Well, today is my first day at J&J in my new role as Manager of Portal and Collaboration for the Global Procurement function. This position is a challenge to make collaboration “really real” for a smallish (~1100) and highly decentralized organization.
The vision to reduce spend, increase quality and connect the global team is there. The ledership team is very eager to drive collaboration and work online - but after an initial Sharepoint deployment didn’t result in active adoption, the leadership team accurately realized that there’s more to collaboration than just plugging in Sharepoint. So a few months ago they brought in Andrew MacAfee from HBS to talk about how to drive collaboration, and approved new headcount for someone to drive the vision. And here I am!
My goal here is to document our progress as much as I can while respecting J&J confidentiality, and my long term goal is to turn this experience into a whitepaper or report. The nutshell: Most of what I’m reading - even in the Forrester report, seems suspiciously fluffy, still, about collaboration. How real can we make it? The challenge is mine - so here I go!
I’m armed with a 150 page report from Forrester on understanding the CIO’s role in Enterprise Collaboration, as well as my history with IBM and IBF leading up to this. Increasingly the discussion around Intranets has been focused on on understanding how to “do” collaboration right. Right now my task feels more than a little daunting - but heck, it’s only day 1, and I think it’s natural to be wondering what on earth I’ve gotten myself into.
