Tech IT Easy » web2.0

What’s social, anyway?

Kari Silvennoinen — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 08:19:04 +0000

The social networks are the latest Flash intro animations, the new tag clouds. They are everywhere. However, what is actually social about all these services? It’s a really valid question, because apparently everything is social these days.

One aspect to this is to consider the available social objects in the service and what interactions are available. As a simple rule, a social object is something that usually has an URL and is often serialized as an entry in an RSS feed. Also, often the actor who created these social objects is also a social object.

I just love this picture.

Let’s take Twitter, for example. It’s as “social network” as they come if you asked anyone. But once you start to think about it, it offers very few social objects and even fewer interactions with them. Basically there’s just two, the social objects are the tweets themselves or an off-linked thing in them. On Twitter itself you couldn’t really interact with the latter directly until recently with the new user interface that let’s you see some of the linked content on twitter.com, but that’s still hardly interacting with them. At least with the tweets you have two interactions: reply (discuss) or retweet (like).

In contrast, Facebook offers way more social objects and allows users to push many more into Facebook. However, the available interactions are often limited to textual interactions (discussing) and liking. Of course, the web is mostly a textual medium so it’s not a surprise that our interaction through it is mostly textual. However, the services and the technology and design in them really limit our interactions with social objects. You’re bound to fail if you just try to replicate Facebook and not think how people have traditionally acted in social contexts.

I would not count services where the only social objects are the users themselves as social networks. Because what you then have is essentially a contact list and e-mail and IM have been already done. In this way, I really liked Google Wave as it made the whatever the people were working on the main social object. It just wasn’t really good at it. Some of the “social” games qualify, only because they add a high score next to names in that contact list.

Another aspect is to consider the value to the user. It really isn’t enough just to depend on critical mass and then let Metcalfe’s Law do the rest, because Facebook already did it. This is probably the only reason LinkedIn is still alive – their value proposition is that being part of the network increases your chances with your career. Another example is last.fm, which promises better music recommendations. Ideally, the social network should allow the user to accomplish something regarding the social objects in a better way.

This aspect is also the one that is easy to get backwards. Adding a “social network” to a service doesn’t automatically add value to the service. It depends on the social objects and if the social network adds any value to them and the users. (As a sidenote, isn’t it a misnomer to say to “add” a social network, isn’t the social aspect always there, but you just “utilize” it?) Many of the various Twitter and Facebook integrations haven’t really increased a services value to me. For example, Spotify’s Facebook integration just lets me see somewhat useless information about what they listen to (unlike, say, last.fm). Also that the major Finnish newspaper shows on its front page what articles my friends have “liked” via Facebook has been less than useful for me so far (it just distracts). On the other hand, adding social features to a service like Nike+ sounds like it could improve a user’s motivation for running – there’s nothing like pure social pressure.

The third, and these days the most prevalent aspect is the value to the network’s owner. Of course, in the ideal world the network would be owned by the users, but we do live in a capitalistic system. The most blatant example of this has to be Apple’s Ping, which is essentially a social network to sell more songs on iTunes. The social objects are the songs, albums and artists on iTunes, which the users can interact to make them visible to their friends. And they can follow products (the artists). It’s just as sociopathic as you would expect from Mr. Jobs. One could argue that Ping is the “naked” social network, cutting all the happy-happy-joy-joy bullshit.

In addition to encouraging your users to pimp your stuff in hope of new business (like Ping and Zynga), the other value in the network is the value you get from an exit. Thanks to Metcalfe’s Law, your company is more valuable the more users you have – but you can also try to do something the others haven’t been able. No doubt many founders of the new, smaller social networks hope to have a feature that makes them the next YouTube, Friendfeed or Groupon. The danger here is of course fragmentation and the current players developing the features in-house (see Foursquare, Brightkite and others whose only magic component was location).

The most curious thing is that most “social” networks are forums where you limit the interaction of the social objects to a list of “friends”. The only way iTunes’ Ping really differs from Amazon’s venerable Listmania is that the latter is visible to all. Is it really social to narrow your world-view to just what your friends or companies who manufacture your favorite products share with you? Also, doesn’t it really bother you that these services are designed to let us socialize using their objects (products)?

Consider this blog post, for example. If this was a Facebook note, or a Buzz write-up, it would be mostly visible to just to people that I consider friends by each network’s definition of a friend. Even worse, the only people able to comment on this would be the aforementioned friends. It’s a brave new world.

The Annual Kari Silvennoinen is out!

Kari Silvennoinen — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 07:21:16 +0000

I’ve been on the road recently with very spotty wifi access and that’s when Twitter really breaks down. You’re left without context because most tweets aren’t self-standing but a link to a URL shortener giving no idea what’s going on. If you’re not knee deep in the “social”, Twitter seems like a mish-mash of ideas and links and bot posts. Then again, that what the web is: links to other places. However, how we use it and what we link to seems to have changed.

Yo dawg, I heard you like news aggregation so I put a news aggregator in your news aggregator so you can read social media while you read social media.

People are using services that make Twitter a duct-taped-together activity stream. I prefer to hear people’s ideas instead of being carpet bombed with bot notifications from the social media service du jour. But this isn’t exclusive to Twitter, Facebook took this further with web-wide likes and Facebook Connect. Your activity on the web is a feature on Facebook and they encourage you to dump everything there. Fortunately I can’t control what other people do, but a little bit of the Web dies every time someone publishes that stuff. That’s how I feel, but that’s the beauty of the Web: It’s a playground for experimentation. Too bad it feels like there’s not that much experimentation going on except on the business case side of the Web.

I rarely cross-post what I share/do on the various services. I don’t assume you’re stupid, if you want to know what links I find interesting, don’t expect them on my Twitter feed but on my Google Reader. If you want to know about my runs, I’m on Nike+. If you’re interested in what I read, or something else – well, there’s an app that isn’t Twitter for that. Sure, that’s more work for you if you want to know about everything I do but I don’t expect you to be. I don’t have to promote myself on the web – I have a nice day job and as a Finn I’m quite introverted anyway.

Also, if you guys haven’t yet figured it out – Google’s social network is the Web. And it will fail on your usual Web 2.0 metrics, because people don’t want platforms – they want applications. This is what happened with Google Buzz.

I ran a mile! Then I spent two hours promoting it on the web.

As I alluded previosuly, people use Twitter and Facebook as a make-shift Activity Streams because they just work well enough. Google Buzz was an early attempt to the next gen, but it failed miserably. It was complex, it was a platform and no one got the point. It offered advantages over Facebook and Twitter only on infrastructure level, not for the user. I’m quite certain that Google continues on this path, because there’s no reason to make a yet another Orkut when it seems that the future of Facebook and Twitter are activity updates. Better to control those updates than the services where they are published. Also, most of that stuff is just noise. In the future, the real business is filtering and exploiting those little snippets of information, not just dumbly showing them.

This hopefully could also mark the end of the dark age of “social media”, where we ignored the complexities of human social behavior and assuming that before “social media” everything was asocial. When someone can go and say that the end of social gaming is near because all gaming will be social – are you fucking kidding me? At what point in time were games missing a social aspect? Or did these guys only play Solitaire and Minesweeper? The Internet is after all a tool. It’s a delusion to believe we have required social enlightenment through Facebook when a compelling case can be made be against it. Repeat after me: you are not how many friends you have on Facebook, you’re not your LinkedIn profile, you’re not your fucking tweets, …

For example, Facebook gives us just one identity. This is by design and Mark Zuckerberg believes this is the right way to go forward. He and Facebook prefers that identity is our most low common denominator identity, probably so that they can sell more eyeballs to “targeted” ads. That might be reason why Facebook is boring, everyone is just showing their most bland identity they are willing to show to strangers.

On the web, people don’t always want to be “themselves” – or even social. Play some multiplayer games, preferably a FPS on a console – like Call of Duty: MW on PS3 – and you’ll quickly see the dark side of human psyche, also known as Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Blizzard tried to solve the problem as an engineering problem and attempted to force people to use their real names, this was very quickly shot down by users. On the internet, some of us want to be DeathSpank, the Orc slayer.

The future of online music: not just about access, but about continuous entertainment

Vincent van Wylick — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 13:45:58 +0000

I feel that something like this does not need to be said, but Spotify a relatively new service here in the Netherlands and selected countries, while cool, is missing one key ingredient: suggesting new music to users that feels somehow related to what they want.

Spotify knows what users want. There are few songs that I haven’t been able to find on Spotify, which in itself is awesome. But it ends there. When I look for the “Baby got Back” song, which I tend to do, it plays EVERY song that has those terms in the title (luckily fewer than you might expect). Instead of saying, hey, it’s “Baby got Back,” it’s a 90s song, it’s a hip-hop song, it’s funny (to some), it just plays the list of whoever decided to use those terms in the title (no seriously, there’s only 72 tracks).

Why it doesn’t need to be said that such a feature needs to exist, is because it already has for some time. Starting with Amazon, which suggests products to you based on what other people with similar tastes like, to Pandora Radio, which unfortunately (grrrr!) doesn’t work outside the US anymore, to Last.fm, which also plays some funny regional games since CBS took it over, iTunes Genius, which rocks (though iTunes as a music-player is way too bloated), Netflix, another US-only service (I’m sensing a pattern here…), etc. etc.

It’s called collaborative filtering, it’s not a new thing and I don’t at all get why not all (music-)services have it. It leads to more user-engagement, it allows listeners to navigate a musical world that has become increasingly diverse and fast-moving, and it has drastically improved my music-listening experience.

So my question is: why doesn’t Spotify have collaborative filtering? Is it expensive to implement, does it require more data than Spotify has, is it an up-and-coming feature, or is it a hidden feature that I haven’t discovered yet? In any case, it is the No. One Reason why I don’t open Spotify as often as either of us would like.

Liberating Leadership, intrinsic equality and world-class businesses

ceciiil — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 13:25:23 +0000

Many thanks to @flapinta for pointing this one to me (french link). What a revelation !

Isaac Getz is is a professor of Idea, Involvement, and Innovation Management at ESCP Europe. He has been Visiting Professor at Cornell University, Stanford University and at the University of Massachusetts. He graduated in Computer Science, then obtained a M.Sc. in Management Science, a Doctorate in Psychology and a post-doctoral degree (HDR) in Management.

I usually don’t spend too much time providing information on the business thinkers I quote, but considering the content, I just wanted to make sure Isaac Getz is not mistaken with some kind of hippie smoking ganja on a beach in Goa.

With Liberating Leadership : How the initiative-Freeing Radical Organization Form Has Been Successfully Adopted (pdf) Isaac Getz received the accolade of French Management Union of engineers (SYNTEC) with the Academic Prize of Management (french link again).

This 26 pages essay provides us with further evidence that methods of management that arose in the 50s (Chris Argyris and Douglas McGregor), have been successfully applied by dozens of world class companies and market leaders in their area (Toyota, Southwest Airlines, USAA, Avis, WLGore, QuadGraphics, FAVI in France etc …) to foster employees engagement. The amazing thing is how they align with the management principles that are consubstantial to Enterprise 2.0.

In a time where leadership has never been so critical for businesses, some lessons to remember from this essay :

The key to F-Form organisations

Chris Argyris and Douglas McGregor researches converge in the 50s to the conclusion that traditional organization forms (organisation silos, command and control type of management) lead to failure.

In the 90s many companies such as Southwest Airlines or Toyota illustrated successfully Argyris and McGregor preferred organisation type : what Getz calls the F-form. In F-form organisations, employees have complete freedom and responsibility to take actions that they (not their bosses) decide is best.

Getz decided to study these companies to answer this obvious question : how come this type of organisation, yielding impressive economic results, have not been more generally adopted throughout the business world ?

What he found out : there is a common factor in all the companies where F-form of organisation prevail : liberating leadership. Enterprise without this type of leadership just can’t adopt this type of organisation.

All studied leaders understand the defining function of the organizational form they were building, to allow complete freedom and responsibility of employee’s action.

Nourishing people three universal needs

McGregor redefined the How to motivate people ? conundrum into a “How to build an environment where people self motivate themselves“.

Edward L. Deci and Richard Ryan studied organisations and proposed a self-determination (wikipedia) and work motivation (pdf) theory. This identifies a framework of non controlling environmental factors required for self-motivation : relatedness, competence and autonomy.

Beyond these environmental factors, they identified three universal needs that, once fulfilled, lead to self motivation :

need of being treated intrinsically equal,
need of growth
need of self-direction.

Creating an environment for intrinsic equality

Robert Townsend (CEO of Avis) published the Up the organisation best seller in 1967. Motto : once you’re in charge, remove everything you didn’t like as a subordinate and implement what you missed.

Robert was an admirer of Management Theory Y by Douglas McGregor. Alike other liberating leaders, he proceeds in what could seem to be an empirical fashion, adopting work practices that help treating people intrinsically equals and removing the ones that does not.

Principle thoroughly adopted for instance by Cristobal Conde, CEO of SunGard :

How do people get recognized? How do you establish a meritocracy in a highly dispersed environment? The answer is to allow employees to develop a name for themselves that is irrespective of their organizational ranking or where they sit in the org chart

It’s all about listening

This is a very strong and common trait of liberating leaders : stop controlling and start listening. There are some telling examples in Isaac Getz essay but the most impressive I know of probably is Paul Chambers CEO of Cisco (though not in the essay) :

I had to move from a command-and-control leader to a collaborative one.” Collaborative leadership means “letting go” by involving others in decision making, listening to ideas.

The are good reasons behind the listening key. Jeff Westphal CEO of Vertex provides the Wisdom of Crowds one in Getz’s essay. But the main one is that when people genuinely are listened to, they feel intrinsically equal.

Creating an environment for people to grow and self direct

With all the studied companies and organisations, Getz’s team has witnessed a strong focus on making sure the company encourage self-direction. Among other examples, the essay explains how USAA (insurance company) does not measure the performance of the call center on the number of calls handled per hours but on the number of customer problems solved during the first call.

What really is interesting here is that the company provides the guidance (take care of the customers by fixing its problem in one call) rather than the control (count the number of calls addressed by employee). This did not prevent USAA to top Business Week 2007 and 2008 (2nd in 2009) customer service ranking US wide.

Fostering culture-keepers

Another common principle with liberating leaders : they are the culture keepers. There is a strong will to foster this. We live the culture (Terri Kelly CEO of WLGore – link to her video).

And there is a will just as strong to make sure nothing can damage it. Getz gives the example of FAVI, an amazing french company building brass gear forks auto parts. This company has experienced a 3 decade long double digit free cash flow and solid margins, moving from 0 to 50% of market share in an industry where its European competitors are, at best, at a loss, and in most cases has disappeared.

In the 25 years of the company, Jean François Zolbrist (great french blog post by @pmeance including a video of JFZ explaining FAVI principles) didn’t dismiss people whose job became useless. But he did promptly fire 3 people for malfeasance as they were not treating people intrinsically equals.

This brings us back to how Brad Bird protects innovation in Pixar by getting rid of passive-agressive people.

Main values

All the leaders of the studies company share the same values :

Freedom and responsibility values. As Bil Gore said : “Freedom is is the great motivating power of individual human beings”.
Creativity : A survey from IBM’s Institute for Business Value shows that CEOs value one leadership competency above all other : creativity. One of the observed main feature of their creativity, is the ability to rephrase problems to find solutions more easily.
Wisdom : The ability to contextualise and the reluctance to fundamentally attribute errors to individuals

Be nice

Last remarkable trait of Liberating leaders, they make sure their F-Form organisation are considerate not only with their employees but also with their suppliers, customers and partners.

This brings us back (again !) to E. Goldratt definition of any company goals : be profitable, take care of the customers and take care of the employees.

By doing so, the F-Form companies develop trustful long term relationships.

A remarkable essay which sheds a great light on the “mysteries” of many successful and exemplary companies. It perfectly complements Gary Hamel best seller The Future of Management.

Now the questions : have you witnessed such type of leadership ? Have you experienced it ? How to implement such type of leadership in an organisation ? (My hint : it starts with E and finishes with 2.0). Let us know.

The value of Twitter vs. the value of Facebook vs. the value of having Neither [weekend ramblings]

Vincent van Wylick — Fri, 14 May 2010 20:17:31 +0000

I think a value should always be weighed against the value of not having it, particularly when it’s hard to put a numerical value on something. This something is clearly Facebook and even more clearly Twitter, which still doesn’t compute for 100%. Why I love Twitter would be like saying why I love my dog or my Bengalese tiger, it’s hard to place a value on love. Not to say that I love Twitter, but there are few things that bother me about it. I tolerate it and it has nestled in a comfortable (but small) place in my life.

There are again ramblings against the status quo, or rather the status pecunia—the status of wealth. A few years ago, it was Twitter which seemed to show the Fail Whale more often then the “what are you doing now?” page. It lead to Friendfeed and various other me-too services that were dropped as soon as Twitter got its act together. There are again ramblings about evicting Facebook from people’s lives, though I’m here to tell you that if you want to have any kind of social life online, you’re probably better of keeping that account, though perhaps with less naked pictures or whatever you are worried about losing.

The value of Facebook is that it allows for richer connections between people that do not see each other every day. I care for my high-school friends that live in the UK, France, or Brazil, but since I can’t see them everyday, it adds value to my life to know that they are getting a kid or getting married. It does not add value to my life if people choose to leave Facebook, like some of my friends did at first when they were overwhelmed by all this publicity (something blogging prepares you for). And I’m really glad Facebook doesn’t delete accounts permanently as when people change their mind (they usually do), their friends are again there waiting for them (life is too exhausting to be-/de-/re-friend friends like most of the internet forces you to do).

The value of Twitter is like that morning coffee that adds a little (but not everything) to the quality of the moment you’re experiencing. No, NO, let’s not equate the value like that. The biggest value of Twitter to me is actually pretty much the same one as Facebook’s. I met up with a friend in Denmark a few weeks ago, who is also on Twitter, and I was able to finish his sentences because I read about his experiences ON Twitter. To me Twitter is more like a Second Life than Secondlife(tm) is. It allows for quick streams about people you care about or you “follow” because you respect them. If I had intelligent displays running Twitter on my sunglasses, I would wear them all the time while walking through life, that is how second life Twitter has become to (some of) my relationships. My business partner is going to China this week and I would love for him to update his Twitter-account while there to keep me informed of the cool stuff he’s researching for us (mobile operators better start catching up to this dynamic).

So, what, WHAT, could possibly be the value of Neither? Such a leading way to pose that question, as I’m clearly not on that side of the fence. I’m sorry that many of my friends decide against Twitter accounts because they don’t see the value of it. Those are usually the people that I see once every 6 months and our conversations are less deep because, well, we still have to get through the superficiality of “how was your day? What are you up to?” Questions that Twitter & Facebook both ask. And I’m sorry if my friends decide not to use Facebook as it not only allows them to post their thoughts, but pictures of their Bengalese tigers or their latest trip to hell, and even status updates about Farmville, which I previously stated, was an imperfect way of showing of your virtual garden to your friends.

The value of Neither is a type of emptiness that may be good for meditation, but it is no longer how the world works. It’s like seeing my parents struggle with emails or internet banking when no one sends snailmail or goes to a physical bank anymore. The world without Facebook or Twitter no longer exists. I don’t care about privacy issue 1 or 0, because it’s really your business what you put on the internet and what you don’t and you should never put stuff on there that you don’t want people to know about. I care about connections and about the empowerment that they bring to interpersonal relationships.

I have met 80 people on Facebook that I never expected to see again after graduating from high school, from university, or from leaving the coolest job I had as a tween. I am so grateful to the site for that that if Zuck were here, I could kiss him. Facebook isn’t perfect, and we should protest against these imperfections until they are fixed. Whether we should leave social networks and abandon all the possibilities they have brought us, that is like starving yourself in protest against war: Nobody cares!

This post was brought to you by TigersInPoolsHellYES. Donate via the paypal button on the right.

Facebook’s power grab of the social web

Kari Silvennoinen — Wed, 12 May 2010 07:55:27 +0000

Seems like Facebook is teh new evil. The new Microsoft of the nerd epic. The biblical mark of the beast, the Windows-logo, has been replaced by Facebook’s like-button on a website.

But seriously. Facebook’s grab of their users is getting quite out of hand. Exposing more and more of stuff that could be argued to be personal information, pimping that stuff to other sites and companies… it’s not cool and it’s pretty dark in the grey area of abusing their users’ respect. The “evolution” of Facebook’s concept of privacy was best illustrated by Matt McKeon’s neat infographic.

You know these pics as lolcats, but majority of Facebookers just think they are cute.

If you look at the new things Facebook is developing it’s easy to start thinking what are the real benefits to users? It’s all just exploitation. But that’s just the business model for web 2.0 social. Companies are willing to pay a lot to know what their target demographics like and how they behave and lots of other metrics that supposedly make their marketing more effective. They also want to have “presence” on the “social”. I have no experience with marketing industry so I’ve no idea how well this works.

Many internet pioneers were against any first legislation involving Internet, because the Internet was somehow “different”. They felt that these laws would restrict the “freedom” of the whole Internet. Yet, it’s clear that at least our consumer protection and privacy laws are not good enough. The German Federal Minister of Consumer Protection sent a letter to Facebook where her threat was that she’d get out of Facebook if Zuckerberg and his company don’t start to respect users’ privacy more. Seriously, is this how toothless even European consumer protection agencies are against Facebook’s rampant power grab?

One of the weaknesses of Facebook is that they’re centralized. This is why Google, Yahoo et al are working hard on social web that’s distributed. The problem is that this is not a competition where the best technology wins. So what if “web industry leaders” are quitting Facebook? Most of the Facebook’s userbase don’t know who they are and don’t care.

The strength of Facebook at this point is that it’s what pretty much everyone and their parents know how to use on the web. Even otherwise computer illiterate people feel at home with Facebook, like the ReadWriteWeb’s article on Facebook that people ended up when they searched for “facebook login” on Google demonstrated. Whatever the pioneers, early adopters, or any other web power users do to create “anti-Facebooks” does not matter, especially on the short term.

The internet has always been a scary place for newbies and it’s a shame how easily scammers can use Facebook as an attack vector. All the groups and pages that advertise free Farmville cash or an iPad for just doing these simple steps that compromise the whole computer… The problem is that it is difficult to distinguish these from the marketing agencies’ competitions on who can create the most “liked” “viral” astroturfed page and also by the simple fact that people tend to trust their friends’ judgment so these scams can get easily spread through the “social”.

From the web power users’ viewpoint the future is either a more interactive web, or the wet dream of every SEO and internet marketing expert – a web that stinks and where its users are just a crop for marketing analytics. We are idealistic and tend to believe in the power of technology, but the web is a commercial venture. Google isn’t exactly our friend (not even using the web 2.0 definition of the word), but it looks it is in their best interest to push for the same cause – a more open web.

It’s not that Google and others are doing this out of kindness for web users. It just makes business sense for them, Google makes money when more people use the web. And it’s not like Facebook is inherently evil – the exploitation of their userbase is a natural progression for any social network business, especially because their users are not willing to pay for the service in any direct fashion.

We can’t bluff Facebook about quitting our accounts, because we are not going to hurt ourselves here and they know it. For its users, Facebook does add value. But, there are limits on how much they can exploit this fact. What Google and others are trying to do is make Facebook redundant, unnecessary – but they’re still far from this goal.

This is why I would expect more from the people we have appointed to take care of our personal information in the society, the different national and international data protection agencies. Not just empty threats like Mrs. Aigner’s.

What Twitter Trains You For [2Long4aTweet]

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 04 May 2010 13:49:29 +0000

Filling out a form with boxes of max. 1000 characters is just as hard to do that as writing a 140 character tweet. 20-50% of the time I spent to tweet is usually about shortening the message using only the most essential words. And that is exactly the same for a 1000 character box.

Blogging doesn’t train you for this. Sure, you develop an instinct for when you exceed 400 words (the magic number that makes up a perfect blog post), but nothing physically stops you. We may hate the Twitter-box for imposing this limit, but in a user-generated world of way too many characters, some brevity is really, really refreshing.

- – Vincent van Wylick (again, too long for a tweet)

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Theory of social networking [2Long4aTweet]

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 04 May 2010 08:40:32 +0000

We should auto-follow the whole world but it should be hidden by default.
Relationships are too dynamic for an explicit follow, de-follow, re-follow relationship.

- – Vincent van Wylick (too long to fit into a tweet)

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The management toolkit for an interconnected world

ceciiil — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 07:12:59 +0000

Ever since the first time Andrew McAfee coined the term, the definition of Enterprise 2.0 has constantly evolved.

Arguably, the most appropriate has been : “The use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.”

Regardless of how good these definitions have been, none of them has given enough credit to a) the tight relationship between Enterprise 2.0 and Management and b) the reason why we need to adopt these social platforms.

Management

Management here is considered here in its most generic sense, i.e. applied to people, managers, knowledge, innovation, business, customer relationship, IT, communication or human resources.

This is a critical dimension since while importing social platforms from the Internet into the workplace, we also import an underlying electronic culture that profoundly impact the workplace organization.

Interconnected

We are passing from an era in which things were assumed to be controllable, able to be deconstructed and then assembled into a clear, linear, always replicable and thus static form, to an era characterized by a continuous flow of information.

(Jon Husband – Will Enterprise 2.0 drive management innovation)

In The Future Of Management, Gary Hamel (the most influential business thinker according to The Wall Street Journal) asks how relevant it is in the 21st century to use the same management techniques as the ones we used a century ago.

How appropriate these techniques are in a world where changes have never been so fast nor happening to such large a scale, where barriers of entry have never been so low, where strategy cycles are shrinking, and, last but not least, where customers and employees have never been so informed and interconnected.

In the conclusion of this book, Gary Hamel states that a) to survive in such an interconnected economy, companies have to be extremely adaptable and b) adaptable eco-systems are not reduced to mere vertical top bottom flow of information and processes but are peer-to-peer democratized flat systems.

Toolkit

Gary Hamel conclusion : Internet is the best metaphor for 21st century management.

The Internet happens to be the foundation of our interconnected world and Social Platforms have naturally emerged as the best way to connect people and get things done on the web.

This is the very reason why we HAVE to import these tools behind the firewall.

It is not because they are new, trendy or because our competitors have implemented it. It is because they have proved on the web to be the most appropriate tools to leverage a continuous flow of information in order to create value.

Definition

Hence the proposed Enterprise 2.0 definition : the management toolkit for organizations in an interconnected world.

Management Innovation : problems, facts and 10 lessons for the future

ceciiil — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 07:16:06 +0000

God bless Jon Husband : he pointed me via a Twitter conversation to his telling blog post (Will Enterprise 2.0 drive management innovation) on Fast Forward blog, where he quotes Gary Hamel FAN-TAS-TIC book : The Future of Management.

To start with, Gary Hamel is not an obscure blogger or some kind of geek preparing the internet revolution. He has been ranked the most influential business thinker by the Wall Street Journal ahead of personalities such as Thomas Friedman or Bill Gates. Therefore, it won’t be as easy for corporate afficionados to dismiss his theories as it may be to dismiss Cluetrain Manifesto’s chapters by Chris Locke ou David Weinberger (regardless of how brilliant these are).

This is fascinating essay. Lucid, smart, driven by a relentless desire to find the truth and to help the reader find the one of his company.

Problems

Funnily enough, Gary Hamel asks the same question as Chris Locke : how relevant it is in the 21st century to use same management techniques defined by Taylor or Weber in a world where :

Change has never been so fast or happening to such a scale. Nowadays not only advantages erode rapidly but whole industries are crashing (airlines, music …)
Barriers of entry have never been so low because of deregulation and technologies. Therefore, companies are now facing ultra low cost competitors.
Internet offers a light speed disintermediation between producers and consumers
Strategy life cycle is shrinking. New Business is faster than ever
Customers (and employees !) have never been so well informed thanks to the internet and the amount of information available to them

Facts

Looking into these management issues, Gary Hamel analyses how management works today and how innovation prone it is. Well, not much since :

All companies gets obsessional about innovation and yet don’t apply any at management level
Right now, your company has 21st-century Internet-enabled business processes, mid-20th-century management processes, all built atop 19th-century management principles.
19th century management will just not work to manage knowledge workers in a world-changing at such breathtaking space.
Management is extremely conservative because it is based on unchallenged beliefs and politics of people willing to keep their status, power and benefits
The only solution to survive and succeed in an ever-changing business environment is to be adaptable
You can not be adaptable if the whole company is controlled by a heavy and fossilized hierarchical chain of command. Adaptable eco-systems (life, markets, cities) are not reduced to mere vertical top bottom flow of information and processes but on peer-to-peer democratized flat systems

Use cases

The Future Of Management goes through different real life use cases and tell the remarkable stories of enterprise very famous world-wide for their amazing innovation ability.

WL Gore

Bill Gore left DuPont in 1958 to create a company (WL Gore) based on Douglas McGregor book The Human Side of Enterprise. Motto : make money and have fun. Which reads in terms of organisation :

Small operating units
No bosses but leaders that get things done and are excelling in team building
Team free to fire its boss
High Trust / Low fear environment
Willing commitment instead of assignment
20% time to personal project.

In terms of quality of workplace :

For the 13th consecutive year, W. L. Gore & Associates has earned a spot on FORTUNE magazine’s list of the “100 Best Companies to Work For.” Only a dozen other workplaces have appeared in every edition of the rankings. The company, known for everything from waterproof, breathable GORE-TEX fabric to life-saving medical devices, is No. 13 on this year’s list, now posted at fortune.com/bestcompanies. (fibre2fashion)

Whole Food Market

WFM is the most profitable food retailer chain in the US according to their profit / sq foot ratio. 3000% increase in revenue between 1992 et 2007. Rules :

Small units (up to 8 people)
associates are empowered and accountable
Trust and equity : executive can not earn more than 19 times of the lowest salary
Strong purpose and common cause : quality and healthy food, local producers

Google

Again extremely innovative and rather successful company.

Network of lateral communication
Small work units (3 to 4)
Position and hierarchy don’t win an argument.
Grueling recruiting process
Collaborative tools (MOM, MiscList)

10 Lessons

Out of the real life stories above, Gary’s extracts the following lessons for management innovation :

Management innovation is critical. Because systemic management brings advantages that are tough to replicate.
Principles matter. Whole Food Market is quite representative in this respect : love, community, trust transparency, mission are the principles the whole company has based its success on
The main obstacle to management innovation is the belief that there is no other way to manage an organisation. Ask : who benefits from the status quo ?
Management innovation redistributes power. When people are empowered (responsibilities, accountability) their job makes more sense and they are more likely to get more engaged and passionate about. And engaged and passionate people are happier and more productive
Costs of management innovation are more obvious than benefits. For instance, WL Gore cluster of factory plants sounds ridiculous in terms of costs savings for business orthodoxy. But in practice, it offers cross business learning to the people in the company. How to measure such intangible assets as adjacency, autonomy, agility, commitment ?
Management innovation that humanized work is irresistible : the three main case studies (Whole Food Market, WL Gore, Google) this book is based on are exhilarating examples on how empowering people fosters a grand slam in organisation success : innovation, profits, and employee engagement. This is leveraging Gary’s pyramid of human capabilities.
Experience managers are not the best in terms of innovation and MBA is an obstacle to management innovation. In all 3 real cases above, CEOs are graduated in computer science, philosophy and chemistry. As Gary Hamel puts it, not doing MBA, they are not been told what NOT to do. Which echoes the David Heinemeier Hansson presentation : Unlearn your MBA.
Small is the new big. All these companies have chosen to have small operating units
Manager is more a producer of the show rather than being the lead to quote Cristobal Conde.
Internet is the best metaphor of for 21st Century Management. This is where we go back to Jon’s insightful blog post :

Whether we like it or not, we are passing from an era in which things were assumed to be controllable, able to be deconstructed and then assembled into a clear, linear, always replicable and thus static form to an era characterized by a continuous flow of information. Because it feeds the conduct of organizations large and small, it is a flow that necessarily demands to be interpreted and shaped into useful inputs and outputs.

What’s next

If you have any interest in management, do yourself a real treat and read this book. It contains many questions that will help you rate your organization in terms of management innovation : very useful.

Surprisingly enough, this book concludes on the Internet as a metaphor for management. This is the perfect introduction to another Harvard Business Press release : Enterprise 2.0 new collaborative tools for your organization toughest challenges book by Andrew McAfee.

We are now faced with this chicken and egg question type of question : who was the first in the 2.0 landscape : Management 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 ? This has to be the subject of another blog post …

How Enterprise 2.0 nurtures employees engagement

ceciiil — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 20:44:59 +0000

Towers Perrin has published the results of a Global Workforce Survey they made about employees engagement. The survey has involved about 90,000 people over 18 countries. The objective was to rate the level of engagement of the people in their work.

People are split into 4 groups depending on their level of engagement :

Engaged: Those giving full discretionary effort, with high scores on all three dimensions.

Enrolled: The partly engaged, with higher scores on the rational and motivational dimensions, but less connected emotionally.

Disenchanted: The partly disengaged, with lower scores on all three components of engagement, especially the emotional connection.

Disengaged: Those who have disconnected rationally, emotionally and motivationally.

What Towers Perrin found out does not give much credit to management : only a fifth (21%) of the workforce is engaged, twice as much (41%) feels enrolled, a third (30%) feels disenchanted and almost a tenth (8%) feels disengaged.

Costs of lost engagement

This excellent study also shows the cost of lack of engagement. On a three-year study, companies with high employees engagement show a positive evolution of operating margin (+3.74%) while companies with low employee engagement show a 2% reduction of their operating margin.

In addition, it shows that this engagement strongly affects the belief people have regarding the impact they can have on the company innovation, productivity, costs, growth and customer satisfaction.

Three conclusions from this report :

The global workforce is not engaged — at least not to the extent that employers need their employees to be in order to drive results.
Engaged employees are not born, but made
Employees worldwide want to give more, but they also want to see a clear and measurable return for their effort.

Now : let’s see how and where Enterprise 2.0 can help in nurturing engagement …

How to close the engagement gap ?

Tower Perrins provide three axis along which management can make a difference in creating a more engaged workforce.

1 – Engaged Leadership

2 – Shape the work environment.

3 – Puts employees under the microscope

In addition, the report provides the Top 10 engagement factors for employees. Based on real life Enterprise 2.0 stories, we’ll see how these collaborative platforms answer all these employees requirements along the 3 axis identified above.

1. Senior management sincerely interested in employee well-being.

Enterprise 2.0 platform helps leaders to communicate with the workforce. With blogs, leader can engage in a conversation with employee. And conversational communication is key for leadership.

Paul Otelinni from Intel or, more recently, Ben Verwaayen of Alcatel Lucent are examples of leaders who has fostered Enterprise 2.0 platforms to exchange directly with their employees (blog for Otelinni, Ask Ben for Verwaayen) and show leadership engagement (management axis #1).

2. Ability to improve skills and capabilities

Coming from an open source background, I can guarantee that there is no better place in the world than inter connected network between people with similar area of knowledge to learn, locate experts and support and develop new skills.

I am still surprised this does not happen behind the firewall apart from those companies that have implemented Enterprise 2.0. One has to be very persuasive to convince me this is not necessary for knowledge workers productivity.

These collaborative platforms are genuine tools to shape the work environment (management axis #2).

3. Organization’s reputation for social responsibility

By providing a mean for customers, communities and citizens to openly discuss with brands and corporations, Enterprise 2.0 Social Tools allows for more transparent and visible policy regarding the social responsibility.

The Nestle Vs Greenpeace story in social media shows how harmful it is in the 21st century for company to neglect their social responsibility.

4. Employees’ input into decision-making

Gary Hamel essay Future Of Management describes how Enterprise 2.0 Prediction Markets have made wonder in Best Buy, thanks to a manager fascinated by the theory of James Surowiecki book Wisdom of Crowds.

It has been quite a tough one for the bunch of internal experts/analysts from the company. But at the end of the day, people felt more engaged as their input was taken into account and the company made more profits.

5. Quick resolution of customer concerns

Again, in Future of Management Gary Hamel explains how adding organisational layers between the workers and the final customers made knowledge workers losing sense and responsibility about their contribution.

By reducing the feedback loop and offering the space of conversation between employees and customers, Enterprise 2.0 provides the framework for quick resolution of customer’s concerns while helping knowledge workers to make more sense out of their contribution.

6. Setting of high personal standards

In his book, The 22 Non-Negotiable Laws of Wellness, author Greg Anderson wrote, “When we change our perception we gain control. The stress becomes a challenge, not a threat. When we commit to action, to actually doing something rather than feeling trapped by events, the stress in our life becomes manageable.” (Setting High Personal Standards – ezine articles)

In the excellent series about Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen, Bill Ives reports that thanks to professional profiles in the implemented solution :

There is also a greater sense of individual responsibility as people are better empowered to manage their identity in the firm and their career development. The Hello tools provide both greater control and increased transparency. So the firm is now more global, and at the same time, more of a collection of empowered individuals rather than a collection of partially siloed teams

7. Excellent career advancement opportunities

Again, with the People Profile feature in Hello platform Booz Allen, Bill Ives notes that

A person is more likely to get staffed on a project that reflects the interests and experience noted in their profile. They are also more likely to find the right contacts and intellectual capital to allow them to succeed in their areas of interest contributing to their preference to stay with the firm.

This goes back to my definition of enterprise 2.0 : the empowerment of knowledge workers. Providing professional profiles to employees allow them to have a greater control on their career.

Last but not least, these professional profiles and open contributions to conversation provide the company with an opportunity to put the employees under the microscope (management axis #3).

8. Challenging work assignments that broaden skills

Enterprise 2.0 offers more comprehensive understanding of the company and the business as a whole via conversations. Besides it also provides networking possibility with weak-links people the employees wouldn’t hve been in contact with otherwise.

And these weak-links are instrumental in getting new opportunities : studies show most career opportunities occurs via weak links.

9. Good relationships with supervisors

As Susan Scrupski puts it, trust is the currency of anything social.

Enterprise 2.0 open and easy platforms are a bedrock for transparency and trust, hence a better relationships with supervisors.

10. Organization encourages innovative thinking

Professors from Harvard Business School, Insead and Brigham Young University have completed a six-year study of more than 3,000 executives and 500 innovative entrepreneurs, that included interviews with high-profile entrepreneurs. They have identified five keys that drive innovation : Associating, Questioning, Observing, Experimenting, Networking.

Enterprise 2.0 collaborative platforms are the obvious management toolkit for knowledge workers to

Associate with people from different background,
Observe internal processes and user experiences, `
social Network,
Question experts and whoever involved in the project,
Experiment and get an instant feedback from all expert on the domain on the business value of their proposal.

Refer to my Enterprise 2.0 presentation (How Collaborative platforms fosters knowledge, productivity and innovation) for a more detailed description on this subject.

Actions

Now that you know how make your employees happier, more engaged, more productive and more innovative, you just need to refer to the 10 keys of successful projects to see how to implement Enterprise 2.0 in your company and increase your operating profit by 6%.

E2.0 evangelists : the Revolutionaries and the Evolutionaries

ceciiil — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 12:46:39 +0000

This is a question I love to ask in the Enterprise 2.0 interviews :

Broadly speaking, one can say that there are 2 types of Enterprise 2.0 activists. The revolutionaries and evolutionaries. The formers believe that collaborative platforms are disruptive technology that will deeply change the organisations. The latter think this is an incremental evolution that will just fill up some communication holes that are not covered in organisation 1.0. Where would you stand ?

Andrew McAfee talks about new way of doing business in his Enterprise 2.0 book, of disruptive technologies in his PARC talk but still reckons that this is not such a big deal. We can see here that evangelists position is not very comfortable.

On one hand going towards the revolution paradigm risks scaring executives out of it. On the other, minimizing the disruptive nature on Enterprise 2.0 may slow knwoledge workers buy-in and adoption as it may curb their enthusiasm.

First approach is more of an Executive show-stopper while the second is more of a knowledge worker tue-l’amour (desire killer) and adoption obstacle. What’s best ?

Funnily enough, two of the main Enterprise 2.0 figures posted completely opposed post on the topic this week : Oscar Berg on one end and Bertrand Duperrin on the opposite. The former regrets Our Tendency to think and talk in terms of efficiency while the latter is pleased with the end of social washing in his Enterprise 2.0 Forum wrap up.

The Revolutionaries

Oscar’s post is quite telling. It starts from Susan Scrupski blog post Enterprise 2.0: The Next Narrative and the themes to be addressed in the cases study the 2.0 Adoption Council is currently working on.

Together with Denis Howlett (the official Enterprise 2.0 referee) Oscar regrets that most of these themes are only efficiency driven and bring nothing new to the enterprise plate.

Oscar quotes the quite brilliant Maslow’s Hierarchy of Enterprise 2.0 ROI by Hutch Carpenter and insists on the need of expanding the scale of benefits beyond mere ROI when evangelizing Enterprise 2.0.

The conclusion says it all :

I think that all us in the Enterprise 2.0 space need to realize that we are all – like it or not – under heavy influence of Taylor, Deming etc, and the dominating management paradigm that focuses almost entirely on efficiency. We need to listen to Dennis Howlett when he blows the whistle, and do our best at trying to adjust the balance so that we don’t get stuck in the efficiency corner with Enterprise 2.0. I personally believe that the greatest potential business benefits from Enterprise 2.0 lies in doing things that weren’t possible to do before social software.

The Evolutionaries

Bertrand’s post lie at the completely opposite end.

I’m fed up with the usual 40 min “show flat” presentations which conclusion is “it’s really awesome but I can’t do this in my company” and where we have the vague impression that instead of getting answers to our problems we’re being sold a little piece of dream that comes with a big piece of software. In brief, attendees leave with shining stars in they eyes but realize, when the time to wake up comes, that it does not help them to achieve anything.

I tend to agree with Bertrand in the sense that we need to get the job done. In the Enterprise 2.0 Forum Workshop that happened on the Wednesday afternoon, the day before the use case keynotes, Bertrand insisted on the specific french cultural issue with Enterprise 2.0. In all fairness, he didn’t really need to insist, I’m convinced.

Anyway, in such a rational and individualist culture as french one, it is just scoring an own goal to mention things like social, dreams, utopian values when trying to sell Enterprise 2.0 solution. Bertrand knows, he’s been in the business for many years and he does know how it works here.

From this perspective, he admitted that being an Enterprise 2.0 consultant in France is far more touchy and complicated that it may be in such cultures as US or UK. As a result, as a pragmatist, he is a strong advocate of incremental evolution.

(Still, I was very pleased to notice that the only book that has been mentioned during the discussions after the keynotes has been The Cluetrain Manifesto, a quite revolutionary one).

Heavy Mentalery

I think the reason why we’re focussing on Taylor or Demings values when trying to sell Enterprise 2.0, is to smooth the disruptive nature of E20 not to scare executives out of it.

The unique nature of collaborative platforms and what you can achieve with them is quite challenging to envision if you’re not familiar with it.

It will naturally emerged as the tools/approach is deployed. The culture will naturally evolves as a result of it.

But if you want executive support to start such a project in the company I guess that the best way is to talk about current problems, how E20 can solve them and the business value it will bring to the company.

Starting with cultural issues, disruptive technologies, transformation of the enterprise may work with some but not with the vast majority of executives. And will most likely not work in France, alleged home of the revolution, funnily enough – hence Bertrand’s position.

I leave the conclusion to Clay Shirky :

“A revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new tools, it happens when society adopts new behaviors”

So how about you ? Are you a revolutionary or an evolutionary ?

Enterprise 2.0 Forum – the 10 keys of successful projects

ceciiil — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 12:56:25 +0000

Big up to Kongress Media (Thomas Koch, Bjoern Negelmann) for organising such a superb event in Paris. Both ON (the conference) and OFF (parties in the evening) were fun and it was so nice to hang out with Enterprise 2.0 people (@bduperrin @flapinta @cflanagan @an_elm @tlg @ceciledemailly @tdebaillon @gculpin @aponcier) in real life.

Local Consulting firm NextModernity (Bertrand Duperrin, Richard Collin) acted as moderator and contributed to make the whole thing casual yet focussed.

Great organisation, great speakers but most of all : great real life projects feedback. Featuring : Claire Flanagan (CSC – multi-awarded project), Anu Elmer (SwissRe), Jérôme Poujardieu (Dassault Systems), Fabrice Poireaud Lambert (Lyonnaise des Eaux), Nicolas Rolland (Danone), Julien Le Nestour (Schlumberger), Jean-Paul Chapon (Alcatel Lucent) et Jane McConnell (NetStrategy).

A high number of common best practices have naturally emerged. Here are 10 of them :

1) Manage risks from the early stages of the project

Fabrice Poireaud-Lambert showed a very interesting 4 axis graphs (Organization and HR / Competencies / Methods and Tools / Culture and Behaviors) that LdE used to evaluate the change factor of such a project on the enterprise scale. They reached a 12/16 value which is pretty high.

In addition, these are cross-functional projects with a high cultural impact. Therefore, it is critical to address subsequent risks as of the very early stages of the project.

This comes with an advantage, though. When such risky and game-changing projects succeed, they benefit from large recognition : both CSC and Lyonnaise des Eaux projects are running for most innovative project of the year in their respective organisation.

2) Seek Executive supports

Both Claire Flanagan and Anu Elmer insisted on how critical it was to have unconditional Executives support for project involving change of such magnitude. Big changes project need legitimation. The reason : without strong leadership and executive support, the project is a lost cause against managers who have day to day budget and objectives.

So first thing first : use the elevator pitch and then Enterprise 2.0 presentation to show your executives how collaboration platforms can foster knowledge, innovation and productivity in the organisation.

3) Know your business needs and address them

Danone really wanted some tools to perpetuate their strong networking culture born at the beginning of the century and put the people right in the center of the solution.

Dassault needed to share sales best practices amongst their distributors (the Value Added Resellers) of their software solutions.

Schlumberger desired to save time to their workforce in critical environment (example : deep water drilling) when few minutes saving can turn into million of dollars.

Alcatel Lucent new management made it a strategic goal to have a greater transparency throughout the company.

The objectives can be marketing, HR’s, operational, leadership ones. The solution may be internal (i.e only amongst employees) or external as for Dassault between employees and partners. In any case, for any successful project, the objectives are clear so is the expected business value.

4) Knowledge sharing in complex and fast paced changing environment for distributed workforce is a common motive

Regardless of the business needs, the type of industry or activity, all companies have this same problem they wanted to tackle.

SwissRe is a reassuring Insurance company. They have experts on climate changes, terrorism threats, global economy etc … Hugely complex topics. They have office in many different cities.

CSC is a global IT services company : new technology, cloud computing, open source, software architecture, virtualization, enterprise system integration, project management, you name it : knowledge sharing make their professionals more reactive, efficient and team oriented.

If your organisation context includes these constraints, Enterprise 2.0 surely will make more sense and witness better adoption.

5) ROI may be complicated to evaluate but some benefits are unassailable

Talking about ROI in a project whose bottom line is a cultural one may be quite challenging.

Apart from Cisco who shows impressive figures, most companies and consulting firms struggle to puts ROI figures.

However difficult to monetize, some benefits may still be extremely valuable for the company. The most important one being engagement. CSC employees feedback is quite spectacular : the distances disappear and their solution has helped fostering a one team one company culture.

Jane McConnell in her survey on Intranet adoption reported that 30% of surveyed managers/executives answered either Quite a lot or Absolutely when asked if collaborative tools had improved employee engagement. This ratio grows to 50% when including people answering A few.

This is not anecdotical : Tower Perrin showed in their Global Workforce Survey that, on a three-year study, companies with high employees engagement show an average positive evolution of operating margin (+3.74%) while companies with low employee engagement show an average 2% reduction of their operating margin.

6) Usability is key for quick adoption

A key to Enterprise 2.0 project is the adoption. There actually are metrics to rate the success of adoption. How many people opt-in ? How many clicks ? How many people add content ? Commented ?

Now, if your tool is complex, not user-friendly etc … people won’t waste their time trying to contribute.

Open and easy are two of the key characteristics of Enterprise 2.0 solutions as per Andrew McAfee. Lyonnaise des Eaux and Dassault went for the Blue Kiwi solution. SwissRe and CSC went for the Jive SBS one. All choose a solution of a vendor specialized on the topic and went against the standard vendor selection IT policy of their respective companies.

The tool is so intuitive no-one get blocked during a 20,000 seats pilot (C. Flanagan).

Specialised vendor, no usage issue reported thanks to user-friendlyness, massive adoption rate, tens of thousand seats project successfully achieved within a year : would that be a coincidence ?

7) Cross functional participation is critical

Since Enterprise 2.0 project is a cultural one, and not simply a technological one, it requires cross functional competencies. HR, Marketing but also IT : all have to be involved in the project.

8. IT support is critical but IT Governance is crippling

This is probably one of the most challenging issue : have IT involvement without suffering the constraints of IT Governance. IT has been key in helping companies deploying enterprise solutions to support business processes (ERP, CRM, etc …). Security, stability, operability, overall IT architecture coherence, these are the main criteria they took in consideration. Usability ? Never. Here is the main problem : refer to point 6.

In order to circumvent this issue, both SwissRe and CSC prepared beforehand the list of criteria along which all different solutions would be benchmarked. One of the main use case for Claire Flanagan was the ability to administer the solution herself with her limited IT Admin knowledge. It was easy with Jive SBS and not with the other vendor being the IT preferred solution. CTO accepted that and all agree to play the game and chose the solution that satisfied the most the predefined use cases.

9) Don’t use the S word

Our company is a well respected 150 years old company. We are doing very serious stuff. In order to make sure we have executives support, I made sure no one ever pronounced the S word, following the very good advice from Andrew McAfee. (Anu Elmer)

Claire Flanagan, Fabrice Poireaud-Lambert, Nicolas Rolland, all reported the same lexical cautious approach. They never mentioned Social Media or so but kept on referring to business problems and how they could solve them with collaborative tools when selling the project to executives.

10) Top-Grassroot-Down is the new Bottom-up

All these projects started with a clear lead from project team. But as the project implementation started they all needed support from advocates disseminated in different teams to evangelize the new tool and make it viral. (Again if the tool is not usable, forget about viral regardless of how enthusiastic your evangelists are …).

So successful projects are both Top Down and grassroot efforts, more one or the other depending on the stage of the project.

Conclusion

I leave it to Richard Collin and his comment after Claire Flanagan keynote :

“CSC project massive success is a great example. These are knowledge workers generating business value through services, the typical 21st Century company. The fact that Enterprise 2.0 succeeds with such company is a proof of how relevant this approach is today and will be tomorrow.”

See you all next year. Be there or be 1.0.

Single Purpose Browsing & Why Tabbed Browsing Makes for a Pretty BAD User Experience

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:19:35 +0000

When Firefox, previously called Phoenix and Firebird, launched tabbed browsing (well, after Bloatzilla), I was super-excited and pimping it to all my friends. It’s been a while since I felt this way and, with tab-saving in browsers (which I of course turn on), I tend to choose the browser with the least tabs saved in it. Apps like Choosy for the Mac, which gives me a pop-up with a choice of browsers whenever clicking a link, or which chooses the best-performing browser running at the time, are a life-saver, but they are just a piecemeal solution to a greater problem.

Firefox, in its latest version (3.6), introduced a nifty feature for a better tab user-experience, which I hope they expand a little more. Basically, when you click on the little icon on the top right (see screenshot), you get a nice overview, called “Showcase,” of all the tabs loaded in your browser at the time.

A similar implementation is of course Safari’s and Chrome’s start-window, which shows you an overview of your most viewed sites, making it a visual replacement for your bookmarks and/or history managers.

For some time now, you’ve also had the feature of restoring tabs after closing your browser, either voluntary, which makes sense as tabs consume an insane amount of ram and CPU (especially for Flash sites, but for plenty of other things also), and as a safety feature, when your browser crashes. Saft for Safari (Mac only) introduced a tab-recovery user-interface (see picture), where you see a list of tabs previously loaded and where you can tick or untick sites that you want to start up with. I believe Firefox has a similar interface for tab-recovery after a crash.

But it’s all still a hassle and I really haven’t come across a perfect implementation of dealing with several dozens of tabs. I wouldn’t mind having the option of starting Firefox tab-free, with option of restoring whatever tab I used previously, in its original state, via something like the Firefox Showcase interface. There are some Firefox extensions that do just that, but I’ve so far not come across something that is intuitively usable.

There is the other problem, which is that sometimes you want to open a browser for a single purpose, such as Google Maps, Gmail, or the weather, and it’s annoying to have to open a browser with 50+ tabs in it. Some sites have become applications rather than sources of information and just like it doesn’t make sense to open the full Office suite when opening Microsoft Word, it doesn’t make sense to open several tabs to go to one site.

Since last night, I’m experimenting with Fluid on the Mac, one of a few, I’m sure, applications that turn websites into applications that launch from your application folder. So I now have a Google Calendar app, a Google Docs app, etc. For Gmail, I really like Mailplane, which also uses Webkit, Safari’s open source sibling, as a basis for creating a service dedicated to one site, or in Mailplane’s case, multiple Gmail accounts.

So far that is the best user-experience for me if I want to go to a site that is also an application. Tabs, I’m sure, have a purpose, but they just invite information overload and the guilt for not being able to deal with it all. If you, the readers, have similar experience, feel free to share them, and if you found solutions, please let us know as well!

Addendum: talk about measuring the real cost of tabs… In the last weeks, I received 12 identical letters from the Dutch government regarding an access code I requested once. Turns out that it was one of my 50 saved tabs in Firefox that, every time I restarted the browser, requested a new code when the page loaded.

Enterprise 2.0 Forum : the Jive side of Swiss Re project

ceciiil — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:13:08 +0000

(Hi It’s Cecil here. A french version of this blog post is available on Heavy Mental)

The Enterprise 2.0 Forum to be held on 17 and March 18 in Paris at the Meridien Montparnasse will present some case studies. The Swiss Re project is one of them.

So I’ve contacted Jive Software for an interview to check Jive situation today (rather good as the Gartner Magic Quadrant tends to show) but also their view on that project.

I owe quite a lot to Jive. As part of my job, I invited back in summer 2008 Devan Batavia (VP Sales EMEA) to give us a presentation on their product, then Jive Clearspace today Jive SBS (Social Business System).

It was a revelation. All the problems of knowledge management, innovation, productivity in a global enterprise and complex environment, all these problems that I was intimately involved with in my everyday job, all appeared in full light in one of the most relaxed and most professional presentations that I have ever witnessed.

To such extent that it has inspired my own presentation Enterprise 2.0 and allowed me to put order in my ideas and shed light on an irrefutable truth : my subject is Enterprise 2.0.

Devan has politely declined the interview and rerouted me to Nathan Rawlins to answer them. Nathan is Sr. Director of Product and he is in charge of steering the revolution of the Social Business. A bit of Jive promotion of course, but many ideas and comments that are worth visiting …

1) Could you please provide the readers with some feedback on you and on Jives ?

Jive is number one in Social Business Software (SBS), with the most extensive solution, the largest implementations, and unmatched expertise in delivering value.

Jive SBS is driving the biggest change to business practices in decades. Jive SBS takes all the things people love about social networking software, collaboration software, and community software and makes those work for business.

This is why many of the brands that drive the global economy – including Cisco, Deutsche Lufthansa AG, Intel, NIKE Inc., SAP, Swiss Re, T-Mobile and Yum! Brands – and thousands of other companies all Jive.

2) Tell us a few words on the Swiss-re deployment project that will be presented at the E20 forum by Anu Elmer, Swiss-Re VP Communications

Swiss Re provides highly customized service based on the unique risk profiles and objectives of its customers. Like most global companies, the teams at Swiss Re were becoming increasingly virtual and travel budgets had been cut. The current economic climate both increases the demand for Swiss Re’s services and places a premium on the firm’s ability to respond effectively to increasingly complex customer requirements. The business problem was clear: quicker and more efficient exchange of expertise was needed to better service new and existing clients.

The multiple collaboration tools the company depended upon-including email and other web-based tools-no longer satisfied their needs.
The Jive SBS platform – implemented under the name “Ourspace” – has enabled a more efficient exchange of specialized expertise and information which has enhanced innovation in response to client needs, reduced proposal development costs, and sped the delivery of services to key clients.

3) In terms of implementation project, what are the difference with an E20 project and the roll out of any of the above systems ? Is there any specific issue to bare in mind with E20 implementation ?

End-user adoption is paramount in the rollout of social software. That happens when interactions and connections are front-and-center. This is why adding a few social features to existing applications doesn’t support a successful social strategy. Traditional systems are focused on documents, records, or processes, not people. As such, when social initiatives are implemented, the old practices of “roll out the platform and mandate its use” won’t work. People need to feel drawn to the community.

Quite frankly, that is what is behind the success of Jive SBS. We hear again and again from companies that Jive SBS is the application people love to use, the application that makes them proud to be part of the company.

4) Some people recommend to have different collaborative platforms within the same company, some other a single one. What is your recommendation ? Don’t we lose some centralization benefits when multiplying the platforms ?

When it comes to social interactions, trying to have many platforms is a losing game. If users have to hop from system to system and stitch together conversations, they are going to stop using the systems altogether. This doesn’t just apply to internal conversations. What we have seen from our customers is that once they get collaboration happening internally on Jive SBS, the next step is they want to collaborate with customers, partners, and suppliers in a similar way. That’s why we’ve introduced the unique capability within SBS to bridge conversations across different communities, giving businesses the ability to maintain separation where necessary and foster open collaboration wherever possible.

5 ) Towers Perrin has just released a great study about people engagement in the company. This study shows that 40% of the workforce feels disengaged. Do you think E20 can help in improving workforce engagement ? How ? Have you witnessed such engagement improvement with ESSP during your studies ?

This goes back to the point in question three. One of the main reasons people are disengaged is they feel disconnected. They feel like they don’t understand where the company is going. They feel like they don’t have a voice.

That is where Jive SBS comes in. SBS lets anyone in the company have a voice. Not only does it help surface questions and concerns, it gives a platform for broad discussion of vision and direction. It gives employees something highly personal to rally around. As people feel connected on a personal level, they become more engaged.

6) Many middle manager feel unsafe with ESSPs. These bring disintermediation, and make manager feel like they are losing control of the work in the team. Do you think that 1st and 2nd level managers jobs and type of activity is at stake with the advent of the E20 ? How can they contribute ?

Successful managers will take advantage of social collaboration to help them build happier, more engaged, and more productive teams. Instead of worrying about disintermediation, they will embrace a more open dialogue that leads to better ideas and less confusion.

7) Broadly speaking, one can say that there are 2 types of Enterprise 2.0 activists. The revolutionaries and evolutionaries. The formers believe that collaborative platforms are disruptive technology that will deeply change the organisations. The latter think this is a incremental evolution that will just fill up some communication holes that are not covered in organisation 1.0. Where would you stand ?

Think of it this way: Facebook didn’t take off because it filled in a few gaps email didn’t cover. Facebook took off because it made it possible for people to interact more like they would if they were in the same room.
Chris Brogan has said the social media is our attempt to be human at a distance. Similarly, the potential of social business goes far beyond making it a little easier to collaborate. It makes it possible for employees to work together in fundamentally different ways — ways that are innately more human.

8 ) From all the studies you made with all types of organization, is there any standard anti-e20-persona that emerge ? Any over-enthusiastic-e20- supporter persona ?
Anti-e20 persona: those that are afraid of change
Over-enthusiastic e20 persona: those that just want to shake things up

9) Who would you think is the best C-Level sponsor for an Enterprise 2.0 project ? CEO ? Head of HR ? COO ? CIO ?

We’ve seen great sponsors with just about any title. It’s less about title, and more about vision. An executive that gets that this isn’t just a new technology, but rather a way of changing the way that business gets done—that’s the executive that is going to be successful.

10) My 9 years old boy keeps on asking me what I’m blogging about. What would you reply in a simple sentence ?

I’m blogging about changing the way business gets done.

Thank you Nathan and keep on making the social software revolution !

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Enterprise 2.0 : the end of office politics ?

ceciiil — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 08:49:50 +0000

I have been thinking about this topic for a while now. Enterprise 2.0 book from Andrew McAfee chapter 8 (Looking ahead), a nice twitter conversation with @oscarberg, and a New York Times article about Microsoft Creative Destruction : all combine to convince me there was some room for a blog post. Snip from the NYT article :

Internal competition is common at great companies. It can be wisely encouraged to force ideas to compete. The problem comes when the competition becomes uncontrolled and destructive. At Microsoft, it has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence. It’s not an accident that almost all the executives in charge of Microsoft’s music, e-books, phone, online, search and tablet efforts over the past decade have left.

As Wikipedia defines it :

“Office politics is the use of one’s individual or assigned power within an employing organization for the purpose of obtaining advantages beyond one’s legitimate authority. Those advantages may include access to tangible assets, or intangible benefits such as status or pseudo-authority that influences the behavior of others. Both individuals and groups may engage in Office Politics.”

One has to be extremely pedagogic to explain me how on earth this may help the company in being more profitable, increasing customers satisfaction and being a better place for employees, the three goals of any company according to Eliyahu Goldratt.

The Transparency test

Throwing such concepts as Trust and Transparency into the discussion is a good method to identify the politics freaks out there. Transparency is their worst enemy : manipulating and controlling information is their favorite way to achieve their goals : intriguing to keep and strengthen their positions and power (as Oscar puts it).

They’ll soon show the standard behavior pattern of politics : denial and/or cynisism and standard resignation. “It’s not that simple, it just can’t work like that, You just can’t change that, that’s the way it has been and that’s the way it always will be etc …”.

I am very defiant towards these people. More often than not, this is somehow to excuse their own questionable behaviour. My take on politics jerks : The No Asshole rule.

Office politics specialists of the world unite ! Because you will soon die and no-one will shed a tear on you. Enterprise 2.0 is near the corner : trust and transparency will eventually rule the work place and the exact nature of your contribution will clearly appear : poisonous, irrelevant and damaging. We shall then follow Robert Sutton advice : get rid of you.

Model 1

Chapter 8 (Looking Ahead) of Enterprise 2.0 book is, according to me, the most engaging and impressive. In that section, McAfee describes how the egalitarian and transparency values of the social platforms born on the internet may not be very welcomed in some companies.

To illustrates this, he mentions The Liar’s Club, this weekly executive meeting in a company where some people lie to each other regarding their budget, progress etc … to make sure they are not the ones the blame is put upon.

He then goes on and mentions Chris Argyris people behaviour models in organisations. Argyris describes two types of model. Model 1 is defined with the following principles :

1 – Define goals and try to achieve them.

2- Maximize winnings, minimize losings

3- Suppress negative feelings :

4- Behave rationally

ChangingMinds offers a clear description of Model 1 limitations :

In order to acquire a sense of control we need to prove to ourselves that we can control our environment. We thus set ourselves goals and do our best to achieve these goals. In order to maintain our sense of control, we tend to do this unilaterally — to include others is to risk losing control

We all like to win, because this proves to ourselves that we are achieving our goals and are in control. On the other hand, if we lose, we not only do not achieve our goals, but we are seen by others as inferior and are likely to receive less support in the future (thus we lose social control–i.e. power). Winning (or losing) becomes a spiral as the more people ally with us, the more others will feel socially isolated and be motivated to join us.

There are many ways we can experience dissonance in the actions from the above approaches (how well we achieve our goals, what we lose …). We will tend towards avoidance, denial and suppression. This suppression can be a collaborative action — I won’t talk about your limitations if you don’t talk about mine. This is a hugely poisonous spiral that leads entire organizations into sub-optimal and dysfunctional ways of working that can eventually bring down the entire company.

We all need to predict the world around us, including what other people will say and do. A defensive way of being rational is to judge the rationality of others, thus setting ourselves up as authorities and hence automatic winners. Blaming people and situations is to attribute cause, which is itself a rational action.

Even if these 4 principles may sound legitimate at first, soon the the trade-offs become obvious : it focus on individuals hence foster ego centric decisions and actions. Defensive communication, problems and mistake denials, stealing other people’s ideas and results (in France we are world champions), blaming, bitching and gossiping about people, brown-nosing, manipulating information … In one word : politics.

Model 2

As an alternative, Argyris proposes another behavior model based on (from Wikipedia which tends to prove that Tables are not Wiki specialty):

1- Valid information : Design situations or environments where participants can be origins and can experience high personal causation (psychological success, confirmation, essentiality). Actor experienced as minimally defensive (facilitator, collaborator, choice creator). Quality of life will be more positive than negative (high authenticity and high freedom of choice)

2- Free and informed choice : tasks are controlled jointly, Minimally defensive interpersonal relations and group dynamics, effectiveness of problem solving and decision making will be great, especially for difficult problems, Increase long-run effectiveness

3- Internal commitment to the choice : Protection of self is a joint enterprise and oriented toward growth (speck in directly observable categories, seek to reduce blindness about own inconsistency and incongruity), Learning-oriented norms (trust, individuality), Public testing of theories

4- Constant monitoring of the implementation : open confrontation on difficult issues, Bilateral protection of others

The second model is based on valid information, choices, commitment and monitoring, all within a team activity. This is transparency. And transparency is a bedrock for trust.

As this is less individual centric, this second model is more open to the possibility of admiting mistakes (a great enabler of office balanced relationships) : it makes assertive communication natural and the only way to go.

From Model 1 to Model 2

This will resonate with a strong echo for any of us that have witnessed these top managers meetings where one hardly talks not to make a mistake and undergo a scathering attack by other managers. This is just dreadful.

McAfee concludes that :

ESSP can help organizations move from a Model 1 to a Model 2 theory-in-use. These tools can change the nature of collaboration and discussion within the enterprise giving people the ability both to contribute their perspective to a dialogue and to inform themselves by incorporating multiple perspectives. In short, they can help organizations move from defensive to productive reasoning(…) Enterprise 2.0 is about abandonning the assumption that unilateral control is the best way to achieve desired outcomes.

This is my favorite part of the book as this sounds to me the most enlightening.

While implementing Enterprise 2.0 and moving from Model 1 to Model 2, would we eventualy defuse office politics and focus, at last, on the main goals of private organisations : profits, customers satisfaction and employees well being ?

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Toward Enterprise 2.0 with Cécile Demailly

ceciiil — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 19:45:07 +0000

Early Strategies has just released a fresh an extremely useful report on Enterprise 2.0 and the current level of adoption.

This international (FR, UK, NE, US) survey (summary) was conducted between November 2009 and January 2010, targeting Multinational Companies (MNCs) and international organizations (France-Telecom, Cisco, AT&T, Amadeus, IBM etc …). The clear intent was to study change execution.

This report sheds a bright light using real life examples on favorite topics of the Enterprise 2.0 Activists community : cultural values, strategic reasons, change agents, executive champions, management inducements etc …

This analysis is precise enough to distinguish different results depending on the type of company business (B2B, B2C). It’s pretty interesting to see the consequences this difference creates in companies adoption strategy.

The results and conclusion on strategy, maturity, change, policy but also on people daily work and perceived usefulness have priceless value for anyone wishing to embrace the subject of Emergent Social Software Platforms (ESSP) adoption.

Last but not least, the report addresses the ROI issue, the one most E20 activists are the least comfortable with – Andrew McAfee included. Early Strategies approach differs as it distinguishes tangible from intangible ROI. thus provides a completely different perspective on the whole thing.

Together with McKinsey’s and Cisco, probably the most insightful report on the topic I’ve read so far.

Tech It Easy has been lucky enough to have the opportunity of an interview with the person behind Early Strategies : Cecile Démailly. Impressive professional background, real enthusiasm and insight on the ESSP topic, and a charming person : Tech It Easy readers deserve no less …(Note, I’ve bolded+italicize most interesting and valuable parts- there are quite a few).

1. Hello Cécile. Could you please introduce yourself to the readers ?

I am an old GenX (or a very young baby boomer), interested in the future but probably with an eclectic approach, green (except for stairs when on high heels), mother of GenYs (they bind my understanding of new trends, among other things, and keep me modest). More seriously, I have long been a corporate person in high tech blue chips (IBM, AT&T and GE) before I started my own consulting business. I worked internationally, mainly in product management and executive jobs, and this helps me today to grasp organizational change challenges. I do change consulting and research for MNCs.

2. Tell us a few words on this “Toward Enterprise 2.0” Report. Why did you start this project in the first place ? What were the questions you wanted to answer ?

Enterprise 2.0 is a fascinating change. Imagine it has roots as far as the theory of social capital a century ago! And everything is accelerating by the magic of the technology. It happens fast and in a disruptive way. The adoption grows quickly and the research we did a year ago needed a deepening. I saw a need for more collaboration between IT, HR, Communications and other departments to lead the change, continuous discussions about ROI, and pervasive questions on where to start, what to address, how to make it successful. I wanted to find out what is happening around these topics in leading organizations.

3. Some people recommend to have different collaborative platforms within the same company, some other a single one. What is your recommendation? Don’t we lose some centralization benefits when multiplying the platforms?

Certainly you lose power and benefits when you don’t integrate the tools, and using a single platform is theoretically the cleanest and less expensive way to get them integrated. Now, the reality is more complex: you have to deal with legacy systems and you can hardly wipe out initiatives that started locally, even more when they are successful and helped you justify the need to transform the organization. Plus it might happen that no single platform responds to your priorities. Each case is different and needs thinking.

4 . Towers Perrin has just released a great study about people engagement in the company. This study shows that 40% of the workforce feels disengaged. Do you think E20 can help in improving workforce engagement ? How ? Have you witnessed engagement improvement with ESSP during your study ?

It certainly can, when it is not imposed. I won’t go into a long dissertation on what can engage workforce, but it is not the Enterprise 2.0 in itself. Again, the corporate vision is key here, if it fuels spirit and passion, and if the workforce in convinced their participation will do good, they will engage. Well being, a sense of fairness, organization’s ethics are other components among many. Enterprise 2.0 offers a way to participate to something – that ‘something’ will foster engagement. I have to say that often the satisfaction about Enterprise 2.0 surveyed is bound to the workforce engagement. Both are interlinked.

5. Many middle managers feel uncomfortable with ESSPs and you report tends to confirm that. Do you think their jobs and type of activity is at stake with the advent of the E20 ? How can E20 project manager/sponsor can help in having manager less reluctant for adoption ?

Most often, companies focus on cultivating employee adoption, rather than management, not to say middle management; and HR is not often enough associated to the transformation effort from the beginning. The Enterprise 2.0 has an impact on the organizational structure, mainly because information flows differently. Managers need to put new shoes on, and HR needs to help them do that, redefine the role of management, and get them comfortable in their new role. How ? My advice is to use collaboration and collective thinking, and “kill 2 birds with 1 stone” : set up a think tank, or a task force, a workout, or whatever works for your organization, gather a maximum of volunteers from the target population, i.e. the middle managers, introduce them to the concepts, and let them define their own future. Ideally introduce them to the tools before the thinking work happens: that is called building awareness.

6. In the introduction, you mention that transformation toward E20 must support strategic vision. One could ask how a platform of collaborative tools that may help overall company strategy ?

Your organization and the stakeholders around (customers, partners, suppliers, etc.) form an ecosystem. How your ecosystem will live, grow, change, depends on 1/your strategic vision and 2/how you nurture it. Enterprise 2.0 is a way to nurture the ecosystem better – it is not a goal or an end as such, it is a mean. Organizations don’t adopt Enterprise 2.0 because this is ‘in the air’; they adopt Enterprise 2.0 because it will help their future. And the way they will implement it, the content they will focus on, needs to serve their vision.

7. From all the studies you made with all types of organization, is there any standard anti-e20-persona that emerge ? Any over-enthusiastic-e20-supporter persona?

Not really an anti-E2.0 persona, there are rather a set of common resistances that slow down adoption: fear of visibility, where to find the time for it/rebalance workload, understanding how it relates to the daily job, just to mention a few. Those resistances disappear as awareness grows, whether it is common global awareness or individual one (trough learning and practice). Regarding E2.0 supporters, I did meet a few different: some knowledge managers, networkers who are also techno-addicts, often communications team members. These are gems, when they are open minded enough to accept that others may not be at the same stage of understanding, and when they find ways to help late adopters.

8. Who would you think is the best C-Level sponsor for an Enterprise 2.0 project ? CEO ? Head of HR ? COO ? CIO ?

Good question, and there is no one response that fits all – it is linked to the organization’s structure and the executives’ personality. The survey reported that most often, the CEO is the executive champion or among them. It also reported that in 20% of the cases, no executive champion is known. What is sure is that it works better when one or more sponsor(s) personify the transformation effort, at least in the early stages: considering the change, piloting, and starting to deploy. Like for any change. Who is the best? Try answer these questions: is there a visionary, where is it important to center the Enterprise 2.0, who is convinced, who will be listened on this subject?

9. Some people wonder where they should start with E2.0 : with internal solutions or external solutions (with partners, customers etc …). What would you recommend?

Again, each case is different. It needs some thinking and, as mentioned above, it needs to be linked to the vision. Marketing teams in strong consumer brands may want to start ahead; though most of the time it is rather centered internally and external initiatives that may exist in parallel join gradually.

Sometime we see a dichotomy between the internal and the external realizations. Ideally there should not be. Of course the organization boundaries will continue to exist, and some content will not flow externally. There should be bridges. It usually happens when Enterprise 2.0 becomes mature, not at the beginning of the deployment.

10. My 9 years old boy keeps on asking me what I’m blogging about. I’m not comfortable with the E20 explanation to him. What would you reply in a simple sentence ?

Aha. Make the most of it, questions are fun until kids think they know better than you. How about: “I’m trying to better understand how it will be when you will start working”.

Thanks you very much Cécile.

(Hi. It’s Cecil here. A copy of this blog post also is published on Heavy Mental).

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Positioning with other IT systems: the liquid nature of Enterprise 2.0

ceciiil — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 09:00:54 +0000

Emergent Social Software Platforms (ESSP) are now at the doorstep of the enterprise. The question one may ask is : how does it fit alongside the already existing Enterprise IT systems.

Companies have spent a fortune during the last 10 years implementing business critical Enterprise wide systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain Management (SCM) or Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). Yet another system could be seen as a risk for the balance of the whole company IT strategy.

In his enlightening book on PLM (Product Lifecycle Management, Driving the Next Generation of Lean Thinking) Michael Grieves proposes a map to illustrate the positioning of PLM together with the main business critical IT systems.

This blog post extends this map and propose a perspective on Enterprise 2.0 platforms positioning.

Enterprise 1.0 systems

On Michael Grieve’s book map, the Y axis identifies the different functions and activities of the company while the X axis identifies the different domains of knowledge.

I like this diagram because it is simple yet powerful and illustrates the orthogonal positioning of ERP against PLM, SCM or CRM. It shows where and how these different systems interconnects. (Comment from a me as a PLM professional : PLM/ERP integration looks simple here but I tell you, you don’t want to see the gory details of the real life software integration, that’s not pretty).

(Click to enlarge)

It is revisited because there is a key area that these systems do not cover : tacit knowledge. So to make it more representative I’ve slimmed their width down to explicitly show that, in real life, they don’t fully fill their column (PLM, SCM, CRM) or lines (ERP) as in the original Grieves diagram. The missing portions are the uncaptured tacit knowledge units.

Enterprise 2.0 systems

As Andrew McAfee notices in his Enterprise 2.0 book, most of these systems are focussed on controlling and monitoring closely the activities of knowledge workers. They have very clear boundaries and a strict scope of responsibilities.

ESSPs are completely different animal. While ERP, PLM, SCM or CRM have strict boundaries, ESSP are open systems whose usage may evolve as per user needs. In other words, rather than forcing user to adapt to them, ESSP adapt themselves to the usages of the knowledge workers.

This provides a liquid nature to ESSPs that helps them to seep in and fill up any gaps left by other systems. ESSP don’t have a predefined shape, they just take the shape of their container. Here the container is the scope of business activity and knowledge of the enterprise. More precisely, the scope that IT systems have captured and manage.

The gaps ESSP are filling have a name : tacit knowledge. Michael Grieves book explains so clearly how tacit uncaptured knowledge can hurt the implementation project of such system as a PLM. Heavy Mental already wrote on the great ability of Enterprise 2.0 systems to capture tacit knowledge.

The second ESSP core feature that contributes to this liquid nature is communities. ESSP make it easy to build communities which, in the enterprise context, are built around common areas of knowledge, business expertise, and professional know-how. These communities juxtapose different types of experts (technical, marketing, sale, integration) on a specific domain. This allows to build multi-dimensional expertise in very confined and otherwise unreachable locations in the company activity and knowledge map.

The different communities of expertise are illustrated in the diagram below as contiguous boxes.

(Click to enlarge)

Obviously, at ESSP launch time, the whole map will not be filled but it will eventually overtime, as valid data and information is fed into the system and the liquid spread into the whole enterprise knowledge frame.

So what is the positioning of ESSP alongside other enterprise systems ? Knowledge gap filler to offer a conductor environment for ideas and information to propagate on an enterprise-wide scale.

How would you position ESSPs alongside enterprise systems ?

(Hi. It’s Cecil here. A copy of this blog post also is published on Heavy Mental).

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Five Elevator pitches for Enterprise 2.0 adoption

ceciiil — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 13:00:05 +0000

I have been reading a lot of Scott Berkun lately, including his brilliant Confessions of a Public Speaker (french review available). A must read for any speaker, professional or not, to make sure you transmit clearly your ideas .

However, sometimes you just don’t have a dedicated room, with people ready to offer you 30 minutes of attention. You don’t have the slideware, you don’t have the projector or your laptop.

No. What you have is just a 30 seconds time frame, where you bump into some executive or very important people in the company. And what you want is to take advantage of this opportunity to pitch people into some Enterprise 2.0 basics.

Scott addresses this point in one of his many excellent blog posts : how to pitch idea.

Now let’s see some elevator pitches to 5 key enterprise persona for 2.0 adoption …

Two things to keep in mind before getting into the detail. First, you obviously won’t be able to pitch people into Enterprise 2.0 adoption within 30 seconds. Second, executives are important people always thinking about thousand things. So what you want is them to pay attention and ignite their curiosity. And the best way to do so is to ask questions, painful questions.

1 – C.E.O.

Definition : A chief executive officer (CEO) or chief executive is one of the highest-ranking corporate officers (executives) or administrators

Role and responsibility : in charge of total management. The CEO responsibility is to align the company, internally and externally, with their strategic vision.

Background : For the last decade, CEOs have been through period of extreme transition. IT has costs him dear with many enterprise system implementation (ERP, SCM, CRM, etc …). They rather are defiant towards the prospect of any new enterprise wide system and million dollar implementation with dubious ROI.

How E2.0 can help : Productivity of course but more than everything : Innovation. Most CEOs surely want to make money but what they mostly take pride of is innovation and his company ability to make the world a better place.

Apprehension : Decreasing employees productivity. So make sure you never pronounce the S word.

Speech :

Would you rank amongst the 65% of the executive disappointed with the level of innovation in their company ?

Have you heard about {competitor’s name} implementation of a system that has improved innovation ?

My name is Joe Smith. May I invite you to a 45mns presentation on how we can foster collaboration, innovation, productivity and knowledge management in our organization ?

2 – Head of HR

Definition : Head of HR is responsible for human resources.

Role and responsibility : Recruiting and staffing, organizational and space planning;organization development;employee orientation, development, and training; etc …

Background : Most of HR people keep a closed look on social networks and how they could implemented behind the firewall. They could be your best support.

How E2.0 can help : Foster an enterprise wide culture, improve employees engagement so that they are happier and more productive

Apprehension : Decreasing employees engagement, mess around the organisation

Speech :

Hey I’ve heard that about 40 %of the workforce are either disengaged or disenchanted. What are we doing in our company about that ?

Is it true that people are unlikely to collaborate if they are more than 50 feet apart ?

My name is Joe Smith. May I invite you to a 45mns presentation (etc …)

3 – CIO

Definition : Chief Information Officer is a job title for the board-level head of information technology within an organization.

Role and responsibility : a CIO proposes the information technology needed by an enterprise to achieve its goals and then works within a budget to implement the plan.

Background : CIO has just spent the last decade implementing and deploying million-dollars project for Enterprise wide systems : ERP, CRM, SCM, KM … CIOs are the tough ones. Both Lee Provoost and Gilbert Cattoire even recommend to skip the CIO altogether and make the E2.0 project an HR one for a faster and easier implementation. Anyway, some tips to try your luck …

How E2.0 can help : A better general knowledge management within the company. As a result : a best overall ROI on IT systems.

Apprehension : 3 of them : Security, Security, Security

Speech :

Have you heard about this study showing that 46% of the people find what they’re looking for on their intranet while they are twice as much finding what they want on the internet ?

Hey shall I invite you to a 45mns presentation on how CIA, NASA, Intel or VMWare fostered collaboration, innovation, productivity and knowledge management in their organization without compromising the security ?

4 – Middle Manager

Definition : Middle manager are basically in charge of the productive forces.

Role and responsibility : They are responsible for making sure that the teams produces what has been identified by top management and company strategy to make money. Quality, budget and productivity are their main concerns.

How E2.0 can help : : Knowledge Management. Technologies, process, methods : everything evolves as fast as hell and managers are bombarded with information. It is just no possible to keep up the pace.

Apprehension : Disintermediation. Losing control + command.

Strategy : Don’t talk about management radical changes but, rather, smooth shifts and how they align with standard principles of modern management. It is to show that their role may be just as important with Enterprise 2.0, but different. As Cristobal Conde puts it :

I think the role of the boss is to then work on those collaboration platforms, as opposed to being the one making the decisions. It’s more like the producer of the show, rather than being the lead.

Speech :

Hey how do you feel about the figures that managers spend 2 hours a day looking for data, with half the data they found is no value ? And spending 20% of the remaining time struggling with their e-mail box ?

My name is Joe Smith. May I invite you to a 45mns presentation (etc …)

5 – Experts

Definition : They’ve been in the company for ever. They’ve seen many different managers, policies, systems etc … Most of the time they are old fashion, not impress at all by the 2.0 buzz.

Role and responsibility : Know about everything on very specific topics. Quite often this knowledge is critical for the company.

How E2.0 can help : Collaborative platforms may help diffuse his knowledge on a company wide scale. This will give a lot of visibility on his work.

Apprehension : Get bored by a new process/system coming out of the void, imposed by top management and that will make it harder for him to get the job done.

Strategy : Expert usually are old school and still identify their knowledge as their job security. Insist on how the whole company could benefit more of their insight/knowledge

Speech :

Hey have you heard that knowledge workers spend 30%of their time looking for expertise such as yours ?

How do you think the whole enterprise could rip more benefit from your expertise ?

My name is Joe Smith. May I invite you to a 45mns presentation (etc …)

What is your elevator speech for Enterprise 2.0 adoption ? Who have you tried it with in your company ? Any supplementary trick you may recommend ? We’d love to know.

(Hi, it’s Cecil here. A mirror copy of this post is available on Heavy Mental)

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How Social Are You? An Insight to Social Technographics

Anand — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 23:33:15 +0000

Have you ever noticed, the increasing interest of your old Aunts in facebook or other social networking websites? Have you ever noticed, people updating their status messages (provoking conversations and chitchats). I have observed these kind of behavior and sometimes participated in these conversations as well. But where am I heading with all this? Letme ask you a question, How social are you?

Answer comes from a researcher Josh Bernoff who noted a “new behavior” in patterns of social technology usage by the people, and made a new category to describe such users: “conversationalists.” Bernoff defines conversationalists as “people who update their social network status to converse” on at least a weekly basis. According to Forrester surveys, the category is 56 percent female, more so than any other group, with 70 percent aged 30 and older. All of which fits quite nicely with my anecdotal evidence.

They take a close look at the social and demographic structure of the social web population ( To be more exhaustive and close to accurately model the user behavior, they analyzed the profiles for over a hundred clients, profiling Walmart shoppers, non-profit donors, and doctors). The categorization of users is different than Technorati’s statistics which mostly focus on raw blog growth numbers and structural features of the blogosphere.

: The Segmentation

P.S: Note that participation at one level may or may not overlap with the participation at other levels — so the ratios sum up to over 100%.

I am trying to explain as well as compare the increase and change in the user behavior for two years of their research. Results for previous year research can be found here.

Creators publish blogs, maintain Web pages, or upload videos to sites like YouTube at least once per month. Creators include just 24% of the adult online population. Creators are generally youngsters the average age of adult users is 39 — but are evenly split between men and women. This percent in year 2007 was just 13%.

Critics participate in either of two ways commenting on blogs or posting ratings and reviews on sites like Amazon.com. Critics represent 37% of all adult online consumers and on average are several years older than Creators. This percent in year 2007 was just 19%.

Collectors create metadata that’s shared with the entire community, e.g. by saving URLs on a social bookmarking service like del.icio.us or using RSS feeds on Bloglines. Collectors represent 20% of the adult online population and are the most male-dominated of all the Social Technographics groups. This percent in year 2007 was just 19%.

Joiners use a social networking site like MySpace.com or Facebook. Joiners represent 59% of the adult online population and are the youngest of the Social Technographics groups. They are highly likely to engage in other Social Computing activities — 59% also read blogs, while 30% publish blogs. This percent in year 2007 was just 19%.

Spectators represent 70% of the adult online population and are slightly more likely to be women and have the lowest household income of all the social Technographics groups. The most common activity for Spectators is reading blogs, with only a small overlap with users who watch peer-generated video on sites like YouTube. This percent in year 2007 was just 33%.

Inactives. Today, 17% of online adults do not participate at all in social computing activities. These Inactives have an average age of 50, are more likely to be women, and are much less likely to consider themselves leaders or tell their friends about products that interest them. This percent in year 2007 was 52%.

What we see from the above classification is a drastic change in behaviour of online users in last two years, most changes are directed towards the Inactives and Spectators. So now next time if you see your aunt updating her status message in Facebook, consider her among the new Joiners to the world of social networking.

Article Previosuly mirror-posted by me at Global Thoughtz.

Anand

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Thoughts on Farmville, an addictive but flawed Facebook game

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 07:20:54 +0000

I quit Farmville yesterday, after 3.5 weeks of pushing it up to level 20. In the first week, I wanted to write a review of how awesome it was and how it changed the social dynamic of Facebook. Now after a few weeks of wintery downtime, my gaming habit is back in the closet where it belongs, and my opinion is somewhat different.

What attracted me to Farmville in the first place? Well, in true Web3.0 spirit, it was someone raving about it on Twitter (Fidji Simo, I believe). It made me check it out and when I found out that some of my friends were on it, it made me give it a chance. I also remember SimFarm being one of the first games I played on my first PC and there was the nostalgia factor.

Farmville = FunVille?
The fun part of Farmville was to me truly the social dynamic. You build experience by doing different activities, such as growing fruit and vegetables, herding animals, and also helping out your friends. You can also give gifts to friends who in turn gift you back. All of that leads to two ways of measuring progress: experience points, which leads to new levels and abilities, and achievements, which you get after doing certain activities enough. While helping friends fuels my socialist—we are all equal, blablabla—self, the latter fuels my competitive—I am better, haha—self. As such, Farmville gives me complex feelings of satisfaction that can’t be found in every activity or game.

Now, while I admit that the latter statement is a little weird, but hopefully sufficient to explain why I liked the game, let me get to the parts that made me quit Farmville. They are, simply put: money, Adobe’s Flash, and boredom.

Farmville = CashVille
Farmville was admittedly the biggest blockbuster on the Facebook platform in 2009 and I have no doubt it will do well in 2010 also. The reason it is what it is, is because of its way of making money. Yes, if you want the easy way to winning, which is measured by how beautiful your farm is, you have to pay! There are three ways to pay for stuff in Farmville: achievements, such as having many neighbours or growing many tomatoes, which gets you free stuff; fake money, which buys you stuff; and Farmville money, which you get by either levelling up or by buying it for real dollars.

You can do pretty much everything you want without spending Farmville cash. Except for two things: expanding your farm, which would lead to having more real-estate and thus more “fun.” And, buying fuel. You can buy vehicles that make farming an easier chore, but using those vehicles requires fuel, which is expensive to buy and slow to recharge. The fact that I couldn’t sustainably earn income and spend it (without spending real cash) was a real downer in terms of gameplay.

Farmville = FlashVille
Flash made headlines these last few years mostly because of three things. It got bought by Adobe, its Air-platform and the sheer ubiquity of Flash as a development platform on sites such as Facebook. And, its lack of support on the iPhone / iPod Touch OS. And the latter is the case because Flash really sucks! It’s bloated, it’s not as good as pretty much any other interfacing technology (for lack of a better term), and it reminds us all of badly designed Myspace sites.

For me, the lack of iPhone OS support was a real factor as I got a Touch this Christmas, which became my nr. 1 Facebook interface, minus the reason* why I mainly visited Facebook these last few weeks (*: yes, yes, I really did mean it when I wished my friends a Merry Xmas and Happy New Year, but that just wasn’t getting me the experience points to get me ahead on Farmville…).

The second factor was that Flash is simply a bad technology. 1. it was incredibly slow and I had to reload the page several times, also losing my progress. 2. the Farmville interface is split up into blocks, on which you can farm, build, plant trees, or herd animals. Doing stuff on these chunks required actual movement of my avatar/farmer, who wasn’t moving to swiftly because of “Flashville’s bloatyness,” and I also couldn’t drag actions across the screen, which I would have been able to do even in the 16 years older SimFarm! Flash sucks and was the no. 2 reason for quitting Farmville.

I think Farmville would make the perfect iPhone App, but I really think Flash needs a major overhaul and/or be killed of.

Farmville = FrustrationVille
I already mentioned how repetitive the actual playing part became, going from one block to the next to plant or harvest. Every level felt slower and more frustrating, which was mostly due to Flash, but also perhaps due to Farmville making it harder to get to the next level. In the end, I kind of started wondering why I was playing this game and if I was even playing and not just doing manual labour. The only real reward seemed to be Farmcash, which you could either earn by levelling up (1 Farmcash per level, while buying more farmland costs like 20-30 farm-dollars, seems frustrating) or by paying real money (and that would just be sad). I could also spam my friends to join Farmville and become my neighbours, but come on!

I did get some satisfaction out of reading the several strategy guides that exist for Farmville and there really is no shortage of community support. But in the end it seems like Farmville emulates actual farming too closely, by making it tedious manual labour to grow stuff on your farm (mostly due to Flash sucking!) and it also makes it feel like serfdom, by having to buy Farmcash from your “masters,” in order to have a great-looking farm.

Well, that’s all I have to say on Farmville. It was a fun experience during the holidays and I don’t regret trying it. But while I think social gaming has a strong future, I really don’t like business models that rely on making its users’ lives more frustrating. I know World of Warcraft has a similar model and is the most successful multiplayer game ever made, but that doesn’t mean that it makes it the best game ever made. I can name a dozen single player and half a dozen multiplayer games that aren’t as successful financially, but just work well in terms of gameplay. And games like Farmville have a long way to go before they get there.

End review.
Vincent

Must Use Twitter Tools for Corporate Users

Anand — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 17:32:24 +0000

If you are new to Twitter then it’s easy to get confused with so many twitter applications out there. Further, if you are a business user than you may have no time to do research on the applications. We really can’t deny the fact that businesses are testing out Twitter as part of their steps into the social media landscape. You can say it’s a stupid application, that no business gets done there, but there are too many of us (including me) that can disagree and point out business value. I used many of the tools available in internet to manage my old twitter account.

With this idea behind I am trying to categorize the tools which may be helpful for our readers to use according to their needs. Here are some twitter tools along with the snapshots which impressed me and according to me will be easy to use even for a newbie to promote his/her business .

Buzzom Premium http://premium.buzzom.com/

Buzzom Premium is very newly launched application which allows you to focus in your twitter growth. It has many functions to choose from but more essentially its spam filter, scheduler and monitor. These are the three basic functions over which the application is build.

Direct Message is full of SPAM and it is almost unusable now. Thanks to various gaming applications and welcome or thank you messages. I like Buzzom SPAM filtering for DM. It actually makes this feature usable.

Buzzom also provides a great way to visualize your Twitter growth and network’s activity such as tweets, Retweets etc. The service also has the auto grow and follow system to increase your network’s size. Scheduler allows you to schedule tweets at certain time and control it by specifying its repeat cycle for future tweets.

2. Twonvert http://www.twonvert.com/

Twitter is all about 140 characters of words. People are already got use to expressing themselves in 140 characters with shorthand notation and some ingenuity. But that takes time and when you are in hurry, its more frustrating. With Twonvert you can easily convert your tweets into SMS shorthand language and allows you to say more with less characters!

3. Wefollow http://wefollow.com/

WeFollow is the directory of all the people in the Twitter, who have added themselves to the list. It provides an easy way for you to find relevant people in twitter and connect with them. You can find all short of people from celebrity to technologist in the list. WeFollow.com helps you use your time efficiently by making your people search easy and fast.

4. Twitscoop http://www.twitscoop.com/

Twitscoop is the service which lets you search the real-time trend in the twitter. Twitscoop uses the dynamic tag cloud to show the most talked topic in an interactive way. You can also search for related keyword and finds its popularity in the Twitter network.

Overall, it allows users to “Mine the thought stream” provided by Twitter. Twitscoop’s algorithm cuts every English non-spam tweets into pieces (“tags”), and ranks them by how frequently they are used versus normal usage. Twitscoop can essentially be described as your real-time web’s monitor.

5. Twittercal http://twittercal.com/

Managing your calendar is very tedious. You may have to enter new task on the go and may not have access to web version of Google calendar. Now you can do that easily via Twitter, you just have to send a small tweet and it gets added to your Google Calendar.

It’s a free service that connects your Twitter account to your Google Calendar. Add events in a snap from your favorite Twitter client. Follow the 5 steps procedure to get started.

6. Socialtoo http://www.socialtoo.com/

Socialtoo is a paid service that lets you manage your twitter account by autofollow and unfollow tool. It also provides you basic statistics about your followers count and tweet count. It helps you manage your account and reduce the spam in your network.

It has interesting features like social survey that allows you to create survey that will allow you to understand your network much better.

7. StrawPoll http://strawpollnow.com/

Can you measure the sentiment of your network? Ets say you have 1000 people in your network, getting everyone’s opinion one to one is difficult. If you just want to measure if your network is Pro Apple or Pro Google, what do you do? Well Strawpoll is the tool you are looking for.

StrawPoll is the coolest way to follow the opinions of people onTwitter. It allows you to create poll and communicate with your network and understand their opinion.

8. TweetDeck http://www.tweetdeck.com/

Tweetdeck is the most popular desktop application for Twitter developer in Adobeair. It is very popular for its interface. It provides you a very easy way to maintain your daily twitter activities. Tweetdeck provides easy way to group your friends into different tabs and clean up the twitter stream. You can also search in the Tweetdeck and open a dedicated tab for the keyword; this allows you to track them easily. Recently, TweetDeck also has added TweetDeck Directory which is similar to WeFollow.

9. Stocktwits http://stocktwits.com/

StockTwits is an open, community-powered idea and information service for investments. Users can eavesdrop on traders and investors, or contribute to the conversation and build their reputation as savvy market wizards. The service takes financial related data and structures it by stock, user, reputation, etc.

User can add a set of specific stocks, save them to their own portfolio and limit the conversation around it or focus only on their favorite and trusted sources. Watch the whole stream or create your own filters. User can follow the best on the site, the best only in your areas of interest and in turn share your best actionable ideas. This is the best Twitter related financial site on the web does this in real-time.

10. TwitterSearch http://search.twitter.com/

TwitterSearch is the basic framework of the entire search engine that is present. It provides an easiest way to find out tweets related to keywords. It also has an advanced feature that lets you customize your query to find relevant tweets. It is small but powerful tool. Once you get hang of it, it can be your most powerful tool of all. Beside search, it was shows the trending topic which can be useful to get hold of the perspective of twitter.

To Actually understand how to use twitter to promote your business here is a link to an awesome article by Chris Brogan.

P.S : All the rankings and stats are based on my personal opinions and experiences while using them.

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How Enterprise 2.0 fosters Knowledge Capture

ceciiil — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:05:24 +0000

(Knowledge Capture in Enterprise 2.0 – click to enlarge)

Knowledge Worker : one who works primarily with information or one who develops and uses knowledge in the workplace (Peter Drucker – 1959)

If the definition above applies to your job then you probably are a knowledge worker. I personally am. And knowledge is the raw material we’re working with.

As opposed to the raw material manual workers deal with, knowledge is immaterial, it is just floating around. If we want to be productive we need to make sure this knowledge is harnessed, i.e captured and easily accessible.

Some studies show that between 25 and 50% of the communication between knowledge workers remains tacit and uncaptured. The question is how can we be productive and comfortable with our daily work if about half of the raw material we’re working with is wandering around ?

In the enterprise 2.0 presentation, I compare the knowledge capture in Enterprise 1.0 and 2.0. And it goes like this …

Enterprise 1.0

(Knowledge Capture in Enterprise 1.0 – click to enlarge)

Split knowledge

In the Enterprise 1.0 Microsofty world of the last century, the enterprise knowledge is split all around the place.

To start with, there are different types of document : office, HTML, mails. Even though mails are not supposed to contain information they do contain an awful lot of project related information.

These different types of documents are stored on different machines : mail server, intranet, shared network drives, knowledge management systems, local machines, etc …

Last, but not least, these pieces of information are accessed via different applications : Outlook, Office, browser.

Intimidating corporate policy

In the post about the conversation in the enterprise, I stress the fact that a knowledge policy based on Word documents and Knowledge Management bloated solutions is intimidating and discourage knowledge workers from capturing these units of knowledge. Therefore, a large number of units of knowledge (illustrated with color circles in the diagrams) are not captured and remain tacit.

However, some brave knowledge workers sometimes capture units of knowledge in Word documents. But they still don’t go the extra mile and share the actual document on the complicated KM system.

In the event where there is no KM system but a network shared drive they don’t store the document in the right location according to the actual taxonomy. As a result, these pieces of knowledge become hard to reach and find.

Knowledge leaks and productivity issues

From the whole enterprise perspective, just like tacit knowledge, this unreachable pieces of information are knowledge leaks. And lost of productivity.

This results in figures such as the ones reported by an Accenture study on 1009 middle managers from UK and US. It shows that managers spend about 2 hours a day looking for information and 50% of the information found is of no value.

There are tons of such studies : another one reports that knowledge workers spend about 30% of their time looking for data (Butler Group). Others show that

Looking at the different applications and data repository used, this hardly comes as a surprise.

Enterprise 2.0

Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers (Andrew McAfee).

Most people naturally focus on the term social in the definition above by M. 2.0. However, emergent and platform should not be underestimated.

Emergent

Emergent means that the system has gradually been adopted and naturally emerged as the best solution. The collaborative environment in which these systems have naturally emerged is the bigger there have ever been on the face of earth : the internet.

One can notice that there has been no manager or super architect that has defined up front which tools and how to use them to communicate. This has just emerged between the developers and project stakeholders.

The barrier entry for knowledge capture and sharing is just one click. It makes a huge difference. As a result, knwoledge workers capture far more knowledge.

Social

These collaborative platforms have been heavily used to develop successful and ubiquitous applications on the internet. How relevant these social tools are in a collaborative environment is therefore unquestionable.

If the system has emerged in such a darwinist environment as the internet, it also is because it has proved the most appropriate in a social environment.

Wiki, forums, blogs, etc … are straight forward, one click away from any browser. There is no intimidating corporate template to follow, no complicate KM system to master or Network Share Drive taxonomy to remember.

Folksonomy and social bookmarking have offered a new way to categorize the information. It helped in making the information easy to index and find afterwards. As I mentioned in the post dedicated to management in enterprise 2.0, whenever we put information in order, the objective is not to have an harmonious and logical tree of information which make managers feel secure, but rather it is for the information to be found quickly and easily afterwards by anyone in the community.

Besides, the natural conversational tone of these tools allow a more efficient communication.

Platform

Platform means that the whole set of collaborative tools is accessed from a single entry point. Blogs, Wiki, Forums, etc .. they can all be searched from the platform single search engine.

This is a key aspect of Enterprise 2.0 : having a single entry point for search is critical in this respect.

Enterprise 2.0 Vs Enterprise 1.0

Enterprise 2.0 knowledge capture is more efficient than Enterprise 1.0′s because :

It is easier and less intimidating for knowledge workers to capture knowledge on collaborative platforms (wiki, blogs, forums etc …) then on word documents and then knowledge management systems
Collaborative platforms offer a single entry point from the same application (web browser) to a set of tools and application where information has been captured

This enhanced knowledge capture has measurable results on knowledge worker productivity as reported by Andrew McAfee in his Financial times article :

The consultancy firm McKinsey has conducted three annual surveys on this question. In the most recent, published in September, respondents reported benefits that included better access to knowledge and internal experts, greater employee and customer satisfaction, and higher rates of innovation.

The magnitude of the gains was striking, ranging from 20 per cent (innovation rates) to 35 per cent (access to internal experts).

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6 reasons to encourage enterprise conversations with collaborative platforms

ceciiil — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 12:02:34 +0000

(Hi, it’s Cecil here. A french version of this post is available on Heavy Mental)

Bertrand Duperrin explains in a quite remarkable post the risk of backslash when using standard web 2.0 key words while presenting social networks to a new audience. The reason is : there could be some misunderstanding from the audience.

Among these key words : Conversation. Bertrand exposes the issue :

Just try to explain to a manager who has been struggling for years to reduce wasted time and productivity due to gossip, that time is now for team talk and conversation. And even worst : that his role is to stimulate this conversation. Then watch his face that slowly turns sour.

6 reasons to bring management and the enterprise conversation back together. And to use collaborative platforms to foster the latter.

1 – Conversation = units of knowledge

I have been working in the IT industry for about 20 years. Whatever the country, the industry or the size of the organization, I have always found myself facing this problem : how to capture these priceless bits of information floating around and share them in an efficient way ?

How to foster these coffee machines or telephone discussions where experts talk about the best way to solve a particular problem and help a customer within a specific context etc … ?

Management always has proposed the same solution : bloated Knowledge Management systems and well structured Word documents with corporate templates etc … Even though this tends to reassure management, nobody uses this system or write those documents because it’s frustrating.

It’s frustrating to write a 10+ pages document for one unit of knowledge. Not to mention the actual Knowledge Management system that is so complicated that most people are terrorized with the idea of logging onto it.

Reason #1: Within conversations lie many units of knowledge that the company need to capture. It is easier, more direct and far less intimidating to capture these on collaborative platform tools such as Wikis or Forums. And it’s then easier for other people to find them afterwards.

2- Knowledge Management != Documents Management

I was giving a training to some U.S call-center colleagues back then. One of them, Billy-Bob, told me this : Hey, when the client calls for a problem, depending on the area where the problem occurs, I forward them to the right document and give the polite RTFM Directive (Read That F***ing Manual). Because, hey, all documents are available online.

Except that, as part of the training, they have to configure a database. Billy-Bob encountered a problem and although the document describing the database configuration was open right before his very eyes on his PC desktop, he directly googled the symptoms (I.e error code) to see what it was. I asked him what he was doing and gave him some RTFM. Which had everybody laughing. Everybody but him, of course.

Reason #2 : When a knowledge worker looks for some information in the 21st century, he uses a web browser to search. Collaborative platforms offer single entry point and search engine on company knowledge (Wikis, Forums, Blogs, documents …).

3 – Conversational communication is more efficient

In one of her many unmissable posts at Creating Passionate Users, Kathy Sierra tells it all : Conversational writing kicks formal writing’s ass.

Kathy has been interested in cognitive science as she suffers epilepsy. So she knows what she talks about : you can see the result of her study on the topic in the amazing Head Firt Series IT industry self-teaching books.

In the blog post, she mentions a study published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, in which researchers found out that :

Students who learned with personalized text performed better on subsequent transfer tests than students who learned with formal text. Overall, participants in the personalized group produced between 20 to 46 percent more solutions to transfer problems than the formal group.

According to Sierra, when pieces of information are communicated using a conversational tone (using You and I) the brain thinks it is in a conversation and become much more responsive and involved in the communication.

Reason #3 : Communicating in a conversational style results in a much better quality of message transmission. Collaborative platforms have a native informal style and therefore nurture better quality communications.

4 – Conversational communication is key for leadership

We have already mentioned it here. Michel Crozier is a sociologist, expert in the study of the enterprise. His analysis (according to a french university lecture) of the tight relationship between the simplicity of the speech and the subsequent team support is rather interesting :

The more sophisticated and complex the communication, the more it sounds simplistic. While simple message appears as a source of wealth, because it allows individuals to make it their own and discuss freely. The involvement of experienced manager, the fact that everyone is convinced of his conviction helps to give considerable strength to a simple message.

I once had a great American CEO. He had a straight forward speech style, both bewildering and stimulating. During the open questions in General Meetings, he would encourage people to ask questions on and on, until the very last drop. He would then willingly answer, using this typically American laid back tone using We/You/I. This always resulted in giving a great feeling of proximity and stimulated employees engagement.

During my long career, I’ve hardly ever been so motivated and convinced by the company strategy than when I left his meetings. A feeling that was shared by my colleagues.

This is something that large companies are looking into. At Intel, for instance, most company executives have an internal blog, Paul Otellini – CEO – included. Thanks to this medium, they benefit from the disintermediation offered by the collaborative platforms and engage in conversations with potentially all employees, regardless of their role and position.

Reason #4 : Excutives speech with conversational tone help to establish leadership and contributes a great deal in engaging employees. Blogs is the perfect media for executives to engage into these company wide conversations.

5 – Fostering weak links

Thanks to collaborative platforms, coffee machine chats became global. In other words, the global conversation has started.

Rather than chatting with always the same colleagues, people we professionally hang out with, people we share the same knowledge with, we have broaden the conversation scope thanks to collaborative platforms on the internet. We now reach different people and roles. The exchange has become much more fruitful, for everybody’s benefit.

Mark Granoveter wrote a theory about this : the Strength of weak ties. The great benefit is innovation. While one confront ideas with always the same people, with the same knowledge and new innovative ideas seldom appear. On the other hand, these new ideas are much more likely to pop up when different people in the company, working in different areas, with different responsibilities engage and chat.

Reason #5 : The global conversation is encouraged by collaborative platforms. It leverages weak links and allows new ideas and new business opportunities to emerge.

6 – Make sense out of knowledge workers contribution

One of the great frustation and source of insecurity at work for knowledge workers is how difficult it is for them to apprehend the actual purpose of their contribution in large projects.

We have this excellent developper in our team who has been working his ass off for 6 months building a fully integrated Installer for our PLM solution. PLM is an enterprise complex system involving many servers, different components etc … It is was a nightmare to install and configure. Johnny Boy made a great work automating our solution installation, hiding all the gory details of the configuration behind a smooth user interface.

A couple of weeks after the release of this installer, we had Peggy Sue, our lovely Marketing Events Manager storming into the office asking Who the hell this Johnny Boy is ?

He rose his hand and she ran to him giving him the biggest hug in his professional career. She said : “Oh thank you so much. You made our life soooo easier with your great installer. You don’t have any idea how much this tool has changed our daily work in such a lovely way”.

No matter how much we, in the department, praised his remarkable work, nothing gave more sense to his contribution than this hug from someone he never heard of before, a person and a role he hardly knew they existed. The reason is : all of a sudden, with Peggy Sue hug and gratitude, he touched the reality of his contribution, his piece of software became a life changer. From that hug onwards, Johnny Boy dedication and commitment (which already were of higher standards) became unbelievable.

The global conversation on collaborative platforms facilitates this type of real life feedback from someone at the completely opposite end of the enterprise organization.

Reason #6 : The enterprise global conversation with collaborative platforms provides a company-scale perspective to employees actual contribution together with real-life feedback. To paraphrase the stone cutter story, it helps turning knowledge stone worker into knowledge cathedral workers. This is a key factor (arguably the most important) to employee well-being and commitment.

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Understanding The Green Future!

Anand — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 18:43:56 +0000

“For those new to Tech IT Easy who could obviously not remember the initial announcement, Anand Kishore Raju is a new blogger on Tech IT Easy, who will focus on providing you with analyses of greening the internet, carbon footprints, energy and power figures of the internet and web2.0. Anand, the floor is now yours…”

The debate on climate change has moved beyond an argument about whether it is happening or not, to a discussion about what can be done to tackle its root causes. Pollution and energy savings are keywords that are becoming more and more of interest to people and to governments across the globe, and the research community is also becoming more sensible towards these topics.

McKinsey & Co. recently reported that the world’s 44 Million servers* consume about 0.5 percent of total electricity productions across the globe and emits about 80 megatons of Carbon Dioxide a year, which is nearly the emissions of entire countries like Argentina or the Netherlands (Data needs an Update ).

Recent Studies have also estimated that power consumption related to ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) can be somewhere from 2% to 10% of the worldwide power consumption. This trend is expected to increase notably in the near future. Not surprisingly, reports also confirm that only 20% of ICT carbon emissions derive from manufacturing, while 80% arise from equipment use. With increasing penetration rates of Internet broadband in Asia and Africa these numbers are all set to scale newer heights.

One of the ways to be Green and lower the Carbon Footprint is to Just have less and Do less.

No houses, no cars, no travel, no PCs, no Internet, as seen from the night time satellite image illustrating power usage in North Korea and South Korea. Driving the society back in Stone Age is not the real sense of Going Green. North Korea as compared to rest of world may be emitting lesser Carbon Dioxide but definitely its not A Model Green Society. This scenario becomes clearer in the the second over night pic of the region . The black spot represents North Korea surrounded with developed neighbors like Japan, China and S.Korea.

By Green, I mean to be Sustainable. To be more specific its the ” development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. In my upcoming posts I would be writing more about various aspects of Greener Digital Ecosystems with focus on Operations with minimum environmental impact and having long term sustainability.

PS : Some data in the post needs an Update.

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