Accenture Webinar Follow-Up: Q&A with Tom Barfield (Part 2)

In our recent webinar with Tom Barfield of Accenture, he explored how the company takes a comprehensive hire-to-retire approach for capability development through social learning. In Part 1 of this blog we summarized the viewers’ answers to the question “what imperatives or challenges are causing you to consider a social approach?”

In Part 2 of this blog, Tom graciously took the time to answer many of the remaining questions we did not get to during the live webinar. Here they are by category:

Adoption

Q: How do you define connect, contribute, and cultivate from a measurement perspective? And can you share specifically how you would put people into the 3C categories?

Tom: The table below summarizes the metrics that are aligned to each of the three C’s. Each person receives a total score which is made up of a possible 100 points for each of the C’s. Any one metric may be worth 10-30 points.

Connect	Contribute	Cultivate
Subscribe to e-mail digest	Contribution posted to KX as contact	Respond to Discussion
Download content in the KX	Post Discussion Question	Comment microblog, contribution, video, blog, idea
Vote Idea (KX or Grapevine)	Create Blog	Edit Wiki
Member of a Community	Create Microblog
Rate	Create Idea (KX or Grapevine)
Complete People Profile - bio, photo, additional skills	Create Wiki
Visit an Assets tab	Create Bookmarks
Visit one.accenture.com	Download of content on the KX by others
	Blogs viewed by others

Q: What period of time is used to measure the 3 c's (a month, week, quarter?) How often do I need to contribute to be counted as such?

Tom: Today we run our scoring process after each quarter. Most elements are based on activity during the quarter, but there are some exceptions. For instance, in Connect, if you complete your profile and subscribe to the email digest once, you will automatically continue to receive points in the future. 

Q: How do you address the fear factor (e.g., where someone sits on a painful lesson learned rather than publicizing it for all to learn from)?

Tom:  An excellent question – and one I admit we haven’t completely solved.  From a learning perspective failure has much to teach. I don’t expect that our people proactively share their lessons learned - individually. I do see more of that openness, however, in responses to questions (ex. “I tried this approach and it didn’t work”). I think we do a better job at capturing lessons learned more formally through our offering owners – who are responsible for specific solutions. As we implement these solutions we are able to learn from our mistakes which are then baked back into our offerings for future delivery.

Another type of fear factor can come from general sharing. There can be a hesitancy to share because of a belief that their point-of-view or insight needs to be perfect. One of the ways we try to address this is by encouraging our leaders to be natural in their communication style – lose the formality, spelling mistakes are OK. We also encourage our leaders to engage in conversations – even if it is simply saying “Thank you” - to a post that was made. 

Management

Q: Do you still find the need to have a "librarian" to manage taxonomy, tagging, and findability of the data? Or are you 100% organic in terms of management of the knowledge?

Tom: The Social Learning team I lead is responsible for providing taxonomy management governance; interestingly we have just started an internal debate on my team about the value of taxonomy vs. folksonomy (I believe both have a place in our world). The main purpose of taxonomy and tagging is of course to help improve the findability of content. 

From a content perspective our biggest challenge continues to be search quality. In this past year we have formed a small Search Center of Excellence team whose sole responsibility is identifying and implementing approaches to improve search quality. This can be through search relevancy tuning or improvements to managing our content. I expect that we will start seeing the fruit from this team’s work in the next month or so.

Q: What is the curation overhead? Do you invest in resources directly or expect the end users to do this work?

Tom: We have a central team who are located primarily in India that helps us with the management of content, metrics, and site maintenance. We are also in the process of expanding the responsibility of this team to include community management. Approximately 70% of the content that is contributed is harvested from our client teams vs. posted by end users. We focus our content harvesting on the most strategic content areas where content gaps have been identified. 

Technical

Q: Are you using any product for gamification? Or is it custom software?

Tom:  We plan to use the Spotlight module provided in NewsGator Social Sites.

Q: Do you use FAST for SharePoint for search?

Tom:  Yes

Q: The e-mail into a community to post a question is interesting. How is that enabled?

Tom:  This is native functionality included in NewsGator Social Sites. Questions or insights that are posted with #hashtags cause the system to identify any community or users following those #hashtags and routes the question/insight to those communities and individuals.

Rollout

Q: Can you talk more about the integration between social learning and formal learning programs?

Tom:  There are several areas of integration:

• Organization – We have an organization known as Capability Development responsible for working with areas of our business to understand their skill and knowledge needs. Based on these needs, Capability Development will develop a strategy to meet the performance goals.  This strategy incorporates a combination of formal and social learning approaches.
• Governance – Members of Capability Development (including the Chief Learning Officer) are a primary component of the Social Learning Steering Team that I lead which helps me set the vision and priorities for our social learning investments.
• Technology/Innovation – While our Social Learning system (called Knowledge Exchange) and our Learning Management System (myLearning) are separate technology infrastructures, the teams driving these systems work together in developing the visions and requirements of each system. 

Q: Do you find it works best to organize groups/communities around skill sets (e.g., project management) or industry sectors or product offerings?

Tom: Yes, yes, and yes. Those are all examples of categories of communities that are provided. I wouldn’t say that one is better than the other. Our main categories of communities are Industry (ex. Banking), Business Function (ex. CRM, Strategy), Technology (ex. Testing, Technical Architecture) and Offering.  We also have informal social communities (ex. Running, Gamers).


Thank you Tom for taking the time to answers these great questions submitted by our webinar viewers! Again, if you missed the webinar, you can watch the on-demand version anytime.

As you can tell Accenture has a quite impressive and innovative social strategy where they invest heavily in making sure their employees benefit from social tools like Microsoft SharePoint and NewsGator Social Sites. To find out more about how NewsGator can guide you in the right “social” direction, contact us today!

Accenture Webinar Follow-Up: Q&A with Tom Barfield (Part 1)

During our webinar with Tom Barfield of Accenture, he addressed the audience and asked “Think about your business or your area of the business – what imperatives or challenges are causing you to consider a social approach?” In Part 1 of this blog we captured everyone’s responses and summarized them below. Do you have any more to add?

 

• Want to improve productivity of workers
  • Increase performance
  • Improve processes
  • Increase productivity    
  • Break down old barriers between businesses to improve the speed of work and decision making    
  • Share information and increase efficiency
  • Leverage workforce to the fullest as good talent is difficult to recruit

• Want to foster innovation
  • Gain competitive advantage with best people
  • Develop ideas beyond what a closed group of people can do
  • Facilitate serendipitous connections to build collaboration and new ideas   

• Want to foster collaboration
  • Enable sales force virtual team collaboration 
  • Solve scientific problems through the use of collaboration

• Want to improve employee engagement, retention
  • Decrease turn over, globally
  • Engage Millennials in new and different ways; younger generation coming in and expecting to learn this way
  • Foster employee engagement by building a stronger, more scalable sense of community
  • Offer different learning styles and demands of employees

• Want to better connect a dispersed workforce
  • Allow for globalization and expansion, reaching people all over the world; many of whom work remotely

• Need to keep up with speed of business
  • Enable faster learning in changing times
  • Keep up with speed of changes

• Want to standardize business processes, image
  • Communicate in a "one-firm" channel instead of email; leading to greater connections between offices    
  • Develop a common work flow; critical in health care to bridge multiple hospitals who are used to their own way of doing things
  • Mend fragmented brand

• Want to improve information, method sharing
  • We want to take advantage of what our site employees know, and want to know. We need to share more information and ensure the site employees understand and embrace the company culture.    
  • Share market research techniques across product brand teams    
  • Surface knowledge dispersed across the organization
  • Communicate best practices to reduce making the same mistakes

• Connect with and involve customers
  • Establish a better way of learning, creating networks
  • Integrate client in delivery and innovation

• Knowledge retention and identification
  • Help find subject matter experts within the organization; expertise location
  • Retain tacit knowledge from retiring experts   

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this follow-up blog with Tom Barfield of Accenture as he answers more questions that we weren’t able to address during the live webinar Q&A. Check back tomorrow!

If you missed the webinar, you can watch the on-demand version anytime!

Support Spontaneous Collaboration with a Sphere

Collaboration and internal group communications are often spontaneous; a quick brainstorm of ideas or an ad hoc clustering of people focused on a topic or problem. For this type of agile collaboration you don’t need a long-term, full-scale community with full document handling capability – you need a Sphere!

NewsGator Social Sites 2010 lets users quickly pull together a public or private group using distribution lists or active directory groups. Tapping into SharePoint audiences, Sphere users can easily gather the right group of people as followers to be part of the conversation – without the need of involving IT.

Since Spheres are all about agility and being flexible in a fast paced environment, simple administration of ownership is vital and easier than ever. A Sphere administrator gets a new tab in the management user interface providing them with the ability to change the ownership of a Sphere as needed. This new admin feature makes a Sphere more able to fulfill its intended function – empowering a workforce with more internal mobility whereby creating a collaborative environment that moves as quickly as your business.

To find out more about how NewsGator Social Sites and its Sphere feature can help you enable a more nimble, collaborative workforce, please visit www.newsgator.com.

Are there instances when self-created and administered breakout groups like Spheres would make sense for your organization?

Reaching New Milestones with NewsGator as the Guide

For an increasing percentage of Fortune 2000 organizations around the world, NewsGator is the way social business gets done. As many of our customers implement social for the first time or upgrade their platform from a previous version of Microsoft SharePoint and Social Sites, NewsGator is there to be a guide – to make sure the process goes as smoothly as possible.

A few customers in the first quarter of 2012 reached impressive milestones and we would like to give them a shout out for a job well done! As many of you may know, becoming a “social” enterprise not only involves IT but it’s a fundamental cultural change within your organization.

Accenture – a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company with more than 246,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries – recently migrated from SharePoint and Social Sites 2007 to 2010. With help from NewsGator, they were able to make this a successful transition across their entire global organization. Nice work Accenture!

The Nature Conservancy (TNC) – is the leading conservation organization who protects ecologically important lands and waters for nature and people in all 50 states and in more than 30 countries. The team at TNC successfully launched their internal CONNECT portal across the organization with immediate adoption of more than 1/3 of their staff. Congratulations TNC!

MTN Group – a multi-national telecommunications group offering voice and data communications products and services to individuals and businesses – recently launched their Intranet portal called MTN Connect running on SharePoint and Social Sites 2010. This launch marks the beginning of the transformation of MTN into one global community. Way to go MTN!

Stockland – one of Australia’s leading diversified property groups – just upgraded from SharePoint 2007 to 2010. In that process they implemented Social Sites 2010 as a catalyst to begin redefining their organizational purpose and establish better ways to communicate and collaborate internally. Great job Stockland!

Wipro – employs over 120,000 people across five continents to provide IT solutions and services globally to their clients. They recently launched their Catalyst portal aimed at improving employee productivity and satisfaction, capturing and sharing knowledge and best practices, breaking down silos between geographies and departments, and enabling mobility. Kudos Wipro!

When it comes to making SharePoint and the entire Microsoft stack more social, NewsGator is the answer. We have the most experience and insight, more paid users (over three million), more implementations, a significant feature edge, a more mature portfolio and, as Microsoft’s 2011 Partner of the Year, a roadmap to extend the value of the infrastructure you’ve already paid for.

The world of social isn’t always charted. Let NewsGator be your social guide.

Tune in by tuning out: Mute Activity Stream Email Notifications

The information age mantra seems always to be: “more! faster!” In a social enterprise, activity streams are a prime example. They can get loud…fast – and there’s no dial to turn it down.  While volume and speed have their place, increasingly the real value in information is found in managing it - being able to tune in to what’s really important while filtering out the noise. Not everything requires a comment. Sometimes a glance is enough to give you what you need and you don’t need to be included in every contribution that follows. 

NewsGator Social Sites is making it easier to hone your social experience by applying intelligent routing and muting email notifications. Being able to fine-tune the activity stream silences the white noise, making it easier to stay focused on relevant content at the right time. Just click the “mute” link in your email notification to opt-out from receiving further notifications on a particular thread. Worried you might miss something?  When another user specifically @targets you, you automatically re-subscribe to the conversation and begin receiving notifications again.

Smart, relevant social interaction is sometimes as easy as clicking “mute.”  To learn more about how Social Sites is boosting company productivity and engagement globally, please visit www.newsgator.com.

Have you found less can be more in social information? Would a “mute” capability help you tune in?

OppenheimerFunds Webinar: Follow-Up Q&A Blog

If you attended our recent webinar with Codey Fredenhagen and Colleen Bridges of OppenheimerFunds, you know their corporate intranet, called MyOFI and built on SharePoint 2010 and NewsGator Social Sites 2010, has grown virally throughout the organization. We had so many questions from the audience we weren’t able to get to all of them during the webinar. Fortunately, Codey and Colleen were gracious enough to take the time to answer the rest of them via this follow-up blog. Here they are:

Rollout

1.  How do you or did you measure adoption and collaboration? Do you use any specific tools or strategies?

a.  We have developed specific SQL queries that export the data out of the database and then report in Excel.  We are taking the basic metrics at this point (e.g., how many events by type week over week, how much event activity per Community).

b. We learned at the NewsGator Collective user group meeting, however, that these might not be the best measures. Some companies are using metrics around how quickly information was found, measuring the perception of speed gained in finding knowledge and the increase in collaboration.  We are looking at how we can best measure this in our environment.

2.  Can they tell us more about the Change Management group?  What was their focus and what type of resources made up this group - HR, Communications, etc.?

a. The Change Management (CM) Group is comprised of Corporate Communications, Project Governance & Delivery, SharePoint Development, Corporate Training, Marketing, Legal and Compliance.  It’s a team of about eight people for a 2,000 person employee base.

b. The CM Group is primarily geared to address “social” collaboration. Their goal is to teach about and introduce people to a new way of getting information to others that need it. The group initially focused on how to drive adoption and awareness, but now is more focused on communicating the value of “collaboration.”   

c. The CM Group was absolutely vital to making the implementation of MySite and Communities a success. You need to build excitement across a diverse group – the CM Group is a cheerleader as well as a fighter when needed. In our functional groups it was crucial to have people that could cross those boundaries easily and effectively. It’s imperative to keep the CM Group diverse and positive. 

3. Did you perform any formal usability testing? If so, what types of insights came from that research? Did any customizations come from that research?

a. When it came to our corporate intranet site makeover, MyOFI, we had an experienced User Experience Team work through how best to lay out the site. It has really paid off. Finding information on the site is far better than it used to be. 

b. Also, the need to incorporate a consistent branding across all the sites was a key component to getting enterprise acceptance. Our previous efforts were not globally branded and it gave people an excuse to avoid an application that didn’t appear to be “corporate sponsored”.

Adoption
4. How are you educating users on E2.0 in general (i.e., why is E2.0 important vs. how to use Social Sites)?

a. There has been a tremendous amount of senior leadership campaigning and promoting the use of E2.0. We hold several demo sessions (Lunch-n-Learn, Tech Dojo, etc.)  We have seeded the community with some evangelists that were early adopters and believers in the medium. And we have specifically done some targeted training about when to use email, IM, blogs, and social (NewsGator). 

b. Education is probably the most important aspect of the implementation. You need to reinforce that it is okay to use this medium to communicate and promote its use. It has been a major shift for our company to communicate in this manner. 

Results/Benefits
5. How are you making the jump from social to business? In other words, what do you think will be the most productive use of this tool in your business environment?

a. It really has been more about the business and much less about the social. We rolled this out as a business tool to be used for business communication. This set the tone. It wasn’t introduced as a “water-cooler” substitute – more as a tool that would enable others to more easily collaborate. People recognize that “social” is effective in a business setting because people get what they need faster and more effectively than other means.

6. Is your implementation purely social or have you formally embedded any business processes (i.e., moved from some previous process to the Social Sites platform)?

a. We didn’t have any previous internal social application, so this was our initial foray into the space. We set the tone as “business only.”  All the business processes are embedded into MySite, the Intranet, and Communities. We found people are too busy trying to do their jobs; that just “social” was not worthwhile. The activities they perform are about getting work done. 

Governance
7. Do you let anyone create a Sphere in Social Sites? Or, do they have to request it and have someone with elevated privileges create it?

a. Spheres are available to anyone to create and manage – unlike Communities which are set up through an approval process to ensure people know the commitment that they must make for the site.

8. What are you putting in place to govern video? File format? File size? Raw/edited? Centralized videographers or does everyone gets a camera?

a. Video hasn’t taken hold too much. We do limit personal MySite storage and each Community also has a limit of 5GB. We can increase that if there is a reasonable request.

b. The governance of video falls under the strict electronic usage policy that we have established. 

c. We have installed some professional video components that comprise the main intranet site. These are managed by our Corporate Communications group and are professionally edited and produced. This was a large investment and commitment on the part of our Corporate Communication teams and it has been very well received. 

Management
9. Who maintains and monitors the social communication at OppenheimerFunds? Is it HR, IT or Corporate Communications? What challenges are you seeing, if any, with this?

a. All social, email, and IM communication is monitored by our Compliance department.

b. Surprisingly, there have been very few issues around the implementation of MyNewsfeed. We have more challenges with “lurkers” and encouraging them to contribute on the site instead of just consuming. 

Compliance
10. What technology does OppenheimerFunds use for archiving and retaining SharePoint content to comply with FINRA regulations?

a. Previous to installing NewsGator’s Newsfeeds, we had installed the company’s 17a-4, retention product. This tracks all of the “social” traffic and routes it to a searchable archival and monitoring solution.  The SharePoint content is also retained in an off-site backup that is archived for seven years. 

Thank you Codey and Colleen again for taking the time to answer these additional questions! If you miss the webinar, you should check it out!

“Hashtag Assistant” effortlessly enriches metadata stores and enhances information discoverability

Every lock has a key.  For enterprise content management and social collaboration, hashtags are that key.  Hashtags (#) mark important keywords or topics and make microblogs and questions & answers more visible, discoverable, and relevant in the activity stream. Hashtags unite users around common interests, topics, and projects, and encourage meaningful discussion and collaboration within an enterprise.

Ok, so hashtags are great, right?  But what happens when you get an overzealous tagger or someone who tags nothing?  Wouldn’t it be nice to have some smart suggestions? NewsGator’s latest “Hashtag Assistant” feature for Social Sites 2010 makes it easier to tag the right terms quickly.  Social Sites Hashtag Assistant suggests tags from the Enterprise Metadata Service as the user types.  Click on a suggested hashtag and it is automatically added to the post or question. To keep it simple for users and to ensure system performance remains high, only single-term hashtags are suggested — and of course, a user can still choose to create their own relevant hashtags as desired.

To find out more about how NewsGator’s hashtag suggestions feature can increase the visibility of important content within your organization, please visit www.newsgator.com.

Webinar Recap: How Nalco is weaving social into the fabric of their business

In NewGator’s recent webinar with Dan Flynn, Knowledge Management Manager at Nalco, we explored how McKinsey and a corporate study showed a need for a more robust set of tools for tiered services and for a higher quality knowledge system, inspired a three-prong community strategy for weaving social into the fabric of their business.
 
An Ecolab company, Nalco selected SharePoint 2010 and Social Sites 2010 to power their social and community activities, search functions, and mobile enterprise. As the platform began connecting people with content and other people, Nalco decided to focus their efforts on four areas:

• Libraries for explicit knowledge
• A social element including communities
• A search center
• A mobile component

The Power of Communities

The goal was to foster a culture change around knowledge access. Nalco discovered that communities with strong leadership and good reasons to exist thrived, while other communities with a lack of focus and leadership tended to flame out.

Nalco developed governance through previous experience, benchmarked learnings, pilot results, and consultant input. This included using the “Thou Shalt” model and dividing community types between those with clear business objectives, and those without. Nalco also identified several community success factors including:

• Strong leadership and sponsorship
• Business alignment
• Adequate resources and defined roles
• Engaged members
• Clear deliverables and activities
• Development of trusted relationships
• Standard collaborative practices
• Technology support
• Motivation and recognition
• Community measurement

They use a Health Check process on a quarterly and yearly basis as an effective way to keep communities focused and thriving. The Health Checks also serve as a roadmap to leaders.

Check out the full webinar with Nalco to learn more about their pilot process, three-prong community strategy, “Thou Shalt” process, benchmarked learnings, routine community Health Checks, and how their biggest advocate on the executive team has helped drive change and reinforce the business value of social throughout the organization.
 

Eight Reasons Enterprise Social Software Makes Sense: #7 Intelligent Activity Streams

In today’s digital age, the art of personal efficiency is constantly evolving. Day planners and palm pilots have become nearly obsolete, replaced with faster, sexier tools that encourage rapid information consumption, utilization and sharing.  Everyone wants to know what’s happening NOW and what will be happening 10 minutes from now.  Needless to say, it can be hard to keep up with what’s important and act on what needs to happen. 

Using a social software feature like activity streams is an important part of tracking what’s happening NOW – in your business, with your colleagues, in consumer social media…but keeping track of it all is a fluid affair.  You can literally consume every minute of every day processing the information.  How do you pick out the important bits to use or share?  Fortunately, NewsGator Social Sites 2010 can help in a number of ways. By implementing intelligent routing, filtering and visualization, and recommendation engines, NewsGator cleans up your activity feed – based on your filters and settings - delivering only the information you need.  Just as useful are recommendation engines and intelligent routing. By analyzing your online behavior, in particular, the content you are reading and searching most often, recommendation engines organize and prioritize posts specifically for you, while intelligent routing makes your network more efficient and adaptable.  Keeping your activity stream lean and relevant ultimately improves your productivity. 

After all, who needs just another tool adding to the confusion?  Don’t we want to simply remain current and share relevant information with colleagues?  Leave the passé, wannabe gadgets in the closet; just clean up your activity stream.

Subscribe to the countdown via e-mail, RSS, or Twitter. Or, keep watching for next week's #6. Ask a Social SharePoint 2010 question and we may feature it in our next post.

Viva Microsoft SQL 2012!

Just in time for the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 launch, NewsGator now offers full support for the latest version of the data platform. We’ll be providing more details next week about our support of SQL Server 2012 in conjunction with our participation at the DevConnections Conference in Las Vegas. Make sure to swing by the expo hall and visit us at booth #321 to learn about our SQL Server 2012 announcement and get a tour of the latest and greatest features of Social Sites 2010. We’ll be at the event starting Monday, March 26th through Thursday, March 29th.

And, if you haven’t yet registered, use discount code: DEVCONVB100 to save $100 off a full conference registration. This event will cover most of the Microsoft stack with sessions specifically focused on Visual Studio, ASP.net NET and Silverlight, SharePoint, Exchange and Windows, in addition to SQL. It should be a great event - we hope to see you there!