Hack:
Enterprise apps library
By Magdalena Pawlowicz Magdalena Pawlowicz - Several roles: Making people excel, partner, innovator, do-er, listener, at Several: GL Consulting, www.trendsales.fi, Social Viper, collaborating with Ethos tech on their enterprise collaboration platform
September 21, 2010 at 11:52pm
Moonshots
Summary
Most of data repositories in enterprises today is not accessible in any practical matter to people in an organization. In addition to this, comes information from external sources. There is an information overload. Employees are asking themselves, how am I to prioritize my e.g. customer information across different tools? Tools and IT- systems are not connected, as companies experiment with new grassroots E 2.0 systems. In future, there will be Enterprise apps libraries, where enterprises can download or re-use from cloud already pre-connected applications-platforms to solve specific business problems. This will be possible as business processes practices will no longer be locked inside the IT applications and cloud infrastructure will become identical.
Problem
In general, people do not like to learn about new tools, just for the sake of a new tool. In Enterprises, they want the tools to be helpful and easy up the work that needs to be done. As there will be one UI for the employee, she will no longer have to work on various systems or tools. She will have a dashboard in which she has access to all tools and technologies without knowing what they are. She will know that she has access to all the information about her customers in only one place, as systems will have built in relations, so that all information relevant to one particular customer will be on the customer wall (both structured and non structured information). Even the information might come to her.
Everybody will have access to the information they need. As all systems and information are connected, there will be full transparency and each person can see how much she or he is contributing to the goals and the performance of the company. Reward and recognition and feedback will be transparent and should increase engagement and motivation.
New applications will be easy to connect onto existing systems as there are pre-built connectors. And these new applications might be used for a period to solve an emergent business problem or for a longer period of time. IT will therefore be working closer with business side. The company is no longer dependent on IT system upgrades, but can decide to borrow or buy it from the apps library.
Solution
well, as the Enterprise apps library will be available for all Enterprises, each enterprise has to determine if they need to change their organizational structure e.g. IT being embedded into the business (e.g. by business process or practice), and IT will join and integrate with the business community rather than being a stand alone department.
Businesses will have the possibility to create communities, or teams or projects to solve a business problem rather than create fixed hierarchies. So we will see more agile organizations as they no longer have to be dictated by IT systems on how to carry out their work.
Practical Impact
People would work virtually, would be engaged as there is transparency. Work would be easier as information is accessible and has not to be looked and searched for. Expertise is available when needed. Tacit knowledge becomes less tacit, and people work more like architects than firemen. They might even become so motivated that they get to the next level, meaning start to innovate and propose new ideas as the company culture changes.
First Steps
Step 0: Reasoning for change? Allocate budget and resources to make initial definition, time frame, communication etc
Step 1: Readiness and capability assessment - is our culture, people, leadership, IT etc ready for this, can we afford to wait if our competitors have it, and what about our customers, if they require us to have it?
Step 2: What would we like to achieve with the Enterprise apps library? What is our motivation? What is our peoples motivation? Workshops, pools, interactive and collaborative discussions, hearings etc
Step 3: What are the gaps between what we want and what we actually can do? gas analysis and how we can mitigate the gaps
Step 4: Where do we start? Match it to the goal, and strategy and where we will get the biggest benefits and how we ensure everybody is with us(not necessarily quantitative but also qualitative)
Step 5: First small show case, use to create engagement.
Credits
The Enterprise apps library and business angel to the Idea is mine, which I shared with a technology partner, Olav Nedrelid from Ethos Technologies, who had been thinking along the same lines but more from a technology point of view. So he has added the IT feasibility to the idea. Since then he and his team and I on the side have been working to develop the first mini connected Enterprise apps on top of Microsoft. It includes now social computing and business solution for Talent Management, Innovation Management, easy CRM and business alignment.
We hope that one day it will be sold in or borrowed from an Enterprise apps library.
Videos
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