IT@Intel Blog

6 Posts tagged with the social_networking tag
Click to view Laurie Buczek's profile
3

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?

3 Comments Permalink Tags: social_media, social_networking, social_computing, social_enterprise, laurie_buczek, enterprise2.0
Click to view Laurie Buczek's profile
8

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.

8 Comments Permalink Tags: social_media, social_networking, social_computing, social_enterprise, enterprise2.0, blogs, wikis, social_productivity, laurie_buczek
Click to view Laurie Buczek's profile
4

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.

4 Comments Permalink Tags: social_media, social_networking, social_communities, enterprise2.0, social_computing, social_productivity, laurie_buczek
Click to view Heath Buckmaster's profile
3

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.

3 Comments 0 References Permalink Tags: social_networking, social_media, communities, profiles
Click to view Heath Buckmaster's profile
0

Over on the IT @ Intel blogs, I talked about whether Corporate Blogs Really Matter some time back. Several of you provided comments and questions, and I wanted to take a moment to answer a couple of them.

Michael commented: "I like reading about what you are thinking about, and how you are making a difference in the lives of Intel staff."

On this topic, I did a two-part post on what we were doing to build a technical community within IT. You can check out these posts at the following links: Building a Community Within IT, and Lets Jam. Those posts are pretty extensive, and talk specifically about how we're making a difference in the lives of IT employees, so I won't repeat that here.
Yvan commented: "I would like to hear some of the management problems you encounter when doing your job."
Here's a specific one that has been a challenge - Many of the employees who post here on the IT @ Intel blog are not directly part of the IT @ Intel program, and therefore don't have social media/networking as part of their job description. That means we have our normal jobs but also participate in this stuff on the side. Making the time for posting and commenting is one thing, but being recognized for it is the bigger challenge. How do you make sure that your manager sees your blog as strategic for Intel and not a waste of time that takes you away from your job?
I've personally been very lucky that part of my job is focused on community development (you can read about that on the links above). On my annual performance review I have an entire section of accomplishments that are directly related to work I've done in support of social media. My manager didn't ask me to put it on my review, I did it because I felt that it was important - but I still had to educate him about it and the value it provides to the company.
Sometimes middle and senior management just don't "get it". Unless they themselves are participating in the community they don't necessarily see the value it brings. To them it's just a diversion from what employees are actually paid to do. But what if the company saw it as a strategic advantage vs. a perk or side effort? What if the entire company, every employee all the way up to the CEO, was actively involved in being a spokesperson for the company?
Paul O., our CEO, is a blogger on our internal systems. It's not a weekly or monthly thing, but he does it, and it's something that employees appreciate and look forward to. Our CIO recently kicked off his first blog as an attempt to change the way he communicates to IT. It's been a huge success already. As soon as we start to see blogging as another form of communication like using the telephone, sending an instant message, or walking down the hall and speaking to a group of people, then it doesn't become a diversion/distraction, it becomes part of your life/job.
Personally, I hate talking on the phone - I'd much rather have someone communicate to me via an email, a blog post, or a face to face conversation.
The way that we communicate as people is changing - blogging is one of those new ways. Making the switch from tapes to CD's was a big change; rotary to touch tone changed the way we dialed; learning how to send a text message instead of calling someone was huge; what's the big deal with blogs and forums??

It takes time to educate management on the value of social media, and it takes time for them to formally recognize it and make the time for it. But if you can get there, and you can start to use social media as a strategic advantage for your company, then you've got it made. It just takes the time to sit down with your boss and say - "Here's how my participation in this activity is adding to Intel's bottom line. And here's how it helps me do my job better." Speak their language, and the change will happen.

Keep the questions coming - let us know what you want to hear about as it relates to IT @ Intel.

0 Comments 0 References Permalink Tags: social_media, social_networking, creating_change, community_building, it@intel, influencing_management, strategic_advantage
Click to view Laurie Buczek's profile
5

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?

5 Comments 0 References Permalink Tags: social_media, social_productivity, productivity, social_networking