Collaborative enterprise project : Feedback Needed

One of my contacts is progressing on the HR component of a corporate project. He lauched some projects, initiatives and would like to exchange about it with people with similar experciences in order to share best practices, idees and make headway together.

Here’s his request.

Hi,
I am managing a programme called Alstom collaborative Way. I’d like to get a dialogue about it. Today, tools exist for and success stories are already starting to come through.
Today the next steps is to manage organizational enablers and blockers and identify how to best capture the benefits of collaborative ways of working. So, feel free to suggest your answers and comments on how to do this.
Alstom is a leader in Power and Transport sector (76,000 people in 70 countries). The programme “Alstom Collaborative Way” aims to enhance employees’ collaborative ways of working by integrating in their practices the use of communities of practice, networks and collaborative information systems. Its goal is to provide means to facilitate, reward and favour the Search, Sharing and Connection between people and between data
The steps of the programme have been: First provide building blocks for a collaborative working environment* for Early adopters and Pilots (see above the 3 “building blocks”). Extract from this tangible proof of business value and take stock on needs for change in order to ensure organizational support of collaborative ways of working. Lastly, pull for the alignment of organizational policies and processes, culture, IT and people management tools.
Example component of the “collaborative working environment”
A policy that sets the Frame for governance and golden rules
A portfolio of IT collaborative tools (“Web 2.0.) such as: Blog, Wiki, Search engines, RSS, document-sharing solutions, Intenal Yellow pages.
Alstom University training content and assessment are aligned to ensure learning is also done through peer-to-peer coaching or exchange of knowledge and creates networking opportunities.
Toolkits to animate small and large meetings in a collaborative way (Open space, Fishbowl, best practice-Marketplace, Cafezhino, Knowledge café, 4-game brainstorming workshopTM).
Collaboration as part of our Competencies framework (basis for performance mgt, promotion, recruitme

You can contact him directly by email : slim.lambert (at) chq.alstom.com

But you can also discuss the topic here.

Collaboration may happen by luck : how to provide valuable information without purpose

You must have already heard about serendipity, the effect by which one accidentally discovers something fortunate, especially while looking for something else entirely. This is the best way to gout out of the common path instead of recycling the same ideas again and again, which often leads to the same overused solutions. But in  order to find something by luck, someone should have made it available without knowing if it would be useful for anybody, and in which purpose, if not we stay in a classic system where people keep information for themselves or only give it to those they think need it. With two consequences : people we don’t know they woudl find the information useful are not informed and people we wrongly think they need it are flooded by unsolicited infomation.

This must make us remember that, when talking about information sharing, we must not have any a priori about addressees, knowing that what’s gold for someone may be mud for someone else and vice versa.

Let me explain this by the example, trough a situation I experienced myself last week.

[Read more...]

SOO + Reuse = productivity

In a former post I gave you my first thought about what I walled SOO or Service Oriented Organizaton. A recent post from Oscar Berg about SOA gave me more ideas about this.

According to him it’s important to focus on reuse which is the very basis of SOA. It is essentiel to isolate, prior to anything, which services have to be reused by others in order to make them become components on which other services will rely.

If I try to apply the same theory to organization, the fact is it’s impossible to know what will be reusable. So a system has to be set tup in order to isolate reusable knowledge and make it “solid knowledge” with a process that solidifies gaseous information. Which implies companies have to hire best practices hunters.

But there are also what I call “golden nuggets”, which are too specific or not strategic enough to be “solidified” but may still be useful for anyone, knowing information’s value is relative : what’s gold for some could be mud for others. [Read more...]

Information is like water (part 2)



Thanks to Oscar Berg.

Information is like water



Via Oscar Berg.

Conversations and the emergence of unsuspected knowledge

A large part of companies’ knowledge is not available for all for the only reason people are not conscious of the importance of some details of their experience and that, since others don’t know what these people know, they don’t think of asking them anything…

Hence the importance of not organising knowledge capture on the only base of “forms people have to fill” and pay attention to what can capture conversations which are the only way to make emerge “what we don’t know people know and they dont measure the importance”.

That reminds of this famous Donald Rumsfeld’s sentence. It made me laugh at this time, but perharps it has more sense than I though (even if he didn’t did it in purpose…)

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know.

There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know.

But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.

Managing information will soon be a key competence

While informations is becoming more and more important in everyone’s day to day job, we always ear the same things : “too much information, not enough time, impossible to manage it”. This looks like a paradox as people don’t seem ready to embrace what is becoming more and more essential in most of us’ jobs. Yet, as mentioned in a recent UNESCO survey, we’ll have to learn to deal with that. Managing information is about not not remain a constraint anymore but to become a key competence.

What is it about ? The issue is clear : find, extract, evaluate, and make an efficient use of information. [Read more...]

People are more likely to share information if they know why

Companies know their performance depends more and more on their ability to use information. But information that’s not harnessed can’t be used.

There are two kinds of information : company generated information that’s harnessed (even if people within the organization don’t know where to find it), and employee generated information that remains informal and is only known from its owner and some few people around him, because it’s not harnessed at the organization scale.

Harnessing this informal information is one of enterprises 2.0′s purposes. As said in this Gartner’s post, this kind of information exists and is available as flows, contrary to what people used to know, that is more about stocks. That’s quite destabilizing because the liquidity of this information, the fact it’s owned by employees, and the fact that employees share it and make it available for the whole organization only if they want is the exact opposite of everything that’s been known till then. [Read more...]

Archivists : a new performance lever

Everything started with this note about Lille Business school and some talks with an archivist, a job I didn’t know at all, or, as a lot of people, a job I thought I knew things about. It gave me the idea to make a little poll around me about how this function was considered within their companies.

I think the result won’t be a surprise for anybody. I’ve been talked about “temple keepers”, the people who know “were information is”. With a strong “achive” connotation. It’s like people were talking about old relicts for those who want to learn about the past but without any use in the day to day job, noboday talking about topicality, intelligence, digital information (as if archivists only knew paper).

Nothing to do with the talks I had with the above mentioned person. Nothing to do with what is made in Lille. A the time when information is  becoming more and more strategic, when it’s the basis on collaboration between people, when 75% of the companies’ value is made of intangible assets, it’s somehow a worrying situation.

What do companies need ? Funneling and organizing information that’s pouring into an always increasing numbers of channels. Of course, there’s still “paper information” that’s about both topicality and content. But there are also feeds coming from business/competitive monitoring on the web, since more and more companies try to take the most of each employee as a point of contact with their ecosystem. Of course the number of sources can be reduced but it’s more about closing our eyes to reality than trying to face it. [Read more...]

The best search engine is you

Access to qualified information is a double challenge : first because information is the new economic oil, second because we’re snowed under information.

Google showed the way : information relevance comes from users. The more you quote, the more you link, the more you read the more you give pertinance. Solutions that aim at analyzing user’s behaviors to prune the informational forest now arouse and added interest.

Saying that we admit the best search engine is nothing else that the individual, the most efficient engines trying to capitalize on human users behaviors. I wrote about it a year ago : the future is information social processing.

I experienced it yesterday afternoon : despite my employer provides us with a very efficent search engine, my first reflex was to ask a colleague “Do you know if we have something about that….where is it ?”. Immediate answer, more pertinent and quicker that the list the engine would have found.

So the best way to find the right information is to find the person who know it or know where it is. I talked about it yester with Alexis Mons who had this kind of discussion with an organization working in a very specifi context (can’t say more…). When teraoctet is the minimal information unit, the organization realized that the simplest query brought thousand pages of results and concluded that only the individual was able to make a really qualified search and that information qualification was, finally, highly related to its publisher.

The Aspen Insititute report concluded that the most accessible form of knowledge is conversation. So we just have to make the informal discussions become effective and capitalize on it.

Anne-Marie ducroux, president of the French Sustainable Development Council published a very interesting reflection about that. “Benchmarking experiencences often allows to enrich people and even innovation“she said. She continued “convergence between everyone’s actions has to be reinforced, new relationships between players have to be built, outdates distinctions have to be abolished and new collaborations have to be encouraged. This begins inevitably by discussions. Hence the need of building their crucible : tools, moments, places and mediations“. She finally concluded : “New alchimists, in the 21th century, won’t try to make gold but conversations…that are worth gold for society“.

Nothing more than the way our organizations have to follow in the upcomming years.