Usage

• Wikis
• Blogs
• Instant messaging
• Social networking
• Video conferencing
• Corporate directory with presence awareness

Purpose

• Attract and retain Gen Y workers. 

“Their engagement with the organization falls off if you bludgeon them with hierarchy and legacy systems.  They grew up with a frictionless collaboration environment, and we need to give them the technology [to support that].”  (Senior VP and project sponsor Pete Fields)

• Connect a geographically dispersed employee population. 

“virtual communities are as real and relational as actual communities.” (Fields)

• Reduce travel expenses
• Retain knowledge as baby boomers retire.  Pete Fields:

“It dwarfs what we have in our content management systems” (Fields)

• Increase employee collaboration

Approach / Advice

• On user adoption (Fields):

“we still underestimated the change impact” (Fields)

• In overcoming negative pre-connotations : 

“Executives came to this topic assuming that what holds true on the public Internet today would also hold true for the corporation.  Those really are faulty assumptions, in that context really drives everything. The context for the workplace is so different than the context of the home and the consumer market.” (Fields)

• Using younger Gen Y workers to mentor senior staffers on the tools and benefits. 

“We’re still working like first generation enterprises.  We are run by boomers who are very comfortable with that.  [The next generation of workers] has grown up with reality television where they not only see themselves as involved with the programming but they all vote (on the outcome). In a traditional company there is no way for a new generation worker coming in to have a voice and to be heard.” (Fields)

• Spent about a year defining business processes to support these tools and building a business case.  After a proof-of-business case, began rollout to 1,000 employees in Dec 2007 and complete rollout to all employees by end of May 2008.
• Established a wiki with a very specific purpose: to capture all 3 letter acronyms across the company.  Captured 900 entries within a short time.
• Strategic plan is to engage customers and business partners with the tools.
• No specific rules on how employees can or cannot use the tools – employees must act within the same guidelines as other communication.  

“They’re governed by our same codes of conduct that apply to written communications, voice mail, and e-mail.  There’s nothing in the world that prevents employees from jumping on that stage and screaming something inappropriate, but they don’t do it.” (Fields)

Funding

• Managers committed 5% of their annual travel budget for 5 years to help pay for the tools.

Product

• Microsoft Sharepoint Server

Who says 

• Information Week, “Enterprise 2.0: Wachovia Turns to Wikis, Blogs to Support Growth”.  June 11, 2008.
• CIO, “The ROI of Enterprise 2.0: Four Ways Wachovia Justified Wikis, Blogs, and Other Social Networks”, June 11, 2008.
• ComputerWorld, “CIA, Pfizer, Wachovia and Sony Execs suggest options for adopting Web 2.0”. June 11, 2008.
• IDG, “Bank to give users access to wikis, blogs, social networks”. June 9, 2008
• Internetnews, “Finding the Enterprise Why in Wikis”. June 11, 2008.

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“There is a fundamental shift in the industry and it’s occurring much faster than any market transition I have seen so far…This will usher in what I believe will be a generation of productivity that will change not only how we work, where we work, but the very nature of work itself.”

Even though Cisco has a lot to gain by the world increasing internet traffic with Web 2.0 they have demonstrated some of their own impressive successes with Enterprise 2.0.   Chambers puts it this way

“Web 2.0 has been around but at Cisco we’re doing it with a vengeance.” 

One of the things I found most compelling in the Cisco story is how John Chambers has successfully driven innovation from the bottom with Web 2.0 collaboration while in his own words he himself is a “command and control person”.  They’ve achieved this yin and yang by matching strong leadership, tough objectives and a “measure everything” mentality with an aggressive, open collaboration model with Web 2.0 tools.  Set the goals, provide the tools and let people find ways to meet those goals as productively as possible.   Beautiful isn’t it.  For those managers and executives that are still scared of losing control by letting Web 2.0 into their enterprises, this is a comfort case study. 

One final quote from Chambers because I thought this hit right on.   As exciting as Web 2.0 is right now, I agree that it will take us years to fully realize the potential gains in productivity. 

“I think it (productivity gains via Web 2.0) will be a five to ten-year run. Where I think we are is right at the very early beginning of the next phase of this creativity, which will last, I think, a minimum of ten years, probably 15 years. But it will have more impact (than Web 1.0) because the power of many to many allows you to do things at a dramatically different speed.”

Usage

• “Ciscopedia” wiki (of course the Cisco Wikipedia)
• “I-Zone” wiki for cultivating ideas as a key component to their very successful intrapreneurship which is generating new businesses within Cisco.  I-Zone has generated 400 business ideas with 10,000 people actively contributing to the ideas.  “we just did three billion-dollar market opportunities without my knowing about it.”, Cisco CFO referring to Emerging Technology executive Martin de Beer’s response to I-Zone.
• Text and video blogs
• Employee profiles (internal version of MySpace) which provides the basics such as title, contact information, etc as well as video, notes, blog, roles, expertise, instant messaging, video messaging.
• Social bookmarking: “We’re going to use social bookmarking to allow us to take the pulse of the organization” 
• Telepresence.  Cisco’s new telepresence product is their new shining star.  There’s hope that it really does allow us to feel like we’re in the same room with our partner in Bangalore.

Advantages Seen

• Significantly faster closing and integration of acquired companies such as closing the WebEx acquisition in 8 days.  Cisco has been acquiring a new company every 3 weeks on average in 2008.  (Yes, the Borg will require you to speak Web 2.0)
• Ideas generated from their I-Zone wiki which have launched new products and entire business units.
• Reducing expenses and carbon footprint by reducing business travel.
• Faster business unit development.  Cisco grows one new emerging technology business unit about every 3 months. 
• “I’m comfortable that I can grow productivity at 10% per year for the next decade (because of social networking / collaboration).”, Chambers

Biggest Challenge

“Simple matter of people…Technology will not be the inhibitor.  Technology will really outstrip our ability to adjust to it as people.”, Chambers

Who Says

• Fortune, “Cisco’s display of strength”, Oct 31, 2007
• All Things Digital, “Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers: The Entire D5 Interview with Kara Swisher“, Sept 11, 2007
• CIO, “Cisco CEO John Chambers on Web 2.0, Collaboration, Avatars and Mashups”, July 13, 2007
• Cisco blogs
  David Hsieh, Nov 5, 2007.
  Nick Earle, VP Services, Cisco Eurpoe, Feb 01, 2007
• Harvard Business Review, “To Succeed in the Long Term, Focus on the Middle Term”, Geoffrey A. Moore, July-August 2007
• InternetNews.com, “Chambers: The Network is The Power of Us”, May 22, 2007
• ZDNet, “Cisco CEO: Virtualisation to fuel second web boom”, Sept 17, 2007.
• Financial Times, “Interview: Cisco’s John Chambers”, July 15, 2007

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General Motors is the largest automaker with more than 300,000 employees operating in over 70 countries. 

Usage

• Wikis  “A lot of the collaborative work that goes on amongst project teams has really benefited from the use of wikis and discussion forums; the ability to have people interact much more quickly, much more immediately on the web has been very powerful for us.”, Fred Killeen
• Customer facing blogs  “We know that we’re competitive with any truck or car company in the world in terms of quality and durability and design, but we felt that message wasn’t really being communicated very well to people outside of GM. As we looked at how we could help change that perception, we felt that blogs were the right way to develop better interactivity with the customers and really communicate our message better.”, Bill Betts, GM Customer Communication Manager
• Exploring mashups
• Exploring folksonomies and tagging

Advantages

• Real-time collaboration around the world & across time zones
• Developing a common sense of terminology and language across the company
• “they don’t have to e-mail Powerpoint presentations or Word documents to each other in order to share ideas; instead, they can just start a wiki” (Killeen)
• “you don’t need to be a technical expert to post the content” (Killeen)”
• “there’s great potential for changing the way we do a lot of things, from how we engage our users, to how we develop systems, to how we interact with our customers, right through to how we collaborate together in order to design and develop better cars and trucks.” (Killeen)

Approach / Advice

“do some pilots, and through those pilots understand how it changes the work and how it impacts the users and what you need to do from a change management standpoint. The thing that makes this technology great is that it’s reasonably simple yet allows you to exploit a whole host of capabilities.” (Killeeen)

Who Says

• Business Management, The dawn of Enterprise 2.0, February 2007
• ComputerWeekly, Drive business change with Web 2.0,  Nov 7, 2006
• KPMG, “Enterprise 2.0: Fad or Future?”, 2007

Wells Fargo is a Financial Services company headquartered in San Francisco, has $482 billion in assets and 160,000 employees.

Usage

• Blogs:
  • At least 50 internal blogs for product group discussions
  • Customer facing blogs for specific niches such as disaster recovery and student loans
  • Blog for business customers to give feedback to Wells Fargo
• Wikis
• RSS feeds  
• Second Life: Experiment to try to engage younger consumers – off to a slow start.
• MySpace presence

ROI

Steve Ellis, Wells Fargo EVP doesn’t bother with figuring a dollar ROI for the E2 tools : “I can just go out and tell our boss I know we’ll be better off”.

Advice

“The culture of blogging is unique and we strive to connect with that culture through many different voices at Wells Fargo. Finding the person with the right passion + knowledge is our goal, whether they have a professional communications role or not (most do not).”  Wells Fargo VP of Social Media Ed Terpening

Who Says

• Investors.com “Firms Using Wikis, RSS as Enterprise 2.0 Grows“, Aug. 20, 2007
• Information Week “Revenge of the Suits: Companies Show How To Blog“, Oct 23, 2006
• Bank Systems & Technology “Adoption of Web 2.0 Is Taking Off, But Some Firms Are Still Reluctant“, March 30, 2007
• Wells Fargo blog, “Wells Fargo Continues its Social Media Innovation with a MySpace page”, March 29, 2007
• NetBanker Wells Fargo Archives

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Young’s study clearly points to the advantage, and perhaps necessity, of getting executive commitment. CEO Edward Zoe embraced the blogging concept from the first presentation to him from their corporate communications group.  It’s also a situation where the commitment to share openly precedes and leads to the Web 2.0 tool adoption rather than the Web 2.0 tools driving the issue as is more often the case.  To keep this all in perspective on the enterprise sharing continuum, David Carter from Awareness implemented Northwestern Mutual’s blogging platform and comments “(Northwestern Mutual is) not the poster child for free and open communications.“

Young has a lot of good food for thought.  From my own experience I thought this advice targeted to vendors, but also applicable to adopters, was especially insightful : 

“Success with enterprise Web 2.0 will come from a combination of progressive changes — punctuated by some surprising benefits. Don’t try to predict which benefits your clients will realize. Instead, help clients realize and quantify the smaller victories on which they can build.”

Northwestern Mutual is a Fortune 500 company with about 5,000 employees.  They began their experiment with employee blogging in late 2005 and currently have 91 blogs and 600 blog posts with 500 employees receiving RSS feeds.  By their own measure they have “strong, but not blockbuster, employee usage”.

Motivating Factors

• CEO Edward Zoe’s strategy to “open the windows” and increase collaboration and communication across the enterprise.
• Build an institutional memory due to 1/3 of employees due to retire within 5 years.

Usage:

• Blogs-internal and external
• RSS
• wikis (on a limited scale.  Looking at vendors and solutions currently)
• podcasts (experimental)

Products:

• Awareness for blogs
• Newsgator for RSS
• Confluence Atlassian for wikis

Compliance Issues
Northwestern Mutual is in the highly regulated insurance industry.  They developed a working team to ensure compliance.  They ensure that corporate document retention policies are followed and have implemented tools to flag potentially unprofessional words or phrases.

Security
For blogging, Awareness implemented identity servers that manage who can log into and contribute content.

Employee Adoption: 

• Seeded with 8 respected employees’ blogs before opening it up to all employees
• Enlisted blogging evangelizers

Benefits seen:

• Improvements in corporate communications
• Individual productivity
• Team productivity

“When we get to the meeting, we are a little more up to speed on issues we’ve raised on the project blog and a little farther down the road on our thinking. It leads to greater productivity.” (Tom Lemke, Manager of Communications Technology, Northwestern Mutual)

Advice

• Establish blogging guidelines and best practices 
• “…people feeling freedom to express their opinions at all levels and being encouraged to do that is easy in theory but is more difficult in practice. People do feel intimidated; they do feel vulnerable. It takes a long time to foster that kind of environment.” Edward Zoe

Lessons learned

• “I wish we would have had RSS capabilities at the initial launch (of blogging)…” Edward Zoe
• Employees have been using blogging for increased productivity like project management rather than cultural or “hot topic” issues
• Interesting content and presentation drive readership

Who  Says

• Forrester, “Case Study: Northwestern Mutual’s Enterprise Web 2.0 Journey“, October 1, 2007
• ComputerWorld “IT Execs Seek New Ways to Justify Web 2.0“, August 13, 2007  
• Wall Street Journal Online, “Social Studies“, June 18, 2007

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Janssen-Cilag is a pharmaceutical company and is an operating unit of Johnson & Johnson.  They have about 300 employees and are located in New Zealand and Australia. 

Usage: Wiki to replace the company intranet.  

 Business Drivers:

• Content in company intranet was too static and out-of-date. 
• News distributed via email.    

Success Gauge

• After 12 months, 184 people (~ 60% of total user population) have made 18,000 contributions.
• “Business information that was previously scattered in email (e.g. Business Planning presentations) is now collected into a permanent, secure online space. We have a growing reference and history of information to build on and make available to newcomers. Knowledge management, previously a big concern, has moved off the agenda for the time being.”

His Advice:

• “…concentrate on letting people do things rather than worrying about what they shouldn’t do”
• “Own the flow and the stock will come”.   By owning the flow of content (eg, they instituted a rule that all announcements come through the wiki), the creditability & usage will happen.
• “best collaboration systems are incredibly simple and open.”

 Implementation Strategies:

• Kept usability as easy as possible – so easy that users forget the term “wiki”.
• Interviewed 27 people of various levels before implementation to understand their concerns while building support of a wiki approach during the interview.
• Piloted the product using a fast moving project that had a lot of interest across the company.
• Content from the existing intranet was not converted due to age & credibility of information.
• Instituted policy that all new announcements must be made via the site.
• Allows personal news like baby announcements.

User Training:  5 minute presentation during all employee meeting

 Primary Challenge: “Encouraging a culture of collaboration and transparency.”

 Addressing Regulatory Concerns:

• Consider if social forces can be at least as effective as technical constraints.
• Anyone can monitor any content and quickly take corrective actions.
• Lock down content in “exceptional cases”

Cost:  $11,000 AUD / $9,300 US  including graphic design & single sign-on integration.

 Product : Confluence by Atlassian

Thanks To  Stewart Mader (“Blog on Wiki Patterns”) for his post where I initially learned about Janssen-Cilag’s case study.   For those interested in successful wiki implementation techniques and approaches, Stewart’s blog is a good one to check out.

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As an enterprise, SAP has one of the largest and most successful customer collaboration Web 2.0 projects.  SAP’s intent was to open their internal content to collaborate with people around the world.  

Their two communities are “SAP Developer network” (SDN) and “Business Process Expert” (BPX) which targets business processes.  The two networks currently have about 750,000 members with about 4,000 posts per day and 550,000 unique monthly visitors.

The communities have blogs, wikis, forums, technical articles, white papers, how-to guides and e-learning.  Anyone internally or externally may join the communities.  SDN and BPW are transparent, searchable and easy to use.  Members of the community establish reputations via points awarded by their contributions.  People who wish to blog must have a certain number of points.  

According to Mark Yolton, the VP responsible for SDN, ““We wanted the community to influence the company as much as the company influences the community.”

SAP also uses wikis internally but perhaps not to the extent of the external communities.  SocialText and TWiki both claim to be used internally by SAP.  SAP is also investing $850,000 in SocialText which claims itself as the “leading enterprise wiki”.

Usage: Blogs, wikis, discussion forums, e-learning

Products: Confluence from Atlassian, SAP’s Netweaver, SocialText, TWiki

Who Says:

• Wall Street Journal Online “Wikis at Work”, June 18, 2007
• Pittsburgh Post Gazette “Offices Co-opt Consumer Web Tools”, Sept. 12, 2006
• Social Media Today “A Company Transforms Itself Through Social Media”, April 21, 2007.
• SocialText press release.

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Here’s what I most appreciated from their story.

• A very systematic approach to the problem, objective, solution and implementation

• Groups used the tools in unpredictablely effective ways

• Security mainly enforced with typical enterprise security mechanisms (Active Directory, VPN – firewall)

“Once security is enforced, radical freedom”

• Put together what looks like a fantastically integrated suite of tools with a very small group of developers (1 part time senior tech, 2 interns – no PM or CMS)

• Their bottom line:“We can work faster and more effectively”

Andrew McAfee, Associate Professor at Harvard Business School, dedicated one of his Enteprise 2.0 case studies to Avenue A | Razorfish’s implementation.   He comments:

“…their E2.0 Intranet is a really nice piece of work.  I’m relieved that we finally have a clear case study of deep penetration of Enterprise 2.0 technologies across a sizable company.  And I’m optimistic that this example is a harbinger of things to come. “

Usage: Wikis, blogs, tagging, interactive project pages, profiles, RSS, bookmarking, imbedded google maps, user ratings

Their Advice:

• Keep it light: Let people want to use the wiki

• Encourage humour

• Appoint wikivangelists

• Bring in a creative designer early

• Consider using WYSIWYG for editing rather WikiText

 Who Says: 

• Avenue A | Razorfish

• Andrew McAfee, Associate Professor at Harvard Business School

• Gartner Case Study: “Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki Shows Business Value of IT Consumerization“

Thanks to Jeremy Thomas for his post on the new slideshare from Avenue A | Razorfish.

Carson comments:

“[Enterprise 2.0] is not an ‘if’ anymore — it is a ‘when’ and ‘how’ these things will come to the enterprise…If you can tap into the power of your company better than your competitors … that is a competitive advantage. Are you going to wait until a NetFlix takes 30 percent to 40 percent of your market share before you realize something is going on with the Internet?”

Usage: LinkedIn, “80 different web 2.0 projects”, social communities, RSS, wikis

Advice:

• Create Web 2.0 awareness
• Locate supporters in the company
• Make friends with IT
• Approach senior management with a proposal
• Work closely with business units
• Gather and distribute best practices
• Feed the open mouths; don’t force it
• Be patient because change takes time

Vendor: Microsoft and internally built applications

Who says:

• PC World, “Morgan Stanley, Pfizer Turning to Web 2.0 Tools”, 
• Office 2.0 Presentation
• Adam Carson
• ComputerWorld “IT is a Key Barrier to Corporate IT Adoption, Users Say”