Links for this week (weekly)

  • “While collaboration platforms are increasingly attractive to enterprises, most people still don’t know how to use them at work.

    After a brief introduction, individuals are quick to understand the concepts: the power of networks, the potential for shaping their reputation, the extraordinary commercial possibilities.

    But they struggle with what they should actually do.”

    tags: visiblework workingoutloud observablework enterprise2.0 socialbusiness

    • The last thing anyone wants is Yet Another Communications Channel.
    • it’s important that collaboration and contribution is in line with the work people do every day
    •  â€œWorking out loud = Narrating your work + Observable work”  
    • narrating your work is “journaling…what you are doing in an open way.” And making your work observable is “creating/modifying/storing your work in places that others can see it, follow it, and contribute to it IN PROCESS
    • But modern collaboration platforms combine rich content-handling with Twitter-like activity feeds that make it easy to skim large amounts of content quickly.
    • Collaboration platforms make all of that work visible. Every one of those actions can be communicated to your social network without any extra effort
    • working out loud leads to succeeding (or failing) more quickly…makes a company more intelligent: quicker to improve, and more resilient in the context of uncertainty
  • “Selon une étude réalisée par le cabinet Millward Brown pour Google et présentée le 15 mai, les cadres estiment que les réseaux sociaux leur permettraient d’améliorer de 20% la productivité dans leur entreprise. “

    tags: management socialnetworks socialnetworking productivity

    • Le gain de temps se ferait donc en évitant des déplacements pour rencontrer des collègues ou des clients, en envoyant et lisant moins d’emails ou encore en limitant les réunions internes.
    • Seul 1/3 reste plus sceptique. “Selon eux, ces activités sont chronophages et pas suffisamment sécurisé
    • Certaines grandes enseignes maîtrisent les notions de communautés“, explique-t-il. “Elles ont bien saisi l’enjeu. Les marques fortes de demain seront les entreprises ‘conversationnelles’
    • Pampers par exemple a très bien compris qu’il ne fallait pas parler de ses produits mais de ce qui intéresse ses clients, à savoir les enfants. T
  • “Les DRH ont un rôle clef à jouer dans la transformation numérique des entreprises. Elles doivent positionner les usages et l’acculturation au centre des réflexions et projets numériques.”

    tags: humanresources transformation IT changemanagement organization

      • La DRH constitue un poste d’observation idéal pour appréhender la nature systémique de l’entreprise, en prenant en compte tout ce qui en fait ses particularités :

         

        • les éléments formalisés, bien-sûr comme la stratégie ou la structure des organisations
        • mais aussi les sous-jacents informels comme l’identité ou la culture (les cultures ?) de l’entreprise.
    • La révolution numérique n’aide pas le monde à être moins incertain. Mais une utilisation en pleine conscience des outils, des concepts, des transformations qu’elle apporte permet d’en tirer tout le potentiel.
    • La DRH peut être, doit être, au centre de ces réflexions pour que les dispositifs numériques contribuent à faire de nos entreprises des lieux où règnent ensemble épanouissement, engagement, respect, intelligence collective et performance.
  • “The hierarchical organization is built on a concept of mass replication. Taylorite in its origins, the idea is to create replicable jobs.

    The actual qualities of the incumbent are far less important than that they simply do what the position demands. These, in turn, are collected under managers.

    The organization represents the elements of the design: the sub-assemblies of a machine.

    Grafted onto this base are the knowledge worker functions. “

    tags: knowledgework taylorism knowledgeworkers

    • But knowledge work does not work well based on position.

       

       It depends far more on the qualities of the person doing the work, the background they bring to the task.

    • What this means is that we can turn the specialists we hired into people who are a little more generalist in nature, capable of working outside their normal domain.
    • So perhaps it makes more sense to look at a group like this. Suppose there are 100 people in a department. Create 10 first-level managers. Their roles are not defined as subsets of the work, but by the nature of their reporting employees: the historians here, the functionalists there, etc.
  • “It is important to clarify the type of collaboration you are talking about. Although the different types are not black and white, there are fundamental differences. Why is it important to clarify?

    It influences the coherence of your whole digital workplace, in particular your entry point strategy.
    It will reduce conflict among digital teams and bring understanding of how different pieces fit together to serve the people.
    To some extent, it impacts the roles and scopes of members of the digital teams. It partially answers the question of “who is in charge of what”.”

    tags: collaboration digitalworkplace communities team

         

         

        Team collaboration – probably the oldest sense of “collaboration”

         

        This refers to designated people working together on a project with deliverables and a timeline. This has long been part of what organizations do.

    • Most large organizations have long-established communities of practice for their support functions: finance, IT, communication and HR. Finance is almost always the leader because companies need to consolidate figures across the organization
    • Communities around topics of interest are being created. They are voluntary. People join, participate, leave as they wish. Leaders emerge. There are no pre-defined deliverables. These communities are usually closely tied to social networking
  • “Social media, then, can help you become a better B2B sales professional, even helping improve sales. Understand how to use social media to your advantage in the highly competitive sales industry.”

    tags: socialmedia sales B2B sociacrm research competition

    • Social customer research management, or CRM, refers to a business’ ability to interact with customers using social media. Social CRM is a must for sales professionals. Through social media, you can find out what your customers like about your product or service and what they find is lacking.
    • businesses managing social media pages, you can research your clients in just one click. Regular visits to your clients’ social media pages can give you a wealth of knowledge about the business. What are their customers saying? What needs does the business have? How can your business help theirs?
    • Just like your business has social media pages, so do your competitors. Some investigative social media searching can help you assess your competition and better understand the market.
  • “The words “risk management” usually evokes less subjective, more data-driven pursuits. But data and objectivity can only get you so far. Philosopher Karl Popper famously proposed that to be scientific, a theory had to be falsifiable: that is, it had to make predictions that could be tested and possibly shown to be wrong. Popper spent a lot of time thinking about this definition of science and the burgeoning science of probablility, which he called propensity.”

    tags: risk riskmanagement arguments routinework

    • To navigate such unquantifiable hazards, then, you need to make judgment calls. And that’s where argument (or discussion, or conversation, if you prefer) comes in. You want diverse, even opposing viewpoints. You want to manage their interactions in a way that allows the quieter, less-senior, less-predictable voices to be heard. You probably do want to accord different weights to the arguments of different people, although deciding how to do so (past track record? clarity of argument?) is hard.
    • In any case, it should be clear that you don’t want to just let the loudest voices win.
    • Successfully managing most of the biggest risks that businesses and societies face requires successfully managing arguments about what exactly those risks are and how seriously they should be taken.
  • ” It was until recently that I started focusing around the business value of Enterprise Social that it hit me. Most people talk in jargon and have very little insight into what the underlying business problems are that they are trying to solve. Don’t get me wrong, they know their business problems, but in most cases haven’t connected the dots between problem and solution. Why? Because it takes a lot of analysis and thought to develop that understanding and most of us lack the time to do it.”

    tags: enterprise2.0 socialbusiness collaboration gtd value businessvalue

    • Does it mean that we should all be working with each other on everything? If that’s the case, we need to understand that collaborating usually slows things down because it involves scheduling and interacting aligning expectations and establishing a method for collaborating.
    • What I think people expect when they want improved collaboration is to work with each other to get better results and do it faster.
    •  

      Faster – Get the work done faster so that we can: Close more deals, get product to market faster, beat the competition, etc.

    • Better – Output better quality work so that we can: Improve customer satisfaction, win more business and beat the competition, etc.
    • So executing faster and better is important to the business.
  • “During the course of our lives, learning becomes detached from creating experiences and getting feedback. And so it turns from fun to a dreadful exercise with often devastating results: the knowledge taught is forgotten pretty quickly, with the whole education effort becoming a waste of everyone’s time. In the corporate world this can be costly, and if you don’t know how to use the tools properly or effectively, work becomes more inefficient, expensive and possibly even dangerous.

    Which leads me to the following questions:

    How can we make training more fun, add rich experience and gain feedback?
    How can we enable trainers to add these elements to their materials?
    Why is training separate from work rather than embedded into it?”

    tags: education work learning training gamification

    • Teachers were among the first to realize that a playful approach works wonders when it comes to getting students to be more active in the classroom environment. And it wasn’t just  teachers: parents also saw the merits of gamified learning. Embedding the material in a larger story, giving kids a mission, providing feedback by appending stars and stickers, encouraging kids to collaborate, and many more techniques that we find from game design helped to get kids going, have more fun, be more curious and make the content more memorable.
    • Which brings me to a rather heretical question: when it comes to the workplace, why do we even use classrooms at all?

      Why not embed learning into the workplace instead? Why do we ask employees to attend week-long classroom sessions to learn new skills, when most of their new-found knowledge often evaporates by the time they get home? Instead, why not make the workplace itself into the classroom environment and every work interaction a learning experience

    • On-boarding via a game exposes you to just the right amount of functionality that you’d expect to have at that time: practically none. But step by step, the system teaches you and gives you more challenges while your skill level rises. Without noticing, the system brings you to a level of mastery by keeping you in the “flow zone”.
    • Former Starbucks CIO Stephen Gillet is the most prominent example of someone who attributes part of his career success to the management skills he learned as Guild Master in the MMORPG World of Warcraft.
  • “En cette rentrée, une interrogation de fond émerge des yoyos économiques et politiques européens et des révolutions arabes aussi improbables que bien réelles. Cette interrogation peut se formuler de la manière suivante : la problématique de l’accès au savoir est totalement bouleversée. 95% de l’information est disponible en accès libre. Elle est disponible de partout et en temps réel. Les outils et la technologie la rendent parfaitement mobile. La vitesse d’échange ne laisse plus forcément le temps du recul et de l’assimilation. La difficulté n’est plus l’obtention de l’information, mais le discernement de l’information utile, voire de l’information vraie.”

    tags: information knowledge knowledgemanagement mobility remotework organization

    • Le temps de l’information ne correspond plus, comme pendant des millénaires, au temps de la connaissance. Car le temps de la connaissance, immédiatement dépendant du fonctionnement de l’être humain et de sa « nature Â», ne s’est nullement accéléré
    • Mais les conséquences de la distorsion avec la connaissance individuelle et collective lui ont totalement échappé, alors qu’elle impacte aujourd’hui le cÅ“ur de l’activité
    • En France, même leur impact sur les possibilités d’organisation en télétravail moderne ont été totalement négligées, alors que c’est une des révolutions les plus fondamentales à venir dans la conception même du travail.
    • Centrées sur le traditionnel contrat juridique et la subordination, nos entreprises sont passées à coté du contrat professionnel et de l’approche client des collaborateurs !!!
    • un salarié équipé d’une connexion nomade travaille 240 heures de plus par an que ceux qui s’en tiennent aux horaires de bureaux.
    • Cet outil sépare aujourd’hui l’entreprise de ses salariés, parce que cette entreprise ne s’inscrit pas, dans sa matrice fonctionnelle, dans ce nouveau mode de vie, de vivant, d’organisme… d’organisation d’un autre type
    • qui tourne autour de qui ? Quoi autour de quoi ? Les repères traditionnels deviennent obsolètes.
  • “The short answer is that no one’s got enterprise collaboration all figured out yet, owing to the dizzying array of platforms (SharePoint, Google Sites, Drupal, Yammer, LotusLive, Salesforce.com Chatter, Jive, Cisco Quad), various Web and video conferencing systems, and of course the legacy email, IM, and other platforms. Add to that the varying personal, cultural, and some even say generational preferences. And I think we still do too much thrusting and not enough teasing out.”

    tags: enterprise2.0 socialbusiness collaboration

    • So it appears that users are becoming more comfortable with their companies’ social collaboration efforts. But pockets of discontent remain, our extensive reporting and research find. F
    • current BrainYard columnist Venkatesh Rao made the case that the enterprise collaboration movement had lapsed into something of a “generational war” between advocates of social media tools and advocates of more structured knowledge management tools.
  • “The list of the world’s CEOs regularly includes celebrities, billionaires, big egos, risk takers, and failures. What it does not include are social media experts; but that’s about to change. When IBM (NYSE: IBM) conducted its study of 1709 CEOs around the world, they found only 16% of them participating in social media. But their analysis shows that the percentage will likely grow to 57% within 5 years. “

    tags: ibm study social CEO competitiveness openness empowerment transparency collaborationativity interpersonnalskills flexibility

    • CEOs are changing the nature of work by adding a powerful dose of openness, transparency and employee empowerment
    • Companies that outperform their peers are 30 percent more likely to identify openness
    • While social media is the least utilized of all customer interaction methods today, it stands to become the number two organizational engagement method within the next five years
    • More than half of CEOs (53 percent) are planning to use technology to facilitate greater partnering and collaboration with outside organizations,
    • Championing collaborative innovation is not something CEOs are delegating to their HR leaders
    • CEOs regard interpersonal skills of collaboration (75 percent), communication (67 percent), creativity (61 percent) and flexibility (61 percent)
    • The trend toward greater collaboration extends beyond the corporation to external partnering relationships.
    • Seventy-three percent of CEOs are making significant investments in their organizations’ ability to draw meaningful customer insights from available data.
  • “Advice on how to cope in this “always connected” age is plentiful: How to prioritize work better, manage your time more effectively across different domains of your life, survive email overload and even remedy your smartphone addiction. The trouble is that there is only so much that you can do alone: You can decide to turn off, but that does not mean everyone else will too.”

    tags: smartphones mobility connectivity work worklifebalance interruption PTO predictabletimeoff timeoff

    • The trouble is that it is nearly impossible to mandate open dialogue, and even if it emerges, any gains in efficiency that follow will be reinvested in the organization–not your personal life.
    • Four years after our first “Predictable Time Off” (PTO) experiment–afternoons or evenings totally disconnected from work and wireless devices, agreed-upon email blackout times, or uninterrupted work blocks that allow for greater focus, for example–72 percent of people involved said they were satisfied with their job vs. 49 percent of their colleagues who were not doing PTO; 54 percent of PTO participants were satisfied with their work-life balance vs. 38 percent; and 51 percent said they were excited to go to work in the morning, vs. 27 percent.
      • Every team member strives to achieve an agreed upon unit of predictable time off each week–the PTO Goal. This PTO goal should be of personal value to those on the team, creating a deep-seated motivation to participate. The goal should also be aspirational, as well as achievable, so as to engage people in the process and drive them to challenge assumptions and rethink ways of working in their efforts to achieve this goal
      • The team gathers weekly to discuss how well each member is meeting the PTO goal and to talk about the team’s work process more generally. These weekly discussions should focus on what happened during the past week and how it could have been different.
    • Team leaders show support for team members’ engagement in the process. The only time I have seen teams that have undertaken PTO fail to outperform teams that are not involved is when the team’s leader is outright resistant.
  • “Le 16 Mai je suis intervenu à la conférence Webcom à Montréal pour aborder l’évolution du poste de travail en entreprise, tirée par les outils collaboratifs et le développement de l’entreprise 2.0. Un débat intéressant dont je reprends ici en deux parties, les principales idées de ruptures qui ont été discutées.”

    tags: digitalworkplace intranet IT interoperability security email agility

    • Pour faire simple, le soufflé du réseau social interne retombera vite s’il ne permet que de parler de la pêche à la mouche et n’améliore pas l’efficacité de chacun et celle des processus.
    • Et c’est tout l’enjeu de l’entreprise 2.0 de développer et mobiliser le capital social, humain et informationnel de l’entreprise.
    • Le poste de travail fixe est un outil dépassé
       
      Ce bon vieux poste de travail dont la définition d’origine est “le lieu dans lequel un employé dispose des ressources lui permettant d’effectuer son travail“. Une définition obsolète dans un monde post-industriel quand on considère la mobilité qui fait voler en éclat la notion de lieu et demande une continuité des données entre les terminaux si on en utilise plusieurs.
    • Le cycle projet et les méthodes doivent laisser la place aux usages et aux services, mis en ligne de façon incrémentale
       L’immuable cycle projet qui commence par une expression de besoin et se termine par une mise en production a déjà été revisité par le SaaS. Quand la solution est déjà en production lors de son achat, cela change un peu les choses
    • Ce cycle projet est donc peu adapté au collaboratif, qui lui demande des méthodes plus agiles, plus itératives. Quand on regarde les succès grand public, l’outil a précédé les besoins. Les usages ont été découverts par quelques utilisateurs et sont devenus des services offerts à tous.
    • LA solution d’entreprise est peut-être une illusion qui doit laisser la place à la diversité et à l’interopérabilité
    • Cherchons donc a segmenter les usages et les utilisateurs au lieu de toujours globaliser les besoi
    • La sécurité qui vise Ã  protéger les accès va vite trouver ses limites dans un monde de partage.
       
      La sécurité des données est complémentaire à celle des accès et doit devenir plus intelligente en repérant les comportements suspects
    • La sécurité doit être repensée mais au lieu de ça elle est utilisée comme une raison pour empêcher l’entreprise de collabore
    • L’email est intrusif. Ce sont les autres qui choisissent les destinataires, le nombre et même la priorité!
    • C’est aussi un destructeur massif de connaissances car a chaque départ de salariés, sa boîte mail disparaît avec lui
    •  

      Pour revenir au poste de travail collaboratif, imaginons-le comme un terminal d’accès aux ressources et espaces partagés par les collaborateurs

  • tags: intranet intranet2.0 digitaworkplace

  • “SAP hasn’t necessarily set up its StreamWork product as a competitor to Jive’s social collaboration software. SAP is actually a customer of Jive, albeit for the software that powers the SAP community website rather than for internal collaboration. However, in terms of getting work done inside an organization, SAP says it is playing a whole different game.”

    tags: SAP socialsoftware enterprisesocialsoftware CRM successfactors streamwork

    • Six years after the rise of the Enterprise 2.0 concept, organizations are still struggling to achieve the kind of “natural adoption” that social business advocates keep telling us is right around the corner,
    • Although applications for CRM or supply chain and procurement are widely employed, they don’t necessarily cover the entire process they aim to facilitate.
    • the next generation of useful social collaboration” different is that it will fit better “in the context of work,
    • The best the other players can say is that they have an API,
    • providing “better BI” when employees have a social mechanism for commenting on reports or questioning the validity of numbers–rather than “jamming a microblogging feature into an app.
    • Patel said he would not consider StreamWork a workflow product because it does not try to confine collaboration to a predefined, structured process.
    • compared with traditional workflows, StreamWork collaboration is user-defined
    • StreamWork also is an open platform that can provide feeds into other social collaboration products. The StreamWork user interface can also embed other applications within a collaboration process
    • Yet StreamWork will ultimately gain the upper hand by positioning itself at the center of business processes
  • “Organizations that allow employees to use their personal devices for work purposes reap the benefits of a more engaged workforce, particularly among the younger generation. But many of those same organizations are trying to simplify and consolidate the systems they’re running in order to save money on infrastructure and software that helps manage mobile devices, and supporting BYOD creates additional, often unseen costs.”

    tags: iT byod costs

    • There are several advantages to adopting BYOD policies, most important of which is making the company a more attractive place to work
    • . Now, instead of having to manage a single device–for instance, establishing security policies like strong password protection, uploading the appropriate applications based on the user’s role in the company, or developing applications based on a single operating system–IT departments have to manage several different platforms for Apple iPads and iPhones or Microsoft and Android based devices. Even Google’s Android operating system has differences from one device manufacturer to another.
    • The cost of the device is peanuts,” says Matt Brown, an analyst with Forrester Research. In addition to the management costs, “what’s really going to kill these companies is the data plans.
    • YOD “is adding more things into the environment that you didn’t have before, and you’re not eliminating anything
    • 84% of employees considered Generation Y say they choose their work devices without considering corporate policy
  • “Schwartz argues that it’s up to individuals and managers to avoid the multitasking trap. But I look at it a different way: ultimately, it’s up to institutions to make sure employees are focused. Businesses and government agencies that are serious about improving productivity need to tackle this as an organizational initiative.”

    tags: productivity multitasking

    • Multitasking workers keep others waiting for their output.
    • When managers multitask, even small decisions can take days
    • Every task seems equally urgent. As a result, truly critical issues and genuine bottlenecks can’t be identified, and the organization wastes its resources solving the wrong problems.
    • Reduce the number of open projects by 25% to 50%.
    • Don’t start on a project without adequate preparation.
    • Establish a clear rule for task-level priorities.
  • “Génération Y, concept marketing ou réalité sociologique ? Peut-on réellement cataloguer une génération dans son ensemble, en mettant dans la même case un jeune fraîchement diplômé d’une grande école et un autre à faible qualification ? La validité du concept, propagé par des cabinets de consultants qui estiment qu’il existerait un comportement typique de cette génération au travail, est discutée.”

    tags: generationy sociology humanresources babyboomers

    • L’appartenance générationnelle n’influence pas le niveau de fidélité du salarié de l’entreprise, qu’on soit de la génération Y, X ou baby boomers. Aucune revue scientifique digne de ce nom n’a publié d’article établissant ce lien.
    • a génération Y n’existe pas. “C’est un concept marketing fabriqué par les consultants, explique le professeur en gestion des ressources humaines. Si on interroge les différentes générations sur leurs attentes au travail, la manière dont ils envisagent leur carrière, le rôle de l’entreprise ou encore la façon de se comporter au travail, on ne voit pas apparaître de différences.”
    • Cette génération s’est fait déposséder de toute capacité d’autonomie. Les baby boomers ont fait un hold-up moral, intellectuel et économique. Le modèle de société qu’on a imposé aux Y, par sa structure même, n’est pas très séduisant et si j’avais leur âge, je ne me comporterais pas vraiment différemment”.
  • Génération Y, concept marketing ou réalité sociologique ? Peut-on réellement cataloguer une génération dans son ensemble, en mettant dans la même case un jeune fraîchement diplômé d’une grande école et un autre à faible qualification ? La validité du concept, propagé par des cabinets de consultants qui estiment qu’il existerait un comportement typique de cette génération au travail, est discutée.

    tags: generationy humanresources babyboomers

  • “Creating the conditions for a successful Social Business requires a strategic approach that focuses on establishing clear business objectives and strategies, understanding cultural considerations, developing frameworks and managing processes that adapt to the changing needs of the organisation, defining systems of governance, and enabling emerging collaborative tools that integrate with existing workflows.”

    tags: collaboration socialbusiness enterprise2.0 governance emergentcollaboration workflows compliance

  • “An invisible manager is a person who holds the position as manager and who works behind the scenes to make sure the actors get what they need to perform at their best; autonomy, access to the relevant resources, good working conditions, recognition, space to think and act. Invisible managers help to find and recruit talented people.”

    tags: management leadership

    • many managers are not leaders; it is because they haven’t been assigned as managers primarily because of their leadership skills, but because they comply well with the existing management model.
    • The leaders are often elsewhere, trying to stay away from management because they are afraid of getting stuck in status qu
    • Leaders are driven by passion, while managers are usually driven by other things such as monetary rewards and climbing in the hierarchy.
    •  So, a manager does not always have to be a leader. It is important for anyone who thinks about entering a management position to realize this.
    •  Managers who are not leaders but who try to act like leaders are just drawing attention to themselves as persons rather than the work that has to be done and the challenges which have to be dealt with.
  • “Imagine the power of social networks once they will be part of daily business and not mainly being used by consumers only. In spite of Facebook’s remarkable success so far, the truth is that we have thus far witnessed just the earliest beginnings of social networking’s power to fuel the real economy. Social networking will revolutionise business interactions, just as the Internet revolutionised retailing more than a decade ago. And the result will be a game-changing surge in innovation and productivity and a big leap forward in job creation and new growth opportunities.”

    tags: socialnetworks socialbusiness enterprise20 intelligence realtime sentimentanalysis

    • On an everyday basis, we envision an intelligent network of businesses – what I like to call the ‘Intelligent Business Web’. The Intelligent Business Web will be most important to small and medium sized businesses because it allows them to tap into the collective knowledge of their cohorts.
    • Today we can optimise entire value chains for minimum cost and consumption of scarce resources and in the future this will be common.
    • Our customer relationship management software offerings already monitor online sentiment. Similar business applications will soon be everywhere, changing the way business is conducted on every continent and in every industry.
    • but if we leverage social networking for business processes and real-time information flow, we can change the world.

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