Organizational Development of All Areas

Organizational Development Of all areas of Organizational Development (OD) that are the most challenging in terms of translating the strategic, long-term, abstract objectives of an organization into results, it is in the use of interventions. As has been seen in this course, interventions can span from the individual, workgroup or team and throughout an organization as well. The most effective interventions bring a high degree of pragmatism and measurability to short-term strategies that over time are relied on for accomplishing strategic goals (Hodgkinson, Healey, 2008).

Interventions at the individual and team level must concentrate on changing not only processes, systems and people but the underlying perspectives and values of associates as well (Weatherbee, Dye, Bissonnette, Mills, 2009). The intent of this analysis is to evaluate how interventions have been successfully used in knowledge-centric industries. These specific industries are chosen for this analysis of interventions as knowledge experts often have the highest resistance to change as much of their perceived self-worth is in what they know (Paik, Choi, 2005).

Bringing OD Intervention to Knowledge-Centric Industries Interventions are the most difficult to successfully implement in those companies whose cultures highly value knowledge over pure efficiency or output. When knowledge becomes the delineating factor of status in any industry the challenge of successfully implementing personal and group interventions rises significantly (Hodgkinson, Healey, 2008). One company which was faced with significant resistance to change and successfully overcame its challenges using OD-based intervention techniques is consulting and advisory firm Accenture (Paik, Choi, 2005).

Faced with growing fragmentation of its business units as their senior experts in such key areas as supply chain management (SCM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), pricing and revenue management, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) practice areas began hoarding information and not entering it into the Accenture Knowledge Navigator knowledge management system (Paik, Choi, 2005) the consultancy faced the daunting task of how to recycle and reuse knowledge across its many ongoing projects.

As is the case with organizations that have dozens of concurrent projects underway with members of teams from various levels of experience, the initial intervention of coaching and mentoring only worked with the remote senior-level project contributors (Paik, Choi, 2005). Interventions at the personal level also included the use of Myers-Briggs Types Indicator (MBTI) analyses to help Accenture teams better delineate their roles in virtual teams.

The entire intervention process was made more difficult in the context of the virtual teams have learned over time to rely more on informal approaches to communication vs. using the processes as defined for entering and accessing data in the Knowledge Navigator (Paik, Choi, 2005). Catalyst of Intervention in Knowledge-Centric Industries Accenture, like many other organizations who find the need for OD-based intervention in their firms, found that the informal processes were beginning to completely re-define the roles of individual contributors in virtual teams.

This led to an entirely new, and often less manageable, organizational structure becoming more prevalent in Accenture. As a result of the individualized intervention not completely working, Accenture focused on re-defining teams based on the customer groups they served. This was different than industry-based vertical practice segments including banking, manufacturing, or services and instead sought to re-define knowledge workflows based on customer centricity.

The use of business process management (BPR)-based interventions to create more of a customer-centric mindset is critically important for re-orienting a culture to be more accountable in the use of knowledge (Kok, Biemans, 2009). Interventions are also made more difficult when it investments must be aligned to process workflows that are re-designed to allow them to be more efficient and cost-effective. Interventions that involve the re-alignment of it and processes so they can become more customer centric run a higher risk of failure as a result (Lee, Chu, Tseng, 2009).

What is critically important is that coaching and mentoring be relied on to reward collaborative behavior on a consistent basis (Weatherbee, Dye, Bissonnette, Mills, 2009). Interventions at the personal level that combine this focus on collaboration with a process-centric approach to putting customers, not necessarily taxonomies of data, at the center of project efforts forces interventions to higher success rates (Song, 2008). Conclusion In highly knowledge-centric industries the need for intervention, both at the individual and corporate level, is particularly challenging given.