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My Enterprise 2.0 rollout: 4 keys to success
Early this year, executives at Philips, a global healthcare, lighting and consumer lifestyle business, initiated talks on selecting and deploying an enterprise 2.0 suite for its 100,000 employees worldwide. The need for the solution, says CIO Maarten de Vries, was multifaceted. "We had a very dispersed landscape in IT and wanted to create an environment where people could connect better, find each other better and share information better," he says. These needs aligned with two of the business's key performance indicators: driving enterprise collaboration and productivity. "We work a lot in virtual teams, so we needed to connect better. There is a lot of knowledge in the company, but we needed a better way of unlocking it."
After exploring several solutions, de Vries and his team selected Socialcast as its provider for the enterprise collaboration component, primarily for its ease of integration with SharePoint 2010. The suite, which they internally named "Connect Suite," integrated e-mail, SharePoint solutions, chatting, VoIP, Web meeting solutions, Web casting, telepresence and Socialcast's microblogging tool. IT launched a month-long pilot program of Connect Suite with 1,000 users, which de Vries says was hugely successful.
In early May, shortly after the pilot concluded, his staff rolled out Connect Suite to the rest of the company. In only eight weeks, the user base grew to 11,000-far exceeding de Vries' expectations. "Originally, our hope was to have 10,000 users by the end of this year," he says. "We've really been taken by surprise; we've been really successful," he says.
De Vries attributes Philips' success to four guiding factors, which he recommends to others considering a deployment of an enterprise 2.0 suite.
1. Begin with a clear strategy. Don't explore an enterprise collaboration solution blindly; have a clear understanding of which issues it will solve and how the company will benefit. Philips wanted to dissuade employees from flocking to external sites-as well as encourage collaboration and communication-so including Socialcast's microblogging component in its suite made sense.
2. Partner with the business. "You have to realize that these are not IT initiatives, these are IT and business initiatives," de Vries says. The deployment was as successful as it was, de Vries says, in part because it aligned directly with the organization's key performance indicators, making the intended ROI transparent from the beginning.
3. Lead by example and learn from others. Members of the Philips executive team were cheerleaders for the collaboration suite, using it frequently. Having top-down support-and engagement-helped its adoption really take off, de Vries says. "When you see active involvement in the leadership, we saw it take off virally," he says. "Not only is it top down, it's also bottom up because you see the young generation of employees take up these kinds of tools very quickly. They're not at all shy to use it."
4. Loosen the reins. Philips hasn't yet instituted a formal policy for how employees should or shouldn't interact with the collaboration suite. De Vries says that as his company does with e-mail, they trust that employees can make proper judgments about what to and not to discuss, and whether something may be inappropriate or sensitive.