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Dream of forming a team with the flick of a button? Read how Fidelity Investments made its employees' and customers' lives a little easier.
How do you begin utilizing the constantly changing plethora of new technologies? How do you continue embedding the core skills of the quality sciences to improve customer service, efficiency, speed, and flexibility? What are some of the new technologies that lend themselves to use in a quality program? And what new tools and skills are needed to use them effectively?
Fidelity Investments, located in Boston, has been successful in utilizing technology by emphasizing the tools needed to make it work and building upon existing processes. This approach has been successful in producing measurable results in terms of direct savings, costs avoided, improved customer satisfaction, and implemented process improvements. Fidelity's strategy has recognized that "communities of practice" already existed within its culture and are quite sophisticated in how they manage learning among themselves. From the very beginning, one important key of Fidelity's implementation was to be able to communicate a common process and vocabulary across organizational borders and to deliver it to the desktop, wherever that may be.
In keeping with the corporate culture, Fidelity's approach to using technology to improve quality and to foster organizational learning has been to have many sites tailored to the specific business a unit needs to develop independently. A central coordinating function, the quality network, acts as a networking agent to allow learning and to facilitate the voluntary adoption of best practices across business units.
Key components of a quality Intranet
Shortly after the corporate Intranet was established in 1994, the quality services group at Fidelity Investments Systems Company recognized its potential and established a website to support quality information and sharing. A key planning principle was to keep it simple: keep it inhouse so it can be maintained and modified easily and often.
Another key was to focus on knowledge management using what was recently called a "personalization approach" in the March/April 1999 Harvard Business Review-as opposed to a "codification approach," which means capturing the knowledge of frequently repeated projects for use by less-experienced associates. A personalization approach relies on the logic of "expert economics"the process of sharing deep knowledge among seasoned professionals-a process...