ?

- this report left me unsatisfied. Ok there are tangible benefits, but we may expect to know more, how do they materialize, how they are measured…

To be continued…

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: adoption, culture, Customer Relationship & Marketing, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, mckinsey, open innovation, stakeholders, workflows

Your knowledge helps you more than your productivity

September 9, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 3 Comments

I’ve always had an ambiguous feeling about productivity. In the one hand, doing more or faster with the same amount of resources is a significant improvement. In the other hand, with hindsight, we have to admit that productivity continuously increased these last decades, that whenever a hard time everything is done to increase it even more, but despite of that, companies don’t seem to have improved their overhall financial performance. We also have to add to this the fact that, a time when enterprises rely not on machines or peopeale repeating endlessly the same tasks but on people managing information and solving problems, thinking that any business can run a 100m run in zero seconds is hare-brained.

Months ago, the idea came to me that productivity has to be rethought in order to shift from a mechanical concept to a human one, an from something that could be improved at the individual scale to something that has to be improved at a collective, systemic scale.

I’ve been neglecting this issue untill I came across this article that remembered me of it. Please have a look at this meaninful chart stolen from it :

Despite an ongoing improvement in productivity, ROA collapsed on the same period. Why dit it happen ?

According to the article, it’s due to a total disconnect between enterprises et their current environment. Till now, businesses used to increase their size to create more value. Today, in an interconnected economy, value is not created anymore by increasing size but by multiplying information flows. The difference between the most and the less performant companies can be found in their participation to knowledge flows, both internally and externally, dynamics relying on social software. Focusing on “traditional” productivity only benefits to clients, not to the enterprise that doesn’t create more value.

In brief, the good old scalable efficiency is not enough anymore and companies should now focus on scalable learning.

The gap between the potential of any company and the benefit drawn from it is doomed to increase unless companies decide to take the most of their digital infrastructure supporting knowledge flows and actively participate to these flows, both internally and externally with other businesses, and implement a voluntarist innovation policy.

Performance improvement will require the adoption of a logic of exchanges and innovation within ecosystems which is the only way to significantly improve things. It will make possible for anyone to improve one’s own performance through a creative problem solving process which implies the ability to connect among peers inside and outisde the organization. Contrary to the previous century when things used to come from the top, these new dynamics will be driven by people.

All that takes us back to a well known topic. The only way to bring a real and perenial improvement is to take the most of both knowledge capital and digital infrastructure. If not, the gap between investment and results will become wider every day.

Filed Under: Economy & New Models, Knowledge & Information management, strategy, Web & Usages Tagged With: collaboration, economy, ecosystem, Innovation, knowledge, knowledge-economy, learning, problem solving, productivity, ROA, social media, social-software

Social CRM needs more than a CRM approach

August 24, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 7 Comments

Ross Mayfield recently published a fundamental post about “social CRM“. The statement of fact is simple : 1% of customer’s conversations improve the organizational knowledge, 9% touch the organization without changing anything and 90% are not heard at all, businesses miss an impressive source of possible improvemens. I’m not meaning 100% of these conversations are valuable but harnessing only 1% of them is a real risk. At this point, the question is not to know how to take this conversations into account but, first of all, to be able to join them and participate. Even the stupidest conversation may be of some interest since not paying any attention to it can be seens as disdain. More, statisticians would tell that if businesses want to harness the conversations that can bring real opportunities, they also have to pay consider the less intereting ones : we’re talking about a domain where, if one aims at excellence, he has to accept a high variability, what is the opposite of the beliefs most our business processes rely on.

Those who’d look into this subject because they have a traditional CRM issue may suffer from vertigo : it’s about CRM…but also many more things at the same time. As Ross writes, it’s impossible to change the way a business considers and implements its customer relationship management without changing the way people actually operate inside the company. Knowing how hard it is to change things internally, the point of deciding what has to be changed first (internally or externally), one pushing the other, can be discussed. But the fact is both are needed and that they are the two sides of an only project.

Is Innovation an Affair of State ?

August 19, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Innovate, Innovate ! You must innovate. That’s this year’s hit ! Even this crisis’ hit, since crisis and especially this one force us to review many certainties and reinvent many things we used to take for granted. Innovation is shown as being the enterprise’s call. Innover ! Il faut innover. C’est le tube de l’été, en tout cas celui d’une crise qui met à mal quelques certitudes et nous amène à revisiter nombre de choses que l’on croyait acquises. Et comme de bien souvent l’innovation pèse sur l’entreprise. C’est bizarrement lorsqu’elles en ont le moins les moyens que c’est d’autant plus vital qu’elles s’y mettent. Cela n’est pas sans quelques aspects positifs : tout d’abord les entreprises ouvrent leur leur innovation en impliquant leurs clients, leurs salariés, leur écosystème au sens large, ensuite elles comprennent que la prochaine fois que tout ira bien elles ne se reposeront pas sur leurs acquis et travailleront à se doter de quoi bien se tenir lors de la prochaine période de vache maigre.

Mais l’entreprise ne fait pas que ce qu’elle veut. Elle évolue dans un cadre économique et législatif dont elle ne maitrise pas tous les éléments. C’est là qu’entre (ou non d’ailleurs) l’état dont le rôle est de créer les conditions de la sortie de crise. Au départ cela commence par des exhortations : “Nos entreprises doivent innover”. Ce qui fait une belle jambe au patron de PME empêtré dans le marasme économique et une législation parfois peu facilitatrice. Cela se poursuit souvent par des financements. Des enveloppes distribuées plus ou moins à propos, pas forcément aux bonnes personnes et pour les bons projets, et en fonction d’un processus administratif qui fait que les fonds sont débloqués au milieu de la crise suivante. Quoi qu’il semble que coté français on s’améliore de ce coté là (même si le caractère purement “web” des initiatives en cours tendent à négliger les efforts dont ont besoin des industries plus traditionnelles).

Et ensuite ? Besoin de coordonner, d’actions sectorielles spécifiques. Car on ne parle pas que de financer le développement de nouveaux produits (il est d’ailleurs souvent trop tard). On parle de nouveaux produits, mais de nouveaux business models, de se donner les moyens de créer et explorer de nouveaux marchés, de nouveaux modes de travail.

Le problème de l’innovation c’est que cela relève de l’économie, mais également des PME, des grandes entreprises. Un peu de recherche. Un brin de fiscalité. Sans parler des secteurs d’activités qui ont un ministre de tutelle dédié : transports, éducation, santé, TIC, industrie, et pourquoi pas d’ailleurs sport et culture.

Bref, repenser la manière dont on fait les choses n’est pas une affaire simple. empiète sur de nombreux territoires sans qu’on sache en définitive qui a leadership, coordonne, et donne le ton aux autres. On peut créer une taskforce dédiée, mais le caractère nouveau et provisoire de ce type d’organismes nuit souvent à son autorité. Ou alors donner un grand coup de balais dans l’existant histoire de matéraliser ces priorités nouvelles et rappeler à ceux qui en ont la charge ce qu’on attend d’eux.

Jamais en retard en terme de modernité, la Lituanie a décidé de transformer son ministère de l’économie en Ministère des affaires, de l’Innovation et du travail. Pas un simple changement de nom mais une véritable restructuration.

Bon…et chez nous il se passe quoi ?