The collective is not always the answer

February 2, 2012 By 1 Comment

Summary : one of the assumption on which many enterprise projects rely is that the collective is better than the sum of the individuals that composes it. This have been proven being right many times. But is it that simple ? In systems that struggle at jointing people and groups, in which people have more and more difficulties to see to see what is their contribution to a global purpose and what this purpose is, there are three obvious risks. The first is to built an organizations in which the collective makes no sense. The second is to use the collective to avoid facing individual issues, a way to blame others for one’s lacks. The third, on the enterprise side, is to believe that the social or 2.0 orgnanization will be the remedy for irrelevant processus no one dares changing.

 

More ideas can be found in ten heads than in a single one. 100 people are stronger than ten. Crowds are wiser than individuals. We are more efficient when we act together as a living organism than as a sum of individuals. As many facts and assumptions that make organizations think about 2.0 or social approaches of work. With some “magic words” raised as remedies to all diseases : “communities”, “network”, “ties”, “together”.

But do these approaches come without shortcomings ?

Implementing those approaches and the tools that support them often aim at improving collective dynamics through more efficient interactions between resources, bewteen those who have something to do and those who can help them to do better and faster. Gathering and exchanging seem to be the cornerstones of these approaches. But :

• Interacting is not producing : conversations, exchanges are preparatory to action but, in the end, there’s still one person that has to deliver something, make a decision, act. People co-innovate, co-design but action is still an individual issue. One may mention co-writing something with solutions like Google Docs as an exception. But, with a closer look, it appears that someone always have to “clean up” the document, align styles and ideas. Doing so helps a lot a the beginning but anyone who once had to do this cleaning job on a document written by 4 or 10 people can tell it’s like hell. The more basic unit of work, the task, is and will remain an individual issue if we adopt an execution driven point of view.

• many organizations trie to use the collective as a remedy for individual discipline, accountability, professionalism issues. If one does not behave as a professional when managing his tasks, its workload, gathering everyone won’t solve the problem. Things may even get worse because of unproductive interactions that won’t improve anything, no one having done the preparatory work needed to make group discussions productive.

• the focus is put where there problem isn’t, avoiding to tackle what’s core, and accountability moves from individuals to the group. “If I don’t do that, the community will”. SInce everybody thinks the same, the collective does not do anything. Remember that a community is nothing more than a gathering of individuals who may have their own priorities and agendas. When the community does something, it only means that one or some of its members have individually decided to move forward. So we thank the community while, in many cases, only one of its members should be thanked. Communities don’t move forward if, at least, one member does not decide to.

• but organizations are doing the same mistakes. “If we bring employees to communities, if we make them more social, they’ll make up for our crappy processes without us having to work on that”. On the contrary, these dynamics need strong processes to give people reasons and time to move toward the collective. [Read more...]

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

Social Business should become structural

November 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : there is no change without people and social business or 2.0 projects are not exceptions. WIthout a good sponsor and passionate advocates, failure is often at the end of the road. But people change, come and go, and old systems often come back to life once the bright leaders are assigned to another mission. At a certain moment, projects must be able to survive the people who initiated and lead them to become perennial. It needs to implement the social model in the deepest layers of the organizational model, what prevents from having two models fighting together in the same organization. As long as social is not more than a surface phenomenon tacked on a structure that is not, there will be few chances to demonstrate wide-scale benefits and secure the future of the project. There is not one “normal” enterprise and a social or 2.0 one working on the edge. There’s a one and only enterprise that needs clear and strong leading principles as well as common foundations for all employees.

I recently wrote on the risk of not turning the social potential released by enterprise 2.0 and social business into structural capital, the danger of projects stacked on top on the official organization or playing against it and, most generally, on the unproductive and even counter-productive nature of changining without changing. This post follows the same logic and speaks in favor of making social business or enterprise 2.0 projects structural ones.

First, I’d like to make clear what I need by “structural”. It’s about implementing social and 2.0 ways or doing things and behaviors in the deepest layers of the organizational models, creating common foundations shared by all on how to manage people, behave, process information and live with others. Foundations that should be mandatory and non negotiable. A kink of “here we work this way and not in any other”.

Of course, that’s a middle/long term goal. At the beginning, hesitating, proceeding by trial and error is logical. But having this goal in mind from the very beginning is essential and, as Roma was not built in one day, it will take a long time to get there. The risk of not doing ? Either not making the most out of social projects or see them decline over time.

Why ?

First, it’s just a matter a logic. If something is good and beneficial it should be applied to the whole organization. If it has a negative or even neutral impact, it’s better to do nothing and save resources for more worthy things. Second because no one need to be a genius to understand that an organization where some people work in one way and some in another have many chances to loose on both sides.

Let’s make a simple analogy. Let’s consider a sport…basketball for example. There are rules that makes that it’s impossible for some players to play with their feet while other are playing with their hands, that makes that some things are allowed and other prohibited. Then inside a team, there are strategies and systems that apply to all players to make the collective effort productive (the whole having to respect the above mentioned rules). If half of the players don’t respect the rules and/or does not apply the team systems it’s easy to understand how messy things may get. That’s the same in business.

These rules apply to all and, when people move, rules and systems are still applied (with more or less talent…but the basics stay and are shared by everyone). That’s also a lesson that lots of 2.0 project teaches us.

[Read more...]

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

Process, enterprise 2.0, lean and agility

October 4, 2011 By 1 Comment

Summary: enterprise 2.0 has often been shown as the opposite of formal organizations and processes that have been the rule until then. What raised a keen interest from and fear for others who know that enterprises, organizations with a production purpose, can’t live without processes. In “Enterprise 2.0 and processes”, Yves Caseau shows that putting the one against the other in a Manichean way is wrong and to what extent each one improves and completes the other.

I usually don’t write about french books on this blog, for obvious reasons. By definition, most of the audience I have here can’t read french and even for those who do, prices are too expensive on amazon.com for imported books. But I decided to make an exception for this one because I think it brings a new way of considering things that is worth knowing about for anyone.

This book is Processus et Entreprise 2.0 (Processes and enterprise 2.0 in english), and is about innovation and collaboration through lean management. It’s by Yves Caseau, Senior VP at Bouygues Telecom (large Telco, part of the Bouygues Group). This book is interesting because it makes us look at enterprise 2.0 with a new point of view in this kind of literacy and gives it, in my opinion, a new relevance that lots of CxOs many have not seen until then. As a matter of fact, the common vision focused on social media/communities/passion/engagement often turns its back on value measurement and relies on the only fact one is a believer or not. What I often call “Enterprise Denial” made the message hard to get in “our” european cultural context relying on rational scepticism. Caseau’s approach is different : it starts with processes and shows that enterprise 2.0 is the only possible way to keep them efficient in the future.

Let’s start with some words as an aside. Even if this movement may look odd, I did not came to enterprise 2.0 by the web but by short cuts that were more about operations efficiency.Many parts of  the management side of enterprise 2.0 (or, rather, all the things one should wonder to avoid staying in a world of angelic illusion), have things in common with Theory Of Constraints (anyone should have read The Goal at least once in his life). It’s also impossible to deny that new forms of management we are promoting can be found in Deming’s 14 points, Deming who had also a clear understanding of what what wrong in our economy….30 years ago. The list is very long… It’s interesting, even surprising, to see how the manufacturing industry has solved agility, quality, improvement issues while the world of services and knowledge relying on intangible flows is still struggling. Maybe because the intangible nature of flows makes visual management impossible or makes it easy not to see things one don’t want to see ? Maybe. We’ll discuss this in a future post.

So let’s come back to Caseau’s book. Rather than starting with the assumption that 2.0 (or social) is the answer to anything and try to make the enterprise fit in, he starts with the opposite approach. He starts with problems and ends with a solution that appears to be enterprise 2.0. Like it or not but enterprises are organized on processes that are essential and vital and this won’t change. I’m to talking about the caricature of processes we’re being inflicted to make it too easy to hold them up to public ridicule. but what they should be. Caseau makes it clear that processes should be as light as possible to be manageable, as agile as possible to be improvable. Hence the importance of lean management. Things become really interesting when enterprise 2.0, rather than being seen as a danger for steadiness and processes appears than being a lever that serves agility and innovation. In this context, conversational systems support ongoing learning, innovation and ongoing improvement.

He ends with the necessary cultural of human sided of this necessary change.

Contrary to what some like to promote, processes should not disappear but become people centric to make sense, be understandable, drivable, manageable, improvable. As a matter of fact, processes are here to serve both people and the enterprise while the reality is more about people serving processes. Caseau gives us an “understandable” explanation of the world of processes, quality, Lean, Lean Six Sigma and hits the nail on the head on things like KPIs, information flows management, meetings (that are the more elementary form of exchange…)…

This book will appeal to people who don’t see a clear link between the new paradigm and what the enterprise and its operations are about or see it rather like a danger. A technical book that those who love incantations, acts of faith and fairy tales may enjoy less but that reminds us that 2.0 and social are here to serve the organization. I endlessly repeat that enterprise 2.0 increases the human and knowledge capital that can be tapped to better process execution….that’s what all the book is about.

If I had to summarize the book in one sentence I’d say “looking at the future, feet on the ground”.

Processus et entreprise 2.0 is available on Amazon. It’s so expensive oversees that buying it on amazon.fr and having it shipped could be a better option. I think it’s also available on iTunes for iPad owners.

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: Books I read, Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Better collaboration does not mean better results for the organization

February 8, 2011 By 1 Comment

Summary : when we try to explain the new way of collaborating that’s expected in the workplace, it often looks like a lot of flows and interactions that has to form around every employee. But that’s overlooking one essential point : context. If interactions flows around employees, employees are organized around a production flow that aims at turning a request into a solution or answer. That’s the difference between collaboration to meet one’s goals and collaborating to create value. That’s essential because it makes us put individual actions into perspective and measure their usefulness and added value not in relation to the person performing them but to their contribution to the production flow, even if intangible and made of information. Conclusion : the value of any collaborative system does not rely on generic approaches but has to target the weakest link of the chain. The latter is not only weak because of the lack of collaboration tools but also because of organizational constraints that are peculiar to him.

Let’s take a few minutes to wonder about the sense, the goal of one’s activity in the workplace. We collaborate, exchange, solve problems (more or less efficiently)…but it’s only the micro part of a wider system. We tend to focus on individuals who “should” and “need to” without paying attention to their context.

At the beginning there’s an input, a request. It cames in the form of a simple question, a request to get a deliverable, a problem to solve. This input needs an output in return, that may be an answer, an operating model, a methodology to apply. If we have a closer look it appears that the whole organization is working this way, the input being either ‘can our product do such thing”, “how to fix this machine”, “what communication plan for our new product”, “designing our new intranet” or “how to hire someone with such or such skills”. It comes from someone who can be called customer, who can be either internal or external.

What does happen when this input is sent ? There are two possible situations : either it exists a methodology/process/procedure to manage the input or not.

In the first case we have a linear intangible flow with defined steps (creation, problem solving, design, validation etc…). Each of these tasks needs specific actions that themselves need information, knowledge, experience, expertise that that the owner of the task seldom have. If he can identify the right information/resource, he’ll use it to create/design/decide as fast and good as possible. If not he’ll do with what he has and push the work to the next person in the chain and so on until the final deliverable is issued, what is the output. Behind something that looks linear we have, in fact, a something that quite different and looks like a network even if, officially, things are supposed to be linear.

In the second case, the person that receives the input has to manage to find the way to process the input before starting to work. So he immediately falls into a network logic that, in the end, looks like the result of the previous case with on difference : there was no predifined role.

Let’s call “flow” the processus that ensures the transformation of the input into output (solution, answer), should it be linear or not. What is the major and most legitimate concern for any business ? (note that even if the matter that is transformed and the role of humain being has evolved, the problem has been the same for ages).

Improve both the output (that impacts created value and revenue) and its pace (productivity). Not more not less. But that’s already a lot.

Now, let’s find what’s needed to meet this goal. [Read more...]

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Community management and processes by the example

July 12, 2010 By 2 Comments

Some weeks ago I promised to illustrate my “community management and processus” post with a fictitious but credible example. So, here it comes…

Jack and John are community managers (or, at least, in charge on figuring things out on social media on behalf of their employer). Both are working for an airline (what was a trendy and volcanic topic at the time I thought about the case). Jack is working at AirShy and Paul at AirSocial.

AirShy knows things have to be done one on Twitter, Facebook and all these new medias but is not comfortable with that. The company is used to keeping everything under control, to avoid any kind of risk. On the other hand, people at AirSocial think that if they don’t dive into the pool they have no chance to learn how to swim.

So AirShy decided to occupy the field in the only purpose to have a presence. They asked to someone who likes these new media to deal with this work : Jack. he reports to the communication department but could have reported to any department that would have taken the leadership on this subject.

At AirSocial, people wondered what these medias could be used for. Half of the answer was in que question : things are worth when they allow to serve the customer in a better way. So how could they serve their customers better with new medias ? Deliver information to eveyone, but also to people with individual concerns. That means the company should engage in conversations…about what, with what tone, to what extent ? And what should not be tackled ? Confidential issues of course ! But also what people don’t want to read in such channels. The communication department is in charge but they quickly realized that they had in their hands a pipe that can be used by anyone in the company. Even if it’s still quite vague they decided to start and learn from their own experience. John is told to deal with these media, on the operational side.

At first sight, Jack has less constraints than John. There’s no doubt he’ll achieve better results. Not that sure…

[Read more...]

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

My first takes on Enterprise 2.0 conference

June 16, 2010 By 4 Comments

Here are my first takes after one day of workshop about adoption best practices and one of conference. That’s a quick overview and I’ll take time to go deeper into it once I’m back in Paris. To be as clear as possible I’ll tackle the topic taking three view points : vision, methodology and cases.

1°) Vision

It seems that enterprise 2.0 is now at the crossroads. On the one hand the well known discourse on social media adoption within the workplace, the “it’s about people” and, on the other hand, a vague feeling of emptyness as if something was missing. It’s  like after having pushed the 100% human, informal, unstructured thing to its limit, people (finally ?) realize that the model had its limits or that it was possible to go further and have a discours and a value propostion that fit more “real” companies expectations. By “real” I mean those who have not one many visionnaries on their board, not a passionate and talented project manager and not a culture that’s open to change.

Two meaningful things have to be mentioned. SAP came to talk about “connecting people to processes” and one of the teachings from the session led by Oliver Marks and Dennis Howlett is that content and context have to be embeded into business processes and that that is the current missing link in enterpise 2.0. While Howlett is oftened said being “on the enterprise 2.0 borderline” and tend to have a sceptical discourse, there are evidences his pragmatism brings a needed pragmatism and common sense in the field of dreams.

If I consider this regarding to my the speech I gave last week in Milan on “bringing conversations into proceses to get the most out of your human capital) I think we are facing a major issue that, if not dealt with, will bring back enterprise 2.0 to the category of the nice ideas that seldom worked because of lack of realism.

Second point : the internal/external barrier is collapsing : organizations think in terms of ecosystem and marketplace and considering the inside and the outside of the company as watertight bubbles is not possible anymore. But I already mentioned that here. Anyway, there’s a point really worht being mentioned : nobody talks about intranets anymore. A sign ?

Conclusion : enterprise 2.0 is at the end of a stage and is taking a breath before going into the next one. Definitively a tipping point. If we don’t want this transition moment to become a boring trip that leads to the cemetary we’ll have to put  our hands deep in business processes and admit one thing : the in-the-flow approach is the one to start with when addressing average organizations. If this move is understood, enterprise 2.0 may be skyrocketing very soon.

2°) Method

That’s the logic consequence of what’s above. After the “community and passion” period, a more rational approach seems to be emerging, more business process oriented. Moreover, during the excellent adoption council workshop, Schneider Electric was very clear : “meet users and solve their pains tackling business processes”. Compared to CSC, last year’s rockstar, an interesting evolution can be seen. CSC had a “business problem solving approach” that makes them impressively successful compared to those who only had a “connect, socialize and wait” approach. Schneider is going one step further, tackling business processes. Let them manage their project and look how it’s doing in one year.

On the other hand more attention is becoming to be paid to European HR and legal issues that were often overlooked in the past and are the reason why our organizations started a little bit slower.

3°) Cases

This conference is definitively consistant. Except the confirmations of last years successes (CSC for instance) I did not see this year (at the time I’m writing…we’re only at the beginning) the case that would have made me fall down of my chair. That’s normal : since many adoption best practices are known and have been gathered and consolidated, many cases now look alike and, to some extent, banalisation is a proof of success. On the other hand I’m looking forward to seing more advanced business process driven methodologies and the results they brought (next year ?). I think that enterprise 2.0 hav mostly been experienced by convinced organizations till then and that we now need a model for the rational-sceptic ones. What’s funny is that these new methodologies may look like what’s currently being done in Europe where we quickly had to deal with such organizations and had to adapt consequently.

What if the next enterprise 2.0 rockstars would be european ? French, Italian, German ? I would only be half surprised. After a very slow start that is usual in our contries and the very long work that has to be made beforehand considering legal, hr and cultural issues, I’m sure many “nice” things will emerge soon.

Besides that, a very competent person in the enterprise 2.0 field told me :”maybe you’re right, we lack concrete business results measurement”. Me : “I’m sure these results are often there, but sometimes we don’t measure the right things or refuse to implement relevant new indicators“. If any project aims at improving the performance of a business process, you only have to measure its delivery, what is concrete and understandable by any business. If the 2.0 approach is applied to something that has nothing to do with value creation, then things get really complicated.

To be continued

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business 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...]

Filed Under: Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

A process approach to enterprise 2.0

April 27, 2010 By 1 Comment

I recently came across an old post in which  Andrew McAfee stated:

While creating an innovative business process is less visible than developing a new product or investing in factories, our research shows it is actually more important to a company’s success. Intangible process capital is changing the way companies operate and the capabilities they possess. As a result, it also is changing the way they compete.

Generally speaking it’s obvious that the more a business makes progress in its enterprise 2.0 project the more it has to deal with processes. Some settle that in an natural and intuitive way without even raising the issue but for many others it needs a more analytic approach.

There are many reasons why the issue can’t be neglected :

• Some organizations tried to put everything into processes, even what was not relevant. As a result, there is very few room to develop less structured logics.

• Processes appears to be for what’s mandatory. As a result, what is not a process appears to be optinal and of lower importance what does not make it easy to motivate and engage employees.

• Companies used to keep under a high control what impacts value creation. If we want anything 2.0 to contribute to value creation, it has to articulate with what already exists, build bridges and deal with zones of overlapping.

• Businesses that successfully made their first steps in the world of 2.0 without tackling the issue, a time comes when they need to think synergies between processes and informal practices to go further.

Even if we don’t have so much hindsight in this field, we begin to have some ideas about how to tackle processes in the 2.0 era, according to their nature.

• Heavy processes relying on structured datas.

In general, those processes in which people’s only part is to enter datas at an end of the chain and read dashboards at the other end after information has been processed and consolidated are not in our scope. In large businesses, for this kind of work, people cause errores and slowness so the less they have to do the better it is. On the contrary, even if people don’t have much value in execution they have a part to play in a collaborative ongoing improvement approach aiming at improving the process in question.

We often hear that if a process is not broken we don’t have to fix it. That’s true. But we should also add that we must not wait it’s broken to think about improving it and figure out what was becoming wrong in it.

• Structuting process partly relying on unstructured information

Unlike the previous point, no machine or system can run the process alone here. Tools can help to structure and pilot on a global scale but human worlk is needed to proceed through the different steps of the process. For instance, we can mention a sales, innovation or recruiting process. So, we’re talking about processes that are supposed to be rigids but whose exectution relies on people’s capacity to find answers, information, contacts…. Here,  building a social system around the process allows a faster execution and a higher quality level. It’s an “in the flow” approach, which I think is the more senseful for people who are lookin for sense, rationality and tangible benefits.

Such logics are supported by “activity specific social software” or more generalists platforms, the latter needing a certain kind of discipline to build relevant enterprise-scale usages.

Of course, the ongoing improvement approach also applies here.

• Un-process, mainly unstructured

That’s about all what does not fit into any of the above mentioned points (and what used to be forced to fit in for ages…causing the disappointments we all know). That’s the “third way” whose inexistence and lack of tools to support it used to make businesses do many mistakes and whose emergence should allow organizations to have an operating model that fits with any situation rather than trying to push suare pegs into round holes.

That’s at the same time the sequel of the previous point and the answer to what was not predictable and does not have a dedicated operating model.

In the other hand, people feel always lost and uncomfortable with this approach. Since they are used to follow rigid models, finding themselves with a large autonomy in un-constrained work and collaboration places make they suffer from vertigo and agoraphobia. Consequently, they are asking for a kind of guiding line to follow in order to reassure them.

The answer may be what I call social routine. One can find paradoxical that the answer to the absence of process is to set something that aims at structuring something that’s unstructured by nature. That’s whay I call it a routine because it’s more about a mindset and a bunch of reflexes that will even become unconscious as time will go by. This is illustrated in the schema I proposed here.

At the end, it’s not that complicated. It’s only about applying the right logic to the right situation and put the right issues in the right holes…

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

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...]

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

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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