Peer To Peer Learning | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

Why HR are really central to Enterprise 2.0

May 26, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 3 Comments

Relationships between human resources and enterprise 2.0, or rather the use of social software”, are very complicated. Whatever the way you consider the issue, you always have to deal with HR.

There are two reasons to that :

The first is that many people came to take an interest in enterprise 2.0 because their primary issue was an HR one. In this case, tools were seen as catalysts for new desirable practices that were hard to put to work because of barriers (time / space / tools) social software helped to get rid of.

The second is that the others, those who were passionate about tools but didn’t care much about how large organizations internal concerns, finally realized that they could not avoid bumping into HR people, who, most of times, were not very social software savvy and had a suspicious attitude. I don’t even mention that, in many cases, HR are most often askek to keep things as the are instead of behing innovative. What shows its limits today as we have to admit how the human dimension matters in today’s crisis.

Experience teach us that when HR were deeply involved things were successful (for example Cisco did a great job on leadership and appraisal) and, when they were not, they were taken for troublemakers.

In fact that’s not that simple.

Enterprise 2.0 and Human Capital Management to support strategy

June 5, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

As we saw in a previous post, since human, information and organization capital support all the processes that create value, the question we have to answer is whether all these things we put in this “big bag” called enterprise 2.0 can help developing this pool of value. Or to make it clearer : in which way a company can rely on enterprise 2.0 to achieve its goals.

I’ll start with a warning : when saying enterprise 2.0 I’m talking in a broad sens, which also includes management practices and culture in addition to the tools. I don’t believe in the tool-centric definition that reduces a company to the tools it uses and forget its rules, its people, its culture, its history.

I’ll also add that what I say is “how can enteprise 2.0 help” : in no way I’d think that enteprise 2.0 would be self-sufficient. What we’re talking about must be used together with many existing things.

So let’s start our first step : human capital.

Best practices are not the best : it’s those that work

March 16, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 2 Comments

Now that transfert of best pratices is at the center of companies’ concernes, old habits seem to be a real barrier.

How are things done ?

The best solution brought to a problem within the company (and sometimes at competitor’s) is identitied and implemented. Easy, isn’t it ?

But there’s a snag. Since activities are not as repeatable as they were, similar consequences may have totally different causes. Global solutions reach their limits and it’s obvious than a contextualizes issue needs a contextualized answer. Because of different social context, of different cultures, of differences in the relationship with one client, the same solution won’t apply in Paris, New York or Beijing.

Problem : if it’s impossible to find a one and only solution, how to implement a different solution for each issue ? At this time we realize that a best pratice is the best only when we consider the context.

The solution is to make a wide range of solutions available and chose the one which is the best in a specific situation. Better, to focus not only on the answer but on the way people thought to built it. And allow exchanges that will make the transfer possible, taking the context into account, which is the specific characteristic of peer to peer learning. That means identifying not only solutions but also the people who put it at work.

The end of “one size fits all” solutions may turn the often failing mechanism of best practices transfert into a social learning mechanism. And implementation into discussions.