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People as a service ?

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In one of my former posts I suggested that we may have been wrong trying to socialize people while their primary need was to be able to easily socialize information first and, then only, interact around it.

Since "social", "socialize"  are used to say many things without saying anything precisely I think some definition is needed. By "socializing" I meant making any information socially actionable, ie start conversations, bring people etc...around it without having to get into any other tool, copy/past, explain etc... Making it easy for interactions to start and happen in the context of information is really key to adoption.

That said, I took time to go further in my reflection, questioning it and trying to draw all possible conclusions.

- information has to be socialized because it's in most of cases what stimulates conversations and informal interactions. It's the stimulus, the problem that has to be solved etc...

- Then these interactions need knowledge and knowledge can seldom be found on traditional information systems. Knowledge can be found in people's head, between their two ears and is waiting for the above mentioned stimulus and conversations to surface and be expressed on the tool that hosts the conversation.

- Consequence : managing knowledge is managing people. But what does it imply when it comes to sharing information ? Does it mean sharing people ?

At first sight, when stimuli and conversations have made anyone write his knowledge down on any social platform we can consider that it's shared, regardless of its original owner. But it implies that the owner was available and ready to share what he knew, what is far from being always true.

All we're talking about is bringing pieces of knowledge together, assemble and transform them through conversations to solve a problem or take the most from any information. That means bringing pieces of people or, said differently, that people are shared, being mobilizable for anything that is not their own job, their own duty.

One the reasons many enterprise 2.0 initiatives fail is because people are not shared resources : they can't give time to others, to the business units that don't pay them, to the colleague next door because they are not working or the same project or for the same managers. All our assumptions rely on the fact people are shared resources, even shared services,  what is the only way to make knowledge a shared resource too. And that's not an issue that has to do with technology, adoption, change management but with HR, organization, management and even internal processes and workflows.

So, let's sum up :

- as a stimulus, information has to be socialized

- knowledge has to be a shared resource

- and people shared services

So many things to reivent in terms of work, organization, assignments, rewards and even accounting.

Comments

Submitted by Mike Ricard July 28, 2010 - 9:41 AM

Bernard, I concur with your summary. As an Enterprise 2.0 community manager, I know for most given situations who I can call upon to be a 'shared service'. These are usually the people in the business who 'get it', E2.0 that is, who appreciate the value of knowledge sharing and collaboration. As a proportion of the community overall, they are but a tiny minority.

For the purpose of helping people use the social networking tools on the community, I have a stable of 'Super Members' - who I promote and encourage. Within the community, if not the business, they have a prominent standing and a good reputation.

People who don't 'get it', do not understand that they are now very much in control of their personal reputation (brand, capital - whatever), both at work and on the internet in general. With the maturing of Web 2.0 services like LinkedIn, there are fewer reasons for people to keep their heads buried in the sand about their personal reputation.

You rightly identified HR and management in general as being the sources for giving recognition to people for their social contributions to the business. As with many ECMs designed for E2.0, our Telligent community platform offers points for various actions on the community. The greater the perceived value of these actions, the more points gained.

So HR & management already have a visible means of identifying, through points, the social high flyers in the business. A content/activity reporting mechanism comes with the platform to tally and list, for example, the top bloggers/forum posters with most comments/replies/answers etc. Not to mention the available testimony of people who have been helped by these social high flyers. It's all there, it's simply the will to take it on board which is missing.

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