Home
Bertrand Duperrin's Library tagged → View Popular
The Rise Of Networks, The End Of Process
"For decades, business planners have made a distinction between repetitive, lock-step processes, where very little variability is involved (think pharmacy), and more free-form, unstructured processes where a higher degree of variability is expected (think emergency room). Taking the abstraction of a process out of the world of chemistry, manufacturing, and logistics, and treating the people involved as so many chemicals, gears, or trucks seemed like a good idea in the past, but is not going to be workable, going forward."
-
We will have to devise a new, richer way to think about people's interactions -- via social networks -- and our connection to mechanical processes and devices.
-
We will still get some value out of thinking through business models structurally, and choreographing steps in production or the delivery of service. But the sophistication of machines and customers means that more and more of the steps will have a wider range of alternatives,
- 1 more annotations...
Blogging Innovation: Identifying the Innovators in your Firm
"The five attributes the authors identified as relevant for innovation are: associating (making connections across unrelated ideas or problems), questioning (especially focused on "what if" or "why not"), observation (especially observing behavior), experimentation (new experiences or exploration) and networking (especially with people from different industries or perspectives). Let's assume these factors are correct - from my experience they appear to be. Then, let's compare to what happens in many firms today."
-
The point here is that most organizations actively work against many of the attributes that would define good innovators.
So, if you are seeking to build an innovation team, or hire people with a greater proclivity for innovation, perhaps you should ask the following questions:
Missing Voices: Why Employees Are Afraid to Speak Up At Work
"So why aren’t employees speaking up? And when they do, what are they saying, and to whom? And what’s the danger to the company when it’s not listening to employee voices?
Burris sought to answer these questions in an ongoing study in which he and his colleagues are surveying more than 3,000 employees at 11 different credit unions around the country about their experience in speaking up at work."
-
“There’s lots of research that shows when employees don’t feel involved in the workplace, they tend to withdraw. They don’t engage in all the extra activities that aren’t required for the job, such as helping a coworker, staying late or taking on extra responsibilities. It’s not the formal, required part of the job, but it’s certainly necessary for the organization to succeed.”
-
Many employees say they don’t speak up to their boss because of fear of repercussions. But are workers just being paranoid? Burris’ research says no.
- 3 more annotations...
Networked community management
Online work team environments do not and cannot have this level of complexity or work would not get done in the manner that those paying for it would like. The work may be complicated but there are rules, boundaries and processes. Work groups need managers who can direct activities in order to achieve goals. This type of work is collaborative.
Role of social software and networks in knowledge management
Social software provides an answer to the 'why' question. It is a means of giving people what they want in terms of their traditional knowledge management activities, in a way that also benefits the firm.
Understanding Users of Social Networks
If the ongoing social networking revolution has you scratching your head and asking, "Why do people spend time on this?" and "How can my company benefit from the social network revolution?" you've got a lot in common with Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski
-
"Online social networks are most useful when they address real failures in the operation of offline networks," says Piskorski.
-
Corporate marketers by and large struggle with how to use social networking sites to reach potential customers, says Piskorski, who advises companies on this subject. The problem is that execs think of online social networks as social media and treat it as another channel to get people to click through to a site.
- 2 more annotations...
What Enterprise Could Learn From AI Research History
The analogy itself between neural networks and a real community-based company is striking, and so are the similarities between the limitations of this approach and some Enterprise 2.0 concerns. Neural networks encountered two big problems: relevancy and convergence (they couldn’t ensure to converge onto the desired pattern, and sophisticated training techniques, such as back-propagation, were necessary to ensure convergence). Social media are facing the very same problems in the enterprise: how could we ensure that communities lead to the right consensus for applicable decisions to be taken? I evoked some possible trails in my last post, and this is a crucial point.
-
Should, and will, the Enterprise 2.0 follow the same track as AI did? If so, next move would be to get rid of the big business processes we all know, and replace them with micro-processes applicable at individual scale. For instance, the way Japanese coworkers are able to make a consensus emerge from community-based workshops, one of the pre-requisite of Kaizen, rely on their heavy sense of “doing the right thing”. To set up such micro-processes is a radical move from where we are and where the most daring organizations try to go,
A Community? A Network? An Audience?
We have a lot of semantic issues in the social media/online space. The term community is particularly problematic because people tend to throw it around for any online group that interacts with content. The problem for me is that communities are not about content, they are about relationships. Relationships do need content/programs/conversations in order to develop – just like they do in the real world – but just because a large group of people come by regularly and comment on online content doesn’t mean there is a true community.
How 3M Forged a Culture of Collaboration
The Post-it company built and nurtured a system in which employees across divisions are encouraged—even expected—to collaborate
Chez les développeurs, trop de connexions freine l'innovation
Viktor Mayer-Schönbergeren est persuadé, dans le futur "nous verrons apparaître des poches d’équipes réduites avec moins d’interconnections et un mode de pensée moins grégaire". Elles pourront ainsi prendre plus de risques et s’aventurer à essayer des solutions plus radicales. Il est également urgent de réintroduire une certaine compétition entre les différentes équipes de développement. Et de faire évaluer les projets non par des pairs - comme c’est l’usage - mais par un panel d’experts évoluant dans des domaines légèrement en retrait de celui étudié.
Productivity in a Networked Era – Assessing ROII (Return on Investment in Interaction)
Today’s networked era requires a new way to make investment decisions that incorporates intangible assets and more accurately depicts how value is created.
The industrial age has run out of steam. Look at General Motors. Look at Chrysler. We are witnessing the death throes of management models that have outlived their usefulness.
The network era now replacing the industrial age holds great promise. Networked organizations are reaping rewards for connecting people, know-how and ideas at an ever-faster pace. Value creation has migrated from what we can see (physical assets) to intangibles (ideas). Look at Google and Cisco.
-
ROI is an accounting and financial management concept businesses use to decide where to make investments and to assess the success of investment decisions after the fact. ROI reduces both return — R, what you expect back — and investment — I, what you expect to put in to numbers — making it possible to compare one investment opportunity to another. The numbers tie back to categories on the balance sheet and income statement, (i.e. tangible assets and hard-dollar returns).
-
Measuring intangibles involves making judgment calls, so managers often exclude intangibles from their ROI calculations. Several purported authorities on calculating ROI suggest taking intangibles into account by putting them on a list but refusing to estimate their value. This leads you to comparing numbers to words, apples to oranges.
- 1 more annotations...
Four Value Network Patterns to Accelerate Time from Ideation to Commercialization | ValueNetworks.com
Value network analysis as applied to innovation from ideation to commercialization provides a possible solution to one of the most challenging business issues in the intangibles economy: describing exactly how intangible assets such as intellectual capital are converted into ideas and other deliverables deployed in purposeful networks to create economic or social value. The ability to visualize, analyze and optimize innovation networks is of great value to both government bodies responsible for regional development and for commercial businesses seeking to bring innovations to market. Specifically making the transition from one phase or "state" of the innovation network to another is often problematic. As additional roles come into play the nature of the interactions change across the entire network. Innovation networks are increasingly complex and relationships must be maintained in some cases for several years. Supporting the integrity and continuity of an innovation network is critical to success.
12 Rules For Bringing 'Social' To Your Business
The social meme has now fallen prey to this and frankly it's at serious risk of losing what makes it special, at least in terms of the modern 2.0 era. All of the new uses of "social" in the online world: Social media, social marketing, software software, social networking, and so on, can be -- and often are -- extremely potent new methods for creating value with human relationships over the network. They can represent truly important, even revolutionary, new changes in the way to we interact with each other in our lives and businesses.
-
Claims that you can use a Twitter account to turn around your customer service are another. These things can certainly help make a business social, but they are just the means to a long journey; a new way of operating a business in a more open, emergent, and efficient way.
-
the network (the Web or enterprise or both) is about who is on it and how involved they are. Whether this is a customer community, an internal Enterprise 2.0 effort with blogs, wikis, or just a corporate social network, the transition to social business is about involving and engaging people far more than it is about picking a technology or building the infrastructure
- 10 more annotations...
Travail collaboratif et gestion des talents
Cette présentation de Knowledge infusion insiste avant tout sur les changements de pratiques et de cultures liés à la mise en place d'une entreprise 2.0, que ce soit pour les SI, le business model ou la gestion des ressources humaines. Cette démarche en réseau impact aussi la relation client. On va trouver une ouverture plus importante de la part de l'entreprise. Ainsi les clients vont proposer des solutions, des innovations et accompagner ces évolutions. Ce qui réduit grandement les coûts de R&D, marketing, service après-vente...
Getting togetherness
Many other companies are also trying to foster greater collaboration within their ranks. Some are using web-based social media to help them. For instance, Lockheed Martin, an American defence giant, plans to roll out Unity—a software platform that encourages employees from different areas to connect with one another via blogs, wikis and other online tools—across its entire business later this year, after piloting it in one area. But dismantling internal barriers to co-operation is a tricky business that requires much more than smart software. Unless firms are careful, there is a real danger that collaborative crusades could do them more harm than good.
The Strategic Advantage of Global Process and Practice Networks - The Big Shift - HarvardBusiness.org
It goes without saying that no matter how much talent a company might have, there are many more talented people working outside its boundaries. Yet all too many companies focus solely on acquiring talent, on bringing talent inside the firm. Why not access talent wherever it resides?
Some might say there's no way of doing so without sharply increasing the cost of complexity. New institutional practices can reduce these costs, however, as companies become:
-
• Less transactional and more relational.
• Less "hardwired" and more "loosely coupled."
• Less focused on merely accessing external capabilities and more focused on rapid capability building for every participant.
• Less focused on the firm and internal silos and more supportive of richer cross-enterprise interactions and collaborations among workers. -
Companies must also participate in (and sometimes orchestrate) new organizational forms and structures called global process and practice networks.
- 3 more annotations...
Tomorrow's Talent Networks - The Big Shift - HarvardBusiness.org
Even these questions indicate a dated view of where talent is and how to get the most out of it. Sure, no one disputes the importance of talent, even in a recession. But, as a Deloitte report contends (.pdf link), companies spend entirely too much time focused on attracting and retaining talent. Moreover, as they do, they often lose sight of what appeals to and keeps hold of talent in the first place. (See John's perspectives on the report and on the mindsets that limit firms.)
-
Talented workers join companies and stay there because they believe they'll learn faster and better than they would at other employers.
-
Talented workers develop instead by:
- Trying new things.
- Experimenting with what they do in their jobs and how they do it.
- Tackling real problems with talented people who have different backgrounds and skills.
- Participating in talent networks, the largely invisible matrix structures that run within firms and, with increasing frequency, between and across them. - 1 more annotations...
The New Organization Model: Learning at Scale - The Big Shift - HarvardBusiness.org
In recent posts we've described a massive institutional transformation that will occur as part of the big shift: the move from institutions designed for scalable efficiency to institutions designed for scalable learning. The core questions we all need to address are: who will drive this transformation? Who will be the agents of change? Will it be institutional leaders from above or individuals from below and from the outside of our current institutions?
-
From the talent side of the equation the key requirement for institutional success is to move from scalable efficiency to scalable learning.
-
talent will pull institutions into the 21st century.
- 1 more annotations...
SocialText
Who are the effective people you know? They're not just smart and good at what they do. They know how to get things done. In an organization, they know how the system works in ways that aren't written down. They know who really knows what (and that may not be the person with the title). They may not know everything, but they know who knows what. They don't have all the skills and contacts themselves, but they know how to find the key people. In an organization, functional relationships and functional skills are only a part of what makes people successful.
Collaboration will push people management from execution to strategy
In this approach, it is more important to find key issues on which to collaborate (and learn to better collaborate) than to identify "collaboration skills" that would afterwards be deployed through training. I think that training can only come as a support of a wider methodology.
Selected Tags
Related Tags
socialnetworks (26)- collaboration (11)
- networking (10)
- communities (8)
- socialnetworking (8)
- management (7)
- web2.0 (7)
- business (6)
- process (5)
- innovation (5)
- socialmedia (5)
- organization (5)
- change (4)
- enterprise2.0 (4)
- collectiveintelligence (4)
- connections (3)
- businessprocess (3)
- productivity (3)
- talentmanagement (3)
Sponsored Links
Top Contributors
Groups interested in networks
-
Social Networking for Language Learning
Social Networks for Learnin...
Items: 15 | Visits: 365
Created by: Victoria Castrillejo
-
Educational Tools
These tools can be used to ...
Items: 87 | Visits: 120
Created by: Tracie Hightower
-
Digital Citizenship for Educators
Some resources for educator...
Items: 15 | Visits: 176
Created by: Shelley K.
Highlighter, Sticky notes, Tagging, Groups and Network: integrated suite dramatically boosting research productivity. Learn more »
Join Diigo