Implementing a corporate weblog for SAP by Justus Bross

Implementing a corporate weblog for SAP
Presented by Justus Broß
Paper written byJ. Broß, M. Quasthoff, J. Zimmermann, S. Mac Niven and C. Meinel
presented at BlogTalk’09 | Jeju, Korea | September 16th

The next 20 minutes...
Introduction: Social software & weblogs
Corporate weblogs – capabilities and challenges
Forms of deployment
Success factors, risks and best-practice
Case study: Point of View
Scope, motivation and vision
Configuration of the standardized
Design issues
Fact sheet
Suggestions for further research
Conclusion
"Implementing a corporate weblog for SAP" presented by Justus Bross (HPI) at BlogTalk'09, Korea
Introduction|Corporate-weblogs|Case-study|Research-suggestions|Conclusion
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Social Software & Weblogs
Weblogs belong to the group of “social software”: simple, easy-to-use and flexible applications that not just enable but facilitate cooperative gathering of content
Consent among all existing social software tools next to weblogs (e.g. Instant Messaging, Wikis, Forums or multimedia-sharing-platforms) is that the surplus value is generated out of collaborative (social) activity.
Social software therefore enables affiliation to (social) networks as well as structuring and channeling of attention towards a certain field of interest.
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Numerous areas of application
Individual weblogs (diaries)
Educational blogs
Political blogs
More …
Corporate blogs:
CEO blog
PR blog
Internal communications tool
Crisis blog
Branding blogs
…
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Hype Cycle (2009)for Emerging Technologies
Source: Gartner (July 2009)
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Corporate weblogsuccess factors
Know what you doing, be honest, be prepared, understand the medium (Long-term monitoring, test & try, media-conformity, back-up and emergency plan)
Involvement, topicality, institutional backup, good resource planning (Moderation, content-generation)
Fitting company values and culture => blogging policies ( IBM Blogging Policy, Sun Policy on public discourses, Weblogs at Harvard: Terms of use)
Who, why and for what or to whom? What are the objectives, goals, milestones, target-group, etc.?
Overall fit=> social software strategies
Technology: security, scalability, etc.
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What’s wrong here?
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Deployment possibilitiesfor corporate weblogs
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Sources: Zerfaß (2005), DB Research

Best practice examples
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IBM’s “Innovations Jam” (Collaborations blog)
“Frostablog” (Product blog)
“Openblog” (CEO blog by Xing), similar to ones of:
Sun
Intel
Adobe
GM “Fastlane” … and thousands more…
Daimler blog (Customer relationship blog)

Scope, motivation and vision for SAP blog “Point of view”
Especially in a time of crisis, generating open dialogue is paramount to managing fear and wild speculation
Triggers that had generated an atmosphere of uncertainty:
The transition of a new CEO
the global economic and financial crisis
the first lay-offs in the history of the company
“Point of View” shall be
the first step toward ubiquitous dialogue throughout the company
an approach to facilitating open, transparent dialogue is arguably the single most pivotal enabler of internal cultural transformation at SAP.
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Deployment
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Point of View

Basic requirements
Basic (and requested) blogging functionalities have already been provided by WordPress MU:
Ready-to-use, open-source (cheap) and easy to handle CMS
Post & comment authoring and moderation
Permission and role management
Handling of multimedia files within postings
Generation of permanent URI (so-called permalinks) for posts and comments
Generation of separate statistics for readers and moderators.
Bi-lingual support (WPMU)
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Configuration of the standardized
benefit of using a popular blog-system like WordPress MU is that some customization requirements can be achieved by using systems-extensions such as freely available plug-ins or add-ons.
A considerable part of the system and its extensions needed to be configured and adapted to fit SAPs functionality-requirements:
Display nested ("threaded") view of comments
Highlighting selected comments, e.g. in a dedicated area of the Web site
Anonymous voting and ranking (requirement by work council)
Enhanced search and browsing functionality for postings, comments, and tag keywords – including portal search
Authentication issues (SSO, HTTPS, LDAP)
Design issues – fitting Ci/CD requirements of SAP, browser compatibilities, barrier-free-programming, etc.
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Case study: „Point of View“
Barrier-free-programming
Single-Sign-On (SSO)
Bilingual (MU)
Anonymous rating functionality
„Highlighted comments“: moderation (back-end) highly customized
Design Issues (CI/CD):e.g. Browser compatibility
Commenting order: Wok council first, employees, „highlighted comments“
SAP-portal integration
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Initially, participation was slow, and employees waited to see how the channel developed.
Following critical statements, people felt encouraged to participate.
Platform has begun to take on a life of its own with 128 comments for 1st post alone, even 2 months after it was posted.
Around 19,000 employees have visited the platform, and it has clocked up 55000 page views.
This far exceeds the initial expectations and shows the need for feedback was indeed very present.
An increase in access to the blog via tags has also been identified, a trend expected to grow as more content becomes available.
Fact sheet
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Research suggestions
Https-support of Wordpress (e.g. embedment of external video players, authentication issues)
Standardized option (plugin) for linking corporate authentication system to Wordpress backend.
Language issues (switching, some plugins only in one language)
MU vs. SU: Most plugins are developed only focussing on SU. WPMU is constantly behind.
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Contact us
Justus Bross, MSc. Int. Business & MBE
Scientific Assistant & Doctoral Candidate
Hasso-Plattner-Institut | IT Systems Engineering
University of Potsdam
Campus Griebnitzsee
14482 Potsdam, Germany
Tel: +49 (0)331 5509-524
Fax: +49 (0)331 5509-325
Email: Justus.Bross@hpi.uni-potsdam.de
Web: www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de
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The End
Thank You
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