While Social Networking is getting into daily discussions everywhere, social network analysis is gaining acceptance as an effective organizational tool. However, there is still scattered knowledge about how to bring these two seemingly related issues together in organizations. This post summarizes and points out some new ways service organizations can capitalize on these trends to address new challenges.
Major challenges to service organizations
Today's service organizations are facing high demand for knowledge-intensive works. However, ever changing knowledge and skills in the service areas require organizations to maintain current business while learning and unlearning at an unprecedented pace. It is only efficient if organization members can together create and learn from their colleagues. In another word, service organizations need to retain talents and be learning organizations to be competitive in the long run.
This great challenge is complicated by the fact that service organization's workforce is often distributed in time and location. By the nature of service business, a part of the workforce is spending significant time on site, or working in time shifts. Many large organizations have branches in many locations, sometimes countries and regions. As works are getting more complex and demand becoming unpredictable, many organizations choose to employ contractors to gain access to skills and at the same time maintaining a certain number of employees for the stable part of the workload. Together with flextime, remote working and outsourcing, these factors make traditional learning and information exchanging methods ineffective.
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