Tomorrow’s businesses need strong processes and deep automation

January 3, 2012 By 1 Comment

Summary:Tomorrow’s business will give people and their peculiar skills a good deal to increase overall performance. Creativity, problem solving, exception handling…everything that has nothing to do with processes and automation. But if excellence is not reached on these points if will be difficult to develop knowledge work and even to give it time to happen.

When we talk about the future of enterprise, we often mention the need for getting rid of the rigidity of processes, autonomy, processes, making the system (organization and IT) serve people instead of making people serve the system. It need a very scarce resource to work : time. It also need trust and a strict definition of the limits of autonomy, understood by all. Without that, tomorrow’s enterprises won’t last under this form.

I often say that the largest part of employee’s activity is and will be more and more about exceptions handling and problem solving what supposes to have time for creativity, innovation; knowledge and practices exchanges etc.. In fact that’s only half true. That’s true when everything that could be automated has been (some things that could not be automated have been , in fact, automated but that’s not our point today). As long as everything needs no judgement and does not tolerate any exception has been modeled and given to the appropriate tools. This is the one and only condition to make people focus on what they excel at and are much better at than any software. If it’s not met, “essential routines” will require most of their time on tasks where their added value is poor and where they’ll be rather sources of errors.

That said we have to admit that the dawn of social tools in the workplace brought more confusion to things that were not easy to get. Before, it was very common for employees to capture data on many different tools. This the reason why lots of information where not captured or updated because doing so was both boring and time consuming. “Social” brought a new layer of troubles. In addition to capturing data in traditional business tools, employees had to switch to social tools to say “I’m doing this and need some help to solve that problem”, identify the right resources to progress. Reason why most people stick to the basic, well known, lowest common denominator of their work. Today we’re seeing a solution slowly emerging with the integration of social and business tools, the latter being able to send signals into the firsts, not participating into the conversation but becoming conversations starters. Globally speaking, the ability to easily, directly (even automatically) link an object (document, event generated by a business tool) to the conversations that relates to it will be essential.

If the first point misses, time lacks and energy goes (is wasted on ?) essential but repetitive tasks where the human factor has a poor added value. If the second misses, the new social layer will be more a burden than an opportunity.

Going further, we can even add that if these foundations are not perfected and solid, anything that will be added to move toward new organization models will generate more troubles than benefits.

It’s always easier to be agile and mobile when one’s feet are on a solid ground rather than a friable one.

 

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

Intangible objects and abstraction at work : the need for a case centric environment

July 15, 2011 By 1 Comment

Summary : If we try to understand what work is actually in the knowledge economy, it appears that it’s mainly about handling, gathering and organizing intangible objects to deliver a tangible result. Many tools are provided to give these objects a material existence on our screens to make their manipulation easier. At the end, a dual conclusion emerges : not only the skills that are necessary to this kind of work are seldom acquired or even taught but tools, as they exist today, make the situation getting even worse by splitting the matter between tools and dividing employees’ attention. Employees spend more attention connecting pieces of information together than solving problems. The shift from a tool centric to a case centric environment is necessary.

We all know that everything that has to do with work models transformation, collaborative practices, new value creation creations is a matter of anything but technology. Solution is to be found in HR, management, sense making rather than in lines of code. But, by endlessly repeating that technology comes second (or even third), we may miss some essential points.

The nature of work is evolving and requires new skills. In other words, it’s getting more and more about gathering resources together, put them in context and leverage them than than about delivering preset processes with predefined resources. To do so, employees need to handle “objects”. This is a vague word chosen in purpose : it refers to more or less entities like pieces of knowledge, information, data from a customer case or elements of context of a given case, people who own other relevant objects. In fact, rather than “while working”.

All these operations, this conceptual gathering of abstract entities is sometimes done by a single person but, most of times, in a collaborative or participative way.

An objective analysis of the situation as it can be observed in any organization any day makes us learn two lessons :

[Read more...]

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

Social media and customer service : don’t make exceptions become mainstream

January 24, 2011 By 3 Comments

Summary : when an enterprise invests in social media to improve its customer service it may think that a good indicator of success would be the amount of interactions that will happen on this channel. That’s a mistake : the social channel aiming at dealing with exceptions, making it process generic requests overloads it without bringing any added value. It’s important not to try to attract all customer requests on this channel but, on the contrary, to distribute the requests in order the social channel will only process the few percent for which it’s irreplaceable compared to a more conventional way of doing things.

In some of my previous posts I talked about the use of social media for customer relationship, most of all to mention that it’s more a management, process and one-to-one relationships between the enterprise and the customer than a community clap-trap. Since I recently dealt with the system bandwidth issue, I’d like to digg a little further to warn against a failing that is very foreseeable.

As you have certainly understood, using social media to improve customer service makes the whole organization move in order to face the demand and not be overwhelmed. The logical consequence, once all these efforts and investments have been done, is to make them as profitable as possible. So it implies to drive as much customers and interactions on the social media platforms that are used. Wrong. It will lead the system to failure and will seriously annoy customers.

Before specifically dealing with social media, we need to understand the difference between what need an human intervention and what doesn’t. Human are essential when the situation so exceptional and complex that an automated processing won’t work or when the customer is not able to initiate this processing by himself. Knowing that, compared to an automated system, human are not scalable, they have to focus on what they’re unique at. Typically the two ends of the Gauss Curve, the center needing an automated processing that may be launched by the customer itself (on web sites, online forms, voice systems…). Example ; no human should have to fill a form that the customer could fill by himself if he could access it.

So, human should be kept for what can’t be automated and customers that are not able to use the tools they’re given. Then, many channels exist depending on the context of the customer, his prefered devices, the fact he’s in a mobility situation. So there’s a wide range of tools that goes from the traditional call center to social media (both being complementary and not alternative). Why is it important ? Because everything that does not need an human processing and lands on an human channel saturates it and prevents it from dealing with what it should.

Maybe you guess where my thoughts are heading… [Read more...]

Filed Under: Customer Relationship & Marketing Tagged With: , , , , ,

Customer service : avoid being the victim of you social media success

December 27, 2010 By 2 Comments

Summary : while some businesses are puzzled towards the lack of success of their customer service initiatives on social media, others are trying to find solutions to face the increase of contacts and interactions. Hence the hasty conclusion that social media don’t scale. That’s a big mistake. The only fact that the point of contact is overloaded shows that the media scale. What does not is the bandwidth of the system that prevents from processing all customers requests. This limit is not peculiar to the media but to the processus it supports and that can only be removed by organizational actions. The capacity of the point of contact, should it be called community manager or anything else, can be improved by adding more resources, improving the system, redefining people’s tasks and, most of all, refocusing on exception management.

I often say that organizations that use social media for customer relationship purposes split in two groups : those that won’t take any benefit from it and those that will be overwhelmed with their success. In both cases, things have to be made to improve the situation.

• Those that don’t benefit from their initiative : poor understanding of customer expectations, interaction refusal,  absence of a service logic in communication activities.

• Those that are victim of their success : their understood what was the good positioning, had the right proposition of value for their customers…and were so successful that they can’t keep up with the load, what prevent them for keeping their promises and, then, creates a deceptive feeling among their customers that spreads and harm their reputation.

Today, I’d like to focus on this second group.

To find themselves in such a situation that can be described as a “rich people problem”, these businesses understood that beyond community management they had to have a processus approach. Since they offered an actual added value, they met their audience. But, either because of an exceptional event or a linear increase of the workload, they can’t keep up with their commitment anymore.

I’ve been observing something for a couple of months : many organizations that are successful with external facing social media initiatives realize that the internal organization has to be aligned too. Community managers (or whatever you call them) need to interact with internal resources to find solutions to customer problems what implies they can identity and mobilize them. So it’s an expert location issue. If tools and organization don’t make these actions possible, community management becomes a bottleneck where problems pile up without being solved. In conclusion, a scalable channel was used to replicate the same kind of bottlenecks that exist on the traditional channels they were supposed to make up for.

Should iy be executed in a linear or networked way, a processus has a constraint : its bandwidth, determined by the step that at the lowest processing capability. In our example, community management is the constraint of the processus. Said in other words, improving anything in the customer service processus will be without any effect and won’t change anything for customers since the limit is the community manager(s).

Like many airlines, British Airways is using twitter to solve customers problems. Everything works well in normal times but when snow begins to block european airports the switchboard explodes, as this tweet from R. Ray Wang mentioned :

In fact I think that this conclusion is a mistake : this is not the media that doesn’t scale but there a bottleck that limits the scalability of the processus it supports. The only fact that they can’t keep up with tweets is a proof that the media scale, since the amout of incoming messages exploded. What does not scale is the processing.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Customer Relationship & Marketing, 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: , , , , , , ,

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

Engage with customers. And then ?

August 23, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Summary : It’s obvious that the use of social media within companies and between companies and customers are not compartmentalized but complementary disciplines. If the “internal” company is more and more trying to get in touch with customers, the world of marketing struggles to make his way toward internal departments. As communication is becoming service, initiatives that target customers can’t be separated from those that aim at reversing communication flows inside the organization, redefining roles  and realigning the whole organization with the needs of employees who are directrly in touch with customers. To demonstrate its value, social and community makerting will have to replace “push” with “pull” not only in its interactions withn customoers but also in the way the whole organization works.

Even if the external/marketing/communication part has never been my prefered one, it has become obvious that it’s impossible to dissociate the evolution of work from what’s happening outside the corporate walls. First, because no company creates value on its own et a high level of internal performance is useless when a business is not as efficient with its external partners and clients that it is internally (theory of the limiting factor or bottlneck…as you prefer), second because the internal shift from push to pull logically leads to consider customers.

The time when 2.0 was either about marketing or collaboration but not both at the same time is over. Yet, the concept of enterprise 2.0 evolved overtime and everybdoy finds logical to include all external stakeholders into it, what is confirmed by the rise of social crm. But even if enterprise 2.0 is heading down toward customers, marketing struggles to head up toward internal activities.

I recently found this interesting deck about the failure of social media initiatives. It tells us that

- there’s a lack of strategy (81%) and most marketers don’t undestand the value of interactions…and how all these things work.

- consequently, businesses invest more on technology than on people and relationships.

Why Social Media Project<s Fail?! – A European Perspective
View more presentations from BSI.

I’d like to go a little bit further and sum it up in one sentence : when marketing and communication people use social media to communicate better and differently, there are two possibilities:

- either they (or their company) don’t get it and that doesn’t work.

- Or they understand how to make a good use of social media and…they deceive their customers.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Customer Relationship & Marketing, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Picture of the week #6 : Every problem has a solution…

August 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Every problem has a solution, or else, you’re part of the problem

Albert Einstein

Illustration from the book “The Golden Rules for Success“.

Thanks to Thierry d’Auzers for this excellent book, the rights of use and Dimitri Tolstoï for the pictures.

Offer yourself The Golden rules for Success.

Browse the previously published pictures of the week.

Get the iPhone or Ipad App.

Filed Under: Picture of the week Tagged With: ,

GE, enterprise 2.0 since….1989

October 13, 2009 By 2 Comments

One of the the most frequently mentioned enterprise 2.0 successful project is General Electric’s SupportCentral. It’s true that their numbers are really impressive even for those who usually criticize anything that’s about 2.0. So, inevitably, people wonder how they dit it.

The recipe is obviousl well known : a long term project, deeply anchored in employees’ day to day job, where conversations are led by operations. So we could content with this explaination and say that anyone who wants the same results just have to do the same things. But there’s certainly something else…

While investigating, I found the trace a project gradually implemented between (if my sources are rightà 1989 and 1992 at GE. That’s to say a long time before the conscience that the web, generation Y and all the usual arguments will revolutionize the way people work.

The idea behind “workout” (since it was its name) was, when facing a problem, to gather the more relevant people (regarldess to their functional or hierarchical position) and make them interact in what was nothing else than a flat problem solving process. For further details, everything is explained here.

Building groups according to people’s relevance and not to the organization chart, favor “flat” discussions, beeing problem solving oriented, relying on a strong executive sponsorship, making managers teach by the example, inviting a facilitator when needed…. all these things seem very close to what we say have to prevail in internal communities implementation ? It really looks similar. And embodies the diagram I suggested here.

Workout’s template looks very relevant to implement these famous communities that enterprises still don’t get what makes them fail too much often.

Source : Adapting General Electric’s Workout for Use in Other Organizations: A Template

If we extrapolate, we can say that workout is “small scope 2.0″ since the need for gathering people prevented large groups, systematization of bottom-up, and making it a background routine for everybody. The new tools are only removing the barriers that prevented from making “workout” a common and day to day behavior, they only powered actual practices that match actual needs. We could deduce that more than being something new people had to be convinced about, they were meeting an expectation.

I don’t know in which way SupportCentral and workout are linked (and even if they are) but it’s obvious that SupportCentral was more likely to succeed in a company that implemented something like workout years before, the one being the natural development of the other.

Enterprise 2.0 does not solve any really new problem but removes the barriers that used to limit the solutions implemented (successfully or not) to solve more traditional problems. Its implementation will be more or less easy depending on wheter enterprises accept to deal with the underlying problems or not.

Entreprise 2.0, GE, résolution de problèmes, workout,management,organisation

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Intranets and digital workplace, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
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