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This case study provides an overview of the first 5 years of an evolving journey with Enterprise 2.0 applications within a large telecommunications company.
The company under review is actually a combination of several companies due to mergers and acquisitions. The initial parts of this case study will be a review of 2004-2007. This company has been acquired and combined with three other companies which increased the employee population from 70,000 to 300,000. Thus, providing more opportunity to see what works and what does not in Enterprise 2.0, just at a larger scale.
nto the pool and go from their. Initial response or demand was weak in that people didn’t really understand the need back in 2003. For over a year, the implementation struggled to get traction but when it did; demand sky rocketed. Collaborative spaces, meeting spaces, web conferencing and shared document spaces started movement. As with many implementations, it’s the small value add components that add up with volume. Sharepoint is considered the tool not really a product. Products are what you can do with the tool. Additional products and services were added as the implementation progressed. Services like search, PDF creation, and vanity URL are just a few add on services. The entire customer experience was reviewed from the initial knowledge that the tool existed to the killing of a decaying collaborative site. The goal was to create a single customer experience model that could be scaled as the user base grew from 100 to 60,000.
Today, a new set of tools are being added including blogs, wikis, professional profiles, and many others. While some are inside the Sharepoint offering, many will be provided through development and open source. As we progress, the key will be to bring all of these tools together into a single offering for many-to-many communications. Cost transformation and business speed are the two principle problems being addressed with the portfolio.
The case study picks up after two years of implementation with little adoption by the business and technology communities. In 2004, another group with experience in deploying mass adoption software was brought in and asked to take this application to the scale defined by "mass adoption". The main metric of progression will be the collaborative site count. Teams, group, and individuals can order a collaborative site which allows for group communication. At the time of only 100 collaborative sites had been built. This is similar to the five other implementations seen by the author. After implementing the core business model described below, the site count has increased to around 13,000 with around 3.5 Million page views per month. The number of document objects stored within the collaborative solution is over a million. Social Software is considered a subset of Collaborative Solutions and this group has now picked up the Social Software rollout deployed at the enterprise level.
The enterprise solution is actually a portfolio of solutions built on top of vendor products and open source. Microsoft's Sharepoint and MOSS provide the core collaborative solution set. Confluence Wiki Software was also purchased for the Enterprise Wiki and various Open Source solutions provide the additional enterprise social software (Drupal, Roller, etc.)
Phase 1 (2004-Present)
SharePoint WSS v2 and MOSS 2003
Corasworks
OLM/netMeeting
Phase 2 (2007-Present)
SharePoint WSS v3 and MOSS 2007
Corasworks
OLM/netMeeting
Enterprise Wiki
Enterprise Blogs
Professional Profiles
Book Marking
Communities
Forums
Over 37,000 Collaborative Sites growing at 124%
Over 4 Million Documents Housed and Managed
User Awareness of 98% of Total Population
Average 8 Million Page View per Month
Intranet Replacement
Documented Reduction of Staff (Web Developers)
Servers Retired (Cost Transformation)
Speed of Business and Decision Making
Awareness of the Solution and Service Provided by the Collaborative Organization is normal for most organizations. It's not unusual to have a 60% Awarness Issue which must be addressed with Business Development programs which include marketing, branding, roadshows, announcements, newletters, etc.
Education of Business Use and Value of the Applications are also a problem where people are aware of the social application but not really sure how to use the software in a business setting.
Social, Cultural, and Political Issues are always present and must be addressed over time
Open versus Closed Organization can also create problems since power comes from the controlling of information.
Leadership is essential from the high end as well as topical SME's
Ensure a complete business model (See Diagram) focus. The business model ensures that all aspects are covered by people with the right skills. The business model have resources assigned for business development, client-support, product development, service development, architecture, operations, and leadership.
Marketing and Branding are Essential to long term growth
Survey the User Community every Six Months
Focus on Customer Service and Self Service Models of Delivery
Add products, services, and solutions for the various customer segments
Users want to learn, teach them and make it easy to do business with the tools
Usability and Design are critical and often over looked
Measure and Monitor Everything. Metrics should include both content and usage metrics.
Screenshots
R Todd Stephens, Ph.D.
Online:http://www.rtodd.com
Weblog:http://www.collaborage.com
Todd Stephens is the technical director of the Collaboration and Online Services (COS) Group for the BellSouth Corporation, an Atlanta-based telecommunications organization. Todd has served as the director since 1999 and is responsible for setting the corporate strategy and architecture for the development and implementation of the Enterprise Knowledge Stores and Collaborative Applications. For the past 25 years, Todd has worked in the Information Technology field including leadership positions at BellSouth, Coca-Cola, Georgia-Pacific and Cingular Wireless.
Todd writes a monthly online column in DMReview and has delivered keynotes, tutorials and educational sessions for a wide variety of technology conferences. Todd holds degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from Columbus State University, an MBA degree from Georgia State University, and a Ph.D. in Information Systems from Nova Southeastern University. Todd has been awarded seven U.S. patents in the field of Technology and a co-author for books on Web-Enabled applications, Open Source, Collaborative Solutions, Virtual Environments and Web 2.0 Transformations. Todd also published Trademark 2.0 which focuses on career management in a web 2.0 world.
(relationships between author and company, technology vendor, consultant, etc.)
Page Last Updated: May 13 3:28am by Todd Stephens