UdZ 1-2012

25 Unternehmen der Zukunft 1/2012 UdZ Organizational transformation through FSI framework: Personnel, Processes and Collaborative technologies Adapting collaborative technologies for organizational productivity Problem domain The challenges businesses faces today are not due to the inability to create information, but rather an inability to manage and to connect diverse information and knowledge sources. According to the report from Forrester Research in 2011, 80 % of learning and innovation is informal, which means only 20 % of poten- tial is exploitable through formal means. Yet organizations spend most of their ICT budget on formal aspects, which means they are spending 80 % of the company’s budget on programs that benefit only 20 % of employee´s work. Innovation and learning organizations must address this discrepancy by exploring non-conventional and unorthodox techniques and models. FSI Framework: Process and ICT categorization FSI framework, supported by evaluation approach and assessment tool, presents revolutionary me- ans for the organization’s management to analyse and restructure their process and IT profiles. The main focus of FSI framework is to highlight the knowledge and collaboration potentials of or- ganizational processes and then mapping them to the organizational collaborative technology. Thereby, identifying the mismatches between the process itself and employed ICT, as well as, providing the bases of organizational address the gaps. The framework is structured into three operati- onal parts: • First part presents an extended spectrum to include semi-formal category within both organizational process and ICT profile • Second part looks into the dynamics of or- ganizational knowledge and collaboration constraints • Third part maps the organizational ICT for knowledge and collaboration support Organizations, of all sizes, in every domain and in all geographies, are facing growing challenges to comprehend the scope of social media based technologies for their internal process use and for their networks. To assist the CIO’s and executives, FIR has developed a tool based framework to evaluate the impact of social web based collaborative technologies to support knowledge inten- sive processes. The FSI framework extends organizational spectrum to three categories of Formal, Semi-formal and Informal. The FSI tool places the emphasis on both business process and IT level. The FSI framework and approach are validated in conjunction with industrial and research clients as test cases. Initial finding, reflected in this article, show a dire mismatch between the process exploitable potential level and organizational ICT profile. At the end, a set of recommendations are included for the organizational management to consider for organizational transformation. Process categorization In process context, any entity (person, depart- ment, agency) expecting a specific outcome, from the given process for its further use, is considered a client and thus a stakeholder along with the staff performing the task. To make such a structure operational it is important to consider looking at the processes in a different light; i.e. instead of using process description as a strict workflow, organizations should take them as recommendations and guidelines. This is highly helpful in the markets that deal with high customization of products and services. To make change into a success we need a different representation and categorization of processes. In Figure 1 two perspectives on business process are traced to long tail curve; X-axis represents uniquely identifiable processes and Y-axis repre- sents the sum of the occurrences of a process. The curve on the left represents a conventional view of organizations and the curve on the right represents the contemporary view based on the FSI framework. In FSI process categorization, formal processes are automated with higher occurrence without any change in the configurations; traced to the left of the X-axis. The processes that require high level of configurations and are executed as a reaction to a non-traced unique event in the environment are Informal and are traced further right on the X-axis. The Semi-formal segment, represented in the right curve, relies on both formal and informal aspects of a process by considering the formal features and tracing them to the informal events, thereby making this segment as much traceable to the organizational value drivers as the formal processes. There are some specific high level characteristics associated with semi- formal processes: • Semi-formal tasks are triggered based on the occurrence of known events in the working environment that require the formal tasks to be adjusted or partially customised. Aktuelle Forschungsvorhaben