Today the best companies can make decisions almost instantaneously. When something happens in a store or a field sales office the key decision makers are made aware of these developments and can make a decisions that get communicated back to the field just as quickly. Nobody meets this ideal all the time but this rapid response cycle is becoming an increasingly critical success factor in any business.
Businesses with the shortest response cycles have a significant advantage over their slower, less aware competitors. These short response cycles allow a business to respond to the market faster and provide superior products and services.
Not only are market conditions changing faster than ever but they are also harder to predict. Customers are better informed and more demanding than ever and word of mouth spreads at unprecedented speed. As a result, central planning and strategy becomes increasingly difficult. The only way for businesses to deal with this rapid change is to transform themselves into communities that constantly reinvent themselves by continuously learning and adapting as the business environment changes.
Guidance for Management
In order to build this new rapid learning, rapid response environment management needs a new set of principles.
- Employees must have a core set of rules that guide them in using the system
- Employees must share more information
- Managers must receive more feedback from the field
- Managers must be more effective in communicating strategic objectives
Tools to Support This New Environment
This new environment would also be impossible without a new set of tools. Important new developments on this front include: wikis, blogs, RSS and improved search and feedback mechanisms.
Wikis
Wikis are a new innovation that can form the backbone of this highly adaptive learning environment. Because wikis are so open and adaptive they come with a set of rules that surround them and help ensure they produce effective results. Though wikis are designed to support open contribution they still support the idea of privileged users that help settle disputes and enforce the rules of the community. Wikis create a critical resource that is constantly changing in response to changing market, competitive and customer conditions. Information can come from anywhere in the organization and can be checked and improved by everyone who uses it.
Blogs
Blogs are another method for improving information sharing in the business world. Internal blogs differ from wikis because they are the voice of an individual instead of a group. They are also often more personal and more opinionated. They are an excellent way for experts to document and share their knowledge. Blogs can also be an excellent source of information for a more official source like a wiki. Blog posts that have lasting interest and relevance to a larger audience can be transitioned into the wiki format so that they can be verified and enhanced by the entire user base.
RSS and My Place
And finally a new development called RSS makes it possible to distribute information much more efficiently. The organization can deliver a customized “My Place” style desktop that uses RSS to populate a custom home page with constantly changing information feeds that reflect the interests of the specific organization, team or individual.
Search, Feedback, Integration and Navigation
Critical enabling technologies such as wikis, blogs and RSS need to be surrounded by a handful of supporting features in order work effectively.
Search is a critical element to any information space as has been demonstrated by the success of search companies like Google.
Discussion functionality is absolutely critical in creating an adaptive, feedback driven resource. Participants in the system need to know how the community is responding to their contributions and they need to be able use this feedback to direct their participation. Other key feedback elements include popularity rankings, related links, granular alerting, and a method for showing recent changes in the system.
Integration with existing information resources is also critical to this kind of resource. The term integration can bring up the thought of all kinds of complex integration schemes but at its most basic level integration can mean making it easy to get information out of existing common information sources and into the system. For practical purposes two of the most common information sources are people’s email inboxes and their collection of personal documents usually found in a format like Microsoft Word. So a key starting point on integration is making it easy to transition information from email and Word into the system. The ease of use of wikis make it easy capture emails using cut and paste and if you add a Word Import feature you have a solid basis for transferring information from an unstructured environment to a more structured, shared environment.
And finally a navigation engine is critical to provide a framework for the site and to support a method browsing the system for information.
Participation
The final element needed to tie all this together is participation. None of these tools mean anything without the trust and participation of the community. If only a handful of people use the system then it will never reach its potential. But if management leads by example, encourages experts to share, and gains the trust and participation of the broad user base then the system can provide unprecedented improvements in the knowledge and decision making of the organization. These advantages are the key to an organization’s long term competitive strength and success.
Conclusion
The implications of this approach are nothing short of revolutionary. Empowering the entire organization to share and contribute is breaking new ground for many. But paradoxically this is only way organizations will maintain control of their position in the market in the long run. Tomorrow’s winners will be those that have a constant pulse on their markets and their customers and those that stick to their top down methods will be swept away by those same rapidly changing market forces. So join us in embracing a new vision for market driven organizations that learn and respond at the speed of the global marketplace.
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