by Rob Paterson
February 8, 2010 at 3:53 pm · Filed under
2.0 Business Model, 2.0 Design Thinking
Jon and I hope to reveal to you why it is so hard to get performance from a conventional organization today? Why do they find change so hard? Why is cooperation all but impossible? Why are people so unhappy?
Why is HR and all it stands for in the way?
The simple answer is that the simple idea of a “Job” – really a new idea since 1905 and the advent of the Ford Motor Company – no longer works but all the rules insist that it does. HR is all about the Job.
But the Job is going away – even without my polemic. It is dying quietly. Maybe we could hurry it along?
Organizations are being de-capitalized and networked.
After I left CIBC, most of the operational aspects of the bank’s HR department were outsourced. The same for IT. Much of the data processing had preceded that and now lives in a utility coop with some other banks and IBM I believe.
Today large chunks of any large organization that would have been inside are now supplied as services from the outside. The monolith is looking more like an eco system than a machine.
Back in the day, 1994, there were part time employees but they were somehow seen as an exception. Most were in junior roles. They were landless serfs. The lowest of the low and there are even more of these roles now.
But now at the high end and at the skill end this is changing. No longer landless serfs, the new contrator is the Knight for hire – The White Company of our time.
Today, especially in smaller firms, many key roles are played by long term outsiders. I am involved in such a start up today where all the key roles such as accounting, HR, legal etc will be rented from people that will be working under a retainer. These will not just be “consultants” but high level people who will have long term relationships. I play this role with several clients already. This enables, smaller firms to have national or global capability at a price that they can afford.
There are Men at Arms for hire as well. People with important skills that everyone needs
All over North America, networks of book keepers are emerging. The ones that I know of have a roster of about 6 -12 clients each and back each other up. Such an arrangement is ideal for both sides. The firm gets consistency and security while not paying for full time staff – the book keeper has the security of having say 10 clients and with that she can lose some or break up with those that she does not like,
If the Contractor CFO is the Knight for Hire, these are the “Men at Arms”. I use these terms because I think what we are seeing has happened before.
In the middle ages, the main occupation was war. But there was a revolution in the 15th century. Until then your birth determined your rank in the hierarchy. It mattered not much if you were any good, if you were born a noble or a knight (JOB) you were that. But after the Black Death, people were scarce. If you were a king, you wanted to have an army that was good. You paid for real skill and not for position. War became a profession where real accomplishment and the ability to attract good people to you became the new norm.
The centre of the problem is the whole idea of a job. I think it is a relic of the early industrial past ad has no place in the world we live in. It is bad for us as people and it is bad for organizations. It is all about the infantilism of the work place.
Strong words! OK lets look at the Job and what it means and then at the alternative.
- The Employee has a “Job”. This is an artifact that has skill boundaries and skill demands. Recruitment is an impersonal process based on the idea that the job has defined tick boxes and we are all ciphers. “Must have 4 years experience as a ********* Plus an education *******” Few interviews or jobs demand any behavioural attributes. It is seen as bad form to hire people you know. So you can be a psychopath and that is OK because the skills on the table are instrumental. Nor does a job imply what performance is. Somehow the work continues as defined for ever??? The employee is also assumed to be a child who needs to be supervised. The reason is that the outcome of what she does is never on the table. She is assumed to need training, for she could never get skills herself. Her #1 real job is pleasing her boss. The #1 career path is to get into management, for that is where the money is. The #1 aim is to have the largest budget for that drives the biggest pay check. None of any of this has much to do with the work at hand or the goals of the organization. The #1 process is the budget! This is why cooperation and collaboration are no no’s. The only route is up or out or burn out. It is every man for himself. There is no friendship in the executive ranks. The competition are people you understand and who know what you face. Your colleagues are the real foe. Sound familiar?
- So let’s look at the evolving alternative. The contractor has a “Gig” or a long term role to play. Central to the appointment is that there is an output, an impact and a result required. The real interview issue is, can you show that you can and have done this? Not only does the contractor have to prove that, but smart employers will find out what it is like to work with that person. Behavior is central. The hiring issue is reputation not resume. Not only should this person have skills but also a network. Much of what a contractor brings are others who can help in some way. If the contractor has a longer term connection it is because she can still add value to the ever changing work. The contractor gets more money by being more competent in fields that are of value. He stays as long as he is needed. He gets new work as a result of the good work he has done before. He looks after his own training. Most of his skill development comes from doing hard and new work not from taking courses.He needs next to no supervision, he is after all hired because he is competent. The focus is on the work. His security is his field and his good name. Having more than one employer is better than only having one. He tends to own his own tools that tend to be better than his employers! He is no threat to his employer and can often become close. His best allies are his colleagues in his field. As teams they do better. They help each other. They routinely collaborate.
In looking at these two views of how work is done we see the heart of the HR and OD issue today.
Let’s explore this dissonance over the next few weeks. For we have two systems that are in the same space.
The whole social software field is behind the latter. The adoption issues are all related to the OD metaphor.
If we can see the role that our conventional thinking plays in harming the real needs of the organization and of the people in it, we might make some progress.
by Bill Ives
February 8, 2010 at 3:42 am · Filed under
Event Announcements
Forrester has issued a report, Collaboration Needs Will Fuel A Smartphone Surge, by Ted Schadler with Matthew Brown, Brownlee Thomas, Michele Pelino, and Peter Schmidt, with the subtitle: The Surge Can Be Funded Through A Bring-Your-Own Smartphone Strategy. I appreciate receiving a review copy. It predicts that 2010 will be the year of the smartphone surge.
The Forrester team surveyed 3,904 information workers nad found great excitement about about smartphones, “attracted by the ability to email, collaborate, and work with documents from anywhere.” While only 14% percent of information workers across the US, Canada, and UK already use smartphones, another 64% would like to. This compares with general consumers usage at 78% with mobile phones and 11% with smart phones. That yet to be fulfilled demand in information workers, along with some employers’ willingness to share monthly mobile costs, sets the stage for the surge. This calls for KM and other information professionals to determine a strategy for effective and coordinated usage. There is also the numbers to pressure mobile carriers to cut costs across plans.
I imagine that most smart users also use a fraction of the capability of their devices. I know I do. I see my colleagues using much more capability. The report provides along list of potential capabilities and their current usage from email (92%) to enterprise apps (7%). Some others include: personal contacts (84%), work calendar (83%), IM (48%), emergency response (17%), and team collaboration (12%). The last one should go up dramatically if the report is correct it its predictions.
Location flexibility is the top reason (60%) for using a smartphone over a laptop. The increased reach will provide the ROI for smartphone, according to Forrester report. While this seems obvious, there seem to be two reasons here: the portability of the device and the extended access, and these will continue to evolve. Having greater wifi access will mitigate one difference and such devices as the tablet might go into the other. However, I think the convergence of capabilities into a single type of device that takes two forms will balance that out.
In other words, content that used to come through many channels such as music, TV, Web, phone now comes through one device (see for example, TV Moving Closer to Mobile Phones and the Web and Who Will Win: TV Sets or Computers?. I now have all my music and photos on my iPhone, as well as my laptop and have stopped using separate devices for them. However, this device will take two forms, one that sits on a desk and perhaps even connects to a larger monitor and one that fits in your pocket. There will be an increased need to synch these devices and that needs to be part of the smartphone strategy.
There is much more in the report including suggestions on how to start your smartphone strategy.
by Jon Husband
February 4, 2010 at 4:37 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Collaboration, Connected Enterprise, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Interaction, Organizational Design, SharePoint, Social Computing
As FASTForward readers may know, colleague Rob Patterson and I have decided to put forth a series of opinions about the HR issues that may become prominent as the implementation of purposeful social computing proceeds in the enterprise arena.
I believe it’s fair to say that Rob and I come by our interest in this area honestly, as we both have had significant chunks of our past careers tangled up in the world of human resources management. Rob was Senior Vice-president, Human Resources for one of Canada’s major banks, and I spent a number of years in a relatively senior role with Hay Management Consultants, one of the well-known global HR / organizational effectiveness consultancies.
Today we are both dropouts from that career path. We both encountered the Web in its early days and decided that it would have a major impact on work, organizations and human activities, and asked ourselves the question “Do I want to belong to the past, or to the future ?” We came to the same answer, it seems. We’ve both been blogging etc., and proselytizing its usefulness, for what seems now like forever. I started blogging (arguably) in 2001, and if I remember correctly Rob started around about then, maybe in 2002 ? We’ve both been intimately involved in what’s now called social media ever since.
In my opinion, nowhere is the impact of hyperlinks, HTMLx, well-designed platforms, easier-and-easier-to-use tools, etc. more apparent than in the lively and far-reaching conversations all over the Web about the tug-of-war between structured formal learning and semi-structured informal learning as bedrock for equipping employees to deliver effective performance in their work. As my ITA colleague Harold Jarche often says,”work is learning, learning is work”.
Generally, the Learning & Development area of organizations tends to fall under the HR function, though in some instances teh Marketing department is getting involved. And, from what I can tell, the Learning (Training) & Development industry is in an uproar these days. More and more of the pros in that area are beginning to understand that fundamental workplace dynamics are probably forever changing in massive ways, as organizations and employees everywhere are exploring the benefits, the tools and the necessary organizational adaptations. The implications for stimulating, supporting, managing and measuring employee performance are important, and massive.
The L&D pros are wrestling with the fact that most often one of or the core accountability of their role is for choosing, implementing and supporting an LMS whilst the utility and effectiveness of said LMS is increasingly in question. The question of LMS effectiveness is feeling the impact of ‘work-arounds’, as of course employees everywhere are learning socially, in interaction with others on-and off-line. And (I think) there is pressure on mainstream LMS platforms also coming from the spread of collaborative social computing platforms like the most recent version of Sharepoint (2010) and its competitors.
How and why employees learn is directly linked to setting and managing performance objectives, which in turn is related to the design of (knowledge) work and individuals’ learning contracts and the acquisition and evolution of job competencies. Today, performance objectives tend to be developed top-down (which is necessary, as performance derives directly from an organization’s strategy and overall objectives). But that genesis does not take into account the whole picture of an organization’s or individual employees’ information-and-knowledge ecosystem.
As both horizontal and vertical networks inside organizations (or inclusive of connections external to the organization) become increasingly interconnected and intertwined, the impact on which objectives most clearly define effective and high levels of performance needs to be explored more deeply. This is also, I think, connected to the ongoing debate about the ROI of social computing, the value of intangibles like relationship capital and intellectual capital, and metrics about effectiveness in a networked environment
That exploration will be the subject of my next post in this series on HR in the Enterprise 2.0 context. If you’re interested, please stay tuned.
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by Paula Thornton
February 1, 2010 at 2:56 pm · Filed under
2.0 Business Model, 2.0 Design Thinking, Change, Emergence
As I began writing this, I started to wonder if an alternate title for this should be, “Stop Looking for ‘Done’”.
These reflections are a direct result of a challenge from renowned-for-his-email-shunning-antics, Luis Suarez (@elsua). But oddly, there was already a lot of reflecting and projecting of this topic. There are fundamental computing principles and possibilities introduced to the industry over 40 years ago that are currently being revisited for relevance (thx @roundtrip and others), and have been the inspiration for some of the best E2.0 solutions. All of which caused me to recently reflect (apologies to Doug for misspelling Engelbart):
We’ve been at this stuff for a long time, and yet while lots of ‘new’ stuff has come and gone, those of us who’ve been around the block for most of this, wonder if we’ve really accomplished all that much as we continue to circle the block over and over again. At least a group of students from BYU have found ways to make going in circles productive, a byproduct of having fun.
Trying to honor Luis’ specific challenge to me “I sense designing a new Web will have direct implications for every business and for every society we are part of”. Adding to that challenge a 20-year horizon, I have to consider the evidence that it’s taken us 40 years to achieve much of what Engelbart described and the 2.0 realm is just beginning to address some of the subtle intentions.
I’m taking a step up on my soap box to insist that we need more designing and less decorating. I am so sick of ‘innovation’ being used as the false god of the deathmarch to profits: increasing sales by creating yet another ‘new’ product that everyone “just has to buy’, even though they already have one.
I’ve been using a particular word processing program for 25 years and was recounting last night that I can hardly use the latest version — key familiar functions are lost-in-action among the unfamiliar. Something as fundamental as word processing has the potential for what sort of negative impact on our overall productivity?
Look, if we were talking about soap (consumables) that would be one thing — I finish a bar of soap, it’s gone, I have to buy a new one to replace it. Software is NOT a consumable (well, unless you consider the flip of the equation — how much it consumes in its path with each new version, taking up more and more memory and raw storage in its aftermath — but that’s a soap box of another color).
We’re really bad at design because we don’t architect well. If we did, we could leave the infrastructure alone (except as needed), and keep updating the fixtures and decor — but not for purposes of ‘fashion’ (although occasionally relevant), but for ‘function’.
We’re really bad at leveraging existing resources and seem to want to design for 5 years out, when it’s been proven over and over again, that when the 5 years come, what we thought was relevant isn’t any more. We need to design for NOW, and just do that really, really well, as simply as possible.
The problem is that there seems to be some confusion over “as simply as possible”. While insisting that it’s an architectural challenge, I’m beginning to think it’s due to a different set of P’s: power, pride and pomposity. I’ve experienced/witnessed countless situations where a design was going down a meaningful path, it has been derailed by someone wielding one of these to insert their own individual mark. It’s kinda like the annoying male cat who keeps insisting on marking his territory — only in places where it doesn’t make sense, like, inside your house.
The greatest reality that the 2.0 era has embraced is that there’s no such thing as ‘done’. The only ‘done’ in life is ‘dead’ (and that’s just a phase/state transition). We need to get little things done better and stop chasing more things.
We erroneously think we need to move faster or change tracks. In reality there are so many tracks crossing ours that we should be heeding the well-known adage, learned as a child: stop, look, listen. We think we can’t stop — and then a tsunami comes or a market collapses, and stops it all for us. We chase around ‘outside the box’ and get nowhere relevant or important in the grand scheme of things — we waste all sorts of real human lives and potential in the meantime when we could be using what’s already in the box (like a merry-go-round) to solve world hunger and make a real difference in people’s lives.
The connectedness of 2.0 tools that now allow for continuous ‘now’ conversations landed this relevant thought from Alan Watts (thx @rickladd):
If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.
We need to add “no” to our vocabulary. You want a mind-bender for the day? Go consider why it is so significant that toddlers all seem to naturally have a ‘no’ phase that they go through. We’re there.
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