Panorama Business Intelligence

Social media has fired the first shots of an information revolution. MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn have changed the way we network, while tools like Twitter and Yammer have introduced the roles of “content creators” and “followers.”

The rate at which information consumption has evolved is really astounding. This April alone, Twitter estimated more than 17 million unique US visitors. The same month, Facebook reported 200 million active users – only three months after reaching the 150 million mark. Factoring in blogs, wikis, podcasts and other social media outlets, the amount of businesses and consumers that companies are actively engaging is through the roof.

The emergence of social media has laid the groundwork for anyone to publish thoughts, ideas and information and share that content instantaneously with the rest of the web. Because social media is inherently simple to manipulate, it is quickly becoming the preferred way to consume information.

We’ve already begun using these platforms for marketing, networking, content sharing and a wealth of other purposes. In a world where Business Intelligence tools are still used primarily by few power users in the organization, it seems that extending the reach of insights through social media is the right way to go.

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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…

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