Drive Efficiency
Efficiency is focused on the optimum use of organisational resources. A sample of efficiency related objectives we have achieved with our technology, include:
- Improve collaboration and engagement
- Foster innovation and creativity
- Enhance agility and adaptability
- Improve learning behaviour
Case studies of how we have improved the above objectives are provided below.
Application Areas
Our technology can be applied in a completely transparent and privacy-ensuring manner to:
- Discover: Proactively identify efficiency hotspots, reveal patterns of behaviour and benchmark better practice
- Evaluate: Automatically measure known efficiency issues to determine their likelihood and impact
- Improve: Rapidly enhance and ingrain the desired efficiency behaviour
- Monitor: Accurately predict the effectiveness of efficiency interventions
Summary
- Our client is a major high-tech manufacturing company seeking to improve team collaboration across functional and geographic lines of business.
- The deployment of GalaxyLens significantly increased the level of effective collaboration. This was achieved by streamlining and redistributing responsibilities for collaboration to eliminate bottlenecks and overload and by bridging gaps in team communication structures.
Highlights
The communication tools used by this organisation includes email and chat and a proprietary content management system. Our technology is able to capture any data sources stored by a client on its servers.
GalaxyLens initially identified the communication and information sharing patterns throughout the organisation. As part of this process, invisible communication pathways were automatically mapped and critical knowledge flow networks quantified.
It quickly became evident that there were numerous pressure points of collaboration overload between people and teams, which were adversely impacting the time it was taking to get things done and the efficiency of decision making.
There were also noticeable gaps in the flow of knowledge and information between teams, which was reducing the level of effective collaboration. The medium through which knowledge was being shared was also a key issue. For example, it became evident that knowledgeable people in high demand should have been transferring certain types of information to permanent locations rather than the more transient medium of email.
Outcomes
GalaxyLens identified previously unknown disenfranchised, misaligned, overwhelmed and isolated people and teams. This enabled us to significantly improve the collaboration efficiency by:
- Enhancing participation by ensuring the allocation of appropriate resources and contribution opportunities for the identified disenfranchised,
- Creating greater value at the intersection of different skills and functional interests for the misaligned,
- More clearly defining the role and accountability parameters for the overwhelmed,
- Developing a more inclusive approach to idea development and explanation of the larger context to ensure greater inclusion on the part of the isolated.
These outcomes should not be considered in a vacuum. For example, people should be encouraged to be constructive contrarians and creative challengers. Similarly, it is acceptable for people/teams to deliberately isolate themselves for specific purposes (e.g. as found in Agile initiatives).
Summary
- Our client is a global energy organisation which sought to improve the creativity of their R&D department.
- GalaxyLens was deployed to identify particularly creative employees in the R&D department and measure and codify their email communication patterns.
Highlights
This project analysed the email communication of thousands of employees in the R&D department of a global energy company over a 13-month period. The purpose was to identify and codify the communication behaviour of the most innovative employees so as to establish a benchmark and method for increasing creativity throughout the department.
The results demonstrated that the best innovators respond to email quicker and also received quicker responses. They also communicate more frequently with external parties, which helps them to step outside internal echo chambers and bring new ideas into the organization. At a team level, more creative teams rotate the thought leadership amongst themselves based on the needs and objectives of the task in question.
Outcomes
The energy organisation was able to measurably improve innovation by encouraging relevant employees to adopt a more intrinsically motivated communication style and reach out to the outside for novel ideas. Managers were also shown how to nurture a self-organizing or rotating leadership style for different circumstances, which helped to find more creative solutions to R&D challenges.
Summary
- Our client is a software development company operating throughout Europe.
- GalaxyLens was deployed to study the flow-experience of software developers by measuring their agility and adaptability.
Highlights
This engagement analysed communication between teams of software developers by combining e-mail, phone, wiki, chat and face-to-face interaction. We correlated this analysis with individual daily ratings collected through an online survey from the software developers.
This included information about how creative, productive, adaptive, communicative, and stressed the developers felt on each particular day. We found a strong correlation between creative agility and productivity, meaning the software developers felt creative and productive at the same time.
There is also a positive correlation between the average volume of speaking within a team and the creativity of a team. Moreover, the two teams felt more in flow and synchronised when they had a varied pattern of activity during the day.
Based on analysing personality characteristics through electronic interaction, the analysis demonstrated that there can be two different types of knowledge worker creativity, the “lonely genius” - feeling most creative when on his/her own with lower trust in others, and the “swarm creative” - most creative when in the midst of other people, and with higher trust.
Outcomes
Our analysis enabled the software development function within the organisation to build more agile teams and cultivate more agile and adaptive behaviour on the part of individuals.
Summary
- Our client is a healthcare organisation seeking to improve the standard of learning behaviour amongst its people.
- A key theoretical construct of learning behaviour is that it is essentially a social process based on interaction with other people.
- GalaxyLens was deployed to measure key drivers of learning behaviour amongst dispersed and virtual teams, including workplace social interaction, information exchange, motivation, negotiation and reflection.
Highlights
This engagement used social network analysis and communication dynamics to measure learning behaviour and outcomes. A specific innovision task was used as the context and benchmark for the learning process. Some of the more interesting insights from the analysis included:
- Identifying social network influencers based on their ability to help people get things done can provide teams with access to some of the most valuable but potentially unknown learning resources within the organisation.
- Adaptive communication network structures can be a potent way for teams to engage in idea generation and constructive learning behaviour.
- Participation equality and practical application on the part of all team members is important when teams are generating and learning about new ideas.
- A method of self-reflection is critical for ensuring people are able to adequately absorb new ways of doing things. This can be in the form of providing people with information on their learning progress through a personalised dashboard (we call this the Virtual Mirror). This process can be supplemented with regular socialisation of aggregate learning results where teams meet to discuss their collective progress and areas for improvement.
Outcomes
- The key drivers of learning behaviour in this organisation were Identified, measured and reported upon on a predictive basis.
- Using an innovation process to contextualise and benchmark the effectiveness of learning activities, there was a measurable improvement in the way teams undertook and absorbed the learning required to collaborate on innovation.
- ‘Entanglement’ – A new dynamic metric to measure team flow
- Persuasive Natural Language Generation - A Literature Review
- Taming the snake in paradise: combining institutional design and leadership to enhance collaborative innovation
- The Digital Footprint of Innovators: Using Email To Detect the Most Creative People in Your Organization
- Measuring the Impact of Spammers on E-mail and Twitter Networks
- Creating The Collective Mind Through Virtual Mirroring Based Learning
- Collaborative Innovation Networks: Building Adaptive and Resilient Organizations.
- It is Rotating Leaders Who Build the Swarm: Social Network Determinants of Growth for Healthcare Virtual Communities
- The Impact of Virtual Mirroring on Customer Satisfaction.
- Measuring Creative Performance of Teams Through Dynamic Semantic Social Network Analysis
- Social Capital Increases Efficiency of Collaboration among Wikipedia Editors
Data Sources, Privacy & Security
Our technology can securely capture and analyse any text, voice or video data stored by an organisation on its servers, whether on premises or in the cloud. This includes email, calendar, collaboration and chat apps and voice and video recordings.
Our analysis strongly respects individual privacy. Only aggregated information is available to management, while individual results are only accessible by the relevant individual. This ensures full GDPR compliance whilst continuing to achieve the optimum level of analytical insight and accuracy.
All data is fully encrypted on the server side, while the analysis takes place on anonymized and encrypted data to ensure maximum information security. This means that data is also protected from potential internal abuse.