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  • Jose Manuel Perez Marzabal 9:00 am on May 23, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: data protection, personal data protection   

    The future of data protection and how to adapt to it 

    Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

    The recently held #bigdataweek reminds us that monitoring data processing is a critical aspect of most strategic decisions and internet business models. We are faced with the widespread use of apps in mobile devices and in contexts with a major potential for data handling, such as the big data phenomenon, the Apache Hadoop software framework, or the emerging quantum computing.

    Against this backdrop, the European Commission presented its Proposal of the General Data Protection Regulation on January 25, regarding the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and the free movement of such data (henceforth “Regulation”), which will replace the current Directive 95/46/EC.

    The Regulation (as opposed to the current directive that requires a transposition process to make it applicable in national law of the Member States) will be directly applicable, will be hierarchically superior to Spanish law, and undoubtedly will have a major impact on the operations of the industry in general, and more specifically, on Internet companies and start-ups.

    Among the new general aspects incorporated, the Regulation includes the tightening of sanctions for non-compliance, the increase in the principle of transparency in companies, the need to reinforce the level of personal data protection, the right to data portability, and the principle of accountability.

    Aspects of the Regulation applicable to data processing in Internet companies

    1. On a conceptual level

    The Regulation designs a security architecture that takes into account both the technological process and the solutions offered for data protection by design –focus developed successfully by the Information and Privacy Commissioner, Ontario (Canada)- and by default. This new approach to data protection means that data protection is contemplated in the technology design phase of business models and risk analysis and management methodology are enhanced, as well as including the control panel for users as a privacy interface or other security technologies.

    2. At an authority level

    The new regulation introduces the key figure of the “data protection officer” with a wide spectrum of functions such as supervision, implementation and application of internal policies, auditing, information of the interested parties, and applications presented in exercising their rights, and monitoring document management.

    3. Regarding processes

    It establishes the impact assessment that must be carried out prior to data processing and proceeds to regulate the so-called “right to be forgotten”, both in search engines and digital footprint, in line with the Spanish ARCO rights. In other words, it specifies that public personal data on the Internet, such as hyperlinks or specific data, must be canceled by the controller when they are accessible in communication services that enable or facilitate their search or access.

    Similarly, it includes a contingency plan in the event of data breach, which establishes the obligation to notify a personal data security breach to the supervisory authority within a period of no greater than 24 hours and, where feasible, to the interested parties.

    Finally, mention should be given to other major developments introduced by the Regulation, such as the modification of the minimum age of minors to under 13 years of age regarding the direct offer of information society and social network services. On this point, it will be more important to sufficiently highlight the data protection and privacy policy on home pages and in registration forms in HTML format.

    Conclusion

    To sum up, I suspect that the legislator has once again made an assessment of data protection dissociated from the technological context, maintaining an asymetrical exchange between the fast technological evolution and legislation. In particular, regarding the evident tensions between regulation and the dynamics of the Web 2.0 that generate bilateral business models based on the exploitation of user data.

    Although aspects such as account release, privacy by design and default, and the assessment of impact encourages the IT security culture in companies and operational criteria focused on risk management and the implementation of compliance programs, it is yet to be seen how regulatory solutions will evolve and what technical innovations will be introduced in the future.

    Jose Manuel Pérez Marzabal (@jmperezmarzabal) is a lawyer who specializes in Internet and e-commerce at MTNProjects. Furthermore, he is a visiting professor at BES La Salle and a teaching consultant at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). He has a Master’s degree in International Law (LL.M) from WWU Münster and a Diploma in Advanced Studies in International Law and Economics from the University of Barcelona.


     

  • Dioni Nespral 9:00 am on May 15, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , social technologies   

    The Business Revolution is called Social Business 

    Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

    Editor’s note: Today we would like to start by welcoming a new contributor on our blog. Dioni Nespral (@dioninespral) is Social Business and Digital Innovation Manager at everis. Dioni is an expert in business innovation and sociodigital strategy. With a degree in Business Administration and Management from the Universidad Antonio de Nebrija, he also holds an Executive MBA from the Instituto de Empresa and a Master’s degree in Marketing and Sales Management from the ESIC.

    Fear of change is universal and has been around since the dawning of time. No one likes their surroundings to change and we all dream of the greatest stability possible. However, the era in which we live is established in permanent change and with a differential feature: the speed of change is exponential. Nothing happens at “our own speed”, everything takes place dynamically and somewhat unpredictably. It is the greatest challenge of our era: we live in a world that is instantaneous.

    I’m sure you’ll have heard of many executives talking about growth, improvement, change, and even innovation. You’ll have heard about it on numerous occasions, but are we really getting the best out of our organizations? Are we getting the maximum potential of the people and the talent who work with us? The answer is obvious: No. A big No at that. Once again, we can’t see the wood for the trees. And the wood is immense.

    In such dynamic environments, leadership with a clear vision and an ordered administration is required. We have created fans of the perfect administration that have gradually destroyed (and continue to destroy) different visions that enable us to face incremental changes. The vision-administration mix is more than advisable, because we have become too used to the organization prepared for “no-change” in a world of constant chaos. I suspect that many organizations are not reflected by these words and are looking to start to change towards incremental improvement, growth, diversity, and perhaps, towards innovation.

    A connected society commands a socio-connected organization

    Social Business emerges as one of the greatest solutions for achieving greater speed in companies. When living in such a connected environment, adaptation is essential, and adopting solutions based on the Network philosophy and social technology is the driving force. The speed of change in companies is becoming faster. The behavior of users, citizens, customers, in short, people, is changing in gigantic leaps and this means organizations need to have open constant bridges of connection that are flexible and dynamic.

    Out of this arises the socio-connected organization, which must be one before appearing to be one. Its members need to be connected, it needs to be collaborative, open, digital and innovative. And obviously, in tune with its market’s demands. A company from a dynamic sector is not the same as one in a more traditional market, and hence, the speed of change is slower. Knowing the right speed helps to move fluidly on the business highway of each market.

    And yes, it’s about people. It seems obvious, but change won’t take place if we don’t put talent at the center of our organizations. How easy it is to say this and how complicated it is to put this into practice. This is understandable, as no one has taught us to do this. At the center of the organization, there always needed to be processes, standards, protocols, management. Now, when we look inwards, and try to find how to drive our talent, we don’t know how to do it, because we need to place differential elements that are not as predictable and much less manageable at the center. But that is our challenge and the pending (r)evolution.

    Social Business affects strategy, culture, processes, people, and technology. The impact of the social side is so strong that it reaches each and every corner of the organization, requiring a single sociodigital implementation model for each case.

    Social technologies together with open, horizontal, collaborative and connected communication enable, when used in the company, its adaptation to traditional processes in the organization, favoring tangible benefits like for example, reduced number of processes, improved customer service, generate incremental ideas and innovations, unveil differential talent or intelligent knowledge in the behavior of customers thanks to the analysis of their experience and processing relevant data.

    Initially, changes are organizational and cultural, as the first major decision is to look inwards and promote level structures where people can connect and communicate more easily. Because most new ideas, those that lead to innovation and enable incremental changes, come from the people in the organization. And these individuals need to find a highway that provides a constant and adequate flow.

    Welcome to the next revolution. Welcome to Social Business.

     

     

  • Carlos Gonzalez Jardon 9:00 am on May 8, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , ,   

    Enterprise Social Networks and Project Management 

    Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

    Editor’s note: Today we would like to welcome a new author to our blog. The clarity of his first post has surprised us, and that has made us even more delighted about him joining our group of contributors. Carlos González Jardón (@cgjardon) is consultant and trainer in project management. With more than 18 years’ experience in the IT sector, his activities revolve around IT project management and quality standards such as CMMi. He holds a computer engineering degree from the Universidad de Vigo, an Executive Master’s from ICAI/ICADE and PMP certification from the Project Management Institute. He is currently consultant in Project Management at Tecnocom. Welcome and thanks!

    We live in a society where access to information is no longer the privilege of a few and has been democratized. Nowdays, in a single click, we can access a wide range of data from multiple sources: search engines, online newspapers, blogs, social networks… The technology revolution is causing a social and professional evolution, in how we relate to our environment. Information continues to be important, but how we access/acquire that information is gaining relevance.

    In this environment, an enterprise social network can become a vital tool that enables us to strengthen some key aspects in our work:

    • Speed. Quick decision-making.
    • Reliability. Quality of the data.
    • Collaboration: Share information.
    • Acccessibility: A single data source, multiple devices to access it.

    The subject is rather extensive, but we will look briefly at how an enterprise social network can help us in executing projects.

    Projects and Enterprise Social Networks

    In project management, communication is a critical factor. But what do we understand communication to be in a project?

    According to the PMBok® Guide (project management knowledge base), one of the leading references for any project leader, managing communication involves all processes required to ensure timely and appropriate generation, collection, distribution, storage, retrieval and ultimate disposition of project information.

    In other words, the project manager needs to ensure that all project stakeholders have or have access to, at the right moment, the information required using suitable and efficient means. This is extremely relevant as poor management of communication and information in a project could cause the time that the project manager devotes to communicate, distribute, share and access the information to sky-rocket, and even bring the project to the brink of disaster.

    In order for the project manager to have the right information at each stage, they need to interact with their team, the customers, suppliers, and the ‘closer’ they are to the task being done, the better the information. Basically, the project manager needs to beSOCIAL with all those stakeholders in the project. It is not enough to have social skills based on ‘face-to-face’ interaction. We need to seek support from the tools that enable us to manage online or virtually multi-disciplinary and multi-site teams.

    In this scenario, an enterprise social network can play a differential role. If we share aspects of our daily lives, why shouldn’t members of a project team share, through an enterprise social network, their problems, doubts, concerns regarding the activities being performed in the project? This activity is already being done in the corridors, on the phone, but it is difficult to have a document support with the conclusions reached. Using collaborative tools can help to flourish and document information that would be lost otherwise. In those project-focused organizations, an enterprise social network can provide major value by sharing and accessing data easily and quickly.

    Benefits of Enterprise Social Networks in Project Management

    Although I’m sure there are many more, these are some of the benefits they can provide:

    Quick access to one of the best sources of knowledge: the team’s experience.

    The senior profiles are an excellent source of knowledge and that knowledge can be used to resolve different situations that we face daily in a project. Coaching, mentoring, tutoring, training or resolving of doubts can be done dynamically through an enterprise social network.

    Repository of project information and documents.

    Although this point has already been solved by many other tools, an enterprise social network can be the main point of access to shared resources. It means converting the current static or one-directional intranet (always focused from the company to the employee) into a social and collaborative environment ‘company-employee’ and ‘employee-employee’ (beyond a simple question-response network).

    Reduce “meetingitis”.

    In many organizations, there are too many inefficient meetings. Often we finish the day with the feeling that we haven’t done anything “productive”. Simple meetings to exchange information and update everyone can be replaced by short virtual meetings (e-meetings): for example, the status of our project, clarification of doubts, etc. These e-meetings will not replace face-to-face meetings, rather they will complement them and reduce them to the essential ones, as the cost, both economically speaking and cost-opportunity (what I don’t get done) is very high.

    Simplify management in multi-site environments.

    In environments where the team is located at different sites in the company or in the client (or even in teleworking situations), the social network will help us enormously with that task of “sharing”, reducing, or even eliminating problems resulting from not all being in the one place.

    Neglected management.

    On many occasions, we experience many short interruptions that break our usual work rate. Enterprise Social Networks mean that those short interruptions can be channelled through it to be answered at a later stage; or even they could be resolved by other members of the team collaboratively, leaving evidence of their resolution in the “social environment” itself.

    Our value lies not in what we know, rather how quickly we can “update” (learn what we don’t know, acquire knowledge) and how we share it with our co-workers.

    In this scenario, an enterprise social network can become a perfect work environment where different stakeholders in our project can interact according to their role, regardless of their physical location and time zone.

    The work environment is a clearly social activity in most cases, so why not use enterprise social networks? This way sharing knowledge among the project team can be more agile, although to achieve it, a cultural change is required in organizations.

     

     

  • Ana Asuero 7:00 am on May 6, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , social enterprise,   

    6 Essential Things You Must Know About Social Business 

    Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

    A few weeks ago I read about interesting ideas and strategies for social businesses in a report carried out by the team and contributors of Sprinklr: ‘How the Most Social Brands do it‘.

    More specifically, Olivier Blanchard (@TheBrand builder) reminded me of some of the ideas we need not only to understand, but to implement and not forget if we really want to build social businesses.

    It is important to take a step back every so often and forget about technology to assess what companies really need for Social Business. We know that this isn’t just about tools. It’s about a change in organizational culture.

    Olivier spoke about some of the lessons we can learn from organizations that are successful thanks to their social business efforts.

    1. ‘Social’ is something you are, not something you do. It’s a question of corporate culture. If a company doesn’t focus on building relationships with its customers as part of its general strategy, the possibilities that it will do it with the new social media are remote. And what’s more, it won’t work. Tools won’t dictate whether a company is social or not; that is something defined by the company’s ‘being’. First, socialize the heart of your organization and base your general strategy on building relationships with your customers in the real world, and then use new social media to cultivate that relationship in the digital world.

    2. Marketing on social media channels isn’t being ‘Social’. A blog is just a blog. Publishing content on it doesn’t make you automatically a social business nor will it convert you into an opinion leader magically. Just because you post ideas on a blog, it doesn’t mean you will ‘engage’ with your customers. Learn the difference between marketing and ‘social engagement’ and then combine them effectively.

    3. ‘Transparency’ isn’t just a word. If you don’t intend to practise it, don’t preach it or mention it. Transparency isn’t a flag you get to wave around only when it is convenient.

    4. Changing your management model is crucial for developing ‘social business’. We’ve already said that ‘social’ is something you are, not what you do; and for that reason most organizations cannot succeed in the social space by changing what they do and not who they are. If you don’t care about your customers, a director of social media or a social media manager won’t be able to transform you company and help you take advantage of the new tools. First you need to become a customer-centric organization. The rest will come later.

    5. People are more important than technology. Hire people who care about people. If you hire idiots, your company will be full of idiots. It doesn’t matter what your social network strategy is or how many useful conversation monitoring dashboards you have. Start with your people, not your tools. They are the ones that will make social work or fail.

    6. Talk less, listen more. On many occasions, organizations become obsessed with producing content, blog posts, press releases, tweets, events… That’s great, but it’s not the only thing. You should spend the same time listening to that audience you address as you spend producing content for them. Listen to your customers, listen to your employees, listen to your competitors. If you only focus on talking and publishing, you miss the conversation.

    With that, you can start to work and practise social business. Success takes work, time, patience, passion, honesty, integrity and, also, a good measure of luck. If anyone else tries to tell you it’s easy, they’re lying to you. At Zyncro we talk about social business Know how?

    Ana Asuero (@aasuero) works as Social Media Manager at Zyncro. She is an expert in corporate digital communication, social media and social media marketing. She has previously worked on institutional communication, media planning, advertising campaign strategy and market analysis projects.

     

     

  • Bill Cushard 9:00 am on May 2, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , ,   

    On-boarding New Employees on Enterprise Social Networks 

    Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

    On-boarding new employees is a major undertaking for many organizations. In fact, for most training departments, on-boarding is most of what it does. A lot of money is invested in on-boarding new employees, but there are staggering statistics that show that all of this time, energy, and effort is largely wasted.

    For example, according to the Wynhurst Group, 22% of staff turnover happens in the first 45 days of employment and the cost of losing an employee is at least three times the salary. This means that organizations are spending thousands of dollars per new employee to on-board them only to see many leave, costing the organization even more money to replace.

    These statistics alone should cause business leaders to question whether their current on-boarding efforts are effective enough to reduce these numbers. The good news is that new employees who went through a structured on-boarding program were 58% more likely to be with the organization after three years.

    So there is hope.

    Learning Job Skills is a Limited Goal of On-boarding

    The purpose of most on-boarding programs is to help new employees learn the skills they need to perform their jobs. Of course, this is important, but not enough attention is placed on other important goals of on-boarding, including socializing new employees into the culture of the organization. This limited goal of on-boarding is short-sighted because research has shown that effective on-boarding and new employee socialization can lead to positive outcomes in terms of job satisfaction, better performance, higher commitment to the organization, and reduction in intent to quit.

    Therefore, if organizations can just change how they on-board new employees by thinking about socializing new employees into the organization rather than just training them, organizations can improve performance through new employees who are more satisfied at work, perform better in their jobs, are more committed to the company, and have a lower intent to quit.

    So how do organizations socialize new hires instead of just training them? This is where enterprise social networks (ESNs) come into play.

    Where ESNs Come In

    In most cases, a new employee completes a new hire training class and then is shuffled to a desk surrounded by people in their department. Most of what a new person now learns about the company comes from their immediate surroundings, which is only a microcosm of what the company is all about.

    What if a new person ends up sitting in between the two most negative people in the company? What influence do you think they will have on the new person? Enterprise social networks open up the entire company to new employees, and empowers new people to interact with anyone in the organization no matter what department they are in or where in the world they are located.

    In the remainder of this post, I share four ideas for how to use enterprise social networks to more effectively on-board and socialize new employees into your organization.

    Four Ideas for Implementing Effective Socialization on ESNs

    1. New Employee Group: Create a group on the enterprise social network and assign all new hire employees to this group. Encourage new employees (perhaps defined as people hired within the past 0 to 12 months) to interact with each other, share stories of their on-boarding experience, and otherwise support each other.

    2. Assign New Employee Community Manager: Many companies have community managers to facilitate interactions between companies and their customers. The idea is to improve customer engagement. Why not assign a community manager to improve engagement specifically among newly hired employees?

    3. Encourage New Employees to Reach Out (with Direction): One of the most important benefits of enterprise social networks is that they allow employees to easily communicate with people beyond their immediate network. The new hire community manager should encourage new employees to reach out to people all over the organization, which could mean reading posts of others, finding people with expertise, asking questions of people they find interesting or commenting on the posts of others.

    This reach out should be structured in order to get new hires started. One example is a scavenger hunt. All new employees could be given instructions to seek people out using the enterprise social network. Some assignments could be to 1) find three people who share a hobby or interest with you by searching employee profiles; and 2) find three people in departments or with skills and expertise you want to acquire and send them a message asking them a question about how they got started. There are many ways this can be done.

    By providing structure to early activities, it reduces the anxiety of what to look for and also gives new people the confidence to continue to reach out and build their network on the enterprise social network as they progress with the company.

    4. Provide Links to Resources Related to Their Job: As a learning and development professional, I can tell you that the worst thing you can do is cram everything people need to know about their new job into the new hire training. It is too much. New hires get overwhelmed and forget much of what was taught anyway. Enterprise social networks allow you to strip out much of the content from the new hire training, and provide it to your new people over time, and in the moment of need. Use enterprise social networks to post resources when needed and also allow users to share these resources with each other.

    A Natural Opportunity to Improve Performance

    Enterprise social networks provide a natural opportunity for vastly improving how newly hired employees are socialized into organizations. By leveraging the power of enterprise social networks, your new people can be more satisfied at work, will perform better, and will stay longer. How could you not want that? If you are not using an Enterprise Social Network yet, it’s time for you to try Zyncro for free.

    The ideas above are just the beginning of what can be accomplished on enterprise social networks. How are you using enterprise social networks to on-board and socialize new employees into your organization? Share your stories in the comments below.

    Bill Cushard (@billcush), a new author to our Zyncro Blog. Bill is writer, blogger and learning experience (LX) designer and facilitator. He has extensive, in-the-trenches experience in creating learning programs that incorporate semi face-to-face and social learning methods. You can follow him on Twitter or on Google+.

     

     

  • Ana Asuero 9:00 am on April 29, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , ,   

    The future for companies is to become social, mobile, and cloud: the keys from Zyncro 

    Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

    Editor’s note: Today we bring you this post that we wrote in Spanish for Eurocloud, the Spanish Association of SaaS and Cloud Computing Providers. We though it would be interesting to look at how the future for companies will be social, mobile and in the cloud.

    Companies are experiencing a transformation process marked by technology platforms and defined by the convergence in everything social, mobile, and cloud-based. The buzz word SoMoClo is a concept that provides companies with a new opportunity to transform their business processes using technology solutions.

    The SoMoClo trend is another symptom of how technology consumerism has evolved. We use applications that are designed for synchronizing with the cloud, sharing content on social networks, and of course, to work from mobile devices.

    This also adapts to the business world. Many of you have been using your personal devices at work for some time; you access social networks to keep up-to-date with the latest developments in your sector to see what your competitors are doing, you use online storage to save and access your corporate documents from home without having to use a virtual private network. And all this in a scenario where the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) trend is growing, mobile devices improve each day and the cloud is becoming something easier to adopt.

    There are experts who consider that soon employees won’t just ask for better smartphones. They’ll go beyond that and will ask to have contents available through their cells and easy access it through the tools they normally use. Employees will want simply to be able to use their favorite tools that they use in their private lives in the work environment.

    With the explosion of Big Data (according to IBM, we generate more than 2.5 quintillion bytes per day), organizations need to convert that consumer trend into a strategy for transforming their business processes. SoMoClo is here to stay. The world is already social, mobile, and cloud-based; companies shouldn’t wait to do it too, seeing the cloud as the means of delivery, the social side as the shared service, and the mobile side as an omnipresent access. The leaders of organizations will need to rethink their processes because SoMoClo needs to be integrated in the company and will represent the next chapter in the Internet transformation, expanding collaboration to new levels of productivity.

    The figures already point to a positive change. According to data from the IDC, 2012 represented a turning point in the implementation of the cloud model in Spanish business, duplicating its penetration rate on the previous year, reaching 29%.

    The benefits of working in the cloud for businesses

    The benefits of working the cloud for businesses are easy to identify. Among others, it helps to reduce costs and increases service levels and productivity. In fact, it is estimated that the budgets for cloud computing will grow by 25% by 2015. Cloud technology is cheaper, more usable, more accessible, faster and easier to implement. What’s more, it makes applications more mobile and collaborative.

    Zyncro helps organizations to reap the benefits from working in the cloud

    At Zyncro we understand the business benefits of the cloud and we help organizations that are transforming their business model to make it more social, mobile and in the cloud thanks to our platform.

    For that reason, we integrate with a wide number of serivces in that line, on our continuous search to become the first social software platform capable of offering integrated access to organizations’ entire documental contents.

    Zyncro started its journey to centralize and socialize corporate documentation with its integration with the renown SharePoint from Microsoft (November 2011), becoming the social, collaborative, mobile, and user-friendly layer of major enterprise systems. This integration trend continued with Zyncro’s association with the Google Apps suite, more specifically with Google Calendar, Gmail (July 2012) and notably Google Drive (September 2012), and the technology unification process Zyncro has sought from its outset was reinforced with its integration with other social networks, cloud-based productivity apps, ERPs, or even business intelligence systems. A few weeks ago we announced our integration with Dropbox, the leading cloud file management system, and shortly we will launch our integration with box.

    Our goal is to continue helping organizations to reap their maximum potential by using social technology applied to the business world. With this vision, we continue our strategy to add sources that host business knowledge in a continuous search to improve the functionality and capacity of our platform, and become one of the Enterprise Social Networks with the greatest capacity to adapt to the most popular services on the social web and enterprise software.

    Ana Asuero (@aasuero) works as Social Media Manager at Zyncro. She is an expert in corporate digital communication, social media and social media marketing. She has previously worked on institutional communication, media planning, advertising campaign strategy and market analysis projects.


     

  • Rafael Garcia-Parrado 9:00 am on April 26, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , , ,   

    The professional facilitator in organizations 

    Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

    Technological advances and growing competitiveness force companies to stay permanently up-to-date, so collaborative practices are becoming more valued as a more than profitable option.

    Here we can talk about practice communities that can enhance productivity in organizations thanks to an improvement in processes and empowering the employees who should assess, propose and solve in decision-making.

    Placing these work groups at the heart of any productive improvement involves giving them autonomy, with the result being the sum of the individual productivities and knowledge transfer.

    However a change of such dimensions in any organization used to functional or departmental structures can entail a number of problems in managing this complex change. To face it, and to ensure that projects don’t de-virtualize from their auto-da-fe, total integration is required and not just changing the structure of the departments.

    To respond to these limitations in organizations, professional facilitators or facilitator teams have emerged, which are responsible for developing strategic capacities for re-focusing the actions of the work group.

    These professionals seek to:

    • Drive innovation
    • Ensure strategic cohesion
    • De-bureaucratize the organization
    • Instill a new way of doing things (innovation requires a method)
    • Streamline the organizational change
    • Use social technologies to provide business openness

    These professionals can acquire a greater role in the classical structure, while they reduce their weight and importance. Through their interruption in the work methodology, they seek to generate wisdom across the board that enables the company to give an efficient response to the challenges.

    To sum up, I want to highlight the importance of people, as a high level of involvement and maturity is essential in order for the companies themselves to adapt to the rhythm and the quality of their employees, achieving greater flexibility and orientation on the outcome.

    Rafael García (@rafagparrado) works as a consultant at Índize and has his own blog, which at Zyncro we highly recommend: La Factoría Humana.


     

  • Javier Velilla 9:00 am on April 17, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , ,   

    The role of the brand in organizations in the cloud 

    Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

    The networked enterprise is a knowledge-intensive, decentralized organizational model with data exchange processes, with a global and local presence, with talent connected inside and outside the strict limits of the enterprise. The networked enterprise is defined by its capacity to adopt ICTs thanks to a profound cultural and organizational transformation when faced with a complex and demanding market.

    It is a phenomenon that grows in all advanced economies and that has been described in many books and articles by Manuel Castells. Along the same lines, Juan Freire and Antoni Gutierrez-Rubí state in point 1 of Manifiesto Crowd that “markets are relationships.”

    The networked organization means decentralizing: networks of semiautonomous units or strategic alliances between companies. The advantages of this model include adaptability, flexibility and coordination of objectives, knowledge and innovation in both a local and regional perspective, as well as a global one.

    In short, this type of enterprise does not express itself by the inside-out, near-far or top-bottom. They missed that episode on Sesame Street, or they have just forgotten it. The search for greater competitiveness encourages them to adopt this type of logic, which are accompanied obviously by the support of cloud media.

    Competitiveness moves with a click: with new distances and behavior. This logic is based on the concept of the network, which describes structures comprising people and organizations connected by one or several types of relationship. Technology has made great advances in this aspect, however from a brand perspective, some very important questions have been raised. Most are to do with balance among consistency (control, cohesion, uniqueness, homogeneity…) and dispersion (cloud, node, link, diversity, network…) Many companies are moving on these variables and their impact on the management of their brand is evident.

    A brand must be the glue holding these nodes and connections together. A brand defines the horizon for the organization and acts as unifying force because it establishes the meaning, the value proposal, and the facts and behavior that sustain it. When any company is cloud-based, the brand must act as a guiding element to give consistency to all points of contact (marketing, HR, innovation, etc.) and to ensure a shared focus (objectives, corporate culture, stories, etc.)

    Brands set out a journey, a reality that invites each individual to travel along through different supports, contexts and stories. Faced with a dynamic, experiencial and bi-directional reality, the brand behaves as a facilitator. More is expressed as a brand territory (an open mental space equipped with different realities) than those mythical USPs (unique selling propositions).

    A tip for managing a brand in a cloud environment: everything is periferal, the brand must be the center. It is the best way to generate a memorable mental frame (that sets the brand apart from the noise), it helps the consumer to buy (guarantee and trust), and aligns the entire organization with a inspiring viewpoint.

    Javier Velilla (@javiervelilla) is founding partner and director of the strategic communication consultancy company Comuniza. He is an expert in brand management, planning and social networks. He is also a professor at higher education centers, businesses and institutions, as well as an academic researcher and author of a book on branding.

     

     

  • Chris Preston 9:00 am on April 15, 2013 Permalink | Reply
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    Losing Meaning Amongst Complexity 

    Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

    I’ve recently been reading Dan Ariely’s latest book – The Upside of Irrationality. For those of you who don’t know him, he’s a frequent writer and speaker on the subject of human behavior, with a particular emphasis on why we do things that make no practical sense. In this book, he shares research into how we find meaning in what we do, and the consequences of not having it in our working lives. It’s fascinating stuff, and I could read his work all day.

    He makes a key point about the need for us to see the outcomes of our work successfully launched into the world, and that it’s the role of leaders to make sure people can join the dots between what they are doing, with the ultimate outcome of the organisation. In the book, he uses SAP as an example of where complexity is clouding this process – I don’t believe he’s saying SAP is a bad system; it’s just one of many, many tools that we now use for our daily lives… probably one too many.

    How bad is the problem he’s describing? Well, for example, in 2008 I was working with a police force that had just audited its systems – they had upwards of 350 different ones. That was four years ago – I dread to think how many they have now. Officers at the time were frustrated and disheartened with the situation, feeling that it took them away from the core of the job: to police.

    This situation is echoed in the pharmaceutical industry, one of the most heavily regulated groups you will ever find. With multi-billion dollar fines levied for illegal activity, the companies involved have layer upon layer of systems to prevent any, tiny, slippage of the ‘code’. This compliance is aimed to benefit the patient, but it has the hugely negative effect of creating a group of dispirited people who genuinely want to make people’s lives better, but feel the myriad of steps in the process simply don’t allow it. I’ve been part of trying to make the many systems more understandable, which is a Sisyphean task I would not wish on anyone.

    Thinking this over, one phrase came to mind, written by the equally fascinating author John Maeda, who, when talking about simplicity, uses this powerful equation “How simple can you make it / How complex does it have to be?” I love this statement, and I turned to it recently when working on an online profiling tool, which I was happily heaping with features that I thought would be wonderful. The final product would have needed days of patient explanation before anyone understood it, and a manual the size of a phone book. Applying John’s rule, I chopped out most of the things I’d added, and it worked just fine.

    But with my system, I had total control. With the police and pharmaceutical industry control is far from perfect, and the ‘clear lake’ slowly silts up as many contributors independently bring in their own needs. Organizations over a certain size lose clarity around complexity – no one has the reach or remit to ask the question ‘are we too complex?’ when it comes to systems and process. Many companies simplify their products, operations and footprint, but few ever truly simplify how they do business. As one police officer put it to me, “we are good at adding, but not taking away process.” Systems seem to disappear only when technology takes a step forward.

    There’s no doubt that the proliferation of systems is damaging our ability to find meaning in what we do, research, common sense and performance figures all bear witness to this fact. I’m not suggesting that we stack them up and burn them – we’re past that point. What I do feel is needed is local ownership of this challenge. It’s the job of the manager to ensure that people working in complex environments can see how their contribution adds to the organization’s ability to deliver services, goods or outcomes. No one wants a meaningless task, but the danger today is that the processes we’ve built up around the daily job make it difficult to see past the task of administration.

    Leaders and managers need to become practiced at holding conversations about the organization’s aims, what’s coming off the assembly line, and who they are helping. They need to recognize that people are blinkered by the systems they have to use, and need encouragement, support and time to step out of this and look at the wider picture.

    None of this is difficult, it’s about time and effort on the part of the people that really need their teams to perform well.

    And, if you have the capability, maybe also extinguish the odd system here and there – start a quiet revolution around simplifying working life. One of John’s governing laws is “Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.” So, if it’s a law, you’ve got to do it.

    Chris Preston (@Trimprop) is a Psychology graduate and specializes in internal communication and team development. He currently is Director at The Culture Builders.

     

     

    • David Zinger 10:58 pm on April 15, 2013 Permalink | Reply

      Well said Chris. I like the way you put Johm Maeda and Dan Ariely together. I have been thinking about this a lot in relationship to employee engagement and this was a very nice personal booster.

    • Chris Preston 10:13 am on April 16, 2013 Permalink | Reply

      Thanks David – they are two lovely authors, and I really wish that business could do more with John Maeda’s work – I think the challenge is it’s not as easy to link his thinking with business process as it is with product design. Glad it helped boost you!

  • Bill Cushard 9:00 am on April 8, 2013 Permalink | Reply
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    Improving Sales Enablement with Enterprise Social Networks 

    Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

    Editor’s note: Today we have the pleasure of presenting a new Zyncro Blog author: Bill Cushard (@billcush). He is an author, blogger, and learning experience (LX) designer with extensive, in-the-trenches experience building learning programs that leverage blended and social learning methods. You can follow him on Twitter or on Google+.

    According to the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), U.S. businesses spend $15 billion per year on sales training and that many sales people find the training ineffective or less than useful. This statistic should drive business leaders crazy because it forces them to ask what they are getting from such a large investment. And this number is just in the United States. Imagine what that number would be if one includes businesses around the globe. Because of the large amount spent on sales training each year, there is great value in solving the problem of improving the effectiveness of sales enablement efforts in organizations.

    The question is, “How can organizations improve sales enablement efforts, in order to get the most out of the large investment they are making in preparing the sales force to grow their businesses?” According to research, I believe there is promise in the use of enterprise social networks (ESN).

    Research is Pointing Towards ESNs

    In a 2012 article in the Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, it is suggested that the future of sales training must be individualized, jointly determined, voluntary, tailored to fit mutual needs and offered in various modes. Accordingly, the authors advise that future research should explore different types of technology delivery methods, including social, which could help improve sales training effectiveness.

    Enterprise social networks seem to satisfy this need, which is why I am conducting a research project for my dissertation to test Etienne Wenger’s (1998) social theory of learning. I am seeking to find out whether there is a relationship between participation of newly hired sales people on an enterprise social network and sales results. In other words, if newly hired sales people participate in peer-to-peer, social learning activities on an enterprise social network, will their sales results improve? According to a social theory of learning, it should.

    A Social Theory of Learning: How People Learn

    One key element of a social theory of learning considers that people learn through a back-and-forth duality between participation and reification. Participation refers to taking part in communication, activities, or events and applies both to individuals and groups. Reification refers to the process of solidifying the experience of participation in the form of resources. In other words, learning occurs when there is participation in conversation and available resources about a specific topic.  

    Where Enterprise Social Networks Come In

    Enterprise social networks are designed perfectly with the need for participation and reification in mind. Think about it. On an enterprise social network, people can continually participate in conversations and those conversations can contain links to resources and those conversations themselves become resources (reified conversations) that others can access.

    So, if sales enablement is an on-going process of equiping a sales force and learning occurs through an ongoing process of participation and reification, then enterprise social networks should be a foundational platform to get the most out of an organization’s sales enablement efforts.

    But how, you ask?

    There are many ways enterprise social networks can be leveraged to support sales enablement. Here are three ways to start:

    1. Find Experts: It is not always easy to find the right person with the right expertise in medium to large sized companies. This is especially a problem in companies with offices around the world. With an enterprise social network, people can find expertise from people they have never met and from people around the world.

    2. Ask Questions: We all get stuck on a problem from time-to-time. It could be in a sales meeting, a technical support call, or on a big project with new stakeholders. Sometimes, we do not have the answers we need. On an enterprise social network, we can ask a question. Sure, it is easy to ask questions from people who sit near you, but how do you ask questions of people who work in different offices? And how do you ask questions from people you don’t even know?  An enterprise social network empowers people to ask questions of anyone in the organization.

    3. Sharing Resources and Stories of Success and Failure: If I read an article about a major change to an industry that my company sells to, I can post that link to everyone in my sales organization so that the team is aware. To make my post even more valuable, I can add some commentary to set the context for why I think it is important. This commentary can spark a conversation from others and a discussion can occur that may impact a broader group of sales people.  Furthermore, I can share a recent success I had trying a new sales technique that might benefit the team. Someone else may comment on my story about how that same technique did not work for them. Others can ask further questions and decide for themselves whether the technique would work for them and how they could apply it to their situation. This is a scenario that no training can keep up with.

    Sales Enablement Is Not Just About Sales Training

    Sales enablement is not just about sales training. In fact, Forrester defines sales enablement as an ongoing process that equips client-facing employees to have valuable conversations with clients and prospective clients. Yes, training is vital, and so is a systematic sales process. But in order to foster and sustain an ongoing process that equips your sales force, an enterprise social network must become a foundational infrastructure in sales enablement efforts. As much as organizations spend on sales enablement, efforts to equip the sales force in a sustainable way should be a top priority.

    How do you use enterprise social networks to sustain your sales enablement efforts? Share your stories in the comments below. The sales force of Telefónica Latin America use Zyncro. This is our best example :-)


     

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