Cultural collaboration for decision making is an essential element for remaining competitive in the industrial Internet of Things ecosystem.
Is your organization taking the necessary steps to ensure you are proactively poised for “What’s Next?”
The pace and nature of tech advances in the industrial Internet of Things manufacturing ecosystem wait for no one to play catch up.
Will your organization, regardless of size, be compromised or competitive due to current cultural collaboration practices?
Regardless of the size of your organization, ignoring the impact of big data and analytics on the future sustainability of your company is not an optimal strategy. Big data and analytics create tremendous competitive value, especially when cultural collaboration is involved in decision making.
Does your organization have the right stuff for collaboration?
First things first. Does your organization utilize data-generated insights for IIoT decision making? Is your idea of big data manually inputting information onto spreadsheets and doing simple math? Is this strategy realistic or competent?
How can you trust the data?
Cultural collaboration focuses your business on collecting the right data at the right time and applying the right analyses which yield the right insights. Having the right insights allows you to can take make the right decisions and take the right actions on behalf of your customers.
All of this “right stuff” doesn’t happen spontaneously. Rather, creating cultural collaboration starts with enlightened tech and plant workforce hiring strategy. To do the right stuff, and make the right business decisions, hire the right people.
Cultural collaboration requires collaboration. Hmmm.
This strategy seems intuitive, doesn’t it?
Yet far too many organizations focus on hiring individuals to fill specific job functions rather than hiring for collaborative capabilities. Employees are sequestered within specific departments, rather than functioning cross-functionally and collaboratively.
This traditional human capital model is not compatible with the connectivity characterizing the IIoT connected workplace.
Enlightened organizations create a strategic human resources and human capital hiring strategy. Their goal is to understand how employees can be hired, and developed, for a culture focused on collaboration and engagement. Then take action on what has been learned.
Cultural collaboration includes an enlightened tech workforce hiring strategy to create a more data-friendly workplace.
Developing an innovative tech workforce hiring strategy is critical to creating a collaborative, data-driven organization. In the industrial Internet of Things organizational ecosystem, data becomes the common denominator running across your entire enterprise.
Do you continue to hire employees who are intimidated by data? (Do I need to tell you to stop. Now?)
Target hiring the right employees who welcome the opportunity to engage with each other as they utilize data. Your organization benefits from a collaborative tech workforce environment fostering greater familiarity with and accessibility to the right data to generate the right insights for IIoT decision making.
Data-driven organizations proactively focus on “What’s Next?” Non-data driven organizations react and keep wondering what just happened.
Cultural collaboration focuses on a collaborative and connected plant floor.
The industrial Internet of Things ecosystem, by its very nature, connects people, software, sensors, processes and equipment. Does your current manufacturing culture foster connectivity across departments, functions and job titles?
One of the greatest opportunities for IIoT cultural collaboration empowers the end user, or machine operator. When operators are able to utilize automation insights to make decisions impacting equipment productivity and yield, they become more engaged in and connected to overall plant strategy, according to a panel discussion on predictive maintenance at the IMTS2016 Global Automation and Manufacturing Summit.
That type of empowerment calls for flattening organizational hierarchies in response to a growing need for shared, data-driven insights throughout the organization. Is your organization prepared to create the beta teams to catalyze this type of cultural collaboration?
Creating cultural collaboration is an organization-wide initiative.
Regardless of the size of your organization, get your big data and analytics cards out on the business table. No one is too small or too big to get a free pass out of this conversation on cultural collaboration in the IIoT ecosystem.
Take a look around your organization. Get a sense of whether your employees are engaged with each other and willing to collaborate and become more data-driven.
Otherwise, you may find your organization behind a competitive rock and a big data hard place.
What are your organization’s biggest impediments to implementing cultural collaboration for IIoT decision making?
Babette Ten Haken writes, speaks and coaches about customer success for customer retention. She traverses the interface between human capital strategy for hiring and developing collaborative technical and non-technical teams. She serves manufacturing, IT and engineering intensive companies. Babette’s playbook of technical / non-technical collaboration hacks, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon. Image source: iStock
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