Managing Global Compliance through Collaborative Innovation Networks

Historically, managing employees that are not co-located has relied on exploding e-mail in-boxes, endless e-mail folders to track issues, conference calls, and manually generated metrics passed from local management to home office just to try and keep up with performance and workload distribution. As a result, the understanding that global managers have of their off-shore teams is often skewed by the lack of information that one would normally obtain by being in close proximity to employees.The Digital Diffusion Dashboard has provided a set of metrics and tools that enable global managers to understand the network in which their employees operate. This network can be analyzed to understand things such as volumes, response time, individuals with whom an employee regularly interacts, cultural influences in the workload of an employee, “buzz” around critical topics, emotion, and team collaboration. Additionally, using these tools can help manage the adoption of new global processes as well as staff changes and turnover to shorten transition time for both incoming and exiting employees. All of these measurements have a significant impact, especially in virtual teams where the tools help bridge the gap between location and perceived performance.A software suite of programs is used to create these metrics, which include: Condor, WORDij, and LIWC. Together this software suite creates the Digital Diffusion Dashboard metrics and tools, which are used to illuminate details that are hidden in e-mail networks that can improve efficiency and increase a manager's ability to understand how work gets done in a global collaborative network.This research was sponsored by National Science Foundation Award #SES-0527487.