Investing in people ? Are you kidding ?

September 28, 2011 By 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: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Making the most of key resources in collaboration

September 22, 2011 By 1 Comment

Summary : tomorrow’s organization will be connected and communicative. This is the only way to success in the knowledge economy. But communication and exchange, which are essential foundations for collaboration, need a sender and a receiver who mobilize their attention. But attention, more than time, is the scarce productive ressource which use has to be optimized. In the end, if everyone makes the most of the system in one’s own interest, the whole organization may become paralyzed. Solutions exist and suppose more accessible business tools, information filtering based on context and better education and training.

Whatever the organizational structure is, top-down, networked, push, pull etc… there’s always a constant concern : optimizing the use of resources. Said in other words : “get the maximum by spending the minimum”, “prevent productive potential wasting”.

In this productivity driven view, people see time as being the limiting factor. That’s, right…at least in a system based on repetitive tasks and involving few knowledge if any. But this assumption becomes wrong in a knowledge economy where time is not a relevant productivity indicator at all because individual production is not linear or constant anymore. And not individual either by the way. In this context, the limiting factor is attention, which could be defined as qualified time, a subdivision of time. That’s the time dedicated to do/deal with/process something, being focused on it (by the way it would be interesting to start a discussion on what attention at work is….to find a less shoddy definition than this one).

So attention is the scarce resource which use has to be optimized.

But we know than nobody can be focused, attentive, 8 hours a day. A least not 8 hours in a row. That’s, in fact, a reason why the barrier between personal and professional time is blurring.

One of the best way to avoid productive time wasting is not to make sure everyone is checking in the office at the right time but to make work tools available when and where attention is maximal. Note that attention is not always the result of a voluntary action. Who did never have a brilliant idea about a business concerns at night, on vacation or during a week end…and lost it because he was not empowered to work or share it at the very moment when it came ? Moment when one’s mind shifted to a business focus unpurposely on a non dedicated time ?

Another way is to avoid disruptive elements that come and interrupt employees in an “attention phase”. These elements are well known : untimely email reception as well as any incoming signal that grab attention and force to refocus after : instant messaging, phone calls or social media. There’s an easy solution being used by many people : disconnecting from everything. But disconnection has risks : not being able to communicate with people who can help, not receiving the information that would help to solve a problem. The notion of context that helps filtering the available information and, most of all, the information being pushed at a given moment is essential and will play a key role in tomorrow’s business applications.

Then after, there’s the need to master the human factor. As a matter of fact, these signals don’t fall from the sky : they’re sent by people. That’s the paradox of the new coming forms of organizations. If each person makes the most of his ability to share, alert and mobilize others, the situation will look like a tragedy of the commons applied to attention. If each person makes the most of other’s attention in his own interest, the collective result will be horrendous because no one will have enough attention left to do his own work. This issue is fare from being the easier to solve.

Of course, specific education and training will be needed to make people aware of the attention paradigm and what a wise use of people’s attention means (using any communication channel is using others’ attention by the way). But is this a risk for weak signals and serendipity which are essential in agile, networked and “pull” organization ?

The result will surely be a mix of all these solutions…but is still unclear…and far.

Anyway, if organizations need to become (over ?) connected and communicative, they’ll need mechanisms that will prevent these skills from backfiring and avoid the paradoxical trap according to which when everyone makes the most of the system, the organization as a whole will suffer from it.

 

 

Filed Under: Economy & New Models, Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Knowledge & Information management, Management & HR, Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Are curators the missing thing in enterprise 2.0 approaches ?

January 11, 2011 By 6 Comments

Summary :in a few weeks, a new concept burst into the web : the curator. It can be defined as filter and broadcaster for qualified and targeted information. Is it a new fad or a key element of a successful approach. With hindsight it seems that it’s the perfect complement to community managers when the latter makes no sense, one targeting actual communities, the other those who want informations without interactions as well as those who need to be stimulated to interact. The curator may be the person who feeds “social skeptics” as well as community discussions or community managers themselves when they need expert contents to do their job.

Sometimes, there are themes that emerge from who knows where and find themselves at the heart of the discussions. That’s how what what supposed to be an insignificant on twitter with Anthony Poncier and Benoit Faverial ended in a real debate that lasted long at night with Xavier Bartholome, Vincent Berthelot and Mark Tamis. In this post I’ll try to sum up what was said.

Why talking about curators here ?

Because, in my opinion, it’s one of the most important levers to successfully achieve 2.0, social (use the words you prefer) projects within the organization.

What is a curator ?

As for any emerging concept we need to be very cautious when trying to define what anything is. We can say that curators are people who process, rate, contextualize, enrich and broadcast information.

Here’s the diagram shared by Anthony.

There’s something I like a lot with the concept of curator and what it refers to. Like curators in museums, they do not transform the primary matter but understand it, explain it, expose it in a context that increases its value. We can consider that their contribution is rather about meta-data and meta-information.

What’s the difference with KM ?

At first sight I can see three major differences with KM : feeds, maturity and the exclusive nature of the role.

• Curators are not processing information to tidy it up but to broadcast it. KMer ended in a container filling role while curators are rather broadcasters. So, curators are more “filters and pumps” than meticulous archivists.

• KMers don’t address the same level of information as curators. KMers deal with mature, validated and consolidated information while curators are more focused on emergence and weak signals.

• Kmers were, in some ways, knowledge depositories, a mandatory agent any knowledge related thing had to go through. Curators act rather by subsidiarity : anyone can do one’s own sourcing and filtering job without dealing with curators. But, for those who don’t want, don’t know how to, can’t, the curator is here to make things easier.

That’s a watch work isn’t it ?

Yes, there are lots of similarities. The difference is that curators are not necessarily “institutionalized” and depends on a less structured, managed and constrained approach. On the other hand, curators may work at a narrower level and be in a more instantaneous logic when watch often needs time to finally reach employees.

To be also taken into account :

• Brokerage. Curators directly transmit information to employees while watchers make it through a complex and  nebulous intermediary called enterprise or organization which has its rules and constraints that make the system less reactive.

• Scope : watchers watch what’s happening out of the enterprise while curators are also dealing with internal information. So they’re the possible missing link between internal social and community activities and conversations that only interest those who participate and those who need the information that can be found here but don’t have the time or will to find it…or are even convinced that these activities are useless and don’t believe in social approaches.

Curators can even be seen as those who facilitate a P2P watch system in complement to an heavier and institutionalized one. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Knowledge & Information management, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Many challenges and lots of progress to make for HR according to IBM

October 21, 2010 By Leave a Comment

IBM recently issued a study after having gathered insights from more than 700 Chief Human resources officers, titled “Working Beyond Borders”.. I let  you peruse this long and interesting document but here’s in a few lines some of my takes from it.

Let’s start with te conclusion. As we could expect, it confirms what many people have been knowing for years : in today’s economic context and makets, HR’s main challenge is to develop work “beyond the borders”. What does it mean ?

  • ability to work out of the enterprise silos and collaborate acrosse functions, departments, countries.
  • ability to work out of the enterprise boundaries with partners, clients
  • ability to work out of one’s own competence boundaries : mobilize expertises one don’t have and acquire new ones in a flexible and responsive way.
  • ability to mobilize out of one’s comfort and authority zone what implies to develop new forms of leadership.

These are creativity, agility and flexibility challenges that CHROs want to address in many ways

  • Develop creative leaders that will tackl challenges and opportunities in a new way that’s more adapted to our times. Kind of “intrapreneurs” able to react in an innovative way and engage people around them.
  • Develop speed and flexibility by simplifying processes and making employees more responsive.
  • Capitalize on collective intelligence by finding new ways to connect people

Even more interesting, one of the many illustrations of the study

It’s the evidence that while there are domains where CHROs find themselves efficient, some remain where about which they acknowledge not being effective although they will be critical in the future : fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing, developing leaders and developing workforce skills.

Now that that’s everybody know in what direction to head…the only thing to do is to work on that. The road seems very long but the amount of opportunities is more than worthy.

One more point to conclude :

I think there’s nothing to add. Just do it…

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

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

October 12, 2010 By 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: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Are you “on demand” or “when we can” ? Enterprise 2.0 and the customer perspective

November 19, 2009 By Leave a Comment

What does social software bring ? Nothing by itself (contrary to many others, a social app doesn’t process or treat anything but allow people to do things…) but since it makes some things more easy to do it should, in principle, help to improve performance and productivity for many kind of tasks provided people understand they have to slightly change the way they work (what does not means changing work fundamentals but only adjust a few things).

Most often, operations managers can’t see the concrete benefits. To do so they would need to take hindsight but they don’t have time and are too involved to. Consequence : top executives often have the vision while people who have their hands in everyday operations still wonder what problem this new things actually solve, why they’d need to socialize their work, share part of the information. Everyone know what a solution that solves no problem (or no problem people are aware of) is worth.

An approach that sometimes work is to ask managers to imagine themselves at the client’s place. Note that a client could either be an external client or an internal client. Their staff’s job is to meet the client’s need and their role, as managers, is to make sure they will, in the assigned time limit, without being directly in touch with the client. Furthermore, in many cases, managers have to get in thouch with clients only when things go wrong. It’s all the more easy to imagine oneself at the client’s place since everyone know how being a client is, either from internal or external providers. Sometimes, realizing that you do exactly what you don’t like your providers to do is a big step to progress.

[Read more...]

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Thoughts on social learning

October 29, 2009 By Leave a Comment

What’s social learning ? The word comes more and more often in lots of conversations, everyone understands what’s behind and yet everyone has his own definition. That’s the reason the idea formed at Ecollab to ask some experts what was their vision and to gather all these views into a whitepaper. And for once I have a good news since both the site and the whitepaper exist in both french and english.

Collaborative Enterprise – Social Learning Introduction

View more documents from Frédéric DOMON.

I’d like to thank Frédéric Domon and Harold Jarche who managed to get us on the project and coordinate our work.

People who contributed : Harold Jarche, George Siemens, myself, Frédéric Cavazza, Clark Quinn, Cédric Deniau, Jay Cross, Florence Meichel, Charles Jennings, Frédéric Domon, Julien Pouget, Lilian Mahoukou, Christophe Deschamps and Anthony Poncier.

Filed Under: Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , ,

Your knowledge helps you more than your productivity

September 9, 2009 By 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 :

Image 2

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: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Is multitasking dangerous or a myth ?

January 23, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Multitasking is a big issue for both people and organization. It’s the (presumed and made essential) ability for someone to do many things at the same time. The social media phenomenon and the increasing number of information flows people are exposed to are making this concern more and more central.

I’m afraid that, behing th multitasking question, hides a fundamental and dangerous erreur that may make us lose sight of what matters.

Human beings are not fully multitask. We can fully do ony one thing at the same time and it will last for years even if I can admit that in a few centurys our skills will surely imprve. Even Digital Natives are not more multitask than others.

Being multitask and being able to switch from one thing to another are often mistaken. New generations (but many other too) can quickly shuttle between two tasks, what is sometimes seen as being multitask. These people are able to transfer attention and energer between two things, what does not mean they adress them jointly.

But we also have to assume that, when attention is continuously transfered from one point to another, it loses intensity and the more multitask people are the more errors can be found in the tasks they achieve. If you need to be convinced, please read this note .

Some may find it disappointing since  because they used to see in multitasking the response to many concerns about productivity. But it’s not that bad : the impacts of multitasking would not all be positive. I already mentioned the risk of an higher failure rate. But there’s also another point : the impossibility to respect due dates. Imagine three tasks, A, B and C, whose duration is 10 (minutes, hour, days… ).

If they are carried out in a raw, the first will be achieved at H+10, the second at H+20, the third at H+30. Now imagine they are carried out in a fragmentary way, on a 5 minutes slot base. The result will look like that :

image-28

I didn’t even take into account the time needed to re-focus on each task. Maybe it can make it possible to finish a task earlier but, on a global scale, it doesn’t help people to save any time.

People are overwhelmed by signals and information that force them to try to multitask. At the end, it only lowers their productivity although communication tools are supposed to help them improve it. That is not becaue a message is received that it’s treated, and everyone has his own prioriies. But, obviously, those who send messages and those who conceive the tools that carry them, seem not to be paying any attention to that.

Being exposed to a lot of flows that condition their work, employees need to take leadership upon tools and to maser channels instead of being under a waterfall. By the way I like the analogy that consists of saying that a multi jet shower is something pleasant while being under a waterfall hurts.

The response to this issue has two sides

• The first is behavioral : employees have to learn how to turn flows off and achieve a task without being interrupted.

• The second is rather technical: tools employees are provided with must allow them to master flows and not to be their victims anymore. They must be able to priorize some, put some on hold, reroute some others and make things in order to ” if information is relevant it will find me…if not it will wait”. In brief, tools will have to make it possible for people to build their own information supply chain, whose timing, rate and content will be under their control, starting from a information marketplace, a kind of marshalling yard. A major issue for the software industry where social software will have to play its part.

Filed Under: Knowledge & Information management, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Web 2.0 tools to improve information readiness

November 28, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Today, many opinions converge to admit two things :

• companies need to be more and and more reactive in order to run their traditionnal activities in a more and more complexe context, where foreseeability is very uncertain and where sharp competences and complex competences assembling are needed in a short range of time. Something like “special forces forces for special taks”, running in parallel with traditionnal activities which are companies common background operations.

• in order to match this need, adequate expertises and competences are needed.

We have no choice but to admit that high levels of performance are reached in legay and “institutionnalized” activities and the money that has been invested to improve many business processes often provided a ROI. Competencewise, we also have to admit they are really present within organizations. But, for what’s about building efficient adhoc self-organized teams, even if the need is identified it gets harder and harder to be successfull since more and more situations requires this way of doing things.

One reason is that what we call intellectual capital, if present, is not easily accessible and its owners can barely be identified. To improve things, experience and knowledge should be “findable” and “findability” can only come from putting it all in words because it’s (and will remain for years) the more efficient way of indexing and finding datas in an online network, the so-called online network being the only commons space shared by all employees in scattered companies. So people would be able to search the experience and, if they can’t find what they’re looking for, identify referent people they could contact and ask.

All this is nothing more than a matter of information and readiness.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Economy & New Models, Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Innovation, Knowledge & Information management, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,
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