Bank Intranet
金融essay代写 There was one more step to go. The programmers in Joe’s department started using The Brain to write specifications for new systems.
Joe Cutler was well aware of the dangers involved in building a corporate intranet for a bank with 28,000 employees. As the IT manager for Fictional Bank (FB), he was determined to make the Intranet a customer driven resource. He had read many case studies of companies that built big, fancy Intranet’s with sophisticated knowledge management systems. Almost all of the systems failed miserably, because they did not do what people wanted. He knew that over 60 percent of all features put into custom systems were never used. Another 20 percent were used only rarely and 15 percent were used occasionally. In reality, companies made good use of just about 5 percent of the features built into most custom built IT systems.
Joe knew that people do not use a system they do not trust. So he built airtight applications for the human resources people, for the loan officers and for executives. It was all part of the company’s Digital Nervous System (DNS) — a concept he had learned about from Bill Gates. He had over 20,000 desktops to manage and he made sure that everyone had the same version of the software. He set up a 24-hour help desk, staffed by well-trained operators to help trouble-shoot any problems. Joe had a small army of programmers and a nonstop parade of expert consultants, all working together to make his Digital Nervous System (DNS) the lifeline for everyone in the bank.
A technical solution: The Digital Nervous System (DNS) 金融essay代写
Robin, one of the bank’s loan officers, made good use of the DNS. When a client comes in with a loan application, Rob has easy access to credit history, property information, current interest rates and everything he needs to give the client an immediate answer. In most cases, he can tell clients exactly which pieces of information they still need to provide and what the loan terms would be. The time from meeting a client to closing has dropped from 42 days to 11 days and most of that time is used by the title office, which is still processing applications on paper. Rob’s loan volume has doubled in six months. For internal customers like Rob, the system really works.
Unfortunately, Joe’s ambitious DNS does not work for everyone. As much as he has tried, Joe cannot always motivate people to put meaningful information into the system. Take Elsa, for example. She works at Fictional Bank’s headquarters (HQ) in Melbourne. She is working on restructuring a loan package for an international company. The company is merging with a European conglomerate. Fictional Bank (FB) has offices in a few European cities, but Elsa does not know anyone overseas. She needs corporate data, economic data, sector performance and currency forecasts from seven countries. The DNS has not been much help to her. Even if all that information were in the system, which it is not, Elsa could not deal with most of it. She needs advice, not data. 金融essay代写
Maggie is a new senior manager who has just moved to the Melbourne HQ.
She is in the middle of a huge restructuring effort and is putting in 60 hours a week. She needs to learn as much about the employees involved as possible. She needs information about other offices in Australia, who handles which accounts, competitive information and other business intelligence. She also needs to find an apartment, by some furniture, lease a car, set up childcare for her daughter, find a doctor and handle many other moving details. Joe’s DNS has not been much help to Maggie, either.
Joe could install new features to make the DNS more useful to knowledge workers like Elsa and Maggie, but they had trouble describing to him exactly what they wanted it to do. Joe got frustrated. “If you can’t specify it, I can’t build it,” he would say.
Why does Joe’s DNS serve Rob so efficiently, and Elsa and Maggie so poorly? Does Joe need more resources to expand his digital nervous system? The answer is, of course, “No”. Joe could spend $850 million on his digital nervous system and, as we know, most of it would go unused.
A human solution: The Brain
Joe wants everyone to use one big structured repository, but there is no way to get the structure right because everyone has different needs, jobs, ways of thinking and processing information and a different view of the banking world. Joe’s DNS and your computer desktop are examples of hierarchical structures. In a hierarchical structure, there is only one path to any particular object. It is easy to lose something, for example, because you cannot remember whether it is in the folder with all the spreadsheets or the folder with the contracts or the folder for that particular client. It should be in all three, but then you would have problems with multiple-versions of the same document. 金融essay代写
The world-wide-web, on the other hand, is an example of a relational structure. The Web has no beginning and no end, no top or bottom, no predetermined hierarchical structure and no single preferred frame of reference. A single “click” can be the path from any object or idea or place to any other. When new pages arrive they work their way into the web of links. If some pages disappear, it leaves links that point nowhere. It is messy and unstructured … just like our brains … just like The Brain.
In this context, The Brain is a connected set of thoughts (I will capitalize both words “The Brain” in this case to distinguish it from our human brains).
A thought within The Brain can contain a word, a paragraph, a list, a document, a link to another document, an image, a sound file, a database, a phone number or address, a software program, a set of links to web sites, and so on. A thought can contain another thought, or even a link to another brain. 金融essay代写
Think of The Brain as a personal world-wide-web — a loose collection of information and links. The Brain works the way our brain does — by association. It stores thoughts relationally, not hierarchically. The thoughts above the center line are called parent thoughts. The thoughts below the center are known as children of the parents. This is just a way of displaying the links below and the links above a certain item. The links can be circular, so that there is no particular top thought, or the links can be set up as a tree structure — a strict hierarchy whose top most thought is paradoxically known as the root of the tree.
The Brain is an unstructured, associative way of looking at people, places and things that is compatible with the way people store and find information. For example, consider Sheila.
Sheila has been a marketing manager at Fictional Bank’s Melbourne office for two years. Sheila keeps lists of everything. She has lists of restaurants, office supply stores, travel agencies, suppliers, contractors (writers, Illustrator’s, designers, ad agencies, printers, etc.), clients, holidays, trade shows, doctors, lawyers — everything she needs to keep her job and her personal life organized.
Sheila has been helping Maggie get settled in Melbourne. When Maggie asked for a baby sitter recommendation, Sheila offered to print out a list for her to consider. That was when Maggie showed Sheila The Brain. It took about two hours to get all of Sheila’s lists into The Brain. Sheila was so excited about her Brain, she started creating more lists immediately and linking them together. 金融essay代写
Maggie told Sheila, “You don’t have to plan everything out.
Just start putting stuff in. You can rearrange it as you go. That’s the beauty of The Brain.” For Sheila, the best part was that she did not have to ask Joe for anything. She just went to the www.brain.com (NOTE – There really is a website at www.brain.com but it does not do what we are suggesting here), logged on, and did everything herself. Sheila’s Brain contains personal and business areas, many of which overlap. The Brain lets Sheila connect to thoughts easily and expand her knowledge-base without any programming.
That same day, Sheila built another brain, and kept going. She created thoughts for different people, documents, tasks, resources, clients, links to web pages, and so on. The next morning, all her teammates received an e-mail explaining how to go to The Brain’s web site, log on and start exploring. By the end of the second day, Sheila and 5 others had created their own brains and linked them into the team brain. Now they had a team-wide-web.
The next night, Sheila and Maggie build a brain for the entire Melbourne office. 金融essay代写
They spent most of Friday afternoon using Sheila’s digital camera to take people’s pictures and creating Starter brains for anyone who did not have one yet. In two weeks, the whole thing had grown organically into hundreds of links to brains and thousands of thoughts. The Brain is a secure environment — each person decides which parts of her/his brain s/he wants to share with others. Anyone with a Web connection and a password can run a keyword search to find a suitable entry point and begin exploring the parts of peoples’ brains they want everyone to see. The Melbourne Brain is just a network of personal brains. Everyone can designate a thought to be shared or private. The web shared thoughts become the office Brain.
Since all the brains were stored on a central server outside the office, anyone could access them from anywhere they could get an Internet connection.
The Brain was the system people had been wanting Joe to give them for over two years and they had built it themselves in two weeks. Now they had an office-wide-web. 金融essay代写
There was one more step to go. The programmers in Joe’s department started using The Brain to write specifications for new systems. They scrapped their old tracking system and built a Brain in just a few days. They used it to create a living documentation system, which was always up-to-date. They gave customers access to the system and stopped printing paper manuals. The marketing people used the brain to develop proposals. Within a month, they had all but forgotten PowerPoint. Now, to make a presentation, a marketing manager simply fired up a Web browser, pointed to www.brain.com, logged on, and started an interactive dialogue. Sheila was astonished to hear people bragging about how many visitors they had had to their Brains. People were actually excited about sharing what they knew.
Joe, however, was not happy about The Brain. It was “a mess” and a possible “security risk”.
Joe used to be popular. People used to need him. He used to write proposals for extensions to his digital nervous system, saying how much more resources and people he needed to make it state-of-the-art. He was “going to tell” the CEO and the Executive Team how many hours people were wasting on this Brain toy. He had his PowerPoint presentation all ready to go.
Then one Monday he was shown the knowledge management brain some people in the private banking group were already using to share information about their clients. Any banker could field a phone call from any client. Simply by linking Brains the bankers could share all their knowledge instantly. This was something Joe had budgeted six months of development for. 金融essay代写
The word got out. Sheila started getting e-mail messages from people in other offices asking about The Brain. With Maggie’s help, she designed a series of Brain workshops and took them to all the banks’ offices. It was so successful that the Executive Team and CEO asked her to come show them how it worked and how to use it for their presentations. A few months later, the bank had a Brain-Based company-wide-web.
The Fictional Bank Brain connects all the offices into one large, organic system. Just by building individual brains and connecting them, the entire company built a usable knowledge management system the way bees build a hive.
Gray Matters 金融essay代写
Why does The Brain sound so familiar? Because it is just like the word-wide-web. The truth is … you can build a sophisticated Internet with a simple web authoring tool. Each Web page can hold images, text, links, lists and other content. To build their own information network, people need the ability to link from their information to anyone else’s information. Companies would just give everyone some space on the company server, a half-day authoring lesson and some search capabilities, they would then be able to do just about everything we have talked about so far in this case. The web was built with primitive tools, yet the degree of sophistication inherent in the environment is astonishing.
The Brain is messy and unstructured … like communication … like business … like life. You can work your way in from a particular starting point or circle around to the other side. Two Brains converge into one big Brain … then split into several smaller ones. The structure morphs and emerges. You do not have to change the framework with each new perspective. They just add that view to the system and everyone can start using it if they choose to.
A company like Fictional Bank can also let outsiders into its Brain.
The Brain can link up customers, partners and suppliers into certain parts of its company-wide-web, forming an ecosystem of information. This is not about transactions — for that, you need other systems. This is about people, places and things. This amorphous extra-net can be an excellent tool for those outside the company to connect with people inside it. It is a phone list, a document management system, a calendar and messaging system all in one. It is another way to widen the bottleneck between employees and customers. 金融essay代写
At Fictional Bank, The Brain has led to a huge boost in productivity. The new system is “relative and open” not “absolute and proprietary”, and that makes people like Sheila feel more like owners than users. People take pride in maintaining and sharing their Brains. Many employees are now known as experts in certain fields and their brains have become popular destinations for others inside the company. By identifying their area of expertise and watching company colleagues come to interact with them, peoples’ status in the company goes up, not down. Employees are now more valuable because of what they share, rather than what they know. New projects and people start their own Brains immediately and start to integrate quickly. The unstructured support layer becomes a growth medium for new activity.
Maggie’s reorganization went smoothly. Sheila became the Internet facilitator helping people across the company add their own functionality to the company-wide Brain. Joe got a job at a software development company. More than one market analyst changed Fictional Bank’s rating from a “hold” to a “buy” after Fictional Bank’s management team made their quarterly “question an answer” session using The Brain.
Old mission statement: Our Intranet gives people what they need to be more productive. 金融essay代写
New mission statement: Knowledge management by the people, for the people.
Your assessment task:
Part 1. Diagnosis
Use relevant concepts, models, theories and information from the readings, lectures, discussions, exercises and your own research related to the topics from this course and apply them to help you understand, assess and diagnose what is going on the “The Bank” case study. Using relevant concepts, models, theories and information from the course, provide a succinct diagnosis of the major issues you see in the case and justify why you think these are the major issues. 金融essay代写
Part 2. Recommendations
Discuss how Joe and others at “The Bank” can transform their internal communications and organisational structure while recognising the importance of relationships and communication in an information rich organisation. Be sure to justify your recommendations based on your analysis.
Your response should be concise, well-structured and approximately 2000 words in length.
