Links for this week (weekly)

  • “Social CRM sets the stage (or assumes) that HR, Sales and Marketing are now everyone’s job. However, social CRM when built with workflows – needs organizational structures and processes to enable it. And I am not merely talking about policy. The questions that need to be answered are:”

    tags: socialcrm innovation support marketing sales collaboeation humanresources

  • “Even if we set aside the truly productive HR departments, the problem is all the other HR departments that are unnecessary and counterproductive. Let’s look at what HR does, and how it could be done better by another corporate function:”

    tags: humanresources training development organizationdesign compensation workforce performance recruitment hiring

    • Create a position that enables managers to decide how to educate, train, and develop their workers. Implement it locally, where bureaucratic nonsense is less likely to interfere.
    • Any business unit’s management team is responsible for structuring its operations, and it should hire the experts it needs to help it do the job.
    • believe performance and workforce planning problems start when the department (HR) responsible for them is not measured on… workforce performance.
    • Last year one of the biggest online job board’s revenues were around $1.3 billion. Your HR department is the source of most of that revenue.
    • your HR execs are telling the world there’s a “talent shortage” while we’re experiencing the greatest glut of unemployed, highly-educated and skilled workers in history.
    • The problem is, those organizations don’t expect as much from HR, hence HR is usually not overseen, not measured, and not judged for its performance. It’s the department no one wants to be responsible for. It’s the department that is not subjected to outcomes analysis. Anything goes.
    • The best HR people I know find ways to embed themselves into business units
  • “Two separate themes stood out to me during my time at the E2.0 Conference in Boston last week. The first, design for loss of control, came directly out of JP Rangaswami’s top-notch keynote address. The second, how can E2.0 improve process at my company?, was something I picked up more organically from time spent in conversation with E2.0 pundits and practitioners. Separately, these concepts seem opposed but when blended together they create a healthy tension that exists in agile organizations.”

    tags: processes control enterprise2.0 businessprocess

    • The first theme strikes the core of a learning organization.  A learning organization is in constant flux, continually challenging its assumptions and evaluating wins and losses to glean insights for competitive advantage.  Organizations designed for loss of control will not be in balance; their equilibrium will be deliberately and continually challenged.  These challenges and pressures are the forces that create learning organizations.  Attempts to learn and achieve equilibrium will create a more flexible and agile enterprise better equipped to respond to frequent and unexpected changes in the competitive landscape.
    • addressing the process issue starts to become more clear.  When (re)designing process, assume and design for loss of control.  Build in an evolutionary mechanism for the process itself.
  • “According to research shared on the UK-based Psyblog, there are three main reasons teams don’t share information. Four, if you count “I hate you and want you to crash and burn” but we won’t go there today.”

    tags: information informationsharing knowledge teamwork remotework

    • Memory is a shaky thing. Generally, people remember shared information better than information they pick up on their own. Let’s face it, if three people remember something, it’s more likely to come up in a meeting
    • Pre-judgements and assumptions get in the way. A major reason people don’t share information is they don’t think they have to share it. While it might be a good thing to give people the benefit of the doubt, often people don’t know (or can’t immediately recall) a specific piece of information
    • Anxiety and stress are part of the job. Many of us would recall and share information more readily if we weren’t so stressed out. It’s hard to think clearly when your amygdala is screaming warning signals in your brain.
  • tags: Enterprise2.0

  • “Otherwise, bear with me here. I want to re-consider a really important assumption about one way that flatter organizations with internal network structures are better. (I’m thinking about the organizations advocated by folks bringing social media inside organizations, mostly proponents of Enterprise 2.0 and social business.)
    Flatter, more networked organizational structures do not significantly reduce power inequalities among employees or across domains within a firm.”

    tags: organization networks egalitarism democracy decisionmaking

    • Studies show that organizations that are flatter because they have a network structure encapsulated or embedded inside them still, in the big picture, feel and act like hierarchies (Dean, 2007).

    • Our assumptions are wrong. It doesn’t work that way. Power is rarely redistributed in any kind of egalitarian fashon. A little power might go to the levels below the ones eliminated, but the important power stays up above.
    • Networks/teams get more “production-level authority” over who’s doing what within the overall project, what parts of the day are spent where, and the like. But the team or network doesn’t get ‘high level’ decision making authority. This still remains with upper management.
    • employees might not even notice that they still lack power where it matters the most: over the distribution of gains.
    • Keep in mind the ‘real’ business reason that organizations restructure and create internal networks. Organizations restructure to improve productivity. They want more stuff produced and they want to produce it at a higher quality. Why? So that the organization is more profitable.
    • We just have to make egalitarianism and justice overarching goals. These goals have to be as important, if not more important, than increased innovation, nicer interpersonal interactions, and yes more surplus value.


  • By making social a layer, we (the vendors) can create solutions that bridge the gap between islands of applications, allowing you (the customers) to work in a far more efficient and effective way. We’re (the industry) just starting to make this happen, but I hope that by working together we can avoid the integration issues that have plagued enterprise applications for decades. In my next post I’ll discuss the standards that are being put in place to make this vision a reality, and how we’re using them to develop Socialtext Connect. “

    tags: enterprise2.0 sociallayer silos socialsoftware integration

  • “Then, the rules are altered. Social network operators begin unlocking the doors to people’s personal worlds. The recent debate about Facebook is only the tip of the iceberg; frequent changes in privacy settings in social media are resulting in an entire generation becoming increasingly wary and guarded about their private lives. “

    tags: socialnetworks privacy trust

    • e study found that members of Gen Y were more likely to monitor privacy settings than are older people, and more often delete comments or remove their names from photos so they can’t be identified. In another survey by the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, 88% of a sample of Gen Y-ers voiced support for a law that would require websites to delete captured information. Sixty-two percent of them wanted the right to know everything a website knows about them.
    • Look at the broader issue. I believe that collaboration through social networks is an important way of building trust. Trust is built on transparency. If you are in the business of enabling collaboration through social networks, you have to demonstrate that you can be trusted. So, I ask, can you afford to change the rules midway? Or do frequent changes corrode the very foundations of trust?
  • “I had an interesting experience at last week’s Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston walking around the expo asking a simple question – “what business problems are you attempting to solve with your E20 solution? “. To me “better collaboration” and “knowledge sharing” are not really good enough to justify the business value of implementing E20 solutions in front of a CFO.

    However this year for the first time I heard (a few) people talk about E20 and business process integration in the same sentence and not just list all the technical features that would make their product stand out. Several claimed to have or were working on new APIs for existing enterprise legacy applications like ERP and CRM, but none that I spoke to had actual deliverables (I could be wrong!?).”

    tags: enterprise2.0 businessprocess integration

    • Informal “social” interaction in the context of the business process application will replace stick-on notes and handwritten notification on paper documents as a way to move information.
    • A shared digital archive as a live repository will provide transparency for knowledge processes involving structured and unstructured/social interactions as well as facilitate establishing regulatory compliance in terms of defining the rules for information retentions and what constitute a material record. This effort is substantial and should not be underestimated!
    • The trend I think will be to move towards paperless business process management. Information will move between people and desks electronically in a much more transparent way combining structured information flow (ERP, CRM, HR, Case mgmt,….) with back-and-forth unstructured information (integrated social media tools) BUT all in the context of a business process!
  • “The graphic below outlines a basis for determining when Enterprise 2.0 adoption must be pushed, and when to let adoption be pulled:”

    tags: enterprise2.0 adoption pull push

        • Existing ways are ‘good enough’ for employees
        • Executives see great potential for value from adoption
      • Requires a Top-Down Push

        Situation:

        • Existing ways are actually not “good enough”
        • There is high value in large-scale adoption
      • Mix a Push-Pull Strategy

        Situation:

        • Existing ways are actually not “good enough”
        • There is low value in large-scale adoption
      • Let It Grow Organically

        Situation:

        • Existing ways are ‘good enough’ for employees
        • There is low value in large-scale adoption
      • Don’t Waste Your Time

        Situation:

  • “Yeah, I just coined the phrase Social ERM – and I take this off from the concept of Social CRM that Gaurav blogged about.

    So what would Social Employee Relationship Management do?”

    tags: humanresources SocialERM socialmedia engagement employeesengagement

    • Energising and Retaining – Clearly employees who engage in social media in the work arena are excited by other rewards and recognitions than employees who are not vocal about their work.
  • E2.0 seems to be entrenched in the domain of the CIO and IT organizations. That’s a shame because it really does spread across many domains. Gautam Ghosh lamented the lack of attendees or speakers from the HR realm in a few tweets during the event. Yet many of the talks were certainly around employee behavior and engagement.

    I have to be honest. There are many things that are still left unanswered this year. I didn’t expect solutions but I was looking for more thought on the following ideas:

    tags: enterprise2.0 ROI privacy adoption communties maturity

    • ROI –
      Surprisingly, I agree with Dennis
      Howlett
      . I don’t think people should be looking for a single answer or
      approach to figuring this out. What was being affirmed is that are some
      cases of ROI particularly in the external or public-facing environments,
      but very rare for internal enterprise 2.0 environments
    • Adoption
      is about transforming human behaviors at work
    • E2.0
      transformation teams even in large companies are small and understaffed

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Head of People and Business Delivery @Emakina / Former consulting director / Crossroads of people, business and technology / Speaker / Compulsive traveler
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