Intel Open Port: IT@Intel Blog : Tags : collaboration

I look forward to sharing my thoughts related to the areas of collaboration and office productivity. I currently manage three teams within our engineering world. First, I will start with our office productivity team that is responsible for the client software packages for our Intel users. This team works in very broad spectrum from focused Microsoft Office products to extended office products from a variety of suppliers. Next up is our collaboration team that is focused on social media, async collaboration like meeting workspaces, team sites and much more. Last but not least, is the Learning and User Adoption team. This team is focused on providing content for training and focus on helping with users adopting the tools that could help them within their jobs.

I feel that we (IT shops) are being asked to keep the lights on, infrastructure running smoothly and doing this with the lowest possible budget that we tend to leave out the help that we could provide the end user with improved productivity and collaboration solutions. Within my world, we have been slowly introducing these items with mixed impact and effectiveness. Is it the products? Training? Acceptance from the users? Old dogs, new tricks? Boomers to Generation Y'ers? Too late to the party?

I am wondering what others experiences have been? Please share the good, the bad and helpful not the too ugly...

In the future, I am planning on each area in more detail. I look forward to discussing my experiences and gaining new knowledge from those that would like to share.

0 Comments Permalink Tags: collaboration, productivity

In my blog inside Intel I'm exploring some ideas for social media implementation, and would like to throw them out here to the IT Community for input. Our social media implementation is a bit patchwork at the moment, so I'm looking at ways to help fill it in. In this case, the idea is to open up our current method of corporate employee communication.

Currently, our intranet is a fairly static site. Most news and articles are just fixed web posts, and what I've been exploring is adding an open discussion area on the end of every article published on any intranet site. Then any reader who has something to ask or add on a topic can contribute. It may be a simple link to related material, or it may be detailed thoughts on the topic. There may be no comments for an FYI about a local road closure, or a lengthy exchange about some of our product strategies. If the topic draws out a reader who cares enough to add thoughts, the net result of those inputs creates material that is more valuable than the post alone. At worst it shows what people think of a topic, and at best there could be ideas, information, and discourse that adds a lot more than the original post.

The second piece of this change would be to allow employees to directly submit their own articles and material, similar to something you might see on del.icio.us or Digg. Those sites are very different, but together they enable every single employee to quickly share content they find valuable, and provide a mechanism for the best of that content to rise up for all to see. It's a staggering difference from the tops-down, management sanitized communication we get today. It leverages the incredible knowledge and brainpower already present across Intel, and starts building a valuable repository of information that no centralized, "tops down" organized project could accomplish.

Perhaps it gets to the heart of an ongoing debate about the role of IT - are we an enabler for existing technical demand, or do we have an obligation to stretch the rest of the company in new behavorial directions around technology? I'm a believer in the latter, but it's far from a settled issue.

Do any of you allow that sort of deep participation in all levels of employee communications? Is your company even one that would allow it? As I work this issue internally, I'd really like to hear how others address it.

7 Comments Permalink Tags: collaboration, value, it, social_media