Strategy Maps | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

Enterprise social network : a famous stranger

May 17, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : enterprise social networks are the future of corporate IT, a tool overwhelmingly supported by employees because it will save them from email and favor the adoption of more efficient work practices. Sure ? Outside of a circle of initiated (that is growing everyday), except for people who are in charge of such programs in their organization, the words “social network” and “enterprise” seldom come together in many employees’ mind. And, when it happens, it’s more about Facebook and brand management than work efficiency. The reason ? Few people have tried to understand what it’s all about, personal usages are hard to transcribe in a work context to articulate a clear value proposition and the ubiquitous image of Facebook is a real burden.

I had recently the opportunity of talking with a small group of people who had one thing in common : their title started with either “chief” or “director”. Suddenly, one said the magic word : “social network”. All but one had an opinion, a question, something to share about this topic. Nothing surprising since social network has become a very trendy topics in organizations over the years.

And then…crash ! The star of the conversation quickly became facebook and the focus came on information leaks, lower productivity etc., to the surprise of the person who launched the conversation and thought it was obvious that everybody around the table knew this kind of thing. Obviously they didn’t. Surprisingly I was expecting this kind of reaction.

Enterprise social networks are a paradoxical topic. Of course, you, who read this blog, are well informed about that. Of course, you, who are in charge of deploying such a thing in your organization, know what an ESN is. Now, ask the question around you, to your friends, family etc.. I’m sure you’ll get lots of ideas, opinions or concerns about “enterprise and social networks”. But nothing “enterprise social networks”.

We have to admit that, outside of a circle of initiated people, social networks are seen as an entertaining tool, sometimes as a tool for marketing and communication. This article from French newspaper speaks for itself. It says that CHROs get social networks better and better. And what do they say to illustrate their thoughts ? Recruitment, employer brand, image and general public social networks. And yet HR should have many things to say on the potential (and risks) of internal social networks….

ESNs are far from having “killed their father” (Facebook…even if many ESN solutions were already existing when FB became mainstream and open to all).

Ok, anyone who talks with “real people” out of the echo chamber already knows that. But knowing the causes to deal with the issue more efficiently can be worth.

Enterprise 2.0 and ROI : forget the “whether” and focus on the “how”.

September 14, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 2 Comments

Summary : even if the concep of ROI, in its traditional sense, hardly hardly works for enterprise 2.0, overlooking the question of tangible benefits tha should be expected is impossible. But the reasonnings on this issue suffer from a noticeable bias : technology is assessed in the current context while it needs organizational and management changes to deliver its effects. So there are few chances to have a solid demonstration if the focus is kept on the existence of ROI without a joint reflexion on how to make it happen.

The ROI of Enterprise 2.0 is interesting because it’s at the same time unavoidable and a problem that’s impossible to solve without rethinking the whole paradigm of value creation.

First, I’d like state something. I’m using the word ROI because it’s the one we all use to discuss this point while I think that “measurable improvement” would be more relevant.

Then, I’ll start with a metaphor. If a logical and rational thinking makes us deduct that an engine is the best solution to make a car move and that, despite your car has one that works, your car don’t move when you accelerate, it may mean two things. The first is that ou forgot to shift the gear box on the right position, the second is that it’s not connected to the transmission. Instead to trying to fix the engine or throwing it away, what needs a fix is the transmission.

Then let’s talk about ROA (return on assets). The number is well known but John Hagel recently reminded it to us : it has dropped to 25% of what it was in 1965 while people’s productivity has been skyrocketting in the meanwhile. Conclusion : that’s not employees that don’t pedal fast enough but the organization that struggles at turning their effort into value. So the solution is not to blame employees and put even more pressure on them but to rethink the way work is organized and people are managed.

Now, have a look at new ways of doing things and the tools that support them. Anyone with few objectivity understands that the easier it is for employees to access resources and expertises in a fluid way that helps to save time, the quicker problem solving and the better made decisions made will be. But since this system is hardly systematizable, organizations keep their old way of doying things. What means telling the cyclist to pedal harder and harder while the chain is broken.

So the true question about ROI is not to know if it exists but how to turn a potential into actual benefits. This is not about social media or behaviors (even if it will play a part) but about “plumbing”.

That’s exactly what I wrote a couple of years ago about strategy maps and intangible assets :

• Value creation is indirect : intangible assets don’t create value by themselves, but through their use in business process.

• Value is contextual : the value of intangible assets depends on their alignment with strategy

• Value is potential : if business process don’t use those assets, their value remain potential and can’t be fully realized.

• Assets are bundled : intangible assets have to be use in conjuction with tangible assets.

So it’s logacally difficult if not impossible to demonstrate any kind of benefit and, most all all, to measure them, if the question of alignment has not been tackled and if processes have not been designed or fixed to actually rely more on intangible assets.

Organizations have to forget the old principle according to which tools ahave an endogenous value : the value of social tools is exogenous and can’t be delivered if tools are not used in the context of adapted processes.

So there are chances we keep on discussing the ROI of Enterprise 2.0 again and again for years if the focus is kept on “whether” it exists instead of “how to deliver it”. Even people who are convinced and don’t care about the “if” shoud care of the ‘how” that ensures that processes will be able to turn the potential into tangible benefits.

As my good friend Luis Suarez rencently wrote, we should learn to work smarter, not harder. Lett me add : provided we avoid to pedal better but in emptiness.

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: alignment, business process, Enterprise 2.0, intangible assets, measure, process, processus, ROI, strategy maps, transformation, value

Behind enterprise 2.0 there’s coherence

June 3, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

I’d like to go further into a point I mentioned in a previous post and that deserves some more explainations.

According to what we can often hear or read (and that I sometimes wrote here too), organizations lack many things to perform in today’s context. What has to be understood like “they need to acquire and implement many things they don’t have” like ideas, competences, employee’s passion about their job and many other things. Finally I wonder if it’s that true.

• Ideas and innovative potential ? It exists both inside and outside the organization. Just have to bend down to pick it up.

• Talents ? I see many brilliant people, from any generation in every organization I know.

• The will to engage and do one’s best ? It exists, in proportions that may vary depending on local culture and the relationship between people and business world. I agree it can fade away if not sustained.

• ….

I don’t think the issue is the acquisition or the development (even if this last point can be discussed) of all these things but the way they are used.

• Talented and creative people at the marketing department, talented sales people…but no alignment and the impression that both don’t go in the same direction.

• plenty of ideas, sometimes heard and acknowledged. But seldom implemented.

• Rare expertises but hardly accessible and shared.

• People able to face the challenges of the organization…with incentive to do the opposite.

• Brilliant young qualified people, hired because they can bring something new in the workplace and who are asked to fit the mould once they join the company.

• ….

As we can see, organizations have an impressive energy tank, a huge potential, that fits today’s need. But the corporate engine is plugged on an old tank full of aldultered fuel. Or maybe the carburation is not set for today’s fuel.

Would it be with a management toolbox or new technologies, the question behind what we call enterprise 2.0 is plug the right tank on the engine.

That’s also the reason why ROI is very hard to get when talkin about intangibles : it’s hard to deliver any value when the engine does not use the fuel the company invests in.

The challenge is to bring some coherence, that’s to say aligning business practices with the fuel the organization is putting a lot of money in (human, intangible…). And if tools are needed to be used as catalysts to boost the reaction…

That will also imply to redefine some roles or have a more systemic vision of investments : those who invest in intangibles seldom are those who design the way it will be used. Yet, when businesses invest in the bottom layer they need to design the “plumbing” that will ensure it will impact the upper layer, what has many incidences on the structured and formal part of the organization. Remember this old diagram I published years ago :

Food for thought…

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: alignment, enterp, intangible assets, strategy maps

Enterprise 2.0 and ROI : beyond numbers it’s about meaningful arbitrations

April 7, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

The debate on the ROI of Enterprise 2.0 is far from its end even if I often have the impression that avoiding the question is a common easy answer. Either the “we don’t care” or the ‘it’s different, you can’t understand” answers don’t satisfy me.

When an enterprise is asked to invest energy, time, money, it’s legitimate to want to know what it will get in return. More precisely :

- if their will be any return

The answer is obvious : yes

- if this return will be a vague “better something”, nebulous and unseizable or if it will be measurable in a way or another, in a un unit that would not be too eccentric (money for instance…)

Here, my answer would be double. There are things that have a direct impact on opeations and thant can be measured and quantified. For instance the lenght of the innovation or sales cycle, the time saved by avoiding micro-coordination…

There are things that are not measurable by themselves but impact things that are. This is clearly demonstrated by Strategy Maps.The idea is to implement the mechanisms that will ensure that what’s invested to improve intangible will actually impact value creation. In brief, make sure that everything is conherent with the investments and that the way work is done is aligned with that in order investments are made profitable (it’s seldom said but businesses usually don’t suffer from a lack of talent or innovation…only a lack of coherence that impacts the whole value creation process, preventing processes to harness talents and innovation potential).

3°) If this return can be foreseeable in a mechanical and linear way.

Here, the answer is : no. In the other hand, between the exact prediction and the “we can’t predict so let’s five give up” I think there’s a long work to be done by searchers and specialists to be done. Without this work that will help to implement relevant measurement and predicition means, the risk is high to see managers piloting businesses with indicators that have nothing to do with the current reality, the way operations are done and the matter that is processed.

That said, there’s another side of the issue that should also be tackled. Basically, being sure that the investment will bring some benefits should be enough to start a project, regardless of the quantifiable predictability of the benefit. The latter matter when the point is not to choose between doing and not doing but arbitrate the choice between two possible investments. In this case it’s obvious that the chosen one will be the one with the highest return so both possibilities have to be comparable what implies being predictable.

When does the value of a “social object” have to be measured ?

June 2, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

Let’s be clear, I’m talking about value, not about ROI (although the one is a part of the other) and about “social objects” in the large sense of the word : everything that can exist on a social platform, when using social software. It may be a content, an information specially generated, an information shared from elsewhere, a mark given to any contribution, the contribution to a collaborative work…but also the time taken to do so, the attention mobilized while the person may have had something else to do at this time etc…

Behind the everlasting discussions about ROI stands, before all, the question of the value. Does what is done have value, and what value ? In which ways an information and the time needed to publish it can have any value ? You’ll notice that it turns the ROI question not into something about tools and contents but into something wider made of tools, contents, resources and …the context in which the information is used.

That is a point that is often forgotten : it’s the context that determines values, it’s its limiting factor, more than the intrinsic value of the information itself. An insignificant information may be very valuable at a given moment for a given person even though thousands people will have nothing to do with it. On the other hand, a capital information have no value if nobody uses it. It takes us back to a reflection I’ve had a long time ago about strategy maps : intangibles have no intrinsic value but their value depends on how it’s used.

Talking about an enterprise context, let’s make it clear that “value” means the ability to turn information into money.

So the point, not that trivial, is to know when value has to be measured.

Social networks : are companies looking for the ROI or something else

January 29, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 2 Comments

Whatever people may say, it’s still the hot issue of enterprise social networks. Considering ools that that are not processing tools strictly speaking, benefits have to be found on the new way of doing things they make possible rather than in the tools themselves that are only enablers. As I wrote here, benefits are not on the cloud but in the operational reality.

This said, the answer is still hard to be found.

So we may follow Forrester :

I found the list of direct and undirect benefits very exhaustive and clear. But is that enough ? No. If we can explain, for example, how intangible assets contribute to value creation, we cannot explain in which measure. Let’s consider the CISCO case. Chambers can give a backed up by figures ROI in terms of capacity to drive projects and in financial terms, but I’m not sure that when the decision was made had any figure he was automatically sure he would reach.

Web 2.0 tools to improve information readiness

November 28, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Today, many opinions converge to admit two things :

• companies need to be more and and more reactive in order to run their traditionnal activities in a more and more complexe context, where foreseeability is very uncertain and where sharp competences and complex competences assembling are needed in a short range of time. Something like “special forces forces for special taks”, running in parallel with traditionnal activities which are companies common background operations.

• in order to match this need, adequate expertises and competences are needed.

We have no choice but to admit that high levels of performance are reached in legay and “institutionnalized” activities and the money that has been invested to improve many business processes often provided a ROI. Competencewise, we also have to admit they are really present within organizations. But, for what’s about building efficient adhoc self-organized teams, even if the need is identified it gets harder and harder to be successfull since more and more situations requires this way of doing things.

One reason is that what we call intellectual capital, if present, is not easily accessible and its owners can barely be identified. To improve things, experience and knowledge should be “findable” and “findability” can only come from putting it all in words because it’s (and will remain for years) the more efficient way of indexing and finding datas in an online network, the so-called online network being the only commons space shared by all employees in scattered companies. So people would be able to search the experience and, if they can’t find what they’re looking for, identify referent people they could contact and ask.

All this is nothing more than a matter of information and readiness.

Web 2.0 : a more realistic systemic approach

October 7, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

This could have passed unnoticed. In a post about Dell an the fact their online shop was more 2.0 than their ideagora Ideastorm, Tim O’Reilly made his definition of web 2.0 seriously evolve from the original one.

For your information, here his the “original” defintion as it can be found on wikipedia today.

Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.

A visionnary definition that was victim of the too many interpretations it allowed and gave rise to techno-centric trends. If the web’s flexibility made it possible to get out of that, adapting the definition to the enterprise’s world, aka enterprise 2.0, which was something like “using blog and wikis within the enterprise” did more harm than good to the E2.0 concept, even if Andrew McAfee refind the termis of its definition from the use of web 2.0 tools within the enterprise to the use of emergent social tools within the enterprise and with clients and partners as I noticed in Montreal in may.

In brief, O’Reilly introduced a major evolution of its vision. Even if I often find discussions about definitions more funny than useful, what this one implies deserves that we have a closer look at it.

The art of mistaking means for goals

July 24, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

I often worry when I see companies that mistakes means for goals. It’s a common issue on enterprise 2.0 : “put people into networks”, “share information”, “collaborate” are not goals, they are only means that help to achieve goals. Reduce the time of response, innovate more and quicker, devilver something that exactly meets client’s needs, reusing people’s knowledge are goals

This post [fr] is obviously a good example

Sudden thought during a meeting.

Training’s goal is not the training, it’s the company !

Evaluating the training is relevant only if it measures the impact on the company !

Right said ! It’s one of the consequences of a disease that affects organization, which causes are nearly twins :

- mistaking means for goals

- evaluating a on local scale although the benefits take place on a global scale

It can be linked to my series on the impact of enterprise 2.0 on intangible assets (here, here, here, here and here ), which may be useful when discussing the ROI of enterprise 2.0. As a matter of fact, even if I’m convinced that a “Soft ROI”, unquantifiable, exists, I don’t think the hard ROI topic is taboo and, on the contrary, I’m sure it exists. No need to complicate the issue : the ROI has to be measured at the level of the business processes that are supported by intangible assets, and strategy maps and BSC indicators make it very easy to visualize.

Interesting Report on IT depts role in value creation

July 16, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

The CIGREF (french big companies CIO club) issued and interesting report co-writen with McKinsey. Although it’s writen in French, [ now availabe in english] I would like to share some points with you. And, if ever you know someone who can make a quick translation for you I think it’s really worht.

- IT doesn’t impact directly value creation

- value doesn’t reside in tools but in their use

- as a result, IT depts don’t have to provide people with tools, hoping it will meet their needs and they’ll manage to do something efficient with it, but have to fulfill people’s needs.

- IT depts can’t create value by themselves and on their own, they have to co-create it with business managers.

- by the way, IT’s impact on value creation has to be measured by business indicators and not by IT ones.

That reminds me of the debate on enteprise 2.0 ROI which, according to me, in neither soft nor qualitative but can be well and truly measured through the performance of the business processes it supports. For example, the report quotes a case study from AXA ( a big insurance company) where results are measured through Balanced Scorecard indicators which reminds me of my series about strategy maps.

If this reflection can apply to all IT issues, it’s obviously relevant when discussing social sofware issues.

Whatever, the end of the “one size fits all” logic is coming closer et the time when IT depts role will be to provide people with the tools that match their needs instead of providing a standardized offer which makes IT people feel comfortable but doesn’t help people to be efficient in their day to day job. No more “try to do what you can with what we give you” but “Why can I do for you ? What are your needs ? Fopr what purpose ? ” instead !

It inspires me another reflextion on the very notion of goal. If we consider the IT activity is a goal in itself, the current way of doing things is logical : rationalize costs, tools, providing one unified offer. But if we consider it has to serve corporate performance as a whole, measuring its efficiency according to its own results is contrary to any business efficiency approach. By the way, it takes us back again to the discussion on “local optima vs. global maximum” that companies will soon have to deal with. But we’ll be discussin that further in a few weeks…

However that may be, the report can be downloaded here.