Employees first ! Supporting those who really create value.

June 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : “Reverse the pyramid”…other words may be used to scare less but it’s concern shared by many organization. It’s, in some ways, necessary to face the increasing complexity of the world that surrounds us but it’s also the obsessive fear of many organizations and managers used to the command and control model and not willing to go out of their zone of their comfort zone to improve what’s happening in the value zone. Value zone ?  As a matter of fact that’s because value is created at the field employee level that the command chain should turn into a service one. But, beyond exhortations that are easy way to drive change while being surprise it doesn’t work it’s a hard work that consists of reversing flow, redesigning some processes and transfering responsabilities that has to be done. That’s was was made at the Indian compant HCL and the story is told by Vineet Nayar, HCL CEO, in his book, Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down. Here are my takes.

One year ago, in July 2010, I read attentively and bookmarked this blog post by Gary Hamel where he was telling the incredible management experience that people just lived at HCL, an Idian IT service company. Spurred on by its CEO, Vineet Nayar, they seemed to be on the right way to meet a goal that look unreachable for many : reversing the pyramid to make the organization more successful.

Here’s what I highlighted at that time :

– Transparent Financial Data. Vineet realized it’s hard to feel empowered if your manager has a lot of data you don’t. With this in mind, HCLT’s IT team created a simple widget that gave every employee a detailed set of financial metrics for their own team and other teams across the company.

– U&I. Early on, Vineet and his leadership team set up an online forum and encouraged employees to ask tough questions and offer honest feedback. Nothing was censored on the “U&I” site; every post, however virulent, was displayed for the entire company to see.

– Service Level Agreements. Powerful corporate departments, like HR and finance, often seem more interested in enforcing blanket policies than in making life easier for employees. When Vineet would ask front line employees, “What have the enabling functions done to help you create value in the value zone?”

-Today, HCLT employees are able to rate the performance of any manager whose decisions impact their work lives, and to do so anonymously. These ratings are published online and can be viewed by anyone who has submitted a review.

- As the CEO, Vineet was being asked to weigh in on hundreds of unit-level plans each year. Recognizing the limits to his time and personal expertise, Vineet challenged his colleagues to develop an online, peer-based evaluation process. The solution: MyBlueprint. In 2009, three hundred managers posted their business plans, or “blueprints,” online. Each document was accompanied by an audio presentation. More than 8,000 employees were then invited to jump in and review the plans.

- Three years after launching this concept, 20% of HCLT’s revenue is coming from initiatives launched in these communities of interest.”

Today, Vineet Nayar tells us more in a book called Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down. Rather than summarizing a book that’s very easy to read, I’m going to highlight what seem to me being the key points of his approach and share a couple of comments. [Read more...]

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Enterprise 2.0 in 2011 : value or denial of reality ?

December 14, 2010 By 7 Comments

Summary : what will happen in the Enterprise 2.0 world in 2011. Making predictions is very difficult because many things will depend on what enterprise 2.0 wants to become. After 5 years of experimentations, thoughts, discussions, there’s enough maturity on methodologies, limits, improvements to be made that we should say the big change is on its way. But the road is long from words to actions and many things will depend on enterprise 2.0′s ability to get out of kind of denial of enterprise. Accept to frankly talk about value, put hands into complex and sensitive mechanisms that drives production and execution, forget the idealistic and angelic vision of a dreamt organization driven by passion, openness and nice intentions wlll be key in 2011. What’s at stake : moving forward or losing credibility.

Before trying to guess what the enterprise 2.0 world will look like in 2011, let’s start summing up what has happened since 2006 and what the situation looks like today.

In 2006 Andrew McAfee came to the conclusion that the use of social software could support new ways of working. Nothing more, nothing less. That’s what he called “tech-enabled organization”. These new ways of working being made desirable and even necessary by the evolution of the economy and value creation models, lots of people tried to implement the above mentioned tools. Often without success. Then came the conclusion that (for those who did not get it before…) tools were nothing but enablers (the “tech-enabled” thing in McAfee’s writings is too often overlooked) and that organization, management, people and even culture were parts of the equation.

With time and after lots of experimentations and reflection, it became obvious that the structure of work and organization had to be tackled (read my 2009 and 2010 predictions) to make the change possible and be sure it would improve value creation. What led to a consensus on the need to tackle business processes both for alignment and value creation matters. It was quite a logic conclusion for anyone knowing the deep mechanisms that drives operations and value creations but was light-years away from the dominant doctrine that was nearly exclusively focused on building communities above (and out of) the flow of work. The idea was not to favor the one or the other but to articulate both to meet organization needs and create synergies between unstructured cross-organization exchange dynamics and structured and vertical operation ones.

Meanwhile, tools improved a lot in terms of richness, integration capabilities etc.

Let’s sum-up :

• awareness that we have to tackle the organization mechanisms and machinery

• awareness that we have to articule on the flow and above the flow dynamics.

• awareness that we have to go beyond community dynamics

• existence of a lot of valuable knowledge and sets of practices about community management. Let’s be honest ; we have “best practices”, heaps of methodology, lots of cases and the tools to support the whole (Cf: the incredible work of the Community Roundtable). More and more people are now able to build and manage successful communities and what gives the opposite feeling is that too many businesses try to turn into communities what is not communities (hence the need to do beyond…)

• we have good social software tools.

So everything is alright and enterprise 2.0 won’t experience any issue in 2011. Things are going well, we’re on a straight highway and success is ahead. Problem : it seems we take pleasure driving with he hand brake on.

[Read more...]

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Can participation be mandated into communities. Yes…most of all when it’s not communities

December 7, 2010 By 2 Comments

Summary : organizations have to face a real issue about  managing their communities : making the system work without mandating. unfortunately there’s no alternative : communities rely on voluntary service. But there are two possible options. The first is, since it’s impossible to mandate participation, to tackle what prevent people from participating. The second is to wonder if the group in question is a community…and adapt rules accordingly.

Many organizations that try to harness the power of internal communities wonder if participation can be made mandatory. But they already know the answer : participation into communities rely on voluntary service and the best they can do is to create the conditions that will make employees feel like participating and understand how important it is.

There’s also  another lever. That’s not because participation can”t be mandated that it’s impossible to fight against what prevents people from participating. It’s obvious that many factors exist in the workplace that incite people not to participate. Job description,  goals, evaluations…are, among many others, strong signals saying “focus on your job, don’t put you at risk by joining this stuff”. Then, even before inciting people to play the game, rather start with what tells them not to. I remember people from financial group Hypoport speaking at the last Enterprise 2.0 Summit quoting their CEO : “wiki time is work time…”.

Then, remember that many of the communities organizations want to make emerge (I’m not talking about user generated communities) are not communities. So they don’t have to respect the art of managing communities. When your community has the same scope has an operational entity (team, department) and is supposed to be used to perform daily tasks through better collaboration coordination etc… so it’s a workspace, rather a socialized workspace. Since then, its rules are the team’s. What would you say to the sales representative who would refuse to use the CRM, the accountant that refuses to use the accounting software ?

The success of such group does not rely on content generation or of a community manager that would interfer with the real manager. It needs a model that fits employees needs, tools that fit in this model and some consistency into management. I remember of a director who said “the era of emails send to the whole department is over…everyhting has to be be shared in our new space. Same for the ideas I’m submitted, competitive watching, best practices etc…. This is also the only place where I’ll talk to you and answer questions that my interest everybody. It will also makes it easier for me to assess how collaborative and supportive each of you will be toward his colleagues in a transparent and factual way”. Let me tell you that “adoption” happened very fast. Of course, in the tool’s terminology, this group was a community but he knew that it was nothing but the way to fluidify his team’s daily operations.

A community will always rely on voluntary service. But are you sure what you’re setting up is a community ? Do you think it’s a part of people daily work to perform tasks that are part of their job description ? If so, that’s not a community, what does not mean that tools and operating models can’t be changed. Do you think it’s a voluntary contribution in addition to people’s “official” work ? This is a community and can be managed as such.

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

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

November 23, 2010 By 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: , , , , , , ,

Does your enterprise social network really make you more productive ?

August 24, 2010 By 1 Comment

Summary : one of the most frequent arguments used in favor of the implementation of an internal social network is productivity improvement through the ability to access and mobilize resources more easily. While that’s an undisputable truth at the individual level (and provided the tool is used by enough people), it does not mean that the company is made more productive : optimizing tasks and optimizing the chain of tasks that lead to the final deliverable, what is the only thing that counts, are not the same thing. So, companies will have to consider their whole production processus and identify their bottlenecks that prevent the chain from taking the most of local improvements.

One of the promises that usually come with a social network (and even with “anything 2.0″) is that some time will be saved. Since, in order to deliver the expected results, people and knowledges have to be put together in order to make progress along a processus, the more these resources are available and accessible, the faster problems are solved, solutions are found and the better decisions are.

So, here’s a very usual indicator : if any employee losts 38 minutes a day to find information, documents or people, if he can save 5, 10 or 15 minutes a day, it means x minutes a week, y minutes a year, what can easily be turned into money. By saving 5 minutes a day, your employees will make you save billions every year.

Hearing such a thing, and even if the promise is seducing and the logics credible, many managers feel there’s something wrong and they’re often right : 5 minutes saved every day, or even 30 may equal to…no saving for the company. But we must not throw the baby out with the bathwater : it’s possible to deliver the promise provided we focus on the right thing.

5 minutes saved at the employee level are…saved at the employee level

So imagine that an employee can save these much-touted 5 minutes a day ? Does it mean that he’ll be productive 1/2h more a week ? 5 minutes is the time for a coffee  break and there are many chances he will use the time he saved for his own purpose. He may also use it to cool off, knowing that even unconsciously he’ll adapt his pace to deliver at the due date. So if he realizes he can save time on some tasks there are many chances that he’ll take advantage of that to slow down or start later. I don’t even mention the case when these five minutes are 20 times 15 seconds…

Of course that’s a positive thing for the organization if employees can cool off, take the time to discuss etc… But that’s not what they were expecting at the beginning..

Optimizing tasks is useless

In fact, the whole value proposal relies on the optimization of a given task : search (whatever people are looking for). Yet, search is only one task, even a sub-task, in a more global processus.

Finding the right information or the right person helps to achieve any assigned task faster. So they can start the next earlier and so on and, at the end of the week, they would be more productive. That’s good for their individual evaluation and they’ll even be rewarded. But what’s the benefit for the organization ? None. The organization may even lose by rewarding people for something that did not change anything.

Generally, people are a link in a much longer chain. The task one achieves is necessary for another to start his part of the work and so on. If the first does things faster but the one who have to carry on or the manager that has to validate are not able to react as fast, some time will be saved for one employee but nothing will change for the company because the overall performance of the whole processus won’t be improved and, at the end, the client (internal or external) won’t be served faster. The only consequence of one employee being more productive is more files, emails and to dos for the others. That increases the pressure on the othere, brings more confusion, make things more complicated because they have to re-priorize things continuoulsy and disperse. In the worst case they’ll try to increase theyr own pace to keep up the with other’s and make more mistakes.

Optimizing people’s work at an individual scale seldom brings the expected results if the processus is not rethought and limiting factors, bottlenecks are not dealed with. It implies individual needs and actions are seen as understood as a part of a longer process that is sometimes formalized, sometimes informal (so to be identified).

It reminds me of a situation I had to deal with a few years ago. A manager was complaining that, despite of all the many undertaken efforts, the productivity of his team was not improving. Of course, he was thinking that employees had to be blamed on for that while the whole staff was close to explode due to the impressive amount of work they had to do and the high level of pressure. At the end, it was made clear that, since the manager had to validate all the files his staff has worked on before pushing it to another team…he didn’t have enough time to deal with all his team was producing. All the efforts the make the team more productive were dashed because he didn’t paid attention to his own role in the processus.

Understanding the whole processus is mandatory

So, it’s easy to understand that, once people’s day to day work has been explored with them and that some new practices that may make them more efficient, productive, have been identified, it’s important to think it as a part of a more global chain, to understand what one’s job serves (and whom), and look for bottlenecks. These bottlecks limit the overall performance of the chain and are often people at the center of a network (even informal), those most of the information has to go through. So they may be managers.

Then, each case has its own story, context and solution. Maybe the decision making process is not relevant, maybe an “a priori” validation is not necessary since corrections can be made afterwards when needed, maybe this part of the job can be handle by other people, maybe the only fact he can access his business tools while away from the office would be enough, maybe the “innovation board” does not meet often enough to deal with all the ideas that are submitted….

“Anything 2.0″ can make many things more fluid but won’t solve the bottlneck question that bridle “anyhting 2.0″ and prevent it from bringing significant performance improvements. Now it’s up to HR and managers to deal with that.

Finally it’s a very old debate that is much older than enterprise 2.0, it’s all about the pursuit of a local maximum vs. a global optimum.

Anyway, measuring any link of the chain is often misleading : what has to be optimized and measured is the whole chain.

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

Community Management is a “processus in processum”

May 17, 2010 By 1 Comment

Even if community management is still an unclear concept with changing boundaries, many senseful and insightful things are slowly emerging about it. A few weeks ago, I came across a very interesting web tv show about it (sorry…it’s in french). While watching the video, a sentence grabbed my attention. You know, the kind of thing that makes you think “yes…that’s it…he/she gets it all right”. The sentence was “community management is a processus” (and the author Sandrine Plasseraud from We are Social).

It’s possible that I’ll go a little bit far from what they said and meant on the video in the following lines but I’d like to go further in this discussion that I find senseful. As just once won’t hurt, I’ll mainly address external community management issues even if, as we’ll see, they have very little value if not connected to the inside.

Community Management is a processus

I’d like to apologize to those who like the pretended “freestyle” and “village fest” side of community community management, but not only it’s a processus but a processus that has to be tightly managed. Whatever are the autonomy and the seniority of the person in charge (and most of all when both are low), it’s about:

• defining the goals of the activity

• defining its scope, the issues to address and not address, what to talk about and what to never talk about.

• defining how information will be processed : what kind of information has to be pushed, what kind of information has to be pulled to internal business people and what to do with it, how follow-up will be managed, what kind of reporting, what actions ?

• Autonomy level : how far community managers can do, what kind of initiative can he take, to what extent can he speak in the name of the company.

• Organizing subsidiarity : when out of the autonomy scope, to whom must he refers, ask an anwer, a permssion, an action.

• Setting-up support for community managers : in the above-mentioned case, be sure that the person who’ll be asked something by the community manager know that answering and taking any necessary action is not facultative and that it should be done in a time limit that’s compatible with customer or audience’s expectations.

• Define the “online style” : what tone to adopt, how close and friendly can the community manager be.

I agree it’s a little bit constraining but that’s the price to pay to make community managers feel comfortable, make them sure they won’t be any mistake. It will also help the company to be comfortable with its communitu manager, trust him. Community managers need to know what they can and can’t do, that they’ll be supported in their initiatives and get the needed help in the same way that organizations need to be sure their CM won’t put them at risk. It’s a matter of reciprocal trust : guidelines are the best way to carry on while waiting for trust to emerge and each player to deserve it.

But that’s not all. The above statements make it clear that community managers are not isolated protuberances on the web isolated from the rest of the company but their actions have to take place within clearly definined and known business areas. If community management is a processus in itself, it has to take place within more traditional processus. [Read more...]

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Will Adam Smith drive businesses in the future ? I’m doubtful…

May 11, 2010 By 4 Comments

We often say that implementing enterprise 2.0 is useless if it’s done in an 1.0. Said like this, even if “we” understand what it means, it’s still hard to get for many people.

That refers to enterprise models named according as two eras of the internet : one named 1.0 and the other 2.0. In practical terms it’s about opposing a top-down and directive model an emerging relying on the existence of an “invisible hand” that, in the same way as Adam’s Smith theory in economics, would make people personal actions and choices contribute to a collective purpose without the need of organizing anything.

Anyway, it’s an opposition between an out-of-breath dirigist model and harrowing one that means for businesses “it’s critical to your survival but you don’t have to do anything…just trust your employees and let them do what they decide to do”. In the same way that the economical word realized that Adam’s Smith’s invisible hand needed some guidance, the same conclusion is imposing upon businesses that can’t rely on serendipity to ensure their sustainability and success.

Here’s a quick comparison of “1.0″, “2.0″ and “2.0 rationalized” adoption principles.

1.02.0Rationalized 2.0
Command and controlLet people doset up goals, build a framework, give guidance and let people do
Adoption is order-drivenAdoption is driven by desireAdoption is driven by sense
Everythings has to be scriptedPeople are free to make decision and actA light script helps people being reassured and then they grow bold and become more autonomous
Only what can be used immediately and provide immediate benefits is allowedAnything may be useful one dayNeed to articulate in the flow and over the flow activities, give each a framework a timeframe
Everything is verticalEverything is horizontal and networkedHorizontal and vertical articulate, verticality is a responsability and decision making model, horizontality is a model for getting things done
Focus on the organic structure (team, departments...)Focus on communitiesOrganic and communities articulate.
What is not expressly authorized is prohibitedPeople should respect the "etiquette". Nothing is mandatory.Everything that's out of a defined framework is subject to validation, the rest is authorized is possible. The "Don't be stupid" rule applies.

Generally speaking it seems obvious that Serendipity and the Invisible hand, even if they can bring many benefits to excessively rigid organizations, aren’t viable business or organizational models alone.

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Toward a new hierarchy of norms in the workplace

April 1, 2010 By 1 Comment

This is a sequel of my thoughts on enterprise 2.0 and ERPs. It’s obvious that not everything has to be put into processes and given to machines that would run them endlessly and blindly….and than not everyhing has to be left to the wisdom of employees has well. An happy medium has to be found. In fact “middle” may not be the right word since it would mean a compromise that would not satisfy anyone and would add more issues without bringing any solution to past issues.

Let’s start with a kind of legal comparison.

Our friends jurists know something called “hierarchy of norms”. That means that different of norms exist, promulgated by different kind of authorities with some automoy provided any of them respect the one that hierarchically above.

That’s quite the same in the workplace where we can find :

- the constituion : everything the organization can’t depart from and is about legal, security (legal, of people, of goods…)

- the law : everything about how things have to be done. Processes etc…

- local regulations: within a department, a team, a manager can organize work as he want provided he respects the two above mentioned levels.

We may even push the comparison further.

- customs : this is what makes people make things in such a way because it’s always been like that. No one decided that, it comes from the past and the power of habits. This is partly due to the corporate knowledge, partly to knowledge transmission between generations of workers, partly from mimicry.

- jurisprudence : the way corporate norms are interpreted when they’re not precise or clear enougjh. Jurisprudence works until a new process or a new rule comes that makes it useless or contradicts it.

In the workplace as in the legal world, each of these elements comes from different authorities, have different ranges of enforcement, and are not sanctionned the same way.

Even if the State may look dusty and unsuited to our world, it’s one steph ahead because it understood a long time ago that constitution and laws can’t rule everything. Once can retort that it depends on the beliefs of the state administration, and that’s true. But it’s the same in organizations : the freedom and autonomy that are given to anyone depends on the top management’s culture and beliefs.

Enterprises, as for them, have always been thinking that the two first levels were enough and, instead of relying on the principle of subsidiarity, they tried to make everything fit into heavy and rigid systems, hence the failure of many projects that were said “structuring” and the limis that are encountered today in terms of corporate agility.

[Read more...]

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About enterprise 2.0 and ERPs

March 11, 2010 By 1 Comment

I’ll soon take a part in a webTV discussion which theme is “Is enterprise 2.0 the antithesis of ERP” organized by the great Techtoc.tv team (ok…that’s all in french). The preparatory discussions are rather heated, what’s promising for the debate. Meanwhile, I’d like to share some thoughts about the issue we’ll debate.

ERP ? That’s to say ?

First, we need to define what we mean when we say “ERP”. At first sight, it looks simple, a look at the definition on wikipedia and that’s done. Then some some wonder if we should include RH systems in the discussions : some say that’s radically different, some say that’s the same, some say the underlying logic is the same.

But this is a tool-oriented discussion. When talking about ERPs in the enterprise 2.0 context, people often think beyond the tools, they think of what the tools embody: structure and processes. Even untooled, a process is a process and can be defined by its rigidity.

Beyond the strict definition, depending on people and context, ERP symbolizes many different things in the collective mind. In my opinion, saying “that’s that” or “that’s not that” is pointless. What matters is not the word but the feeling, what people think about when hearing or saying the E. word. This feeling, either right or wrong, exists and has to be taken into account into any changeme management approach.

Where does the discussion comes from ?

It has many sources.

First, one is already implemented, the other is emerging. Anything that comes in a crowded place has to find its own place, would it be in replacement or as a complement to what was there first.

Then, because they symbolize two opposite approaches : automation and, as some say, enslaving or even denying people for the one, liberating the human potential and more autonomy for the other.

Last because it’s so hard to agree on a “positive” definition of enterprise 2.0 that it’s easier to build a “negative” one, to define it according to what it’s not. In this context, ERP and the concepts that come with are the absolute reference. When things are built the one against the other, antagonism and rejection feelings comes in the discussion, either justified or not. [Read more...]

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Enterprise 2.0′s weakness ? Decision

December 29, 2009 By 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...]

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