This next phase involves institutionalizing what we've learned, driving skills and capabilities across the company, and inviting others to join the conversation. The discussion becomes progressively more important as the number of outside partners increases and as business processes move across several companies in an ecosystem. For example, some of our
E-commerce suppliers ship directly to customers—we don't own the inventory, but simply pass the order to them. For these companies, we'd like to share sales plans and progress against those plans.
The objective isn't only to optimize cross-functional interactions, but also to build a tighter bond with companies that have a vested interest in our success. One piece of the dashboard focuses on camping equipment, for example. We'd like to be more transparent so that all pertinent camping vendors can access this part of the dashboard to view top-line sales information and post comments to a blog. Our product manager for this area could use a wiki to pose challenges for the next season—such as a proposed percentage increase in sales—then ask vendors to suggest innovative ways to achieve these goals.
Some of our customers and partners subscribe to an RSS feed on our E-commerce Web site called Extreme Deals, which refers to products that are marked down significantly for a limited time. RSS provides an efficient means to keep interested parties apprised of this information. Now we're asking ourselves what types of information we might want to share with our suppliers and business partners in a similar manner.
We're also embedding a blog into our product-management life-cycle tool to let product-development managers and sourcing vendors have virtual conversations. Ultimately, we'd like to add buttons to our merchandising dashboard so users can receive real-time updates as key metrics change. Other buttons would allow them to comment and view comments from others as they monitor fluctuations in our KPIs.
BI users want relevant, customized content tied to enterprisewide conversations about managing and running a successful business. CIOs can provide that with BI solutions that have the basic functionality of an
information dashboard, but that also enhance decision-making processes by encouraging collaboration within the user community.
Instead of having these conversations occur in the hallway, where you need to be in the right place at the right time to benefit, they can take place within the dashboard, where all interested parties can participate.
CIOs can encourage these interactions and help marshal the user community around topics and content that fulfill the charter of the organization. At EMS, we believe it's easier to drive adoption if you use tools, techniques, and methods with which people are already familiar. That means Web 2.0—it's how EMS users expect the Web to work.
Jeffrey Neville is CIO at Eastern Mountain Sports, where he's responsible for strategy, technology, and an Alternate Channels business that includes EMS.com.
Are you implementing Web 2.0 technologies at your company? Tell us about them.
See Related Articles:
E2.0 Evangelists, September 2006
Web 2.0 Meets The Enterprise, May 2006
