Web-2.0 | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

McKinsey identifies 6 key sucess factors for enterprise 2.0

March 10, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

McKinsey recently issued a report on enterprise web 2.0 projects which identifies what they think being the six success factors for such projects. Before reading what follows, I suggest you to read what they were saying about that a few months ago in order to get some distance.

Context

Companies has been trying to optimize their transactional processes (ERP, CRM) for a long time. Now, we’re getting close to the end of what these logics can bring and the next challenges are about collaboration and participation. In this approach, many businesses tried to import web 2.0 tools within their organization, hoping they will “de facto” bring the same resultats as those we can see on the general public web. Most of times they failes, for two reasons. The first is the uncomfort of managers toward the potential risks implied by the needed changes. The second comes from the fact managers don’t know how to encourage and make possible the form of collaboration that can create value. Whatever, companies will persist and this market will experience a significant growth in 2009.

According to me it’s a classical analysis of the current situation and issues what does nothing but confirm what many experts have been saying for years. What is good it that somethings things are most likely to be heard when the come with a McKInsey logo.

Technically speaking I would make a reservation about the first chart of the report. According to me web 2.0 is also about transactions, but a different kind of transactions than those that were taken into account before. Maybe it would be useful to qualify more this evolution of the nature of transactions to have a better positionning for this kind of project.

For what’s about companies’ perseverance, I think it’s unavoidable. After having focused on optimizing processes, new performance pools have to be found elsewhere and, I as wrote earlier, the current crisis is more about management and business models than purely economic. So, finding new ways of operating in alignment with tomorrow’s business models is strategic.

Second reservation : in their web 2.0 tools chart, all of them are postionned as being broad communication or creation tools but social networks which appears as being about social graphing. I think we have to get rid of the common general public vision of social networks to make them used to collaborative and intelectual proximity analysis. Their purpose may not be to link people but link people through information and information through people.

Whatever, here are my thoughts about this 6 success factors.

Quoi qu’il en soit McKinsey a identifié six facteurs de succès pour réussir les projets web 2.0 en entreprise. Je vous laisse lire le rapport pour prendre connaissance de leurs analyses, voici le regarde que je porte dessus.

Social Media needs a better signal to noise ratio : discovering Microplaza

March 6, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Information is key for efficient business operations. The way it circulates must be facilitated and fluidified? Everything may be very valuable at a given moment for a given person while being useless for anybody else. Identifying week signals is critical but it implies to increase the amount of information that circulates through the enterprise. People can’t manage more than a given quantity of information but we know that if we want everyone to find what’s needed, more and more information will have to circulate.

Companies are not comfortable with this paradox : the need for making more and more information coming from many people accessible while protecting people from information overload and delivering a clear signal about “what matters”. Knowing that “what matters” depends on the people. So it’s not a surprise that for many businesses, even if they understand there’s a real potential, social media is seen as a source of confusion and information overload.

I often say that, in order to improve things, two main lines have to be explored at the same time

• a human line : trust your environment to filter. Knowing that people you are professionally close to share your concerns, the information filtered by your network is often relevant.

• a software line : tools have to identify “strong weak signals” from the informational hubbub.

Of course, we’re only at the beginning but we can see emerging initiatives that prefigure what things may look like tomorrow. To illustrate my words, let’s have a look at Microplaza.

3 web 2.0 tools enterprises must consider

March 6, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

I often touch on the need for professionaling web 2.0′s tools and usages in order to make them consistent in a corporate context. But we also have to keep in mind that there are some tools and usages that exist on the general public web that businesses haven’t considered yet and that they should bring inside their firewall.

Why three tools ? Because I didn’t find more. Even if I more addicted to the Harvard Business Review than to Techcrunch, it seems to me that as regards tools the essentials are behind us. Some cobble things up, make improveent, build mashups but no new logic comes and bring something really new in the extensive catalog that already exists. I was really looking for some new logics and not for an nth copy of something that already exists.

If you look at web 2.0 tools, very few are those that businesses have not try to implement for internal purposes yet (which does not mean they successfully managed to do so). Blogs : done. Wikis : done too. Social Networs k : they are learning. FlickR and YouTube like ? Done. Google Docs : done. Bookmarking : done. Then come some new services that are nothing but mashups. Let’s end the list.

3°) Silentale

I’ve put silentale on the third step of the podium because it’s not available yet so I rely on the promise that was made at the last LeWeb08 conference when won a special award from the public. The ability to gather and funnel all your conversations, exchanges, wherever they take place is an interesting productivity booster. This is a part of the “personal information supply chain” I’ve already developed here. A part of the corporate plumbing.

2°) Dopplr

To be honnest, Iwould never have thought of mentionning Dopplr here if I hadn’t have a conversation with a friend weeks ago. He works for a company that has subsidiaries all over the world and which teams are send…all over the world too. Experts can be in a local headquarter or send to join temps in a place near you, in the jungle or in the middle of the ocean. “Sometimes we can be 10 at the same time in NYC, each one coming from a different country….plus our NYC team. But it can also happen in the middle of nowhere without any of us knowing others people from the company are there. So we’d like to use Dopplr but, considering our industry, we can’t rely on a public platform. A prive dopplr would do the job”. What may seem of a secondary importance for sedentary businesses may be essential for those where mobility is the norm. And not only for human reasons…

1°) Seesmic.

Here is the big winner, coming in an easy first. It take a long time for businesses to recognize the business value of asynchronous and public conversations between the members of their staff. Video seems to be gadget for many of them. But the video asynchronous public conversations, instead of cumulating all the barriers bring a sudden ray of light as its ROI is obvious. Perhaps it’s also because of the current context.

Imagine that you need your sales team to be more efficient (I know…nobody cares about that today ). They are asked to qualify their leads better, to react in an adapted way to each situation…. The solution has a name : training. But how can an expert trainer work with people all over the world knowing that it’s just not possible to put him on a plane every morning !

A case can be imaginated. Everyone is asked to register his sales speech when he can. The trainer can see them one by one, make corrections showing what to improve, the the sales person start again… It’s more efficient than a videoconference because it does not disturb people’s own agendas, it allow corrections, it allow to teach by the example and, most of all, conversations can made accessible for all so that a real expertise library is available on the intranet with cases, real examples, corrections etc…

Only a blind person would not see the ROI here. And it’s only a quick and dirty example.

Ok…maybe none of these players are interested in this kind of market.

And you ? Do you see others ?

Filed Under: Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: dopplr, e-learning, e-learning 2.0, enterprise, Enterprise 2.0, mobility, seesmic, silentale, social computing, Social Networking, training, video, videoconference, web-2.0

No enterprise 2.0 without professionalizing web 2.0

March 3, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

One of the most common barriers to enterprise 2.0 is web 2.0 itself. Many decision makers, when they start their benchmark, logically look at what happens on the web. Some rely on their own experience, some discover a world that’s really new to them, sometimes without understanding it.

This causes issues on two points of the transformation process :

• decision making : when they have to decide whether to launch a social media project and even if they caught the organizational issues that comes before tools, decision makers think of people telling their lives on facebook, “poke” their friends, play vampires against zombies. They think about the links to funny videos his friends send to him and the conversations on his son’s blog’s comment. They think about those who are looking for someone to lunch with is such district, complain about noisy neighbours or the mediocrity of the TV show they’re watching and share their thoughts in real time on twitter.

If they don’t take any distance, this is what they will have in their mind when they will make their decision.

• deployment : deploying a tool is one thing, but the purpose is to improve performance so to make it used for the right reasons. “Share, collaborate and connect” makes no sense for users. Behaviors that can be seen on the web need to be translated in concrete words in their day to day work context. Beforehand it helps the leaders to vizualive what they are heading to (it’s neither obvious nor unnecessery), down the line it helps users to understand clearly what they are expected to do.

Whatever, a translation of general public usages into business behaviors is needed.

Examples :

• Find one’s college classmates on facebook : search the intranet to find people one doesn’t know yet but that can solve one’s problems. (Need to turn declarative networks in analytic ones).

• Twit one missed the train this morning : mobilize available resources for a true urgency.

• Become “fan of” on Facebook : mobilize people who have a shared interest on a given topic and help them sharing their work, their thoughts in order to achieve their goals faster.

• fill in your facebook profile with your interests and hobbies : make it possible for anybody to know what are your competences, experiences, expertises. Possibly let people to “back” what you say by confirming it.

• Tell your life on your blog : debrief your last mission, your last “win”, in order to share your best practices…or call for help.

• Update your status : say what you’re working on, what you need.

• Vote for a content : help what makes sense for staff at a given moment emerge.

• Comment to say “I agree”, “Cool” : do your management job, teach by the example, encourage / congratulate people.

Other ideas ?

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: Enterprise 2.0, facebook, management, professionalization, social media, usages, web-2.0

Social networks are the quintessence of enterprise web 2.0

February 27, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

The issue has been emerging for years but it’s now a hard trend : companies don’t consider internal use of web 2.0 as a prospective subject and started to work on its implementation. The network logic and the question of knowing how to implement it is now on CEO”s agendas. All the same, people in charge often can’t make head nor tail of it.
In the first years, the equation was as simple as web 2.0 = Blogs + wikis. No sooner companies understand what they could do with these tools that they were told about social bookmarking. Then RSS. Then microblogging. And now social networks.

So many new things that common people in common businesses may get lost, don’t you think ?

In fact the point is not to make a choice between all these tools but to make a rational use of many of them, each having its purpose, in an unified context. Continously switching from one to another is out of question : employees must have everything at their disposal at the same time and in one interface, without having to care about how they communicare together. Another point is that IT depts can’t afford building bridges between a multitude of tools that evolve independantly, depending on the will of each vendor. I don’t even mention the real risk of overlap as solutions become more mature and expand their scope.

In this logic, the emergence of social networks as the main issue doesn’t have to be understood as “one more tool” but, on the contrary, as the integration of what’s above in a consistant approach.

How to integrate innovation in your organization…with your IT dept.

February 17, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

I’coming back on an article titled “Teaming Up to Crack Innovation Enterprise Integration” and issued in the Harvard Business Review in last november. It has many interests : it’s about the vital problematic of innovation, it shows this so-called innovation can only be distributed and rely on sharing, it shows how such principles can be put at work within companies and explain the role of IT.

• The principle

Growth rely on two factors : innovation (ability to propose new products that meet the maket’s expectation and conceive new processes and business models) and integration (ability to make separate entities work together in order to lower structural costs, higer overall production capacity and discover new opportunities).

• The constraints

Integration and innovation share a common point : they are not in most of corporate DNAs. Innovation because it breaks with traditional habits and is more often stifled than promoted, integration because it goes against local optimization that it tries to replace with a systemic approach.

More, because they suppose more exchanges and an increased work on information, these logics need a strong support from IT departments and yet the article mentions a survey that shows that if half the IT depts are in charge of integration and a third of innovation, very few of them are in charge of both.

Using web 2.0 to improve sales performance

February 15, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Dennis McDonald and Social Media Today are working on a white paper in order to define where web 2.0 would have the biggest impact on sales processes. To do that, they put a short survey online in order to gather informations from sales managers about their current practices.

I advise sales manager to complete it so that Dennis will have as much informations as possible to achieve a whitepaper whose resultst will surely be useful for them.

You can take the survey here.

To know more, it’s here.

Filed Under: Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: sales, sales efficiency, sales process, web-2.0

Enterprise 2.0 and the myth of content generation

January 31, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Web 2.0 is fueled by user generated content (UGC) ans, logically, it should be the same within companies. It’s obvious : when connecting people to information and connectiing people through information is a driving principle, it’s easy to undersand that the existence of a published and shared information is the key to the new form of interactions companies want to make emerge.

Here’s for the “expert” side. Because, on the enterprise side things are not that simple. I’m not talking about creating and using contents, I’ talking about the concept of content itself.

It’s said that employees generate lots of contents. That’s true. That they will generate more and more contents. That’s true too. That they must be encouraged to generate and share even more contents. Why not. That companies have to imagine all this amount of information to understand how it’s important to switch to cloude computing. Certainly but..

Contents are like discussions : they are words companies may not understand and that may worry many managers.

It’s a misunderstanding that has to be vanished because the substance remains true. Two apects have to be taken into consideration : formulation and organization.

Let’s put ourselves one second in a manager’s shoes. Everyday he’s asked to do the impossible, he feels light fighting against a non-reactive machine and employees that are overwhelmed by work. Imagine what he may think when someone tells him about the “incredible chance that all the contents his staff will generate represents”. He will answer that his staff is not here to generate and spread contents but to work. If the example of internet is used to convince him, he will have the impression that his department will be turned into a leisure center. That’s one of the examples that show that web 2.0 logics have to be translated when it comes to import them into the enterprise.

Can enterprises organize themselves as markets

January 17, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 3 Comments

What’s a market ? It’s a place when offer meets demand.

Companies love markets because it’s the more efficient way to find outlets for their products and identify suppliers. It’s a competitiveness factor because of the outlets it provides and the optimization of costs that competition makes possible.

The “social” web is a market somehow. Contents can find an audience, ideas outlets, projects people who’ll make them become real, people partners, question answers. It’s because of this market that events as trivial as flashmobs happened, that some people had great carriers evolutions, that some companies where born. This huge self-organized space made possible things that would not have been in a classical, organized, regulated market, operation costs making it irrational the organization of niche micro-markets. It’s because it has no physical nor economic barriers that the web made all this possible : intermediation and transaction costs are near to zero.

There is another place that is full of ideas, projects, needs, competences, longings, question, which would gain a lot if the ones were able to meet the others within its walls : the enterprise.

Experience showed me this is definitively the place where exist the more questions and answers, and the place where we can be sure there are very few chances that the ones meet the others. Companies are traditionnally, on this point of view, the place for misses opportunities. It may sound surprising according to all the things companies do, to all their obvious successes, but when looking at what they don’t or painfully do and would make sense, it may makes us feel dizzy. A kind of vertigo that is proportional with the size of the enterprise. Are there any reason to that ? Of course : high transaction and intermediation costs and the fact companies don’t want to give intermediation up.

McKinsey identifies 6 key sucess factors for enterprise 2.0

Using web 2.0 to improve sales performance

Enterprise 2.0 and the myth of content generation

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