Managing eBusiness

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Managing e-Business High Technology (10)

• Last week Innovation and Assignment Workshop
• Some thoughts about breaking into markets
• This Week The Future of Work
• How working practices may change through
  technology
• Dynamic Workplaces and mobile technology
• Based on a conference arranged in 2003 by Lotus
• Next time Implementing and running e-commerce
• Based on Chaffey E-Business E-Commerce Mgt.
  Ch.12
• Producing an implementation plan
• Minimizing risk
• Defining a maintenance process

2
IS and the Future of Work

• I am indebted to Ron Hulman and Carys Davies of
  IBM UK Limited for much of this material
• Hulman (2002) Dynamic Workplaces the Future of
  Work
• Davies (2002) Achieving Cultural Change
  Communities, Collaborative Working and HR Policy
  
• Their focus has moved on to how people learn in
  the workplace
• We all think about tasks that directly use IS,
  but...
• ..how does IS influence how we behave in other
  contexts?
• Social Factors
• Information Flows
• Managing Change

3
Learning at Work New Materials

• http//www.ibm.com/investor/viewpoint/podcast/pdf/
  27-03-06-1.pdf (part of a series of Future of
  podcasts and transcripts)
• http//www-304.ibm.com/jct03001c/services/learning
  /solutions/pdfs/learning_strategy.pdf Strategy
  for the future of Learning
• http//www-1.ibm.com/services/uk/igs/pdf/global-hu
  man-capital-survey.pdf HR-based study
• http//www-1.ibm.com/services/uk/igs/html/on-deman
  d-workplace.html The on-demand workplace
• The University of Winchester hosted the European
  Conference of e-Learning in 2006, with papers
  from many of our teamSeveral of us also
  presented at the 2007 conference in Copenhagen
• David Rush has a Learning Network module on using
  the LN to support innovation, and another on
  Blended Learning

4
Public Policy towards Work is Changing

• Issues
• Environmental concerns
• Congestion on roads and in airports
• Speed, competitiveness
• Quality of life
• Resulting Policy
• Infrastructure spending changes
• Promotion of Entrepreneurship
• Telework initiatives
• Incentives for work at home
  

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The Dynamic Workplace

• IBMs term for result of IT reducing constraints
  on how we work
• Information available via information systems
• In the Office
• At Home
• On the Road
• Improved information sharing and communication
• Permits hot-desking without loss of context
• Major real-estate savings
• BUT need to be aware of territorial factors
• Can dramatically change how we do our jobs

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The history of business interaction
2004
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IBM's eWorkplace Strategy

• Render complexity of company irrelevant for
  employees
• Scale of challenge represented by intranet
  statistics (2002)
• More than 8,000 intranet sites in IBM
• 680 "major" sites
• More than 11 million Web pages
• More than 5,600 domain names
• Used worldJam WebAhead programmes to
  coordinate
• Most large and devolved organizations have
  similar challenges
• Pure centralization is rarely a successful remedy
• If youre on BS3909, think back to Alasdair
  Whites concept of the Deconcentrated
  organization

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Technology Overview

• Dynamic Workplace uses PC to give access to
• Information private to the user
• Organization and Workgroup information
• Tool-set offered by Organization
• Contact Management
• Available over network from work, home,
  elsewhere
• IBM model works through an WebSphere Portal
• Integration of information from disparate sources
  
• Consistent appearance
• Devolved content management

Proprietary web-server
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IBMs e-Workplace
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Journey to a single vision
Think how the University is now moving in the
same direction
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(No Transcript)
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Federation Model Organization Chart Online
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From Communities to Rôles
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My News

• Description
• Allows individuals the option to choose from
  various channels of information (300 channels)
• Personalization at main page level and
  application level
• 173,000 subscriptions
• Benefits
• Enhances individuals knowledge about their
  respective organization, industry or specialist
  area
• Delivers information that individual wants to see
  only
• Saved 50 (gt1M/year) with enterprise news feed
  licence

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IBM's eWorkplace Strategy

• Render the complexity of the company irrelevant
  for employees
• Bring the marketplace inside
• Equip employees for the journey
• Media Jukebox
• Instant Messaging
• e-meetings
• e-learning

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Media Jukebox

• Description
• Experience audio/video live, or later via
  playback service
• Online presentation, authoring and publishing
• Benefits
• Enhanced employee efficiency and knowledge
  sharing and distribution
• Provides real-time access to knowledge anytime,
  anywhere
• Reduces event-related travel, lodging and
  coordination/preparation costs
• How much is relevant in our business?

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e-meetings Real-Time Collaboration

• Description
• 65,000 Registered e-meetings users
• 47,000 person-hours in e-meetings each month
• Within/outside company
• Benefits
• Convenient to attend
• Easier to plan and run
• Saves travel costs, meeting coordination/ setup
  costs, and productive work time
• Cut opportunity cost of global meetings

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How do we learn our jobs?

• Formal Training
• RTFM (Read the Fine Manual)
• Observe a skilled practitioner (Sitting by
  Nellie)
• Guided Trial and Error
• Key point is that we need to acquire expertise
• Some is explicit and formal
• Others may share implicit knowledge
• Much is not rocket science (e.g. how to fill in
  expenses)
• Sometimes you are breaking new ground

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Global Learning Portal

• Description
• Web portal to learning environment
• Video, audio, and multimedia technologies used to
  enhance learning experience
• Browse and search integrated course catalogue to
  select functions for over 38,000 learning
  events
• Course completion tracking to log employee skill
• Benefits
• More than 200,000 employees use e-learning
  annually
• Just-in-time learning saves employees time in
  class
• 40 of training via Web annual savings over
  350M

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HR Self Service

• Description
• Complete access to Financial, Health, Benefits,
  Life, Career, Expense applications
• Direct linkage to many of the Financial Services
  providers
• Dedicated call centre support
• Benefits
• Increased customer satisfaction from 40 to 90
• Moved ratio of Employees to HR staff to best of
  breed
• Reduced cost of HR processes, applications and
  centres
• Improved management information

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Expense Account 2000

• Expense submission, tracking, and credit card
  payment
• Allows expenses to be directed to a particular
  charge code or defaulted to users department
  code
• Copies supervisor for approval step
• Automated matching against credit card expenses
• Automated payment of corporate credit card
• Benefits
• Reduced paperwork and expense coordination
• Enhanced efficiency of the expensed process
• Reduced operations costs

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IBM's eWorkplace Strategy

• Render complexity of company irrelevant for
  employees
• Bring the marketplace inside
• Equip employees for the journey
• Tap into the company's collective knowledge
• BluePages/Personal address books
• Community-driven knowledge re-use
• Teaming / Collaboration tools
• HR programmes for reinforcement
• Redefine the manager/employee relationship

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Company/Employee Relationship

• Best (credible, preferred, useful) sources of
  information about IBM to get job done

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Cultural Issues of Dynamic Workplace

• Adapting to the virtual environment
• How do employees react?
• Managing the change
• HR Policy and Management Development

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What do IBM employees think?

• Mobility has very favourable impact on
• productivity, morale
• job satisfaction, commitment
• work/life balance
• Issues with
• teamwork, communications
• career advancement
• Work-at-home responding positively
• Impact on productivity 90
• Job satisfaction 86
• on morale/motivation 84
• Impact on work 84
• Impact on commitment 83

2001 IBM Morale Survey
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The Hidden Activities of the Office

• Communications
• Senior managers presentations, walkabouts,
  broadcasts
• Team individual communications, accidental
  meetings
• Formal, informal broadband tone, gesture,
  emotion
• Teamwork
• Mostly invisible often people dont even like
  to discuss it
• Knowledge and ways of working learned and
  created
• Career Advancement
• Visibility and networking
• Managers managingSee employees working, Can
  interact informally, Can see and manage issues
  discreetly

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Social/gossip in office can have value

• Social/gossip includes
• Mentoring/learning
• Building the team
• Building trust
• Networking
• And during change
• Making sense of the change
• Creating new ways of working in the new
  environment
• But this comes at a cost in time spent

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Cultural Issues of Dynamic Workplace

• Adapting to the virtual environment
• How do employees react?
• Maximizing the value of face-to-face meetings
• Adapting technology, adapting with technology
• Managing the change
• HR Policy and Management Development

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Do we still need face-to-face meetings?

• Globalisation is restructuring work on an
  international basis at least for some large
  firms but the nature of knowledge work and the
  importance of trust means that the need for
  face-to-face contact continues to grow
• While information and data travel the world
  effortlessly knowledge and understanding are
  largely contained in our heads.
• On the Move, Feb 2002, Local Futures Group,
  London, Kate Oakley and Tom Campbell
• In the wired world, physical presence counts
  more than ever
• Economist, 24 Aug 02 Press the flesh, not the
  keyboard

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Using face-to-face differently

• Different outcomes, different styles
• Building relationships, increasing trust,
  resolving issues, creating shared language and
  context
• Interactive, small groups conversations,
  informal, intensive, productive
• Different space
• Starbucks
• Drop-in areas, bookable offices, literal
  transparency
• From accidental interactions to communities
• Maximize knowledge sharing, mentoring, expertise
  location through formal or informal communities
• Managing knowledge the next step

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What do Communities contribute?

• Connections
• Intra-network clearing house who knows what
• Reference mechanism evaluate each others
  knowledge
• Connect outsiders to knowledge holders reduce
  learning curve
• Relations
• Test trustworthiness and commitment of members
• Develop norms and values
• Encourage empathy for others situations
• Shared Context
• Shape language used in everyday conversation
• Generate objects and artefacts that are used by
  members
• Generate stories that communicate norms and values

From Eric Lesser and Larry Prusak, IKM 1999
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Adapting technology to teams side talk

• e-meeting may include shared presentations and
  parallel voice conference
• Private side-conversations using instant
  messaging can range from from comments (reducing
  interruptions!) to managing questions or
  interventions
• Probably wont involve live video of
  participants
• WIMBAR does this Business School is
  experimenting with it

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Adapting technology to communities
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Doing this builds trust in the source
IBMs Best sources of information (credible,
preferred, useful)
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Cultural Issues of Dynamic Workplace

• Adapting to the virtual environment
• How do employees react?
• Maximizing the value of face-to-face meetings
• Adapting technology, adapting with technology
• Managing the change
• HR Policy and Management Development

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Key to successful change always consider
users frame of reference
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Deeper change needs careful management

• Dynamic Workplace will
• include multiple, sometimes parallel initiatives
• cover multiple departments, units, geographies
• Fundamental change to how people work for
  example
• How they talk to other people in the company
• How they know they are working effectively
• Change management approach must be tailored to
  each initiative and unit, recognizing
• Units or teams have different experiences and
  start points
• Buy-in from the people is key Dynamic Workplace
  requires a collaborative effort
• Change will be ongoing with each initiative,
  with each group brought into the Dynamic Workplace

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Deeper distributed change programmes

• Responsibility for Change programmes over
  multiple initiatives and organisational units
  must be delegated
• To be effective
• To be cost-effective
• Major change programmes need additional
  techniques
• Top level sponsorship is necessary but not
  sufficient
• However fast you start you have to wait for
  results
• Teams need to adapt programme to fit their local
  culture
• Actions speak louder than words
• Think global, act local
• Communicate vision and tools, not plans
• Build skills for managing change within the teams

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Examples of additional change techniques

• Publicising real stories to reinforce the new
  culture
• Creating central and local change teams with a
  common approach
• Change team itself must model desired behaviour
  in all interactions with virtual teams

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Cultural Issues of Dynamic Workplace

• Adapting to the virtual environment
• How do employees react?
• Maximizing the value of face-to-face meetings
• Adapting technology, adapting with technology
• Managing the change
• HR Policy and Management Development

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Managers have to adapt

• Real work gets done in different ways and in
  different places not just the traditional
  office
• Managers cant assume that people who take
  advantage of our flexibility options are less
  committed to their careers or our business
• Lou Gerstner - Think Magazine 1998

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Fundamental Change for Management
Old
New

• Management power
• Fixed style of work
• Functional silos
• Fixed place
• Space ownership
• Space boundaries
• Status offices
• Mine to have

• Leading, sharing, empowered
• Life style choice
• Teaming
• Any place
• Team spaces
• Flexible spaces
• Shared assets
• Ours to share

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HR Management Policy must reflect change

• Example from 1995, IBM
• Developed new core management competencies needed
  
• Identified new management style portfolio to
  match
• Tested managers against styles
• Support for key new styles eg coaching
• New development models future focus, focus on
  skills, not job
• 17 Key Experiences to support development
• Delivered through
• Executive development support staff
• Management development training programmes
• Increasingly online learning tools

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IBM Management Development home page
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Big evolution Big Pay-Off

• Benefits to IBM
• e-learning over 350 million in 2001
• Customer self-serviceover 700M
• Blue Pagesestimated 10M
• Consolidating News Sources 2M
• HR Process Reengineeringreduced costs by 40
  and increased satisfaction to 92
• e-Workplace Key tool to changing the culture of
  IBM

• Benefits to Employee

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How can we apply these approaches?

• Be aware of differences in scale and culture
• Were unlikely to have 300,000 cats to be
  herded
• Health sector probably more authoritarian (but
  this wont make a single, central solution work)
• Reflect on where your enterprise stands in the
  spectrum
• And the similarities
• Many sectors are highly federal with local
  seats of power
• Existing investments cannot be ignored
• Core resource is information and knowledge
• How would you exploit an intranet portal in your
  environment?

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Assignment Part II

• Due in the Faculty Office on or before 330 pm on
  12 June 2008 (Friday of week 14).
• If you are not around to hand in the assignment
  in person, please submit electronically
• Or make sure you use recorded delivery and that
  the package is postmarked on or before the due
  date
• Consists of a detailed plan for deploying the
  change you proposed in Part I
• Assessment criteria concentrate on your
• demonstrating a good understanding of the issues
  involved in managing high-technology ventures
• logic and clarity of your analysis
• Please hand assignment brief with your materials

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Assumed Starting Point

• Your Part I report produced the outcome you asked
  for you now have the funding to start developing
  your proposal
• You are committed by any promises you made, e.g.
• To run a pilot before spending the full amount
• To seek collaborators or additional channels
• But this doesnt mean you have to do these things
• You will generally just include them in your
  planning
• And you can re-evaluate anything
• You could even decide not to go ahead at
  all(better to cut your losses than make bigger
  ones)

Unless you have a really good reason not to