Monday, December 17, 2007

Collaboration based change management

Some quick thoughts on the next wave of change management, on which we are beginning to work

- First, it is as important as reengineering was. If then we changed the processes, now, we are going to change the way we collaborate ACCROSS processes (and more generally, the way we collaborate);
- Second, it is going to take as long as reengineering did. Uncovering processes and making them effective and efficient was a long road. Imagine about identifying key skills and knowledge, prompting people to making them visible, pushing people to call on others for help and problem solving, asking people to proactively share, help, collaborate;
- Third, it involves tools. Not the same tools though. ERP-like software was a good way to make processes visible and to control them. But now we need tools that help people make their own work more impactful and visible to others. It is not "command and control" software that we need, but "peer production" environments;
- Finally, it is all about web 2.0, enterprise2.0, ... I mean, it is collaboration based ! We need to invent new types of change management projects in which we invent the future as we go.

Then we changed the processes. Now we are going to change the culture. And that will not be done top-down