By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
Business processes has recently became quite a buzzword among the Enterprise 2.0 community, notably since June’s Boston conference. It suddenly seems that the whole discourse has changed from a leadership-fueled point of view to a down-to-the-ground (and to the balanced scorecard) vendor’s one. Pragmatism? I rather think that this approach is severely flawed, in three places at least: core processes concepts, knowledge handling and customers’ consideration.
When cats are called dogs
I recently wrote about SAP StreamWork and the fact that, despite their claim, this new tool is not a collaborative decision-making solution, but allows for better collaborative problem analysis, which is not, and by far, the same. Mistaking the mean for the goal is a clever tactic: this allows for frictionless adoption of an otherwise useful tool into existing processes, with the added hype of 2.0 technologies.
In a much more subtler register, Bertrand Duperrin made a common mistake in one of his last posts ‘Community management and processes by the example’. What he calls “process” is in fact a resource lifecycle, describing who is involved, when, in relationship to whom, where a process is a matter of chained actions allowing to progress through this lifecycle. Substituting communities for individual along the flow is of course an improvement of the entire lifecycle, but has de facto no impact on the process design or execution. The difference is important, since processes were developed to minimize variability and risks, specifically facilitating and streamlining execution when different silos, different business logics, are working in parallel through complicated operations and/or organizations. Moreover, there are designed to be as people independent as possible. They are typically built to avoid “reinventing the wheel”; but what would happen if tapping into the networks comes out with a solution which doesn’t require a wheel at all? Predictability is processes’ mainspring and, unless breaking them into much smaller, adaptive, parts, which contradicts their efficiency chasing goal, socializing resources lifecycles won’t have any positive impact on existing processes, besides giving the opportunity to integrate 2.0 technologies into workflows. This clearly is a dead-end for anybody believing that Enterprise 2.0 is more than technology.
Processes are Taylorist knowledge
Cecil Dijoux recalled Michael Grives’ interesting distinction between processes and practices. Unfortunately, practices, built upon people’s behavior, and not upon the least variable output available, still fall short from giving us a way to harness collaborative work. When it comes to knowledge, they behave quite the same, fossilizing thinking into formal procedures.
Fostering the use of tacit knowledge, which represents 80% of available knowledge in an organization, requires a much more flexible framework than those given by processes and practices. Knowledge is variable, unfocused, complex, and messy. By building automatic workflow rules, by assuming that today’s conditions are the same as yesterday’s ones, processes segment knowledge into bits of repeatable information and decision making guidance, exerting a division of knowledge similar as the division of labour envisioned by Adam Smith. Socializing business processes won’t take advantage of collaborative work, but of specialized cooperative knowledge. The only feature of processes which might benefit from social integration is their ownership.
The customer-centric Enterprise
Besides owners, processes have customers. Dealing with internal customers is usually a matter of connecting dots, which often means offering predictable output through connected, repeatable, actions. This could be fine, regardless of the two precedent points, as far as external customers are not involved. But the social web is transforming the way customers act and react in a radical way, and maintaining our business processes to engage and interact with customers is nonsense. If capturing internal tacit knowledge in a non obfuscating way is a challenge, ignoring customers knowledge about your products and services will soon become a deadly attitude. Business processes, with their inability to deal with uncertain, irreproducible knowledge, are the least suitable tools to establish and maintain any kind of relationship with your customers.
Wait, we need processes
Yes, we need business processes. Not as we know them today, driving our organizations from end to end, but we need them as an infrastructure, to free knowledge workers from complicated tasks, even collective ones. But they must now be considered as tools at our disposal, not as our organizations’ backbones. Besides that, not any company is destined to become a social business, not any product or service is meant to be discussed about on the social web. The future of business is both brands and commodities, and that will be the subject of my next post.
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
I find quite ironic that, while emphasizing the transformations needed / involved on the road to Enterprise 2.0, most case studies and literature on the subject, specifically when it comes to ‘adoption’, focus on the steps, and so rarely on the whole journey. Although collaboration is claimed to (hopefully) become our global way of working, much accent is put on technologies, practices, pilots, behaviors, management,… introducing tools and recipes without considering the constraints and mutations stressing the whole system: Enterprise itself. This sometimes makes me think of physicians talking about organs, topical cures and diseases without ever mentioning, or taking into account, the whole human body.
The vocabulary used is itself indicative of this state of mind. ‘Enterprise 2.0 adoption’ sounds like a technology-inclined, more process- that people-centric, one at a time methodology. Don’t misunderstand me; I am not saying that we should skip pilots, onboard anyone with a gentle smile and shout “we got the tools, we are 2.0 now”. Very few have tried, and even fewer are succeeding. Number of connections on a social platform doesn’t mean anything beyond brainless propaganda and top-down socialwashing. We will need to keep on coaching, evangelizing and scouting emergent practices for quite a long time. Seeding, then nurturing, is the correct attitude. Taking a broader view on Enterprise 2.0 diffusion dynamics in organizations might help leading the transformation at systemic scale.
Corporate culture, individual empowerment and management model are the three main assets any organizational change has to deal with. Let us see how a collaborative paradigm could fit an organization, given different corporate backgrounds and agents of change, and consider three main different approaches.
Holistic diffusion
Convergence between corporate culture and a leader’s vision offers, indeed, an ideal loam, not only to nurture a collaborative environment, but to leverage a whole social business ecosystem around the customer. Transforming such a business is only a matter of time and good communication, as the right practices get weaved into each company’s department. This might sound like an ideal world, but we all know the examples of Zappos and Cisco…
Empathic diffusion
Most companies aren’t designed for collaboration. Fostering its diffusion throughout the organization requires undertaking the usual steps we, practitioners, all know about: finding the right champions, targeting business departments already prone to work in a collaborative way, communicate about successes, and iteratively extend the experience. Enthusiasts will become ambassadors, and initiatives will spread to other parts of the business. Michael Idinopulos described this approach pretty well on his blog. Chances are good that this may help compensating for an unfavorable internal culture, with good support from the management. No wonder that most present case studies are following a similar approach: empathy, which Michael calls enthusiasm, is the glue of human relationships.
Fractal diffusion
One of the most discussed aspects of Enterprise 2.0 diffusion strategies is the necessity and the difficulty to involve the middle management. Our businesses hierarchical structure put a heavy pressure on managers, and their role is key to most business processes. Asking them to change to embrace collaboration and its inherent complexity is often perceived like asking them to dig their own grave. In this case, empathy won’t work, and even best evangelizers will fail along the way.
Modern businesses are inherently fractal, composed of nested routines, structures and know-how which deeply influence the behavior of the whole company, even without explicitly noticing it. The real backbone, the DNA of a company is sometimes hidden, buried behind processes or Excel dashboards. Identifying the core competencies of a business, whether it be in teams, departments or divisions, and leveraging collaboration in those places, will produce patterns which are reproducible throughout the whole organization. New practices, new managing routines will emerge, which can then be injected into other teams, departments and divisions. This, of course, will challenge managers. Some will adapt, some won’t. But new leaders will emerge, paving the road for a more empathic or holistic approach.
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
How do we take decisions in a networked, community-based, environment? Yet crucial to one of the core competencies of business, this very question is quite never addressed in the fast growing literature about Enterprise 2.0 or Social Business.
In order to mitigate risk and insure operation’s reproducibility, business processes have relegated decision making at the fringe of most workers’ tasks, and have somehow left its responsibility to the higher levels of hierarchy. To compensate for the fact that problems to be solved are more and more complex, organizations evolved from pyramidal to matrix based, partly to allow for greater expertise in decision making. With no real convincing improvement in fact. As companies face an always faster changing and more competitive environment, and as networked collaborative work appears as a more and more obvious solution to cope with complexity and with the required level of innovation, we still have very few clues about how to deal efficiently with decision making.
Esteban Kolsky recently left me a great comment, which he developed in an article, about the future of social business. Sooner or later, brands will have to include customers in their business decisions. But how will that be? Who will be in charge of taking the structuring decisions? Of course, we are still have plenty of time before most companies open their internal silos to customers’ voice. But going there, and even further, as Esteban suggests, will require a clear understanding of what’s going on on the decision making’s side.
Up to now, despite their highly heralded collaborative nature, present initiatives and case studies in the Enterprise 2.0 field give no insight. If you closely look at the departments they affect, you will find out that no real decision takes place inside the collaborative garden. Marketing? Most decisions are taken upstream, and social media integration is more tactical than strategic. R&D? Decisions are taken downstream, and collaborative work is either used for intelligence or for strictly processed innovation. Knowledge Management? There is no decision to be seen there too.
Don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying that those are of no value, I am just noting that successful Enterprise 2.0 implementations do not tackle the collaborative decision making issue. Not yet. Not until some organizations are brave enough to build sandboxes (not pilots, these have to be on purpose, fast paced, experimental initiatives) to tackle this challenge, we are left to speculate…
On Management and Leadership
The easiest way to address decision making is to keep it away from collaborative spaces. Does this look like an heresy? It is, but this is exactly what a new breed of so-called ‘collaborative’ tools, such as SAP StreamWork, does. Despite their claim, they facilitate collaborative problem analysis, NOT decision making, delegating the real responsibility to the traditional command-and-control management chain, where each manager takes his share of decision, according to his place in the hierarchy.To step out this broken model and truly leverage the power of collaborative networks, decisions definitely need to take place inside communities and networks, not outside, which means releasing control and leveraging emergence. This is not your typical managerial task. Today’s management has to deal with a dual burden: escaping from a rigid hierarchical model, inherited from the industrial age, which doesn’t allow for much freedom in decision making, and building enough trust to encourage other workers to escape from his own hierarchical imprint. In that sense, despite the fact that involving management in Enterprise 2.0 adoption and Social Business design is an imperative, there are no more dubious candidates than managers to cope with community-based decision making. Even worse, hybrid communities, involving both employees and customers, cannot be managed.Building trust, encouraging sharing and enthusiasm is more a leader’s job than the one of a manager. Leaders are more likely to drive adoption and to foster collaboration. But what about decision making? There is no single and simple definition of what a leader is or should be, but from the most authoritarian to the most libertarian one, they all share two common points: influence and a vision, which both weight negatively on the group in a decision context. it is likely that leaders might more than often raise consensus around their own perspective.
Yes, managers and leaders are the necessary catalysts of Social Business adoption and setup. But when it comes to decision making, both might get as much as possible out of the way.
On Complexity and New Skills needed
On his blog, Bas Reus suggests that we stop predicting, and embrace emergence instead. But, to be fruitful, this supposes that emergence leads to convergence (to a common view, or, at least, to a common action plan), and that negative outcomes are quickly enough identified to allow for new orientations. It supposes that decision making takes place
somewhere. Absolute self-organization is not an option for organizations, and so is total failure. Workers need to be sufficiently individually empowered to be able to take their own decisions, according to their skills and competencies, without been entangled by a manager’s or a leader’s view, but they still need guidance. We can watch today the effects of such self-organization and independent decision making in the financial realm. While banks and trading companies pursue a quite clear strategy, traders are left alone in their tactical decisions making. Big profits, erratic losses, as, among others, in the exemplary Kerviel affair…
Empowering both customers and knowledge workers by providing all information needed for correct analysis, facilitating individual decision making according to one’s competencies and learning abilities, providing guidance across internal and hybrid clusters and communities, fostering autonomy, those are the new skills needed inside organizations to unleash the power of networked environments. To reach the next step, companies dipping their toes into Social Business will need people who combine HR skills with high analysis-synthesis competencies. Empowerers?
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
Last few months were, for me, pretty insightful. I tried to spread and nurture some ideas about organizations, collaboration and complexity, met people, chatted online with others, read, assisted or talked at events… The last pebbles of wisdom came for The Age of Paradox, from Charles Handy, whose S-curve metaphor quasi magically fitted my intuitions. Little by little, I have now built a somehow practical model of organizational maturity which drastically shows the need for enterprise to step into the 2.0 world.
This is what I wanted to share with you today. 
Phase #1: the simple enterprise
Most companies start simple, with a few people gathering their skills on an idea. Decision making, tasks assignment and direct interaction with clients and all stakeholders are straightforward. As every entrepreneur knows, initial company’s growth is often a synonym for efficiency drop and P&L decrease, since administrative tasks, indirect structural costs and middle-term forecasts add financial and human pressure on its early development.
Overcoming these obstacles is one of the main burdens of start-ups and young businesses. Innovation sparks, knowledge capitalization is eased by a common vision on business, and further growth usually stands for sustainable efficiency and market shares increase.
Phase #2: the complicated enterprise
As organizations grow in size, original simplicity gets harder and harder to maintain. In The Pursuit of Wow, Tom Peters considers the ideal size of organizations to be around 150. Beyond this size, knowing everybody in person becomes impossible (think about the Dunbar number, which has the same value), and intermediate layers of power and delegation begin to develop. Beyond this phase, whether they want it or not, to go on growing, most companies enter the complication realm.
Most today’s big companies and groups are complicated. To afford growth and efficiency increase, more and more processes are setup to ensure reliable operations and risk mitigation, thus relegating the core competencies of decision making and innovation to the periphery. The vision, if any, is now supported at board level, no more at individual level. New layers of control and supervision appear, silos are created and knowledge acquisition is formalized as an attempt to gain efficiency through specialization.
As big companies get bigger, unless sustained by a never-ending expanding market, internal growth and innovation reach a tipping point, and companies rely on mergers and acquisitions to keep on steadily growing. As a matter of fact, at some stage of complication, companies do not create jobs anymore. In France, a study from INSEE showed that big organizations and groups rather destroy internal jobs; they transfer them to subsidiaries, contractors and subcontractors, and, even this way, only very barely participate in job creation. Similar studies, conducted in other countries, showed the same results. Knowledge, and acquisition of new knowledge, are still a key factor for innovation and efficiency. To compensate for the fact that it cannot be brought in by external stakeholders anymore, the complicated enterprise shifts to another organizational paradigm, and becomes a learning enterprise, putting an overall important effort into training.
Threats to the complicated enterprise
What we are witnessing today in most business sectors is the inability for big companies and groups to reinvent themselves fast enough to cope with the threats they are now facing. Optimization of business processes and costs reduction only marginally affect organizations’ efficiency and growth. Faster evolving markets challenge organizations’ ability to react to customers’ demand, and to reorganize internally accordingly. Decision making is more and more paralyzed by process-based operations and chains of control, thus affecting companies’ agility.
Furthermore, organizations now have to face important internal challenges. Baby boomers, once the lifeblood of business, are now retiring at increasing rate, depriving companies of crucial knowledge and expertise. At the other end of the population pyramid, Generation Yers are today experiencing a totally new experience in the way they communicate and interact. This isn’t about tools, about technologies and the way they use them. The internet is radically changing their and our lives, enabling a radically different perception of ourselves, transforming the very nature of information, challenging hierarchies, management and workflows.
Without a shift, complicated organizations will soon enter a delusional phase, leading to increased efficiency loss.
Phase #3: the complex enterprise
To answer these threats, organizations need now to embrace complexity, instead of persisting into increased complication. I already wrote about the necessary shift they need to undergo to harness the power of networked collaboration, to step from hierarchy to wirearchy, as Jon Husband defines it. This paradigm’s shift comes at a cost; while present organizational strategies still show efficiency improvements, the challenge of adopting Enterprise 2.0 concepts and practices will necessarily see it dropping for some time. Coexistence of both structures will not ease things out, until companies get a clearer view of the new induced competitive advantages.
Here is an attempt to summarize some key organizational changes involved during the journey from simplicity to complexity:
|
Simplicity |
Complication |
Complexity |
| Organizational Theory |
Knowledge-Based View |
Learning Enterprise |
Micro-Foundations of Dynamic Capabilities |
| Attractors |
Stakeholders (vision) |
Shareholders (wealth) |
Clients (service) |
| Growth Model |
Internal |
M&A |
Ecosystem |
| Knowledge Acquisition |
Formal Training |
E-Learning |
Social Learning |
| Knowledge Capitalization |
Best Practices |
Good Practices |
Emergent Practices |
Future doesn’t belong to complication, and simplicity is far behind most companies. Pioneering Enterprise 2.0 is a bold, but soon to be unavoidable, step into business redesign.
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
I was lucky enough to have in hands “Toward Enterprise 2.0″, a recent study of Enterprise 2.0 adoption, conducted by Cecile Demailly, from Early Strategies consulting agency. This survey unveils many interesting results about transformation strategies, and about the perception that actors of the change have.
This survey “was offered online from November 2009 to January 2010, and was answered by a primary set of people involved in Enterprise 2.0 deployment, and a secondary audience of well-informed users of Enterprise 2.0 applications and projects. The 50 respondents are mainly located in France (48%), the US (18%), the UK (12%) and the Netherlands (10%)”.
As no surprise, most of the themes emerging from this survey match commonly heralded attitudes and necessities. The report explicitly states that “organizations face a paradox that often happens with adoption of disruptive change (whether it is technology, work methods or management patterns): they have to cope with it, but cannot yet justify it nor master the transformation because it is too early, too little history and case studies to learn the lessons from others”. Despite the fact that most respondents see themselves as pioneers, one of the key findings of the study is that “there are good links between the organizational values and the transformation goals, ROI expected and success factors”, and that “this sense needs to exist at different levels. The most obvious being at the organizational level, the most enduring being at individual level, and the least recognized, probably, being at management level”.
I won’t detail the numerous results of this 37 pages report, which you can buy on the Early Strategies website. I want instead to highlight some quite disturbing findings which, in my opinion, highlight the shortcomings of present adoption approaches and expectations.
Although considered as an intangible ROI of E2.0 adoption, “better innovation” is cited by 70% of respondents; but when asked about the impact of the tools in their daily work, innovation is no more on the list of positive outcomes. What is happening here? Cecile suggested me that innovation is an organization-wide vision, while people think it only has a very limited impact in their own tasks. My opinion is a bit different, since innovation seems to be also absent from organization-wide usefulness results: albeit innovation is seen as a capital competitive advantage, present adoption frameworks of 2.0 technologies do not create the necessary organizational structures to foster it.
Another matter of concern relates to the learning programs and medium used by companies to accompany the change. Unstructured programs account for only 17% of the total learning efforts, and collaborative unstructured learning takes place in a small 14% of all the media used. Knowing that 80% of organizational knowledge is tacit, and that collaborative tools are, by far, the best medium to be used to set up informal learning, it looks like adoption guidance takes place without harnessing the inherent power of the tools themselves. We are trying to deal with a new paradigm with the methods and processes inherited from conventional “Enterprise 1.0″ thinking. What we need is a huge reappraisal of our change management methods.
I was also puzzled to read that the marketing department was not involved at all during adoption for all B2C respondents. The report states that “this might not be meaningful given the size of the panel”. What a relief… But as partial as they are, those results state that some companies ARE in fact trying to implement Enterprise 2.0 as a closed system, keeping the client view away from the change. This is quite frightening.
Diving into complexity is for sure a bold move. But some of the results from the report suggest that the necessary change from a process-based organization toward a network-based ecosystem, collaborative, innovation and client-centric, is not taking place the way it should. The era of socialwashing seems now behind us, but are present Enterprise 2.0 adoption frameworks REALLY changing organizations, or are we just pushing further a square peg into a round hole, trying to fit a new paradigm into an obsolete one? I would love to read your view about it.
By Thierry de Baillon
This article has been cross-posted with ecollab blog carnival.
Version française ici.
Much has been told and written about the capital importance of knowledge in organizations, and the rise of networks-enabled enterprise emphasizes even more the role of informal learning and knowledge sharing in human interactions in the workplace. Enterprise 2.0 is neither about technology nor about people, Enterprise 2.0 is about capturing and harnessing the knowledge flows which circulate inside and across organizations. But “capturing” knowledge is somehow like seizing the air we breathe. I f knowledge were an animal, it would definitely be a cat. Both Cheshire and Schrödinger’s cats.
Knowledge as Cheshire cat
As innocuous as the word seems, defining ‘knowledge’, particularly in relation to ‘information’, is no easy task. Furthermore, English language only has one word where French, for example, has two: “savoir” and “connaissance”. “Savoir” encompasses every human symbolic production (whether it be concepts, data, methods, philosophies…) and is independent from any being. “Connaissance”, on the other side, relates to the appropriation of knowledge by the human being. It is a never-ending process of understanding in the spiritual sense of it (see for instance, in French, these articles from Florence Meichel or René Barbier). Most of modern definitions of knowledge assume its social nature, embedding value into context.
The same piece of information won’t have the same meaning and importance if delivered or learned in different contexts. The way we learn this information is by itself part of its contextual inheritance, making look knowledge like the Cheshire’s cat: whenever you think you are able to formalize it, it has already taken a different meaning in another context, leaving you with dead, barely usable, information. Every Knowledge Manager knows how difficult reusability of formalized knowledge is.
An idealistic vision of a network-based company would allow for free flow of knowledge without any formalization. Nevertheless, the need for formalizing informal learning, as way of capturing informal knowledge, is quite mandatory in our organizations, notably in regard to HR issues. As Jon Husband recently pointed out:
there’s also ongoing dissonance or competition between the methods behind structured and defined organizational forms and activities, and the growing world of hyperlinked flows in which knowledge and meaning are built layer by layer, exchange by exchange
Organizational structures, job requirements and training valuation require a way to measure informal learning, thus to somehow formalize it. Rather than chasing the utopian goal to formalize knowledge, companies are in fact able to formalize and measure its outcome (think about Cheshire cat’s smile): increased ability to solve problems, coaching or mentoring assignments,…
Knowledge as Schrödinger’s cat
Furthermore, thinking of knowledge as a dual, formal versus informal, statement is a mere illusion. Any discrete piece of knowledge is paradoxically at the same time both a formal and informal artifact and, like in the Schrödinger’s cat paradox, we cannot assert anything before we actually use it. Every parent knows that acquisition of the most ever formalized knowledge by children is in fact conditioned by the relationship they maintain with their teachers.
Web 2.0 technologies allow us to formalize the informal, allowing us to tag, comment, recommend documents or contributions, adding them an interactive, tangible contextual layer. At the opposite, patents are among the most formal pieces of knowledge. But the use of properly designed SNA tools unveils their hidden informal nature. By uncovering citations, comments, and referencing and patterns of influence among clusters of linked patents and examinations, network analysis highlights intangible relationships. By changing our view on knowledge, we are able to consider it as formal or as informal, switching from an artifact to another.
Design is another great example of this “artifact switching”, which incarnates informal information gathered from customers, about their behaviors, conversations and wishes, into real-life formal products. This paradoxical co-existence, while difficult to leverage, is what ultimately keeps knowledge alive and useful.
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
A small conversation with Olivier Blanchard (@thebrandbuilder ) on Twitter left me with an interesting question: what drives us into the need and will to change long time cultural habits (the kind of paper we are writing on), if not fancying novelty? My take is that setting our mind in a different environment not only enables a different perception of our surrounding, even if this environment is as trivial as a sheet of paper, but also changes our very way of thinking, in this case helping us fostering new ideas. Typically, it means emergence.
Technology always has deeply influenced our lives and behaviors. The wheel had revolutionized our geographical influence, electricity allowed us to extend our physical abilities, all of this because some people shifted their thinking from the primary destination of these technologies to new uses, empowering their real potential. Innovation always has been a matter of shifting the way we look at current objects, behaviors, usages or processes, finding and leveraging new patterns from the existing.
2.0 technologies are already changing the way we are using the Web, the way we are connecting, conversing and interacting with each other. We discovered that these conversations are a totally new way to learn, to collaborate and to exchange knowledge, but most of our initiatives are still about harnessing these technologies into existing models. To go further, really unleash their potential and embrace the systemic changes they are allowing, we all need a shift.
One of the current trends in Enterprise 2.0 frameworks is the use of social tools to optimize business processes, to fit them into the existing, or to replace them when (and only when) they fall short. This, of course, will minimize failure cases, will speed up business efficiency and facilitate adoption in organizations. But…. where is the shift? Our process driven businesses are no more than thirty years old, and were born from a misunderstanding of Japanese heterarchic and consensual social culture. A process-oriented approach to Enterprise 2.0 won’t allow place for the most powerful aspects of what the Social Web emphasizes: self-organization, non deterministic outcome, unconstrained trust, informal knowledge capture, borderless ecosystems, etc.
We have no tangible, rational proof that the process driven organization is the best model for today businesses, apart from “it works better than before” statements. One of the main reasons why companies are not ready to shift to another, networked, model is risk avoidance. While sustainability, and the gain of new competitive advantages, are crucial for any business, risk avoidance is a management and delivery model which literally turns its back to the non-linear complex world we are living in, and are in fine unsustainable. The very nature of CAS makes them unsuitable for complicated rules and determinist mechanisms, and complexity must instead be embraced with simple, quickly reconfigurable rules.
Marketing, too, needs a shift to truly take into account and take advantage from new customers’ behaviors. A drastic change happened since Peter Drucker wrote that marketing and innovation are the two basic functions of enterprise; both are now tightly connected through direct unbiased interactions with customers. The rise of Social CRM tools allow marketers to get insights from consumers and exchange knowledge to build better customer experiences. This dive into the Social Web and into the conversations blooming everywhere is of course a gold mine for today’s marketing. But if the data those conversations convey is capital for sales or the customer relations department, the weak signals embedded into those interactions are even more important for innovation and for every core business activity. By allowing putting the customer’s voice at the center of organizations, Social CRMs are true design thinking tools. Here lies their real power. To harness it, marketers, from being an interface between businesses and customers, must shift to become real ‘trends amplifiers’, and get ready for a role convergence with innovators, leaving data crunching and mining to an evolving sales department.
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’?
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
Albeit time is a critical dimension in today’s every business, it is curiously absent from most discussion around Enterprise 2.0. Adoption time scale is an issue we will eventually empirically solve as more and more successful case studies are publicized. Just don’t put too much expectation on this data beyond “fail fast and often”, as Dion Hinchcliffe stated it, since adoption can merely be measured on an individual basis, and each case is unique. But beyond that, even more cruelly absent from the debates going on are operational time scales.
It’s all in the process. Really?
Reducing time consumption in complicated tasks’ chains is one of the main objectives of the sophisticated processes which drive our organizations. (Repeatability and industrialization of production is the other one) To achieve productivity and efficiency improvements, they release the burden of “reinventing the wheel” by minimizing the number, and complexity, of decision which have to take place along the chain.
Recent technologies, like SAP’s Gravity or Thingamy, suggest that BPM can be efficiently improved through collaborative work, which opens a new path to Enterprise 2.0 (I won’t discuss here my personal view on the discrepancy between collaborative enterprise and process based organizations). But even if considered from an integrated-to-the-workflow angle, this approach doesn’t take into account the time factor: how long will it take to optimize a process in a collaborative way? To what extend is “how long” acceptable? When is the result of collaborative work stated satisfactory enough to be considered as an outcome?
Thinking of Enterprise 2.0 from a process perspective doesn’t free us from the major shortcoming of all E2.0 frameworks so far: making decisions is one of the main tasks of organizations. This takes time, and we lack methods to understand, leverage and quantify collaborative decision making’s time scales.
Complexity at work
Processes helped shaping big, complicated organizations from the industrial era, but cannot encompass the complexity of our hyperlinked economy. Industrialization has reached a tipping point beyond which traditional productivity funnels must be rethought. Of course, admitting that organizations are complex adaptive systems brings new, and sometimes overwhelming, challenges, but it also highlights some aspects diretcly relevant to the time issue.
Complex adaptive systems (CAS) are self-similar and embedded, which means that communities and collaborative teams are CAS themselves, and their time scale is independent from the global time scale (of the process, of the company…).
CAS are, well, adaptive, which means that the definition of an absolute time scale is out of reach. Time in execution depends on initial factors, so setting fixed time rules for a collaborative work to provide an outcome seems irrelevant. Timeframes are relative to the environment in which they are measured.
CAS are non-linear, which trumps any attempt to measure time and set it as a process variable in a ‘traditional’ way. Statements like ‘you have two days to come to a consensus and find an answer’ are irrelevant. Instead, several time states, several thinking processes, can cohabit in a collaborative initiative.
Time-relative processes
We need to think differently here. Complexity and quantum theories allow us to encompass time, not as an absolute forward mechanism, but as a probabilistic one. While we cannot quantify the time needed to take a decision, we can measure the percentage of consensual adoption of a collaborative decision. Setting thresholds to this percentage would allow for triggering the next task or process, without compromising the global performance of enterprise.
Instead of being dependent on fixed task-based rules, and to be able to address the operational time scales concern Enterprise 2.0 is facing, my bet is that we will see the emergence of new relative time-based processes, to harness the true power of networked teams and communities. I hope you will add your view on this crucial issue.
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.
