A strange thing happened to me a few months ago at J&J: The manager who had hired me into J&J left the company, and I was moved to a temporary manager in the same team while new reporting lines were sorted out. Around the same time, I had been starting to look at my new MySite page - just released in a sort of “beta” for J&J employees. One day, I noticed that my management line had changed again - instead of my temporary holding manager, me and a line of other Procurement folks now reported into a whole new group.
Huh! I thought - odd that nobody let me know ahead of time - but maybe they meant to, or HR jumped the gun on the change.. who knows.
So during the next few days I was in a leadership meeting, during which time I had a series of increasingly confusing conversations with my temporary manager, and my 2nd line manager, the Procurement CPO - alluding to the change. Finally after the CPO looked totally blank when I mentioned the org change, I told him that I had seen the change on MySite - which pulls reports-to data from an established J&J enterprise directory system called JJEDS.
“Oh!” he said. “That thing is always wrong.”
I was totally astounded. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that an enterprise directory system could display wrong management chain information. What the…?
How could I have expected such data integrity? In thinking about it afterwards, I realized my expectation was a testament to the astonishing maturity of the IBM Intranet. It’s probably just about 10 years ago now that the IBM Intranet surpassed the co-worker and the immediate manager as the source employees turned to as the most trusted source for company information. This data point has been illuminated again and again as a hallmark of the transformation of the company through the Intranet.
Looking back, I realize how much I took for granted. Questioning the validity of core data source like report-to information is as alien to me as questioning whether my online banking statement is accurate. It better had be!
So where does that leave things for J&J? Well, I think the story points out how an effective Intranet Strategy needs to focus really intently on core metrics like this. Trust, credibility, value, usefuleness - all are critical bellwethers of Intranet success.
If nothing else, the experience was an amusing interpretation of e2.0: Talk about the demise of the org chart! J&J is already there.
