Bertrand DUPERRIN's Notepad

Links for this week (weekly)

Diigo — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 03:30:44 +0000

Open Innovation, or is Business War?

The catchphrase of Henry Chesbrough’s work on innovation (a doctrine called “open innovation” and described in Open Innovation, 2003, and Open Business Models, 2006), is “not all the smart people work for you.” The key operational message that corporations seem to take away from it though, is “buy and sell intellectual property vigorously and throw some money at universities.” Somewhere along the way unfortunately, a sophisticated reconstruction of the logic of innovation becomes reduced to quick-money recipes.

tags: openinnovation, intelectualproperty, innovation
- Here is the obvious conclusion that Chesbrough is unwilling to draw from his own theory: if intellectual property moves around in an economy through the clumsy and cumbersome process of trade, things get drastically slowed down. The solution isn’t just more trade. It is faster trade, and sometimes, free sharing.
Enterprise 2.0 SaaS: Customer Benefit or Vendor Convenience?

However, SaaS is not an optimal solution for every business problem and every customer. Providers need to look in the mirror and be brutally honest with themselves about the motivations around their SaaS strategy and its relevancy to the customer. I’ve already heard of instances of business changing hands between E2.0 vendors at this early stage in the game, for these very reasons.

tags: Saas, onpremise, vendors, businessproblems
Microsoft: Bad User Experience Is Cultural

It is much easier to use product managers to create a repeatable process. After all, there is much less passion involved. For many markets, it may not be worth Apple-style design. People often wonder for Enteprise software whether it matters, for example. But I don’t buy my PM friend’s argument. Talent of all kinds is always scarce. A decision to eschew finding talent for a repeatable process creates mediocrity.

tags: productmanagement, productdesign, culture, microsoft, process, repeatableprocess, userexperience
Reinventing Silos

Blogs and wikis provide specific formats to content. There are behavioral format clues that differentiate a blog from a wiki, but under the covers it’s all content. Content elements have value beyond the formats and applications that hold them hostage — they’re enterprise assets that can be repurposed in other formats. The specific format of content (.pdf .doc .html) is really only relevant for consumption — to associate the ‘viewing’ of the content with an application that can display it. The semantics of the content itself doesn’t really care about the format (don’t hold me to that when I’m telling you how to create semantically-relevant formats), just ask your favorite search engine — it’s all words to them.

tags: silos, content, formats, enterprise2.0
- Consider a simple ‘hostage’ example (one that I’ve been aghast as many UX designers have missed the significance of), a UI with the labels “Blog” and “Wiki” as two separate options for navigation.
- Sure, 2.0 technologies can increase transparency across organizations, but that’s all lost as you move across ‘closed’ solutions or formats, with no architectural layer to synthesize it all. One silo is simply replaced by another.
Notes from Enterprise 2.0: Still looking for End User Adoption

What I did not hear from these groups are the three things that I think are crucial to encouraging use amongst the rank and file:

tags: enterprise2.0, adoption, problems, businessprocess
- Helping business leaders map out what specific business problem the tool will solve
- Providing assistance in re-engineering the business process that will be served by the tool.
- Embedding the tool within areas that the information workers live.
Connecting ideas with communities - Annotated

I use the chasm model to explain my professional work of 1) seeing what is ready to cross the chasm by 2) staying connected to the innovators & being an early adopter so that 3) I can help mainstream organizations. It’s a good graphic summary of my consulting practice.

tags: innovation, ideas, chasm, communities, connectors, mavens, salesmen
Adopt Intranet 2.0 or risk failure

An organization without a 2.0 strategy risks being left behind, or outright failure (though death may be slow). Employees want to work for progressive and innovative organizations, and expect 2.0 environments from employers of choice.

561 organizations of all sizes from across the planet participated in the Intranet 2.0 Global Survey and the results reveal rapid adoption of social media on the corporate intranet in the past year.

Once a nice-to-have or a future wish, Intranet 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis and other vehicles have become mainstream, and are present in nearly 50% of organizations (regardless of size) in the Western World.

Intranet blogs, wikis and discussion forums are quite pervasive, while other less common tools such as podcasts and mashups remain an after-thought at most organizations:

tags: enterprise2.0, intranet2.0, adoption, survey, costs
Management 2.0 : quel rôle pour le management de proximité dans les organisations collaboratives

Ce sujet n’est pas neutre, ces managers vont être les principaux relais dans la mise en place de communautés ou de plateforme collaborative dans votre organisation. Les avoir contre vous, c’est la garantie de l’échec de votre projet. Maintenant, il ne faut pas se leurrer, dans une organisation collaborative, le rôle traditionnel de ce management va évoluer, il ne peut pas demeurer le même. Comme le disait Peter Drucker : “90% de ce que nous nommons le management consiste à compliquer le travail des collaborateurs. Dans un nouveau monde de management, je vois l’employé gérer sa charge de travail et demander un soutien à un coach quand il en a besoin”. Ce n’est pas sans rappeler le fonctionnement d’une entreprise collaborative.

tags: middlemanagement, collaboration, management, personalbranding, proximitymanagement, management2.0
Death of the middle managers: thinking of Enterprise 2.0 and Corporate Culture Change

They were not responsible for giving reports work to do. Instead a resource pool operated with resourcing managers identifying staff with the right skills mix to quickly staff-up and tear down projects. Consultants had to proactively go about managing their career, promoting themselves and finding their next job.

This, I believe will become the new model of the corporation in a Web 2.0 world. And the fact of the matter is this model exists today in many consulting firms.

tags: enterprise2.0, middlemanagement, management, consulting, resources, resourcingmanagers
Post #e2conf thoughts – installment 2.

Internal communities contain members who are employees of a company. They are paid and can be fired. The panelists touched upon many issues and gave excellent advice.

tags: communities, internalcommunities, communitymanagement, silos, customers, employees, communication
Productivity in a Networked Era – Assessing ROII (Return on Investment in Interaction)

Today’s networked era requires a new way to make investment decisions that incorporates intangible assets and more accurately depicts how value is created.

The industrial age has run out of steam. Look at General Motors. Look at Chrysler. We are witnessing the death throes of management models that have outlived their usefulness.

The network era now replacing the industrial age holds great promise. Networked organizations are reaping rewards for connecting people, know-how and ideas at an ever-faster pace. Value creation has migrated from what we can see (physical assets) to intangibles (ideas). Look at Google and Cisco.

tags: networks, socialnetworks, ROI, organization, productivity, ROII, interactions, judgment
- ROI is an accounting and financial management concept businesses use to decide where to make investments and to assess the success of investment decisions after the fact. ROI reduces both return — R, what you expect back — and investment — I, what you expect to put in to numbers — making it possible to compare one investment opportunity to another. The numbers tie back to categories on the balance sheet and income statement, (i.e. tangible assets and hard-dollar returns).
- Measuring intangibles involves making judgment calls, so managers often exclude intangibles from their ROI calculations. Several purported authorities on calculating ROI suggest taking intangibles into account by putting them on a list but refusing to estimate their value. This leads you to comparing numbers to words, apples to oranges.
- Executives manage immeasurable things all the time. The more powerful the executive, the more likely he or she is involved in effectiveness — doing the right things rather than doing things right. Intuition, judgment and gut feelings guide these more important decisions. Qualitative assessment often can make up for a concrete numeric result.
Collaborative Enterprise: Enterprise 2.0 & The Flywheel

My triggering point for this post was a post by Peter Bergman in the Harvard Business blogs on the best way to change corporate culture. It is in many ways a recapitulation of fundamental issues organizations face on the cultural side. He says: “Performance reviews and training programs define the firm’s expectations. Financial reward systems reinforce them. Memos and communications highlight what’s important. And senior leadership actions — promotions for people who toe the line and a dead end career for those who don’t — emphasize the firm’s priorities. In most organizations these elements develop unconsciously and organically to create a system that, while not always ideal, works.”

What all of this really boils down is two things - human and social capital. Toyota in my view could be one such company - the robust and high performance knowledge sharing network they have built across their supply chain is a case in point. See research paper here .

tags: enterprise2.0, toyota, knowledgesharing, humancapital, socialcapital, collaboration, lean
- “Toyota’s network has solved three fundamental dilemmas with regard to knowledge sharing by devising methods to (1) motivate members to participate and openly share valuable knowledge (while preventing undesirable spillovers to competitors), (2) prevent free riders, and (3) reduce the costs associated with finding and accessing different types of valuable knowledge
- Technology makes things possible; people collaborating makes it happen.”
- Could Toyota have done this better with E2.0 technologies? Looks like it would have helped them accelerate this journey but then it would have been possible only because they had a strong cultural and business foundation.
The Seven Deadly Sins of Online Community Management

Community managers are human and imperfect. Here are the Seven Deadly Sins that community managers are sometimes guilty of:

tags: communities, sins, communitymanagement

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

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Telecommutig and virtual teams : going too far can harm your organization

Bertrand DUPERRIN — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:00:25 +0000

Applying good ideas is like nervous tension and cholesterol : too few is dangerous, too much can be harmful. The example of telecommuting and its consequence, virtual teams, is very meaninful.

Telecommuting is, at least partly, the answer to many harms. First, the need for being able to work anywhere (and not only from one’s home). Then, a trend that makes everyone concerned about unnecessary transportations. Whether it’s about business travels or daily commutation, it’s a discourse that impacts both finances and environmental awareness and that makes telecommuting tools a remedy to both economic and societal issues. Something that may make businesses charge in blindly.

But we must also acknowledge that virtual teams, that is a consequence of telecommuting, is not a cure-all. Believe me, virtual teams don’t exist. There are only real teams that telecommutes. Tools and devices allow people to get rid of barriers related to time, space and team member’s schedules. But a team must exist first. A team can telecommute but has to be created and maintained through real meetings. The quality and efficiency of virtuals teams directly depends on the frequency and quality of these moments in real life with real people.

Telecommuting tools are a palliative to the impossibility to work together at the same place and time. Social tools bring an added value, giving more quality to distant relationships and lower, without eliminating them, the disavantages of distance. But teamwork and the need for cohesion that is very important for businesses make that a full time distant teamwork is counter productive on a long term. Moreover it seems that some businesses that choose to fully virtualize team work are changing their mind. On the other hand, a sucessuful example for telecommuting and telenetworking can be found (once again)at Cisco but, I we have a closer took at the numbers, people telecommute in average only 2 days per week. Maybe more telecommuting may have sides effects…

Some thing can only be done or solved through a real contact. Some other can’t start without a discussion, an eye contact, a shakehand. What is sometimes true on the web is even more true within a business.

Making the office the only place to work at is counter productive, both economically and humanly. People may be able to work from everywhere in order to face the constraints of business life, even of personal lives. I don’t even mention the environmental impact. But thinking the same results will be obtained with people who seldom meet each other and were not introduced to each other in real life is a mistake. Truth is halfway and needs a serious reflection that can’t rely on the fad of the moment. “Greenwashing” can be good, washing the human capital and team cohesion surely not.

Today, teams can telecommute. But that supposes that teams exist.

The impossible modeling of the social enterprise as such

Bertrand DUPERRIN — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:00:57 +0000

I really liked Jeremiah Owyang’s work on the future of the social web a lot, just as the discussion we had when he visited Paris. I wondered if such a model can apply to enterprises, the kind of thing that is intellectually challenging whitout being sure if would be of any use.

I quickly came to the conclusion that the model could not apply.

As a matter of fact, modeling the social web is modeling the web itself. In fact, the social web is the very nature of the web. At its very beginning, the web’s vocation was to become what’s becoming now. Anlyzing the social web is like making a two levels analysis : technology and behaviors. This reminds me of what Jeremiah told be : his report was about people’s behaviors. Busineses have to choice to jump on the wagon or to stay out of the way.

On the other hand, the social enterprise is not the very nature of the enterprise. No need for long explainations : what happened, is happening and will happen on the web is driven by the natural attirance internauts have for some behaviors. These behaviors, even if organizational performance makes them necessary, even when businesses want to promote them are not natural in the workplace.

In short, we can say that if nothing is done the web will become social. On the contrary, if we want businesses to become social, many efforts are needed. If we consider that employees and internauts are the same people, the difference comes once again from external variable which are neither technology nor people but what drives them.

Of course we can analyse the social part of the enterprise. It would be a little like analyzing its connections with the web as I did here. But it’s still incomplete because social web is a natural trend while social corporate web is a managed trend. One is unavoidable, the other has to be implemented.

Analysing the evolution of the social enterprise is, in fact, of little interest since it’s only a layer of the existing enterprise. That’s what I explained here and what Andrew McAfee said with other words a few time ago : what matters in not to describe the phenomenon but to explain what it will replace and how it will articulate with what will remain from the existing. What will make the transition successfull would be usefull too. So it’s a model with too many entries to be understandable, most of all because its audience is not supposed to be social media experts but people who wan to understand how things will word. I also advise you to read this post from Tom Davenport who does not focus on 1.0 nor 2.0 but 1.5. According to me “1.5″ means “articulation”.

So an indusputable axis has to be be found in order to build the rest around it. I still thing that production can be a relevant one. Putting it in perspective with the service oriented organization and simplifying the result may bring something interesting.

So the next step will have two sides : reconciliation (find common denominators, cultural links) and articulation (how to switch between two working models depending on the situation).

To be continued…

Tags: enterprise 2.0 , organization , social enterprise , social-web , web-2.0

Links for this week (weekly)

Diigo — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 03:28:28 +0000

The Clash Of Ages: How Technology Divides Workers

If you’re a boss, what do you do about employees who love to tweet, text and social network throughout the day? It’s a question companies are grappling with as the generation gap threatens to create a communications divide.

tags: generationY, socialnetwork, divide, culture, technology, technologygap, multitasting, reputation, generationdivide, generations
Cisco Study Finds Telecommuting Significantly Increases Employee Productivity, Work-Life Flexibility and Job Satisfaction -> News@Cisco

Today, Cisco announced the findings of its Teleworker Survey, an in-depth study of almost 2,000 company employees. The study, conducted to evaluate the social, economic and environmental impacts associated with telecommuting at Cisco, revealed that a majority of respondents experienced a significant increase in work-life flexibility, productivity and overall satisfaction as a result of their ability to work remotely.

tags: cisco, telecommuting, productivity, telenetworking
The Evolving Web In 2009: Web Squared Emerges To Refine Web 2.0

At first glance this can seem to be an impersonal and inhuman concept as the network expands to surround everything and dominate the participation that so far at least is still driven (for a little bit longer anyway) by what people do and contribute online. However, this bleak vision is tempered by the realization that far from being pushed to the side, we collectively must be the feedback loop that guides Web Squared through billions of daily interactions that makes it possible in the first place. It’s the full environment, including us, which makes it all work.

tags: web2.0, websquared, productdevelopment, businessmodel, productdesing
Value Chain Approach to Web 2.0 For Enterprises

tags: enterprise2.0, valuechain
The Value Chain 2.0: Bringing In The Consumer

Value chain 2.0 takes into account the active consumer in the production of value, across every level of a company’s activities. Henceforth, we call the active consumer the “ConsumActor “ to indicate this reality.

tags: valuechain, valuechain2.0, consumer, consumactor
Product Development 2.0

What is Product Development 2.0 exactly? It’s an informal term I’m applying to something that online startups and traditional businesses both are increasingly doing: leveraging of mass user contributions, providing open architectures for others to build on as they like, and even handing control over key product decisions directly to users. The reasoning behind doing this is simple: Satisfied customers have always been essential to having the most successful business, both online and offline. But how best can you ensure that they get exactly what they want from you, as customized and quickly as possible? This is where the scale, new tools, and business models of Web 2.0 have stepped in, giving us the potential to provide our customers with better, rich products, much more quickly, and with more of what they want. Taken as a whole, it’s increasingly clear that there are new business models afoot that are just now being well understood.

tags: productdevelopment, innovation
Google Gets Serious about Innovation

So when the company says it’s missing out on good ideas, this is both surprising, and perhaps somewhat expected. Surprising, because how does a company consistently ranked at the top of innovation surveys miss good ideas? Expected, because Google now employs 20,000. With that many people, how does a company stay on top of all those ideas?

What I’m seeing is a company that is is progressively systematizing its innovation practice. Google is following the path of its large enterprise brethren, adapting its internal processes to account for its size and its need to grow across multiple fronts. It really has to. It’s no longer the small company where ideas get tossed around on a white board, and everyone knows what’s going on. I mean, there are 20,000 people employed there.

Google is getting serious about innovation.

tags: google, innovation, scorecard, innovationmanagementscorecard
What kills startups

Most closures, however — even those that do not end in bankruptcy — are the result of unforeseen circumstances. It seems that Murphy’s Law affects entrepreneurs disproportionately. Often, these disasters could have been avoided if company management had paid more heed to the principles of risk management.

tags: startup, strategy, management, risk, closure
Disney Crowdsources Its Own Company

I know what you’re asking: “How can you crowdsource your own company?” Well, in this case I’m referring to the fact that once a year, Disney (DIS) puts out a call for product ideas to its entire consumer products division of 12,532 employees, which includes Fashion & Home, Toys & Electronics, Food, Health & Beauty, Stationery and Publishing. That means sales, communications, and other non-inventing divisions get to participate. It’s what they call the “Big Idears” contest. For the first time, one of these ideas is coming to the mass market…

tags: disney, innovation, crowdsourcing, business
Business Strategy Expert Gary Hamel: Ten Tips from the Top

Recognized by Fortune magazine as “the world’s leading strategy expert in business today”,
Gary Hamel has outlined ten design rules for innovation for companies intent on generating sustained wealth in the future:

tags: innovation, garyhamel, openinnovation, openmarkets, experimentation
Is the Corporate Structure Obsolete?

We have also seen social media form communities that increase productivity in manufacturing processes, software development, and project management. We have seen people self manage in social media to segregate and elevate good information away from bad information. We have seen communities act with logic, tact, and precision previously thought to be the province of top management guidance.

In short, we have seen social media replace or duplicate almost every structural element of the traditional corporation outside of the construct of corporations. Can social media provide a corporate structure in and among itself?

tags: socialmedia, productivity, accounting, businessplan
- Increasingly, access to the community knowledge inventory is becoming a means be which people can convert productivity to money.
- The next paradigm of economic development will reside almost entirely on a statistical game of managing risk and return, matching surplus to deficit, and increasing human productivity in the operating system of Social Media.
- Finally, look for the threats that can corrupt an innovation economy. Social Media is currently responsible for trillions of dollars of productivity gains – all this money is still on the table for social entrepreneurs to monetize once the integration reaches a tipping point.
Social processes #e2open

The home page is dominated by the activity stream, which includes links to tasks, blog posts, documents and other systems that are relevant to this person’s work. It’s not just the usual social network stuff; it also includes information from enterprise systems such as ECM and BPM systems. There would be rules to set priorities on what’s in any given user’s activity stream.

tags: ecm, bpm, enteprise2.0, process, activities, activitystream
Process Discipline and Creativity

I’ve recently been asked a couple of questions I used to hear all the time. The questions are:

1. Doesn’t process discipline add overhead and cost?
2. Doesn’t process discipline stifle creativity?

tags: process, costs, creativity, discipline, standardization
- So, process discipline makes the most sense for activities that are routine and sequential –
- Juran argued that you can manage for control (process discipline, incremental and continuous improvement) or you can manage for breakthrough performance (step change, creativity, process reengineering). He further argues that each require different organization and management approaches, and you had better be clear on which you need and are trying to achieve – control or breakthrough, and then ensure you are managing and motivating appropriately.
- Know where you need creativity, and where you don’t, and where the nature of the work lends itself to excellent processes, follow a strong process discipline.
Microsoft Reinvents Its Global R&D Model

Undoubtedly Microsoft is pioneering the R&D 2.0 model that I discussed in my last post — an organizational model that relies on anthropologists and development economists to first decipher the socio-cultural needs of users in emerging markets like India and then use these deep insights to develop appropriate technology solutions. And it’s telling that Microsoft picked India as the epicentre of its global R&D transformation.

tags: R&D, microsoft, innovation, r&d2.0
Social Business Design = Web 2.0 + Médias sociaux + Entreprise 2.0

En ce moment c’est la saison des conférences et l’actualité est particulièrement riche cette semaine avec la 140 Characters Conference à New York et l’Enterprise 2.0 Conference à Boston. Médias sociaux et entreprise 2.0… deux domaines qui suscitent beaucoup de bruit et de créativité mais qui ne se mélangent pas. Une des raisons principale qui fait que ces deux domaines sont jusqu’à présent restés hermétiques est parce qu’ils répondent à des objectifs différents et surtout fonctionnent différemment (notamment dans la motivation et les dynamiques sociales sui régissent les interactions).

C’est dans ce contexte que le Social Business Design fait son apparition avec l’ambition d’unifier ces deux pratiques en une sorte de Théorie du Tout : From Social Media To Social Business Design.

tags: socialbusinessdesign, socialmedia, enterprise2.0, ecosystem, value, valuematrix, socialsoftware
How Companies Increase Innovation

hose ideas, however, don’t really come from nowhere. Instead, they are typically at the edge of a company’s radar screen, and sometimes a bit beyond: trends in peripheral industries, unserved needs in foreign markets, activities that aren’t part of the company’s core business. To be truly innovative, companies sometimes have to change their frames of reference, extend their search space. New ways of thinking and organization can be required as well.

tags: innovation, ideas, ideasmanagement, ideagoras, conversations, communities, communitiesofpractices
- Problem solvers can be professionals, retired scientists, students or anyone who can answer a problem that has stumped a company’s own researchers. InnoCentive, based in Waltham, Mass., says the site gives solutions to about 40% of the problems posed.
- Many companies set up so-called communities of practice, which are typically internal Web sites where employees are encouraged to share knowledge and skills important to the company.
From Social Media To Social Business Design

While I can’t go into the full vision of what we’re thinking about yet—we’re realizing that the bigger picture goes beyond how you can be a great tweeter, blogger or social media evangelist for your organization. It’s time to think beyond marketing and building personal brands and time to think about how participation through social technologies can lead to emergent outcomes for any organization. Can “social media” save GM? It’s unlikely that media can save any organization grappling with changes in their business environment. But what if organizations of that size were able to act preemptively before market conditions forced them into similar predicaments?

tags: enterprise2.0, organization, ecosystem, GM, socialmedia, socialbusinessdesign, socialbusiness, businesstransformation
- If the big picture is business transformation, it’s going to take more than a few tweets to get there.
Enterprise 2.0 Flourishes When You Understand The Business Side Of The Enterprise

My point, with emphasis, is that we all need to a better job of understanding how our customers operate. Everyone needs to tell product managers that customers don’t care about your widget unless it can be tied to something larger that can transform business. It’s the classic technology silo. If your widget isn’t tied to a larger architecture that can be used to reconstruct a process, it’s just a widget that will rest on a digital shelf instead of a wooden one. (for you shrink-wrap folks)

tags: enterprise2.0, business, adoption, customers, vendors
- When vendors press for big picture questions early, they quickly have an opportunity to brand themselves as strategic instead of the tool company.
- what I plan to do is look at enterprise 2.o not from a toolset lens but from my customer’s lens. The disparity between the two is what frustrates me. I’ve seen some of the best technology around with a bunch of folks sitting around a table unable to produce more than one use case for the how it can impact the business.
Driving innovation in large professional service firms: Six high-return initiatives

However there are many barriers to innovation in large professional firms, including billing imperatives, strong functional specialization, and often highly risk-averse cultures. Much of the management literature on innovation focuses on product development and design, and is not always relevant to a professional services environment.

tags: professionalservices, innovation
- Young, talented professionals show little interest in continuing to plough the furrow of long-established processes, however wax enthusiastic about creating new approaches to their work.
- There are many aspects to service delivery innovation, notably the integration of internal, external and online resources to create efficient and differentiated value creation for clients.
- Effective innovation in this space enables offers that create value for both clients and their service providers
Launching Social Networks for the Enterprise

Anne said that when a social network is deployed internally separate from the workflow, it does not tend to drive productivity, as employees do not engage. There needs to be a compelling reason apart from the technology to make it work. It cannot be implemented as a utility without a specific value proposition tied to work processes. I am in strong agreement here as it correlates with my own experiences with knowledge management.

tags: socialnetworks, value, workflow, problems, businessproblems
- Companies who are interested in implementing the new social networking solutions need to start by identifying a business problem. This premise is almost as old as people but it so often ignored that we need to keep raising it. Every time there is a new hot technology, it can step on its own toes if we are not careful.
Four Value Network Patterns to Accelerate Time from Ideation to Commercialization | ValueNetworks.com

Value network analysis as applied to innovation from ideation to commercialization provides a possible solution to one of the most challenging business issues in the intangibles economy: describing exactly how intangible assets such as intellectual capital are converted into ideas and other deliverables deployed in purposeful networks to create economic or social value. The ability to visualize, analyze and optimize innovation networks is of great value to both government bodies responsible for regional development and for commercial businesses seeking to bring innovations to market. Specifically making the transition from one phase or “state” of the innovation network to another is often problematic. As additional roles come into play the nature of the interactions change across the entire network. Innovation networks are increasingly complex and relationships must be maintained in some cases for several years. Supporting the integrity and continuity of an innovation network is critical to success.

tags: valuenetworks, networks, ideation, comercialization, patterns, innovation, intellectualcapital
Enterprise 2.0 Reflects the Culture

Why are Enterprise 2.0 implementations of blogs, wikis, or forums not living up to the expectations of the technology?

The primary reason is because social media tools reflect the culture of the organization – they can’t change the culture of the organization by themselves. If the “social” part of social media doesn’t exist within your organization or is corrupted, all you’re going to end up with is “media” – a blog with no readers or a wiki with no edits.

tags: enterprise2.0, implementation, adoption, culture
Does Self-Censorship Help Innovation? The Enterprise 2.0 Approach

The next time someone tells you that you need lots of ideas, stop, think and work out the outcomes you want before you go collecting thousands, and thousands, and potentially more thousands of fluffy, non-relevant ideas that go nowhere.

The gist of Mark’s post is that encouraging the contribution of ideas from all quarters is actually counterproductive. He prescribes the concept of an “appropriate” number of ideas.

tags: ideas, innovation, enterprise2.0, emergence, filters, culture
The Importance of Cultivating Interdisciplinary Relationships

The result is that a lot of people in the workforce have a pretty narrow view of what the word “colleague” means. It’s important to broaden that definition and cultivate relationships with people in other fields. Here’s why.

tags: interdisciplinaryrelationships, collaboration, colleagues, learning, partnership, relationship
- Expanding your definition of who you count as a colleague is not just a petty semantics game. It will help shape the way you interact with people, and could lead to more meaningful relationships where none would otherwise exist
- But by sticking to familiar ground you’re only doing yourself a disservice in the end.
- If you happen to be successful at learning about things beyond your usual sphere, you may start to get ideas for strange and unusual projects that bridge disciplines or industries.
Can Enterprise 2.0 Afford to be Boring?

It is critically important that Enterprise 2.0 tools get adopted by the risk takers and in-the-line-of-fire people actually driving the business. If we speculate that 20% of the employees are responsible for 80% of the results, we need that proportion reflected in online activity. The people who don’t pull their punches. The ones who dare to call a spade a spade. The ones who know how to tell the truth without unnecessary collateral damage. Without them, the revolution that Enterprise 2.0 thinking is capable of triggering will not happen.

tags: enterprise2.0, risk, risktaker, adoption
Le Personal Branding au service de l’entreprise 2.0

L’entreprise 2.0, ce n’est pas « une entreprise + du Web 2.0 ». L’objectif n’est pas la création d’une entreprise technophile mais d’une « entreprise intelligente » dont les salariés ont un vouloir coopérer (une culture, des croyances qui favorisent les coopérations intellectuelles), un savoir coopérer (un mode de management adapté à l’entraide sur les activités très intellectuelles) et enfin un pouvoir coopérer (une organisation et un fonctionnement qui favorisent la transversalité et le partage des bonnes pratiques). Les technologies Web 2.0 font partie du pouvoir coopérer, elles viennent en support de la culture, des compétences et du fonctionnement de l’organisation.

tags: personalbranding, enterprise2.0, culture, collaboration, cooperation, reputation
- Compte tenu du principe de la dissonance cognitive, si un individu fonctionne dans une logique de réseau et d’entraide pour gérer sa carrière, il est fort probable qu’il finira par fonctionner dans la même logique dans ses activités professionnelles. Bien sûr, la transition se fera progressivement.
Hal Varian (chef économiste Google): “L’heure est venue des micromultinationales” : Entreprise Globale

La démocratisation totale des moyens de communication, l’explosion du volume d’information disponible - et son organisation, bien sûr, par Google - ne manquent pas de rappeler les responsables du moteur de recherche - auront un impact aussi important, estime Hal Varian, que l’introduction de la chaîne d’assemblage dans l’industrie, voici un siècle. “On optimise ainsi les flux d’information et d’idées pour l’économie de la connaissance. A l’instar de l’optimisation, jadis, du flux de production de biens physiques, dans l’industrie, d’Henry Ford à aujourd’hui.

tags: informationflows, multinational, organization, communication, startup, micromultinational, collaboration
The State of Intangibles Measurement - KPI’s Are An Imperfect Answer

In the industrial economy, we had lots of ways of measuring our work. It was a mostly physical process so we could literally see what was going on. Our financial systems were built around this industrial model and we could also put dollar values on products as they progressed through factories and machines, converting raw materials into finished goods.

The shift to a knowledge economy has changed that. A lot of the value created today happens inside peoples’ heads or their computers. This is the case in service and technology businesses but even in manufacturing settings where it is the process, not the product, that creates so much of the value.

tags: kpi, intangible, measurement, intangibleassets, indicators
- Well here’s what worries me. KPI’s are by definition a small number of indicators. There is no guarantee that KPI’s are the right metrics. And they can be manipulated.
KM and HR: Siamese Twins?

I’ve previously pondered over how we could possibly work with HR to ensure success for KM and can perhaps summarize some of the key points as follows: (I am assuming that the points below represent key components in HR strategies)

tags: km, humanresources, training, hiring, competences, appraisals, incentive, motivation, satisfaction, attrition, retention, talentmanagement, humancapital, rotation, jobrotation
- Hire people with at least an average KM quotient
- Encourage informal learning mechanisms
- including the employee’s KM quotient as one of the objectives/competencies in the appraisal process
- visibility/recognition/appreciation being more important than monetary gestures
- I firmly believe that one of the critical aspects that contribute to employee satisfaction, delight and engagement is an environment that enables and celebrates knowledge sharing and collaboration.
- We need to understand the links between various roles and how rotation of employees (knowledge) would help the organization get more efficient/innovative.
Réseaux sociaux et réputation, l’étude du cabinet conseil Deloitte LLP

Le cabinet conseil Deloitte LLP vient de publier une enquête sur l’impact des réseaux sociaux sur la réputation et l’image des entreprises. L’introduction de cette étude par son président, Sharon L Allen est sans équivoque: “Si la décision de publier des videos, des images des réflexions, expériences ou observations sur des sites de réseaux sociaux est un acte personnel, un seul d’entre eux peut avoir d’importantes conséquences éthique pour les individus comme les entreprises. Par conséquent il est important pour les dirigeants d’être conscient des implications et d’élever la discussion au sujet des risques et cela en association avec le plus haut niveau d’encadrement.”

tags: deloitte, socialnetworks, reputation
TOYOTA WAY: 14 PRINCIPLES

The Toyota Way is not the Toyota Production System (TPS) . The 14 Principles of the Toyota Way is a management philosophy used by the Toyota corporation that includes TPS, also known as lean manufacturing. TPS is the most systematic and highly developed example of what the principles of the Toyota Way can accomplish. The Toyota Way consists of the foundational principles of the Toyota culture, which allows the TPS to function so effectively.

tags: toyota, management, philosophy, organization, culture, toyotaway, problemsolving, push, tps, lean

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

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The enterprise and the web

Bertrand DUPERRIN — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:00:02 +0000

Finally, many current debates are about the enterprises’ ability to understand, master and harness the web, internally. This may seem trivial because purely technological and being about competences that are much lighter that those IT depts have been using for decades. But, at the end, it’s more complicated that it seems.

As a matter of fact :

• It’s about making enterprises assimilate somethings external, which is not something culturally easy. More, it has an impact on the competences that have to be gathered.

• For the first time, it’s about assimilating something coming from the general public whereas enterprises used to be leaders in technological change, adopting things years before it becomes available and affordable for common people.

• The assimilation, that was technological at the beginning, became about new usages. But enterprises don’t know the word usages : they have methods, processes, norms. The only fact something can change, even a small detail, causes a self-defences reaction. Considering there is also a behavioral impact, it’s easy to understand how difficult things are even if many people are overestimating the upcoming changes. Even if it will help businesses to be aligned with their economic and competitive context, the shift is not easy.

So, here’s how, in less than a decade, things went from face-lifting interfaces to an human and organizational project.

Phase 1 : Disinterest

The web exists but is not massively adopted by the general public. Still under construction. While its players are working to make it become mainstream, to find it a purpose and businesses models, enterprises are looking at it from a distance, focused on their uneasy to use and bad looking business softwares.

Phase 2 : Graphical face-lift (late 90’s - 2005)

The web is becoming more and more popular, interfaces improves and it’s gaining attention beyond the early adopters. It doesn’t bring many things except the online replication of online business models. Unidirectional and rigid. But its interfaces, even if they were less user friendly than what we know today, are a real progress compared with what enterprise applications were providing at this time. Enterprises started to open their doors to the web, and “webize” their online apps. Then, the intranet followed the same direction.

It’s a little revolution even if nothing fundamental changes : web is coming mainly for esthetic reasons and the will to make many things available through a browser. But behind this renovated frontage, the logics remained the same.

Phase 3 : Simplification (2005 - 2009)

General public web is improving. More users, improved technologies, and the emergence of the notion of usage. People don’t browse or consult the web anymore, they use it. Applications and services are slowly replacing sites and portails. Light interface, intuitive use, social dimension : internauts are not looking at the web without interacting together, they are on the web to connect and interact. That’s web 2.0. Or, more humbly, the original promise finally kept. Let’s be honnest : it’s been overemphasized but the crital mass wass there and it’s logical that something emerged from it. Capitalizing on this kind of proof of concept, a worldwide trend began.

As in the previous phase, enterprises were seduced and thought they will be able to do the same thing : assimilate the technology and make that the inside of the company looks like the outside. That’s when things got complicated. Assuming that the same tools will lead to the same results without any effort was a mistake. What was key to success was context, something that is much harder to bring into a company than the technology alone.

For the first time, technological assimilation that have always been successfully achieved had to come with behavioral assimilation. That is a very hard challenge since the people in charge of the one are not those in charge of the others and that the famous usages were worrying and had to be professionalized.

That’s the cause of the big misunderstanding that prevent businesses from adopting what is called enterprise 2.0. Usages professionalization is possible but hard to understand for businesses that need something more founding to move forward. That leads to the next step that will be more related to operational processes.

Phase 4 : Empowerment (2009-…)

This is the logical next step : enterprise web (intranet and internet) is not only a media people can consult, it’s a plateform that has to used. In the enterprise language, use means production and productivty gains. What takes us to my previous analysis.

“Web as a platform”, inside the firewall, will be used to enrich existing processes and give more autonomy to people to help them reaching achieving their objectives in a networked enterprise.

It’s not about importing and assimilating technologies but about building “services” meeting organization needs. This may look complex but, in fact, it’s easier for businesses to understand this because it’s closer to production organizaiton logics they are used to. More used than with usages logics. When I say “services” I mean a “tools/working models” couple as I said here. Furthermore, tools will be less and less homemade but rent “as a service” from external providers.

Success will depend on the ability to articulate these new ways of working with the traditional ones, which will still be necessary.

Phase 5 : Openness (Maybe one day)

The last predictable phase will be aligning internal with external. Today, both are cutt off from one another : things are tried externally (with more or less success…) that no one dares trying inside the enterprise, with employees. Some others are very active inside but fearful outside. Things like community management or corporate branding can’t be effectless on the inside if businesses really want to succeed. These posts make us think about aligning practices but information flows must not experiment a break when passing the corporate wall. So tools have to be aligned too. Employees can not afford to spend their time being marshalling yards, trying to deal with both internal tools, tools they use with their cients, tools they use to communicate with the general public…

This phase will be driven by the need to work in ecosystems. Acknowledging the weight of the the outside world in business development will initiate this ultimate step of the “enterprise and web story”, the one will make easier to interact with partners and clients and will help businesses to meet the market’s expectations as described by Jeremiah Owyang.

Conclusion

As web is evolving, it slowly disappears behind what it makes possible, what is a good thing beacause the only way for a technology to create value is to be invisible, hidden by its usages.

In fact, the quality of web adoption within businesses depends on the ability to embrace jointy the evolution of technology, of working models and of interactions between businesses and their ecosystem. This is also the evidence that the web, as such, as no importance : it comes naturally in every project that is well thought, well conceived, with a real vision.

Tags: enterprise , extranet , intranet , processus , production , web , web-2.0

An enterprise 2.0 strategy is something that can’t exist (because it’s already one)

Bertrand DUPERRIN — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:00:31 +0000

This is one misunderstanding that comes very often. Someone asks “what strategy is needed to become an enterprise 2.0 ? ” and you feel like answering “but it’s obvious…you just described it !”. Strange, isn’t it ?

Let’s start from the beginning. There is one undisputed principle : any enterprise is here to produce, its employees to participate in and, consequently, enterprises have to continuously try to find and implement the operating models and tools that fit the best their current context. One example : Cisco.

One questioning has been rising for years : according to the evolution of economy, of the demand, of the context : how to to decompartmentalize
enterprises, make it more flexible, make people more autonomous and tool them to be more more efficient with flows that are not physical anymore but informal ?

All these things, taken as a whole, are what is called “enterprise 2.0″. I tried to find a wordy definition years ago, defining it not as a stactic situation, a resultn but as something dynamic, moving, a set of means .
Trying to find a strategy for enterprise 2.0 is like thinking constantly without any chance to get out of the loop since enterprise 2.0 is the name of the strategy.

An enterprise 2.0 strategy, and the Cisco case demonstrates it, consists of using traditionnal toolboxes to implement the component of a project called enterprise 2.0 and , in no way to implement enterprise 2.0 hoping its component will implement themselves miraculously, allowing not to deal with sensitive issues.

As a matter of fact there are many tools that are known by HR people and by mamagers in order to define an implement a leadership model, to improve the management model, to use consistant evaluation and rewarding models that are sensemakers and favor alignment. Same here for IT depts that know how to implement tools and assist users. The list may be long but there is really nothing new for trained professionals in the enterprise 2.0 toolbox.

It seems to me that “how to built the enterprise 2.0″ often means “I don’t want to deal with all these sensitive issues so I’ll focus on enterprise 2.0 and the issues will disappear”. But building the enterprise 2.0 is about tackling “all these sensitive issues”.

Enterprise 2.0 is not a magic wand that avoids tackling important issues. It is exactly le the consequence of tackling these issues. Giving it a strategy is useless because it’s a strategy itself. It’s the name given to what has to be done so there’s no need to search anything else.

This reminds me of some kind of patients…

Tags: change , enterprise 2.0 , Human resources , management , strategy

Web 2.0 turned the digital divide into a social divide

Bertrand DUPERRIN — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 14:00:44 +0000

Digital divide used to be and still is a real concern in our industrialized countries. Maybe we should end talking about industrialized countries to say “computerized countries” what seems to be more relevant with today’s world. Maybe some would say that it’s because we neglected this shift that we were stuck with old industrial models applied to a “soft” economy and that what happened last fall happened. We could talk about the destiny of both Google and GM, what is the embodiment of the changes our word is experiencing but that’s not my point here.

At the beginning, digital divide was defined as inequality of access to digital tools. There were those who could access them and the others. It’s easy to understand the amount of opportunties for the early users who were able to gain abilities while the computer and, after, the web industry was growing up, while, on the other hand, the other had to catch up with these technologies years later. And some are still running to jump into the train.

Considering my generation for instance, I can see the difference bewteen those who had their first computer in 1985 when aged 10, discovered the web with a 56 ko modem in 1995 and followed this trend and those who had their first computer in 1997 and their first internet experience in 2000. The gap still remain today.

Anyway, at this time things were clear : there were those who could affort a computer (or those whom parents could) and the others. Among them, some see the interest, some didn’t. Then there were those who had cable or ADSL very early and those for whom this technology was not available in their city. Hence this divide.

Today, web 2.0 shows us the divide has a new nature. What means different means will be needed to fix it.

In 2009 I don’t think that, in our countries, affordability is an issue. Both computers and internet are affordable for most people. We can even do, with a phone, things we would not have expected years ago.

Applications are also more and more easy to use. Who once tried to explain to non tech-savvy people how to use a computer running on windows (or even MacOs), how to use Word, Excel, a mail client, or a photo or video application knows how hard it was.

Today eveyone can understand how to publish something on twitter, update a facebook profile, write on a blog. The rising of a generation of “bloggin’ grandads” and the fact +50 yo people is a growing population on facebook is an evidence. I would not be surprised to learn one day that grandparents will, if not the iniatiators, at least the animators and active members of family social networks like HelloTipi which existence shows that usages transcend generations.

But the divide still remain. Tools are accessible, affordable, easy to use. What’s missing ? Usages and sense.

Everybody can publish something on twitter. But it you make a test with average people, how many of them will answer “ok…I understand how it works. But what for ? I can undersand how to do things…but I don’t know why I would”.

Years ago, everybody could see the interest of a word processor, of a spreadsheet, but found it hard to use it. Everybody can easily use new tools but can’t see why. Ok, milions of people are using them. But it’s still a very low number compared to the people who could use them.

Digital divide is more and more looking like a social divide beacause it’s about the ability and the will to get involved in social dynamics.

We can fear it can become, later, a social divide in the true sense of the word because it could be a cause of exclusion for those who just can’t get those new social dynamics that are becoming more and more important for professional and businesses purposes.

Many reasons can be found to explain that : what remains of the technological barrier, age, but none of the them can explain everything alone. Not every “Y” are hyperconnected, some seniors are true social leaders. So there’s something very complex behind all that, something related to each one’s personality.

So the social divide depends on each one’s ability to adopt new usages. Less impressive that a divide caused by the unaffordability of technoogy, it may be much harder to overcome, even with new generations.

Tags: digital divide , internet , social divide , society , web-2.0

Links for this week (weekly)

Diigo — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 03:28:18 +0000

Social Networking for the Legal Profession

We explore the networking practices and social tools that are currently being adopted by individuals and firms, and provide practical guidance to those looking to get started with an online social networking strategy, including:

tags: lawyers, networking, socialnetworking, legal
Enterprise 2.0 Software: Commoditization before Monetization | Pretzel Logic - Enterprise 2.0

So the real question for me is: Are we on the path to super sonic commoditazion in the Enterprise 2.0 market before even a single vendor has truly broken out & dominated the space?

tags: enterprise2.0, socialsoftware, vendors, commodization, monetization, googlewave
- The next wave of differentiation amongst Enterprise 2.0 providers was going to be based on content creation as well as smart aggregation, fueled by micro-messaging, integration, aggregation, activity streams and the concept of the real time enterprise
- Or we will in fact start to see competition based on which software vendor can help organizations move into an Enterprise 2.0 design by focusing on specific business processes.
4 idées pour booster l’entreprise 2.0… pour de vrai !

En complément de cette vidéo qui est longue mais très intéressante, voici 4 idées qui résument mes positions :

Idée 1 : Le Web 2.0 est relié au comportemental et non au financier

Idée 2 : L’art du management paradoxal

Idée 3 : Le Web 2.0 pour vendre et recruter, pour développer sa notoriété et gérer sa réputation

Idée 4 : Dissoudre un individu dans le collectif nuit gravement… au collectif !

Voici le détail de ces idées :

tags: web2.0, enterprise2.0, behaviors, finance, ROI, adeo, management, personalbranding
How to Support Your IT Innovators

It’s critical to have at least one person on your team who is a “power user” because, in the words of a wise IT leader I interviewed, “business groups who have somebody on their team who is an IT expert do much better with IT (in terms of leveraging technology to meet their needs) than those who do not.”

tags: IT, innovation
- This lack of competence and confidence means that you are letting technology manage you rather than the other way around.
- This isn’t about “doing IT’s job for them” — it’s about giving your people the capability to discover value-added opportunities and develop “visual” requirements to facilitate productive communication with IT.
- “safe haven network where users feel free to try anything within the bounds of the innovation rules without fearing harm to the network or disrupting core business.
Integrating Learning and Work

Look at “understand the job” and see how much of a challenge that could be in today’s workplace. What do you do when everyone’s job is unique? The learning professional must be in constant contact with the realities of the everyone’s work. Interventions and support will likely be incremental, addressing changing circumstances, but using multipurpose platforms for information and knowledge-sharing. Understanding work needs good two-way communications.

tags: integration, onboarding, learning, organizationallearning, training
Management By Listening Around

Resistance to (fear of) change is one of the leading impediments to introducing social software in businesses. This should come as no surprise. Resistance to change is always one of the greatest barriers to change. But what is different this time is that resistance to change is likely to be quite heavy among managers, even more than on grass-root level.

tags: socialsoftware, change, enterprise2.0, management, businessintelligence
- On each level in an organizational hierarchy, information is aggregated from subordinates, filtered and twisted by the managers so they can convey a version of the truth that aligns with their own agendas.
- But, relying too much on traditional BI can also be deceiving. The diagrams and figures on their BI dashboards do not tell them what people are doing, what problems they are dealing with, which decisions are being made, and so on.
- By the smart use of social software, a business can create a digital work environment where managers (and others) can inform themselves and learn from the activities and decisions made by people instead of just relying on transactional data and the information they get from their subordinates or managers.
- But it also presents a threat to those managers (and information-hoarding “experts”) who have build their positions on the exclusive right to distribute information up- and downwards in a hierarchic organization.
My Notes and Thoughts on Google Wave Video Demo

I think this integration and the development of more focused capabilities that sit on top of Wave will be key to its success. As I mentioned earlier, I think that the completely open Wave will get some use as a novelty and even as a collaboration platform. However, it is too open ended for many work applications, as people will not want to recreate the functionality and features. It can potentially serve as a meeting point for applications. On the other hand, people might want to shape application themselves and not be forced to follow the structure of existing applications.

tags: google, googlewave, collaboration, email, sharepoint
- Since Wave may serve as a useful meeting place for applications, it may not replace many but become a useful platform.
Enterprise Web 2.0 Calls for Access Control, Not Shutoff

What’s holding many organizations back are four core concerns:

* Productivity levels will decrease, due to employees spending time on social media Websites (given that it’s not part of their job).
* High-bandwidth Web 2.0 sites will overload the network, potentially blocking mission-critical applications and services.
* Employees will access pornographic material or other inappropriate Websites.
* Security and privacy issues will increase.

tags: productivity, enterprise2.0, web2.0, security, access, IT, policies
- I believe the solution lies in an organization’s ability to gain insight into user activity, applications, and potential threats and then use this knowledge to group users into different categories of access.
- Only by helping to find out what’s needed and helping management to create policies around these requirements can IT ensure that network resources are available for business-critical applications and traffic spikes — without compromising the quality of the network or the productivity of employees.
Crowdsourcing: What It Means for Innovation - BusinessWeek

tags: no_tag
- Managing those submissions in an effective manner is, of course, another challenge altogether. And the biggest struggle for companies that dip their toes in crowdsourced water is to shift from having a reactive culture to one that’s proactive. There’s a delicate balance between encouraging participation and maintaining clarity of overall business objectives.
- Another challenge for anyone entering the co-creation/crowdsourcing arena is how to compensate people fairly for their ideas.
Crowdsourcing: What It Means for Innovation

Some have predicted that crowdsourcing is the future of the marketing, advertising, and industrial design industries. The phenomenon, they argue, will accelerate creativity across a larger network.

Others, meanwhile, have predicted this practice of opening up a task to the public instead of keeping it in-house or using a contractor will be the demise of those businesses because of the downward pressure on prices. If LG crowdsources a new cell phone design on CrowdSpring for $20,000, as it did recently, what happens to the old model of paying a design firm millions of dollars for the same project?

So which is it? Does crowdsourcing represent the beginning of the end of creative organizations? Or does it herald the beginning of something bigger and transformational for those agencies—and for business in general?

tags: innovation, crowdsourcing, compensation, reward
Community 2.0

Challenges in building virtual communities

In reflecting on the experiences accumulated to date by companies seeking to build virtual communities, I’d like to focus on four challenges:

tags: communities, virtualcommunities, language, skills, integration, organization, organizationalbarriers, ROI, returnonattention, returnoninformation, ROS, returnonskills, socialsoftware, collaboration, metrics, benefits
- First Challenge – Language.
- Second challenge – Integrating diverse skill sets
- Third challenge – Shifting mindsets.
- Fourth challenge – Organizational barriers
Why 1.5 Is Greater Than 2.0

Of course, it’s more romantic and revolutionary to assert that only the masses can generate useful content. It’s appealing that the hoi polloi can replace experts, editors, and experienced professionals. It just doesn’t happen to be true. The key word is “augment,” not “replace.” 1.5 is greater than either 1.0 or 2.0.

tags: enterprise2.0, enterprise1.5, 2.0, 1.5
Key success factor for Enterprise 2.0: Finding new roles for middle management

And just like how social media and other Web 2.0 technologies have enabled Lance Armstrong to bypass the middle management (e.g. PR firms, talent management agencies, news makers) that has stood between him and the general public, Enterprise 2.0 technologies enable people who are doing the “real” work within organizations to bypass their middle management and connect and collaborate with each other directly as well as update and engage upper management directly. By cutting out middle management, the savings are not only in the salaries of those individuals but also in the time and energy expended by their subordinates and upper management to interact with them. Yes, middle management is the tangible overhead in many organizations that Enterprise 2.0 can eliminate!

tags: enterprise2.0, management, middlemanagement

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Do we work the same way with providers and with colleagues ?

Bertrand DUPERRIN — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:00:51 +0000

The answer is obviously not. And not only because this is not the same kind of contracts. It’s because businesses still act according to the model that makes them consider their employees on one side and the others on the other side. And in the middle…they build walls. They proctect from the outside although value is not created on one or the other side of the wall alone but by people, from both companies, sitting on the top of the wall. Externals can’t access the tools that are used to collaborate inside et interactions between insiders and suppliers are much harder than between colleagues (even if, even in this case, it’s often far from being easy).

A few months ago I was wondering if the future of businesses was to manage an ecosystem of partners and outsource many competences.A phenomenon that won’t be driven by circumstances but by an organizational vision (which limits can easily be found)

I’m reading here that self employement will dramatically increase in the US in the ten next years. If this prediction is true, businesses will have to learn how to work efficiently with a growing number of external people, getting rid of irrelevant barriers.

Changes have to be undertaken, both in business and management practices (consider the others as a part of ours) and tools (platforms that allow both formal and informal interactions, open to external people). How many companies do open their internal collaboration spaces to their providers ? And, even when they do, what kind of interactions do they make possible ?

Working with providers as if they were one’s own employees is not only a self-fulfilling concept. It has noticeable implications which may soon become vital.

écosystème, collaboration, entreprise, externalisation, knowledgeworkers, outils-collaboratif, prestataires, réseaux, travailleurs indépendantss, travailleurs-du-savoir,interactions

Tags: collaboration , collaborative-tools , ecosystem , enterprise , interactions , knowledgeworkers , networks , outsourcing , providers , self employment

The three dimensions of enterprise 2.0

Bertrand DUPERRIN — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:00:59 +0000

There are many discussions on what enterprise 2.0 is, what it implies. There are many different visions, depending on each one’s interests. From one extreme to the other we start from an utilitarian vision (providing with new tools) to end with a cultural big bang (new philosophy of organization and economics, new human-centric values). One reassures people even if it’s efficiency is still to be demonstrated and the other scares businesses. None of them is particularly relevant or irrelevant : there’s a piece of truth everywhere and each one builds his own vision finding the balance that meet his values.

This is not very helpful for businesses that are looking for guarantees and certainties. What about facts ? What should they believe in in order to figure things out ?

According to me there are three dimensions that structures the whole discourse on this topic. Everyone is free to mix them together…or not : they can apply either jointly or autonomously.

Tools 2.0

It’s about using tools 2.0 within the company, without changing anything else. I often say it’s impossible but, in fact, it depends on the goals businesses want to achieve. If we rely on what I wrote here, it’s about formal production. The structured side of classical BPM tools is enriched by harnessing informal datas, contextual elements, that gives more visibility to the management to drive their teams and improve the collective knowledge base. As an example, there is the case of the sales manager who asks his staff to document what made prospects sign (or not), to tell how a negociation is going, on the flow. When they want to know (what, how much, when) they use the CRM. When they want to know “what, why, how” they use blogs and social networking tools. It’s about socializing a report that should have been done in one way or the other but would not have been shared. It’s a mandatory part of the sales process.

Here, tools 2?0 are used around the traditional process to enrich it without changing anything neither in terms of organization nor in terms of values or at the human level. So an enterprise may be basically 2.0 (tools are used) while still remaining a top-down organization. This also demonstrates that enterprise 2.0 does not necessaraly mean a more human enterprise or happier employees. It’s not because wikis and blogs are used that a business pays any added attention to its employees.

Organization 2.0

In the previous case there is a real use of tools, benefits, but we are far from delivering the full potential of what is possible. It’s proved that in order to take the most of human capital and the above mentioned tools, people have to work and organize differently. It’s what I called “adhoc” here. People have to be able to escape from the necessary traditionnal vertical process to enter a “dedicated” work model. That’s what I had in mind when I wrote about the service oriented organization (btw I will have to refine this post).

That implies not only to be able, when needed, to switch from a vertical mode to an adhoc mode made possible by new networking capabilities offered by social netwoks, but also to improve management, leadership, evaluation models that makes this shift possible.

Doing that we impact more the heart of organization than in the previous case but without any change of philosophy or values. In the first dimension the purpose was “more efficiciency and productivity”, in this one it’s “even more efficiency and productivity”. The purpose is performance driven without any other kind of concerns.

Let’s also notice that it’s possible to be “organized 2.0″ without using the so-called tools (even if it helps) and that it’s also possible to have tools without changing the organization. And that’s it’s possible to have both without paying any attention to employees and without any will for making the enterprise more human.

Philosophy 2.0

To end, it’s posible to have a certain vision of the place of Human in the organization, of the enterprise in the socialy, of ethics, and the will to implement it. If the “tools 2.0″ dimension is painless, if the “organization 2.0″ is more sensitive because it implies deeper changes (but brings operational benefits), “philosophy 2.0″ is what businesses fear above all.

There is no need to implement tools and organization 2.0 to that. In the same way, it’s possible to focus on the two performance driven dimension without paying any attention to anything human or ethic.

This third dimension, even if it’s (too ?) often linked to the two others, have nothing to do with them and ca be considered autonomously. Noble and laudable though it may be, I think that it disturbs more the discourse than it serves it.

It’s important to understand that starting a performance driven project, what is the case for many enterprises, does not mean they are being involved in something that will end with dealing with so sensitive things. Philosphy 2.0 can be a part of the whole package but it can also be left alone.

Companies must be able to build their own 2.0 model, deciding to what extent they will implement each of these three dimension.

entreprise 2.0,organisation,organisation 2.0,philosophie,web 2.0,technologie,éthique,management,performance,SOO,adhoc,

Tags: adhoc , enterprise 2.0 , ethics , management , organization , organization 2.0 , performance , philosophy , soo , technology , web-2.0

Bertrand DUPERRIN's Notepad

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