NETTING IT OUT
Corporate Executive Board, an organization that provides best practices and
decision-support guidance to large corporations, is supporting customer-created
content and collaboration. Within the Compliance and Ethics Leadership Council,
one of the Corporate Executive Board membership services, the research team
has created a collaborative space where members can share compliance and ethics “messages” that
they have created. Built on CustomerVision BizWiki, the Compliance and Ethics
Message Generator, allows members of the service to submit messages for posting,
find messages that they can reuse, and easily download and customize these
messages.
In this spotlight interview, Ronnie Kann, Program Director, Compliance and
Ethics Leadership Council, shares how Corporate Executive Board has responded
to its customers’ requests for increased collaboration.
BACKGROUND ON THE CORPORATE EXECUTIVE BOARD
Corporate Mission
Founded in 1983, the Corporate Executive Board provides best practices research,
decision-support tools, and executive education to a membership of the world’s
leading corporations and not-for-profit institutions. Its research addresses
issues related to corporate strategy, operations, and general management.
The Corporate Executive Board focuses on identifying management initiatives,
processes, tools, and frameworks that will allow members to avoid reinventing
the wheel in addressing problems they share in common with their peers. At
its best, its work is able to shape strategic debate and to accelerate tactical
implementation in even the most progressive organizations.
Membership
Corporate Executive Board provides research and analysis on an annual subscription
basis to a membership of the world’s largest and most prestigious organizations.
For a fixed annual fee, members of the Board’s subscription programs
(see Table A) have access to an integrated set of services, including:
(The specific services are outlined in Table A.)
Corporate Executive Board Membership Programs
(Please see the formatted PDF to see the table at http://dx.doi.org/10.1571/i04-03-08cc.)
Table A. The Corporate Executive Board offers services in eight subject areas,
each targeted at a different high-level executive in a large corporation.
PROVIDING A COLLABORATIVE ENVIRONMENT FOR RESEARCH ON COMPLIANCE AND ETHICS
ISSUES
Interview with Ronnie Kann, Program Director, Compliance and Ethics Leadership
Council, a Division of the Corporate Executive Board
PATRICIA SEYBOLD GROUP. We’ve provided a brief background on Corporate
Executive Board. In your own words, how would you describe the Board and your
role in the organization?
RONNIE KANN. Basically, we are a research and executive education firm, headquartered
in a single location in Arlington VA, where we just relocated from our several
locations in D.C. (I should mention that we also have smaller offices in
London, Sydney, India, Chicago, and San Francisco.) The location issue is
significant because, since we are now all within the same facility, our employees,
from all the different programs, are now more easily able to communicate
and work together for our members.
We’re an organization that serves over 4,700 different companies worldwide,
with various types of research, decision support, and seminars. Our mission
is to try to identify the best solutions to shared corporate problems—the
common problems that most large organizations face.
There are 50 different research groups in the Board, each serving a different
exec or officer in an organization, such as the CFO, the head of human services,
the chief marketing and sales officers, etc. I work within the Compliance
and Ethics Leadership Council which serves Chief Compliance and Ethics Officers
(CCEOs), addressing the issues common to this role. As Program Director,
I am responsible for the day-to-day operations of the group. I am also the
head of the research team, so I wear two different–but closely related—hats.
Each research group has its own membership and has its own research team, account
management team, and Web team. My research group serves more than 400 CCEOs
around the world.
PATRICIA SEYBOLD GROUP. You say each group has its own Web team—so are
there 50 different sites? Do they each have their own look and feel?
RONNIE KANN. Although there are different named sites for each research area,
there is a single Web template and architecture corporate-wide that is managed
by the central IT group and the CIO. So each site has the consistency of
branding and look and feel, but they are managed and maintained individually.
PATRICIA SEYBOLD GROUP. What are the information sharing/collaboration needs
within your group?
RONNIE KANN. The premise of what we do is that we have membership networks
of executives at large organizations, and we try to identify and answer their
common challenges. We do this by sharing ideas and identifying best demonstrated
solutions. To more effectively share these ideas, we needed to “activate
the member network” and find a way to use the Web to create a virtual
sharing environment, both internally and with members.
In fact, the way we work here, our tools, templates, and decision support are
based on member feedback on what they want. Members told us that they wanted
a place where they can find compliance and ethics “messages” and
exchange them with each other.
PATRICIA SEYBOLD GROUP. What are “messages?”
RONNIE KANN. Messages are information that is helpful to the compliance/ethics
professionals in their day-to-day jobs. For example, around Valentine’s
Day, companies might want to send out reminders about appropriate and inappropriate
workplace behaviors. We would have a number of sample messages which could
be customized by each member for his or her organization. This saves them
a lot of time and effort creating new messages from scratch.
PATRICIA SEYBOLD GROUP. Who creates these messages?
RONNIE KANN. The research team creates some of the messages, but the vast majority
comes from the members. Members send us messages that they have created and
want to share. We then take out any specific references to their organizations,
and we make them available to the compliance and ethics membership at large.
The research team only creates messages to address specific questions that
members might have for which no other member has yet volunteered a message.
This is why a collaboration environment is so important. Based on input from
members, we recognized that we needed to create a place where members could
go to find this helpful information. We have created what we call our Compliance
and Ethics Message Generator based on the BizWiki technology from ComputerVision
[see sidebar].
The Compliance and Ethics Message Generator is a living, categorized repository
of compliance and ethics messages that members use in their companies. And
it is populated by messages that members have shared with us and includes
tools that allows members to borrow from each other and use the messages
in their environments. (See Illustration 1.)
Compliance and Ethics Message Generator
© 2008 Corporate Executive Board
Illustration 1. Members of the Compliance and Ethics Leadership Council can
download and customize messages, many of which were submitted by members
themselves to share with others.
PATRICIA SEYBOLD GROUP. How are the contributions from members coming along?
RONNIE KANN. The membership has been very forthcoming. We try to filter all
the submissions so we have a library of good, reusable examples—about
150 to 200 messages.
PATRICIA SEYBOLD GROUP. So are all messages just volunteered outright?
RONNIE KANN. Informally, in the collaborative environment, some member might
say, “we’re thinking about writing a message to the sales department
warning to be careful about giving gifts to prospective customers. So what
do you think of this idea?” Or they might ask if we have any examples.
We then work with that member to help him create a message for his organization,
and we might then ask for him to offer it to be shared by other members.
We do also screen all volunteered messages. Inappropriate language is not really
a problem—this is about compliance and ethics issues, after all. But
we scrub any corporate-specific details and make the messages generic and
easy to repurpose.
PATRICIA SEYBOLD GROUP. Please elaborate on how the process works.
RONNIE KANN. Basically, members either browse the Compliance and Ethics Message
Generator to find what they are looking for or else they submit a question
to our team via email. We respond to the email inquiries by either pointing
them to appropriate messages in the repository or, if none is available,
by creating a new message for their specific issue and then publish it to
the Generator for others to customize and use.
When members have a message they have created and want to share with other
members, they email it to a member of our research team, who vets it and
then publishes it. We turn around these volunteered messages very quickly
and try to get them posted as soon as possible. Given the sophistication
and expertise of our membership, most of the time spent in the vetting process
is simply determining if this is a new message (on an issue we don’t
already address) or a repeat, or if it is a variation on an existing message
that better addresses a different industry or locale. These are the kinds
of “filters” we use when reviewing submitted messages.
If the message is new or a valuable variation, we then make it as applicable
as possible to all members, removing identifiable corporate information and
other specific details. Our goal is to make the messages more generic and
easily customizable through judicious editing.