Digital Pandey: Rise of the underdog from your IT backyard

When Bollywood star - Salman Khan - decided to take on the role of Chulbul Pandey in the blockbuster – Dabangg, little did anyone foresee the impact of social media and customer segmentation in the film industry. While many corporations still stayed resistant to tweet or create a fan page, here was a fantasy hero breaking records with more than 19,000 followers in one day and tweeting his experience live during the shooting of this movie. The positioning of the brand – Chulbul – was strategic, and marketing of ‘Munni Badnam Hui’ was extravagant. Touching the hearts and minds of a target audience, this movie set out to become a lesson for businesses to learn, consume, and act upon.

Can the real Chulbul please stand up? Let's be honest. The PC age, Y2K phase, and Dot com era have come and gone; each of them highlighting the relevance of effectively managing Information Technology (IT) in the business environment. Despite multiple attempts to prove its worth, the IT department in many organizations is still undermined and under-funded. It continues to struggle to change its perception of being merely a support function for the business.

So what is it going to take for IT to prove its worth and come in the limelight? When will companies truly believe in IT as a strategic driver for the business?

Well, the time has come!

Today there is a lot of pressure for IT to innovate in support of their businesses and help drive new product development, increase operational efficiencies, and improve customer satisfaction. Similar to social media, other disruptive trends such as cloud and mobility have also emerged. IT is now on the forefront of business. It seems as if it’s now or never.

While the time to rise and shine has come for IT, the expectations to drive business strategies have also increased dramatically. IT will need to continue to act as a support function for the business. But now with the expectation to drive technology-driven strategic changes in the enterprise, IT seems to officially have an added responsibility of playing the role of Chulbul Pandey in today’s business context.

Here are three ways to Dabangg-ify your IT department to meet new business expectations:

1. Get business-savvy. If IT wants to lead fearlessly, then it will need to develop its business acumen as well as understand the business well. Going forward, IT will increasingly be invited to present their innovation plans at board meetings. Skills such as financial forecasting and budgeting will become imperative to justifying large investments. These new IT investments are bound to face resistance from CFOs if IT is unable to demonstrate their value in a clear and measurable way. IT will need to develop business cases and explain how new technology investments will make the company more profitable and competitive in the marketplace.

2. Effectively align IT with business. IT will not only need to talk business but also closely work with business to understand their goals and effectively apply new technologies to meet their goals. However, in order to work closely work with business, IT leaders will firstly need to build strong relationships with key business stakeholders and patiently listen to their current concerns and future needs. In doing so, IT will be able to become a trusted partner on the journey to innovation.

For instance, it is not uncommon to find companies these days adopting customer centricity as the means to sustainable business growth. As consumers spend increasing proportion of their time connecting and expressing themselves on the internet today, companies are looking for ways to leverage these social behaviors to understand, acquire, and retain their customers across digital channels. These intensive data collection and analysis efforts can only be successful if IT effectively partners with business teams – Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service. IT should not just provide technology services and tools but use the opportunity to effectively apply these consumer-facing platforms and technologies to meet the goals of the business. To ensure effectiveness, reduce risk, and justify cost of a radically new technology investment, a detailed technology assessment (including a proof of concept) should be collaboratively conducted and reviewed with business. Once the project is approved, releases should be incrementally rolled out. To build further credibility for such efforts, tying technology metrics to business metrics is also strongly recommended.


3. Sustain innovation capabilities. Social media, cloud computing, mobility, analytics, and Green IT are some of the emerging zones of technology heroism. This is only the beginning of an age of enterprise innovation. Tomorrow there will be a new wave of technologies and trends coming our way that companies will want to leverage in order to refine their business processes or even redefine their business models. 

To drive the business with IT-enabled innovation, IT leaders will need to embody creative leadership and inspire others to walk the path of innovation. 

They will need to develop the right long term strategy and supporting structure, such as creating a nimble, high performance team of business-savvy IT resources and dedicating time to assessing emerging technologies on a regular basis.

To summarize, if you are a part of the IT department in your organization and are excited about innovation, chances are that there is a Digital Pandey in you. So why not take this opportunity to transform yourself, put measurable value from innovation on the enterprise table, and change the perception for IT in your organization!

Talent Management 2.0: How HR can use Web 2.0 to attract and retain Talent

Attracting and retaining talent are two major challenges for HR these days.

If you think about it, talent managment really starts from recruiting through on-boarding; and carries on until the employee is comfortable with the culture, is made to feel at home in the organization, and is equipped with the tools to be productive.

Talent attraction
Some thoughts around how HR can use Web 2.0 concepts and tools to attract talent:

1. Use employee-generated videos to describe a day in their life or what the company really means to them. These videos are able to establish a more "real" connection with potential recruits.

2. Create company's external-facing social networking platform where candidates can ask questions or chat live with recruiters about the company and recruiters can share experiences more than formal facts about the company. They can also meet other candidates. E.g. companies use Facebook as a social networking platform for potential recruits.

3. Create a virtual / rich 3D experience for employees to learn more about the company using cool self service features, have walk in interviews or interactive info sessions, get a virtual feel of the culture, and overall learn more about the company through rich media interfaces. E.g. companies can use SecondLife to provide such a rich and close to real experience.

4. Conduct video conferences or virtual interviews, and accept multimedia/video resumes.


Talent Retention
The real work for HR really begins once the offer is accepted. Promises made during the interviews need to be fulfiled. Many times a company hires a person for a specific role but what really keeps that person in his chair is not merely the role he was hired for. For large companies, it is difficult for HR to provide every employee the attention they deserve. Therefore HR needs to consider providing 'self-service' tools and methods to retain employees.

To retain an employee it is important to provide him the right tools to be productive, and that includes providing the ability to quickly establish the social connections that he needs to be successful in job. We all know that work is really done through informal networks and with the tacit or unstructured type of work these days, structured tools and systems that exist in organizations today do not help.

Some thoughts around how HR can use Web 2.0 concepts and tools:

Once the offer is accepted, HR provides the new employee with a URL to access the intranet for the following:

1. Provide the ability to create his/her own profile on a social networking platform on the intranet.

2. Start with searching employees in the company who may be a friend, classmate, or worked with him before. This can be done using web services that read directly from the employee's personal address books in Yahoo, Gmail, MSN, etc. and finding employees from the company's address book and social networking portal - similar to the Friend Finder feature in Facebook.

3. Also by feeding his interests into the portal so that he can quick find others with similar interests.

4. Provide the ability to search and join online groups. Suggest online groups based on his interests, such as volunteer / social service groups - an important criteria to select an employer these days.

5. Allow personal blogs, wikis, and ability to tag employee-generated content.

Social networking can specifically turn new hires into star performers, and should also be considered for faster onboarding. Such web-based onboarding, also known as 'relational onboarding', is a shift from adminstrative onboarding.

These methods can particularly be useful in tough times, i.e. when resolving issues at work. They can particularly prevent employees from leaving the company when they are not satisfied with their current roles by letting them search and apply for internal job postings.

Wondering whether these methods really add any business value. Watch slide 4 at this link! And click here for on-going research on HR and Web 2.0.

Would love to hear your thoughts on talent management using Web 2.0 and next generation internet trends.