Business Interaction Management

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• A couple of weeks back I (Gary Hamel) provided you with a synopsis of Vineet Nayar's new book, "Employees First, Customers Second," which has been recently published by Harvard Business School Press. In it, Vineet, CEO of HCL Technologies, talks about the progress his company has made in making managers more accountable to those on the front lines. Having posted my summary, I invited you to submit your questions to Vineet, and many of you did, along with plenty of piquant comments. Herewith, Vineet's reply. He begins by providing a bit of context, and then takes on a few of the most-asked queries. - Marc Buyens

Tags: Vineet_Nayar, EFCS

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• The "real" Enterprise 2.0 is not a technology or marketing plan, but the reinvention of the enterprise itself. It's a rethinking of the structure, process, culture and even, in some cases, the very purpose of the enterprise.
  With technology erasing barriers to participation and communication, we're seeing a change in the nature of how we go about running an organization. - Marc Buyens

Tags: BIM, enterprise_2.0, collaboration, culture

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• We are living times with a growing focus on NOW. Increasingly, we have access to information anywhere, anytime and increasingly, our interaction behaviour asks for anywhere, anytime, now. That is evolution. However, is it also progress? - Marc Buyens

Tags: BIM, enterprise_2.0

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• Let's talk efficiency, let's talk simplicity and leave the big words to others. Bottom line, from all the available pieces of technology on my laptop, nothing -- and I mean nothing -- compares to e-mail. We can reach anyone around the world in a split second, send any file, share ideas and get feedback. E-mail is our way to communicate and work together daily that is always tied to a business process being carried out in the organization. But in all actuality, e-mail is a problem. Basex Research recently estimated that businesses lose $650 billion annually in productivity due to unnecessary e-mail interruptions and overload. - Marc Buyens

Tags: BPM, BIM

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• As high-tech supply chains increase in complexity, they become harder to manage. Collaboration between OEMs, suppliers, and retailers is the answer. - Marc Buyens

Tags: collaboration, supply_chain

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• Recent events in the news have inspired a thought experiment: I asked myself what I would do if I were put in charge of IT as part of the turnaround effort at a big US automaker. To be a bit more specific, I imagined that one of the big 3 American auto companies was taken over tomorrow by enlightened and aggressive new leadership whose only goals are to restore the company to operational and financial excellence. This leadership is enlightened (in my book) because it believes firmly in the power of IT to help businesses achieve their goals and differentiate themselves in the marketplace, and will fund and fully support whatever initiatives I propose (this is a complete fantasy for several reasons, but thought experiments aren't supposed to be constrained by reality.).\nSo what would I propose? - Marc Buyens

Tags: Andrew_McAfee, enterprise_2.0

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• Business is about process, typically starting with a customer calling, then proceeding through a sequence of tasks and activities ending with the delivery of some value. - Marc Buyens

Tags: framework, business_processes

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• Tacit interactions are becoming central to economic activity. Making those who undertake them more effective isn't like tweaking a production line. - Marc Buyens

Tags: collaboration, competitive_advantage, tacit_interactions

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• Successful efforts to exploit the growing importance of complex interactions could well generate durable competitive advantages. - Marc Buyens

Tags: interactions, employees

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• About half a century ago, Peter Drucker coined the term "knowledge worker" to describe a new class of employee whose basic means of production was no longer capital, land, or labor but, rather, the productive use of knowledge. Today, these knowledge workers, who might better be called professionals, represent a large and growing percentage of the employees of the world's biggest corporations. In industries such as financial services, health care, high tech, pharmaceuticals, and media and entertainment, professionals now account for 25 percent or more of the workforce and, in some cases, undertake most typical key line activities. These talented people are the innovators of new business ideas. They make it possible for companies to deal with today's rapidly changing and uncertain business environment, and they produce and manage the intangible assets that are the primary way companies in a wide array of industries create value. - Marc Buyens

Tags: structure, organisational_change

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• Why companies like Best Buy design their office spaces to encourage more employee interactions - Marc Buyens

Tags: interactions, workplace

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• This blog is focused on "exploding" old concepts and thinking about economies, organizations, communities, and groups.\n\nWe will focus on patterns of connectivity and self-organizing behavior in economic and social networks and how these new structures lead to resilience, adaptability, agility, transparency, and innovation. - Marc Buyens

Tags: networks

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• FIPA Interaction Protocols (IPs) specifications deal with pre-agreed message exchange protocols for ACL messages. Below are the Preliminary, Experimental and Standard specifications relating to IPs. - Marc Buyens

Tags: FIPA, interactions, BIM

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• Business process management in open environments remains a stubborn and important challenge. In open environments, autonomous organizations having heterogeneous information systems interact in an ever-evolving manner. The nature of the contractual relationships among such organizations has a significant bearing on the modeling of the business processes in which they participate. Conventional approaches are not suitable for open environments because (1) they lack support for modeling and management of contracts among organizations, (2) the modeling abstractions they offer do not afford crucial software engineering desiderata such as reuse, refinement, aggregation, and verification, and (3) they fail to provide the designers with guidelines on adapting the models should the underlying requirements change.\n\nWe propose a novel approach for engineering interorganizational business interactions. Contractual relationships are modeled via commitments and the interactions for enacting the contracts are captured via the modular abstraction of protocols. Relative to how organizations value the various terms of the contracts and how the contracts are played out via protocols, safety and benefit of the contracts are reasoned about. A protocol specifies rules that govern the interactions among the organizations. Protocols can be published to a repository, shared, reused, refined, and aggregated. We propose a methodology-Amoeba-that guides software designers in the face of evolving requirements on how the protocols and contracts can be adapted. - Marc Buyens

Tags: interactions, BIM

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• While thinking about the concept 'interaction' it is important to understand that the traditional business view and the real world's view on the interaction do not really match. When businesses interact, they want to achieve something. When people interact, they want to understand something. - Marc Buyens

Tags: interactions, BIM

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• All interactions are crucial steps in any business process. Yet, in most process descriptions, interactions are just endpoints. Once we get there, the process reaches completion and everything is OK. There are no further consequences. Unfortunately, this is incorrect. - Marc Buyens

Tags: processes, interactions, BPM, BIM

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• Today's networked era requires a new way to make investment decisions that incorporates intangible assets and more accurately depicts how value is created. The industrial age has run out of steam. Look at General Motors. Look at Chrysler. We are witnessing the death throes of management models that have outlived their usefulness. The network era now replacing the industrial age holds great promise. Networked organizations are reaping rewards for connecting people, know-how and ideas at an ever-faster pace. Value creation has migrated from what we can see (physical assets) to intangibles (ideas). Look at Google and Cisco. - Marc Buyens

Tags: ROII, interactions

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• I can't tell you how many companies I have worked with that have encouraged or tolerated a large degree of geographic dispersal among employees and management teams. "We're virtual, and proud of it," one told me. "It doesn't matter where you live anymore," many employees of virtualized companies have argued. "We travel all the time anyway," has been another frequent mantra.\n\nBut I recently encountered a company that is moving the other way. Eclipsys makes software for healthcare providers. The company's headquarters is in Atlanta. Last week, it changed CEOs. The previous CEO, Andrew Eckert, lived in Silicon Valley. By all accounts, he did a good job in the role, and the company has been doing well. However, the board of directors felt that the company couldn't be managed successfully from afar, and held discussions with Eckert about moving to Atlanta. He was committed for both family and career reasons to stay in California, however, and declined to move. The board decided to change leaders, and Philip Pead, who had previously headed and sold a healthcare software company in Atlanta, got the nod as the new CEO. Pead had moved to Miami, but is returning to Atlanta to run the company. - Marc Buyens

Tags: Tom_Davenport, organisational_change, virtual_communities

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• Here's an interesting rumour (from Mike Arrington, so let's take it with a skyscraper-ful of salt): CBS turned over Last.fm listening data to the RIAA.\n\nThe music industry has big, big problems. Let's use them to illustrate a bigger idea: next-generation leadership.\n\nIn my zombieconomy podcast, I discussed the idea of leadership - not as an individual capability, but as an organizational capacity. Organizations that act as leaders break new ground consistently and unstoppably. - Marc Buyens

Tags: interactions, edge, Umair_Haque

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• Social networks now exist for several years and some of the behaviour of such communities is reasonably well understood. Enough to know that there are potential pitfalls. However, somehow we always seem to forget. Twine, a perception of social interactions. - Marc Buyens

Tags: Twine, BIM, web_2.0