This week I attended Beyond Enterprise 2.0 in Amsterdam. The event was put on by KGS Global and attendees came from the US, France, the Netherlands and the UK.
We know how social media has exploded in the US for organizations that are leveraging it for internal as well as external communication, so it was refreshing to see that there are many organizations in Europe that have already implemented enterprise collaboration solutions or are planning to implement them in the coming months.
After speaking with some of the attendees, it seems that in Europe they are looking to focus their “social media” efforts internally before turning to external use.
There were a handful of presentations by big companies sharing their experience with various tools or platforms as well as how they overcame some of the common challenges.
I heard a lot of great things from the presenters, so I thought I would use this post to share some key insights, ideas and best practices around dealing with the challenges of integrating enterprise collaboration.
“The Dos and Don’ts of Enterprise Social Adoption: Stories From The Oil Patch” – Andrew Barendrecht, Collaboration Strategist for Apache Corporation
Apache’s approach: “Drive a “Structured Revolution”
1. Phased development: roll out in phases; don’t try to do everything right away.
2. Build Focused communities: build internal communities within the social network around specific expertise, so that people can find subject matter experts easily.
3. Focus on locations: bring people together based on their physical locations and make the content and social networking experience relevant to them in their specific locations.
4. No clean up as you deploy: allow for some flexibility and the innovation of the communities to find ways to leverage the new tools; keep it simple.
Tip: If there are people that don’t want to use a social network, they can still use email, but it must sync with the common platform, so the information is centralized and people who are engaged with the platform can be successful at it.
“Effectively Rolling Out an Enterprise 2.0 Strategy Globally” – Maria Serra, Head of Business Practice Collaboration and End User Workplace from Sony Ericsson
There are three elements you need to bring together seamlessly for success: collaboration, knowledge management, and networking.
As a global company, addressing different cultures, processes and business models is critical. Not everyone does the same thing everywhere. How will you address these differences? How will you enable people to do things they way they need to while still enabling collaboration and social networking across geographies? The key, according to Maria is balancing “facilitating vs. managing.”
Four things that must happen before you integrate a global collaboration strategy:
1. Business model readiness
2. People readiness
3. Technical readiness
4. Leadership and process readiness
“The Real Value of Social in the Enterprise” – Ram Menon, President of Social Computing
1. Must be Easy to Get Started – like Facebook. Ram said, “If you need training for your enterprise social network – forget it.”
2. Must be Within Context – From your business applications to your collaborative environments, all of the information must be served in context–when and where you want it.
3. Must Integrate all Information Sources:
4. Must Adhere to the Way People Work: globally distributed,cross-functionally, mobile and more.
5. Must make IT Happy – on-premise, in the cloud, security and governance.
Overall it was a very informative event.
