Ge's Digital Revolution Redefining The E In Ge Analysis

GE's digital Revolution Redefining the E in GE

Within 18 months of introducing the e-business initiative, Internet Week named GE the ~{!0~}Internet Company of the Year.~{!1~} How was GE to drive this ambitious company-wide program throughout its complex and diverse organizations so quickly and effectively?

GE is a huge company, with 3 dozen of business areas, over 300 thousand employees and annual sales revenue as high as 129 billion in the year of 2000. It was the "social architecture" (culture and values) and "operating systems" (systems and processes) helped this complex and diverse organization to drive through changes quickly and effectively that have it named Internet Week's top e-business of 2000. These deeply rooted strengths did not only contribute to the process in introducing the e-business initiative, but also assisted GE in evolving into a typical successful learning organization.

GE~{!/~}s ~{!0~}social architecture~{!1~} is recognized as the platform from which Jack Welch launched the company~{!/~}s transformation. Firstly, Welch himself is a man loves embracing new technology. He started to use computer in his 50s and even found someone under 30 to teach him internet. As early as 1989, Welch articulated organization culture as ~{!0~}one that characterized by speed, simplicity, and self-confidence~{!1~}. In the early 1990, Welch~{!/~}s vision was to create a competitive advantage out of GE~{!/~}s diversity by making the company ~{!0~}a vast laboratory whose principal product is new ideas that are spread rapidly throughout the company~{!1~}. GE values the process of sharing insights, knowledge and mental models between internal departments but also with external partners. Later on, many of the embedded beliefs become an formal set of values (as stated in Exhibit 2) such as ~{!0~}insist on excellence and are intolerant of bureaucracy~{!-~}create an environment of stretch, excitement, informality and trust~{!-~} continually renew and refresh its execution~{!-~} reward improvement~{!1~}. GE keeps challenging itself with a higher bar of standard. GE~{!/~}s ~{!0~}social architecture~{!1~} should be considered as a good tradition that flow inside the company and the source of power to drive itself through changes.

~{!0~}Operating System~{!1~} is GE~{!/~}s learning culture in action--in essence, it is the operating guideline of the company. As shown in exhibit 3, the Operating system is a year-round series of intense learning session in which business CEOs, role models and initiative champions from GE as well as outside companies need and share the intellectual capital to the world. The Operating System allows different GE businesses to operate at performance levels and speeds that would be unachievable were they on their own. The system functions across departments, and also cross several key initiatives in GE history: the Globalization has been enriched dozens of cycles; Six Sigma, Service and e-Business are all being enriched with this cycle. GE keeps the accumulation of its own previous precious experience and also enriches these experiences in the new strategic cycles, especially in e-Business.

The reason that E-Business initiative was driven successfully among this complex and diverse organization was that GE loves learning and keeps learning from both inside and outside. Firstly, in GE, people use six-sigma, the tool that can monitor and control production quality, to drive the manufacturing and even the quality control in e-Business areas. People work in the norm of systematic problem solving, which means they conduct business based on data rather than assumption, they use statistical tools heavily. Secondly, GE keeps improving the new tools and learning from previous success and failures, accesses them systematically, and record the lessons in a form that employees find accessible. The CEO of GE plastic Gary Rogers, initiated dyb.com first, and them accumulated many good lessons from this website and evolved this website into geplastic.com website. In the new website, it is more customer-oriented, by focusing on four key end-user function~{!*~}Buy, Design, Research and Interact. The new website development team used GE~{!/~}s previous experience by exploiting files containing 30 years of information on the technical characteristics and properties