LinkedIn across the Extended Flat-World Enterprise!
“What if we had LinkedIn within the enterprise?” – asked the CIO of a large CPG company. Three different Fortune 500 company CIOs in the past two weeks have approached my team for help in the area of employee productivity, internal communications, company-wide collaboration,etc…. Coincidence? Lets look at similarities in these companies. These are large, high growth, successful companies who continue to add employees by the thousands every year, in different parts of the globe, organically and through acquisitions….The nature of their business (Retail / CPG) is such that the employees are operating in distributed locations. All three companies are known to be very employee-friendly.
So why did these companies simultaneously have the same problem to solve? Why the CIO?
As we engaged these companies further, it became clear that these companies were adapting to a new flat world where successful teams had to necessarily be in far-flung geographical locations, in different time zones, in different business units, and sometimes: in different companies itself! Team-members needed to find other team-members with specific skillsets and collaborate. They needed to see the pictures of those team-members so that the personal touch in those interactions remains intact. They need to arm the project teams with collaboration tools. They need to communicate key messages from corporate headquarters to different divisions and individuals effectively.
In summary : they needed to leverage the latest in technology to become a better flat-world company so the CIO seemed to be the best person to champion this initiative.
The interesting aspect also lies in the fact that these companies looked at Infosys as a leader in this space since we manage an ever-increasing young employee base that is geographically disparate and necessarily needs to collaborate and receive consistent communication. The resultant conversation is a plethora of strategies and tools that are being discussed that includes advanced tools like blogs, wikis, facebooks, externally hosted knowledge portals, collaboration engines,etc. to more mundane intranets, audio-enabled emails/voicemails, department portals, bulletin boards all of which will be powerful if implemented with the right objectives and strategy in mind. Conversations range from the tactical : “what will it take to implement an employee directory with skillsets?” to the strategic “What will it take to harness the true power of the collaborative enterprise” to the imaginative “What if my suppliers, customers and partners were all part of this collaborative ecosystem?”
Regardless of the tool or the conversation, one thing is clear. These companies are some of the first to realize the new flat-world mindset. They already have some of these tools in place but creating a communication and collaboration strategy with strategic intent is the key difference. I suspect you will see many companies follow the trend. Watch this space for more.
Comments
Interestingly I encountered a situation where the CIO of a 100 year old retailer is trying to reinvent their business to support the explosive growth of their online channel. While the organization attempts to shed their internal structural barriers to collaborate better across channels, their consumers have taken the lead by creating communities, content and comments through product reviews and feedback. While this does help the retailer given that the consumer is voicing their opinion as to what motivates them to buy, it also potentially opens up the retailer to negative publicity about their products. The web has broken down the barriers between consumers and retailers and flattened the nature of interaction between them.
Posted by: Ashish Jandial | May 9, 2007 12:16 PM
I agree 100% with Ashish and the blogpost, that today conversational marketing is on. The customer is a collaborator in 'mar-com' activity, like it or not. This is true of healthcare products too. Even in the case of diseases like diabetes there are vibrant blogs such as www.diabetesblog.com and www.diabetesmine.com. There is a trend of patient empowerment by patients themselves in the online world. This is akin to customer empowerment on various other products and services through customer interactions. There is word-of-mouth activity like never before thanks to web 2.0 technologies.
Posted by: Sunil S Chiplunkar | May 10, 2007 04:55 AM
Nice post..blogs,wikis n all are mere tools.What's more important is to develop an open culture in organization to communicate frankly with stakeholders.
Posted by: praneeth | May 22, 2007 10:15 AM
Interesting post.
With the availability of linkedin type of information within the organization, I guess it would also require the HR and Information Security teams to step up and ensure such information is not potentially mis-used e.g. sold outside the organization.
Meanwhile, here's another good article I read a while back that lists some more specific ideas around how web 2.0 concepts can translate into specific ideas within an enterprise:
http://www.avenuea-razorfish.com/articles/Web20TourfortheEnterprise_Singh.pdf
Posted by: Arvind Raman | July 12, 2007 04:38 PM