A new Enterprise 2.0 approach: Frequent setup errors (2/4)
In the first post I introduced the principal levels and variables characterizing an Enterprise 2.0 project.
From my integrated point of view we can identify four frequent setup errors present in several Enterprise 2.0 approaches.
It’s not the Web
The design point of view of a web interface or of a famous social network is only a part of knowlewdge nessesary in an Enterprise 2.0 project. The point is to understand the psychosocial, motivational and persuasive mechanisms under the success of an app or a project. If you don’t consider these levels and variables:
- you lose the opportunity to have major probabilities that the target behaviours will be performed by the users
- you risk to not understand what is going on in the network and losing the social dynamics in the network instead to managed them
The users in a company don’t make a free choice when they adopt a new app and collaborative practies, like what happens in the open web. So it’s necessary a strategy of engagement.
Objectives and the ecosystem of a network in a company are different from a social network in the web. This means different users, differents behaviours, different incentives, different strategies from the web.
Technocentric
In the last fifteen years many companies had thought that is enough to have a good IT, a good technology, to achieve several knowledge management objectives. But opening a channel isn’t enough to make people participate. In fact, the knowledge management processes and practices have a relational origin in the organizational culture. With a technocentric point of view, IT only extends the cognitive processes inside the knowledge management processes of the organisation. So, the risk is to have the potentiated capacity of communication, collaboration but not used or partially used.
You have to work both on technology and organisational culture at the same time.
Only top-down
When consultants or designers talk about top-down processes in a social network or intranet, generally they mean the hierarchic direction, from the top to the bottom of contents, information organisation and the strategy of governance of the community. But top-down can be also the motivational strategy and the typology of incentives. It’s fundamental moving from estrinsic to intrinsic motivations because intrinsic incentives are the best to nudge collaborative behaviours. If you want active users, don’t use only a TV or bingo incentive metaphor that makes them passive.
It’s not a matter of faith in the bottom-up organisation. The logic between top-down and bottom-up is inclusive, not esclusive. The point is to understand that auto-organizations of behaviours and informations (meme) is related to more engagement of the user and the evolution of the community.
Collusion
The knowledge management objectives are a challenge to the decisional capacity and coordination of several parts of a big company. An Enterprise 2.0 project could create hierarchic and conflictual resistence inside the structure of the organization. The complexity is also present in the different competences required to understand and manage all the different levels. Generally this situation produce the request that a partial approach can be “magical” enough, or that the company need only a design solution because they have clear the strategic point of view. Unfortunatly the difficulty to deal this complex and multilevel scenario produced a big loss of time and money for the many companies.
Don’t worry, it’s normal. It’s physilogically difficult for a big company organised an important internal coordination for a transversal project as a project of Enterprise 2.0. It’s also normal that there is always someone ready to collude with this partial request.
The correct way is that from the first moment an Enterprise 2.0 project is Change Management and is fundamental to not collude with this partial request, but help the company to coordinate and understand itself to produce solid start point.
In the next post I’ll introduce the main processes of my approach to Enterprise 2.0.
A new Enterprise 2.0 approach: fundamentals and competences (1/4)
This is the first of a four post introduction to a new approach to the Enterprise 2.0 concept.
To start, I’m going to show you the basic concepts and the fundamental conditions you need to understand the specific variables, the levels and the competencies of a E2.0 project.
The specific points of view of my approach are two:
1. PSIxD: the integration of psychological and social levels in the cognitive artefacts
2. Hybrid: the transdisciplinary convergence of competences necessary to analyse and design in complex scenarios
- PSIxD is the acronim of Psychology applied to Interaction Design, a field I’m working on since several years ago, check for example the syntesis of the methodology I created with Davide Casali.
PSIxD is an important differentiation point from a big part of Enterprise 2.0 approaches that you can find around the world. It’s an expression of the changing of users and the co-evolution between human and cognitive artefacts. It’s a scientific and serious modality to analyse the impact of that darwinian natural selection of technologies, apps and practices that is the web and the mobile. We had seen to much speculations on Web 2.0. What are in synthesis the concepts you have to know?
- the cognitive artefacts extend the cognitive processes
- the social networks expand the social dynamics
So, in other words, the interaction is even more a virtual space, a middle ground where you can represent and manipulate mental, social and motivational dynamics of users. In an Enterprise 2.0 scenario PSIxD is a methodology of Persuasive Design that improves the probability to nudge the user to take or break several behaviours.
- Hybrid is the mix of competence, theories and tools you need to approach all levels present in Enterprise 2.0 project.
Too many models of Enterprise 2.0 are too limited on a few competences and points of view.
The competence have to be transdisciplinary because the object of consult and design is a complex system.
We have two principal objects, users and organization.
The user in a social network is on a continuum between a complex system and a psychological and social system.
In the first case the user is a node, expression of nonlinear dynamics of a complex net, in the second case the network is the expression of specific psychological and social caratteristics of the user. So, to analyse and design we need these competences:
- Social Network Analysis
- PSIxD (User Centered Design approach is implicit in IxD)
The organisation is on a similar continuum, so in one hand we have the organisation as complex, autopoietic system and in the other hand we have the organisation as a psychosocial group of persons. So as competences we need:
- Management of complexity (Change Mangement from a complex system point of view)
- Psychology of organisations
You can see in this image the hybrid competencies that are necessery to manage a Enterprise 2.0 project.
In the next post I’ll talk about the most frequentily mistakes in Enterprise 2.0.
UX Conference 2010
Yesterday, it was a beautiful day in Lugano, at the UX Conference 2010.
It’s a conference of and for designers, with some companies interested in UXD.
Luca Mascaro, owner of Sketchin is the father of this event. Luca gives vitality to the UXD in Switzerland and north Italy with this conference and the UXMagazine.
These kind of meeting moments are important to open the mind to the new scenarios in such a fast professional field.
These were the slides of my speech.
New Ibridazioni
As you can see, Ibridazioni changes again.
It isn’t only the minimalist graphic (thanks Foll) but the language too. This change is an expression of the evolution of the contents, my points of view, models and experiences.
In the next weeks I’ll finish all the changes and adjustments and as soon as possible I’ll post some news about my model of psychology applied to interaction design, stay tuned.