Enterprise 2.0 and ROI : do we ask the right people ?

October 25, 2011 By 2 Comments

Summary : when talking about the ROI of Enterprise 2.0 projects, people often focus on the ROI of the software they’ll use to achieve their goals. But social software, morst of all in the enterprise world, has no ROI by itself but a potential ROI that needs that need technology and new usages to be coupled together to become real. In fact the ROI question does depends on software vendors who are often asked it as much as it depends on the the enterprise that knows how far they are ready to go in its transformation process. So there’s so surprise businesses don’t get the answer they need from vendors and suppliers : no one has the answer except themselves.

I recently has the pleasure to moderate a panel on “ROI 2.0″ at the last MIS  conference(Management, Information, Strategy) in Paris.

Many interesting things came from the discussion. Some are slowly but surely becoming mainstream, some others being more specific and demonstrating that maturity is improving what allows some new approaches to emerge.

In the first category, there’s the fact that ROI as both a qualitative and a quantitative side. But, even when one decides to focus on the qualitative sides, it does not mean that it should not be measurable. Other point : progress is hard to measure because lots ot improvements are about things that did not use to be measured before/

Another very important point is the consensus on an activity oriented operational vision. If one want to measure anything worthy, it need to apply on an activity, a process which execution needs to be improved. Social networks are generic tools which use has to specifically target one’s need in the context of his work. Of course, the “above the flow” dimension will still exist and matter but it’s better to start focusing on practical  things, meeting identified needs and bringing tangible improvement in people’s work.

Last, it’s difficult and even impossible to propose hard numbers beforehand (but is it useful ?). What can be done is to target activity oriented usages that ensure a potential improvement, then measure on the flow to align and improve.

What leads us to the most important point, what is the consequence of what  precedes : changing tools without changing the way work is done does not improve anything. In oter words, what makes a potential ROI become real is the will to change processes, organization, rethink HR models etc… What is not anecdotical since it sends back the ROI question to the one who asks it : the enterprise.

As a matter of fact, enterprises tend to ask the question to their suppliers and vendors first, while the latter only master a small piece of the approach. They are responsible for the tools, its functionalities and a part of the potential ROI. But they have no impact of delivering the ROI because it will depend on what the enterprise will do, how it will use the tool as a part of a global transformation program. The same reasoning works for the implementation of new work practices ? What’s their ROI ? It will depend on whether the enterprise will decide to change as less things as possible, just to say “we’re doing 2.0 things”…only for show.

Organizations ask their suppliers and partners questions they have the answer to and only depends on a factor called willingness (or courage). Those who supply the tools or methodologies can only provide a potential ROI, sometimes advise to make the first steps. But, to get significant results, enterprises should ask themselves : “how far am I ready to go ?”.

As a conclusion on “ROI 2.0″ :

- 2.0 or social tools are inert tools : they do nothing but allow people to do things. They don’t have any ROI by themselves but enable the ROI of a global approach.

- rather than the ROI of a tool, organization should focus on the ROI of the tool/usage couple. Then, couple this duet with activities and processes. What provides a potential ROI.

- to move from potential to real ROI, it’s all about the courage and ability to align the work context (ROI, processus etc…) with the project in question.

- the ROI word, in its usual meaning, does not mean a lot in such projects. Talking about tangible, observable and measurable improvement is more relevant.

 

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR 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.

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

Enterprise 2.0 : who spends one’s time reading a dictionnary forgets his bank statement

November 16, 2010 By 2 Comments

Summary : the Enterprise 2.0 Conference that took place last week in Santa Clara leaves those who followed it from a distance with a strange impression. While we could expect, with the increasing maturity, a real breakthrough on value creation models, we end with a petty squabbling about enterprise 2.0 and social business. What brings, one more time, the focus on what enterprise 2.0 is, is not, its limits…at the risk of desperating enterprises that don’t see any change in the problem they’re facing meanwhile and would like to be told how to improve things instead of being offerd to join the dreams of the ones or the others. In the end, the debate is meaningful not because of its content…but because of what’s not in : value creation and ROI are still missing.

I followed the last Enterprise 2.0 conference from a distance, mostly on twitter. In general I’m often good at feeling what the hot topics will be but this time I have to admit I did not see what was coming at all. I would have bet that things woul dhave followed the same path as in Franckfurt but the debate focused on two points (at least according to what I read…assuming there may be a difference between what happened and what attendees wanted to highlight) :

• still a strong focus on communities (to such an extent I thought it was the Community Management Conference). I’ll share my views about this in a next post but, in my opinion, even if that’s a key element of the system, it’s not the only one and seems to be over-dealt with regarding to the rest. It’s impossible to claim addressing organization challenges on a global scale while focusing on dynamics that, by definintion, rely on employees willingness, out of work flows and which final impact on performance, even if potentially impressive, is still unpredictable.

• a new “enterprise 2.0 vs social business” debate. Is the first dead and being replaced by the second ? Is an heretic group trying to grab the power at St McAfee’s church ?

I was really surprised by the extent this second point reached, seeming to be the biggest point of concern. I first thought I had nothing to say about it but, finally, I realized that it was important not because of the arguments used…but because of what was not mentioned. By the way, a good occasion for those who still wonder what enterprise 2.0 is to make their own opinion.

[Read more...]

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

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

September 14, 2010 By 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: , , , , , , , , , ,

Does your enterprise social network really make you more productive ?

August 24, 2010 By 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.

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

The enterprise and the web

June 26, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Finally, many current debates are about the enterprises’ ability to understand, master and harness the web, internally. This may seem trivial because purely technological and being about competences that are much lighter that those IT depts have been using for decades. But, at the end, it’s more complicated that it seems.

As a matter of fact :

• It’s about making enterprises assimilate  somethings external, which is not something culturally easy. More, it has an impact on the competences that have to be gathered.

• For the first time, it’s about assimilating something coming from the general public whereas enterprises used to be leaders in technological change, adopting things years before it becomes available and affordable for common people.

• The assimilation, that was technological at the beginning, became  about new usages. But enterprises don’t know the word usages : they have methods, processes, norms. The only fact something can change, even a small detail, causes a self-defences reaction. Considering there is also a behavioral impact, it’s easy to understand how difficult things are even if many people are overestimating the upcoming changes. Even if it will help businesses to be aligned with their economic and competitive context, the shift is not easy.

So, here’s how, in less than a decade, things went from face-lifting interfaces to an human and organizational project.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Intranets and digital workplace, Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , ,

How can we tell we are productive…or not ?

December 3, 2008 By 1 Comment

According to me it’s really a key issue for the future of organization, call it 2.0 or whatever you want. I’m not talking about the need for productivity but about what productivity is and how we can measure it and say someone is productive or not.

When I was young it was a typical excercise in maths classes : “and at the end can you tell us how many pieces the machine will have produced”. Ok, the purpose was to teach us multiplication and division. A few years later we were old enough to be taught it only worked in a system without interdependance and variability.

But the exercise was always the same and was about a machine or a person doing a repetitive, well known, invariable task. And most of time it was a task in a manufucturing process which made possible to identifiy a product and give it a monetary value.

Today, people’s productivity a key issue and everybody has nothing but this word in mouth. But we have to admit that, beyond the words, the definition of this Holy Graal is very vague. Everybody wants to be productive, wants other people to be productive. But none can can tell clearly what it means nor how the can measure it in order to objectivize what’s nothing more than an impression.

So I’d like to know how you determine your own productivity and as well as your team’s. Time of presence ? Of active presence ? Number of achieved tasks (repetitive or variable tasks ?) ? Created value ? Do you find what you use satisfying or do you think it’s only better than what’s worse, a kind of stopgap.

All your feedbacks are welcome…and feel free to ask you friend to answer. The more information we’ll get the more exhaustive our reflection will be.

PS : For french speaking people, there’s already a few relevant answers on my french blog.

Filed Under: Economy & New Models, Management & HR Tagged With: , , ,