Employee Value

As if eliminating fragmentation didn t already have enough benefits ” saving money and solving problems ”there is one more. Consolidation has a clear impact on employees. Enabling employees to ask questions and find solutions unleashes their ingenuity. Employees are happier when they are challenged and that in turn leads to better performance. Enabling employees to do their jobs better makes them feel more valued and makes them more valuable to the company.

Fortunately happiness has bottom-line value at two levels. The company is able to attract better employees and improve retention. Top performing employees will create more value. Improving retention saves resources that would otherwise have been deployed to hiring and training. When employee turnover rates are high, so are the costs associated with recruiting and bringing new hires up to speed. It turns out that eliminating fragmentation is a good investment from the employee perspective too.

Does that mean every single employee should see every bit of data and feel free to ask questions and search for solutions to any problem? No. As information becomes more accessible, information governance becomes more important. If the people who need information are going to get it how and when they need it, information can t be preorganized. To anticipate the questions people will ask as data is being collected will limit its usefulness . To be of use information needs to be freely available in flexible formats.

SBC

But as SBC CIO Ed Glotzbach points out, SBC wants more ubiquitous and intelligent use of its information resources, without providing every piece of data to every person. A balance needs to be struck that gives access to information to those who need it, without predetermining what they might need it for. The Achilles heel of centralized and available information, says Glotzbach, is the oft-held belief that everyone should have access. In practice that means people who have no reason to be spending their time asking questions are neglecting their real job responsibilities. It s analogous to the time lost to Web surfing at many companies that provide Internet access to everyone. Information can and should be empowering, but access needs to be assessed on an ongoing need-to or right-to-know basis.

 

So how does a corporate ecosystem, well oiled with information, actually run? In the next two chapters we ll break the issues down and look at them from the perspective of each of the three integral mini-ecosystems within every company ”customers, suppliers and partners , and internal operations. Let s look at each in turn.