An interesting new whitepaper from Intel’s Social Computing team discusses their approach and experience of planning and delivering the first stage of their enterprise-wide social software initiative.
Intel views enterprise social software as central to addressing some of the most important organisation-wide business challenges facing their business: improving collaboration, sharing information, creating professional networks and fostering innovation.
Enterprise 2.0 planning
As well as covering key business challenges the case study also discusses the team's approach to finding the current collaboration pain points of their colleagues, achieving management support for initiatives, assessing the risks and (most importantly) a review of the functionality.
It’s definitely a worthwhile read if you’re currently planning a business case or researching how enterprise social software can be exploited within your own organisation.
Conclusion: Phase one was a “moderate success”
During the initial stage Intel limited itself to delivering improved versions of existing capabilities such as blogs and forums, and starting to add some professional networking capabilities.
The overall conclusions are interesting. The project team report that the first phase has been a ‘moderate success’, citing improvements in the dissemination of information and innovative ideas as the main benefits (they discuss how one particular blog post generated an overwhelming response from throughout the business).
Delivering a subset of social technologies may provide limited value!
The Intel team have concluded that it's extremely important to implement the full 'social computing stack' to achieve the maximum enterprise-wide value, and have decided to accelerate delivery of the project.
Planning for success
It’s worth bearing the above point in mind when planning your own projects – If you’re beginning your enterprise 2.0 journey by implementing an enterprise wiki (for example), it is important to try and find specific collaboration challenges within your business to solve and set realistic expectations of the results.
That way you'll be able to gain management buy-in to expand the implementation and introduce enterprise 2.0 to a wider audience - and that's when you'll start to see the true business value of enterprise social software: an environment where colleagues can share knowledge and expertise, collaborate effectively, find experts and build wide ranging professional social networks.
You can download the full case study here from the Intel website.
If you're currently researching enterprise social software it's also worthwhile taking the time to review some of the many enterprise 2.0 tools on offer and see how they can be combined to create a social computing environment (the Booze Allen Hamilton video case study that I blogged about recently is a good place to start).
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