Designing the Social Workplace #e20s

This track (nr 3) at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit is about ‘Designing the Social Workplace’ with Miguel Membrado (Kimind), Marie Khayet (Essec Business school), Frederic Williquet (SD Worx) and Jane McConnell (NetStrategy/JMC). This breakout was prepared before the Summit in Meet-ups. The insights from the meet-ups are shared first.

What is a social workplace? What is the digital workplace and how is it becoming social? There are four enablers of the digital workplace, according to Marie?
  1. Flexible work hours
  2. Technology
  3. Social media platform
  4. Cloud-based services 
How can this be integrated in the corporate tools? The social workplace is not an IT system but an ecosystem with work in context.

Miguel goes into the company cultural issues with respect to Social Business. Not in all cultures openly sharing insights is normal. In companies like Google and IBM this is mainstream, but not in all companies.

They also looked at objectives and metrics. How do you measure adoption and metrics? Good tools have the potential to easily provide analytic information.

Finally they also talked about rewards. If you have the data, how do you reward employees? Do you reward employees or should their motivation come from within? In France explicit rewards is stranger than in the US, for instance.

The breakout speakers see most of the adoption problems coming from (middle) management, not employees. The most-heard reason to thwart adoption is information security. Adoption is most efficient when top-management is on board. It is important to give management good reasons and objectives to move in this space.

On the other hand, Jane thinks it’s more complex. It’s not just management and/or employees. It’s also legislation (for instance in the pharmaceutical industry). There, management would like to move, but also has to reckon with rules and laws in countries.

Frederic wonders: Is it really middle managers? Don’t they have to fill in the same processes? Is it middle management or is it the processes that should be reengineered? For this reason he thinks change has to come from the CEO.

As an intermezzo Jane gives a short presentation about her findings from the Digital Workplace Survey she conducts yearly (high recommended, by the way!). The leadership class of the Digital Workplace have: 
  1. A digital board: strategic decision-making body for all digital channels: internal and external (17% have this). Interesting fact: business is involved more in leading organization.
  2. Internal social collaboration: well-established in all or parts of the organization (all in 5% and 17% in parts)
  3. Intranet or digital workplace: the way of working for the organization (10%) 
The key challenges for organizations can easily be derived from them.

Social Business Excellence by Yves Caseau #e20s

Yves Caseau of Bouyeau Telecom is the second keynote at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit. His talk is about Social Business Excellence.

Caseau starts out by giving an overview of the changing landscape and the need for social business. But also shows that elements of Enterprise 2.0 are very old (e.g. lean and 2.0 are closer than you think). His slides give a nice overview of the elements of social business found in lots of older management books. It shows that social business is an integration of many (older) insights.
There is a need for more business agility, because environments are changing faster and are more complex.

Enterprise 2.0 is a cure for "common congestion". Enterprise 2.0 solves 1.0 problems. For instance, how do we reach the right people. E2.0 tools help to do this faster and easier. And, another example, slow convergence of multi-author editing.

Recommendations:

  • Integrate 2.0 in (decision and business) processes, not next to it
  • Laissez-faire & faire-savoir (bottom-up, but top-down consolidation)
  • Fractal deployment
  • Lean philosophy: information producer is at the service of the info consumer
Caseau says we need business processes in this new world. They are (still) the backbone of the organization. He points to "lean" and shows how process oriented it is, but still very agile. This kind of process and structure is not that strict as we have come to know.

Conclusions:
  • Scientific management (Taylor) needs an overhaul
  • Enterprise 2.0 and lean management, approaches differ, but share a common ground
  • These common grounds are an answer to the ever-increasing complexity of the enterprise and its environment

Understanding the Social Business Excellence by @rawn #e20s

I'll be live blogging the Enterprise 2.0 Summit. So my posts will contain typo's etc. Hope you don't mind!

First keynote of the Enterprise 2.0 Summit is about 'Understanding the Social Business Excellence' by Rawn Shah, Social Business Tranformation Expert at IBM.

We all know the core elements of Business Value Creation like Customer Value, Operating Efficiency, Quality in Operations, and Organization Culture. What is happening to this, is it changing? Is it still necessary?

Rawn starts out with a research fact: 65% of line of business buyers will buy without IT (Forrester).
Many of our organizations today have invisible walls. We would like to have fewer walls, or one wall between external and internal. Really is conversations are starting out everywhere and they´re scaling. This creates a bit of chaos. How do you make sense of this?
This does not imply the line of business is going away? Line of business is still important. So, how do we harness the power of these conversation. Start by adding structure. This does not imply control, but relates to places (where), people (who) and purpose (why).
We have to find out what insights from the conversations are most relevant (add value) to the elements of the business value creation. For HR they are different, than for IT, for instance.

How does Social actually create value?

  1. Capture Unstructured Data (one of the old goals of KM)
  2. Collaboration and Discovery (accelerating ideation and innovation, building engagement and strenghtening relationships, etc.)
  3. Analytical Insight (attention management, pattern analysis, sentiment analysis, accelerating decisions based on data).
  4. Transformation (integrating, process resiliency, handling process exceptions, alleviating process frustration)

And how does it apply to the business? Rawn applies the above-mentioned steps to Product and Service Innovation based on goals that this part of the business can have.

So, value creation = structured social experiences + line of business goals, challenges and processes + mappings goals to strategy to execution.