Chapter 1 Introduction on the Virtual Community
Curriculum Discipuli Cura (Career Student Management) is an innovative platform where the management consulting business and students become allies in solving issues in the industry. Additionally, it offers significant opportunities for talents to show their managerial knowledge and for the business to identify the right personnel prospects for their business.
This innovative idea is based on the needs for two different parties. Firstly, the management consulting industry requires the best possible candidates for their starting positions in order to remain competitive in their industry. It offers the management consulting industry to:
- Crowd search for solutions to complex real-time and real-life problems in the current industries. By calling out for motivated students to tackle these problems they can use a wider source of information to solve the problems.
- Crowd search facilitates out-of-the-box thinking for companies. It will be good for consulting companies repositioning on forecasting potential problems and preventing problems for the potential customers. This broadens their scope instead of only focusing on helping to resolve problems for their current customers. This enables them to expand their customers and market substantially.
- Discover and follow talents in at an early stage and form a virtual talent pool. This forms an opportunity for the management consulting industry by finding the best of the best and selecting candidates for starting position early. The current selection procedure starts with a pool of thousands of applicants.
The second party refers to students. Student in Business, Management or any other related field have the possibility to:
- Develop students personally by applying the learned theory in their universities to real-time and real life problems in the current business landscape. This nourishes their practical development significantly.
- They can position themselves towards the management consulting companies that host the platform to show their potential. This increases the fare change of being selected for positions by showing your skills on the platform.
- Create a short term advantage for students. Their knowledge can be applied right away.
- Offer opportunities for students to work in the field of consulting part-time or full-time after graduation with a virtual-team based online communication and management.
The above-mentioned combines into a set of common motivations for a collaboration in order to receive a share in the collective success in this alliance (Markus et al, 2000)
The students’party will exist involved students that are final Bachelor year or in their Master or PhD trajectory. Additionally, their study has to be in the field of: Business, Economics or Management within the College of Business at City University Hong Kong. These measures create a certain filter to prevent people with insufficient knowledge on the topics to distort the input into the innovative platform. The party will be explained by a given example from the eyes of the student:
John is a motivated and well-performing student in at CityU in the MA Global Business Management. He is currently in his final Master year and he dreams of getting a challenging job in Management Consulting. He has much knowledge about his field. He discovers the website www.CDC.com and starts to participate on it. He actually discovers that many of the topics he is currently discussing in his classes are applicable to the cases that are available on the website. Motivated and encouraged he starts to participate by discussing online about the cases and coming up with solutions for the complex problems. By now, he already starts to enjoy his studies more because he can use his learned theoretical knowledge in practice, so it now has a purpose on the short term instead of only the long term. Sarah is a talent recruiter for CRA International, a worldwide management consulting company. She regularly posts relevant cases on the platform for students to look into. This way she can help several business units with finding innovative solutions to complex problems by crowd sourcing. Additionally, she keeps track of different potentials that are performing very well on the platform. With a position coming vacant in September she starts to look for several possible candidates. One of these candidates is John. John has a profile on Curriculum Discipuli Cura with his updated résumé and contact details. Sarah pro-actively contacts John to check for his interest in applying for the vacancy that is about the pop-up and he accepts. Eventually, John proves himself throughout the remaining part of the selection procedure and gets the position. It is win-win situation for both parties on multiple levels.
With the development of every industry’s globalization, consulting industry is confronted with more challenges, most focusing on: (1) hard to acquire right set of talent, (2) cost inefficiency operations to match the client’s requirements and (3) limitations of consulting service outsourcing. These challenges are particular obvious for small consulting companies or some consulting companies in developing countries, who have not yet expanded their subsidiaries to other countries. The virtual community enables the consulting company to operate more efficient into finding the right talents for the right positions. Additionally, the forum forms a platform to discuss and solve complex industry problems in an out-of-the-box and extremely low cost way.
In the case of the Universities, success of graduates and satisfaction of students are two important elements in their existence. The ultimate goal for a university is to increase its number of student and to provide quality education in order to increase the chances of their alumni on the job market. This virtual community will greatly improve both quality of education by connecting theory and practice with real-life examples for motivating students. Additionally, this cross fertilization will increase the joy of students in their studies, because their theoretical knowledge can be put into practice. The discovered talents that get recruited in this collaboration form a showcase for universities, increasing their brand image. Therefore, this forms a cost-effective opportunity to create extra value for the University and its students.
Chapter 3 Community Characteristics
Philosopher and scientist Aristoteles (320 BC) was one of the first to set up a definition of what a community is: “A group of people that gather together to share values and ideas.“ This can be seen as the basic definition of a community. The traditional form of a community however is based on direct interaction between people living close to each other (van Dijk, p.63). Parallel to the emergence of the World Wide Web and modern form of communications, modern societies expand across time and space and form so called virtual communities. Following this definition, Curriculum Discipuli Cura is indeed congruent with the basic characteristics of a real community, however embracing and building on the advanced traits of a virtual community. The following figure illustrates the theoretical structure of our community:
A portal is a web system that focuses on providing functions and features to authenticate and identify users as well as an easy, intuitive, personalized and user-customizable web-interface that enables users to facilitate access to information and services that are of primary relevance and interests to the users. Hence, a portal focuses primarily on the benefits and value for the individual user. However, sense and purpose of a community is the collaboration and interaction between individuals and groups of individuals. The individual on its own will not be able to survive and add value in a community, but rather connecting with other individuals enhance and facilitate creativity, problem solving and value creation in terms of win-win outcomes. In this regard our virtual organization is clearly assignable to the category of a virtual community and therefore suited to serve the interest of more than one party.
"Community: The origin of the word "community" comes from the Latin munus, which means the gift, and cum, which means together, among each other. So community literally means to give among each other."
As mentioned above community is about more than one individual or organization create value through interaction and collaboration. Thus, for our virtual organization to work, the following key requirements of a virtual community need to be satisfied:
· Clear set of goals that provides sense of direction to all members
· Boundaries that clearly edge the narrow circle of potential members
· Member’s ability to access the community
· Members ability to communicate with each other through virtual
communication
· Substantial Relationship between members of community
· Active participation of members
· Collaboration and interaction towards certain issues based on virtual
problem solving concepts
· Value-Added for all parties involved in virtual collaborative process
Chapter 4 How to translate competences into actual value
Having a community between City University of Hong Kong and ‘’Consulting Company’’ might sound as a very nice-to-have collaboration. Yet, to show its true value it is of high importance to translate the competences that are created through the collaboration into actual value. Balasubramanian & Mahajan (2001) conclude in their research that many companies fail to get real value from virtual communities. In order to turn the community in a success sponsors shall need to invest effort into achieving this. Therefore, City University of Hong Kong and CRA International will need to create a strategic architecture that explains what the competences of this collaboration is and how it will be translated into actual value for all parties. By means of identifying core competences a company or a collaborative party can determine a combination of competences that make them unique in the market facilitate value (Prahalad & Hamel, 1990).
Figure 1 shows a complete picture the following aspects of this virtual collaboration. First, the core competences explain the combination of competences that make the collaboration unique. Secondly, the core product explains the link between the competence and the end-product. It determines the value addition. Thirdly, the end products are the ‘’physical’’ delivery. It explains ‘what the both parties actually get’. Additionally, on both sides of the figure the added value specific to the parties is explained. How does this collaboration create specific actual value for the parties? This collaboration enables both parties to uniquely combine their core assets to create additionally value individually in the industries they operate in.
In order to turn this unique collaboration into a success it is, first of all, very important that both City University and "Consulting Company" acknowledge, build, develop and communicate the core competences of the collaboration. Only when both parties follow the mindset behind the collaboration and balance their values it can become a success. A well structured business model explaining the concept will create a foundation for both parties to remain successful in the collaboration. Since a virtual community needs proper management, we propose to have quarterly meeting between both companies in order to efficiently monitor progress and evaluate successes. In figure two a business model explains the strategic architecture needed for a successful evolution of the collaboration. The University will also take the role intermediate in this collaboration between the students and the consulting companies. This is important in terms of protecting and guiding the students properly. Finally, this virtual collaboration does need periodical face-to-face meetings between both partners in order to maintain key social processes in the collaboration and timely recognize potential issues (Siedrat et al, 2009)
From the perspective of the University it is of high importance to focus on the development of students’ competences on such as communication, problem solving, data analysis and the use of technology. These competences determine the future employees’ success in the work field (Martin et al., 2010) .We therefore also assume that students’ employment preparation positively influences the satisfaction with the university. This collaboration enables students to develop their tacit knowledge that makes them very unique and useful for the CRA International. Tacit knowledge in this case refers to the knowledge in the heads of the students (Polanyi, 1967).
Chapter 5: How do we turn visitors into members?
How students can get access to our CDC.com, involve in it and stay for it voluntarily?
As our CDC.com is a free platform for students and management consulting companies, so it will also face some challenges, for example, students may just visit it for one time and the company cannot retain the talents they need. So we try to find a way to manage this kind of challenges properly and help both parties gain a best-match. Here is our solution
----to establish Online Membership Management System.
Online Membership Management System is a system for both parties can enjoy. As from students’ perspective, we set Membership Forum (an information sharing pool) and students can exchange information and ideas there freely.
And we also provide Job Related Test and Assessment for students to have an overview of knowing about their adaptability and competence to the industry and find their strengths to upgrade and weaknesses to complement.
Based on the result of the job related test and assessment, Free Online Coaching or Training Projects for different levels of new comers will be provided and students can freely to choose whether they will participate in or not.
Talents Fishing Section (to find the talents and form a talent pool, meanwhile to retain the talents here). Actually, this section includes the above three columns and we just give a detailed illustration about how it will be organized and works----if one student thinks she/he is the right person for a CRA International consulting company he/she must achieve the required level in the company set online assessment or test, and when he/she get to the certain level, and then the students can become a star member for the company he/she applied and can be involved into the real consulting project. And based on the performance of project the student has joined, the student will also get an assessment from the company and other online co-workers, if he/she get a considerable score during this section, and then the student will get a another star and his/her membership level will get a higher position and we set the Membership advanced route map (Figure 3) for students learning the detailed path for joining our visual.com. In this way, we can stimulate students’ potential in this field and help them improve a lot and achieve their own career goals.
Figure 2 Website examples
City University cooperates with the companies to assess and select potential students----university provides opportunities, like further overseas development plan, and the company provides capital, such as scholarship, to culture talented students. It can be called as “Joint Development Scheme”. And the company can select these talented candidates to intern or work in bank after they graduate. Make students have more opportunities to develop and practice.
Students can also assess the company he/she has served and give a score level, from the “one-time employer” to the “most want-to-join company” and share his/her online working experience with other students in the forum. In this way, from the feedback and score, we can help companies know their position in this field and meanwhile improve their own service and quality and promote their images and reputations.
Chapter 6 The Collaboration Business Model
All the above-mentioned is combined in the collaboration business model which forms the strategic architecture needed to successfully execute the program. This summarizes the road map needed to execute the virtual community.
References:
Balasubramanian, S., & Mahajan, V. (2001). The economic leverage of the virtual community. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 5, 103-138.
Lord, Carnes (1981), The Character and Composition of Aristotle's Politics.”, Political Theory 9, 459–478
Lynne M. M., Manville B. & Carole E. A. (2000), what makes a virtual organization work? p. 19-21, Sloan management review.
Markus, M. L., Manville, B., & Agres, E. C. (2000). What makes a virtual organization work?. Sloan Management Review, 42(1), 13-26.
Martin, A. J., Milne-Home, J., Barrett, J., Spalding, E., & Jones, G. (2000). Graduate satisfaction with university and perceived employment preparation. Journal of Education and Work, 13(2), 199-213.
Polanyi, M. (1983). The tacit dimension (pp. 21-25). Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith.
Prahalad, C. K., & Hamel, G. (1990). The core competence of the corporation. Resources, firms, and strategies: A reader in the resource-based perspective, 235-256.
Siebdrat, F., Hoegl, M., & Ernst, H. (2009). How to manage virtual teams. MIT Sloan Management Review, 50(4), 63-68.
Thomas Lee, Introduction to Membership & Walkthrough: Managing Web Site Users with Roles.
Van Dijk, Jan (1996), the reality of virtual communities, p.39 – 63, Utrecht University
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