Why haven’t I use this app earlier ?

November 27, 2009 By Leave a Comment

A few weeks ago I was in a meeting, taking notes. A glance at a colleague’s screen aroused my curiosity and I asked her : “what’s the application you’re using ?”. Then she showed me this wonderful app she just discovered weeks ago. As for me, I only had to blame myself : it’s not been weeks but months that it was installed on mu computer. I even had a “beta” account. When I first tried it, I made a quick tour then switched to another task. Not because the app was good or bad but because, at this time, I did not want to take the time to ask myself some questions. And here comes the lesson I learned through this short piece of worklife.

Like everybody, I have my own routine when it comes to manage information. There are notes I take, what I read on the web…then comes a “buffer” step, then I treat it what means delete/keep for later/bookmark or undertake any action. This routine applies to both my professional and personal watch (in fact both are about the same topics). Of course I organized it with applications : each task has its app and I push the info through my process. An application to read, another to queue, another to bookmark, another to…

Adopting a new app, ie changing one of those I’ve been using so far, would have made me change my routine. It doesn’t matter if the new app is better that the one one it replaces or not. Then, since I was only testing this app before deciding to adopt it or not, it would have meant I spread my datas (or have some data duplicated) before I choosing to switch or not. Since I had no time to waste, I contented myself with testing the functionalities without trying in real work conditions. So, since “testing” things this way is more about playing than working, I didn’t used the app for real work purpose so I couldn’t say if there were real benefits or not. A last point was missing too :  I did not take the time to think about the application’s scope (personnal/profession, notes/notes+…., overlapping….). All these things put together made that I was unable to see myself using this app in my day to day work, to visualize what I could mean to my routine.

That’s why I was about to miss Evernote.

That’s quite a simple case. Imagine what happens when someone has to conduct the experimentation of a social platform at a company-wide scale and how those who are asked to participate may fill. It’s not about one person but 10, 100, 500 peope, that are not as tech-savvy than I can be and have not the freedom I have in the choice of the tools I use at home or at work.

It’s one more point to take into consideration when launching an enterprise 2.0 pilot.

application, Entreprise 2.0, evernote, expérimentation, pilote, routine

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

Are you “on demand” or “when we can” ? Enterprise 2.0 and the customer perspective

November 19, 2009 By Leave a Comment

What does social software bring ? Nothing by itself (contrary to many others, a social app doesn’t process or treat anything but allow people to do things…) but since it makes some things more easy to do it should, in principle, help to improve performance and productivity for many kind of tasks provided people understand they have to slightly change the way they work (what does not means changing work fundamentals but only adjust a few things).

Most often, operations managers can’t see the concrete benefits. To do so they would need to take hindsight but they don’t have time and are too involved to. Consequence : top executives often have the vision while people who have their hands in everyday operations still wonder what problem this new things actually solve, why they’d need to socialize their work, share part of the information. Everyone know what a solution that solves no problem (or no problem people are aware of) is worth.

An approach that sometimes work is to ask managers to imagine themselves at the client’s place. Note that a client could either be an external client or an internal client. Their staff’s job is to meet the client’s need and their role, as managers, is to make sure they will, in the assigned time limit, without being directly in touch with the client. Furthermore, in many cases, managers have to get in thouch with clients only when things go wrong. It’s all the more easy to imagine oneself at the client’s place since everyone know how being a client is, either from internal or external providers. Sometimes, realizing that you do exactly what you don’t like your providers to do is a big step to progress.

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10 questions to answer to succeed in an Enterprise 2.0 project

November 10, 2009 By 1 Comment

It’s a common place to say that if you want to succeed there are things that have to be done. But, by focusing only on actions and forget thinking, the risk of doing hudge mistakes is obvious, that’s why so many opportunities are wasted. To succeed, you also need to have answers. Answers that allow you to go from one step to the next one. Answers that make you sure you’re not managing the wrong project. Answers you’ll have to provide to you boss to prove you’re not throwing his money through the windows and that your project desserves funding and his active sponsorhip.

At each step of your project, you have to wonder if you have the answer to some key questions. If you don’t, slow down and take the time to find it instead of insisting in a direction that may be wrong.

If we assume that a project is made of 3 phases, exploration (when you try to understand a new phenomenon,), pilot (when you validate what you thought you have understood) and industrialization (when you scale things up to make them company-wide), here a 10 questions you must be able to answer to.

There is not always an only right answer. But an answer is needed. When the choice is between “yes” or “not” I let you guess what is right one and what the other means…

1°) At the end of the exploration phase

What are the tools I’m planning to use do and don’t do ? More precisely, what are they designed for, and what aren’t they designed for.

Do I have any idea of how my project will change the way people work ? Can I visualize what the workplace will look like then ? And am I ready to assume.

Can I demonstrate the project’s impact on the value chain, on value creation, on people’s efficiency ? (At least theorically)

2°) While running pilots

Are the contents and information published and shared by “real” users or by people who have been assigned this task to make things look busy.

Have I formalized and shared the expected “outcomes” ? And checked they made sense in people’s day to day work ?

Am I sure that the purpose of people that play a part in the project (whether internal or external) is to deliver these outcomes or to make enough noise in the tool to deserve their pay ? Does the use of the tool have become the project’s goal to the detriment of operational objectives ?

Have I organized the way how the expected social interactions and what they’ll produce will be reused for business purpose (ex : how an idea will become a project, how people will be able to access and reuse their peer’s knowledge, how one will be able to mobilize people  found through these interactions…)

Did I thought about “social routine” with managers, and began its implementation ?

3°) In the industrialization phase

Do I have concrete indicators that measure social logic’s contribution to business (lenght of the innovation cycle, lenght of the sales cycle, turnover, number of best practices formalized, meetings avoided, ideas gathered, lenght of the decision making cycle, decrease of the time spent by managers to connect people together…)

Do I have examples of things that would not have happened without the project ? And what was their impact.

Of course this is not an exhaustive list but I’m sure that the inability to provide the answer to one of these questions (or provide the wrong one) may have painful consequences one day or the other while taking the time to think about it at the right moment would prevent from future disappointments.

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

You want your employees to be more “social” ? Rely on their selfishness

November 3, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Among all the projects that have a “2.0 label”, it’s possible to make a distinction between those that are mainly about social networkings and those that aim at bringing traditional office applications on the cloud. Each kind addresses specific needs and has its own barriers.  In one case it’s about changing the way people work, in the other it’s about making them use their browser instead of their usual desktop application, what makes me say it’s more about Office 2.0 than enterprise 2.0. In both cases, getting over IT depts’ reluctance is everything but trivial, Office 2.0 seems to be less sensible on an adoption side since it does not impact people’s behaviors that much : they will still write docuemtns, fill spreadshits, but in another interface (but I’m not saying that’s easy !) I’ll also add that applications like Google Docs makes it possible to make giant steps in collaboration (or rather co-building…). All the people I’ve that who once worked on both kind of projects told me the same thing : “Office 2.0 is simpler (or less hard) than enterprise 2.0. But collaboration matters in Office 2.0 too, even if less developped than in Enterprise 2.0″. Understanding what that means may be of some importance.

Who would accept to make everything he writes on his word processor public ? No one. In the other hand, starting a work on one’s own and invite people to collaborate as and when needed because some help is needed, because it’s better to ask a specialist to write a specific part, because proof-reading is needed or because the manager needs to know how things are going on without getting a daily report makes a lot of sense. One starts on his own and widens the scope of the human, social and knowledge capital that is used he can’t do more, when he realizes he won’t be able to deliver on time or when he faces his limits. I think that enterprise 2.0 has a lot to learn from that, most of all on the adoption side. What drives collaboration is “me, the goals I’m assigned, my tasks, my issued”, and if we want to bring people to the logic that will make them help their colleagues, they first need to understand how this logic will serve them. Then for the same reasons they bring themselves to “invite” people on their Google Docs, they’ll initiate the famous conversations that are so important in the 2.0 culture.

That’s the evidence that, for 99% workers, things are not social by nature but by need. Everything starts with a (personal) taks, with (personal) limits that are faced and with the need of making all these things “social” in order to get out of the situation. Such a logic can lead to a systematic sharing not because people want to share but because they realize they have to. Conversely, any systematic sharing that would not be the result of this reasonning would be against people’s nature and causes apprehension.

What conclusions can we draw ?

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

Enterprise 2.0 : adoption through social routine

October 27, 2009 By 1 Comment

Nearly everydody now admits that the only way to make a social software project succeed (and make people adopt the new tools) and be a source of value is to link it to the core of employee’s day to day job and life. What implies some attention as to be paid to a few trivial things as BPM, worflows, processes…

This does not mean that what exists has to thrown away. There are things that has to be made such a way, tasks that have to be made in a certain order, steps that has to be followed in order to make operations under control, for quality reasons, in order to avoid leaving in a world of approximation. Changing how things are done does not mean changing what is done.

The challenge of any enterprise 2.0 project is not to get rid of all these things but, on the contrary, to find its place inside. Studying the way everyone’s job is done does not mean it has be changed but facilitated. How ? By allowing people to rely on collective, social logics when it’s getting hard, if not impossible, to achieve a good work on their own? (Have a look here too).

So things are not (and above all in the begining) to rethink processes (most of all when they’re mission critical) but to widen their bandwith and increase the knowledge capital they use. That’s what enterprise 2.0 is all about.

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

Socialize your business ? What does it mean ?

July 21, 2009 By 1 Comment

So this is the continuation of the reflection I started here. The purpose is not to discuss any management related thing but to position enterprise 2.0 regarding to the real enterprise.

Why ? Because lots of feedbacks converge on this point. The question about Enterprise 2.0 is not anymore about knowing what are the benefits, if a business should try or not, if it’s a fad, but how to implement it in a company that has a past, certainties and used to work without that for ages.

So what we need first is a reflection about positioning and integration with pre-existing logics. As a matter of fact, a reason why so many projects fail is that they were not positioned in order to have any impact on business, would it be negative or positive, and, consequently, failed to engage people who didn’t understand both the purpose and the method.

Let’s take knowledge management as an example. When businesses faced issues that needed such projects, the very name of the approach was meaningful enough to make people understand what it was about. It doesn’t mean that KM projects were successful, but understanding what things are about are essential for success. Say “we’re launching a KM project” doesn’t mean it will be successful but makes everyone understand what it is about. Say “the solution to you problem is Enterprise 2.0″ and have a look at the doubtful face of 95% employees and you have to admit the road will be very, very long.

Everyone needs to understand “why, what, how”. It’s the preliminary condition to the ownership that is needed for success. This ownership means that people should not be taken to an unknown ground they will consider as hostile, but need to start from a well known groung and, step by step, push its frontiers. The whole while being aware of making sense regarding to they day to day job and concerns, what is their current paradigm.

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