Introduction: Here is an early definition of Organization Development practice: “Organization Development is an effort planned, organization-wide, and managed from the top, to increase organization effectiveness and health through planned interventions in the organization’s ‘processes,’ using behavioral-science knowledge.” Here is a newer definition of OD: “Organization Development is the attempt to influence the members of an organization to expand their candidness with each other about their views of the organization and their experience in it, and to take greater responsibility for their own actions as organization members. The assumption behind OD is that when people pursue both of these objectives simultaneously, they are likely to discover new ways of working together that they experience as more effective for achieving their own and their shared (organizational) goals. And that when this does not happen, such activity helps them to understand why and to make meaningful choices about what to do in light of this understanding.”
Challenge: If OD is a system-wide application of behavioral science knowledge to the planned development and reinforcement of organizational strategies, structures, and processes for improving an organization’s effectiveness can SharePoint Web Solution Platforms (WSPs) be used to facilitate such success? This paper argues how SharePoint WSPs can be used to accomplish the purposes of OD by fostering:
✓ Collaboration sites are provided for communication and product/service development activities, such as (a) brainstorming to design solutions, (b) dialoguing to plan projects, (c) coordinating creation or response to a request for proposal (RFP), and (d) declaring goals so decision makers go on the record and track their progress.
✓ Social networking is supported for enterprise-wide sharing and inquiring experiences to help communicate and track employees’ interests and needs to enlist people in informal expertise networks.
✓ Information portals and public-facing websites offer self-service internal portals and intranets as well as creating visually appealing websites for prospects and customers to dialogue thus increasing shared understanding and awareness.
✓ Enterprise content management is offered for discoverable/retrievable documentation and record-management capabilities with support for metadata and customized search experiences to manage and share knowledge of leaders’ guidance and tailored best practices.
✓ Business intelligence derived from the organization’s business analysis assets can be “seen” to be learned using dashboards which allow users to get the big picture at-a-glance and then drill down to get more detail and formulate action plans.
✓ Visual prompts urge users to commit to take actions to apply what was just viewed/learned.
In OD professionals often work like organization physicians to improve the effectiveness of people & organizations by taking a linear approach:
- Establishing relationships with key personnel in organizations;
- Researching and evaluating systems in the organization to understand dysfunctions and/or goals of the systems in the organization (“diagnosing” the systems in the organization);
- Identifying ways to improve effectiveness of the organization and its people;
- Applying methods (e.g., training, orientation, decision-making tools) to improve effectiveness; and
- Evaluating the ongoing effectiveness of the approaches and their results and helping organizations improve more.
SharePoint WSP Designers, Developers and Administrators can redefine OD practice as “Organization Development delivered by SharePoint WSPs is influencing organizations’ communication, collaboration and compliance increasing candidness with each other and accountability for their actions as organization members.” They should support such OD as business development by:
- Facilitating top-down communications in organizations to help key personnel learn, commit and do what it takes to increase profits and grow market share.
- Communicating research and evaluation of systems in the organization to share understanding of dysfunctions and/or goals of the systems in the organization to facilitate accurate diagnoses and remedies.
- Facilitating collaborations to identify ways to improve effectiveness of the organization and its people.
- Supporting the application of methods (e.g., training, orientation, decision-making tools) to improve effectiveness in measurable meaningful ways.
- Enabling leaders to evaluate the effectiveness of the approaches and their results to help the organization improve.
Conclusion: One of the oldest hypertext usability principles is to offer a visual representation of the information space in order to help users understand where they can go. Site maps can provide such a visualization, offering a useful supplement to the primary navigation features on a website or intranet. Web Designers building site hierarchies should offer such a representation to facilitate understanding and awareness concerning what they design. Designers who mirror users’ organization structures make relating and learning what they build easier for users and thus increase the likelihood of their architecture/hierarchy being enthusiastically embraced by users. This means, if a user’s org chart is flat then the web hierarchy should be flat too.
© Copyright 2015 by John T. Gilleland, Jr. All rights reserved.
Attached is what might be the final draft of this article. It is being considered for publication by http://www.odnetwork.org/
