All I Want For Christmas is my E2.0

I am fresh off sabbatical and back in the trenches implementing 2.0 technologies within our enterprise. This year has been crazy busy.  It was our big year of deploying the first phases of our multi-phased approach.  So how did we do?  Well….good news is that I don’t think I will get coal in my Christmas stocking, however,  I am only sitting on ½ leg of a three legged stool.  We have done a ton of work, but we still have a long way to go.  As I laid out in Intel's Enterprise Social Computing Strategy Revealed, Intel has been dabbling internally with web 2.0 since 2004.  We made a concerted decision to take the momentum and learning from the grass root efforts, and drive a globally deployed framework for social computing inside Intel.  It is no small task.  Not only do we have to evaluate and deploy solutions, but we also have to address Governance, Security Concerns, provide quantifiable ROI, capture use cases, and tackle transition change management one person and one team at a time.  Here are my reflections on 2009:

Got Community?  We successfully completed phase one and deployed the new community framework that now includes a blog, forum, groups (a.k.a. communities) and limited professional networking.  We also entered into pilot with our new enterprise wiki.  As we close the year, we will be upgrading the community platform to resolve some usability challenges, give the search a huge boost and enrich the current capabilities.  We are also expanding the wiki pilot while we continue to work on a migration strategy to get over 200+ wikis rolled over.  Lastly, we should have a vendor recommendation for a new on demand video solution (think internal You Tube).  I am happy to say that the individual pieces are coming together.

We built it and people are coming:  We have been shocked and awed by the adoption & usage rate of the new technologies.  Since the launch of the first phase in March 2009, we have tripled & maintained traffic; have 12% of the workforce that enhanced their profile and have over 800 groups (communities).  In a survey conducted after 3 months, we found that 84% of the group owners felt that they have been successful in achieving their business objectives of using the new platform.  About 57% of the groups formed were trying to improve communication & collaboration amongst a globally dispersed team – 53% felt they achieved improvement!

Stranded on an island:  A critical underpinning for success is to integrate the various 2.0 capabilities together and also integrate the pieces into our “traditional” office computing solutions.  It is what I call integrated into the workflow or how people get work done.  We completed integration into Enterprise Search, but we haven’t begun the complex task of unifying profiles, tagging, search, activity streams amongst the 2.0 tools, let alone, insertion into the office computing tools.  Without the “in flow” abilities, we will continue to see end user confusion about which “tool” to use and reach an adoption limit.  If we strand the 2.0 technologies on an island, they will be out of sight and out of mind.  It is a top priority to fix in 2010.

Clean up on Aisle 12:  As I mentioned above,  we have a lot of grass root efforts.  One of the worst is wikis gone wild.  We have at least 200+ unique instances of various wikis deployed inside Intel.  Now that we are getting the new global solution up and running, we have a daunting task of migration.  Unfortunately we have found that a “clean” migration doesn’t exist and business customers aren’t willing to resource the move themselves.  It appears that IT might have to pay a “tax” in 2010 and undertake some migration work to consolidate the various niche solutions.

Where’s the ROI?  My entire year has been a quest to find quantifiable ROI. I swear I have nightmares with the "Where's the Beef" lady crackling out a "Where's the ROI?!"  In the fall, we ended a joint effort with finance to look under every stone and quantify what we could.  Finance agreed- it ain’t easy.  Where we did quickly find quantifiable business value during an ideation proof of concept.  Ideas that are discovered and turned into action have produced dollarized return of business value.  Where we are finding it tougher to quantify is determining improvements in team collaboration, communication, individual productivity and the softer side of enterprise 2.0.  We aren’t off the hook, but there is now a better understanding of the challenges of ROI for enterprise 2.0.

Governance:  We spent a lot of time working through governance, legal and security concerns.  A joint steering committee was formed with HR and IT.  We have updated internal policies and tackled risk assessments for various features of 2.0 technologies.  We have a solid foundation of governance for social computing which is critical to ensure we are doing the right things right.

That is my 2009 in a nutshell.  While I am still singing “all I want for Christmas is my E2.0”, I am happy to say that we are beginning to reap the benefits of a TON of hard work.  I have a whole team of highly dedicated people on my program that deserve all the credit for our success to date.  Now on to 2010…..Happy New Year!