Tech IT Easy » enterprise 2.0

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.

How to tell when Enterprise 2.0 is not appropriate for your organisation

ceciiil — Fri, 28 May 2010 12:54:36 +0000

As Enterprise 2.0 activists, we keep on trying to sell Enterprise 2.0 as the ideal solution for your organisation.

But to be completely honest, depending on your company objectives, values and culture it may just not work.

10 principles your company may have adopted that will make Enterprise 2.0 implementation counter productive …

1. Your company is not comfortable with innovation

It’s not a matter of being conservative, it just that your company culture loves it when nothing change.

Managers and employees alike have been doing the same routine job for the last ten years, they don’t want any innovation to emerge and disrupt the nice and quiet day-to-day work in real life business.

2. It is business critical to foster politics

Politics happens in any social organisations. So if you master politics, you master the organisation.

Your company loves it when people in the hierarchy feels they are powerful. This is the raison d’être of your enterprise. They have dedicated parking spaces, business card for travels, dedicated secretary, guaranteed pay rise and many other advantages.

Each department rates its own importance with the number of people they have and the cash flow they burn : that’s the way it is in real life business.

3. Strong managers are pivotal in the organisation

In your company managers have to be tough men, there’s no wimp in here. They have to be able to kick the butt of people lacking motivation to reach the company objectives.

They make it clear who is the boss during the very long meetings whose agenda is decided on the fly by the manager.

In addition, managers make sure any bottom-up or top down information go through them so they can filter and make sure they stay in control. A proof of how important they are : they spend 20% of their time fighting with their email box.

Taylor and Ford made it clear that’s the way you have to run your lazy resources to get the job done in real life business.

4. Employees are engaged or else …

The Company needs the engagement from employees. So either they engaged, either our managers kick their butt (refer to point 3).

Employees have to behave. They’ve been hired to produce and apply the methods, processes and strategy coming from above.

They are not here to ask silly questions that would disrupt the regular process.

It is OK for strong managers to take ownership of any of their employee successful contribution : this is what we call team spirit in the real life business.

5. The IT department defines the organisation

Nowadays you have to be VERY careful with IT security issues. As a result, IT has naturally emerged as the most important department in your organisation.

It is very handy for the IT department that all different department (Marketing, Sales, Professional Services, R&D, Product definition, IT) has its own hermetic silo : then we can ensure that all communication go through the Strong manager : this help preventing any security issue in real life business.

6. Collaboration is dangerous

In a similar fashion, collaboration is DANGEROUS. One could exchange information with somebody from another department without going through the manager. The latter would then be terribly upset and upsetting managers goes against your company core values.

Besides, it could happen that employees share information that is not 100% VALIDATED & CORRECT. Can you envision the disaster ? Your company can. Better be safe in real life business.

7. Employees need to know where to find stuff

In every company, people are losing an amazing amount of time searching for information. Not in yours, because employees HAVE to know where things are.

The IT department have structured what there is to know in directories in different network drives and in Real Time Database Management Systems. All your employees have to know is the name and location of every bit of information they are supposed to work with.

Who needs knowledge management system in real life business with disciplined and closely monitored employees ?

8.High Fear / Low Trust

In such a dangerous world as ours you don’t want to nurture a trust culture. You need your employees to be wary of any person they have not been working with for at least 5 years.

Besides, you make sure that any mistake is severely punished and ridiculed so that people don’t lose other people time with any idea/document they are not 200% sure of in real life business.

9. By IT workers for PC users

Your company is developing software. To be run on computer. Nowadays every man and his dog can use a computer.

So why should your teams ask any question to the customers and question the way they use your product ? Asking questions to your users is the best way to make them think you are clueless and lose market share.

To communicate with the customer, a couple of annual official corporate statements and ad campaigns are the way we do in real life business.

10. Business Methodologies are just a way for consultants to make big bucks

What’s the whole story with this Getting Thing Done fad ? How about these Agile projects ? Hey did they use Scrum to build the Pyramids or the Ford T ? Let’s be serious for a minute. Your company has been in the business for 30 years and it has been doing things the same way ever since.

Why should it change ? As if the world has seen any dramatic change since then. Hexadecimal numbers still go from 0 to F : there’s nothing new under the sun.

And don’t even mention business schools studies or academics : none has been interested in your organisation lately. A proof of how little they know about real life business.

Conclusion

If any of the above is true for your company, then Implementing Enterprise 2.0 is very risky.

It encourages collaboration and knowledge sharing for employees to be more efficient.

It fosters weak links, networking, questioning and associating : there could be the risk of some people discussing the same problem from different perspectives and come with some ideas or even an innovation.

It fosters employees engagement and helps leveraging flow of information to create value.

How scary. Better be safe : in that case make sure you stay out of Enterprise 2.0.

Can you think of any other principles that would make Enterprise 2.0 a no-go for an organisation (in real life business) ?

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Enterprise 2.0 : less control and more leadership

ceciiil — Tue, 18 May 2010 13:50:15 +0000

Bertrand Duperrin makes an interesting analogy in his post Will Adam Smith drive business in the future ? His take :

(…) Opposing a top-down and directive model an emerging relying on the existence of an “ invisible hand” that, in the same way as Adam’s Smith theory in economics, would make people personal actions and choices contribute to a collective purpose without the need of organizing anything.

I guess the difference between the enterprise and the market is that within the former, people (ideally) are working with the clear goal of collectively creating value and making the company richer. While in the latter the goal is to individually create value to make oneself richer.

Bertrand then sets a table comparing Enterprise 1.0 (strict), 2.0 (anarchy) and Rationalized 2.0 (ideal organisation).

My take : Bertrand’s Rationalized 2.0 is Enterprise 2.0 with a strong and clear leadership. The invisible hand in Adam Smith Enterprise is the leadership.

Leadership is doing the right thing while management is doing the things right (Peter Drucker).

Usual suspects 2.0

Offering more organisational freedom to employees is suicidal if it’ not carried out under a strong leadership. Looking at the usual suspects in terms of bottom up organisations these companies have strong principles.

Whole Foods Market have strong purposes and causes that are underlined by Gary Hamel essay The Future of Management.

Cisco‘s CEO John Chambers has completely revamped Cisco to build the whole organisation around collaboration as main core value. This transformation has been carried out based on five pillars, first of which being change of leadership style.

WL Gore Terri Kelly CEO on her company organisation :

WL Gore has guiding principles : freedom, fairness, commitment and waterline. this creates engagement, empowers team et voila : business results. People are leaders in our company only if there are people to follow them. (…) Leaders at WL Gore are not bosses. They earn their leadership, they have followers, they live the culture, and they explain rationale behind their decision.

37Signals is another great example of an amazingly successful company with strong principles. No-nonsense, get things done, technology alignment on objectives, think small, do less but do better, financial independence, etc … Strong principles are so pervasive in the company culture that they even infuse the web development framework (RubyOnRails) they have created : Convention over Configuration is the motto being the whole framework.

Agree on what to do

These guiding principles act as clear boundaries and define the frame within which employees are given freedom to organise their activity. They provide visibility and guidance.

Since the foundations of the collaboration the enterprise and the employees agreed on upfront are principles on what to do rather than processes on how to do, they naturally give more freedom to employees and are a bedrock for trust.

Organise and Control Vs Lead and Engage

Thinking about it, this is probably what scares the most leaders out of enterprise 2.0. It is not possible to hide : they need to show a strong and clear leadership to frame the collaborative work. There is no workaround if they want to fully benefit from bottom-up organisation that empowers employees.

Leadership is not granted. As Terri Kelly reminds us : it is earned. Organising control is dead easy. Leading to engage people is not.

This brings us to the first questions an organisation should ask itself on its way to 2.0 : do we have a strong and clear leadership ? What are the principles and purposes on top of which we want to build our whole collaborative environment ? Are these clear and strong enough for our employees to take ownership ?

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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%.

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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Enterprise 2.0 Vs Diffusion of Innovation

ceciiil — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 09:32:04 +0000

After reading the excellent Andrew McAfee Enterprise 2.0 book, I was wondering if there was any point for Heavy Mental to publish yet another review. There already are plenty around with Venkatesh Rao’s on Enterprise 2.0 blog and Gil Yehuda’s probably being the most interesting ones.

It might be more valuable to offer a perspective focussing on the Adoption part of the book. By and large, the adoption topic has been the one sparking off most of the conversations and thinking on the Enterprise 2.0 topic. The idea is to confront McAfee work with a reference on the topic of adoption of innovation : Diffusion of Innovation : by Everett Rogers.

In all fairness, I haven’t read Diffusion of Innovation. I only know it through Scott Berkun presentation on innovation (already mentioned in a post on the subject). Scott quotes Everett Rogers work :

The diffusion of innovation is based more on sociology and psychology than on technology. Here are the things technologists hate : whenever they come with innovation, the main forces against the innovation adoption are sociological ones : ego, envy, fear, pride, politics, security etc …

These are the factors according to E. Rodgers to evaluate how likely your solution is bound to be adopted :

Relative advantage : what value does it bring ?
Compatibility : how much effort to transition to this innovation ?
Complexity : how much learning is required to apply it ?
Triability : How easy is it to try the innovation ?
Observability : How visible are the results ?

Enterprise 2.0 represents innovative ways to communicate, collaborate and share knowledge among distributed teams in the organizations. So let’s see how Mc Afee writings answer these questions …

Relative advantage : What value does it bring ?

Andrew Mc Afee mentions Bob Kaplan who co-authored Converting Intangible Assets Into Tangible Outcomes. In this book, Kaplan argues that

None of these intangible assets (human, organizational and informational capital – i.e databases, Information systems, networks, technology infrastructure) has value that can be measured separately or independently.

Baseline : you just can’t build a regular business case for IT with Enterprise 2.0.

Mc Afee still recommend to build some kind of business case with the following elements :

Costs and time lines : if benefits can’t be estimated, effort should be put in place to have some cost estimates. How long the project will lasts, what are the milestones, number of people involved. Even though one knows that these estimates must be considered very carefully. Remember General Eisenhower quote : plans are useless, but planning is indispensable
Expected benefits : Here McAfee recommends to include short cases studies or example. A great one could be Cisco Economics of Collaboration, reporting a whopping $US691M of operating savings and 4.9% of productivity increase in 2008 thanks to the introduction of Web 2.0 tools into the enterprise.
Technology footprint : the scale of a technology reach from geographical, organisational and functional perspectives. Enterprise Social Networks are like e-mail : they are supposed to be used all over the company. So their technological footprint is quite large.

Tech It Easy Comment

Mc Kinsey have published a comprehensive report on How companies can benefit from Web 2.0 . This could be a good entry point to provide some visibility of Enterprise 2.0 benefits.

Compatibility : How much effort to transition to this innovation ?

McAfee refers to Harvard Business School Marketing professor John Gourville and his article in Harvard Business Review “Eager Sellers and Stony Buyers“. Gourville looked into research on behavioral economics and reported the three principles of people solutions evaluation :

People make relative evaluations
Reference point is status quo
People are loss-adverse : a prospective loss of X is 3 times more painful that a gain of X is pleasurable.

These elements lead to the fact that we value what we have far more highly that what we could have instead. The result is what Gourville calls the 9x effect : people rate what they have 3 times more than their actual value and prospective items three times less than what they’re actually worth. A new item must therefore be at least 9 times better to justify the (perceived) effort required for the adoption.

Here, the risk is to overvalue prospective new tools (Wikis, Blogs, Twitter-like, Professional Profiles) in a view to increase or chance the reach the 9x threshold. Gourville thinks this may have disastrous consequences.

As a result, McAfee quotes Gourville and recommends not to oversell the collaborative platform and make it clear that the adoption will be a long phase.

Tech It Easy Comment

I also think the overselling approach is not good but for other reasons : this might alter the perception of our speech (buzzword, vaporware, consultants concepts etc …) and have opposite effects within our audience.

Instead, I am a firm believer that we should help knowledge workers rationalize their perceived value of the collaboration and communication tools they’ve been using for the last 15 years : MS Office, e-mails, Network File Repositories, Intranet etc …

Not by telling them these tools are not appropriate but rather by asking them painful questions. The objectives is to help them realize that these tools are the root cause of many of their daily work frustrations.

Once this frustration has surfaced and has been clearly described by the people, it will be natural for them to decrease the perceived value of these enterprise 1.0 tools. Therefore the value threshold Enterprise 2.0 tools need to meet to reach the 9 times value will decrease accordingly. And the effort to transition to E20 as well.

The Five Elevator Pitches suggests some of these painful questions to help rationalizing the perceived value of today’s enterprise tools.

Then you can ask what they are doing about these communication/organizational / knowledge sharing problems or what are they planning to do. Are they giving up despite all the new communication tools available ? Then you can talk about how Enterprise 2.0 can foster knowledge management, innovation, collaboration and productivity.

Complexity : How much learning is required to apply it ?

This is one of the main advantages of Enterprise 2.0 in terms of adoption. These tools are dead easy to use. This is the first of the three trends that yield better tools according to McAfee. It also is the A (Authorship) part of the S.L.A.T.E definition : ensuring every worker has easy access to enterprise 2.0 platforms.

Wiki, blogs, FAQ, Real Time Web, Personal Profile. Their universal adoption on the internet is a solid proof of how easy these platforms are.

Trialability : How easy is it to try the innovation ?

Again : it is extremely easy to test these tools. You can install main Enterprise 2.0 software solutions for free for 30 days and have people try the solution.

McAfee describes the case of Serena Software using public platforms (Facebook) with appropriate security settings as enterprise platform. If your company is happy with this approach, the trial can even be easier.

Tech It Easy comment

The concern with 30 days trial is that on such a small time frame, network effect won’t have the time to foster full benefits. These systems become more valuable as the number of users and the volume of injected data grows.

So a 30 days trial might not be enough to see the full benefits of such solutions. However it can still proves how easy it is to use them.

Observability : How visible are the results ?

A good strategy to make the results visible is to locate some teams of social networks enthusiasts (IT or HR departments might be a first good guess). And start to deploy the solution on such narrow teams.

Andrew McAfee recommends to measure the progress (number of blog posts, comments, wiki pages, personal profiles etc …) rather than the ROI. Besides, McAfee strongly encourages leadership in the form of valueing the people that enrich the platforms.

Tech It Easy Comment

In a transparency and observability purpose, it might be a good idea to monitor the knowledge workers perceived value of their tools and measure the progress. Preparing a questionnaire with a set of questions around the subject of collaboration, innovation, productivity and knowledge management could be a good starting point.

Organization employees could then answer these questions before and after the launch of the E20 solution and then on a regular basis. This could be a good solution to see if E20 solution helps in reducing the frustration of knowledge workers in their daily work.

The final score

The end result is that McAffe book is the perfect entry point to set up a corporate Enterprise 2.0 strategy. It describes clearly and perfectly the tools, the context in which they were born and how appropriate they are within knowledge workers organizations, via some real life examples.

In terms of diffusion, McAfee provides all the principles and examples required to answer most of Everett Rogers questions.

What would you recommend to help diffuse Enterprise 2.0 ?

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

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Social Networks : the third level of immersion

ceciiil — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 07:20:25 +0000

(French version)

The pitch: Enterprise implementation of social networks is the third step of a gradual immersion of the enterprise into the internet culture. This immersion occurs because there is the obvious truth : web works with amazing speed on an amazing scale.

I have been lucky enough to witness from the inside the major changes the IT industry have been going through in the last ten years. What is really interesting within the scope of Enterprise 2.0 is that these changes involve the adoption of tools, solutions and approaches that really came from the internet culture.

As Enterprise 2.0 activists, we keep on wondering where to find meaningful experience of internet culture adoption in our company. The IT department is the place to look because they already been through the first 2 steps of immersion ….

1 – Enterprise Systems foundations

In the IT world, the productive workforce is behind this revolution. Developed by geeks on their own time, in flat organizations with leaders who have emerged naturally, Open Source Software (OSS) has completely changed the IT business.

OSS market share

Who would have thought 20 years ago that an operating system created by a bunch of hackers (Linux) would have such a market share in operating systems for large banks and insurance back-end servers ? Who would have bet a penny 10 years ago that Firefox would have taken about 25% of the internet browser market share to Internet Explorer? That the most popular HTTP server (Apache Web Server) in the world would be free ? That most popular Integrated Development Environment would be free and hackable (Eclipse). That the White House would adopt an open source Content Management System for their web portal (Drupal)?

OSS success reasons

The reasons why open source solutions have been so massively adopted are multiple. Quality, efficiency etc … But the main one is the Darwinism of the internet : the solutions that survive are the ones that prove to be the most adaptable. Free software is open to anyone to participate : in order to survive, it has to be more adaptable than a solution locked by a publisher to a limited number of in-house developers.

Emergence of standard IT architecture for solutions developed by distributed teams

It’s worth mentioning that in terms of software architecture, the successful solutions have many similarities. The most flexible and modular software solutions has survived. They are built around a kernel offering the possibility of many optional plug-ins. Thus anyone can develop new peripheral add-on features independent from one another. This is the architecture principle behind Linux of course but also Eclipse, Firefox or the application server JBoss (solution of French online taxes system, the market leader ahead of vendors such as IBM or Oracle), .

OSS Developers rule

Even though major software vendor have stepped into the OSS market of the Java Enterprise Solutions (which is the technical area I know the most), it is still the open source community that rules the technical solutions. As I mentioned in my rant against bloated SOA : Spring became the new J2EE (over industry standards), Hibernate became the standard for J2EE ORM mapping (again over industry standard JDO). In other words : open Source Solutions started by single developers, each solving specific problems, have been massively adopted by the developers community and became de facto standard ahead of bloated theoretical solutions agreed by a consortium of major vendors.

As Martin Fowler reports it :

Tim Bray contended that the key decisions on technology are made by the programming community. (…) The reason we have so much bloatware in IT is because IT purchasing decisions are usually made on golf courses by people who have lost meaningful contact with the realities of software development.

2 – Project Management

Building on the success of the implementation of OSS in the enterprise IT, the productive forces have started to think about project management within the company. And a number of embarrassing questions have been asked.

Why do we concentrate so much on the process and so little on productivity ? Why so much time is spent on documentation (specifications) that are subject to interpretation, while these artifacts will be useless during the life of the product? Why do we waste so much time building contracts rather then trusting each others ?

Why phases of study, analysis, development and validation of products and services they are so strictly defined ?

Why should we wait so long before realizing that what we do does not match the business needs ? Or that it does match the needs identified 18 months ago but that the initial target has moved ?

Why not focus on simplicity rather than designing systems to manage the complexity ?

How come everything goes so well and so fast when we’re developing software for free on the internet and everything becomes so slow and complicated when we develop for our company ? Why not getting real , man ?

Agile adoption issues

Major players in software engineering meet in 2001 and wrote the manifesto for agile development.

This manifesto fell ill. It is considered with a lot of caution by a generation of managers who just get into the new the web techs (led by developers, ouch). These managers had to adapt to the Java platform, which is the core 70% of new IT projects since the beginning of the century. A generation of leaders not so keen to challenge their methods despite the disappointing results : in 2003, between 65 and 80% for enterprise Java projects are failures according to Scott Ambler.

Reasons of Agile success

This generation nevertheless had to adopt Agile methods because, again, it does deliver results. Pragmatism and performance of the implementation phase, adequacy between what is delivered and the constantly evolving expectations, visibility on projects progress throughout all phases of development, well-being of the teams thanks to constant user feedback and overall project visibility : all these combine to make Agile methods the most adapted ones for the constantly evolving context of IT development.

3 – Communication and knowledge management

For IT teams, after OSS and Agile project management methods, Enterprise 2.0 solution is the natural third step of enterprise immersion into the internet culture : the XXIst century way of getting things done for distributed teams.

What makes me think that this transition is inevitable, despite the rather considerable impact, is that executives are thinking about it. According to Forrester, 49% of the 2008 initiatives of CIOs of Fortune 500 companies focused primarily on collaboration.

They just hesitate as they are not sure how to handle this. Indeed, the problem remains the adoption in the enterprise. But there are teams around who have experienced that already in their daily work and within your enterprise.

It’s your IT people : they have adopted first OSS solutions, then Agile Project Management methods : they already have tested the amphibia nature of your organization. Just ask them how it went, they’ll be happy to help.

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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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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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37 Signals : Digital Natives Leadership in action

ceciiil — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 14:48:46 +0000

The question I’m always asked when I run out of my friends/colleagues/dog patience with the issue of Digital Natives integration within the enterprise is : how to convince the proponents of this culture to adhere to a common professional project, to an organization with rules and commitments ?

The answer is straight-forward : leadership. A leadership for a post-ideologic generation. A leadership whose core resides in simple and clear principles, to put in practise, rather than plastic values nobody believes in.

Enterprise 2.0 represents a gradual immersion of the XXth century organisations into the web culture. Digital Natives Companies are born from this culture : there is no change required to adopt these principles as they are the core foundations the companies were built on.

In order to illustrate this assertion (and as promised), an overview of 37Signals, a GenY company achieving incredible results, from both financial and reputation perspectives.

Anti-nonsense manifesto

37Signals initially is a Web Agency created in Chicago by Jason Fried at the end of the XXth Century. We are not talking here about just another web agency. They already display strong opinions and principles with their original manifesto : Ergonomics, Design, Simplicity, productivity, no-nonsense.

This is a small structure where employees are split all across the USA. To solve subsequent problems, 37Signals chose to develop a in-house project management application.

They recruit David Heinemeier Hansson who decide not to use any of the standard technologies (Java, PHP etc …) for the development. Invoked reason : these technologies are far too complex and not productive enough. Being a fan of the agility and flexibility offered by an obscure scripting language (Ruby), he develops his own web development framework : Ruby On Rails.

At the end of a quick build, 37signals proposes Basecamp service in SaaS mode and reaches the million user milestone in November 2006.

Start-up with an opinion

RoR framework is well received by the open source software development community, which leans heavily on the Java side of things back then.

Well respected figures such as Martin Fowler or Bruce Tate praise the great simplicity and the strong principles of the framework (convention over configuration etc …).

Getting Real

From Basecamp development experience and success, Jason Fried writes an essay : Getting Real.

This book enjoys a tremendous success for his strong anti-corporate stances and the radical principles it preaches : no functional specifications, no planning, no meeting. Also : do less features than the competitor but spend more time to design them properly; do not anticipate on problems you don’t already have (think scalability) and embrace constraints which can prove to be innovation opportunities.

As a kind of alternative business bible, this e-book contributes significantly to their reputation and the growing incoming traffic on their blog SignalVsNoise. This online business reputation allows Fried et Hansson to give conferences and raise them to well respected figures in the industry.

The next small thing

All start-ups dream of getting bigger and bigger in order to become global companies ?

37Signals insist they want to remain a small shop : there are only twelve of them today. This small size allows them to remain extremely agile and to progress with small changes while implementing small decisions. This especially allows them to focus on their core activity et to get rid of any other issue.

Key points are productivity and trust : I have no idea how many hours my employees work — I just know they get the work done (J. Fried).

Productivity, Trust but also simplicity, the ultimate sophistication according to Leonardo Di Vinci : “Simple requires deep thought, discipline, and patience – things that many companies lack” (Matt Linderman a 37Signals employee)

Business Model Conundrum

In A Secret to making money online a presentation he gave in Startup Stanford conference in 2008, Hansson goes against standard start-up policies and introduce the thoughts that brought them to their business :

The classic conundrum : You have a

great application and then
?????? (something magical happens and then)
You make profits.

We have been doing research, experiment etc … we found out that the best option for us was to 2 – put a price on the application to make profit. It’s too simple to be true but believe me it works.

Financial Independence

Each time you see a successful company, tell yourself it’s because someone in the company took a brave decision – P. Drucker

Once again on the opposite side of the other start-up financial approach, 37Signals made the brave choice to bill their customer on a monthly basis. This service is as easy to subscribe as it is to cancel. The objective is to ensure the company is financially sound and independent.

So far, they only have accepted one investor : Jeff Bezos. Bezos, who knows a couple of things about online business, guarantees not to interfere with their business strategy.

A cool, though very meaningful anecdote : when they launched their Basecamp service, they didn’t know how they would bill their customer at the end of the month. They implement their billing solution within that 30 days. This is hardcore just-in-time.

Working hard is overrated

All start-ups have the overtime culture ? DHH openly takes on à Jason Calcanis when the latter recommends in his start-up management principles to only recruit workaholics.

Their position : to design, develop and launch software services is a creative craft and it’s just not possible to be creative more than 4 or 5 hours per day. In order to preserve their creativity, 37Signals decide to switch to the 4 days week. Working hard is overrated indeed to quote the great Caterina Fake, flickr founder.

No meeting

For the Fried’s mob, evil in the organisation has a name : interruptions. And the embodiment of Evil is Meetings. Meetings should be exception not the rule (Fried). According to Fried, in order to be creative, one has to be in the zone, a sort of state of mind which requires deep focus : all these interruptions prevent people from reaching the zone. And from being creative.

In order for people to collaborate smoothly without interrupting each other, 37Signals create the Campfire service, a Business Group Chat.

Ban the four letter words

Leadership also is a sound and harnessed communication. 37Signals has banished a set of four-letter-words from the company vocabulary. These simple and common words which often prove to have bad consequences : must, need, just, can’t, easy, only, fast.

Reality is a terrible collaborator

According to Fried, planning is useless. These are just vague guesses who have no purpose other than reassuring control addicted managers.

What the point in losing time trying to predict the future when Reality is a terrible collaborator. Where will we be in 10 years ? In the business (Fried).

Do the right thing

Management is doing the things right, while Leadership is doing the right thing. (P. Drucker)

Offering simple enterprise SaaS solutions to SMBs who praise their services, and focussing on simple principles they literally apply on a day-to-day basis, Fried and Hansson give a great leadership lesson to the online business.

Some people sometimes misinterpret this intransigence and confuse it with arrogance. As a result, they have quite a few detractors. But these, in turn, contribute to grow their fan base who admire more the company as they loudly voice their strong opinions.

They enter the HallOfFame-2.0 with Basecamp being mentioned in the mythic Meet Charlie presentation slideware, probably the best introduction to Entrerprise 2.0 ever designed.

Wrongfooted Enterprise

37Signals has shown with much panache that Digital Natives know how to run their business while completely integrating constraints and characteristics of the XXIst century connected world. With this amazing result : 12 people (working 4 day/week) in a company delivering services to million of customers. Most importantly, they achieve so doing the exact opposite of what last century companies recommend.

Peter Drucker, again, in Management Challenges of the XXIst Century :

The most important, and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the 20th century was the fifty-fold increase in the productivity of the manual worker in manufacturing. The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of knowledge worker.

This objective has been patently achieved at 37Signals.

Thinking about it, that’s probably one of the main blocker of Enterprise 2.0 adoption. For the first time since Taylorism age, Corporate world is facing a successful alternative business model that seasoned business leaders have trouble to apprehend.

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Digital Natives Vs Corporate BS

ceciiil — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 08:24:21 +0000

(Hey, believe it or not, it’s Cecil again. Another translation from an original french post on Heavy Mental).

One often refers to usages when talking about the advent of the collaborative web. In my opinion, this is an understatement which nurtures misunderstanding. The relationship developed by people with the collaborative web is much more of a culture with principles, values and habits.

In this respect, the Digital Natives has an equally revolutionary DNA, although less spectacular, than the boomer generation.

This Generation Y presents cultural characteristics that cause thorny problems within the organizations, in particular as far as the propagand … erm … internal communication is concerned.

Here we have to deal with knowledge workers : a post-ideological /over-educated /over-informed / born connected generation. In short : a corporate BS proof generation.

Some tips to facilitate the communication …

Knowledge workers

Even if Peter Drucker coined the term back in 1959, the Digital Natives seem to be the first generation to assimilate this concept so naturally.

The result that Drucker mentionned is completely integrated into the psyche of Digital Natives : if as Karl Marx rightly said the workers are alienated in their relationship to their job because they don’t own the means of production, it is not the case for knowledge workers : their production tool is knowledge.

Drucker goes on to explain that this is the reason why the company or organization need more the knowledge worker than the KW needs the organization. This is a radical change in the nature of the company-employee relationship.

Solutions for business communication : eliminate the assumption of subordination in the relationship with the employee to establish a balanced connection, based on mutual exchange.

Post-ideological

This is the biggest difference between this generation and the boomers.

The boomer generation will remain the one of the adolescence of the modern man. A generation that will be remembered more for consuming illegal substances and having fun naked from San Francisco to Paris while proclaiming Guy Debord than for what they actually achieved : building up la Société Du Spectacle.

(Being a nice guy I won’t even mention the Generation X, the generation I belong to and for which the “Generation no-one” would be a more appropriate name, as it remains still and quiet in the shadow of the boomers. But that’s another story.)

Digital Natives left childhood when the Berlin Wall fell and came into adulthood when the twin towers collapsed. Within ten years they witnessed in real time both the end of communism and the end of the belief that democracy + market economy = world peace.

During their studies they’ve seen Maoist China become the main ally of Uncle Sam in a rapidly globalizing world. Finally they entered the job market with the subprime crisis and they saw, live again, the market oracle himself stunned by the insatiable greed of financial business.

So we’re talking about a generation that is genetically immunized against the rhetoric, the great ideologies and the views of the mind.

It’s no surprise that they are post-ideological and fundamentally pragmatic. They only believe into things that work. The only remarkable and undeniable realization that this generation has seen developing while growing up is the Web. This is what they believe in.

Solutions for business communication : Integrity. Align actions and words. And swap pompous values (that sound plastic, as Jason Fried said) with principles that are clear and easy to implement.

Over-educated

If you look at the evolution of university graduates in the OECD over the past 20 years, you’ll see that this number has doubled. It would not be stupid to pretend that human knowledge area has at least doubled as well since the late 80s.

More importantly, with the advent of the web, the volume of information and knowledge that is instantly available has increased in an incommensurable proportion.

This has a direct consequence : the key to survival in the online world is the ability to make sense of the ocean of information available: the ability of synthesis rather than ownership of knowledge ; the ability of being a human synthetizer as David Armano puts it.

Thus, if expertise (mastering a part of knowledge) is the guarantee of job security and recognition for Generation X, it is just wasted effort for the Digital Natives. Knowledge is too vast and changing too fast to be harnessed by one individual. What matters is the ability to navigate this knowledge and to make sense. That’s a key concept discussed by David Weinberger in his essay “The Hyperlinked Organization” in Cluetrain Manifesto.

Solutions for business communication: focus communication strategy on the ability to manage change rather than on the five-year plans that everyone knows they are useless (and GenY openly say so)

Connected and over-informed

Digital Natives = who grew up in a perpetually connected world, alongside the more powerful tool ever built by humanity for sharing knowledge : the web.

A tool they manipulate better than anyone else. A consequence : they have made a habit of verifying the authenticity of any piece of information communicated to them.

For the generation in control (X, Baby Boomers) the truth lies within the company (intranet, emails, official gossips) and should be monitored. For GenY, the truth is on the web : immensely larger and obviously uncontrollable.

In the introduction of his forthcoming book on the subject, Andrew “Mr. Enterprise 2.0 “McAfee tells this story about Wikipedia. Highly doubtful as to our willingness to work peacefully to build knowledge, McAfee went to see the definition of Skinhead, a rather fertile ground to witness the application of Godwin’s Law.

And there he found the more objective, dispassionate and documented description of the word together with its political, musical, cultural, etc … connotations.

With Wikipedia as a constantly evolving bible, this generation has developed an inordinate taste for objective truth and beyond, for conversation and exchange that help to let the truth emerge.

Solutions for business communication: tell it like it is and face reality, even if it has to hurt people. Assertivity is the most effective communication technique for this generation.

Confident, assertive and unhappy

We cannot speak about this generation without mentioning the remarkable essay by Jean Twenge: Generation Me, which explains Why Today’s Young Americans are more confident, assertive, entitled and more miserable than ever.

This, mostly in the United States, is a consequence of the emphasis on self-esteem in education, importance of which has caused terrible damage. This is a generation who were told throughout their education they can do what they want during their careers. The shock when they arrive onto the job market is even tougher.

I don’t know what to recommend here. However, it remains quite important to keep this element in mind during the integration of GenY in the company.

Digital Natives in action

Enough of dry theory : this post will soon team up with another one dedicated to a genuine Digital Natives company in action: the ruthless crew and super sexy 37Signals.

Enterprise 2.0 : an opportunity for modern management to fulfill its promises ?

ceciiil — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:04:15 +0000

All organizations say Routinely ‘People are our greatest asset’. Yet few practice what they preach, let alone truly believe it. (Peter Drucker)

Peter Drucker is the main theoretician of modern management.

He was the first to define the Knowledge Worker, back in 1959. The excellent David Weinberger (one of the Cluetrain Manifesto terrorist) may call the definition as pompous, it remains nonetheless visionary. Drucker’s whole theory on organizations of the XXth century is built around the knowledge worker.

What is surprising when we analyze the recommendations for management within the implementation of an Enterprise 2.0 approach is that by and large, these are pretty similar to the ones we can find in the writings of major XXth century authors on management and leadership (Drucker, Crozier, DePree) or among the great industry leaders.

Participation, reputation, emergence, transparency, simplicity, agility and trust : would Enterprise 2.0 finally deliver the promises of modern management ?

(Hey, it’s Cecil here. This is a translation of an original french post published on Heavy Mental).

1- Participation

Max DePree is the son of the founder of Herman Miller, a US company manufacturing high quality office furniture. Herman Miller is consistently recognized for its dedication to a people focused employee culture, following a servant leadership concept.

DePree wrote Leadership is an Art in 1987 while retiring from the business. He was a keen supporter of participatory management, a popular trend in management during the 80s :

Participatory management begins with a belief in the potential of people. Everyone has the right and the duty to influence the decision making and to understand the results. Participatory management Guarantes that decisions will not be arbitrary, secret or closed to questioning. It is not democratic: having a say differs from having a vote. (Max De Pree)

This concept of participative management is also central in Peter Drucker work :

Most discussions of decision making assume that only senior executives make decisions or that only senior executives’ decisions matter. This is a dangerous mistake.

2- Reputation

Reputation in the online world is the quantified assessment of the contribution of the individual by his peers. We find one of the basic principles of evaluation advocated by P. Drucker : not the effort, the time spent in the office or anything else but the contribution and the delivered value.

An example of leveraging reputation is what Max De Pree called Roving Leadership :

“Roving Leadership is the expression of the ability of the hierarchical leaders to permit others to share ownership of problems, in effect to take possession of a situation. Roving leadership takes charge in varying degrees when hierarchy does not respond swiftly or decisively. It demands a great deal of trust “

3- Emergence

Wiliam Mc Knight has dedicated his career to 3M (Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company). He constantly promoted an open culture based on trust, and he made sure the company leaves enough room for the emergence of innovation. Doing so, he transformed a mining company which produces grinding tools and sandpaper in a particularly innovative one, successful in many different areas (abrasive, athletics tracks, boardgames, synthetic fibers, office furnitures etc. …).

His profession of faith does not let much room for misinterpretation :

As our business grows, it become increasingly necessary to delegate responsibility and to encourage men and women to exercise their initiative. This requires considerable tolerance. Those men and women, to whom we delegate authority and responsibility, if they are good people, are going to want to do their jobs in their own way. Mistakes will be made. But if a person is essentially right, the mistakes he or she makes are not as serious in the long run as the mistakes management will make if it undertakes to tell Those in authority exactly how they must do their jobs. Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills initiative. And it’s essential that we have many people with initiative if we are to continue to grow.

4- Agility

Dee Ward Hock is the founder and CEO (68-84) of Visa Credit Card Association. He coined the term chaordic, mixing chaotic and ordered. His praise for agility is summarized in this quote:

Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.

Here we find a trend of Management 2.0, described with the usual panache by Kathy Sierra : Micro management and the zombie function.

5- Transparency

Again, Max De Pree has a clear and straight position. Again, not much room for misinterpretation here :

“It is better to err on the side of sharing too much information than risk someone in the dark. Information is power but it is pointless power if hoarded. Power must be shared for an organization to work” (Leadership is an Art).

6- Simplicity

The best response to the complexity of human relationships is the simplicity of the organization (Crozier).

Michel Crozier is the leading expert in the french sociological study of the enterprise. His analysis of the relation between the simplicity of speech and the commitment of teams 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.

Which brings us back to two things:

1) the strength of the ties born from conversation, as opposed to the defiance born from official speeches full of TechnoLatin (as David Weinberger calls it) or more prosaically, corporate BS.

2) the leadership that results from simple and clear communication. Mentioning studies from 1984-1985 on the necessary corporate cultural revolution (the time was then at the advent of the participating companies), Crozier identifies simplicity as one of the 5 prerequisites.

7- Trust

The quotes on the subject are countless. The contribution of Peter Drucker in his reflection on the management of knowledge workers is not the least:

It demands that we impose the responsibility for their productivity on the individual knowledge workers themselves. Knowledge workers have to manage themselves. They have to have autonomy.

Knowledge worker productivity requires that the knowledge worker is both seen and treated as an ‘asset’ rather than a ‘cost’. It requires that knowledge workers want to work for the organization in preference to all other opportunities.

Making knowledge workers productive requires changes in attitude, not only on the part of the individual knowledge worker, but on the part of the whole organization

The most spectacular may be the work of Stephen Covey Jr., the son of the author of the bestseller 7 Habits of Highly Successful People. Covey Jr. became the head of the publishing house of his father’s company during the merger with Franklin Quest. In a difficult and challenging time, the leadership of Covey Jr. obtained impressive results. The motto : trust. He wrote a book on the subject : The Speed Of Trust.

Bar the vaguely guruesque approach which may inspire some caution, the feedback remains interesting. It explains how trust enables smoother relationship within the company and save valuable time.

Jason Fried, CEO of the start-up extraordinaire 37Signals has adopted a similar principle : “As a rule, I always decide to trust the people I meet, this saves a lot of time and inspires trust back.”

So ?

With the implementation of collaborative tools within the enterprise, would it be the the time for modern management to finally keep its words ?

The temptation for utopia is quite big …

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Enterprise 2.0 explained to our managers in 10 principles

ceciiil — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 14:03:53 +0000

(Hi, it’s Cecil here. This is a translation of an original french post published on Heavy Mental).

One of the most common misconceptions our managers make when they talk about Enterprise 2.0 is to reduce this approach to a mere web2zero (quote mark with the fingers) collaborative toolset. We can smile about it, but if we get this kind of misunderstanding, it’s probably because we missed something while communicating around this.

In the slideshared Enterprise 2.0 presentation, I realized that I only devoted one slide to the underlying changes.

It’s critical for people to understand that while importing these social platforms from the Internet, we also import an underlying electronic culture that will profoundly change the workplace organization. And these changes involve management principles. 10 of which being described hereafter …

1 – Conversation (Vs Broadcast)

Just as traditional media conditioned the audience to be passive consumers — first of commercial messages, then of products — the traditional organization conditioned employees to be obedient executors of bureaucratically disseminated work orders. Both are forms of broadcast: the few dictating the behavior of the many. The broadcast mentality isn’t dead by any means. It’s just become suicidal. (Christopher Locke – Cluetrain Manifesto)

This medium based on open conversations has irrevocably changed not only our electronic culture but also the way we apprehend social relationships. It will become increasingly difficult for our management to have us accept a one-way communication (top down) while we are used to bi-directional ones in our everyday online life. Reducing our contribution to enterprise communication field to 5mns Q&A at the end of General Meetings will quickly become unsustainable.

2 – Bottom up (Vs Top Down)

It’s about the same as far as technologies choice is concerned when it comes to develop new product/services. As Tim Bray put it : Decisions on key technologies are now being taken by developers and not by leaders at the turn of a golf course.

This a similar trend to that of Toyota workers on assembly lines. In this company, recognized worldwide for its amazing processes, the employee contribution to innovation is permanent :

The average Toyota employee Contributes more than 100 improvement ideas each year. That quickly adds up to millions of ideas. Certainly most of them are incremental ideas, in fact, most of them probably are not even new ideas. But while the actual ideas are important, even more important is the culture In which this spirit is nurtured.

It is not only a matter of innovation, but also recognition, rewarding and job commitment. This is pure Management.

3 – Reputation (Vs Hierarchy)

Another fundamental aspect in the participatory culture imported from the internet is the concept of Reputation. In Enterprise 1.0, the job title embodies the status of the employee within the company. This concept is substituted in the internet culture with Reputation, i.e. the quantified assessment of the contribution of the individual by his peers.

This significantly broadens the scope of reference for people skills evaluation, from the sole enterprise to the whole Internet. The consequence is that the reputation built by an employee on the intranet and internet will have to be taken into account in one way or another within the company.

Conversely, hierarchy granted power will not necessarily be recognized among employees if it is not validated by a significant reputation in the intranet / internet. This is the Granted Power Vs Earned Power issue discussed by Scott Berkun in the Trust chapter of The Art Of Project Management.

3 – Emergence (Vs Structure)

There is this unquestionable statement : the Web works. The Web was built without a predetermined structure. Unexpected solutions have emerged naturally and were massively adopted : this also is called Serendipity.

As an example, hyper-text has naturally fostered the relevance of Google and has helped to classify the web. No one has written in the Web_User_Guide.doc that whenever we publish resources to the web we have to make links to other pages. This has just happened and it has shaped the internet as we know it.

4 – Folksonomy (Vs Taxonomy)

Similarly, Folksonomy has naturally taken precedence over Taxonomy when it came to classify the ocean of information available on the web. Namely, according to Wikipedia, a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content performed by non-specialists, rather than a rigorous and structured classification.

The advantage of folksonomy is that information is classified according to its contents, with labels (tags) that anyone can choose. While with the Taxonomy, the information is classified according to its location. Folksonomy has two advantages: a) we find pieces of information more easily and b) within collaborative platforms, these tags help in finding quickly people we share thematic affinities with.

If you give it a thought, it makes sense : when we put our information in order, we do it to find the information quickly afterwards. Not to build an harmonious and logical tree of information.

5 – Agility (Vs Bureaucracy)

Agile project management (focusing on transparency, simplicity, collaboration, visual management, simplicity and trust) helps greatly in absorbing the inevitable changes that occur during the life of a project development.

Similarly, the Enterprise 2.0 needs an agile organization that enables to absorb the emergence of new tools, practices and relationships. Among other things, this open organization allows emergence and promotes innovation.

Agility also meets the high demands of connected culture, namely the radical pragmatism (to quote Alexander Bard) and the obsession in Getting Things Done. Productivity rather than processes, speed of execution rather than bureaucratic slowness, frequent releases, etc. …

6- Transparency (Vs Security)

Before anything, let’s make sure we share the same understanding of what type of company information we apply transparency to. It obviously does not apply to sensitive and confidential pieces of information. But to any other.

Talking with managers helps to reveals the main fear it inspires. According to managers, it may let emerge the fallibility of their teams and/or themselves.

The thing is : when honestly undertaken in a context of trust and addressed quickly, these errors and potential problems help to give a human face and to create genuine links between the teams. As Herman Melville puts it :

“Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses — for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it…”

On the other hand, the temptation of security, of building silos of knowledge accessed through complex algorithms which rule rights access can contribute to add friction, to slow down the diffusion of knowledge and to nurture a sense of paranoia. Which is not a good for teams morale.

7 – Intertwined Networks (Vs Silos)

Transparency is about information sharing, on both vertical and transverse organization axis. This multi directional communication helps fostering efficiency as it ensures that employees know what the priorities and business strategy are. In addition, it also nurtures innovation through the use of Weak Ties of Mark Granovetter (see Enterprise 2.0 Presentation).

Besides, broadening the scope of knowledge of collaborators to the activities of the company as a whole allow them to give a meaning to their professional contribution. This is a fuel to collaborator commitment.

8 – Simplicity (Vs complexity)

Agile is focused on driving towards simplicity rather than creating systems that manage complexity (Mike Cottmeyer et V. Lee Henson The Agile business Analyst)

Simplicity is a core agile principle and agile organization is a critical component of Enterprise 2.0. Therefore, it is necessary to resist the mysterious charms and the intellectually stimulating complexity of potential solutions / organization / processes. The aim is to strive for simplicity in the implementation of social networks in the enterprise.

9 – User-oriented technologies (Vs IT Governance)

One of the main feature identified by Andrew McAfee in his presentation on Enterprise 2.0 is the concept of simple tools and easy access. The usability has became the key quality criteria against which we rate online applications. The main difference between internet applications (Facebook etc …) and intranet’s : the budget share spent on design and usability: about 10 times more for the internet applications.

Again, it will become increasingly difficult to impose anti-ergonomic and unusable intranet tools to people that use Twitter or Facebook day-in day-out. The main reason is that applications developed without usability concerns are neither pleasant to use nor productive.

10 – Trust (Vs Control)

This is the basic principle as it determines all others.

Without Trust there cannot be transparency in information. There cannot be an organisation flexible enough to let emergence happens. There cannot be an open bottom-up communication.

Without Trust, Management will only prevail in the implementation of complex processes to define the inflexible scope of responsibilities of knowledge workers. Without Trust it is not possible to establish an organization which leverages the agility, speed (refer to Stephen Covey Jr. book) and productivity offered by the net.

Without Trust, the management will not abandon the command and control strategy. And the required space for effective implementation of collaborative tools shall never appear.

Enterprise 2.0 : fostering knowledge management, innovation and productivity

ceciiil — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 17:22:39 +0000

Hi ! it’s Cecil here.

Just uploaded this Enterprise-2.0 presentation. Title : Enterprise 2.0 : leveraging collaboration platforms to foster knowledge, innovation and productivity.

Best to see full screen

Enterprise 2.0 : Leveraging collaboration platforms to foster knowledge, innovation and productivity

View more presentations from ceciiil.

Target audience is upper management.

The objective is to address key issues faced by organizations built around knowledge : management of not only knowledge but also innovation and productivity. First to see the current limitations with the tools and processes in place and then to see how collaborative platform and enterprise 2.0 approach can offer competitive advantages to the company.

I have not been really convinced by the material available on the topic. Mostly too buzzwordy and flashy, this often scares upper management out. Most of them then subsequently relate E2.0 to consultant-dollarmaking-vaporware material, hence the dedicated section in the presentation.

Besides, in my view, these presentations usually go from the existing social applications (and their many exciting features) into the enterprise. In order to convince management, they should rather go the other way round : from enterprise real problems to how they can be addressed by social software platforms.

Mostly influenced by this excellent presentation by Mr Enteprise 2.0 : Andrew McAfee at PARC (link). Also by many of the videos, books, articles, blog posts refererred to in TechItEasy and Heavy Mental.

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An interview of Yoolink Pro’s bizdev director, Sebastien Blanc

Jeremy Fain — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 00:55:08 +0000

I had wished very hard my sharp-minded friend Sébastien Blanc joined me as a partner when I founded environmental management software company Verteego, almost two years ago. Instead Séb accepted an offer from online collaborative tools Yoolink, which makes me think that either I’m very bad at convincing people on joining me in projects, or that Yoolink is a very special startup. Although both options are still wide opened and not exclusive at all, I like for some reason to consider it’s Yoolink that’s an amazing company and felt it would be just fair play from me to interview Sébastien on what actually Yoolink is doing for its enterprise customers.

Hello Seb, could you please introduce yourself?

Hi Jeremy. Well, my name is Sebastien Blanc and I am the Business development director for YoolinkPro, a Paris-based start-up developing a micro-sharing Platform for professionals.

Things have changed and knowledge now is increasingly on-line. We all spend loads of time googling the Internet for information about customers, about markets or to solve work-based issues. Yet when we find an interesting document we rarely do anything with it.

YoolinkPro changes that. The service allows you to save, share, tag and discuss information you find on-line. It allows you to bring the knowledge you find on the web into your company to increase productivity.
– What’s Yoolink business model?

We are mainly targeting SME. So our business model is really flexible. You can subscribe to the service and pay a monthly fee depending on how many people are going to use the service. It starts at 34€/month for 5 people.

For departments or teams within large companies we offer special plans depending on needs and of course we offer tailor-made developments to ensure the product meets each customers’ needs.
– What is YoolinkPro’s market?

We are developing sales on different markets, the main ones being communication agencies, R&D fuelled companies and public organization. We have customers in Western Europe but France is our main market. Our average customer is a 30-40 person company but we are currently implementing tests in companies way larger than that. We’ll keep you posted!
- Is Enterprise 2.0 an evolution or a revolution? Let me ask the question differently, do you think large companies are ready to switch to Web 2.0, online services like Yoolink?

That’s a good question and I think many people are discussing it in depth: Dion Hinchcliffe or Denis Howlett to name but a few. Personally I don’t think it’s a revolution per se. You can’t get into a company – large or not – by saying everything they are doing is crap and they have to change it all. They were making profits way before you existed. So talking about revolution is not likely to drive up sales.

If you want to work with large groups, I think you have to start with a small team of highly motivated users and then use them as a base to spread within the company. It’s a one-step-at-a-time approach. And I think dropping the buzzwords is also a good idea. Or to put it differently, you solve problems rather than bringing in some fancy technology. People call me back a lot more since I started talking about operations instead of 2.0.
– What is Yoolink’s secret sauce? What makes you better than del.icio.us and WordPress altogether?

WordPress is not really a competitor. We are working with people who are using both YP and WordPress. WordPress is used to communicate with people outside a company and YoolinkPro is an easy way to share information within the company. Both services can communicate with each other.

As for Delicious there are of course some common features. But it is definitely a service for private users, not for professionals. YoolinkPro offers features a company really needs that private users don’t: privacy, guaranteed quality-of-service, support, storage, etc. When you address companies, you have to meet higher standards.
– What are you most proud of at Yoolink?

Our interface. We definitely have a good interface. We often have a “wow” effect from people during presentation. That’s something we really enjoy and that is critical in users’ adoption of the service.
– What will you be most proud of at Yoolink in 1 year, 3 years, and 5 years? In other words, what will be Yoolink’s next major landmarks?

Our next landmark is a business one: break-even. That’s what we are working toward. Bringing the service to companies, solving their problems, developing new ways to work. I hope my portfolio of happy customers is going to be what I am most proud of in 1 year!
– Do you find easy to get bloggers write about Yoolink Pro?

Well if you want me to be honest I’d say it is one of the hardest things I’ve encountered. From a more general point of view it is really difficult to get visibility as an IT start-up when you’re not US-based. It’s as if being American boosts both your product and your brand…
– Is blogging and twittering most useful when it comes to building a community around the Yoolink brand?

Definitely. We worked a lot on PR and media a couple of month ago. And then we realized that a single twit or blog post from a good analyst was worth more in terms of users than several articles in major on-line newspapers. Besides, with twitter and blogs we can actually exchange with our users and not just publish information…
– How does the Yoolink team look like today? And tomorrow?

We are a small but efficient team. There are 6 people, three of whom develop the service, 1 designs it and 2 develop the Business. Everyone is highly motivated and devoted and the CEO – Sunny Paris, former founder of Weborama, a listed company – is bringing loads of energy and vision to the team. I think the team is going to remain the same for a while, at least until 2010.
– How is Yoolink funded as of today? What are its capital development perspectives?

We raised 500k€ last June from industrials and BA and we have a really low burn-rate. So we don’t plan to raise money in the short term. Once again the focus is on business development.
– On a more personal standpoint, what is your next move?

I have many in mind. The one coming the fastest though is to try running the semi-marathon in less than 1’30!

Many thx Séb.

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