5.+Analysis

Themes from the Interviews:

 * Centralized Decision Making
 * Traditional Hierarchy
 * Disconnect between management and staff perception
 * Unclear about actual staff engagement - perception is 50%/50%
 * IT as a tool for work
 * Incorporation of Social Media would be a good thing
 * Inconsistent Leadership throughout organization
 * Cross Cultural Integration is Poor
 * Future plans uncertain due to stakeholder needs

Knowledge
The staff members at Al Ain Hospital come from destinations from around the world. They bring with them a mixture of experience and skills into their new working environment. The IT skill level overall is somewhat poor throughout the hospital. This is a bit of an issue as the hospital is moving from paper-based systems and process through to computerized systems and processes. In November of last year a Health Information Management System was launched within the hospital and to date the information produced from this system is inconsistent.

With relation to the driver of Knowledge - there is no formal process for staff to interact and share their knowledge. The intranet is hosted on SharePoint which could possibly be used for this purpose. Currently it is mainly used to book conference rooms, post upcoming events and to inform. There is no group 'wiki' style of information sharing.

The opportunity here would be to start to use the software we already have 'SharePoint' and train people to start using this as an information sharing tool. People would be able to post and interact with each other and ensure that knowledge / events are shared such as a staff member going on a training course - there should be an area where they post what they have done and be able to answer questions of other staff members. (Model - Moodle)

Immediacy
This driver relates to the issues of social networking and the timeliness of information. The system within the hospital that most closely relates to this is our "call tree" in the event of an emergency. Whereas, the first person to discover the emergency calls into the switchboard and then a chain of people are called in turn.

One opportunity that the hospital could take advantage of would be SMS messages. Every person in the hospital has a minimum of a mobile phone - if not something more sophisticated like a Blackberry or an iPhone. What if to get important information out to people the hospital starts to use a blanket SMS system where an alert will go out to everyone with specific instructions in the case of an emergency. (there would have to be an upgrade for phones within the hospital due to dead zones) OR if there is a major inspection such as the Health Authority arriving - all staff would be alerted to their presence.

Intermediation
One of the recent information bulletins that went out in the hospital was one relating to the fact that sites such as facebook were not allowed during working hours. The challenge here is that the organization has a formal policy from SEHA (our parent company) that social networking is not allowed. However, taking an informal poll of employees, about 80% of them said they were on facebook.

Since our organization is a traditional structure and about as far as you could get from a flat organizational structure - we are bound by certain rules and regulations such as staff competencies that are set from SEHA. In this light, we also make many of our business decisions based on KPIs set by SEHA as well as information from the other hospitals run by SEHA.

One solution to this issue would be to again use what we have more effectively. The SharePoint system has the ability for employees to customize their own homepage and there is also a module for discussions. These could be implemented in a more formal way so that people are encouraged to share which would help with engagement and cross cultural relations. It would ensure that expertise is drawn from our employees and they would be more able to share their knowledge.

Al Ain Hospital as an organization is not using technology to its full advantage, the hospital is still not at Web 2.0 let alone ready for Web 3.0. Compared to companies in other industries the hospital structure and capacity for change is very slow and technologically they are in the process of catching up to where western companies were in 2003.
 * Conclusion**

One of the main factors in this is the overall technological competency of the staff members. The other factor is employee engagement. The basis for this will be established by HR this year as they begin the process of the 'Staff Satisfaction Survey'.