The Deloitte e.Xpert Community - SwarmCreativity in Industry

Trust increases knowledge sharing. Because consistent behavior according to a mutually agreed code of ethics increases trust, COIN members collaborate more efficiently and have less need for time-consuming coordination meetings, therefore working more productively. A COIN-driven activity such as the e.Xpert virtual e-Business consulting practice of Deloitte Consulting in Europe demonstrates how networks of trust boost product quality.

Background and project genesis
I joined Deloitte Consulting in 1999 to help build up the firm’s European e-Business practice. In fact, I was with Deloitte when the phone rang inviting me to get involved in what became DaimlerChrysler’s e3 project. At the time, Deloitte Consulting was a distinct part of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu (DTT), a global firm of 120,000 practitioners delivering assurance and advisory, tax, and consulting services to clients in 140 countries. DTT established the consulting arm as a distinct organization in 1996, with major offices in the Americas, Europe, Asia/Pacific and Africa.
Deloitte Consulting grew thanks in large part growth to the firm’s approach – a more collegial and flexible consulting style than found in other large consulting firms – and the integration across the consulting practice. Major contributors to revenue growth included e-Business, the development of key services including customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, and outsourcing, and a global expansion strategy. Focusing on seven business sectors – manufacturing, public sector, consumer business, healthcare, financial services, communications, and energy – the firm would pull together teams across the four services lines (strategy, process, technology, people) for each engagement with the aim of helping organizations achieve strategy, process, technology, and people transformations. In 1999, Deloitte Consulting expanded its portfolio of service offerings to include the latest developments in e-Business technology such as e-procurement, portals, and other collaborative tools, e-supply chain optimization systems, and an integrated value chain approach. When I joined Deloitte Consulting, my colleagues in the United States were already in the process of creating a dedicated e-Business consulting unit they called dc.com and comprising 200 consultants and partners working exclusively on e-Business engagements out of offices in the Silicon Valley, on the East Coast, and selected other U.S. locations.
We decided on a different approach in Europe – we would build up a virtual practice, the e.Xperts. We assembled a team of Deloitte Consulting practitioners working from offices throughout the continent. We selected an e-Champion in each country to be the point of contact and leader of the national e.Xperts group. Our e-Business leadership team embarked on a whirlwind tour to visit the national offices, educating practitioners about the e.Xpert concept. In most countries, we found a senior manager who volunteered to become the national e-Champion and who was as a natural point of contact.
It was crucial that e.Xperts also remain full members of their national practices and of their competency areas, which included strategy, process, technology, and a category Deloitte called “people” (encompassing human capital, change leadership, and learning). Similarly, the e.Xpert process was self-selecting: motivated practitioners volunteered to become e.Xperts. We offered a structured training program, turning experienced consultants into full-fledged e.Xperts.

COINs emerge.
We wanted to build up a virtual e-Business consulting practice across Europe providing skilled resources to staff e-Business projects as needed. We also wanted to grow a core of Internet and e-Business technology and strategy experts. These experts would be able to team with other practitioners, teaching them and to improve client processes with their e-Business skills. The goal was to recruit internally a core of 150 to 200 e-Business specialists, with 80% of the consultants focusing on technology and delivery and the other 20% having a strategy focus.
Within a short period of time, a vibrant community of Deloitte Consulting e.Xperts was born, with whom we pursued multiple goals. We used the e.Xpert community as a recruiting tool to attract highly sought-after e-Business experts and as a retention device for highly marketable staff with Web-relevant skills. We made it very clear that the e.Xpert organization was never seen as a new service line, but rather as a virtual organization across all existing service lines. The result was the development of a multidimensional matrix organization. The e.Xperts were a network of smaller national teams with people participating concurrently in cross-national subject matter expert practices (e.g., there was a group of people working on Internet banking projects, while another worked on e-learning projects). Each of these were COINs led by an e-Champion; the e-Champions themselves were forming a particularly close-knit COIN.
We fostered a sense of community by inviting all the e.Xperts to bi-annual meetings in central locations such as Paris or Brussels, but all other collaboration was virtual. virtual. Leaders of the different coins held regular Web meetings.

Hubs of trust.
One of the powerful discoveries in building up Deloitte Consulting’s e.Xpert community was how people delegate trust. In cases where they had to work together with someone did not yet know, they would rely on the judgment of people they trusted. And this reliance on other people’s friends worked not only locally, but extended into a pan-European network of trust by proxy.
Within the e.Xpert network, e-Champions became the hubs of trust. The e-Champions led various subcommunities (such as the national e.Xpert group in each country); there was also an e-Champion for each industry and practice area (e.g., e-Business consulting for financial institutions or the Java developers practice group). The 24 e-Champions knew and trusted each other well, having become acquainted through regular pan-European e-Champion meetings. As senior members of the consulting organization, many had also worked together previously in consulting assignments.
The e-Champions formed a pan-European network of trust, which they were able to extend to other members of their organizations. This meant, for example, that an e-Champion in Lisbon might act as a reference for one of his team’s e.Xperts, delivering a fair assessment of his skills to a project leader in Norway who would send his inquiry through the national e-Champion in Oslo. The e-Champion network of trust was similarly effective in recruiting new e.Xperts, staffing projects with e.Xperts, and identifying the right people that might have personal relations to a potential client or business partner. The project leader in Norway was placing trust in the e.Xpert in Lisbon through two intermediate hubs of trust. He was using his personal network of trust, extending it to the e-Champion in Oslo, whom he knew, on to the e-Champion on Lisbon, whom the e-Champion in Oslo trusted, to the e.Xpert consultant in Lisbon.
This e-Champion network of trust allowed for extremely efficient operation at very low cost. Without the e-Champions, the project leader in Norway would have had to place his request with the European central staffing manager in London, who would then have used his skill database and contacts with conventional management to identify suitable candidates. The project leader would then have done multiple interviews to find the best candidate, leading to substantial communication and travel overhead. But the network of trusted hubs operates far more efficiently, offering an extremely scalable and robust way of efficient virtual collaboration.

Figure 5.2, produced by automatically analyzing the email archives of the community using the TeCFlow system, shows the actual communication flow in Deloitte’s e.Xpert community. The people represented by the core team in the center are the most connected e-Champions, acting as hubs of trust. The coordinator of the community is in the center of the network and is communicating with everyone. The e-Champions are actively communicating among themselves. The other e.Xperts talk mostly to e-Champions and the coordinator, but have very little communication among themselves. This is a typical scale-free structure, with a highly connected center, and a large number of peripheral people who are mostly connected to the center. As long as the e-Champions remain active, large numbers of e.Xperts can be added or removed without any risk to the overall network. If just a few of the e-Champions leave, though, the e.Xpert network would dissolve. The central coordinator has a critical role; if he leaves, many e.Xperts would no longer be reachable. The e.Xpert network is also a small world: because of the high connectivity of the e-Champions, most e.Xperts have a degree of separation of two to three, which means that the path from one peripheral e.Xpert to another e.Xpert takes at most three steps: from the e.Xpert to his e-Champion, then to another e-Champion, and then to the destination e.Xpert.

Lessons learned.
That COINs communicate efficiently by hubs of trust was a key lesson learned in the Deloitte Consulting example. The fully committed approach to virtualization, coupled with a sharp focus on building up high levels of trust within the COIN, was a critical success factor. The main elements of building that trust were a high degree of transparency with respect to recruitment and reward of the e.Xperts, as well as a tightly woven network of e-Champions. The e-Champions knew and trusted each other personally and were able to convey their level of trust to e-Champions from other countries and other service lines as well as to the members of their own local e.Xpert teams. (This aspect of the e.Xpert network is discussed as an application of the TeCFlow tool in Appendix B).
The Deloitte experience also taught us that COINs are highly agile and productive at a very low cost. The flexibility and agility of the e.Xpert concept allowed rapid reaction to external market changes. In the hectic e-Business days of 1998 to 2000, the e.Xperts were instrumental in successfully acquiring and delivering projects well in excess of $100 million. When the e-Business wave cooled down in 2001, it was simple and straightforward to fold the virtual e.Xpert community back into mainstream Deloitte Consulting. Some of the COINs making up the e.Xpert community maintained a life of their own. They are still vibrant communities or have even become service areas in their own right, such as the groups focusing on knowledge management, on e-learning, and on CRM (customer relationship management). The e.Xperts were an extremely fast and flexible, as well as very cost-efficient, way not only to react to the torrent of e-Business, but to be well ahead of the market. Deloitte Consulting Europe was able to nurture internal talent rather than having to resort to expensive external hiring. This increased profitability and enhanced the firm’s reputation in the market. As an added benefit, our e.Xpert structure earned high ratings by industry analysts such as Gartner, Forrester, and IDC, making Deloitte Consulting one of the top-ranked e-Business consulting organizations.
A project done as part of the Deloitte e.Xpert consulting practice provides another outstanding example of a COIN. While this one is in the financial services industry, the basic principles of operating as a COIN are the same as in the automobile industry with the DaimlerChrysler case.