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Laudon, K., & Laudon, J. (2021). Management information systems : Managing the digital firm, ebook , global edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a
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 72 Part One Organizations, Management, and the Networked Enterprise

company. A People Directory provides a searchable database of contact infor-

mation, skills, and expertise. Yammer can be accessed through the web, desk-
top, and mobile devices and can be integrated with other Microsoft tools such as
SharePoint and Office 365 to make other applications more “social.” (SharePoint
is Microsoft’s platform for collaboration, document sharing, and document
management. Office 365 is Microsoft’s online service for its desktop productiv-
ity applications such as word processing, spreadsheet, electronic presentations,
and data management.)
Sharp created a pilot Yammer program in February 2013, with employee
adoption voluntary and employees allowed to write about hobbies and interests
as well as work-related topics. Within months there were 6,000 adopters, and the
number of Yammer users within the company has passed 10,000. Sharp wants to
deploy Yammer to all domestic employees in Japan and eventually to overseas
offices.
Yammer has improved the flow of information between senior management
and rank-and-file employees. Communication among employees themselves
has increased appreciably, with some conversations occurring among differ-
ent departments and different regions. For example, smartphone developers
are able to share opinions about functions and user-friendliness throughout the
company and also learn about activities in other departments that they would
not normally hear about by reading Yammer postings.
Some department leaders use Yammer to solicit ideas from their staff on
how to use the latest technology in the business. Sharp is able to incorporate
such feedback into product development and company policies. This ability to
collect dispersed information from all over the company and have managers
freely exchange ideas and learn from employees represents a major cultural
change for the company.

Sources: “Sharp: A Culture Reborn Through Enterprise Social,” www.microsoft.com, ac-

cessed February 12, 2020; www.globalsharp.com, accessed January 21, 2020; and Sharp
Corporation, “Sharp Is Back With Big Screens,” Hexus, February 5, 2019.

S harp’s experience illustrates how much organizations today rely on infor-

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mation systems to improve their performance and remain competitive. It

also shows how much systems supporting collaboration and teamwork make
a difference in an organization’s ability to innovate, execute, grow profits, and
remain competitive.
The chapter-opening diagram calls attention to important points raised by
this case and this chapter. Sharp Corporation is a knowledge-intensive technol-
ogy company that depends on innovation, but it was hampered by hierarchi-
cal top-down processes and a culture that prevented employees and managers
from freely sharing information and innovating. This impacted the company’s
ability to create and deliver new leading-edge products, maintain high profit
margins, and fend off increasing competition from other companies.
Sharp management found that the best solution was to deploy new technol-
ogy to help the company move from a hierarchical corporate knowledge and
work environment to one that was more democratized. Enterprise social net-
working actively engaged employees and enabled them to obtain more knowl-
edge from colleagues and managers. The company took advantage of Microsoft
Laudon, K., & Laudon, J. (2021). Management information systems : Managing the digital firm, ebook , global edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a
onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a>
Created from kadirhas on 2021-10-04 07:02:11.