Case Study: One Year of Social Intranet

A major part of our Social Media perception is the direct result of our experiences with our own Social Intranet. It is based on Atlassian’s enterprise wiki Confluence and internally known as the “Teamweb”.  The Teamweb is now a little more than one year old and with some delay to the celebrations I want to describe our experiences and insights from this year.

T-Systems Multimedia Solutions has more than 700 employees at 8 locations in Germany. Our old intranet is a CMS system on the basis of Vignette with a SharePoint Platform (MOSS 2007) for project collaboration within the company as well as customer integrated collaboration. As said before our new social Intranet is based on Confluence, which we have upgraded to version 3.1 recently. The old intranet is still up and running parallel to the new system but will be shut down in near future.

An average month in numbers:

• 381 comments
• 1.413 pages
• 6.951 edited pages
• 87.155 page views

This year we have received the award “excellent knowledge organization” from the German ministry of economics and technology for our social intranet and especially for our use case of the intranet based companywide strategy development process. The award is a nice acknowledgement but at the end of the day the question that matters is:

What were the benefits?

You find. The old intranet was always sufficient to find a template or the number of the service desk. But the question what does currently happen around a particular topic? Unimaginable! Today, searching for the Open Source Software “Magneto” directly provides an overview about who is working on it, which documents or presentations are available and which related events are taking place. Thus search does not only find static information but business relevant knowledge. Important content is not hidden on fileservers or individual email inboxes but much better- and centrally accessible. The benefit of the new search quality is hard to quantify but it certainly feels like a great leap forward. For me it is the most important result of the social intranet. Interestingly this opinion is shared by the respondents of the third McKinsey Web 2.0 study who rated “increasing speed of access to knowledge” as the most prominent advantage from the company internal use of social software.

Networking and Collaboration. The simple technology and the extremely facilitated administrative processes to open a group-workspace have significantly lowered the efforts needed to initiate communities of interest. As of today we have 36 active communities of interest which play a major role in internal networking and knowledge distribution as well as innovation. Our experience was that these groups somehow existed before but the lack of a central workspace for the coordination of collaboration efforts or just informal exchange hindered those expert groups to unleash their full potential. No wonder it didn’t take any persuasion efforts to get expert groups into the social intranet. These employees always wanted to collaborate and were already searching for the right infrastructure. Such extremely motivated users are key participants to bring life and content into the system and especially useful in the early phase of a social intranet deployment.

New public. Classical instruments for creating public within companies like boards, meetings or newsletters are strictly regimented and access towards them is limited. The social intranet has created a new, very egalitarian public, which does not ask for titles or status but primarily focuses on good arguments and quality of contributions. This makes committed employees more visible and motivates them to contribute even more. Young employees feel taken seriously, included and are able to influence things much stronger than before. But also a company wins: Discussions and topics which have been chewed through over and over again in the same boards and meetings are opened up for interested employees and are enriched with new thoughts and ideas. In this way innovation is put on a broader basis and lives within the whole organization rather than just in a few departments.

Training for new tasks. Social Media will not completely dissolve the borders of companies but make them more permeable. The more employees have the ability to act confidently and authentic within the virtual social rooms of companies, partners and customers, the better. There is a threshold for anyone to write the first comment or blog post out in the open web (representing the company) because theoretically everybody could read it but testing the waters internally will take this insecurity away. The social intranet in that respect serves as a protected training field on which employees can test and develop their social media skills. In general, the willingness, motivation and most importantly the competence to communicate with stakeholders and the general public (blogs, comments, barcamps, paper,…) has been strongly enhanced with the implementation of the Social Intranet.

What did we do right?

These results are not coming out of nowhere – we have had long discussions about many decisions and details and actively accompanied (monitored) the implementation- and growth process. The following aspects are a selection of points we consider success critical looking back on the first year of our social intranet.

Maximum of openness. T-Systems Multimedia Solutions is made up of individual profit centers, which primarily focus on their own success. Consequently the willingness for companywide collaboration varies from one business unit to the other. Under this precondition, openness on a voluntary basis was not an option. Hence we demanded (and got) a clear statement of the top management to assure that all content, which did not have to be protected (e.g. for legal reasons), would be freely accessible for all employees. Thus anybody who wants to open a closed workspace has to justify the request. This is completely accepted today and is not questioned at all. Today, about 90% of all workspaces are open and accessible by all employees.

A social intranet, which has a high percentage of closed workspaces, can be very helpful for team or interest group collaboration; the central benefit for us however, “finding and networking”, will not appear in such an environment. Usually a simple shift in perspective is sufficient already:  Changing the question “which information can we make accessible?” to “which information has to be secured?” will lead to great openness and visibility and still guarantees the protection of sensitive information.

Management support. Management support is always requested. The question however is, whether and how it is provided. The most important role of the management with the introduction of the social intranet was, beside financial support, especially the decision with the issue of openness. A very good possibility to include the management is to target the assistance or staff of the executive board. In this group a lot of information is assembled and a lot of indirect steering of the executives takes place. If the executive staffs are social intranet enthusiasts, like in our case, they will make sure that executive support is not just a lip service but that tools are used in the day to day work of the top management.

Another stroke of luck was the decision to develop the new corporate strategy exclusively in the Teamweb. In the early phase of the social intranet implementation it meant that more than 60 leading managers had (the chance) to work with it in order to actively take part in the strategy building process. As a use case for social software implementation and change management process for all management levels it proved to be absolutely recommendable.

Use cases, which solve problems. Right from the start we defined a number of use cases which should be addressed with the social intranet. The corporate strategy development process has been mentioned already. Another, rather simple but important use case, are spaces for all business and service units. Having an individual space, each unit was enabled to insert own content and keep it up to date. Thus, much relevant information was quickly inserted into the system. At first sight, this use case is all but spectacular but it has a great advantage: It does not overburden anybody and takes along everybody by adhering to the organizational structure people are already familiar with from the old intranet. Only the content is much more up to date because it is created on a much wider basis of people (potentially everybody). A lot of other use cases have been added over time; many centrally initiated but later overtaken by de-centrally organized structures. A little extract: Innovations management, visualization of all processes including their development, template library, skill enhancement coordination, interest group support, corporate knowledge base, sales team coordination, menu display of surrounding cafeterias, organization of sport groups, starter kit for new employees, surveys, internal project management, companywide weekly progress report.

Structure. Who thinks a Wiki does not have or does not need any structure is wrong. Even Wikipedia, as an encyclopedia, has a strict implicit structure. Equally a social intranet needs a structure which is easy to understand because it helps users to orientate themselves and find their way around even within enormous amounts of content and data. This is why we have invested a lot of into a good and well-arranged navigation (with an extra Confluence plug-in) which always answers the questions “Where am I?” and “What else is there to see?”.

Example of the Enterprise 2.0 interest group. Workspace navigation on the left side, platform navigation at the top of the page with all important sections of the social intranet.

What else do we have to work on?

Not everything is perfect of course. The points, which did not turn out to well and are still ahead of us, I won’t hide because usually they are the most valuable in the learning process.

Critical beta phase. We started the social intranet in a beta phase and we quickly got a lot of active users working on many business critical use cases. While having hardware, support, monitoring and process management still in experimental status our social intranet reached the criticality degree of established enterprise software. This is very risky so the lesson learned is: A professional operation has to be planned carefully and early because social intranets may quickly grow beyond experimenting status of a Wiki under the desk and newly won users should not be frustrated by system downtime or even loss of data.

The late introduction of a dashboard. Social intranets lead to a mass production of contents which may overwhelm a user. The standard Confluence platform has a very weak dashboard, so a starting page where important information is summarized and visible at a glance. Other products, like Jive, offer more in the sense of information variety, aggregation and especially personalization of information. We had planed an external dashboard which will only be introduced in combination with the enterprise wide search at the end of this year. A good dashboard is an important success factor for a social intranet and should be rolled out with the start of the platform if not already included in the chosen software.

Enterprise wide search. A point similar to the dashboard. A good enterprise wide search function which does not only cover the social software platform but also other relevant applications is extremely important for the acceptance of the platform and the perceived control of the user over information resources. The rollout of the search is imminent but should have been earlier.

Learn to forget. The handling of ever-growing amounts of data will be a challenge for the future. Theoretically storage is unlimited and a good search finds everything but still the question here is primarily about structure. Even five years after its rollout, a social intranet needs to have an intuitive structure, which is not blown up from the ballast and thus irrelevant in function. Here companies need to “learn to forget” – or at least archive.

Conclusion

The development of our social intranet was a positive surprise and has convinced us that a solid (user) value proposition is behind all the buzzwords of the 2.0 world, which will strongly impact our ways of communication and collaboration in the future. It will be very interesting to see in how far classical content management intranets will be able to defend their position against advancing enterprise social software platforms. Modern social software suites can, for most intents and purposes, replace a CMS System as an intranet while bringing a full featured collaboration platform along.

 Author: Frank Wolf

Translation: Bernd Appelhans

German Version on besser20.de