Seesmic | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

The death of oral exchanges in the workplace ?

September 2, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

Résumé :some people are more comfortable with oral exchanges, some others with written ones. Similarly, some companies have a culture that’s more “latin” than others. Before even thinking of changing the way people work we have to admit that some of the tools that have to support these new ways of working do not fit a part of the workforce and even many companys for which switching from oral to written is vert hard. Does it mean that enterprise 2.0 is doomed to failure ? Will the upcoming evolution happen to detriment of oral culture cimpanies ? No, because tools are getting more oral themselves. But a question remains : will tools evolve before many people give up ?

Do you prefer oral or written communication ? And your enterprise ? We all have our own preferences, each company has its culture and an efficient work requires to find the right balance between staff preferences and the corporate culture.

This is not trivial at all. Imagine two people having to work together, who have a very good relationship together, if one is more “oral” and the other more “written’ it may cause many issues and misunderstandings in their everyday work. Imagine a high level executive who joins a new company, if he’s “oral” in a very formal organization or very formal in an oral culture company, things will be very difficult.

That clearly impacts the capacity any organization has to change the way it works, to embark on social media. What, seen from a different standpoint, could be turned into : “will enterprise 2.0 kill oral cultures ?”.

Traditionnally, organizations favor written things. More reliable, more “engaging” while words only engage those who hear them, easier to track and to be used as an evidence the day someone has to find what has gone wrong and why. But there are also organizations where people prefer to talk together rather than write, where the direct human contact is prefered. The Chief HR Officer of a company of this kind once used the word “latin” to describe their culture when we were discussing this kind of issue together. That’s the same for people, each have their prefered way of communicating.

The fact is that writing is the enteprise 2.0 tool’s favorite way of communicating. It’s easy to understand why. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: Communication, corporate culture, culture, formalism, latinity, oral communication, search, search engines, seesmic, seesmic video, written communication

3 web 2.0 tools enterprises must consider

March 6, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

I often touch on the need for professionaling web 2.0′s tools and usages in order to make them consistent in a corporate context. But we also have to keep in mind that there are some tools and usages that exist on the general public web that businesses haven’t considered yet and that they should bring inside their firewall.

Why three tools ? Because I didn’t find more. Even if I more addicted to the Harvard Business Review than to Techcrunch, it seems to me that as regards tools the essentials are behind us. Some cobble things up, make improveent, build mashups but no new logic comes and bring something really new in the extensive catalog that already exists. I was really looking for some new logics and not for an nth copy of something that already exists.

If you look at web 2.0 tools, very few are those that businesses have not try to implement for internal purposes yet (which does not mean they successfully managed to do so). Blogs : done. Wikis : done too. Social Networs k : they are learning. FlickR and YouTube like ? Done. Google Docs : done. Bookmarking : done. Then come some new services that are nothing but mashups. Let’s end the list.

3°) Silentale

I’ve put silentale on the third step of the podium because it’s not available yet so I rely on the promise that was made at the last LeWeb08 conference when won a special award from the public. The ability to gather and funnel all your conversations, exchanges, wherever they take place is an interesting productivity booster. This is a part of the “personal information supply chain” I’ve already developed here. A part of the corporate plumbing.

2°) Dopplr

To be honnest, Iwould never have thought of mentionning Dopplr here if I hadn’t have a conversation with a friend weeks ago. He works for a company that has subsidiaries all over the world and which teams are send…all over the world too. Experts can be in a local headquarter or send to join temps in a place near you, in the jungle or in the middle of the ocean. “Sometimes we can be 10 at the same time in NYC, each one coming from a different country….plus our NYC team. But it can also happen in the middle of nowhere without any of us knowing others people from the company are there. So we’d like to use Dopplr but, considering our industry, we can’t rely on a public platform. A prive dopplr would do the job”. What may seem of a secondary importance for sedentary businesses may be essential for those where mobility is the norm. And not only for human reasons…

1°) Seesmic.

Here is the big winner, coming in an easy first. It take a long time for businesses to recognize the business value of asynchronous and public conversations between the members of their staff. Video seems to be gadget for many of them. But the video asynchronous public conversations, instead of cumulating all the barriers bring a sudden ray of light as its ROI is obvious. Perhaps it’s also because of the current context.

Imagine that you need your sales team to be more efficient (I know…nobody cares about that today ). They are asked to qualify their leads better, to react in an adapted way to each situation…. The solution has a name : training. But how can an expert trainer work with people all over the world knowing that it’s just not possible to put him on a plane every morning !

A case can be imaginated. Everyone is asked to register his sales speech when he can. The trainer can see them one by one, make corrections showing what to improve, the the sales person start again… It’s more efficient than a videoconference because it does not disturb people’s own agendas, it allow corrections, it allow to teach by the example and, most of all, conversations can made accessible for all so that a real expertise library is available on the intranet with cases, real examples, corrections etc…

Only a blind person would not see the ROI here. And it’s only a quick and dirty example.

Ok…maybe none of these players are interested in this kind of market.

And you ? Do you see others ?

Filed Under: Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: dopplr, e-learning, e-learning 2.0, enterprise, Enterprise 2.0, mobility, seesmic, silentale, social computing, Social Networking, training, video, videoconference, web-2.0

Tools on the cloud for “on the ground” benefits

November 13, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Even if cloud computing is not the same thing as social software and enterprise 2.0 et is more about the way tools are delivered than functionnal classication, it makes interesting shortcuts in order to remind people of some obvious things that are too often forgotten.

I always repeat that social tools related benefits are not to be searched into the tools but in people’s work which is most of times nothing 2.0 at all, and, at the end, in production. Intangible makes sense only when used jointly with tangible and, even if some people may find it shoking or dream-breaking, when it serves to make real money.

One can do everything in a 2.0 mood, should this buzzword really mean something, but at the end benefits have to be found on the ground, and not on the clouds. In a jumble :

• Politics 2.0 but at the end still counting ballots

• Innovation 2.0 but what matters are the number of new things actually launched or the saved money.

• Training 2.0 but what is important is the way the trainee’s performance is improved

• Marketing 2.0, but even if it’s nice when thousands of people talk about you brand, what matters is to sell more or in a more cost efficient way.

• More generally “work 2.0″ but at then end people mainly care about their pay-slip.

Just the once won’t hurt, I’ll refer to the general public web to end my demontration with the clear-headed Cyrille de Lasteyrie (aka vinvin) who works for Seesmic besides Loïc Le Meur and the keynote he made during last podcamp Montreal.

Cyrille told the audience that every online acitivities, especially in relation with video contents, are time consumer and that there’s always a point beyond which you have to monetize them, something that only very few people success to do. And he followed with the example of “Bonjour America” .

“Bonjour America” didn’t make him earn anything except people’s esteem, and we all know that’s a currency bankers rarely accept to fill one’s bank overdraft. In the other hand it served as a business card that made other things possible. No one offered him to fund “Bonjour America” on a wider scale by some opportinities were given to him to do other things, more tranditional, but fundable and funded.

It seems to me that it’s an excellent example of many things than happen online in terms of networks or contents production: very few value by themselves but an incredible value when people manage to tranform it “in real life”. They are only levers, but levers that help people making things in the concrete world.

What’s the value of the audience of a blog ? Of a network ? Of all the information that can be found on the web ? Nothing if using it in real life is impossible or has no sense. Huge in the opposite situation. But what will have value will not be the intagible but what will have been done because of it.

In my opinion a similar reflexion can be applied to enterprise 2.0, doesn’t it ?

Even if it’s not the only point he addresses, I advise you to watch the video of his speech (sorry…for once it’s in french)
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