Liens de la semaine (weekly)

• Social Learning, Collaboration, and Team Identity

  « One of my earlier posts posed the question Who’s on Your Team? to highlight the importance of social networking to establishing team identity and enhancing knowledge sharing across distributed, multidisciplinary teams. Its focus was on the importance of social software applications in the Enterprise to the ability of distributed project team members to recognize who is on their team at any point in time, and who isn’t. Organizational analysts refer to the challenge of establishing team identity as a boundary definition problem for teams, when members are spread across large distances whether geographic or cultural in nature. »

  tags: collaboration sociallearning boundaries distributedteams distributedwork sharing awareness ambiantawareness

  • Mortensen and Hinds surveyed twenty-four product development teams, finding that, on average, only 75% of the employees on any given distributed team agreed on who is, and who is not, a member of their product development team.
  • For example, my previous post implied that social software tools in the Enterprise, such as awareness/sharing tools (Yammer, Chatter, etc.), or collaboration tools (Wikis, blogs, discussion forums, etc.) assumed that increased information sharing would decrease such boundary definition problems among distributed teams
  • In other words, lack of an agreement on who is a member of a distributed team does not present a problem that needs solving in order to manage performance. The awareness that differences exist about who is on distributed teams, and recommendations on how to manage those differences, point to the focus needed on collaboration from management.
  • Collaboration isn’t just about people sharing information to achieve common goals. Collaboration is about people working with other people to achieve common goals and create value.
  • Even though goal-orientation is a big part of collaborating, collaboration requires more to achieve goals effectively. It requires shared experience.

• Activity Streams: Moving Beyond Event Aggregation

  « Trend: Activity streams will continue to be a much hyped capability within social platforms. However resulting “stream glut”, interoperability, and security-related issues will threaten benefits unless better user experience design, filtering, standardization, permission models, and back-end analytics are applied. « 

  tags: activitystream filtering informationoverload visibility

  • The concept overall is compelling €“ activity streams allow applications to publish events that are captured by aggregators that serialize the items into a sequence of posts
  • Activity streams also have an interesting intersect with identity. Depending on how someone sets up publishing of their own personal activity stream, the meta data shared about themselves creates a sense of presence enabling others to be aware of their actions.
  • The idea is that we can improve both productivity and collaboration needs by making events more visible and allowing people to take action more effectively (sometimes collectively) based on that level of event transparency (especially when compared to how people rely on their e-mail inbox for much of this type of group notification and work coordination).
  • Of course, you can “follow” people and applications but the more you follow, the closer you move to the original state of too much information flowing by. People end up spending a fair about of time scrolling up and down searching for things they might have missed. Depending on the way activities are aggregated, there may be limits as to how much information is actually kept around to enable historical review.
  • The answer some will argue is better filtering €“ a more advanced way to organize and view an activity stream. By creating virtualized views, or specific streams, we can reduce the “noise” and enable people to watch the activities that are most relevant to them.
  • Activity streams will also need to respect the permission models associated with the event being signaled from a publisher.
  • There is also the possibility that activity streams will be collected in some type of store within the system aggregating events from various publishers. This scenario reinforces the need for security coordination with source system since the data within the activity stream item might need to have access controls similar to those of the “system of record”.
  • If there is a key take-away from this post, it’s that everything mentioned above reinforces the need for interoperability and standardization. Without both, there will be isolated aggregators embedded within multiple enterprise platforms (portals, collaboration, social) with no effective way for organizations to federate events across these activity stream silos.

• AVOP : Apportez Vos Outils Personnels !

  « BYOT : Bring Your Own Technology (Tools). Cette expression est utilisée en anglais pour définir une démarche innovante, qui commence, tout doucement, à  se diffuser : les salariés d’une entreprise arrivent au bureau avec leurs propres outils, PC portables, smartphones ou tablettes. »

  tags: IT consumerization tools BYOT AVOP

  • Dans une démarche AVOP, un salarié peut venir au bureau avec un outil qui lui appartient et l’utiliser pour tout ou partie de ses activités professionnelles.

  • Les principes AVOP sont simples :

    – On fait confiance aux utilisateurs pour choisir les outils qui correspondent le mieux à  leurs attentes.

    – Ils utilisent les mêmes outils dans leurs activités professionnelles et personnelles.

    – Les outils sont achetés, assurés et maintenus par les collaborateurs.

    – L’entreprise participe au financement de ces outils

  • Le salarié prend plus soin de ses outils personnels que de ceux de l’entreprise. Toutes les entreprises savent bien que les voitures de fonction ont plus de bosses que celles des salariés !
  • L’entreprise réduit fortement ses investissements en informatique ; on passe d’un budget CAPEX (investissements) à  un budget OPEX (Opérations).

  • Le mythique TCO, Total Cost of Ownership, d’un poste de travail est immédiatement réduit. La majorité des cabinets d’étude, tels que le Gartner, estime que le TCO annuel d’un poste de travail est compris entre 3 000 et 4000 ‚¬.

    Chez Revevol le TCO d’un PC est de 600 ‚¬ (50 ‚¬x12) ; en passant de 3600 à  600 ‚¬, Revevol économise 3000 ‚¬ par personne et par an !

  • Sur ce thème important, le pragmatisme s’impose : sécurité du poste de travail, sécurité des applications, sécurité des réseaux … pour chacun de ces challenges, il est possible de trouver des réponses raisonnables qui permettent de «ne pas interdire» une démarche AVOP.

• Usage d’Internet : les différences entre générations

  « Dans un récent article, nous nous sommes fait l’écho d’une étude sur les différences générationnelles entre matière d’Internet et de T.I.C.

  Pour prolonger cette étude, vous trouverez ci-dessous une infographie qui permet de visualiser les différences d’usages entre générations. »

  tags: generationy usages internet web onlineactivities socialnetworks Instantmessaging

• Quand Twitter améliore la participation des élèves et leurs résultats scolaires

  « Dans la vidéo suivante, le prof. R. Junco et quelques-uns de ses étudiant-e-s partagent leur avis sur l’expérience menée par cet enseignant concernant l’utilisation de twitter en classe. »

  tags: twitter learning education teaching engagement students

  • Parmi les résultats de cette expérience, menée avec deux groupes soit un groupe utilisant twitter et un groupe de contrôle, il faut noter la variété des utilisations de Twitter, le sentiment des étudiant-e-s d’être plus à  l’aise dans l’échange de leurs idées via Twitter qu’en classe de manière habituelle, la disparition des frontières entre les «clans» et un meilleur taux d’implication des étudiant-e-s ayant utilisés Twitter par rapport aux étudiant-e-s du groupe de contrôle ainsi qu’au final de meilleures notes académiques.

• Is Your Budgeting Process Killing Your Strategy? – Tony Golsby-Smith – The Conversation – Harvard Business Review

  « Ideally, developing a strategy should be exciting: strategy making is about creating a future for your organization, and engaging your people in that process. But all too often, the budget-planning monster weighs an organization down with endless inputs and bureaucracy and rules. The monster does not create coherence. It does not create energy. It does not excite people. No wonder companies have trouble inventing new products, services, and futures. »

  tags: strategy budgets planning

  • « Everything has to be a strategy in order to get noticed, » he told me. « You practically need a strategy for visiting the restroom. »
  • It was as if « strategy » was synonymous with a long-drawn-out, badly managed budgeting process.
  • Reframe strategy as a story. Strategy is not about streamlining or improving present operations or organizational structures. It is not about a budget, a yearly plan, or solving a specific problem. It is a compelling story about discovering the firm’s unrealized possibilities.
  • Every leader has two jobs: to run the operation as it exists today, and to rethink the organization so that it can survive and thrive into the future.
  • When the two activities are conflated, the strong, data-driven budgeting process can overwhelm the more fragile (but equally important) strategy-making process.
  • The strategy-making system should focus on building the company’s « argument » €” its reason for being, its value statement, its goals and ambitions for the future.
  • The budgeting system, by contrast, should be built around key performance indicators with shorter time horizons.
  • Too often, the very people who should be charting the future get so sucked into the operational quagmire that they have no time to think about where the firm should be going. I

• Will Enterprise2.0 Leaders Replace Middle Managers Entirely?

  « I’m beginning to wonder what function middle managers and line managers perform these days. Can these functions be replaced entirely by new Enterprise 2.0 roles and systems? Is something going to fall between the cracks in a rush to remove these roles? Is the traditional Middle Manager heading towards obsolescence? « 

  tags: management middlemanagement jobdescription leadership managers projectmanagers

  • Part of the problem is that while we move towards implementation of E2.0, and introduce change in roles that support it, we have yet to strongly define some of the job characteristics and functions
  • Another crucial function of a line manager is in managing the team’s budget. While it may require input from their team, trying to manage a budget and make such decisions as a group often leads to disaster.
  • On the other hand, there are functions of a line manager that can be supported via technology and organizational work culture, obviating the need for strong skills in this area by any single role

• Richard Veryard’s How Can IT Fix the Problems of Stupid Organizations « Fredzimny’s CCCCC’s

  tags: IT organizationalintelligence crm BI socialnetworking intranet knowledgemanagement commandandcontrol bpm intelligence decisionmaking weaksignals learning innovation

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