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Master “Projet – Innovation – Conception” (P.I.C.)

Ecole Polytechnique and HEC Paris

Research Thesis

Digitalizing Work: the case of the

research entity IMT at Orange

Lisa Cohen

Partner Company: Orange

Entity: Orange Labs Research (Châtillon)

August 29, 2017

September 2016 – September 2017

Manager: Guillaume Tardiveau, Head of the Digital Enterprise research domain at Orange

Labs Research

Professor: Sihem Jouini, HEC Paris

Professor and head of the Master: Christophe Midler, Ecole Polytechnique

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Table of content

Abstract

Special Thanks

General Introduction

Part I: What does “digitalization” mean?

I.A. What is “digitalization” and why do we talk about it? ......................................................... 7

I.A.1. Context and appearance of the term .....................................................................................7

I.A.2. Definitions ...............................................................................................................................8

I.A.3. The digital transformation requires a long term vision of the strategy .................................9

I.B. The appearance of Web 2.0 caused the emergence of Enterprise 2.0 ................................... 10

I.B.1. The appearance of a dynamic type of Web: Web 2.0 .......................................................... 10

I.B.2. Enterprise 2.0 emerged thanks to Web 2.0 ......................................................................... 12

I.B.3. Benefits for companies are high if they adopt social networks ........................................... 12

I.C. Companies must become digital organizations to drive their future success ........................ 13

I.C.1. Becoming a “Digital Master” will foster a company’s performance .................................... 13

I.C.2. The real advantage for digital masters is “digital dexterity” ............................................... 16

I.D. How can companies become digital organizations? ............................................................ 17

I.D.1. What does a company need to attain digital dexterity and become a real digital company?

....................................................................................................................................................... 17

I.D.2. How to pragmatically act towards becoming a digital organization? ................................. 17

I.E. Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 18

Part II: Digitalization of work at Orange

II.A. Presentation of IMT and Orange Labs Research ................................................................. 19

II.B. The traditional telco Orange is becoming a “software company” ........................................ 21

II.C. Conclusion of the mission .................................................................................................. 23

Part III: A first step dedicated to studying practices and feelings of employees on digital

technologies: an “Observatory” of digital practices

III.A. Objectives ....................................................................................................................... 23

III.A.1. Introducing the project ...................................................................................................... 23

III.A.2. Definition of an “observatory” ........................................................................................... 24

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III.A.3. Employees’ responses to introducing digital technologies at work and their impact on the

organization of work ..................................................................................................................... 24

III. B. Steps for preparing the survey of the Observatory ........................................................... 27

III.B.1. Starting the project ............................................................................................................ 27

III.B.2. Presentation of the internal social network Plazza ............................................................ 28

III.B.3. Survey focused on Plazza ................................................................................................... 29

III.B.4. Pivoting and broadening the scope of the survey: designing a graph of practices ........... 33

III.B.5. Final version updated by Liegey Muller Pons .................................................................... 37

III.B.6. Finding ambassadors to participate in the observatory .................................................... 41

III.C. LMP methodology and results of survey ........................................................................... 42

III.D. Conclusion on the Observatory ........................................................................................ 48

Part IV: New ways of learning for new ways of working, testing peer-to-peer learning at

work - Digital & Local

IV.A. Presenting the Digital & Local project: why think of new ways of learning? ...................... 48

IV.A.1. Why? .................................................................................................................................. 48

IV.A.2. How? .................................................................................................................................. 49

IV.A.3. What?................................................................................................................................. 49

IV.B. What is peer learning? ..................................................................................................... 49

IV.B.1. Affordances: tools don’t have set practices ...................................................................... 49

IV.B.2. Marketing 3.0 or the value-centered marketing ............................................................... 50

IV.B.3. Teaching vs learning: the untapped benefit of peer learning ........................................... 50

IV.C. Initial strategy, first interviews and launching the project ................................................. 52

IV.C.1. Timeline and first interviews ............................................................................................. 52

IV.C.2. Presentation of the Etableurs network and how it is in tune with Digital & Local ............ 53

IV.C.3. The conception variables ................................................................................................... 55

IV.C.4. Identifying local contributors ............................................................................................. 56

IV.C.5. Methodology of launching sessions and how to foster interest among employees ......... 57

IV.D. Two use cases of launch: Orange Labs India and Châtillon ................................................ 58

IV.D.1. Case of Orange Labs India ................................................................................................. 58

IV.D.2. Case of Châtillon ................................................................................................................ 61

IV.E. Conclusion on Digital & Local ............................................................................................ 61

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Part V: Helping the most digital-savvy employees to manage their digital environment:

developing a messages aggregator HubMe

V.A. Introduction: resolving the issue of info-obesity for the most digital employees ................. 62

V.A.1. Tidy up this mess: Why we need to organize our digital lives ........................................... 63

V.A.2. Identified pain points and first brainstorming session ....................................................... 63

V.A.3. Developing the project hand in hand with Orang Business Services: “ingénierie

concourante” ................................................................................................................................. 66

V.B. Starting the project ........................................................................................................... 66

V.B.1. Forming a product team and gathering information ......................................................... 66

V.B.2. Timeline .............................................................................................................................. 67

V.C. Using the lean startup methodology in a big company ....................................................... 68

V.C.1. Launching an intrapreneurship project and avoiding the V-Cycle type of development .. 68

V.C.2. The Lean Startup methodology (E. Ries) ............................................................................. 69

V.C.3. Agile methodology for software development: using the scrum method ......................... 74

V.D. Deep dive in the project .................................................................................................... 78

V.D.1. Using design thinking to identify users’ needs ................................................................... 78

V.D.2. Product description : platform, comp, demo ..................................................................... 80

V.D.3. Present and future MVP characteristics and first client feedback ..................................... 83

V.D.4. Competition ........................................................................................................................ 85

Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 85

Appendix ......................................................................................................................... 86

Bibliography .................................................................................................................... 95

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Abstract / Résumé

Digitalization is a priority for the telecommunication conglomerate Orange: one objective of Orange’s

strategic plan “Essentials2020” is to become a « digital and human employer » by 2020 to adapt the

work environment to 21st Century digital behaviors. In this context, the Digital Enterprise research

domain at Orange Labs Research launched a portfolio of projects aiming to foster the inclusion of the

majority of employees into new digital practices and reinforce the common digital culture in the

company. These projects are implemented in the research entity called Innovation, Marketing &

Technology (IMT) and are meant to drive its internal digital transformation, meaning transforming

work and directed at employees. Once experimented internally at IMT, they could lead to the

development of new business lines concerning digitalization for Orange corporate clients.

In this research thesis, I will specifically present three projects that I worked on this year to launch

the digitalization at IMT. The Observatory of digital practices comes as a step of observation – like

the first step of the Design Thinking process- and allows understanding the digital practices of

employees in professional and personal contexts in order to identify digital profiles of users. The

second project is the launch of a peer-to-peer digital learning which allows employees to share good

practices concerning digital tools locally on each IMT site. This project lets us explore alternative and

new ways of learning – horizontal instead of top down – through peers and well adapted to the

current digital environment where learning is contextual. Accompanying the majority of employees

into better understanding digital practices is the mission of the company, but its role is also to care

for its most digital-savvy employees through a third project of service composition. This third project

aims at helping the most digital-savvy employees at Orange, IMT. This project allows them to set up

their own digital workspace through a tool of service composition for internal and external tools

coupled with artificial intelligence, and reduce the info-overload they currently experience. We

focused on developing a messages aggregator of digital inboxes allowing Orange employees and

corporate clients to view their unread messages through a unique digital platform.

Special Thanks

I would like to address a warm thank you to my manager Guillaume Tardiveau, who is in charge of

the Digital Enterprise research domain at Orange Labs Research, and of implementing digitalization

projects for IMT internally. He trusted me with the implementation of these projects and gave me a

lot of insight about technology and research at IMT and Orange. Thank you Guillaume for the

knowledge you brought me.

I also want to thank Sihem Jouini, researcher and head of the Innovation chair at HEC Paris, who

assisted me all the way through this research project. I had the chance to benefit from her valuable

experience and insight, and learned a great deal concerning processes of research and digitalization.

Thank you Mrs Jouini for your teaching and flawless support, it really meant a lot.

Last, I want to thank all my professors of the Master PIC and specifically Mr. Christophe Midler for

managing this enlighting program and Angélique Rasiah for coordinating.

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General Introduction

This master thesis has been conducted in a context where digital technologies are profoundly

impacting the way we work daily. We commonly talk about “digital transformation” or

“digitalization” in the workplace when referring to the changes happening concerning internal

processes in companies. For example, meetings in the sixties used to be in person and notes taken on

paper. In 2017, meetings are virtual and interactive – participants don’t have to be in the same room

anymore and the content is recorded, automatically shared and smartly tagged to make future

consultations easier. Another example is about collaboration and communication in the workplace:

so far, the most efficient tool for collaborating has been email. But emails only allow one-to-one and

one-to-many communication and their limits are known to everyone. New collaborative tools have

appeared in the past few years and allow many-to-many collaboration, project-based discussions and

real-time sharing (e.g. Slack or Front).

It’s not the first time in history that technologies impact the way individuals work and collaborate. In

the 19th century, company processes were impacted by the introduction of assembly lines in the

production of goods: they introduced machines in production and formed employees on how to use

them. In the sixties, companies introduced IT for the first time: computers, Xerox photocopy

machines, faxes and telephones. In these two examples, technologies are acquired by the company

itself who has the responsibility to teach their employees on how to use them. The learning process

is top down and employees only use these when they are at work. In 2017, digital technologies are

everywhere as much in the professional sphere as the private sphere: employees are much more

flexible in terms of time and place to work. The context in 2017 is though very different from these

two past situations. Technologies now appear in the consumer sphere and only then spread to the

workplace. Employees arrive in the company with a certain knowledge of digital technologies.

Companies even struggle to keep up with consumer practices that keep evolving quickly. I have in

mind the example of the very connected individual in his everyday life – buying online, paying

contactless in stores, chatting and posting on social media, using collaborative platforms like Uber

and Airbnb – but as soon as he gets in the company, he goes back to outdated behaviors such as

communicating through emails, refusing to use the internal social network and to innovate in terms

of practices. This example is very vocal about the fact that practices can highly differ between the

private and the professional sphere.

“Digitalization” or the “digital transformation” of work is a strategic priority for Orange, for its

internal processes and its corporate clients. First, it’s a strategic objective for the company itself as it

is part of the Essentials2020 strategic plan: Orange has the goal of becoming a “digital and human

employer” by 2020. Its winning the second spot of Les Echos eCAC40 contest – after Engie and before

Credit Agricole – in November 2016 shows how important the digital transformation is for Orange

and to adapt the work environment to current challenges that employees are facing. Second, Orange

wants to accompany its corporate clients to do their own digital transformation of work, in order to

establish Orange as a game-changer and create new lines of business.

Literature dealing with the digitalization of work in companies is abundant but only in

macroeconomics levels, at a company-level. It never deals with how to bring concretely this

transformation to the employees themselves. The objectives of this master thesis – as a research

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domain undertook at Orange Labs Research - is first to explore digital practices of employees in a

professional environment, and second to leverage employees’ individual knowledge through the use

of social networks and digital tools, to allow the digitalization of work at an individual level. How to

support the digitalization of work at the employee level?

Companies must adapt to consumer digital practices if they want to survive and they must start

implementation at the individual level. John Hagel III from Deloitte, interviewed by Gerald C. Kane

(MIT Sloan Management Review) said in The Dark Side of the Digital Revolution: “I think there’s a

tendency to look at digital technology and think about it more as an opportunity, a choice”, but it’s

an “imperative” and “the longer you wait, the more marginalized you’re going to become”.

In order to accompany the digitalization of work for the research entity IMT, we first observed

practices and feelings of employees concerning digital tools in professional and personal

environments. This first project consisted in launching the first step of the Design Thinking

methodology: observe users –i.e. Orange employees - made through an Observatory of digital

practices (Part III). As digital tools are used contextually and don’t require formal academic

knowledge like assembly lines, the second project launched was meant to test a new way of learning

adapted to these new technologies: peer-to-peer learning for hands-on use of digital tools in the

company (Digital & Local, Part IV). After allowing digital inclusion for all employees at Orange, we

also targeted the most digital employees who suffer from information overload: we developed a

software platform for aggregating communication channels and smartly managing messages and

time together to foster individual performance. This third project called HubMe aimed at letting

employees compose their own digital environment that fits them (Part V).

Part I: What does “digitalization” mean?

I.A. WHAT IS “DIGITALIZATION” AND WHY DO WE TALK ABOUT IT?

I.A.1. Context and appearance of the term

Isckia in the Institut Mines-Telecom White paper Entreprise du futur: Les enjeux de la transformation

numérique (2016) draws a panorama of how we came to think about digital transformation. The

years 1990’s saw an important evolution of the means of communication used by companies. Then

the Internet for all appeared and networks infrastructures evolved very quickly; it impacted work

methods and organizations. Corporations became “network-corporations” meaning organizational

structures turned more flexible and work started to be organized as a network of different

geographic areas and relations, and became more collective. The issue of the relations between

technology and social systems (organization) is not new (sociotechnic paradigm, Rojot & Bergman,

1989). However, even though everyone agrees of this relation between technology and organization

in general, few people really understand how they interact concretely, especially managers and

leaders (Markus & Robey, 1988).

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I.A.2. Definitions

The term “digital” comes from “digit” - the number -, which is the language of the computer (the

French word for “digital” is “numérique”, le “nombre”).

“Digitization” and “digitalization” are two conceptual terms which are closely associated and often

used interchangeably in a large range of literatures. According to the definitions from the Oxford

English Dictionary (OED), the first time the terms “digitization” and “digitalization” were used

interchangeably comes from the mis-1950s and the appearance of computers. In the OED,

digitization refers to “the action or process of digitizing; the conversion of analogue data (especially

in later use images, video, and text) into digital form.” It refers to the technical process of converting

streams of analog information (i.e. continuous signals like TV or radio) into bits of 1s and 0s with

discrete and discontinuous values (Brennen & Kreiss, 2014). Digitization is essential to data

processing, storage and transmission, because it "allows information of all kinds in all formats to be

carried with the same efficiency and also intermingled” (McQuail, Mass Communication Theory, 4th

edition, 2000). Digitalization, by contrast and still to the OED, refers to “the adoption or increase in

use of digital or computer technology by an organization, industry, country, etc.” Digitalization has

come to refer to the structuring of many and diverse domains of social life around digital

communication and media infrastructures; and made possible by the sharing, commenting,

modifying, uploading of information through many different kinds of devices. Tasks become

automated, more numerous, complex, and faster (“smart” computers).

To summarize such distinction, Brennen & Kreiss in their web article “Digitalization and digitization”

(2014) explain that “digitization (represents) the material process of converting individual analogue

streams of information into digital bits. In contrast, we refer to digitalization as the way in which

many domains of social life are restructured around digital communication and media

infrastructures”.

Digital - tools, processes, files, etc. (“Le numérique” in French) - hence refer to systems and processes

using discrete values as a representation.

Fitzgerald, Kruschitz, Bonnet & Welch in the study Embracing Digital Technology: A New Strategic

Imperative (2013) define digital transformation as “the use of new digital technologies (social media,

mobile, analytics and embedded devices) to enable major business improvements (such as enhancing

customer experience, streamlining operations or creating new business models)”. Indeed, it

represents the profound and accelerating transformation of business activities, processes,

competencies and models to fully leverage the changes and opportunities of digital technologies and

their impact across society in a strategic and prioritized way, with present and future shifts in mind.

No matter the different existing definitions of Digital Transformation, Baudouin, Berger-Douce,

Besson & al. in the Mines-ParisTech White Paper give the three main criterias to define this

phenomenon: it changes the relation with time, with space (ubiquity of Internet) and gives access to

the many (no limited audiences anymore). The Lemoine report (2014) describes Digital

Transformation as a combination of automation (performance growth in the use of resources and

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more capabilities to individualize supply), virtualization (new distribution and communication

channels, and lower production costs) and disintermediation (reorganization of value chains).

As digital transformation changes the way things are done in companies, it changes the role of

employees and the nature itself of the value created by the company. Landier in Du Rattrapage à la

Transformation : L’aventure numérique, une chance pour la France (Roland Berger, 2014) says that

the digital transformation is reshaping the role of humans in companies because of digital

technologies allowing the automation of repeated tasks. Progressively, the creation of value is

shifting from the effectuation of tasks to three new areas: formulating clients’ needs, conceiving

products and the robots that execute them, and the service which consists in delivering the product

to the client. To Westerman, Bonnet, McAfee & al. in Digital Transformation: a Roadmap for billion

dollar organizations (2011), digital transformation is impacting Customer Experience, Operational

Processes and Business Models. Eventually, the nature itself of the value created by the company is

put in question by the digital transformation. There are new technological challenges but also

management challenges that firms need to think about:

Exhibit 1: The three building blocks of the corporate digital transformation (Capgemini & MIT Sloane)

Implementing a digital transformation is key for companies because they now face a digital

imperative: “adopt new technologies effectively or face competitive obsolescence” (Fitzgerald,

Kruschitz, Bonnet & Welch). Here is the main challenge companies like Orange are facing today.

I.A.3. The digital transformation requires a long term vision of the strategy

John Hagel III interviewed by Gerald C. Kane in The Dark Side of the Digital Revolution explains that

most companies today don’t see the full picture of what digital technologies can bring them. They

only think they can do “more of the same” (faster, more efficiently and cost effectively), but don’t

put in question their core business. What he calls the “dark side” of the digital revolution is that

there is mounting performance pressure among companies which pushes them to take decisions

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based on short term factors - like financials. This prevents executives from thinking more ambitiously

and creatively about what digital technologies enable. Why do they struggle to think more creatively

about reinventing their core business? To John Hagel III, the reason is that they avoid the question

and stick to what they already know and brings revenue in the short term. Also, big companies suffer

from the “curse of success” which means that they’ve proven their worth and no one is going to tell

them they are wrong: so they lose their ability to take risk and innovate. Many companies pretend to

innovate by creating innovation labs or sandbox projects internally: they sponsor them but only as

long as they don’t directly compete with the core business.

Peer-reviewed literature focuses on the strategic side of digital transformation, in other words on the

company-level strategy of implementing digital changes and where it should lead the company as a

whole. We will discuss such strategic-oriented literature but before, let’s understand what is really

new in today’s digital revolution as we are talking about behaviors being impacted.

I.B. THE APPEARANCE OF WEB 2.0 CAUSED THE EMERGENCE OF ENTERPRISE 2.0

“Digital practices” commonly refer to the development of practices and use concerning tools like the

Internet, social media, applications, Clouds, peer-to-peer platforms, opensource protocols, etc. They

are soaring rapidly in the personal sphere where they usually come from; and companies are

making huge effort to follow and develop digital practices at work. For example, it is because of

Facebook’s success among Millennials that companies eventually decided to launch their own

internal social networks for the workplace. It is also because peer-to-peer platforms and

crowdsourced innovation became so popular on the Internet and that their general benefits for

society were proved that companies implemented them for internal processes. Lynda Gratton in the

article Rethinking the Manager’s Role (2016) shows that the use of technology grows more rapidly

outside of the worksphere than within the company. She interviewed employees of different

corporations who felt that little in management has changed in time because of digital technologies.

However, their use of technology in their personal lives has soared.

If we want to understand the importance of today’s technological revolution hitting the corporate

world, we ought to take a step back and look at the emergence of Web 2.0 in the 1990’s, a dynamic

type of Web, which has allowed the spreading of bottoms-up interactivity and has made individual

behaviors evolve to the type of collaboration and communication we experience in 2017.

I.B.1. The appearance of a dynamic type of Web: Web 2.0

Information architecture consultant Darcy DiNucci was the first one to mention the term “Web 2.0”

in 1999 and wrote in her article “Fragmented Future” (1999) that the Web known then as “screenfuls

of text and graphics” and that loads in a browser window will soon become “a transport mechanism,

the ether through which interactivity happens”. Tim O’Reilly popularized the term “Web 2.0” in 2004

when O’Reilly Media and MediaLive hosted the first Web 2.0 conference. The term resurfaced after

the dotcom crisis to characterize the changes happening in the Web: the latter going from static web

pages to dynamic and user-generated content and the emergence of social media. This new kind,

dynamic type of Web encourages collaboration and community. People are not just readers but

participate actively in content creation. This emerging use of the Web revolutionized the way work is

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carried out, information shared and content created. Here is an example Tim O’Reilly gives in his

book What is Web 2.0? of differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0:

Exhibit 2: Differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 (T. O’Reilly)

In a December 2006 blogpost, O’Reilly offered a short definition: “Web 2.0 is the business revolution

in the computer industry caused by the move of the Internet as platform, and an attempt to

understand the rules for success on that new platform”. O’Reilly describes Web 2.0 as a platform: it

doesn't have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core. “You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of

principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or

all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core”:

Exhibit 3: Web 2.0 Meme Map (T. O’Reilly)

Web 2.0 proponent Charles Leadbeater also emphasizes the great deal of change brought by Web

2.0 in We-Think (2008): to him, it is not only a set of tools - wikis and blogs - allowing the publishing

and sharing of information, it’s not the underlying software allowing web pages changes to appear

without refreshing manually, nor new business models encouraging user-generated content. With

the enormous amount of information published and shared online, Web 2.0 is really exciting because

it acts as a “collective intelligence service”, pledging for the most trusted contents (by embedding a

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link to another website, a site acknowledges the latter’s relevance and quality). The Web could hence

enable “mass creativity” and “mass innovation” by making of new ideas creation a mass

collaboration activity.

Two authors oppose their views concerning the impact that Web 2.0 has on our social interactions.

The first author is Clay Shirky who has an optimistic attitude towards Web 2.0, in the Chapter

“Publish, Then Filter” from the book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without

Organizations (2008). On the contrary, Andrew Keen is more weary of Web 2.0 in The Cult of the

Amateur (2007): he thinks Web 2.0 has a negative impact on society because of the growing amount

of user-generated content available online, and as the distinction between author and audience

fades away.

The appearance of Web 2.0 has given power to individuals compared to the traditional top-down

power coming from organizations - the English revolution in the 19th century introducing the steam

engine or the introduction of Xerox photocopy machines and computers in companies in the 1960s

were top down technological revolutions. Web 2.0 is one of the founding elements of the digital

transformation today, bringing a bottoms-up dynamic to changes. Web 2.0 then spread to the

corporate world and changed its internal interactions, leadership, collaboration and it is what the

term Enterprise 2.0 embodies.

I.B.2. Enterprise 2.0 emerged thanks to Web 2.0

McAfee coined the word “Enterprise 2.0” in Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration (MIT

Sloan Management Review, Spring 2006) to describe using Web 2.0 collaboration technologies such

as wikis and blogs within organizations. Here is McAfee’s own definition on his website

(http://andrewmcafee.org/2006/05/enterprise_20_version_20/): “Enterprise 2.0 is the use of

emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or

customers”. Social software enables people to meet, connect or collaborate through computer-

mediated communication and to form online communities. Platforms are defined as digital

environments in which contributions and interactions are globally visible and persistent over time.

Emergent means that the software is freeform, and that it contains mechanisms to let the patterns

and structure inherent in people’s interactions become visible over time. Last, freeform means that

the software is most or all of the following: Optional, Free of up-front workflow, Egalitarian or

indifferent to formal organizational identities, and Accepting of many types of data.

I.B.3. Benefits for companies are high if they adopt social networks

Mark Granovetter in the article “The Strength of Weak Ties”, American Journal of Sociology (1973)

explains the benefits of cultivating weak ties in an individual’s social network, and by extension how

companies would gain from it if employees cultivated them. To him, we rely very closely on our

strong ties — our close colleagues. But Granovetter emphasizes that if we want novelty and

innovation, our weak ties, or our more distant colleagues and acquaintances, are actually the place

to go first, because they have by definition less overlap with our knowledge base and our social

network. Weak ties are hugely valuable. Hence it is important to maintain a large network of weak

ties because they provide access to diverse information and opportunities. Emilio Ferrara & al. in the

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article “On Facebook, Most Ties are Weak” (2011) discuss whether Online Social Networks (OSNs)

like Facebook can apply to Granovetter’s definition of weak ties. Ferrara & al. gave new definitions of

strong ties and weak ties based on a community structure inherent to these large OSNs: Facebook

and other large OSNs tend to fragment themselves into communities. Weak ties are “those edges

linking individuals belonging to different communities”, when strong ties are “those connecting users

in the same community”. After experimenting this new definition on a large Facebook sample

“representing part of the Facebook social graph”, they were able to show the importance of weak

ties in the information diffusion process and showed the connection to Granovetter’s intuition.

Hence, Facebook is a great tool to cultivate weak ties.

I.C. COMPANIES MUST BECOME DIGITAL ORGANIZATIONS TO DRIVE THEIR FUTURE SUCCESS

I.C.1. Becoming a “Digital Master” will foster a company’s performance

Westerman, Bonnet & McAfee show in Leading Digital: Turning Technology into Business

Transformation that the higher a company level of digital maturity is, the better its financial

performance is likely to be. Some companies can be called “Digital Masters”’ thanks to their level of

mastery when it comes to digital technologies and practices. To them, any company can assess their

level of “digital mastery” and work in becoming one. They built a “Digital Maturity Model” with four

different company profiles depending on their respective level of digital technologies and the level of

management necessary to shape the digital transformation and create actual change.

“Digital Masters” excel at two essential capabilities: digital capabilities and leadership capabilities.

First, they know where and how to invest in the digital opportunity, they see technology as a means

to change the way they do business (rethink and improve their business processes, customer

engagement and business models). To these companies, new technologies such as social media,

mobility and analytics are not just goals to attain or a signal to show customers; but a way to get

closer to customers, empower employees and transform their internal business processes.

However, gaining the “true digital advantage” needs more than just technology; it requires

leadership too. In order to turn technology into transformation and become a Digital Master, there

must be committed leadership. “Let(ting) a thousand flowers bloom” in a company and putting

hopes in a bottom-up transformation is not likely to drive effective change. The authors showed that

executives from companies that were identified as Digital Masters, drove the transformation through

strong top-down leadership: setting direction, building momentum, and ensuring the company

follows through. These leaders created a clear and broad vision of the future, started some critical

initiatives, and then engaged their employees to build out the vision over time. Top-Down leadership

means strong governance and coordination to make sure all units of a complex company move at the

same time and in the right place. The true advantage will come from linking different entities and

digital activities, but this will be only if they are in the same page and break the silos that they usually

work in.

Soule, Puram, Westerman & Bonnet in Becoming a Digital Organization: The Journey to Digital

Dexterity (2016) express the same idea of combining digital technologies and management to drive

change: they say the value for a firm wanting to become digital doesn’t come from adopting

technology but from using technology to transform the way a company does business. Fitzgerald,

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Kruschitz, Bonnet & Welch in the study Embracing Digital Technology: A New Strategic Imperative

(2013) agree to the same idea.

Westerman, Bonnet & McAfee were able to show through their research that by combining the two

capabilities, those companies can achieve more than they could perform with only one of them

(examples given of Nike and Asian Paints). Strong digital capabilities make new digital initiatives

easier and less risky, while providing revenue leverage that can generate some cash. Meanwhile,

strong leadership creates synergies that free up money for investment, while also engaging

employees to identify new opportunities. The two capabilities create a virtuous circle of “ever-

increasing digital advantage”.

The way to becoming Digital Master can be different for each company. They can start by developing

digital capabilities first (Fashionistas) like digital master Nike did: after developing digital intensity in

silos, Nike added elements of transformation management intensity to link the silos and launch new

capabilities. Companies can go the other way, like Indian paint manufacturer Asian Paints, by

developing leadership capabilities first (Conservatives): they created a vision, governance and IT

capabilities to become more unified, then they repeatedly built on their capabilities to transform

their customer engagement, internal operations and business models. Usually most companies excel

at only one of the two. Some are weak at both dimensions and lag behind in term of performance

(Digital Beginners).

Digital Beginners are just at the start of transformation. They do very little with advanced digital

capabilities even though they may be mature with more traditional applications such as ERP.

Companies can be Digital Beginners by choice, but they usually end up on that side of the quadrant

by accident. They may be unaware of the opportunities, or may be starting some small investments

without effective transformation management in place.

Fashionistas take action to introduce the newest digital technologies, but lack the adequate

leadership to scale and create real value from these new technologies. One example is a company

that built employee collaboration platforms in different parts of the business using different (and

incompatible) technologies. This incompatibility prevents the company to have a coordinated

approach and a unified answer to customers. Orange could be placed in that category of companies.

Conservatives on their side, do not pay attention to the technology trends happening but make sure

that every digital investment is well coordinated and implemented. They focus more on control and

time and money efficiency but it could lead to a blockage in processes and prevent the company

from making progress.

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Exhibit 4: The digital mastery matrix (Westerman, Bonnet & McAfee)

As I am analyzing digital transformation at the employee level, I interpreted the model of

Westerman, Bonnet & McAfee to adapt it to individual employees’ transformation. In order for an

employee to become a Digital Team Player, he can use two paths as well as the companies described

above. An individual who is a Digital Team Player is an employee who has developed a certain digital

knowledge, keeps informed about new digital releases, and is not afraid to test apps and digital

solutions to get the hang of them (I call it dexterity or willingness to experiment). He also is very

social in his company as he talks to his direct (“strong ties”, Granovetter) but also distant (“weak ties,

Granovetter) colleagues, trying to learn what they do but also offering his help for collaboration,

learning, networking, etc. In order to become a Digital Team Player, the individual can first become

Social, in other words foster peer-to-peer learning and collaboration in the company and break siloes

between teams. It is only by then that gaining digital knowledge and dexterity in learning to use new

tools that he becomes a Digital Team Player. The second way for individuals to become Digital Team

Players is if they first gain the digital knowledge and dexterity (Geeks), and only then develop their

ability to help their peers, participate in cross-functional projects, etc. Here is the graph illustrating

this model:

Exhibit 5: Model of individual's digital transformation

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The micro-level graph in Exhibit 5 is closely related to the macro-level graph on Exhibit 4 as Exhibit 5

shows how employees can behave when their company is in each stage of its digital transformation.

For instance, if a company is a “Fashionista” because spreading and developing high-end digital

technologies internally, it means the employee is starting to learn how to use them and gaining

digital knowledge. However, an employee behavior can exceed the company’s: an employee can be

faster in its own digital transformation than the company it works for. A Geek working for a

“Fashionista” company can at the same time help his colleagues using new tools and organize peer-

to-peer learning sessions on his free time: he can then become a Digital Team Player when the

company is still just a “Fashionista”. Last, I think that having behaviors develop faster than

companies’ digital transformation is a key for making this macro-level transformation go faster as

behaviors will be the reason to make the organization structure evolve. As said with the emergence

of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, our new digital revolution is bottoms-up and individuals have

important roles to play to make companies’ structures adapt.

After showing the different kinds of companies and the stages of digital transformation they are at,

Westerman, Bonnet & McAfee advise on how a company can become a Digital Master at the macro

level and stay one.

I.C.2. The real advantage for digital masters is “digital dexterity”

To Soule, Puram, Westerman & Bonnet in Becoming a Digital Organization: The Journey to Digital

Dexterity (2016) in order to effectively use technology to transform the way a company does

business, and in a context of high digital intensity and technological improvement, “Digital Dexterity”

is what makes a true Digital Organization. How do firms organize themselves to fulfill a chosen digital

strategy?

“Digital Dexterity” is the ability to rapidly self-organize to deliver new value from digital

technologies. It is reflected in enterprise ability to respond to customers’ individual needs and

preferences, and to balance rapidly evolving localized and company-wide needs. It is a dynamic

capability. Enterprises with high levels of Digital Dexterity utilize digital transformation and

operations to engage both digital and human resources fluidly, they are able to detect emerging

trends early and reorganize quickly. In a word, Digital Dexterity allows the firm to always adapt its

organizational design to attain performance (or meet its Digital Capabilities).

“Digital Capabilities” are tangible results to be achieved by a company using digital technology, for it

to be successful. They are divided in three areas: customer experience (the use of technology to

address customers and to communicate), operations efficiency (improve and automate internal

operations with more and precise data) and workforce enablement (use digital tools to facilitate

collaboration across boundaries, develop skills or share knowledge in the company).

In order to build long term digital advantage, companies must collectively enable both digital

capability and digital dexterity. Exponentially improving digital tools creates many new possibilities to

organize work. Reshaping the whole organization can have tremendous consequences, and there are

many different ways to design an organization (what processes and what to produce): for example

customized services can be structured as standardized (Airbnb) or personalized (UPS), or engaging

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customers can be done supply-centered (TacoBell) or by co-creating with customers (Nike).

Challenges will keep coming at the firm and the organization must be designed to easily adapt with

advancing digital technologies: digital dexterity is hence the real digital advantage for firms.

Many firms are in the midst of becoming “digital”, they have developed digital capability to support

different aspects of their businesses and as they make increasing use of digital resources. But still

they can’t be considered true digital organizations, why?

I.D. HOW CAN COMPANIES BECOME DIGITAL ORGANIZATIONS?

I.D.1. What does a company need in order to attain digital dexterity and become a real

digital company?

Becoming a digital organization starts with adopting a digital-first mindset, which is “having an

attitude that reflects a broad tendency to seek out digital solutions first”. As the CTO of ServCo says,

“we’re always going in with the assumption of using a digital solution. (…)We may actually use a

manual approach (…) but if it’s an opportunity we want to pursue in a way that’s scalable, that

requires a digital solution”. Also, developing a Digital Organization requires three key characteristics

like Practices, Workforce and Resources (“PWR”). These characteristics captured as “M-PWR

characteristics” – “Mindset – Practices Workforce Resources” - drive digital capability in the short

term, and digital dexterity, in the long term. Practices relate to developing transparency, fluidity,

adaptability and resilience in the long term; they are digitized-operations, collaborative learning and

data-driven decisions. Then, the workforce needs technology experience, digital skills and high-

engagement. Last, resources are real-time customer data, integrated operations data and

collaborative tools. What the company values most will be determined by where the company

increases attention and investment. Depending on which Digital Capability is the company’s priority –

customer experience, operational efficiency or workforce enablement -, there will be specific M-PWR

combinations to support such outcomes. What matters most for digital capability is handling big

amounts of information and creating digital jobs accordingly.

M-PWR characteristics are used to drive digital dexterity, but leadership effort is required to

cultivate them. It can take time but the level of digital dexterity of an organization shows its level of

advancement towards becoming a digital organization. Many companies from the survey have

started the journey to becoming digital organizations but haven’t achieved a high level of digital

dexterity yet. Early encouragement of more collaborative behaviors is likely to yield strong

dividends for enterprises wishing to become more digital.

In other words, taking action towards building a digital organization will enable the company to

benefit from repeated waves of new technologies. A company must understand its goal and focus its

effort on one area of improvement at a time. Then map common experiences in order to understand

what stage they are at. Developing collaboration, transparency and workforce engagement are

most important to reach digital dexterity over time. Effective digital organizations successfully mesh

digital and human power to continually create value.

I.D.2. How to pragmatically act towards becoming a digital organization?

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Companies must rethink their core business and approach innovation with a different strategy. John

Hagel III interviewed by Gerald C. Kane in The Dark Side of the Digital Revolution gives advice to the

executives that would agree to make significant change in a long term scale.

He first advises to use the “zoom-out/zoom-in approach” for strategy, famous in Silicon Valley,

instead of looking at plans on a one to five year scale - which is irrelevant. Think how will our relevant

market look like in ten years and what will be the implications on the kind of company we want to

become in order to be successful in that market (zoom-out). Then, in parallel ask yourself what

would be the two or three business initiatives that will have the greatest impact into accelerating our

movement towards that long term goal, in the next six or twelve months (zoom-in). Last, the

company leaders must agree on a long-term shared vision if they want actual change to happen.

The second advice he gives is that digital technologies must serve the acceleration of learning and

performance improvement daily in the company. Digital should drive new knowledge creation

through practice, and by resolving business situations that have never been confronted before.

Companies must create experimentation platforms to allow employees to try out things with very

low risk: this would be a huge enabler of accelerated learning in the workplace. One example is

LiveOps which gave to each of their 20,000 call center employees a real-time performance

dashboard inspired from videogame World of Warcraft, to let them see where they outperform and

under-perform and enable them to ask for help; instead of being an instrument of punishment,

LiveOps was able to create a “powerful peer-to-peer learning environment for their workers”.

Last, implementing a company culture that allows “scalable learning” thanks to digital technologies

instead of “scalable efficiency” will drive Digital Transformation. Admitting that you don’t know how

to do something and asking for help should be praised and not punished. Leadership is also bound to

evolve in this way: leaders will be asked to raise the right questions but not knowing how to solve

them will be accepted.

I.E. CONCLUSION

As Brennen & Kreiss (2014) define it, digitalization is the way in which “many domains of social life

are restructured around digital communication and media infrastructures”. This revolution is

happening with all aspects of society (transportation, communication, work contracting, etc.). Digital

transformation happening in companies is made of three aspects (Westerman, Bonnet & McAfee):

customer experience, operational process and business model.

Concerning the digitalization of corporate operational processes, the peer-reviewed literature

available is mainly professional: it talks about a macro level of transformation, a path that companies

as entities should take in order to become digital masters and be adaptable to ongoing technological

revolution. Literature is professional because it mainly comes from corporate leaders, consulting

(Capgemini) and management labs (MIT Sloane, Harvard, etc.). Literature talks about digitalization at

a macro level but we could extrapolate by adapting these models to an individual digital

transformation, i.e. an employee-level or what one should do to become a digital master himself.

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Digital technologies are usually adopted in the consumer sphere first and companies are trying to

adopt them as well, as a result of their success as consumer products. This new trend is bringing a

bottoms-up approach: change can now come from individuals themselves and if companies want to

become digital masters, we must start thinking about what each employee must do to make it

possible.

To become digital masters, individuals must gain digital knowledge and dexterity but also break

siloes of teams and locations in the company and start reaching out to colleagues they don’t know,

share their results and practices, help others, etc. Cultivating “weak ties” (Granovetter) will prove

essential for their future projects and hence for creating synergies for the company itself.

Digitalization of work has become a priority for Orange which is opening to new markets and

becoming a “software company”. In order to become one, processes and management must evolve

internally.

Part II: Digitalization of work at Orange, IMT

II.A. PRESENTATION OF IMT AND ORANGE LABS RESEARCH

Innovation, Marketing and Technology (IMT) is composed of 8,000 employees in France and abroad

is responsible for conducting research and anticipation projects at Orange. IMT employees have

diverse profiles such as engineers, developers, scrum masters, designers, marketers, etc. My

research project takes place at Orange Labs Research, - composed of a team of fifteen people and led

by Nicolas Demassieux - the IMT steering entity that leads the research effort for the group, and is

divided into nine domains: Knowledge and Data, Security and Trust, Software Infrastructure, Ambient

Connectivity, Internet of Things, Digital Society, Digital Emerging Countries, Smart City, Smart Home

and Digital Enterprise.

Exhibit 6: The nine research domains at Orange Labs Research

I was part of the Digital Enterprise research domain led by Guillaume Tardiveau, who oversees five

research projects concerning the future of communication in companies, how to automate and

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create intelligence to foster new ways of working: Smart Working, Emerging Ways of Working,

Customer Relation, Service Composition and Enterprise 4.0.

In addition to conducting the Digital Enterprise research projects, Guillaume Tardiveau is also

responsible for implementing the internal digitalization of the IMT entity and I am assisting him in

that task. Among a portfolio of six projects (see Exhibit 7) that were validated by the executive

committee in order to digitalize IMT internally, I developed and launched three of them: the

Observatory of digital practices, the Digital & Local program and a messages aggregator tool called

HubMe.

Among that portfolio of six projects, five of the projects are directed towards all IMT employees

(including the observatory of digital practices, the Digital & Local peer-to-peer learning, and

Managers’ Training). Their objective is to foster digital inclusion in order to create a common digital

culture – in other words bring all employees to the same level of digital knowledge. But the project of

service composition HubMe is meant to fix the pain points that the most digital employees face:

information overload. The most digital employees are not necessarily technical people – working in IT

or engineering – but individuals who are genuinely interested in testing new services. They are the

ones who have a “learning-by-doing” mindset that fits with new digital technologies.

Exhibit 7: The portfolio of projects for digitalizing work at IMT

Here is a map of the six projects given two axes of characterization: if they are exploration projects

for innovative services, and if they participate in the set up and implementation of the digital

transformation at IMT:

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Exhibit 8: Map of the Digital Transformation portfolio of projects at OLR

Overall, the role of Orange Labs Research is to conduct research and anticipation projects at Orange

and discover future lines of business. Research projects have a long term timeline (three to five

years) and anticipation projects have a midterm timeline (two years of implementation). Research or

anticipation projects then go into development when they have found internal or external clients: as

soon as a business unit - like Orange Business Services which is the B2B BU of Orange - is interested

in integrating given project into one of their products, to offer such project to external – corporate -

clients, then the business unit finances the development which is carried out by the Technocentre

(IMT).

Exhibit 9: Research, Anticipation and Development projects at IMT

II.B. THE TRADITIONAL TELCO ORANGE IS BECOMING A “SOFTWARE COMPANY”

This is what Executive Committee member and IMT president Marie-Noëlle Jégo-Laveissière stated

when interviewed in September 2016 by Edouard Laugier (“Mari-Noëlle Jégo-Laveissière, Orange :

"Orange est une software company", Le Nouvel Economiste.fr, 2016): “Orange is a software

company”. It means to MNJL that Orange “must work differently” as topics are dealt with a

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multidisciplinary aspect. There is now a common language – coding – that must be understood by all

teams (developers, architects, security, customer relations, design, etc.) if they want to work

together. Orange hence launched a big training program to bring coding competencies to all types of

jobs and train 20,000 people at Orange in order to facilitate interactions and synergies.

Director or all-IP corporate program at Orange Jehanne Savi also stated during a panel discussion in

2016 in the presence of the group’s CIO Pascal Viginier, that becoming a “software company” is a

priority and challenge for Orange: “We are engaged in a big project of transformation of our activities

to adjust to new processes which are often very technical”. She adds that Orange’s goals are to

rethink the way employees work, from the conception of the network infrastructures to crafting

more agile ways of working and closer to clients. Orange employee Eric Debeau adds during the

same panel that “Software is eating everything”.

To MNJL in the same interview, there are two axes for innovation at Orange. The first market for

innovation is local – Europe - and is a telco market. Orange competitors are telcos like Free,

Numericable and SFR in France, Telephonica and Vodaphone in other European countries like Poland

or Spain. Orange is leader in French telecommunications with almost 19,000 million clients

(operator) in the third semester of 2016 (ARCEP figures), and one of the leaders in Europe.

Exhibit 10: French operators markets shares in France (T3 2016) (ARCEP)

The second market of innovation to MNJL is global and Orange competitors are OTT – over-the-top

like YouTube, Netflix, Apple, etc. To her, “digital technologies contribute to amplifying the

phenomenon of ecosystems and our role as telco is to catalyze innovations”.

Orange’s leader position doesn’t mean it is exempted from launching its digital transformation, on

the contrary. Digital transformation is a step all companies must go through today in order to stay

alive at the digital age. Generally speaking (cf Exhibit 1), they must adapt their customer relations

and supply by taking digital challenges into account (new channels of supply, new advertising and

marketing means, evolution of the traditional path of purchase, customer service must be even more

reactive to answer clients’ every need, constantly launching innovative products, etc.). However,

Orange must also adapt its internal processes with digital technologies (digitalize administrative

work, secure data, reshape the software infrastructure to be more efficient in development and

taking into account the change of behaviors and collaboration, etc.). The GAFAs are Orange’s new

competitors and they are developing their services and processes way faster than Orange does in the

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OTT market. Orange must foster the creation of a digital mindset in order to develop digital dexterity

and become a digirati (Puram, Bonnet & McAfee).

Given the context of the years 2000 at Orange, during which the company went through a serious

social crisis, one of the priorities of the group is to allow employees to work and grow in a caring and

benevolent environment, learn and develop their skills while adapting efficiently and humanly to the

challenges of the digital age.

II.C. CONCLUSION OF THE MISSION

For Orange to become a “software company” as Marie-Noëlle Jégo-Laveissière stated it, the

company has to adapt the way employees work, leadership and management are done, and think

about the workplace of the future, in order to stay in tune with technological and behavioral changes

of the 21st century. During this research project at OLR, I assisted Guillaume Tardiveau in launching

the three projects of digital transformation at IMT concerning internal processes: the Observatory of

digital practices, the “Digital & Local” peer-to-peer training program and the messages aggregator

tool HubMe.

The first project of the Observatory of digital practices allowed to start attesting the situation: how

employees felt about digital technologies and especially what are the gaps between their practices in

a professional and personal context.

Part III: A first step dedicated to studying practices and feelings of

employees on digital technologies: an "Observatory" of digital

practices

III.A. OBJECTIVES

III.A.1. Introducing the project

To start implementing the digitalization of IMT’s internal processes, we first decided to observe the

current situation of employees’ practices. We saw that digital behaviors develop faster in the

consumer sphere and take more time in the professional sphere (cf Part I). Individuals differ in the

way they use digital technologies depending if it’s in a personal or professional context. Some are

very digital-savvy outside of work, they are active on social media, participate in hackathons,

crowdsourcing platforms, etc. but as soon as they arrive in the company they shut everything off, as

if they were even reluctant to digital technologies at work. On the contrary, some people are not

digital at all in their personal lives but have strong digital behaviors at work. Why such gap in

behaviors exist between the two spheres?

This project equates to the first step of the Design Thinking methodology: Observation. We wanted

to watch employees use their digital tools on a day-to-day basis, sitting behind their screens while

they were using their devices and apps. But we knew few people would accept. In order to observe

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IMT employees without being intrusive and facing reluctance, we decided to launch the Observatory

of digital practices. It is not a typical observatory as it didn’t consist in a traditional statistical survey.

We launched a face-to-face survey, asking IMT employees to interview their colleagues directly and

ask them about their practices of digital tools and what they thought of them. The “ambassadors” –

employees who asked the questions – gathered open answers and comments from their colleagues.

We partnered with the startup Liegey Muller Pons who is an expert in semantic and sentiment

analysis through the use of natural language processing (NLP) software on open text.

III.A.2. Definition of an “observatory”

It appears that the notion of an observatory can mean different things. The first type is a location

used to observe terrestrial or celestial events. It is usually a place built for that purpose and using

scientific instruments to measure such occurrences (volcanology, meteorology, geology, etc.). For

instance, the Parisian building “Observatoire de Paris” is dedicated to the watching and measuring of

celestial occurrences.

The second type of observatory is an observatory of practices. It usually represents a virtual place

that defines indicators and measure data in order to bring knowledge that will be instrumental to

understanding a given reality. After defining specific characteristics that will help determine a

situation, one will be able to create a snapshot of a situation in a specific time and place. Then, after

measuring such event at successive moments in time, one will be able to observe an evolution or a

trend. Such investigation requires going on the field and interviewing involved parties, gather insight

and feedback that will help determine real behaviors. This methodology will help create knowledge

concerning a behavioral encounter and is the first step for taking action and impacting a trend. In a

word, an observatory of practices gives an overview of a situation related to human and social

behaviors.

Observatories of practices can be divided into two types themselves. The first type of practices relate

to “experience” or know-how, in other words a craft or a line of business (e.g. the Observatory of

agricultural practices in France, Observatory of construction jobs). In this case, there is a specific

“way to do things” and the goal is to observe how it is done, understand the gap with the existing

pain points (e.g. to observe agricultural practices to see how they hinder nature preservation).

The second kind of Observatory of practices relate to human and economic behaviors that are

difficult to measure due to their social nature. The goal here is to observe an economic or social

phenomenon and try to correlate it with other factors in order to understand its cause and drivers. It

is highly correlated to personal feelings and to the people involved, so there is no “good way to do

things”. It explains why these behaviors are harder to measure. An example is the observatory of

Enterprise Social Networks. Our project relates to this last category and it resembles to the

observation step from the Design Thinking methodology.

III.A.3. Employees’ responses to introducing digital technologies at work and their impact

on the organization of work

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Employees don’t respond the same way to the introduction of digital technologies in their lives and

specifically at work. Even more so, digital technologies impact work’s organizational structure,

employee behavior and relationships with others. Understanding employees’ practices and

perceptions of digital technologies will help determine how to reshape the organizational structure.

That is why we launched the Observatory of digital practices, in order to capture the “real” practices

and feelings of employees compared to what people like to attest (the gap between what people say

they do and what they actually do, captured by the Design Thinking process).

Markus & Robey in their paper “Information Technology and Organizational Change: Causal Structure

in Theory and Research” examine theories about why and how information technology affects

organizational life in terms of their structures. Building upon the work of Pfeffer (1982), the authors

have identified three conceptions of causality in the literature on information technology and

organizational change. The first one is the “technological imperative” (technologies impact

corporate organizational change as an external factor), the second is the “organizational imperative”

(technologies come from the company as an internal factor) and last the “emergent perspective”

(the main question is not the relation between technology and structure, but the role of users).

Exhibit 11: The ways information technology affects the structure of organizational life (Panagiotis Adamopoulos explaining Markus & Robey)

The “emergent perspective” gives back the focus to individuals: personal characteristics of users,

their perceptions of tools and the social influences that they create are the explaining factors of

practices and organizational changes. To Markus & Robey, this means watching the effective use of

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digital technologies becomes necessary to understanding organizational phenomenons. To Isckia,

interviewing people directly in companies thus becomes important to capture perceptions and how

organizations will be reshaped. Our action for the internal digital transformation at IMT was based on

this insight as we decided to learn about employees real practices by interviewing them face-to-face.

This new era of omnipresent digital technologies at work has an impact on the level of stress of

employees; the company must learn to take their differences into account in order to make

technology actually useful to all. Korzynski, Florent-Treacy & Vries in You and Your Technostress:

Relating Personality Dimensions to ICT-Related Stress (2016) show that how well an individual copes

with permanent connectivity depends on their personality. They explain how specific personality

traits are affected by the different causes of “technostress” and instead of setting rigid corporate

rules about availability, leaders should first acknowledge that the impact of digital technologies is

different on each employee (by making some studies), then help employees understand their

individual preferences and train them to be able to use digital technologies in the way it works for

them. Hence, people will find digital technologies useful instead of being a source of anxiety.

Omnipresent digital technologies are creating increasing pressure on executives, letting them feel

insecurity, overload, and uncertainty. The human cost of digital is very high today; 80% of US

households possess a computer, and the term “technostress” was coined in 1984 when only 8% of

US household had one. The word “technostress” appeared to “describe the nervous tension related

to the (over)use of information and communication technologies” (Korzynski). The authors identified

5 causes of technostress: techno-overload (“situations with higher workload generated by ICTs”),

techno-invasion (“the invasive impact of ICTs on personal life”), techno-complexity (“difficulty in

learning to use ICTs), techno-insecurity (“when users’ jobs are threatened due to ICTs”) and techno-

uncertainty (“related to new ICT developments”).

First, they found that other people usually don’t see how stressed one really is. Concerning

personalities, the more extraverted a person is the more likely he or she is to suffer from techno-

overload. On the contrary, introverts and pseudo-extraverts (introverts who learned to exhibit

extraverted behaviors when necessary) benefit from the use of digital technologies. Digital

technologies allow pseudo-extraverts to communicate with a broader audience without having to be

physically there, and they allow them to choose strategically the people they want to spend quality

time with and build authentic relationships:

People with high self-esteem are less likely to feel techno-insecurity, because for example they won’t

feel that they will lose their job for someone having greater technical skills. Also, very conscientious

people are more likely to suffer from techno-insecurity:

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Last, people who make themselves constantly available through digital technologies are more likely

to feel techno-invasion. On the contrary, people who use them but at their own discretion are less

impacted by techno-invasion, because they feel they are in control of how and when they use it:

Why are some people better in controlling the way they use digital technologies and others fall in the

trap of being constantly connected? Some people, like pseudo-conscientious and pseudo-extraverted

people, are better at it because their personalities allow them to be more skilled at managing

availability and thus reducing feelings of techno-invasion.

How to prevent technostress at work?

At work, technostress can be reduced by taking into account personality differences when allocating

responsibilities and creating guidelines for digital technologies use. For example, technologies work

well with introverted team members (less techno-invasion), but face-to-face communications work

better for extraverts that will stay connected because they fear to miss anything out (prevent

techno-overload). Also, highly conscientious people feel highly insecure so they shouldn’t be

assigned at intensive roles using technologies, or should be accompanied during a learning transition

to gain confidence and control. The authors also think that “some people might connect through ICTs

to build their self-esteem or to cheer themselves up”.

As a conclusion, people can feel different kinds of “technostress” when confronted to digital

technologies at work for different reasons and given their personalities. The company and managers

should know how to listen and care for them in order to help them determine the best work

environment which would allow employees to be productive and happy. Taking this into account, we

launched the Observatory of digital practices meant to observe and listen to employees’ specificities.

III.B. STEPS FOR PREPARING THE SURVEY OF THE OBSERVATORY

III.B.1. Starting the project

We started the Observatory of digital practices with the knowledge that we wanted to understand

what digital tools Orange employees used and what they thought about digital technology in general.

The goal of the observatory was to capture subjective data - feelings and perceptions- in order to

perceive the level of difference between what they say they do and what they actually do. Capturing

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people’s perceptions will help identify the way to introduce digital technologies so they feel useful to

all (avoiding “technostress”).

Digital technologies are spreading in companies and used in their internal processes – product

management, research, development, leadership, validation, administrative, communication, etc. -

and we wanted to attest of the level of confidence / defiance concerning these technologies. Here is

a list of important questions we asked ourselves:

Is there a gap between what employees say they use and what they actually use?

(understanding the “effective” use by Markus & Robey, to prevent technostress)

How do employees feel about digital tools like social networks?

Do digital tools allow them to gain time at work?

Do they consider themselves digital experts?

What are they afraid of concerning digital technologies?

Do they feel their own practices are in tune with the rest of their team and the company?

Do they picture Orange as a digital company?

In order to launch the project, we then knew we needed to bring allies on board (form a team).

Indeed, when given the opportunity to express their opinion, people usually engage in the cause

altogether. This is the reason why we pitched the idea around to as many colleagues as possible, get

their feedback and rally them to the project.

The other requirement was to create a methodology and process easily replicable externally to offer

Orange’s service to clients for their own digital transformation of work processes. The objective was

to launch a survey at Orange to understand IMT employees, but replicating the method and bringing

assistance to Orange corporate clients is a long term goal as well and a business opportunity. In a

word, IMT represents the field for experimentation to test and iterate on products and services that

will then be sold externally by OBS.

I dived into the topic by starting to regroup existing materials and reports concerning digital usage at

Orange: raw data, reports, projects, etc. Since “digital practices” is a very broad topic, we decided to

focus first on the use of the internal social network Plazza which is central and emblematic of the

phenomenon of digital transformation (“Web 2.0” and “Enterprise 2.0”).

III.B.2. Presentation of the internal social network Plazza

Plazza is the name of Orange’s internal social network launched in the company in 2012. It is not a

proprietary Orange software as it is based on Jive, seen as the best software management platform

on the market in 2012 (Gartner). Data is stored in the Orange cloud so the company has the hand on

personal and sensitive information as requested by management. The 2014 version of the platform

was the second important software version since its launch.

The team responsible for the site’s maintenance is part of the HR team at Orange, and the technical

team is based in Romania. Since the set up comes from Jive itself, there are no technical team coding

the interface but they are the official teams responsible for receiving requests and managing the UX.

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Plazza’s governance is reduced to its minimum, in other words Orange wanted the tool to be optional

to use and let the content and maintenance be user-generated. The less governance there is for the

tool, the more employees will have power on their relationships with others and the more useful it

will be for them. Since then, Plazza has been suffering from a lack of network effect (only 20% of

Orange employees have an account) even if user growth rate has been high (10,000 new accounts

created between February and July 2017).

Exhibit 12: The evolutions of Plazza since its creation

Plazza works like any social network. It lets users create a personal profile where one can add a

profile picture and cover photo, present oneself and talk about one’s interests and background, add

one’s skills and let other people recommend them. It also allows users to search posted content by

title, person and group, making the sharing of information easier among employees. Last, users can

create groups based on topics or geography and discuss, share and plan professional and personal

projects together.

One of the issues and setbacks Plazza has been facing is that a majority of employees is still not

convinced about the benefits of such tool in they working lives and it undermines the productivity

and environment of all employees as the network of employees is not being used at its entire

potential (only 20% of Orange employees have an account and 15% are active).

III.B.3. Survey focused on Plazza

After interviewing employees to gather their open answers, I ended up with the following version of

the questionnaire centered on Plazza (the previous version is in Appendix):

If answered a-d to Q1 : Q6. What do you use Plazza for? Q7. Do you post content on Plazza? If yes, what type of content? Q8. Do you use Plazza for the following actions:

Actions Yes or No Comments

a) Collaborate

b) Discuss

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c) Ask questions

d) Meet

e) Get documentation

f) Other

2. Functionalities

Usages

Q9.1. Profile information Y/N Comments

a) Have you posted a profile picture?

b) Have you posted a cover picture on your proflle?

c) Have you written a personal description on your profile?

d) Have you referenced your skills?

e) Have you created a blog?

f) Have you updated your status?

Other usages Q9.2. Do you use these functionalities? (Y/N)

Q9.3. Are you satisfied of the way Plazza answers your given practices?

g) Ask a question

h) Create an idea

i) Create a poll

j) Share a survey

k) Create a group (= community)

l) Communicate through Plazza’s inbox

m) Mention colleagues

n) Download documents

o) Other

Q10. Which of your needs are not met by current available tools on Plazza? Q11. Do you find what you are looking for?

Q.12. Do you post content at least once a month on Plazza ?

a) Yes b) No

Do you consider yourself a Plazza active user?

a) No

b) Little

c) Not bad

d) Very active

Comments

Q13. How frequently in general on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+, etc.):

do you log in do you post (likes, articles, posts, media…)

a) I don’t have an account

b) more than once a day

c) once a week

d) a few times a week

e) more than once a day

f) Comments

Q14. Are you satisfied by the results you obtain on Plazza? Justify Q15. What are the 3 most important things on Plazza to you? Q16. What are the 3 things that need to get better on Plazza to you? Q17. Do you think Plazza is essential today at work?

3. Learning Q18. How do you find Plazza’s usage?

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a) Easy b) A bit difficult but once you know it’s simple c) Complicated

Comments: Q19. How did you learn to use Plazza?

a) By myself instinctively b) Asking my colleagues c) Thanks to online classes d) My manager trained me

Q20. Did you follow online classes to learn how to use Plazza? Q21. Have you ever needed assistance concerning Plazza? Q22. If yes, who do you contact to get assistance?

a) Online Plazza support b) Plazza support on the phone c) Someone I know personally

Comments:

4. The Future Q23. Plazza vs Intranet: do you think Plazza should replace the intranet? Q24. Have you participated in the Rallyteam project launched in 2016? Q25. Integrating new functionalities: to you, should Plazza progressively host new functionalities?

Q26. Sociology Age : <30 years old, 31-40, 41-50, >50 Genre : M or F Area of work at IMT

Then, by regrouping recurrent answers together I was able to close the questions to a list of answers

to choose from:

Q10. Do you post content on Plazza? And if yes, what kind of content? a) Content I created b) Others’ content that I’m sharing c) Interacting with others’ posts (comments, likes)

Q12. Which of your needs are not met by current available tools on Plazza? (Choose the 3 main ones and if nothing comes to mind do not fill in):

a) I’d like to interconnect Plazza with my Outlook calendars b) I’d like to integrate project and tasks management tools to Plazza c) I’d like Plazza to be simpler to use (while keeping the wealth of all existing functionalities) d) I’d like to be able to share confidential documents easily e) I’d like the mobile app to be improved f) I’d like the survey tool to be improved g) I’d like employees to be better tought to create communities and post content (employees don’t use tags so

research becomes more difficult and they don’t know which format they should upload their content on). h) I’d like employees to be supported by physical teams in each building i) Plazza communities should have a moderator so they always stay active, or be deleted if inactive j) I’d like the support team to be more reactive when writing to them on Plazza k) There are still too little users on Plazza to really benefit from the network effect l) I’m happy with Plazza because I use what is given to me. If I don’t find what I want I will go on another platform.

Q13. Do you find what you are looking for?

a) Yes, most of the time b) Yes, sometimes c) Non, I really have to spend time to find d) Indifferent: I don’t expect anything from Plazza, if I don’t find I’ll go look somewhere else

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Q.14. Do you post content at least one a month on Plazza?

a) Yes b) No

Do you consider yourself a Plazza active user?

a) No b) Little c) Not bad d) Very active

Comments

Q15. How frequently in general on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+, etc.):

do you log in do you post (likes, articles, posts, media,…)

g) I don’t have an account

h) more than once a day

i) once a week

j) a few times a month

k) more than once a day

Comments:

Q15. Are you satisfied by the results you obtain? Justify

a) Yes, very b) Yes, because I’m not asking for much, I’ll look elsewhere if I don’t find c) Yes, because I’m going on Plazza to find something specific d) Yes, because once a critical size of the network is reached, we can find the necessary information e) Not really; Plazza is still perceived as non-work activity by managers and the latter don’t push employees to go on

it. So responses are not reactive f) No not at all

Q16. What are the 3 most important things on Plazza to you?

a) Getting information from people outside of your restricted team and area of work, more transparency on what other teams do

b) Find skills that I’m looking for c) Manage events (sign up, schedule, see participants) d) Share documents with a large audience (better than a Sharepoint) e) Follow the activity of colleagues f) Follow groups that are not necessarily related to my day-to-day work g) Collaborate between different types of jobs

Q17. What are the 3 things that need to get better on Plazza to you?

a) Project management tool b) Synchronize Outlook calendar c) Create a network effect, free the usages and make managers advocates of Plazza d) Uploading multiples versions of the same documents e) Make the UX simpler

Q18. Do you think Plazza is essential today at work?

a) Yes absolutely b) Useful but not essential c) No it’s worth nothing

Comments :

1. Learning Q19. How do you find Plazza’s usage?

a) Easy b) A bit difficult but once you know it’s simple c) Complicated

Comments: Q20. How did you learn to use Plazza?

a) By myself instinctively b) Asking my colleagues c) Thanks to online classes d) My manager trained me

Comments:

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Q21. Did you follow online classes to learn how to use Plazza? Yes/No Q22. Have you ever needed assistance concerning Plazza? Yes/No Q23. If yes, who do you contact to get assistance?

a) Online Plazza support b) Plazza support on the phone c) Someone I know personally

Comments: Q21.4. Have you ever used the help center on Plazza? Yes/No/Comments

2. The Future

Q24. Plazza vs Intranet: do you think Plazza should replace the intranet? Q25. Have you participated in the Rallyteam project launched in 2016?

a) Yes b) No, I had an identification problem c) No, never heard of it d) No, I’m against introducing startups into Orange processes

Q26. Integrating new functionalities: to you, should Plazza progressively host new functionalities?

a) Improve the user experience b) Add task management tools c) We’d better keep only basic functionalities to prevent from being dependent technologically from Jive d) Integrate Skype to communicate directly on Plazza e) No I don’t believe in having to have everything on a sole platform; Plazza shouldn’t integrate all these tools, we

are well-off using third-party platforms. f) Other

III.B.4. Pivoting and broadening the scope of the survey: designing a graph of practices

The interviews revealed that focusing on Plazza reduced the scope of the observatory to a list of

claims about Plazza interface whereas we wanted to learn about employees’ digital profiles and

effective use of digital technologies. During the interviews, interviewees mentioned situations like

using online payments, digital classes, digital communication, etc. and made me realize our research

was in fact much broader than the question of Plazza and allowed me to make the survey evolve. I

came up with a matrix made of eight axes that would allow to define a digital profile of an individual:

- How many devices does the person own (PC, smartphones, tablets, watches, etc.)?

- How does the person use data?

- Does he learn online?

- Does he buy and pay online?

- Does he use collaboration tools?

- How does he communicate online, does he use social media?

- What are the person’s openness and sense of initiatives?

- How much does the person personally contribute to others’ work?

Each axis is made of three levels of accomplishment, allowing giving a ranking for each type of

behavior, on how much digital it is. For instance, paying online with a credit card is not a very digitally

advanced behavior whereas using bitcoins is a lot more advanced. The more digital or advanced a

behavior is, the more digitally mature a person will be considered, and the more on the outside of

the matrix she will be positioned.

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Exhibit 13: Graph of the individual digital maturity

This graph is a way to capture the digital maturity of individuals, thanks to the definition of eight axes

of digital behavior. It comes in as the first part of the interview to illustrate individual practices

(closed questions). The second part is about feelings concerning digital technologies and subjective

perceptions (open questions).

Let’s illustrate with an example. Isabelle is an employee working in Lannion and she was interviewed.

She is in her fifties, doesn’t work at nights nor weekends and not at home, so she draws a clear line

between work and her private life. She is not a manager and works with a team of twenty who are

located in different sites. Her digital practices are more developed in a work context because she

feels she has an obligation towards the company and her managers. She uses project management

tools like Orange Forge or Etherpad at work, but none in her private life. At home, it is different: she

has a very poor digital usage and only uses the bare minimum to communicate. She refuses to go too

fast into the dematerialization of services and still prefers to pay with human cashiers in stores or call

an actual taxi driver instead of using cash machines and taxi platforms. She prefers text media

supports instead of videos because she feels videos make her waste time. She is not proactive into

discovering new applications or usage and keeps to what she knows. However, she feels the need to

help others online and contributes to correcting texts and information on websites like Wikipedia.

The graph below sums up her behaviors:

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Exhibit 14: Isabelle's graph of digital maturity

Such interview reveals that digital / non-digital behaviors are complicated to capture. People can

have different types of profiles given their behaviors along the eight axes. This is why I made the

matrix evolve in order to bring the concept of digital profiles in. Let’s go even further, the interesting

information about Isabelle is that she has a very developed practice at work, but a very poor one at

home. Why such a gap between professional and personal usage? Hence, an important question I

wanted to raise is the gap between work and home in terms of practices. We decided it would be

more appropriate to put together two matrices, one for professional usage and the other one for

personal usage. This evolution brings us to the following representation of professional and personal

digital practices:

Exhibit 15: Isabelle’s graph of professional and personal digital practices showing a gap

The questionnaire evolved to take this new model into account and enlarge the initial scope to digital

practices in general.

Introduction: Orange Labs Research is implementing the internal digital transformation at IMT and our first objective is to make an observation of the way IMT employees feel about digital tools and how they use them. By repeating this survey every year, we’ll be able to observe trends and have a tool at hand to measure the actual impact of digitalization and help take

36

decisions based on facts. Our goal is to understand how employees feel and how they use digital technologies at work and at home. Indeed, an employee is also an individual that uses digital technologies in his personal life and arrives in the company with a given digital knowledge. We want to understand how his usage adapts at work and what is the gap between usage in his personal life and professional life. Can we define an employee digital profile? Answers are confidential and there are no right or wrong anwers. I will start by asking questions about your working environment. Then, I will ask you about your digital usage in your private life as well as in your professional life, given eight different axis : this part of the survey is about objective answers, the subjective part comes after. Next, we will define together what digitalization means and I will ask you questions concerning what it makes you feel and where Orange stands in this matter; you can freely comment here. Last, I will ask you what are the practices of digital masters and your own use of Plazza. I. Employee profile, working environment What is your job? How many people do you work with directly? How many employees do you manage? Do you regularly work with people who are in a different location? Do you have a laptop and if yes, do you use it outside of the office? What is your age? 18-25/26-35/36-45/46-55/55+. Do you have regular working hours or do you work on nights and weekends too?

II. Professional and Personal practices

For each question, choose the statement that bests corresponds to your situation.

1) How many digital tools do you use and which ones? (e.g. smartphones, laptop, PCs, watches, etc.) - At home? At work?

2) About your daily use of data in your daily life …/ at work… - I analyze little data or I leave it in the format presented to me (e.g. a dashboard presenting my financial spending

offered by my bank in my personal life / my Plazza log ins at work) - I use data computing software like Excel, PowerPoint or Microsoft Access (databases) (e.g. creation holiday or

projects budgets in my personal life / deal with clients data at work) - I use data analysis tools like Google Analytics (e.g. to analyze how frequent is seen a personal website / to

analyze a professional website consultation or clients’ interests at work)

3) How would you describe your relation to knowledge and online learning? – At home? At work? - I do ponctual searches on the Internet on precise topics (e.g. deep dive searches on a specific topic in my

personal life / find information for my searches at work) - To stay informed, I follow news feeds or I watch videos like TEDx (e.g Following Twitter news feeds on cooking or

watch gardening videos from Leroy Merlin’s website/ Subscribe to TechCrunch newsletters to follow news about the tech word at work)

- I do MOOCs in which my active participation is required

4) Do you use dematerialized payments solutions and if yes, which ones? - Online payments and credit card or PayPal (e.g. Buy book on Amazon in my personal life / Buy flowers online for

a corporate fair at work) - Contactless and payment applications (Orange Cash, Lydia) (e.g. pay contactless or use a payment app at a

cashier in a store or at the office cafeteria) - Bitcoins

5) How do you organize work with a team? – At work? At home? - By sending emails - By sharing documents with all (Plazza, Google Drive, Sharepoint) - By using project management tools (Plan, Orange Forge)

6) Why do you use social networks? - I don’t use them - I use them mainly as an observer - I use them mainly as a contributor

7) When it comes to services or apps you don’t know: if you hear about an app from people around you, how do you react?

- You don’t pay attention to it, it doesn’t concern you - You are curious because you don’t know this app but you don’t download it - You’re interested so you download it and also asks advice to your friends/colleagues

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- You always download apps you hear about in the news to discover them

8) What is your online contribution? You contribute: - To communities or groups that you are a part of and in which you know the members personally (friends, family,

colleagues in Facebook, Whatsapp or LinkedIn groups, alumnis from your school, etc.) - In communities of practice or of experts but in which you don’t necessarily know personally the members

(Forums, Quora) - Where people will need it online : I proactively bring my contribution without people asking for it (correct

Wikipedia pages, forums, etc.) III. Perceptions concerning digital

1) What is digitalization to you? 2) Do you think the concept of digitalization refers maybe, a bit, for sure, not at all, to the following notions (and comment):

- Evolution of behaviors? - Collaboration? - Decisions based on data-analysis ? - Peer-to-peer feed-back? - Agility? - Horizontal exchanges? - Transparency? - Direct accès to information? - Social networks? - Knowledge sharing and helping others?

3) Concerning how digital technologies work and the new aspects they bring, would you say you feel threatened/ worried/ confident/ excited?

4) What is your level of confidence/ defiance when it comes to digital – At home ? At work?

5) Is the permeability of private and professional contexts a reality to you? If yes, how do you manage it? Do you have trouble doing it ?

6) Do you think digital technologies have an impact on the quantity of work you have?

7) At what speed is digitalization going in your specialty FOR you? (Neutral, too fast, too slow)

8) Compared to other companies you know, would you say that digitalization at Orange is… at the same level, more advanced or more lagging?

IV. Opinion

1) Is there a difference between geek and digital? 2) What usage makes someone very digital to you? 3) Do you have suggestions to make to IMT on the topics we discussed here?

V. Questions about Plazza usage

4) Why do you mainly use Plazza for? 5) What are the three things you like about Plazza? 6) What are the three things you would like to change about it?

III.B.5. Final version updated by Liegey Muller Pons

Thanks to the interviews I undertook, I was able to iterate on the survey: starting with questions

oriented on Plazza to broader questions about general digital behaviors, and last to identifying

questions about the gap between professional and personal behaviors. These iterations made me

realize the first direction towards closed questions was maybe not appropriate for the subjective

type of information we tried to capture. What we needed was a way to effectively analyze open

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questions and our discussions with the CivicTech startup Liegey Muller Pons comforted us into

thinking it was the right direction; and they could help analyze them. They are experts in sentiment

analysis. Also, their method of doing interviews face-to-face and ran by employees themselves was

the solution we secretly hoped for: we wanted to run the interviews in person but weren’t sure of

the way to do it while preventing to ruin the results. Hence, we continued the project with LMP and

there was a last iteration on the questionnaire so it would fit their requirements.

Here was the final version of the questionnaire used during the Observatory:

Exhibit 16: Interviewee's profile and working environment (Part 1 of the survey)

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Exhibit 17: Usage of digital tools at home and at work (Part 2 of the survey)

Exhibit 18: Usage of digital tools at home and at work (Part 2 of the survey)

40

Exhibit 19: Interviewees' feelings about digital (Part 3 of the survey)

Exhibit 20: Orange tools and how they answer their needs at work (Part 4 of the survey)

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III.B.6. Finding ambassadors to participate in the observatory

After crafting the final version of the survey with Liegey Muller Pons, we needed to find the

employees present on all IMT sites in France and abroad who would act as “ambassadors”, in other

words who would interviews other employees in person.

To do so and during the first three weeks of April 2017, I reached out to all IMT sites – in relation

with the Digital & Local project, detailed in Part II – to identify volunteers for the survey. We decided

that getting a sample of 500 would be representative of the 8,000 employees at IMT (according to

Orange sociologists and LMP experts’ opinions) and we looked for 50 ambassadors; each of them

would interview ten people from their own site. Who are these ambassadors who accepted to

participate in this cross-functional project? There were employees who had an activity related to

digitalization, were already involved in the animation of groups or communities or wanted to have an

impact in changing the way people worked at Orange with digital technologies. In summary, there

were people passionate about digital technologies and interested about getting to know their

colleagues better; and dedicated their free time to help this project. Many of them had also accepted

to participate in the Digital & Local project when I reached out, and the Observatory of digital

practices acted as the first step of a bigger initiative, Digital & Local being the second step of the

process. These individuals participating in the Observatory and Digital & Local projects were mainly

site directors, communication or HR managers and community managers.

III.C. LMP METHODOLOGY AND RESULTS OF SURVEY

In order to launch the observatory, we partnered with the French CivicTech startup Liegey Muller

Pons that worked on the Macron presidential campaign in France in 2016.

III.C.1. LMP methodology for the survey

When LMP analyzed the answers they gathered from the 25,000 interviewees during the “Grande

Marche” for Macron’s presidential campaign, they used a Natural Language Processing technology

using the Proxen software in order to analyze open questions (e.g. “What is doing well in France?”).

Analyzing comments from French people helped the candidate adapt his speech to the people he

was addressing, and his program to what they actually wanted. Liegey Muller Mons value is to couple

human encounters and digital technologies in order to succeed: people are always more reactive and

eager to participate in a study when they can talk to someone real. This is why they developed an

expertise in launching and analyzing open questions.

LMP’s methodology used at Orange for the Observatory was the same than the “Grande Marche”;

only the topic differed. It was their first time conducting a corporate-oriented study on employee

feelings concerning digital. For a month, we gathered fifty ambassadors across all sites of IMT and

each of them interviewed 10 of their colleagues in person. Analyzing 500 questionnaires was not a

big amount of data compared to the 25,000 surveys analyzed for the “Grande Marche” so they did a

manual analysis: doing so is still more precise to analyze open questions.

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In the questionnaires used for the Observatory of digital practices, there were open answers and

closed answers given the questions. The first part of the survey were closed questions meant to

categorize respondents and helped create a segmentation of profiles (entity, job, manager or not,

man or woman, etc.). The closed questions were analyzed frequency-wise: they counted how many

times each answer was chosen, and then analyzed them given the genre, office, age, etc.

Concerning the open questions, they usually can be analyzed either by hand or using a NLP software

–they did a manual analysis for the observatory. It was done by tagging open questions to make

them fit in specific categories, similar to closed questions. They identify four or five main topics that

are redundant in responses: they highlight in different colors parts that relate to each topic (e.g.

green highlight for all relating to “defiance”). For instance, topics can be “reliability”, “testing”, “see

to understand”, “professional use”. For each question they listed the topics, and for each topic they

identified tags (sub-topics or used words). Once they listed topics and tags for each open answer,

they dealt with these topics as closed answers: how many times each topic is used? Which topics are

evoked together? And by age, location, entity, etc.?

The only difference using a NLP software is that the highlighting is made automatically. The software

first reads 5% of the sample (1,000 questionnaires out of the 25,000 gathered for the “Grande

Marche”); the algorithm detects words that are linked to specific contexts and how many times they

are used. Then the algorithm identifies redundant topics. They are then able to create a database of

words linked to specific topics. Out of this first reading they gathered a small list of topics and

manually checked them to regroup them together in a smaller list (e.g: “environment” and “ecology”

can be regrouped in the same topic). They call it a plan of classification (“Plan de classement”). Then,

they run the algorithm again based on the database and the plan of classification: the algorithm

highlights the answers again but given this new plan so the selection is more precise. Automatic

methods always require a back-and-forth with manual analyses.

III.C.2. Results of the survey

Let’s present the context of the survey explained earlier, in the following tab:

500 interviews (interviewees) 50 ambassadors (interviewers)

All IMT sites in France and abroad In person interviews locally

Build a relationship of trust with the interviewee to let him talk about his personal experience: “discovering the user” spirit

Anonymous

Answers typed by ambassadors on a web page / app during the interview

Goal: Measure the use of digital tools of IMT employees and their behaviors with the former

Breakdown of the questionnaire: I. Digital usage at home and at work (closed questions) II. Feelings about digital (open questions) III. Fit between Orange tools and employees’ needs (open questions)

First, the sample of 500 questionnaires was representative of the entire IMT population of 8,000

employees in terms of sex. The young generations (18-25 and 26-35) were largely over represented.

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Exhibit 21: Sample description of the observatory of digital practices

In the first part of the survey (Digital usage at home and at work), respondents use digital tools

more frequently to communicate and to resolve logistics issues than in the other dimensions of their

professional lives. Differences in their personal lives are less visible. Women use more digital tools to

communicate whereas men use them for education and to gain knowledge. Digital tools for

payments are used poorly among IMT employees, but are more frequently used in the offices outside

of France.

Exhibit 22: Level of digital tools mastery for all 500 respondents

In the second part of the survey (Feelings about digital), we were able to see that the majority (61%)

of respondents say they feel confident or very confident when it comes to digital technologies. This

proportion is somehow equivalent across the different age categories, being even higher for the 26-

35 category (66%) and the 55+ category (64%).

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Exhibit 23: Level of confidence in digital technologies for all 500 respondents

We observed a gap between the perception respondents had of others and of themselves concerning

the speed of the digital transformation. 39% of respondents consider the digital transformation is

going fast at Orange (at a high pace) but only 15% think it is too fast for themselves. A peak of 60%

of respondents think they are personally in tune with the transformation’s pace, which can be

interpreted by the fact that many may not have understood well the question due to its complexity.

As a side note, we evoked the digital transformation on purpose without defining it so we would get

the first intuition of respondents when the term is called.

Exhibit 24: Perception of the speed of digital transformation by all 500 respondents

Simplifying procedures and gaining time were considered the main benefits of digital technologies

from 44% of the sample. Employees working in French sites also specifically stressed the perks of

having faster and easier communications. The drawbacks of digital technologies are equally

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represented among interviewees: the topics evoked are dehumanization, data security, conception

issues, the creation of dependency, information overload, the choice of tools being too vast and the

number of passwords being too important.

Exhibit 25: Perceived benefits of digital tools by all 500 respondents

Exhibit 26: Perceived drawbacks of digital technologies by all 500 respondents

In the third part of the survey (Fit between Orange tools and employees’ needs), what respondents

perceived as the daily most irritating things were digital tools first (networks reliability and bugs,

37%), then coordination and communication (31%) and last, interpersonal relationships (nice

environment with colleagues, specifically too much noise in the open-space, management, 21%).

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Exhibit 27: Propositions of solutions from all 500 respondents

The three tools respondents wouldn’t be able to live without are the email mainly (36%), then

conference call tools (17%) and smartphones (12%). This answer can be understood as a high

dependency towards emails by obligation, because respondents lack an effective collaborative tool

as a substitute.

The Orange tool that they wish to change is mainly Plazza (22%). It can be understood as employees

see Plazza benefits and are preoccupied by it (other propositions were given by only 6% of

respondents for each).

Exhibit 28: Tools that respondents would want to change at Orange

Last, respondents mainly heard about digital tools that their peers mentioned; first from their

colleagues (31%) and then their relatives (26%), “Orange” (i.e. top-down communication) and

managers’ influence is lagging behind (14%). An important majority of respondents (75%) assert they

have themselves proposed tools to their peers, which led to a third of adoption.

47

III.D. CONCLUSION OF THE OBSERVATORY

All in all, the results of the Observatory of digital practices show that practices of digital tools are very

different among employees. Some are expert and very at ease with testing new tools, others are

lagging behind and technology becomes a burden for them. This gap in the adoption pace of digital

technologies is a hindrance for collaboration in the company. The Observatory helped measure to

what extent this gap goes, and help think of a fair solution to that problem. When this paper was

released, the project of the Observatory had finished and the results shared with participants;

communication and recommendations to the Executive Committee haven’t yet been done. The

results as they were presented above as well as the raw data (anonymized) will be shared publicly to

all the company. The Observatory brought the intuition for the second project that we led: launching

new ways of learning for new ways of working (horizontal learning).

Part IV: New ways of learning for new ways of working,

testing peer-to-peer learning at work - “Digital & Local”

IV.A. PRESENTING THE DIGITAL & LOCAL PROJECT: WHY THINK OF NEW WAYS OF LEARNING?

IV.A.1. Why?

Six months before I joined, Guillaume Tardiveau pushed the initiative to launch a campaign of

adoption of the project management tool Rallyteam (Orange Fab Silicon Valley). Guillaume was very

enthusiastic about using this platform at Orange, which would allow teams to share projects and

work more effectively as a whole. The Rallyteam platform was accessible through Plazza, emails were

sent to communicate about the launch and employees were asked to use it and give feedback. It

turned out the adoption rate was very low and very few people took the time to test it. Employees

feel overwhelmed by the existing number of services and possibilities they have around them. They

already have so many tools that they are lost and don’t feel in control. Instead of introducing new

digital tools to improve team work, processes and communication, we understood that Orange had

to help employees understand their existing digital environment, use the knowledge they already

own and make it beneficial to everyone. We decided that most importantly, instead of launching a

new tool at Orange we should start by letting employees understand their current digital

environment, integrate existing tools and develop such knowledge as a group effort along with IMT

employees.

In the digital age, individuals spend less time developing deep relationships with those around them

and it is a threat for the company. The shared values, culture and engagement of employees to the

company’s mission and success are kept alive because individuals can form relationships based on

trust and get to know each other (Simon Sinek, TEDx video “First why then trust”, 2011). If this

network of social ties disappears, people lose track of their meaning at work and the only thing they

will soon end up sharing is the source of their income – i.e. their employer. Using digital technologies

48

to bring people together, we launched Digital & Local to develop social ties between employees of a

same location.

IV.A.2. How?

Digital & Local is a project allowing employees to gather and teach each other very hands-on tips on

how to use digital tools. In other words, using the existing knowledge of our employees will serve all

IMT employees as they are still not on the same page concerning digital technologies and using them

efficiently in their jobs or private lives. Many employees feel lost by using tools alone and don’t know

who to turn to and ask for help. We will adopt a bottoms-up approach, allowing employees to

choose the topics themselves of the practices they want to share.

The way the program was launched adopts an agile methodology, avoiding going through

bureaucratic processes to make sure the project is user centered and sees the light. The bigger and

more processed projects are at Orange, the more likely they end up not launching at all – e.g.

sociologists worked on a survey for two years to learn about the impact of digital technologies on

Orange employees work and lives but was never launched.

IV.A.3. What?

Digital & Local is a peer-to-peer learning program letting employees share good practices about

digital tools applied to specific situations. The workshops are very practical in order to allow people

to start using the tools on the go. There are on-site periodic physical reunions on all IMT locations.

Local employees eager to share their knowledge and help others will be able to present each at a

time and choose the topics (How to secure data on a shared cloud?) or tools (Plazza, Oneo, Twitter,

Trello, etc.). This will allow reunions to be focused on existing needs and actually solve difficulties

people can have when using digital technologies.

IV.B. WHAT IS PEER LEARNING?

IV.B.1. Affordances: tools don’t have set practices

Patrice Flichy in Understanding Technological Innovation: A Socio-Technical Approach (2008) shows

that historically, designers have thought about technological products only thinking about their

functionality and not about their actual use. In his book, he shows how design and use can be unified

to make product development user-centered and improve products utilization. He evokes the work

of social scientists since the 1980s who studied technology and how they were used. For the first

time in the 1980’s, they studied successful technological objects but also the attempts and failures

(objects that spent their life unused). As they wondered about the choice that was made when the

object was designed and what users then did with it, they introduced the idea of meaning in the

objects. As Flichy says, “some contemporary studies consider that the technical object is not only a

functional entity; it also conveys meaning”. Today, design includes users in the process to understand

the potential meaning of the object. Furthermore to Flichy, users make choices when using

technological objects which modify in fine their functionality. All the choices made by users when

using an object are shaping a better meaning of the object. These choices make representations of

objects evolve at the same time.

49

Gerald C. Kane talks about the same idea through the concept of “affordances” to refer to digital

technology tools. The concept means the “different possible actions that someone can take with an

object in a particular environment”. First, it means that implementing digital technologies doesn’t

make the company digital nor that they will be used by employees. There must be time and

resources invested to change processes and organizational structures so these technologies can

unleash their full potential. Second, there are many different “right” ways to use Digital Technologies

and usage changes with what people need them for. Third, some tools have “hidden affordances”,

i.e. possible actions enabled that are not yet know in advance. Sometimes, you have to start using a

tool without knowing how it could be useful to your specific case. Last, a company can determine its

own set of affordances: to Kane, digital technology creates new opportunities to work differently,

and working differently creates new opportunities to infuse technology into the work process.

Employees and management must start thinking about how these digital technologies are changing

the way they work in a general way, not just think in terms of what these technologies are doing.

IV.B.2. Marketing 3.0 or the value-centered marketing

Philip Kotler coined the term of “Marketing 3.0”, which represents the third wave of marketing

focusing on values and humans. This new kind of marketing is the consequence of customers now

caring about the general message of brands about their positive impact on the world. While

“Marketing 1.0” was product-centered and “Marketing 2.0” client-centered, “Marketing 3.0” is value-

centered towards customers as well as internally. To Kotler, it is a post 2007-2009 crisis and

consumers expectations as well as their practices have evolved (instead of possessing, they put

importance in usage, and collaborative consumption has been gaining momentum).

Orange employees are Orange customers as much as external customers. Orange has to satisfy them

and develop a strategy that can be associated with consumer marketing. Orange has to sell its values

to its employees and make them feel engaged and wanting to represent the brand. By telling its

employees that the strategic goal is to become “a digital and human employer”, Orange shows them

that the company is determined to understand their general needs and will be there to drive the

digital transformation by making sure digital technologies are useful for success and people are

comfortable using them. Hence, by allowing digital inclusion for all employees, Orange is building its

image as an important party for digital transformation and its role to reshape the world we live in.

Allowing employees to share practices and behaviors with their peers follows the trend of the

collaborative economy and creating a feel-good and proactive environment.

IV.B.3. Teaching vs learning: the untapped benefit of peer learning

Peer teaching or peer tutoring is defined by Boud, Cohen & Sampson (Chapter 1, Introduction:

Making the move to peer learning, in Peer Learning in Higher Education: Learning From & With Each

Other, 2002, https://web.stanford.edu/dept/CTL/Tomprof/postings/418.html) as a teaching activity

in schools where an advanced student (in later years) takes an instructional role over the other. It

usually requires a certain form of payment or reward for the student acting as a teacher, and this

practice is largely established in universities. If we do a parallel with the corporate world, peer

teaching as presented here doesn’t really exist in a corporate context but we can evoke the top-

50

down training organized by the company, employing a contractor or an expert to bring knowledge to

employees in a cold relationship.

(Reciprocal) peer learning evokes reciprocity between the parties involved in the learning process.

To Boud, Cohen & Sampson, it relates to the notions of mutual benefits, the sharing of knowledge,

ideas and experience between the parties. Students who are usually in the same class –which avoids

timetable problems – learn and contribute at the same time, and there is no payment involved.

Questions of power and domination are less present than in peer tutoring where a student is

designated “teacher” and wears a role of authority for the duration of the activity.

To them, peer learning usually happens informally as it is not dictated by schools’ staff. Effective

learners highly benefits from this practice when it’s left to chance but students who are not used to

this method feel confused, and they miss opportunities of learning together. Peer learning should

be formalized to help all students: “Formalized peer learning can help students learn effectively”

(Boud, Cohen & Sampson). “Reciprocal peer learning is often considered to be incidental-a

component of other more familiar strategies, such as the discussion group”. We can make a parallel

with the company where peer learning can catch people off guards when they are not accustomed to

it. Companies should formalize it and allow all employees to benefit from shared learning to

improve their knowledge process. To Boud, Cohen & Sampson, peer learning “gives (students)

considerably more practice than traditional teaching and learning methods in taking responsibility for

their own learning and, more generally, learning how to learn”.

They give the following definition of peer learning: “Students learning from and with each other in

both formal and informal ways”. To them, peer learning puts a stress on the learning process and

includes emotional support.

Who are the “peers” in peer learning? Who are called peer are people who do not have any

hierarchical power over one another; even if they have different levels of skillsets. They are both

“fellow learners” and accept it.

Peer-learning can refer to many different realities; researchers Griffiths, Housten & Lazenbatt (1995)

from the University of Ulster identified ten different models of peer learning (seminars, parrainage (a

buddy system) or counseling, private study groups, peer-assessment schemes,…). But apart from

these empirical examples, little research has been done on peer learning. Boud, Cohen & Sampson

assert that the teaching model is still the most common way of understanding how students assist

each other, rather than the learning model. This assertion can be extrapolated to corporate

employees: reciprocal peer learning usually happens by chance and hence is not perceived as a

phenomenon it itself.

To Noriko Hara in Communities of Practice : Fostering Peer-to-Peer Learning and Informal Knowledge

sharing in the Work Place (2009), traditional top-down training allows the learning of formal and

explicit knowledge but makes its application to context difficult. Peer learning is highly beneficial

because there is no formal knowledge passed on but rather contextual learning (and adapted to

digital technologies, cf “affordances” in IV.B.2.). Also, it allows the capturing of experiences and use

cases, and by reusing them it helps improve shared knowledge and corporate internal processes as

well.

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IV.C. INITIAL STRATEGY, FIRST INTERVIEWS AND LAUNCHING THE PROJECT

IV.C.1. Timeline and first interviews

We started pitching the Digital & Local project in order to raise interest and identify potential

contributors. We dived in the program specifics in February and asked ourselves following key

questions: Who will we contact? Who will be in charge of organizing the events? What formats and

topics do we want? What are the sites looking for and how to engage employees in the project? How

to make recurring events without having the same persons highly involved?

The planned strategy was to reach out to all IMT sites in France and abroad starting by employees

working in site management, communications or involved in communities mentoring - so well aware

of learning digital practices and leading workshops. Then we would define a list of 3-5 existing

initiatives and propose them to each location, to be launched locally. The first initiatives were

launched in June (New Delhi) and in July after the Observatory of digital practices otherwise

(Châtillon).

Exhibit 29: Timeline of Digital & Local

Three existing initiatives were the following: the “Etableurs” network present in a dozen of locations

(a mentoring community composed of volunteers), the “Open Cafés” in Sophia Antipolis (casual

meetings and discussions about specific questions) and the Plazzaiollo network (community focused

on fostering the use of Plazza). Being given the names of the project leaders, I was able to reach out

to them to implicate them in Digital & Local and start from there to get names of people to rally.

a) “Open Cafés” or “Cafés Agiles” are informal gatherings and were launched in order to answer a

situation of psychological and social risks among employees at Sophia Antipolis. It meant to form

study groups and discuss specific topics which needed special attention and teaching. Such format

was chosen by employees and consists in organizing monthly 30-minute coffee breaks to present

specific topics, chosen and presented by employees (e.g. presenting at the Salon de la Recherche,

organizing a trip with the CE, creating a Plazza community). The focus is mainly on digital challenges

that people may face. Participants regularly interact on a shared Plazza group and decide the next

topics. This format in very informal and free, and doesn’t require a big commitment for presenters.

However, it needs one person or two to entertain the network. They are present in Châtllon (Orange

Gardens)

b) The Plazzaiollo network is a community of contributors helping employees to better use the

internal social network Plazza. Plazza is far from being intuitive to use and many employees struggle

with it. Members organize learning sessions to talk about specific actions in Plazza.

c) The “Etableurs” network was created in 2014 through a HR initiative to launch reverse mentoring

in the company. The consulting firm Decide was hired to help launch these site-specific occurrences

52

and started at the Jobbe-Duval location in Paris. They would recruit motivated employees who would

give of their time in order to lead discussions about digital-related topics and help others. This

network spread to other sites and it is present on fifteen sites today. Gabrielle Stypak who was

leading the project on the part of the firm Decide eventually joined Orange and kept extending the

network from the inside. As of today, there are 900 Etableurs members.

IV.C.2. Presentation of the Etableurs network and how it is in tune with Digital & Local

When Digital & Local launched in 2016, we started discussions with the existing Etableurs network,

which organizes sessions for employees to learn about digital technologies. Their network is slightly

different from OLR objective but we partnered with them to join forces. The main differences

between the Etableurs and the OLR approach was that OLR wanted to research the characteristics

and spreading of peer-to-peer learning among the company but didn’t took care of the

implementation of Digital & Local – whereas the Etableurs are focused on spreading their network.

Our goal was only to create the impulsion for the sessions to launch. The Etableurs either organized

some sites implementation (Châtillon) or are present to assist local steering teams and help them in

doing so. The last difference was that the Etableurs’ scope of learning is originally broader than just

learning to use daily digital tools contextually, their learning include more technical learning like IoT,

security, etc. and as well corporate tools impulse by management and HR.

The Etableurs network was first created because employees struggle to use digital tools, and

adoption remains low (15% of Plazza users are strongly active) and trainings to learn to use them are

online (“learning to use Plazza on Plazza” is similar to learning Japanese in a Japanese handbook; it’s

complicated). The second reason was that some tools are not supported by the Orange Information

System but could very much benefit everyone; but employees don’t necessarily hear about them.

The third reason for creating this network was that being employees of a tech company, Orange

employees are expected to know the newest technology trends and such initiative is a good reason

for helping them stay on top of things.

The objectives of the Etableurs network were to recreate communities of people within Orange in a

context were work becomes more remote and less people work from offices. This network is meant

to recreate a sense of membership among employees of the same company and digital practices

could serve as an excuse to bring people together. The program also allows a digital culture to spread

in the company, in a friendly and benevolent environment to prevent people from feeling guilty of

not knowing how to use tools.

The network was created three years ago from the Direction of Human Resources because they are

responsible for launching the Digital Transformation at Orange. The name “Etableurs” refers to the

établi in French, a place for experiments, a fab lab. It was launched so far among support teams, to

test and learn. They still haven’t reached customer-facing teams as they haven’t figured out how to

manage the participation in the project while having a tight schedule and rush times.

They need volunteers in order to launch sessions about digital initiatives and tools. The network is

organized by building on a specific site, so any employee can go see an Etableur member and get

help. They count on a network effect: the more members they have, the easier it is for any employee

to get the help they need and for members to spend more time on their own projects. Etableurs are

53

mainly solicited concerning office tools and Plazza. People decide to join the network out of interest

and volunteer to help. They must have some time to offer but the format is free, they can choose the

amount of time they are ready to dedicate.

When they decide to launch the network on a new site: the request comes from an “équipe Outils”

which requires help on the ground. Given team – from the new site – trains the Etableurs members

on what they need, and the Etableurs members then deal with addressing employees. They create a

local network where Etableurs are spread in all the buildings. HR and site managers then get involved

in the program. Last, the Etableurs find local people to join the network themselves. Members of the

network contact people on sites and let them choose the format of the gathering if they are

interested in launching the community. Local employees must be the ones to choose the topics and

formats, but the Etableurs network proposes examples.

Orange sites where the Etableurs network was launched:

Topics of the workshops are internal and external social networks, Orange applications, Connected

objects, Hello Show innovations, employee’s workspace, external mobile applications, office

software. Passed workshops included presentations on: Excel (TCD, functions, basic concepts), Plazza,

Jive, Smartphone Android QR Code, Communicator, Mind mapping, Office shortcuts, Webmail, Cube

Essentials 2020.

The existing formats of workshops are as follows:

- “Trocs Astuces workshops” are monthly on-site workshops that last 1 hour (15 minutes of

theory and 45 minutes of practice) between 6 or 7 volunteers, and the topic is defined in

advance. Each participant is free to decide to present on the next session.

- Internal events: the Etableurs hold a spot at events organised by Orange like the “Cafés

Digitaux”, the Hello Show, the Digital encounters (“Rencontres digitales”).

- The remaining are punctual solicitations: internally, Etableurs can help employees on one-

on-one or participate in team meetings. Externally they participate in fairs.

The essence and objectives of Digital & Local are very similar to the ones of the Etableurs network

and we decided we would use their methodology to bring new Etableurs on-board, especially on IMT

site lacking peer-to-peer initiatives.

54

What are the main differences between the Etableurs network and Digital & Local? Digital & Local

exclusively focuses on the presentation of internal and external tools that exist in everyone’s daily

lives whereas the Etableurs network deals with a broader scope including tools like IoT or

Cybersecurity. Both projects focus on bringing a practical angle to workshops to let employees able

to use them right away. The second difference is that the Etableurs network is a HR initiative

whereas Digital & Local comes from a research entity. The reason why OLR launched is to be involved

with local employees and be in tune with them when launching future research experiments. Being a

research unit, the objective is to learn from this alternative horizontal way of learning. Hence, it

was decided that Digital & Local and the Etableurs network would work tightly together for French

IMT sites, launching an Etableurs network to the sites that want it and enrich existing initiatives for

the ones that prefer. International sites will choose between both initiatives. Digital & Local is not a

new idea to implement since the Etableurs network already exists, but as it is our duty to launch the

digital transformation at IMT, there are sites where this initiative still doesn’t exist.

IV.C.3. The conception variables

Guillaume and I brainstormed on the conception variables of the Digital & Local program: what

would a workshop look like? What could we propose to a site that doesn’t have any initiative and

would need help for the launch? How to engage employees in participating? What would they

benefit from? The two variables to think about an event are the content and the format.

The first variable is the content and what it allows to do: what should be presented during these

workshops; what would be the topics? We made a list of ten tools - internal and external - that

everyone should be interested in learning of (Plazza, Trello, Twitter, Oneo, WeKan, Orange Forge).

The second variable is the format: should it be a formal presentation of a tool, should there be two

employees giving their own experiences of the same tool, should it be a team competition on a broad

question, a presentation after a Direction Committee, an informal lunch break at the cafeteria, etc.

The conception variables became more specific along the interviews; talking to people from each site

helped understand their needs. The following tab sums up the different possibilities of

implementation:

Exhibit 30: Conception variables for Digital & Local sessions

By Topic Format

Internal External

Coopnet TrelloHow to use online available

information?

Use case and Q&A (presentation and

informal discussion)

Skype WeCanHow to find the people who have

the right skills for my project?Group challenge

Orange Forge Twitter How to Search for content? Lunch

Oneo Slack How to efficient organize my Coffee Break ("Open", "Agile")

Plazza Photoshop How to use Twitter in my work? Presentation at a Direction Committee

Mobile Survey Whatsapp How to successfully plan group SILabs

La Boîte NEP

100% Pratique

InfoDoc

Wikis

Sharepoint

By Tool

55

We also listed the different IMT sites and the number of IMT employees working in each one, and by

keeping the 23 sites with more than 35 employees, the list is as follows:

IMT Sites IMT employees

Chatillon 2485

Lannion 986

Cesson-Sevigne 813

Blagnac 375

Paris (Bonne Nouvelle) 343

Meylan 281

Paris (Archives) 277

Caen 267

Guyancourt 231

Tunis 155

Bagnolet 125

Bucharest 113

New Delhi 100

Cairo 100

Valbonne 91

Pessac 84

La Seyne-Sur-Mer 74

Puteaux 59

Belfort 57

Marseille 54

Brest 53

London 47

Beijing 38

Total 7208

Exhibit 31: List of all IMT sites with more than 35 employees

After identifying IMT sites and running fifty interviews, I was able to make a list of local contacts

thanks to Guillaume Tardiveau and Gabrielle Stypak recommendations and my Plazza searches.

These people are people involved in digital communities, interested in digital technologies and

sharing practices.

IV.C.4. Identifying local contributors

Along the interviews I undertook, I was able to identify future ambassadors that would be ready to

present on specific tools from the list. The details of potential ambassadors are as follows (list to be

completed along the next interviews):

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Exhibit 32: Identifying presenters for Digital & Local sessions

Last, after listing all the existing initiatives (see Appendix) that existed, I was able to categorize them

by types of programs:

National programs with special rooms that opened on each site (top down): Code Room,

Tiers Lieu.

Orange events organized in all sites and include demonstrations for digital tools: Journées

digitales et humaines.

Local bottoms-up communities to organize events by region: CAPs, Blagnac Découverte

Informal gatherings by site: Cafés Agiles, personal initiatives from certain individuals. In many

sites, some persons want to spread the use of a certain tool and are active to help. It usually

concerns Plazza and these people are identified by their peers as experts on specific topics

(for example people find them because they put their expertise on their Plazza profile).

Sessions around Plazza: Plazzaiollos, some sessions of the Etableurs network.

There are many sites where there are no official workshops nor animations

IV.C.5. Methodology of launching sessions and how to foster interest among employees

We identified a few important launching criterias. The first question is about the topics of sessions:

should a site decide themselves which tools they want to present or should they ask employees?

Some teams decided to start with a closed list of tools given the type of work they do, others

preferred to launch a survey to identify pain points. Some teams mixed the two, starting the first

sessions to test interest and then launching a survey. Some teams had specific requirements

concerning the topics, for instance presenting only internal tools (Lannion).

The second question was about presenters: how to lure volunteers and employees who will agree to

present sessions? Should a team make an open call or identify people themselves? It ended up being

Chatillon Paris (ODS) Lannion Blagnac Meylan Guyancourt

Local Project

Leader (if applies)

Marie Quesne

Catherine Anne-Vincent

Clotilde Coron,

Gabrielle Stypak

TrelloMeetup at the

Villa Occitane

WeCan Yes Pascal Boussemart

Twitter No

Whatsapp

Slack

Coopnet

Skype

LaBoîte NEP

laboite.si.francet

elecom.fr

Alexandra

Ciachia (team)

Orange Forge

Patrick Duclos

Montagne + 4

identifier people

Oneo YES

Plazza

Nelly Pann +

other people

identified Isabelle Coulon

Mobile Survey Yes

SILabs YES

PhotoShop YES

100% pratique André Sanciaume

Exploitation de

l'information

(infodoc,

InnovAtlas, wikis)

Jeanne Damay

How to search for

content

(challenge)

Jeanne Damay

Information

storing Jeanne Damay

57

a mix of the two solutions, sometimes employees were identified as experts or references for a tool

(they already helped people out) and we asked them to join. In some sites, when launching a survey

about the tools to present, they also asked employees if they would be ready to present (India,

Châtillon). Volunteers don’t have to be experts on a topic, they are just asked to explain the way they

personally use the tool and why it’s important for them. If some people however, need training, it

will be possible for the Etableurs team to train them beforehand. Fostering interest to push people to

volunteers is made possible thanks to the examples of other sites that we share: seeing the success

of other sessions can lure people to participate.

The next question was about the audience: should we address all employees from a site or should

we talk to managers first? The approach is intended to be bottoms-up so we went for a generalized

communications to all employees but we will probably present Digital & Local to managers

separately so they understand the objectives for the company and will be likely to let their

employees participate.

The last question was about steering the project locally: Who should be in charge of managing the

project on a site as it will be time-consuming? Gabrielle Stypak is the one to globally manage the

network of Etableurs for support functions, then the objective is to ensure a rotating leadership on

each site between presenters; each presenters would elect the next ones.

The intention of Digital & Local is to create local physical communities of people interested in

helping each other get a hand at digital technologies. After attending sessions, they will be more

likely to contact a participant again and ask them about what they understood about given tools, and

create more human interactions. All local communities are also part of a bigger online community,

represented by a Plazza group where information and insight from local sites can be shared. Hence,

each site can give advice to another for their implementation.

No formal reporting is asked from sessions as the creation of interest and success will come from a

recurring and growing participation of employees and if they find the sessions useful. We want the

sessions to be informal and please participants by recreating more social interactions with their

peers (as we saw in the Observatory that peers are the vectors of digital transformation).

Given the level of peer-to-peer echanges that already exist on each site, the implementation and

OLR support is likely to differ. First, when there are existing physical sessions like Café Agiles, OLR

and the Etalbeurs just bring support concerning new topics and tools, and bring the site to organize

more hands-on sessions (Meylan, Guyancourt). Second, where there are only individual initiatives,

we will count on these people to start gathering participants around and foster excitement (Lannion).

The Etableurs network is always there to help and give advice for the implementation. Third and last,

some sites decided or will decide to launch the Etableurs network (Châtillon, Bonne Nouvelle); a few

steering team members helped with the Etableurs will coordinate the launch as in Châtillon (see use

case).

IV.D. TWO USE CASES OF LAUNCH: ORANGE LABS INDIA AND CHÂTILLON

IV.D.1. Case of Orange Labs India

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The New Delhi office decided to ask employees what tools they would want to learn about instead of

referring to our defined list of tools. They have interactive weekly events called Sharing Friday during

which any employee can present something he likes to the rest of the team. Learning is mainly

focused on developers tools and as they don’t organize sessions on the adoption and use of digital

tools, they were interested in launching Digital & Local. The project started in March 2017.

IV.D.1.i. Entry survey to identify topics

They listed all the tools they use internally and launched a non-anonymous survey to all employees

asking them if they used such tools, with which frequency and if they wanted to learn about it. They

received a 69% answer-rate (84 answers out of 122) (see Appendix for further details). Being non-

anonymous, the survey allowed them to identify potential contributors who would be interested in

presenting the tools they rated as “known” or “frequently used”.

They analyzed the answers of the survey and found gaps in usage and level of formation necessary.

For five identified categories of tools – Administrative, Development, HR, Project Management and

Social – they were able to identify the relevance of tools (the tools’ level of usage in each category)

and if employees wanted to learn more about them:

Exhibit 33: Topics for future sessions of D&L across five categories in India (only four featured here)

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Exhibit 34: Relevance and interest of employees in India about Plazza (example)

They regrouped the tools in categories given the frequency of use:

Most frequently used tools: Plazza, Office books ordering, Intrapool (meetings), Outlook and

Calendar, Orange Forge.

Tools for which employees need to Learn more: they noticed employees want to learn more

concerning Orange Labs IT Desk (report desktop incidents, and the function of organizing

documents on Plazza.

Third category of tools they should use instead of existing ones

IV.D.3.ii. Launch of the first sessions

For the next four weeks, they organized weekly hourly sessions each Friday talking about a

tool/topic. People identified in the survey presented the tools they feel enthusiastic about and

shared their own practices. The organizing team decided they would choose the final format of

sessions depending on people’s feedback and the level of knowledge attendees had on a topic: if

they are beginners with a tool they might need a formal presentation first, but if they are frequent

users presenters would to need to share good practices in a more interactive way.

Each session lasts less than an hour at lunch time (12:30pm-1:30pm and 1:30pm-2:30pm), is very

casual and with no more than ten participants; the objective being that it doesn’t seem to be a

formal training session. Participants come with their laptop for a hands-on experience of the tool.

Each session has a predefined topic – which was defined thanks to the survey results – and the

organizing team made a schedule of future sessions to come with identified volunteers. With Digital

& Local, sessions can be on technical tools like development or project management tools, but also

on more casual tools. Last, topics will be organized given two levels of competence: beginners

sessions (to learn how to install and use the tool) and more advanced sessions (learn the tips about

the tool).

The first session organized was on May 26 and dealt with development tools (« BDD »). 25 persons

were present, it was open to all but mainly developers came. Participants were extremely interested

in using these frameworks. The employees working on this framework did the presentation and

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explained why they thought it was important to use it in their projects: there was first a formal

presentation, then Q/A and last a hands-on installation. The second session was on June 2nd and

dealt with Android applications testing tools and more diverse types of participants were present this

time.

Last, they plan on launching another survey to assess results, ask feedback from attendees to see if

the sessions are appreciated and what they could improve.

IV.D.2. Case of Châtillon

We launched the Digital & Local project in Châtillon around May 2017 with the participation of the

Etableurs team. Guillaume and I as part of Research created the impulse to start the project and

the Etableurs team was the one to implement.

First, there were a few meetings organized with core participants and contributors to agree on the

format it would take: Catherine-Anne Vincent, Marie Quesne, Jeanne Damay, Thomas Blanc,

Guillaume Tardiveau and myself. We planned three sessions to take place in May and June starting

with a few topics like Twitter and Slack. We identified some volunteers to present the tools and had a

small group of participants.

The first session on Slack was enriching as it made us realize we needed to first launch a survey to ask

employees about their level of mastery of the tool on top of what they wanted the sessions to be

about. As the Slack session was presented by a developer hence a very advanced user of Slack, the

majority of the room who had never used the tool didn’t understand it. It is important to have first a

beginners’ session, and then a more advanced targeted to developers to improve their use.

The case of Châtillon is very different from New Delhi: New Delhi is an international Orange Lab

composed of 122 employees which makes it casual and members to have more frequent

interactions. In Châtillon, the Orange Gardens’ site has 2,000 employees from teams that never met

each other – the site is two years old and was made to regroup different offices. As a results, people

at Châtillon are less receptive and proactive when it comes to participating I cross-functional events

and volunteering. We decided to adapt the sessions to the situation and presented the Digital &

Local sessions directly to team meetings and Directions’ Committees to foster interest. Guillaume

and Catherine-Anne presented the PowerPoint pluggin OAB Tools (allowing having Orange’s logos

and charts at hand) to the HR Direction Committee and it was a success. The first official sessions for

Digital & Local in Châtillon are already planned every two weeks starting in September 2017.

IV.E. CONCLUSION ON DIGITAL & LOCAL

One of the goals of Orange as a company is to accompany a majority of its employees into the

challenges of digitalization. Digital tools are being created every day and many employees feel lost in

such environment. Also, they are suddenly asked to change the way they work. Many of them feel

lost and the company is responsible for their “transformation”, i.e understanding their new

environment. Digital tools don’t have set practices but evolve given what one does with it

(affordances). Allthemore so, tools don’t have an instructions guide as typing machines did. Hence,

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learning to use a digital tool is always contextual and can come from peers. The formation provided

by Orange must adapt to such features.

The implementation of Digital & Local can differ from site to site given the number of staff and type

of job. In Orange Labs India - a hundred-people lab based in New Delhi composed mainly of young

developers – the specificity of Digital & Local implementation was to ask employees what tools they

wanted to learn about and build Digital & Local on an existing event, Sharing Friday. Digital & Local

only added up to this existing format and brought new topics as well as a more hands-on DIY

approach. In the case of Orange Gardens in Châtillon, the biggest site of IMT, no event similar to this

one existed but we benefited from the Etableurs who were starting to develop their network there

and we commonly decided to launch Digital & Local. The project started from scratch in Orange

Gardens which means we created a new event, but benefited from the experience of the Etableurs.

Through Digital & Local we wanted to research the reality and effectiveness of this new way of

learning, in a corporate environment. The project is currently unfolding with implementation

starting already on a few sites (New Delhi, Châtillon, Lannion, Guyancourt). On my scope of research,

the deliverable was to constitute the list of local contributors present on the 23 IMT sites, who are

eager to participate in cross-functional missions related to digitalization. They will be the vector of

change for the rest of deployment of Digital & Local and will be the chore of future similar projects

of animation and accompaniment. The existing Etableurs network which activity has been since

2012 to launch such events on Orange sites outside IMT, were part of the project and took care of

assisting local steering teams for implementation.

Accompanying the majority of employees towards a better general understanding of digital tools will

allow the reduction of a knowledge and practice gap, and foster better collaboration among

employees. To OLR, and as a research project, is interested in understanding the extent of such

new type of learning in the corporate world, in order to rethink knowledge management in its

whole. However, some employees are at ease with digital tools as they are the kinds of people who

are eager to test new applications. As a second category of employees, they also have their issue

which is to experience information overload. The third and last project we launched during this thesis

is a messaging aggregator tool built to regroup all communication streams to a unique platform and

help the user manage them smartly.

Part V: Helping the most digital-savvy employees to manage their

digital environment – developing a messages aggregator HubMe

V.A. INTRODUCTION: RESOLVING THE ISSUE OF INFO-OBESITY FOR THE MOST DIGITAL EMPLOYEES

After launching the observatory of digital practices, results of the study brought the intuition not only that the majority of employees prefer to learn through their peers but that the most digital ones are suffering from info-obesity. The most digital employees, in other words the ones at ease with new applications and tools, are surrounded by too much information for them to process and be efficient in their daily tasks. They have too much data at their fingertips starting with their communication streams and through the observatory, they called for a digital assistant able to help them filter information in order of importance.

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V.A.1.Tidy up this mess: why we need to organize our digital lives

Our digital environment has grown progressively because of siloed developments in the economy

and the rule of competition (“the winner takes it all”). But from a consumer perspective, our digital

environment is a mess. There are so many existing services - and sometimes dozen of the same ones

- that we don’t know what to use anymore. We start using a service or app through word-of-mouth

and because we believe it is reliable. Also, we have so many services at arm’s length that we forget

we had them already downloaded. How to integrate all these services and create a digital easy-to-

use and understandable ecosystem? Each person is using several services and apps regularly and

there is a need for integrating them together to help consumers manage them more easily. Digital

technologies are supposed to relieve individuals from daily repetitive tasks, not give them

headaches.

In order to make digital lives easier, we must give a meaning to our digital environment: create the

software architecture allowing anyone to stop thinking about how they should set up their apps but

actually start using them and gain time. We shouldn’t think our lives relatively to applications but

rather by task -have a “cross-app mindset”- and relatively to our most rare factor: time. The way we

could gain efficiency and lose the headache would be to understand our actions and configure our

digital environment to make it fit and actionable. For instance, I would be able to use Orange Cash

directly on the Orange internal social network Plazza to pay back a colleague whom I am discussing

with. Or, I would be able to order flowers automatically every time I have a friend’s dinner scheduled

in my calendar and be able to pick them up on my way.

We want to give power to people by allowing them to be the decision-makers by composing the

services they use daily. Today, software architectures – at Orange and outside – don’t allow

composing services together, in other words services can’t be embedded and used simultaneously.

We want to create a digital environment giving such freedom to people, letting them improve their

digital lives. The objective of the project is hence to create a modular software architecture

platform that will be an enabler for individuals to manage their digital space.

There are two types of users when tackling digital technologies: first beginner users are the ones

feeling overwhelmed as they don’t know how to use digital tools properly and feel lost very quickly.

They are the users that the Digital & Local project targeted. On the other hand, the advanced users

are digital-natives and tech-savvy individuals. They can feel overwhelmed too as they constantly

receive huge amounts of information. These two populations need help to be on top of their digital

lives, using different means. The project of composing services was created to help advanced users

and prevent them from getting information overload and be even more efficient in the way they

use digital services. Our first customers will be IMT employees themselves. We want to help Orange

employees be on top of their digital lives and launch the digital transformation for employees.

Second, as we test our product in-house it will serve external commercial purposes as well: selling

the project to Orange corporate clients. As a software company and launching a digital

transformation program, Orange wants to be a company driving change, not only with its own

internal development but also by being able to foster change around them.

V.A.2. Identified pain points and first brainstorming session

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During the year of my master’s, the short term objective of the service composition project was the development of HubMe, a service composition tool centered on messaging channels only (Outlook, Gmail, SMS, RSS, Messenger, Twitter, LinkedIn inboxes, Whatsapp, Cisco Spark, etc.) aimed at reducing information overload when it comes to reading and taking action on one’s communications. HubMe is the project that we launched and it focused on developing a communication channels aggregator. The project initially started when Laure Van Der Hauwaert, an Orange Business Services project

manager, identified pain points in her own user journey of managing communications streams. Every

day, she has to check each application one after the other; her personal emails, her professional

emails, SMS, Whatsapp threads, LinkedIn inboxes, etc. Sometimes, she’s dialoguing with the same

persons through different threads and it makes it harder to search for past conversations or content

as there is no grouped search engine: “I can’t find the message in which Tom gave me the

instructions about this project; I can’t remember if he sent it to me via email or if it was on our

team’s Whatsapp”. Also, she realized that she receives SMS from her nanny in the middle of

meetings and Messenger notifications about the planning of her holidays during work hours: she

receives them at an inconvenient moment because she can’t take action on them upon reception

and gets disturbed from her activity. She also would like to filter professional threads from personal

threads and select by recipient, conversation or key word: for example she would regroup as

“professional” her Outlook professional emails, a professional Whatsapp group and all incoming

communication from her boss Tom (SMS, Whatsapp and emails).

Laure then thought of a digital assistant that would manage her communication streams so she

wouldn’t get disturbed in the middle of her activities and filter messages given the time of day and

importance of messages. The project HubMe started with the identification of Laure’s pain points

and design of an aggregating platform. She then asked people around about their behaviors and own

pain points when it comes to dealing with communication streams to see if they had the same issues

as her. She eventually came up in January 2017, with the following drafts of a potential interface,

based on the modular design of the Salsa software previously developed for sales employees in

Orange’s stores:

Exhibit 35: HubMe's first draft

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Exhibit 36: HubMe's draft as a modular piece in the existing Salsa software

Guillaume randomly met with Laure at an Orange fair and this is how the HubMe team formed; by

realizing they had the same intentions of development. She presented her previous research by

showing her thought process described here, and we started to think of the interface design. We

brought the Salsa development team – project manager Nicolas Fournier and designer Aurore

Catteau - in the discussion as we decided it would have a modular design to allow any Orange team

to add it in their own projects. We organized a brainstorming session with Guillaume, Laure, Nicolas

and Aurore in January 2017 to determine the important features we wanted to have in the product.

We put the first features together (integrate messages in a unique stream, set up flows of messages

that are defined by rules – personal and professional, recipients, tags, etc.) and Aurore designed the

first desktop comp as followed.

Exhibit 37: HubMe's first desktop comp designed by Aurore Catteau (January 2017)

The HubMe product is not a technology innovation as the technology allowing aggregation already

exists. The challenge of crafting HubMe will be in the application design, in other words finding the

right and easy way to aggregate all one’s streams and allow them to gain time. Hence, conducting

several rounds of prototyping, testing and validation will be key to the success of the product. Fast

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iteration as used in the lean startup methodology will be extremely important to make HubMe

successful.

V.A.3. Developing the project hand in hand with Orange Business Services: “ingénierie

concourante”

The peculiarity of the HubMe project was that the entity in charge of selling products to corporate clients – Orange Business Services – was highly involved from the beginning. Many research projects implemented internally at Orange are usually done in siloes and struggle to access the market. It is an important challenge at Orange since all research projects are supposed to lead at some point to products that will be sold. To Charue-Duboc in her article “Le pilotage des processus d’innovation amont” (2017, I3-CRG CNRS), it is key for a company that the creation of technological knowledge and the exploration of the use value (or “R&D-market coupling”) are developed closely together.

V.B. STARTING THE PROJECT

V.B.1. Forming a product team and gathering information

The team that was formed was as follows: Nicolas Fournier was the project manager for the Salsa

platform (BIZZ entity) - it was launched for physical store employees – and is helping design HubMe’s

comp and Minimum Viable Product. The Salsa platform was developed using a modular design and

letting store employees set up and access the information they needed about their customers. The

designer Aurore Catteau from Nicolas Fournier’s team worked on the design of Salsa and is designing

the HubMe app on the same basis. Laure Van Der Hauwaert is a product manager from Orange

Business Services and working on unified communication tools. She is the project’s business owner.

Her objective is to sell the software to corporate clients. Laure is the business owner, in other words

she establishes priorities, manages the timeline and objectives, owns the vision of the project and

has the final say concerning the design. Mickael André is the scrum master, and will lead the relation

with the development team. He helped set up the timeline for the software development, set up the

project management tools and leading the implementation of the consecutive sprints. The

development team is composed of four developers including scrum master Mickael. They come from

Orange Labs Egypt and work under the constraint of two-week sprints. They report each day to

Mickael André via daily scrums which allow them to share feedback and reorient the development if

needed. This method used is the scrum method, representing the agile or “lean startup” method

applied to software development. Last, the UX Designer Nadine Katz from XDLab is helping for the

development and giving her feedback regularly concerning the product’s experience. My role in this

project is to help with the marketing and communication materials and official presentations in

corporate fairs, but I mainly have the role of an observer in order to understand the implementation

of the project as a research topic.

After the team was formed, I started reaching out to different teams at Orange that could be related

to service composition, in order to understand their activity and bring knowledge to the HubMe

project:

- Aymeric Castelain, XDLab: Focus Groups and Users Testing. Works at Center of employees

testing (Meylan), they get feedbacks from clients on innovation projects. They have people

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responsible for quantitative and qualitative survey in his team and we could work with them

if needed: see how many people use multiple messaging apps regularly (they would be

potential users). Says we should organize focus groups to test our comp (Lara Koudim and

Emmanuelle Boyer) and do experimentation with employees on the field to ponder the

results of focus groups (help of Aymeric to find clients and classify feedbacks).

- Philippe Moreaux, API Factory: his team, Odyssée is reshaping the organization, business

models. 2 existing platforms at Orange: Orange Partners for external use of API (now

accessible internally), or SSI platform for internal use

- Laure Jouffre and Bertrand Mignot, API Factory: Orange Developer Inside (platform)

- François Rall, VPN Gallery: understand business model

- Arnaud Ganaye: developing an Orange dialler application

- Joseph Messina: Orange Modular Design (platform created bottoms-up)

V.B.2. Timeline

The project of service composition – not yet focused on HubMe but in a more general vision of

composing digital services - was presented by Guillaume and accepted by the Executive Committee

(Marie-Noëlle Jégo-Laveissière) in November 2016, along with the five other projects of

digitalization. Between October and November 2016, Guillaume and I reached out to colleagues and

presented the project in order to find a product team. We eventually found Laure (OBS), Nicolas and

Aurore (BIZZ) and started the project together.

To launch HubMe, we did a competitive analysis of similar tools existing on the market around

December 2016 (market push). We looked at existing business models and where we could

potentially fit in, what would be our value proposition (selling consulting sessions on the

development of specific service composition structures).

Then we came up with our own idea of how the product should be (January 2017). We did a few

brainstorming sessions to choose which applications we should include (Outlook, Gmail, RSS, SMS,

Twitter, etc.) and the general view of the tool. The brainstorming sessions led to defining a list of

features that the messaging aggregator tool should have in a Minimum Viable Product. The

brainstorming session ended in letting Aurore design the first comp.

In parallel to the design of the first comp, as we presented the project to XDLab designers they

strongly recommended we got customers feedback first to make sure the product was answering a

need. We wanted to organize the Observation step of the Design Thinking process to make sure to

understand customers perfectly. We would have had to observe employees every time they use their

devices, look at their online activity and follow their every move. We knew this practice wouldn’t

have been accepted by employees because it is intrusive so we decided to launch an online survey

instead. We launched the survey (January 2017) and received 1,000 answers at IMT (March 2017).

The survey results comforted the creation of our product as customers expressed the need for such a

tool. However, they reacted against having a mixed thread of professional and personal messages,

which we thought to be a need. We continued designing the comp and the first version was ready in

January, 30th. Then, Aurore worked on designing a smartphone version of the comp which was ready

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in April 2017. We started the development of the app in April 2017 thanks to the team of developers

working from Cairo and the scrum master Mickael working from France.

The first presentation of the concept was at the Mobile Business Unit presented by Laure and myself,

hoping to raise their interest as internal clients. We showed the mobile comp and how the MVP

would look like. They didn’t seem to be interested as of this day and we hope to continue the

discussion with them as the product evolves.

The next product pitch and real formal presentation was on June 13 and 14 at the Credit Agricole

corporate fair. We presented HubMe at a stand in front of corporate clients, using a mobile comp

specifically designed for the occasion and using Credit Agricole’s colors. I worked on the marketing

pitch with Laure. The feedback we received was very positive and people seemed extremely

interested in having such a tool. The majority were in favor of mixing professional and personal

streams so in order to stay consistent with our initial survey, we decided that we wouldn’t explicitly

talk about mixing them but the option would be possible. Some employees from Credit Agricole

expressed special interest and the company will be a potential beta tester in the fall 2017.

Exhibit 38: HubMe's timeline

V.C. USING THE LEAN STARTUP METHODOLOGY IN A BIG COMPANY

V.C.1. Launching an intrapreneurship project and avoiding the V-Cycle type of development

The way HubMe was thought and launched from the beginning is interesting because of its process. It represents an intrapreneurship and agile project in a company that historically has been very heavy with procedures and waiting to have the perfect product to launch it years after. First, HubMe’s approach is different when it comes to form a project team and working together (no procedures and discussion with HR). Second, it follows an agile methodology for software development – scrum method - and abandons the traditional “V cycle” of development. Traditionally, project development followed a “V Cycle” which last between six and eighteen months. These cycles were too long and weren’t following users’ needs on a regular and fast-iteration basis as by the time the product arrived to customers, they already had changing needs.

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Exhibit 39: The traditional V-Cycle type of development for software

Simultaneously at Orange today, the whole software infrastructure is being reshaped –led by top management - with a program called Odyssée: the objective is to make the software infrastructure modular company-wide so each new development can reuse the existing (breaking the silos with leadership to attain digital mastery, see Part 1). The Odyssée project will take years and important questions are being tackled such as: What team will pay for software development if it becomes modular and shared? How to make internal contracting evolve to this new digital challenge? HubMe is not linked to the Odyssée project in any way but is happening in parallel. It is important to highlight the difference of methodology of these two projects. HubMe is intended to be an intrapreneurship and “lean startup” experience, starting small and with a few people and iterating fast. We wanted to prevent the project from being blocked by HR considerations because of politics and bureaucracy. We have decided to stay on the IMT scope on purpose, staying small and local, and not pretending to reshape the company by ourselves and doing someone else’s job, as well as being redundant with the Odyssée project.

The product team formed in January and by Mid-May 2017, we had the comp for our MVP and were

finishing our first sprint of development. Since the success of the product will come from a good UX

design, we asked some advice to XDLab designers, Pierre-Olivier Dubois and Xavier Roubaud. The

objective was to know fast if our design needed to evolve and try to bring them into the project as

designers. Indeed, iterating fast is key to reducing the risk rate of our product and being sure we

answer an actual need. With the Minimum Viable Product being designed, we formed a bunch of

hypotheses about the value creation of our product, and will test them by asking potential customers

about their users and needs. Validating and invalidating hypotheses is called “customer

development” (Blank, HBR 2003) and is a key component to the Lean Start-up methodology (Ries).

To XDLab designers, choosing the product architecture early on will help go fast on the development

side: do we want an application (OS or Android or both) or a native version? The development and

the required resources will change depending on this choice. The team decided to go for an Android

and iOS app, and a desktop version.

V.C.2. The Lean Startup methodology (E. Ries)

Initially, the Lean Startup method developed by Eric Ries was conceived for fast-growing tech

companies, but it can be used for more traditional ones. It can also be used by big corporations

because they need to continually innovate as well: they need to keep inventing new business models,

which requires entirely new organizational structures and skills.

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Traditionally, to Harvard Business School scholar Shikhar Ghosh, 75% of startups fail. But as Steve

Blank explains in Why the Lean Startup Changes Everything (HBR, 2013), a recent force has emerged

after the dot-com crisis which reduces the risk rate of a start-up creation: it’s the methodology called

“Lean Start-up”. It favors experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition

and iterative design over traditional “big design up front” development. Some of the concepts of

Lean Start-up are the “Minimum Viable Product” – the minimum set of features that will make the

first version of the product. These features will be tested with potential customers to validate or

invalidate them - and “pivoting” – changing the core of the product because user testing invalidated

some hypotheses of the minimum viable product. The impact of the Lean Startup method is still

being tested but the practice has spread widely to startups and universities. Companies that have

embraced the principles of failing fast and continually learning have much higher success rate.

Traditionally, a start-up prepares a static business plan including a five-year forecast for income,

profits and cash-flows. But many of them realize that customers don’t want most of their features

when they put the product out. Blank highlights three important learnings: first, business plans rarely

survive first contact with customers. Second, the five-year cash-flow forecast is fiction; no one can

predict all of the unknown. Third, starts-ups are looking for a business model whereas companies

execute a business model; they do not unfold according to a master plan. They continually learn from

customers. As a result, a “lean” definition of a startup is “a temporary organization designed to

search for a repeatable and scalable business model”.

To Blank in Why the Lean Startup Changes Everything (HBR, 2013), the three key principles of “Lean

Startup” are as follows:

The first one is the Business Model Canvas by Osterwalder & Pineur in Business Model Generation: A

Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers (2010). Instead of engaging in months of

planning and writing a business plan which never reflects the reality of the project, entrepreneurs

must write down a series of untested hypotheses about the value creation of their project and

summarize them in the Business Model Canvas. To Osterwalder & Pineur, there are nine building

blocks that define a product: customer segments (the single or various customers that the company

serves), value propositions (the problems that the company solves for the customers), channels (of

communication, distribution and sales through which the value propositions are delivered to the

customers), customer relationships (which are established and maintained with each customer

segment), the revenue streams (which result from the successful offer of value propositions to

customers), key resources and activities (the assets required to deliver the previously described

elements by performing various key activities), key partnerships (that are the outsourced activities

and acquired resources) and the cost structure (the elements result in the cost structure).

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Exhibit 40: The business model canvas (Osterwalder & Pineur)

Here is Osterwalder’s example of Nespresso that Blank uses in his HBR article:

Exhibit 41: The Business Model Canvas illustrated with the example of Nespresso (Osterwalder, 2010)

The second principle is called “Customer Development” by Blank: Entrepreneurs must “get out of

the building” to test their hypotheses with customers. They have to ask potential users, purchasers,

partners for feedback, the most important factor being nimbleness and speed. They can then revise

their assumptions if needed and make new hypotheses to test.

Exhibit 42: The steps of the "customer development" concept (Blank, HBR)

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Entrepreneurs look for a working business model during this phase. If customer feedback reveals that

some hypotheses are wrong, then you change you “pivot” to new hypotheses and test it again. Once

a model is proved, the startup starts executing, building an organization.

The third and last principle used by lean startups is called “agile development”: it originated in the

software development and consists in short cycles of development allowing developing a product

iteratively and incrementally. It’s the process by which startups create a Minimum Viable Product

that they test. It is in opposition with the V-Cycle traditional yearlong development.

Exhibit 43: The Lean Startup successive cycles of iterations (Blank)

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Exhibit 44: The benefits of an agile development compared to a traditional long one (Ries, Lean Startup)

Robert D. Austin in his article Unleashing Creativity With Digital Technology (MIT Sloan Management

Review, Fall 2016) explains it used to be very expensive to iterate on a product, but it has become

very cheap since the appearance of digital technologies and software. To him, iteration allows

creativity to be unleashed: “processes often become more creative when rapid iteration is

affordable”.

Indeed, and to Blank as well, new technologies have set entrepreneurs free from the following five

existing constraints: a) the high cost of getting the first customer and getting the product wrong, b)

the long technology development cycles, c) the limited number of people with an appetite for risk

(Lean Startup helps reducing the three first constraints), d) the structure of the venture-capital

industry (it is centralized and only big funds invest in an area. Today, the access to financing is

decentralized, early-stage investments are made possible by small funds, accelerators are created,

crowdsourcing, etc.), and last, e) the concentration of real expertise – today, there is access to too

much information and startup advice thanks to the spreading of information with digital

technologies.

After attending Blank’s class, Eric Ries published the book Lean Startup conceptualizing such

methodology, which is a combination of customer development and agile practices. He provides the

scientific approach to creating and managing startups and getting a desired product into the

consumers’ hands faster. A startup – or a team of intrapreneurs – shouldn’t develop a product

behind closed doors and driven by intuition. Many times, teams work on a product for months or

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years and discover after a long period of time that it doesn’t satisfy consumers’ needs. “Using the

Lean Startup approach, companies can create order not chaos by providing tools to test a vision

continuously”. He observed for example that the Toyota Production System was a “lean

manufacturing”.

To Ries, entrepreneurs must enter a “build-measure-learn feedback loop”: the first step is to figure

out what the problem needs to be solved is and the team develops a Minimum Viable Product to

begin the process of learning fast. Then, once the MVP is built, the company tunes the product and

they are able to learn from it. Through this learning phase, they must have clear metrics that will help

demonstrate direct cause and effects questions.

Exhibit 45: The "Build-Measure-Learn" feadback loop of Lean Startup methodology (Ries, Lean Startup)

V.C.3. Agile methodology for software development: using the scrum method

V.C.3.i. Definition

My research project deals with project management and uses an agile software development

method known as Scrum. The goal is to define three or four two-week sprints in order to finish the

first version of a Minimum Viable Product.

Takeuchi & Nonaka first introduced the concept of Scrum in their article The New New Product

Development Game (Harvard Business Review, 1986) defining organization members who use

specific characteristics in managing their new product development processes: “built-in instability”,

“self-organizing project teams”, overlapping development phases”, “multilearning”, “subtle control”,

“organizational transfer of learning”. Nonaka in The Knowledge-Creating Company (2008) defines

Scrum as a form of “organizational knowledge creation, [...] especially good at bringing about

innovation continuously, incrementally and spirally". They define the scrum method as a way to add

speed and flexibility to a commercial product development, getting inspiration from use cases in the

automotive and printer industries. They also called it the “holistic approach” or “rugby approach” as

the process is performed by a cross-functional team that "tries to go the distance as a unit, passing

the ball back and forth” (in rugby football, a scrum is used to restart play, as the forwards of each

team interlock with their heads down and attempt to gain possession of the ball).

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In the early 1990s, Ken Schwaber used in his company what would become “scrum” while Jeff

Sutherland developed a similar approach at Easel Corporation, referring to it as “scrum”. In 1995,

Schwaber and Sutherland presented a paper together describing the scrum methodology at the

Business Object Design and Implementation Workshop in Austin, Texas. Over the following years,

they continued their collaboration using this material and their evolving experience to develop what

would become the known Scrum method. In 2001, Schwaber & Beedle described the method in their

book Agile Software Development with Scrum (2001) as a method that brings decision-making

authority to the planning and managing of product development. In 2002, Schwaber and others

founded the Scrum Alliance and set up the certified scrum accreditation series. Schwaber then left

the Scrum Alliance in late 2009 to found Scrum.org which oversees a parallel professional

scrum accreditation series.

The methodology was created with the intention of coming up with better ways of developing

software. The essence of Scrum is to satisfy customers’ needs through early and continuous delivery

of potentially shippable product increments. Scrum is an iterative and incremental agile software

development framework for managing product development. The dual key principle of Scrum is that

customers will change their minds on what they want or need (“requirement volatility”) and there

will be unpredictable challenges - for which a predictive or planned approach is not suited. Hence,

Scrum adopts an evidence-based empirical approach, accepting that the problem can’t be fully

understood or defined upfront, and allowing responding to emerging requirements and adapting to

evolving technologies and changes in market conditions.

The first sprint’s goals need to be achieved in order to go through the following one. According to

Paul Allen in Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (2015), when having a big

project that requires many hours of dedication, one must divide the work into small and achievable

tasks, and then plan deadlines for each tasks. Following development regularly allows the team to

know exactly where they are at and possibly re-prioritize work if needed.

The values of Scrum are that individuals and interactions win over process and tools, working

software wins over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration wins over contract

negotiation, and responding to change wins over following a plan.

IV.C.3.ii. A Scrum process

The process is based on iterative cycles called sprints which typically last between two and four

weeks during which the product is designed, coded and tested. The business sets the priorities and

the team organizes themselves to determine the best way to deliver the highest priority features.

The product owner represents the business side and is responsible for maintaining the list of product

features and sets priorities for development. Anyone in the team can add items in the product

backlog (list of features to implement in development) but the product owner has the authority to

choose the features and set the priorities. Every two-four weeks, customers can see real working

software and decide to release it as-is or continue to enhance it for another sprint. In HubMe, Laure

is the product owner. The scrum master is a facilitator for the development team, he removes

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barriers, guides the product owner, improves the productivity of the team and engineering practices,

he reports the team’s progress to all parties, and he makes sure the team is insulated from the

product owner. HubMe’s scrum master is Mickael. The development team is usually made of eight or

ten members, they are a mix of software engineers, architects, programmers, analysts, QA experts,

testers, UI designers, etc. They self- organize to meet the sprint goals.

Sprint planning meetings happen at the beginning of each sprint so the team and the product owner

can set sprint goals and determine which product backlog items to commit for the next sprint. They

break the backlog items into tasking and estimate the time for each of them, units of work being

usually between four and sixteen hours. Scrum meetings are fifteen-minute daily meetings for each

team member to answer three questions: 1)”What have I done since the last Scrum meeting? (i.e.

yesterday)”, 2)”What will I do before the next Scrum meeting? (i.e. today)” and 3)”What prevents me

from performing my work as efficiently as possible?”.

The product backlog refinement is an ongoing process of reviewing the product backlog items and

checking that they are appropriately prioritized and prepared to make them clear and executable for

the teams once they enter sprints. This activity may include further breaking down of backlog items,

clarifying acceptance criteria, obtaining clarifications on client needs, identifying issues etc.

A sprint review meeting is conducted at the end of a sprint cycle to review the work that was

completed and the planned work that was not completed, and to present the completed work to the

stakeholders (through a demo).

The sprint retrospective is moment where two questions are raised: What went well during the

Sprint? What could be improved in the next sprint? This is the final activity in the sprint process and

is facilitated by the scrum master to reflect on the past sprint, discuss and record the lessons learned

during the sprint cycle and make continuous process improvements.

The sprint velocity is a metric used to measure the total effort a team is capable of in a sprint. The

number is derived by evaluating the work (typically in user story points) completed from the last

sprint’s backlog items. It helps determining work the team can do in future sprints.

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Exhibit 46: The Scrum process

In order to organize work within the development team and make the follow-ups understandable by

the rest of the team, Scrum Master Mickael organized work using management tools. Mickael and

the product team defined the product backlog for every sprint using the tool Taiga:

Exhibit 47: Product backlog on the tool Taiga

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Exhibit 48: Managing timeline on FeatureMap (macro view)

V.D. DEEP DIVE IN THE PROJECT

V.D.1. Using design thinking to identify users' needs

From its beginning, the goal of HubMe was to start small and iterate fast. I knew we had to use the Design Thinking methodology in order to create a product that would be user-centered and answer an actual need: Tim Brown shaped the Design Thinking strategy to conceive innovative products using designers’ skills and being, for once, consumer-centered. The most important factor in the process is to feel empathy and put yourself in the consumer’s shoes. Understand the way he or she lives in order to understand how you can make his or her life a little better with your product. Tim Brown explains his methodology as a three stage path: first “Inspire” (empathize with consumers, see how they live), then “Ideate” (brainstorming session, open up the discussion and conceptualization) and last “Implement” (then think a product and iterate through multiple cheap experimentations). Iterating on the product will enable to identify “lead users” (Urban & Von Hippel, 1988, MIT), in other words the consumers that will be the first ones to use your product ad be enthusiastic about it: they will be the first ones to test it, give feedback and help improve it. Also, they will be the ones to inspire other consumers to join. Design Thinking is a user-centered creative design methodology made of three steps. The first one is “Inspire”: it’s key to understanding users, see the way they live, what their problems are in their daily lives and formulate insights about their needs. These insights must me authentic (supported by the data), non-obvious (not something you would immediately think of) and revealing (describing how users think or feel). This first phase is the longest because understanding users is most important. The second phase is “Ideate” meaning generating ideas. Once we have formulated an insight about our users’ needs, we go back to the abstract and formulate as many ideas as possible that would bring a solution to the defined need. This second phase must be judgment-free to allow creativity to unleash. Only after a short ideation period can we decide to keep a few of the ideas generated for the third phase. The third and last phase is “Implement”: Using the few ideas that were generated during ideation, we can prototype fast in a very frugal way. Using elementary products (paper, scissors, tape, or basic and cheap tools) make it easy to create a first prototype and test the main features with users.

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Keeping the prototype cheap and small allows testing basic features of our product without spending much time and money. It’s key to iterate fast in order to learn as much as possible on the product we want to develop.

Exhibit 49: The three stages of Design Thinking (Ideo)

Concerning our project, we first came up with the idea of service composition software. Then, we decided to focus our work on creating an aggregating tool for messages as an MVP. But how to know that such a product answers real customers’ needs if we don’t ask them? According to the phase of observation of Design Thinking, we launched a survey among IMT employees to ask them if they would want a product like HubMe. In order to thoroughly follow the Design Thinking method, we would have needed to follow employees in their daily routines and watch them to see if they suffered from information overload. Like the first project of the Observatory, we would have faced reluctance so we launched a survey instead. We worked alongside designers from XDLab to ask employees what they thought. Even if this method is not quite Design Thinking, we still managed to put potential users in the loop of creation instead of taking action on our own visions of the product. Overall, the answers were positive so comforted us into building HubMe. However, an important feedback was that people were very much against mixing professional and personal streams: we will focus on explaining that the tool is useful in a professional context, but the software will still allow users to set up personal streams.

Exhibit 50: Employees survey launched by XDLab

This survey was launched in parallel with the development of the first web-based comp by Aurore. Luckily the results of the survey were in tune with the initial idea we had of the platform; hadn’t it been the case we would have adapted the comp to incorporate users’ feedback.

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V.D.2. Product description: platform, comp, demo

In order to check unread messages today, one has to view many different apps in parallel (Outlook,

Gmail, SMS, Messenger, Twitter, Whatsapp, Snapchat, Slack, etc.). It takes time, it is not an efficient

way to look at unread and potentially urgent messages, and one is not able to do cross-platform

searches.

“I am a very busy and solicited person so every day I have to check my messages on Outlook for

work, then on Gmail for my personal projects, and last read my Whatsapp messages on Whatsapp,

my Facebook ones on Messenger, etc. Every day, I have to click on each of these apps and it’s tiring

to have all your messages scattered like that”.

“I was looking for some information about healthy food recipes Christina sent me last month but I

couldn’t find them because I wasn’t able to remember from which interface she sent them; whether

if it was via Gmail, Messenger, Whatsapp or Skype. I was searching through my Gmail account when I

remembered she had sent them via SMS.” There is a need for an aggregated search tool bar.

“When I am in a work meeting during the day, I keep receiving messages from my fitness club and it

pollutes my emails and smartphone. I don’t want to receive such emails when I’m at work”. Why

couldn’t we set up messages given the time of day and only let work-related conversations and news

appear?

V.D.2.i. The solution

HubMe is the platform allowing one to check all their unread messages directly from a unique

interface, and helps them gain time. They can also make cross-platform searches (e.g. searching for a

recipient, tags, or dates) and create rules for filtering what messages they receive and when.

V.D.2.ii. How does it work?

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Step 1: The user chooses his existing accounts he wants to connect to HubMe:

Exhibit 51: Connecting accounts on HubMe

Step 2: The user defines the flows he wants to have and creates rules to define them. For instance,

he can create a “professional” flow aggregating his Outlook professional emails and SMS from his

boss. Another example is to create a flow by project; the “Meeting your needs project” flow will

aggregate all emails, Whatsapp messages and SMS in relation with the Meeting your Needs project.

Through the definition of these flows, the user is able to create the context of reception. He can

decide to create only work-related flows, only personal flows, or both in order to set up his messages

into a comprehensive general stream. Last, he can schedule the reception of given flow in order to

not be polluted by messages that don’t concern the task or environment he is in at a certain period

of the day: he can set up personal messages to pop up only outside of work hours (after 6pm or at

lunch time) and professional ones not to pop up on nights and weekends.

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Exhibit 52: Creating rules on HubMe

Exhibit 53: Examples of message streams on HubMe

Step 3: The user can access his calendar on the app, which was synchronized with his Outlook or

Google calendar.

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Exhibit 54: One's timeline on HubMe

Step 4: The user is notified on the homepage about the number of unread messages he has and by

flow. He can also see the next meeting he planned and the details of the meeting.

Exhibit 55: HubMe's homepage

V.D.3. Present and future MVP characteristics and first client feedback

A minimum viable product is “minimum” in terms of characteristics. It is a product designed with a

few important characteristics only, and its goal is to be tested with potential clients to verify each of

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the defined characteristics as reliable hypotheses. Hence, each characteristic is a hypothesis that

needs to be validated or invalidated through customer development.

The characteristics of the minimum viable product launching in 2017 are as follows: the HubMe

platform is multi-channel, in other words it will allow users to regroup all their communication

streams into a unique platform. Second, HubMe lets users create communication flows, i.e.

customize groups of messages given the way they want to get notified. They can customize a flow

adding filters (recipient, tags or channels). There is a single sign-on authentication that makes the

application safer. It also allows the user to manage when they can or can’t be reached given the date

and time (availability). They are able to prioritize certain types of messages (e.g. if it’s a message

from your boss it is more important and urgent to receive it). Notifications are configurable in order

to receive them during the timeslot dedicated to a given flow. Graphics will be consistent in the

entire application while keeping the specificity of each platform. Combined searches will be possible

and help users find a specific content through all their communication channels. Last, HubMe will

allow social interactions like sharing, liking or commenting a message.

Concerning the future characteristics of the product to test, there will be Artificial Intelligence

introduced –maybe through the use of a bot - to help tag and classify new messages, as well as

organize messages and actions given the free time one has in its calendar. By allowing the reading of

one’s schedule, it will propose taking action contextually. Last, it will detect important messages and

put them on top of the list a high priority.

By pitching the product at the Credit Agricole “24H techno” fair, we were able to gather important

client feedback which was that the majority of interrogated people felt interested about such a

product to help them solve their communication overload. There were a majority to think that

aggregating professional and private communication streams was a great ideas; one even said “I only

have one life” meaning that he want to had all his communications at the same place. The second

important feedback was that in order to bring the product and deploy it within a company, there will

be the need to deploy it on-premices for data safety questions.

Exhibit 56: Validated, to-be validated and future hypotheses for HubMe's MVP

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V.D.4. Competition

HubMe has a multi channels feature like the existing applications Franz and Front. Like Front and

Cisco Spark it is also multi devices, allowing users to seamlessly continue their experience on the

application while switching devices. However, HubMe is a tool for individual performance while Front

gives access to collective performance – for a team. Hence, HubMe doesn’t have any direct

competitor on the individual performance segment.

Conclusion

I conducted this master thesis on the digitalization of internal processes at Orange, IMT, as part of a

research domain from Orange Labs Research. What we learned from the Observatory of digital

practices was that employees act very differently for a same type of behavior (payments,

collaboration, team work, openness, learning, etc.) if the context is professional or personal. Some

people are very digital-savvy at home for example concerning collaboration, using project

management tools and high end digital platforms, whereas when they are at work, they only

communicate through emails. Conversely, some employees have basic behaviors at home – they only

use the call button on their phone for instance - but have very developed practices at work as they

might feel it as an obligation for their company. The survey also showed the attractiveness of

employees to learn and gain digital knowledge directly from their peers instead of from the company

as a corporation. Last, we learned that digital-savvy employees suffer from information overload and

asked for a digital assistant to help them manage their digital environment. The survey hence

brought the intuition for the next two projects.

The first goal of digitalization is to accompany the majority of employees into transforming the way

they work, and reduce the gap of digital knowledge that exist among employees, and which is a

hindrance for collaboration. The “Digital & Local” peer-to-peer learning program was launch to attain

that goal and develop peer learning give the feedback given by the survey. We organized in-person

regular meeting with employees from a same location to reunite them and help them learn in a

hands-on way how to use a digital tool. There are no formal teachers but only employees who

present each session based on a rotation. It allows all employees to benefit from the existing

knowledge at Orange and recreate a social interaction with their colleagues. For this thesis, I was

able to gather a list of contributors from the 23 IMT sites, whom are passionate about digital

transformation and willing to have an impact on the evolution work.

The second goal of digitalization and materialized by our third project is to accompany the most

digital employees as well and help them reduce the information overload they are suffering from. To

do so, we developed the digital tool HubMe aimed at integrating all messaging platforms in a unique

interface and help gain time and attention. It will integrate artificial intelligence in future versions in

order to let users have their communication streams and tasks smartly managed, and take action

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efficiently. A beta version of the software is being released in September 2017 and will be tested

with partner companies and Orange entities.

Observing employees’ practices when it comes to using digital technologies allowed us to propose a

way to bring digitalization of work on an individual level. It is by implicating each individual into

changing their daily routine through a bottoms-up approach, that work processes will be able to

evolve. Each employee as individuals have their ways of working and using digital tools, that fits

them, and they have an opinion about how collaboration and management ought to adapt. All in all,

technology is absolutely instrumental to bringing simplicity to a digital environment that has become

intrusive –using AI – but human interactions are as important for a company; it is the cement for

keeping a strong company culture, fostering creativity, synergies and knowledge creation.

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Appendix

OBSERVATORY OF DIGITAL PRACTICES APPENDIX (PART III)

A. Gathering existing data to build the survey

While looking for existing reports, data and other resources, I was also looking for employees to

bring on board. Here is a list of some of the materials and interviews I was able to gather:

- Questionnaire Bilan Annuel des TIC 2012 (Fabienne Gire, Denis Algalarrondo)

- Survey concerning internal social networks (2010, Fabienne Gire)

- O’Zone and the question of information overload

- Alexandra Bordalis (MNJL cabinet director) interview

- Surveys from the Plazza team (Sylvain Hudelot)

- Questionnaire methodology from Caroline Dubois (sociologist)

- Presentation of the Conseil de Domaine

- Vim Vacula – Knowledge Management, Plazza Playground (group) for testing

Trying to regroup existing resources ended up difficult as reports and data are scattered among the

different teams and entities that developed them. I realized at this moment that one can easily

launch a project that has already been done before him. Hence, being transparent internally and

allowing employees to be aware of undertook projects and the persons that launched them, is key,

and it at least one clear goal of an internal social network.

During this process, I also had a few discussions with sociologists from IMT in order to get advice on

how to conduct a survey: what method to use for quantitative (closed) and qualitative questions

(open questions), getting employees’ profiles to measure the representability of the sample, how

many employees to interview, etc.

Among the list of the gathered resources, there was a project developed by sociologists in 2012 in

order to build an annual report on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) at Orange

(“Baromètre Annuel des Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication”). It was meant to be

an annual report based on an online survey sent to all Orange employees, asking them about their

use of technologies at work. This report seemed very close to the observatory we wanted to launch

and we first wanted to build it based on this survey. However, it turned out that after working for

two years on such report, the project wasn’t accepted by HR and it was a victim of red tape: the

survey was never launched. One reason was that it targeted all employees from the group and

political matters can easily kill a project in the egg. Launching an HR survey from the research entity

to all 160,000 Orange employees might have seemed touchy. This is why we decided to focus only on

IMT employees for our Observatory of digital practices to prevent such administrative issues. Would

Orange Labs Research be an entity fit to ask all employees about their practices? Is it more

appropriate if HR did it? The question is pertinent; however we decided to narrow the scope of the

survey and keep the project an observation that will serve future research topics. It was the moment

when I started drafting a questionnaire of our own, focused on the perceptions of employees of their

own practices.

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B. Version 1 of the survey focused on Plazza and testing the questions with the first

interviewees

After a few weeks dedicated to finding existing resources about the use of Plazza and other digital

technologies in the company and then writing a first draft for the questionnaire, I started the

interviews. The objective was to test a first draft of the survey centered on Plazza by interviewing

employees on the phone or in person. The questions were open-ended to detain all relevant

information related to a given question.

The first draft contained twenty questions. I interviewed employees chosen randomly on Plazza, and

received open-ended answers. I then tagged the answers by topic in order to identify recurrent

answers and turn the questions into closed questions to make the analysis easier. This is the method

that the CiviTech startup Liegey Muller Pons with whom we ended up working used (detailed further

in the paper). At this point, we were thinking about sending the survey online to all employees at IMT

so it explains why I was trying to close the questions.

Here is the first draft of the survey before conducting the first interviews:

3. Usage Q1. Are you a Plazza user? Yes / No IF NO AT Q1 Q2. What are the reasons preventing you from using Plazza?

a) Never heard of Plazza b) I know Plazza but I don’t see its benefit c) I couldn’t sign up d) Other: Comment

Q3. If answered at Q2: Does a tool like an enterprise social network make sense to you to do the work required at Orange? (Y/N) Q4. If answered yes at Q3: What changes would have to occure on Plazza that would make you use it? IF YES AT Q1 Q5. How frequently do you log in Plazza?

a) Less than once a month b) Multiple times a month c) Multiple times a week d) Once a day e) More than once a day

Q5.2. What do you use Plazza for? What are your main usages of Plazza?

4. Individual feelings

Q6. Are you satisfied of the way Plazza answers your given practices evoked in Q5? Q7. Which of your needs are not met by current available tools on Plazza? Q8. Are you in favor of the existence of Plazza? Of a growing use of Plazza for communicating with colleagues at work? Q9. Do you consider yourself a Plazza active user? Q10. Being yes or no at Q9: What are the reasons? Q11. Do you post content on Plazza? Y/N Q12. What type of content? Q13. Are you satisfied by the results you obtain? Justify Q14. What are the 3 most important things on Plazza to you? Q15. What are the 3 things that need to get better on Plazza to you? Q16. Would you say you are more (position oneself in a qualitative way on a category of usage):

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a) Against digital b) Not really aware c) Interested by digital developments and changes d) Digital

5. Learning

Q17. How do you find Plazza’s usage?

a) Easy b) A bit difficult but once you know it’s simple c) Complicated

Comments: Q18. How did you learn to use Plazza?

a) By myself, instinctively b) Asking my colleagues c) Thanks to online classes d) My manager trained me

Q16. Sociology: Your age, genre, area of work, manager or not, and if yes managing how many people.

Then I interviewed employees chosen randomly on Plazza and each interview last an hour, either on

the phone or in person. They were qualitative interviews because I was able to write their whole

answers. These interviews helped identify the questions that weren’t clear enough and allowed me

to start noticing patterns in the way people answered.

C. LMP methodology

The first big change in the questionnaire modified by LMP was that instead of trying to close the

questions, LMP opened them on purpose as much as possible in order to get comments from

interviewees. Since the beginning, I worked on capturing recurrent answers to propose a closed

questions survey. LMP actually used the same method for the analysis that comes after the interview

(tagging answers to identify topics, explained further). The second big change was that they easily

helped to express the questions of the matrix of practices using another matrix of answers (see next

exhibit).

We organized live sessions to explain the process to the 50 ambassadors (interviewers) and LMP

gave instructions while presenting the questions. Interviews happened in person for about thirty

minutes each. Each ambassador had to interview ten IMT employees from their own site in five

weeks. The interview had to be a casual discussion between two colleagues so the interviewee would

not feel stressed to answer personal questions. The objective was to capture open questions in order

to get the sentiment of the interviewee. The interviewer hence used an app or web page to write

down the answers during the interview. The interviewer was asked not to judge answers as it is

individuals’ perception that counted here.

DIGITAL & LOCAL APPENDIX (PART IV)

A. Contacting local contacts to participate in Digital & Local

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I conducted about fifty interviews with IMT employees scattered on IMT sites and who were

potential contributors to Digital & Local. The objective of the project as not to be redundant with

existing and similar initiatives, and not to impose any top-down decision on how the meetings should

be. Instead, as we want each site to start their own animations and in an informal manner without

having to report to us. Also, I asked which animations already existed and who are the best people to

talk to – i.e. the persons already entertaining such networks or workshops, and motivated in such

initiatives. Last, how we could be of help for them to launch a local initiative on digital tools and their

practices in work situations.

Here are some questions I asked:

What do you think about a peer-to-peer digital learning?

Do you have similar initiatives already organized on your site? If yes, what are they and who

is in charge?

Who would be good ambassadors for tools you would want to put forward and present?

Are you interested in us sharing information about organized events that took place in other

sites? Similarly, would you like us to post the content of your events?

The types of answers I would get would be overhaul positive. They would tell me the on-site

initiatives they know of, express their interest in our project when the case or redirect me to the

right people. In the end, I talked to 70 people across all 23 IMT sites and got 50 of them interested in

becoming contributors of the project. Here is the list of existing interactive initiatives that I was able

to gather thanks to my interviews:

Etableurs (Blagnac)

Plazzaiollos network

Café Agiles (Lannion)

Code Room (Guyancourt, Meylan, Pessac)

Learning sessions for new hires (New Delhi)

Entreprises digitales (Lannion)

Tiers Lieu (Lannion, Meylan)

Animations de la Direction Ouest OF (Lannion)

Les trente Minutes pour Tout Savoir (Guyancourt)

Les CAP, dont Orange SQY (Guyancourt)

Ateliers Plazza (Lannion)

Journées Digitales et Humaines (Lannion)

UX Room (Meylan)

Moments informels de partage (Meylan)

Atelier de scribing avec XDLab (Meylan)

Capitole (Blagnac)

Blagnac Découverte

B. Case of Orange Labs India (details)

Orange Labs India launched a survey to employees to ask them about their uses of internal digital

tools, asking four questions:

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The original timeline of the project was the following:

During our first call with Maher Djelassi (president of Orange Labs India) and Emilia Nicolae, the

project was supposed to last six weeks: a week to launch the first survey, four weekly sessions, and

an exit survey to ask participants’ feedback. The timeline was very tight and the project took longer,

but sessions still continue as of the publication date of this paper. The analysis of the entry survey

was longer and richer than expected.

After organizing the first two sessions, here are the next topics they agreed upon:

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HUBME APPENDIX (PART V)

A. Marketing 4.0 or the data-based predictive marketing that will allow curated modular

development

Philip Kotler evokes a newer kind of marketing that he calls “Marketing 4.0”. He defines it as the

continuation of “Marketing 3.0” but with a bigger digital dimension, appearing in an environment

where people are always connected. “Marketing 4.0 represents the automation practices that rely on

a systematic exploitation of big amounts of data” explains Frederic Cavazza. “Its goal is not to sell a

product (1.0), no engage clients (2.0) or to expose values (3.0), it is to optimize the brand

performances and anticipate consumers’ needs”.

The development of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning in digital technologies are allowing

the tools to predict what the consumer wants before it has expressed it. Developing an integrated

modular platform to allow any individual to shape the digital environment that he or she envisions

will be based on AI and predictive analytics. Because we will be able to analyze the data produced by

a user of the platform, we will be able to bring him the right information when he needs it – without

him needing to search for it – and it be the era during which marketing will be precisely adapted to

individual needs. Data-based predictive marketing is the objective of all technology companies today;

to be able to bring the right information or product to a specific person when he needs it.

B. Details of sprints (examples)

Sprint 1 Review / May 24th Stories:

- Application structure : done 8 points - Connector - Twitter connector : done (some extended studies will be done for unread

messages, etc.) 8 points - Splash Screen : done 8 points - Channel part - see the list of channels : done 11 points (3+8) - Orange social API : done 3 points - Investigate other API : not finished (put into product backlog)

Velocity = 38 pts

SPRINT 2 Planning / May 24th: Here are priorities: Stories:

- Back-end server (mediation server): ? pts - GUI internationalization: 3 pts - Connector - Exchange connector: 8 pts - Flow part - see the list of flows: 10 pts - Investigate in other API: 2 pts

Sebastien/Ahmed/Mahmoud/Ahmed: tell us if this content is ok for you or too big (depending on back-end estimation)

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For estimation, please separate back-end implementation and server deployment (I will try to find someone to create V.M. under OpenWatt/Kermit/DevWatt). Review/ June 8th: Stories:

1. Connector - Twitter connector : done (end of previous story : unread messages, etc.) 8 points

2. GUI internationalization: done 3 points 3. Flow part - see the list of flows : done 10 points 4. Splash Screen : done 1 point 5. Connector - Exchange connector : almost done (need to be integrated on a backend server

and customized on mobile App UI) 8 points Velocity = 21 pts (29 if we count Exchange connector)

SPRINT 3 Planning / June 8th: Here are priorities, this content is available into “sprint 3 taskboard” under Taiga tool: Stories:

1. Back-end server (mediation server): ? pts //Ahmed is working on the backend part with our Orange expert to find the suitable frontend , backend architecture if any for the app , expected response on the next week

2. Connector - Exchange connector: ? pts (need to be re-estimate for integration part with back-end and mobile App UI) //ahmed is working on the backend part with our Orange expert to find the suitable frontend , backend architecture if any for the app , expected response on the next week

3. Connector - Twitter (activities feed): ? pts (new technical story about Twitter, see description in Taiga tool) this story is added because we have a doubt on Twitter messages fetched for the moment … are they fetched from activities feed of end-user, or they represent end-user posts ?

// what do you mean by this post , Do you mean user Tweets or Activities on the tweets . OR Connector – Plazza: ? pts (only if above story is not needed, story in replacement ) drag

and drop it into backlog otherwise 4. Channel part - add a new channel: ? pts 5. Investigate in API with Spring boot: ? pts (technical story suggested by Sébastien) //Ahmed

is working on the backend part with our Orange expert to find the suitable frontend , backend architecture if any for the app , expected response on the next week

LITERATURE ON MANAGERS’ TRAINING

A. A digital-first mindset fosters a positive attitude towards digital

To Soule, Puram, Westerman & Bonnet in Becoming a Digital Organization: The Journey to Digital

Dexterity (2016), managers attitudes and beliefs evolve positively with Digital Dexterity stages. In

the early stages of the Digital Journey, managers often feel their digital abilities are weak and they

feel uncertain. Then, the more a company becomes digital and gets a higher level of Digital Dexterity, the

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stronger the Digital-First Mindset becomes and digital is less perceived as a threat. Last, as the level of

Digital Dexterity develops (as well as employees’ digital skills), strong positive feeling of being in-control

of digital technologies emerges: they view digital as a source of opportunity rather than risk.

B. Today’s digital transformation is about changes in management

Companies have to adapt to the introduction of digital technologies in the workplace. They are not

new since companies have already introduced hardware - like computers, smartphones, 3D printers,

etc. – and software to create seamless processes - VPNs allowing remote work, automated reporting

and expenses processes, data analysis, etc. But as these technologies evolve rapidly, behaviors and

mentalities haven’t really. What is very special in today’s Digital Transformation are the changes in

management, mindsets and collaboration that we ought to foster. It is the “leadership” capability

that Soule, Puram, Westerman & Bonnet call for in Becoming a Digital Organization: The Journey to

Digital Dexterity (2016).

C. Changes to happen in managers roles

Because of a changing work environment, some authors evoke the way Managers’ roles are bound to

be disrupted.

Lynda Gratton in the article Rethinking the Manager’s Role (2016) says that technology won’t make

management obsolete, but managers will need to be more skilled and especially in 4 areas.

First, the Manager’s role as a work coordinator is questioned by the growth of machine learning and

automated routine tasks, and its role becomes unclear. Second, as technology allows information to

travel freely, the relationship between a manager and his employee will shift from a parent-to-child

to an adult-to-adult relationship. Managers don’t hold the valuable information anymore in the

company and technology empowers employees (360 feedback, self-assessing tools, peer reviews and

feedback, crowd-sourcing, etc.). Third, why learn from a manager when peer-to-peer feedback gives

you access to the best learning and coaching experience? Power is shifting from a vertical to a

horizontal form. Last, platform-based businesses are allowing the creation of many new types of

businesses (like Uber) and are fostering a more flexible way of working.

But it won’t be the end of management, it is just changing because of technology; managers of the

future will be required to be more skilled individuals. To the individuals interviewed by Lynda

Gratton for her study, “future risks factors” of introducing digital technologies at work, will be the

following: How to manage a virtual team, manage a multigenerational group in regards to differences

in technological use, and how to support rapid knowledge flows across business units. These risk

factors are all about management, but complex forms of it: manage virtually instead of face to face,

manage when the group is heterogeneous, and manage when most of the knowledge flows are

across groups instead of within. These roles are highly skilled and here are the managing skills that

will be augmented by technology in the future: managerial capabilities (build a rapid trust, coach,

empathize, inspire) and management practices (team formation, objective setting, conflict

resolution).

On her side, Monideepa Tarafdar points out 3 other skills that managers will need to have. First,

learn to partner with “digital colleagues”, i.e. algorithms that help managing a range of tasks in the

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company. Managers will need to provide context for the decisions and recommendations of their

digital partners by monitoring those decisions and recalibrating them. Decisions can’t still be taken by

algorithms.

Second, managers must start cultivating a “mindful” relationship with technology, since it now

enables a continuity of meaningful tasks being work or non-work related. They will have to support

employees in managing the possibilities of flexibility brought by technology and the disappearances

of the boundary between work and home; and push them to be flexible in the way that works for

them. It is becoming harder to separate work from non-work and instead of seeing it as a conflict, it

must be considered as flexibility. Instead of talking about “conflict”, “technology detox” or “digital

dark side”, we should talk about “flexibility”, “flow-driven use”, “digital mindfulness”.

If all authors agree to say that the boundary between work and nonwork is shaken up by the

increasing use of technology in our daily lives, to Sonnentag, Binnewies & Mojza (2008), remaining

connected with work during personal time reduces the opportunity for psychological detachment,

relaxation and recovery. Also, to Mazmanian, Orlikowski & Yates (2013), it leads to a norm of

constant connectivity which reduces the sense of autonomy.

Last to Monideepa Tarafdar, managers will need to develop empathy concerning the digital choices

of their human colleagues (sending emails at night or at work, constant connectivity against allotted

email time, etc.). Since different preferences can create misunderstanding and stress, managers will

need to clear communicate about their own preferences but also well understand the ones of their

team members. They need to stay flexible and thoughtful. In the long run, it might be possible to

form teams according to members’ digital preferences (multitasking, constant connectivity or not,

etc.).

It seems that developing these managerial new skills will be possible with the development of a

Digital-First Mindset (Soule, Puram, Westerman & McAfee), which is the condition for managers to

thinking positively about digital.

Lynda Gratton in The End of the Middle Manager (HBR Review, Jan-Feb 2011 Issue) states that

technology has changed the way people work and the job of the middle manager (with basic

management skills) will disappear. In a way, we are going back to the pre-Industrial Revolution era

when the high skilled people (craftsmen) had power (instead of the division of work in factories).

Technology has become a great manager as it can monitor performance, give feedback, organize

workloads, etc. Gen Y doesn’t want a manager to organize their time or workload; they want a

mentor and a coach, someone to train them and who they look up to. Gratton’s advice for managers

are first, to build valuable and rare competencies, and second develop skills in an area of business

that will be successful in the future (social and micro entrepreneurship, life and health sciences,

creativity and innovation, coaching…).

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