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Enterprise Collaboration Playbook
HOW TO USE ENTERPRISE SOCIAL SOFTWARETO CHANGE THE WAY YOU DO BUSINESS
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2Table of Contents
The blueKiwi Enterprise
Collaboration PlaybookAbout this playbook ........................................................... 1
Why enterprise social networks?............................................................................................2
Theres a new way of doing business.....................................................................................3
Solving common business challenges ...................................................................................4
Features and benefits .............................................................................................................5
New technologies supersede the old .....................................................................................6
A history of enterprise social networks .................................................................................7
Social business success stories: BASF ..................................................................................8
Social business success stories: Burberry .............................................................................9
Social business success stories: Alcatel-Lucent .................................................................10
How we connect ............................................................... 11Weak ties are the key ............................................................................................................12
What comes after weak ties .................................................................................................13
Tying it all together ...............................................................................................................14
Automating tie creation ........................................................................................................15
A collaborative culture ..................................................... 16Creating a social environment .............................................................................................17
Make collaboration a top company value ............................................................................18
Start collaborating ................................................................................................................19
Getting started with an ESN ............................................. 20Setting social business goals ...............................................................................................21
Transitioning to a new cor porate culture.............................................................................22
Consider transitioning requirements ...................................................................................23
Using your new ESN ..............................................................................................................24
More ESN features ................................................................................................................25Make the mostof your ESN ..................................................................................................26
Define your strategy .............................................................................................................27
Set your schedule and get started .......................................................................................28
Overcoming obstacles ...........................................................................................................29
Overcoming obstacles - more ...............................................................................................30
Building an ESN business case ......................................... 31Return on value cost vs. benefits .........................................................................................32
Social Network Analysis (SNA).............................................................................................33
Using return on value to map out benefits ..........................................................................34
What CEOs need to hear .......................................................................................................35
Benefit: improved sales and marketing ...............................................................................36
Benefit: foster innovation .....................................................................................................37Benefit: optimise company talent ........................................................................................38
Benefit: manage exception handling ...................................................................................39
Return on productivity ..........................................................................................................40
France Post case study ..................................................... 41
Allianz case study ............................................................ 42
Manufacturingcase study ................................................ 43
About blueKiwi................................................................. 44Why chooseblueKiwi?...........................................................................................................45
How to buy blueKiwi .............................................................................................................46
Footnotes ......................................................................... 47
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1About this playbook
About this
playbookWelcome to the Enterprise Collaboration Software Playbook. If youre
considering launching an enterprise social network for your company,
youre in the right place. As you know, in the technology game theres a
lot of hype to play through, and this certainly is true for social business
software.
Social platforms come in many shapes and sizes. There are different
types of platforms available for different uses. Some will help you
accelerate your business, nurture innovation, and build strong
relationships inside and outside your organisation. But not all will make
sense for your needs. So how do you find the one with the best fit?
Start here.
We cut through the hype to show you what really works. Specifically
designed for those involved in the buying process, our playbook provides
an overview of the benefits of enterprise social network software; the
psychology behind interpersonal networking and collaboration; how
to create an effective collaborative environment; how to establish a
successful enterprise social network; how to build a powerful business
case for implementing social network software, and finally how blueKiwi
specifically can help you reach your business goals.
Weve done the latest research and weve pulled together this
one-stop playbook to help you best integrate an enterprise
social network into your business.
Social software enables people to
rendezvous, connect, and collaborate
through computer-mediated
communication and to form online
communities. In the case of enterprisesocial network software, it is adopted
for use by a business and not for
personal use.1
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2Why enterprise social networks?
Why enterprise
social networks?
In this chapter well answer some basic questions about enterprise
social software, one of the most-talked about technologies to hit
the enterprise in the last decade. Where did it come from? What
can it do? And how can it help your company or organisation?
Japan after the 2011 earthquake
Social collaboration saves the day. On March 11, 2011, a devastating
earthquake struck Japan, interrupting the countrys transportation
infrastructure. In Tokyo, thousands of people were left stranded, facing
difficult choices: Wait until the transportation systems starts working,
walk home, or find a roof for the night.2
The people of Tokyo responded. Government agencies, companies,
and even individuals opened their homes to strangers. And a group of
Japanese software developers came together on the Web to publicise the
availability of shelter with an interactive map of Tokyo.
Twitter connects Japan. Using Twitter as their principal communication
mechanism, the map was populated in a few hours with details on the
temporary shelters. By midnight, over 180,000 people had accessed the
map, and many stranded commuters were eventually spared the ordeal of
spending a night out in the cold. 3
What happened in Tokyo was not an isolated event. From the uprisings
in Egypt to the capture of Osama Bin Laden, collaborative technologies
have been used to share important information and inform the global
community.
Chapter 1
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Theres a new wayof doing business
The evolution of social business. Over the past 10 years, a new breed
of social and collaborative technologies has emerged in the workplace,
enabling businesses to solve exceedingly complex problems.
These new applications bring together an organisations diverse skills,
perspectives, and problem solving approaches in a way that uniquely
benefits the business. Built on a platform where information and ideas are
visible and shared across a corporate community, these applications are
innovative by nature. With them, businesses are able to communicate and
collaborate in new ways, design better solutions, and innovate with fresh
ideas and product offerings.
Collaboration is critical. Business is more complicated than ever.
Companies are connected 24/7 and for many, the workday extends past
the typical business hours as critical business communication continues
after hours and into the weekends. Collaboration among employees
across regions, countries, and even continents is not just the normal
operating environment for large multi-nationals, its also become the
status quo for many small companies too.
Why enterprise social networks?
Why enterprise social networks?
Staying ahead of the curve. The promise of enterprise social software
is that it can enable organisations to meet the world of non-stop
business and effectively communicate, collaborate, and innovate in
new ways, thereby paving the way to a new organisational culture,
where companies can respond quickly, stay ahead of the market, and
out-compete their rivals.
Customers
Partners
HumanResources
Marketing
Sales
EnterpriseSocial Network
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Solving commonbusiness challenges
Exceptions, the unanticipated issues that require timely
resolution to maintain competitive business performance
occur in every organisation.4
Why enterprise social networks?
How to succeed with social business.Where social business successes
have occurred, the organisations focused on specific operational pain
points. That is to say, business processes or activities where the promise
of enterprise social software could make a difference. Operational pain
points were also easier to get management buy-in, as they were often hot
topics within the company and widely acknowledged as a problem.
Start with business exceptions. One of the most common pain points
is the exception. Within todays typical company or organisation,
employees regularly encounter non-routine issues, which break the
standard processes. While standard processes are well documented,
knowing how to handle a problem outside their scope is not.
The same goes for crisis situations, which are non-routine by
definition. Knowing how and when to respond is critical. The wrong
or haphazard response can have devastating effects (remember the BP
Gulf of Mexico oil spill).
One-off solutions dont scale. These process exceptions slow the
effectiveness of operations and negatively impact business performance
as a whole. With exceptions, employees spend a great deal of time trying
to fix problems or find answers and often this work is duplicated over and
over, because the one-off solution isnt shared. It is a wasted opportunity
to capture and take advantage of important institutional knowledge.
Collective knowledge accelerates problem resolution. Because
exceptions negatively impact business operations, they are an excellent
fit for an enterprise social network, which can capitalise on their
common elements. Employees can use their organisations collective
knowledge, share information across organisational boundaries, and
accelerate exception resolution. Even more importantly, eliminating
the negative impact of exceptions can positively impact organisations
operating metrics.
Why enterprise social networks?
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Features andbenefits
What does enterprise social software do? We define enterprise social
network technologies as platforms or software applications that are
usually web-based and enable large groups of people to:
Collaborate across the organisation, fostering more effective commu-nication among isolated groups for greater cross-pollination of ideas
Engage in one-to-many or many-to-many conversations
Share information across a select group of people or share informa-
tion globally, like across a company Access archived or persistent content and institutional knowledge.
Whether organised in a predefined structure, like a wiki, or found
via search
How can it help your organisation? In terms of benefits, the
technology and tools inherent in enterprise social networks can help
organisations to:
Quickly identify expertise
Initiate cross-department and cross-boundary communications
Act as a collective, institutional memory
Connect and harness distributed knowledge
Become a catalyst for innovation, uncovering new opportunities and
bringing new ideas together
Shorten business cycles and projects through better collaboration
Why enterprise social networks?
Why enterprise social networks?
Top 3 measurable benefits
1. Increasing speed toknowledge access
2. Reducing communication costs
3. Increasing speed to accessinternal experts
Results from their 5th annual social tools and technologies survey
Source: McKinsey Global Institute, 2011
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New technologiessupersede the old
Why enterprise social networks?
The old guard of business collaboration is inefficient and outdated. Email,
intranets, or more traditional knowledge management tools are not based
in social business technologies and therefore do not offer some of the
powerful benefits that enterprise social networks do.
Email. In business, email functions as a personal productivity tool,
providing one-to-one interactions. Andrew McAfee, in his Enterprise 2.0
book, describes email as a Channel, designed to keep communications
1-on-1, or private between the sender and receiver.5
By comparison, with an enterprise social network the group can view
information shared. Information is visible, can be easily consulted,
and can be acted upon. And the sharing of information can be used to
dramatically reduce redundant work, improve employee efficiency, and
increase productivity.
Company intranets. Intranets were designed to disseminate informationto an organisation not share or generate information among a group.
Adding content to a company intranet is often restricted to just a few
company employees.
By contrast, an enterprise social network is accessible to all.No special
skills are required to share information. Unlike traditional corporate
intranets, enterprise social networks can also be used to discuss problems
on the fly, find relevant knowledge, and get answers to questions.
Knowledge Management Solutions. Knowledge Management solutions
(KMs) are used to capture and transfer existing knowledge. Although they
can improve business performance by facilitating information sharing and
retaining intellectual capital, they often become repositories of outdated
information because KM solutions have not historically been incorporated
into daily work activities.6
By comparison, enterprise social software enables organisations to
not only capture knowledge, but also to create knowledge. Integrated
into the daily workflow, they support f ree-form collaboration, enabling
employees to connect across departments or teams. Collaboration is
driven by the desire to simplify how an employee does his or her job,
making all potential resources accessible. In addition, because enterprise
social networks dont enforce a set workflow, they create an environment
of innovation, where new ideas and perspectives can come together.
Why enterprise social networks?
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A history of enterprisesocial networks
Whats different about them, and key to their collaborative
roots, is that Web 2.0 sites and applications become more
valuable to each member as they attract more members.9
The birth of Enterprise 2.0. Today, we refer to them as enterprise social
networks, private social networks, or social business applicationsbut
they all evolved from the concept of Enterprise 2.0, a phrase coined in
2006 by Andrew McAfee, author of the book, Enterprise 2.0.
What is Enterprise 2.0? McAfee defines Enterprise 2.0 as the use of
emergent social software platforms by businesses or organisations
in pursuit of their goals.7 These platforms, where information can
conceivably be visible and accessible to all employees in a company,
include collaborative technologies born from some of the most influential
applications of the last decade, including Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube,
Twitter, Google search, and Blogger.
The roots of Enterprise 2.0. The term Enterprise 2.0 evolved from
Web 2.0, which was introduced by Tim OReilly in 2005 to describe the
changes we were seeing to sites and applications on the Web. Unlike
their predecessors, Web 2.0 sites and applications all incorporated three
basic ideas into their design and functionality: they were free and easy
platforms for communication and interaction; they lacked an imposed
structure; and they incorporated mechanisms to let structure emerge
organically.8
Why enterprise social networks?
How are Web 2.0 sites different? The process of users connecting,
sharing, and exchanging information is at their core, whether its
multimedia, personal updates, facts, opinions, or page ranking of
search results based on value perceived by users. And Web 2.0 sites and
applications were (and are) enormously popular. Today, Web 2.0 sites
account for roughly 40 of the top 50 sites according to the website ranking
company, Alexa.
The emergence of the enterprise social network. In 2006, the
technologies behind Web 2.0 sites and applications such as blogging,
social streams, wikis, and file/multimedia sharing began to appear in
collaborative applications designed specifically for a business, or as
McAfee describes, for Enterprise 2.0 use.
Why enterprise social networks?
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Social businesssuccess stories
Collaboration changes everything. Social business applications create
communities that share common objectives: the success of the company
as a whole, the success of a team or departments business objectives,
or the evolution of corporate cultural and standard business process
through the use of new and innovative communication tools. Interestingly
enough, all this can and has occurred without senior management
intervention, or the need for internal or external consultants.
Profile BASF. BASF is a large multi-national chemical company based
in Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Germany. They employee more than 109,000
people scattered across 390 production sites. In 2011, their annual sales
topped 73.4 billion euros.
Their collaboration problem. With such a large and distributed workforce,
BASF needed a platform that could bring workers together, establish
a common working culture, and improve the flow of information and
communications across the globe. Their goal was to find a solution that
would help them eliminate their existing communication structure of
hierarchies and teams and enable them to evolve to a network of formal
and informal communities.10
Why enterprise social networks?
The solution. Their pilot project began in 2009 and then launched to
the entire company in 2010, using a well-developed communications
strategy, including webinars, demos, and other learning events. BASF has
successfully grown their network voluntarily, adding more than 28,00 0
registered users in the last 18 months.11
Solution highlights and benefits. Today, their network features more
than 2,300 spaces (communities) organised by expertise, interest,
projects, and service engagements.
How has it made them more productive?12
Helps employees find experts and potential stakeholders
Increases the value of knowledge through sharing
Boosts efficiency through open communication across the
organisation
Facilitates online collaboration of teams and communities
Reduces email by transferring conversation to a common platform
Provides a familiar working environment for Facebook Generation
Why enterprise social networks?
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Social businesssuccess stories
Profile Burberry. Burberry is an international luxury fashion goods
purveyor founded in the mid-1800s and headquartered in London,
England. The well known company employs over 6,600 people spread
across 200 locations. In 2011, their annual sales were $1.5 billion dollars.
Their collaboration problem. It was twofold - their dispersed workforce
needed a way to communicate effectively and they also wanted to create
a seamless digital customer experience across all brand touch points
from start to finish - from both a business and a technology standpoint.
From in-house collaboration, to a social CRM program, to social branding,
marketing, to an online presence, they wanted an integrated digital
Burberry World.13
Why enterprise social networks?
The solution. Burberry calls it one of the fastest programs theyve
deployed. Named Burberry Community, their enterprise social network
technology connected the globally dispersed employees and created a
wildly successful and consistent customer experience, using CRM, IM, and
a social networking platform. Adoption across the company was energised
by their young workforce, since over 70% of Burberrys workers are under
30, making the move to an enterprise social network faster and easier.14
Solution highlights and benefits. Better connectivity and collaboration
have resulted in a 21% increase in profit (Q4 2011), driven mostly, the
media notes, by their social business efforts.15
How has it made them more productive?
Presents an accessible face to customers - with over 10 million
Facebook fans
Allows real-time online conversations between customers and
employees Creates a user-centric community for sharing information about the
company and spreading word-of-mouth recommendations about itsproducts
Why enterprise social networks?
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Social businesssuccess stories
Why enterprise social networks?
Profile Alcatel-Lucent. With 80,000 employees, this international
telecommunications company is based in Paris, France. In 2010, their
annual revenues were just shy of 16 billion euros.
Their collaboration problem. Alcatel-Lucent has always had a progressive
approach to business. They have used social technologies like blogs,
forums, and wikis since 2008; however, all the tools were separate and
there was no overall strategy for their use. This resulted in duplicateidentities, content that fell into silos, and information that was difficult to
access or find since it was spread across too many platforms.16
The solution. To let employees directly interface with the CEO, they
created Ask@Ben. Next, they introduced an enterprise microblog to link
workers across the globe. As employees became comfortable with these
technologies, they added more features, including comments and ratings
capabilities without filtration. They also incorporated external touch
points through blogs, YouTube, and Twitter to connect with the outside
world. Internally, they developed a plan to consolidate their disparate social
business strategy by measuring their progress to see what was working.17
Solution highlights and benefits. Alcatel-Lucent rolled out a beta version
of their enterprise social network in late 2009. As of July 2010, there were
20,000 registered users (about 25% of their employees were engaged
within the first three months), with approximately 200-400 coming on
board each day. Now, over 60,000 employees have profiles and a full 25%
are actively using the software. Six percent contribute, which is higher
than consumer social media but lower than the activity level at some
enterprises.18
Their careful study of what worked and what didnt helped them develop a
solution that has worked well. They supported this plan with a strong staff
and have achieved great results, without the high overhead that you might
expect would be needed to manage a project of this scope.
How has it made them more productive?
Reduces overhead associated with meeting travel expenses and time
Eliminates duplication of information caused by various redundantplatforms
Encourages a collaborative environment supported by employees
specifically assigned to nurture this company value
Why enterprise social networks?
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How weconnect
The science of collaboration is fascinating stuff. In this
chapter we explore psychology, sociology, and business theory
to discover just how people connect and the major impact it
can have on your business.
Developing a network. Now that youve seen the importance and the
history of enterprise social network software, well take a broader view
and investigate our relationships as human beings. To truly understand
how to collaborate effectively with these new technologies, its important
to look at the way we make connections with other people. While you may
think you already know what makes us click, read onwhat you find will
surprise you.
The ties the limitand the secret. In 1973, Stanford professor Mark
Granovetter published a groundbreaking paper in the American Journal of
Sociologythat focused on the various types of connections we form with
each other. Rooted in social theory, The Strength of Weak Ties, premise
was thiswe maintain strong and weak ties with other people. Our strong
ties represent relationships with those closest to us, whereas our weak
ties represent our interactions with acquaintances. In order to maximise
the power of collaboration, you might think we would tap our strong ties
to generate the most collective wisdom. However, Granovetter argues the
opposite. Instead, he maintains, the magic lies in our weak ties.19
How we connect
Chapter 2
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Weak tiesare the key
This is true of our professional relationships as well. Strong ties do
not bring large networks together in the way that weak ties can. Since
each weak alliance has its own set of strong ties, connecting two groups
together through a weak tie opens up exponentially more information-
sharing opportunities. By virtue of this new connection, we are then
weakly connected with all of the strong ties in our weak ties network.
(Hows that for tying up your tongue?)
Strong ties provide benefits. Strong ties are important in their own right.
They cultivate their own sets of ideas and exchange of information within
their network. However, strong ties lack a crucial component of effective
collaborationthey do not provide the opportunity to expand beyond
their small group because so many of the relationships within them are
redundantpeople within these groups have similar strong ties.
Weak ties provide even greater benefits. When seeking innovation, its
the bridge between groups thats key. This becomes especially evident
within a company or organisation, where the exchange of accurate up-
to-date information is critical, and the influx of new ideas provides the
lifeblood for change.
Bridges help solve problems, gather
information, and import unfamiliar
ideas. They enable work to be
accomplished more quickly and more
effectively. The ideal network for aknowledge worker probably consists
of a core of strong ties and a large
periphery of weak ones.
Andrew McAfee
Enterprise 2.0
How we connect
How we connect
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What comesafter weak ties
Potential ties provide opportunity. Beyond strong and weak ties lies
another valuable source of connections the potential ties, which are
those that we will make down the road. They represent a treasure trove
of good advice and resourcesa virtually unlimited source of information
waiting to be tapped. The number of potential ties is even larger because
there are always more people we dont know than people we do know.
And then there are no ties. The last tie group in the equation is None.These are the people with whom well never form connections. For now,
these ties represent virtually all of the worlds population. As technology
evolves, who knows? Maybe well have the opportunity to connect. Its our
own brains management of billions of relationships that will need to
keep pace.
No weak tie connections means no collaboration. If we dont connect
weak ties, our ability to spread information loses steam. Where there are
holes, and groups or networks of workers remain untethered, we miss
great opportunities. Granovetter says, ...Social systems lacking in weak
ties will be fragmented and incoherent. New ideas will spread slowly,
scientific endeavors will be handicapped, and subgroups separated by...
geography or other characteristics will have difficulty reaching a modus
vivendi [way of living].20
Filling the holes between networks. University of Chicago Professor
Ronald Burts influential book Structural Holesreinforced this idea. He
called structural holes, a separation between non-redundant contacts...
[those that do not] lead to the same people, and so provide the same
information benefits.21 There is unlimited potential in spanning a hole
to bring together two networks, but it can be difficult to motivate people
to do so. According to McAfee, they need to be both well positioned and
motivated typically a rare combination.22 So, many times holes remain.Since these gaps essentially block the flow of information, they can prove
highly detrimental to an organisation.
How we connect
How we connect
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Tying it alltogether
Enterprise social networks are built for connecting workers
at any tie strength, and offer unique benef its to the
collaboration process
How to connect employees and teams through enterprise social
networks. We know how to connect workers with strong t ies, both through
traditional face-to-face interactions as well as through technological
channels and platforms. In fact, enterprise social network features like
activity streams, micro-blogging, and wikis serve this category well. But
how do you connect workers whove never metthe critical component
in the secret weapon of connecting weak ties? This is where enterprise
social networks are highly effective tools.23
Time to innovate and grow. Implementing an enterprise social network
provides endless opportunities for innovation and growth, helping to
solve longstanding and vexing challenges around knowledge capture and
sharing, locat[e] expertise, open up innovation processes, and harness the
wisdom of crowds, notes McAfee in his blog The Business Impact of IT.
And its a lot of fun.
How to build powerful collaboration. Like Facebook or LinkedIn, the
social networking sites we use for our personal and professional lives,
enterprise social networks can build powerful collaboration in a number
of ways: 24
Maintain thousands of weak ties
Aggregate related posts for ease of information-gathering
Provide search capabilities and therefore make it easy to findinformation and locate strong and weak ties; they can also convertpotential ties to actual ones
Display contact information as well as other background content
Make it exceedingly easy to post (distribute) and also consume avariety of information, either through status updates, photos,
videos, hyperlinks to other s ites, longer notes, or more, includingredirects to more content
Add an emotional element through media like photos, video,
and audio
Can be accessed via mobile devices, which are starting to replacecomputers as the primary way to go online
Make interactions more engaging and even fun by blending bothpersonal and professional content
How we connect
How we connect
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Automatingtie creation
1st generation automation. When enterprise social networks first
appeared, they included automated methods allowing coworkers to meet
and connect. Built on the words or short descriptions attached to user
profiles (also known as tags) employees could search for and find one
another based on the same or similar tags.
Then the enterprise social network would make suggestions the
application would recommend people with whom to connect and spacesto join based on similar interests, or tags.
Bringing employees closer together. This technology has done an
incredible job of connecting employees who otherwise would never
have met. As a result, its helped to unite employees spread over
multiple locations and time zones, which is particularly critical for large
international corporations.
Whats happening now and in the future.The current generation of
enterprise social networks includes even more advanced, real-time, and
business relevant ways to connect employees.
Social recommendation engines. Often referred to as social
recommendation engines, this sophisticated technology is able to track
patterns across the enterprise social network as it mines all kinds of
business relevant communications, activities, discussions, wikis, andmuch more. In real-time, the social recommendation engine is looking for
ways to connect workers based on what they are doing, talking about, or
interested in.
And it works! Social recommendation engines can magically bring two
people together through recommendations, when they are working on
the same or similar topic but based in different locations. Imagine how
much time that can save the employeesand the company as a wholeas
redundant work is eliminated.
How we connect
How we connect
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In this chapter we explore how to grow an enterprise social
network. Well cover minimising resistance to change, how
valuing and trusting employees improves collaboration, and
ways to encourage collaboration within your organisation.
A collaborativeculture
Handling change. To create a culture that will embrace an enterprise
social network, it is important to address the process of change, build an
environment that welcomes collaboration, and then continually reinforce
the value of collaboration.
Overcoming our aversion to change. Change is hard and group adoption
of new technology can be a long and arduous process. It may not catch on
like the wildfire you envisionedso set your expectations to settle in for abit. It might take months, even years to gain traction. Stick with itwhen
you change your collaboration culture, the rewards are worth it.
Eradicate resistance. Even though enterprise social network technology
is superior to its predecessors (and certainly much better than having
no collaboration technology at all), people are psychologically disposed
to resist adoption. They need to believe that the benefits of the new
technology will far outweigh the time and effort that their learning
curve entails. In fact, studies show that the perceived value of the new
technology must be at least nine times greater than the perceived value of
their current tools in order to motivate them to make a change.25 Not an
easy sell for anyone marketing new technology.
Breaking the status quo. There are several reasons for this thought
process. Behavioral Economist Richard Thaler attributes it to the
endowment effect, where we value things in our possession more than
we value a substitute that is potentially in our possession.26 Similarly,
McAfee adds, the status quo bias directs our preferences. Plus, we need
to give up something now for a benefit that we may not see for some time,
the benefit is not guaranteed, and it is subjectiveall reasons for us to
stay right where we are, as Harvard Business School Marketing ProfessorJohn Gourville notes.27
Eliminating email. Since email is the primary incumbent collaboration
technology, it remains the biggest competitor to an enterprise social
network. McAfee describes this challenge: Consider how high this sets
the bar. Email is freeform, multimedia (especially with attachments)
WYSIWYG, easy to learn and use, platform-independent, social, and
friendly to mouse clickers and keyboard-shortcutters alike.28 Pretty
hard to compete with, right? Well it is still a one-to-one or one-to-many
channel (as we described in Chapter 1), and as such lacks the powerful
collaborative capabilities native to an enterprise social network.
A collaborative culture
Chapter 3
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With an enterprise social network, all contributors must feel free
to share their voices. Only then can the medium work its magic.Creating a socialenvironment
Social business needs a trusting and valued atmosphere.While weve
underscored the benefits of enterprise social networks, for this growth
to take place in an organisation, we must set the stage by defining first
what an organisation needs to become a social business. Before the tools
are even in place, an enterprise needs to cultivate and encourage an
environment where employees are foremost collaborative and feel free to
share their ideas and work in an open and team-oriented culture.29
Create an environment to support all kinds of users. Since each person
will relate to a different spot along the introvert-extrovert continuum,
his or her need to interact with others in order to generate ideas and
creativity will vary accordingly. However, in all human endeavors, we
benefit from the constant exchange of information. Once the environment
is ripe for collaboration, the applications help it happen.
A collaborative culture
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Make collaboration atop company value
Attracting collaborative people. First, youll need to prime your
people. One of the most important places to start is with your human
resources (HR) team. As they make new hires, they should be seeking out
collaborative qualities in these prospects.
Trusting and valuing your people. Next, you need to show your people
the love. We are accustomed to top-down, unilateral forms of leadership
when it comes to business. Enterprise social networks enlist a completelydifferent model. They rely on a true democracy, where each employee is
encouraged to contribute and let his voice be heard by the group.30 From
this organic growth comes great cross-pollination and other benefits of
collaboration that would not be possible otherwise. By connecting weak
ties and delivering innovative filtering and recommendation capabilities,
we increase our ability to harness massive amounts of information and
innovation.
Investment bank Goldman Sachs explains their approach this way:
In a hiring process that is legion across business-school campuses,
candidates interview with as many as 60 senior members of the firm.
Rejection by just one scuttles an interviewees candidacy. The interviews
are clearly not about intelligence or focus; GMAT scores and university
grades attest to these traits. The interviews are purely and simply about
whether the candidates talent, drive, and ambition are married to a
willingness to work collaboratively with others.31
Empower employees. Therefore, it is imperative to provide an
environment of trust and appreciation, empowering employees to
engage with and embrace your new enterprise social network so that
your business can enjoy a collaboration environment that is easy to
search and navigate, capture and spread knowledge, provide high-quality
answers to important questions, and increase both the number and
strength of ties among people.32 When you foster an environment where
employees feel secure and valued, they will collaborate in ways youvenever dreamed of.
A collaborative culture
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Startcollaborating
Eight specific ways to start collaborating. When youre ready to kick off
or roll out your enterprise social network project, these eight ideas will
help get your group connected.
1. Dont limit your pilot program to one or two communities. If you
limit it to just a few, you might miss that wildly successful team or
department group. Keep in mind that the value of business social
networking is proportional to the number of people involved.
2. Recruit your Champions. You will need a Community Manager
dedicated to your project. Choose people that will be enthusiastic
about the programs potential and who arent afraid to try new things
or to use new technology.
3. Include an influential senior person. If you dont hold the budget,
involve the person who does. If thats not possible, engage a senior
person who can make things happen.
4. Pilot around specific business goals. A real-world scenario allows
you to see how the software performs under real use. Think about
creating a group that can solve problems or exceptions.
5. Set-up local, virtual, a nd cross-department groups.Let people
participate spontaneously in a variety of groups with different
business objectives (simple or complex ones).
6. Populate some initial content and people. Users learn by example so
make sure theres something new on the home page every single day
(items, polls, ideas, or more) as well as new people to connect with.
This will encourage them to return daily.
7. Set up email notifications. Email notifications help ease the
transition to the new platform. Use them automatically to notify the
community when an action occurs, like the posting of new comments
or a shared file. When you kick off your enterprise social network,
they help keep online conversations flowing and drive repeat traffic
to the pilot.
8. Promote, launch, and follow up. Send several email communications
to your pilot participants to get them excited. Host an event to launch
the pilot. Schedule and follow through with progress reviews, as they
help to keep your new enterprise social network moving along.
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20
In this chapter we address how to get started with an
enterprise social network (ESN)--the features youll need,
creating a winning strategy, and overcoming objections.Getting startedwith an ESN
Set your goals. Like any new business strategy, we begin with identifying
goals. What do you want to accomplish with your enterprise social
network? Most importantly is everyone, including upper management,
on the same page?
Building collaboration across an organisation. Sometimes different
departments or teams within an organisation can have competing
business goals. For instance, the financial team that needs to keep costslow may be in direct conflict with the product engineering team that
needs to meet a tight product deadline. These are mutually exclusive
goals, so collaborating across departments can be tricky.33
Once your organisations goals are aligned, the full force of enterprise
social software can be brought to bear. So make sure you sync up
objectives among different groups before you get started. And even
more important, make sure you have goals that you can accomplish
and measure. Nebulous goals like enhanced communication and
collaboration can set you up for failure. By comparison, with well-defined
business goals, you can easily track the impact of an enterprise social
network on your business.34
Remember, there are several important objectives that a soc ial business
strategy can accomplish:35
Cross-silo collaboration: Fosters more effective communicationamong isolated groups for greater cross-pollination of ideas
Archive institutional memory and amass collective knowledge:Bring together all your organizations great ideas, employee brainpower, documents, communications, and other ideas in one an easily
accessible format Handle business exceptions with ease. Exceptions become a
thing of the past since every exception and its solution is docu-mented, searchable, and easily found by all participants
Identify emerging opportunities: With more heads in the game itseasier to find the opportunitiesand issueson the horizon
Locate expertise: Identify the person or people best equipped toprovide the right answers
Getting started with an ESN
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Setting socialbusiness goals
The biggest determinants, by far, of whether you will be
successful at social business are leadership and culture.
Charlene Li, Founder of the Altimeter Group
Here are some thought-starters for your social business goals:
1. Do you want to facilitate communications among employees in
different offices?
2. Do you have silos or closed communication paths within your own
organisation that you would like to take down?
3. Do you want to harness collaboration for stronger innovation?
4. Would you like to capture the answers to exceptions so that they no
longer tie up time and resources?
5. Are you interested in speeding up your employee onboarding process?
If youd like, take a moment and write down your goals.
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22Getting started with an ESN
Transitioning to a newcorporate culture
As with any transition, youll hit some bumps in the road. Hang on!
They are temporary roadblocks and once youve built your new system
of communication and collaboration, you can move ahead of the
competition.
Here are some strategies to consider as you decide how to integrate your
enterprise social network: 36
Turn off the old communication system: If you have another collabo-ration tool that is out-of-date and out-of-mind, you can shut it down
cold turkey. Have group or team leaders transition to the enterprise
social network first and work there moving forward. For instance,they can elect to only share information and respond to employee
questions via the enterprise social network.
Dispatch your believers: Send out your most vehement early adoptersof the technology your Champions (more about them in a minute)
to continually educate and motivate your group or department.
Integrate with your environment: Integrate the enterprise socialnetwork directly with your existing software or, if you do not have anytools in place, just implement it directly.
Make it easy to collaborate: For employees to jump onboard, make iteasy to move to the new application by incorporating the enterprisesocial network into everyones daily workflow.
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23Getting started with an ESN
Consider transitioningrequirements
Some questions for you:
1. Are you able to transition from your current collaboration tool
immediately?
2. Will you need to integrate your new enterprise social network with
other applications?
3. List some Champions that can evangelise the system for the entire
organisation.
4. Think of ways to encourage people to use the enterprise social
network in their daily workflow, like recognition for posts.
If youd like, take a moment and write down some thoughts on how your
organisation can get started.
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Using yournew ESN
If youre connecting ties of any strength, then the core
features of an enterprise social network can help.
What features do I use? Enterprise social networks include a variety of
different features to help you achieve your business goals. Heres a quick
review of the core features youll work with and how they can help.
Activity Streams. Foster real-time communication and provide a forum for
answering questions. If you are connecting weak ties, activity streams do
a great job in establishing these connections. Since they maintain large
numbers of weak ties, its easy for a user to communicate with thousandsof people and post different types of updates. Theyre also useful for
finding potential ties.
Wikis are especially helpful for document collaboration because they
eliminate the closed-channel, back-and-forth of email and the confusion
of trying to work with multiple, rapidly changing versions.
Microblogs. When employees use these to share information, thoughts,
and opinions, they help identify expertise and facilitate communication.
Microblogs are also great ways to communicate with large groups of
people and their viral nature makes them good incubators for weak tie
building.
Public and Private Spaces. These are the communities you create to
enable your employees, as well as customers and partners, to share
information. Create as many as you need to support your business
objectives. Set security (open or closed) based on the overall community
objectives.
Messaging. Share information with one or more enterprise network
members. Messages can go across your network and are not associatedwith a single community. Use messaging instead of email to group all
relevant communications together in your enterprise social network.
Getting started with an ESN
What featuresdo I use?
wikis
Public &privatespaces
Messaging
Microblogs
Activitystreams
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More ESNfeatures
Expand the use of your enterprise social network. These features build
on the core foundation. They will help you take your collaboration to the
next level.
Content sharing. Use your enterprise social network to share content and
work collaboratively. Upload documents, videos, presentations, links, and
much more. Use version control to keep up with the latest changes. Post
notes to your content, add comments, tags, or whatever you need to make
it more accessible to your social workplace. You can even organise it into
folders to make it easy to find.
Integrations with existing tools. Enterprise social networks succeed
when they become part of employees daily workflow. As needed, make
sure you integrate your enterprise social network with other key company
business applications.
Surveys. Use surveys to get quick and relevant feedback on almost
anything. These can be done within a team community, across the
company as a whole, to your customer community, or to just a selectgroup of customers.
Tasks. These are particularly useful for project-based communities but
they can be applied anywhere. Use tasks to assign work, track milestones,
and manage work from end-to-end.
Ideation. Enterprise social networks create an environment where
ideas can germinate. Share a contribution as an idea. Ask your team or
community for feedback. If accepted, track your idea through its initial
phase to final implementation.
Mobility. Stay connected and up-to-date wherever you are with the mobile
version of your enterprise social network. For employees on the road, a
mobile app version of the enterprise social network is critical to keeping
them in the loop.
Getting started with an ESN
Surveys
Mobility
Existingtoolintegration
Ideation
Contentsharing
Tasks
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Make the mostof your ESN
Enterprise social networks allow executives to realise
the dream of creating an up-to-the-minute repository of
everything an organisation knows.
Andrew McAfee
Some questions for you.
1. Take a moment to review the two pages covering ESN features. Which
would help you achieve long term goals? How?
2. What features will you use to share information across your
organisation and in public communities?
If youd like, take a moment and write down some thoughts on how your
organisation can get started.
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Define yourstrategy
Lets launch! There are several strategies you can use to integrate your
enterprise social network into your corporate culture. First, youll need
to make sure that your companys values reflect the importance of social
businessand that you communicate this to everyone. Then you can
support adoption with incentives and policies.
Communicate. Scream it from the mountaintop! If your employees dont
know that there is a new technology in town then they cannot use it. Getthe word out that you are starting an enterprise social network and that
you will be providing the support needed to get it off the ground. Clearly
state the goal so that your organisation embraces it and makes it its own.
Educate. Give your employees good reason to adopt the technology. As we
discussed earlier, there may be a knee-jerk resistance to taking on new
work. When you make a strong case that cites their increased efficiency,
realisation of operational goals, or achievement of financial goals, they
will be motivated to use it. Remember to organise and provide excellent
training.
Evangelise. Identify and organise your Champions, or your believersthe
early adopters who can get started right away. These are the people that
will advocate for setting up an enterprise social network. No matter where
they live in the business organisation, these people can be powerful
agents of change. Typically, they are Generation Y, the Millenials, or
the Facebook Generation that has already reached a level of comfort
working with social platforms in their personal lives and are very tech
savvy. When you support this group and make it their mission to convertthe non-believers, you are on your way to energising the entire group.37
Reward. Reward those who make the switch either with prizes or other
incentives and offer continual encouragement. Conversely, you can
change behavior by monitoring use or only posting information within the
new platform.38 When your upper management team regularly and visibly
participates, it sends a powerful message to the entire organisation, so
make sure that they are posting content and using the new technology as
their primary communications effort.
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28Getting started with an ESN
Set your scheduleand get started
Timeline. Youll also need to set a timeline. While its not a hard and fast
rule, it can give you a clearer picture of how youll implement the program.
And you can always adjust as you move along.
Some good advice to consider a s you deploy :39
Change is good. Understand and accept that you will lose somecontrol as new voices emerge.
Stubborn people do exist. Be ready for managers (and employees) toresist implementation.
Top down support is a must. Make sure you have the executivessupport.
Pilot projects are a great beginning. Stay focused on concise,measurable goals and work to achieve them.
Go past projects to also include other activity. Cast a wide net withyour pilot project. Dont just include a few teams or groups.
Focus on culture, not technology.Your new enterprise social
network will facilitate change, but the change must occur in yourorganisation. Build an open culture, dont encourage closed towers oruse allow information to be used as currency.
A plan should be taking shape. Hopefully, its all beginning to gel in your
mind. Next well talk about the obstacles you may have to hurdle.
Use this area to jot down your ideas on timeline, when to start, who to
include, etc.
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Overcomingobstacles
CEOs and other high-ranking executives harbor various fears
about enterprise social networks, but industry experts, like
Andrew McAfee, have found little evidence to corroborate
these worries.40
Change is hard. When you make a big change in an organisation, there are
bound to be challengesand challengers. Deployment of new technology
is certainly a good example. In addition to the technical difficulties that
can accompany a transition, theres also the human factor. Youll likely
meet resistance from many colleagues before the software is even tested
in a pilot project. Change is hard, and people are hard on new things,
especially applications theyll need to start using in their daily workflow.
The five myths of Enterprise 2.0. There are several reasons why CEOs are
afraid to pull the trigger on evolving to a social business. McAfee calls
these The Five Myths of Enterprise 2.0.41
Myth #1: The risks of enterprise social networks outweigh therewards. Some CEOs worry that the company will leak sensitive
information or will be subject to noncompliance if employees broadcast
illegal activities. Yet real-world results show that sensitive information
can still be safeguarded and company employees effectively self-police
enterprise social networks. As a result, problems are found earlyand
dont grow over private emails.42
Others worry about the brand, thinking customers might post incorrect
or negative comments. Since content is self-corrected by the community,
its usually highly accurate. Any negative posts can be turned into good
public relations as the company remedies them on large scale with a
large audience.43
Regarding productivity, management worries that employees will waste
the companys valuable time. In reality, people use enterprise socialnetworks responsibly to grow professional contacts and knowledge
bases.44 Finally, CEOs fret that a leaderless project wont be executed
correctly. However, research shows that group efforts are more powerful
and generate more ideas.
McAfee notes, attribution is the norm for enterprises, meaning that
people like to get credit for their work, so enterprise social networks dont
have the anonymity associated with the Internet. Bottom line? The rules
of business etiquette also rule enterprise social networks. The rewards of
enterprise social networks absolutely outweigh the risks.
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Overcomingobstacles more
Myth #2: Enterprise social networks need a business case with a highROI figure. Since enterprise social networks are frequently an IT expense,
many CEOs pin their justification to an ROI. However, there are also many
subjective and intangible benefits that are inextricably linked to the
outcome yet difficult to quantify. Instead, CEOs should judge success
by other metrics too, including anticipated cost and timeline, potential
benefits, and productivity gains.45 Well discuss ROI further in Chapter 5.
Myth #3: If we build it, they will come. The reality? People are busyand find it hard to incorporate new technology into their workflow.
Additionally, they dont want to be seen as shirking responsibilities for a
social endeavor so they may add some content but nothing meaningful.
Remember, your enterprise soc ial network wont grow on its own without
proper nurturing. To be successful, employees need to be educated on
the mission, provided with constant support, given incentives, and shown
that the upper level management is participating. Since the personal
social network revolution grew quickly and exponentially, CEOs expect its
enterprise counterpart to do the same. Yet as we learned earlier, adoption
is a long process, and CEOs must adjust their expectations accordingly.46
Myth #4: Enterprise social networks help close colleagues worktogether better. Remember the tie discussion from Chapter 2. Weve seen
that these networks work with all levels of connection strong ties, weak
ties, potential ties, and even no ties at all.47
Myth #5: Enterprise social networks can only be judged by theinformation they create. Much of your enterprise social network will be
evolving in real time, so it may appear rough and unfinished. But evenwith unpolished information, these networks provide valuable content
that can be traced back to the people that generated itand this is
where the real secret of powerful collaboration resides. Once expertise is
located, the potential for innovation is limitless.48
Dont let obstacles defeat you. These five myths stop some CEOs in their
tracks. There are many reasons, whether real or imagined, to shelve your
social business plans. But dont even think about it.
Your competitors are running theirs right now and thriving. And it wont
take long to put you ahead of the curve now. Dont you want a piece of the
success story?
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Building an ESNbusiness case
Your business case for an enterprise social network. Making an
enterprise social network part of your companys game plan requires one
major play: Making sure that all stakeholders are on board. They must
believe in its importance and its power to transform the collaboration at
your company. Here are a few facts and ideas to build on when making
your business case.
Calculating the ROI. As you compile a clear picture of the projects scope,youll likely get the question of what is the expected ROI? While it is
important to consider ROI when youre adding infrastructure, personnel,
technology, or other new components to your business, the ROI of
enterprise social network software, as weve shown, is not easy to pin
down. The benefits can be subjective and it can be difficult to map out
exact costs and even timing, especially when deploying large and complex
projects with thousands of users.49
McAfee does note that for most of the companies he has studied, an
enterprise social network pays for itself. This assertion isnt based on a
traditional ROI formula; rather its based on his years of research in the
field of business technology.50
What to consider when you calculate ROI. When you calculate an ROI,
there are two important measurements to considerReturn on value and
return on productivity.
Chapter 5This chapter provides a solid business case for an enterprise
social network. We show you how to define costs and timelines
and perform a value/benefits or time-saving analysis. Youll see
exactly how to present your business caseand win.
The blueKiwi ROI calculator. You can test your ownassumptions with the ROI calculator on our website.
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Return on valuecost vs. benefits
Anecdotal evidence surfaces first. From a financial perspective, return
on value is not a powerful justification for acquiring an enterprise social
network platform. Understandably, claims of business gains in top line
revenue, rate of innovation, or level of satisfaction are met with a healthy
dose of skepticism. After all, there is no proven equation that connects the
dots between social business and business performanceat least not yet.
Organisations already enjoying the benefits of enterprise social networks
extol concrete anecdotal evidence, but ultimately the benefits must bemeasured by the success of overall business performance, and this takes
time to materialise.
Innovations in product development result in a richer sales pipeline,
improved quality, and on-time project delivery. These benefits depend
upon a large number of variablesthe industry, the business function, the
extent of executive support, the strength and motivations of community
managers, the adoption rate of the platform within the organisation, the
familiarity of users with the platform, and many more. With nearly five
years of data regarding enterprise social networks, there is sufficientinformation to develop a planned approach that will result in success.
A complex measurement. Return on value can be difficult to measure
quantifiably and is often tracked in terms of fundamental changes in
collaborative behavior and interaction. Increasingly, CEOs are noting
that enterprise social networks bring tremendous value to organisations
by aggregating the right expertise and information and fostering
collaboration.
However, return on value is still hard to predict when the enterprisesocial network is just in the planning stages. Even with full support
from management and a strategic plan in place, projecting a measurable
outcome is difficult because the specifics of how and what the enterprise
social network will target have not yet been determined. There may be
significant benefits, but what will they be?
Building an ESN business caseGains from an enterprise social network can be dramatic;
they include enhanced satisfaction scores, lower attrition,
and ultimately higher revenues.
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Social Network Analysis(SNA)
Measuring Success with Social Network Analysis (SNA).A recent
innovation in the field for assessing success is the Social Network
Analysis (SNA). This process measures the patterns of interaction
information sharing, problem solving, coaching, and mentoringthat
make up the less visible, often informal side of an organisation. Using
surveys and other tools, SNA can map the social networks that exist
outside of organisational charts or process diagrams.51
Over time, SNA can track patterns and changes.Armed with this
information, an organisation can see its communication structure and
can implement specific strategies to reorganise itself and improve
collaboration. In fact, a recent SNA conducted at Novartis helped reveal
a pattern of communicationand parallel innovation approachesthat
helped them combine teams before they reached a critical stall point in
developing a new vaccine.52
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Using return on valueto map out benefits
This is key. When you identify the expected benefits youll gain with an
enterprise social network, you can accurately gauge your success. For
example, if youd like to save t ime and money, measure the savings in
travel time and costs gained by conducting global or otherwise travel-
intensive meetings online instead of in person. When you apply a return
on value (or similarly a cost versus benefits analysis), you can see where
subjective elements like shifting meetings can make a real impact.53
Dont focus on adoption rate. The one thing we dont recommend
studying is the adoption rate of the new software. It takes into account
how often people access the platform or how long they stick with it.54 This
metric has been often used as the typical yardstick of success, but it can
deter and depress many a CEO.
Further, there is no correlation between adoption and results, as many
users may not be using the software regularly, even if theyve adopted
it. Since youve seen how difficult adoption of new technology can be, it is
not the place to hang your hat on the success of the program. Instead, pick
a specific challenge to overcome and watch what it does.55
Building an ESN business case
Many believe that if organisational barriers to the use of social technologies
diminish, they could form the core of entirely new business processes that mayradically improve performance.How social technologies are extending the organisation
McKinsey Quarterly, Nov 2011
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What CEOsneed to hear
Building an ESN business case
Three powerful benefits. If you need to get your CEOs attention, share
these three competitive advantages that enterprise social network
technology can help you achieve:56
1. Imagine harnessing everything your employees know. Lew Platt, who
ran HP, a highly respected and very successful technology company
for decades, once quipped, If only HP knew what HP knows, wed be
three times more productive.
2. Connect weak ties and change the way you work. Connect
weakly tied employees to reap exponentially more collaboration,
innovation, and growth. Before enterprise social networks, we
lacked the technology to really take advantage of these professional
acquaintance ties. Now we can exploit them indefinitely. See Chapter
2 for a refresher on connecting ties.
3. Become a magnet for the Millenials. As Generation Y, the Millenials,
or the Facebook Generation play larger roles in the workforce, their
style of collaboration will be king. The social technologies they are
familiar with are infiltrating the business world as well.
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Benefit: improved salesand marketing
Some specific expected benefits for a return on value. Enterprise social
networks improve the performance of sales and marketing teams in
these ways:
Facilitate the conversation.Increasing communication andinformation sharing among teams increases the ability to continually
repeat successful sales strategies.
Find the best prospects. Help marketers zero in on their prospects
and target them with the resonant messages and offerings. Reduce the cost of a sale. Cut the length of a typical sales cycle by
making business information centrally accessible to every member
of the sales team. Theyll also be able to connect to each other via
activity streams and messaging, keeping dispersed team members inthe loop.
Connect everyone. Transform pyramids into circlescirculatinginformation among a larger group of people, rather than just the
few partners at the top of the pyramid. Since great ideas cancome from anywhere, flattening the pyramid to a circle yields more
comprehensive, powerful conversations and better, stronger ideas.
Building an ESN business case
Top 3 measurable benefits
with customers
1. Increasing market effectiveness
2. Increasing customer satisfaction
3. Reducing market costs
Results from their 5th annual social tools and technologies survey
Source: McKinsey Global Institute, 2011
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Benefit: fosterinnovation
Incite innovation. Innovation is increasingly viewed as the primary
growth driver for companies as they battle stronger competition and
pricing pressures. And innovation is not just limited to new products and
servicesideally it can occur throughout the organisation. Through a
forum that encourages open collaboration, innovation can thrive.
Generate ideas. Since it is people, not processes, who create ideas, you
need a two-fold approach to generating new ideas. Use an ESN to find
and tap the unknown expertise already in your organisation. Second,connect people inside and outside of your organisation so that they can
cross-pollinate ideas and eventually focus their collective knowledge on
selecting the ideas that should be implemented.
Funnel ideas to create real value. Innovation happens in three distinct
phases: the emergence, incubation, and industrialisation of ideas. In
addition to the number of ideas created in the first phase, a critical
success metric is the reduction of cycle time to move ideas through the
latter two phases. By pushing collective ideas through the network in real
time, enterprise social networks greatly accelerate the process.
Reward creativity. Identify and reward those who create this exciting
environment, thus propagating the cycle of creativity. Regardless of where
they work in an organisation, all participants can shine through enterprise
social networks.
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Benefit: optimisecompany talent
Improve Human Resources with engaged employees and clearly
identified talent. The HR department is critical to the recruitment and
onboarding of new employees and the nurturing of the existing talent
pool. Make sure they are a key component of your enterprise social
network launch.
Reward your Champions. Although designed for group collaboration,
an enterprise social network makes it easy to see when an individualscontributions stand out. Human resources can efficiently track and
reward employees that make a difference.
Attract and keep Facebook Generation talent. Since this group is
extremely adept at using social media, the enterprise versions of the
software become an easy way to recruit and use their talents.
Maintain the new norm of open sharing and transparency.Enterprise
social networks are all about transparency and collaboration, something
the business world is now recognising as essential to its success.
Train and integrate new employees. With an enterprise social network,
the collective knowledge and opportunities to meet dispersed colleagues
are there at the ready, so new people can jump right into the conversation.
Building an ESN business caseWith an investment in social software tools, OSIsoft saw a
22% reduction in its customer support teams average time to
issue resolution.57
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Benefit: manageexception handling
Enterprise social networks manage exception handling. As we
established earlier in Chapter 1, companies are dealing more and more
with events and issues which are not easily handled by the standard
process and have no immediate answer-- theexceptions.
They can be a huge time drain as people struggle to resolve an issue
that has not been seen before, either attempting to fix it with a guess or
starting over to reinvent the wheel.
One great thing about enterprise social network software? They are
great at handling exceptions, for the same reasons that theyre great
at coordinating collaborationthey help people cross organisational
borders, find expertise, consolidate institutional knowledge, incubate
innovation, and move it all forward in real (fast) time.58
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Return onproductivity
After benefits its important to consider return on productivity.With
this measurement, you see less dramatic results than with a return on
value; however this type of productivity assessment is also much more
measurable than a return on value since it has direct links to an existing
communication or collaboration process.
Saving time and resources.Enterprise social networks drive efficiencies
when they replace routine communication and collaboration processeslike email, resulting in productivity gains that save time and resources.
The newer technologies reduce meeting t ime, information search
time, and perform other time- saving activities. With open information
distribution models displacing closed information loops like email and
in-person meetings, all pertinent people are included and know that the
information exists.
Most importantly, it is easier to track the time saved in reviewing
messages, sending replies, or searching for information and other routine
work activities through a time study evaluation. And these gains accruemore homogeneously to organisations across industries and business
functions.
More network activity drives business value. Both return on value
and return on productivity depend greatly on the level of adoption and
enterprise social network user engagement. Greater adoption of course
drives higher network effects and can substantially grow the business
value.
As companies gain traction with their enterprise social networks, the
benefits continue to build. More voices and the greater exchange ofknowledge exponentially create greater innovation and collaboration.
Building an ESN business caseAlcoa Fastening Systems regained 61% of its time when it cut
that much on compliance activities using [enterprise social
network] software.59
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France Postcase study
Profile France Post. La Poste is the most diverse of European postal
operators and the leading provider, distributer, and integrator of consumer
retail services. Headquartered in Paris, the company employs over
268,000 people throughout France. Their total revenue for 2011 was over
21.3 billion euros.
Their collaboration problem. The Department of Innovation and Services
(DIDES) at La Poste was created to address technological change andincreased competition by driving business and process innovation. DIDES
is organized horizontally across four operating divisions and needed to
accomplish three objectives: Provide an environment that encourages
open exchange and social collaboration to inspire innovation, connect
geographically dispersed team members to gather ideas and build
stronger relationships, and reduce dependency on costly in-person
meetings.
The solution. With blueKiwis help, DIDES created an internal network
called BlueNove. Employing real-time posts and notifications, theycreated an archived and easily accessible, searchable community for
critical collective knowledge, increased engagement and interaction
between geographically dispersed employees, and reduced labor and
travel costs when members connected online instead of in meetings.
Due to this success, La Poste has expanded the original project scope
beyond DIDES to encompass three new communities within La Poste.
Additionally, BlueNove will go beyond incubating ideas to helping
employees transform them into concrete projects.
Solution highlights and benefits. With 400 members, DIDES BlueNove
generated 16 000 visits, 2000 usable notes, and 1000 comments within
the first few years of deployment.
How has it made them be more productive?
Optimized group collaboration and innovation through the exchangeof information and capture of collective knowledge
Strengthened internal relationships
Increased productivity by creating a repository for important
information
Built collaboration among departmental teams and across
geographically dispersed project teams Drove significant labor savings when meetings were moved online
Chapter 6: Case studies
Case studies
In this Chapter, youll see how blueKiwi has helped companies with their
collaboration and innovation goals. Whether connecting employees
across the globe, streamlining processes and optimising ideas, reducing
costly travel and meeting costs, or otherwise creating stronger working
ties, blueKiwi makes it easy for companies to grow their business.
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Allianzcase study
Customer profile. Headquartered in Munich, Germany, The Allianz Group
is one of the leading integrated financial services providers in the world.
Allianz offers a comprehensive range of insurance and asset management
products and services to approximately 78 million customers in over 70
countries. Their total revenue for 2011 was more than 103 billion euros.
Background. In the Paris area, the company had 21 different lab agencies
that tested new products and selling methods. Around 60 collaborators
and agency managers staffed these various labs and needed an effective
way to collaborate.
The solution. Allianz used blueKiwi to create an enterprise social network
to facilitate weekly corporate communications from the division director
in Paris, circulate surveys soliciting feedback about new products and
selling methods, and share file templates, questions, and best practices
among its collaborators.
Due to the success of this i