Achieving Organizational Mobilization

An RFID project likely touches many parts of an organizationfrom planning and sourcing to manufacturing and finance. It also touches many outside entitiesfrom suppliers and partners to distribution agents and customers. It is critical that all these different entities, each with its own list of priorities, understand and commit to achieving the goals of the RFID deployment. Because such a deployment invariably involves a change in business processes, it is important to familiarize people with the required change and get their commitment for it.

How do you achieve organizational commitment (mobilization)? Through leadership, communication, and integration. The framework provides a structured way to do the following:

• Effectively communicate organizational priorities to individual team members and verify that the follow-up action plans are clear and specific

• Organize a team so that it is efficient in achieving the goal, yet flexible enough to find creative ways to achieve it

• Define and implement a realistic plan to successfully integrate the new process into existing business processes

Figure 6.1 shows the RFID deployment framework (introduced in the previous chapter) with emphasis on the organizational mobilization part. The part is broken into four pillars on which the total organizational commitment for an RFID project resides. In this chapter, we provide a set of questions that must be answered to successfully construct each pillar. We also mention several examples based on real-world situations to illustrate the points. Note that these questions and examples are samples only. They are likely to be different from one enterprise to the next. Nonetheless, they should provide a good starting point for you. We understand that there are countless books available on building and motivating teams that touch upon the mechanics and behavioral aspects of this issue. We are not trying to replicate that material in one chapter. Instead, we focus on those aspects of the organizational behavior that impact an RFID deployment the most.

Figure 6.1. Framework for Organizational Mobilization

The subsequent sections look at the framework in detail. The organizational mobilization achieved through this approach provides the commitment by the team members to work toward and achieve the common goal. The commitment can take many forms depending on the task required of the team members. Examples include taking an action to make a part of the deployment occur faster, providing public support, providing funding, or altering one's own goals and behavior. This commitment is essential for the cross-functional, cross-organizational team to carry out a successful RFID deployment.