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Enterprise Collaboration Enterprise collaboration tools offer organizations significant benefits – greater productivity, improved efficiency, more communication, just to name a few. Yet it’s not as easy as installing new software; enterprises need to identify the areas of their business that can benefit most from collaboration tools, deploy in stages, reward successes and try again when projects fail. Most of all, organizations will benefit from developing collaborative processes and new approaches that take advantage of this technology, instead of letting the tools set the tone.
eGuide
In this eGuide, IDG News Service, Computerworld and CIO look at some recent trends in enterprise collaboration and the advantages it’s bringing to organizations. Read on to learn about how enterprise collaboration could improve communication, efficiency and productivity in your organization.
In this eGuide At IBM Connect, IT Execs Talk About Betting on Enterprise Social Executives from 3M, Taco Bell, Fluor, and other companies have launched projects to improve collaboration and communication
Enterprise Collaboration Many Employees Won’t Will Drive Digital Mingle With Enterprise Social Software Transformation Digital transformation is on the menu for most companies this year, but the ingredients needed are still being determined. However, new research highlights the recipes companies are using to evolve internal processes, structure and culture to match the evolution in customers’ behavior
Execs Talk About Betting on Enterprise Social
Achieving solid adoption of these ‘Facebook-for-work’ tools takes planning, vision, training and effort
Enterprise Collab to Drive Transformation
Collaboration 2.0: Old Meets New
Take the essential concept of sharing, then add cloud, social, Web and mobile
Employees Won’t Mingle With Enterprise Social
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Collaboration is the essence of teamwork and probably the most important reason businesses build teams in the first place. Ironically, however, many companies struggle to embrace and enable collaboration among today’s digital workforce
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At IBM Connect, IT Execs Talk About Betting on Enterprise Social By Juan Carlos Perez • IDG News Service
Executives from 3M, Taco Bell, Fluor, and other companies have launched projects to improve collaboration and communication UNUSED INTRANETS. Siloed departmental portals. Excessive email use. Those are some of the problems that IT and business leaders at large organizations continue to face with their enterprise collaboration and communication platforms, although these systems have been around for more than 20 years. However, with ESN (enterprise social networking) software, which attempts to adapt consumer social media capabilities for workplace settings, some companies are hoping to sharpen their collaboration systems and make it
simpler and more effective for employees to work together. At the IBM Connect conference, officials from a number of large organizations talked about their ongoing projects in this area, and about their goals for improved productivity, higher employee engagement and sharper innovation. But not everyone is convinced that the ills affecting enterprise collaboration will be easily cured with ESN products, which let employees create profiles, microblog, set up wikis, participate in discussion forums, share documents, build online communities, and rate, tag and review content. While IBM was holding its conference touting the ben-
efits of enterprise social technologies, Gartner released a prediction that through 2015, a whopping 80 percent of social business efforts will fail to achieve their intended benefits, hampered by “inadequate leadership and an overemphasis on technology.” To avoid failure, organizations need to first identify how these enterprise social projects will enhance work practices, which requires a deep understanding -- and in many cases a transformation -- of the way people work and interact, according to Gartner. Still, Gartner also said that by 2016, 50 percent of large organizations will have internal ESNs, of which 30 percent will be considered “as essential as email and telephones are today.” Alan Lepofsky, a Constellation Research analyst, is optimistic about the potential for ESN tools to significantly
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Get it together
“Instead of trying to stop the proliferation of collaboration tools, what we want to do is gather the information and funnel it into a unified repository.”
improve collaboration in workplaces. Legacy collaboration systems from vendors like IBM Lotus, Microsoft and Novell weren’t particularly friendly for end users, and were expensive and complex to install and maintain for IT departments, but ESN software attempts to mimic consumer social media services, with which users are familiar and comfortable, he said. It also helps that most are Web-based and accessible via mobile devices, and that ESN tools are increasingly being integrated with line-of-business applications, like ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management) products, shifting from being stand-alone to what Lepofsky calls “purposeful collaboration” tools. This is happening from the side of the application vendors, like Salesforce.com and SAP, which both have ESN components in their stacks, and from the side of the ESN vendors like IBM, Microsoft and Jive Software, he said.
— Jeffrey R. Berg, business manager of architecture and development, 3M
“I’m encouraged. We’re at a good stage,” he said in an interview. Threading its ESN tool into its overall workflow is something 3M is currently engaged in. At the giant multinational, which has about 84,000 employees and more than $30 billion in annual revenue, the IT department is working to tie a variety of collaboration tools with the activity stream of its IBM Connections ESN system. Departments and units across the company use products like Microsoft’s SharePoint, custom applications, Yammer, Salesforce.com’s Chatter, SAP’s Jam and VMware’s SocialCast. However, they aren’t integrated companywide, so often employees resort to the Notes email system, which isn’t designed for collaboration in the way these other tools are. “Instead of trying to stop that proliferation of collaboration tools, what we want to do is gather the information
and funnel it into a unified repository,” Jeffrey R. Berg, IT eBusiness manager of architecture and development at 3M, said during a presentation. The plan is to hook up these tools with IBM Connections, so that its activity stream becomes a common container for event notifications generated by the other applications, Berg said. The goal? To get the right information at the right time to the right person and let the recipient act on it. 3M is clear that it won’t ever achieve a perfect solution, but it trusts that its effort will make the process much better than it is today, he said. Meanwhile, at Taco Bell the IT department is engaged in a project to revitalize the company’s intranet for its restaurant employees by making it easier to use and more effective. First rolled out about five years ago, the intranet had two portals -- one for restaurant personnel and another one for
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franchisees, and they weren’t integrated, leading to much duplication of efforts and lack of content consistency. In addition, the system was architected in such a way that the IT department had to be involved in the posting and changing of content, due to technical complexities. As a result, it could take three days to publish something new. “It was very difficult to maintain, and it was very cumbersome to roll out content,” said Christian Klein, a Taco Bell senior manager, in a presentation. Coupled with limited personalization capabilities, engagement with the intranet was very low -- most restaurant employees limited themselves to glancing at whatever was new on the home page. “They had a big challenge: They had a portal that wasn’t much of a portal. It was a website,” said Rafael Trujillo from consultancy Base22, which Taco Bell hired to help with the revamping of the intranet. The user interface and the navigation scheme have been simplified and made more intuitive, and a content classification, taxonomy and metadata architecture was put in place, improving the search experience. The back-end system has been reworked with IBM
WebSphere Portal 8 and Base 22 widget applications to allow non-IT users to modify content with minimal IT intervention. The new intranet will go live soon, Klein said. For the restaurant employees, it was decided that at this point they wouldn’t be given a full enterprise social toolset, since the nature of their work is in making food and serving patrons. “When we rebuilt the portal site, a question was: Can we introduce social to the company, and what does this mean in the restaurants?” Klein said. The decision was to give them access to a commenting system, so that they can provide input, suggest ideas and express opinions about the content on the intranet, such as articles about new products or procedures. Employees can post their comments, and remove them if they want, as well as rate and flag content and other comments. Later on, Taco Bell may consider rolling out more enterprise social capabilities to these employees via a tool like IBM Connections, he said. Fluor, an engineering, construction and project management company, decided in mid-2011 that it had to revamp its aging intranet, which over the course of about 10 years had become fragmented and ineffective.
“It wasn’t a single platform, and everyone did their own thing locally using different tools to create different websites,” said Say Lim, vice president of IT at Fluor, in an interview. “From a corporate communications standpoint, it was very difficult to present a cohesive communications channel to our 40,000-plus employees,” he said. The company also realized that its over-reliance on email for collaboration was not only counterproductive but also a turnoff for younger employees who are social media-savvy. It decided that offering enterprise social networking is important not only to improve staff interaction but also to attract and retain this type of employee, he said. Fluor also realized that in the absence of an enterprise social networking system, employee groups were taking matters into their own hands and setting up systems in an ad-hoc manner from various vendors. “We decided we had to offer a well-governed, controlled, corporatewide social business platform,” Lim said. Since its corporate email system is Notes, the company decided to stick with IBM and has adopted Connections and WebSphere Portal, he said. It is still in the process of migrating about 200 legacy collaboration sites. •
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Enterprise Collaboration Will Drive Digital Transformation By Matt Kapko • CIO “That’s the irony about digital transformation, it doesn’t work when in of itself technology is the solution. Technology has to be an enabler and that enabler needs to be aligned with a bigger mission. We already found that companies that lead digital transformation from a more human center actually bring people together in the organization faster and with greater results,” Solis says.
Digital transformation is on the menu for most companies this year, but the ingredients needed are still being determined. However, new research highlights the recipes companies are using to evolve internal processes, structure and culture to match the evolution in customers’ behavior IN TODAY’S increasingly converged world, there’s a tendency to pit CIOs and CMOs against one another as if they’re standing in opposing corners of the ring. But that’s rarely the occasion, says Altimeter Group principal analyst Brian Solis, citing new research from the firm that focuses on the state of digital transformation among companies investing in the digital customer experience. It’s a turf war that’s been sensationalized ad nause-
am, and with few concrete examples. It turns out CIOs and CMOs are in much greater alignment than some would suggest. “The CIO is more important than ever before,” says Solis. Instead of working against a technology roadmap, CIOs are now focusing on organizational processes and objectives that matter more to different types of customers and employees.
‘Technology becomes an enabler, not the answer’ When technology is heralded above all else, there becomes an even greater disconnect between employees and the challenges that their business is trying to solve. “There might be isolated investments that are doing very well, but they’re still isolated,” says Solis. And that’s what opens the door for CIOs or CMOs trying to land grab, he explains.
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Companies focused on the bigger picture are asking questions like how technology can enable them to achieve new things and what’s different about customers today versus yesterday. With the right information and foundation in place, technology becomes an enabler, not the answer, Solis adds. Digital transformation in enterprises isn’t only about what the customers see and experience, according to the firm. Companies must evolve and reimagine their internal
Executives Championing Digital Transformation Efforts Which executive roles champion and support digital transformation within your company?
54%
CMO 42%
CEO 29%
CIO/CTO
CXO
How to compete for digital customers
15%
CDO
process, structure and culture to match this evolution in customer behavior among their employees. “It’s sort of transformation with purpose and once you have purpose you can have vision,” he says. “Those companies that do start, especially from a digital customer experience perspective, they get answers that allow them to then see a path forward for how tech plays a role, but also how internally processes and people need to play a role that supports the greater goal,” says Solis. “No one person can do that alone.” Indeed, Altimeter Group’s research found that digital transformation is most effective when somebody rises to the occasion. But among executives it’s the CMOs that are leading the charge at 54 percent, according to the firm. CEOs come next at 42 percent while CIOs and chief digital officers are championing and supporting digital transformation within their company by a rate of 29 percent, among 20 leading brands interviewed by Altimeter Group.
5% SOURCE: Altimter Group Digital Transformation Survey, 2014. N=59
The top challenge in digital transformation is culture, according to 63 percent of the companies surveyed, but cross-functional collaboration comes close behind. As
businesses compete for digital customers, disparate groups must find a way to work together in a more collaborative manner, but it isn’t always easy or natural. More than half, 56 percent, of the companies surveyed by Altimeter Group said they find it difficult to work with the right people to create a consistent experience and journey that stitches together seamlessly. “Part of the challenge is that, at the same time, external-facing teams are thinking about how the governance works and who owns what,” Ford’s former head of social media Scott Monty tells the firm. “In parallel, we have to figure out internally what infrastructure looks like, the people and the processes (HR), tools, and tech (IT). We have a need for an internal transformation with infrastructure going on at the same time that we’re trying to steer on the outside.”
One in four have mapped the digital customer journey Most companies recognize the need to transform operations for digital employees and customers, but the path to reach that end is rarely paved. Almost 9 in 10, or 88 percent, of executives tell Altimeter that their company is
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undergoing a digital transformation effort in 2014, but only 25 percent have mapped out the digital customer journey. Companies like Sephora are making this transformation by grouping every employee that touches a digital customer into a single team. Social media, customer service, sales, support and other functions are now equally equipped, informed and capable of meeting various customer needs. “It all started with this greater intent to recognize that the digital customer is different than solving any one of these problems alone. To the customer we’re one brand, so we should act like it internally,” explains Solis. “It’s not about egos, it’s not about politics, it’s not about point fingers. We just all recognize that in order to do this and to do this well and efficiently, we had to formally make people who didn’t work together now part of one team. So we start to see the forming of new teams within organization so that they can be more agile and more dynamic,” he says. Finally, Altimeter Group asked the brands being surveyed to list the most important digital transformation initiatives underway within their organization. Here’s how they rank:
The Most Important Digital Transformation Initiatives Please indicate how important each type of initiative is to your digital transformation efforts Very important
Somewhat important
Improving processes that expedite changes to digital properties, i.e., website updates, new mobile or social platforms, etc.
80%
19%
Updating our website and ecommerce programs for a mobile world
71%
25%
Integrating all social, mobile, web, ecommerce, service efforts and investments to deliver an integrated and frictionless customer experience
70%
36%
Updating customer-facing technology systems
66%
29%
Further researching our customers’ digital touchpoints, as there’s more to learn
63%
36%
Building a social media program that is more competitive with our peers’
58%
36%
Creating a sense of urgency to show executives that our digital transformation effort does not align with current plans
54%
27%
Overhauling customer service to meet expectations of connected customers
46%
49%
SOURCE: Altimter Group Digital Transformation Survey, 2014. N=59
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Many Employees Won’t Mingle With Enterprise Social Software By Juan Carlos Perez • IDG News Service
Achieving solid adoption of these ‘Facebook-for-work’ tools takes planning, vision, training and effort IN A GREAT IT industry irony, enterprise social networking (ESN) software, designed to boost interaction and collaboration, is often ignored by users and ends up forgotten like the proverbial ghost town with rolling tumbleweeds. The promise of a successful ESN deployment is appealing to businesses: implement a Facebook- and Twitter-like system for your workplace, with employee profiles, activity streams, document sharing, groups, discussion forums and microblogging, and watch employee collaboration bloom. IT and business managers envision staffers using the ESN suite for brainstorming ideas, answering each other’s questions, discovering colleagues with valuable expertise, co-editing marketing materials, sharing sales leads and
collaborating on a new product design. ESN software is also often billed as the cure for moribund intranets that employees rarely visit, and for stagnant extranets that fail to attract customers and partners. Implemented properly, ESN can be beneficial, analysts say. “It’s great for breaking down geographical barriers and harnessing collective action,” said Rob Koplowitz, a Forrester Research analyst. “Their value can be astronomical.” The siren song of ESN is hard to resist. Spending on this type of software is expected to grow from $4.77 billion in 2014 to $8.14 billion in 2019, according to MarketsandMarkets. Yet, many companies struggle to achieve the level of user adoption and engagement for ESN suites that’s nec-
essary for them to be effective. “It’s still a challenge, and will be for a while,” Koplowitz said. “It’s going to be a long journey.” Carol Rozwell, a Gartner analyst, estimates that between 70 percent and 80 percent of companies she talks to about their ESN deployments are struggling with it. “Too often we see companies whose leaders are thrilled with the technology, and they see how quickly consumer social networks like Facebook have grown. They think they’ll accomplish the same growth rate and participation if they purchase the right tool,” she said. “That approach doesn’t work.” Gartner predicts that through 2015, 80 percent of social business efforts will not achieve their intended benefits due to inadequate leadership and an overemphasis on technology, she said. Charlene Li, an Altimeter Group analyst, shares a similar view. “It’s not a situation where if you build it, they will
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It’s for the good of the company come. That’s not how it works at all,” she said. “Adoption definitely continues to be a problem.” The pitfalls are plentiful and not altogether obvious. Employees may resist having to spend time monitoring and tending to another “inbox” of sorts, when they are barely able to keep email under control. Some may not feel comfortable publishing their thoughts and opinions via blogs and comments on forums. Others may not see any value in using the software. The experts say that there has to be a business goal behind the implementation of an ESN suite, and that this has to be made explicitly clear to the end users, who must see how the software can help them do their job better. It’s also important to provide proper training to show employees how they can switch some -- or many -- email and IM interactions over to the ESN software, and be more productive and efficient. It’s also key for managers and top
Experts say that there has to be a business goal behind the implementation of an ESN suite, and that this has to be made explicitly clear to the end users.
company executives to endorse the use of the ESN software and lead by example through their own participation. Experts also say it helps when the ESN software is integrated at a technology level with the other tools employees use on a daily basis to do their jobs, whether it’s their email and calendaring client, their CRM and ERP suites or their office productivity applications. All that can be done in a way that works as intended. GE, which has made use of many of these best practices when rolling out ESN software in recent years, achieved success where other companies have stumbled. GE has a primary ESN suite that’s available to all 300,000 employees globally and that’s known internally as GE Colab, and it has other ESN tools in place for specific teams and departments. The adoption of ESN software is part of a broader push within GE to leverage cloud computing products to simplify
employee access to information and help them work more effectively. It includes the recent decision to make the Box cloud storage and file-sharing service available to all employees. The GE Colab system, in place since late 2012, gets very strong usage. “Hundreds of communities have popped up on Colab,” said Andrew Markowitz, the company’s global director of digital strategy. “It’s very actively used. There are strong metrics around it.” It has gotten so far about 50 million page views. Several hundred thousand comments have been posted to it. Users spend an average of 10 minutes on GE Colab per visit. “There is good, strong appetite for this type of tool,” he said. GE Colab, based on a commercial ESN suite Markowitz declined to identify, acts as the typical ESN: It’s an intranet for information dissemination and lets employees create profiles, follow each other’s posts via activity
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streams, host and share documents, brainstorm, track down experts, interact in forums and groups and the like. In one of many similar examples, GE search marketing experts dispersed across the company have found each other and come together via Colab to share ideas and tips about their job. “In a company like GE with 300,000 people, connecting those islands is a big deal,” he said. A key for its success is that it wasn’t a solution looking for a problem, but rather the opposite. GE wanted to make information more easily accessible to its massive workforce, and from the start encouraged employees to use Colab, telling them it would be a tool where they would find valuable content and interactions that would help them with their work. “To everyone’s credit, they saw the value, and started using it organically,” he said. A key is to have a “purpose-driven” ESN, according to Altimeter’s Li. “Successful programs have clear prescriptions on how the ESN should be used and why,” she said. They’re also clear on the specific problems the ESN is meant to help solve, whether it’s to make it easier for employees to find experts among their colleagues or to re-
duce the reliance on email for communications, she said. “Many ESNs aren’t living up to their full potential because they’ve been implemented as a technology and not as a business strategy,” Li said. Gartner’s Rozwell stresses that there needs to be “a compelling purpose for which the tool will be used.” Compelling in this context means not only that the software has to be enticing, but that it also helps people get their job done better, whether that means faster, easier, more efficiently or less expensively, she said. “The key there is that it’s got to help me get my real work done,” Rozwell said. Companies that seek her advice sometimes complain that, for example, they can’t get their employees to blog, without having asked themselves first whether blogging will be helpful to those staffers or relevant to their jobs. The participation of managers, informal team leaders and top level executives is also crucial, because average workers will take their cue from them. “That demonstrates the fact that this is a real set of tools for everyone,” she said. “The leaders have to model the behavior they want others to mirror.” And once people start dipping their toes in the water,
managers have to be there validating their efforts, by acknowledging their participation with gratitude. “You’re trying to start up new behaviors, so when people take these new steps and do what you want them to do, it’s going to be uncomfortable for them at first, so reinforce their actions,” Rozwell said. For Alan Lepofsky, a Constellation Research analyst, the meshing of ESNs with business processes is essential. “If an ESN is not integrated with tools like file-sharing, CRM, marketing automation, support tracking or project management, then it becomes just another tool, and that is where adoption issues begin,” he said via email. Organizations need to ensure that ESNs are woven deeply in to their core business processes in areas such as sales, marketing and engineering, according to Lepofsky. All of this means that setting up an ESN that enjoys robust engagement among users takes planning, vision and effort, especially because by definition it involves a change in how people work, according to Forrester’s Koplowitz. “It’s not easy. It’s a tough road, much tougher than we anticipated, but the payoff is very high,” Koplowitz said. “Successful companies have worked hard at it, or they’ve had help. They’re starting to give us the blueprint now how to do this effectively.”•
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Collaboration 2.0: Old Meets New By Nancy Gohring • Computerworld
Take the essential concept of sharing, then add cloud, social, Web and mobile THE CONCEPT of enterprise collaboration tools is nothing new. After all, Lotus Notes, a pioneer in this technology, dates back 25 years. And computing visionary Douglas Engelbart famously showed off early collaborative software in his 1968 “Mother of All Demos.” Yet in the past few years a host of new collaboration products has hit the market, and they differ from their predecessors in ways both big and small. Yes, the new tools, like the old, promote collaboration and idea-sharing in the workplace. But the new crop is, generally speaking, Web- or cloud-based instead of living on a server inside the firewall. They are also, mostly, much easier to use and set up than the older generations. There are also some new kinds of collaboration built around
tools such as task management, chat, social networking and even document sharing. “A common thread among these really highly disruptive vendors is they’re always born in the cloud,” says Rob Koplowitz, a Forrester Research analyst. “They’re not retrofitting something to the cloud. They are very easy to access and start using, even on an individual basis and certainly by a small team.” In contrast, Notes, for instance, was a big piece of software tied to a specific version of Windows. That meant users got updates only when they got a new OS. “You sat around with 4-year-old software you hated,” says Alan Lepofsky, who spent over a decade working on Notes at IBM and is now a Constellation Research analyst.
Plus, a Web-based offering is easily accessible by mobile devices, without requiring users to download an app. That makes the products useful in today’s work environment, where people want to work wherever, whenever and with any device. Also, and perhaps most notably, a culture of sharing and social networking has become much more ingrained. “We spent a lot of time trying to explain what Notes was,” Lepofsky says. Today, people expect to be able to share and communicate at work as easily as they do in their personal lives. Despite the advances, the new breed of services faces similar implementation challenges that products such as Notes and Microsoft’s SharePoint have faced. “We do see a lot of failures” in deployment, says Jeffrey Mann, a Gartner analyst. Still, with forethought into how best to roll out a new tool, some businesses say they have gained notable efficiencies.
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The benefits Companies that use collaboration tools say they find real value in them, often much more than they had with some of the older products. Populous, which manages major sporting events including the Super Bowl and NCAA tournaments from the Big 10 men’s basketball games to the Sugar Bowl and Orange Bowl, turned to collaboration tools to help coordinate those huge events. The company designs and manages the building of the physical space and oversees the operations planning. It must coordinate the activities of hundreds of people who work for dozens of different companies, ranging from fence builders to broadcasters. “We got to the point with the large events that they were absolutely unmanageable,” says Marc Klein, associate principal for Populous. The company had a full-time person whose job it was to receive emailed spreadsheets of worker schedules, pore over them to find the updates, make changes to the master and then send it back out to everyone. “There was no true live schedule information available at any real time,” he says. As a result, mistakes were happening too often. Populous needed a service that didn’t require a client ap-
Some definitions “Collaboration tool” has become a catch-all term that a wide range of vendors use. Some providers deliver a host of features, including file sharing, task management, social networking and instant messaging, all in one offering. Others wrap collaboration tools into traditional enterprise products such as CRM and ERP software. And yet others focus on one core function, such as file sharing, and offer additional lightweight features that could help with collaboration. The adoption of such tools in the enterprise has grown steadily. Jane McConnell, adviser and researcher at Digital Workplace Trends, found that in 2009, fewer than 10% of organizations she surveyed had deployed enterprise social networking software, either in parts of their organization or across the business. In 2013, deployments had jumped to 40% of organizations. Her annual report, The Digital Workplace in the Connected Organization, surveys 314 companies around the world.
McConnell puts survey respondents into two groups -- early adopter firms, which typically make up 20% of the respondents, and everyone else, which she calls the majority. In her most recent survey, from third-quarter 2013, 57% of the early adopters had deployed a production enterprise social networking product companywide. That’s compared to just 25% of the majority. But a fair number of those majority firms are making steps to adopt new social products. Some 29% said they were considering or planning a deployment and 18% were piloting products. Other collaboration tools being used across the board, the survey says, include Web-based video meetings, conference calls and webinars with customers. Both early adopters and the majority use “unofficial, ad hoc collaborative workspaces” in the public cloud. This is part of a greater trend “that people are increasingly taking their tools into their own hands and using what suits them best regardless of corporate policies,” according to the survey. -- Nancy Gohring
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plication because some partners, such as the NCAA, have strict requirements about the kind of new software that can be loaded onto workers’ computers, Klein says. He also wanted a service that could be easily accessible on a mobile phone. Around four years ago, the company settled on Smartsheet, which offers a spreadsheet-like interface that teams can share -- adding notes, attaching documents, setting up alerts and linking to calendars. In the past, for an event like the Super Bowl, Populous would have a schedule on a spreadsheet with 5,000 lines. Now, using Smartsheet, it creates one master schedule but can sort it and send only the relevant parts to various vendors. Smartsheet also offers a cost structure that works great for Populous, Klein says. He pays only for licensed users, a small group of people who travel from event to event. The additional 200 to 300 people who are invited to collaborate for each event can do so without cost. That makes it easy for him to predict the cost when he’s budgeting.
The future Experts say collaboration tool providers will continue to take cues from the consumer market when adding new features. “I’m excited about the next-generation version of content creation,” says Constellation Research analyst Alan Lepofsky. People don’t want to just share links to Word documents; they want to use services that look like Vine or Pinterest for sharing, he says. Gartner expects more interest in video. “Recorded video is probably going to be as big as realtime video,” says Gartner analyst Jeffrey Mann. Lepofsky also expects to see much more work around what he calls “personal analytics.” The idea is to offer data to individual users about whether their blog posts are being read or if their files are being opened.
The services might also be able to advise users about the best time of day to share on a company social network, based on past performance, for example. Those types of new features are likely to come first from the standalone vendors, which are younger and tend to be more nimble. But businesses should also expect traditional enterprise software makers such as Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP to build more collaboration tools into their products, Lepofsky says. This is already happening, but it makes these vendors viable options for enterprises to consider even into the future, he says. For businesses that have already implemented software from one of those vendors, it could make sense to stick with them for new or future collaboration features, Lepofsky says. -- Nancy Gohring
Implementation can’t be an afterthought Whether a company uses an array of features for different applications or benefits from a more focused use case, a careful approach to rollout is key. Otherwise, the tools are
unlikely to be widely used. “Don’t make a choice like ‘we’re going with SharePoint’ and then figure out how to use it.” That’s a sure-fire way
to ensure nobody will actually use the package, he adds. Gartner’s Mann sees companies that won’t consider new collaboration tools because they are in industries with
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Don’t make waves tough compliance regulations. “The irony is, then they keep with email, which has even fewer controls,” he says. However, that doesn’t mean companies should just throw open the door to any and all collaboration tools, he says. Some groups might prefer a curated environment, or might find a space for open communications to be too big a
Some groups might prefer a curated environment, or might find a space for open communications to be too big a cultural change. Pushing a collaboration tool into that environment can be more disruptive than it’s worth.
cultural change. Pushing a collaboration tool into that environment can be more disruptive than it’s worth, Mann says. Other users might need to be taught about appropriate use of collaboration tools. “People need to think about who’s in this group,” Mann says. For instance, if a manager creates a group for colleagues to work out forthcoming lay-
offs, the group shouldn’t be accessed by all employees. “It’s best to accept that not every attempt at using a collaboration tool will be successful,” Mann suggests. “What usually happens is it will be spotty,” he says. “But it’s better to have a few good successes than to bang your head going after areas that don’t work.”•
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Gartner Tells IT Executives How to Enable Enterprise Collaboration By Matt Kapko • CIO
Collaboration is the essence of teamwork and probably the most important reason businesses build teams in the first place. Ironically, many companies struggle to embrace and enable collaboration among today’s digital workforce ANALYSTS, CIOS and other IT executives at Gartner’s Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit discussed why businesses are failing to make the most of collaboration, and offered advice on how to develop a more enriched digital workforce. “Because we have access to very good tools in our private lives we expect the same level of functionality and performance in business,” says Jeffrey Mann, a vice president of research at Gartner.
Workers are often disappointed by legacy applications that can drag down productivity and workflow. As a result, Mann says, many employees have stopped using these ineffective apps or at least avoid using them as much as possible. These issues are ignored at every business’s peril, Mann says. According to a recent Gallup poll, only 13% of employees are engaged at work. “What you’ll find is that disengaged employees will potentially be killing your business,” he says.
Content can become the “connecting tissue” between employers, customers and business goals, but if company data is not available at the right time in the right context it will slow down the machinery of an entire business, says Mann. “Just like oil, if it stays buried underground well there’s not going to be any value created from it.” Susan Landry, managing vice president of Gartner Research, reminds her colleagues that IT has been digitizing business since the dawn of computing. “We’ve been spending billions bringing things together, [but] our data and logic is scattered all over the place,” she says.
Experiment with mobile, social, cloud and data Enterprise collaboration is being transformed by the nexus of mobile, social, cloud and data, says Monica Basso, a research vice president at Gartner. While the hurdles to suc-
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cess may be daunting, she encourages businesses to not be shy about experimenting with newer tools and resources. “Collaboration can turn into something more contextualized and more impactful in terms of the business,” she says. “This new collaboration is going to be a differentiating factor for the competitiveness of your company going forward.” Basso says four trends -- mobile devices, BYOD, mobile apps and personal cloud storage/sharing services -- are driving the adoption of mobile collaboration today. By 2017, Gartner expects 3 billion new device units to be shipped annually, bringing the total installed base to more than 8 billion connected devices by then. “Collaboration styles or apps that used to be available on PCs are going to be transferred or need to be transferred to the mobile environment,” she says.
IT must embrace mobile apps Gartner’s research concludes that 60% of organizations have already deployed BYOD as an option to the more traditional corporate programs. The average adoption rate of BYOD smartphones in these organizations is at 33% while the average BYOD tablet adoption rate is at 47%, according to Gartner.
By 2020, 45% of all CIOs surveyed by Gartner said they expect to be supporting BYOD programs and only half of them are expected to still be running a corporate device program at all by then. Mobile applications are driving collaboration and disrupting the market because they often take the user’s perspective into account first and foremost. “We think the mobile apps paradigms will have to be adopted by IT organizations in their systems,” Basso says. “This is the new standard that consumer apps have set for the workplace, for individuals,” she adds. “For enterprise, it’s important to think about mobile apps as an enabler for a more accessible and easier access point to their employees.” Within two years, Gartner projects more than 300 billion mobile apps a year will be downloaded from mobile app stores. “This is where the work is moving so mobile is becoming the primary access point for IT resources and solutions,” says Basso.
file storage and sharing services at work. While these services make it easier for employees to find and share content, they also create a number of challenges like potentially creating an open door to bring corporate data into the wrong hands. “Don’t try to block this. Try to exploit this phenomenon,” says Basso. “You shouldn’t deny the existence. This is what we see in many cases is that many companies ignore how many employees have installed Dropbox, for example.” By 2016, Gartner expects every mobile device will be connected to at least five different cloud file storage or sharing apps. The number of mobile social users is expected to reach 2.5 billion by that time as well. “Collaboration is enabled by technology, but collaboration is not just about technology,” Basso says. Organizations still need to identify and remove the roadblocks that are preventing a more collaborative environment from taking flight.
Don’t block cloud storage services
How Deutsche Bank embraced collaboration at scale
Some of the biggest organization tensions between IT and users today come from the prolific use of personal cloud
When John Stepper began thinking about how to enable more effective collaboration among staff at Deutsche
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Spread your wings Bank five years ago, the complexities were daunting considering the financial institution employs more than 100,000 people in at least 70 countries. “I saw the gap of what I was able to do at home on my phone for free and what I was able to do at work -that gap was growing,” says Stepper, managing director at Deutsche Bank. Previously failed attempts kept to the same pattern in which there would be early adoption and buzz followed by silence. “We didn’t really change very much. We certainly didn’t make a dent in how people worked,” he says. Stepper said he and his team began developing of an enterprise social network in 2012 called myDB. “People didn’t want more tools and they wanted fewer of them and they wanted work to be simpler,” he says. “This one stuck, this one actually made a difference,” he says. In April 2014 “about 40,000 people used myDB” and the
Collaboration is enabled by technology, but collaboration is not just about technology. Organizations still need to identify and remove the roadblocks that are preventing a more collaborative environment from taking flight.
number of users and platforms myDB is replacing goes up every month. With 40% of Deutsche Bank employees now using myDB, Stepper has solidified the seven elements most important to a successful enterprise collaboration strategy: • Platform • Commercial value • Community managers • Management engagement • Advocate network • Center of excellence • Individual benefits “The interesting part and the hard part is how do you take these things and apply them to your particular culture, your particular company,” he says. “Success also
looks different at different times at different maturity levels. So what we thought was success two years ago wouldn’t nearly be enough now.” While Stepper initially expected myDB to go viral, the project steadily gained interest and usage on an individual or team-by-team basis over time. The network has grown to 40,000 users but as many as 80,000 employees say they want to use it, so Stepper still has his work cut out for him. “Part of the promised land is making work more fulfilling,” he says. “People hate work, it’s dehumanizing. That’s what we’ve made it. We don’t treat people like people. In the promised land, we have the opportunity to re-humanize work and make work more effective.”
No short cut to collaboration Businesses often struggle with collaboration because it can be so difficult to replicate at scale. Before myDB got
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The land of milk and productivity off the ground, Stepper and his team experimented with 20 different ideas -- four of which actually worked. There is no prescriptive way to implement these ideas other than trying a variety of fast, cheap experiments before quickly pruning down to the most effective solutions. For myDB, the typical path to adoption begins with authenticating an account and then interacting with the service or tracking meaningful insights from the platform. “As much as vanity metrics aren’t science in terms of value, it’s like the first set of numbers that shows you’re relevant
“Part of the promised land is making work more fulfilling. People hate work, it’s dehumanizing. That’s what we’ve made it. We don’t treat people like people. In the promised land, we have the opportunity to re-humanize work and make work more effective.” —John Stepper, managing director, Deutsche Bank and then you start talking about business testimonials and real money,” Stepper adds. “If there are more than 10,000 people in India using our platform, even if that’s generally true, it’s not terribly useful because there could be 500 that are awesome at it,” he says.
1. Create and imagine a new digital story for your organization and determine three scenarios in which your organization could work radically different in a digital world. 2. Identify parts of your infrastructure that must go. “Identify those parts that are hostile to a digital workforce,” says Mann.
3 take-away tips from Gartner Gartner’s Mann and Landry left attendees with three tips, or homework as they put it:
3. Identify the skills or talent you can afford to lose and those you need to develop. •
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