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How Integrated Are Your Customer Experiences?
When I attended Forrester's first Customer Experience Forum last month, I was struck by two themes that recurred through both the presentations on stage and the hallway conversations afterward.
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"Web plus one" may be a perfect first step in defining a multi-channel experience for your customers, but it's only that -- a first step. In my work, I've seen the insights about customer behavior and psychology that were spearheaded (and funded) by web groups trickle out into the rest of the organization, informing customer experience efforts far from the web. By feeding the work of these other groups back into the web group's work, the organization can take the next step toward developing a truly integrated customer experience strategy.
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This is no small challenge, and it's a rare organization that's ready for it. Channel-specific organizational silos rarely have incentives to coordinate their activities, and in many cases have stronger incentives to go their own way. When those silos regularly compete for the same ever-shrinking slice of the budgetary pie, the cultural antipathy between them can be systemic. It takes politically savvy leadership with a strong mandate to erode those barriers.
Reinventing Silos
Blogs and wikis provide specific formats to content. There are behavioral format clues that differentiate a blog from a wiki, but under the covers it’s all content. Content elements have value beyond the formats and applications that hold them hostage — they’re enterprise assets that can be repurposed in other formats. The specific format of content (.pdf .doc .html) is really only relevant for consumption — to associate the ‘viewing’ of the content with an application that can display it. The semantics of the content itself doesn’t really care about the format (don’t hold me to that when I’m telling you how to create semantically-relevant formats), just ask your favorite search engine — it’s all words to them.
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Consider a simple ‘hostage’ example (one that I’ve been aghast as many UX designers have missed the significance of), a UI with the labels “Blog” and “Wiki” as two separate options for navigation.
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Sure, 2.0 technologies can increase transparency across organizations, but that’s all lost as you move across ‘closed’ solutions or formats, with no architectural layer to synthesize it all. One silo is simply replaced by another.
Post #e2conf thoughts – installment 2.
Internal communities contain members who are employees of a company. They are paid and can be fired. The panelists touched upon many issues and gave excellent advice.
When Internal Collaboration Is Bad for Your Company
The greater the collaboration (measured by hours of help a team received), the worse the result (measured by success in winning contracts). We ultimately determined that experienced teams typically didn’t learn as much from their peers as they thought they did. And whatever marginal knowledge they did gain was often outweighed by the time taken away from their work on the proposal.
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Too often a business leader asks, How can we get people to collaborate more? That’s the wrong question. It should be, Will collaboration on this project create or destroy value? In fact, to collaborate well is to know when not to do it.
Does Social Media really destroy hierarchies or silos?
In an organisation built upon traditional management structures with departments and the like, rigid reporting lines often make for poor communication channels and awkward cross department interactions. Those very structures designed to provide human resource control actually prevent humans from doing what humans do best – connecting. How on Earth does one quickly & easily connect to the right person in another area of the company for help when constrained into following hierarchical chains of reporting? This has been long recognised and working groups, committees and project focussed groups containing staff from across a number of departments or skill bases are commonplace nowadays.
Dr Karen Stephenson, a corporate anthropologist and lauded as a pioneer and "leader in the growing field of social-network business consultants” (Business 2.0 2006), and her company NetForm have been publishing work on social network (think social graph web peoples) analysis for years which quite clearly shows that no matter how one tries to enforce structure on people informal networks of people will emerge – normally based around a specific context. Yet the structure, the hierarchy prevails
The Strategic Advantage of Global Process and Practice Networks - The Big Shift - HarvardBusiness.org
It goes without saying that no matter how much talent a company might have, there are many more talented people working outside its boundaries. Yet all too many companies focus solely on acquiring talent, on bringing talent inside the firm. Why not access talent wherever it resides?
Some might say there's no way of doing so without sharply increasing the cost of complexity. New institutional practices can reduce these costs, however, as companies become:
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• Less transactional and more relational.
• Less "hardwired" and more "loosely coupled."
• Less focused on merely accessing external capabilities and more focused on rapid capability building for every participant.
• Less focused on the firm and internal silos and more supportive of richer cross-enterprise interactions and collaborations among workers. -
Companies must also participate in (and sometimes orchestrate) new organizational forms and structures called global process and practice networks.
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Upgrading talent - The McKinsey Quarterly - Upgrading talent - Organization - Talent
Downturns place companies’ talent strategies at risk. As deteriorating performance forces increasingly aggressive head count reductions, it’s easy to lose valuable contributors inadvertently, damage morale or the company’s external reputation among potential employees, or drop the ball on important training and staff-development programs. But there is a better way. By emphasizing talent in cost-cutting efforts, employers can intelligently strengthen the value proposition they offer current and potential employees and position themselves strongly for growth when economic conditions improve.
Companies can maintain their attractiveness to internal and external talent by using cost-cutting efforts as an opportunity to redesign jobs so that they become more engaging for the people undertaking them. A job’s level of responsibility, degree of autonomy, and span of control all contribute to employee satisfaction. Head count reductions provide a powerful incentive to use existing resources better by breaking down silos and increasing the span of control for challenging managerial roles—thus improving the odds of engaging key talent in the redesigned jobs.
The Silo Lives! Analyzing Coordination and Communication in Multiunit Companies — HBS Working Knowledge
Although many companies aspire to promote easy interaction and coordination across departments, office locations, and pay scales, the "boundaryless" organization—like the paperless office—hasn't materialized.
The corporate silo is alive and well.
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"We were surprised by how little interaction occurs across three major boundaries: the strategic business unit, the organizational function, and the geographic office location," Stuart says.
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In other words, people talk to the very same people they e-mail. As electronic collaboration technologies further develop, this may change. For now, e-mail interactions seem to reinforce human relations.
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Five Innovations Corporate India Needs
While Western economies are slipping into a recession, India's own economy is showing no sign of fatigue and is poised to expand at 7.5-8% in 2008. As a result, all the Indian CEOs I interact with are actively seeking to innovate and transform their products, services, processes, and even business models in order to drive global competitive advantage. And they are willing to harness cutting-edge technologies to fine-tune their market offerings, operating models, and customer engagement scenarios.
Managing Corporate Social Networks (in Harvard Business Review) Business Innovation
Big companies are good at innovating within silos, but woefully bad at combining creative energies across divisions to build new businesses. As the Merrill Lynch analyst Jessica Cohen once asked, How is it possible that Time Warner owned both Warner Music and AOL and didn’t create something like iTunes? The problem, according to Adam M. Kleinbaum and Michael L. Tushman, is structural: Business-unit boundaries exist precisely because they create efficient structures for executing strategy. But silo focus and ruthless efficiency come at the cost of cross-divisional collaboration, so some innovation opportunities are either poorly executed or not seen at all
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But after surveying 30 years’ worth of organizational network literature and conducting extensive research at a large IT services firm on how networks influence innovation, Adam M. Kleinbaum and Michael L. Tushman concluded that when left unmanaged, informal networks tend to inhibit innovation more often than they enable it.
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The research by Adam M. Kleinbaum and Michael L. Tushman suggests that ideas for productive collaboration will most likely come from “idea brokers.” These people maintain broad networks throughout the organization and are thus uniquely able to draw connections between — and recognize collaborative opportunities for — technologies, markets, or people that might otherwise never come into contact.
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