Story:
The Enterprise Social Network: Driving Innovation by addressing the Unexpected
Addressing unexpected business challenges often requires identification and mobilization of relevant participants — this can be the major bottleneck to rapid problem resolution and innovation. Two factors make this important: first, different parts of the organization must be represented to ensure that the resolution and innovation is consistent with broader firm interests; second, employees want to connect with other people who are knowledgeable and can be helpful in resolving difficult and unfamiliar problems in order to create high-value innovations. A connecting disposition causes a person to reach out and share information with others who can help them get better faster. Increasingly, these likely participants reside across enterprise boundaries among partners in extended business processes.
The Company has become a modern, highly flexible and international business. For the constant innovation in the travel market and the changes in organizational structures both externally and internally a high level of customer focus and flexibility is key task for our management and employees.
Cloud computing provides flexible access to the resources needed to address the unexpected
Enterprise Social Networks provide easy access to sophisticated tools and highly flexible IT resources for the people on the edges of the enterprise who are confronted with unexpected business challenges. These unexpected business challenges are far more prolific on the boundary of enterprises. They require workers to respond quickly and to pursue a number of solutions, often without any certainty about outcomes or time for extensive planning. The people encountering these challenges often are not in a position to get the central IT organization to support their efforts. With cloud technology and mobile, they don't have to wait for approval by a central IT organization — they can quickly ramp up alternatives and pursue parallel solutions. Because access to tools and resources doesn't require major investments or time-consuming implementations, cloud technology and mobile encourages improvisation, experimentation, and tinkering in Enterprise Social Networks — within and across enterprise boundaries.
Enterprise Social Network – Functionalities:
Building participation by enabling management networks across the organization to drive organizational agility
•Empower people with a personal branding page
•Expand the scope of employee autonomy
•Enhance knowledge/trust about one another in local and cross-boundary peer-groups
•Enable collaboration on ideas and projects for solving unexpected business challenges
•Connect people across functions and build an organization of participation.
•Build communities of practice and interest in Strategy, Innovation, Customer and Fulfillment
•Achieve Fast-cycle teamwork for linking strategy to execution as core of organizational agility
•Taking work out of the work •
By significantly reducing barriers to experimentation, these capabilities help foster a questing disposition among employees on the edge. They don't have to invest a lot of time and resources to address these business challenges and they can get a significant payoff from their efforts. This helps to increase the motivation not only to address these challenges when they arise, but also to begin to actively seek out similar challenges as opportunities to test themselves and drive their performance to new levels.
Timline:
Central Set-Up: Create a Central Network Office for System Administration ,Content Creation and Roll-out Management
Country-specific Projects:
Step 1: Create Social Directory by Profiling all central/local Employees and Partner (2 months)
Step 2: Assign Roles for Employees and Partner and Coaching of Business Approaches (Apps) (3 months)
Step 3: Link Role of the Employee/Partner with the adequate Business Activity Space (1 months)
IT-Integration: The Networked Organization (ongoing)
This type of orientation toward the unexpected not only causes stress (because these challenges come up every day) but also fails to derive any possible benefit or satisfaction from the experience, for the individual or for the business. Opportunities for growth and learning are lost, inefficiency remains, and another inconvenient challenge will probably pop up tomorrow.
A questing disposition, in contrast, reacts with excitement at the opportunity to confront something new that will test the capabilities of the worker and provide a catalyst for reaching new levels of performance. Dispositions develop over a series of accumulated experiences. A worker who is inspired to solve problems but repeatedly runs up against an inflexible, hard-wired IT system that cannot be readily bent to the needs of an experimental response is likely to lose enthusiasm for tackling difficult challenges. Workers are much more likely to maintain or develop a questing disposition if they have tools an proven business approaches to effectively respond to unexpected challenges.
- Integrate all Employees & Partner in one place
- Platform to achieve sustained high performance
- Connect Co-Managers for Strategy & Operations
MANAGING EXCEPTIONS:
- Unite people with information and proven business approaches
- Keep everyone on the same page
- Create a corporate memory
TAKING WORK OUT OF WORK:
Two-thirds of headcount time in major enterprise functions is spent on exception handling.
The Enterprise Social Networks captures this opportunity by:
- Be productive immediately
- Work the way you want
- Move from collaboration to action
- Give structure to discussions
- Create a collective view with embedded business tools
- Make the best decisions by ensuring your group works from the same information
- Reduce e-mail
PROVEN BUSINESS APPROCHES: The Management 2.0 Apps are based upon proven methods of major consulting companies like McKinsey & Co. or leading business schools like MIT-Sloan and combining them with Google Apps™ capability to make world's information universally useful.
COMPLETE SET OF MANAGEMENT APPS IN ONE PLACE: Business view, Market Strategy, Scorecards, Portfolio, Innovation, Product Launch, Supply Chaining, Sourcing, Key Account, Customer, Campaign, Opportunity, Competitors,Pricing, Diagnostic, Quality, Performance, Restructuring
DATA SECURITY FOR TravelFirst: Structure the Rights of every manager to do certain things with his management links solves the security, control and compliance issues
UNLOCK INITIATIVE,CREATIVITY,PASSION: Sharing Strategies, Innovations, Opportunities etc enables self-sufficient operations and greater business impact of managers
The only way to accelerate and sustain usage of the Enterprise Social Network Platform at TravelFirst is to target implementations against very specific operating performance levers. This will help managers to see how social software directly impacts the traditional performance metrics that they care about. This will be a more effective, and ultimately more valuable, approach than trying to measure a financial ROI for social software implementations. Calculating a financial ROI requires too many assumptions, and it distracts from a more explicit focus on the key operating metrics that drive line managers.
Once FirstTravel has embarked on implementation, measuring the improvement in specific operating metrics and looking for opportunities to tell and re-tell the stories of workers who became more productive through the use of these tools made the connection to the Enterprise Social Software more tangible for others in the organization. That, more than mandating adoption or fine-tuning an ROI calculation, has the potential to drive sustained, rich and productive use of the Enterprise Social Network .
Enterprise Social Networks puts employees first and amplifies passion
Employees of TravelFirst more likely to view unexpected challenges as positive opportunities for learning or problem solving (questing disposition) if they feel they can quickly and easily reach out to find people who can help them in their quest. People are more likely to have a desire to connect to others for insight and skills (connecting disposition) if they are repeatedly engaged in addressing difficult challenges that they have not seen before. As the Social and Mobile technologies amplify both dispositions, we expect that they will help to catalyze passion among workers. Passion represents a sustained commitment to a specific domain where the intent is to make a difference by continually seeking out new challenges and connecting with others to more rapidly find creative ways to address these challenges. The combination of questing and connecting dispositions among workers helps to establish a foundation for extreme performance improvement.
TravelFirst users are convinced y of the potential of Enterprise Social Networks, they believe that the real value is in their combined power of Social and Mobile to ignite and unleash the human potential in the firm. Ultimately, the convergence of social software , cloud computing and mobile may support a more productive orientation to the constant disruption and unexpected change of the business environment. These technologies provide the tools and platforms to extend and deepen questing and connecting dispositions among workers, and in the process, fuel greater passion among the workforce. This indeed will be a key factor in driving sustained extreme performance improvement of TravelFirst.
Thanks so much for sharing Paul - my passion is "organizational agility" (you will see that common thread in mys postings: http://www.managementexchange.com/users/bjkc2ecn4k) and pre-adatively expecting and managing the unexpected. So I read your posting with great interest. Thanks so much. Best.
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Interesting and informative.
I feel better informed & inspired to delve deeper.
Thankyou
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