Social-software | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

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

November 19, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 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.

Community management Vs Socio-Collaborative management : how to make the right choice

November 17, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

I already wrote how dangerous it was to use community management for every kind of purpose, and that instead of seing communities everywhere (which need community managers), enterprises have to learn to recognize groups who only need a “simple” manager who’s doing his job right.

Using social platforms in the context of teamwork has a purpose : increase both individual and collective performance and I can’t imagine that a manager will let a community manager speak to his staff, start discussions or even try a grab a bit of their time. That’s not the purpose and, anyway, legitimity and competences related issues will quickly emerge. Exchanges, discussions, will be driven by people everyday’s work, by social routine, and in no way by marketing and communication established as a managent model.

On the other hand, there a cases when the purpose is to make a group emerge, convince them, make them aware of something… where community management is the right choice.

In the on case, a community manager, a “communication perso”, will be needed. In the other, it will be a manager (THE manager) who should has improved his practices, heading to what we could call management 2.0, social management or whatever you want. Reminding of the brillant speach of Andrew McAfee at the last enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston and the discussions that followed, above all on twitter, I’ll suggest socio-collaborative management. Quite a bit longer but more meaningful, and does not sound “buzzy” than social. Anyway, it doesn’t matter since it’s nothing more than a manager with an improved toolbox (on both behavioral and technical sides).

So we need to know what’s the difference between community management and socio-collaborative management in order to make the right choices and apply the right model to each case. By the way, knowing how many people are offering community management services to businesses that are totally lost, it may be a good anti-quack weapon.

Enterprise 2.0 case studies says “it’s possible”…and nothing more

November 6, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 2 Comments

As usual, when a hange that’s both organizational and technological happens, everyone is looking for case studies to be convinced. But as the first solid cases come about social media, it looks like doubt remains, that cases are not close enough to people’s concerns to convince them. How many times can we hear “they don’t have our culture, our past, we’re not on the same market, our products are different, our clients are different”.

At first sight nothing changed. Cases start with a problem, explain what has been done and the results got. But it does not seem to work as well as before. The reason is quite simple : in the past cases were about softwares that treated and automated many tasks and helped to improve such or such thing. The only software was shown at the cause of how a given business went from a situation A to a situation B. It was credible and everyone believed it. Anyway, people believed all the more since everyone was implementing the the software, helped with the same consultants who where using the same methodologies, getting to the same implementations. Of course, one may object that from the case to the implementions there were lots of impressive gaps. That’s a fact : as every business is different from another, there are human, managerial, organizational and cultural factors that are neutral. But the nature of the projects made that people only need to have the proof that “the software could do it”, provided it came from a credible company.

Another factor had signifcant consequences. If all companies used to implement the same things, the same way, made the same choices, it was also because they were asked to be “comparable”. Investors knew that they could not compare apples with bananas so, even unconciously, they initiated a pressure that lead to the same choices and made companies adopt the same practices and technologies. Who would have risked to be pointed at because of nonconformist management, technology or organizational choices that would have made that their results and operations could not have been compared point by point with their competitors, using the same indicators in the same context.

Enterprise 2.0 cases differ for two reasons.

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

November 3, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 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 ?

Your indicators say that your online communities are very busy ? So what ?

October 20, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

When a social media project is launched, whether internal or external, it’s often structured in groups or communities. What every project manager fear is to end with empty or moribund communties, so making them busy is an obvious goal from which indicators are drawn. This is pure logic. These indicators are linked to the the use of the tools that support the project. It’s also logical.

It’s obvious that if the indicators depress (ie the community is dead) it’s a bad news and it’s important to take things in hand. But is it right to assume that things are doing well when indicators are doing well too.

Of course, no benefit can be expected is the tool is not used. (Saying that I assume that the whole project was designed and positioned in order to bring real operational benefits and that the tool supports processes that contribute to value creation in one way or another).

But even in the opposite situation, viligance is needed.

- lots of members (or even a satisfying number). Ok, people registered. And so what ? They updated their profile ? Came back once, twice, regularly ? And why do they come for ? Make sure nothing has changed since their last connection ? (Of course I don’t mention the hypothesis of people being registered automatically whithout knowing why…)

- lots of groups are created ((or even a satisfying number) : that’s one more step. Who structures the social space wants to use it and identified needs that groups can meet. But, at the beginning, the number of groups created “only to try” may be huge so being carried away may be a mistake at this time. In fact it’s not a risk but a common practice for users who try to find out what they can do with their new tools. Then, according to the governance, some groups may not be work-related (but some companies accept it because it helps to foster relationships anyway). Of course, I’m not talking about groups created by the company according to its organizational-chart or its own expecations, without making sure that the people in the groups know what’s it about and feel engaged.

- lots of contents (or even a satisfying number) : so you have users distributed among purpose driven groups. Well. If the indicators say some (or a lot) of content is published, you are getting closer to success. But here agin, try to find what’s the reality behind the numbers. On a qualitative point of view first (is the information useful, does it help people to move forward, to improve..) Then have a look at the publications/members ratio. Of course if you have a group open to anyone and if your purpose is to gather as many people as possible to sensibilize them about something, the 1-9-90 rule should apply. If you group is made of people who actually work together in real life, everyday, who have shared goals, participation should be more balanced. If 95% of the contents come from one only person whose job is to feed the group in order it won’t look like a dead end…your indicator is biased. You are doing nothing but moving the main function of you old intranet into on a social platform. It may be a transitional step but in no way a solution for a project that is meant to bring any added value.

Which future for middle managers ?

October 1, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Among the subjects that are classified “sensitive” by many companies, middle management is not one of the least. It’s easy to understand that the latter will be widely impacted by the emergence of networked ,”unintermediarized” organizations, what brings legitimate fears. Companies fear the consequences of mid-managers fears and reaction and want to preserve the internal peace. As for middle managers, they need to know what will happen to them, if their job will change or if they will simply become useless.

Let’s try to demistify the debate in order to see clearer.

Your knowledge helps you more than your productivity

September 9, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 3 Comments

I’ve always had an ambiguous feeling about productivity. In the one hand, doing more or faster with the same amount of resources is a significant improvement. In the other hand, with hindsight, we have to admit that productivity continuously increased these last decades, that whenever a hard time everything is done to increase it even more, but despite of that, companies don’t seem to have improved their overhall financial performance. We also have to add to this the fact that, a time when enterprises rely not on machines or peopeale repeating endlessly the same tasks but on people managing information and solving problems, thinking that any business can run a 100m run in zero seconds is hare-brained.

Months ago, the idea came to me that productivity has to be rethought in order to shift from a mechanical concept to a human one, an from something that could be improved at the individual scale to something that has to be improved at a collective, systemic scale.

I’ve been neglecting this issue untill I came across this article that remembered me of it. Please have a look at this meaninful chart stolen from it :

Despite an ongoing improvement in productivity, ROA collapsed on the same period. Why dit it happen ?

According to the article, it’s due to a total disconnect between enterprises et their current environment. Till now, businesses used to increase their size to create more value. Today, in an interconnected economy, value is not created anymore by increasing size but by multiplying information flows. The difference between the most and the less performant companies can be found in their participation to knowledge flows, both internally and externally, dynamics relying on social software. Focusing on “traditional” productivity only benefits to clients, not to the enterprise that doesn’t create more value.

In brief, the good old scalable efficiency is not enough anymore and companies should now focus on scalable learning.

The gap between the potential of any company and the benefit drawn from it is doomed to increase unless companies decide to take the most of their digital infrastructure supporting knowledge flows and actively participate to these flows, both internally and externally with other businesses, and implement a voluntarist innovation policy.

Performance improvement will require the adoption of a logic of exchanges and innovation within ecosystems which is the only way to significantly improve things. It will make possible for anyone to improve one’s own performance through a creative problem solving process which implies the ability to connect among peers inside and outisde the organization. Contrary to the previous century when things used to come from the top, these new dynamics will be driven by people.

All that takes us back to a well known topic. The only way to bring a real and perenial improvement is to take the most of both knowledge capital and digital infrastructure. If not, the gap between investment and results will become wider every day.

Filed Under: Economy & New Models, Knowledge & Information management, strategy, Web & Usages Tagged With: collaboration, economy, ecosystem, Innovation, knowledge, knowledge-economy, learning, problem solving, productivity, ROA, social media, social-software

Does enterprise 2.0 threaten your security ?

August 25, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

Among the many questions businesses have about enterprise 2.0, this one has an important place. Not because enterprise 2.0 is necessarily dangerous but because any new thing brings a change in a situation that’s supposed to be secured. So the principle of precaution plays its part in organization where risk aversion is more important than anything else.

The purpose here is not to discuss the fact this risk aversion causes (or not) a form of phobia toward any kind of novelty that would be a barrier to any kind of evolution, of improvement. It’s about assessing if enterprise 2.0 brings a new security risk in organizations and, if so, how to deal with it.

What security ?

Security is a legitimate concern that, in fact, has to do with lots of different things to such an extent that when someone broaches this subject it(s hard to really know what he has in mind. With hindsight, businesses have to main concerns about security : the one is about structure security, the other is about information security.

By structural security I mean protection againt attacks toward the IT system itself. By information security I mean concerns about unauthorized information broadcasting or disclosure.

Subscribe to this bog

Tag cloud

Happy to work at…

Favorite books

Copyright