L'Institut Boostzone est un carrefour d'échanges construit autour des réseaux professionnels vivants et de ses implications sur le management

Sponsored Top Level Domains, branding and communities

sTDL, i.e. those extensions after the “dot”, that are sponsored e.g. by a brand like .ibm or .love or .hate, or .brand, etc. will soon be available.

The implications for branding are quite interesting. A “brand” will much less need to register in multiple countries or with multiple extensions to be “protected”. The .brand will be useable for all its activities in a fully controlled way. In other words a brand can decide to have only .brand as its root extension.

For examples the countries could then be www.france.brand or www.us.brand etc.

Furthermore multiple groups and communities will be easily identifiable, example www.alumni.brand or www.alumni-france.brand, or whatever address a group within a company or a subgroup may want to have. Communities of practices will have their own visible URL even if the site remains locked for visitors.

Suppliers or other parts of the extended enterprise will be able to have their clearly identified URL like www.supplier.brand or www.partner.brand and by definition the email addresses going with it. This will then be a brand carrier for “brand”.

Similarly, a brand will be able to recognize external leaders and via some sponsoring probably create brand driving communities like John.bertrand@external-experts.brand. Just think of the currently sponsored chairs at university, a sponsored chaired professor might be asked to take as an email john.bertrand@abcuniversity-chair.brand increasing therefore the visibility of the chair and the brand.

Also it may increase the relationship between the individual’s brand and a corporate brand reinforcing the interesting concept of personal brand and corporate brand interactions.

The implications are quite important in terms of marketing, of loyalty creation, of brand protection and development, of personal brands and corporate brands, etc.

For more details in French see this document written by a Boostzone Institute member, Marie Emmanuelle Haas.

Written by Dominique Turcq Uncategorized No Comments »

Tools and Usages, the Innovation Conundrum

As I mentioned in an earlier blog on the Future Features of Social Media, there is a lot of difficulties for community tools designers to “invent” new usages (although they can invent new features) and there is a lot of difficulties for the users to find out which usages they will need tomorrow. This conundrum is particularly true with social media within corporations. It is harder for a corporation to put itself on a wait and see basis, to see how employees will use a tool, than for the Internet community at large (where the evolutions of, say, a Twitter is always fascinating, interesting and risk free for the observers).

The Boostzone Institute organized a workshop on the topic, gathering tool designers and large corporate users, from HR executives to community managers to organization change specialists.

The group arrived at a number of interesting questions and at identifying a number of fields for attention. This post summarizes some of the highlights of the workshop’s discussion and opens discussion for comments.

THE UNDERLYING CORPORATE ORGANIZATION’S SUPPORT FOR A STRUCTURED COLLABORATIVE ENVIRONMENT IS THE FUNDAMENTAL BASE FOR A SOUND CORPORATE COLLABORATIVE PROGRESS

The underlying organization of any collaboration effort is critical for the new usages to become part of the internal culture. Walfa Chouki of Alstom University in her introduction mentioned the constant balance required between technology management, people development and practical community management. For more info on Alstom see their video. One interesting point is that even if the “Center” of the collaborative organization does not “own” the tools or even the collaborative process, since many Business Units prefer to try it alone, the fact that a sort of “base camp” does exist facilitates the progressive development of a new culture. The risk however to see new silos (i.e. new closed communities within the organization) is not negligible.

THE NEW RULES OF CONDUCT ARE NOT YET THERE

As for email, that most individuals still don’t know how to properly use after twenty to thirty years of usage, social media, even internally, are not yet mastered properly by the users. The proliferation of means to distribute knowledge and information actually blurs even further the emerging usages clarity. The most important issues are around the notion of pull/push for information and around the notion of filtering information. The “Infobesity” is a constraint for all players and the quantity of un-useful or unimportant information creates too much noise in every one’s work ecosystem. Tools will be useful but most important will be the emergence of new usages.

Furthermore the arrival of Netgeners (or whatever the name you give to digital natives or social networks native) is not really helping since the rules of conduct within closed corporate networks are very different from those for the outside social networks and many young co-workers are actually lost, when asked to use the collaborative tools within corporations, rather than becoming drivers of change.

The interactions between internal networks and external networks are increasing but here again the rules, even for some crucial things like confidentiality, are far from being understood by employees.

GOVERNANCE(S) OF SOCIAL MEDIA BASED ORGANIZATIONS

The discussion about governance is one of the most important in this field of social innovation. The workshop outlined the necessity for progressing on that front and outlined three types of governance that need a deeper approach:

- The one by the organization (at corporate level or at Business Unit level or even at community level) on the employees’ behavior on social media; it includes the legal governance for instance of work contract and IP protection;

- The one by individuals on what they want to receive or not and on how they want to use the various tools;

- The “de facto” governance imposed by a tool when this tool forces a number of behaviors or processes (number of clicks, nature of publications, visibility of activity, etc.) This third governance seems to be often creating anxieties and discomfort for users.

THE ROI IS NOT AN ROI

The debate on ROI is happening anywhere. It becomes acute at the tool and usage level. Everyone knows now that the cost of tool is more or less negligible but that the cost of collaborative time can be staggering. The discussion went a step further by proposing to separate various ROI: the ROI for an organization in general, the ROI for a given business unit, the ROI for an individual. It proposed as well to include a Risk of non-investing in collaboration.

One of the interesting issues to pursue is the notion that an organization by Business Unit (BU), by separating too clearly the P&Ls, actually reduces the potential for cross unit collaborations by individuals. If a BU is more on the contribution side than on the retribution side, the risk for this BU to stop contributing is extremely high since the return on collaborative time investment would be more visible in the receiving BU..

THE NEW SYMBIOSIS OF USAGES / TECHNOLOGY

Usages and technologies are in symbiosis. Each one acts on the other on a non-linear way. Among the issues to watch with the emergence of new technologies because they will have an important impact on internal collaboration usages:

- The personal platform — (like the one on the IPhone), combined with mashup possibilities and with new technologies like Augmented Realities, — create a universe where an incredible level of mobility is possible but where individuals are partially lost and sometimes scared.

- The arrival of semantic web based applications

- The arrival of powerful localization tools

CHALLENGES ON THE HORIZON

As issues coming soon on the radar screen the group noted as important:

- The improving communities’ technical monitoring tools, linked to the evaluation of individuals, allowing the emergence of metrics on networks and collaboration, are scaring many individuals

- Training programs that should integrate as soon as possible training for collaboration skills for employees and for managers

- The collaboration “evangelists” ; they might in some case prove counter productive since they tend to constantly propose new tools and lose the attention of middle and top management. Organizations need some stability of the tools used, and a slightly outdated tool is more effective if accepted than a new and technologically better tool that scares or at least distracts users.

- On the contrary the newbies, if one organization can attract them properly into communities, become soon very good viral evangelists. The issue then is on how to motivate more newbies to join communities and make them more engaged.

NEXT STEPS

The group agreed on a number of next steps:

- Implications of the collaboration tools (Social Network Metrics in particular but not only) on job definition, evaluation process, compensation frameworks, skill development process

- More work on ROI various dimensions

- A new workshop on the notion of governance of communities

- Analysis of the organizational and engagement risks related to the changes in evaluation systems and in privacy protection

- Analysis of the issues related to the interactions between internal and external communities

- A similar session in 6 months

- The immediate creation of a working group on the subject. It will first be open to the members of the Boostzone Institute who were participants to the September 18^th workshop.

Dominique Turcq

Sept 28^th 2009

Written by Dominique Turcq Uncategorized 2 Comments »

Future features of Corporate Social Media. What’s next?

Technology has progressed so much that it has lost its power towards the users. Today users of Social Media and collaborative tools don’t have to follow the “rule” of a given technology. They can more and more decide what features they want and how they want them to work. This was already valid when mobile phone users decided that SMS was a key feature (telecom companies had not planned for SMS to be an important communication tool!). It is valid today when users of Twitters decide that retweeting is a major usage, etc. But there is more than these ways of using some existing features and making them a major pattern of usage. Today the users, especially in the corporate world, can dictate what they want or not and the technology has to follow. The dictatorship of the programmer’s thinking on how to use a tool is over.

WHICH NEXT MORPHING?

The SMS case and the retweet case mentioned above are just easy examples. The usage of many tools is morphing fast. Let’s mention a few. Calling someone on the phone for a simple question that could be solved by IM or SMS has become intrusive. Using mail inside Social Networks replaces the usage of “classic” mail tools (although not yet within corporations, will it come?). Blogs are progressively becoming an anchor point toward which microblogging is pointing (not yet within corporations). Physical meetings are switching to virtual meetings and it becomes slowly (organizationally) incorrect to convene physically a meeting that could have been hold virtually. A static profile becomes progressively unacceptable and “friends” want to be informed of the changes of profiles, preferences etc; of their “friends” via regular updates as on all Social Networks; will this soon apply within industrial organizations when the word “friend” is replaced by the word “colleague”? Tags are evolving from being tags used by the publisher to qualify documents to tags used by the users for searching not only relevant information but also communities. Etc. examples are plenty.

However, do the users really know that well what they want? (Many will recognize here a classic question for marketing people and a classic topic for those interested in the wisdom of crowds). Probably not yet but it is certainly something coming up.

It is not obvious that users can predict the next morphing, it is however certain that tools designers cannot. The question then becomes for the designers how to remain alert and ready to modify the tools according to the next morphing of social media usage within corporation?

Lets try to identify a few fields where questions are already arising for the usage of social media within corporations. Here are my two cents on the issue of “courtesy governance”, qualification of information and dashboard. This list is just indicative and a deeper one will be elaborated at the upcoming workshop of the Boostzone Institute on the new collaborative usages in corporations.

FOR A “COURTESY GOVERNANCE” of Push and Pull

One of the many issues with current social media is that the notions of Pull and Push are not clear for senders and for receivers. The tools are not clear. The usage could be ambiguous. Twitter is a good example of a push media (that can be at least a distraction, at worst a nuisance, at best a valuable source of information) that has become also a pull media and even a sort of search engine (the ultimate pull).

However the question is not only on the tool’s functionality but on the way it is used, on the power both receivers and senders have on choosing what they want to send and receive. It is probably impossible to create a formal governance (although a few organizations are trying) but it is certainly possible to develop a courtesy governance (remember the time where it was important to explain that capital letters in mail were shouting). A push media can become intrusive, and not only Twitter but even RSS are hard to monitor by the users. How can one receiver user select among the messages coming from a blog or a twitter user according to his priorities and interest as a receiver at a given point of time? Today most of tools are still on a O/1 format: either you get everything or you get nothing. Very few tools allow a confrontation of priorities and interest. Some do, like a phone call when the number is displayed: the caller says to the receiver that he wants to talk and considers it as urgent and important. But if the receiver has a different point of view he can just skip the call. The same happens with mail where one can open, or not, or delay the opening of a mail or even hide the sender definitively by pushing the spam button. But even these rudimentary measures do not exist easily on other social media and we all for example have to read the boring and uninteresting tweets of people, or their blogs on which we have put an RSS, just because we consider that from time to time they have interesting things to say. I personally subscribed to a number of people I am interested to follow because I consider them as having things to say, but I have recently cut the link because I discovered they also have many things to say on which I am not interested at all. My arbitrage was towards losing information rather than losing time.

One can expect future tools to help chose, in a simple way, how to configure and constantly reconfigure the alerts one gets. The simplicity is essential since the priorities one has on what one receives can change according to the moment, the sender and the topic.

QUALIFIYING INFORMATION

The qualification of information/publication will become a must. But it is easier said than done. What is a qualification? One can say at least that a message can be urgent/ important/ urgent and important/ neutral i.e. informational only. And this is still very simplistic since it does not even include the topic to which the piece of information is related or the public/confidential dimension, the sender’s importance for the receiver, etc. But, anyway, the most important is that the sender’s choice does not necessarily correspond to the receiver’s choice for the same information (and the problem is compounded when an information goes to several receivers, like with a blog or a tweet where multiple receivers will have multiple opinions on the qualification of an information).

The risk of creating frustration is large, especially for time conscious people (what most working people are and what all supervisors are) as the diagram below shows. The difference of perception on the relevance of an information can lead to distrust, frustration, even anger because of the time loss, and at the end can often harm the credibility of the sender.

WHICH DASHBOARD FOR TOMORROW?

How to plan for tomorrow? Probably by starting to develop “relevance dashboards”. In other words, like what is done today with search engines, future dashboards of information will have to get intelligent and to filter information according to the receiver needs and not only to the sender’s indications. It will have to be a better combination of automatic pull (please Mr. aggregator search constantly for that very specific type of information and bring it up, this feature is quite advanced today but still lacks flexibility), of filters on received push (please Mr. Aggregator separate the wheat from the chaff; this feature is clearly in infancy), of an intelligent filtering system able to identify quickly my time available, my current priorities, my current interests… (This feature is not yet here, but is it that far?).

Other issues corporate as users may want to see included as soon as possible are elements of the interfaces between internal social media platforms and public social networks. For instance for importing data from LinkedIn of a new employee. Also, for checking on groups, opened on external platforms like LinkedIn but in a way limited to a number of employees (e.g. project group X of corporate Y) in order to make sure that, when an employee leaves the company, his access to the external group is cancelled (a tough challenge as one can predict, but an essential one if one wants to reduce the governance challenge of external groups of employees).

We will discuss these issues and others around the topic of corporate user’s choice within a round table of users and tool designers at our next Workshop of the Boostzone Institute on the new collaborative usages in Paris on September 18^th. For those not having the opportunity to come, comments are welcome on this blog and a summary will be published here after the workshop.

Written by Dominique Turcq corporate social media, corporate tools, features, future Enterprise 2.0, Management, WOW world of work No Comments »

Sharing good practices as a social networking practice

Through Jean-Paul Taravella (Thanks !), my colleague at AREVA, I had the privilege to meet Lamis Zolhof of SNCF today. Lamis, an architect by training, has implemented one of the very few successful intranet applications I have seen so far to share best practices. Many companies present similar concepts at conventions and trade shows, usually along with the software company who developed the application, but actually very few go beyond a vague proof of concept.

The platform, nick named ISIBOL (don’t ask why – only SNCF insiders can understand) is actually used!  Several new good practices have been posted each day for the last three years, and some of them have been downloaded for reuse hundreds and even thousands of time.

To me this was an eye opener, because I have always had serious doubts about the general concept of sharing “best practices”. The whole idea of transferring a collective way of doing things from one business location to another regardless of the context appears to me like a daunting task even if it it mandated by the CEO, which is seldom the case, if ever. It’s like transplanting a full grown tree. But ISIBOL is different. Here it’s not about collective best practices such as a new business process, but about personal ones such as excel macros or survey templates. It’s about sharing reusable methods and tools for personal productivity. Not only are these much easier to transfer, but the benefit is primarily for the users themselves. The benefit for the company is not an objective but an outcome.

Aside from this sensible starting point, Lamis has managed to focus her attention on something that most intranet program managers tend to take for granted, i.e. the user experience. Since the beginning, Lamis wanted the platform to be user-friendly and straightforward, with zero training need. She copied some of the features of the successful internet applications, both in the e-business and collaborative fields, and went into extreme details, never compromising on clarity, simplicity and ease-of-use, raising hell if the developer did not meet her expectations. She ended up with a lively collaborative platform that everyone could understand and relate to. It is also fun to use because contributions and downloads are rewarded by a point system that can be redeemed with token gifts.

But this was still not enough. Lamis had to put a lot of energy in the first 18 months of roll-out to actively sell the platform to key users, making sure that all people she met actually subscribed to the service. She put professionally designed posters on the wall, sent flyers, e-mailed reminders, etc. never giving up. And it finally paid off.

But in the end, the key achievement of this ISIBOL platform is the initiation of a deep behavioral change whereby employees have been provided with a way to present to their colleagues what they are proud of, which is a good step towards presenting what they are currently doing, which is the essence of social networks. And that is the next step.

Written by Martin R. Dugage best practices, lamis_zolhof, sncf Enterprise 2.0, Uncategorized No Comments »

A note to CEOs: WHY switching your organization toward interactive management? HOW?

French text under the English one

WHY? Three objectives.

Let’s take some distance with the Enterprise 2.0 concept and fashion and wonder what are the real reasons why a corporation should switch to an interactive management with all its cohort of implied pain and complexity (since this is a change issue and not a fun issue). It is not only because collaborative/ interactive management is on its way to become a sort of new normal for management, due in particular to the social evolution towards more connections and social networks. More deeply, the so what is simpler than that and more profound: the collaborative mode is an essential way to improve productivity, innovation and engagement. All the rest is accessories.

HOW? Two assets have to be built

Any strategy relies on the creation of competitive advantages. Two are emerging out of a well managed interactive management model.

The first one is an “Information asset” by which a corporation becomes able to better manage information than its competitors. It implies finding information, codifying it, qualifying it, distributing it, valorizing it, combining it, towards one of the objectives mentioned above. It implies publishing, tagging, distributing, debating, validating, all those things that work infinitely better within a collaborative culture.

The second one is a “Relational asset” by which individuals interact better with each other internally and externally. It implies social networks, intelligent directories, forums, internal and external communities, etc. In short all the structures and systems allowing individuals to co-labor together.

NOTHING REALLY NEW HERE

These three objectives and these two assets were here long before the Internet (1.0 or 2.0 or whatever) BUT the mass (of information or of contacts), the speed of mobilization (of information or contacts) and the drastic reduction in transaction costs (for accessing information or contacts) are such that a whole new way of building these assets and pursuing these objectives is now necessary. Tools are available and the nice thing here is that once one knows what one wants, the tools will follow, not the contrary. The slavery to the tools is over. It does not make change simpler since all these issues involve both choices and pain. One cannot pursue all objectives at once or build these assets in one day (even one year) and one cannot build these assets without pain, all changes are painful. But the rewards could be great IF the strategic intent is not lost and pursued relentlessly.

This is what is behind the Boostzone Institute base line: “Strategic Impact Through Connected People”.

VERSION FRANCAISE

Note aux PDG : Pourquoi faire passer votre organisation au management interactif? Comment ?

POURQUOI ? Trois objectifs

Si la mode du 2.0 et notamment de l’Entreprise 2.0 ou encore E2.0 (!) semble s’être installée, il convient de prendre un peu de distance et de s’interroger, simplement, sur les vraies raisons qui font qu’une entreprise devrait faire les efforts considérables de changement que le management réseau-centré / collaboratif/ interactif va apporter, car il s’agit d’un changement profond de son organisation, et donc d’un changement couteux et risqué. Ce n’est certainement pas parce que tout le monde y vient ou encore parce que le mode « réseau-social » va devenir le mode normal de travail. Mais simplement parce que le mode collaboratif va permettre de poursuivre mieux les trois objectifs fondamentaux de toute organisation qui sont nécessaires à sa survie: Productivité, Innovation, Engagement. Pratiquement tout le reste n’est que sous chapitre.

COMMENT ? Deux actifs à construire

Toute stratégie repose sur la construction d ‘avantages compétitifs. Deux avantages compétitifs vont émerger d’un management collaboratif bien mené :

La construction d’un « actif informationnel », c’est à dire la capacité à mieux gérer que la concurrence les informations, leur codification, leur qualification, leur circulation, leur transformation, leur utilisation vers l’un des trois objectifs ci dessus mentionnés. Cela implique la veille, le marquage d’une information, son partage, sa discussion, son évaluation, etc. tout un ensemble de choses qui se font infiniment mieux et plus vite dans une organisation collaborative.

La construction d’un « actif relationnel », c’est à dire la capacité à inciter les hommes à mieux interagir entre eux dans l’entreprise et avec le monde extérieur. Cela implique des annuaires sociaux, des forums, des communautés internes et externes, bref des structures et des façons de co-labeurer radicalement nouvelles.

RIEN DE NEUF MAIS TOUT EST NEUF

Rien de nouveau ici par rapport à l’organisation du XXième siècle SAUF que la masse (d’information ou de contacts), et la vitesse (de diffusion ou de mobilisation de contacts) ont augmenté ET sont désormais gérables à un coût de transaction ridiculement bas. Les outils sont disponibles. Toutefois ils ne serviront à rien si les objectifs prioritaires ne sont pas définis (on ne peut pas poursuivre de façon égale les trois objectifs à la fois) et si les actifs à construire ne le sont pas de façon méthodique (un actif ne se construit pas « tout seul »).

C’est ce qui est derrière la baseline de l’Institut Boostzone : Strategic Impact Through Connected People…

Dominique Turcq

Written by Dominique Turcq collaboration, collaborative management, communities, E2.0, enterprise2.0, interactive management, tools Enterprise 2.0, Management, WOW world of work, edito No Comments »