The document discusses Microsoft's efforts to become a social enterprise by creating a shared knowledge portal called InfoPedia. It involved consolidating content from various sites and simplifying the experience for their 46,000 field sellers. The key aspects included empowering people as change leaders, developing simple processes, shifting culture to encourage sharing, using effective technologies like SharePoint, and measuring impact through adoption rates and feedback. The transformation took over a year but provided field sellers with easier access to critical information.

1. WHITEPAPER AUGUST 2011
Becoming
a Social
Enterprise
Sharing, connecting and “We wanted to enable a knowledge
Sustaining a Collaborative sharing experience to create a social
Social Culture
experience that drives sharing and the
right behaviors to streamline information
management.”
Chaitra Vedullapalli, Sr. Director, Microsoft Field Operations.
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The key ingredients to a social enterprise are well beyond social
technology tools. Enterprises that are becoming socially enabled are
quickly learning that engaged people, simple processes and effective
technology play an increasingly important role.
people
First, what does a social enterprise looks like?
An effective social enterprise benefits the enterprise by evolving itself
simple
organically to become a relevant, connected and involved 2-way
interaction between publishers and consumers.
Our experience creating a social platform takes the form of InfoPedia,
a wiki-style shared, consolidated portal for Microsoft’s 46,000 field
sellers. Our 10-year-old legacy system had reached its limits which
gave us an opportunity to make Microsoft a social enterprise and make
our sellers more productive and more efficiently realize revenue through
shared knowledge.
The social enterprise includes several capabilities:
• Generating content: Employees with subject expertise publish
content using a process and technologies to collaborate; discuss and
Our outcome has been a major consolidation hundreds of separate
network with each other.
destinations, reduction in complexity by focusing current, field ready
content in one place. The field to focus on their core job since they
• Organizing content: Employees need a robust enterprise content
no longer needed to hunt through dozens of sites or spend hours
management system with right surfacing experience such as search,
preparing for customer visits.
navigation to increase discoverability.
• Contributing content: Employees need to see a priority in stories
to acquire and understand knowledge easily. “What I do, I do for collaboration, sharing and
• Sharing Content: Employees need social capabilities such as Like,
partnerships. This is an essential shift in thinking
Comment with each other. that is required to embrace the social enterprise”
• Measuring impact: Quantifying elements of the business receive
the most positive results.
This paper shares our best practices and tips on making it work within
Microsoft or any another enterprise organization looking to turn social.
It took over a year to make this transformation which impacts a large
proportion of our employees and, nearly 10,000 people were involved
in the effort which involved transforming 76 terabytes of information;
387 portals, 13000 sub-sites and 1600 vendor teams.
Here, we share enabled key learning that was captured through the
20 core team members who led the effort. It is hoped that this insight
can be shared within and outside of Microsoft as enterprises around
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the world take the same path.

3. WHITEPAPER AUGUST 2011
Key Ingredients
1. Empowering people: Skilling Change Leaders
& empowering individuals to enable the change
and generate support for their organization to
2. Share a collaborative vision & metrics: The
vision must include a “place” for everyone involved
to feel that they are represented within the vision.
3. Gain executive buy-in when appropriate:
There is a positive turning point in the team when
sharing
mobilize around their new experience. the constituent leadership. The core team builds
enabling metrics and content to help each
2. Simple Processes: Inventory analysis; cleansing constituent earn the buy-in from their executive
content; developing topic ownerships, onboarding team.
a division and communicating effectively
4. Provide role clarity: The roles often self-emerge
3. Culture of Sharing & Simplification: Developing in a social project. The types of leaders you
a mindset for sharing and consolidating the define will typically have a specific subject
enterprise digital experience. expertise and in our experience, they volunteer
4. Effective Technology: Enabling technologies If the effort is top-down then the leader of the effort
& processes to maintain content. should not more than lip service experience in living
social media and fully embracing the openness,
5. Impact & Measurement: Is the social working? flexible and organic nature of such an effort.
What the Future Holds In your own organization, you should look for
individuals with a progressive vision and the ability
to generate thought-leading content. They will be
For us, the platform has been popular and growing your leaders for influence, advocacy and collaboration.
so our plan to sustain includes: They are essential for establishing the team’s credibility
within the company. The individuals on our team
• Fully optimized mobile experience had a multi-faceted skill set that included an industry
• Sustain usage (vs. purely corporate) view. These individuals could
• Encourage adoption see the big picture and possessed a unique collaborative
• Promote publishers and SMEs mentality and their aggregate talent included topical
expertise that would help us develop rich and
1: Empowering People meaningful content. Being socially proactive them-
selves, they were also able to reach out to their own
personal network and act as a catalyst for the change.
If the effort is a bottom-up effort (as ours was), then
getting the right leaders in charge and influencers Once we had the right people, we started with a
who have information that requires significant pitch deck for our key representatives from segments
discussion and who would benefit the most. A including marketing, enterprise sales, OEM,
checklist for this might look like this: competitive, fastest-moving technologies and areas
where information was evolving quickly. We then
1. Identify initial stakeholders: Where are we
buy-in
invited them to a Workshop and titled the
entering new markets or promoting new participants as “Change Leaders” and our goal was
technologies? For example, Microsoft Lync as a to make them successful and recognized for their
new product and topic area, was an ever-evolving contribution to the company and to justify their
technology that required discussion, involvement resources.
and frequent updates – a perfect candidate for
a topic to be part of the early stages of the
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Then, together, we built a unified vision.
enterprise social.

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2: Simple Processes
At each stage, the team worked on the same step:
1. Inventory analysis: There was a major undertaking
“Greater than Yourself” by Steve Farber.
Our experience was that it only takes one or two
outliers to block the collective focus on others. The
entire team must buy into this mentality.
changing
to review and catalogue what content to keep,
archive and delete and each group defined their The Learning-to-share paradigm is a shift for many
own criteria for how they organized into these enterprises where employee evaluations put peers
categories. in a “me” mentality of making themselves look good.
2. Content cleansing: Assign content management Not to imply that employees are selfish but this
and development owners behavior is often driven by factors such as leadership
3. Topic and owner development: To watch over examples, cultural expectation and compensations.
content areas, a topic owner was defined for a
topic page that contained the priority content The enterprise social effort at Microsoft took place
and chief landing page for a particular topic. simultaneously with another major initiative around
4. Onboarding a division: Ensuring that divisional simplification. “We all found special challenges in
leadership was supportive. Since this was not a simplification of complex messages and processes”,
top-down effort, each change leader needed to said one stakeholder. “We have more work to do in
gain buy-in from their organization. this area.”
5. Communicating: Together, we developed core
messages and synchronized timing and then each Understanding the target for your social platform
group would personalize and deliver what was is also essential. In our case, we identified Microsoft
most relevant to their organization. field sellers, marketers, service delivery and country
leaders as the key target to benefit from our social
Ample notification time is needed to ensure that any solution. Discussions and surveys started our quest
particular stakeholder has the opportunity to plan as we learned the key pain points for our field which
ahead for adoption of a consolidated. included this poignant remark:
Simplification came about in a massive scale at
3: Changing culture: Developeing
a Mindset for Shaping & Simplification
Microsoft due to a decade of ad-hoc and randomized
content sources. Our social effort dramatically
simplified the experience for our field which included:
“InfoWeb (legacy system) is the
Learning to share is something we might have
thought we mastered in kindergarten, but for • 5 navigations became 1 navigation in order to first place I look for information
reduce time spent to find relevant information
enterprises taking on social enablement, there are
some formed habits that must be replaced with new
frames of mind, primarily the notion of
• Migrated 5,452 pieces of content
• Simplified 19 top field-facing brand sites
and the last place I find it”.
• Simplified 2 search engines into 1 search engine
• Consolidated 1,600 unmanaged vendors to 49
“making others successful”. InfoPedia vendors
• Consolidated over 6,000 unmanaged tags one
Additionally, there must be an understanding that tagging set on InfoPedia
the main point of the effort is to make others great • Each organization such as SMSP, DPE has realized
so the effort can be greater than yourself, a key a 40-70% content and site consolidation
concept in...
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4: Effective Technologies
There are mountains of social tools available for the enterprise but the
essential criteria for the technologies utilized in our project were:
• Showcase our own technologies in SharePoint and FAST Search
rhythm
• Consider legacy apps already widely adopted
• Determine what can be measured
• Scale
• Discoverability
• Ease of use, adoption
• Manageability – Both cost of managing the platform and the cost
to publish and share content
Governance can conjure visions of bureaucracy, but in a social enterprise,
governance must be democratizing, fruitful and high-value. Policies
and processes around social enablement must be as clearly valuable
as stop lights are viewed as a useful benefit to the overall flow of traffic.
We set out to create policies with clear value so that publishers viewed
them as policies for better user experience.
Governance around content management in InfoPedia ensures that
information is tagged, prioritized, connected and relevant for the long
term sustainability of this simpler experience. The engagement involved
design reviews, accountability assignments, standards and policies, and
of course, good communication.
Governance also includes policies that can capture outliers that can
risk the overall user experience. In this case, once the majority of Rhythm of business is the recurring routine of business planning and
adopters are in place with carrots, the “stragglers” can be adopted with execution that every company has in place formally or informally. To
the stick. Here is a sample of our policy that was introduced after the make our social platform more relevant, we enabled a built-in connection
first wave of adopters were secured and we demonstrated success with to the business
our audience:
Communication was an essential element that involved and informed
Infoweb site owners have been aware of the InfoWeb Platform Retirement stakeholders on a routine basis. Weekly check-ins and sequenced
for well over a 2 years now and have had adequate notice to act on communications ensured that top-level communications rolled properly
their transition off of the platform. Transition help and guidance have into the right organizations but were orchestrated from a central source
been provided and therefore, Infoweb Site Owners should be equipped to turn confusion into clarity:
and prepared to successfully decommission their sites by the target
decommission date that they have provided. A new policy is being We developed a routine course of targeted communication packaging,
realworld
implemented to ensure all sites are successfully decommissioned as targeted rhythm of the business, targeted messages and reviews for
committed before June 15th and recover costs of managing decommission greatest impact of our marketing mobilization.
changes and escalations.
Enabling the real-world social in the enterprise means getting specific
on what your employees (socially adept or not) can plug in. Here are
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some of those areas:

6. WHITEPAPER AUGUST 2011
Improve Collaboration
Private groups – We use discussion groups. We create private
groups and invite individuals into a group discussion. This is good
for internal teams working on similar projects.
ideas
Amplify Communication
Blogging – We use blogs for sharing news, tips and resources. We
focus our blogs with a clear purpose; allow commenting for employee
to share their voice. This is implemented witha right editorial process
and privacy rules to protect employees with any severe consequences
to raise their voice.
Microblogging – We use micro blogging for broadcasting, public
Q&A and sharing resources. This is a big hit and helpsus identify
communities to engage. This is implemented with a monitoring
process and messaging plans to increase the participation. At
Microsoft, this tool is called OfficeTalk.
Video – A platform like YouTube to share your insights and platform
is really a good one. I believe it is a great way for employees to
engage and share their voice.
Research to understand behaviors
Collective Intelligence – we use collective intelligence technology
to understand behavior and insights via blogs, distribution lists and Trip-and-Fall Alert!
feeds. This is like a research on employee conversations inside a
company. It will work provided employees share their voice in public. Because each member of the team can feel like this project
Predictive Markets – I remember it was implemented however is “their own” – many group members may communicate
don’t have any bias around this technology. What I know is that
this required a heavy process to make it effective. independently to their set of constituents which may lead
Sharing ideas and knowledge
to lack of consistency. Keep circling the wagons around
Knowledge Sharing-We have a knowledge sharing experience for
your core change leaders to ensure that they can leverage
sharing content easily all in one place. I would say it is the best wiki your base message.
style topic sharing on sales and marketing content I have encountered
exchange
which has grown into a vital source of knowledge every day.
Ideaxchange – This technology allows employees to get involved.
You can suggest new products, promote favorite features, and
preview upcoming releases.
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5: Impact & Measurement:
Is social working for your company?
Most enterprises are driven by scorecards to know where a project
starts and where it finishes. The key challenge with a collaborative
project such as a social platform is how to share in the management
cost.
How do you know when your social is effective?
• When your share is increasing and trust in the content is rising
• When you see comments and involvement
• When productivity rises and employees are searching less and finding
more relevance
Collection and Prioritization of Requirements: There has to be a
point person (PM) to collect all the requirements from various sources
(team members, customers and management). Management of demand
list helps to create roadmaps and ongoing improvement plans.
Investment Allocation: This is a juggling act. Investment in new
capabilities versus sustaining the experience is a delicate balance. I
focus on allocating in capabilities that help my customers achieve their
goals.
Resource Allocation: Self Service is everyone’s business in the
organization. Clearly defining roles and responsibilities will help in
reducing chaos and confusion. At the end of the day customers lose
if the resources are not available at the time of need
.
Listen and Respond: Ask these questions: Am I listening to my
customer? What am I doing with the information? Active listening is
key to the success of Self Service. Without a listen and respond plan
all the effort becomes ineffective.
For InfoPedia, our growth rates have been a satisfying hockey stick-
shaped adoption rate.
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