The most valuable tool
While recently travelling on the train from Kiev to Vladikavkaz, I shared the space with Alexei Zaikin from Greenstroi who told me about their high-tech construction technologies and innovative approaches that are ahead of the best practices even in America.
I was most fascintated by their key competitive edge, a program that they used for internal communication, project management and tracking of their information. A construction company with great technologies in their industry nevertheless regard their internal communication tool that they update from the sites of their construction, from their office and from the trips to suppliers their main edge.
His experience very much parallels mine. When the communication tools are well implemented, the culture of their use is universal and there is a world of complex problems to be solved, these tools are priceless. They can provide feedback, insight and support to the team. The secret of their effective implementation is that they do not only ad an encouraging feedback but that they help work on the business and only in it. They have the protocols that enable the effective communication with all the aspects of activities in creating the business scaffolding, not just supporting the business transaction.
This is another side of measurement, decidedly qualitative, but nevertheless no less important than the traditional quantitative measurements. A number of Balanced Scorecard measurements can be gathered and aggregated directly from such tools. We can measure the number and frequency of customer and supplier contacts, number and types of issues. Volume and quality of internal communication, as well as many others.
The power of the open communication tools extends beyond the internal communication, as the best tools on the market, such as the version of Open Atrium by the Bucket Brigade, Inc do. It allows to build a community of customers and suppliers, allowing them to share the data and interact internally within a system. Once the protocols of communication become polished, the skills easily transfer in to the world of social media. And that is when measuring the data that is accumulated in the system becomes really exciting. It allows us to clearly see all the different data points together, in the aggregated fashion.
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Oleg Tumarkin, Juris Doctor, Master of Business Administration, Certified Six Sigma Black Belt is an Adjunct Professor of Business at Lakeland College and Concordia University of Wisconsin. His firm, FutureWorks, in partnership with Bucket Brigade and AKS-Labs provides business coaching and Balanced Scorecard implementations. His life’s passion is the development of a universal business measurement and management system that would cause management in to the realm of a repeatable, replicable, yet humane and flexible science.
