Global E-Business and Collaboration: Case of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Posted: August 26th, 2021

Student’s Name

Professor’s Name

Course

Date

Global E-Business and Collaboration: Case of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Introduction

NASA’s Goddard Space Center is based in Greenbelt, Maryland. The center is an organization for NASA space scientists, technologists, and engineers. Following the need to enhance collaboration among the diverse teams of experts, the organization developeda social tool called Spacebook 1 in the year 2001. However, the social tool failed to meet the desired objectives of facilitating collaboration among the teams. This was attributed to the absence of adherence to the culture and politics of the company workplace. Later, in 2008, the company made an upgrade on the social tool that appreciated the needs of employees to network both within and outside the working environment. The discussion examines the issues that contributed to the failure of Spacebook 1 and subsequent adjustments that enhanced its performance, hence the success of Spacebook 2.

Issues/Problems

The major problems in adopting internal social networks include:

The company failed to identify the way its employees do business. In this case, they established social networks that are irrelevant to employees with few features to attract their attention. As such, the established social networkcould not meet their expectations.Besides, most employees preferred using conventional public networks such as e-mail despite the concerted efforts by information technology experts (IT) to introducenew social and collaborative networks. For instance, assessment on the uptake of the internal social network by employees across its global branchesrevealed that about 22 percent of employees felt that the tool is helpful. However, most averred that the tool is not necessary for the context of their workplace, thus irrelevant.

            Moreover, some employees were unwilling to learn new technologies that accompany internal social networks. As a result, it was as if they were being pressured when the management attempted to bring social networking technology in their work setting. It was worse when the social tool lacked features that focus on employee needs. For instance, the need to enhance collaboration among small teams without e-mailing the larger groups did not last long as the IT experts could not incorporate employee interests. The teams did not understand how Spacebook 1 would help them deliver on their duties, unlike other methods of collaboration, such as e-mail.

            Lastly, in some cases, the introduction of internal social networking initiative did not accompany incentives to change the perception of employees that like doing business in specific traditional ways. For example, people may join Facebook since most of their friends are on it. However, within a workplace setting, the significant aspects the teams needed included job efficiency and ease of using the internal network rather than succumbing to peer pressure. Therefore, it was difficult for employees to appreciate a social tool that could not embrace workplace interests.

Solutions

In search to have subsequent internal social network realized the intended objectives, the Company endeavored to undertake the following measures in the development of its internal social tool:

First, IT experts in the company strived to ensure that the internal social network they are introducing add value to the company business. As such, they focused on developing content that is relevant to employee needs. Equally, the content included up-to-date and easily accessible features. Notably, while examining previous failures, NASA IT experts endeavored to understand the interest of small teams who were the target users of the network. Also, through its research and development department, the institution investigated critical resources that most team members needed to access from external sources. In this way, they made it easily accessible by including external communication features to help access external resources whenever needed. The incorporated features are mainly the links to traditional social networks such as Facebook, YouTube, E-mail, and LinkedIn, which were embedded in the new version of Spacebook 2. Hence, the move served toenhancethe reliability and importance of the established social business tool to the performance and interaction of respective team members.

Secondly, the company initiated sensitization programs to help create awareness about the new features and the benefits attributed to the internal social tool. It targeted at ensuring that employees see the relevance of the tool to their tasks, understand its usage, and the reasons they needed to incorporate it in their daily activities in the workplace. Further, the company has ensured constant innovation of the software to rhyme with the changing dynamics in technology.  The innovation has helped bridge external and internal communities by addressing the needs of other stakeholders such as suppliers, customers and partners outside the company. As such, through the expanded social network, most employees increasingly appreciate the social tool thus achieving the intended collaboration among small teams in the company.

Evaluation of Solutions/Analysis

The implementation of an internal social network is becoming an imperative aspect of the improvement of internal communication and collaboration. These tools are cheaper and easy to operate besides helping the company lower expenses in many areas of interaction than the usual conventional channels. However, looking at the case of NASA, the company has faced challenges in ensuring that employees appreciate the efforts undertaken to introduce the tools. After the failure of the first social network tool, NASA moved to introduce the second version, Spacebook 2. The second version proved successful after incorporating various solutions that were the primary causes of failure in the first attempt. In this case, the struggle manifested by the company in implementing internal network tool shows that companies need to be aware of their employee needs. Introducing technologies that do not attest to employee traditions and workplace needs can prove costly for an organization.On the contrary, proper assessment of employee needs gives a chance to the company to focus on introducing tools that are relevant to employee needs. In this way, the company will reap the benefits of enhanced productivity and networking, like in the case of CSC Technologies. Therefore, achieving global e-business and collaboration objectives relies on the company’s ability to harmonize the support of its employees and other key stakeholders.

Recommendations

According to the above analysis, the following are recommendations tothe adoption of internal social network tools for enhancing global e-business and collaboration:

• Understand the culture and politics of the workplace environment. In this way, the company can introduce social tools that align with the expectations of employees.
• Focus on the interest of employees. When introducing an internal social network, IT experts should strive to understand the interests of employees concerning duty delivery.
• Provide incentives to enhance transformation from one system to the other. Incentives are intended to attract traditional employees into the new social network.

Conclusion

The case study analysis and the chapter focus shows that companies are striving to adopt collaborative tools, yet they become disappointed at the end due to their failure to meet expected performance. Technology is imperative in enhancing collaboration. However, management and cultural initiatives are the driving engines, especially at the introduction levels of several collaborative tools. Therefore, companies should endeavor to instill required changes in the workflow besides ensuring that suitable features are incorporated to suit the employee’s workplace environment.

Relations to the Chapter

The case study is directly related to the content of the chapter as it presents a situation of companies facing challenges in their attempt to introduce internal social networks. The issues raised in the case, such as employee culture and politics of workplace environment, need for a collective approach to the introduction of social network tools, and resistance among employees to change are addressed in the chapter.