Borrowing profitability from the future ?

December 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : in the knowledge economy economy era, investing on human capital development is key but stays marginal because of short term profitability logics. But does this vision actually creates value ? Locally, for the enterprise, it seems so. But globally speaking the question is worth being asked because the related costs does not disappear but are shifted to the society or the future of the enterprise what, in fine, backfires in a long term perspective since it’s becoming harder to pay the debt caused by decisions made in the past. As cycles shorten, it may lead to a dead-end.

A couple of days ago, a started reading again The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business by Umair Haque.This book was already brilliant when it was issued even if it more comfortable to think that the author was exaggerating too much, that his predictions would never happen. Less than one year after, the least we can say is that he was right.

Many concepts and ideas developed in the book look innovating, disruptive…too much according to some even if the news tell us the contrary. A better explanation would be to say theiy’re thought-provoking. Among these ideas, there’s the one according to which enterprises have been borrowing  their benefits while shifting costs to others for decades and that, one day, the debt becomes so big that the whole system jams.

Practically speaking it means that profitability is often overestimated because enterprises don’t assume all their costs that are shifted to the society of the future of the organization. Environmental costs, training costs…many of these things are known under the name of corporate social responsibility. If the whole costs was taken into account we would see that lots of enterprises are not socially profitable. Le system works until the day when shifted costs became so big that society can’t deal with them. And it backfires on the enterprise.

Social Business and triple bottom line experts (not the social business used to rebrand enterprise 2.0, the real  Social Business) will find here some concepts they know quite well and that I’ll sum up using the words of Antoine Riboud when he was leading Danone : enterprise responsibility does not stop at the enterprise’s doors and making one’s ecosystem poorer to become oneself richer will cause one’s failure because it kills future markets.

I don’t claim I’m able to have such a deep thinking as Haque but, by thinking about these things again and again to assess how relevant they were, I ended asking myself a couple of questions.

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Filed Under: Economy & New Models, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Making the most of key resources in collaboration

September 22, 2011 By 1 Comment

Summary : tomorrow’s organization will be connected and communicative. This is the only way to success in the knowledge economy. But communication and exchange, which are essential foundations for collaboration, need a sender and a receiver who mobilize their attention. But attention, more than time, is the scarce productive ressource which use has to be optimized. In the end, if everyone makes the most of the system in one’s own interest, the whole organization may become paralyzed. Solutions exist and suppose more accessible business tools, information filtering based on context and better education and training.

Whatever the organizational structure is, top-down, networked, push, pull etc… there’s always a constant concern : optimizing the use of resources. Said in other words : “get the maximum by spending the minimum”, “prevent productive potential wasting”.

In this productivity driven view, people see time as being the limiting factor. That’s, right…at least in a system based on repetitive tasks and involving few knowledge if any. But this assumption becomes wrong in a knowledge economy where time is not a relevant productivity indicator at all because individual production is not linear or constant anymore. And not individual either by the way. In this context, the limiting factor is attention, which could be defined as qualified time, a subdivision of time. That’s the time dedicated to do/deal with/process something, being focused on it (by the way it would be interesting to start a discussion on what attention at work is….to find a less shoddy definition than this one).

So attention is the scarce resource which use has to be optimized.

But we know than nobody can be focused, attentive, 8 hours a day. A least not 8 hours in a row. That’s, in fact, a reason why the barrier between personal and professional time is blurring.

One of the best way to avoid productive time wasting is not to make sure everyone is checking in the office at the right time but to make work tools available when and where attention is maximal. Note that attention is not always the result of a voluntary action. Who did never have a brilliant idea about a business concerns at night, on vacation or during a week end…and lost it because he was not empowered to work or share it at the very moment when it came ? Moment when one’s mind shifted to a business focus unpurposely on a non dedicated time ?

Another way is to avoid disruptive elements that come and interrupt employees in an “attention phase”. These elements are well known : untimely email reception as well as any incoming signal that grab attention and force to refocus after : instant messaging, phone calls or social media. There’s an easy solution being used by many people : disconnecting from everything. But disconnection has risks : not being able to communicate with people who can help, not receiving the information that would help to solve a problem. The notion of context that helps filtering the available information and, most of all, the information being pushed at a given moment is essential and will play a key role in tomorrow’s business applications.

Then after, there’s the need to master the human factor. As a matter of fact, these signals don’t fall from the sky : they’re sent by people. That’s the paradox of the new coming forms of organizations. If each person makes the most of his ability to share, alert and mobilize others, the situation will look like a tragedy of the commons applied to attention. If each person makes the most of other’s attention in his own interest, the collective result will be horrendous because no one will have enough attention left to do his own work. This issue is fare from being the easier to solve.

Of course, specific education and training will be needed to make people aware of the attention paradigm and what a wise use of people’s attention means (using any communication channel is using others’ attention by the way). But is this a risk for weak signals and serendipity which are essential in agile, networked and “pull” organization ?

The result will surely be a mix of all these solutions…but is still unclear…and far.

Anyway, if organizations need to become (over ?) connected and communicative, they’ll need mechanisms that will prevent these skills from backfiring and avoid the paradoxical trap according to which when everyone makes the most of the system, the organization as a whole will suffer from it.

 

 

Filed Under: Economy & New Models, Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Knowledge & Information management, Management & HR, Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Optimizing the value of time

April 28, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : time measurement is a permanent concern for any organization because it’s tightly connected to productivity : the less time needed to perform a task the more productivity and, so, the less costs. That’s not sure at all in the knowledge economy where time and value are loosely tied. If time measurement is not a relevant indicator anymore, the focus has to be put on created value and not necessarily by increasing work intensity which is not key for knowledge worker but rather by working smarter.It will need, among other, to push information depending on its relevance in a given context and a better information sharing, what is the “informational” version of economies of scale.

 

How many times did we hear, while asking employees to change anything in the way they work and collaborate, comments like “we don’t have time” or, from their managers, “how much time will it take to them ? I don’t want them to waste their time”.

The reason ? Time is easy to measure and, once done, costs are easy to infer. In fact…it’s not that easy. What was true decades ago isn’t anymore. While the nature of work is evolving and people have to perform many tasks in parallel, trying to know how much time was needed for each of them is counter productive. What I often explain by “it never takes a lot of time but it takes time often”. While we’re being asked more and more to collaborate, be available to help others, all these activities are seldom taken into account. The consequence is that the role of a given person in getting a result often remains unknown but, even worse, that this person may be blamed for collaborating or helping others.

So, even if we keep up measuring time because we haven’t found another better right now, it’s now obvious that it’s not a relevant indicator to measure the performance of a person, a team or the whole organization.

Let’s also add that if time is not relevant anymore to track costs, it’s not relevant either to track value creation because it’s not proportional with time anymore. In the knowledge economy a lot of value can be created in 10 minutes by solving a problem or having an idea while days can be spent to do something that’s key in a global project but has few value per se.

Recently talking about organizations that want to move away from email to other tools, I heard :

- “they say employees are spending too much time in emails”

- “And they think they’ll spend less time in social networks ?”

That’s true. On the other hand, if the amount of time spent remains the same and, so, its cost don’t decrease, its value can be increased. Like it’s often said, an information send by email is only accessible by its receivers, if shared it becomes a part of the informational capital of the organization, can be reused and make other people save time. An information may be sent to someone who don’t need it while someone else may need it to perform a valuable task.

So, the question is not time measurement but how to optimize its value.

Some ideas ?

• Make people focus on what create value. Making a decision relying on information creates value while searching information to make a decision is a waste of time. It can be made possible by “analytics” that will suggest relevant content and people as well as robots based on “Watson-like” technologies. By the way, it’s impressive to see how many organizations say they have a sharing problem while, before all, they have a search problem.

• Multiply the value of time by making what’s been produced reusable. It will need sharing mechanisms “in the flow of work” as well as generalized capitalization practices.

• To be completed with you own ideas…

Filed Under: Economy & New Models, Knowledge & Information management, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Does your enterprise social network really make you more productive ?

August 24, 2010 By 1 Comment

Summary : one of the most frequent arguments used in favor of the implementation of an internal social network is productivity improvement through the ability to access and mobilize resources more easily. While that’s an undisputable truth at the individual level (and provided the tool is used by enough people), it does not mean that the company is made more productive : optimizing tasks and optimizing the chain of tasks that lead to the final deliverable, what is the only thing that counts, are not the same thing. So, companies will have to consider their whole production processus and identify their bottlenecks that prevent the chain from taking the most of local improvements.

One of the promises that usually come with a social network (and even with “anything 2.0″) is that some time will be saved. Since, in order to deliver the expected results, people and knowledges have to be put together in order to make progress along a processus, the more these resources are available and accessible, the faster problems are solved, solutions are found and the better decisions are.

So, here’s a very usual indicator : if any employee losts 38 minutes a day to find information, documents or people, if he can save 5, 10 or 15 minutes a day, it means x minutes a week, y minutes a year, what can easily be turned into money. By saving 5 minutes a day, your employees will make you save billions every year.

Hearing such a thing, and even if the promise is seducing and the logics credible, many managers feel there’s something wrong and they’re often right : 5 minutes saved every day, or even 30 may equal to…no saving for the company. But we must not throw the baby out with the bathwater : it’s possible to deliver the promise provided we focus on the right thing.

5 minutes saved at the employee level are…saved at the employee level

So imagine that an employee can save these much-touted 5 minutes a day ? Does it mean that he’ll be productive 1/2h more a week ? 5 minutes is the time for a coffee  break and there are many chances he will use the time he saved for his own purpose. He may also use it to cool off, knowing that even unconsciously he’ll adapt his pace to deliver at the due date. So if he realizes he can save time on some tasks there are many chances that he’ll take advantage of that to slow down or start later. I don’t even mention the case when these five minutes are 20 times 15 seconds…

Of course that’s a positive thing for the organization if employees can cool off, take the time to discuss etc… But that’s not what they were expecting at the beginning..

Optimizing tasks is useless

In fact, the whole value proposal relies on the optimization of a given task : search (whatever people are looking for). Yet, search is only one task, even a sub-task, in a more global processus.

Finding the right information or the right person helps to achieve any assigned task faster. So they can start the next earlier and so on and, at the end of the week, they would be more productive. That’s good for their individual evaluation and they’ll even be rewarded. But what’s the benefit for the organization ? None. The organization may even lose by rewarding people for something that did not change anything.

Generally, people are a link in a much longer chain. The task one achieves is necessary for another to start his part of the work and so on. If the first does things faster but the one who have to carry on or the manager that has to validate are not able to react as fast, some time will be saved for one employee but nothing will change for the company because the overall performance of the whole processus won’t be improved and, at the end, the client (internal or external) won’t be served faster. The only consequence of one employee being more productive is more files, emails and to dos for the others. That increases the pressure on the othere, brings more confusion, make things more complicated because they have to re-priorize things continuoulsy and disperse. In the worst case they’ll try to increase theyr own pace to keep up the with other’s and make more mistakes.

Optimizing people’s work at an individual scale seldom brings the expected results if the processus is not rethought and limiting factors, bottlenecks are not dealed with. It implies individual needs and actions are seen as understood as a part of a longer process that is sometimes formalized, sometimes informal (so to be identified).

It reminds me of a situation I had to deal with a few years ago. A manager was complaining that, despite of all the many undertaken efforts, the productivity of his team was not improving. Of course, he was thinking that employees had to be blamed on for that while the whole staff was close to explode due to the impressive amount of work they had to do and the high level of pressure. At the end, it was made clear that, since the manager had to validate all the files his staff has worked on before pushing it to another team…he didn’t have enough time to deal with all his team was producing. All the efforts the make the team more productive were dashed because he didn’t paid attention to his own role in the processus.

Understanding the whole processus is mandatory

So, it’s easy to understand that, once people’s day to day work has been explored with them and that some new practices that may make them more efficient, productive, have been identified, it’s important to think it as a part of a more global chain, to understand what one’s job serves (and whom), and look for bottlenecks. These bottlecks limit the overall performance of the chain and are often people at the center of a network (even informal), those most of the information has to go through. So they may be managers.

Then, each case has its own story, context and solution. Maybe the decision making process is not relevant, maybe an “a priori” validation is not necessary since corrections can be made afterwards when needed, maybe this part of the job can be handle by other people, maybe the only fact he can access his business tools while away from the office would be enough, maybe the “innovation board” does not meet often enough to deal with all the ideas that are submitted….

“Anything 2.0″ can make many things more fluid but won’t solve the bottlneck question that bridle “anyhting 2.0″ and prevent it from bringing significant performance improvements. Now it’s up to HR and managers to deal with that.

Finally it’s a very old debate that is much older than enterprise 2.0, it’s all about the pursuit of a local maximum vs. a global optimum.

Anyway, measuring any link of the chain is often misleading : what has to be optimized and measured is the whole chain.

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Managing attention : a key challenge for the future of businesses

April 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment

I’ve been willing to tackle this topic for a long time and seing Julien le Nestour‘s presentation at the last Enterprise 2.0 forum made me feel it was high time to put my thoughts in words.

Facing an increasing amount of information and considering the time we need to peruse, process, generate it, time is a key factor. In fact, even ignoring information takes time. But, on the other hand, I’m convinced that the assertion that we’ve reached a point of no return, that we don’t have time anymore to deal with more information is wrong. We don’t have a time problem but a prioritisation one. The point is not to have less accessible information but a better qualification of the information that’s pushed to us (the rest being accessible,findable in case of need) and a better hierarchisation to be able to handle what matters first.

These prioritisation and hierarchisation issues matter even more now that many enterprises and vendors realize that providing users with a unified collaboration context (ie the “unique customized home page” or “unique activity stream”) will be a major issue in the upcoming months. In the general public web we already saw a first attempt with Google  Wave : a service with a really impressive potential that was quickly deserted by those who were supposed to be its power users, those who had to centralize a large amount of information feeds in an unique interface and for whom prioritisation and hierarchisation were the missing feature. On the business side and according to what I saw at Lotusphere, Lotus Notes is also heading this way and I bet that the success of this new approach will highly depend on how the product will handle these issues. If it doesn’t…

So we have to identify some objective criterias for prioritisation. To make it simple, we can say that prioritisation depends on the value created while handling the information. For instance, spending one hour to answer a colleague who needs some information to handle a strategic activity or task is more important than spending one hour to read emails (or anything else) that are nothing but “for your information” emssages.

The same logics applies when trying to introduce a new tool in a context where the ROI is known for being very hard to get. So, Julien showed us of Schlumberger used another indicator called ROA (Return on attention) that helps to evaluate how a new tool is worth according to the value of the time of the user, the number of occurence of a given task and its criticality in a given use case (ok…I simplified it a lot).  This allows not only to easily justify a new tool according to its benefits compared to the current situation but also to take into account the importance of things like ergonomics in an arbitration thats supposed to be economical. As a matter of fact, maybe the best enterprise social software platform on the market has a blog feature but if the interface is so boor that the time people will spend to understand and use it will not be justified by the benefit in return, it’s better to take a tool that’s less “prestigious” but that will be easily used by anybody.

There’s also one more layer of complexity. Prioritisation is not only a matter of individual arbitration but a collective dynamic. I prioritize according to my own benefits and objectives, the anyone who sends me information prioritizes according to is own objectives. What can be strategic for one may be trivial for the other. So it’s important to have some “nice behaviors policies” (think about the other, wonder what is necessary…) and some arbitration mechanisms (when should I help, when should I say no…)

All these questions have to be tackled when tools are implemented, in the change management process and, beforehand, by vendors who won’t be able any longer to afford building bottlenecks and let users sort them out. These bottlenecks are a key issue in enterprise performance and have to be tackled in a systemic and coherent way by tools, business practices, management and organization.

Since real time seems to be a very trendy topic now, understanding its limits according to prioritisation issues may be quite useful.

I’ll conclude quoting Julien Le Nestour : attention is now a key resource, it’s scarce and constrained so its use have to be optimized in priority, even before funding.

Filed Under: Knowledge & Information management, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Stop saying nonsenses about Facebook and productivity

September 3, 2009 By 1 Comment

One day we can read that using Facebook at work increases productivity by 9%. The day after we ear that it decreases by 1,5%. Depending on people’s interest, sometimes a liberal attitude is promoted, sometimes a total ban, sometimes an internal placebo made of home-mades facebook-likes intranet. This is only my own opinion but I’d like to share it : the best way to use such surveys is to…throw them into the trask and never listen to any (disinterested) conclusion that can be drawn from them.

First I’d like to know how Facebokk’s users productivity is measured against those who don’t use it in the workplace. This means two things : those who use it at home can get benefits they’ll use once in the workplace. And vice-versa. And conversely. The second is how we know some use it and when ? Of course the IT dept can track such things, but what about mobile use on iPhone or BlackBerry ? Last, I’d like to understand what “productivity” exactly means. It’s easy to undersand what it mean on an assembly line, less in office work. Ok, the final result may be measured, but what about intermediate indicators ? Admitting that productivity is the right word, it does not take into account something that is key in the modern economy : the accumulation of knowledge at a M moment that makes someone more productive at a M’ moment. Unlike M. Taylor’s time, productivity is not an instant measurement and being less productive at a given moment helps being more productive later. For some people, Facebook may contribute to the accumulation of knwoledge.

I’d also like to point at another issue : numbers only say what you want them to say. If any service or department is underutilized, employees are obviously unproductive. Maybe that’s the reason way they use facebook in the workplace. There are many things to see about how to deal with such causality chains.

To end, we have to consider two situations : when Facebook is a work tool and when it’s not.

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Filed Under: Management & HR, Software & Tools Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Efficiency, performance, constraints and things 2.0

April 16, 2009 By 3 Comments

We saw in a previous post that one of the best ways to improve performance was not to push to people to make impossible things but to get rid of the constraints that crub their performance. Once that said, if the vision is understandable by everyone (rather than trying to push something large in a blocked thin pipe, better unblock and enlarge the pipe), it’s still useful to see what can be done in the day to day work.

So let’s find out what those constraints are and how to get rid of them. This will also be a good way to understand that enteprise 2.0 is not a goal by itself but a trigger to achieve organizational goals.

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Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Productivity : this elusive graal

January 15, 2009 By Leave a Comment

A few weeks ago  I threw a bottle in the sea on the productivity question, a graal everyone’s looking for without really getting it. I had a lot of answers on my french blog which inspires me to write this synthesis.

I was sure there will be a lot of discussions but I didn’t think there was such a gap between what productivity is supposed to be (a ratio) and how people consider and apply in their everyday job, with a wide variety of senses.

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Filed Under: Economy & New Models, Management & HR Tagged With: , , ,

Wasting time is not a matter of tools

October 2, 2008 By Leave a Comment

On of the main issues about social software introduction within companies is that it would make people waste time. In order to answer this question, we have to understand the underlying concerns.

Because the suggested way of working doesn’t need many discussions : in the current context, people are more efficient in a network rather than in a silo. But why so many anxieties ? In fact there’s no doubt about tool’s efficiency but about the way people may use them, possible deviant attitudes that would transform a productivity tool in an unproductivity tool.

Two situations have to be distinguished : the case of internet use from the office and the one of using the same kind of tools in an intranet context.

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Filed Under: Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Can we identify good managers by the way their team uses the net ?

October 1, 2008 By Leave a Comment

A very common discourse within companies is : “our people waste their time on social networks and, more globally, on the web. We have to restrict access to it”.

If, when talking about social networks, it depends on the way people use them, so its important to grant access to what useful for business, I find it very damageable when companies come to restrict access to the whole web.

What are the motives for that ?

First comes security. I think it’s more a convenient motive than a relevant one and is an excuse for the next point I’ll mention. Second, it’s IT depts job to ensure security without blocking everything. Did we remove doors and windows from houses and offices in order to prevent to struggle against burglars ? No, because we need to go outside, to see what’s happening by the window,
The second point is abiut productivity. It’s a waste of time and people are not here to do that during work hours. But what does companies mean by “doing that” ?

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Filed Under: Economy & New Models, Knowledge & Information management, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,