ABSTRACT
GenCo is a large multinational corporation with approximately 75,000 employees and offices in more than 100 countries. GenCo is very decentralized with autonomous business units focused on specialty products and services for the healthcare industry. Because of the focus on different products with different customer needs and different levels and types of product complexity,
the units operate differently. Yet, there are potential synergies across product lines. Co-marketing and co-development of product lines and services is a potential growth area. For example, drugs and services developed and marketed for different diseases may be co-branded to provide a broader range of services for a healthcare patient with multiple needs. The challenge faced by management is how to foster connections between individuals across autonomous business units of a highly distributed company in a complex and rapidly changing industry. A common management practice to address this problem is to create customer-facing cross-functional teams across different areas of the firm and providing groupware, e.g., WebEx™, or other electronic communication platforms to support collaboration between these individuals. However, management at GenCo believes that it is difficult to predetermine the members of these teams. The rapidly changing environment, both in discovery of new treatments and in the regulation of treatments, means that it is difficult to ascertain the next innovation or the individuals with the knowledge to develop the innovation. Instead, the firm wants to focus on creating social connections to support the emergence of collaborative relationships that will lead to innovation. GenCo IT managers report that they have been unable to find one tool that supports the development of social connections between disparate individuals. The emergence of effective teams that can work together to produce a product or service innovation requires not only that members have the necessary expertise but also that they can work cohesively together. As one manager said, “There is a difference between finding an expert and finding a ‘trusted’ expert.” Thus, the challenge is two-fold. There is the challenge of finding and connecting people with the needed expertise, but also providing a social context for trusting relationships to emerge. Managers feel that SNSs add important context to information such as: how is this person related to me? Who do they know that I know? Is their background similar to mine? This social context is especially critical to the working relationships of distant employees. Finally, management expects that SNSs can offer intangible benefits that would be valuable to GenCo. First, in an increasingly discontinuous work environment, SNSs offer a platform for creating a social community within the workplace. Second, management feels that young people, who have deeply integrated SNS use into their personal life, will be more likely to work at firms that support this communication platform. This GenCo example does not represent one particular firm but an aggregation of comments made by IT managers at a number of firms with employees, and hence knowledge, distributed across many geographic locations. GenCo, like many firms, is competing in an industry marked by rapid change, global competition, and the need for continuous innovation. I next discuss in more
detail the changes that are taking place in the workplace and the possible limitations of current communication media used in these firms.
