Yers and corporate IT : the expected divorce is far from happening

May 13, 2011 By 1 Comment

Summary : gen Y-related myths seem to collapse the one after the other. After having been seen as sworn enemies of IT dept’s inflexibility because of their behaviors and the usages that come with, it seems that they’ve given in and happily accept what they’re given. Their opinion on IT departments is even quite positive. The reasons of this gap are worth being understood. Maybe that, for this generation, the struggle is more about the content of work than on tools.

Many things have been said on the famous generation Y. Most of all that this generation, used to simple and efficient tools won’t accept a work environment that looks rather like Jurassic Park and will lead the fight against IT depts found guilty of opposition to change and refusal to listen to the actual concerns of end users.

Members of this generations are now well established in organization and being to have management positions. The time for a first assessment has come. Are Yers the revolutionists we were told they were or, like in many other fields, did they become more consensual than expected (and sometimes feared) and put up with their IT environment without complaining ?

Forrester recently issued a study called “What Gen Y really thinks about your IT department” which conclusions speak for themselves.

• Yers are getting older and reaching senior positions. Now they can start changing things from the inside instead of complaining.

• They feel that their personal equipment is better that what they’re given at work but are not more likely to bring their own at work than the elder generations.

• They’re quite satisfied with the tools they’re provided with at work…and are even more satisfied than the elders.

• They see IT departments as partners rather than enemies :

 

 

So, what can we say about those numbers that won’t, in fact, surprise many people and only confirms the gap between how Yes have been oversold and what can be seen on the field ? Many possible answers, one not precluding the others.

• They adjusted to the workplace and fitted in the corporate mould while getting older, having more responsibilities to assume and discovering the constraints of real business.

• Yers are not tech-savvy, sometimes even less than Xers. They’re more involved with the content of work, the way people, work and collaboration models  and usages than with tools. Conclusion : the tools they’re given fit well with their current context and what they’re asked, with how organization actually work and collaborate. If Yers had a fight to lead, it would rather be about management, organization and the content of work instead of tools. Maybe the limit of the consumerization if IT is the one of corporate usages.

• IT depts are not as corny as it’s commonly said and are adjusting to today’s world.

Your opinion ?

 

 

Filed Under: Intranets and digital workplace, Management & HR, Software & Tools Tagged With: , ,

And the best enterprise social network platform on the market is…

November 5, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Summary : at a given moment in any enterprise 2.0 project, a choice has to be made about the tools that will be used. And,, the “specialist” is often asked the same question : “Tell me what’s the best tool on the market”. That’s a tough question regarding to the number of parameters to take into account and, in fact, there’s no “best tool on the market” but rather “tools that fit the most a given context. However, with hindsight and as organization’s maturity is increasing, the criterias that are used to define such a tool are evolving. For a perenial, scalable and coherent project that will avoid the “social bubble syndrome, I came to the conclusion that businesses should  qualify an environment and application services rather than an application as such.

I can’t remember how many times I was asked what social platform to chose, what was the “best one” in my opinion. That’s a question I’ve never been able to answer.

First, because it’s impossible to suggest a tool regardless to its purpose. Do you want a tool to screw or hammer ? Both a hammer and a screwdriver are excellent tools to do DIY but if the objective is not known there’s a real risk of suggesting to buy a hammer while there’s a screw issue.

Then, because many factors hav to be taken into account. Its functional richness, its ergonomy (very subjective), how easy it is to implement it quickly, the need or aversion for Saas, its ability to integrate with existing tools, its coherence with the prevailing technologies in the organization…not mentionning a lot of factors that may sound surprising but may be essential in a given context. Depending on the need, each of these points will weight differently what will lead the organization to make a choice that will be theirs.

Last, because it will always be a matter of compromise rather than a matter of choice. Anyone who have ever tried to conduct an exhaustive researche on social tools or, like me, has to know and work with a lot of platforms will tell you the same thing : there’s no perfect tool on the market and even if some are marking themselves out, a given need will make us chose a tool that we would never have considered as a possible first choice before. Even worse : by dint of trying more and more platforms, we are often disappointed with the one that’s chosen, whatever its name is. Everyting being a matter of compromise, we chose the one that is 70%, 80%, 90% like the “ideal tool” as we could dream it but does not exist. And we spend our time saying “xxx software does it better”…knowing that if we have chosen xxx software we would have regreted something from yyyy soft that was the other option.

What’s wrong with compromises is that, by chosing something that averagely meets all the needs, you can end with something that specifically meet no need at all and see all business departments launch pirate projects and go to find an alternative platform for their own needs.

So my answer used to be “try to fing the tools that fits your needs the best and avoid tools that are so neutral that despite they won’t raise any issue they won’t solve anything either”. And once done “learn to love what you have since you can’t have what you love”. Far from being satisfying.

I don’t even mention the cases when businesses have to chose two tools because any couldn’t do the job alone.

Now I’ve refined my criterias. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Employees are not middleware

October 5, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Summary : the reason why employees balk at using many of the tools they’re provided with is because they are asked to articulate different ways of working and type of informations together and bridge the gaps between application silos. Not only all of them don’t have the required skills to do that, to understand how and why they should articulate things together but, moreover, they don’t have the time to bridge between tool. For a long time they’ve been asked to do a kind of middleware job. In the future, organizations won’t avoid the cost of a deeper tool integration in order to replace people’s time that’s not scalable by a technological layer that is. That’s also true for enterprise social software.

The less we can say is that organizations have been investing a lot to make employees more productive by making their tasks easier to perform but employees really balk at using the tools that are supposed to make their life easier. At the beginning many thought that it will be different with enterprise social software because it’s made of tool that people use and appreciate in their personal lives. But, at the end, the conclusion is still the same : an incredible portfolio that can help to face nearly all situations…but very few adoption.

Let’s try to think as the average employee. In front of him, on his screen : an email client, a portal, a document management system, one or two activity specific application (ERP, CRM…), a social network, an instant messaging client… Enough to do everything and solve all his needs and channels for every kind of interaction : structured, unstructured, synchronous, asynchronous, within a defined project group, within open topic-centric communities…

The truth is that organization made a bet. They bet people intuitively know how to articulate these logics and tools and behave as information smugglers.

- articulate logics : work with structured activity centric tools and go to find relevant information to make decisions in a social network for instance.

- articulate tools : use a CRM, then find some information in the social network, then in the ECM, come back to the CRM then use the portal… Aggregate all the informations about someone from the official directory, his activities on the social network, his contribution to wikis etc…to be sure this is the right person to contact to solve a business problem.

- being information smugglers : a discussion in a tool may help to generate an information in another, an information here may be the cause of a conversation there.. To make the system work, information has to move from one tool to another. A report from the CRM to share in a group space, a discussion inside a community to link to an action in the CRM… In the best case people copy and past, in the worse they make screen shots…and end doing nothing because it makes them waste too much time. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Information security is too serious to be entrusted to IT people

September 24, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Summary : I recently read a survey about the dangerosity of social networks regarding to information leak, relying on the observation of a representative group of people. That’s a hasity concusion : it only proves that information security is not only a matter of technology but of usages, behaviors, a dimension that IT departements still barely master because they consider the issue from a technological standpoint. As an evidence, it seems that IT people are those who are the most likely to have dangerous behaviors, maybe because they only consider the technological side of the problem and overlook the behavioral one.

Recently I found a study about the dangerosity of some tools considering information leak. It says that email is the first cause of leaks (but is it a surprise) and that social networks are becoming a growing cause of such issues, what is not surprising because as they’re becoming more and more popular the risk is growing proportionally.

When I’m asked my opinion, my answer is always the same : no tool is dangerous by itself. It’s usage can be. Said differently : an irresponsible person is dangerous with any communication tool, even a homing pigeon. And the best way to fight irresponsibily is education, not interdiction. As a matter of fact when people are prohibited doing something without being educated, they send their time cheating with the system what may cause even more problems.

This study won’t make me change my mind. The way it was conducted is quite interesting :

The study sample group included 2,000 users from all over the world registered on one of the most popular social networks. These users were randomly chosen in order to cover different aspects: sex (1,000 females, 1,000 males), age (the sample ranged from 17 to 65 years with a mean age of 27.3 years), professional affiliation, interests etc. In the first step, the users were only requested to add the unknown test profile as their friend, while in the second step several conversations with randomly selected users aimed to determine what kind of details they would disclose.

The study showed:

  • More than 86 percent of the users who accepted the test-profile’s friend request work in the IT industry, of which 31 percent work in IT Security
  • The most frequent reason for accepting the test profile’s friend request was her “lovely face” (53 percent)
  • After a half an hour conversation, 10 percent disclosed personal sensitive information, such as: address, phone number, mother’s and father’s name, etc – information usually requested as answers to password recovery questions
  • Two hours later, 73 percent siphoned what appears to be confidential information from their workplace, such as future strategies, plans, as well as unreleased technologies/software

Some points to notice.

- some people accept a friend reques from an unknown person. It confirms my assumption. The problem is about people and the way their awareness about this kind of issue has been raised. There are two options. Either they would do exactly the same if they bumped into this nice looking girl in a bar and a full education program has to be implemented across the orgation or the fact they are online makes them lose their common sense and they have to be taught than the web is like real life : don’t follow a stranger.

Let me add that we already have more dangerous tools than social networks : familiy lunches, parties with friends and colleagues have been perfect situations for information leak for ages. I don’t even mention discussions in trains, people you can read their laptop screen when seated next to them etc…

- IT people are even more dangerous than others. Of course because they only see things through a technological point of view and only consider technological responses. A secured tool can be real strainer if people don’t use it well. Non IT people perceive the risk through a behavioral point of view, they analyze the nature of the context and of the relationship and may be more mistrustful.

Conclusion : anything that has to do with information security is not only a matter of technology and IT people may not be the best to handle the whole problem. Security is about technology and behaviors, this second point needing a specific program to be approached.

A last example. What’s better ? An employee who’s aware of dangers and uses Facebook or a non aware employee that can’t use facebook at work but uses it on mobile and at home ? The second is made harmless while he’s in the office but will be dangerous when he’s outside unless he’s educated.

Of course, pushing the “off” buttion is easier than implementing an awareness program. But it doesn’t solve everything.

Filed Under: Management & HR, Software & Tools Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Empowered : the service marketing (and even economy) manifesto

September 1, 2010 By Leave a Comment

I just finished the reading of Empowered, by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler, that is in some ways the sequel of Groundswell which was a must read when it was published. To be honest, I have been quite deceived by Groundswell. Of course that’s a lucid, accurate and comprehensive photography of what the web is today and is still worth reading for many execs because there’s still an impressive gap between the usages of the web and how decision makers gets it. But something was missing in the conclusions : businesses must, of course, go on the web and join the groundswell, ok there are identified best practices about than? And so what ? Flirting with internauts is useless if it doesn’t create any kind of value for both the business and the customer.

That’s the new dimension brought by “empowered” : the book goes far beyond the nice discussions on the web to tackle what’s core in business :realigning the whole company with customer satisfaction. Everything starts with one assumption : facing a customer that can talk, compare, and impact the reputation of the company, there’s a need for employees able to fight with the same weapons, to join the customer on his own field. What means : use the same tools as the customer, meet him where he his and take any initiative to meet his expectations. The answer to customer’s needs will result more and for from an individual initiative from an employee, taylored and designed “on demand” that from the general and standardized corporate discours that aims at addressing anything without addressing anyone.

To do so, not only the employee has to want to engage in such a process but also the company must not prevent him from acting this way and, ideally, must provide him with the right tools and policies to achieve a good customer service. Saying that, the issue appears to be about management and IT policied that the book tackles in a pragmatic and lucid way. Some organizations that are comfortable with their good old practices from another century may not be comfortable with that but the arguments are clear and indisputable. That’s not about giving up control and let anybody do anything but facilitating things with a framework that’s secured at both the legal and IT level. Moreover, and that adds to the credibility ot the book, the authors admit that employees may be a danger to themselves and the organization and some risks have to be mitigated. That’s the first fundamental contribution of the book : for once, marketing is not considered as an isolated bubble but as a part of a global chain that involves the whole company and has to be perfectly aligned. The book is full of wise advices, best practices, examples and means to self-evaluate and compare with one’s industry leaders.

Second contribution, that is the logical consequence of the first : the concept of service. Marketing becomes service. Understand : instead of saying “look at how great my product is”, say “How can I help ?”. Of course it applies to people who are already customers to make them stay and spread the word, but it’s also an exemplary attitude towards those who may become customers in the future. In fact some companies already got it. And if I come back to my last dummy case, AirSocial would be a company that empowers its employees, not AirShy. That said, the question of knowing if service is replacing marketing or marketing has to learn service is still open.

Enough reasons to buy a book that, for onces, tackle the customer relationship issue from another standpoint than futile and lovely conversations in isolation.

That said, it makes us wonder about many things. The assumption is that there are HEROs (Highly Empowered and Ressourceful Operatives), or people who want to become HEROs, in organizations, and that they need to be supported by the management, by IT ect.. But it’s obisous than any HERO may need some help from his no-HERO colleagues, those who only want to do their job as they were told to do it, without taking initatives and risk. What to doin this case ? The non written conclusion of “Empower” is that service is not only about customers but that anyone in the company is an internal customer that needs empowered colleagues, and that, in the end, the very notion of collaboration in the workplace may be replaced by service too.

Months ago, John Chambers was talking (among other) about “Everything as a service”. Here we are, and “Empowered” indirectly lays the first brick of the concept of Service Economy. Not the way it’s been thought for decades, but the way it should be.

Get it on the “empowered” micro-site : http://www.forrester.com/empowered

Filed Under: Books I read, Customer Relationship & Marketing, Management & HR, Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

My takes on the Enterprise 2.0 Forum : Enterprise 2.0 and the end of social washing

March 23, 2010 By 9 Comments

Capture d’écran 2010-01-23 à 00.12.50I’d like to take a few minutes to share with you my takes about the last  Enterprise 2.0 Forum that took place in Paris on march 17th et 18 th. First, a few words about the context.

I was looking for a professional event about enterprise 2.0 in Paris. Why do I mean by “professional” ? I’m fed up with the usual 40 min “show flat” presentations which conclusion is “it’s really awesome but I can’t do this in my company” and where we have the vague impression that insteat of getting answers to our problems we’re being sold a little piece of dream that comes with a big piece of software. In brief, attendees leave with shining stars in they eyes but realize, when the time to wake up comes, that it does not help them to achieve anything. I don’t even mention the events where we gather among experts, gurus, convinced practictionners to share certainties and common places before we realize that those we’re supposed to help weren’t in the room.

I came to the last Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Frankfurt with this idea in mind and, there, two things surprised me in a positive way. First, the format, that favors exchanges instead of one way talks (exchanges with the speaker but also among attendees) and, second, the fact that sponsors, even present around the event and the conference room were not allowed on stage to turn case studies into disguised sales speeches. So I we had the idea to bring this format to Paris, with a modest ambition regarding to the time we had : demonstrate it was possible in a local an french context and provide attendees not with discourses but with a strong added value. I think we did it and can already promise you there will be a second edition next year and than having 12 months instead of 2 to organize it will allow us to make things even better ans maybe bigger.

Last thing before delivering my takes. We usually judge this kind of event regarding to the quality of speeches (and of the buffet if you’re french). That’s not enough in the format we chose because it relies on an active participation from attendees (what implies to keep an “human size” to favor discussions). If I got many positives feedbacks, it’s also mainly because of the audience that asked the right questions and started vibrant discussions. When a conference room is crowed with people that have to het things done in their company, the debate easily reaches a higher level.

After the form, the substance. Here are my conclusions in a few points

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Intranets and digital workplace, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

IT interests : good news but too much compartmentalization

October 30, 2009 By Leave a Comment

I recently came across this this chart about what IT departments are currently thinking about. What inspires me some thoughts.

First point, as mentioned in the post where I found this document, there’s  nothing really new. Many of these issues have been discussed for years, some are more recent but even when names change, the topics themselves don’t.

Second point : cloud computing is on the top of the list. That’s the evidence, but did we need some more, that the topic is really a true current concern. But we have to be careful and don’t make numbers say what they don’t : being interested in something does not mean adopting it, it even may mean finding arguments to find it. As a friend of mine who works as a plane pilot, often says : “The reason why I’m interested in plane crashes is because I want to avoid them, not because I want to have one”. Behind, nothing emerges (I don’t consider the difference between 47% and 51% as significant).

Third point, the most interesting one in my opinion : the link between many of these topics. BI and BPM : don’t you think that one the the current challenges is to enrich BPM with BI ? Aren’t wikis, blogs etc.. and collaboration tools the two sides of one only thing ? By the way, to enrich BI, isn’t it necessary to harness the value contained into the unstructured information carried by blogs, wikis and social networks ? Good news : social networks come one rank behind. As for content management, isn’t it the formal alter ego of social medias ? Here again, two sides of one global issued.

So, at first sight, there’s a kind of coherence that is a good news. On the other side I’m afraid that all these issues may be thought independantly, without any articulation between one and another just when they must be thought jointly if we don’t want to see things that are complementary by nature confront each other. Keep in mind that operations are expecting such a coherent and integrated approach from the IT depts instead of technological projects isolated the one from the other which lack of coherence have negative impacts on adoption and value creation.

Filed Under: Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Is Saas the future of your corporate IT ?

September 25, 2009 By 1 Comment

This is one more question that haunts many people’s night. More serioulsy, if it doesn’t make people stay awakened all nights long, it creates debates and brings some confusion that doesn’t help businesses to move forward. As a matter of fact deploying any solution is not that easy when one still have many infrastructure related concerns.

So, let’s try to get cleared idead about what’s going on.

Which debate ?

To make it short,  while companies have been used to host their information system on their own infrastructure are facing the emergence of an alternative solution, called Software as a Service, that makes possible to deliver applications through the internet, using services that are not hosted by its IT dept anymore but by external providers. The debate could be simple (I manage everything by myself vs I let others dealing with the issues and I pay for for service) but there are security and privacy concerns that are not trivial. Concerns that are legitimate even if, sometimes, the answer is simple, in a world where old habits have a very heavy weight.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Make your own enterprise 2.0 diagnosis

August 11, 2009 By Leave a Comment

The concept of enterprise 2.0 is still unclear to many, even though they are often less far from it than they think. If, for sticking to their reality, we look at it in terms of process socialization, we realize that a lot of Mr. Jourdain in companies that have a logical relatively close but not “institutionalized” and not tooled. In short there are many “almost 2.0″ islets but no many companies as a whole deserve the same name. (Notice : M. Jourdain is a reference to “Le bourgeois gentilhomme“, one of the most famous part of the play being when he was delighted to learn that he has been speaking prose all his life without knowing it.)

For once I’ll try to make it short because I came across a simple diagnosis tool that can let you know where you are and, roughly, to determine where to focus your efforts.

I invite you to go read the post where I “stole” the matrix.

Image 1

Where are you in terms of technical maturity? And  in terms of ‘social practices’, a word that should not be confused with collaborative: there is a dimension related to independence, intrapreneurship that is not negligible. Determine both what you think being to be the key elements of the technological maturity, the key behaviors of the social dimension and you know where you are and, more importantly, what you need to develop. More relevant than aiming to a nebulous 2.0 and applying magic recipes that are inappropriate to your own situation.

By the way, this is close to what I already wrote on  IT / HR  synergies on such a project. Each axis is indeed a dimension related to one of these entities.

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , ,
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