Driving Me
Carmen Pooling shares her journey over the past 10 years as PR director of an international transport organization.
The core values of our company have always centered around creativity and an entrepreneurial spirit. When staring out, we saw great potential in the business idea to generate large revenue streams and to be a potential disruption in the market place, to create a whole new market segment and customer base, really. When starting out, a fast-growing technology based start-up, we were compliant with all financial and other mandatory requirements for a business, but we did not have any formal system, structure, procedures or certification in place. Naturally, our organization had a very lat structure and a free-spirited atmosphere.
Our idea really resonated with people. Today, we operate in over 16 countries. Rapid growth has made the company adopt a formal structure, with a greater focus on established business processes in order to consistently meet stakeholder expectations.
However, as a company we do not see the need to have an established management system in the traditional sense. Our top management believes that the spirit and the core values of the company can be achieved by a flexible structure. It was an important pillar when we were a start-up and it still is.
We have really found business processes that are robust, codified, and adaptable, generating traceable data, in the form of social media sharing, mobile applications, etc. These business processes are established in cloud based computing and essential functions (HR/Finance, etc.) are supported by standard software packages, which are adapted to our company’s requirements.
The large amount of data available (e.g. tweets, web exposure and customer feedback) helps us further develop our business processes and business model, with the software package provider providing process assurance.
With possession of this amount of data comes responsibility. The biggest challenge we face today is the threat of data security and integrity of our customers’ information. Protecting this and ensuring that there is no misuse of data is one of our primary concerns.