Being done with the enterprise 2.0 value discussion

October 19, 2010 By 1 Comment

Summary : many still wonder what new tools will bring to their organization and still have trouble visualizing the benefits. The reason is simple ; they imagine these tools in their current organization while it’s difficult to see their contribution out of a new way of working. Organizations built rules to accomodate to the constraints of existing tools. If these constraints are removed by new tools, organizations have to built new rules that will replace the current ones.

I recently found this post on the value (or lack of) of a new technology. It applies to new technologies in a general way, applying it to social software is very instructive.

First, let’s try to answer a few simple questions.

1°) What’s the main power of this technology

It makes information sharing easier and more efficient as well as enterprise-wide discussions related to business issues, the whole taking place out of organization and application silos. It allows anybody to identify, mobilize, put together all the information, data, expertises and people on a scale that was impossible before because of the above mentioned silos. So it allows, in fine, to provide employees with what they need to be efficient in what is called the “knowledge economy”.

2°) What are the limitations this technology is removing

The difficulty sharing unstructured data, identify information and people out of a silo.

3°) What rules were built to accomodate these limitations ?

In the context of a given business process, organizations started with the assumption the information needed for delivery and decision making was not findable. So they built operation models that rely on preset rules aiming at minimizing exceptions even it it meant to deliver an acceptable result in any situation but never something adapted to a very specific need. Assuming this, knowing that people will never have to look out of the process, the time allocated to informal-out-of-process-and-silos-collaboration was considered as wasted time…what impacted the way people were measured.

List to be continued…

4°) What rules should be implemented now  ?

I won’t elaborate that much on this point because it’s specific to any situation and many contextual elements are needed to give an answer that applies to a specific business, industry, business process. But it may look like “service oriented organizations“, social routines,articulating structured and unstructured work activities, rethinking quality…

Taht’s only the starting point of a deeper investigation that has to be conducted within a given organization. Anyway, conclusions are the same than those I made about the ROI of enterprise 2.0.

- technology has no value by itslelf

- technology should allow to to things that couldn’t be done before

- rules were set to accomote the limits of previous technogies. The new technology has no value is old rules are not replaced with new ones adapted to the new potential that can now be harnessed.

In one sentence : rules have been set to accomodate constraints. If any technology removes constraints, rules have to be changed or the technology will be useless.

To end, when organization wonder “how to think” their social network or any social media project, they should wonder what rules have to be removed and what should replace them. Designing such projects without thinking a new way of working is removing all the value of the project from its beginning. It’s also the evidence that, to convince an IT dept,  a value co-construction process has to be implemented with business people because it’s simply not their role to care about how business is done.

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

Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed…but not luckily

October 12, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Summary : there’s a missing link in the enterprise 2.0 discourse that does not reassure organizations. They’re being asked an impressive effort to generate information, connect people, they’re being told all the benefits they can draw from that but are not explaine the mechanism that will turn this information potential into tangible results. The fact this link misses is certainly one of the reasons that explain why we still lack some matter in the ROI discussion. This transformation, that’s too often overlooked, will certainly be made possible by the implementation of organizational and management mechanisms as well as a redesign of some process.

If a chemist observes an organization through Lavoisier’s words, he would say that it’s impossible to get anything from such a system :

• Nothings is lost : wrong, organizations lose everything. They lose their non capitalized knowledge as people retire of resign. The NASA and Boeing have already painfully learned it, but not everyone has begun to prepare the future. Worse, they can’t even find what’s within their walls. A former CEO of HP used to say “if HP knew what HP knows we’d be three times more productive”. The problem still remains.

• Nothing is created : that’s the difference between business and chemistry : businesses creates, and innovates. In fact that’s theory. Practically talking they don’t create enough. Not enough innovation, not enough solutions to new problems (or not fast enough) : it’s hard to find how to solve a problem, without even mentioning how hard it is to implement any new solution.

• Everything is transformed : of course…provided organizations want it. Not only a reaction does not happen by luck, most of all in organizations where silos are built to prevent elements to mix together and where any reaction has to be kept under control. The taylorian legacy dies hard and the “silos and control” approach still rules, what causes few transformation except by luck or when a manager builds a clandestine laboratory.

Many organizations understands this is a critical stake and know they should favor transformation if they don’t want to be at risk in a near future. Favoring information capitalization and sharing, breaking down silos to create and innovate more and faster…that’s a current (or scheluded) program in many organizations and initiates call it “enterprise 2.0″.

But, to be honnest, most of them are still afraid of embracing this new paradigm, wonder if it’s really worth. They’re still waiting for an answer to this questions, some in terms of ROI calculation some others looking for the certainty that things will improve. Said in other words, they want to be sure the new potential they’ll built will be turned into tangible results. That’s a double edged issue because it both brings an answer to a strategic questions and force organizations to think about reinventing the way their employees actually work, their managers manage. But that’s the difference between an actual improvement and a façade change. [Read more...]

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

Putting conversation into processes

July 20, 2010 By 4 Comments

Summary : nowadays, people need to continuously solve problems to execute business processes. To do so they need a quick and easy assess to knowledge. But knowledge needs stimulis to be expressed, what seldom happes out of conversational logics. Traditional processes need to be enriched with a social layer. On top of that, business processes are the smallest common denominator upon which an enterprise 2.0 dynamic can start without having to deal too much with cultural issues because it brings a focus to what makes sense for anyone : solving actual issues they face while they tried to achieve what they are evaluated on.

There are many ways to deal with the articulation of enterprise 2.0 dynamics with business processes. Here’s the presentation I made at the Enterprise 2.0 Forum in Milan in June.

Putting conversations into processes

And here are some explainations… [Read more...]

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What do employees need to turn 2.0 ?

May 27, 2010 By 2 Comments

The paradox of enterprise 2.0 is that even when businesses manage to go on their fear of the unknown and decide to embrace this new paradigm, they are often not followed by their employees even if they bring a solution to their problems with solutions that are supposed to make their work easier.

Everybody now understands that employees need mor than tools and communication campaigns to adopt new practices and behaviors even if that would be beneficial to them. Even saying “do whatever you want, we trust you” doesn’t work”.

Here’s a little checklist of customer’s expectations.

• What are the expected outcomes ? What am I supposed to “produce” on these tools, and what is expected from the groups / communities I’m a part of.

• What are the limits to my responsability ? To what extent am I autonomous, beyond which point should I ask for permission or refrain from doing anything.

• Is it a part of the job I’m paid to do ? Will my manager or any person paying me with his budget consider my activity as wasted time ? Will they blame me for participating or reward me ?

• What’s my exposure ? How to control it ? What kind of information am I supposed to share ? Facts or opinions that engage me ? Can I set my own limit ? Who can access what ? And what will the information I share be used for ?

• Show me first and then I’ll follow.

• Before asking to me to any new thing, show me how all that can help me to do what I’m already doing today, how it makes it simpler and easier.

• Don’t scatter my attention. I already have so much to do so don’t distract me with pointless information and issues that have no added value according to my objectives and daily tasks.

• Don’t break my “personal workflow”. I don’t have time to play with 3 applications, aggregate information, forward it, copy/past. In this case I’ll focus on the tool that is not the best but that can do a little bit of anything, even not in an efficient way, without having to switch between several apps. (email ?)

• Don’t add but remove. For 50 years, the response to any new issue was a new layer of solution (tools, rules, practices), These layers have been piling up for decades and we’ve reached such a point that they slow me down and are sometimes contradictory the one with the other. Instead of adding new layers, remove those that are actual burdens, doesn’t make any sense anymore and are useless.

• Don’t bring me into one more experiment. I’m not a guinea-pig and the time I’m investing penalizes me in my real work and is even bad for my image and reputiation. I’m ready to learn, to explore, provided it won’t be shut down in 6 months and it will help me in my day-to-day word.

• How information will be used ? Reused ? It will help me to know what to share.

• Teach me, show me how to articulate the structured and unstructured part of my work, the formal and informal ones. And I hope tools take this need for articulation into account because I don’t want to play the human connector.

• Teach me how to seamlessly integrate it in my daily work and how to translate it into a simple, scripte, reassuring routine I’ll follow without thinking about it.

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

33 things to know about those who make your online social spaces live

May 3, 2010 By Leave a Comment

I wrote a lot about community management these last month for a simple reason: there’s so much confusion about a topic that’s said being strategic that heading for disaster and throwing the baby with the bathwater is a really actual risk. But by dint of thinking about it again and again, it seems to me that some guidelines are slowly emerging.

• That’s not because there are social medias in the workplace and that employees use them to do their work that the person in charge of managing their use is a community manager.

• A group of people doing things and interacting through social is not necessarily a community or a social network.

• A corporate social media strategy has to be driven at several levels which are often embodied by different people who have specific roles, responsabilities and objectives. These individual works has to be coordinated and articulated.

• Ca n’est pas parce qu’il y a échange entre des individus en utilisant les médias sociaux qu’on à affaire à des communautés. Ni à des réseaux sociaux d’ailleurs.

So, here’s a few things to know about all these players…

[Read more...]

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A process approach to enterprise 2.0

April 27, 2010 By 1 Comment

I recently came across an old post in which  Andrew McAfee stated:

While creating an innovative business process is less visible than developing a new product or investing in factories, our research shows it is actually more important to a company’s success. Intangible process capital is changing the way companies operate and the capabilities they possess. As a result, it also is changing the way they compete.

Generally speaking it’s obvious that the more a business makes progress in its enterprise 2.0 project the more it has to deal with processes. Some settle that in an natural and intuitive way without even raising the issue but for many others it needs a more analytic approach.

There are many reasons why the issue can’t be neglected :

• Some organizations tried to put everything into processes, even what was not relevant. As a result, there is very few room to develop less structured logics.

• Processes appears to be for what’s mandatory. As a result, what is not a process appears to be optinal and of lower importance what does not make it easy to motivate and engage employees.

• Companies used to keep under a high control what impacts value creation. If we want anything 2.0 to contribute to value creation, it has to articulate with what already exists, build bridges and deal with zones of overlapping.

• Businesses that successfully made their first steps in the world of 2.0 without tackling the issue, a time comes when they need to think synergies between processes and informal practices to go further.

Even if we don’t have so much hindsight in this field, we begin to have some ideas about how to tackle processes in the 2.0 era, according to their nature.

• Heavy processes relying on structured datas.

In general, those processes in which people’s only part is to enter datas at an end of the chain and read dashboards at the other end after information has been processed and consolidated are not in our scope. In large businesses, for this kind of work, people cause errores and slowness so the less they have to do the better it is. On the contrary, even if people don’t have much value in execution they have a part to play in a collaborative ongoing improvement approach aiming at improving the process in question.

We often hear that if a process is not broken we don’t have to fix it. That’s true. But we should also add that we must not wait it’s broken to think about improving it and figure out what was becoming wrong in it.

• Structuting process partly relying on unstructured information

Unlike the previous point, no machine or system can run the process alone here. Tools can help to structure and pilot on a global scale but human worlk is needed to proceed through the different steps of the process. For instance, we can mention a sales, innovation or recruiting process. So, we’re talking about processes that are supposed to be rigids but whose exectution relies on people’s capacity to find answers, information, contacts…. Here,  building a social system around the process allows a faster execution and a higher quality level. It’s an “in the flow” approach, which I think is the more senseful for people who are lookin for sense, rationality and tangible benefits.

Such logics are supported by “activity specific social software” or more generalists platforms, the latter needing a certain kind of discipline to build relevant enterprise-scale usages.

Of course, the ongoing improvement approach also applies here.

• Un-process, mainly unstructured

That’s about all what does not fit into any of the above mentioned points (and what used to be forced to fit in for ages…causing the disappointments we all know). That’s the “third way” whose inexistence and lack of tools to support it used to make businesses do many mistakes and whose emergence should allow organizations to have an operating model that fits with any situation rather than trying to push suare pegs into round holes.

That’s at the same time the sequel of the previous point and the answer to what was not predictable and does not have a dedicated operating model.

In the other hand, people feel always lost and uncomfortable with this approach. Since they are used to follow rigid models, finding themselves with a large autonomy in un-constrained work and collaboration places make they suffer from vertigo and agoraphobia. Consequently, they are asking for a kind of guiding line to follow in order to reassure them.

The answer may be what I call social routine. One can find paradoxical that the answer to the absence of process is to set something that aims at structuring something that’s unstructured by nature. That’s whay I call it a routine because it’s more about a mindset and a bunch of reflexes that will even become unconscious as time will go by. This is illustrated in the schema I proposed here.

At the end, it’s not that complicated. It’s only about applying the right logic to the right situation and put the right issues in the right holes…

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

Enterprise 2.0, collaboration and personal constraints

February 2, 2010 By 1 Comment

Like it or not, the smallest unit of work is the individual task. People’s workday is made of achieving tasks, and even in the context of group or collaborative work. A group only delivers the sum of the tasks achieved by its members. That’s why coordination matters. We can even say that, how ironic, knowledge work makes individual tasks even more important : if it’s possible to achieve a physical task through a joint effort, thinking jointly is impssible. We think individually and group work implies increased interactions to stay coordinated and consistent. Ten people can push a car together but they can’t think as one to solve a problem : that’s why it’s important to exchange to share task statuses, update, get coordinated.

Now, let’s guess how an individual does when they have a task to achieve.

If he can do it by himself, it’s alright. And what if he can’t ? He reports to his team to ask for help and sometimes the problem solving is assigned to the group. What implies a new individual task for members even if the numerous interactions makes it look like a collectivce task. By group I mean a formalized set of people that have been assigned an objective, would it be a department or a project team. This situation looks very usual but some “2.0″ practices may improve things as it may help to deal with a lot of informal signals aiming at making everyone’s work status more visible, avoiding an heavy,time consuming and poorly responsive coordination. But what happens when the group reaches a dead-end ?

In a traditional system, the group would be in big trouble : the solution to avoid being block would be to throw a bottle into the sea. But how to find the right people out the human structure one is used to work into ? At this point, a 2.0 approach becomes very valuable : people rely on their network, on communities where discussions on this specific topic take place. If a similar problem has already been solved, it’s ok. If not, it’s possible to find the right people/communities and submit the problem. People are easy to find because their social activity enrich their profile…

A first conclusion has to be made at this point : people start from themselves, then go to formal groups they’re part of and to networks and communities. They start with an individual work, then a coordinated work in a defined geoup and, at the end, unstructed  interactions within fuzzy-boundaries groups. Things happen in this order and in not other. That’s nothing but logic : from the nearer to the most distant, from the known to the unknown, from the certain to the uncertain.

This is a very “in the zflow” approach. Here, the 2.0 dimension favors visibility, micro-coordination and quick problem solving. In the other hand, people don’t have to expose themselves, to do more than their jon, to engage more. The group efficiency is improved and people can even go and find answers out of it. This is an organization oriented approach : social practices are built around a process or a workflow to increase their bandwith.

But it also need another factor : to push the logic to its end, vibrant and relevant communities are needed, making it possible for people to swith in a network mode when the group reaches its limits. This is a more “social” approach. This communities are made of people who naturally share their experiences, their thoughts on a given subject, to go one step beyond their job description and their assignments, to put a little bit of their soul into their work. In this casen people expose themselves more because they share more than knowledge : they give opinions, propose things. This is clearly about “over the flow” activities, with a participation depending on people goodwill. This is what we can call pure 2.0 : conversations, communities that form and die, soft collaboration, informal, unstructured, unpredictable, with a hudge human component because it relies on people’s will to share, learn, connect to people they would never have met otherwise. This is nearly often what people think about when thinking about enterprise 2.0.

This brings things back to the distinction I already made a few months ago.

Now it’s time to go to the point.

[Read more...]

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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.

[Read more...]

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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 ?

[Read more...]

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