Does driving adoption mean being off the point ?

November 26, 2009 By 4 Comments

I’ne never been that comfortable with the concept of adoption when applied to enterprise tools. More precisely when the point point was “driving adoption”.

Of course adoption is necessary. And, like every necessary thing, businesses can not afford not to drive it. Nothing but pure logic…but it can’t prevent me from feeling its sounds odd. I was slowly getting used to these words when Paula Thornton brought it back to my attention.

Let’s start with the meaning of words.

Driving : giving oneself the means that are necessary to achieve someting and the appropriate indications to pilot actions.

Adoption : action of making something one’s own in a voluntary way. Supposes the benefit, sense and implications are understood.

If both are necessary, I still can’t put them together in the same sentence. The reason is obvious : if adoption implies spontaneity and a choice that’s not made under duress, driving means make people do something unnatural because if it were natural people would adopt without any external intervention. Some may say that driving only means “create a breeded ground” but I don’t think that’s how companies see things : it would mean they don’t have any hold on the result and, as a result, they only try to make their best so things can happen instead of considering they have an obligation to produce results, what is not conceivable for most businesses. So driving adoptions means making people do unnatural things and such an approach explains how things are so difficult, why people don’t adopt or adopt reluctantly.

Is it a dead end ? Not at all. If both adoption and driving are necessary, we have to be cautions not to mistake what has to be driven and the final result.

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

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: , , , , , , ,

To build strong online social networks, better focus on your offline networks

October 29, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Businesses begin to be more and more aware of social networks’ benefits. I’m, of course, talking about online social networks, a topic that’s been hot for several months. Talking about social networks for businesses often makes me think about two things :

- since the  network logic has been know and used by many professionals and managers for years (even centuries), everybody seemed to be under panic when the social networks trend emerged. What the difference between both ? Can we imagine that networks could not be social ?

- the great transhumance toward social networks made people forget offline networks (ie in real life with visual and hearing contacts). Since internet was about to allow us to connect to thousands people without leaving our chair and screen, to generate networks in one clic, why should have we wasted our time with people who don’t understand what we’d like them to do, who ask questions and even have doubts.

This second point is what this post is about.

As surprising as it may be, one click self-generated networks, that work and produce great tangible results on their own, never existed nor worked. The only issue is that lots of people believed that, hence painful wakenings and a sudden questionning : how to make these networks work ? How to create and build them ? The same questions also works for communities…

When I’m asked to define what online social networks are and what are the benefits, I often say they allow to get rid of time and space constraints we face in our real and “physical” life when we need to deliver something, engage conversations with people we know or ask our contacts to identify people we don’t know and who can help. That implies we can rely on a “real” network, that actually works, and which results are only limited by its members ability to “materialize” it (have a view on people outside our level 1 contacts) and to find the time to organize it and use it.

Any network or community won’t be created by a tool, the latter only helping to materialize and fluidify. That’s also what says  this report on social networks

“Online social networks are most useful when they address real failures in the operation of offline networks,”

The conclusion is easy to draw : starting from a tool, as brilliant as it could be, to generate networks fails most of time. What should be done is to built real networks and communities in real life and then bring them online. Explaination : thinking that launching a technological project will prevent to work on issues like sense, teambuilding, membershif, the understanding (and even the definition) of a shared goal etc…is a mistake. On the contrary, it’s a preliminary work that has to be done before the launch of any online project. Of course, tools increase the power of what is done “IRL”, they serve as catalysts. They increase…but seldom create.

This is valid for businesses who aim at improving the value they draw from any kind of network, whether internal (with employees) or external (with clients, prospects, “people”). As the post concludes, it’s not one more communication chanel that has to be managed like any other, but a strategy has such that needs a new state of mind.

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

People Centric Organizations ? Not that sure…

September 24, 2009 By Leave a Comment

One of the most common thing we can hear about enterprise 2.0 is that “it’s about people”. Even if it delivers a meaningful meassage, it brings more questions than it solves, leaving enterprises into doubt, if not in fear. I’m not even sure that everybody agree on what it means at the end. “It’s about people” is a bit like the “enterprise 2.0″ word : vague enough to gather many people, not defined enough to provide a framework for action.

What businesses may undersand is “power to people”, “people matter more than organization”. At the end they see a real threat to essential concepts such as organization/objectives/discipline/work. I think it’s a huge misunderstanding : it’s not about the cult of the “individual kingé” but about optimizing the way it’s used as a resource. That does not prevent from having an human vision of business, to value and give consideration to people, to help them develop and improve. But the main objective, let’s be honnest, is to make people give their best, to be sure that no talent or expertise is left unemployed. That’s the macro level. (Those who want to know more about the “union risk” must refer to this post by Oliver Young).

At the micro level, it’s considering people as the engines of the organization. And their knowledge and social capital as the fuel. A new kind a fuel that can’t be stocked, replaced or substitutable and which combustion is uncertain. By “uncertain”, I mean that it delivers energy when it wants, and decide of its energetic power according to its current mood and state of mind. That’s a big change, considering the times when companies owned the engine or the fuel. That’s the reason why things like motivation, sense, engagement, are more important than ever. So, “it’s about people” means that people are the factor that limit any change or transformation project. More, it’s a factor no company can’t do without. Even of some understand than once things are implemented, they’ll be able to take the most of everyone, it’s also important to understand that working on the human parameter is key to achieve anything, how great and fantastic social media tools can be. Culture, that is a point that many try to dispose of because of lack of courage, remains essential.

Then comes “User Generated Content”. Many businesses fear generating monsters, that’s to say the uncontrable popularity of employees trying to overpromote their own status, what would go against the seeked efficiency. With hindsight, experience shows that people are not the entry point to new practices but are only the fuel. Except for CxOs or recognized experts, people don’t focus on other people as such but because they are relevant from a business viewpoint. And that changes many things. A good example is Google wave: it’s the subject that aggregates people, that determines who has to be involved into a wave. That’s the same of every social tool : it’s all about outputs and people only exist through their ability to contribute to a given output. This shows the limits of personal branding strategies in the workplace. Anyway, what has to be understood is that it’s not a “people vs process debate”, on the contrary it’s about taking the most of people while following processes.

People are engines, essential, and deserve all our attention. But, at the end, in a corporate 2.0 context, they are not central points round which everything revolve but only exist through their ability to bring an added value. The “It’s about people” word is not absolute but has to be contextualized according to the expected outputs.

Even powered by people more than ever, enterprises are still objective driven productive organizations. We all should remind this.

capital informationnel, capital social, engagement, Entreprise 2.0, Management, medias sociaux, motivation, people-centrism, personal branding, process, Ressources Humaines, sens, social-media, syndicats, ugc

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Who’s looking for a magik stick on the clouds only gets showers

October 16, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Sometimes some of my readers, rather than letting a comment or leaving with their doubts, send me questions by email. And among the questions, one comes so often that it desserves a public answer.

Generaly the mail looks that that

“Dear Bertrand

I’m very interesting in all that’s being said about enteprise and web 2.0. As a matter of fact, lack of information sharing, email overload, the fact good ideas never come to the surface are situations we experience everyday and we have to fix them for our company’s wealth. It’s obvious we have to learn to work a little bit differently.

On the other hand it’s hard for me to understand how all these tools, this “cloud computing”, will make my people work differently.

Perhaps you could give me some pieces of advice.

Regards.

xxxxxx”.

First I could start explaining the difference between tools and cloud computing, the second being rather a way to deliver the tools, or saying that enteprises are not the web that…

But what’s important is not there.

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