Are your people working smarter in the New Economy?

What is the common thread in the following situations?

Why are people having to change the way they work?

Key people can no longer get together in the same place, or at the same time, often enough. Increasingly, they need to operate "on the move". So, organisations are having to find more effective ways to do key tasks such as:

developing strategy

launching new products

conducting market research

developing and retaining high calibre employees

Phone and video-conferencing, emails, knowledge management systems and the
internet all help. But they don't do the job well enough.

Hence the growth of online communities. Businesses such as BP, Otis, Xerox, the
World Bank, Sara Lee and IBM are all using such approaches. Recently a number of
organisations have extended their use and impact in innovative ways.

Examples of how companies are using on-line communities

Trinity Industries a world leader in transportation products and services is currently using a world wide on line community of experts to design the railroad tank car of the future. A community of forty geographically dispersed engineers is generating ideas, conducting ongoing dialogues and making critical decisions about the implementation of new ideas.

Hallmark, specialises in greeting cards and gifts and has a huge need to innovate constantly in an intensely competitive market place. Historically good at getting customer input to new product ideas, they have recently created the online Hallmark Ideas Exchange. This community of customers (parents of young children) contribute their ideas and feedback online. Specifically they:

discuss their needs and product preferences

brainstorm new ideas

react to pricing suggestions

comment on merchandising strategy

The input helps Hallmark to develop new products and services that extend the
brand and add significant future revenue. The results have been quickly impressive:

Innovation: in the first two months they generated several new product ideas in half
the time usually needed. (Successful new products can generate $10 to $20m in revenue.)

Cost Saving: saved one third of the cost of conducting traditional market research and spent the remainder more effectively.

Other benefits: the ability to probe for greater understanding of what customers think and why. Hallmark can now go back cheaply and quickly and ask important follow up questions. Something that is tough with traditional customer focus groups.

Transora a global B2B e-marketplace for the consumer packaged goods industry,
founded by 54 of the largest players (including Gillette, Eastman Kodak and
General Mills):

communicate and collaborate among employees, consultants, investors and customers

orientate new people quickly and effectively

retain key people and their knowledge

execute with innovation and speed

build a new distinctive culture

Tangible benefits of these online corporate communities were:

Time to Talent: learning and productivity are greatly accelerated. Preliminary indications suggest they can reduce the learning curve by three weeks per employee with important cost savings.

Innovation: they will get 3-4 good ideas for new/improved service offerings each year. (One new idea successfully implemented can represent revenues of $50-$100m.)

Employee Retention: learning at e-speed and being quickly "acclimatised" reinforces employee satisfaction and retention.

So what are corporate communities?

The common themes in these and other similar stories is that of online groups ("communities") who share an interest or an aim, determine a key business purpose and set out to achieve measurable results using new internet based working practices and enabling software. There are several types of communities:

Working Communities
Connecting colleagues who need to work across time, space or organisational boundaries to:

implement strategic initiatives

drive innovation

share best practice

Customer Communities
Using customers to give feedback, help evaluate and propose ideas for product and service improvement. This can mean cheaper and faster 24/7 access to:

market intelligence

user groups

customers' views

Learning Communities
Most organisations now see informal learning as more important than formal learning.
Online learning communities can improve the effectiveness of:

induction

executive education

corporate universities

MBA Programmes

The understanding of how to exploit corporate communities is now available and the important supporting software tools have been created. Time and space problems are being mastered by some of the smarter organisations!

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