Process | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

Enterprise 2.0 and social business : what to expect in 2012 ?

January 10, 2012 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

Résumé : what will be the enterprise 2.0 / social business in 2012 ? It will highly depends on choices organizations will make to deal with the paradox of finding ways to go out of the crisis while not having much money to invest. 2012 will certainly be the year where window window-dressing projects and deeper corporate ones will diverge as well as those aiming at adding a community layer to the existing organization vs those aiming at reinventing the organizational structure and operation models. Should the world be perfect, we’ll see budgets shift from technology to organizational transformation, from adding new layers to integrating existing ones, community approaches becoming more operations-driven, social becoming more a transformation than transplanting an external body. In a non perfect world we’d see window-dressing projects surviving a little bit before the final collapse, because of approaches too disconnected from the enterprise world to deliver results and sustain long term engagement.

A new year is starting…with the usual prediction challenge. It does not matter if these predictions become true or not, that anticipation is confused with taking one’s dreams for granted : predictions are a part of the landscape and even those who don’t take them seriously expect them. So I’m trying to play the game one more time.

First, let’s be clear on what prediction means. Even if I’m happy with what I “predicted” these last years (understand “I was right”), don’t expect to find anything revolutionary in the next lines. What we usually call predictions is nothing more than common sense (or lack of). Predicting the iPhone en 1990 would have been a prediction. Prediction the need from bringing social into the flow of work in 2009 was only common sense. Rather stating the obvious.

What leads us to a very important point. As long as one is lucid and clearly understands that, even social or 2.0, the real point is enterprise and business, with all the constraints and context that comes with, it’s not that hard to identify where things will block and what concerns will arise. Finding how organizations will decide to respond is much harder. Anyway each one will respond in its own way depending on its culture, its culture, the courage of its executives when it will come to make strategic decisions. Because of all that, we’ll surely see much more diversity than before in social business approaches…

So, here are the trends I seen for 2012.

1°) Budget : from technology to organizational transformation

Before being about people or technology, that’s a matter of money. Technology, accompaniment, internal efforts… And we all know that in 2012 money will fall from the sky and anyone will be able to spend it on any shiny initiative. Or not. So it all depends of a strategic choice for enterprises facing crises : getting ready for the crash or finding the winning way out.

Finding the winning way out may mean many different things. One of them could be keeping the investments and even making more efforts because it’s “now or never”. Another could be of not changing the amount but the allocation. I recently mentioned a survey saying that HR seem to refocus on organizational transformation to the detriment of some other points. I read another one, about services budgets, saying something like “less software and integration, more on building new business and organizational models”.

The most meaningful choice will on whether to favor technology or its usages. It seems that the second may win or at least not being the least considered part of the job anymore. Such arbitrations will be key facts to understand 2012.

2°) A more operations-driven approach to social dynamics

Some of us have been discussing this point for years but it seems that things are becoming more mature now. In 2009, anyone talking about a social approach to business processes was considered as an heretic. Today things seem to be converging and enterprises are more ready to listen and understand to such discourses that make more sense for them. Or maybe the disciples of the “Care Bears Social Church” have given up and admit that the word process was not a blasphemy anymore.

So, the job is not about keeping the old organizational structure and adding a community layer on its top, out of the flow of work, but :

1°) Bringing social into the flow of work even it means fixing the flow to make it agile and adaptable

2°) Jointing flows of work and out-of-the-flow community approaches to ensure all the efforts will contribute to value creation. If not, the final conclusion will come quickly : communities = unproductive silos…and once again we’ll have missed a great opportunity to improve things.

But being aware does not mean acting accordingly. Even if a consensus forms on such an approach, it will take time to implement it because it needs organizations to put their hands in the organizational mess and out of age processes. That’s what the “E20 = E1.0+communities” was designed to avoid. Unsuccessfully.

Depending on the choices made in each organizations, we’ll see forks forming in the the social business world. And, in my opinion, one of them is a dead end.

Behind this point lies something deeper…that’s my third point.

Tomorrow’s businesses need strong processes and deep automation

January 3, 2012 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 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: automation, Enterprise 2.0, enterprise software, exception handling, exceptions, problem solving, process, social business

Enterprise 2.0 does not tolerate halve measures

November 29, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : many organizations have undertaken a transformation process. Each one is moving forward at its own rate, according to its ambitions and fears, to what seems possible and what they don’t want to tackle. But for what results ? As we may fear, a recent McKinsey study shows that such programs don’t tolerate half measures.. As a matter of fact, organizations that tackle organization issues and business processes make much more out of their projet than those who stay with the soft, community based and out of the flow of work approach. Even worse, the latter not only don’t progress but slowly regress as lack of sense, of alignment and coherence discourage even the more engaged zealots.

I’ve been observing many organizations on they journey to new forms of organization, no matter if it’s called enterprise 2.0 or social business, and the least I can say is that some of my early convictions are being reinforced day after day. Don’t worry, this is not about any outstanding disruptive concept or awesome discovery, but only common sense that can apply to any project. But, on the other hand, the only outstanding thing about this is the fact lots have believed and made others believe that so basic principles would not apply here for such a long time. A little but like if Boeing or Airbus started designing a new aircraft saying “for this one we’ll consider that gravity does not exist”.

In other words

1°) It’s easy to start with small shiny projects and end with a nice end result even it if means to make things more attractive that they actually are.

2°) Counting on passion and keen interest help doing this easily. But the further you’ll want to go, with a greater ambition and and wider scope, the more a rational approach focusing on operation efficiency will be needed.

3°) If we compare the progress curve with a hill to climb, a time comes when passion and interest aren’t enough. Even if they can conceal the lack of work on sense and alignment at the very beginning, adoption logics show their limits one day or the other. Something more is needed to climb the last mile.

3°) Talking about sense and alignment means making this new operating model logical, understood, coherent in the context of work. Making it structural. This can’t be done without rethinking management practices and making business processes evolve, what’s been a taboo for a long time even if things are slowly changing.

4°) Making a break in the middle of the journey is not possible. No one can say “I’m going to this point but not further…I don’t want to handle such or such kind of issues”. At this point the comparison with a hill is quite relevant : who stops on the middle of the way does not stay immobile but regresses. As a matter of fact, even the more engaged zealots are returning back on earth, tired of swimming against the current, adoption behaviors that go against the very nature of their organization and even against their own interest. So they end in letting things go.

In short, one can install any software, fall into the community illusion, thinking that making people participate in addition to their work in above the the flow communities will be enough. If nothing is done to proceed to the newt next, interest and motivation will decrease because of lack of coherence, direct benefits.

I’m even ready to bet that many of yesterday and today’s so-called successes will be only souvenirs in one or two years. When the community bubble, disconnected from the reality of operations will burst, when programs relying only one people’s willingness and passion will fail and, with them, window-dressing projects.

Guess what ? It’s more or less the conclusions of a recent McKinsey study. What does it say ?

Organizations don’t (only) need builders

May 5, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : it’s a shared assumption that enterprises need doers. But, pushed to its limit, these logics do not always mean improvement but, paradoxically, stagnation if not regression. As a matter of fact, “doing” and “building” often means adding things to what exists without taking time to unravel it even when it goes against what has to be implemented. It has a well known consequence : a pile of orders, rules and contradictory processes that cause the opposite of what’s expected : lost, employees do anything but what they’re expected to, don’t take initiatives because they always go against an existing rule or, on the contrary, make failure to respect the rules the new rule. Before building, instead of adding, organizations need people who clean things up. Tomorrow’s organizations are organizations that remove things more than they add.

I recently wrote a post on the myth of “superman manager” that was a barrier to any significant evolution of this role. My intent, in this post, is to go further in the reflection. Behind all that, there’s the idea according to which the only people that matter are the “doers”. At first sight that seems obvious. But it highly depends on what we mean by “doing”.

I won’t elaborate once more on the fact that, for many, “doing” means acting in a visible way and micro-managing.

“Doing” also means leaving one’s trace, one’s mark. And that’s not only an individual issue but also a collective one because the whole organization is acting the same may. Managers’ job being to make things work, they try to take the necessary steps. At the organization level, all the managing body is heading in the same direction : taking steps to solve problems and move forward.

That’s where things often go wrong.

Is something doing wrong ? No problem, a new layer of tools, procedures and rules is implemented. Should things dysfunction a little time later ? The same method will be applied. Organizations have been piling layers of tools and rules supposed to make the organization more efficient for decades. Each time with the satisfaction of having done things well for those who have “built” the solution. In fact they often added their own repair patch to the patches others added before them.

At the moment enterprises are making a move toward enterprise 2.0 or social business there’s no doubt they’ll use the same old good methods. New tools and rules that will make sure that the right usage (because it’s all about usage) will be adopted.

So employees will have to sort tools and arbitrate between 15 layers of procedures that prescribe them 15 different behaviors in a given context. The result is often farcical situations where, having to comply with many conflicting obligations, employees do not respect any of them.

For example, I’m often asked “how to be sure this community will work”. My answer is often miles away from the expected one that establishes community managers as the saviours as dying community systems. Sticking to a very strict definition of what a community is, I’m convinced that a facilitation system may help when things makes sense but can’t make miracles. In other words :

• If the community really exists, it will work by its own. A little facilitation can improve things to some extent.

• If the community exists but is not alive, there’s no reason to add systems that will make people go against the systemic and corporate rules, even against their own interest. In this case, the solution is not to add anything new but remove the barriers tha prevent people to make a move from intention to action.

• If the community does not exist there’s no reason to set up a system that will create it. What has to be created is the interest toward a topic, the “community feeling” will follow and we’ll end in one of the two above mentioned cases.

To state things in a more simple way : what prevents new models from working and from solving today’s problems is what has been implemented to solve yesterday’s problems and seldom makes sense today. Examples are more than numerous.

So, lets have a quick tour :

What is a social intranet or an intranet 2.0 ?

January 28, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 2 Comments

Summary : Everybody’s talking about social intranets or intranet 2.0 but none have a clear idea of what it can look like. Between the myth of intranets being replaced by social networks and traditional owners of the intranet fearing the end of the top-down model, ideological and functional debates may last for long. A social intranet does not mean that social networks will assume the whole power but that the elements of a traditional intranet, information, people and business applications, will be socialized. It’s not about adding new tools but generalizing new services and functionalities across all the components of the intranet. And, at last and even before all, it’s a work tool that’s here to serve a corporate vision. Changing the intranet is useless unless work, internal and external relationships as well as the related behaviors and positions are revisited.

Many organizations are rethinking (or thinking or rethinking) their good old intranet that is obviously affected by the weight of years and wonder how to integrate the famous “2.0 layer” in what is supposed to be a social intranet (or intranet 2.0). But, even if the word are in every mouth it does not mean that the idea of what it exactly mean is clear. There are many options depending on the maturity of the owner of the project, the realistic nature of the roadmap he’s assigned, and the change tolerance of the organization. Depending on the context, some of these options will be more or less relevant.

In the previous paragraph I mentioned the “social layer”, what states that the 2.0 side is a new dimension of the intranet and not an isolated bubble. So, it’s not about building an intranet on the one side and a social network on the other side. Why ? For 90% of employees, using a social network at work is not a reflex and it the network is not close to the center of gravity of their work environment, there are lots of chances no one will use it. Moreover, social activities need stimulation and stimulation often comes from a corporate information, a business related data…in fact from sources that are usually on the traditional intranet.

I suggest that such an intranet relies on some pillars that are. :

Socializing information

What I mean by socializing information can take one many forms :

- allowing users to choose the sections of the intranet he wants to read in particular and display them on his home page or a dedicated page.

- allowing users to share any content of the intranet with colleagues (via their internal “twitter”, in a community etc…) with respect of rights and authorizations. (But let’s be honnest = today, even without such tools, secret information circulates by email).

- allowing users to share external content and bring them in the internal flow, and let rating and curation mechanisms make it climb to the head of the organization or spread horizontally.

- allwing users to react to any content either where it’s published or by pushing it to a blog or a community to start a conversation.

- allowing users to promote any content by rating it, approving it (“like”) to make it more visible on the homepage or share it through one’s activity stream.

- allowing any corporate department to deploy on-demand microsites (with predefined templates) what makes corporate communication more granular and close to employees.

It’s the least any enterprise can do, most of all because it’s in the scope of the traditional top-down communication that will not disappear but needs serious improvements to become more user-centric and interactive.

Socializing people

Sharing, reacting, discussing and collaborating are good things…but knowing with whom is even more important. Of course, there are people we know and who’ll quickly join our “network”, but there are also all those we don’t know today but we will need one day. So, before telling users to connect and do things together we should make it easier for them to find and identify one another.

Everything starts with a rich profile like those we can find on any social network. It will made of official information from the traditional IT systems (position, hierarchical belonging, competencies…), employees being free not to display all of it, but also of information provided by its owner (past experiences, topics of interest) and even bu his colleagues (endorsements, tags…). Of course, the owner validates anything others want to put on his profile. Last, the profile also includes employee’s social activities : communities, blogs, wikis updates, shared bookmarks…

This information constitute a stream other users can subscribe to to follow the activities of one person in the same way they can follow a specific section of the intranet or the corporate communication. Anyone can choose what appears in his one’s own stream.

This rich profile should not compete with the official directory : it’s the directory. To be more precise, it’s were the directory is accessible to users. (Note to IT people : don’t forget to choose solutions that can sync with several directories at the same time : it’s very useful when there’s not a single directory and it shows a unified view of all your directories even if your standardization project is late…)

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

December 27, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 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.

Enterprise 2.0 in 2011 : value or denial of reality ?

December 14, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 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.

Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed…but not luckily

October 12, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 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: articulation, Enterprise 2.0, immaterial assets, Innovation, intangible assets, knowledge, knowledge-management, problem solving, process, ROI, silos, social routine, value

Enterprise 2.0 and ROI : forget the “whether” and focus on the “how”.

September 14, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 2 Comments

Summary : even if the concep of ROI, in its traditional sense, hardly hardly works for enterprise 2.0, overlooking the question of tangible benefits tha should be expected is impossible. But the reasonnings on this issue suffer from a noticeable bias : technology is assessed in the current context while it needs organizational and management changes to deliver its effects. So there are few chances to have a solid demonstration if the focus is kept on the existence of ROI without a joint reflexion on how to make it happen.

The ROI of Enterprise 2.0 is interesting because it’s at the same time unavoidable and a problem that’s impossible to solve without rethinking the whole paradigm of value creation.

First, I’d like state something. I’m using the word ROI because it’s the one we all use to discuss this point while I think that “measurable improvement” would be more relevant.

Then, I’ll start with a metaphor. If a logical and rational thinking makes us deduct that an engine is the best solution to make a car move and that, despite your car has one that works, your car don’t move when you accelerate, it may mean two things. The first is that ou forgot to shift the gear box on the right position, the second is that it’s not connected to the transmission. Instead to trying to fix the engine or throwing it away, what needs a fix is the transmission.

Then let’s talk about ROA (return on assets). The number is well known but John Hagel recently reminded it to us : it has dropped to 25% of what it was in 1965 while people’s productivity has been skyrocketting in the meanwhile. Conclusion : that’s not employees that don’t pedal fast enough but the organization that struggles at turning their effort into value. So the solution is not to blame employees and put even more pressure on them but to rethink the way work is organized and people are managed.

Now, have a look at new ways of doing things and the tools that support them. Anyone with few objectivity understands that the easier it is for employees to access resources and expertises in a fluid way that helps to save time, the quicker problem solving and the better made decisions made will be. But since this system is hardly systematizable, organizations keep their old way of doying things. What means telling the cyclist to pedal harder and harder while the chain is broken.

So the true question about ROI is not to know if it exists but how to turn a potential into actual benefits. This is not about social media or behaviors (even if it will play a part) but about “plumbing”.

That’s exactly what I wrote a couple of years ago about strategy maps and intangible assets :

• Value creation is indirect : intangible assets don’t create value by themselves, but through their use in business process.

• Value is contextual : the value of intangible assets depends on their alignment with strategy

• Value is potential : if business process don’t use those assets, their value remain potential and can’t be fully realized.

• Assets are bundled : intangible assets have to be use in conjuction with tangible assets.

So it’s logacally difficult if not impossible to demonstrate any kind of benefit and, most all all, to measure them, if the question of alignment has not been tackled and if processes have not been designed or fixed to actually rely more on intangible assets.

Organizations have to forget the old principle according to which tools ahave an endogenous value : the value of social tools is exogenous and can’t be delivered if tools are not used in the context of adapted processes.

So there are chances we keep on discussing the ROI of Enterprise 2.0 again and again for years if the focus is kept on “whether” it exists instead of “how to deliver it”. Even people who are convinced and don’t care about the “if” shoud care of the ‘how” that ensures that processes will be able to turn the potential into tangible benefits.

As my good friend Luis Suarez rencently wrote, we should learn to work smarter, not harder. Lett me add : provided we avoid to pedal better but in emptiness.

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: alignment, business process, Enterprise 2.0, intangible assets, measure, process, processus, ROI, strategy maps, transformation, value

Does your enterprise social network really make you more productive ?

August 24, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 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.