Leading a Controlled Revolution

Interesting case study from Schneider Electric about how they introduced a social enterprise program.

Big company, 150,000 employees in 100 countries. Introduced the programme to tap into the knowledge held by the employees, to connect to people. To make sure people are connected to each other, and connected to information.
IT department is a key player in the programme. Part of IT strategy is working smarter.

3 main objectives.
One window to the world of Schneider electric
Know what's happening around us
Bring collaboration to our line of work

Designed an enterprise wide social collaboration platform using Tibbr, and are building a collaborative and personalised employee portal. Integrating a collaboration layer, wikis, blogs etc. Will eventually integrate with business apps to create a desktop.

Deployed in a phased way using focused communities and locations, and influential teams. Trained them, showed them carefully how to get best out of solutions. Then let it spread out of pilot group, ie let it go viral. Eventually opened it up to whole company. Gone from 6000 users to 50,000. 70% of users return every week.

Three phases, connect, contribute, collaborate.
Connect- learn what a network is, understand how to use it, observe conversations.
Contribute - use new media to broadcast content, post new content, engage in 2 way dialogue, launch and participate in conversation, develop working relationships
Collaborate - really use the tools to collaborate across teams to support business objectives of the organisation. It's all about adding value.

Using it for IT support, users posting questions on social platform instead of going to Helpdesk, crowd sourcing solutions.
Also being used to share information on vendors, to get help with engineering problems.
Communities are being formed on the platform, >100. Communities of experts, of practice, of interests. Has caused big culture change. Comms used to be top down, now much more bottom up, and much more interactive. Comms team not happy at first, didn't like concept of comments etc, wanted to keep top down communication. Have changed now :-)

Some challenges
Technology - fix the basics, check the quality of product before release, have clarity on technology landscape, have a roadmap for future, develop apps in house if cant get functionality from vendors.

Collaborators
Leadership involvement is necessary - actual participation, not sponsorship.
Set up communities, communication and training, celebrate successes
Is a space called Cafe Schneider for non work related conversations.


Good presentation. Glad our comms team aren't like theirs :-)


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