People and Technology - MicroStrategy Inc.

The Transparent Organization

Bansal calls it the "five-minute rule": Any MicroStrategy employee should be able to find any piece of information on the company or its employees within five minutes, whether it's a colleague's technical qualifications, a briefing on a competitor, or sales activity in the south of France. Usually, those five minutes are more than enough time, because MicroStrategists go straight to Enterprise Solutions, the company's internal Web site. If they can't find it there, it probably doesn't exist.

MicroStrategy owes much of its success to its high level of information transparency. Using one integrated, central information portal, employees in different departments and locations, including sales offices and client sites around the world, can monitor which deals are in the works, which recruits are in the pipeline, and which technical solutions are currently being tackled. When MicroStrategy issues an important press release, all of its employees are sent a copy. "Why should they have to look for company information elsewhere?" asks Joe Payne, 35, chief marketing officer.

The company's intranet technology also saves time. Let's say that Lisa Nolan, 37, director of corporate communications, wants to schedule a meeting with Joe Payne. She can electronically pull up a copy of Payne's schedule in Microsoft Outlook, choose an open time slot, and enter her name and meeting topic. He's automatically emailed the meeting request, which he can accept or reject. His response then generates the appropriate reply, which is sent to Nolan. "If you don't use Outlook, you miss meetings," says Payne.

MicroStrategists understand firsthand the value of their software products because they rely on them to do their jobs more effectively. For instance, the technical-services department uses the software that analyzes purchasing patterns for customers to guide its engineers (as well as its partners and customers) toward solutions. When they open an existing tech note, which outlines a fix, the system recommends other documents, based on what previous users have selected. Engineers can see their colleagues' research paths -- very valuable intelligence, considering the complexity of the problems and the urgency of their customers' deadlines. "Sometimes you go into organizations and find that they don't 'eat their own dog food,' " says Payne, who receives daily, automated reports on visitors to the company's corporate Web site. "We definitely do."

The technology lets an organization that's growing rapidly and becoming increasingly dispersed tap into its collective brainpower. Employees share what they know with Enterprise Solutions, which, in turn, makes that knowledge accessible to the entire company. "In a company like ours, everyone should write about and publish what they do," says Bansal. Which is why, after attending a conference on health care, Hernandez wrote a paper outlining what he'd learned. Employees who receive health-care documents got an email containing a link to Hernandez's report.

Rich Brown, 30, manages the Enterprise Solutions Site, so he sees the company getting smarter every day. By mid-January, for instance, the site had 23 contributions, mainly from the sales and consulting staff, along with 8 new tech notes and 24 revisions to existing tech notes. Brown is working on a new feature that will alert employees whenever a document or a specific page that they subscribe to in Enterprise Solutions is updated. The corporate overview changes frequently, and the sales staff needs to know whether it has the latest version. "You have to have quality control," Brown says. "Otherwise, you wind up with information glut."

To encourage people to learn in different ways, MicroStrategy offers 12-month overseas assignments to employees who've been with the company for at least a year. It also urges employees to work in different jobs and departments. "You find people here who've had six jobs in four years," says Vince Gabriele, 37, head of global staffing. "The more exposure you get, the more valuable you become."

Then, during a week in July, most of the company shuts down for University Week, when employees attend classes similar to their boot-camp experience. That gives workers an opportunity to broaden their skills or to explore new interests in such areas as programming, management, sales, or marketing. "For me, the class that I took is paying off right now," says Pedro Arellano, 24, a technical-support leader, who took an in-depth course on the latest version of MicroStrategy's platform. "Without it, I wouldn't be able to answer the questions that I'm getting from customers."

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