Email is a great communication tool enabling you to get in touch with business colleagues at the touch of a button. However, email isn't a
Next Generation Manufacturing Study
The Manufacturing Performance Institute just finished a study entitled 2011 Next Generation Manufacturing Study that focused on awareness, best practices and achievements related to the 6 key strategies listed below.
Customer focused innovation: Develop, make amd market new products and services that meet customers' needs at a pace faster than the competition.
Engage people/human-capital acquisition, development and retention; Secure a competitive performance advantage by having superior systems in place to recruit, hire, develop and retain talent.
Superior processes/improvement focus: Record annual productivity and quality gains that exceed the competition through a companywide commitment to continuous improvement.
Supply-chain management and collaboration: Develop and manage supply chains and partnerships that provide flexibity, response time, and delivery performance that exceed the competition.
Sustainability: Design and implement waste and energy-use reductions at a level that provides superior cost performance and recognizable customer value.
Global Engagement: Secure business advantages by having people, partnerships, and systems in place capable of engaging global markets and talents better than the competition.
The Era of Intrapreneurship
I read a great article today by Luis Suarez entitled The Social Enterprise – Welcome to the Era of Intrapreneurship! that I thought that I would share
"An era, where thanks to the Social Web, whether internal or external, or both!, knowledge workers, for the first time ever, are now in charged of their own productivity, of their own workflows and personal business relationships with others, of their own responsibility not only towards the work that needs to be done, but also towards the fellow peers they collaborate and share their knowledge with.
Thanks to that Social Enterprise we are starting to see how knowledge Web workers are becoming a whole lot more open, public and transparent in narrating their own work, therefore making observable work an integral, critical and paramount activity at the workplace; we are starting to witness how knowledge workers are shaking off their fears for the work they do, or don't do! as well the fears of no longer being considered indispensable, despite the the huge amount of knowledge they have accumulated over the course of the years, or those other fears of no longer being considered the experts they once thought they were.
In short, fear is out, having fun @ work is in."
Why do companies invest in new technologies.
Why do companies invest in new technologies? We do it because we believe that new technologies make our lives easier and our businesses more successful. But technology alone is not enough to bring success. Customers want fast solutions to their problems no matter whether the application is hosted in the cloud or not. Your customers don't see the great technology you are using internally. All they see is whether they get good products and great services for a good price. In other words, regardless of the specific technologies and trends you adopt, your operational processes are key.
The Knowledge Economy
We all agree that we are working in a knowledge economy and organizations are striving to create an empowered workforce, with the in-house knowledge capital being critical for a company's operations and performance, not to mention innovation and competitive advantage. Organizations are focusing on how to improve business operations, bring down costs of servicing customers and reduce time-to-market for new products and services.
Timereaction Overview & Testimonials
Important information is often inefficiently communicated between key players by using a toolbox made up of complex enterprise software within the company structure, while team members and supply chain use simple low tech solutions such as email and spreadsheets.
Making Social Business Effective
Social business must must be connected to the day-to-day workings in order to succeed. Technology alone will never be the answer, but must be woven into our daily work flow. Most of the heavy lifting within a company is done by the two extremes, powerful legacy software or manual systems including spreadsheets , neither of which are very social. If we're lucky, we can forge a link to a piece of enterprise data from within a social tool, a basic requirement for social collaboration. But more likely we have to manually copy information from the systems of record in order to collaborate on it. Even more likely, the social business environment just becomes a parallel silo that's not connected to the business and is used for light conversation and status updates instead of meaningful, high value line of business activities.