This summer during my internship, we were working on corporate policies for social media use. A big sticky area was monitoring people's use of social media on their own computers, on their own personal time. Naturally, the company policy stated that whenever people were using company-owned computers or phones, they could be monitored. But this policy also said that if employees were to post something negative about the company from their home computer, on their own personal site (say, for example, Facebook), the company reserved the right to monitor the Internet and discipline them for it.
This was controversial, but I think it makes sense because as an employee of the company, if you are bad-mouthing the company on the TV news or on your Facebook page, it should be treated similarly in both situations. And we all know if you are shown on TV saying something bad about your employer, you are not likely to remain an employee for long.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Good Governance Hard for the Little Guys
We've talked a lot about how good governance of processes is more important than the actual technology and applications. While I definitely agree with this, I know it is a real struggle for small companies.
Having worked recently as a writer for a small, entrepreneurial e-Learning company, I saw how technology does not equal governance. Our company invested in significant technology like Salesforce.com, Eloqua e-mail software, and various Google analytical tools, which did make data gathering easier. However, that was usually where the process stopped - at gathering. No analysis was possible, because the internal processes didn't exist (and certainly weren't automated) to get the piles of data into any usable form. I would chalk that up to the company's personnel not enough time or knowledge to realize the importance of creating solid processes and steps to accompany the technology.
As the information revolution carries on, I expect that it will get easier for organizations to institute these processes, but today it is still a struggle for small companies who lack the vision and simply the manpower to understand that technology by itself is not the answer.
Having worked recently as a writer for a small, entrepreneurial e-Learning company, I saw how technology does not equal governance. Our company invested in significant technology like Salesforce.com, Eloqua e-mail software, and various Google analytical tools, which did make data gathering easier. However, that was usually where the process stopped - at gathering. No analysis was possible, because the internal processes didn't exist (and certainly weren't automated) to get the piles of data into any usable form. I would chalk that up to the company's personnel not enough time or knowledge to realize the importance of creating solid processes and steps to accompany the technology.
As the information revolution carries on, I expect that it will get easier for organizations to institute these processes, but today it is still a struggle for small companies who lack the vision and simply the manpower to understand that technology by itself is not the answer.
Silos, Silos, Silos!
People always talk about silo-ed organizations, and in the smaller companies I've worked in I haven't seen too much evidence of that. But having been at a large multi-national manufacturer this past summer for my internship, I saw silos in action. Because I was in a role where I had to drive communication and marketing plans across multiple divisions and functions (like IT, Legal, HR, Corp Marketing, etc.), I was tasked with figuring out how to communicate between all the groups.
For one project, I needed to look at social media use across the company. I assumed there would be systems monitoring and aggregating what people were doing into a central master data file, but I quickly learned that her wasn't, and that each division worked off different systems. For example, I needed information from the call center related to a certain product, and was shocked to find that the marketers for that product had no communication channel with the call center, and the only way to interact was to have the call center pull a report into Excel. Worse, the report included un-coded answers to open-ended questions which could only be analyzed by manually analyzing each of the thousands of comments - not exactly real-time business analytics!
Fortunately, the "people networks" were pretty strong between the silo-ed divisions, so I was able to get the integrated information I needed by talking to the right people. Still, it made it very plain how important it is to get off the legacy system of silos and integrate data into a central place where it can leveraged with business analytic software to get usable knowledge from the mountains of data.
For one project, I needed to look at social media use across the company. I assumed there would be systems monitoring and aggregating what people were doing into a central master data file, but I quickly learned that her wasn't, and that each division worked off different systems. For example, I needed information from the call center related to a certain product, and was shocked to find that the marketers for that product had no communication channel with the call center, and the only way to interact was to have the call center pull a report into Excel. Worse, the report included un-coded answers to open-ended questions which could only be analyzed by manually analyzing each of the thousands of comments - not exactly real-time business analytics!
Fortunately, the "people networks" were pretty strong between the silo-ed divisions, so I was able to get the integrated information I needed by talking to the right people. Still, it made it very plain how important it is to get off the legacy system of silos and integrate data into a central place where it can leveraged with business analytic software to get usable knowledge from the mountains of data.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Cloud Computing/Groove
The time for cloud computing has definitely arrived. I think I first realized this last year when our first-year MBA class received our computers pre-loaded with Microsoft Groove. It soon became obvious that the proprietary U of M software that we were supposed to use to collaborate on projects was impossible to use (or even figure out how to access it).
So our class started using Groove, where we allowed Microsoft to host our group projects and let us collaborate on them and chat about them from anywhere. The school administration and IT department were upset about this "unauthorized use" and warned the class that it was not supported and our data could be lost. Soon they backed off because they realized that it worked better than their solutions, and that we weren't going to change our usage of Groove anytime soon.
So our class started using Groove, where we allowed Microsoft to host our group projects and let us collaborate on them and chat about them from anywhere. The school administration and IT department were upset about this "unauthorized use" and warned the class that it was not supported and our data could be lost. Soon they backed off because they realized that it worked better than their solutions, and that we weren't going to change our usage of Groove anytime soon.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
