Panorama Business Intelligence

Many companies strive to become “flat organization” where senior management is connected to employees, giving them the ability to act and react much faster in a much more agile way.

Wikipedia defines: Flat organization (known as horizontal organization) refers to an organizational structure with few or no levels of intervening management between staff and managers. The idea is that well-trained workers will be more productive when they are more directly involved in the decision making process, rather than closely supervised by many layers of management.

The flat organization model promotes employee involvement through a decentralized decision making process. By elevating the level of responsibility of baseline employees, and by eliminating layers of middle management, comments and feedback reach all personnel involved in decisions more quickly. Expected response to customer feedback can thus become more rapid. Since the interaction between workers is more frequent, this organizational structure generally depends upon a much more personal relationship between workers and managers. Hence the structure can be more time-consuming to build than a traditional bureaucratic/hierarchical model.

Unfortunately, the flat organization concept has had only limited success so far. The main reasons are that this structure is generally possible only in smaller organizations or individual units within larger organizations. When they reach a critical size, organizations can retain a streamlined structure but cannot keep a completely flat manager-to-staff relationship without impacting productivity. Certain financial responsibilities may also require a more conventional structure. Some theorize that flat organizations become more traditionally hierarchical when they begin to be geared towards productivity. So in other words, employees just don’t have that ability today to communicate directly with executives in an agile and direct way that will make the vision of a flat organization work.

Or should I say until now…

Twitter and Yammer, 2 micro-blogging services are doing what “cutting layers of management” has failed to accomplish for such a long time!

I’m a heavy twitter user (http://twitter.com/oudiantebi) and aside of my personal account also manage the pubic panorama software account (http://twitter.com/panoramaSW) that we use to communicate with customers and partners. We also implemented Yammer, “the twitter for enterprises”, at panorama that provides the same functionality as Twitter but only for people inside the firewall.

The usage of Twitter and Yammer at Panorama has grown significantly and today almost 90% of employees have “joint the conversation”. Our #1 user is our CEO who shares openly the things he is doing and is actively “listening” to the messages that are being shared across the organization.

I can proudly say that we’ve become totally flat in a matter of 2 months! The change is astonishing and impactful in ways that have changed how we operate in all aspects of the company.

How did it affect us?

The best example is our CEO who gets dozens of comments and feedback from employees in real time, the entire organization can track and see the feedback form across the organization and we all know what our CEO focuses on in real time.

For example, recently a support engineer was on a call with a customer that was having some problems with deploying our product, the engineer wrote the following message using Yammer: “got a call from XYZ and they have a problem with a feature in our product, doing my best to get it resolved so they can go live on time”. 2 minutes later the CEO replies “how can I help make them happy” and 2 more minutes later the head of R&D assigning a person to help solve the problem in real time. All in all it took us 10 minutes to solve a problem that would usually take days to resolve using the normal processes.

All this could be done before but the process to get there was much longer. The ability of the support person to get the attention of the CEO was slim to non existent.

Same thing goes for Twitter. A customer that we follow on twitter wrote that he was trying to deploy our solution in a record time of 2 days. The moment I saw this message we assigned 2 people to help them to make their goal. This was a mind blowing experience that made this customer a fan for life.

The amazing fact is that Yammer was introduced as a small utility and was never meant to change our company so profoundly. I can clearly say that after email, Micro-bloging is the most impactful technology on organizational culture and behavior.