Information should go from tool to tool. End users shouldn’t.

June 4, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : Even if there are lots of discussions on new ways of working and the tools that will make it possible, very little attention is paid to the matter that’s being worked and the reason why it’s worked. Employees, who need to gather knowledge, information and people from many tools, still don’t have any melting pot to do their work. As a matter of fact and contrary to the usual way of looking at it, tools and people need to articulate and follow each other around the matter employees are working on rather than scattering the matter between tools. The problematic people are working on is unchanging while the rest varies. What matters is to organize the mobility of objects in the context of work rather than the mobility of employees around tools.

When discussing the way people work (or should work), we use to focus on the organization of work (usages and management), tools (collaborative, participative etc…) but seldom pay any attention to the objects people work on. Thinking that work is all and only about adopting new tools and practices may be too simplistic if no one cares about what needs to be handled, gathers, put together, transformed in the context of work. These things may be of so many different kind that I’ll use the very generic word of “object” to call them. This word also seems very relevant in the context of a concept that is more and more talked about and is really key to understand what employees need to get their work done : “social objects”.

To get their work done, people need to find, enrich, improve, modify, put together, alone or in a collaborative may, “objects” as various as a “case”, a person, a file, a feedback, a procedure etc…in fact nearly any form of information available in the organization, This is one more evidence of the changing nature of work that is more and more about putting knowledge and people together and in context.

The biggest issue in change programs is not always to make people work this way. In fact they’re already doing so,  juggling with many tools and the information they contain, trying to be the middleware between all these things. The problem is that they’re given new tools that are supposed to fill some shortcomings but no attention is paid to how to pu all these new tools and info together. So the amount of useful and usable information can endlessly increase while users are still unable to make the most of it. And the reason is quite simple to get : users are equipped to handle objects in the context of the tool that “owns” them and not in the context of their work. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Economy & New Models, Knowledge & Information management, Recommended Bookmarks, Software & Tools Tagged With: , , , , , ,

People Centric Organizations ? Not that sure…

September 24, 2009 By Leave a Comment

One of the most common thing we can hear about enterprise 2.0 is that “it’s about people”. Even if it delivers a meaningful meassage, it brings more questions than it solves, leaving enterprises into doubt, if not in fear. I’m not even sure that everybody agree on what it means at the end. “It’s about people” is a bit like the “enterprise 2.0″ word : vague enough to gather many people, not defined enough to provide a framework for action.

What businesses may undersand is “power to people”, “people matter more than organization”. At the end they see a real threat to essential concepts such as organization/objectives/discipline/work. I think it’s a huge misunderstanding : it’s not about the cult of the “individual kingé” but about optimizing the way it’s used as a resource. That does not prevent from having an human vision of business, to value and give consideration to people, to help them develop and improve. But the main objective, let’s be honnest, is to make people give their best, to be sure that no talent or expertise is left unemployed. That’s the macro level. (Those who want to know more about the “union risk” must refer to this post by Oliver Young).

At the micro level, it’s considering people as the engines of the organization. And their knowledge and social capital as the fuel. A new kind a fuel that can’t be stocked, replaced or substitutable and which combustion is uncertain. By “uncertain”, I mean that it delivers energy when it wants, and decide of its energetic power according to its current mood and state of mind. That’s a big change, considering the times when companies owned the engine or the fuel. That’s the reason why things like motivation, sense, engagement, are more important than ever. So, “it’s about people” means that people are the factor that limit any change or transformation project. More, it’s a factor no company can’t do without. Even of some understand than once things are implemented, they’ll be able to take the most of everyone, it’s also important to understand that working on the human parameter is key to achieve anything, how great and fantastic social media tools can be. Culture, that is a point that many try to dispose of because of lack of courage, remains essential.

Then comes “User Generated Content”. Many businesses fear generating monsters, that’s to say the uncontrable popularity of employees trying to overpromote their own status, what would go against the seeked efficiency. With hindsight, experience shows that people are not the entry point to new practices but are only the fuel. Except for CxOs or recognized experts, people don’t focus on other people as such but because they are relevant from a business viewpoint. And that changes many things. A good example is Google wave: it’s the subject that aggregates people, that determines who has to be involved into a wave. That’s the same of every social tool : it’s all about outputs and people only exist through their ability to contribute to a given output. This shows the limits of personal branding strategies in the workplace. Anyway, what has to be understood is that it’s not a “people vs process debate”, on the contrary it’s about taking the most of people while following processes.

People are engines, essential, and deserve all our attention. But, at the end, in a corporate 2.0 context, they are not central points round which everything revolve but only exist through their ability to bring an added value. The “It’s about people” word is not absolute but has to be contextualized according to the expected outputs.

Even powered by people more than ever, enterprises are still objective driven productive organizations. We all should remind this.

capital informationnel, capital social, engagement, Entreprise 2.0, Management, medias sociaux, motivation, people-centrism, personal branding, process, Ressources Humaines, sens, social-media, syndicats, ugc

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

The best search engine is you

February 14, 2008 By Leave a Comment

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.

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