Since March 2020, companies have had to change the way they approach problems. What if the COVID19 crisis was an opportunity for us to return to a more pragmatic management of our problems? What if the survival of our businesses depended on our ability to question the approach to the needs of our customers or our users of the IT resources we provide them? Frugal... Jugaad... how can we keep the pragmatism and efficiency of March 2020?
Solving problems! and what we could learn from covid19
1. Solving problems!
And What We Could
Learn from COVID19
NICOLAS GEORGEAULT – FOUNDER AND PRINCIPAL PRODUCT MANAGER
@MUBRAIN INC. | EXTEND YOUR COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE
HTTPS://WWW.LINKEDIN.COM/IN/NICOLASGEORGEAULT
2. About me
Founder and PPM @MuBrain Inc.
Over 20 years of experience in KM
13 years with Microsoft SharePoint
Microsoft Specialist and Partner
MVP for 11 years
Machine Leaning certificate from Stanford University
Co-author of books about SharePoint
Mad about Jazz clubs, music and Horse-Ball
3.
4.
5. MuBrain
A Research
Group
Can build Intelligent and polymorph
metadata classifications?
What common sense means for the
business?
Where Collective Intelligence brings to
common sense?
Can we evaluate the IQ of a service or an
artificial intelligence?
6. MuBrain
A Product
Editor
5 applications in the roadmap
Based on a Polymorph metadata system
A classification capable to adapt to people
Using graph database structure
Built on EnterpriseBrainTM
Corporate Graph
7. “I limit myself to the strictly
professional sphere, without
neglecting the impact that a
personal tragedy can have on our
lives”
- PERSONAL QUOTE – FROM THE FIELD
23. Frugal
innovation
Frugal innovation provides ways to do more and
better with less. It helps us to solve problems
with limited resources in a sustainable way and
to address inequality and empower billions of
people at the bottom of the pyramid.
24. Jugaad
refers to a non-conventional, frugal
innovation, often termed a "hack". It could
also refer to an innovative fix or a simple
work-around, a solution that bends the
rules, or a resource that can be used in
such a way. It is also often used to signify
creativity: to make existing things work, or
to create new things with meager
resources.
32. References
Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate
Breakthrough Growth Hardcover
◦ https://www.amazon.ca/Jugaad-Innovation-Flexible-Generate-
Breakthrough/dp/1118249747
Navi Radjou: Creative problem-solving in the face of extreme
limits
◦ https://www.ted.com/talks/navi_radjou_creative_problem_solving_in_the_face
_of_extreme_limits
33. Educate and help users
Do not explain how to create a Private Channel but why to create
Empower some local people to help others (I hate champions…)
Use you support team
Publish short videos using Stream
50% of time, users do not really need a Private Channel
https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/whats-next-how-to-survive-thrive-in-a-post-covid-19-world/
Hello everyone, my name is Nicolas Georgeault. I am French by origin but I moved to Canada 9 years ago.
I am a consultant specializing in Microsoft 365 and especially knowledge management.
That's why I started the MuBrain’s Collective Intelligence Research Initiative 4 years ago.
The goal of this research group is to understand the evolution of knowledge management in heterogeneous environments where human and artificial intelligences must collaborate.
How to process feedbacks that could come from systems with automated or semi-automated learning to reintegrate them into the human learning loop.
Today, I would like to present my personal experience but also my reflections on an event that I identify as major and which I believe will mark our history for many years in our professional life.
I am currently working with a private company in close contact with Quebec government institutions. I support the overall effort to implement Microsoft 365 for the 1,400 users. And I'm particularly involved as a Microsoft Teams specialist.
I want to make it clear that I limit myself here to the strictly professional sphere without neglecting the impact that a personal tragedy can have on our lives in our companies.
With each major event that occurs, we then have to choose to consider it as a disaster or as an opportunity.
In Quebec, as in many other parts of the world, heavy government decisions had to be made. Decisions that we cannot fully assess yet are the impacts on the operations of our businesses and our professional activities.
But there has been an event that offers us a great opportunity to do things differently. We all know how changing the way we work and the way we see things can be extremely complicated when companies have been using the same processes for years.
But all these processes that have been in place for several years often represent obstacles to the innovation capacity of our companies. Brakes on our ability to think differently. "Outside the box."
By 2020, many companies or professions have and will still have to implement changes that they still considered impossible until the end of 2019.
We all have in mind the case of remote work, which has become the most logical and obvious choice to be put in place for many workers who are still waiting to be able to return to their offices one day.
"One day, they will return to their offices... That's a phrase we used to use before 2020. Rather, the question is, "Should we finally get back into an office?" or "Does our business really require an office?"
These are all questions that have been needed since the beginning of this year. Questions that any start-up company has to ask but not the companies "established" for several years.
Like many companies, I had been accompanying a client since last September to the deployment of Microsoft Teams. The choice was already obvious to this company that putting in place a conversational tool was a no-brainer. But like any tool that changed the information chain, its implementation was eminently political.
This is not only true in the professional sphere but when a way of doing things or a process needs to be questioned, there are often two important levers.
The first one is: Keeping history, Legacy (And sometimes the weight of legacy as we know with all the migration projects)
And the second one is: don't upset the hierarchical convention
And it is common for these levers to act against the challenge effort. Often closing opportunities yet indispensable for reflection.
For example, whether or not Microsoft Teams's "private" conversations are activated or whether or not private channels are used in Teams teams.
At the beginning of the year, hierarchical conventions were put to the test for two specific reasons:
The emergency
Lack of resources
The sudden decision to stop travel to avoid rapid and unpriced rapid spread and the lack of everything caused by the slowing down of these displacements in economies and professional environments still too based on physical presence and abundance of resources, have placed most companies in a precarious situation for at least some time.
Because the reaction was nevertheless relatively rapid. Thanks to the support offered by most governments, companies have been able to focus their efforts and imagination on being able to respond to the most urgent: "Deliver service to customers" from "Doing with less resources, without further delay"
This is exactly what Frugal innovation has been offering since now.
We are not talking about doing better here, because the notion of better or less well is subjective to say the least. But no, here we're just talking about doing.
What represents a major change here is that for a while yet, the customer, the user... Since the beginning of the year, it has also been projected into a profound questioning of its activities and the way it consumes them.
Is it going to last? No one can predict that. That is where this represents a real opportunity.
It is this type of approach that regularly allows emerging solutions, often in a niche, to meet a great success. Simply because they focus on the essentials: "Solve a problem!"