Blog Posts From Open Port IT Community Tagged With laurie_buczek

All I Want For Christmas is my E2.0

webadmin@intel.com — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 14:40:34 GMT

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!

Intel's Enterprise Social Computing Strategy Revealed

webadmin@intel.com — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 19:37:09 GMT

For the last 18 months, Intel has invested a significant effort to develop a full strategy & implementation roadmap for social computing within the enterprise. I am pleased to announce the release of a white paper Developing an Enterprise Social Computing Strategy that I did jointly with Malcolm Harkins, Chief of Information Security. The paper details our approach towards embracing the use of collaborative technologies while addressing the mitigation of legal, HR and governance issues. Here are some key areas you will find detailed in the paper:

The business focus for social computing (also refer to: Why Intel is investing in Social Computing
Collaborative approach IT, HR and Information Security
Intel's integrated architecture
Intel's approach to determine early use cases, business value and vendor/solution evaluations
Results of a security risk assessment
Phased implementation plan
Initial results after 3-1/2 months into deployment & adoption

There are a lot of key takeaways within this paper. The biggest one that I hope you will walk away with is: Enterprise 2.0 is a challenging effort. Yes, there are risks. But Intel hasn't discovered any new risks introduced with 2.0 technologies that doesn't already exist with 1.0. We believe the opportunities outweigh the risks. In fact, we are convinced that inaction carries much greater risks: that the enterprise will not realize the benefits that social computing can deliver, and that employees will increasingly turn to external, unsecured tools for communication. IT has a leadership opportunity to get ahead of and deliver emerging platforms, at a fraction of the cost of "standard" collaborative infrastructure, to enable their business to stay one step ahead of the competition.

I hope you enjoy the paper. I welcome your perspectives and learning about that strategy that is yielding success for you.

Why Intel is investing in Social Computing

webadmin@intel.com — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 16:37:38 GMT

In my post Testing the Business Value of Social Networking in the Enterprise I shared our results of extensive exploration to determine if there is value in adding professional networking for employee use. The exploratory results moved us forward to creating a modular and integrated social framework to consolidate current "islands" of blogs, forums and wikis and add new capabilities such as the people connection that professional networking brings. We are 1.5 weeks away from launching the first phase of bringing robust social tools in-house to augment and improve the way our employees connect and collaborate today. I get asked a lot about "Why" we are doing this and the value we believe we will bring to Intel. I wanted to share with you the reasons.

Employees Want to Put a Face to a Name: We are a large (~85k employee) globally dispersed workforce. Global teams of people work together, but in many cases wouldn't recognize a team member if they passed them on the street.
Too much time is lost to find people & information to do your job: The average Intel employee dumps one day a week trying to find people with the experience & expertise plus the relevant information to do their job. We have calculated some of the $$ impact due to lost productivity & opportunity. Let me just say that it is motivating us to take action.
Getting work done effectively in globally dispersed teams is challenging: There is usually a window of 2 hours a day that team members can communicate real-time with each other. Work in progress collaboration is often done in email, passing back and forth edited presentation decks and crossing discussion wires. Task hand-offs from one team leaving work and another entering are very rough.
New hires want to have a way to integrate into Intel faster: This isn't a generational thing. Think back to your first day at your company. How did you learn about the company? How did you put a name to a face or discover who you needed to connect with? Did you feel isolated and lost? I bet you answered yes to most or all. It's a fact that if you can improve the integration experience you will get faster engagement, happier workers and quicker delivery of solid results.
Restructuring and employee redeployment impacts Organizational Health: The last two years Intel has spent restructuring and reducing our workforce. With the current economic conditions, now all companies are faced with and embarking upon the same venture. This leaves employees feeling disconnected, isolated and disengaged. We are finding value in providing opportunities for Intel to feel small, give employees a voice and build a sense of community.
We reinvent the wheel over and over again: Need I say more? Stovepipes and silos breed redundancy.
We learn more via on the job training, then we do in a classroom: Providing employees opportunities to share their knowledge and their expertise allows other employees to organically discover information to help them do their jobs. Your organization becomes a learning organization with "wisdom of crowds" at its core.
We need to deliver radical innovation in a mature company: It is challenging for mature companies, like Intel, to find a parallel innovation vein to the current incremental innovation. However, it is essential in order to power future growth. In Judy Estrin's book "Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy", she states the five core values of innovation are questioning, risk taking, openness, patience and trust. Intel has these values at our core but organizational stovepipes get in the way of ideas. Social tools can unleash those ideas.
When the mature workforce starts to retire, they carry knowledge out the door: Have you thought about the bottom line impact that the large amount of retiring baby boomers will have on your company? Or better yet, our economic future? Tacit knowledge is imperative to transfer knowledge. To date, there aren't any solid tools to effectively extract the tacit knowledge. Social tools show real promise. See Knowledge Boots Are Made for Walking.

I'll keep you posted as we robustly launch and capture the success stories. We believe these tools have the potential to be transformational. This isn't our mother or father's information workplace any longer.

Knowledge Boots Are Made for Walking

webadmin@intel.com — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 16:20:20 GMT

Over the last several months I have engaged with conversations both internally within Intel and externally around the work I am doing with enterprise social computing. Inevitably someone always states, “Knowledge management has been attempted and failed over the last several years. Why is it going to be different this time?”

Warning- the following might be considered heresy by KM loyalists :):

From my perspective I believe social computing will ultimately achieve what traditional KM has been attempting to do for years. Call it a paradigm shift, but unlike traditional KM, social computing is not about managing knowledge. Rather, social computing is about enabling more effective people interactions. Therein lies the yellow brick road to bringing knowledge to the forefront. How could I possibly make this claim? Because tacit knowledge is a key portion of the knowledge this is relevant and necessary. Traditional knowledge management tactics have struggled to effectively capture and harness tacit knowledge. Within Intel, we have substantial efforts to document processes- especially within our engineering and manufacturing organizations. Many white papers have been written. But at the end of the day, all that captured and managed knowledge isn’t enough to effectively transfer a process completely or in Intel terms “copy exact.” It takes the documentation, white papers plus a team of people to do the knowledge transfer. Ultimately tacit knowledge is at the heart of the matter. It is the golden key. With social computing, we are finally able to see more light at the end of the tunnel.

So what does this mean for us, for you? There are a number of environmental pressures that are descending on Intel and peer companies. The first – Knowledgification- essential for economic growth in the 21st century: I recently had an opportunity to hear Gene Meieran, an Intel Fellow and employee for 34 years, speak at our Intel IT Technical Leadership conference. Gene stated that during the 20th century, the #1 innovation was electrification- the delivery of cheap power to homes and factories. Gene makes the case that the capturing and sharing of knowledge between people, organizations and communities, will be the force that drives the economy in the 21st century. Knowledge is the glue the holds our virtual universe together. The global sharing of information will change the world for the better - if we do it wisely. Knowledgification also powers radical innovation. Radical innovation is rarely seen in mature companies. It is risky, has high failure rates and is birthed by individuals. Gene argued that it is the institution’s job to enable the culture of innovation. The role and responsibility of IT is to create an environment that supports collaboration and sharing of information across time zones, across geographies, across organization hierarchies. IT must develop technology that allows people to work better and more effectively (asynchronously and synchronously) than we currently are today.

The second environmental pressure is one of the biggies. Starting in 2012, the U.S. is going to experience a large portion of our workforce aging out of the system. Yes, baby boomers will be retiring. That means that tacit knowledge gets up and walks out the door. As a 40 year old company, this should be enough to have Intel shaking in its boots. If effectively implemented early, I believe social computing provides the ability to extract and capture knowledge tidbits or knowledge streams- a fundamental portion missing from KM today. Instead of exerting even more efforts to formally document, house, realize knowledge - social computing captures the knowledge that is shared informally via conversations and people interactions. Social computing naturally fits over ways that people connect and share knowledge, tacit in particular. Metcalf’s law of exponentially increasing the value of your knowledge network, by increasing its volume – can be achieved.

You may be thinking I had a big breakfast of motherhood and apple pie this morning. But I challenge us to think differently. I challenge us to look in the mirror and determine if we have achieved the highest levels of being a learning organization. Do we feel we are effectively capturing tacit knowledge today? What is the business impact of having large amounts of knowledge walk out the door? How much does the knowledge transfer process cost today? Could there be a better way? I believe there is a better way and it’s wearing social computing boots. Knowledge boots that keep the knowledge from walking out the door and boots that kick radical innovation into high gear. Are you ready to try on a new pair of boots?

Keep Your Scary Software Out of the Workplace!

webadmin@intel.com — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 04:24:54 GMT

Today is the first day of participating in an IT Consortium around collaboration. The hot topic seems to be around Enterprise 2.0. Not surprising. I am speaking tomorrow around how Intel is using social computing tools to transform collaboration. I will admit that I entered this discussion with a misperception about other company's state of maturity in "going social." An open conversation began with discussions about whether companies block access behind the firewall to any social media sites. An unbelieveable 75% said "yes" to sites like Facebook and YouTube but a bit more were receptive to LinkedIn. I asked "why"? Answer: Business groups don't want their employees to "goof off" doing non-business activity during work time. Also expressed were security and information control concerns. I followed-up with a question asking of those companies that block social sites, how many have external corporate blog sites. Zero. I think corporations are trying to control something that no longer can be controlled.

I flashed back to a great post on Go Big Always. The article captured historical reactions to disruptive software and technologies to corporations. If you answered "yes" to blocking social sites and not finding business value in social software, then this is a MUST read! It shows that sometimes reactions to change are more out of fear, than logic. We are taking it as food for thought as Intel attempts to take our investment and usage of social software to the next level. Below are the article's key takeaways (re-published):

Email has no place at work (1994)

It’s clearly used for goofing off. The last thing I want are my employees wasting my money emailing each other. What’s the use case for email at work? What’s the ROI? Who else is doing it? See industry article

Internet access has no place at work (1996)

Giving employees access to the internet would be a massive productivity problem. Not to mention there are huge security concerns. What’s the reason employees should be allowed to cybersurf? See industry article

eCommerce is too high a risk for our company (1998)

Our company can’t afford the risk associated with opening ourselves up to new, unproven channels or even hacking. There are a lot of thieves online. Why would someone buy our products on the World Wide Web? See industry article

Instant Messaging has no place at work (2002)

It’s a massive distraction. Interruptions cost billions each year. Employees shouldn’t be allowed to spend time chatting all day work. Instant messaging has massive productivity loss implications. See industry article

Social Software has no place at work (2005)

It’s clearly used for goofing off. The last thing I want are my employees wasting my money blogging or networking with each other. What’s the use case for social software at work? See industry article

If IT is truly a strategic business partner, then let's start advising our businesses that not only can we not stop scary software, but that the software may not be that scary after all.

Testing the Business Value of Social Networking in the Enterprise

webadmin@intel.com — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:56:50 GMT

We have officially completed our exploration process to determine the value of social networking within our enterprise. This is included conversations with industry analysts; IT peers; a proof-of-concept (POC); usage model work; focus groups and human factors engineering. The first lesson we learned is to not call it "social" networking. It was wrought with images of kids throwing virtual pies at each other. Our new terminology for the capability within the enterprise is now Professional Networking.

We took a look at professional networking’ s ability to solve some key challenges for Intel and tested a short list of vendor platforms to determine which one, if any, could meet our requirements. Below are some key findings and conclusions.

Employees see a significant ability to tackle increasing feelings of isolation and difficulty finding knowledge.

In particular, POC participants noted the ability to put a face to a name; extend and create their network; and locate experts as valuable features. As one participant stated, “Providing people better ways to connect, and find that knowledge from experts, would really help with silo’d information and make Intel feel more productive.”

There is substantial value in improving the attraction & retention of the next generation workforce.

Professional networking is expected by the next generation workforce. See What Gen Y Teaches Us About Enterprise Social Networking for learnings from focus group conversations with recent college graduates. Intel has opportunities to deliver expected new ways to learn, interact and access information immediately. This is not a trend, it is reality.

What Strategies are Critical for Success?

In addition to exploring the business value of professional networking, we learned a lot about what strategies are critical for success and what key road blocks need to be removed. What are the most critical strategies surrounding the deployment of professional networking?

Professional networking must bolt into an integrated social collaboration framework.

The strength of professional networking doesn’t just lie with the people information in the tool, but with the added context that other tools bring. For example, my profile lets people know that I am the Enterprise Social Media Program Manager but doesn’t present any documents, blogs, wikis or discussions forums to discover my “knowledge” around social media. A robust social stack provides the full rich picture.

Integration across social tools and traditional collaborative tools such as email, meeting workspaces and instant messaging is critical.

We heard loud and clear that the professional networking application should not be a disparate application. At a minimum, it must be integrated across social tools such as blogs, forums and wikis. Additionally, it needs to be engrained in work flow processes. This means that it is integrated into internal white pages; enterprise search results; email v-card, presence, to name a few.

Employees want only one profile to maintain; it must be unified.

If time is dedicated to update and enrich a profile, employees want only one. In addition, employees want to be able to leverage the profiles to search and find experts. In a survey done by our Enterprise Search program team, finding people was the third most important search employees want to do.

Deploying professional networking successfully is not as easy at it sounds. See The Best Social Tools Don’t Make a Social Enterprise, which highlights some of the key challenges. In a nut shell, if IT doesn't act, business units will. Also, if a strong investment in enterprise social computing has lacked, then the success of professional networking will be at risk without a solid core social stack. The core stack brings to the forefront the information and knowledge associated with the people.

Our goal is to have professional networking deployed by the end of the year. However, we still have a bit of work to be done.

I would love to hear how your company is approaching professional networking. Are you finding the same business value, challenges and strategies necessary for success?

The Best Social Tools Don’t Make a Social Enterprise

webadmin@intel.com — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 11:47:13 GMT

As the person responsible for driving social media within our enterprise, I have come to realize that the best darn enterprise social tools don’t magically turn your company into a social enterprise. There is a core foundation that must be present or else you cannot reach social enterprise utopia. There are realizations that must occur or else you will not succeed. There are (sometimes) painful things you must do.

• Silos must come down like the Berlin Wall:

I bang into silos on a daily basis. Corporations love silos. I remember clearly one of my university professors stating that a threat to innovation is that people hoard knowledge. Knowledge is power. In order to become a social enterprise, sometimes a significant cultural shift has to occur. Power must shift from teams, groups, organizations, individuals to the masses. Knowledge needs to make the enterprise powerful versus silos within the enterprise. For example, I recently happened into 3 proposed silos in our marketing organization. One team wants to build a knowledge sharing and collaboration system to vet through innovative ideas.. Another team is budgeting to put in social networking software for all sales and marketing personnel, mainly for the field to “find experts”. And lastly, the marketing organization as a whole will have an exclusive best known method (BKM) sharing and networking solution that just marketing will use. If you are making the assumption that all the innovative ideas and expertise you will need is housed within one organization- then you are sorely mistaken. Applying a social tool over a silo doesn’t suddenly make you more innovative. Smashing down and not allowing any new silos serves innovation up to the company Social media routes around those silos and traditional boundaries. It connects people based on interest, not position in the hierarchy. True social enterprises apply social tools that allow wisdom of crowds and six degrees to prevail.

• Consumerism affects what you do inside your four walls:

How people use technology to interact, collaborate and communicate outside of works DOES affect what they want to do inside work. There is a very clear bar that have been set by expectations because of the consumerism of social tools. For example, if your social networking tool isn’t as intuitive to use as external sites, employees won’t use it. This doesn’t mean employees want a “wall” to write on or widgets that allow you to throw pies at each other. They just want a similar ease of use and utilitarian enjoyment that we receive externally but appropriate for business. Read What Gen Y Teaches Us About Enterprise Social Networking for ah-ha’s out of a focus group with recent college graduates.

• Understand that people will go down with the email ship:

We are not delusional and think that any of these social tools will replace email for people. We all know that email was never meant to be a collaborative tool, but somehow it is reality. Social tools need to be engrained into current business processes. For example, email alerts should occur when I am asked to join a community or someone comments on my blog post. My profile that I have in my social networking tool should be the unified profile that everyone sees in the company directory, email, instant messaging, blogs and wikis (to name a few). The Wiki should be incorporated into team workspaces and easily accessible. Implementing social tools in a disparate way or thinking that you can replace current knowledge management tools – will be a barrier to adoption.

• If it takes a manual to use it – throw it out the door:

When was the last time you read a manual? Seriously. Does any software or computer even ship with one anymore? Can you even find an online manual with Digg, LinkedIn, Twitter or the like? If you answered no to these questions, then you will need to say “no” to manual required for pulling social capabilities inside the enterprise. It all comes down to usability. Ease of use has to be your #1 criteria. We are recommitting to user driven design. We have painfully realized that the complexity of our enterprise architecture has the capability to turn our social software into mush. Our users are guiding us to rise above the complexity and to focus on simplicity without sacrificing feature richness.

• If IT doesn’t act now, then someone else will:

Social media tools can quickly “go wild”. Listening to your business customers and becoming keenly aware of what people are doing within external applications or what is housed on a server under someone’s desk, is critical to tame the wild beast within social tools. Just like instant messaging (IM) got into your enterprise, so will social tools. We have some taming to do…particularly with wikis. We are at the critical inflection point of deciding to pull in enterprise grade social networking. If we in IT don’t act swiftly, I guarantee you someone else will. It is a reality IT cannot run from.

So far my key learning comes down to the above. I fight these challenges daily. It all boils down to the fact that at the end of the day, social media isn’t about the tools….it’s about people.

What Gen Y Teaches Us About Enterprise Social Networking

webadmin@intel.com — Fri, 23 May 2008 03:46:26 GMT

Are you considering social networking in your enterprise? Surprise! We are too. We started off the process with certain perceptions about what the application should do and shouldn't do. If you think that your employees (especially the younger ones) want social networking within the enterprise just to have "fun" - think again. If you think it is purely for improving collaboration and productivity - ponder more. How do we know? We did a focus group with employees who are recent college graduates. Here is what we learned.

Pulling in an existing external social networking application into the Intel environment is viewed very negatively. Even a "like" experience wasn’t well received. Gen Y'ers use social networking to connect with friends and to share outside-of-work experiences. They don’t want their personal life to become exposed in a work environment.
Fun in the work environment is more directly tied to “physical” spaces/experiences and not a social networking application. There was even an allergic reaction to the term “social” as applied to the networking application. Social = their life outside Intel. They said within a business environment it needs to be a professional network.
They expect to put a name to a face before they reach out to that person.
They want tools that will help them to find relevant & trusted information/people faster. An analogy they used to describe the tool is your school yearbook entry + phone book+ management hierarchy.
The application needs to be integrated with current destinations & other communication tools. Presence and a unified profile are very important to them. They want the ability to view another employee's profile in our internal Phonebook or email and within that application begin an instant message session with them. They explicitly stated that if we create another disparate application, they will not use it.
They want the power to personalize. They don’t want to be fed the information that an administrator thinks they want- they want to decide what it is they will receive. They prefer the "iGoogle" like personalization.
The application must be easy to use & not require a lot of time. Recently, a lot of them are getting turned off by some social networking applications because they are too busy- too much noise.

Gen X and Baby Boomers – do you agree with the younger generation? Other IT shops, what are you seeing in your environments? I would like to hear from you. In my next post, I will share with you what some others in our work force said when I posted these results in our blog.

At IDF? - Here are the community managers

webadmin@intel.com — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 00:12:00 GMT

We're out at IDF - if you find us we'll get you a free shirt on OPEN PORT.