Marketing is evolving toward a new thought-framework where the intangible experiences, transactional processes and relationships are becoming central to the brand and the customer has become a ‘co-creator’ of the brand rather than simply just a ‘user’.

The logic of branding is shifting from the conceptualisation of brand as the collection of attributes determined by the organisation, to the brand as collaborative, value creation between all stakeholders including organisations, employees and customers. This shift in logic is important when considering the Internet as a brand-building medium because its modern interactivity or web 2.0 places the user as a co-creator of the content and therefore the brand.

A strong brand provides a series of benefits to both buyers and sellers, simplifying the buyers’ search process and simplifying some of the sellers’ tasks, and enabling competitive advantage through preferential pricing.

Branding is defined as the process of creating value through the provision of a compelling and consistent offer and customer experience that will satisfy customers and keep them coming back¹ . Companies are beginning to realise that brands are among their most valuable assets.

The Internet has had a transformational impact on business shifting the balance of power from companies towards customers  adding further complexity and dynamism to branding strategy. These days brands are socially constructed by consumers who are actively involved in brand creation.

Consumers respond to brands within communities, where the members of the community have a sense of shared consciousness, personal stories, morals and traditions that are all associated with a branded good or service. A great example of this is the new mums community on the Pamper’s community platform. Their brand conversations are not limited to nappies and creams, they are part of building the Medical Aid brands as they share experiences and provide advice on which Medical Aid to choose.

Brand communities have the ability to influence members’ perceptions and actions and can lead to a socially embedded and entrenched loyalty. Although negative implications involving brand communities exist, such as the ability for negative rumours to pervade the community, competitors gaining information through the community’s internal communication and normative community pressure, brand communities offer an effective method for building brands. Companies are able to advance customer engagement with the brand, foster the creation of stronger brand relationships and in so doing mitigate customer exit barriers resulting in increased competitive advantage.

The development of a strong brand community significantly influences brand loyalty and as a result positively impacts on a company’s financial performance and competitive advantage. Online community members potentially have stronger commitment to the brand and are more likely to buy the brand repeatedly, spread more positive word-of-mouth information and provide useful information to the company.

Web 2.0 simplifies the development of an online brand because it facilitates the creation of user-generated content by the community and the interactions of its members around this content.

¹ Aaker, D. (1991) Managing Brand Equity: Capitalizing on the Value of a Brand Name. New York: Free Press

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Internet marketing is concerned with creating a Digital Footprint which serves the organisation’s marketing needs. It consists four distinct elements

• Providing information and education to the various stakeholders, whether they are potential customers, journalists, future employees etc. on the website;
• Brand building through developing on-line communities, creating digital profiles etc;
• Other on-line collateral to enhance “findability”; and
• Direct response advertising.

Budgets need to be divided along the same lines for the best results.

Budgeting for a website

The budget for a website is normally informed by the website strategy as it translates from the organisational strategy. Most of us have built brochure websites in the past, and budgeting is relatively straight forward. The following components should be found in a website budget.

• Scoping and specification in order to ensure that the site is fit for purpose and easy to use;
• Design and development;
• Hosting;
• Software – there is some question of whether the software budget belongs with Marketing or IT. My suggestion is that if it is a discreet web based software that only relates to marketing, for example a bulk mailing app, then keep it in the marketing budget. However if it is an enterprise software like Microsoft’s’ SharePoint, budget for it in IT and reallocate the relevant portion to marketing, in that way marketing can quantify its returns more effectively;
• Technical maintenance;
• Content development and management – this is usually where most website’s fail, because this part of the budget is included in technical maintenance and allocated to the web company who it maintaining the site. Content generation and management is a marketing function, not a technical function and should be allocated to an internal marketing resource or an outsourced content management partner;
• SEO – budget for the time for developing and tweaking the meta-data which is associated with the web page so that search engines can identify what your website is about and whether it is useful; and
• Constant and never ending improvement, the modern website is in a constant state of flux and the organisation reacts or pro-actively engages with its environment. The website must be budgeted for in such a way that it can be dynamic and serve the organisation’s best interests.

Budgeting for Brand Building

On-line brand building is the use of social media to create communities, whether they are fans on Facebook, followers on Twitter or registered members of specialist communities such as the Pampers’ mums who blog and message each-other about all things baby.

These communities are used by marketers to create positive associations with the brand, to make the organisation more accessible to its target market as well as to educate them as to the brand attributes etc.

Brand building, while quantifiable is difficult to relate directly into sales generation and so we see fixed marketing budgets in this area. The budget can be determined as a percentage of sales or at the discretion of a pro-active marketer. Marketers do, however, need to understand that the investment is not only a Rand investment into design and development, but there is a far higher investment in terms of human resources. Maintaining healthy brand communities is a labour intensive activity and requires dedicated time to be allocated to the community. It is important to remember that on-line brand building creates a launch platform for enhancing the effectiveness of direct response marketing and increasing conversion rates, as such it is an essential part of the on-line marketing strategy.

Budgeting for “Findability”

A large part of creating a digital footprint is concerned with “Findability”, in other words, making sure that the brand is served up to the potential consumer on-line, at the point when they require the brand’s products or services.

The additional on-line marketing collateral that enhances findability includes blogs and thought leadership articles on specialist forums, the personal profiles of prominent employees on social media such as Linked-in, on-line press releases etc.

The budget for these activities is mainly concerned with the time that people spend on creating the content on the web which ensures that your organisation is found by the right people at the right time. There will be a direct financial implication if you outsource the management of any of these aspects to a professional content generation firm, in the same way as you can outsource your PR.

So far, the on-line budget has been very straight forward, it has included the financial aspects agreed to with the executive and the cost in terms of human resources who are allocated to these highly labour intensive marketing activities. But when it comes to budgeting for direct response advertising, we see an entirely new budgeting pattern starting to emerge.

Budgeting for Direct Response Advertising

The modern web offers numerous ways to create demonstrable and predictable ROI from direct response advertising activities. Well thought-out Internet advertising campaigns produce highly quantifiable results. The big opportunity for business is to recognise that a positive ROI from an advertising campaign means that profits should be maximised by investing more into the campaign.

Progressive marketers should not be constrained by limited budgets, rather, they should be accountable for revenues and net profits and any budget should be informed by the desired outcome. This is set to change the static, set-piece budget battles that marketers have had to fight with their financial counterparts in the boardroom.

In the past 5 years, advertising has been turned on its head by the rise of social media. This new media enables us to contextualise on-line brand messages and calls to action within our audience’s digital environment. According to Forrester Research, interactive marketing will represent 21 percent of all marketing spend by 2014. Those who understand and exploit the new marketing opportunities should not be constrained by a “percentage of sales” budget and be empowered to drive increased profits through marketing programmes that deliver predictable and demonstrable returns on marketing investments.

Advertising is becoming more complex and harder to execute. Audience fragmentation has accelerated making mass market targeting irrelevant to all but the largest brands. The democratisation of content in social media has replaced print, radio and TV as authoritative contexts where product advertising and endorsements drive sales and market share.

Direct response advertising is targeted and measurable. We can determine, with accuracy and predictability, the marketing ROI by campaign. It is the marketer’s job to quantify financial expectations and monitor the results very carefully. If you know you are going to make a profit from your campaign then the constraint is not a budget but the supply of profit drivers. On-line advertising enables CMOs to figuratively buy R100 notes for R50 each, by investing in on-line campaigns that create demonstrable profits at a predictable and repeatable rate.

Building marketing programmes with predictable and reliable profits is the original promise of Internet marketing. High performance marketers start with the premise that advertisers will reach the right customers (i.e., those who are in market with a demonstrable interest in the product or service). This enables advertisers to pay only for the action (click through, register, fill in the form etc.) that is positive proof that the potential customer is in the market and considering their particular offering.

In direct response marketing, the potential customer is interested in a product or service, the advertiser only pays for the click, proof that he is interested in the product or service. With the click, the conversation between advertiser and consumer begins. As long as an advertiser understands the profitability of each sale and the conversion rate from click to sale, he knows the value of each search click (Value of a click = profitability of sale X conversion rate of click to sale). As long as the advertiser is buying clicks from the likes of Google for less than the value of each click, he is guaranteeing a profit on his direct advertising spend. The new limits on marketing spend is no longer the budget, but rather how much can be spent while maintaining the conversion and sale values, or the capacity of the advertiser to deliver products and services.

While the principle is simple, execution is hard because online programmes have many key success factors. These include:

• Managing a portfolio of multiple, evolving social media types with different conversion characteristics.
• Purchasing the media so as to limit advertiser risk (e.g., CPA, CPC, CPL);
• Targeting to ensure conversion rates and sale values stay satisfactory;
• Developing creative for all consumer touch points (both advertising and user experience) that drive conversion;
• Capturing, qualifying, and converting customer data. Advertisers need the right tools to transform customer information they gather into sales;
• Responding rapidly to initial interest. According to an MIT study, responding to consumer interest within 5 minutes versus the following day increases conversion 100-fold!; and
• Continuously optimising – Direct response advertising takes place in a dynamic marketplace, successful marketers will continuously optimise their media, creative, target segments and sales process to maximise profits.

For advertisers that understand well the value of a sale and how their advertising converts into sales, the marketing budget has been replaced with innovative, integrated marketing programmes that invest every Rand that drives a positive ROI possible.

The Internet has made marketing much more complex. But at the same time, it’s also much more measurable and accountable. Because CMOs can determine which parts of the marketing portfolio provide the greatest ROI, they can demand more from their marketing spend. Successful marketing is becoming less about bigger budgets and more about delivering ROI. Marketing requires being ruthlessly focused on delivering measurable profits.

Future winners in the on-line marketing space will understand that success means investing in continuous improvement that provide increasing and demonstrable profits.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

The 21st century with its advances in communication and technology requires us to be more agile than ever before in responding to business challenges and business leaders realise that helping employees access greater levels of collaborative intelligence at work is key to the future success of the business. It turns out that this is a way of motivating and retaining skilled people.

In a recent article released by GIBS entitled “The Age of Participation is about getting clever – together” (Gibs Review March 2008) they mention that research has shown a direct link between the level of collaboration within organisations and employee motivation, which depends on an individual’s attitude and the quality of their relationships within the team/entity.

Stephen James Joyce says in his book Teaching an Anthill to Fetch: Developing the Collaborative Intelligence of Teams, while that customer motivation impacts the quantity of business you do, employee motivation impacts the quality of business.

High levels of collaboration within an organisation improve employee retention, because people feel more connected and are much less inclined to leave.

Collaborative Intelligence is denoted with the symbol CQ, and is defined as is the ability to create, contribute to, and harness the power within networks of people. It enables participants to coordinate their actions closely with everyone else’s.

The GIBS Review quotes James Joyce as saying high CQ organisations:

• Attract and retain high quality team members
• Create a sense of meaningful participation
• Collaborate in highly effective ways
• Connect to a strong sense of purpose
• Balance leadership and followship

Moreover, high CQ holds many transformative advantages for organisations:

• People pull their weight and support each other to an extraordinary degree
• There is a vigorous pursuit for learning, at an individual and a the team level
• There is a sense of community within collaboratively intelligent teams/ departments, which others sense as something special.
• Teams or entities with high CQ expect challenges and meet them with one eye on the results and the other on what they can learn from each encounter.

Collaborative and collective intelligence are two distinct things

The GIBS Review warns that collaborative intelligence should not be confused with collective intelligence. They are two distinct things:

• Collective intelligence is the emergent intelligence of a collective entity, like a group or community.
• Collaborative intelligence is a way of exercising collective intelligence.

Co-intelligence can be used at any level of social organisation.

• A company can use better teamwork (collaborative intelligence) to build a more collectively intelligent company so that it can become dominant in its market (non-collaborative intelligence).
• A collectively intelligent group could use its collective intelligence in collaborative or controlling ways or use collaborative intelligence to help it compete.

Co-intelligence affects how organisations are managed. It is fundamental to our survival in the 21st century. This means we create serious problems, when we don’t use co-intelligence at the higher levels of social organisation.

Management guru, Professor Gary Hamel says few executives would argue with the traditional and outdated definition of a manager’s role: the art of getting others to do what you want them to do. In fact the Industrial Age was built on four basic principles:

• Managers have a clear vision
• Managers exert hierarchical power
• Managers get things done through bureaucratic procedures
• Managers motivate their people through extrinsic rewards.

Hamel has formulated four alternative, ‘inversed’ principles:

• Vision is often less effective than a guiding purpose and a desire for discovery
• Industrial Age hierarchic decisions are often less accurate than those based the wisdom of the crowd
• Bureaucratic procedure is often slower and less effective than a market-based system for allocating resources
• Human motivation is, in reality, built on intrinsic rewards not on money.

High CQ requires the right tools and the right attitude

Web 2.0 tools are most conducive to developing high collaboration quotients in organisations. Tools, like virtual meetings and Web-based applications and wikis -  make it possible to do things at scale without necessarily having large groups of people physically aggregated, with hierarchic structures, says Hamel.

Collaborative tools also enable business professionals to explore the true potential of the group or team to which they belong. But, as useful as they are, collaborative tools are only part of the solution. As with most IT, it is not the technology itself that enables the competitive advantage, but the people. Witness CRM, the panacea of all customer relationships in 2000. It wasn’t until we figured out that having the software and the process wasn’t enough that organisations started to incorporate people skills into the solution and we see more successful CRM applications

In the same way CQ is quantified by what employees can and will do together, rather than what a piece of software will allow them to do.

James Joyce suggests 10 ways to develop people’s collaborative intelligence at work:

1. Establish a ‘higher calling’ for the team

• This is a common purpose that represents a higher calling and brings context to the significance of the team’s existence.
• Providing a service to society is the simplest way that an organisation can isolate a higher calling for its existence.
• This process must be entered with full sincerity. A ‘true’ higher calling is reflective of the culture and intentions of the organisation as a whole. It is core to what the organisation stands ‘‘for’ and how it plans to achieve that.

2. Establish a reward system for innovation and creativity

• Ensure that rewards are equally available for ideas and innovations that don’t work as for those that do.
• Instead of focusing on the practical results of a particular idea, focus the level of innovation, even those that don’t result in ‘success’ in the conventional sense.
• Many ‘mistakes’ have gone on to became innovations of great value
• When we reward attempts at innovation, we demonstrate that it is the intention that is important.

3. Plan to use all of the experience within the team

• Think of the years of life experience represented in a room of 15 people with an average age of 35. It represents over 500 years of life experience.
• Great team leaders and managers know how to harness and tap into those years of experience and wisdom.

4. Raise awareness of the importance of shared assumptions

• Assumptions cause us to run on ‘autopilot’.
• Supported by assumptions that go unchecked and unchallenged, teams continue to run the same old routines for a long time without anyone noticing.

5. Encourage team members to find out about each other’s roles

• The more they know about others perspectives, the more likely they will be able to empathise with each other when the going gets tough.
• Empathy is an important business skill. The ability to put ourselves in another’s shoes helps us understand what others’ needs and motivations are.

6. Intention is very important

• Intention is just as important as attention. Intention directs attention.
• Having the whole team form a positive intention around an objective is one of the best ways of doing this.

7. Celebrate successes along the way

• Making celebration an integral part of the organisational life helps individuals feel more deeply connected to the entity.

8. Invest resources in learning

• Continuous improvement is only possible when individuals and the team as a whole learn new things.
• By publicly demonstrating support for the learning process, leaders model the importance of building ‘learning organisations’. This serves everyone in the long run.
• Establishing learning teams’ is one of the core strategies of running an organisation that is highly adaptable and responsive to change

9. Provide opportunities for sharing ideas during the project-planning phase

• Getting ‘buy-in’ for a project is much easier when everyone plays an active part in the planning process.

10. Balance ‘top-down’ with ‘bottom-up’ processing

• This means that directives and guidance from the top must be balanced with feedback and ‘street-level’ information.

When we look at each of these ideas, we see that 2.0 technologies lend themselves to supporting collaboration. With careful planning it is possible to create an Internet based platform that becomes a strategic tool for facilitating collaboration and organisational growth.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Many companies like to boast that employees are their greatest source of competitive advantage, yet the reality is somewhat different. it has become imperative for us to focus not only on how we attract and retain talented people, but also on how we engage them to deliver to our bottom line, to the best of their abilities.

Gone are the days of company loyalty. Talented employees see themselves as mobile and in control of the future of their careers. As the workforce becomes more mobile, gains control of negotiations with employers, the costs of managing and retaining talent intensify because we need to take a strategic approach to attracting talent and managing our competitive advantage.

So where do marketing and innovation fit into the picture?

In their book Marketing Management, Kotler and Keller (2006) say that “Marketing deals with identifying and meeting human and social needs”. The American Marketing Association (2004) defines marketing as “an organisational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organisation and its stakeholders”. The social definition of the role of marketing in society is “a societal process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating, offering and freely exchanging (products and) services of value with others.”

Substitute the word “customer” with “employee” and we see a remarkable similarity in the processes for attracting and retaining talent.

To escape the economically challenged business models that have their roots in a time when talent was plentiful, companies will need to adopt a strategic approach to the HR processes for attracting, retaining and engaging talent through innovation (Hamel 2007). Elements of this approach can be adopted from marketing best practice.

So how could we use innovation and marketing to mitigate the skills shortages?

There are several steps in creating, communicating and delivering value to employees and for managing relationships in ways that benefit the organisation and its stakeholders

Creating value through innovating employee processes

Many organisations have removed themselves from their employees and adopted processes to automate their management and standardise their delivery. This was entirely relevant in a manufacturing world such as we saw in the last century, where the unit we applied to make money was labour. Today, it is intellectual capital that provides competitive advantage. The rules have changed, we are no longer standardising delivery, but amplifying it.

Take a good look at your business. Are you creating sustainable competitive advantage through your most important assets? Have you evaluated and innovated the principles, processes and practices that are based on outdated economic and business environments? Wealth creation will come from ensuring that you get a superior return on your employee investment. This is the product of attracting, retaining and engaging superior skills that are committed to acting in the best interests of your organisation.

Delivering value to your employees

We find ourselves in a very interesting time; just as we see the rise of the power of the knowledge worker as a revenue generating resource, along comes a new technology in the form of web 2.0 which enables us to change the way we manage to get the best return from employees.

The Gartner Group describes web 2.0 as “a transformative force that’s propelling companies across all industries towards a new way of doing business characterised by harnessing collective intelligence, openness and network effects.” We derive value from our employees by engaging with them, delivering the value to them as knowledge workers and motivating them to act in the best interests of the organisation.

The future of how an organisation will derive value from its employees is gathering pace on the web. The Internet is the most adaptable, innovative and engaging thing that human beings have ever created (Hamel, 2007).

The modern role of employee management is to magnify human effort, this is now possible using web 2.0 to get more out of individuals by harnessing their initiative, creativity and passion and then equip them with the tools, incentives and working conditions to compound those efforts in ways that allow human beings to achieve together what they could not do individually.

Grow your employer brand

Critically evaluate your brand from the point of view of potential and existing employees. You may know that you work for a first-rate organisation, but does prospective talent know this and how much credibility does your employer brand have in the market? How can they recognise you as a superior employer above other companies?

In marketing there are three primary ways to communicate your value; advertise it, use compelling public relations and rely on word of mouth. When communicating to your employees and future employees, the best way, is to let them experience it and tell others about it. What better way than to harness the power of 2.0 as a strategic business tool in your organisation?

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Web 2.0 represents a fundamental change in the way that people interact, collaborate and perform in the 21st century. It has become necessary to review the way we think about many other business disciplines in response to this structural change in the way we could do business. In this article we look at the ergonomics and contextualise it in the web 2.0 environment.

Ergonomics is defined as the application of scientific information concerning objects, systems and environment for human use (International Ergonomics Association, 2007). The term ergonomics is derived from the Greek words ergon – work and nomos – natural laws.

Ergonomics is commonly thought of as how companies design tasks and work areas to maximise the efficiency and quality of their employees’ work. However, ergonomics comes into everything which involves people. Well designed working environments embody sound ergonomics principles; this includes web 2.0 enabled employee management and engagement systems.

The goal of ergonomics in the 21st century, in a 2.0 environment, should be to make the interaction of humans with humans and technology as smooth, intuitive and enabling as possible, enhancing the adoption of the system, improving performance, reducing error and increasing user engagement through comfort and aesthetics.

Cognitive ergonomics

Cognitive ergonomics in the 2.0 environment concerns mental processes such as perception, attention, cognition and collaboration as they affect interactions among humans and other elements of a system, for example – diagnosis, decision making, innovation, project management and planning. It focuses on the complex, cognitive thinking and knowledge-related aspects of system performance. Cognitive ergonomics enhances cognitive tasks by:

• Adopting a user-centred design of human-technology interaction
• The design of information technology and applications that support cognitive tasks
• The development of human mentoring, training and development programmes
• Work redesign to manage cognitive workload and increase skills optimisation
• (Social) Network and collaboration oriented application design

Macro-ergonomics

Macro-ergonomics is concerned with the optimisation of socio-technical systems, including organisational structures, policies, virtual spaces and processes. Relevant topics include virtual time and space scheduling, job satisfaction, motivational theory, supervision, risk mitigation, culture, teamwork, network and ethics.

Macro-ergonomics is concerned with the analysis, design and evaluation of work systems. The design of any job in a work system should focus on work modules, resource networks, tasks and knowledge, capacity and skill requirements. Other factors to consider in job design include the degree of autonomy, identity, variety, meaningfulness, feedback and social interaction. This is where web 2.0 technologies are increasingly playing a role in organisations.

Virtual ergonomics

The use of web 2.0 technologies in the business environment necessitates that we optimise human interactions in the virtual world in order to increase collaboration and productivity.

Digital Bridges has adopted the term “Virtual ergonomics” for an approach to ergonomics that emphasises a broad system view of design, organisational environments, culture, diversity and work goals in the 2.0 context. It deals with the design of collaborative interfaces and applications and the virtual environment. It focuses on the nexus of strategy, process, people, environment and technology and the consequences for competitive advantage and productivity.

It also deals with the optimisation of the designs of organisational and work systems through the consideration of employees, technological and environmental variables and their interactions. The goal of virtual ergonomics is an efficient work system at both the macro- and micro-ergonomic level which results in improved productivity and employee satisfaction and commitment.

We can thus see that while web 2.0 is an enabling technology, it is still merely a business tool. Through the application of certain strategic disciplines such as virtual ergonomics, it can be harnessed as an effective tool in order to optimise the benefits of collaboration for wealth generation and sustained competitive advantage for businesses.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Sustaining corporate performance is a challenge to most businesses. Many senior executives find it hard to shift their attention away from today’s share price and the next set of results. Fluctuations in exchange rates, rising interest rates, the demands of shareholders, Eskom’s load shedding and the talent crisis has intensified the pressure to focus on short-term performance.

In a series of articles written by McKinseys¹, they describe the way companies could take steps to ensure that they perform well in the years to come. Underlying these actions is a mental discipline which they express using the metaphor of human health, which improves when cared for and deteriorates when neglected.

Mental minefields

McKinseys describes three sets of impediments block the way to nurturing health in a corporate context.

The Mindfulness Trap

This is the tendency to be pulled back into a short-term performance perspective by the pressure of daily business.

The Cognitive Trap

This is the preoccupation with the belief that organisational health is soft and intuitive and therefore lacking the tough rigor and precision needed to drive performance. Another cognitive trap assumes that corporate health problems will arise in the unknown future rather than taking hold in the present.

The Self-Knowledge Trap

This is our tendency to say and believe one thing and do another. Managers often see themselves as strategic visionaries, although in practice they spend a remarkably small proportion of their time on anything related to strategy.

Attributes of health

What characteristics must companies have to be truly healthy? It’s important for executives to develop a clear picture of what sound health looks like before they try to embed healthy thinking in a company’s processes and people.

McKinseys identifies 5 characteristics of business health: resilience, execution, alignment, renewal and mutual reinforcement.

These 5 characteristics are not isolated from other influencing factors, such as the macroeconomic environment, the attractiveness of different industries, or luck. They represent a coherent and interrelated set of ideas.

Resilience

Markets can be tough, clients capricious and competitors relentless. Managers must contend with unpredictable disruptions such as financial-market fluctuations, inflation and crime. Healthy companies are practised at spotting and managing key risks, and they build mechanisms and have the resources — cash reserves or backup IT systems — to get through difficult periods.

Execution

Even as companies hedge against external shocks, they need to make good decisions, and perform essential tasks. Brilliant products, clever promotions, or surging markets can obscure sloppy execution for a while. But sooner or later this kind of fragility will be exposed.

Companies that execute well share certain attributes: distinctive capabilities, the ability to make sound and timely decisions, strong forecasting skills and employees who understand their roles and responsibilities.

Alignment

Healthy companies, achieve a cohesive purpose because they have a compelling vision of the future shared by everyone connected with them. They articulate a shared identity that rises above individuals, functions and business units; reflect stakeholder concerns in corporate values; and reinforce the sense of common purpose with formal mechanisms, such as performance contracts.

Renewal

Healthy companies invest in their future by expanding into markets where existing assets and competencies provide real leverage, usually with the help of a winning formula that has been honed from experience and facilitates smooth integration across the entire value chain and the efficient extraction of synergies.

Renewal requires attention to softer issues, such as the ability to attract and retain talent, innovate and adapt to change, both culturally and strategically. Markets and industries move quickly; most companies do not.

Mutual Reinforcement

Organisational practices, such as hiring policies, training programmes, and consistent and mutually reinforcing behavioural incentives act in concert to deliver on the strategic objectives of healthy companies.

Effective communication and collaboration are crucial to ensuring that assets, processes, relationships, and management practices act in concert. Typically, information flows across the organisation, as well as from top to bottom, tapping into social networks beyond the formal organisational structure. Web 2.0 based IT platforms reinforce this kind of communication.

Healthy actions

The discipline of managing tensions among the different characteristics of health requires willingness by the organisation to view the performance system in its full complexity. Vital corporate and individual processes are highlighted by breaking down a company’s resources into separate performance and health components, ensuring a balanced portfolio of strategic and tactical initiatives, integrating that approach into planning and budgeting, identifying metrics for assessing health, and building health into formal performance mechanisms. This will help an organisation to focus routinely and instinctively on the health imperative.

Monitor the way you allocate resources

McKinseys recommend that organisations break down resources into two categories—those devoted to driving performance and those devoted to deriving health. One easy indicator is labour costs: executives should know how many of their employees work on delivering the current operating plan as opposed to looking after the underlying health issues. That way, they can have well-informed conversations about whether or not they are investing resources in a balanced way.

Another indicator is financial spend, by taking all the money going out of the business during a quarter and splitting it into two piles: payments for current operations (expenses necessary to generate that quarter’s revenue) and payments for everything else. The first stack can be defined as performance related; the second represents longer-term investments, excluding in-kind capital replacements. Regularly making these calculations allows executives to see how much IT expenditure, goes toward innovation and R&D (health) and how much toward improving labour productivity (performance). It also allows them to compare the company’s investments in health-related activities (such as brand building, lobbying, and community outreach) with the cost of outsourcing operations to boost profitability (performance).

Balance the strategic portfolio

Companies can keep an eye on their health by regularly assessing their business ideas and new initiatives — projects or programmes to change or improve something in the business. They evaluate these projects both by mapping the point when each would be likely to create the greatest value and by looking at whether a project involves familiar, routine work that plays to their strengths and experiences or is a novel departure, which could be riskier and consume additional resources. Healthy companies keep a balance between the two and know that investing for the long term means action today.

Integrate into core processes

Extending health-oriented strategic thinking into detailed planning and budgeting processes is the next step; an analysis of the underlying health of cash flows should inform traditional budget reviews. Initiate, as a formal part of the performance-management process, a health dialogue that touches on the relevance of investment priorities or the product pipeline to a company’s future performance. Review human-resource allocations and the way executives spend their time .

Have the metrics to match

Many businesses make a religion out of counting their new customers, the growth of their revenues, their financial ratios. But these metrics don’t necessarily measure corporate health, so executives should develop a number of health variables for each of the attributes vital to the health of the business. Resilience, for example could be tested by tracking credit fraud volumes or customer lifetime values. Execution skills could be measured by determining the turnaround time. A company can monitor its alignment by calculating the proportion of its senior managers who disagree about strategies and corporate priorities. To concentrate the minds of its executives, it can test its capacity for renewal by tracking the share of its revenues from new markets and new products and its mutual reinforcement by calculating how much of its revenues come from products and services that span business units and from integrated solutions, or by understanding which policies are counterproductive to strategy. In South Africa , we often see a commitment to BEE undermined by a policy of employing internally first before going to the market. This policy maintains the status quo and doesn’t engender diversity and change

Reinforce through performance

Once a company has redesigned its regular strategic, budgeting, and planning processes to inject a strong dose of “healthy” thinking — and appropriate metrics are in place — executives must embed health in formal people-management mechanisms, including performance contracts, incentives, career path planning, and staffing decisions. Managers at all levels should know the expectations set for them. Companies should use the metrics discussed earlier to structure evaluations ensuring that employees reap rewards as much for doing health-building work as for enhancing performance.

The precise weighting of targets depends on the situation of the individual company and the extent to which it already has struck the right balance between performance and health. The early — and full — involvement of managers in any discussion about adopting this approach is a key prerequisite for success.

Implement and Enterprise 2.0 architecture

Enterprise architecture is the practice of applying a comprehensive and rigorous method for describing a structure and behaviour for an organisation’s processes, communication, IT systems, personnel and organisational structure, so that they align with the organisation’s core goals and strategic direction.

Web 2.0 is a trend in the way we design technology that changes the way we use the Internet to facilitate creativity, information sharing and transparency through collaborative processes and communication. These tools ensure that everyone is exposed to the organisation’s vision, thinking, perception of risk and experience. This mutual understanding leads to greater organisational resilience, execution, alignment and renewal, which in turn leads to healthy organisations which can sustain their performance.

Notes

¹ Robert L. Cross, Roger D. Martin, and Leigh M. Weiss, “Mapping the value of employee collaboration,” The McKinsey Quarterly, 2006 and Robert L. Cross, Salvatore Parise, and Leigh M. Weiss, “The role of networks in organizational change,” The McKinsey Quarterly, April 2007.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

The Balanced Scorecard¹ was developed by Kaplan and Norton as a strategic approach and performance management system, which enables organisations to translate a company’s vision and strategy into implementation. It works  from 4 perspectives:

• Financial perspective;

• Customer perspective;

• Business process perspective; and

• Learning and growth perspective.

These perspectives are a useful departure point for translating Organisational Strategies into implementable Digital Strategies.

The Financial Perspective

Timely and accurate financial data is always be a priority, but the emphasis on financial issues can lead to an unbalanced situation with regard to other perspectives, therefore we use the financial perspective as a quantification of the success of the other elements of the Digital strategy and programmes.

The Financial perspective is satisfied when we are able to capture financial information to report on the period. Generally, when implementing a Balanced Scorecard Digital Strategy, we determine which numbers we will be interested in seeing at the end of the financial period and how we will quantify the success of the implementation and applications.

These numbers could include ROI on the digital investment, percentage increase in sales, reduced cost of attrition and recruitment, increased margin on innovation, R&D etc. The numbers are determined by the organisational strategy and the metrics which the organisation choose to report on. They could be as simple as Balance Sheet and Income Statement line items.

The Customer Perspective

Using the Customer perspective to develop digital strategies should be the most lucrative aspect of the digital strategy.

The customer perspective elements of the Digital Strategy include providing information through the website, sales enablers including eCommerce applications, customer self service where customers can manage their own portfolios through extranets, building communities of value where customers can network and engage with each other, crowd-sourcing initiatives so that the customer can help the organisation design products, using social media such as blogs to educate the customer, social tools to create and retain relationships and a host more applications.

When developing customer facing applications it is important to note that these are not just transactional applications and that the their value is also derived from the data that we can collect around the clients which may be lead indicators of future value. For example on-line community satisfaction is a lead indicator; if members are not satisfied, they will find other suppliers that will meet their needs. Poor performance is a lead indicator of future decline.

The Business Process perspective

This perspective refers to internal business processes. Key applications for digital strategies include the development of collaboration tools, document management, content management, online project management, leave management and in-situ knowledge management tools to name a few. These applications are more successful when accessed through the Intranet, and perceived by the employee to be part of the Intranet, rather than a stand alone application.

Learning and Growth perspective

This perspective includes employee training and corporate cultural attitudes related to both individual and business improvement.

The Intranet is the key application for managing employees, programmes that can be run through the Intranet include employee relationship programmes, on-line learning and education, strategic behavioural alignment, succession programmes and performance management dashboards.

Management by Fact

The use of the Balanced Scorecard enables us to measure our Digital Strategies, applications and implementations effectively.

The goal of measuring is to see more clearly and to make wise long-term decisions. Measurements are derived from strategy to provide critical data and information about key processes, outputs and results. Data and information needed for performance measurement and improvement could include: customers, sales, market, competitive comparisons, supplier, employees, cost and financial data. Analysis uses data to determine trends, projections, and cause and effect. Data and analysis is used to support a variety of company purposes, such as planning, reviewing company performance, improving operations, and comparing company performance with competitors’ or with ‘best practices’ benchmarks.

A major consideration in performance improvement involves the creation and use of performance measures or indicators. A comprehensive set of indicators tied to performance requirements will align all business activities with organisational goals.

¹ Kaplan, R.S. and Norton, D.P. (2006) Alignment Using the Balanced Scorecard to Create Corporate Synergies Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Have you ego-googled yourself recently?

For those of you who are wondering what an “ego-Google” is, it is when you do a Google search for yourself, and it is an essential part of the management of your professional (and personal) brand. Of course there are a lot of other search engines out there and it won’t do any harm to “ego-bing” etc. yourself.

Ego-googling is your professional mirror to your digital brand, in other words it reflects your on-line profile, in the same way as your business cards, CV and behaviour reflect your professional brand. When we leave home in the morning, most of us take care to look professional for work because we recognise that first impressions count. The Internet makes it so much easier for us to discover things that many people now Google someone before meeting, hiring or doing business with them. It is important that our professional off-line brand that we have crafted for success (all be it unconsciously in some instances) matches our digital brand, because the digital brand is rapidly becoming the new first impression.

If someone Googles you and they don’t find any indication of your expertise, or worse still, they see evidence on your Facebook profile that you are a drunken reprobate, chances are you won’t even know that you have missed a business or job opportunity.

Finding New Business

Many people start the business process by using search terms to identify the players with whom they may do business. If your potential client is looking for a CRM consultant, say, chances are that they will search for “Customer Relationship Management Consultant in Gauteng” etc., and if you emerge as the pick of the CRM bunch (by appearing in the top three results) then you have done a fantastic Search Engine Optimisation job. But constructing your brand so that search engines can find you is more than having the right technical tags on your website. What if the business hasn’t realised that your services are available? How do you make sure that opportunities come your way?

In order to ensure that people who are searching for professional services find you, you need to leave a digital trail of evidence that you are an expert in your field. In the real world, you would speak at conferences and network at business breakfasts. In the digital world you can participate in on-line industry forums, or upload presentations that you have developed on the subject.

Managing Client Relationships

Today, with web 2.0, the boundaries between businesses and clients are blurring, and organisations are increasingly experienced as a collection of people, rather than an institution. People and businesses can enhance their future success by ensuring that the individuals’ professional brands are carefully built and maintained on the Internet. This is a pretty labour intensive exercise in the beginning, filled with more introspection than many of us have undertaken in a long time. The maintenance of a professional profile is a relatively pain free discipline.

Steps to creating a personal professional digital brand

So you have recognised that you need to maintain your professional profile on-line, what do you do next? Do you register yourself on Plaxo, Ning, Linked-in, Facebook, Twitter etc.? This is the equivalent to getting someone to design you a logo and thinking that you have created a brand.

Personal brands are all about how people experience you, what they believe about you and what they expect from you, it talks a lot of thought to craft an personal brand.

Step 1 Who do you need to be in your professional life to be successful?

We all have CV’s of experience that we have built up over the years (some more comprehensive than others). We used those CV’s or experiences to get to the professional position that we are in now. The first thing to do is to dust off (metaphorically speaking) and update that old CV. This is the starting point, your collection of skills, education, awards, experience and competencies. The next step is to ask yourself what your CV should look like for what you want to be professionally, and to update it to be the framework of your professional brand. You may also identify that you need to acquire more skills, or register with more professional bodies etc.

Step 2 Prove it

Once you have understood who you are and who you need to be, you can set about creating a strategy for creating your professional brand on-line.

If your CV indicates that you are a great writer, include proof of your writing skills as collateral in your professional brand strategy. Ask yourself what you could blog about that proves that you have fabulous writing skills. The same goes for blogging to demonstrate innovation, thought leadership, creativity, management and leadership etc.

You need to design some evidence that you are as good as you say you are. At the same time, look for public endorsements of your professional brand, do you have recommendations from clients or bosses, have you won any awards for projects you have managed?

Step 3 Select your Social Media

There are many choices of Social Media out there for you to choose to create your digital brand. Because you know what you want to achieve, you can select them to support your strategy.

If it is important for you to be seen as a fun loving guy, because you are a tour operator, then Facebook and Twitter are perfect mediums for you to upload photographs and provide ongoing commentary on how much fun people are having around you. If it is necessary that people trust you, let’s say you are a doctor or accountant, then by all means, use Facebook, but ensure that the information about you and the updates are all about wholesome things like family rather than debauched parties. Make sure that your updates are thoughtful, not silly.

Look for communities of interest like the 702 ad feature group, where if you are an advertising professional, you can demonstrate your knowledge of the advertising world, by commenting meaningfully on the latest advertisements.

If you are a professional, either self employed or working within a large corporate, choose Linked-in and Plaxo and pro actively surround yourself with people that you want to be associated with. Link up to industry leaders, join in relevant conversations and discussion groups.

Blogging is an incredibly good way to express yourself, many of the social media platforms enable you to pull in blogs that you have written on other sites, so that no matter where a potential opportunity encounters you, you will be equipped with the professional collateral that demonstrates your professional brand.

Step 3 Maintain

The modern internet is all about dynamism, we no longer create brochureware once and leave it for an annual review. Our professional profiles are ongoing manifestations of our personal brands and need to be kept active so that we don’t run the risk of an out dated (read unkempt) personal brand.

Many people will be reading this article and thinking “I couldn’t do this, it would be like boasting, or vain”.

The reality is that in the same way as you wouldn’t dream of leaving home inappropriately dressed and you engage with people in the real world (through phone calls, eMail or in the boardroom), on the Internet people are assessing the professional value you have to them, and in the plethora of noise on the web, you have to stand out as a professional brand to be taken seriously.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Social Media is restructuring society, marketers need to adapt if they are going to participate in the opportunities this offers us.

Throughout time, communication systems have formed the foundations of society and have determined the development of civilisations. The parameters of communication have always been time and geography. Some communication occurs over time when the transmitting party and the receiving party are not in the same time dimension, for example reading books. Other communication requires the parties to be in the same geography and time, for example face to face. There are many permutations in between.

Witness when people wandered the earth in tribes, much of their communication and therefore cultural development was related to the welfare of the tribe and restricted to their direct contact with one another. The communication was primarily face to face in an instant of time and very little evidence of what was said remained except in the individual memories. Then mankind developed iconography to communicate over time and distance by leaving messages for each other that could be interpreted despite the intervals of time.

The printing press extended peoples’ ability to share ideas and enabled anyone who could read to participate in society’s dialogue. This was an early form of mass, one directional communication over both geography and time.

Imagine how big the world became with the advent of network technologies like telephones, where numbers of participants and geographies were no longer the constraining parameters of civilisation. As a communication tool however, telephones are primarily immediate. People speak directly to each other and the telephone does not automatically capture the conversation in a format that can be analysed over time.

When a society shifts from one communication model to another, all institutions in society get reinvented according to the new logic of the medium. The advent of web 2.0 means that mass communication is no longer a broadcast communication, instead we have multiple people participating in network communication, unfettered by time or geography, on a scale we have never seen before.

Markets are systems where people and businesses are connected and influence each other. As businesses, we will benefit from approaching social networking from a social sciences perspective, and using metrics and visualisations of the dynamics of the system, which can be translated into action plans for communication.

For the first time we can capture and analyse data about network communication, because we are freed from the constraints of time and geography. We can use visualisation to understand the structure of networks in the market, how individuals are connected within their communities and how communities are connected. By understanding these structures, we can design strategies to move messages, products or ideas backwards and forwards through the network efficiently. Instead of using pure segmentation based on the psychographics and demographics of our audience, we can now enhance our marketing with the behavioural analysis of networks and patterns of communication.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Organisational network analysis is the use of Business Intelligence (BI) on the relationships, processes, workflow and exchanges between employees. It can be used by businesses to identify potential opportunities or disruptions.

Work is routinely conducted between employees, partners and customers without a clear understanding of the roles that people play in the organisational network or quantifying the exchanges that occur.

Interactive Intranets provide employees with their own profiles and access to web 2.0 apps such as wikis, blogs, instant messaging, document sharing and other collaborative tools. Companies that have interactive Intranets, can capture and analyse data as their employees work and use it to understand the hidden economic patterns within the organisation.

Organisational network analysis explores the constraints, connections, communication and information flows between individuals, or nodes, in a network. Businesses can use organisational network analysis to develop strategies by identifying, amplifying and exploiting business patterns and capitalising on opportunities that emerge.

There are three variations of organisational network analysis that organisations can use to develop strategies.

• Employee Analysis

Determines which employees are critical to business performance, overcommitted or bottlenecks to getting work done, or untapped sources of insight. Companies can identify which employees are maximising their performance by collaborating effectively across the functional silos in the organisation.

They can also understand the real processes as they actually manifest themselves during the employees’ working day, rather than as they are designed to work. Very often employees adapt processes to work for them, this may suggest more practical ways to get the work done, but it might also indicate hidden risky practise.

• Influence analysis

Here we identify influential people, associations or trends. This can help an organisation understand which employees are most influential or competent so that they have a higher presence in the organisation. It can surface recruitment and attrition patterns which could influence the culture of the organisation and the effectiveness of its design.

• Economic Analysis

This examines the transactions and relationships that create economic value. It can help an organisation understand which stakeholders in their value networks (suppliers, partners, coalitions) are meeting their performance commitments. The relationship between value and time can be examined and greater efficiencies be built into the work environment.

This is analysis can be used to optimise the allocation of people, processes and information as new patterns emerge. It also supports a performance-driven culture, by focusing on lead indicators and using measurable results to drive behaviour.

Organisational network analysis provides intelligence about the networks on which businesses depend to achieve performance goals by providing tools with dashboards that summarise key parameters.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.