Assessing Human Capital in the Entreprise

In these first days of the new year, I feel like I've started to climb an unfamiliar mountain. The path is narrow and looks unsafe, but the vista that is revealed to me as I make my way up, step by step, is gorgeous and full of nice surprises.
What is this mountain? It's the personal challenge that I've decided to meet to establish myself as an independent consultant in Collaboration and Social Network Analysis.

So, where am I on the journey?
As I am preparing to leave my current company at the end of the month, I've been contacting colleagues who are potentially interested in using the ONA approach in some of their client departments. So there is a (small) chance that this company becomes my first client. In addition, I am in contact with my former boss who is now at the head of an informatics group in a pharmaceutical company on the West Coast. Here again, there are active talks that could lead to positive outcomes.
These contacts are extremely valuable, whether they lead to work or not, as they prompt me to refine my offer and clarify the approach that I am offering to conduct Organizational Network Analyses.

ONA is one of the tools to assess Human Capital
Human Capital is the value creating potential of the entreprise. It relies on how the actors, who make the entreprise thrive, interact with one another while juggling with the following organizational constructs:

• Values that enable constructive human interactions
  As a primary example, I would mention Strategic Thinking which helps determine the courses of actions that will help align everyone's efforts in a common direction. There is also the fundamental value of Respect for People which is a keystone of any human interaction. The third value is the promotion of knowledge sharing as an instrument of power, as opposed to knowledge retention, which is so widespread in many companies.
• Obligations and Constraints
  Human Capital can often be hindered or inhibited by the set of internal constraints and duties that are grown off sheer organizational complexity. The first one comes from the hierarchical organization, that can sometimes be mixed with a dose of matrix reporting. Other self imposed constraints are the business objectives, which are necessary and a good thing when they directly support a well established and understood strategy., but can be translated into sets of unaligned individual goals. Another big constraint on organizations is the time sinks represented by rigid bureaucracy, including governance, corporate policies, meetings and email overload.

Faced with the organization's sluggishness and the values that give a framework of how to cope with its complexity, the Human Capital can be assessed by the responses of individuals and groups:

• Their behaviours
  regarding how to do their day to day jobs, how they interact informally with one another (social networking), what time they can afford to spend on improving the way they do things (innovation) and how they develop themselves.
  
• Rewards and recognition
  This is the feedback loop that can re-enforce or undermine any effort towards a more collaborative environment. What are the behaviours that are really rewarded? Is it global thinking, team focus, knowledge sharing and personal contribution to improve the level of cooperation, or is it exacerbated competition, hero mindset, power by information silos?

Organizational Network Analysis focuses on the collaborative behaviours within the entreprise. Its results have the potential to reveal the dynamic results of the set of obligations, constraints, values, rewards and recognition that form the culture of the entreprise. It will give clues about what could be changed to enhance people's contribution to the welfare of the entreprise, thus helping to improve Human Capital.

I will dive into how ONA's can be conducted as I take you along in my exciting journey up the mountain!

Link: A mind map of Human Capital Assessment

Photo: Jura (France) - August 2007 - Patrice Chollet

Convergence of Social Networking in the Entreprise

These are interesting times for fostering collective intelligence in the enterprise. More and more people have taken steps to connect with other people they trust, using one or several social networking platforms of their choice (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Viadeo, Xing, etc.).

A lot of big corporations are now making forays into building social networking capabilities within the entreprise. For instance, Pfizer was one of the two companies to strike a collaboration deal with Microsoft to explore the potential of Knowledge Network, an entreprise solution for mining emails for keywords, and providing people search capabilities, i.e. the ability to search for people with specific knowledge, skills or talents. I'll expand later on the lessons from that particular initiative, the point here is that the traditional approach to getting social networking capabilities within the firewall has been to either bring in a major provider of software solutions or build a solution from scratch.

The big aha for me has been to realize that the content of social networking does not belong to the companies people work for. It belongs to the people. Therefore, companies would be well advised to get the content where it currently sits; i.e. directly from the social networking platforms of the planet.

That is in this perspective that I am very excited about the recent publication of the OpenSocial API standards, which has the potential to offer social networking content for consumption in the entreprise environment. Just imagine the possibilities: company X gets a view of how its people communicate internally and externally, simply by putting together an aggregated view of all connections made by its employees. In addition, it can develop services that help mine internal data along with people data, or using the wealth of information to initiate fruitful collaborative efforts outside the entreprise.

What's in it for the people? Well, they would not have to maintain yet another profile page and connection data in the company they work for, or have to fill all that over again when they change companies. And more importantly, they would keep ownership of their profile page and connections data and bring that to the company they work for as part of their intrinsic worth.

What do you think?

Links of interest:
Explaining OpenSocial to your Executives by Jeremiah Owyang
Google OpenSocial will (hopefully) make social apps more relevant by Charlene Li
OpenSocial: it's the data, stupid by Tim O'Reilly
(I do not share Tim's misgiving about OpenSocial's ability to share data. Some comments are quite interesting to read)
OpenSocial: a new universe of open applications all over the web by Marc Andreessen

Post update at 1:48 pm:
I just came across this article that goes in the direction I was hinting:
Enterprise Social Computing by Jon Williams
I will check the Alfresco WCM platform closely. As a matter of fact, in a completely separate stream of work, I've made contact with folks at Knowings, a French firm who have a partnership agreement with Alfresco. Connections come around...

"Portage salarial or umbrella companies": risk free entrepreneurship*

The next session I attended at the "Salon de la Micro-Entreprise" in Paris on October 9th was sponsored by Freelance.com, a portage company which basically offers to employ people who aspire to create their own business, but are not quite ready to do it on their own.

Main services provided by "Portage companies":

• Employee status, with public and private health insurance and means of contributing to a pension scheme.


• Compensation is based on business contracts that the employee-entrepreneur lands, which corresponds to a net pay of about 50% of contract money (after deduction of the portage company charges (10%) and the health insurance and pension deduction (40%). Please note that the net pay is before tax, as in France, tax are due one year after income was earned.
• Professional insurance and judiciary protection
• Invoicing and accounting services
• Network of entrepreneurs and potential clients
• Portage seems to be an appealing proposition to intellectual workers who would like to start a business of their own, test a new idea, product or service, while minimizing risks. They are still considered as employees, which in France, ensures maximum protection in case their business is not as successuf as anticipated.

From what I've seen the main domains of application are strategy, human resources, training and information services.

What's in it for potential clients?

Well, companies looking to offer them one-off missions that require specific skills, can do so with the assurance that they will get a highly qualified consultant, backed by the portage companies' reputation, at a very competitive cost.

Alternatives for them would be to 1) hire a person either temporarilly or permanently with all the overhead of the recruiting process or 2) call upon a temp company (of the like of Manpower) at a high cost.

Who are these "umbrella companies" in France?

There were a number of portage companies present at the "salon", in addition to Freelance .com (formerly portage.com and Valor Consultants). Others present were:

• Access Etoile
• Acefas
• Adequalliance
• Altorem Group
• Calleo (200 consultants)
• Executive Euro Management (Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, United Kingdom)
• Groupe AVS (3000 consultants)
• ITG (2600 consultants)
• Jam (1000 consultants)
• Links Conseil (1000 consultants)

Public services (part of Départments' Chambers of Commerce and Industry) also offer structures to host and help would be consultants. It's very well worth checking with your local administration, if you live in France.

What personal insights did I gain from this presentation?

The formula looks vey appealing to rapidly gain knowledge about how consultants operate and to help get a network of people (competitors and potential client). It seems like a good way to validate a project and speed up getting to a profitable situation. So my plan is to investigate further by contacting several of these companies, probably towards beginning of next year.

* I could not find a suitable translation for the French expression "portage salarial". I'd appreciate any clue... Update: thanks for the tip. I'll adopt "umbrella company" as a translation.

My take on a Collaboration Maturity Model

Hierarchy versus informal knowledge sharing

Over the past few years companies have paid increasing attention to communication skills, have trained their employees and screened candidates to find people with appropriate skills. All this is generally being done so that current employees and new hires fit seemlessly into companies' organisational structure and easily adopt their culture. What is systematically overlooked, though, are the human assets represented by the informal communication patterns within the enterprise, or between entreprise colleagues and the outside world for that matter. Although, companies have representations of their hierarchical organisation, they do not have means to easily represent the patterns of communication, information sharing and value creation that are the actual paths towards getting work done effectively.

A framework for entreprise collaboration

A way to build views of the way a group or a company interact informally is to perform an organisational network analysis that will help quantify the shape, intensity and value of communication in support of business objectives.

The results will give insights about the maturity of collaboration in the company. I would define maturity of collaboration as the ability for a group or an entreprise to create sustaining value through an unfettered flow of information that can be generated to solve problems, develop products or markets or foster innovation.

Drawing from a number of sources (see linkography at the end of this post), I've been trying to depict a collaboration maturity model that would clearly describe the state of an organisation as well as give clear indications as to what needs to be done to move from one stage to another. I came up with this diagram:

The main conclusions that one can draw from this model are:

• Collaboration moves from aphazard individual initiative to full blown enterprise strategy as we climb up the maturity ladder


• Entreprise culture needs to evolve to nurture, recognize and reward values of openness, knowledge sharing, risk taking, trust and "crowd evaluation" (knowledge value emerging from assessment by the people in an interactive fashion)


• The technical infrastructure needs to evolve towards content and people information accessibility, global metadata management and ultimately provide seemless access to intranet + extranet resources

Linkography:

• Collaboration: A new Key Characteristic for the Information Process Maturity Model
• Collaborative SOA Lessons Learned
• A Collaboration Maturity Model - The Bumble Bee