Reading from news (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10368956-36.html) today, a survey has shown that 54% workplaces block social networks completely. I'm glad to be in a company which is the 10% which allow social-network use at work so I can stay connected with my external partners and industry peers. It seems the debate on whether social media is a effective business tool or a productivity drain is still going on.

In Intel, we are embracing social media as a mean to transform collaboration in Intel. We see the opportunity out weights the potential risk. We are deploying a social media platform for our employees. You can find out more about our social media strategy from our recent white paper (Developing an Enterprise Social Computing Strategy) and the blogs from Laurie Buczek (Why Intel is investing in Social Computingand Intel's Enterprise Social Computing Strategy Revealed).

Personally, I think social media is going to repeat the history of email and instant messaging (IM) at work. Few years ago, there were skeptics about IM at work. Our CIO at that time, John Johnson, took the risk and deployed IM in Intel. Today, it's a productivity tool that I cannot live without. This morning I was troubleshooting a problem with a colleague waiting to broad a plane 16 hours away thru IM. I frequently talk to my colleagues around the world. They could be anywhere in office, at home, or on the road, when I need to connect with them. Whenever they pop up online, I can get hold of them. Without IM, life will be much more difficult and less productive.

I have been participating in a IT pilot program testing out Windows 7 in our environment. We have a Windows 7 group setup in our social media platform where we share BKM and help each other. I got workarounds from the forum for issues I ran into with the beta version of the operating system. I also contribute my findings and solutions back to the group. Together we are creating a rich knowledge base for the Windows 7 program team. The pilot users around the world were helping each other and saving each one of us a lot of time learning about the new OS, troubleshooting and finding workarounds. This is an excellent success story for social media at work. (Find out our Windows 7 experience here: The Value of PC Refresh with Microsoft Windows 7*)

What is your view of social media at work? Is your company putting up a strategy to adopt the technology?

In my post Testing Business Value in Social Networking 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 These 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.

*** This post was originally published in 2007 on the old IT @ Intel blog - I am reposting it for the benefit of this new community site , with some updates to bring it up to date. ***

Back at the beginning of 2007, the managers of my organization had a dilemma and they  needed someone to help solve it. Now, I’ve got 13-16 direct reports which is already a full  time job, but their need was something I found pretty interesting, and since I have a  passion for social media it seemed right up my alley.

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Here was their problem - how could they help a group of developers in another country learn  everything that our US resources knew about an enterprise software we’ve been using for  over a decade? Keep in mind, these US resources had stayed mostly static for the last 10+  years…the people who implemented it are the same people who engineer it today. They have  significant “tribal knowledge”, and are intimately familiar with how we have configured and  modified the software through the years to adapt to changing business needs.

But the new teams in other countries did not. Not only were many of them new to the  technology, but they had no idea what we’d done over the last ten years, or why we’d done  it in the first place. So I was chartered to go off and “build a community“…and that’s  what I did.

Here’s where we are today, then I’ll tell you how we got there (keeping in mind that we  still have more work to do)…

Today

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?

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.

I've got profiles everywhere these days, and not just on the internet, but on the intranet as well. I'm sure we've all got a variety of external faces, whether on Yahoo, MSN Spaces, Facebook, myspace.com, LinkedIn*, or the myriad of other social networking sites out there.

But what about on the corporate intranet? It can get just as complicated there, especially if you are trying to find someone who knows something about something that no one in your organization knows anything about!

We're starting to see social networking tools for the enterprise show up in evaluations, and I really do hope we implement something within the company - there's incredible value in knowing that I could search for organization development and find a person who is in another division that did an OD project last year that's exactly what I'm trying to do now. But we're not quite there.

Right now I've got a pseudo-profile on my internal blog, another on our internal wiki, another on our document collaboration environment, another that's part of my email signature line, and I'm sure there's yet another floating around somewhere. If someone wanted to know what I've been up to for the last 12 years at Intel, they would have to look around in three or four different places to get the full story, or just ask me for a copy of my resume.

Part of that is my fault - I just need to pick one place to keep updated and point everything else to it, but the problem there is that now I'm sending people to sites that might not be their PREFERRED location for social networking. As an external example, let's say you've got a personal blog on wordpress.org, but you've also got a myspace account and another on MSN Spaces. All three have blog functionality, which do you pick? Do you post to all three at the same time, or do you point people to one or the other? What if one of your friends prefers MSN Spaces, but you keep sending them to wordpress.org to read your blog?

It's profile overload! Not only do you have profile/personal info in 10 different places, but you're trying to communicate redundantly based on other people's preferences. Stop the madness!

I'm now to the point where I'm shutting down my profiles on sites that are just secondary or tertiary, and if people want to know who I am and what I'm wearing, they will go to the one site that has it all, because realistically, whichever site you choose will have another competitor in 6 months that everyone will flock to and add 500 friends they've never actually met before. In my mind, I'm seeing a group huddled together moving in unison from one corner of the room to the next as the latest social media site pops up.

Will it settle any time soon? I doubt it. There are many competitors that are getting into niche areas and offering more for your money (which in most cases is free). It's a challenge outside and a challenge inside. At least within the company you can create a "mandate" that says here is the site to create your profile and it's what the company is going to use.

Maybe some day everyone on the planet will have an ID number and their own website. I want to be 0100100001000101010000010101010001001000.com.

• Websites and locations mentioned in this blog are trademarks and properties of their respective companies.

As social media adoption is beginning to gain ground, "the" requests are starting to trickle in. "I want to start blogging/wiki/forum internally or externally....but I only want a certain group to have access to the blog/wiki/forum." The enterprise and marketing social mediaites have done our due diligence and attempted to find solutions to meet the business needs, but it typically means advising them that social media may not be the right fit. Then, I read today that a company called Mixx (Digg equivalent) is adding private email and group message boards to its offerings. Whoa! Stop the presses. I am challenged by what appears to me to be counter intuitive. Stepping back and looking into the enterprise I ask, "Can social productivity really be social productivity with velvet ropes?"

I have always been of the mindset that in order for community to be built, innovation to be fostered and collaboration to be achieved, that everything needed to be public. If you started to form "silos" of private groups, private messages, private forums, private blogs then your ability to leverage the power of the community would be lost. As Steve Bell in Social Networking - Bookmarks - Social Productivity and Sam Lawrence have referenced in previous posts "Social productivity...is about getting work done outside the team of like-minded people you work with everyday....an idea is introduced and all sorts of people get to chime in...your idea has developed openly by all sorts of people who bring their own valuable perspective." Sam cites Wikipedia as a prime example of nontraditional collaboration at it's finest. Intel started internal blogs & forums in 2004; built Intelpedia, our first internal wiki, back in 2005; and subsequently launched the internal IT Innovation Zone, collaboration & sharing site, in 2006. These are open to the entire company and we have had strong success with these tools. So is IT now getting requests to go smaller, go private because these tools aren't meeting business needs or because we as a company haven't fully embraced the culture shift to social productivity? With the Mixx announcement I am giving deeper thought to what social media looks like within the enterprise; the desired results of social productivity and whether private subcommunities are necessary for optimal collaboration and communication. I still say "no". I beleve that velvet ropes and social productivity are like oil and water. They don't mix. Am I wrong?