As pointed out in my recent blog ”The Grail Quest for Social Organization”, zero mail is not an objective in itself but the recognition that companies are suffering from email overload.While the use of social media has become common place in the consumer space at the expense of email usage, the enterprise is still struggling to come to terms with the unstructured nature of these platforms. read more
Social organization, the other name for Enterprise 2.0, is now on every CEO and CIO’s agenda. Early November in Barcelona, Gartner decided that time has come to recommend putting communities at the center of new enterprise management “to tap the collective genius of your customers and employees” We all have in mind the WSJ disruptive article of Gary Hamel: “The Facebook generation vs the Fortune 500”.In the 12 principles proposed to characterize the new management we find all the ingredients of what makes a community active and effective. After two years of successful cooperation in our Atos Scientific Community we have a pretty good view of best practices in a 90 members strong community.
The “Social Organization” by Anthony Bradley and Mark Mc Donald is going one step further in proposing an approach to prepare enterprises for “mass collaboration” by addressing two key issues : (1) how to make sure that the purpose of a community is in line with the objectives of the company, (2) what level of sponsorship a given community needs to survive if it is not a “grass root community”(the own interest of members is enough to keep the community alive)
The buzz created by the announcement of Thierry Breton early February 2011 is also a symptom in the same direction. Restated this week in WSJ the intention is to eradicate mails in Atos in the next 18 months. Spending more than 20 hours each week on mails, having your priorities dictated by your Inbox is not the way forward. Mail deluge is like body temperature, 40 ° Celsius means you are sick, returning to 37° Celsius means you are not sick anymore but plunging in a cold bath is not the right way to diminish fever, you better cure the disease.
Now addressing the crunch point: it is a fact that Facebook fans (more than 800 million) do not use anymore the mail because most of their messages are exchanged within their communities.
The assumptions of the Social Organization are then around two key principles:
1. Communication will be done more and more within communities (which could be either grass roots or company sponsored and less through hierarchical line)
2. Each employee will belong to several communities some of them on a voluntary basis some of them because of his/her function or skills
Creating the appropriate communities within the enterprise is the prerequisite for a social organization to happen but the difficulty to choose the right ones.
These communities will resuscitate a very ancient practice which has been theorized by an anthropologist as Marcel Mauss in his book “The Gift” who explained ” the way that the exchange of objects between groups builds relationships between humans”. In the Social Organization, people are not any more exchanging objects but informations through the cooperation mechanism: the community can only work if the members are giving information to each others expecting a reciprocal exchange which is by definition not monetized’ In his book “Give and take the cooperation in enterprise” (not yet translated in English) the sociologist Norbert Alter inspired by Marcel Mauss explains that cooperation is vital for companies to make sure that people working with defined processes can deal with local failures or temporary objective misalignment.
If we want that the majority of employees be passionate about their job, Norbert Alter is suggesting that management shall visibly support cooperation.
This is ultimately the “Holy Grail” for the Social Organization.
Thanks to H. Koppdelaney for sharing the photograph.
When I was 8, plastics were becoming ubiquitous. So saying ‘this is a nice plastic model refreshment kiosk, but so far it has defied all our attempts to get it to make plastic tea’ was a good enough joke for the Model Railway Constructor, avidly read by schoolboys of the 1960s.
Google finally seems to have gotten it right this time. After an impressive track record of failed social network intiatives, starting with Orkut and most recently Buzz, the launch of Google + is a huge success. After a couple of weeks buzzing around the social web, + now has over 20 million users, sharing more than 10 billion messages a day. And counting. But will it stick this time?
So, what’s different this time around?
Timing and type of launch.
Google’s timing this time around seems to have been very good, either by chance or these guys are seeing things happen and are able to act. What I’ve noticed, and have been discussing with others lately, is something I’d like to call social media fatigue. People are beginning to show less interest and participation, and maybe a ‘been there, done that’ attitude is even starting to show. Also, with privacy as a hot topic in current-day western society, people are becoming wary of the Facebook-way. And + is new, and therefore interesting. Robert Scoble evenly posted on + that he now is bored with Twitter (and created a big debate in doing so). And ofcourse, the typical Google way of introducing +, by invite only, makes people want it. Well played by Google.
Features
Many, many reviews of the + platform and interface have been published the past weeks. I won’t bother repeating that, or trying to put my two cents in. As we can expect from Google, the interface is Clean and Rich, it has Drag-and-drop functionality, but it also has some nice surprises. It’s intuitive and accessible everywhere. Checkout site’s like Mashable or Read Write Web to get in depth information.
From Social Graph to Interest Graph, from drawing lines to making circles
Online social networks have the social graph as backbone. + Uses this, but acknowledges the fact that there’s more to relationships than just who you know. In real life, in general you will talk to your colleagues about different things than you would at a family diner. And in a different way, most likely. + Gives you your circles, and a way to map your real life to your online ones. Yes, multiple.
Ofcourse, Google uses your social graph as well, for instance to make friend suggestions. Even though I think I can say I’m rather deep in to this matter, again I am amazed about what Google knows. I have been using Google services like Gmail for years, and this shows in +. And now I’ve given it even more by linking other my social networking profiles from Facebook and Twitter. Google identified me on Twitter by itself, by the way.
My conclusion is that where Facebook would know this stuff about you, they keep it to themselves and sell it off to third parties. As opposed to Google giving back some of the additional value of your social graph through + (and using it for their own marketing mechanisms, they’re not stupid either).
Freedom and transparency
Google clearly takes a standpoint that you own your data. So, that ends this debate. My social graph belongs to me, period. Managing your profile and privacy settings is easy to find (unlike Facebook), you can easily delete your + account, but before you should decide to do so, you can also export your data.
And, let’s face it. the fact that’s it’s from Google
The value for organizations
Officially Google doesn’t allow it at this point, but there are a number of companies that have set up profiles in +. A good example was Mashable News, althought they recently posted on + that after talking to the “guys at Google” that they will behave and wait just like the rest (!?). Why won’t Google allow it now? What is their strategy with + towards organizations?
When looking at externally facing value, the obvious thing would be for organizations to get + profile pages, just like the Facebook fanpages. This way organizations will have another way of interacting with their customers. What I see + promise is more functionality, integration with other applications and – again – data portability. Wow, companies will own this data themselves? Being able to interface with their marketing and business intelligence systems? [just in via Read Write Web at the time of publishing this post: Google Plus Business Profiles Are Coming Q3, Analytics and All].
And for integrating with the business processes, use cases can be easily thought of in the areas of customer support or product management. We are now talking about the internally facing value of +, where it is also easy to see possible integration with Google Docs and Apps. According to a post on Google Operating System, there is evidence of Google Plus becoming available for Google Apps users. Google’s John Constigan said that Plus for Google Apps accounts “should be available in the coming months.” A developer has discovered hints in Plus’s source code that point to more full-fledged meeting functionality, including video and voice conferencing, screen sharing, document sharing and a whiteboard feature.
There already is a very cool new feature on + called Hangouts. Through this web application one can make videocalls, chat and watch movie clips together. It can be used for videoconferencing, where the person talking (or rather: talking the loudest) is shown in the big screen.
So, the platform offers a lot to people and holds a lot of promises for organizations. Especially smaller organizations, maybe even already working with google apps will see the benefits. For instance, in helping realize their own Zero Email Ambition. But remember… make sure you turn off your email notifications in your account settings!
And what about the – ?
The thought behind + is good, and the implementation is excellent, with undoubtedly even more good stuff to come. So, are there any -’s to mention? For one, my fear is the manageability of the + platform in the end. People creating more and more circles, following more people and getting more followers on yet another platform. The concern I have lies in what Clay Shirky called ‘filter failure’. How will people cope with this? Or will Google add the priority inbox functionality to + at some point?
And what do you think? Will Google keep it alive this time?
P.S. For a little tongue-in-cheek minus: here’s a link to a ‘Google Minus’ chrome plugin which allows you to switch of the + toolbar to work without distractions
Carbon conscious companies have already decided for severe restrictions in several domains : company car not to exceed 120 g of CO2 , Vidieo conference to substitute to travels. Country taxation have, in certain cases, helped to take the right decisions by imposing heavy taxes. But … read more
(17) (16) (14) (12) (11) (10) (8) (8) (6) (6)
Posted in Zero email