Socio-collaborative Management | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

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

May 3, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 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…

A central corporate department is in charge of your enterprise 2.0 project ? Some traps to avoid

January 5, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

An enteprise 2.0 project (or whatever the name it’s given) can be carried by many different kind of people or departments. A dedicated joint team (what is ly prefered choice), HR dept, Communication Dept, IT dept… This is something that has to be thought about upstream but in many cases someone takes the leadership and starts the engine. There is no perfect solution but some traps to avoid when a central corporate department is in charge.

So sum it up in one line : B2E professionals struggle to do E2.E. Don’t worry, it doesn’t matter and it’s logical. The only things to do is take the necessary precautios and everything will be fine. Beyond this abstruse formulating, let’s see what’s the reality behind…

Let’s consider, for instance, a project driven by the communication department or the HR department. They are B2E departments, what stands for “Business to employees”. These departments usually address employees in a vertical and one way fashion. If these departments take the lead on the project that’s often because they can see the limits of their current model and try to improve their efficiency. For instance the Com’ Dept can think that wat matter is not to deliver the message (what is a means) but to ensure that it’s understood by all. Explaining things supposes to know if the message was understood, what are employee’s concerns. This implies a feedback channel and the ability to enegage conversations : hence the interest for 2.0 things when they understand that expressed or not doubt is a doubt and the easier way to correct and react is to let the signal come to them. Of course, the scope of the project can be wider but this is the kind of concerns that are often at the beginning of an E2.0 project.

These depts are here for doing vertical stuff, and it’s necessary. The 2.0 logic is a part of a PDCA-like approach that helps to adjust and react in real time to improve their impact on the organization. That’s no that hard to understand provided people know have a clear vision of the expected results and what will happen, what is the best way to avoid last minute fears.

So everyhting is fine….until the day when the project blocks. The reason is known and foreseeable : the question of the possible use of tools par employees, at their initiative, for their own needs arises and, suddenly, projects leaders feel like their loosing control, that their project is running away from them. That’s normal : as I wrote above, their role is to do “B2E” things, and, even in a 2.0 approach, to keep the lead, the initiative, in one word : keep the process under control even it they try to democratize it. On their side, employees also need “E2E” stuff (stands for employees to employees” in order to facilitate their workaday work. So it should be an employee-driven process, for their own problems and, necessarily, practical-things-oriented on subjects on which, logically, and HR or Com dept does not have neither any hold nor any expertise or competence since that’s local management’s call.

Enteprise 2.0 : what to expect in 2010 ? The year of “uncrokment”.

December 15, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 3 Comments

A quick look at my predictions for 2009 makes me say that I was not so far from truth even if it took time for things to shift. In my opinion, the tipping point between 2008 and 2009 was the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston and things accelerated at the San Francisco Conference and then at the E2.0 Summit in Frankfurt. By the way, it makes me say that, to whom wonders if conferences of this kind are still relevant since we can discuss all year long, the right answer that they formalize the way trends are evolving.

This said, here’s what I see as the majors trends for 2010 and my intuition tells me that the key dates will still be the same. I’ll consider 3 different levels : concep, implementation and tools in this order. As a matter of fact, if the way one implements things depends of what the concepts means to him, I thing that companies will more and more chose their tools depending on their implementation strategy instead of building strategies constrained by what a given tool is good or bad at depending on its conception.

The concept : enterprise 2.0 as a new layer

Before wondering how to do something, having a clear vision of what this something is matters. The least we could say is that the end of 2009 was very rich in terms of experience and thoughts. Is it about making people use new tools for the sake of making them used ? Is it about (over)connecting people, relying on the assumption that their deep nature will make them naturally develop a community feeling and change their business practices and behaviors ? Obviously both one and the other failed.

Less idealistic but more pragmatic, enterprise 2.0 appears more and more as a productivity tool. In a world “1.0″, individual and collective productivity used to rely on specialization, tailoring tasks at an individual level, rigid processes and fight against any kind of deviation. In such a system the value is…in the system and its conception. In a world “2.0″ characterized by an intensive use of knowledge, value isn’t only in processes anymore but in knowledge and people who have it. So, doing one’s work, delivering results, becomes not only a matter of respecting the process but also a matter of accessing information and people that are out of the process. To do so, people need tools and practices that won’t necessarily replace what exists but add to it.

A few weeks ago I wrote :

Enterprise 2.0 is a set of tools and practices aiming at increasing the scope of the human and informational capital that’s accessible and usable in order to execute everyday’s processes and workflows and deliver the expected work in the assigned time limit. It’s not build outside or in replacement for workflows and business processes but around them.

It still need to be refined but the trend is here. Companies are here to produce things and we can’t neglect this structuring dimension. So enterprise 2.0 is nothing but a new layer that helps to maximize the use resources that are poorly exploited at this time. It’s a layer made of practices and tools that help anyone to access and engage what and whom is needed to achieve his goals. That brings us back to the concept of systems, Service Oriented Organization and Wirearchy.

So the central issue becomes the articulation between existing things and novelty. I’ll discuss that in the next point. For those who got interested in the recent enterprise 2.0 schism discussion, it’s, in my opinion, the victory of the druckerian model.

Maybe 2010 will be one of the last years of the word “enterprise 2.0″. Knowing that it’s a new layer that helps businesses to achieve their primary goal, that articulation is central, we’re obvious talking about “enterprise” without versioning number and how it will do “old things” in a new context. Enterprise 2.0 has no value outside of enterprise and thinking it out of this whole will bring nothing concrete.

Last consequence : the rupture with the world of web 2.0 which logics and vocabulary are the opposite of what companies are. The web will still be source of inspiration and will open the way. But, for the rest, web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 are two really different worlds and each of them will have its own life. Two worlds that inspire one another but that can’t copy. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business Tagged With: activity-specific social software, bpm, bpm 2.0, business process, community management, Enterprise 2.0, enterprise-social-software, implementiation, management, on the flow, over the flow, processes, social-software, socio-collaborative management, workflows

How to understand and position enterprise 2.0 in the real enterprise

December 1, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 3 Comments

It’s time to sum up all the thoughts I had these last months. I tried to start from both the concerns expressed by C level managers asking for a global vision and ground managers who needed a “hands on” vision because they don’t have time to waste to try to understand such nebulous things. Having to focus on day to day delivery and short term objectives, many see such a fallen-from-the-sky (and on their head) gift as a source of misunderstanding and discomfort.

These concerns are not surprising at all : what is it, what does it bring, how does it work, how to position it and integrate it in the organization as it is today… Talking about a new discipline, lots of things were learnt from early adopters who worked on a “try / fail / improve” model and, in so doing, helped to build a knowledge and know-how corpus. As a matter of fact this corpus was build upon failed and successfull implementations that helped to refine some presupposition that were prevailing at their beginning. The whole helped “followers” to benefit from these experiences.

But we still have to be aware that that’s not by saying “that’s that, that’s not that, one must, one must not” that things will improve. Businesses need to undersand the path that lead to these conclusions to make them theirs, and we all know what happens when one content himself with copying a result without understanding what reasonning often leads to : lack of self-confidence, fear of the unknown, defensive attitude….then failure.

Rather than proposing an attractive future at the end of a vague road, let’s start from what actually exist to build the future. This will also help to explain the “why”, relying on what can be learnt from past experiences.

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.

A central corporate department is in charge of your enterprise 2.0 project ? Some traps to avoid

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