The most successful companies are those that think jointly technological change, work design and the changes in internal social relationships.” Antoine Riboud.
In some pevious posts we (quickly) saw how enterprise 2.0 can impact enterprise’s intangible assets, supporting the value creation process.
But, looking at the following diagram, we can also wonder if it’s possible to go further in this reflection.
According to me it’s obvious, mostly on the following issues :
[Read more...]
This is the third (and last) post of the series about enterprise 2.0 and intangible assets. Why do “organization capital” ? It’s the ability to mobilize and support the change process that is needed to support strategy.
It’s made of four elements :
- culture : appropriation of the vision and key values needed to support strategy
- leadershp : presence of skilled leaders at every level of the organization
- alignment : link between objective and individual and collective reawards to reach strategic goals
- teamwork : shared knowledge across the organization;
In concrete terms those components are about behavioral change. Some are dedicated to value creation (focus on client, be reative and innovant, deliver results), some to strategy execution (undertanding the mission, the rules, link the financial aspects to strategy, communicate with transparency, team work).
Do we really need to add anything since the link with E2.0 seems obvious ?
After some days “off” (too busy at work to take care of my blog), this is the second post of my series about how enterprise may support strategy. After human capital comes information capital.
It’s about assessing the availability of the information systems, networks and infrastructure which aee needed to support strategy.
A first sight the two concepts are very far one from the other. If we consider Norton and Kaplan’s model, we’re in the ERP field. As a matter of fact they talk about “transformational applications”, ” Analytic Applications”, Technology infrastructure” and “transaction processing applications”.
But it inspires me a few thoughts . [Read more...]
As we saw in a previous post, since human, information and organization capital support all the processes that create value, the question we have to answer is whether all these things we put in this “big bag” called enterprise 2.0 can help developing this pool of value. Or to make it clearer : in which way a company can rely on enterprise 2.0 to achieve its goals.
I’ll start with a warning : when saying enterprise 2.0 I’m talking in a broad sens, which also includes management practices and culture in addition to the tools. I don’t believe in the tool-centric definition that reduces a company to the tools it uses and forget its rules, its people, its culture, its history.
I’ll also add that what I say is “how can enteprise 2.0 help” : in no way I’d think that enteprise 2.0 would be self-sufficient. What we’re talking about must be used together with many existing things.
So let’s start our first step : human capital.
As I said in a previous post, there’s one and only one way to know whether something is worth or not : whether it supports the enteprise’s strategy, whether not. In the first case it’s worth being done, in the second it’s worth being forgotten. In concrete termes, that mean the only question in the enterprise 2.0 debate should be to explore if, and in which way, it can support strategy.
As enterprise 2.0 aims at taking the most of intagible assets, we have to wonder if those assets are really useful or if they’re just “nice to manage”, and if what we put in this big bag called enterprise 2.0 can really help to harness them. This will be the purpose of a coming series of posts.
The problem with intangible things is that even if we feel they are very important, i’s hard to mathematically quantify their contibution. We know they help to create value without being able to say how and how much. Because of that, when it’s time to make a decision about investment, this area is often left aside.
Since I needed a starting point, my first though took me to the balanced scorecard. Without any prejudice, just because ar first sight I felt there were some possibilities there.
My first thought were confirmed : even if it’s reaaly interesting and powerful, it’s often partially applied, and our balanced scorecard becomes unbalanced due to the priority given to the financial side.
Norton and Kaplan must have come to the same conclusions since they improved their system with the concept of Strategy Maps. Unfortunately most companies focus on the original concept expressed in 1992. Strategy maps dates from 2001 and obviously too few companies really paid attention to what was really important with that.
Instead of presenting different perspectives and hope an equal importance will be given to each, strategy maps show the correlation between all the perspectives in the purpose to support strategy. And the result is meaningful
Of course it’s only a framework that has to be adapted to each particular case but we have things to learn from that.
For example we can see that organization capital, information capital and human capital are the base of every formal business process which contribution in value creation we know how to measure. This sound obvious but shown like that it makes things clear. Without the appropriate clture it’s impossible to support any strategy. It’s the same for key competences, information, management methods etc.
In 60% cases, enterprises have the right strategy but they fail to support it. Perhaps because fundamentals are neglected.
In the coming posts we’ll talk about those differents aspects, what they mean, how to measure them, how to value them. And once we’ve finished we’ll be able to say whether enterprise 2.0 can help, in its technical and organizational side.
Some elements to begin :
• 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.
For those who want to go furher I recommend you to read the excellent “Strategy Maps“.
(But the opinions expressed in this blog are only my own)
You can find the "original" french version of this blog here
