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Johns Hopkins University uses Facilitate.com to support
its organization change initiatives
The Opportunity
The Organization Development (OD)
Unit at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) had the opportunity
to build a new retreat facility. Experienced in running
conferences for various different departments throughout
the university, part of the group's vision was to include
groupware tools in the new facility and explore how
collaborative technology could have a positive and measurable
impact. They wanted to explore technology in support
of synchronous and asynchronous meetings, in the conference
facility and distributed across campuses. The survey
tool would provide further opportunities to engage faculty,
staff and students in the future development of the
university.
The Choice
The OD unit decided to conduct a competitive
review of collaborative software on the market. They
chose Facilitate.com for its ease of use, flexibility
and capability to work seamlessly over the web including
options to provide links to topics directly from the
OD web site. The OD consultants also appreciated sharing
ideas with the knowledgeable and accessible facilitation
experts at Facilitate.com, Inc.
The Solution
The JHU OD unit now uses Facilitate.com
inside and out of its retreat facility for a variety
of same time and asynchronous meetings. Groups of conference
participants are first introduced to Facilitate.com's
collaborative tools while they are together at the retreat
center for a variety of purposes including strategic
planning, organization change initiatives and dialogues
on diversity. After the groups go home, they continue
to share ideas and work together from their dispersed
offices guided by an OD consultant/facilitator.
The organization change initiatives
use Facilitate.com's brainstorming and prioritization
tools in team/committee meetings at the retreat facility.
These team events are supplemented by employee surveys,
such as climate and satisfaction surveys, that reach
out to a broader population and provide critical baseline
data to target and measure the effectiveness of the
project. Facilitate.com's brainstorming and action planning
tools support responsibility charting, another important
part of the OD methodology. Meeting and survey results
are readily documented using Facilitate.com's printing
and export capabilities.
The OD unit is also making good use
of Facilitate.com's survey tools to quickly set up and
administer questionnaires over the Internet or an intranet.
Heather Williams, Facilitator and OD Consultant, has
been impressed at the speed and ease of use of the product.
"I was able to conduct a survey for the libraries
across two campuses, with responses from all over the
world," she said. "I had 8000 to 9000 respondents.
It saved us tons of money being able to run the survey
this way, in a very quick fashion."
The Results
The JHU Organization Development Unit
continues to find new and interesting ways to utilize
Facilitate.com in the higher education environment.
The collaborative technology tools have helped leverage
a small department's ability to support the member departments,
faculty and staff of a large multi-campus university.
"Facilitate.com has provided
a quick and easy method of collecting a lot of data
and ideas, from both meetings and surveys,"
added Heather Williams. "It is so easy to put
up a survey and link people into it, they don't even
realize that they've left our web site."
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