More and more customer facing business lines and workers are developing core business social usages

Enterprise Digital Summit in Paris : here we are ! The conference will take place Wednesday and Thursday, 1rst and 2nd of June at the UIC-P next to the Eiffel Tower. Here is the 2nd part of my chat with Bjoern Negelmann, the conference organizer around the preparation of the event, my expectations and of course our perception of digital transformation. The 1rst part of my interview is here.

Several Lecko customers will talk at the event (Sodexo, Air France, …) as well as great speakers (see detailed agenda there), furthermore, we will present a summary of our last study :ESN vol 8. The fact that more and more customer facing business lines and workers adopt business oriented social usages is really a meaningful signal. The conference will be a great opportunity to feel the pulse of digital transformation !

BN : What are your drawbacks on the reasons for this low-understanding of the transformational power of those networks?

ME : Most professional now understand the need of transformation, whether because they are scared to be uberized or because they see it as an opportunity or at least because they don’t want to stay on the side of the road.

But it takes time to convert this awareness into concrete, daily practices, and companies don’t give themselves much time nowadays.

BN :Isn’t the positioning of the “social initiative” as Enterprise Social Networking already the wrong approach? Shouldn’t the “collaborative idea” be the central part of this approach?

ME : Yes and that’s why we observe on the field : the priority comes back to collaboration, where the business value is : collaborate efficently on business matters first, social will come naturally !

With the development of new tools and their ease of deployment, the idea of a unique, global corporate ESN for the whole company is no more realistic. Corporate IT must provide a framework and at the same time accept that their users develop multiple usages with multiple tools.
BN : What are your recommendations for changing this situation and for unfolding the transformational effects of the collaborative approach?

ME : I think the transformation is on it way. We just have to foster it by :

– Large acculturation programmes to develop a fertile soil
– Identifying change leaders, help them, recognize them, coach them : they are the engine
– Communicate on the success stories (rather than on potential benefits)
– Setup a collaborative governance of digital transformation, including all stakeholders and not siloed by technologies (Intranet / ESN / Productivity / …).

BN :At the Enterprise Digital SUMMIT we are emphasizing the advancements in AI technology and the market forces of platform models as new change drivers for the digital transformation. What is your opinion on this in regards to the results of your research?

ME : Technologies are evolving fast (big data, AI, …) but especially for B2E technologies, the limiting factor is employee adoption ! Companies don’t have time to deploy, really adopt a tool that it’s already obsolete. We have to move forward to the next generation without having fully collected the benefits of the previous one ! We notice everyday how the corporate world is late in terms of digital usages compared to the real world. This being said, adding AI to social & collaboration usages represent a huge potential and many possible applications. Especially for HR and Comms : interpreting the social graph, understanding trending topics into the organization, detecting leaders, suggesting really significant content to employees, …

AI will introduce predictive analysis. Predicting the success of a community, of a project, of solving a given problem for instance. I hope it will not lead to the translation of minority report scenario to the entreprise : predicting employees success or failure !

BN : What are your expectations for the Enterprise Digital SUMMIT?

Have fun, network with colleagues, meet practicioners, learn from great case studies, and sense how digital transformation is progressing !

This interview has also been published there : http://blog.enterprise-digital.net/enterprise-digital-summit-blog/