Links for this week (weekly)

  • “There are three fundamental ways that companies can improve their processes in the coming decade: (1) expand the scope of work managed by a company to include customers, suppliers, and partners; (2) target the increasing amount of knowledge work; and (3) reduce cycle times to durations previously considered impossible (as I discussed in my last post).

    So how do you do this? As science fiction writer William Gibson said, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” This is to say that you don’t have to wait until the end of the decade for some breakthrough technology to emerge; it’s already here, albeit in bits and pieces.

    I’m collectively referring to these process improvement approaches as “Process Strategy 2.0”. They stand on the shoulders of the methods of “Process Strategy 1.0″: Lean, Six Sigma, and Business Reengineering. Let’s explore what Process Strategy 2.0 is all about:”

    tags: lean sixsigma reengineering process businessprocess businesspro agility

    • To streamline customer experiences in end-to-end processes, Process Strategy 2.0 will require aligned goals and supporting systems to manage work between partners.
    • To keep such a multiparty system from degenerating into chaos, virtual process teams must have aligned goals and support systems.
    • To manage the rising tide of knowledge work performed by a younger generation of employees, Process Strategy 2.0 will depend heavily on social collaboration tools.
    • Companies who just try to let it evolve, don’t go after it with a plan and with dedicated resources, and don’t seek to create a culture around collaboration will fail
    • To speed operations and improvement, Process Strategy 2.0 will make greater use of quick experiments and more agile management processes.
  • “Many organizations have started using social media tools internally to interact with their employees. However, in our survey of 1,060 global executives, only 30% of executives work for companies that benefited from the internal use of social media.

    To understand why the rate is so low it’s instructive to compare the social media experiences of two companies we studied. “

    tags: socialmedia emotions emotionalcapital authenticity pride community fun communication internalcommunication

    • Authenticity. What you communicate through social media has to be aligned with how you interact with people in the real world
    • Pride. Pride is a better motivator than money and relying on financial or promotion incentives to elicit employee engagement in social media initiatives can backfire
    • Community. Social media users often do not consider time spent on non-work related discussions within social communities as wasted from a professional standpoint. When employees identify common non-work related interests among each other and forge informal bonds, they will eventually start discussing work-related matters even outside of formal work hours.
    • Fun. Enjoyment is well known to be a strong motivator of innovation.
    • internal social media success isn’t really about the software but about the emotional connection it creates.
    • Companies that lack active community builders tend to create cold communities without heart and spirit, underutilizing technological infrastructure, generating employee cynicism and destroying what little emotional capital was present.
    • executives should use locally appropriate means to develop the four pillars of emotional capital.
  • “Organizational structures are typically represented as inverted trees with the root of the organization at the top and its adjacent branches denoting the major divisions or functions. More branches follow all the way to the atomic level of the organization where the smallest units of work take place. Every organization requires this kind of inverted tree manifested in an “org chart” to legitimize its structure; however, “org chart” abstractions do not tell the entire story of the structure of an organization. What is missing is the identification of the part of the organization that controls its destiny; the specification of the major method the organization uses to coordinate its activities; and the type of decentralization for decision-making that is employed.”

    tags: organization hierarchy organizationalcharts coordination decentralization context

    • practical framework for understanding the structure of organizations and provide insight on the three missing dimensions of “org charts.” They are: the key parts of an organization; the organization’s coordinating mechanism; and the type of decentralization employed.
      • The key parts of an organization are the operational components that drive success or failure. Even though Mintzberg defined five key parts, only one is generally dominant. The five key parts are:

         

           

        1.   Strategic apex, which consists of top management and its support staff.
        2.   Operating Core, which consists of workers who carry out the organization’s tasks.
        3.   Line managers, which consists of management teams, particularly middle management.
        4.   Technostructure, which consists of specialized professionals such as engineers, accountants, planners, researchers, and personnel managers.
        5.   Support staff, which consists of people who provide indirect services.
      • Coordinating Mechanisms

         

        Within an organization, coordinating mechanisms specify the way the organization organizes and manages its work. While there are six possible coordinating mechanisms, only one tends to be employed by an organization. The six coordinating mechanisms are:

         

           

        1.   Mutual adjustment, where coordination takes place through simple, informal communications.
        2.   Direct supervision, where coordination takes place by person issuing orders or instructions to others.
        3.   Standardization of work processes, where coordination takes place by specifying the work processes that people follow to carry out interrelated activities.
        4.   Standardization of outputs, where coordination takes place by specifying the results of different work.
        5.   Standardization of skills, where coordination takes place through the specialization and training of the various people in the organization.
        6.   Standardization of norms, where coordination takes place by engaging the same set of beliefs and expected behaviors, such as the case in a religious organization.
      • Types of Decentralization

         

        This dimension relates to the distribution of decision-making power. In its basic form, decision-making power can be centralized or distributed. Mintzberg differentiates six types of decentralization:

         

           

        1.   Centralized, where all of the powers resides in the strategic apex.
        2.   Selective, where the apex shares some of the power with the technostructure who standardizes the work for everybody.
        3.   Parallel, where leaders of market-driven parts of the organization are given the power to make decisions for their units.
        4.   Decentralized, where most of the power rests in the operating core.
        5.   Selective decentralization, where decision-making is shared by the operating core, support staff, line managers, and staff experts who work in teams at various levels of the organization.
        6.   Distributed, where power is shared more or less equally by all members of the organization.
    • Next time you look at an “org chart,” ask what the strategy behind the structure is
  • “Il est tendance actuellement d’entendre de ci de là «les JobBoards sont morts, comme la presse hier » ou encore « vos annonces faut les mettre sur les réseaux sociaux »… Opposer devient le maître-mot en échos à un autre mot très en vogue, le ROI. En l’espace de 18 mois les marchands du temple s’en donnent à cÅ“ur joie sur le marché du recrutement en ligne, trompant allégrement les « users-digital » qui se veulent les révolutionnaires du 3.0.”

    tags: recruitment socialnetworks socialnetworking humanresources

    • Les entreprises sont encore à l’Age de pierre de la parole démocratique digitale et seraient sur le point de se ruer sur les réseaux sociaux pour recruter lowcost ? Jusqu’à preuve du contraire un réseau social n’est pas un JobBoard ! Sa raison d’être est le contenu, l’échange, bref le participatif !
    • Le communiqué de presse de Facebook précisait lors de ce lancement « Nous savons que la puissance des médias sociaux – les connections entre amis, membres de la famille et communautés – peuvent avoir des conséquences énormes sur la capacité à trouver un travail
    • Penser une ligne éditoriale, travailler un contenu, former les équipes RH à l’écriture et à la conversation digitale, sortir des sites RH « béni oui-oui » au profit d’un écosystème médias sociaux et une harmonisation des profils en ligne, structurer une valeur ajoutée de Marque Employeur… SONT DES CHANTIERS PRIORITAIRES.
    • En vingt ans, les budgets de communication RH ont été divisés par 12 ! En face, l’influence des DRH s’est effondrée en écho à un mal-être généralisé – «en entreprise on n’existe qu’à la hauteur de son budget
    • OUI, TROIS FOIS OUI, LES RÉSEAUX SOCIAUX SONT L’AVENIR sous réserve de ne pas les instrumentaliser via une dimension réductrice du recrutement et de les intégrer dans une vision globale de stratégie de Marque et non de les limiter au ROI du cv
  • “There seems to be a general concensus these days, one I emphatically agree with, that adoption of social business will hinge on the success with which it is integrated into business processes. Successful social integration will require a detailed examination and transformation of existing business processes in light of this new transparent social culture.”

    tags: process businessprocess socialbusiness integration

    • This highlights the dichotomy we face, where we want to keep some of the structure & governance of traditional processes, while at the same time benefiting from the flexibility of social.
    • dentifying a ROI from collaboration is probably the first question most managers have … starting from an existing process and its baseline is a great way for seriously evaluating the improvement participative work provides
    • its the only way of accurately measuring social ROI integrated into existing KPIs
    • how do I keep some level of governance and capture provenance with socialized business processes when social is inherently ad-hoc
    • One gives you control, governance, traceability, and provenance, but is slow and rigid. The other gives you speed, responsiveness, transparency, and broad engagement, but is hard to govern
  • “I just tripped over an old video of a prototype I built a couple of years ago for IBM Lotusphere in Orlando. The objective was to distill the cacophony of noise out in the socialsphere into something that could be effectively integrated into the business, bringing together internal and external communications. The solution combined a range of approaches:

    Content analytics for entity extraction and classification.
    Semantic disambiguation for topic detection.
    A graph store to persist the social semantics.
    Social network analysis for social ranking.
    Influence scoring for building trust networks.”

    tags: analytics socialanalytics signalnoiseratio noise semantic influence networks trus

  • “I don’t believe in gamifying enterprise applications. As I have argued before, the primary drivers behind revenue and valuation of consumer software companies are number of users, traffic (unique views), and engagement (average time spent + conversion). This is why gamification is critical to consumer applications since it is an effort to increase the adoption of an application amongst the users and maintain the stickiness so that the users keep coming back and enjoy using the application. This isn’t true for enterprise applications at all. This is not only not true for enterprise applications, but gamifying enterprise applications is couterproductive that makes existing task more complex and creates an artificial carrot that does not quite work.”

    tags: flows workflows enterprisesocialsoftware gamification

    • A design philosophy that we really need for enterprise applications is flow.
    • Mihaly describes flow as a series of autotelic experiences as an activity that consumes us and becomes intrinsically rewarding
    • What people really want is enjoyment and not just pleasure. They are different. Enjoyment is about moving forward and accomplishing something.
    • All the gamification efforts by new innovative entrants that I see seem to be disproportionately focused on “edge” applications since it’s relatively easy for an entrant to break into edge applications to beat an incumbent as opposed to redesigning a core application
    • Application designers have traditionally ignored flow since it’s a physical element that is external to an application, but life and social status extend beyond the digital life and enterprise applications
  • “For customers, 2013 will be a year of taking action. Over the last few years organizations have invested a great deal of resources into learning about the technological and cultural shifts required for social business transformation. Now they can move past the struggles explaining “Facebook for the Enterprise” and instead focus on implementing the social features that will help their employees get their jobs done.

    For product vendors, 2013 will be less about creating shiny new features and more about helping their customers (and prospects) derive real business value from their platforms. Yes, of course there will still be innovations in user experience, mobile access, analytics and many more, but for the next little while the “competitive feature wars” will be less important than proving they understand how to help organizations succeed. “

    tags: sociabusiness socialtechnology enterprisesocialsoftware


    • Collaborative applications for specific business purposes.
    • Information will be structured around projects
    • Personal Task Automation helps employees get their jobs done
    • Keep track of information from multiple applications
    • Elearning makes a comeback as social learning
    • It’s time to turn that webcam on at work.
  • “We’ll know social has arrived when it ceases to stand out” says Sameer Patel. Patel is the Global Vice President, Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software Solutions for SAP – a global leader in enterprise solutions.

    Patel has a refreshing take on how social technologies can work for business, a successful blog and a propensity for making the complicated sound and seem simple. If you’re interested in understanding where busines is trending, read further.”

    tags: collaboration SAP socialbusiness socialtechnology

    • A well designed and purpose driven collaboration fabric is critical to ensure that companies efficiently find, share and engage with each other in the context of business activity.
    • By bringing BI and social collaboration together, sales teams can quickly share, discuss, and analyze pipeline opportunities allowing them to prioritize quickly, marketing teams can plan campaigns and analyze metrics post-delivery to ensure success or take away learnings that can be applied to future campaigns, or supply chain teams can track, discuss, and analyze metrics directly with each supplier
    • The problem with many social and collaborative offerings today is that they sit in a silo and as a result, business value or adoption is hard to achieve.
    • Many are great at letting people connect, but they miss the important business context that sparks purpose-driven collaboration, and as a result, social applications suffer from limited adoption
    • the next big thing in social is the disappearance of social from the center of the conversation
    • When organizations finally see how it can be applied to drive business value, we’ll see it become part of the business technology fabric and an indispensable capability to get work done
    • It isn’t the central value proposition but when combined with a contextual application, it becomes much more powerfu
  • “La communauté universitaire n’a pas idée de ce que la mise en réseaux des gens et des contenus va bouleverser son « écosystème » dans les prochaines années.

    Il n’en sera probablement pas question au Sommet sur l’enseignement supérieur, mais le phénomène des Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) est un des leviers de transformation les plus percutants de l’enseignement supérieur, à court terme, et l’université ne le voit pas venir…

    Les étudiants inscrits à un cours offert par une université dans une « dynamique MOOC » (voir cette infographie) font l’expérience d’apprendre en étant connectés en réseau (du connectivisme) avec une masse impressionnante d’autres étudiants. Le ou les professeurs « dans un monde de MOOCs » adopte(nt) une posture différente. Cette vidéo (En) de Dave Cormier et Neal Gillis me paraît être le document le plus « abouti » qui répond à la question qu’est-ce qu’un MOOC ?”

    tags: education networks socialnetworking learning

    • « L’internet fait naître un nouvel espoir de révolution dans l’enseignement supérieur. Depuis l’automne 2011, un grand nombre des meilleures universités du pays (dont le MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton…) offrent des cours gratuits sur le Net et plus d’un million de personnes à travers le monde se sont engagées à les suivre
    • Le président de Stanford a évoqué le tsunami à venir.
    • partout, son intégration [du numérique] pose plus de questions qu’elle n’offre de réponses.
  • “Aujourd’hui, les notions de bottum-up / top-down, d’intelligence collective des foules et autres sujets connexes sont très souvent évoqués. Pourtant, la concurrence est palpable entre les deux concepts : d’un côté, les méthodes qui prônent des modes d’organisation très structurés et particulièrement bien définis ; de l’autre, le monde en plein essor des flux interconnectés, là où les connaissances se construisent petit à petit, échange après échange (tous ces liens interactifs qui composent ce que l’on appelle le « travail de la connaissance »), porté par le social computing.”

    tags: management socialnetworking topdown problemsolving measurement evaluation

    • L’évaluation des postes (et ses dérivés tels que la cartographie de la responsabilité ou encore l’analyse de la redondance) est un outil essentiel à la conception et l’organisation du travail. Les méthodes que nous utilisons aujourd’hui sont nées dans les années 1950 et n’ont pas beaucoup évolué depuis lors. Les principes fondamentaux sur lesquelles elles se basent s’inspirent directement du Taylorisme et ont contribué à asseoir cette méthode de travail au sein de l’organisation moderne.  
    • Fondamentalement, l’évaluation des postes (la mesure du travail dans le jargon professionnel) repose sur le postulat que le savoir est structuré et utilisé de façon hiérarchique. Il en résulte que celui ou celle qui dispose du (ou les postes qui requièrent le) plus haut niveau de connaissances, sur le papier, mérite d’être plus haut placé(e) dans la hiérarchie de l’organisation.
    • Ces méthodes émettent une hypothèse fondamentale et essentielle quant à la nature du savoir. Elles laissent entendre que l’acquisition des connaissances, leur développement et l’usage que nous en faisons suivent un schéma relativement stable qui évolue lentement et posément et que le savoir se définit selon une classification officielle et entendue 
    • Ces méthodes d’évaluation n’ont pas anticipé l’arrivée du web, des hyperliens et des multiples échanges d’informations qui, petit à petit, empilent et assemblent les connaissances ; pas plus le phénomène de négociation, par les pairs, des résultats et responsabilités que nous observons dans le monde en réseau actuel.
    • Dans cette dynamique où se mêlent intérêt, débit et circulation d’informations pertinentes et utiles, le social computing (les outils du web 2.0 selon les adeptes de la Méthode Hay) monte en puissance, le service et les compétences sont plus fermement ancrés dans le travail de la connaissance sous la forme de plateformes collaboratives â€” c’est ce que l’on appelle désormais l’Entreprise 2.0.
    • Ceux d’entre nous qui connaissent le milieu des moyennes et grandes organisations voient pourquoi le postulat dicté par le Taylorisme (selon lequel le savoir est agencé verticalement, utilisé dans des structures pyramidales pour ensuite redescendre au niveau exécutif) se trouve aujourd’hui sur le point d’exploser dans le monde de réseaux interconnectés dans lequel de nombreuses personnes travaillent aujourd’hui. 
    • Ces phénomènes génèrent désaccord et ambiguïté car les objectifs fixés, l’attribution des tâches, les modalités de rémunération et les systèmes de bonus sont généralement basés sur la structure verticale des connaissances et leur utilisation intervient dans le cadre d’initiatives planifiées et structurées. Comme le travail de la connaissance est réalisé en grande partie par les individus qui communiquent et échangent des informations par le biais d’hyperliens au sein des réseaux sociaux (lieu de résidence du savoir) et les dirigent là où il y en a besoin, le schéma vertical des connaissances se trouve ainsi perturbé, voire menacé. 
    • Peu importe qu’il y ait beaucoup de débats autour du besoin de leadership à tous les niveaux ou encore de la responsabilisation et la démocratisation des travailleurs dans une organisation X ou Y. La gestion de la performance et les niveaux tant de rémunération que hiérarchiques ne se sont pas encore acclimatés à l’environnement ni au monde en réseau.
  • “Yesterday I wrote about the steps needed to proactively manage company culture. Today, I’d like to look at one company who does just that – LinkedIn.

    You’d think a company all about serving the needs of Human Resources would get this right, but that’s certainly not always the case. However, LinkedIn does get it right. Indeed, they take it to a level I rarely see – adding an additional layer of “dimension.”

    tags: humanresources linkedin casestudies culture behaviros values

    • So our culture has five dimensions: transformation, integrity, collaboration, humor and results. And there are six values: members first; relationships matter; be open, honest and constructive; demand excellence; take intelligent risks; and act like an owner. And by far the most important one is members first. We as a company are only as valuable as the value we create for our members
    • It’s how the values are different from culture that’s important – the values are very clearly behavioral actions. The values clearly say, “Go behave this way in how you get your job done.”
    • Culture is who we are. It’s essentially the personality of our company — who we are and who we aspire to be. Values are the principles upon which we make day-to-day decisions.
  • “I talked with Gary Hamel last week about the new M-Prize challenge on Innovating Innovation. The challenge is organized by the Management Innovation eXchange (MIX), an open innovation platform that aims to “crowd-source the future of management.” Among other things, it launches idea-challenges called “M-Prizes” to stimulate contributions from their community of management practitioners. Previous M-Prize challenges have focused on “Management 2.0” and “Beyond Bureaucracy”. This time, the focus is on “innovating innovation”.”

    tags: innovation capabilities M-Prize dna experimentation systemic Connectanddevelop procter&gamble

    • We’re never going to build a truly innovative company without a gene-replacement therapy.
    • . Moreover, my guess is that most of those “satisfied” managers weren’t benchmarking themselves against Apple [AAPL] or Amazon [AMZN]. They were thinking about their other lackluster peers, and worrying about whether they were even up to snuff there.
    • You look at a company like Nokia [NOK], which for a time was absolutely a product innovator. Their original candy-bar shaped phones were a huge design innovation. Then they lost it.
    • Procter & Gamble [PG] was celebrated as an innovation power-house. They had this model of “connect and develop”, where they were trawling the world for new innovation ideas. Yet, by their own admission, they have struggled over the last few years to come up with groundbreaking innovation.
    • A DNA-level problem

       

      First, innovation isn’t like something that we’d like to have and so we just go out and get it. Organizations were built to do things that are antithetical to innovation. Organizations were built around principles that deify conformance, control, alignment, discipline and efficiency. The principles that organizations have at their core are antithetical to innovation.

    • Building a capability takes time

       

      Secondly, if you want to create an innovation capability, you cannot do it in a piecemeal fashion. What often happens in organizations is that they have a series of unlinked and partial innovation programs. Somewhere there will be an idea-wiki. Somewhere else, there will be an innovation rewards ceremony. Somewhere else there will be a CEO slush fund or an internal venturing arm that vets new business ideas. So those efforts are not joined up. They are incomplete.

    • You have to train people how to be business innovators. If you don’t train them, the quality of the ideas that you get in an innovation marketplace is not likely to be high
    • An innovation marketplace won’t work unless there’s a rapid feedback process.
    • There also have to be clear criteria around which your ideas get evaluated and then funded.
    • And the decision needs to be linked to the availablity of experimental capital.
    • There are so many things that you have to think through and get right, and a lot of companies just haven’t thought this through in a truly systemic way
    • So if you want innovation capability, you have to have all these things—training, funding, and accountability for it at every level of the organization
    • But we do have to think about innovation as a systemic capability, with the skills, the metrics, the policies, the values, and the IT platform that support innovation
    • Organic sharing of innovations

       

      The organic route draws on the fact that there’s actually a lot of innovation going on. Companies are tackling individual pieces of this problem. They may not have seen it as systemically as we do. But by starting to aggregate these innovations together, people can learn from each other and see where are the missing pieces in their own innovation efforts.

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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