Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Day 2: Spontaneous Association and Tom Kelly of Moxie and Tony Martins of Teva Canada

Tom Kelly from Moxie Software is presenting with Tony Martins of Teva Pharmaceuticals (disclosure:  Teva is a client of my law firm's.). 

Tom Kelly

Tom Kelly first spoke in somewhat repetitive fashion about how he thought businesses should approach implementing social software. 

The most exciting companies to work at were the one where people are engaged.  The speed at which things are moving has changed in tennis and football just as in our businesses.

Three key elements of any social platform are simple design (simplicity), knowledge, and thought leadership. 

Knowledge is the key part of what we are trying to accomplish.  Knowledge is about sharing what different people know to accomplish a given goal. 

How do you design software for how people work?  People work in groups, on projects.  It must have an interative process to bring innovative ways for people to work.  It should not bankrupt company. 

We do need to integrate into existing systems.  Like Facebook and Twitter, you can add something simple that will let people connect. 

We can change from ""push" model of major enteprise software changes every 18 months to doing something simple (he keeps saying that!). 

Tony Martins

Tony Martins runs the supply chain for Teva Canada.  He started exploring social business in 2005, with Wikinomics. 

The key ingredient is "spontaneous association."  Human beings have an amazing ability to combine their skills to resolve problems.  We are born that way, and can do it as long as we are allowed to.

Teva has used this in the organization. 

There are many changes in regulations, consumer behavior, and the world around the company.  The challenges they are confronting are not what they expected would happen.  For instance, managers at Teva were spending more than half of their time addressing unexpected events. 

A small group of people can come up with solutions much faster than a traditional command-and-control approach where problems are kicked up the organizational chart. 

Provide environments where people can bring their skills together quickly.  Spontaneous association has to happen somewhere.  Over time, Teva found that virtual collaboration spaces (based on Moxie Software) worked well. 

What happened in those spaces was becoming aware of those problems, and leaving it up to the people involved to address.

His most recent experience with business value of this approach was that between January and April of this year (2011), manufacturing cycle time was reduced 40% and reduced face-to-face meetings by 50%. 

He'll be presenting in a workshop later today (with Sameer Patel). 

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