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Employee Computing for Collaboration, Innovation, and Productivity
The anecdotes come from the fieldwork of a major study of employee computing released by nGenera Corporation earlier this week. A group of colleagues and I spent more than a year conducting the research, which was sponsored by a blue-ribbon syndicate of global corporations that are members of our nGenera Insight programs. We interviewed individuals at top vendors, global companies, and major government agencies to understand the best way to unleash employee creativity, support new forms of collaboration, and drive new levels of productivity.
What Social CRM means for the IT Department
Though the theme of today’s meeting is “Is Social CRM for Real?”, I suspect that many of the people at today’s meeting will actually be thinking “What exactly is Social CRM and what does it mean to me?” Of course this question has been asked and answered in a number of blog posts by various members of the SCRM community, but the perspective of the IT department has been largely ignored. So in preparation for today’s meeting I thought I’d take a pass at trying to explain what Social CRM means from an IT department perspective.
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From a business systems point of view, becoming a socially-driven business requires that you re-think and re-engineer your business systems and processes in order to take advantage of Web-based social tools, technologies, and concepts.
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With Enterprise 2.0 tools the asset being leveraged is employees. With Social CRM the asset being leveraged is the customer.
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Social IT leadership
Social IT leadership is leadership that is exercised through the organization’s internal social media (Enterprise 2.0) and used to spread visions, provide feedback, develop and communicate organizational culture, and motivate knowledge workers for knowledge sharing and to work together across organizational structures. The leadership has a social and relational character, and use social mechanisms to help in the execution.
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A Social IT leaders’ most important function will be to facilitate common knowledge created and open network among the employees. This implies a shift of the information’s power center, which previously has been within the management, to the employees. This will require a change of culture, for both the employees and the managers in an implementation phas
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Knowledge on how to develop networks and engages to knowledge creation will be a key competence. Moreover, the leader must be conscious of own behavior on the sites. By using the platform the leader will be able to consciously exercise a leadership that encourages, engages, involves, and not least creates knowledge among the employees
Gartner Identifies New Approach for Enterprise Architecture
“The first key characteristic of the emergent approach is best summarised as ‘architect the lines, not the boxes’, which means managing the connections between different parts of the business rather than the actual parts of the business themselves,” said Bruce Robertson, research vice president at Gartner. “The second key characteristic is that it models all relationships as interactions via some set of interfaces, which can be completely informal and manual – for example, sending handwritten invitations to a party via postal letters - to highly formal and automated, such as credit-card transactions across the Visa network.”
Sanity check: Is IT no longer about technology?
It’s become horribly cliche to talk about the importance of IT-business alignment and the need for IT professionals to become much more business-savvy, but Gartner’s Tom Austin (right) takes it to the next level. He believes that the IT professional of the future will be less of an engineer and more of a social scientist.
What? Yes, you heard that right — the word “social” will become a key part of the IT professional’s job description. It flies in the face of most of the stereotypes about techies and it sounds a little corny, but Austin does draw some interesting conclusions that are worth a look, if only because they are so unconventional.
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“Too often, we have measurement and reward systems that are focused on how many transactions did you process, how many orders did you ship, and how many deals did you close — rather than who helped these other people succeed.”
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“There are still people in IT who’ll have to worry about keeping the systems running, but now we’re going to think more about how to exploit the things we can do with social networking, expertise location, and all of the other higher-level social ordered phenomenon we can facilitate using technology.”
Dismantle Mistrust Between IT and the Business
While these perceptions are typically not found at the top of IT or business organizations, they are prevalent in the trenches where the work gets done. And they need to be addressed. Without effective internal collaboration between IT and the rest of the business, technology will continue to be underutilized and the potential under-realized. How, for example, can companies leverage collaborative technologies when the teams tasked with exploiting the tools have difficulty collaborating?
Sustaining Software Innovation from the Client to the Web
Despite the current strength and promise of the Internet software market, the future pace of growth and innovation is not assured. The principles of choice, opportunity, and interoperability were important in the growth of PC software and in the overall health of the information technology ecosystem, and these same principles will shape competition in Internet software, according to HBS professor Marco Iansiti
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firms should allow consumers and partners to have a real choice between complementary products and services from otherwise competing firms
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specifically, opportunity that is facilitated by giving developers platform access and the ability to innovate and build on platform technologies to create new products and services.
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An alternative way to define IT project results
IT projects need define a combine the engineering work to be done and the results that they create. Doing so requires more than giving the project a business based name. Here are a few steps for an alternative way to define an IT project.
Combining these three ideas, when companies pay to execute a project, it’s not the project they want, it’s the result. They want more revenue generating customer relationships, not processes around a CRM system or even the capability to look up customer names. What they want is the result.
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First, companies don’t pay for activities, they pay for results. As explains in the blog post http://blogs.gartner.com/mark_mcdonald/2009/06/30/activities-vs-results—the-difference-makes-all-the-difference/From this post.
Second, those results come from changing capabilities which are a more powerful definition of the business. So it’s the capability people want. http://blogs.gartner.com/mark_mcdonald/2009/07/02/capability-is-more-powerful-than-process/
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Results can be defined in the following ways:
«La vocation des produits TIC est de générer des gains de productivité»
L’immatériel constitue aujourd’hui un enjeu incontournable pour l’ensemble de l’économie. A en croire certains, les actifs immatériels ont un rôle non négligeables en termes de croissance. C’est la raison pour laquelle nous aimerions approcher avec vous le profil macroéconomique de cette «nouvelle» économie de l’immatériel.
Tout d’abord, si vous me le permettez, il est nécessaire de clarifier les définitions et les différents concepts dont on parle, et avec lesquels tout le monde n’est pas forcément familier.
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Dans la «knowledge economy», le savoir et la production intellectuelle deviennent des inputs de production, la matière première, mais également l’output de cette nouvelle catégorie d’industries (en d’autres termes, on produit du savoir, ou des œuvres de l’esprit, avec d’autres savoirs ou œuvres de l’esprit). Tout cela correspond à de l’information «numérisable» qui peut être «traitée» par les TIC.
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La nouvelle économie est plus difficile à définir. Elle traduit l’impact des TIC et de la knowledge economy sur les processus productifs, la réorganisation des chaînes de valeur et on pense bien entendu que cette réorganisation des chaînes de production s’est basée sur des gains de productivité.
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How to Support Your IT Innovators
It's critical to have at least one person on your team who is a "power user" because, in the words of a wise IT leader I interviewed, "business groups who have somebody on their team who is an IT expert do much better with IT (in terms of leveraging technology to meet their needs) than those who do not."
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This lack of competence and confidence means that you are letting technology manage you rather than the other way around.
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This isn't about "doing IT's job for them" — it's about giving your people the capability to discover value-added opportunities and develop "visual" requirements to facilitate productive communication with IT.
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Enterprise Web 2.0 Calls for Access Control, Not Shutoff
What’s holding many organizations back are four core concerns:
* Productivity levels will decrease, due to employees spending time on social media Websites (given that it’s not part of their job).
* High-bandwidth Web 2.0 sites will overload the network, potentially blocking mission-critical applications and services.
* Employees will access pornographic material or other inappropriate Websites.
* Security and privacy issues will increase.
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I believe the solution lies in an organization's ability to gain insight into user activity, applications, and potential threats and then use this knowledge to group users into different categories of access.
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Only by helping to find out what’s needed and helping management to create policies around these requirements can IT ensure that network resources are available for business-critical applications and traffic spikes -- without compromising the quality of the network or the productivity of employees.
Toward a Pattern Language for Enterprise 2.0
I’m dividing my 2.0 vs. 1.0 comparisons into two groups. First is a set of patterns where 2.0 is just better than 1.0 – where the old should, I believe, just be replaced with the new. Second is a set in which 2.0 is an alternative or addition to 1.0, not a replacement for it. This second group of patterns, in other words, shows two alternatives, both of them valuable and viable, for how computers are used to get work done.
Enterprise 2.0 Isn’t a Checklist
This appears to be indicative of all emerging disciplines/practices. But for Enterprise 2.0, unlike Data Warehousing, the predominant focus is NOT technology. And yet, from where does the funding or focus from such initiatives typically come? This is a much larger issue — one related to obsolete organizational design practices. The reason IT is the most obvious choice for sponsorship is that it is the only organization not vertically challenged — it delivers (or should) only horizontal services to an enterprise — crossing all other departments. Indeed, IT is one of the few organizations that takes on the battle to find common threads across organizations to weave the horizontal lines of the tapestry that holds the business together.
And yet, the approaches needed for E2.0 initiatives are the antithesis of typical IT practices.
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An optimal E2.0 initiative evolves organically (hold that thought for further clarification).
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this is an era to shift away from the locked down binary code of repeatability (optimal for machinery) and become more comfortable with the ’squishy’ realm of the heuristic (optimal for capitalizing on human wetware).
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A Curious Case of Enterprise 2.0
When was the last time you used a sequence of dot-separated numbers to describe a large official organization? Yet all the talk about Government 2.0 doesn’t seem to surprise anyone. The lack of surprise however doesn’t imply shared understanding. Just try asking ten people who use the term Web 2.0 what exactly it means – and most likely you will get ten different answers.
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AIIM’s year-old survey, which found that 74% of surveyed organizations had no idea what E2.0 meant or how it could be meaningfully applied, likely would’ve come back with a similar numbers today.
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E2.0 is still primarily a vendor space, dominated by ISVs selling software to businesses who haven’t really asked for it. It is simply not a demand-driven market. By contrast, just think of CRM or payroll software. You don’t need to convince businesses they need that.
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IT, RH, Com : bouleversements à venir
Que restera-t-il à la fonction RH ? Les nouvelles compétences de communication déployées par la fonction communication, l’environnement de travail développé par IT, et dans tout cela, les managers de plus en plus acteurs dans les pratiques classiques d’entretien annuel, de recrutement, de développement …
Le vrai défi, à mon sens, sera de mesurer l’impact des investissements à venir puisque la plupart seront faits dans les domaines … du talent. Identifier les populations clé, définir des stratégies sur mesure pour chacune d’entre elles tout en assurant la cohérence d’ensemble et surtout, surtout, être capables d’établir avec la Direction une conversation suivie sur l’importance et la pertinence de l’investissement dans le capital humain.
Consumer apps in the workplace: much worse than expected
To maintain a grip on application and device security, enterprises will clearly have to work harder. Gartner, for example, predicts that by 2011, 10% of all information technology spending will reside with employees. Employees will acquire their own technology and use it for work purposes - especially in situations where no clear policy is set. Employees are also set to customize 90% of the technology they use at work by 2015.
Four Ways to Spur Innovation at Your Company
How can other institutional leaders follow suit to foster the emergence of creation spaces and collaboration curves? Here are four broad suggestions:
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More broadly, leaders must redefine the reason their institutions exist, breaking down institutional walls to move from scalable push to scalable pull.
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Passionate individuals are usually talented and motivated, but they're often unhappy - they see the potential for themselves and for the institution where they work, but can feel blocked in their efforts to achieve it. Institutional leaders must put mechanisms in place to connect these individuals with each other, and serve as their champion.
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Innovating for all the wrong reasons
My good friend and fellow TechRepublic blogger Chad Perrin suggested that I write about when clients pursue change for the wrong reasons. If your client says, “We need to implement TPD” (an abbreviation I just made up to stand for Technology/Process of the Day), you better make sure it isn’t because of any of these motivations.
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It’s buzzword compliant.
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The competition’s doing it.
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Enterprise 2.0: Chance or Fool’s Paradise for Business Transformation in Economic Crisis
The last two Enterprise 2.0 FORUMs have shown that there are some reoccuring characteristics of sucessful perceived E2.0 projects that - from a qualitative perspective - might turn out to be the critical success factors. In regards to our on-going discussions about the topics of the Enterprise 2.0 programm I would therefore like to make some summing-up on these aspects:
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IT organizations usually follow a Plan-Build-Run framework that often means Plan-Build-Runaway after the system is deployed. But since many social applications are not transactional or process-specific in a traditional sense [.
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It structures the benefits of feedback on five levels (from the more concrete to less concrete) : “social creation” (benefits from the collective intelligence and actions in creating information, cross-links etc), direct feedback (benefits from cross-linking people and information by trackbacks, comments, bookmarks and feed subscriptions), systemic feedback (benefits from new relations/interconnections between people and information) and social feedback (benefits from gaining positive feedback, authority and acknowledgement).
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Forrester Research: SaaS gains enterprise adoption, expands beyond 'vanilla' offerings | Dana Gardner’s BriefingsDirect | ZDNet.com
Forrester determined 13 areas where SaaS applications are making headway. These include:
* Archiving and eDiscovery
* Business Intelligence (BI)
* Collaboration
* CRM
* Digital asset management
* Enterprise content management
* Enterprise resource planning (ERP)
* Human resources
* Integration
* IT management
* Online backup
* Supply chain management
* Web content management
* Web conferencing
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