Ethnography for Process/Workscape Transformation

Game-changing innovations often cut across established channels or combine elements of existing capacity in new ways. -- Rosabeth Moss Kantor, Harvard Business Review

To stay ahead of the competition, innovate better, or operate more effectively, companies must understand their customers and human-organizational processes.

This is especially important as industries continue to migrate towards the services sector. As complex systems, however, most corporations encounter difficulties when attempting to transform their people, processes, or cultures.

Some common challenges include:
-	lack of customer understanding, knowledge capture, or strategy-sharing — especially as customers and services take center stage in corporate operations;
-	difficulty identifying the problem (or only focusing on the surface problem) — especially for mature companies where entrenched organizational processes occur outside mainstream awareness; and
-	ineffective or shallow professional development programs — often due to a gap between perceived processes and actual work practice.

The Solution

By using ethnographic studies to target and co-design solutions, PARC ethnographers help companies:

• identify what the real problem is and where it is located or embedded in practice;
• identify hidden or nascent capabilities and resources;
• select and help develop the most promising avenues for addressing the problem(s);
• customize and co-design tools, processes, workspaces, or training programs that build on organizational strengths and counteract weaknesses.

The results:

• more effective information-sharing, collaboration, or knowledge capture across organizational boundaries or distributed project teams;
• enhanced organizational metrics such as increased productivity and profits, better customer service, or greater employee satisfaction/ retention;
• improved company culture or successful shift in core company values;
• and much more.