The next time you need to communicate, whether it is during a client visit or a trip to the coffee machine, take a close look at how people communicate around you. How well do words capture the essence of what you are seeing, now much will retain for future use? How much of the communication is verbal, and how much transpires through other “channels” of communication: sights, sounds, smell, touch and taste? How does technology (microphones, laptops, block notes and/or the coffee machine) enhance or distort communication? Which types of social media applications will help managers learn to communicate better?

One critical point is that communication isn’t neutral, nor can it be separated from “objective” reality. We inherently communicate more than the “facts”, for all communication has a purpose, a direction (one-to-one, one-to-many…), a structured content, and a function in the group, organization or community for which it’s targeted. This multiple facets of communication are continually reshaped by conversation between customers, employees and managers to create new forms of the original message. In this light, communication is never just a simple exchange of information, but is tied to production of experiences that define the realities of our work and our work place.

If communication flows through different channels, it also can be envisioned as distinct processes that meet varying needs in any organization. Normative processes are used to communicate the formal organizational procedures: information is communicated from the top of the organization down, the objectives of organizational communication are meant to be clear, precise and replicable. Descriptive processes on the other hand are used to communicate business practices in an attempt to understand how work actually gets done, the objectives of descriptive communication is to understand dissonance, obstacles, and the flexibility needed to meet organizational goals. Finally, social processes are used within the organization to negotiate the meaning of work (why do we come to work each day? why should we purchase this product or service?); they tend to be informal, fuzzy, and horizontal to meet individual needs of identity, adherence, and vision.

Management consultants have long argued that organizations should consciously model communication processes to align with organizational strategy. Specialists in social media will help their clients focus on key questions of how IT can help managers learn to communicate better in specific organizational contexts and visions:

• Can improving communication channels enhance corporate identify or inversely is improving communication dependent upon clarifying corporate strategy?
• Does the quality of communication depend on how the business community is structured, or can it be targeted independently for improvement to reach organizational objectives?
• Should communication processes be modeled from the top-down or should they be mapped from the bottom-up?
• In what conditions can social media help managers learn to communicate more effectively?

Which forms of social media can best be leveraged for different types of professional audiences? There is panoply of applications today; blogs, wikis, shared workspaces, search, social networks, that have potential uses in professional applications. Three questions can help determine the potential value proposition of a specific technology. To begin with, what are the benefits that the organization hopes to reap from implementing the application (collaboration, innovation, support for decision making, archiving and retrieval)? Next, what type of community is the organization trying to support and/or develop (closely knit with frequent interaction? loosely knit with few spontaneous contacts? potential contacts who share similar interests…?). Finally, what products (or forms of service) does the organization hope to foster (document sharing? information retrieval? expertise? opinions or suggestions?). Social media, like other forms of information technology, has no value in itself, but in applying it to specific objectives, interactions and communities

Specific forms of social media add value in specific contexts

Perhaps information technology isn’t worth anything more than the degree to which companies value their own employees. To begin with, many owners and managers feel that labor in emerging markets is both cheap and abundant. With so many people looking for work, whether it be for manual labor or more highly skilled jobs, why shouldn’t labor costs be kept to a minimum? Why invest in anything more than basic training when it’s so easy find substitute sources of labor for your current employees? Why pay them anymore than the market minimum when there are so many others that are willing to work for less? Information technology can do very little for a workforce that is unmotivated, disillusioned and even bitter with work.

Work itself in many companies is seen as nothing more than a series of manual tasks. People are paid to produce things and follow directions, not to actually innovate in the way they respond to customer challenges. In these firms information work is looked upon with distain : the work force is there to produce, while management is there to cut costs and institute best practices. Strategy isn’t based on information gathered from the bottom-up; company policies are defined by management and then communicated from the top down. In such cases, information technology is simply ciment for command and control.

In these organizations, there is little link between information and trust. Information doesn’t circulate freely within the company, people only need to know what they need to know to do their jobs. Decision-making is the job of top management, and is based on intuition, relationships, and/or privileged information. Customers learn little about company practices, and management learns little more about customers beyond how much they are willing to purchase.

In such companies information technology offers very little strategic value, and management has all the “proof” it needs. Computers are used to store data on products, machines and structures; whereas the knowledge of people; processes and networks is safely stored in the minds of the owners and a few trusted advisors. Current computer applications, or even those installed years ago, largely cover organizational needs without management having to figure a use for collaboration, synchronization, or social media.

Perhaps the key to using information technology to enhance business value isn’t found in the features and functions of technology, but in helping management invest in its own workforce. Investing in people can lead to a sense of purpose, motivation, and commitment to the organization. Focusing value propositions on information and services rather than bare bone products has proven to be powerful value levers in modern economies. Rethinking organizational structures to become more customer focused, if not customer centric may well be a key to success in creating an agile, profitable organization in the future. A new breed of information technology based on flexible approaches to collaboration, synchronization, and business practice correspond to this new mindset. Perhaps information technology is worth as much as the degree to which management values its own employees.

In the World is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman provides abundant proof, anecdotes and stories to support the idea that of the increasing circulation of ideas, services and labor across the borders of both organizations and markets. This global village that Thomas Friedman sees so clearly differs profoundly with the village I’ve chosen to live in nestled high up in the French Alps. Writing from my desk, the mountains and the valleys of the Belledone offer welcome relief from the monotonous routines of big city life. People choose to live in villages like mine because they see things a little bit differently than those living in Europe’s metropoles; they play the game of business a little differently. If business applications fail to capture the values and passions that define why we come to work, what lessons are managers minimizing or leaving out of the picture altogether?

In an interconnected economy, information technology plays a fundamental role in shaping how we see our organization, our business and our markets. Business applications help us capture, aggregate and structure “proof” of client demands, organizational capacities, and the efficiency and/or effectiveness of our efforts to produce sustainable revenue streams. Business applications commonly do this by helping managers structure organizational data into scorecards (boxes) and/or processes (activities and tasks) and that help them focus on what’s essential in pushing their businesses forward. Whatever doesn’t fit into the picture is either flagged as a bottleneck or worse discarded as unworthy of managerial attention. Although managers must continually filter and structure information given the monumental sums of data at their disposal each day, are business applications helping them focus on the right information? Is IT largely responsible for the impression that our world is flat, when anyone looking at a sunset can see abundant proof of importance of the mountains and the valleys?

In there is little doubt that managers can neither hide from nor ignore the winds globalization, there is little doubt that local context, culture and vision continues to influence the actual patterns of business practice. One reason appears to be experience with “real” clients and customers, for managers judge the value of the information they receive against their impressions of current and past realities of trying to get work done. A second justification can be found in how different business communities use information: whereas in certain businesses information is often taken at face value, in other cultures information is believed to be essentially a political instrument, and in others still more often than not largely divorced from business behavior. A third explanation could be analyzed in understanding how rules and regulations impact corporate behavior: whereas many cultures feel that managers must play by the rules, others accept the reality of a “grey” economy, where in others legislation offers only a vague guideline for organizational behavior. Faced with the rugged contours of reality of business, it is of little wonder that managers have widely varying opinions of the facts and figures provided by today’s business applications.

Implicit in our concepts of “modern” markets is an assumption that local cultures are slowly but surely giving way to one global lifestyle. Current business applications, based on notions of best practice, projects and processes, and the objectivity of information, reinforce the view that the business world is indeed “flat.” Corporate culture, which colors the mountains and the valleys of business practice, are largely ignored in today’s approaches to enterprise applications. Corporate culture has proved difficult to define but easy to see: it’s composed of a coherent set of beliefs and values that define how managers perceive themselves and the organization around them. Although corporate culture isn’t easily captured in a database nor specified as part of an operating procedure, it conditions how IT is appropriated and used to do business on a daily basis. Proof of these unwritten rules of engagement are relegated to the anecdotes and stories told in corporate hallways and restaurants, human attempts to give meaning to the naked facts and figures of corporate reporting and scorecards. Why aren’t current business applications capturing these realities of business?

Several challenges need to be resolved before such applications can help managers appreciate the importance of mountains and valleys in shaping local markets. How can business applications best be designed to capture information outside of projects and processes, i.e. the large parts of each workday in which managers are firefighting, relationship building and just simply muddling through? How can enterprise applications best represent “non-structured” data, i.e. data on feelings, values, and experience that is difficult to put into spreadsheets and databases? How can taxonomies, processes and procedures accommodate differences in opinion, experience and vision from one manager to another? How can interfaces be designed to draw managers’ attention to dissonance, data that doesn’t quite fit into the tables, not as a source of error, but as a potential reservoir for improving an organization’s products, services and ideas? If the industry can rise to meet these challenges, they will develop better visions of the depth and breadth of potential ideas, passions and business models that will continue to shape markets in the foreseeable future.

Enterprise applications, including those dedicated to enterprise resource planning, supply chain management and even project management, and are largely based on the principles of business process improvement. A process can best be understood as a set of activities and tasks that managers group together to meet internal or external client demands. Processes thus have four defining characteristics: their origin can be detected in an organization’s recognition of a client need for a product, service or information, they consume resources, and they have a set cost and produce a benefice that ideally meets the clients’ needs.

Improving business processes requires tracking inefficiencies in how an organization captures market demand, supply or measurement. How are an organizational activities and tasks executed to capture client demands? How can an organization improve its capacity to deliver products and services? How does the organization capture and evaluate costs and benefits? Enterprise applications provide responses to these fundamental questions in allowing management to map the current state of existing processes, implement best practices around ideal designs of how these processes should work, and measure organizational progress to these goals.

The resulting ‘process-centric” view of the organization is often a weak approximation of the reality of business practice, and as such limits the usefulness of enterprise applications. One reason for this is that business process improvement was originally designed for organizations producing standardized physical goods, modeling processes around personalized services and/or information delivery has proven a much more difficult assignment. Implementing business processes assumes that management (or their business partners) understand where an industry or a market is headed, an assumption that is sorely tested today in industries ranging from information services to banking to telecommunications.

Moreover, the notion of “best practices” which assumes that there is “one best way” to build product or deliver services has been widely disputed in organizations that have traditionally put a premium on company culture, customization, and understanding individual customer needs. Finally, improving business processes assumes that the employees and managers involved in the targeted processes agree with organizational objectives, and are willing and able to follow organizational guidelines. In many situations, even this assumption is contested by those that prefer focusing on the realities of their organization and their market (i.e. getting the job done) than complying to unrealistic or unworkable company procedures. For all of these reasons, “process-centric” software most often offers management a highly distorted view of the realities of the workplace.

If we abandon the notion of processes, how can business applications be modeled to provide a more realistic view of work? A growing number of management specialists are underlining the importance of networks in understanding how employees and managers actually get work done. In business, networks are interconnected systems of people that share common interests, beliefs, and goals. Social and business networks are used by workers and managers alike to solve problems, to identify opportunities, to build trust and passion, and make sense of their jobs, organizations and careers. These networks cross organizational boundaries; they are composed of centers of influence (the “hubs”) and are held together by the intensity of personal relationships (the “links”).

If most managers understand the importance of their personal networks, improving networks requires understanding how these networks function and how they can be extended and strengthened. Social researchers have identified a number of defining characteristics of networks that potentially can help mangers improve their effectiveness: “power laws”, “degrees of separation”, “discontinuous change”, “fat tails”, etc. These networks are held together by common beliefs, passions, trust or know-how: in other words non-structured information that largely escapes “process-centric” view of enterprise. The power of networks has fueled the popularity of a new breed of the social media applications: LinkedIn, Plaxo, and Facebook are among the better known examples. Will this new generation of software applications help management improve their business?

One value proposition of such network-centric applications is to shift the focus of attention away from an ideal set of activities and tasks (what we “should” be doing) to how employees and managers actually get things done (what they “are” doing). A second insight of a network based view of business is the understanding that networks are self-structuring; people seek to work with those their share their goals, passions and beliefs. A third point of interest is understanding the importance of “non-structured” data, just because we can’t get passions, trust and know-how into a spreadsheet doesn’t mean they don’t largely influence the way we work. Finally, this line of inquiry reminds us that business is essentially a human activity; technology’s role in business is limited to understanding, uncovering and eventually enhancing the human interaction that defines the nature of “work”. For management and their business partners, these propositions constitute powerful levers to improve the value of information technology.

None-the-less, there certainly is a considerable amount of work to be done before applications like LinkedIn or Facebook help managers improve their jobs, organizations and careers. The metaphors of “avatars”, “friends” and “connections” don’t easily translate into the realities of either commerce or industry. The personal information, photos, and videos available in social media today are certainly interesting, but often of little use in driving a business forward. These applications today are largely hard coded; it is difficult or often impossible for end-users to enrich either the information or the software. These applications capture data on how end-users wish to see themselves, rather than how they actually practice business (or anything else…). Most importantly, these virtual networks don’t elucidate today the passions, beliefs, and goals that define how individual professional networks operate. If network-centric applications provide a glance of how the future of enterprise applications can improve business practice, these images need to be brought into focus.

Next Week : In an interconnected business world, what does “local” mean?

After having listened to hundreds of managers in diverse industries throughout Europe, the Middle East and Asia, we have the firm conviction that IT is essentially a conversation, and individual markets for IT can best be understood as stories with multiple voices. This view may help explain why many operational managers feel that value of software depends less on its ability to incorporate global best practices than its ability to accurately reflect local visions, contexts and experience. In this era of “anywhere, anytime, anyplace” this ambition of this blog in the coming months will be to explore IT frameworks that amplify these voices to strengthen future success stories of business.

Deploying information technologies to focus on the complexity of business practice will require that vendors and organizations alike give some serious thought to how they design and deploy information technology. Instead of limiting our conversation to choices of information architectures, programming languages and features and functions, we would to extend the scope of discussion to explore how software can enhance or distort our views of our jobs, our organizations, and our clients. In today’s world of mobile workers, dotted-line management, multiple communication channels and “virtual” clients, information technology inevitably plays an increasingly critical role in putting the pieces of business together into a more or less meaningful whole.

The mirror image that most business applications feed back to managers today is biased around structured data, processes, and efficiency metrics. As a result, these applications tend to minimize the importance of non-structured data, networks, effectiveness, innovation and passion. Faced with this distorted view of reality, line management is faced with two options. They can “play the game” by enthusiastically filling in the tables, reports and scorecards that fit their own manager’s view of the market. They can alternatively develop personal information strategies that will help them identify, structure and qualify the knowledge that is important to their assignments, companies, and careers. Rather than blindly filling in the bits and pieces of somebody else’s puzzles, successful managers need business applications that can help them actively restructure information about the specificities of their assignments, customers and clients to get work done.

Let’s take a concrete example in focusing on one of businesses’ key technological challenges today: creating virtual workspaces that will help managers leverage information technology. Forester defines an information workspace as: “a next-generation digital work environment that provides information workers of all types seamless, contextual, role-based, guided, visual multimodal, right-time access to people, content, data, voice, business processes, and eLearning.” Faced with such functional, process-centric jargon, no wonder most managers have trouble understanding exactly how information technology will improve their business…

Let’s suggest a different approach. Assume that the information workspace should be a mirror image of the workplace that we take with us wherever we happen to be working. There are six defining characteristics of the work “place”- how clearly are they reflected in business software solutions today?

• A vision that defines the meaning of work;
• Actors : the managers, employees, partners and customers that produce work;
• Interactions : the events in which we sell and purchase products, ideas and services;
• Outcomes: the generated revenue stream
• Gateways : communication channels that integrate the workspace into local context, culture and organization

This blog is dedicated to conversations and stories designed to help managers leverage technology to learn about their businesses. In the weeks to come we will explore the methodologies, architectures and technologies that can be deployed today to build an accurate picture of the multiple realities of business. Fundamental questions that will be addressed include how can business applications capture experience rather than just the facts and figures? Can we extend the paradigm of search to identify patterns of behavior? What technologies today can help managers focus on non-structured data, networks and effectiveness? What are the technical requirements of applications that will capture organize and enhance individual visions, contexts and experience? In short, how can managers make a better use of information technology to learn about business?

Next week’s post : « Processes or Networks ?»