Talent Management | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

Why HR are really central to Enterprise 2.0

May 26, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 3 Comments

Relationships between human resources and enterprise 2.0, or rather the use of social software”, are very complicated. Whatever the way you consider the issue, you always have to deal with HR.

There are two reasons to that :

The first is that many people came to take an interest in enterprise 2.0 because their primary issue was an HR one. In this case, tools were seen as catalysts for new desirable practices that were hard to put to work because of barriers (time / space / tools) social software helped to get rid of.

The second is that the others, those who were passionate about tools but didn’t care much about how large organizations internal concerns, finally realized that they could not avoid bumping into HR people, who, most of times, were not very social software savvy and had a suspicious attitude. I don’t even mention that, in many cases, HR are most often askek to keep things as the are instead of behing innovative. What shows its limits today as we have to admit how the human dimension matters in today’s crisis.

Experience teach us that when HR were deeply involved things were successful (for example Cisco did a great job on leadership and appraisal) and, when they were not, they were taken for troublemakers.

In fact that’s not that simple.

Talent is the bottom-up side of competence

December 24, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

A friend of mine was making fun of the use of the word “talent” since he didn’t see in which way it was different from “ressource”, even if human. He was only seeing one more employer brand trick, a promise that only engages the one who hear it.

It’s true that HR marketing, as general marketing, likes to use new terms to value the people it talks to even if that doesn’t mean anything really changed in the workplace. But if we look into the subject, there is sometimes a true reflection behind all that and we can guess this will spread in the upcomming times.

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Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: competences, empowerment, Human resources, talent, talent management

CE0 concerns : network driven business models

December 16, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

What are CxOs real concerns ? How do they undertsand current issues ? Lots of people are talking about the need for companies to change in order to evolve in the context that is theirs now but it supposes the “information” has reached the highest decision makers and that they really understand what it’s about if we want things to slowly happen.

It would be very usefull for all the people who are “pushing” ideas and evangelizing to know the gap (if any) between their ideas and what CEOs really think.

Fortunately the work was done by PriceWaterhouseCoopers in its 11th “CEO Survey”, titled : “Compete and Collaborate : What is Success in a Connected World”.

One year after predicting that three main trends will impact enterprises (Globalization, connectivity, communities), PWC follows the same way and focuses on the way business models will evolve and, most of all, on the way to create value with employees but also with competitors. With an underlying question : is building business networks a prerequisite to create value in today’s economy ?

Said in practical terms, companies are torn between two forces : collaboraton and collective actions in the one hand, competition and individualism in the other hand. The whole while considering the impact of a strengthened collaboration on power diffusion and control loss by management.

The report being freely downloadable, I’ll only focus on a few points.

1°) Current context

• New growth levers will be agility, talent and technology

• The downturn will bring many opportunities for mergers.

• An interconnected world is more exposed to risk but also offers much more opportunities

2°) Impact on business models

• Companies say their people are more important than ever but they still don’t translate it in concrete facts.

• Middle and junior management weakness is a real barrier to change

• In order to face this block, companies have to involve employees in the change process, build connected organization, develop people continuously, make people accountable at every level and make change become the norm.

• The HR function will have to work in front line, besides top management in order to drive change and not only being a support.

• Companies know of to collaborate on an opportunistic basis. But they still can’t “industrialize” that and learn from their experience. Opportunistic collaboration does not have to be an exception anymore but an organizational principle.

• Higer productivity will only be reached through new communication technologies, global networks and innovative management.

• Networks that were only use to transfer knowledge in a small perimeter will have to be deployed to deal with wider strategic issues; both internally (employess) and externally (partners,cliens…)

3°) Conclusion

• Growth must be responsible

• Defining the conditions for a long term success with clients is essentials. Short term objectives are not enough anymore.

• To make collaboration efficient, the objectives, the operating modes must be redefined, involving all the stakeholders?

PS : not a word on enterprise 2.0 : the evidence that the work around the concept has ended and the time of implementation has come. Lucky we are, it’s on CEOs agendas !