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Collective Intelligence in Healthcare
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In this article we define Collective Intelligence and explain the benefits delivered by this innovative approach to collective decision making.
In September 2005, Gartner analysts Alexander Linden, Jackie Fenn and Nikos Drakos, predicted that Collective Intelligence would deliver a 10% productivity benefit by 2015. Unsurprising then that many organisations are now reviewing how they can gain competitive advantage by better use of information.
What is Collective Intelligence?
Collective intelligence is a collective (rather than hierarchical) approach to making decisions. Knowledge workers choose to allocate their time and resources to tasks where their skills can best be used, based on corporate needs. This more-efficient use of resources can increase the quantity and quality of work output.
Gartner defined Collective intelligence as "an approach to developing intellectual content, such as code and documents, through individuals working together with no centralised authority. This is seen as a more cost-efficient way of producing content, metadata, software and certain services".
New Ways of Doing Business
Collective intelligence enables new ways of doing business across industries that will result in major shifts in industry dynamics. No longer will motivated workers need to put forms in a 'suggestion box'. All workers will have access to, and be able to contribute to, the latest corporate thinking.
Gartner believes that "Working within a wide community to achieve common goals will be embraced by businesses within five to 10 years".
In reality, many organisations have already started reorganising in this way. Communities of Practice is one example where collaborative, interactive networks of individuals come together to work on a generally defined topic. They are networks of individuals with a common, shared purpose grouped together to facilitate knowledge building, idea creation and information exchange.
What Does This Mean in a Healthcare Context?
Collective Intelligence principles are not new to healthcare service provision. Managed clinical networks are already an important and established way of maintaining access to services across NHS organisations which, because of their size, location or recruitment challenges, might otherwise be unable offer them.
However, whereas clinical networks focus on inter-organisational cooperation primarily between clinical staff, Collective Intelligence emphasises intra-organisational collaboration that can engage staff in any role within a healthcare organisation.
Oakleigh believe that Collective Intelligence can and will contribute significantly to the current change agenda in the NHS. The increasing focus on the experience of those using healthcare services, experience which is shaped by more than the immediate clinical outcomes, requires a more holistic approach to service planning and provision.
One aspect of this is the increased emphasis on the involvement of the public and patients in decision making. Equally important however, is the opportunity for the meaningful engagement of those involved in every aspect of healthcare service.
Collective Intelligence is a valuable means of tapping the collective knowledge and experience of the workforce in order to transform the services on offer. It promotes the behaviours through which organizational cultural change is affected and lends substance to the concept of a learning organisation.
Collective Intelligence means pockets of good and best practice are more likely to be disseminated and lead to innovation elsewhere. It should also lead to a reduction in the duplication of effort so often seen where service improvement initiatives remain isolated within an organisation.
In a service environment increasingly characterised by plurality of provision it is those organisations that are cost effective and offer an all round positive patient experience who stand to benefit most. To a large extent the latter is a refection of staff morale.
By both valuing and drawing upon the staff resource and at the same time increasing the awareness and understanding amongst staff of the organisations direction, priorities and challenges Collective Intelligence is a management approach which should not be overlooked.
5 Ways Collective Intelligence Can Benefit Health Care
1. Improved Knowledge retention
Currently, much 'organisational knowledge' or 'corporate memory' is held in the heads of senior / middle management'. However, the current employment market rewards those who move more frequently. This presents a serious potential loss of a valuable resource for many organisations and is without doubt an organisational risk that needs to be addressed. Taking a Collective Intelligence approach will stimulate, record, store, distribute and make the corporate memory available across the organisation.
2. More efficient business processes
In many organisations individuals and groups are duplicating effort by reinventing wheels and repeating past corporate mistakes. Utilising a Collective Intelligence approach can help individuals build upon existing and previous initiatives. It can also provide access to useful parts of similar initiatives which may be of value while only indirectly related.
3. Increased flexibility
Organisations that can quickly share knowledge are able to respond faster to both internal initiatives and external opportunities.
4. Sustainable working practices
In many organisations individuals are storing their activities and corporate experience in large and personal email files, which only they access, which are rarely used, and exist as an unstructured database on a local computer. Within the same organisation another individual may choose to keep similar information, perhaps with a financial bias, in their own personal spreadsheet. As the number and size of these files grows, this becomes increasingly unsustainable. A Collective Intelligence approach removes the need for many of these files, allowing the ones actually needed to be better managed.
5. Reduced 'Corporate Reputation' risk
Personal and 'save just in case' behaviours conflict with regulatory, Freedom of Information and Data Protection requirements. When individuals have confidence in the 'official and managed' corporate information stores, they will not keep their own unmanaged and therefore risky personal records.
It is important to keep in mind that achieving corporate advantage from a Collective Intelligence approach within an appropriate Knowledge Management Strategy will require senior sponsorship of:
- Changes in staff and management behaviours;
- Improved ways of working;
- A review of existing information architecture; and,
- Well informed use of recent and still emerging technology.
Case Study: A Government Agency undergoing major organisational change.
Oakleigh was commissioned to bring together and then disseminate the lessons learnt from recent work programmes. The resultant 'Knowledge Resource' summarised information about the organisation's major achievements, what it did, what is known and what works.
This information and access to the underlying knowledge and evidence base will be available via the internet. This will minimise the loss of intellectual capital on the creation of a new Agency and provide an ongoing knowledge resource for the new Agency teams made up of staff from all the legacy organisations.
The knowledge resource captured what staff regarded as being the key topics and underlying knowledge resource across the whole spectrum of the organisation's work which will be carried forward to the new organisation.
If you have any questions about the subjects covered in this white paper or you would like to find out more about how Oakleigh Consulting could help your organisation, please contact us on 0161 835 4100 or email us.
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