You are no doubt familiar with the concept of the extended business. In simple terms, it means that a business is no longer an entity strictly cut off from the outside world by boundaries that define its limits. As opposed to the notion that there is the business on the one hand, and its customers, partners and suppliers on the other, the notion of the extended business assumes that the business, in the pursuit of efficiency, has a duty to collaborate more with these ‘outsiders’, even if this means including them ‘virtually’ within its perimeter when it comes to developing communication, decision-making and information-sharing processes. For example, it is more effective to involve customers and suppliers in the definition of new products. It is in this way that many information systems go beyond the business perimeter for greater efficiency (an order from one company leads to pre-orders for spare parts or raw materials from its suppliers and the suppliers of its suppliers, for example).
I would describe this vision of the extended business as ‘spatial’, as opposed to ‘temporal’.
This comment comes from an article in Le Figaro (business and employment section, 11/09/2006 p13) which I found very interesting. It talks about structuring communities of former employees. This already exists in some businesses (the ex-Procter network is one of the best-known examples). As Dominique Turcq from Boostzone says, structuring this network is a major source of value for the business: facilitating recruitment, finding a gateway to customers, providing feedback, possibly bringing back an ‘ex’ for a special assignment… I’m forgetting some but there are many cases where former employees, even if they have left, represent a major source of value for a company. Not to mention the fact that an ex-employee can become a future supplier or customer.
While this alumni culture is very much in evidence across the Atlantic, there is still work to be done on our side of the ocean, both in terms of evangelising and structuring.
Once this stage has been reached, can we envisage a day when alumni will keep a certain ‘entry’ on the intranet, for example? That they will remain in the internal directories ‘just in case’? A bit like what is increasingly done in the Grandes Ecoles, where you keep your email address and access to certain areas of the school’s network even after you’ve left (even though the issue is totally different, I agree, in terms of both risks and opportunities).
In any case, this is a view that should not be lost sight of when evaluating the assets of your business: there is a time dimension to it that even the termination of an employment contract does not render obsolete. In the same way, taking the ‘alumni’ dimension into account when analysing a company’s human capital is far from neutral, whether you use it to evaluate your own business, a supplier or a business in which you want to invest or which you are helping to invest.
