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Curation in the Enterprise: Actionable information
In Steve Rosenbaum’s Curation Nation, Esther Dyson quotes Bill Gates as saying “The future of search is verbs”. Esther goes on to say that nobody really looks for something per se, they look for things in order to do something.
Action.
When Marc Benioff elucidates his vision for the Social Enterprise, he stresses the importance of having information you can act on. So for the last few months I’ve been spending time thinking about what makes information actionable, and whether the social enterprise helps or hinders in this regard.
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In Steve Rosenbaum’s Curation Nation, Esther Dyson quotes Bill Gates as saying “The future of search is verbs”. Esther goes on to say that nobody really looks for something per se, they look for things in order to do something.
Action.
When Marc Benioff elucidates his vision for the Social Enterprise, he stresses the importance of having information you can act on. So for the last few months I’ve been spending time thinking about what makes information actionable, and whether the social enterprise helps or hinders in this regard.
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For information to be actionable, it must have at least four characteristics:
It must be accurate, and verifiably so
It must be timely
It must be comprehensive
It must be comprehensible -
First, because of the transparency implicit in the social enterprise, we get Linus’s Law in operation: given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. So
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This power is further amplified by the existence of a second phenomenon, the multidisciplinary team. Social enterprises are fundamentally non-hierarchical in practice, given that everyone and everything is a node on the network
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Besides, the very concept of everything in the network being a node increases substitutability. You no longer have to wait because someone in the serial process is busy or on vacation or something, the social enterprise has no time for all that.
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Consequently it is more likely that the information is generated by a domain expert, close to the action as it were. If the original information was not actually generated by the domain expert, it is reasonably likely that he or she will annotate the info, comment on it, tag it, augment it in some way.
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, the social enterprise is built with a deep understanding of entitlements and permissions; as long as you have the right to see it, you can get to the source information, the order in question, the compan profile, the complaint, whatever. So the context of the information is carried with the content. You can drill down as needed, or see the summary.
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The social enterprise is therefore designed to provide more accurate, verifiable information, faster and more effectively when compared with the traditional enterprise, easier to understand, more complete and in context.
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The Social Contract in a Social Business | A Smarter Planet Blog
« Now businesses and organizations are seeking to adapt to the Social Web and incorporate this big switch in human behavior and cultural habits into their operations and strategies. At IBM €” and consultancies such as Dachis and Altimeter €” this new stratagem is often referred to as “social business.” It entails more than just business use of social software and networks for external purposes such as marketing. In the fuller view, social business is about re-shaping organizations to become more collaborative, communal and capable in fostering human relationships. Not surprisingly, such a new frontier is right in the wheelhouse of the strategy & transformation consulting services offered by Global Business Services (GBS), the part of IBM I work in. »
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our relationships (with colleagues and customers) are forged on trust, a shared sense of purpose and a willingness to share and build on each other’s ideas. In this sense I think you could say that a social business strives to be a much more human (and humane) kind of entity.
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On this score, my informal social contract with IBM is pretty great €” I’m not just able to devote time and energy to strategic sharing and innovating in social media, I am generally recognized and rewarded for leading by these examples.
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In my view, more people, in more kinds of companies and in a wider range of roles, need this kind of clear charter. Social computing skills and best practices should no longer be limited to “evangelists” or enthusiasts, but should become an integral facet of professional business leadership.
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By social contract, I don’t mean a formal agreement or legal document, but a more explicit understanding between organizations and their people (or at least across teams, departments and peers)€¦ something more defined as official policy, doctrine or value.
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(IBM developed one of the most emulated corporate Social Computing Guidelines, but it is centered on giving IBMers direction on how to delve responsibly in external social media and networking. It doesn’t really establish sharing and collaboration as part of every IBMer’s role or responsibility.) IBMers and workers elsewhere should know how they are expected to share their knowledge and expertise; in return, workers should be clear on how businesses and organizations will measure and reward that behavior.
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If organizations want to become more innovative and productive by encouraging and rewarding their workforce to share, collaborate and build collective intelligence they must do more than grant permission for people to build relationships and share their experience inside and outside the organization. They must bake incentives for this new way of working into their policies, management systems and training programs.
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Right now, many businesses don’t have the kind of social (business) contract with workers they need, and may even be discouraging sharing. Some companies forbid or restrict external social sharing, largely because they don’t have the systems, controls or guidelines to make these efforts constructive rather than the productivity drain they may perceive them to be.
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Some people might cringe, or be fearful, of this kind of personal openness or institutional data mining. I embrace it because I expect that the data I share (and over which which I have lots of privacy controls) will enhance my reputation and IBM’s ability to evaluate my contributions. As a knowledge worker in a very large, complex, global organization, I want my work and effort as a social business activist to be empirical and transparent, not just anecdotal, or based solely on the subjective opinions of managers or peers, (as much as I may enjoy working and collaborating with so many of them).
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Finding the right person within your organization
« Understanding who knows what inside today’s modern organizations can be an exercise in frustration, especially when you’re trying to get things accomplished in tight timelines. Social software that delivers insight into the community can help by making it easier to find the right person. SAP’s Scott Lawley explores how, by leveraging community connections and interactions, a series of expertise dimensions can be measured, computed, and put to good use to improve collaboration. »
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Sales, however, has a different story. The sales organization is rewarded for selling. Period. Sales reps are generally held accountable for deals closed and revenue targets on a quarterly and annual basis. In this case, online communities do not provide a solution.
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But at the end of the day, the sales rep still will not use the online communities. Why? Because online communities as they are today do not help sales reps close more deals.
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This summarizes nice and neatly into two use cases and one constraint: deliver a set of mobile applications that enables sales reps to find experts and get answers to questions
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To answer this we must first understand what is an expert.
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The first thing that became apparent was the realizations that there is no absolute expert, and that there are numerous dimensions that qualify the level of expertise. From our research we identified the following variables used to identify experts within our organization:
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These seven dimensions are each calculated by topic relative to the total community population, and a final expert score can is computed based on a weighting of these variables. This in turn becomes a topic expert matrix and is updated continuously.
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Data sources feeding all of this include numerous internal and external systems, such as CRM, HR, address book, project DB, community platforms, blogs, forums, wikis, sales management DBs, Twitter, LinkedIn, and etc. See
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The end-user application is a mobile application tailored to finding people. All expert dimensions are filterable by the sales rep.
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Finding the right person within the organization is a tough challenge. Leveraging community connections and interactions, a series of expertise dimensions can be measured and computed. Providing access to this information via a mobile device helps enable sales reps to find the right person within the organization to help close deals.
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Intranet strategy needs leaders not managers
When I run workshops on intranets, I sometimes put down cards on the floor labelled “HR”, “IT”, “Communications” etc. and ask people to stand on the card that reflects who sponsors their intranet. Typically there are clusters around Communications and IT, one on “Knowledge Management” and a few people that end up playing Twister trying to straddle multiple cards. Others merely sigh and shuffle over to the €˜Nobody’ card.
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When I run workshops on intranets, I sometimes put down cards on the floor labelled “HR”, “IT”, “Communications” etc. and ask people to stand on the card that reflects who sponsors their intranet. Typically there are clusters around Communications and IT, one on “Knowledge Management” and a few people that end up playing Twister trying to straddle multiple cards. Others merely sigh and shuffle over to the €˜Nobody’ card.
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When we discuss what makes a good sponsor, people talk about enthusiasm, understanding and promoting the vision of the intranet, rather than just giving funding. That, for me, is the crucial difference between a real sponsor and someone senior that happens to have the intranet in their portfolio.
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There’s nothing wrong with ROI being a component of the decision-making process, but if it is the only process then all that comes out of it is money, not support
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Conversation Agent: Become a Relevant Filter
« The tech world is just getting started with its own full launch – a love affair complete with predictions, trends, and already a roster of tools and services. »
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People are spending more time in social networks – and getting stuff done there, too. Which means that many of the activities that used to happen in mall stores, while on the phone with friends possibly, or through just solitary search, are now happening as a social experience.
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There’s a crop of other, some quite specialized, sites that plan to capitalize on the strong signals and filters currently offered in social networks to help people talk about the items they find, either ask their friends or even perfect strangers how they look with a new outfit, what they should buy, even create public visual displays or carts to share.
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This is where you come in to work on how information is displayed, aggregated, filtered, and then analyzed so that it’s more digestible — and helps people share it with their friends.
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For relevance to be part of the conversation, both are predicted upon three considerations:
(1.) Ethics in data collection — full disclosure is the new transparency
(2.) Open communication — as business is a process, so two-way communication or conversation is the lubricant that fosters ownership, and commerce
(3.) Clear language — say what you mean, illustrate with stories, eliminate jargon, adopt the words of your community
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Endeca Provides Dynamic Business Intelligence
« One of the issues I have with many BI tools is that you have to set up what you are looking for before you start and thus miss the opportunity to find relationships beyond the anticipated. Endeca is tackling this issue in several ways. First, it allows for a greater dialog between business analysts and IT as BI applications are set up so that a more iterative process can occur and unanticipated questions can emerge through this dialog. Second, the actual applications can supply suggestions to the user through unanticipated facets to further explore their topics of interest. I recently spoke with Endeca’s Chief Strategist, Paul Sonderegger, to understand what they are offering and will cover these issues and others in more detail here. »
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They created an application that provides answers for aircraft technicians. The application pulls together content from a vast diversity of sources to answer questions that cannot be anticipated in advance.
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First diverse data is brought together. Then it is made available to people with business expertise and not simply the technical experts. Finally, the tool is made to adapt to a constantly changing set of requirements. You can create comprehensive data visualization
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Paul talked about how their client, Toyota Motor Sales (MTS), USA, was able to use Latitude to better respond to their crisis over the massive product recall. They could find where the pedal assemblies were installed, a data point they had not known in advance needed tracking, and tie together such critical data sources such as customer claims and government agency reports. They were better able to answer the many customer questions that continued to arise as the situation unfolded.
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Social Media Handbook 2011
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Putting Social Business To Work
« A great post yesterday by Laurie Buczek brought home for me a key issue that I’ve been pondering lately, namely how surprisingly disconnected some social business efforts end up becoming. We know many of the reasons this happens: Not-invented here, political fiefdoms, integration challenges, the tendency of many applications to turn into silos easily, etc. However, social media in the enterprise is about connecting deeply to those around us to improve the way we work. It’s certainly not about isolation, yet that sometimes becomes the state of affairs. How we organize for social business determines much of our success, as emergent as the process is »
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I should be clear that it’s not social business as a concept that’s the problem here. It’s that social must be connected to the day-to-day work that takes place. Unfortunately, most work today is done through existing systems that aren’t very social.
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But more likely we have to manually copy information from the systems of record in order to collaborate on it. Even more likely, the social business environment just becomes a parallel silo that’s not connected to the business and is used for light conversation and status updates instead of meaningful, high value line of business activities.
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Instead we need to wrap our businesses in social in a more ambient and deeply connected manner. To work, this must be more than for example merely adding threaded conversations to our systems of record. It’s about weaving collaboration into everything we do, efficiently and simply.
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The Big Failure of Enterprise 2.0 Social Business
» However, enterprises with several years of Enterprise 2.0 efforts under their belt have failed to reach the tipping point and cross into mainstream adoption of social collaboration . Coincidentally, Dion Hinchcliffe recently noted in The Path to Co-Creating a Social Business, the existence of the fissure with older collaborative channels on one side and the option to voluntarily engage socially on the other. I believe this is a sign post that we must pay attention to and make adjustments or social business could fall deeply into the rabbit hole where knowledge management (KM) efforts of past, already reside. «
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I left the Enterprise 2.0 program not because I lost passion for social collaboration, but because I realized that the effort had plateaued. The initiative has achieved quite a bit, but my vision & strategy still hasn’t been fully reached.
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At the beginning, I clearly outlined integration as one of three foundational pillars for our strategy. Unfortunately, various forces created challenges in this space. Social collaboration applications have been immature in this area for years
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We deployed just another tool amongst a minefield of other collaborative tools €“ without integration. To make it even harder, we underinvested in transition change management.
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Believe me, tops down support & culture change are two of the largest hurdles social business must conquer for long-term success.
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s evidenced by the IBM journey, I believe it will be rare that culture change will be one of the first things accomplished or changed in a short period of time. Culture will change as a result of the pervasive use of social tools. Lack of cultural change is not social business’s biggest failure. The biggest failure is the lack of workflow integration to drive culture change.
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When asked why they don’t use the internal platform, one responder stated,“Bottom line, we’ve had a social community internally (for a while) and it doesn’t feel natural.” Translation: It isn’t in their workflow.
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If you don’t provide the “easy button” with integrated tools that are “just there” in your workflow, adoption will not cross the chasm. Culture will not change. Enterprise 2.0 social business becomes the bad sequel to Knowledge Management.
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Your intranet should be one in the same with your social platform.
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Rid yourself of multiple employee profiles. One employee = one integrated profile.
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La solution à la crise ? L’économie systémique
« Seule une économie en rupture avec celle qui existe nous sortira de la crise chronique dans laquelle l’humanité s’est empêtrée. Au terme de vingt ans de recherche sur les mécanismes systémiques appliqués aux entités sociales, dont plus de dix ans d’expérimentation en entreprises, il est démontré qu’il existe une autre façon de faire du business et de créer de la richesse. (*) »
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– Le fonctionnement des écosystèmes sociaux est identique à celui des écosystèmes biologiques : recherche permanente d’efficience (moindre effort), équilibre prédation/coopération, croissance adaptative, intégration
– Une entité acquière sa dimension intégrée grâce à l’action simultanée de cinq fonctions systémiques liées par une mécanique systémique invariante
– Dès qu’un système est constitué, il ne peut que croître ou disparaître
– La croissance d’un système est de nature adaptative
– Un système ne prospère que lorsqu’il s’intègre de manière win-win dans son éco-système
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La réparation systémique, c’est-à -dire le rétablissement d’une économie sur des bases systémiques, est possible. Ces connaissances nouvelles sur le fonctionnement interne des systèmes, ainsi que sur leur interaction avec leur éco-système, offrent en effet la possibilité d’un véritable changement de paradigme, même si elles sont sophistiquées et qu’elles requièrent un véritable changement de pensée. En effet, si la pensée linéaire occidentale s’intéresse aux mêmes « objets » sociaux que la pensée systémique, ce sont les liens fonctionnels qui unissent ces objets les uns aux autres qui constituent le fondement de cette dernière. C’est en cela que cette pensée du lien constitue une véritable référence nouvelle.
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Comme chacun sait, il existe à l’heure actuelle deux économies parallèles : une économie des marchés et l’économie dite réelle, qui elle, est bien une économie de marché.
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L’économie réelle a pour raison d’être de créer de la richesse : elle transforme de la matière (dont l’« idée ») en biens matériels ou immatériels. Par la mise en relation de ces biens (objets ou services) avec un marché, et selon un mécanisme typiquement systémique d’offre et de demande, cette économie assure la croissance des territoires et de leur habitants. Cette économie repose sur l’intelligence entrepreneuriale propre à l’humain, ainsi que sur l’intelligence et l’huile de coude de ceux que l’on appelle €˜travailleurs’. Bien évidemment, sa croissance repose sur la capacité des entreprises à proposer une offre en phase avec les demandes (besoins ou désirs) de leur marché.
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Leur besoin en financement est bien moindre, mais avec des ROI mieux sécurisés et accélérés. Les conditions de croissance adaptative étant rétablies par la mise en résonnance des créneaux les plus réactifs et des intelligences internes, la stratégie de croissance est établie sur des bases rationnalisées. L’investissement n’a plus un rôle compensatoire.
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Leur intégration dans leur écosystème se fait sur des bases bien plus matures : recherche du win-win. De par sa rapidité, c’est probablement l’un des aspects les plus surprenant du travail de systémisation. Les liens aux investisseurs, banques, fournisseurs et, évidemment aux clients sont rétablis sur des bases plus justes et certainement plus fructueuses.
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La gouvernance de ces entreprises évolue rapidement également. Les fondamentaux systémiques étant rétablis, les responsabilités des uns et des autres sont redistribuées de manière plus rationnelle. Notons que l’approche systémique requière que chaque personne impliquée dans l’entreprise soit entièrement responsable du poste qu’elle occupe. Cela vaut également pour le dirigeant. Dans cette logique de travail, il n’est pas concevable qu’un individu €“ dirigeant ou actionnaire majoritaire- puisse bloquer pour une raison ou une autre l’évolution de l’entreprise systémisée Il y va de la préservation du bien social que celle-ci constitue.
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Que nous montre cette expérience ? Tout d’abord, elle montre que la recherche d’une croissance adaptative est possible et payante ! Elle montre également que le fait de réparer un élément du système (entreprise) influe directement et positivement sur l’éco-système (autres acteurs). Enfin, elle montre que la systémisation d’une entreprise entraine une maturation (salutaire) des liens sociaux
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Il nous faut donc créer un éco-système alternatif, capable de côtoyer le marché financier, tout en produisant les richesses (matérielles et sociétales) nécessaires à assurer une qualité de vie pour le plus grand nombre.
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La première est d’établir une masse critique d’entreprises de croissance adaptative sur chaque territoire afin de ré-enrichir ceux-ci : rétablir un éco-système sain dans les pays riches qui se paupérisent, et établir une modalité de développement responsable dans les territoires émergents avant que les erreurs du passé ne soient répétées.
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La seconde exigence est d’instaurer un mécanisme win-win de financement de la croissance adaptative des entreprises de manière à ce que tous les acteurs de l’écosystème profitent de cette croissance : dirigeants, entreprises (bien social) et investisseurs (ou prêteurs).
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6 Companies With Awesome Employee Perks
« When job candidates are considering a position, they often compare the benefits and perks package. We’ve all heard about the Googleplex and its gourmet food, dry cleaning and Razr scooters made available to Googlers. But you don’t have to be a search giant to offer admirable perks. In fact, it may even be more cost-effective to offer goods and services instead of cold hard cash, since the latter is taxed twice. The key to great perks is to make them exciting and keep them on-brand. Below, you’ll find how six brands €” from small startups to larger companies €” reward their employees and maintain happy and efficient workers »
Découvrez le livre que nous avons co-écrit avec 7 autres experts avec pleins de retours d'expérience pour aider managers et dirigeants