Sunday, March 15, 2009

Social Networking in the workplace - embracing the creativity of all employees:

Recently, while with Levi Strauss & Co., we conducted an assessment of the learning and development aspects of the SAP implementation, and I was holding interviews with managers and employees across the Finance organization. Because of technical problems, most technical support staff had been pulled back to try and solve the problem, creating a situation where users in the field where left to fend for themselves. I was amazed at how resilient many of these people were in the face to having to perform with a totally new process and technology, with little or no technical support to answer an ever changing scenario of technical fixes that were being put in place. Most impressive was how some teams had set up informal collaboration networks to pose questions on how to perform tasks or were instant messaging each other to share knowledge in this rapidly changing environment.