This document provides a contrarian view on adopting collaboration tools in global workplaces. While building collaborative capabilities seems obvious, it faces challenges like geographical distribution and cultural differences. The author argues conventional wisdom on best practices for adoption is sometimes misguided. Successful strategies often do the opposite - like focusing on grassroots adoption over executive support, choosing the right technology over any platform, making community managers the owners instead of IT, integrating tools into workflows instead of expecting people to use them, and starting small within interested groups instead of expecting company-wide adoption. Taking these counterintuitive approaches may lead to higher rates of sustained adoption and collaboration.
Five Key Focus Areas for New-Age CollaborationCognizant
Virtually any enterprise can benefit greatly from deploying new-age organizations' collaboration technologies and systems. We review the tools and activities available for collaborating on five levels: within a program, within an organization, between channels, within the extended enterprise and with the external world.
Analyst report from Forrester on how leading organizations are investing in integrated collaborative and social solutions, and find out how to develop a strategy that will drive the most value for your business.
Social Media in the Workplace - Are We Nearly There?Infor HCM
Since Facebook was invented a decade ago, it has attracted a billion users worldwide. Twitter now reports 200 million users who send 400 million tweets every day. Compounded by record IPO valuations well into the billions, there is little doubt that the social media way of life is here to stay.
The covid-19 pandemic boosted the Digitalization initiative. Every company started relying more on digital technologies to continue their business operations. To cope with this changing environment, employees planned to improve their skills and started learning new things virtually; this gave rise to E-learning during the pandemic. The future of E-learning looks excellent because it is the easiest way to learn.
How can companies use their internal communities of practice to collaborate, innovate and grow?
This paper explores the elements of internal on-line community success, and provides examples of how Schneider-Electric addresses this challenge.
McKinsey: How social technologies are extending the organization 24-11-11Brian Crotty
Fifth annual survey on the way organizations use social tools and technologies finds that they continue to seep into many organizations, transforming business processes and raising performance.
Five Key Focus Areas for New-Age CollaborationCognizant
Virtually any enterprise can benefit greatly from deploying new-age organizations' collaboration technologies and systems. We review the tools and activities available for collaborating on five levels: within a program, within an organization, between channels, within the extended enterprise and with the external world.
Analyst report from Forrester on how leading organizations are investing in integrated collaborative and social solutions, and find out how to develop a strategy that will drive the most value for your business.
Social Media in the Workplace - Are We Nearly There?Infor HCM
Since Facebook was invented a decade ago, it has attracted a billion users worldwide. Twitter now reports 200 million users who send 400 million tweets every day. Compounded by record IPO valuations well into the billions, there is little doubt that the social media way of life is here to stay.
The covid-19 pandemic boosted the Digitalization initiative. Every company started relying more on digital technologies to continue their business operations. To cope with this changing environment, employees planned to improve their skills and started learning new things virtually; this gave rise to E-learning during the pandemic. The future of E-learning looks excellent because it is the easiest way to learn.
How can companies use their internal communities of practice to collaborate, innovate and grow?
This paper explores the elements of internal on-line community success, and provides examples of how Schneider-Electric addresses this challenge.
McKinsey: How social technologies are extending the organization 24-11-11Brian Crotty
Fifth annual survey on the way organizations use social tools and technologies finds that they continue to seep into many organizations, transforming business processes and raising performance.
Dette notat samler op på en række analyser og anbefalinger omkring begrebet Social Business. Formålet er at give et hurtigt overblik over, hvordan anerkendte konsulenthuse m.fl. ser på betydning og brug af Social
Business.
Notatet er primært en sammenstykning af diverse uddrag og figurer uden en egentlig sammenbindende tekst.
Selection of a standard collaboration platform and toolset used to be easy: Microsoft or IBM Lotus. Now there are many competitors in this market, fueled by the rise of Web 2.0 collaboration paradigms, requiring organizations to know what the problem is they are trying to solve.
This storyboard will help you:
•Understand and identify collaboration opportunities that exist within your organization.
•Identify leading vendors and compare capabilities.
•Select the right solution to implement.
Organizations are embracing the need to support teams with enterprise collaboration solutions.
In Finland, Enterprise 2.0 is currently at the early (but accelerating) adoption stage, where competitive advantages will come to those who embrace the new tools and business models. In today's economic climate, that can mean the difference between survival and failure for many companies.
Enterprises and organizations in Finland have found Web 2.0 tools to be effective in reducing costs, however, Finnish organizations and businesses are still early adopters when it comes to the use of Enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0 for revenue growth and innovation.
This presentation explores the new ways we are working and the implications for business and for workers. Each theme has 4 trends and each trend is supported by 4 examples, supporting statistics and implications defined by PSFK Labs team.
Enterprises always look for ways to help employees collaborate with each other more effectively that leads to faster and higher-quality work, which, in turn, drives increased productivity. Though most enterprises keep employee collaboration on top of their corporate agenda, they still lag behind to drive that force to its optimum level! Using traditional approaches for attaining high productivity and innovation among employees are no more beneficial and effective in fast-technology pace and people oriented work space environments.
Presentation on the evolution of internal communications and the emergence of the social enterprise. Also features tips on how to foster social inside organizations.
At its essence, enterprise social computing is the connection of people to people, data to data and people to data within a corporate environment. The discovery, connection and collaboration occurring among employees through social interaction promote the collection of ideas and the encouragement of transparent information sharing, as well as eliminate tacit information loss through long-term employee attrition.
A strong communication capability between the business and IT ensures the alignment of business requirements with delivered IT functionality and value. Use this storyboard to understand common barriers to effective requirements management, tactical solutions to overcome these barriers, and how to achieve a high level of project success.
This storyboard will help you:
•Understand the common barriers to effective requirements management
•Learn how organizations have solved these challenges
•Implement your own tactical solutions to enable effective communication of business requirements for IT projects in your organization
•Achieve a high level of project success
Whether an organization develops its own applications or implements packaged solutions, the success of the project depends on the clear communication of business requirements in terms IT can understand and deliver.
The Road to Innovation is Paved With Information TechnologyNetApp
Technology, which is producing so much disruption and so much opportunity, also serves as a key tool to facilitate innovation. And continual innovation, at every level, has never been more important for business success. NetApp asked 300 executives worldwide for their views on tech priorities today and in the future. Download this report to learn what they had to say.
Investor Relations in the Age of New MediaDave Hogan
This presentation was delivered March 14, 2011, at the SNL Financial Bank Investor Relations Symposium at the New York Stock Exchange in New York, NY, USA.
A social business is an organization whose culture and systems encourage networks of people to create business value. Social businesses connect individuals, so they can rapidly share information, knowledge and ideas by having conversations and publishing informal content. They analyze social content from multiple channels and sources, in addition to structured data, to gain insights from both external and internal stakeholders. When those things happen, innovation and business execution rates increase, better decisions are made, and customers and employees are more engaged and satisfied. Social businesses enjoy lower operating costs, faster speed-to-market, improved customer and employee engagement, and increased profitability.
Whole-brain leadership prepares C-suites for the digital challenges ahead, ensuring seamless growth and high-value problem solving capabilities. Read more.
HCLI report_HR best practices_Genpactcollaboration case studySubroto Gupta
Case study on Genpact's global collaboration platform 'Glue' published by Human Capital Leadership Institute as part of their research report on innovative HR best practices in Asia.
Dette notat samler op på en række analyser og anbefalinger omkring begrebet Social Business. Formålet er at give et hurtigt overblik over, hvordan anerkendte konsulenthuse m.fl. ser på betydning og brug af Social
Business.
Notatet er primært en sammenstykning af diverse uddrag og figurer uden en egentlig sammenbindende tekst.
Selection of a standard collaboration platform and toolset used to be easy: Microsoft or IBM Lotus. Now there are many competitors in this market, fueled by the rise of Web 2.0 collaboration paradigms, requiring organizations to know what the problem is they are trying to solve.
This storyboard will help you:
•Understand and identify collaboration opportunities that exist within your organization.
•Identify leading vendors and compare capabilities.
•Select the right solution to implement.
Organizations are embracing the need to support teams with enterprise collaboration solutions.
In Finland, Enterprise 2.0 is currently at the early (but accelerating) adoption stage, where competitive advantages will come to those who embrace the new tools and business models. In today's economic climate, that can mean the difference between survival and failure for many companies.
Enterprises and organizations in Finland have found Web 2.0 tools to be effective in reducing costs, however, Finnish organizations and businesses are still early adopters when it comes to the use of Enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0 for revenue growth and innovation.
This presentation explores the new ways we are working and the implications for business and for workers. Each theme has 4 trends and each trend is supported by 4 examples, supporting statistics and implications defined by PSFK Labs team.
Enterprises always look for ways to help employees collaborate with each other more effectively that leads to faster and higher-quality work, which, in turn, drives increased productivity. Though most enterprises keep employee collaboration on top of their corporate agenda, they still lag behind to drive that force to its optimum level! Using traditional approaches for attaining high productivity and innovation among employees are no more beneficial and effective in fast-technology pace and people oriented work space environments.
Presentation on the evolution of internal communications and the emergence of the social enterprise. Also features tips on how to foster social inside organizations.
At its essence, enterprise social computing is the connection of people to people, data to data and people to data within a corporate environment. The discovery, connection and collaboration occurring among employees through social interaction promote the collection of ideas and the encouragement of transparent information sharing, as well as eliminate tacit information loss through long-term employee attrition.
A strong communication capability between the business and IT ensures the alignment of business requirements with delivered IT functionality and value. Use this storyboard to understand common barriers to effective requirements management, tactical solutions to overcome these barriers, and how to achieve a high level of project success.
This storyboard will help you:
•Understand the common barriers to effective requirements management
•Learn how organizations have solved these challenges
•Implement your own tactical solutions to enable effective communication of business requirements for IT projects in your organization
•Achieve a high level of project success
Whether an organization develops its own applications or implements packaged solutions, the success of the project depends on the clear communication of business requirements in terms IT can understand and deliver.
The Road to Innovation is Paved With Information TechnologyNetApp
Technology, which is producing so much disruption and so much opportunity, also serves as a key tool to facilitate innovation. And continual innovation, at every level, has never been more important for business success. NetApp asked 300 executives worldwide for their views on tech priorities today and in the future. Download this report to learn what they had to say.
Investor Relations in the Age of New MediaDave Hogan
This presentation was delivered March 14, 2011, at the SNL Financial Bank Investor Relations Symposium at the New York Stock Exchange in New York, NY, USA.
A social business is an organization whose culture and systems encourage networks of people to create business value. Social businesses connect individuals, so they can rapidly share information, knowledge and ideas by having conversations and publishing informal content. They analyze social content from multiple channels and sources, in addition to structured data, to gain insights from both external and internal stakeholders. When those things happen, innovation and business execution rates increase, better decisions are made, and customers and employees are more engaged and satisfied. Social businesses enjoy lower operating costs, faster speed-to-market, improved customer and employee engagement, and increased profitability.
Whole-brain leadership prepares C-suites for the digital challenges ahead, ensuring seamless growth and high-value problem solving capabilities. Read more.
HCLI report_HR best practices_Genpactcollaboration case studySubroto Gupta
Case study on Genpact's global collaboration platform 'Glue' published by Human Capital Leadership Institute as part of their research report on innovative HR best practices in Asia.
The Six Highest Performing B2B Blog Post FormatsBarry Feldman
If your B2B blogging goals include earning social media shares and backlinks to boost your search rankings, this infographic lists the size best approaches.
Each technological age has been marked by a shift in how the industrial platform enables companies to rethink their business processes and create wealth. In the talk I argue that we are limiting our view of what this next industrial/digital age can offer because of how we read, measure and through that perceive the world (how we cherry pick data). Companies are locked in metrics and quantitative measures, data that can fit into a spreadsheet. And by that they see the digital transformation merely as an efficiency tool to the fossil fuel age. But we need to stretch further…
Driving Repeatable Business Innovation: The Vision to Action LifecycleMindjet
The current generation of Social Business tools has missed
a huge opportunity to impact business innovation and
results. By focusing on functionality that emphasizes
communications, they’ve omitted the required structure
and process needed to meaningfully affect the business.
In this presentation, we take you through the Vision to Action Lifecycle, and explain why a holistic approach to innovation can create repeatable, tangible results for your business.
Introducing Social Employee Engagement: Shifting From Technology To PeopleMSL
Social employee engagement puts people at the centre by focusing on what inspires and
engages them to do their best work. This report offers a complete introduction to social business and sets out a roadmap for success.
In a study carried out in July 2015, MWD Advisors' Angela Ashenden asked participants about the level of interest in – and adoption of – social collaboration technologies within their organisations. As well as exploring the things that had acted as drivers to those who’ve already taken their first steps with social collaboration, the survey aimed to compare the concerns of those who have not yet implemented the technology with the real-life challenges experienced by those who have.
The impact of cloud computing, consumer
mobile and social networking technologies are transforming how enterprises drive efficiency, maintain
innovation and increase motivation. Being socially enabled means more than simply leveraging the
convergence of these tools for short term productivity gains; it involves being part of a broader
organisational, cultural and behavioural shift towards allowing individuals more self-direction and
creativity in their work.
Leveraging social technologies and particularly social workflow is a core part of how organizations today can manage the transition to a new way of working or usher in a more holistic cultural change.
A Connected Enterprise - Transformation Through Mobility and Social Networks IJMIT JOURNAL
Due to rapid changes in business dynamics, there is a growing demand to encourage social
conversations/exchanges and the ability to connect and communicate with peers, partners, customers and
other stakeholders anytime, anywhere which drives the need of mobile-enable, the existing enterprise
applications.
This paper highlights a distinct set of needs and key customer challenges that must be considered and
addressed for deployment of Social Collaboration applications and Mobility services in enterprises. It not
only addresses the Critical Success Factors for enterprise mobility enablement but also outlines the unique
business requirements to rapidly create social collaboration culture and the discipline of turning social
data into meaningful insights to drive business decisions in real-time
A connected enterprise transformation through mobility and social networksIJMIT JOURNAL
Due to rapid changes in business dynamics, there is a growing demand to encourage social
conversations/exchanges and the ability to connect and communicate with peers, partners, customers and
other stakeholders anytime, anywhere which drives the need of mobile-enable, the existing enterprise
applications.
How to Leverage Social Media in HR?, Imad LahhadThe HR Observer
Everyone is jumping on the Social Media bandwagon and HR is no exception. One thing is for sure, it is not a joyride if you are not equipped with the right strategy and tools. Which platform is the most suitable? What are the guidelines? Do we need specific expertise to make the best of them? This workshop will give HR executives’ insights and hands-on experiences on how organisations are leveraging social networks.
What you will learn
• Leveraging social networks to benefit the entire organisation
• Implementing and managing social networks to spur innovation and knowledge sharing
• Using social media to increase employee engagement and bolster employer branding
This presentation was used at HR Summit and Expo 2013 www.hrsummitexpo.com
Every company, of every size, in every corner of the globe collaborates on one level or another. At one end of the spectrum lies tactical communication and coordination between people, teams, partners and customers. However, the other end of the spectrum is reserved for those who have established the tools, process and culture, and optimized their environment for Collaboration - those who are Collaborating with a "big C". White paper by Bill Haskins, Senior Analyst at Wainhouse Research.
Socially Driven Collaboration Research Study 2014 Leader Networks
What happens when Marketing and IT unite to tackle the escalating challenges that today’s
rapidly moving digital, social and mobile world bring? Collaboration brings both Marketing
and IT the potential to influence management decisions while, in tandem, add business value.
When Marketing collaborates with IT, the possibility exists for Marketing to make an impact
beyond raising awareness to improving speed to market for new products and services while
reducing project costs. In turn, IT’s collaboration with Marketing can give rise to greater
awareness of thought leadership and increase share of budget.
When collaboration happens, Marketing often leads the charge to break down the functional
silos with IT. And even though Marketing is making progress, it faces strong headwinds as it
attempts to advance collaboration within the company.
To get a better understanding of the state of collaboration between Marketing and IT, Oracle
commissioned Social Media Today and Leader Networks to field a study to investigate the
changing relationship between these functional teams. Responses were gathered from 662
Marketing and 263 IT leaders from more than 500 organizations around the world.
Dev Dives: Train smarter, not harder – active learning and UiPath LLMs for do...UiPathCommunity
💥 Speed, accuracy, and scaling – discover the superpowers of GenAI in action with UiPath Document Understanding and Communications Mining™:
See how to accelerate model training and optimize model performance with active learning
Learn about the latest enhancements to out-of-the-box document processing – with little to no training required
Get an exclusive demo of the new family of UiPath LLMs – GenAI models specialized for processing different types of documents and messages
This is a hands-on session specifically designed for automation developers and AI enthusiasts seeking to enhance their knowledge in leveraging the latest intelligent document processing capabilities offered by UiPath.
Speakers:
👨🏫 Andras Palfi, Senior Product Manager, UiPath
👩🏫 Lenka Dulovicova, Product Program Manager, UiPath
Slack (or Teams) Automation for Bonterra Impact Management (fka Social Soluti...Jeffrey Haguewood
Sidekick Solutions uses Bonterra Impact Management (fka Social Solutions Apricot) and automation solutions to integrate data for business workflows.
We believe integration and automation are essential to user experience and the promise of efficient work through technology. Automation is the critical ingredient to realizing that full vision. We develop integration products and services for Bonterra Case Management software to support the deployment of automations for a variety of use cases.
This video focuses on the notifications, alerts, and approval requests using Slack for Bonterra Impact Management. The solutions covered in this webinar can also be deployed for Microsoft Teams.
Interested in deploying notification automations for Bonterra Impact Management? Contact us at sales@sidekicksolutionsllc.com to discuss next steps.
Epistemic Interaction - tuning interfaces to provide information for AI supportAlan Dix
Paper presented at SYNERGY workshop at AVI 2024, Genoa, Italy. 3rd June 2024
https://alandix.com/academic/papers/synergy2024-epistemic/
As machine learning integrates deeper into human-computer interactions, the concept of epistemic interaction emerges, aiming to refine these interactions to enhance system adaptability. This approach encourages minor, intentional adjustments in user behaviour to enrich the data available for system learning. This paper introduces epistemic interaction within the context of human-system communication, illustrating how deliberate interaction design can improve system understanding and adaptation. Through concrete examples, we demonstrate the potential of epistemic interaction to significantly advance human-computer interaction by leveraging intuitive human communication strategies to inform system design and functionality, offering a novel pathway for enriching user-system engagements.
GDG Cloud Southlake #33: Boule & Rebala: Effective AppSec in SDLC using Deplo...James Anderson
Effective Application Security in Software Delivery lifecycle using Deployment Firewall and DBOM
The modern software delivery process (or the CI/CD process) includes many tools, distributed teams, open-source code, and cloud platforms. Constant focus on speed to release software to market, along with the traditional slow and manual security checks has caused gaps in continuous security as an important piece in the software supply chain. Today organizations feel more susceptible to external and internal cyber threats due to the vast attack surface in their applications supply chain and the lack of end-to-end governance and risk management.
The software team must secure its software delivery process to avoid vulnerability and security breaches. This needs to be achieved with existing tool chains and without extensive rework of the delivery processes. This talk will present strategies and techniques for providing visibility into the true risk of the existing vulnerabilities, preventing the introduction of security issues in the software, resolving vulnerabilities in production environments quickly, and capturing the deployment bill of materials (DBOM).
Speakers:
Bob Boule
Robert Boule is a technology enthusiast with PASSION for technology and making things work along with a knack for helping others understand how things work. He comes with around 20 years of solution engineering experience in application security, software continuous delivery, and SaaS platforms. He is known for his dynamic presentations in CI/CD and application security integrated in software delivery lifecycle.
Gopinath Rebala
Gopinath Rebala is the CTO of OpsMx, where he has overall responsibility for the machine learning and data processing architectures for Secure Software Delivery. Gopi also has a strong connection with our customers, leading design and architecture for strategic implementations. Gopi is a frequent speaker and well-known leader in continuous delivery and integrating security into software delivery.
LF Energy Webinar: Electrical Grid Modelling and Simulation Through PowSyBl -...DanBrown980551
Do you want to learn how to model and simulate an electrical network from scratch in under an hour?
Then welcome to this PowSyBl workshop, hosted by Rte, the French Transmission System Operator (TSO)!
During the webinar, you will discover the PowSyBl ecosystem as well as handle and study an electrical network through an interactive Python notebook.
PowSyBl is an open source project hosted by LF Energy, which offers a comprehensive set of features for electrical grid modelling and simulation. Among other advanced features, PowSyBl provides:
- A fully editable and extendable library for grid component modelling;
- Visualization tools to display your network;
- Grid simulation tools, such as power flows, security analyses (with or without remedial actions) and sensitivity analyses;
The framework is mostly written in Java, with a Python binding so that Python developers can access PowSyBl functionalities as well.
What you will learn during the webinar:
- For beginners: discover PowSyBl's functionalities through a quick general presentation and the notebook, without needing any expert coding skills;
- For advanced developers: master the skills to efficiently apply PowSyBl functionalities to your real-world scenarios.
Neuro-symbolic is not enough, we need neuro-*semantic*Frank van Harmelen
Neuro-symbolic (NeSy) AI is on the rise. However, simply machine learning on just any symbolic structure is not sufficient to really harvest the gains of NeSy. These will only be gained when the symbolic structures have an actual semantics. I give an operational definition of semantics as “predictable inference”.
All of this illustrated with link prediction over knowledge graphs, but the argument is general.
Transcript: Selling digital books in 2024: Insights from industry leaders - T...BookNet Canada
The publishing industry has been selling digital audiobooks and ebooks for over a decade and has found its groove. What’s changed? What has stayed the same? Where do we go from here? Join a group of leading sales peers from across the industry for a conversation about the lessons learned since the popularization of digital books, best practices, digital book supply chain management, and more.
Link to video recording: https://bnctechforum.ca/sessions/selling-digital-books-in-2024-insights-from-industry-leaders/
Presented by BookNet Canada on May 28, 2024, with support from the Department of Canadian Heritage.
Software Delivery At the Speed of AI: Inflectra Invests In AI-Powered QualityInflectra
In this insightful webinar, Inflectra explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming software development and testing. Discover how AI-powered tools are revolutionizing every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), from design and prototyping to testing, deployment, and monitoring.
Learn about:
• The Future of Testing: How AI is shifting testing towards verification, analysis, and higher-level skills, while reducing repetitive tasks.
• Test Automation: How AI-powered test case generation, optimization, and self-healing tests are making testing more efficient and effective.
• Visual Testing: Explore the emerging capabilities of AI in visual testing and how it's set to revolutionize UI verification.
• Inflectra's AI Solutions: See demonstrations of Inflectra's cutting-edge AI tools like the ChatGPT plugin and Azure Open AI platform, designed to streamline your testing process.
Whether you're a developer, tester, or QA professional, this webinar will give you valuable insights into how AI is shaping the future of software delivery.
"Impact of front-end architecture on development cost", Viktor TurskyiFwdays
I have heard many times that architecture is not important for the front-end. Also, many times I have seen how developers implement features on the front-end just following the standard rules for a framework and think that this is enough to successfully launch the project, and then the project fails. How to prevent this and what approach to choose? I have launched dozens of complex projects and during the talk we will analyze which approaches have worked for me and which have not.
Builder.ai Founder Sachin Dev Duggal's Strategic Approach to Create an Innova...Ramesh Iyer
In today's fast-changing business world, Companies that adapt and embrace new ideas often need help to keep up with the competition. However, fostering a culture of innovation takes much work. It takes vision, leadership and willingness to take risks in the right proportion. Sachin Dev Duggal, co-founder of Builder.ai, has perfected the art of this balance, creating a company culture where creativity and growth are nurtured at each stage.
JMeter webinar - integration with InfluxDB and GrafanaRTTS
Watch this recorded webinar about real-time monitoring of application performance. See how to integrate Apache JMeter, the open-source leader in performance testing, with InfluxDB, the open-source time-series database, and Grafana, the open-source analytics and visualization application.
In this webinar, we will review the benefits of leveraging InfluxDB and Grafana when executing load tests and demonstrate how these tools are used to visualize performance metrics.
Length: 30 minutes
Session Overview
-------------------------------------------
During this webinar, we will cover the following topics while demonstrating the integrations of JMeter, InfluxDB and Grafana:
- What out-of-the-box solutions are available for real-time monitoring JMeter tests?
- What are the benefits of integrating InfluxDB and Grafana into the load testing stack?
- Which features are provided by Grafana?
- Demonstration of InfluxDB and Grafana using a practice web application
To view the webinar recording, go to:
https://www.rttsweb.com/jmeter-integration-webinar
JMeter webinar - integration with InfluxDB and Grafana
A contrarian view to adoption of collaboration-tools-in-the-global-workplace
1. POINT OF VIEW
A contrarian view to adoption
of collaboration tools in the
global workplace
Subroto Gupta
Vice President,
Social Business & Digital Marketing
More than eighty-thousand enterprises worldwide have operations in ten or more
countries, and this number only continues to rise. How do these enterprises effectively
harness the collective knowledge of their global workforces, which are increasingly
scattered? Although building a collaborative eco-system is the most obvious answer,
it’s no easy task, and besides investment in new technologies, it requires training, and
the adapting of processes and organizational matrixes. Those that get this right have
a competitive edge—incorporating real-time intelligence not just for market strategy
but also for resource allocation, talent sourcing and investment decisions. A study of
enterprises with successful collaboration eco-systems reveals that the factors that
steer them toward success are often counterintuitive to what is believed to be the best
practice.
Has the time come?
A 2012 study by McKinsey & Company of just four industry
sectors suggests that social platforms can unlock
$900 billion to $1.3 trillion in value in those four
sectors alone.1 In a recent whitepaper, we
discussed how new technologies, process
advances, and imbalances in talent
are changing the way people work
together.2 Over the last five years,
social technologies have reached
mainstream adoption and a variety
of synchronous and asynchronous
platforms available have accelerated
this adoption. For example, more
and more companies have adopted
IM and VoIP (Voice over Internet
Protocol) tools as ways of promoting
interaction between employees.
Despite the obvious benefits and the
theoretical feasibility, building these
collaborative capabilities is challenging, given
geographical distribution and cultural differences
in global companies. For instance, a 2011 study by a
researcher from IBM and the University of Michigan found that
while the workforces in China and India are comfortable with
using instant messaging (IM) as a communication tool, their
counterparts in Japan view IM as an “improper interruption in a
business context.”3
Moreover, while many multinationals have
invested heavily in social platforms, the
returns on these investments can be
slow to materialize. A 2013 survey by
Towers Watson found that while 56
percent of the employers surveyed
deployed various social-media tools
in their organizations, only 30
percent to 40 percent of respondents
rated the tools as highly effective.
What’s more, only 40 percent of the
employers rated the use of social
media technology as cost effective.4
This failure carries a high cost.
Failure to achieve significant productivity
gains could be attributed, in part, to the
fact that when deploying social technologies,
organizations often make the mistake of applying
the same principles as those used to adopt other
technologies.
McKinsey & Company, “The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies,” 2012.
Genpact, “The Future of Global Business Operations,” 2013.
Yang & Wen, et al., “Collaborating Globally: Culture and Organizational Computer-mediated Communication,” 32nd International Conference on Information Systems,
Shanghai 2011.
4
Towers Watson, “2013 Towers Watson Change and Communication ROI Survey,” 2013.
1
2
3
2. The four questions that matter
our experience and success leads us to believe that the best
practices are often the ones that are, in fact, counterintuitive.
To ensure its social collaboration strategy is executed with
success, any organization that embarks on the journey must
consider the following:
Conventional wisdom #1: Executive
sponsorship is critical to adoption
• How do you ensure that socialcollaboration tools help identify
and then generalize, tag, and
distribute the right content?
Much like icebergs, often 90
percent of the knowledge
in any organization is buried
below the surface. The
question is, does your social
collaboration strategy help
make this knowledge readily
available in such a way as
to significantly improve the
supply chain of information?
• As resources and operations
become more distributed,
how can companies use
the principles of social
collaboration to design
effective processes, particularly
those that touch multiple internal
and external stakeholders?
• How can social graphs and social-network analysis be
leveraged to detect influencers within the network and to
identify collaboration issues and bottlenecks?
• How does an organization’s corporate culture affect
collaboration? In addition, how does this change between
geographies?
Having these answers will help enterprises overcome the
most significant challenges, such as how to create a unified
operational view and how to ensure adoption and use of these
platforms by employees.
A counterintuitive approach to
achieving adoption
At Genpact, we started using social intranets and SharePointbased internal and external communities in 2006 to effectively
connect a large workforce distributed across more than ten
countries at the time. And what we have discovered from
our experience is that companies need to modify commonly
accepted practices and conventional wisdom when building
collaborative platforms.
Much of the existing literature regarding the further adoption
of enterprise collaboration platforms places undue emphasis
on so-called “best practices,” as well as on other guidelines
for deploying knowledge-management platforms. However,
social technologies are inherently different. For one, the needs
and expectation of users have evolved dramatically, thanks to
the massive growth of Web 2.0 communities and social media
outside the work environment. More importantly, collaboration
platforms need to support real work. A collaborative approach
that incorporates social tools promotes two-way dialogue
between work groups and can also include the growing
number of outside contractors that organizations rely upon
these days.
Here are six examples of “best practices” that have become
part of the conventional wisdom. In each of these instances,
Social-tools adoption doesn’t work like other IT
applications. When it comes to social tools,
grassroots adoption is the most critical
success factor. Relying exclusively on
executive sponsorship can often
delay growth and adoption. Rather,
employees will naturally gravitate
towards and stick to social tools if it
makes their job easier.
Getting employees to adopt
social tools is an effort that
shouldn’t begin with the C-Suite
but with juniors still in their 20s.
Organizations that first recognize
and recruit advocates with which
entry-level employees can identify
have a much higher chance of
sustained adoption. At Genpact,
this approach resulted in 22,000
users joining the community within
the first twelve months of rolling out and
a 36-percent adoption rate that was tenpercent higher than the industry benchmark.
Conventional wisdom #2: Technology is
not important; any platform will do
While everyone agrees that technology is only part of the
equation, it is important to choose the right technology based
on business priorities. The key role of technology is to make
it easier for individuals to connect based on areas of common
interest. Beyond the general questions regarding security, it is
also important to consider the user experience. How easy and
intuitive is it for people to use? Does it integrate with other
commonly used systems, and does it easily address their most
important work requirements? Is it available on mobile devices?
Does it support multiple languages for global organizations?
The choice of platform is a critical decision: platforms
that enhance the user’s experience will aid adoption and
collaboration.
Conventional wisdom #3: Because this
involves software, IT should be the
natural owner
Because enterprise collaboration is powered by software
applications, the IT department becomes the natural owner
in most large organizations. While its role is significant
for deployment, the real owner should be a community
manager whose singular goal is to drive adoption across the
organization. The community manager must be involved
with IT experts throughout the process of selecting the right
technology and platform.
The community manager will drive engagement and adoption
and, more importantly, gather feedback In a successful
community, contribution and engagement tend to start out as
transactional and then move to the supportive, the critical, and,
finally, the collaborative stages. How long this process takes
depends on how quickly the community managers mobilize
users to become connected.
3. Conventional Wisdom #4: Build it and
they will come
work better to drive early adoption within one or more
sub-communities first (based on region or a function) - a group
more willing to use collaboration in their daily workflow.
When organizations roll out a new social-media tool, the
announcement creates a buzz, which, in turn, generates high
levels of adoption—at least for the first few months. However,
over time, usage typically drops when the novelty wears off and
stakeholders don’t see tangible benefits. As a result, the socialmedia tool starts to gather dust.
Most organizations today operate in a matrix structure.
Managed properly, the combination of horizontal and vertical
alignment can enable successful collaboration. The vertical
alignment helps ensure relevance with business strategy, while
the horizontal alignment enables collaboration across functional
groups.
The truth is that unless the tool becomes integral to users’ work
habits, it quickly develops a reputation as just one more thing
that has to be done. As a result, it is critical to entrench online
collaboration services into the existing workflows. For example,
users need a clear roadmap of how the collaboration platform
can be synchronized with e-mail, calendar, or documentmanagement solutions.
Collaborative platforms such as SharePoint have been used by
many companies, but how it’s leveraged varies vastly. For most
companies, building a collaborative culture is an evolutionary
process that requires balancing users’ needs with the latest
technology. To ensure that social tools become integral to
daily tasks, companies need to pre-populate the platform
with customized content and then build a framework around
key themes of interest within the organization. Running an
extended pilot may yield a lot of seed content, which can
eventually be migrated to the final platform. For example, at
Genpact, some of the most prolific user groups were active long
before the platform was actually rolled out, and the feedback
from subject-matter and functional experts was crucial towards
eventually engaging a wider base of members.
Conventional wisdom #6: Reward and
recognition drives usage and behavior
Let’s face it: most reward and recognition (R&R) programs do
not generate the kind of excitement that their sponsors expect.
Organizations create campaigns to reward adoption and assign
“knowledge champions,” but often with little success.
What these organizations don’t recognize is that the true value
of enterprise collaboration comes from bringing data, content,
and people together in the context of business activities. The
reality is that most people will adopt a platform only if it makes
them more efficient and effective. If it doesn’t, usage will be
short term and driven by incentives.
Conventional wisdom #5: Play the
culture card right
What most global organizations have to account for is that
there is no single universal culture. While there are values and
behaviors that all organizations promote, cultures can vary
greatly based on demographics, geography, and the nature of
the business.
In some restrictive cultures, a lack of access to social tools at
the workplace leads to a reluctance to adopt social tools. Very
often, the concern for employees is how their peers judge
them. Following a merger, organizations usually discover
that the new entity brings its own unique culture. Similarly,
companies that expand into new countries find the regional
office operates quite differently from the headquarters.
To accommodate these differences, it’s important to recognize
that a collaboration community is an aggregation of
sub-communities, representing different geographies, with
different needs and communication dynamics. It may actually
Think global, act social
Across the world, social tools are supporting a rapid shift from
transaction to engagement. Most companies have understood
that a social community is the only collaboration mechanism
that they can scale up easily. And like any network, as more and
more members participate, the value of the community grows
exponentially. Our experience shows that if organizations are
willing to rethink the conventional wisdom, they can drive the
kind of adoption rates that generate increased value from these
tools.
4. About Genpact
About the author:
Genpact Limited (NYSE: G) is a global leader in transforming and running business processes
and operations, including those that are complex and industry-specific. Our mission is to
help clients become more competitive by making their enterprises more intelligent, meaning
more adaptive, innovative, globally effective and connected to their own clients. Genpact
stands for Generating Impact – visible in better management of risk, regulations, costs and
growth for hundreds of long-term clients including more than 100 of the Fortune Global
500. We offer an unbiased, agile combination of smarter processes, analytics and technology,
which limits upfront investments and enhances future adaptability. We have 60,000+
employees in 24 countries with key management and corporate offices in New York City.
Behind our single-minded passion for process and operational excellence is the Lean and Six
Sigma heritage of a former General Electric division that has served GE businesses for more
than 15 years.
Subroto Gupta leads social business
strategy and digital marketing at Genpact.
unified.collaboration@genpact.com
For more information, visit www.genpact.com.
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