Assessing the maturity levei of an organization in its adoption of collaboration technologies

Nowadays there are many information technologies that can make a significant difference to support collaborative efforts in the workspace. The role of IT is to support group collaboration by empowering team members with the right capabilities. One way to assess capabilities is through a maturity model. This paper proposes a first version of the Collaboration-Technology Maturity model (CTMM), aiming to serve as a strategic instrument for IT managers to control and manage the adoption of Collaboration Technologies (CITs) among their organizations. Our contribution is both theoretical and practical as we propose a descriptive maturity model. Nevertheless, it is also an application method and assessment instruments. We also completed an empirical evaluation by conducting 89 assessments at Latin American companies of all sizes and industries. This extensive field exercise allowed us to not only evaluate the usefulness of the model and instruments but also investigate CIT adoption patterns in Latin America in an attempt to collect historical data to further evolve CTMM into a comparative model. Responses were used to provide conclusions on CIT adoption in Latin America with respect to three specific backgrounds: the country of origin (region), size (in number of employees) and industry type. The implications of our findings are discussed for practitioners and researchers.

O processo de descentralização da gestão orçamentária nos núcleos regionais da Agência Nacional de Saúde Suplementar: um estudo de caso

O presente estudo teve como objetivo analisar como se deu a descentralização da gestão orçamentária na Agência Nacional de Saúde Suplementar em suas Coordenadorias de Brasília e São Paulo e em que medida é possível replicá-la aos demais Núcleos Regionais espalhados em todo território nacional. Para tanto, apoiou-se em um conjunto de dados/evidências levantados a partir da revisão da literatura, pesquisa documental e pesquisa de campo envolvendo observação participante e aplicação de entrevistas e questionários. Como estratégia de pesquisa foi utilizado o estudo de caso, visto tratar-se da análise de uma intervenção em uma organização, no caso a Agência Nacional de Saúde Suplementar, com o intuito de esclarecer como e por que as decisões foram implementadas e com quais resultados. Para a compreensão do fenômeno estudado, necessitou-se explorar os conceitos da descentralização, compreender as especificidades que afetam o grau de descentralização, investigar a experiência acumulada nos Núcleos que possuem Coordenadorias de Administração Descentralizada e identificar a viabilidade de instalação de CADs nos demais Núcleos. A despeito dos problemas observados e relatados na implementação do processo, é visível os ganhos obtidos com a descentralização, tanto na percepção dos gestores envolvidos quanto dos servidores das unidades descentralizadas. A análise documental também comprovou que ganhos de eficiência e gestão foram obtidos nessas unidades, mas correções devem ser realizadas. Mediante a análise dos dados apresentados, verifica-se que a descentralização das demais unidades é possível, e resolveria alguns dos problemas relatados pelos servidores, criando uma gestão mais participativa que se adeque as especificidades locais, mas a replicação desse modelo aos demais núcleos passa primeiramente por uma efetiva avaliação e ajustes das unidades já implantadas.

Social media crises in the organization: exploring management strategies through cases from France and Brazil

The aim of this Master’s thesis has been to shed light on the response strategies that organizations are implementing when facing a crisis created on or amplified by social media. Since the development of social media in the late 1990s, the interplay between the online and the offline spheres has become more complex, and characterized by dynamics of a new magnitude, as exemplified by the wave of “Twitter” Revolutions or the Wikileaks scandal in the mid 2000s, where online behaviors deeply affected an offline reality. The corporate world does not escape to this worldwide phenomenon, and there are more and more examples of organizational reputations destroyed by social media “fireballs”. As such, this research aims to investigate, through the analysis of six recent cases of corporate crises (2013-2015) from France and Brazil, different strategies currently in use in order to identify examples of good and bad practices for companies to adopt or avoid when facing a social media crisis. The first part of this research is dedicated to a review of the literature on crisis management and social media. From that review, we were able to design a matrix model, the Social Media Crisis Management Matrix, with which we analyzed the response strategies of the six companies we selected. This model allows the conceptualization of social media crises in a multidimensional matrix built to allow the choice, according to four parameters, of the most efficient (that is: which will limit the reputational damage) response strategy. Attribution of responsibility for the crisis to the company by stakeholders, the origin of the crisis (internal or external), the degree of reputational threat, and the emotions conveyed online by stakeholders help companies determining whether to adopt a defensive response, or an accommodative response. The results of the analysis suggest that social media crises are rather manichean objects for they are, unlike their traditional offline counterparts, characterized by emotional involvement and irrationality, and cannot be dealt with traditionally. Thus analyzing the emotions of stakeholders proved to be, in these cases, an accurate thermometer of the seriousness of the crisis, and as such, a better rudder to follow when selecting a response strategy. Consequently, in the cases, companies minimized their reputational damage when responding to their stakeholders in an accommodative way, regardless of the “objective” situation, which might be a change of paradigm in crisis management.