On the topic of Crock-i-ness
November 14, 2009
Well, there’s been a lot of
buzz both before and since Enterprise 2.0 San Francisco in San Francisco on the question of
whether or not Enterprise 2.0 is a crock. Put another way, can Enterprise 2.0
tools and technologies deliver tangible business benefits with tangible use
cases in support of the tools?
Anyone that knows me knows by
now that I believe the answer to this is Yes – Enterprise 2.0 can provide
tangible business benefits supported with tangible use cases and I’m going to
share a few with you here that we’ve realized since the creation of our enterprise
community two years ago, which supports blogs, wikis, discussions and user
profiles, to name a few things.
I will say right up front that
we never identified success for our initiative as 100% user adoption. Not only
do I feel that 100% adoption is unrealistic, but I also don’t believe that
Enterprise 2.0 is for everyone. I think that a lot of people can realize
benefits from using the tools available to them, but I do not believe that
there’s any “one size fits all” tool for any organization. If that were the
case, we wouldn’t still have people using interoffice mail, leaving post-its on
our desks, leaving voicemails, sending emails, etc. We’d have everyone using
only one way to communicate, and I don’t think I need to say that this view of
the world is completely unrealistic.
I’ll say again what I said on the panel I participated on at Enterprise 2.0 – Enterprise 2.0 is not a cure-all or fix-all. It’s an enabler. Here are some examples of what it’s enabled at EMC in just two short years:
Increased Collaboration
One of the many challenges that
large, geographically dispersed organizations face is bringing employees
together to collaborate. It’s not that employees don’t want to collaborate; it’s
that they have no way of knowing who is working on similar projects or facing
similar problems around the company or around the world unless we enable and
encourage them to share them somewhere.
That’s exactly what we’ve done
on EMC|ONE – provided a platform that enables global, searchable access to
conversations and content so that employees can connect with others facing the
same challenges and share what has worked, what hasn’t and brainstorm on what
to try next. A memorable story that has been shared with me, and that I like to
retell is the salesperson in Australia who connected with the salesperson in
North America about a deal on a specific product, against a specific competitor
and they shared how they went into the sales call, collaborated on things that
worked or didn’t, and ultimately won the deal. So, if I knew the dollar amount
of that deal, I could conceivable call those dollars ROI.
Corporate Memory & Reduction in Redundant Requests
Content and conversations that
occur via email or presentations stored on people’s hard drives is arguably
essentially lost when that employee leaves or their computer get fried or
stolen unless they’ve happened to share that content with others and/or done
regular backups of their content – neither of which always happens in a
predictable fashion.
EMC|ONE provides employees a
venue to share their content and have their conversations and ultimately helps
to preserve that conversation and the though process behind it, along with any content
that was shared in the context of the conversation. It also makes it accessible
to other employees in a searchable community of information for reference,
collaboration and updates, as needed. EMC|ONE has also helped many employees reduce
redundant requests for information as these employees share and document their
information and FAQs in the community, they have a central location to point
people to for consistently requested information, and reduce their own personal
email and phone traffic and free up their time to work on other things.
Quicker Response Times
One of the biggest frustrations
I hear from employees is that they have to wait on or even track down
information they’re looking for, which wastes time, money and effort on a
consistent basis. I’ve heard, (I think it was in Dion Hinchcliffe’s workshop at
Enterprise 2.0) that the average employee spends an hour a day looking for
information, searching through old files, emails, etc. and boy do I believe it.
A story that I consistently
hear from our sales folks is how wonderful it is for them be able to search our
competitive community on EMC|ONE and find real-time information and updates
about competitors. They also love the ability to ask a question and have anyone
in the company be able to answer it instead of just whoever is on a
distribution list they send an email out to.
Following up on the example
above, folks also are very happy to have access to a location that has FAQs to
various questions they need answers to without having to wait to hear back via
phone or email when time is of the essence. Depending on the person and amount
of time they spend searching for information, this savings could be minimal to
a fairly substantial amount.
Increased Innovation
For the past three years, EMC
had held an annual innovation conference, and it has been planned during the
past 2 years on EMC|ONE and then the summary, wrap up, photos, etc. are also
shared on EMC|ONE. That in and of itself (using EMC|ONE as the coordination point) has not increased innovation, but what
it has done is helped to increase worldwide awareness of the importance that
EMC places on innovation and it has increased access to the information, ideas,
and proposals that were submitted for the innovation conference by EMC
employees.
In addition to the annual
Innovation Conference, employees innovate on EMC|ONE every single day by coming
up with creative new ways to address problems, challenges, and concerns on a
wide variety of topics (products, customer support, solutions, internal issues,
software challenges, you name it) they are facing. Not only that, they work
with other employees that they would not have otherwise had an opportunity to
work with had it not been for EMC|ONE.
Customer Support
At EMC, customer service is of
the utmost importance. Our internal employee support forums for solving
customer issues are, as of this weekend, now hosted on EMC|ONE. But long before
the official migration happened, there have been all sorts of examples of
employees collaborating together to make customer service as good as it can be.
They work together, similar to the example above with innovation, on a wide
variety of topics that concern EMC customers and creatively come up with new
ideas and solutions to a wide variety of issues. Have some of those efforts
kept customers and/or gotten us new customers? Yes, they have, and that in and
of itself is an immensely powerful ROI.
Increased Employee Satisfaction
I’ve read varying articles on
how much it costs to replace an employee that leaves the organization and it
seems relatively consistent that it’s around 150% of the employee’s annual
salary to resource, interview, hire, and train a replacement employee for
someone who quits.
I can tell you without a doubt,
that many, many of our employees have shared stories with us (that were not
solicited) about how much more connected they feel to the company since EMC|ONE
began two years ago. A few examples:
I cannot think of a time during my 20 years at EMC when I felt more informed, involved, and confident in myself and the business before EMC|ONE. ~EMC|ONE User
No other corporate resource gives me more value than EMC|ONE. I feel connected with what is going on, I understand our direction, and I get great satisfaction from contributing to people and initiatives across the organization that before I didn’t even know existed. ~EMC|ONE User
There has been no single resource which has added as much value to me, my customer messaging, and my understanding of EMC as EMC|ONE. I am part of the silent majority, who rarely makes the time to post, but gains tremendous value from this fantastic glimpse into the breadth of EMC. ~EMC|ONE User
What I don’t want folks to think is that I think is that Enterprise 2.0 is a piece of cake, that it’s easy or that it will fix all of your problems. It’s not a piece of cake, it’s not easy, and it won’t fix all of your problems. What it will do is begin to connect employees to one another that have never had an opportunity to connect before and possibly never would have if it hadn’t been for our efforts. It takes a lot of hard work and effort to even begin an Enterprise 2.0 initiative, let alone sustain it and grow it and assist in continuing along the path to reach its full potential. We certainly didn’t do everything perfectly. Tell me who has and I’m happy to listen. I am proud that we are trying, and continue to try to enable employees to get more done with less, be more connected with one another and work, and find increased job satisfaction.
Do I think Enterprise 2.0 is a crock? Nope. But what do think is that companies that don’t take it seriously and start investing in researching what it can do for them might just find themselves at a significant competitive disadvantage in the very real and near future.
To companies and individuals that
ignore the potential that Enterprise 2.0 has to offer or call it a crock, I’d
say – Be careful, that crock’s teeth are very sharp and it's liable to bite you when you least expect it.
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Jamie
Blog: http://www.jamiepappas.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/jamiepappas