Accenture Webinar Follow-Up: Q&A with Tom Barfield (Part 1)

During our webinar with Tom Barfield of Accenture, he addressed the audience and asked “Think about your business or your area of the business – what imperatives or challenges are causing you to consider a social approach?” In Part 1 of this blog we captured everyone’s responses and summarized them below. Do you have any more to add?

• Want to improve productivity of workers
  • Increase performance
  • Improve processes
  • Increase productivity    
  • Break down old barriers between businesses to improve the speed of work and decision making    
  • Share information and increase efficiency
  • Leverage workforce to the fullest as good talent is difficult to recruit

• Want to foster innovation
  • Gain competitive advantage with best people
  • Develop ideas beyond what a closed group of people can do
  • Facilitate serendipitous connections to build collaboration and new ideas   

• Want to foster collaboration
  • Enable sales force virtual team collaboration 
  • Solve scientific problems through the use of collaboration

• Want to improve employee engagement, retention
  • Decrease turn over, globally
  • Engage Millennials in new and different ways; younger generation coming in and expecting to learn this way
  • Foster employee engagement by building a stronger, more scalable sense of community
  • Offer different learning styles and demands of employees

• Want to better connect a dispersed workforce
  • Allow for globalization and expansion, reaching people all over the world; many of whom work remotely

• Need to keep up with speed of business
  • Enable faster learning in changing times
  • Keep up with speed of changes

• Want to standardize business processes, image
  • Communicate in a "one-firm" channel instead of email; leading to greater connections between offices    
  • Develop a common work flow; critical in health care to bridge multiple hospitals who are used to their own way of doing things
  • Mend fragmented brand

• Want to improve information, method sharing
  • We want to take advantage of what our site employees know, and want to know. We need to share more information and ensure the site employees understand and embrace the company culture.    
  • Share market research techniques across product brand teams    
  • Surface knowledge dispersed across the organization
  • Communicate best practices to reduce making the same mistakes

• Connect with and involve customers
  • Establish a better way of learning, creating networks
  • Integrate client in delivery and innovation

• Knowledge retention and identification
  • Help find subject matter experts within the organization; expertise location
  • Retain tacit knowledge from retiring experts   

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this follow-up blog with Tom Barfield of Accenture as he answers more questions that we weren’t able to address during the live webinar Q&A. Check back tomorrow!

If you missed the webinar, you can watch the on-demand version anytime!