Wiki | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

Social medias : don’t mistake revenue for organizational performance

August 13, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Yesterday morning someone pointed out this CioInsight survey to me (the publication date isn’t mentioned although it would be an useful information…).

It tells us that, among the technologies that will be expected to drive revenue, only 11,5% of enteprises quote social networks and only 12.3% quote wiki. Does it mean enterprise 2.0 is unable to generate revenue ?

My answer is “not obviously wrong”. And if one would tell me I spend my time saying the opposite I’d answer people have to be careful of the words they use and the concepts they use.

Let me explain.

Using wikis as a coaching tool

November 28, 2006 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

wikipedia I’ve already writen someting about blogs as a self development tool, now this is wiki as a coaching tool [fr]. You can also find things in English here.

It’s a very interesting concept because it :

- it favors the adoption of a new tool

- it suggests the idea that there people can find a new way for an easy collaboration

- it allows concerned people to organize their collaboration by themselves.

- it allwos a quick evaluation by the particpants who can easily see they quickly came to an interesting result.

- it favors the emergence of a culture of exchange in the organization.

We now have feed back[fr] on a coaching session based on “wikipedia raid”.

So what happened (translation of the post in short)

Context :

a group of people who’ve been working together for 3 days, who are easy the ones whith the others

they know and they are used to goup efficiency techniques and tools

The exercise :

You have 2H30 to organize yourselves in groups

You have tho produce and publish on Wikipedia a “quite perfect” article on a defined subject.

At the beginning the group was hesitating :

Emergence of subgroups

Discussions, disagreements

Isolated initiatives

Then the group started producing

a series of short posts

that were independant but linkable

and that he aggregated in a 3 web pages document

At the end they provided quite a good entry on wikipedia on a subject that have nearly been treated before.

The group was satisfied because they successed in the allowed time and the result is public and published on wikipedia.

The observation of group member’s behaviours, attitudes and discussions about regulation was also very interesting.

I see two interesting points:

- evolution of team practices

- getting used with a new kind of tools.

I also had a comment from the consultant that made this session : people didn’t know anything about wikis before, they liked it and they suggested to use it at work. But IT department doesn’t like this kind of proposal at all

Filed Under: Intranets and digital workplace, Management & HR Tagged With: coaching, collaboration, collaborative-tools, wiki, wikipedia, wikipedia-raid

About transparency in decision-making

August 1, 2006 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

corporate communication I often say that transparency is very important in decision making. Because it gives sense to the decision it’s key in improving membership, trust toward managers and organization, and it makes people more implicated as long as they’ve been implicated in the process. A good approach to solve part of HR problematics.

This post is mainly inspired by a former post by Elizabeth Albrycht that I bookmarked weeks ago.

There are two parts in decision’s transparency:

- toward the outside: it’s very important for customers and (above all) investors. The US context is slightly different from ours since they have to deal with a specific legislation (Sarbanes-Oxley) that force companies to be more transparent on anything that can have a financial impact (that’s to say nearly everything ). Despite this we, european, must keep eyes open wide because such a legislation may be voted in our countries and, above all, that in case of a coming-together beetween Euronext and the NYSE our companies will surely have to take Sarbanes-Oxley in consideration. This is a very important point in a middle term strategy.

- toward the inside: no more to say than that I said in my introduction or what you can find in Elyzabeth’s post. I just want to mention that (few) companies are now getting involved in this (heretic?) way of doing things. Wikis and blogs are empowering transparency in some companies by making it public and sometimes collaborative. A good example I know very well (because I am involved in as an external consultant) is the deployement of blueKiwi as a beta project at Dassault Systemes Sales France, the project becoming now mainstream. Proximity, explaintions, discussions, co-construction…that what it actually brought to the company and we’re far from having discovered all the potential of this “peopleware” tool.

It will take time to make things change but I’m sure things will go this way. It’s our role to make managers understand what they can win in so doing. It’s not about communication but about management and the need you have to count upon motivated and implicated employees…and to bring a touch of collective intelligence in your company.