Appendix

Case Studies: Learn from Others

Success in social collaboration is often earned by having a good story to tell, which encourages adoption and gives more employees an opportunity to create their own success stories. In other words, “anecdotal evidence” can still be powerful if it is convincing and success stories tend to snowball. While you’re waiting for your own success stories to materialize, take advantage of the ones in this appendix to see what others have done that you might be able to apply to your own organization.

Most of these stories are adapted from my work for InformationWeek and from the companies I talked with while judging the E2 Social Business Leaders recognition program (which recognized Red Robin Gourmet Burgers as #1 in 2012 and State Street Corp. as top leader for 2013).

SAS Institute: Connecting Experts Worldwide

By the time SAS Institute fielded its internal social network, known as The Hub, SAS already had plenty of other internal collaboration tools in place, including SharePoint, as well as internal blogs and wikis. Yet Rick Wicklin, one of the firm’s experts on statistical software development, says that SAS’s introduction of a network based on Socialcast caught his attention in a way none of those other tools had.

“I guess the difference between The Hub and all those others is that I use The Hub, and I didn’t really use the others,” Wicklin says. The Hub did a better job of connecting him with the serendipitous moment of finding something he hadn’t been looking for (but still found useful) from someone he never would have connected with otherwise. Internal social networks are often promoted as a tool for connecting ordinary employees with experts, but at SAS, it’s also proved valuable as a way of connecting experts with each other. By putting himself forward as a group discussion leader, Wicklin found himself connecting with more people throughout the organization with similar research interests.

SAS, which makes advanced data analysis software, is one of the world’s largest private software companies, with a strong reputation for good management. The company was #1 on Fortune’s Best Places to Work list in 2010 and 2011 and consistently places near the top of the list (in 2013, it was #2 behind Google). That’s why I point to it as an example of a company making intelligent use of social software in the workplace.

Wicklin’s discovery of the unique value in the online social experience was exactly what SAS was hoping for when it selected Socialcast, which has a relatively narrow focus on the comment stream and social network profiles, as opposed to something like the Jive Software platform that includes blogging and other content management functions. SAS actually uses Jive to power its customer support communities, but for internal use, it included a lot of features SAS didn’t want or need, explains Becky Graebe, the senior internal communications manager at SAS. The existing blogs and wikis were working fine, so rather than replacing them, SAS wanted to supplement them with the social layer proved by Socialcast.

Social collaboration at SAS began as an initiative of the internal communications group although IT provides support and manages the vendor relationship. Because it’s relatively easy for web-based tools to link to content in each other’s repositories, Graebe saw no need for all those tools to come from the same vendor. Nor has SAS seen any pressing need for deep integration with business applications or business workflow, she says. The Hub does play a supporting role in project management, and SAS is starting to experiment with the Socialcast Projects module.

Mostly, however, The Hub is offered as a tool for communication. SAS’s determination to find the unique value of internal social networking also led to some unusual design decisions. Rather like Twitter, The Hub is biased toward current information rather than serving as a historical repository. Postings expire from the site if there is no new activity on them, such as a comment or a Like. This custom configuration of Socialcast is very different from the design of most other internal social networks, which often play a role in preserving information as an extension of knowledge management or content management for the enterprise.

Originally just 180 days, the expiration period has since been extended to two years. Any new activity, such as a reply to a discussion, restarts the clock. Still, an employee who wants to preserve some bit of insight or information uncovered in a discussion would be wise to copy it into a more permanent repository such as a wiki. Again, the goal of The Hub was to focus on things it could do better than those established tools. “We didn’t want The Hub to become a graveyard of outdated information,” Graebe says.

About 75 percent of the company’s 13,600 employees are active on the internal social network — a statistic that’s more impressive if you understand that the company employs its own landscapers and cafeteria workers who don’t use a computer to do their jobs. In divisions like Research and Development, use of The Hub is nearly universal. First informally launched in early 2011, The Hub attracted 1,000 users within a month and 8,000 by the end of the first year, continuing to grow steadily since.

The network also hosts more than 1,100 professional interest groups. Their proliferation is a mixed blessing, given that Socialcast doesn’t make it easy to sort or filter the list of groups. Still, collaboration groups have a lot of advantages over the e-mail mailing lists traditionally used for group discussions. Graebe says her team isn’t necessarily campaigning for the elimination of e-mail groups but is trying to make the collaboration platform such a convenient alternative that there is no reason not to switch.

Nor does Graebe see social communication replacing regular old e-mail. When you know exactly whom you want to communicate with, “It’s a much straighter shot to send them either an instant message or an e-mail,” she says. “Where The Hub comes into play is when you don’t know or are not certain who can address your need. Then, The Hub is the better place to go.”

SAS hasn’t put as much emphasis on community management as some other firms. The project manager for the initial launch of the software played a community management role during that phase, but the online community has been largely self-sustaining since. Graebe says that her team does some troubleshooting: for example, highlighting instances where two online discussion groups are duplicating each other’s work and ought to move. As of mid-2013, Graebe was considering establishing a more formal community manager role, but probably just on a part-time basis — maybe two or three hours per day.

The big change for the internal communications team was taking a role in enabling communication between employees, rather than from the corporation to its people. Rather than “pushing things out to the masses, now it’s our goal to connect employees with each other,” Graebe says.

SAS already had a culture in which people would try to help each other, but the social network allows them to do so on a global scale.

“It provides a way to collaborate across divisions, across departments, and also across countries or time zones,” Wicklin says. He particularly values it because the nature of his job in research and development means he works “with a small number of people in a fairly specialized area” and has limited opportunities to meet other people in the company, other than at events like lunchtime seminars or through the soccer league. “This is another venue to meet people and find out who knows what about what,” he says, and has helped him identify others in the organization “who really know their stuff.”

Wicklin has worked for the company for 15 years, but even people he has known for a long time often reveal expertise and interests through the online forums that he never suspected before.

In one instance, his involvement on The Hub led to a change in corporate policy — or, at least, the scrapping of a policy that was no longer being enforced. Looking at competitors’ websites and social media pages, he had noticed that a range of their employees were involved in answering customer questions. He wondered whether SAS employees should be doing the same even though ever since he came to work at the company, he had been told that all such questions should be routed through SAS technical support rather than being addressed informally. When he broadcast that question, he got a response saying that the old policy was outdated, and he could safely ignore it. Because a member of the corporate communications team was monitoring that conversation, that informal ruling was transformed into an official announcement of a new policy empowering employees to engage more in answering those questions rather than leaving them all to tech support.

“I’d never gotten the official word that this was now okay, but as a result of the discussion on The Hub, that comment turned into a corporate decision, which was then advertised,” Wicklin says.

In addition to providing a broad company social network for all employees, The Hub includes interest groups that help him connect with other employees who work in his specialty or related specialties. Trying to e-mail everyone who might know the answer to a question would be impractical and awkward, but in a social environment, employees decide which co-workers and what topics they want to follow. If a competitor is making a claim and Wicklin wants to reality-check it or find out how SAS products stack up in comparison, he can post a question like that to the group and get a knowledgeable answer.

Although Wicklin’s focus is technical, SAS’s Chris Tunstall uses The Hub to share quotes about leadership, links to web resources, and articles from publications like Harvard Business Review. As a member of the SAS leadership development organization, he moderates the Leaders Develop Daily, Not in a Day group, which has attracted hundreds of members.

“One of the things that really stands out on The Hub is that it’s a one-stop shop you can go to,” Tunstall says. “You’re not jumping around to different SharePoint sites, but you can get a constant stream” of items of interest, customized on the basis of the people and groups you follow, he says.

Meanwhile, SAS still has 600 internal blogs, which are hosted independently of The Hub. That’s fine as long as they continue to serve a purpose, Graebe says, but the volume of posts to them does seem to have fallen off somewhat. Social collaboration lends itself to “a quick thought, versus a formal blog post, which tends to be something more thought out and structured. Some bloggers have gone to more of this microblog feel, which is a little less formal,” she says.

Wicklin says the internal blogs were a fine vehicle for “a select few” within the organization who committed to maintaining them, and wikis could be useful for finding specific information. But by encouraging broader participation, social collaboration does a better job of connecting him with all the people doing good work and thinking big thoughts.

TD Bank: Start Small, Think Big

TD Bank’s interest in social collaboration began long before it chose an enterprise social networking software package. Headquartered in Canada, where it was founded as Toronto Dominion Bank, TD Bank also operates in the United States and is the sixth-largest bank in North America.

Today, its Connections internal collaboration platform, based on IBM Connections, provides social networking, blog, wiki, discussion, and other tools to more than 85,000 employees. However, social collaboration had far more modest beginnings. Originally, the team exploring the use of social technologies fielded a simple commenting system that allowed employees to give feedback on newsletter articles on an internal website.

Vice president of social media Wendy Arnott says the question was whether employees would take advantage of the opportunity and whether anything useful would result from it. Actually, yes. An online conversation started by a junior teller led to an idea that is now “expected to represent our biggest single productivity improvement” in 2013, Arnott says.

In response to an article asking about bank workers’ biggest frustrations, the teller suggested that a paper-based enrollment process could be handled much more efficiently online. Hundreds of other employees quickly voiced their agreement and added their ideas about how it should be done.

“The idea had come up before, but until social [networking] amplified it, it was not a priority,” Arnott says. After management saw how unanimous employee sentiment was in favor of the change, it became a priority. Actually getting the signup form online took a couple of years. Still, the fact that social collaboration led to this product idea was a powerful example, Arnott says. “It got us thinking, there must be hundreds of other things that we could be doing better and that we can fix. We started asking, how can we go big with this?”

TD Bank considered about 20 enterprise social networking products, fairly quickly narrowing the field to four leading contenders. Ultimately, IBM Connections was the only one that met every requirement on the bank’s list, according to CIO Glenda Crisp.

The major technical challenge has been identity management, which is critical to a system built around employee profiles. Crisp wanted to deliver a single sign-on across Connections, content management systems, and other corporate applications, meaning that employees would be able to use the same login credentials across all of them rather than needing to remember separate passwords. The integration challenge has been further complicated by the acquisitions of U.S. banks with their own systems, she says.

Social collaboration has become part of a broader social business strategy for TD Bank, which also employs a social customer support team to answer questions submitted through Twitter and Facebook. Besides managing its own pages on those sites, TD Bank listens for mentions of its brand elsewhere on social media and responds, where appropriate.

In addition, the bank created a customer-facing community, TD Helps, which allows consumers to ask questions of TD Bank experts in disciplines including mortgages, credit, and small business banking. TD Helps runs on TemboSocial, the same discussion tool TD Bank used for its early internal social collaboration tests.

“We realized that social was going to be a game changer for the organization, especially after a number of large acquisitions with many employees spanning vast geographies,” Arnott says. “We basically totally buy in to the idea of social business. Every part of the business will eventually use social” to do whatever it does better, she says.

One rationale for supporting an internal social network was to give employees practice handling business communications through social media, Arnott says. That way, if regulations eventually allow the broader population of employees to engage more freely in social media on behalf of the bank, they will be better prepared. Today, only a small number of people who work for Arnott or have been trained by her group are authorized to speak on behalf of the bank in public social media.

TD Bank is also large enough in terms of both employee base and geographic spread to need a social network to keep everyone engaged and to allow them to connect with the company’s best experts in every discipline. In some of her presentations, Arnott uses the example of Adam, a small business credit specialist in a branch in Western Canada. TD Bank has specialists like this wherever it does business, and before the social network, those in remote offices were likely to feel they were on their own. But when a customer comes to Adam with a question he doesn’t know how to answer, he knows he can post it on Connections and quickly get a response from experts at headquarters or elsewhere around the organization.

“He can get that answer, get that deal — but what it really means is he helped that customer,” Arnott says. Significantly, he also got the answer in a shared community where others who have the same question can see it. “If the answer had been given in an e-mail or telephone exchange, all that knowledge would have been lost,” she says.

DenMat: Social Collaboration for Salespeople and Distributors

DenMat’s story of social collaboration on Salesforce.com Chatter is hard to disentangle from a broader strategy of using Salesforce cloud services for sales, service, and custom application development.

Founded in 1974, DenMat makes restorative dental and cosmetic products and provides laboratory services for those that must be custom fit to the individual patient. A couple of its best-known products are Lumineers dental veneers and Snap-On Smile partial dentures. Vice President of IT Jonathan Green embraced Salesforce.com’s CRM platform partly to move away from green-screen terminal software running on an old AS/400 midrange computer, which was what DenMat used to run manufacturing and sales. Through custom programming on Salesforce’s Force.com platform, and use of the Cast Iron Systems integration appliance, he was able to synchronize data between the legacy system and the cloud.

DenMat participated in the original beta test of Chatter, when Salesforce first introduced it as a “Facebook for the enterprise” product that would make commenting on a customer or a sales opportunity recorded in the customer relationship management system as easy as sharing a link or a photo on Facebook. When I first spoke with Green in 2010, one of the reasons he judged Chatter a success was the way it encouraged faster adoption of the Salesforce CRM application by adding a social dimension that made the tools more fun to work with. “You can’t estimate fun,” he told me then.

Today, DenMat has gotten more serious about both the Salesforce platform and social collaboration on Chatter. The collaboration network isn’t entirely internal, including dentists who act as distributors for DenMat products as well as employees. External sales partners can place orders and check the status of orders through the sales and service applications, and they can also use Chatter to discuss anything that may have gone wrong with the process or suggest improvements.

Figure A-1 shows a snippet of a conversation on Chatter between a work-at-home sales representative and a vice president in DenMat’s laboratory business, a sales vice president, and Green.

Figure A-1: Chatter collaboration at DenMat.

Conversations from the social stream have led directly to product improvements, Green says. For example, when a dentist suggested that a soft-tissue dental laser used to address conditions like gingivitis would be more useful with the addition of a foot pedal, “we got that right to R&D” and before long the accessory was in manufacturing, he says.

DenMat was acquired in late 2011 by a new investment firm, where management was initially “very skeptical of Salesforce.com in general,” Green says. However, the new leaders couldn’t help being impressed by the way Chatter helped them connect with employees across the organization, he says. “Now, they want every customer-facing touch point to be through Salesforce.”

Adoption of the new tools is not universal. For all that Green has promoted the use of Salesforce, some internal users continue to fall back on the old terminal-based interface because it’s what they are used to — and, honestly, because the shortcut key combinations they have memorized can make it faster for routine tasks than working with a web-based user interface. Similarly, some employees have been slow to adopt Chatter “for fear that it could be used against them,” Green says. “But then we would hire new people, and they post everything because they’re used to working that way. It takes seeing someone do it and not get in trouble” for others to start to change their minds, he says.

At the same time, Green has noticed that usage of the Microsoft Lync instant messaging application is dropping as users find it easier and more convenient to connect with each other through the Chatter realtime chat feature. One of the managers who was an early, determined skeptic has taken to using Chatter regularly, discovering that it really is the best way to connect with and motivate his team, Green says. “I saw three posts from him just yesterday — and he was one of my biggest holdouts.”

One of his next targets is the manufacturing production floor, where he is in the process of replacing desktop computers with Android tablets so that manufacturing employees can do their work without being chained to a desk. Next, he wants to rebuild the user interface of the manufacturing software to include Chatter, with the goal of getting “realtime feedback on production cycles.”

Unisys: Expanding from Knowledge Management to Social Collaboration

Unisys is taking full advantage of the social capabilities of its platform but within a wider context. “We want to make sure we don’t take such a myopic view of social that we don’t see how it touches knowledge management and collaboration,” says Gloria Burke, director of knowledge and collaboration strategy and governance.

In other words, even as social networking exposes what otherwise might be tacit knowledge (not written down anywhere), part of the goal should be to capture that knowledge in an organized way. Meanwhile, social connections are most valuable when they lead to more intensive collaboration on projects and innovation.

Enterprise social networking adds a dimension beyond what previous knowledge management and collaboration initiatives were able to accomplish at Unisys by providing access to people, not just documents. Previously, “One of the things we struggled with was we weren’t able to find subject matter experts easily, and our salespeople can’t be experts on everything we sell,” Burke says. Now, employees are encouraged to tag their profiles with areas of expertise so they will get an automatic notification when someone posts a query about that topic. That profile tagging is a feature of NewsGator Social Sites, the enterprise social network software that Unisys uses in combination with SharePoint.

“We do have a tradition that goes back 10 years where our employee base has been exposed to the technologies for knowledge management,” says Rajiv Prasad, director of knowledge management and CTO for operations at Unisys. Adding social is not just about the technology but about getting people to interact and change their behavior, he said. “The technology is needed infrastructure to make it easy to do what you need to do, but if either the capabilities or the content are not up to expectations, they will get turned off.”

Instead, 91 percent of the employees in the targeted global audience for the new social platform adopted it within 18 months.

One more basic key to success is helping employees discover how social tools can help them in their jobs.

“We’ve put a lot of emphasis on helping employees learn how social tools can add value in their particular role,” Burke says. After they have it figured out, she encourages them to share. “Nothing drives the adoption of something new more than a colleague telling you it works for them,” she says.

In the search for productive uses of social collaboration, experience has proven to be the best teacher, Burke says. “We spent time on a pilot when in retrospect we should have just deployed,” She also wishes she had introduced role-based workshops on the value of social networking earlier because “a focused audience approach was much more effective and really drove the usage.”

Unisys actually has two social collaboration platforms in play: Chatter for the sales teams, in addition to the NewsGator/SharePoint combination as a company-wide platform. Unisys hopes to achieve a degree of technical integration between the two platforms’ social streams so that employees on each will get the notifications they need to see.

Meanwhile, salespeople have access to both platforms, meaning that they can also hop on the NewsGator-powered network to connect with people or find information not present on Chatter.

One of the things that really matters to the sales team is “market agility,” Burke says. The kind of ready access to experts provided by the social communities is paying off now that sales can use a mobile device such as a tablet to get answers to customer questions. In the old days, they’d have to go back to the office, figure out who to ask, and then wait for an answer, she says. “Now they can often find out who the subject matter expert is, pose the question, and get the answer before they even leave the [client’s] office. That’s impressive to the client.”

Unisys is also pushing for truly global social collaboration, investing in making translation technology available to allow its professionals around the world to express themselves in their own language and consume content in their own language. Spanish and Portuguese are the priorities.

“It’s really an all-in proposition — you can’t be just a little social,” Burke says. It makes no sense to be “exchanging content silos for social silos,” she says. Each nation’s organization will still have its own view of the collaboration system, along with nation-specific news feeds, but the content needs to be managed through a common system, or “you lose that transparency social was supposed to bring to the enterprise,” Burke explains.

Ford: Driving Social Business Standards

Ford Motor Co. is a social business success story on many levels, but its social collaboration strategy is still a work in progress.

The potential for an end-to-strategy for social business and social technology is enticing but “really, really hard” to execute in a large enterprise says Scott Monty, global director of social media at Ford. “I don’t think anybody’s really figured it out completely yet.”

Monty is best known for his role in formulating the company’s social media marketing programs and as the editor of the Social Media Marketing Blog. Ford was an early user of Google+ (where Ford had a company page before other companies were allowed to establish one) and Google+ Hangouts.

Monty is also user #1 on Ford’s Yammer enterprise social network, which has grown to have about 17,000 registered users (about 10 percent are active participants). Ford is using Yammer to prove the business value of internal social networking but has not necessarily made a long-term commitment to it as the technology of choice.

Regardless of what technology is selected, social collaboration absolutely makes sense for Ford because it meshes so well with the One Ford strategy that CEO Alan Mulally established when he became Ford’s CEO in 2006.

“What it was designed to do was break down all the silos around the company around the world,” Monty says, noting that at the time, some car designs would be introduced in Europe and never make it to the United States, while other functional divisions impeded collaboration for people who ought to be working together. Mulally wasn’t thinking in terms of social technologies when he first articulated this vision, but they present “just an amazing opportunity to start bridging these gaps,” Monty says.

Since joining Ford in 2008, Monty has been seeking opportunities to use social media to distinguish Ford from the competition. One milestone: When Ford introduced a redesigned edition of the Ford Explorer in 2010, it skipped the usual auto show and auto journalist briefings route in favor of simultaneous announcements in eight cities — and on Facebook. The Facebook campaign, created using tools from Buddy Media (now part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud) prominently featured videos about the vehicle from the product managers and engineers, as well as CEO Mulally and celebrity spokesman Mike Rowe. The Explorer “reveal” campaign attracted 99 million social media impressions and became the #1 trending topic on Twitter and the #2 search for the day on Google.

“We took that as indicator we could be successful in social at the scale we were used to in traditional media,” Monty says.

Meanwhile, one of the benefits of bringing social networking inside the company was it shortcut traditional processes. When Monty was planning what became the Summer of Taurus campaign in 2009 (to unveil the 2010 model of that car), he wrote a rough outline of what he wanted and posted it to Yammer, asking whether it could be accomplished by IT or needed to be contracted out.

“He basically says, I need something to bring this technology together and that technology together, and I don’t know where to start,” recalled IT architect Ed Krebs, part of an advanced technologies group that oversees the Yammer implementation. Within a week, one of the participants to that discussion — from an IT group that typically didn’t work with marketing — was able to show Monty a prototype he had built in his spare time, which evolved into a mashup with Bing Maps. The social conversation cut short what could have been a months-long process of gathering requirements for a traditional IT project, while also avoiding the expense of hiring outside developers, Krebs says.

Ford employees have lots of other collaboration tools available, Krebs says. (One co-worker told him, “If you give me one more productivity tool, I won’t be able to do my job.”) But social networking within the company is something different. “It’s much more cross-organizational as a way of identifying issues and allows people who otherwise might not have been engaged to bring in new solutions,” he says.

Although the Yammer network has racked up success stories, Krebs says it remains in a test phase where it is available to employees, but the company is not encouraging them to get accounts.

One hesitation in making it the official, IT-blessed social collaboration platform is Yammer’s lack of support for standards like OpenSocial, a method of application embedding that’s so far been embraced most enthusiastically by Jive Software and IBM, as well as a few smaller software firms like SugarCRM. Krebs team has been running some experiments on Shindig, an open source implementation of the OpenSocial specifications. He is also active in a committee of business technology users affiliated with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) pushing for social business technology standards.

Krebs thinks the real success of OpenSocial will come when it is pervasive — for example, with engineers able to carry on social conversations from within the context of a computer-aided design (CAD) tool.

Although it doesn’t support OpenSocial, Yammer is promoting an alternate Enterprise Graph approach to social application integration, based on extensions to Facebook’s Open Graph. Krebs says he considers that a more proprietary approach, and in any case, decided it was more appropriate to do some initial experiments on Shindig than to “get wrapped up in Yammer’s weekly releases.”

Because he works in an advanced technology branch of the IT organization, “I always have three or four things running back in the lab,” Krebs says. In the end, Yammer “might or might not be a winner, but what we didn’t want to do was have 50 people on Yammer, 50 people on Socialcast, maybe 50 people on some other tool. We thought it was more important to get critical mass than it was to do tools selection” at this stage of the game, he says.

So is Ford a leader or a laggard? Maybe a little of both, Krebs says. “We’ve got a lot of elements that are well thought out, where I think we’re ahead of where a lot of other companies are. But just like any other large company, we’ve got a bigger risk footprint. We may move slower than much smaller companies, or companies in different industries, but that’s OK.”