This blog post is intended to fulfill a requirement for Professor Voelker’s Strategic Management Seminar course (MGMT 6731) at University of Houston Clear Lake this Fall 2012 semester. The requirement in question is to provide an overview of a current event associated with an assigned topic area, in this case relating strategic management and innovation. To fulfill this requirement I have chosen what I have found to be a very interesting current event on how busisnesses leverage social media to innovatively improve teamwork via internal communication, in this particular case as a system called “Colab” by General Electric.
How can a firm leverage the experience of all their employees in one fell swoop? GE has the way. It’s called “Colab”. A social networking system internal to the company that allows employees to post items of interest they are in need of resolving and provides a mehanism where other employees who might have unique insights can offer helping advice. The system was started up by the chief information office in the beginning of 2012 and already has over one hundred thousand users. Emphasis has been on getting power users to try out the system and make value added feedback to the developers on what functionality they would find most useful. Idea here is that if the power users actually take hold of the new system and refer there associates, then they system will take hold and be of value. Evidently this concept is working great because GE reports they adding on the order of a thousand users ever few days.
Finding innovative ways to get the most out of your human capital is a key to sustained competitive advantage. Leveraging technology such as social media to bring your people together who have common interests and complimentary experience is such an example. Unleashing the creativity that comes along with such diveristy will yield great returns.
Citations:
1. Robert Berkman and Ron Utterbeck, November 7, 2012. GE’s Coab Brings Good Things to the Company. MIT Sloan Management Review. Accessed at http://sloanreview.mit.edu/feature/ges-colab-brings-good-things-to-the-company/ on November 12, 2012.
2. Paul Wolf, November 12, 2012. Harnessing The Power of Thousands of Brinas. Reinventing Government. Accessed at http://reinventinggov.org/2012/11/12/harnessing-the-power-of-thousands-of-brains/ on November 13, 2012
3. Karen Goulart, August 7, 2012. GE Brings Social Collaboration to Live with Colab. SearchCIO. Accesseed at http://searchcio.techtarget.com/feature/GE-brings-social-collaboration-to-life-with-GE-Colab on November 13, 2012.
Leveraging of the efforts of the teams is an effective management and allows the companies get to a common purpose.But what if trade secrets or confidential information is disclosed?
ReplyDeleteI agree, trade secrets, etc are potentially exposed. I see this as the future in harnessing human capital knowledge, however. Getting more information quickly seems to be a priority in mgmt. let's hope to good outweighs the potential bad in this case.
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