Investing in people ? Are you kidding ?

Summary : the knowledge economy rely on people as an efficiency and growth driver. That’s a given. To ensure the competitiveness of businesses in the future, new operating models, frameworks and practices will be needed. That’s understood but not easy to implement. Investing in human and the frameworks that will ensure that the best use will be me made of their skills in the production process is a nonsense, most of all regarding to business and accounting indicators that were designed for other value creation models and lead businesses in the wrong direction. Knowledge accumulation and sharing, collaboration, frameworks based on trust which is essential in this context makes no sense regarding to rules that need change if we want to build a suitable environment that will favor business and employees’ development.

In a previous post, I mentioned that an economy relying on the intensive use of knowledge was, before all, a system relying on accumulation.

- knowledge accumulation : before being reused, knowledge should be shared, so made accessible so be formalized. In other words, if we take the example of an enterprise social platform supporting the way work is done, it will take time before a critical mass of knowledge can be found in the platform to make anyone found a reason to go there to take what they need and even bring their own knowledge.

- trust accumulation : trust is at the center of collaboration frameworks as well as of work models relying on knowledge sharing and exchange. But it can’t be ordered and only come over time, as people interact more and more the one with the other. Trust applies to lots of things : relationships between peers, with one’s manager and subordinates, with the enterprise as a cultural entity, trust in the tools one has to use, trust in the organization and work model. When anyone does not trust one of this elements, the whole system collapses.

- reputation accumulation : reputation is a kind of accelerator for trust because it says a priori that someone is legitimate, skilled, nice to work with, based on peers’ experience, before one starts to investigate to know if one is worth being trusted. It’s not the solution to everything but helps things to start and even accelerates them. But, like reputation, it takes time to build one’s internal reputation on any professional matter.

Let me add one more thing. Such a system also relies on combining. Combining knowledges, expertise and ideas that need to be continuously combined and re-combined to make decisions and solve problems in complex contexts that need a multidisciplinary and transverse approach. Since all these resources are embodied, are stored in people’s brain, it’s also about combining people and their work in an adhoc way, out of static and rigid structures.

Accumulation is nothing new. It was already there in the industrial economy we’re about to leave. It was about the accumulation of tangible capital. The cost for businesses was impressive but they were able to rely on rules that made it easier to follow the economic revolution that was on its way. Amortization with one this rules. Smoothing costs made investment possible. It’s only an accounting trick that made the spending acceptable on the balance sheet, keeping it nice-looking while lot of money was spent to prepare for the future even if the final cost was strictly the same. The only purpose was to make things acceptable without preventing businesses to invest for their future.

That’s the same with combining. When a department buys a machine they won’t use alone, their is a mechanism that makes sharing acceptable : the allocative key. Here again it does not chance anything to the price but makes resource sharing acceptable.

The economy we’re entering, usually called the knowledge economy, needs, to create value, an intensive use of intangible capital made of people, knowledge, relation or social capital that is key to agile and continuously evolving work. [Read more...]

Making the most of key resources in collaboration

Summary : tomorrow’s organization will be connected and communicative. This is the only way to success in the knowledge economy. But communication and exchange, which are essential foundations for collaboration, need a sender and a receiver who mobilize their attention. But attention, more than time, is the scarce productive ressource which use has to be optimized. In the end, if everyone makes the most of the system in one’s own interest, the whole organization may become paralyzed. Solutions exist and suppose more accessible business tools, information filtering based on context and better education and training.

Whatever the organizational structure is, top-down, networked, push, pull etc… there’s always a constant concern : optimizing the use of resources. Said in other words : “get the maximum by spending the minimum”, “prevent productive potential wasting”.

In this productivity driven view, people see time as being the limiting factor. That’s, right…at least in a system based on repetitive tasks and involving few knowledge if any. But this assumption becomes wrong in a knowledge economy where time is not a relevant productivity indicator at all because individual production is not linear or constant anymore. And not individual either by the way. In this context, the limiting factor is attention, which could be defined as qualified time, a subdivision of time. That’s the time dedicated to do/deal with/process something, being focused on it (by the way it would be interesting to start a discussion on what attention at work is….to find a less shoddy definition than this one).

So attention is the scarce resource which use has to be optimized.

But we know than nobody can be focused, attentive, 8 hours a day. A least not 8 hours in a row. That’s, in fact, a reason why the barrier between personal and professional time is blurring.

One of the best way to avoid productive time wasting is not to make sure everyone is checking in the office at the right time but to make work tools available when and where attention is maximal. Note that attention is not always the result of a voluntary action. Who did never have a brilliant idea about a business concerns at night, on vacation or during a week end…and lost it because he was not empowered to work or share it at the very moment when it came ? Moment when one’s mind shifted to a business focus unpurposely on a non dedicated time ?

Another way is to avoid disruptive elements that come and interrupt employees in an “attention phase”. These elements are well known : untimely email reception as well as any incoming signal that grab attention and force to refocus after : instant messaging, phone calls or social media. There’s an easy solution being used by many people : disconnecting from everything. But disconnection has risks : not being able to communicate with people who can help, not receiving the information that would help to solve a problem. The notion of context that helps filtering the available information and, most of all, the information being pushed at a given moment is essential and will play a key role in tomorrow’s business applications.

Then after, there’s the need to master the human factor. As a matter of fact, these signals don’t fall from the sky : they’re sent by people. That’s the paradox of the new coming forms of organizations. If each person makes the most of his ability to share, alert and mobilize others, the situation will look like a tragedy of the commons applied to attention. If each person makes the most of other’s attention in his own interest, the collective result will be horrendous because no one will have enough attention left to do his own work. This issue is fare from being the easier to solve.

Of course, specific education and training will be needed to make people aware of the attention paradigm and what a wise use of people’s attention means (using any communication channel is using others’ attention by the way). But is this a risk for weak signals and serendipity which are essential in agile, networked and “pull” organization ?

The result will surely be a mix of all these solutions…but is still unclear…and far.

Anyway, if organizations need to become (over ?) connected and communicative, they’ll need mechanisms that will prevent these skills from backfiring and avoid the paradoxical trap according to which when everyone makes the most of the system, the organization as a whole will suffer from it.

 

 

Optimizing the value of time

Summary : time measurement is a permanent concern for any organization because it’s tightly connected to productivity : the less time needed to perform a task the more productivity and, so, the less costs. That’s not sure at all in the knowledge economy where time and value are loosely tied. If time measurement is not a relevant indicator anymore, the focus has to be put on created value and not necessarily by increasing work intensity which is not key for knowledge worker but rather by working smarter.It will need, among other, to push information depending on its relevance in a given context and a better information sharing, what is the “informational” version of economies of scale.

 

How many times did we hear, while asking employees to change anything in the way they work and collaborate, comments like “we don’t have time” or, from their managers, “how much time will it take to them ? I don’t want them to waste their time”.

The reason ? Time is easy to measure and, once done, costs are easy to infer. In fact…it’s not that easy. What was true decades ago isn’t anymore. While the nature of work is evolving and people have to perform many tasks in parallel, trying to know how much time was needed for each of them is counter productive. What I often explain by “it never takes a lot of time but it takes time often”. While we’re being asked more and more to collaborate, be available to help others, all these activities are seldom taken into account. The consequence is that the role of a given person in getting a result often remains unknown but, even worse, that this person may be blamed for collaborating or helping others.

So, even if we keep up measuring time because we haven’t found another better right now, it’s now obvious that it’s not a relevant indicator to measure the performance of a person, a team or the whole organization.

Let’s also add that if time is not relevant anymore to track costs, it’s not relevant either to track value creation because it’s not proportional with time anymore. In the knowledge economy a lot of value can be created in 10 minutes by solving a problem or having an idea while days can be spent to do something that’s key in a global project but has few value per se.

Recently talking about organizations that want to move away from email to other tools, I heard :

- “they say employees are spending too much time in emails”

- “And they think they’ll spend less time in social networks ?”

That’s true. On the other hand, if the amount of time spent remains the same and, so, its cost don’t decrease, its value can be increased. Like it’s often said, an information send by email is only accessible by its receivers, if shared it becomes a part of the informational capital of the organization, can be reused and make other people save time. An information may be sent to someone who don’t need it while someone else may need it to perform a valuable task.

So, the question is not time measurement but how to optimize its value.

Some ideas ?

• Make people focus on what create value. Making a decision relying on information creates value while searching information to make a decision is a waste of time. It can be made possible by “analytics” that will suggest relevant content and people as well as robots based on “Watson-like” technologies. By the way, it’s impressive to see how many organizations say they have a sharing problem while, before all, they have a search problem.

• Multiply the value of time by making what’s been produced reusable. It will need sharing mechanisms “in the flow of work” as well as generalized capitalization practices.

• To be completed with you own ideas…

Social media and ricocheting benefits difficulties

To convince peope to start using social media in the workplace it’s important to demonstrate quick personal benefits. And that’s not alsways that easy

Let’s consider profiles for instance. What’s my interest in filling in a rich profile where I’ll share many informations about me and know that the more socially active I’ll be the more this profile will refine according to my readings, my activities, the tags I use etc ? I’ll help who needs someone like me to find me, of course, but that’s not what we can call a direct personal benefit. Of course, if others do the same, I’ll be able to find my “saviors” and that’s an actual beneif. But the lofgic that will make make me fill in my profile hoping that it will gave others the idea to do the same is so nebulous that the average user may not understand the direct benefit. More, since as anyone I’m more than very busy, I don’t have time for such a thing. So I’ll update my profile later…maybe…

Since microblogging is becoming a trendy tropic, its “quick and direct” benefit is also being questioned. One may be “give others visibility on what I’m doing to avoid answering endlessly to the same questions”. Ok…the benefit seems more direct…but we can go one step further.

In a team, other often makes decision that have consequences for us. They overestimate our availability, decide to take an action without knowing if it’s coherent with what we’re doing etc… and, at the end, we have to explain, do things we didn’t plan or want,  keep up appearnaces. Well used with scenarios that fit the needs of teamwork, microblogging help others to make better decisions and, most of all, avoid us suffering from the impact of decisions made regardless of the context.

Does the fact that information sharing through social media produces a benefit that’s not direct but ricocheting inspire you anything special regarding to social media adoption ? Is it something that’s been neglected or underestimated ?

The day they (may) stop sharing

Many current projects among enterprises rely on well known beliefs and needs : a better sharing and circulation of information are key to business performance, people share a lot on the web so organization have to provide them with the means to do the same at work.

Experience shows that it’s not that easy. Personal life is one thing, worklife is another one. That’s not because peope adopt some behaviors in one case that they’ll do the same in the other case in a natural fashion. Most of all, everybody now know that only less than 10% are actual content producers on the web. 10% on the web is a critical mass but 10% in an organization can be very few people so it implies to design work-specific approaches.

Anyway, more and and more businesses achieve it successfully. But we can already wonder how long it will last.

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What makes the value of shared information ?

As I often say, we often complain about software while the problem is the way we use it. It’s the reason why many people consider that the largest part of spam they receive at word comes from their colleagues, their hierarchy.

That’s why I liked this Dilbert strip about information sharing. We can also conclude that a link is nothing without the added value brought by its analysis. We may wonder, in our networked world, what makes the value of all the links we create between people and information or between people and informations.

Dilbert.com

Are contents social by nature or by need ?

Web 2.0, aka “social web” and its corporate avatar known as enterprise 2.0 were built upon the following assumption : within a given groupe, information should be shared and discussions should be public because no one knows who may improve the work of another person, to bring a solution. So it’s more effieient letting people  take a stand where and when they find they may bring some added value rather than pushing information to many people, flooding those who are not concerned and often forgetting those who may help. Moreover, pushing informations means that the right person is a part of our contacts, someone we know. An assumption that is often wrong.

The concept of “group” or “perimeter” is very important : it’s not about sharing every information with everybody, but within a defined area, depending on the situation. For example, one can publish on a blog (public), a group of friends on facebook, a business community on linkedin….and it should be the same with corporate tools : team members, everybody, department members…

We are forced to admit that not everybody is comfortable with this approach. First, because many of us have been taught to retain information for years and consider colleagues and information sharing as a threat and not as an opportunity. Second because it’s humain to fear the others’ look one one’s work, above all when it’s still in progress. That brings a strange paradox because that’s when we need the most other people’s opinion and help (work in progress, need to solve a problem) that we dare to share our concerns and work the less.

This may be partly solved on an organizational side. It can be decides that such kind of information has to be shared, it’s in the workflow and that’s the way everybody has to do. Of course, it would start with non-sensitive infomations that’s not hard to share for anyone, and the scope of the shared information will be widened step by step as people realize that’s not that hard or armful. Even if not everything is possible with a carrot and stick policy, it may help to start the initial move.

But that does not solve everything : a part of the problem is linked to individual (and collective) beliefs that can’t be changed just because one decided. Waiting for the Gen Y wave to come with its ultraconnectivity and its inborn knowledge of sharing best practices, we have to deal with the old habits of all the people that are more than…30 yo.

This is important for many resaons : it impacts both the human side of the change project and the design of the tools that will be used to share information.

Do we have to think we must align with a logic that implies that nearly everything is supposed to be shared out by nature ? Or with a logic that implies that everything has to be seen from an individual point of view (all I do is for me, for my own purpose), with the ability, when one feels the need, to make a private information become public, within a defined group of people, what is surely more reassuring for many people ? If, at the end, the result should be the same, the logic that leads to it is quite different.

In brief, is it simpler to start with an individual approach and make people slowly push the walls of their walled garden or to start by throwing them in a world where everything is shared by nature. Obvioulsy neither change management nor the design of the tools will be the same in each case.

Survey on the use of IT in french companies

Two weeks ago I was invited by Microsoft to attend the presentation of a survey on the use of IT in fench companies. Two things made it really interesting

• Although the fact new generations were transforming the use of IT, there was no global study to quantify and qualify it.

• The methodology was neutral and exhaustive : they started with general considerations and focused step by step to get to business cases. So the survey provides sociological elements, that were qualified, assessed, turned into busines practices etc… Each step was managed by a specialized partner (Eranos, Added Value, Ifop andt BearingPoint ).

Let’s see what’s in.

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Collaboration may happen by luck : how to provide valuable information without purpose

You must have already heard about serendipity, the effect by which one accidentally discovers something fortunate, especially while looking for something else entirely. This is the best way to gout out of the common path instead of recycling the same ideas again and again, which often leads to the same overused solutions. But in  order to find something by luck, someone should have made it available without knowing if it would be useful for anybody, and in which purpose, if not we stay in a classic system where people keep information for themselves or only give it to those they think need it. With two consequences : people we don’t know they woudl find the information useful are not informed and people we wrongly think they need it are flooded by unsolicited infomation.

This must make us remember that, when talking about information sharing, we must not have any a priori about addressees, knowing that what’s gold for someone may be mud for someone else and vice versa.

Let me explain this by the example, trough a situation I experienced myself last week.

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