Addressing the communications challenges faced by such a geographically diverse organisation led the company to review and transform its own operational effectiveness, and adopt social networking technology into the enterprise arena. As Paul Mason, Applicable’s Business Development Manager for UK and Australia explains, “With offices in Bristol and Brisbane, staff in North America, a number of home workers and consultants working on customer sites, there were inevitable issues around communication. Relying on email and the telephone was restricting the amount of knowledge sharing that we could achieve, and wasn’t providing enough access to the information and intelligence in the business.” This frustration was particularly felt by Peter Ross, Operations Manager for Applicable’s APAC division, “When you are restricted to email and phone calls between the UK and Australia, you’re dealing with 12+ hour time lags or very early mornings and late evenings to communicate with your peers. The lags in getting or sharing information are a barrier to effective operations and can lead to a feeling of isolation in remote offices.”
Feelings of isolation don’t just occur in geographically diverse locations. As Applicable’s business has grown along technology lines (the company has Microsoft as well as IBM specialist knowledge) there was tendency for departments to become silos of information with relatively poor knowledge sharing.
As an established IBM Business Partner the company had the solution readily to hand, IBM Lotus Connections – software that delivers the advantages of social computing to the enterprise. Using techniques for sharing information that form the basis of social networking, Lotus Connections brings knowledge and people together in a way that empowers innovation: giving people access to information as well as a voice to share ideas, thoughts, opinions as well as documents, articles, white papers, you tube clips and much more.
As Paul Mason says, “Connections is the glue that brings the whole company together. Within Connections we can weave in all the information, lessons learnt, customer experiences etc that add up to real business intelligence within the organisation.”
Using techniques familiar to social networking users, users create profiles, blogs, list activities, share bookmarks and documents and can submit and comment on Wikis; all designed to involve and integrate the whole community.
Individuals create a Profile and tag their areas of interest to provide the rest of the organisation or community with a searchable set of criteria to identify expertise, current projects and responsibilities. As Paul Mason says “the profile feature means that I can identify people with the skillset I need to put together a project or a bid team, or even to question an individual directly – something that could have taken 3 or 4 emails before, or drawn on my own and others’ informal networks. Connections extends the informal networks, making them an enterprise-wide resource.” With Profiles enabling users to tap into the knowledge-base of others, the blogging feature provides up to date status on activities with a human voice. Paul Mason, again, “While formal monthly sales meetings are invaluable, blogging means that I can communicate the latest status on fast moving programmes in a less formal way. This also gives valuable transparency to other stakeholders. Board members, for example, regularly read and comment on blogs. Sharing views, ideas etc in this way helps keep everyone connected with the organisation, top down and bottom up.”
One clear advantage of Applicable’s use of Connections is the accessibility of relevant information. For companies using email as their primary communications vehicle, information and intelligence is held prisoner within inboxes or on file servers and in order to find it, you have to know where to look. Connections provides a single location for accessing information and is also less intrusive than email as users can determine their preferred way and time to access the information within Connections. A further advantage to Applicable is that Connections empowers individuals to contribute rather than just receive information. The Wiki feature means that any information put onto the company’s website is first available for scrutiny and comment by individuals, giving employees a greater sense of ownership and ensuring more accurate information is available.
The benefits have been felt across the organisation and have addressed the need for a cultural change within Applicable to a more open, knowledge-sharing structure. As Peter Ross, based in Brisbane says, “Connections has been invaluable in building a uniform approach across the continents. It has given us an enhanced sense of belonging to the global team with access to all areas of the company.”
Peter Ross concludes, “In just six months Connections has revolutionised communications across all the teams within Applicable. People work off the same information and can see the status of projects together with an audit trail of progress. It helps build best practice as there is now a single place to share ideas, experiences, thoughts and documents.”
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