I just finished my report and business case for launching an Enterprise 2.0 program for your 1000 information workers. We are now in the final phase of our Enterprise 2.0 discovery track - a five day track where we have focused on
- Creating awareness on the possibilities of Enterprise 2.0
- Discovering the business benefits of web 2.0 in the organization
- Identifying current information bottlenecks
- Mapping new attitudes and solutions on 2.0 technologies
- Building the business case for launching an Enterprise 2.0 program
We have identified how typical information bottlenecks reduce the throughput of your information workers and lead to a serious amount of waste in your enterprise. In this context, we simply define waste as lost productivity as a result of:
1. Not finding information
2. Recreating content
3. Reformatting content
4. Sharing and distributing content.
If we take the average knowledge worker's time spent on information tasks and include these factors in our equation, our analysis shows that a whopping 30% of your employee's time is wasted. In other words, your employee spends 12 hours per week on tasks that could easily be avoided. If you want to find out more about how you con boost productivity with E2.0 tools, then you might want to read this article too. You might wonder what is causing all this waste? Well, to a great extent technology is causing most of these information bottlenecks:
- Multiple information repositories
- Ineffective search tools
- Poor information architecture
- Information overload
- Irrelevant communication
- Meetings culture
- Version issues
- Islands of emails
- Fear of transparency/openness
Combine inadequate tools with a "closed" culture and you end up in a dysfunctional situation. Fear of openness, weak leadership, lack of empowerment and the like put up barriers to effective knowledge and information sharing and ultimately affect the bottom line of your organization's corporate performance.
Your organization with a 1000 employees consequently faces an annual productivity loss of € 20 million. And the maths are quite easy here: based on input from Human resources, you spend € 60 million on personnel costs on an annual basis. This implies that you loose 30% of productive output as a result of the above mentioned information bottlenecks.
Reducing these waste factors in your information and knowledge processes will free up time. Time which can be spent more productively on value adding activities such as development of new products or services, relationship building, bonding, learning and training just to name a few. These trade-off effects will create growth in the middle and long term and consequently will add a multiplying effect to the gains generated by Enterprise 2.0. Exciting, isn't it?
In your case, Enterprise 2.0 will help to save your organization roughly 10 € million over 3 years on top of other less-tangible benefits such as improved employee engagement, employee retention, agility, improved decision making or employer reputation.
Enterprise 2.0 will open up new opportunities for your organization in today's climate of cost reduction, operational efficiency, risk mitigation and business growth. It will enable you and your management to achieve your targets and allow you to jump the next curve because today it's not about being the fastest nor the most intelligent. Today it is about getting to grips with the new normal and be responsive to change. Enterprise 2.0 is indeed about change - change needed to survive in today's corporate jungle and become the fittest of the pack.