“…in the end, management doesn’t change culture. Management invites the workforce itself to change the culture.”
— Lou Gerstner, Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?
In a word, the role of the On Demand Workplace in IBM’s strategy is to be the vehicle through which workforce transformation takes place — to turn the IBM brand and values into enterprise-wide behaviour.
At the simplest level, the On Demand Workplace’s “work product” is a productive individual – where “productive” means not just cheaper and faster, but more creative, imaginative, independent, collaborative and opportunistic. We have to create a “horizontal” experience in which employees, wherever they sit, are free to collaborate, decide and act – and in which this vast, interconnected global business ecosystem operates in a way that makes it feel small.
For IBM, key to getting there will be an On Demand Workplace that provides:
- Content management and information architecture (IA) that are holistic, that organises the company without regard to geo or division or brand. (see also Guest Speaker piece by Sarah Goldman for more on IA)
- Instantaneous contact among people without regard to organisation, rank, profession or physical location. (see also Guest Speaker piece by Kristine Lawas for more on online, global collaboration)
- Common set of tools, applications and processes that are integrated end-to-end and that work automatically and ad hoc with one another.
- System that makes possible virtual team formation and marshalling of resources from around the world – all on demand.
In that spirit of where we need to go – w3 On Demand Workplace (w3 ODW) continues to evolve from it’s legacy role as our corporate intranet to a modern on demand workplace helping IBM employees be more productive by providing a single point of entry for the content and resources they need to do their work. “My ODW” today provides the capability to offer an employee a rich and personalised experience ranging from the content and tools presented for All IBM to know and use to the industry-specific content a seller needs in a specific geography or country in local language.
Over the past ten years content and sites has increasingly been converted to “look alike” from a design and standards perspective, but the problem has remained that the content has been generated by organisational silo – so in many cases – particularly for our sales force – the content not only looked alike it was alike! The only difference being the source of publication, e.g., brand, unit, corporate function.
Today, over 70% (i.e., 251,000) of IBMers have completed their w3 ODW profile and thus ready and willing to have timely, relevant content pushed to the array of portlets across all three tabs to help them manage their career, their clients and their life. The main challenges we face today are two-fold.
First, organising the delivery of content into a simple, integrated view that leverages the power of w3 ODW up-front and quickly directs employees to consolidated sites and resources as needed or required across the rest of IBM’s intranet.
Second, changing the mind-set of content creators and publishers world-wide to understand that the content is the valuable item to the end-user not the piece of real-estate they have created to wrap-around the information.
Through the creation of roadmaps to address integration from the end user perspective – this means the concern is how information is perceived by employees within the context of w3 ODW, rather than how information is most efficiently stored or manipulated within a given IT infrastructure – to developing compelling business cases demonstrating “value” tailored to the audience, i.e., employees, content authors, site owners and senior executives, we have are well poised to evolve.
What the On Demand Workplace will offer, for the first time, is an enterprise platform and management system adequate to the complexity and variety of our actual experience – something that can turn IBM’s size and breadth into assets, rather than obstacles. For IBM, “the way we do things around here” in the future will mean, to a very large degree, “the way we do things in w3.”
By Liam J. Cleaver, w3 On Demand Workplace, IBM’s Corporate Intranet
