How Bruno Kahne's "12 Deaf-Tips" relate to online communication

I recently attended the PMI UK chapter's annual Synergy event in London.  
One of the guest speakers was Bruno Kahne, responsible for Leadership Development and Culture Change at Airbus Group Leadership Academy.
Bruno presented his recent book titled "Deaf-Tips - Powerful Communication": Twelve lessons from the Deaf world to improve your communication in your personal, social, and professional life.

Bruno is a great speaker and got the whole audience engaged rapidly.  His 12 tips concern face-to-face communication as this is the context he did extensive research comparing teams of deaf people and teams of hearing people.  The deaf teams always beating the hearing ones at the same tasks requiring good collaboration.

While I was listening to Bruno, I started thinking if his 12 tips would apply to online communication as well.  I decided to buy his book and challenge myself at adapting his tips to the online context. You will find below how I succeeded in this challenge.  I should point out that I have contacted Bruno to ask for his feedback before publishing this post.  He sent it to some of his deaf collaborators and they confirmed that these adaptations do relate to the way they communicate online.

The online communication I am referring to are the social media platform – like Facebook and LinkedIn on the web or Yammer  and Jive in the organisation.  This type of communication is typically:

·         Asynchronous (not real time with a time lag between a question and a response)

·         Many to many (the same comment can be shared by many – ie. use of the ‘Like’ function)

·         Involving a combination of relations and strangers (people not knowing one another personally)

I have re-sorted Bruno's tips from the most relevant to online communication to the one that required more adaptation, but kept the numbering used in the book:

Deaf Tip No 05: Be simple and precise.     

      

<<When Deaf people communicate, they are both simple and precise at the same time.  [..] When Hearing people try to be simple, they are automatically vague.  And when they try to be precise, they suddenly become complex.>>  

In today’s increasingly connected world, it is essential to remain simple while not losing valuable information.  We can do this by keeping our online messages (sms, emails, social media posts) simple, to the point, avoiding unnecessary words.

Being precise in your descriptions or explanations is nearly as important to avoid unnecessary lengthy exchanges for you to give successively more information.  Worse still if by not being precise, you lead the readers on the “wrong path” without being asked to clarify.  This will affect your online reputation and make others being more wary of your contributions.

Deaf Tip No 03: Put yourself in the other’s shoes.

This tip applies fully in an online context.  In fact, with regards to the choice of words it applies even more as you don’t have the luxury of the others’ body language to warn you that they do not understand your point.  Furthermore, online social communication is typically to be read by numerous people, many of whom you don’t know personally, so you cannot adapt your language to all of them.  Therefore, it is useful to think about how others will read and understand what you write online, before you press ! 

Avoiding technical language and acronyms, placing words in the right order, and avoiding unnecessary lengthy posts are all very good advice for online communication.

Finally, Postponing judgment of course fully applies when reading other’s initial comments/replies.

Deaf Tip No 07: Dare to ask questions.

Many will argue (including myself) that asking questions is one of the raison d’être of any online collaboration tool. Most online discussions either start with a question or start with an assertion which calls for others to ask questions.

About the three conditions – Precision, Honesty and Space - for asking the right question, this is how they more specifically apply to online communication:

Precision: It is even more important in an asynchronous communication where hours or even days can laps between a question and its first answer!

Honesty: Again, posting questions and responses on a medium that will retain them for a very long time after you wrote them (probably longer than the time it will take you to forget writing them) it is a very good advice to be honest with yourself and with the others you are collaborating with.  Don’t take the risk of an old lie to come back and bite you!

Space: Online this means to not systematically provide an answer to your own question.  Don’t show off.  Instead give others a chance to respond first and build on their answers.

Deaf Tip No 09: Do you see what I say?

The use of visual supports such as infographics and “visual words” fully applies online.  An online collaboration environment is also very well suited for using the story telling technique.

Deaf Tip No 06: Don’t say don’t.

Our brain is wired to remembering positive images/messages.  Using negative phrases will tend to let others remember the opposite to the point we are trying to make.  So in any discussions, including online ones, we should use positive sentences.  For instance, in online discussions, avoid the use of the negative word ‘but’ and use ‘and’ instead which will encourage more responses from the other participants.

Deaf Tip No 01: Prepare to be prepared

Preparing to be prepared for online communication consist of doing the following before engaging: 

• “Looking around”/assessing everything you can gather from the context of the discussion you are about to engage with
•   Reading what others have written, assess who the participants are (or tend to be if there are many of them).  
• Being clear on the purpose of the group/Community of Practice/Space in which you are intending to engage with (you could read some of the previous discussions involving the same people to get a better feel for the topics that are expected here, how people are “behaving” and the dominant style of writing).

We must keep an open mind and not being too quick at judging/interpreting others’ point of views.

We need to read on a regular basis what others are writing online which will give us the ability to anticipate what others would respond to our own contributions

Deaf Tip No 04: Be sequential.

In the asynchronous context of an online social media discussion, you do not run the risk of participants talking at the same time or someone starting to respond while someone is still talking.   However, it is frequent for multiple threads – sub-threads - to occur within one discussion.  This often causes confusion among participants, especially with the new entrants who have not taken part from the start:

•  It gets increasingly difficult to follow the various threads simultaneously and always understand who responds to whom
•  When you reply to a “sub-thread”, you have this annoying feeling that you are no longer addressing all the participants but only the ones who will care to follow this thread
•  Sub-threads often diverge so much from the discussion’s original topic that you end up with very different topics being addressed within the same discussion.

Some tools do allow to visually differentiate the “sub-threads” (such as indentations) in order to see who is responding to whom.  But this workaround only partially address the first issue above and potentially exacerbates the other two.

Being sequential online means avoiding sub-threads.  You can do this by adopting these two simple behaviours:

• If a discussion inspires you to ask a related but clearly different question than the one that started this discussion, start a new discussion with your question.  If you want to relate to the first discussion, you can explicitly refer to it by using a hotlink.  You can also tag the specific participants whom you would like to see contributing to your new discussion.
• If you notice a sub-thread within a discussion, you should post a reply suggesting to the contributors that this topic would seem to warrant a new dedicated discussion.   You might be surprise to see how often this triggers the right behaviour from the person who really want to put across his/her point of view on this divergent topic.

Being sequential online also means making sure to fully understand others point of views before contributing ourselves.  We can do this by asking “clarifying/confirming” questions.  Each question should be preceded by a relevant quote from the other person you are questioning – so literally copy/pasting the sentence(s) that you are asking to clarify/confirm. 

Deaf Tip No 08: Focus on the right thing.

In an online context, focusing on the meaning fully applies. 

Focusing on the others means being conscious of our filters and put them aside while trying to understand other’s contributions. 

Focusing on here and now applies also: it means avoiding other distractions when writing a question or a response, and rereading what we wrote before sending.

Deaf Tip No 12: Say what you think.

Saying what you think online in a shared “public” environment is fine when it is not about someone in particular.  When you are not face-to-face with the person and in addition communicating asynchronously, the risk of being misunderstood is greater.  Furthermore, the arguments given for being honest in Tip No 7 are relevant here too.

However, how saying what you think applies online is by being as factual as possible, as descriptive as possible (but again not personal).  If you express an opinion, belief, then make that clear, and then make your point completely, don’t stop half-way as it will likely backfire: It would confuse/mislead others, leading the discussion on a wrong path, requiring from you a lot of effort to recover and clarify.  

An important relevant point about online communication: Some readers and contributors of an online discussion might not come back to read your late clarification, and will keep this wrong interpretation of your points.

Deaf Tip No 11: Get in Touch.

This was at first the hardest tip to translate to an online communication context. 

“Being touched” by someone has two meanings: The physical one and the social one when someone does/says something really nice about you.

So “touching” online can be about not missing an occasion to please someone, to help out and ask nothing in return, to congratulate, to praise, recognizing someone’s efforts/successes/performance.

Deaf Tip No 02: Read Body Language.

“Body language” reading has literal relevance in a video conference.    

In the context of mostly text-based online asynchronous communication, body language translates as being always conscious that what people write is not necessarily what they truly mean or even believe.  In doubt, reach out to the other person directly (via email, or better Instant Messaging, or even better via telephone or better still face-to-face) to get clarification.

Reading words like we can read muscle contractions: color, high capitals, fonts, short/long sentences, quickly or carefully written sentences, order of words, repeated words etc…

Deaf Tip No 10: Listen in Technicolor.

Active listening translates online into active reading.  

Active reading in a social media context is about not limiting yourself in reading a given discussion thread (especially if you intend to contribute) but to refer to other relevant “parallel” discussions, on the same forum or others.  Relevant means “on the same topic” and/or “similar topic” and/or “involving most or all of the same participants.

I addition, active reading requires the following behaviours:

• Focus on the others’ posts by avoiding distracting “noise” around you and on your device’s screen, and by focusing on getting the true meaning
•  Postponing judgment (ask questions first)
•  Avoiding parallel mental activities
• Truly connect with others (use humour, praises, references to previous relevant discussions) and collaborate (it is not about scoring points but about “adding a piece to a puzzle”).

The multichannel challenge

I have not written on this blog since July 2010.  It is not that I was struggling to find topics, but more a lack of time: my current interim contract with Matches Fashion and the adoption of an adorable child finally becoming a reality just took their toll on my spare time.   

In the April 1^st edition of Retail Week, I read an interesting supplement with same title as this post (in the print version) that motivated me to start blogging again.  This supplement contains a lot of good comments but I will highlight a few here.

Ok, it’s a word now, so we can write “multichannel”, no longer having to write “multi-channel”.  Every one in retail is now more than just talking about it, as it must have a prominent position in every retailers strategy.

 But critically, retailers are finally understanding what multichannel really means.  It’s not just about adding one more channel to market, it is about providing integrated and seamless services to your customers.   A transaction can then involve 2 or more channels ideally at no extra costs and in a very flexible way.  

Darryl Owen, the SAP head of retail for EMEA, provides a short list of must-haves for a multichannel software solution:

·         Centralised data, including master data and transactional data.This is about full and true integration between all systems supporting the various channels.  One system must be the holder of the single truth.

·         Real-time IT infrastructure.As technology enables customers to be always connected, they will expect real-time information with all channels.   So if your tills poll once/day, here is one priority for you to change.

·         Accurate data analytics.Reporting must be consistent throughout the channels.  This means for instance that each customer or each product have the same unique identification across channels.

·         The ability to think ahead.This is absolutely key for success and competitive advantage.  Your systems and business processes must be fully flexible to associate existing channels differently or incorporate new channels no one has even thought of yet.  

I would like to comment on the “multichannel shopper” article as well:

 <<In December, Deloitte surveyed 2,000 multichannel consumers to find out about their shopping habits. Shoppers’ expectations are shifting as quickly as their behaviour. Deloitte head of multichannel Colin Jeffrey says: “What one retailer offers as a new service quickly becomes the expected. Customers will struggle to understand why others don’t have the same.”

The research showed that on average multichannel customers spent nearly twice that of their store-only peers, with multichannel customers spending an average of £130 per transaction compared with £67 for store-only transactions and £113 for internet-only customers.>>

Being a multichannel retailer is first about providing new convenience to existing customers rather than increasing sales.  However, as Deloitte’s research showed, multichannel customers tend to spend more.  So for instance, when using a click & collect in store service, a customer might purchase additional products while in store collecting the order placed online.


A key point to realise is the speed of change with multichannel customer behaviours.  Success will not be about playing the crystal ball game about what is to come, but to transform the organisation’s systems, processes and culture, so as to be as flexible as possible to adapt to any new technologies and customer behaviours while remaining competitive.

A hint that Burberry is on the right track about social media integration

 In my last post, I wrote that I didn't know of a retailer that is yet offering a fully integrated multi-channels experience.  I have however just discovered that Burberry's own social media site www.artofthetrench.com might indicate that they are on the right track towards this full integration.  The site allows a Facebook account connection (in fact imposes it) before uploading your own trench coat pictures.  This of course does not mean that Burberry will implement this type of integration on its ecommerce site but it's a start.

PS. I am not suggesting that a Facebook account should necessarily give you access to all ecommerce sites! Social media is not just about Facebook for a start, and a social media strategy should not be application dependent anyway.  If the technology might still need to be defined, the goal is clear however: offering an integrated and consistent multi-channels customer experience and follow each customer as a unique individual through all channels.

Loyalty cards are about customer knowledge, next step: integration with social media

Despite its recent loss of market share, Asda continues to argue that its lowest price policy is a better strategy than its main rivals’ loyalty card schemes.  I think they are wrong but not with respect to prices but because of the valuable customer data they are not collecting.  Asda simply does not “know” its loyal customers.

In Retail Week May 28^th 2010 edition, there is an interesting article about customer loyalty: “Loyalty cards: the bedrock of future success?” 

 <<[David Roth (former B&Q marketing director, now chief executive of the Store WPP)] observes: “The world is going to divide between those who can organise and make use of their customer data and the others, who will wake up in five or six years’ time, outmanoeuvred. The person who owns the data, owns the customer.”
But he maintains that loyalty schemes are primarily a means to an end and will not on their own make a retailer successful.  He says: “Gaining customer loyalty is about a lot more than a scheme. The value proposition will be important.”
For all the interest in loyalty and the success of some programmes, they will never be a panacea for retail’s ills and typically cannot answer one vital question. As [James] McCoy (Yougov SixthSense research director) says: “Loyalty schemes can tell you what people are buying - but not what they’re not buying. As well as whatever they are spending at one retailer, they might be spending another £40 a week at Lidl, which you have no idea about. The challenge is to find the data you don’t have.” >>

David Roth and McCoy are absolutely correct.  In the FMCG sector, loyalty schemes will increasingly be a necessity for commercial success but will not be sufficient by themselves to ensure competitive advantage.  Competitive advantage will first come with what is done with the information collected at the till.  Tesco Clubcard is a perfect illustration of this: I am a Tesco customer and I receive at home personalised mail including discount coupons for products that I am likely to buy based on my purchase history.

However, the true Holy Grail of competitive advantage is not in the customers’ purchase history data, it is with the knowledge of what they want but cannot find or afford, what they might buy if they were made aware of it or if it was conditioned differently, what they buy with the competition, etc…  The most valuable customer knowledge will not come from transactions at the till but from engaging with customers to get them to tell what their needs and wants are.  Luxury goods retailers have known this for centuries and have always valued and leveraged the in-store customer knowledge obtained by the salesperson through the conversations with his/her “loyal” customers.

So FMCG retailers will need to engage with the customers registered in their loyalty scheme.  Since they will have to do this through all channels, it will require a holistic approach to customer identification: So this means one account per customer for all channels.  This might seem obvious but I have not yet come across a single retailer (from FMCG to luxury) with such a pervasive integration strategy.  For instance, all retailers with a Facebook page do not integrate the Facebook account with the ecommerce customer account: This means no systematic way of tying up a customer’s comments on Facebook with his/her online (let alone offline) purchase history.

<<Tesco is one of the most advanced of retailers in its ability to mine customer data and use it effectively and, notes Shore Capital analyst Clive Black, has put its scheme at the heart of its business, rather than run it as an add-on.>>

Similarly, in the next few years, retailers will gain competitive advantage from putting social media and all customer interactions at the heart of its business, rather than run it as a an add-on.

How will luxury Brands be creatively different with ecommerce?

Read Fadi Shuman’s (Pod1) very informative article about ecommerce in the luxury market. 

Fadi might be correct that “2010 will be the year that the majority of [the luxury] brands jump on the e-Commerce bandwagon”.  The latest purchase of Net-a-Porter.com by Richemont supports this statement.  But I have yet to be convinced that these same brands have worked out a way to reproduce on the web what made them different on the high street: uniqueness, exclusivity,  high quality, dream-making image, personalized customer services, refined and luxurious stores, best store locations, etc… As Marci Ikeler (Publicis) puts it in her excellent slideshow I referred to in a previous post :

“How do we use the web to tell a luxury story?” Or “How do we recreate the sensorial experience of the brand online?”

 Fadi refers to Faberge and its site with a very exclusive access or the ecommerce pioneer Burberry’s use of social media for an interactive approach around its catwalk shows.   Marci does provide other examples or innovative online initiatives from several luxury brands but we have yet to see the same level of creativity and innovation with their ecommerce. 

I have checked out several (ok not all of them, but let me know if I missed one that contradicts my point and that will be the exception that confirms the rule as we say in France) of the oldest or more recent luxury brands’ ecommerce sites (Cartier, Burberry, Prada, Louis Vuitton, Dior, Dunhill, Gieves and Hawkes ) and all of them failed for me at the first main hurdle, well before making the first purchase!  And this is a key feature of a luxury brand store: the special experience starts with the shop windows and continues throughout your visit of the store through primarily excellent customer service, even if you end up buying nothing.  Before leaving you might have exchanged a lot of valuable information with one (or more) sales staff.  You might have given for example your contact details, your preferences, your sizes (for clothes).   You might have been told specific details about products of interest, what is in stock, what is about to arrive or about to run out, what is very popular, etc…  I am assuming here that you are a new visitor to the store, not yet a customer of the brand. 

Now, what did I mean by stating that the luxury brands failed this first hurdle related to the pre-sale experience?  Well, let’s start with the fact that for most of the sites I visited and browsed the products available to purchase online, my visit has only contributed to the website analytics but the brand does not know I – as a specific person – visited its site.  This is simply because my credentials were to be requested only at the purchasing stage.  Worse, in most cases even though I was willing to provide my details, there was no way to do this without buying something!  Gieves and Hawkes, Dunhill and Louis Vuitton did cater for a pre-sale registration.  However, in both cases the benefits of doing so are limited and lack creativity.  Typical facilities available once registered are:

• Create and share your personal wishlist
• Expedite the check-out process
• Receive special updates and promotions
• Modify your account details at anytime 
• Check the status of orders
• Recording alternative addresses
• View past orders

These are basic services that most non-luxury sector ecommerce sites have been offering for years.  Luxury brands should do much better to create a more personalised and special online experience. 
For instance, once logged in I would expect a personalised experience wherever my web browsing takes me within the brand’s online world.  So my account should follow me around so that I do not need to log in/register again on different pages.  Of course, another benefit could be a personalisation of the content on each page based on my preferences (I have other ideas but wont give them out for free!).

For example, Gieves and Hawkes has a Corporate Blog on its site.  This is good but unfortunately, even though I was logged in on the main site, I would have had to enter my credentials again in order to leave a comment.   This lack of integration is not just about a lack of user friendliness, it does also highlight a lack of or poor multi-channels and multi-media CRM strategy.  In the luxury business, knowing your customers well and your customers to know you well is so vital for competitive advantage that it is starting to defy belief why luxury brands are following on the FMCG brands footsteps rather than lead the way.

Brands need an online social media strategy

Jeremiah Owyang  is right, a Brand should not “throw away” traffic on its corporate site by inviting visitors to join the Brand profile on Twitter or Facebook or other social site without a well thought strategy.  It is a bit like sales associates of a high street shop telling visitors on their way out: “We invite you to visit us at our small corners inside most department stores”.  This might seem to be sending the positive message “we’re present in these locations” but it might lead to the visitors buying at other Brands also located there as well as not coming back to the original store!  The same as sending a visitor of your Brand website to twitter where he/she will receive twits from many other Brands, is likely to lead to another Brand attracting more of his/her attention, and not have him/her visit your site again!

A Brand does typically spend much much more on its own website than on its social networks presence (if it has one) so if not careful, doing so might mean actually losing these visitors as potential active fan of the Brand, to become at best simple passive observers of some Brand-related activity.


However,  I am not convinced by Jeremiah’s matrix on the Evolution of Social Media Integration and Corporate Websites.  Or rather, I do not see it as a “must follow this path” for all Brands.  Let’s just take the last stage for example: “Complete integration between corporate site and social sites”.  I can think of most of the Brands in the luxury goods sector that would not benefit from such an integration.  This would lower the Brand name status too much to the level of just another network relation such as a friend on Facebook.  The Brand would risk losing its exclusive image, its capacity to generate and fulfill dreams.  Luxury Brands would need to maintain this image online and a complete integration with social media would make this difficult. 

Marci Ikeler from Publicis has a very good presentation on slideshare  “Digital strategies for luxury Brands”. 

Digital Strategies for Luxury Brands

View more presentations from Marci Ikeler.

She mentions the successful examples of Gucci on Facebook and MAC on twitter, both of which support the Brand image instead of “cheapening it”.  I noted this statement supporting Jeremiah’s first point: “The most successful luxury digital campaigns are fully integrated with a larger digital strategy and align with the brand’s values”.  But do not confuse this with a complete integration of the Brand’s website and social media!

You must read the chapter 10. Use digital to convey exclusivity (slides 43 to 45).  It shows 2 examples of exclusive social networking, illustrating why complete social mass media integration will not be beneficial for all Brands.

Enterprise 2.0 is not a game anymore, it's serious business

Another good post from Bertrand Duperrin following the Enterprise 2.0 Forum in Paris on March 17th/18th.

His bullet point list of conclusions is good news for everyone (like me) promoting the uptake of E.2.0.

I will highlight the following 4 points:

• It’s not a game anymore. Now projects are global and carried by the top management. That’s the end of social bubbles disconnected from reality. Companies think global and pilots are not made to test but are the learning stage before global rollout. I really appreciated Claire Flanagan’s approach that set a time limit (5 month) instead of limiting the number of users what allowed her to quickly get a critical mass (nearly 30 000 users) with an opt-in policy.
  
• Tools come second. We talked a lot about management, culture, governance. 90% speakers did not even mention the name of the platform they used and, in fact, the question is elsewhere (even than there’s always the same usual drudge in every conference). The best example comes from Danone where the “networking attitude” program was launched in 2003. It’s all about management and behaviors. Management 2.0 without web 2.0 tools. Tools came only when the behavioral dimension was natural in people every life in the workplace.
  
• There’s no “one size fits all” adoption model. Each company has to define its own way depending on its culture and on local cultures.
  
•  Support from top management. That’s been known for ages but it’s clear that a bottleneck appears when top managers are not active sponsors. I don’t mean being benevolent from a distance (”ok…let’s go guys…I’m watching you play..”) but being able to understand the change, make it theirs and imagine them, their staff and their behaviors in the future, be comfortable with it to be an active sponsor.

I (and many others) have been writing for years now about the importance of a strategic consideration, visible top management leadership, conducive corporate culture, adapted management behaviours and internal processes for the successful introduction of knowledge-sharing tools in an Organisation.  Looks like business leaders are finally getting the message. 

Social Media: overhyped fad or essential tool?

Attended an MBA Association event last night: Social networking for business – overhyped fad or essential tool? Speakers: Mireia Fontbernat, Paul O’Nolan & Paul TannerLocation: Strand Palace Hotel In a few words, the speakers confirmed what I already knew or suspected: No one has a clue where online social media is really taking us (and these 3 speakers were no exception). It is not about having a crystal ball but about having a clear understanding of the effects that these social tools have on our societies, and what their generic objectives are. When the telephone was starting to spread around the world many years ago, one could understand the effect on the society (connect everyone synchronously and speed-up information flows between individuals) and foresee an end-game (everyone being able to call directly anyone else from anywhere). You can't do that for social media today.Maybe it's because it is too soon after the first of these tools were created. But that is my point actually, we need more time to make real sense of it all. In the meantime, if it is important to embrace this online social world, it is no less important to be wary of potential pitfalls. For instance, the more you interact with this world, the more it knows about you. So, for a start, what you need to really keep private, don't put it online (but these pitfalls were not really addressed at the event yesterday either, it was more about what you can effectively do today for your business or for yourself). I think that what can be said today of the effect (benefit!) of social media is that it transfers power of influence to the individuals, and by extension to communities of individuals.Each of us has potentially the power to influence comparable to politicians or journalists. Recently, Ashton Kutcher (Demi Moore's husband) managed to reach 1 million twitter followers before the News network CNN. I am certainly influencing many more people with this blog than through my physical networking. What does this mean to businesses? Well, it can be summarized like this: Your company can choose not to know about its customers through social media, but your customers will certainly learn a lot about you online and it won't always be nice stuff! And that, they did illustrate it well at the event last night. So embrace online social media yes, but not in haste and choose the right tools for the intended audience and purpose.

Getting the right information to your retail customers at the right time, or how to make them loyal to your brand

In these very challenging economical times, retaining your customers is a must to survive now and thrive when things improve. For your customers to repetitively shop in your stores (on the high street or online) means for them one or both of the following conditions:

· It is to them the most practical or ‘lack of choice’ (ex.: “I shop at your supermarket because it is the closest to my home”).
· It is the brand that best fits their needs and/or wants at that moment in time.

You could of course consider the first group of customers as a bonus but they should be nurtured too as the practical reason for their custom could disappear and them with it (like moving house). The key for making either type of customers (“for practicality” or “by choice”) stay with your brand long term, is increasingly to provide them with the right information at the right time and in the right place, and this through all the market channels you make available to them. For instance, when online, a customer is virtually always one-click away to choose a competitor. I am not referring here only to ecommerce situation but to any web browsing situation to obtain information about your brand/company, starting of course with your main informational website.

In retail, you not only need to be consistent between your various channels but you need to integrate them as well. So it is not just about consistency in products and pricing, but also for example about enabling a customer who purchased online to be able to collect and return in store if he/she wishes to. And this type of seamless (to the customer) integration is not just an information systems problem. For instance, the manager of the store where the products purchased online are collected, will not welcome the transaction if the sale isn’t allocated to his store some way or another! So if only your online store gets the sale, you will de facto create internal resistance and unnecessary competition that ultimately could affect the customer (a solution by the way here is to have the sale shared by both channels).

Providing customers with the right information at the right time and in the right place implies understanding their likes and dislikes, their needs and wants. In the luxury goods sector, this knowledge on customers has historically been obtained by the sales associate on the shop floor during the process of a sale. When you buy a £,000+ product or service, you have time to chat about yourself and the reasons for your purchase (and you often want to) but when you are buying a pack of beer, a pair of socks or a bottle of shampoo, you usually don’t want to spend more time than necessary. Well, this is changing and primarily thanks to ecommerce. When you want to buy a shampoo or a pack of beer online, you must first register your name and contact details at the very least, so you have provided the private information that the retailer would not have obtained on the high street – except if you had used a “loyalty” card. So retailers can track customer behaviour online but often fail to do so on the high street which makes it difficult to leverage the integration of the different channels to market. Loyalty card schemes have been thought of the solution but too often fail to deliver the desired outcome because:

- Too many customers don’t bother signing up to the scheme (for various reasons but often simply because they don’t consider the associated discounts significant enough).
- A majority of customers will view it only as a discount scheme (“when I shop here, I might as well use the card and get the discount points as a bonus”) but their repeat visits do not depend on it.
- Most of the competition have a similar scheme so it does not constitute a significant USP (large number of customers end up with all your competitors’ loyalty card in their wallet).

A loyalty scheme needs to be about loyalty, not only about discounted repeat purchases. So this takes us back to the subject of this post: “true” loyalty can be achieved when the customer has access to and is given the right information at the right time about your product and services. “Right” information means as individualized as possible. A customer is really only interested in the products and services that concerns him/her. So for ex, a customer who never drinks alcohol wouldn’t care less about a promotion on wines. And it is not as simple as thinking that such a promotion should target only customers with a history of wine purchases. Our non-drinker customer could easily have once bought a bottle as a one-off gift for a friend.

My point here is that the goal for retailers should be to have reliable and relevant knowledge of their customers in order to provide them in return with the right information at the right time.
This effective knowledge of your customers will of course rely on sales history based information obtained with traditional “loyalty schemes”. But crucially, to obtain a true USP with this knowledge, a retailer will have to find and master other sources of information. Social networks are one such source, with examples being online communities. Examples of retail focused websites taking full advantage of this are the customer reviews based sites like www.toptable.com or www.yelp.com. Retailers need to engage with these indirect sources of customer information and use them as models for implementing social networking solutions directly engaging with their customers (or potential customers).

I will not list here all the possibilities (and I don’t know them all anyway) for retailers to improve their deliveries of effective information to their customers. Obviously, many great ideas are still to come. What is certain is that the retailers that will consider this challenge strategically and be among the first to surpass their customers’ expectations, will lead the pack when the economy recovers.

About The Wisdom of Crowds

In his book “The Wisdom of Crowds – Why the many are smarter than the few”, James Surowiecki makes - indirectly but nonetheless powerfully - a very good case for Knowledge Management or the leverage of individual and collective knowledge. Simply put this way, that the many are smarter than the few is hardly a contentious statement. After all, a croud of say 1000 individuals should be smarter than only 500 of this same croud most of the times. You have more minds available to solve a problem/find an answer. However, what Surowiecki means is that a croud of 1000 can be – with the right conditions – much smarter than the sum of its parts even when it acts/decides in a completely uncoordinated way (meaning each individual acts/decides in isolation from the others). In fact, such a group can be (and Surowiecki gives plenty of examples) smarter than the even best experts in a particular field! The three conditions for this group wisdom to materialise according to Surowiecki, are that it must be diverse, independent and decentralized. On diversity, Surowiecki writes (chapter 2, part III): <<The fact that cognitive diversity matters does not mean that if you assemble a group of diverse but thoroughly uninformed people, their collective wisdom will be smarter than an expert’s. But if you can assemble a diverse group of people who possess varying degrees of knowledge and insight, you’re better off entrusting it with major decisions rather than leaving them in the hands of one or two people, no matter how smart those people are.>>This can be hard to believe but Surowiecki then makes the case for this point very well and I cannot find any reason to disagree with him. On independence, he writes (chapter 3, part I): << First, [independence] keeps the mistakes that people make from becoming correlated.[..] One of the quickest way to make people’s judgments systematically biased is to make them dependent on each other for information. Second independent individuals are more likely to have new information rather than the same old data everyone is already familiar with. The smartest groups , then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other. >> I would think that this condition is in theory much less contentious than the first one on diversity. However, the problem with true independence is that in practice, it is rather difficult to obtain. Often, decisions in a croud are made sequentially with each individual influenced by his/her predecessors.Therefore, Surowiecki advises that <<If you want to improve an organization’s or an economy’s decision making, one of the best things you can do is make sure, as much as possible, that decisions are made simultaneously (or close to it) rather than one after the other.>> On decentraization, he writes (chapter 4, part II): << [..] if you set a croud of self-interested, independent people to work in a decentralized way on the same problem, instead of trying to direct their efforts from the top down, their collective solution is likely to be better than any other solution you can come up with. [..] Decentralization’s great strength is that it encourages independence and specialization on the one hand while still allowing people to coordinate their activities and solve difficult problems on the other.>> However, Surowiecki then cautions that : << decentralization’s great weakness is that there’s no guarantee that valuable information which is uncovered in one part of the system will find its way through the rest of the system.>> He then asserts that for a crowd of any kinds to allow << individuals to specialize and to acquire local knowledge [..] while also being able to aggregate that local knowledge and private information into a collective whole, [..] [it] needs to find the right balance between the two imperatives: making individual knowledge globally and collectively useful (as we know it can be), while still allowing it to remain resolutely specific and local. >> Well, well, isn’t this where/when Knowledge Management should come in? In fact, for all intent and purposes, this is a definition of KM I am satisfied to work with in an organizational setting: any intentional and managed changes or activities with a conscious objective to facilitate/enable what is highlighted in blue above. But it then highlights a fundamental reason for organizational KM to have so often failed to deliver: the lack of management recognition that collective knowledge in practice is indeed always valuable, with the potential to be very often correct and effective. Leveraging knowledge is then not just about realizing (and doing something about it) that each employee’s knowledge is valuable (and that’s already hard enough for most senior managements) but that the collective knowledge of the whole or groups of employees is even more valuable. I think that a cultural shift is needed here for this realisation to become the norm rather than the exception. This shift has already started with the ubiquitous nature and global reach of the World Wide Web enabling huge crowds to influence decisions directly or indirectly (eg. Obama’s election). This shift now needs to enter the board rooms en masse. According to Malcolm Gladwell, “the tipping point” (see his book with this title) should be reached when between 10 and 15% of board rooms will have formally acknowledged the value and power of individual and collective knowledge. I can safely predict this will happen even if I cannot say when.

What should Web 2.0 mean for Luxury Brands ecommerce strategies?

[NOTE: I had written this article back in 2006 but could not publish it then. I can now do so and it is still very much relevant 16 months later!] 

It is bizarre how an acronym so widely used as “Web 2.0” can lack an unanimous definition. What most experts tend to agree on however is that Web 2.0 is made up of at least two key concepts (as noted by the journalist Phil Muncaster in ITWeek 02/Oct/06 issue- http://www.itweek.co.uk/ ): “Improved user experience and collaboration. The democratisation of information.” The latter concept refers to the fact that information becomes ubiquitous and relatively easily and cheaply accessible by potentially anyone.

Democratisation also implies virtually no control over this “open” information. Companies cannot control what is said about them and about their products. They cannot even hope to read all this information relevant to them due to the shear amount involved. The former concept is I believe even more specific to the Web 2.0. It relates to the fact that the web users are increasingly expecting a positive and memorable experience while visiting a site. By “experience” is meant: as user-friendly as possible, as interactive as possible and as unique as possible. In the case of ecommerce sites, this will be on top of the Web 1.0 criteria such as reliability, overall performance, competitive product prices and efficient and effective integration with back-end delivery and CRM systems. As Phil Muncaster concludes in his article: “So whether you believe all the hype or not, Web 2.0 is changing the way users behave, retailers react and enterprises interact with their staff and business partners. Those who fail to embrace it will probably be left out”. 

So then what does this new environment entails for the luxury products companies launching ecommerce initiatives? 

As for all other companies, it means both an opportunity and a challenge. An opportunity since the Web 2.0 should enable companies to better satisfy their customers by being more in tune with what they expect and desire. A challenge because of the relative difficulty to get it right first time using emerging Web 2.0 technologies (such as Ajax, Mashup) and because of the growing concerns for the Web security and privacy issues. 

I would however infer that the luxury market companies are particularly well positioned to seize the opportunity and take on the challenge. The reason is that these companies are already by nature in the business of providing customer-centred, differentiating, memorable, even unique experiences to their customers. I believe you can make a parallel between: 

· The individualized experience expected when we enter a Cartier, Louis Vuitton or Gucci boutique compared with the standardized experience expected in a Tesco or Wal-Mart superstore; and 

· our expected experience on the Web 2.0 compared with the original Web 1.0. 

Ecommerce customers of luxury companies will expect and value a Web experience as differentiating as purchasing in their high street shops. Therefore, these companies’ ecommerce websites must be highly innovative and take full advantage of the Web 2.0 context. This is totally in line with the following statement I made in my earlier post “Customers increasingly demand more personalized products and services” in Dec/05 : “This new competitive environment indicates that luxury Brands should focus on bridging the gap between them and their customers through co-creation of value with the customers”. 

The basic principle is to build this personalized experience through collaboration with the customers, which happens to be the other Web 2.0 key characteristic! 

Luxury goods companies need to first realize that they must and can be as exclusive on the Web as on the high street. They then need to engage in a sincere and continuous collaborative process with their customers to not only deliver what they seek, but to surpass their expectation.

It was about SOA all along! Chapter 7

[Continuation of my commented reading of Andy Mulholland’s book: “Mashup Corporations. The End of Business as Usual”].

Chapter 7 is about the “typical” barriers to implementing SOA throughout an organization. The authors added this chapter in the 2nd edition following a suggestion by Avrami Tzur (VP of SOA at HP). I will start by saying that I was a bit disappointed with this chapter: it does literally focus on the specific resistance to SOA without considering the probable more generic reasons for this resistance. But maybe it’s me again expecting cultural issues to be mentioned everywhere! At least, this chapter has the merit of existing. I am sure Avrami was far from being the only one noticing the need for addressing this topic after reading the 1st edition of the book.

This chapter deals with the fears and needs of technologists - used to a “develop and control” centralized infrastructure – that are being asked to adapt to SOA and the flexibility, openness and informality that comes with it. These fears and needs would typically raise questions such as:

• How do I know what services are available for me to use?
• How do I know exactly what each service does?
• What happens when a service I am using is changed or upgraded?
• What happens when I have to debug an application based on services?
• How does the new world of services fit and interoperate with existing IT systems? Etc,…

Five rules are then proposed to encourage adoption of SOA:

• Use visibility to reduce fear, build trust
• Put it in writing
• Extend existing management processes to SOA
• Support new pattern of collaboration
• Provide incentives for SOA adoption
  

The authors do introduce these rules as enablers of communication and knowledge sharing. I agree. However, if your organisation has a command and control culture where knowledge sharing is not the norm (I take you back to my 16 traits of such a culture) following these 5 SOA adoption rules won’t be enough. But maybe it could be argued that a “command and control” organisation would not initiate a SOA in the first place (now that could be a topic for a lively debate).

The authors do explain that the << adoption of SOA do reflects an evolution in the skills and systems of a company >> ( I would like to add that it reflects an evolution in the organisational culture as well). This evolution is made of 3 stages: Integration, Architecture and finally Operations. I finally noted that successful SOA adoption will rely on 3 groups of people: the Enterprise Architects or designers, the Providers or builders of services, and the Consumers of these services.

It was about SOA all along! Chapter 6

[Continuation of my commented reading of Andy Mulholland’s book: “Mashup Corporations. The End of Business as Usual”].

Chapter 6 is about “Internal IT” or the effect the SOA transformation can/should have on the internal IT department/functions. With the help of a meeting with all the managers of the fictitious company Vorpal’s IT department, it explains that a SOA does not only support the informal edges of the organisation but also the formal transactional hub. What unifies it all are “the processes that flow through the business” and link “the informal processes at the edge” with “the more formal controlled processes at the hub”. It is therefore important (in order to successfully become a service-oriented organization) to adapt the company’s functional structure. The functions must mirror the key business processes that SOA has formalized.

The authors then suggest a new structure for Vorpal’s IT department. Below are the original (standard) structure followed by a new service-oriented structure:

Old:
End-user support
Development
Infrastructure (CTO)
ERP
Engineering
New:
· Composition (about defining the common services)
· Services Creation (about development of the services)
· Disruptive Innovators (about the creation of new services)
· Consolidation (about the link with the core systems)
· Services Repository (about keeping track of all the services available)

The authors do make it clear that this is only a suggested structure and that each organization would adapt it to suit their needs.

And then reorganizing the IT department around SOA is only a start. The whole organization structure should be reviewed. For example, I can see new cross-functions between sales, marketing and public relations departments: Services to a specific customer group could benefit from having a function (an individual or a team even) pulling resources from these 3 departments to better satisfy these customers no-less specific needs.

It was about SOA all along! Chapter 5

[Continuation of my commented reading of Andy Mulholland’s book: “Mashup Corporations. The End of Business as Usual”].

With the family reunion of the Christmas break, I have only managed to complete Chapter 5. In my defence, it is probably the most important chapter of the book judging from the powerful messages it conveys. The following chapters seem to be only about some of the consequences of taking on the challenge defined in this chapter: “Creating a Program of Service Enablement”. The authors describe such a program in terms of three levels or steps:

1. Designing a Single Service.
2. Designing Systems of Services.
3. Service-Enabling your Enterprise Applications.

According to the authors, no company has yet (at the time of writing) reached level 3! This is probably still true but I wonder if a company like Google that seems to have been implementing step 2 for years now, is not already well into service-enabling its core applications (and maybe they were designed as such from the beginning). In any case, what is implied here is that the first companies to successfully reach (and complete) step 3 are likely to be the success stories in the coming years.

The chapter starts with a wonderful email sent by the CEO of the fictitious company Vorpal. She writes to all the staff to involve them in building a new service-focused culture. The goal is to foster technological innovation throughout the company and “take shadow IT out of the shadows”. Once again, I’m not aware of many CxOs (let alone CEOs) with such an open-mind on new technologies and the courage to initiate and lead the drastic cultural change that a SOA demands. Such forward-looking leadership is indeed a must for a successful SOA implementation.

Chapter 5 describes 5 rules for successful SOA implementation. I want to comment only on the first two:

This chapter’s first rule is about promoting Shadow IT. The authors are quick to note that it is not a new phenomenon. Probably since IT was provided to people to do their work, most of them would work out their own “tools, procedures and workarounds” to increase efficiency at doing their job. Most importantly, this personal or team innovation is done without the IT department (official) involvement and in most cases even without it’s knowledge. This unofficial but productive IT is what the authors define as Shadow IT. I will quote their conclusion on this topic: “Failure to embrace and support Shadow IT in the long run means wasted resources, and inability to maximize the value of your company’s collective candlepower, and lost opportunities”.

The second rule is “Institute a Service Culture”. This is for me the cornerstone of an SOA implementation. The author only give this rule half a page but a lot more is implied. Service-enabling an Organization means adapting its internal culture. “Creating a lifecycle process in which services are made, reported, judged, and finally supported by IT, is essential to maximizing the potential of your homegrown and ecosystem-developed services.” I would add that all this creativity and innovation resulting in productive services must be formally recognized and rewarded. New pay, rewards and even promotion mechanisms will be needed to foster Shadow IT.

Going back to the second level of a Service Enablement Program introduced above, the authors give a brief but useful explanation of how to build a good set of services. In a nutshell, [each service must be] “sufficiently granular to allow for easy reuse; good design is decomposing process steps into a suite of services that can be orchestrated to solve the business need in question, while allowing for recombination.” This implies a potentially large number of services that will then need to be cleverly referenced, tracked and maintained.

The last comment I will make on this chapter refers to its last section (before a set of real life examples) titled “Rethinking Your Architecture”. SOA implementation will eventually (when reaching the level 3) mean a completely new organisational physical structure, and not just limited to IT but hierarchies and departments as well. When embarking seriously on the SOA adventure, you must be ready for significant no-turning-back – sometimes painful - changes that will transform your Organization.

It was about SOA all along! Chapter 4

[Continuation of my commented reading of Andy Mulholland’s book: “Mashup Corporations. The End of Business as Usual”]. Chapter 4 is about how SOA can transform the relationships with your suppliers. I will quote from the book how a Vorpal supplier defines these SOA-driven relationships it has built with it’s customers (p.57). He is responding to one of Vorpal’s manager who noted that the collaborative meeting they just had was unusual in style: “Yes, we’ve noticed [this change] as soon as we created our new services and started doing mass customization for our customers, the relationship changed pretty quickly from a Darwinian struggle to a win-win situation – from conflict to collaboration, if you will – because we’re both going to make a lot of money that way. I like to think of it as negotiation jujitsu – it’s now my job to use your strength to create new business for us instead of just holding the line on price while you pummel me.” With an SOA, suppliers and customers work hand-in-hand to generate value. They help each other out. Another useful quote on the next page is: “[…] don’t just define your suppliers as services – define your own operations as services to them”. You could say that you are helping your suppliers to serve you better. It is then in fact suggested that we should think of our partners and suppliers as members of ‘our’ dynamic ecosystem, where each member contributes directly or indirectly to the growth of all the others. Another good concept given is to see your suppliers as a channel. Your supplier’s customers are potentially new customers for you.

It was about SOA all along! Chapters 2 & 3

[cont. from previous post about my commented reading of Andy Mulholland’s book: “Mashup Corporations. The End of Business as Usual”]. After reading chapters 2 & 3, I realised that I should clarify something important. When I state that my writings on this blog were about SOA all along, I mean that SOA is probably the best value-adding, customer-facing, tangible web-based implementation (that I know) of a knowledge leveraging strategy. What I do not mean is that SOA is the only way to leverage organizational knowledge, nor do I mean that a company-wide change process to establish a knowledge sharing culture must incorporate some degree of SOA in order to be beneficial. Also, SOA is primarily concerned with online services on the Web but of course, not all transactions are online! Having said that, if the technological aspect of SOA might probably not apply in a meaningful sense to all businesses; its associated cultural implications should be relevant to all. SOA first advantage [over most other knowledge leveraging initiatives] is to be directly concerned with increasing/generating sales and this should help catching the attention of CxOs. In chapter 2, a fundamental principle of a SOA is explained: extending IT to the edges of the company. This does not only mean involving the customer-facing collaborators in the creation/evolution of the services to the customers, it means to involve outsiders as well. That is collaborators outside the firewall (to use a technical view) and not on the payroll (well, they could get paid but not with a salary). So, do get this straight: the suggestion is to enable outsiders to “add their own services that create new revenue stream”. The cultural change required to support this is to have your whole company at the service of the people at the edge: the front-line/client-facing collaborators and any trustworthy outsiders with an interest to grow your business (see my knowledge-driven and customer focused organization diagram ) From chapter 3, I will retain in particular the advantages of services (Web 2.0) over traditional Enterprise Applications, with the guiding principle of releasing control to communities of users. The importance of a legal framework also must be noted, in order to secure a service-enabled commercial environment that heavily involve outsiders.

Mesh working rather than Matrix working

Read this very good post by Andy Mulholland (Cap Gemini CTO) about the impact of Web 2.0 collaboration on organizational structure and working practice. Andy identifies the new working practice as Mesh working: http://www.capgemini.com/ctoblog/2007/11/this_is_going_to_be.php Here is how Andy defines Mesh working: <<[…] The change in how people work is focused on Web 2.0, and I have chosen to label this as Mesh Working to differentiate it from Matrix Working. Matrix working is broadly the capability for individuals to work at the specific tasks in which they specialise for a variety of managers, and is made possible by using client-server to allow the separation of the client activity from the data consolidation on the server. However it is at heart a data centric transaction based working method where relationships both between people and systems are ‘managed’ through a close coupled environment. Put simply the relationships in Matrix working are always pre determined, fully defined and use known data. Put equally simply Mesh working is loose coupled, for both the people and systems, relying on forming the relationships required through the ‘interactions’ leading to the definitions of who, and what, should be found and used. The Mesh of people and systems is potentially a never ending huge open environment extending externally as well as internally rather than the closed internal world of Matrix working. […]>> A Mesh of people is really what I also have in mind when I think of a Web 2.0 collaborative environment. It is organized chaos. Andy ends his post with this good assessment of what this means from a competitiveness point of view: <<[…] Competitive advantage is shifting from the cost management of transactions in the back office to business optimisation in the front office and the external market. Globalisation is forcing all enterprises to compete in this space so ultimately Mesh working is being driven as a necessary response to a changing Business world. It’s a World that takes us way beyond internal agility, and flexibility, through Matrix working, and into external responsiveness through Mesh working. >> I totally agree with this conclusion. However, leaders need to be careful about what they first need to do about it. Essentially, it first depends on their organization’s current culture. Mesh working is not compatible with an environment with a heavy hierarchical structure, where horizontal communication – let along team working - other than for prescribed “routine” processes is scarce. You cannot declare mesh working, you cannot impose it. You need to nurture it, gradually implement a conducive organizational environment, starting with a clear and unconditional support from all the CxOs. A “do what I say but not what I do” behaviour will surely not succeed. If as a leader you want your collaborators to willingly share their knowledge outside routine business processes, you must lead by example. Maybe start a corporate personal blog accessed by all and use it to tell your vision. Mesh working is not a concept that can be applied only to the grass roots of your organization and leave the upper echelons unchanged. Mesh working implies a fundamental change structurally, culturally and technologically. All organizational values, processes and methods must be reviewed and progressively adapted to the new way of working. For example, the pay and reward mechanisms must cater for the new importance given to knowledge-sharing, idea generation and innovation. Now, Andy implies in his article that Mesh Working is in fact not an option and that it is happening whether you like it or not. Thinking that as a leader you have today a choice to ignore it would be like if in the late 80’s/early 90’s, you would have been thinking the same of the Matrix working brought by the networked PC and the Information Age that followed. “Symptoms” of Mesh working can very probably be detected in your organization. One obvious reason is that millions of people have already socially embraced this concept largely thanks to the Web 2.0 and, seeing the benefits, it is only natural that they try to extend this behaviour in the workplace. Another reason is that some of your customer or supplier organizations will have already made the transition to Mesh working, and their collaborators will expect the same behaviours from your collaborators. The pressure will therefore mount on all organizations to fully embrace the Knowledge Economy. Traditional Intellectual Property (e.g. Brand name, patent and trademark) will no longer suffice to build and maintain competitive advantages: Intellectual Capital leveraging through effective and efficient Mesh working is to become the key to successful business. Peter-Anthony Glick

will Web 2.0 social tools have a major transformational positive impact in the workplace?

Yesterday, I attended in London a David Gurteen’s Knowledge Café with the topic of the Web 2.0 social tools and what they will mean for organizations. The question to answer was: will these tools have a major transformational positive impact in the workplace? This K Café had an unusual format this time, starting with two speakers given 10mn to either answer positively or negatively. Then the 50+ attendance divided in groups of 5 to discuss/debate, followed with a speaker for each group addressing everyone with the conclusions reached by their group. The event ended with an informal vote on the question. Let’s start with the result of the vote: about 35 people chose to answer positively. It’s a majority but that still left 15 to 20 people (so about 1/3) either unsure, or believing that these new social tools will either have a negative impact or no significant impact at all. I felt that was still quite a lot. Being a supporter of any tools that can help to foster knowledge-sharing and innovation, I will focus here on the arguments given against them having a large impact. A key “negative” argument mentioned was that these social tools are over-hyped since the bulk of effective conversation can only be spoken, not written. Face-to-face conversation would always be required. I would agree with the over-hyped status but not for this reason. The Web 2.0 social tools are not designed to replace face-to-face conversation at all! They are to enable conversations and knowledge sharing that would for the most part otherwise simply not take place. You don’t start a blog and join online forums to discuss with your neighbors and the colleagues you see every day. Yes they might also take part but you intend to reach many many more people you will never speak to directly, let alone meet face-to-face. The reason these tools are over-hyped is that the issue is not about the technology but about the people and the organizational culture. As it was correctly highlighted yesterday, these tools are to be used for a purpose that make business sense to the people using then and to the organization they work in. In other words, they must contribute directly or indirectly to the bottom line: higher profits (or value for money in the public sector). Another “negative” argument I noted was the fear of information overload. More collaborative tools meant for many the risk of increasingly less control over the amount of incoming information. I believe this risk is real but so it was with the telephone a century ago, with email 15 yrs ago or with mobile phones 10 yrs ago. It didn’t stop our ancestors to install a phone in their home or for us to now receive emails on ou mobile phone(s)! It is a potential problem yes but not one that would prevent the Web 2.0 social tools from flourishing. This fear will influence more how we use them individually or collectively such as within an organization. On the whole, the majority agreed that the spread of Web 2.0 tools inside the organization was inevitable. It was only a matter of time. What was less clear was what would be their true benefits, what transformation they would generate. What is happening on the public web can give us some clues but it is indeed difficult to foresee exactly their impact on the workplace. Nevertheless, this is not a reason for not starting to use them, maybe just one to be cautious and not move too fast. But that’s ok, that was also the case with email back in the 90’s. Peter-Anthony Glick http://leveragingknowledge.blogspot.com

Knowledge-driven, not simply customer-driven

There are numerous hurdles/blocks for converting an organization to become “knowledge-driven”; but if we look at the fundamentals for commercial success, we see that it is the right way to go to efficiently leverage organizational resources (mostly the human part) and sustain competitive advantage through creativity and innovation.

Ok some of you might be thinking: surely “customer-driven” is the way to go, knowledge being “only” a mean to an end. There is some truth in this view. Indeed the customer’s satisfaction is often considered as the ultimate objective for all corporate projects and operational activities. It is also correct that organizational knowledge is to be used to facilitate this endeavour. However, is satisfying the customers really the drive for share-holders? No, they are driven by increased market share, increased profits and revenue and increased growth potential/forecast. 

Now, you might say: hold on, if you don’t satisfy your customers you wont get these increases! Yes and No. This view actually supports my first point: that a satisfied customer is a mean to an end, not the end of the means (if I can put it this way). 

Furthermore, being customer-driven often leads to a short-term view: it is about “pleasing them enough to enable us to make our sales target for the month [or the year]”. The long-term repeat business isn’t necessarily cared for. 

For long-term competitive advantage and growth, what is instead needed is to view the customers not “simply” as purchasers of goods and services but as “collaborators”. 

The customer participates (directly or indirectly) in as many stages of the product cycle as possible. The idea is to build a long-term partnership between the organization and its customers. The message to the customer becomes “we are partners/collaborators in this on-going endeavour to please you while at the same time growing our business”. This approach aims at more than satisfying the customer, therefore at delivering above his/her expectations. To achieve this, the organization needs to know well its customers (who they are, their cultural/social background, what they like/want, where/how they live, where/how they travel, etc…). 

Similarly (and this is where it gets really interesting) the customer needs to know well the organization (its products/services – past, present and future; its mission/goals; its history; its point of sales network – incl. of course its website; its successes and - yes why not – its failures; and lastly but certainly not least, its people). Knowledge is then at the centre of this collaborative relationship, hence the knowledge-driven approach.

Now, before enabling your customers to “know” your organization well, the organization must first know itself well. An organizational culture valuing knowledge-sharing is needed. Then, in order to sustain such a collaborative relationship with your customers, your organization will require continuous innovation, and not just in the product design department! Innovation must be encouraged in all functions. Everyone without exception can be creative/innovative. Innovation is fuelled by sharing knowledge/experience and by effective collaboration across departments and borders. This is where Knowledge Leveraging (or the so-called Knowledge Management) comes in... 

Peter-Anthony Glick http://leveragingknowledge.blogspot.com

I am Time Magazine's “Person of the Year” (*) !

(*) As millions of other web 2.0 enthusiasts. Yes, Time Magazine chose all the bloggers, the wikis’users, the online Forum members and other Web-based collaborators as their Person of the Year 2006 (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/ 0,9171,1569514,00.html?aid=434&from=o&amp;amp;to=http%3A//www.time.com/time/magazine/article/ 0%2C9171%2C1569514%2C00.html ). This is a fantastic recognition of this exponentially growing movement unleashing a power for the individual equalling that of political leaders! This power relies on a core principle: a Worldwide reach. I particularly love the conclusion of the article: “Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There's no road map for how an organism that's not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion. But 2006 gave us some ideas. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It's a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who's out there looking back at them. Go on. Tell us you're not just a little bit curious.” My question now is what should this mean for Organizations? The answer must depend on what aspect of the Organization we are considering: internal or external. Externally, this “new kind of international understanding” will mean new ways for Organizations to reach their customers. However, not simply to communicate but to collaborate with them. Customers will increasingly expect and value being involved throughout the product life cycle, from the idea generation to the after-sales services. Internally, Organizations will need to quickly realise that many of their collaborators are also “Person of the Year”. They will expect similar collaborative facilities within the Organization to the ones they use at home. Of course, internally you need a higher degree of control than on the Web for security and confidentiality, with user access rights to sensitive information. However, it is also clear that efficiently and effectively connecting all the brains working in an Organization can generate value. How many of us have experienced the annoying realization that a collaborator had the answer to a problem that at the time required external help, simply because you had no easy way of finding the answer internally (in other words, reinventing the wheel). Peter-Anthony Glick http://leveragingknowledge.blogspot.com