New version of XWiki is very impressive indeed. XWiki moved increasingly in the best worldwide position in the enterprise wiki market, while preserving its open source dimension. The roadmap presented is also very motivating, the direction taken by XWiki is certainly good, because it is outside the framework of pure traditional wiki rather reserved to collaborative writing, to actually go to the real area of collaborative working environments with a new social dimension arriving at high speed.

Our work was mainly divided into 3 phases:

• The first step was a study of opportunity, around 3 axes: the vision at 10 years of the evolution of the office and collaborative ; the business impacts in terms of usage transformations for the employees; the losses or gains expected in terms of overall productivity for the company. The study, conducted in parallel with other actions concerning the choice of the solution (between Microsoft, IBM and Google), have resulted in the final choice of the Google Apps by the large-account.
• The second step was to accompany a first Google Apps pilot for 3 months to assess the usage transformations on a smaller sample and evaluate actions for a massive deployment. The pilot quickly hired hundreds of people and has been quickly adopted by users.
• The third step is the final deployment to all employees, which is in a phased path depending on different products, takeovers of existing, technical and organizational measures. Google Docs & Sites may for example be immediately deployed to all employees, but GMail and Google Calendar require a more gradual deployment to cover existing data imports from older systems.

The feedback is extremely rich. The first interesting point is the ease with which users adopt the solution as soon as their profits are introduced and demonstrated. Of course 100% of the needs formerly covered by Microsoft Office for example cannot be by Google Apps (complex Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint Slideshow filled with animations), but in fact we realize very quickly that:

1. users are demanding the simplicity and ease of use in the information production and exchange with their colleagues. Once they understand that Google Docs for example offers these two dimensions instantly, they are ready to sacrifice some advanced uses of existing products to get the benefits of Google.
2. At least 90% of normal daily use of an employee are covered by Google Apps. We can even say that 100% of the usages of a vast majority of users are covered by Google Apps. Only what we can call “power users” will need in some cases advanced features of Excel or PowerPoint (Word we put it in another category, because it is 99% very quickly replaced by direct online wiki or doc production). In this case we retain versions of MS Office for these people and uses it, which drastically reduces the need of licenses (one Google Apps licence costs 10 times less).

Unlike many ideas in this area, consisting generally to say that Google Apps is suited to small businesses but not to large accounts, this implementation proves in one hand our own studies in this subject (solutions like Google are the future of the office and collaborative areas) and in the other hand also confirms that Google Apps is perfectly usable for large-account, at very large scale, in place of Microsoft Office and any other collaborative solution.

There is one initial condition: having previously determined the necesary usage transformations to perform in the company from the old to the new paradigm, and implemented an adoption policy that allows the deployment for employees with the most ease possible while enjoying the characteristics of viral adoption of such a product.

The benefits are to go, not in terms of “better knowledge management”, “increased ability to innovate,” or any other qualitative argument difficult to quantify in the short term, but in terms of individual and collective productivity gains. Because in the end, and it is the credo that Kimind defends since its inception through the expertise of its consultants, it is at the level of the daily work productivity that the challenge of adopting these new tools is.

By simplifying the usage of new tools, promoting mass collaboration and instantaneous collaboration between employees (and beyond with immediate sharing with partners, customers or suppliers), it is the individual, group and enterprise level which improve their overall work processes, break the barriers accumulated over the years and disrupt bottlenecks that overfilled e-mailboxes and files servers have become.

It is extremely easy thanks to field interview conducted by Kimind’s consultants to make understand the protagonists themselves how much huge savings in time they will perform throughout the process transformation of informal workflows. Not only saving time but also the ability to perform tasks previously impossible because of the lack of real collaboration tools.

Therefore, a true usage transformation is happening, which induces a transformation of the organization and which must therefore be engaged by the top management to be quickly adopted.

Google Apps is currently the only solution focusing on such approach and delivering thses gains in productivity on a global scale of a large-account. No other solution offers a broad spectrum of functionalalities, even if they cover better small parts of this set.

But large accounts need a global solution, and Google Apps is so far the only operational alternative, which was demonstrated by the massive deployment and feedback. Other players like Microsoft and IBM will of course change it underway, but the transformation of their own architectures and minds are extremely slow throughout the evolution of these solutions, and the delays are significant.

In conclusion, Google Apps is perfectly adapted to the use of a large account, the problem is more on the ability for this large account to transform the usages and to realize that it can and must do so to unleash new levels of productivity.

I’ve asked her why to speak about “social network” instead of the more generic expressions “social media” or “social tools”. She answering me that they decided to with at&t because targeted people understands better what is it when using “social networking” even when we speak about wikis and blogs.

Will it be the new expression to use for all of our social tools?

You can download the white paper directly from the at&t page.

Description

Europe faces a major
demographic challenge! According to OECD, demographic projections are
uncertain, but on middle-of-the-road assumptions, the ratio of people
over 65 to those between 20 and 64 could double between now and the
middle of the century. And in some countries, such as Italy and Spain,
this ageing will be much stronger. The situation is similar in most
developed countries due to the combined effect of the lowering of the
birth rate and the “boomers” reaching retirement age. The phenomenon
will be reaching the emerging economies within a few years as was
discussed during the eSangathan Mumbai
conference.

The
shift from an industrial society to a knowledge society, as well as the
extension of the individual lifespan in healthy conditions, and the
increasing role of ICT in the work process are a set of factors
enabling people to work longer in good conditions. It will be a
personal choice for some people, and a necessity for others. The real
question remains: how to increase the percentage of aged workers
(55-64) included into the labour market?

This was exactly the purpose of the
eSangathan project!

The
project focussed on two particular segments, of this 55-64 population:
one consisting of employees about to retire in the corporate world, and
the other being people willing to be further involved into the labour
market as entrepreneurs. eSangathan analysed
the situation based on two pilots: one in a major Indian corporation,
Mahindra & Mahindra and one at regional level in the Öresund region
in Sweden and Denmark.

ICT
played a major role in the project and in the life of the pilot
members. Indeed, the consortium made the “a priori” assumption, based
on previous experiences, that Collaborative Working Environments (CWE)
could represent a well adapted solution to improve working conditions
and offer a better work-life balance to the ageing workers. The
consortium members will be happy to share with you the results of these
experimentations during the conference.

eSangathan
was also eager to innovate in the field of tools and methods used to
reach the social goals of the project. We all know that the Nordic
countries are the “best in class” in Europe with regard to the
employment of the “seniors”; so, we knew we would learn from our
Swedish, Danish and Dutch partners. So will you when attending the
conference. You will discover how we shifted from a hierarchical
management approach to a heterarchical one.

The
inclusion of the ageing workforce into the labour market becomes a hot
topic in all the countries where their employment rate is low. Indeed,
15 countries out of 27 do not reach the strategic objective of 50%
employment rate for the 55-64 population segment. This brings Europe at
44,7% of employment rate at the end of 2007. The employment rate varies
from 28,3% (Malta) to 70% (Sweden).

Despite
the recent research led by IRDES saying that 31% (The Netherlands) to
67% (Spain) of the 50-64 workers say they want to retire as soon as
possible, one can assume that the working life of the Europeans will be
longer in the future. This economical and social reality has been a key
concern of the eSangathan team. It results in a set of recommendations and proposals which will be presented in the
eSangathan White Paper.

The White Paper will be presented and made available during the conference!

You want to know more or share opinion: contact us at event@esangathan.eu
or visit us at www.esangathan.eu

Register the conference at http://www.esangathan-conference.eu/registration.asp

What are the links between e-management, web 2.0 and corporate governance? They are in the fact that it is more and more clear every day that participatory tools and collaborative working environments are changing drastically the human interactions within corporations, and impacting first the organization and the management. For the benefit of the corporation itself, thanks to the raise of a new level of collective intelligence, and a new standard of productivity.

The use of participatory technologies in the company is changing radically relationships between individuals. Breacking top-down hierarchies, we are moving to a Network Centric Management, where the supervisor will no longer base its legitimacy on its authority to direct the work of others, but where he’ll be at the same time coordinator, moderator, advisor and arbitrator of his teams and employees.

Lying, incompetence and other bad habits of a lot of deviated organizations that can be more easily concealed in an authoritarian management, will be unveiled in broad daylight in a participatory management imposed by the use of this new tools.

The introduction of these technologies in the enterprise, and even within the extended enterprise (customers, partners and subcontractors), will change this things, it is inevitable. Why? Because in the same way, when intranets arrived in the companies, they were sometimes promoted by the hierarchy, but most often they were growing from the grassroots, under the radar, because the need was too strong to prevent people to deploy them. People wanted to publish information without constraints. But a few years later, IT people succeeded to master this freedom, and intranets became again a hierarchical organization for content production. So the intranets were at the beginning a cultural revolution in most of our businesses, but at the end the impact in terms of management finally was very weak.

It’s totally different with the participatory web, where the questioning of management is complete, and hence the organization of the enterprise itself. That is why we can replace the previous-decade-words “e-management” with “Management 2.0″, and “e-organization” with “Enterprise 2.0″.. Not to be hype with a « 2.0 » acronym, but because the prefix “e-” hasn’t been disruptive for organizations and management. The “2.0″ prefix by contrast illustrates this qualitative and fundamental leap that we can no longer go back.

The Enterprise 2.0 will be a cross-organization, where information will flow seamlessly and securely, and where the creativity of everyone will be unleashed giving to everybody the opportunity to write, to say, to show, to talk, to share, to discuss, to participate, and ultimately to build together.

Other virtues will then appear as a result of these liberation, such as individual and collective efficiency, increased productivity, quality improvment and transparency.

Business leaders, from large and small organizations, that will anticipate the first these new usages, both within and outside their company, will be the first to reap the real benefits of this new corporate governance. It is necessary to invest massively, to train and support users, from the assistant to the CEO, because adopting these practices doesn’t happen overnight.

This is not about learning to use a software and pushing buttons. This is about thinking and acting differently, working differently, establishing different relationships, and this will not be done in a day, but in several months. It’s why the change must start as soon as possible in order to reap the benefits as soon as possible as well.

We must all commit ourselves to evangelize. We are on a fertile ground, because we are not at this disruption level only thanks to the technology. We are facing the convergence of two fundamental factors: (1) technology, and (2) the changing usages due to the Internet being here now for many years.

Most of the technologies of the Web 2.0 have nothing revolutionary, and some of them exist for over a decade! But they have spread this recent years very quickly because human beings were ready to receive and exploit them.

We’ve reached the limits of our actual organizations, and it is not possible to gain in daily productivity continuing to use the same tools (files, emails, and legacy systems) with the same organizations, because this tools are not anymore helping to improve these organizations. They are even creating more and more disorganization, and people are a lot more conscious of this now.

This is why we are in the good momentum, because the consciousness and the demand exist. We must therefore push both managers and users to be trained to these new usages, in order to implode the traditional business models and managements, and usher them in a new era of corporate governance, an era where individual, its efficiency, creativity, and its relationship to the team and the corporation, will be at the very heart of economics and social growth the next few years, for the benefit of all.

Miguel Membrado (May 1st, 2008)

Identificateurs Technorati : Enterprise 2.0, Management 2.0, Corporate Governance, Governance

The answer is NO! The most used collaborative tool is still the electronic messaging system. Why? Because e-mail is an unstructured way to send and share information; an immediate and effortless system. When you enable people and teams to work with powerful collaborative tools, you notice that it takes time for them to consider these tools as part of their daily work.

The reason is the length of the adoption curve, because it takes time to change working habits to work in a more structured and disciplined way. If the company is well organized and its processes well defined, documented and managed, the adoption of the collaboration tools will be easier and faster because they will drive and support the processes.

But, this is not the most common case. A majority of corporations and SMEs are not that well organized and a huge number of employees are still working with a lot of informal knowledge. To force those employees to structure this informal knowledge through a collaborative tool is a difficult challenge.

This problem doesn’t exist with synchronous collaborative tools, because they are based on a real-time communication and there is no need to structure anything. But even those tools are not widely spread in corporations. This lack of usage of synchronous tools will be solved with a pragmatic approach by the hierarchy when it will be obvious that security issues can be managed and that productivity is really higher using these tools.

However solving the asynchronous tool adoption problem will be much more difficult, and what follows shows why it is so important to change our way of thinking about collaboration, because this topic could be one of the next most important corporate organisational changes in the coming years.

Do Collaboration Tools Have Improved Corporate Organizations?

An established fact now is that even in most of the companies using collaborative tools the organization has not changed. It should be obvious that introducing such tools in companies should result in major organisational changes. Why? Because those tools allow people to be more interconnected, to capitalize information, to work transversally instead of vertically, to need less hierarchy in their management, in other words to be more efficient, more productive and more creative. But it is not the case.

As research shows us, the major issue is that these collaboration tools have been matching the rules of the existing organizations, not the reverse. In fact, collaborative tools are used as suppliers, facilitators in some cases, but not as disruptive tools changing radically the behaviour of people. They are just enablers.

On the opposite, the most unique recent experience is the emergence of the Web 2.0 paradigm with the birth of a generation of new participative tools and the creation of huge social communities and user-generated contents. The blogosphere has grown from nothing in 2001 to more than 70 million of blogs in 2006, doubling each six months up to now. Social networks like mySpace have reached the 100 million users in 3 years, and user-generated content web sites like YouTube reached 100 million videos streamed daily in less than 2 years! It is not possible to stay quiet in front of this phenomenon. Is it a pure consumer change or will it affect also the companies? Why these participative tools have such a great impact and not the collaborative ones?

It seems that the Web 2.0 wave has woken up a “deep human longing for individuals to participate and make their voices heard” (Thomas Friedman, The world is Flat, 2006). People want to participate, to be involved, and to take part of. It is the reason why blogs, wikis, and all user-generated content web sites are so successful.

Participation versus Collaboration

What is the real difference between participation and collaboration? Collaborate is “to work together, especially in a joint intellectual effort; to work together toward a common end” (Webster); Participate is “to take part” (Webster) or “to join in, to take part, to involve oneself” (Wiktionary); What it means is that participation action doesn’t need a “work together” action, only a personal involvement in a global action. It is easier for most people. “Working together” can be done without reflecting upon the nature of work, while participating induces involvement, and it is what people want, to be involved in the decision, to take part of them, even if they are not fully collaborating to achieve the work.

Blogs are the best example of this new participation era. The origin of blog is egocentric: it is the ability for a human being to publish his own thoughts to be read by his family, his friends, and perhaps some other unknown internet users. Thanks to the possibility of commenting and “trackbacking” on the other bloggers’ posts, a huge network of links has been created day after day: the most important ones are not the URL links but the human links created between all bloggers thanks to these two trivial mechanisms. Step by step, a collective intelligence has emerged from this pile of blogs, without any real collaboration, just through a self-organization of active participation! Consequence is that world is changing, not thanks to the collaborative technologies, but thanks to the participative ones that have unleashed the human will to be actively involved in his environment.

Consequences for institutions and hierarchies are huge. For institutions, it is the emergence of the “democracy 2.0″ concept, a participative democracy, where the citizen will be involved in the political decisions at a level never reached until now. For hierarchies, it is the end of hierarchical management in companies, because nobody will suffer anymore not to use in their own company the tools that everybody is using so efficiently in their private life. Even if the company’s managers don’t want to introduce these participative technologies inside their companies, the pressure from their employees will be so strong that no one will hold this wave.

Participation, a Disruptive Change for the Organization

The situation is critical for the organization, because for the first time, the consumer world is ahead in terms of new usages. Participative tools, even collaborative ones are used daily by millions of people in their private life, changing their habits and their way to see the world and interact. The new generations, still in college or universities, have grown up with these tools, which is not the case for their parents who are today the companies’ employees.

It is a disruptive change for the companies. Collaboration tools haven’t succeeded in changing organizations and mindsets, because these tools are only facilitating current work and matching current organizations, even if a small percentage of advanced users take profit from these new tools to change their way of working (e-working, e-organizations). If it is impossible for most users to be fully involved in all the company’s collaborative processes, participative tools give the technical infrastructure to allow all company’s employees to be really involved, each of them at their own level, in the small or big decisions where they can have something to say. Like in the blogosphere, if the company is able to manage this new organization, a collective intelligence will be self-generated, increasing the efficiency, the productivity and the creativity of each individual, team and finally the whole company.

Participative technologies are for everybody: each employee can use them, publish, comment, interact, share, exchange, validate, interrogate, freely, without any constraint, just following the good usage rules and conventions decided by the company. It is the reason why today the most important thing to do for a company is to implement immediately participative technologies, at least blogs and wikis, in all their departments, with all their teams, allowing people to express themselves, to interact through comments, to start building participative interactions and create step by step a participative ecosystem. This way, it is not only an improved information system that the company will earn; it will be a deep involvement of all the company’s actors to reach a common goal and to improve their collective results and intelligence, and finally their mutual collaboration.

Participation is the key;
Collaboration will be the natural consequence

(I published this article for the first time in January, 2007 within the eSangathan newsletter #2)

OUTLINE

Miguel Membrado

Founder & CEO
membrado@kimind.com

23 août 2007

Miguel Membrado

Serial entrepreneur & Consultant
ErgoSum in 1989 (Paris)

Search Engine & Document Image Processing Software

Mayetic in 1996 (Paris)

Collaborative Workspaces, #2 worldwide on the Internet
250,000 users, 45,000 workspaces, 100 countries, 14,000 organizations

Netcipia in 2006 (Palo Alto)

Participative Business Ecosystem (free wiki-blogs)
Online Content Monetization

Kimind Consulting in 2007 (Paris/London)

Web 2.0 & Enterprise 2.0 Consulting & Services

Kimind Consulting

Entreprise 2.0

Consulting & Services to large companies
Enterprise blogging, participative project management, radical transparency, new participative customers relations, unleashing innovation and competitivity, agile management, …

Web 2.0

Consulting, Services & Coaching to startups
Online identity & reputation, blogosphere influence, participative strategies, Web 2.0 business plans & business models, start-up management, …

3 revolutions since 2000

Globalization 3.0
Web 2.0
Radical Transparency

Globalization 3.0

Empowers individuals
The World is Flat (Thomas Friedman)
Empowers individuals
10 forces inTowards Enterprise 2.0cluding :

Connectivity
Workflow
Uploading & communities
Offshoring
In-forming
The Steroïds (Digital, Personal, Mobile, Virtual)

…
Web 2.0

Unleash People Interaction
3 dimensions of Web 2.0

Social

People centric
User Generated Content
Participation

Business

the web as a platform
For working and exchanging

Technological

Ajax, Web Services, Widgets, Mashups, …

The long tail

The long tail – derivatives
A political long tail? 

Blogging

Blogging
Blogging – figures

User Generated Content

YouTube
FlickR
Del.icio.us
Wikipedia
Oh My News

Social Networking

LinkedIn

THE professional network

MySpace

100 million users in 2 years

FaceBook

THE phenomenon
100,000 new users/day
50% daily active users!!
Viral marketing engine

NING

To create its own social network

+ 746 other startups…

And…

3D collaborative worlds
Recommandation websites
Participative e-commerce websites
Customizable home pages
Job 2.0
P2P banking
Etc…

Web 2.0 has induced new usages

Information production
Participation, interaction, communication
Mass collaboration
Private life sharing
Seeking the truth
Relationship
Content aggregation
Collective intelligence emerges by links and knowledge accumulation

Web 2.0 has induced new rules

Continuous experimentation
Direct discussion with the market
Global business with small teams
Not so much capital
New management style
…

Radical Transparency

The naked company
Before = Secret as a value
After = Transparency as a value

Reverse the relation to the information

« Ideas don’t have worth, execution is everything »

Strong examples

GoldCorps Inc.

Gold maps publicy published

SAP

Partner Business Ecosystem fully transparent

Microsoft

4,000 public blogs

Redfin

Management difficulties publicly revealed

Secret is dead

Everything will be known one day
Faster and faster
Global memory
Google is no more a search engine, it is a reputation engine
Online identity & reputation
Crisis management
Truth

Impacts

Professional Life
Private life
Political life (democracy 2.0)
Associative life
…

Towards the Entreprise 2.0

From Collaboration to Participation?
4 steps

The end of files/e-mails era
Participation vs Collaboration
Forget the control
Integrate clients, partners and subcontractors

The end of files/e-mails era

Replace files by
Online content production (Google Apps, Wikis, Blogs, etc…)
Acting online
Collaborating online
Replace e-mail collaboration by
One « container » by project (a wiki)
Capitalize ALL the information
E-mail retrieve it alert or input mechanism status
Persistant Instant Messaging

Participation vs Collaboration

Collaboration is to difficult!
Participation is easy 
Enterprise blogging
Inside or outside communication
Project blogging
Communities of practice
1 project = (at least) 1 wiki
Participative watching and bookmarking
80% participation – 20% collaboration
Self-service audios and videos repositories

Forget the control

Knowledge emerges by itself
Information sharing
Flat hierarchies
Non-structured information
Awareness
Autonomy
Open discussions
Mobility
Mindshift
…

Integrate customers, partners and subcontractors

Radical transparency
Documentations
Wikis
Blogging
Communities
Open discussions

…

Benefits

Innovation
Competitivity
Collective Intelligence
Collective efficiency
Employee loyalty
Customer loyalty
Talent magnet

Conclusion

A new era thanks to techno / social / business convergence
Mandatory usage to understand
We are in the momentum
Transparency / Participation / Collaboration
Continuous experimentation