Workflow | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

Tools connect people. But with what ?

January 6, 2012 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

summary :tomorrow’s enterprise will be connected. And employees too. If they don’t they’ll become obsolete and useless : success, performance and competitiveness relies on connectivity. That’s why businesses have been trying to connect their employees for years. But connect them to what ? To their colleagues ? To information ? Of course. But the most important point has been overlooked : reconnect them to their work. By forgetting people’s challenges, the very reason they were part of the organization and neglecting execution for communities and conversations, businesses lead their social business and enterprise 2.0 projects in dead ends they have to get out of now !

In a very near future, connectivity will be a key factor of competitiveness. That’s obvious because it was ties businesses to a complex environment to feel its changes, its moves to react relevantly. Another point is that, since no one can know everything, everyone need to be able to get in touch with someone who knows to do a better work, solve problems, make decisions.

So the future of the connected organization is discussed a lot but that hides another reality : the connected employee. Of course, there won’t be connected organizations without connected employees. That’s obvious but help us to consider what’s been undertaken by lots of organizations with new eyes. Some tried to be highly connected with their external environment while disconnecting their employees. Others tried to improve their internal connectivityfirst. That was the starting point of many enterprise 2.0 or social business projects : employees need to be connected.

Yes but…connected to what ? If you’re trying to understand why many projects of this kind are still struggling at delivering tangible results, a part of the answers lies there.

- connecting employees with information : yes. It’s been done at two levels : social bookmarking (what is still a minor usage of internal social platforms) and exchanges within communities that is main objective of many projects.

- connecting employees with employees : that’s the role of social networks. But, to work, it needs that people can be identified through their contributions and up to date rich profiles.

That’s working but, in most cases, not very well. Of course there are exceptions but not enough to think that a new era has strated. After the novelty and euphoria phase that can make 80% of employees or more register on the social platforms that hosts these new usages, numbers can quickly decrease and, in the end, only a few percent will be active users and contributors. Not that high regarding to the investment. One of the reasons is obvious : considering the social platform as a bubble disconnected from the rest of the intranet is a first step to failure. The second reason is that even if people are socially addicted (what is not proven at all), even if they are willing to exchange and connect with their peers, employees are not internauts nor the ones they are at home.

What do employees need to turn 2.0 ?

May 27, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 2 Comments

The paradox of enterprise 2.0 is that even when businesses manage to go on their fear of the unknown and decide to embrace this new paradigm, they are often not followed by their employees even if they bring a solution to their problems with solutions that are supposed to make their work easier.

Everybody now understands that employees need mor than tools and communication campaigns to adopt new practices and behaviors even if that would be beneficial to them. Even saying “do whatever you want, we trust you” doesn’t work”.

Here’s a little checklist of customer’s expectations.

• What are the expected outcomes ? What am I supposed to “produce” on these tools, and what is expected from the groups / communities I’m a part of.

• What are the limits to my responsability ? To what extent am I autonomous, beyond which point should I ask for permission or refrain from doing anything.

• Is it a part of the job I’m paid to do ? Will my manager or any person paying me with his budget consider my activity as wasted time ? Will they blame me for participating or reward me ?

• What’s my exposure ? How to control it ? What kind of information am I supposed to share ? Facts or opinions that engage me ? Can I set my own limit ? Who can access what ? And what will the information I share be used for ?

• Show me first and then I’ll follow.

• Before asking to me to any new thing, show me how all that can help me to do what I’m already doing today, how it makes it simpler and easier.

• Don’t scatter my attention. I already have so much to do so don’t distract me with pointless information and issues that have no added value according to my objectives and daily tasks.

• Don’t break my “personal workflow”. I don’t have time to play with 3 applications, aggregate information, forward it, copy/past. In this case I’ll focus on the tool that is not the best but that can do a little bit of anything, even not in an efficient way, without having to switch between several apps. (email ?)

• Don’t add but remove. For 50 years, the response to any new issue was a new layer of solution (tools, rules, practices), These layers have been piling up for decades and we’ve reached such a point that they slow me down and are sometimes contradictory the one with the other. Instead of adding new layers, remove those that are actual burdens, doesn’t make any sense anymore and are useless.

• Don’t bring me into one more experiment. I’m not a guinea-pig and the time I’m investing penalizes me in my real work and is even bad for my image and reputiation. I’m ready to learn, to explore, provided it won’t be shut down in 6 months and it will help me in my day-to-day word.

• How information will be used ? Reused ? It will help me to know what to share.

• Teach me, show me how to articulate the structured and unstructured part of my work, the formal and informal ones. And I hope tools take this need for articulation into account because I don’t want to play the human connector.

• Teach me how to seamlessly integrate it in my daily work and how to translate it into a simple, scripte, reassuring routine I’ll follow without thinking about it.

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: adoption, change-management, Collaborative practices, Enterprise 2.0, social routine, workflow

Think 2.0 and search for your client

April 2, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

In the “how to build enterprise 2.0″ or “how to make management 2.0 happen in the workplace” series (which is not always the same thing) I think that before defining any action plan it’s important to understand the logic underneath. As a matter of fact, it’s impossible to bring anyone to do anything if he can’t understand the logic. What has to be done to make things change is known by everybody, it’s nothing but classical change management actions, but many people still refuse to consider them and keep on asking “how” because what they’re being proposed is out of their logic. And since there is no blinder person than the one who doesn’t want to see..

Many blocks are related to questions such as “who can”, “who has the right to”, “who leads”, “who commands”, “who controls”, “who validates”… The matter is not to suscribe to any theory of the organizations but to know what is effective.

Let’s consider things from the beginning.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: bottom-up, client, management, management-2.0, pull, workflow

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 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.

2.0 has to be aware of business orientation

November 25, 2007 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

In the “let’s make 2.0 a performance oriented tool instead of a nice concept”, some more ideas.

What are enteprise 2.0 specialists biggest challenges ? Overriding fear and have the tools adopted in order to demonstrate their added value.

Because by dint of hearig about agility, informal, off project spontaneous connexions between individuals, decision makers realize than, even if the concept seduces them and if they think it will lead to gains, it’s something that has nothing to do with the organization they’ve known for ages. Hence the conclusion : it’s the reverse so it’s the opposite…so it’s risky…so I’m affraid. In the following paragraphs we’ll see it’s rather about complémentarity and that [Read more...]