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How Web 2.0 technologies can help orchestrate people, processes, and content to achieve strategic success.

How Web 2.0 technologies can help orchestrate people, processes, and content to achieve strategic success.

The world of work is changing. Disruptive forces are at play in business and are compelling life sciences organizations to rethink traditional content communication and the way we define an information worker. We must address these disruptive forces in order to compete globally, increase product pipeline, and speed time-to-market and protect the corporate memory resident in employees and applications.

In this, the first of a two-part series on social media in the life sciences, Therese Harris, Program Manager for Life Sciences at Open Text, explores how life sciences organizations can adapt the innovations of Web 2.0 to meet organizational objectives.

More social workplaces and more social marketplaces raise productivity even as resources become scarce. They tap into the collective intelligence across researchers, medical practitioners and business partners. They open the door to mentorship and knowledge sharing to information workers who are not traditional desktop PC users. And they connect people to the content and processes they need to get their jobs done.

Enterprise 2.0

Setting and communicating goals and measurable objectives for an Enterprise 2.0 initiative in a life sciences organization is critical to successful implementation and for navigating change management challenges. What are the objectives of the project? What engagement levels are expected and achievable? Where do you start? Identify tangible objectives with measurable and meaningful milestones, include participants from a variety of job levels to test and pilot solutions, consider risk and compliance issues proactively and ensure managers are supportive of goals and targets ... these are the keys to success.

Enterprise 2.0 allows life sciences organizations to adapt the innovations of Web 2.0 to meet organizational objectives. It facilitates cooperation among information workers, provides a secure and managed collaborative environment for information creators and producers, and helps orchestrate your people, processes and content to achieve strategic success.

Life sciences organizations are recognizing that they need to innovate to thrive. But disruptive forces are at play, and business and government are under pressure to reduce costs and freeze or reduce workforces while delivering the same quality of product or service. Technology can facilitate this new productivity imperative. Delivery of the social workplace and social marketplace while meeting social compliance objectives is the end goal of an Enterprise 2.0 strategy.

The social workplace is an ideal expression of Web 2.0 technologies to connect people with their peers and with critical content and information. Culturally, it helps break down hierarchical and departmental barriers to innovation and idea exchange across functional areas. Technologically, it introduces simpler information creation and communication tools and uses the Web to bridge geographical and organizational gaps.

The social marketplace recognizes that the Web has opened up conversations among and between customers, prospects, employees, citizens, and external trusted advisors. Business is increasingly done based on peer-to-peer or word-of-mouth recommendations. Content and information can flow unimpeded out to a diverse audience who can consume the personalized data as needed and then offer rapid and simple feedback and commentary to the enterprise.

Social compliance is a necessary consideration for life sciences organizations that recognize the value of the social workplace and social marketplace but need to balance the risks inherent in opening new channels of peer-to-peer and frontline-to-consumer communication. Traditional compliance pressures are reactive; records retention mandates and restrictive access to content are often driven by regulation. Social compliance ensures proactive prevention of unauthorized information exchange as communication channels become more transparent. As part of an Enterprise 2.0 strategy, these three elements can:

Accelerate employee engagement and productivity - Employees who use technology to strengthen their internal social and expert networks can respond quickly to demands and opportunities. These tools make collaboration and information access easy and intuitive, allow streamlining of routine tasks that free information workers to focus on more complex and challenging tasks.

Protect and value corporate memory - Preserving corporate memorythe content, context and discussion that led to decisions and actionsis essential for continuity of operations, consistency of goals, archival preservation and education of employees. Capture of content, however, is not sufficient. Allowing people to share, re-use and learn from this collected knowledge contributes to productivity and accurate information disclosure.

Develop trusted relationships - Trust occurs when we become aware of the expertise, experience and track records that surround people as nodes in that network. Trust in the sources of knowledge greatly affects the decision to subscribe to, use and communicate information.

Educate and enable channels - The most critical battles are won by those organizations that can deliver knowledge and insight to partners, customers and prospects at precisely the right moment. This builds loyalty, engagement and ultimately revenue opportunities.

Reach out to new markets

Customers can be the voice of your success. A pharmaceutical company can spend millions of dollars on brand awareness or it can let the brand speak for itself through the positive communication across existing ecosystems. Embracing social media, cultivating effective online engagement and delivering superior customer experiences will result in new business opportunities.

The Social Workplace - Employees who actively share their knowledge emerge as experts, and companies that encourage employees to share their expertise build stronger peer-to-peer networks, accelerating internal productivity gains.

Life sciences organizations that provide simple, interactive, personalized community tools can achieve measurable positive results with a social workplace: attraction, retention and management of talent; transparency in the corporate governance and communication of disclosure rules; accurate and timely enablement of frontline staff; enablement of the more virtual enterprise; and respect and protection of corporate memory. A social workplace can help:

Manage human capital - Collaborative tools, skills and learning management, expert finders, employee on-boarding and mentorship, alumni networks, succession planning and career developmentthese are key to an organizations ability to attract, maintain and cultivate a talented employee base.

Create self-service and peer-to-peer empowerment - As life sciences companies downsize, right-size, re-organize, merge, acquire or go global, complexities compound, and productivity and a sense of accomplishment suffers. Disengagement sets in. Organizations that strive to build a social workplace make effective use of simple and intuitive content-creation tools suited to team environments. Measurable productivity gains, reduced search times and efficient reuse of shared content are demonstrated with Web-based authoring tools for FAQs, site-visit notes, project knowledgebases, product documentation or meeting notes. Easy location of in-house experts, regardless of level or role, becomes a natural part of internal knowledge discovery.

Enhance transparency and corporate governance - The social workplace allows corporate management to communicate with employees about shared objectives, strategy, values and culture. Knowledge sharing and more transparent collaborative tools allow for broader perspectives and internal expertise to voice concerns on patterns of risk or incorrect assumptions.

Create consistent communication - Highly regulated companies often struggle to educate all employeesincluding frontline, field and remote workersregarding obligations to observe health, safety, disclosure or information-handling policies. Consistent communication across generations, geography and language differences can be achieved by using a range of media forms.

The virtual enterprise - An online social workplace for employees who work away from the physical office is important. Geographical separation can lead to a disconnection from team- or organizational-shared goals. A social workplace allows distributed organizations to offer a virtual water cooler networking experience to remote staff.

Enable the front line - Sales teams, customer service representatives, marketers, inspectors and emergency responders are mobile professionals who require accurate, timely data at their fingertips. Often the most accurate intelligence on field conditions, competitors, hazards or safety issues will come from peers ... this is the buzz, the scoop, the first-hand observational knowledge. Organizations that get better at capturing and disseminating the intrinsic knowledge held in the frontline field will find competitive advantage.

Click here to read Social media in life sciences part II: Creating a social marketplace

About the author

Therese Harris, program manager for Life Sciences at Open Text, is responsible for vertical market applications, key industry partnerships, and marketing specific to Life Sciences. She has more than 15 years experience in the enterprise software industry with special focuses on collaboration, communication and compliance solutions.  Therese has spent the past six years in the Enterprise Content Management market and has written and lectured on the application of ECM in vertical markets such as Life Sciences, Financial Services, and Government.