Enterprise Networking Strategies - Building Effective Wisdom Networks

An Enterprise Networking Strategy that Increases Effectiveness and Performance

                                   By Steve Benton

The following is a brief summary of a strategy that is gaining more visibility in many large organizations, government bodies, and non-profit agencies. For purposes of this blog, this summary applies to all of them.

Enterprise Networks (ENs) are used by organizations to alter the behavior patterns of their work force without changing the existing organization structure and reporting lines – which is obviously a costly endeavor in any firm. Used appropriately, the power of networks to improve the bottom line stems from their ability to challenge entrenched work patterns. Specifically, they allow firms to:

o    create new, more collaborative approaches to identifying and fixing problems,
o    share lessons learned and stories of successes, and build upon them
o    provide greater transparency into the daily trials and tribulations faced by line staff.

The key premise of such a networking strategy has to do with the enablement of staff to get more accomplished, to do it better and smarter, and for less spend. ENs are a proven resource that allow employees at all levels to give more into the firm while concurrently learning how to deliver quicker, how to leverage existing resources in ways that enrich core capabilities, and to provide solutions without increasing costs, often finding ways to reduce costs in the process.

A few examples of different approaches

o    A leading petrochemical firm formed more than 20 enterprise networks, ranging in size from 50 to several hundred employees, focused on work areas where people could benefit from sharing best practices. A network assessment was used to analyze the effects these networks were having on productivity. One sixty-person network alone contributed $50 million in savings annually to the organization.
o    Wachovia, the fourth largest bank in the U.S., plans to rollout a social networking service to 110, 000 staff by early 2008. The target goal is to deliver a highly sophisticated collaboration platform integrated with multiple applications and enabling workers to locate information and connect online with resources simply, intuitively, and timely.

Adopting ENs is also a means to help develop talent while simultaneously finding new ways to deliver solutions cost-efficiently and effectively. Many large and complex organizations have documented successes in utilizing a networked approach to driving competitive advantage in the development of their talent – successes ranging from adopting a highly focused approach to networking in order to bring mentors and coaches to younger or less experienced staff, to a broader (more open) adoption of online staff connectivity that increases the pool of knowledge resources for everyone.

How it works

The keys to success in executing an EN strategy rests with an organization’s ability to influence and alter the behavior of its staff, to get people to not only work differently but to think differently about how to get the best and most results out of their every effort. Doing so will result in increasing the firm’s ability to identify and remove bottlenecks and redundancies that reduce its ongoing ability to deliver goods and services. ENs help with creativity, too, and bring new pools of ideas that could feed into strategy development and to innovate competitively.

ENs should be established to specifically address key strategic projects’ issues, areas of inefficiencies or decreased effectiveness, to find and eliminate bottlenecks, pain points, and items of large, unnecessary concern (revenue or cost-side). They could be assigned to perform research into areas particularly germane to the organization’s goods and services – be it in product development, industry competitors, client segmentation, or other areas of relevance.

Therefore, to succeed, ENs should be assigned a specific topic area, issue, or workflow for its members to address. A network lead and a senior sponsor should have the backing and support of a firm’s top leaders, appointed by senior management. The members will then engage with each other to share knowledge, stories, lessons learned, review best practices and to brainstorm collectively to create actionable recommendations on how to make things better.

These actionable recommendations should be delivered back to senior management by the sponsors for approval or rejection. In this way, the sponsors also act as champions of the network’s focus. Upon approval of the recommendations – and depending upon the recommendations themselves – in the case of “quick win” solutions, the network members will collectively work to accomplish the changes outlined in the recommendation; in the case of longer term change recommendations, the network members will work to develop change program proposals for resubmission to senior management. Progress on each recommendation should be tracked and reported back to the management team in order to help them prioritize enterprise resources assigned to carry out the change recommendations and to monitor overall effectiveness of each EN.

Social computing and networking technologies and services could be used to further enable the appropriate behavior change of the network members. These include use of Web 2.0 – applications that provide on-line team workspaces, instant messaging, tags/bookmarks, wikis, and blogs. Such tools provide structure to the networks, a repository for storing and sharing relevant information and discussion threads, and enable the networks to exist “virtually” on-line (e.g., without needing a lot of travel and ‘face-time’ in order to collaborate). Each one encourages cooperation amongst the network members that is essential in order for them to succeed. The power of an effective online network is to minimize ineffectiveness that arises from teams not being in the same physical space/time zone by creating a co-location platform based on mutual intent, incentives and process.

For more information, email info@networlding.com.