My 2011 Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes: E2.0 Black Belt Practitioner's Workshop – Part Four
Posted by Bill Ives on Mon, Jun 20, 2011
Here is the fourth in a series of notes on the 2011 Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. I am attending the E2.0 Black Belt Practitioner's In-Depth Workshop. Susan Scrupski is the organizer. Here is part of the session description: “Members of The Social Business Council, a peer-led community, have had an early mover advantage in thinking through the difficult transformational issues that are required to create a more connected, participatory, engaging enterprise ready to embrace the future. In this full-day lecture and interactive workshop, learn first hand from practitioners who have tackled adoption, architecture, change management, community management, education, governance, and the realities of living through an Enterprise 2.0 transformation.”
This picks up after the mid-afternoon. Now there is coffee so no excuse for typos.
Andy Carusone first discussed social business at Lowe's Home Improvement. Lowe’s is a 50B a year retailer. I have been there. They have a very complex inventory of around 50,000 items and 280,000 employees. Only about 17,000 employees are salaried. The rest are hourly and many are part time. About two years ago they looked at enterprise 2.0, as hey had to find a way for a more connected organization with a more common communication system. They embraced 2.0 as they felt they had no choice.
They were the largest home improvement retailer before Home Depot came along (and changed the market) and they were then a relatively small Southern retailer. They had to change to embrace big box on a national scale to stay competitive. Now the customer wants to experience home improvement not just in the store. Lowe’s wants to make the process simple but not be limited to the store environment. The challenge is that in order to make it simple for the customer, they had to become more complex to handle the multiple channels.
In 2010 they began with the enterprise 2.0 technologies. One of the first tasks was how to find the expertise (without interrupting the expert). At the annual company sales event in Las Vegas, they built a site to support the event. People quickly began using this to go beyond the event and the audience.
Transparency was key to making it success in migrating risks. People wanted to protect their reputation so they behaved properly. Success stories spread quickly. Someone asked for more product because their new idea sold 8 times as much product and they could not get enough inventory of this product. Others picked up on it and used this employee’s methods and over $1 million in additional sales occurred.
Andy found that ROI is a trap. However, they got huge benefits. They focused more on behaviors than numbers. They look at the return on the behaviors rather than the technology. They did a Beta in Florida with IBM Lotus Connections and then expanded it. They found that benefits are higher than anticipated and the risks are lower but middle management resisted. To meet the middle management resistance, he first acknowledged the concern but then showed how the old way costs too much so they can see the light themselves.
He said that you cannot measure one community against another. You can compare similar communities like the cabinet makers or the zombies. Yes, they have a zombie community. The zombie community was started by some employees who were interested in the topic. I wonder if they do this like the CDC who issued what to do in a zombie attack to draw attention to their web site. It was successful for CDC.
A reverse mentor is someone who supports a senior executive in getting involved in the community discussions or other enterprise 2.0 activities. He said this has been very successful in getting senior management engaged.
They now get 45 million page views a month. There are over 4,000 communities. There are over 3,000 blogs. The top ten blogs account for 22% of all blog visits. The top two blogs account for 10% of all blog visits. All content in published real time. There is a link to the collaborative technologies guidelines on each page.
Jim Worth and Renee Creciun now discussed social business at Merck & Co. Inc. Merck has about 90,000 employees and is in the top three in pharma sales. Jim started with a description of the internal system. Their enterprise portal is their collaboration environment. It is a social intranet with NewsGator on top of SharePoint. It has tabs with company news and employee generated content. The “about me” page is like a Facebook page. There is an organization hierarchy view that allows you to navigate up and down the chain.
There is an activity stream like Twitter but also with auto-generated updates. It is front and center. I certainly agree with this placement. There are two types of communities. There are organizational communities and communities of practice. There are related blogs, activity stream, tag clouds, information about the community steward and other Web parts.
Jim said he was hired by Merck two years ago to build a “Facebook” for Merck. He scanned the tweet log from this conference in 2009 that someone sent him. He found many of the early adopters and ideas to get started. There were multiple connectivity initiatives at the time operating in parallel. The research group led the social intranet effort. They did a soft launch with just email notification.
By August 2010 they had the first enterprise rollout. It is called the Sync Intranet Portal. In Spring 2011 they did the full rollout. Some of the biggest challenges were with legal around topics like eDiscovery and other regulatory issues, as well as privacy. They also need to have approval on a country-by-country basis because of the different legal issues on privacy among other things. There are now over 120 communities. They are requirements such as a steward. They are not trying to proliferate communities, but also not suppress them.
Renee then discussed culture change issues. The merger with another pharma company happen at the same time as the rollout of the social intranet so there has been much turmoil. They are trying to increase employee engagement with the system. They want to enable bi-directional communication and make Merck more personal. They also want to reduce waste and find knowledge and expertise more efficiently.
They have provided incentives to increase participation. It is opt-in as legal requires this. There was an iPad2 given away once a day for several weeks and this helped. Other incentives were also provided.
With the new social intranet the ability to communicate beyond your immediate network has expanded and they are trying to encourage this. They encourage people to check out profiles before meeting new people and before communicating virtually with global colleagues. To make this easier, the profile is added to email signatures so you can click on it and go to the profile.
There are two different types of community templates. The communities of interest are peer to peer and people are very engaged as they are interested in the topic. The organizational communities are just getting started. You can recognize people for good work. Anyone can do this. There are leadership blogs and the ones that are more informal get more response.
The community steward supports people in their participation, including the leaders. So it serves the reserve mentor role that Lowe’s had initiated, among other tasks. They have plans to greatly extend such areas as metrics, search, reports, enable mobile, and add external communities.