ORCID is pleased to announce we are optimizing our ability to scale and provide consistent service across regions and members with a restructure of our global Engagement team.
ORCID Executive Director Chris Shillum and Director of Engagement Ivo Wijnbergen explain more.
What is changing?
In our new Engagement Team structure, we are moving from a regional set-up to one organized around our different types of members and stakeholders. This will allow us to optimize our support with improved focus and consistency for each group of members. It will also allow us to efficiently manage ORCID’s ever increasing number of members.
There will be three groups in the new Engagement Team:
- Consortia
- Direct Members, and
- Outreach & Partnerships
In addition to the three new groups, we have added a dedicated technical support function specifically for members. We have already hired our first Member Support Technical Specialist (MSTS), and we will be adding a second in the next few months.
Though the faces and contacts for some of our members will change, we expect that they will experience improved, specialized support, whether they need technical assistance or strategic consultation and coordination. And even though each group has their own main focus, we will continue to operate as one Engagement team.
Why the change?
In their previous roles, each member of the Engagement Team was tasked with covering everything from strategic relationship building to providing complex technical support for their assigned members. This meant that team members were constantly juggling a multitude of different tasks, which made it difficult to provide timely support to member enquiries and hindered our ability to scale and provide consistency across regions and member types.
In order to solve the challenges presented by the previous structure, the senior leadership team hired an external consulting organization to conduct a thorough mapping of our business processes and propose several scenarios for new organizational structures.
As well as reducing the number of tasks each engagement team member is responsible for, we believe the new structure will allow us to more effectively meet the needs of our different kinds of members, such as universities and academic institutions, funders and policy makers, publishers and professional societies, and vendors and service providers.
When is this happening?
Our new structure goes into effect April 1, 2021.
Over the past weeks we’ve been handing over responsibilities between the various engagement leads, and we began the process of communicating the change internally and to key external stakeholders, updating them on their new contacts within ORCID.
April will be a transition month during which team members will finalize any residual commitments that are not aligned with their new roles, and hand over tasks to colleagues.
What about regional presence?
We continue to be committed to having ORCID staff located in the places where our members and users are. ORCID’s current 36 team members are located across 15 countries in all parts of the world. Member contacts will be assigned as much as possible to align with the person in-region.
What if a member wants to join or form a consortia?
Members who want to join an existing consortium can simply work with their new ORCID contact to be put in touch with the relevant consortium lead organization.The formation of new consortia varies from place to place. We believe our new structure provides us with more ability to foster the formation of the local communities of practice and identification of common needs which are essential to consortium formation. We will coordinate internally as necessary across teams to ensure the right people are engaged along each step of the way towards building a new consortium.
Reach out
The main contacts for each of our members will be receiving an email with the details of their new engagement lead in early April. In the meantime if you’d like more information, please reach out to us.
We’ve put a great deal of effort and strategic oversight into this reorganization, and we believe the changes we’re making now are sound and likely to endure. Our goal for the reorganization is simple: externally, we expect that our members will experience more efficient, specialized support, whether they need technical assistance or strategic consultation and coordination. Internally, we hope to provide clarity of responsibility and more manageable scopes of work for our engagement leads such that they feel energized and excited to take ORCID into its next decade.
