You may or may not know this, but I'm spending my weekends going to business school. We just started our new semester, and my study group did a presentation yesterday entitled: "Improving Environmental Sensing and Interpretation in Your Organization." Basically, it all boils down to: everything in the biz world is moving fast. Lots of information is being exchanged. So, how do you, in a dynamic, dispersed, and often frantic organization - ensure that the right people in your organization have access to the information they need in order to interpret and react to information/changes/etc. in the business environment?
So we talked about who's responsible for gathering the info (everyone really). And they we talked about how to build a culture (through example and reward) so that everyone did feel responsible. Then, we talked about how to disseminate the info. This is where the issue gets problematic. Say you work for a large organization, and you're at a tradeshow cocktail hour and hear some juicy competitive info regarding another team's product. Would you know what to do with it? Would you just disregard it because, well, that's another team? If you did try to pass it on, would that team welcome your input? Would you even know who to tell?
What a perfect place for social media. I can easily imagine my own company's internal "phone book" becoming more like MySpace. Instead of just the generic page with my phone number and address, each employee would have a "profile." I'd list in there all my vitals: contact info, job responsibilities, etc. But the page would also show current projects, teams and interests. What a fantastic way to encourage knowledgeshare and collaboration across large companies. If you wanted to know who's working on that Dept of Defense project up in DC, a quick search would lead you right to them.
Of course, I'm sure I'm not the first person to think of this. I'm certain companies and vendors are already all over the idea... or are they?
Sunday, January 14, 2007
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3 comments:
So I'm going to steal your idea for work. People have been complaining that they don't know who others are, in our own organization. It only gets worse as we get outside it. Maybe profiles are a way to solve some of this.
In many of the ancient pages that we are now trying to rip out, there seem to be some attempts at this, but it's all highly controlled and structured. It is a very formal, highly controlled environment, so I'll be curious to see what the response is.
I'll let you know how it goes.
ohh this is very exciting. now, i assume that because you are in a technical sort of office - everyone can html their own pages - or do you have an application that they will use to maintain their profiles? any idea on the structure yet? i can't wait to hear how people react to the idea...
I've gotten some positive responses so far. We have a couple of tool options. We already have a staff database, so if we can link that in with Expression Engine (our CMS), or a wiki or however we re-do our Intranet, it should be straightforward. I imagine a process where the new employee gets a "welcome, your profile is here, log in and edit it" message. I don't think it would work if we can't put the control in the hands of the staff.
Like I said, good responses so far. Unfortunately I know we're months away from being able to start on it, unless we get some more staff.
I also read a summary of Jakob Nielsen's annual Intranet survey, and these types of profiles are one of the things that people are doing that work. Now trying to convince the boss to fork over for the whole study.
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