Relationship | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

Managing information and people is not the same thing

November 22, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : “accept as friend”, “add to your network”, “follow” are concepts that are more and more present in our personal and business lives. That does not come without human issues. One may be interested in the messages, information, signals shared by another person without having a good relationship with this person. Sometimes there’s even no relationship at all. The problem occurs more and for frequently in both the consumer web and enterprise tools where things are even more sensitive. Binding how one manages the information flows he receives and how he manages his relationships with others causes complex and complicated situations that are humanly uncomfortable for people. The solution is simple : splitting both. The good news is that it’s a very actual trend.

I recently wrote on the difference between signals and conversations. It’s not only about words : it’s about the whole approach for people, for the system as long as we admit that conversations is only one way among others to share and transmit information. It gets even more important if we consider that a given person may be more or less comfortable with one or the other and that one or the other will work better in a given context.

A similar issue applies to relationships, contacts, friends etc. Managing what I’ll call relationships is about to become a pain on the consumer web and raises many questions on enterprise internal tools tools.

I won’t mention the wording that can kill the system by itself. It’s the somehow political context of work there’s a big difference between adding someone as a friend or as a contact. Accepting or requesting such a request from one’s manager or staff member is a kind of political and diplomatic decision. It comes even more critical when one has to make such a request, to state a relationship, to see what someone shares or interact with this person. Add to that the sensed attitude of users saying they don’t have the time (and often not the know-how) to manage as many relationships even if they need to shortly interact with one or the other to get things done.

It all comes from the confusion between managing one’s information flows and managing one’s contacts. By mixing up diplomacy and efficiency, many social platforms, internal or consumer facing, did not help their users and made themselves touchy to use.

What CRM is and what it should be

January 25, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 3 Comments

The good thing with acronyms is that they are easy to remember. Their weakness is that it’s easy to forget their meaning. Let’s consider CRM for instance, it means “Customer relationship management”. I repeat customer relationship management.

If we have a closer look, we are forced to admit that CRM has been lead astray to become, in the best case, a sales enablement tool and in the worse case a reporting tool to provide informations to sales managers without any benefits for the salespeople who have reluctance to update the data and often both this tedious task.

Don’t blame the tools. It’s the notion of customer relationship that’s been lead astray. Tools only followed the trend.

Network or proximity ? Where’s the value for businesses ?

October 21, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Social networks seem to be used to fit nearly any case, regardless to the fact their value come from the context. As an example, my newtorks on facebook and linkedin have nothing in common, links are built upon different criterias, in different contexts. Knowing than Mr. so-and-so is one of my contacts on one or the oher may help to understand the nature of our relationships. But in each case there’s a commonb point : one asked the other to validate we were contacts and the other agreed according to his own criterias. Materializing this relation built a link.

But the link can be created differently. Not only according to relations but objects. Dopplr uses travels as objects. Lastfm songs. FlickR pictures as I mentioned here. What creates the link is not the fact people know each others but an object

Not let’s imagine we’re in an enterprise context.

What’s the personal link related network within an enterprise ? People start by adding the ones they work with every day. Then they accept their superiors because refusing would be diplomatically hard. Then, followin the same logic, they link their subordinates. Then across the organization because we use to have coffee breaks together or use the same bus lie. Whatever : the only fact we have the same employer is enough to link one another. So we may have two kinds of result : either people reproduce the organization chart or eveyone is linked to every other. I do not use the “friend” or “relationship” in purpose.

What the interest for the employees ? None : the corporate directory would give him the same result. For the company ? None too : organizations know their orghanization chart and their employees directory (although….). Whatever. The general public web model does not operate in a corporate context.

So, what’s the solution ?

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