Internal Social Collaboration Has to be the Mandate for ITDMs

Collaboration is indeed the top priority for almost every organization, but knowing what makes organizations successful still remains tricky. Collaboration initiatives of no two companies are alike and there is so much variety in the strategies and technologies each one adopts to be successful.

So if there is so much variety, how do we know what makes organizations successful? Simple, any organization that approaches the collaboration initiative with the aim to get better business results with collective effort of employees rather than the sum of individual efforts is known to succeed.

Sahil Sagar, Head-IS, Aditi Technologies says, “In today’s global economy, talent knows no boundaries. Execution of complex projects requires skilled talent from all corners of the globe to come together as a team. This means implementing seamless workflow, information exchange, and knowledge sharing & task coordination worldwide -- a tall order for any organization till now.”

A key trend that has become more pronounced in the last decade is the retirement of baby boomers and the entry of millennial generation in the workforce. With the retirement of baby boomers, a large part of the tactical knowledge that they have gathered over the years is likely to go away with them. The millennial generation entering the workforce is one that has grown up on technology and has a fundamentally networked view of organizations. With such increased importance to networking it is not surprising to know that (as revealed by a report from Cisco) more than half of millennial workers would choose social-media freedom over a higher salary when considering a job offer.

Here is a blueprint to implement a successful collaboration framework in the enterprise.

We should aim to have a collaboration hub in the company to enable our people to work together and collaborate—creating a more rewarding workplace, while empowering employees to provide a higher quality and more responsive service to customers.

A phased approach to minimize risk and maximize business value delivery with this initiative:

Phase 1: Top Management Buy-In

In this phase, the goal is to work with the top management to facilitate an interactive workshop. This is aimed at increasing awareness of the business value that a social enterprise can drive, and developing a sustainable adoption plan. Maximum support at management level at this early phase can help in communicating the initiative’s individual benefit and the overall corporate benefits.

Phase 2: Enterprise Wide Adoption Campaign

Second way is to go a level down and involve key business groups such as HR and corporate communications in driving and facilitating the collaboration project.

We also need to formulate a strategy team with representation from IT teams, and senior executives from other teams such as HR, Marketing, and Finance, that are responsible for organization culture, communications, and budgets.

One of the most important tasks for the strategy team is to develop a strong business case and seek commitment on the budget and necessary resources, so that there is no hiccups midway during deployment.

The next step is a series of campaigns to create excitement around the new social enterprise transformation journey. Communicating “What is in it for me” to every individual is the goal of this phase. When this gets clear, increasing user adoption after implementation will become a lot easier. For some users it will be search, ability to find content and for others it will just be to know who all are around and how our organization hierarchy looks like?

Phase 3: Rollout

Rollout an initiative with the following goals:

1. Collaborate — Get people working efficiently together instead of silos.
2. Manage — Manage work proactively instead of reactively
3. Win — Build on enthusiasm over time by adding increasingly beneficial capabilities through successive iterations

There are multiple great platforms available now, SharePoint, Yammer,Tiber, Cisco connect to name a few. Usually these portals will have features such as my profiles, Activity Feeds, Team Sites, Knowledge Libraries, and Blogs.

Sagar, citing in the implementation in his own organisation, says, “In our case, Yammer was integrated with SharePoint to provide a trusted, secure social networking technology to connect employees directly to each other and to the best experts and information across their business, anywhere in the world.”

Yammer soon picked up momentum as the corporate communication platform. Different business units leveraged Yammer to host events and interactive discussions.

The users of the platform increased 10 times within 6 months.

Our efforts thus far revolutionized the response time to business and customer demands with better information sharing and crowd sourcing of ideas. The truly connected network has transformed a widespread employee base into a more tightly knit workforce focused on customer satisfaction.

adidas