Is your Company Creating Zombies 2.0?

By Thierry de Baillon

Version française ici.

As time goes by, I see more and more surveys and positive case studies about Enterprise 2.0 adoption. This is good, but not so much. Most of the time, use of technologies such as instant messaging or web conferencing is viewed as concrete steps toward Enterprise 2.0 adoption. But is there any behavioral difference between meeting up face to face with someone and talking via IP networks? Barely any; this helps saving fossil fuels for our planet’s health and sets up a hypothetical technological ground for some later adoption. Not that much to jump for joy about.

Monitoring Enterprise 2.0 adoption should instead focus on communities, networks, and flows of knowledge, These are the real bricks on which to measure change, with a lot of precautions nevertheless.

Communities of practice exist for some time now in big organizations. They gather people with similar or related roles in a company, and are built around practical cases sharing, knowledge emergence and collaborative problem solving. While this is a great move toward new modes of collaboration and new, tacit, knowledge capture, these communities are often heavily structured and managed, just to insure that they “work”. Regular fixed-date gatherings, mandatory outcome, fixed agenda and assigned roles are among common practices. In other words, keeping control on the internal working of communities of practice allow organizations to fit roles, responsibilities and (collaborative) productivity all together.

But communities are inherently dynamic and have fuzzy boundaries.  Networks, which may both encompass or be nested inside them, are often unpredictable, uncontrollable, activate and dissolve on purpose, instill passion and disruption into communities. In networks relies the real power of communities. Without purposely enabling them and fully fostering their capabilities, which means giving up control and deeply changing the way we think about work, online communities are, and ever will, only be technology assisted para-hierarchical structures. Communities are the bodies, while networks are the souls of the collaborative enterprise.  Without a real cultural change, ‘change toward Enterprise 2.0 adoption’ merely means creating Zombies 2.0. Is your company into ‘socialwashing’?

Knowledge, From Productivity Source to Critical Component

By Thierry de Baillon

Version française ici.

This post was cross-posted on ecollab carnival blog, as part of a collaborative thinking about the future of the training department.

Productivity: The amount of output per unit of input (labor, equipment, and capital).

Enterprise has for long understood, and applied, that training and education are an important part of its hunt for competitive advantages.  At operational level, first, training allows for better adequacy between employees, their role, and the hierarchy- and process-based ‘mechanics’ of Enterprise. At competitive level, then, acquisition of new knowledge is for companies both a way to keep best talents in house and a way to setup an innovation friendly ecosystem. In both cases, education and learning have taken a privileged position in professional environments, and is now openly recognized as an important productivity source.

It is quite striking to see how much this concept, rationalized, statutory, acquisition of formal and explicit knowledge in order to maximize individual productivity, is now spread across our whole society, bridging more and more closely business and education worlds, notably with generalization of internship requirements. This concept, however, ceases today to be legitimate.

While apparently justified by security and… productivity concerns, present trend of blocking access to main social networks rather looks like a desperate attempt in denying actual cultural and societal evolution. How could we otherwise explain such practices, as more than 40% of employees will use a mobile terminal to priority access the internet in two years from now? Whether they want it or not, companies will soon face a real organizational dilemma: to witness a drastic individual productivity dropout, for letting employees freely access the social web, or to provide them internally with an environment as much attractive as the one they can find outside. As the ideal enterprise will stay, for long, an almost unreachable ideal, other solutions have to be considered for a vast majority of companies. Finding the most relevant one? This seems quite an evidence for most of us: we have to recognize the importance of knowledge informal acquisition, and to include this activity in the general framework of individual listening and self-training task.

The growing importance of informal knowledge, and its necessary integration into professional education, doesn’t limit itself to external influence. Whether they wish it or not, companies are today involved into collaborative initiatives which question the very foundations of individual productivity. It will have to be more and more transferred to the community, one of its natural functions being training through implicit knowledge sharing.

From being considered today as a source for productivity, in our hierarchy and process-based structures, training will very logically and quickly become one of its critical components. This will ultimately modify existing relations between knowledge, innovation and production. Concretely, and naturally, social learning will pave the way for Enterprise 2.0.

Le savoir, de source à composante de la productivité

By Thierry de Baillon

English version here.

Ce billet est cross-publié sur le blog carnival ecollab dans le cadre d’une réflexion collective sur l’avenir de la formation en entreprise.

Productivité : rapport entre la production d’un bien ou d’un service et l’ensemble des intrants nécessaires à sa production (travail, équipement et capitaux).

L’entreprise a depuis longtemps compris, et intégré, l’importance de la formation dans sa recherche permanente d’avantages compétitifs. Dans sa dimension opérationnelle, tout d’abord, l’apprentissage permettant une meilleure adéquation entre les employés, le rôle qu’ils occupent, et la « mécanique » hiérarchique et procédurale de l’entreprise.  Dans sa dimension compétitive, ensuite, l’acquisition de nouveaux savoirs étant pour l’entreprise à la fois un moyen de retenir les talents et celui de mettre en place un écosystème propice à l’innovation. Dans les deux cas, l’apprentissage a acquis une place privilégiée dans l’univers professionnel, et est ouvertement reconnue comme source importante de productivité.

Il est d’ailleurs frappant de voir à quel point cette notion, celle de l’acquisition raisonnée d’un savoir explicite et formalisé, statufié, en vue de maximiser la productivité individuelle, trouve un écho dans la société toute entière, établissant des passerelles de plus en plus étroites avec le monde de l’éducation, notamment à travers la pratique généralisée des stages. Une notion qui, pourtant, cesse aujourd’hui d’être légitime.

En s’appuyant en apparence sur des raisons de sécurité et… de productivité, la tendance actuelle des entreprises à  bloquer l’accès aux grands réseaux sociaux apparaît davantage comme une tentative désespérée de nier les changements sociétaux en cours. Alors que 40% des employés accèderont prioritairement à l’internet via un terminal mobile d’ici deux ans, comment expliquer autrement des mesures aussi dérisoires ?  Qu’elles le veuillent ou non, les entreprises devront faire face à un véritable dilemme organisationnel : laisser s’effondrer la productivité individuelle, en autorisant leurs employés à accéder librement au web social, ou leur offrir en interne un environnement de travail aussi attractif que ce qu’ils trouvent à l’extérieur. Cette entreprise parfaite restant, et ce pour de longues années encore, un idéal difficilement accessible, d’autres solutions doivent être envisagées pour la majorité des entreprises. La plus pertinente ? Elle va de soi pour bon nombre d’entre nous : il s’agit de reconnaître l’importance de l’acquisition informelle du savoir, et d’inclure cette activité dans le cadre d’un travail de veille et d’auto-formation de l’individu.

L’importance croissante du savoir implicite, et sa nécessaire intégration à l’apprentissage, ne s’arrête pas à l’influence extérieure. Qu’elles le souhaitent ou non, les entreprises sont aujourd’hui entraînées dans une démarche collaborative qui remet en question les fondements même de la productivité individuelle. Celle-ci devra, de plus en plus, être déléguée à la communauté, dont l’une des fonctions naturelles est l’apprentissage par le biais du partage de savoir implicite.

Aujourd’hui considéré, dans nos structures hiérarchiques à base de processus, comme source de productivité, l’apprentissage va très logiquement et rapidement en devenir une des composantes essentielles, modifiant ainsi les rapports aujourd’hui en place entre savoir, innovation et production. De façon concrète et naturelle, le social learning ouvrira de fait la voie à l’Entreprise 2.0.

‘Communities’ and ‘Networks’: A Conceptual and Linguistic 2.0 Mess

By Thierry de Baillon

Version française ici.  R8WDSZFCZWAY

Among the most overheard and misused buzzwords in companies are, you guessed it, ‘communities’ and ‘networks’.  One of the side effects of Marketing 2.0 is, besides embodying new relationships between brands and customers, raising awareness among top managers about the potentials of collaborative work.

Of course companies, particularly the biggest ones, are dealing with internal communities for a few years now, often without truly understanding how to energize and leverage their power, but goofy expressions such as “Facebook for Enterprise” are now making their way into executives wish lists and discourses. Social platforms vendors aren’t helping either. Socialtext’s claim is ‘Social Networking with Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration’; Jive Software presents its SBS software as “robust social networking software for employee communities”. An awful 2.0 mess…

Technology itself, introducing more and more real-time capabilities into platforms, contributes further in blurring the lines between communities and networks.

Both concepts have their place in the connected Enterprise. Not only is the understanding of what differentiates them is key to successfully implement socio-collaborative initiatives, but harnessing their complementarity also provides us with a valuable framework of building blocks to leverage the internal ecosystem of Enterprise 2.0.

Rather than fighting each other, communities and networks may, while serving different purposes, raise quality of connected work inside enterprise. Being fluid and highly interactive, networks can address specific issues out of the scope of a single community. They can be setup on demand, self-arrange to solve problems, then dismantled or put at sleep once the issue resolved. Networks act as powerful ad hoc task forces, their power amplified by real-time tools. Lot has been written about the need or not to embed community-based outcome into existing business processes.  I do believe than working in a connected environment will ultimately lead to replace our actual processes by some new adaptive individually empowered mechanisms, and we can already put this vision at work: correctly driven (and understood, which means they must not been implemented as a substitute for communities but built ASIDE them), social networks have the tremendous power to deliver.